easily molded; easily won. She is a woman; therefore,
soft, yielding; yours for the asking. You are over valorous at a
distance; too timorous near her. Approach her boldly, and, though she
were Diana's self, I'll answer for your victory! Eh, Triboulet, are
our ladies cold-hearted, callous, indifferent to merit?"

"Cold-hearted?" answered the dwarf, with a ludicrous expression of
feigned rapture. "Were I to relate--but, no, my tongue is
silent--discretion--your Majesty will understand--"

"Well," said the duke, "with encouragement from the best-favored
scholar in the kingdom and the--ugliest, I should proceed with more
confidence."

"Best-favored!" smirked the little monster. "Really, you flatter me."

"A whimsical fellow, Sire," vouchsafed the nobleman.

"When he is not tiresome," answered the monarch. "On, gentlemen!" And
the cavalcade swept down the road toward the castle. Far behind, with
cracking of whip, followed the mules and their drivers.

CHAPTER VII

THE COURT OF LOVE

The rough Norman banqueting hall, with its massive rafters, frayed
tapestries and rude adornment of bristling heads of savage boars,
wide-spreading antlers and other trophies of the chase, had long since
been replaced under the king's directions by an apartment more to the
satisfaction of a monarch who was a zealous and lavish patron of the
brilliant Italian school of painting, sculpture and architecture.
Those barbarous decorations, celebrating the hunt, had been relegated
to subterranean regions, the walls dismantled, and the room turned over
to a corps of artists of such renown as Da Vinci, Francois Clouet, Jean
Cousin and the half-mad Benvenuto Cellini.

Where formerly wild boars had snarled with wicked display of yellow
tusks from the blackened plaster, now Cleopatra, in the full bloom of
her mature charms, reclined with her stalwart Roman hero in tender
dalliance. Where once the proud and stately head of the majestic stag
had hung over door and panel, now classic nymphs bathed in a pellucid
pool, and the only horns were those which adorned the head of him who,
according to the story, dared gaze through the foliage, and was
rewarded for his too curious interest by--that then common form of
punishment--metamorphosis.

Overhead, vast transformation from the great ribbed beams of oak and
barren interspaces, graceful Peri floated on snow-white clouds and
roguish Cupids swam through the azure depths, to the edificati