outbreak took place at Bordeaux on account of the gabel or salt-tax; and the king’s lieutenant was massacred in it.  Anne de Montmorency, whom the king had made constable in 1538, the fifth of his family invested with that dignity, repaired thither at once.  “Aware of his coming,” says Brantome, “MM. de Bordeaux went two days’ journey to meet him and carry him the keys of their city:  ‘Away, away,’ said he, ’with your keys; I will have nothing to do with them; I have others which I am bringing with me, and which will make other sort of opening than yours (meaning his cannon); I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king, and kill his governor and lieutenant.’  Which he did not fail to do,” adds Brantome, “and inflicted exemplary punishment, but not so severe assuredly as the case required.”  The narrator, it will be seen, was not more merciful than the constable.  Nor was the constable less stern or less thorough in battles than in outbreaks.  In 1562, at the battle of Dreux, he was aged and so ill that none expected to see him on horseback.  “But in the morning,” says Brantome, “knowing that the enemy was getting ready, he, brimful of courage, gets out of bed, mounts his horse, and appears at the moment the march began; whereof I do remember me, for I saw him and heard him, when M. de Guise came forward to meet him to give him good day, and ask how he was.  He, fully armed, save only his head, answered him, ’Right well, sir:  this is the real medicine that hath cured me for the battle which is toward and a-preparing for the honor of God and our king.’” In spite of this indomitable aptness for rendering the king everywhere the most difficult, nay, the most pitiless services, the Constable de Montmorency none the less incurred, in 1541, the disfavor of Francis I.; private dissensions in the royal family, the intrigues of rivals at court, and the enmity of the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Etampes, effaced the remembrance of all he had done and might still do.  He did accept his disgrace; he retired first to Chantilly, and then to Ecouen; and there he waited for the dauphin, when he became King Henry II., to recall him to his side and restore to him the power which Francis I., on his very death-bed, had dissuaded his son from giving back.  The ungratefulnesses of kings are sometimes as capricious as their favors.

The ladies’ peace, concluded at Cambrai in 1529, lasted up to 1536; incessantly troubled, however, by far from pacific symptoms, proceedings, and preparations.  In October, 1532, Francis I. had, at Calais, an interview with Henry VIII., at which they contracted a private alliance, and undertook “to raise between them an army of eighty thousand men to resist the Turk, as true zealots for the good of Christendom.”  The Turks, in fact, under their great sultan, Soliman II., were constantly threatening and invading Eastern Europe.  Charles V., as Emperor of Germany, was far more exposed to their attacks and far more seriously