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Updated: July 6, 2025
One evening that the king was with Beaupertuys, in a good humour, having drunk heartily, joked heartily, and offered early in the evening his prayer in Madame's oratory, he said to Le Daim his crony, to the Cardinal, La Balue, and to old Dunois, who were still soaking, "Let us have a good laugh! I think it will be a good joke to see misers before a bag of gold without being able to touch it.
He therefore had him confined in a cage, "eight feet broad," says Commynes, "and only one foot higher than a man's stature, covered with iron plates outside and inside, and fitted with terrible bars." There is still to be seen in Loches castle, under the name of the Balue cage, that instrument of prison-torture which the cardinal, it is said, himself invented.
Now, in his torments, not knowing if she were in the room, he came back and gave vent to a diabolical "Oh!" on beholding her near his master. "What do you mean?" exclaimed the king, looking at the priest in a way to give him the fever. "Sire," said La Balue, insolently, "the affairs of purgatory are in my ministry, and I am bound to inform you that there is sorcery going on in this house."
"Ah," sighed Willis, "I wish we had only Sir Marmaduke Travers' cage here." "Cage!" cried Fritz, laughing, "what, to shut up the game first and shoot it afterwards?" "No, quite the reverse: to shut up the hunters." "Ah, you would serve us in the same way as Louis XI. served Cardinal Balue."
The interview at Peronne was a simple trap conceived by Balue and the Duke of Burgundy. The treaties of 1465 and 1468, both obtained by undue pressure, had not been respected by Charles, etc. The assembly was obedient to suggestion. It was a packed house.
Coasting about 40 leagues south from this place, they came to the mouth of a large river named Balue or Baeli in about 17° S. and having doubled Cape St Andrew, they saw the river and kingdom of Casame, between the latitudes of 17° and 18° S. where they found little water and had much trouble . Here also amity was established with the king, whose name was Sampilla, a discreet old man; but hitherto they could get no intelligence of the Portuguese whom they were sent in search of.
Not only did he hunt down implacably the men who, after having served him, had betrayed or deserted him; he revelled in the vengeance he took and the sufferings he inflicted on them. He had raised to the highest rank both in state and church the son of a cobbler, or, according to others, of a tailor, one John de Balue, born in 1421, at the market-town of Angles, in Poitou.
How now, my Lord, have you brought the Count to reason and to temper?" "Sire," said Balue, "my task hath been difficult.
Here, at least, we succeed in meeting a guillotine which catches its maker. By a singular coincidence another lord of Noisy, Cardinal Balue, underwent a long detention in an iron-barred cage one of those famous cages, so much favored by Louis XI., of which the cardinal, as we learn from the records of the time, had the patent-right for invention, or at least improvement.
But at the same time that, out of regard for the dignity of cardinal, which he had himself requested of the pope for the culprit, he dispensed with the legal condemnation to capital punishment, he was bent upon satisfying his vengeance, and upon making Balue suffer in person for his crime.
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