"The glorious day of Marignano saw the rising, and that of Pavia the setting, of his fame as a soldier; so true it is that the prowess of the man was shamed by that of the boy. The early and unregretted death of one of his neglected queens, and the heart-broken endurance of the other, contrasted with the unbounded influence of his first favorite and the insolent arrogance of his second, will sufficiently demonstrate his character as a husband. His open and illegal oppression of an overtaxed and suffering people to satisfy the cravings of an extortionate and licentious court, will suffice to disclose his value as a monarch; while the reckless indifference with which he falsified his political pledges, abandoned his allies in their extremity in order to further his own interests, and sacrificed the welfare of his kingdom and the safety of his armies to his own puerile vanity, will complete a picture by no means calculated to elicit one regret that his reign was not prolonged." Victor Hugo dared to puncture the "legend," when, in the play of "Le Roi s'Amuse," he represented the "knightly king" as being enticed to a low water-side hovel by the charms of a girl of the street; but even the government of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe, could not brook such an attack upon the "divinity that doth hedge a king," and, after the first performance in 1832, the strong hand of the censorship was laid upon the play, and fifty years elapsed before it again saw the light upon the stage. The first titular favorite of King François, the Comtesse de Châteaubriand, whose character was in every respect diametrically opposed to that of her successor, was an object of dislike and dread to Louise de Savoie, the king's mother, because of her unbounded influence over François. When he returned to France, after his captivity in Spain following upon his defeat at Pavia, his passion for Madame de Châteaubriand was found to have increased rather than diminished. In looking about for some means to kill this passion, and in that way put an end to the influence of the favorite, Louise de Savoie was not obliged to go beyond the lovely and licentious circle of her own maids of honor. She found in Anne de Pisseleu, Mademoiselle d'Heilly, that combination of loveliness, youth, frailty, and forwardness which she required for her purpose, and so arranged her first presentation to the king that the desired effect was produced almost immediately. It was not long before a suitably complaisant husband was found for the new divinity, in the person of the Duc d'Etampes, and she had soon entirely supplanted Madame de Châteaubriand, driven her from court, and entered upon a period of queenly power and magnificence, which was to endure with little change or diminution for full twenty years, and until the death of her royal lover and slave in 1547.