He accordingly told Leander he required thirty very large rooms to be filled completely with gold pieces, and gave him his royal word that he would then retire with his army. Leander was conducted to the apartments selected to be filled with gold. He took the rose and shook it, and shook it, so much, so much, that out of it poured pistoles, quadruples,[1] Louis, gold crowns, rose-nobles,[2] sovereigns,[3] guineas,[4] sequins,[5] in a perfect deluge. There are few things in the world to be seen more beautiful than a shower of gold.
Furibon was in raptures, in ecstasies; and the more gold he saw, the more he longed to seize the Amazon, and catch the Princess. As soon as the thirty chambers were quite full, he called to his guards, "Arrest! arrest that cheat; she has brought me bad money." All the guards rushed forwards to fling themselves upon the Amazon; but, at the same instant, the little red hat was put on, and Leander had disappeared. They thought he had made his escape, and ran after him, leaving Furibon by himself. Leander immediately seized him by the hair and cut off his head, as if it had been a chicken's, without the wretched little king ever seeing the hand that dealt the blow.
As soon as Leander had severed the head, he wished himself in the Palace of Pleasures. The Princess was walking in the gardens, meditating sadly on the message she had received from her mother, and on the means by which she could repulse Furibon; a difficult matter, considering she had no other troops but a few Amazons, who could not possibly defend her against four hundred thousand men.
Suddenly she saw a head suspended in the air, without
- ↑ The Spanish gold doubloon, called quadruple in French, because it was equal in value to four Louis, or eighty francs.
- ↑ The rose-noble, an appropriate coin to issue from such a mint, was the old English gold coin of Edward III.'s reign, first called rose-noble in that of Henry VIII., to distinguish it from the new George noble, struck by the latter monarch.
- ↑ The sovereigns here mentioned were Austrian gold coins of the value of thirty-three francs nine centimes, or about twenty-eight shillings English. There was, however, a gold sovereign coined in England in the reign of Henry VII. The modern Austrian sovereign is of much less value.
- ↑ The guinea in Madame d'Aulnoy's days was a new coin. It was first struck in the year 1664, and took its name from the gold of which it was made, being brought from Guinea by the African Company. It was originally only a twenty-shilling piece; its increased value occurring from the subsequent scarcity of gold, in the reign of William and Mary, at one period of which it passed for thirty shillings.
- ↑ The sequin (zecchino) is a gold coin still current in Italy and the Levant, and varies greatly in value. In Tuscany it is worth about 10s. 6d. English.
