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This occasioned a good deal of mirth; and Mr. Carew asking what scabby sheep had infected the whole flock? was told, Parson Bryant was the man who had discovered him, none of the other gentlemen knowing him under his disguise: upon which, turning to the parson, he asked him if he had forgotten good king Charles’s rules? Mr. Pleydell, of St.
There is only one unanimous opinion concerning Agnes Sorel, and that is as to her beauty. For the rest, it would seem as if prejudice and flattery held the scales. The mean is difficult to discover, and perhaps it is only possible to get somewhere near it by studying results the remarkable change, as already noticed, in Charles’s life and conduct whilst under her influence.
So much glamour has attached, and rightly so, to Joan of Arc, the soldier-saviour of Charles the Seventh of France, that another woman, Agnes Sorel Charles’s good angel of a less militant order has been almost entirely overlooked, and where she has been remembered, has been treated by the few with the honour due to her, and by the many merely as Charles’s mistress.
If this unwilling guest represents Mahaut, her woeful look is intelligible when we recall the sad story connected with Charles’s first wife, Mahaut’s daughter Blanche, married when she was but fifteen, and whose beauty was so dazzling that Froissart records that “she was one of the most beautiful women in the world.” Accused of an intrigue with a gentleman of the Court, she was imprisoned in the Château-Gaillard, where she remained, with shorn head, until, shortly after Charles ascended the throne, the Pope declared the marriage null.
Some thirty years earlier Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and sometime Chancellor of England, speaks of his frequent ambassadorial visits to “Paris, the Paradise of the World, with its delightful libraries, where the days seemed ever few, for the greatness of our love.” And he adds, “unfastening our purse-strings, we scattered money with joyous heart, and purchased inestimable books.” But whilst it is true that Charles’s predecessors had collected books, none before had thought of forming a library for public use, and Charles’s work, as M. Delisle remarks, was really the first germ of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
His cooks were often at their wits’ end to devise some new dish, rich and highly seasoned enough to satisfy his appetite, and his perplexed purveyor one day, knowing Charles’s passion for timepieces, told him "that he really did not know what new dish he could prepare him, unless it were a fricassée of watches." Charles drank as heartily as he ate.
It will here be proper to observe, that this lady, though of a very charitable disposition to her poor neighbours, having been often deceived by mendicants, and finding few of them deserving of her charity, had resolved to relieve no unknown objects, however plausible their tale; but our hero, depending upon his art, was not afraid to accept of Sir Charles’s challenge.
The trustworthiness of this statement has, however, been so questioned, that it seems safer to endeavour to arrive at the truth from other sources, although, if the statement can be relied on, it seems to follow, almost as a matter of course, that Agnes must have been born earlier than 1422. It is an admitted fact that between 1433 and 1438 the manner of Charles’s life entirely changed.
Storey’s powdered wigs was of so tempting an aspect, on the shelf where it was laid up in ordinary, that the cat actually kittened in it. I saw her and her little ones all together in the warm wig. He also kept a little white and black bitch, apparently of King Charles’s breed.
Allow me—Jemima, my dear—my uncle. I think you’ve seen Jemima before, sir?’ ‘Have had the pleasure,’ returned big Dumps, his tone and look making it doubtful whether in his life he had ever experienced the sensation. ‘I’m sure,’ said Mrs. Kitterbell, with a languid smile, and a slight cough. ‘I’m sure—hem—any friend—of Charles’s—hem—much less a relation, is—’