ion presaging, but presaging only to heedless revellers, the
great tidal wave that was to envelop and bear down the just and the
unjust alike some four hundred years later. The butchers and bakers and
honest workingmen, led chiefly by a surgeon, Jean de Troyes, came by
thousands to reform the morals of the dauphin. This miserable debauchee,
as well as the rest of the court, trembled before them, and willingly
conceded anything that could be asked. Even the poor mad king, whom the
people loved and did not blame, had the white hood, emblem of the
commune, placed upon his head, and smiled pitifully at his rough but
well-meaning subjects. Forthwith, Isabeau equipped her head with a white
hood, and so did all the court, the judges, and even the learned doctors
of the University. But Isabeau's white hood was not wide enough to cover
the scandalous horns of her headdress. Rising to the point of fury upon
hearing that the dauphin, probably at the instigation of his mother, had
been in communication with the Orleanist forces to induce them to march
upon Paris, the Cabochiens, as the communists called themselves, in May,
1413, invaded the palace itself and arrested Louis de Baviere, the
queen's brother, and as many as fifteen of the ladies of her suite
probably such as had made themselves peculiarly conspicuous and
offensive by the extravagance and the indecency of their costumes.
Isabeau wept, and pleaded vainly for a respite for her brother, then on
the eve of his marriage; the stern moralists from the markets of Paris
were inexorable and Louis went to jail unmarried, while Isabeau went to
bed sick with childish fury.

For a moment turning our attention from the queen, let us advert to the
political conditions in France. From the time of the assassination of
Louis d' Orleans there had been civil war, with rare and brief intervals
of peace, between the partisans of Burgundy and those of Orleans, now
led by Bernard d'Armagnac, whose daughter Charles d'Orleans had married
after the early death of his first wife, Isabelle de France. While civil
war in itself would have caused misery and ruin enough, its horrors were
enhanced by the crafty policy of Henry IV. of England, who, when he was
not able to intervene in person, responded to the solicitations of first
one party and then the other, and thus caused Armagnacs and Bourguignons
to exhaust themselves in fruitless strife. It was the craft of Henry IV.
and the folly of France that pr