The king’s marriage was an opportunity for gayeties not to be lost. It is said that one of his motives for concluding the treaty of St. Germains was the unwillingness of the Emperor Maximilian to part with his daughter while France was in a state of civil commotion. There may have been other causes of delay, for very unfavorable reports of the king’s health and disposition had got abroad. His character certainly had not improved during the few years he had occupied the throne. He was fond of athletic sports, and excelled in jumping and tennis. He took delight in shoeing horses and working at the forge, like a blacksmith.[466] He was addicted to the chase “even to frenzy,” passing whole days and nights in the woods.[467] This made him “cruel toward beasts, but _not_ toward men.”[468] Sometimes he and his madcap associates would tear along the roads, decapitating any unlucky donkey he might encounter, or transfixing stray pigs with his hunting spear.[469] Then, as if maddened by the sight of blood, he would dabble in their entrails like a butcher. He was fond of practical jokes; often at night he would break into the bedrooms of his young companions, pull them out of bed, and flog them as if they were school-boys. He was not licentious, and Marie Touchet was the object of a sincere passion. Perjury seemed to him nothing but a figure of speech and no crime; he therefore violated his word as often as it seemed profitable to do so. But fortunately for the human race “men are not all evil,” and in his lucid moments--for Charles was at times quite insane--he appears affectionate and desirous of doing what is right. When at Bayonne, he quite disgusted the unscrupulous Alva by saying that to take up arms against his own subjects was quite out of the question, and could only be followed by general ruin. Though no soldier, he had seen service at the sieges of Bourges, Rouen, Havre, and St. Jean d’Angely, and possessed all the ambition of his race to extend the frontiers of his kingdom. There were times when he courted the society of men of letters, and would shut himself up with “his friends” Ronsard, Baif, Passerat, or Theodore Corneille, to compose verses. Nor was he himself a stranger to the Muses, if the fragments ascribed to him are really from his pen. Even his treatise on hunting--_La Chasse royale_--shows him to have possessed considerable skill. Such was the man to whose word the Huguenots had entrusted their property and lives, and to whom the Emperor of Germany was about to entrust his daughter. Perhaps it was hoped that the amiable Elizabeth would tame him down, as in later years and in another country Peter the Czar was controlled by the low-born Catherine.