A few miles southeast of Tours is the ruin of a castle still more terrible in its suggestiveness than even Plessis, for here Louis XI perpetrated deeds of secret cruelty, which he shrank from committing within the walls of his own palace. It is the Castle of Loches, for many years a royal residence. It is interesting to Scotchmen from the fact that it was the scene of the royal wedding of King James V to the Princess Magdalene, in whose honour the Palace of Linlithgow was remodelled and greatly embellished.
The castle is now a pile of ruined buildings, standing on the summit of a lofty rock, where it dominates the landscape. Its principal tower is one hundred and twenty feet high, with walls eight feet thick. Its date is said to be the twelfth century. A part of it is now the local jail, and the building has been used as a prison for centuries. Beneath were dungeons under dungeons, dimly lighted by narrow windows, cut through small recesses in the walls, which are here ten or twelve feet thick. In two of these were the iron cages invented by Cardinal John de La Balue. He was a cobbler, some say a tailor, whom Louis elevated to the highest rank and employed in his secret devices. The cage was built of iron bars and was only eight feet square. The Cardinal proved a traitor to his king and the latter's severity kept him in the dungeon cells for eleven years, a part of which time, at least, was spent in one of the cages of his own invention. The governor and gaoler of this dreaded prison was Oliver le Daim, the King's barber and prime minister.
The events culminating in the murder of the Bishop of Liège were, of course, purely fictitious. Scott did not hesitate to 'violate history,' as he afterward expressed it, to meet the requirements of his story. The actual murder of the Bishop occurred in 1482, fourteen years after the period of the novel and five years after the death of Charles the Bold. William de la Marck, called the 'Wild Boar of Ardennes,' wishing to place the mitre on the head of his own son, entered into a conspiracy with some of the rebellious citizens of Liège, against their Bishop, Louis de Bourbon. The latter was enticed to the edge of the town, where he was met by the fierce and bloodthirsty knight, who murdered him with his own hand and caused the body to be exposed naked in St. Lambert's Place, before the cathedral. Scott's version, never intended to be historically accurate, places the scene of the murder in the fictitious Castle of Schonwaldt, outside the city.
The description of the meeting of Louis XI and Charles the Bold at the town of Péronne and the King's imprisonment in the castle, while somewhat amplified with fictitious details, is in the essential facts quite in accord with history. Péronne is a small town of great antiquity, ninety-four miles northeast of Paris, in the Department of the Somme. Its castle still retains four conical-roofed towers in fairly good repair. On the ground floor are many dark and dismal dungeons. In one of these miserable cells Charles the Simple, in the year 929, ended his days in agony. He was confined in the tower by the treachery of Herbert, Count of Vermandois, and left there to starve to death. Adjoining this room, in what is known as the Tour Herbert, is the chamber said to have been occupied by Louis XI.
Great was the surprise and alarm among the retainers of Louis when that monarch, trusting to an exaggerated notion of his own wit and powers of persuasion, proposed to visit his most formidable adversary, Charles of Burgundy, at the town of Péronne. The latter granted the King's request for a safe-conduct, and Louis set forth in October, 1482, accompanied by a small detachment of his Scots Guard and men-at-arms, and two faithless councillors, the Constable de St. Pol and the Cardinal de La Balue. The Duke met the King outside the town and together they walked in apparent friendliness to the house of the Chamberlain, Charles apologizing for not taking the King to the castle because it was not in fit condition. Some portion of the Duke's army arrived the same day and encamped outside the walls. Learning this, the King became greatly frightened and demanded quarters in the castle—a request which Charles granted with great, but secret, glee. The next day brought forth nothing but ill-feeling and misunderstanding, which was brought to a climax by the news from Liège. It was reported that the emissaries of Louis had stirred up sedition against the Duke, and had killed the Bishop of Liège, and the Lord of Humbercourt. Charles was a man of tremendous passions and this news threw him into a fury which he made little attempt to control. His royal guest became his prisoner, the gates of the town and the castle were closed, and for a time Louis was in danger of his life at the hands of his enraged vassal. Louis, meanwhile, remained calm, making full use of his native shrewdness, keenness of penetration, and unusual cunning. By a liberal use of money, with which he had sagaciously provided himself, the Duke's servants were corrupted wherever he could hope to secure information or assistance. His craftiness, however, proved unnecessary. Charles cooled off after a day or two and realized that he could not well afford to violate his safe-conduct. Meanwhile the news from Liège turned out more favourably. The Bishop had not been slain and the revolt had been less serious than supposed. Charles, however, compelled the King to swear a new treaty, which Louis did by taking from one of his boxes a piece of the 'true cross,' a relic, formerly belonging, so it was said, to Charlemagne, which Louis regarded with great veneration. The oath upon the cross duly made, Louis accompanied his captor on an expedition against the town of Liège, the particulars of which were not essentially different from the version of Scott.
The novel brings out to great advantage the striking contrast between the King and the Duke. Charles was strong, vigorous, clear-sighted, and in the words of Philippe de Comines, 'a great and honourable prince, as much esteemed for a time amongst his neighbours as any prince in Christendom.' The great fault of his character was that expressed in the sobriquet, Charles the Rash; and this was the cause of his downfall. That, however, is a tale which Scott reserved for a later novel.
Though received at first with apparent indifference, 'Quentin Durward' came in time to be regarded as one of the best of the Waverley Novels, dividing the honours, in the minds of the boys, at least, with 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Talisman.'