The House of Valois.--Luxury of the Court and the Nobles.--Insurrection.--Jaques Bonhomme.--Henry III.--Henry IV., of Navarre.--Cardinal Richelieu.--French Academy.--Regency of Anne of Austria.--Palaces of France.--The Noble and the Ennobled.--Persecution of the Protestants.--Edict of Nantes.--Its Revocation.--Distress of the Protestants.--Death of Louis XIV. In the year 1328 the direct line of the Capets became extinct by the death of Charles IV., who left no male descendant. The nobles, assembled in parliament at Paris, assigned the crown to Philip, Count of Valois, a nephew of the former king. He was crowned at Rheims, in May, 1328, as Philip VI. The nobles, having thus obtained a king according to their wishes, complained to him that they had borrowed large sums of money from wealthy merchants and artisans, which it was inconvenient for them to pay, and that it was not consistent with the dignity of the French nobility that they should be harassed by debts due to the low-born. The king promptly issued a decree that all these debts should be cut down one fourth, that four months grace should be allowed without interest, and then, that these plebeian creditors might be reduced to a proper state of humility, he ordered them all to be imprisoned and their property to be confiscated. The merciless monarch doubled the taxes upon the people, and created a court at Paris of such magnificence that the baronial lords abandoned their castles and crowded to the metropolis to share its voluptuous indulgences. Even neighboring kings, attracted by the splendor of the Parisian court, took up their abode in Paris. The nobles needed vast sums of money to sustain them in such measureless extravagance. They accordingly left stern overseers over their estates, to drive the peasants to their toil and to extort from them every possible farthing. The king, to replenish his ever-exhausted purse, assumed the sole right of making and selling salt throughout the realm. Each family, always excepting the nobles, who were then exempted from every species of tax, was required to take a certain quantity at an exorbitant price. Vincennes was then the great banqueting-hall of Europe. In its present decay it exhibits but little of the grandeur it presented four hundred years ago, when its battlements towered above the forest of oaks, centuries old, which surrounded the castle--when plumed and blazoned squadrons met in jousts and tournaments, and when, in meteoric splendor, hunting bands of lords and ladies swept the park. Brilliant as was this spectacle, no healthy mind can contemplate it but with indignation. To support this luxury of a few thousand nobles, thirty millions of people were plunged into the extreme of ignorance, poverty, and misery.