stitution.[1235] His temperament was so out of harmony with his
position that he may be said to have endured his life rather than to
have lived it. His father assassinated by night in the Rue Barbette in
Paris by order of Duke John; his mother a perennial fount of tears,
dying of anger and of grief in a Franciscan nunnery; the two S's,
standing for _Soupirs_ (sighs) and _Souci_ (care), the emblems and
devices of her mourning, revealing her ingenious mind fancifully
elegant even in despair; the Armagnacs, the Burgundians, the
Cabochiens, cutting each other's throats around him; these were the
sights he had witnessed when little more than a child. Then he had
been wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Azincourt.

[Footnote 1235: Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. fr. 966, fol. 1.]

Now, for fourteen years, dragged from castle to castle, from one end
to the other of the island of fogs; imprisoned within thick walls,
closely guarded, receiving two or three of his countrymen at long
intervals, but never permitted to converse with one except before
witnesses, he felt old before his time, blighted by misfortune. "Fruit
fallen in its greenness, I was put to ripen on prison straw. I am
winter fruit,"[1236] he said of himself. In his captivity, he suffered
without hope, knowing that on his death-bed Henry V had recommended
his brother not to give him up at any price.[1237]

[Footnote 1236: _Les poesies de Charles d'Orleans_, ed. Guichard,
1842, in 12mo, p. 145.]

[Footnote 1237: A. Champollion-Figeac, _Louis et Charles, ducs
d'Orleans, leur influence sur les arts, la litterature et l'esprit de
leur siecle_, Paris, 1844, 1 vol. in 8vo, with an atlas, pp. 300-337.]

Kind to others, kind to himself, he took refuge in his own thoughts,
which were as bright and clear as his life was dark and sad. In the
gloom of the stern castles of Windsor and of Bolingbroke, in the Tower
of London, side by side with his gaolers, he lived and moved in the
world of phantasy of the _Romance of the Rose_. Venus, Cupid, Hope,
Fair-Welcome, Pleasure, Pity, Danger, Sadness, Care, Melancholy,
Sweet-Looks were around the desk, on which, in the deep embrasure of a
window, beneath the sun's rays, he wrote his ballads, as delicate and
fresh as an illumination on the page of a manuscript. For him it was
the world of allegory that really existed. He wandered in the forest
of Long Expectation; he embarked on the vessel Good Tidings. He was a
poet; Beauty was h