In a Dark Wood Wandering (85 page)

When Cailleau thoughtfully suggests possible remedies, Charles shakes his head: pills and herbs cannot make Marie contented and happy. He watches her from a window above the inner court as she rides out among laughing, blushing maids, adroit young horsemen and frolicsome pages. Their clothing, in Charles' eyes, is ridiculous: fierce colors, crenellated and scalloped sleeves, loops of small bells, shoes with long, turned-up toes that constantly threaten to trip them. But they are young: warm-blooded, seething with a lust for life. He is filled with deep pity for Marie: is she doomed to wither at his side?

Sighing, he turns back to the book which lies open on the table. It is a day when Marie and her cortege have ridden out to celebrate May Day. They have planted a maypole in the flower-covered meadow outside Blois. He cannot distract himself with reading and study. For the first time in many years, for the first time since he foreswore poetry after Bonne's death, he picks up again the old copybook in which, during his captivity, he jotted down verse after verse. The bittersweet melancholy which he feels seems to him too narrow and transient for a ballad; he manages to capture it in a few rondelets. When the young people return laughing and singing from the meadow, carrying bouquets of flowers, Charles too has plucked his souvenir of the first day of May. Standing before the window he repeats under his breath the lines now written on the pages of his Thought Book:

In the spring of the year 1444, Charles at last received the long-awaited summons from the King. The English armies of occupation, driven back everywhere to the coastline, were more than weary of the struggle. At long last the government in London appeared mellow and ready to renounce all its demands. Although the King of France continued to besiege the cities still held by the English, he announced that he would receive a delegation, for the preparation of which Charles d'Orléans would act as intermediary.

Charles was charged to enter into communication with representatives of the English government; immediately he sent couriers to Suffolk and Sir Robert Roos. He did not have to wait long for an answer. Suffolk wrote back in detail: the legation which would speedily cross the Straits of Calais would serve a two-fold purpose: to conclude peace, or at any rate an armistice and, in order to confirm the good understanding between the two Kingdoms, to negotiate a marriage between Henry VI and the daughter of a French prince.

Princesses of royal blood who were already betrothed were not to be considered; moreover, memories of the tragic nuptials of 1396 and 1420 were still fresh in both countries. “But,” Suffolk wrote formally—Charles knew how strongly his erstwhile warden opposed the idea of a French bride on the English throne—”But we hear that there are daughters in the Houses of Brittany, Armagnac and Alençon.”

Charles paid a visit to his sovereign to acquaint him with the
English proposals. The King rejected out of hand any alliance between an English king and a member of those French feudal Houses.

“Do they think I am going to admit the Trojan horse with my own hands?” he asked with his faint, bitter smile. “I charge you, Monseigneur my worthy cousin, to put yourself immediately in communication with my brother-in-law of Anjou; I can trust him without reservations. He has a daughter. It is our wish that you offer her as a bride to our cousin, the King of England.”

So Charles began at once to prepare for the journey to Tarascon in the extreme south of the realm where Anjou lived; still mindful of his claim to Sicily, he always called himself “King”. He was some ten years younger than Charles; from his father he had inherited a glittering series of sonorous and imposing titles and claims to crowns: he should rule—so he had been taught from childhood on—over Jerusalem, Aragon, Valencia, Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica, Barcelona and Piedmont. In actuality he possessed only the domain of Anjou, and the regions of Provence and Lorraine which his wife had brought to him as her dowry. King René—he was never called anything else—had, since succeeding his father, been obliged to wage one war after another to protect his rights, battles in which he had been defeated time after time, so that of so much worldly power and glory, of a kingdom which stretched from Spain to Jerusalem, nothing was left except the gleaming crown emblazoned on his coat of arms.

Along with the Duchy of Lorraine, his wife had brought him armed conflict with Burgundy. The results for René were defeat and six years of captivity in Flanders. During that enforced stay in Burgundy's court, it became apparent that René was a gentle visionary, an aesthetic dreamer. Burgundy freed him without compunction and saw his assumptions justified: in sunny Provence King René immersed himself in his many hobbies and bothered no more with politics.

“We have definitely settled all our business,” mused King René, rising and drawing the folds of his wide, flowered brocade robe around him. “No more politics, worthy friend, no more of that. Let's enjoy the sunshine together as friends; here the good God grants us so abundantly all the joys which life has to offer. I have hardly had the chance to tell you how delighted I am at your coming
here. We are brothers, dear friend, brothers, more firmly attached to each other than if we had been linked by bonds of blood.”

Charles stood up too, somewhat dizzy from the heat and the blinding glare of the sunlight on the landscape around him. They had held their conversation under a spacious awning of tapestries in the open gallery which King René had had constructed, in the Oriental fashion, against the walls of his castle in Tarascon; one sat there as though one were sitting on a cloud high in the sky, with an unimpeded view over the richly variegated landscape.

The cool amber wine proffered by the pages seemed headier than its aroma might lead one to expect; Charles felt remarkably carefree, as though he had partaken of the nectar of oblivion. He took the hand which his host held out to him and allowed himself to be led inside the cool shadowy halls of the castle; lute players and minstrels accompanied the princes. They passed through many apartments adorned with Moorish mosaics; finally they went down some stairs.

King René clapped his hands and nodded to his followers: nobles, pages and servants stopped behind them. Charles and his host stepped together through a small arched gate cut into one of the outer walls.

“Yes, follow me, worthy friend, follow me!” King René looked behind him, smiling and nodding; his white teeth gleamed in his broad olive face; he made a grandiose gesture of invitation. Charles bowed in assent; he was somewhat taken aback but amused at the almost childlike pleasure of his royal host, who had confessed that he attached infinitely more importance to his visitor's poetic art than to all the honorable messages from the French and English governments together.

King René opened a little door, so narrow and low that they both had to stoop. When Charles looked up, he could not repress an exclamation of amazement. He was standing in a walled courtyard filled with blossoming trees and bright flowers; paved paths traversed the garden where three fountains played. Exotic, brightly colored birds sat chained to swinging perches set among the branches of the bushes; the air was filled with their penetrating sweet fluting and twittering and with the heavy fragrance of the flowers. The walls surrounding the garden were so high that only the tops of the trees on the other side could be seen. Above the garden and the treetops arched the dazzling deep blue sky.

On one side of the little door through which Charles and René had entered, stood a pavilion without walls; above a floor of large shining tiles a canvas had been stretched between poles; it drooped to one side to temper the light. Beneath that awning stood a bench, a slanted reading desk like the one Charles used and a table heaped with boxes, cases and folio volumes. To this bower King René, still nodding mysteriously, led his guest.

Charles entered the pavilion, feeling that he had left the everyday world for one of the symbolic fairy gardens described in the Romance of the Rose. He stared enchanted at the exotic birds and flowers, at the grass and leaves suffused with a greenish glow, while King René busied himself at the table and the reading desk.

“Look here now.”

Charles gave ear to the gently urgent tone in which the request was made and turned around. King René had set out a number of small wooden panels on which were painted miniatures in brilliant jeweled colors, in the style of the Flemish masters whose work Charles had seen at the court of Burgundy. He was strongly interested; he removed his spectacles and leaned over to inspect the paintings.

“These are singularly beautiful,” he said after a while. “Who painted them, Monseigneur?”

King René had watched Charles with quiet intensity as, one by one, he took the little panels in his hand; now he began to laugh. In his large, round face his jovial black eyes glittered like stars. “Do you really find them beautiful, my friend?” he asked happily. “That pleases me. I too find them excellent. I painted them.”

“You have great skill,” said Charles, surprised. “These are real works of art.”

King René bent over the table so that his face almost touched the paintings; carefully he caressed the wood with his fingertips.

“Yes, they are beautiful, they are good,” he repeated a few times in a pleased voice. “The colors are well-mixed. Look at how lovely that blue is—that cost me a fortune in lapis lazuli. But it's worth the cost, this beauty is worth it. I taught myself to paint when I sat in Flanders as a prisoner,” he went on, looking at Charles. “That was a pastime for me, just as poetry was for you in England.”

“Apparently you still derive much pleasure from it.” Charles smiled and pointed to the dozens of paints, the reading desk, the brushes and jars for mixing the paints. “Unfortunately, the world
claims too much of my attention; I cannot dedicate myself to the thing I love.”

“The world, the world?” For the first time a shadow crossed King René's childishly good-natured face. “What do you call the world? Conferences, affairs of state, war, diplomatic maneuvering, money worries, obligations to all the world and his wife? Do you know what the world is?” He gripped Charles' arm and directed him to look once more at the panels: with his broad brown forefinger he pointed at the paintings: holy pictures, scenes from mythology, emblematic figures. “That is the world; there is the world for me,” he said, his voice filled with affection. “During the hours I spent on that, I felt like a completely fulfilled man for the first time in my entire life. I am never so contented, so deeply happy, so filled with gratitude to God who created me, as when I sit here with my brushes and my colors and create little creatures, small worlds, on the wood. This is the world, Monseigneur my friend, and all things outside it are only dreams and illusions, lighter than smoke. Don't tell me that you don't know this already.”

“I have often thought almost the same thing,” said Charles thoughtfully, still smiling. “But I was never able to express the idea so clearly as you, Monseigneur. I have never dared to suppose that poetry could constitute the meaning and the purpose of my life. I thought that I had … and have … many other responsibilities to perform. My time does not belong to me alone.”

“Friend, friend!” King René raised his hands and shook his head. His eyes began to twinkle once more. “You still have much to learn. You don't know yourself, esteemed friend. Be honest, confess that you really only live when you are thinking of poetry, or poetically thinking. I have had the privilege of reading a few of the verses which you sent some time ago to your wife in Rodez. Ah, let us not fall into comparisons, let's not name names, or mention Virgil or Horace whom we have learned to love and respect as great poets. The blackbird and the skylark know how to sing as well as the nightingale, and the fact that God has created them shows there must be room in the world for their song. Monseigneur, worthy friend, your songs are not the conventional rhymes which we all learn to compose at one time or another. Your heart is in them, they are warm and true as … as …” he waved his large hands back and forth, searching for the right word. Charles, still smiling, shrugged.