with him, this subtle Lombard, in the 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.

of silk sewn over with French lilies worked 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?

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. At 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 Paris was a beautiful city; but it seemed traditions - Valentine, with the Visconti a paradise upon the occasion of the royal snake on her escutcheon, must have entry. The Rue St. Denis was draped seemed to these Parisians much such anfrom top to bottom in green and crimson other mysterious serpent-woman, another silk scattered with stars. Under the gate- Mélusine. For the Italian character, way angels sang in a starry heaven, and to never fanatic and yet so prone to spiritual the sweet sound of instruments little chil- passions; seldom bestial, yet so guilty of dren played a miracle. There were tow-unnatural vices Italy has ever been a ers 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

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

48

For some time the king had been ailing with a hot fever. He was, says the Monk of St. Denis, strange, languishing, and bewildered. When, in the summer of 1392, the French invaded Brittany, the dukes, his uncles, conjured him to remain at home. But Charles was not to be persuaded. He started with them upon the long, fatiguing journey.

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.

About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the king set upon his brother, his spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag. The more distant of the royal party thought the king had spied a hare or a hart in the forest. Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman, who was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The king of France was furiously and murderously mad. Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death. (he had just exchanged his duchy of Orleans 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. cruel part of his sickness was the evident The most anguish of his spirit. out of my heart the dagger that my fair "Will no one pluck brother of Orleans has planted there?" the poor mad youth would cry; and he would mutter to himself, " I must kill him! I must kill him!" It was useless to instruct the people that there is no reason in the sick hatred of a distempered mind. Nor would they find sufficient motive in the rumored unfaithfulness of Isabel with Louis. They sought a darker, a more subtle explanation, and their suspicions were fostered, for political ends, by the enemies of Orleans uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. the faction of his

For when the king recovered from his frenzy his mind remained weak and dis

abled. It was necessary to hand over to his uncles for a while the direction of affairs. This made the strongest of them, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, more than ever strong; he was in fact, if not in form, the regent. Against his rule one voice was ever raised in protest; the voice of the young, ambitious brother of the king. years of age; through his marriage and Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one 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 childanger. hood, eloquent, religious, gay, slow to

With Juvenal they found him Christine they accounted him, "en ces "beau prince et gratieux;" and like jeunes faiz et en toutes choses trés-avenant . . . car il aime les bons . . . nul fellonie ni cruautè en luy." But he was young; he had been led away (Juvenal finds the phrase for them) "by the means of those who were near to him. strange youthful follies that I will not deHe had clare. young people, who induced him to do There were those about him, done." This vague and mysterious excuse many things he had better have left unis the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.

...

wizard! There was a contagion of horror
The king mad; the king's brother a
ple," writes the Monk of St. Denis, "be-
in France. "Many nobles and poor peo-
gan to change and sicken with the same
strange malady that had attacked the
king."
evil spread and deepened.
The fanatic terror of supernatural

unfortunately for Orleans. On the 29th
Things, at that critical season, fell out
of January, 1393, there was a wedding fes-
tival at the Hôtel de St. Paul for one of
Queen Isabel's German maids of honor.
The bride was a widow, and thrice a
widow; therefore a subject for the gro-
tesque license of the age. At night, in
there burst in a company of six satyrs
the great hall among the dancers, suddenly
dressed in tight linen vests, with flakes of

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. is the devil!" he said, with great admiraFive of them were chained together, the tion; or, according to another version, sixth disported loose. The sixth was the "Diabolicum recitas et quod est impossiking. Stung by some unlucky madcap bile- You tell me a diabolic thing, and prompting, Orleans took a flaming torch one that is impossible! The king cannot from its bearer, and held it close to the be well!" 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 Charitable souls like Demoiselle Chris- we are a pastoral people again, may have tine declared in vain, "C'est impossible once more some reason for their public que son âme et ses mœurs n'en vaillant and solemn utterance. But they are also mieux." Charitable souls are rare. The words which all lovers of old towns and mass of the people did not hesitate to say old buildings must often have upon their that Louis visited the Celestins the better lips, or at least in their minds, as they to conspire with a certain monk there see the havoc of restoration, or the ruin an old counsellor of his father's - one of modern improvements aiding the work Sire Philippe de Mézierès. This person of time and decay. One age is too fond was acknowledged to be wise, experienced, of destroying the work of another, of able, and a man of science, according to removing its landmark; and our own age, the age. He was a monk, too, but the if it has been the most restoring, has, crowd doubted of his religion, for it was possibly, been the most destroying as common rumor that he said there was no well. Few places, few buildings, indeed, truth in sorcery. Let him say it! Sire have escaped restoration, or ruin, or dePhilippe de Mézières was none the less struction. Perugia has been singularly no judicious companion for the Duke of fortunate in avoiding their worst evils, Orleans. The sire had lived too long in and it is this good fortune which seems Lombardy: "a country," as Juvenal de- to constitute half its charm. And this scribes it, "where they practise magic and most interesting old city is, perhaps, not the casting of spells.' as well known, as much visited, as it deserves to be. There are not many places of its size, even in Italy, which are more full of art, of beauty, and of associations, than the capital of Umbria. Nature, too,

About the same time a malignant rumor grew in France concerning the father of Valentine. People said the seigneur of Milan had asked the French ambassador VOL. LVIII. 2968

LIVING AGE.

down these picturesque vistas of quaint architecture are visible, vignetted often against a landscape as blue as the background of an early Tuscan painter. All the smaller streets lead, after more or less winding, to the main thoroughfare, the Corso Vannucci, which lies along the ridge of the hill, and in which are the chief buildings, the Duomo and the Municipio.

aids it as well as history. It stands on a long ridge of hill, at the foot of which the Tiber flows, yellow and poplar-fringed as it sweeps through the Umbrian plain. The town still preserves, on the whole, its medieval look, with some touch, also, of its classical descent. The medieval walls surround it, and within them the circuit of the Roman walls can yet be traced. At the entrance of one steep street there is a massive gateway of plain, Passing through the Arch of Augustus, gigantic masonry (a relic, they say, of and following a steep, narrow street, such Etruscan rule) and on the span of the arch as I have just described, the explorer will we read Augusta Perusia - a legend cross the little Piazza Ansidei, and take a which speaks to us of the beginning of small vaulted foot-road; this will lead him the empire. One side of this old town to the south side of the Duomo, and if he gate supports a loggia of the Renaissance; keeps under its wall to the western door, and by the Roman wall, of which it forms he will find himself by the statue of Julius a part, there winds a steep, rough, med- the Third. The figure is of bronze, and iæval footway, half stair, half slope, to is on a high pedestal. The pontiff, in some desolate, but more modern, palaces. cope and tiara, is seated on a throne, with It is this close mingling of the ages which his right hand raised in the act of blessis the charm, the characteristic of Perugia. ing. The folds of the drapery, as the cope Its neighbor, Assisi, is far more med-falls from the outstretched arm, are very iæval; but though it has a Roman portico fine; and the whole pose of the figure is above ground, and a forum beneath, it has noble and dignified. not much of the Renaissance. Gubbio, a little farther off, is most mediæval 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 towns.

The streets of Perugia are narrow, winding, 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

-

Some

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 Salisbury, or Westminster; and it has not the severe beauty of the cathedral of Florence; but it leaves an impression of breadth, height, and spaciousness. 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 interesting object in it is the tomb of Innocent 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