Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/29

14 delighted, to compose the Heptameron to please him in his illness.

Louisa of Savoy was scarcely less devoted. As great a love and ambition filled her heart, but was met and thwarted there by other passions, by intenser personal cravings. She was not like Margaret, a sunflower, seeing only one object, turning only to that. She was a passionate, personal, violent woman—eager for love, eager for money, eager for power, yet subordinating these intense desires to her motherly ambition. Her passion was as strong as Margaret's devotion. Both these women lived only for the glory of Francis. Let us see of what stuff this idol was made.

There is, I believe, no good portrait of Francis in his youthful manhood. The face so familiar to us is of a later date: a dreadful face, with its sly and carnal look, the long coarse nose, and full voluptuous mouth. It seems as if some pressure of blood on the brain weighed down the eyelids over those small and narrow eyes, and inflamed those florid cheeks, over which the coarse dark hair falls down. A dreadful face truly—apoplectic, sensual, indifferent, cunning. But, from the frequent contemporary representations of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, we can believe that in 1520 the King looked different from this. Still slender, tall, and elegant in figure, he rode his horse gracefully, and was first in every pastime. His long face, with the small eyes, is not yet swollen and reddened by indulgence and disease. It has, indeed, a gentle, benevolent, and royal expression; an air of kind knightliness: and this is the pose which Francis affected. He was to be the Amadis of kings. He was brave to folly, ideally rash in love and in war; he was fantastically honourable. A story in the Heptameron relates how, having