Did he never feel sorry afterwards? Said he never to himself, “Fool that you are, you will always be unlucky?” I readily believe he did; but I also think that a barrier of dread invincible stopped him short. I cannot believe with the monks who have told us all things concerning witchcraft, that the treaty with Satan was the light invention of a miser or a man in love. On the contrary, nature and good sense alike inform us that it was only the last resource of an overwhelming despair, under the weight of dreadful outrages and dreadful sufferings. * * * * * But those great sufferings, we are told, must have been greatly lightened about the time of St. Louis, who forbade private wars among the nobles. My own opinion is quite the reverse. During the fourscore or hundred years that elapsed between his prohibition and the wars with England (1240-1340), the great lords being debarred from the accustomed sport of burning and plundering their neighbours’ lands, became a terror to their own vassals. For the latter such a peace was simply war. The spiritual, the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the _Journal of Eudes Rigault_, lately published, make one shudder. It is a repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault, Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal inquiry into the state of Normandy. Every evening he comes to a monastery. In all of them he finds the monks leading the life of great feudal lords, wearing arms, getting drunk, fighting duels, keen huntsmen over all the cultivated land; the nuns living among them in wild confusion, and betraying everywhere the fruits of their shameless deeds. If things are so in the Church, what must the lay lords have been? What like was the inside of those dark towers which the folk below regarded with so much horror? Two tales, undoubtedly historical, namely, _Blue-Beard_ and _Griselda_, tell us something thereanent. To his vassals, his serfs, what indeed must have been this devotee of torture who treated his own family in such a way? He is known to us through the only man who was brought to trial for such deeds; and that not earlier than the fifteenth century,--Gilles de Retz, who kidnapped children. Sir Walter Scott’s Front de Bœuf, and the other lords of melodramas and romances, are but poor creatures in the face of these dreadful realities. The Templar also in _Ivanhoe_, is a weak artificial conception. The author durst not assay the foul reality of celibate life in the Temple, or within the castle walls. Few women were taken in there, being accounted not worth their keep. The romances of chivalry altogether belie the truth. It is remarkable, indeed, how often the literature of an age expresses the very opposite of its manners, as, for instance, the washy theatre of eclogues after Florian,[24] during the years of the Great Terror.