In fact, most of the Emperor's seigneurs and officers, now hastening in on horseback to his presence from all sides of the thickets in response to the horns, presented an appearance that contrasted sadly with that which they had presented a few hours before. Magnificently attired at the start of the hunt, those seigneurs, who looked so resplendent in their rich tunics of silk, now presented a sight that was as ridiculous as it was pitiful. The embroideries on their tunics, at first so rich in color, were now frayed, soiled with mud, and torn by the branches of the trees and the thorns of the briars; the feathers that floated proudly from their caps, now drooped, wet, broken and draggled, resembling long, dislocated, and limp fish-bones; the boots of oriental leather had vanished under a thick coat of slush, and not a few of them, torn by the thorns, exposed their owners' hose, not infrequently also their skin itself. They shivered and looked distressed. Charles, on the contrary, simply and warmly dressed in his thick sheep-skin coat, which reached down over his boots of rough leather, and his head covered with his badger-skin bonnet, rubbed his hands with a cunning look of satisfaction in his eyes at the sight of his courtiers shivering with the cold and the wet. After contemplating the spectacle for a moment, Charles made a sign of intelligence to Amael and said to him in an undertone: "Just before breaking ranks for the hunt, I recommended you to observe the magnificence of the costumes of these coxcombs, who are as vain as Asiatic peacocks, and even more devoid of brains than the bird whose spoils they wear. Look at them now--the fine fellows!" Amael smiled approvingly, while the Emperor, shrugging his shoulders, turned to the seigneurs with his squalling voice: "Oh, ye most foolish of people, which is at this moment the most precious and useful of all our raiment? Mine, which I bought with barely a sou? Or yours, which you have had to pay for through the nose?" At this judicious raillery, the courtiers remained silent and confused, while the Emperor, placing both his hands on his spacious paunch, roared out aloud. "Charles," Amael said to him unheard by the others, "I prefer to hear you speak with that sly wisdom than to see you disemboweling stags." But the Emperor did not answer the aged Breton. He suddenly interrupted the discourse, extending his hand towards a group of nearby serfs, and crying out: "Oh! Look at that pretty girl!"