nd to the princes and cities that
entertained him, a cause of enormous expense. "When the king stopped
anywhere, there were wanted for his own table, and for the maintenance of
his following, six oxen, eighty sheep, thirty calves, seven hundred
chickens, two hundred pigeons, and many other things besides. The
expenses for the king were set down at two hundred and thirty livres a
day, without counting the presents which the large towns felt bound to
make him." But Charles was himself magnificent even to prodigality, and
he delighted in the magnificence of which he was the object, without
troubling himself about their cost to himself. Between 1389 and 1390,
for about six months, he travelled through Burgundy, the banks of the
Rhone, Languedoc, and the small principalities bordering on the Pyrenees.
Everywhere his progress was stopped for the purpose of presenting to him
petitions or expressing wishes before him. At Nimes and Montpellier, and
throughout Languedoc, passionate representations were made to him
touching the bad government of his two uncles, the Dukes of Anjou and
Berry. "They had plundered and ruined," he was told, "that beautiful and
rich province; there were five or six talliages a year; one was no sooner
over than another began; they had levied quite three millions of gold
from Villeneuve-d'Avignon to Toulouse." Charles listened with feeling,
and promised to have justice done, and his father's old councillors, who
were in his train, were far from dissuading him. The Duke of Burgundy,
seeing him start with them in his train, had testified his spite and
disquietude to the Duke of Berry, saying, "Aha! there goes the king on a
visit to Languedoc, to hold an inquiry about those who have governed it.
For all his council be takes with him only La Riviere, Le Mercier,
Montaigu, and Le Begue de Vilaine. What say you to that, my brother?"
"The king, our nephew, is young," answered the Duke of Berry: "if he
trusts the new councillors he is taking, he will be deceived, and it will
end ill, as you will see. As for the present, we must support him. The
time will come when we will make those councillors, and the king himself,
rue it. Let them do as they please, by God: we will return to our own
dominions. We are none the less the two greatest in the kingdom, and so
long as we are united, none can do aught against us."

The future is a blank, as well to the anxieties as to the hopes of men.
The king's uncles we