y would have
moved the cardinal but little, so much a part of the customs were the
liberties of that day. Moreover, he had another cause for solicitude,
and his mien as wholly preoccupied with it, which entered the estrade
the same time as himself; this was the embassy from Flanders.

Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing trouble
about the possible consequences of the marriage of his cousin Marguerite
de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles, Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how
long the good understanding which had been patched up between the
Duke of Austria and the King of France would last; nor how the King of
England would take this disdain of his daughter. All that troubled him
but little; and he gave a warm reception every evening to the wine of
the royal vintage of Chaillot, without a suspicion that several flasks
of that same wine (somewhat revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor
Coictier), cordially offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI., would, some
fine morning, rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. "The much honored embassy of
Monsieur the Duke of Austria," brought the cardinal none of these cares,
but it troubled him in another direction. It was, in fact, somewhat
hard, and we have already hinted at it on the second page of this
book,--for him, Charles de Bourbon, to be obliged to feast and receive
cordially no one knows what bourgeois;--for him, a cardinal, to receive
aldermen;--for him, a Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to receive
Flemish beer-drinkers,--and that in public! This was, certainly, one
of the most irksome grimaces that he had ever executed for the good
pleasure of the king.

So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in the world
(so well had he trained himself to it), when the usher announced, in a
sonorous voice, "Messieurs the Envoys of Monsieur the Duke of Austria."
It is useless to add that the whole hall did the same.

Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a contrast in the
midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of Charles de Bourbon, the
eight and forty ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, having at
their head the reverend Father in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin,
Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand
Bailiff of Ghent. A deep silence settled over the assembly, accompanied
by stifled laughter at the preposterous names and all the bourgeois
designations which each of these personages transmitted with
imperturbable