clever young priest, for his secretary and almoner,
Louis made him successively clerical councillor in the parliament of
Paris, then Bishop of Evreux, and afterwards cardinal; and he employed
him in his most private affairs. It was a hobby of his thus to make the
fortunes of men born in the lowest stations, hoping that, since they
would owe everything to him, they would never depend on any but him. It
is scarcely credible that so keen and contemptuous a judge of human
nature could have reckoned on dependence as a pledge of fidelity. And in
this case Louis was, at any rate, mistaken; Balue was a traitor to him,
and in 1468, at the very time of the incident at Peronne, he was secretly
in the service of Duke Charles of Burgundy, and betrayed to him the
interests and secrets of his master and benefactor. In 1469 Louis
obtained material proof of the treachery; and he immediately had Balue
arrested and put on his trial. The cardinal confessed everything, asking
only to see the king. Louis gave him an interview on the way from
Amboise to Notre-Dame de Clery; and they were observed, it is said,
conversing for two hours, as they walked together on the road. The trial
and condemnation of a cardinal by a civil tribunal was a serious business
with the court of Rome. The king sent commissioners to Pope Paul II.:
the pope complained of the procedure, but amicably and without
persistence. The cardinal was in prison at Loches; and Louis resolved to
leave him there forever, without any more fuss. But at the same time
that, out of regard for the dignity of cardinal, which he had himself
requested of the pope for the culprit, he dispensed with the legal
condemnation to capital punishment, he was bent upon satisfying his
vengeance, and upon making Balue suffer in person for his crime. He
therefore had him confined in a cage, "eight feet broad," says Commynes,
"and only one foot higher than a man's stature, covered with iron plates
outside and inside, and fitted with terrible bars." There is still to be
seen in Loches castle, under the name of the Balue cage, that instrument
of prison-torture which the cardinal, it is said, himself invented. In
it he passed eleven years, and it was not until 1480 that he was let out,
at the solicitation of Pope Sixtus IV., to whom Louis XI., being old and
ill, thought he could not possibly refuse this favor. He remembered,
perhaps, at that time how that, sixteen years before, in writing to his