The Story of Paris Part 8

Six months later, while Charles was sunk in sloth at the chateau of Sully, Jeanne was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiegne, and her enemies closed on her like bloodhounds. The university of Paris and the Inquisition wrangled for her body, but English gold bought her from her Burgundian captors and sent her to a martyr's death at Rouen. Those who would read the sad record of her trial may do so in the pages of Mr. Douglas Murray's translation of the minutes of the evidence, and may a.s.sist in imagination at the eighteen days' forensic baiting of the hapless child (she was but nineteen years of age), whose lucid simplicity broke through the subtle web of theological chicanery which was spun to entrap her by the most cunning of the Sorbonne doctors.

"The English burnt her," says a Venetian merchant, "thinking that fortune would turn in their favour, but may it please Christ the Lord that the contrary befall them!" And so in truth it happened. Disaster after disaster wrecked the English cause; the Duke of Bedford died, Philip of Burgundy and Charles were reconciled, and Queen Isabella went to a dishonoured grave. The English were driven out of Paris, and in 1453, of all the "large and ample empery" of France, won at the cost of a hundred years of bloodshed and cruel devastation, a little strip of land at Calais and Guines alone remained to the English crown. Charles, who with despicable cowardice had suffered the heroic Maid to be done to death by the English without a thought of intervention, was moved to call for a tardy reparation of the atrocious injustice at Rouen; and a quarter of a century after the Te Deum sung in Notre Dame at Paris for her capture, another, a very different scene, was witnessed in the cathedral. "The case for her rehabilitation," says Mr. Murray, "was solemnly opened there, and the mother and brothers of the Maid came before the court to present their humble pet.i.tion for a revision of her sentence, demanding only 'the triumph of truth and justice.' The court heard the request with some emotion. When Isabel d'Arc threw herself at the feet of the Commissioners, showing the papal rescript and weeping aloud, so many joined in the pet.i.tion that at last, we are told, it seemed that one great cry for justice broke from the mult.i.tude."

The story of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite the coronation of the young king at Notre Dame and the rigid justice and enlightened policy of Bedford's regency, they failed to win the affection of the Parisians. Rewards to political friends, punishments and confiscations inflicted on the disaffected, the riotous and homicidal conduct of some of the English garrison, the depression in commerce and depreciation of property brought their inevitable consequences--a growing hatred of the English name.[95] The chapter of Notre Dame was compelled to sell the gold vessels from the treasury.

Hundred of houses were abandoned by their owners, who were unable to meet the charges upon them. In 1427 by a royal instrument the rent of the Maison des Singes was reduced from twenty-six livres to fourteen, "seeing the extreme diminution of rents."

[Footnote 95: In 1421 and 1422 the people of Paris had seen Henry V.

and his French consort sitting in state at the Louvre, surrounded by a brilliant throng of princes, prelates and barons. Hungry crowds watched the sumptuous banquet and then went away fasting, for nothing was offered them. "It was not so in the former times under our kings,"

they murmured, "then was open table kept, and servants distributed the meats and wine even of the king himself."]

Some curious details of life in Paris under the English have come down to us. By a royal pardon granted to Guiot d'Eguiller, we learn that he and four other servants of the Duke of Bedford, and of our "late very dear and very beloved aunt the d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford whom G.o.d pardon,"

were drinking one night at ten o'clock in a tavern where hangs the sign of _L'Homme Arme_.[2] Hot words arose between them and some other tipplers, to wit, Friars Robert, Peter, and William of the Blancs Manteaux, who were disguised as laymen and wearing swords. Friar Robert lost his temper and struck at the servants with his naked sword. The friar, owing to the strength of the wine or to inexperience in the use of secular weapons, cut off the leg of a dog instead of hitting his man; the friars then ran away, pursued by three of the servants--Robin the Englishman, Guiot d'Eguiller and one Guillaume.

The fugitive friars took refuge in a deserted house in the Rue du Paradis (now des Francs Bourgeois), and threw stones at their pursuers. There was a fight, during which Guillaume lost his stick and s.n.a.t.c.hing Guiot's sword struck at Friar Robert through the door of the house. He only gave one "_cop_," but it was enough, and there was an end of Friar Robert.

A certain Gilles, a _povre homme laboureur_, went to amuse himself at a game of tennis in the hostelry kept by Guillaume Sorel, near the Porte St. Honore, and fell a-wrangling with Sorel's wife concerning some lost tennis b.a.l.l.s. Madame Sorel clutched him by the hair and tore out some handfuls. Gilles seized her by the hood, disarranged her coif, so that it fell about her shoulders, "and in his anger cursed G.o.d our Creator." This came to the bishop's ears, and Gilles was cast for blasphemy into the bishop's oven, as the episcopal prison was called, where he lay in great misery. He was examined and released on promising to offer a wax candle of two pounds' weight before the image of our Lady of Paris at the entrance of the choir of Notre Dame.

The fifteen years of English rule at Paris came to a close in 1446.

Three years before that date, a goldsmith was at _dejeuner_ with a baker and a shoemaker, and they fell a-talking of the state of trade, of the wars and of the poverty of the people of Paris. The goldsmith[96] grumbled loudly and said that his craft was the poorest of all; people must have shoes and bread, but none could afford to employ a goldsmith. Then, thinking no evil, he said that good times would never return in Paris until there were a French king, the university full again, and the Parlement obeyed as in former times.

Whereupon Jean Trolet, the shoemaker, added that things could not last in their present state, and that if there were only five hundred men who would agree to begin a revolution, they would soon find thousands leagued with them. Jean Trolet's loose tongue cost him dear, but the general unrest which this incident ill.u.s.trates burst forth in plot after plot, and on 13th April, 1446, the Porte St. Jacques was opened by some citizens to the Duke of Richemont, Constable of France, who, with 2000 knights and squires, entered the city and, to the cry of _Ville gagnee!_ the fleur-de-lys waved again from the ramparts of Paris. The English garrison under Lord Willoughby fortified themselves in the Bastille of St. Antoine but capitulated after two days. Bag and baggage, out they marched, circled the walls as far as the Louvre, and embarked for Rouen amid the execrations of the people. Never again did an English army enter Paris until the allies marched in after Waterloo in 1815.

[Footnote 96: The fifteenth-century goldsmiths of Paris: Loris, the Hersants, and Jehan Gallant, were famed throughout Europe.]

CHAPTER X

_Louis XI. at Paris--The Introduction of Printing_

Paris saw little of Charles VII. who, after the temporary activity excited by the expulsion of the English, had sunk into his habitual torpor and bondage to women. In 1461 the wretched monarch, morbid and half-demented, died of a malignant disease, all the time haunted by fears of poison and filial treachery. The people named him Charles _le bien servi_ (the well-served), for small indeed was the praise due to him for the great deliverance.

When the new king, Louis XI., quitted his asylum at the Burgundian court to be crowned at Rheims and to repair to St. Denis, he was shocked by the contrast between the rich cities and plains of Flanders and the miserable aspect of the country he traversed--ruined villages, fields that were so many deserts, starving creatures clothed in rags, and looking as if they had just escaped from dungeons.

It is beyond the scope of the present work to describe the successful achievement of Louis' policy of concentrating the whole government in himself as absolute sovereign of France, by the overthrow of feudalism and the subjection of the great n.o.bles with their almost royal power and state. His indomitable will, his consummate patience, his profound knowledge of human motives and pa.s.sions, his cynical indifference to means, make him one of the most remarkable of the kings of France. In 1465, menaced by a coalition of n.o.bles, the so-called League of the Public Good, Louis hastened to the capital. Letters expressing his tender affection for his dear city of Paris preceded him--he was coming to confide to them his queen and hoped-for heir; rather than lose his Paris, which he loved beyond all cities of the world, he would sacrifice half his kingdom. But the Parisians were far from being impressed by the majesty of their new monarch. "Our king," says De Comines, "used to dress so ill that worse could not be--often wearing bad cloth and a shabby hat with a leaden image stuck in it."

When he entered Abbeville with the magnificent Duke of Burgundy, the people said "_Benedicite!_ is that a king of France? Why, his horse and clothes together are not worth twenty francs!" and a Venetian amba.s.sador was amazed to see the most mighty and most Christian king take his dinner in a tavern on the market-place of Tours, after hearing ma.s.s in the cathedral. The citizens remembered, too, his refusal to accord them some privileges granted to other cities; they were sullen at first and would not be wooed. The university declined to arm her scholars, Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle, vagabond _clercs_ of the Palais and the Cite composed coa.r.s.e gibes and satirical songs and ballads against his person. Louis, however, set himself with his insinuating grace of speech to win the favour of the Parisians. He supped with the provost and sheriffs and their wives at the Hotel de Ville. He chose six members from the burgesses, six from the Parlement and six from the university, to form his Council, and with daring confidence, decided to arm Paris. A levy of every male able to bear arms between sixteen and sixty years of age was made, and the citizen army was reviewed near St. Antoine des Champs, in the presence of the king and queen. From 60,000 to 80,000 men, half of them well-armed, marched past, with sixty-seven banners of the trades guilds, not counting those of the munic.i.p.al officers, the Parlement and the university. The n.o.bles were checkmated, and they were glad to accede to a treaty which gave them ample spoils, and Louis, time to recover himself. The "Public Good" was barely mentioned.

Louis, when at Paris, refused to occupy the Louvre and chose to dwell in the new Hotel des Tournelles, near the Porte St. Antoine, built for the Duke of Bedford and subsequently presented to Louis when Dauphin by his royal father; for thither a star led him one evening as he left Notre Dame. Often would he issue _en bourgeois_ from the Tournelles to sup with his gossips in Paris and scarcely a day pa.s.sed without the king being seen at ma.s.s in Notre Dame.

"When King Louis," says De Comines, "retired from the interview[97]

with Edward IV. of England, he spake with me by the way and said he found the English king too ready to visit Paris, which thing was not pleasing to him. The king was a handsome man and very fond of women; he might find some affectionate mistress there, who would speak him so many fair words that she would make him desire to return; his predecessors had come too often to Paris and Normandy, and he did not like his company this side the sea, but beyond the sea he was glad to have him for friend and brother."

[Footnote 97: At the conclusion of the Hucksters' Peace at Amiens.]

Louis had long desired to punish the Count of St. Pol for treachery, and as a result of a treaty with Charles of Burgundy, in 1475, had him at length in the Bastille. Soon on a scaffold in the Place de Greve his head rolled from his body at a tremendous _coup_ of Pet.i.t Jean's sword, and a column of stone twelve feet high erected where he fell, gave terrible warning to traitorous princes, however mighty; for the count was Constable of France, the king's brother-in-law, a member of the Imperial House of Luxemburg, and connected with many of the sovereign families of Europe.

Two years later another n.o.ble victim, the Duke of Nemours, fell into the king's power and saw the inside of one of Louis' iron cages in the Bastille. The king, who had learnt that the chains had been removed from the prisoner's legs, that he might go to hear ma.s.s, commanded his jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured (_gehenne_) and the duke wrote a piteous letter, praying for clemency and signing himself _le pauvre Jacques_. In vain: him, too, the headsman's axe sent to his account at the Halles.

The news of the humiliating Peace of Peronne, after the king had committed the one great folly of his career by gratuitously placing himself in Charles the Bold's power,[98] was received by the Parisians with many gibes. The royal herald proclaimed at sound of trumpet by the crossways of Paris: "Let none be bold or daring enough to say anything opprobrious against the Duke of Burgundy, either by word of mouth, by writing, by signs, paintings, roundelays, ballads, songs or gestures." On the same day a commission seized all the magpies and jackdaws in Paris, whether caged or otherwise, which were to be registered according to their owners, with all the pretty words that the said birds could repeat and that had been taught them: the pretty word that these chattering birds had been taught to say was "Peronne."

Louis' abas.e.m.e.nt at Peronne was, however, amply avenged by the battle of Granson, when the mighty host of "invincible" Charles was overwhelmed by the Switzers in 1476. A year later, the whole fabric of Burgundian ambition was shattered and the great duke lay a mutilated and frozen corpse before the walls of Nancy. Louis' joy at the destruction of his enemy was boundless, but in the very culmination of his success he was struck down by paralysis, and though he rallied for a time the end was near. Haunted by fear of treachery, he immured himself in the gloomy fortress of Plessis. The saintly Francesco da Calabria, relics from Florence, from Rome, the Holy Oil from Rheims, turtles from Cape Verde Islands--all were powerless; the arch dissembler must now face the ineluctable prince of the dark realms, who was not to be bribed or cajoled even by kings.

[Footnote 98: The reader will hardly need to be reminded that this amazing folly forms one of the princ.i.p.al episodes in Scott's _Quentin Durward_.]

When at last Louis took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier, told him that most surely his hour was come. Confession made, he gave much political counsel and some orders to be observed by _le Roi_, as he now called his son, and spoke, says De Comines, "as dryly as if he had never been ill. And after so many fears and suspicions Our Lord wrought a miracle and took him from this miserable world in great health of mind and understanding. Having received all the sacraments and suffering no pain and always speaking to within a paternoster of his death, he gave orders for his sepulture. May the Lord have his soul and receive him in the realm of Paradise!"

It was in Louis' reign that the art of printing was introduced into Paris. As early as 1458 the master of the mint had been sent to Mainz to learn something of the new art, but without success. In 1463, Fust and his partner, Schoffer, had brought some printed books to Paris, but the books were confiscated and the partners were driven out of the city, owing to the jealousy of the powerful corporation of the scribes and booksellers, who enjoyed a monopoly from the Sorbonne of the sale of books in Paris; and in 1474 Louis paid an indemnity of 2500 crowns to Schoffer for the confiscation of his books and for the trouble he had taken to introduce printed books into his capital. In 1470, at the invitation of two doctors of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet and Jean de la Puin, Ulmer Gering of Constance and two other Swiss printers set up a press near Fichet's rooms in the Sorbonne. In 1473 a press was at work at the sign of the Soleil d'Or (Golden Sun), in the Rue St.

Jacques, under the management of two Germans, Peter Kayser, Master of Arts, and John Stohl, a.s.sisted by Ulmer Gering. In 1483 the last-named removed to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the doctors granted to him and his new partner, Berthold Rumbolt of Stra.s.sburg, a lease for the term of their lives. They retained their sign of the Soleil d'Or, which long endured as a guarantee of fine printing. The earliest works had been printed in beautiful Roman type, but unable to resist the favourite Gothic introduced from Germany, Gering was led to adopt it towards the year 1480, and the Roman was soon superseded. From 1480 to 1500 we meet with many French printers' names: Antoine Verard, Du Pre, Cailleau, Martineau, Pigouchet--clearly proving that the art had then been successfully transplanted.

The re-introduction of Roman characters about 1500 was due to the famous house of the Estiennes, whose admirable editions of the Latin and Greek cla.s.sics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin cla.s.sics outside his shop, offering a reward to any pa.s.ser-by who pointed out a misprint or corrupt reading. Their famous house was the meeting-place of scholars and patrons of literature. Francis I. and his sister Margaret of Angouleme, auth.o.r.ess of the Heptameron, were seen there, and legend says that the king was once kept waiting by the scholar-printer while he finished correcting a proof. All the Estienne household, even the children, conversed in Latin, and the very servants are said to have grown used to it. In 1563 Francis I.

remitted 30,000 livres of taxes to the printers of Paris, as an act of grace to the professors of an art that seemed rather divine than human. But in spite of royal favour printing was a poor career. The second Henry Estienne, who composed a Greek-Latin lexicon, died in poverty at a hospital in Lyons; the last of the family, the third Robert Estienne, met a similar miserable end at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. So great was the reaction in the university against the violence of the Lutherans and the daring of the printers, that in 1534 all the presses were ordered to be closed. In 1537 no book was allowed to be printed without permission of the Sorbonne, and in 1556 an order was made, it is said at the instance of Diane de Poitiers, that a copy in vellum of every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited at the royal library. After Gering's death the forty presses then working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior printing.

CHAPTER XI

_Francis I.--The Renaissance at Paris_

The advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek lectures.h.i.+p by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the Sorbonne warns us that we are at the end of an epoch. With the accession of Charles VIII. and the beginning of the Italian wars a new era is inaugurated. Gothic architecture had reached its final development and structural perfection, in the flowing lines of the flamboyant style;[99] painting and sculpture, both in subject and expression, a.s.sume a new aspect. The diffusion of ancient literature and the discovery of a new world, open wider horizons to men's minds, and human thought and human activity are directed towards other, and not always n.o.bler, ideals. Mediaevalism pa.s.ses away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of stone.

[Footnote 99: Flamboyant windows were a natural, technical development of Gothic. The aim of the later builders was to facilitate the draining away of the water which the old mullioned windows used to retain.]

The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of overhanging timbered houses, "thick as ears of corn in a wheatfield," of narrow, crooked streets,[100] unsavoury enough, yet purified by the vast open s.p.a.ces and gardens of the monasteries, from which emerged the innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cite, with its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great s.h.i.+p moored to the banks of the Seine by five bridges all crowded with houses. One of the most curious characteristics of Old Paris was the absence of any view of the river, for a man might traverse its streets and bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine.

[Footnote 100: The drainage of an old city was offensive to the smell rather than essentially insanitary. "Mediaeval sewers," says Dr.

Charles Creighton in his _History of Epidemics in Britain_, pp. 323-4, "were banked-up water-courses ... freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, the oxygen of the air."]

The portal of the Pet.i.t Chatelet at the end of the Pet.i.t Pont opened on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with its fifty colleges and many churches cl.u.s.tering about the slopes of the mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great Augustine abbey and church founded by Clovis. Near by, stood the two great religious houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens, the lesser monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast Benedictine abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Pres, with its stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north bank lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as the Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hotels of the rich merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the n.o.bles, all enclosed by the high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth's fortifications, and defended at east and west by the Bastille of St.

Antoine and the Louvre. To the east stood the agglomeration of buildings known as Hotel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces sloping down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of Bedford's Hotel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were among others, the hotels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alencon, and out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories).

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOWER OF ST. JACQUES.]

North and east and west of the munic.i.p.al centre, the Maison aux Piliers, on the Place de Greve, was a maze of streets filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of the great church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers' and skinners' shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basket-makers were busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria.

Painters, gla.s.s-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists, made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers' shuttles rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now Quai) de la Megisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St.

Honore. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders stood the grim thirteenth-century fortress of the Chatelet, the munic.i.p.al guard-house and prison; to the north in the Rue de Heaumarie (Armourers) lay the Four aux Dames or prison of the abbesses of Montmartre; further on westward stood the episcopal prison, or Four de l'Eveque. North-west of the Chatelet was the Hotel du Chevalier du Guet or watch-house and round about it a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly crenelated and turreted fortress of the Knights-Templars, huge in extent and one of the most solid edifices in the whole kingdom. This is the Paris conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in "Notre Dame," and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance, pseudo-cla.s.sic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.

With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII., _notre pet.i.t roi_, as Brantome calls him, and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest.

But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII.

returned to Paris from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed.

The latter supervised the rebuilding of the Pet.i.t Pont and after the destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499--when the whole structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river--he was made head of the Commission of Parisian artists who replaced it by a n.o.ble stone bridge, completed in 1507. This, too, was lined with tall gabled houses of stone, and adorned with the arms of Paris and statues of Notre Dame and St. Denis. On its restoration in 1659 the facades of the houses were decorated with medallions of the kings of France held by caryatides bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side, even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve of the Revolution, Louis XVI.

ordered the bridges to be cleared.

The French Renaissance is indissolubly a.s.sociated with Francis I., who in 1515 inherited a France welded into a compact, absolute monarchy, and inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people; for the twelfth Louis had been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned to them the balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese Expedition, which had been over estimated, saying, "It will be more fruitful in their hands than in mine." Commerce had so expanded that it was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there were, in his reign, fifty. Scarce a house was built along an important street that was not a merchant's shop or for the practice of some art. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran about the open fields without risk of pillage from his soldiers. It was the accrued wealth of his reign, and the love inspired by "Louis, father of his people,"[101] that supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis I. The architectural creations of the new style were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of Blois and Chambord, and other princely and n.o.ble chateaux along the luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn resistance.

[Footnote 101: The good king's portrait by an Italian sculptor may be seen in the Louvre, Room VII., and on his monument in St. Denis he kneels beside his beloved and _chere Bretonne_, Anne of Brittany whose loss he wept for eight days and nights.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PONT NOTRE DAME.]