Louis thought that the King had suddenly become seriously ill; he prepared to leave at once, urging the gentlemen of his suite to sit down and eat without him. He left the Hotel Barbette accompanied by only a few nobles on horseback and Jacques van Hersen, who had once been his squire but who for the last several years had been his personal attendant.
Louis rode a mule, a beautiful beast which he had had sent from Lombardy. He sat carelessly in the saddle and let the reins hang loose. To conceal his annoyance and anxiety he hummed a tune and toyed with a glove. The dog Doucet leaped forward exuberantly beside the mule; the torchbearers ran ahead. Thus the small procession left Isabeau’s residence. Without undue haste the lord and his retinue rode through the Barbette gate and entered the dark alley which led to the rue Vieille du Temple.
It was a mild, humid November evening; it was not raining but a fine vapor hovered in the air. Louis coughed and pulled his cloak closer about him. He saw on his right, by the light of the torches, the building which was called the House of the Effigy of Our Lady, because a statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a niche in its façade. Louis never passed the spot without lifting his eyes to the brightly painted, stiffly smiling image. Now as always he glanced at the old house, which had been empty for years.
At that moment a young woman was standing at the window of her house opposite the House of the Effigy. Her name was Jacquette and she was the wife of a ropemaker, Jean Griffart; she had gone to the window to see if her husband was coming and to take in some washing which she had hung out to dry at noon. The torches in the street belonged to a distinguished company; a gentleman on horseback, attended by a groom and followed at some distance by five or six horsemen, came riding from the direction of the Barbette gate — a small white dog leaped in front of its master. Jacquette Griffart looked down at the procession for a moment — then she turned, intending to put her child to bed. But before she had taken three steps, a loud cry sounded from the alley: “Kill him! Kill him!” With the child in her arms, she hurried back to the window. The nobleman had fallen from his mount — he had slumped to his knees in the middle of the street, bareheaded, the blood streaming from his face.
“Who is that? Who is doing that?” he said weakly, raising his arms as though to ward off a blow. Now armed men swarmed upon him from all sides — they struck home with sticks, knives, axes. The blows echoed in Jacquette’s ears; it sounded as though they were beating a mattress, a lifeless thing.
She regained her voice and shrieked, “Murder!”, pushing the window open. A stone hissed past her cheek and a man who stood in the shadows under the window shrieked, “Shut up, woman!”
More torchbearers appeared from the House of the Effigy of Our Lady; by the flickering red glow the woman, softly wailing with terror, saw something formless and unrecognizable lying on the ground. The mule had galloped off in fright; the little dog yelped from a distance away. Jacquette heard the shouts of hurrying men coming from adjacent streets — there was nothing at all to be seen of the riders who had followed many paces behind the distinguished horseman. The squire, however, who had been wounded trying in vain to defend his master during the attack, now began to creep toward him. At the command of a long-haired, emaciated man in a monk’s habit, they gave him the death blow; he lay sprawled partially over the body of his lord. Out of the House of the Effigy of Our Lady, followed by a youth leading a horse by the reins, came a tall man, his head covered by a red bonnet. He held a lappet of the bonnet before his nose and mouth, but Jacquette saw the glitter of very dark eyes above the concealing cloth.
“Douse the torches,” he said. “Let’s get out; he’s dead. Come on, don’t make any mistakes!”
The man in the red bonnet leaped onto his horse and galloped off down a side street. The armed men followed him as quickly as they could; they hurled their torches away or extinguished them in the mud. Soon the street was plunged into darkness except where a torch still smouldered on the ground beside the dead man.
“Murder, murder!” Jacquette screamed again. She heard her cry taken up in the rue Vieille du Temple and in the rue des Rosiers. From the direction of the Barbette gate, many people came running with torches; before long the street was filled with people. A nobleman in silk clothes flung himself down in the mud beside the two bodies.
“Monseigneur!” he cried desperately. “Monseigneur! Messire van Hersen!”
The squire was still alive; they laid him down on a cloak under the arched doorway of a house. The dying man moaned words unintelligible to the onlookers. “My lord … both of us … in the Celestine monastery … The omen … the omen …”
The body of the distinguished lord lay in a pool of blood and mud; his skull was cloven in two places so that the brains protruded; someone had lopped off the left arm between elbow and wrist. The hand was found some distance away in a gutter, and placed on a litter with the rest of the corpse. Even before the dead man was borne away, a new calamity struck: flames burst through the ground floor windows of the House of the Effigy of Our Lady. “Fire, fire!” screamed the excited crowd; pails of water were dragged over to quench the blaze.
“In God’s name, what was that?” cried Jacquette, who still stood at the open window, trembling with cold and horror; without knowing what she did, she rocked the desperately screaming baby. “Whom have they killed there?”
A man passed by, dragging a bag of sand; he looked up and grinned sardonically, as though he brought good news.
“Orléans!” he replied. “Orléans the blood-sucker, our tormentor! May God rest his soul!”
As soon as the murder was made known at court, a messenger left Paris for Chateau-Thierry. While the man, bent low in the saddle, urged his horse to greater speed, residents of the castle, still unaware of their affliction, were celebrating the joyful fact that Monseigneur Charles had been born on that day fourteen years before.
II. OF VALENTINE, THE MOTHER
“Rien ne m’est plus, plus ne m’est rien.” “Nothing has meaning any more.”
On the tenth of December, 1407, the Duchess of Orléans returned to Paris after an absence of eleven years. She arrived in a carriage draped in black, drawn by six black horses; beside her sat her youngest son, Jean, and her daughter-in-law, Madame Isabelle, the King’s daughter. Valentine’s carriage was followed by an almost endless procession of riders: among them, along with officers of the ducal household, were many of Orléans’ vassals with their armed soldiers, friends and intimates.
Valentine was solemnly greeted at the city gate by the most exalted nobility; Berry and Bourbon showed the widow the honor which they had all too prudently withheld from their nephew’s wife when she had departed the city years earlier. The Duchess of Orléans sat motionless in the carriage. She was white as snow; her staring eyes were vacant. Isabelle clutched her hand, more terrified by her mother-in-law’s icy calm than she had been by the outbursts of despair and savage grief to which Valentine had abandoned herself when she had heard the tragic news. Isabelle had not believed it possible that a noble lady would carry on so, screaming and weeping, lying on the ground in torn clothing. Valentine had been like a madwoman; she had refused food and drink and beat her forehead against the earth, which will never give up its dead.
The small children had been too frightened to come to her; but Isabelle and Charles had kept the Duchess company day and night in the chapel of the castle. Kneeling on either side of the despairing woman, they prayed aloud, not eating, not sleeping, like Valentine herself. Isabelle, who prided herself secretly on having learned to bear suffering while she was still a child, maintained an exemplary attitude like a martyr on a tapestry; even during the long hours of kneeling, she betrayed no sign of weariness. She held the tips of her fingers firmly pressed together, her head erect, her eyes fixed upon the altar.