aid, "did I draw you from out of the salting-box to the ruin
of the virgins of Vervignole?"

And he reproached him with the magnitude of his offence. But Maxime
shrugged his shoulders, and turned his back, without making any reply.

At that moment King Berlu, in the fourteenth year of his reign, was
assembling a powerful army to fight the Mambournians, the determined
enemies of his kingdom, who, having entered Vervignole, were ravaging
and depopulating the richest provinces of that great country.

Maxime left Trinqueballe without saying goodbye to a soul. When he was
some leagues distant from the town, seeing in a field a mare of moderate
quality, except that she was blind in one eye and lame, he jumped on her
back and galloped off. On the following morning, accidentally meeting
a farm lad who was taking a great plough horse to water, he immediately
dismounted, bestrode the great horse, and ordered the lad to mount the
blind mare, and to follow him, saying that he would take him for his
squire should he prove satisfactory. Thus equipped Maxime presented
himself to King Berlu, who accepted his services. He became in a very
short time one of Vervignole's greatest captains.

Meanwhile, Sulpice was giving the holy Bishop cause for perhaps more
cruel, and certainly more momentous, uneasiness; for if Maxime sinned
grievously, he sinned without malice, and offending God without thought,
and, so to speak, unknowingly. But Sulpice set himself to do evil with a
greater and more unusual malignity. Being destined from early youth for
the Church he assiduously studied letters, both sacred and profane; but
his soul was a corrupted vessel, wherein Truth was turned into Error.
He sinned in spirit; he erred in matters of faith with surprising
precocity. At an age when people have as yet no ideas at all, he
overflowed with wrong ones. A thought occurred to him which was
doubtless suggested by the devil. In a field belonging to the Bishop he
gathered a multitude of boys and girls of his own age and, climbing into
a tree, he exhorted them to leave their fathers and mothers to follow
Jesus Christ, and to go in, parties through the country-side, burning
priories and presbyteries in order to lead the Church back into
evangelical poverty. This youthful mob, led away by emotion, followed
the sinner along the roads of Vervignole, singing canticles, burning
barns, pillaging chapels, and devastating the ecclesiastical lands. Many
of these crazy