em taller than he really was, an effect further heightened by the
erect grace of his carriage. His body was nimble and alert--the words
are the words of an ancient chronicler--his limbs were finely shaped;
his hands and feet were the theme and the despair of his parasites. But
no quality with which it had pleased Heaven to endow his body was ever
noted by an observer who was not at first taken captive by the
enchantment of the young King's face. His countenance was cast in the
mould of antique beauty. So might Alcibiades have looked when he reeled
into the banquet-hall, with roses on his forehead, to reason and to jest
with Socrates; so might Antinous have seemed when he drifted with
Hadrian upon the Nile. The passion for pleasure, which had characterized
him from the moment of his recovery from the illness that threatened his
youth, had laid no stain upon his visage; his cheeks were as smooth, his
lips as red, his hair as bright as those of a child, and the limpid
clearness of his eyes met the beholder's gaze with the unblemished
frankness of a boy. Most of those who praised Prince Robert for his
physical beauty would, no doubt, have so praised him if he had been as
ugly as a monkey, but for once in a way the tongue of flattery could
scarcely overcrow the truth.

The young King, heedless of the fashion of the day, clothed his comely
body so as to display it to the best advantage; he eschewed the long and
cumbrous garments that were associated with dignity, with royalty, and
wore, instead, the tunic and long hose that gave his shapely limbs the
greatest freedom and the most liberal display. But any simplicity in the
form of his habit was splendidly atoned for by the costliness of the
material. The revenues of a rich merchant for a year might have been
spent upon the woven and embroidered stuffs that garbed the King's
person, yet little of these noble stuffs was visible, so richly were
they embellished with gold and adorned with jewels.

Behind the King came the Count Hildebrand, who might have passed for the
handsomest man in Sicily if Sicily had no King Robert. Dressed almost as
richly as the monarch, he would have dazzled many if Robert himself had
not been by. He was of a more powerful make than the King, though he
affected with success the same almost feminine daintiness of carriage
and habit; but the beauty of his face was of a coarser pattern than the
King's, and his dark eyes had no gleam of the almost infantile