to drink himself drunk; and it is also to show distrust of the excellent means you have for preventing all the ruses and artifices that might be invented to throw your service into confusion.”  The king acquiesced, but not without anxiety, in Vieilleville’s refusal, and, leaving at Metz as governor a relative of the constable’s, whom the latter warmly recommended to him, he set out on the 22d of April, 1552, with all his household, to go and attempt in Alsace the same process that he had already carried out in Lorraine.  “But when we had entered upon the territory of Germany,” says Vieilleville, “our Frenchmen at once showed their insolence in their very first quarters, which so alarmed all the rest that we never found from that moment a single man to speak to, and, as long as the expedition lasted, there never appeared a soul with his provisions to sell on the road; whereby the army suffered infinite privations.  This misfortune began with us at the approach to Saverne (Zabern), the episcopal residence of Strasbourg.”  When the king arrived before Strasbourg he found the gates closed, and the only offer to open them was on the condition that he should enter alone with forty persons for his whole suite.  The constable, having taken a rash fit, was of opinion that he should enter even on this condition.  This advice was considered by his Majesty to be very sound, as well as by the princes and lords who were about him, according to the natural tendency of the Frenchman, who is always for seconding and applauding what is said by the great.  But Vieilleville, on being summoned to the king’s quarters, opposed it strongly.  “Sir,” said he, “break this purpose, for in carrying it out you are in danger of incurring some very evil and very shameful fate; and, should that happen, what will become of your army which will be left without head, prince, or captain, and in a strange country, wherein we are already looked upon with ill will because of our insolence and indiscretions?  As for me, I am off again to my quarters to quaff and laugh with my two hundred men-at-arms, in readiness to march when your standard is a-field, but not thither.”  Nothing has a greater effect upon weak and undecided minds than the firm language of men resolved to do as they say.  The king gave up the idea of entering Strasbourg, and retired well pleased nevertheless, for he was in possession of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Pont-a-Mousson, the keys for France into Germany, and at the head of an army under young commanders who were enterprising without being blindly rash.

Charles V. also had to know what necessity was, and to submit to it, without renouncing the totality of his designs.  On the 2d of August, 1552, he signed at Passau, with the Protestant princes, the celebrated treaty known under the name of “treaty of public peace,” which referred the great questions of German pacification to a general diet to be assembled in six months, and declared that, pending definitive