of negotiation to a happy issue.  “Every one tells me,” she wrote, “that he loves the king; but there is small experience of it. . . .  If I had to do with good sort of people, who understand what honor is, I would not care; but the contrary is the case.”  She did not lose courage, however:  “she spoke to the emperor so bravely and courteously,” says Brantome, “that he was quite astounded, and she said still worse to those of his council, at which she had audience; there she had full triumph of her good speaking and haranguing, with an easy grace in which she was not deficient; and she did so well with her fine speaking that she made herself rather agreeable than hateful or tiresome, that her reasons were found good and pertinent, and that she remained in high esteem with the emperor, his council, and his court.”

But neither good and pertinent reasons, nor the charm of eloquence in the mouth of a pleasing and able woman, are sufficient to make head against the passions and interests of the actors who are at a given moment in possession of the political arena; it needs time, a great deal of time, before the unjust or unreasonable requirements and determinations of a people, a generation, and the chief of a state become acknowledged as such and abandoned.  At the negotiations entered upon, in 1525, between Francis I. and Charles V., Francis I. was prompt in making large and unpalatable concessions:  he renounced his pretensions, so far as Italy was concerned, to the duchy of Milan, to Genoa, and to the kingdom of Naples; his suzerainty over the countships of Flanders and Artois, and possession of Hesdin and Tournay; he consented to reinstate Duke Charles of Bourbon in all his hereditary property and rights, and to pay three millions of crowns in gold for his own ransom; but he refused to cede Provence and Dauphiny to the Duke of Bourbon as an independent state, and to hand over the duchy of Burgundy to Charles V., as heir of his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, only daughter of Charles the Rash.  Charles V., after somewhat lukewarmly persisting, gave up the demand he had made on behalf of the Duke of Bourbon, for having Provence and Dauphiny erected into an independent state; but he insisted absolutely, on his own behalf, in his claim to the duchy of Burgundy as a right and a condition, sine qua non, of peace.  The question at the bottom of the negotiations between the two sovereigns lay thus:  the acquisition of Burgundy was for Charles V. the crowning-point of his victory and of his predominance in Europe; the giving up of Burgundy was for Francis I. a lasting proof of his defeat and a dismemberment of his kingdom:  one would not let his prisoner go at any price but this, the other would not purchase at this price even his liberty and his restoration to his friends.  In this extremity Francis I. took an honorable and noble resolution; in October, 1525, he wrote to Charles V., “Sir, my brother, I have heard from the Archbishop of Embrun and my premier-president