VII
Charles VIII. was lodged in the lower floor of the Castle of Pavia, luxuriously prepared for him by Ludovico Il Moro. Reposing after his dinner, he was listening to the reading of a book, absurdly translated out of the Latin into French, and called Mirabilia urbis Romæ.
Charles had been a solitary, sickly child, frightened to death by his father. During many weary years, in the Castle of Amboise, he had beguiled his melancholy by the reading of chivalric romances, till his brain, never of the strongest, was completely turned. At twenty years of age he was on the throne; and, his mind full of Lancelot, Tristram, and the other heroes of the Round Table, believed himself destined to rival these legendary persons, and to put into the reality of life what belonged only to books and to dream. The court poets bathed him in an atmosphere of perpetual adulation, calling him the offspring of Mars, the heir of Julius Cæsar, when at the head of a great host he had crossed the Alps, and made his descent into Lombardy, lured by the extravagant hope of conquering Italy and the East, and destroying the heretical Mahometan religion.
To-night, listening to the description of the wonders of Rome, the King smiled, thinking of the glory to accrue to him from the Eternal City. His thoughts were, however, somewhat confused. He had dined heavily, and was now troubled by stomach-ache and headache, and above all by the recollection of a certain Madonna Lucrezia Crivelli, whose beauty had haunted him for a day and a night.
Charles VIII. was low in stature and sufficiently ugly. His chest was narrow, his shoulders crooked, his legs thin as a pair of tongs. His nose was too large, his mouth hung open, his projecting eyes were so short-sighted as to give him a perpetually strained expression; his light hair was scanty, and he had no moustache; his hands and face twitched convulsively, his speech was thick and abrupt, it was said he had six toes, and for this reason had set the court fashion of broad soft shoes of black velvet, rounded at the top to the form of a horse-shoe. This general ungainliness, together with his habitual melancholy and distraction, produced an impression not too ill warranted of natural imbecility.
'Thibaut! Thibaut!' he cried suddenly to his valet, interrupting the reading with his customary abruptness, and stammering with the effort to find his words. 'Thibaut! I—somehow think I am thirsty. Eh? Perhaps the heat——Bring me some wine—Thibaut——'
The Cardinal Brissonet, entering, announced that the duke was expecting His Most Christian Majesty.
'Eh—eh? What? The duke? Good; we come immediately. Let me first drink——'
And he stretched his hand for the cup brought by his servant. Brissonet, however, stopped him, and demanded of Thibaut:—