even said that several were killed, among them a bastard of Polignac.
The king's brother, the Duke of Orleans, happened to be quite close by.
'Fly, my nephew d'Orleans,' shouted the Duke of Burgundy: 'my lord is
beside himself. My God! let some one try and seize him!' He was so
furious that none durst risk it; and he was left to gallop hither and
thither, and tire himself in pursuit of first one and then another. At
last, when he was weary and bathed in sweat, his chamberlain, William de
Martel, came up behind and threw his arms about him. He was surrounded,
had his sword taken from him, was lifted from his horse, and laid gently
on the ground, and then his jacket was unfastened. His brother and his
uncles came up, but his eyes were fixed and recognized nobody, and he did
not utter a word. 'We must go back to Le Mans,' said the Dukes of Berry
and Burgundy: 'here is an end of the trip to Brittany.' On the way they
fell in with a wagon drawn by oxen; in this they laid the King of France,
having bound him for fear of a renewal of his frenzy, and so took him
back, motionless and speechless, to the town."

It was not a mere fit of delirious fever; it was the beginning of a
radical mental derangement, sometimes in abeyance, or at least for some
time alleviated, but bursting out again without appreciable reason, and
aggravated at every fresh explosion. Charles VI. had always had a taste
for masquerading. When in 1389 the young queen, Isabel of Bavaria, came
to Paris to be married, the king, on the morning of her entry, said to
his chamberlain, Sire de Savoisy, "Prithee, take a good horse, and I will
mount behind thee; and we will dress so as not to be known and go to see
my wife cone in." Savoisy did not like it, but the king insisted; and so
they went in this guise through the crowd, and got many a blow from the
officers' staves when they attempted to approach too near the procession.
In 1393, a year after his first outbreak of madness, the king, during an
entertainment at court, conceived the idea of disguising as savages