accused the young queen of having poisoned the prince. The queen
protested her innocence; the nobles of her train asserted, on the
contrary, that Labrosse was probably the murderer, as he was jealous of
the confidence which the king bestowed upon her, and which the
chamberlain had previously enjoyed. The king was unable to believe
either of them guilty; the medical science of the day was quite unequal
to the task of determining whether there had been any poisoning; the
queen demanded that Labrosse be put to the torture, and, to decide this
doubtful question, appeal was had to the judicial duel. The duke, Jean
de Brabant, arrived to maintain his sister's innocence in the lists; if
he were vanquished, she would be burned at the stake. While the unhappy
king was sending messengers to a celebrated _beguine_, a species of nun,
in Brabant, who was reported to have the gift of revelation, and
receiving only obscure replies, a certain man suddenly fell ill in a
convent in Melun, after having confided to a monk a sealed letter to be
sent to the king. The king received it, read it, showed it to his
council, which declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly
those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of
high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation,
everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated
gibbet of Montfaucon,--the first mention of it in history, though it had
been long in existence.

It was in the first year of the reign of this monarch that the first
Parisian was ennobled,--Raoul, "called the Goldsmith," the king's
silversmith. Philippe afterward extended this privilege to several other
worthy bourgeois who had distinguished themselves in the arts.
Restricted as the space enclosed within the wall of Philippe-Auguste
had been, it still contained many cultivated fields and other
unbuilt-upon tracts of land; the numerous religious edifices and
university establishments erected since that reign had occupied these
waste spaces, and the population had even over-flowed in several
directions and congregated around the abbeys that had been constructed
outside the walls. When Philippe IV, the Bel, succeeded his father in
1285, four principal streets were paved,--those leading to Saint-Denis
and to the Portes Baudet, Saint-Honore, and Notre-Dame. The bourgeois
successfully resisted the demands of the _prevot_ of Paris that they
should pave more.

U