All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend
René's in Provence, would soon be made impossible: interference was the
order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what
was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily
in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South
Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the
islanders will not be much more puzzled and irritated than Charles of
Orleans at the policy of the Eleventh Louis. There was one thing, I seem
to apprehend, that had always particularly moved him; and that was, any
proposal to punish a person of his acquaintance. No matter what treason
he may have made or meddled with, an Alençon or an Armagnac was sure to
find Charles reappear from private life and do his best to get him
pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels with them. They
were charming people in every way. There must certainly be some mistake. Had not he himself made anti-national treaties almost before he was out
of his nonage? And for the matter of that, had not every one else done
the like? Such are some of the thoughts by which he might explain to
himself his aversion to such extremities; but it was on a deeper basis
that the feeling probably reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to
be impressed at the thought of disastrous revolutions in the fortunes of
those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those
who had everything to make life valuable were deprived of life itself
And it was shocking to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should
be hurried before their Judge without a fitting interval for penitence
and satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor,
purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with "the
universal spider," Louis XI. He took up the defence of the Duke of
Brittany at Tours. But Louis was then in no humour to hear Charles's
texts and Latin sentiments; he had his back to the wall, the future of
France was at stake; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his
path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of
Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was
monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke
never recovered the indignity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened,
and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of
his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious
rondels to the end of time. V

The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece throughout. He
never succeeded in any single purpose he set before him; for his
deliverance from England, after twenty-five years of failure, and at the
cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical
to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking-horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
following years he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind. During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman. He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alençon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once. Alençon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; "yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year,
and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of
Louis XI. if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political
deliberation. This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and
narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of
the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he
failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we
might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in
his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors
whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has
perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear testimony rather to the
fashion of rhyming, which distinguished the age, than to any special
vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exercises,
and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something
in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they
are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put
it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles
literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved
bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical
forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating
truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to
challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against
himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from
intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less
autobiographical. But they form an autobiography singularly bald and
uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside sentiments. Thoughts, in
any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had
been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and
that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as
much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred
pages of autobiographical verse. Doubtless, we find here and there a
complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age.