generally believed,” says the monk of St. Denis, “that he died of poison.”  At his own dying wish, no inquiry was instituted on this subject.  The measure adopted in the late council was, however, generally approved of.  The king was popular; he had a good heart, and courteous and gentle manners; he was faithful to his friends, and affable to all; and the people liked to see him passing along the streets.  On taking in hand the government, he recalled to it the former advisers of his father, Charles V., Bureau de la Riviere, Le Mercier de Noviant, and Le Begue de Vilaine, all men of sense and reputation.  The taxes were diminished; the city of Paris recovered a portion of her municipal liberties; there was felicitation for what had been obtained, and there was hope of more.

Charles vi. was not content with the satisfaction of Paris only; he wished all his realm to have cognizance of and to profit by his independence.  He determined upon a visit to the centre and the south of France.  Such a trip was to himself, and 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