both injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for being too late at the play, when he is a handsome man, and wears handsomely his scarlet robe.

He entered, then, saluted the company with that hereditary smile which the great have always in readiness for the people, and stepped slowly towards the fauteuil or state chair of scarlet velvet placed for his reception, looking as if some other matter occupied his mind. His train - what a Frenchman might now call his staff - of bishops and abbots issued after him upon the estrade, not without exciting redoubled tumult and curiosity among the spectators below. All were busied in pointing them out, or in telling their names, each one striving to show that he knew at least some one of them; some pointing to the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if we remember right), some to the Primicier or Dean of St. Denis, others to Robert de Lespinasse, Abbot of the great neighboring monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI., -- all their names being repeated with a thousand mistakes and mispronunciations. As for the scholars, they swore. It was their own day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia, the annual orgies of the basoche and the école. No turpitude but was a matter of right, to be held sacred that day. And then there were mad gossips among the crowd, - Simone Quatre-livres, Agnès-laGadine, Robine Pièdebou. Was it not the least that could be expected, that they should swear at their ease, and profane God's name a little, on such a day as that, in such good company with churchmen and courtesans? And accordingly they made no min

cing of the matter; but amid the uproarious applause a frightful din of blasphemies and enormities proceeded from all those tongues let loose, - those tongues of clerks and scholars, tied up all the rest of the year by the fear of Saint Louis's branding-iron. Poor Saint Louis! how they defied him in his own Palais de Justice! Each one of them had singled out among the newly-arrived company some one of the cassocks, black, gray, white, or violet. As for Joannes Frollo de Molendino, brother to an archdeacon, it was the red robe itself that he audaciously assailed, singing out as loud as he could bawl, and fixing his shameless eyes upon the cardinal, “Cappa repleta mero!"

All these particulars - which are thus clearly detailed for the reader's edification - were so completely drowned in the general hum of the multitude that they were lost before they could reach the reserved gallery; though, indeed, the cardinal would have been little moved by them, so intimately did the license of the day belong to the manners of the age. He had something else to think of, which preoccupation appeared in his countenance, - another cause of solicitude which followed closely behind him, and made its appearance in the gallery almost at the same time as himself: this was the Flemish embassy.

Not that he was a profound politician, or concerned himself about the possible consequences of the marriage of madame his cousin, Margaret of Burgundy, with monsieur his cousin, Charles, Dauphin of Vienne; nor how long the patched-up reconciliation between

the Duke of Austria and the French king might endure; nor how the King of England would receive this slight towards his daughter. All that gave him little anxiety; and he did honor every night to the wine of the royal vineyard of Chaillot without ever suspecting that a few flasks of that same wine, revised and corrected a little by the physician Coictier, and cordially presented to Edward IV. by Louis XI., might possibly some fine morning rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. La moult honorée ambassade de Monsieur le Duc d'Autriche brought none of these cares to the cardinal's mind, but annoyed him in another respect. It was, in truth, rather too bad (and we have already said a word or two about it in the first pages of this volume) that he should be obliged to give good reception and entertainment - he, Charles de Bourbon - to obscure burghers; he, a cardinal, to a pack of scurvy échevins; he, a Frenchman and a connoisseur in good living, to Flemish beer-drinkers -and in public, too! Certes, it was one of the most irksome parts he had ever gone through for the good pleasure of the king.

However, he had so perfectly studied it that he turned towards the door with the best grace in the world when the usher announced in a sonorous voice, "Messieurs the Envoys of the Duke of Austria!" It is needless to say that the whole hall did likewise.

Then appeared, two by two, with a gravity which strongly contrasted with the flippant air of the cardinal's ecclesiastical train, the forty-eight ambassadors from Maximilian of Austria, having at their

head the reverend father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, high bailiff of Ghent. A deep silence now took place in the assemblage, a general titter being suppressed in order to listen to all the uncouth names and mercantile additions which each one of these personages transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then gave out their names and callings, pell-mell and with all sorts of mutilations, to the crowd below. There were Maître Loys Roelof, échevin of the town of Louvain ; Messire Clays d'Etuelde, échevin of Brussels; Messire Paul de Baeust, sieur of Voirmizelle, president of Flanders; Maître Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city of Antwerp; Maître George de la Moere, principal échevin of the kuere of the city of Ghent ; Maître Gheldolf vander Hage, principal échevin of - the parchons of the said city; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dimaerzelle, etc., etc., etc., bailiffs, échevins, and burgomasters, - burgomasters, échevins, and bailiffs, all stiff, sturdy, drawn-up figures, dressed out in velvet and damask, and hooded with black velvet cramignoles decorated with great tufts of gold thread of Cyprus, - good Flemish heads, after all, with severe and respectable countenances, akin to those which Rembrandt has made stand out with such force and gravity from the dark background of his picture of "Going the Rounds at Night;" personages on every one of whose foreheads it was written that Maximilian of Austria had done right in "confiding to the full,” as his manifesto expressed it,

"in their sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good endowments."

There was one exception, however, to this description; it was a subtle, intelligent, crafty-looking face, a sort of mixture of the monkey and the diplomatist, to whom the cardinal made three steps in advance and a low bow, but who, nevertheless, was called simply Guillaume (or William) Rym, counsellor and pensionary of the town of Ghent.

Few persons at that time knew anything about Guillaume Rym, - a rare genius, who in a time of revolution would have appeared with éclat on the surface of events, but who in the fifteenth century was confined to the practice of covert intrigue, and to "live in the mines," as the Duke de Saint-Simon expresses it. However, he was appreciated by the first "miner" in Europe; he was familiarly associated in the secret operations of Louis XI., - all which was perfectly unknown to this multitude, who were amazed at the cardinal's politeness to that sorrylooking Flemish bailiff.