At any rate his son, King Charles VIII., which did succeed him, was not of this complexion; for ’tis reported of him now that he was the most reticent and fair-speaking monarch was even seen, and did never offend man or woman by the very smallest ill word.[59] I leave you then to think of the fair ladies of his reign, and all merry lovers of the sex, did not have good times in those days. And indeed he did love them right well and faithfully,—in fact too well; for returning back from his Naples expedition triumphant and victorious, he did find such excessive diversion in loving and fondling the same, and pleasuring them with so many delights at Lyons, in the way of tournaments and tourneys which he did hold for love of them, that clean forgetting his partisans which he had left in that Kingdom, he did leave these to perish,—and towns and kingdom and castles to boot, which yet held out, and were stretching forth hands of supplication to him to send them succour. ’Tis said moreover that overmuch devotion to the ladies was the cause of his death, for by reason of a too reckless abandonment to these pleasures, he did, being of a very weakly frame of body, so enervate and undermine his health as that this behaviour did no little contribute to his death. Our good King Louis XII. was very respectful toward the ladies; for as I have said in another place, he would ever pardon all stage-players, as well as scholars and clerks of the Palace in their guilds, no matter who they did make free to speak of, excepting the Queen his wife, and her ladies and damosels,—albeit he was a merry gallant in his day and did love fair women as well as other folk. Herein he did take after his grand-father, Duke Louis of Orleans,—though not in this latter’s ill tongue and inordinate conceit and boastfulness. And truly this defect did cost him his life, for one day having boasted loud out at a banquet whereat Duke John of Burgundy, his cousin, was present, how that he had in his private closet portraits of all the fairest ladies he had enjoyed, as chance would have it, Duke John himself did enter this same closet. The very first lady whose picture he beheld there, and the first sight that met his eyes, was his own most noble lady wife, which was at that day held in high esteem for her beauty. She was called Marguerite, daughter of Albert of Bavaria, Count of Hainault and Zealand. Who was amazed then? who but the worthy husband? Fancy him muttering low down to himself, “Ha, ha! I see it all!” However, making no outcry about the flea that really bit him, he did hide it all, though hatching vengeance, be sure, for a later day, and so picked a quarrel with him as to his regency and administration of the Kingdom. Thus putting off his grievance on this cause and not on any matter of his wife at all, he had the Duke assassinated at the Porte Barbette of Paris. Then presently his first wife being now dead (we may suspect