LITMIR.BIZ

      "Jean-sans-Peur," Duc de Bourgogne.

       (From a painting by an unknown artist, at Chantilly.)

      At last "Jean-sans-Peur" mustered his courage and his assassins to deliver himself and France. Isabelle of Bavaria had left her crazed husband in desolate Hôtel Saint-Paul, and carried her unclean court to Hôtel Barbette—we shall see more of these residences in another chapter—where she sat at supper, with her husband's brother, on the night of November 23, 1407. It was eight in the evening, dark for the short days of that "black winter," the bitterest known in France for centuries. An urgent messenger, shown in to Orleans at table, begged him to hasten to the King at Saint-Paul. The duke sauntered out, humming an air, mounted his mule and started on his way, still musical; four varlets with torches ahead, two 'squires behind. Only a few steps on, as he passed the shadowed entrance of a court, armed men—many more than his escort—sprang upon him and cut him down with axes. He called out that he was the Duke of Orleans. "So much the better!" they shouted, and battered him to death on the ground; then they rode off through the night, unmolested by the terrified attendants. The master and paymaster of the gang, who was watching, from a doorway hard by, to see that his money was honestly earned, went off on his way. A devious way it turned out to be, for, having admitted his complicity to the Council, in his high and mighty fashion, he found himself safer in flight than in his guarded topmost room of this tower before us. He galloped away to his frontier of Flanders, cutting each bridge that he crossed. It was ten years before he could return, and then he came at the head of his Burgundian forces, and bought the keys of Porte de Buci, stolen by its keeper's son from under his father's pillow. Entering Paris on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, on the following day, the Burgundians began those massacres which lasted as long as there were Armagnacs to kill, and which polluted Paris streets with corpses. Within a year, John, lured to a meeting with the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII., went to the bridge at Montereau, with the infinite precautions always taken by this fearless man, and there he was murdered with no less treachery, if with less butchery, than he gave to his killing of Louis of Orleans.

      Valentine Visconti, widow of Orleans, had not lived to see this retribution. Her appeal to the King for the punishment of the assassin was answered by pleasant phrases, and soon after, in one of his sane intervals, was further answered by the royal pardon to Burgundy, for that "out of faith and loyalty to us, he has caused to be put out of the world our brother of Orleans." She had counted on the King's remembering that, in the early years of his madness, hers had been the only face he knew and the only voice that soothed him. She crept away to Blois with her children, and with Dunois, her husband's son but not her own. The others were not of the age nor of the stuff to harbor revenge, and to him she said: "You were stolen from me, and it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are fiery words from a rarely gentle yet courageous woman, grown vindictive out of her constancy to a worthless man. She is the one pure creature, pathetic and undefiled, in all this welter of perfidy and brutality. "She shines in the black wreck of things," in Carlyle's words concerning another "noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes," of a later day. There, at Blois, she died within the year.

      It would carry us too far from this tower to follow the course of the feud between the heirs of these two houses. "Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, Luxembourg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord of Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, Lord of Salins and Macklyn," was a high and puissant prince, and versatile withal. "He could fight as well as any king going, and he could lie as well as any, except the King of France. He was a mighty hunter, and could read and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. He loved jewels like a woman, and gorgeous apparel. He dearly loved maids-of-honor, and, indeed, paintings generally, in proof of which he ennobled Jan van Eyck. … In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues." Charles of Orleans, son of Louis, was of another kidney. Spirited at the start, this prince was spoiled by his training, "like such other lords as I have seen educated in this country," says Comines; "for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes with finery and fine words." Young Charles d'Orléans took his earliest lessons in rhyme, and he rhymed through life, through his twenty-five years of captivity in England, until he was old Charles, the pallid figure-head of a petty, babbling, versifying court. And the quarrel between the two houses came to nothing beyond the trifle of general misery for France.

      It was only when Burgundy came into collision with the crafty Dauphin of France, the rebellious son of Charles VII., who had fled from his father's court and taken refuge with Duke Philip the Good, that this great house began to fail in power. When that Dauphin, become Louis XI., made royal entry into Paris, this Hôtel de Bourgogne showed all its old bravery. From its great court, through its great gate on Rue Saint-Denis, into the space behind the town gate of that name, Duke Philip rode forth on the last day of August, 1461, at his side his son—then Comte de Charolais, known later as Charles "le Téméraire"—to head the glittering array of nobles, aglow with silken draperies and jewels, their horses' housings sweeping the ground, who await the new King. Few of them are quite sure "how they stand" with him, and they hardly know how to greet him as he enters, but they take the customary oaths when they get to Notre-Dame, and thence escort him to the old palace on the island. There they feasted and their royal master pretended to be jolly, all the while speculating on the speedy snuffing-out of these flashing satellites. On the morrow he took up his residence in the Hôtel des Tournelles, almost deserted within, and altogether without. For the populace crowded about this Hôtel de Bourgogne, all eyes and ears for the sight and the story of its splendors. Its tapestries were the richest ever seen by Parisians, its silver such as few princes owned, its table lavish and ungrudging. The duke's robes and jewels were so wonderful that the cheering mob ran after him, as he passed along the streets, with his attendant train of nobles and his body-guard of archers.

      With his death died all the pomp and show of this palace. His son, Charles the Bold, wasted no time in Paris from the fighting, for which he had an incurable itch, but no genius. He kept this deserted house in charge of a concierge for his daughter Mary, "the richest heiress in Christendom," who was promised to five suitors at once, and who married Maximilian of Austria at last. Their grandson, the Emperor Charles V., in one of the many bargains made and unmade between him and François I.—the one the direct descendant of Louis of Orleans and the other the direct descendant of John of Burgundy—gave up to the French crown all that Burgundy owned in France, one portion of it in Paris being this Hôtel de Bourgogne. By now this once most strongly fortified and best defended fortress-home in all the town was fallen into sad decay, its spacious courts the playground of stray children, its great halls and roomy chambers a refuge for tramps and rascals. So François, casting about for any scheme to bring in money, and greedy to keep alive the tradition, handed down from Hugh Capet, that gave to his crown all the ground on which Paris was built, sold at auction this old rookery, along with other royal buildings and land in the city, in the year 1543. This hôtel was put up in thirteen lots, this tower and its dependencies, Burgundian additions of the first years of the fifteenth century, being numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and while all the other structures

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