The constable did not consider it seemly to wait about; so he quitted the court and withdrew into his own duchy, to Moulins, not openly disgraced, but resolved to set himself, by his proud independence, above the reach of ill-will, whether on the king's part or his mother's.
Moulins was an almost kingly residence.

"The dukes," said the Venetian traveller Andrew Navagero, in 1528, "have built there fortress-wise a magnificent palace, with beautiful gardens, groves, fountains, and all the sumptuous appliances of a prince's dwelling." No sooner did the constable go to reside there than numbers of the nobility flocked thither around him.

The feudal splendor of this abode was shortly afterwards enhanced by an auspicious domestic incident.

In 1517 the Duchess of Bourbon was confined there of a son, a blessing for some time past unhoped for.

The delighted constable determined to make of the child's baptism a great and striking event; and he begged the king to come and be godfather, with the dowager Duchess of Bourbon as godmother.