Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/132

Rh the late King, which did torment and chide and bully them most strangely. Such is the account I have heard of that good monarch, Louis XI., from divers old stagers.

At any rate his son, King Charles VIII., which did succeed him, was not of this complexion; for 'tis reported of him now that he was the most reticent and fair-speaking monarch was even seen, and did never offend man or woman by the very smallest ill word. I leave you then to think of the fair ladies of his reign, and all merry lovers of the sex, did not have good times in those days. And indeed he did love them right well and faithfully,—in fact too well; for returning back from his Naples expedition triumphant and victorious, he did find such excessive diversion in loving and fondling the same, and pleasuring them with so many delights at Lyons, in the way of tournaments and tourneys which he did hold for love of them, that clean forgetting his partisans which he had left in that Kingdom, he did leave these to perish,—and towns and kingdom and castles to boot, which yet held out, and were stretching forth hands of supplication to him to send them succour. 'Tis said moreover that overmuch devotion to the ladies was the cause of his death, for by reason of a too reckless abandonment to these pleasures, he did, being of a very weakly frame of body, so enervate and undermine his health as that this behaviour did no little contribute to his death.

Our good King Louis XII. was very respectful toward the ladies; for as I have said in another place, he would ever pardon all stage-players, as well as scholars and clerks of the Palace in their guilds, no matter who they did make free to speak of, excepting the Queen his wife, and her ladies and damosels,—albeit he was a merry