When Cailleau thoughtfully suggests possible remedies, Charles shakes his head: pills and herbs cannot make Marie contented and happy. He watches her from a window above the inner court as she rides out among laughing, blushing maids, adroit young horsemen and frolicsome pages. Their clothing, in Charles’ eyes, is ridiculous: fierce colors, crenellated and scalloped sleeves, loops of small bells, shoes with long, turned-up toes that constantly threaten to trip them. But they are young: warm-blooded, seething with a lust for life. He is filled with deep pity for Marie: is she doomed to wither at his side?
Sighing, he turns back to the book which lies open on the table. It is a day when Marie and her cortege have ridden out to celebrate May Day. They have planted a maypole in the flower-covered meadow outside Blois. He cannot distract himself with reading and study. For the first time in many years, for the first time since he foreswore poetry after Bonne’s death, he picks up again the old copybook in which, during his captivity, he jotted down verse after verse. The bittersweet melancholy which he feels seems to him too narrow and transient for a ballad; he manages to capture it in a few rondelets. When the young people return laughing and singing from the meadow, carrying bouquets of flowers, Charles too has plucked his souvenir of the first day of May. Standing before the window he repeats under his breath the lines now written on the pages of his Thought Book:
Les fourriers d’Eate sont venus
pour appareillier son logis,
et ant fait tendre ses tapis,
de fleurs et verdure tissus,
The servants of Summer have come
to prepare his residence
and have hung his tapestries
woven from flowers and green leaves.
En estendant tapis val us,
de vart herbs par Ie pais,
les fourriers d’Este sont venus.
Spreading thick carpets
of green grass over the land,
The servants of Summer have come.
Cueurs d’annuy pisca morfondus,
Disu mercy, sont sains et jolis;
Allez vous en, prenez pais,
Hiver, vous ne demeurez plus;
les fourriers d’Eate sont venus!
Hearts long sunken in misery,
Thank God, are now healed and gay.
Go away, find another realm,
Winter, you live here no longer,
The servants of Summer have come!
In the spring of the year 1444, Charles at last received the long-awaited summons from the King. The English armies of occupation, driven back everywhere to the coastline, were more than weary of the struggle. At long last the government in London appeared mellow and ready to renounce all its demands. Although the King of France continued to besiege the cities still held by the English, he announced that he would receive a delegation, for the preparation of which Charles d’Orléans would act as intermediary.
Charles was charged to enter into communication with representatives of the English government; immediately he sent couriers to Suffolk and Sir Robert Roos. He did not have to wait long for an answer. Suffolk wrote back in detaiclass="underline" the legation which would speedily cross the Straits of Calais would serve a two-fold purpose: to conclude peace, or at any rate an armistice and, in order to confirm the good understanding between the two Kingdoms, to negotiate a marriage between Henry VI and the daughter of a French prince.
Princesses of royal blood who were already betrothed were not to be considered; moreover, memories of the tragic nuptials of 1396 and 1420 were still fresh in both countries. “But,” Suffolk wrote formally — Charles knew how strongly his erstwhile warden opposed the idea of a French bride on the English throne—”But we hear that there are daughters in the Houses of Brittany, Armagnac and Alençon.”
Charles paid a visit to his sovereign to acquaint him with the English proposals. The King rejected out of hand any alliance between an English king and a member of those French feudal Houses.
“Do they think I am going to admit the Trojan horse with my own hands?” he asked with his faint, bitter smile. “I charge you, Monseigneur my worthy cousin, to put yourself immediately in communication with my brother-in-law of Anjou; I can trust him without reservations. He has a daughter. It is our wish that you offer her as a bride to our cousin, the King of England.”
So Charles began at once to prepare for the journey to Tarascon in the extreme south of the realm where Anjou lived; still mindful of his claim to Sicily, he always called himself “King”. He was some ten years younger than Charles; from his father he had inherited a glittering series of sonorous and imposing titles and claims to crowns: he should rule — so he had been taught from childhood on — over Jerusalem, Aragon, Valencia, Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica, Barcelona and Piedmont. In actuality he possessed only the domain of Anjou, and the regions of Provence and Lorraine which his wife had brought to him as her dowry. King René—he was never called anything else — had, since succeeding his father, been obliged to wage one war after another to protect his rights, battles in which he had been defeated time after time, so that of so much worldly power and glory, of a kingdom which stretched from Spain to Jerusalem, nothing was left except the gleaming crown emblazoned on his coat of arms.
Along with the Duchy of Lorraine, his wife had brought him armed conflict with Burgundy. The results for René were defeat and six years of captivity in Flanders. During that enforced stay in Burgundy’s court, it became apparent that René was a gentle visionary, an aesthetic dreamer. Burgundy freed him without compunction and saw his assumptions justified: in sunny Provence King René immersed himself in his many hobbies and bothered no more with politics.
“We have definitely settled all our business,” mused King René, rising and drawing the folds of his wide, flowered brocade robe around him. “No more politics, worthy friend, no more of that. Let’s enjoy the sunshine together as friends; here the good God grants us so abundantly all the joys which life has to offer. I have hardly had the chance to tell you how delighted I am at your coming here. We are brothers, dear friend, brothers, more firmly attached to each other than if we had been linked by bonds of blood.”
Charles stood up too, somewhat dizzy from the heat and the blinding glare of the sunlight on the landscape around him. They had held their conversation under a spacious awning of tapestries in the open gallery which King René had had constructed, in the Oriental fashion, against the walls of his castle in Tarascon; one sat there as though one were sitting on a cloud high in the sky, with an unimpeded view over the richly variegated landscape.
The cool amber wine proffered by the pages seemed headier than its aroma might lead one to expect; Charles felt remarkably carefree, as though he had partaken of the nectar of oblivion. He took the hand which his host held out to him and allowed himself to be led inside the cool shadowy halls of the castle; lute players and minstrels accompanied the princes. They passed through many apartments adorned with Moorish mosaics; finally they went down some stairs.
King René clapped his hands and nodded to his followers: nobles, pages and servants stopped behind them. Charles and his host stepped together through a small arched gate cut into one of the outer walls.