In a Dark Wood Wandering

by Hella S. Haasse

  For the first time in months, he had left the castle of Creil where he was confined, to show himself to the public. His relatives, warned by physicians, watched him anxiously, fearing a sudden renewed outburst of madness. Valentine felt a heartrending pity for the King, of whom she was as fond as he was of her. The news two years earlier of an unexpected eruption of his illness had upset her no less—although she reacted in a different way—than it had upset the Queen. Despite her displays of desperate grief, Isabeau believed—or professed to believe—that recovery was possible; Valentine, on the other hand, perhaps because of her swifter Southern intuition, knew that the germ of madness, always present in the King’s childlike, capricious nature, had now put down roots that were ineradicable. To some degree, Valentine shared the view that a madman was little more than a dangerous animal; but the thought of her brother-in-law imprisoned in the barred balcony high above the walls of Creil, gazing down from his cage at the nobles of his retinue who were playing ball in the dry moat below, filled her with horror and compassion. Although she knew that Isabeau’s grief was sincere, she could not remain blind to the avidity with which the Queen had taken over the administration of the court, and the Duke of Burgundy the control of affairs of state.

  She had little faith in the physician Guillaume de Harselly, however capable he might be. She no longer believed that illness could be banished by confession and exorcism. The previous winter she had found another physician’s recommendation for a cure even less beneficial; the King should be kept away from the Council and all state business; he should be diverted with various amusements. As a result, Saint-Pol became a madhouse where the music was never silenced, where the uproar of balls and drinking bouts never stopped; where Isabeau, evening after evening, on the arm of Louis d’Orléans, led the rows of celebrants in their multi-colored finery, and the King, actually somewhat recovered, clapped his hands in time with the music and looked on eagerly at each new entertainment.

  The torchlight pricked Valentine’s closed eyes; the heat of the lying-in chamber made her think of the endless nights spent under the canopy of tapestries and fading flowers at the side of the King, who enjoyed having her near him and would not allow her to withdraw. As she looked down from the raised platform upon the crowd in the overflowing hall, it often seemed to her that she was in a purgatory more cruel and terrifying than the one the Church had taught her to fear. The statues in the niches of the cathedral, the spewing monsters, the devils and gargoyles which looked down upon Paris, grimacing, from the exterior of Notre Dame, had come to life in the grotesquely-masked dancers illuminated in the torchlight: in the women whose high headdresses were decorated with horns and rolls of stuffed cloth, in the men whose wide pleated sleeves looked like the wings of bats and who wore sharply pointed shoes like the beaks of alien beasts.

  Valentine moved her head restlessly on the pillows. The rush of milk made her feverish. The normal cure for this, the feeding of her child, was denied to her: that was taken care of by the wet nurse who sat by the hearthfire, a cloth folded over her breasts. A chamberwoman threw some logs on the fire; the flames leapt high in the recesses of the hearth.

  Flames had put a premature end to the wild masquerade which Isabeau had held in January to celebrate the marriage of her friend and confidante, the widow of the Sire de Hainceville. The celebration of a second marriage offered abundant opportunity for unbridled pleasures, jokes full of double entendres, reckless debauchery. An endless train of guests danced hand in hand through the hall. And the King, infected by the general atmosphere of wild elation, allowed himself to be seduced into joining a game of dressing-up invented by some noblemen who wanted to terrorize the women for sport.

  In a side room they had their naked bodies sewn into garments of thin leather smeared with pitch and then strewn with feathers; they put on feather headdresses to make themselves look like savages. So attired, they leapt shouting among the dancers who dispersed in panic in every direction, to the onlookers’ delight.

  The Duchess of Berry, the very young wife of the Duke’s uncle, sat beside Valentine under the canopy. She recognized the King by his build and laughed uncontrollably at his antics, which were wilder and more excited than those of the others. Louis d’Orléans entered the hall, drunk, with a lighted torch in his hand, accompanied by some friends; the savages rushed over to him and began, crowded together, to dance around him. The shouts of the bystanders drowned out the music. A scuffle broke out, in the course of which the feathered headdresses caught fire.

  In nightmares, Valentine still heard the screams of the living torches, hopelessly doomed in their tight garments; they ran in circles, frantically clawing at themselves, or rolled howling over the floor. Isabeau, who knew that the King was one of the dancers, collapsed at the sight of the flames. But the young Duchess de Berry, tears of laughter still on her cheeks, wrapped the train of her dress around the King and was able to smother the fire. The others burned half an hour longer, but they did not die for several days.

  Valentine moaned aloud and threw her hands over her face. This caused a stir among the women near the door. Someone came quickly to the bed; it was the Dame de Maucouvent, who looked after Valentine’s oldest son Louis.

  “Madame,” she said, curtseying low, “the procession is returning from the church.”

  The Duchess opened her eyes—she was still overcome by the memory of that hellish night which had caused the King to have another, and prolonged, relapse. She gazed for a time at the trustworthy, somewhat faded face of the Dame de Maucouvent. “Help me,” Valentine said at last, holding out her arms.

  The woman helped her to sit up, wiped the perspiration from her face and spread the deeply scalloped sleeves of her upper garment over the coverlet. The pealing of the bells began to subside.

  The Dame de Maucouvent put a silver dish filled with sweetmeats and spices on Valentine’s lap. Custom dictated that the mother of a new-born child quit her bed during the King’s visit to offer him refreshment with her own hand. The women took the lids from the jugs on the sideboard; a fragrance of warm hippocras filled the chamber. The voices of arriving guests could be heard in the antechamber; pages opened the door to the lying-in room and the King entered quickly, walking between rows of torchbearers and curtseying women.

  Valentine, who had not seen him since the early spring, was so shocked and horrified by his altered appearance that she forgot her manners and remained sitting in bed. She watched him approaching her, slovenly in his rich clothing, his eyes distended with nervous mirth. Behind him, on the threshold of the chamber and in the anteroom, stood the royal kinsmen and the court. The baptized child began to wail.

  Hastily the women pulled back the coverlet and Valentine, supported by the Dame de Maucouvent, set her feet on the floor.

  “Sire,” Valentine whispered, lifting the dish toward him. She was blinded by a sudden dizziness; two ladies of the court held her firmly under the arms while the King, dawdling like a child, poked among the delicacies in the dish.

  “Take this, Sire, it is a deer,” Valentine said softly, almost in tears to see him staring uncertainly at the sugar beast in his hand. Over his shoulder she caught the Queen’s eye, cold and full of suspicion. Louis, Valentine’s husband, leaned against the doorpost, toying with his embroidered gloves; he held them before his face to conceal a yawn. The King clutched the piece of candy and raised his eyes for the first time to Valentine’s face.

  “A deer?” he asked, motioning for the dish to be removed. “A deer? Yes, surely, a deer. You are right, Madame my sister-in-law, Valentine, dear Valentine. A deer. You know of course that a deer brings me luck? You know the story, don’t you?”

  His eyes strayed about the room. No one said anything.

  “I’ll tell you what happened to me,” the King continued in a confidential tone, walking along with Valentine who was being led back to bed. “I was already crowned, although I was still only a boy. I was hunting in the forest of Senlis …”

&nb
sp; The Queen, the Dukes of Burgundy, Berry, Bourbon and Orléans, the prince and princesses of the royal House and all the counts and barons and their ladies, as well as the women who carried the infant Charles, followed the King into the lying-in chamber. They accepted some of the hippocras and candied fruit offered by the Duchess’s women and exchanged knowing looks. It was not for the first time that the King talked in front of them about this youthful experience, which held great significance for him.

  “Know then, Valentine,” said the King. He bent over his sister-in-law and took one of her cold hands in his. “At a crossroad I came upon a deer. I did not shoot it. It let itself be taken by hand. It was like the deer of Saint Hubert, but instead of a cross it wore a collar of gilded copper—what do you say to that?—and on it was written in Latin …” He placed the spread fingers of his left hand over his mouth and looked with glistening eyes at Valentine, who smiled sadly at him. “On it was … well, what was written there? … In Latin?” he asked suddenly, with an impatient stamp of his foot.

  One of the nobles stepped forward and bowed. “Caesar hoc mihi donavit, Sire,” he murmured, sinking onto one knee beside the bed. His long red sleeves trailed behind him on the carpet.

  “That was it! ‘Caesar has given me this collar’,” continued the King, speaking so quickly that he stammered. “That is to say, the deer was more than a thousand years old. Think of it, Valentine! Was that a good omen or not? Well?” He tugged at the hand which he still clutched tightly.

  “It was a good omen, Sire,” the Duchess said in a flat voice. She was constantly aware of Isabeau’s eyes; the Queen stood near the bed, staring at her husband.

  “I thought so too—no, I’m sure of it!” the King said loudly. “I dreamed of a hart on the eve of the battle of Roosebeke. And didn’t I win a glorious victory there? Who dares to deny that? I was twelve years old then, no older. But you should have seen that battlefield … Ten thousand dead, ten thousand, all because of me.” He struck his chest, panting with excitement. “I won it; it was I who gave the signal for the assault. When I finally had the flag hoisted again, the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in five days … Wasn’t it so? Wasn’t it so? … Mountjoye for the King of France!” he cried hoarsely, stepping down from the platform on which the bed stood.

  Isabeau made a movement toward him, but he stepped back, looking at her with anger and fear.

  “Who is this woman, anyway?” he said to the courtiers standing near him. “What does she want from me? She is always bothering me. She wants to touch me. Send her away!”

  Valentine’s lips parted in terror. What she had heard whispered these past few months was true … that the King did not recognize his wife and refused to see her. It was true. Isabeau turned white, but her mouth remained pulled down in an expression of contempt. She stood in the middle of the lying-in chamber, broad and heavy in her ermine-lined mantle, the train held up by two ladies of the court. On her head she wore an extraordinarily tall crowned hat, under which her face looked small and full, with almost lashless eyes, round cheeks and well-shaped lips. On her breast above the square deeply-cut bodice, jeweled stars trembled with her heavy breathing.

  Valentine’s cheeks burned with shame at the insult inflicted on the Queen; she nodded to her women. The platter with the candied fruit was passed around once more. Although the child was now in its cradle, it did not stop crying. It was carried into an adjoining room.

  The King showed no sign of quitting the chamber. He allowed a chair to be brought to him and sat down next to Valentine at whom he stared fixedly without speaking. The court, which could not leave before the King gave the signal for departure, stood in a half-circle around the bed. The Duchess found this wall of bodies, of faces wearing formal smiles, immensely oppressive. She could not sit upright because of the roaring in her ears, which rose and fell at regular intervals. Although no one betrayed impatience by word or look, she knew only too well what thoughts were hidden behind those courteous masks.

  The King’s affinity for his sister-in-law was no secret; from the moment she had arrived as Louis’ bride in Melun to celebrate her marriage—Louis then was still Duke of Touraine—Charles had openly manifested signs of the greatest affection for her. He had paid all the costs of the wedding fetes, had issued orders that the municipal fountain should gush milk and rosewater as it had at the Queen’s formal entry into the country some years earlier, and had heaped gifts upon Valentine. But the affection which, before the King became ill, had been a mark of favor that increased the respect of the court for Monseigneur d’Orléans and his wife, evoked a different response when it was evinced by a madman. The contrast between the King’s almost morbid fondness for his sister-in-law and the aversion he showed for Isabeau, was glaring. Indignation, derision, perverse enjoyment of someone else’s discomfiture—all these feelings undoubtedly existed behind those polite smiles.

  Isabeau had sat down too; she turned to whisper to Louis d’Orléans, who stood behind her. The Duke of Burgundy finally decided to put an end to this painful waiting. He took off his hat and approached the bed. He had been Charles’ guardian and the real ruler of France in the first years of the kingship. Now he had completely regained the power which had been threatened when the King, full-grown, had chosen other advisors. He bent down and spoke to Charles as though he were speaking to a child, with his stern impenetrable face close to the King’s.

  “Sire, my King, it is time.”

  “So soon?” the King asked impatiently. He had taken off his rings and set them on the edge of Valentine’s bed. Now he picked them up one by one and dropped them into the Duchess’s lap. “For the child—from his godfather,” he said with a smothered laugh as he arose. “Valentine, dear Valentine, don’t forget to come and visit me tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.”

  He kissed her on both cheeks, stroking the damp braids on either side of her forehead. The Duke of Burgundy drew him away. The King looked back. “Be sure to remember,” he muttered. The courtiers stepped aside to make way for him. Isabeau took leave of her sister-in-law, but her kiss was no more than a fleeting touch with pursed lips; her eyes remained cold. The ladies-in-waiting picked up the Queen’s train.

  The old Duke of Bourbon, Charles’ uncle on his mother’s side, took Isabeau’s hand and led her out of the room; the court followed. Even before the anteroom door had closed, Valentine fell backward upon the pillows. The heat in the lying-in chamber was unbearable, but custom forbade anyone to let in fresh air before the mother had taken her first walk to church. Not the Dame de Maucouvent nor any of the other women could unlace the Duchess’s bodice to make her breathing easier because Louis d’Orléans, who had stayed behind in the room, came and sat on the edge of the bed. The women withdrew to the hearthfire.

  “Well, my darling,” said Louis, smiling. He stooped to pick up his wife’s handkerchief from the floor. “Our brother the King has been quite generous today.” He took the rings which lay scattered over the bed and looked at them carefully, one by one; finally, he slipped one onto his index finger. “How are you feeling today? You look tired.”

  “I am tired,” answered the Duchess. She did not open her eyes.

  There was a brief silence. Louis looked down at his wife’s face, which had an ivory tint in the green reflection of the bedcurtains. In a sudden rush of warmth and pity, he reached for her hand which lay weakly, half-open, on the coverlet. She turned her head slightly toward him and her narrow lips curved into a smile—a gentle smile, not without melancholy.

  “Maître Darien brought me our new son’s horoscope this morning,” Louis went on. “He says the child was born under a lucky star.”

  Valentine’s smile deepened. Her husband rose to his feet.

  “Adieu, Valentine.” He pressed her cold fingers. “You should sleep well now.” He stepped easily from the dais, tossed his right sleeve over his shoulder, saluted the women and left the room.

  The Duchess beckoned. The Dame de Maucouvent came qui
ckly forward and removed the heavy crown from her head.

  Louis d’Orléans went directly to the armory, a room adjacent to the library. That portion of the palace of Saint-Pol which he and his household occupied was no less sumptuous and was, in fact, more elegantly furnished than the apartments of the royal family. The armory reflected, in a small way, the opulence with which the Duke liked to surround himself. A Flemish tapestry depicting the crowning of Our Lady covered two walls with the colors of semiprecious stones: dull green, rust red and the dark yellow of old amber. Facing the arched window hung racks of Louis’ weapon collection: daggers with wrought-gold sheaths, swords from Lyon, Saracen blades, the hilts engraved with heraldic devices and set with gems, the scabbards covered with gold and enamel.