character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit of the courtier,
and devotion to the powers that be. The reader can form an idea of the
numberless embarrassments which this double relationship had caused him,
and of all the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been
forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either Louis or
Charles, that Scylla and that Charybdis which had devoured the Duc de
Nemours and the Constable de Saint-Pol. Thanks to Heaven's mercy, he had
made the voyage successfully, and had reached home without hindrance.
But although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he
never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of his political career,
so long uneasy and laborious. Thus, he was in the habit of saying that
the year 1476 had been "white and black" for him--meaning thereby, that
in the course of that year he had lost his mother, the Duchesse de la
Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that one grief
had consoled him for the other.

Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's life, liked
to enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau, did not hate
Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty
girls rather than on old women,--and for all these reasons was very
agreeable to the populace of Paris. He never went about otherwise
than surrounded by a small court of bishops and abbes of high lineage,
gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on occasion; and more than once
the good and devout women of Saint Germain d' Auxerre, when passing
at night beneath the brightly illuminated windows of Bourbon, had been
scandalized to hear the same voices which had intoned vespers for
them during the day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic
proverb of Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the
Tiara--_Bibamus papaliter_.

It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved him on
his entrance from any bad reception at the hands of the mob, which had
been so displeased but a moment before, and very little disposed to
respect a cardinal on the very day when it was to elect a pope. But the
Parisians cherish little rancor; and then, having forced the beginning
of the play by their authority, the good bourgeois had got the upper
hand of the cardinal, and this triumph was sufficient for them.
Moreover, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome man,--he wore a fine
scarlet robe