Many less powerful lords, who had lived a long while in the household of Duke John the Fearless, quitted his son, and sorrowfully returned to their own homes. They were treated as Armagnacs, but they persisted in calling themselves good and loyal Frenchmen. In the duchy of Burgundy the majority of the towns refused to take the oath to the King of England. The most decisive and the most helpful proof of this awakening of national feeling was the ease experienced by the _dauphin_, who was one day to be Charles VII., in maintaining the war which, after the treaty of Troyes, was, in his father’s and his mother’s name, made upon him by the King of England and the Duke of Burgundy. This war lasted more than three years. Several towns, amongst others, Melun, Crotoy, Meaux, and St. Riquier, offered an obstinate resistance to the attacks of the English and Burgundians. On the 23d of March, 1421, the _dauphin_’s troops, commanded by Sire de la Fayette, gained a signal victory over those of Henry V., whose brother, the Duke of Clarence, was killed in action. It was in Perche, Anjou, Maine, on the banks of the Loire, and in Southern France, that the _dauphin_ found most of his enterprising and devoted partisans. The sojourn made by Henry V. at Paris, in December, 1420, with his wife, Queen Catherine, King Charles VI., Queen Isabel, and the Duke of Burgundy, was not, in spite of galas and acclamations, a substantial and durable success for him. His dignified but haughty manners did not please the French; and he either could not or would not render them more easy and amiable, even with men of note who were necessary to him. Marshal Isle-Adam one day went to see him in camp on war-business. The king considered that he did not present himself with sufficient ceremony. “Isle-Adam,” said he, “is that the robe of a marshal of France?” “Sir, I had this whity-gray robe made to come hither by water aboard of Seine-boats.” “Ha!” said the king, “look you a prince in the face when you speak to him?” “Sir, it is the custom in France, that when one man speaks to another, of whatever rank and puissance that other may be, he passes for a sorry fellow, and but little honorable, if he dares not look him in the face.” “It is not our fashion,” said the king; and the subject dropped there. A popular poet of the time, Alan Chattier, constituted himself censor of the moral corruption and interpreter of the patriotic paroxysms caused by the cold and harsh supremacy of this unbending foreigner, who set himself up for king of France, and had not one feeling in sympathy with the French. Alan Chartier’s _Quadriloge invectif_ is a lively and sometimes eloquent allegory, in which France personified implores her three children, the clergy, the chivalry, and the people, to forget their own quarrels and unite to save their mother whilst saving themselves; and this political pamphlet getting spread about amongst the provinces did good service to