VII.
The King was mad again; he had fallen into the first of innumerable relapses. Henceforth, for thirty years, any moment of too poignant feeling would throw him back in agony and madness. At such times he suffered much. It would happen (says the Monk of St. Denis), that as he sat in his council chamber, receiving his ambassadors and discoursing with sense and clearness, a sudden shudder would pass over him, the actual world would drift into oblivion. Again the forest near Mans, the leper’s warning, would rise on his tormented vision. He would shriek out for help against his enemies, and yet, poor king, be still aware these enemies were phantasms. At such moments he would cry and wail and sob, till all the Court fell a-weeping to hear him. “O not madness. Death, any pain, anything but madness!” and joining his hands he would look eagerly in face after face of his kinsmen. “I pray you, for the love of Christ, if any of you be party to this magic, then let me die at once and end it.” But no prayers avail, and as the fantastic world of lunacy gradually eclipsed the receding truth, the King’s last entreaty showed the unaltered sweetness of his tormented nature. “Keep away all the knives,” he would cry. “I had rather die than hurt any one.” For no lapse of time, no suffering effaced in his gentle character the stamp of that terrible moment of Mans when he had awoken to find his innocent hands stained henceforth for ever with innocent and loyal blood.
While the King wailed in desperate protest against his oncoming madness, all the Court wept with him. But, once that eclipse accomplished, the Court forgot the King. Part of the royal palace of St. Paul’s had been turned into a safe asylum. There the King lived, sometimes for many weeks unwashed, eaten with filth and vermin, suffering no attendant to approach him. He was then a mere wild beast, tormented with canine hunger, fierce, suspicious, and sometimes wild with fear. Then he would pace from end to end of his apartments, fleeing his imaginary pursuers, until he dropt exhausted in senseless lethargy.
But more often, and especially in the first years of his illness, he was not sunk so low as this. He was then an aimless, laughing, boyish imbecile. He was no longer the King even in his own fancy; he had forgotten himself as others had forgotten him. Did he see his own arms or the Queen’s emblazoned anywhere upon the walls, he would smear out that heraldry, laughing the while and dancing in a burlesque, unseemly fashion. “These are not my arms. I am not King Charles. My name is George,” he would cry, “and my arms are a lion pierced with a spear.” The poor King was himself transfixed with that intangible spear his fair brother of Orleans had planted in his heart for ever. But in his madness, his jealousy had undergone a subtle change. Sometimes he could not endure the sight or mention of the Queen and Orleans, but more often he utterly forgot them. Once they brought Isabel into his presence. He shook his head and swore he did not know the lady.
There was in all the world one only creature whose presence shed a little balm and solace on his unhappy lunacy. This was his sister-in-law, Madame Valentine. She was the only person he ever fully recognized. Absent and present he called upon her, “Oh, my dearest sister! Oh, my beloved sister!” and if Valentine left him a single day unvisited, the poor king would wander up and down for hours in aimless regret and complaining.
Valentine was kind and pitiful. Although at this time she was ailing (her second son was born in August, 1393), she did not fear to bring her delicate magnificence into the filth and peril of the mad king’s presence. For hours she would sit with him, playing at cards: those painted Saracen Naibi which Covelluzzo noticed at Viterbo (the first known in Europe) in 1379. Perhaps Valentine had brought them out of Italy; they were the only pastime of the haggard king; and for hours the painted images of Death, Love, Fortune, Madness, and the Angel, would silently fall from the hands of these two unhappy people, keeping each other melancholy company in the dismantled chambers of the barred and altered palace.
Valentine was ill herself; she was a woman; and yet she was not afraid of this tall, broad-shouldered young man of twenty-five, subject to violent mania, who in one fearful paroxysm had slain four men in armour. His attendants dared not come too near. But Valentine seemed to bear a charmed life, she did not even tremble. This unnatural courage of hers, this fascination, this mastery which she exercised upon their king ... all this was terribly explicable to the people of Paris.
Who was this lady?—Valentine of Milan. “Now,” says Juvenal, “her father was the Duke of Milan,[[20]] who was a Lombard, and in his country they practise magic and the casting of spells.” “The common people,” says the Monk, “declared the King was bewitched. They accused the Duke of Milan, and in confirmation of this ridiculous proposition they said the Duchess of Orleans was the only person the King recognized or cherished in his sickness. They did not scruple to say she was a witch, though that so generous a lady should commit so great a crime is a fact that never has been proved.” “The King’s physicians, arioles, and charmers,” says Froissart, “affirmed the King was poisoned or bewitched by craft of sorcery; they said they knew it by the spirits that had showed it to them. Of these diviners, arioles, and charmers, certain were burned at Paris and at Avignon. They spake so much, and said the Duchess Valentine of Orleans, daughter to the Duke of Milan, had bewitched the King.”
In those days the accusation of sorcery was terrible and ominous. To bewitch the King was the most damnable of crimes, for witchcraft in itself was treason against God. It was indeed no less than taking out of heaven the tremendous issues of life and death, apportioning them with profane and mortal hands, and breaking the heavenly order of the universe. God was mocked. This side of sorcery excited the horror of theologians, but it was not this that infuriated with helpless terror the shuddering populace. We know how the Polynesian islanders will die to-day of a fatal langour if they believe their enemy has prayed against them. The citizens of Paris in the Middle Ages died as easily. “Throughout the kingdom,” says the Monk of St. Denis, “many nobles and poor people are attacked with the same strange malady as the King’s.” A contagion of fear paralysed the sources of life. “For they can bewitch you,” said, in 1407, Maître Jean Petit, a very learned doctor in theology; “and they can bewitch the King, and make him die in a very subtle manner, quite unapparent, by the casting of a spell.” “A word is enough,” said two Augustine friars who suffered for sorcery in 1397, “a word, a touch; it is no natural malady.” To those who suffered, and saw their near and dear ones suffer of this incurable, inexorable enchantment, there was no death too cruel for the wizard.
The Duke of Milan was a very powerful magician. By spells and sorcery he, the weakest of his clan, had made himself the most astute and potent of all the princes of the West; by spells and sorcery he would make his daughter queen of France. “Il n’y avait qu’une bouche à clore,“ said Jean Petit. Valentine, the people thought, was helping her father, for the Duchess of Orleans was a witch.
The powers of the Prince of the Air were in high places. Valentine was not only protected by Satan—not only served by Hermas and Astramin the two livid demons of Montjoy that obeyed the House of Orleans—she was also sheltered by the effulgence of the throne. Every power, every protection was hers. Hell and earth obeyed her, and heaven smiles upon the sins of princes. Yet with the cruel heroism of pity the people of Paris rose against her, pouring down the streets, reaching out their fanatic hands to tear in pieces no omnipotent demon in a violent aureole of flame, but a pale neglected foreign woman far from home. They determined to save the King, and at last the peril of the duchess grew so great that Marshal Sancerre and many other nobles advised her husband to send her out of Paris. So in great pomp, nowise abashed, but with all the splendour of a royal progress, Valentine left the city. She went to a fair castle of her husband’s near Pontoise, and then to Neufchatel upon the Loire. She went alone, for Orleans was kept by State affairs in Paris. There was a subtle political reason for the irritation of France against the Milanese. In the complex recesses of the human heart an actual terror of supernatural evil, a crusader’s passion to avenge the honour of God, may co-exist with the most sordid calculations of a worldly advantage to be gained. It was not only for the love of God that the Jews and Moors of Spain, the Protestants of Flanders, the monasteries of England, were made to enrich their persecutors. It was not entirely for thirty pieces of silver that Judas delivered a heretic to the secular arm. And it was the easier to condemn the Duke of Milan that he was not only a wizard, but the political rival of France for the rich suzerainty of Genoa.