n Nights_, of
traversing the streets at night in disguise and mingling familiarly with
the people,--but with the design of drawing from them their complaints
against their feudal lords and their knowledge of their machinations.
They were not without their grievances against the king himself, and it
was not till the reign of his son that was abolished the right of the
royal officers, when the king came to Paris, to enter the houses of the
bourgeoisie and carry off for their own use the bedding and the downy
pillows they found therein.

During the long reign of Philippe-Auguste, which even the modern
historians call "glorious," the power of the nobles was seriously
impaired. The _Cour du Roi_ retained the organization it had received,
but its importance increased with that of the royal authority, and the
most powerful vassal of the king of France saw himself dispossessed of
his fiefs by its decree. The feudal power was attacked in one of its
most cherished rights, that of private warfare, by a royal ordinance
compelling the observance of a truce of forty days after any injury, so
that no one might be assailed without warning. Any seigneur might be at
once vassal and suzerain, but when Philippe acquired the fief of the
Amienois, for which he was to render homage to the Bishop of Amiens, he
refused, saying that the king of France should be the vassal of no man.
"To the feudal contract, between man and man, symbolized by the homage
and the investiture, the thirteenth century saw succeed the democratic
contract between a man and a group, between seigneurs and subjects,
carrying an engagement written and public. Then began the conquest of
liberty,--liberty of the person, of the family, and of the property;
liberty administrative and political; economic liberty.... Of the total
sum of partial contracts intervening between the king and the provinces,
cities and corporations, has been formed the great national contract
tacitly concluded between him and the people." (M. Imbart de la Tour.)

Notwithstanding war, famine, and pestilence, Paris had outgrown the
fortifications of Louis le Gros, and, before he departed for the
Crusade, Philippe-Auguste ordered the bourgeois of the city to construct
a new wall, solidly built of stone, with towers and gates. This was
commenced in 1190; the faubourgs were surrounded with a wall of more
than two metres in thickness, faced with masonry, flanked by five
hundred towers and pierced with fiftee