Louis, meanwhile, after passing a day at Corbeil, had once more, on the 18th of July, entered Paris, the object of his chief solicitude.  He dismounted at his lieutenant’s, the Sire de Meinn’s, and asked for some supper.  Several persons, burgesses and their wives, took supper with him.  He excited their lively interest by describing to them the battle of Montlhery, the danger he had run there, and the scenes which had been enacted, adopting at one time a pathetic and at another a bantering tone, and exciting by turns the emotion and the laughter of his audience.  In three days, he said, he would return to fight his enemies, in order to finish the war; but he had not enough of men-at-arms, and all had not at that moment such good spirits as he.  He passed a fortnight in Paris, devoting himself solely to the task of winning the hearts of the Parisians, reducing imposts, giving audience to everybody, lending a favorable ear to every opinion offered him, making no inquiry as to who had been more or less faithful to him, showing clemency without appearing to be aware of it, and not punishing with severity even those who had served as guides to the Burgundians in the pillaging of the villages around Paris.  A crier of the Chatelet, who had gone crying about the streets the day on which the Burgundians attacked the gate of St. Denis, was sentenced only to a month’s imprisonment, bread and water, and a flogging.  He was marched through the city in a night-man’s cart; and the king, meeting the procession, called out, as he passed, to the executioner, “Strike hard, and spare not that ribald; he has well deserved it.”

Meanwhile the Burgundians were approaching Paris and pressing it more closely every day.  Their different allies in the League were coming up with troops to join them, including even some of those who, after having suffered reverses in Auvergne, had concluded truces with the king.  The forces scattered around Paris amounted, it is said, to fifty thousand men, and occupied Charenton, Conflans, St. Maur, and St. Denis, making ready for a serious attack upon the place.  Louis, notwithstanding his firm persuasion that things always went ill wherever he was not present in person, left Paris for Rouen, to call out and bring up the regulars and reserves of Normandy.  In his absence, interviews and parleys took place between besiegers and besieged.  The former, found partisans amongst the inhabitants of Paris, in the Hotel de Ville itself.  The Count de Dunois made capital of all the grievances of the League against the king’s government, and declared that, if the city refused to receive the princes, the authors of this refusal would have to answer for whatever misery, loss, and damage might come of it; and, in spite of all efforts on the part of the king’s officers and friends, some wavering was manifested in certain quarters.  But there arrived from Normandy considerable re-enforcements, announcing the early return of the king.  And,