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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Probably Fair Rosamond, or Blanchefleur," Kit replied, down on her hands and knees after a little patch of flag-root that bordered the bed of a brook. "You know, this fall I'm going to take a whole sack of bulbs and come up here through these woods and plant whole clumps of crocus and narcissus and hyacinths broadcast. Just imagine poet's narcissus underneath those drooping hemlocks."
Then the Lady Blanchefleur turned away her face and bowed her head, and said in a voice as though it were stifling her for to speak: "Percival, it needs not to take the castle from me; take thou me for thine own, and then the castle and all shall be thine." Then by and by he said: "Lady, meseems that no knight could have greater honor paid to him than that which you pay to me.
Approving the counsel of his Queen, King Fenis sent for two rich merchants, and bade them take Blanchefleur and sell her to foreign traders at the harbour of Nicæa, which they promised faithfully to do.
But said Lycoris again: 'Sir, so far as I can judge by his mien and bearing, I deem that this youth grieves for the maiden Blanchefleur, who, now shut up in the Admiral's high tower, spent two weeks with us in grievous sorrow of heart, bewailing her sad fate in being thus sold away far from the youth she loved, and for whose sake she shed many a tear and heaved many a sigh; and, as you may remember, sir, on leaving us this Blanchefleur was bought by the Admiral for ten times her weight in gold.
'What remedy there be for Fleur I know not, said the King, 'but this thing I know full well, that Blanchefleur has cast a spell upon him, and by enchantment has bound him so fast in love to her that he can look on none other than herself; so go, fetch me Blanchefleur, that she may die and be forgotten. Once more did the Queen plead for Blanchefleur's life.
Thus did the Queen save Blanchefleur from a cruel death, and thus did she further counsel her lord: 'Ah, sir! said she, ''twere sin and shame to slay the child thus untried and unheard; better far, let her be taken to the harbour, and there sold away into distant lands and never be heard of more.
Marked you not what road the travellers took on leaving you? 'Young sir, replied the host, 'they took the road to Babylon. Then Fleur arose, and brought from his store a golden cup and a scarlet mantle. 'Take these, said he to the host, 'as my gift, but keep your thanks for Blanchefleur, who reigns within my heart.
No sooner, however, did Blanchefleur, a helpless stranger in a distant land, find herself in a chamber alone and undisturbed, than, giving way to tears and lamentations, she cried, 'Alas, Fleur! who has torn us asunder?
'Life, replied Daries, 'were ill lost for sake of a maiden, whom no aid of mine can make your own, seeing that not, were the whole world to help you, could Blanchefleur be taken from the Admiral, Lord of a hundred kings, whose city Babylon is a four-square of twenty miles, and has for its defence walls full seventy feet in height, built of a stone so hard that no engine of war from enemies without can pierce their stony front, and in these walls are three-and-thirty doors of solid steel let in with cunning art, and high uplifted are seven hundred towers, the loftiest ever seen by mortal eye, and these towers are guarded by seven hundred great lords, each one of whom is great as any king; and if all these suffice not to prove the madness of your quest, know that in the heart of the city a mighty castle stands; four stories high is the castle, and on the fourth and topmost dwells your Blanchefleur, together with four other noble damsels in a fair chamber, whose windows are cased in wood of the sweet-scented myrtle tree, while its doors are formed of ebony that never yields to fire, and this ebony is overlaid with beaten gold, on which are graven strange devices of words and scroll and flower-work, and, because none but maidens dwell there, this tower is called the Maidens' Tower.
In some surprise the Admiral then bade a chamberlain go see why Blanchefleur tarried: so the chamberlain hasted to Blanchefleur's chamber, which was all ablaze with precious stones, and there, locked in each other's arms, found Fleur and Blanchefleur, and, taking Fleur in his tender beauty to be Clarissa, the chamberlain had not the heart to wake the two, but hasted back to tell his Lord how sweetly Blanchefleur and Clarissa slept, and, lo!
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