.. "
Applause interrupted him. The phrase had struck home and caught.
Those who had writhed under that infamous designation from their
betters leapt at this turning of it against the nobles themselves.
"But let me tell you of their leader - le pins noble de cette
canaille, on bien le plus canaille de ces nobles! You know him
- that one. He fears many things, but the voice of truth he fears
most. With such as him the eloquent truth eloquently spoken is a
thing instantly to be silenced. So he marshalled his peers and
their valetailles, and led them out to slaughter these miserable
bourgeois who dared to raise a voice. But these same miserable
bourgeois did not choose to be slaughtered in the streets of Rennes.
It occurred to them that since the nobles decreed that blood should
flow, it might as well be the blood of the nobles. They marshalled
themselves too - this noble rabble against the rabble of nobles -
and they marshalled themselves so well that they drove M. de La
Tour d'Azyr and his warlike following from the field with broken
heads and shattered delusions.
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