[La-bas by J. K. Huysmans]@TWC D-Link bookLa-bas CHAPTER IV 3/25
We have no explicit statement as to the role he played in this court, but one can easily imagine what sort 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 Orleans, 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.
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