About an hour afterwards, suddenly, the King set upon his brother, his spear a-tilt, as hunters hunt a stag.... The more distant of the royal party thought the King had spied a hare or a hart in the forest.... Then, as the truth dawned, there was a dreadful scene. Cries, wounds, men falling from their horses, and a fanatic madman who none the less was still a sacred and irresistible presence! The King of France was furiously and murderously mad.
Four men were slain, others saved themselves by simulating death. Orleans fortunately was not hurt at all. For four days the King’s frenzy lasted, with fits of delirium and lapses into death-like exhaustion. The most cruel part of his sickness was the evident anguish of his spirit. “Will no one pluck out of my heart the dagger that my fair brother of Orleans has planted there?” the poor mad youth would cry; and he would mutter to himself, “I must kill him! I _must_ kill him!” It was useless to instruct the people that there is no reason in the sick hatred of a distempered mind. Nor would they find sufficient motive in the rumoured unfaithfulness of Isabel with Louis. They sought a darker, a more subtle explanation, and their suspicions were fostered, for political ends, by the enemies of Orleans—the faction of his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.
For when the King recovered from his frenzy, his mind remained weak and disabled. It was necessary to hand over to his uncles for a while the direction of affairs. This made the strongest of them, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, more than ever strong; he was in fact, though not in form, the regent. Against his rule one voice was ever raised in protest, the voice of the young ambitious brother of the King.
Louis of Orleans was now twenty-one years of age; through his marriage and the gifts of the King he had become formidably rich; through the weakness of the King he was formidably powerful. He was the nearest to the throne and he desired the regency. But the people suspected Orleans; he had too much to gain by the death or the incapacity of his brother. The people, in their passionate pity for the gentle monarch they adored, began to hate and fear the Queen and Orleans. In later days they did not scruple to declare their misgivings, but at first they dared not directly accuse the Queen, they would not directly accuse the young, beautiful Louis, their pride from his childhood, eloquent, religious, gay, slow to anger. With Juvenal they found him “beau prince et gratieux;” and, like Christine, they accounted him, “en ces jeunes faiz et en toutes choses très-avenant ... car il aime les bons ... nul fellonie ni cruauté en luy.” But he was young; he had been led away (Juvenal finds the phrase for them) “_by the means of those who were near to him_.... He had strange youthful follies that I will not declare.... _There were those about him_, young people, who induced him to do many things he had better have left undone.” This vague and mysterious excuse is the veil of a terrible accusation. The people began to say that the Duke of Orleans was a sorcerer.