316

THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

in his sister. He used to send her to church to pray for
his success against the Emperor. “ Ma Mignonne,” he said,
“allez vous en a 1’Eglise, a Complies, et la pour moi faites
priere a Bien.” He summoned her to his bedside when he
was ill, and it was most likely to amuse him that she wrote
her book of Stories, the half-merry, half-poetic “Hepta-
meron.” She jotted them down while she was travelling
about the country in her litter, probably on her journeys
to and from her brother. The Senechale de Poitou, her
duenna and Brantome’s grandmother, was with her to hold
the silken inkstand steady for her pen, as they jolted along
the roads. We can imagine Francis laughing at the strange
adventures of the Friars, as he lay on his sick couch. When
he was convalescent, he wandered in her company from chateau
to chateau and showed her his latest improvements. For
his great resource besides Margaret was still his passion for
building. He was completing Chambord and Fontainebleau;
he was ornamenting his Chateau of Madrid, built directly
after his captivity; he was still re-constructing the Louvre
(the work was begun in 1528), and turning it from a
prison-fortress into a “logis de plaisance pour soi y loger.”
Margaret admired them all because they were his handi-
work. “I should have started sooner,11 she writes in 1542,
“had it not been for the great wish I felt to see Chambord.
I found it of so great beauty that none but its creator is
worthy to sing its praises.” The King was at Paris. She
humbly thanked him for promising to show her Fontaine-
bleau. “To see your buildings without you,11 she says, “is
to see a lifeless body; and looking at the work without
hearing your intentions concerning it, is like reading in