The duke bore him company to within half a league of the city.

As they were taking leave of one another, the king said to him, "If, peradventure, my brother Charles, who is in Brittany, should be discontented with the assignment I make him for love of you, what would you have me do ?" "If he do not please to take it," answered the duke, "but would have you satisfy him, I leave it to you two." Louis desired no more: he returned home free and confident in himself, "after having passed the most trying three weeks of his life." But Louis XI.'s deliverance after his quasi-captivity at Peronne, and the new treaty he had concluded with Duke Charles, were and could be only a temporary break in the struggle between these two princes, destined as they were, both by character and position, to irremediable incompatibility.

They were too powerful and too different to live at peace when they were such close neighbors, and when their relations were so complicated.

We find in the chronicle of George Chastelain, a Flemish burgher, and a servant on familiar terms with Duke Charles, as he had been with his father, Duke Philip, a judicious picture of this incompatibility and the causes of it.

"There had been," he says, "at all times a rancor between these two princes, and, whatever pacification might have been effected to-day, everything returned to-morrow to the old condition, and no real love could be established.