But side by side with these powerful symptoms of a new regimen appeared also the vices of which that regimen contained the germ, and those of the man himself who was laboring to found it.  Feudal society, perceiving itself to be threatened, at one time attacked Louis XI. with passion, at another entered into violent disputes against him; and Louis, in order to struggle with it, employed all the practices, at one time crafty and at another violent, that belong to absolute power.  Craft usually predominated in his proceedings, violence being often too perilous for him to risk it; he did not consider himself in a condition to say brazen-facedly, “Might before right;” but he disregarded right in the case of his adversaries, and he did not deny himself any artifice, any lie, any baseness, however specious, in order to trick them or ruin them secretly, when he did not feel himself in a position to crush them at a blow.  “The end justifies the means”—­that was his maxim; and the end, in his case, was sometimes a great and legitimate political object, nothing less than the dominant interest of France, but far more often his own personal interest, something necessary to his own success or his own gratification.  No loftiness, no greatness of soul, was natural to him; and the more experience of life he had, the more he became selfish and devoid of moral sense and of sympathy with other men, whether rivals, tools, or subjects.  All found out before long, not only how little account he made of them, but also what cruel pleasure he sometimes took in making them conscious of his disdain and his power.  He was “familiar,” but not by no means “vulgar;” he was in conversation able and agreeable, with a mixture, however, of petulance and indiscretion, even when he was meditating some perfidy; and “there is much need,” he used to say, “that my tongue should sometimes serve me; it has hurt me often enough.”  The most puerile superstitions, as well as those most akin to a blind piety, found their way into his mind.  When he received any bad news, he would cast aside forever the dress he was wearing when the news came; and of death he had a dread which was carried to the extent of pusillanimity and ridiculousness.  “Whilst he was every day,” says M. de Barante, “becoming more suspicious, more absolute, more terrible to his children, to the princes of the blood, to his old servants, and to his wisest counsellors, there was one man who, without any fear of his wrath, treated him with brutal rudeness.  This was James Cattier, his doctor.  When the king would sometimes complain of it before certain confidential servants, ‘I know very well,’ Cattier would say, that some fine morning you’ll send me where you’ve sent so many others; but, ’sdeath, you’ll not live a week after!’” Then the king would coax him, overwhelm him with caresses, raise his salary to ten thousand crowns a month, make him a present of rich lordships; and he ended by making him premier president of the Court of Exchequer.  All churches