ined
and successful as Jeanne de Montfort, and had come to Calais fresh from
her victories over the Scots, of which Froissart gives a careful and
glowing account.

CHAPTER X

AT THE COURT OF THE MAD KING

THAT France which had known queens good and bad, from Constance in the
tenth to Blanche of Castille in the thirteenth century, was delivered
over, toward the close of the fourteenth, to the hands of one of the
worst women in her history. The woes of France under the rule of the mad
King Charles VI. would have been enough to bear; but the Court of France
was led in a veritable saturnalia by the licentious Queen Isabeau de
Baviere. Once more, in Isabeau, we find a woman whose life-story cannot
be told without at the same time telling much of the history of France;
but it is not because the queen does anything good that we must tell of
the government of the kingdom during her ascendancy; she does nothing
but indulge her vulgar tastes for pleasure and debauchery, to satisfy
which she would pawn France itself.

In 1380, died the wise though unlovely Charles V., leaving the kingdom
temporarily free from the English and in just that nice state of balance
between recuperation and ruin when a little thing would suffice to turn
the scale either way. His son and heir was a boy of twelve, already
madly fond of pleasure, already filling his weak head with fantastic
tales of chivalry and romantic devotion to such sturdy warriors as Du
Guesclin, whom he could never hope to rival. His reign begins in a
dream--a dream of his meeting a fantastic flying hart, which he took for
his emblem. The dream goes on, in mad festivities encouraged by Philippe
le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy, who had chief charge of the boy. This
Philippe--that same brave son of King John whom we see at Poitiers
fighting by his father's side--was a great man, though not lovable; he
was too acute a politician to be altogether admirable. In one of the
grand shows arranged for the boy king on the occasion of the double
marriage of the son and the daughter of Philippe de Bourgogne to the
daughter and the son of Duke Alberic of Bavaria, the Duchess of Brabant,
whom Froissart calls a woman "full of good counsel," suggested to the
king's uncles that it would be well to find a wife for the young king in
the same powerful family now allied to the house of Burgundy. Nothing
could have better suited the plans of Philippe de Bourgogne, who
accordingly sent portrait painte