But Louis XI.’s deliverance after his quasi-captivity at Peronne, and the new treaty he had concluded with Duke Charles, were and could be only a temporary break in the struggle between these two princes, destined as they were, both by character and position, to irremediable incompatibility.  They were too powerful and too different to live at peace when they were such close neighbors, and when their relations were so complicated.  We find in the chronicle of George Chastelain, a Flemish burgher, and a servant on familiar terms with Duke Charles, as he had been with his father, Duke Philip, a judicious picture of this incompatibility and the causes of it.  “There had been,” he says, “at all times a rancor between these two princes, and, whatever pacification might have been effected to-day, everything returned to-morrow to the old condition, and no real love could be established.  They suffered from incompatibility of temperament and perpetual discordance of will; and the more they advanced in years the deeper they plunged into a state of serious difference and hopeless bitterness.  The king was a man of subtlety and full of fence; he knew how to recoil for a better spring, how to affect humility and gentleness in his deep designs, how to yield and to give up in order to receive double, and how to bear and tolerate for a time his own grievances in hopes of being able at last to have his revenge.  He was, therefore, very much to be feared for his practical knowledge, showing the greatest skill and penetration in the world.  Duke Charles was to be feared for his great courage, which he evinced and displayed in his actions, making no account of king or emperor.  Thus, whilst the king had great sense and great ability, which he used with dissimulation and suppleness in order to succeed in his views, the duke, on his side, had a great sense of another sort and to another purpose, which he displayed by a public ostentation of his pride, without any fear of putting himself in a false position.”  Between 1468 and 1477, from the incident at Peronne to the death of Charles at the siege of Nancy, the history of the two princes was nothing but one constant alternation between ruptures and re-adjustments, hostilities and truces, wherein both were constantly changing their posture, their language, and their allies.  It was at one time the affairs of the Duke of Brittany or those of Prince Charles of France, become Duke of Guienne; at another it was the relations with the different claimants to the throne of England, or the fate of the towns, in Picardy, handed over to the Duke of Burgundy by the treaties of Conflans and Peronne, which served as a ground or pretext for the frequent recurrences of war.  In 1471 St. Quentin opened its gates to Count Louis of St. Poi, constable of France; and Duke Charles complained with threats about it to the Count of Dampmartin, who was in commend, on that frontier, of Louis XI.’s army, and had a good understanding with the constable.  Dampmartin,