not to taste meat for two years, and that I held you safe and sound my prisoner, for by the treatment I showed you, you should have understanding of how much I esteemed the high prowess that was in you.”  He ordered his people to rig up a tent over Bayard, and to forbid any noise near him, so that he might die in peace.  Bayard’s own gentlemen would not, at any price, leave him.  “I do beseech you,” he said to them, “to get you gone; else you might fall into the enemy’s hands, and that would profit me nothing, for all is over with me.  To God I commend ye, my good friends; and I recommend to you my poor soul; and salute, I pray you, the king our master, and tell him that I am distressed at being no longer able to do him service, for I had good will thereto.  And to my lords the princes of France, and all my lords my comrades, and generally to all gentlemen of the most honored realm of France when ye see them.”

[Illustration:  The Death of Bayard——­76]

“He lived for two or three hours yet.  There was brought to him a priest, to whom he confessed, and then he yielded up his soul to God; whereat all the enemy had mourning incredible.  Five days after his death, on the 5th of May, 1524, Beaurain wrote to Charles V., ’Sir, albeit Sir Bayard was your enemy’s servant, yet was it pity of his death, for ’twas a gentle knight, well beloved of every one, and one that lived as good a life as ever any man of his condition.  And in truth he fully showed it by his end, for it was the most beautiful that I ever heard tell of.’  By the chiefs of the Spanish army certain gentlemen were commissioned to bear him to the church, where solemn service was done for him during two days.  Then, by his own servitors was he carried into Dauphiny, and, on passing through the territory of the Duke of Savoy, where the body was rested, he did it as many honors as if it had been his own brother’s.  When the news of his death was known in Dauphiny, I trow that never for a thousand years died there gentleman of the country mourned in such sort.  He was borne from church to church, at first near Grenoble, where all my lords of the parliament court of Dauphiny, my lords of the Exchequer, pretty well all the nobles of the country and the greater part of all the burgesses, townsfolk, and villagers came half a league to meet the body:  then into the church of Notre-Dame, in the aforesaid Grenoble, where a solemn service was done for him; then to a house of Minimes, which had been founded aforetime by his good uncle the bishop of Grenoble, Laurens Alment; and there he was honorably interred.  Then every one withdrew to his own house; but for a month there was a stop put to festivals dances, banquets, and all other pastimes.  ’Las! they had good reason; for greater loss could not have come upon the country.” [Histoire du bon Chevalier sans Peur et sans Reproche, t. ii. pp. 125-132.]

It is a duty and an honor for history to give to such lives and such deaths, as remarkable for modesty as for manly worth, the full place which they ought to occupy in the memory of mankind.