By the way, I do not at all agree with that usually wise and just lady in her estimate of Louis XII. As M. La Tour says, he was far in advance of his age in his breadth of mind and his sense of the duty owed by a king to his people. Perhaps something of his father's poet vision entered into the more practical nature of Louis, and in nothing did he show more plainly the generosity and breadth of his character than in his forgiveness of those who had slighted and injured him,--when he said, upon ascending the throne, "The King of France does not avenge the wrongs of the Duke of Orleans," Louis placed himself many centuries in advance of the revengeful and rapacious age in which he lived. Another poet whose name is associated with Blois is Francois Villon. A loafer and a vagabond he was, and a thief he may have been, yet by reason of his genius and for the beauty of his song this troubadour was welcomed to the literary court of Charles d'Orleans. That Villon received substantial assistance and protection from his royal brother poet appears from his poems. Among them we find one upon the birth of the Duke's daughter Mary: _Le Dit de la Naissance Marie_, which, like his patron's verses, is part in French and part in Latin. In this chateau, which is so filled with history and romance, our thoughts turned from the times of Charles of Orleans to a later period when Catherine sought to dazzle the eyes of Jeanne d'Albret by a series of fetes and pageants at Blois that would have been quite impossible in her simpler court of Navarre. The Huguenot Queen, as it happened, was not at all bedazzled by the splendors of the French court, but with the keen vision that belonged to her saw, through the powder, paint, tinsel, and false flattery, the depravity and corruption of the life that surrounded her. To her son she wrote that his fiancee was beautiful, witty, and graceful, with a fine figure which was much too tightly laced and a good complexion which was in danger of being ruined by the paint and powder spread over it. With regard to the marriage contract which she had come to sign, the Queen said that she was shamefully used and that her patience was taxed beyond that of Griselda. After many delays the marriage contract was finally signed, and a few days later the good Queen of Navarre was dead, whether from natural causes or from some of the products of Queen Catherine's secret cupboards the world will never know, as Ruggieri and Le Maitre were both at hand to do the will of their royal mistress with consummate skill, and to cover over their tracks with equal adroitness.