Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

Burgundy was a great seigneur, and held the canaille of no account. At the battle of Granson, Sire, he
shouted: ‘Cannoneers, fire upon these churls!’ and he swore by Saint-George. But the syndic
Scharnachtal rushed upon the fine duke with his clubs and his men, and at the shock of the peasants with
their bull-hides, the glittering Burgundian army was shattered like a pane of glass by a stone. There was
many a knight killed there by the base-born churls, and Monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest lord in
Burgundy, was found dead, with his great gray charger, in a little boggy field.”
“Friend,” returned the King, “you are speaking of a battle. This is but a riot, and I can put an end to it
the moment I choose to lift a finger.”
To which the other replied unconcernedly, “That may be, Sire; but in that case, the hour of the people
has not yet come.”
Guillaume Rym thought it time to interfere. “Maître Coppenole, you are talking to a great King.”
“I know it,” answered the hosier gravely.
“Let him speak his mind, friend Rym,” said the King. “I like this plain speaking. My father, Charles
VII, used to say that truth was sick For my part, I thought she was dead and had found no confessor.
Maître Coppenole shows me I am mistaken.” Then, laying his hand on Maître Coppenole’s shoulder:
“You were saying, Maître Jacques——”
“I said, Sire, that may-be you were right; that the people’s hour is not yet come with you.”
Louis XI looked at him with his penetrating gaze. “And when will that hour come, Maître?”
“You will hear it strike.”
“By what clock, prithee?”
Coppenole, with his quiet and homely self-possession, signed to the King to approach the window.
“Listen, Sire! There is here a donjon-keep, a bell-tower, cannon, townsfolk, soldiers. When the tocsin
sounds, when the cannons roar, when, with great clamour, the fortress walls are shattered, when citizens
and soldiers shout and kill each other—then the hour will strike.”
Louis’s face clouded and he seemed to muse. He was silent for a moment, then, clapping his hand
gently against the thick wall of the keep, as one pats the flank of a charger:
“Ah, surely not,” said he; “thou wilt not be so easily shattered, eh, my good Bastille?”
And turning abruptly to the undaunted Fleming: “Have you ever seen a revolt, Maître Jacques?”
“Sire, I have made one,” answered the hosier.
“How do you set about it,” said the King, “to make a revolt?”
“Oh,” answered Coppenole, “it is no very difficult matter. There are a hundred ways. First of all, there
must be dissatisfaction in the town—that’s nothing uncommon. And next, there is the character of the
inhabitants. Those of Ghent are prone to revolt. They ever love the son of the prince, but never the prince
himself. Well, one fine morning, we will suppose, some one enters my shop and says to me: ‘Father
Coppenole, it is thus and thus—the Lady of Flanders wants to save her favourites, the chief provost has
doubled the toll on green food, or something of the kind—what you will. I throw down my work, run out