A prodigious amount of sculpture by Jean Cousin, Pierre Bontemps, Jean Goujon, and Germain Pilon was interpolated above the doorways and windows, in the framing thereof, and above the great fireplaces. Inside and out, above and below, were vast areas to be covered, and François allowed his taste to have full sway. The presumptuous François made much of this noble residence, perhaps because of his love of _la chasse_, for game abounded hereabouts, or perhaps because of his regard for the Comtesse Thoury, who occupied a neighbouring château. For some time before his death, François still lingered on at Chambord. Marguerite and her brother, both now considerably aged since the happier times of their childhood in Touraine, always had an indissoluble fondness for Chambord. Marguerite had now become Queen of Navarre, but her beauty had been dimmed with the march of time, and she no longer was able to comfort and amuse her kingly brother as of yore. His old pleasures and topics of conversation irritated him, and he had even tired of poetry, art, and political affairs. Above all, he shamefully and shamelessly abused women, at once the prop and the undermining influence of his kingly power in days gone by. There is an existing record to the effect that he wrote some "window-pane" verse on the window of his private apartment to the following effect: "Souvent femme varie; Mal habile quis'y fie!" If this be not apocryphal, the incident must have taken place long years before that celebrated "window-pane" verse of Shenstone's, and François is proven again a forerunner, as he was in many other things. Without doubt the Revolution did away with this square of glass, which--according to Piganiol de la Force--existed in the middle of the eighteenth century. Perhaps François's own jealous humour prompted him to write these cynical lines, and then again perhaps it is merely one of those fables which breathe the breath of life in some unaccountable manner, no one having been present at its birth, and hearsay and tradition accounting for it all. François, truly, was failing, and he and his sister discussed but sorrowful subjects: the death of his favourite son, Charles, the inheritor of the throne, at Abbeville, where he became infected with the plague, and also the death of him whom he called "his old friend," Henry VIII. of England, a monarch whose amours were as numerous and celebrated as his own.