Part 10

The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted, stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower, the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he, rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome, so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no doctors who were proof against his _bonne memoire et belle loquelle_. Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning, devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs, and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness, still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of his enchanting presence.

According to Burcarius the King was handsomer than his young brother; but we must allow for a natural Burgundian hostility to Louis, and a natural Burgundian preference for force and valour, fresh colour, sweet temper, good humour, and all vigorous northern qualities, in preference to the subtler charms of their enemy. The stalwart Fleming thinks the King the finest man at Court, and handsomer than any there, far handsomer than his wife, “jolie et avenante,” indeed, but “basse et brunette”: fatal defects in the eyes of a Fleming! Her indisputable empire over men he ascribes not to her face, but to her lively manners. “Folle et légère,” was she:

“Touse n’y avoit tant jonette Plaine de sy grant gaiété Ny de sy grant joliveté Sy amoureuse, ne sy lie, Que cette Bergère jolie.”[18]

Footnote 18:

Le Pastoralet. A Burgundian satire, in the form of a Pastoral, written by one Burcarius in the first half of the fifteenth century, and published of late years in the Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove’s collection of Belgian chronicles.

As for Louis, the Burgundian has no word in favour of this melancholy free-lover, this _Tristifer_ (for such is the name he goes by among shepherds) who sins with no pleasure in sin; who spends his days in the pursuit of love, yet keeps a heart of iron; whose joys are such as are not to be found in the real world, but the fantastic joys of art, repugnant to the Philistine:

“Tristifer, tristièce portant. ... Et tout fut-il jolis, Trop sembloit-il mirancolis; Qui le coer a plus dur que fer.

. . . . . . \.

Bien nouvelette chanson S’en va tout chantant à hault son, Qu’il avoit, par un soir bruyant Et bel, rimoié en riant.”

Thus the Burgundian ... unaware that this portrait of his enemy is the only one that awakens curiosity and stimulates the fancy. And, by way of adding a blacker touch than all, he tells us that this singing Tristifer is the paramour of the gay Queen Belligère.

I have said that Louis was held to possess an unearthly ring, a magic wand, of desire. For a perfect knight it was said that he had put them to strange uses. He had fascinated with his wand, he had bewitched with the circle of his ring, the young wife of his brother, the beautiful Queen Isabel. And he was the bridegroom of Valentine Visconti. Queen Isabel was at Melun to greet her new kinswoman. We can imagine with what critical eyes she ran her over. Valentine, though not beautiful, was a novel and irradiating vision in her veil of gems. She was wise too; she could talk with her husband over the poems he made, the verses of Lord Salisbury and Maître Eustache Deschamps, the romances of Wenzel of Luxembourg, or of Maître Jean d’Arras, all the literature of the Court. She could argue with him, this subtle Lombard, in the tenuous and fanciful dissertations that he loved. Queen Isabel could not endure to see this stranger, by reason of her splendour and her novelty become the centre of attraction. The marriage festival was scarcely over when Isabel persuaded her husband to ordain a greater festivity for herself. She had been married four years, she was known by sight to every clerk in the Rue St. Denis, yet the King, obedient to her behest, proclaimed the Royal Entry of the Queen into Paris.

V.

This Paris that Valentine entered as a stranger was a beautiful city. The streets and bridges had been largely rebuilt by her uncle, Charles the Wise. Between the new Bastille and the river he had raised an immense royal palace, the Hôtel de St. Paul. Close at hand stood the Palais de Tournelles, the great hotel of the King of Sicily, the Hôtel Clisson, and the Hôtel de Behaigne, where the husband of Valentine sometimes lived. A little farther off (in the Rue de Turbigo) the castle of the Duke of Burgundy still rears its out-dated menace. On the left bank of the Seine another group of palaces surrounded Nôtre Dame. At the extremity of the city stood the Louvre. Rebuilt by Charles the Wise, it was endowed by him with a library of nine hundred and ten volumes (chiefly illuminated missals, legends, miracles, and treatises on astrology). There a silver lamp burned always day and night in the service of students, to whom the library was ever open.

Paris was a beautiful city; but it seemed a paradise upon the occasion of the royal entry. The Rue St. Denis was draped from top to bottom in green and crimson silk scattered with stars. Under the gateway angels sang in a starry heaven, and to the sweet sound of instruments little children played a miracle. There were towers and stages raised along the streets, where the legend of Troy-town and other pleasant matters were enacted. There were fountains also, flowing with milk or flowing with claret. Maidens, in rich chaplets of flowers, stood beside them and out of golden cups they gave the passers-by to drink, and sang melodiously the while; up and down this magic city went the citizens’ wives and daughters in long robes of gold and purple. The citizens themselves were clad in green, the royal officers in rose colour. But all these splendours paled and dwindled when the royal procession came in sight. In the middle, in an open litter, sat the Queen, the beautiful, smiling idol of the feast; she was dressed in a gown of silk, sewn over with French lilies worked in gold. Behind her, in painted cars, went the great ladies of the Court. Only the Duchess of Touraine had no litter; Valentine rode on a fair palfrey, marvellously caparisoned; she went on one side of the Queen’s litter among the royal dukes. The people of Paris, says Froissart, were as anxious to see the new Duchess as the Queen, whom indeed they had often seen. For Madame Valentine was immensely rich, the daughter of a great conqueror, and she had only just come out of Lombardy, a mysterious country where wonderful things came to pass. What impression did Valentine make on the people of Paris, pressing and craving to see the foreign duchess?

Which of her gala-dresses did she wear? The scarlet one sewn thick with pearls and diamonds, with a cap of pearls and scarlet for her dusky hair? Or the robe of gold brocade with sleeves and headdress of woven pearls? Or the flashing crown of balasses and sapphires, and the dress of scarlet sewn with jewels and embroidered with pale blue borage flowers? In any of these this splendid Italian stranger must have appeared to the burghers of Paris as a vision of Southern luxury, of mysterious outlandish enchantment. At least it is certain that never after they looked upon her as a mere mortal woman. Just at that season every one was reading the “Mélusine” of Maître Jean d’Arras. Valentine of Milan with her fairy splendours, her subtle wisdom, her Lombard traditions—Valentine, with the Visconti snake on her escutcheon—must have seemed to these Parisians much such another mysterious serpent-woman, another Mélusine. For the Italian character, never fanatic and yet so prone to spiritual passions; seldom bestial, yet so guilty of unnatural vices—Italy has ever been a mystery, a hateful enigma to the practical French; and of all Italians the Lombards, the border people, are most unlike their Gallic neighbours. A century later, when the French poured into Italy, no blazing mountain of Vesuvius, no wonderful Venetian city swimming in the seas, no antique and glorious ruins of Rome, so much astonished the foreign soldiers as the learned and subtle ladies of Lombardy. Those later chroniclers who have been in Italy relate with wonder their fables of ecstatic virgins, and gifted women wiser than their sex; they have seen one Anna, a woman forty years of age, who never eats, drinks, or sleeps, and who bears on her body the mystical wounds of Christ, breaking out and bleeding afresh on every Friday. In Milan, a demoiselle Trivulce, “de son grant jeune aage,“ wrote letters in Latin and was eloquent in oratory; “elle estoit aussi poeticque” (adds the author of La Mer des Chroniques) “et scavoit moult bien disputer avecques clercs et docteurs.” And also she was virtuous, so that her holy life seemed a thing to marvel on. At Venice, Maître Nicole Gilles encountered a certain Virgin Cassandra, the daughter of Angelo Fideli, a maiden expert in the seven liberal arts and in theology, all of which matters she expounded in public lectures. At Quiers, near Asti, a “jeune pucelle,” the daughter of Maître Jehan Solier, received the king with a public and most eloquent oration. Learned and subtle and virtuous as these Lombard ladies were, enthusiastic and spiritual as were many of their countrymen, yet this strange Italy, where the women taught the men, where Jesus Christ in Florence was the official head of the Republic, inspired a secret dread and horror in the French. Like men in an enchanted country, they feared what might lurk behind the shows of things. Above all, the French could never rid themselves of a haunting suspicion of poison—poison and sorcery, underhand and terrible weapons, such as these frank and passionate Gauls associated with the subtlety and wisdom of the people they had conquered. “And yet,” says Commines, “I must here speak somewhat in honour of the Italian nation, because we never found in all this voyage that they _did_ seek to do us harm by poison, and yet, if they had chosen, we could hardly have avoided it.”

This attitude of suspicion towards Italy, of reluctant admiration, characterized the French of 1494. Minus the admiration, it is quite as significant of the French to-day; and in 1387 the same distrust was there, but sharper, more anxious, and the same wonder, but intensified. Valentine the Italian, seemed to these alert, honest, practical Parisians a marvel of strangeness and wisdom; but to them these attributes suggested chiefly a fatal potency for evil.

And, in truth, there was in Italy a wickedness such as for another hundred years should not penetrate into France. The Italians were a nation of secret poisoners; and the French bourgeois vaguely guessed that this splendid young lady was acquainted with a world terribly different from their ingenuous and turbulent Paris. No need for turbulence in Italy. Valentine’s father poisoned the uncle who, for his part, had, poisoned his own brother. And Giangaleazzo, who, as Corio relates, had been nearly poisoned by Antonio della Scala, disposed of that enemy by the self-same means. The Florentines[19] (but theirs is the evidence of an enemy) said he paid his official poisoner a hundred florins monthly. These it was murmured were the traditions of the new Duchess.

Footnote 19:

Lamansky: “Secrets de l’Etat de Venise,” pp. 157-159. Also “Archivio di Firenze,” Signori Legazione Commissioni, &c. Filza 28, folio 7 t.

Thus, after all, Queen Isabel played but the second part in the pageant of her entry. Soon, however, she forgot her jealousy of the Italian—a jealousy which on that holiday kept her sick in her chamber, while Valentine danced with Touraine and the King in the royal ball below. But Valentine was no rival of the beautiful, bright little Queen: she was a persistent, ambitious, and devoted woman, never vain and never timid. From the first she lavished on her boyish husband that passionate devotion of an elder woman which asks no return from the radiant young creature she adores. She did not grudge Louis the love of Isabel, if, indeed, that love was his. A stranger thing happened: Valentine united with her rival to push the fortunes of Touraine. These two women were ever together, ever scheming, and planning the welfare of the unfaithful husband of the one, whom an unbroken tradition has regarded as the criminal lover of the other. An unnatural league; but it served to strengthen Touraine.

For Valentine and Isabel alike had the ear of the King. Charles VI., a little slow, a little dull, neglected in his Court, betrayed by his wife for his more brilliant brother—this gentle, kindly, unimportant creature was irresistibly drawn to his sister-in-law. Of all her royal kinsfolk in France, the King was the only one who from the first had welcomed Valentine. “My dear sister, my beloved sister,” the words were ever on his lips. Valentine, like him, was set aside; like him she suffered. She, too, was patient and gentle; but she was strong, she was prudent. The King of France was a great heavy lad, over-boyish for his years, loving jests and disguises, hating ceremony, and only very dimly feeling the wrongs that perplexed him; he sought from the sweet and quiet Italian her protection no less than her compassion.

In 1390, at Montpellier, the King could not support his absence from her. “I am too far from the Queen and Madame Valentine,” he said to his brother. “Let us ride post haste to Paris.” Unaccompanied and for a wager, they rode all the way, four nights and nearly five days in the saddle.... A little later the physicians said that such violent exercises as this had unsettled the feeble reason of the King.

VI.

In 1391, the young Duke of Touraine acquired the succession of the Duchess of Orleans. He was now as rich as he was ambitious. Could the old king, his father, have seen his eminence and his ambition, he would have risen from his grave, and have returned to the salvation of France. But the dust was in his ears and eyes, and it was not to be so.

For some time the King had been ailing with a hot fever. He was, says the Monk of St. Denis, strange, languishing, and bewildered. When, in the summer of 1392, the French invaded Brittany, the Dukes, his uncles, conjured him to remain at home. But Charles was not to be persuaded. He started with them upon the long, fatiguing journey.

On the 5th of August, near the town of Mans, after some hours of riding in armour under a beating sun, the royal party passed the Lepers’-village. A beggar, a leper, dressed in rags, the outcast of the world, the lowest human thing, came out and accosted the young King of France: “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!” The King was startled, and though the Royal Guards interfered they could not at once shake off the loathsome prophet. Clinging to the King’s bridle, the leper cried again, “Go no farther, noble King, they betray you!”... They betray you! Louis and Isabel, his nearest and dearest, what else did they? The King said nothing.

About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the King set upon his brother, his spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag.... The more distant of the royal party thought the King had spied a hare or a hart in the forest.... Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman who none the less was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The King of France was furiously and murderously mad.

Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death. Orleans fortunately was not hurt at all. For four days the King’s frenzy lasted, with fits of delirium and lapses into death-like exhaustion. The most cruel part of his sickness was the evident anguish of his spirit. “Will no one pluck out of my heart the dagger that my fair brother of Orleans has planted there?” the poor mad youth would cry; and he would mutter to himself, “I must kill him! I _must_ kill him!” It was useless to instruct the people that there is no reason in the sick hatred of a distempered mind. Nor would they find sufficient motive in the rumoured unfaithfulness of Isabel with Louis. They sought a darker, a more subtle explanation, and their suspicions were fostered, for political ends, by the enemies of Orleans—the faction of his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.

For when the King recovered from his frenzy, his mind remained weak and disabled. It was necessary to hand over to his uncles for a while the direction of affairs. This made the strongest of them, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, more than ever strong; he was in fact, though not in form, the regent. Against his rule one voice was ever raised in protest, the voice of the young ambitious brother of the King.

Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one years of age; through his marriage and the gifts of the King he had become formidably rich; through the weakness of the King he was formidably powerful. He was the nearest to the throne and he desired the regency. But the people suspected Orleans; he had too much to gain by the death or the incapacity of his brother. The people, in their passionate pity for the gentle monarch they adored, began to hate and fear the Queen and Orleans. In later days they did not scruple to declare their misgivings, but at first they dared not directly accuse the Queen, they would not directly accuse the young, beautiful Louis, their pride from his childhood, eloquent, religious, gay, slow to anger. With Juvenal they found him “beau prince et gratieux;” and, like Christine, they accounted him, “en ces jeunes faiz et en toutes choses très-avenant ... car il aime les bons ... nul fellonie ni cruauté en luy.” But he was young; he had been led away (Juvenal finds the phrase for them) “_by the means of those who were near to him_.... He had strange youthful follies that I will not declare.... _There were those about him_, young people, who induced him to do many things he had better have left undone.” This vague and mysterious excuse is the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.

The King mad; the King’s brother a wizard! There was a contagion of horror in France. “Many nobles and poor people,” writes the Monk of St. Denis, “began to change and sicken with the same strange malady that had attacked the King.” The fanatic terror of supernatural evil spread and deepened.

Things, at that critical season, fell out unfortunately for Orleans. On the 29th of January, 1393, there was a wedding festival at the Hôtel de St. Paul for one of Queen Isabel’s German maids of honour. The bride was a widow, and thrice a widow; therefore a subject for the grotesque licence of the age. At night, in the great hall among the dancers, suddenly there burst in a company of six satyrs dressed in tight linen vests, with flakes of tow fastened with pitch upon their backs. These hideous merry-makers sprang and danced about the bride, with leaps and gestures, in a sort of diabolic frenzy. Five of them were chained together, the sixth disported loose. The sixth was the King. Stung by some unlucky madcap prompting, Orleans took a flaming torch from its bearer, and held it close to the face of one of the maskers to see who he was. A flake of fire from the torch dropped among the tow and pitch. Up and down the hall, dancing a wilder and more terrible saraband, the flaming satyrs went. Two were burned to ashes, two died of their burns in agony, one saved himself by leaping into a water-butt. The King was rescued by the Duchess of Berri, who wrapped him in her mantle. But the danger and the fearful spectacle had upset his tottering reason. The King was mad again.

The people were furious against Orleans. Had Charles been burned, his brother’s life must have answered for it; for the people loved the King. The party of Burgundy—the popular party—did not hesitate to accuse the unfortunate young Duke of a fiendish plot to murder his brother. It was in vain that Louis raised a magnificent chapel of marble in the Church of the Celestines, to expiate his involuntary guilt. The people murmured that the Duke of Orleans went too often to the Celestines. It was said he went there every day. So much devotion was uncanny in so wild a liver.

Charitable souls like Demoiselle Christine declared in vain—“C’est impossible que son âme et ses mœurs n’en vaillent mieux.” Charitable souls are rare. The mass of the people did not hesitate to say that Louis visited the Celestines the better to conspire with a certain monk there—an old counsellor of his father’s—one Sire Philippe de Mézières. This person was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, able, and a man of science, according to the age. “Cestui vieil solitaire” for forty years had been the counsellor of princes. For thirty years he had been the life and soul of the policy of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of the Christian East. Then disgraced by an ungrateful king—Pierre II. de Lusignan—he took refuge in France, bringing to the service of Charles V. his enthusiasm, his political wisdom, his minute and extensive acquaintance with the Courts of Italy and the East. In 1379 he entered the Convent of the Celestines in Paris; not too secluded to remain the trusted counsellor of Charles V., and in his turn, of his son Louis of Orleans. But though the good Sire was a monk, the crowd doubted of his religion, for it was common rumour that he said there was no truth in sorcery. Let him say it! Sire Philippe de Mézières was none the less no judicious companion for the Duke of Orleans. The Sire had lived too long in Lombardy: “a country,” as Juvenal describes it, “where they practice magic and the casting of spells.”

About the same time a malignant rumour grew in France concerning the father of Valentine. People said the Seigneur of Milan had asked the French Ambassador for news of the King. “He is very well,” replied the Frenchman. Whereupon Visconti grew pale, and staggered. “He is the Devil!” he said, with great admiration; or, according to another version, “Diabolicum recitas et quod est impossibile—You tell me a diabolic thing, and one that is impossible! _The King can not be well!_“

Now, it was generally known in Italy that the Duke of Milan, like every other successful prince or Signory, was a secret poisoner. But in France a more terrible and a yet more hateful accusation was rumoured against him. The people began to whisper that the Duke of Milan was a wizard.

VII.