pleasing to him. The king was a handsome man and very fond of women;
he might find some affectionate mistress there, who would speak him so
many fair words that she would make him desire to return; his
predecessors had come too often to Paris and Normandy, and he did not
like his company this side the sea, but beyond the sea he was glad to
have him for friend and brother."

[Footnote 97: At the conclusion of the Hucksters' Peace at Amiens.]

Louis had long desired to punish the Count of St. Pol for treachery,
and as a result of a treaty with Charles of Burgundy, in 1475, had him
at length in the Bastille. Soon on a scaffold in the Place de Greve
his head rolled from his body at a tremendous _coup_ of Petit Jean's
sword, and a column of stone twelve feet high erected where he fell,
gave terrible warning to traitorous princes, however mighty; for the
count was Constable of France, the king's brother-in-law, a member of
the Imperial House of Luxemburg, and connected with many of the
sovereign families of Europe.

Two years later another noble victim, the Duke of Nemours, fell into
the king's power and saw the inside of one of Louis' iron cages in the
Bastille. The king, who had learnt that the chains had been removed
from the prisoner's legs, that he might go to hear mass, commanded his
jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured
(_gehenne_) and the duke wrote a piteous letter, praying for clemency
and signing himself _le pauvre Jacques_. In vain: him, too, the
headsman's axe sent to his account at the Halles.

The news of the humiliating Peace of Peronne, after the king had
committed the one great folly of his career by gratuitously placing
himself in Charles the Bold's power,[98] was received by the Parisians
with many gibes. The royal herald proclaimed at sound of trumpet by
the crossways of Paris: "Let none be bold or daring enough to say
anything opprobrious against the Duke of Burgundy, either by word of
mouth, by writing, by signs, paintings, roundelays, ballads, songs or
gestures." On the same day a commission seized all the magpies and
jackdaws in Paris, whether caged or otherwise, which were to be
registered according to their owners, with all the pretty words that
the said birds could repeat and that had been taught them: the pretty
word that these chattering birds had been taught to say was "Peronne."
Louis' abasement at Peronne was, however, amply avenged by the battle
of Granson, whe