It was very hot, and there was a great crowd at the joustes and banquet, the Queen and several of the ladies nearly fainted. The King ordered a barrier to be broken down to let in air, and the tables withdrawn (“levées”) to let them go out “without wine or spices” (dessert).
The King, who took no part in the entry, which was in honour of the Queen alone, had nevertheless managed to amuse himself very well, and had seen the whole spectacle in disguise. “Savoisy,” he said to his chamberlain, “I want you to get on a good horse, and I will get up behind you; we will disguise ourselves so that no one will know us, and go and see my wife’s entry.”[125]
They mingled in the crowd, seeing and hearing much that diverted them, and the King afterwards told the Queen and ladies all his adventures with great delight.
Some of the ladies left and went to their own hôtels when the King and Queen retired, but many remained all night, and the next morning the Queen and court moved to the hôtel St. Paul, where the revels went on for six days more, with a license that again called forth the reproaches and indignation of the preachers.[126]
Splendid presents were given by the City of Paris and by different people to the Queen and the Duchesse de Touraine, whose first appearance among them had excited great curiosity and interest. The Duc de Berry gave Isabeau a large house in the faubourg St. Marcel, with courts, galleries, moats, gardens, meadows, and a rabbit warren.[127]
The fatigue and excitement of all these gaieties seem to have told upon her, for she could not be present at a banquet and dance given by the King to the ladies of the court during the festivities at St. Paul, but stayed in her room and supped there.
She did not accompany the King when early in October he set off on a journey south. He had received great complaints from Aquitaine[128] of the oppressions and extortions of the Duc de Berry, and he also wanted to attend the coronation at Avignon of the young King of Sicily. The Queen being _enceinte_ could not take a long and tiring journey, besides which it is more than probable that Charles on this occasion greatly preferred her absence. For his progress through Provence, Guyenne, and Languedoc, though ostensibly for political objects, such as the extinction of the schism at Avignon, the coronation of the King of Sicily, and the reformation of the abuses in Aquitaine, had also its social side. There, in the land of troubadours, poetry, and courts of love, where the sun was burning and the nights were bright, where the imagination was more vivid and the hot blood of the south ran quicker through the veins, where manners and morals were easy and had a tinge of orientalism derived from contact with the East; the progress of the young King from one town to another was a saturnalia of dancing, feasting, love-making, and violent exercise in games and tournaments, which for the first time seem to have taken visible effect upon him.