the constable not only did not succeed, but advised him to make peace with the duke of Brittany and his party. Du Guesclin, grievously hurt, sent to the king his sword of constable, adding that he was about to withdraw to the court of Castile, to Henry of.Transtamare, who would show more appreciation of his services. All Charles V.'s wisdom did not preserve him from one of those deeds of haughty levity which the handling of sovereign power sometimes causes even the wisest kings to commit, but reflection made him promptly acknowledge and retrieve his fault. He charged the dukes of Anjou and Bourbon to go and, for his sake, conjure Du Guesclin to remain his constable; and, though some chroniclers declare that Du Guesclin refused, his will, dated the 9th of July, 1380, leads to a contrary belief, for in it he assumes the title of constable of France, and this will preceded the hero's death only by four days. Having fallen sick before Châteauneuf-Randon, a place he was besieging in the Gévaudan, Du Guesclin expired on the 13th of July, 1380, at sixty-six years of age, and his last words were an exhortation to the veteran captains around him " never to forget that, in whatsoever country they might be making war, churchmen, women, children, and the poor people were not their enemies." According to certain contemporary chronicles, or, one might almost say, legends, Châteauneuf-Randon was to be given up the day after Du Guesclin died. The marshal de Sancerre, who commanded the king's army, summoned the governor to surrender the place to him; but the governor replied that he had given his word to Du Guesclin, and would surrender to no other. He was told of the constable's death: " Very well," he rejoined, "I will carry the keys of the town to his tomb." To this the marshal agreed; the governor marched out of the place at the head of his garrison, passed through the besieging army, went and knelt down before Du Guesclin's corpse, and actually laid the keys of Châteauneuf-Randon on his bier. This dramatic story is not sufficiently supported by authentic documents to be admitted as an historical fact; but there is to be found in an old chronicle concerning Du Guesclin [published for the first time at the end of the fifteenth century, and in a new edition by M. Francisque Michel in 1830] a story which, in spite of many discrepancies, confirms the principal fact of the keys of Châteauneuf-Randon being brought by the garrison to the bier. "At the decease of Sir Bertrand," says the chronicler, "a great cry arose throughout the host of the French. The English refused to give up the castle. The marshal, Louis de Sancerre, had the hostages brought to the ditches, for to have their heads struck off. But forthwith the people in the castle lowered their bridge, and the captain came and offered the keys to the marshal, who refused them, and said to him, 'Friends,, you have your agreements with sir Bertrand, and ye shall fulfil them to him.' 'God the Lord!' said the captain, 'you know well that sir Bertrand, who was so much worth, is dead: how, then, should we surrender to him this castle? Verily, lord marshal, you do demand our dishonor when you would have us and our castle surrendered to a dead knight.' 'Needs no parley here upon,' said the marshal, 'but do it at once, for, if you put forth more words, short will be the life of your hostages.' Well did the English see that it could not be otherwise; so they went forth all of them from the castle, their captain in front of them, and came to the marshal, who led them to the hostel where lay sir Bertrand, and made them give up the keys and place them on his bier, sobbing the while: 'Let all know that there was there nor knight nor squire, French or English, who showed not great mourning.'" The body of Du Guesclin was carried to Paris to be interred at St. Denis, hard by the tomb which Charles V. had ordered to be made for himself; and nine years afterwards, in 1389, Charles V.'s successor, his son Charles VI., caused to be celebrated in the Breton warrior's honor a fresh funeral, at which the princes and grandees of the kingdom, and the young king himself, were present in state. The bishop of Auxerre delivered the funeral oration over the constable; and a poet of the time, giving an account of the ceremony, says,— "The tears of princes fell, The life, character, and name of Bertrand du Guesclin were and remained one of the most popular, patriotic, and legitimate boasts of the middle ages, then at their decline. Two months after the constable's death, on the 16th of September, 1380, Charles V. died at the castle of Beauté-sur-Marne, near Vincennes, at forty-three years of age, quite young still after so stormy and hard-working a life. His contemporaries were convinced, and he was himself convinced, that he had been poisoned by his perfidious enemy, King Charles of Navarre. His uncle, Charles IV., emperor of Germany, had sent him an able doctor, who "set him in good case and in manly strength," says Froissart, by effecting a permanent issue in his arm. "When this little sore," said he to him, "shall cease to discharge and shall dry up, you will die without help for it, and you will have at the most fifteen days' leisure to take counsel and thought for the soul." When the issue began to dry up, Charles knew that death was at hand; and " like a wise and valiant man as he was," says Froissart, "he set in order all his affairs, and sent for his three brothers, in whom he had most confidence, the duke of Berry, the duke of Burgundy, and the duke of Bourbon, and he left' in the lurch his second brother, the duke of Anjou, because he considered him too covetous. My dear brothers,' said the king to them, 'I feel and know full well that I have not long to live. I do commend and give in charge to you my son Charles. Behave to him as good uncles should behave to their nephew. Crown him as soon as possible after my death, and counsel him loyally in all his affairs. The lad is young, and of a volatile spirit; he will need to be guided and governed by good doctrine; teach him or have him taught all the kingly points and states he will have to maintain, and marry him in such lofty station that the kingdom may be the better for it. Thank God, the affairs of our kingdom are in good case. The duke of Brittany [John IV., called the Valiant] is a crafty and a slippery man, and he hath ever been more English than French; for which reason keep the nobles of Brittany and the good towns affectionate, and you will thus thwart his intentions. I am fond of the Bretons, for they have ever served me loyally, and helped to keep and defend my kingdom against my enemies. Make the lord Clisson constable, for, all considered, I see none more competent for it than he. As to those aids and taxes of the kingdom of France, wherewith the poorer folks are so burthened and aggrieved, deal with them according to your conscience, and take them off as soon as ever you can, for they are things which, although I have upheld them, do grieve me and weigh upon my heart; but the great wars and great matters which we have had on all sides caused me to countenance them." Of all the dying speeches and confessions of kings to their family and their councillors, that which has just been put forward is the most practical, precise, and simple. Charles V., taking upon his shoulders at nineteen years of age, first as king's lieutenant and as dauphin and afterwards as regent, the government of France, employed all his soul and his life in repairing the disasters arising from the wars of his predecessors and preventing any repetition. No sovereign was ever more resolutely pacific; he carried prudence even into the very practice of war, as was proved by his forbidding his generals to venture any general engagement with the English, so great a lesson and so deep an impression had he derived from the defeats of Crécy and Poitiers, and the causes which led to them. But without being a warrior, and without running any hazardous risks, he made himself respected and feared by his enemies. "Never was there king," said Edward III., "who handled arms less, and never was there king who gave me so much to do." When the condition of the kingdom was at the best, and more favorable circumstances led Charles to believe that the day had come for setting France free from the cruel conditions which had been imposed upon her by the treaty of Brétigny, he entered without hesitation upon that war of patriotic reparation; and, after the death of his two powerful enemies, Edward III. and the Black Prince, he was still prosecuting it, not without chance of success, when he himself died of the malady with which he had for a long while been afflicted. At his death he left in the royal treasury a surplus of seventeen million francs, a large sum for those days. Nor the labors of government, nor the expenses of war, nor farsighted economy had prevented him from showing a serious interest in learned works and studies, and from giving effectual protection to the men who devoted themselves thereto. The University of Paris, notwithstanding the embarrassments it sometimes caused him, was always the object of his good-will. "He was a great lover of wisdom," says Christine de Pisan, "and when certain folks murmured for that he honored clerks so highly, he answered, 'So long as wisdom is honored in this realm, it will continue in prosperity; but when wisdom is thrust aside, it will go down.' He collected nine hundred and fifty volumes (the first foundation of the Royal Library), which were deposited in a tower of the Louvre, called the library tower, and of which he, in 1373, had an inventory drawn up by his personal attendant, Gilles de Presle. His taste for literature and science was not confined to collecting manuscripts. He had a French translation made, for the sake of spreading a knowledge thereof, of the Bible in the first place, and then of several works of Aristotle, of Livy, of Valerius Maximus, of Vegetius, and of St. Augustine. He was fond of industry and the arts as well as of literature. Henry de Vic, a German clockmaker, constructed for him the first public clock ever seen in France, and it was placed in what was called the Clock Tower in the Palace of Justice; and the king even had a clockmaker by appointment, named Peter de St. Béathe. Several of the Paris monuments, churches, or buildings for public use were undertaken or completed under his care. He began the building of the Bastille, that fortress which was then so necessary for the safety of Paris, where it was to be, four centuries later, the object of the wrath and earliest excesses on the part of the populace. Charles the Wise, from whatever point of view he may be regarded, is, after Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip the Handsome, the fifth of those kings who powerfully contributed to the settlement of France in Europe, and of the kingship in France. He was not the greatest nor the best, but, perhaps, the most honestly able. And at the same time he was a signal example of the shallowness and insufficiency of human abilities. Charles V., on his death-bed, considered that "the affairs of his kingdom were in good case;" he had not even a suspicion of that chaos of war, anarchy, reverses and ruin into which they were about to fall, in the reign of his son, Charles VI. CHAPTER XXIII. THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR-CHARLES VI. AND THE DUKES OF BURGUNDY. SULLY, in his Memoirs, characterizes the reign of Charles VI. as "that reign so pregnant of sinister events, the grave of good laws and good morals in France." There is no exaggeration in these words; the sixteenth century with its St. Bartholomew and The League, the eighteenth with its reign of terror, and the nineteenth with its Commune of Paris contain scarcely any events so sinister as those of which France was, in the reign of Charles VI., from 1380 to 1422, the theatre and the victim, |