They mingled in the crowd, seeing and hearing much that diverted them, and the King afterwards told the Queen and ladies all his adventures with great delight.
Some of the ladies left and went to their own hôtels when the King and Queen retired, but many remained all night, and the next morning the Queen and court moved to the hôtel St. Paul, where the revels went on for six days more, with a license that again called forth the reproaches and indignation of the preachers.[126]
Splendid presents were given by the City of Paris and by different people to the Queen and the Duchesse de Touraine, whose first appearance among them had excited great curiosity and interest. The Duc de Berry gave Isabeau a large house in the faubourg St. Marcel, with courts, galleries, moats, gardens, meadows, and a rabbit warren.[127]
The fatigue and excitement of all these gaieties seem to have told upon her, for she could not be present at a banquet and dance given by the King to the ladies of the court during the festivities at St. Paul, but stayed in her room and supped there.
She did not accompany the King when early in October he set off on a journey south. He had received great complaints from Aquitaine[128] of the oppressions and extortions of the Duc de Berry, and he also wanted to attend the coronation at Avignon of the young King of Sicily. The Queen being enceinte could not take a long and tiring journey, besides which it is more than probable that Charles on this occasion greatly preferred her absence. For his progress through Provence, Guyenne, and Languedoc, though ostensibly for political objects, such as the extinction of the schism at Avignon, the coronation of the King of Sicily, and the reformation of the abuses in Aquitaine, had also its social side. There, in the land of troubadours, poetry, and courts of love, where the sun was burning and the nights were bright, where the imagination was more vivid and the hot blood of the south ran quicker through the veins, where manners and morals were easy and had a tinge of orientalism derived from contact with the East; the progress of the young King from one town to another was a saturnalia of dancing, feasting, love-making, and violent exercise in games and tournaments, which for the first time seem to have taken visible effect upon him.
Some symptoms he must have felt which troubled and alarmed him, for while at Avignon he caused an effigy of himself to be made life-size in wax and placed under a tabernacle close to the relics of the young Cardinal Pierre de Luxembourg, of saintly reputation, to whose tomb people were flocking to be cured of epilepsy and other maladies.[129]
There was no royal post at that time; it was not instituted till the reign of Louis XI. Charles sent a courier to the Queen two or three weeks after his departure, to ask for news of her; he was then in Dauphiné, and from that time until his return in March she seems to have had no more letters or communications from him.[130]
During his absence another daughter was born and named Jeanne, like the first one. Isabeau had now two daughters still living. This second Jeanne afterwards married the Duc de Bretagne.
M. Vallet de Viriville says of Isabeau that although frivolous, capricious, and fantastic, she seems to have been liked by her ladies, and was certainly just as fond of her children as other women usually are. While they were little she had them always with her, caressed and watched over them, wept and prayed when they were ill, and redoubled her lamentations when any of them died. Her neglect of them a little later on, however, seems to contradict this; but then Isabeau was a person so inconsistent and selfish that neither her affection nor her dislike could ever be reckoned upon; and her extravagance and folly was the cause of the penury to which the royal children were at one time reduced. Her quarrels with her sons in later years were long after they had passed childhood; with those of her daughters who lived to grow up she does not seem to have disagreed.
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