odd
commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three
vellum skins to bind the duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed
to prepare parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was
who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles's own
poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan,
with the text in one column, and Astesan's Latin version in the
other.[57]

Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of
many others. We find in Charles's verse much semi-ironical regret for
other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been
"nourished in the schools of love" now sees nothing either to please or
displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means
to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life. He
had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant
little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone
with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond
the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his animal strength
has so much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of
the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life,
he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from
grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing,
talking, and singing.[58]

While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of
which he was the outcome and ornament, was growing old along with him.
The semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the
past; and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king
reigned in France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI.
had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were
inconceivable, to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able
enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous
spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable
phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend
Rene's in Provence, would soon be made impossible: interference was the
order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what
was to go next? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily
in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South
Sea Islands and lay strange embarg