the instrument. The council of princes met the next day at the Hotel de
Nesle. The Duke of Burgundy, who had recovered all his audacity, came to
take his seat there. Word was sent to him not to enter the room. Duke
John persisted; but the Duke of Berry went to the door and said to him,
"Nephew, give up the notion of entering the council; you would not be
seen there with pleasure." "I give up willingly," answered Duke John;
"and that none may be accused of putting to death the Duke of Orleans, I
declare that it was I, and none other, who caused the doing of what has
been done." Thereupon he turned his horse's head, returned forthwith to
the Hotel d'Artois, and, taking only six men with him, he galloped
without a halt, except to change horses, to the frontier of Flanders.
The Duke of Bourbon complained bitterly at the council that an immediate
arrest had not been ordered. The Admiral de Brabant, and a hundred of
the Duke of Orleans' knights, set out in pursuit, but were unable to come
up in time. Neither Raoul d'Anquetonville nor any other of the assassins
was caught. The magistrates, as well as the public, were seized with
stupor in view of so great a crime and so great a criminal.

But the Duke of Orleans left a widow who, in spite of his infidelities
and his irregularities, was passionately attached to him. Valentine
Visconti, the Duke of Milan's daughter, whose dowry had gone to pay the
ransom of King John, was at Chateau-Thierry when she heard of her
husband's murder. Hers was one of those natures, full of softness and at
the same time of fire, which grief does not overwhelm, and in which a
passion for vengeance is excited and fed by their despair. She started
for Paris in the early part of December, 1407, during the roughest
winter, it was said, ever known for several centuries, taking with her
all her children. The Duke of Berry, the Duke of Bourbon, the Count of
Clermont, and the constable went to meet her. Herself and all her train
in deep mourning, she dismounted at the hostel of St. Paul, threw herself