For the first time that Louis could remember, the Duke of Burgundy lost his haughty self-control; his face became ashy grey with rage, his voice trembled.
“Tell me, nephew, whether it is for love of France that you maintain relations with an Emperor who is too drunk to sign his own name; that you heap gold and gifts on his relatives from the House of Luxembourg. And tell me whether you accept the cities and provinces so often bestowed upon you simply for the sake of justice, and is it for the sake of justice that you are so well paid from the public treasury for your services?”
The King’s lips quivered; he moved his hands quickly and aimlessly over his cloak, over the arms of his chair.
“It is coming again,” he said suddenly. He looked helplessly in wild terror at Isabeau. “It is coming over me again. Oh, God, I can feel it approaching; please help me!” He slid from his chair onto his knees, wailing hoarsely. The Queen stood up; her lips were compressed in abhorrence. She knew what would follow; over the last few years she had been present several times when his madness overcame him.
“Take him away,” she said in a low, tense voice to the Duke of Burgundy. “Call his people. Send the physicians — quickly.”
De Courcy seized this opportunity to slip away unnoticed. The King was crawling across the floor, howling and weeping plaintively; he tried to cling to his wife’s skirts, to Burgundy’s sleeves. Louis d’Orléans went to the door to call some nobles of the King’s retinue who were in the anterooms. After a few minutes the reception hall was filled with people — bringing more lights, a cool drink, some damp towels. This pitiful spectacle had been repeated at regular intervals since 1392; it was always followed by several months at least of complete insanity. Louis helped his brother to stand and held him up; he cursed himself for the altercation with Burgundy which had inadvertendy aggravated the King’s overwrought condition.
“In Christ’s name,” the King implored, clutching Louis with mad strength, “help me. It hurts — so much! It is coming upon me again. Oh, God, if anyone here hates me so much that he would torture me like this, let him kill me now, here where I stand, I cannot endure it any longer!”
Louis put his arms around the King and soothed him like a child. He did not see Isabeau and Burgundy exchange glances. While servants and physicians bustled about the King, the Duke of Burgundy and the Queen left the room.
Louis led the King to his apartments. But he could not force himself to watch while the physicians tried crudely to undress the sick man and restore him to his senses. The sound of the King’s screams seemed to pursue Orléans into the remote corridors of the palace. In one of the abandoned doorways, he stopped and pressed his face against the icy wall.
“My God, my God,” he whispered. “What shall I do? Parry … or attack? Frustrate my enemy or fight him to the death? Up to now I have been passive, more or less — but in the name of Jesus Christ, I shall lash out now and woe to him who stands in my way!”
He heard footsteps and turned quickly. A noble from the King’s retinue walked past, with a respectful salute. It was the Sire Aubert de Cany.
In his adult years, Charles d’Orléans remembered three incidents which occurred in the year 1400; as a child Charles saw no connection between them. But in retrospect, when he was grown, he saw their underlying relationship. The first was a visit paid to his mother at their castle in Chateau-Thierry, by the Dame Christine de Pisan. The Duchess of Orléans was in a mournful mood in those days; the old Queen Blanche had died, the only royal woman who continued to behave as she always had, showing kindness to Valentine in her exile and disgrace. She had visited her young friend twice; in her will she bequeathed to her small, cherished gifts: a ring, a precious prayerbook, a breviary with illuminated miniatures. Sorrowfully, Valentine accepted these heirlooms; she felt she was now completely alone. It had been a long time since Louis had paid her a visit. And she was expecting a child in the spring once more. Thus she was doubly glad to see the Dame de Pisan, a noble, generous woman, Italian like the Duchess herself and, moreover, one who knew from her own experience the bitter taste of tears. Valentine found some comfort in the companionship of the poetess; they had much in common. The days passed quickly with pleasant conversation, music and reading.
Charles was often with his mother and her guest; while they talked in the high-ceilinged room hung with bright tapestries, the child sat in his favorite spot in the deep window niche looking; out the small, thick, slightly cloudy panes at the winter landscape and the crows’ nests in the tall trees around the castle.
Once on an afternoon filled with grey light and squalls of rain, he amused himself by breathing on the curved glass of the panes and then drawing a puppet on the clouded surface with his finger. But when it got dark and he grew tired of that, he caught fragments* of the conversation between his mother and the Dame de Pisan; he listened more attentively when he heard mention of his father’s name. The lady Christine described a brilliant fete given by the Duke of Orléans on Saint Valentine’s Day in the Hotel de Behaigne in Paris: she had been there watching the spectacle from a bench set against the wall. She described the elegant repast, enlivened by the music of Orléans’ famed minstrels; an allegory was presented with Love and My Lady Fidelity and her retinue. Young maidens wearing wreaths of flowers in their hair, clearly and sweedy sang a new motet, and after the banquet an Order of the Rose had been created in honor of the ladies present. And after that they arranged themselves in long rows to begin the dance. The Dame de Pisan, a widow who would wear mourning as long as she lived, did not join in the dance, but she enjoyed the dancers’ pleasure. She watched the ladies and knights move forward slowly and elegandy over the mosaic floor in the great hall of the Hotel; the dance seemed unending. None of the couples who moved, bowing and turning under the chandeliers, wanted to break the spell.
“With whom did Monseigneur, my husband, dance?” asked Valentine with a sad smile. The glowing splendor of Louis’ fetes in the Hotel de Behaigne seemed very remote to her, like images in a dream.
“With the best dancer of all, surely,” replied the Dame de Pisan readily. “The wife of Sire Aubert de Cany — I have never seen anyone so graceful.”
The Duchess of Orléans bent her head over her embroidery.
“Charles,” she said to her son after a prolonged silence, “ask the woman to bring candles. It is getting so dark I cannot see the thread.”
The child obeyed, surprised at the change in her voice.
One early spring morning the Demoiselle Marie d’Harcourt came to tell Charles that he had a new brother, Monseigneur Jean d’Orléans. Later they brought Charles to his mother, who lay motionless in bed, white as snow, with closed eyes. The baby was so ugly that Charles turned away in horror; he had expected to see a small child like Philippe, who followed his older brother everywhere on his sturdy little legs. Every day, for a few minutes in the morning and evening, Charles was allowed in the lying-in chamber. His mother sat up now, but she looked strange and thin and she spoke little.
The buds on the trees and shrubbery burst open. A light green haze hung over the tree branches in the forest; the sky was filled with white shining clouds. Charles, less carefully supervised now that his mother and little brother took up all the nurses’ time, chose to spend his days watching the falconers exercising the young birds. The hawks were taught to fling themselves upon the prey — which at the moment were heron wings tied to a stick — and then to drop it at a certain spot. Charles was fascinated by this bird training; he watched closely as the falconer bound thin strong cords to the hawks’ legs, as they artfully handled stick and hood.