a varlet’s knapsack.  I went to see the king in his chamber, where there were some wounded whom he was having dressed; he wore a good mien, and every one kept a good face; and we were not so boastful as a little before the battle, because we saw the enemy near us.”  Six days after the battle, on the 12th of July, the king wrote to his sister, the Duchess Anne of Bourbon, “Sister, my dear, I commend myself to you right heartily.  I wrote to my brother how that I found in my way a big army that Lord Ludovic, the Venetians, and their allies, had got ready against me, thinking to keep me from passing.  Against which, with God’s help, such resistance was made, that I am come hither without any loss.  Furthermore, I am using the greatest diligence that can be to get right away, and I hope shortly to see you, which is my desire, in order to tell you at good length all about my trip.  And so God bless you, sister, my dear, and may He have you in His keeping!”

Both armies might and did claim the victory, for they had, each of them, partly succeeded in their design.  The Italians wished to unmistakably drive out of Italy Charles VIII., who was withdrawing voluntarily; but to make it an unmistakable retreat, he ought to have been defeated, his army beaten, and himself perhaps a prisoner.  With that view they attempted to bar his passage and beat him on Italian ground:  in that they failed; Charles, remaining master of the battle-field, went on his way in freedom, and covered with glory, he and his army.  He certainly left Italy, but he left it with the feeling of superiority in arms, and with the intention of returning thither better informed and better supplied.  The Italian allies were triumphant, but without any ground of security or any lustre; the expedition of Charles VIII. was plainly only the beginning of the foreigner’s ambitious projects, invasions and wars against their own beautiful land.  The King of France and his men of war had not succeeded in conquering it, but they had been charmed with such an abode; they had displayed in their campaign knightly qualities more brilliant and more masterful than the studied duplicity and elegant effeminacy of the Italians of the fifteenth century, and, after the battle of Fornovo, they returned to France justly proud and foolishly confident, notwithstanding the incompleteness of their success.

[Illustration:  CASTLE OF AMBOISE——­308]

Charles VIII. reigned for nearly three years longer after his return to his kingdom; and for the first two of them he passed his time in indolently dreaming of his plans for a fresh invasion of Italy, and in frivolous abandonment to his pleasures and the entertainments at his court, which he moved about from Lyons to Moulins, to Paris, to Tours, and to Amboise.  The news which came to him from Italy was worse and worse every day.  The Count de Montpensier, whom he had left at Naples, could not hold his own there, and died a prisoner there on the 11th of November, 1496, after