fellow, there is here a Turpenay who angers me, rid the world of him for me.”  Tristan, taking a frock for a monk, or a monk for a frock, came to this gentleman, whom all the court called Monsieur de Turpenay, and having accosted him managed to lead him to one side, and taking him by the button-hole gave him to understand that the king desired he should die.  He tried to resist, supplicating and supplicating to escape, but in no way could he obtain a hearing.  He was delicately strangled between the head and shoulders, so that he expired; and, three hours afterwards, Tristan told the king that he was discharged.  It happened five days afterwards, which is the space in which souls come back again, that the monk came into the room where the king was, and when he saw him he was much astonished.  Tristan was present:  the king called him, and whispered into his ear—­

“You have not done that which I told you to.”

“Saving your Grace I have done it.  Turpenay is dead.”

“Eh?  I meant this monk.”

“I understood the gentleman!”

“What, is it done then?”

“Yes, sire,”

“Very well then”—­turning towards the monk—­“come here, monk.”  The monk approached.  The king said to him, “Kneel down!” The poor monk began to shiver in his shoes.  But the king said to him, “Thank God that he has not willed that you should be killed as I had ordered.  He who took your estates has been instead.  God has done you justice.  Go and pray God for me, and don’t stir out of your convent.”

The proves the good-heartedness of Louis XI.  He might very well have hanged the monk, the cause of the error.  As for the said gentleman, he died in the king’s service.

In the early days of his sojourn at Plessis-les-Tours king Louis, not wishing to hold his drinking-bouts and give vent to his rakish propensities in his chateau, out of respect to her Majesty (a kingly delicacy which his successors have not possessed) became enamoured of a lady named Nicole Beaupertuys, who was, to tell the truth, wife of a citizen of the town.  The husband he sent into Ponent, and put the said Nicole in a house near Chardonneret, in that part which is the Rue Quincangrogne, because it was a lonely place, far from other habitations.  The husband and the wife were thus both in his service, and he had by La Beaupertuys a daughter, who died a nun.  This Nicole had a tongue as sharp as a popinjay’s, was of stately proportions, furnished with large beautiful cushions of nature, firm to the touch, white as the wings of an angel, and known for the rest to be fertile in peripatetic ways, which brought it to pass that never with her was the same thing encountered twice in love, so deeply had she studied the sweet solutions of the science, the manners of accommodating the olives of Poissy, the expansions of the nerves, and hidden doctrines of the breviary, the which much delighted the king.  She was as gay as a lark, always laughing