“Ah! ah! your son!... much blood!... much glory!... always fortunate! An Emperor’s family.”
And, stooping to pick up his alms, he disappeared in the grass and vanished.
The good castellan looked right and left and called his loudest. Not a soul! The wind blew, the morning mists cleared away.
He attributed this vision to lightheadedness from want of sleep. “If I talk about it,” he said to himself, “they will laugh at me.” However, the splendours destined for his son dazzled him, although the promise of them was by no means clear, and he even doubted whether he had heard it.
The spouses kept their secrets from each other. But both cherished the child with equal love; and, respecting him as one marked out by God, they bestowed an infinity of care upon his person. His cradle was stuffed with the finest down; a lamp in the shape of a dove burned over it continually; three nurses lulled him to rest; and, well wrapped in his swaddling-bands, his face rosy, and his eyes blue, with his brocade cloak and his cap trimmed with pearls, he looked like a little Jesus. His teeth came without his uttering a single moan.
When he was seven, his mother taught him to sing. To make him brave, his father hoisted him on to a great horse. The child smiled with satisfaction, and was not long in learning everything about chargers.
A very learned old monk instructed him in the Holy Scriptures, Arabic cyphering, Latin letters, and the art of drawing dainty pictures on vellum. They worked together away up at the top of a tower, out of the noise.
The lesson finished, they went down to the garden, where, walking about side by side, they studied the flowers.
Sometimes they would see a string of pack-animals making their way along the bottom of the vale conducted by a man on foot in Oriental garb. The castellan, who had recognized him for a merchant, would send a servant to him. The stranger, taking confidence, turned out of his way, and, taken into the parlour, he brought out of his coffers pieces of velvet and silk, jewellery, aromatics, strange things of which the use was unknown; in the end the honest man went away with great gain, without having suffered any violence. At other times a group of pilgrims would knock at the door. Their wet garments smoked before the fire; and when they were fed they told their travels: the wanderings of barks on the foaming sea, marches on foot through the burning sands, the ferocity of the Paynims, the caverns of Syria, the Cradle and the Sepulchre. Then they gave the young lord cockle-shells from their mantles.
Often the castellan feasted his old companions-in-arms. As they drank, they recalled their wars, the assaults on fortresses with battering of engines and prodigious wounds. Julian, who was listening, uttered shouts at what he heard; thereupon his father had no doubt that he would some day be a conqueror. But in the evening, when the angelus sounded, as he passed between the bowing poor, he put his hand in his purse with such modesty and such a noble air that his mother was certain he would be an archbishop in course of time.