Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich Strasbourgeois, there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.