l--"

"There's the throne!" returned Caillette, courteously. "Since you have
overcome Triboulet, his place is yours."

"A precarious place!" said the new-comer, easily, dropping,
nevertheless, into the chair.

"The king is dead! Long live the king!" cried the cardinal's jester.

"Long live the king!" they shouted, every fool and zany raising a
tankard, save the dwarf and the young woman, the former continuing to
glare vindictively upon the usurper, and the latter to all intent
remaining oblivious of the ceremony of installation. Poised upon a
chair, she idly thrust her fingers through the gilded bars of the cage
that hung from the rafters and gently stroked the head of the now
complaisant bird.

"Poor Jocko! Poor Jocko!" she murmured.

"La!--la!--la!--" sang the parrot, responsive to her light caress.

"Your Majesty's wishes! Your Majesty's decree!" exclaimed the monastic
wit-worm.

"Hear! hear!" roared Brusquet.

"Silence!" commanded Marot. "His Majesty speaks."

"Toot! toot! toot!" rang out the flourish of a trumpet, a clarion
prelude to the fiat from the throne.

The new king in motley arose; heedless, devil-may-care, very erect in
his preposterously pointed shoes.

"I appoint you, Thony, treasurer of the exchequer, because you are
quick at sleight-of-hand," he began.

"Good," laughed Marot. "An he's more light-fingered than his
predecessor, he's a master of prestidigitation!"

"You, Brusquet," went on the new master of Fool's hall, "I reward with
the government of Guienne, for he who governs his own house so ill is
surely fitted for greater tasks of incompetency."

This allusion to the petticoat rule which dominated the luckless jester
at home was received in good part by all save the hapless domestic
bondman himself.

"You, Villot, are made admiral of the fleet."

Villot smiled, thinking how Francis had but recently bestowed that
office upon the impoverished husband of pretty Madame d'Etaille.

"Thanks, your Majesty," he began, "but if some post nearer home--"

"You are to sail at once!"

"But my wife--"

"Will remain at court!" announced the duke's jester with great decision.

Villot made a wry face. The king in motley smiled significantly. "A
safe haven, Villot! Besides, remember a court without ladies is like a
spring without flowers."

A movement resembling apprehension swept through the company. The
epigram had been Francis'; the court--a flower-bed of roses--was, in