flocked in; and the King had scarcely any forces at his back with which to withstand them.  His plans for the campaign against the league were admirable, though they were frustrated by the bad faith of his captains, who mostly sympathised with this outbreak of the feudal nobility.  Louis himself marched southward to quell the Duc de Bourbon and his friends, and returning from that task, only half done for lack of time, he found that Charles of Charolais had passed by Paris, which was faithful to the King, and was coming down southwards, intending to join the Dukes of Berri and Brittany, who were on their way towards the capital.  The hostile armies met at Montleheri on the Orleans road; and after a strange battle—­minutely described by Commines—­a battle in which both sides ran away, and neither ventured at first to claim a victory, the King withdrew to Corbeil, and then marched into Paris (1465).  There the armies of the league closed in on him; and after a siege of several weeks, Louis, feeling disaffection all around him, and doubtful how long Paris herself would bear for him the burdens of blockade, signed the Peace of Conflans, which, to all appearances, secured the complete victory to the noblesse, “each man carrying off his piece.”  Instantly the contented princes broke up their half-starved armies and went home, leaving Louis behind to plot and contrive against them, a far wiser man, thanks to the lesson they had taught him.  They did not let him wait long for a chance.  The Treaty of Conflans had given the duchy of Normandy to the King’s brother Charles; he speedily quarrelled with his neighbour, the Duke of Brittany, and Louis came down at once into Normandy, which threw itself into his arms, and the whole work of the league was broken up.  The Comte de Charolais, occupied with revolts at Dinan and Liege, could not interfere, and presently his father, the old Duke Philip, died (1467), leaving to him the vast lordships of the House of Burgundy.

And now the “imperial dreamer,” Charles the Bold, was brought into immediate rivalry with that royal trickster, the “universal spider,” Louis XI.  Charles was by far the nobler spirit of the two:  his vigour and intelligence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts to render his father’s dissolute and careless rule into a well-ordered lordship, all these things marked him out as the leading spirit of the time.  His territories were partly held under France, partly under the empire:  the Artois district, which also may be taken to include the Somme towns, the county of Rhetel, the duchy of Bar, the duchy of Burgundy, with Auxerre and Nevers, were feudally in France; the rest of his lands under the empire.  He had, therefore, interests and means of interference on either hand; and it is clear that Charles set before himself two different lines of policy, according as he looked one way or the other.