The "three of Gruyère" whose acts are recorded in the dry and unpoetic parchments of the time, were united in a paternal and pacific rule under which people and country reached a legendary height of arcadian prosperity.
First to deserve the name so cherished in the legends of Gruyère of "pastoral king," Count Pierre III saw his herds increase and valleys and mountain sides blossom into fabulous fertility. His was the golden age of the herdsmen the "Armaillis," of whom it was related in symbolic legend that, "their cows were so gigantic and milk so abundant that it overflowed the borders of the ponds into which they poured it." By boat they skimmed the cream in these vast basins, and one day a "_beau berger_," busy with the skimming, was upset in his skiff by a sudden squall and drowned. The young lads and maidens sought long and vainly for his body and wore mourning for his tragic fate. Discovered only several days later, when amid floods of boiling cream they whipped the butter into a mound high as a tower, his body was buried in a great cavern in the golden butter, filled full by the bees with honey rays wide as a city's gates. "Where," asks a living Romand writer, "is the eclogue of Virgil or Theocritus to surpass the beauty of this legend?"