No great proofs were required for a swing on the gibbet, or for the inside of a sack and a plunge in the Loire. . . .  Men who, like Sire de Commynes, had been the king’s servants, and who had lived in his confidence, had no doubt but that he had committed cruelties and perpetrated the blackest treachery; still they asked themselves whether there had not been a necessity, and whether he had not, in the first instance, been the object of criminal machinations against which he had to defend himself. . . .  But, throughout the kingdom, the multitude of his subjects who had not received kindnesses from him, nor lived in familiarity with him, nor known of the ability displayed in his plans, nor enjoyed the wit of his conversation, judged only by that which came out before their eyes; the imposts had been made much heavier, without any consent on the part of the states-general; the talliages, which under Charles VII. brought in only eighteen hundred thousand livres, rose, under Louis XI., to thirty-seven hundred thousand; the kingdom was ruined, and the people were at the last extremity of misery; the prisons were full; none was secure of life or property; the greatest in the land, and even the princes of the blood, were not safe in their own houses.

An unexpected event occurred at this time to give a little more heart to Louis XI., who was now very ill, and to mingle with his gloomy broodings a gleam of future prospects.  Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Rash, died at Bruges on the 27th of March, 1482, leaving to her husband, Maximilian of Austria, a daughter, hardly three years of age, Princess Marguerite by name, heiress to the Burgundian-Flemish dominions which had not come into the possession of the King of France.  Louis, as soon as he heard the news, conceived the idea and the hope of making up for the reverse he had experienced five years previously through the marriage of Mary of Burgundy.  He would arrange espousals between his son, the dauphin, Charles, thirteen years old, and the infant princess left by Mary, and thus recover for the crown of France the beautiful domains he had allowed to slip from him.  A negotiation was opened at once on the subject between Louis, Maximilian, and the estates of Flanders, and, on the 23d of December, 1482, it resulted in a treaty, concluded at Arras, which arranged for the marriage, and regulated the mutual conditions.  In January, 1483, the ambassadors from the estates of Flanders and from Maximilian, who then for the first time assumed the title of archduke, came to France for the ratification of the treaty.  Having been first received with great marks of satisfaction at Paris, they repaired to Plessis-les-Tours.  Great was their surprise at seeing this melancholy abode, this sort of prison, into which “there was no admittance save after so many formalities and precautions.”  When they had waited a while, they were introduced, in the evening, into a room badly