"Because he is a poor man, the son of small laboring folks, who are still tillers of the ground in our country." "Ah!" said Charles; "is there nothing more?
Assuredly, fair brother, we should prize more highly the poor man of wisdom than the profligate ass;" and he maintained in the office him whom he had put there.
The government of Charles V.was the personal government of an intelligent, prudent, and honorable king, anxious for the interests of the state, at home and abroad, as well as for his own; with little inclination for, and little confidence in, the free co-operation of the country in its own affairs, but with wit enough to cheerfully call upon it when there was any pressing necessity, and accepting it then without chicanery or cheating, but safe to go back as soon as possible to that sole dominion, a medley of patriotism and selfishness, which is the very insufficient and very precarious resource of peoples as yet incapable of applying their liberty to the art of their own government.

Charles V.
had recourse three times, in July, 1367, and in May and December, 1369, to a convocation of the states-general, in order to be put in a position to meet the political and financial difficulties of France.

At the second of these assemblies, when the chancellor, William de Dormans, had explained the position of the kingdom, the king himself rose up "for to say to all that if they considered that he had done anything he ought not to have done, they should tell him so, and he would amend what he had done, for there was still time to repair it, if he had done too much or not enough." The question at that time was as to entertaining the appeal of the barons of Aquitaine to the King of France as suzerain of the Prince of Wales, whose government had become intolerable, and to thus make a first move to struggle out of the humiliating pace of Bretigny.
Such a step, and such words, do great honor to the memory of the pacific prince who was at that time bearing the burden of the government of France.

It was Charles V.'s good fortune to find amongst his servants a man who was destined to be the thunderbolt of war and the glory of knighthood of his reign.

About 1314, fifty years before Charles's accession, there was born at the castle of Motte-Broon, near Rennes, in a family which could reckon two ancestors amongst Godfrey de Bouillon's comrades in the first crusade, Bertrand du Guesclin, "the ugliest child from Rennes to Dinan," says a contemporary chronicle, flat-nosed and swarthy, thick-set, broad-shouldered, big-headed, a bad fellow, a regular wretch, according to his own mother's words, given to violence, always striking or being struck, whom his tutor abandoned without having been able to teach him to read.