Whilst winding endless skeins of silk off the hands of the page, she sighed in a heart-breaking way, and made the most pointed remarks about the laziness and unmannerliness of those noblemen who purposely avoided any approach to the kind, chivalrous king.
Gottfried long forbore to respond to such innuendoes. Of what use would it be to try to explain to this silly old person that the court of King Francis was not the proper sphere for such a fat old woman as herself, or for a little maiden like Blanche, who would receive a kind of adulation before which the good, true-hearted warrior shuddered? Once, however, when Dame Isabella, more excited than usual, stormed in upon him and insisted that the young girl's future should be taken into immediate consideration, he gave her an angry answer. But it did not silence her, and though the worthy woman talked plenty of nonsense, yet she sometimes made a remark that Gottfried could not think wholly unjustifiable. "Blanche is eighteen years old!" stormed Dame Auberive; "if you do not wish her to marry you must resolve to place her in one of the nunneries, which are the only respectable refuge for unmarried women of her position."
"Who told you that I did not want Blanche to marry?" exclaimed Gottfried, with anger and agitation; "it is only that I have not yet found any one good enough for her." But Dame Isabella replied with cutting scorn, "No one will ever seem to you good enough for her!" and bounced out of the room the picture of righteous indignation.
Shortly after this it happened that a young knight was brought into the castle badly wounded; he had fallen among thieves, been robbed, and left unconscious by the roadside. He must be a man of rank, the servants thought who brought him in, for his dress, though soiled and torn, was of the finest material, and he wore the full beard with close-shaved hair which most of the courtiers wore in imitation of the king. Gottfried recognised in him a certain Henri de Lancy who, at the battle of Marignano, had fought beside him and won general admiration for his bravery, and had, more than all, dragged him--his old friend Gottfried--out of the thick of the battle after a ball had broken his leg.