A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 by François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
page 78 of 470 (16%)
page 78 of 470 (16%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
his own house; but for a month there was a stop put to festivals dances,
banquets, and all other pastimes. 'Las! they had good reason; for greater loss could not have come upon the country." [_Histoire du bon Chevalier sans Peur et sans Reproche,_ t. ii. pp. 125-132.] It is a duty and an honor for history to give to such lives and such deaths, as remarkable for modesty as for manly worth, the full place which they ought to occupy in the memory of mankind. The French army continued its retreat under the orders of the Count of St. Pol, and re-entered France by way of Suza and Briancon. It was Francis I.'s third time of losing Milaness. Charles V., enchanted at the news, wrote on the 24th of May to Henry VIII., "I keep you advertised of the good opportunity it has pleased God to offer us of giving a full account of our common enemy. I pray you to carry into effect on your side that which you and I have for a long while desired, wherein I for my part will exert myself with all my might." Bourbon proposed to the two sovereigns a plan well calculated to allure them. He made them an offer to enter France by way of Provence with his victorious army, to concentrate there all the re-enforcements promised him, to advance up the Rhone, making himself master as he went of the only two strong places, Monaco and Marseilles, he would have to encounter, to march on Lyons from the side on which that city was defenceless, and be in four months at Paris, whether or no he had a great battle to deliver on the march. "If the king wishes to enter France without delay," said he to Henry VIII.'s ambassador, "I give his Grace leave to pluck out my two-eyes if I am not master of Paris before All Saints. Paris taken, all the kingdom of France is in my power. Paris in France is like Milan in Lombardy; if Milan is taken, the duchy is lost; in the same way, Paris taken, the whole of France is lost." By this plan Bourbon calculated on arriving |
|