Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/92

Rh thanksgiving with which she would have hailed it on the morrow of Pavia. The King's deliverance meant poverty and dismemberment to France; meant the imprisonment of the Royal princes. And it was barely four months since Francis had sworn that he would rather die in prison than subject her to such disgrace! The King was to be the King again; but no longer Ogier, no longer Roland. A note of satire pierces through the songs which the people made about their prince in his hard captivity:

There is no condition he will not grant for freedom's sake.

It was not only gold, not only the Royal children that Charles demanded; he required the province of Burgundy. And those that surmised the contents of the peace could not know that the King in prison had signed before witnesses two secret protests, whereby he declared that a prisoner under lock and key is in no wise constrained to keep a forced obligation.

In this month of February, when Montmorency brought the news of the treaty into France, the children who were to be exchanged as hostages for their father were themselves very ill with measles (or so Margaret calls their illness, probably scarlatina) accompanied with long and severe fever. "Monsieur