CHAPTER II

point was that the fact, the situation, was grasped in practice for a moment, dimly it may be, yet sufficiently to illustrate the whole antecedent and succeeding event. As a matter of fact the ordinance remained practically in great part a dead letter. That it did so—that it did not accomplish its purpose—has been attributed to the malheur, the unhappiness, of the time. It was due to no such thing. It was due to the simple fact that in the ordinance two quite distinct, and one of them impossible, reforms were projected. The attempt to tie down the écu to 60 sols. was foredoomed to failure, and as the eye of contemporaries was fixed more entirely on prices rather than on method of tender, the most significant part of the ordinance passed out of mind; already by the time of the death of Henry III., "the people," it is again said, had increased the écu to 64 sols. On the 30th March 1594 a proclamation Page 89 was issued to call it down to the value prescribed by the celebrated declaration of 1577, i.e. 60 sols. but, finding it impossible, the whole system created by that declaration was abolished (September 1602); the reckoning by écus was done away with, and the old system of reckoning by livres returned to; the gold écu was tariffed at 65 sols., and the circulation of foreign monies was again permitted. Henry