Another enterprise of Louis, in the year 1121, marks the rapid increase of the king’s influence. A few years since he had established his authority in the Bourbonnais: now he extended it to Auvergne. In a quarrel betwixt the count and the bishop of Clermont, the latter appealed to Louis, who summoned the count to his supreme court, and, on his refusal to appear, marched with an army and subdued him, as he had previously the lord of Bourbon. The counts of Anjou and of Nevers aided him in the expedition. They felt no reluctance in carrying into effect the decrees of that court of peers of which they formed a part. Louis was not so fortunate in his treatment of Flanders as in his subjugation of Aquitaine. The Flemings, indeed, proved always intractable to French treatment whether of amity or hostility. The count of that province, perplexed and curbed by the frowardness of the townsfolk and the middle class, sought to taunt the family of Van der Straten by asserting they were serfs. One of them replied by cleaving the young count’s skull as he knelt at prayers. There being no heir to the family of Flanders, Louis sought to give the county to William Clito (1127). This unfortunate prince soon after fell in an engagement; and Flanders passed to Theodoric of Alsace, a descendant of Robert the Frisian (1129). Louis VI died in 1137. It is strange that history could find for this monarch no epithet save that of the Fat, at the same time that it records innumerable proofs of a talented mind, of an active and enterprising spirit. [Illustration: LOUIS VII]