So they flayed a liver-coloured dog, and clapped it, yet palpitating, to their sovereign's breast and he died.
Philip the Good, thus scientifically disposed of, left thirty-one children: of whom one, somehow or another, was legitimate; and reigned in his stead.
The good duke provided for nineteen out of the other thirty; the rest shifted for themselves.
According to the Flemish chronicle the deceased prince was descended from the kings of Troy through Thierry of Aquitaine, and Chilperic, Pharamond, etc., the old kings of Franconia.
But this in reality was no distinction. Not a prince of his day have I been able to discover who did not come down from Troy. “Priam” was mediaeval for “Adam.”
The good duke's, body was carried into Burgundy, and laid in a noble mausoleum of black marble at Dijon.
Holland rang with his death; and little dreamed that anything as famous was born in her territory that year. That judgment has been long reversed. Men gaze at the tailor's house, here the great birth of the fifteenth century took place. In what house the good duke died “no one knows and no one cares,” as the song says.
And why?
Dukes Philip the Good come and go, and leave mankind not a halfpenny wiser, nor better, nor other than they found it.
But when, once in three hundred years, such a child is born to the world as Margaret's son, lo! a human torch lighted by fire from heaven; and “FIAT LUX” thunder's from pole to pole.