Isabeau as linguistic incompetent
A form of vilification popular from the last decades of the twentieth century has been to cast Isabeau as a foil, as the baleful opposite of a good figure. She has been the traitor and adulterer opposed to the patriotic maid Joan of Arc, promiscuous spendthrift against the austere proto-feminist Christine de Pizan, and evil mother against the good mother Yolande of Aragon (or Anjou), Charles VII’ mother-in-law, also tasked with managing her dynasty.
Philippe Erlanger names the first two chapters of his study of Charles VII “La mauvaise mere,” a reference to Isabeau, and “La bonne mere,” a reference to Yolande. In Erlanger’s estimation, Isabeau was neither the monster nor the unnatural mother that she has sometimes been thought to be: she was just busy enjoying the caresses of her lover Louis of Orleans while humble nurses watched over the little Charles.[178] Yolande, on the other hand, was the good fairy who snatched the little prince from the evil genies and brought him to a peaceful oasis.[179] Throughout the course of the almost entirely footnote-free work Erlanger offers not the slightest justification for the characterizations either of the “Bavarian” or Yolande in whom “burning Spain” and “harsh Lorraine” met under the peaceful protection of the Valois.[180]These examples appear farfetched, the anti-Germanism flagrant. It will also be objected that the authors are not serious histories. Still, the narrative continues to circulate in an attenuated form. A recent set of articles on Yolande of Aragon pits Isabeau as the incompetent bungler in contrast with the successful administrator Yolande, as a frivolous dimwit unable to manage her reputation in opposition to the supremely confident, damage-controlling Yolande. Unlike Yolande, “Isabeau never matured; she was stuck fast in an adolescent phase of avid selfishness underwritten by an astonishing aptitude for intrigue” and her “flamboyance and party-girl reputation...
establish[ed] the foundation for the propaganda that weakened her influence.”[181]No primary sources are offered as evidence, only secondary sources which themselves offer no evidence: Charity Cannon Willard; Marie-Josephe Pinet, who propagated the narrative of Isabeau’s bad reputation, claiming, without citation, that “all year [1405], people never ceased to talk about the queen;”[182] and Marcel Thibault, whose attitude toward the queen should surely militate against accepting his claim uncritically. According to Thibault:
She remained German in her innermost heart and soon we will see her, oblivious to the noble task that had fallen upon her, presiding in a sense over the misfortunes that will rend the kingdom, and which, throughout the long year, cover it with misery and ruins until a heroic girl from the Marches of Lorraine, saves the crown that this foreigner almost lost.[183]
The most subtle and eloquent example of Isabeau as foil is set forth in Franpoise Autrand’s erudite biography of Charles VI. In this work, Isabeau is positioned to her disadvantage against Valentina Visconti. We have seen Collas mooning over the French-Italian beauty and registering disgust for her German relative. Autrand’s Isabeau is not Collas’s “shame of the reign of Charles VI,” or even Willard’s greedy vulgarian, but a dazed and confused woman who, next to Valentina, was quite simply out of her league.
In a discussion of Isabeau’s magnificent three-day coronation ceremony in 1389, the biography depicts the queen as a tongue-tied simpleton. The depiction is an old favorite with earlier historians, as well. Autrand draws perhaps on Collas, who zeroes in on Isabeau’s linguistic ineptitude. Glossing chronicler Jean Froissart’s description of Isabeau, accompanied by Valentina, during the parade and subsequent festivities, Collas describes the elite bourgeois of Paris presenting the king, the queen and Valentine with gifts, carried to them on elegant litters.
Collas, following Froissart, notes the king’s response: “Thank you, good people, these are beautiful and rich.”[184] Collas then continues:The queen seems to have said nothing, which is not surprising, because at that point it seems that she still had trouble speaking French. As for Valentine, the chronicle mentions that she “thanked profusely and wisely those who had presented them,.,.”[185]
Collas’s image of the tongue-tied Isabeau has been absorbed into the scholarship on her, emerging periodically in such assumptions as Eric Russell Chamberlin’s comment that her “grasp of French was never complete and she spoke with a thick guttural accent to the end of her days.”[186] The image features too in Autrand’s Charles VI. Commenting, like Collas, on Froissart’s report on the presentation of gifts by the Parisians, the biography asserts that whereas Charles VI and Valentina offer their gracious thanks, Isabeau, in contrast, “said nothing.”[187] Why? Was it awkwardness? Did she not yet speak French even though she had been in France for four years at that point? Or was it simply the malice of a somewhat nationalistic chronicler who was happy to observe that eloquence, that eminently royal quality, belonged only to the French line? As in Collas’s work, the nationalistic chronicler is not named, but it is clear that that both Collas and Autrand are citing Jean Froissart. Of the two major sources of information on Isabeau’s coronation, the chronicle of the Michel Pintoin is extremely concise, and it says absolutely nothing about anyone—the king, the queen or Valentina—responding to their gift-givers.[188] The chronicle of Froissart, however, narrates the episode at length.
An examination of the episode as Froissart recounts it, however, reveals that it does not at all suggest that Isabeau was incapable of expressing herself in French. This chronicle account offers instead a particularly useful exercise in the necessity of reading sources critically and carefully.