ce in the year 1465. At
Meung-sur-Loire he met Louis XI, who received him with much honor,
though he appears to have quite declined to listen to the seigneur's
proposals of a treaty of alliance between the two nations; he
accompanied the king to _Kand_ (perhaps the chateau of Candes,
Indre-et-Loire), where he was presented to the queen and all her train.
Her Majesty received him cordially, "and every one kissed him on the
mouth. It was the king who had ordered it, and who wished it so.
Afterward, the queen gave her hand to every chevalier and was very
gracious with all." Louis invited his guest to come to visit him in
Paris, but the latter fails to record his doing so.

In the year 1470, it may be mentioned, Ulric Gering, Michel Friburger,
and Martin Krantz set up the first printing-press, in the college of the
Sorbonne, and printed a book: _Epistolae Gasparini Pargamensis_ (Letters
of Gasparin de Bergamo). Other works appeared, the first of which was a
Bible, offered to Louis XI in this same year.

The universal demoralization of manners resulting from the long wars
against the English and between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, the
English occupation of the city, the presence in the capital of a
multitude of drunken and debauched soldiers, did not serve to check the
extravagance and license among the wealthier bourgeois against which the
clergy thundered in vain. One of the boldest of these preachers was a
Cordelier named Olivier Maillard, who appealed to the multitude by the
freedom of his language and his images too frequently borrowed from the
vernacular, and who--although he bore the title of _predicateur du
roi_--did not hesitate to denounce the monarch himself. He accordingly
received an intimation that if these attacks did not cease very
promptly, he would be tied up in a sack and thrown in the river. "The
king is master," replied Maillard, "but go and say to him that I would
go quicker to paradise by water than he with his post-horses." A species
of crusade was organized by the mendicant friars against the
extravagance of the costumes and the indecency of the manners; the evil
had assumed such proportions that to be modestly and decently dressed
was to be, in the language of the people as well as in that of the
preachers, "clothed without sin." "To the ferocity, to the barbarity of
feudal times had succeeded the vices of a semi-civilization, whilst
waiting till manners and customs should refine themselves unde