Having dauntlessly performed these unmatched feats, the champion paused to reward himself with a pinch of snuff. The lid of his snuff-box bore the portrait of his dear friend and patron, Philippe d’Orléans, and it seemed odd to be regarding familiar features in these mischancy uplands. Then Florian, refreshed, looked about him. Three incredibly weather-beaten sheep were grazing to his right: to the left he saw, framed by the foliage upon each side of and overhanging the green roadway, the castle of Brunbelois.
Thus one by one did Florian cut off the heads of the seven wardens, with real regret—excepting only when he killed the catoblepas,—that his needs compelled him to destroy such colorful and charming monsters. The two remarkably hairy persons, without ever speaking, lifted each enormous head, one by one, into the cart. The party mounted within eyeshot of Brunbelois thus triumphantly. And at Brunbelois, where the old time yet lingered, the hour was not afternoon but early morning: and at the instant Florian slew the mantichora all the persons within the castle had awakened from what they thought was one night’s resting.
Now the first of the awakened Peohtes whom Florian encountered was a milkmaid coming down from Brunbelois with five cows. What Florian could see of her was pleasurably shaped and tinted. He looked long at her.
“To pause now for any frivolous reason,” reflected Florian, “or to disfigure in any way the moment in which I approach my life’s desire, is of course unthinkable—”
Meanwhile the milkmaid looked at Florian. She smiled, and her naturally high coloring was heightened.
“—So I do not pause for frivolous reasons. I pause because one must be logical. For, now that I think of it, to rescue people from enchantment is a logical proceeding only when one is certain that this rescuing involves some positive gain to the world. Do you drive on a little way, and wait for me,” said Florian, aloud, to his hirsute attendants, “while I discover from this enticing creature what sort of persons we have resurrected.”
The hairy servants of Janicot obeyed. Florian, very spruce in bottle-green and silver, dismounted from his white horse, and in the ancient roadway now overgrown with grass, held amicable discourse with this age-old milkmaid. She proved at bottom not wholly unsophisticated. And when they parted, each had been agreeably convinced that the persons of one era are much like those of another.
Florian thus came to the gates of Brunbelois logically reassured that he had done well in reviving such persons, even at the cost of destroying charming monsters and of the labor involved in removing so many heads. He counted smilingly on his finger-tips, but such was his pleased abstraction that he miscalculated, and made the total eight.
He found that, now the enchantment was lifted, Brunbelois showed in every respect as a fine old castle of the architecture indigenous to fairy tales. Flags were flying from the turrets; sentinels, delightfully shiny in the early morning sunlight, were pacing the walls, on the look-out for enemies that had died many hundred years ago; and at the gate was a night-porter, not yet off duty. This porter wore red garments worked with yellow thistles, and he seemed dejected but philosophic.
“Whence come you, in those queer dusty clothes?” inquired the porter, “and what is your business here?”