illes de Presle. His taste for literature and
science was not confined to collecting manuscripts. He had a French
translation made, for the sake of spreading a knowledge thereof, of the
Bible in the first place, and then of several works of Aristotle, of
Livy, of Valerius Maximus, of Vegetius, and of St. Augustine. He was
fond of industry and the arts as well as of literature. Henry de Vic, a
German clock-maker, constructed for him the first public clock ever seen
in France, and it was placed in what was called the Clock Tower in the
Palace of Justice; and the king even had a clock-maker by appointment,
named Peter de St. Beathe. Several of the Paris monuments, churches, or
buildings for public use were undertaken or completed under his care. He
began the building of the Bastille, that fortress which was then so
necessary for the safety of Paris, where it was to be, four centuries
later, the object of the wrath and earliest excesses on the part of the
populace. Charles the Wise, from whatever point of view he may be
regarded, is, after Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip
the Handsome, the fifth of those kings who powerfully contributed to the
settlement of France in Europe, and of the kingship in France. He was
not the greatest nor the best, but, perhaps, the most honestly able. And
at the same time he was a signal example of the shallowness and
insufficiency of human abilities. Charles V., on his death-bed,
considered that "the affairs of his kingdom were in good case;" he had
not even a suspicion of that chaos of war, anarchy, reverses and ruin
into which they were about to fall, in the reign of his son, Charles VI.

END OF VOLUME II.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Popular History of France From The
Earliest Times, by Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF FRANCE, V2 ***

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