The seigneurs, their wives and daughters on the platforms had just enjoyed the refection, while commenting upon the incidents of the tourney, when a shudder ran through the crowd of peasants and bourgeois massed outside of the barriers. Until then and while witnessing the jousts and the passages of arms they had been animated with curiosity only. In the combat, which it was murmured among them was to follow these harmless struggles, the populace felt themselves concerned. It was to be a combat to the death between a vassal and a knight, the latter on horseback and in full armor, the vassal on foot, dressed in his blouse and armed with a stick. Even the more timid and brutalized ones among the vassals revolted at the thought of so crassly unequal a conflict, in which one of their class was inevitably destined to death. It was, accordingly, amidst a silence laden with anxiety and suppressed anger that one of the heralds uttered three times from the center of the arena the consecrated formula: "Let the appellant enter!" The knight Gerard of Chaumontel, now summoned to the trial of a judicial combat against the accusation of theft made by Mazurec, issued from one of the contiguous tents and entered the arena on horseback, in full armor. His buckler hangs from his neck; his visor is up; in his hand he carries a little image of St. James, for whom the pious knight seemed to entertain a peculiar devotion. His two seconds, on horseback like himself, ride beside him. With him they make the round of the arena while the fair Gloriande says to her father disdainfully: "What a shame for the nobility to see a knight reduced, in order to prove his innocence, to do combat with a varlet!" "Oh, my daughter! What evil days these are that we live in!" answered the aged seigneur with a growl. "Those accursed king's jurists are crossing their pencils over all our rights under the impertinent pretext of legalizing them. Was not a decree of the court of the seneschal of Beauvoisis requisite in order to authorize our friend Conrad to exercise his seigniorial right over a miserable female serf in revolt?" Remembering, however, that his daughter was the betrothed of the Sire of Nointel, the Count of Chivry stopped short. Gloriande surmised the cause of her father's reticence and said to him with a haughtiness that verged on anger: "Do you think that I am jealous of such as her? Can I look upon these female serfs as rivals?" "No, no; I am not placing such an insult upon you, my daughter ... but after all, the rebellion of that female vassal is as novel as it is monstrous. Oh, the spirit of revolt among the populace, although partly broken to-day, has spread into our domains and has infested our peasants also; and that is taken by the crown for a pretext to add to our troubles by encroaching upon our rights, claiming that they must be first sanctioned by the jurists. A curse upon all reform kings!" "But, father, our rights remain."