ve, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans.
He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle
friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and
pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That
child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge
Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say
that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string
harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one
harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at
last the whole body of sound was harping only.

His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy,
still living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the
most sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his
Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till
(years after his death) the soldiers roared through Briancon and broke
the crusted snow of Mont Genevre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful
of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her
half million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of
France's brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of
magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave.
Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more
unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times, ran
in him nobly.

Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the
fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs
of slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining
bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some
cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and
always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight, now
intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild adventure
out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.

Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they
loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have
made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest
subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and
almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters with
hard enamelled colours against skies of gold