There was no help here from the violence of Raynouard. Venice especially declared that against France and Genoa she would do nothing. And every day recorded the conquests of the French. The Milanese ambassadors returned very sadly, “despised by the Venetians,” says Corio, “and treated as perniciously as possible.” In vain they bade Francesco Sforza give battle to the audacious little force of Raynouard. Count Francesco, who had ever been favourable to France, pursued his waiting game, although Bosco Marengo, closely besieged by the French, was almost at the end of possible resistance, and the fall of Bosco meant the loss of Alessandria. At last the Milanese succeeded in scraping together about fifteen hundred soldiers, and these, under Coglioni, they sent to Alessandria to harass the enemy. The French were taken between two fires—on the one side Coglioni, on the other the Alessandrian reinforcements; yet at first they gained the day, but so furious was their anger, and so long they dallied in the slaughter of their enemies, that before they had despatched the last, a further reinforcement of the Milanese, and a successful sally on the part of the besieged, intercepted their return. Raynouard was taken prisoner with many of his men; the cities which had revolted to him returned to the allegiance of the Milanese republic; and the royal troops, leaderless and disbanded in the very hour of victory, fled home as best they might to Asti.
This was on Oct. 17, 1447. Twelve days later the Duke of Orleans himself arrived in Asti. There he made a solemn entry on Oct. 26th, riding under a däis borne by the notables of the city robed and hooded all in white, _pro majori letitia adventus ipsius domini ducis_. Charles of Orleans was now a man of fifty-seven, amiable and sanguine. Something of the charm and of the inefficiency of youth appeared to linger around this aging poet, who, taken captive a youth of twenty-four, issued into the world again almost a man of fifty. Those intervening years had held for him none of the serious business of life: and his experience was still the experience of charming, ardent, and unhappy youth. Since Agincourt he had counted his years by lyrics, not by battles; and now perhaps one of the serious things to him in this contentious Lombardy was his friendship with Antonio Astesano, professor of eloquence and poetry at Asti, himself no inconsiderable versifier, and author of a poetic epistle on the victories of the Maid of Orleans, which in 1430 he had sent to the Duke in his English prison. Charles, with his serene unpractical temper, his interest in literature, his inexperience of life, hoping all things, doing nothing, appears a strange figure in that distracted Lombardy: a garlanded maypole stuck in the front of battle.
