Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/200

Rh Imperial province, Charles could afford to promise the King a governorship for his younger son.

So the short war ended in far more perilous amity. All celebrated the occasion with rejoicings: Francis, Leonor, the young Duke, even Margaret herself, Margaret the champion of the oppressed. In a long poem to her brother, she entreats him not to forget, in suppressing heresy, to reform the Church. She sings a pæan, strange in her mouth, over the triumph of the Holy Church, and the reunion of Charles and Francis. No words are rich enough to express her rapture: "All other good or gain, compared to this, appears imperfect." And she concludes: "This peace is of God, we are very sure." Little did Margaret divine over what graves she was chanting her hymns of victory.

The Dauphin alone was angry and suspicious. His vanity as a general, his jealousy of his brother, were cruelly stung by this treaty, which closed a fortunate campaign with an ignoble truce, and gave the gain of the war to the Duke of Orleans, and all the loss to France. Gathering his nobles round him at Fontainebleau, he signed a solemn act of protest, witnessed by the Count of Anguien and the Duke of Guise. Though no high motives illumined him, at least he saw the iniquity of this treaty, and did his utmost to prevent it. But there was no one to listen to him. The King was hunting at Romorantin. The Queen of Navarre was writing stories in her castle at Alençon.

Very soon the treaty began to bear its natural fruit; this treaty which Margaret praised in prose and verse; this pact of treason and derogation which she declared should give peace, "not to us alone, but to all Christendom." Whom the gods doom, first they madden.