epared the way for Agincourt, that
crushing victory of the great Henry V., who in the presence of the
overwhelming French army proclaimed, in Shakespeare's paraphrase of his
words:

"We are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more!"

The event justified King Harry's boastful confidence: the chivalry of
France found itself discredited, dead, or in captivity. And yet, even in
the hour of France's distress, the indolent Isabeau could hardly be
prevailed upon to take any action in behalf of her son, the dauphin,
Louis de Guienne who, in fact, lived but a little over two months after
Agincourt, and was succeeded by Jean de Touraine. In two years more
(1417) Jean de Touraine was dead, poisoned, it was said, by Bernard
d'Armagnac; the new dauphin, Charles, was a boy of but fourteen years.

This Charles, one of the most uncomfortably cold and contemptible
personages in history, had been reared by the queen and the Armagnac
party with sentiments of the bitterest hatred against the Burgundians.
Determined to win complete control of Charles, Bernard d'Armagnac sought
to discredit Isabeau with her son and with the king. There was no
difficulty in finding pretexts, for the sober-minded Juvenal des Ursins
tells us that in the chateau of Vincennes, whither Isabeau had retired
to revel more at ease, "many shameful things were done" by the queen and
her troop of rakes and gaudily dressed ladies; but indecency in dress
was not the only scandal that Bernard revealed to the king, who was at
the time in better mental condition than for years.

As he rode back from the chateau one evening the king met Loys de
Boisbourdon, whom he knew to be one of Isabeau's associates. Suddenly
suspicious and resolved to know the whole truth, Charles had him
arrested and put to the question (_i.e._, tortured). Such horrors were
revealed by this unlucky sharer of the queen's pleasures that Charles
deemed them not fit for further circulation, and accordingly Loys de
Boisbourdon carried his secrets with him into a sack, which was
inscribed: _Laissez passer la justice du roi_, "Make way for the justice
of the king," and the waters of the Seine covered the sack and the
sinner. The mad king's justice, of which we read with a certain joyful
sympathy, was not ended, for he sent the queen and the duchess of