sed her court. She
rightly considered herself the guardian of the honour of the former, and
of the virtue of the latter; therefore, as long as she lived, her court
was renowned for purity and politeness, noble and refined gallantry, and
was never allowed to degenerate into imprudent amusements or licentious
and culpable intrigues.

Unfortunately, the moral influence of this worthy princess died with her.
Although the court of France continued to gather around it almost every
sort of elegance, and although it continued during the whole of the
sixteenth century the most polished of European courts, notwithstanding
the great external and civil wars, yet it afforded at the same time a sad
example of laxity of morals, which had a most baneful influence on public
habits; so much so that vice and corruption descended from class to class,
and contaminated all orders of society. If we wished to make
investigations into the private life of the lower orders in those times,
we should not succeed as we have been able to do with that of the upper
classes; for we have scarcely any data to throw light upon their sad and
obscure history. Bourgeois and peasants were, as we have already shown,
long included together with the miserable class of serfs, a herd of human
beings without individuality, without significance, who from their birth
to their death, whether isolated or collectively, were the "property" of
their masters. What must have been the private life of this degraded
multitude, bowed down under the most tyrannical and humiliating
dependence, we can scarcely imagine; it was in fact but a purely material
existence, which has left scarcely any trace in history.

[Illustration: Fig. 57.--Louis de Mallet, Lord of Graville, Admiral of
France, 1487, in Costume of War and Tournament, from an Engraving of the
Sixteenth Century (National Library of Paris, Cabinet des Estampes).]

Many centuries elapsed before the dawn of liberty could penetrate the
social strata of this multitude, thus oppressed and denuded of all power
of action. The development was slow, painful, and dearly bought, but at
last it took place; first of all towns sprang up, and with them, or rather
by their influence, the inhabitants became possessed of social life. The
agricultural population took its social position many generations later.

As we have already seen, the great movement for the creation of communes
and bourgeoisies only dates from the unsettled period ran