"If it is to be that way, the ways of the Lord are strange and inscrutable, as our tonsured friends say. To have the crown and kingdom of France turn upon the maidenhood, upon the virginity of a cowherd!"
"Are you still at it?" responded Aloyse, interrupting Charles. "I guess your villainous thoughts regarding the poor girl."
"I ask myself, how could the idea have germinated in the mind of that poor girl of restoring my crown to me!"
"You display very little concern about your kingdom!"
"On the contrary—I think a good deal of my crown. It is the cares of royalty that cause me to speak in that way, my beautiful mistress."
"If the English take Orleans, the key of Touraine and Poitou, and they then invade those provinces, what will then be left to you?"
"You, my charmer! And if I must make the confession, it has often occurred to me that my great-grandfather, King John II, of pious memory, must have recorded among the happy days of his life the one on which he lost the battle of Poitiers—"
"The day when your great-grandfather, taken prisoner by the English, was transported to their own country? You must be crazy, my dear Charles!"
"Without any doubt, I am crazy; but crazy with love for you, my Aloyse! But let us come back to King John, made prisoner at the battle of Poitiers. He is taken to England. He is received with chivalrous courtesy and unheard-of magnificence. A sumptuous palace is assigned to him for prison, and he is invited out to exquisite banquets. The handsomest girls of England are charged to watch him. The forests that are at his disposal teem with game; the fields are vast; the rivers limpid. Thus his time is divided between love, play, the table, fishing, hunting—until he dies of indigestion. While King John was thus peaceably enjoying life in England, what was his son doing, the unhappy Charles V? Driven out of Paris by a vile populace that rose in rebellion at the voice of Marcel, the unhappy Charles the Wise, as he was called, frightened out of his senses by the ferocities of the Jacquerie, beset by the bustle of royalty, broken with the fatigues of war, ever on horseback, ever sleeping on the hard ground, and never sleeping with both eyes shut, living on poor fare and on poorer love, rushing hither and thither over hill and dale, was ever out of breath running after his crown! By the glories of Easter! Do you call that 'wisdom'?"
"He at least had the glory of re-conquering his crown, and indulged the pleasure of executing his enemies."