ious pleasure
has not fixed on my younger daughter, Joan. I should otherwise have had
spear breaking between you and my cousin of Orleans; and, had harm come
of it, I must on either side have lost a kind friend and affectionate
cousin."

"Nay, nay, my royal sovereign," said Duke Charles, "the Duke of Orleans
shall have no interruption from me in the path which he has chosen par
amours. The cause in which I couch my lance against Orleans must be fair
and straight."

Louis was far from taking amiss this brutal allusion to the personal
deformity of the Princess Joan. On the contrary, he was rather pleased
to find that the Duke was content to be amused with broad jests, in
which he was himself a proficient, and which (according to the modern
phrase) spared much sentimental hypocrisy. Accordingly, he speedily
placed their intercourse on such a footing that Charles, though he felt
it impossible to play the part of an affectionate and reconciled friend
to a monarch whose ill offices he had so often encountered, and whose
sincerity on the present occasion he so strongly doubted, yet had no
difficulty in acting the hearty landlord towards a facetious guest; and
so the want of reciprocity in kinder feelings between them was
supplied by the tone of good fellowship which exists between two boon
companions--a tone natural to the Duke from the frankness, and, it might
be added, the grossness of his character, and to Louis, because, though
capable of assuming any mood of social intercourse, that which really
suited him best was mingled with grossness of ideas and of caustic
humour and expression.

Both Princes were happily able to preserve, during the period of a
banquet at the town house of Peronne, the same kind of conversation,
on which they met as on a neutral ground, and which, as Louis easily
perceived, was more available than any other to keep the Duke of
Burgundy in that state of composure which seemed necessary to his own
safety.

Yet he was alarmed to observe that the Duke had around him several of
those French nobles, and those of the highest rank, and in situations
of great trust and power, whom his own severity or injustice had driven
into exile; and it was to secure himself from the possible effects of
their resentment and revenge, that (as already mentioned) he requested
to be lodged in the Castle or Citadel of Peronne, rather than in the
town itself. This was readily granted by Duke Charles, with one of those
gri