Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
melancholy to affect him. But now, when his
animal strength has so much declined that he sings
the discomforts of winter instead of the inspirations
of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life,
he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep
his mind from grievous thoughts, he must have
many people around him, laughing, talking, and
singing.^
While Charles was thus falling into years, the
order of things, of which he was the outcome and
ornament, was growing old along with him. The
semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already
a thing of the past; and when Charles vii. was
gathered to his fathers, a new king reigned in
France, who seemed every way the opposite of
royal. Louis xi. had aims that were incompre-
hensible, and virtues that were inconceivable, to his
contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able
enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his
cruel and treacherous spirit. To the whole nobility
of France he was a fatal and unreasonable pheno-
menon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois,
or his friend Rene's in Provence, would soon be
made impossible : interference was the order of the
day ; hunting was already abolished ; and who
should say what was to go next? Louis, in fact,
must have appeared to Charles primarily in the light
of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in
South Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the
simplest things in life, the islanders will not be
1 Works, ii. 57, 258.
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