I.; “the appetite of cardinals is insatiable; I could not satisfy it.”  “Sir,” replied Duprat, “France will not have to bear the expense; I will provide for it; there are four hundred thousand crowns ready for that purpose.”  “Where did you get all that money, pray?” asked Francis, turning his back upon him; and next day he caused a seizure to be made of a portion of the chancellor-cardinal’s property.  “This, then,” exclaimed Duprat, “is the king’s gratitude towards the minister who has served him body and soul!” “What has the cardinal to complain of?” said the king:  “I am only doing to him what he has so often advised me to do to others.” [Trois Magestrats Francais du Seizieme Siecle, by Edouard Faye de Brys, 1844, pp. 77-79.] The last of the chancellor’s biographers, the Marquis Duprat, one of his descendants, has disputed this story. [Vie d’Antoine Duprat, 1857, p. 364.] However that may be, it is certain that Chancellor Duprat, at his death, left a very large fortune, which the king caused to be seized, and which he partly appropriated.  We read in the contemporary Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris [published by Ludovic Lalanne, 1854, p. 460], “When the chancellor was at the point of death, the king sent M. de Bryon, Admiral of France, who had orders to have everything seized and all his property placed in the king’s hands. . . .  They found in his place at Nantouillet eight hundred thousand crowns, and all his gold and silver plate . . . and in his Hercules-house, close to the Augustins’, at Paris, where he used to stay during his life-time, the sum of three hundred thousand livres, which were in coffers bound with iron, and which were carried off by the king for and to his own profit.”  In the civil as well as in the military class, for his government as well as for his armies, Francis I. had, at this time, to look out for new servants.

He did not find such as have deserved a place in history.  After the deaths of Louise of Savoy, of Chancellor Duprat, of La Tremoille, of La Palice, and of all the great warriors who fell at the battle of Pavia, it was still one more friend of Francis I.’s boyhood, Anne de Montmorency, who remained, in council as well as army, the most considerable and the most devoted amongst his servants.  In those days of war and discord, fraught with violence, there was no man who was more personally rough and violent than Montmorency.  From 1521 to 1541, as often as circumstances became pressing, he showed himself ready for anything and capable of anything in defence of the crown and the re-establishment of order.  “Go hang me such a one,” he would say, according to Brantome.  “Tie you fellow to this tree; give yonder one the pike or arquebuse, and all before my eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a clock-case as this against the king; burn me this village; set me everything a-blaze, for a quarter of a league all round.”  In 1548, a violent