the last corner they hold in the kingdom; but such matters are too weighty; all that business ends with me.  M. d’Esquerdes must give up such designs, and come and guard my son without budging from his side for at least six months.  Let an end be put, also, to all our disputes with Brittany, and let this Duke Francis be allowed to live in peace without any more causing him trouble or fear.  This is the way in which we, must now deal with all our neighbors.  Five or six good years of peace are needful for the kingdom.  My poor people have suffered too much; they are in great desolation.  If God had been pleased to grant me life, I should have put it all to rights; it was my thought and my desire, let my son be strictly charged to remain at peace, especially whilst he is so young.  At a later time, when he is older, and when the kingdom is in good case, he shall do as he pleases about it.”

[Illustration:  Louis XI——­260]

On Saturday, August 30, 1483, between seven and eight in the evening, Louis XI. expired, saying, “Our Lady of Embrun, my good mistress, have pity upon me; the mercies of the Lord will I sing forever (misericordias Domini in ceternum cantabo).”

“It was a great cause of joy throughout the kingdom,” says M. de Barante with truth, in his Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne:  “this moment had been impatiently waited for as a deliverance, and as the ending of so many woes and fears.  For a long time past no King of France had been so heavy on his people or so hated by them.”

This was certainly just, and at the same time ungrateful.

Louis XI. had rendered France great service, but in a manner void of frankness, dignity, or lustre; he had made the contemporary generation pay dearly for it by reason of the spectacle he presented of trickery, perfidy, and vindictive cruelty, and by his arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of kingly power.  People are not content to have useful service; they must admire or love; and Louis XI. inspired France with neither of those sentiments.  He has had the good fortune to be described and appraised, in his own day too, by the most distinguished and independent of his councillors, Philip de Commynes, and, three centuries afterwards, by one of the most thoughtful and the soundest intellects amongst the philosophers of the eighteenth century, Duclos, who, moreover, had the advantage of being historiographer of France, and of having studied the history of that reign in authentic documents.  We reproduce here the two judgments, the agreement of which is remarkable:—­

“God,” says Commynes, “had created our king more wise, liberal, and full of manly virtue than the princes who reigned with him and in his day, and who were his enemies and neighbors.  In all there was good and evil, for they were men; but without flattery, in him were more things appertaining to the office of king than in any of the rest.  I saw them nearly all, and knew what they could do.”