y. He
instituted, at first for his own and before long for the public service,
post-horses and the letter-post within his kingdom. Towards intellectual
and social movement he had not the mistrust and antipathy of an old,
one-grooved, worn-out, unproductive despotism; his kingly despotism was
new, and, one might almost say, innovational, for it sprang and was
growing up from the ruins of feudal rights and liberties which had
inevitably ended in monarchy. But despotism's good services are
short-lived; it has no need to last long before it generates iniquity and
tyranny; and that of Louis XI., in the latter part of his reign, bore its
natural, unavoidable fruits. "His mistrust," says M. de Barante, "became
horrible, and almost insane; every year he had surrounded his castle of
Plessis with more walls, ditches, and rails. On the towers were iron
sheds, a shelter from arrows, and even artillery. More than eighteen
hundred of those planks bristling with nails, called caltrops, were
distributed over the yonder side of the ditch. There were every day four
hundred crossbow-men on duty, with orders to fire on whosoever
approached. Every suspected passer-by was seized, and carried off to
Tristan l'Hermite, the provost-marshal. No great proofs were required
for a swing on the gibbet, or for the inside of a sack and a plunge in
the Loire. . . . Men who, like Sire de Commynes, had been the king's
servants, and who had lived in his confidence, had no doubt but that he
had committed cruelties and perpetrated the blackest treachery; still
they asked themselves whether there had not been a necessity, and whether
he had not, in the first instance, been the object of criminal
machinations against which he had to defend himself. . . . But,
throughout the kingdom, the multitude of his subjects who had not
received kindnesses from him, nor lived in familiarity with him, nor
known of the ability displayed in his plans, nor enjoyed the wit of his
conversation, judged only by that which came out before their eyes; the
imposts had been made much heavier, without any consent on the part of
the states-general; the talliages, which under Charles VII. brought in
only eighteen hundred thousand livres, rose, under Louis XI., to
thirty-seven hundred thousand; the kingdom was ruined, and the people
were at the last extremity of misery; the prisons were full; none was
secure of life or property; the greatest in the land, and even the
princ