ve upon the
people, that is to say, to exact from the unhappy inhabitants of the
town or the country whatever they pleased, to ransom them, to rob them,
to pillage them, free to beat them unmercifully or to spit them like
chickens, if they took it into their heads to complain. This was what
was called the necessities of the troops.

"Presently, these adventurers, French or foreign, formed an effective
force of four thousand men.

"If one imagine these four thousand armed bandits falling unexpectedly
upon the inhabitants of Saint-Cloud, of Sevres, of Montreuil, ravaging,
destroying, robbing all, ransoming the nuns of Longchamps, threatening
to pillage Le Landit, it can readily be believed that the merchants were
so uneasy that they hastened to place their goods upon carts and to flee
with them.

"There was certainly sufficient here to frighten the Parisians...."

All this took place in a period of general prosperity, of unexampled
ease and comfort compared with what had gone before. "Bodin assures us,"
says Duruy, "that, from 1516 to 1560, there was more gold in France than
had ever been collected there before in two hundred years. 'The
bourgeois,' as the Venetian ambassador so well said, 'have become the
masters of wealth.' Ango had amassed, like Jacques Coeur in another
century, the fortune of a prince," And this was in full Renaissance. "It
is the radiant awakening of human reason, the spring-time of the mind.
After a long and rude winter, now behold the earth reanimating under
the sunshine of the new birth! A generous sap circulates in her bosom;
she adorns herself with a vegetation capricious, yet fruitful, which
re-covers and conceals the old soil, while sustaining itself by it, like
those vigorous plants which, born at the foot of an antique oak, embrace
it and kill it in the clasp of their younger tendrils. Everything is
renewed, art, science, philosophy; and the world, arrested for two
centuries in the lower levels which it had found at the end of its
passage through the Middle Ages, resumed its progress that it might
mount into the light and the purer air. 'Oh! age!' exclaims Ulrich von
Hutten, 'letters flourish, minds awaken;--it is a joy to live!' Even the
least philosophical experience the sentiment of this renaissance of the
mind. 'The world laughs at the world,' said Marot;--'therefore is it in
its youth!'"

The question of the social evil had been taken up in this city as early
as the time of Charle