"Dead!?" cried Jocelyn, stupefied with terror. "Dead! Massacred! My God!" "Come, keep cool.... Listen to the details of the adventure ... you are to transmit it to your friends." "This man frightens me!" thought Jocelyn, a cold perspiration bathing his forehead. "Is it some trap he is laying for me?" "The Jacques came," resumed Charles the Wicked, "those wild beasts that pillage and burn down castles, massacre priests and seigneurs, outrage women, and pitilessly cut the throats of children, to the end, as these devils put it, of annihilating the nobility!" "Oh, God!" cried Jocelyn, sitting up, "the reprisals of Jacques Bonhomme lasted one day ... his martyrdom centuries!----" "Vassal!" the King of Navarre haughtily interrupted Jocelyn, "the rights of the conqueror over the conquered, of the seigneur over the serf, are absolute and from heaven!... A villein or peasant in revolt deserves death. It is the feudal law." The champion shivered, and looking fixedly at the King of Navarre said: "Charles the Wicked, you will not let me leave this place alive; you would be a lost man if I carried your words to Marcel!" "You will leave this place alive," coldly answered the prince, "and besides my words, you will report the facts to Marcel." A prey to irrepressible agony, Jocelyn fell back upon the settee and Charles the Wicked proceeded: "You will first of all tell Marcel that, however wily he may be, I have not been his dupe. The chiefs of the Jacques whom he sent to me as auxiliaries were expected to become my watchers, and, if need be, my butchers ... if I deviated from the path marked out by that insolent bourgeois. I was in his hands, said he to me, but an 'instrument that he would break if need be'.... Very well! I have broken one of Marcel's redoubtable instruments.... I have annihilated the Jacquerie ... and at this very moment my friends, Gaston Phoebus, the Count of Foix and the Captal of Buch are crushing in Meaux the last coils of that serpent of revolt that sought to rise against the nobility----" "The Jacquerie crushed! annihilated!" exclaimed Jocelyn, more and more beside himself. But returning to his first suspicion, he gathered voice to say: "Charles the Wicked, you are the most cunning man on earth ... you are laying some trap for me.... If the Jacques came to Clermont to the number of eight or ten thousand, you were not in command of sufficient forces to exterminate them." "Sir envoy, you are too hasty in your conclusions. Listen first, you will then be able to judge. I promised facts to you. Here they are. Yesterday, towards noon, I was apprised of the approach of the Jacques. The bourgeoisie of Clermont and the corporation of artisans, infected with the old communal leaven, went out to meet the malefactors and to feast them. I encouraged their plans, and while the Jacques halted in the valley near Clermont, three of their chiefs presented themselves at the drawbridge demanding to entertain me." "What were their names?"