BOOK FIRST.
CHAPTER 3. MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.
(continued)
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was
well worth any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon,
Archbishop and Comte of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was
allied both to Louis XI., through his brother, Pierre, Seigneur
de Beaujeu, who had married the king's eldest daughter, and
to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy.
Now, the dominating trait, the peculiar and distinctive trait
of the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit
of the courtier, and devotion to the powers that be. The
reader can form an idea of the numberless embarrassments
which this double relationship had caused him, and of all
the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been
forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either
Louis or Charles, that Scylla and that Charybdis which had
devoured the Duc de Nemours and the Constable de Saint-Pol.
Thanks to Heaven's mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But
although he was in port, and precisely because he was in
port, he never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of
his political career, so long uneasy and laborious. Thus, he
was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been
"white and black" for him--meaning thereby, that in the
course of that year he had lost his mother, the Duchesse de
la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and
that one grief had consoled him for the other.
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's
life, liked to enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau,
did not hate Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la
Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty girls rather than on old
women,--and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the
populace of Paris. He never went about otherwise than surrounded
by a small court of bishops and abbés of high lineage,
gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on occasion; and more
than once the good and devout women of Saint Germain
d' Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly illuminated
windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the
same voices which had intoned vespers for them during the
day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic proverb of
Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the
Tiara--Bibamus papaliter.
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