over the house of M. de Bourbon, in such wise that it should appear only
a nest beside his own." Francis I., during a royal promenade, took the
constable one day to see the edifice the admiral was building, and asked
him what he thought of it. "I think," said Bourbon, "that the cage is
too big and too fine for the bird." "Ah!" said the king, "do you not
speak with somewhat of envy?" "I!" cried the constable; "I feel envy of
a gentleman whose ancestors thought themselves right happy to be squires
to mine!" In their casual and familiar conversations the least pretext
would lead to sharp words between the Duke of Bourbon and his kingly
guest. The king was rallying him one day on the attachment he was
suspected of having felt for a lady of the court. "Sir," said the
constable, "what you have just said has no point for me, but a good deal
for those who were not so forward as I was in the lady's good graces."
[At this period princes of the blood, when speaking to the king, said
Monsieur; when they wrote to him, they called him Monseigneur.] Francis
I., to whom this scarcely veiled allusion referred, was content to reply,
"Ah! my dear cousin, you fly out at everything, and you are mighty
short-tempered." The nickname of short-tempered stuck to the constable
from that day, and not without reason. With anybody but the king the
constable was a good deal more than short-tempered the chancellor,
Duprat, who happened to be at Moulins, and who had a wish to become
possessed of two estates belonging to the constable, tried to worm
himself into his good graces; but Bourbon gave him sternly to understand
with what contempt he regarded him, and Duprat, who had hitherto been
merely the instrument of Louise of Savoy's passions, so far as the duke
was concerned, became henceforth his personal enemy, and did not wait
long for an opportunity of making the full weight of his enmity felt.
The king's visit to Moulins came to an end without any settlement of
the debts due from the royal treasury to the constable. Three years
afterwards, in 1520, he appeared with not a whit the less magnificence