of treatment the richest baron in France received at the hands of an
impoverished king.

"For at that moment Charles VII was in extremities. He was without
money, prestige, or real authority. Even the cities along the Loire
scarcely obeyed him. France, decimated a few years before, by the
plague, and further depopulated by massacres, was in a deplorable
situation.

"England, rising from the sea like the fabled polyp the Kraken, had cast
her tentacles over Brittany, Normandy, l'Ile de France, part of Picardy,
the entire North, the Interior as far as Orléans, and crawling forward
left in her wake towns squeezed dry and country exhausted.

"In vain Charles clamoured for subsidies, invented excuses for
exactions, and pressed the imposts. The paralyzed cities and fields
abandoned to the wolves could afford no succour. Remember his very claim
to the throne was disputed. He became like a blind man going the rounds
with a tin cup begging sous. His court at Chinon was a snarl of intrigue
complicated by an occasional murder. Weary of being hunted, more or less
out of harm's way behind the Loire, Charles and his partisans finally
consoled themselves by flaunting in the face of inevitable disaster the
devil-may-care debaucheries of the condemned making the most of the few
moments left them. Forays and loans furnished them with opulent cheer
and permitted them to carouse on a grand scale. The eternal _qui-vive_
and the misfortunes of war were forgotten in the arms of courtesans.

"What more could have been expected of a used-up sleepy-headed king, the
issue of an infamous mother and a mad father?"