in gold. Behind her, in painted cars, went the great ladies of the court. Only the Duchess of Touraine had no litter; Valentine rode on a fair palfrey, marvellously caparisoned; she went on one side of the queen's litter among the royal dukes. The people of Paris, says Froissart, were as anxious to see the new duchess as the queen, whom indeed they had often seen. For Madame Valentine was immensely rich, the daughter of a great conqueror, and she had only just come out of Lombardy, a mysterious country where wonderful things came to pass. What impression did Valentine make on the people of Paris, pressing and craving to see the foreign duchess?

with him, this subtle Lombard, in the | of silk sewn over with French lilies worked tenuous and fanciful dissertations that he loved. Queen Isabel could not endure to see this stranger, by reason of her splendor and her novelty, become the centre of attraction. The marriage festival was scarcely over when Isabel persuaded her husband to ordain a greater festivity for herself. She had been married four years, she was known by sight to every clerk in the Rue St. Denis, yet the king, obedient to her behest, proclaimed the royal entry of the queen into Paris. This Paris that Valentine entered as a stranger was a beautiful city. The streets and bridges had been largely rebuilt by her uncle, Charles the Wise. Between the new Bastille and the river he had raised an immense royal palace, the Hôtel de St. Paul. Close at hand stood the Palais de Tournelles, the great hotel of the king of Sicily, the Hôtel Clisson, and the Hôtel de Bohême, where the Duke of Touraine sometimes lived. A little farther off (in the Rue de Turbigo) the castle of the Duke of Burgundy still rears its out-dated menace. On the left bank of the Seine another group of palaces surrounded Nôtre Dame. At the extremity of the city stood the Louvre. Rebuilt by Charles the Wise, it was endowed by him with a library of nine hundred and ten volumes (chiefly illuminated missals, legends, miracles, and treatises on astrology). There a silver lamp burned always day and night in the service of students, to whom the library was ever open.

Paris was a beautiful city; but it seemed a paradise upon the occasion of the royal entry. The Rue St. Denis was draped from top to bottom in green and crimson silk scattered with stars. Under the gateway angels sang in a starry heaven, and to the sweet sound of instruments little children played a miracle. There were towers and stages raised along the streets, where the legend of Troy and other pleasant matters were enacted. There were fountains also flowing with milk or flowing with claret. Maidens stood beside them in rich chaplets of flowers, and out of golden cups they gave the passers-by to drink, and sang melodiously the while; up and down this magic city went the citizens' wives and daughters in long robes of gold and purple. The citizens themselves were clad in green, the royal officers in rosecolor. But all these splendors paled and dwindled when the royal procession came in sight. In the middle, in an open litter, sat the queen, the beautiful, smiling idol of the feast; she was dressed in a gown

|

Which of her gala dresses did she wear? The scarlet one sewn thick with pearls and diamonds, with a cap of pearls and scarlet for her dusky hair? Or the robe of gold brocade with sleeves and headdress of woven pearls? Or a flashing crown of balasses and sapphires, and a dress of scarlet sewn with jewels and embroidered with pale-blue borage flowers? In any of these this splendid Italian stranger must have appeared to the burghers of Paris as a vision of southern luxury, of mysterious outlandish enchantment. least it is certain that never after they looked upon her as a mere mortal woman. Just at that season every one was reading the "Mélusine" of Maître Jean d'Arras. Valentine of Milan with her fairy splendors, her subtle wisdom, her Lombard traditions - Valentine, with the Visconti snake on her escutcheon, must have seemed to these Parisians much such another mysterious serpent-woman, another Mélusine.

At

For the Italian character, never fanatic and yet so prone to spiritual passions; seldom bestial, yet so guilty of unnatural vices-Italy has ever been a mystery, a hateful enigma to the practical French; and of all Italians the Lombards, the border people, are most unlike their Gallic neighbors. A century later, when the French poured into Italy, no blazing mountain of Vesuvius, no wonderful Venetian city swimming in the seas, no antique and glorious ruins of Rome, so much astonished the foreign soldiers as the learned and subtle ladies of Lombardy. Those later chroniclers who have been in Italy relate with wonder their fables of ecstatic virgins, and gifted women wiser than their sex; they have seen one Anna, a woman forty years of age, who never eats, drinks, or sleeps, and who bears on her body the mystical wounds of Christ, breaking out

Thus, after all, Queen Isabel played but the second part in the pageant of her entry. Soon, however, she learned to spare her jealousy of the Italian -a jealousy which on that holiday kept her sick in her chamber, while Valentine danced with Touraine and the king in the royal ball below. But Valentine was no rival of the beautiful, bright little queen; she was a strong, ambitious, and devoted woman, never vain and never timid. From the first she lavished on her boyish husband that passionate devotion of an elder woman which asks no return from the radiant young creature she adores. She did not grudge Louis the love of Isabel; but the strangest thing happened; Valentine united with her rival to push the fortunes of Touraine. These two women were ever together, ever scheming, and planning the welfare of the criminal lover of the one, the unfaithful husband of the other. An unnatural league ; but it served to make Touraine strong.

and bleeding afresh on every Friday. In | And Giangaleazzo, who, as Corio relates, Milan, a demoiselle Trivulce, "de son had been nearly poisoned by Antonio della grant jeune aage," wrote letters in Latin Scala, disposed of that enemy by the selfand was eloquent in oratory; "elle estoit same means. The Florentines* said he aussi poeticque" (adds the author of "La paid his official poisoner a hundred florins Mer des Chroniques ") "et sçavoit moult monthly. These were the traditions of the bien disputer avecques clercs et docteurs." new duchess. And also she was virtuous, so that her holy life seemed a thing to marvel on. At Venice, Maître Nicole Gilles encountered a certain virgin Cassandra, the daughter of Angelo Fideli, a maiden expert in the seven liberal arts and in theology, all of which matters she expounded in public lectures. At Quiers, near Asti, a daughter of Maître Jehan Solier, "jeune pucelle," received the king with a public and most eloquent oration. Learned and subtle and virtuous as these Lombard ladies were, enthusiastic and spiritual as were many of their countrymen, yet this strange Italy, where the women taught the men, where Jesus Christ in Florence was the official head of the republic, inspired a strange dread and horror in the French. Like men in an enchanted country they feared what might lurk behind the shows of things. Above all, the French could never rid themselves of a haunting suspicion of poison-poison and sorcery, underhand and terrible weapons, such as these frank and passionate Gauls associated with the subtlety and wisdom of the people they had conquered. "And yet," says Commines, "I must here speak somewhat in honor of the Italian nation, because we never found in all this voyage that they did seek to do us harm by poison, and yet, if they had chosen, we could hardly have avoided it."

This attitude of suspicion towards Italy, of reluctant admiration, characterized the French of 1494. It is quite as significant of the French to-day; and in 1387 the same distrust was there, but sharper, more anxious, and the same wonder, but intensified. Valentine, the Italian, seemed to these alert, honest, practical Parisians a marvel of strangeness and wisdom; but these attributes suggested to them chiefly a fatal potency for evil.

For Valentine and Isabel alike had the ear of the king. Charles VI., a little 'slow, a little dull, neglected in his court, betrayed by his wife for his more brilliant brother this gentle, kindly, unimportant creature was irresistibly drawn to his sister-in-law. "My dear sister, my beloved sister," the words were ever on his lips. Valentine, like him, was set aside; like him she suffered. She, too, was patient and gentle; but she was strong, she was prudent. A great heavy lad, over-boyish for his years, loving jests and disguises, hating ceremony, and only very dimly feeling the wrongs that perplexed him, the king of France sought from the sweet and quiet Italian her protection no less than her compassion.

In 1390, at Montpellier, the king could not support his absence from her. "I And in truth there was in Italy a wick- am too far from the queen and Madame edness such as for another hundred years Valentine," he said to his brother. "Let should not penetrate into France. The Italians were a nation of secret poisoners; and the French bourgeois vaguely guessed that this splendid young lady was acquainted with a world terribly different from their ingenuous and turbulent Paris. No need for turbulence in Italy. Valentine's father poisoned the uncle who in his turn had poisoned his own brother.

us ride post haste to Paris." Unaccompanied, and for a wager, they rode all the way, four nights and nearly five days in the saddle. A little later the physicians said that such violent exercise as this hal unsettled the feeble reason of the king.

* Lamansky, Secrets de l'Etat de Venise, pp. 157

159.

On the 5th of August, near the town of Mans, after some hours of riding in armor under a beating sun, the royal party passed the lepers' village. A beggar, a leper, dressed in rags, the outcast of the world, the lowest human thing, came out and accosted the young king of France: "Go no farther, noble king, they betray you!" The king was startled, and though the royal guards interfered they could not at once shake off the loathsome prophet. Clinging to the king's bridle, the leper cried again, "Go no farther, noble king, they betray you!" They betray you! Louis and Isabel, his nearest and dearest, what else did they? The king said nothing.

For some time the king had been ailing | abled. It was necessary to hand over to with a hot fever. He was, says the Monk his uncles for a while the direction of of St. Denis, strange, languishing, and affairs. This made the strongest of them, bewildered. When, in the summer of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, more than ever 1392, the French invaded Brittany, the strong; he was in fact, if not in form, the dukes, his uncles, conjured him to remain regent. Against his rule one voice was at home. But Charles was not to be per- ever raised in protest; the voice of the suaded. He started with them upon the young, ambitious brother of the king. long, fatiguing journey. Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one years of age; through his marriage and the gifts of the king he had become formidably rich; through the weakness of the king he was formidably powerful. He was the nearest to the throne and he desired the regency. But the people suspected Orleans; he had too much to gain by the death or the incapacity of his brother. The people, in their passionate pity for the gentle monarch they adored, began to hate and fear the queen and Orleans. In later days they did not scruple to declare their misgivings, but at first they dared not directly accuse the queen, they would not directly accuse the young, beautiful Louis, their pride from his childhood, eloquent, religious, gay, slow to About an hour afterwards, suddenly, anger. With Juvenal they found him. the king set upon his brother, his spear "beau prince et gratieux; " and like a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag. The more Christine they accounted him, "en ces distant of the royal party thought the king jeunes faiz et en toutes choses trés-avenant had spied a hare or a hart in the forest... . car il aime les bons. . . nul fellonie Then, as the truth dawned, there was a ni cruautè en luy." But he was young; dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men fall- he had been led away (Juvenal finds the ing from their horses, and a fanatic mad- phrase for them) "by the means of those man, who was still a sacred and irresisti-who were near to him. He had ble presence! The king of France was strange youthful follies that I will not defuriously and murderously mad. clare. There were those about him, young people, who induced him to do many things he had better have left undone." This vague and mysterious excuse is the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.

Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death. Orleans (he had just exchanged his duchy of Touraine for Orleans) fortunately was not hurt at all. For four days the king's frenzy lasted, with fits of delirium and lapses into deathlike exhaustion. The most The king mad; the king's brother a cruel part of his sickness was the evident wizard! There was a contagion of horror anguish of his spirit. "Will no one pluck in France. Many nobles and poor peoout of my heart the dagger that my fair ple," writes the Monk of St. Denis, "bebrother of Orleans has planted there?" gan to change and sicken with the same the poor mad youth would cry; and he strange malady that had attacked the would mutter to himself, "I must kill him! king." The fanatic terror of supernatural I must kill him!" It was useless to in- evil spread and deepened. struct the people that there is no reason in Things, at that critical season, fell out the sick hatred of a distempered mind. unfortunately for Orleans. On the 29th Nor would they find sufficient motive in of January, 1393, there was a wedding festhe rumored unfaithfulness of Isabel with tival at the Hôtel de St. Paul for one of Louis. They sought a darker, a more Queen Isabel's German maids of honor. subtle explanation, and their suspicions The bride was a widow, and thrice a were fostered, for political ends, by the widow; therefore a subject for the groenemies of Orleans the faction of his tesque license of the age. At night, in uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. the great hall among the dancers, suddenly For when the king recovered from his there burst in a company of six satyrs frenzy his mind remained weak and dis-dressed in tight linen vests, with flakes of

is the devil!" he said, with great admiration; or, according to another version, "Diabolicum recitas et quod est impossibile-You tell me a diabolic thing, and one that is impossible! The king cannot be well!"

tow fastened with pitch upon their backs. | for news of the king. "He is very well," These hideous merry-makers sprang and replied the Frenchman. Whereupon the danced about the bride, with leaps and Visconti grew pale, and staggered. "He gestures, in a sort of diabolic frenzy. Five of them were chained together, the sixth disported loose. The sixth was the king. Stung by some unlucky madcap prompting, Orleans took a flaming torch from its bearer, and held it close to the face of one of the maskers to see who he was. A flake of fire from the torch dropped among the tow and pitch. Up and down the hall, dancing a wilder and more terrible saraband, the flaming satyrs went. Two were burned to ashes, two died of their burns in agony, one saved himself by leaping into a water-butt. The king was rescued by the Duchess of Berri, who wrapped him in her mantle. But the danger and the fearful spectacle had upset his tottering reason. The king was mad again.

The people were furious against Orleans. Had Charles been burned, his brother's life must have answered for it; for the people loved the king. The party of Burgundy the popular party did not hesitate to accuse the unfortunate young duke of a fiendish plot to murder his brother. It was in vain that Louis raised a magnificent chapel of marble in the Church of the Celestins, to expiate his involuntary guilt. The people mur mured that the Duke of Orleans went too often to the Celestins. It was said he went there every day. So much devotion was uncanny in so wild a liver.

Now, it was generally known in Italy that the Duke of Milan, like every other successful prince or State, was a secret poisoner. But in France a more terrible and a yet more hateful accusation was rumored against him. The people began to whisper that the Duke of Milan was a wizard.

A. MARY F. ROBINSON.

From Macmillan's Magazine. PERUGIA.

"CURSED is he who removeth his neigh bor's landmark." These are words which many of us no longer care to hear in church; to some of us it seems that these words, and others like them, are not suited to the solemnity, the serenity of that sacred place. They are words which, Mr. Jesse Collings and his friends would tell us, are vain and useless, for no landmarks are left; the greater landlords have moved them all long ago. They are words which, perhaps, when Mr. Chamberlain and his friends have had their will, and we are a pastoral people again, may have once more some reason for their public and solemn utterance. But they are also words which all lovers of old towns and old buildings must often have upon their lips, or at least in their minds, as they see the havoc of restoration, or the ruin of modern improvements aiding the work of time and decay. One age is too fond of destroying the work of another, of removing its landmark; and our own age, if it has been the most restoring, has, possibly, been the most destroying as well. Few places, few buildings, indeed, have escaped restoration, or ruin, or destruction. Perugia has been singularly fortunate in avoiding their worst evils, and it is this good fortune which seems to constitute half its charm. And this most interesting old city is, perhaps, not as well known, as much visited, as it deAbout the same time a malignant rumor serves to be. There are not many places grew in France concerning the father of of its size, even in Italy, which are more Valentine. People said the seigneur of full of art, of beauty, and of associations, Milan had asked the French ambassador | than the capital of Umbria. Nature, too,

Charitable souls like Demoiselle Christine declared in vain, "C'est impossible que son âme et ses mœurs n'en vaillant mieux." Charitable souls are rare. The mass of the people did not hesitate to say that Louis visited the Celestins the better to conspire with a certain monk there an old counsellor of his father's - one Sire Philippe de Mézierès. This person was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, able, and a man of science, according to the age. He was a monk, too, but the crowd doubted of his religion, for it was common rumor that he said there was no truth in sorcery. Let him say it! Sire Philippe de Mézières was none the less no judicious companion for the Duke of Orleans. The sire had lived too long in Lombardy: "a country," as Juvenal describes it, "where they practise magic and the casting of spells.

LIVING AGE.

VOL. LVIII. 2968

Passing through the Arch of Augustus, and following a steep, narrow street, such as I have just described, the explorer will cross the little Piazza Ansidei, and take a small vaulted foot-road; this will lead him to the south side of the Duomo, and if he keeps under its wall to the western door, he will find himself by the statue of Julius the Third. The figure is of bronze, and is on a high pedestal. The pontiff, in cope and tiara, is seated on a throne, with his right hand raised in the act of blessing. The folds of the drapery, as the cope falls from the outstretched arm, are very fine; and the whole pose of the figure is noble and dignified.

aids it as well as history. It stands on down these picturesque vistas of quaint a long ridge of hill, at the foot of which architecture are visible, vignetted often the Tiber flows, yellow and poplar-fringed against a landscape as blue as the backas it sweeps through the Umbrian plain. ground of an early Tuscan painter. All The town still preserves, on the whole, the smaller streets lead, after more or less its medieval look, with some touch, also, winding, to the main thoroughfare, the of its classical descent. The medieval Corso Vannucci, which lies along the walls surround it, and within them the ridge of the hill, and in which are the circuit of the Roman walls can yet be chief buildings, the Duomo and the Mutraced. At the entrance of one steep nicipio. street there is a massive gateway of plain, gigantic masonry (a relic, they say, of Etruscan rule) and on the span of the arch we read Augusta Perusia - a legend which speaks to us of the beginning of the empire. One side of this old town gate supports a loggia of the Renaissance; and by the Roman wall, of which it forms a part, there winds a steep, rough, mediæval footway, half stair, half slope, to some desolate, but more modern, palaces. It is this close mingling of the ages which is the charm, the characteristic of Perugia. Its neighbor, Assisi, is far more mediæval; but though it has a Roman portico above ground, and a forum beneath, it has not much of the Renaissance. Gubbio, a little farther off, is most mediaval in its look, and very full of the Renaissance in its decoration and detail; but its classicism is not mingled with these, it gives no character to the appearance of the town. Assisi is always reminding one of St. Francis, or of Dante and Giotto, and the thirteenth century. Gubbio speaks, too, of that flowering-time of the Middle Ages, and of the dukes of Urbino. But at Perugia it is impossible to forget Etruscans, Romans, mediæval burghers, Baglioni nobles, and the art of the Renaissance; they are all confronting us at every turn. The ages here have, no doubt, destroyed a good deal, but they have had some respect for each other's landmarks - they have left a good deal. An antiquarian_seeker will have that formula of commination, "Cursed is he who removeth his neighbor's landmark," less often on his lips than he is wont to have in historical

The Duomo is on the right. Outside, like so many Italian cathedrals, it is unfinished; but the west entrance is a good specimen of Italian Gothic; and the north side, with its exterior pulpit (said to have been used by St. Bernardino of Siena) is irregular and picturesque. The whole fabric is raised by several steps above the level of the piazza. Inside, the building wants the grace and lightness of the great northern churches, of Amiens, or Šalisbury, or Westminster; and it has not the severe beauty of the cathedral of Florence; but it leaves an impression of breadth, height, and spaciousness. Some of the pillars are of very beautiful veined marble, and there are two rich Renaissance chapels at each side of the nave. But all that can be done to lessen its dignity and vulgarize its beauty has been done; decorations which should be severe, are tawdry; furniture which should be simple, is gaudy; and the church is spoilt. Perhaps, to Englishmen, the most interThe streets of Perugia are narrow, wind-esting object in it is the tomb of Innocent ing, and steep. Little cave-like shops open on to them; the shopman, often a workman too, busy at his trade, may be seen within, and his wares generally overflow and cover the scanty pavement. Above, on clear days, is the deep blue sky; and the whole effect the dark, shady street, the darker shops, the tall houses, the clear sky overhead — is most Italian. The streets, narrow as they are, are crossed by passages yet narrower; and

towns.

the Third, the liege lord and protector of King John, the foe and condemner of the Great Charter; the pope who, from the standpoint of matured feudalism, looked at the assertion of an English freedom more venerable than his own system, and thought it new, audacious, and dangerous to religion and order.

The north wall of the Duomo forms one side of the great piazza, and opposite to it is the Municipio. Between them stands