The last duke of the Robertine line was Philip de Rouvre, so called from the castle of Rouvre where he was born near Dijon. He inherited both Burgundies and Artois from his grandfather, his father having been killed at the siege of Aiguillon. Now this Philip de Rouvre, like some of my readers, is an interesting personage only by the woman he married; and to his wife rather than to him I ask your attention. She was Margaret daughter of Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders, lord of Ghent, of Bruges, of Ypres and of other municipalities of the Low Countries. Margaret was his only child and heir. It was she who was destined to bring to the House of Burgundy, those first acquisitions in the Netherlands which were to draw the rest after them, and make the Spanish Hapsburgs counts of Flanders, of La Franche Comté, of Holland, of Hainault; dukes of Brabant, lords of Ghent, etc., an accumulation of titles by no means empty, such as the world had never seen before. In a word, Margaret of Flanders was to lay the foundation of the Belgic wing of the empire of Charles-the-fifth. Margaret was very young when she married Philip de Rouvre, and not long after their espousals Philip died of the plague, leaving Margaret childless; and the great Robertine line which had worn the ducal coronet three centuries, was ended. How then was this childless widow to fulfil the destiny we have marked out for her? We will leave her to ponder that problem, and take up our story at another point. John of Valois king of France was called John II., though you have to look with a microscope into French history, to discover John I. No chapter bears his name at the head of it. (v. Captivity, page 62.) John II. was called John-the-good for no reason that history has explained. If he ever did anything that was good, it has shared the fate of the men who lived before Agamemnon. He was not even a good soldier for a king, though very pugnacious. His idea of military strategy was to shut down his visor, couch his lance and spur into the thickest of the fight. In following up these tactics at the battle of Poictiers, he was knocked off his horse. He could not rise for the weight of his armor; so his attendants set him up on end, and he instantly began to lay about him again, on foot, with his accustomed fury. His eldest son the dauphin, seeing that the battle was lost, turned on his heel and ran away; and not only lived to fight another day but to rule France so well that he gained the name of Charles-the-wise. Not so Charles’ youngest brother Philip a boy of sixteen. He stood by his sire to the end; and as the enemy pressed in now on this side and now on that, he would cry out: Look out father, on the right! look out father on the left! and would throw himself in front, and play at cut and thrust like a gladiator.