"Ronan, only the Master of the Hounds is missing. When the conflagration was at its height, he was seen by one of our men running towards the door of the bishopess; he leaped through the flames and re-issued at the garden door running with a fainting woman in his arms."
"He is doubtlessly engaged in making her regain consciousness. Well, while the bishopess is being revived, shall we try the bishop?"
"The holy man has tried people, whom he said were under his jurisdiction, as bishop of the city of Clermont. He is now under our jurisdiction. Let us try him!"
Louder than the Vagres themselves, the slaves of the prelate set up the cry:
Two Vagres went out in quest of the holy man of God, who had been kept locked up in a contiguous compartment. He was brought in pinioned. Pale and wrathful he was pushed before the tribunal of Ronan and his four Vagre clerks.
"Seigneur bishop," said Ronan to him, "thy 'charity,' thy 'piety,' thy 'exalted chastity' (thou seest I am giving thee all the honorary titles that thou and thine bestow upon one another, holy men that ye are) thy 'exalted chastity' will be kind enough to inform us of thy name?"
"Incendiary! Pillager! Sacrilegious wretch! Those are your names! I damn and excommunicate you, you, together with your whole band! You stand excommunicated in this world and in the next, where you will suffer everlasting tortures!"
"Thy 'exalted chastity' answers my question with insults. Seeing that thou refusest to state thy name, I shall answer for thee. Thy name is Cautin--"
"Slaves of the bishopric," proceeded Ronan addressing those who surrounded him, "what charges have you to prefer against your bishop?"
"He grinds us down with toil and with taxes. He oppresses us from morning till night all the year long!"
"For food he lets us have a handful of beans, for clothes rags, and for shelter rickety mud huts!"
"Our slightest oversights are visited with the whip!"
"He violates our daughters! What resistance can the female slave offer when threatened? She submits with a shudder--she weeps--"
"That a Frank should be ready to subjugate us and whelm us with misery we can understand: he is a conqueror who abuses his power. But that bishops, Gauls like ourselves, should join the Frank in order to share with him the plunder that he levies upon us--that we cannot understand; such action must draw down the severest punishment upon the heads of the perpetrators. Oh! Our old priests, the venerated druids, never allied themselves with the Roman conquerors of Gaul. No! No! With the sword in one hand, the mistletoe twig in the other, they were ever the first to give the signal for war against the foreigner; they roused the peoples to revolt with the words: 'The country and freedom!' The response came swift from the masses; out of their midst arose the Chief of the Hundred Valleys, Sacrovir, Vindex, Marik, Civilis! And the Romans trembled in their very Capitol!"