But to return to the epoch of Charles's death, or, at all events, of his disappearance. 'The people, the masses'--we are quoting from Kervyn--'who had lately been astounded at the pomp and wealth of the great Burgundian Duke, and who had so long been accustomed to bend to his iron will, utterly failed to understand how so great a prince, the sovereign of so many realms, a man so redoubtable throughout all the West, could have been suddenly swallowed up with all his glory in a pit which his own foolhardiness had digged for him. At the siege, too, of a petty town in Lorraine, by a troop of Rhenish boors and a handful of Swiss shepherds. It altogether passed their comprehension, and they persuaded themselves that he had escaped, and would one day come back again, as his great ancestor Baldwin of Constantinople had done two centuries before. Some of the vanquished had succeeded in crossing the Meurthe, and were known to have escaped by concealing themselves in woods and so forth; perhaps he was among this number. As late as January 15 Margaret of York still cherished this hope. 'From news which we have received from divers quarters,' she wrote at this date, 'we expect and hope that by God's mercy the Duke is still alive and well,' and on the 23rd his daughter Mary wrote that she was not yet sure that her father was dead. Five years later a report was set abroad that he was leading the life of a hermit at Bruchsal in Suabia--_genus vitæ super humanum morem horridum atque asperum_. An old servant who had fought beside him at Nancy, and had there been made prisoner by the Swiss, went to see, but he failed to recognize his master. The figure, voice, beard, hands, scars of the recluse were not those of Charles the Terrible. But others there were who believed in the marvellous stories of the hermit of Bruchsal, and loaded him with presents, thinking to receive them back tenfold when he returned to his estates. Others swore they had seen Charles at Rome, at Jerusalem, at Lisbon, at London. Others again whispered that he had been spirited away by the machinations of Louis XI.[36] Upon the mysterious disappearance of Charles the Terrible after the defeat of Nancy, his dominions devolved on his only daughter, a girl of nineteen years of age, without army, without treasure, without any rock of defence save those Flemish communes which her ancestors throughout seven generations had never ceased to persecute. They did not refuse to help her, but they demanded that their grievances should first be redressed. Flanders, they urged, was not a fertile land, its prosperity depended wholly on commerce. Commerce could only flourish where freedom was respected, and hence it was of paramount importance that the time-honoured rights and liberties and privileges of the Flemish people should be once more restored to them.