Slight though the diversion may be it was none the less appreciated—certainly more than he appreciated a European winter. It was a dreadful country, this Europe, cursed with a superfluity of water that fell from the sky in an appalling variety of forms, all of them obnoxious. If it wasn’t drizzling, it was foggy, if it wasn’t foggy it was snowing, if it wasn’t snowing it sleeted, and if it were not doing any of these things it was getting ready to. And when the sky wasn’t drooling something objectionable, moisture creeped from the ground itself and rotted one’s clothes and ruined one’s food and made fungus grow between one’s toes.King Agramant had been laying siege to Paris for months, successfully blockading the Christian emperor and his army—although in reality the situation was a stalemate. Not even that, if one considered that Karl was not particularly discommoded, comfortably ensconced as he was in his palaces behind the sturdy walls of the city, surrounded by his court and in turn by his army.
