At the time of their marriage, Charles II. of Lorraine and Margaret of Bavaria were a model couple upon the principles of dissimilarity and contrast. The Duke, a soldier born, had made good his degree of knighthood ten years before, when, a mere stripling, he won his spurs fighting daringly by the side of his cousin, Philippe “le Hardi,” Duke of Burgundy. With him he went on a punitive expedition against the pirates of the Barbary coast. At Rosebach, and especially at the tremendous battle of Azincourt, he did prodigies of valour. In Flanders and in Germany his ensign led on victorious troops. Charles’s last military achievement was the rout of the Emperor Wenceslas under the very walls of Nancy. No warrior loved fighting more than the Duke of Lorraine. Slightly to alter the text, he was one of those war-lords whom Shakespeare, in his “seven ages of man,” says “sought reputation at the cannon’s mouth.” He yearned for the applause of gallant knights, both friends and foes; he yielded himself amorously to the smiles and embraces of the fair sex, and he revelled in the praise and adulation of poets and minstrels. His mailed fist was ever toying with his trusty sword and grappling the chafing-reins of his charger; his mailed foot was ever ready for the stirrup and to trample upon the head of a fallen foe. At the same time he was a gay and polished courtier, one of the most accomplished Princes in Europe. Fond of literature and poetry, he studied daily his Latin copy of the “Commentaries of Julius Cæsar” and similar treatises. He had besides a taste for music, and was no mean exponent of the lute and guitar, and a friend of troubadours. On the other hand, the gentle, lovable Duchess was born for the cloister and for the worship of the Mass. Her bare feet were ever moving in penitential pilgrimages and religious processions, and her shapely hands were ever joined in prayer or divided in charity. Her passion was the submissive rule of Christ, her will the conquest of herself. Daring and devotion thus harnessed together rocked the family cradle, and insured for their offspring the best of two worlds. Such a union was bound to be productive of genius and corrective of faults of heredity. What a bitter disappointment, then, it must have been for both the Duke and the Duchess when one after another their beauteous babes and adolescent sons dropped like blighted rosebuds from their young love’s rosebush prematurely into the cold, dark grave, leaving only the aroma of their sweet young lives to soothe their sorrowing parents!