blazed in gorgeous heraldry on a hundred banners, surmounting as many
towers. The long lines of battlemented walls spread down the mountain
to the Loire, and were defended by thousands of steel-clad serving-men.
Four hundred knights and six times as many archers fought round the
banner of Barbazure at Bouvines, Malplaquet, and Azincour. For his
services at Fontenoy against the English, the heroic Charles Martel
appointed the fourteenth Baron Hereditary Grand Bootjack of the kingdom
of France; and for wealth, and for splendor, and for skill and fame
in war, Raoul, the twenty-eighth Baron, was in no-wise inferior to his
noble ancestors.

That the Baron Raoul levied toll upon the river and mail upon the shore;
that he now and then ransomed a burgher, plundered a neighbor, or drew
the fangs of a Jew; that he burned an enemy's castle with the wife
and children within;--these were points for which the country knew and
respected the stout Baron. When he returned from victory, he was sure to
endow the Church with a part of his spoil, so that when he went forth to
battle he was always accompanied by her blessing. Thus lived the Baron
Raoul, the pride of the country in which he dwelt, an ornament to the
Court, the Church, and his neighbors.

But in the midst of all his power and splendor there was a domestic
grief which deeply afflicted the princely Barbazure. His lovely ladies
died one after the other. No sooner was he married than he was a
widower; in the course of eighteen years no less than nine bereavements
had befallen the chieftain. So true it is, that if fortune is a
parasite, grief is a republican, and visits the hall of the great and
wealthy as it does the humbler tenements of the poor.

*****