Moulins was an almost kingly residence.  “The dukes,” said the Venetian traveller Andrew Navagero, in 1528, “have built there fortress-wise a magnificent palace, with beautiful gardens, groves, fountains, and all the sumptuous appliances of a prince’s dwelling.”  No sooner did the constable go to reside there than numbers of the nobility flocked thither around him.  The feudal splendor of this abode was shortly afterwards enhanced by an auspicious domestic incident.  In 1517 the Duchess of Bourbon was confined there of a son, a blessing for some time past unhoped for.  The delighted constable determined to make of the child’s baptism a great and striking event; and he begged the king to come and be godfather, with the dowager Duchess of Bourbon as godmother.  Francis I. consented and repaired to Moulins with his mother and nearly all his court.  The constable’s magnificence astonished even the magnificent king “five hundred gentlemen, all clad in velvet, and all wearing a chain of gold going three times round the neck,” were in habitual attendance upon the duke; “the throng of the invited was so great that neither the castle of Moulins nor the town itself sufficed to lodge them; tents had to be pitched in the public places, in the streets, in the park.”  Francis I. could not refrain from saying that a King of France would have much difficulty in making such a show; the queen-mother did not hide her jealousy; regal temper came into collision with feudal pride.  Admiral Bonnivet, a vassal of the constable and a favorite of the king, was having built, hard by Chatellerault, a castle so vast and so magnificent, “that he seemed,” says Brantome, “to be minded to ride the high horse over the house of M. de Bourbon, in such wise that it should appear only a nest beside his own.”  Francis I., during a royal promenade, took the constable one day to see the edifice the admiral was building, and asked him what he thought of it.  “I think,” said Bourbon, “that the cage is too big and too fine for the bird.”  “Ah!” said the king, “do you not speak with somewhat of envy?” “I!” cried the constable; “I feel envy of a gentleman whose ancestors thought themselves right happy to be squires to mine!” In their casual and familiar conversations the least pretext would lead to sharp words between the Duke of Bourbon and his kingly guest.  The king was rallying him one day on the attachment he was suspected of having felt for a lady of the court.  “Sir,” said the constable, “what you have just said has no point for me, but a good deal for those who were not so forward as I was in the lady’s good graces.” [At this period princes of the blood, when speaking to the king, said Monsieur; when they wrote to him, they called him Monseigneur.] Francis I., to whom this scarcely veiled allusion referred, was content to reply, “Ah! my dear cousin, you fly out at everything, and you are mighty short-tempered.”  The nickname of short-tempered stuck to the constable