‘Oh, leave him, leave him, Eustace,’ said Des Barres, ’and come with me.  We shall meet him in the fair way yet, you and I together.’  So the Frenchmen rode away, and Gilles, with his father and his parchments and his square forehead, went to Evreux, where King Henry then was.  Kneeling before their Duke, expounding their gravamens as if they were suing out a writ of Mort d’Ancestor, they very soon found out that he was no more a Norman than Saint-Pol.  The old King made short work of their ‘ut predictum ests’ and ‘Quaesumus igiturs.’

‘Good sirs,’ says he, knitting his brows, ’where is this lord who has done you so much injury?’

‘My lord,’ they report, ’he has her in his strong tower on the plain of Saint-Andre, some ten leagues from here.’

Then cries the old King, ’Smoke him out, you fools!  What! a badger.  Draw the thief.’

Then Gilles the elder flattened his lips together and afterwards pursed them.  ‘Lord,’ he said, ’that we dare not do without your express commandment.’

‘Why, why,’ snaps the King, ‘if I give it you, my solemn fools?’

Young Gilles stood up, a weighty youth.  ‘Lord Duke,’ he said, ’this lord is the Count of Poictou, your son.’  It had been a fine sight for sinful men to see the eyes of the old King strike fire at this word.  His speech, they tell me, was terrible, glutted with rage.

‘Ha, God!’ he spluttered, cracking his fingers, ’so my Richard is the badger, ha?  So then I have him, ha?  If I do not draw him myself, by the Face!’

It is said that Longespee (a son of his by Madame Rosamund) and Geoffrey (another bastard), with Bohun and De Lacy and some more, tried to hinder him in this design, wherein (said they) he set out to be a second Thyestes; but they might as well have bandied words with destiny.  ’War is war,’ said the foaming old man, ’whether with a son or a grandmother you make it.  Shall my enemy range the field and I sit at home and lap caudle?  That is not the way of my house.’  He would by all means go that night, and called for volunteers.  His English barons, to their credit, flatly refused either to entrap the son of their master or to abandon the city at a time so critical.  ‘What, sire!’ cried they, ’are private resentments, like threadworms, to fret the dams of the state?  The floods are out, my lord King, and brimming at the sluices.  Be advised therefore.’

No wearer of the cap of Anjou was ever advised yet.  I can hear in fancy the gnashing of the old lion’s fangs, in fancy see the foam he churned at the corners of his mouth.  He went out with such men as he could gather in his haste, nineteen of them in all.  There were old Gilles and young Gilles with their men; eight of the King’s own choosing, namely, Drago de Merlou, Armand Taillefer, the Count of Ponthieu, Fulk Perceforest, Fulk D’Oilly, Gilbert FitzReinfrid, Ponce the bastard of Caen, and a butcher called Rolf, to whom the King, mocking all chivalry, gave the gilt spurs before he started.  He did not wear them long.  The nineteenth was that great king, bad man, and worse father, Henry Curtmantle himself.