A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [286]
Deschamps is a scold but not an advocate of fundamental change or infusion of new blood into the nobility. He is bourgeois in sympathy, deplores injustice to the peasant, and writes ballads in praise of rural Robin and Margot for their love of France, but he denounces peasants who attempt to become squires and remove themselves from labor on the land. “Such rogues should be brought to justice and made to keep their class.”
All of society is found corrupt in Mézières’ Dream of the Old Pilgrim. Like Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, it is an allegorical guidebook to the troubles of the age and, in addition, a plea for “reformation of all the world, all Christianity and especially the Kingdom of France.” The pilgrim Ardent Desire and his sister Good Hope journey through the world to test the fitness of mankind for the return of the Queen of Truth and her attendants Peace, Mercy, and Justice, long absent from the earth. Mézières’ message was urgent, his sense of wrongdoing profound, his prognosis somber.
As if in response, Charles VI at age twenty dismissed his uncles and assumed full sovereignty himself immediately upon returning from Guelders in 1388. The Cardinal of Laon, ranking prelate, proposed the motion at a meeting of the Council. A few days later he fell ill and died, “delivered from the fury and hate of the uncles of the King,” and widely believed to have been poisoned by them.
Clisson later boasted to an English envoy that it was he who had made Charles VI “king and lord of his realm and put the government out of the hands of his uncles.” Apart from Clisson’s personal enmity, Coucy and others in the Council at the time were anxious to lift from the crown and themselves the further burden of the Dukes’ unpopularity. The person most closely concerned, however, was the King’s younger, cleverer, more dynamic brother and, for the time being, heir apparent, Louis, Duc de Touraine, soon to be known by his more familiar title, Duc d’Orléans.
Beginning in 1389, Louis of Orléans replaced the Duke of Burgundy in the Royal Council and for the rest of his brief, eventful life, already nearly half over, was to play a major role in French affairs, with a particular link to Coucy. A handsome pleasure-seeker and “devoted servant of Venus” who enjoyed the company of “dancers, flatterers, and people of loose life,” he was also devoutly religious and used to retreat for two or three days at a time to the Celestine monastery, whose quarters in Paris (on the present Quai des Célestins) had been established by his father in 1363. A penitential order favored too by Philippe de Mézières, who had been the royal princes’ tutor, the Celestins observed extreme rules of abstinence designed to promote concentration on eternity and disappearance of the body. Louis was much influenced by Mézières, whom he named his executor. He had evidently learned more from him than had his brother, for he was said to be the only member of the royal family who could understand diplomatic Latin. Something of a scholar for one of his station, he was also a compulsive gambler at chess and tennis as well as dice and cards. He played with his butler, his cup-bearer, and his carver, and at tennis with fellow nobles lost sums up to 2,000 gold francs.
Louis was as rapacious and ambitious for power as the uncles whom he ousted to make way for his ambition. The feud he thereby started was to end nineteen years later in his murder by his cousin Jean, son and successor of the Duke of Burgundy, tear France and Burgundy apart, and re-open the way to the English. Toward the end of his life he adopted a device of strange significance, the camal, a clerical hood or knight’s mantle, which was said at the time to represent Ca-mal or Combien de mal, meaning how much evil is done in these days. Born to the century’s last generation, Louis, for all his indulgences in pleasure, saw his world somberly. A verse of the time describes him as