Avril | Page 5

this one Valois and you see all the qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:
Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur?Ordonnez par grace et douceur?De l'ame d'elle tellement?Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement?En peine souci et douleur.
Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance, engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth, at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:
Mon très bon h?te et ma très douce h?tesse.
For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.
Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin crowned at Rheims. His river of Loire, and then the Eure, and then the Seine, and even the field where he had fallen were reconquered. Willoughby had lost Paris to Richemont four years before Charles of Orleans was freed on a ransom of half his mother's fortune. It was not until the November of 1440 that he saw his country-side again.
The verse formed in that long endurance (a style which he preserved to the end in the many poems after his release) may seem at a first reading merely medi?val. There is wholly lacking in it the riot of creation, nor can one see at first the Renaissance coming in with Charles of Orleans.
Indeed it was laid aside as medi?val, and was wholly forgotten for three hundred years. No one had even heard of him for all those centuries till Sallier, that learned priest, pacing, full of his Hebrew and Syriac, the rooms of the royal library which Louis XV had but lately given him to govern, found the manuscript of the poems and wrote an essay on them for the Academy.
The verse is full of allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade--the Lyrical note of direct personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of the marching songs was still spontaneous:
Gentil Duc de Lorraine, vous avez grand renom,?Et votre renommée passe au delà des monts?Et vous et vos gens d'arme, et tous vos compagnons?Au premier coup qu'ils frappent, abattent les Donjons.?Tirez, tirez bombardes, serpentines, Canons!
Whatever the cause, this spontaneity and freshness run through all the mass of short and similar work which he wrote down.
The spring and sureness, the poise of these light nothings make them a flight of birds.
See how direct is this:
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!?La gracieuse, bonne et belle.
or this:
Le lendemain du premier jour de Mai?Dedans mon lit ainsi que je dormoye?Au point du jour advint que je sonjeay.
Everywhere his words make tunes for themselves and everywhere