The lower feudatories were absorbed one by one, and the higher followed. By a curious fatality it fell to the family of Valois to unite the characteristic defects of a centralised despotism with those of an oligarchy. The great provinces came gradually one by one into the hands of the King; but instead of being united to the crown so as to make a compact and symmetrical empire, they were given to the princes of the blood and their descendants.

Hence arose a class of nobles or territorial aristocracy, who formed a separate caste, looking down upon and bearing enmity to all owners of territory who were not of the blood-royal. Such were the lords of Burgundy, Orleans, Anjou, Bourbon, Berri, La Marche, and a crowd of others. The tendency of things was towards not only a divine right in the crown to govern, but a divine right in the bloodroyal to possess all things. The law was gradually withdrawing its protection from those who were not either themselves of the royal stock, or protected in a sort of clientage by one of the princes of the blood. Men in the highest places who did not belong to the sacred race might be pitched from their chairs of state to the dungeon or the scaffold, with that reckless celerity which characterises the loss of influence in Eastern despotisms.

One of the few men in that disastrous period who was enabled to afford to France some of the services of a real statesman was the Sieur de Montagu. He had been raised to influence under Charles V., and

became Comptroller of Finances under his mad successor, Charles VI. He was a little, smooth-spoken, inoffensive man, who had the art of making friends; and few positions would have appeared in any tolerably well-governed state more firm and unassailable than his. He had two brothers invested with rich bishoprics, one of them also holding civil office, and rising to be Chancellor of France; while his daughters were married into the first families among the nobles of France below the rank of royalty.

Of course he had not neglected the opportunity which a supervisance of the wretched and ruined finances of the nation afforded him for enlarging and consolidating his own fortunes. He had enormous wealth to fall back upon should he ever be driven from office. In too fatal a reliance on the security of his position, he made an imprudent display of his worldly goods, on the occasion of the advancement of one of his brothers from the shabbyish bishopric of Poitiers to the brilliant see of Paris. Montagu resolved to give an entertainment, and to do the thing in style. The company who were invited and who attended proved at once his greatness and his popularity. The list of distinguished guests would dazzle the eyes of the most fashionable penny-a-liner of the

Morning Post.' It included the King and Queen of France, the King of Navarre, and the royal dukes in a bundle. They were feasted from a service of gold and silver such as, it was significantly remarked, none of their own palaces could produce.

The magnificence of an entertainment is not always so exceedingly satisfactory to the entertained as the confiding landlord expects it to be. On this occasion one of the guests-John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy-took offence at the profuse magnificence which surrounded him, and argued himself into the conclusion that it would more aptly become his own palace than the hotel of the parvenu.

A few days afterwards, when Montagu was decorously walking to morning mass with one of his bishop brothers, Pierre des Essarts the Prevôt of Paris crossed his path and laid a hand on his shoulder. The great statesman, highly indignant at such a familiarity, cried out, "Ribaud, es-tu si hardi que de me toucher?" but Essarts had a warrant, and in fact the affair was serious. Montagu was arrested and thrown into a dungeon in the Petit Chatelet. The next step was to get up a feasible accusation against him. Doubtless his methods of amassing money, like those of every other statesman of the day, would not stand a very severe scrutiny; but proceedings in this direction would be slow, petty, and inconclusive; and as any chance might turn the tables in the victim's favour, it was necessary to get up something more astounding, odious, and conclusive. He was therefore charged with sorcery and magic; and, to bring the accusation to a definite and practical conclusion, it was alleged that by these illegal arts he had produced the King's insanity. He was put to the torture, and, after giving

his tormentors hard work, he confessed whatever they pleased. The instruments being removed, he retracted, and appealed to his dislocated wrists and wrenches of the body, ending in hernia, as the real causes of his confession. But he was in hands where his wealth, not the punishment of a guilty man, was wanted.

The affair had to be got over before the King should have a lucid interval; so the tortured mangled body was relieved of its miseries by the headsman's axe. The King, when the lucid interval came, was indignant at the usage his faithful servant had received: but there was no remedy. John the Fearless was not the man to loose his grip on what he had touched, and, unless the head could also have been restored to its old owner, how was restoration to be made of the estates?

It is one of the most significant marks of a Providence overruling the affairs of man, that such acts are calculated, in some shape or other, to retaliate on their doers. When the princes of the blood established practices of cruelty and perfidy, they were unable absolutely to exempt themselves, and establish as an unfailing rule that the consequent calamities should be restricted entirely to inferior persons. The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orleans, the King's nearest relations, were rivals for that supreme power which somebody or other must wield in the name of the madman. The former took a short way of settling the question. Orleans was murdered in the

streets of Paris by the direction of Burgundy. The clergy and the savans of the day were called upon to applaud the deed as a wholesome act of tyrannicide. The opportunity was a good one for propitiating clerical influences. It was the time when rival popes were bidding for support, and stretching points with each other; so, what the one scrupled at, the other was delighted to oblige with. The sinuosities of the discussion on the slaughter of Orleans, influenced as they were by the duplex action of the Popedom and the oscillations of the two contending civil parties, would make an amusing history of ups and downs. To-day a consistory applauds the act as a service to God and the King— next a synod brings the consistory to task for maintaining a doctrine so revolting; and, anon, a higher authority justifies the consistory and rebukes the synod.

This affair caused great uneasiness throughout the whole privileged class of royal scions. Attacking and killing one of their own number in the open street was treating him no better than a common seigneur, or even a roturier. The Duke of Burgundy should not have acted so by one of themselves—it was an ungentlemanly thing. Upon the other hand, were he to be subjected to legal responsibility for what he had done, this would involve the admission that the royal class could be liable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals-an alternative too horrible and preposterous to be indulged in for a