ordeaux gave orders to the soldiers of the watch
to arrest a gipsy chief, who, having shut himself up in the tower of
Veyrines, at Merignac, ransacked the surrounding country. On the 21st of
July, 1622, the same magistrates ordered the gipsies to leave the parish
of Eysines within twenty-four hours, under penalty of the lash.

It was not often that the gipsies used violence or openly resisted
authority; they more frequently had recourse to artifice and cunning in
order to attain their end. A certain Captain Charles acquired a great
reputation amongst them for the clever trickeries which he continually
conceived, and which his troop undertook to carry out. A chronicler of the
time says, that by means of certain herbs which he gave to a half-starved
horse, he made him into a fat and sleek animal; the horse was then sold at
one of the neighbouring fairs or markets, but the purchaser detected the
fraud within a week, for the horse soon became thin again, and usually
sickened and died.

Tallemant des Reaux relates that, on one occasion, Captain Charles and his
attendants took up their quarters in a village, the cure of which being
rich and parsimonious, was much disliked by his parishioners. The cure
never left his house, and the gipsies could not, therefore, get an
opportunity to rob him. In this difficulty, they pretended that one of
them had committed a crime, and had been condemned to be hung a quarter of
a league from the village, where they betook themselves with all their
goods. The man, at the foot of the gibbet, asked for a confessor, and they
went to fetch the cure. He, at first, refused to go, but his parishioners
compelled him. During his absence some gipsies entered his house, took
five hundred ecus from his strong box, and quickly rejoined the troop. As
soon as the rascal saw them returning, he said that he appealed to the
king of _la petite Egypte_, upon which the captain exclaimed, "Ah! the
traitor! I expected he would appeal." Immediately they packed up, secured
the prisoner, and were far enough away from the scene before the cure
re-entered his house.

Tallemant relates another good trick. Near Roye, in Picardy, a gipsy who
had stolen a sheep offered it to a butcher for one hundred sous (about
sixty francs of our money), but the butcher declined to give more than
four livres for it. The butcher then went away; whereupon the gipsy pulled
the sheep from a sack into which he had put it, and substituted for it