In France itself he had quite enough of questions to be solved and perils to be surmounted to absorb and satisfy the most vigilant and most active of men. Four princes of very unequal power, but all eager for independence and preponderance, viz., Charles, Duke of Berry, his brother; Francis II., Duke of Brittany; Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, his uncle; and John, Duke of Bourbon, his brother-in-law, were vassals whom he found very troublesome, and ever on the point of becoming dangerous. It was not long before he had a proof of it. In 1463, two years after Louis’s accession, the Duke of Burgundy sent one of his most trusty servants, John of Croy, Sire de Chimay, to complain of certain royal acts, contrary, he said, to the treaty of Arras, which, in 1435, had regulated the relations between Burgundy and the crown. The envoy had great difficulty in getting audience of the king, who would not even listen for more than a single moment, and that as he was going out of his room, when, almost without heeding, he said abruptly, “What manner of man, then, is this Duke of Burgundy? Is he of other metal than the other lords of the realm?” “Yes, sir,” replied Chimay, “he is of other metal; for he protected you and maintained you against the will of your father King Charles, and against the opinion of all those who were opposed to you in the kingdom, which no other prince or lord would have dared to do.” Louis went back into his room without a word. “How dared you speak so to the king,” said Dunois to Chimay. “Had I been fifty leagues away from here,” said the Burgundian, “and had I thought that the king had an idea only of addressing such words to me, I would have come back express to speak to him as I have spoken.” The Duke of Brittany was less puissant and less proudly served than the Duke of Burgundy; but, being vain and inconsiderate, he was incessantly attempting to exalt himself above his condition of vassal, and to raise his duchy into a sovereignty, and when his pretensions were rejected he entered, at one time with the King of England and at another with the Duke of Burgundy and the malcontents of France, upon intrigues which amounted very nearly to treason against the king his suzerain. Charles, Louis’s younger brother, was a soft and mediocre but jealous and timidly ambitious prince; he remembered, moreover, the preference and the wishes manifested on his account by Charles VII., their common father, on his death-bed, and he considered his position as Duke of Berry very inferior to the hopes he believed himself entitled to nourish. Duke John of Bourbon, on espousing a sister of Louis XI., had flattered himself that this marriage and the remembrance of the valor he had displayed, in 1450, at the battle of Formigny, would be worth to him at least the sword of constable; but Louis had refused to give it him. When all these great malcontents saw Louis’s popularity on the decline, and the king engaged abroad in divers