nly tell them
what is wrong. All things will come in due season."

"Although your hopes can not realize the object that you proposed, they,
nevertheless, are an evidence of a generous soul."

"By the cap of St. Martin! You Bretons are a strange people. What! If
you should believe that I deserve esteem and affection, and if your
countrymen should share your opinion, would neither you nor they accept
with joy the authority that you now submit to by force?"

"With us it is no question of having a more or less worthy master. We
want no master."

"And yet I am your master, ye pagans!"

"Until the day when we shall have reconquered our independence by a
successful insurrection."

"You will be crushed to dust, exterminated! I swear it by the beard of
the eternal Father."

"Exterminate the last of the Breton Gauls, strangle all the children,
and you will then be able to reign over the desert of Armorica. But so
long as there lives a single man of our race in our country, you may be
able to vanquish, but never to subjugate it."

"But tell me, old man, is it that my rule is so terrible, and my laws so
hard?"

"We want no foreign domination. To live according to the laws of our
fathers, freely and as becomes free men, to choose our chiefs, to pay no
tribute, to lock ourselves up within our own frontiers and to defend
them--these are our aspirations. Accept them and you will have nothing
to fear from us."

"To dictate conditions to me! to me, who reign as sovereign master over
all Europe! To have a miserable population of shepherds and husbandmen
impose conditions to me! to me, whose arms have conquered the world!
Impudence can reach no further!"

"I might answer you that, in order to vanquish that miserable population
of shepherds, of woodmen and husbandmen entrenched in their mountain
fastnesses, behind their rocks, their marshes and their forests, your
veteran bands had to be requisitioned for Gaul--"

"Yes," cried the Emperor in a vexed voice, "in order to keep your
accursed country in obedience, I am forced to leave there my choicest
troops, troops that I may need at any moment here in Germany, where I
have hard battles to fight."

"That must be an unpleasant thing to you, Charles, I admit. Without
mentioning the maritime invasions of the Northmans, there are the
Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Bavarians, the Lombards and so many other
people whom your arms have overcome, the same as they overcame us, the
Bret