strong party so hostile to the Lord of Milan, that riches, and mere
riches, were not enough to overpower their opposition. Visconti desired
above all things a Royal alliance. He saw that the Guelf—the national
party—in Italy was strong and was unrepresented. He would be Head of the
Guelfs, until he secured something better, and his best title to that
Headship was a French alliance. Moreover, self-preservation, no less
than ambition, rendered the marriage desirable. Isabel of Bavaria,
granddaughter of the murdered Bernabò Visconti, was Queen of France. How
could Giangaleazzo suffer that his exiled cousins should possess so
tremendous an advantage over him? He may have felt himself insecure in
his usurped sovereignty, so long as France was united by blood and
interest only to the Disinherited. If Valentine married Louis, Milan was
safe from France. So at Christmas, 1386, Giangaleazzo offered the
husband of Valentine the county of Vertus, in his lifetime as well as
after his death, and included in the marriage contract the astounding
clause of the succession of Valentine to Milan.
Even without this, Valentine was a very wealthy heiress; she brought
back to France her mother’s dowry, the county of Vertus in Champagne. In
addition to this she took into the kingdom 450,000 golden florins, a
freight of golden ornaments and jewels, furniture to the amount of
70,000 florins, gold and silver plate, and the county of Asti in
Lombardy, with a yearly income of nearly 30,000 golden florins.[15]
Footnote 15:
This was the estimate of Giangaleazzo. The actual revenues proved to
be a little less, and an arrangement _à l’amiable_ was made between
him and his son-in-law (Arch. Nat., K. 554, dossier 6).
The county of Asti comprised a whole province of towns, villages, and
castles. Thirty signories were in its fief; forty-eight villas paid
homage to the Count of Asti; Brie and Cherasco, two large towns in
Piedmont, belonged directly to him. In the politics of those times few
things are more striking than the singular lightmindedness with which a
king of France bestows upon a Lombard adventurer a county in the very
heart and centre of his own kingdom; or the confidence with which an
Italian conqueror hands the key of his position to a wealthy neighbour.
The situation of the French at Asti turned out to have the very gravest
political consequences. It assured them Savona, Genoa, Pisa for a
moment, and a century of wars about the Milanese. For this secure
footing in Lombardy gave a point of reality to their vision of an
Italian kingdom, and made the subtraction of Italy from the Empire
appear not only desirable but possible. On the other hand, it
familiarized Italy with the French. Henceforth the Italian princes, in
any dispute among themselves, would call in the protection not only of
the King of France but of their French neighbour, the powerful Count of
Asti.
But at first the Lombards did not like it. “I Lombardi,” says Corio,
“furono di mala voglia.” What they really dreaded was the succession of
Valentine and her French husband to Milan. This is too complicated and
intricate a question to dispose of here. I will only say that the
Italians believed that in some fashion Giangaleazzo had secured Milan to
his daughter, in case he should have no sons, or (as actually happened)
in case all his sons should die childless. But the question of the
French claim to Milan deserves a history to itself.
IV.
In April, 1387, Valentine of Milan was married by proxy and parole to
Louis, Duke of Touraine. The bride was twenty-one, the bridegroom just
sixteen; but, as Juvenal des Ursins remarked, “Assez caut, subtil et
sage de son aage.” But not until the 3rd of June, 1389, did the Lord of
Milan send his married daughter to her home in France.
For in France a powerful faction opposed the marriage. The king
was little more than a lad; entirely—or, of late, _almost_
entirely—submissive to his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. When the
wise King Charles expired in the autumn of 1380, he left the
custody of his two children to this younger brother of his, who in
all his battles and adventures had been his right-hand man. But
the King left the Regency of the Kingdom to the elder of his
brothers, the Duke of Anjou. In every sense the brothers were
rivals and antagonists; the interests of Anjou lay to the South,
the interests of Burgundy to the North. Anjou was a man of
culture, made by nature to be the head of a society of nobles;
while Burgundy, the Captain, was the champion of popular rights.
In nothing were they at one. When Anjou left the kingdom to
conquer Naples, and when the news came to France that he would
nevermore return, the supremacy of Burgundy appeared secure. But
Anjou had left behind him a successor—not his son, the child-king
of Sicily. No, the real successor to his aims and policy was his
nephew, the Prince Louis, the younger of the two sons of the dead
king.
Little harmony between this lad and his uncle of Burgundy! At ten years
old the child fights like a hero at Rosebecque; but the old captain, his
tutor, keeps all his smiles for the other nephew, the docile and amiable
king. He feels in Louis a spirit of danger, a breath of insubordination.
And, in truth, one after the other, the ancient counsellors and
servitors of Anjou take shelter in the household of the prince. Burgundy
feels that Louis is Anjou Redivivus—he must be kept low. And for this
the testament of Charles V. gives ample warrant: for that king,
well-named the Wise, feeling that the danger of France lay in the
greatness of her princes, had conquered his fatherly heart and decreed
that his younger son should have no more than a pension of 12,000 livres
a year. But this was not to be. As time went on, and the Regency came to
an end, Louis stimulated his placid brother to a sense of independence.
And the young king, less Roman than his father, and glad perhaps to feel
in the kingdom another power than that of Burgundy, began to enrich his
only brother, giving him the counties of Valois and Beaumont, lands in
Cotentin, Caen, Champagne, and Brie: then the Duchy of Touraine; the
promise of the inheritance of the old Duchess of Orleans; finally, this
rich marriage with Valentine Visconti.
Burgundy resisted with might and main. Not only would this marriage make
Louis too strong, but of all brides Valentine was the bride least to his
mind. For Burgundy had married two of his own children into the House of
Bavaria, and had given a Bavarian princess—the vivacious Isabel—as wife
to the young king. Now all these Bavarians were the grandchildren of
Bernabò, murdered by the father of Valentine. Also the niece of
Burgundy, Béatrix d’Armagnac, “la gaie Armagnageoise,” had married in
1382. This Carlo Visconti, Lord of Parma, heir of Bernabò, had been
stripped of all his goods by Giangaleazzo and Beatrice, no longer
laughing, had returned to eat the bread of exile in her brother’s house.
Thus the Queen, and Burgundy, and Armagnac, and Berry (the other brother
of the dead king) were bound by every instinct of natural anger and
honourable vendetta to look upon Giangaleazzo as the spoiler of their
kinsmen—of mother, children, niece, or husband—and in their eyes the
riches of Milan were the price of blood. Not one of these but hoped to
oust the usurper and restore the rightful line. And so for two years
they contrived to defer the marriage.[16]
Footnote 16:
See Comte Albert de Circourt, “Le Duc d’Orléans, frère du roi Charles
VI.: ses entreprises au dehors du royaume.” Paris: Victor Palmé, 1887.
Meanwhile the influence of Burgundy weakened, that of Prince Louis
increased, with the king. In the autumn of 1388 the disastrous “Voyage
d’Allemagne” deeply discredited Burgundy, its author. In their tent at
Corenzich, far from Queen and Court, the two brothers held long
colloquies. Not in vain did Louis plead for his bride. In the summer of
1389, Philippe de Florigny was sent into Lombardy to bring her home.
Valentine took away with her an escort of knights, a burden of gold and
gems, the possession of Asti, and the promise of Milan. She had in her
caskets three hundred thousand pearls of price, beside the pearls upon
her gala-dresses. Her plate was valued at more than one hundred thousand
marks Parisis. Her jewels, ornaments, and tapestries were estimated at
nearly seven hundred thousand golden florins.[17] Giangaleazzo had found
nothing too costly or too radiant for his only daughter. When at last he
let her go, he rode with her out of the gates of Pavia, saying never a
word of farewell, looking not once into her beloved face, lest he should
fall a-weeping. In the saddest hour of her tragic life, Valentine
remembered with tears that silent parting.
Footnote 17:
The florin, the Venetian ducat, and the French franc were
interchangeable coins worth about nine-and-eightpence of our money.
They are the equivalent of our half-sovereign, the French crown that
of our half-guinea; the Burgundian noble being, I think, the only coin
that reached the value of the modern guinea. See the tables for
1384-1394 in De Wailly.
It was the 17th of August, 1389, according to the dates of the Monk of
St. Denis, when Valentine rode into Melun to meet her bridegroom. The
King was there as well as all the Court—a Court full of kinsmen for
Valentine. The Viscontis counted their alliances with the kings of
France back into those mythical ages when Æneas, ancestor of either
House, founded the city of Angleria. Valentine found plenty of more
recent connections. The King and her husband were both her first
cousins, and so was the young King of Sicily; the Dukes of Burgundy and
Berry were her uncles. She was also, as I have said, first cousin once
removed to the King’s young wife, Isabel of Bavaria. She was cousin also
to Madame de Montauban, cousin by marriage to Madame d’Armagnac. But
these three kinswomen looked on her with horror, and all her splendour
seemed to them unholy spoil fresh from the unclean hands of her father,
the triumphant assassin of his kinsmen.
The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest
greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court.
Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the
devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted,
stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye
and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was
lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower,
the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of
St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he,
rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke
of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome,
so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no
doctors who were proof against his _bonne memoire et belle loquelle_.
Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young
Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning,
devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs,
and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent
amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a
lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted
ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a
knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the
Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and
retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his
rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness,
still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des
Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical
Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of
his enchanting presence.
According to Burcarius the King was handsomer than his young brother;
but we must allow for a natural Burgundian hostility to Louis, and a
natural Burgundian preference for force and valour, fresh colour, sweet
temper, good humour, and all vigorous northern qualities, in preference
to the subtler charms of their enemy. The stalwart Fleming thinks the
King the finest man at Court, and handsomer than any there, far
handsomer than his wife, “jolie et avenante,” indeed, but “basse et
brunette”: fatal defects in the eyes of a Fleming! Her indisputable
empire over men he ascribes not to her face, but to her lively manners.
“Folle et légère,” was she:
“Touse n’y avoit tant jonette
Plaine de sy grant gaiété
Ny de sy grant joliveté
Sy amoureuse, ne sy lie,
Que cette Bergère jolie.”[18]
Footnote 18:
Le Pastoralet. A Burgundian satire, in the form of a Pastoral, written
by one Burcarius in the first half of the fifteenth century, and
published of late years in the Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove’s collection
of Belgian chronicles.
As for Louis, the Burgundian has no word in favour of this melancholy
free-lover, this _Tristifer_ (for such is the name he goes by among
shepherds) who sins with no pleasure in sin; who spends his days in the
pursuit of love, yet keeps a heart of iron; whose joys are such as are
not to be found in the real world, but the fantastic joys of art,
repugnant to the Philistine:
“Tristifer, tristièce portant.
... Et tout fut-il jolis,
Trop sembloit-il mirancolis;
Qui le coer a plus dur que fer.
. . . . . . \.
Bien nouvelette chanson
S’en va tout chantant à hault son,
Qu’il avoit, par un soir bruyant
Et bel, rimoié en riant.”
Thus the Burgundian ... unaware that this portrait of his enemy is the
only one that awakens curiosity and stimulates the fancy. And, by way of
adding a blacker touch than all, he tells us that this singing Tristifer
is the paramour of the gay Queen Belligère.
I have said that Louis was held to possess an unearthly ring, a magic
wand, of desire. For a perfect knight it was said that he had put them
to strange uses. He had fascinated with his wand, he had bewitched with
the circle of his ring, the young wife of his brother, the beautiful
Queen Isabel. And he was the bridegroom of Valentine Visconti. Queen
Isabel was at Melun to greet her new kinswoman. We can imagine with what
critical eyes she ran her over. Valentine, though not beautiful, was a
novel and irradiating vision in her veil of gems. She was wise too; she
could talk with her husband over the poems he made, the verses of Lord
Salisbury and Maître Eustache Deschamps, the romances of Wenzel of
Luxembourg, or of Maître Jean d’Arras, all the literature of the Court.
She could argue with him, this subtle Lombard, in the tenuous and
fanciful dissertations that he loved. Queen Isabel could not endure to
see this stranger, by reason of her splendour and her novelty become the
centre of attraction. The marriage festival was scarcely over when
Isabel persuaded her husband to ordain a greater festivity for herself.
She had been married four years, she was known by sight to every clerk
in the Rue St. Denis, yet the King, obedient to her behest, proclaimed
the Royal Entry of the Queen into Paris.
V.
This Paris that Valentine entered as a stranger was a beautiful city.
The streets and bridges had been largely rebuilt by her uncle, Charles
the Wise. Between the new Bastille and the river he had raised an
immense royal palace, the Hôtel de St. Paul. Close at hand stood the
Palais de Tournelles, the great hotel of the King of Sicily, the Hôtel
Clisson, and the Hôtel de Behaigne, where the husband of Valentine
sometimes lived. A little farther off (in the Rue de Turbigo) the castle
of the Duke of Burgundy still rears its out-dated menace. On the left
bank of the Seine another group of palaces surrounded Nôtre Dame. At the
extremity of the city stood the Louvre. Rebuilt by Charles the Wise, it
was endowed by him with a library of nine hundred and ten volumes
(chiefly illuminated missals, legends, miracles, and treatises on
astrology). There a silver lamp burned always day and night in the
service of students, to whom the library was ever open.
Paris was a beautiful city; but it seemed a paradise upon the occasion
of the royal entry. The Rue St. Denis was draped from top to bottom in
green and crimson silk scattered with stars. Under the gateway angels
sang in a starry heaven, and to the sweet sound of instruments little
children played a miracle. There were towers and stages raised along the
streets, where the legend of Troy-town and other pleasant matters were
enacted. There were fountains also, flowing with milk or flowing with
claret. Maidens, in rich chaplets of flowers, stood beside them and out
of golden cups they gave the passers-by to drink, and sang melodiously
the while; up and down this magic city went the citizens’ wives and
daughters in long robes of gold and purple. The citizens themselves were
clad in green, the royal officers in rose colour. But all these
splendours paled and dwindled when the royal procession came in sight.
In the middle, in an open litter, sat the Queen, the beautiful, smiling
idol of the feast; she was dressed in a gown of silk, sewn over with
French lilies worked in gold. Behind her, in painted cars, went the
great ladies of the Court. Only the Duchess of Touraine had no litter;
Valentine rode on a fair palfrey, marvellously caparisoned; she went on
one side of the Queen’s litter among the royal dukes. The people of
Paris, says Froissart, were as anxious to see the new Duchess as the
Queen, whom indeed they had often seen. For Madame Valentine was
immensely rich, the daughter of a great conqueror, and she had only just
come out of Lombardy, a mysterious country where wonderful things came
to pass. What impression did Valentine make on the people of Paris,
pressing and craving to see the foreign duchess?
Which of her gala-dresses did she wear? The scarlet one sewn thick with
pearls and diamonds, with a cap of pearls and scarlet for her dusky
hair? Or the robe of gold brocade with sleeves and headdress of woven
pearls? Or the flashing crown of balasses and sapphires, and the dress
of scarlet sewn with jewels and embroidered with pale blue borage
flowers? In any of these this splendid Italian stranger must have
appeared to the burghers of Paris as a vision of Southern luxury, of
mysterious outlandish enchantment. At least it is certain that never
after they looked upon her as a mere mortal woman. Just at that season
every one was reading the “Mélusine” of Maître Jean d’Arras. Valentine
of Milan with her fairy splendours, her subtle wisdom, her Lombard
traditions—Valentine, with the Visconti snake on her escutcheon—must
have seemed to these Parisians much such another mysterious
serpent-woman, another Mélusine. For the Italian character, never
fanatic and yet so prone to spiritual passions; seldom bestial, yet so
guilty of unnatural vices—Italy has ever been a mystery, a hateful
enigma to the practical French; and of all Italians the Lombards, the
border people, are most unlike their Gallic neighbours. A century later,
when the French poured into Italy, no blazing mountain of Vesuvius, no
wonderful Venetian city swimming in the seas, no antique and glorious
ruins of Rome, so much astonished the foreign soldiers as the learned
and subtle ladies of Lombardy. Those later chroniclers who have been in
Italy relate with wonder their fables of ecstatic virgins, and gifted
women wiser than their sex; they have seen one Anna, a woman forty years
of age, who never eats, drinks, or sleeps, and who bears on her body the
mystical wounds of Christ, breaking out and bleeding afresh on every
Friday. In Milan, a demoiselle Trivulce, “de son grant jeune aage,“
wrote letters in Latin and was eloquent in oratory; “elle estoit aussi
poeticque” (adds the author of La Mer des Chroniques) “et scavoit moult
bien disputer avecques clercs et docteurs.” And also she was virtuous,
so that her holy life seemed a thing to marvel on. At Venice, Maître
Nicole Gilles encountered a certain Virgin Cassandra, the daughter of
Angelo Fideli, a maiden expert in the seven liberal arts and in
theology, all of which matters she expounded in public lectures. At
Quiers, near Asti, a “jeune pucelle,” the daughter of Maître Jehan
Solier, received the king with a public and most eloquent oration.
Learned and subtle and virtuous as these Lombard ladies were,
enthusiastic and spiritual as were many of their countrymen, yet this
strange Italy, where the women taught the men, where Jesus Christ in
Florence was the official head of the Republic, inspired a secret dread
and horror in the French. Like men in an enchanted country, they feared
what might lurk behind the shows of things. Above all, the French could
never rid themselves of a haunting suspicion of poison—poison and
sorcery, underhand and terrible weapons, such as these frank and
passionate Gauls associated with the subtlety and wisdom of the people
they had conquered. “And yet,” says Commines, “I must here speak
somewhat in honour of the Italian nation, because we never found in all
this voyage that they _did_ seek to do us harm by poison, and yet, if
they had chosen, we could hardly have avoided it.”
This attitude of suspicion towards Italy, of reluctant admiration,
characterized the French of 1494. Minus the admiration, it is quite as
significant of the French to-day; and in 1387 the same distrust was
there, but sharper, more anxious, and the same wonder, but intensified.
Valentine the Italian, seemed to these alert, honest, practical
Parisians a marvel of strangeness and wisdom; but to them these
attributes suggested chiefly a fatal potency for evil.
And, in truth, there was in Italy a wickedness such as for another
hundred years should not penetrate into France. The Italians were a
nation of secret poisoners; and the French bourgeois vaguely guessed
that this splendid young lady was acquainted with a world terribly
different from their ingenuous and turbulent Paris. No need for
turbulence in Italy. Valentine’s father poisoned the uncle who, for his
part, had, poisoned his own brother. And Giangaleazzo, who, as Corio
relates, had been nearly poisoned by Antonio della Scala, disposed of
that enemy by the self-same means. The Florentines[19] (but theirs is
the evidence of an enemy) said he paid his official poisoner a hundred
florins monthly. These it was murmured were the traditions of the new
Duchess.
Footnote 19:
Lamansky: “Secrets de l’Etat de Venise,” pp. 157-159. Also “Archivio
di Firenze,” Signori Legazione Commissioni, &c. Filza 28, folio 7 t.
Thus, after all, Queen Isabel played but the second part in the pageant
of her entry. Soon, however, she forgot her jealousy of the Italian—a
jealousy which on that holiday kept her sick in her chamber, while
Valentine danced with Touraine and the King in the royal ball below. But
Valentine was no rival of the beautiful, bright little Queen: she was a
persistent, ambitious, and devoted woman, never vain and never timid.
From the first she lavished on her boyish husband that passionate
devotion of an elder woman which asks no return from the radiant young
creature she adores. She did not grudge Louis the love of Isabel, if,
indeed, that love was his. A stranger thing happened: Valentine united
with her rival to push the fortunes of Touraine. These two women were
ever together, ever scheming, and planning the welfare of the unfaithful
husband of the one, whom an unbroken tradition has regarded as the
criminal lover of the other. An unnatural league; but it served to
strengthen Touraine.
For Valentine and Isabel alike had the ear of the King. Charles VI., a
little slow, a little dull, neglected in his Court, betrayed by his wife
for his more brilliant brother—this gentle, kindly, unimportant creature
was irresistibly drawn to his sister-in-law. Of all her royal kinsfolk
in France, the King was the only one who from the first had welcomed
Valentine. “My dear sister, my beloved sister,” the words were ever on
his lips. Valentine, like him, was set aside; like him she suffered.
She, too, was patient and gentle; but she was strong, she was prudent.
The King of France was a great heavy lad, over-boyish for his years,
loving jests and disguises, hating ceremony, and only very dimly feeling
the wrongs that perplexed him; he sought from the sweet and quiet
Italian her protection no less than her compassion.
In 1390, at Montpellier, the King could not support his absence from
her. “I am too far from the Queen and Madame Valentine,” he said to his
brother. “Let us ride post haste to Paris.” Unaccompanied and for a
wager, they rode all the way, four nights and nearly five days in the
saddle.... A little later the physicians said that such violent
exercises as this had unsettled the feeble reason of the King.
VI.
In 1391, the young Duke of Touraine acquired the succession of the
Duchess of Orleans. He was now as rich as he was ambitious. Could the
old king, his father, have seen his eminence and his ambition, he would
have risen from his grave, and have returned to the salvation of France.
But the dust was in his ears and eyes, and it was not to be so.