When Louis thought of his father, he remembered him so, teaching, his pale face with strong arched eyebrows in the shadow of his hood; the long nose had the tint of old ivory. He had a large, sensitive mouth. It was a face that gave a preponderant impression of sadness and suffering; it was clear from the lines that ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth that old age had come to him prematurely; but his brown eyes were sharp and lively, the eyes of a man of great understanding and clear insight.
Charles V seemed to have been born old. Before he came of age, he had known enough trouble to make him realize the relativity of all things under the sun. In his sickly body lived a spirit which coldly and calmly surveyed a France ravaged by war and pestilence, a welter of famine, chaos and boundless misery, in which he began to create order, following a system that did not meet with a positive reaction from the people around him, the pretentious and haughty nobles who had not only lost battle after battle against the English invaders, but had brought their own country to the point of ruin by squeezing the commoners and peasants dry. He rendered them harmless by surrounding himself with advisors from the bourgeoisie, men who were tirelessly zealous in their newly awakened social consciousness. Gradually, by proper organization of the armies, he freed the country from the pillaging bands of roving mercenaries who came from all over; he let the English exhaust themselves on unimportant skirmishes — now on the coast, now deeper in the land again; buildings rose up — forts, palaces, the towered Louvre, the Bastille and a long series of connecting halls in Saint-Pol.
The King was extremely frugal and sober; he had no desires to be gratified at the cost of the exchequer and the prosperity of the country. Day after day he kept punctually to a regimen of work and relaxation. The pleasures of the table meant nothing to him; he ate little meat and drank diluted wine. He loved his family, his work; above all, however, he loved his books — and the writers, philosophers and astrologers who lived in great numbers at his court. France had raised itself from the morass of misery into which it had fallen; the eyes of all Christendom were fixed again upon the heart of the Western world.
“Le Sage” he was called in his time; the wise, the thoughtful one. So he was seen, with his books and his scriveners, governing from his library; so Louis saw him when he thought of his father: leaning against his reading desk, the fingers of one hand between the pages of a manuscript, and the other hand — permanently paralyzed as a result of the poison given him as a youth by his archenemy Navarre — resting in the folds of his mantle.
As long as the King lived, much care was expended on the education of both boys — a succession of excellent tutors instructed them in all accomplishments essential for princes of the blood and, perhaps because of the direct supervision of the King, this instruction was more thorough than would have been the case in other circumstances. And as was customary with him, the father looked to the future. He was righdy concerned about his health. The inheritance he was leaving — a reviving France, barely-allayed hostilities with England, discontented nobles who waited, hand on sword, in their castles for a chance to rehabilitate their positions, and an awakening populace of commoners and peasants — this inheritance was a dangerous toy for children or reckless youths. In addition, ambitious rivals, the King’s brothers, waited near the throne — the avaricious Anjou, the crafty Burgundy, the cold, sensual Berry and his brother-in-law Bourbon, meddlesome and pompous — in truth, a pack of vultures which could never be feared enough.
Therefore, the King set up a guardian trust consisting of various high dignitaries of the Church and some of his advisors — among them Philippe de Maiziéres and Clisson, later constable of France. These men were part of the group which the King’s brothers and knights referred to tauntingly as ‘the Marmousets’—the fools. Charles V expected that these tested servants would be a temporizing influence on the far-from-disinterested Regency of the Dukes. At the same time he decreed that his son should be considered to have come of age on his fourteenth birthday.
Even as the King lay dying, the Dukes swooped down upon the Regency. With their armies they came riding from their domains to challenge one another in turn for the greatest power. The King lay in his death agony, surrounded by his court; at his feet knelt his sons, his friends, his devoted servants. While he was receiving the sacraments, a bitter argument raged in the anteroom between his brothers which resulted in Anjou ransacking the deserted rooms of the palace. Furniture, golden tableware, jewels were carried off with no further comment. Anjou withdrew as regent; with the plundered gold he could carry on a war for the possession of Sicily, to which he lay claim. Bourbon, Berry and Burgundy now fastened their claws in earnest into the crown of France, which at Reims had been placed on the head of a twelve-year-old boy.
Louis remembered it as though it were yesterday: the colorful silk banners rippling in the breeze along the stone pillars; the reflection of the flicker of wax candles in the golden censers, in the jeweled ornaments, in the burnished steel of armor.
He knelt behind his brother on the altar steps, holding in both hands the sword Joyeuse which had belonged to Charlemagne and which had been brought from the royal treasury for the occasion. Even more than the sight of the slender figure of his brother in his royal robes of gold and purple, the legendary sword filled Louis with pride and awe. Where his childish fingers grasped the hilt, the hand of the great Emperor had once rested. He thought it a good omen that he had been given the sword to carry, a sign that he was destined to perform valiant deeds.
After their father’s death, both boys had drawn even more closely together, perhaps in reaction to the surveillance with which the Dukes had surrounded them behind a mask of courtesy. But the time for childish games was over for good; Charles fell prey to Burgundy’s powers of persuasion; seduced by the prospect of heroic deeds on the field of battle, he allowed himself to lead an army into Flanders to subdue the regions which had risen against French rule; thus, without being aware of it, he played into the hands of Burgundy, whose power in Flanders had been firmly established by French victories in Roosebeke and elsewhere. Louis had fervently hoped to go to war, too; he was wisely kept at a safe distance from the battlefield by sensible elements in the Council. They did not entertain the possibility that some accident would befall the young King; they thought only that it was prudent to keep the successor to the throne close at hand. Among the Marmousets, those ministers who had served his father and who had not been banished by the Regents, he found sharp-witted and objective advisors; one of them, Philippe de Maizieres, a man advanced in years, was uncommonly fond of Louis and only for his sake remained near the court which had lost the sobriety characterizing it during the reign of Charles V. Louis delighted in this wantonly sensual and luxurious atmosphere. He had too ebullient a personality not to be the first among those dancers, those devotees of Our Lady Love, addicted to gambling and hunting.