Taken the same evening to the Château de Talant, near Dijon, the royal prisoner was treated with the deference due to his rank, but, alas! he had fallen into the hands of the enemy of his house--the hated Duke of Burgundy. That evening the curfew sounded not in Nancy, but the gates were shut and barred, and two weeping women, powerless in their woe, never sought their couches in the castle. Mother and daughter, Margaret and Isabelle, were nigh death themselves. No tidings could they gain of the whereabouts or of the condition of the man they loved. Duchess Isabelle cried out: “Alas! I do not know whether my husband is dead or alive or wounded, nor where they have taken him.” None had a consoling answer, for all Nancy was in mourning. Two thousand good men and true lay dead upon the stricken field, and three thousand more shared the imprisonment of their Duke. The wounded in hundreds crawled into city, village, and mansion; not a house in Lorraine but was flooded with women’s tears and men’s blood that desperate day and night. At last splashed and bedraggled heralds brought news of the Duke’s captivity, and that his wounds were not serious: “_M’sieur le Duc, madame, estoit en bon santé; les Bourguignons l’avoient pris: il se trouv at Dijon demain_.” Thus assured of her husband’s safety, Isabelle brushed away her tears and roused herself to action. Promptly she called together the Council of State, where she presided in person, and eloquently demanded that strong measures should at once be taken to carry on the war against Vaudémont and Philippe de Bourgogne, raise sufficient funds to make good losses, and secure the liberty of the Duke. The Council responded nobly and patriotically to the call of their Duchess; as the “_Chroniques de Lorraine_” has it: “They had pity upon her, for she had borne four sturdy children as comely as you might wish to see.” “_Elle fust allegrée!_” was the universal testimony to Isabelle’s worth as a wife and mother. Duchess Margaret, too, perhaps for the first time in her life of devotion, raised her voice, and called for the temporal sword to be reground to avenge the disaster. She accompanied her daughter, both mounted, to Vézelise, which Isabelle had appointed as the rendezvous of the new army, and personally enrolled companies and squadrons, fastening to each man’s helm a thistle--the cognizance of Lorraine. Then she addressed a protest to the victor of Bulgneville, in which she warned him not to approach Nancy, but to regard herself as his implacable foe until he should deliver up the Duke. Étienne Pasquier, the chronicler, sums up in ten words the courageous character of Duchess Isabelle. “Within the body of a woman,” he says, “the Duchess carries the heart of a man.” After warning Vaudémont, she concluded with him a truce of three months, during which period she went in person to Charles VII., who was then in Dauphiné, and implored his intervention and assistance. In her train was a young Maid of