I.

His birth—if we are to argue from a man’s parents—was above his merit.

It is not merely that he was the grandson of one king, the father of

another, and the uncle of a third; but something more specious was to be

looked for from the son of his father, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orleans,

brother to the mad king Charles VI., lover of Queen Isabel, and the

leading patron of art and one of the leading politicians in France. And

the poet might have inherited yet higher virtues from his mother,

Valentina of Milan, a very pathetic figure of the age, the faithful wife

of an unfaithful husband, and the friend of a most unhappy king. The

father, beautiful, eloquent, and accomplished, exercised a strange

fascination over his contemporaries; and among those who dip nowadays

into the annals of the time there are not many—and these few are little

to be envied—who can resist the fascination of the mother. All mankind

owe her a debt of gratitude because she brought some comfort into the

life of the poor madman who wore the crown of France.

Born (May 1391) of such a noble stock, Charles was to know from the first

all favours of nature and art. His father’s gardens were the admiration

of his contemporaries; his castles were situated in the most agreeable

parts of France, and sumptuously adorned. We have preserved, in an

inventory of 1403, the description of tapestried rooms where Charles may

have played in childhood. {238} “A green room, with the ceiling full of

angels, and the _dossier_ of shepherds and shepherdesses seeming

(_faisant contenance_) to eat nuts and cherries. A room of gold, silk

and worsted, with a device of little children in a river, and the sky

full of birds. A room of green tapestry, showing a knight and lady at

chess in a pavilion. Another green room, with shepherdesses in a

trellised garden worked in gold and silk. A carpet representing

cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cherries in

a basin.” These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might

busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With

our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large

a space in the attention of mediæval men might be occupied by such

figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in

the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of

traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered

vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows and

the walls and floors of palaces. The reader will remember how Villon’s

mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty stock of

theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her as she

prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the

chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at

second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of

mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in the first infant

school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round

the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues.

So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time,

to a liberal education in itself.

At Charles’s birth an order of knighthood was inaugurated in his honour.

At nine years old, he was a squire; at eleven, he had the escort of a

chaplain and a schoolmaster; at twelve, his uncle the king made him a

pension of twelve thousand livres d’or. {240a} He saw the most brilliant

and the most learned persons of France, in his father’s Court; and would

not fail to notice that these brilliant and learned persons were one and

all engaged in rhyming. Indeed, if it is difficult to realise the part

played by pictures, it is perhaps even more difficult to realise that

played by verses in the polite and active history of the age. At the

siege of Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over the

walls. {240b} If a scandal happened, as in the loathsome thirty-third

story of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_, all the wits must make rondels

and chansonettes, which they would hand from one to another with an

unmanly sneer. Ladies carried their favourite’s ballades in their

girdles. {241a} Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already,

kissed Alain Chartier’s lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts and

golden sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well known, that this

princess was herself the most industrious of poetasters, that she is

supposed to have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes

wrote as many as twelve rondels in the day. {241b} It was in rhyme,

even, that the young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all

manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a

smack of ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de

la Bigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the

verses of his father’s Maître d’Hôtel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated

of “l’art de dictier et de faire chançons, ballades, virelais et

rondeaux,” along with many other matters worth attention, from the courts

of Heaven to the misgovernment of France. {241c} At this rate, all

knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We

need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very well

educated person. He could string Latin texts together by the hour, and

make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He had

seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken emperor

who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a great

deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped

his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies dance on

into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of dainties

and good wine. {242a} And when all is said, it was no very helpful

preparation for the battle of life. “I believe Louis XI.,” writes

Comines, “would not have saved himself, if he had not been very

differently brought up from such other lords as I have seen educated in

this country; for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes

with finery and fine words.” {242b} I am afraid Charles took such

lessons to heart, and conceived of life as a season principally for

junketing and war. His view of the whole duty of man, so empty, vain,

and wearisome to us, was yet sincerely and consistently held. When he

came in his ripe years to compare the glory of two kingdoms, England and

France, it was on three points only,—pleasures, valour, and riches,—that

he cared to measure them; and in the very outset of that tract he speaks

of the life of the great as passed, “whether in arms, as in assaults,

battles, and sieges, or in jousts and tournaments, in high and stately

festivities and in funeral solemnities.” {243}

When he was no more than thirteen, his father had him affianced to

Isabella, virgin-widow of our Richard II. and daughter of his uncle

Charles VI.; and, two years after (June 29, 1406), the cousins were

married at Compiègne, he fifteen, she seventeen years of age. It was in

every way a most desirable match. The bride brought five hundred

thousand francs of dowry. The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence,

Louis of Orleans figuring in crimson velvet, adorned with no less than

seven hundred and ninety-five pearls, gathered together expressly for

this occasion. And no doubt it must have been very gratifying for a

young gentleman of fifteen, to play the chief part in a pageant so gaily

put upon the stage. Only, the bridegroom might have been a little older;

and, as ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of

thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as queen,

or the contemptible age of her new husband. _Pleuroit fort ladite

Isabeau_; the said Isabella wept copiously. {244} It is fairly debatable

whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (September

1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death. Short as it was,

however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find

that, in the last decade of his life, and after he had remarried for

perhaps the second time, he had not yet forgotten or forgiven the violent

death of Richard II. “Ce mauvais cas”—that ugly business, he writes, has

yet to be avenged.

The marriage festivity was on the threshold of evil days. The great

rivalry between Louis of Orleans and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy,

had been forsworn with the most reverend solemnities. But the feud was

only in abeyance, and John of Burgundy still conspired in secret. On

November 23, 1407—in that black winter when the frost lasted

six-and-sixty days on end—a summons from the king reached Louis of

Orleans at the Hôtel Barbette, where he had been supping with Queen

Isabel. It was seven or eight in the evening, and the inhabitants of the

quarter were abed. He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires

riding on one horse, a page, and a few varlets running with torches. As

he rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove. And so riding,

he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain. My lord of Burgundy

set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found some years after on the

bridge of Montereau; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly

by his rival’s death. The horror of the other princes seems to have

perturbed himself; he avowed his guilt in the council, tried to brazen it

out, finally lost heart and fled at full gallop, cutting bridges behind

him, towards Bapaume and Lille. And so there we have the head of one

faction, who had just made himself the most formidable man in France,

engaged in a remarkably hurried journey, with black care on the pillion.

And meantime, on the other side, the widowed duchess came to Paris in

appropriate mourning, to demand justice for her husband’s death. Charles

VI., who was then in a lucid interval, did probably all that he could,

when he raised up the kneeling suppliant with kisses and smooth words.

Things were at a dead-lock. The criminal might be in the sorriest

fright, but he was still the greatest of vassals. Justice was easy to

ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed was another

question. No one in France was strong enough to punish John of Burgundy;

and perhaps no one, except the widow, very sincere in wishing to punish

him.

She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her eagerness

wore her out; and she died about a year after the murder, of grief and

indignation, unrequited love and unsatisfied resentment. It was during

the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing

the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain

natural son of her husband’s destined to become famous in the sequel as

the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. “_You were stolen from

me_,” she said; “it is you who are fit to avenge your father.” These are

not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a

saying, over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That

the child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her

body, was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression

of this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance,

in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear only

on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history—where we see

things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is brought

before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very vague and

pompous words, and strained through many men’s minds of everything

personal or precise—this speech of the widowed duchess startles a reader,

somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A human voice breaks

in upon the silence of the study, and the student is aware of a

fellow-creature in his world of documents. With such a clue in hand, one

may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and exasperate the

resentment of her children, and what would be the last words of counsel

and command she left behind her.

With these instancies of his dying mother—almost a voice from the

tomb—still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of

Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously

similar to that of Shakspeare’s Hamlet. The times were out of joint;

here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here, in

both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters

right. Valentina’s commendation of Dunois involved a judgment on

Charles, and that judgment was exactly correct. Whoever might be,

Charles was not the man to avenge his father. Like Hamlet, this son of a

dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart. Like Hamlet, too,

he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter to

the king, complaining that what was denied to him would not be denied “to

the lowest born and poorest man on earth.” Even in his private hours he

strove to preserve a lively recollection of his injury, and keep up the

native hue of resolution. He had gems engraved with appropriate legends,

hortatory or threatening: “_Dieu le scet_,” God knows it; or

“_Souvenez-vous de_ —” Remember! {248} It is only towards the end that

the two stories begin to differ; and in some points the historical

version is the more tragic. Hamlet only stabbed a silly old councillor

behind the arras; Charles of Orleans trampled France for five years under

the hoofs of his banditti. The miscarriage of Hamlet’s vengeance was

confined, at widest, to the palace; the ruin wrought by Charles of

Orleans was as broad as France.

Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of honourable mention.

Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts; and there is a story extant, to

illustrate how lightly he himself regarded these commercial obligations.

It appears that Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunder-storm,

had a smart access of penitence, and announced he would pay his debts on

the following Sunday. More than eight hundred creditors presented

themselves, but by that time the devil was well again, and they were

shown the door with more gaiety than politeness. A time when such

cynical dishonesty was possible for a man of culture is not, it will be

granted, a fortunate epoch for creditors. When the original debtor was

so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the incumbrances of

his inheritance. On the death of Philip the Forward, father of that John

the Fearless whom we have seen at work, the widow went through the

ceremony of a public renunciation of goods; taking off her purse and

girdle, she left them on the grave, and thus, by one notable act,

cancelled her husband’s debts and defamed his honour. The conduct of

young Charles of Orleans was very different. To meet the joint

liabilities of his father and mother (for Valentina also was lavish), he

had to sell or pledge a quantity of jewels; and yet he would not take

advantage of a pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount.

Thus, one Godefroi Lefèvre, having disbursed many odd sums for the late

duke, and received or kept no vouchers, Charles ordered that he should be

believed upon his oath. {249} To a modern mind this seems as honourable

to his father’s memory as if John the Fearless had been hanged as high as

Haman. And as things fell out, except a recantation from the University

of Paris, which had justified the murder out of party feeling, and

various other purely paper reparations, this was about the outside of

what Charles was to effect in that direction. He lived five years, and

grew up from sixteen to twenty-one, in the midst of the most horrible

civil war, or series of civil wars, that ever devastated France; and from

first to last his wars were ill-starred, or else his victories useless.

Two years after the murder (March 1409), John the Fearless having the

upper hand for the moment, a shameful and useless reconciliation took

place, by the king’s command, in the church of Our Lady at Chartres. The

advocate of the Duke of Burgundy stated that Louis of Orleans had been

killed “for the good of the king’s person and realm.” Charles and his

brothers, with tears of shame, under protest, _pour ne pas desobéir au

roi_, forgave their father’s murderer and swore peace upon the missal.

It was, as I say, a shameful and useless ceremony; the very greffier,

entering it in his register, wrote in the margin, “_Pax_, _pax_, _inquit

Propheta_, _et non est Pax_.” {250} Charles was soon after allied with

the abominable Bernard d’Armagnac, even betrothed or married to a

daughter of his, called by a name that sounds like a contradiction in

terms, Bonne d’Armagnac. From that time forth, throughout all this

monstrous period—a very nightmare in the history of France—he is no more

than a stalking-horse for the ambitious Gascon. Sometimes the smoke

lifts, and you can see him for the twinkling of an eye, a very pale

figure; at one moment there is a rumour he will be crowned king; at

another, when the uproar has subsided, he will be heard still crying out

for justice; and the next (1412), he is showing himself to the applauding

populace on the same horse with John of Burgundy. But these are

exceptional seasons, and, for the most part, he merely rides at the

Gascon’s bridle over devastated France. His very party go, not by the

name of Orleans, but by the name of Armagnac. Paris is in the hands of

the butchers: the peasants have taken to the woods. Alliances are made

and broken as if in a country dance; the English called in, now by this

one, now by the other. Poor people sing in church, with white faces and

lamentable music: “_Domine Jesu_, _parce populo tuo_, _dirige in viam

pacis principes_.” And the end and upshot of the whole affair for

Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless. France is

once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin; he may ride home again

to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he had

got engraved in the early days of his resentment, “_Souvenez-vous de_ —”

Remember! He has killed Polonius, to be sure; but the king is never a

penny the worse.