eign. The
courtiers did not generally follow the king in his transferral of _le
diner_ from eight o'clock in the morning (according to the custom
established at the beginning of the reign) to noon, but the people seem
to have adopted the new hour. The wars in Italy brought to the French
table for the first time the pates of that country, vermicelli,
macaroni, semoule, the lassagnes and others. For women in childbed and
for consumptives were reserved the _bouillons_ or "restaurants,"--these
were composed of meat, of animals or of chickens, cut up very fine and
distilled in an alembic with peeled barley, dried roses, cinnamon,
coriander, and Damascus raisins. One of the most succulent of these
bouillons was called _restaurant divin_.

Under Francois I, the dinner-hour was established at nine o'clock in the
morning, and the supper-hour at five in the evening. It is true that the
hour of rising was also most unreasonably early according to modern
ideas. There was a popular rhyme:

"_Lever a cinq, diner a neuf,
Souper a cinq, coucher a neuf.
Fait vivre d'ans nonante-neuf._"

(To rise at five, to dine at nine, to sup at five, to go to bed at nine,
will make you live to ninety-nine.)

The national menu was further increased by contributions from Italy and
from domestic producers, pates, cheeses, and some new fruits, apricots
and plums; the latter, still a great favorite with the French, was
called _la reine Claude_ after the daughter of Louis XII. With the good
living came an increase in drunkenness among all, lower classes,
bourgeois, courtiers, and soldiers,--the latter, indeed, to such an
extent that the king felt constrained to issue edicts threatening this
growing vice with the severest penalties: for the first offence,
imprisonment; for the second, flogging in private; for the third,
flogging in public; and the hardened offender ran a great risk of losing
his ears and being banished from the kingdom.

With the reign of Francois I began the _ancien regime_,--"that is to
say, a government in which the subjects have no guarantee against
oppression, even the most iniquitous, and the prince, no obstacle to his
will, even the most capricious." In 1527, the president of the
Parliament of Paris declared openly that the king was above the law,
though he added that his sovereign will should be regulated by equity
and reason. The nobility, reduced to a state merely of revenues and
titles, were no longer the great