Some symptoms he must have felt which troubled and alarmed him, for while at Avignon he caused an effigy of himself to be made life-size in wax and placed under a tabernacle close to the relics of the young Cardinal Pierre de Luxembourg, of saintly reputation, to whose tomb people were flocking to be cured of epilepsy and other maladies.[129]
There was no royal post at that time; it was not instituted till the reign of Louis XI. Charles sent a courier to the Queen two or three weeks after his departure, to ask for news of her; he was then in Dauphiné, and from that time until his return in March she seems to have had no more letters or communications from him.[130]
During his absence another daughter was born and named Jeanne, like the first one. Isabeau had now two daughters still living. This second Jeanne afterwards married the Duc de Bretagne.
M. Vallet de Viriville says of Isabeau that although frivolous, capricious, and fantastic, she seems to have been liked by her ladies, and was certainly just as fond of her children as other women usually are. While they were little she had them always with her, caressed and watched over them, wept and prayed when they were ill, and redoubled her lamentations when any of them died. Her neglect of them a little later on, however, seems to contradict this; but then Isabeau was a person so inconsistent and selfish that neither her affection nor her dislike could ever be reckoned upon; and her extravagance and folly was the cause of the penury to which the royal children were at one time reduced. Her quarrels with her sons in later years were long after they had passed childhood; with those of her daughters who lived to grow up she does not seem to have disagreed.
The Queen and the Duchesse de Touraine had been left together at Beauté by their husbands when they started for the south.
After an absence of several months, spent as has been described, those young princes turned their steps northwards again. When they arrived at Montpellier the King told his brother that he felt so impatient to see the Queen and Duchesse de Touraine again that he could not wait any longer, but proposed that they should race back to Paris; a bet of 5,000 francs to be paid to the winner. Louis agreed, and they set off, riding day and night, changing horses very frequently and being carried in litters when it was absolutely necessary to take a little rest. The race was won by Louis, who got on to a boat at Troyes and went down the Seine to Melun, thus getting rest all that part of the way. At Melun he disembarked and rode on to Paris, where he arrived some hours before the King, having done it in four days and a half.