If Jack had just arrived in France recently he’d have said, But that’s crazy-why not? but as it was he knew Arlanc spoke the truth. Arlanc recommended such-and-such a broker, to be found at the House of the Red Cat in the Rue du Temple, but then recollected that this fellow was himself a Huguenot, hence probably dead and certainly out of business.

They ended up talking through the night, Jack feeding him bits of bread and cheese from time to time, and tossing a few morsels to the others to shut them up. By the time dawn broke, Jack had given up his boots as well as his food, which was stupid in a way. But he was riding, and Monsieur Arlanc was walking.

He rode north cold, hungry, exhausted, and essentially barefoot. The horses had not been rested or tended to properly and were in a foul mood, which they found various ways to inflict on Jack. He groggily took a wrong turn and ended up approaching Paris by an unfamiliar route. This got him into some scrapes that did nothing to improve his state of mind. One of these misadventures led to Jack’s staying awake through another night, hiding from some nobleman’s gamekeepers in a wood. The rented horses kept whinnying and so he had no choice but to leave them staked out as decoys, to draw his pursuers while he slipped away with stalwart Turk.

So by the time the sun rose on the next day he was just one step away from being a miserable Vagabond again. He had lost two good horses for which he was responsible, and so all the livery stables and horse-brokers in Paris would be up in arms against him, which meant that selling Turk would be even more thoroughly impossible. So Jack would not get his money, and Turk would not get the life he deserved: eating good fodder and being fastidiously groomed in a spacious nobleman’s stable, his only responsibility being to roger an endless procession of magnificent mares. Jack would not get his money, which meant he’d probably never even see his boys, as he couldn’t bring himself to show up on their Aunt Maeve’s doorstep empty-handed… all of Mary Dolores’s brothers and cousins erupting to their feet to pursue him through East London with their shillelaghs…

It would’ve made him mad even if he hadn’t been afflicted with degeneration of the brain, and awake for the third consecutive day. Madness, he decided, was easier.

As he approached Paris, riding through those vegetable-fields where steam rose from the still-hot shit of the city, he came upon a vast mud-yard, within sight of the city walls, streaked with white quick-lime and speckled with human skulls and bones sitting right out on the surface. Rude crosses had been stuffed into the muck here and there, and jutted out at diverse angles, spattered with the shit of the crows and vultures that waited on them. When Jack rode through it, those birds had, however, all flown up the road to greet a procession that had just emerged from the city-gates: a priest in a long cloak, so ponderous with mud that it hung from his shoulders like chain-mail, using a great crucifix as walking-stick, and occasionally hauling off a dolorous clang on a pot-like bell in the opposite hand. Behind him, a small crowd of paupers employing busted shovels in the same manner as the priest did the crucifix, and then a cart, driven by a couple of starveling mules, laden with a number of long bundles wrapped and sewn up in old grain-sacks.

Jack watched them tilt the wagon back at the blurred brink of an open pit so that the bundles-looked like three adults, half a dozen children, and a couple of babies-slid and tumbled into the ground. While the priest rattled on in rote Latin, his helpers zigzagged showers of quick-lime over the bodies and kicked dirt back into the hole.

Jack began to hear muffled voices: coming from under the ground, naturally. The skulls all around him began to jaw themselves loose from the muck and to rise up, tottering, on incomplete skeletons, droning a monkish sort of chant. But meanwhile those grave-diggers, now pivoting on their shovels, had begun to hum a tune of their own: a jaunty, Irish-inflected hornpipe.

Cantering briskly out onto the road (Turk now positively sashaying), he found himself at the head of a merry procession: he’d become the point man of a flying wedge of Vagabond grave-diggers, whose random shufflings had resolved into dazzling group choreography, and who were performing a sort of close-order drill with their shovels.

Behind them went the priest, walloping his bell and walking ahead of the corpse-wain, where the dead people-who had hopped up out of the pit and back into the wagon-but who were still wrapped up in their shrouds-made throaty moaning noises, like organ-pipes to complement the grim churchly droning of the skeletons. Once all were properly arranged on the road, the skeletons finally broke into a thudding, four-square type of church-hymn:

O wha-at the Hell was on God’s mind

That sixteen-sixty day,

When he daubed a Vag-a-bond’s crude form

From a lump of Thames-side clay?

Since God would ne’er set out to make

A loser of this kind

Jack’s life, if planned in Heaven, doth prove

Jehovah’s lost His mind.

Switching to Gregorian chant for the chorus:

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

But at this point, as they were all nearing the city gates, they encountered a southbound column of galeriens, obviously Huguenots, who were shuffling along in a syncopated gait that made their chains jingle like sleigh-bells; the guards riding behind them cracked their whips in time with a sprightly tune that the Huguenots were singing:

Chained by the necks,

Slaves of Louis the Rex,

You might think that we’ve lost our freedom,

But the Cosmos,

Like clock-work,

No more than a rock’s worth

Of choices, to people, provides!

But now at this point the grave-diggers were greeted by an equal number of fishwives, issuing from the city-gates, who paired up with them, kicked in with trilling soprano and lusty alto voices, and drowned out both the Huguenots and the Skeletons with some sort of merry Celtic reel:

There once was a jolly Vagabond

To the Indies he did sail,

When back to London he did come

He wanted a fe-male.

He found a few in Drury-Lane

In Hounsditch found some more

But cash flow troubles made him long

For a girlfriend, not a whore.

Now Jack he loved the theatre

But didn’t like to pay

He met an Irish actress there

While sneaking in one day.

Now the Priest, far from objecting to this interruption, worked it into his solemn hymnody, albeit with a jarring change of rhythm:

He could have gone to make his peace

With Jesus and the Church

Instead he screwed a showgirl

Then he left her in the lurch.

Now God in Heaven ne’er could wish

That Irish lass so ill

Jack’s life’s proves irrefutably

Th’existence of Free Will

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

And the irrepressible galeriens seemed to pop their heads into the middle of this scene and take it over with the continuation of their song:

Will he, or nill he,

It’s all kinda silly

When predestination prevails!

He can’t make decisions

His will just ain’t his, and

His destiny runs on fix’d rails!

Now the Priest again:

The Pope would say, that he who blames

The Good Lord for his deeds

Is either cursed with shit for brains

Or is lost ‘mong Satan’s Weeds.

»The former group should take good care

To do as they are told

The latter’d best clean up their act

And come back to the fold.

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

And then the galeriens, obviously wanting to stay and continue the debate, but driven southward, ever southward, by the guards: