r the
action of the Renaissance."

[Illustration: BONAPARTE AND THE GRENADIER.]

One of the first acts of the new king, Charles VIII, was to hang Olivier
le Dain, _valet de chambre_, barber, counsellor, and, finally,
ambassador of his father. His property was confiscated and given to the
Duc d'Orleans. This act afforded a lively satisfaction to the Parisians
and to the nation at large. Another favorite of the late monarch, Jean
de Doyat, was somewhat more fortunate, though he was arrested, publicly
whipped in the streets, pilloried at the Halles, where his tongue was
pierced with a hot iron and one ear cut off, then sent down to Auvergne,
his native province, flogged again, robbed of the other ear, and all his
goods confiscated. Later, however, the king quashed the judgment and
restored him his property, if not his severed members.

By his marriage with Anne de Bretagne, December 13, 1491, this monarch
united the last of the great fiefs of France to the crown, and
disappointed several powerful foreign suitors, English, German, and
Spanish. On the 9th of the following February the royal couple entered
the capital in state, and the stately and haughty carriage of the Breton
princess was greatly admired by the populace. The bourgeois and
merchants of various conditions who rode, two by two, to meet her had
all "magnificent costumes, robes of satin _cramoisi_, of damask _gris
cendre_, or of scarlet cloth on a violet ground. They had had made a
dais the canopy of which was of cloth of gold, embossed, sown with
lilies and roses. They carried it alternately from the Porte Saint-Denis
as far as Notre-Dame."

When the king set off on his ill-advised expedition to conquer the
kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, he was very short of funds and wished to
borrow a hundred thousand ecus from the Parisians, but met with a flat
refusal. Consequently, when a deputation of the notables of the city
took the liberty of remonstrating with him concerning this Italian war,
he received them very badly and requested them to keep their advice for
themselves, as he had no need of it. But, after having conquered the
Milanais and lost it very soon afterward, he applied again to his city
of Paris for a vessel of war; Jean de Ganay, president of the
Parliament, presented to the _prevot_ of the merchants and to the
_echevins_ at the Hotel de Ville the letter which the king had written
on this subject. In order to deliberate on it weightily, they assembl