"Did your Majesty expect we should cloister you?" she answered, with a lively glance.
He gazed meditatively upon the "Rose of Valois," or the "Pearl of the Valois," as she was sometimes called; then a shadow fell upon him; the futility of ambition; the emptiness of pleasure. In scanty attire, the Duchesse d'Etampes, with the king, flashed before him; the former, all beauty, all grace, her little feet trampling down care, so lightly. Somberly he watched her, and sighed. Mentally he compared himself to Francis; they had traveled the road of life together, discarding their youth at the same turn of the highway; yet here was his French brother, indefatigable in the pursuit of merriment, while his own soul sang miséréré to the tune of Francis' fiddles. Yet, had he overheard the conversation of the favorite and the king, the emperor's moodiness would not, perhaps, have been unmixed with a stronger feeling.
"Sire," the duchess was saying in her most persuasive manner, "while you have Charles—once your keeper—in your power, here in the château, you will surely punish him for the past and avenge yourself? You will make him revoke the treaty of Madrid, or shut him up in one of Louis XI's oubliettes?"
"I will persuade him if I can," replied the king coldly, "but never force him. My honor, Madam, is dearer to me than my interests."
The favorite said no more of a cherished project, knowing Francis' temper and his stubbornness when crossed. She merely shrugged her white shoulders and watched him closely. The monarch had not scrupled once to break his covenant with Charles, holding that treaties made under duress, by force majeure, were legally void, while now— But the king was composed of contradictions, or—was her own influence waning?
She had observed a new expression cross his countenance when in the retinue of the emperor he had noted the daughter of the constable; such a tenderness as she remembered at Bayonne when the king had looked upon her, the duchess, for the first time. When she next spoke her words were the outcome of this train of thought.
"To think the jestress, Jacqueline, should turn out the daughter of that traitor, the Constable of Dubrois," she observed, keenly.
"A traitor, certainly," said Francis, "but also a brave man. Perhaps we pressed him too hard," he added retrospectively. "We were young in years and hot-tempered."
"Your Majesty remembers the girl—a dark-browed, bold creature?" remarked the duchess, smiling amiably.
"Dark-browed, perhaps, Madam; but I observed nothing bold in her demeanor," answered the king.