would lead to sharp words between the Duke of Bourbon and his kingly guest. The king was rallying him one day on the attachment he was suspected of having felt for a lady of the court. “Sir,” said the constable, “what you have just said has no point for me, but a good deal for those who were not so forward as I was in the lady’s good graces.” [At this period princes of the blood, when speaking to the king, said Monsieur; when they wrote to him, they called him Monseigneur.] Francis I., to whom this scarcely veiled allusion referred, was content to reply, “Ah! my dear cousin, you fly out at everything, and you are mighty short-tempered.” The nickname of short-tempered stuck to the constable from that day, and not without reason. With anybody but the king the constable was a good deal more than short-tempered the chancellor, Duprat, who happened to be at Moulins, and who had a wish to become possessed of two estates belonging to the constable, tried to worm himself into his good graces; but Bourbon gave him sternly to understand with what contempt he regarded him, and Duprat, who had hitherto been merely the instrument of Louise of Savoy’s passions, so far as the duke was concerned, became henceforth his personal enemy, and did not wait long for an opportunity of making the full weight of his enmity felt. The king’s visit to Moulins came to an end without any settlement of the debts due from the royal treasury to the constable. Three years afterwards, in 1520, he appeared with not a whit the less magnificence at the Field of Cloth of Gold, where he was one of the two great lords chosen by Francis I. to accompany him at his interview with Henry VIII.; but the constable had to put up with the disagreeableness of having for his associate upon that state occasion Admiral Bonnivet, whom he had but lately treated with so much hauteur, and his relations towards the court were by no means improved by the honor which the king conferred upon him in summoning him to his side that day. Henry VIII., who was struck by this vassal’s haughty bearing and looks, said to Francis I., “If I had a subject like that in my kingdom, I would not leave his head very long on his shoulders.”