There was, however, one honour that lay wholly within his gift.  If Charles desired higher rank, the emperor would be quite willing to erect his territories into a realm and to create him monarch of his own agglomerated possessions, welded into a new unity.  This proposition wounded Charles keenly.  He assured Sigismund[8] (January 15, 1471) that his nomination as King of the Romans would never have occurred to him spontaneously.  He had been assured that it was a darling project of the emperor, and he had simply been willing to please him, etc.  As to a kingdom of his own, he refused the proposition with actual disdain.

Then various suitors for the hand of Mary of Burgundy appeared on the scene successively.  To Nicholas of Calabria, Duke of Lorraine, grandson of old King Rene of Anjou, she was formally betrothed.[9]

“My cousin, since it is the pleasure of my very redoubtable seigneur and father, I promise you that, you being alive, I will take none other than you and I promise to take you when God permits it.”  So wrote Mary with her own hand on June 13, 1472, at Mons. On December 3d, she declared all such pledges revoked as though they never had been made, and Nicholas, too, formally renounced his pretensions to her hand.

There were several moments when Charles of France had appeared to be very near acceptance as Mary’s husband, and several other princes seemed eligible suitors.  Doubtless her father found his daughter very valuable as a means of attracting friendship.  Doubtless, too, as Commines says, he was not anxious to introduce any son-in-law into his family.  His fortieth year was only completed in 1473, and he was by no means ready to range himself as an ancestor.

At successive times the negotiations between Charles and Frederic were ruptured only to be renewed on some slightly different basis.  Threaded together they made a story fraught with interest for Louis XI., and one that, very probably, he had an opportunity to hear.  Up to August, 1472, it is a safe inference that Philip de Commines was fully cognisant of the propositions and counter-propositions, the understandings and misunderstandings, the private letters of, as well as the interviews with, the accredited Austrian envoys that appeared at one Burgundian camp after another.  Probably there was nothing more] valuable in the store of learning carried by the astute historian from his first patron to his second than all this fund of confidential miscellany.

It seems a fair surmise that Louis XI. enjoyed immensely the delightful private view into his rival’s dreams, the disappointments and rehabilitation of his shattered visions.  The relation would have made him not only fully aware of the reasons why Charles was diverted from his hot pursuit of the Somme towns, but thoroughly informed as to the great obstacles lying in the path which the duke hoped to travel.  Naturally, the king was quite willing to rest assured that ruin was inevitable.  If his rival were disposed to wreck himself rashly on German shoals, the king was equally disposed to be an acquiescent onlooker and to spare his own powder.