Even when we had conducted our negotiations to this issue, there was one other matter to come between us and harmony. To whom was the folio to be entrusted? In this, however, Sir Richard Pendragon showed a measure of arbitrariness that was only to be deplored. He took the signed and sealed document from off the council board, saying that, “by right of consanguinity,” he claimed the prerogative of presenting it to the good France; and that “if either Mounseer or little Don What-did-he-call-himself questioned that right, let him be good enough to pluck these letters of marque from a doublet that enclosed the blood of kings.” CHAPTER XX OF OUR ROAD TO PARIS THE sun had scarce begun to creep from behind his white curtain when, on the following day, madam’s three ministers set forth on their embassy. The road to Paris was more than an hundred leagues. The first part of it lay through the very heart of Castile; much of it was difficult and beset with peril for the traveller, and particularly for those upon such a service as ours. Yet upon this beautiful morning of midsummer, as we rode forth from the castle down the steep winding track, these jealous servants of a noble mistress gave not a thought to the dangers that might befall. As we took the road our chief concern was to come to King Louis at Paris with all expedition, and to return again with all the speed possible in the company of an armed host, that the designs of the Castilian might be thwarted. With madam’s high courage and a tolerable address on the part of her garrison, her fastness might be held against an enemy until our return. Yet we felt that every hour was of price, and that there was not one to lose. Judge, then, of our concern when upon coming into Toledo, Sir Richard Pendragon stayed his horse at that fonda we had come to know so well. He declared that, “Castilian or no Castilian, he must break his fast,” and acquire a store of victual to bear with him during the day. “For,” as he declared, “Spain was a most cursed country, and unless you had been bred to eat sand and brown dust, you were like to go short at your meals in the course of a long excursion.” The Englishman declined to be moved by our prayers to hurry his campaign at the inn table. “The belly is a proud jade,” he said, “and apt to take affront at a small thing. It was through an intemperate haste at his meals that one of the foremost among my ancestors was fain to renounce the eating of roast pig, that most delectable of cates, at the age of one-and-thirty.”