Avril | Page 5

loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have
made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest
subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and
almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters
with hard enamelled colours against skies of gold, and is drawn and
sharp and clean as a thing can be.
Such is the whole line, but look at 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 hôte et ma très douce hôtesse.
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 mediæval. 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 mediæval, 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