Louis XI "...the universal spider...", by Paul Murray Kendall (read 13 June 1971) This is a masterful biography. Louis was born July 3, 1423, in Bourges, the son of Charles VII--the Dauphin whom Joan of Arc saved--and grandson of Charles VI, the king who went mad in 1392 (dramatically sketched in, I believe, The Three Popes, by Marzah Gail (which book I read 6 Sep 1970). Louis XI's father died July 22, 1461, and Louis proceeded to lay the foundations of modern France, overcoming the feudal lords--culminating in the downfall of Burgundy in 1477--and leaving a royal state to his son Charles VIII, when he died Aug 30, 1483. These words on his dying days struck me: "As the King gazed upon his sacred objects, upon the summer green beyond the gallery, as he listened to the flutterings of his birds, the soft sounds of shepherd pipes outside his windows, the scratching of a greyhound, what long thoughts he now had time for. Doubtless his mind cast back. over the years, over the ranging designs, the comedies, the anxieties, the hunting and hawking, to that sulfurous particle Charles of Burgundy who had once been his companion of the chase in the woods around Genappe, and the sympathetic English Earl Warwick, maker of kings, and Francesco Sforza, and the gentlemen of Dauphine closing round him in the blood and dust of Montlhery, and his father, who once, like him, had lain in the shadow while a son waited for his death, and, still further back to the Dauphine who became Prince of Cutthroats, and, perhaps, to the six-year-old boy who had looked upon the face of Joan of Arc..." ( )

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