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Upon receiving the report the Consuls issued a decree, in which they directed all the individuals included in the proscription to retire respectively into the different communes which should be fixed upon by the Minister of Justice, and to remain there until further orders.

We should cherish such vital nearness to our Lord, that we may commune as freely with him as friend communes with friend; feeling that we can and would do nothing, even in the common affairs of life, without his aid and guidance.

The king was most cordially welcomed, and, being deeply touched by his reception, ordered each company of the militia to pass before him according to their communes, and with their respective colours. "The king Charles Albert to the people who welcomed him with so much affection."

Guibert of Nogent, the contemporary historian, who was but lately loud in his blame of the bishop of Laon's character and conduct, now takes sides with the reaction aroused by popular excesses and vindictiveness, and is indignant with "those execrable institutions of communes," the source of so many disturbances and crimes.

A very large number of factories or of communes had received legacies for maintaining a school; the instructor often enjoyed, through an endowment, a metayer farm or a piece of ground; he was generally provided with a lodging; if he was a layman he was exempt, besides, from the most onerous taxes; as sexton, beadle, chorister or bell-ringer, he had small perquisites; finally, he was paid for each child four or five sous a month; sometimes, especially in poor districts, he taught only from All Saints' day down to the spring, and followed another occupation during the summer.

"That were madness. What would be the number of the able-bodied men of all three communes? Let us say two thousand; that is over the mark. What weapons would they have? Old muskets, old fowling-pieces, and not many of those; their scythes, their axes, their sticks. A single battalion would cut them down as you mow grass. You have not seen rioters dispersed by trained troops. I have.

At the end of March, 1414, the king's army was set in motion; Compiegne, Soissons, and Bapaume, which held out for the Duke of Burgundy, were successively taken by assault or surrendered; the royal troops treated the people as vanquished rebels; and the four great communes of Flanders sent a deputation to the king to make protestations of their respect and an attempt to arrange matters between their lord and his suzerain.

"Credit," he said, "is but a dispensation from paying cash." In spite of Mollien's protest, however, a new issue of paper money was ordered, but for this there was collateral security. It was found in certain plots of land or domains belonging respectively to each of many thousand communes, by the rentals of which they severally diminished their direct local taxes.

The best things of life are beyond reasoning. As in religion reason leads us, as it were, to the very edge of the rock of proven fact, then faith takes wing, and soars above the things of earth into the great silence where the soul communes with God, so in love there comes to the heart a sweetness, a certainty, which no reasoning can shake.

All the cantons and all the communes sent thither, together with their mayors and their richest farmers, their prettiest village girls in Alsatian costume. Five hundred peasants, clad in red vest and long black coat, the head covered with a great hat turned up on one side, a white ribbon tied about the left arm, were on horseback at the place of meeting.