ance to
continue the fight for Naples. So far from remembering with resentment
the enormous sums formerly stolen from him by this very family, Charles
VI. must needs squander more in a splendid show to celebrate the
knighting of the princes of Anjou.

That ceremony in which the young soldier of God swore to defend the
right, with all the solemn and impressive ritual that the Church could
devise to sanctify and dignify his act, was to be turned into a vile
debauch. In the ancient abbey of Saint-Denis, beside the tombs of the
great dead who had glorified France, were lodged "the Queen and a bevy
of illustrious ladies." Monastery or no monastery, the monks must harbor
these fair guests, whom all the rules of their order would have rigidly
excluded. Says the chronicle of a monk of Saint-Denis: "To gaze on their
exceeding beauty you would have said it was a meeting of the heathen
goddesses." And so they were, heathen goddesses, with a lawless Venus at
their head. But the festival, be it remembered, was a religious one; we
go "to hear mass every morning." The religious services over, the day
was given up to magnificent tourneys and rich banquets, and the nights
to balls, masked balls, "to hide blushes." For three days and three
nights was this revel maintained, the mad Bacchanals scrupling not to
defile even the most sacred places by their orgies, which the presence
of the king and queen rather encouraged than checked. It was the queen
herself, indeed, who loved all this. One does not wonder that people
began to whisper that she had already shown more than decorous affection
for her brother-in-law, the brilliant Louis d'Orleans; in the
_pervigilium Veneris_, the "wake of Venus," as they called the balls at
Saint-Denis, who could say what might have happened?

The king attained his majority; in a sudden fit of impatience, he threw
off the control of his uncles, till now the rulers of France, and set up
his own government. The royal princes had not been good governors; each
one was too intent upon his own interests to consider those of France;
and accordingly France hated them, and hoped for better things from the
young king and his sober government of humble counsellors. But Charles
needed excitement; in lieu of war there were fetes, upon which he
squandered money till the people groaned and the councillors trembled.
Any excuse was sufficient for holding a fete. Of a sudden, Charles and
Isabeau remembered that the queen had n