Because his pride was wounded, he said nothing the following morning. The Dame de Maucouvent, who usually came to wake him and Philippe, behaved as though nothing had happened, but the harsh lines of her mouth showed her displeasure. Jeanne la Brune was busy in the nursery with little Jean, but next to the fire sat an unknown woman with an infant in her arms. Philippe stared at the strange baby with his mouth open. Charles did not betray any surprise because la Brune and the Dame de Maucouvent were watching him.
The two eldest boys were brought to the Duchess. She sat completely alone in the small room which was furnished as a private chapel. Charles had expected to find his mother in bed; he could not remain silent any longer.
“There is a new baby,” he said reproachfully. “Why is it not lying with you in the lying-in room?”
Valentine looked calmly at her sons and smiled; the anxiety and bitterness of the past few years seemed to have vanished.
“Come here,” she said. “Now listen carefully to what I am going to tell you, and promise me here in this place that as true knights you will repeat it to no one. The infant who came to us last night is not my child. But he is your half-brother; therefore you must love and protect him as you love and protect Jean.”
“Half-brother?” asked Charles hesitantly; leaning against his mother’s knee he looked close up into her large, shining amber eyes.
“That means,” Valentine continued, “that Monseigneur your father is his father also. His mother died in childbirth; and that is why he has come to live with us.”
Philippe understood nothing of all this; barely listening, he stared at the reflection of the candle flame in the golden altarpiece. Charles, however, frowned in thought.
“Where is Monseigneur my father then?” he asked at last.
“He is still asleep,” answered the Duchess; she gave her oldest son a searching look and then began to stroke his hair gently. He was six years old; did he really understand what she meant?
Charles remained silent as he had sworn he would; he rebuked Philippe when his brother tried to ask him questions about the newest baby. The Dame de Maucouvent gave neither glance nor word to the infant; she walked about with a surly look on her round face, as though she had been personally insulted.
However, the stableboys were less reticent. They spoke once in the courtyard in Charles’ presence of the bastard of Orléans who had been taken into the ducal family. Charles knew very well what a bastard was; he had heard a scullery servant’s puppy called that. But he did not understand how this word could be applied to his half-brother.
“Why is the little baby a bastard?” he asked his mother later. The Duke his father had been sitting by the fire with his face in his hands; he looked up.
“I want to tell you that it is not always disgraceful to be a bastard,” he said before Valentine could reply. “But I forbid you to call your half-brother that, my son, before you are old enough to know what you are saying. His name is Jean and he is Lord of Chateau-Dun, just as you are Count of Angoulême. Address him as Dunois, that is his rightful name.”
“Do not be angry at your half-brother, Charles,” said the Duchess gently. “I love him as much as you and Philippe and Jean, child. He really should have been mine …” She looked past Charles at her husband, and gave a low, sad laugh. “He was stolen from me, the small Dunois.”
The sudden death of Mariette de Cany flung Louis back into the vortex of battle. He had with her — for a few months at any rate — been able to forget the frustrations of the past year: the death of England’s former King, Richard; the fall of Wenceslaus, followed by the coronation of Ruprecht of Bavaria. Nor had he enjoyed undiluted happiness at the castle of Epernay, where he had brought the Dame de Cany after they became lovers. She never spoke of love, but her silence was more eloquent than words. Her desperate surrender terrified Louis; it was true that he was profoundly aware of guilt and sin, but he believed his passion could justify the relationship. For Mariette, however, there was no future; it had died, she thought, from the moment that she betrayed Aubert de Cany; she went through a purgatory of humiliation and remorse. Louis blamed her pregnancy for her emotional state; to the end he did not understand her.
“Forgive me that I must flee from you,” said Maret before she retired to the lying-in chamber. The pains had already begun, but she held herself erect and refused to allow the women to support her. Louis wanted to cheer her up. He took leave of her lighriy, with a joke. “You cannot escape me anymore, ma mie!”
“Alas, it is true,” replied Mariette slowly, turning back to face him. “But think of me sometimes, when you cannot find me.”
Louis had reason to think of her; when he saw her again, after the confinement, she lay straight and stiff between two rows of burning candles. Without a smile or farewell, she had left him forever.
After the quarrel in the presence of the King, the feud between Burgundy and Orléans was an accepted fact. Uncle and nephew avoided each other as much as possible, but in the Council passionate reproaches and thrusts burst out at every turn. Their mutual hatred could no longer be hidden; in Paris the rabble taunted Orléans’ household with cries of “Burgundy! Burgundy!”
In the beginning of the year 1401, Isabeau’s father, Duke Stefan of Bavaria, appeared at the French court to try to conclude a pact between Charles and the Emperor Ruprecht. Isabeau promised to use all her influence. But before she could act, she received a heavy blow: the Dauphin caught a chill and died; he was barely eight years old. Only a few months earlier he had made his solemn entrance into the city of Paris; accompanied by his granduncles and a brilliant procession, he had ridden on horseback through the city to the cheers of the people. Neither the efforts of the physicians nor the masses held in the King’s name in all the churches of Paris could save the child. His weak constitution succumbed to an illness which should not have been dangerous. Once more he was brought through the city to Saint-Denis, but now he was borne in a bier intended for dead kings, and weeping had supplanted the cheers. Under the weight of affliction, Isabeau for a time lost all interest in public affairs. She did not trouble Burgundy, who had begun to negotiate a betrothal between the small Marguerite de Nevers and the new Dauphin, whose elder brother lay still unburied.
Mourning for the Dauphin increased Isabeau’s worries about her daughter; the eleven-year-old widow of England’s King was in Windsor Castle, surrounded by all the ceremony which her station required, but in actual fact Lancaster’s prisoner. Delegations from France were allowed to hold brief, formal conversations with her, but all attempts to negotiate her return to Paris and the restoration of her substantial dowry, were frustrated by Henry’s cold refusal to respond, which aroused uneasy suspicions. Even Burgundy believed that Lancaster was considering a marriage between his son and the little widow. But Isabeau had other plans, with which the Duke of Burgundy, on second thought, agreed; she wanted to find a husband for her daughter in Germany.
Before summer came, Lancaster decided that keeping the dowry was not worth the loss of popular favor. No king of England had sought a French bride for himself or his kinsmen without penalty. Preparations were made for Madame Isabelle’s homeward journey. Meanwhile, Burgundy, with a great entourage, waited in state in Calais.
The prospect of her daughter’s homecoming put an end to the depression from which Isabeau had suffered throughout the spring, when she had determined to do penance for the damage she had unwittingly done to French interests and to those who attempted to thwart her over the past years. During a summer storm lightning had struck Isabeau’s bedchamber; the violence of the blow, the sight of the bedcurtains in flames, had shocked her into a vow to alter her way of life. But when the storm had passed, and her bedchamber was repaired, the Queen came to see things in another light. She established a church and required weekly masses to be said for the soul of the dead Dauphin. And thus she considered she had done her duty.