Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/157

142 Francis, unable any longer to endure his distress alone, summoned his sister from Alençon to Paris.

Margaret had met her brother in April at her Castle of Alençon, and had spent some time in his company, while he directed the arrangements for the campaign in the North. She was, therefore, aware of the further change that his sickness had worked in him. But in April she had still been able to interest him in projects of war and of State; in April she still had held a brief for England, she still had hoped to gain Henry and detach him from the Emperor; in July she found him at war with both alike, confined to his room, without energy, or impulse, or resource: the miserable débris of a King.

Her cheerful ardour infused new life into Francis. She roused him from his nerveless melancholy, and made him show himself to the anxious burghers of Paris. She restored him, as far as possible, to his legitimate place as head of the State. She prayed with him and for him, exerting her benign and tolerant spirit to direct him into the way of peace; and, amid these more serious endeavours, she did not forget to amuse. She knew that the most grievous enemy of her brother was neither the Emperor Charles nor Henry of England, but the hypochondriac melancholy which hung like a cloud over his senses. She sang to him the psalms of her protégé, Clément Marot. She read to him the novels of Boccaccio, recently translated by another of her gentlemen-in-waiting, Antoine Le Maçon, under her own direction, and these novels became at once as great a fashion at Court as the Psalms of Marot had been a year or two before. For a few hours they even chased away the pain and depression of the King. In this book, says