Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/21

6 son was born, but, writes Louisa in her journal, with an almost savage triumph, "he could not retard the exaltation of my Cæsar, for he had no life." Sharp anxiety and goading ambition had so changed by this time the gentle wife of Charles of Angoulême.

Louisa brought up her son as befitted a king. Her castle of Romorantin was scarcely large enough to hold the court and retinue of the young heir of France, and for this purpose the beautiful palace of Amboise was assigned to her by the King. As years went on, Louis grew to regard the young Count of Angoulême as his heir, and, despite the bitter jealousy of Queen Anne, he loved the boy, and treated him with care and kindness. He created Francis Duke of Valois; he consulted the child's taste with fatherly foresight; and when his young cousin came to court, Louis had the royal park filled with deer and game, so that Francis might not be debarred from his favourite pleasure of the chase.

Meanwhile, at Amboise, Francis was educated with the greatest nobles of France. Of these boy-companions, five, in especial, were to become conspicuous in the history of his life. Gaston de Foix, the King's nephew, "the thunderbolt of Italy" as people learned to call him, who, ten years later, in the flower of his youth, should perish in the moment of victory on the desolate Ravenna marshes. The light-hearted Bonnivet, Margaret's too daring lover, killed at Pavia. The brilliant and gay Philippe Brion, Sieur de Chabot, so often favoured and disgraced by Francis in later years. And, a more potent influence, Anne de Montmorency, the determined, stern, narrow-hearted boy, on whom his godmother, the Breton Queen, seemed to have bestowed her pure and relentless nature with