lergy,
the people to show some pity for her miserable state. If Froissart
had not discerned the evils of the feudal system, they were patent
to the eyes of Alain Chartier. His _Livre de l'Esperance_, where the
oratorical prose is interspersed with lyric verse, spares neither
the clergy nor the frivolous and dissolute gentry, who forget their
duty to their country in wanton self-indulgence; yet his last word,
written at the moment when Joan of Arc was leaving the pastures for
battle, is one of hope. His _Curial_ (_The Courtier_) is a satire
on the vices of the court by one who had acquaintance with its
corruption. The large, harmonious phrase of Alain Chartier was new
to French prose, and is hardly heard again until the seventeenth
century.

The last grace and refinements of chivalric society blossom in the
poetry of CHARLES D'ORLEANS, "la grace exquise des choses freles."
He was born in 1391, son of Louis, Duke of Orleans, and an Italian
mother, Valentine of Milan. Married at fifteen to the widow of Richard
II. of England, he lost his father by assassination, his mother by
the stroke of grief, his wife in childbirth. From the battlefield
of Agincourt he passed to England, where he remained a prisoner,
closely guarded, for twenty-five years. It seems as if events should
have made him a tragic poet; but for Charles d'Orleans poetry was
the brightness or the consolation of his exile. His elder years at
the little court of Blois were a season of delicate gaiety, when he
enjoyed the recreations of age, and smiled at the passions of youth.
He died in 1465. Neither depth of reflection nor masculine power of
feeling finds expression in his verse; he does not contribute new
ideas to poetry, nor invent new forms, but he rendered the old material
and made the accepted moulds of verse charming by a gracious
personality and an exquisite sense of art. Ballade, rondeau, chanson,
each is manipulated with the skill of a goldsmith setting his gems.
He sings of the beauty of woman, the lighter joys of love, the pleasure
of springtide, the song of the birds, the gliding of a stream or a
cloud; or, as an elder man, he mocks with amiable irony the fatiguing
ardours of young hearts. When St. Valentine's day comes round, his
good physician "Nonchaloir" advises him to abstain from choosing a
mistress, and recommends an easy pillow. The influence of Charles
d'Orleans on French poetry was slight; it was not until 1734 that
his forgotten poems w