In 1380, died the wise though unlovely Charles V., leaving the kingdom temporarily free from the English and in just that nice state of balance between recuperation and ruin when a little thing would suffice to turn the scale either way. His son and heir was a boy of twelve, already madly fond of pleasure, already filling his weak head with fantastic tales of chivalry and romantic devotion to such sturdy warriors as Du Guesclin, whom he could never hope to rival. His reign begins in a dream--a dream of his meeting a fantastic flying hart, which he took for his emblem. The dream goes on, in mad festivities encouraged by Philippe le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy, who had chief charge of the boy. This Philippe--that same brave son of King John whom we see at Poitiers fighting by his father's side--was a great man, though not lovable; he was too acute a politician to be altogether admirable. In one of the grand shows arranged for the boy king on the occasion of the double marriage of the son and the daughter of Philippe de Bourgogne to the daughter and the son of Duke Alberic of Bavaria, the Duchess of Brabant, whom Froissart calls a woman "full of good counsel," suggested to the king's uncles that it would be well to find a wife for the young king in the same powerful family now allied to the house of Burgundy. Nothing could have better suited the plans of Philippe de Bourgogne, who accordingly sent portrait painters to reproduce the charms of the respective candidates for the hand of the king, and from the portraits selected Isabeau de Bavière, daughter of Etienne II. and a princess of the great Italian family of Visconti.
The young Isabeau, whose portrait showed her to be the most beautiful of the princesses to be chosen from, was brought into Brabant by her uncle, under pretext of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint John of Amiens, while the Duke of Burgundy at the same time found an excuse for conducting Charles to Amiens, without giving him the slightest hint of the purpose of the journey. Isabeau was presented to the king by the Duchesses of Brabant and Bourgogne, and kneeled low before him, lifting up her sweet girlish face to him in lieu of speaking in a tongue as yet unknown to her. Then Charles took her by the hand, raised her and looked at her pensively; "and in this look the sweet thought of love did enter into his heart." After the ladies had withdrawn from the royal presence, the Sire de la Rivière, an old minister of Charles V., asked the king: "Sire, what think you of this young lady? shall she remain with us?" "By my faith, yes," replied Charles, "we wish no other, for she pleases us." There was no tarrying for elaborate ceremonies, fond as the king was of them; Charles insisted on an immediate wedding. He and the young German princess were married on July 17, 1385, four days after this first interview. The bride was but fourteen, and the groom not quite seventeen; it was one of those infamous child marriages of which the history of Europe is too full.
Isabeau de Bavière was already of a slothful habit, to be roused only by her love of amusement, to purchase which neither she nor her young husband would spare anything. Luxury and wild extravagance in dress, in entertainments, even in funerals, was characteristic of the age; the whole kingdom gave itself up to extravagance and debauchery; existence was one mad revel, with no thought of who should pay the piper; all must dance and caper as if bitten by the tarantula. The very costumes are wild: "Here (we see) men-women comically tricked out, and effeminately trailing on the ground robes twelve ells long; there, others, whose figures are distinctly defined by their short Bohemian jackets and tight pantaloons, though with sleeves floating down to the ground; here, men-beasts, embroidered all over with animals of every kind; there, men-music, pricked all over with notes, from which one could sing before or behind; while others placarded themselves with a scrawl of signs and letters, which, no doubt, said nothing good.... Rational beings did not hesitate to disguise themselves in the satanic, bestial shapes which grin down upon us from the eaves of churches. Women wore horns on their heads, men on their feet the peaks of their shoes were twisted up into horns, griffins, serpents' tails. The women, above all, would have made our spirits (of the age of Saint Louis) tremble; with their bosoms exposed, they haughtily paraded high above the heads of the men their gigantic hennin (the peaked and horned headdress) with its scaffolding of horns, requiring them to turn sideways and stoop as often as they went in or out of a room."
With all this outlandish fashion of dress the young queen was in perfect accord; and the life of the court was one succession of brilliant entertainments, wicked in their sensuality no less than in their waste of the revenues of a kingdom already impoverished by long wars. During the early years of her presence--we cannot call it her rule--in France, Isabeau took no part in politics; neither did her husband, for that matter, since he left the government in the hands of his uncles, chief of whom was Philippe de Bourgogne. We shall therefore have little to record at first beyond some of the more noteworthy of the doings at the court.
The first of these, and one of the most scandalous, occurred in May, 1388; and the occasion which it was intended to celebrate merits some attention from those who would appreciate the utter incapacity of Charles VI. even at this period. To understand the circumstances we must go back to the time when Charles V. lay dying, and his brother, Louis, Duke of Anjou, waited in an adjoining room till the breath should be out of the king's body. When the king was really dead, out came Louis to seize upon the plate and other movables of value. Hearing that Charles had concealed a considerable treasure in the walls of his palace at Melun, and being unable to discover the hiding place, this affectionate brother sent for the treasurer of the late king, and uttered the grim threat: "You will find that money for me, or off goes your head." The executioner was there with his ax--the treasure was found; and Louis carried it off to squander it in prosecuting his claims to the throne of Naples. Now he was dead, and his two sons were about to leave France to continue the fight for Naples. So far from remembering with resentment the enormous sums formerly stolen from him by this very family, Charles VI. must needs squander more in a splendid show to celebrate the knighting of the princes of Anjou.
That ceremony in which the young soldier of God swore to defend the right, with all the solemn and impressive ritual that the Church could devise to sanctify and dignify his act, was to be turned into a vile debauch. In the ancient abbey of Saint-Denis, beside the tombs of the great dead who had glorified France, were lodged "the Queen and a bevy of illustrious ladies." Monastery or no monastery, the monks must harbor these fair guests, whom all the rules of their order would have rigidly excluded. Says the chronicle of a monk of Saint-Denis: "To gaze on their exceeding beauty you would have said it was a meeting of the heathen goddesses." And so they were, heathen goddesses, with a lawless Venus at their head. But the festival, be it remembered, was a religious one; we go "to hear mass every morning." The religious services over, the day was given up to magnificent tourneys and rich banquets, and the nights to balls, masked balls, "to hide blushes." For three days and three nights was this revel maintained, the mad Bacchanals scrupling not to defile even the most sacred places by their orgies, which the presence of the king and queen rather encouraged than checked. It was the queen herself, indeed, who loved all this. One does not wonder that people began to whisper that she had already shown more than decorous affection for her brother-in-law, the brilliant Louis d'Orléans; in the pervigilium Veneris, the "wake of Venus," as they called the balls at Saint-Denis, who could say what might have happened?
The king attained his majority; in a sudden fit of impatience, he threw off the control of his uncles, till now the rulers of France, and set up his own government. The royal princes had not been good governors; each one was too intent upon his own interests to consider those of France; and accordingly France hated them, and hoped for better things from the young king and his sober government of humble counsellors. But Charles needed excitement; in lieu of war there were fetes, upon which he squandered money till the people groaned and the councillors trembled. Any excuse was sufficient for holding a fête. Of a sudden, Charles and Isabeau remembered that the queen had never been crowned and had never made a royal entry into Paris. The city was ordered to make unexampled preparations to receive Isabeau as queen; she had been living in Paris a good part of the time during the four years since her marriage, but that did not do away with the necessity for a formal introduction to the capital of her dominions.
With his usual love of the spectacular, Froissart gives us an account, covering many pages, of the reception of Isabeau. The Parisians dressed themselves in gay costumes of scarlet, and green, and gold, each vying with his neighbor and rivalling, as far as he dared, the gorgeousness of the courtiers and nobles. The fountains ran wine and milk, the balconies and windows were festooned with flowers and crowded with eager spectators, while musicians played before the doors of many houses and miracle plays were given on the street corners. On August 22nd, the young queen, hailed at every step by the acclamations of the throngs in the streets, and accompanied by a crowd of noble ladies borne in sumptuous litters, passed from Saint-Denis to Paris. At the Porte Saint-Denis there was a canopy representing "heaven, made full of stars, and within it young children apparelled like angels," and an "image of Our Lady herself," holding the infant Saviour. Two of the angels, let down from heaven by ropes, placed a golden crown upon Isabeau's head, singing: "Sweet lady amid the fleur-de-lis, are you not from heaven?"
"Then when the Queen and the ladies were passed by," having greatly admired this "high heaven richly apparelled with the arms of France, the device of the king," they proceeded along the street till they came to a place where was a fountain, "which was covered over with a cloth of fine azure, painted full of flower-de-luces of gold.... And out of this fountain there issued in great streams spiced drinks and claret, and about this fountain there were young maidens richly apparelled, with rich chaplets on their heads, singing melodiously: great pleasure it was to hear them. And they held in their hands cups and goblets of gold, offering and giving to drink all such as passed by; and the Queen rested there and regaled herself and regarded them, having great pleasure in that device, and so did all other ladies and damosels that saw it."
Passing onward to where stood the Church of Saint James, "all the street of Saint-Denis was covered over with cloths of silk and camlet, such plenty as though such cloths should cost nothing. And I, Sir John Froissart, author of this history, was present and saw all this and had great wonder where such number of cloths of silk were gotten; there was as great plenty as though they had been in Alexandria or Damascus; and all the houses on both sides of the great street of Saint-Denis were hanged with cloths of Arras of divers histories, the which was pleasure to behold."