Justice was easy to
ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed
was another question. No one in France was strong enough to
punish John of Burgundy; and perhaps no one, except the
widow, very sincere in wishing to punish him.
She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her
eagerness wore her out; and she died about a year after the
murder, of grief and indignation, unrequited love and
unsatisfied resentment. It was during the last months of her
life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing the soft
hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain
natural son of her husband's destined to become famous in the
sequel as the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. "YOU
WERE STOLEN FROM ME," she said; "it is you who are fit to
avenge your father." These are not the words of ordinary
mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a saying, over
which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That the
child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of
her body, was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and
the expression of this singular and tragic jealousy is
preserved to us by a rare chance, in such straightforward and
vivid words as we are accustomed to hear only on the stress
of actual life, or in the theatre. In history - where we see
things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times
is brought before us, deplorably adulterated and defaced,
fitted to very vague and pompous words, and strained through
many men's minds of everything personal or precise - this
speech of the widowed duchess startles a reader, somewhat as
the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe.
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