in
a glittering suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred
in white and cloth of silver, prick his steed, making it prance and
rear, _faisant rage_, that he might display his horsemanship, his fine
figure and dazzling costume before the queen and her ladies. It was
all _bien gorriere a voir_. "Born between two adoring women," says
Michelet, "Francis was all his life a spoilt child." Money flowed
through his hands like water[102] to gratify his ambition, his
passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at
Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his
reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which
never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and
paralysed in the right hand, was otherwise in possession of all his
incomparable faculties.

[Footnote 102: "He was well named after St. Francis, because of the
holes in his hands," said a Sorbonne doctor.]

[Illustration: CHAPEL, HOTEL DE CLUNY.]

The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting
before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of
acrimonious discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to
its existence in the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard,
and not before it had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture
the impress of its native genius and adapted it to the requirements of
French life and climate. The Hotel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still
remains to exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic
architecture modified by the new style. The old Hotel de Ville,[103]
designed by Dom. da Cortona and submitted to Francis in 1532, was
dominated by the French style, and not until nearly a century after
the first Italian Expedition were the last Gothic builders superseded.
The fine Gothic church of St. Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not
finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Etienne and
St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance
features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante's
Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, _Ome, come ti muti! Vedi, che
gia non sei ne duo ne uno!_[104]

[Footnote 103: The authorship of this famous building is much
canvassed by authorities. M.E. Mareuse, secretary of the Committee of
Inscriptions, affirms that Domenico must be considered the _unique
architecte_ of our old Municipal Palace: other writers claim with
equal