Marguerite, about this time, sees her husband, who escaped from Pavia, die at Lyon. She mourns him; but after the first two days she surmounts her grief and conceals it from her mother the regent, because, not being able to render services herself, she should think she was most unfortunate, she says, to hinder and shake the spirit of her who can do such great things. When Marguerite is selected to go to her brother in Spain (September, 1525) and work for his deliverance, her joy is great. At last she can be useful to this brother, whom she considers “as him whom God has left her in this world; father, brother, and husband.” She mingles and varies in many ways those names of master, brother, king, which she accumulates upon him, without their sufficing to express her affection, so full and sincere is it: “Whatever it may be, _even to casting to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you service_, nothing can seem to me strange, or difficult, or painful, but always consolation, repose, honour.” Such expressions, exaggerated in others, are true on Marguerite’s lips. She succeeded but little in her mission to Spain; there, where she sought to move generous hearts and make their fibre of honour vibrate, she found crafty dissimulation and policy. She was allowed to see her brother for a short time only; he himself exacted that she should shorten her stay, thinking her more useful to his interests in France. She tears herself from him in grief, above all at leaving him ill, and as low as possible in health. Oh! how she longed to return, to stay beside him, and to take the “place of lacquey beside his cot.” It is her opinion that he should buy his liberty at any price; let him return, no matter on what conditions; no terms can be bad provided she sees him back in France, and none can be good if he is still in Spain. As soon as she sets foot in France she is received, she tells him, as a forerunner, “as the Baptist of Jesus Christ.” Arriving at Béziers, she is surrounded by crowds. “I assure you, Monseigneur,” she writes, “that when I tried to speak of you to two or three, the moment I named the king everybody pressed round to listen to me; in short, I am constrained to talk of you, and I never close my speech without an accompaniment of tears from persons of all classes.” Such was at that time the true grief of France for the loss of her king. As Marguerite advances farther into the country she observes more and more the absence of the master; the kingdom is “like a body without a head, living to recover you, dying in the sense that you are absent.” As for herself, seeing this, she thinks that her toils in Spain were more endurable than this stillness in France, “where fancies torment me more than efforts.”