tions concerning the administration of the city, the fountains,
markets, slaughter-houses, gutters, etc. Nevertheless, the pest
prevailed throughout the whole of his reign.

This gay monarch, who aspired to excel in all the accomplishments of a
chevalier, wrote verses in his lighter moments, but the celebrated
"_Souvent femme varie; bien fol est qui s'y fie_," said to have been
written with the diamond of his finger-ring on a window in the Chateau
d'Amboise, has been resolved into the very commonplace phrase: "_Toute
femme varie_," which Brantome saw written by the royal hand on the
window-casing. In like manner, the pretty verses ascribed to Mary Queen
of Scots, on leaving France,--

"_Adieu, plaisant pays de France,
O ma patrie,
La plus cherie,_" etc.,

were really written by a journalist named Meunier de Querlon. What the
young queen did say, as she saw the French coast sink below the horizon,
was: "_Adieu, chere France! je ne vous verrai jamais plus!_"

The son of Francois I, who succeeded him, had all his father's defects
and none of his good qualities; his short reign is made memorable
chiefly by his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and the unusual manner of
his death. The former, whom he made Duchesse de Valentinois, and who
exercised in the court an authority quite denied to the queen,
maintained over her royal lover,--she had been the mistress of his
father,--notwithstanding her forty-eight years of age, an ascendency, by
her beauty and her intelligence, which her contemporaries ascribed to an
enchanted ring. She was nearly sixty years of age, and the king was in
his forty-first year when he wore her colors, the black and white of
widows, in the fatal tourney which he had commanded to celebrate the
wedding of his eldest daughter, Elisabeth de France, to Philippe II,
King of Spain, already twice widowed. The lists were set up across the
Rue Saint-Antoine, from the Palais des Tournelles almost to the Bastile,
with great amphitheatres of seats on each side for the spectators. The
king, who excelled in bodily exercises, had distinguished himself during
the first two days; on the third, the jousting was completed, when he
happened to see two lances still unbroken, and commanded the captain of
his guards, Gabriel, Comte de Montgomery, to take one of them and tilt
with him "for the love of the ladies." Montgomery protested, but the
king insisted, and as they came together the former did