a debauched mother,"
Charles VII did not lack for intelligence, and in his diplomacy,
directed during the first part of his reign against a foreign enemy and,
in the latter part, against a domestic one, the Burgundians, he gave
proof of the highest qualities. He had a taste for letters, and
was--"unique, doubtless, in this among the kings of France"--a good
Latin scholar. His mistresses, of whom Agnes Sorel was only the first,
were imposed upon his wife, Marie d'Anjou, and upon his court with
unusual effrontery. The queen was even obliged to distribute gifts to
the "_filles joyeuses_ who followed the court in its peregrinations."
This moral depravation, naturally, extended downward to the whole court.
M. Brentano, who is one of the few French historians who venture to lay
disrespectful hands on the grand _Roi-soleil_, says: "Charles VII was
the original source of the crapulous debauchery of the last Valois; he
traced the way for the crimes of Louis XIV, and the turpitudes of Louis
XV." This, although the higher clergy of the reigns both of Charles and
of Louis Quatorze did not fail in their duty, and did denounce openly
from the pulpit the sins of these all-powerful monarchs.

On his re-entry into Paris, Charles did not take up his residence in the
Hotel Saint-Pol, the sorrowful lodging of his father, but in the
Tournelles, which he made a "delightful sojourn," and where his
successors installed themselves until Francois II, who established his
dwelling in the Louvre. In the time of Louis XI, however, the Tournelles
partook of the sordid and melancholy character of its master. "The king
lived there alone and stingily," says the historian Michelet. "He had
had the odd taste to retain some servitors whom he had brought from
Brabant; he lived there as if in exile.... As soon as he was king, he
assumed the pilgrim's habit, the cape of coarse gray cloth, with the
gaiters of a travelling costume, and he took them off only at his
death.... If he came out of the Tournelles, it was in the evening, like
an owl, in his melancholy gray cape. His gossip, companion, and friend
(he had a friend) was a certain Bische, whom he had formerly set as a
spy on his father, Charles VII, and whom afterward he kept near the
Comte de Charolais, to induce him to betray his father, the Duc de
Bourgogne."

The king had, indeed been one of the worst of sons,--at the period of
his accession to the throne he was almost in open rebellion against his