THE STORY OF DU GUESCLIN.*
IN the picturesque tracts of Brittany, round the quaint old fortress-town of St. Malo, rising solidly and antiquely out of the fashionable surroundings of Dinard and Parame, are yet to be found many patriotic records of the once famous Constable of France, Da Gaesclin (carefully to be sounded without the "a" as Da Gueclin), who was the nearest approach to the purgative drug to drive "these English hence" whom history has to tell of. It was in a village near pretty Dinan that Bertrand dri Gnesclin was born, and his statue in the market-place still stands to record his triumphs over the perfidious race, who with their usual tenacity may almost be said to have retaken the town in peaceful guise at the present day. The endless tourists who crowd about the town where Chateanbriand was born and buried, famous more perhaps for that picturesque place of sepulture than for all the literary work which made him a man of such mark in his day, ask equally idle questions about the author of the Genie du Christianisme and the warrior of the fourteenth century. Dr. Stoddard has suc- ceeded in making out of his hero's career a book which reads like a romance of chivalry rather than as a his- torical record of fact. For the Constable of France was, as his historian appropriately reminds us, the typical product of the days of chivalry, that strangest and most contradictory of institutions, at once splendid and puerile, which reigned supreme till Cervantes laughed it out of life. Mr. Stoddard constantly refers us to Froissart, whose old-world pages are the fittest of all chronicles for the strange careers embodied in the chivalric romance. Bertrand du Guesclin was but seventeen years old in 1337, when he entered upon his knightly career in a fashion which should have furnished a chapter for Ivanhoe. He was an ugly boy, and neglected, if not ill-treated, by his parents, who would have nothing to say to him by the side of his brothers and sisters, and aggravated the peculiar nature by persistent unkindness, until a Dame Converse from a neighbouring con- vent, professing to a knowledge of palmistry, prophesied that he was to have no equal, but to become the most esteemed of all the sons of France. Like the gipsy's prophecy to the equally romantic Lady Burton, many centuries afterwards, this startling presage helped to work out its own fulfilment. The "ugly duck" began to preen its plumage. The parents at once regarded their child in a new light, and treated him in a different way, though they were obliged to confine him for four months, when he was nine years old, for inciting the children of his father's tenantry to mimic battles and tournaments, and spending all his pocket-money in entertaining them. When they declined to join in his battles, he assaulted them till they did. At the date of which we have spoken, in 1337, there were festivities at Rennes in honour of the marriage of Jeanne la Boiteuse, • Bertrand the Guesciin, Coos,able of Franc., his Life and Times. By Enoch
Vine Stoddard, M.D. London : G. P. Putnam', Sons-
daughter of the Duke de Bretagne and Countess de Penthivre, with Charles, son of the Count de Blois, and the chief feature was a tournament by the assembled knights and squires.
Mounted upon a workhorse of the family's, and shabbily dressed, he had to listen to the jeers of the bystanders and watch the richly dressed ladies and the bright-armed cavaliers. Among these last was a cousin of his own, who after a certain number of courses kindly lent his armour and horse to the poor relation, and arming him with his own hands, sent him with visor down into the lists. There he promptly overthrew his first adversary, and refusing to uncover or to give his name, he proceeded to unhorse and discomfit all the flower of the field one after another, only lowering his lance courteously to his own father, who thus far had been the con- queror in the tourney. Challenged at once by a stranger who thought he was giving in, he sent the rash man's helmet ten paces off, and was only unhelmeted by a famous Norman champion after a matter of fifteen victories. Then, recognised by his friends, he was awarded the prize of valour and carried off in triumph, to the proud delight of his father. Either on this or on some similar occasion, Tiphaine Ragnenel, heiress and "Fair Maid of Dinan," an enthusiastic descendant of a family loyal to Charles de Blois, to whom Da Guesclin early in the day pledged himself entirely, fell frankly in love with the young hero's plain face, and afterwards married him. She was throughout his brave and faithful helpmeet and his best adviser, looked after all his affairs in his absence, and pledged her jewels for the cause when its adherents were imprisoned. And when she died she left him incon- solable, in the better sense.
The whole of Du Gnesclin's career was in keeping with its wild beginning, which reads like the adventures of the Disinherited Knight at Ashby-de-la-Zouch when he over- threw Reginald Front-de-boauf and Sir Brian de Boisguilbert. At any time or at any place the heroes of that day were ready to turn aside from their stricter duties, and appeal to the ordeal by representative single combat. Thus the "Battle of the Thirty" is minutely described by Froissart, with the doings of Sir Robert Beanmanoir, who, coming into the neighbourhood of the Castle of Ploermel (still famous for its "pardon "), held by one Brambourg for the Countess of Montfort; challenged him to bring out thirty of his garrison to meet an equal number on his side; the friends of both parties being forbidden on pain of death to interfere or to give help. The challenge was accepted, and at the chine de mi Annie, or mid-way oak, half way between the castles of Josselin and Ploermel, Brambourg's party of twenty English, with a complement of Germans and Bretons, met on March 27th, 1351, with Beaumanoir's French and Breton chevaliers. We grieve to say that after a terrible struggle with Bordeaux
swords, daggers, and battle-axes, the English were defeated and Brambourg slain. It will be the part of every true patriot to hope that it was the German element which thus decided the issue. Not a combatant on either side escaped without severe wounds. It is perhaps a pity that similar diffi- culties cannot nowadays be decided in the same summary way, to which perhaps the methods of Henry of Orleans approach the nearest.
The lover of the stricter sides of history will no doubt turn from these characteristic scenes to the more familiar in- cidents of siege and battle which fill the greater part of Dr.
Stoddard's book. They are a little difficult to follow closely, so completely have all the modern developments of military science not only superseded but effaced the records of another age. They have their pictorial interest for us still, though, the annals of the Black Prince and the story of Poitiers, which Dr. Stoddard revives for us with spirit and effect, while the true genius of the time stands boldly out in the story of Da Guesclin's promotion :—
"The King [Charles V.] informed him that he had been elected by the Council of the Nobles of the Realm, Constable of France. Du Guesclin at once begged to be excused from accepting so high an office, saying that he was but a poor chevalier compared with the great lords and valiant men of France. The King declared that it was the will and order of the Council of the Lords of France, and that he did not wish to go contrary to it. Du Guesclin replied, Dear Sir and noble King ! I neither wish nor dare nor am able to do contrary to your wishes, but it is true that I am poor and of noble birth. The office of Constable is so grand and so noble, that he who holds it must lead and command the great even more than the humble. Here are my lords, your brothers, your nephews, and your cousins, who have command of men-at- arras in expeditions : how should I assume to command them ? So I pray you to take this office from me, and confer it upon another who will accept it more willingly than I, and who knows better how to perform its duties.'" And then the Froissart chronicle goes on, after the naïf and simple fashion which a more critical and supercilious age has gradually modified into the relations of H.M.S. 'Pinafore,' to describe how the uncles and the cousins and the aunts were all agreed in asking for Du Guesclin's leadership, and how at last he agreed upon the simple condition that the King would believe nothing that might be said against him behind his back till it had been repeated before his face. And so the thing was promised, and the sword of office pre- sented to the new Constable. And how he fought and conquered, and was imprisoned and released and died,—all these things are written in the chronicle. The downfall of chivalry must have been very complete when, but for two mocking allusions to King Arthur, Shakespeare is silent about it all his pages through, in the whole of the mighty plays which we learn that Tennyson described as the one intellectual process which appeared to him to defy explanation. "A free association of which the ultimate object was the defence of the feeble,"—so Dr. Stoddard defines chivalry, pointing out how its laws grew out of usage before they became feudal. "Strength, endurance, gentility, gentle- ness, courtesy, wealth, and influence" were the qualities of the chevalier, who was before all things pledged to the defence of the true faith. How entirely tactical methods have changed, and by what gradations, since that day, is carefully followed out in the book before us, and typically illustrated by the account of Da Guesclin alternately challenging his opposing Generals to single combat and hewing down the English like oxen with a battle-axe. It is a contrast, indeed, to Moltke planning out his campaigns with deadly exactness in his tent. Yes, the world changes strangely and wildly enough, if slowly on the whole. It is, we think, inevitable that the campaigns of the Black Prince and of Peter the Cruel should at the present day prove rather difficult to mark and to digest, setting aside the melancholy and inevitable speculation as to what all this perpetual hacking and maiming and slaying has led to, or is supposed to effect. But Dr. Stoddard has set them forth with a careful and a worthy zeal, and those who wish it may even study the battle of Poitiers with the help of a ground-plan. Aided by the rich, full sound of the Breton names, the story of Du Guesclin's successful crusades against the irrepressible English invader will be an attractive study to many. There is the very ring of Thermopyla3 about Roncesvalles and the Peers and paladins who fought there, while the chronicles tell of no love-story more graceful than of the manner in which the wealthy and beautiful Tiphaine Raguenel bestowed her heart and hand upon the penniless and unattractive youth who had nothing but his chivalry to bring. We are grateful for these old-world pages, which shift from Brittany to Gallicia and England to Spain, and sorry when, like the Lord Athelstane of Thackeray's Rebecca, his lordship marries again, for prudential reasons after Tiphaine's death witk eanne de Laval, daughter of the Lord de Chatillon. Simply and pathetically is the end of the warrior tol,: at the good age of sixty ; and it is a curious note of the cklvalric feeling that a truce with the English expired on that, day, after which they had agreed to surrender to him, bat to him alone. On learning of his death their commander refused to take advantage of the stipulation, and yielded up his fortress by laying the keys upon the bier, and kneeling before the body. By the wish of the King, Du Guesclin was buried at St. Denis. "To few of her sons in the past does France owe so much, and to none does she owe more." The conception and the foundation of the idea of French unity is the summary of the debt which Dr. Stoddard assigns to him.
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