FONTAINEBLEAU.

FONTAINEBLEAU.Itstands girdled with its forty thousand acres of forest, or gathering of many palaces rather than a united single one, and presents perhaps a wider and more varied retrospect than any of its historical compeers. Poet, philosopher, and historian alike find inexhaustible food for meditation before the grand, irregular pile that rises up before us with its towers and gables massed against the sky—the most elaborate epic ever written in stone. But prior to the stupendous poem that we behold to-day, an idyl rose upon its site; a song, half sacred, half sylvan, floats to us across the distant tide of time, the record of an undying past. A vast virgin forest where the chant of prayer and penitence mingles with the voicing of the primeval choir of oaks, and sycamores, and elms, and spire-like poplars, ranged in many-octaved lyres for the winds to strike with strong melodic finger; and human souls set up in the high places, higher than forest trees or earth-built towers; harps wooing the touch divine of the Master’s hand, joining in the ecstatic song of seraph praise; souls these who have cast aside crowns of gold, and trodden their purple garments under foot, to choose the crown of thorns and the scant robe of poverty—love driven to the strange madness, of the cross; others there are who sing the deep plain-song of humility and forgiven sin; while some, whose snow-white brow the dark shadow of sin has never crossed, carol forth in innocent joy with the matins of the lark the hymn of deliverance, the psalm of praise and worship, of intercession and thanksgiving—such is the concert of celestial harmony that echoes to us from the long-ago of the grand old forest. Many changes, will follow: we shall see a busy stir of multitudinous life alternating with the chill silence of the tomb; princes and prelates hurrying to and fro, noble matrons, and frail women, and death in many forms, beautiful and terrible, serene and tragic, passing and repassing the gates; and we shall hear the woods reverberating to other sounds than those of prayer—to the clanging of civil strife, to the voice of laughter and of tears.Distinct amidst all the earlier memories of Fontainebleau stand out the figures of S. Louis and hismother, Blanche of Castille. There are many versions as to the origin of the place; the most popular one records that S. Louis, being out hunting one day, lost a favorite hound called Bleau, and, after scouring the forest in search of the truant, found him at last quietly drinking at a fountain, and was so enchanted with the beauty of the surrounding scene that he determined to build a hunting-lodge on the spot; he did so, and, in memory of the incident, it was named Fontaine de Bleau. But this pretty legend is rejected by the most reliable historians, who have searched out traces of a much earlier origin for Fontainebleau. There seems sufficient evidence of its having been used as a royal residence by Hugh Capet, and frequented as a favorite rendezvous for the hunt by all the earlier kings of France. The existence of the famous monastery of S. Germain l’Auxerre, at the western extremity of the forest, is advanced as a proof, and a strong one, of its being in those remote times inhabited by royal patrons, for monasteries sprang of necessity where kings lived; and there is no doubt that the greater portion of the abbey lands were grants from good King Robert. Blanche of Castille retired to an old château of some sort at Fontainebleau during her husband’s absence while at war with England or the Albigenses; she founded in the neighborhood the Abbaye de Lys, which was later on munificently endowed by her son, Louis IX., who even went the length of giving up to it some acres of the forest that he loved so well. It was here that a great portion of his childhood was passed. Under the shadow of the old woods, or pacing the solemn cloisters of the abbey, his mother instilled into his mind those first lessons of fear and love upon which his life was so faithfully modelled. “My son, I love thee dearly, but, so help me God, I would rather see thee dead at my feet than have thee live to sully thy soul with one mortal sin.” Truly, a valiant mother of the Machabean mould—a woman of strong faith, worthy to be the mother of a Christian king.When the child has grown to manhood, we see him still at Fontainebleau, holding his court of justice under the broad shade of a giant oak, he seated on the gnarled trunk, while his people gathered round him—a young patriarch settling the disputes of his tribe, dealing out the law; justice and mercy being counsel, and judge, and jury, and the king’s word supreme. Sometimes we see him dashing through the glade, followed by his courtiers, while the merry hunting-horn scares the wild birds from their nests, and rouses the tusky boar in his lair; but more frequently we see the king alone, meditating on the frail tenure of earthly joys and pride, or surrounded by the wise and learned men, too noble to be called courtiers, whose society he enjoyed better than that of youths of his own age. Louis preserved through life a taste for the monastic offices that he had joined in habitually with Blanche de Castille in his childhood; and, when he could spare a few days from the cares of his kingdom, he would spend them in the prayerful solitude of the monastery of the Mathurins, assisting at all the offices with the monks, and helping them in tending the sick and teaching the poor. His young courtiers made merry over this strange pastime for a king, but Louis only laughed, and said: “Let them laugh, these young ones! It hurts no one, and God is not offended. If I spent my time in hunts, and tournaments, and dancing, they would not blame me. Let them laugh; pray GodI may never give them cause to weep!” Once S. Louis fell ill at Fontainebleau, and, being considered at the point of death, he called his little son to him, and gave him some touching advice concerning his conduct and private life; then suddenly changing his tone to one of great impetuosity, he exclaimed: “I pray thee, fair son, make thyself loved of my people! for verily I had rather a Scotchman came from Scotland to govern the kingdom well and loyally than that it should be unfairly or unkindly governed by thee!”Joinville, who was the close companion of S. Louis through the most active part of his career, finds no words wherewith to praise adequately the character and virtues of the king. “What concerned himself alone could never move him to joy or wrath,” says this trustworthy chronicler; “but when it touched the honor of God, or the happiness of his people, Louis knew no fear, and brooked no delay, nor could any earthly consideration hinder him in the discharge of a duty.” Yet Joinville censures his master severely for having undertaken the second Crusade, which he condemns as a great military and political mistake. Had it succeeded, however, Egypt would have become a Christian colony, and the cross would have been planted on the pyramids; this was what S. Louis looked to beyond the conquest of Jerusalem; and, if his dream had been realized, Joinville would hardly have pronounced it a “great mistake.”A quaint anecdote is told of a trick played by S. Louis to ensnare his nobles into enlisting in this fatal expedition. The court was at Fontainebleau for the celebration of Christmas. It was customary for the king to present the courtiers with furred cloaks calledliveriesto wear at Midnight Mass on Christmas eve. S. Louis had a great number of these made, and gave orders that a cross should be embroidered in dark silk on the shoulder of each, and that they should be distributed at the last moment in a dimly lighted apartment; this was done, according to the king’s command; the courtiers hurriedly donned theirliveries, and it was only when they entered the brilliantly illuminated church that the wearers beheld the symbol on each other’s backs. They were at first astonished and displeased, says Joinville, but when the king came forward with the cross on his own shoulder and the crucifix in his hand, and asked if they would tear theirs off, and send him forth alone to the Holy Land, a thrill of chivalrous ardor ran through the assembly, and all answered as one voice: “No; we will follow you! We will keep the cross!” And they did.Blanche de Castille, whose religious enthusiasm is rightly or wrongly credited with the responsibility of this ill-fated enterprise, held the regency during her son’s absence, and proved by her courage in confronting the dangers and difficulties of the charge, and by her wisdom and counsel, that even in those unprogressive days a wise and virtuous woman made no bad substitute for a man in the mighty task of government. She spent most of her time in the comparative retirement of Fontainebleau; but when the news came of the disastrous issue of Mansoorah, where the Christian army was cut to pieces, and the king with his noblest captains taken prisoners, she left it, and hastened to the capital, in order to work more actively for the ransom of her son and his brave companions in arms. It was a terrible time for a mother. The queen knew that those who had taken herson captive had no power over his soul; she knew that Louis was more commanding in his chains than he had even been at the head of his armies; that adversity would teach him no language unbecoming a Christian prince; that neither threats nor torture would wrench from him any compromise unworthy of his honor; and that captivity, nay, death, in so august a cause was the most enviable destiny she could have wished him; but she was a human mother withal, and in this hour of trial her motherhood vindicated itself relentlessly. Blanche labored day and night to raise a ransom that might tempt the Turk to give up his prize. She heard that eight thousandbesants[102]would be accepted for the king himself, and this sum was with great difficulty mustered and sent to Palestine. But when Louis heard it, he sent word to the sultan that “the King of France was not to be ransomed with gold or silver; that he would give the town of Damietta for his own person, and eight thousandbesantsfor his army.” The offer was rejected with scorn, and Louis was subjected to still greater cruelties and humiliations; but at last, worn out by the indomitable heroism of his victim, the sultan gave way; the regal fortitude in which suffering had clothed their captive had subdued even his jailers into wondering admiration, and they set him free, declaring that “this king was the proudest Christian that the East had ever seen.” No sooner was he at liberty, than, instead of hastening away from the scenes of his misery and misfortunes, Louis set to work to spread the Gospel far and wide in Palestine; but Blanche had earned a right to clasp him to her heart after those three years of separation. She felt, too, that the days were growing short; so she wrote, entreating him to come home. S. Louis was repairing the ramparts of Sidon when the summons reached him; he immediately prepared to obey it; but, before he had left Sidon, the mother who, next to God, had been the supreme love of his life had taken her flight to a better world. She died at Fontainebleau. “He made great mourning thereat,” says Sire de Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man to fetch me. When I came before him in his chamber, where he was alone, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O seneschal! I have lost my mother. My God, thou knowest that I loved this mother better than all other creatures, but thy will be done. Blessed be thy name!’” Philip le Bel (IV.) was born at Fontainebleau. There are conflicting versions as to the place of Philip’s death, but it is generally supposed to have taken place at Fontainebleau, in the same room where he was born. There was a current belief at the time, and it was preserved through many succeeding generations, that his death was the result of a summons issued against him by the grand master of the templars, Jacques de Molai. A hundred and thirteen templars perished at the stake during Philip’s reign, and theseautos-da-fewere crowned by that of the grand master, who was burnt alive in the gardens of his own palace. As the flames rose round his naked body, the templar lifted up his voice, and, in the hearing of the vast multitude of spectators, solemnly summoned Philip “to meet him at the judgment-seat in four months from that day.” The death of the king precisely four months from the day of De Molai’s execution gave a sanction to thecredulity of the people, and the legend passed into an historical occurrence. The fact of the summons is accepted; we can have no difficulty in admitting its inevitable effect on the mind of the individual against whom it was sent forth. There was a prevailing belief that a dying man had the power to issue the formidable command, and that obedience was compulsory. Philip, whose passion for gold had led him to confiscate the treasures of the templars, and then to calumniate and persecute them in order to justify his own spoliations, was haunted by the words of De Molai. He grew sick, and his illness, defying all the arts of medicine, soon brought him to the verge of death. Feeling that his days were numbered, he begged to be taken to Fontainebleau, that he might gaze once more upon the home of his happy childhood. On arriving there, he sent for his children and his friends, and took a sorrowful farewell of them. “They entered the chamber where the king was,” says Godefroid de Paris, “and where there was very little light. They asked him how he felt, and he answered: ‘Ill in body and in soul. I have put on so manytillagesand laid hands on so much riches that I shall never be absolved. Methinks I shall die to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me.’” And that same night he died (1314).The sons of Philip frequented Fontainebleau very faithfully. So did Charles V.; but a veil of mist hangs over the history of the castle during the greater part of the XIVth century. We only find it mentioned now and then as a meeting-place for the hunt of royal sportsmen. Isabeau de Bavière honored it often with her presence, and enlarged a portion of the building. But the romantic history of Fontainebleau dates from Francis I. He was to it what Louis XIV. was to Versailles. It is customary amongst the admirers of those two brilliant representatives of French monarchy to set them side by side, and compare their characters and achievements. And no doubt there are points of resemblance between them, but it is difficult to pursue the comparison much below the surface. Louis XIV., as a king, certainly has the best of it, and, as a man, Francis seems to have had all the vices without many of his successor’s redeeming virtues. Louis was dissipated, but he put a limit to his dissipation: Francis knew none; he exhausted the treasury by his wanton prodigality and the army by his senseless ambition; he burnt La Provence, he broke his plighted word to Charles V., and yet we hear him spoken of as the rival of Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche.”[103]History passes strange verdicts sometimes, but stranger still is the blind credulity with which posterity endorses them, and clings to them in spite of the light that by degrees pierces through the darkness, showing up the idol or the monster, stripped of masks and drapery, and exposed in its nakedness, or clothed with its own deeds, that make the only garment it has a right to wear; we acknowledge that we have been worshipping a false standard, or forswearing an honest one; but we go on with a dogged tenacity worshipping and forswearing still, rather than forsake an old love or renounce an old antipathy. There are few personages in history who have usurped this kind of worship and held it more successfully than Francis I. Fontainebleau is not, however, the appropriate place for challenging his claims to the applauseof posterity; here he is on his vantage-ground; we see him at his best, all his faults, if not obliterated, mellowed in the blaze of borrowed glory that encircles him; here he is the graceful knight-errant, the magnificent patron of art, and science, and learning, surrounded by men of genius, whom he treats as equals and as friends; we forget his profligate follies, his reckless waste of the kingdom’s money and the kingdom’s blood, when we see him petting Leonardo da Vinci, doing the behests and humoring the crotchets of the cantankerous old genius so tenderly, and bearing his unreasonable jealousy and his reproaches like a chidden child. It would go hard with us to be severe on so lovable a scapegrace, even if he were not the King of France. Francis ought never to come before us except in the midst of his beloved artists. There he is perfect. To Leonardo his demeanor is especially touching. When the proud old man, still in the zenith of his fame, but stung by the coldness of Leo X. and frightened by the rising glory of Michael Angelo’s sun, turned sulkily away from his native land, Francis invited him to Fontainebleau, received him with open arms, and treated him like a prince as he was of the trueright divinecreation, and laid himself out to console him and brighten the evening of his days. The exile was querulous from ill-health, as well as soured by disappointment and the ingratitude of the Medici; but Francis bore with his temper and his lamentations with the sweetness of a woman; there was no tender gracefulness that sympathy could devise to cheer the old man’s spirit and heal his aching pride that the king had not recourse to; he would have kept him at Fontainebleau, near his own person, but Leonardo, who was so fond of solitude and meditation that he never married, “because the clatter of a wife’s tongue would have disturbed his thoughts,” could not bear the gay bustle of the court, and said he must go somewhere to be quiet; so Francis gave him a splendid suite of apartments in the Château de Clou at Amboise. He spent the remaining four years of his life there, painting his celebrated Mona Lisa, the most exquisitely finished perhaps of all his works, and in writing his treatiseDella Pittura, a book of great originality and learning, written, like all Da Vinci’s books, after the manner of the Eastern manuscripts, from right to left—a singularity which he adopted, it is said, to foil the curiosity of those around him, and prevent his brother artists from discovering his secrets. The king paid twelve thousand livres for Mona Lisa—an unprecedented sum for a work of art in those days. When Leonardo was thought to be near his end, Francis had him conveyed to Fontainebleau that he might watch over him himself and be with him at the close.On the morning of his death, when the king came into the room, the dying man tried to raise himself on his couch to welcome him, but the effort was too much; he sank forward, and would have fallen but for the timely arms that rescued him. Francis laid the venerable old head upon his breast, and there it lay till Leonardo breathed his last.The artist had been pursued for months before his death by a morbid terror of being buried alive, and had implored Francis to let him be kept three days before the coffin was closed. The king complied with the wish, and caused his friend to be exposed with royal honors, and the body laid in state for three days. He was buried in the Church of S. Florentin,near his own abode at Amboise.Benvenuto Cellini is another shining stone in the pedestal of Francis I. Discontented with the recognition that his genius met with at home, he too was enticed from the blue skies of Florence to the colder but more genial atmosphere of Fontainebleau, and was petted by the graceful king only in a less degree than Da Vinci. But Benvenuto, who knew so many things, who excelled almost equally as a poet, a sculptor, and a painter, was lamentably ignorant in the art of being a courtier. The Duchesse d’Estampes was queen of the gay palace of Armida, and all the great men that frequented it bowed before her; but this bold Florentine, who had a dash of the brigand in his composition, thought he might dispense with her patronage, and refused to do homage at the common shrine; he knew that he had had the bad luck to displease the haughty fair one by his untutored manners from the first, and, instead of trying to conciliate, he determined to conquer her. The duchess was a liberal and enlightened patroness of art, and seems to have merited in some degree by her personal accomplishments the flattering title bestowed on her by one of her protégés of “the most beautiful ofsavantesand the most learned of belles.” Her sway over Francis rested, therefore, on something stronger than the ephemeral tenure of mere beauty; but, had it been otherwise, what chance was there for Benvenuto against the favorite of the king? He, foolish mortal, braved her so far as to ask the king direct, without having recourse to her intervention, for an order to cast a bronze statue for the great gallery which was in process of completion, and Francis gave him the order, with carte-blanche for the execution. The statue was finished, and a day appointed for the king to see it. This was a precious opportunity for a woman’s vengeance; the duchess knew that the triumph of the artist depended altogether on the first impression produced on the king, and that the triumph of the work depended mainly on the light in which it was seen: Cellini had named an hour when the sun would pour in soft, full floods of light down the gallery; and, long before the appointed time, he was there, watching every changing shadow that it cast upon his statue, counting the minutes impatiently, while his friends and all the court flocked in to assist at the king’s entrance, and witness the triumph or the humiliation of the sculptor. But the hour passed, and another, and another, and there was no sign of Francis; the sun was gathering up its light, and speeding away to the west, and the brown twilight was creeping into the gallery. Benvenuto grew nervous, then outrageous. He paced up and down before his Jupiter like a man gone mad. Where was the king? Would no one take pity on him to go and call the king? But Benvenuto knew full well that none in that courtly crowd would be guilty of so rash an act. Not even he himself would dare to do it. He knew whose fault it was that the king was not forthcoming, and he gnashed his teeth in savage but impotent rage. But genius, like prophecy, has a ready handmaid in inspiration. “Let fall the curtains, and bring lights,” cried the sculptor, with a sudden bound from despair to triumph. The partisans of the “belle savante” groaned, and stood still; the friends of Cellini flew to obey his orders. It mattered not that they did not understand: the master did. In less time than it takes to tell, the gallerywas illuminated from end to end; lamps, torches, waxlights, every luminary that hands could carry, was put in requisition, till Jupiter shone out magnificent, terrible, and dazzling in the blaze of an impromptu illumination more weirdly effective than the brightest daylight could have been.Cellini’s spirit rose to frenzy. He ran hither and thither, arranging the lights with a view to more striking effect; clustering many flames in a group at one point, leaving another in partial shade; clapping his hands in wild delight one minute, impatiently knocking down one of his helpmates the next. It was finished. The king was heard approaching. Cellini, with an imperious gesture, commanded silence; the doors of the gallery were thrown open, and the colossal bronze god flashed out in all his dark effulgence on the astonished and enchanted gaze of the monarch. The triumph of the hour was complete; but it cost the sculptor dear. The duchess gave Francis no peace till he quarrelled with her enemy, and dismissed him from the court.Many Italian artists had followed Leonardo da Vinci to France, some out of love for the great master himself, others tempted by the generosity which the King of France showed universally to their class. The most distinguished of these disciples of Leonardo was Andrea del Sarto. But he was of too restless a disposition to settle anywhere permanently; camp, court, and studio alike wearied him after a time; his wings were too buoyant to remain long folded even in the enchanted clime of Fontainebleau; he was not more than a year there, when he declared it was a necessity of life for him to return to Florence, the ostensible motive being to see his wife. Francis proposed to send for her, promising that she should be made welcome to his court as an honored guest; but Andrea said this would not do: he must go himself and fetch her. All the king could obtain was a promise that he would return to France in a year; and, to make the promise more binding, he entrusted him with a considerable sum of money, to be expended, according to Andrea’s taste and judgment, on objects of art for the decoration of the palace. But when Andrea found himself once more in Florence, in the company of his wife and his former boon companions, he forgot all about his mission, and spent the king’s money in merry-making; he did not dare show himself at Fontainebleau after this, but frittered away the rest of his life in his native city, where he eventually died in poverty and contempt. It would take too long to enumerate the various European celebrities who fill up the brilliant picture presented by Francis’ court at this period; but we cannot refuse a passing mention to Serlio, the accomplished Bolognese architect, whom the king lured away from Italy by his gold and his honeyed flattery. Serlio rebuilt the palace almost entirely; his genius was allowed full scope, and the result justified the confidence of his patron.The area of the old building being much too small for the magnificent new plan, Francis bought in the Mathurin Convent and the noble grounds with which Louis IX. had endowed it, and added them to the original site. The design of the library had been sketched by S. Louis, and this Serlio adhered to strictly, making no change of his own. When the edifice was finished, Francis swept Italy and Spain for artists to adorn and beautify it. Rosso came to paint the walls in fresco, and his design for the grand gallery, which was to be called the Gallery of Francis I., carried the prize overall his competitors; he embellished it with paintings, friezes of great beauty, and rich stucco-work. So delighted was the king with the result of Rosso’s labors that, in addition to other favors, he created him a canon of the Sainte Chapelle. This wonderful gallery had sixteen frescoes representing the most remarkable incidents in the life of Francis; the famousporte dorée[104]was decorated by the same gifted hand. It is lamentable to think that these glorious works of art, which formed Rosso’s principal claim on the admiration of the world, were sacrificed to the vindictive jealousy of a rival. Francesco Pellegrini had been the early friend of Rosso; but, when they met as fellow-laborers at Fontainebleau, the friendship turned to a rivalry which soon developed into bitter enmity, and ended in the tragic death of Rosso. Primaticcio, as Pellegrini is usually called, was accused by his rival of having stolen a large sum of money from him; he was put to the torture, but acquitted triumphantly. Rosso was then seized with shame and remorse; haunted in imagination by the shrieks of the innocent man, the friend of his youth, whom he had given up to the torture, his mind gave way, and in a fit of insanity he took poison, which killed him in a few hours. Some say that Rosso knew that the accusation was false, and that he brought it designedly against Primaticcio, hoping to get rid of him; but his frantic grief on discovering his mistake, and the fatal consequences of his remorse, may be taken as contradictory evidence of this opinion. Primaticcio, moreover, by his subsequent conduct, vindicates his unhappy rival from having done him so very great a wrong in suspecting him capable of the theft, for he unblushingly stole from Rosso what was incomparably more precious to him than gold—his fame. No sooner was he master of the field, than he set about to destroy all traces of Rosso’s beautiful compositions, pulling down the walls which they adorned, under pretence of enlarging the space. Some few that were spared by the relentless destroyer have been obliterated by damp and the effects of time. There is one fine painting of his to be seen in the Louvre—“Mary receiving the homage of S. Elizabeth.”The fêtes given at Fontainebleau by Francis I., though perhaps inferior in splendor to those of Louis XIV. at Versailles, surpassed them in picturesque elegance; they were rather the ideal festivities of an artist than the gorgeous pageants of an Arabian caliph. But the leisures of Francis were not all wasted in frivolous amusements. In his sane moments, when he was not flying after that will-o’-the-wisp that cost France and him so dear, the conquest of the Milanese, he was something more than the mere fascinating madcap that his enemies make him out; for it is his lot, like that of all charming but unprincipled sovereigns, to inspire panegyrics and denunciations equally exaggerated. He was not only a patron of those artists who contributed to the adornment of his dwellings: Francis courted the society of learned men for learning’s sake. The luxurious repasts of Fontainebleau were enlivened and refined by the presence of such men as Clement Marot, whose style, full of terseness and incisive grace, the king was fond of emulating in verses of his own composition, not altogether devoid of poetic merit. He delighted in the chivalrous lays of the middle ages, and in the harmonious cadence and florid imagery of the ballads of thetroubadours. The witty Curé of Mendon was a frequent guest at the royal table, Francis provoking his lively sallies, and heartily enjoying them, though the sarcasm was often boldly pointed at himself. Learned men of every class—doctors, bookworms, and even printers—were admitted to the same honor. Erasmus was one of the few who withstood the wiles of the charmer; he steadfastly refused all invitations to reside permanently at Fontainebleau; but he kept up a brisk correspondence with Francis, the honest freedom of whose tone throughout does equal honor to the scholar and the king. The French court was, in fact, the most polished and the gayest in Europe at this period. The sprightly Queen of Navarre—that sister whom Francis so tenderly loved, his “Marguerite des Marguerites”—was its presiding genius and brightest ornament. She was passionately fond of Fontainebleau, and made it her home during the greater part of her first husband’s life, and after her marriage with Henri de Navarre, who was so frequently absent, either in her brother’s service or in the pursuit of war on his own account. Her image is everywhere associated in our memory with that of Francis in his favorite palace. In her boudoir, a spacious and magnificently decorated room, leading out of Rosso’s noble gallery, the royal brother and sister passed many delightful hours, either in affectionate converse together, or surrounded by the artists and learned men whom they both loved to honor. Here Francis placed the library of rare books and manuscripts for which he had scoured Italy, Spain, and Greece. The erudite Erasmus would sometimes deliver one of his learned discourses on deep and elevating themes in the privacy of this enchanting retreat, while Marguerite de Navarre worked out, in rainbow-tinted silks and golden threads, the poem of one of her artist friends, or some chivalrous exploit of her idolized Francis. Happy had it been for Francis and for France had he dwelt content amidst the peaceful and refined delights of this Eldorado. But there was the Milanese—that unlucky Milanese, the bane of his life, and of his people’s while his lasted. Again and again he flew at it like a moth at the flame, or a madman at hisidée fixe—failure and humiliation, instead of disgusting him with his hobby, only goaded him to its pursuit with greater zest. And what odd, shifting relations grew out of this standing duel between him and Charles V.! Alternately, they were rivals, friends, deadly foes, and “dear brothers.” Beside the gloomy, vindictive Spanish warrior, subtle in his policy, swift and ruthless in his vengeance, the brilliant figure of Francis shone at its best; he had all the qualities that his rival lacked; his uncalculating generosity, his rash impulses that led him into so many grievous straits, all stand out in bright relief against the dark background of the contest. The story of the broken Treaty of Madrid is one of the many vexed questions over which the apologists of both princes have broken innumerable lances, but they leave it pretty much where it stood in the year of grace 1527, after the Notables decided that the conditions of the treaty were monstrous, and had been unjustifiably imposed by a jailer on his prisoner, and that Francis was right in maintainingque prisonnier gardé n’est tenu a nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.[105]Charles had no right to exact the abdication of his conquered foe, andthe latter had no power to effect it without the consent of his Notables, which he knew full well would never be granted. Still, the solemn oath sworn on the crucifix by Francis in presence of the emperor is not to be disposed of so easily. It would have been more consistent with the character for Bayard-like chivalry, which the French prince arrogated, to have withheld the pledge which he knew he could not redeem, than to purchase his liberty by a subterfuge that has left an equivocal mark upon his memory. He was only a lifetenant of the crown of France; he might resign it, but he had no power to alienate its most insignificant fief; in swearing, therefore, to hand over the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Flanders and Artois to Charles V., he was performing a vain sham; for, had he been willing to carry out the promise of renunciation himself, he was well aware that the states-general and the parliament of the realm would never ratify the act, and that without their ratification it remained null and void. The strong epithets used by Charles in denouncing the disloyalty of his quondam captive in violating this preposterous treaty are, however, somewhat misplaced, considering the duplicity and cruelty which he himself had displayed in extracting impossible concessions from a brave and conquered foe.It was not long before Francis had an opportunity of vindicating his much-prized character for chivalrous magnanimity by heaping coals of fire on the head of Charles. The emperor was on his way to Ghent, and applied to the king for a safe-conduct through his dominions. It was granted at once, but on condition that the emperor should remain for a few days the guest of Francis. Charles was in such a hurry to castigate the rebels that he would have promised more than this in order to arrive swiftly on the scene of vengeance; he consented to halt at Fontainebleau; but no sooner had he set foot on the soil of his “good brother of France,” than he was seized with tremors and suspicions that made his life miserable; he accused himself of madness in having so rashly rushed into the arms of a prince whom he had persecuted meanly when he was in his power, and whose state he had grievously injured; nor did the magnificence of the reception which greeted him on his arrival calm his fears. Francis, who was utterly incapable of a base breach of hospitality, could not forego the pleasure of playing a little on the agonies of Charles; he occasionally repeated to him the murmurings of the Queen of Navarre and the Dauphin, who would fain have improved the rare opportunity by compelling their guest to undo some of the mischief he had done their brother and father. Francis even recounted to the emperor with great merriment an epigrammatic little passage between himself and his favorite dwarf, Triboulet: while the latter was diverting the king with his usual antics on the night of the Spaniard’s arrival, he suddenly pulled out his tablets, and began to write with an air of great gravity. “What are you writing there, Triboulet?” inquired his master. “The name of a bigger fool than myself,” replied the dwarf. “Who is that?” said Francis. “Charles,” replied Triboulet. “But suppose I keep my word, and let him go?” queried the king. “Then,” answered Triboulet, “I would rub out Charles, and write Francis instead.”The question of the Milanese was discussed between the two sovereigns during this period with great earnestness on one side and consummateskill on the other. Charles promised solemnly to bestow the investiture on the Dauphin; but, when Francis urged him to confirm his pledge by a written guarantee, he cunningly retaliated his host’s answer concerning the Treaty of Madrid: “Prisonnier gardé n’est tenu à nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.” He declared, however, that on reaching Flanders he would give the promise in writing. We know how he kept his word.TO BE CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT NUMBER.

FONTAINEBLEAU.Itstands girdled with its forty thousand acres of forest, or gathering of many palaces rather than a united single one, and presents perhaps a wider and more varied retrospect than any of its historical compeers. Poet, philosopher, and historian alike find inexhaustible food for meditation before the grand, irregular pile that rises up before us with its towers and gables massed against the sky—the most elaborate epic ever written in stone. But prior to the stupendous poem that we behold to-day, an idyl rose upon its site; a song, half sacred, half sylvan, floats to us across the distant tide of time, the record of an undying past. A vast virgin forest where the chant of prayer and penitence mingles with the voicing of the primeval choir of oaks, and sycamores, and elms, and spire-like poplars, ranged in many-octaved lyres for the winds to strike with strong melodic finger; and human souls set up in the high places, higher than forest trees or earth-built towers; harps wooing the touch divine of the Master’s hand, joining in the ecstatic song of seraph praise; souls these who have cast aside crowns of gold, and trodden their purple garments under foot, to choose the crown of thorns and the scant robe of poverty—love driven to the strange madness, of the cross; others there are who sing the deep plain-song of humility and forgiven sin; while some, whose snow-white brow the dark shadow of sin has never crossed, carol forth in innocent joy with the matins of the lark the hymn of deliverance, the psalm of praise and worship, of intercession and thanksgiving—such is the concert of celestial harmony that echoes to us from the long-ago of the grand old forest. Many changes, will follow: we shall see a busy stir of multitudinous life alternating with the chill silence of the tomb; princes and prelates hurrying to and fro, noble matrons, and frail women, and death in many forms, beautiful and terrible, serene and tragic, passing and repassing the gates; and we shall hear the woods reverberating to other sounds than those of prayer—to the clanging of civil strife, to the voice of laughter and of tears.Distinct amidst all the earlier memories of Fontainebleau stand out the figures of S. Louis and hismother, Blanche of Castille. There are many versions as to the origin of the place; the most popular one records that S. Louis, being out hunting one day, lost a favorite hound called Bleau, and, after scouring the forest in search of the truant, found him at last quietly drinking at a fountain, and was so enchanted with the beauty of the surrounding scene that he determined to build a hunting-lodge on the spot; he did so, and, in memory of the incident, it was named Fontaine de Bleau. But this pretty legend is rejected by the most reliable historians, who have searched out traces of a much earlier origin for Fontainebleau. There seems sufficient evidence of its having been used as a royal residence by Hugh Capet, and frequented as a favorite rendezvous for the hunt by all the earlier kings of France. The existence of the famous monastery of S. Germain l’Auxerre, at the western extremity of the forest, is advanced as a proof, and a strong one, of its being in those remote times inhabited by royal patrons, for monasteries sprang of necessity where kings lived; and there is no doubt that the greater portion of the abbey lands were grants from good King Robert. Blanche of Castille retired to an old château of some sort at Fontainebleau during her husband’s absence while at war with England or the Albigenses; she founded in the neighborhood the Abbaye de Lys, which was later on munificently endowed by her son, Louis IX., who even went the length of giving up to it some acres of the forest that he loved so well. It was here that a great portion of his childhood was passed. Under the shadow of the old woods, or pacing the solemn cloisters of the abbey, his mother instilled into his mind those first lessons of fear and love upon which his life was so faithfully modelled. “My son, I love thee dearly, but, so help me God, I would rather see thee dead at my feet than have thee live to sully thy soul with one mortal sin.” Truly, a valiant mother of the Machabean mould—a woman of strong faith, worthy to be the mother of a Christian king.When the child has grown to manhood, we see him still at Fontainebleau, holding his court of justice under the broad shade of a giant oak, he seated on the gnarled trunk, while his people gathered round him—a young patriarch settling the disputes of his tribe, dealing out the law; justice and mercy being counsel, and judge, and jury, and the king’s word supreme. Sometimes we see him dashing through the glade, followed by his courtiers, while the merry hunting-horn scares the wild birds from their nests, and rouses the tusky boar in his lair; but more frequently we see the king alone, meditating on the frail tenure of earthly joys and pride, or surrounded by the wise and learned men, too noble to be called courtiers, whose society he enjoyed better than that of youths of his own age. Louis preserved through life a taste for the monastic offices that he had joined in habitually with Blanche de Castille in his childhood; and, when he could spare a few days from the cares of his kingdom, he would spend them in the prayerful solitude of the monastery of the Mathurins, assisting at all the offices with the monks, and helping them in tending the sick and teaching the poor. His young courtiers made merry over this strange pastime for a king, but Louis only laughed, and said: “Let them laugh, these young ones! It hurts no one, and God is not offended. If I spent my time in hunts, and tournaments, and dancing, they would not blame me. Let them laugh; pray GodI may never give them cause to weep!” Once S. Louis fell ill at Fontainebleau, and, being considered at the point of death, he called his little son to him, and gave him some touching advice concerning his conduct and private life; then suddenly changing his tone to one of great impetuosity, he exclaimed: “I pray thee, fair son, make thyself loved of my people! for verily I had rather a Scotchman came from Scotland to govern the kingdom well and loyally than that it should be unfairly or unkindly governed by thee!”Joinville, who was the close companion of S. Louis through the most active part of his career, finds no words wherewith to praise adequately the character and virtues of the king. “What concerned himself alone could never move him to joy or wrath,” says this trustworthy chronicler; “but when it touched the honor of God, or the happiness of his people, Louis knew no fear, and brooked no delay, nor could any earthly consideration hinder him in the discharge of a duty.” Yet Joinville censures his master severely for having undertaken the second Crusade, which he condemns as a great military and political mistake. Had it succeeded, however, Egypt would have become a Christian colony, and the cross would have been planted on the pyramids; this was what S. Louis looked to beyond the conquest of Jerusalem; and, if his dream had been realized, Joinville would hardly have pronounced it a “great mistake.”A quaint anecdote is told of a trick played by S. Louis to ensnare his nobles into enlisting in this fatal expedition. The court was at Fontainebleau for the celebration of Christmas. It was customary for the king to present the courtiers with furred cloaks calledliveriesto wear at Midnight Mass on Christmas eve. S. Louis had a great number of these made, and gave orders that a cross should be embroidered in dark silk on the shoulder of each, and that they should be distributed at the last moment in a dimly lighted apartment; this was done, according to the king’s command; the courtiers hurriedly donned theirliveries, and it was only when they entered the brilliantly illuminated church that the wearers beheld the symbol on each other’s backs. They were at first astonished and displeased, says Joinville, but when the king came forward with the cross on his own shoulder and the crucifix in his hand, and asked if they would tear theirs off, and send him forth alone to the Holy Land, a thrill of chivalrous ardor ran through the assembly, and all answered as one voice: “No; we will follow you! We will keep the cross!” And they did.Blanche de Castille, whose religious enthusiasm is rightly or wrongly credited with the responsibility of this ill-fated enterprise, held the regency during her son’s absence, and proved by her courage in confronting the dangers and difficulties of the charge, and by her wisdom and counsel, that even in those unprogressive days a wise and virtuous woman made no bad substitute for a man in the mighty task of government. She spent most of her time in the comparative retirement of Fontainebleau; but when the news came of the disastrous issue of Mansoorah, where the Christian army was cut to pieces, and the king with his noblest captains taken prisoners, she left it, and hastened to the capital, in order to work more actively for the ransom of her son and his brave companions in arms. It was a terrible time for a mother. The queen knew that those who had taken herson captive had no power over his soul; she knew that Louis was more commanding in his chains than he had even been at the head of his armies; that adversity would teach him no language unbecoming a Christian prince; that neither threats nor torture would wrench from him any compromise unworthy of his honor; and that captivity, nay, death, in so august a cause was the most enviable destiny she could have wished him; but she was a human mother withal, and in this hour of trial her motherhood vindicated itself relentlessly. Blanche labored day and night to raise a ransom that might tempt the Turk to give up his prize. She heard that eight thousandbesants[102]would be accepted for the king himself, and this sum was with great difficulty mustered and sent to Palestine. But when Louis heard it, he sent word to the sultan that “the King of France was not to be ransomed with gold or silver; that he would give the town of Damietta for his own person, and eight thousandbesantsfor his army.” The offer was rejected with scorn, and Louis was subjected to still greater cruelties and humiliations; but at last, worn out by the indomitable heroism of his victim, the sultan gave way; the regal fortitude in which suffering had clothed their captive had subdued even his jailers into wondering admiration, and they set him free, declaring that “this king was the proudest Christian that the East had ever seen.” No sooner was he at liberty, than, instead of hastening away from the scenes of his misery and misfortunes, Louis set to work to spread the Gospel far and wide in Palestine; but Blanche had earned a right to clasp him to her heart after those three years of separation. She felt, too, that the days were growing short; so she wrote, entreating him to come home. S. Louis was repairing the ramparts of Sidon when the summons reached him; he immediately prepared to obey it; but, before he had left Sidon, the mother who, next to God, had been the supreme love of his life had taken her flight to a better world. She died at Fontainebleau. “He made great mourning thereat,” says Sire de Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man to fetch me. When I came before him in his chamber, where he was alone, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O seneschal! I have lost my mother. My God, thou knowest that I loved this mother better than all other creatures, but thy will be done. Blessed be thy name!’” Philip le Bel (IV.) was born at Fontainebleau. There are conflicting versions as to the place of Philip’s death, but it is generally supposed to have taken place at Fontainebleau, in the same room where he was born. There was a current belief at the time, and it was preserved through many succeeding generations, that his death was the result of a summons issued against him by the grand master of the templars, Jacques de Molai. A hundred and thirteen templars perished at the stake during Philip’s reign, and theseautos-da-fewere crowned by that of the grand master, who was burnt alive in the gardens of his own palace. As the flames rose round his naked body, the templar lifted up his voice, and, in the hearing of the vast multitude of spectators, solemnly summoned Philip “to meet him at the judgment-seat in four months from that day.” The death of the king precisely four months from the day of De Molai’s execution gave a sanction to thecredulity of the people, and the legend passed into an historical occurrence. The fact of the summons is accepted; we can have no difficulty in admitting its inevitable effect on the mind of the individual against whom it was sent forth. There was a prevailing belief that a dying man had the power to issue the formidable command, and that obedience was compulsory. Philip, whose passion for gold had led him to confiscate the treasures of the templars, and then to calumniate and persecute them in order to justify his own spoliations, was haunted by the words of De Molai. He grew sick, and his illness, defying all the arts of medicine, soon brought him to the verge of death. Feeling that his days were numbered, he begged to be taken to Fontainebleau, that he might gaze once more upon the home of his happy childhood. On arriving there, he sent for his children and his friends, and took a sorrowful farewell of them. “They entered the chamber where the king was,” says Godefroid de Paris, “and where there was very little light. They asked him how he felt, and he answered: ‘Ill in body and in soul. I have put on so manytillagesand laid hands on so much riches that I shall never be absolved. Methinks I shall die to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me.’” And that same night he died (1314).The sons of Philip frequented Fontainebleau very faithfully. So did Charles V.; but a veil of mist hangs over the history of the castle during the greater part of the XIVth century. We only find it mentioned now and then as a meeting-place for the hunt of royal sportsmen. Isabeau de Bavière honored it often with her presence, and enlarged a portion of the building. But the romantic history of Fontainebleau dates from Francis I. He was to it what Louis XIV. was to Versailles. It is customary amongst the admirers of those two brilliant representatives of French monarchy to set them side by side, and compare their characters and achievements. And no doubt there are points of resemblance between them, but it is difficult to pursue the comparison much below the surface. Louis XIV., as a king, certainly has the best of it, and, as a man, Francis seems to have had all the vices without many of his successor’s redeeming virtues. Louis was dissipated, but he put a limit to his dissipation: Francis knew none; he exhausted the treasury by his wanton prodigality and the army by his senseless ambition; he burnt La Provence, he broke his plighted word to Charles V., and yet we hear him spoken of as the rival of Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche.”[103]History passes strange verdicts sometimes, but stranger still is the blind credulity with which posterity endorses them, and clings to them in spite of the light that by degrees pierces through the darkness, showing up the idol or the monster, stripped of masks and drapery, and exposed in its nakedness, or clothed with its own deeds, that make the only garment it has a right to wear; we acknowledge that we have been worshipping a false standard, or forswearing an honest one; but we go on with a dogged tenacity worshipping and forswearing still, rather than forsake an old love or renounce an old antipathy. There are few personages in history who have usurped this kind of worship and held it more successfully than Francis I. Fontainebleau is not, however, the appropriate place for challenging his claims to the applauseof posterity; here he is on his vantage-ground; we see him at his best, all his faults, if not obliterated, mellowed in the blaze of borrowed glory that encircles him; here he is the graceful knight-errant, the magnificent patron of art, and science, and learning, surrounded by men of genius, whom he treats as equals and as friends; we forget his profligate follies, his reckless waste of the kingdom’s money and the kingdom’s blood, when we see him petting Leonardo da Vinci, doing the behests and humoring the crotchets of the cantankerous old genius so tenderly, and bearing his unreasonable jealousy and his reproaches like a chidden child. It would go hard with us to be severe on so lovable a scapegrace, even if he were not the King of France. Francis ought never to come before us except in the midst of his beloved artists. There he is perfect. To Leonardo his demeanor is especially touching. When the proud old man, still in the zenith of his fame, but stung by the coldness of Leo X. and frightened by the rising glory of Michael Angelo’s sun, turned sulkily away from his native land, Francis invited him to Fontainebleau, received him with open arms, and treated him like a prince as he was of the trueright divinecreation, and laid himself out to console him and brighten the evening of his days. The exile was querulous from ill-health, as well as soured by disappointment and the ingratitude of the Medici; but Francis bore with his temper and his lamentations with the sweetness of a woman; there was no tender gracefulness that sympathy could devise to cheer the old man’s spirit and heal his aching pride that the king had not recourse to; he would have kept him at Fontainebleau, near his own person, but Leonardo, who was so fond of solitude and meditation that he never married, “because the clatter of a wife’s tongue would have disturbed his thoughts,” could not bear the gay bustle of the court, and said he must go somewhere to be quiet; so Francis gave him a splendid suite of apartments in the Château de Clou at Amboise. He spent the remaining four years of his life there, painting his celebrated Mona Lisa, the most exquisitely finished perhaps of all his works, and in writing his treatiseDella Pittura, a book of great originality and learning, written, like all Da Vinci’s books, after the manner of the Eastern manuscripts, from right to left—a singularity which he adopted, it is said, to foil the curiosity of those around him, and prevent his brother artists from discovering his secrets. The king paid twelve thousand livres for Mona Lisa—an unprecedented sum for a work of art in those days. When Leonardo was thought to be near his end, Francis had him conveyed to Fontainebleau that he might watch over him himself and be with him at the close.On the morning of his death, when the king came into the room, the dying man tried to raise himself on his couch to welcome him, but the effort was too much; he sank forward, and would have fallen but for the timely arms that rescued him. Francis laid the venerable old head upon his breast, and there it lay till Leonardo breathed his last.The artist had been pursued for months before his death by a morbid terror of being buried alive, and had implored Francis to let him be kept three days before the coffin was closed. The king complied with the wish, and caused his friend to be exposed with royal honors, and the body laid in state for three days. He was buried in the Church of S. Florentin,near his own abode at Amboise.Benvenuto Cellini is another shining stone in the pedestal of Francis I. Discontented with the recognition that his genius met with at home, he too was enticed from the blue skies of Florence to the colder but more genial atmosphere of Fontainebleau, and was petted by the graceful king only in a less degree than Da Vinci. But Benvenuto, who knew so many things, who excelled almost equally as a poet, a sculptor, and a painter, was lamentably ignorant in the art of being a courtier. The Duchesse d’Estampes was queen of the gay palace of Armida, and all the great men that frequented it bowed before her; but this bold Florentine, who had a dash of the brigand in his composition, thought he might dispense with her patronage, and refused to do homage at the common shrine; he knew that he had had the bad luck to displease the haughty fair one by his untutored manners from the first, and, instead of trying to conciliate, he determined to conquer her. The duchess was a liberal and enlightened patroness of art, and seems to have merited in some degree by her personal accomplishments the flattering title bestowed on her by one of her protégés of “the most beautiful ofsavantesand the most learned of belles.” Her sway over Francis rested, therefore, on something stronger than the ephemeral tenure of mere beauty; but, had it been otherwise, what chance was there for Benvenuto against the favorite of the king? He, foolish mortal, braved her so far as to ask the king direct, without having recourse to her intervention, for an order to cast a bronze statue for the great gallery which was in process of completion, and Francis gave him the order, with carte-blanche for the execution. The statue was finished, and a day appointed for the king to see it. This was a precious opportunity for a woman’s vengeance; the duchess knew that the triumph of the artist depended altogether on the first impression produced on the king, and that the triumph of the work depended mainly on the light in which it was seen: Cellini had named an hour when the sun would pour in soft, full floods of light down the gallery; and, long before the appointed time, he was there, watching every changing shadow that it cast upon his statue, counting the minutes impatiently, while his friends and all the court flocked in to assist at the king’s entrance, and witness the triumph or the humiliation of the sculptor. But the hour passed, and another, and another, and there was no sign of Francis; the sun was gathering up its light, and speeding away to the west, and the brown twilight was creeping into the gallery. Benvenuto grew nervous, then outrageous. He paced up and down before his Jupiter like a man gone mad. Where was the king? Would no one take pity on him to go and call the king? But Benvenuto knew full well that none in that courtly crowd would be guilty of so rash an act. Not even he himself would dare to do it. He knew whose fault it was that the king was not forthcoming, and he gnashed his teeth in savage but impotent rage. But genius, like prophecy, has a ready handmaid in inspiration. “Let fall the curtains, and bring lights,” cried the sculptor, with a sudden bound from despair to triumph. The partisans of the “belle savante” groaned, and stood still; the friends of Cellini flew to obey his orders. It mattered not that they did not understand: the master did. In less time than it takes to tell, the gallerywas illuminated from end to end; lamps, torches, waxlights, every luminary that hands could carry, was put in requisition, till Jupiter shone out magnificent, terrible, and dazzling in the blaze of an impromptu illumination more weirdly effective than the brightest daylight could have been.Cellini’s spirit rose to frenzy. He ran hither and thither, arranging the lights with a view to more striking effect; clustering many flames in a group at one point, leaving another in partial shade; clapping his hands in wild delight one minute, impatiently knocking down one of his helpmates the next. It was finished. The king was heard approaching. Cellini, with an imperious gesture, commanded silence; the doors of the gallery were thrown open, and the colossal bronze god flashed out in all his dark effulgence on the astonished and enchanted gaze of the monarch. The triumph of the hour was complete; but it cost the sculptor dear. The duchess gave Francis no peace till he quarrelled with her enemy, and dismissed him from the court.Many Italian artists had followed Leonardo da Vinci to France, some out of love for the great master himself, others tempted by the generosity which the King of France showed universally to their class. The most distinguished of these disciples of Leonardo was Andrea del Sarto. But he was of too restless a disposition to settle anywhere permanently; camp, court, and studio alike wearied him after a time; his wings were too buoyant to remain long folded even in the enchanted clime of Fontainebleau; he was not more than a year there, when he declared it was a necessity of life for him to return to Florence, the ostensible motive being to see his wife. Francis proposed to send for her, promising that she should be made welcome to his court as an honored guest; but Andrea said this would not do: he must go himself and fetch her. All the king could obtain was a promise that he would return to France in a year; and, to make the promise more binding, he entrusted him with a considerable sum of money, to be expended, according to Andrea’s taste and judgment, on objects of art for the decoration of the palace. But when Andrea found himself once more in Florence, in the company of his wife and his former boon companions, he forgot all about his mission, and spent the king’s money in merry-making; he did not dare show himself at Fontainebleau after this, but frittered away the rest of his life in his native city, where he eventually died in poverty and contempt. It would take too long to enumerate the various European celebrities who fill up the brilliant picture presented by Francis’ court at this period; but we cannot refuse a passing mention to Serlio, the accomplished Bolognese architect, whom the king lured away from Italy by his gold and his honeyed flattery. Serlio rebuilt the palace almost entirely; his genius was allowed full scope, and the result justified the confidence of his patron.The area of the old building being much too small for the magnificent new plan, Francis bought in the Mathurin Convent and the noble grounds with which Louis IX. had endowed it, and added them to the original site. The design of the library had been sketched by S. Louis, and this Serlio adhered to strictly, making no change of his own. When the edifice was finished, Francis swept Italy and Spain for artists to adorn and beautify it. Rosso came to paint the walls in fresco, and his design for the grand gallery, which was to be called the Gallery of Francis I., carried the prize overall his competitors; he embellished it with paintings, friezes of great beauty, and rich stucco-work. So delighted was the king with the result of Rosso’s labors that, in addition to other favors, he created him a canon of the Sainte Chapelle. This wonderful gallery had sixteen frescoes representing the most remarkable incidents in the life of Francis; the famousporte dorée[104]was decorated by the same gifted hand. It is lamentable to think that these glorious works of art, which formed Rosso’s principal claim on the admiration of the world, were sacrificed to the vindictive jealousy of a rival. Francesco Pellegrini had been the early friend of Rosso; but, when they met as fellow-laborers at Fontainebleau, the friendship turned to a rivalry which soon developed into bitter enmity, and ended in the tragic death of Rosso. Primaticcio, as Pellegrini is usually called, was accused by his rival of having stolen a large sum of money from him; he was put to the torture, but acquitted triumphantly. Rosso was then seized with shame and remorse; haunted in imagination by the shrieks of the innocent man, the friend of his youth, whom he had given up to the torture, his mind gave way, and in a fit of insanity he took poison, which killed him in a few hours. Some say that Rosso knew that the accusation was false, and that he brought it designedly against Primaticcio, hoping to get rid of him; but his frantic grief on discovering his mistake, and the fatal consequences of his remorse, may be taken as contradictory evidence of this opinion. Primaticcio, moreover, by his subsequent conduct, vindicates his unhappy rival from having done him so very great a wrong in suspecting him capable of the theft, for he unblushingly stole from Rosso what was incomparably more precious to him than gold—his fame. No sooner was he master of the field, than he set about to destroy all traces of Rosso’s beautiful compositions, pulling down the walls which they adorned, under pretence of enlarging the space. Some few that were spared by the relentless destroyer have been obliterated by damp and the effects of time. There is one fine painting of his to be seen in the Louvre—“Mary receiving the homage of S. Elizabeth.”The fêtes given at Fontainebleau by Francis I., though perhaps inferior in splendor to those of Louis XIV. at Versailles, surpassed them in picturesque elegance; they were rather the ideal festivities of an artist than the gorgeous pageants of an Arabian caliph. But the leisures of Francis were not all wasted in frivolous amusements. In his sane moments, when he was not flying after that will-o’-the-wisp that cost France and him so dear, the conquest of the Milanese, he was something more than the mere fascinating madcap that his enemies make him out; for it is his lot, like that of all charming but unprincipled sovereigns, to inspire panegyrics and denunciations equally exaggerated. He was not only a patron of those artists who contributed to the adornment of his dwellings: Francis courted the society of learned men for learning’s sake. The luxurious repasts of Fontainebleau were enlivened and refined by the presence of such men as Clement Marot, whose style, full of terseness and incisive grace, the king was fond of emulating in verses of his own composition, not altogether devoid of poetic merit. He delighted in the chivalrous lays of the middle ages, and in the harmonious cadence and florid imagery of the ballads of thetroubadours. The witty Curé of Mendon was a frequent guest at the royal table, Francis provoking his lively sallies, and heartily enjoying them, though the sarcasm was often boldly pointed at himself. Learned men of every class—doctors, bookworms, and even printers—were admitted to the same honor. Erasmus was one of the few who withstood the wiles of the charmer; he steadfastly refused all invitations to reside permanently at Fontainebleau; but he kept up a brisk correspondence with Francis, the honest freedom of whose tone throughout does equal honor to the scholar and the king. The French court was, in fact, the most polished and the gayest in Europe at this period. The sprightly Queen of Navarre—that sister whom Francis so tenderly loved, his “Marguerite des Marguerites”—was its presiding genius and brightest ornament. She was passionately fond of Fontainebleau, and made it her home during the greater part of her first husband’s life, and after her marriage with Henri de Navarre, who was so frequently absent, either in her brother’s service or in the pursuit of war on his own account. Her image is everywhere associated in our memory with that of Francis in his favorite palace. In her boudoir, a spacious and magnificently decorated room, leading out of Rosso’s noble gallery, the royal brother and sister passed many delightful hours, either in affectionate converse together, or surrounded by the artists and learned men whom they both loved to honor. Here Francis placed the library of rare books and manuscripts for which he had scoured Italy, Spain, and Greece. The erudite Erasmus would sometimes deliver one of his learned discourses on deep and elevating themes in the privacy of this enchanting retreat, while Marguerite de Navarre worked out, in rainbow-tinted silks and golden threads, the poem of one of her artist friends, or some chivalrous exploit of her idolized Francis. Happy had it been for Francis and for France had he dwelt content amidst the peaceful and refined delights of this Eldorado. But there was the Milanese—that unlucky Milanese, the bane of his life, and of his people’s while his lasted. Again and again he flew at it like a moth at the flame, or a madman at hisidée fixe—failure and humiliation, instead of disgusting him with his hobby, only goaded him to its pursuit with greater zest. And what odd, shifting relations grew out of this standing duel between him and Charles V.! Alternately, they were rivals, friends, deadly foes, and “dear brothers.” Beside the gloomy, vindictive Spanish warrior, subtle in his policy, swift and ruthless in his vengeance, the brilliant figure of Francis shone at its best; he had all the qualities that his rival lacked; his uncalculating generosity, his rash impulses that led him into so many grievous straits, all stand out in bright relief against the dark background of the contest. The story of the broken Treaty of Madrid is one of the many vexed questions over which the apologists of both princes have broken innumerable lances, but they leave it pretty much where it stood in the year of grace 1527, after the Notables decided that the conditions of the treaty were monstrous, and had been unjustifiably imposed by a jailer on his prisoner, and that Francis was right in maintainingque prisonnier gardé n’est tenu a nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.[105]Charles had no right to exact the abdication of his conquered foe, andthe latter had no power to effect it without the consent of his Notables, which he knew full well would never be granted. Still, the solemn oath sworn on the crucifix by Francis in presence of the emperor is not to be disposed of so easily. It would have been more consistent with the character for Bayard-like chivalry, which the French prince arrogated, to have withheld the pledge which he knew he could not redeem, than to purchase his liberty by a subterfuge that has left an equivocal mark upon his memory. He was only a lifetenant of the crown of France; he might resign it, but he had no power to alienate its most insignificant fief; in swearing, therefore, to hand over the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Flanders and Artois to Charles V., he was performing a vain sham; for, had he been willing to carry out the promise of renunciation himself, he was well aware that the states-general and the parliament of the realm would never ratify the act, and that without their ratification it remained null and void. The strong epithets used by Charles in denouncing the disloyalty of his quondam captive in violating this preposterous treaty are, however, somewhat misplaced, considering the duplicity and cruelty which he himself had displayed in extracting impossible concessions from a brave and conquered foe.It was not long before Francis had an opportunity of vindicating his much-prized character for chivalrous magnanimity by heaping coals of fire on the head of Charles. The emperor was on his way to Ghent, and applied to the king for a safe-conduct through his dominions. It was granted at once, but on condition that the emperor should remain for a few days the guest of Francis. Charles was in such a hurry to castigate the rebels that he would have promised more than this in order to arrive swiftly on the scene of vengeance; he consented to halt at Fontainebleau; but no sooner had he set foot on the soil of his “good brother of France,” than he was seized with tremors and suspicions that made his life miserable; he accused himself of madness in having so rashly rushed into the arms of a prince whom he had persecuted meanly when he was in his power, and whose state he had grievously injured; nor did the magnificence of the reception which greeted him on his arrival calm his fears. Francis, who was utterly incapable of a base breach of hospitality, could not forego the pleasure of playing a little on the agonies of Charles; he occasionally repeated to him the murmurings of the Queen of Navarre and the Dauphin, who would fain have improved the rare opportunity by compelling their guest to undo some of the mischief he had done their brother and father. Francis even recounted to the emperor with great merriment an epigrammatic little passage between himself and his favorite dwarf, Triboulet: while the latter was diverting the king with his usual antics on the night of the Spaniard’s arrival, he suddenly pulled out his tablets, and began to write with an air of great gravity. “What are you writing there, Triboulet?” inquired his master. “The name of a bigger fool than myself,” replied the dwarf. “Who is that?” said Francis. “Charles,” replied Triboulet. “But suppose I keep my word, and let him go?” queried the king. “Then,” answered Triboulet, “I would rub out Charles, and write Francis instead.”The question of the Milanese was discussed between the two sovereigns during this period with great earnestness on one side and consummateskill on the other. Charles promised solemnly to bestow the investiture on the Dauphin; but, when Francis urged him to confirm his pledge by a written guarantee, he cunningly retaliated his host’s answer concerning the Treaty of Madrid: “Prisonnier gardé n’est tenu à nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.” He declared, however, that on reaching Flanders he would give the promise in writing. We know how he kept his word.TO BE CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT NUMBER.

Itstands girdled with its forty thousand acres of forest, or gathering of many palaces rather than a united single one, and presents perhaps a wider and more varied retrospect than any of its historical compeers. Poet, philosopher, and historian alike find inexhaustible food for meditation before the grand, irregular pile that rises up before us with its towers and gables massed against the sky—the most elaborate epic ever written in stone. But prior to the stupendous poem that we behold to-day, an idyl rose upon its site; a song, half sacred, half sylvan, floats to us across the distant tide of time, the record of an undying past. A vast virgin forest where the chant of prayer and penitence mingles with the voicing of the primeval choir of oaks, and sycamores, and elms, and spire-like poplars, ranged in many-octaved lyres for the winds to strike with strong melodic finger; and human souls set up in the high places, higher than forest trees or earth-built towers; harps wooing the touch divine of the Master’s hand, joining in the ecstatic song of seraph praise; souls these who have cast aside crowns of gold, and trodden their purple garments under foot, to choose the crown of thorns and the scant robe of poverty—love driven to the strange madness, of the cross; others there are who sing the deep plain-song of humility and forgiven sin; while some, whose snow-white brow the dark shadow of sin has never crossed, carol forth in innocent joy with the matins of the lark the hymn of deliverance, the psalm of praise and worship, of intercession and thanksgiving—such is the concert of celestial harmony that echoes to us from the long-ago of the grand old forest. Many changes, will follow: we shall see a busy stir of multitudinous life alternating with the chill silence of the tomb; princes and prelates hurrying to and fro, noble matrons, and frail women, and death in many forms, beautiful and terrible, serene and tragic, passing and repassing the gates; and we shall hear the woods reverberating to other sounds than those of prayer—to the clanging of civil strife, to the voice of laughter and of tears.

Distinct amidst all the earlier memories of Fontainebleau stand out the figures of S. Louis and hismother, Blanche of Castille. There are many versions as to the origin of the place; the most popular one records that S. Louis, being out hunting one day, lost a favorite hound called Bleau, and, after scouring the forest in search of the truant, found him at last quietly drinking at a fountain, and was so enchanted with the beauty of the surrounding scene that he determined to build a hunting-lodge on the spot; he did so, and, in memory of the incident, it was named Fontaine de Bleau. But this pretty legend is rejected by the most reliable historians, who have searched out traces of a much earlier origin for Fontainebleau. There seems sufficient evidence of its having been used as a royal residence by Hugh Capet, and frequented as a favorite rendezvous for the hunt by all the earlier kings of France. The existence of the famous monastery of S. Germain l’Auxerre, at the western extremity of the forest, is advanced as a proof, and a strong one, of its being in those remote times inhabited by royal patrons, for monasteries sprang of necessity where kings lived; and there is no doubt that the greater portion of the abbey lands were grants from good King Robert. Blanche of Castille retired to an old château of some sort at Fontainebleau during her husband’s absence while at war with England or the Albigenses; she founded in the neighborhood the Abbaye de Lys, which was later on munificently endowed by her son, Louis IX., who even went the length of giving up to it some acres of the forest that he loved so well. It was here that a great portion of his childhood was passed. Under the shadow of the old woods, or pacing the solemn cloisters of the abbey, his mother instilled into his mind those first lessons of fear and love upon which his life was so faithfully modelled. “My son, I love thee dearly, but, so help me God, I would rather see thee dead at my feet than have thee live to sully thy soul with one mortal sin.” Truly, a valiant mother of the Machabean mould—a woman of strong faith, worthy to be the mother of a Christian king.

When the child has grown to manhood, we see him still at Fontainebleau, holding his court of justice under the broad shade of a giant oak, he seated on the gnarled trunk, while his people gathered round him—a young patriarch settling the disputes of his tribe, dealing out the law; justice and mercy being counsel, and judge, and jury, and the king’s word supreme. Sometimes we see him dashing through the glade, followed by his courtiers, while the merry hunting-horn scares the wild birds from their nests, and rouses the tusky boar in his lair; but more frequently we see the king alone, meditating on the frail tenure of earthly joys and pride, or surrounded by the wise and learned men, too noble to be called courtiers, whose society he enjoyed better than that of youths of his own age. Louis preserved through life a taste for the monastic offices that he had joined in habitually with Blanche de Castille in his childhood; and, when he could spare a few days from the cares of his kingdom, he would spend them in the prayerful solitude of the monastery of the Mathurins, assisting at all the offices with the monks, and helping them in tending the sick and teaching the poor. His young courtiers made merry over this strange pastime for a king, but Louis only laughed, and said: “Let them laugh, these young ones! It hurts no one, and God is not offended. If I spent my time in hunts, and tournaments, and dancing, they would not blame me. Let them laugh; pray GodI may never give them cause to weep!” Once S. Louis fell ill at Fontainebleau, and, being considered at the point of death, he called his little son to him, and gave him some touching advice concerning his conduct and private life; then suddenly changing his tone to one of great impetuosity, he exclaimed: “I pray thee, fair son, make thyself loved of my people! for verily I had rather a Scotchman came from Scotland to govern the kingdom well and loyally than that it should be unfairly or unkindly governed by thee!”

Joinville, who was the close companion of S. Louis through the most active part of his career, finds no words wherewith to praise adequately the character and virtues of the king. “What concerned himself alone could never move him to joy or wrath,” says this trustworthy chronicler; “but when it touched the honor of God, or the happiness of his people, Louis knew no fear, and brooked no delay, nor could any earthly consideration hinder him in the discharge of a duty.” Yet Joinville censures his master severely for having undertaken the second Crusade, which he condemns as a great military and political mistake. Had it succeeded, however, Egypt would have become a Christian colony, and the cross would have been planted on the pyramids; this was what S. Louis looked to beyond the conquest of Jerusalem; and, if his dream had been realized, Joinville would hardly have pronounced it a “great mistake.”

A quaint anecdote is told of a trick played by S. Louis to ensnare his nobles into enlisting in this fatal expedition. The court was at Fontainebleau for the celebration of Christmas. It was customary for the king to present the courtiers with furred cloaks calledliveriesto wear at Midnight Mass on Christmas eve. S. Louis had a great number of these made, and gave orders that a cross should be embroidered in dark silk on the shoulder of each, and that they should be distributed at the last moment in a dimly lighted apartment; this was done, according to the king’s command; the courtiers hurriedly donned theirliveries, and it was only when they entered the brilliantly illuminated church that the wearers beheld the symbol on each other’s backs. They were at first astonished and displeased, says Joinville, but when the king came forward with the cross on his own shoulder and the crucifix in his hand, and asked if they would tear theirs off, and send him forth alone to the Holy Land, a thrill of chivalrous ardor ran through the assembly, and all answered as one voice: “No; we will follow you! We will keep the cross!” And they did.

Blanche de Castille, whose religious enthusiasm is rightly or wrongly credited with the responsibility of this ill-fated enterprise, held the regency during her son’s absence, and proved by her courage in confronting the dangers and difficulties of the charge, and by her wisdom and counsel, that even in those unprogressive days a wise and virtuous woman made no bad substitute for a man in the mighty task of government. She spent most of her time in the comparative retirement of Fontainebleau; but when the news came of the disastrous issue of Mansoorah, where the Christian army was cut to pieces, and the king with his noblest captains taken prisoners, she left it, and hastened to the capital, in order to work more actively for the ransom of her son and his brave companions in arms. It was a terrible time for a mother. The queen knew that those who had taken herson captive had no power over his soul; she knew that Louis was more commanding in his chains than he had even been at the head of his armies; that adversity would teach him no language unbecoming a Christian prince; that neither threats nor torture would wrench from him any compromise unworthy of his honor; and that captivity, nay, death, in so august a cause was the most enviable destiny she could have wished him; but she was a human mother withal, and in this hour of trial her motherhood vindicated itself relentlessly. Blanche labored day and night to raise a ransom that might tempt the Turk to give up his prize. She heard that eight thousandbesants[102]would be accepted for the king himself, and this sum was with great difficulty mustered and sent to Palestine. But when Louis heard it, he sent word to the sultan that “the King of France was not to be ransomed with gold or silver; that he would give the town of Damietta for his own person, and eight thousandbesantsfor his army.” The offer was rejected with scorn, and Louis was subjected to still greater cruelties and humiliations; but at last, worn out by the indomitable heroism of his victim, the sultan gave way; the regal fortitude in which suffering had clothed their captive had subdued even his jailers into wondering admiration, and they set him free, declaring that “this king was the proudest Christian that the East had ever seen.” No sooner was he at liberty, than, instead of hastening away from the scenes of his misery and misfortunes, Louis set to work to spread the Gospel far and wide in Palestine; but Blanche had earned a right to clasp him to her heart after those three years of separation. She felt, too, that the days were growing short; so she wrote, entreating him to come home. S. Louis was repairing the ramparts of Sidon when the summons reached him; he immediately prepared to obey it; but, before he had left Sidon, the mother who, next to God, had been the supreme love of his life had taken her flight to a better world. She died at Fontainebleau. “He made great mourning thereat,” says Sire de Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man to fetch me. When I came before him in his chamber, where he was alone, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O seneschal! I have lost my mother. My God, thou knowest that I loved this mother better than all other creatures, but thy will be done. Blessed be thy name!’” Philip le Bel (IV.) was born at Fontainebleau. There are conflicting versions as to the place of Philip’s death, but it is generally supposed to have taken place at Fontainebleau, in the same room where he was born. There was a current belief at the time, and it was preserved through many succeeding generations, that his death was the result of a summons issued against him by the grand master of the templars, Jacques de Molai. A hundred and thirteen templars perished at the stake during Philip’s reign, and theseautos-da-fewere crowned by that of the grand master, who was burnt alive in the gardens of his own palace. As the flames rose round his naked body, the templar lifted up his voice, and, in the hearing of the vast multitude of spectators, solemnly summoned Philip “to meet him at the judgment-seat in four months from that day.” The death of the king precisely four months from the day of De Molai’s execution gave a sanction to thecredulity of the people, and the legend passed into an historical occurrence. The fact of the summons is accepted; we can have no difficulty in admitting its inevitable effect on the mind of the individual against whom it was sent forth. There was a prevailing belief that a dying man had the power to issue the formidable command, and that obedience was compulsory. Philip, whose passion for gold had led him to confiscate the treasures of the templars, and then to calumniate and persecute them in order to justify his own spoliations, was haunted by the words of De Molai. He grew sick, and his illness, defying all the arts of medicine, soon brought him to the verge of death. Feeling that his days were numbered, he begged to be taken to Fontainebleau, that he might gaze once more upon the home of his happy childhood. On arriving there, he sent for his children and his friends, and took a sorrowful farewell of them. “They entered the chamber where the king was,” says Godefroid de Paris, “and where there was very little light. They asked him how he felt, and he answered: ‘Ill in body and in soul. I have put on so manytillagesand laid hands on so much riches that I shall never be absolved. Methinks I shall die to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me.’” And that same night he died (1314).

The sons of Philip frequented Fontainebleau very faithfully. So did Charles V.; but a veil of mist hangs over the history of the castle during the greater part of the XIVth century. We only find it mentioned now and then as a meeting-place for the hunt of royal sportsmen. Isabeau de Bavière honored it often with her presence, and enlarged a portion of the building. But the romantic history of Fontainebleau dates from Francis I. He was to it what Louis XIV. was to Versailles. It is customary amongst the admirers of those two brilliant representatives of French monarchy to set them side by side, and compare their characters and achievements. And no doubt there are points of resemblance between them, but it is difficult to pursue the comparison much below the surface. Louis XIV., as a king, certainly has the best of it, and, as a man, Francis seems to have had all the vices without many of his successor’s redeeming virtues. Louis was dissipated, but he put a limit to his dissipation: Francis knew none; he exhausted the treasury by his wanton prodigality and the army by his senseless ambition; he burnt La Provence, he broke his plighted word to Charles V., and yet we hear him spoken of as the rival of Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche.”[103]

History passes strange verdicts sometimes, but stranger still is the blind credulity with which posterity endorses them, and clings to them in spite of the light that by degrees pierces through the darkness, showing up the idol or the monster, stripped of masks and drapery, and exposed in its nakedness, or clothed with its own deeds, that make the only garment it has a right to wear; we acknowledge that we have been worshipping a false standard, or forswearing an honest one; but we go on with a dogged tenacity worshipping and forswearing still, rather than forsake an old love or renounce an old antipathy. There are few personages in history who have usurped this kind of worship and held it more successfully than Francis I. Fontainebleau is not, however, the appropriate place for challenging his claims to the applauseof posterity; here he is on his vantage-ground; we see him at his best, all his faults, if not obliterated, mellowed in the blaze of borrowed glory that encircles him; here he is the graceful knight-errant, the magnificent patron of art, and science, and learning, surrounded by men of genius, whom he treats as equals and as friends; we forget his profligate follies, his reckless waste of the kingdom’s money and the kingdom’s blood, when we see him petting Leonardo da Vinci, doing the behests and humoring the crotchets of the cantankerous old genius so tenderly, and bearing his unreasonable jealousy and his reproaches like a chidden child. It would go hard with us to be severe on so lovable a scapegrace, even if he were not the King of France. Francis ought never to come before us except in the midst of his beloved artists. There he is perfect. To Leonardo his demeanor is especially touching. When the proud old man, still in the zenith of his fame, but stung by the coldness of Leo X. and frightened by the rising glory of Michael Angelo’s sun, turned sulkily away from his native land, Francis invited him to Fontainebleau, received him with open arms, and treated him like a prince as he was of the trueright divinecreation, and laid himself out to console him and brighten the evening of his days. The exile was querulous from ill-health, as well as soured by disappointment and the ingratitude of the Medici; but Francis bore with his temper and his lamentations with the sweetness of a woman; there was no tender gracefulness that sympathy could devise to cheer the old man’s spirit and heal his aching pride that the king had not recourse to; he would have kept him at Fontainebleau, near his own person, but Leonardo, who was so fond of solitude and meditation that he never married, “because the clatter of a wife’s tongue would have disturbed his thoughts,” could not bear the gay bustle of the court, and said he must go somewhere to be quiet; so Francis gave him a splendid suite of apartments in the Château de Clou at Amboise. He spent the remaining four years of his life there, painting his celebrated Mona Lisa, the most exquisitely finished perhaps of all his works, and in writing his treatiseDella Pittura, a book of great originality and learning, written, like all Da Vinci’s books, after the manner of the Eastern manuscripts, from right to left—a singularity which he adopted, it is said, to foil the curiosity of those around him, and prevent his brother artists from discovering his secrets. The king paid twelve thousand livres for Mona Lisa—an unprecedented sum for a work of art in those days. When Leonardo was thought to be near his end, Francis had him conveyed to Fontainebleau that he might watch over him himself and be with him at the close.

On the morning of his death, when the king came into the room, the dying man tried to raise himself on his couch to welcome him, but the effort was too much; he sank forward, and would have fallen but for the timely arms that rescued him. Francis laid the venerable old head upon his breast, and there it lay till Leonardo breathed his last.

The artist had been pursued for months before his death by a morbid terror of being buried alive, and had implored Francis to let him be kept three days before the coffin was closed. The king complied with the wish, and caused his friend to be exposed with royal honors, and the body laid in state for three days. He was buried in the Church of S. Florentin,near his own abode at Amboise.

Benvenuto Cellini is another shining stone in the pedestal of Francis I. Discontented with the recognition that his genius met with at home, he too was enticed from the blue skies of Florence to the colder but more genial atmosphere of Fontainebleau, and was petted by the graceful king only in a less degree than Da Vinci. But Benvenuto, who knew so many things, who excelled almost equally as a poet, a sculptor, and a painter, was lamentably ignorant in the art of being a courtier. The Duchesse d’Estampes was queen of the gay palace of Armida, and all the great men that frequented it bowed before her; but this bold Florentine, who had a dash of the brigand in his composition, thought he might dispense with her patronage, and refused to do homage at the common shrine; he knew that he had had the bad luck to displease the haughty fair one by his untutored manners from the first, and, instead of trying to conciliate, he determined to conquer her. The duchess was a liberal and enlightened patroness of art, and seems to have merited in some degree by her personal accomplishments the flattering title bestowed on her by one of her protégés of “the most beautiful ofsavantesand the most learned of belles.” Her sway over Francis rested, therefore, on something stronger than the ephemeral tenure of mere beauty; but, had it been otherwise, what chance was there for Benvenuto against the favorite of the king? He, foolish mortal, braved her so far as to ask the king direct, without having recourse to her intervention, for an order to cast a bronze statue for the great gallery which was in process of completion, and Francis gave him the order, with carte-blanche for the execution. The statue was finished, and a day appointed for the king to see it. This was a precious opportunity for a woman’s vengeance; the duchess knew that the triumph of the artist depended altogether on the first impression produced on the king, and that the triumph of the work depended mainly on the light in which it was seen: Cellini had named an hour when the sun would pour in soft, full floods of light down the gallery; and, long before the appointed time, he was there, watching every changing shadow that it cast upon his statue, counting the minutes impatiently, while his friends and all the court flocked in to assist at the king’s entrance, and witness the triumph or the humiliation of the sculptor. But the hour passed, and another, and another, and there was no sign of Francis; the sun was gathering up its light, and speeding away to the west, and the brown twilight was creeping into the gallery. Benvenuto grew nervous, then outrageous. He paced up and down before his Jupiter like a man gone mad. Where was the king? Would no one take pity on him to go and call the king? But Benvenuto knew full well that none in that courtly crowd would be guilty of so rash an act. Not even he himself would dare to do it. He knew whose fault it was that the king was not forthcoming, and he gnashed his teeth in savage but impotent rage. But genius, like prophecy, has a ready handmaid in inspiration. “Let fall the curtains, and bring lights,” cried the sculptor, with a sudden bound from despair to triumph. The partisans of the “belle savante” groaned, and stood still; the friends of Cellini flew to obey his orders. It mattered not that they did not understand: the master did. In less time than it takes to tell, the gallerywas illuminated from end to end; lamps, torches, waxlights, every luminary that hands could carry, was put in requisition, till Jupiter shone out magnificent, terrible, and dazzling in the blaze of an impromptu illumination more weirdly effective than the brightest daylight could have been.

Cellini’s spirit rose to frenzy. He ran hither and thither, arranging the lights with a view to more striking effect; clustering many flames in a group at one point, leaving another in partial shade; clapping his hands in wild delight one minute, impatiently knocking down one of his helpmates the next. It was finished. The king was heard approaching. Cellini, with an imperious gesture, commanded silence; the doors of the gallery were thrown open, and the colossal bronze god flashed out in all his dark effulgence on the astonished and enchanted gaze of the monarch. The triumph of the hour was complete; but it cost the sculptor dear. The duchess gave Francis no peace till he quarrelled with her enemy, and dismissed him from the court.

Many Italian artists had followed Leonardo da Vinci to France, some out of love for the great master himself, others tempted by the generosity which the King of France showed universally to their class. The most distinguished of these disciples of Leonardo was Andrea del Sarto. But he was of too restless a disposition to settle anywhere permanently; camp, court, and studio alike wearied him after a time; his wings were too buoyant to remain long folded even in the enchanted clime of Fontainebleau; he was not more than a year there, when he declared it was a necessity of life for him to return to Florence, the ostensible motive being to see his wife. Francis proposed to send for her, promising that she should be made welcome to his court as an honored guest; but Andrea said this would not do: he must go himself and fetch her. All the king could obtain was a promise that he would return to France in a year; and, to make the promise more binding, he entrusted him with a considerable sum of money, to be expended, according to Andrea’s taste and judgment, on objects of art for the decoration of the palace. But when Andrea found himself once more in Florence, in the company of his wife and his former boon companions, he forgot all about his mission, and spent the king’s money in merry-making; he did not dare show himself at Fontainebleau after this, but frittered away the rest of his life in his native city, where he eventually died in poverty and contempt. It would take too long to enumerate the various European celebrities who fill up the brilliant picture presented by Francis’ court at this period; but we cannot refuse a passing mention to Serlio, the accomplished Bolognese architect, whom the king lured away from Italy by his gold and his honeyed flattery. Serlio rebuilt the palace almost entirely; his genius was allowed full scope, and the result justified the confidence of his patron.

The area of the old building being much too small for the magnificent new plan, Francis bought in the Mathurin Convent and the noble grounds with which Louis IX. had endowed it, and added them to the original site. The design of the library had been sketched by S. Louis, and this Serlio adhered to strictly, making no change of his own. When the edifice was finished, Francis swept Italy and Spain for artists to adorn and beautify it. Rosso came to paint the walls in fresco, and his design for the grand gallery, which was to be called the Gallery of Francis I., carried the prize overall his competitors; he embellished it with paintings, friezes of great beauty, and rich stucco-work. So delighted was the king with the result of Rosso’s labors that, in addition to other favors, he created him a canon of the Sainte Chapelle. This wonderful gallery had sixteen frescoes representing the most remarkable incidents in the life of Francis; the famousporte dorée[104]was decorated by the same gifted hand. It is lamentable to think that these glorious works of art, which formed Rosso’s principal claim on the admiration of the world, were sacrificed to the vindictive jealousy of a rival. Francesco Pellegrini had been the early friend of Rosso; but, when they met as fellow-laborers at Fontainebleau, the friendship turned to a rivalry which soon developed into bitter enmity, and ended in the tragic death of Rosso. Primaticcio, as Pellegrini is usually called, was accused by his rival of having stolen a large sum of money from him; he was put to the torture, but acquitted triumphantly. Rosso was then seized with shame and remorse; haunted in imagination by the shrieks of the innocent man, the friend of his youth, whom he had given up to the torture, his mind gave way, and in a fit of insanity he took poison, which killed him in a few hours. Some say that Rosso knew that the accusation was false, and that he brought it designedly against Primaticcio, hoping to get rid of him; but his frantic grief on discovering his mistake, and the fatal consequences of his remorse, may be taken as contradictory evidence of this opinion. Primaticcio, moreover, by his subsequent conduct, vindicates his unhappy rival from having done him so very great a wrong in suspecting him capable of the theft, for he unblushingly stole from Rosso what was incomparably more precious to him than gold—his fame. No sooner was he master of the field, than he set about to destroy all traces of Rosso’s beautiful compositions, pulling down the walls which they adorned, under pretence of enlarging the space. Some few that were spared by the relentless destroyer have been obliterated by damp and the effects of time. There is one fine painting of his to be seen in the Louvre—“Mary receiving the homage of S. Elizabeth.”

The fêtes given at Fontainebleau by Francis I., though perhaps inferior in splendor to those of Louis XIV. at Versailles, surpassed them in picturesque elegance; they were rather the ideal festivities of an artist than the gorgeous pageants of an Arabian caliph. But the leisures of Francis were not all wasted in frivolous amusements. In his sane moments, when he was not flying after that will-o’-the-wisp that cost France and him so dear, the conquest of the Milanese, he was something more than the mere fascinating madcap that his enemies make him out; for it is his lot, like that of all charming but unprincipled sovereigns, to inspire panegyrics and denunciations equally exaggerated. He was not only a patron of those artists who contributed to the adornment of his dwellings: Francis courted the society of learned men for learning’s sake. The luxurious repasts of Fontainebleau were enlivened and refined by the presence of such men as Clement Marot, whose style, full of terseness and incisive grace, the king was fond of emulating in verses of his own composition, not altogether devoid of poetic merit. He delighted in the chivalrous lays of the middle ages, and in the harmonious cadence and florid imagery of the ballads of thetroubadours. The witty Curé of Mendon was a frequent guest at the royal table, Francis provoking his lively sallies, and heartily enjoying them, though the sarcasm was often boldly pointed at himself. Learned men of every class—doctors, bookworms, and even printers—were admitted to the same honor. Erasmus was one of the few who withstood the wiles of the charmer; he steadfastly refused all invitations to reside permanently at Fontainebleau; but he kept up a brisk correspondence with Francis, the honest freedom of whose tone throughout does equal honor to the scholar and the king. The French court was, in fact, the most polished and the gayest in Europe at this period. The sprightly Queen of Navarre—that sister whom Francis so tenderly loved, his “Marguerite des Marguerites”—was its presiding genius and brightest ornament. She was passionately fond of Fontainebleau, and made it her home during the greater part of her first husband’s life, and after her marriage with Henri de Navarre, who was so frequently absent, either in her brother’s service or in the pursuit of war on his own account. Her image is everywhere associated in our memory with that of Francis in his favorite palace. In her boudoir, a spacious and magnificently decorated room, leading out of Rosso’s noble gallery, the royal brother and sister passed many delightful hours, either in affectionate converse together, or surrounded by the artists and learned men whom they both loved to honor. Here Francis placed the library of rare books and manuscripts for which he had scoured Italy, Spain, and Greece. The erudite Erasmus would sometimes deliver one of his learned discourses on deep and elevating themes in the privacy of this enchanting retreat, while Marguerite de Navarre worked out, in rainbow-tinted silks and golden threads, the poem of one of her artist friends, or some chivalrous exploit of her idolized Francis. Happy had it been for Francis and for France had he dwelt content amidst the peaceful and refined delights of this Eldorado. But there was the Milanese—that unlucky Milanese, the bane of his life, and of his people’s while his lasted. Again and again he flew at it like a moth at the flame, or a madman at hisidée fixe—failure and humiliation, instead of disgusting him with his hobby, only goaded him to its pursuit with greater zest. And what odd, shifting relations grew out of this standing duel between him and Charles V.! Alternately, they were rivals, friends, deadly foes, and “dear brothers.” Beside the gloomy, vindictive Spanish warrior, subtle in his policy, swift and ruthless in his vengeance, the brilliant figure of Francis shone at its best; he had all the qualities that his rival lacked; his uncalculating generosity, his rash impulses that led him into so many grievous straits, all stand out in bright relief against the dark background of the contest. The story of the broken Treaty of Madrid is one of the many vexed questions over which the apologists of both princes have broken innumerable lances, but they leave it pretty much where it stood in the year of grace 1527, after the Notables decided that the conditions of the treaty were monstrous, and had been unjustifiably imposed by a jailer on his prisoner, and that Francis was right in maintainingque prisonnier gardé n’est tenu a nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.[105]

Charles had no right to exact the abdication of his conquered foe, andthe latter had no power to effect it without the consent of his Notables, which he knew full well would never be granted. Still, the solemn oath sworn on the crucifix by Francis in presence of the emperor is not to be disposed of so easily. It would have been more consistent with the character for Bayard-like chivalry, which the French prince arrogated, to have withheld the pledge which he knew he could not redeem, than to purchase his liberty by a subterfuge that has left an equivocal mark upon his memory. He was only a lifetenant of the crown of France; he might resign it, but he had no power to alienate its most insignificant fief; in swearing, therefore, to hand over the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Flanders and Artois to Charles V., he was performing a vain sham; for, had he been willing to carry out the promise of renunciation himself, he was well aware that the states-general and the parliament of the realm would never ratify the act, and that without their ratification it remained null and void. The strong epithets used by Charles in denouncing the disloyalty of his quondam captive in violating this preposterous treaty are, however, somewhat misplaced, considering the duplicity and cruelty which he himself had displayed in extracting impossible concessions from a brave and conquered foe.

It was not long before Francis had an opportunity of vindicating his much-prized character for chivalrous magnanimity by heaping coals of fire on the head of Charles. The emperor was on his way to Ghent, and applied to the king for a safe-conduct through his dominions. It was granted at once, but on condition that the emperor should remain for a few days the guest of Francis. Charles was in such a hurry to castigate the rebels that he would have promised more than this in order to arrive swiftly on the scene of vengeance; he consented to halt at Fontainebleau; but no sooner had he set foot on the soil of his “good brother of France,” than he was seized with tremors and suspicions that made his life miserable; he accused himself of madness in having so rashly rushed into the arms of a prince whom he had persecuted meanly when he was in his power, and whose state he had grievously injured; nor did the magnificence of the reception which greeted him on his arrival calm his fears. Francis, who was utterly incapable of a base breach of hospitality, could not forego the pleasure of playing a little on the agonies of Charles; he occasionally repeated to him the murmurings of the Queen of Navarre and the Dauphin, who would fain have improved the rare opportunity by compelling their guest to undo some of the mischief he had done their brother and father. Francis even recounted to the emperor with great merriment an epigrammatic little passage between himself and his favorite dwarf, Triboulet: while the latter was diverting the king with his usual antics on the night of the Spaniard’s arrival, he suddenly pulled out his tablets, and began to write with an air of great gravity. “What are you writing there, Triboulet?” inquired his master. “The name of a bigger fool than myself,” replied the dwarf. “Who is that?” said Francis. “Charles,” replied Triboulet. “But suppose I keep my word, and let him go?” queried the king. “Then,” answered Triboulet, “I would rub out Charles, and write Francis instead.”

The question of the Milanese was discussed between the two sovereigns during this period with great earnestness on one side and consummateskill on the other. Charles promised solemnly to bestow the investiture on the Dauphin; but, when Francis urged him to confirm his pledge by a written guarantee, he cunningly retaliated his host’s answer concerning the Treaty of Madrid: “Prisonnier gardé n’est tenu à nulle foye, n’y se peut obliger à rien.” He declared, however, that on reaching Flanders he would give the promise in writing. We know how he kept his word.

TO BE CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT NUMBER.

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