"The sight is worth the music!" remarked Adam the Devil listening to the sound of the bells. Crossing his arms behind him, spreading out his legs, and poising himself on his robust loins he swept with an eager eye the flaming curtain of the distant conflagrations. "There they are on fire and in ruins, those proud donjons cemented in the blood and the sweat of our people, and that for centuries have been the terror of our fathers! Ha! Ha! Ha!" and laughing boisterously the serf proceeded: "What mournful scenes must now be enacting at those manors!" "At this hour," observed Caillet, "in Beauvoisis, in Laonnais, in Picardy, in Vermandois, in Champagne, everywhere, in the Isle of France, Jacques Bonhomme is making similar bonfires! Everywhere the nobility and their supporting priests are being massacred!" "I wish I could see all the fires!" exclaimed Adam the Devil, raising his head. "I would like to hear all the cries uttered by these nobles!" "Oh!" observed Jocelyn, with profound sorrow, "if the cries of our fathers, the male and female serfs and vassals, who for so many hundreds of years have endured martyrdom, could reach us across the centuries!... Oh! if the cries of our mothers, borne down by serfdom, starved in misery, and outraged by the seigneurs, could now reach us across these many centuries.... If that could be, then the frightful concert of maledictions, of imprecations and of cries of pain that would reach us would drown that which now goes up from these feudal strongholds!... The hour of justice has come at last!"