IV.
In April, 1387, Valentine of Milan was married by proxy and parole to Louis, Duke of Touraine. The bride was twenty-one, the bridegroom just sixteen; but, as Juvenal des Ursins remarked, “Assez caut, subtil et sage de son aage.” But not until the 3rd of June, 1389, did the Lord of Milan send his married daughter to her home in France.
For in France a powerful faction opposed the marriage. The king was little more than a lad; entirely—or, of late, almost entirely—submissive to his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. When the wise King Charles expired in the autumn of 1380, he left the custody of his two children to this younger brother of his, who in all his battles and adventures had been his right-hand man. But the King left the Regency of the Kingdom to the elder of his brothers, the Duke of Anjou. In every sense the brothers were rivals and antagonists; the interests of Anjou lay to the South, the interests of Burgundy to the North. Anjou was a man of culture, made by nature to be the head of a society of nobles; while Burgundy, the Captain, was the champion of popular rights. In nothing were they at one. When Anjou left the kingdom to conquer Naples, and when the news came to France that he would nevermore return, the supremacy of Burgundy appeared secure. But Anjou had left behind him a successor—not his son, the child-king of Sicily. No, the real successor to his aims and policy was his nephew, the Prince Louis, the younger of the two sons of the dead king.
Little harmony between this lad and his uncle of Burgundy! At ten years old the child fights like a hero at Rosebecque; but the old captain, his tutor, keeps all his smiles for the other nephew, the docile and amiable king. He feels in Louis a spirit of danger, a breath of insubordination. And, in truth, one after the other, the ancient counsellors and servitors of Anjou take shelter in the household of the prince. Burgundy feels that Louis is Anjou Redivivus—he must be kept low. And for this the testament of Charles V. gives ample warrant: for that king, well-named the Wise, feeling that the danger of France lay in the greatness of her princes, had conquered his fatherly heart and decreed that his younger son should have no more than a pension of 12,000 livres a year. But this was not to be. As time went on, and the Regency came to an end, Louis stimulated his placid brother to a sense of independence. And the young king, less Roman than his father, and glad perhaps to feel in the kingdom another power than that of Burgundy, began to enrich his only brother, giving him the counties of Valois and Beaumont, lands in Cotentin, Caen, Champagne, and Brie: then the Duchy of Touraine; the promise of the inheritance of the old Duchess of Orleans; finally, this rich marriage with Valentine Visconti.
Burgundy resisted with might and main. Not only would this marriage make Louis too strong, but of all brides Valentine was the bride least to his mind. For Burgundy had married two of his own children into the House of Bavaria, and had given a Bavarian princess—the vivacious Isabel—as wife to the young king. Now all these Bavarians were the grandchildren of Bernabò, murdered by the father of Valentine. Also the niece of Burgundy, Béatrix d’Armagnac, “la gaie Armagnageoise,” had married in 1382. This Carlo Visconti, Lord of Parma, heir of Bernabò, had been stripped of all his goods by Giangaleazzo and Beatrice, no longer laughing, had returned to eat the bread of exile in her brother’s house. Thus the Queen, and Burgundy, and Armagnac, and Berry (the other brother of the dead king) were bound by every instinct of natural anger and honourable vendetta to look upon Giangaleazzo as the spoiler of their kinsmen—of mother, children, niece, or husband—and in their eyes the riches of Milan were the price of blood. Not one of these but hoped to oust the usurper and restore the rightful line. And so for two years they contrived to defer the marriage.[[16]]
Meanwhile the influence of Burgundy weakened, that of Prince Louis increased, with the king. In the autumn of 1388 the disastrous “Voyage d’Allemagne” deeply discredited Burgundy, its author. In their tent at Corenzich, far from Queen and Court, the two brothers held long colloquies. Not in vain did Louis plead for his bride. In the summer of 1389, Philippe de Florigny was sent into Lombardy to bring her home.
Valentine took away with her an escort of knights, a burden of gold and gems, the possession of Asti, and the promise of Milan. She had in her caskets three hundred thousand pearls of price, beside the pearls upon her gala-dresses. Her plate was valued at more than one hundred thousand marks Parisis. Her jewels, ornaments, and tapestries were estimated at nearly seven hundred thousand golden florins.[[17]] Giangaleazzo had found nothing too costly or too radiant for his only daughter. When at last he let her go, he rode with her out of the gates of Pavia, saying never a word of farewell, looking not once into her beloved face, lest he should fall a-weeping. In the saddest hour of her tragic life, Valentine remembered with tears that silent parting.
It was the 17th of August, 1389, according to the dates of the Monk of St. Denis, when Valentine rode into Melun to meet her bridegroom. The King was there as well as all the Court—a Court full of kinsmen for Valentine. The Viscontis counted their alliances with the kings of France back into those mythical ages when Æneas, ancestor of either House, founded the city of Angleria. Valentine found plenty of more recent connections. The King and her husband were both her first cousins, and so was the young King of Sicily; the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry were her uncles. She was also, as I have said, first cousin once removed to the King’s young wife, Isabel of Bavaria. She was cousin also to Madame de Montauban, cousin by marriage to Madame d’Armagnac. But these three kinswomen looked on her with horror, and all her splendour seemed to them unholy spoil fresh from the unclean hands of her father, the triumphant assassin of his kinsmen.
The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted, stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower, the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he, rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome, so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no doctors who were proof against his bonne memoire et belle loquelle. Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning, devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs, and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness, still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of his enchanting presence.
According to Burcarius the King was handsomer than his young brother; but we must allow for a natural Burgundian hostility to Louis, and a natural Burgundian preference for force and valour, fresh colour, sweet temper, good humour, and all vigorous northern qualities, in preference to the subtler charms of their enemy. The stalwart Fleming thinks the King the finest man at Court, and handsomer than any there, far handsomer than his wife, “jolie et avenante,” indeed, but “basse et brunette”: fatal defects in the eyes of a Fleming! Her indisputable empire over men he ascribes not to her face, but to her lively manners. “Folle et légère,” was she:
“Touse n’y avoit tant jonette
Plaine de sy grant gaiété
Ny de sy grant joliveté
Sy amoureuse, ne sy lie,
Que cette Bergère jolie.”[jolie.”][[18]]
As for Louis, the Burgundian has no word in favour of this melancholy free-lover, this Tristifer (for such is the name he goes by among shepherds) who sins with no pleasure in sin; who spends his days in the pursuit of love, yet keeps a heart of iron; whose joys are such as are not to be found in the real world, but the fantastic joys of art, repugnant to the Philistine:
“Tristifer, tristièce portant.
... Et tout fut-il jolis,
Trop sembloit-il mirancolis;
Qui le coer a plus dur que fer.
. . . . . . \.
Bien nouvelette chanson
S’en va tout chantant à hault son,
Qu’il avoit, par un soir bruyant
Et bel, rimoié en riant.”
Thus the Burgundian ... unaware that this portrait of his enemy is the only one that awakens curiosity and stimulates the fancy. And, by way of adding a blacker touch than all, he tells us that this singing Tristifer is the paramour of the gay Queen Belligère.
I have said that Louis was held to possess an unearthly ring, a magic wand, of desire. For a perfect knight it was said that he had put them to strange uses. He had fascinated with his wand, he had bewitched with the circle of his ring, the young wife of his brother, the beautiful Queen Isabel. And he was the bridegroom of Valentine Visconti. Queen Isabel was at Melun to greet her new kinswoman. We can imagine with what critical eyes she ran her over. Valentine, though not beautiful, was a novel and irradiating vision in her veil of gems. She was wise too; she could talk with her husband over the poems he made, the verses of Lord Salisbury and Maître Eustache Deschamps, the romances of Wenzel of Luxembourg, or of Maître Jean d’Arras, all the literature of the Court. She could argue with him, this subtle Lombard, in the tenuous and fanciful dissertations that he loved. Queen Isabel could not endure to see this stranger, by reason of her splendour and her novelty become the centre of attraction. The marriage festival was scarcely over when Isabel persuaded her husband to ordain a greater festivity for herself. She had been married four years, she was known by sight to every clerk in the Rue St. Denis, yet the King, obedient to her behest, proclaimed the Royal Entry of the Queen into Paris.