mission to France was pacific; in vain did he declare that its object was simply the boy's education. Henry replied jestingly that "he knew the French language indifferently well, and that the King of Scots could not have sent his son to a better master."

Meanwhile the remains of Rothsay had been carried from the prison-vaults of Falkland, and laid, with funeral pomp, in the church of Lindores. In that age of superstition and credulity men could imagine and believe almost anything. It is not, therefore, surprising that strange apparitions were reported to haunt the last resting-place of the murdered Prince, and that miracles were believed to be wrought at his tomb.

23

LOUIS DE VALOIS,

DAUPHIN OF FRANCE.

ON an August morning in the year 1394 a noble army was traversing the forest of Mans. At its head rode a man of twenty-seven or thereabouts, who wore a jacket of black velvet and a crimson hood, on which glittered a chaplet of pearls. His eye wandered wildly and feverishly; his cheek was pale and wan; and his features were haggard, like those of a person on whose mind was preying some secret sorrow. It was Charles the Sixth, King of France; and his grief was caused by the knowledge that the beautiful queen who had presented him with the chaplet that adorned his hood was not, by any means, the most faithful of wives.

King Charles was on his way to arrest an assassin of high rank, who had taken refuge with the Duke of Britanny, when suddenly from among the trees sprang a man in a garment of white russet, with bare head and naked feet, who, seizing the King's bridle, exclaimed with wild gestures, "Oh, King, go no further; for you are betrayed!"

The guards, perceiving that the man was insane,

removed him by force; and the King, pursuing his

journey, emerged from the forest about noon, and entered upon a plain. At that time the sun was shining with such excessive brightness as to affect both men and horses; and one of the pages who bore the royal lance falling asleep, let the weapon strike on the steel casque that was carried by another. The King, who was still brooding over the madman's mysterious warning, alarmed at the sharp ring, started, shuddered, drew his sword, and exclaimed, "I am betrayed!" He then turned round, spurred his horse to a gallop, fell upon his attendants with fury, and finally yielding to numbers, was conveyed back to Mans. To acute observers the cause was clear enough. The King of

France was a maniac.

When the unhappy man, removed to the Castle of Creil, had recovered his reason, the Queen and a youthful Prince appeared at that place. The Queen was Isabel of Bavaria, a woman of great beauty, but of equivocal reputation; the infant Prince was Louis de Valois, who, as heir to that crown which Hugh Capet had torn from the feeble Carlovingians, enjoyed the title of Dauphin and the Dukedom of Aquitaine. Yet few young serfs who laboured in the sunny fields of France had reason to envy that child, with his royal name, his princely title, and his extensive territory; for hardly could any influences have been less auspicious than those which presided over his boyhood, and consigned him to an untimely grave.

The King, the Queen, and the Dauphin returned to Paris, and occupied the Hôtel de St. Paul, long a royal residence; but the King's malady returned, and his condition was pitiable. The Queen, a votary of pleasure, totally neglecting her husband, formed a close intimacy with his profligate brother, the Duke of Orleans; and the poor demented monarch, whom from the first she had despised for his puerility, becoming a prey to intolerable misery, was incapable of being soothed or calmed save by one person, his sister-in-law, Valentine, Duchess of Orleans.

Valentine, one of the Visconti of Milan, whom the ambition of her family had, at the cost of a million of francs as her dowry, made a royal duchess, possessed numerous personal graces, and manifested a gentle and amiable disposition. As a native of Italy, however, she was suspected of witchcraft and poisoning; and it was said that when her father, the Duke of Milan, took leave of her in Paris after her marriage, he remarked significantly, "I never wish to see you again but as Queen of France." Acting on the paternal hint-such was the popular suspicion-she not only caused the King's lunacy, but occupied herself with the project of destroying the young Dauphin and the other royal children, who stood between her posterity and the throne of France.

The sudden death of one of Valentine's own sons strangely gave colour to these reports. Rumour asserted that one day when the Dauphin was amusing himself

with his little cousin of Orleans in the apartments of the Duchess, a Parisian boy was sent with a beautiful apple as a present to the heir of France. A nurse in the service of the Duchess, passing through the palace garden with an infant prince of the house of Orleans in her arms, happening to meet the boy, requested that the apple might be given to her little charge; but the boy having been ordered to present it to "My Lord the Dauphin," and no one else, persisted in refusing. The nurse, however, took the apple by force, and the little Orleans prince having gratified his appetite, sickened and died.

The apple, it was concluded, had been intended to poison the Dauphin; and suspicion immediately fell on the Italian Duchess. Those in charge of the Dauphin hurried him away, and declared that he should never more enter her apartments; and the credulous Parisians, in the ardour of their exasperation, threatened that if the Italian sorceress were not removed they would forcibly drag her from the palace and drown her in the Seine. This menace was effectual; and the Duke of Orleans, fearful of suspicion falling on himself, sent his Italian spouse to pine for many long months in one of his castles.

Meanwhile the court of France was nothing the better for the absence of Valentine. The King was sometimes overrun with vermin, and most scantily supplied with the necessaries of life; and as for the Dauphin and royal children, their plight was SO