at, "France will not have to bear the expense; I will
provide for it; there are four hundred thousand crowns ready for that
purpose." "Where did you get all that money, pray?" asked Francis,
turning his back upon him; and next day he caused a seizure to be made
of a portion of the chancellor-cardinal's property. "This, then,"
exclaimed Duprat, "is the king's gratitude towards the minister who has
served him body and soul!" "What has the cardinal to complain of?" said
the king: "I am only doing to him what he has so often advised me to do
to others." [_Trois Magestrats Francais du Seizieme Siecle,_ by Edouard
Faye de Brys, 1844, pp. 77-79.] The last of the chancellor's
biographers, the Marquis Duprat, one of his descendants, has disputed
this story. [_Vie d'Antoine Duprat,_ 1857, p. 364.] However that may
be, it is certain that Chancellor Duprat, at his death, left a very large
fortune, which the king caused to be seized, and which he partly
appropriated. We read in the contemporary _Journal d'un Bourgeois de
Paris_ [published by Ludovic Lalanne, 1854, p. 460], "When the chancellor
was at the point of death, the king sent M. de Bryon, Admiral of France,
who had orders to have everything seized and all his property placed in
the king's hands. . . . They found in his place at Nantouillet eight
hundred thousand crowns, and all his gold and silver plate . . . and
in his Hercules-house, close to the Augustins', at Paris, where he used
to stay during his life-time, the sum of three hundred thousand livres,
which were in coffers bound with iron, and which were carried off by the
king for and to his own profit." In the civil as well as in the military
class, for his government as well as for his armies, Francis I. had, at
this time, to look out for new servants.

He did not find such as have deserved a place in history. After the
deaths of Louise of Savoy, of Chancellor Duprat, of La Tremoille, of La
Palice, and of all the great warriors who fell at the battle of Pavia, it
was still one more friend of Francis I.'s boyhood, Anne de Montmorency,
who remained, in council as well as army, the most considerable and the
most devoted amongst his servants. In those days of war and discord,
fraught with violence, there was no man who was more personally rough and
violent than Montmorency. From 1521 to 1541, as often as circumstances
became pressing, he showed himself ready for anything and capable of
anything in defence