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By Root 1612 0

knighting of twelve-year-old Louis II of Anjou and his younger brother aged ten. In the ceremony’s four days of all-too secular festivities staged in the royal Abbey of St. Denis, 14th century France relived the decadence of Rome, and indeed the knighting of little boys was not so far removed from the emperor who made a Consul of his horse. The surpassing pomp of the occasion and the selection of St. Denis as the site were intended to promote enthusiasm for the Angevin recovery of the Kingdom of Naples. Radical alterations were made in the abbey’s precincts to accommodate tournaments, dances, and banquets. Religious services gave way to the hammering of carpenters and the coming and going of laborers and their materials. At the ceremony, after ritual baths and prayers, the two princelings, robed in floor-length furred mantles of double red silk, were escorted to the altar by squires holding naked swords by their points with golden spurs hanging from the hilts. In his enthusiasm for chivalric forms, Charles VI resurrected antique rituals which had fallen into disuse in his father’s time and were already so faded that spectators “thought it all strange and extraordinary” and inquired what the rites signified.

The same nostalgia was enacted in the next day’s tournament, when knights in polished armor were conducted to the lists by noble ladies “to imitate the gallantry of ancient worthies.” Each of the ladies in turn drew from her bosom a ribbon of colored silk to bestow graciously upon her knight. After each day’s jousts and tourneys, the celebrants “turned night into day” with dances, masquerades, feasting, drunkenness, and, according to the indignant Monk of St. Denis, “libertinage and adultery.” Knighthood, represented by the two half-forgotten little principals, was not noticeably enhanced.

Government expenditure continued to mount through the year 1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles’, although its purpose was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of the new government, the performance was in itself a form of government in the same sense as a Roman circus. What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite.

Some of the Queen’s thunder was stolen by Valentina Visconti, the new wife of Louis d’Orléans, who arrived just in time for the occasion. Since her marriage by proxy to Louis in 1387, the two intervening years had been required by her father, Gian Galeazzo, to amass her unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, plus Asti and other territories of Piedmont. Valentina was his only remaining child, to whom he was so attached that he left Pavia rather than be present at her departure, “and this was because he could not take leave of her without bursting into tears.” As the daughter of his dead wife, Isabelle of France—and thus Louis of Orléans’ first cousin—Valentina had grown up in a household which her father had made “a harbor for the famous, for men skilled in all learning and art whom he held in high honor.” She spoke Latin, French, and German fluently, and brought her own books and harp with her to France. Thirteen hundred knights escorted her across the Alps, her trousseau may be extrapolated from a robe embroidered with 2,500 pearls and sprinkled with diamonds, her future household with Louis was carpeted in Aragon leather and hung with vermilion velvet embroidered with roses and crossbows. The household accounts show silk sheets costing 400 francs as New Year’s gifts, but all the luxuries could not keep melancholy from pervading the marriage.

On the great day of the Queen’s entry, the procession advanced along the Rue St. Denis, the main boulevard leading to the Châtelet and to the Grand Pont over the Seine.