health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness,
clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash,
and heightening the effect with a resounding cheer. It was a fine
thing to see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so
popular in a strange land in so little a while, and without other
helps to his advancement than just his tongue and the talent to use
it given him by God–a talent which was but one talent in the
beginning, but was now become ten through husbandry and the
increment and usufruct that do naturally follow that and reward it
as by a law.
The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their
flagons and call for “the King’s Audience!–the King’s
Audience!–the King’s Audience!” The Paladin stood there in one
of his best attitudes, with his plumed great hat tipped over to the
left, the folds of his short cloak drooping from his shoulder, and
the one hand resting upon the hilt of his rapier and the other lifting
his beaker. As the noise died down he made a stately sort of a bow,
which he had picked up somewhere, then fetched his beaker with a
sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and rained it to the
bottom. The barber jumped for it and set it upon the Paladin’s
table. Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform
with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked
he talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house
and so standing continued his talk.
We went three nights in succession. It was plain that there was a
charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest
which attaches to lying. It was presently discoverable that this
charm lay in the Paladin’s sincerity. He was not lying consciously;
he believed what he was saying. To him, his initial statements
were facts, and whenever he enlarged a statement, the enlargement
became a fact too. He put his heart into his extravagant narrative,
just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his
earnestness disarmed criticism–disarmed it as far as he himself
was concerned. Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed that
he believed it.
He made his enlargements without flourish, without emphasis, and
so casually that often one failed to notice that a change had been
made. He spoke of the governor of Vaucouleurs, the first night,
simply as the governor of Vaucouleurs; he spoke of him the
second night as his uncle the governor of Vaucouleurs; the third
night he was his father. He did not seem to know that he was
making these extraordinary changes; they dropped from his lips in
a quite natural and effortless way. By his first night’s account the
governor merely attached him to the Maid’s military escort in a
general and unofficial way; the second night his uncle the governor
sent him with the Maid as lieutenant of her rear guard; the third
night his father the governor put the whole command, Maid and
all, in his special charge. The first night the governor spoke of his
as a youth without name or ancestry, but “destined to achieve
both”; the second night his uncle the governor spoke of him as the
latest and worthiest lineal descendent of the chiefest and noblest of
the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne; the third night he spoke of
his as the lineal descendent of the whole dozen. In three nights he
promoted the Count of Vend“me from a fresh acquaintance to a
schoolmate, and then brother-in-law.
At the King’s Audience everything grew, in the same way. First the
four silver trumpets were twelve, then thirty-five, finally
ninety-six; and byk that time he had thrown in so many drums and
cymbals that he had to lengthen the hall from five hundred feet to
nine hundred to accommodate them. Under his hand the people
present multiplied in the same large way.
The first two nights he contented himself with merely describing
and exaggerating the chief dramatic incident of the Audience, but
the third night he added illustration to description. He throned the