"Your conduct is unjust. Frankish warriors have often come to the Gallic camp to solicit an exchange of prisoners. Those Franks have always been respected. A truce is now in force between us, during a truce only spies who furtively enter the camp are put to death. I have come in open daylight, with a green bough in my hand, and in the name of Victorin, the son of Victoria. I am the carrier of a message from them for the chiefs of the Frankish army. Take care! If you act without orders from them, they will be sorry for not having heard me, and they may make you pay dearly for your treachery towards a soldier, who comes unarmed, during a truce, and in broad daylight, with the bough of peace in his hand." Riowag's answer to my words was a sign to his band. I was immediately raised up by four black warriors who placed me on their shoulders and carried me off in the tracks of their captain, who marched with a solemn air in the direction of the Frankish camp. At the moment when the barbarians raised me on their shoulders, I overheard one of those who wished to flay me alive say to one of his companions in a mocking tone: "Riowag is Elwig's lover; he wishes to make a present of the prisoner to his mistress." These words enabled me to realize that Riowag, the captain of the band of black warriors, being the lover of the priestess Elwig, gallantly made her a present of my person, just as in our country bridegrooms offer a dove or a sheep to the young girl whom they love. You will be astonished, my child, to find in this narrative that I have used words that sound almost droll in describing events that were so threatening to my life. Do not imagine that this is due to the circumstance that at the hour when I write these lines, I had escaped all danger. No. Even when the danger was most imminent--a danger from which I was almost miraculously delivered--I had full control of my spirit, and the old Gallic sense of humor, a thing so natural to our race, however long it lay torpid under the weight of the shame and the trials of slavery, revived in me as it did with so many others when we once more tasted the boon of freedom. The observations that you will encounter, and which I have reproduced as they occurred to me at times when death seemed inevitable, were sincere, they proceeded from my faith in that belief of our fathers that man never dies, that when he leaves this world he enters others in which he proceeds to live.