A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [334]
In later years the King’s seizures came and went unpredictably. In one year, 1399, he suffered six attacks, each more serious than the last until he was cowering in a corner believing himself made of glass or roaming the corridors howling like a wolf. In his intervals of sanity Charles wished to resume the function of kingship, though it had to be in mainly ceremonial capacity. At these times he is said to have resumed marital relations with Isabeau, who gave birth to four more children between 1395 and 1401—in itself no proof of paternity.
Frivolous and sensuous, still an alien with a thick German accent, humiliated by her husband’s mad aversion, Isabeau abandoned Charles to his valets and to a girl she supplied to fill her place, a horse-dealer’s daughter named Odette de Champdivers, who resembled her and was called by the public “the little Queen.” The Queen herself turned to frantic pleasures and to adultery combined with political intrigue and a passionate pursuit of money. Insecure in France, she devoted herself to amassing a personal fortune and promoting the enrichment and interests of her Bavarian family. She extracted from Charles, lucid or not, assignments in her own and her children’s names of land, revenues, residences, and separate household accounts. She acquired coffers of treasure and jewels which she stored in a variety of vaults. Her sway at court grew ever more extravagant and hectic, the ladies’ dresses more low-necked, the amours more scandalous, the festivities more extreme. The Queen established a Court of Love at which both sexes took the parts of advocates and judges and discussed, according to a scornful contemporary, “in this ridiculous tribunal the most ridiculous questions.”
Court life can produce ennui and disgust even in a Queen. In nostalgia for the bucolic, 400 years before Marie Antoinette, Isabeau built a Hotel des Bergères (House of the Shepherds) at her property of St. Ouen, complete with gardens and fields, barn, stable, sheepfold, and dovecote, where she played at farming and took care of chickens and livestock. The King, as time went on, was rumored to be neglected to the point of penury, living unclean and even hungry in apartments where the paper windowpanes were torn and pigeons entered to leave their droppings. During one return of sanity he arrested the Queen’s chamberlain and current paramour, had him imprisoned in chains, questioned under torture, and afterward secretly drowned in the Seine.
In the political struggle Isabeau attached herself where power lay. When Louis d’Orléans was named Regent, she joined him against Burgundy and was generally supposed to have become his mistress. When he was assassinated by Burgundy’s son and successor, John the Fearless, she changed sides and moved into the camp and bed of Louis’ murderer. In the vacuum created by a living but helpless King, France floundered, and the Queen, lacking any capacity to cope, became the tool of the ruthless forces—Burgundy and England—which moved into the vacuum. Hard-pressed in Paris, separated geographically and politically from the Dauphin, unable to mobilize support, she finally agreed to the infamous treaty which named the King of England heir to the throne of France in place of her own son. In the end, obese and depraved, she outlived her husband by fifteen years and was eventually to find an all too imaginative biographer in the Marquis de Sade.
Looking back from a perspective of some 200 years, the Duc de Sully, Henri IV’s chief minister, characterized the reign of Charles VI as “pregnant with sinister events … the grave of good laws and good morals in France.”
Chapter 25
Lost Opportunity
While the peace parley was meeting at Leulinghen in May-June 1393, Coucy was conferring with Pope Clement in Avignon, where he had gone after settling