Miniatures of French history

In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen years younger or fifteen years older—he would have looked the same. He was simply dressed—it was winter—in warm grey clothes, and though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands. His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to himself.

One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.

It was the king—Louis XI.

To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely, stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks, was further stored the whole business of the realm.

In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges. In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.

It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in the same fashion to gold.

But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This, the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them—some quite unconsciously, none quite consciously—the agents of a great purpose, had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.

All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man—Charles the Bold—ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State, breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France halved.

This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning, tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail, patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle, square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a charge.

The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital, destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.

As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame, muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.

In the first light of a very cold morning the king rode out with half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the poorer sort. He was in grey, as always—a thick, coarse cloth—and on his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.

He rode out over the drawbridge toward Tours, in the bitterly cold mist as the day broadened. One hundred yards and more behind came the archers and the drivers of the wagons; for he had begun a journey.

The king and his little group of attendants halted for twenty minutes in the town for Mass. As he came out of Mass, he turned to the first poor inn of the market square, and ate the first short meal of the day, while the innkeeper and the serving-maid watched him in terror, and the passers-by in the streets huddled in corners, catching glimpses of him through the thick, small panes of the window.

And all during that meal he talked, and talked incessantly, to his companions, upon every point of his policy: upon the place they should visit, upon the chances of meeting the messenger whom he expected—upon all things.

They took the road again like a little company of poor pilgrims; they followed up the Loire.

They came at last to a place where the road, damp with melting snow but now lit by a pale morning sun, passed through a deep wood along the river bank, and there stood a hut which the foresters used. It was the appointed spot. The king halted, dismounted, and entered with but one companion. The rest stood without.

They had not long to wait. Another small group approached from the west, but these were splashed with mud, broken with fatigue, their fine horses hardly carrying them, and stumbling as they went. One of them was half in armour, and seemed to be their chief. He scrambled down stiffly from his beast, almost falling as he did so, entered the hut, and knelt before the king.

The king raised him, but before he could tell his great news Louis deluged him with yet another river of talk. How were the ways? What had he met? Had he passed through Bar, or had he come round north through Argonne? Had he heard what the common people were saying in either place?

Twice the newcomer attempted to tell his news, and twice he was swamped again by that ceaseless flood of clipped, tumbling words. At last he had his moment, and he took it to tell in three phrases the enormous thing which he had carried in silence through that night and through four desperate marches before.

Charles the Bold was dead. Nancy was relieved. Lorraine was master of his own again. The imagined new State was in ruins. Louis took up the ceaseless chatter again, patting the hand of his messenger as he did so, and smiling a thin but contented smile.

His work was accomplished. His great scheme was fulfilled, and yet such a moment led him to nothing more solemn than an endless cataract of words—save for one moment, when he fell again upon his knees on the earth floor of that hut and prayed as fervently as though he had been alone. He rose again to question and requestion, and to make his comments. He was exhausted before he was silent.

Meanwhile, far off in Lorraine, the battle had been brought to its conclusion, and the great Duke was dead.

It was upon Sunday, the 5th of January 1477, that René of Lorraine, coming out from his Mass in the Abbey Church of St. Nicholas, had ordered his armies—some few of the lords of the Barrois, some few more from the Charolais, some from the Jura were there; but the great mass of his rank and file were a hubbub of German talk from the Alsatian towns and from the Swiss mountains—ten thousand of them.

They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away, and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender, Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles.

It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles away, the spires of Nancy.

From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the Burgundians.

But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one. They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge.

Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no troops will stand—the sound of attack behind their line.

It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where none thought soldiers to be—far off and behind them to their right, from the woodside.

It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob, and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter.

Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford.

Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them of his nobility, but it could not stand—it was forced back in the general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.

A mile from the city gate there ran a brook, the brook of St. John. There, in the hurly-burly, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, parried right and left desperately, his lords about him, and in their midst were the enemy, ahorse and afoot, the long halberds of the Swiss, thrusting pikes, and the swing of swords.

None knew the great Duke Charles in such a confusion. They saw his rich armour, but they had no other sign; for the golden lion of Burgundy upon his helm had fallen even before the battle, and he himself, as he saw the crest tumble on his saddle bow, all those hours before, had muttered: “An omen—signum dei!”

So that man, unknown to the enemy, fought hard with his visor down. A thrust took him in the left thigh, another in the back. As he reeled he cried “Bourgoyne!” but one Claude, the Lord of Bauzemont, who was fighting there for Lorraine, hearing that cry, thrust a lance at him, not knowing whom he struck. The helm and its visor shattered. The face of the great Duke was gashed from ear to chin, and he went down. None knew who had so fallen, for all the nobles about him also were destroyed. And that was the end of Charles the Bold.

The press of the conquerors rushed up to the city gate, the Gate of St. Nicholas. The starving people ran to cheer, the garrison let down the bridge beyond the town, the last remnants of Charles’s force were massacred at the bridge of Bouxières.

The wintry sun was setting. The force had its hold again upon all the fields. The Duke of Lorraine held festival that night—back in his own city, and all his people eating again and drinking, and rejoicing in victory.

But one thing checked his triumph: whither had Charles gone? Was he in Metz, or fled perhaps into the Germanies, or got home among his own people in the Low Countries?

All the next day, Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, they searched the battlefield, heaps of naked bodies stripped by the spoilers, but none could say that they had found the great Duke. But that evening, as Lorraine rode back into Nancy, despondent and fearful, a captain brought to him a young page, one of the Colonnas of Rome, and said to him: “This lad knew the great Duke.”

So next morning, the Tuesday, the 7th of January, very early, they went out among the bodies in the snow, and the Italian boy would say first of one, then of another: “It is not he ... it is not he.” And with him also went one who had been a maid in the service of Charles. Then, at last, they came to the strong body, lying all wounds, with its dreadful gashed face, and the mass of thick, black hair against the snow, and the Italian page cried, “That is the Duke,” and the servant knelt down crying and sobbing, and they heard her say, “Ha! Burgundy, my Lord! my Lord!”

René of Lorraine had that famous body lifted with reverence, and wrapped in a linen shroud, and carried with pomp into Nancy.

Thenceforward, with whatever vicissitude of come and go, the Rhine was recovered for the Gauls.