and all sanctuaries of any small celebrity were recipients of his oblations, and it was not the salvation of his soul, but life and health, that he asked for in return.  One day there was being repeated, on his account and in his presence, an orison to St. Eutropius, who was implored to grant health to the soul and health to the body.  “The latter will be enough,” said the king; “it is not right to bother the saint for too many things at once.”  He showed great devotion for images which had received benediction, and often had one of them sewn upon his hat.  Hawkers used to come and bring them to him; and one day he gave a hundred and sixty livres to a pedler who had in his pack one that had received benediction at Aix-la-Chapelle.

[Illustration:  Louis XI. at his Devotions——­255]

Whatever may have been, in the middle ages, the taste and the custom in respect of such practices, they were regarded with less respect in the fifteenth than in the twelfth century, and many people scoffed at the trust that Louis XI. placed in them, or doubted his sincerity.

Whether they were sincere or assumed, the superstitions of Louis XI. did not prevent him from appreciating and promoting the progress of civilization, towards which the fifteenth century saw the first real general impulse.  He favored the free development of industry and trade; he protected printing, in its infancy, and scientific studies, especially the study of medicine; by his authorization, it is said, the operation for the stone was tried, for the first time in France, upon a criminal under sentence of death, who recovered, and was pardoned; and he welcomed the philological scholars who were at this time laboring to diffuse through Western Europe the works of Greek and Roman antiquity.  He instituted, at first for his own and before long for the public service, post-horses and the letter-post within his kingdom.  Towards intellectual and social movement he had not the mistrust and antipathy of an old, one-grooved, worn-out, unproductive despotism; his kingly despotism was new, and, one might almost say, innovational, for it sprang and was growing up from the ruins of feudal rights and liberties which had inevitably ended in monarchy.  But despotism’s good services are short-lived; it has no need to last long before it generates iniquity and tyranny; and that of Louis XI., in the latter part of his reign, bore its natural, unavoidable fruits.  “His mistrust,” says M. de Barante, “became horrible, and almost insane; every year he had surrounded his castle of Plessis with more walls, ditches, and rails.  On the towers were iron sheds, a shelter from arrows, and even artillery.  More than eighteen hundred of those planks bristling with nails, called caltrops, were distributed over the yonder side of the ditch.  There were every day four hundred crossbow-men on duty, with orders to fire on whosoever approached.  Every suspected passer-by was seized, and carried off to Tristan l’Hermite, the provost-marshal.