Charles surrendered his palace in the Cité to the Parlement, and erected an immense palace (known as the Hôtel St. Paul) in the east of Paris, outside the old wall, where he could entertain the whole of the princes of the blood and their suites. It was an irregular group of exquisite Gothic mansions and chapels, furnished with sumptuous magnificence and surrounded by tennis courts, falconries, menageries, delightful and spacious gardens—a hostel solennel des grands esbattements (“a solemn palace of great delights.”) This royal city within a city covered a vast space, now roughly bounded by the Rue St. Paul, the river, the Rue de l’Arsenal and the Rue St. Antoine. Charles VII. was the last king who dwelt there; the buildings fell to ruin, and between 1519 and 1551 were gradually sold. No vestige of this palace of delight now remains, nothing but the memory of it in a few street names,—the streets of the Fair Trellis, of the Lions of St. Paul, of the Garden of St. Paul, and of the Cherry Orchard. To Charles V. is also due the beautiful chapel of Vincennes and the completion of Etienne Marcel’s wall. This fourth enclosure, began at the Tour de Billi, which stood at the angle formed by the Gare de l’Arsenal and the Seine, extended north by the Boulevard Bourdon, the Place de la Bastille, and the line of the inner Boulevards to the Porte St. Denis; it then turned south-west by the old Porte Montmartre, the Place des Victoires and across the garden of the Palais Royal to the Tour de Bois, opposite the present Pont du Carrousel. It was fortified by a double moat and square towers. The south portion was never begun. To defend the Porte St. Antoine, Charles laid the foundation of the Bastille of sinister fame—ever a hateful memory to the citizens, for it was completed by the royal provost when the provost of the merchants had been suppressed by Charles VI. in 1383.

“Woe to the nation whose king is a child!” During the minority and reign of Charles VI. France lay prostrate under a hail of evils that menaced her very existence, and Paris was reduced to the profoundest misery and humiliation. The breath had not left the old king’s body before his elder brother, the Count of Anjou, who was hiding in an adjacent room, hastened to seize the royal treasure and the contents of the public exchequer. No regent had been appointed, and the four royal dukes, the young king’s uncles of Anjou, Burgundy, Bourbon, and Berri, began to strive for power.

In 1382 Anjou, who had been suffered to hold the regency, sought to enforce an unpopular tax on the merchants of Paris. The people revolted, armed themselves with the loaded clubs (maillotins) stored in the Hôtel de Ville for use against the English, attacked the royal officers and opened the prisons. The court temporised, promised to remit the tax and to grant an amnesty; but with odious treachery caused the leaders of the movement to be seized, put them in sacks and flung them at dead of night into the Seine. The angry Parisians now barricaded their streets and closed their gates against the king. Negotiations followed and by payment of 100,000 francs to the Duke of Anjou the citizens were promised immunity and the king and his uncles entered the city. But the court nursed its vengeance, and after the victory over the Flemings at Rosebecque the king and his uncles with a powerful force marched on Paris. The Parisians, 20,000 strong, stood drawn up in arms at Montmartre to meet him. They were asked who were their chiefs and if the Constable de Clisson might enter Paris. “None other chiefs have we,” they answered “than the king and his lords: we are ready to obey their orders.” “Good people of Paris,” said the Constable on his arrival at their camp, “what meaneth this? meseems you would fight against your king.” They replied that their purpose was but to show the king the puissance of his good city of Paris. “‘Tis well,” said the Constable, “if you would see the king return to your homes and put aside your arms.”

On the morrow, 11th January 1383, the king and his court, with 12,000 men-at-arms, appeared at the Porte St. Denis, and there stood the provost of the merchants with the chief citizens in new robes, holding a canopy of cloth of gold. The king, with a fierce glance, ordered them back. The gates were unhinged and flung down: the royal army entered as in a conquered city. A terrible vengeance ensued. The President of the Parlement and other civil officers, with three hundred prominent citizens, were arrested and cast into prison. In vain was the royal clemency entreated by the Duchess of Orleans, the rector of the university and chief citizens all clothed in black. The bloody diurnal work of the executioner began and continued until a general pardon was granted on March 1st on payment of an enormous fine. The liberties of the city met the same fate. The provostship of the merchants, and all the privileges of the Parisians, were suppressed, and the hateful taxes reimposed. Never had the heel of despotism ground them down so mercilessly.

On the Quai des Grands Augustins.
On the Quai des Grands Augustins.

After cruelty and debauchery came madness. As Charles one sultry August day was riding in the forest of le Mans he suddenly drew his sword, wounded some of his escort and attacked the Duke of Orleans. The demented king was seized by the Duke of Burgundy and carried senseless and bound into the city. In 1393, when he had somewhat recovered, a grand masked ball was given to celebrate the wedding of one of the ladies of honour who was a widow. The marriage of a widow was always the occasion of riotous mirth, and the king disguised himself and five of his courtiers as satyrs. They were sewed up in tight-fitting vestments of linen, which were coated with resin and pitch and covered with rough tow; on their heads they wore hideous masks. While the ladies of the court were celebrating the marriage the king and his companions rushed in howling like wolves and indulged in the most uncouth gestures and jokes. The Duke of Orleans, drawing too near with a torch to discover their identity, set fire to the tow and in a second they were enveloped in so many shirts of Nessus. Unable to fling off their blazing dresses they madly ran hither and thither, suffering the most excruciating agony and uttering piteous cries. The king happened to be near the young Duchess of Berri who, with admirable presence of mind, flung her robe over him and rescued him from the flames. One knight saved himself by plunging into a large tub of water in the kitchen, one died on the spot, two died on the second day, another lingered for three days in awful torment. The horror of the scene[86] so affected Charles that his madness returned more violently than ever.

TOWER AT THE CORNER OF THE RUE VIEILLE DU TEMPLE AND THE RUE BARBETTE.
TOWER AT THE CORNER OF THE RUE VIEILLE DU TEMPLE AND THE RUE BARBETTE.

The bitterness of the avuncular factions was now intensified. The House of Burgundy by marriage and other means had grown to be one of the most powerful in Europe and was at bitter enmity with the House of Orleans. At the death of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, his son Jean sans Peur, sought to assume his father’s supremacy as well as his title: the Duke of Orleans, strong in the queen’s support, determined to foil his purpose. Each fortified his hôtel in Paris and assembled an army. Friends, however, intervened; they were reconciled, and in November 1407 the two dukes attended mass at the Church of the Grands Augustins, took the Holy Sacrament and dined together. As Jean rose from table the Duke of Orleans placed the Order of the Porcupine round his neck; swore bonne amour et fraternité, and they kissed each other with tears of joy. On 23rd November a forged missive was handed to the Duke of Orleans, requiring his attendance on the queen at the Hôtel St. Paul, whither he often went to visit her. He set forth, attended only by two squires and five servants carrying torches. It was a sombre night, and as the unsuspecting prince rode up the Rue Vieille du Temple behind his little escort, humming a tune and playing with his glove, a band of assassins fell upon him from the shadow of the postern La Barbette,[87] crying “à mort, à mort,” and he was hacked to death. Then issued from a neighbouring house at the sign of Our Lady, a tall figure concealed in a red cloak, lantern in hand, who gazed at the mutilated corpse. “C’est bien,” said he, “let’s away.” They set fire to the house to divert attention and escaped. Four months before, Jean sans Peur had hired the house on the pretext of storing provisions, and for two weeks a score of assassins had been concealed there, biding their time. On the morrow, Jean with the other princes went to asperse the dead body with holy water in the church of the Blancs Manteaux, and as he drew nigh, exclaiming against the foul murder, blood is said to have issued from the wounds. At the funeral Jean held a corner of the pall, but his guilt was an open secret, and though he braved it out for a time he was forced to flee to his lands in Flanders for safety. In a few months, however, he was back in force at Paris, and a doctor of the Sorbonne pleaded an elaborate justification of the deed before the assembled princes, nobles, clergy and citizens at the Hôtel St. Paul. The poor demented king was made to declare publicly that he bore no ill-will to his dear cousin of Burgundy and later, on the failure of a conspiracy of revenge by the queen and the Orleans party, to grant full pardon for a deed “committed for the welfare of the kingdom.” The cutting of the Rue Etienne Marcel has exposed the strong machicolated tower still bearing the arms of Burgundy (two planes and a plumb line), which Jean sans Peur built to fortify the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as a defence and refuge against the Orleans faction and the people of Paris. The Orleans family had for arms a knotted stick, with the device “Je l’ennuis”: the Burgundian arms with the motto, “Je le tiens,” implied that the knotted stick was to be planed and levelled.

The arrival of Jean sans Peur, and the fortification of his hôtel were the prelude to civil war, for the Orleanists and their allies had rallied to the Count of Armagnac, whose daughter the new Duke of Orleans had married, and fortified themselves in their stronghold on the site now occupied by the Palais Royal.

The Armagnacs, for so the Orleanists were now called, thirsted for revenge, and for five years Paris was the scene of frightful atrocities as each faction gained the upper hand and took a bloody vengeance on its rivals. At length the infamous policy of an alliance with the English was resorted to. The temptation was too great for the English king, and in 1415 Henry V. met the French army, composed almost entirely of the Armagnacs, at Agincourt, and inflicted on it a defeat more disastrous than Crecy or Poitiers. The famous oriflamme of St. Denis passed from history in that fatal year of 1415. The Count of Armagnac hurried to Paris, seized the mad king and the Dauphin, and held the capital.

In 1417 the English returned under Henry V. The Burgundians had promised neutrality, and the defeated Armagnacs were forced in their need to “borrow[88] of the saints.” But hateful memories clung to them in Paris and they were betrayed. On the night of 29th May 1418, the son of an ironmonger on the Petit Pont, who had charge of the wicket of the Porte St. Germain, crept into his father’s room and stole the keys while he slept. The gate was then opened to the Burgundians, who seized the person of the helpless and imbecile king. Some Armagnacs escaped, bearing the dauphin with them, and the remainder were flung into prison. The Burgundian partisans in the city, among whom was the powerful corporation of the butchers and fleshers, now rose, and on Sunday, 14th June, ran to the prisons.

Before dawn fifteen hundred Armagnacs were indiscriminately butchered under the most revolting circumstances. The count himself perished, and a strip of his skin was carried about Paris in mockery of the white scarf of the Armagnacs. Jean sans Peur and Queen Isabella[89] entered the city, amid the acclamation of the people, and soon after a second massacre followed, in spite of Jean’s efforts to prevent it. He was now master of Paris, but the Armagnacs were swarming in the country around and the English marching without let on the city. In these straits he sought a reconciliation with the dauphin and his Armagnac counsellors at Melun, on 11th July 1419. On 10th September a second conference was arranged, and duke and dauphin, each with ten attendants, met in a wicker enclosure on the bridge at Montereau. Jean doffed his cap and knelt to the dauphin, but before he could rise was felled by a blow from an axe and stabbed to death.[90] In 1521 a monk at Dijon showed the skull of Jean sans Peur to Francis I., and pointing to a hole made by the assassin’s axe, said: “Sire, it was through this hole that the English entered France.”

On receipt of the news of his father’s murder, the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip le Bon, thirsting for vengeance, flung himself into the arms of the English, and by the treaty of Troyes on May 20, 1420, Henry V. was given a French princess to wife and the reversion of the crown of France, which, after Charles’ death, was to be united ever more to that of England. But the French crown never circled Henry’s brow: on August 31, 1422, he lay dead at Vincennes. He was buried with great pomp in the royal abbey of St. Denis, leaving an infant son of nine months to inherit the dual monarchy. Within a few weeks of Henry’s death the hapless king of France was entombed under the same roof; a royal herald cried “for God’s pity on the soul of the most high and most excellent Charles, king of France, our natural sovereign lord,” and in the next breath hailed “Henry of Lancaster, by the grace of God, king of France and of England, our sovereign lord.” All the royal officers reversed their maces, wands and swords as a token that their functions were at an end. At the next festival the Duke of Bedford was seen in the Sainte Chapelle of the palace of St. Louis, exhibiting the crown of thorns to the people as Regent of France, and a statue of Henry V. of England was raised in the great hall, following on the line of the kings of France from Pharamond to Charles.

CHAPTER IX

JEANNE D’ARC—PARIS UNDER THE ENGLISH—END OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION

The story of the resurrection of France at the call of an untutored village girl is one of the most enthralling dramas of history. When all men had despaired; when the cruelty, ambition and greed of the princes of France had wrought her destruction; when the miserable dauphin at Chinon was prepared to seek safety by an ignominious flight to Spain or Scotland; when Orleans, the key to the southern provinces, was about to fall into English hands—the means of salvation were revealed in the ecstatic visions of a simple peasant maid. With that divine inspiration vouchsafed alone to faith and fervent love, she saw with piercing insight the essential things to be done. The siege of Orleans must be raised and the dauphin anointed king at Rheims. “The originality of the Maid,” says Michelet, “and the cause of her success was her good sense amid all her enthusiasm and exaltation.” We may not here narrate the story of those miraculous three months of the year 1429 (27th April-16th July), which saw the relief of Orleans, the victories of Jargeau, of Patay (where invincible Talbot was made prisoner), of the surrender of ill-omened Troyes and of the solemn coronation at Rheims. Jeanne deemed her mission over after Rheims, but to her ill-hap was persuaded to follow the royal army after the retreat of the English from Senlis, and on 23rd August she occupied St. Denis. She declared at her trial that her voices told her to remain at St. Denis, but that the lords made her attack Paris. On the 8th September the assault was made, but it was foiled by the king’s apathy, the incapacity and bitter jealousy of his counsellors, and the action of double-faced Burgundy. In the afternoon Jeanne, while sounding the depth of the fosse with her lance,[91] was wounded by an arrow in the thigh. She remained till late evening, when she was carried away to St. Denis, at whose shrine she hung up her arms—her mysterious sword from St. Catherine de Fierbois and her banner of pure white, emblazoned with the fleur-de-lys and the figure of the Saviour, with the device “Jesu Maria.”

Notre Dame from the North
Notre Dame from the North

Six months later, while Charles was sunk in sloth at the château of Sully, Jeanne was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne, and her enemies closed on her like bloodhounds. The university 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 assist 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.

A summary of Jeanne’s answers was sent to “Our Mother, the University of Paris.” The condemnation was a foregone conclusion[92] and after a forced retractation, the virgin saviour of France was led to her doom in the market-place of Rouen. As she passed the lines of English soldiers, their eyes flashing fierce hatred upon her, a cry escaped her, “O Rouen, Rouen, must I then die here?” With her last breath she protested that her voices had not deceived her and were of God; and calling on “Jesus!” her head sank in the flames. “We are lost,” said an English spectator; “we have burnt a saint!”

Some contemporary letters from Venetian merchants in the cities of France have recently been published, which give valuable testimony to the sympathy evoked among foreign residents by the career of Jeanne the Maid. To them she was a zentil anzolo, “a gentle angel sent of God to save the good land of France, the most noble country in the world, which having purged its sins and pride God snatched from the brink of utter destruction. For even as by a woman, our Lady St. Mary, He saved the human race, so by this young maiden pure and spotless He hath saved the fairest pearl of Christendom.”

“The English burnt her,” says one of the merchants, writing from Bruges, “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 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 petition 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 petition that at last, we are told, it seemed that one great cry for justice broke from the multitude.”

The story of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite 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.[93] The chapter of Notre Dame was compelled to sell the gold vessels from the treasury. Hundreds 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.”

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 Duchess of Bedford whom God pardon,” were drinking one night at ten o’clock in a tavern where hangs the sign of L’Homme Armé.[94] 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 snatching 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. Honoré, and fell a-wrangling with Sorel’s wife concerning some lost tennis balls. 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 God 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.

Many of the religious foundations had suffered by the wars, for in 1426 the glovers of Paris were authorised to re-establish the guild of the blessed St. Anne, founded by some good people, smiths and ironmongers, which during the wars and mutations of the last twenty years had come to an end. In 1427, “our well-beloved, the money-changers of the Grand Pont in our good town of Paris were permitted to found a guild in the church of St. Bartholomew in honour of our Creator and His very glorious Mother and St. Matthew their patron.” In 1430 was granted the humble supplication of the shoemakers, who desired to found a confraternity to celebrate mass in the chapel at Notre Dame, dedicated to “the blessed and glorious martyrs, Monseigneur Crispin the Great, and Monseigneur Crispin the Less, who in this life were shoemakers.”

Our Lady of Paris—Early Fifteenth Century.
Our Lady of Paris—Early Fifteenth Century.

The fifteen years of English rule at Paris came to a close in 1446. In 1443 a goldsmith was at déjeuner 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[95] 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. The general unrest which this incident illustrates soon burst forth in plot after plot, and on 13th April, 1446, the Porte St. Jacques was opened by some citizens to the Duke of Richement, Constable of France, who, with 2000 knights and squires, entered the city and, to the cry of Ville gagnée! 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.

CHAPTER X

LOUIS XI. AT PARIS—THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING

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. The “Universal Spider,” as the Duke of Burgundy called Louis, was ever on the move about France, riding on his mule from dawn to eve. “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!” A Venetian ambassador 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 mass in the cathedral.

It is not within our province to describe in detail 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 nobles with their almost royal power and state. His indomitable will, his consummate patience, his profound knowledge of human motives and passions, his cynical indifference to means, make him one of the most remarkable of the kings of France. In 1465, menaced by a coalition of nobles, 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 at first were sullen and would not be wooed, for they remembered his refusal to accord them some privileges granted to other cities. The university declined to arm her scholars, Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle, vagabond clercs of the Palais and the Cité composed coarse 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 chose six members from the Burgesses, six from the Parlement and six from the university, to form his Council. With daring confidence, he 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 municipal officers, the Parlement and the university. The nobles 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.

The king refused to occupy the palace of the Louvre and chose to dwell in the new Hôtel 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.

The institution of the mid-day Angelus, in 1472, was due to Louis’ devotion to the Virgin. He ordained that the great bell of Notre Dame should be rung at noon as a signal that the good people of Paris should recite the Ave Maria. When in Paris scarcely a day passed without the king being seen at mass, and at leaving he always gave an offering.

In 1475, Louis’ old enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, was seeking an alliance with Edward IV. of England, and once more a mighty army entered France to reassert the claims of the English kings to the French crown. Louis, by his usual policy of flattery and bribery, succeeded in leading Edward to negotiate. If he had had to meet in the flesh the lion rampant on the English king’s escutcheon, he could not have taken ampler precautions. A bridge was built over the Somme, near Amiens, “and in the middle thereof was a strong trellis of wood such as is made for cages of lions, and the holes between the bars were no larger than a man could put his arm through.” On either side of this cage the monarchs and a score of courtiers met and conversed. Louis had divided his enemies; each in turn was cajoled and bribed, and the “Hucksters’ Peace” was concluded.

Porch of St. Germain L’auxerrois
Porch of St. Germain L’auxerrois

“When King Louis,” says De Comines, “retired from the interview 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 predecessor 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.” De Comines was informed next day by some English that the peace had been made by the Holy Ghost, for a white dove was seen resting on the king of England’s tent during the interview, and for no noise soever would she move; “but,” said a sceptical Gascon gentleman, “it simply happened to have rained during the day, and the dove settled on the tent which was highest to dry her wings in the sun.”

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 Grève his head rolled from his body, 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 noble 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, commanded his jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured (gehenné) 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.

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,[96] 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’ abasement 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. The great provinces of Burgundy, of Anjou, of Maine, Provence, Alençon and Guienne soon fell under the sovereignty of France, whose boundaries now touched the Alps. But in the very culmination of his success Louis 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.

When at last the king took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier, told him that most surely his hour was come. Louis made his confession, 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, Schöffer, 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 Schöffer 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, assisted 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 Strassburg, 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 Vérard, Du Pré, 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 classics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin classics outside his shop, offering a reward to any passer-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 Angoulême, authoress 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 Hôtel Dieu in Paris. So great was the re-action 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 lectureship 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.[97] Painting and sculpture, both in subject, matter and style, assume 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 nobler, ideals. Mediævalism passes away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of stone.

The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of narrow, crooked, unsavoury streets, of overhanging timbered houses, “thick as ears of corn in a wheat-field,” from which emerged the innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cité, with its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great ship 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.

The portal of the Petit Châtelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with its fifty colleges and many churches clustering 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 (Jacobins and Cordeliers), 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 Prés, 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 hôtels of the rich merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, 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 Hôtel 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 Hôtel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were, among others, the hôtels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alençon, and out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories).

Rue Royale.
Rue Royale.