Thereupon, Giles went down to the Rue des Lombards, and with such aid
as was then easily purchasable, he soon wrapped the Jew’s dwelling
in flames. Shylock looked to his papers and money-bags. The knight
groped through the smoke and carried off the daughter. The Jew still
held the promissory note of the Knight of Pontoise, whose incendiary
act, however, had destroyed half of one side of the Rue des Lombards.
Therewith had perished reams of bonds which made slaves of chevaliers
to Jew money-lenders. “_Sic vos non vobis_,” thought Giles, “but at all
events, if he has my bill, I have possession of Jessica.”
The Jew held as much to his daughter as to his ducats. He persecuted
the pretended husband with a pertinacity which eventually overcame
Giles de Pontoise. A compromise was effected. The knight owed the
usurer three thousand golden crowns, and had stolen from him his only
daughter. Giles agreed to surrender his “lady,” on condition that the
money-lender should sign an acquittance of the debt. This done, the Jew
and daughter walked homeward, neither of them well satisfied with the
result of their dealings with a knight.
The burnt-out Lombarder turned round at the threshold of the knight’s
door, with a withering sneer, like Edmund Kean’s in Shylock when he
was told to make haste and go home, and begin to be a Christian. “It
is little but sorrow I get by you, at all events,” said the Jew to the
Chevalier.
“Do you make so light of your grandson?” asked Giles. And with this
Parthian dart he shut his door in the face of the trio who were his
victims.
This knight was a victimizer; but below we have an illustration of
knights victimized through too daring affection.
The great Karloman may be said to have been one of those crowned
knights who really had very little of the spirit of chivalry in him,
with respect to ladies. He married, successfully, two wives, but to
neither did he allow the title of Empress. It is, however, not with his
two wives, but his two daughters and their chevaliers _par amours_,
with whom we have now to do.
In the Rue de la Harpe, in Paris, may be seen the remains, rather than
the ruins, of the old building erected by the Emperor Julian, and which
was long known by the name of the “old palace.” It served as a palace
about a thousand years and half a century ago, when one night there
drew up before it a couple of knights, admirably mounted, and rather
roughly escorted by a mob, who held up their lanterns to examine the
riders, and handled their pikes as if they were more ready to massacre
the knights than to marshal them.
All the civility they received on this February night was of a highly
equivocal nature. They were admitted, indeed, into the first and
largest court of the palace, but the old seneschal locked and barred
the gate behind them. An officer too approached to bid them welcome,
but he had hardly acquitted himself of his civil mission when he
peremptorily demanded of them the surrender of their swords.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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