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Updated: July 5, 2025
Keeping his point of expectation safely low, he got a smaller vibrohammer from the toolbox and began chipping cautiously around the foreign object, until the flint split open and revealed a smooth yellow ellipsoid, half an inch long. "Worth a thousand sols if it's worth anything," he commented. A deft tap here, another there, and the yellow bean came loose from the flint.
"For having set in the Hotel des Tournelles six panes of white glass in the place where the iron cage is, thirteen sols; for having made and delivered by command of the king, on the day of the musters, four shields with the escutcheons of the said seigneur, encircled with garlands of roses all about, six livres; for two new sleeves to the king's old doublet, twenty sols; for a box of grease to grease the boots of the king, fifteen deniers; a stable newly made to lodge the king's black pigs, thirty livres parisis; many partitions, planks, and trap-doors, for the safekeeping of the lions at Saint-Paul, twenty-two livres."
In harvest-time, they have as much as 36 sols, about 1s. 6d. English money. The average daily wages of the year may amount to 24 sols, or a shilling English; they are allowed moreover, three pints of the wine of the country. Their condition is upon the whole very comfortable: the greater part of them have a cow, and a small slip of land.
They were saving a lot of wax; each one of those big sausages that the lifters picked up and floated away weighed a thousand pounds, and was worth, at the new price, eight hundred sols. Finally, they got everything away that they could, and then the blowers were shut down and the two dredge shovels moved in, scooping up the burning sludge and carrying it away, scattering it on the concrete.
For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market.
A workman, who formerly earned twenty-five sols a day, has at present three livres; and you give a sempstress thirty sols, instead of ten: yet meat, which was only five or six sols when wages was twenty-five, is now from fifty sols to three livres the pound, and every other article in the same or a higher proportion.
Before I could drop them into my jacket pocket and get out the other roll, one of the sergeants at arms drew a gun. I just hurled the handful of coins at him. He dropped the pistol and put both hands to his face, howling in pain. I gave a small mental howl myself when I thought of all the nice things I could have bought for ten sols.
Within these few days, however, the municipalities have attempted to remedy the inconvenience, by creating small paper of five, ten, fifteen, and twenty sols, which they give in exchange for assignats of five livres; but the number they are allowed to issue is limited, and the demand for them so great, that the accommodation is inadequate to the difficulty of procuring it.
Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's good heart in paying the twenty sols for the man's red bullock; perhaps for no reason at all, but certainly with no idea of making the lover's misery seem by comparison trifling there are, nevertheless, few things in literature more striking than the meeting in the wood of the daintily nurtured boy, weeping over the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of the fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, at whose very aspect the Bel Aucassin stops in awe and terror.
In the morning, seeing the soldiers were fast asleep, she rose happy at bearing no marks of the sharp skirmish, and although slightly fatigued, managed to get across the fields into the open country with her thirty sols.
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