brought him away. The king made a show of being satisfied with the
treaty, and on the 2d of November, 1468, the day but one after the
capture of Liege, set out for France. The duke bore him company to
within half a league of the city. As they were taking leave of one
another, the king said to him, "If, peradventure, my brother Charles, who
is in Brittany, should be discontented with the assignment I make him for
love of you, what would you have me do?" "If he do not please to take
it," answered the duke, "but would have you satisfy him, I leave it to
you two." Louis desired no more: he returned home free and confident in
himself, "after having passed the most trying three weeks of his life."

But Louis XI.'s deliverance after his quasi-captivity at Peronne, and the
new treaty he had concluded with Duke Charles, were and could be only a
temporary break in the struggle between these two princes, destined as
they were, both by character and position, to irremediable
incompatibility. They were too powerful and too different to live at
peace when they were such close neighbors, and when their relations were
so complicated. We find in the chronicle of George Chastelain, a Flemish
burgher, and a servant on familiar terms with Duke Charles, as he had
been with his father, Duke Philip, a judicious picture of this
incompatibility and the causes of it. "There had been," he says, "at all
times a rancor between these two princes, and, whatever pacification
might have been effected to-day, everything returned to-morrow to the old
condition, and no real love could be established. They suffered from
incompatibility of temperament and perpetual discordance of will; and the
more they advanced in years the deeper they plunged into a state of
serious difference and hopeless bitterness. The king was a man of
subtlety and full of fence; he knew how to recoil for a better spring,
how to affect humility and gentleness in his deep designs, how to yield
and to give up in order to receive double, and how to bear and tolerate
for a time his own grievances in hopes of being able at last to have his
revenge. He was, therefore, very much to be feared for his practical
knowledge, showing the greatest skill and penetration in the world. Duke
Charles was to be feared for his great courage, which he evinced and
displayed in his actions, making no account of king or emperor. Thus,
whilst the king had great sense and great ability, which he used