“So you persist in going to meet your brother, the Emperor Charles, your loving brother of Spain, whom I hate because he was so cruel to you at Madrid.” The Duchess looks up and smiles. Her eyes are beautiful, but hard and cruel. She wears an ermine mantle, for it is winter; her dress is of the richest green satin, embroidered with gold. On her head is a golden net, the meshes sprinkled with diamonds, from which her dark tresses escape in long ringlets over her shoulders.
Francis turns towards her and pledges her in a cup of Malvoisie. The corners of his mouth are drawn up into a cynical smile, almost to his nostrils. He has now reached middle life, and his face at that time would have made no man’s fortune.
“Duchess,” says he, “I must tear myself from you. I go to-morrow to Touraine. Before returning to Paris, I shall attend my brother the Emperor Charles at Loches, then at Amboise on the Loire. You will soon follow me with the Queen.”
“And, surely, when you have this heartless king, this cruel gaoler in your power, you will punish him and revenge yourself? If he, like a fool, comes into Touraine, make him revoke the treaty of Madrid, or shut him up in one of Louis XI.’s oubliettes at Amboise or Loches.”
“I will persuade him, if I can, to liberate me from all the remaining conditions of the treaty,” said the King, “but I will never force him.” As he speaks Triboulet, who has been shaking the silver bells on his parti-coloured dress with suppressed laughter, pulls out some ivory tablets to add something to a list he keeps of those whom he considers greater fools than himself. He calls it “his journal.”
The King looks at the tablets and sees the name of Charles V.
“Ha! ha! by the mass!—how long has my brother of Spain figured there?” asks he.
“The day, Sire, that I heard he had put his foot on the French frontier.”
“What will you do when I let him depart freely?”
“I shall,” said Triboulet, “rub out his name and put yours in its place, Sire.”