they had received their pay.”  “I sent you four hundred thousand crowns when you asked for them.”  “I received the letters in which your Majesty notified me of this money, but the money never.”  The king sent at once for the superintendent-general of finance, James de Beaune, Baron of Semblancay, who acknowledged having received orders on the subject from the king, but added that at the very moment when he was about to send this sum to the army, the queen-mother had come and asked him for it, and had received it from him, whereof he was ready to make oath.  Francis I. entered his mother’s room in a rage, reproaching her with having been the cause of losing him his duchy of Milan.  “I should never have believed it of you,” he said, “that you would have kept money ordered for the service of my army.”  The queen-mother, somewhat confused at first, excused herself by saying, that “those were moneys proceeding from the savings which she had made out of her revenues, and had given to the superintendent to take care of.”  Semblancay stuck to what he had said.  The question became a personal one between the queen-mother and the minister; and commissioners were appointed to decide the difference.  Chancellor Duprat was the docile servant of Louise of Savoy and the enemy of Semblancay, whose authority in financial matters he envied; and he chose the commissioners from amongst the mushroom councillors he had lately brought into Parliament.  The question between the queen-mother and the superintendent led to nothing less than the trial of Semblancay.  The trial lasted five years, and, on the 9th of April, 1527, a decree of Parliament condemned Semblancay to the punishment of death and confiscation of all his property; not for the particular matter which had been the origin of the quarrel, but “as attained and convicted of larcenies, falsifications, abuses, malversations, and maladministration of the king’s finances, without prejudice as to the debt claimed by the said my lady, the mother of the king.”  Semblancay, accordingly, was hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon, on the 12th of August.  In spite of certain ambiguities which arose touching some acts of his administration and some details of his trial, public feeling was generally and very strongly in his favor.  He was an old and faithful servant of the crown; and Francis I. had for a long time called him “his father.”  He was evidently the victim of the queen-mother’s greed and vengeance.  The firmness of his behavior, at the time of his execution, became a popular theme in the verses of Clement Marot:—­

          When Maillart, officer of hell, escorted
          To Montfaucon Semblancay, doomed to die,
          Which, to your thinking, of the twain supported
          The better havior?  I will make reply: 
          Maillart was like the man to death proceeding;
          And Semblancay so stout an ancient looked,
          It seemed, forsooth, as if himself were leading
          Lieutenant Maillard—­to the gallows booked!