If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever he pleased
in time or space, with all the ages and all the countries of the world
to choose from, there would be quite an instructive diversity of taste.
A certain sedentary majority would prefer to remain where they were.
Many would choose the Renaissance; many some stately and simple period
of Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years wandering
among the villages of Palestine with an inspired conductor. For some of
our quaintly vicious contemporaries, we have the decline of the Roman
Empire and the reign of Henry III. of France. But there are others not
quite so vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect
gravity, who have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and
have more taste for what is comfortable than for what is magnanimous and
high; and I can imagine some of these casting their lot in the court of
Blois during the last twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans.
The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and the
high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois on a visit,
formed a society for killing time and perfecting each other in various
elegant accomplishments, such as we might imagine for an ideal
watering-place in the Delectable Mountains. The company hunted and went
on pleasure-parties; they played chess, tables, and many other games.
What we now call the history of the period passed, I imagine, over the
heads of these good people much as it passes over our own. News reached
them, indeed, of great and joyful import. William Peel received eight
livres and five sous from the duchess when he brought the first tidings
that Rouen was recaptured from the English.[46] A little later and the
duke sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne and
Normandy.[47] They were liberal of rhymes and largesse, and welcomed the
prosperity of their country much as they welcomed the coming of spring,
and with no more thought of collaborating towards the event. Religion
was not forgotten in the court of Blois. Pilgrimages were agreeable and
picturesque excursions. In those days a well-served chapel was something
like a good vinery in our own,--an opportunity for display and the
source of mild enjoyments. There was probably something of his rooted
delight in pageantry, as well as a good deal of gentle piety, in the
feelings with which Charles gave dinner every Friday to thirteen poor
people, served them himself, and washed their feet with his own
hands.[48] Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his courtiers from
their trivial side. The duke perhaps cared less for the deliverance of
Guyenne and Normandy than for his own verses on the occasion; just as
Dr. Russell's correspondence in _The Times_ was among the most material
parts of the Crimean War for that talented correspondent. And I think it
scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as patriotism was
principally cultivated as a means of filling up the day.
It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the
destiny of nations who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any
man of accomplishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and
something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson
like Drummond of Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay.
They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It
might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it might be
three high English minstrels; or the two men, players of ghitterns, from
the kingdom of Scotland, who sang the destruction of the Turks; or again
Jehan Rognelet, player of instruments of music, who played and danced
with his wife and two children; they would each be called into the
castle to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke.[49]
Sometimes the performance was of a more personal interest, and produced
much the same sensations as are felt on an English green on the arrival
of a professional cricketer, or round an English billiard-table during a
match between Roberts and Cook. This was when Jehan Negre, the Lombard,
came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won
much money from my lord and his intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of
Chalons made ballades before all these ballade-makers.[50]
It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of
ballades and rondels. To write verses for May-day seems to have been as
much a matter of course as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to
gather hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and
the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as
in a literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our friend
Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the
funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of
nouns or the moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in
similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating
episodes. If Fredet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to
upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Fredet would excuse himself.
Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the
same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of
the poetasters were heavy enough; others were not wanting in address;
and the duchess herself was among those who most excelled. On one
occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge"
(Je meurs de soif empres de la fontaine).
These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention
rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in
itself. It purports to be the work of Francois Villon; and so far as a
foreigner can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be
his. Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the
great _tabula rasa_, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the
biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon
a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons,
found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell
nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would
not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as
would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of
kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of
the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy
with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter
from Villon's dungeon at Meun; yet each in his own degree had been tried
in prison. Each in his own way also loved the good things of this life
and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf that separated Burns
from his Edinburgh patrons would separate the singer of Bohemia from the
rhyming duke. And it is hard to imagine that Villon's training amongst
thieves, loose women, and vagabond students had fitted him to move in a
society of any dignity and courtliness. Ballades are very admirable
things; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting visitor. But among
the courtiers of Charles there would be considerable regard for the
proprieties of etiquette; and even a duke will sometimes have an eye to
his teaspoons. Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have
disappointed expectation. It need surprise nobody if Villon's ballade on
the theme,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge,"
was but a poor performance. He would make better verses on the lee-side
of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin, than in a cushioned settle
in the halls of Blois.
Charles liked change of place. He was often not so much travelling as
making a progress; now to join the King for some great tournament; now
to visit King Rene, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw
all manner of interesting things--Oriental curios, King Rene painting
birds, and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester,
whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange.[51] Sometimes the journeys
were set about on horseback in a large party, with the _fourriers_ sent
forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage. We find almost
Gargantuan details of the provision made by these officers against the
duke's arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and
chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red.[52]
Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a
friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before
the wind.[53] Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the
Crinan Canal; and when Charles threw in money they would dive and bring
it up.[54] As he looked on their exploits, I wonder whether that room of
gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the device of
little children in the river, and the sky full of birds?
He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angouleme
in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when
Bedford put it up for sale in London.[55] The duchess had a library of
her own; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in attendance
on the blue-stocking Margaret of Scotland.[56] Not only were books
collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois. The widow
of one Jean Fougere, a book-binder, seems to have done a number of odd
commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three
vellum skins to bind the duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed
to prepare parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was
who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles's own
poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan,
with the text in one column, and Astesan's Latin version in the
other.[57]
Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of
many others. We find in Charles's verse much semi-ironical regret for
other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been
"nourished in the schools of love" now sees nothing either to please or
displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means
to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life. He
had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant
little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone
with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his animal strength
has so much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of
the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life,
he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from
grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
talking, and singing.[58]
While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of
which he was the outcome and ornament, was growing old along with him.
The semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the
past; and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king
reigned in France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI.
had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were
inconceivable, to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able
enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous
spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable
phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend
Rene's in Provence, would soon be made impossible: interference was the
order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what
was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily
in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South
Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the
islanders will not be much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of
Orleans at the policy of the Eleventh Louis. There was one thing, I seem
to apprehend, that had always particularly moved him; and that was, any
proposal to punish a person of his acquaintance. No matter what treason
he may have made or meddled with, an Alencon or an Armagnac was sure to
find Charles reappear from private life and do his best to get him
pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels with them. They
were charming people in every way. There must certainly be some mistake.
Had not he himself made anti-national treaties almost before he was out
of his nonage? And for the matter of that, had not every one else done
the like? Such are some of the thoughts by which he might explain to
himself his aversion to such extremities; but it was on a deeper basis
that the feeling probably reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to
be impressed at the thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of
those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those
who had everything to make life valuable were deprived of life itself
And it was shocking to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should
be hurried before their Judge without a fitting interval for penitence
and satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor,
purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with "the
universal spider," Louis XI. He took up the defence of the Duke of
Brittany at Tours. But Louis was then in no humour to hear Charles's
texts and Latin sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of
France was at stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his
path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of
Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was
monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke
never recovered the indignity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened,
and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of
his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious
rondels to the end of time.
V
The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece throughout. He
never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure, and at the
cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical
to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking-horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
following years he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alencon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alencon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; "yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year,
and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of
Louis XI. if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political
deliberation.
This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and
narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of
the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he
failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we
might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in
his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors
whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has
perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the
fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special
vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises,
and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something
in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they
are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put
it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles
literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved
bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating
truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to
challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against
himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from
intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less
autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald and
uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had
been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels
the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring;
winter as the time of snow and the fireside; spring as the return of
grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart.
And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again we learn that Charles
of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole
gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of
passion; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the
matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were
indeed inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had never
seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in any one of
these so numerous love-songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was
she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction? The old English translator mentions grey eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_,
while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the
world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man
going to order dinner.
Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a
prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and
how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all
pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have
come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.
Theodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now
nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in
his happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans.
I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
duke, not only because they are delightful in themselves, but because
they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their
model. When de Banville revives a forgotten form of verse--and he has
already had the honour of reviving the ballade--he does it in the spirit
of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at
all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of
thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed
natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to
Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself.
But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is
illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has
been retained of the old movement; the refrain falls in time like a
well-played bass; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and
restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the
imitation. But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of
other days, when it seems as if men walked by twilight, seeing little,
and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and
spectral fluid circulated in their veins. They might gird themselves for
battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within, and those
processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we
feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make
it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or
took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in
their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a
sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been
strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably
trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal
des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much of our
florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so
different; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring
editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and
nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not
wonderful if we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to
authors who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation.
Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to find a small
man without the buskin, and obvious sentiments stated without
affectation. If the sentiments are obvious, there is all the more chance
we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may
find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys
and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there
is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt,
and sing themselves to music of their own.