s, all basing their claims upon the
pontifical warrant.[60]

[Sidenote: Fall of Cardinal Balue.]

Cardinal Balue was not slow in finding means to remove from office the
intrepid _Procureur-general_, who had been prominent in urging
parliament to resist the measure of repeal. But Saint-Romain's bold
stand had confirmed both parliament and university, and neither body
would acquiesce in the papal demands. Louis, however, was reconciled to
a second abandonment of the scheme by the opportune discovery of the
cardinal's treachery. The unhappy prelate met with deserved retribution,
for his purple did not save him from enduring his own favorite mode of
punishment, and being shut up in a great iron cage. The new Perillus was
thus enabled--to the intense satisfaction of many whom he had
wronged--to test in his own person the merits of a contrivance which he
was reputed himself to have invented.[61]

A concordat subsequently agreed upon by Louis and the Pope fared no
better than the previous compacts. Parliament and university were
resolute, and the king, having no further advantage to gain by keeping
his word, was as careless in its fulfilment as was his wont. The
Pragmatic Sanction was still observed as the law of the land. The
highest civil courts, ignoring the alleged repeal, conformed their
decisions to its letter and spirit, while the theologians of the
Sorbonne taught it as the foundation of the ecclesiastical constitution
of France. Yet, public confidence in its validity having been shaken, it
was desirable to set all doubts at rest by a formal re-enactment. This
was proposed by the Dean of St. Martin of Tours, in the States General
held during the minority of Charles the Eighth; but, notwithstanding the
well-known opinion of all the orders, this reign passed without the
adoption of any decided action.

[Sidenote: Action of Louis XII.]

[Sidenote: His motto.]

It was reserved for Louis the Twelfth to take the desired step. In 1499
he published the Pragmatic Sanction anew, and ordered the exclusion from
office of all that had obtained benefices from Rome. In vain did the
Pope rave. In vain did he summon all upholders of the ordinance to
appear before the Fifth Lateran Council. The sturdy prince--the "Father
of his people"--who had chosen for his motto the device, "_Perdam
Babylonis nomen_," made little account of the menaces of Julius the
Second, whom death overtook, it is said, while about to fulminate a bull
tran