Clement Marot Author:Henry Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XII. Last Exile And Last Home. King Francis resumed war in the year after the narrow escape of the kingdom. It was his turn to be confident. After ... more »peurile formalities, the parliament of Paris declared Flanders and Artois re-united to the crown of France, and Francis advancing to the Low Countries, began a campaign. But the course of war was again arrested by the intervention of the ladies. Queen Eleonore of France and the queen of Hungary, two sisters of Charles, obtained a ten month's truce for the Low Countries, and afterwards proceeded to secure a truce for three months in Piedmont. Pope Paul III. proposed an interview between the contending mon- archs. A truce for ten years was signed, on the 18th of June, 1538, and afterwards they met as great friends at Aigues-Mortes. Francis then cultivated the friendship of the emperor. He fell off from his allegiance as an ally of Solyman, and the Protestants, whom he had favoured fitfully when they formed one of the elements of antagonism to Charles, again felt the weight of his orthodoxy. Then the clouds began slowly to drift again over the little household of Marot. Meanwhile Clement was happy with home, friends, and countrymen. Grace of a kindly nature was on all his work. He endeavoured to commend to the king grave thought with an air of levity, and poured out his religious feeling in such pieces as his poem of The Rich in Poverty, Joyous in Affliction, and Content in Suffering,'1 a purely didactic strain of resignation to God in the sorrows of the world, which bids the worldly put on Christ and lay up treasures in heaven. Among his later pieces of this kind we have most insight into his life from one entitled Balladin. This poem calls on lovers of the ball or dance to cease their footing, and the instruments to c...« less