It was not against the foreign foe only that the peasants excavated their underground retreats. Froissart paints the chivalry of his time in the brightest colours, and only here and there by a few touches lets us see what dark shadows set them off. Who paid for the gay accoutrements of the knights? Who were the real victims of the incessant wars? From whom came the ransom of King John and of the nobles taken at Creçy and Poitiers? From the peasant. The prisoners allowed to return on parole came to their territories to collect the sums demanded for their release, and the peasant had to find them. He had his cattle, his plough and tumbril. They were taken from him; no more corn was left him than enough to sow his field. He knew how he would be exploited, and he hid his precious grain that was to make bread for his wife and children. The seigneur endeavoured to extort from him the secret as to where it was concealed. He exposed the man's bare feet before the fire; he loaded him with chains. But the peasant bore fire and iron rather than reveal the hiding-place. Here is Michelet's account of the seigneur in the first half of the fifteenth century. "The seigneur only revisited his lands at the head of his soldiery to extort money by violence. He came down on them as a storm of hail. All hid at his approach. Throughout his lands alarm resounded --it was a _sauve-qui-peut_. The seigneur is no longer a true seigneur; he is a rude captain, a barbarian, hardly even a Christian. _Écorcheur_ is the true name for such, ruining what was already ruined, snatching the shirt off the back of him who had one; if he had but his skin, of that he was flayed. It would be a mistake to suppose that it was only the captains of the _écorcheurs_--the bastards, the seigneurs without a seigneurie, who showed themselves so ferocious. The grandees, the princes in these hideous wars, had acquired a strange taste for blood. What can one say when one sees Jean de Ligny, of the house of Luxembourg, exercise his nephew, the Count of Saint-Pol, a child of fifteen, in massacring those who fled? They treated their kinsfolk in the same manner as their enemies. For safety--better be a foe than a relation. The Count d'Harcourt kept his father prisoner all his life. The Countess of Foix poisoned her sister; the Sire de Gial his wife. The Duke of Brittany made his brother die of starvation, and that publicly; passers-by heard with a shudder the lamentable voice pleading piteously for a little bread. One evening, the 10th of January, the Count Adolphus of Gueldres dragged his old father out of bed, drew him on foot, unshod, through the snow for five leagues to cast him finally into a moat. It was the same in all the great families of the period--in those of the Low Countries, in those of Bar, Verdun, Armagnac, &c. The English had gone, but France was exterminating herself. The terrible miseries of the time find expression, feeble as