es?"

"I say, sire, that you may possibly be in the right, that the hour of
the people may not yet have come with you."

Louis XI. gazed at him with his penetrating eye,--

"And when will that hour come, master?"

"You will hear it strike."

"On what clock, if you please?"

Coppenole, with his tranquil and rustic countenance, made the king
approach the window.

"Listen, sire! There is here a donjon keep, a belfry, cannons,
bourgeois, soldiers; when the belfry shall hum, when the cannons
shall roar, when the donjon shall fall in ruins amid great noise, when
bourgeois and soldiers shall howl and slay each other, the hour will
strike."

Louis's face grew sombre and dreamy. He remained silent for a moment,
then he gently patted with his hand the thick wall of the donjon, as one
strokes the haunches of a steed.

"Oh! no!" said he. "You will not crumble so easily, will you, my good
Bastille?"

And turning with an abrupt gesture towards the sturdy Fleming,--

"Have you never seen a revolt, Master Jacques?"

"I have made them," said the hosier.

"How do you set to work to make a revolt?" said the king.

"Ah!" replied Coppenole, "'tis not very difficult. There are a hundred
ways. In the first place, there must be discontent in the city. The
thing is not uncommon. And then, the character of the inhabitants. Those
of Ghent are easy to stir into revolt. They always love the prince's
son; the prince, never. Well! One morning, I will suppose, some one
enters my shop, and says to me: 'Father Coppenole, there is this and
there is that, the Demoiselle of Flanders wishes to save her ministers,
the grand bailiff is doubling the impost on shagreen, or something
else,'--what you will. I leave my work as it stands, I come out of my
hosier's stall, and I shout: 'To the sack?' There is always some smashed
cask at hand. I mount it, and I say aloud, in the first words that occur
to me, what I have on my heart; and when one is of the people, sire,
one always has something on the heart: Then people troop up, they shout,
they ring the alarm bell, they arm the louts with what they take from
the soldiers, the market people join in, and they set out. And it will
always be thus, so long as there are lords in the seignories, bourgeois
in the bourgs, and peasants in the country."

"And against whom do you thus rebel?" inquired the king; "against your
bailiffs? against your lords?"

"Sometimes; that depends. Against the duke, also, so