the Monk of St. Denis, strange, languishing, and bewildered. When, in
the summer of 1392, the French invaded Brittany, the Dukes, his uncles,
conjured him to remain at home. But Charles was not to be persuaded. He
started with them upon the long, fatiguing journey.
On the 5th of August, near the town of Mans, after some hours of riding
in armour under a beating sun, the royal party passed the
Lepers’-village. A beggar, a leper, dressed in rags, the outcast of the
world, the lowest human thing, came out and accosted the young King of
France: “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!” The King was
startled, and though the Royal Guards interfered they could not at once
shake off the loathsome prophet. Clinging to the King’s bridle, the
leper cried again, “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!”... They
betray you! Louis and Isabel, his nearest and dearest, what else did
they? The King said nothing.
About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the King set upon his brother, his
spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag.... The more distant of the royal
party thought the King had spied a hare or a hart in the forest....
Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds,
men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman who none the less
was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The King of France was
furiously and murderously mad.
Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death.
Orleans fortunately was not hurt at all. For four days the King’s frenzy
lasted, with fits of delirium and lapses into death-like exhaustion. The
most cruel part of his sickness was the evident anguish of his spirit.
“Will no one pluck out of my heart the dagger that my fair brother of
Orleans has planted there?” the poor mad youth would cry; and he would
mutter to himself, “I must kill him! I _must_ kill him!” It was useless
to instruct the people that there is no reason in the sick hatred of a
distempered mind. Nor would they find sufficient motive in the rumoured
unfaithfulness of Isabel with Louis. They sought a darker, a more subtle
explanation, and their suspicions were fostered, for political ends, by
the enemies of Orleans—the faction of his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.
For when the King recovered from his frenzy, his mind remained weak and
disabled. It was necessary to hand over to his uncles for a while the
direction of affairs. This made the strongest of them, Philip, Duke of
Burgundy, more than ever strong; he was in fact, though not in form, the
regent. Against his rule one voice was ever raised in protest, the voice
of the young ambitious brother of the King.
Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one years of age; through his marriage
and the gifts of the King he had become formidably rich; through the
weakness of the King he was formidably powerful. He was the nearest to
the throne and he desired the regency. But the people suspected Orleans;
he had too much to gain by the death or the incapacity of his brother.
The people, in their passionate pity for the gentle monarch they adored,
began to hate and fear the Queen and Orleans. In later days they did not
scruple to declare their misgivings, but at first they dared not
directly accuse the Queen, they would not directly accuse the young,
beautiful Louis, their pride from his childhood, eloquent, religious,
gay, slow to anger. With Juvenal they found him “beau prince et
gratieux;” and, like Christine, they accounted him, “en ces jeunes faiz
et en toutes choses très-avenant ... car il aime les bons ... nul
fellonie ni cruauté en luy.” But he was young; he had been led away
(Juvenal finds the phrase for them) “_by the means of those who were
near to him_.... He had strange youthful follies that I will not
declare.... _There were those about him_, young people, who induced him
to do many things he had better have left undone.” This vague and
mysterious excuse is the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began
to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.
The King mad; the King’s brother a wizard! There was a contagion of
horror in France. “Many nobles and poor people,” writes the Monk of St.
Denis, “began to change and sicken with the same strange malady that had
attacked the King.” The fanatic terror of supernatural evil spread and
deepened.
Things, at that critical season, fell out unfortunately for Orleans. On
the 29th of January, 1393, there was a wedding festival at the Hôtel de
St. Paul for one of Queen Isabel’s German maids of honour. The bride was
a widow, and thrice a widow; therefore a subject for the grotesque
licence of the age. At night, in the great hall among the dancers,
suddenly there burst in a company of six satyrs dressed in tight linen
vests, with flakes of tow fastened with pitch upon their backs. These
hideous merry-makers sprang and danced about the bride, with leaps and
gestures, in a sort of diabolic frenzy. Five of them were chained
together, the sixth disported loose. The sixth was the King. Stung by
some unlucky madcap prompting, Orleans took a flaming torch from its
bearer, and held it close to the face of one of the maskers to see who
he was. A flake of fire from the torch dropped among the tow and pitch.
Up and down the hall, dancing a wilder and more terrible saraband, the
flaming satyrs went. Two were burned to ashes, two died of their burns
in agony, one saved himself by leaping into a water-butt. The King was
rescued by the Duchess of Berri, who wrapped him in her mantle. But the
danger and the fearful spectacle had upset his tottering reason. The
King was mad again.
The people were furious against Orleans. Had Charles been burned, his
brother’s life must have answered for it; for the people loved the King.
The party of Burgundy—the popular party—did not hesitate to accuse the
unfortunate young Duke of a fiendish plot to murder his brother. It was
in vain that Louis raised a magnificent chapel of marble in the Church
of the Celestines, to expiate his involuntary guilt. The people murmured
that the Duke of Orleans went too often to the Celestines. It was said
he went there every day. So much devotion was uncanny in so wild a
liver.
Charitable souls like Demoiselle Christine declared in vain—“C’est
impossible que son âme et ses mœurs n’en vaillent mieux.” Charitable
souls are rare. The mass of the people did not hesitate to say that
Louis visited the Celestines the better to conspire with a certain monk
there—an old counsellor of his father’s—one Sire Philippe de Mézières.
This person was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, able, and a man of
science, according to the age. “Cestui vieil solitaire” for forty years
had been the counsellor of princes. For thirty years he had been the
life and soul of the policy of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of the Christian East.
Then disgraced by an ungrateful king—Pierre II. de Lusignan—he took
refuge in France, bringing to the service of Charles V. his enthusiasm,
his political wisdom, his minute and extensive acquaintance with the
Courts of Italy and the East. In 1379 he entered the Convent of the
Celestines in Paris; not too secluded to remain the trusted counsellor
of Charles V., and in his turn, of his son Louis of Orleans. But though
the good Sire was a monk, the crowd doubted of his religion, for it was
common rumour that he said there was no truth in sorcery. Let him say
it! Sire Philippe de Mézières was none the less no judicious companion
for the Duke of Orleans. The Sire had lived too long in Lombardy: “a
country,” as Juvenal describes it, “where they practice magic and the
casting of spells.”
About the same time a malignant rumour grew in France concerning the
father of Valentine. People said the Seigneur of Milan had asked the
French Ambassador for news of the King. “He is very well,” replied the
Frenchman. Whereupon Visconti grew pale, and staggered. “He is the
Devil!” he said, with great admiration; or, according to another
version, “Diabolicum recitas et quod est impossibile—You tell me a
diabolic thing, and one that is impossible! _The King can not be well!_“
Now, it was generally known in Italy that the Duke of Milan, like every
other successful prince or Signory, was a secret poisoner. But in France
a more terrible and a yet more hateful accusation was rumoured against
him. The people began to whisper that the Duke of Milan was a wizard.
VII.
The King was mad again; he had fallen into the first of innumerable
relapses. Henceforth, for thirty years, any moment of too poignant
feeling would throw him back in agony and madness. At such times he
suffered much. It would happen (says the Monk of St. Denis), that as he
sat in his council chamber, receiving his ambassadors and discoursing
with sense and clearness, a sudden shudder would pass over him, the
actual world would drift into oblivion. Again the forest near Mans, the
leper’s warning, would rise on his tormented vision. He would shriek out
for help against his enemies, and yet, poor king, be still aware these
enemies were phantasms. At such moments he would cry and wail and sob,
till all the Court fell a-weeping to hear him. “O not madness. Death,
any pain, anything but madness!” and joining his hands he would look
eagerly in face after face of his kinsmen. “I pray you, for the love of
Christ, if any of you be party to this magic, then let me die at once
and end it.” But no prayers avail, and as the fantastic world of lunacy
gradually eclipsed the receding truth, the King’s last entreaty showed
the unaltered sweetness of his tormented nature. “Keep away all the
knives,” he would cry. “I had rather die than hurt any one.” For no
lapse of time, no suffering effaced in his gentle character the stamp of
that terrible moment of Mans when he had awoken to find his innocent
hands stained henceforth for ever with innocent and loyal blood.
While the King wailed in desperate protest against his oncoming madness,
all the Court wept with him. But, once that eclipse accomplished, the
Court forgot the King. Part of the royal palace of St. Paul’s had been
turned into a safe asylum. There the King lived, sometimes for many
weeks unwashed, eaten with filth and vermin, suffering no attendant to
approach him. He was then a mere wild beast, tormented with canine
hunger, fierce, suspicious, and sometimes wild with fear. Then he would
pace from end to end of his apartments, fleeing his imaginary pursuers,
until he dropt exhausted in senseless lethargy.
But more often, and especially in the first years of his illness, he was
not sunk so low as this. He was then an aimless, laughing, boyish
imbecile. He was no longer the King even in his own fancy; he had
forgotten himself as others had forgotten him. Did he see his own arms
or the Queen’s emblazoned anywhere upon the walls, he would smear out
that heraldry, laughing the while and dancing in a burlesque, unseemly
fashion. “These are not my arms. I am not King Charles. My name is
George,” he would cry, “and my arms are a lion pierced with a spear.”
The poor King was himself transfixed with that intangible spear his fair
brother of Orleans had planted in his heart for ever. But in his
madness, his jealousy had undergone a subtle change. Sometimes he could
not endure the sight or mention of the Queen and Orleans, but more often
he utterly forgot them. Once they brought Isabel into his presence. He
shook his head and swore he did not know the lady.
There was in all the world one only creature whose presence shed a
little balm and solace on his unhappy lunacy. This was his
sister-in-law, Madame Valentine. She was the only person he ever fully
recognized. Absent and present he called upon her, “Oh, my dearest
sister! Oh, my beloved sister!” and if Valentine left him a single day
unvisited, the poor king would wander up and down for hours in aimless
regret and complaining.
Valentine was kind and pitiful. Although at this time she was ailing
(her second son was born in August, 1393), she did not fear to bring her
delicate magnificence into the filth and peril of the mad king’s
presence. For hours she would sit with him, playing at cards: those
painted Saracen Naibi which Covelluzzo noticed at Viterbo (the first
known in Europe) in 1379. Perhaps Valentine had brought them out of
Italy; they were the only pastime of the haggard king; and for hours the
painted images of Death, Love, Fortune, Madness, and the Angel, would
silently fall from the hands of these two unhappy people, keeping each
other melancholy company in the dismantled chambers of the barred and
altered palace.
Valentine was ill herself; she was a woman; and yet she was not afraid
of this tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five, subject to
violent mania, who in one fearful paroxysm had slain four men in armour.
His attendants dared not come too near. But Valentine seemed to bear a
charmed life, she did not even tremble. This unnatural courage of hers,
this fascination, this mastery which she exercised upon their king ...
all this was terribly explicable to the people of Paris.
Who was this lady?—Valentine of Milan. “Now,” says Juvenal, “her father
was the Duke of Milan,[20] who was a Lombard, and in his country they
practise magic and the casting of spells.” “The common people,” says the
Monk, “declared the King was bewitched. They accused the Duke of Milan,
and in confirmation of this ridiculous proposition they said the Duchess
of Orleans was the only person the King recognized or cherished in his
sickness. They did not scruple to say she was a witch, though that so
generous a lady should commit so great a crime is a fact that never has
been proved.” “The King’s physicians, arioles, and charmers,” says
Froissart, “affirmed the King was poisoned or bewitched by craft of
sorcery; they said they knew it by the spirits that had showed it to
them. Of these diviners, arioles, and charmers, certain were burned at
Paris and at Avignon. They spake so much, and said the Duchess Valentine
of Orleans, daughter to the Duke of Milan, had bewitched the King.”
Footnote 20:
Giangaleazzo in 1395 obtained the title and investiture of the Duchy
of Milan from Wenzel, King of the Romans, for 100,000 florins.
In those days the accusation of sorcery was terrible and ominous. To
bewitch the King was the most damnable of crimes, for witchcraft in
itself was treason against God. It was indeed no less than taking out of
heaven the tremendous issues of life and death, apportioning them with
profane and mortal hands, and breaking the heavenly order of the
universe. God was mocked. This side of sorcery excited the horror of
theologians, but it was not this that infuriated with helpless terror
the shuddering populace. We know how the Polynesian islanders will die
to-day of a fatal langour if they believe their enemy has prayed against
them. The citizens of Paris in the Middle Ages died as easily.
“Throughout the kingdom,” says the Monk of St. Denis, “many nobles and
poor people are attacked with the same strange malady as the King’s.” A
contagion of fear paralysed the sources of life. “For they can bewitch
you,” said, in 1407, Maître Jean Petit, a very learned doctor in
theology; “and they can bewitch the King, and make him die in a very
subtle manner, quite unapparent, by the casting of a spell.” “A word is
enough,” said two Augustine friars who suffered for sorcery in 1397, “a
word, a touch; it is no natural malady.” To those who suffered, and saw
their near and dear ones suffer of this incurable, inexorable
enchantment, there was no death too cruel for the wizard.
The Duke of Milan was a very powerful magician. By spells and sorcery
he, the weakest of his clan, had made himself the most astute and potent
of all the princes of the West; by spells and sorcery he would make his
daughter queen of France. “Il n’y avait qu’une bouche à clore,“ said
Jean Petit. Valentine, the people thought, was helping her father, for
the Duchess of Orleans was a witch.
The powers of the Prince of the Air were in high places. Valentine was
not only protected by Satan—not only served by Hermas and Astramin the
two livid demons of Montjoy that obeyed the House of Orleans—she was
also sheltered by the effulgence of the throne. Every power, every
protection was hers. Hell and earth obeyed her, and heaven smiles upon
the sins of princes. Yet with the cruel heroism of pity the people of
Paris rose against her, pouring down the streets, reaching out their
fanatic hands to tear in pieces no omnipotent demon in a violent aureole
of flame, but a pale neglected foreign woman far from home. They
determined to save the King, and at last the peril of the duchess grew
so great that Marshal Sancerre and many other nobles advised her husband
to send her out of Paris. So in great pomp, nowise abashed, but with all
the splendour of a royal progress, Valentine left the city. She went to
a fair castle of her husband’s near Pontoise, and then to Neufchatel
upon the Loire. She went alone, for Orleans was kept by State affairs in
Paris. There was a subtle political reason for the irritation of France
against the Milanese. In the complex recesses of the human heart an
actual terror of supernatural evil, a crusader’s passion to avenge the
honour of God, may co-exist with the most sordid calculations of a
worldly advantage to be gained. It was not only for the love of God that
the Jews and Moors of Spain, the Protestants of Flanders, the
monasteries of England, were made to enrich their persecutors. It was
not entirely for thirty pieces of silver that Judas delivered a heretic
to the secular arm. And it was the easier to condemn the Duke of Milan
that he was not only a wizard, but the political rival of France for the
rich suzerainty of Genoa.
VIII.
The French had counted upon Giangaleazzo Visconti rather as a captain
than as a rival. Visconti had looked upon the French as the tools of his
ambition, and not as serious competitors. In reality each was in pursuit
of the same thing; each desired to be supreme in Italy.
Visconti had easily acquired the direction of his son-in-law’s policy.
It is not surprising. A lad of eighteen, poor, kept under,
systematically neglected, Orleans before his marriage had known little
of power, nothing of supremacy. He was nominally Duke of Touraine; but
his estates were administered by the King. Until a few months before his
marriage he had not even a house of his own, but lived with his retinue
in a corner of his brother’s palace. In February, 1389, he appeared for
the first time at the Royal Council. Valentine brought him wealth,
consideration, and ambition; for, with the possession of Asti, and under
the guidance of his father-in-law, the young Duke began to dream of
battles and signiories in Italy.
Visconti was very willing to adopt his daughter’s husband in place of
the clever and valiant son he should have had. His own son was a baby at
the breast. And Orleans brought him not only a clear young mind, a fresh
and eager will and the courage that the great Visconti never had, but
also the influence of France. Thus the great Ghibelline saw within his
reach the support of the Guelfs. To reconcile all parties for his own
interest was ever the aim of this unrivalled statesman, as magically
gifted to make peace as to foment a discord. Ghibelline and Guelf,
Emperor and King of France, Pope and Antipope, aye, even Orleans and
Burgundy, should join hands to fight his battles.
His first move was a whisper of ambition in the ear of his son-in-law.
And Louis forgot his love-making and ballad-making, his jousting and
feasting, and turned to other thoughts. Asti was his; Asti should be the
centre of his operations, and in swiftness and silence a French army
gathered in Asti.
In 1389, the very year of Orleans’ marriage, there was peace with
England; hence, leisure in Court and camp; hence troops of riders and
men-at-arms infesting every countryside, preying on the ruined peasants,
and loitering hungry for another war. Nothing easier than to enlist a
company! In 1389 Orleans sent to his new county François, Seigneur de
Chassenage, as governor with twenty men-at-arms and two chamberlains,
each with twenty men-at-arms and thirty archers. Fifty-five other
men-at-arms and as many archers were added to these, and formed the
nucleus of a rapidly increasing army. By the end of June more
men-at-arms and squires joined the service. Enguerrand de Coucy,
Lieutenant of the Duke and Captain-General _ès parties d’Italie_, went
to keep his state at Asti in July.[21]
Footnote 21:
Arch. Nat. (K K. 315 f^{os}. 9-52): “Notes à compter faiz à certaines
gens d’armes et archiers retenus par Monsieur le Duc à son service
avant la venue de M. de Coucy ès parties d’Ytalie.”
From this moment, long pages of the manuscript account book of
Chassenage are filled with lists of captains, men-at-arms, and archers.
Archers under Braguet, archers, under Viezville, a concentration of
devoted Orleanists, once Angevines, in Italy. Italian names, also, begin
to crop up in the French harvest: Messire Othe Tusque, des parties
d’Italie, Messire Jehan Visconti, escuier, Messire Aloyset de Plaisance,
also Luquin Rusque, Francesquin Martin demourant à Pavey, Hannibal
Lommelin of Genoa and his troop, others from as far as Florence and
Venice. Then a great name, commander of many others, a name that means
business: _Messire Facin Can and his company_.
The red towers of Asti—still here and there existing, a bouquet of
wine-red stems slenderly streaking the pale and radiant Lombard sky—the
red towers of Asti, innumerable then, grew home-like and familiar to
many a French lord. No dreary exile this—large houses, wine-red also
(“non hanno acqua ma vino per impetrargli,“ laugh the men of Alba),
beautiful churches, a rich plain, streaked with the wide Tanaro, and
girt with hills. At night, the Alps come out, invisible by day; they
appear at sundown even as a rose-red heavenly wall divinely dividing the
Lombard country from the unseen land of France.
Yet here are the French and quite at home. Plenty of wine, red and
white; beautiful women; plenty of money. Orleans pays fifteen francs a
month to every man-at-arms (but a man-at-arms, we must remember, is more
than a man, being at least the soldier himself, his page and his
varlet), eight francs a month to every archer; two hundred francs a
month to Chassenage and the chamberlains; four hundred and fifty to
Enguerrand de Coucy. All this serves at least to bring wealth and custom
to Puielhez, mine host of the Cross of Asti, who supplies the wine. But
for what other purpose does Orleans thus dissipate his new-got treasure?
The “Dance of Fools,” sculptured on a wall in the market place, by some
gay ironic band not long dead then, looks down with silent bells and
silent laughing lips that answer not.
In August, Orleans sends one of his men (Blaru), on a secret embassy to
his father-in-law at Milan, another (Craon) to the Antipope Clement.[22]
They have scarcely gone when he sends another (Garancières) to Pavia. In
February of the next year (1390) there is much prate at Court of a
voyage to Italy—voyage being then the polite name for an invasion—in
order to establish Pope Clement in his see of Rome.
Footnote 22:
De Circourt, _op. cit._, p. 48.
And now, little by little, the great plan disengages itself—audacious,
simple, as befits the brain of Visconti. Orleans and Burgundy themselves
start for Pavia, and arrive there in March, 1391. Brilliant Visconti, to
have persuaded Burgundy that the expansion of Orleans in Italy will
leave him free to extend his grasp at home! Great things also, as we
know from a passage in Walsingham,[23] are vaguely held out to Burgundy.
As for Orleans, there are no bounds to his ardour; he defrays the entire
expense of the journey, 60,000 francs, lavished magnificently to astound
his new ally and his subjects of Asti. The Royal Dukes remain but a week
in Lombardy, and then return—recalled by rumours of Armagnac’s
disturbance. But the week was long enough.
Footnote 23:
Walsingham, “Historia Anglicana,” vol. ii. p. 201.