For the Blood Is the Life. Francis Marion Crawford
adherence to the details of an antiquated code. What he really wanted was my marriage with Eleonora. He got it. I more than atoned for refusing to return to captivity by letting him go freely through my kingdom on his way to Ghent. Anne advised me to put him into the Bastille. If I had been the perjured wretch people have since described me I would have followed her advice. I was a better gentleman than Charles. Perhaps that is not saying much. In my lifetime I aspired to be the first gentleman in France, or in the world. My faults were such as his majesty, Charles the Sour, could not well comprehend. But he comprehended my virtues in such a way as to attempt to play upon them to his own advantage on every possible occasion. I generally chose those occasions to lapse from virtue — as when I broke my Madrid promise. He had no right to expect me to sacrifice my kingdom and the welfare of my people to my personal convictions concerning the code of honour."
The king laughed, and in his laughter there was a coarse element which struck very disagreeably upon Lady Brenda's refined ears.
"You say nothing?" continued the king, as he noticed her silence.
"I do not understand politics," said Lady Brenda, wisely.
"I fear I did not understand them either," laughed Francis, good-humouredly. "The lady who ruled my son and my son's wife always said so. I was persuaded that I understood everything when I was alive — and when a man holds such an opinion of himself he will always find fools to agree with him and women to govern him. Had I known more of myself I might have avoided many complications — and poor Francoise would not have died in the vaults of a Breton castle."
"Perhaps there need never have been any Francoise for your majesty in that case," suggested Lady Brenda.
The king looked at her curiously as though not fully understanding her, or fancying that she was jesting. But Lady Brenda was grave and serious.
"You mean, madam, that I should have loved the queen, because she was queen — first Claude and then Eleonora ? That is a very singular notion, but I presume that ideas have changed since my day."
"Perhaps not so much as they ought to change," returned Lady Brenda. " There was a publicity in those days — "
"We were more honest."
" You had less to fear."
" We were more in earnest," said the king.
" Then you were worse — because you were more in earnest in doing wrong."
"Perhaps; but we were misguided by bad example — "
" Which your majesty strengthened by doing openly and ostentatiously what ought not to be done at all."
"I think we were bolder," objected Francis. " If we did wrong we were not afraid to do it in the face of the world."
"That is not a high form of courage," replied the inexorable lady.
"Nevertheless, it was courage," laughed the king. "But I will not discuss the question. I am sufficiently persuaded of my own badness without further argument. On the other hand a man is never so much in need of a word of encouragement and appreciation as when he is conscious of not deserving it."
"Am I to pay you compliments?" asked Lady Brenda, laughing in her turn. " It would not be hard. History has found much to say in praise of your majesty's reign. You were generous on many occasions — and you did much for the arts."
"By employing jewellers to make trinkets for Francoise and Anne. When any of those things are found nowadays they bring good prices, because they belong to the epoch of Francis the First. Yes — my name is connected with the arts. I meant it should be that of a conqueror and I am most famous for a phrase I did not pronounce when I was conquered. Fate, madam, is ironical. Perhaps I am more famous for having lost the day at Pavia than I should have been had I won it. If Bayard had been with me, instead of Bonnivet I should have had the victory. But Bayard was dead — poor Bayard! He was the truest friend I ever had."
"Have you found men truer friends than women?" asked Lady Brenda.
"Women have the qualities which attract without retaining affection — men have the faculty of retaining without attracting."
"What does that mean ? "
"It means that I always expected to find friends in the women I loved and was always disappointed; and that, though I was not attracted to seek the friendship of man, yet the few men who were my friends were on the whole very faithful to me. Bayard was one — poor Lautrec, Fraucoise's brother, was another. Louis de Breze was faithful — "
"He received a poor return," said Lady Brenda.
"Madam," returned the king, with much suavity, " he was old. His wife was young. My son Henri was very wild. What would you have ? Diane did very well."
"It was abominable," exclaimed Lady Brenda, hotly. " Diane de Poitiers might almost have been your majesty's son's mother! "
"It was precisely because she was older than he that she had such an influence over him," explained Francis. " Beware of reading histories in which everybody is abused for doing in one age what is considered immoral in another; in that way you get a very imperfect idea of the times. It would be as sensible to say that you think me very vulgar for wearing this dress instead of a coat and a tall hat. I cannot get rid of this dress — for I lived in it. In the same way, we of my time cannot get rid of the ideas of our epoch. We were brought up in them, we lived in them and we died in them. Indeed I think we were already improving. In a moral way, I daresay I do not compare badly with Henry the Eighth of England, with Roderigo Borgia, with Giovanni Maria Visconti, or even with my old enemy Charles Quint."
"Perhaps," admitted Lady Brenda. " The difference would have been greater had you prevented the attachment of your heir to Diane de Poitiers, and had you had no such affairs of the heart as caused the destruction of Madame de Chateaubriand — and your majesty's destruction by Madame d'Etampes."
"As for Diane," said the king, " Catherine did not object to her husband's attachment, as you call it. Honestly, would you, in her place, have thought it worth while to be so particular?"
"I? Indeed I would never have spoken to him again — though he was my husband! "
"Really? " exclaimed the king, with a rough laugh. " Are you so severe as that, madam ? "
"I cannot understand loving a man who does not love me," replied Lady Brenda, firmly. " It is enough to make one severe."
"But suppose that you had never loved him at all—"
"I would not have married him, even for the honour of being your majesty's daughter-in-law. If I had been married to him, supposing that he loved me, and if he afterwards showed me that he did not — in such a way as that — I would never speak to him again."
"Consider what would have been the difficulties of Catherine's position had she refused to pardon Henri," objected Francis. "She must have led a miserable life. Diane was powerful. She ruled France after my death."
"I would have been divorced from the king, and he could then have married Madame de Breze."
"Divorce in those days was not easy. We had prejudices which did not permit us to imitate our brother of England. We still regarded matrimony as a bond — a view of the rite which seems nowadays to be falling into disrepute."
"Oh ! I do not think so at all," exclaimed Lady Brenda, in a tone of conviction.
"No ? And yet divorces can be had very easily. It appears to me to be only an ingenious method of legalising the very faults with which you reproach me."
" On the contrary it is a human mode of escape for women who are ill-treated by their husbands. I am sure, if Brenda treated me as you — your majesty — treated Queen Claude and then Queen Eleonora, I would get divorced at once."
"But then there would be many men who would be certain to be divorced from every wife they married. A man loves a woman; he marries her; he tires of her and begins to love some one else; his wife at once divorces him and he is then at liberty to marry the next woman. She, in her turn, divorces him — and