true to their Count.'[22] The rest of this story is more intimately connected with Bruges, and it must be told at greater length. CHAPTER XIV _Peter de Coninck_ Although the city on the Roya had been in great measure responsible for the success of the French arms--at the very commencement of the war she had opened her gates to Philippe le Bel--she was destined to be the chief factor in the great movement which ended by chasing the French from Flanders. Early in the spring of 1301 Philippe le Bel had resolved to make a triumphal progress through his new domains, and on the 18th of May, accompanied by his Queen, he arrived at Douai--having visited Courtrai, Audenarde, Peteghem, Ghent--where he was received with the greatest magnificence. Towards the close of the month he reached Bruges, and Bruges would fain have surpassed her rival in the cordiality and gorgeousness of her welcome. All the palaces and public buildings were hung with precious stuffs; on platforms draped with taffeta stood the wives and daughters of the burghers, arrayed in glorious apparel, and tradition tells us how the shimmer of their gems and the lustre of their silks aroused the envy of Isabelle of France. 'I thought,' quoth she, 'that I alone was Queen, but here I see six hundred.' But if the _majores et potentiores_ were exuberant in their manifestations of loyalty, the people were dumb. In vain Philippe called the sheriffs to him, and bade them proclaim public games; no man would take part in them. Indeed, these very games were destined to be the source of the ill-fortune which afterwards befell the French. The sheriffs essayed to place to the cost of the city companies the price of the gala uniforms expressly manufactured for the occasion. The latter refused to acknowledge the debt, and riots ensued which presently culminated in successful rebellion. In those days there dwelt in the city of Bruges a little wizened, one-eyed man who loved the people. Speaking no language but his own rude mother-tongue, he knew how to infuse so much fire into it, and to mould it into such pithy sayings, and there was so much shrewdness in his speech, and so much sense in his ugly head that, in spite of his physical infirmities and in spite of his uncouth form, his influence with them was unbounded. This man was the dean of the great Guild of Weavers, Petrus de Coninck, or, in plain English, Peter King.