Afterwards, Louis sought advancement at the royal court.[6] King Charles VII appointed him governor of the Dauphiné in 1448 and of French-occupied Genoa in 1461.[3] He was in Genoa when Louis XI succeeded Charles on the throne. When the War of the Public Weal broke out in 1465, he remained loyal to the crown. On 4 August 1465, he was named governor of Champagne.[7] In a letter to the city of Reims, the king praised Louis as "a man of great conduct, wise and expert in warfare and other things."[8]
On 18 May 1466, Louis XI appointed Louis Grand Maître des Eaux et Forêts du Roi [fr], with the power to appoint and dismiss all officials under him. On 21 May 1483, however, the king limited his powers.[9] Although he spent his career in royal service in various parts of France, Louis still frequently joined his elder brother for hunts on his Breton estates.[10]Thomas Basin relates a story of how Louis attempted to put him in his debt by intervening on Thomas's behalf without being asked. Thomas calls him a "generous and powerful lord".[11]
Louis and his brother André were among the original twelve knights of the Order of Saint Michael, created by Louis XI on 1 August 1469.[12] In 1483, Louis was appointed governor of Touraine.[3] He maintained a pro-French attitude throughout the Mad War of 1485–1488 and, in one of his final letters, dated 16 October 1488, urged Charles VIII to marry the Breton heiress, Anne of Brittany, thereby uniting the duchy with the crown.[13]
Nine manuscripts from Louis's library are now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Six of these he acquired and three he had commissioned.[16] The six are:
MS fr. 409, a 14th-century French religious miscellany, including homilies on the Nativity and the conversion of Paul; Le mariage de Nostre-Dame; La passion de Nostre Seigneur Jhesu Crist; La vie de Magdaleine; Lamentation Notre Dame; and Laurent d'Orléans's La somme le roi[18]
Duval, Frédéric (2001). La traduction du "Romuleon" par Sébastien Mamerot: étude sur la diffusion de l'histoire romaine en langue vernaculaire à la fin du Moyen Âge. Librairie Droz.
Lapina, Elizabeth (2019). "Crusader Chronicles". In Anthony Bale (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades. Cambridge University Press. pp. 11–24.
Lewis, P. S. (2002). "Note on the Fifteenth-Century Grande Chronique de Normandie". Nottingham Medieval Studies. 46: 185–198. doi:10.1484/j.nms.3.341.
Walsby, Malcolm (2007). The Counts of Laval: Culture, Patronage and Religion in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France. Ashgate.