CHAPTER VII

PARIS OF PHILIP THE FAIR

Probably, also, he did not realize that when he raised to the nobility a certain silversmith whose work he admired he struck a blow at the hereditary pride of the lords, and showed a new power which threatened the integrity of their class. Naturally, too, it encouraged the democracy.

A comparatively trivial happening of this reign shows the increasing boldness of the democratic spirit. The king took as his favorite a man who had been his father’s barber, and who probably possessed the traditional conversational charm attaching to his occupation. When Philip made him wealthy with lands, houses and gold the nobles of the court could not restrain their jealousy, and accusations charging him with the medieval equivalent of graft and even with baser crimes were soon so persistent and apparently so well-proven that even his royal master either was convinced or thought it wise to seem to believe. At any rate the man was hanged in company with Paris thieves of the meaner sort. To the commonalty of Paris who were not in a position to hear the whispers and accusations of the court this seemed an unmerited punishment, and they did not hesitate to express vivid opinions concerning the victim of what they supposed to be aristocratic greed.

When an aristocrat engaged in petty graft his reproof was not so swiftly administered. Enguerrand de Marigny, under whose direction the palace was enlarged by Philip the Bold’s son, Philip the Fair, was accused of charging rental for the booths along the Galérie des Merciers which connected the Great Hall with the Sainte Chapelle and whose stalls were supposed to be given rent free to tradespeople whose goods might be of interest to the folk who had daily tasks at the palace. Nothing came of the accusation, however, unless it may be thought to have been punished in common with other financial misdeeds of which Marigny was accused by Philip the Fair’s successor, Quarrelsome Louis—le Hutin—, and for which he was hanged on the Montfaucon gallows which he had built when he was Philip’s “Coadjutor and Inspector.”

Guilty or not, de Marigny was set a poor example by his master, for Philip the Fair (1285-1314) was so consumed by avarice that he spared neither friends, vassals, burgesses nor ecclesiastics if by taxing them or dragging them into warfare he might add to his treasures. His greed led him into the pettiness of debasing the coinage, and inspired him to defy the pope himself, though he claimed sovereignty over all the monarchs of Europe. He was a masterful ruler—Philip—but one who worked for his own interests and not for those of his people.

Probably, however, his subjects were entirely in sympathy with Philip’s evident desire upon his accession to know where he stood with England. If he wanted to bring about an immediate quarrel his wish was balked, for when he summoned Edward I to appear before him to take the oath of allegiance “for the lands I hold of you” the English king came to Paris without a whimper and offered public acknowledgment to his suzerain. Philip made a trifling quarrel between some French and English sailors an excuse for war, and the Flemish, who were also Philip’s vassals, were soon involved. Flanders manufactured woolen cloths which went all over Europe. Raw wool was imported from England. For commercial reasons it behooved the Flemish to stay at peace with England and to regard England’s enemies as their enemies. Philip was willing enough to be considered in that light since it gave him a chance to invade a country whose industries with their resultant wealth fairly made his palms tingle.

Certainly “Hands off” was not his motto. By underhand means he contrived to get some of Edward’s French possessions away from him and he forced the Parliament of Paris to approve his action. Naturally such behavior drove Philip’s opponents together. Philip suspected some new coalition and ordered the Count of Flanders to come to Paris. Guy obeyed unwillingly, and he was confirmed in his belief that it was a mistaken step when Philip, upon hearing that Guy and Edward were arranging a marriage between Edward’s son Edward and Philippa, Guy’s daughter, flew into a rage and straightway cast the count and his two sons into the tower of the Louvre. There they stayed for several months, gaining their freedom only at the expense of poor Philippa, who, as hostage, replaced them within the grim walls on the river bank.

For the next few years there was constant trouble in the north. The imprisonment of an entirely innocent girl gave zest to the Flemish rage over Philip’s arrogant demands. Guy betrothed another of his daughters (he had eight daughters and nine sons) to the English crown prince and sent an embassy to announce the new arrangement to Philip and to tell him that he considered himself freed from his allegiance.

In the resulting war Philip was victorious. Guy and his immediate followers went to Paris and gave themselves up to the king before the steps of the palace while the queen looked on sneeringly from a window. It was not Philip’s nature to be magnanimous and he hurried his enemy off to prison. With the queen he soon after paid a visit to his new possessions where Jeanne was filled with jealousy of the rich apparel of the women of Bruges. “There are only queens in Bruges,” she cried. “I thought that only I had a right to royal state.”

The governors whom Philip put over Flanders suffered from their master’s disease, greed of gold, and so outrageous was their behavior that Flanders revolted. In the battle of Courtrai the French suffered a defeat that made terrible inroads on the ranks of the nobility. This loss was of benefit to the personal power and the pocketbook of the king, however, through his inheritance of estates and his privileges as guardian of children orphaned by the battle.

Philip was in a fury over the check to his arms at Courtrai. He took Guy of Flanders out of the Louvre and sent him to arrange a peace. The Flemish were elated by success and would not listen to him, and the now aged count, who had been promised his liberty if he succeeded, returned again to his prison and to the death that was soon to give him a long-delayed tranquillity.

The war went on with varying fortune. Philip’s chief advantage was at the battle of Mons-en-Puelle. When he returned to Paris crowds gathered before the cathedral to see their monarch ride in full equipment into Notre Dame, bringing his horse to a stand before the statue of Notre Dame de Paris to whom he had vowed his armor if he might be given the victory. During the Revolution the equestrian statue which had worn this same suit of mail for four centuries and a half was broken up in the destruction that was meted out to all representations of royalty.

The struggle with Flanders lasted even beyond Philip’s reign. On the whole the results—direct and indirect—of the contest were in Philip’s favor. In England he was able to exert a more or less open influence through his daughter, Isabelle, to whom the often-betrothed English prince (who came to the throne as Edward II) was at last united. Probably the bridegroom’s pride in having married the handsomest woman of her country was somewhat neutralized by developments of her character which won for her the nickname of “the she-wolf of France.”

Meanwhile Philip became involved in a quarrel with the pope that lasted for many years and set its mark for all time on the relations and possible relations between France and Rome. In the course of one of his attempts to replenish his treasury Philip insisted that imposts should be levied on the clergy. They had previously been free, and they turned to the pope to support their refusal. This action precipitated an immediate quarrel which was patched up but broke out again under pressure of the king’s behavior. What with his wars and what with his natural acquisitiveness Philip was always needing and always obtaining money in ways deserving of sternest censure. Beside debasing the coinage, he had used infamous methods with the Jews, he had sold patents of nobility to men considered unsuitable to enjoy the honor of belonging to the aristocracy, and he had given their freedom to all serfs who were able to pay for it.

The king rebuked Philip in a bull. Philip personally superintended its burning by the Paris hangman. When the pope sent another the king summarized it for the popular understanding into “Boniface the Pope to Philip the Fair, greeting. Know, O Supreme Prince, that thou art subject to us in all things.” This document Philip caused to be read aloud in many public places together with what purported to be his answer; “Philip to Boniface, little or no greeting. Be it known to thy Supreme Idiocy that we are subject to no man in political matters. Those who think otherwise we count to be fools and madmen.”

This was all very dashing but Philip was shrewd enough to see that it was necessary when contending with a power that proclaimed itself accountable only to God to have the support of his people. He summoned to meet in Notre Dame (April 10, 1302) the first National Assembly. It was called the States General because it was made up of representatives of the three upper classes or estates—the clergy, the nobility and the burgesses of the free cities. It may well have been a satisfied body that gathered under the Gothic arches of the great church. Its members did not realize that their powers were only advisory and that they would be expected to advise the king to do what he wanted to. All that they were yet to learn. For the moment they felt that this meeting was a concession from a king who had curbed the power of the nobles, who was trying to prevent the clergy from even entering the hall where was sitting the Parliament of Paris, increasingly made up of lawyers, and who made it clear that he tolerated the burgesses only because they were occasionally useful.

To the burgesses this was in truth a proud moment, for it was their first admission to any body of the kind on even terms with the other two estates. They were to find out that, because the voting always was done by classes, they were to be outnumbered two to one on almost every question with a unanimity that betrayed the fear that their presence excited in the lords and clergy.

It was not until the fifteenth century that deputies from the peasantry sat with the Third Estate. In the five centuries between the calling of the first States General and the Revolution the Assembly was summoned only thirteen times. When Louis XVI ordered an election in the futile hope that something might be suggested that would help France in her trouble it had been one hundred and seventy-five years since a sitting had been held.

The first States General found itself in something of a predicament. It was clear that it was expected to endorse Philip’s attitude toward the pope, yet such a course would place the clergy at variance with the head of the church. Of course they yielded. Boniface was a long way off; Philip was near at hand, and the dungeons of the Grand Châtelet and of the Louvre were always able to hold a few more prisoners. The pope was notified that the affairs of France were the concern of France and not of an outsider. The pope replied with excommunication. Philip retaliated with charges for which, he said, the pontiff should be tried. Boniface, justly enraged, threatened to depose Philip and make the German emperor king of France. Philip once more laid his case before his subjects, this time in the palace garden. Hot and heavy raged the quarrel after this. It resulted in the popes becoming for seventy years no more than dependents upon the will of the French crown, and practically its prisoners at Avignon on French soil.

Having negotiated the election of a pope of French birth, Philip used him as a tool for the accomplishment of his mercenary and cruel plans against the Order of Knights Templar. This order, at once religious and military, had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. Its duties over with the ending of the Crusades, idleness may, perhaps, have done its proverbial work. No one believes, however, that Philip’s charges of corruption in both religious practices and in manner of living were other than shamefully exaggerated excuses for seizing rich possessions which he had coveted ever since the time when, during a Paris riot caused by an unjust tax, he had taken refuge in the Temple to the north of the city. There he had seen the gathered treasures, and the fact that he owed his life to the Templars did not deter him from devising elaborate plans to rob them.

Early in the morning of October 13, 1307, all the Templars in France were seized in their beds and thrown into ecclesiastical prisons. There were one hundred and forty arrests in Paris. The knights listened, astounded, to what purported to be a confession by the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, of the truth of the abominable charges brought against the Order. They were promised liberty if they confirmed the confession. To the lasting credit of the Order only a few bought their freedom by perjury. The rest were “put to the question” with a wealth of hideous ingenuity which has seldom been approached in the grisly history of the torture chamber. In Paris alone thirty-six died as a result of their rending on the rack, and the others said anything that would put an end to suffering worse than death.

The methods employed by Philip became known to the pope, and although he had sworn to do the king’s behest in regard to some unknown deed, and this proved to be the deed, yet he had the courage to send a commission to Paris to search into the truth of the rumors that had reached him. It sat in the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève. Under shelter of the commission’s protection scores of witnesses from all over France told what they had endured, and denied their extorted confessions. Jacques de Molay himself was tortured physically and tormented mentally, but he persisted in a denial. His courage gave strength to over two hundred other knights who came before the commission to show the wounds by which they had been forced into saying what was not true.

But Philip was not to be balked of his prey. The archbishop of Sens, who was also metropolitan of Paris held a special court in the Hôtel de Sens. This palace was replaced almost two centuries later by the Hôtel de Sens now to be

seen on the rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, a house well worth a visit from lovers of line and proportion as well as from antiquarians. To his court the archbishop summoned half a hundred of the knights who had denied their confessions, and the tribunal promptly convicted them of heresy and condemned them to be burned. The pope’s commissioners had no control over a local court and could not save the poor wretches. On a day in May, 1308, they were taken out of the city on the northeast and there suffered their cruel punishment, every one of them protesting to the assembled crowd the innocence of the Order. Six others were burned on the Grève.

Five years later the pope ordered the dispersal of the Order and Philip was at last able to take possession of their treasure—to repay himself for the heavy expenses of the trial!

While the Grand Master lived, however, even though he was in prison for life, the king did not feel secure in his ill-gotten gain. A year after the general dispersal the Parisians thronged one day into the Parvis de Notre Dame—the raised open space before the cathedral—where a representative of the pope, the archbishop of Sens and other church dignitaries sat enthroned. There Jacques de Molay and three other officers of the late Order were confronted with their false or extorted confessions. If it was done to harry them into some betrayal of feeling which could be taken advantage of for their destruction it was successful. De Molay protested against this untruth being again attributed to him. The crowd, eager for excitement, pressed closer to hear the ringing words of the old soldiers. Then, in the dusk of evening, noble and burgess and cleric pushed to the western end of the Cité where they could look across to some small islands, to-day walled and made a part of the land on which the Pont Neuf rests between the two arms of the Seine. On one of these islets the fagots were piled. A witness says; “The Grand Master, seeing the fire, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die, but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’”

While the flames leaped scarlet against the river and the sky the Grand Master summoned pope and king to appear with him before the bar of the Almighty. They who heard must have shuddered, and shuddered yet again when in fact Pope Clement died within forty days and Philip the Fair within the year.

In Paris the huge establishment of the Temple with its many buildings, its considerable fields and gardens and its walls, had been independent of the city, and over its inhabitants the Grand Master had power of life and death. When Philip took possession of its treasure he turned over the enclosure to the Knights of Saint John who held it as his subjects. In the course of time the quiet precincts of the Temple became a haven for impoverished nobles, for unlicensed doctors and for small manufacturers “independent” of the guilds, for all these found sanctuary here. Later the growth of the city smothered the grounds with streets and houses and did away with most of the buildings. In 1792 when Louis XVI was imprisoned in the large tower and the other members of the royal family in the smaller tower the few buildings that were left were torn down so that they might not serve as hiding places for any rescue party. Napoleon had the donjon demolished in 1811, and everything that was left of the once superb commandery melted into the Square du Temple under the beautifying process instituted by Napoleon III. Until a very few years ago one of the sights of Paris for seers in search of the unusual was the Temple Market edging the square, where old clothes, old curtains, old upholstery—every sort of second hand “dry goods”—offered a chance for the securing of occasional wonderful bargains provided the purchaser was either fluent in his own behalf or indifferent to what was said to him.

Not far from the site of the Temple there stands to-day the church of Saint Leu, a part of which dates from the fourteenth century. It has small architectural value, but a quaint picture within tells a tale of legendary interest. A statue of the Virgin used to stand at the corner of the rue aux Ours, not far from the church. One day an impious Swiss soldier struck the figure with his sword and blood spurted from it. The man was hung upon the scene of his crime, and the statue was preserved in the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. For more than three centuries afterward and until, indeed, the destructive spirit of the Revolution did away with customs as it did with buildings, it was usual to celebrate this happening by carrying through the streets a straw man in Swiss costume which was burned on the corner of the rue aux Ours.

Among the utilitarian institutions of the fourteenth century were the étuves, public vapor baths, which were made desirable by the scantiness of the water supply at home. These establishments were as popular as necessary. When they were ready for action a crier went through the streets shouting:

Wars and persecutions show large in any period but every day living and the minor happenings of social and civic growth weave the fabric on which occasional events stand out like figures on a patterned cloth. The shuttle of time flashed back and forth through Philip’s reign carrying the brilliant woof of exploits that resulted in increasing concentration of power, of wealth and of prestige in the monarch, and threading it through the dull warp of the increasing poverty of the lower classes and the lessening vigor of the nobles.

The persecution of the Templars was not the only persecution of the time. The narrow-mindedness that was increasingly to begrudge freedom of thought was beginning its death-dealing work. Here and there throughout France heretics were put to trial every now and then. The king defiled the day of Pentecost in 1310 by causing to be burned on the Grève a Jew who had been converted but who had denied his new faith, a priest who had been convicted of heresy, and a woman who had distributed heretical tracts.

Perhaps Philip thought by such deeds to win pardon for the financial exactions with which he tormented his people. He was constantly devising new taxes. One of the chief duties of the uniformed militia which he founded—dependent upon and consequently faithful to the crown—was the collection of his unjust levies. As he lay dying at Fontainebleau he said to his children gathered at his bedside, “I have put on so many talliages and laid hands on so much riches that I shall never be absolved.”

Paris did not increase much in extent or in population during Philip’s reign. Its beauty lay in the harmony that was building every new construction like its fellows, ogival (Gothic), with pointed windows and doors and high-pitched roofs—a style superb in large edifices but giving a pinched appearance to domestic architecture.

The Louvre served its grim purpose untouched through this period. Its commander was raised to the rank of captain and was honored by being forced to stand in no one’s presence but the king’s and to receive orders only from his royal master.

The little church of Saint Julien still served as the chapel of the University, and Philip decreed that the Provost of Paris, the king’s representative in the city, should go there every two years and in the presence of faculty and students should solemnly swear that he would protect the rights of both professors and students and that he would respect them himself. This meant the confirmation of Philip Augustus’s regulations which made the dwellers in the University section answerable only to the rector of the University. The schools of the left bank were increased by the addition of the College of Navarre, founded by the queen, Jeanne of Navarre, in gratitude for Philip’s victory at Mons-en-Puelle.

A curious story is told of the origin of the monastery of the Carmes Billettes in the city’s northern section that had been redeemed from the marsh and hence was called the Marais, a name which it still retains. It appears that in the reign of Philip the Fair a Jew of the Marais lent a sum of money to a woman, and then offered to quit her of her debt if she would bring him a consecrated wafer. When he had possession of it he pierced it, and then plunged it in boiling water. At each attack upon it blood spurted forth, and at last the nerve-shaken Jew screamed for help. Forced to confess his deed he was put to the torture and his house was torn down. Upon its site the king permitted the erection of a religious establishment.

It was Philip who built the first quay to restrain the Seine from damaging its banks. The king bought the Hôtel de Nesle of which the Tour de Nesle, scowling across at the Louvre, was a part. Its grounds had stretched down to the water where they fringed the stream with willows under which the townspeople used to enjoy the shade on hot summer days. The king had the trees cut down and a wall constructed to check the swirl of the river whose two arms rejoin just above after their separation by the island.

In the palace the administrative work of the city and of France was conducted, and so extensive was it now with all Philip’s territorial additions and all his activities calling for court adjustment that the ancient building was found to be much too small. Enguerrand de Marigny superintended its enlargement, and so generously did he build that the old palace came to be called “Saint Louis’ little hall.” The grandest part of the new structure was the Great Hall, called to-day in its rebuilt form the Salle des Pas Perdus. It was lofty and adorned with much vivid blue and gold. Statues of all the kings of France from Pharamond were placed on the upper parts of the pillars, visualizing historical characters for the youth of the town who might read dates on tablets affixed. For long years the curious were delighted by the sight of the skeleton of what chroniclers have described as a sort of crocodile, which had been found under the palace when the new foundations were dug. Across one end of the room was the enormous marble slab known as the table of Saint Louis. What is supposed to be a fragment of it is now in the lower part of the palace. Around this table met the members of three different law courts. When dinners or suppers of ceremony were given by the monarch only royalties were allowed to sit at this post of honor. An idea of its size may be gained from the knowledge that the Clerks of the Basoche at a later time used to enact plays upon it as a stage.

This organization, the Clerks of the Basoche, came into being in Philip the Fair’s time. The clerks of the law courts used to hold trials to adjust differences among themselves. They played the parts of attorneys and court officers, and no doubt there was a fine display of imitative rhetoric. The word basoche probably is derived from basilica, and was adopted because it was high-flown and unusual. The president was called the King of the Basoche until Henry III, who felt a bit weak about his own royal strength, forbade the use of the title.

In the court in front of the palace the clerks used to plant a tree or pole on the last day of every May, and this entrance is called even now the Cour du Mai. Here stood the tumbrils that carried the Revolutionary victims to the guillotine. At the foot of the former staircase convicts were branded, and here Beaumarchais gained the best possible free advertisement when his books were burned as being hostile to the well-being of society.

Opening out of the Salle des Pas Perdus is the “First Chamber,” the room which replaces Saint Louis’ bedchamber. Many a stern tribunal has been held there since the time of the gentle king. It was here that Louis XIV commanded his abashed hearers to understand that “I am the State,” and here sat the court that gave Marie Antoinette a poor semblance of trial.

With its prisons on one side stirring with memories of the Revolution, and its wonderful Gothic jewel, the Sainte Chapelle, on the other, the Palace of Justice, with all its myriads of rooms for a myriad of purposes, is one of the most story-laden and varied in Europe.

When Enguerrand de Marigny had finished his work of enlargement Philip commanded a season of rejoicing in the city. For a whole week the townsfolk poured in to the palace to see and to admire, and all the shops were closed so that there might be no other distractions. These same people had to pay the bills for the new construction, and, since the privilege of free entrance was one of long standing it is to be hoped that they felt themselves sufficiently rewarded for their enforced outlay by the pleasure given to their esthetic sense.

To the ceremony of the knighting of the king’s three sons, which was a part of the celebration, they were not admitted in numbers, as that was in the more private Louvre.

Philip the Fair’s immediate successors, Louis X, le Hutin, the Quarreler (1314-1316), Philip V, the Long (1316-1322), and Charles IV, the Fair (1322-1328), were rulers of small account. They all did some fighting, all inherited their father’s capacity to raise financial trouble for their subjects, and all had serious domestic difficulties. Their wives were unfaithful to them, and the three women were imprisoned or forced to enter the Church. Two brothers, Pierre and Philip Gualtier d’Aulnay, the lovers of Louis’ wife, Marguerite of Burgundy and of Charles’s wife, Blanche, were executed on the Grève. Philip’s wife, Jeanne of Burgundy, was the playful lady who dropped Buridan into the Seine from the Tour de Nesle.

After Marguerite had been strangled in her prison Louis le Hutin married Clémence of Hungary. His posthumous son, John I, lived but a few days, and Philip the Long claimed the confirmation of the promise which the Parliament of Paris, sitting in the palace, had made to support him rather than let the throne go to a possible daughter of Louis. This decision established the Salic law as applying to the throne.

Philip the Long had no children and was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Fair. Charles was twice married after his repudiation of Blanche, but he left only a daughter, born at the Louvre after his death, and the crown therefore went to his first cousin, Philip of Valois.

CHAPTER VIII

PARIS OF THE EARLY VALOIS

As often happens with men of extraordinary force Philip the Fair did not bequeath any legacy of energy to his sons. Philip of Valois, son of Philip the Fair’s brother, had no notable inheritance of character, but he was made of livelier stuff than his cousins. Although three reigns had passed since his uncle’s death it was only a period of fourteen years, and the royal power was then at the greatest point of concentration it had yet reached. A man of but ordinary vigor and judgment, one would suppose, would have been able to entrench himself strongly. Yet the promise of Philip’s early years of victory over the Flemish was unfulfilled by his serious defeats at the hands of the English.

He jumped into the arena promptly enough. At his coronation at Rheims on Trinity Sunday, 1328, the Count of Flanders, whose duty it was to bear the great sword, did not answer the herald’s summons, although he was there in plain view. When Philip asked for an explanation his vassal answered that he had been called by his title, and, because of the disobedience of his people, his title was now but empty sound. Philip was fired with instant sympathy. “Fair Cousin,” he said, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.”

He found that he had entered upon no easy task, for the Flemish burghers were both brave and obstinate. However, he won a brilliant victory at Cassel, where, according to Froissart, of sixteen thousand Flemish “all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another.” So annoyed was Philip by the trouble he had been put to to save his word unbroken that he gave the Count of Flanders some rather threatening advice when he left to make his deferred entrance into Paris.

“Count,” he said, “I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for, if I do, it will be to my own profit, and to your hurt.”

The count, however, could not keep out of embroilment with his people. Because England supplied the wool which the Flemish looms wove it was important to the manufacturers of Flanders that peace should be preserved between the two countries. Heedless of this necessity, the Count of Flanders, in 1336, eight years after the battle of Cassel, ordered the imprisonment of all the English in Flanders. King Edward retaliated in kind and clapped into jail all the Flemish merchants in England. The people of both countries were well aware that Philip of France was the instigator of all this turmoil.

A year after Philip’s accession, Edward, as lord of Aquitaine, had gone to France and paid his feudal duty to him. The two monarchs were supposed to be friends. Friendship is hard to preserve, however, when ambitions clash and when interested people are alert to foment trouble. In 1337 war was declared, and its dragging course for the next decade was prophetic of the whole miserable century.

After nine years of desultory fighting the French suffered at Crécy the worst defeat the country ever had known. For the first time in history gunpowder was used in war and the innovation made apparent at once the futility of the nobles’ fortresses against the new ammunition.

A part of the English army drew dangerously close to Paris—so near that the watchmen on the towers caught the gleam of their camp-fires, and refugees brought news of burning and slaughter no farther away than Saint Denis. The city was saved from attack only because Edward was besieging Calais. It cost England a year’s fighting to capture this Channel key to France, but she held it for two hundred years, a threat to French power and a grief to French hearts.

Destructive as was the new ammunition its work could not approach the loss occasioned by the “Black Death,” the plague which swept across Europe with such might that it even put an end to war.

In 1350 Philip VI died. His body was carried to Notre Dame where it lay in state before being taken to Saint Denis. There it was buried “on the left side of the great altar, his bowels were interred at the Jacobins at Paris, and his heart at the convent of the Carthusians at Bourgfontaines in Valois.”

A month later Philip’s son, John (1350-1364) was crowned at Rheims. By way of signalizing his accession he conferred knighthood on many young men, and for a week Paris was gay with continual feasting. Perhaps it was because so many people thronged the palace at this time, perhaps it was because of the encroachments of the courts, that John did not always occupy the royal apartments on the Cité but lived for some time at the Hôtel de Nesle which Philip the Fair had bought for the crown.

During the next five years John showed himself entirely lacking in the discretion and calmness which the uncertainties of the time demanded. He was influenced by favorites and he was constantly quarreling with his son-in-law, Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had caused the murder of a man whom John esteemed and who was incessantly playing fast and loose now with England, now with France. It was to consider certain charges against this undesirable connection that John held the first known lit de justice. The “bed of justice” received its name from the king’s seat, a couch raised on a dais, both covered with handsome stuffs sown with the fleur-de-lis. The king’s appearance was in harmony with his desire to accent his regal state for he wore his robes of ceremony and his crown.

With an exhausted treasury threatening the people with taxes, with the plague devastating the country, and with war imminent, it is small wonder that France was in a discouraged state. John tried to hearten his subjects by establishing subsidies and by giving festivals. By these means he won his nickname of “the Good,” but they were the cause of such impoverishment that when the English war broke out again he found himself in embarrassment for lack of money. Twice he summoned the States General, but his preparations were seriously hindered. His judgment as a general was no better than as a ruler. Inflated by some trifling successes he scorned the Black Prince’s proposals of peace and then allowed himself to be beaten ignominiously by a force much smaller than his own in one of the world’s great battles, that of Poitiers.

John’s personal courage was magnificent. Although several divisions of his army were withdrawn, including those headed by his three older sons, he fought valiantly in a hand-to-hand fight that waxed ever brisker as his opponents saw that they were dealing with some man of prominence. His fourteen-year-old son, Philip, stayed at his father’s side helping him by constant cries of warning. As a reward for his fidelity John afterwards gave him the province of Burgundy, a gift which proved to be a sore mistake for the happiness of France.

After the battle of Poitiers a burgher of Paris vowed a candle as long as the city to Notre Dame de Paris. It was to burn always. When the city grew so large as to make such a mass of wax impracticable the offering was changed (1605) to a silver lamp, and it may be seen now before the graceful figure which stands at the south side of the entrance to the choir of the cathedral.

John was gently treated in England and his presence was something of a social event. When he was held at a ransom and was returned to France while two of his sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent across the Channel to serve as hostages for the payment of the ransom, the king’s departure was a matter of regret. His welcome in France was equally warm.

The hostage sons proved themselves not more reliable as hostages than they had been as fighters. One of them, at least, yielded to the call of Paris, broke his parole and fled home. John’s paternal pride was profoundly outraged. “If honor is banished from every other spot,” he said, “it ought to remain sacred in the breast of kings.” He returned at once to London and gave himself up to king Edward.

Again he found himself popular at the English court, and he passed a gay winter, entertaining Edward at Savoy House and being entertained in turn at the palace of Westminster. Before many months, however, he was stricken with a mortal illness and died without seeing France again.

While king John was held prisoner by the English (1356-1360), his son the dauphin, afterwards Charles V, ruled or tried to rule in France. During his regency there appears one of the foremost characters known to the history of Paris, Étienne Marcel. This man belonged to an old family of drapers, and had achieved the position of the Provost of the Merchants, the chief administrative office in the city’s gift.

The burghers of Paris were restless. The establishment of the States General had given them recognition of a kind and a consequent feeling of importance. Repeated tax levies had kept them in a constant state of irritation. John had crowded them out of the army, war, according to his theory, being a matter for nobles to handle. The ignominious defeat at Poitiers made them dissent cordially from this opinion.

These were but a few of the causes stirring in the minds of the burghers. Now, with their jovial and improvident king a prisoner in England, France entrusted to an untried youth of nineteen, and England’s plans unknown but always threatening, the bourgeois felt themselves to be facing both opportunity and responsibility.

To test the prince seemed to be the first summons. Returning from Poitiers Charles took the title of Lieutenant-General, installed himself in the Louvre, summoned the States General, and entered into negotiations with Marcel. The provost either was really distrustful of the dauphin or he saw some advantage for his own ambition in setting the people against their lord. When he went to a conference with Charles he was supported by a body of men heavily armed, and a little later he expressed himself as so fearful of the prince’s integrity that he refused to go nearer to the Louvre than the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to the east of the fortress.

Egged on by Marcel the States General did their utmost to torment the young regent. Undoubtedly they had grievances, but Charles was not at all responsible for the state of the country and the Assembly’s methods of improving conditions savored more of bullying than of coöperation.

The body met less than three weeks after Charles’s arrival in Paris. More than eight hundred members from all northern France gathered in the Great Hall of the palace. Half of this throng was representative of the bourgeoisie, and their superiority in numbers over the nobility—depleted by its losses at Poitiers—and the clergy—naturally a lesser body, though almost every prelate of high rank was present—gave the middle class a courage they never before had assumed.

Activity against the regent was manifested promptly. The size of the Assembly being unwieldy a body of eighty was chosen from the full membership to confer and report to the whole meeting. Charles sent officers to represent his interests and to furnish information. On the second day the representatives refused to take counsel unless the officers were withdrawn. Why they wanted to be unchecked was quite evident when, a few days later, the States-General requested the dauphin to meet with them in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank and hear the recommendations which had been approved by the full house. They demanded that twenty-two men of king John’s closest friends and councillors should be arrested, lose their offices and have their property confiscated, and, if trial proved them guilty of “grafting” and of giving bad advice to the king, they were to be further punished. A traveling commission was to be appointed to keep a check on all the officials of France, and a body of twenty-eight men—four prelates, twelve nobles and twelve burghers—was to have “power to do and to order everything in the kingdom just like the king himself.”

This proposition practically relegated the regent to private life. A proposal to release from prison Charles’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, was not only an attack on John’s management, but a threat against the dauphin’s peace, for the king of Navarre had come honestly by his nickname and was capable of fomenting endless trouble.

In return for conceding their demands the States promised the regent a force of thirty thousand men, their support to be provided by taxes of doubtful collectibility.

Charles found himself in a position of extreme difficulty. The people of Paris were clamorously in favor of the Assembly’s proposals. Everybody was ready to hit the man who seemed to have no friends. Charles sparred for time, announcing at a meeting held in the Louvre that all the matters under discussion must hold over until he had attended to some business with the German emperor and the pope which called him to Metz.

Although Paris was hostile to him Charles had friends elsewhere. He received information that the south of France was heartily royalist, and also that some of the deputies from northern towns to the Paris Assembly had been rebuked by their constituents when they returned home, for their attitude to the regent.

Unfortunately, to obtain money for his journey, Charles followed his father’s example and debased the coinage. When this became known a few days after his departure Marcel and the mob went to the Louvre and frightened Charles’s younger brother into rescinding the order. Six weeks later Charles returned and reëstablished his original order, with the result that all Paris rushed to arms and he was compelled to grant practically every demand of the Assembly.

When the Assembly met three months later its early enthusiasm had waned or else the representatives repented of their harsh demands or saw their injustice. The clergy and the nobility were fewer and there was a lack of harmony among the bourgeois, many of them objecting to the concentration of power which Marcel and a few of his friends were effecting.

Charles was clever enough to seize this time of uneasiness to announce that he “intended from now on to govern” by himself. His first efforts were not very successful, for Marcel by specious promises wheedled him into summoning the Assembly again, and then arranged for the liberation of Charles the Bad. He was welcomed by the Paris populace and had the audacity to make an address to them from the platform on the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés from which the kings were used to watch the sports of the students on the adjoining Pré au Clercs.

The deputies foresaw a clash between the brothers-in-law, and it was but a small Assembly which met, some of the members having returned home after reaching Paris and recognizing the trouble that was bound to come from forcing the dauphin to accept Charles the Bad’s liberation and to receive him with a show of friendliness.

Outside of the city there was no show of friendliness between the royalists and the friends of Navarre. A lively little war was going on that sent the people from round about to seek protection within Marcel’s new wall. That Marcel was a man prompt both to see a need and to meet it is shown in his action when the news of the French defeat at Poitiers was brought to Paris. The very next day he gave orders for the rebuilding and enlargement of the wall that the English might encounter that obstacle if they advanced upon the city. The existing wall had not been changed since Philip Augustus’s time, five centuries before, and the new rampart showed one change in fashion—its towers were square instead of round. Its size indicated a distinct increase in the size of the city on the north side, for when the wall was completed by Charles V the ends on the right bank were not opposite the ends on the south bank. The south wall was made stronger, however, by a deepening of the ditches.

Charles lived much at the Louvre. Because he gathered a body of soldiers about him it was rumored that he was going to use them against the Parisians. The regent was not lacking in courage. Accompanied only by a half dozen followers he rode into one of the city squares and told the astonished crowd of his affection for Paris and its people, and of his intention of defending it against its enemies.

The people were so touched by their prince’s pluck and candor that Marcel found it prudent to stop laying charges against the dauphin and to transfer them to his councillors. After working up feeling against them for over a month he led a mob to the palace, where Charles was then staying. Together with some of his friends he pressed into the dauphin’s own room and there they killed Charles’s councillors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, not only in his sight but so close to him that he was splashed with their blood. Having impressed the boy with his strength he patronizingly offered to protect him and put on his head his own citizen’s cap of red and blue, the colors of Paris. Then he had the bodies flung on to Saint Louis’ huge marble table in the Great Hall, later to be exposed publicly, and made his way back to the Maison aux Piliers on the Grève and there addressed the people, taking great credit for the murderous deed that he had just brought to pass. The crowd approved him with vigorous shouting.

Marcel’s action with regard to the Maison aux Piliers is significant of his entire disregard of the wishes or the property of the crown prince. The house took its name from the fact that its second story, projecting over the street, was supported by columns. At this time it was over two hundred years old for it had been built in 1141. Philip Augustus bought it in 1212, but evidently he resold it, for there is a record that Philip the Fair bought it for a present for his brother. In some way Philip the Long got possession of it and gave it to one of his favorites. It seems to have returned to royal hands almost immediately, for Louis the Quarreler’s widow, Clémence, died there and willed it to her nephew, the dauphin of Vienne. His heir bequeathed the dauphiny and other property to Philip of Valois in trust for his grandson, the Charles of this chapter, who was the first heir apparent to wear the title of dauphin.

Marcel wanted the Maison aux Piliers for a city hall. The dauphin refused to give it up and tried various ways—even that of giving title to a private citizen—to save it from being taken from him. About six months before the murder of the marshals, however, Marcel bought it with public money, and called it La Meson de la Ville.

On the northern slope of the Mont Sainte Geneviève, on the site of a building of Roman construction, rose in Carolingian days the first city hall. It was clumsily made of stone and was called the Parloir aux Bourgeois. This was succeeded at some later day by a “parloir” near the Grand Châtelet. Marcel’s purchase decided the situation of the Hôtel de Ville for all time. It was in its logical place near the Grève where the very heart of the city’s business throbbed. There, rebuilt in 1540 by Francis I and in 1876 after its destruction by the communists, it has housed the city’s offices and has seen many strange and furious scenes in days of disturbance, and received many sovereigns and potentates in times of peace.

After the death of the marshals Marcel’s exactions upon the prince were grosser than ever. Charles was even forced to give Charles the Bad an annuity and to be frequently in his company. Just about a month after the assassination the dauphin managed to escape from Paris and go to Champagne where he was given cordial sympathy by the friends of the slain marshal. They urged him to besiege Paris and to kill the provost as punishment for the murder he had instigated. When the Parisians learned that the prince to whom they paid so little consideration was receiving a dangerous support in other places they begged the University of Paris to send messengers to ask him to spare the lives of the provost and his immediate following. Charles returned word that he would forgive the citizens provided a half dozen or so of their chief men were sent him as hostages. No one was willing to take the chance of surviving the “hostage” condition, and the city prepared to withstand a siege.

Immediately after Charles’s flight Marcel had removed the artillery from the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville, and had begun to swing the new wall outside of the fortress in order to cut it off from the country. The work of wall-building went on briskly on the right bank, and the moat was deepened around the fortifications of the left bank.

Being still under the spell of Charles the Bad’s vivacity and enterprise the Parisians invited him to be their captain. Down in their hearts, though, they did not trust him, and it was not long before they made his going out of the city with his men and engaging in a shouted conversation with the regent’s men an excuse for charging him with treachery and driving him out of the city.

Once beyond the walls he promptly joined the dauphin in putting down the peasant insurrection called the Jacquerie, from the peasant’s nickname, Jacques Bonhomme. Whether or not Marcel instigated the uprising is not known with certainty, but at any rate it served the purpose of leading the prince’s army away from Paris. The insurrection was not of long duration, for it was crushed with a heavy hand and no quarter.

Again Marcel dickered with Charles the Bad who was always ready to dicker with anybody on the chance of something turning out for his own profit. He was encamped at Saint Denis. The regent’s army almost surrounded the city and was in communication with a friendly party inside of which Jean Maillard was the most prominent.

Confident that he would be put to death if he were captured by the prince, Marcel arranged to open the city to Navarre on the night of July 31, 1358. Maillard was in charge of the Porte Saint Denis and when Marcel demanded the keys he refused to give them up. Then he leaped on his horse, took the banner of the city from the Hôtel de Ville and rode through street after street shouting “Montjoie Saint Denis,” the rallying cry of the monarch from early days. There was lively fighting among the citizens throughout the evening.

Marcel had sent word to Charles the Bad that entrance might be made by the east gate, the Porte Saint Antoine. As he neared it, key in hand, about eleven o’clock that night, he was met by Maillard.

“Étienne, Étienne,” cried Maillard, “what are you doing here at this hour?”

“What business is it of yours, Jehan! I am here to act for the city whose government has been entrusted to me.”

“That is not so,” cried Jehan with an oath. “You are not here at this hour for any good end; and I call your attention,” he said to the men with him, “to the keys of the gate that he is carrying for the purpose of betraying the city.”

“Jehan, you lie!”

“Traitor, ’tis you who lie!”

A sharp fight arose between the two bands and Maillard himself killed Marcel. He explained his course the next day to the people, “and the greater part thanked God with folded hands for the grace He had done them.”

When Charles the regent rode into Paris on the second day of August he passed a churchyard where the naked bodies of Marcel and two of his companions were exposed on the same spot where the provost had exposed the bodies of the two marshals.

It is not possible to tell now—perhaps it was not possible to tell in his own day—how much of Marcel’s activity was due to a sincere desire to improve the economic and political condition of the burghers of Paris, and how much was the result of his own ambition. Perhaps he was ahead of his time; certainly he was mistaken in his methods. Whatever the judgment upon him it is undeniable that he was a man of extraordinary force and a “spellbinder” whose personality has won him admiration through the centuries. Beside the Hôtel de Ville his statue stands to-day, a stern figure looking south across the river, and mounted on a horse which has been proclaimed as the finest bronze steed in the world.

Upon his return to Paris Charles showed a forbearance unusual in those times of swift reprisals. There were confiscations of the property of some of Marcel’s friends and even the beheading of two of them on the Grève, but that was before the regent’s entrance into the city, and he tactfully steadied popular feeling and gave no rein to the spirit of revenge which he might have been expected to feel. He even entered into an agreement of peace with that weathercock, Charles of Navarre, and Paris and its neighborhood drew a sigh of relief.

The dauphin seized the opportunity offered by this time of quiet to make the Louvre more habitable. The ancient tower was left undisturbed except that a gallery sprang from it to the northern wall which Charles built to complete the rectangle which Philip Augustus had begun.

Marcel had met his reward in the summer of 1358. The next spring Charles received from London the terms of a treaty which his father had made with king Edward III. A large stretch of western territory was to be yielded to England and an enormous ransom to be paid for the king’s release. It is a testimony to the increased strength of the subject in France that Charles submitted this document to a gathering of deputies who surrounded the regent on the great outer staircase of the palace and filled the courtyard below. They rejected with promptness and scorn the proposal to make their enemies a gift of nearly half of France and to ruin themselves by the raising of the exorbitant sum of four million crowns of gold. If any money was to be raised they preferred to spend it in fighting the English, and they offered their services as soldiers.

When Edward learned of France’s refusal to accept the treaty he promptly crossed the Channel. He met with such small success, however, that he was glad to make a compact with Burgundy by which he promised—for a consideration—to let that province alone for two years.

Edward then pressed on to Paris which he approached on the south. Charles, learning of his coming, burned all the villages adjoining the city on that side so that the English army would have to seek far for food. He discouraged any response to Edward’s attempts to draw the French soldiers outside the walls, and at the end of a week, the English, bored and hungry, withdrew.

Not long after, Charles was able to negotiate the Peace of Brétigny, which was all too hard upon France in its demands for the cession of territory and of a large ransom for John, but which the people, weary of war, received with joy. The bells of Notre Dame pealed their satisfaction, and the light-hearted Parisians danced and feasted in the squares, and entertained heartily the four Englishmen who represented King Edward. Each was given a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, the choicest possession of Paris.

Charles had obtained the money to pay part of his father’s ransom from his new brother-in-law, the duke of Milan who had just married his sister Isabelle. It was to secure the payment of the remainder that John’s younger sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent to England as hostages.

John reëntered Paris in December, 1360, four years after the disastrous battle that had cost him his liberty but had had the result of giving his son training which went far to make him one of the greatest kings that France ever has known. Paris was glad to welcome her monarch whose charm they loved and whose weakness they forgot.

The remaining four years of John’s rule was hardly wiser than the early part. He jaunted about the country, everywhere instituting festivals and tournaments. It was now that he gave the duchy of Burgundy to prince Philip as a reward for his pluck at Poitiers.

Then came the breaking of his parole by the duke of Anjou and John’s return to England and death. The stage was clear for the reëntrance of a man who was to treat his task of rulership as one worthy of serious approach.