y rights, have devolved upon
the king's eldest brother, Louis d'Orleans, who was twenty-one years of
age at the time of Charles's madness; but the Dukes of Burgundy and
Berri set him aside for "his too great youth." There might have been
found some precedent for recognizing Isabeau as regent; but there is no
evidence that she ever made any serious efforts to establish her claim;
for she was content with that which the Duke of Burgundy was quite
willing to allow her, viz., the squandering of money--not his money--in
her pleasures. Isabeau was nominally associated in the council that
exercised the powers of regency, but she was really under the control of
the Duchess of Burgundy, whom the chroniclers call "a haughty and cruel
woman."

With such care as the doctors of the period were likely to give him,
there was not much hope of the permanent restoration of the king's
reason. One learned physician, however, did have the correct idea as to
the cause of Charles's malady and prescribed a moderate diet and a quiet
life for him. Under this wise treatment Charles soon recovered as much
reason as he had ever had; but the regimen imposed by the physician's
orders was as distasteful to the king as it was to Isabeau. The queen,
under pretext of furnishing diversions for him, began again the wild
life of debauchery which had been the prime cause of Charles's insanity.
It was at one of these festivals that occurred the famous "dance of
savages" that so nearly deprived France of her mad king.

The chronicler of Saint-Denis says that "it was an evil custom of the
time in many parts of France to indulge unreproved in all sorts of
indecent follies at the marriage of a widow, and to assume with their
extravagant masks and disguises the liberty of making all sorts of
obscene remarks to the bride and bridegroom." It was at a sort of
charivari held one night (January 29, 1393) in celebration of the
marriage of one of Isabeau's German waiting women, a widow, that Hugues
de Guisay, one of those panders to the follies of the rich and
extravagant who plan their "amusements" for them, undertook to divert
the mad king, the queen, and the whole court. He devised "six coats made
of linen cloth covered with pitch and thereon flax like hair." Charles
put on one of these, and he and his five satyr-like companions, much
delighted with their resemblance to things of horrid form, pranced in
among the other revellers. The five were linked together by a ch