The king would have given the command of this important place to Vieilleville, but he refused it, saying, "I humbly thank your Majesty, but I do not think that you should establish in Metz any governor in your own name, but leave that duty to the mayor and sheriffs of the city, under whose orders the eight captains of the old train-bands who will remain there with their companies will be." "How say you!" said the king: "can I leave a foreign lieutenant in a foreign country whose oath of fidelity I have only had within the last four-and-twenty hours, and with all the difficulties and disputes in the world to meet too ?" "Sir," rejoined Vieilleville, "to fear that this master sheriff, whose name is Tallanges, might possibly do you a bad turn, is to wrongly estimate his own competence, who never put his nose anywhere but into a bar-parlor to drink himself drunk; and it is also to show distrust of the excellent means you have for preventing all the ruses and artifices that might be invented to throw your service into confusion." The king acquiesced, but not without anxiety, in Vieilleville's refusal, and, leaving at Metz as governor a relative of the constable's, whom the latter warmly recommended to him, he set out on the 22d of April, 1552, with all his household, to go and attempt in Alsace the same process that he had already carried out in Lorraine.

"But when we had entered upon the territory of Germany," says Vieilleville, "our Frenchmen at once showed their insolence in their very first quarters, which so alarmed all the rest that we never found from that moment a single man to speak to, and, as long as the expedition lasted, there never appeared a soul with his provisions to sell on the road; whereby the army suffered infinite privations.

This misfortune began with us at the approach to Saverne (Zabern), the episcopal residence of Strasbourg." When the king arrived before Strasbourg he found the gates closed, and the only offer to open them was on the condition that he should enter alone with forty persons for his whole suite.

The constable, having taken a rash fit, was of opinion that he should enter even on this condition.

This advice was considered by his Majesty to be very sound, as well as by the princes and lords who were about him, according to the natural tendency of the Frenchman, who is always for seconding and applauding what is said by the great.