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"To Barthelmy the painter, for making the cover of a pasty for the Count of Charolais to present to Monseigneur on the night of St. Gachard says that they placed at the top of their letter their titles of sheriffs and deans, as princes and lords take the title of their seignories. Chastellain, ii., 278. La Marche, ii., 313. Lavisse, Histoire de France, accepts 13,000 as the number slain.
"At the hour in which I write his taste for hard labour is excessive, but in other respects his good sense has dominated him, at least thus far. It is to be hoped that as his reign grows older he will curb his over-strenuous industry." As to the duke's sympathies, Chastellain regrets that circumstances have turned him towards England.
Still his courtiers were not quite bereft of the gorgeous and spectacular entertainments to which the "good duke" had accustomed them. Soon after the assembly of the Order, the alliance between Duke Charles and Margaret of York was celebrated at Bruges. Our Burgundian Chastellain is not pleased with this marriage.
"Indeed," says the courtly Chastellain, "the mischief was so imminent that God alone averted it, and there was not an archer or noble or man so full of assurance that he did not tremble with fear, nor one who would not have preferred to be in India for his own safety. Especially were they in terror for their young prince, who, they thought, was exposed to a dolorous death."
From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as a "supreme rhetorician."
After expatiating on the points where Charles was like his father conventional princely qualities Chastellain adds: "In some respects they differed. The one was cold and the other boiling with ardour; the one slow and prone to delay, the other strenuous in his promptness; the elder negligent of his own concerns, the younger diligent and alert.
"The sense he had by nature," says his historian Chastellain, "had been increased to twice as much again, in his straitened fortunes, by long constraint and perilous dangers, which sharpened his wits perforce." "He is the king of kings," was said of him by the Doge of Venice, Francis Foscari, a good judge of policy; "there is no doing without him."
Genappe was too far and the anxious son moved to Avesnes in order to receive his messages more speedily. Our chronicler Chastellain begins his story of Louis's accession as follows: "Since I am not English but French, I who am neither Spanish nor Italian but French, I have written of two Frenchmen, the one king, the other duke.
Brabant, Holland, Zeeland and Liége, though less severely affected, passed through a time of strife and civil war. Chastellain eloquently vaunts their banquets and gorgeous festivities. The dukes themselves took every opportunity to display their wealth, especially in the presence of foreign princes.
There is no doubt that such comparisons were used as Chastellain puts into the mouths of the first deputation from Ghent to ask pardon for the sins committed at the dolorous unjoyous entry into the Flemish capital. What did he do in Abraham's time, when He sent word to Lot that if there were ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah He would remit the judgment on the two cities? In Ghent," etc.
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