"You think so, Master Coppenole?" And Louis XI.'s glance was almost as joyous as that of the hosier. "Will it not be difficult to resist?"
"Cross of God! Sire! Your majesty will damage many companies of men of war thereon."
"Ah! I! 'tis different," returned the king. "If I willed." The hosier replied hardily,-"If this revolt be what I suppose, sire, you might will in vain."
"Gossip," said Louis XI., "with the two companies of my unattached troops and one discharge of a serpentine, short work is made of a populace of louts."
The hosier, in spite of the signs made to him by Guillaume Rym, appeared determined to hold his own against the king.
"Sire, the Swiss were also louts. Monsieur the Duke of Burgundy was a great gentleman, and he turned up his nose at that rabble rout. At the battle of Grandson, sire, he cried: 'Men of the cannon! Fire on the villains!' and he swore by Saint-George. But Advoyer Scharnachtal hurled himself on the handsome duke with his battle-club and his people, and when the glittering Burgundian army came in contact with these peasants in bull hides, it flew in pieces like a pane of glass at the blow of a pebble. Many lords were then slain by low-born knaves; and Monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest seigneur in Burgundy, was found dead, with his gray horse, in a little marsh meadow."
"Friend," returned the king, "you are speaking of a battle. The question here is of a mutiny. And I will gain the upper hand of it as soon as it shall please me to frown."
The other replied indifferently,-"That may be, sire; in that case, 'tis because the people's hour hath not yet come."
Guillaume Rym considered it incumbent on him to intervene,-"Master Coppenole, you are speaking to a puissant king."
"I know it," replied the hosier, gravely.
"Let him speak, Monsieur Rym, my friend," said the king; "I love this frankness of speech. My father, Charles the Seventh, was accustomed to say that the truth was ailing; I thought her dead, and that she had found no confessor. Master Coppenole undeceiveth me."
Then, laying his hand familiarly on Coppenole's shoulder,-"You were saying, Master Jacques?"
"I say, sire, that you may possibly be in the right, that the hour of the people may not yet have come with you."
Louis XI. gazed at him with his penetrating eye,-"And when will that hour come, master?"
"You will hear it strike."
"On what clock, if you please?"
Coppenole, with his tranquil and rustic countenance, made the king approach the window.