have told you that I lay no claim whatever to my share of human
flesh," impatiently answered Berthoald. "The sight of those poor
creatures is painful to me. You refused to give them their freedom....
Have your way.... But do not mention them again to me."

"Well, it is no loss to us. After having amused ourselves with them on
the road we can sell them for at least from fifteen to twenty gold sous
each, according to what a Jew, who looked at them, said to us."

"Enough!... I have heard enough about the Jew and the slaves!" and
wishing to put an end to a conversation that was painful to him, he
touched the flanks of his horse with his spurs to join his Frankish
companions whom he hailed from afar. "Friends, good news! Our abbey is
rich, well stocked with cattle, and fertile; and we are to succeed an
abbess; whether she be young or old, handsome or ugly, I do not yet
know. We shall see her within an hour and shall be able to judge."

"Long live Charles Martel!" cried one of the warriors. "There's no
abbess without nuns.... We shall have a good laugh with the nuns!"

"I would have preferred to have dispossessed some fighting abbot. But I
console myself with the thought that we are to be masters of numerous
herds of swine."

"Richulf, you can think of nothing but loins of beef and ham!"

Thus gaily conversing, the warriors followed the avenue bordered with
poplars. The abbey was presently descried from the distance, rising in
the center of a sort of peninsula, and reached from this side by a
narrow road that was built between two ponds.

"Hurrah for Charles Martel!"

"What a magnificent building! Look at it, Berthoald!"

"Vast domains! And that grand forest in the horizon--it surely all
belongs to our abbey. We shall be able to hunt at our ease."

"It must be full of game. We shall hunt deer, bucks and wild boars....
Long live Charles Martel!"

"And the ponds that extend down there on either side of the road, they
must be full of fish.... We shall fish carp, tench and pike that I like
so well!... Long live Charles!"

"Do you not find, comrades, that this abbey has a certain martial
aspect, with its high battlements, its counter forts, its ramparts, its
few and narrow windows and its ponds that surround it like a natural
defence?"

"So much the better! Within its walls we shall be entrenched as within a
fortress; and should it please the successors of our good Charles, or
the phantom kings, to dispossess us in