ss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we find Charles singing of
the "pleasant wind that comes from France."[30] One day, at
"Dover-on-the-Sea," he looked across the straits, and saw the sandhills
about Calais. And it happened to him, he tells us in a ballade, to
remember his happiness over there in the past; and he was both sad and
merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of gazing on the
shores of France.[31] Although guilty of unpatriotic acts, he had never
been exactly unpatriotic in feeling. But his sojourn in England gave,
for the time at least, some consistency to what had been a very weak and
ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the influence of more
than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded to turn Henry's
puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and reproach France,
and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony, idleness, unbridled
covetousness, and sensuality.[32] For the moment, he must really have
been thinking more of France than of Charles of Orleans.

And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be released in case of
peace begins to think upon the disadvantages of war. "Pray for peace,"
is his refrain: a strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard
d'Armagnac.[33] But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one side
in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and he did not
hesitate to explain it in so many words. "Everybody," he writes--I
translate roughly--"everybody should be much inclined to peace, for
everybody has a deal to gain by it."[34]

Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity.[35] He was
for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received fourteen
shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses; and from the fact that
Suffolk afterwards visited Charles in France while he was negotiating
the marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman's
impeachment, we may believe there was some not unkindly intercourse
between the prisoner and his jailer: a fact of considerable interest
when we remember that Suffolk's wife was the grand-daughter of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer.[36] Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates and
places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles's
captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew
on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against