Sorely and bitterly did the emperor weep and bewail his miserable fate when the servants drove him from the castle gate. “Alas, alas!” he exclaimed in his misery, “what shall I do, and whither shall I resort? Even the good duke knew me not, but regarded me as a poor madman. Come, I will seek my own palace, and discover myself to my wife. Surely she will know me at least.”
“Who art thou, poor man?” asked the king’s porter of him when he stood before the palace gate and would have entered in.
“Thou oughtest to know me,” replied Jovinian, “seeing thou hast served me these fifteen years.”
“Served you, you dirty fellow,” rejoined the porter. “I serve the emperor. Serve you, indeed!”
“I am the emperor. Dost thou not know me? Come, my good fellow, seek the empress, and bid her, by the sign of the three moles on the emperor’s breast, send me hither the imperial robes, which some fellow stole whilst I was bathing.”
“Ha! ha! fellow; well, you are royally mad. Why, the emperor is at dinner with his wife. Well, well, I’ll do thy bidding, if it be but to have the whipping of thee afterwards for an impudent madman. Three moles on the emperor’s breast! how royally thou shalt be beaten, my friend.”
When the porter told the empress what the poor madman at the gate had said, she held down her head, and said, with a sorrowful voice, unto her lord: “My good lord and king, here is a fellow at the palace gate that hath sent unto me, and bids me, by those secret signs known only to thee and me, to send him the imperial robes, and welcome him as my husband and my sovereign.”
When the fictitious emperor heard this, he bade the attendants bring in Jovinian. And lo, as he entered the hall, the great wolf-hound, that had slept at his feet for years, sprang from his lair, and would have pulled him down, had not the attendants prevented him; whilst the falcon, that had sat on his wrist in many a fair day’s hawking, broke her jesses, and flew out of the hall: so changed was Jovinian the emperor.
“Nobles and friends,” said the new emperor, “hear ye what I will ask of this man.”
And the nobles bowed assent, whilst the emperor asked Jovinian his name, and his business with the empress.