Alliances are
made and broken as if in a country dance; the English called in, now by
this one, now by the other. Poor people sing in church, with white faces
and lamentable music: "_Domine Jesu, parce populo tuo, dirige in viam
pacis principes._" And the end and upshot of the whole affair for
Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless. France is
once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin; he may ride home
again to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he
had got engraved in the early days of his resentment, "_Souvenez-vous
de--_" Remember! He has killed Polonius, to be sure; but the King is
never a penny the worse. II

From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of
Charles's life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in
the play of _Henry V._; and it is at least odd that we can trace a
resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, "I
have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may
very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle;
and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene
would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life
capping verses with his courtiers. Certainly, Charles was in the great
battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
was made prisoner as he led the van. According to one story, some ragged
English archer shot him down; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting
ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of
bodies and retailed him to our King Henry. He was the most important
capture of the day, and used with all consideration. On the way to
Calais, Henry sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will
remember, was an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles
would neither eat nor drink. Thereupon Henry came to visit him in his
quarters. "Noble cousin," said he, "how are you?" Charles replied that
he was well. "Why then do you neither eat nor drink?" And then with some
asperity, as I imagine, the young duke told him that "truly he had no
inclination for food." And our Henry improved the occasion with
something of a snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought
against the French on account of their manifold sins and transgressions. Upon this there supervened the agonies of a rough sea-passage; and many
French lords, Charles certainly among the number, declared they would
rather endure such another defeat than such another sore trial on
shipboard. Charles, indeed, never forgot his sufferings. Long
afterwards, he declared his hatred to a seafaring life, and willingly
yielded to England the empire of the seas, "because there is danger and
loss of life, and God knows what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness
is for many people hard to bear; and the rough life that must be led is
little suitable for the nobility":[27] which, of all babyish utterances
that ever fell from any public man, may surely bear the bell. Scarcely
disembarked, he followed his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy,
through the streets of holiday London. And then the doors closed upon
his last day of garish life for more than a quarter of a century. After
a boyhood passed in the dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp
of war, his ears still stunned and his cheeks still burning from his
enemies' jubilations; out of all this ringing of English bells and
singing of English anthems, from among all these shouting citizens in
scarlet cloaks, and beautiful virgins attired in white, he passed into
the silence and solitude of a political prison. [28]

His captivity was not without alleviations. He was allowed to go
hawking, and he found England an admirable country for the sport; he was
a favourite with English ladies, and admired their beauty; and he did
not lack for money, wine, or books; he was honourably imprisoned in the
strongholds of great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London. But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years. For
five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he
liked, or speak with any but his jailers. We may talk very wisely of
alleviations; there is only one alleviation for which the man would
thank you: he would thank you to open the door. With what regret
Scottish James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of
the time when he rose "as early as the day." What would he not have
given to wet his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his
vagrant fancy among the meadows? The only alleviation to the misery of
constraint lies in the disposition of the prisoner. To each one this
place of discipline brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron
Trenck into heroic action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable
spirits. Béranger tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours
and long evenings, both pleasant and profitable. The "Pilgrim's
Progress" and "Don Quixote" were begun in prison. It was after they were
become (to use the words of one of them), "Oh, worst imprisonment--the
dungeon of themselves!" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well
for the profit of mankind. In the year 1415 Henry V. had two
distinguished prisoners, French Charles of Orleans and Scottish James
I., who whiled away the hours of their captivity with rhyming. Indeed,
there can be no better pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical
exercise of verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel, with the
recurrence first of the whole, then of half the burthen, in thirteen
verses, seem to have been invented for the prison and the sick-bed. The
common Scots saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, "he
must have had little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on
all the song-books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to
the same class of pleasures as guessing acrostics or "burying proverbs." It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently
and gingerly. It keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so
intently as to be distressing; for anything like strain is against the
very nature of the craft. Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall
into their place as if of their own accord, and it becomes something of
the nature of an intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the
rhymes will go, just as you must strike your ball as your adversary
played it. So that these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to
make verses than for those who wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on
the other hand, difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man's head,
and fugitive words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the
same time the deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and
the ardour of the chase.