at the bottom of a man’s soul, he cannot do without youth and success; he cannot make head against age and decay, reverse of fortune and the approach of death; and so Louis XI. when old in years, master-power still though beaten in his last game of policy, appeared to all as he really was and as he had been prediscerned to be by only such eminent observers as Commynes, that is, a crooked, swindling, utterly selfish, vindictive, cruel man.  Not only did he hunt down implacably the men who, after having served him, had betrayed or deserted him; he revelled in the vengeance he took and the sufferings he inflicted on them.  He had raised to the highest rank both in state and church the son of a cobbler, or, according to others, of a tailor, one John de Balue, born in 1421, at the market-town of Angles, in Poitou.  After having chosen him, as an intelligent and a 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