ckly put an end to his life without
bringing on himself the hostility of the King of Denmark, and other
powerful friends of Ogier. He exacted a new oath of Turpin to obey his
order strictly.

The good Archbishop loved Ogier too well not to cast about for some
means of saving his life, which he foresaw he would soon lose if
subjected to such scanty fare, for Ogier was seven feet tall, and had
an appetite in proportion. Turpin remembered, moreover, that Ogier was
a true son of the Church, always zealous to propagate the faith and
subdue unbelievers; so he felt justified in practising on this occasion
what in later times has been entitled "mental reservation," without
swerving from the letter of the oath which he had taken. This is the
method he hit upon.

Every morning he had his prisoner supplied with a quarter of a loaf of
bread, made of two bushels of flour, to this he added a quarter of a
sheep or a fat calf, and he had a cup made which held forty pints of
wine, and allowed Ogier a quarter of it daily.

Ogier's imprisonment lasted long; Charlemagne was astonished to hear,
from time to time, that he still held out; and when he inquired more
particularly of Turpin, the good Archbishop, relying on his own
understanding of the words, did not hesitate to affirm positively that
he allowed his prisoner no more than the permitted ration.

We forgot to say that, when Ogier was led prisoner to Soissons, the
Abbot of Saint Faron, observing the fine horse Beiffror, and not having
at the time any other favor to ask of Charlemagne, begged the Emperor
to give him the horse, and had him taken to his abbey. He was impatient
to try his new acquisition, and when he had arrived in his litter at
the foot of the mountain where the horse had been brought to meet him
mounted him and rode onward. The horse, accustomed to bear the enormous
weight of Ogier in his armor, when he perceived nothing on his back but
the light weight of the Abbot, whose long robes fluttered against his
sides, ran away, making prodigious leaps over the steep acclivities of
the mountain till he reached the convent of Jouaire, where, in sight of
the Abbess and her nuns, he threw the Abbot, already half dead with
fright, to the ground. The Abbot, bruised and mortified, revenged
himself on poor Beiffror, whom he condemned, in his wrath, to be given
to the workmen to drag stones for a chapel that he was building near
the abbey. Thus, ill-fed, hard-worked, and often bea