In a neighbouring field the lists had been prepared, surrounded with wooden galleries for the ladies; and in the great court of the abbey a banquet hall had been constructed 192 feet long by 36 wide and hung throughout with tapestries of silk and gold. The first day of the tournament twenty-two knights in green and gold armour were conducted into the lists to the sound of music, by twenty-two fair ladies similarly attired and mounted on elegant palfreys; each gave her knight a ribbon of her own colours. The contests lasted all day; then the company proceeded from the enclosure to the festival hall and after the supper the ladies awarded the prize to the two who had done the best. The rest of the night was passed in dances and _caroles_[30] and in “pastimes” of a less innocent kind. The fête lasted three days and three nights--nights of orgy and delirium which rendered the venerable cloisters of St. Denis the witnesses of many voluptuous mysteries and which must have strangely scandalised the chaste shade of St. Louis in the depths of its tomb. The jousts and balls were succeeded by a ceremony of a sterner character but equally sumptuous: the young king loved to vary his emotions and his shows. He had been seized with “a great love” for the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, a feeling which was shared by the whole nation: although nine years had passed since the death of that great captain, and though Charles V had honoured him with a splendid funeral, Charles VI insisted on recelebrating the obsequies of Messire Bertrand in presence of all the French and foreign nobility whom the tournament had brought together.