The heads and figures of the ladies of the court were for the most part fearfully and wonderfully bedecked. In some instances the horned-shaped head-dress had been followed by yet loftier steeples, "battlements to combat God with gold, silver and pearls; wherein the lances were great forked pins, and the arrows the little pins." With more simplicity, the Princess Louise wore her hair cased in a network of gold and jewels, and the austere French moralist who assailed the higher bristling ramparts of vanity would, perhaps, have borne in silence this more modest bastion of the flesh and the devil.
But the face beneath was a greater danger to those who hold that beauty is a menace to salvation; on her cheek hung the rosy banner of youth; in her eyes shone the bright arrows of conquest. And the duke, discarding his backwardness, as a soldier his cloak before battle, watched the hue that mantled her face, proffered his open breast to the shining lances of her gaze, and capitulated unconditionally before the smile of victory on her blood-red lips. With his great shoulders, his massive neck and broad, virile face, he seemed a Cyclops among pygmies in that gathering of slender courtiers and she but a flower by his side.
"I thought, Sire, your duke was timorous, bashful as a boy?" murmured the Countess d'Etampes to the king.
"He was—on the road!" answered the king thoughtfully.
"Then has he marvelously recovered his assurance."
"In love, Madam, as in battle, the zest grows with the fray," said Francis with meaning.
"And the duke is reputed a brave soldier. He looks very strong, as if—almost—he might succeed with any woman he were minded to carry off."
"To carry off!" laughed the monarch. "'Tis he, Madam, who will be bound in tethers! At heart he's shame-faced as a callow younker."
She wilfully shook her head. "No woman could keep him in leading-strings, your Majesty. There is something domineering, savage, crushing, in his hand. Look at it, on the table there. Is it not mighty as an iron gauntlet? What other man at the board has such a brutal hand? The strength in it makes me shudder. Will she not bend to it; kiss it?"
With amused superiority Francis regarded his fair neighbor on the left. "Women, Madam, are but hasty judges of men," he said, dryly, "and then 'tis fancy more than reason which governs their verdict. If the duke should seem over-confident, 'tis to hide a certain modesty, and not to appear out of confidence in so large a company."