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She eventually powdered it, he adds, and found it an efficacious medicine for herself and others. An earlier example, of a lady at the French court who embalmed and perfumed the genital organs of her dead husband, always preserving them in a gold casket, is mentioned by Brantôme.
"She was extremely good-humoured, charitable, and humane," continues Brantome "The people of France ought to pray to God that the female favourite of every chief magistrate of their country may resemble this amiable frail one."
Abruptly Brantome reappeared in the doorway with his mane disheveled, like a lion let out of a cage; but Lilla was too wretched to laugh at him. Now he was bursting with memories of those, since great, with whom he had chummed in his youth, when he, too, had expected to be great. He swept his listeners away to foreign studios, where they saw young men poising for flights amid the stars.
I have very little knowledge of the historians of the Renaissance or of those prior to the French Revolution. Apart from the chroniclers of individual exploits, such as Lopez de Ayala, Brantome, and the others, they are wholly colourless, and either pseudo-Roman or pseudo-Greek.
Brantome, who relates this story, adds, that the victor might have done as he pleased with the body, cut off the head, dragged it out of the camp, or exposed it upon an ass, but that, being a wise and very courteous gentleman, he left it to the relatives of the deceased to be honourably buried, contenting himself with the glory of his triumph, by which he gained no little renown and honour among the ladies of Paris.
In the midst of his conclusion, however, he lost his self-satisfied smile: he had caught sight of Lilla, who was looking at him blankly as though he had slammed a transparent door in her face. She heard Brantome benevolently murmuring the platitude: "It is often in making others forget their sorrows that one diminishes one's own, and in doing good to others that one finds good for oneself."
Brantôme relates a story of the favorite's clever and ingenious method of rousing Charles from his apathy and selfish pursuit of pleasure while the English, under the Duke of Bedford, were ravaging his kingdom.
Once, years after that night, having gone up to Paris to give our two eldest children a glimpse of the court, we were walking through the gallery built by our great Henri IV., to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries, when my son asked me who was the painted fat old lady that was staring so hard at him as if she had seen him before. In turn I asked the Abbe Brantome, who happened to be passing.
But on board the Queen's own galley were three others of Guise or Lorraine uncles the Duc d'Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d'Elbeuf with M. Danville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterward in literary history as Sieur de Brantome, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphine, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Danville.
Brantome states the number of Turks killed at thirty thousand, without counting those who were drowned or who died afterwards of their wounds; six thousand prisoners, twelve thousand Christian prisoners liberated, and ten thousand Christians killed. Hoofd, vi. 214, gives the figures at twenty-five thousand Turks and ten thousand Christians slain.
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