I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me, you were born too late,
And I for you was born too soon.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine.
Well might I have suspected
That such a destiny,
Thus would have happened this day,
How much that Love would have commanded.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine.
Charles, duc d’Orléans at the Tower of London, 1415, aetatis suae 21.
On 24 November 1394, Charles was delivered into the midst of the murderous Hundred Years’ War, a treasured son of the brother of King Charles VI of France, Louis duc d’Orléans, and a wildly wealthy Valentina Visconti, daughter of the duke of Milan.
An instant political pawn, Charles was married at the age of 11 to his cousin Isabella of Valois, age 16, the widow of the mentally disordered and deposed (and murdered by starvation) King Richard II of England.
His mother, Valentina, fell foul of the Queen of France, Isabeau, who was in an intimate relationship with Valentina’s husband, lecherous Louis. Valentina herself was too close for comfort to the intermittently lunatic (probably schizophrenic) King Charles: she was expelled from the Royal Court.
On 23 November 1407, 35-year-old lecherous Louis duc d’Orléans was murdered by order of his political rival and cousin, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.
On 4 December 1408, Charles’s 38-year-old mother, the side-lined Valentina, “grief-stricken”, died of an unknown cause at the Château of Blois, the headquarters of clan Orléans.
Louis and Valentina’s son Charles had been orphaned at the age of 13, inheriting the dukedom and a truly fabulous fortune. His wife Isabella was to die in childbirth two years later at the age of 18.
And so, on 15 August 1410, Charles, now aged 16, was remarried to Bonne d’Armagnac. His new wife was 11 years old.
Charles’s new father-in-law, Bernard, Count of Armagnac, took him in hand. Unsurprisingly, Charles became an “Armagnac”. Armagnac v Burgundy had become a long drawn-out and lethal contest for the throne of France.
In the absence of a sane King, it was the Armagnacs who raised the massive army necessary to obliterate the English invasion under King Henry V – who also had a clear claim to the French throne.
Well, we know the story…
Late on 25 October 1415, under one of the bloody muddy piles of dead and dying Frenchies at Agincourt, was found the unharmed but chagrined 20-year-old Charles, duc d’Orléans, one of the most senior nobles captured, in direct line of succession for the French throne.
Charles spent the following 25 years in English captivity, far too valuable for Henry V to ransom.
He was first held in the Tower of London, in the White Tower, and was then moved around a variety of relatively benign prisons, the most disturbing of which may have been Pontefract Castle, where his erstwhile first wife’s husband, King Richard II, had been murdered by starvation.
English became Charles’s first language. Having some little time on his hands, he developed his redoubtable poetical skills, outwriting his contemporaries in technique and in sheer volume. Not well recognised in England, but revered in France to this day, a current American academic has commented of Charles that the problem relates to his “approach to the erotic, his use of puns, wordplay and rhetorical devices, his formal complexity and experimentation, his stance or voice: all things place him well outside the fifteenth-century literary milieu in which he found himself in England” – in other words, a bit rude and really difficult to get your head around.
His rondeau, “I am already sick of love, My very gentle Valentine” (Je suis desja d’amour tanné, Ma tres doulce Valentinée) was said to have been written to his wife, Bonne from the Tower of London, the first valentine. This is certainly not true.
The poem is anti-valentine. Charles is referring to the “practice of holding a lottery on St. Valentine’s Day in which everyone was assigned a partner, generally not their husband or wife, who was supposed to be their ‘valentine’ for the year”. This was a courtly custom from which Charles is excusing himself, telling his allotted valentine that he is too old and tired. It was written after his return to France, and after the death of his wife Bonne.
Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) relates the custom in his “Parlement of Foules” (Parliament of Fowls), supposedly originating the idea that St. Valentine’s Day is a special day for lovers.
Of course, Lupercalia was celebrated in the ides (the day of the full moon, usually the 15th) of February in ancient Rome, a festival of purification. The young Brothers of the Wolf, the Luperci priesthood, sacrificed a male goat (or goats) and a dog. A feast followed, and the Luperci cut thongs (februa) from the flayed skin of the animals. Plutarch tells us that “many noble youths… run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school, present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy”.
Lupercalia was Christianised by Pope Gelasius in 494 becoming St. Valentine’s Day. Who exactly was St Valentine is hotly contested, but he was supposedly found wanting and executed in February 270 by the order of Emperor Claudius II Gothicus.
Milton Hershey introduced his Kisses in 1907, bite sized conical pieces of chocolate wrapped in squares of aluminium foil, packed with saturated fat and refined sugar, the ideal valentine gift. The home of Kisses, Hershey, Pennsylvania, is also home to Danny Welch’s laboratory where he identified in 1996 the gene KISS1 which prevents an active cancer cell from spreading. In 2003, kisspeptin was found to be involved in the development of the gonads at puberty. Discoveries have continued apace.
The results of a randomised clinical trial of kisspeptin at Imperial College London were published in October 2022. “Effects of Kisspeptin Administration in Women With Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder” reported that “32 premenopausal women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder, kisspeptin administration (by intravenous infusion) was found to modulate sexual and attraction brain processing in functional neuroimaging, psychometric, and hormonal analysis. Furthermore, kisspeptin’s modulation of brain processing correlated with psychometric measures of sexual aversion any associated distress”.
It is hoped that kisspeptin delivery by nasal spray will soon be developed.
Well now, that really will be quite a valentine.
. . . .
“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
. . . .
p.s. Charles returned to France in 1440 after complex negotiations. He lived at Château de Blois, and married 14-year-old Marie de Clèves. Dearly loved Marie bore him three children, one of whom became King Louis XII. He died aged 71 on 4 January 1465, a survivor.
Richard Petty
