



Produced by David Widger





          A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

                             by

                         MARK TWAIN
                     (Samuel L. Clemens)

                           Part 4.




CHAPTER XVII

A ROYAL BANQUET

Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged that
I was deceived by her excuse; for her fright dissolved away, and
she was soon so importunate to have me give an exhibition and kill
somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing.  However, to my
relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers.  I will
say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous,
rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and
enthusiastically religious.  Nothing could divert them from the
regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the
Church.  More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his
enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat;
more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching
his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give
thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.  There was to be
nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini,
that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later.  All the nobles of
Britain, with their families, attended divine service morning and
night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of them
had family worship five or six times a day besides.  The credit
of this belonged entirely to the Church.  Although I was no friend
to that Catholic Church, I was obliged to admit this.  And often,
in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would this country
be without the Church?"

After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which was
lighted by hundreds of grease-jets, and everything was as fine and
lavish and rudely splendid as might become the royal degree of the
hosts.  At the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of the
king, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine.  Stretching down the hall
from this, was the general table, on the floor.  At this, above
the salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of their
families, of both sexes,--the resident Court, in effect--sixty-one
persons; below the salt sat minor officers of the household, with
their principal subordinates: altogether a hundred and eighteen
persons sitting, and about as many liveried servants standing
behind their chairs, or serving in one capacity or another.  It was
a very fine show.  In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps,
and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to be
the crude first-draft or original agony of the wail known to later
centuries as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye."  It was new, and ought
to have been rehearsed a little more.  For some reason or other
the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.

After this music, the priest who stood behind the royal table said
a noble long grace in ostensible Latin.  Then the battalion of
waiters broke away from their posts, and darted, rushed, flew,
fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began; no words
anywhere, but absorbing attention to business.  The rows of chops
opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound of it was like to
the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.

The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was the
destruction of substantials.  Of the chief feature of the feast
--the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposing
at the start--nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt;
and he was but the type and symbol of what had happened to all
the other dishes.

With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking began--and the talk.
Gallon after gallon of wine and mead disappeared, and everybody
got comfortable, then happy, then sparklingly joyous--both sexes,
--and by and by pretty noisy.  Men told anecdotes that were terrific
to hear, but nobody blushed; and when the nub was sprung, the
assemblage let go with a horse-laugh that shook the fortress.
Ladies answered back with historiettes that would almost have made
Queen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth of England
hide behind a handkerchief, but nobody hid here, but only laughed
--howled, you may say.  In pretty much all of these dreadful stories,
ecclesiastics were the hardy heroes, but that didn't worry the
chaplain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than that, upon
invitation he roared out a song which was of as daring a sort as
any that was sung that night.

By midnight everybody was fagged out, and sore with laughing;