him stood the lords and prelates
of the most sumptuous court in the West. King Sancho the Wise was ready
to stoop all his wisdom and burden of years before such superb state as
this; but the moment his procession entered the hall Richard went down
from his dais to meet it, kissed him on the cheek, asked how he did, and
set the careworn man at his ease. As for Berengere, he took from her of
both cheeks, held her small hand, spoke in her own language honourable
and cheerful words, drove a little colour into her face, screwed a word
or two out of her. Afterwards there was high mass, sung by the
Archbishop of Auch, and a great banquet, served in the cloister-garth of
the Charterhouse under a red canopy, because the hail of the citadel was
too small.

At this feast King Richard played a great part--cheerful, easy of
approach, making phrases like swords, giving and taking the talk without
any advantage of his rank. His jokes had a bite in them, as when he said
of Bertran that the best proof of the excellence of his verses was that
he had undoubtedly made them himself; or of Averrhoes, the Arabian
physician and infidel philosopher, that the man equalised his harms by
poisoning with his drugs the bodies of those whose minds had been
tainted by his heresies. But he was the first to set the laugh against
himself, and had a flash of Dame Berengere's fine teeth before he had
been ten minutes at table.

After dinner the Kings and their ministers went into debate; and then it
seemed that Richard had got up from his meat perverse. He would only
talk of one thing, namely, sixty thousand gold besants. On this he
harped maddeningly, with calculations of how much victual the sum would
buy, of the weight in ounces, of its content in sacks in a barn, of the
mileage of the coins set edge to edge, and so on, and so on. Don Sancho
sat winking and fidgeting in his chair, and talked of his illustrious
daughter.

'Milled edges they should have, these besants,' says King Richard,
'whereof, allowing (say) three hundred and fifty to a piece, we have a
surprising total of'--here he figured on the table, and King Sancho
pursued his drift until Richard brought his hand slamming down--'of
one-and-twenty million ridges of gold upon the treasure!' he concluded
with a waggish look. Agreement was as hard as to prolong parallels to a
point. Yet this went on for some two hours, until, worn frail by such
futilities, the Navarrese chancellor plumply asked h