at feared not the things that other
children are wont to fear." Duke Louis of Orleans, having thus become
heir to the throne, did not care to go and run risks at a distance. He,
nevertheless, declared his readiness to obey an express command from the
king if the title of lieutenant-general were given him; but "I will never
send him to war on compulsion," said Charles, and nothing more was said
about it. Whilst still constantly talking of the war he had in view,
Charles attended more often and more earnestly than he hitherto had to
the internal affairs of his kingdom. "He had gotten it into his head,"
says Commynes, "that he would fain live according to God's commandments,
and set justice and the Church in good order. He would also revise his
finances, in such sort as to levy on the people but twelve hundred
thousand francs, and that in form of talliage, besides his own property
on which he would live, as did the kings of old." His two immediate
predecessors, Charles VII. and Louis IX., had decreed the collation and
revision of local customs, so often the rule of civil jurisdiction; but
the work made no progress: Charles VIII., by a decree dated March 15,
1497, abridged the formalities, and urged on the execution of it, though
it was not completed until the reign of Charles IX. By another decree,
dated August 2, 1497, he organized and regulated, as to its powers as
well as its composition, the king's grand council, the supreme
administrative body, which was a fixture at Paris. He began even to
contemplate a reformation of his own life; he had inquiries made as to
how St. Louis used to proceed in giving audience to the lower orders; his
intention, he said, was to henceforth follow the footsteps of the most
justice-loving of French kings. "He set up," says Commynes, "a public
audience, whereat he gave ear to everybody, and especially to the poor;
I saw him thereat, a week before his death, for two good hours, and I
never saw him again. He did not much business at this audience; but at
least it was enough to keep folks in awe, and especially his own
officers, of whom he had suspended some for extortion." It is but
too often a man's fate to have his life slip from him just as he was
beginning to make a better use of it. On the 7th of April, 1498, Charles
VIII. was pleased, after dinner, to go down with the queen into the
fosses of the castle of Amboise, to see a game of tennis. Their way lay
through a gallery the