'Si , , . ; '^■■:/ ^ v: GIFT OF SEELEY W. ML'DI) and GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER DR. JOHN R. HAYNKS WILLIAM L. HONNOLD JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH E. SARTORI to th$ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SOUTHERN BRANCH JOHN FISKE This book is DUE on the last date stamped below -<^Y \ 6 192T MAR 2 1 1938 iVlAY 3 ^ 1927 ^''^^ 1 9 1939 ^^^ ' « 1929 ' 1930 '»¥J3As .1 ^330 ,OCT ^ »s*34l i-, probably by Michel Columl)e, now in the possession of M. M^lizet, La P^raudiere, Tours. RcJ>ro.1uced by permission qf M. P^ricat, Tours. OLD TOURAINE THE LIFE AND HISTORY OF THE FAMOUS CHATEAUX OF FRANCE THEODORE ANDREA COOK, B.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF WADHA.M COLLEGE, OXFORD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I Second Edition. Revised CHARLES SCRIBXER'S SONS 743 and 743 llROADWA Y 85;!0'<2 T)CG M v I T.QI nATPI AIAAKTPA PREFACE " Pour I'instruction de I'Univers Sedentaire." ^ Xavier de Maistre. The chapters which follow have been arranged on the only plan by which it seemed logically possible _ to sketch the great amount of history with which ji they have to deal : it may be as well to point out the way in which they arc meant to be of use. ^ Each castle in the valley of the Loire has a •H history of its own, sometimes going as far back as Roman times, sometimes reaching forward to the present day ; but in each castle there is also some particular event, some especial visitor, whose import- ance overshadows every memory connected with llie place ; it therefore became possible to arrange these " moments " chronologically, and thus gradualh- to unwind a more or less connected thread of history from the rise of the Angevin Plantagcncls where Chinon guards the bridge of the X'ienne to the last X PREFACE days of the Valois in the Chateau of Blois. In some cases the story has been carried on by chai)ters on the more important personages, such as the carh'er Dukes of Orleans or Marguerite de Valois, but any- thing approaching to thorough treatment of so long a period in one book was impossible. This arrange- ment of the mass of details which had to be in some way dealt with, seemed to recommend itself botli from its utility to the traveller in the valley of th3 Loire, and from its clearness in the presentment "f a certain side of French history to that large portic n of the cultivated universe which, like M. de Maisti 3, is wont to do its travelling at home. " Could any spot of earth Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witnessed, render back an echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod." . . . Characters will perhaps gain in reality for the reader, scenes may be imagined with a greater vividness, when described in their actual setting. " The stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it." The materials used have been first and foremost the rich mine of original authorities published in the Documents Inedits, the collection of Me moires by Petitot, and the smaller transcripts by Zeller from PREFACE XI the Memoirs and Letters of the time, which are in a more portable form and of distinct value. Among more modern authorities I have referred to the Histories of jMichelet and of Martin, and the Analyse Raisonnee of Chateaubriand; for Chapter II. to K. Xorgate's Angevin Kings ; for episodes at Chinon and at Blois to Yriarte's Cccsar Borgia and the Stan- hope Essay for 1891 ; to Un Gcntilhoinuic dcs temps passes and Fra)icois I. b}- C. Coignct ; and to lyie End of the Middle Ages and Marguerite of Navarre by Madame James Darmcsteter, to whose invaUiable suggestions I have been very much indebted through- out the whole work. On questions of architecture, Petit's Arehitectural Studies, the wondcrfull}' com- plete works of Viollet le Due, and the Renaissance of Art in France by Mrs. ^lark I'attison, have been consulted. A list in the Appendix has collected a few other authorities upon various subjects. Much help has doubtless been obtained elsewhere, but it is not wittingly left unacknowledged. All of the guide- books which are published for each chateau have been freely used, and in recognising my obliga- tions to their various authors I would especially single out the accurate and conscientious produc- tions of Mgr. Chevalier, whose publications from the archives of (hcnonceaux are particularly VOL. I b Ml PREFACE \aluablc, aiul lastly, the researches of M. do la Saussa)-e in the histor)- of the Chateau of IMois aiul its neighbourhood. I am assured that the materials at present collected ha\-e never been published in one book before cither in h'rance or h^nc^iand ; the need for them in a port- able form for travellers in Touraine is certainly a distinct one, and it is hoped that the illustrations will still further increase the interest of hjij^lishincn in a province, once an English possession, whose history has so much in common with their own. I have especially to thank I\I. Pericat of the Rue dc la Scellerie, Tours, for allowing me to reproduce several plates from a book of which he has latch- published a few copies, and which forms the finest collection yet extant of the best types of art in Touraine. The earlier chapters of Mr. Henry James's Little Tour in France, full of hap[n' suggestion and a keen artistic sense, will show the traveller the right way to use his eyes; Mgr. Chevalier's Guide Pittorcsquc du Voyageur en Touraine will give him further details and still more extend his wanderings ; ]\Irs. Mark Pattison's Renaissance in France will point out for him all that is most valuable in Tours and in Touraine of architecture, painting, and sculpture. These three books will also give all the information required PREFACE xm concerning the town of Tours itself, its possibilities of pleasure, its facilities for locomotion, its unequalled surroundings. In the Appendix I have inserted a few points which would have overcrowded the text, but which seemed necessary to give completeness to the work ; among them is a note on the Library of Tours furnished for me b\- the kindness of the librarian, M. Duboz. The first division of the Appendix collects some additional points of interest in the town of Tours itself and in Touraine ; the second is a list of the manuscripts and books in the various public libraries of the town ; the third deals with the numerous portraits and pictures (chiefly of the school of the Clouets) to be seen in Touraine and elsewhere in France and England, that bear upon the portion of history treated ; in the last is added a further list of books and manuscripts which ma}- be used where more facts are needed than I have been able to reproduce. I-'rom lack of space much has been omitted that may afterwards appear, should the want f(jr it seem pressing. I have, however, been able to add a Genealogical Table, which includes all the more im- portant families in I'rance who had any connection with Touraine, and a .Map which is reducetl n\)ni the XIV PREFACE sheets of the French Government Surve)-, aiitl will show the relative position of the places mentioned, several of which are considerably beyond the bound- aries of Tourainc, accurately so called. From this map it will be seen that three centres of exploration should be made by the traveller in the valley. The first, Saumur, from which he can drive to Fontev- rault and Chinon, then go b)- rail to Azay-le-Ridcau, and by rail or road return to Tours ; the second, Tours, from which three excursions are possible — (i) by road along the Loire to Luynes, Cinq Mars, and Langeais, and thence home by train ; (2) by rail past ?^Iontbazon to Loches ; (3) by rail to Amboise, thence to Chenonccaux, and home b}- rail ; his third centre will be Blois ; from here he can drive to Chambord and return by the Chateau of Cheverny, and the next day follow the road along the Loire to Chaumont, and drive back through the Forest of Russy, past the Chateau of Beauregard, and so to Blois. Throughout the province the hotels are good, the wines sound, the roads excellent, and a great deal can be done on horseback or in a light carriage ; the trains are slow but conscientious, and by the various lines will take the traveller who is wise enough to be leisurel}', to almost any place he may desire to visit. PREFACE XV In conclusion, I take this opportunity of expressing m\' deep sense of the courtes\- and assistance so freel\- rendered me on every side during- m}- sta)- in Touraine, and more especial!}' I would acknowledge the great help given me in man\^ wa)\s b\- M. James Darmesteter ; to him and to several friends in Ox- ford I owe most of what is useful in this attempt ; its shortcomings are my own, T. A. C. 19 Merton Street, Oxford. CONTENTS PAGE A Tahi.e of the Descent of the Royal Houses of France from St. Louis to Louis XIV. . foface i CHAPTER I Introductory ....... i The Geography of the Castles — Their History — Their Fate — Feudalism — The Influence of Women in France — The Associations of Literature. Early History of Touraine .... id Charles Martel — Csesarodunum, the first Tours — St. Martin of Tours — The Cathedral of St. Martin — The \'isigolhs — The Franks — Alcuin — The Pirates — The Re- building of the City — The first Counts of Anjou. CHAPTER II The Counts of Anjou, the Castle Builders . i8 Their Origin — Fulk the Red — Fulk the Good and the Leper — GeofTrey Greygown — Fulk Xerra, the typical Angevin — The Victory of Conquereux — I lis Fortresses in Touraine — His Kxpeditions — His Tonih at Beaulieu — His Son, Geoffrey .Martcl, completes the Conquest of Touraine and attacks Maine — Fulk Kechin — .\remhurg, Heiress of .Maine — .Matilda of Anjou marries William the Aclheling — Geoffrey I'lantagenet marries Matilda the Empress — Hirthof the future Henry II. — His Capacities — Murder of Thomas Hecket — Prosperity of the Angevin Empire from th<- |-..rtli t.. Ill • Pyrenees. CONTENTS ciiAi'i'i:i< III TACIC Chinon. The Plantacicnkis. Tiik ICaki.y IIistouy ok THE Casti.e ...... 29 Journey from Tours — Market Day at Chinon — Birthplace of Rabelais — His Statue — The old Fortress — Its three Divisions, the I'lantagenet Castle, the Chateau du Milieu, the Fort du Coudray — Henry II. of England and Anjou — Quarrels in his Family — Mis Death at Chinon — His Sons, Richard and John — The English driven from France — The Knights Templars — The Armagnacs and " Cabo- chicns " — The Misery of France. CHAPTER IV Joan of Arc and the Later History of Chinon . 50 Visit of the Maid of Orleans — Importance of her Place in History — Change of Opinion with respect to her in France and more especially in England — Agnes Sorel and the King — The English driven out of France — Visit of Mar- garet of Anjou to Louis XI. — Illness of Louis XI. at Les Forges — Betrothal of Philippe des Commines — His Value as Historian and Politician — Entry of Ccesar Borgia — The Plague — The " Receveur," M. Besnard — Condeat Chinon — Richelieu — Ruins of Chinon. CHAPTER V The Abbey of Fontevrault .... The Drive from Chinon — Candes and its Church — Mont- soreau — Fontevrault — Its base uses — Its Origin — Robert d'Arbrissel — The first Community of Pilgrims — The Lady Abbesses — The Plantagcnct Tombs — The so - called " Tour d'Evrault " — Visit of Francis I., of Marie Stuart, of Mademoiselle de Montpensier — Later Abbesses — "Fireworks and a big Dinner" — Revolution — The Drive to Saumur — The " Truncus " — Museum — The Dolmen — The " Rcpublique de ITle d'Or" — .System of Beacon Fixes from Langeais to Amboise. CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PAGE Three Dukes of Orleans ..... 92 Influence of the Family of Orleans in Touraine — Influence of Italy on France — TheViscontis — Marriage of Valentine Visconti to Louis d'Orleans, Duke of Touraine, brother of Charles VI. — Madness of Charles VI. — Unbridled Power of Louis d'Orleans— His Intrigues — Jficques Le- grand — Murder of Louis d'Orleans — His Brilliancy and Strength — Charles d'Orleans (the Poet) in his Vouth — Imprisonment in England after Agincourt — His Poetry — Ransom — Return to France — Visit to Italy — Life at Blois — Birth of his Son — The Youth of this second Louis d'Orleans — His Intrigues in Brittany and Mistakes in Italy — "Vive Louis XII." CHAPTER VIl LocHES AND Louis XI. . . . .116 Position and Importance of Lochcs — The Collegiate Church — Its Masonry and Architecture — Its hollow Pyramids — Agnes Sorel and her Tomb — The Chateauof Charles VII. and of Louis XII. — Oratory of Anne de Brelagne — The Keep of Fulk Nerra — Louis XI. as Dauphin and as King — His strangely composite Character — The " monstrous " Nature of his Age — The Policy of Centralisation. CHAPTER VIII Till-: Dungeons of Loches ; i iifjr most Famous Prisoners . . . . . i|i Jean Baluc — Commines — Ludovico Sforza — His Dungeon and its Inscriptions — His previous Career in Italy — His Face in tlie Ccrlosa of Pavia — Charles VII I. and .Sforza — Bayard in Milan — .Sforza betrayed to the I-'rench by his Swiss Mercenaries — The Prison of the Bisl)0|is — The Conspiracy of Bourl)on — The Dungeon of .Saint Vallicr — Later Prisoners — Kochcchouart — The Legend of I'ontbril- lant — The Inscriptions. C0Nr£.V7'S CIIAl'TICR IX PACK Langeais and Charles VIII. . . .160 Position of Langeais — The Angevin Fortress — The present Building — Its Architecture — The Castle of Pierre de la Brosse — The Chateau of Jean Bourrec — Anne dc Bretagne — Her Face — Her Character — Iler First Marriage — The Marcchal de Gic — The Invasion of Italy — The Crossing of the Alps by Charles VIII. 's Army — Extraordinary Success of the French in Italy — ^Mistakes of Louis d'Or- leans — The River Taro — Return of the King — His Death in 1498 — Rabelais at Langeais — Death of the "Chevalier de Langey " — Later Owners — The Park and the River. CHAPTER X Cmaumont and Louis XII. ..... 187 Tlie fust Castle in Angevin Times destroyed — The second Castle destroyed by Louis XI. — The third Castle built by Philibert de I'Orme — Its Architecture — Changes in its Structure — Vouth of Charles d'Amboise — His Importance in Louis XII. 's Reign — His Ambition for the Papacy — The King's second Marriage — D'Amboise is brought a Cardinal's Hat by Ccesar Borgia — Improvements in Domestic Policy during the Reign — "The Father of his Country " — Campaigns in Italy — Scenes at Milan and Pisa — Garigliano — The Marriage of Claude de France — Death of Cardinal d'Amboise — "Laissezfaire a Georges" — Death of Gaston de Foix at Ravenna — Ill-fortune of the French in Italy — Death of Anne de Bretagne and of the King — Diana at Chaumont — Later History of the Castle — Its old Tapestry and its Rooms. CHAPTER XI The Reign of Francis I. . . . . .211 " Le grand gar9on qui gatera tout " — Memories of him in Touraine — The " Amadis of a Later Gaul " — His deal- ings with the Emperor Charles V. — The Reformation — Marisrnano — The Concordat — The Election — The Field PAGE CONTENTS of the Cloth of Gold — Disgraceful Condemnation of Jacques de Beaune Semblancay — Early Career of Charles, Constable de Bourbon — Attacked by Louise de Savoio and driven into Rebellion — "Tout est perdu fors I'honneur" — The I'risons of Madrid — Death of Bayard — Marguerite's Visit to her sick Brother — Return of the King — His new Wife — His new Mistress — Bourbon in Italy — The Sack of Rome — Distress in France — Death of Louise de Savoie — Her despicable Character — The Italian Marriage — Power of the Emperor and his Visit to France — Old Age of Francis — His peculiarly "French" Characteristics — Strange Nature of the Times in which he lived — Mar- guerite de Navarre and the Reformation — The " Danse Macabre " of the early sixteenth Century — Holbein's "Simulachres de la Mort " — Death of Marguerite. CHAPTER XII Chenonceaux. The Reign of Henry II. . . . 240 First View of the Chateau — The Fortress of the Marques — Catherine Bri9onnet's Building — Its Architecture — Thomas Bohier, " Surintendant des Finances" — His Death in Italy — Misfortunes of his Son — Visit of Francis I. and the Dauphin — Business-like Proceedings of Diana — A sixteenth - century Lawsuit — " Le Proprictaire Malgre Lui" — The Character and Personal Appearance of Diane de Poitiers — Her first Reception at Court and subsetjuent Career — Her Party — The "Coup de Jarnac" — Mistakes of Henry II. 's Reign — Coligny and the Party of Reform. Index ........ 269 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Pencil drawing by Jane E. Cook, from a bust in lerra-cotta of a Magistrate in Touraine of the sixteenth century, prob- ably by Michel Columbe .... Frontispiece Vignette, from an eighteenth-century design (drawn by J. E. Cook) ....... I Facsimile of Rabelais' Signature, from the Calorie des Estampes, Bibliotheque Nationale ..... 29 Tour de I'Horloge at Chinon (from a drawing by C. G. Harper) to face 37 Fourteenth - century Key, from the Collection of M. Lacosic, Paris ....... 50 Ccesar Borgia (drawn by J. E. Cook), from the woodcut in Paulus Jovius, ed. 1575 . . . . . .63 The Abbey Church of Fontevrault (from a photograph) to face 74 Twelfth-century Kitchen at Fontevrault (from a drawing by Viollet le Due) ..... to face 82 The Porcupine, Badge of Louis XII. and the House of Orleans, from the Chateau of Blois (drawn by J. E. Cook) . . 92 Porch of the Collegiate Church at Lochcs (from a photograph) to face 116 .Steeple of the Collegiate Church at Lochcs (from a drawing by VioUct le Due) . . . .120 Hollow Pyramids in the roof of the Collegiate Ciiurch at Loclies (from a drawing by Viollet le Due) . . to face 125 The Chateau of Loches from beneath (from a photograph) to face 12S The Oratory of Anne de Uretagne at Loches (from a pholograpi)) 132 Fourteenth-century Key, from the Collection of M. I.acostc, Paris . . . . .1.11 The Keep and Dungeons of I^jchca (from a phutugraph) to face 147 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Arms of Langcciis — France quartereil willi Urittany (from a drawing by Roy) ...... i6o Langeais — Exterior of Chateau (from a photograph) . to face 163 Plan of Langeais (from a drawing by Roy) . . .166 Anne de Bretagne (from a pencil drawing by Jane E. Cook) . 168 Tomb of the Children of Charles VIII. and Anne dc Bretagne, carved by Jean Juste, in the Cathedral, Tours (from a photograph by M. Peigne, Tours) . . . to face 178 Langeais — Interior of Courtyard of the Chateau (from a jilioto- graph) ...... to face 1S5 Cardinal Georges d'Amboise (drawn by Jane E. Cook), from the tomb at Rouen, carved by Leroux . . . ,194 Iron Candlestick, from the Room of Catherine de Medicis at Chaumont (drawn by J. E. Cook) .... 206 Francis I., aged 34, from the enamelled terra-cotta bust in the possession of the Marquis de Bridieu, Chateau de Sansac, Loches (reproduced by permission of M. Pcricat, Tours) to face 211 Signature of Francis I., from the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris 211 Marguerite de Navarre, sister of Francis I. (from a drawing by J. E. Cook) ....... 227 Arms of Chenonceaux — the Bohier Family (from a drawing by J. E. Cook) ...... 240 The Chateau of Chenonceaux from the Entrance Drive (from a photograph) ..... to face 242 Henry II. of PVance, from the original in the possession of M. le Marquis de Biencourt at Azay-le-Rideau,by Francois Clouet (reproduced by permission of M. Pericat, Tours) . to face 262 Map of the Valley of the Loire . . . . .at end Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now does always last," SoK€i yo.p elrac ri rw reBveiori Kac kukuv ko.I uyadov. Beneath the lime trees on the terrace walk I sat, and watched the silver of the moon Slip softly from the river to the sands That fring^e with pale gold bars the silent Loire. The busy chirping of the insect wings, That all day long had rustled in the sun. Was still ; the tiny lizards on the wall, That all day long had flitted to and fro The burning stones, had vanished ; sweetly fell A silvern silence on the shadowed fields Where scarce a blade of grass bent to the breeze. The gentle breeze of evenings in Touraine Which comes but to caress the weary l)row And breathe contentment ; from the darker line, Where the soft grey of heaven kissed the earth, The moon rose higher to the cloudless blue And touched with light the tall Cathedral Towers, That like twin sisters rose above the trees Crowned with the evening star. There came a sound More felt llian luaid, as of tlic rustling \vini,'s Of countless souls that moved in ui)pcr air Or glided with the moonbeams through the niylit ; Souls of the dead who visited the homes Where once they dwelt ; and some sought all in vain And some who found seemed sorrowful to liiul, Or, with a horror of remembered sin Pursuing them, shuddered and passed alone ; And some few, near the old Cathedral Towers, Rested awhile in peace, as though to kiss A treasured memory within the stones. Softly the echoes from the far-off bell Whispered along the river, and the souls All gathered, so methought, within the fane. And joined their silent prayers with those below Who sang' thanksgivings ; all the vault of night Seemed full of harmonies that rose and fell Till they were caught up to the heaven above And borne amid the company of souls From lesser lights to higher, where the stars Bent down to listen. So the future seemed To mingle with the past. For a short space I saw revealed the double threads that bind This little speck of time we call "To-day" To the great cycle of unending life That has been and that shall be evermore. Tkiano.v, St Symi'Horien, Tours. # . TABLE OF THE DESCENT OF THE ROYAL HOUSES or FRANCE FKOM ST. LOUIS TO LOUIS XIV. Sliowing llicir Connection with the Families of Navarre, Lorraine, Visconti, Condi^ Ch&tillon, and Nassau, and with the English Kings. 1 left lo rifihi. . .•■' «r,w|™»-„(. .«, Jcunt,\ei«4trniui .,...» W/.-.TI.F^,...,., J..Vi ,.^i,..,v*,. .„...!. M ,.^,!x. ■*" '"'"'"■■'■■" '■"•"""■ .,„l„v..,v.., '3^23^- ie«- LJ .,™.v., IL, 2jM«™.VJ,.J.Vl„.n CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY EARLY HISTORY OF TOURAINE "With kings and counsellors of the earth, wliicli built desolate places for themselves ; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver." The old province of Tourainc very nearly corresponds to the modern department of the Indre ct Loire, though in some directions it is rather more extended. It is crossed from east to .^^ west by the rapid and sandy %4^ stream of the Loire, which flows through it for a dis- tance (jf some ninety kilo- metres from a point not far above Ambcjisc to the \allcy of Fontcvrault. The three chief Irilnitaries of the Loire, at this part of its course, join the river from its southern side ; and with very few VOL. I 11 OLD I-OURAIXE exceptions it is with this left-hand bank of the stream that wc shall chicll}- ha\c to do, our limits being Chambord to the east, in the department of the Loir et Cher, and to the west Saimiin-, in the old province of Anjou, the modern department of the Maine et Loire. In the forests to the north and east of Blois are the Chateaux of Chambord, of Cheverny, and Beaure- gard; while farther to the south and west is Chaumont looking down upon the Loire, which then flows be- neath the ramparts of Amboise westward to the cathedral towers of Tours. Upon the right bank, farther down, are Luynes, Cinq Mars, and Langcais ; and the Cher, which near here flows from the south- east into the Loire, has passed the galleries of Chenonceaux, some sixty kilometres from its mouth. The southern waters of the Indre are guarded by the rugged keep of Loches, and by Montbazon farther westward, and finalh' wintl in and out among the trees that shade Azay-le-Rideau, before losing them- selves in the swifter current of the main str-^am. At Candes the river is still further swollen by the Vicnne, which after passing the ruined towers of Chinon has flowed by the Forest of Fontexrault to add its story to the many voices of the Loire. Perhaps no stream in so short a portion of its course has so much history to tell. Until the end of the sixteenth century this part of l<"rance was covered with a multitude of chateaux, for beside the INTRODUCTORY old feudal towers, whose strength had saved them from destruction in the happier times of peace, the nobles of later days had raised more elegant abodes, in which they strove to preserve only what had been picturesque in the earlier fortified dwellings. B\' the wars of religion and the disturbances of the Fronde a great number of the chateaux had been ruined or defaced : by the line of policy which was begun by Louis XI. and carried on by Henry IV. to receive its full development at the hands of Richelieu and Louis XIV., the old feudal spirit had been finally crushed ; even architecture took an cntircl)- different form. The Court, which for so man)' centuries had moved to and fro among the pleasant castles of Tourainc, migrated towards Paris, and filled the wide walks and never-ending gardens of Versailles and Fontaine- bleau : the last of the old feudal barons was Agrippa d'Aubigne, the friend and comrade in arms of Henry of Xavarre, who kept his fortresses till he left France, and then sold them to the Rohans. By the Revolu- tion the old chateaux were within an ace of being destroyed for ever ; the " crown of Cybele " in Tourainc lost nearly half its beaut)-, for with chang- ing times the life of other centuries perished, and " like an unsubstantial pageant faded," though legends of it and memories of it still cling to the ruined walls like the ivy which a kindly soil has lent to hide their falling gateways. It is true that here OLD TOUR A I NE and aL;ain a new life mingles with the oUl, bill many of the ancient homes stand empt)- and deserted, or, saddest fate of all, await richer i)urchascrs to save them from destruction. Chenonceaux is in the tj^rip of a L;reat Paris corn- pan}- ; in Amboisc, where iVbd-el-Kader chafed in prison, where Marie Stuart sighed over the slaughtered Huguenots, no courtly laughter comes again to grace the mutilated halls, for the Orleans princes abode there but a little while, and have left it dead again, Loches seems happier as the seat of a Sous-Prefct, who dwells by the tomb of Agnes Sorel ; Plessis-lez- Tours is worst changed of all. The churches of the Middle Ages live on still and have a meaning f(^r us even in their ruins, for the faith that built them is among us still ; but the feudal castles belong to a life and a time so different from our own that to understand them at all we must go back to the history of which they formed a part ; we must try, as well and shortly as may be, to people these walls that are still echoing with a larger and a fuller life than ours, to realise the men who built them and lived in them, to imagine fcjr oursches that dead and gone feudalism in the midst of which the youth of the P^rench nation grew hard and strong. Nor is it difficult to discover a reason for the interest and fascination which the modern world finds, and will always find, in that old life : we arc perpetually receiving pleasant shocks from its INTRODUCTORY astounding originality, from the unexpected nature of its modes of thought and action. An age un- fettered by the later restrictions of what is called society, by a morality from which it results that the actions of any given man in any given position can often be accurately foretold, a generation which was innocent of Kant, and ignorant of Herbert Spencer, could well preserve a spontaneity and freshness of impulse, an individuality of method and resource which is as strange as it is fascinating to men of a later and more conventional society ; for the passions of its barbarism mingle in curious ways with lighter fantasies of the imagination, with a deeper and more heartfelt poetic feeling. But in this very freedom of the feudal age lay the germs of its decay. The system that liberated the warriors of the time from all the higher bonds imposed by the idea of Nation- ality had placed in society a principle of anarchy that was incompatible with the existence of a great country, that favoured private civil wars, that made a national resistance impossible, and was the source of the terrible disasters of the Hundred Years' War. William the Conqueror, at the conquest of iMigland, had discovered long before the rest of France the defects of the old system, and had broken the mould of Feudalism ; ^ it was one of the many signs of his greatness that he had done so. There is yet another fact which, while it adds ' C. Coi^jnct. /■lancois I. OLD TOURAINE one more reason for our interest in these early days, is itself the mainspring of much of their hot-blooded impulse and versatile emotion : in no other countr}' have women exercised so great an influence upon politics and the whole life of the peoi)le as in France. It has been truly said that thc}' have avenged the passing of the Salic law ; but they have done more : throughout French history, even down to modern times, the motto which guides the historian's re- searches is " Cherchez la Femme." F"rom the heroine of Charles VII. down to the grand-daughter of that Agrippa d'Aubigne already mentioned, their ambition and their influence for good or evil have been exhibited by women who understood better than those of any other nation how to wield the weapons peculiar to their sex. It is the same in later as in earlier times. " The vice of the six- teenth century," says IMichelet, " is the unrestrained outburst of its passion, its blind desire for physical enjoyment, which outraged what it loved." The reaction was a matter of course. The skilful wit of woman and her " sweet reasonableness" laid hold upon this strong brutality and governed it. The sixteenth century was the reign of woman ; from the days when the Pisan girls surrounded Charles's army and melted their hard hearts to tears, to the cscadron volant of the Valois Court, it is by women that the century is troubled, corrupted, civilised. Fven in Mero- vingian times the loves and hates of Fredegonde INTRODUCTORY and of Hrunhilda ^ gave a theme to poets of Tourainc, and at the very beginning of the period with w hicli these chapters chiefly deal we have three such opposing influences as the shameless Isabel of Bavaria, the Maid of Orleans, and Agnes Sorel. Immediately after Louis XL's death the masculine firmness and ability of his daughter Anne dc Bcaujeu is replaced by the quiet womanly tcnacit}' of the twice- crowned little Breton Queen. The baneful influ- ence Louise de Savoie exercised over her son Francis was but half counteracted by the gentleness and mysticism of his sister Marguerite : Francis was the plax'thing of his mistresses. The next reign is indeed the reign of a woman. Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, was ruler of the destinies of France, and powerful enough even to crush the venomous Italian Queen into subjection for a time ; but the day of Catherine of Medicis was not long in coming, and for three more reigns her hand was at the throat of France, her influence poisoning its Court. Many more notable women there arc — Marie Stuart and La Rcinc Margot, Gabrielle d'Estrees, and yet another Medicis but little better than the first and far less wi.sc, until we come to Louise de la Vallicre, and sec among the mistresses of Louis XIV. the widow of Scarron standing apart, " the most influential woman of French history," Madame de Maintcnon, wh(j was to be the lawful wife of the King. ' Sec Thierry's Rtciti Maovingicns. OLD TOUR A I NE All of these has Tourainc welcomed at some time or another, to one of its many jxalaccs, beneath the soft sunshine of the Loire valley, where energy and sustained action seem a thing contrary to nature, in the country of Rabelais, the home of Ro}-al favourites, the afternoon-land of idleness and laughter. Here the grass is as green in .August as in May among the orchards and the groves. Look across the ri\er at the other bank and it will seem hanging in the air, so faithfully is cknid and sky reflected in the stream. The sands that line the river's bed are fringed with willows bending down as if to sip its waters ; poplars, aspens, and acacias shade the stream, where countless little islets break the siher current. As Victor Hugo sang of Bievre — " Une riviere au fond, des bois sur les deux ])cntes, Lk des orneaux brodes de cent vignes grimpantes Des pres ou le fauchcur brunit son bras nerveux, Lk des saules pensifs qui pleurent sur la rive Et comma une baigneuse indolente et naive Laissent tremper dans I'eau le bout de leurs cheveux." A soft and sensual country is it, where the idea came naturally to D'Arbrissel to make a woman queen of his monastery.^ Nor are these memories of men and women who have lived the only ones with which Touraine is filled ; scarcely less real, and with an added charm ^ Michelet, vol. ii. IXTRODUCTORY from the genius of their creators, are the characters from Balzac, from Rabelais, from George Sand that moved and had their being in the valley — and English readers will before all recognise the scenes in which young Quentin Durward played his part, the postern gate through which he rode out of Plessis with the Ladies of Cro)-e, so soon to be pursued by Dunois and Orleans. Chenonceaux reminds us of " Lcs Huguenots " as much as of Diana. The halls of Chambord arc still crowded with the courtiers watching Marion Delorme, and in the streets of Blois there stands the lamp-post beneath which her lover fought his duel and was taken by the King's officers. There is scarce an abbc}- in Tourainc but finds its own story among the Contes Drolatiques, not a landscape but has its more delicate associations with a Felix or a Lucien, even a Duchesse de Langeais. The very house where the terrible old maid who tortured the Cure de Tours resided, rises hard by the cathedral walls with the great buttress en- croaching upon its quiet garden close. Dumas' musketeers are laughing in the Salle des Gardes at Blois, and the rattle of their swords as they fence upon the staircases is ringing even in the King's chambers beyond ; and Athos' house nn"glit still be seen, to which K.ioul rode nut tVwm Hlois after a certain stolen intcr\iew with a young lady distrusted by his father. Jean Jaccjues Rousseau has wandered in the groves of Chenonceaux ; OLD TOURAINE Madame de Stael has watched the wideninc^ Loire at Chaumont. The brilh'ant pamphlets of Paul Louis Courier come into our miiul in the little town of Luynes ; at Loches we recall De Vigny's vivid romance and the fall of the unhappy Cinq Mars. Near Blois, " Cctte maison Qu'on volt, batie en pierre, ct d'ardoise couvertc, Blanche et carree, au bas de la collinc verte," is the house where Victor Hugo spent his childhood. In endless wa}-s the genius of the place has been embodied and personified. Rabelais is full of touches of the true spirit of Touraine, the life of plenty, and the love of wine, and midday siestas in the autumn sun of good fat priests, their paunches " with fat capon lined," in abbeys that were his models for the great vision of Thelema. Such is the Touraine to the early history of which we must now turn, and first to its focal point the town of Tours. If there is one thing for which Tours is famous it is for its soldier-saint and the victory of Charles Martel. In 718 the Arabs, who held nearl}- the whole of Spain, poured over the P\-renees into the Narbonese district ; they were driven back b\- Odo from Toulouse and from Provence, but they sacked Autun not long afterwards, and in 732 Abd-el- Rahman, the commander of the Khalif's arm\' in Spain, took Bordeaux, ravaged Aquitaine, and ad- vanced to the plunder of the rich see of St. Martin TOUR A I XE EARLY HISTORY at Tours. At this time the town was united with the rest of Gaul, and the vigorous Charles Martel was j\Iayor of the Palace ; he led out his small forces against the advancing squadrons of the In- fidels, and between Tours and Poitiers (the exact spot is not known) " the young ci\"iIisations of Europe and Asia stood face to face," the scimitar of the Eastern horseman tried conclusions with the broadsword of the West. One of the decisive battles in the world's history was won by Charles Martel ; the incredible number of 300,000 Arabs are reported to have fallen with their leader, and the Saracens were finally driven out of the midst of France. But there was a Tours before Charles INIartcl, although its history does not go back (like that of Langeais and Amboisc ^) before the Roman con- quest. Its early name Caesarodunum first occurs in the Itinerary of Antonine, and by the third ccntur}' it is already a free State, the Civitas Turonum ; the inscriptions proving this were discovered in 1 7 i i on the old foundations of the city wall, which arc still to be seen in the cellars of the archbishop's palace. Of this Roman time we can distinguish two periods : the first, some three centuries of ease and prosperity ; ^ the second, a time of military * Langeais (Alingavia), Amboisc (Ambacia), Chinon (Caiiio), and Candes (Candate) are of Gallic origin. See E. Mabillc, Bibl. de Pkolt cits Charles, 3me Seric, Art. "Tourainc." * For details of the costume about this period see the carvings on tlie tomb 'f •'!'■ f'onsul Torinus at Kheims, showing the (Jallo-Ronian OLD TOURAINE occupation, of fighting which was to last for many \-car.s, when new walls were hurriedly reared out of the debris of the older and more peaceful town which extended over the ground covered by the chateau, the cloisters of St. Gatien, and the Archevcche. The ruined walls of the fifth century may still be seen, in fragments, with the capitals and carvings hastily built into them, as Themistoclcs built the first walls that strengthened Athens : they lasted until 1202, with the addition of some strengthening towers which looked out over the vines and gardens that covered what is now the Rue Royale. This Caesarodunum was the cradle of Gaulish Christianity ; ^ St. Gatien had been one of seven missionaries sent out from Rome to evangelise the Gallic provinces ; St. Lidorius, the second bishop, began the Cathedral Church in memory of his pre- decessor. This cathedral, the oldest foundation in Touraine, was dedicated to St. IMaurice until the thirteenth century. The first building was burnt in 561 and rebuilt by Gregory. After the fire of 1 166 the present structure was begun in 1170; by 1260 the greater part was finished and definitely dedicated to St. Gatien ; in 1426 the twin towers were begun, knight going hunting with spear and hound, clad in short tunic and buskin, with the shoulder-clasped cloak, which recalls the memory of the great centurion's charity. ^ It also formed the centre of a system by which the great Roman roads connected and bound together Poitiers, Chartres, Bourges, Orleans, Le Mans, and Angers — in many cases the modern roads follow these lines ; there are always traces of the old ones. TOURAIXE EARLY HISTORY 13 and soon afterwards the sculptures of the grand facade were finished, but the larger tower was not completed until 1500 and its sister some fifty years later. The Romans completed the foundation of French civilisation, and then passed away, but the Roman Church remained. Before the end of the fourth century St. iMartin, third and most famous of the bishops of Tours, had left the service of the Emperor Julian to engage under the Christian Cross. From every side, and in great numbers, the pagans poured in to be converted to the faith, and the good bishop was constrained to retreat for rest to his little cell at St. S}'mphorien, backed by the limestone rock and peering down across the greensward to the river, where later on was to rise the noble Abbey of Marmoutier, whose greatest abbot was the famous Alcuin of York. The immense popularity of St. IMartin, both in England and France, is evident from the vast number of legends connected with his name upon the Continent, and from the fact that even after the purging of the Calendar his name remained upon the list of saints recognised by the luiglish Church. The first church dedicated to St. IMartin was built by his successor ; the ne.xt, which was burnt in 994, was rebuilt by llcr\c in 1014, and only two towers of it remain, the Tour dc rilorlogc and the Tour de Charlemagne, in the R(jniano-B}'7.antine style, with traces of rcstoraticjn in twelfth -century 14 OLD TOURAINE Gothic. The tomb of St. Martin was the ancient sanctuary, the Delphic oracle of France, the centre of the Merovinq^ian workV where its kini^^s came to question destiny at the shrine round wliich the Counts of Blois and of Anjou broke so many lances. Mans, Angers, and all l^rittany were dependent on the see of Tours, whose canons were the Capets and the Dukes of l^urgundy and lirittany, the Count of Flanders and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the i\rch- bishops of Mayence, of Cologne, and Compostella. At Tours there was a mint for money as good as that at Paris, and in very earl\- times silk and precious tissues were made here of finer fabric than in all the rest of France, until Nantes and Lyons joined the capital in competition with the older centre. But soon after St. Martin's days, by 419, the Visigoths were in Poitou and Berry, and in a {cw years the " Tractus Armoricanus " revolted from the yoke of Rome ; then the Tourangeaux joining the men of Anjou and ]\Iaine entered the great con- federacy of rebellion and chased from Touraine the Romans, who by 446 had lost all hold upon the province. Long years of struggle follow between Visigoths and P'ranks, until in 507 Clovis finally conquered Alaric, and Touraine becomes a pro\ince of the P'ranks, in whose hands it remained with several unimportant changes of ownership for the ^ Michelet, vol. ii. In Cailovingian times this "centre" of faith and activity was transferred to Anjou. TO I 'RAINE EA RL 1 ' HIS TOR V 1 5 next two centuries. In the time of Charles Martel the Abbey of St, ^Martin was in its greatest splendour; there is still a relic left, in the modern library of Tours/ of its ancient magnificence and culture, in the Gospel written in gold letters upon vellum, upon which the French kings took their oaths. Half a century later Alcuin, pupil of the Venerable Bede, had been sent for by Charlemagne from Rome to be made Bishop of Tours, and here in his famous school he taught the King's sons, Charles, Pepin, and Louis." In 800, Luitgard, the wife of Charlemagne, the "guardian of her people," was buried in the church of St. :\Iartin. During the ne.xt century Tours was, to her sor- row, again the bulwark of that part of France against invading barbarism, but no Charles Martel was at hand to help, and these new invaders proved more troublesome than the Saracens. The terrible pirates from the North had rowed up the Loire and burned St. Martin's Abbey, and the sacred body of the saint had to be moved out of danger and brought back, tradition says, by one Ingelger in 805. The second " reversion " of the same kind occasioned the legend of the saint's bod)', borne up by his worshippers, ' Sec nolo on this lilirary in the A|tpen(iix. - Sec Alcuin's Letters, /Jo/n Hoitijtut, v. O05. He wiiles lo Cliarle- magnc to Ik- allowed to send to England for some books, the " (lowers of British learning ; so that they may he found not only in the garden close of York, but that Tourainc also may have its share in the fruits of I'aradi.se. " l6 OLD TOCRAIXK having put to flight the armies of the aliens, probably in the actual siege of 90 3. At the rebuilding of the city King Charles (the Simple) granted the men of Tours a charter for a fortified borough, subject only, like that of St. Denis at Paris, to its own abbot the Duke of the French. ]^y the side of the old town of St. (iatien, the Ca;sarodunum of the Romans, arose the town of St. Martin with its especial wall and moat, the Martino- polis within which Henr}' II. built his Chateauneuf, and which was onl\' united to its neighbour in 1350 to make a better resistance to the English. Within these walls was the Abbey of St. Martin, where h\ilk the Good, Count of Anjou, might so often be seen sitting in his stall next to the Dean. Of the An- gevin chateau, built upon the ruins of the old Roman palace, only the Tour de Guise remains, and a stone preserved in the gardens of the Prefecture car\cd with what looks like the well-known Pompcian grouj) of two doves drinking from a cuj).^ A still older structure than this was the Tour du roi Ilugon, haunted by the legends of this mythical personage, which was destro}-ed in the eighteenth centur\'. By an ancestor of Henry II., the Count luides II. of Anjou, was built the bridge over the Loire in 1031, of which some remnants are still left upon the right ban]-: : the present bridge was begun in 1765. ^ This stone has been described with more zeal than accuracy as " the funereal monument of Turnus." TO L 'KA IXE EA RLY HIS TORY 17 Of the Angevin Princes we must know more. The sketch of later histor\' in Tours (so far as it is not aUuded to in subsequent chapters) will be found in the last chapter on the town, which brings its story shortly down to modern days. The Counts of Anjou are the ancestors of the Plantagenets whom we shall meet at our first castle of Chinon, and it is with their extraordinary rise to power and importance that we have now to deal. VOL, I CHAPTER II THE COUNTS OF ANJOU " rugneiit ipsique nepotesque." — \'irgii,. r^KOM the wrilinL^s of John, a monk of Alarnioulicr, and Thomas I'aclius, Prior of Lochcs, we hear of one Tortulf, a Breton, who especially distinguished him- self b}- his bold defence of the valleys of Touraine against the pirates ; his son Ingelger, already mentioned in connection with the return (jf St. Martin's body to the church of Tours, married the niece of the Archbishop and took Amboise as his dowry. But later researches^ cast some doubt on these facts. The first name which may be considered as historically accurate is the reputed son of Ingelger, Fulk the Red, Count of Anjou, who, whatever his ancestors may have been, was the first of a remark- able line of princes, stamped all with a strong family likeness, with the same characteristics of energy and thoroughness, and endowed with \-er)' brilliant and varied natural powers crossed by a ' Mabille. loc. cit. Salmon, Supplement an rceucil des Chroiiiqiies Jc Touraine. THE COUNTS OF AXJOU 19 strange vein of spasmodic and unreasonable piety or superstition. The little kingdom of Anjou, given to its first counts by Odo of Paris in reward for their services against the dreaded pirates, was wedged in between the Loire, the Sarthe, and the Mayennc, and in the hands of less energetic owners would have been inevitably swallowed up in the possessions of the powerful Counts of Blois, had not these latter shown as much of irresolution and weakness as their life- long opponents possessed of keen and unwearying activity. Alone of all his race the second Count, Fulk the Good, waged no wars and took but little part in politics : of him is related the story that when on his way to Tours from his own province he met a leper desiring to be carried to the shrine of St. ]\Iartin ; the good Fulk lifted up the loathsome burden which every other passer-by had refused, and bore him on his shoulders to the shrine, where the leper vanished ; and it was revealed to Fulk, as he was sitting in the choir of the church he loved so well, that the leper was the Christ Himself His son, Geoffrey Greygown, was of a more martial character, and helped Hugh Capet to his throne before he was laid to rest with his father in the Church of St. Martin. it is about this time that we meet with legends of an Angevin Count having married a lady of sur- passing beauty and somewhat doubtful antecedents, OLD TOUR A INK not unconiicctcd with the lower world. The myth is probably an attcmjit to explain the strange char- acter of the next Count, the t\'pical Angevin, Fulk Nerra, the Black Falcon, who must have been a standing enigma to his contemporaries. In this strange being men saw wonderingly " mad bursts of passion which would have been the ruin of an ordinary man, but which seem scarcely to have made a break in his cool, calculating, far-seeing policy, a rapid and unerring perception of his own ends, a relentless obstinacy in pursuing them." iLver}- town in Touraine has its legend of the Black Count, the great builder beneath whose hands the lower reaches of the Loire gradually bristled with fortresses, that were each one a solid step towards the one dream of his life, the greatness of Anjou. His prowess as a fighter was shown early in the victory of Conquereux, where, in spite of Breton pitfalls, he led his cavalry again and again upon the foe, " as the storm wind sweeps down upon the thick cornrigs." By that victory he secured the lower waters of the Loire. Farther up he held Amboise through his mother's right, and Loches b}' his wife, and from both places he dashed out upon Touraine against the power of Odo, Count of lilois, in the beginnings of a strife which was but the foreshadowing of the quarrel between Stephen of Blois and Ilenr}- of Anjou for the English crown. In pursuance of a steady policy Fulk built his THE COUXTS OF ANJOU fortresses in a long crescent from Angers to Amboise, cutting out Touraine from the domains of Blois ; Loudun and IMircbeau menaced Saumur, the border fortress which held the valley of Vienne ; INIontrcsor was kept by Roger the Devil, between the Indre and the Cher, on whose banks was the keep of Montri- chard ; Langeais and Montbazon threatened Tours. From his high tower of Loches, beneath which his son, the future Hammer of Anjou, was being brought up in a blacksmith's forge, the Black Count looked out across the lands of Beaulieu, lit up by the rising sun, and, in a sudden fit of repentance for much bloodshedding, built there, in 1012, an abbey, which was consecrated on his return from one of several visits to the Holy Land undertaken from the same strange spasmodic promptings of irregular religion. Four years later, after several victories over Odo of Blois, he turned his restless arms from Touraine northward to the lands of Maine: it was a momentous change of policy, the first link in the chain that was to stretch across the borders into Normandy and beyond seas to England, until it ended in the mar- riage of the Empress Matilda to Geoffrey Piantagenet. But for the moment farther advance northward was stopped by a resolute attack from l^lois, which the Black Falcon checked with his usual vigour. Swooping ujjon Saumur, whose master was awa)' near Tours, VwW seized the valley of the \'icnnc, retook Montbazon and Langeais, and by finally OLD TOUR A I XE capturiiis^ Chinon, reduced all Touraine, except its capital, Charactci'isticall}' he left the last task un- finished, went suddenly (for the fourth time) to Jerusalem, and died on his way home near Metz. Until 1/93 ^"'is tomb was in the Abbey of ]?caulicu, and can still, with some amount of ccrtaint}-, be pointed out.^ Geoffrey Martel seemed to have inherited his father's warlike capabilities. He signalised his arrival to power by crushint:^ Aquitainc, and absorb- ing the territory of Maine after the taking of Lc Mans : the possessions of Anjou now touched the Norman boundary. Then, taking up Fulk's un- finished work in Touraine, Geoffrey seized St. Julien and attacked the town of Tours, which, after some severe fighting, he finally captured. But Touraine was not yet to be Angevin, and the conquest of Le Mans now began to bear fruit. In 1048 Duke William of Normandy came to the help of his suzerain the French King and attacked Maine ; but a rapid change of policy followed William's too evident and increasing power. It is characteristic of the times that some ten years after we find King Ilcnry at Geoffrey's palace in Angers arranging a combined harrying of the Duchy of Normandy. This failed, as it only deserved to do, and within two years both conspirators were dead. The County of Anjou now enters upon the ^ See Salics, Foiilqitcs Nerra, pp. 456 seq. (ref. quoted by Norgate). THE COUNTS OF ANJOU saddest portion of its histon-, the times of the Count Fulk Rechin, who for t\vcnty-eiy;ht }-cars kept the riijhtful heir, Geoffrey, imprisoned in the dungeons of Chinon, until the wretched captive lost all longing for liberty or crown. Nor were other signs of this shameful period any more encouraging. The onh' bright spot in the dark reigns of Fulk Rechin and of Philip I. is the life of Count Elias of Maine, who for a time saved Le ]\Ians from Norman rule. But with the accession of Louis VI., and after Henry of England, by the victory of Tinchebray, had made himself master of Normandy, better days dawned for Anjou with the marriage of the new Count Fulk to Aremburg the heiress of Maine, The next years are years of fighting with Normandy and England, which resulted in impressing the English King Henry more and more with the strength and capacit}' of his young Angevin rival. At last, in I 1 19, IMatilda of Anjou was married to William the Aetheling, heir to the English Crown, to whom Fulk shortly after left his kingdom before going to Jerusalem. But the end was not yet. The youth who would have inherited an undisputed power over England, Normand)', and the possessions of Anjou was drowned in the White Ship in November i 1 20. After the first passion of his grief was over, IIem-\' at once took new measures for the security of the succession to the English crown. His daughter OLD TOURAINE ^Matilda, widow of the l\mi:)cror ] Icnr\- V., was acknowlcdi^cd licircss In- the asscnil)li'(l l^n^iish barons, and sent over to be married amidst yreat rejoicings to Geoffrey Plantagenct, tiie handsome son of Fulk, Count of Anjou. All hope for the new i^mpire of the Angevins now rested on tlie issue of this marriage, and Fulk, feeling, perhaps, that his day was over and his work in Europe done, was given the cross by Archbishop Hildebert in the Cathedral of Tours, and said good - b}'e to his daughter, the widow of William the Aetheling, who had retired to the Abbey of Fontevrault. The rest of his famil}- met him for the last time in the same quiet cloisters, and he went away to fight the Turks and Saracens as King of Jerusalem. Geoffrey Plantagenet, who took his name from the golden broom that brightens the wide fields of Maine and Anjou, was of " a fair and rudd\- counte- nance, lit up by the lightning glance of a pair of brilliant eyes ; " his broad shoulders and strong frame were graceful as they were strong and active. Nor were his intellectual attainments less striking, in a time of almost universal ignorance among the fighting barons. Within a few years a son and heir was born to Matilda at Le Mans, the future Henry II., who was to overshadow even his father's strong individualit}'. Two years later died Ilcnry I. The old quarrel between Anjou and Blois arose again, and was to be far keener, for the stake was a THE COUNTS OF ANJOU 25 much greater one. Stephen, Count of Boulogne, the first layman in England after the King, was the third son of Stephen, Count of Blois, by his wife, Adela, daughter of the Conqueror. At the King's death he had the immense advantage of being on the spot almost immediately after, though such a tempest arose at his crossing from Boulogne as almost rid the young heir in Anjou of his most dangerous rival. But at first the outlook seemed black indeed for the child of Geoffrey and ]\Iatilda. England they had lost, and Normandy was gone too ; yet the Angevin persistence won at last, helped by the old unsteady nature traditional in the house of Blois. In I 1 39 Matilda sailed for England with her son, to be received by Robert of Gloucester. Seven years of struggle followed, during which the English Chronicle gives a fearful picture of the sufferings of the land, until, in 1146, Stephen finally freed him- self from opposition. ^leanwhile across the Channel Geoffrey of Anjou had taken Normandy, and had been recognised its duke by King Louis VI. The young Henry was then called back to be gi\cn the duchy by his father, who died in 1151. As Duke of Normandy and Count (.A AnjL P. Jannet. CEiivres Computes de Rabelais (ed. Jannet Picard). Other authorities give 1483 ; the date is uncertain. - The best portrait of Rabelais I have seen is in the Bibhotheque Nationalc at Paris — a cut by P. Tauje, 1739. Of earlier portraits that by N. Habert, 1699, is best. CHIXON 33 and again of Rabelais later on, until Ronsard sings his epitaph in 1553, and a new school of literature begins very foreign in its methods to the cultured strength of the Cure de Meudon. The statue looks towards a bus\- little square filled with a throng of traffickers, and crowded with gaily decorated booths : in the middle played the waters of a fountain circled by young acacia trees, and in their shade opened the inviting portals of the Hotel de France. Onh- a Yorkshireman can do justice to a breakfast in Touraine ; in Chinon the traditions of Panurge's friend, the famous " Innocent le Patissier," are evidently still kept up. We did our best, and were soon leisurely ascending the hill abo\e which stretched the long broken line of the three fortresses whose ruins combine to form the relic of feudal strength known as Chinon. Arrived on the high ground, we passed beneath an iron lantern swung upon a rope across the road, and felt at once that we had left modern France behind us. In front was the gateway of the castle with a mass of stone towering above it, crowned b\' a belfry at one corner with its aged, battered weathercock. Behind stretched the garlanded poles om the next room, which has a small square bakehouse by its side, descends a strange little flight of steps through a narrow passage cut in the rock down to the bottom of the moat. This moat is crossed by a stone bridge, which, like the longer one at the entrance, replaced the old wooden structure about the sixteenth century. It is defended by two towers ; from that on the left, built in the thirteenth century, perhaps the best view of the whole castle is to be obtained, while the full sweep of the ri\-er below is seen at its finest. The tower on the right is of the same epoch, and contains some of the best masonry in Chinon ; it was the old donjon of the castle, and its strong foundations plunge down into the moat beneath in one bold line of massive buttress. Within is a range of prisons, vault below vault, to the lowest level reached. We are now within the Fort du Coudray, the last of the three castles, at the extreme CHINON 39 western edge of the cliff; its chief feature is the fine Tour du Moulin, where the mill of the fortress once stood, whose pointed leaden roof and widespread sails must have been a strange feature in the old castle. Along the wall of which this tower forms the western corner arc the oldest relics of the twelfth- century buildings. Chinon more than all other places in this part of the country leaves an impression of antiquit)^ far greater than that of its neighbours ; it is easy to people Blois with the gallants of Henry III.'s Court, or the intrigues of Louis XIV. ; Chenonceaux tells its own light, uneventful stor\- in every ripple of reflected sunbeam upon its graceful windows ; but Chinon, greater in extent than all of them, a very wilderness of towers and battlements — Chinon is in ruins irretrievably. It would seem as if the move- ments to which its walls gave birth were too weighty for the nurse that bore them, and the mother of so many royal fortunes has not had strength to live to sec the fulness of their destiny. The history of the Plantagenets of Chinon has passed on to the walls of Windsor. The dense woodland of larches, oaks, and firs which stretches to the north-east, almost to the valley of the Indrc, was no doubt one of the attrac- tions of Chinon to Fulk Ncrra and to the greatest of his descendants, Ilcnry II. of iMigland and Anjou, whose favf>uritc home in hVance was licrc. it 40 OLD TOURAINE remains for us to complete the stor\- of the .An^^cvin kings which was traced up to the liighest point of their prosperity. A great cliange is now to come. With the death of "the }-oung King," his son Henr)', in I I 83, discord at once broke out between Richard, Geoffre\-, and John, the other three sons ; a further element of complication was introduced by the death of Geoffrey of Brittany, whose son Arthur was ahnost immediatel)- claimed by the French King as his ward. The confusion had reached such a pitch that Richard had seized his father's treasury at Chinon, when news came of the great Saracen victor}- over Gu}- of Lusignan, which gave Jerusalem itself into the hands of the Infidels, ancl Richard took the cross from the Archbishop of Tours. The would-be Crusaders began operations against the Infidel by quarrelling among themselves at home ; amidst a general disorder Richard joined Philip of France against his father, and Henry II., hot!}' besieged within Le Mans, liad but just time to escape from the flaming town towards the Norman frontier. Suddenly changing his direction, in a ride that equalled the legendary rush of the Black Falcon on Saumur, the King spurred frenziedly back to Chinon, while his attendant knights fainted or died from fatigue and wounds upon the wa\-. Then Philip advanced by Chaumont and Amboise as far as Rochecorbon, and proposed a meeting at Azaj' ; CHIXOX 41 but the devil which had helped Fulk Nerra 011 his ride had entered into Henry after his escape from Maine, a devil of despair and pain that racked his peace of mind while it tortured his body with a fever. Tours fell to the French King-, and Henry was unable to move from his room. Then he was summoned again to meet Philip at Colombieres between Azay and Tours. By a great effort Henry started from Chinon, and rested on his way at the Commanderie of the Knights Templars at Ballan ; there, leaning for support in his extreme anguish against a wall, he was persuaded to rest for a while by William the ^Marshal. The meeting was for the next day, and neither his own son nor the French King would put it off. On that July morning two great shocks of thunder from a clear sky put the finishing touch to the collapse of the poor King, who was obliged to be held fainting upon his horse — he signed a humiliating peace. On his return to Chinon he had just .strength left to soundly rate the monks of Canterbur\', who had come at this inopportune moment to present their demands ; one of them, as he went out, cur.scd him by the memory of the murdered Becket. That night his Chancellor was reading to him the list of the rebels. " Sire," said he, " may Jesus Christ help me ! the first name which is written here is the name of Count John, your .son." Then Henry turned his face to the wall, caring no more for himself or for the 42 OLD TOURAINE workl. I'^or some (la}-s he la}- half unconscious, niuttcrini;-, " Shame, shame on a conquered King." At last he was carried out to die before the altar of the castle chapel. The servants stripped his body and laid it naked on the ground to be covered by a cloak borrowed from William de Trihan. The last rites were with difficulty arranged by William the Marshal. " Robed as for coronation, with a crown of gold upon his head, a gold ring upon his finger, sandals upon his feet, and a sceptre in his glo\-cd right hand," he was borne across the bridge that he had built to be laid in state in the Abbey Church of Fontevrault ; thither came his unworthy son Richard to see the body, which streamed with blood, it is said, as he approached it. Henry was buried before the high altar by Bartholomew the Archbishop of Tours, in July I I 89. Three years afterwards Philip of France, returned from the Crusades, was ravaging Anjou. The attacks on the foreign dominions of England which had been prompted by the news of Richard's imprison- ment ceased for the moment when he was released. But in 1 193 the attacks upon Touraine had become so fierce and systematic that Richard left England never to return, and made direct for Tours, where he drove out the canons of St. Martin as being friends of the French King. He then blockaded Loches and took it, turned on Blois, and surprised so many valuable papers and cases that Philip was obliged c/nxo.v 43 to make a truce ; finally, where the Seine bends suddenly to the north, Richard built his famous Chateau Gaillard with its three lines of defence very much like the walls of Chinon. The fame of the Lionheart, which gains little from his doings in French territor}*, is still less increased by the story of his death. In 1 199, being very much pressed by want of money, he suddenly heard that a treasure had been discovered at Chalus, and claimed it as the overlord. In attempting to take the castle he was shot, and died from the mortification of the wound. ^ John, who had been appointed as his brother's heir, hurried to Chinon and was acknowledged King by the ro}'al household. But a counter-claimant appeared in Arthur of Bretagne, who was at Tours with his mother, Constance, supported by the King of France and the adherence of the barons of Touraine. To attempt to foil Constance, Eleanor came out from Fontevrault and took up her son John's cause. A peace was patched up by the Dauphin's marriage with Blanche, niece of the English King. In the next year John, having put away his first wife A\-ice of Gloucester, scandalised the barons by his marriage with Isabel, the daughter of the Count of Angoulcme, and spent the ne.xt suinmer at Chinon with her and Bcrengaria the widow of his brother Kichard. ' In the Chroniijiics de Normatidii,, .-i M.S. of the (iftcL-nth century, there is a str.nnj;e |)icture of the storming of Chalus, showing KiclLird's wound in the shoulder. 44 OLD TOUR A I NE Disconlciit L;rcw more and more throughout the provinces. Ah-eacl\- had John been sentenced by default to lose his lands and fiefs, when Philip in 120 1 attacked Arqucs while Arthur of lirittany besieged Tours, where his small band of knights was reinforced by Hugh de la Marchc (the bridegroom John had first insulted) and by Geoffrey of Lusignan, an inveterate foe of the Plantagcnets. The next move was to the siege of Mirebeau, whither John's mother Eleanor had gone after her second retreat to Fontevrault. Arthur was taken prisoner by the relieving forces which John brought up, sent to Falaise, and was no more heard of This was a fatal mistake, for it drove John's rebellious subjects to choose between him and Philip. Their choice was soon made. By spring of the next year the taking of the Chateau Gaillard drove the English from all French lands north of the Loire ; on Midsummer Eve, 1205, after a long and desperate siege, Chinon was taken too, and by the beginning of 1206 the English were finall}- dri\en out of France. In the thirteenth century there was not much of importance that happened at Chinon. The French monarchy, so much enlarged and strengthened b\- Philip Augustus, was still further expanded b\' the religion and the higher life of St. Louis, " the most loyal man of his age," whom Charles VUL and all France of the time looked back upon as their patron CHINON 45 saint, and with whom died the last spark of the crusading spirit. In 1309 occurred one of the few notable events of the next century at Chinon, the examination of Jacques IMolay, Grand INIastcr of the Knights Templars, by the Pope's cardinals in state assembled. The order of the Templars had been founded nearly two hundred years before by nine knights who defended the Temple at Jerusalem. Growing in wealth and strength, the Knights had left Palestine and built their Temple opposite the Louvre in Paris. Strange rumours of the wealth and wickedness of this secret society were rife throughout France,, and sudden!}- tlie King seized every member of it ;• the " Proces des Templiers " ^ gives some horrible details of their trial and examination. Meanwhile the Pope, ' In the cullcclion of Docuiiuiits iiicdits stir Chistoire dc F)-ance. See also Rci'tie des deux Mondes, I5lh Jan. 1S91, " Le Proces des Temp- liers d'apres des documents nouveaux," Ch. V. Langlois; and L. Delisle, Mctnoires stir /es operations financiires des Templiers. The Knights Templars so unrighteously condemned si.x centuries ago have only (juite lately received the justice due to them; the verdict of Michelet must l>c reversed in the face of the later facts forthcoming. It seems clear that the chief, if not the only reason for the summary destruction of the order was to be found in the rapacity and indebtedness of the King. Krom the acknowledged safety of their fortresses in Europe it had resulted that the Templars became the bankers of the warriors and prelates of the troublous times of the Crusades. The wide extent of their connections enabled them to begin operations of the highest value with the Jews and Lrjmbards, and their inevitaijle rise in power and imjKjrtance was the beginning of their unpopularity. The King who hunted them down was also their heaviest creditor. The only testi- mony-ftgainst them was the confessions wrung from the anguish of the i-rivmL-r, by the torture to which they were mercilessly condemned. 46 OLD TOUR A IN E wlio was in " l>al)_\'lonish captivit)' " at Avit^non, was made to dissolve their order, main- Templars (includ- ing the Grand Master) were burnt in Paris, and almost the onl\- remnant of their existence left in France is the name of " Commanderie," which still clings, as at Ballan, to the places where once a house of the famous order used to stand. This particular Com- manderie, whose graceful modern rooms are grouped round the little library with its carved ceiling, which is the last relic of the Templars, was inhabited even down to 1790 by the Knights of St. John, who suc- ceeded the old order. In 1337 began the Hundred Years' War, the struggle between France and England for the ma.stery which began with the crushing defeats of Crecy and Poitiers. Then came the period of Du Guesclin's victories over the English from 1360 to 1380; but thc\' were nullified by weakness and dissension which ended in the catastrophe of Agincourt. The fortunes of P^-ance were indeed at a low ebb ; it is from Chinon that the first ray of hope appears ; the short visit of Joan of Arc, the beginning of that romantic and inexplicable episode of which she is the heroine, is the salient point among all the traditions of the castle. The years that immediateh- followed Agincourt were terrible years for P^-ance. The Dukes of Bour- bon and Orleans, fighting in the front rank, had been taken prisoner, and the power of the Armagnac CHIXON 47 party was still further weakened by the alliance of the Queen (who had been exiled to Tours for her misconduct) with the Burgundian party. The mas- sacres in Paris which followed resulted in the death of some two thousand of the Armagnacs, and the Dauphin himself hardly escaped with life. The so- called " Cabochiens " were filling Paris with blood- shed and disorder.^ Soon after the death of Henry of England the poor French King ceased the mocker}' of life that still remained to him ; the touching attachment of his people to this crazed monarch would alone show how oppressive was the rule of the princes who were now in power. In 1422 the Dauphin assumed his ro}-al robes as Charles \TI. in Berri, while Bedford and his Englishmen in Paris were shouting " Long live the King of France and England " round the little son of Henry V. The English had run a wedge into the very heart of France from the sea -coast to Paris, and to this laz)-, kindly, good-looking Charles VH. was left the task of turning them out. His defeats at the ver\' outset were so numerous that he was nicknamed " Le Roi de Bourges : " the misery of P'rance went on unabated." The state of the people at this time ' Monstrelet relates the entry of the Burgiintliaiis into Paris on 2Sth May 141 8, and the Journal of the Bourgeois de Paris gives terriMe details of the scenes in the streets during the continual massacres that went on. He describes especially the horrors of .Sunday, 29th May, in that year, when the dead " etaicnt en tas comme pores au milieu de la boue," Ijcncath the splashing <»f the ceaseless raindrops. ' The GrauJes Chroitiques give a fearful picture nf these miseries. 48 OLD -J'OURAINE was frightful ; wolves were fightinr^ for the corpses of the (.lead in the church}-ards of I'aris, churches were sacked, castles burnt to the ground, the lands left untilled, a hideous " dansc Macabre " among the tombs came into fashion, wild rumours of portents and j)rodigies were in the air. At last in 1423 the King came to Chinon with the Queen of Sicily and the Due d'Alencon to assemble the States-General, to deliberate with his small Court over the small part of France that had been left him by the l^nglish, and to receive the Count of Richemont, Arthur of Bretagne, who had offered his services against the enemy. The evil inilucnces of La Tremouillc and the anti-nationalist party had already begun to be felt in this as in other matters about the Court, when in 1428 letters came from Tours praying for help against the English at Orleans, the northerninost point of the Loire and the key to Southern P^rance, which was besieged by Bedford. The Court was full of bickerings and jealousies, and the treasury was cmpt}', but the States voted In eighteen months more than 1500 men had died in Paris. Some monks of St. Denis, seeing men and women dancing to the sound of music in a certain town, asked why they did so. " Nous avons vu nos voisins morts, et les voyons de jour en jour mourir," and they danced for joy that their time had not yet come. Tiiat evening the greater part were dead or dying. The actual horrors of the time were reflected in a corruption of morality and dissoluteness of manners which gave thj graver chroniclers small cause to wonder that God was chastening France by means of his scourge the King of England. C///XON 49 subsidies, and in the next year help came from unexpected quarters. The King was in fact \-ery little worthy of the \eneratit>n b\- which that help was inspired, when in the midst of the intrigue and idleness of his Court appeared the strange figure of the peasant girl from Domrem}-. vol.. I ciiai*ti:r IV C H 1 N ON ( Continued) " La Roync Blanche commc \\\v^ lys (Jui clianloit a voix de sereinc, ]>eilhe au grand pied, Biclris, Allys ; Ilaiembourges, cjui tint le Mayne, Et Jchanne la bonne Lorraine Qu' Anglois bruslcrent a Rouen ; Oil sont-ilz, Vierge Souveraine ? Mais oil sent Ics neiges d'antan?" — Vili.on. On Sunday, 6lh March 1429, Jeanne d'Arc came to Chinon, and the well is still "^ shown where she alighted off her ■5."? horse, and the house of the " bonne femme "' who sheltered her. Once within the chateau she was lodged within the Tour du Coudra}' until the }-oung King should find time to rouse himself \ -s from the caresses of .\lo\-se de p I Castelnau and give audience to K -• the peasant girl about whom his i courtiers were alread\' disputing. The introduction to the ro}-al presence, hard enough already for Jeanne, was 2 -• CHINON (Co?iiifiitei/) 51 made still harder by the indifference of that King who had been the ideal of her dreams, by the studied insolence and opposition of his counsellors, and by the whisperings of a licentious Court. She needed all her courage to support the cold and cynical reception which was all she found in return for enthusiasm and offers of victory ; and the Chapel of St. ]\Iartin in the castle precincts must have witnessed no slight struggle between her reluctance to go forward and her eagerness to fulfil her destin}-. Tiie contemptuous trial of her powers made by the King at her very first appearance, the examina- tions and tests which she was afterwards to undergo, the numberless perils of her position, all must have combined to make her self- sought trial wellnigh harder than she could bear. But " aide toi et le ciel t'aidera " was her unfiinching motto, and to the taunt- ing questions of the officers she would only answer, " Les hommes d'armes bataillcront et Dicu donncra la victoire." Of her personal appearance scarcely a word has come down to us ; that she had long black hair, that after a little practice she could sit a horse in full armour as bravely as the rest, that her chief charm lay in the firm accents of her soft low voice, such are almost the only hints we have of the per- sonality of Jeanne d'Arc' ' See in Beaucourt, Hist, de Charles I'll. vol. ii. |>. 21S, " Lilt re- de Guy et <:<: Journal d' tin Boiiri^eois dc raiis, aniicc 1429. ' In Holinshcd, cd. 1577, she is called " tlial im>nstri>us maid, Jean la Tuccll dc Dieu." 56 OLD TOURAINK showed her truly to the world, amidst the horror of the courtiers and ecclesiastics of her tiinc at the flood of faith and ])urit\- and truth slic poured out upon the miserable pettiness of their depraved ambitions, so (nithrie in 1747 first pointed out how the least tint of falsehood would have smirched her fame, and how she came out pure as fine gold from every proof. The truth had come at last, and from the most convincing quarter — from the country that had least to win in proving it. To Southey she is the one pure figure in a luxurious and selfish age ; to Carl}'le these " French without heart, mockers forgetting God, are not worthy of this noble virgin," this maid "to whom all maidens upon earth should bend," as Landor bids them. After Jeanne's death a certain change seems to have come over the King's life at Chinon.' h^rom the Tour d\-\rgentan, in the corner of the Chateau du ^lilieu farthest from the entrance, it is said that a secret passage used to wind,' by which Charles VII., at that time more worthy of the name of King, visited Agnes Sorel, whose statue rests upon its sculptured lambs at Lochcs. " Je vais conibattre ; Agnes I'ordonne ; Adieu repos ; plaisirs adieu," 1 The fame of the favourite of Charles VII. has rather obscured the virtue and goodness of his wife, who quietly encouraged all the best influences of the time ; see the miniature in Lcs Doiize Pcrilz d/Eiifer by her learned chaplain Robert Blondcl, in which he jircsents the Ijook to her, 1455. — Bihlioth. de V Arsenal. - No traces of it exist now. CHIXOX {Confi/iucii) 57 as Beranger makes him say, and whether owing to the influence of " la belle des belles " or not, the King of 1450 is a ver\- different man from the " roi faineant" for whom Jeanne d'Arc died. " Dunois, la Treniouille, Saintrailles, O Fran^ais I quel jour enchant^ Quand des lauriers de vingt batailles Je couronnerai ta beaute ! Frangais, nous devrons a ma belle Moi la gloire et vous le bonheur. J'oubliais Thonneur auprcs d'elle ; Agnes me rend tout 11 Thonneur." ^ The changed King had turned out his old favourites and replaced them by men like the Count de Riche- mont and Jacques Cccur ; " by 1453, after the death of Talbot in Guienne, there were no more English in I'rance except at Calais. In that same year ^ The lines of Colonel Lovelace come irresistibly into our memory with their higher thought — " I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more." - Jacques Cceur was "argentier d'iceluy roy de France" (Charles VII.), says Du Clerq, "lequel Jacques Coeur estoit e.xtrait de petite generation sans quelque noblesse. En sa jeunesse il se bouta en marchandise . . . et devint sy puissant par tous les royaulmes qu'il expedioit et meme comme on disoit en Sarragie. II avait fait faire a Bourges une maison la plus richc de quoy on pouvait parler." This house with its motto "a cceur vaillant rien impossible" is well worth seeing ; it has been charmingly descril>ecforc. He never returned to France. See Thomas IJasin, I/istoire lie Charles VII. et Louis XL, iv. 26, also Du Clcrr], Mi'nioircs, III. iii., and Mathicu de Coucy, Chronii/ucs, cix. 5cS OLD TOL'KA/XE Constantinople had been taken by the Turks, and the IcainiiiL;- of llie l^astcrn caiMtal was scaltci-cd broadcast in the west to ijrow into the full (lower of the Renaissance. lUit even Agnes Sorel could not charm away the troubles which i)ursucd Charles \'I1. in all his chateaux. i\t Chinon the l)au[)hin had been whisperinc^ with the Sire de Chabannes, and from the window of his rooms was plotting awa\' the honour of the Scottish guards. L'seless to execute several of the soldiers and to expel the Dauphin — one trouble was but followed by another. Heralds arrived with their futile explanations and were sent back in anger, and at last the King with his soldiers wearily set out for Amboise on his wa\- northwards. At Mehun sur Ycvre he died, and the news soon came to Marie d'Anjou, the wife he had left at home, that she was a widow, for black care sat behind the horseman and killed him more surcl)^ than the arrows of the enem)-.' The reign of Louis XI. was marked at Chinon b\- the arrival at the ro\-al stronghold of Margaret of Anjou. Quitting for a time the struggles between Lancaster and York, this somewhat turbulent Queen had left Kirkcudbright for Brittau)- and Anjou to get help from Louis XL, who promised more than might have been expected of him. lie probabl)- had his reasons. He had already helped Rene, and the house ^ 22d July 1461 ; see Mathicu de Coucy, Chroniques, cap. c.\xv. CHIXON ( Continued) 59 of Anjou must be still further conciliated by the help of Rene's daughter. An\- diversion, too, that would tend to unsettle the dynasty in England was a welcome aid, keeping the English in a state of enforced neutral it\- ; there was even the chance of Calais being surrendered as the price of help. So, strangely enough, Peter de Breze, the Seneschal of Xormandy, was offered his choice of continued prison or the chances of the English wars, and we find him later on assisting the restless Margaret at the siege of Alnwick, while the strife between the two parties went on as fiercely as ever. Louis himself did not often darken Chinon w ith his presence. It was close to here, at Les Forges, in the forest to the north-east, that while the King was at dinner, " luy vint comme une perclusion," and he lost the power of speech. Commines, who tells us of the scene, was sent for, and waited on his sick master for forty days. Other courtiers, who had not been so well advised in their offers of assistance, were exiled from the Court as soon as Louis re- covered. His great fear was a loss of authority in his weakness. All the time of his illness the two brothers, Louis and Charles d'Amboise, were writing despatches and arranging affairs of State in a lower room, but every letter had to be taken up to the paralytic, who could barely sec or speak, to receive the mocker)' of his approval. It was at the time of his recovery from this attack that he at last released 6o OLD TOURAIXE Cardinal Baluc, whom he kept imprisoned fourteen years. Mis last and fatal illness overtook him at Plessis-lez-Tours. A more intercstincj event is the betrothal of Philippe de Commincs to Mdlle. de Montsoreau, which took place at Chinon in 1473. It was durinLj the strange scene at Pcronnc, where the craft of Louis almost overreached itself and placed him in the hands of Charles, Duke of Burgund}', that Commines had first learned the extraordinary intellectual powers of Louis XL, with which he seems to have been so much dazzled that he lost sight of the depravity of that odious monarch's real character. Just before his betrothal the historian had passed into France, where " Louis XL lui fit cet honncur de dire qu'il I'avait bien servy a Peroniie." The Duke of Ikirgundy let him off all debts on his estate, the convenient sum of 6000 livres came in from a jeweller at Tours, and he was richly rewarded by the French King for a loyalt}- which was frequently held up to the imitation of his companions. That there was a real tic of sympathy and friendship between these two very different characters is seen, if in nothing else, in the fact that Commincs was almost the only man who could understand the King's enfeebled utterances during his illness. This keenness of temperament was reflected, too, in the finesse with which he managed all the political affairs CHINON {Continued) 6i with which he was entrusted either in France or Italy. Among his other rewards he was made Governor of Chinon in 1476, and soon began to take that active part in politics which ended later on in his imprisonment at Loches by Anne of Beaujeu, who held the ro\'al power for her young brother Charles VIII. " I have ventured on the great ocean," he says regretfulh', " and the waves devoured me." But he emerged with safety later on, and the world gained his histor\-, written, it is said, in the hours of his enforced leisure. He was employed by Charles VIII. and favoured by Louis XII., though this latter monarch showed him some little in- gratitude, and perhaps rather feared the political experience of a minister of Louis XI. His work as an ambassador, especially in Italy, was always of service to his country ; his work as a writer was the only thing of the kind that could have been compared to that of ]\Iachiavelli or even of Guicciardini, the first sound attempt at a philo- sophy of history ; and b\- his death at Argenton, near Chinon, France lost one of her most skilful statesmen and far the best historian of his timc.^ ' Montaigne's ojiinion of Commines is worlii recording here. " Kn Monsieur I'hilippc de Commines il y a cecy : vous y trouverez le langage doux el agreable d'unc naifve simplicitc, la narration pure, et en laquclie la bonne foy de I'autheur reluit cvidamment exempte de vanite parlant dc soy, ct d'affection et d'envic parlant d'autruy." Mon- taigne's recommendation of his own essays to his readers couKl produce no Ijctter justification for an autlior's work. .Matthieu d'.\rr:is. a 62 OLD TOUKAINE " Si tu n'as plus que faire en cette eglise ici," says Ronsard, in some lines on Commincs, " Rclounie en ta maison ct contc a ton fils conime Tu as \u le tombeau du premier gentilhomnie Qui d'un cfL'ur vertueux fit a la France voir Que c'est honneur do joindrc au\ amies le s^avoir." It is from the Itah' that was tlic scene of Commincs' most brilh'ant nci;(;tiations that the next actor comes who plays an important part at Chinon. In 1498 Louis XII., who had just come to the throne, was applying to Pope Alexander VI. for a divorce from his first wife, Jeanne de I'rance. The ro}-al letters came to the X'atican during the reign of the Borgias. Lucrezia was being gi\-cn in marriage to one after another of the Italian princes as it suited the policy of her unscrupulous father. C.xsar Borgia, who had not long before murdered his brother, the Duke of Gandia, was longing to give full rein to his ambition, to throw away his Cardinal's hat and take up the sword, to fight his way from a successful captainc}' to the Dukedom of the Romagna, and even higher honours. The request of Louis XII. came at a ver}- opportune moment. The bill of divorce was easily bought from Ciusar's father by the gift of the Duchy of Valentinois to his son, and a treaty promising equal advantages to France and friend of Commines, tells us he was tall and handsome, that he spoke German, Italian, and Spanish, that his memory was prodigious, and his industry amazing. CHINON {Continued) 63 the \'atican. In the general interchange of civilities GeorGfes d'Amboise was given a Cardinal's hat, and ZALiiSV. liuKiiiA (drawn from the Woodcul in Paulus Jovius, cU. 1575) towards the end of 1498 C.xsar liorgia set out from Ostia for Marseilles, accomj)anicd by the Baron de 64 OLD TOI'RAINE Trans, the French ambassador, and provided with ample funds for his hu'ish exi:)enditurc upon tlie \\a\' from the two huiKhwl thousand cUicats seized from the unfortunate l^ishop of Calahorra. In those daws the science of etiquette was ver)' fcarfull}- and wonderfulh' arranged, and in all their treatises the worried officials at the I-'rench Court could find no mention of the reception proper to a Pope's son. The difficulty was evaded without suppressing the gorgeous entr)- which it was well known the Italian had prepared for himself and his suite. The King went hunting with his Court and met Borgia some miles outside the town ; upon the bridge across the ri\er the Cardinal de Rohan was read\- to receive the Italians, and headed the procession that started for the castle gates ; every detail of its magnificence has been carefully preserved for us. First came eighty mules in gorgeous harness blazoned with Caesar Borgia's crest and arms, fol- lowed b}' the finest horses of the prince's stables ; then eighteen pages riding, clad in " velours cram- oisie," two of them resplendent in cloth of gold ; more mules followed " still more exquisitely ap- pointed," evidently carr}-ing "the precious documents from Rome," thought the onlookers ; after, amid a flourish of drums and trumpets, rode the new Due de Valentinois and his suite, among whom was the Cardinal d'Amboise. The duke was resplendent in CHINON {Continued) red satin and cloth of gold, and thickly covered with jewels ; great rubies were in his cap, his very boots were sewn with precious stones.^ A crowd of mules, carriages, and litters closed the procession ; " Ainsi entra pour avoir grand renom Ledit Seigneur au Chateau de Chinon," sings the poet whom Brantome copied ; but while the formal welcome was in progress within the ro\-al apartments, the old soldiers who had fought through Italy with Charles VIII. were laughing at this new- fledged Frenchman's ostentation, a displa}', by the way, which Caesar rarely allowed himself in Italy. That evening the articles of the treaty were agreed upon — the divorce was granted and the alliance formed against Naples ; in return, h^rancc was to help the Pope in the Romagna, Caesar was to receive the Duchy of \'alentinois and certain sums down in ready money ; better than all, he was to be given the services of one hundred French knights ; \}c\Q. flairs de lys of France were to be quartcrcil with the Borgia arms — " c'ctait lui livrcr I'ltalie," says Michelet. But what was perhaps nearer to the duke's ^ An authentic portrait of Caesar Borgia is a difficult thing to find. Of the jx)rtraits in the Bibliothef|ue Nalionale, a drawing by Lecreur is the best, which is probably taken from the woodcut in Paulus Jovius. The famous description of Ca*sar Borgia wliich Jovius gives is worth inserting : " F'aciem atro rubore suffusam . . . oculostjue introrsus re- cedentes, et atroci vipereo(|ue obtutu scintillantes ac igneos osleiidcret, fjuos nee amici quidem et familiares contuend(j ferre possent ; quancjuani eos inter focminas jocabundus, niira commutatione ad lenitatem con- verlcre consuessct." — I'AULI J0%'II, Elogia, p. 20I. 1575. 66 OLD TOUKAINE ambition, the promise of a high alh'ance, was not so easily performed : negotiations dragged on unuill- ingl\', and when the Court left for Loches in the spring C.x'sar was half inclined to return to Ital\- in disgust ; but he stayed a little longer, and at lilois we shall hear how he fared. The later history of Chinon is not so full of interest ; the movement of events passes to the other chateaux, whose Renaissance windows had been scarcel)- thought of when Ca.'sar l^orgia was in France. The castle is somewhat troubled b\- the vicissitudes of the Wars of Religion and frequently changes hands, not without suffering from the excesses of both parties. The townspeople of Chinon, who seem to have shown an extraordinary amount of pluck and spirit in these tr\'ing times, were still further harassed b\- a terrible \isitation of the plague: the first attack lasted four j-ears. After the murder of Guise at Blois had still further embittered party spirit throughout the kingdom, and Henry of Navarre had led his forces to Chinon on his way to attack the Due de Mayenne, who had succeeded his murdered brother in the headship of the Catholic League, the plague broke out again in 1589, and throughout the unhappy little town the red and white crosses were marked upon the doors, and great fires burnt at every thirty paces to purify the poisoned air. A strange glimpse of the habits of the time is given in the records of the rude sanitar}' precautions CH/XOX {Continued) 67 that were taken at this crisis : " pourccaux, vaches, pigeons, oies, Cannes, ou autres betes immondcs " are to be kept out of the houses, sa}-s the edict, which might have been framed for the benefit of a be- nighted Irish peasantry ; one Matthieu Renard and his wife are charged with the care of the sick at a fixed price. In the midst of all this distress events outside were following fast. The letter of Henry III. to his wife Louise, at Chinon. reached her after her husband's death by the knife of Jacques Clement ; she retired to an inconsolable widowhood in Chenonceaux. The old Cardinal de Bourbon had been summoned from his prison in tlic castle to dispute his royal title with Henry of Xa\-arrc, and died without defending it. Chinon was rapidly entering on the last centur\- of its existence. The history of the town in the first years of the seventeenth century gains considerabh- in interest from the careful accounts of its " Receveur, M. Besnard," which have been preserved by M. de Cougn\-. After the peace this good I\I. Besnard, whose acquaintance it is quite worth while to make in these records, welcomes with his fellow-townsmen the Prince of Conde. He fires salvos of honour frfim certain "fauconnaux" placed upon the bridge, which was still in ruins, and presents the tratlilional offering of fruit and wine, nay, even searches ior artii hola.-s to send up to the ra^^tlf, and "confitures 68 OLD rOURAlNE seches " for the piiiiccss — the last refinement of politeness. Condc was soon sent ^-''Ci to X'inccnnes, and there was no one mnv to send sweetmeats to the ladies, for Rochcfort, the " ame damncc " of the Cardinal, is there instead, and soon the whole town is cringing to the great Richelieu himself in the full pride of that despotism which was partly forced upon him b)- the anarchy of Huguenot revolutions. How the delicate but frugal soul of Besnard would have shuddered had he seen the town-clcrk of a community grown recklessly extravagant spend nearly three hundred livres upon a single fete. But it was almost the last that Chinon, either town or castle, was to see. In 1628 the outraged inhabitants with difficulty persuaded Muret, the King's architect, to spare their castle walls ; and when Chinon was joined with Langeais, Richelieu, and other estates to the great possessions of the Cardinal, the old castle only bored him, and was designedly left to ruin and decay. One of the greatest of the feudal monuments was allowed to moulder into uselessness, like the institutions of which it was a remnant, b\' the man with whose name is chiefly connected the final crushing of the feudal spirit. M. Touchard Lafosse says that in 1758 the room where Jeanne d'Arc was received still stood in its entirety. He publishes, too,^ 1 Paris, Delahays, 1S56, La Loire Historiqiie. CH/NOX {Cofiii/n/ed) 69 an engraving that shows the complete hnes of the fortress before the chateau of the Plantagenets had fallen ; but for two centuries the whole castle has been slowly crumbling to its foundations, and it will probably take many more before time has utter!}- destroyed its might}- buttresses and walls. The stones of Chinon will die hard, but its memories will live, though both are growing older, and perhaps weaker, year by }car. CHAl'Tl'-R V FONTKVKAULT "Tliink liuw many royal bones Sleep within these heaps of stones. . . . Here's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate." F. Beaumont. 0\ a cold winter's morning" \vc started from Chinon to follow that funeral procession of the Plantagenets, which we had pictured to ourselves before, to their last home at Fontevrault. The road leads straight southward from the town for a short distance away from the \'ienne, then turning sharply to the west and north winds through pleasant apple orchards and walnut - trees till it joins the river bank again opposite Port Gu}-ot. Some three or four miles farther on we reached the extreme limit of the Province of Indre et Loire, the town of Candes,^ where the dark and swift waters of the Vienne mingled with the ice-bound current of the T^oire. The bright rays of a December ^ M. Touchard Lafosse {op. cit.) publishes a very good engraving of the view of Candes from the right bank of the Vienne. FONTEVRAULT 71 sun lit up the circles of broken ice that were swirled rapidly down the stream, and touched the tall sails of the black windmills dark against the sk}--linc of the western shore, where numbers of little churches between the forest and the river marked the sites of villages and castles long since in ruins. And Candes itself is little like to what it was. Placed at the meeting of the waters, it must very early have been marked out as a place of some importance, and indeed, before 400 there must have been a con- siderable number of clergy at the church which the famous Bishop of Tours had built here, for in that }-ear St. Martin, being on a visit to the priests, died at Candes.^ His body was, after some dispute with the men of Poitou, buried at Tours, and the church at Candes was consecrated afresh to his memory. It was no unworthy companion, on a small scale, to that great shrine at Tours, of which but two towers remain to indicate its ancient size and beaut}-. In any other country than Touraine such a church as that at Candes would have alone made the district famous, and no greater surprise had encountered us than this sudden sight of sculptured saints and battle- mented roofs- at an opening of the twisting little ' In 1495 ''^"^ town had already licgun to decrease in .size and imjxjrlance. Sec Comniine.s, VIII. iv., " La ville (Vigcvano) ne vaut poinct Sainct Martin de Cantle, qui n'cst ricn.s." - This coml)ination of church and fortress was not «nct>mnion in tlie Middle .Ages, and was not without its value. The Catiiedral of Nar- 72 OLD 'JXn'RAINE villacfc street. The exterior decoration of the porch, wliich is flanked by two towers crowned willi maclii- cohitions like a fortress, shows signs of the double influences at work during the century when the church was built. The date in the nave is 12 15, when it was probably begun ; it was finished towards the end of the ccntur}-, and the sculiilurc (jf the figures round the porch, though terribly mutilated, shows signs of the older Byzantine tendencies slowly yielding to the new Gothic art. The fourteen statues rest on a base richl\- decorated with foliage and strange monsters, twisting round the heads of kings and queens carved with marvellous expression. The decoration is extended up the tow'crs, and seems in man}' cases unfinished, for in several of the niches simple blocks of stone are left that have never been carved into completeness. The interior of the porch is supported b\- one light springing column, whose capital branches into the groined work of a roof all carved with statues and strange arabesques. Within' the church the same transition of style is observable. The lacework of the foliage upon the double rank of pillars in the nave is in the late thirteenth-century Gothic, while the capitals in the choir are ]^}-zantine. The whole of the interior is filled with quaint and grotesque carvings, many of which were fortunateh- untouched b\- the restorers of bonne, which anciently formed part of the defences of the archeveche, "bristles with battlements." — Henry James, A Little Tour in Fravcc. FOXTEVRAULT the seventeenth century. Of the chateau little more than ruins can be sq.q.x\, \qX it had once a certain notoriety and importance ; it underwent a hot siege from Geoffrey IMartel, and it served at various times to shelter Philip Augustus, Charles VII., and Louis XI. It was here, too, that Pierre dc Courcelles paraphrased the Song of Solomon in French verses to accompany Clement Marot's new metrical transla- tion of the Psalms. The road along the river bank turns south to Fontevrault at the village of Montsoreau, which irre- sistibly reminded us of Bussy d'Amboise and his unfortunate Diana.^ But the place was long filled with more terrible associations. It served as the rendezvous for a swarm of titled robbers, whose exactions from the voyagers up and down the Vienne and the Loire remained a standing source of anno}"- ance to the district until the days when Richelieu could veil his policy beneath a semblance of benevo- lence, and relieve the river trade by crushing the feudal rights of Mont.soreau. The chateau must have once been a fine one; the facade is still impos- ing, pierced with loopholes and supported by strong flanking towers ; its massive walls and masonr)- attest the goodness of the stone in this district ; the square (juarricd blocks still line the cjuax-s aloni; tin- ' It was in ihc chateau of Coulancicre at Brain, in tlie .Sauniur dis- trict, that the scene of Hussy's niunler actually took jjlace, as it is described in Dumas's tlirillinj^ story. 74 OLD TOUKAINE river here, ready to be floated down to Saumiir and the west. As \vc slowly mounted the hill the first towers of the Abbey of Fontevrault came in sii;ht, and wc were soon parleying for admittance with the sentinel at the great door, for the h'rcnch Government, with its usual love of strict utilit\-, has turned the old abbey into a vast prison or criminal reformatory, guarded by a regiment. The long lines of silent prisoners in their dull uniforms and round caps file in and out beneath the arches where the white-robed nuns in their black veils used to flit softly to and fro ; one of the many chapels of the abbey is turned into the storehouse for the garrison beer ; lines of great casks fill up the spaces between the pillars that lead from the altar to the door : the strange contrast seemed to strike the keynote of the abbey's history, the history of perhaps the most remarkable institution of its kind in Christendom, and one of the most enduring, for it was as far back as the end of the eleventh century that Fontevrault was founded. At this time one Robert d'Arbrissel, a monk of "humble but honest parentage" and a scholar of some mark at Paris, had begun to distinguish himself by the fervour and eloquence of his preaching. So great became his renown that Pope Urban II. especially requested him to preach in favour of the Crusades, which just then were moving all the hearts of Europe. The new apostle met with an astonishing FONTEVRAULT 77 success. He was soon surrounded by crowds of men and women, good and bad, of every age and degree, who left all to follow him. At the head of this vast multitude, which kept increasing every day, the preacher wandered through town and country until his flock of converts became unmanageable. He had started for the Hoh' Land ; his charity was compelled to begin nearer home, and at last in this valley he had to stop and make some provision for his strange and ill-assorted company. The contrasts have begun already, these voyagers for Palestine settle b)- the Loire ; such was the strange beginning of the famous institution that was to shelter the children of kings beneath its roof, and to become famous throughout the length and breadth of Europe. The queer pilgrimage had ceased by a spring where tradition still remembers the habitation of the robber Evrault, whose stronghold with its conical roof and lantern is still recommended to the wonder of the credulous. The place had a bad reputation, and the owners of the ground found the pious task an easy one of giving up a site to the new colony. Help of more land, of food and clothing, poured in from all sides. The rough clay huts and dividing trenches of the first daj's of necessitx' began to give way to more substantial buildings; D'Arbrissel began to draw up rules for his association. These rules were absolutel}' different from an\-thing that had been heard of before in such a C(jnnection. 7S OLD TOURAIXE At Poitiers or at Lucca there may have been a monaster}' ruled b}- an abbess, but never was the principle of the sui)eriority of woman so darint^ly asserted as at h'ontevrault. What was the motixe of D'Arbrissel in his plans it is difficult and perhaps profitless to conjecture, but the fact remains that the prosperit}^ of Fontevrault seemed to depend up(jn its Lad}' Abbess, and to vary in proportion at once to the strength and the weakness of her authorit}'. But the founder's motto, " Mere voila votrc fils, fils voila votre mere," was to have a wider meaning still: the mixed character of his first flock was to be reflected in the future constitution of the community. The first four houses built by the first abbess were for the learned ladies, for penitent women, for lepers, and for monks, and suggested pretty accurately the mingled elements of the first assembh', which had now grown to the respectable figure of 4000. After leaving the strictest rules as to the separation of the sexes, their clothing and their food, and abso- lutely prohibiting the use of wine (" qui fait meme apostasier les sages," say the rules), the good founder died, and was honoured b}- a funeral at which a great number of his admirers from all parts ot the country assisted. The reign of the abbesses had begun ; a glance at their names alone, in the list published by ?kl. ?\Ialifaud, will give an idea of the importance to which the institution soon attained. The chief interest of Fontevrault for English FOXTEVKAULT 79 travellers consists in the help and protection always afforded to it by the Plantagenets, whose history was sketched at Chinon ; these English kings, as Counts of Anjou and Touraine, loved the valley of the Loire, and particularh- this Fontevrault, where many of their princesses took the veil. Especially was this the case with Henr\- II., who built the Pont aux Nonnains, which we have already heard of, across the Vienne, near Chinon, to allow, men said, an easy passage from the castle to the abbey and its fair inmates, who were alread\- suspected of something more than ready hospitality. If the visitor in these da\-s is not so fortunate as to arrive soon after one o'clock on Sunda)', he will find the military strictness of the establishment ver\' much against his wanderings in search of knowledge. But he will at least be able to see all that remains intact of the fine church whose buttresses and roofs he has already admired from a distance. The carving round the outer arch upon the western wall that he will pass upon his way towards the entrance of the cloisters is particularly worthy of attention, and the extremely fine circle of pillars round the apse behind the great altar is the best piece of architecture in the abbey. In a dark little chapel in the right transept of this same mutilated building lie the four Tlantagenct statues ; they are those of Henr)' II., dressed as he was borne out to burial frf)m Chinon. ant! of his son So OLD TOURAINE Richard Cceur-de-Lion (whose heart is at Rouen). The difference in the expression of father and son is very well rendered ; the}' lie in the niitldle of the group. To the left is Eleanor of Guienne, the wife of Henry II., who died here in May 1204; she holds a book in her hands. These three figures are of colossal size, hewn out of the tufa rock, and painted. The last, and perhaps the best of the four as a work of art, is of smaller size and carved in wood which has also been coloured : it represents another English Queen, Isabel of Angouleme, one of the most wicked and most beautiful women of her time. She was the daughter of Aymar, Count of Angouleme, and upon the da\- of her betrothal to Hugues de Lusignan she was carried off by John of England, who put away his first wife Avice to marry this unprincipled and voluptuous beauty ; she bore him the future Henry HI. (whose heart was also sent to Fontcvrault), and after her English husband's death came back to France to marry her old lover. These statues, too, have a history of their own. Before 1638 there lay two other figures in the old Cimetiere des Rois beneath the cloister of the nuns ; they were the effigies of Jeanne d'Angleterre, the Queen of Sicily, and of her son, Count Raymond of Toulouse, who was represented beating his breast for having embraced the doctrines of the heretics. The sculptor had determined that the count should be FONTEVRAULT Si penitent after death at any rate, and represent the error of his ways in effigy to after centuries. These last two statues were shattered by the vandals of the Revolution, who broke open all the tombs and scat- tered their ashes to the winds ; they had no leisure to remember that the Plantagenets had built the great d\'ke beside the Loire and the hospital at Angers, besides numerous other works of public good — Henry II. alone, in time of great famine, supported ten thousand of the poor a day upon his own supplies. The four statues that remained were allowed to moulder into ruins until in i 8 i 7 the English Regent asked for them. But the Prefect of the Maine et Loire upheld the right of the province to their pos- session ; the interest and value of the statues had suddenly become apparent. In 1848 Louis Philippe consented to the English request ; they even travelled through the busy streets of Paris to the Louvre to be repainted, but on their way to England the famous 24th of February intervened, and they were reclaimed finally and irrevocably by the province in which they now rest after these strange wanderings. " The eastern part of the Abbey of I"'onte\rauIt," says Mr. Petit,* " though it exhibits slightly pointed arches, has a pure Romanesque rather than a transi- tional character. The choir is apsidal, with an aisle of the same shape, and radiating semicircular chapels, * Architectural StiiJics in France, new edition, rcviscil by Ililw.inl licll. VOL. I G OLD rOURAl.XE which also occur eastward of the transepts , . . the roofs are in general c\lindrical." Mr. Petit also saw a "very curious circular structure of the twclflli century," which he considered to be E\rault's hut. But M. Viollet Ic Due conclusively proves that it is a fine example of a twelfth-century kitchen, " cuisine qui existc encore mais qui passe pour unc chapcUc fuficraire" a third alternative which only shows how little is really understood of mediaeval habits. But after most of the finest of these buildings had been raised, the English wars that harassed France for so many years left their mark upon Fonte\-rault too in the dismal times of the fourteenth and begin- ning of the fifteenth centuries. The revenues of the abbey lessened, the communit}- began to grow poor, dissensions arose in its midst, and the more its abbess was slighted the worse the abbe\' fared. At last the administration fell into vigorous hands ; its restoration, which had been begun under great difficulties by Marie de Bretagne, was carried on firmly and successfully by Renec de Bourbon, " Rcligieuse, Reformee, Reformante," as she called herself, epithets which show the change in religious opinion which had come over the countr\'. Meanwhile the abbey was not without illustrious visitors. Francis I. had come with his mother, Louise de Savoie, and the daughter of Louis XII., to confide his natural sister Madeleine d'Orleans to the care of Renee, and we find the loval abbess later on remembering TWELI-TII-CEN rUKV KlTl-in-.N A I loM I'.VH AL 1 1 . The chiinncyi arc rc»lorcd from trace* still cxii,linK in tlic buililiiiK, whicli i^ now known i the "TourJ'Kvrault. "— /'v«/ liol/cl I,- I'm. FONTEVRAULT 85 the visit to good purpose by a substantial con- tribution to the ransom of the ro}-al princes from their capti\"ity in Spain. In tlic next rciij^n another visitor appeared with the Duchesse de Guise to be shown to the new abbess, Louise de Bourbon ; this was Marie Stuart, who was staying near Saumur, and came to be admired and feasted by tlie hospital:)lc nuns.^ The wars of reHgion later on left their traces too, and the abbey was sharply attacked by some of the royal princes, who had been offended at some plain speaking of the Lad\- Abbess to King Charles IX. But the gay young King of Navarre, who iiad apparently helped in this somewhat foolish attempt, was welcomed by the whole communit}- some years afterwards, \\hen on a visit to his aunt with tlie Princess of Conli. The records of the feast are still preserved : the prince was prudenth* lodged out of danger beyond the abbe\' walls. A visit of [Mademoiselle de INIontpensier from her dull Court at Blois is worth noticing, for she relates that soon after her arrival screams and loud cries were heard from an inner court ; she was told there was a mad woman there, confined in a cell and ab.solutely naked ; she went to see at once, and stayed there until supper. The sight was repeated the next day with a new \ictim, but the ' Tlic monks liy ihis time had learned ihego.spel of good livinj; fidiu the example of Gargantiia. One at least, (Jaliriel dc ruitsllcrliaut, liad read KalK-lais to some purpose, for lie puMislied a l»itter attack against that author ami his works at I'aiis in I5.)9. 86 OLD TOURALXE day after there were no more maniacs to laugh at, so " fceHng bored " she left the abbc)-. The great Richelieu had been seen here before, and seems to have made some efforts to mitigate the extremelj- severe treatment of the prisoners, evidently without much success. Ikit the strictness of old D'Arbrissel's rules was relaxing as time went on and abbesses became more worldly. In 1670 Marie Madeleine Gabrielle de Rochechouart ^ is combining the duties of Lady Abbess with a translation of some of Plato's works which was submitted to the scrutiny of Racine, l^oileau, IMadame de la Fa)ctte, and Madame de Maintenon were among her friends too. Ideas within the abbey were rapidly enlarging. The last abbess, Julie Sophie, daughter of the Due d'Autin (the name sounds very modern among the cloisters of Fontevrault), arrived in a blaze of splendour so contrary to the directions of the pious Robert that we can see the final ruin of his institution is hard at hand. On the 3d of September 1767 this gay exponent of monastic principles rode into the abbey escorted by fifty carabineers antl a jubilant band of hautbois, flutes, and trumpets : in the even- ing there were fireworks and a big dinner. The abbey had outlived its meaning ; the revolutionary edicts swept its inhabitants awa}-, and this last abbess died upon the straw bed of a hospital in Paris. ^ She was the sister of Madame de Montespan. FONTEVRAULT 87 We left the abbey echoing with the clank of arms and the trampHng of soldiers' feet, hired another horse from the little inn across the street, and drove quickly down the hill towards the Loire. The road to Saumur turns sharply to the left along the river banks between the low line of the hills and the sandy marshes of the stream. Farther along, the slopes are dotted with black windmills, perched on their tin}- basements with great arms wide-spread to the breeze ; and from every part of this strange cliff curl little wreaths of smoke from hidden chimneys, while a glint of sunlight on a window-pane, that opens suddenly within the rock beneath, reminds the startled traveller that the vcr\- ground is teeming with inhabitants.^ W'c had noticed this strange sight before among the cliffs of Rochecorbon, but never had it appeared so extraordinar\-. " It seems," says De \^igny, speak- ing of the Tourangeaux, " that in their lo\e for so fair a home , . . they have not been willing to lose the least scrap of its soil, the least grain of its sand . . the very rocks are inhabited, and whole families of labourers from the \inc)-ards breathe the air (jf these deep caverns, sheltered at night by the same mother earth which they have toiled to cultivate b\' day." .And near Saumur it is the same ; fjr nearly ' A traveller alony this .same road to .Saumur tells inc it remimleil him tion of Touraine written to a friend, as the best painter of that time in France ; and Antonio Filarete praises the picture which Jean Fouquet painted on canxas in the Minerva at Rome, rejiresenting Pope Kugene I\'. with two cardinals, about 1443. From 1470 to 1475 he was paid by Louis XI. for pictures, miniatures, and the design for a lond), but his chief patron was Ftienne Chevalier, treasurer of Charles VII. and I.KJuis, for whom he (inished the copy of Boccaccio's " Des Cas des Nobles IIoiniiiLS et Femuies," 94 OLD TOUKAIXE and through the many Italian artists who came from Rome by Narbonnc and jjassed throui^h Touraine on their way to Paris or to ICngland. Such a traveller, we may suppose, was the unknown artist who built the chateau of Iku'}- in 1502, for Flori- mond Robertet. The shower of Italian inllucnces let loose by the expedition of Charles VIII. did not fall upon soil that was unprepared for it. Touraine and all France were already eager to learn more of the Ital\- with which they had begun to come in contact. An exact idea of this connection with Italy, even though briefly stated, is absolutcl\- necessary for the understanding of what follows in the history of France.^ John the Gtjod, King of France, who died in 1364, had a daughter Isabella, who married Gian Galeazzo Visconti, first Duke of Milan. The palace to which the French princess was brought was filled with priests and friars from the Certosa, with professors from the new college, with poets like Geoffre}' now at Munich, on 24th November 1458^ and also a prayer-book in which his taste for Italian architecture is especially remarkable. Nine of the miniatures in the French translation of Josephus in the Bibl. Nat. (Franc. 247) are by Fouquct, and again show the strong Italian influ- ences under which he worked. Examples in England, either of the work of this artist of Tours, or of his school, are the illuminations in the French "Legend de St. Denys " at Christ Church, Oxford, and a prayer-book in the Bodleian Library (Douce, 311). There is also a " Horarium Maria; Virginis" of 1490 in the same style at Cambridge. See Woermann's History of raititiiig. ^ See also the genealogical table, especially the houses of Orleans, Valois, Visconti, and Navarre. THREE DUKES OF ORLEAXS 95 Chaucer and P"ranccsco Pctrarca, with savants Hke Phihppe de iNIezieres. England, I^-aiicc, and C}-prus contributed to the brilliant societ\- of the \^i.sconti's Court, where the young heiress, Valentine Visconti, grew up with a keen interest in all the intellectual life before her, and a quick wit to grasp the advan- tages of her situation : for it soon became exidcnt that this princess, " wise as Medea," would marr}- into foreign Courts not only as the daughter of Gian Galeazzo, but as the diplomatic agent of the Duke of Milan. She was a "slender woman, ^ rather tall, with a long neck and slim arms, and a bust both full and delicate. The head is small, the hair parted from car to ear across the middle and looped in pendent braids above the ear. Under this severe coiffure we discern a serious, gentle, placid face, long narrow eyes, a high forehead, a full mouth with pretty pursed lips." In 1389 she was sent over " bien jo}'cllee et aornci'e dc joyaux " to marry Louis d'Orlcans, the handsome brother of Charles VI. of France, bearing with her the Duchy of Asti as her dowry, nearly half a million gold florins, and the i)romise of the succession to Milan : it was this last portion of the dowry that was to start the quarrel which never ended until ra\ia ; but even undisputed Asti was a very important foothold for the i'lviich in l.om- bardy, Valentine made a ijublic cnlr\' into Paris * .Mary Dnrincstctcr, End of the Middle yl,:,rs, \>. 107. 96 OLD TOURAIXE with the Ouccn.^ The good citizens were too much afraid of the wisdom of tlic Visconti serpent to bclicxc it as harmless as a dove, and this mistrust deepened in later years into a definite hatred ; but the kind-hearted )'oung King took to Valen- tine at once, and kept his liking for her to the end. Her husband Louis, then but eighteen and Duke of Touraine, was already the first knight of chivalr\-, and among his many passionless amours could find but little time for this new Italian one. Yet one point of contact the newly-married pair possessed — a common love of literature and art, a love which made them still more repugnant to the rude minds of a comparatively unlettered time. With him Valentine could talk over the poems he had made, or the romances of ]\Iaitre Jean d'Arras ; to her he could show, with a full certainty of appreciation, his new ^ Froissart gives a detailed and animated account of tliis entry : " Kt encore n'avait la jeune dame, qui s'appelait \'alentine, entie la cite quand elle y entra premierement en la compagnie de la reinc de France." The people of Paris also presented her with a magnificent litter, as a wedding present, carried by two men dressed in rich Moorish costumes, and containing gold and silver plate to the value of 200 marks. " Le present rejouit grandement la duchesse de Touraine, et ce fut raison, car il etait beau et riche ; et remercia grandement et sagement ceux qui presente I'avaient, et la bonne ville de Paris de qui le jirofit venait." Juvenal des Ursins also comments on the prodigality of the display made on this occasion. For a picture of a similar entry in the next reign see Bibl. Nat. (fonds Lavalliere, 20361), C/tromques cF Enguc7-rand de JMonslrelet, where birds are being let loose along the roads as the King beneath a canopy rides past a fountain guarded by two anaels. THREE DUKES OF ORLEANS 97 Lhie dc la iiaissaiicc de tonics clioscs, just bought from Jacques Jchau his friend, or discuss the black velvet binding of his new translation of the Bible with its silver clasps enamelled with the arms of Orleans.^ But in 1392 the little leisure Louis gave from politics to literature was interrupted by the news of the first outbreak of the King's madness near Mans.'- " The King was mad," murmured the people, " and the King's brother was a wizard." In the next year his illness was increased by the accident of the ^ See the catalogue of Charles d'Orleans' books in the Bodleian Librar)-. - Froissart relates what happened. Early in the hot summer's day, in the forest of Mans, a man dressed in white had suddenly rushed from among the trees to the King's bridle, crying, " Roi, ne chevauche plus en avant, mais retourne ! car tu es train." The King was much moved ; "son esprit fremit et son sang se mcla tout. " Later on, about midday, as he rode beneath a burning sun that scorched the sandy road and beat upon his black velvet jacket and tlie scarlet cap upon his head, a careless page let fall a lance upon the helmet of his comrade. The King, fancying, at the clash of steel, that he was attacked by traitors, rushed upon his brother of Orleans with sword drawn, and wa.s with difficulty restrained from killing and wountling all in his path. At last he lost consciousness altogether. " Et hii tour- naient a la fois moult merveilleusement les yeux en la tete, ni a nullui il ne parlait." The same author describes the fetes at the Hotel Saint Pol in January 1393, when, in a scene which might have suggested to Edgar Allan Poe one of his most ghastly stories, the King and five courtiers (including the Norman who had suggested the unlucky freak) came in dresst^d as savages in rough flax. The Duke of Orleans imprudently put a torch too near this inllamniable material and in an instant there was a quick blaze and shrieks of pain. Eorlunalcly the King was not joined in the circle with the other five but dancing Sfj«irately, and the Duchesse de Ikrri saved him by wrapi)ii)g her cloak round the flames, but iiis reason never recovered the shock. Fur a picture of the whole see iJibl. Nat. M.SS. Fr., No. 2046. VOL. I II 98 OLD TOURAINE flaming satyrs at a masked ball, and the people cried out that the old \'isconti was a wizard too, and through his daughter cast his spells upon the King of France. But Valentine was far from acting up to such a part. For hours she would patiently sit pla\-ing cards with the poor mad King in his dark lonely rooms, and soothe him with the accents of the only voice that he could bear with patience.^ Even this gentle influence was misconstrued : the people were wild with terror of an unknown danger, " a contagion of fear paralysed the sources of life." Amidst all this horror and uncertainty Wilcntine left Paris for the Loire. Meanwhile the Duke of Milan was sending not charms or poisons but ambitious advice to Louis d'Orleans as to an empire to be won in Adria, and a centre of his power at Asti ; and when these plans were thwarted by the King of France, Gian Galeazzo tried to enforce his policy by annulling Valentine's claim to the inheritance of Milan, by ^ He had no knowledge (writes Juvenal dcs Ursins of the King in 1393) of man or woman, save of the Duchess of Orleans; "caril la voyait et regardait tres volontievs, et I'appelait belle soeur. Et comme souvent il y a de mauvaises langues, on disait et publiait aucuns qu'elle I'avait ensorcele, par le moyen de son pere le due de Milan, qui etait Lombard, et qu'en son pays on usait de telles choses." For a portrait of this historian, who was peculiarly fitted for giving a close account of this reign, see the picture in the Museum at Versailles of "Jean Jouvenel des Ursins " (with a long sword and murderous spurs), " prevot des marchands de Paris, et Michelle de Vitry sa femme." See also in the Louvre, Ecole Fran9aise, No. 652, a fine portrait of Des Ursins, who was Chancellor of France under Charles VIL and Louis XI. THREE DUKES OF ORLEAXS 99 double dealings with the Turk, and other question- able methods of Italian stratagem. As a matter of fact, Louis d'Orleans was feeling too strong to need his help, or indeed that of any man. Before his death he was Duke of Orleans,^ Lord of \'alois and Beaumont, of Asti and \"crtus, of Soissons, Blois, and Dreux, with many other dignities, and he used his power unthinkingly for his own ends and un- restrainedly, with all the resources of a man of intellect unfettered by enfeebling scruples. Already an Augustine Friar, Jacques Legrand, had boldly preached before the Court against licen- tiousness of manners, and had greatly moved the poor half-witted King. It was no new thing for t}'rann}' and incompetence in rulers to be swiftly punishcd.- All attempts to reconcile Orleans with the house of Burgundy had failed ; he was becoming hated by his own party for the effrontery of his amours, and 1 The King gave his brother Louis the Duchy of Orleans in 1391, which had reverted to the crown after the death of Philip, Duke of Orleans. This was much objected to at the time by the people of Orleans, as contrary to former promises, but the gift remained a matter of iz.c\..—Juvi'tial dcs Urshis. - At this lime the Queen and the Duke of Orleans were fearfully mismanaging the kingdom during the illness of the King. " lis etaient ilevenus un objet de scandale pour la France et la fable des nations ctrangercs." — Kiligicttx dc Saint Dcitis. At last one was found bold enough to speak out what every one felt and was afraid to utter. " I will speak the truth," said Legrand in his sermon before the Queen, "la dcessc Venus rcgne scule a votrc cour ; Tivressc ct la dcb.iuchc lui scrvcnt de cortege." . . . On the day of Tcntecost following he preached before the jxior King himself, who sat imme- diately in front and listened carefully. — Ibid. OLD TOCRAINE by the rest for the oppression necessitated by the expenses of his kixury. The down-trodden people I)raycd, " Jesus Christ in Heaven, send Thou some one to deHver us from Orleans." And a deliverer appeared, if it is just to call a murderer so — John, the impetuous son of the dead Duke of Burgundy. On the 23d of November 1407 Orleans was sup- ping alone with the Ouccn when a message came that he must go at once to the King. Almost alone, and reckless and gay as ever, he rode through the dark streets of Paris to his brother's house, when he was murdered by the hired assassins of Jean Sans Peur.^ The clever and capricious Louis d'Orlcans was dead. In hiin died the most ambitious of a bold and gallant race ; a thinker, a savant, an innovator, a friend of poetry and letters, with an " extreme facilit\- of eloquence," the very embodiment of unprincipled I-'rcnch strength, which, wedded to the Italian suppleness and finesse of Valentine, was to pro- duce the French Renaissance.- Valentine " was ' As he was passing the Porte Barbette, eighteen men nulled out on him, and at the first blow cut off his hand with an axe. Then by strength of numbers they forced him off his mule and beat his brains out in the road. His page, a young German, tried to protect his master l)y covering him with his body, but only shared his death. — MoiisfrcLt. See the shorter account given h)y Saint Gelais. - See the portrait of Louis d'Orlcans drawn by the Religieux de Saint Denis. It was this " merveilleuse facilite d't-loculion " that was faintly reproduced in the elegant versification of his son, Charles the poet. * See the picture of \'alentine \'i>conti in the Museum at Blois. THREE DUKES OF OKLEAXS overwhelmed with grief, and she never recovered from the shock. Her two elder sons were sent to Blois to forget their cares in the garden full of rare flowers and in the library, over T/tc Battle and Destruction of Troy, or the mutilated copy, bound in red leather, of the History of Ki)ig Arthur and the Holy Grail. Of all her children only the bastard Dunois, who " had been stolen from her," had enough courage for the task of vengeance in the future ; that satis- faction in the present was impossible soon became evident. !Maitre Jean Petit in Paris had accused Louis of " sorcery, high treason against God, and regicide high treason against the King.^ Charles himself, in letters of pardon to Burgundy, announced that " out of faith and loyalty to us, he has caused to be put out of the world our brother of Orleans." Poor Valentine returned to Blois with Dunois and her children,'- Charles, the father of Louis XII., John, the grandfather of P^rancis L, and Philip, Count of Vertus. Here she ceaselessly taught and cared for ' Monslrdct gives the extraordinary accusation of Jean I'elit at full length. " II represcnta le due conime un honime souille dc tous les vices," says the Rcligieux de Saint Denis, commenting on this same f>ne-sidcd harangue. • Saint Gelais adds that her daughter married into the house of IJriltany, and was the grandmother of Anne dc Hretagnc, wife of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. of France. "Or peut chacun con- sidtrer," he continues, "en quelle desolaticm demeura cette Ires nolile dame Valentine . . . tous nobles clus plus nc m'est ricn." OLD TOUR A IN E them, and hoped for venc^eancc for a year, until her heart broke. Fortune was not kind to tlic }-oung Charles in his early days. Apart from the terrible bereave- ments that had just so suddenly fallen upon him, he had also to deal with a very real distress in money matters, produced b)' his father's numerous debts, and in 1409 his first wife, Princess Isabelle, died in childbed. No wonder that, amid so many shocks, Charles could not do much. He found himself at the head of the Armagnac party against Burgundy. As a matter of fact he was still merely the standard round w^hich Armagnac (whose daughter Bonne was his second wife) rallied the southern forces. The strange nature of society at this time had produced a series of duels between the great feudal princes, in which a weak and vacillating royalty sometimes sided with one and sometimes with another. In all this Charles could not distinguish yet that his part}- was the true national part}-, the part}^ of Joan of Arc and of France. But if his aims were not yet clear to him, his spirit was active and courageous. It is only later ^ that it ga\e in under capti\it\', and Charles d'Orleans took " Nonchaloir " for his device, "Insouciance" for consolation, and "Resignation" for his God. At last, in 14 10, preparations began in earnest ^ See K. L. Stevenson's somewhat depreciatory sketch of Charles d'Orleans in Men and Books, p. 236. THREE DUKES OF ORLEANS for war. Armagnac joined in one great national part}- the lords of Orleans, Bcrri, Bourbon, l^re- tagne, and Alencon. In July Charles is at Amboise, in December at Blois, collecting money, and the next summer his defiance is sent to Burgund)', and deep offence given to the King of France. lUit there was a rapid change. The momentary political blunder of his alliance with England was remedied by his reconciliation to Burgundy at Blois, and the }-ears 141 3 and 14 14 are those of Charles's greatest glory. By the Crown are restored all his possessions, and from the University of Paris arrive learned congratulations. That strange " grace de famille " which Charles pre-eminently possessed com- pletely fascinated the poor King, and the Due d'Orleans, when he was taken prisoner at Agincourt,^ was one of the most popular young princes in France. On an October morning in 141 5, when the English searched the battlefield after their victor)-, Charles was found still alive amid a heap of dead ' Monslrelet tells us that Orleans was knighted, wiili several otliers, just before the battle, after a reconnaissance in force which he had led with the ConUe de Richeinont. The vanguard, on the day of Agincourt, was led by the Constable, and with him the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the Counts d'Ku and Richeniont, and others. Juvenal des Ursins gives an account of the speech in which the King of Kngland in plain terms gives the reasons for their defeat to the French nobles. Tho.se reasons were the misgovernment and ruin already mentioned in connection with Louis d'Orleans. " God," said the English King, "is against you because of your sins." "... ils dcrobaient lout le peuple ct Ic delruisaient sans rai^o^.'' 104 OLD TOURAINE and dying, and by the next month was safely lodged in the Tower of London, where, with rare change.s to other places, such as Ampthill and W'ingficld, he remained for twenty-five years. Here, where the Duke of Orleans lost his crown, the world gained those poems by which he tried, with memories of the past and graceful fancies of the future, to lighten the captivity that changed him into the heavy old man of his later life. In politics his place is a curious one : he was a remnant of the front rank that fell at Agincourt, and by its fall made easier the levelling policy of Louis XI. He was the " Sleeping Beauty of Feudalism," ^ who fell asleep when the great lords were fcaidal gods, and awoke in a France that had begun to realise the power of royalty. His position as a poet is as strange. His verses are still charm- ing, for he was a poet of no school, and, like so many unknown ballad -writers of the time, sang naturally and easily as the lark beneath the open sky. They were written at the very beginning of the poetic fervour brought on b}- the Renaissance, and at the very birth of the new art of printing ; but they were as little known in his own day as they were recognised by later times, and this becau.se their pure " finesse " was out of place in a century to which Villon only appealed by his intellectual 1 M. Charles d'Hericault, Preface to Poesies Completes de Charles (T Orleans. Jannet Picard, 1874. THREE Dl'KES OF ORLEANS 105 vigour and his popular grossness. In an age when ease, simplicit\', and grace were sacrificed to imita- tions of the classics, his poems were equally disdained by the exclusive and pedantic school, to whom Charles d'Orleans was as " profanum vulgus." The imprisonment that gave their originality to Charles's verses freed them also from the fetters of an Alain Chartier or a Meschinot.^ The delicacy of his touch may be seen in the lines of the fourteenth Rondeau in Hericault's edition — " Les en voulez-vous gardcr Ces rivieres de courir,'" or in the numerous sonnets to Springtime, such as — " Le temps a laissie son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye ; " or in the sad lines to Old Age (Rondeau ccxci.) — " A I que vous m'enniiycz, X'ieillesse." Many of these were written in the last years of his life, many (some of them in I*lnglish, too} in the long days of his captivity, in which he lingered on amid vain hopes of release. Henry V. died giving no word of hope. D'.Mcncon and D'lui had left their prisons, but Charles d'Orleans refused to recog- nise the English King as suzerain. It was Jeanne d'Arc who really made the first step towards his ' Mcsthinot, for instance-, wioic "pDciii-. wliicli can l/c read in thiily (liflTtTcnt ways, any word being as goorl to l)cgin with as any oilier."— Sainlii'tiiy. io6 OLD TOURAINR deliverance, Jeanne who must have thought of him while she took English prisoners for exchange, and who delivered his Orleans, which was besieged con- trary to all promises made him by the English King. But his estate languished without him. Dunois had been captured, and the messenger who brought ill news said nothing of the good work that his friends were doing. Already, in 1427, hearing in the Tower of London of the English advance along the Loire, Charles had feared for his books at l^lois, and sent them by the Seigneur de IMortcmart to his house in Saumur. They were moved farther on to La Rochelle, until eight years later, the danger having passed, Charles writes to have them sent back to Blois, and directs especial search to be made at Orleans for a cherished little volume stamped with the arms of Berry. In 1433 he uselessly gave in his submission to the King of luigland, \\ho, as the grandson of Charles VI., was posing as the real heir of Erance. But seven more years dragged on before the Duke of Burgundy, the son of Jean Sans Pcur, arranged his deliverance. It was granted now, for the policy of England was at this time to weaken the royal power by encouraging the great barons, as it had been before to weaken feudality b\' keeping Orleans prisoner. At last his cry was answered. " Qui ni'ostera de ce tourment II m'achctera plaincmcnt. THREE DUKES OF ORLEANS 107 A tousjoursmos ^ heritage Tout sien seray, sans changement, Mettroye corps et ame en gage." His marriage with Marie de Clex'cs (liis second wife was dead long ago) produced enough monc)' by her dowry to bring his ransom within the bounds of possibiHt}-. The friendship of Charles d'Orlcans with the son of his father's murderer is an interesting and touching trait in this strange story of his release. His dreamy, romantic nature was not made for the sterner necessities of revenge.^ In 1440 he returned to France with all the ideas of 141 5, and took up his abode at Blois, where his " good fat face," his strong Italian nose and chin, are seen among physicians and astronomers, watching over his choir, listening to the harpers, and reading the ballads that everybody wrote to please him : no one paid the least attention to Charles's own verses, the only ones that were to live. During the first few years of freedom, the time there was left to him from the business of collecting his ransom, to which every one contributed, he spent in happily wandering about and ".seeing France"" after his long absence, ' "Or voycz que c'est des jiigcmcnls de Dicu. Car les pi.res de ccs deux seigneurs avaient ete les plus grands eniKrniis (|ui onctpies furent." — Saint Gelais. - " Et la (Dlois) et aillcurs jiarlout oii il passa, le peujjle en etait aussi rejoui que si c'eut (-le un ange qui ful descendu du ciel," .says .Saint Gclai.s. The .same author tells us that at this time Charles d'Orleans insli"""! nn order or livery, called " Lc Camail," on which Inm^; a loS OLD TOUR A I NE just as some years after he travels abroad and dreamil)' inspects his property at Asti. He took his pleasures gently ; old age was coming on him all the quicker for his long caplivit}- ; and he li\cd quietly in his home at IMois. " I'oiirce qu'on jouxtc ;i la quintaine A Oilcans jc tire a Blois, Je mc sens foule du harnois Et veulx rcprcndre mon alaine." In 1444 he had the pleasure of leading his own old gaoler, the Duke of Suffolk, from Blois to Tours, where the peace was made that followed the marriage of ^Marguerite d'.Vnjou, and Charles seems to have celebrated the occasion with much light-heartedness. " Durant les Ireves d'An^letcrre Qui ont este faittes a Tours, Par bon conseil, avcc Amours J'ai prins abstinence de guerre." But he found himself compelled at last to go abroad. In 1422, John and Charles d'Orleans being both in prison and Henry VI. of England crowned King of France, Asti had sent for protection to h'ilippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. Three }-ears before Charles's deliverance Francesco Sforza was in possession at .Asti as lieutenant ; but shortK' hedgehog, which was given as an honourable badge to several of the notable French knights. His son, Louis XII., used the porcupine as his badge, which is still carve