ching the small
chance of bringing her grand object of negotiation to a happy issue.
"Every one tells me," she wrote, "that he loves the king; but there is
small experience of it. . . . If I had to do with good sort of
people, who understand what honor is, I would not care; but the contrary
is the case." She did not lose courage, however: "she spoke to the
emperor so bravely and courteously," says Brantome, "that he was quite
astounded, and she said still worse to those of his council, at which
she had audience; there she had full triumph of her good speaking and
haranguing, with an easy grace in which she was not deficient; and she
did so well with her fine speaking that she made herself rather agreeable
than hateful or tiresome, that her reasons were found good and pertinent,
and that she remained in high esteem with the emperor, his council, and
his court."

But neither good and pertinent reasons, nor the charm of eloquence in the
mouth of a pleasing and able woman, are sufficient to make head against
the passions and interests of the actors who are at a given moment in
possession of the political arena; it needs time, a great deal of time,
before the unjust or unreasonable requirements and determinations of a
people, a generation, and the chief of a state become acknowledged as
such and abandoned. At the negotiations entered upon, in 1525, between
Francis I. and Charles V., Francis I. was prompt in making large and
unpalatable concessions: he renounced his pretensions, so far as Italy
was concerned, to the duchy of Milan, to Genoa, and to the kingdom of
Naples; his suzerainty over the countships of Flanders and Artois, and
possession of Hesdin and Tournay; he consented to reinstate Duke Charles
of Bourbon in all his hereditary property and rights, and to pay three
millions of crowns in gold for his own ransom; but he refused to cede
Provence and Dauphiny to the Duke of Bourbon as an independent state,
and to hand over the duchy of Burgundy to Charles V., as heir of his
grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, only daughter of Charles the Rash.
Charles V., after somewhat lukewarmly persisting, gave up the demand he
had made on behalf of the Duke of Bourbon, for having Provence and
Dauphiny erected into an independent state; but he insisted absolutely,
on his own behalf, in his claim to the duchy of Burgundy as a right and a
condition, sine qua non, of peace. The question at the bottom of the
negotiations between the two