For one who was no great politician, nor (as men go) especially wise,
capable, or virtuous, Charles of Orleans is more than usually enviable
to all who love that better sort of fame which consists in being known
not widely, but intimately. "To be content that time to come should know
there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to
subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts," is,
says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition. It is to some more specific
memory that youth looks forward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes
disinterred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay,
the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon
the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great
and beautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, public
curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after
fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not
impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a man would rather
leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face,
_figura animi magis quam corporis_. Of those who have thus survived
themselves most completely, left a sort of personal seduction behind
them in the world, and retained, after death, the art of making friends,
Montaigne and Samuel Johnson certainly stand first. But we have
portraits of all sorts of men, from august Caesar to the king's dwarf;
and all sorts of portraits, from a Titian treasured in the Louvre to a
profile over the grocer's chimney shelf. And so in a less degree, but
no less truly, than the spirit of Montaigne lives on in the delightful
Essays, that of Charles of Orleans survives in a few old songs and old
account-books; and it is still in the choice of the reader to make this
duke's acquaintance, and, if their humours suit, become his friend.
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.[14] "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 mediaeval 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 a 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.[15] 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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18] 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 Maitre d'Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated
of _l'art de dictier et de faire chancons, ballades, virelais et
rondeaux_, along with many other matters worth attention, from the
courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France.[19] 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.[20] 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."[21] 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."[22]
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 Compiegne, 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.[23] 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 re-married 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 Hotel 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 Shakespeare'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![24] 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 thunderstorm,
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 Lefevre, 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.[25] 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 desobeir 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._"[26] 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.