incurable craze of French kings in the sixteenth century. In vain did his most experienced warriors, La Tremoille and Chabannes, exert themselves to divert him from such a campaign, for which he was not prepared; in vain did his mother herself write to him, begging him to wait and see her, for that she had important matters to impart to him. He answered by sending her the ordinance which conferred upon her the regency during his absence; and, at the end of October, 1524, he had crossed the Alps, anxious to go and risk in Milaness the stake he had just won in Provence against Charles V. Arriving speedily in front of Milan, he there found the imperial army which had retired before him; there was a fight in one of the outskirts; but Bourbon recognized the impossibility of maintaining a siege in a town of which the fortifications were in ruins, and with disheartened troops. On the line of march which they had pursued, from Lodi to Milan, there was nothing to be seen but cuirasses, arquebuses tossed hither and thither, dead horses, and men dying of fatigue and scarcely able to drag themselves along. Bourbon evacuated Milan, and, taking a resolution as bold as it was singular, abruptly abandoned, so far as he was personally concerned, that defeated and disorganized army, to go and seek for and reorganize another at a distance. Being informed that Charles III., Duke of Savoy, hitherto favorable to France, was secretly inclining towards the emperor, he went to Turin, made a great impression by his confidence and his grand spirit in the midst of misfortune upon both the duke and his wife, Beatrix of Portugal, and obtained from them not only a flattering reception, but a secret gift of their money and their jewelry; and, equipped with these resources, he passed into Germany to recruit soldiers there. The lanzknechts, who had formerly served under him in France, rushed to him in shoals; he had received from nature the gifts most calculated to gain the hearts of campaigners: kind, accessible, affable and even familiar with the common soldier, he entered into the details of his wants and alleviated them. His famous bravery, his frankness, and his generosity gained over those adventurers who were weary of remaining idle; their affection consoled Bourbon and stood him in stead of all: his army became his family and his camp his country. Proscribed and condemned in France, without any position secured to him in the dominions of Charles V., envied and crossed by that prince’s generals, he had found full need of all the strong tempering of his character and of his warlike genius to keep him from giving way under so many trials. He was beginning to feel himself near recovery: he had an army, an army of his own; he had chosen for it men inured to labor and fatigue, accustomed to strict discipline; and thereto he added five hundred horsemen from Franche-Comte for whose devotion and courage he