Charles that their romantic but sterile mountains were not altogether worth the bridles of his splendidly equipped cavalry.  But the more they humbled themselves, the higher was his haughtiness raised.  It appeared that he had at this period conceived the project of uniting in one common conquest the ancient dominions of Lothaire I., who had possessed the whole of the countries traversed by the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po; and he even spoke of passing the Alps, like Hannibal, for the invasion of Italy.

Switzerland was, by moral analogy as well as physical fact, the rock against which these extravagant projects were shattered.  The army of Charles, which engaged the hardy mountaineers in the gorges of the Alps near the town of Granson, were literally crushed to atoms by the stones and fragments of granite detached from the heights and hurled down upon their heads.  Charles, after this defeat, returned to the charge six weeks later, having rallied his army and drawn reinforcements from Burgundy.  But Louis had despatched a body of cavalry to the Swiss—­a force in which they were before deficient; and thus augmented, their army amounted to thirty-four thousand men.  They took up a position, skilfully chosen, on the borders of the Lake of Morat, where they were attacked by Charles at the head of sixty thousand soldiers of all ranks.  The result was the total defeat of the latter, with the loss of ten thousand killed, whose bones, gathered into an immense heap, and bleaching in the winds, remained for above three centuries; a terrible monument of rashness and injustice on the one hand, and of patriotism and valor on the other.

Charles was now plunged into a state of profound melancholy; but he soon burst from this gloomy mood into one of renewed fierceness and fatal desperation.  Nine months after the battle of Morat he re-entered Lorraine, at the head of an army, not composed of his faithful militia of the Netherlands, but of those mercenaries in whom it was madness to place trust.  The reinforcements meant to be despatched to him by those provinces were kept back by the artifices of the count of Campo Basso, an Italian who commanded his cavalry, and who only gained his confidence basely to betray it.  Rene, duke of Lorraine, at the head of the confederate forces, offered battle to Charles under the walls of Nancy; and the night before the combat Campo Basso went over to the enemy with the troops under his command.  Still Charles had the way open for retreat.  Fresh troops from Burgundy and Flanders were on their march to join him; but he would not be dissuaded from his resolution to fight, and he resolved to try his fortune once more with his dispirited and shattered army.  On this occasion the fate of Charles was decided, and the fortune of Louis triumphant.  The rash and ill-fated duke lost both the battle and his life.  His body, mutilated with wounds, was found the next day, and buried with great pomp in the town of Nancy, by the orders of the generous victor, the duke of Lorraine.