Charles liked change of place. He was often not so much travelling as making a progress; now to join the king for some great tournament; now to visit King René, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw all manner of interesting things—oriental curios, King René painting birds, and, what particularly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester, whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange. { 276a} Sometimes the journeys were set about on horseback in a large party, with the _fourriers_ sent forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage. We find almost Gargantuan details of the provision made by these officers against the duke’s arrival, of eggs and butter and bread, cheese and peas and chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red. { 276b} Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before the wind. { 276c} Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the Crinan Canal; and when Charles threw in money, they would dive and bring it up. { 276d} As he looked on at their exploits, I wonder whether that room of gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the device of little children in a river, and the sky full of birds?
He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angoulême in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when Bedford put it up for sale in London. { 277a} The duchess had a library of her own; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in attendance on the blue-stocking Margaret of Scotland. { 277b} Not only were books collected, but new books were written at the court of Blois. The widow of one Jean Fougère, a bookbinder, seems to have done a number of odd commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three vellum-skins to bind the duchess’s Book of Hours, and who was employed to prepare parchment for the use of the duke’s scribes. And she it was who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles’s own poems, which was presented to him by his secretary, Anthony Astesan, with the text in one column, and Astesan’s Latin version in the other. { 277c}
Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubtless take the place of many others. We find in Charles’s verse much semi-ironical regret for other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been “nourished in the schools of love,” now sees nothing either to please or displease him. Old age has imprisoned him within doors, where he means to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir themselves in life. He had written (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, when his animal strength has so much declined that he sings the discomforts of winter instead of the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life, he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing, talking, and singing. { 278}