s cruel,
dissolute, and crushed the Jewish people with taxes; thus, when they
learnt that one of the cavaliers was the Seigneur Chusa, steward of this
execrated prince, the hatred they felt for the master was visited on the
steward as also on his companion, the Seigneur Gremion, who in the name
of the Roman tax-gatherer, gleaned where Herod had reaped. Thus, whilst
Jane, Aurelia, and the slave Genevieve painfully traversed the crowd to
reach the two cavaliers, hootings burst from all sides against Chusa and
Gremion, and they listened, trembling with rage, to words such as the
following, the faint echo of the anathemas of the young master against
the wicked:

'Woe to you, Herod's steward! who crush us with taxes, and eat up the
house of the widow and the orphan!

'Woe to you, too, Roman! who also come to take a part in robbing us!'

Banaias, with one hand waiving his cutlass in a threatening and
ferocious manner, approached the two seigneurs, and, showing his fist to
them, exclaimed:

'The fox is cowardly and cruel! but he has called to his aid the wolf,
whose teeth are longer, and whose strength is greater! The fox, cowardly
and cruel, is your master Herod, Seigneur Chusa! and the ferocious wolf,
is Tiberius, your own master, Roman! who helps the fox in hunting the
game!'

And as the Seigneur Chusa, pale with rage, was about to draw his sword
to strike Banaias, the latter raised his cutlass, and exclaimed:

'By the belly of Goliath! I will cut you in two like a water melon, if
you put a hand on your sword!'

The two seigneurs, having only five or six men as an escort, restrained
themselves, from a fear of being stoned by the enraged people, and
endeavored to sneak out of the crowd, which, more and more enraged,
exclaimed:

'Yes, woe to you! tax-gatherers of Herod and Tiberius! Woe to you! for
we are hungry; and the bread moistened with our sweat, which we carry to
our lips, you snatch it from our hands in the name of taxes!

'Woe to you! for instead of pardoning misery you overwhelm with miseries
people without defence! Woe to you, but happiness to us, for the day of
justice approaches, the young man of Nazareth has said so. Yes, yes,
for you wicked and oppressors, there will soon be weeping and gnashing
of teeth, and then the last shall be first, and the first shall be
last.'

Chusa and Gremion, more and more alarmed, consulted each other by a
look, not knowing how to escape this menacing crowd. The most