King

KING SPIDER--D. Bevan Wyndham Lewis--Coward McCann & Edwin V. Mitchell ($5).

"Louis XI, the medieval, knew all there is to know about efficiency: the value and power of Money, and its use in buying men, the importance of the single personal command, the importance of time." He was the biggest big executive of his day, a man who spent his life bringing order on a large scale out of colossal chaos. Louis' father, Charles VII, had been that weak-kneed Dauphin whom Joan of Arc crowned. Charles turned out better as a king than he had been as a Dauphin; but when his impatient son Louis (he led two rebellions against his father) came to the throne, at 38, he found France still disunited, Paris disloyal, the English threatening, and such powerful nobles as the Duke of Burgundy openly his enemies. The whole kingdom was exhausted by the Hundred Years' War. Fertile regions were wastelands; brigandage, starvation, lawlessness were everywhere.

With Paris, never his home town, Louis had no sympathy and less patience. Once he made a speech to some learned scholars of Paris' famed Sorbonne. Said he: "You are a bad lot. You lead bad lives, with the great fat trollops you keep!" With England he fought, when he thought he could win; made treaties, when he thought he could win that way. When the great Houses of Burgundy, Bourbon, Brittany, Lorraine, Artois, Alenc,on, Armagnac, Anjou leagued against him, he played them off one against the other, overcame them gradually by force, craft or bribery. When he died, at 60, he left a united France and a dynasty that lasted for 300 years.

Louis XI was no picture-book king. He had "a long ugly nose . . . a pair of oblique eyes too deeply set, thin lips, a powerful jaw . . . a jutting chin;" was less than middle height, bald, thin-shanked, shabbily dressed. A great talker himself, though direct and blunt, he required others to be the soul of brevity. Like many autocrats, he preferred plain people to the aristocracy. His favorite hat, high-peaked, shapeless, banded with leaden images of saints, was famed. But once at least he ordered a new one. He wrote to his General of Finances: "I have forgotten to ask you to finance me with a hat similar to the one which the Bishop of Valence, Messire Loys de Poictiers, gave me, which he said he had brought from Rome. I think it was of some felt other than beaver, a good inch thick, covering the shoulders and back completely, and coming well over the horse's crupper; it was also well turned up in front and at the sides, so that one had no need of a cloak against the rain, and in hot weather it was as good as a little house."

Louis' one passion (outside of his job) was hunting. He liked women, but loved dogs. He had mistresses in his younger days, and was twice married, purely as a matter of business. Suspicious, he had an elaborate system of spies. Relentless, he hung traitors or put them in iron cages. Personally brave, he was terribly afraid of death.

The Author. Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis (not to be confused with Wyndham Lewis, author of Time and Western Man) is a scholarly, lively, devout, belligerent Roman Catholic, living in France. In company with his compatriots Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Montague Summers, his Catholicism makes him an apologist for the Middle Ages, a contemner of his own. Author D. B. Wyndham Lewis has also written Franc,ois Villon.

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