"But you have not heard the jest, sire," Joyeuse struck in. His thin handsome face, pale with excess, belied eyes thoughtful and dreamy, eyes that saw visions. He had been a King's favourite, he had spent years in a convent, he had come forth again, now he was head of the great Joyeuse house, lord of a third of Languedoc. By turns "Father Angel"--for he had been a noted preacher--and Monseigneur, there were those who predicted that he would some day return to the cloister and die in his hood. "They call them the Tards-Avises," he continued, "because they were foolish enough to rise when the war was over." "God pity them!" the King said. "_Morbleu!_ Your Majesty is pitiful of a sudden!" The speaker was the Constable de Montmorency. He was a stout, gruff, choleric man, born, as the Montmorencys were, a generation too late. "I pity them!" the King answered a trifle sharply. "But you"--he spoke to the table--"neither pity them nor put them down." "You are speaking, sire," one asked, "of the Crocans?" It was so; from the name of a village in their midst, they called these revolted peasants of the Limousin of whom more will be said. "Yes." "They are not in my government," the speaker replied. "Nor in mine!" "Nor mine!" And so all, except the Governor of the Limousin and the Governor of Poitou, who sat sulkily silent. Another of the great ones, Marshal Matignon, nodded approval. "Let every man shoe his own ass," he said, pursing up his lips. He was a white-haired, red-faced, apoplectic man of sixty, who thought that in persuading the Estates of Bordeaux to acknowledge Henry he had earned the right to go his own way. "Otherwise we shall jostle one another," he continued, "and be at blows before we know it, sire! They are in the Limousin; let the Governor put them down. It is his business and no other's." "Except mine," the King replied, with a frown of displeasure. "And if he cannot, what then?" "Let him make way, sire, for one who can," the Constable answered readily. "Your Majesty will not have far to look for him," he continued in a playful tone. "My nephew, for instance, would like a government." "A truce to jesting," Henry said. "The trouble began, it is true, in the Limousin, but it has spread into Poitou and into the Angoumois"--he looked at Epernon's agent, for the Duke of Epernon was so great a man he had not come himself. "Gentlemen," the King continued, sitting back in his great chair, "can you not come to some agreement? Can you not mass what force you have, and deal with them shortly but mercifully? The longer the fire burns, the more trouble will it be to extinguish it, and the greater the suffering." "Why not let it burn out, sire?" Epernon's agent muttered with thinly veiled impudence. "It will then burn the more rubbish, with your Majesty's leave!"