was further legislation against these women,
_les ribaudes_, and renewal of the edicts forbidding any citizen to let
his house to them under penalty of confiscation. Thus early do we find
in use one of the least ineffective of modern measures for correcting
this evil. This king, who had a weakness for cruel and excessive
punishments, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) his sanctity,
also commanded that these disturbers of public morals should be stripped
of all their property, wherever found, and imprisoned at hard labor.
This being found impracticable, he modified his ordinance, and directed
that they should be restricted to certain streets, that they should not
be allowed to wear embroideries, or silver or other ornaments
appertaining to honest women. Three of these streets being in turn
denied them under Charles VI, in 1387, the proprietors appealed to
Parliament, which by a decree restored to them the Rue de Baillehoe. In
1367, in 1379, in 1386, and in 1395, there were further ordinances
forbidding them numerous other streets; in 1446, the week before
Ascension, proclamation was made by the public crier of the furs, silver
girdles, reversed collars, and other articles of feminine adornment
which were forbidden them. There were at this date between five and six
thousand of them in Paris, and all classes of society, ecclesiastics,
monks, magistrates, openly paraded their immoral mode of life. The very
churches and bath-houses were used as rendezvous. Henry VI, King of
England and France, had, in 1424, forbidden the sergeants and the
archers of the municipality to confiscate to their own use the girdles,
jewelry, or vestments of the _fillettes et femmes amoureuses ou
dissolues_, but this regulation seems to have been no better enforced
than all the others.

Under Louis XI, we find the same bold Cordelier, Olivier Maillard, who
had not hesitated to preach against the king himself, denouncing all the
sins of the Parisians at once from his pulpit. He reproached them with
their games of chance, their playing cards, their taking the name of God
in vain in their oaths, their turning their houses into dens of
prostitution, their selling their daughters to the seigneurs; he accused
their wives of deceiving their husbands for the sake of fine gowns,
embroidered and furred. "Is it not true, mesdemoiselles," he cried,
"that there are to be found among you, here in Paris, more debauched
women than honest women? Is it not fin