however, generally approved of. The king was popular; he had a good
heart, and courteous and gentle manners; he was faithful to his friends,
and affable to all; and the people liked to see him passing along the
streets. On taking in hand the government, he recalled to it the former
advisers of his father, Charles V., Bureau de la Riviere, Le Mercier de
Noviant, and Le Begue de Vilaine, all men of sense and reputation. The
taxes were diminished; the city of Paris recovered a portion of her
municipal liberties; there was felicitation for what had been obtained,
and there was hope of more.

Charles VI. was not content with the satisfaction of Paris only; he
wished all his realm to have cognizance of and to profit by his
independence. He determined upon a visit to the centre and the south of
France. Such a trip was to himself, and to the princes and cities that
entertained him, a cause of enormous expense. "When the king stopped
anywhere, there were wanted for his own table, and for the maintenance of
his following, six oxen, eighty sheep, thirty calves, seven hundred
chickens, two hundred pigeons, and many other things besides. The
expenses for the king were set down at two hundred and thirty livres a
day, without counting the presents which the large towns felt bound to
make him." But Charles was himself magnificent even to prodigality, and
he delighted in the magnificence of which he was the object, without
troubling himself about their cost to himself. Between 1389 and 1390,
for about six months, he travelled through Burgundy, the banks of the
Rhone, Languedoc, and the small principalities bordering on the Pyrenees.
Everywhere his progress was stopped for the purpose of presenting to him
petitions or expressing wishes before him. At Nimes and Montpellier, and
throughout Languedoc, passionate representations were made to him
touching the bad government of his two uncles, the Dukes of Anjou and
Berry. "They had plundered and ruined," he was told, "that beautiful and