father, and had sought refuge at the court of Burgundy. The great nobles
consequently looked with complacency upon his coming into power, and
were very far from foreseeing that through him their privileges and
authority throughout the kingdom were to be finally ruined. During his
reign, the capital prospered,--"the king made of it his refuge, his
citadel and his arsenal for all his enterprises against the feudality."
In one respect, he followed his father's example and even bettered
it,--his counsellors were chosen by preference among the _tiers etat_,
and frequently even among men of base extraction. When occasion
required, he did not disdain any of the arts of the demagogue: on
entering Paris after the indecisive battle of Montlhery, with the
Burgundians, almost under the walls of the capital, he took supper with
the principal ladies of the city in the house of Charles de Melun, and
so moved them with the recital of the dangers he had undergone that all
the dames bourgeoises wept. He was in the habit of visiting familiarly
the principal bourgeois, seating himself at their table or inviting them
to his own, and interesting himself in their private affairs. By this
means, he endeavored to ascertain their opinions concerning his
political measures, and the amount of obedience which they were likely
to render to them. In 1471, "he honored the city by starting the fire
with his own hand in the Place de Greve, the evening of Saint John the
Baptist." On a mast, twenty-five metres in height and surrounded by
combustibles of all kinds, was hung a great basket containing a dozen
black cats and a fox, symbols of the devil. "The more the grilled cats
cried, the more the people laughed."

For all his craftiness, "he had not reigned four years when all the
world was against him," says Duruy. "The people forced to provide, by
paying a great many imposts, for the necessities of the government which
they did not as yet comprehend, the bourgeoisie wounded in its
particular interests, which it did not know how to sacrifice to the
general interests, the clergy menaced in its property, the lesser
nobility in its rights and in its dearest habits, the higher aristocracy
in its pretensions to sovereignty,--all these classes, so widely
diverse, so often hostile one to another, found themselves for the
moment quite in accord upon one point,--the necessity of limiting the
royal authority." The _Ligue du Bien public_ was formed by the great
nobl