Vanish as they like, they all go with a clog about their
feet.  Sooner or later, here or there, they will be caught in
the fact, and ignominiously sent home.  From our vantage of
four centuries afterwards, it is odd and pitiful to watch the
order in which the fugitives are captured and dragged in.

Montigny was the first.  In August of that same year, he was
laid by the heels on many grievous counts; sacrilegious
robberies, frauds, incorrigibility, and that bad business
about Thevenin Pensete in the house by the cemetery of St.
John.  He was reclaimed by the ecclesiastical authorities as
a clerk; but the claim was rebutted on the score of
incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground; and he
was condemned to death by the Provost of Paris.  It was a
very rude hour for Montigny, but hope was not yet over.  He
was a fellow of some birth; his father had been king's
pantler; his sister, probably married to some one about the
Court, was in the family way, and her health would be
endangered if the execution was proceeded with.  So down
comes Charles the Seventh with letters of mercy, commuting
the penalty to a year in a dungeon on bread and water, and a
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Galicia.  Alas! the
document was incomplete; it did not contain the full tale of
Montigny's enormities; it did not recite that he had been
denied benefit of clergy, and it said nothing about Thevenin
Pensete.  Montigny's hour was at hand.  Benefit of clergy,
honourable descent from king's pantler, sister in the family
way, royal letters of commutation - all were of no avail.  He
had been in prison in Rouen, in Tours, in Bordeaux, and four
times already in Paris; and out of all these he had come
scatheless; but now he must make a little excursion as far as
Montfaucon with Henry Cousin, executor of high justice.
There let him swing among the carrion crows.

About a year later, in July 1458, the police laid hands on
Tabary.  Before the ecclesiastical commissary he was twice
examined, and, on the latter occasion, put to the question
ordinary and extraordinary.  What a dismal change from
pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph with
expert operators and great wits!  He is at the lees of life,
poor rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper
romances are now agonisingly stretched upon the rack.  We
have no sure knowledge, but we may have a shrewd guess of the
conclusion.  Tabary, the admirer, would go the same way as
those whom he admired.

The last we hear of is Colin de Cayeux.  He was caught in
autumn 1460, in the great Church of St. Leu d'Esserens, which
makes so fine a figure in the pleasant Oise valley between
Creil and Beaumont.  He was reclaimed by no less than two
bishops; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by
incorrigible Colin.  1460 was an ill-starred year: for
justice was making a clean sweep of "poor and indigent
persons, thieves, cheats, and lockpickers," in the
neighbourhood of Paris; (1) and Colin de Cayeux, with many
others, was condemned to death and hanged. (2)

(1) CHRON.  SCAND. ut supra.
(2) Here and there, principally in the order of events, this
article differs from M. Longnon's own reading of his
material.  The ground on which he defers the execution of
Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the date of their trials seems
insufficient.  There is a law of parsimony for the
construction of historical documents; simplicity is the first
duty of narration; and hanged they were.


VILLON AND THE GALLOWS.


Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the
Prior of Paray sent such a bombshell among his accomplices;
and the dates of his return and arrest remain undiscoverable.
M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for the autumn of 1457,
which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and the
first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils.
We may suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we
may suppose him competed for between lay and clerical Courts;
and we may suppose him alternately pert and impudent, humble
and fawning, in his defence.  But at the end of all
supposing, we come upon some nuggets of fact.  For first, he
was put to the question by water.  He who had tossed off so
many cups of white Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water
through linen folds, until his bowels were flooded and his
heart stood still.  After so much raising of the elbow, so
much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at last was enough
drinking for a lifetime.  Truly, of our pleasant vices, the
gods make whips to scourge us.  And secondly he was condemned
to be hanged.  A man may have been expecting a catastrophe
for years, and yet find himself unprepared when it arrives.
Certainly, Villon found, in this legitimate issue of his
career, a very staggering and grave consideration.  Every
beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin.  If
everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay,
and it becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as
dear as all the rest.  "Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively
ballad, "that I had not enough philosophy under my hood to
cry out: 'I appeal'?  If I had made any bones about the
matter, I should have been planted upright in the fields, the
St, Denis Road" - Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis.
An appeal to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de
Cayeux, did not necessarily lead to an acquittal or a
commutation; and while the matter was pending, our poet had
ample opportunity to reflect on his position.  Hanging is a
sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination.  With the
aspect of Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the
neighbourhood appears to have been sacred to junketing and
nocturnal picnics of wild young men and women, he had
probably studied it under all varieties of hour and weather.
And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new
and startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of
epitaph for himself and his companions, which remains unique
in the annals of mankind.  It is, in the highest sense, a
piece of his biography:-


"La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
Puis ca, puis la, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiscaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."


Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that
was spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering
soul.  There is an intensity of consideration in the piece
that shows it to be the transcript of familiar thoughts.  It
is the quintessence of many a doleful nightmare on the straw,
when he felt himself swing helpless in the wind, and saw the
birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his eyes.

And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one
of banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must
carry his woes without delay.  Travellers between Lyons and
Marseilles may remember a station on the line, some way below
Vienne, where the Rhone fleets seaward between vine-clad
hills.  This was Villon's Siberia.  It would be a little warm
in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what
with the hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone
wines, he was little to be pitied on the conditions of his
exile.  Villon, in a remarkably bad ballad, written in a
breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
Parliament; the ENVOI, like the proverbial postscript of a
lady's letter, containing the pith of his performance in a
request for three days' delay to settle his affairs and bid
his friends farewell.  He was probably not followed out of
Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular preacher, another
exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes; (1) but I
daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a
bottle with him before they turned.  For banished people, in
those days, seem to have set out on their own responsibility,
in their own guard, and at their own expense.  It was no joke
to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon alone and
penniless in the fifteenth century.  Villon says he left a
rag of his tails on every bush.  Indeed, he must have had
many a weary tramp, many a slender meal, and many a to-do
with blustering captains of the Ordonnance.  But with one of
his light fingers, we may fancy that he took as good as he
gave; for every rag of his tail, he would manage to indemnify
himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France
and Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over
petty thefts, like the track of a single human locust.  A
strange figure he must have cut in the eyes of the good
country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet, with a
smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street
arab, posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the
green fields and vineyards.  For himself, he had no taste for
rural loveliness; green fields and vineyards would be mighty
indifferent to Master Francis; but he would often have his
tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic dupes, and
often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.

(1) CHRON. SCAND., p. 338.

How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the
protege of the Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when
it was that he took part, under the auspices of Charles of
Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be referred to once again
in the pages of the present volume, are matters that still
remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives.  When we next find him, in summer
1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-
sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of
Orleans.  He had been lowered in a basket into a noisome pit,
where he lay, all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing
upon fate.  His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for
being excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the
man for being a caricature of his own misery.  His eyes were
"bandaged with thick walls."  It might blow hurricanes
overhead; the lightning might leap in high heaven; but no
word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.  "Il
n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon."  Above all, he was
fevered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his
heart flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault
d'Aussigny, walking the streets in God's sunlight, and
blessing people with extended fingers.  So much we find
sharply lined in his own poems.  Why he was cast again into
prison - how he had again managed to shave the gallows - this
we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we
ever likely to learn.  But on October 2d, 1461, or some day
immediately preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his
joyous entry into Meun.  Now it was a part of the formality
on such occasions for the new King to liberate certain
prisoners; and so the basket was let down into Villon's pit,
and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but
once more a free man, into the blessed sun and wind.  Now or
never is the time for verses!  Such a happy revolution would
turn the head of a stocking-weaver, and set him jingling
rhymes.  And so - after a voyage to Paris, where he finds
Montigny and De Cayeux clattering, their bones upon the
gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets,
"with their thumbs under their girdles," - down sits Master
Francis to write his LARGE TESTAMENT, and perpetuate his name
in a sort of glorious ignominy.


THE LARGE TESTAMENT.


Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style
in general, it is here the place to speak.  The LARGE
TESTAMENT is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental
reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and
enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable
ballades, both serious and absurd.  With so free a design, no
thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed
without expression; and he could draw at full length the
portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and
blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and
sufferings.  If the reader can conceive something between the
slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's DON JUAN and the racy
humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the
vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of
Villon's style.  To the latter writer - except in the
ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from
no other language known to me - he bears a particular
resemblance.  In common with Burns he has a certain rugged
compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a
delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides
of life, that are often despised and passed over by more
effete and cultured poets.  Both also, in their strong, easy
colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the
obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language.  They are perhaps the
only two great masters of expression who keep sending their
readers to a glossary.

"Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that
he has a handsome leg?"  It is a far more serious claim that
we have to put forward in behalf of Villon.  Beside that of
his contemporaries, his writing, so full of colour, so
eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in an almost miraculous
isolation.  If only one or two of the chroniclers could have
taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a
pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as
the age of Charles Second.  This gallows-bird was the one
great writer of his age and country, and initiated modern
literature for France.  Boileau, long ago, in the period of
perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the first
articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not
by priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not
on a comparison with obscure forerunners, but with great and
famous successors, we shall instal this ragged and
disreputable figure in a far higher niche in glory's temple
than was ever dreamed of by the critic.  It is, in itself, a
memorable fact that, before 1542, in the very dawn of
printing, and while modern France was in the making, the
works of Villon ran through seven different editions.  Out of
him flows much of Rabelais; and through Rabelais, directly
and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and growing inspiration.
Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way of looking
upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a
more specific feature in the literature of France.  And only
the other year, a work of some power appeared in Paris, and
appeared with infinite scandal, which owed its whole inner
significance and much of its outward form to the study of our
rhyming thief.

The world to which he introduces us is, as before said,
blackguardly and bleak.  Paris swarms before us, full of
famine, shame, and death; monks and the servants of great
lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry; the poor man
licks his lips before the baker's window; people with patched
eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and
ruffling students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes
stumbling homewards; the graveyard is full of bones; and away
on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux and Montigny hang draggled in
the rain.  Is there nothing better to be seen than sordid
misery and worthless joys?  Only where the poor old mother of
the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.

In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers,
where not long before, Joan of Arc had led one of the highest
and noblest lives in the whole story of mankind, this was all
worth chronicling that our poet could perceive.  His eyes
were indeed sealed with his own filth.  He dwelt all his life
in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Meun.  In the moral
world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners.  Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden
ships and sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning
leaps and cleans the face of heaven; high purposes and brave
passions shake and sublimate men's spirits; and meanwhile, in
the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is mumbling crusts and
picking vermin.

Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work: its unrivalled insincerity.  I
can give no better similitude of this quality than I have
given already: that he comes up with a whine, and runs away
with a whoop and his finger to his nose.  His pathos is that
of a professional mendicant who should happen to be a man of
genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread.  On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy
the reader, and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of
sympathy.  But when the thing is studied the illusion fades
away: in the transitions, above all, we can detect the evil,
ironical temper of the man; and instead of a flighty work,
where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for the
mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to
think of the LARGE TESTAMENT as of one long-drawn epical
grimace, pulled by a merry-andrew, who has found a certain
despicable eminence over human respect and human affections
by perching himself astride upon the gallows.  Between these
two views, at best, all temperate judgments will be found to
fall; and rather, as I imagine, towards the last.

There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in
one case, even threatening sincerity.

The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer
than himself.  He was for ever drawing a parallel, already
exemplified from his own words, between the happy life of the
well-to-do and the miseries of the poor.  Burns, too proud
and honest not to work, continued through all reverses to
sing of poverty with a light, defiant note.  Beranger waited
till he was himself beyond the reach of want, before writing
the OLD VAGABOND or JACQUES.  Samuel Johnson, although he was
very sorry to be poor, "was a great arguer for the advantages
of poverty" in his ill days.  Thus it is that brave men carry
their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in their
vitals.  But Villon, who had not the courage to be poor with
honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his
teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl.  He envies
bitterly, envies passionately.  Poverty, he protests, drives
men to steal, as hunger makes the wolf sally from the forest.
The poor, he goes on, will always have a carping word to say,
or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious thoughts.
It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor.  Thousands in
a small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through
life with tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of
mind, as the rich gluttons whose dainties and state-beds
awakened Villon's covetous temper.  And every morning's sun
sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil.  But Villon
was the "mauvais pauvre" defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its
English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens.  He
was the first wicked sansculotte.  He is the man of genius
with the moleskin cap.  He is mighty pathetic and beseeching
here in the street, but I would not go down a dark road with
him for a large consideration.

The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic
was common to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling
conviction of the transitory nature of this life and the pity
and horror of death.  Old age and the grave, with some dark
and yet half-sceptical terror of an after-world - these were
ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.  An old ape,
as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
none of them will tickle an audience into good humour.
"Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant."  It is not the old
jester who receives most recognition at a tavern party, but
the young fellow, fresh and handsome, who knows the new
slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air.  Of this,
as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious.
As for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his
reflections on their old age, in all their harrowing pathos,
shall remain in the original for me.  Horace has disgraced
himself to something the same tune; but what Horace throws
out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.

It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration in the
swift and sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the
strange revolution by which great fortunes and renowns are
diminished to a handful of churchyard dust; and in the utter
passing away of what was once lovable and mighty.  It is in
this that the mixed texture of his thought enables him to
reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enchance
pity with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral
march.  It is in this, also, that he rises out of himself
into the higher spheres of art.  So, in the ballade by which
he is best known, he rings the changes on names that once
stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no more
than letters and a legend.  "Where are the snows of yester
year?" runs the burden.  And so, in another not so famous, he
passes in review the different degrees of bygone men, from
the holy Apostles and the golden Emperor of the East, down to
the heralds, pursuivants, and trumpeters, who also bore their
part in the world's pageantries and ate greedily at great
folks' tables: all this to the refrain of "So much carry the
winds away!"  Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux
clattering their bones on Paris gibbet.  Alas, and with so
pitiful an experience of life, Villon can offer us nothing
but terror and lamentation about death!  No one has ever more
skilfully communicated his own disenchantment; no one ever
blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness.  This unrepentant
thief can attain neither to Christian confidence, nor to the
spirit of the bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love
die early.  It is a poor heart, and a poorer age, that cannot
accept the conditions of life with some heroic readiness.

* * * *

The date of the LARGE TESTAMENT is the last date in the
poet's biography.  After having achieved that admirable and
despicable performance, he disappears into the night from
whence he came.  How or when he died, whether decently in bed
or trussed up to a gallows, remains a riddle for foolhardy
commentators.  It appears his health had suffered in the pit
at Meun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald; with the
notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the
sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine.  In default
of portraits, this is all I have been able to piece together,
and perhaps even the baldness should be taken as a figure of
his destitution.  A sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with
a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with
wit and an overweening sensual temperament.  Certainly the
sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.



CHAPTER VII - CHARLES OF ORLEANS



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. (1)  "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 the time, to a
liberal education in itself.

(1) Champollion-Figeac's LOUIS ET CHARLES D'ORLEANS, p. 348.

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. (1)  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. (2)  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. (3)
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. (4)  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. (5)  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. (6)  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." (7)  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." (8)

(1) D'Hericault's admirable MEMOIR, prefixed to his edition
of Charles's works, vol. i. p. xi.
(2) Vallet de Viriville, CHARLES VII. ET SON EPOQUE, ii. 428,
note 2.
(3) See Lecoy de la Marche, LE ROI RENE, i. 167.
(4) Vallet, CHARLES VII, ii. 85, 86, note 2.
(5) Champollion-Figeac, 193-198.
(6) Champollion-Figeac, 209.
(7) The student will see that there are facts cited, and
expressions borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period
extending over almost the whole of Charles's life, instead of
being confined entirely to his boyhood.  As I do not believe
there was any change, so I do not believe there is any
anachronism involved.
(8) THE DEBATE BETWEEN THE HERALDS OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND,
translated and admirably edited by Mr. Henry Pyne.  For the
attribution of this tract to Charles, the reader is referred
to Mr. Pyne's conclusive argument.

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. (1)  It is fairly
debatable whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three
years later (September 1409), this odd marriage was dissolved
by death.  Short as it was, however, this connection left a
lasting stamp upon his mind; and we find that, in the last
decade of his life, and after he had remarried for perhaps
the second time, he had not yet forgotten or forgiven the
violent death of Richard II.  "Ce mauvais cas" - that ugly
business, he writes, has yet to be avenged.

(1) Des Ursins.

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
Shakspeare's Hamlet.  The times were out of joint; here was a
murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here,
in both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set
these matters right.  Valentina's commendation of Dunois
involved a judgment on Charles, and that judgment was exactly
correct.  Whoever might be, Charles was not the man to avenge
his father.  Like Hamlet, this son of a dear father murdered
was sincerely grieved at heart.  Like Hamlet, too, he could
unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter
to the king, complaining that what was denied to him would
not be denied "to the lowest born and poorest man on earth."
Even in his private hours he strove to preserve a lively
recollection of his injury, and keep up the native hue of
resolution.  He had gems engraved with appropriate legends,
hortatory or threatening: "DIEU LE SCET," God knows it; or
"SOUVENEZ-VOUS DE - " Remember! (1)  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.

(1) Michelet, iv.  App.  179, p. 337.

Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of honourable
mention.  Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts; and there
is a story extant, to illustrate how lightly he himself
regarded these commercial obligations.  It appears that
Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunder-storm, had
a smart access of penitence, and announced he would pay his
debts on the following Sunday.  More than eight hundred
creditors presented themselves, but by that time the devil
was well again, and they were shown the door with more gaiety
than politeness.  A time when such cynical dishonesty was
possible for a man of culture is not, it will be granted, a
fortunate epoch for creditors.  When the original debtor was
so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the
incumbrances of his inheritance.  On the death of Philip the
Forward, father of that John the Fearless whom we have seen
at work, the widow went through the ceremony of a public
renunciation of goods; taking off her purse and girdle, she
left them on the grave, and thus, by one notable act,
cancelled her husband's debts and defamed his honour.  The
conduct of young Charles of Orleans was very different.  To
meet the joint liabilities of his father and mother (for
Valentina also was lavish), he had to sell or pledge a
quantity of jewels; and yet he would not take advantage of a
pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount.  Thus,
one Godefroi 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. (1)  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." (2)  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.

(1) Champollion-Figeac, pp. 279-82.
(2) Michelet, iv. pp. 123-4.


II.


From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second
period of Charles's life.  The English reader will remember
the name of Orleans in the play of HENRY V.; and it is at
least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet
and the original.  The interjection, "I have heard a sonnet
begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well
indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of
trifle; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable
in the same scene, would be quite in character for a man who
spent many years of his life capping verses with his
courtiers.  Certainly, Charles was in the great battle with
five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
was made prisoner as he led the van.  According to one story,
some ragged English archer shot him down; and some diligent
English Pistol, hunting ransoms on the field of battle,
extracted him from under a heap of bodies and retailed him to
our King Henry.  He was the most important capture of the
day, and used with all consideration.  On the way to Calais,
Henry sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you
will remember, was an article of luxury in the English camp),
but Charles would neither eat nor drink.  Thereupon, Henry
came to visit him in his quarters.  "Noble cousin," said he,
"how are you?"  Charles replied that he was well.  "Why,
then, do you neither eat nor drink?"  And then with some
asperity, as I imagine, the young duke told him that "truly
he had no inclination for food."  And our Henry improved the
occasion with something of a snuffle, assuring his prisoner
that God had fought against the French on account of their
manifold sins and transgressions.  Upon this there supervened
the agonies of a rough sea passage; and many French lords,
Charles, certainly, among the number, declared they would
rather endure such another defeat than such another sore
trial on shipboard.  Charles, indeed, never forgot his
sufferings.  Long afterwards, he declared his hatred to a
seafaring life, and willingly yielded to England the empire
of the seas, "because there is danger and loss of life, and
God knows what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness is for
many people hard to bear; and the rough life that must be led
is little suitable for the nobility:" (1) which, of all
babyish utterances that ever fell from any public man, may
surely bear the bell.  Scarcely disembarked, he followed his
victor, with such wry face as we may fancy, through the
streets of holiday London.  And then the doors closed upon
his last day of garish life for more than a quarter of a
century.  After a boyhood passed in the dissipations of a
luxurious court or in the camp of war, his ears still stunned
and his cheeks still burning from his enemies' jubilations;
out of all this ringing of English bells and singing of
English anthems, from among all these shouting citizens in
scarlet cloaks, and beautiful virgins attired in white, he
passed into the silence and solitude of a political prison.
(2)

(1) DEBATE BETWEEN THE HERALDS.
(2) Sir H. Nicholas, AGINCOURT.

His captivity was not without alleviations.  He was allowed
to go hawking, and he found England an admirable country for
the sport; he was a favourite with English ladies, and
admired their beauty; and he did not lack for money, wine, or
books; he was honourably imprisoned in the strongholds of
great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.  But
when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty
years.  For five-and-twenty years he could not go where he
would, or do what he liked, or speak with any but his
gaolers.  We may talk very wisely of alleviations; there is
only one alleviation for which the man would thank you: he
would thank you to open the door.  With what regret Scottish
James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles)
of the time when he rose "as early as the day."  What would
he not have given to wet his boots once more with morning
dew, and follow his vagrant fancy among the meadows?  The
only alleviation to the misery of constraint lies in the
disposition of the prisoner.  To each one this place of
discipline brings his own lesson.  It stirs Latude or Baron
Trenck into heroic action; it is a hermitage for pious and
conformable spirits.  Beranger tells us he found prison life,
with its regular hours and long evenings, both pleasant and
profitable.  THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and DON QUIXOTE were
begun in prison.  It was after they were become (to use the
words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment - the dungeon
of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so
well for the profit of mankind.  In the year 1415 Henry V.
had two distinguished prisoners, French Charles of Orleans
and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their
captivity with rhyming.  Indeed, there can be no better
pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical exercise of
verse.  Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel,
with the recurrence first of the whole, then of half the
burthen, in thirteen verses, seem to have been invented for
the prison and the sick bed.  The common Scotch saying, on
the sight of anything operose and finical, "he must have had
little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on all
the song books of old France.  Making such sorts of verse
belongs to the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics
or "burying proverbs."  It is almost purely formal, almost
purely verbal.  It must be done gently and gingerly.  It
keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so intently as
to be distressing; for anything like strain is against the
very nature of the craft.  Sometimes things go easily, the
refrains fall into their place as if of their own accord, and
it becomes something of the nature of an intellectual tennis;
you must make your poem as the rhymes will go, just as you
must strike your ball as your adversary played it.  So that
these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to make
verses, than for those who wish to express opinions.
Sometimes, on the other hand, difficulties arise: rival
verses come into a man's head, and fugitive words elude his
memory.  Then it is that he enjoys at the same time the
deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and
the ardour of the chase.  He may have been sitting all day
long in prison with folded hands; but when he goes to bed,
the retrospect will seem animated and eventful.