Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses,
Charles acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He
was perpetually reminded of the change that had befallen him.
He found the climate of England cold and "prejudicial to the
human frame;" he had a great contempt for English fruit and
English beer; even the coal fires were unpleasing in his
eyes. (1) He was rooted up from among his friends and
customs and the places that had known him. And so in this
strange land he began to learn the love of his own. Sad
people all the world over are like to be moved when the wind
is in some particular quarter. So Burns preferred when it
was in the west, and blew to him from his mistress; so the
girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it
might carry a kiss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we
find Charles singing of the "pleasant wind that comes from
France." (2) One day, at "Dover-on-the-Sea," he looked
across the straits, and saw the sandhills about Calais. And
it happened to him, he tells us in a ballade, to remember his
happiness over there in the past; and he was both sad and
merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of
gazing on the shores of France. (3) Although guilty of
unpatriotic acts, he had never been exactly unpatriotic in
feeling. But his sojourn in England gave, for the time at
least, some consistency to what had been a very weak and
ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the influence
of more than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded
to turn Henry's puritanical homily after Agincourt into a
ballade, and reproach France, and himself by implication,
with pride, gluttony, idleness, unbridled covetousness, and
sensuality. (4) For the moment, he must really have been
thinking more of France than of Charles of Orleans.
(1) DEBATE BETWEEN THE HERALDS.
(2) Works (ed. d'Hericault), i. 43.
(3) IBID. 143.
(4) Works (ed. d'Hericault), i. 190.
And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be
released in case of peace, begins to think upon the
disadvantages of war. "Pray for peace," is his refrain: a
strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard d'Armagnac.
(1) But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one side
in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and
he did not hesitate to explain it in so many words.
"Everybody," he writes - I translate roughly - "everybody
should be much inclined to peace, for everybody has a deal to
gain by it." (2)
(1) IBID. 144.
(2) IBID. 158.
Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even
learned to write a rondel in that tongue of quite average
mediocrity. (1) He was for some time billeted on the unhappy
Suffolk, who received fourteen shillings and fourpence a day
for his expenses; and from the fact that Suffolk afterwards
visited Charles in France while he was negotiating the
marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that
nobleman's impeachment, we may believe there was some not
unkindly intercourse between the prisoner and his gaoler: a
fact of considerable interest when we remember that Suffolk's
wife was the granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. (2)
Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates and places,
only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles's
captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty
years drew on, he became less and less resigned.
Circumstances were against the growth of such a feeling. One
after another of his fellow-prisoners was ransomed and went
home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit
France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed
himself more eager for his own deliverance than for the
profit of his native land. Resignation may follow after a
reasonable time upon despair; but if a man is persecuted by a
series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no more
attains to a settled frame of resolution, than his eye would
grow familiar with a night of thunder and lightning. Years
after, when he was speaking at the trial of that Duke of
Alencon, who began life so hopefully as the boyish favourite
of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove that captivity was a
harder punishment than death. "For I have had experience
myself," he said; "and in my prison of England, for the
weariness, danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I
have many a time wished I had been slain at the battle where
they took me." (3) This is a flourish, if you will, but it
is something more. His spirit would sometimes rise up in a
fine anger against the petty desires and contrarieties of
life. He would compare his own condition with the quiet and
dignified estate of the dead; and aspire to lie among his
comrades on the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to
have the wings of a dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of
the sea. But such high thoughts came to Charles only in a
flash.
(1) M. Champollion-Figeac gives many in his editions of
Charles's works, most (as I should think) of very doubtful
authenticity, or worse.
(2) Rymer, x. 564. D'Hericault's MEMOIR, p. xli. Gairdner's
PASTON LETTERS, i. 27, 99.
(3) Champollion-Figeac, 377.
John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge
of Montereau so far back as 1419. His son, Philip the Good -
partly to extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a
popular action, and partly, in view of his ambitious schemes,
to detach another great vassal from the throne of France -
had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans, and negotiated
diligently for his release. In 1433 a Burgundian embassy was
admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the
presence of Suffolk. Charles shook hands most affectionately
with the ambassadors. They asked after his health. "I am
well enough in body," he replied, "but far from well in mind.
I am dying of grief at having to pass the best days of my
life in prison, with none to sympathise." The talk falling
on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he
were not sincere and constant in his endeavours to bring it
about. "If peace depended on me," he said, "I should procure
it gladly, were it to cost me my life seven days after." We
may take this as showing what a large price he set, not so
much on peace, as on seven days of freedom. Seven days! - he
would make them seven years in the employment. Finally, he
assured the ambassadors of his good will to Philip of
Burgundy; squeezed one of them by the hand and nipped him
twice in the arm to signify things unspeakable before
Suffolk; and two days after sent them Suffolk's barber, one
Jean Carnet, a native of Lille, to testify more freely of his
sentiments. "As I speak French," said this emissary, "the
Duke of Orleans is more familiar with me than with any other
of the household; and I can bear witness he never said
anything against Duke Philip." (1) It will be remembered
that this person, with whom he was so anxious to stand well,
was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son of his
father's murderer. But the honest fellow bore no malice,
indeed not he. He began exchanging ballades with Philip,
whom he apostrophises as his companion, his cousin, and his
brother. He assures him that, soul and body, he is
altogether Burgundian; and protests that he has given his
heart in pledge to him. Regarded as the history of a
vendetta, it must be owned that Charles's life has points of
some originality. And yet there is an engaging frankness
about these ballades which disarms criticism. (2) You see
Charles throwing himself headforemost into the trap; you hear
Burgundy, in his answers begin to inspire him with his own
prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the misgovernment
of France. But Charles's own spirits are so high and so
amiable, and he is so thoroughly convinced his cousin is a
fine fellow, that one's scruples are carried away in the
torrent of his happiness and gratitude. And his would be a
sordid spirit who would not clap hands at the consummation
(Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the
Sacrament that he would never again bear arms against
England, and pledged himself body and soul to the unpatriotic
faction in his own country, set out from London with a light
heart and a damaged integrity.
(1) Dom Plancher, iv. 178-9.
(2) Works, i. 157-63.
In the magnificent copy of Charles's poems, given by our
Henry VII. to Elizabeth of York on the occasion of their
marriage, a large illumination figures at the head of one of
the pages, which, in chronological perspective, is almost a
history of his imprisonment. It gives a view of London with
all its spires, the river passing through the old bridge and
busy with boats. One side of the White Tower has been taken
out, and we can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved
room where the duke sits writing. He occupies a high-backed
bench in front of a great chimney; red and black ink are
before him; and the upper end of the apartment is guarded by
many halberdiers, with the red cross of England on their
breast. On the next side of the tower he appears again,
leaning out of window and gazing on the river; doubtless
there blows just then "a pleasant wind from out the land of
France," and some ship comes up the river: "the ship of good
news." At the door we find him yet again; this time
embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding two
saddled horses. And yet further to the left, a cavalcade
defiles out of the tower; the duke is on his way at last
towards "the sunshine of France."
III.
During the five-and-twenty years of his captivity, Charles
had not lost in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen. For so
young a man, the head of so great a house, and so numerous a
party, to be taken prisoner as he rode in the vanguard of
France, and stereotyped for all men in this heroic attitude,
was to taste untimeously the honours of the grave. Of him,
as of the dead, it would be ungenerous to speak evil; what
little energy he had displayed would be remembered with
piety, when all that he had done amiss was courteously
forgotten. As English folk looked for Arthur; as Danes
awaited the coming of Ogier; as Somersetshire peasants or
sergeants of the Old Guard expected the return of Monmouth or
Napoleon; the countrymen of Charles of Orleans looked over
the straits towards his English prison with desire and
confidence. Events had so fallen out while he was rhyming
ballades, that he had become the type of all that was most
truly patriotic. The remnants of his old party had been the
chief defenders of the unity of France. His enemies of
Burgundy had been notoriously favourers and furtherers of
English domination. People forgot that his brother still lay
by the heels for an unpatriotic treaty with England, because
Charles himself had been taken prisoner patriotically
fighting against it. That Henry V. had left special orders
against his liberation, served to increase the wistful pity
with which he was regarded. And when, in defiance of all
contemporary virtue, and against express pledges, the English
carried war into their prisoner's fief, not only France, but
all thinking men in Christendom, were roused to indignation
against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim. It was
little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the
imagination of the best of those at home. Charles le
Boutteillier, when (as the story goes) he slew Clarence at
Beauge, was only seeking an exchange for Charles of Orleans.
(1) It was one of Joan of Arc's declared intentions to
deliver the captive duke. If there was no other way, she
meant to cross the seas and bring him home by force. And she
professed before her judges a sure knowledge that Charles of
Orleans was beloved of God. (2)
(1) Vallet's CHARLES VII., i. 251.
(2) PROCES DE JEANNE D'ARC, i. 133-55.
Alas! it was not at all as a deliverer that Charles returned
to France. He was nearly fifty years old. Many changes had
been accomplished since, at twenty-three, he was taken on the
field of Agincourt. But of all these he was profoundly
ignorant, or had only heard of them in the discoloured
reports of Philip of Burgundy. He had the ideas of a former
generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a
factious party. With such qualifications he came back eager
for the domination, the pleasures, and the display that
befitted his princely birth. A long disuse of all political
activity combined with the flatteries of his new friends to
fill him with an overweening conceit of his own capacity and
influence. If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed
quite natural men should look to him for its redress. Was
not King Arthur come again?
The Duke of Burgundy received him with politic honours. He
took his guest by his foible for pageantry, all the easier as
it was a foible of his own; and Charles walked right out of
prison into much the same atmosphere of trumpeting and bell-
ringing as he had left behind when he went in. Fifteen days
after his deliverance he was married to Mary of Cleves, at
St. Omer. The marriage was celebrated with the usual pomp of
the Burgundian court; there were joustings, and
illuminations, and animals that spouted wine; and many nobles
dined together, COMME EN BRIGADE, and were served abundantly
with many rich and curious dishes. (1) It must have reminded
Charles not a little of his first marriage at Compiegne; only
then he was two years the junior of his bride, and this time
he was five-and-thirty years her senior. It will be a fine
question which marriage promises more: for a boy of fifteen
to lead off with a lass of seventeen, or a man of fifty to
make a match of it with a child of fifteen. But there was
something bitter in both. The lamentations of Isabella will
not have been forgotten. As for Mary, she took up with one
Jaquet de la Lain, a sort of muscular Methody of the period,
with a huge appetite for tournaments, and a habit of
confessing himself the last thing before he went to bed. (2)
With such a hero, the young duchess's amours were most likely
innocent; and in all other ways she was a suitable partner
for the duke, and well fitted to enter into his pleasures.
(1) Monstrelet.
(2) Vallet's CHARLES VII., iii. chap. i. But see the
chronicle that bears Jaquet's name: a lean and dreary book.
When the festivities at Saint Omer had come to an end,
Charles and his wife set forth by Ghent and Tourney. The
towns gave him offerings of money as he passed through, to
help in the payment of his ransom. From all sides, ladies
and gentlemen thronged to offer him their services; some gave
him their sons for pages, some archers for a bodyguard; and
by the time he reached Tournay, he had a following of 300
horse. Everywhere he was received as though he had been the
King of France. (1) If he did not come to imagine himself
something of the sort, he certainly forgot the existence of
any one with a better claim to the title. He conducted
himself on the hypothesis that Charles VII. was another
Charles VI. He signed with enthusiasm that treaty of Arras,
which left France almost at the discretion of Burgundy. On
December 18 he was still no farther than Bruges, where he
entered into a private treaty with Philip; and it was not
until January 14, ten weeks after he disembarked in France,
and attended by a ruck of Burgundian gentlemen, that he
arrived in Paris and offered to present himself before
Charles VII. The king sent word that he might come, if he
would, with a small retinue, but not with his present
following; and the duke, who was mightily on his high horse
after all the ovations he had received, took the king's
attitude amiss, and turned aside into Touraine, to receive
more welcome and more presents, and be convoyed by torchlight
into faithful cities.
(1) Monstrelet.
And so you see, here was King Arthur home again, and matters
nowise mended in consequence. The best we can say is, that
this last stage of Charles's public life was of no long
duration. His confidence was soon knocked out of him in the
contact with others. He began to find he was an earthen
vessel among many vessels of brass; he began to be shrewdly
aware that he was no King Arthur. In 1442, at Limoges, he
made himself the spokesman of the malcontent nobility. The
king showed himself humiliatingly indifferent to his
counsels, and humiliatingly generous towards his necessities.
And there, with some blushes, he may be said to have taken
farewell of the political stage. A feeble attempt on the
county of Asti is scarce worth the name of exception.
Thenceforward let Ambition wile whom she may into the turmoil
of events, our duke will walk cannily in his well-ordered
garden, or sit by the fire to touch the slender reed. (1)
(1) D'Hericault's MEMOIR, xl. xli. Vallet, CHARLES VI., ii.
435.
IV.
If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever
he pleased in time or space, with all the ages and all the
countries of the world to choose from, there would be quite
an instructive diversity of taste. A certain sedentary
majority would prefer to remain where they were. Many would
choose the Renaissance; many some stately and simple period
of Grecian life; and still more elect to pass a few years
wandering among the villages of Palestine with an inspired
conductor. For some of our quaintly vicious contemporaries,
we have the decline of the Roman Empire and the reign of
Henry III. of France. But there are others not quite so
vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect
gravity, who have never taken the categorical imperative to
wife, and have more taste for what is comfortable than for
what is magnanimous and high; and I can imagine some of these
casting their lot in the Court of Blois during the last
twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans.
The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and
the high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois
on a visit, formed a society for killing time and perfecting
each other in various elegant accomplishments, such as we
might imagine for an ideal watering-place in the Delectable
Mountains. The company hunted and went on pleasure-parties;
they played chess, tables, and many other games. What we now
call the history of the period passed, I imagine, over the
heads of these good people much as it passes over our own.
News reached them, indeed, of great and joyful import.
William Peel received eight livres and five sous from the
duchess, when he brought the first tidings that Rouen was
recaptured from the English. (1) A little later and the duke
sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne
and Normandy. (2) They were liberal of rhymes and largesse,
and welcomed the prosperity of their country much as they
welcomed the coming of spring, and with no more thought of
collaborating towards the event. Religion was not forgotten
in the Court of Blois. Pilgrimages were agreeable and
picturesque excursions. In those days a well-served chapel
was something like a good vinery in our own, an opportunity
for display and the source of mild enjoyments. There was
probably something of his rooted delight in pageantry, as
well as a good deal of gentle piety, in the feelings with
which Charles gave dinner every Friday to thirteen poor
people, served them himself, and washed their feet with his
own hands. (3) Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his
courtiers from their trivial side. The duke perhaps cared
less for the deliverance of Guyenne and Normandy than for his
own verses on the occasion; just as Dr. Russell's
correspondence in THE TIMES was among the most material parts
of the Crimean War for that talented correspondent. And I
think it scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as
patriotism was principally cultivated as a means of filling
up the day.
(1) Champollion-Figeac, 368.
(2) Works, i. 115.
(3) D'Hericault's MEMOIR, xlv.
It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged
with the destiny of nations, who were made welcome at the
gates of Blois. If any man of accomplishment came that way,
he was sure of an audience, and something for his pocket.
The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson like Drummond of
Hawthornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay. They
were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic.
It might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler; or it
might be three high English minstrels; or the two men,
players of ghitterns, from the kingdom of Scotland, who sang
the destruction of the Turks; or again Jehan Rognelet, player
of instruments of music, who played and danced with his wife
and two children; they would each be called into the castle
to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke.
(1) Sometimes the performance was of a more personal
interest, and produced much the same sensations as are felt
on an English green on the arrival of a professional
cricketer, or round an English billiard table during a match
between Roberts and Cooke. This was when Jehan Negre, the
Lombard, came to Blois and played chess against all these
chess-players, and won much money from my lord and his
intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of Chalons made ballades
before all these ballade-makers. (2)
(1) ChampoIlion-Figeac, 381, 361, 381.
(2) Champollion-Figeac, 359,361.
It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers
of ballades and rondels. To write verses for May day, seems
to have been as much a matter of course, as to ride out with
the cavalcade that went to gather hawthorn. The choice of
Valentines was a standing challenge, and the courtiers pelted
each other with humorous and sentimental verses as in a
literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our
friend Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn
it into the funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the
names of the cases of nouns or the moods of verbs; and
Maistre Estienne would make reply in similar fashion, seeking
to prune the story of its more humiliating episodes. If
Fredet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to upbraid
him; and it was in a rondel that Fredet would excuse himself.
Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to
work on the same refrain, the same idea, or in the same
macaronic jargon. Some of the poetasters were heavy enough;
others were not wanting in address; and the duchess herself
was among those who most excelled. On one occasion eleven
competitors made a ballade on the idea,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge"
(Je meurs de soif empres de la fontaine).
These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests
the attention rather from the name of the author than from
any special merit in itself. It purports to be the work of
Francois Villon; and so far as a foreigner can judge (which
is indeed a small way), it may very well be his. Nay, and if
any one thing is more probable than another, in the great
TABULA RASA, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the
biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may
have gone upon a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master
Baudet Harenc, of Chalons, found a sympathetic, or perhaps a
derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays the degree of
Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would not be wanting
for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as would
seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a
sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard
himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would
have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking
upon Windsor gardens is a different matter from Villon's
dungeon at Meun; yet each in his own degree had been tried in
prison. Each in his own way also, loved the good things of
this life and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf
that separated Burns from his Edinburgh patrons would
separate the singer of Bohemia from the rhyming duke. And it
is hard to imagine that Villon's training amongst thieves,
loose women, and vagabond students, had fitted him to move in
a society of any dignity and courtliness. Ballades are very
admirable things; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting
visitor. But among the courtiers of Charles, there would be
considerable regard for the proprieties of etiquette; and
even a duke will sometimes have an eye to his teaspoons.
Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have disappointed
expectation. It need surprise nobody if Villon's ballade on
the theme,
"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge,"
was but a poor performance. He would make better verses on
the lee-side of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin,
than in a cushioned settle in the halls of Blois.
Charles liked change of place. He was often not so much
travelling as making a progress; now to join the king for
some great tournament; now to visit King Rene, at Tarascon,
where he had a study of his own and saw all manner of
interesting things - oriental curios, King Rene painting
birds, and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the
dwarf jester, whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange.
(1) Sometimes the journeys were set about on horseback in a
large party, with the FOURRIERS sent forward to prepare a
lodging at the next stage. We find almost Gargantuan details
of the provision made by these officers against the duke's
arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and
chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and
red. (2) Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing
chess or tables with a friend in the pavilion, or watching
other vessels as they went before the wind. (3) Children ran
along the bank, as they do to this day on the Crinan Canal;
and when Charles threw in money, they would dive and bring it
up. (4) As he looked on at their exploits, I wonder whether
that room of gold and silk and worsted came back into his
memory, with the device of little children in a river, and
the sky full of birds?
(1) Lecoy de la Marche, ROI RENE, II. 155, 177.
(2) Champollion-Figeac, chaps. v. and vi.
(3) IBID. 364; Works, i. 172.
(4) Champollion-Figeac, 364: "Jeter de l'argent aux petis
enfans qui estoient au long de Bourbon, pour les faire nonner
en l'eau et aller querre l'argent au fond."
He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother
Angouleme in bringing back the library of their grandfather
Charles V., when Bedford put it up for sale in London. (1)
The duchess had a library of her own; and we hear of her
borrowing romances from ladies in attendance on the blue-
stocking Margaret of Scotland. (2) Not only were books
collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois.
The widow of one Jean Fougere, a bookbinder, seems to have
done a number of odd commissions for the bibliophilous count.
She it was who received three vellum-skins to bind the
duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed to prepare
parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was
who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of
Charles's own poems, which was presented to him by his
secretary, Anthony Astesan, with the text in one column, and
Astesan's Latin version in the other. (3)
(1) Champollion-Figeac, 387.
(2) NOUVELLE BIOGRAPHIE DIDOT, art. "Marie de Cleves."
Vallet, CHARLES VII, iii. 85, note 1.
(3) Champollion-Figeac, 383, 384-386.
Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take
the place of many others. We find in Charles's verse much
semi-ironical regret for other days, and resignation to
growing infirmities. He who had been "nourished in the
schools of love," now sees nothing either to please or
displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors,
where he means to take his ease, and let younger fellows
bestir themselves in life. He had written (in earlier days,
we may presume) a bright and defiant little poem in praise of
solitude. If they would but leave him alone with his own
thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his
animal strength has so much declined that he sings the
discomforts of winter instead of the inspirations of spring,
and he has no longer any appetite for life, he confesses he
is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from grievous
thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
talking, and singing. (1)
(1) Works, ii. 57, 258.
While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of
things, of which he was the outcome and ornament, was growing
old along with him. The semi-royalty of the princes of the
blood was already a thing of the past; and when Charles VII.
was gathered to his fathers, a new king reigned in France,
who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI. had
aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were
inconceivable to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries
were able enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his
cruel and treacherous spirit. To the whole nobility of
France he was a fatal and unreasonable phenomenon. All such
courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend Rene's in
Provence, would soon be made impossible; interference was the
order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who
should say what was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have
appeared to Charles primarily in the light of a kill-joy. I
take it, when missionaries land in South Sea Islands and lay
strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the islanders
will not be much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of
Orleans at the policy of the Eleventh Louis. There was one
thing, I seem to apprehend, that had always particularly
moved him; and that was, any proposal to punish a person of
his acquaintance. No matter what treason he may have made or
meddled with, an Alencon or an Armagnac was sure to find
Charles reappear from private life, and do his best to get
him pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels
with them. They were charming people in every way. There
must certainly be some mistake. Had not he himself made
anti-national treaties almost before he was out of his
nonage? And for the matter of that, had not every one else
done the like? Such are some of the thoughts by which he
might explain to himself his aversion to such extremities;
but it was on a deeper basis that the feeling probably
reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to be impressed
at the thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of
those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast,
when those who had everything to make life valuable were
deprived of life itself. And it was shocking to the clemency
of his spirit, that sinners should be hurried before their
judge without a fitting interval for penitence and
satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last,
a poor, purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into
collision with "the universal spider," Louis XI. He took up
the defence of the Duke of Brittany at Tours. But Louis was
then in no humour to hear Charles's texts and Latin
sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of France
was at stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed
his path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue
like Charles of Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said,
but it seems it was monstrously to the point, and so rudely
conceived that the old duke never recovered the indignity.
He got home as far as Amboise, sickened, and died two days
after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of his age.
And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of
melodious rondels to the end of time.
V.
The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece
throughout. He never succeeded in any single purpose he set
before him; for his deliverance from England, after twenty-
five years of failure and at the cost of dignity and
consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical to treat
as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he
was the passive instrument of English diplomatists; and
before he was well entered on the third, he hastened to
become the dupe and catspaw of Burgundian treason. On each
of these occasions, a strong and not dishonourable personal
motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the following
years, he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a
more immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a
sentiment of gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to
all else, and led him to break with the tradition of his
party and his own former life. He was born a great vassal,
and he conducted himself like a private gentleman. He began
life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of
a petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture
of patriotism; but it was resolvable into two parts: a
preference for life among his fellow-countrymen, and a barren
point of honour. In England, he could comfort himself by the
reflection that "he had been taken while loyally doing his
devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of
Agincourt by wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the
larger interests is perhaps most happily exampled out of his
own mouth. When Alencon stood accused of betraying Normandy
into the hands of the English, Charles made a speech in his
defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alencon, he said, had professed a great love and trust
towards him; "yet did he give no great proof thereof, when he
sought to betray Normandy; whereby he would have made me lose
an estate of 100,000 livres a year, and might have occasioned
the destruction of the kingdom and of all us Frenchmen."
These are the words of one, mark you, against whom Gloucester
warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the
impatience of Louis XI., if such stuff was foisted on him by
way of political deliberation.
This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this
obscure and narrow view was fundamentally characteristic of
the man as well as of the epoch. It is not even so striking
in his public life, where he failed, as in his poems, where
he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet to
be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry.
And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom
a modern may still read and read over again with pleasure, he
has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear
testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which
distinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the
man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises and the
rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with
something in nature or society, with which they become
pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and
cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in
some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an
object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying
words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of
communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when
he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made
verses in a wager against himself. From the very idleness of
the man's mind, and not from intensity of feeling, it happens
that all his poems are more or less autobiographical. But
they form an autobiography singularly bald and uneventful.
Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather
that he had been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in
the Orleannese, and that he hunted and went in parties of
pleasure, I believe it is about as much definite experience
as is to be found in all these five hundred pages of
autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age.
Doubtless, he feels the great change of the year, and
distinguishes winter from spring; winter as the time of snow
and the fireside; spring as the return of grass and flowers,
the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart. And he
feels love after a fashion. Again and again, we learn that
Charles of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes
through the whole gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But
there is never a spark of passion; and heaven alone knows
whether there was any real woman in the matter, or the whole
thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were indeed
inspired by some living mistress, one would think he had
never seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is
nothing in any one of these so numerous love-songs to
indicate who or what the lady was. Was she dark or fair,
passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple? Was it
always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in
cold indistinction? The old English translator mentions gray
eyes in his version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as
I remember, he was driven by some emergency of the verse; but
in the absence of all sharp lines of character and anything
specific, we feel for the moment a sort of surprise, as
though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or as
though we had made our escape from cloudland into something
tangible and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to
all that now preoccupies and excites a poet, is best given by
a positive example. If, besides the coming of spring, any
one external circumstance may be said to have struck his
imagination, it was the despatch of FOURRIERS, while on a
journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be
his favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the
early work of Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes
he looked upon the world, if one of the sights which most
impressed him was that of a man going to order dinner.
Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the
common run of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of
Charles of Orleans are executed with inimitable lightness and
delicacy of touch. They deal with floating and colourless
sentiments, and the writer is never greatly moved, but he
seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are
generally thin and scanty of import; for the ballade
presented too large a canvas, and he was preoccupied by
technical requirements. But in the rondel he has put himself
before all competitors by a happy knack and a prevailing
distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a
statesman; and how he shows himself a duke is precisely by
the absence of all pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He
turns verses, as he would have come into the king's presence,
with a quiet accomplishment of grace.
Theodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous
generation now nearly extinct, and himself a sure and
finished artist, knocked off, in his happiest vein, a few
experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans. I would
recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
duke, not only because they are delightful in themselves, but
because they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the
peculiarities of their model. When de Banville revives a
forgotten form of verse - and he has already had the honour
of reviving the ballade - he does it in the spirit of a
workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and
not at all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew
bygone forms of thought and make historic forgeries. With
the ballade this seemed natural enough; for in connection
with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and Villon was
almost more of a modern than de Banville himself. But in the
case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles
of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two
literatures is illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines.
Something, certainly, has been retained of the old movement;
the refrain falls in time like a well-played bass; and the
very brevity of the thing, by hampering and restraining the
greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the imitation.
But de Banville's poems are full of form and colour; they
smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the
verse of other days, when it seems as if men walked by
twilight, seeing little, and that with distracted eyes, and
instead of blood, some thin and spectral fluid circulated in
their veins. They might gird themselves for battle, make
love, eat and drink, and acquit themselves manfully in all
the external parts of life; but of the life that is within,
and those processes by which we render ourselves an
intelligent account of what we feel and do, and so represent
experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had
only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took
part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion
in their reflective being; and they passed throughout
turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction.
Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the
occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set
forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins
chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for
them all: that "it was great pity." Perhaps, after too much
of our florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in
what is so different; and while the big drums are beaten
every day by perspiring editors over the loss of a cock-boat
or the rejection of a clause, and nothing is heard that is
not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not wonderful if
we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to authors
who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation.
Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to
find a small man without the buskin, and obvious sentiments
stated without affectation. If the sentiments are obvious,
there is all the more chance we may have experienced the
like. As we turn over the leaves, we may find ourselves in
sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys and
smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for
there is a genuine pathos in these simple words, and the
lines go with a lilt, and sing themselves to music of their
own.
CHAPTER VIII - SAMUEL PEPYS
IN two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the
character and position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright
has given us a new transcription of the Diary, increasing it
in bulk by near a third, correcting many errors, and
completing our knowledge of the man in some curious and
important points. We can only regret that he has taken
liberties with the author and the public. It is no part of
the duties of the editor of an established classic to decide
what may or may not be "tedious to the reader." The book is
either an historical document or not, and in condemning Lord
Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As for the time-
honoured phrase, "unfit for publication," without being
cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or
less commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that
when we purchase six huge and distressingly expensive
volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like
scholars and rather less like children. But Mr. Bright may
rest assured: while we complain, we are still grateful. Mr.
Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together, clearly
and with no lost words, a body of illustrative material.
Sometimes we might ask a little more; never, I think, less.
And as a matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's
volume might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to
the margin of the text, for it is precisely what the reader
wants.
In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to
read our author. Between them they contain all we can expect
to learn for, it may be, many years. Now, if ever we should
be able to form some notion of that unparalleled figure in
the annals of mankind - unparalleled for three good reasons:
first, because he was a man known to his contemporaries in a
halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants
with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade;
second, because he has outstripped all competitors in the art
or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, third,
because, being in many ways a very ordinary person, he has
yet placed himself before the public eye with such a fulness
and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius
like Montaigne. Not then for his own sake only, but as a
character in a unique position, endowed with a unique talent,
and shedding a unique light upon the lives of the mass of
mankind, he is surely worthy of prolonged and patient study.
THE DIARY.
That there should be such a book as Pepys's Diary is
incomparably strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period,
played the man in public employments, toiling hard and
keeping his honour bright. Much of the little good that is
set down to James the Second comes by right to Pepys; and if
it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To
his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness
of England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or
Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some
considerable share. He stood well by his business in the
appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some
of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of
the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of
his conduct in that solemn hour - thinking it needless to say
more - that it was answerable to the greatness of his life.
Thus he walked in dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes
attending him in his walks, subalterns bowing before his
periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable
to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him
writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the late
Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the
repulse of the Great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder at the
backwardness of my thanks for the present you made me, so
many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the
Hollander rode master in it, when I have told you that the
sight of it hath led me to such reflections on my particular
interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to that
miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is
fancied to have who found his face in Michael Angelo's hell.
The same should serve me also in excuse for my silence in
celebrating your mastery shown in the design and draught, did
not indignation rather than courtship urge me so far to
commend them, as to wish the furniture of our House of Lords
changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's
designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the
temper of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings
more operative than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments."
This is a letter honourable to the writer, where the meaning
rather than the words is eloquent. Such was the account he
gave of himself to his contemporaries; such thoughts he chose
to utter, and in such language: giving himself out for a
grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to the same date
in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to
his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the
letter, blaming the "madness of the House of Commons" and
"the base proceedings, just the epitome of all our public
proceedings in this age, of the House of Lords;" and then,
without the least transition, this is how our diarist
proceeds: "To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there
bought an idle, rogueish French book, L'ESCHOLLE DES FILLES,
which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of
it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read
it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books,
nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found."
Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly
apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable;
but what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish
book, but who was ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and
recorded both the doing and the shame in the pages of his
daily journal?
We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape
ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we
apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we
are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature
and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to Evelyn would
have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp which
he signed by the pseudonym of DAPPER DICKY; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no
untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly
shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and
these changes are the better part of his education in the
world. To strike a posture once for all, and to march
through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable
to others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn
and to Knipp we understand the double facing; but to whom was
he posing in the Diary, and what, in the name of
astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had he suppressed
all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in the
act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either
case we should have made him out. But no; he is full of
precautions to conceal the "disgrace" of the purchase, and
yet speeds to chronicle the whole affair in pen and ink. It
is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we can exactly
parallel from another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints
against her husband, and written it in plain and very pungent
English. Pepys, in an agony lest the world should come to
see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell-tale document;
and then - you disbelieve your eyes - down goes the whole
story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It
seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he
keeps a private book to prove he was not. You are at first
faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid
religious diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance
disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify; it
is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him,
there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the
religious diarist are of a very formal pattern, and are told
with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you come upon good,
substantive misdemeanours; beams in his eye of which he alone
remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature,
and laughable subterfuges to himself that always command
belief and often engage the sympathies.
