was during
the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing
the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain
natural son of her husband's, destined to become famous in the sequel as
the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. "_You were stolen from
me_," she said; "it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are
not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a
saying over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That the
child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her body
was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression of
this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance,
in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear
only on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history--where
we see things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is
brought before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced, fitted to very
vague and pompous words, and strained through many men's minds of
everything personal or precise--this speech of the widowed duchess
startles a reader, somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A
human voice breaks in upon the silence of the study, and the student is
aware of a fellow-creature in his world of documents. With such a clue
in hand, one may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and
exasperate the resentment of her children, and what would be the last
words of counsel and command she left behind her.

With these instancies of his dying mother--almost a voice from the
tomb--still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of
Orleans, when he was left at the head of that great house, was curiously
similar to that of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The times were out of joint;
here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer; and here,
in both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters
right. Valentina's commendation of Dunois involved a judgment on
Charles, and that judgment was exactly correct. Whoever might be,
Charles was not the man to avenge his father. Like Hamlet, this son of a
dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart. Like Hamlet, too,
he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter
to the King, complaining that what was denied to him would not be denied
"to the lowest born and poorest man on earth." Even in his private
hours he strove to preserv