had been greatly aggravated by all the tragic circumstances of his
reign, including the terrible _bal des ardents_, in which he had been
saved from being burned to death, with several other maskers disguised
as satyrs, by the coolness and courage of the Duchesse de Berry. The
queen, Isabeau, was openly dissolute; on one occasion, the king,
returning from visiting her at Vincennes, encountered her lover, the
chevalier Louis de Bois-Bourdon, had him arrested on the spot, put to
the question, sewed up in a sack, and thrown in the river. Probably with
a view to her own security, she had placed in the king's bed-chamber "a
fair young Burgundian," Odette de Champdivers, and it was this
demoiselle who, in his periods of frenzy, was alone able to soothe and
persuade him. It is related that they played cards together in his saner
moments, this amusement having recently been brought into fashion again.
Even the powers of magic were tried in vain to effect his cure.

[Illustration: FEMME-DE-LA-COUR AND FOUNDLING; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. From
a water-color by Maurice Leloir.]

Nevertheless, few monarchs seem to have been so sincerely mourned.
"All the people who were in the streets and at the windows wept and
cried as if each one had seen the death of the one he loved the best.
'_Ah! tres cher prince_, never shall we have another so good! Never
shall we see thee again! Cursed be Death! We shall have no longer
anything but war, since thou hast left us. Thou goest to repose, we
remain in tribulations and sorrow.'"

Queen Isabeau, in addition to disinheriting her son in favor of her
daughter, was held responsible by her contemporaries for setting the
fashion in wasteful and absurd extravagance in dress. The ladies wore
the _houppelande_, the _cotte hardie_, tight around the girdle, and
looped up their sleeves _excessivement_ to show this _cotte hardie_;
they also had openings in the surcoat to show the girdle. These openings
the preachers called "windows of hell." "They made their stomachs
prominent, and seemed, all of them, _enceinte_: this mode they clung to
for forty years." "The more the misery increased, the more the luxury
augmented; at the Hotel de Boheme, inhabited by Louis d'Orleans, there
were chambers hung with cloth of gold _a roses_, embroidered with
_velours vermeil_, of _satin vermeil_ embroidered with arbalists, of
cloth of gold embroidered with mills.... And, during this time, the
grass grew in the streets, say the his