After the treaty was signed, the king showed no resentment at his defeat but urged his cousin to amuse himself a while in Paris before returning home.  Charles was rash, but he had not the temerity to trust himself so far.  Pleading a promise to his father to enter no city gate until on paternal soil, he declined the invitation and soon returned to the Netherlands, where his own household had suffered change.  During his absence, the Countess of Charolais had died and been buried at Antwerp.  Charles is repeatedly lauded for his perfect faithfulness to his wife, but her death seems to have made singularly little ripple on the surface of his life.  The chroniclers touch on the event very casually, laying more stress on the opportunity it gave Louis XI. to offer his daughter Anne as her successor, than on the event itself.[15]

[Footnote 1:  La Marche, ii., 227.  Peter von Hagenbach was the chamberlain to enforce this.]

[Footnote 2:  The receipt for this half payment was signed October 8, 1462. (Comines, Memoires, Lenglet du Fresnoy edition, ii., 392-403.)]

[Footnote 3:  Du Clercq, iii., 236; Comines-Lenglet, ii., 393.]

[Footnote 4:  Commines, Memoires I., ch. i.  In the above passages Dannett’s translation is followed for the racy English.]

[Footnote 5:  Commines says at The Hague; Meyer makes it Gorcum.]

[Footnote 6:  III., 3.]

[Footnote 7:  Lavisse iv^{ii}., 336.]

[Footnote 8:  Chastellain, v., i, etc.]

[Footnote 9:  V., II.]

[Footnote 10:  Letter of the Count of Charolais to the citizens of Amiens. (Collection de Documents inedits sur l’histoire de France.) “Melanges,” ii., 317.  In this collection taken from MS. in the Bibl.  Nat. there are many letters private and public about these events.]

[Footnote 11:  Since its recovery from the English, there had been no duke in Normandy.  It was thus the one province open to the king.]

[Footnote 12:  I., ch. xi.  His vivacious story of the siege should be read in detail.]

[Footnote 13:  I., ch. xii.]

[Footnote 14:  Commines, I., ch. xii.]

[Footnote 15:  La Marche, iii., p. 27.]

CHAPTER VII

LIEGE AND ITS FATE

1465-1467

“When we have finished here we shall make a fine beginning against those villains the Liegeois.”  Thus wrote the count’s secretary on October 18th.[1] Charles had no desire to rest on the laurels won before Paris.  To another city he now turned his attention, to Liege which owed nothing whatsoever to Burgundy.

Before the days when the buried treasures of the soil filled the air with smoke, the valley where Liege lies was a lovely spot.[2] Tradition tells how, in the sixth century, Monulphe, Bishop of Tongres, as he made a progress through his diocese was attracted by the beauties of the site where a few hovels then clustered near the Meuse.  After looking down from the heights to the river’s banks for a brief space, the bishop turned to his followers and said, as if uttering a prophecy: