You have no idea, none of us is any idea. For years they prayed on the sarsans that take

a nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious stones, silks, ivory. Well now what could

be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy knights to look around for some way

of expressing their gratitude to the emperor? Well so that is exactly what they did and

they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious

golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. Well

sir, what do you think of that? I don't know. Well those are facts. Historical facts, not

schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells' history, but history nonetheless. The bird was sent

in a galley commanded by a French knight named Cormier or Coveur, a member of the order,

it never reached Spain. You know Boba Rosser, Redbeard, Caiériddin? No. A famous admiral

of Buckeneers, sir. He took the galley and he took the bird. The bird went to our

years, that's a fact, and there it remained for a hundred years until it was carried away

by an English adventurer who was with the Buckeneers for a while, Sir Francis Verne,

there's nothing said about the bird in Lady Francis Verne's memoirs of the Verne family

during the 17th century. I looked. And Verne didn't have it with him when he died in

Messina in 1615, he was stony broke. But sir, it did go to Sicily. According to Karuti,

the author of Storia del Renio de Bitorio, Amadeo II, it was one of Victor Amadeus' wedding gifts

to his wife. It turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who'd been with the army that

took Naples in 1734, and there's nothing to show that it didn't stay in his family,

Monino Erendo, until the carlest was when it turned up in Paris. During the carlest troubles,

it had been painted or enameled over to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black

statuettes. And in that disguise, Sir, it was, you might say, kicked around Paris for 70 years

...