Demetrios dryly said:

"I do not question that the virtues of my porter are innumerable.
Therefore we will not attempt to catalogue them. Now Ahasuerus reports
that even before you came to tempt me with your paltry emeralds you
once held the life of Perion in your hands?" Demetrios unfastened his
sword. He grasped the hand of Melicent, and laid it upon the scabbard.
"And what do you hold now, my wife? You hold the death of Perion. I
take the antithesis to be neat."

She answered nothing. Her seeming indifference angered him. Demetrios
wrenched the sword from its scabbard, with a hard violence that made
Melicent recoil. He showed the blade all covered with graved symbols of
which she could make nothing.

"This is Flamberge," said the proconsul; "the weapon which was the
pride and bane of my father, famed Miramon Lluagor, because it was the
sword which Galas made, in the old time's heyday, for unconquerable
Charlemagne. Clerks declare it is a magic weapon and that the man who
wields it is always unconquerable. I do not know. I think it is as
difficult to believe in sorcery as it is to be entirely sure that all
we know is not the sorcery of a drunken wizard. I very potently
believe, however, that with this sword I shall kill Perion."

Melicent had plenty of patience, but astonishingly little, it seemed,
for this sort of speech. "I think that you talk foolishly, seignior.
And, other matters apart, it is manifest that you yourself concede
Perion to be the better swordsman, since you require to be abetted by
sorcery before you dare to face him."