Holding these ideas, the King was very vexed, deified as he was by a crowd of adulators, to meet among his subjects men sufficiently bold to blame his conduct and to frankly tell him so. Some prelates showed severity. It belonged to their profession to do so. But that courtiers, and even, as it was related, a simple bourgeois of Paris, should dare to address remonstrances to their sovereign,--this could not be tolerated,--especially as their reproaches excited his mother against him,--at the risk of an embroilment, which in fact occurred. As good politics, if for no other reason, Louis XIV. was resolved not to permit any interference in his affairs. He felt somewhat vaguely that all these people were uniting to teach him a lesson. He suspected a considerable organised force behind this _Cabale des Devots_, who represented austerity at Court, and whom the Libertins of the Louvre ridiculed. We know this organised force. We have seen it at work in a former chapter under the name of _The Compagnie du Saint Sacrement_, when it was engaged with Vincent de Paul in the great charitable undertakings of the century.[131] The malevolent nickname of _Cabale des Devots_ had been given, towards the year 1658, by the many who abominated the society without knowing its true title or its organisation, simply because it disturbed the course of their own existence. Since the date at which we last saw the organisation at work, the management had been offering the same mixture of good and evil. Everything that it had done for the relief of the poor, the prisoners, the galley slaves, and other miserable beings, to protect them against abuse and tyranny, and to raise them morally, had been above all praise; as had also its efforts to assure a certain amount of decency in the streets, or to combat in the higher classes the two curses of the time, duels and gambling. As much cannot be said of the narrow and fanatical opinions which rendered it a persecutor and police agent, of its taste for spying or accusing, of its barbarity in regard to heretics and men of genius. It easily became dangerous and malignant, and it was difficult to find defence against this occult power which had "eyes and ears everywhere." Mazarin, whom it secretly tormented through anonymous letters, had sought and pursued it with eagerness, and during the last months of his life the society was forced to hide itself. After the death of the Cardinal, the _Compagnie_ again put itself in motion, and it is evident that it had regained confidence, for with only the Queen Mother for its friend it dared to attack the King.