Adam the Devil had finished digging the grave of Aveline. Caillet and Mazurec, holding the body by the shoulders and feet, laid it down in the tomb. The peasants who witnessed the ceremony fell upon their knees. The funeral of the poor female serf piously performed under the vault of the forest in the midst of the heaped-up rocks at the mouth of the cavern--the immense tomb of so many other victims--was a spectacle of mournful grandeur. Everything contributed to render the scene terrible and imposing. There lay the mutilated and bloody members of the bailiff, the pitiless executer of the Sire of Nointel's orders; yonder were strewn the corpses of the English, no less execrated than the seigneurs by the people of the fields; further at a distance was the kneeling crowd of serfs, bare-headed, clad in rags, holding strange and murderous weapons in their hands, and hardly able to restrain their fury; finally there were the father and the husband laying with their own hands into her grave her who should have been the solace of the former's old age and the joy and love of the latter's youth! As soon as the body of the dead girl was laid in the fosse, Adam the Devil began filling it up with earth, while William Caillet standing at the head of his daughter's sepulchre and holding Mazurec to his breast cried out in a voice that pulled at the heart-strings of all present: "Adieu, my daughter! Adieu, my poor Aveline! You who never lied! You who never did wrong! Adieu! For evermore adieu!" and raising his trembling hands heavenward, the old peasant proceeded solemnly: "I swear here by the body of my child whom I have buried with my own hands! By the bones of our friends and our relatives whose grave is that cavern! By the sufferings that we endure! By the blood and the sweat of our forefathers! I shall revenge my daughter! I shall revenge our fathers! I shall revenge our race for the tortures it has endured! War upon the castles, without let or mercy!" Carried away by these words, the surrounding serfs rose to their feet, and brandishing their staves, their scythes, their forks and their axes, all responded in chorus with a voice that the echoes of the forest answered back: "Vengeance!" "Justice!" In the meantime the peasants who had run into the cavern were coming back with terror marked on their faces: "Dead.... They are all dead or dying! Women and children, old and young ... all are dead!" "All dead!" Caillet repeated in a terrific voice, "the little children! The women! The old men and the young! All dead! Up, Jacques Bonhomme! Up, my Jacques! Let the Jacquerie commence!" "It shall commence with the castle of Chivry," cried Adam the Devil. "Our seigneur is to be this very day at the castle of Chivry to wed the gorgeous Gloriande ... on the day of the tourney she laughed at Mazurec!... It will now be your turn to laugh at the haughty damosel.... Up, my Jacques, let the Jacquerie commence!"