All this while Jean-sans-Peur was travelling to Paris. He came at the head of six thousand men-at-arms. The King was mad again, and could not support him; but none the less the Queen and Orleans feared an insurrection in Burgundy’s favour. They decided to flee secretly away into Luxembourg with the royal children. Valentine was with them; and they had got as far as Pouilly when the troops of Burgundy suddenly surrounded the litter of the Dauphin, some hours’ journey to the rear. The boy was delighted; he embraced his father-in-law, and was carried in triumph back to Paris. Isabel, with Valentine and Orleans, fled to the Castle of Melun. Civil war seemed eminent; but when the two armies were actually in the field, peace was arranged, and on the 15th of October the Queen and Orleans re-entered Paris.
Orleans had learned nothing by his lesson. He was more than ever arrogant, more than ever secure in his tyranny. Early in the next year his young son Charles was married to the King’s daughter Isabel, the widowed Queen of England, a girl of sixteen. In the first months of 1407 the King gave his brother the rich duchy of Aquitaine. Orleans began to think again of the governorship of Normandy. He was richer and stronger than the King.
And yet, if Valentine, if Orleans, had really read the future as the people thought they did, or had they even cared to read the present, they might well have paused. In that age the fate of tyrants was not prosperous. The King of England was a leper. The King of France was mad. The little Duke of Milan was mad also, with a furious Italian hemomania. The King of Scotland was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies. There were two Popes, things for scorn and laughter, held in derision of all nations, and a song to the people all day long.
Already, in 1380, Miles de Dormans, Chancellor of France, had declared “A government has no force save in the obedience of the people, for kings only rule by the suffrage of their subjects: Nam et si centies negent, reges regnant suffragio populorum.”
The judgment of heaven, the liberties of man, seemed to conspire alike against the rule of tyrants.
XI.
Notwithstanding his deceptions in the affair of Genoa, and in spite of his supremacy in France, Orleans still cherished designs on Lombardy; and perhaps the chief cause why his Italian enterprises are less noticeable in the fifteenth than in the seventeenth century is due, not so much to his engrossment with affairs at home, as to the fact that in Benedict XIII. he found an ally infinitely less subtle and less brilliant than he had known in Clement VII. Benedict was little more than a captive in the hands of Orleans;[[41]] Clement had been an accomplice.
A greater than Clement failed him a little later. In the autumn of 1402, in the very flush and zenith of victory, Giangaleazzo Visconti died. A score of his captains soon were fighting for his kingdom. That vast territory, whose coherence existed only in the brain of one man, fell rapidly into fragments: city after city threw off the unwilling yoke of union, and what had almost begun to be a national Italy reverted in a few weeks to the old conditions of fragmentary independence. His two sons ruled in a narrowed Lombardy, and with no vista, as it seemed, on the ambitions of their father. In the very same year that the great Visconti died, Charles VI. sent to Genoa a small, restless, quixotic man of much ability, who to some extent filled the empty place of the dead Giangaleazzo. But if Marshal Boucicaut had much of the ambition, and all the audacity of the late Duke of Milan, he possessed nothing of his slow wise mind, of the deep and subtle duplicity that Machiavelli may have envied, or of the powers of combination, the cool tenacity to a grand idea, which foreshadowed the genius of another North Italian, Count Cavour. Moreover, while such share as Visconti meant to allow the French in Italy was destined by him for his son-in-law of Orleans, Boucicaut worked for the King. Thus, for the second time in his experience, the Frenchman found his greatest rival in France.
Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the other an astute child, timid, unscrupulous, who later should develop a trace of the genius of his father. At first their hold on their inheritance was so slight that Orleans determined on invading Lombardy, whether to defend or to supplant his nephews, who shall say? In October, 1403, he started for Lombardy, accompanied by 13 knights-banneret, 43 knights, 212 squires, 28 archers, 20 crossbow-men, and other soldiers.[[43]] On the way south he passed by Beaucaire, and had an interview with his charge, the Antipope Benedict. He took into his service the famous captain of adventure, Bernardon de Serres. He made friends with another mighty captain—an ancient enemy—the Count of Armagnac.[[42]] Vast and serious appeared his project of invasion, but, on the very verge of the Alps, suddenly, on January, 1404, he abandoned the prosperous enterprise, turned right about, and faced home for Paris.
What is the meaning of this sudden change of course, unexplained, and perhaps inexplicable? What was the object of the Lombard invasion? What was the cause which so unexpectedly suppressed it? Orleans believed himself to have a certain claim on Pisa, bequeathed by the great Visconti to his bastard son Gabriello-Maria. Gabriello Visconti was ill at ease in Pisa. A little later, in 1404, as we know, he offered his unruly city first to France, then to Florence. It is possible—it is even from the nature of things a necessary hypothesis—to suppose that in 1403 Gabriello had come to terms with Orleans, and that the rights on Pisa which Orleans vaunted as his own through Valentine Visconti were supported by some cession of the actual lord, her half-brother. But Orleans was not the only Frenchman capable of adventure and practice in Italy. By the time his army reached the frontier he found himself outwitted by a higher bidder, nearer at hand.