"Beautiful," replied Ulenspiegel, "I cannot tell; but fresh as you, no, for the sun has roasted them all."
Long they went their way together: Ulenspiegel was pensive and now and then would say:
"I'll make them pay their masses for the dead."
"What masses, and who will pay?" asked Nele.
"All the deans, curates, clerks, beadles, and other bigwigs high or low that feed us on windy trash. If I were a stout workman, they would have robbed me of the fruit of three years' toil by making me go pilgrimaging. But it is poor Claes who pays. They shall repay me my three years an hundredfold, and I will chant them as well the mass for their dead money."
"Alas, Thyl, be prudent: they will burn you alive," replied Nele.
"I am pure asbestos," answered Ulenspiegel.
And they parted, she all in tears, he brokenhearted, and in anger.
Passing through Bruges on the Wednesday market, there he saw a woman led along by the executioner and his knaves, and a great crowd of other women around her crying and howling a thousand vile insults.
Ulenspiegel, seeing the upper part of her dress equipped with pieces of red cloth, and seeing the stone of justice with its iron chains, at her neck, perceived that this was a woman who had sold for gain the fresh young bodies of her daughters. They told him her name was Barbe, she was the wife of Jason Darue, and would be brought in this costume from place to place until she came back to the great marketplace, where she would be set up on a scaffold already erected for her. Ulenspiegel followed her with the crowd of shouting people. Once back in the great marketplace she was set on the scaffold, bound to a stake, and the executioner laid before her a bundle of grass and a clod, signifying the pit of the grave.
They told Ulenspiegel, too, that she had been whipped already in prison.
As he was going away, he met Henri le Marischal, a swashbuckling rogue who had been hanged in the castle-ward of West Ypres and still showed the track of the cord around his neck. "He had been delivered," he said, "while already hoisted into the air, by saying one only good prayer to Notre Dame of Hal, in such wise that, by a true miracle, the bailiffs and the judges having gone, the cords, already loosened, broke, he fell to earth, and was in this manner saved and sound."