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STORIES FROM

FRENCH HISTORY

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RUDYAKD KIPLING

The Terror
( M \\.iy McCannell, R.B.A.

STORIES FROM

FRENCH HISTORY

ELEANOR C. PRICE

AUTHOR OF
"*ANGELOT " "THE QUEEN'S MAN" "CARDINAL DE RICHELIEU" ETC.

LONDON

GEORGE G. HARRAP 6- CO. LTD.

2 & 3 PORTSMOUTH STREET KINGSWAY W.C.

AND AT SYDNEY

published July

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED. EDINBURGH
c.Ki AT BRITAIN

Contents

CHAPTER PACE

I. CESAR AND VERCINGETORIX ... 9

II. A CITY, A SAINT, AND A KING . . .18

III. ROLAND AND ROLLO . . . .28

IV. THE COMING OF THE CRUSADERS . . .38
V. THE MAKING OF THE MONARCHY . . .47

VI. A MOTHER AND SON . . . .58

VII. THE PROVOST OF THE MERCHANTS . . 67

VIII. A VANISHED PALACE . . . .77

IX. THE STORY OF THE MAID . . .86

X. A PATRIOT . . . . . .06

XI. THE DAWN OF MODERN FRANCE,. . .106

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, , , , t t

XII. A GREAT CAPTAIN / . . .114

• • • '

XIII. A KING OF THE .'RSNAlsaA&cB • , . . . 122

•.:•••

XIV. VALOIS AND Bo(mm>iN. . . . . 133
XV. HENRI QUATRE . . . . .143

XVI. THE IRON HAND . . . . .152

XVII. THE VELVET PAW. . . . .162

XVIII. FIGURES IN THE FRONDE .... 172

XIX. THE RISING OF THE SUN-KING . . .181

Stories from French History

ITKR

XX. VERSAILLES . . . . 191

XXI. PEASANTS AND SMUGGLERS . . .

XXII. CHATEAU AND VILLAGE 211

XXIII. Two GOOD MEN .... ^H)

XXIV. THE QUEEN AND HER SERVANTS . . . 226
XXV. KING TERROR . 235

XXVI. VIVE L'EMPERF.UR! 245

,•-• .....

-•.. . .
- .- ....

Illustrations

FACING
PAGE

THE TERROR .... Otway McCanne.ll Frontispiece

ST GENEVIEVE, CLOVIS, AND CLO-

TILDE . . . . M. Meredith Williams . 24

SHIPS OF THE VIKINGS . . M. Meredith Williams . 34

THE FIRST CRUSADERS IN SIGHT OF

JERUSALEM . . . M. Meredith Williams . 44

THE CHATEAU GAILLARD . . J. M. W. Turner . 52

THE SAINTE-CHAPELLE . . . Photo ... 64

JEANNE o'Afic .... Henri Chapu . . 88

THE HOUSE OF JACQUES C(EUR AT

BOURGES .... Photo ... 98

THE PLACE DE GREVE IN THE

FIFTEENTH CENTURY . . F. Hoffbauer . .110

BAYARD WORKING ON THE FORTI-
FICATIONS OF MEZIERES . . M.Meredith Williams . 118

THE CHATEAU DE BLOIS . . Photo . . .126

VIEW OF PARIS IN THE SIXTEENTH

CENTURY . . . F. Ho/bauer . .146

RICHELIEU AND FATHER JOSEPH . M.Meredith Williams . 156

Stories from French Histor

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STORIES FROM FRENCH
HISTORY

CHAPTER I
C/ESAR AND VERCINGETORIX

The f/randeur (hat was fiome.

EDGAR A. POE

Le fjranit immorte? d\m maynanime exemple.

ARSENE VF.RMEXOCZE

AT the beginning of what is known as French history
stands the great fact — one of the greatest in the
annals of civilization — that Rome invaded and
conquered Gaul.

That triumph is bound up with the name of Julius
Caesar ; but it had really begun long before he crossed the
Alps, about the year 58 B.C., to enter on the first of the
eight campaigns that his conquest cost Rome. Something
like a hundred years earlier the people of the ancient lands
and settlements of Southern Gaul, where the mountains
descend in sun-bathed loveliness and glory of colour to the
Mediterranean Sea — the lands whose seaboard we call the
Riviera, the coast beyond all others — had asked for help
from Rome against enemy tribes. The Romans came,
and remained ; these regions were too like Italy to be
lightly returned to their original owners. Aix and Nar-
bonne, the first Roman colonies, soon became chief cities
in the territories later called Provence and Languedoc,
' the Province ' ruled by Roman power which stretched
across the river Rhone from the Alps to the Pyrenees.

Stories from French History

Here was the favourite seat of the Romans for something
like six hundred years, long after the whole of Gaul had
been more or less colonized — down, indeed, to the fall of
the Empire and the sweeping barbarian invasions from
the North and East, which for the time being destroyed
civilization and by more lasting changes transformed Gaul
into France. In old Provence, where it was once supreme,
are the chief visible relics of that Roman power whose
hidden vital influence will last to the world's end. Here
in the clear dry air, above the blue tideless sea, far removed
from the mud and mist of the North, among the palms
and vines and figs and olives, the red rocks, the dry white
stony beds or winter torrents of the streams, the Romans
built their villas of dazzling marble and set their stately
gardens with statues and fountains. Here were and still
are the great aqueducts, such as the Pont du Card,
marvellous works of engineering to bring water from the
mountains ; the triumphal arches, the pillared temples on
the hill-sides, the baths, the amphitheatres, the streets of
tombs such as the Alyscamps (Elysian Fields) of Aries.
In many cities of France, as well as in Britain and other
countries colonized by Rome, mighty remains are to be
found in their age and decay ; but the bones of the Roman
Empire, a writer on Provence has strikingly said, "pierce
through Provencal soil in many places as though that
giant grave were still too narrow for the skeleton of a past
than can never wholly die."

The Romans brought law and order, justice and good
government. Theirs was the idea of the one ruling state,
yet of the freedom, dignity, and independence of each
member of that state. That these doctrines did not ex-
clude tyranny and slavery is a fact leading to questions too
deep to be discussed here. But one answer may be given :
the Roman Empire at its greatest knew nothing of Christi-
10

Caesar and Vercingetorix

anity. When the knowledge came, bitter persecution
followed it ; for the freedom of a Christian was seen to be
something different from that of a Roman citizen and was
mysteriously alarming to the rulers of a heathen state.

Rome did not destroy the countries she conquered, but
added them to her Empire, giving their people the advan-
tages enjoyed by her own citizens. She imposed on them,
willing or not, her language and her laws, and organized
their trade, education, and local government. Splendid
roads ran from point to point of the Empire, mountains
were crossed, forests pierced, rivers bridged ; thus there
was constant communication by chariot, horse, or running
post between the cities, and regular intercourse with Rome.
The Roman settlers intermarried with the natives of their
colonies. The Latin strain is strong in France to this
day: in the south, women's classical Roman faces often
show descent from the conquerors of two thousand years
ago.

Caesar found in Gaul a large and beautiful country
guarded by mountains and seas, its plains varied by hills
and valleys, among which a thousand lesser rivers and
streams flowed into the great four that were then, as now,
the characteristic boundaries of its provinces and popula-
tions : the Seine, the river of Paris, in later centuries the
chief waterway of French civilization ; the wide and wind-
ing Loire, river of the west, flowing to the Atlantic through
a land of fertility and romance ; the Garonne, rising in
the Spanish mountains, and in Caesar's days better known
and more navigated than any except the noble Rhdne,
that divides the southern provinces in his magnificent
course from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.

Gaul was a wild country in Caesar's days, largely covered
with forest, and inhabited by Celtic tribes with a certain
civilization of their own not unlike that of the ancient

Stories from French History

Britons. They were ruled by their Druids ; but a religion
of terror did not crush the independence of mind, the rest-
lessness, the curiosity about nature and man, or weaken
the love of fighting and the obstinate courage which in
former centuries of wandering had made these Gauls a
dread to Southern Europe and Asia. Caesar found a more
stationary people, in a country whose rough divisions were
marked then, as now, by striking differences in character.
The men of the south were the most prosperous and the
most talkative ; those of the west the most imaginative
and least practical ; those of the north and east the
strongest, bravest, most industrious. There was no
general government of the country, such as the Romans
brought and imposed upon it : the towns, large thatched
villages, often fortified, on hill or river-bank, among
cultivated fields or hidden away in a forest clearing, were
independent communities of quarrelsome folk, constantly
fighting among themselves or with each other. The
difficulty of bringing these tribes into obedience to the
supreme power of Rome may be measured by the eight
years' campaign of Rome's most brilliant commander.

Tall and splendid men these Gauls were : fair, blue-
eyed, red-haired, with long fierce moustaches, of which
they were amazingly proud. The chiefs were gorgeous
in gold-embroidered garments, with collars and bracelets
blazing with jewels. When mounted on great horses,
brandishing swords or javelins, and wearing on their
helmets the skull of some bird or animal with stag's horns
or falcon's wings extended, their height and appearance
might well strike terror into ordinary foes. The small,
dark men of Italy, running and driving into battle with
shining armour and short Roman sword, might seem
overmatched by these tremendous warriors. Caesar,
with his bald head and thin, aquiline face, keen, grave,
12

Caesar and Vercingetorix

and thoughtful, appeared a mean opponent for such a
magnificent young chieftain as Vercingetorix.

And in fact this famous leader of the Gauls made a fine
defence against the Roman invaders, for he had military
genius as well as dauntless courage, and he was a real
patriot, even though his country meant little more than
a group of tribes and scattered communities. His own
tribe, called by Caesar the Arverni, inhabited the moun-
tains of Auvergne, the beautiful central province of France
which takes its name from them ; the dwelling of Ver-
cingetorix was a hill stronghold called Gergovia. The
story goes that his father, a great chief, was murdered
here by the partisans of a jealous brother. This brother
was ruling in his stead when the resistance of Central
Gaul to the Romans broke into flame.

It was mid-winter. From the high plateau where
Gergovia stood — all grass and brambles now — mountain
and plain lay wrapped deep in snow. The thatched roofs
of the little town were heaped with it ; all the warmer
for old men, women, and children, who crowded together
round central fires in the large huts, sleeping or drinking
heavily or singing songs and telling ancient tales of the
glory of the Gauls long ago when they stormed over the
known world and, led by their brave chief Brennus, took
Roman senators by the beard. The name of Rome had a
different sound for them now, in spite of their boasting,
and the chief of Gergovia wagged a prudent head of dis-
approval over the talk of the young men, led by his nephew
Vercingetorix. What were these foolish, fiery dreams of
resistance to Rome ? They would end by bringing fire
and sword on the whole country. They would end in the
extermination of the Gauls. Why not make terms with
the invader and live side by side with him in trade, as
many Gaulish cities were already doing ? These young

Stories from French History

hot-heads should be stabbed or burnt alive, or at least
driven away into the forests to live with the wild beasts,
their brethren !

Even while the old man grumbled, gulping down his
strong drinks and stretching his feet to the crackling fire,
the young men with their leader were out in the snow,
watching the northern sky, listening for a voice that should
travel along the hill-tops to bring the message they ex-
pected, signal for a general rising. Through the stillness
of the winter night under the stars it came, the shout
handed on from man to man over a hundred and fifty
lonely miles. In the town of Orleans on the Loire, called
by the Romans Genabum, where they had made one of
those trading centres which the old chief approved, the
Gauls had risen that morning and had killed all the
Roman colonists.

With rage and terror the chief received the news,
brought to him triumphantly by Vercingetorix. What
vengeance would not the Romans take for such a so-called
victory ! That they might have no excuse for destroying
Gergovia, his innocent self, his followers, and his property,
he ordered that Vercingetorix should be driven instantly
from the town. Had not the young men of the tribe stood
behind Vercingetorix his life would have been in peril.

The little band dashed away into the mountains, and
for a few days or weeks Gergovia heard no more of them.
Then they returned with a troop of fierce young spirits
like themselves, and took the place by storm. There was
slight resistance, for Vercingetorix was more popular with
the tribe than his cowardly uncle could ever be. History
does not tell of the chief's fate, but life was of small account
in those days, and revenge was a duty. He disappears.
We know that his nephew was proclaimed cliief, and that
Gergovia became the formidable centre of a rebellion
14

Caesar and Vercingetorix

against Rome, led by Vercingetorix, which spread quickly
through the central provinces of Gaul. One after another
the strong places where the Romans in the course of
several campaigns had established themselves fell into
Gaulish hands again. Caesar and his legions had gone
south before winter set in, leaving garrisons in the new
colonies. These were easily overwhelmed by the warlike
Gauls and their leader. From south to north, from the
Garonne to the Seine, his countrymen followed Vercinge-
torix. The tribes flocked to his standard in such numbers
that he divided them into two armies, sending one south-
ward and marching northward with the other, designing
thus to free the whole of Gaul. And he might have done
it, had his opponent been any man but Caesar.

The Roman general heard the news in Italy. Travelling
day and night, crossing the Cevennes, the south-eastern
barrier of Auvergne, through many feet of snow, and driv-
ing the southern army of the Gauls before him, he burst
upon the province and began to lay it waste with fire and
sword. Vercingetorix hurried back to its defence, and saw
but one course to take with these terrible enemies : the
land must be made desolate before them, the towns and
villages burnt, the cattle driven away, the women and
children carried off into safety. His men would swoop
on their communications, seize their convoys, starve them
in the bitter weather, and thus force them to retreat.
The desperate plan was carried out, but not entirely.
Vercingetorix had not the relentlessness of Caesar. When
the Bituriges, the inhabitants of Bourges, prayed on their
knees that their beautiful town might be spared — twenty
of their settlements having gone up in flames, surely a
sufficient sacrifice for one day — the young chief listened
to their prayers. But with a doubtful mind ; and they
soon had cause to regret their attempt at self-preservation.

Stories from French History

There were forty thousand people in Bourges when
Caesar besieged it, building towers and raising mounds of
earth against the ramparts. Cold and hunger weakened
his armv. but after twenty-five davs he stormed the town

ff 9 V W

in spite of a heroic defence. Then there was a massacre
so vast that only eight hundred escaped from Bourges
and fled to Vercingetorix, Caesar with his legions pursuing
them. For a time fortune favoured the Gauls. Their
chief made so fierce a stand beneath his own walls of
Gergovia that the power of Rome was driven in disorderly
flight to the north, harassed by rising tribes and pursued
by Vercingetorix. In one of the rearguard actions
Caesar even lost his sword and narrowly escaped with
his life.

But Rome after all was invincible, and the tide was not
long in turning. The tribes agreed in making Vercinge-
torix, their one great soldier, paramount chief in Gaul.
Now we find him at the head of his army, fighting unequal
battles with the legions and finally holding out for many
weeks in the citadel of Alesia, on the Mont Auxois in
Burgundy, waiting till the whole of Gaul, urgently sum-
moned, should hurry its two hundred thousand warriors to
his relief. They came at length : sweeping clouds of horse-
men, hordes of archers and javelin-throwers, attacked the
Roman army where it lay entrenched round about the hill,
imprisoning the fortress within miles of earthworks and
ditches thirty feet wide. To sally out was impossible.
Vercingetorix and his friends, faced with imminent
starvation, watched from Alesia the great battle between
Romans and Gauls, which raged for days in valley and
plain. The end was doubtful till a body of horsemen in
Caesar's pay, summoned from the Rhine, fell suddenly on
the rear of the Gauls. Roman soldiers before, strange
barbarians behind, the men of Gaul were seized with panic :
16

Caesar and Vercingetorix

they fled, pursued for miles by death-dealing enemies,
and there was no more hope for the citadel of Alesia.

To save his army from certain starvation or massacre,
Vercingetorix offered himself as a captive to Csesar, who
accepted the sacrifice, knowing well that without their
hero-leader the resistance of the tribes would soon crumble
into nothing. Then came the wonderful scene handed
down by story through twenty centuries, in which Ver-
cingetorix took leave of the history of his nation.
Splendidly armed, flashing with steel and gold and jewels,
crested with falcon's wings, he mounted his war-horse
and rode alone out of the gate of Alesia. Csesar in his
camp awaited him. The young warrior rode round the
open space, once more waving lance and sword. Then
the thunder of hoofs ceased suddenly : he threw himself
from his horse, cast down helmet and weapons before
Caesar, and M^aited in silence for his fate.

It was hard. They loaded him with chains and led
him to Rome. Six weary years he spent in prison, and
was only brought out to walk through the streets behind
Caesar's triumphal car, long after the whole of Gaul had
been conquered and pacified and made a Roman province.
Then, in some black dungeon, dagger or rope ended the
gallant life of this noblest of the Gauls.

In granite or bronze he still watches over the scenes of
his brave doings of old. In the square at Clermont, in
Auvergne ; on the grass-grown site of Gergovia ; on the
Auxois hill, where he made his last stand and gave himself
to save his comrades ; here and elsewhere his grand figure
reminds modern France of that ancient invasion. And
surely now, as then, the valiant spirit of Vercingetorix
leads the armies of his country.

CHAPTER II
A CITY, A SAINT, AND A KING

Comme tile avail yarde lex moutons a Nanterre,
On la mit a garder un bien autre troupeau.

(Test elle la savante et V antique bergert.

CHARLES PEGUY

THE city was Paris ; the saint was Genevieve the
shepherdess ; the king was Clovis the Frank.
The Roman power was gone. Only a small part
of Gaul south of the Somme remained under the rule
of a dying Empire. Two hundred years of strength and
magnificence had been followed by two hundred more
of internal decay and external pressure of Barbarian in-
vasions. Pride and patriotism were gone, and the subjects
of Imperial Rome, in Italy as well as in the colonies,
crushed with taxes, deprived by selfish despotism of the
wish or the means to defend themselves, had fallen an
easy prey to the armed hordes that swarmed across the
mountains and the Rhine. All the Roman world went
down before them ; the glory and grandeur, the beauty,
luxury, and culture. Ruin was everywhere : Goths,
Vandals, Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks, either as enemies
or auxiliaries of the Empire, overran Gaul, and through
the chaos of the time we can see that great country,
toward the end of the fifth century, broken up north,
south, east, and west into separate dominions ruled by
independent kings, having little in common with Rome
or with the older world she had conquered.
18

A City, a Saint, and a King

They were not all heathen : the Burgundians, for in-
stance, and the Visigoths, who ruled South-western Gaul,
had a form of Christianity of their own. Nor were they
savage : once established in their beautiful new lands,
the ancient influence of Rome was not lost upon them,
and they developed a kind of civilization. But this was
hardly universal ; and these gentler peoples were not
those with whom the future of France lay. The help of a
more warlike race was needed to beat back a last invasion
of Barbarians, the fiercest and most horrible that ever
came storming from the East, before whom Goths and
Vandals were flying when they themselves invaded Gaul.
This warlike race was that of the Franks, and it was the
people called Huns from whom they saved Gaul.

These people came from the Far East and were as hideous
as they were strong and cruel. A Roman chronicler
called them ' two-legged wild beasts.' Led by Attila,
' the Scourge of God,' they carried devastation through
the land, and there came a day when the city of Paris was
threatened by them.

Paris was a small city, but even then an attractive and
important one. The Romans called it Lutetia Parisiorum
-the white town of the Parisii, a tribe settled there on an
island in the broad Seine when Caesar took the place and
made it a military station. It was then a cluster of
thatched huts, with some kind of fortification, surrounded
by woods and marshes. As years went on the Romans
had built a town of brick and white stone, the island being
still the centre, bridges connecting it with the suburbs on
the mainland and the defences on the northern and
southern hills. On the island, where the cathedral of
Notre-Dame now stands, there were palaces and temples :
on the south bank was a great palace with baths and an
amphitheatre. The remains of buildings and walls, their

Stories from French History

masonry fifteen hundred years old, may still be traced in
Paris to-day.

The later Roman rulers had made the city their resi-
dence : the Emperor Julian, artist and philosopher, loved
' darling Lutetia ' and spent much of his time there. The
city was one of those, like Soissons, which remained longest
under Roman dominion, and it long preserved the order
and beauty of ancient Roman rule.

It became a Christian city. The Church, which had
first grown and lived in the heart of Rome against Rome's
will, persecutions and martyrdoms only leading to more
complete triumph, was in these barbarian days the one
organization that stood, representing in the general chaos
the reign of righteousness and law. Among the heroic
phalanx of her pioneer bishops we need only mention the
names of Denis of Paris and Martin of Tours. In the fifth
century, when the Huns invaded Gaul, two of the most
distinguished leaders were Bishop Remy of Reims and
Bishop Germain of Auxerre.

And now we come to the marvellous story of the peasant
woman who, according to old records, was the chief de-
fender and ruler of Paris for nearly seventy years. Nan-
terre, the village where Genevieve was born early in the
fifth century, and where she watched her father's sheep as
they fed under the willows, was a small settlement near
the river where it doubles and winds to the north-west of
Paris. Hither came, so the story goes, Bishop Germain
of Auxerre on a missionary journey into Britain, probably
to travel by boat down the Seine and from its mouth to
venture across the narrow seas. Preaching at Nanterre,
he noticed the refined sweetness and devotion of the little
shepherd girl and gave her a special blessing, prophesying
that this child would one day do great things for God and
her countrymen.
20

A City, a Saint, and a King

Meanwhile, spinning by the river and watching the
sheep, Genevieve grew into a tall, beautiful girl. A
certain stately dignity united with her gentleness of bear-
ing to remind the neighbours of her Gallo-Roman descent.
During these years no hungry wolf, they say, dared to steal
a lamb from her flock, and no evil person on river or shore
by word or deed disturbed her peace. But the day came
when she was to leave her little meek flock to take charge
of a far larger and very different one : no less than the
whole people of Paris, folded between their hills.

No such thought as this can have been in Genevieve's
mind when, after her father's death, she left Nanterre to
live with relations in the city. Though even in these early
days she seems to have been deeply reverenced for wisdom,
sincere religion, and generous charity, it was not till the
year 451, when she was about thirty years old, that either
she or the Parisians knew the extent of her powers. In
that year the Huns entered Gaul and advanced toward
Paris. Their coming would have meant massacre and
utter destruction, for resistance was hardly to be thought
of: little of the Roman strength now lingered, even in
cities still ruled by Roman law. The people had no real
leaders and were distracted with terror, even while the
Huns were many leagues away. They snatched up their
treasures and were ready to fly in crowds to the forests to
escape from the terrible enemy. But Genevieve stopped
them. Standing on the bridge over the Seine, this young,
slight woman of no authority opposed herself to the panic-
stricken mob of fugitives and turned them back to their
homes.

" Our Lord God has shown me," she said, " that if the
men of Paris will pray to Him, sorrowing for their sins,
and will be ready with boldness to fight for their city, He
will Himself be their defence and guard."

Stories from French History

Legends say that a heavenly vision had shown Genevieve
the Him forces retreating from her borders. ^Yhether
this be true or not, news came that Attila had turned
south-westward and was marching toward Orleans : then,
that a great army of Franks and Visigoths, with such
Roman legions as remained in Gaul, had fought a tremen-
dous battle with the Huns on the plain of Chalons and
had driven those dreadful hordes back finally across the
Rhine.

In those unsettled years of no fixed government, when a
certain sense of public order, handed down from Rome,
chiefly represented by the Church, was all that kept
citizenship alive, it was to some strong character that
people turned for guidance ; and this explains the long
trust and dependence of Paris on its beloved saint, ruler,
and defender, Genevieve.

There came a time when the city was menaced again by
Barbarian armies; not, indeed, so inhumanly terrible as
the Huns had been, but fierce and alarming enough, wor-
shippers of Odin and the warlike gods of the North.
Merovee, King of the Franks, had helped in the defeat of
Attila at Chalons. His people were already settled on
both banks of the Rhine and had spread through the
north-eastern provinces to the North Sea, Cologne and
Tournay being two of their principal towns. From
Tournay came Childeric, son of Merovee, with an army of
restless warriors eager for spoil, sweeping like a cloud
round Paris and laying siege to the ruinous Roman walls
of a city that had grown rich and quiet in years of peace.

Now starvation threatened, and the flock looked to
Genevieve for food. Their shepherdess did not fail them.
Trusting herself alone, they say, to a small boat on the
Seine, she slipped past the besieging force and made her
way up-stream to distant towns and villages, from whence
22

A City, a Saint, and a King

she brought back a whole convoy of boats laden with corn.
And when the Frank chieftain at last entered the gates,
when Paris was trembling before the wild invaders who
thronged her streets and stared around at her faded
splendours, it was Genevieve who faced Childeric at his
triumphal feast and obtained from him the sparing of the
city which he already dreamed of making his capital. No
scene in the shepherdess's life can have been more marvel-
lous than this. No wonder that, as old age crept upon her,
the reverence of her flock deepened almost to adoration.

Genevieve was between seventy and eighty years old
when she, representative of Gaul and Rome, at last re-
signed her guarded city into the hands of the Franks,
whose power had now spread through the north of the
country that may be henceforth called France. Clovis,
son of Childeric, became King of the Tournay Franks as a
boy of sixteen. No Frank was stronger or fiercer than he,
but he had great intelligence and generous instincts, and
his actions must be judged by the moral standards of his
own time.

To his twentieth year and his first campaign belongs the
famous story of the Vase of Soissons. A precious silver
bowl or vase had been taken, with other treasures, from a
church, and the spoil was brought to Soissons to be
divided by lot among the chiefs and warriors. A messenger
came from Bishop Remy of Reims to ask for the return of
the vase. The young King — still a heathen — laid the re-
quest before his companions. All consented, except one
man. Crying out to the King : " Thou shalt have nothing
more than the lot gives thee ! " he lifted his battle-axe and
smashed the vase in two. The King governed himself,
says the chronicler, took the broken vase, and gave it to
the Bishop's messenger. But a year later, when inspect-
ing the weapons of his soldiers, he found that man's battle-

Stories from French History

axe stained with rust. Snatching it from him, he threw it
on the ground, and as the warrior stooped to pick it up he
cleft his skull with one blow. "Thus didst llu>u." he
cried, " to the vase at Soissons ! '

Many legends gathered round the name of Clovis. In
them and in more sober history he shows tliroughout his
life two characters : the pagan chief, fierce, ambitious,
cunning, and cruel to his enemies ; the Christian champion
and defender of the Faith, he who cried: "Had I been
there with my Franks ! '' when the story of the Crucifixion
was read to him.

The story of the ford belongs to the campaign against
the Visigoths, in which the southern provinces of old Gaul
were conquered for France and for the Church. On their
march southward Clovis and his army arrived on the banks
of the Vienne, not far from Chinon, to find the river
swollen by flood so that a passage seemed impossible. As
the King sat under a tree in the forest, much discontented,
and watched the dark water swirling by, a slender, snow-
white hind stole out from the thicket and stood a moment
with lifted head, listening to the sounds of war that had
invaded her sanctuary. The King beheld her in silence.
She stepped daintily down the bank, entered the river, and
crossed it to the farther side. She did not need to swim ;
her graceful head was high above water and her little feet
trod the pebbly bed over which the flood rippled so fast.
When she had reached the other side and disappeared
again into the forest, Clovis thanked God and called to
his men. Where the hind had crossed, they could cross :
she had shown them the ford. She seemed a creature of
miracle, sent from heaven to lead the King on his way.

When Clovis was still very young he married a Christian
princess, Clotilde of Burgundy, and she, beautiful and
much beloved, converted him to her religion. The actual

St Genevieve, Clovis, and Clotilde

M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

turning-point was a victory over the Allemans, a German
tribe who were bent on depriving the Franks of their con-
quests in Gaul. This great battle was fought at Tolbiac,
now called Ziilpich, near the Rhine. For the first time
Clovis prayed to Christ for victory, promising to be bap-
tized. He was victorious, and kept his word. He was
baptized at Reims by Bishop Remy, with three thousand
of his warriors.

The young King and Queen entered Paris, where they
were received by Genevieve, still the ruler of her half-
Roman flock. We may imagine her, erect in great age,
dark-robed, black-hooded, stately and wise and kind,
advancing along the streets of low, red-tiled houses and
gardens to meet this final inroad of the Franks, and welcom-
ing them in Latin, her own language, now well understood
by them. Historians have tried to show us how it all
looked ; the white city with its island centre, divided by
the silver Seine, set in a frame of hills and forests and old
Roman villas and tombs, the northern hill of Montmartre
already crowned with a Christian church built by
Genevieve over the grave of St Denis.

The tall young warrior, Clovis, was handsome and stern.
Both he and Clotilde wore their long fair hair in twisted
braids hanging below the waist. His cap was circled with
a plain gold crown. A long royal mantle hung from his
shoulders ; beneath it, over his short garments of linen
and leather, sword and axe were slung from a heavy
jewelled belt. He wore also bracelets and rings and neck-
ornaments set thickly with precious stones. The Queen's
crown was more elaborate ; her jewels too were splendid ;
her under-dress of fine gold network, girded with a long
sash, was covered by an embroidered robe falling to her
feet. Her face, with the hair parted on her brow, was
lovely and proud and full of character. If Paris and the
26

A City, a Saint, and a King

kingdom were Clevis's conquests, he was hers ; it was
through her that he came, a Christian king, to his new
Christian city.

King, Queen, and Shepherdess, followed in long proces-
sion by the royal escort and the people of Paris, crossed
the city from north to south, winding over the bridges and
the island to the Roman palace of Julian on the southern
hill. From there, on some not distant day, Clovis and
Clotilde went forth to lay with Genevieve the first stone
of a great church which became the abbey-church of
Sainte-Genevieve — rebuilt about 1770 and later called the
Pantheon — where King and Queen and Shepherdess were
buried side by side.

For many centuries, when flood or war or pestilence or
any great alarm threatened Paris, the shrine of Sainte-
Genevieve was carried through the streets and people
begged for her prayers that the old flock she had kept
so long might once more be saved. But the time came,
thirteen hundred years after her death, when men of the
Revolution, far-off, forgetful descendants of that first
flock, melted down the rich shrine and burned her bones.

CHAPTER III
ROLAND AND ROLLO

ffelas! toute puissance est a peine i'!evte

Que'lle s'ebranle; oh sont lesfils de Mi'roree ?

On sont ceux de Clovis? — Que derieiulront /es tien-t,

Charlemagne ? HENRI DE BORNIER

Dieu ! que le son du cor est trixte aufond des boi* .'

ALFRED DE VICXY

IN the line of long-haired Merovingians-- Thierrys,
Clotaires, Childeberts, Chilperics, Cariberts, Dago-
berts, Sigeberts, Clodomers, Gontrans — who followed
Clovis through two hundred and forty years and preceded
the race of Charles the Emperor, exceptions were too few
to make the general title of rois faineants an unjust re-
proach. There were good men among them : Clodoald,
a grandson of Clovis, retired from the miseries of a cruel
and sinful world, and is not forgotten in France under his
name of St Cloud ; Dagobert I left behind him a tradition
of justice, strong government, and generosity to the Church
and the poor. But the partition of the kingdom, which
began with the sons of Clovis, led to constant quarrels and
anarchy. Terrible women, such as Brunehaut, wife of
Sigebert, and her rival Fredegondc, deluged France with
blood in a private war of their own. Kings and princes
dwindled to the mere succession of vicious sluggards
against whom the nobles of France at length rose in judg-
ment. Those rulers of kings, for a hundred years actual
viceroys under the name of Mayors of the Palace, cut off
the long royal locks of the last Merovingian and shut him
28

Roland and Rollo

up in a monastery. Pepin the Short, grandson of the
greatest of the Mayors and son of Charles Martel, the first
hammerer of the Saracens, was crowned king by Bishop
Boniface at Soissons in 752. Thus began the Carolingian
dynasty, taking its name from Pepin's splendid son, but
destined after another two and a half centuries to go down
before another race of great nobles, these to rule France,
for good or ill, four times as long.

"A marvellous man is Charles ! " says the old poet of the
Song of Roland. Modern writers hardly attain the glorious
simplicity which has suggested a comparison between the
medieval monk Touroude and Homer himself. They chro-
nicle, as best they may, Charles's "Imperial grandeur, his
stately Court, his energetic rule, his supremacy over Europe,"
his victories over the Mohammedan armies that came
swarming from the East and the South to invade Christen-
dom. But they can show too how Charlemagne and his
paladins, the immortal Roland at their head, foreshadowed
a thousand years ago the Christian chivalry of the Middle
Ages which ennobles Europe still ; how their deeds, truer in
history, share with those of Arthur and his knights the dawn
of modern romance and poetry ; how from their battles
with the Saracens arose not merely the Crusades, but all
fighting for right and truth and justice in the modern world.

This greatest of the Franks, in his reign of more than
forty years, conquered Europe from Italy to the Elbe,
from Spain to the Danube, so that France, anciently Gaul,
lay in the very centre of a new empire of the West. He
was crowned Emperor by the Pope in St Peter's at Rome
on Christmas Day in the year 800 : and from that day
forth — to quote a recent charming writer — " he made an
immense and glorious effort to pull the car of empire out
of its Barbarian rut and set it rolling down the roads of
Rome." In the course of this effort religion and learning

Stories from French History

were everywhere encouraged, though the prince who
founded schools and listened with bent head and tugged
beard to long arguments on Christian philosophy — so
anxious was he to keep pace with his army of well-paid
teachers — could never read or write without difficulty.

Eginhard, the chronicler of Charles's reign, who lived at
his Court and knew him well, describes him as tall, strong,
and fair, with flaxen hair and large bright eyes ; his whole
appearance manly and dignified. He had a generous
charm that attracted both men and women ; he was
reverenced by the Church, feared by evildoers ; in court
and camp a noble example. Not without human weak-
nesses ; but one of those royal characters, so rare in
history, who govern mankind of their own natural right.

It was not alone as a mighty warrior, a wise ruler, an
inspirer of art and learning, that the men of his own day
glorified Charles for all time as ' Charlemagne.' He was
also their unquestioned leader in all the great sports of their
race. The Franks were the boldest riders and most
famous hunters in the world. Hubert, the patron saint
of French hunting, was of royal Merovingian blood, and
his amazing adventure was modern history in the days of
Charlemagne — how he was converted from a careless life
by meeting in the Ardennes a stag of marvellous size and
beauty, bearing a crucifix between his horns ; how he fell
on his knees and vowed obedience to the Faith, becoming
later Bishop of Liege and dying, very old, a dozen years
before Charlemagne was born.

The Emperor was a strenuous follower of St Hubert.
He was a daring horseman, and the chase was his chief
pastime, carried on splendidly with packs of swift fierce
hounds that feared no quarry ; wolf, wild boar, or even
bear, plentiful then in the southern mountains. The deer
and the fox were easier game. The vast tracts of forest-
30

Roland and Rollo

land were still wild and pathless as in Caesar's days ; more
so than in the later Roman time ; for the Merovingian
rule had neglected or destroyed roads and bridges, so that
the country was what it long remained, uncultivated and
difficult of communications.

The merry greenwood of old England was in old France
the dark, wolf-haunted, immemorial forest, where much of
the mystery of the known and unknown world had its
home : gay in spring, to be sure, with birds and blossoms,
and beautiful at all times, but with a wilder, more remote
and solemn beauty : a forest where men saw visions as
they rode down enchanted ways ; where strange presences
lurked among the leaves, for the fairy Morgane and her
like might still deceive unwary knights in the time of
Charlemagne, as in the tune of Arthur.

There were no parks, no warrens, no specially preserved
enclosures : the Imperial hunt swept over a country where
every man might chase what game he pleased, for feudal
lords with their privileges did not yet exist, and there was
more freedom under Charlemagne than under Philippe-
Auguste. Women rode out with falcons perched on their
pearl-embroidered gauntlets, and found hawking fine
sport if they were too lazy to gallop after the stag. But
those of the Emperor's Court were seldom left behind, and
even the clergy, the one restricted class, found means to
rouse the forest echoes with the foremost. Archbishops
and bishops and abbots obeyed the blast of Count Roland's
horn as he hunted the glades, and followed him with equal
joy against wolf or Saracen.

Roland is said to have been Charlemagne's nephew, con-
queror and Count of the Marches of Brittany. His magic
horn, the olifant, made of a great carved tusk of ivory set
in gold, rings through early French history as it did
through the thick forests of the Pyrenees from the valley

Stories from French History

of Ronccsvalles. To the cars of Charles the King — not
yet Emperor — that blast brought the most terrible news
that ever darkened his reign. He was returning with his
army from an expedition against the Saracen invaders of
Spain : sad enough, for the victory had not been complete,
ending in fair promises from the enemy and an attempted
treaty which vexed the King's soul. In long, winding
columns his forces wended their way back through the
rocky gorges of the mountains ; by rushing streams and
pathless woods of pine and beech and chestnut. He was
himself with the vanguard ; hi the rear, leagues away,
were the larger number of his famous preitx, the valiant
men whose names live with his own. There were Roland
and Olivier, Yvon and Yvoire, Gerin and Gerier, Engelier,
Berenger, Othon, Samson, Ansei's, the old Duke Gerard of
Roussillon, Archbishop Turpin of Reims, and many more.
Under the high peak of Altabiscar, where a torrent runs
down through the narrow wooded valley of Roncesvalles,
a terrible noise in the thick forest announced the coming
of an enemy. If we follow the Song of Roland we shall
believe that this sudden attack was made by Marsilis the
Saracen king to whom the traitor Ganelon, Charles's
ambassador, betrayed the route of the army. History
will have it that the wild Basques, whom Charles had
conquered, seized this occasion for revenge and spoil. A
Basque poem, the Song of Altabiscar, describes how the
mountaineers, hidden far above among the clouds and the
rocks, listened to the tramp of the advancing army and at
last, as the shadows of evening fell, saw the gorge below
them full of lances and banners and gleaming armour. Then
they rushed down in their thousands to attack with swords
and arrows, some rolling great stones from the heights ;
and so sudden Avas the surprise, so furious the onset, that
of all Roland's gallant companions not one was left alive.

Roland and Rollo

Roland, with his shining sword Durandal, fought to the
end : his swift horse Veillantif was killed under him : he
was wounded nearly to death : but with his last strength
lifting to his mouth the famous horn, the olifant, he blew
so great a blast that the rocks carried the sound and echo
repeated it thirty leagues away. Charles and his army
heard it and the King said : " Our men are fighting. It is
the horn of Roland."

He rode hard and returned to the fatal valley. The
enemy had retired and there was an awful silence in the
mountains, broken only by lamentation over the heroes
lying slain among the marble rocks, under the trees, along
the course of the stream.

Roland lay dead on the green grass, under a pine-tree,
his face to earth, still grasping horn and sword. A cleft
rock showed how he had vainly tried to break the fine
steel of Durandal. He had confessed his sins, and with
clasped hands commended his soul to God. So died
Roland, with a last thought for ' sweet France,' his friends,
and his lord Charlemagne.

The King is heard crying all those names aloud.
" Where are you — and you — and you ? My twelve peers
who were following me ? " But alas ! none answered.
The King tore his beard and wept in fury and grief. All
his knights wept with him.

Charlemagne long survived that tragedy ; but in the
poems and chronicles of his later life, with the account of
his glorious activities there sounds an undertone of weari-
ness and disappointment. The last lines of the Song of
Roland describe how the summons to a new war came to
the Emperor one dark night, as he lay in his vaulted room.
The summoner was the angel Gabriel : " Charles, Charles,
assemble thy armies ! '

A city of a fabled dream-name was besieged by Paynims.
c 33

Stories from French History

" Christians, loud crying, appeal to thee."

With convincing, inimitable simplicity the old poet
ends : " The Emperor did not want to go : ' God ! ' he
cries, ' how painful is my life ! ' His tears run down, he
rends his white beard."

One of those chansons de gesies of which our forefathers
were never tired, for they were the popular histories of the
time, shows Charlemagne in his last days, desiring to see
his eldest son Louis, Duke of Aquitaine, crowned in his
lifetime as his successor. But the great nobles who now
surrounded the Emperor were very different men, as to
loyalty and truth, from Roland and his marvellous
brethren. They suggest the coming of feudalism, the
system under which each great vassal would fight selfishly
for his own hand, rather than as the friend and follower of
his king.

There was a great gathering at Aix-la-Chapelle. Four
crowned kings, twenty-six abbots, a large company of
bishops and nobles, attended Charlemagne in the cathedral.
The Imperial crown, a gorgeous mass of jewels, was laid
upon the altar, and an archbishop spoke to the assembled
Christians, telling them of the Emperor's intention for his
son. All the congregation lifted their hands, crying their
joy to heaven. Then Charlemagne spoke from his throne
to the young Louis.

" Thou seest that crown," he said. " On certain con-
ditions, I give it to thee. Thou wilt avoid luxury and sin.
Thou wilt betray no man. Thou wilt not rob the orphan
or the widow. My son Louis, behold the crown. Take it,
and conquer the heathen world. But if thou wilt not
keep these conditions, take it not, for I forbid it thee."

Three times, ever more solemnly, the Emperor repeated
his words. But the young prince neither moved nor spoke,
nor stretched his hand to take the crown ; and many

Ships of the Vikings
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

brave knights wept, seeing the boy's timidity ; for he was
but fifteen years old. But the Emperor was very angry.

' This is no son of mine. This is some coward's son," he
cried. " It would be a crime to crown such as he. Cut off
his hair. Let him go and ring bells in the monastery yonder.
Make him a clerk there, that he may not beg his bread."

The story goes on to tell how a magnificent personage,
Count Arnei's of Orleans, interceded for the boy with his
father, pointing out his extreme youth and offering to
take charge of him for three years. When Louis should
be old enough for knighthood, and had proved himself a
worthy heir to the Empire, his guardian would restore him
in all honour and prosperity.

Charlemagne agreed to the specious plan, which was
loudly approved by the Count's many friends and
followers. But he and they were traitors at heart, for
he had great power with the people of France, and desired
to be himself their king.

Then a new champion enters on the scene. William,
Count of Orange, a vassal of young Louis in the South,
was away hunting. His nephew met him with news of
the treacherous bargain just made, and guided him to the
monastery where Arnei's had already imprisoned the boy,
and where, royally dressed, he was holding a kind of court
of those nobles who desired to see him King of France.

William, his sword half drawn, pushes his way through
the throng. His desire is to kill the traitor : but he re-
members that it is a heavy sin to kill a man, and pushes
back his sword. Then, face to face with Arneis, he for-
gets his scruples, and with blows from his two fists lays the
deceiver lifeless at his feet. " I meant to correct thee, liar
and glutton, but thou art dead, and not worth a farthing."

Again the great assembly in the cathedral ; but this
time William of Orange takes the crown from the altar
36

Roland and Rollo

and places it on the head of the boy. " There, my'good
lord ! May the King of Heaven give thee grace to judge
justly ! " And the father rejoiced and said : " Lord
William, I thank you greatly : your house has restored
mine." And thus Louis le Debonnaire became the
successor of Charlemagne.

" One of the most picturesque and romantic figures in
the history of mankind " : such was the King-Emperor.
Also in a sense one of the most tragical : for his lofty
dream of a united Christian world died with himself.
Again the Barbarian forces of anarchy and disorder came
sweeping over a bewildered Europe, and the Empire fell
to pieces, divided among his descendants and the powerful
vassals who shared their rule. Already, before Charle-
magne's death, the heathen vikings from the North were
beginning to harass his dominions, their pirate ships
attacking every coast ; and it was under the threatening
shadow of these new invasions that he died.

Just a century after his death his great-great-grandson,
Charles the Simple, King of France, was forced to make
peace with Rollo the Northman, who had devastated the
country and nearly taken Paris by storm. Becoming
a Christian, Rollo married the King's daughter Gisela
and received the great fief known later as the Duchy of
Normandy. Too proud to do homage as Charles's vassal
in the usual way, by kissing the royal foot, Rollo is said to
have employed one of his followers as deputy. This fierce
man, far from kneeling humbly down as courtly usage pre-
scribed, seized the King's foot and lifted it so rudely to his
lips that King and throne toppled backward amid shouts
of viking laughter, which neither Charles nor his Frankish
courtiers dared to resent.

We may well ask, with Master Frai^ois Villon :
Mais ou est le preux Charlemaigne ?

CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE CRUSADERS

11 faudra, pour tircr la chredentd occidentale de sa lanyuctir, fa
vecousse hcrdique de la Croisade. KMILE GEBHART

Dear Pilgrim, art ihou for ike East indeed?

R. BKOWNI.NC

THE Fat, the Bald, the Stammerer, the Simple,
the Foreigner, the Do-nothing, etc., descendants of
Charlemagne and nominal kings of France, with
small territory and little power, were ruled and frequently
deposed by their great vassals the Dukes of Burgundy,
Normandy, and Aquitaine, the Counts of Paris, Flanders,
Champagne, Toulouse, and the many formidable nobles
who held fiefs depending on these. The most actively
powerful of all were the Counts of Paris, also called Dukes
of France. Their ancestor, Robert the Strong, was a half-
legendary hero of fights against the Northmen early in the
ninth century : we may remember, by the way, that King
Louis-Philippe's gallant grandson, the Due de Chartrcs,
fought for France in 1870 under the name of ' Robert le
Fort.' Eudes, the son of Robert, defended Paris against
the Northmen in an eighteen-months siege. The crown
of France fell to his descendant Hugh Capet, by
agreement among the great nobles, on the death in
A.D. 987 of Louis le Faineant, the last Carolingian king.
" Not bv hercditarv right, but bv noble blood and by

»/ «/ ^j */

ability," said the Archbishop of Reims, himself one of
the chief men of the kingdom. The race of Charlemagne
was not extinct, but degenerate and unworthy. Under
38

The Coming of the Crusaders

the race of Capet France became herself, and marched
on through near a thousand years of her immortal
history.

It was a terribly distressful land over which the first
Capet kings were called to reign. Civilization and learn-
ing had declined since Charlemagne ; the law and order
of old Roman days were buried deep and forgotten. The
early tyrannies of the feudal system had succeeded that
still worse state of things which followed the breaking
up of the Empire, when bands of armed robbers patrolled
the country, seizing what lands and goods they pleased,
forcing the poor inhabitants, the defenceless peasants, the
humble proprietors and farmers, by sheer violence into
slavery. In those days no roads were safe : no crop
could be peacefully gathered in : even the Church, the
protectress of the poor, could not always provide refuge
and sanctuary.

When Hugh Capet became king, the feudal system was
at its height of power, a new rule of the strongest, little
better for the weak than the old savage anarchy. The
lord lived high and safe in his new castle with his house-
hold of armed men. His tenants and serfs were crowded
in their dark hovels, in the steep streets of the little town,
or, more lonely and unprotected, in scattered huts of the
village that rambled off into borders of forest or moor.
Duke or count or baron, they were his men ; they worked
and fought for him, and he was supposed to guard them
from the inroads of fierce neighbours. He was usually at
war with those neighbours whose castles overhung river
or valley a few leagues away. No moonlight night was
safe from raids, the thundering feet of horses, the clatter
of arms, the blaze of thatch, often the violent death of
poor innocents, whose only crime was their enforced
loyalty. But they were avenged : the next night might

Stories from French History

see the neighbour's village in flames and his wretched
vassals flying for safety to his walls and gates. In either
case, if the lord and lady were humane, life was bearable ;
if they were hard and cruel, there was always a better
world beyond. In those days the earth was a flat sur-
face, we remember : above the blue sky was paradise with
"harps and lutes" for poor Christian souls; far under-
ground the boiling cauldrons of hell awaited the wicked.

Toward that thousandth year of Christendom, several
causes combined to bring misery on France. Ignorance
and materialism had their universal consequences :
selfishness, cruelty, and greed. It was prophesied and
believed that the world would come to an end in the year
1000, and this belief, while adding desperation to wicked-
ness, brought a new terror into lives already afflicted be-
yond bearing by the will of God or man. An awful gloom
brooded over provinces desolated by war, famine, and
pestilence. About ten years before the fated A.D. 1000
began a series of appalling famines, caused by perpetual
rains and floods, cold summers, bad harvests or none at
all, which lasted with intervals of a year or two till nearly
A.D. 1040. People ate grass and the bark of trees. Star-
vation brought on epidemics in which the mortality
was frightful, and it was often impossible to bury
the dead. The forsaken bodies were devoured by
hungry wolves. Worse still, the ruffians who ranged
the roads were not satisfied with robbing and murdering
helpless travellers, but became cannibals and roasted
them for food. Many horrid stories of this kind are
told in the chronicles.

The wonderful changes in that eleventh century, the re-
awakening of an older ideal which meant new birth for
Christendom, may be sketched or half imagined from the
traditions of one of the great French houses.

The Coming of the Crusaders

Let us suppose the young son of such a house returning
with his servants and hounds from an autumn hunting in
the forests and marshes of Poitou. It is a year of famine,
and he has seen painful sights enough : skeletons lying by
the roadside ; men and women and children hardly more
than skeletons creeping from their dens with outstretched
hands into which the old huntsman, at his master's com-
mand, throws pieces of gold. Of what use, when there is
nothing to buy ! But in the course of that ride the
hounds have disappeared one by one, and the dead deer
that the hunters had flung across their horses have been
snatched away by sudden raids from the thicket. The
men's bronzed faces are pale and anxious ; they close
round their young master, for these are dangerous days,
and the expedition was a rash one. Young Amaury had
set out against his mother's judgment ; but she, though
a learned and powerful woman, could not resist his
prayers.

His father was absent at a council of nobles and bishops,
important affairs being on hand ; for the end of all things
had not come to pass in the year 1000, and now there was
a great uprising of spiritual enthusiasm. If this old world
was indeed to live, cried the Church, it must be a life of
new religious fervour. And the world sprang to meet the
challenge. Old historians say that it flung off its ancient
rags to clothe itself with a "white robe of churches."
Cathedrals and churches which had fallen into ruin were
rebuilt ; many new ones arose in splendour ; new abbeys
and convents showed the active reawakening of a faith
that had slept but not died. People set out on pilgrim-
ages, no danger or difficulty hindering them : they went
in crowds to the tombs of the saints, even as far away as
Rome. Some began to dream of visiting Jerusalem,
leaving their bones there, possibly. What did that matter

Stones from French History

if their eternal salvation might thus be made sure V The
Church helped the weak and poor by imposing a ' Truce
of God ' on the quarrelsome and strong : men were for-
bidden to take up arms from Wednesday to Monday in
each week, through the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter,
in the month of May, and on all great festivals : a counsel
of perfection not always observed, but its general accept-
ance showed the change in the minds of men. All this
was the light of dawn : the sun of a new age of religion,
chivalry, poetry, and art had not yet risen upon France
when the young Count Amaury rode back from his hunting
on that autumn afternoon.

He drew rein on a high moorland from which his father's
castle could be seen, the watch-tower gleaming tall and
slender against a background of shadowy, threatening
clouds. Stretches of forest and a river lay between.
Amaury and his men stared at the castle. Suddenly
pale, he turned to the old huntsman who rode nearest
him.

" What is that ?"

" I do not know. God knows ! Let us ride on."

But his thin hair bristled on his head. Was it a cloud,
hovering on the watch-tower, or was it rather a woman's
shape, white arms waving, long grey draperies floating
and fluttering in the October wind ? And did not
that same wind, blowing in from the western sea, bring
the cry of a voice wilder and more sorrowful than its

own ?

The men whispered among themselves. It was already
a legend, though few generations old, that the fairy lady
from some northern land who had founded the family and
the castle might still be seen and heard lamenting on its
towers the death of a descendant.

Now they rode down under the copper-coloured woods
42

The Coming of the Crusaders

and crossed the flooded river ; perhaps by the same ford
wonderfully shown to Clovis five hundred years before.
They climbed the stony way to the gate of the village that
crouched beneath the castle ; and now Amaury saw the
wraith of his ancestress no more ; she had melted into the
dusky evening.

Within the walls there was a sound of wailing : but
at long tables a hundred famished folk were being fed.
Amaury's mother in black robes, a very real woman,
awaited him in the torch-lit hall.

" My son, your father is dead — slain treacherously at
Poitiers on the Lord's Day, by a vile enemy who thus
broke the Truce of God. You are lord of this castle.
But you are my son, of tender age, and you will obey me."

Amaury kissed his mother's hand. He had not loved
his father, a hard man of the old fierce world to whom
modern changes were contemptible. But the Countess
was of a different spirit.

Now she could follow her own way and that of her
brother, a saintly bishop from the north of France, who
visited and advised her. From this day religion and
chivalry — the two were one — laid their influence on the
young Count Amaury. He grew up in the light of ideals
which sprang from early Christianity, existed among
the best of the Franks, were glorified by Charlemagne,
and were almost extinguished in the breaking-up of his
empire.

Chivalry at its best was active Christianity. A young
knight's vows made him the soldier of God, the defender
of the honour of Christ, the champion of the faith and
of weak humanity. Unselfish, fearless, pure and true,
courteous to women and to his equals, gentle and charit-
able to his inferiors : in short, all that goes to make a
gentleman. Such became Count Amaury.

Stories from French History

In those days the old ideal had its practical conse-
quences. The people of Christendom awoke and looked
round. They saw a world invaded ever more widely by
the Saracens, the disciples of Mohammed, their Master's
fiercest enemy. They saw " those holy fields " trampled
by pagans, Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth with
their sacred memories subject to slavery and outrage. As
the ideas of chivalry grew in Europe, and more especially
in France, men's grief and anger deepened. It was bitter
shame to Christendom and to every individual Christian
that such things should be. A flame of faith, of literal
belief and passionate loyalty, burned through the eleventh
century till it caught half Europe and blazed high in the
First Crusade.

Count Amaury's saintly mother did not live to see that
climax of her faith and hope ; but while he was still young
and unmarried she undertook with him the dangerous
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, returning safely to found a church
for the good of their people and the repose of her husband's
soul.

Amauty was an old man in the year 1095, when he rode
white-haired with his sons and grandsons to the Council at
Clermont in Auvergne and was among the foremost of
those nobles who listened to the sermon of Pope Urban II,
summoning France to arms against the profaners of the
Holy Sepulchre. There too he heard passionate words
from the monk Peter, mean, wild-eyed, dressed in
sackcloth, thin and weary from those long journeys on
ass-back through the length and breadth of France in
which he called Christians of all ranks to fight for their
Lord.

Arnaury needed no persuasion. He was not too old to
take the Cross ; he had long worn it in spirit. His voice,
if weak with age, was the first to cry ' God wills it! " in
44

The First Crusaders in sight of Jerusalem
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

that assembly. His sons and grandsons would well repre-
sent him in Palestine, should his years forbid him the
actual Crusade. So he would remain in his castle, old
and lonely and poor, having sold broad lands to send
forth his family and vassals on the great adventure
which carried all France on a wave of enthusiasm
eastward. Men, women, and children, noble and peasant,
strong and helpless, wise and foolish, they flung them-
selves into that holy war from which many were never
to return.

The ignorant multitude would not wait for any arm-
ing or preparation. They set out in frantic haste, led by
Peter the Hermit arid AY alter the Penniless, a knight
from Normandy. This was a piteous affair ; for many
thousands of these poor creatures, the first to carry the
Cross into Eastern lands, knew little or nothing of what
they undertook, and in the hope of escaping from misery
at home, expecting miracles which did not happen for
them, only marched to disaster. Of the children who
cried " Is this Jerusalem ? ' at the first view of every
town on their weary journey, scarcely one lived to see
France again. The bones of that forlorn vanguard which
never reached Palestine whitened the way before the
organized armies that followed it.

In that great host of mixed elements, led by the highest
type of religion and chivalry in the valiant Godfrey de
Bouillon, the fine flower of the nobility of France fought
their way to Palestine. And among the first of those who
raised the banner of the Cross on the walls of the Holy
City were the sons and grandsons of Count Amaury.
Their fame, earned in this First Crusade, caused his later
descendants to figure on the long romantic roll of kings
of Jerusalem.

CHAPTER V

THE MAKING OF THE MONARCHY

Ce n'est pas en vain qiie la monarchic franqaise a re$u en depot,
pendant de longs siecles, la grandeur, la gloire, la puissance et la
maj ente nationales. . . . CPest une joie noble et salutaire de saltier
avec respect ces institutions mortes qui out si longtemps garde It
patrimoine commun de la grandeur franqaise.

FERNAND LABORI

THE old chronicles tell a quaint story of Philippe-
Auguste, seventh of the Capet line. One of the
royal bailiffs or officers of justice coveted some
lands, the owner of which had lately died. Having bribed
two labourers to help him, he dug up the dead man under
cover of night, summoned him to sell his estates, and
named a price for them. Silence giving consent, he laid
money in the hands of the corpse and buried it once
more. He then attempted to take possession of the domain.
But the dead knight's widow appealed to the King. The
bailiff, summoned to appear, brought his two witnesses
to swear that the land had actually been sold to him. As
usual with the early kings, Philippe-Auguste was sitting
to dispense justice "simply, without intermediary" — as
M. Funck-Brentano shows him in his book on the kingly
office in France — in his city of Paris, in the great hall of
the palace on the Island, from whose windows he could
watch the flowing Seine. A number of people, as usual,
were present.

In this case, for some reason, the King suspected fraud.
He rose from his chair of state and beckoned one of the
witnesses apart from the crowd, so that words spoken low

Stories from French History

were not audible. He then ordered him to recite the
Paternoster. While the fellow muttered the well-known
prayer, the King repeated in a loud voice, more than once,
"That is well; you say it rightly." Then he dismissed
him and called the other witness aside. " Come, you too
will repeat it rightly ! ' The second labourer, terrified,
and believing that his comrade had told the whole truth,
hastened to tell it himself. The bailiff met with the
punishment he deserved, and the chronicler, according
to M. Funck-Brentano, echoed public opinion when he
wrote that the King's judgment was a match for that of
Solomon.

This clever king was not a hero of romance. He had
little of the crusading spirit of his time : his desires and
ambitions were nearer home. But he will be remembered
among the greatest of French kings, for he made the
monarchy. He was a boy of fifteen when he succeeded
his father, Louis VII, and had already been crowned in
the cathedral at Reims according to the royal custom of
assuring the succession. He was still very young when
tradition tells us of the tall, fair boy leaving his courtiers
to brood by himself, gnawing a twig, staring with absent
eyes and scarcely hearing what was said to him, but at
length confessing the absorbing thought — would grace
be given him and his heirs to make France again great,
following in the steps of Charlemagne ?

Once the rulers of an empire, her kings were now little
more than lords of a small state surrounded by the im-
mense fiefs of their nominal vassals. The king stood,
indeed, on a different footing from these vassals, even the
strongest of them. He was supposed to be the indepen-
dent spiritual power, the central authority, the supreme
administrator of justice, the official protector of religion
and the poor, 'the father of his people.' Louis VI, the
48

The Making of the Monarchy

Fat, Philippe's grandfather, had to some extent lived up
to this ideal of royalty by fighting the oppressions of the
nobles, claiming the right to judge their quarrels, and
granting charters to the towns — which were now begin-
ning to rebel against feudal masters, whether dukes or
bishops, and to demand a civic life of their own. And
Louis VI had done even more. He had begun to solidify
the monarchy by actual force of arms. In his struggles with
the great Crown vassals, whose feudal rights were virtually
the law in France, the King was often victorious. His
son, Louis VII, a much milder personage, a devout but
unsuccessful crusader, the unlucky husband of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, carried on this policy. With the advice of
Abbot Suger, his wise minister, he became the champion
of many towns and abbeys against fierce lords whose
grasping greed mocked at justice or chivalry.

When young Philippe was crowned at Reims, the actual
royal domain was a narrow slice of territory extending
north and south of Paris, from Senlis nearly to Bourges
and from Dreux to Meaux. This tiny centre of France
where the King ruled in person was bounded on all sides
by duchies and counties practically independent. In the
north, the county of Flanders ; in the west and south-west,
Normandy and Anjou, hereditary possessions of the
Norman- Angevin kings of England, to whom the Duke
of Brittany paid homage ; in the east and south-east, the
county of Champagne and the duchy of Burgundy.
South of the Loire were the duchies of Aquitaine or
Guienne, including Poitou, and of Gascony ; these, again,
an appanage of the English Crown through the remarriage
of their Duchess, Eleanor, with Henry II. The Count of
Toulouse held Languedoc and part of Provence : most of
the old Roman province, still foremost in civilization and
in natural beauty, hardly belonged to France at all, but

D 49

Stories from French History

ruled then and for three more centuries by a semi-
royal house of its own. closely connected Avith the Spanish
kingdom of Aragon. It is necessary to look at a map of
the old provinces of France if one is to realize what
Philippe-Auguste fought for and Avhat he won during the
forty-three years of his reign.

It Avill at once be seen that the vast English possessions
Avere the most formidable barrier in Philippe's path to
supreme monarchy ; the path along which his advance
Avas S]OAV, life-long, and gradually victorious. Many
startling episodes in his life and reign, each a chapter in
history, Avere to him of slight importance compared Avith
that dream of following in the Imperial footsteps of
Charlemagne.

There Avere Crusades. Philippe-Auguste joined in one
of them, but Avithout enthusiasm, for his shreAvd mind had
little faith in these holy Avars and " he kneAv Avell," says
an historian, "that his right place Avas at home." There
Avere persecutions in France : first of the JCAYS, at a later
time of the Albigeois, the Christian heretics of the southern
proA'inces, Avhere fanciful minds Avere ahvays ready for
daring and adA7anced thought. Philippe took no personal
part in that terrible and bloody Avar, Avhich arose from
feudal as Avell as religious causes, and almost destroyed
the separate independence and ciA'ilization of the South.
But its results Avere to his advantage, and he did not desire
another quarrel Avith the Pope, Avho had already placed
France under an interdict to punish the King for his
unjust and cruel behaviour to his second Avife, the for-
saken Ingelburga of Denmark. We may note that in this
affair twelfth-century public opinion was strongly against
Philippe and in favour of Pope Innocent III.

The King's first marriage Avith Isabelle of Ilainault
brought him Artois, the Vermandois, Amiens, and the
50

The Making of the Monarchy

district of the Somme. These and other small conquests
were not gained without fighting, for his wife's uncle, the
Count of Flanders, was a powerful personage. But the
chief struggle of the reign was with the chief vassal and
rival, the King of England ; and the chief triumphs over
him and his allies were the siege of Chateau-Gaillard and
the battle of Bouvines.

The history of Richard Lion-heart and his magnificent
new castle must be read elsewhere : how he and Philippe-
Auguste set out on the Third Crusade as friends ; how
Philippe seized the first excuse for returning to the land of
his thought and hope, and there, while Richard lay in an
Imperial prison, allied himself with the traitor John Lack-
land to despoil and divide Normandy ; how Richard,
being set free, returned to France, and how John, warned
by Philippe — " The devil is loose ; take care of yourself '
—easily gained a pardon from his generous brother. Then,
in that splendid position, where its ruined walls, at each
hour grey, or pink, or apricot-yellow, still with a ' saucy ' air
command the winding Seine, Richard built his Chateau-
Gaillard to defend Rouen, his Norman capital, against the
French king. The story goes that Philippe cried : "I
will take it, were the walls of iron ! " and that Richard
retorted, hearing this : "I would hold it. were the walls
of butter ! ' He had no chance. The arrow at Chaluz
ended his heroic life when his castle, his ' daughter,' was
but one year old. The defence was left to John, his
unworthy successor.

Philippe took up the cause of young Arthur, son of
Geoffrey, the rightful heir, and on the boy's mysterious
death cited John to answer before his suzerain for the
murder. John refused. Philippe declared his fiefs
confiscated to the French Crown, and marched into
Normandy.

Stories from French History

Chateau-Gaillard was not a castle only ; it was a great
fortress, including the villages of Les Andelys, an island in
the Seine, and the peninsula formed by the sudden bend of
the river. A stockade of piles, three deep, stopped navi-
gation, so that it was next to impossible for an enemy to
approach Rouen by the river or by either of its banks.
The castle itself was supposed to be impregnable ; the
walls of the keep were nine yards thick, and the outer
defences were planned with extraordinary skill. Richard
Lion-heart was an engineer of genius. But he was not
there to guard his glorious work. John was a luckless
coward, and Philippe was a clever and resolute soldier.
To him the taking of Chateau-Gaillard was a necessary
step in the making of the monarchy.

He invested the fortress in August 1203. He soon
destroyed the river defences, having seized the peninsula
without interference from John ; it was indeed scarcely
defended. After some weak opposition, which soon
ceased, John allowed the island and the village of Petit-
Andely to fall into the hands of the French. Then lie
retired, leaving the castle and its brave garrison to their
fate.

Tn the shortening autumn days provisions became scarce,
and the English men-at-arms were not the chief sufferers.
Twelve hundred miserable people, inhabitants of Petit-
Andely, chiefly women and children, were driven out of
the village and attempted to take refuge in the castle.
But the English governor could not keep them. Shut
into the narrow space between the chalk cliff on which the
castle stood and the river, refused leave to pass by English
and French alike, these poor creatures died by hundreds
of cold and starvation. At length, when half were dead,
King Philippe took pity on the survivors, sent them food,
and allowed them to escape through his lines. Then he

'3 c
0 .-

t.
H

g
O

The Making of the Monarchy

established his camp round the walls for the winter, and it
was not till February 1204 that he began the actual attack
on the castle from the high ground on the south-east
which finally decided the fate of Chateau-Gaillard and of
Normandy. The garrison made a most gallant defence,
but after a month's hard fighting and storming the great
keep itself was taken and the siege was at an end. After
that a few months saw Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, Tour-
aine, and other important fiefs added to the territory of the
kingdom of France.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1214, Philippe had to
defend himself against a strong coalition of all his enemies.
John of England landed at La Rochelle to invade Poitou.
The Emperor Otto IV, with Ferrand, Count of Flanders,
and other north-eastern magnates, discontented French
nobles and citizens, men of Lorraine, German and Italian
mercenaries, an English force under the Earl of Salisbury,
altogether an army of some 50,000 men, marched through
Flanders on their way to Paris, the heart of the kingdom-
the way of many invasions since that time. And these
were not days when all France stood together, sure of
herself, faithful to her rulers. Several of the nobles who
now led their fighting followers against the King were
Crown vassals in rebellion against his new and growing
power.

Philippe sent his son Louis to oppose King John in the
west, and advanced to meet his eastern enemies with a
smaller but most valiant army of his own. The Duke
of Burgundy rode with him ; many counts and barons ;
'' great store of other good knights " ; warlike bishops
and abbots who broke heads and limbs gladly, though
their calling forbade them to shed blood ; best of all, a
crowd of brave citizens, the militia of Amiens, Beauvais,
Compiegne, Arras, Soissons, and other towns, in whom the

Stories from French History

spirit of patriotism Avas already beginning to burn with
a clear flame.

In the August heat this French army rode forward
through the forests and over the plains we now know so well.
We can imagine the heavy horses with their gay trappings
jostling in the roads, the chain armour of the knights, their
pointed shields, coloured plumes, surcoats blazoned with
some device, pennons on bright lances shaking in the sun.
In advance rode the Sire de Montigny, representing the
abbey of Saint-Denis and bearing folded about his neck
its famous banner, the oriflamme, which led the French
armies for three hundred years, from Louis VI to Charles
VI and the fatal day of Agincourt. Displayed on a gilded
lance at the onset of battle, the oriflamme was of flame-
red silk Avithout embroidery, cut in three long points and
tied with knots of green.

The armies met at the bridge of Bouvincs, a village
betAveen Lille and Tournay ; and the story goes that the
King rested beneath an ash-tree, in the shadow of a small
chapel, before leading his men into combat. It appears
from tradition that he doubted even noAAr the loyalty of
some of the nobles who folloAved him. The pOAver of these
feudal magnates was still formidable ; their pride and
ambition Avere immeasurable. The foremost of those
Avhom Philippe distrusted — not without cause, as his
grandson knew — Avas Enguerrand the Great, Sire de
Coucy, the builder of the splendid castle it Avas left for
modern Huns to batter doAvn, and the author of the
proud saying :

Je suis ni Roy ni Prince aussy :
Je suis le Seigneur de Coucy.

They say that after Mass that morning Philippe laid his
crown upon the altar in the sight of his barons ready for
54

The Making of the Monarchy

battle, and, standing near by, proclaimed aloud that the
worthiest among them had only to advance, take, and
wear it. No man came forward. Then the King caused
a loaf of bread to be cut into pieces and invited his true
friends to eat with him, remembering the Apostles who
ate with Our Lord. But if there were any traitors present,
or men of evil thoughts, they were forbidden to draw near.
The barons rushed as one man to take the bread, those
whom the King had suspected foremost among them ;
Enguerrand de Coucy first of all. Then the King was
4 exceeding glad ' and told them how greatly he loved
them. And they cried to him to ride boldly into battle,
for they were ready to die with him.

They kept their word, and the fight began merrily, while
the onflamme fluttered in the sunshine and the King's
chaplains sang psalms in the rear. On both sides of the
bridge the warriors attacked each other, fighting with
swords, daggers, and pikes in a furious melee. At first
the knights in the Emperor's army were too proud to
measure weapons with the gallant militia of the French
towns, but soon they were forced to do so and the fighting
became general. The Bishop of Beauvais fought like a
lion and felled the Earl of Salisbury with his episcopal
mace. Both the Emperor and the King were unhorsed
and narrowly escaped death by stabbing. The Emperor
fled from the field and his dukes and princes galloped
after him. The Counts of Flanders and Boulogne were
taken prisoner. The English force held out longest ; but
in the end the coalition was thoroughly beaten, and
Philippe-Auguste, in this battle of a few hours, had not
only gained glory for himself and his dynasty but had
proved to France that she was a nation, and as such able
to defy her national enemies. And by the way, the English
Great Charter was a direct result of the battle of Bou vines.

Stories from French History

Philippe returned to his city of Paris with all the
triumph of a conqueror : bells ringing, country roads
strewn with flowers, folk running from the villages to
stare and rejoice. Even more attractive than the sight
of the King and his battered warriors was that of the
"fat and mournful" Count of Flanders as they carried
him, chained in a horse-litter, to his prison in the
new royal fortress.

" Lors fut FeiTund tout enferre
Dans la tour du Louvre enseriv ! "

sang the witty citizens of Paris.

For the capital, Philippe-Auguste did very much the
same as for the kingdom : he guarded and completed it.
Paris had grown in size during these centuries, spreading
over the northern and southern hills. The University
was already founded ; the cathedral of Notre-Dame was
in progress of building. But the city was neither enclosed
nor fortified ; it was a confused labyrinth of unpaved
streets and lanes, straggling among fields and gardens,
here and there a church and a burial-ground, farther out a
great monastery, such as St Germain of the Meadows,
standing in its own wide domain. The city had suffered
terribly from visitations of storm and flood during the early
years of the thirteenth century. In 1206, the chronicles
tell us, it was entirely inundated, and its foundations
so shaken that the houses became a peril. Even the
one stone bridge, the Petit-Font, was half destroyed
and — so we are told — only remained standing to allow of
the passage of the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve and the
weeping, praying procession that followed her. In a
former flood two of the bridges were carried entirely away ;
overweighted with houses and shops as they were then and
for many later centuries, they could not stand against the
56

The Making of the Monarchy

great pressure of the water : on that occasion King
Philippe had to fly from his palace on the Island to the
Hill of Sainte-Genevieve.

His works and buildings, if they could not ensure the
city against such ravages as these, gave it much strength,
security, and beauty. His new castle of the Louvre, a
solid keep with corner towers —

Le vieux Louvre,
Large et lourd

— was really for defence, a chief bastion, it seems, in the
long moated wall he built all round central Paris, with
towers at intervals — of which traces still remain — a
beautiful wall of stone, with a gate at the end of each
principal street, formerly unguarded from suburbs and
country. He also paved the streets, and between his new
wall and the mass of buildings he left space for market-
gardens to supply the city. It was said — and it was a
wonderful thing for those times — that every man received
fair compensation whose house or property was interfered
with by the royal improvements.

Learned men, poets, writers of romance and of history,
builders, and masters in all arts flourished in France under
her first really great king. Though at the infinite distance
of inferior character which no cleverness could bridge,
Philippe-Auguste fulfilled something of his youthful
aspiration — to follow in the footsteps of Charlemagne.
Under him France became France, and the old feudal
system of unjust privilege began slowly to give place to
national law.

CHAPTER VI

A MOTHER AND SON

That daughter there of Spain, the Lady Blanch,

/s niece to England. SHAKESPEARE

At the end of the First Renaissance, France was fairer, richer,
freer than she had been for a thottsand years, full of liberties,
poems, and cathedrals. MARY DTTCLAUX

WE all know "the Lady Blanch," paragon among
princesses, suggested by the blunt yet diplo-
matic First Citizen of Angers as a bride for
Louis of France. Perhaps we do not always picture that
same lady as "Blanche of Castile," best of mothers to the
best of men and kings, Louis IX.

The Citizen spoke freely of her " beauty, virtue, birth,"
and one may notice that she showed wit and wisdom be-
yond her years — for she, like the young son of Philippc-
Auguste, was a mere child at the time — in the opinion she
formed and expressed of her future husband :

Further I will not flatter you, my lord,

That all I see in you is worthy love,

Than this : that nothing do I see in you,

Though churlish thoughts themselves should be

your judge,
That I can find should merit any hate.

Shakespeare knew the character of Louis VIII, oddly
surnamefl 'the Lion' — some historians say 'in derision,'
others because of his stoutly obstinate copying of Philippe-
Auguste. Perhaps his youthful invasion of England may
have inspired flatterers. He marched up and down his
kingdom a good deal, led another crusade against the un-
58

A Mother and Son

lucky Albigeois, conquered more territory for the Crown
and appointed royal officers to overawe the nobles. To
this colourless Capet prince, whose chief merits were
loyalty to his father and entire trust in his wife, the Lady
Blanche was married for twenty-six years. Her husband
reigned for only three of those years. She became Regent
of France in the year 1226 ; the mother of six children, of
whom Louis, the eldest, was then eleven years old.

To the Spanish-Angevin princess, the granddaughter
of the great King Henry II and his brilliant wife from
Aquitaine, whose daughter Eleanor married Alfonso the
Noble of Castile, France owed her glorious St Louis, in
whom " chivalry received its crown." From her grand-
father Blanche inherited her resolute mind and statesman-
ship ; from her grandmother, not only the beauty and
attractiveness that even her enemies could not resist, but
perhaps the less charming qualities of which her daughter-
in-law was to have experience.

Suddenly, for her husband's death was unexpected—
and not without a touch of mystery — Queen Blanche
found herself the ruler of a country far from peaceful or
united, in spite of the foundations so strongly laid by
Philippe-Auguste and his son.

On the surface the advance was splendid : there were
prosperous cities that held great fairs and whose merchants
travelled to and from all lands, trading with the East, with
Spain, Italy, England. The crusaders had brought back
the secrets of Eastern manufactures, beautiful things in
glass, silk, linen, jewellers' work in gold, precious stones,
and enamel ; rare fruits and flowers. The University of
Paris was even now not alone in attracting thousands of
students, an unruly crowd but passionate for learning ;
Orleans had begun to teach Roman law, a marvellous
revival, and chemistry, medicine, alchemy, astrology,

Stories from French History

even magic, could be studied at other local universities.
These latter arts were not encouraged by the Church ;
but if she looked suspiciously on such gropings of the
human spirit, her own work at this time was magnificent.
The cathedrals, glorious in carving and colour, were the
proofs and homes of a religious enthusiasm never equalled
later ; the many abbeys and convents, especially those of
St Benedict, were centres of study, charity, and work ;
and by this time the followers of St Francis and St
Dominic, in all their fresh fervour, were travelling the
roads and preaching the Gospel. Famous poems, romances,
and chronicles were being written ; the civilized arts and
manners of daily life, no longer a monopoly of the South,
where the Courts of Love and the music of the troubadours
fell silent in the cruel Albigensian wars, had spread them-
selves over France. There was luxury in castle and town ;
but still the feudal barons watched all changes grudgingly,
catching at any chance of recovering their power, and still
the roads were unsafe, and still, though thousands of serfs
had been freed by royal decree, the poor cultivators were
at the mercy of their lords. For the frowning castle was
but a hundred yards away ; Paris and the king's justice,
perhaps a hundred leagues.

Such was the country through which the Lady Blanche
and her boy rode hard for Reims, where all the great
Crown vassals were summoned to assist at his coronation
on Advent Sunday, 1226. But they did not come. Only
three hundred knights attended the little King to the
cathedral, all in its new splendour, for the crowning of the
best ruler France ever had. The great nobles held aloof,
determined to show at once that they would yield no
obedience to a woman. And now France might have
proved the truth of the Preacher's saying, 'AVoe
to thee, O land, when thy king is a child," for she
GO

A Mother and Son

would have fallen back under the selfish tyranny of a
thousand masters, had the Regent been of a weaker
strain.

The rebellious barons assembled themselves, Henry III
of England, holding the fief of Aquitaine, being their
nominal head. They were strong enough without him.
The splendid Count Thibaut of Champagne was their
leader, and among the foremost were Enguerrand de
Coucy — Bouvines forgotten — Hugues de Lusignan, who
married the widow of King John, Raymond VII of
Toulouse, chief magnate of the South. They gathered an
army and attempted to cut off the young King from his
capital.

At first, it would seem, Queen Blanche was hardly
strong enough to meet them in the field. But she had
other weapons, readier to her hand than swords and cross-
bows. It was not now, one can well believe, that the
Count of Champagne, Thibaut le Chansonnier, chief of
trouveres, successor of the troubadours, was first attracted
by the most beautiful and cleverest woman of her day.
There is a story that when King Louis VIII lay dying
of camp-fever men whispered of poison, and pointed to
Thibaut of Champagne.

The Court, with a weak following of loyal nobles, was at
the royal castle of Montlhery, not far south of Paris. The
rebel army was strongly posted on the Seine, not many
leagues away. From the one to the other a secret
messenger rode in dark night. It was a service of danger,
for more reasons than one : the Regent risked grave mis-
understanding from her own friends, had her plan become
known. But in that age of chivalry she had many a
gallant young man among her people who would do her
bidding without a questioning thought ; and one of these
proved worthy of her trust.

Stories from French History

The King and his mother sat on two high chairs in the
vaulted hall, ladies and knights and hooded chaplains
standing round, little dogs playing at their feet. Evening
had closed in and the light was dim, logs blazing fitfully,
gusts of wind blowing the torches. Outside, round about
the towers, night-birds shrieked now and then. The
Queen's beautiful, dark-browed face was strained with
anxiety, which her attendants, naturally, thought they
understood. Louis, in purple gown and royal mantle
and cap of blue, his light brown hair hanging down on each
side of his thin young face, laughed as he listened to a story
a courtier told him. But there was a lack of life in the
royal party, for Paris was barred to them.

On this scene there suddenly enters a strange minstrel,
a minstrel from the South, they say ; a dark man dressed
in green, with glowing eyes which he hardly lifts from the
rush-strewn floor. He is a welcome distraction : they
bring him a cushion at the Queen's feet ; he touches his
small harp and sings in a lovely voice a romance of the
southern mountains and sea, of a crusader's return to his
castle and his love ; somewhat tragical and old-fashioned,
unlike the lighter modern nature-music of the trouveres,
but pleasing to Queen Blanche with her serious Spanish
blood. At least, so it would seem ; for the stern face
softens, a faint rose-flush rises to the pale cheeks, and
presently the Queen bends from her height and speaks to
the minstrel, perhaps asking for news from the South.
And since he appears unwilling to answer aloud, she waves
her courtiers back, and while the boy-king, weary of those
dismal strains, escapes gladly by her leave with his dogs,
she holds a long, low parley under curious eyes with the un-
known or disguised singer. Not till after he had left the
castle as mysteriously as he entered it did the loyal group
there ask itself, had any man in France such a singing
C2

A Mother and Son

voice, such a faultless touch on the strings as Count
Thibaut of Champagne ?

The royal party travelled unmolested to Paris, whither
Queen Blanche had already sent messengers. To make
the road safe for the King the men of Paris had marched
out in thousands to guard it. Years after Louis IX told
his friend and chronicler, the Sieur de Joinville, how " the
road was thronged with people, armed and unarmed, all
loudly praying to Our Lord to give him a long life and
to defend him from his enemies." An old illumination
shows us the bright face of the boy as he sits opposite his
mother in a kind of wheeled chariot drawn by led horses,
and looks out on the heads, bare or tall-hatted, the waving,
welcoming hands of his faithful citizens.

The war between Queen Blanche and the nobles dragged
on for several years ; but Count Thibaut's sudden rally to
the King's cause, and the loyalty of Paris and other large
towns, made the royal victory finally certain. Under his
mother's constant and careful training, the delicate lad
grew into the man of strong moral character, wise judg-
ment, unflinching faith, whose plain and humorous speech
and fearlessly righteous acts, even in opposition, when
necessary, to bishops and archbishops, are written in the
pages of Joinville. Blanche, in whom wisdom dwelt with
prudence, was the fount and origin of all. She Avas the
chief of her son's tutors : he sat at her feet in the old
palace, diligently learning, a bridge only dividing him
from the hill of the University and the famous Rue du
Fouarre, where the students in their crowds, boys and
young men from every province and nation, in later years
the great Dante himself, lounged on bundles of straw and
listened to their professors shouting Latin from windows
in beetling gables above.

So Louis IX grew up under the shadow of Notre-Dame

Stories from French History

—still unfinished — and in the midst of the noisy, eager,
independent eity that loved him. Those years of his
youth and early manhood may well have been, even be-
fore she had reduced the number and power of his enemies
and victoriously ended the long struggle with the South,
the happiest years of life for the Lady Blanche.

Unluckily, to her many and great virtues was added the
jealous temperament not rare in women of strong char-
acter. It was her duty to find a wife for her eldest son,
and in marrying him to Marguerite of Provence, some
years younger than himself and childish at that, she per-
haps flattered herself that Louis would remain as much
hers as ever. And indeed he never failed in devotion to
his mother. But he fell in love with his little wife, who
was a singularly charming girl, and it must be owned that
Blanche behaved as badly as any mother-in-law of fiction,
treating Marguerite with excessive harshness and doing
her best to keep the two young creatures apart, so that
they were actually driven to secret meetings on winding
castle stairs.

When King Louis, after a serious illness, undertook the
Seventh Crusade, and when his mother, left once more
Regent of France, " made as great mourning as though he
lay dead before her eyes," it may have been a bitter drop
in her cup that the Queen sailed with him. But Blanche
had reason to mourn, for she never saw her son again.

The sad, entrancing story of St Louis and his two
Crusades ranks high in the Christian romance of the Holy
Places. But the aspect of the Seventh Crusade that most
concerns French history is the effect of these wars on the
King's own character. Always heroic, generous, and
utterly unselfish, this earnest soldier of the Cross returned
to France after six years, saddened by failure, by the con-
duct of his brothers, by his mother's death in his absence,

Tha Sainte-Chapelle
X Photo

A Mother and Son

but with all his noble qualities strengthened, his religion
deepened, a keener sense of duty to his people and a higher
wisdom in fulfilling it.

Now we see him as the ideal king, whose right to that
eminence has not been disputed by the most cold-blooded
of historians. It has been said that if Philippe-Auguste
created the monarchy, his grandson breathed into it the
enthusiasm of life and showed what it could be. The
King's justice meant safety for the people ; the King's
peace meant the freedom of the roads. His officers, like
Charlemagne's, were everywhere ; his judgments were
unquestioned, except by evil-doers ; his laws were
supreme. The feudal nobles met their match in this
delicate, gentle-mannered man, who " could even bear to
have the truth told him." Old Enguerrand de Coucy,
proudest of barons, had hanged three students in a row
for killing rabbits on his domain. He was shut up in
the Louvre and condemned to death, being fortunate to
escape with a heavy fine and the loss of his baronial rights.

Tradition and Joinville show us the King, that glory of
the Middle Ages, sitting in the Forest of Vincennes or the
gardens of Paris, dressed in a blue camel's hair coat and a
cloak of black taffety, " his hair well combed . . . and a hat
of white peacock's feathers upon his head," surrounded by
citizens and country-folks, who might talk with him and
bring him their requests without any go-between. These
were his ways with the smaller people ; but when he
received foreign princes and great barons his Court was
splendid and his manner stately.

There were not lacking scornful spirits who complained
of the King's religious observances, of the money he gave
to churches and abbeys, of the hours he spent on his knees
in that exquisite Sainte-Chapelle, the gem of his time,
which he had built as a shrine for the great relic, the
E 65

Stones from French History

Crown of Thorns, sent to him from Constantinople. There
is a story that a woman who came one day to plead before
him — perhaps under the oak at Vincennes — said to him :
' Fie ! thou King of France ! Some one else should be
king ! Thou art only a king of friars and preachers,
priests and clerks. 'Tis pity thou art King of France, and
'tis a marvel they don't put thee out of the kingdom."

The King's sergeants were about to drive the woman
forth with blows, but Louis forbade them to touch her, and
answered her, smiling : " Thou sayest well. I am not
worthy to be king, and had it pleased Our Lord, another
might have been king who would have known better how
to govern."

Then he ordered that money should be given her, and
sent her away in peace.

The King's best friends might have perceived some
grain of truth in the woman's complaint when in spite of
all their prayers he left the kingdom that needed him so
sorely, to embark, already ill, on that last useless Crusade
from which he was brought back in sorrowful pomp to his
tomb at Saint-Denis.

Joinville in old age lamented that never again, since the
good King forsook France, had the country been what
it was in his day, " at peace within itself and with its
neighbours."

CHAPTER VII

THE PROVOST OF THE MERCHANTS

Celte ville
A ux longs eri.i,
Qui profile
Son front gris,
Des toitsfrehft,
Cent tourelles,
dockers grcles,
C'est Paris!

VICTOR Huf:o

A YOUNG prince rode from Poitou to Paris in the
early autumn weather.
France was at her loveliest in those ' crystal
days,' as they call them in the South-west, the woods
touched with gold, not so much spread under a blue sky
as bathed in an immeasurable height of blue air. The low
green valleys of the streams were already cold, but on the
heights, the purple and almost trackless moors, the bare
stony hills, there was glorious September sunshine. Now
a long bridge crossed a wide river creeping among sand-
banks, and a fortified lane climbed from its head to some
white town or city. Now the road dived through narrow
lanes edged by stone walls, above which vineyards, ready
for the vintage, but neglected and straggling, climbed
chalky slopes to the sky. Now a winding track through
marshy country full of reeds ended in a forest so thick
that the turrets of a castle hidden among the bronzing oak-
boughs rose a sudden apparition. Then a wide plain with
distant shining towns, with scattered villages and some

Stories from French History

attempt at cultivated fields, spread to the horizon. But
in all that ride through the pleasant land of France hardly
a man, woman, or child was to be seen. For it was not very
long since the Black Death had destroyed a third part of
the people : and now also on every side, in ruin and loneli-
ness, were the signs of desolating war. No corn, no
cattle : and any human being that peered from cover, any
labourer, armed with his scythe, who glared when the hoofs
clattered by, expected to see yet another band of brigands,
French or English or foreign, the dreaded Free Companies,
ready to tear the last morsel from his children's mouths
and to drive his last thin beast from its straw shelter.

For France was in the seventeenth year of the Hundred
Years War ; and the prince who rode to Paris was
Charles the Dauphin flying from the battle-field of Poitiers,
where his father, King Jean le Bon, had been taken
prisoner by Edward the Black Prince, and where the rash-
ness of the chivalry of France had lost the clay for their
unhappy country.

A heavy task lay on the shoulders of this lad of twenty,
now Lieutenant of the kingdom. In later years he was
known as Charles the Wise, and was probably the best
King of France since his ancestor St Louis. But it
was a dismal, thin-faced, unhealthy youth who now,
slouching on his horse's neck, galloped with a few followers
to Paris to meet the hurriedly summoned States-General,
hoping by their means to raise money for his father's huge
ransom and to carry on the war. A truce with England
would give him time: and France surely would not be
content with threatened terms of peace which would leave
her a smaller and weaker country than in the days of
Philippe-Auguste. Yet who could tell ? Most of her
great men were dead ; many of the living, released on hard
conditions by the English, thought of nothing but how to
68

The Provost of the Merchants

grind out of the bones of their poor neighbours the ransom
they owed. And the towns, the one hope, the merchants,
the traders, the hated Jews with their money-bags — would
they pour out gold to save France ? That depended on
the humour of the Three Estates, first convoked by
Philippe le Bel, for his own ends, in 1302. They were not
too friendly in these days to the claims of royalty. They
had already quarrelled with King Jean as to a fresh levy
of taxes ; and at the head of the opposition stood a strong
man called ^tienne Marcel, the Provost of the Merchants
of Paris.

Approaching the city by the old road between the
south-western hills — partly clothed with vineyards and
studded with a few of that ring of windmills which sur-
rounded old Paris — Charles the Dauphin called to his side
his two chief counsellors, both high officers of the Crown,
Robert de Clermont, Marshal of Normandy, and Jean de
Conflans, Marshal of Champagne. To these men, speak-
ing with his nervous, twisted smile, he confided his fear of
Marcel and his influence with the Estates. They were a
pair of splendid nobles, fierce and gay ; the usual pattern
of French knighthood in the mid-fourteenth century,
which flaunted in bright colours and played at war as a
game. One can well believe that they laughed the boy's
uneasiness to scorn.

A great crowd had gathered at the gate of the spired
and gabled city : there were clergy and lawyers in pro-
cession ; there were the trade guilds with their banners,
a solid company ; there was a prodigiously noisy and push-
ing mass of University students, for once taking a holiday
from fighting the monks of Saint-Germain-des-Pres for the
enjoyment of their pleasant meadows ; and surging from
every lane, filling the narrow streets where dogs fought and
pigs squealed and routed in the gutter, were the low people

Stories from French History

of Paris in their thousands ; squalid, diseased, with faces
as of creatures only fit for the vast, overflowing Cemetery
of the Innocents on the other side of the river.

It was not a kindly welcome that this varied crowd
offered to the Prince who had fled from Poitiers. It might
be outwardly respectful ; but the meaner sort snarled
and hissed, and many bitter words were smothered in the
general hubbub and drowned by the booming and jangling
of bells from a hundred steeples. And the temper of the
Parisians was mirrored in the face of the ruler of Paris, the

>»

Provost of the Merchants, Eticnne Marcel.

He met the Dauphin, riding on a mule : a dark, tall
man. with heavy features and an obstinate jaw. There
may have been something of the old Roman in his square
brow and frowning eyes ; for it has been suggested that
his ancestors were the Marcelli of Rome : but this seems
to be no more than an instance of the imagination which
plays a delightful part in history. Be that as it may, this
chief of the citizens of Paris reminds one of popular leaders
in an age before France was a nation, and the type has
often repeated itself since his day.

Marcel received the Dauphin in the city's name and
attended him to the palace — still, though enlarged, the old
royal palace on the Island, the centre of the city, its
windows looking down the river, where Philippe- Augustc
judged and St Louis studied and prayed. The Louvre-,
little altered in these two centuries, was still a fortress-
prison rather than a residence ; and now. farther east, on
the Place de Greve, a fine old building called the Maison
des Piliers was being transformed by Marcel into the first
Hotel de Ville. the Guildhall of Paris and the heart of her
later historv.

In successive sittings of the States-General through that
autumn and winter of 135G the Dauphin Charles tried
70

The Provost of the Merchants

vainly to gain his ends with a most troublesome assembly.
For the First Estate, the nobles, were few and weak ; the
Second Estate, the clergy, were divided ; and the Third
Estate, the burghers of Paris and the large towns, under
Marcel's guidance, were bent on flouting the royal
authority.

This younger, Valois branch of the House of Capet,
which, through a revived law of the Salian Franks barring
women from the possession of land, had succeeded the sons
of Philippe le Bel — hence the Hundred Years War —
hardly ever gained the nation's confidence to the same
degree as the old kings before them. To a frequent strain
of wildness that displeased the rising bourgeoisie they
mostly added forgetfulness of the doctrine, preached and
lived by St Louis, that a true king must reign as the father
of his people.

The Estates replied to the Dauphin's requests by
demands of their own, covering all the discontents and
miseries of the kingdom. In the spring, as the only means
of obtaining his needed money, Charles was forced into an
empty assent to drastic reforming ordinances which neither
he nor his father could ever have carried out. For they
were so far in advance of the times as to amount to revolu-
tion ; they made the Estates masters of France, destroyed
the privileges of the nobles and restricted those of the
King.

Marcel was in bitter earnest, and reforms were desper-
ately needed. Yet he was hardly patriotic ; for that
moment, France lying at the feet of the victorious English
King, was one for realizing old duties rather than claiming
new rights. Apparently France thought thus, in spite of
her sufferings, for Marcel's tug-of-war with the Dauphin
had not lasted many months when the Provost began to
know that he and his burghers were almost alone in their

Stories from French History

obstinate bargaining. A few bishops, especially those of
Paris and Laon, were of his party, and one or two nobles ;
but the larger towns did not care to be ruled by Paris, the
country people were dumb, and the royal cause, on the
whole, held its own.

The doubt of final success seems to have lashed Marcel
to fury. He set to work to fortify Paris, digging ditches
and building the new wall, finished later by Charles V, to
enclose the city, which had far outgrown that of Philippe-
Auguste. He allied himself with Charles le Mauvais,
King of Navarre, the Dauphin's imprisoned cousin and
enemy, fetching him to Paris, where his clever tongue
harangued the people in the interest of the Third Estate
and in his own. This and other steps led on to a desperate
deed by which Marcel meant to terrify the Dauphin, but
only advanced his own failure and ruin.

Paris was growling, as her way is ; stormy crowds
capped with the Provost's colours, red and blue, were
building barricades at the head of the streets. News ran
round that the Dauphin was betraying the city ; that
there would be no reforms ; that things were growing
worse, for the coin of the realm was to be thinner ; that
Charles of Navarre would be a better king than Charles of
Valois, who listened to evil counsellors and did not trust
the people. This at least was not true, for the young
Prince had ventured almost alone among the angry crowds
to plead his own and his captive father's cause against
Etienne Marcel.

It was a day in February 1358 ; a pale sun shining, the
river running fast and full. The Dauphin had removed
for safety to the Louvre and was holding his small Court
there, a few bishops and nobles standing round him,
nearest of all his two staunch friends, Robert de Clermont
and Jean de Conflans. They were consulting on the perils
72

The Provost of the Merchants

of the situation. Some advised the Prince to leave the
city, where he was half a prisoner, but Charles said nay
to that. He was not willing to surrender Paris utterly
to the Provost of the Merchants. Paris had been evilly
led, but might come to a better mind, he said, and
smiled on his friends ; the sickly youth was far-sighted,
with a kind of nervous courage. The two marshals
applauded him : the very thought of giving way to a
set of greasy shopkeeping knaves was odious to their
proud spirits.

Then a great noise without announced the Provost of
the Merchants, and Etienne Marcel entered the Dauphin's
presence, attended by a number of burghers and hired
men-at-arms.

There he stood, a big, tall figure in his gown of office.
flushed face and dark threatening eves shaded bv the

*. i,

hood of red and blue. The pale Prince on the dais, in gold
brocade and ermine and velvet cap circled with gold,
shrank before him ; the little Court stared, defiant yet
anxious, at the fierce following ready to enforce any
demands this insolent Provost might make.

But the day of demands was over, except as disguising
a violent resolve. Marcel attacked the Dauphin with
sharp words of reproach. Why did he not take heed to the
affairs of the kingdom ? Why did he suffer France to be
devastated by robbers, by the Free Companies, by the
soldiers of two nations ? He had inherited this realm :
whv did he not defend it ?

" Right willingly would I defend it, had I the power or
the means," the Dauphin answered him. " But I have
nothing. Those who take the riches of the State must
defend it."

Under the terrible eves of Marcel his courtiers echoed

•

his words ; especially, we may well believe, the tAvo nobles

Stories from French History

whom the people's leader had already condemned. A few
moments of bitter speech brought the scene to its tragic
end.

'Do quickly what you came to do ! " Marcel cried to his
hired assassins.

They were ready, with swords drawn. As appointed,
they rushed upon the twro marshals where they stood at the
Dauphin's side, cut them down, and killed them as they
crashed at his feet, with such fury that their blood splashed
on his brocaded robe. None of the Court dared defend
them ; the odds were too heavy ; otherwise Marcel might
then and there have met the death that awaited him a few
months later. The young Prince fell back, sickened and
terrified. Was his turn the next ? The Provost told him
he had nothing to fear ; these men were evil traitors, slain
by the will of the people. Snatching off his own parti-
coloured hood, he flung it on Charles's head as a sign of
protection. On his own head he placed the royal cap with
its circlet of gold ; and thus the King of Paris stalked forth
to the Hotel de Ville to boast of his deed to the Parisians
assembled in the Place de Greve.

The Dauphin could not avenge the death of his friends ;
they say, indeed, that Marcel forced him publicly to ac-
knowledge it just. One would like to disbelieve this ;
but Charles the Wise was a prudent personage, and it
may have been the onlv wav of safety.

•/ •/*/*/

Civil war followed the Dauphin's escape from Paris ;
the angry city and her Provost, with Charles the Bad as
an ally, against the royal troops, such as they were, and
the towns and castles of France. The chief sufferers, as
always were the poor folk of the country-side. And now,
in the month of May, ' Jacques Bonhomme ' in his
thousands poured out from every village, every lonely
forest hut and little hidden farm among burnt walls and

i~ i

. i

The Provost of the Merchants

plundered fields, and began on his own account to spread
death and ruin throughout the north-eastern provinces.
War between the nobles and the burghers gave the
peasants their opportunity : feudalism met its doom at the
hands of a savage jacquerie. Many castles were stormed
and pillaged and burnt ; their inhabitants, even if only
women and children, were massacred with awful cruelty.

As it happens so often in history, the innocent meet with
punishment earned by the guilty. The wild bands, armed
with scythes and forks and knives and iron-shod sticks,
come stealing through the woods ; their sudden horrid
yells warn the frightened women ; but no defence is
possible ; doors are burnt and battered in ; the end of all
things is upon them. They pay most pitifully for the
tyrannies of their fathers, husbands, sons ; for oppression
and robbery by men-at-arms and companies ; for all the
losses and sorrows of ' Jacques ' and his children in these
terribly troubled years.

Six weeks saw the end, though the great Provost held
out a friendly hand to the peasants and even sent a small
force to help them when they marched on Meaux. But
the nobles, with the Dauphin at their head, and with the
help of Charles of Navarre, who now began to see on which
side his interest lay, defeated them so thoroughly that the
leaders lost heart and the revolt was soon crushed. Not
without a slaughter which was almost extermination.
The wretched peasants were hunted like wild beasts
through the forests. In a miniature of the time we are
shown the details of their destruction at Meaux. From
walls and bridge they are hurled dead or alive into the
swirling waters of the Marne, while women crowd staring
to street doors, giving God thanks in horror and pity for
deliverance from that terror.

Six weeks more, and the stormy career of Etienne Marcel

Stories from French History

was ended. Things were going badly in Paris ; there was
no money and no food. The Provost saw his power
dwindling : the Dauphin and the King of Navarre were at
the gates. Knowing that Charles of Valois would never
forgive the slayer of his friends, Marcel offered to receive
Charles of Navarre into the city, to make him Captain of
Paris and King of France. Le Mauvais, false to every
cause but his own, was ready enough, and the last night
of July was fixed for his secret entry by the fortress-gate
of Saint-Denis.

Thither came the Provost in the darkness, and there,
with the keys in his hands, he was met by a citizen named
Jean Maillard and two others, these being loyal to the
Dauphin, while Maillard, till now, had been on Marcel's
side. Thus the plot had come to his ears, and he at least
had no wish for a change of dynasty.

" iStienne, Etienne, what doest thou here at this hour ? '

" Jean, I am watching over the city that is in my care."

" Nay, thou art here for no good end. See, friends, he
bears the keys and would betray the city ! "

" Thou licst, Jean Maillard."*

" Thou liest thyself ! Treason, treason ! Ho ! help,
friends ! "

There was a short but sharp struggle, for a party of
Maillard's men were hidden behind the buttresses and now
rushed forward and flung themselves on the Provost's
guard. They say that Marcel would have fled, seeing
that all was lost. But Jean Maillard struck him on the
head with an axe and there he fell and died ; a strong
figure in history, who in more peaceful times might have
done much for the liberties of France.

So it was Charles the Wise, not Charles the Bad, who
triumphantly entered the royal city in that August dawn
of 1358.
70

CHAPTER VI11
A VANISHED PALACE

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch's high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn!— for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him desolate !)
And round about his home the glory

That Hushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed.

EDGAR A. POE

THE historical romance of the later fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries, years along which
the war with England stretched its slow length, is
centred in the wonderful dwelling made for himself by
Charles V and called the Hotel Saint-Paul — " the solemn
hotel of great Diversions !: —of which two hundred years
later hardly anything remained. It pleased the King's
fancy; he regarded it with "singular pleasure and affec-
tion." It was adapted from several large houses belonging
to certain counts and archbishops, which formed a stately
turreted group on the north bank of the Seine between the
city boundary and the river-gate of Saint-Paul ; stretch-
ing northward to the Rue Saint-Antoine and the newly
built fortress of the Bastille, so that it included the old
church and cemetery of Saint-Paul within the sweep of
its garden walls.

A pleasant and delightful place it was ; not a single or
formal building, but a group of beautiful houses connected
by galleries and trellised walks shaded with vines. The

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wine made from the royal grapes was famous. The
gardens and orchards supplied the palace : there were
" apple, pear, and cherry trees, beds of rosemary and
lavender, peas and beans, long arbours and fine bowers."
There were towers for pigeons and yards for poultry
brought from the royal farms to be fattened here for the
royal table. There were also cages of wild and rare
animals.

Within, the palace had all the richness of a time that in
spite of wars and tumults had become luxurious ; carved
panelling, thick tapestries and curtains ; high emblazoned
chimney-pieces, painted and gilded beams, windows of
coloured glass, with wire lattices to keep out the birds ;
furniture of leather and silk, beds ten or twelve feet square.
There were music galleries and a library : in its quiet
peace, shut away from city noises, sat Charles the Wise
among shelves of precious manuscripts. His weak health
kept him a prisoner ; he cared little for riding and hunting,
he hated battles, and did not even care to watch the
tournaments with which his fighting nobles filled up the
intervals of real war. Study was what he loved ; history,
philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and other sciences as
then taught. These were his recreations. The Parisians

outside his gates, curious about a King they seldom saw
and could not understand, whispered strange things and
gave him credit for dealings with the devil. Few men of
his own time understood either Charles V or the quiet work
for France that filled his reign.

At his accession a third of France was in English
hands. When he died, the clever mode of warfare carried
on by his favourite free-lance leader, the famous Bertrand
du Guesclin, the sturdy Breton to whom war was a science,
not a game, had almost driven out the invaders for the
time. And at home Charles V reformed the whole system

A Vanished Palace

of law and government. If the country was heavily
taxed, its poor cultivators were left in peace, except for
an occasional band of robbers ; the Free Companies were
driven away to fight elsewhere. The towns gained much
that Etienne Marcel had demanded ; they prospered,
managing their own finances ; their municipal officers
were often ennobled, thus strengthening their rivalry with
the feudal lords, who now found their master in the King.
The Parliament of Paris became a high court of law,
sitting permanently at the palace on the Island. These
and other ordinances raised France to her feet, even in the
midst of the Hundred Years War.

The Court of Charles V at the Hotel Saint- Paul appears
to have been quietly held, yet peaceful and gay. His
Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, was a good woman, in sym-
pathy with her husband's tastes. Her ladies flitted about
the gardens, the labyrinth of lovely rooms and galleries,
like a number of bright-winged birds. It was the fashion
to wear parti-coloured gowns, half red, half blue, with the
family arms embroidered on each side in heraldic colours.
The head-dress stood up in tall horns studded with jewels,
a white veil flying ; the sleeves of the short upper coat
dangled from the shoulders in long ends like scarves.

The dashing nobles of France were not too welcome at
Court, it seems ; and they more willingly followed the
King's brothers, the powerful Dukes of Burgundy, Berry,
and Anjou, les sires des fleurs-de-lys. But all these had
their lodging in or near the Hotel Saint-Paul ; and at times
we hear of the King's stately rooms crowded with knights
and barons, with foreign princes and ambassadors, so that
there was scarcely room to turn. And among them moved
the King's own valued counsellors, the red-robed lawyers
and Parliament men, scornfully described as les mar-
mousets by the party of the princes. Once at least princes

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and barons and marmousets, in spite of their jealousies,
had to join in doing honour to Bertrand du Guesclin, the
ugly, rough, scientific little soldier whom Charles V placed
above them all, making him Constable of France. This
was in 1370. Ten years later the King buried the Con-
stable in the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. A few weeks,
and he was himself laid there. At a perilous time France
lost both her wise King and her famous leader.

Among the younger women whom we may fancy haunt-
ing that magical Hotel Saint-Paul, with her own songs on
her lips, meeting, with love and laughter, in all the douceur
dujoli mois de Mai, the riants verts yeux of some beautiful
young knight who had surprised her heart, was Christine
de Pisan, daughter of the King's chief astrologer — some
said wizard — who brought her from Venice as a child of
five years old. She married a gentleman of Picardy— him
of the laughing green eyes, possibly — and in later years, a
widow, and known as a writer of genius, she wrote the best
account that exists of the daily life of Charles V.

The King rose between six and seven, was combed
and dressed, joking with his servants the while. After his
private prayers he attended Mass at eight, with " solemn
and melodious singing." Then, like St Louis, he received
all manner of persons, rich and poor, many widows among
them, and listened kindly to their requests, granting those
that were reasonable. When not detained too long, he
held his council before dinner, at which he ate and drank
little, listening to the softest of music. Then during two
hours he attended to business, received ambassadors, and
gave every necessary audience ; then slept for an hour ;
then amused himself and his friends among his special
treasures, manuscripts, and curiosities, especially jewels, of
which he was passionately fond. After vespers in summer
he walked in the garden with the Queen and his children ;
80

A Vanished Palace

in winter he sat by the fire and listened to reading,
historical, philosophical, scientific, till supper- time ; then,
after a short recreation, perhaps in the company of Master
Thevenin, his favourite fool, at nine o'clock he went to
bed.

It does not sound like an exciting life ; but there was
little strength of nerve or muscle in Charles the Wise ;
care and quiet only kept him alive to the age of forty-four.
He did his best for his country, and it was much. On his
death-bed he told his brothers that the condition of the
poorer people weighed on his heart, and begged them to
carry on his work by lifting off, as soon as might be, the
heavy burden of the taxes.

Charles could not have spoken to men less likely to obey
his wishes or to follow out his policy. The Duke of Bur-
gundy, Philippe le Hardi, who had earned that appanage
by fighting beside his father at Poitiers when Charles the
Dauphin rode away, was the first of the line of bold, proud,
ambitious princes who were to drag France down again
into those depths of civil war which left her, after all the
heroic work of du Guesclin and all the wise statecraft of
Charles V, an easy prey to her enemies.

Burgundy's chief desire was to assure himself a strong
dominion in the eastern provinces ; Louis of Anjou, hav-
ing seized the royal treasure, set out to conquer the
Kingdom of Naples ; Jean of Berry ruled the south of
France. Each robbed the country, fighting for his own
hand. And the two young boys, Charles VI and his
brother, Louis of Orleans, motherless, for Queen Jeanne
had died before her husband, were brought up in a vicious
society, varied by the furious quarrels of their uncles, new
oppressions of the people, riots in Paris, war on Flanders,
futile attacks on England.

Paris had welcomed her handsome young King after
F 81

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his coronation with decorated streets and fountains that
poured out wine, milk, and rose-water. Now she rose in
fury against the men who governed in his name, stormed
the Hotel de Ville, and murdered the tax-collectors. When
the royal army returned victorious from Flanders she was
punished like a captured city. Her strong gates were
thrown down. An old writer says that Paris became like
any village where folks could go out and in at any hour of
the day or night. Added to this, enormous new taxes
were imposed on the citizens. Paris became hungry and
miserable, her streets filthy and pestiferous, while every
kind of extravagant luxury reigned in the palaces within
her walls.

Yet Paris loved Charles VI. He seems to have attracted
men's hearts as Henry IV did, by kind looks and courteous,
chivalrous manners. All through the long tragedy of
intermittent madness, brought on by wild living, which
clouded his reign of more than forty years, people never
forgot that during four of those years he tried to be a good
king. Young and ignorant, lately married to that white-
faced, black-eyed woman from Bavaria, who was com-
pared, as she passed through Paris, to a fairy from the old
romances, a goddess from some pagan heaven, or a Virgin
from the painted page of a missal, and who was to prove
the curse of his life — Charles VI had the courage to shake
himself free of his uncles and to recall his father's ministers,
the marmousets, to power. Four years, and any small
chance of peace and prosperity for France vanished one
summer day in the glades of the forest near Le Mans,
where the sight of a tall man rushing to his horse's head,
crying out, "King, you are betrayed ! " and the sound of
a lance accidentally striking on armour, transformed the
excitable prince of tAventy-three into a raging madman
who turned upon his brother and his suite, killing four men

A Vanished Palace

before he could be tied down in a cart for the journey back
to Paris. From this attack he seems to have recovered,
but a year later the terrible affair known as the Bal des
Ardents, a masquerade in which several of his companions
were accidentally burnt to death, threw his weak brain
into hopeless disorder.

Up to this time the Hotel Saint-Paul was a place of
delights; "great Diversions' indeed, though hardly
4 solemn,' for it was here that Queen Isabelle held her
scandalous fetes and gathered round her the worst men
and women in the kingdom, among whom Louis, Duke of
Orleans, handsome, agreeable, and interesting, took a fore-
most place. Now the Hotel became the home of a mad
and melancholy king : men and women looked shudder-
ing at its graceful towers and shining roofs and sunny
spaces of greenery, and shed tears of pity for the un-
fortunate prince who still, through thirty miserable years,
remained their Bien-aime and in his lucid intervals desired
their happiness.

In those days brain disease was more feared than under-
stood, and though the King was not, like meaner patients,
chained in a dark cellar on straw, but had a beautiful
palace for his prison, he was treated with all the precau-
tions of terror. If he refused to take off his clothes and
go to bed, which was sometimes the case during several
months, a dozen men with blackened faces would rush into
the room, seize him, and undress him by force, he being too
much frightened to resist them. At these bad times the
Queen entirely deserted both him and her children, who
went without food and clothing, they say, while she spent
the royal revenues on herself and her favourites. Charles's
one protecting friend was his sister-in-law, the good and
unhappy Milanese lady Valentina Visconti, Duchess of
Orleans, who never forsook him till a false accusation of

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sorcery drove her away from the Court. Card-playing
was his chief entertainment. Cards were printed for him
-almost the first use of printing — by a certain Parisian
painter named Gringonneur ; " three packs of cards, gilt
and variously coloured, with several devices, to be laid
before the said Lord our King, for his amusement."

Through darkened windows the Hotel Saint-Paul
looked upon the long succession of tragical events which
led Paris and all France down an ever-quickening descent
to the worst years of the nation's history : the desperate
quarrel between Louis of Orleans and his cousin Jean sans
Peur, Duke of Burgundy, which ended one November
night in the murder of Orleans by hired ruffians in the
street ; the Duke of Burgundy's successful bid for power
and popularity, posing as the friend of the people ; the
rising against him of the Armagnac faction — named from
the Comte d'Armagnac, whose daughter married the son
of Orleans ; the long struggle between these two parties,
actual civil war, and terrible bloodshed, both in Paris
and the country, till matters were forced to a clear issue
by the English invasions under Henry V and his conquest
of Normandy, the last blows which laid ruined France at
the feet of her enemy.

Those darkened windows saw half France conquered, the
Dukes of Burgundy, Jean sans Peur and his son Philippe
le Bon, allying themselves with the English and accepting
an English king in succession to Charles VI, the triumphal
entry of Henry V into Paris, now his city, and his rejoicing
Christmas there while the streets, not long since running
with the blood of furious factions, were deserted and
silent ; no food, no fuel, pestilence slaying its thousands,
wolves creeping through the broken walls, haunting the
cemeteries, devouring children and the dead ; church bells
silent ; — and then, within the walls of the palace itself, a

A Vanished Palace

poor mad king signing the treaty which gave away his
son's royal inheritance to an English child a few months
old ; his grandson, indeed, but with little right, beyond
that of conquest, to the crown of France.

The conqueror did not live long to enjoy his glory.
Henry V died at Vincennes in August 1422. Seven weeks
later, within the walls of the Hotel Saint-Paul, Charles VI
left this troublesome world. Not a prince of his own
family followed those sad remains to Saint-Denis ; the
curious, high-nosed visage of the chief mourner was that
of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France and uncle
of her new baby-king. The coffin was lowered into the
vault ; the broken staves of the attendants clattered down
upon it. Then a loud proclamation rang through the
arches of the old abbey-church, where so many kings
already slept :

" God have mercy on the soul of the most high and
excellent Prince Charles, King of France, sixth of the
name, our natural and sovereign Lord ! God grant long
life to Henry, by the grace of God King of France and of
England, our sovereign Lord ! '

Charles the Dauphin, the true King of France, was
wandering with a small army of friends in the forests of
Berry and Poitou, nearly all France north of the Loire
being now lost to him.

Jeanne d'Arc was ten years old.

CHAPTER IX
THE STORY OF THE MAID

Kt maintenant voy, dontfai dcsplaisancc,
Qa'il tc fonriutt main! grief mat tousteni r.
Trescrestien, franc royaume dc France.

CHARLES D'ORLEANS

<;<ir<lanl son c<eur intact enpleine adversiti- ;

Tenant tout tin royaume en sa tcnacid',
]'irant en plein mystere avec sagw ''•'•,
Mourant en plcin murfijre avec vivacitd,

Lajil/e dc Lorraine a nulle autre pareillc.

CHARLES PJJGUY

FROM desolated cities and mournful palaces, from
faction fights, murders, and betrayals, it is a
refreshment to turn to that quiet village on the
borders of Lorraine where the marvellous girl was born
who restored the spirit of France and saved her country.
Jeanne d'Arc stands, it has been said, at the confines of
two ages. A double light shines upon her ; she " is
bathed in the latest gleam of the dying Middle Ages,
gilded by the first rays of the rising Renaissance." Her
story is at once " incomparable legend and simple truth."
Brought up in a plain and kindly home like other little
maidens of Domremy, Jeanne worked in house and fields
and sometimes, like St Genevieve, kept her father's
sheep. She never learned to read, but her mother, who
taught her to weave and to sew, taught her also to believe
and to pray. She loved her village church ; when its bell

The Story of the Maid

rang far over the meadows the little shepherdess would
kneel devoutly and say her prayers, like St Genevi^ve
a thousand years before. But never, throughout her
short life, would Jeanne have dreamed of comparing
herself with anyone so ancient and so venerable. She
would certainly have found it incredible that history
would place her name even higher than that of the
shepherdess of Nanterre.

Domremy lay near the frontier and on the highroad.
News going and coming that way between Flanders
and Italy, between North and South, passed constantly
through the village, borne by travellers, soldiers,
messengers ; thus the inhabitants heard of the desperate
condition of France, the civil wars, the English victories,
the conquest of Normandy, the occupation of Paris, the
proclamation of an English king, the despairing struggle
of Charles VII in the western provinces against English
and Burgundians allied to take his crown and devour his
country. And the village had its own experience. Its
politics had always been royalist, therefore Armagnac.
In 1428 it was attacked by a roving company of Bur-
gundians, and the farmer, Jacques d'Arc, fled with his
family into Lorraine. The little farm escaped destruction,
though the church and most of the village was burnt. The
home of Jeanne is still there, a place of pilgrimage, with its
long sloping roof and low beams and shadowing fir-trees.

But Jeanne had known her mission several years before
the adventure of 1428, which only served to make her more
certain and more resolute. Ever since she was a child of
thirteen the gardens and oak-woods of Domremy had been
for her sacred ground where she saw great lights and
visions of saints, St Michael, St Catherine, St Margaret,
and heard their voices commanding her to go into France,
to join the young King, to help him against his enemies,

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and now especially to deliver his city of Orleans from the
English, who were closely besieging it.

Such a mission, laid upon a young peasant girl, was sure
to meet with the anger and derision of her family when
declared to them. Her father's fury may be well under-
stood. So may the rude laughter of Robert de Baudri-
court, captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, when Jeanne
appealed to him for an armed escort to make her journey
possible. He told the friendly uncle who accompanied
her that what the child needed was a good box on the ears !
Nevertheless, when she came to him again early in the year
1429 he supplied her with the men and the arms she asked.
Leaving parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and the old
village with its garden full of unearthly lights and its fairy-
haunted woods, Jeanne rode forth to cross France from
the Meuse to the Loire, like a young knight on a Crusade,
dressed as a boy, shepherdess turned soldier, a daily
amazement, in her courage, modesty, charity, and religious
devotion, to her rough companions on that dangerous ride.

The long yellow ruin of the castle of Chinon, where
Charles VII then was, still crowns the ridge above the
little town on the Vienne. Thither came Jeanne on an
early day in March 1429. This is how she is described by
one who loved her : " She was clad very simply, like the
varlet of some lord of no great estate, in a black cap with
a little silver brooch, a grey doublet, and black and grey
hose, trussed up with many points ; a sword of small price
hung by her side. In stature she was something above
the common height of women, her face brown with sun
and wind, her eyes great, grey, and beautiful, beneath
black brows, her lips red and smiling. In figure she
seemed strong and shapely, but so slim — she being but
seventeen years of age — that, were it not for her sweet
girl's voice, and for the beauty of her grey eyes, she might

Jeanne d'Arc

Henri Chapu

Photo Alinari

The Story of the Maid

well have passed for a page, her black hair being cut en
ronde, as was and is the fashion among men-at-arms."

It was evening, and the castle hall glimmered with
torches, when Jeanne was admitted to the presence of the
King and Queen. Charles VII, a dismal, lethargic young
man of six and twenty, withdrew himself among his lords
and ladies ; he would try the discernment of this mysteri-
ous maiden, who like some prophetess of old declared a
threefold mission — to raise the siege of Orleans, to see her
King crowned at Reims, to drive the English invaders
from her country. It all sounded like a presumptuous
dream in the ears of Charles and his Court. But the
emergency was great, for the loss of Orleans would have
been the last stroke of ruin. There could at least be no
danger in hearing what the maiden had to say ; and first,
would she recognize her King among the crowd of nobles,
many handsomer than himself, and one, the Sieur de la
Tremoille, bigger and more gorgeous than the rest ?
That question was soon answered. Disregarding all
others, Jeanne went straight to Charles, knelt at his
feet, and addressing the uncrowned King as " gentle
Dauphin," wished him long life and told him of her mission.

The accusation of witchcraft, fatal in the end, when
joined with envy, hatred, and malice, to the wonderful
career of the Maid, was not to be escaped even in these
early days. Some of Charles's followers, and especially
the churchmen, who could seldom understand any in-
spiration beyond their own, were inclined to say that she
was a witch. But her courage, purity, nobleness, faith,
and devotion disarmed all suspicion at this time. Theo-
logians pronounced that there was no evil to be found in
her ; the common people and the soldiers acclaimed her
as a saint.

And so the Maid rode with the royal army to Orleans.

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She was clothed in white armour and carried a banner of
white satin powdered with jleurs-de-lys and emblazoned
with a picture of Our Lord holding the globe and wor-
shipped by t\vo angels bearing lilies : the device was
Jhesus Maria. Her arms were a small axe and a conse-
crated sword marked with five crosses, which was found,
by her direction, behind the high altar of the church of
Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois, where she had stopped to
pray on the journey from Domremy. That shining sword
was never stained with blood, for Jeanne, always in the
forefront of battle and more than once wounded, never
killed a man. But it did not long remain with her, for she
broke it, after the fruitless siege of Paris, in driving evil-
doers from the camp ; one of those ill omens which
announced the tragic end of her mission.

During the march to the relief of Orleans no such fiery
discipline was needed ; in its enthusiasm for the saintly
maiden the army reformed itself. Fierce old soldiers
ceased to rob and swear, and became humble Christians,
submissive to her every wish. Michelet describes how on
the banks of the Loire, before an altar set up in the open
air, in the lovely springtide of Touraine, the whole army
heard Mass and confessed their sins. They became young
as the Maid herself, he says, full of faith, ready to begin a
new life. She could have led them wherever she would ;
not to Orleans onlv, but to Jerusalem.

*/ *

Jeanne entered Orleans by the river on 29th April, and
rode through the streets, waving her white banner aloft.
It was evening, and torches flamed under the shadow of tin-
old beetling houses on each side of the way. She had
brought in a convoy of provisions, and the starving people,
long besieged by the English, thronged upon her so that
her horse could hardly push his way. They were wild
with joy, sure that God would save not only Orleans, but
90

•" The Story of the Maid

all France, by means of this miraculous Maid. And the
besiegers without the walls did not deny the miracle-
working power which had so suddenly changed the spirit
of an army and a nation. But for them Jeanne was a
witch, a sorceress, assisted by the Evil One, and two years
later it was as a witch, alas ! in English eyes, an apostate,
a worshipper of demons, that she met her martyrdom at
Rouen.

For the present she was invincible. Inspired and led
by her heroic courage, the royal army attacked the be-
siegers in their strongest posts, and by 8th May the English
commanders had been driven with great slaughter from
these defences and were retreating northward. Orleans
was free, after a siege of a hundred and ninety days.
Jeanne was wounded in the last attack, but she made
nothing of this, though the arrow had pierced her neck
through. The wound had hardly been dressed when she
was on horseback again, encouraging her men. Five days
later she was with the King at Tours, urging him to ride
straight for his coronation at Reims, disregarding the fact
that the English, with their allies the Burgundians, held
most of the country he would pass through.

"In this counsel the Maid was alone, and this heroic folly
was wisdom itself," says Michelet. But the cool-headed
politicians who surrounded the King, La Tremoille and
others — even the Due d'Alen9on, Jeanne's ' fair Duke,' as
she called him, always her supporter — thought it advisable
to go slowly, besieging small towns and driving out the
English by degrees ; in other words, giving them time
enough to organize resistance. In vain Jeanne warned
the King, foretelling that twelve months would see the
end of her own career.

Further successes silenced her enemies ; their jealousy
could not stand against the enthusiastic crowds who came

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hurrying from the South, as if on crusade or pilgrimage,
eager to see the famous Maid and with her to lead their
King to his coronation. Henry VI, King by conquest,
had not been crowned within the sacred walls of Reims ;
and in French eyes that ceremony conferred a right divine.
It appears to have been the victory of Patay which con-
vinced timid souls and discredited those who wished to
linger on the Loire. The English under Talbot had retired
from Beaugency and were on the plain of the Beauce, not
then an expanse of waving corn, but a wild tract of country
covered with low woods and bushy undergrowth in which
the armv could be and actually was hidden. Jeanne and

»/ •*

her captains, the famous La Hire, Xaintraillcs. Alen^n,
and the rest, rode up from the victorious assault of Jargeau
in pursuit of an invisible enemy. And then occurred one
of those magical incidents which so often throw on
medieval French history a light from Fairyland and seem
to link Jeanne the Maid with Clovis and Charlemagne. A
stag, startled from his lair by the advancing French, fled
in among the English and betrayed their position before
the archers had had time to drive their protecting stakes.
A furious French attack rode them down. The gallant
Talbot surrendered to Xaintrailles, saying: "Now King
Charles is master." Jeanne, dismounted and kneeling
on the battle-field, comforted the dying and wept over the
dead.

Sixty leagues of country in enemy occupation still
divided the royal army from Reims. But town after town
submitted or was easily taken ; even Troves, from which
the prudent and the jealous once more counselled retire-
ment to the Loire. On 17th July the Maid, holding her
white banner, stood by the high altar in Reims Cathedral
and saw her King anointed and crowned as successor of
Charlemagne, and heard the shout of the great crowd that

The Story of the Maid

filled the nave : " Vive le Roi a jamais ! ' They wept
too, that crowd, when the girl-knight in her white armour
knelt to pay homage, saying, with tears : " O gentle King,
now is fulfilled the pleasure of God, who willed that I
should raise the siege of Orleans and that I should lead
you to this your city of Reims for your sacred coronation,
showing that you are the true King to whom rightly
belongs the kingdom of France I "

This was to be the zenith, the highest point, of the Maid's
career of earthly victory. And she knew it. In that hour
of triumph, when she had saved Orleans and all France
south of the Loire, had crowned her King and discouraged
his enemies, we meet with a pathetic touch of humanity.
She is once more the country girl, the home child, the
petite bergerette of Domremy. Reims was not very far
from her home : she found herself in the old country, even
among the old folk, for her relations and neighbours came
to Reims to see the wonderful sight there.

" Ah ! " she said, " if it were God's will that I might
return to serve my father and mother, to keep the flocks
once more with my sister and my brothers, who would so
gladly see me again ! '

But this was a mere dream, for her work was not done.
France expected far more from "the Judith of the time,"
who was already honoured with medals, portraits, and
statues, and was even mentioned in the services of the
Church. It was rumoured that Jeanne, having saved
France, would save Christendom, end all heresjr and
schism, and lead a final crusade against the Saracens. But
first she must accomplish her mission of driving the English
out of France. Her spirit, her influence, her personal
leading were of inestimable value to the newly crowned
King. She must remain with him, and he offered her any
reward she chose to ask. Jeanne begged one favour, not

Stories from French History

for herself, but for her native village : that Domremy
might be made free for ever of the taxes which weighed
the people down. This was granted. Till the Revolution
destroyed all past privileges, however honourable their
origin, Domremy's contribution was marked on the
register of each succeeding year : " Neant, a cause de La
Pucelle. ' ' This was the only solid recompense that Jeanne
received from her countrymen.

The campaign continued, and on the whole with success.
Jeanne's ' heroic folly ' -again, probably, the truest
wisdom — would have made a straight dash for Paris, but
she was hindered by the intrigues and jealousies that sur-
rounded the King. His courtiers, like Joseph's brethren,
hated her dreams and her words, and envied her glory ;
and Charles was too lazy and self-indulgent to resist them.
They played at truces with the English and Burgundians,
and the fighting men were discouraged by their hesitations
and delays ; yet many of the northern towns were ready
to open their gates to the King. When at last, in spite of
the Court, Jeanne made her attack on Paris, it failed : she
was wounded, and forced by royal orders to retire.

A few sad winter months, spent by the Court in inaction
on the Loire, and then the Maid rode forth in spring to
relieve Compiegne, threatened by the Duke of Burgundy.
There, fighting heroically at the head of the tiny faithful
troop who were all that was left to her by the commanders
of the royal army, she was surrounded by the Burgundians
and taken prisoner. Then, after a few months' captivity,
she was sold to the English for ten thousand crowns in gold.
A solemn Te Deum was sung in Paris, and the ' witch,'
already condemned by the doctors of the University, was
conveyed to Rouen and given over to the judgment of the
ecclesiastical courts.

That long trial, that wicked condemnation, that awful
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scene in the old market-place at Rouen on 30th May, 1431,
are among the unforgettable things in history. Jeanne
died at the stake ; she died at the hands of the English ;
yet we may be glad to remember that when she begged for
a cross it was an English soldier who made one by tying
two sticks together, and that another English soldier
cried out at the last terrible moment : " We are lost : we
have burned a saint ! '

He spoke more truly than he knew, and after five
hundred years the world has come to think with him.
The canonization of Jeanne d'Arc in St Peter's at Rome
on 16th May, 1920, with all the ancient and splendid cere-
monies of the Catholic Church, while adding a saint to
the calendar, was a fine if tardy act of reparation for the
injustice committed long ago.

As to her King and his nobles, they made no effort at
the time to save the heroic girl, the incarnation of all that
was best in France, the martyr for her country. It is true
that in Jeanne's own century a new trial and complete
vindication made her fame some amends. But it was left
for much later generations to pay highest honour to " the
gentlest of the gentle, the bravest of the brave, and the
truest of the true."

C II APT El? X

A PATRIOT

Alack, it was I who leaped at the *••»»

To (jive it my loving friends to keep!
XoiKjht man could do, have I left undone:

And you *ee my harvest) ichaf I reap
This eery day, now a year in run.

ROBKRT BROWNIM;

/I VA1LLANS cceurs rien impossible.
/J This was the motto of Jacques Coeur, the
^ A greatest merchant prince of the fifteenth cen-
tury, through whom the French middle class carried on
the work of saving their country, so gloriously begun by
her peasantry in the person of Jeanne the Maid.

During the earlier years of that century the ancient
provincial city of Bourges was the centre of France.
Charles VII was proclaimed there, and until his coronation
at Reims men knew him scornfully as ' the King of
Bourges.' There he convened his first States-General,
and there his eldest son, Louis XI, was born.

In those years a young man had grown up at Bourges,
the son of a merchant furrier, in whom a genius for trade
and finance matched a temper of ardent loyalty and
patriotism. Jacques Cceur was brave, romantic, adven-
turous ; in the dying Middle Ages he had the spirit of the
Renaissance, the spirit that invented printing and dis-
covered America. While still young he was dealing with
" all kinds of merchandise," had travelled round the
Mediterranean, visiting Egypt and Syria, and had estab-

A Patriot

lished many trade centres in France and abroad ; in
France at least, torn and exhausted by war, there were
few rivals to be feared. His success was swift and
brilliant. A trading fleet in the Mediterranean, agents in
a hundred ports, spread the name of Jacques Cceur round
the known world ; like Venice, he held " the gorgeous East
in fee." His skill in finance gained him the appointment
of banker (argentier) to the King. This was in 1436. At
another time, and to a man of other character, such a post
might have meant a still greater fortune. Jacques Cceur
took the royal finances into his hands with a single eye to
the service of his country.

Those were years of hard struggle. Though Paris had
been taken from the English, the Hundred Years War was
not yet over. The King had no money to carry on the
necessary campaigns ; it was Jacques Cceur who paid the
armies from his own coffers, saying to Charles : " All that
is mine is yours." Four armies were equipped and paid
at his expense ; and his crowning effort was the conquest
of Normandy in 1449, which almost completed the freeing
of France from her foreign invaders. The King and the
country owed Jacques Cceur a tremendous debt, a debt of
honour. We shall see how it was paid.

Fifteen years of devoted work and generous spending
brought Jacques Cceur to the height of his fortune. He
was the richest man in the kingdom, the most honest and
the most honourable, with a capacity for affairs far be-
yond trade and finance, fully recognized by the King, who
sent him as president to the Estates of Languedoc and
as ambassador to Genoa and to Rome. In France this
merchant held his own among the nobles ; they feared
his power indeed, for they were a needy, extravagant race,
and many vast estates were mortgaged to him. He was
not in any way ostentatious, but he lived with a certain
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simple splendour, having houses in Paris, Lyons, Marseilles,
Montpellier, and he possessed a refinement of mind and
taste, a sort of daring originality cultivated by travel
and adventure, which set him apart from most of his
contemporaries.

To appreciate all this we need only fly to the old city of
Bourges and imagine Jacques Cceur in the stately house
which was his real home, and which is still, as the Palais
de Justice of Bourges, among the artistic glories and his-
torical monuments of France. He began to build it in
the year 1443, and it shows his personal fancy in every
detail. It was built on the ramparts and enclosed towers
of the old wall ; thus one side overhung the valley, while
the other faced on the street where Jacques Cceur 's
statue now stands. With its square-headed windows,
elegantly soaring roofs, towers and slender staircase-
turrets, carvings and quaint devices, the house was a
perfect example of late Gothic beauty.

The builder's famous motto, in tall letters of stone, may
be still read on the gateway facade ; everywhere is his
device, a heart, with a pilgrim's scallop-shell. The space
over the chief doorway once held a statue of Charles VII
on horseback, placed there in the days when Jacques Cceur
was the King's strongest supporter and most trusted
friend. A curious feature of the front of the house still
remains in the two stone figures that lean forward, as if
from windows, on each side of the doorway ; watchers at
the gate, they seem, set there by a mind aware of danger
from without. Between a selfish King and his greedy
favourites on one side, and a rebellious young Dauphin and
a mob of envious nobles on the other, Jacques Cceur in his
most splendid days was never safe. As true patriot and
honest financier, he had a difficult game to play, requiring
great courage, great skill in affairs, untiring industry, and
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O

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A Patriot

penetrating knowledge of men and women. Perhaps the
valiant heart to whom nothing was impossible took too
little account of this last need, trusting princes and familiar
friends too far. Or rather, perhaps, while aware of the
dangers that beset him, he met them too frankly and
fearlessly.

With the beautiful house as a background, we may
imagine a family group met together to celebrate the
master's fSte-day, the Feast of St James, 25th July, 1451.
They were gathered in a large upper room, its timbered
roof shaped like a boat, for Jacques Cceur loved the sea.
A curious carving above one of the great fireplaces of a
man and woman playing a game of chess gives another
personal touch, for these were portraits in stone of Jacques
Cceur and Macee de Leodepart, his wife. Here on that
summer day sat these two, playing their favourite game
once again.

Both were richly dressed in the fashion of their time.
Jacques Cceur, with his keen, eager, delicate face, smiling
and absorbed, had pushed back from his brow the silken
head-covering, hood and scarf combined. Down from his
shoulders fell his crimson loose- sleeved gown, and a gilded
money-bag hung from his belt. Dame Macee, known for
careless spending which often exceeded even the limits
set by her generous husband, wore on this day a green and
gold net which quite hid her closely braided hair, crowned
with a little cap of rose-coloured velvet from which
floated a gauzy white veil ; a short gown to her knees of
pale green silk edged with rose-colour and gold, the sleeves
long and full to the wrist ; a sweeping under-dress of
purplish grey, and rose-coloured shoes. Round her neck
she wore a double row of priceless rubies. Had Dame
Mace"e been merely the wife of a rich bourgeois, this
costume would have been not only against custom, but

Stories from French History

against law. But the King of his favour had granted
letters of nobility to Jacques Coeur and his wife and
children, so that they had their privileged place at Court,
and their only daughter Perrette was married without
obstacle to Jacquelin, Seigneur de Marville and Vicomtc
de Bourges, of the smaller provincial aristocracy.

Perrette and her husband — she, a nun at heart, as simple
as her mother was gorgeous — were present that day in the
group of Jacques Cceur's children. All were young ; but
two of the four sons, still under thirty, were already high
dignitaries of the Church. Jean at twenty-six, having
lately finished his studies at the University of Paris, had
been nominated Archbishop by the Chapter of Bourges ;
and though the Pope had hesitated to confirm this appoint-
ment, which carried with it that of Metropolitan and
Primate of Aquitaine, the persuasions of King Charles VII
were at length successful. As Jacques Cceur's biographer
remarks, nothing gives a better idea of the honour and
credit enjoyed by him. Another son, Henri, was a canon
of Bourges and Dean of the cathedral of Limoges ; the
two younger were mere lads, of whom Ravant, a sulky
youth, was inclined to resent Archbishop Jean's airs of
authority. Geoff roy, the youngest, the laughing favourite
of all, was by future turns of Fortune's wheel to become
treasurer to Louis XI, to end his days as a financial mag-
nate in Paris, and to be buried in the chapel of the College
des Bons Enfans, restored and endowed by his father.

The day was closing in burning heat, the air was sultry
in the large dark stone-floored room with its crimson
hangings and heavy carved furniture. The faces of that
group of young people were pale and shadowed with some
haunting fear or distress hardly suited to a festival.
There was storm in the air — even now a distant growl
announced clashing clouds, thunderbolts, hurricanes—

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A Patriot

and neither Jacques Cceur nor his family could be uncon-
scious of the tempest of hatred and envy that might any
day break over his own head.

To keep his ftte at Bourges he had made the long
journey from Taillebourg in Southern Poitou, where King
Charles VII was visiting the Comte de la Tremoille, and
where the " vultures of the Court " were gathered together,
waiting for the rich banker's spoils. It is true that the
King had lately bestowed fresh favours on Jacques Cceur,
so that he was full of confidence, assuring his friends that
in spite of certain evil tongues his royal master was still
his friend. Yet he could not choose but be aware of dark
plots against him, absurd accusations of secret treason,
dishonesty, unfair exactions, even a whispered tale more
ridiculous and more terrible still, the tale that he had
poisoned Dame Agnes Sorel, the King's favourite, whose
affairs he had managed, and who had died at the birth of a
child some months before. This wild story was trumped
up, as all good men knew, to give jealous courtiers a strong
occasion against Jacques Cceur and a chance of sharing
his vast possessions. Thus they laid their snares for the
man whose only crime was success earned by talent and
honest work, and who walked among them regardless of
mutterings of danger. But his wife and children were not
so bold : they feared his ruin ; they felt that he and they
were on the edge of a precipice.

And here he was, a happy man at his favourite game,
with a clear and proud mind as the deliverer of his country,
dreading neither open nor secret foe, and bent on return-
ing to Taillebourg that very night to carry on his master's
business. They who loved him were resolved that he
must not go.

He had won his game. Looking across the chessboard
with merry, satisfied eyes, he tries to console Dame Macee

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for her defeat. She had played ill, her thoughts being
distracted.

' Thou shalt take thy revenge when these affairs at
Court are finished. Nay, what sad looks ! Cheer thee !
All goes well."

' Must I wait so long ? Do me this favour, beloved.
Stay with us till the King sends to call you. Or listen-
Jean says — is there not some instant need of your presence
in the South ? What of letters from Marseilles ? You
would be safe there from your enemies."

Her eyes are full of anxious prayer.
1 Your enemies, dear husband ! " she murmurs. " Your
enemies at Court ! "

' What matter they, if the King is my friend ! As to
Jean's timid counsels — they may need me at Marseilles, but
must not my master's affairs come first with me ? Arch-
bishop, forsooth ! Has he no faith in the guardianship of
God ? "

With a laugh, Jacques Cceur rises from the table and
turns to his children.

Then a chorus of voices arises in remonstrance and eager
argument. Jean, the Most Reverend, admonishes him
tenderly ; Henri reasons with him seriously ; Ravant
grumbles of the danger to them all ; Geoffrey tries to pre-
vail by affectionate coaxing ; Perrette looks much that
she dares not say, and her husband uods his agreement ;
while Dame Macee's silent tears are eloquent ; they two
have played their last game together, and she knows it
well. Faithful servants, loudly sobbing, crowd now into
the room, all praying against their good master's return
to Taillebourg.

Jacques Co2iir might have said with St Paul the Apostle :
' AYhat mean ye to weep and to break my heart ? " for
like him he would listen to no entreaties of love, no counsels
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A Patriot

of fear and delay. That night, when a storm of thunder
and rain had swept over Berry and cooled the air, he left
his family and rode south-westward to rejoin his un-
grateful King. He had kissed them all and had received
a solemn blessing from his son. They of his household
and the people of Bourges watched his little troop
away under a red moon which would light the forest
roads. So he passed through the summer night into the
hands of his enemies, and never saw his beautiful home
again.

Jacques Cceur was arrested at Taillebourg in the King's
name and tried for the murder of Agnes Sorel. In spite of
his accusers he was proved innocent, and the charge was
withdrawn for very shame : but this did not mean escape
and freedom. All those other imaginary crimes were
piled up against him : he was a thief, a usurer, a juggler
with the finances of the country, a friend of the King's
enemies. He had counterfeited the King's seal, he had
traitorously sold arms to the Saracens. Another long and
most iniquitous trial ended in his conviction on all these
points. He was refused any defence, his witnesses were
not heard, for this time the greedy vultures had it all their
own way, while Charles VII, unworthy master of a faithful
servant, looked on consenting. The Pope's intervention
saved Jacques Cceur's life, but he was condemned to pay a
gigantic fine to the State, all the rest of his possessions
being confiscated and divided among his enemies. This
meant the complete ruin of his family, who were one and
all brought to abject poverty. As to his unhappy wife,
the weight of sorrow and trouble was too heavy for her,
and she died before the trial was ended. .

Thus the patriot had his reward.

After being flung from prison to prison in the West
country he was sent by way of exile to the South and shut

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up in a fortified convent at Beaucaire, the little city which
looks across the Rhone to Tarascon in Provence. Here he
was in a land of romance, haunted by saints and dragons,
pirates and crusaders : the scene of the lovely old story of
Aucassin and Nicolette, world-known since the twelfth
century for the great July fair, to which came traders from
all Europe and the East. No doubt Jacques Cceur the
merchant was a familiar figure there.

And he had powerful friends beyond the Rhone. Pro-
vence was not yet part of the French kingdom. The old
Roman province still kept its independence under the
famous Rene, titular King of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem,
Duke of Lorraine and Anjou, father of Margaret, the un-
lucky Queen of England. In Anjou Rene was the French
King's vassal : as Count of Provence he ruled in his own
right. The charming prince, whose mother, Yolande,
Duchess of Anjou, had befriended Jeanne d'Arc in the
early days of her mission, and who had himself fought for
France beside the Maid, knew how to value the generous
patriotism of Jacques Cceur.

But the prisoner had a more intimate claim on Rene's
interest and protection. One of his nieces had married a
certain Jean de Villages, a native of Berry, an adventurous
spirit like himself, whom in happier days he had estab-
lished as his agent at Marseilles. This man had been
appointed admiral of Rene's little fleet, and the King
delighted in him and the strange curiosities he was con-
stantly bringing home from the East. At the time of
Jacques Cceur's disgrace his enemies induced Charles VII
to demand from Rene the surrender of Jean de Villages
as a confederate in his uncle's pretended treasons. Rene
declined, and Jean de Villages remained at Marseilles.
And the story goes that he slipped across to Beaucaire,
rescued Jacques Cceur from his convent, and brought him
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A Patriot

safely into Provence, where the French king's agents had
no right to touch him.

He was too near the frontier, however, to be safe from
the men who hated him and had shared his wealth. He
passed on into exile in Italy ; and we may see him a free
man in the sunshine of the South, sailing on the blue
sea he loved as ' Captain-general against the Infidels,'
commanding the Pope's galleys in an expedition to defend
the Greek islands against an attack by the Turks, who had
lately taken Constantinople. On one of these islands, in
November 1456, a sudden sickness seized him and he died.
Thus ended a life as romantic as any in French history.

France made some late amends to the valiant man whose
services she had so ill repaid. A small portion of his goods
was restored to his family, and the careers of his sons in
Church and State were no longer hindered. But Charles
VII, -the selfish and lethargic, did little : it was left for
Louis XI to pay just honour to the name of Jacques Coeur
and to crush the men who had been his enemies.

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CHAPTER XI
THE DAWN OF MODERN FRANCE

hare their Aprils when (he world seems to flower with a
fortunate novelty. MARY DCCLAUX

The Frame of Louis XII is the justification of Louis XI.

STANLEY LEATHES

AT the end of the Middle Ages and of the Hundred
Years War France was passing gradually from an
old world into a new. Almost she could call her
soil her own. The labourers worked undisturbed; the
nobles were lazy like the King, and some of them cared
more for heaping up riches, often at the expense of the
bourgeoisie, than for their ancient trade of fighting, or even
for the splendid displays, the tournaments and masquer-
ades, which added joy to life in earlier feudal times. The
towns were free to trade and prosper in their own way.
For Charles VII, with all his defects, ruled France wisely
in these days of her slow recovery. His taxes were not
too oppressive, and his standing army was an improve-
ment on the feudal bands, the troops of fierce mer-
cenaries, even the armed companies of the cities, all of
whom were wont to fight for their own advantage,
robbing, torturing, killing the people they should have
defended.

The reforms of Charles VII led the way for those of
Louis XI, the son he so heartily detested, the clever, mean-
minded, cold-hearted personage whom historians have
counted with Henry VII of England and Ferdinand the
Catholic of Spain as one of the 'three wise kings' of the
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The Dawn of Modern France

time : the man who made France what she had never
before been, a really united and centrally governed
country. Louis XI was the best-hated man in his
dominions ; but under him, in those early years of the
French Renaissance, France advanced so fast and so far as
to become a great European Power. Louis XI "lifted
France into the front rank of nations." How was it
done ? By a long struggle with the strong feudal mag-
nates who remained, especially with Duke Charles the
Bold of Burgundy — their quarrel is a history in itself —
and by a wise administration that took account of every
interest in the kingdom.

So much for the general state of things. One would
like to look more closely at the provinces and cities over
which this King reigned, and at the daily life of his subjects
in hovel or castle, by country roads or city streets. Most
interesting of all is Paris at this time : the medieval city
on which the Renaissance was beginning to dawn, yet
which, in the shadows of its irregular gabled streets,
the decay of its old religious buildings and much
that they signified, the spirit of strangeness and
melancholy mingled with a kind of grotesque mockery
that seems to have brooded over its people, was still
held by the dying Gothic past that had once given it
life.

In these years, since the death of Charles VI and the
English occupation, Paris had ceased to be the favourite
home of the kings. Necessity had taught Charles VII
the charm of the West country, and Louis XI soon began
to avoid the old city, still haunted by the spectres of the
Hundred Years War. For many years, with terrible
regularity, the winter meant starvation and the summer
epidemic disease. Forty thousand died of the plague in
the year 1450. Wolves appeared again in the streets, and

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Stories from French History

not always on winter nights, but in the day-time, and in
the month of September.

Still, the new laws of Charles VII and Louis XI did
much for Paris ; ruined quarters were rebuilt, markets
were enlarged, and under the hundred swinging signs in
various colours that darkened the narrow and muddy
streets, criers with their asses and little carts pushed
noisily along, sellers of wine, milk, cheese, vegetables,
fruit, fish, pies, gingerbread ; wood and old iron ; all
mixed up with chimney-sweeps, mountebanks, beggars,
and thieves ; fat citizens, soldiers, priests ; blind men
from the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts.

This ancient charity, founded by St Louis, was favoured
and supported, with many others, by Louis XI for the
good of his own soul. The abode of the three hundred
blind brethren was a little city within the city : a walled
enclosure surrounding a church, an orchard, and large
cloistered courtyards, shaded by rows of tall elms. The
buildings, which included mills, ovens, kitchens, granaries,
even a prison, stood between the two city walls, that of
Philippe-Auguste and the newer one of Charles V, between
the gates known as first and second of Saint-Honore, thus
near the Louvre and in the very centre of Paris. The
church, full of relics and sacred images, famous for its
music, was a popular place of pilgrimage. The com-
munity of the Quinze-Vingts had many privileges, and for
centuries there was no more familiar sight in the streets
than the blind men in their brown gowns stamped with
the fleur-de-lys, carrying sacks and begging from house to
house and of the passers-by. Sometimes they were led by
a man or woman who could see, but they had a marvellous
power of finding their way : indeed, the story goes that
in the thick river-fogs which often enveloped old Paris
no better guide could be found than a blind man. As
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The Dawn of Modern France

beggars they feared no refusal : their cry " Aux Quinze-
Vingts, pain Dieu ! ' was never raised in vain ; they
begged with authority.

They had their own opportunities for charity. The
hospital had the right of sanctuary, often enough needed
in the Paris of Francois Villon. And to those criminals
who had not succeeded in escaping the officers of justice,
but were led through the streets on their way to be hanged,
burned, boiled alive in the Horse-market, or the Pig-
market, or the Place de Greve, or farther away at the
awful gibbet of Montfaucon, where men hung in rows on
cross-beams till their bones dropped asunder — to those
miserable victims, pauvres patients, as the old chroniclers
call them, the Quinze-Vingts had a right to give wine and
bread with a blessing as they passed the gateway of the
hospital. During this solemn ceremony, we are told,
there was silence in the street, and the staring crowd even
dropped upon its knees.

Another centre of interest for fifteenth-century Parisians
was the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents.

The large old burial-place, largest and oldest of Paris,
was surrounded by cloistered walks crowded with monu-
ments, and on its walls was painted that extraordinary
Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, reproduced on the
bridge at Lucerne and elsewhere, in which the spirit of
the later Middle Ages found its tragic and grotesque ex-
pression. It was destroyed in the reign of Louis XIV,
when all such medieval curiosities were out of fashion.
But the lower class of Louis XI's Parisians haunted the
Innocents by day and night : the more the cloisters
mouldered into age, the greater the number of poor
creatures who found shelter and company there. Bones
buried under the black earth and the rank grass ; bones
stacked in the vaulted roofs : it was a place where death

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and life met very strangely. The Market of the Innocents,
close by, with its crowds and noise, was sometimes a scene
of terrible excitement, as when the Due de Nemours, once
Governor of Paris, and rebel against Louis XI, was dragged
there in an iron cage from the Bastille to be beheaded in
the sight of all. The old morsel of historical gossip which
places the children of Nemours beneath the scaffold that
their father's blood might drip upon their heads and white
garments is probably untrue : even the ' frightfulness ' of
Louis XI may have paused here.

After all, there was a certain merriment in the life of
that old Paris, with all its beggary and romantic despera-
tion. When the King was there, not living at the Louvre,
now a State prison, nor at the Hotel Saint- Paul, with its
tragic memories, but at the Hotel des Tournelles, another
fairy palace of turrets and gardens, many fine spectacles
and entertainments were held in the city. The King
spent little money ; but he encouraged the University and
the trade-guilds to hold festivals and processions with their
banners for the amusement of his guest the King of
Portugal or some magnate among the few he desired to
honour. His mean figure and hawk-like face, his old hat
garnished with leaden images of saints, presided over the
few tournaments still held by his rich nobles and the sing-
ing dances that followed them. He sat religiously in the
square of Notre-Dame to watch the theatrical perform-
ances of the Confrerie de la Passion. The common people
indeed had no reason to fear or to hate Louis XI : it was
the taller plants of the kingdom that his relentless scythe
mowed down.

On clear summer days, when the broad Seine rippled
merrily through the red-roofed, towered city, and trees
were green, and bare-legged haymakers worked and sang
in the meadows under the walls, and windmills tossed their
110

The Place de Greve in the Fifteenth Century

From a drawing by F. Hoffbauer in " Les Rives de la Seine a travers les Ages'

(Paris, H. Laurens)

The Dawn of Modern France

wide wings on the hills round about, Paris might some-
times forget her weariness and long distress in the joy of
her age-long beauty.

Two popular kings followed Louis XI. Charles VIII,
ugly, gay, adventurous, and beloved — whose young life
and the elder Valois line ended together when his head
struck a low archway in the castle of Amboise — has been
blamed by historians for his wild-goose chase after the
crown of Naples, claimed by the French kings in succes-
sion to King Rene and the Counts of Anjou. But this
and later Italian wars, victorious or not, had great conse-
quences for France : they let in the sunshine of the South
and revealed wonders of art to a country where new
thought and new love of beauty had already dawned.

The lovely tomb in Tours Cathedral, a gem of the early
Renaissance, on which small watchful angels still guard
the effigies of two little children of Charles VIII and his
wife Anne, Duchess of Brittany, has kept alive the
memory of ' le bon petit Roy ' through centuries and
revolutions.

Then came Louis XII, ' the Father of his people.' He
had learnt much in a hard school, the school of heirs-
presumptive. He was the grandson of the murdered
Louis, Duke of Orleans, the brother of the mad King.
His father was Charles, Duke of Orleans the poet, a
prisoner in England for many years after Agincourt.
Louis XI kept the young Duke in strict subjection and
married him to his daughter Jeanne, a plain little princess
with a noble and saintly soul. Under Charles VIII he was
first a rebel, then a State prisoner in the great tower of
Bourges, then, through the King's generosity, a com-
mander of armies. He succeeded his cousin without
question on the throne of France.

Louis XII was a just king, a successful ruler, a good-
Ill

Stones from French History

humoured and rather magnanimous personage, who for-
gave his political enemies with the remark that it would
ill become the King of France to revenge the quarrels of
the Duke of Orleans. His Italian campaigns pleased the
fighting spirit of France, so long an invaded and suffering
country. He claimed the city and province of Milan from
the reigning Sforza in right of his grandmother, Valentina
Visconti, Duchess of Orleans, and the history of the time
gives us few more striking pictures than that of the con-
quered Lodovico Sforza, il Moro, riding into France on
a mule, clothed in black, his white hair streaming, cold
and proud of aspect as he passed on to his cruel fate.
Louis XII showed little magnanimity here. The captive
lingered through his last ten years in one of those dungeons
under the Chateau of Loches that Louis XI had prepared
for his own personal enemies ; on its walls il Moro's
inscriptions and drawings are still to be seen.

The territory of France was now complete. From the
Channel to the Mediterranean Sea, from the Meuse to the
Pyrenees, she was at last one country. Calais alone was
still held by the English. In one way or another, by will,
by treaty, by deaths and law-suits, chiefly in the time of
Louis XI, the kings of France had become masters of
Normandy, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois, Maine, Anjou, Pro-
vence, Guienne. One independent feudal state remained.
Brittany, under its spirited Duchess Anne, kept its free-
dom and self-government even after her marriage with
Charles VIII ; and Louis XII saw but one way of securing
the fine old duchy for France : he must marry his cousin's
widow. It was no hardship, for he admired her greatly ;
and she, it seems, was willing enough to be once more
Queen of France. There was only one obstacle : Louis
had already a wife. But these were matters of policy,
easily to be arranged by kings and popes. Caesar Borgia,
112

The Dawn of Modern France

the nephew of Alexander VI, received the French duchy
of Valentinois, and the little childless Queen Jeanne,
divorced from her husband, retired to a life of religious
peace in a convent she had founded at Bourges.

In later years, Queen Anne having died without a son
to succeed to France and Brittany, Louis XII married his
daughter Claude to his splendid young cousin Francois,
Comte d'Angouleme, head of yet another branch of the
Valois line — his grandfather being a younger brother of the
poet Duke of Orleans — who was to become King of France
at the moment when she in her brilliant Renaissance
expected her princes to strike men's imagination.

But the ' Father of his people,' homely, of simple tastes,
and old for his years, had no illusions with regard to the
future Fran£ois I. He was tired of young people. His
third wife, Mary Tudor, had altered his dinner-hour ;
feasts and late hours were killing him, and he took a dark
view of the prospects of the great nation for which he had
worked hard and done his best.

"We have laboured in vain," he said on his death-bed
to a friend. " Ce gros gargon gdtera tout ! '

H 113

CHAPTER XII
A GREAT CAPTAIN

Nous qni sommes
De par Dieu
Cfentilahommes

De haut lieu,
Ilfautfaire
Bruit ,s«r terre
Et la guerre.
X'f*t qu'unjeu.

VICTOR HUGO

Le litre de chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, titre plus beau
que tons les noms des seigneurs du monde. . . . C'est bien le gentt!
seigneur de Hayard, le gaillard homme d'armes, le hardi et adroit
chevalier, le vertueux et triomphant capitaine.

ARTHUR CHUQUET

THE wars of the Valois cousins with Italy and
the German Empire— including Spain under the
Emperor Charles V — lasted with intervals for
many years. They were necessary to the existence of
France and were welcome to the restless spirit of the age.
The old fighting families, crushed into dull inaction by
Louis XI, gladly followed Charles VIII, Louis XII, and
Francois I on those adventurous campaigns.

There was a great rebirth of romance : the chivalric
ideas of the early Middle Ages returned to life. The
crusading dreams of Charles VIII would have carried him
to Constantinople and Jerusalem. In the first brilliant
years of Fran?ois I, " chivalric tales, chivalric dress,
chivalric language became the rage at Court," Much of
all this was external and artificial: the true spirit of
114

A Great Captain

knighthood, the spirit of Louis IX the soldier-saint, was
very rare in the years of the Renaissance and the armies
of the Valois. Yet it was not altogether absent. For
Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, fought in these armies
through all his noble life, the life of a " knight without
fear and without reproach."

He was born in the year 1476 at the Chateau de Bayard,
among the mountains and forests of Dauphine ; its ruins
still command the valley of the Isere. He came of an old
and warlike family ; but it was his uncle, the Bishop of
Grenoble, who fetched him from home, an eager boy of
fourteen, mounted him on a pony, his mother providing
him with a small purse of money, a change of linen, and
much good counsel, and carried him off to be page to the
Duke of Savoy. Riding out thus into the world, young
Bayard " deemed himself in Paradise." He is described
as small of stature but upright, with dark eyes and a mild
countenance, his hair cut straight across his forehead and
falling behind his ears. Some say that he never grew a
beard, but a portrait by Giorgione at Genoa seems to con-
tradict this. He was, by the universal testimony of his
time, the most manly of men, the most daring of fighters,
a splendid horseman, an unrivalled leader, a model of
magnanimity. He was a perfect warrior, not only as le
preux et le passe-preux among his peers, but in the sense
of understanding war. No one was more resourceful
in a difficult place or more popular with the armies ;
his high spirit and gay good-humour never failed.
With all this Bayard was no courtier, and his modest
and disinterested temper was little fitted to make its
way in a pushing, selfish world. This may explain
the strange fact that le bon chevalier, the finest soldier
of his time, ' worth an army in himself," never com-
manded an army, and after fighting through three

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Stories from French History

reigns was still no more than captain of a hundred
lances.

He passed into the service of Charles VIII and marched
with him into Italy. At the age of nineteen he captured
an enemy standard in the battle of Fornovo. This was one
of the first of a series of brave deeds, merveilles d'at'mes, such
as his solitary defence of the bridge of Garigliano against
two hundred Spaniards. And his humanity equalled his
courage. When the ' Adventurers ' under his command
in Louis XII's second Italian campaign had shut up a
number of enemies in a barn, piled straw against the doors,
and set fire to it, so that all perished miserably, he hanged
those men in a row as an example to the rest of the army.

It was not always victory. Twice at least Bayard was
taken prisoner ; before Milan by Lodovico Sforza, who
released him with honour ; and by the English and
Imperialists at Guinegate, after the ' Battle of the Spurs,'
where he led the small band of French who declined to fly.
And some victories were almost too dearly bought by the
deaths of many a noble commander and comrade in arms.
Such a victory was that before Ravenna in 1512, and such
a loss was that of Gaston de Foix, Due de Nemours, nephew
of Louis XII, one of the most heroic young soldiers in
history, who had been given the command of the army of
Italy at twenty- two. When his genius and courage had
sent the enemy flying, he pursued with a small band of
men and was fatally wounded. The cry of " Gaston est
mort ! " rang through the victorious French ranks, and the
silence that followed was only broken by " the sound of
strong men sobbing and weeping." Above all, the bon
chevalier Bayard grieved that in the fury of his own pur-
suit he had not been able to avenge the death of Gaston or
to die with him.

One fancies that Jacques de Chabannes, Seigneur de La
116

A Great Captain

Palice and Marshal of France, who succeeded to the com-
mand, certainly an older and more cautious gentleman,
can hardly have inspired such loyalty. It is not always
unfair to judge by contemporary soldier-songs, and this
famous one has a somewhat disrespectful flavour :

Monsieur de La Palice est niort,

Mort devant Pavie.
Un quart d'heure avant sa inort

II dtoit encore en vie . . . etc. etc.

It was earlier in this campaign that Bayard, wounded,
was nursed back to health in the house of a lady at Brescia.
The city had suffered terribly from the French assault,
but this house was spared because of his presence there.
Before he left his hostess begged him to accept a large sum
of money as her thank-offering for being saved from pillage.
Bayard was then and always a poor man, but he knew it
to be the dowry of her two daughters that the lady offered
him, and he refused the money, asking that it might be
divided between them. There were many chevaliers sans
peur in the French army of his day ; but few, probably,
who would thus have proved themselves sans reproche.

Fran§ois I, the new young King of France, began his
reign with another Italian campaign, one of the most
picturesque ever fought. All the youth of France was in
that army of dashing spirits which flung itself in five days
by chamois-tracks over the guarded Alps into Northern
Italy. Bayard inspired and directed this wonderful
crossing. Seventy- two cannons were dragged by men
over the pathless rocks where oxen and mules could find
no footing. In the wars of those days guns that fired big
bullets of lead or iron were becoming a necessity, though
archers, cross-bowmen, pikemen, and cavalry with swords
and lances still formed the chief strength of an army.

117

Stories from French History

Before the Italian troops, reinforced by a great body of
Swiss mercenaries, were even aware of the French advance,
Bayard and a few other daring horsemen had swooped
from the mountains and surprised Prospero Colonna, the
Roman general commanding the Duke of Milan's forces,
with seven hundred of his knights at Villafranca. Then
followed the famous battle of Marignano, fought in the
late summer heat in the meadows on the road to Milan.
Many thousand Swiss poured out of the city at the bellow-
ing summons of their great mountain horns and fell
furiously on the French men-at-arms and artillery. The
more the Swiss pikemen were mowed down, the more
obstinately they pushed forward ; it was fearful hand-to-
hand fighting, " a battle of giants," old writers say. Be-
ginning in the afternoon, it lasted till the setting of the
moon and was renewed at dawn. King Frangois took no
care for his own safety : he and his Scottish guard, twenty-
five young men in bright steel armour with plumes and
scarves of gorgeous colours, fought in the thickest of the
fray. At night he remained on horseback till sleep over-
came him, and then lay down for an hour on a gun-carriage,
a few yards from the enemy's front line. As to the
Chevalier Bayard, darkness overtook him among the ranks
of the Swiss, his own fearlessness and the confusion of
battle having carried him too far into the melee. Being
as nimble and clever as he was brave, he dropped on his
knees and crawled back to his company.

Next day, the victory being won, the Swiss flying back
to their mountains, Milan and her Sforza prince once more
at a French king's mercy, Francois I sent for the Chevalier
Bayard and asked knighthood from him, thus conferring
great honour on his faithful captain in the presence of
hundreds of lords and knights of higher degree. Bayard
kissed the sword that had touched hi* King's shoulder.
118

Bayard working on the Fortifications of Mezieres
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

' Verily, my good sword," said he, " thou art a
treasured relic from this day. I will carry thee in battle
no more, save against the Infidel."

One of Bayard's chief titles to fame was his defence
of the town of Mezieres when France was invaded by
the Imperialists in the summer of 1521. He had a small
garrison under him, and these men were not of the best,
being, we are told, neither brave nor experienced ; some
of them ran away even before the place was besieged.
But on the other hand he had a number of very gallant
gentlemen, friends, comrades, and cousins of his own, who
were only too eager to fight for France in his company.
Bayard wrote to the King that he hoped to defend Mezieres
as a gentleman should, and to hold out as long as life and
honour would permit. In a most practical way he pre-
pared the town for the siege, storing provisions and giving
out arrears of pay. His biographers tell us how he and
his friends worked with the masons, carpenters, and
labourers at strengthening the weak fortifications, digging
earthworks, and carrying great stones, besides building
high platforms to spy out the enemy, preparing cauldrons
of oil and pitch to cast on his head, iron hooks to lay hold
on him, traps in ditches to snare him.

The town endured a month's bombardment from the
army of Charles V. We are told that in this siege bombs
were used for the first tune ; round bullets that burst and
scattered bits of iron : such artillery, such cannons and
culverins, had never yet been seen. But as fast as the
towers were battered down, Bayard and his brave men
built them up again. And he did not scruple to use
stratagem, sending out a letter which was intercepted, as
he meant it to be, bearing the news of large expected rein-
forcements. The German commanders decided that the
siege of Mezieres was hopeless : they withdrew their forces,
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A Great Captain

and North-eastern France was saved for once from
devastation. The collar of the Order of St Michael was
Bayard's chief recompense.

The good knight's career ended as he would have wished,
on the battle-field : not in the moment of victory, but
this was no fault of his. In the spring of 1524 the French
army, under a foolish and incapable general, was retreating
before the Imperialists in Northern Italy, one of their chiefs
being the famous or infamous Constable Charles de Bour-
bon, traitor to his country. Bayard, in command of the
French rear-guard, held back the enemy till he was dis-
abled by a mortal wound. His men laid him down under
a tree near Romagnano on the Sesia, with his face to the
advancing foe. " I will not begin to turn my back upon
them now," he said. He ordered his men to rejoin the
army, and lay there alone, waiting for death, his eyes
fixed on the cross-hilt of his sword.

Charles de Bourbon, riding by in pursuit of the French,
drew rein when he saw the dying hero and spoke a few
generous words of regret and pity.

" I am not to be pitied, my lord," Bayard answered him,
"for I die an honest man. The pity is for yourself, you
whom I behold bearing arms against your King, your
country, and your oath."

121

CHAPTER XIII
A KING OF THE RENAISSANCE

La Loire est une reine, et les rois I'ont aimee :
Xttr H68 cheveux cVazur, Us ont pose,jaloux,
Des chateaux ciselea, ainsi que des bijoux ;
Et de ces grands joyaux sa couronne estformee.

JULES LEMA!TBB

II nefaut s' Manner, Chrestiens, si la nacelle

Du bonpasteur Saint Pierre en ce monde chancelle.

PIERRE DE RONSARD

THE Court of Francois I was the most gorgeous, the
most brilliant, the most elegant and artistic that
France ever saw. The stiff splendour and majesty
of that of Louis XIV a hundred and fifty years later was
to make an even greater impression on men's minds ; but
in the first half of the sixteenth century everything was
new. The world was full of discoveries and inventions-
printing by far the most wonderful — and of bold adven-
tures on land and sea. It seemed made afresh for this
handsome and generous young King. His keen enjoy-
ment of life, his love of art and learning, his splendid tastes,
made him an incarnation of the French Renaissance in all
its daring beauty and gaiety, its free and joyous romance,
its " sunshine and storm." He had been educated,
adored, and spoilt by two of the cleverest women of their
time, his mother, Louise of Savoy, Comtesse d'Angouleme,
and his sister, Marguerite, first Duchess of Alen9on, then
Queen of Navarre, la Marguerite cles Marguerites.

If Fran?ois was not always fortunate in his Avars with
the Empire, and if he was both immoral and extravagant

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A King of the Renaissance

at home, France did not complain. She was proud of him,
of the gallant show he made in Europe and among rival
kings. And the nation was aware that the prophecy of
Louis XII had not been fulfilled ; this " big boy " did not
" spoil all." The greatness of France and her progress
were safe in his hands. The royal authority was felt
throughout the kingdom : by the Church, the nobles, the
Parliament, the provincial Estates, the bourgeoisie, whom
he trusted, and who loved him. Trade and industry
prospered ; new towns were built ; colonizing was begun ;
education advanced, and the Court was full of learned
men often employed in affairs of State. Artists, French
and foreign, found in Franfois I a distinguished patron.

Every one knows the story of his friendship with
Leonardo da Vinci, whom he invited to France, from
whom he bought the famous portrait of ' La Gioconda '
(Mona Lisa) now in the Louvre, and who died at Amboise,
if not actually in the arms of the young King, honoured
and mourned by him.

But it was the painters and the builders of France whom
Franfois employed most largely, though Italians were
called in to decorate his new palace of Fontainebleau,
and we know from himself that Benvenuto Cellini, the
marvellous goldsmith, was a ' man after his own heart.'
It is to the genius and taste of the French rather than of
the Italian Renaissance that the world owes the chateaux
of the Loire country : those great houses, unmatched for
beauty and homeliness, in which the sixteenth century
lives again. Some of these were built, or altered from
their old feudal gloom, under the direction of Fra^ois
himself : he was his own architect and the builders worked
after his fancy. And the chateaux built by rich private
persons, such as Chenonceaux and Azay-le-Rideau, ' the
flower of Touraine,' have the same air of attractive grace

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Stories from French History

and harmonious elegance : it was the atmosphere of the
time.

All this was in some sort a result of the Hundred Years
War, which drove French royalty into the West. The
rich, luxuriant beauty of Touraine, called even then ' the
garden of France,' and the sweet wildness of Anjou, made
that country the favourite home of Charles VII and his
successors. Chinon, Loches, Tours, Amboise, Blois, were
by turns the residence of the Court, and Fran£ois I added
to them his extraordinary Chambord, a hunting-lodge in
the woods large enough to hold an army. On all these
and more the royal devices are to be seen : the ermine of
Anne of Brittany, the crowned porcupine of Louis XII,
the crowned and flaming salamander of Fra^ois, the
pierced swan of Claude, his queen.

In the autumn of 1534 the Court was at Blois, resting
there after weeks of wandering about France, hunting,
dancing, feasting, visiting towns and castles, often camp-
ing out in the woods and meadows, a small city of tents, a
gigantic picnic by no means enjoyed by everybody who
was forced to take part in it. The Court of France at
these times was like an enormous gipsy encampment, and
courtiers, ladies, foreign ambassadors, and artists who
were not, like the King, romantic by temperament, found
its discomforts hard to bear. It is certain that he. the
most luxurious of princes, did not share them. If he
possessed, as M. Louis Batiffol says, the wandering temper
of his ancestors, the early Capet kings, he had not their
hardy indifference to circumstances. The rustling shade
of old mossy woodlands, the pines and purple heather, the
green grass and rushes by slow, clear rivers and frog-
haunted pools, the sunny slopes of the vineyards, gave him
no love for freshness and simplicity. He lived in a village
or a forest as in a city, with magnificence. When the
124

A King of the Renaissance

whole Court accompanied him, it meant a train of at least
twelve thousand baggage-horses as well as riding-horses,
and mules to carry the silk-curtained litters. The King's
own personal furniture and ornaments, chiefly of gold, his
splendid suits of clothes, brocade, satin, velvet, precious
furs, cloth of gold and silver, finest linen and lace, gorgeous
jewellery, were the charge of a household of servants.
And the lords and ladies of the Court — Fra^ois was the
first French king who insisted on the constant presence
of ladies, saying that a Court without them was a garden
without flowers — were obliged to ruin themselves in
imitation of him and in extravagant rivalry with each
other.

The Chateau de Blois, waiting on that autumn evening
for the King's return from a day's hunting at Chambord,
was indeed a beautiful royal abode. It was mostly new,
rebuilt by the Renaissance kings on the site of an old
feudal fortress. The sunset light streamed through its rich
courts, and broad shadows lay on the white paving-stones.
The wing of Louis XII glowed in colour of red and purple
bricks below shining grey roofs and graceful chimneys :
but in those days the sight deemed most admirable, in
dazzling cream-white stone all carved and fretted, was the
wing built by King Francois and Queen Claude, with the
marvellous open-air staircase that wound upward round
sculptured columns, past balustrades and balconies, to
open on each storey of the vast palace building. To this
day, when you enter the courtyard by the vaulted way
under King Louis XII's statue, " the sixteenth century
closes round you."

In those days the Chateau de Blois was the centre of
Renaissance Court life, the favourite home of the Valois,
the chief scene of a period in history which was to grow
steadily darker and more disastrous through the succeed-

125

Stones from French History

ing reigns of the three grandsons of Francois I, under the
fateful Italian influence of Catherine de Medicis and the
heavy storm-clouds of religious war. These were already
on the horizon, climbing, indeed, half-way up the sky:
during the last seven years occasional Protestant uprisings
had been put down with a cruel sternness that seemed un-
natural in Fran£ois I. Like his sister Marguerite, he had
grown up liberal-minded and tolerant of free thought.
But as the absolute king of a Catholic country he did not
long endure speech or action that rebelled against the laws
of the kingdom or the Church. Possibly a secret inclination
to leniency made him the more severe.

But the Chateau de Blois is at peace on this autumn
evening. The King's favourite small greyhounds are play-
ing in the court, gold collars round their delicate necks, in
charge of a page in blue and silver, with curly hair and
feathered cap. Near the chief entrance the guards go
clanking up and down, their black jerkins slashed with
white and orange-tawny and embroidered on the back
with the royal salamander ; a red quilted helmet shadow-
ing a fierce bearded face, a long halberd resting on the
shoulder. Servants in gay liveries are slipping up and
down the broad twisting staircase, flashing in and out of
sight, busy with preparations for the Court banquet and
ball. Here and there a light begins to glow in upper
windows, where other servants, among heaped glories of
Court costume, are waiting for the return of lords and
ladies, princes and princesses, splashed and weary from
hunting.

The royal party has not arrived when a messenger from
Paris flings himself from his tired horse at the gateway of
the chateau. After being examined by the officer of the
guard he is led to the presence of the King's chief secre-
tary, the Sieur de Neuville, a grave personage, whose

126

<l>
•a o

3 I

A King of the Renaissance

descendants, by the way, were to serve the French
monarchy faithfully down to the Revolution.

The secretary bends bristling brows over the contents
of the messenger's wallet while this young man watches
him with curious, mocking eyes. One would say that
he found satisfaction in what was to Neuville vexation or
worse.

" These placards, good heaven ! Dozens of these
heretical placards posted up in Paris ! '

" Scores, my lord. They are everywhere, even in the
Louvre."

" Insolent blasphemers ! And these letters tell me of
fresh sacrilege and image-breaking. Have not these rash
folk had warning enough ? Do they ask for more punish-
ments ? Or do they presume on the King's known
clemency ? They may go too far, young man ; they may
go too far. His Majesty's humour will not now tolerate
attacks on our holy religion. There has been too much
indulgence. What say the people of Paris ? '

" They are angry. They demand processions to expi-
ate " — the messenger shrugs his shoulders with a smile
which escapes notice, luckily for him. Nicolas de Neuville
is not in a mood to pardon flippancy.

Dismissed, the messenger presently finds himself waiting
in the courtyard for the return of the royal hunting party.
He has orders to eat his supper with the grooms, and the
time might well drag for a hungry youth, but not so with
him. For he has a bold design in his head and a roll of
Protestant placards hidden under his clothes. The son of
a Paris tradesman from Artois, not yet suspected of heresy,
and the godson of Louis de Berquin of that province,
burnt for his opinions a few years since, Louis Paulin is one
of the most hotly flaming young firebrands of the new
Calvinist party. Never so happy as when his head is

127

Stories from French History

actually in the lion's jaws, one day finds him nailing his
placards on the gates of the Louvre and narrowly escaping
the guard ; the next, volunteering to ride to Blois with
letters from the Provost of Paris, denouncing the heretics
and showing specimens of their work ; simply for the
opportunity of spreading that work further.

Strolling round the court in deepening shadows, this
bold adventurer lays his plans for the coming night, and
mingling with the soldiers, eyes and ears wide open and
purse-strings loose, is able to judge his chances of getting
clear away when the task is done.

Dogs bark : there is a distant shouting in the street, and
then, with a noise of talk and laughter, they come pouring
through the archway, that gorgeous crew returning from
Chambord. It is almost dark now : the rich colours, the
trappings and gay jangling harness, are weirdly lit up by
blazing torches. The King's long limbs are stretched in a
litter ; he is wrapped in a great blue velvet mantle lined
with white satin and bordered with sable fur ; the white
ostrich feathers in his velvet hat nod over his cropped hair
and long nose. The rest of the party are on horseback :
even Queen Eleonore, the Austrian successor of Claude de
France, and Princess Catherine of the Medici, wife of the
King's second son. In those days, while Francois the
Dauphin still lived, this young woman did not expect to
be Queen of France ; but she was a personage at Court,
brilliant and energetic, if not beautiful, and her father-in-
law enjoyed her company. There was beauty enough and
to spare in the train of ladies that followed Frangois ; and
ruffling splendour enough and to spare among his gentle-
men. Of a rarer growth in this society were such matters
as ' judgment, mercy, and truth ' and other virtues one
might name.

The palace glows with light and throbs with the music

128

A King of the Renaissance

of harps and viols while feet dance in stately measure. As
midnight draws on and heads are heavy with sleep, about
the time of the changing of the guard, no one takes heed
to certain daring hammer-taps, nor to a slim figure that
darts through a momentarily unguarded door. Louis
Paulin the messenger has slipped away into the night,
leaving defiance behind him.

There was a great cry in the morning, when men woke
in the Chateau de Blois to find these irreverent placards
nailed up here and there in the courtyards and buildings,
even on the chapel door itself ; placards attacking religious
abuses in threatening, unmeasured language and calling
violently for drastic reform. Rank rebellion against the
State, as well as the Church : that was how the Protestant
movement struck Nicolas de Neuville as he almost fear-
fully conveyed this last news, with that of the evening,
to Fran§ois I. The young messenger's disappearance
added a puzzling touch of mystery to the dark business,
and might almost cast suspicion on those who had sent
him from Paris. The affair began to loom like a
conspiracy.

" Le Roy prit feu," says a writer of the time, " et partit
incontinent pour venir a Paris."

The Court, with all its enormous train, set out once more
to labour through muddy roads to the capital. Princes
and princesses, courtiers and ladies ; one may believe
that they bestowed hearty curses on the troublesome
religionists whose zeal broke thus suddenly into the
pleasant peace of Blois. The Louvre was not then a
comfortable abode : the great central prison-keep had
been pulled down, but the new palace with its saloons
and entresols, its wide staircases and stately roofs, was
hardly yet begun.

At the Louvre, however, the fiery King took up his
I 129

Stones from French History

abode and began a fierce crusade against heresy. There
were many trials of those concerned in the affair of the
placards, many cruel punishments and executions. In
an interval of the torturing and burning, Francois made
with his own mouth a long discourse on heresy to the
assembled Parliament and University, all men listening
with respect to his orthodox views and to the new ordin-
ances he laid down for the checking of that deadly disease
in his kingdom.

Paris welcomed and approved his actions, for the Re-
formers were never popular there. The people in their
thousands knelt in the streets at the passing of a more
magnificent religious procession than even the Middle
Ages often saw, ordered by the King as an atonement to
Heaven for the insulting language of the placards.

Immense preparations were made. The streets were
cleaned, un grand luxe ; the stinking mud of Paris was
proverbial. The side streets were barricaded and guarded,
the procession's route, chiefly the Rue Saint-Honore and
the Rue Saint-Denis, being kept clear and hung with
tapestries, a flaming torch at every house-door to light
the way : it was mid-winter, and dark even at midday
under the projecting gables and hanging forest of signs.
In order to prevent ' confusion and tumult,' the University
authorities were directed to keep all students under lock
and key.

The procession started from the Church of Saint-
Germain 1'Auxerrois, the jewelled shrines of St Genevieve
and St Marcel, a holy Bishop of Paris in the fifth century,
having been escorted thither in the early morning by
clergy and banners from all the churches in Paris. It was
the first time in living memory that these shrines had
crossed the bridge north of Notre-Dame. Queen Eleonore
led the procession, dressed in black velvet and mounted on
130

A King of the Renaissance

a white hackney draped in cloth of gold. The princesses
her step-daughters followed her, in crimson satin em-
broidered with gold. With them, says the old historian,
were many princesses and ladies, gentlemen, pages, and
guards. Then — -strange contrast to this courtly splendour
—the blind Quinze-Vingts in their brown gowns, and the
mendicant Orders, all carrying lighted candles ; the clergy
of all the churches, the monks from all the abbeys, bear-
ing the shrines of their patron saints : that of St
Germain had never before been borne through the streets.
The shrine of St Eloy, the famous counsellor of King Dago-
bert, was carried by the guild of the goldsmiths, his own
trade. The two great shrines of St Genevieve and St
Marcel, each carried by eighteen men in white, were
followed by the bare-footed monks of the Abbey of Sainte-
Genevieve. Then came the Chapters of Notre-Dame and
Saint-Germain 1'Auxerrois, the heads of the University,
the King's Swiss Guard with their halberds ; and here was
a fine burst of military music, drums and fifes, trumpets,
cornets, and hautboys, while a thousand voices sang the
hymn Pange Lingua. The choir of the Sainte-Chapelle
preceded its precious relics, borne by bishops and followed
by cardinals. The Host was borne by the Bishop of Paris
under a canopy of purple velvet supported by the King's
three sons and Charles de Bourbon, Due de Vendome, a
prince of the blood royal. Behind the canopy walked
King Fran£ois, bare-headed, in black velvet, carrying a
large candle of white wax ; then a number of nobles and
high officers of the kingdom, the Parliament in red robes,
the courts of justice and of finance ; the Provosts of Paris
and of the Merchants ; the royal household and the officials
of the city.

Thus with loud chanting and pealing of bells, rich in
jewels and colour, the procession wound its slow way

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Stories from French History

through the streets, returning over the bridge to a solemn
service at Notre-Dame. No open sign of disloyalty to
Church or King disturbed its triumphant progress.

But the pale, defiant face of such a youth as Louis
Paulin, the bookseller's son, lost in the crowd, peeping
through the barricades, might have warned Authority in
Church and State that neither by cruelties nor by cere-

»/ *s

monies could it hinder the march of Time or stay the swiftly
rising clouds of religious war.

1 32

CHAPTER XIV

VALOIS AND BOURBON

Din lour/temps les Merits des antiques prophcles,
Les sonyex mena^ants, les hideuses cometes,
Avoient assez predit que Van soixante et deux
Rendroit de tons cot6s les Francois malheureux.

PIERRE DE RONSARD

Tout perissoit enfin, lorsque Bourbon parut.

Jlais Henri s'avanqoit vers sa grandeur supreme
Par des chemins cache's inconnus a lui-meme.

F. M. AROUET DE VOLTAIRE

ON a winter morning in the year 1553, when the long
jagged line of the Pyrenees glittered with snow, a
prince was born in the high tapestried room of the
castle of Pau.

Through his father, Antoine de Bourbon, Due de Ven-
dome, he was tenth in direct descent from St Louis. His
mother, Jeanne d'Albret, was heiress to the kingdom of
Navarre ; a very small kingdom since Ferdinand the
Catholic of Spain had possessed himself of all its territory
south of the Pyrenees, but still free and proud, with an
independent history of seven hundred years.

Its king, Henri II of the House of Albret, ruler of Lower
Navarre and of Beam, and likely enough to be deprived
even of these by his other great neighbour France, had
been in his youth a splendid cavalier, sharing with Fran-
§ois I in many adventures of war and peace. Marguerite,
Duchesse d'Alencon, the King's widowed sister, fell in love
with Henri d'Albret and married him, though eleven years

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Stories from French History

younger than herself. Their Court in Beam was a centre
of cultivation and tolerance. There many Reformers,
even Calvin himself, found refuge from the dangers that
beset them in Catholic France. Not that Marguerite and
her husband accepted the severities of Calvinism. She
was a free-thinker, a daughter of the Renaissance, a
kindred spirit of its great writers, and like them, outwardly
conforming to the Church. She was approved neither by
Catholic bishop nor Protestant pastor, but bestowed her
humorous charm and her kindness equally on both. She
died in 1549, leaving a world the duller for her loss.

As to Henri d'Albret, he was a native of the South, and
from earliest times new opinions and new learning had
been welcome there. As years advanced he became a
stricter Catholic, partly perhaps from policy : a King of
Navarre quarrelled with a King of France at his peri], and
Henri II of France was a gloomy prince, a more bigoted
persecutor than Fran£ois I had been.

These were the grandparents of the child who opened
his eyes at Pau on that winter morning. The story goes
that his mother sang when he was bom : her father, King
Henri, had offered her as a reward a gold chain long enough
to twist twenty-five times round her neck and a gold box
containing his last will. So the first sound the baby heard
was an old song of Beam. King Henri handed the gifts
to his daughter, saying'. "Those arc yours and this is
mine," and carried off the child, wrapped in his furry robe,
to present him to the Court. But first he rubbed the little
lips with garlic, in Bearnais fashion, and made the baby
swallow a drop of red wine from a gold cup, " to make him
strong and vigorous " : a treatment which certainly
justified itself.

The little prince was a treasure worth preserving. Two
children of Antoinc and Jeanne, grandsons of Henri and

Valois and Bourbon

Marguerite, had died in infancy, victims of the ignorance
and carelessness of the time — one stifled in his cradle, one
dropped between his nurse and a courtier, who were play-
ing at ball with him — fun for them, crying ' Catch,' but
death to the poor baby. It was not the mother's fault :
a wilful, high-spirited girl, very much in love with her
husband, she was moving constantly between Court and
camp, and no one in that selfish Valois world would expect
a princess to give much thought to her nursery. It was
her father, furious at these losses, resolving that another
child should have a better chance of life, who had
summoned Jeanne home to Beam in the autumn of
1553. In short dark days and stormy weather she
travelled from north to south, from Compiegne to Pau,
a journey of three weeks, in order to arrive at King
Henri's castle before the future Henri Quatre of France
was born.

At the time King Henri II de Valois, with four young
sons, was reigning in France, and only wise men foresaw
the great storm of civil war in which that degenerate
House was to go down.

" This is mine," said the grandfather, and acted on his
words.

He took the child from his tortoise-shell cradle — still to
be seen. — and sent him away to a castle among the wild
wooded hills between Pau and Lourdes, near the bank of
a swift gave or stream that had its source in the high
Pyrenees. The ruined ramparts of Coarraze still remain.
In a cottage under their shelter lived the faithful nurse
Jeanne Fourchade and her husband, under whose care,
supervised by that of the King's cousin, the Baronne de
Miossens, young Henri lived till he was four or five years
old : not treated as a prince, not richly dressed or loaded
with toys, but clothed and fed like the little peasants

135

Stories from French History

around him and scrambling barefoot with them among the
rocks and the pine-trees.

His grandfather's death changed all that. Antoine de
Bourbon, the new King of Navarre, at once found himself
struggling with the King of France to keep not only his
governments of Languedoc and Guienne but his wife's
provinces of Navarre and Beam. By diplomatic weapons,
an angry protest from the Estates of Navarre and a veiled
threat of calling France's enemy, Spain, to the rescue,
Antoine and Jeanne preserved their little country's inde-
pendence. But in order to ensure for Jeanne and her son
the protecting favour of her royal cousin of France, the
King and Queen of Navarre appeared in Paris and
presented Prince Henri, now five years old. at King
Henri II's Court.

There is a pretty portrait of the child, painted at about
the time when he first set foot in the Louvre : handsome
and curly-headed, dressed in tight jerkin and small ruff, his
dark eyes looking out with bright interest into a new world.
Here were splendours he had never seen in Beam ; here
were boys and girls, cousins older and younger than him-
self, ready to play with him ; here was a fat, olive-skinned,
laughing lady, the Queen of France, whose hand he was
told to kiss, and who kissed him with an ugly mouth. He
did not like her : he preferred King Henri, handsome but
grim, who patted his head and asked him if he would be
his son.

' That is my father," said the little Henri, in his dialect
of Beam, pointing to King Antoine.

' Well then, will you be my son-in-law ? '

" Oni bien ! "

And a darling dark-haired girl of six years old, Princess
Marguerite, la Reinc Mar got of days to come, was led for-
ward to kiss him before the laughing Court.
136

Valois and Bourbon

Weddings were in the air. Frangois the Dauphin was
married in this same year to the lovely Queen of Scotland,
Mary Stuart, whose uncles of the House of Guise thus
became all-powerful at Court : an insufferable state of
things to the Bourbon princes and a blow to the cause
of Reform.

The King and Queen of Navarre returned to Beam with
their two children — their daughter Catherine was born
during this visit to Paris — and it was not till after the death
of Henri II and of his short-lived successor, Frai^ois II,
that Queen Jeanne and her little Henri travelled north
again. In the meanwhile King Antoine had joined his
brother the Prince de Conde and a number of Huguenot
gentlemen in a conspiracy to remove the young King from
the influence of the Guises. The plot failed and was
frightfully avenged by a series of terrible executions at
Amboise. Impolitic as well as cruel, these deaths and the
persecutions which followed them only served to spread
the new opinions and to horrify all humane and generous
minds. Even the Queen-mother, Catherine de Medicis,
cynically clever and indifferent to questions of religion or
humanity, was now in favour of toleration. " These dis-
turbances," she said, " are more political than religious."
Personally, at this time, she would have done much to
conciliate the reforming faction. As soon as the death of
Fran9ois II made her Regent of the kingdom Protestants
\vere allowed to hold their faith and even to worship un-
molested, as long as they forbore to assemble in public, to
raise armies, or to trouble their neighbours' religion. It
was an experiment in gentleness : the penalty of death
and other severities having for thirty years failed to crush
Reform.

By way of further conciliation, Queen Catherine called
the King of Navarre to rule with her as Lieutenant-General

137

Stories from French History

of the kingdom. Antoinc, pleased and triumphant, sent
for his wife and son to share in his new dignity.

AYith a heavy heart Queen Jeanne left her mountains
and travelled northward. She hated the luxurious, de-
generate Court, the centre of evil talk and immoral living,
and justly feared its influence on her husband. She dis-
trusted the Italian Queen-mother, the crafty politician,
unscrupulous and greedy of power, whose Bible was The
Prince of Macliiavelli. Jeanne's own religion, as the
years advanced, had become more austerely Calvinist.
The Huguenots throughout the South looked to her as
their protectress, and her encouragement of them went far
beyond the easy tolerance shown by her mother, Queen
Marguerite. Xo two women were ever more strangely
contrasted than Jeanne d' Alb ret and Catherine de Medicis.
Both were resolute and quick-witted ; but Jeanne was
morally strong, simple, sincere, and plain-spoken, her mind
clearly to be read in her fine expressive face.

There is a characteristic story of the two women at
about this time. One day Queen Jeanne had consulted
the wisdom of the Queen-mother as to the best way of
saving not only her frivolous husband but her kingdom,
threatened by Catholic Spain. Catherine advised " out-
ward conformity to Rome."

" Madame," said Jeanne d'Albret, " sooner than en-
danger my soul I would throw my son and all the kingdoms
of the world, if I had them, into the depths of the sea."

Queen Catherine laughed.

The year 1562, ushered in by tremendous storms and
floods, was a terrible year for all who loved France or be-
lieved in justice and humanity. It was a specially tragic
\ ear for the Queen of Navarre.

The hatred between Catholics and Huguenots was far
too bitter to be held in check by any decree of toleration,
138

Valois and Bourbon

and a few months saw the kingdom in a blaze of civil war.
Begun by the famous massacre at Vassy, where the
soldiers of the Due de Guise attacked a number of Hugue-
nots singing hymns in a barn, this horrible struggle spread
like wildfire throughout France. The Huguenots were
strong and numerous, fully believing in their mission to
uproot idolatry and to convert France by the sword. The
Catholics were resolved to make an end of heresy, sacrilege,
and rebellion. The leaders on both sides were equally
fierce and keen ; and thus poor France entered on the so-
called religious wars which lasted, with intervals of truce,
for nearly thirty years, and reduced the country to a depth
of misery unequalled since the Hundred Years War.
Behind the religious quarrel was the rivalry of political
factions, Bourbon and Guise ; and also the constant effort
of the Queen-mother to hold the balance fairly even and
by playing off one party against the other to keep her own
power and to defend the monarchy.

In the early months of the war she scored a point by
detaching the King of Navarre from the Huguenot party.
Antoine de Bourbon was a weak man, and the magical
influence of the Valois Court, its wickedness and its charm,
proved too much for his faith and honour. It was a man
false both to his wife and to his cause who fell commanding
the Catholic army at the siege of Rouen in the autumn of
1562.

Queen Jeanne returned to Protestant Beam, leaving her
son at the French Court for a time : he wras very popular
there and a favourite playfellow of the boy Charles IX,
not much older than himself. It must be remembered
that while war and destruction were raging in the pro-
vinces and even in Paris, the Court was seldom entirely
on one side or the other. The Regent feared the ambition
of the Guises even more than the rebellious discontent of

139

Stories from French History

the Huguenots. It was the fashion to call theirs the
' intelligent ' party, and their opinions on religion were
held by many nobles and ladies of the Court. The Queen-
mother expected only ' outward conformity,' and some-
times not even that. Little Henri was safe in the care of a
worthy tutor named La Gaucherie — odd name for one
employed at Court — an original person who did not tor-
ment him with ' grammar,' but educated him by word of
mouth, making him learn many wise sayings by heart.
He was a brilliantly clever child, already trained by his
mother in Latin and Greek.

For four years, according to his biographers, the Queen
of Navarre left her boy with his Valois cousins, and no one
who studies the life and character of Henri can say that he
took no harm in that atmosphere of diseased nerves and
vicious tendencies. However, he was taken back to
Beam at the age of thirteen, and at sixteen, after the death
of his uncle the Prince de Conde at the battle of Jarnac,
was made leader-in-chief of the Huguenot armies, his young
cousin Conde and the famous Admiral de Coligny being
styled his lieutenants. At La Rochelle, now the head-
quarters of the party, his mother devoted Henri solemnly
to the cause.

To this gallant, light-hearted young prince, as to his
forefathers, a war of any kind seemed the most entrancing
of games. Though at first kept out of the actual fight-
ing, he soon proved himself a daring leader. His hardy
upbringing carried him brilliantly through a long cam-
paign, and it is strange to think of him, twenty years later
to be welcomed and loved as the most popular of French
kings, merrily helping to devastate his future kingdom
with fire and sword, harrying Guicnne and Languedoc,
sacking small towns and villages, destroying the treasures
of churches, burning the outskirts of Toulouse, crossing

140

Valois and Bourbon

the Rhone to take more towns by storm, sweeping down
on the Saone, invading Burgundy, even threatening Paris,
his army quite undiscouraged by several defeats and grow-
ing in numbers as the months rolled on. Coligny, of
course, was the actual commander of the Huguenot forces :
but it was not only flatterers who praised the martial
genius of young Henri of Navarre.

In one of the intervals of peace, breathing spaces for
France between the exhausting periods of long-to-be-
continued war, Queen Jeanne appeared once more at
Court. In the spring of 1572 she yielded to Queen
Catherine's wish that the old plan might be carried out,
the marriage of her Henri with Princess Marguerite. To
the outward eye — and Jeanne was not a deep politician —
the Huguenot cause seemed for the time victorious. It
did not even matter very much that the unwilling
Marguerite flatly refused to change her religion ; nor that
she had set her heart on another Henri, the leader of the
Catholic party, the young Due de Guise. Such obstacles
were laughed away by Catherine de Medicis ; and after
all, Jeanne d'Albret was as wax in those long hands of hers.

But Jeanne did not live to see her son married to one of
the worst and most fascinating of the bad Valois race.
Was she poisoned by a pair of perfumed gloves, in order
that Henri and his cause might be more completely in the
Queen-mother's power ? Or did she die of consumption
hastened by the heat of Paris in that June ? The mystery
can hardly be cleared up now. In any case, she died, and
the Prince of Beam became King of Navarre.

In royal magnificence, having put off his deep mourning
for the occasion, Henri was married to Marguerite at
Notre-Dame. He was not nineteen, a handsome lad with
shrewd eyes, a head of frizzy curls, and the long nose of
French royalty : she a little over twenty, tall and majestic,

141

Stories from French History

" her white face flushed with rose-red." She wore the
Crown jewels and an ermine cape above her long trained
mantle of blue velvet. All the Court was equally splendid,
and Paris glowed in crimson and cloth of gold. But it
was a strange wedding, with all its grand display. The
Huguenot bridegroom was not allowed to enter the
cathedral, the marriage ceremonies being performed on a
platform outside the great west door. And Paris, full of
the followers of Guise, looked askance at the crowds of
Huguenot gentlemen who had streamed into the city from
every part of France to attend the marriage of their chief.
" It will be a blood-red wedding," people muttered in the
streets.

And so it came to pass. Six days brought Paris to
Sunday the 24th of August, the Feast of St Bartholomew :
that day and night of horror which stained the memory
of Queen Catherine de Medicis ineffaceably with blood,
lengthened the Wars of Religion by nearly twenty years,
and sent Charles IX to his death in misery and madness.

142

CHAPTER XV
HENRI QUATRE

Je chante ce Heros, qui regna sur la France,
Et par droit de conquete, et par droit de naissance,
Qui par de longs travaux apprit a gouverner,
Qui formidable et doux, sut vaincre et pardonner.

Tout leptuple, change dans ce. jour salutaire,
Reconnoit son vrai Roi, son vainqueur, et son pere.
Des lors on admira ce regne, fortune,
Et commence trap tard, et trop tot terming.

F. M. AROUET DE VOLTAIRE

PIERRE DE RONSARD, the friend of the unhappy
Charles IX, who mourned the troubles of his time
and immortalized its romance in exquisite poetry,
was also an unconscious prophet of the years to come. In
a poem celebrating a royal progress through the provinces
made by the Queen-mother and two of her sons, he painted
a picture so ideal, so far from the actual facts, that some
of his critics can hardly decide whether it is an instance
of absurd flattery in a Court poet or the expression of
a pious wish.

Morts sont ces mots, Papaux et Huguenots !

So Ronsard assured Catherine de Medicis ; and he went
on to describe how religion was at rest, how old soldiers
stayed peacefully at home, how the artisan sang at his
work, how traders went fearlessly to market and labourers
to the fields, returning home at moonrise to sit down to
their well-earned meal : all lifting devout hands in prayer
that she, the bringer of this peace, might live in health a

143

Stories from French History

hundred years. No doubt this poetical epistle was written
when the Queen-mother, as Regent, had made some politic
advances toward toleration, and the poet's imagination
carried him far in advance of his time. Forty years
later the prophecy in all its details had been fulfilled by
Henri IV. Misery, fear, and persecution were banished
from the pleasant land of France.

The story of the long civil war, with all its confusions,
the " Bedlam of senseless strife " which was not ended
even by the murders of Henri, Due de Guise, who claimed
the crown, and of Henri III, the last of the Yalois line, is
too complicated to be told here. The Huguenot King of
Navarre, shrewd, practical, good-humoured, who con-
quered hearts as well as armies, and changed his religion
for the sake of winning Catholic Paris, no sooner reigned
over France than he began his happy policy of healing her
wounds.

Those many years of fighting had left the country in a
desperate condition. More than a million persons had lost
their lives ; hundreds of towns and villages lay in ruins,
bridges were broken down, rivers had become unnavigable,
roads impassable, deep in mud and overgrown with briars
and thorns : the land was uncultivated and the people
were starving ; trades and manufactures had almost
ceased. The kingdom, says Archbishop Perefixe, in his
Life of Henri le Grand, " was so to speak a den of
serpents and venomous beasts," being full of thieves,
robbers, murderers, and other vagabonds. In a very few
years Henri changed all this, rebuilt the ruins, paved
the high roads, and set his people to work and to
trade. An excellent book on agriculture, written by a
Huguenot gentleman, Olivier de Serres, was his favourite
reading. He established in every province manufac-
tures of useful and beautiful things, interesting himself
144

Henri Quatre

especially in the great new industry of silk-weaving. It
was his desire that open spaces in town and country,
even the gardens of Catherine de Medicis' palace,
the Tuileries, should be planted with mulberry-trees for
feeding silk-worms.

At the same tune that Henri IV set men's hands to work
he attempted to calm their minds and to check religious
strife by the famous Edict of Nantes — more famous still
through its unhappy revocation less than a century
later — in which he assured liberty of conscience to his
people, granting the Huguenots rights of free thought,
of public worship in specified places, and of holding
office under the State. The King's friend and counsellor,
Maximilien de Bethune, Marquis de Rosny and Due de
Sully, was himself a Huguenot, and of an uncom-
promising type. A rough, honest man, the instrument
of Henri's religious and political schemes, which did
not please every one, and a fierce guardian of the
royal finances, he was naturally unpopular at Court.
Wily ambassadors and greedy courtiers found him totally
incorruptible and unbearably rude. Comrades in arms
and constant friends, two men could hardly have been in
sharper contrast than were Sully and his gay, courteous,
light-hearted, and pleasure-loving master. Their char-
acters met on a common ground of practical good sense,
clear views of reality, and a sincere love of France and
her people.

The King and his minister might have been seen walking
together in Henri's new building, the immense wing of the
Louvre known as the Grande Galerie. Sunshine poured
through stately windows looking down on the river, across
which Henri's still unfinished bridge, the Pont-Neuf, had
been lately thrown. He might well be happy in his Paris, for
on every side were the marks of his restoring and creating
K 145

Stories from French History

hand. The city, like the country, had lain exhausted,
her streets grass-grown, ruined, and half inhabited, at the
end of the wars. Now new streets and squares were
everywhere in building, and Paris, from the Place Royale
to the quays of the Seine, the palaces on the Island
and the beautiful houses and gardens in the southern
quarter, was on the way to the classic splendour, pros-
perity, and civilization of the age of Henri's grandson,
Louis XIV.

The post of confidential adviser to Henri IV was no easy
one, for this popular King had weaknesses of character
and temperament confirmed by his early bringing up at
the Valois Court and the rough soldier life he had led for
years. The wearer of the white plume of Navarre did not
also wear "the white flower of a blameless life." Sully
had something to do in patching up the quarrels between
Henri and his second wife, Queen Marie de Medicis, a self-
indulgent tvoman, jealous for her own dignity ; who had
just cause indeed to complain of her husband, but who
irritated him by her narrowness and obstinate stupidity,
her devotion to Italian favourites, and her strong bias
toward France's enemy, Spain.

In these first days of May 1610 she was to be left Regent
of the kingdom during the campaign planned by Henri
against the Emperor in consequence of the Imperial claim
to the frontier duchies of Cleves and Juliers. At this
moment she insisted on being crowned : a ceremony long
deferred and now for several reasons distasteful to the
King. He did not wish to increase her authority, or
rather, that of the unpatriotic clique surrounding her ; he
disliked the great expense of the function at Saint-Denis
and the State entry into Paris, as well as the delay of his
expedition. And there were other more hidden reasons,
strongest of all.
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Henri Quatre

After dinner that day at the Louvre, Henri played as
usual with his six children, whom he dearly loved ; from
Louis, a solemn boy of nine dressed like a little man; with
cropped dark hair and plumed hat and a toy drum slung
round his neck, to the tight-capped baby Henriette
Marie, the future Queen of England, one day to be
known as ' la Reine Malheureuse. ' A gay and loyal
courtier, the Baron de Bassompierre, was in attendance.
The Due de Sully being announced, Henri dismissed
them all and began to pace the gallery, leaning on his
minister's arm.

They were very unlike in appearance, these two on
whom the welfare of France depended. Henri was a man
of fifty-seven, of middle height, thin and active, with worn
nutcracker face, long nose; and pointed chin. His curly
hair and beard were grey, but he had a wonderful look
of youth and an irresistible smile, even in his worried
moments. Sully, though six years younger, seemed, with
his ponderous figure and bald brow, the older of the two.
• All the affairs of the kingdom, so lightly borne by the King,
weighed heavily on him ; and now new royal troubles of
mind were added to the load. For the Queen was to be
crowned within a few days ; and the nearer the ceremony
the stronger became the King's dislike and dread of it.
Not for the first time he poured into Sully's ear those
presentiments and fears of treachery and death which
sounded to his friend almost unworthy of a brave
man.

' I tell you," he said, " I shall never leave Paris. The
foreign party — Austria — Spain — they have their army of
traitors here, and they will stick at nothing to stop this
war. I tell you, they will kill me. This accursed corona-
tion will be the signal for my death. Ah, Sully, my
heart fails within me ! '

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Stories from French History

" What ideas, your Majesty ! What words from the
hero who never turned his back on cannon-ball or musket-
shot, pike or sword ! '

Thus growled Sully : and yet he was not a stranger to
his royal master's misgivings. Rumour had long been
busy with conspiracies against the King's life ; in many
countries the report of his death had been already spread.
Astrologers had dared to speak openly in warning : and
certainly, says Perefixe, there had been signs in heaven
and earth that the reign was approaching its end. A total
eclipse of the sun ; a ' terrible comet ' ; earthquakes ; a
rain of blood, visitations of plague ; strange visions and
appearances, church-bells tolled by unseen hands : such
things were whispered throughout France and had reached
the ears of both minister and King. Henri had laughed
at the astrologers, yet had listened to them. When a
certain Thomassin, famous in his time and suspected of
darker studies than astrology, warned him to beware of
the month of May, and especially of Friday, the fourteenth
day of the month, Henri seized the wizard by his long hair
and beard, dragged him round the room, and flung him
out with shouts of laughter. But he did not forget
Thomassin's words, nor the older prophecy that he would
die in a coach during the most magnificent function of his
reign.

Leaning on Sully, the King reminded him of all
this, and ended with the same despairing cry : 'Ah,
accursed coronation ! It will surely be the cause of my
death ! "

His old comrade, who loved him, was terribly distressed.
Would not the Queen, he asked, knowing of these fears,
consent even at the last moment to delay her coronation ?
Or would not the King ride off to-morrow to the wars,
leaving ceremonies and coaches behind ?
148

Henri Quatre

Henri shook his head. " Willingly would I do so ! But
my wife has set her heart on this affair — and my absence
would offend her mortally. No — I must go through with
it. If I die, I die, and the merry crew of the Court will
find that they have lost a good master."

" Sire, I cannot endure to hear you speak thus. Drive
away these dark thoughts. You are in the prime of life, in
perfect health, a great King and beloved by your subjects.
My dear master, God numbers our days ! And I would
have you place no faith at all in lying prophets and
star-gazers, paid doubtless by your enemies to torment
your noble spirit and to spread terror in France."

" As you say, God numbers our days," the King
repeated thoughtfully. " Yet prophets are not always
proved liars. Stars are of God's universe : they cannot
deceive. I hear you mutter that their interpreters may :
'tis true, and make money out of fools. But what of
omens ? Come here, old friend, and see."

He led Sully across the gallery to a window which
opened on the inner courtyard of the palace. Down on
the paving- stones, its decorations trailing in the dust,
lay the tall pole which was set up there with religious
ceremony on every first of May. Workmen were now
silently removing it.

Hung with green boughs, garlanded with flowers and
ribbons, adorned with banners and religious inscriptions,
the ' May ' had its modern origin in offerings made by the
guilds of Paris in honour of Our Lady. But probably the
Druids welcomed spring in some such fashion.

" You see our ' May ' ? " said the King. " It fell
yesterday, without a breath of wind or a moment's warn-
ing. I was in the gallery, returning from the Tuileries, with
Bassompierre and others. I bade them stay here while
I visited the Queen in her cabinet to hurry her dressing,

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Stories from French History

that she might not keep me waiting for dinner. From
this very window they saw the fall of the ' May.' And it
fell, as you see, right against my private staircase. When
I returned to them Bassompierre was saying : ' God keep
the King, for this is an evil omen.' I mocked at them
and called them fools. But, Sully, what say you ? '

"They are fools, your Majesty. The pole was rotten,
and some one deserves to be punished."

But Sully was so far impressed by the King's presenti-
ments that he appealed to the Queen to put off her corona-
tion till Henri's return from the wars. For three days, he
says, he pleaded with her Majesty in vain. Marie would
not listen to him : and the suggestion of the King's
absence, as he had foreseen, pleased her still less. So
Henri, with the merrv kindliness that was natural to him,

laughed his own fears away.

The coronation took place at Saint-Denis, with great
magnificence, on Thursday, the 13th of May. It was
noticed that the King was "extraordinarily gay." The
Queen was to make her state entry into Paris, attending a
grand service at Notre-Dame, on Sunday the 16th. On
Friday afternoon the King ordered his coach and drove out
to visit the Due de Sully, who had been taken ill suddenly
at his lodgings in the Arsenal. Before leaving the Louvre
he appeared nervous and restless, so that the Queen, now
in high good-humour, begged him not to go. For a few
moments he was irresolute, and before stepping into the
coach asked his servants the day of the month. When
they told him he laughed, and said impatiently to the
coachman : "Drive on ! Take me out of this ! " ( ' v Mettez-
moi hors de ceans ! ").

Several gentlemen sat with him in the coach, which was
unguarded, except by a few running footmen. It was
open on both sides, the leathern curtains rolled up, for the
150

Henri Quatre

day was fine, and Henri wished to see the triumphal arches
in the streets, already adorned for Sunday's ceremony.
The four horses pranced and plunged on the cobble-stones
as they passed from the Rue Saint-Honore into the Rue
de la Ferronnerie, close to the Cemetery of the Innocents,
and here the royal coach was brought to a stand by two
carts, one loaded with wine-barrels, the other with hay,
which came lumbering along and blocked the street, its
narrow thoroughfare already cumbered by stalls of iron-
mongery and tin goods along the cemetery wall. The
royal footmen turned in at the cemetery gate and ran
along the cloisters in order to rejoin the coach at the end
of the street. Two only remained near it, one running
forward to deal with the carts, the other lingering behind
to tie his garter. Thus, except for the coachman, the
postilion, and a few passers-by, Henri and his companions
were left alone in the street.

A man from Angouleme, a mad, fanatical schoolmaster
named Francois Ravaillac, had followed the royal coach
from the Louvre. For days past, whether tempted by the
Spanish party or inspired by a demon within himself will
never be known, he had been watching his opportunity to
kill the King. He now seized it. Slipping in between a
tin-stall and the open coach, with one foot on the curb-
stone and the other on a spoke of the wheel, he leaped up,
and with a long, sharp knife stabbed the King twice to the
heart.

"I am wounded — it is nothing," the King said: those
who were with him scarcely heard the last faint words.

Thus, on Friday the 14th of May, 1610, in his coach, in
the midst of the most splendid ceremonies of his reign,
died Henri of France and Navarre ; best loved of men
and kings, the father of his people and the restorer of his
country.

151

CHAPTER XVI
THE IRON HAND

Richelieu nous interesse comme un homme fort et coitrageux qui
se livre a tons les dangers et se confie a sa fortune. Sa vie est un
combat eternel. . . . Tout dans Richelieu imprime I'etonnement et
commande, V admiration. Louis MAKCELLIN DE FOXTANES

Voila rhomme rouge qui passe !

VICTOR HUGO

A YOUNG man in episcopal purple, of middle
height, very thin, with black hair, a delicate,
pointed face, keen dark eyes under a broad brow
full of intelligence, quick to catch and respond to every
slightest glance from royalty."

Such was Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu at the
Court of Henry IV, by whose influence with the Pope this
young Poitevin noble had been consecrated Bishop of
Lu£on at the age of twenty-two. Henri called him ' my
Bishop,' laughed at stories of his travels in Italy, was
entertained by his witty, fearless talk, and certainly never
guessed that this boyish ecclesiastic, who would so willingly
have been a soldier, was to carry on his own royal work as
a leader and ruler of men ; that this ambitious courtier
was to make the glory and unity of France his sole objects,
and to prepare the way for what has been called " one of
the great magnificences of the world," the Golden Age of
France under Louis XIV.

Fourteen years after the death of Henri, having gone
through chequered experiences during the regency of
Marie de Mcdicis and the rule of Italian and French
152

The Iron Hand

favourites in her name and that of the young Louis XIII,
Armand de Richelieu, already a proved statesman, became
a cardinal and First Minister of France. The purple
cassock of a bishop is changed for the red flowing robes of
a prince of the Church : he moves to his front place on the
stage of history as we know him in Philippe de Cham-
pagne's great picture, still slender, pale, and keen ; bright
and flexible, as M. Hanotaux has said, like a sword that
wears out its sheath. The sword did indeed wear out the
sheath ; and Cardinal de Richelieu's career seems all the
more remarkable when we know that he was never really
well, and that even in the earlier years, before disease had
laid its cruel and final hold upon him, he suffered con-
stantly from feverish headaches, writing to his friends :
" My pain is excessive. ... I am so persecuted by my
head, I know not what to say."

The death of Henri IV was a frightful blow to the peace
and prosperity he had done so much to establish in France.
When Richelieu took up his heritage of power these bless-
ings had again vanished from the land. He would will-
ingly have restored them : but a rich and happy France
could not exist without the external and internal security
which had vanished with Henri. In the last few years the
power of Spain and the Empire had grown prodigiously
and threatened the frontiers of France. Her provinces
had fallen into the hands of great nobles and princes of the
blood, who governed in the King's name, it is true, but
ground down the populations, made enormous fortunes,
and behaved like independent sovereigns. The Huguenot
party, grown very strong, with leaders among the chief
men of the kingdom, was now in constant rebellion against
the royal authority, and its friendship with England was a
growing danger to France.

Louis XIII was not the man to deal with such a state of

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Stories from French History

things. No son could be a greater contrast to his father
than he to the clever, resolute, popular Henri IV. He had
all Henri's personal courage as a soldier, and was a splendid
sportsman, caring indeed for little else. He was dignified
and conscientious, shy, gloomy, and persevering, of weak
health, and married to a childish, frivolous little Spaniard.
Such a King needed a minister of genius, and Louis was
wise enough to know it, and to place his entire trust in
Cardinal de Richelieu. It has been truly said that the
reign of Louis XIII may be more correctly styled the reign
of Richelieu. For eighteen years, from 1624 till his death
in 1642, the Eminentissime, as they called him, was the
greatest man not only in France, but in Europe.

It was not religious intolerance that inspired Richelieu
in his fierce campaign against the Protestants of France.
He was ready to ally himself with the Protestants of other
countries against the Empire and Spain. But this was a
political question, affecting the unity of the kingdom and
its central doctrine, loyalty to the King. Louis XIII
could not — Richelieu was determined that he should not—
share his authority with the leaders of the Huguenot party.
In their present temper of hostile and disloyal discontent,
now at boiling point in a few privileged cities, they were a
greater peril to France than her foreign enemies. Even
after the King had fought and crushed them in the South
their daring seamen put out from La Rochelle, their chief
stronghold on the coast, attacked ships sailing under the
French flag, and sank or captured them : losses ill to be
borne by a navy which hardly existed in the early days
of Richelieu's rule.

" We must destroy this wasps' nest of La Rochelle ! '
said the Cardinal.

Before he was ready — for he had to build forts, provision
an army, and create a navy — the Duke of Buckingham
154

The Iron Hand

sailed one summer day from Portsmouth and attacked the
French troops already stationed in the Isle of Re outside
the harbour of La Rochelle. If he had made straight
for the city and the royal forts on its seaward side, the
campaign might have ended differently. But the royal
governor of Re and his little garrison held out bravely,
though almost starving, until after several months Riche-
lieu was able to send in provisions and reinforcements.
Then, after serious losses in men and guns, Buckingham
renounced his enterprise and sailed away.

The people of La Rochelle watched from their walls the
English ships disappearing on the dark November horizon.
The winter fogs were closing in on them ; the great grey
sea was empty of their friends. The islands that sheltered
the harbour and all the sandy or marshy coast of the main-
land were occupied by the royal armies, whose entrench-
ments, seven or eight miles long, were connected by a
string of forts : no relief by land was possible. But the
" proud city of the waters," her harbour still open to the
Atlantic Ocean, the home of so many of her bold sons, was
not at all ready to give up the fighting independence of
centuries. Her thirty thousand people were as one in their
will to hold out against the King to the last. If England
had failed them, they would defend themselves. When
the siege was a few months old, they elected as mayor a
sturdy sea-dog, by name Jean Guiton. Laying his dagger
on the council- table, he said to the citizens : "If you elect
me, remember that this steel is for the heart of him who
first talks of surrender. You may plunge it into my heart,
if the word is mine." The dagger lay there till by no fault
of Guiton or his burghers the siege was ended.

It dragged its slow length through the winter of 1627
and the spring and summer of 1 628. The unhealthy, fever-
laden marshes and the barren sand-dunes north, south,

155

Stories from French History

and east of the city became an extraordinary spectacle of
military activity, for the fighting strength of France was
assembled there in a vast camp of tents and wooden huts,
the King, the Court, and the Cardinal being lodged in little
fortified manors or farms, country retreats of the merchants
of La Rochelle. There, in the short, dark days, while
Louis XIII rode up and down with his nobles " in tempest,
wind, and rain," reviewing the troops or watching the
bombardment of the city, Cardinal de Richelieu was the
head and centre of all the siege operations.

Look at him as he dismounts at the door of his quarters
in the December twilight. He has spent the day with his
engineers at the far point of the bay, where his own plan
of a gigantic mole to close the harbour against ingress from
the sea, and thus, completing the blockade, to starve the
city into submission, has already begun to take formidable
shape. Atlantic storms are fighting for La Rochelle ;
wild seas have torn down masons' and carpenters' work,
carrying away masses of stone and the heavy beams hewn
and dragged with enormous labour from forests in the
north. But winds and waves are not almighty when
matched against Cardinal de Richelieu, and the work on
the great mole is but begun again.

He dismounts at the low doorway, slight, tired, and pale,
leaning on a page's shoulder. This is indeed a soldier-
priest, with pistols at his saddle-bow and a sword by his
side, plumed hat, scarlet embroidered cloak flung over a
steel cuirass. He walks Avearily into the room — its rugged
bareness veiled by rich hangings and furniture — where his
secretaries await him and logs blaze in the wide chimney.

No rest for him here. Messengers from all parts of
France demand immediate audience : letters must be
read, consultations held with warlike bishops, the Car-
dinal's lieutenants, and with commanders of the army.
156

Richelieu and Father Joseph
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

A deputation of anxious peasants implores his Eminence
to remember his promise that the soldiers shall not molest
the country-folk in their farm work or carry off their goods
without payment. These are unceremoniously pushed
out to make way for a group of splendid courtiers in
velvet and fur. with long curled hair and deep lace collars,
who bring a message from the King to his tired minister,
excusing him from attendance that night at the royal
headquarters and bidding him good rest. The Cardinal's
words in reply are all of humble and grateful duty to his
Majesty; his manner to the royal envoys is haughty and
icily cold.

" We shall be mad enough to take La Rochelle ! " says
the Baron de Bassompicrre to his comrades as they ride
away along the dimes.

" Why mad ? The sooner the siege is ended the sooner
shall we escape to Paris from this wilderness. I know his
Majesty is already weary of it."

" Mad ! — Do you not see that when this man has
crushed the Huguenots, our turn will come ! '

When the Cardinal is at last alone a shadow advances
from the shadows, a thin figure like his own, disguised in
the habit and cowl of a Capuchin friar. This is the famous
Father Joseph, Richelieu's most intimate friend and
counsellor, a man of noble birth and brilliant talents., but
keeping himself ever in the twilight, the power behind the
throne. For years men knew him as the Eminence <*rise.

•/ '

and if he had lived a cardinal's hat might have been the
reward of his political sendees.

Late into the night the friends talk, while great gusts
from the sea shake the strong Avails of the little old manor.
Sometimes there is a terrible cry in the wind : it has swept
over the streets and towers of the doomed city and may
well echo the voices of her already hungry people. But
158

The Iron Hand

no such thought affects the stern designs and the steeled
resolution of Richelieu and his shadow.

And so through winter and spring the siege dragged on.
After a time the King found it unbearably tiresome,
and the Court returned to Paris, greatly to Richelieu's
indignation. For a moment he wavered : should he
follow the King and leave the siege to shift for itself?
Constant attacks of fever were weakening him ; and
meanwhile all the men who hated him must wax stronger,
having his royal master's ear. But Father Joseph advised
him to hold to the task, hard and cruel as it might be,
which he believed to be necessary for the greatness of
France.

Through tremendous difficulties the mole was finished.
By the month of May its two arms stretched nearly across
the harbour entrance, ships laden with stones being sunk
in the deep and narrow passage between them, and other
armed ships moored outside. The people of La Rochelle,
still watching from their walls, saw their last hope of relief
proved vain. For the English fleet, returning more than
once in the fine weather, found it impossible to break
through. Besides Richelieu's fortifications by sea and land,
his fleet was now strong enough to be an effectual guard.

The heroic mayor and citizens of La Rochelle held out
through the summer months in spite of frightful sufferings
from famine. Fifteen thousand of the weaker inhabitants
died and many lay unburied in the streets, for those who
were left had not strength to remove them. A few
escaped from the city and begged food from the King's
soldiers ; many ' useless mouths,' old men, women, and
children were driven out of the gates by Guiton, and, not
being allowed to pass through the royal lines, perished
miserably between friends and enemies. Richelieu, the
man of iron, did not imitate the humanity of Philippe-

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Stories from French History

Auguste before Chateau- Gaillard or of Henri IV before
Paris when fighting for his crown. He was determined
that for the sake of France La Rochelle should learn her
awful lesson.

Once more, in late September, an English fleet appeared,
only to be driven away by storms and gales after an
attack that utterly failed. Then at last La Rochelle
surrendered to Louis XIII. He and the Cardinal,
followed by a large convoy of provisions, rode through
streets full of the dead and the dying, while a few Aveak
voices murmured: "Long live the King!': A few days
later, too late to save the city, the Cardinal's great mole
was destroyed by furious Atlantic storms.

Thus ended the rebellion of the Huguenots. Richelieu,
as wise as he was strong, treated them with no unnecessary
severity, but pardoned their leaders and granted them the
free exercise of their religion as far as it might tally with
loyalty to the State.

Jean Guiton, the mayor, the soul of the city's defence,
was asked by the Cardinal whether he wished to become
a subject of the King of England. "My lord." he
answered, " I would rather serve a king who could take
La Rochelle than one who could not save her." He was
given the command of a French man-of-war.

And now, as Bassompierre had foreseen, Cardinal de
Richelieu was free to throw his whole strength into the
struggle with the great men of France which had already
begun and which lasted through his whole ministry — that
is to say, his whole life. As long as he could keep the
confidence and in a certain degree the affection of the
King, he was fairly sure of victory ; it was the constant
fear of losing these that made the fighter an old man before
his time. More and more the nobles hated his restraining
hand. He forbade duels, and the unlucky men who dis-
160

The Iron Hand

obeyed the order lost their heads. So did those who
plotted against him at Court, where even the Queen lived
in terror of his jealous severity. So, perhaps with a better
excuse, did men of the best blood in France, such as the
Due de Montmorency, who allowed themselves to be
goaded into open rebellion. Indeed, before his death the
reign of Richelieu had become a reign of terror as far as the
princes and nobles were concerned. Their fortified strong-
holds were levelled ; their power in the provinces was re-
placed by that of the King's Intendants. Many of them
were driven into exile. But at home and abroad the great-
ness of France grew : her arms were victorious ; her unity
was her strength ; and she owed this unity to the strong
hand and resolute soul of Cardinal de Richelieu.

161

CHAPTER XVII
THE VELVET PAW

Men ha . —

7 am ?;o' : — /a?.n _/?.>: — I /ound France rent

• rich men despots, and the poor banditti : —
- -•& in the mart, and schi?m irithin the temple :

I hare re-freated France : and from th-
Oj '.h* oJdffudal a pit carcase

Ci .on her luminou-s icings

•

EDWARD, LORD LTTTOV

IT would be a mistake to imagine Cardinal de Riche-
lieu as entirely the red-robed ogre described by
historv and his enemies. He had a verv human

. »

side ; a faithful heart for his few constant friends and
servants : a desire to please women and children, often
defeated by the awkward pedantic stiffness which helped
to make him unpopular in society, but appreciated by his
own family. His nieces adored the generous uncle who
not only planned splendid marriages for them — these were
State affairs of doubtful future happiness — but took the
trouble to choose such toys as a doll's house, beautifully
furnished and inhabited by a whole family who could be
dressed and undressed. Mademoiselle de Maille-Brezc.
the Cardinal's sister's child, afterward the wife of the
great Prince de Conde. was the lucky owner of this newly
invented treasure.

In the earlier days of his power, when the Court had not
et learned to hate and to fear him. Richelieu tried hard

The Velvet Paw

to make himself agreeable to the young Queen. Anne of
Austria, and her lovely and mischievous ladies. At the
Queen's wish he even consented to give her an exhibition
of his Spanish dancing ; strange accomplishment for a
prince of the Church ! Dressed for the part in green velvet
and silver bells, -with castanets in his hands, he danced
before her Majesty. She was supposed to be the only
spectator, except the CardinaFs own fiddler : but there
were those who peeped and listened behind a screen, and
the eminent dancer's airs and graces convulsed them with
laughter that he never forgave. Queen Anne and her
chief lady, the beautiful Duchesse de Chevreuse. paid
dearlv in after vears for their mockerv of the Cardinal.

» • »

His chief passion was the love of power to be used for
the glory of France. But he had also a passion for mag-
nificence in all his own surroundin_- : -plendid hou-
splendidly furnished : paintings and statues by the first
artists of the dav. whose works were brought to him from

•

Italy at enormous expense. He was a great collector of
curiosities and rarities of even* kind. Not content with
posing as a patron of authors and artists, he was both a
critic and an amateur.

It seems amazing that a statesman with the affairs of
Europe on his hands, in constant danger from personal
and political enemies, should have found time to write
plays and to superintend the acting of them ; more amaz-
ing still that he should have been jealous of the great
writers, his contemporaries especially of the mighty-
tragedian Corneille. So envious was he of their fame, so
afraid of their independent influence, that he devised the
plan of bringing them together in an obediently formal
society under his own ' protection.5 In this way was born
the French Academy, the famous literary tribunal which
has held its own for nearlv three hundred vears. It was

J *

163

Stories from French History

not altogether the fault of its members if one of their first
corporate acts was to condemn Le Cid and to refuse
election to Pierre Corneille.

Stiff poetry and high-flown romances, discussed at
extreme length and with considerable affectation, were
the fashion in Cardinal de Richelieu's time. The centre
of these discussions was the Hotel de Rambouillet, a fine
house near the Louvre, built to please her own fancy by
Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, after
the old town house of her husband's family, the Hotel
d'Angennes, had been pulled down to make room for the
new Palais Cardinal. The early seventeenth century in
France cannot be understood without some reference to
the work of Madame de Rambouillet. In the domain of
manners and taste she was as great a leader as was Riche-
lieu in that of home and foreign politics. She withdrew
from the Court at an early age, being sickened by a coarse-
ness of speech and ways no longer veiled under Valois
elegance, and collected a society of her own in which
refinement was the first and chief requisite, with birth,
beauty, and talent to follow. Much has been written
about the influence of French salons, which lasted more
than two hundred years, till past the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Madame de Rambouillet was the first
Frenchwoman to hold a salon : the Hotel de Rambouillet
in its palmy days was far more of a social centre than the
Court of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria.

Madame de Rambouillet designed her house herself, as
a temple for conversation. She set the fashion, and many
new houses in Paris and in provincial towns were built
after her pattern. Some of them remain to this day.
The old town houses of an earlier date had no large rooms
for receiving company. Visitors were shown into any
room, we are told, according to the hour or season. Nor

164

The Velvet Paw

was there any special dining-room. A table was brought
into one room or another, sometimes a bedroom, accord-
ing to the number or intimacy of the guests. Madame
de Rambouillet built a suite of lofty rooms undivided
by passages or staircases ; doors and windows high and
dignified ; the whole effect so stately, so well suited to
society and its receptions, that the Queen-mother, Marie
de Medicis, sent her architect to study it while building
the Luxembourg, her new palace beyond the river.

In the finest of these rooms, hung with blue velvet, a
pleasing change from the old fashions of red and tawny —
looking out on the gardens and orchards, towers, great
hStels, and narrow streets which divided her domain from
the Louvre and the Tuileries to the south and south-
west, the Rue Saint-Honore and the Palais Cardinal to
the north — Madame de Rambouillet held her famous
assemblies. She, "the incomparable Arthenice " — an
anagram on her name, Catherine — sat or reclined in
an alcove, shaded by screens ; her eyes could not bear a
strong light ; and further, this little air of ceremony had a
restraining effect on the mixed company that visited her.
They saw her like a goddess in a shrine, surrounded by
crystal vases full of flowers richly bound books, and
miniature portraits of her friends. They were led up in
small parties for a few minutes' quiet talk : voices were
low, for she could not endure noise. Women made polite
curtseys and took chairs or stools according to their rank ;
men kissed their hostess's hand and stood flourishing
feathered hats, playing with jewelled sword-hilts. The
hair of the ladies was curled in soft clusters ; they were
dressed in shining satin with strings of pearls. And among
all these fine folk came poets and novelists and divines
in sober black, with plain white collars, carrying manu-
scripts under their arms ; members of the new Academy,

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Corneille in his manly independence, Bossuet, a young lad
just learning to preach. And Madame de Rambouillet
entertained all these people, listened to their poems, their
plays, their romances, their sermons ; and the more
worldly of her company, dukes and counts, a gay cardinal
or two, the beautiful Princesse de Conde with her young
son and daughter, and other delightful girls and boys who
were to lead the society of a later day, smiled in the back-
ground and gossiped and flirted and told malicious stories ;
sometimes, wildly daring, of the Eminentissime, Cardinal
de Richelieu. For though he was never bodily present at
these assemblies, his spirit of universal suspicion and the
shadow ol his red robe were never far away. And since
not much more than the width of a street divided the
Hotel de Rambouillet from the Palais-Cardinal, it was
easy for spies to slip from one to the other.

While rebuilding and beautifying Paris on both banks
of the Seine, Cardinal de Richelieu had bought the Hotel
d'Angennes. It faced south on the Rue Saint-Honor^
and west on the wall of Charles V, which for three hundred
years had bounded the city on that side. He pulled down
the house and others near it, buying out unwilling owners,
and demolished the wall to make his gardens, much to the
public discontent. Then he built the strange, squat
palace which he left to the Crown ; we know it in its deep
decadence as the Palais Royal. Here he lived in almost
kingly state, with a strong guard at his gates, with a
number of gentlemen and pages in attendance, with chap-
lains, doctors, secretaries, musicians, and a large household
of servants, to whom he was a generous if exacting master.
Hither came his numerous spies, stealing in Avith their
reports from France and abroad ; hither also came many
beggars and poor pensioners, for Paris knew well that his
charity was large. Poets and pamphlet- writers crowded

166

The Velvet Paw

his labyrinth of galleries : the learned writer Theophraste
Renaudot displayed the first copies of the first newspaper,
the Gazette de France, founded by him under the Cardinal's
protection.

The gorgeous rooms of the palace, richly coloured and
gilded, splendidly furnished, hung with portraits of famous
people, looked out through windows of crystal framed in
silver on stiff courts and gardens, shaven lawns, clipped
alleys and glowing flower-beds : an army of gardeners
saw to it that nothing grew astray.

Twilight on a March afternoon : a bitter wind howling
through the streets, whirling clouds of dust as poisonous
as the winter mud, clattering the painted signs, the pride
of the Rue Saint-Honore. The sentries shiver, clashing
their halberds on the stones ; the blind men of the Quinze-
Vingts, the Cardinal's almost opposite neighbours, come
trotting back with their laden sacks from all parts of the
city and slip in gladly under their own archway.

He sits wrapped in a furry gown, one favourite cat on his
knee, another on his shoulder, by the fire in his small and
luxurious inner cabinet. The face under the red cap is
yellow and worn. At his elbow is a table covered with
plans and drawings of another of his palaces, the Chateau
de Richelieu in Poitou, not yet finished, and the little new
town outside its park gates. All is his creation and very
near to his heart, an old river-fortress there being the
original home of his family. He dreamed of reigning
there in his old age, but fate would not have it so. One
gains some idea of his strenuous life from the fact that he
never visited chateau and town, though their building and
furnishing constantly filled his thoughts and letters.

" Yes — pale colouring, such as fits the landscape-
wainscots and ceilings painted in grisaille, touched with
gold — what is it, Joseph ? '

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His dreams of peace in the old home province, of the
running river now chained in canals to ornament his new
park, of the mother whose tenderness had never failed
him through a sickly childhood, were suddenly broken
through. He was the nervous, watchful ruler of France,
every man's hand against him.

Joseph du Tremblay the Capuchin comes gliding
through a door hidden behind the hangings.

" The Marquise de Rambouillet's windows are ablaze
with light," he says. "Her guests are on the point of
departing. Is it your Eminence's wish that they should
be observed ? '

"Ah!" The Cardinal is still slightly absent-minded.
The cats lift their heads and stare displeased with
stony eyes ; both he and they are sphinx-like. His long
hand with its brilliant ring caresses them into purring
peace.

" Ah ! Yes. And especially if Madame la Princesse de
Conde is there. I am told that she talks aside with my
enemies — a group of confederates."

" She is a stupid woman. And her husband is a
worthless fool, very fearful of you."

" I am not fearful of him." The two men's eyes meet
in a smile like the flash of swords. " But if Madame la
Princesse be stupid, friend Joseph, as you discourteously
say, she is also beautiful, and knows how to conquer the
silly minds of men. Nor is she too stupid to listen
secretly to my enemies. And I would know certainly who
they are that talk with her at the Hotel de Rambouillet,
Have you at this moment a man or woman you can
trust ? '

Father Joseph hesitates.

"It is a service of delicacy. The doors of Madame la
Marquise are very well guarded. AYe can watch the
168

The Velvet Paw

guests coming or going — but to enter the salon — to
shadow Madame la Princesse — that is another matter."
" Ah ! If managed indiscreetly it might make a scandal
and set them all on their guard. No ; I have thought of
another plan : bolder, therefore safer. You shall go,
Joseph ; you shall go yourself from me to Madame de
Rambouillet, and you shall make her understand that if
she will serve me in these affairs I will do far more for her
worthy husband than I have done for him yet. I gave
him the Embassy to Spain. I will give him his choice of
the richest governments in France. But not for nothing.
It is for the safety of myself and the State that I should
know the intrigues of those who dare to plot against me at
the Hotel de Rambouillet— who they are and what they
say. Especially Madame la Princesse and her friends.
Why do you shake your head ? '

" Because Madame la Marquise is above suspicion."
" Did I say the contrary ? Is not that the reason ? '
" Pardon me ! She is loyalty itself, and utterly dis-
interested."

The Cardinal smiled. " The richest government in
France, remember. Begone, friend Joseph ! I wait your
report here."

The little Eminence grise, his cowl pulled well over his
face, slipped through the guard like a shadow. Past the
chilly splashing of the fountain in the square, under the
garden walls of the Rue Saint-Thomas du Louvre, to the
gateway of the Hotel de Rambouillet : who would think
of noticing a grey friar in the dusk, bent on some religious
or charitable errand ? Some idlers knew him well enough
and shrank aside. Late guests of the Marquise rumbled
by in their coaches, lighted by running torch-bearers ;
groups of gentlemen, followed by armed servants, laughed
and gossiped as they strolled along ; some of the talk

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reached Father Joseph's ears and made him frown. He
did not concern himself with the chatter of the literary
folk trailing modestly behind.

Five minutes later he had sent in his name to Madame
de Rambouillet and was ushered into her presence by an
awestruck man-servant.

The Marquise was tired and a little worried ; her
assembly had been large ; and though conveniently deaf
to much of its talk, she had known enough to make
Father Joseph's visit slightly alarming. She observed
him under heavy eyelids and waited anxiously, though
with perfect outward calm.

He began by compliments, for Joseph was a man of the
world. He talked of her husband and the important
mission on which he was employed and the high opinion
held of him by Cardinal de Richelieu. He said that his
Eminence would do much to show his esteem for Monsieur
de Rambouillet — very rich and important governments
might be vacant — but these were difficult times, and the
Cardinal desired to ask a little proof of friendship — oh, a
mere nothing! — from Madame la Marquise. In short,
would she inform him — of course in strict confidence — as
to the political intrigues carried on in her salon by certain
persons — the Princesse de Conde and others whose names
the Cardinal wished to know — persons who permitted
themselves to speak ill of his Eminence or even to conspire
against his authority ?

Madame de Rambouillet's pale fair face flushed slightly
and her fan fluttered as she listened to the string of
promises and threats, bribes and warnings. When the
friar paused at length for an answer it was ready.

' I do not believe, won pcre, that Madame la Princesse
is concerned in any political intrigue — certainly not with
any other of my guests. My respect and regard for his
170

The Velvet Paw

Eminence are well known, and no one in my presence or
in my house would venture to say a word against him.
But in any case, the vocation of a spy is not one which
commends itself to me."

With formal bows and curtseys the friar and the lady
parted.

Seldom indeed had Father Joseph returned from a
special mission confessing failure. But on this occasion,
undoubtedly, the great Cardinal and his shadow were
defeated by a woman's loyalty.

" Did I not tell you so, my lord ? "

" True. Joseph. We must try other means. But
remember, no more preferment for our unlucky friend
Monsieur de Rambouillet."

The cats stretched their claws and yawned.

171

CHAPTER XVIII

FIGURES IN THE FRONDE

Un vent de Fronde
ti'est leve ce matin :
Je crois qu'il yronde
Centre le Mazarin.
Un vent de Fronde,
S'est leve ce matin.

J. DE BARILLON

Vous allezjoindre, essaim charmant et fol,
La farce italienne a ce drame txpaynol.

EDMOND ROSTAND

A LOVELY lady, fair and tall, eyes turquoise-blue,
long soft ringlets twisted with loops of pearls,
ropes and clusters of pearls about her white neck
and satin-draped shoulders : thus appeared Anne Gene-
vie ve de Bourbon, Duchesse de Longueville, to a great
crowd assembled in the Place de Greve on an afternoon
in January 1649. She was the centre of a brilliant group
assembled at the Hotel de Ville. She and her friend the
Duchesse de Bouillon, beautiful too, if less irresistible,
came forward on the high steps of the building, each
holding a little child in her arms, appealing with smiles
to the crowd. They had moved voluntarily from
their own houses to the Hotel de Villc, the home of
the citizens of Paris, giving themselves as hostages
for the good faith of their husbands, brothers, and
friends, who had deserted the Court and offered their
swords to the Parliament of Paris in its fight with
Cardinal Mazarin. Not without reason the Parliament

172

Figures in the Fronde

doubted the disinterested patriotism of these princes and
lords.

The Place de Greve was a wonderful sight on that
wintry afternoon. The crowd was so immense, an eye-
witness tells us, that it covered even the roofs of the
houses. Men shouted and women wept, hardly knowing
why. Well-clothed workmen and shivering beggars in
rags, the sight of those shining forms on the perron roused
all alike to wild enthusiasm. So royally beautiful, so
like angels, hair and pearls shimmering among torches
early lit ! They were ready to give themselves for Paris :
surely they would protect Paris in these evil days, when
the Queen-Regent had fled away with the boy-king, and
the royal army was beginning to blockade the city.

The noise in the wide square had a growling background
of curses : curses of Cardinal Mazarin, the clever Italian
who was carrying on the work of a great and patriotic
Frenchman. Richelieu had been hated and feared : but
the heavy taxes that financed his wars had at least been
spent for the glory of France. Mazarin had gained
victories in war and in diplomacy, and the burden of the
taxes went on growing. He was insatiably greedy ; his
hands clutched money : his handsome face and soft
manners were found irresistible by the Queen-Regent,
who was entirely controlled by him. The princes and
nobles, so sternly checked in Richelieu's days, rejoiced at
first in the Regency, for Anne of Austria gave with both
hands whatever they chose to ask ; but after a time their
jealous detestation of Mazarin drove most of them to
take the side of the Parliament of Paris when it refused to
register the royal decrees for taxes yet more oppressive.

In such opposition, the Parliament of Paris had before
its eyes the striking example of a very different Parlia-
ment beyond the Channel, which for the time being had

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laid royalty low. The fugitive Queen of England, a
French princess, daughter of Henri the Great, was at this
very moment shivering in fireless rooms at the Louvre.

But the leaders of the Parliament of Paris, though
giving themselves the airs of Roman senators in their
tussle with Mazarin, and talking eloquently of the suffer-
ings of the people, must have known that their hereditary
assembly of judges, magistrates, and councillors did not,
like the English Parliament, represent the nation. Only
the seldom-convoked States-General could do that. The
duties of the Parliament of Paris and of the provincial
Parliaments of France were chiefly to register royal
ordinances, to hear important appeals, and to carry on
local government under the King's officials. This war of
the Fronde, begun by the Parliament and carried on by
the princes, was the uprising of a discontented bourgeoisie
and a furiously restless nobility against a hated minister.
It owed its name to a witty Parisian who compared the
Parliament in its first attempts at rebellion to a party of
schoolboys slinging stones in the city ditches, running away
at sight of the watch, and beginning again when the coast
was clear. In old French, the word fronde means a sling.

Curses of Mazarin were drowned in the thunder of
drums and squealing of trumpets as a band of armed men
in the Parliament's pay forced their way through the
crowd. Then some unhappy wretch who had failed to
join in the shouting was set upon and hustled down a side
street with savage cries of " A Mazarin ! ' Lucky if he
escaped with his life. Then again the crowd pushed and
thrust nearer to the Hotel de Ville, for a high window
stood open and the most popular man in Paris, Paul
de Gondi, the Archbishop's coadjutor, better known as
Cardinal de Retz, was emptying bags of money and fling-
ing handfuls of coin into the square. It was not always
174

Figures in the Fronde

the most miserable who scrambled and fought for the
money. Some of it found its way into the pockets of
hawkers who with shrill cries of their own were selling
hat-bands, neckties, collars, gloves, all a la Fronde.
Even baker-boys' baskets were piled with long looped
rolls a la Fronde.

Monseigneur de Retz, his almsgiving finished, turned
back laughing into the saloon. This little dark man, an
eloquent preacher, a restless, fiery demagogue, had made
himself the soul of the Parliament's resistance to the
Regent and Mazarin. His activity was astounding. He
spent these days in hurrying from one quarter of Paris to
another ; in the dark dawn he was at the Porte Saint -
Honore, persuading the populace to admit the great men
they suspected, the Prince de Conti and the Due de
Longueville, brother and brother-in-law of their enemy
the Prince de Conde. That young military genius, the
victor of Rocroy, with several thousand men under his
command, was now devising means of cutting off the city's
supply of bread. Then there was the difficult business of
bringing about an understanding between these princes
and the Parliament ; journeys between the Hotel de
Longueville and the palace on the I sland ; haranguing
the Parliament, haranguing the angry people in the streets ;
advising and hurrying nobles who never took advice and
never hurried themselves. Finally, Monseigneur de Retz
had been inspired to appeal to the ladies ; to Madame de
Longueville and her court of admirers. Beauty, charm,
a passion for adventure and excitement, a strong hatred of
Mazarin : thus came about the scene at the Hotel de
Ville and the enthusiasm of conquered crowds. Though
she was Conde's sister, her name of Genevieve was surely
a good omen for the Parisians !

It was a gay scene in that stately room at the Hotel de

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Stories from French History

Ville when Monseigneur de Retz rejoined the company.
Madame de Longueville and Madame de Bouillon, their
chilly ordeal over, had handed their children back to the
nurses and were sitting with their friends near the blazing
fire. Round them were grouped ladies and gentlemen
splendidly dressed, some fully armed, polished steel flash-
ing back the firelight, blue scarves fluttering. Some had
begun to dance to the low music of violins. Readers of
the romances then so popular were reminded of a scene in
the famous VAstree. Madame de Longueville talked
languidly with her handsome but deformed young
brother, the Prince de Conti, whom the Parliament had
appointed Generalissimo, and with her friend the Prince
de Marcillac, the future Due de la Rochefoucauld, the
brilliant, attractive, cynical personage whose fame was
to rest on his Maximes. Farther off, the centre of a
group of great nobles, stood a middle-aged and very
perfect gentleman, Henri d'Orleans, Due de Longueville.

Let us fancy that Monseigneur de Retz was approaching
this group, talking eagerly by the way with one of his
friends, when a slight commotion near the door drew his
quick attention. The guards there had made an attempt
to stop the entrance of a figure that looked strange in
that company : the figure of an old priest in a rusty
cassock. But the old man waved aside their halberds
with an air of authority, and they did not persist, for
every one in Paris knew Vincent de Paul, the apostle of
the poor, who was held in such honour that the Queen-
Regent had long ago appointed him a member of the
' Council of Conscience ' which advised her on Church
appointments and charities.

" What is your old master doing here ? " said the friend
of Retz. " He looks furious. Have you displeased him. and
has he brought a rod to chastise the wilful boy in public ? "

17G

Figures in the Fronde

Retz laughed : but he walked quickly to meet ' Monsieur
Vincent,' as Paris called him. The old man had been
tutor to his brothers and himself and the trusted friend of
his saintly mother, Madame de Gondi. Retz knew well
that only a matter of conscience could have brought him,
whose maxim was that priests should not interfere in
politics, to the Hotel de Ville on such a day of stormy
political adventure.

He drew Monsieur Vincent into a window apart from
the gay and restless crowd. We may imagine that the
priest frowned as his eyes wandered over it.

'These lords and ladies," he said, "what are they
doing for Paris ? Tell me, Paul ! Paris is fighting in the
streets, starving in the houses. Death and misery are
abroad. Is it to be real civil war ? And why are these
people laughing ? 5:

'' It will certainly be civil war, Father, unless her
Majesty is better advised. Let her dismiss her evil
counsellors and grant the just demands of these princes
and the Parliament : let her return to Paris with the King,
to whom all are loyal : let her forbid Monsieur le Prince to
blockade the city. It all lies in her Majesty's beautiful
hands."

Retz laughed. Monsieur Vincent scowled, still gazing
on that gorgeous crew.

' To them," he murmured, " it seems a merry ad-
venture ! '

'Tis better to laugh than to weep," said his old pupil.
" The Fronde will win in the end. Surely, Father, you
are not a ' Mazarin ' ! "

;' Mazarin ! ' the old man repeated thoughtfully.
' The struggle is with him alone ? Were it not for him,
the adviser, their Majesties would return to their city?
Paris would be saved ! "

M 177

Stories from French History

Retz bowed and smiled. " You are a wise man. I
might even say you are a prophet. But the prophets of
old did not please every one. and there are those" —he
glanced around — " who feel no consuming desire for such
a return."

Apparently, Monsieur Vincent paid no heed to the last
words. But he walked on past the dancers to the inner
group near the fire, and Madame de Longueville rose and
curtsied to the ugly, shabby little figure.

" Madame," he said, " this is not the place for one who
desired in her youth to lead the religious life and was a
lover of Christ and His poor. It is unworthy of you, and
of others whom I see here, to find your amusement in the
misery of Paris. But as to yourself, madame, your heart
is not so hard as you think, and the day of repentance and
atonement will yet dawn for you."

Madame de Longueville's lovely smile faded. She
shivered a little and looked down : but Monsieur Vincent
was gone without another word, and the soft laughter of
her friends surrounded her.

We may suppose that the old man went back to his
mission-house of Saint-Lazare, where he and his community
lived and worked for the poor. The words of Monseigneur
de Retz may have suggested to him a way of saving his
people and stopping the civil war. For that night, we
know, in all the bitter wind and rain, he rode out of Paris
with one companion and made his way by dangerous roads
and across the flooded Seine to Saint-Germain, where the
Queen-Regent and the young King, with Cardinal Mazarin
and the Court, were now lodged.

Monsieur Vincent was received readily by the Queen,
who supposed that he was acting as an envoy from the
rebels in Paris. But he told her Majesty in plain words
that he was no man's envoy ; and he asked her, for the
178

Figures in the Fronde

sake of her people, to dismiss Cardinal Mazarin, whom they
hated, from the head of affairs, to make peace with the
Parliament, and to return to Paris with her son. As her
answer Queen Anne referred the good man to Cardinal
Mazarin himself.

Monsieur Vincent's romantic mission was a failure,
though kindly Queen and smiling minister treated him
with the respect he deserved. And the consequences to
him were painful, for it was rumoured in Paris that he had
gone to Saint-Germain, and the people, believing him false
to their cause, rose in fury and destroyed Saint-Lazare.
It was many months before Monsieur Vincent was able to
return to Paris. He wrote in his sad disappointment and
humility : 'I thought to serve God by going to Saint-
Germain, but I was not worthy."

In the end Cardinal Mazarin, and after him the young
Louis XIV, triumphed over Parliament and princes. But
the crazy struggle in its two long episodes, the Old Fronde
and the New, lasted five years and caused great misery in
Paris and the provinces. A patched-up peace between
Queen Anne and the Parliament brought little satisfaction
to royal and noble frondeurs and frondeuses. As the great
ones of France had conspired against the severity of
Richelieu, so they rebelled and fought against the gentler
methods of Mazarin : the final result being the establish-
ment of absolute royal supremacy.

We see the Prince de Conde turning against the Crown,
which he had defended ; imprisoned, released ; he and
other princes storming over the wretched country with an
army of mercenaries who recalled the worst times of the
Hundred Years War ; besieging Paris with great slaughter,
and only rescued from the royal troops by the daring
energy of his cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who
threatened to tear the beards of the city magnates, and

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Stories from French History

turned the King's guns on the King's own men. We see
the same young princess, la Grande Mademoiselle, one of
the most romantic figures of her time, riding fully armed
and helmeted at the head of her troops ; taking possession
of the city of Orleans and posing as a new Jeanne d'Arc.
We sec the Duchesse de Longueville and her friends raising
Normandy against the King, while the Princesse de Conde
defends Bordeaux. It is all a riot of wild and dashing
adventure ; a comedy in its desperate gaiety, a tragedy
of lost lives and desolated homes ; a war without worthy
motive or lasting consequence.

The Fronde drove Mazarin out of France, but he soon
returned, more powerful than ever. It taught young
Louis XIV to dislike Paris, and convinced reasonable men
that the welfare of the country needed the strong hand of
an absolute ruler. It was the last flare of the age-long
struggle between the monarchy of France and her proud
nobility.

Most of the chief actors in that stormy drama ended
their days peacefully as loyal subjects of Louis XIV.
Monseigneur de Retz became a wise and respected
cardinal. Many heroes and heroines consoled themselves
with literature and the arts. Monsieur Vincent returned
to his flock and died at Saint-Lazare. The lovely lady of
the Hotel de Ville gave up the world and its splendours for
a life of religious devotion twenty-seven years long. She
divided her time between the famous convent of the
Carmelites, where she was educated as a child, and the
persecuted nuns of Port Royal. By her powerful protec-
tion of those good women she earned from Madame de
Sevisme the title of ' a Mother of the Church.'

180

CHAPTER XIX

THE RISING OF THE SUN-KING

Ce siecle, semblable a cehii d'Auyuste, produisoit a I'envi des
hommes illustres en tout genre, jusqiCa ceux meme qui ne sont bons
que pour les plaisirs. Due DE SAINT-SIMON

Dame Irene
Parle ainsi :
— Quoi ! la reine
Triste id !
Son alteuse
Dit : — Comtesse,
J'ai tristesse
Et souci.

VICTOR HUGO

IN a delightful book called La Flew des Histoires
Frangaises M. Gabriel Hanotaux has helped us to
realize the advance from medieval times to that
which is known as the ' Great Century,' the ' age of Louis
Quatorze,' by a comparison between the Gothic cathedral
of Notre-Dame and the classic hotel and church of the
Invalides. The cathedral, he says, was built in years
of trouble and unrest ; its architecture strains with
painful effort toward heaven. The Invalides, planned
by Henri IV and built by Louis XIV as a home for
old soldiers, has the solid, massive unity of a period of
settled strength and fulfilled aspiration : it is simple,
powerful, and harmonious. We might add, the one dreams
of a perfection beyond this earth : the other aims at
reaching it here.

The seventeenth century in France was a period of great
men ; and after the disorders of the Fronde they came to

181

Stories from French History

their own. The names of Rene Descartes, Pierre Corneille,
and Blaise Pascal are immortal in their several ways :
philosophy, " the art of just reasoning and clear thinking " ;
knowledge of the human heart ; the theory of real re-
ligion. There follows what has been called the Pro-
cession of Genius : La Fontaine, the voice of nature itself
in his wonderful Fables ; Moliere, the brilliant comedian
and satirist of the follies of his time ; Racine, the tender
and refined dramatist ; La Rochefoucauld with his im-
mortal and terrible Maxims ; La Bruyere, the painter of
word-portraits ; Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, the great orator
and theologian ; Fenelon, the religious genius ; and many
more. Such soldiers as Conde, Turenne, Catinat, and
Vauban fought for the Sun-King ; such sailors as Duquesne
and Jean Bart flew his flag on the seas ; such statesmen as
Colbert and Louvois administered his realm and organized
his Avars. The society of his time lives in the unequalled
letters of Madame de Sevigne and the graceful novels of
Madame de La Fayette. His actual Court was his own
creation. No king had ever before gathered round him
all the nobility and beauty and intellect of France as
Louis XIV did.

Quite early in his reign this magnificent young monarch
began to make his nobles understand that their place was
round the throne. Richelieu had practically destroyed
their independent power : they had struggled with
Mazarin, and lost : now they were to figure in a new kind
of splendour as members of the most strictly formal, most
stiffly gorgeous, yet most brilliant and admired Court
ever known.

In those earlier years the Court followed the King,
himself a soldier of high spirit, in the wars with Spain
and the Low Countries which added territory to France
in the north and east and gave her the modern frontiers
182

The Rising of the Sun-King

which Vauban fortified. In those years, as far as
external glory and success were concerned, France stood
easily first in Europe. But all the victories and all
the splendour had to be paid for : and in spite of
Colbert's financial reforms men might see in the sufferings
of heavily taxed provinces the other side of that shining
shield.

In the late spring of 1670, in a short interval of peace,
Louis XIV set out from Saint-Germain with the Court and
a large military escort to visit his recent conquests on the
Flanders border. We have a picture of the young King
as he pranced forth on such a triumphal expedition. Not
much here of the sober stateliness, the measured dignity,
that marked his later days at the great Chateau of
Versailles, hardly yet existing. All is dash and gallant
gaiety : the King's tall horse, in jewelled harness with
silver-gilt stirrups, dances beneath its light and graceful
rider. Under his large feathered hat the long curls of hair
are tied with flame-coloured ribbons. A deep point-lace
collar falls over his blue silk jacket ; this and his wide
breeches, which stand out " like a little petticoat," are a
mass of gold embroidery down to the lace-lined tops of his
high soft boots. Diamonds glitter on every brooch and
buckle. Men and women compare Louis to the god Mars,
and worship him accordingly.

Among the King's troops the wearing of uniform was
coming into fashion, though far from universal. The
Swiss Guards are described as dressed in blue and red
frieze laced with silver, with black velvet caps and plumes
of red, white, and blue. They marched to the music of fife
and drum ; tall, fine men carrying halberds. The famous
Musketeers, riding on white or black horses, wore blue
cloaks with silver embroidery. The common soldiers
were in coarse cloth, red, blue, or brown, a black scarf

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twisted round the neck. These details may give us an
idea of the appearance of the escort which accompanied
the King on that progress through the north-eastern
provinces.

The troops were commanded by the Due de Lauzun. a
showy little courtier, and among the hundreds of great
people in coaches, attended by crowds of servants and
wagon-loads of baggage, who accompanied the King and
Queen, was that eccentric and very human princess
Mademoiselle de Montpensier, whose middle-aged fancy
for M. de Lauzun nearlv ended in marriage. Some

•, O

historians declare that after many vicissitudes it did so
end ; which appears to be more than doubtful.

It is to Mademoiselle that we owe the graphic and
amusing story of that so-called triumphal progress of
twelve thousand persons — royalties, courtiers, ladies,
Court officials, servants, soldiers, and camp-followers,
with their trains of coaches, carts, and wagons, and all the
horses and mules without which this multitude could not
move: a progress in which luxury and splendour were
matched by hardship and discomfort to a degree even
then unusual.

The Court left Paris on 28th April and journeyed in slow
dignity as far as Saint-Quentin, sleeping on the way at
Senlis and Compiegne. So far the weather was kind, and
Mademoiselle, while attending the young Queen at her
card-table, was able to sit in a window and talk to her
cousin the King as he strolled with his gentlemen in the
garden. Louis invited her to join them. " I was dying
to go," says Mademoiselle, " but the Queen would have
been angry." For M. de Lauzun was with the King, and
people already perceived that la Grande Mademoiselle,
first cousin of royalty and the richest heiress in Europe,
had neither eyes nor thoughts for any other man. Lauzun
184

. m

Louis XIV and his Court on their Expedition to Flanders
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

himself was very discreet and careful, living in terror of
the royal displeasure, brave soldier as he was. Made-
moiselle was not equally prudent and found her chief
interest and delight, during the expedition, in watching
the little gentleman in his new dignity of general-in-chief,
the object of envy to other nobles who must receive his
commands uncovered while he was privileged to wear his
hat. This was not always the case, however : one day
Mademoiselle saw her hero talking bare-headed with the
King in a deluge of rain which soaked his hair unbecom-
ingly and dripped from his ears.

" Sire," she cried, " order him to put his hat on ! He
will certainly be ill."

This was in the later days of the expedition. Its
miseries began with an early start from Saint-Quentin on
Saturday, 2nd May. The weather wras bad ; provisions
were scarce ; no fish, no eggs, no fresh butter, half-baked
bread. Terrible roads ; horses and mules foundered and
carts buried in the mud. Coaches stuck in quagmires or
actually lost in the marshes near the river Sambre, which
was in flood and rising every hour ; their owners escaping
with difficulty on the backs of the coach-horses. Heavy
and ceaseless rain ; early darkness ; night actually clos-
ing in before the royal coaches approached the place
wrhere they were supposed to ford the Sambre. A
desert of mud and loneliness ; hardly a village or a
farmhouse ; gloomy forests on the horizon, the swollen
river in front ; the heavy wagons and trains of pack-
horses, laden with the baggage, the food, the cooking
utensils, the beds and furniture and all the necessaries
of royalty, Court magnates and great officials, straggling
leagues behind in the deeply rutted tracks of a half-
inhabited country.

The ford proving dangerous, if not impossible, the royal

186

The Rising of the Sun-King

party were advised to try another two or three miles
farther on. They plunged forward through darkness, rain,
and mud, the King leading the way on horseback, his
effeminate brother, Philippe, Duke of Orleans — known as
Monsieur — and the majority of the Court clinging to
the shelter of their coaches. Queen, princesses, ladies,
waiting-maids, jewel-cases, personal luggage: the coaches
were crammed. Torches and lanterns were scarce. When
the few lights flickered on the black rolling waters of a
second impassable ford, all those women took to scream-
ing, Queen Marie-Therese and Mademoiselle de Mont-
pensier at their head. One little lady seems to have been
the exception, though troubled and ill at the time : this
was Henrietta Stuart, Duchess of Orleans, daughter of
Charles I of England and Henrietta of France. Louis XIV
always honoured and admired his English sister-in-law :
in this moment of confusion, when vexed and deafened
by the silly clamour round him, he may well have valued
her self-control.

The coaches were dragged back to the high road, such
as it was, and then into a meadow belonging to a small,
poor, empty farmhouse. We may fancy that the peasant
farmer and his wife had fled away into the night for fear
of that great noisy invasion ; rumbling, trampling, shout-
ing, shrieking between then: little home and the river, as
French or Flemish troops had done in the recent wars.
Peace must have seemed to Jacques and Jeanne just as
disturbing and full of alarm. So they left their scraps of
furniture and their firewood in the two mud-floored rooms,
their cows and donkeys tied up in the shed, their skinny
fowls on the rafters, and escaped to the village not far off ;
a village with a church and good houses, where the Court
might have found better quarters by pushing on through
the rain.

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Lighted by one dim candle, the King handed the Queen
from her coach into this poor shelter. Marie-Theresc had
the Spanish formality, the reverence for etiquette, of her
mother-in-law, Anne of Austria, without Anne's natural
good-humour and ease. She was horrified and dis-
gusted. Close on midnight, no bed to sleep in, nothing
to eat, half dead with fatigue and hunger, her Majesty's
only refuge those four miserable walls! "What pleasure
can there be," she groaned, " in such a journey as
this?'1 And then, to make matters worse, her Majesty's
train was nearly torn off, for the floor gave way under
the stately tread of Mademoiselle, who was holding it,
and she descended knee-deep into mud and water.

" Ma cousine, vous me tirez ! " cried the Queen, stiffly
indignant.

The Princess excused herself. " Madame, je sids cti-
foncee dans un trou ! '

The King decided that there was nothing for it but
to await daylight. The Court must sleep in the coaches ;
he and the Queen, with her waiting-women, occupying
the farmhouse. Mademoiselle retired obedientlv to her

coach, loosened her rich travelling garments, and put on
her nightcap and dressing-gown. Being far too restless
to sleep, she presently paid visits to the inmates of other
coaches, her servants carrying her through the mud.
She found her neighbours talking and laughing, but their
conversation bored her. Monsieur, for instance, always
ill-natured, was making personal remarks on M. de Lauzun.
Mademoiselle returned to her coach in an ill humour and
frightfully hungry.

A welcome messenger from the King invited her and
other favoured persons to supper in the farmhouse. Food
had been fetched from a town not far off, and most of the
party were too hungry to be critical, though the soup was
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The Rising of the Sun-King

thin and cold and the chickens were so tough that the
strength of two persons was needed to tear them asunder.
King Louis, always cheerful and even-tempered, made
the best of it, but the poor Queen was both miserable
and angry. She refused to touch the repulsive food ; but
when the King, Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle had
greedily swallowed the last spoonful of soup she complained
bitterly : "I wanted some, and they have eaten it all ! '

Etiquette did not permit a smile. The Queen's in-
stincts had already been offended by the King's
suggestion that mattresses should be laid on the floor
for the royal party and various ladies, the one good
travelling bed being reserved for her Majesty. A fire
had been lighted under the black yawning chimney, and
the room, poor as it was, would be warmer than a coach.

"Horrible! What, sleep all together? " cried Marie-
Therese, her Spanish proprieties outraged.

But the King had his way. They laid themselves down
in rows on the mud floor of that smoke-grimed hovel near
the flooded Sambre, those personages, a dozen or more,
whose names occur to us naturally when we think of the
Court of Louis Quatorze. The great King himself, active,
capable, full of dignity, with his handsome, commanding
looks and cloud of dark curled hair ; Monsieur, fat and
frivolous ; Madame, thin and melancholy ; Mademoiselle,
large, frank, and masculine : these were the royal Bour-
bons. Then there were beautiful women with histories of
their own: Madame de la Valliere, Madame de Monte-
span, her witty sister Madame de Thianges ; and a few
other great ladies specially in attendance on the little
Queen, whose fat cheeks and heavy eyelids peeped out
under her sheltering curtains. All, including the King
and his brother, had put on nightcaps and dressing-gowns
over their curls and finery. All were dead tired and ready

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Stories from French History

to fall asleep ; but this was not so easy, for there was a
constant tramping in and out of the royal officers, M. de
Lauzun among them, who were lodged in the smaller room.
These gentlemen's spurs caught in the lace of the ladies'
nightcaps as they picked their way among the mattresses,
and everybody, except the Queen, was in fits of laughter.
The cows and donkeys joined in after their own fashion on
the other side of the wall, and at last the comicalness of the
whole affair was too much for her Majesty : she also began
to laugh. " Which pleased the King," says Mademoiselle,
i; for he was sorry to see her vexed. And we went to sleep."

Daylight proved most unbecoming. Pale and dis-
hevelled, the ladies missed their rouge : all but Made-
moiselle, who rejoiced in her own natural colour. They
gladly scrambled into their coaches, returned to the high
road, and rumbled on to the nearest town, where an
early Mass and breakfast awaited them. The rain still
descended in torrents.

Jacques and Jeanne, we may suppose, splashed home
in their heavy sabots through the mud. Whether they
had any reward for their forced hospitality to the Court of
France, or any compensation for damage done to the little
farm, must be for ever unknown. The broad wheels of
the coaches had ploughed up their meadow ; their floor
was spoilt, their firewood burnt ; their skinny fowls had
been commandeered, their poor beasts had been robbed
of hay to feed the King's horses. If the Court officials
were honest men, all may have been well. Louis XIV was a
just and kindly man at heart : spoilt, selfish, and blind, no
doubt, but fair and generous. It was never his deliberate
will that his poor subjects should suffer for him.

190

CHAPTER XX
VERSAILLES

Orand air. Urbanite desfacons anciennes.
Haut cMmonial. Reverences saw fin.

Tout un monde galant, vif, brare, exquifi et fon,

Arec safine tpt.e en rerrouil, et fturtont

Ce mtpris de fa mort, comme unefleur, mix Ir

ALBERT SAMAIN

Versailles, c'est I'ceuvre et la volonte de Louis XIV ; c'est la qu'il
fut vraiment le grand roi.

GABRIEL HANOTAUX

IN those years the great Chateau of Versailles rose like
a dream among the forests and marsh-lands west
of Paris. That wild tract of wooded hill and valley,
hardly inhabited except by wolf, wild boar, and smaller
game, with its deep lonely ponds and impenetrable
thickets, had been for many centuries a favourite hunting-
ground of the French kings. From its highest points,
then as now, the towers of Paris were visible.

Louis XIII had built himself a hunting-lodge of brick
and stone in the middle of the forest, where the few houses
of an ancient village, with their parish church, clustered
round a windmill. In older times there were a priory and
a leper hospital at Versailles. The peasants lived as they
might on the undrained and sandy soil ; but it seems that
in the fourteenth century four fairs and a weekly market
were granted to them, so that Versailles, not far from at
least one high road into the West, must have been a
trading centre for other villages and scattered hamlets.

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Stories from French History

It was also near Choisy-aux-Boeufs, a chief halting-place
for cattle on their way from the provinces to Paris, which
was swept away to make room for the vast new park of
Louis XIV.

Louis XIII was the last King of France who held his
Court and made his chief home at the Louvre. His
widow preferred more modern and comfortable quarters
at the Palais Royal, or, when absent from Paris, at the
neighbouring chateau of Saint-Germain. Louis XIV grew

^j O

up with a strong dislike of restless Paris with its floods,
famines, frondes, emeutes, barricades. He found Saint-
Germain too small and too near, Fontainebleau in its
romantic beauty too far away. He determined to build
a house of his own, where he could live the life that pleased
him : the life of magnificence and luxury which seemed
to him due to his position as a great king, the central
figure of a great nation, the head of the most splendid
Court in Europe. Louis XIV had a genius for the spec-
tacular in life : he was a lover of beauty as he understood
it, the ordered, dignified, classical beauty of his time.

Le Van and Mansart as architects, Le Brun as decora-
tive painter, Le Notre as gardener-in- chief, the most
famous men in France in their several professions, were
employed in the creation of the chateau and its surround-
ings ; but every sketch and design was submitted to the
King and freely criticized by him.

A new town was built. Old Versailles — except the little
chateau of Louis XIII, which was preserved as the kernel
of the vast new building — disappeared under the tools
of an army of workmen which at one time numbered
thirty-six thousand. The forest retired in ordered lines,
though a great park of a studied wildness surrounded the
immense and formal gardens which fell away from the
palace terraces in long sweeps of turf and flights of marble

192

Versailles

steps, clipped alleys and avenues and groves, the silver
flashing of hundreds of leaping cascades and soaring
fountains, and beyond all the broad rippling waters of
the Grand Canal, which spread in three arms to west,
north, and south. Regiments of tall trees framed the
stately scene and its population of statues and groups in
bronze or marble, the work of famous sculptors of the age.
The wide facades of the chateau itself, the high balconied
windows of its galleries, gazed with regal dignity down
this splendid vista to the distant horizon.

Those who know Versailles in these days understand
that its real life ended with the old French monarchy.
But it will live for centuries yet, appealing to modern
minds by its old-world charm, a type of seventeenth-
century beauty.

In the earlier and more brilliant years of his reign, long
before the works at Versailles were finished, Louis XIV
held many gorgeous fetes there. Open-air ballrooms,
open-air banqueting halls, open-air theatres, where
Moliere and his troupe acted comedies, were crowded
with the royalty and nobility of France. In those days
the King himself rode with his nobles in masquerades
borrowed from the Orlando Furioso, and competed with
them for prizes in the running at the ring. Summer
nights, when fountains and parterres were illuminated
with coloured lanterns, were often spent with music on
the Grand Canal, in gondolas brought from Venice and
rowed by Venetian gondoliers in crimson and gold. Thus
one might glide on a moonlit track down the northern arm
of the canal to a midnight collation at the little palace of
Trianon, built first in porcelain, later in marble, on the site
of another forest village.

Versailles became by degrees, as the building and

decorating of the great chateau, its town and dependencies,

N 193

Stories from French History

and the laying out of its wide surroundings advanced to
completion, the home and centre of an enormous Court.
Some of the nobility built themselves hotels in the nearer

•

streets, and each morning at the chateau gates their gilded
coaches jostled those of ministers and great men newly
arrived from Paris. Royal princes and princesses had
their apartments in the palace itself. It was also in-
habited by a crowd of officials and of courtiers to whom
the King had granted rooms there. Many of these lived
in the utmost discomfort in dark kennels under the stair-
cases, stinking and airless corridors infested by beggars
and thieves, every corner of space that could be spared
from the royal apartments. Even these, except the King's
own rooms, were anything but habitable, for all at Ver-
sailles was sacrificed to marble and gilding and outward
show. But that eager, ambitious crowd of men and
women did not complain of hardship ; to be near Majesty
meant paradise for them. They strutted forth day by
day from their stifling or freezing dens, bewigged, painted
and powdered, velvet-coated, satin-gowned, bold and gay
of air, full of witty and malicious talk, every bow and
curtsey and graceful gesture with its special shade of
meaning, and all with one object in their lives, to copy
and flatter the King.

For as Louis XIV grew older the spirited soldier-prince
became the stiffest, most autocratic of formalists. By his
own studied manners he judged those of other men, to
whom his approval meant advancement and solid gain.
Each salutation was a work of art : none was careless or
neglected, from the lifting or taking off the hat for every
woman, humble serving-maid or great lady, to the mere
touch for a nobleman. The same careful regulation of
manners ran through the whole of his daily life. The
thousand rules of Court etiquette might have been

194

Versailles

scarcely endurable, but for the fact, to which his own
courtier bears witness, that the natural temper of
Louis XIV, his kindness, forbearance, and consideration,
equalled in perfection his outward bearing.

There came a time when Avcariness began to steal over
that gorgeous Court life of Versailles. The beautiful fetes
were held no longer ; the poor little Queen had died — " the
first grief she ever caused me," said Louis XIV ; the lovely
ladies who reigned in succession at Court had fallen from
favour ; and the King had privately married a handsome,
austere, and sanctimonious woman who converted him not
only to a more moral and religious, but to a much duller
and more monotonous way of living. Still there was the
crowd of courtiers, now soberly dressed and fashionably
devout ; and still the fountains played and the gardens
grew in beauty, for the King never lost his pride and
delight in them. The public of Paris were admitted at
times to view this marvellous creation, which seemed to
all good subjects of King Louis a new wonder of the
world.

We may picture to ourselves an afternoon in early
summer, when the gardens and park were at their loveliest,
when roses and jasmine lightened the green thickets that
made a rich background for statuary white from the
sculptor's studio — " all heathen gods and nymphs so
fair " ; when whiffs of scented air stole over from the
clipped lime alleys and rustled the tops of the tall trees ;
when the many fountains scattered diamonds of light in
the sunshine that glowed on the wide parterres and marble
terraces, and birds retired to sing softly in depths of shade,
leaving bolder mortals to roast in the glare. Louis XIV
had a royal contempt for extremes of heat and cold, and
the courtly crowd that waited for his Majesty on the
terrace was bound at least to pretend equal indifference.

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Stories from French History

Monsieur Jean de La Bruyere, the Parisian philosopher,
strolling by with his book under his arm, laughed at the
crimson faces, the fluttering fans, here and there a silk
handkerchief thrown over hat and wig to protect the
wearer from sunstroke till the palace doors should be
thrown open and with the coming of the King strict
etiquette should rule once more.

" I would say, let us walk down to the groves yonder,"
said La Bruyere to his companion. " But as you, Mon-
sieur Bart, desire to pay your respects to his Majesty, we
must not risk losing your moment. You say it is long
since you saw him ? '

" Years, monsieur."

" You have not shown yourself at Court for years ? Is
it possible ! What rashness ! '

The other man laughed. His dark, sunburnt face, his
clear blue eyes, slightly narrowed from watching cloudy
horizons, his frank mouth, his somewhat ill-fitting wig and
coat, his swinging, fearless gait, all seemed to point him
out as a sailor home from the sea.

" I have been better employed," he said. " Rashness ?
On my life, I don't understand you."

" Say rather, otherwise employed, for, saving your
presence, you do not understand the Court," answered
La Bruyere : but his keen eyes and sarcastic lips spoke
admiration for the man walking by his side. "Who in
this nation does not know Jean Bart ! ' he said.
" Who does not know the gallant corsair who earned
his command in the King's fleet by such daring feats of
arms that Dutch and English lied before him ! Truly
better employed than this multitude of needy nobles
you see haunting Versailles ! But it is they, not men
like you, unseen at Court, who have now the ear of
his Majesty. May I ask, monsieur, have you secured
19G

Versailles

the good offices, of some powerful courtier to present you
to-day ? "

'' No, monsieur. The King once thanked me and gave
me a gold chain. He will remember me."

' You have a fine confidence ! ' La Bruyere gazed at
him curiously. "We will hope it may not deceive you.
But royal memories are short, and there is always the
danger that his Majesty may say of you : ' He is a man I
never see ! ' That has been the fate of many a man of
standing in the country and many a soldier home from
the wars. I have noted it in my book — you have read
it, monsieur, by chance ? In my chapter on the Court
you might remember these words : ' Se derober d la cour
un seul moment, c'est y renoncer.'

' I have had no time for reading. I take it from you
that this crowd is the Court. My business is not with the
Court, but with the King."

' I have warned you, monsieur. The rays of the Roi
Soleil shine only—

' Then no wonder that the kingdom is starving, as they
tell me, and the armies and the fleets are discouraged."

M. de La Bruyere was on the edge of offence. His book,
his famous Caracteres, that brilliant satire on human nature
and society which had already won him a notice not always
flattering and was presently to admit him to the Academy
-this benighted barbarian from the high seas did not
even deign to make excuse for his ignorance of it ! The
book was insulted : its author pressed it more closely to
his heart. He had carried it from the Prince de Conde's
hotel at Versailles, where he had his lodging as the former
tutor of the heir of that House, intending to offer it to the
famous sailor Jean Bart, with whom he had made ac-
quaintance by a happy chance, and who had pleasantly
accepted his company in this visit to the gardens.

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Stories from French History

"Nay," thought Jean de La Bruyere, " I do not cast
my pearls before swine ! '

And yet he was too clever and too honest to be really
angry. He guessed in Jean Bart his own scorn of the
lying unrealities of the world in which he lived. They
were kindred spirits, though the one brought clean sea-
breezes where the other used the dissecting knife.

They went on to talk of the gardens, which inspired
Jean Bart with more wonder than admiration. Frankly,
their perfection of classical regularity was tiresome to him.
La Bruyere smiled and marvelled at the bad taste which
could prefer a plain of tumbling green waves to the pros-
pect before them — the careless prodigality of Nature to
the ingenious, proportioned work of man. He was glad,
however, to satisfy the sailor's curiosity as to how the
gardens had been made, and how the lavish supply of
water supplying these lakes and basins and canals had
been brought into this forest country. It was a long story
of tremendous labour, perseverance, engineering genius.
The work had cost millions in money. Its unhealthiness
had cost a terrible sum in human lives. There was a
time — the thing had been hushed up and hidden — when
every night saw carts laden with dead bodies of labourers
on their way from the half-built chateau and half-made
gardens at Versailles.

La Bruyere broke off suddenly. " Monsieur, here is
the King ! ' He thought, but did not say : " Now, Master
Corsair, your pride will have a fall ! '

All hats were swept off. The bowing and curtseying
crowd on the terrace was like a field of tall wheat when the
wind blows over it. Down from the chateau came a small
group of noble and princely personages, bare-headed, all
but one. He was a man in late middle age, not tall, but
graceful and majestic, with the proud profile of some
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Versailles

Roman Emperor. He was plainly dressed in brown, with
a touch of gold embroidery ; diamond buckles in shoes
and hat his only jewellery. His hat, curled round with
white feathers, was edged with Spanish point lace.

There were salutations. The King either touched his
hat or lifted it ; said a gracious word or two. Once at
least his manner was of marked coldness, when some
courtier, not high in favour, presented an evidently rustic
gentleman. " I do not know him," were the words on
the King's lips. Nothing was lost on M. de La Bruyere,
standing in the background and waiting with an amused
smile to see the discomfiture of his late companion.

" What is the fellow doing ? Is he mad ? "

As the King, crossing the terrace between the fountains
and their groups of statues, approached the broad flight
of steps leading down to the parterre and fountain of
Latona, Jean Bart the sailor advanced suddenly, almost
pushing aside bowing courtiers, whose hands flew to their
swords, and dropped on one knee before Louis XIV. For
a moment the King was startled ; his fingers clenched his
cane, and the officer of the guard made a hasty step
forward.

" Aha ! Master Presumptuous ! " muttered La Bruyere.

Then — what happened? The King, frowning a little,
stared into that face browned by the sea, and the corsair's
bold blue eyes stared back. Jean Bart flung open his coat
and showed the heavy gold chain and medal which those
royal hands had slipped round his neck long ago, after the
ocean free-lance with his one small ship had captured for
King Louis seventeen Dutch vessels, one a frigate of
twenty-four guns.

" My admiral Jean Bart ! " said the King, with a smile
such as his Court seldom saw : and he gave his hand to the
sailor to kiss. " Rise, Monsieur 1'Amiral, and join us in

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Stories from French History

our walk," he said. " You have much to tell me, and I
have much to show you. This Versailles, monsieur, has
been created since your first victories."

'' An amazing creation, sire," said Jean Bart.
' I shall presently show you what you will admire still
more," said Louis XIV.

The eyes that followed him and his new courtier were
curious, envious, displeased. Even M. de La Bruyere,
attending the royal party at a humble distance, knew
a touch of disappointment ; for no man, certainly no
philosopher, likes to be proved wrong.

The King led the corsair all the way down the stately,
statue-guarded avenue that led to the great fountain of
Apollo and then to the Grand Canal. Among a crowd of
elegant boats, white-sailed, richly carved, painted, and
gilded, the muzzles of her little brass guns flashing in the
sunshine, floated a beautifully built miniature man-of-
war. Her silken banners drooping, her high decks and
galleries manned by curly-locked sailors in correct costume,
she lay there, reflected in the trembling water, waiting his
Majesty's commands.

" You see, Monsieur 1'Amiral," said King Louis, with a
wave of his hand, " the navy is not forgotten at Versailles.
My fleet is not all on the high seas."

Jean Bart laughed aloud. The courtiers bit their lips,
exchanging glances.

" I see that your Majesty has named your new frigate
The Great Ship ! "

1 You have a better name to suggest ? '

'With permission, yes, sire. The Prctiy Toy!" said
Jean Bart.

200

CHAPTER XXI

PEASANTS AND SMUGGLERS

II y a des miseres sur la terre qui saisissent le c<zur.

JEAN DE LA BRUYERE

Chateau, maison, cabane,
Nous sont ourerts parlout :
Si la hi nous condamne,
Le peuple nous absout !

P. J. DE BERANGER

THAT long reign of seventy-two years left France
tired. Dark clouds obscured the setting of the
Roi Soleil. Royal princes died, one after another,
and a little child five years old was alone left to
succeed his great-grandfather. But long before the
King's death glory and prosperity were deserting his
kingdom. Most of his great men — soldiers, statesmen,
divines, poets, philosophers — were already dead. The
disastrous revoking of Henri IV's tolerant Edict of Nantes
had deprived France of hundreds of thousands of her
best citizens : Huguenot ministers, nobles, merchants and
artisans, soldiers and seamen. Foreign wars meant defeat
instead of victory. The ever-increasing taxes which
supported the whole unwieldy structure of the State in
its ever-growing extravagance became harder and harder
to raise in a country which afforded such terrible sights as
this, beheld by Jean de La Bruyere near the end of the
seventeenth century as he travelled the roads of Northern
or Eastern France.

One sees certain wild animals, male and female,

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scattered about the country, black, livid, and burnt by
the sun ; bowed to the earth which they dig and turn with
invincible perseverance. They have a sort of articulate
speech, and when they rise to their feet they show a
human face : in fact, they are men. At night they retire
into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots.
They spare other men the labour of tilling, sowing, and
reaping in order to live, and they deserve some share of the
food they have sown."

These were the people who paid the taxes !

Even if La Bruyere's picture was of a specially poor
district in a famine year, such years recurred only too
often. We know, for instance, that the saintly Arch-
bishop Fenelon dared to say to Louis XIV, in 1709 : ' ' Your
people are dying of hunger. Instead of dragging money
out of your poor people, you should support and feed
them."

And the records of several other years are equally sad.
Still, writers of the eighteenth century do show another
side — fairly prosperous farms and peasants decently
clothed and fed, enjoying life with the merry stoicism of
their nation as long as they can cheat or satisfy the
absentee landlord and the ravenous tax-gatherer.

It would be a long and difficult task to describe correctly
the state of France at this time, each province differing
from another in burdens and laws as much as in soil and
character. Sometimes a story throws light on something
which seems in a way common to all the millions ruled by
the French king. Such a story is the famous adventure
of Jean- Jacques Rousseau.

^Vandering one day, tired and hungry, among the
mountains and woods of picturesque Pauphine, he asked
for food at a lonely cottage. The solitary old peasant
who lived there did not refuse to feed the wayfarer ; he
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brought him a little skim milk and barley bread chiefly
made of straw ; but all with a frightened and suspicious
air, as if the traveller were an enemy. Watching his guest,
he changed his mind : this was no enemy, open or secret,
but a frank and pleasant young man, honestly starving.

' I see you are a good youth," he said, " and will not
sell or betray me."

At first Jean- Jacques did not understand. When the
peasant descended suddenly through a trap-door, re-
appearing with a loaf of pure wheaten bread, a large ham,
a fat bottle of good country wine, and when he proceeded
to beat up eggs and butter for an omelette, and to set an
excellent meal before the still hungry traveller, and when
he finally refused payment with every sign of alarm, Jean-
Jacques understood still less.

In a few trembling words the peasant explained matters.
He was not so ill off as his neighbours ; he had worked
hard and his little bit of land had prospered : but if the
tax-collectors had any reason to suspect that he was not
dying of hunger, and that there was food and wine stored
in his cellar, he would be a ruined man.

' I left his house," says Rousseau, " indignant and
deeply moved."

This was the effect of the Crown tax known as la taille,
first levied under Charles VII, from which the nobility
and the official classes were exempt.

Another story of the working of this tax comes from
Touraine, the province so happy in its rich soil and kindly
climate, yet which in those days hardly deserved its
familiar name of ' the garden of France.' There, as else-
where, the people suffered. The Marquis d'Argenson, in
his Journal of 1750, tells how an assessor of taxes arrived
in his village and warned the inhabitants that the taille
was going to be much heavier.

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"' He had observed the peasantry to be fatter than else-
where, had seen fowls' feathers on their doorsteps, had
heard that I spent money among them, and judged that
they were comfortably off and living well. This sort of
thing discourages the peasant, causes discontent and
misery in the kingdom, and would make Henri Quatre
weep, were he alive to see it."

Other most hated taxes were those on salt and tobacco,
and there was constant smuggling, both on the frontier
and between the provinces with their differing tariffs, in
defiance of the severest penalties and in spite of the army
of agents employed by the financiers to whom Louis XIV
and Colbert had farmed out these and other monopolies.
The Farmers-general made gigantic fortunes, and their
collectors, like the publicans of old, exacted far more
than was lawfully due to them. In these circumstances
smuggling became an organized trade ; even, in the eyes
of the people, an heroic profession. The risk was very
great, for the punishments were terrible, ranging from the
galleys to a cruel death ; but nothing deterred the bands
of young and daring adventurers, in many of Avhosc
families smuggling was an inherited instinct.

Apparently this was not the case with Louis Mandrin,
the most famous smuggler of the eighteenth century in
France, whose life-story has been told us by M. Funck-
Brentano. He was descended from a worthy bourgeois
family at Saint-^ltienne in l)auphine, horse-dealers and
general merchants, living in their own good flint-built
house, still shown, in the central square of the little hilly
town. ^Ve are asked to imagine young Louis as a fair,
curly-haired choir-boy of the parish church, the cure's apt
scholar, sitting in a corner of his father's open-fronted
shop and listening with sharp ears to the talk of customers
who came from distant villages and mountain-sides to

Peasants and Smugglers

buy drapery, wool or wax, jewellery or spirits. Thus he
heard many tales of local misery, of the cruel doings of
tax-gatherers, and the luxurious lives of their employers
far away in Paris. A passion of rebellious anger filled the
boy's heart. There was fierceness in his blood. He was
the son not only of Francois Mandrin, the peaceable
tradesman, but of Marguerite his wife, a woman of hot
and revengeful temper, who once nearly murdered an un-
lucky neighbour on the suspicion of having bewitched her
delicate girl. Such a mother counted for much in the
wild and short careers of her sons.

Unluckily for Louis, his father died young, and at seven-
teen, the eldest of nine children, he was suddenly forced
to work for the support of them all. His mother drove
him into various money-getting enterprises ; her self-will,
greediness, and violence ruled the family for harm. Louis
was a fine lad, handsome, strong, and gay ; popular with
his neighbours, energetic at his work : in a better home
he might have done well. As it was, he ran wild, drank,
quarrelled, and fought; involved himself in lawsuits till
ruin threatened his household and little Saint-Etienne
became too hot to hold him.

Then a chance of good fortune came his way. In 1748
the War of the Austrian Succession was in full swing, and
the Marechal de Belle-Isle, commanding the French army
in Provence, needed large numbers of mules to carry stores
and baggage over the Alps into Italy. Louis Mandrin, a
horse-dealer like his father, was commissioned to supply
and to take the management of a ' brigade ' of harnessed
mules for this purpose. He set off merrily with two com-
panions and a few stable-boys, driving his mules — "a
hundred less three '; —down the Rhone valley and so by
Aries and Draguignan to the sea and the frontier.

That mountain coast of enchanting colour, then so

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Stones from French History

lonely, with its white stony tracks and torrent-beds and
its olive and chestnut woods, was very unlike Mandrin's
own Dauphine, where tall rocks and solemn pines climbed
the slopes of colder mountains. But the work of transport
from one army camp to another was hard and dangerous.
Several mules were lost among the precipices and ravines.
Mandrin and his ' brigade ' were called upon for feats of
endurance which trained him admirably for his later
adventures. He was happy, hard}-, and brave ; ready for
months of such mountain work with his nimble beasts and
hoping for profit that would restore his fortunes, when the
war ended suddenly ; a fatal event for him, at least, says
his biographer.

One misfortune followed another. His mules died of
disease ; and he had no compensation, since their deaths
were not due to enemy action. Nor was he paid for
certain provisions he had supplied to the financiers—
the Farmers-general, in fact — who had contracted to feed
the army. So Louis Mandrin returned to Saint-Eticnne
with five poor mules to his credit, a ruined man. In
neighbouring farms he was long remembered, crushed by
fate at twenty-four, sitting under some wide chimney-
place with his head in his hands, silent and sad, large tears
dripping through his fingers.

In a young man of Mandrin's character despair led
naturally to desperation. And his own grievances against
authority were terribly sharpened by the fate of two
younger brothers, worse if not wilder fellows than himself,
one of whom was hanged for coining false money, the other
condemned to the galleys for robbing a church. Then came
the drawing for the militia, a most unpopular service in
independent Dauphine, at which Louis threw himself into
a fray with the gendarmes in defence of friends on whom
the lot fell. Two of the King's men were killed, and Louis
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Peasants and Smugglers

Mandrin, with others, was condemned to death. He
escaped over the frontier into Savoy, joined a small force
already existing of smuggling banditti, and in the depth of
winter swooped back into Dauphine with a hundred armed
men and a train of mules laden with contraband — tobacco,
gunpowder, wine, watches, muslins, woollen goods, and so
forth.

This was the first of six campaigns succeeding each
other at short intervals during sixteen months. For that
time Mandrin and his comrades, of whom he became at
once the leader, were a terror to the agents of ' les Fermes '
in South-eastern France. Their operations extended as
far north as Burgundy and Franche-Comte, for we hear of
them at Pont-de-Veyle, Autun, Beaune, and Besan§on,
and as far into Central France as the Rouergue and
Auvergne.

Everywhere they made for the tax-gatherers' houses
and demanded with threats the large sums of money these
men had received for their masters, the Farmers-general.
Contraband tobacco was offered in exchange. The
gdpians, or ' gulls '- —the south-country nickname for the
twenty-four thousand collectors who hovered spying over
the nation like hungry sea-birds over a rocky shore — often
put up a spirited resistance, for their calling was their
living. Then up went muskets, out came knives, and the
smugglers usually had the best of it. For they were
strong, desperate, determined young men, and the officials
of the customs were often small people living in small
houses, protected indeed by the power of the State, but
hated by the people they robbed and ruined. The
smugglers who attacked them were sure of sympathy in
town and country : secret, but none the less useful.
Mandrin and his men could hide their bales of contraband
goods everywhere : in farms, inns, and lonely hovels ; in

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churches and presbyteries, in castles and manor-houses.
If their frays cost lives, which frequently happened,
magistrates were unwilling to convict them. They were
always able to escape, flying by night on their strong little
horses, threading pathless forests, swimming rivers, till
they reached safety in Savoy or Switzerland.

Then they were back again in France with fresh bales
of goods which they sold openly to the country people,
charging them a few pence for tobacco which the gcipians
valued at as many francs. No wonder that the young
Capital ne des Contrebandiers, as Mandrin styled himself,
was a popular personage. Like Robin Hood and other
such heroes he was polite and generous to the poor, keep-
ing his terrors for the dishonest and grasping rich.

" The people love this Mandrin furiously," Voltaire
wrote to a friend. " He interests himself for those who
are devoured by man-eaters. ... In the time of Romulus
or of Theseus he would have been a great man ; but in
these days such heroes are hanged."

That tragic end seemed distant enough on a midsummer
fair-day in 1754 when Mandrin and his troop rode into
Rodez, the old red-towered cathedral city of the Rouergue.

A merry picture has been drawn for us of the confusion
in the market-place, the blue-smocked peasants, the
women with their quilled caps and lace collars, pushing
in crowds among sheep, pigs, poultry, and vegetables for
a better view of the band of mounted men, played into the
town by the martial music of their own drums and fifes.
A hundred or more, sunburnt, dusty, and way-worn, wide
felt hats tilted over their eyes, armed with muskets, pistols,
and knives : these, the rank and file of the smugglers,
were followed by Mandrin and his lieutenant ; these again
by a number of laden mules driven with wild shouts by
men on foot. The young captain rode a grey horse ; his
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Peasants and Smugglers

hair was light and curly ; he wore a scarlet cloak and a
fine black beaver hat caught up with gold cords. Thus
he and his band rode triumphantly through the town to
an open square, where the bales were boldly unpacked.
And that day, at Rodez Fair, quite freely, to their own
joy and in spite of gdpians, the folk of town and country
bought cheap tobacco and muslins from Switzerland.

Among Mandrill's pleasanter adventures was one in the
neighbourhood of Lyons. On a hot summer afternoon
a company of ladies and gentlemen were assembled on
the terrace of a chateau which overhung the road at
the entrance of a village. Their agreeable talk was inter-
rupted by peasants running along the road, shrieking
" Les Mandrins ! " instantly followed in a cloud of dust
by the smuggler captain and his wild regiment. The
ladies were startled ; but Mandrin waved his hat and cried
to them to have no fear. Presently, having left his men
in the village, he appeared himself at the chateau with
two companions and a bale of Swiss embroidered muslin
or some such tempting merchandise, which he offered to
the ladies at a very moderate price. They were delighted,
it seems, to cheat the Farmers-general by dealing with
the notorious Mandrin : they found his visit pleasantly
exciting and fed him with oranges and melons. Later in
the evening, the village having been handsomely paid for
entertaining the band, and handfuls of small coins having
been scattered among the children, les Mandrins trotted
off in another cloud of dust, leaving golden opinions behind
them.

But the law could not be defied for ever with impunity.
The Farmers-general began to take the matter seriously.
It became known that Mandrin's ambition was to push as
far as the neighbourhood of Paris, where these rich mag-
nates lived splendidly in beautiful country houses, to

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seize a few of them and carry them across the frontier
as hostages. To such a daring brigand nothing seemed
impossible. The Farmers-general were alarmed. They
had troops of their own in constant pursuit of Mandril i ;
when these failed to catch him the royal troops were called
into action : regiments of dragoons scoured the country
and watched and guarded the frontiers. The people
began to be frightened : it was all very well for smugglers
to fight tax-gatherers, but fighting the King's own soldiers
was a different affair. Public sympathy began to fail
Mandrin ; and it must be added that he was becoming
unworthy of it. On many occasions his men behaved
brutally and he did not check them ; in fact, during the
last months he was more often drunk than sober. The
end was not far off.

Mandrin was caught at a favourite haunt of his in Savoy,
the old Chateau de Rochefort, near Pont de Beauvoisin,
where the river Guiers was the boundary between France
and the Sardinian kingdom. Spies tracked him and the
royal troops arrested him and carried him into France :
an unlawful act strongly resented by the Court of Sardinia.
But diplomatic stormings came too late to save the arch-
enemy of the Farmers-general. There was no delay in
Mandrin's punishment. He was tried at Valence, and
executed there with the extremest cruelty of the time on
26th May, 1755.

Not forty years later, at the height of the Revolutionary
Terror, twenty-eight Farmers-general, bad and good
together, perished in one day under the knife of the
guillotine.

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

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CHAPTER XXII
CHATEAU AND VILLAGE

Un nid sous lefeuillage,
Un manoir dans hs bois !

VICTOR Huoo

Heureux villageois, dansons :
Sautez, filhttes
Et r/arrons !
UniAsez rosjoyeux sons,

Musettes
Et chansons !

P. J. DE BERANUER

IN the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the old
feudal nobility of France, as distinguished from
those clever men who had been ennobled for services
to the State and those rich men who had bought their
honours, were divided into two classes, of the Court and
of the country. By no means every ancient name was to
be found among the crowd that waited on Louis XIV
or degraded itself at the far worse Court of his great-
grandson. Many nobles lived and died on their estates :
they were often poor enough in spite of their privileges ;
but these were not the men who restored or added
to their fortunes by marrying into the rich bourgeoisie
after the example of many of the more worldly-wise
noblesse de cour ; nor were these the men whose selfish-
ness helped to bring about the Revolution. Proud,
remote, shabby, and plain, stiff without and gay within,
the provincial seigneur, the poor country gentleman of
France in the reign of Louis XV, dwelt among his

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peasant tenants and usually had their respect, if not
their affection.

Let us look at a village in the west of France and the
old chateau or manor that watched over it ; the manor
whose gates and walls had been its strong refuge and
defence in times when wars and marauding bands swept
the country. In those times feudal privileges were the
fighting man's reward for protecting the helpless ; and
still, in the eighteenth century, in places far away from
the talk of towns, it was only a few here and there, more

thoughtful than their fellows, who found it strange that the
sci^ni'iir should take toll of their corn and wine, already so
heavily taxed by the Government, that his pigeons and
his game should live on their harvest, that their flour
should be ground in his mill and shared with him. These
and other such ancient customs had existed for many
centuries ; they almost seemed to be in the natural order
of things. One of the most oppressive, the system of un-
paid labour known as la coiree, had by this time almost
died out on private estates, though the King's officials
still enforced it for the making and mending of roads.
Many other powers once exercised by the xt'/<>iu'ur had
also vanished : he was no longer the ruler and judge, the
chief magistrate, the terror of evil-doers : all this pro-
vincial authority had passed to the royal Intendants, and
in many a village the syndic, or head of the parish assembly,
the tax-collector, even the schoolmaster, man of many
offices, sexton, sacristan, choir-leader, was a person of
more actual importance than either the cure or the land-
owner. This " high and powerful " gentleman, as he was
described in documents and on his tombstone, was some-
times poorer than his farmers. In many cases he had
little beyond his old feudal rights, a thankless possession ;
and his local influence depended largely on his character.
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Chateau and Village

Look along the valley. The road, grass-grown and
deeply rutted, wanders down past uneven groups of low
white cottages to the ford where the stream ripples across
it, then gradually climbs again between the wooded hills.
The cottages are thatched, a few slated, but all of one storey,
except for a garret in the roof. Outside, each has a shed or
two, the better ones a dunghill outside the door ; the little
farms are approached by a flagged pathway and shaded by
walnut or chestnut trees. On a green mound half-way
through the village stands the church with its old round apse
and tall tower, from which three deep-toned bells, rung
by an active schoolmaster, are constantly pealing. They
chime or clang for all services, for the angelus at morning,
noon, and evening ; for births, deaths, and marriages ; for
alarms of fire or robbery ; in a thunderstorm ; to drive away
evil spirits; at the hour of curfew (couvre-feu), when all
honest folk must be indoors and all fires and lights put
out. They and the church clock order the life of the
village.

On one side of the road the ground behind the cottages
slopes to low meadows and the stream : on the other, it
climbs to the edge of the forest, where sheep feed in a
guarded flock : and here too on the hill- side are the small
sunny vineyards and cornfields and vegetable patches
which help the people to live. A short by-road turns
down to the stream and crosses it by a rough bridge. The
dark water moves slowly between rustling poplars ; king-
fishers dart across the shade with a flash of blue. Then
an avenue of large old walnut-trees climbs the slope to the
gates of the chateau. The white walls of the courtyard,
built, like the house, of country stone, are ruinous and over-
grown with ivy ; the plaisance, which used to extend be-
yond them, laid out by a great-grandfather in the days of
Louis XIV, is neglected now ; a few roses bloom, wild and

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straggling, smothered in grass and leaves ; the yew and
box hedges, once trimly clipped, have lost their form.

Though not very large as such houses go, and with no
great extent of stables, kennels, dovecot towers, and the
like, this ancient manor has a stately air as it stands with
its back to the woods and moors, its high grey roofs and
weather-cocks shining. Drawing nearer, we see that the
long outside shutters, half closed against the sun, are hang-
ing by one hinge, and that many birds have built their
nests about the cracked windows and crumbling chimneys.
Weeds are growing in the courtyard, where an old dog lies
asleep in a corner of shade.

Monsieur le Baron and his family are to be found in the
large hall, the centre of the house, which serves them for
all purposes. Anciently there was an immense state bed
in one corner, removed by civilization into an adjoining
room. But the hall is still medieval enough, with its
enormous carved and emblazoned chimney-piece, its
ceiling of painted beams veiled by cobwebs, its paved
floor, high-backed chairs, and chests of walnut wood set
against walls hung partly with old stamped leather, partly
with worn tapestry, partly with quaint portraits of
ancestors. Nothing of the fine art and luxury of the
eighteenth century has penetrated here.

But the Baron and his family are much more alive than
their surroundings, and in this hour of repose after the
twelve-o'clock dinner they have many matters to discuss,
while Monsieur walks up and down in his plain suit and
leather gaiters— the syndic is better dressed on a holy-day
—and Madame with her two daughters sits working cross-
stitch to replace the ragged seats of the chairs. The only
son, a young fellow of eighteen, wears the only gloomy
countenance : and yet the next day is to see him on his
way to Versailles, where a great noble, a distant cousin,

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ay'j-JftJ^W dw^ttlS&fWi-aP&b

An Old French Chateau
M. Meredith Williams

Stories from French History

has half promised him a small place in the household of
the Dauphin, lately married to an Austrian princess and
soon to be King Louis XVI. Perhaps young Charles is
quick enough to guess what his first experience of the gay
world will be, with country manners, country servants,
country clothes, country horses, and the old-fashioned
learning picked up from the cure by a lad whom two old
peasants had held at the font.

His mother's dark eyes rest upon him with a touch of
the sweet mockery that enchanted bygone Courts in her
ancestresses.

' Charles will marry the daughter of a Farmer-general,"
she softly says. "Do not be sad, my child. Think how
your rich wife will transform the old home ! We shall all
grow fat in her shadow."

' Pardon, madame ! ' the Baron turns upon her.
' Charles will marry in his own rank. And I, at least,
wish for no changes here."

She smiles. 'No; you have your gun and your fishing-
rod. Certainly they help to feed us, but they do not mend
the roof or build up the walls."

'' All that will last my time," says the little Baron.
" And I have this ! '

He snatches up a shabby fiddle lying on a chest, and
after a caressing touch or two begins to play a Spanish
dance, slow, romantic, and thrilling. After a moment
young Charles steps up bowing to his mother, and together
they glide off along the hall in graceful movement to that
cadence. The two young girls with entwined arms follow
them, and presently the Baron himself is both playing
and leading the dance, in and out of the long sunbeams
on the floor.

At length he stops suddenly, saying: "Do not fatigue
yourselves ; you must dance with the village later."
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Chateau and Village

And to be sure, when the holy-day is a few hours
older the harsh music of peasant pipers fills the air,
and men, women, and children follow it up the avenue.
All wear their best clothes : the men are well dressed
in cloth, with deerskin waistcoats and silver buttons,
their long hair tied with ribbon under wide felt hats;
the women in serge of different colours, silk aprons, silver
chains and crosses, starched caps of the local pattern.

Monsieur le Baron adjusts his wig and goes out into
the courtyard to receive them with ceremony. He and
his family join in the country dances, which with a
few breathless pauses last on into the late evening, till
shadows are long and the schoolmaster slips away to
ring the angelus. When the older people are tired
they stand out and talk with Monsieur and Madame and
the cure; there are sick cows and sick children to be
consulted on, coming marriages, all the gossip of the
country-side, and the prospects of Monsieur Charles into
the bargain.

Two or three old servants look out smiling from
kitchen and stables ; a wandering pedlar unpacks his
wares on the terrace steps. There is an air of friendly
simplicity and harmless chatter ; even dark and sour
faces, for these are not absent, are lightened of their
discontent by the merry music and joy of the well-loved
dance.

Later they all troop away to their mud-floored cabins
and their evening meal of milk-soup and beans and black
bread. There is a pleasant acrid scent of burning wood
as the smoke from their chimneys mounts into the quiet
air.

Young Charles cannot sleep or rest that night. Has
he some presentiment of changes in a coming time far
beyond any imaginable new experience of his own?

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Stories from French History

Certainly the old home and the old people have never
been so dear. He looks out from his tower window into
a world of moonshine, deathly still but for the croak of a
frog in the ponds below and the hoot of an owl as it flits
between the trees in the avenue.

In the old province one may chance nowadays to hear
a story that brings a past century to life again. Not so
long ago a traveller, a tourist, walking down in a summer
evening from the tableland into the valley, passed the
ruined fragments of a chateau or manor-house. Part of it
had been made into a farmhouse, now deserted ; part had
been destroyed by fire and was a heap of blackened stones
overgrown with weeds and briars. Crossing the old court-
yard to gain the road that led to the village, the tourist,
who had been struck by the eerie loneliness of the place,
suddenly became aware that it was not so lonely. In
the twilight, among the broken stones and the weeds,
he saw groups of strangely dressed people, eighty to a
hundred of them, dancing round and round, up and down,
in figures equally strange. There was no sound, except
the evening wind that stirred the walnut leaves. The
tourist went on his way marvelling, for he knew that
those peasants with their ancient costumes and their
quaint country dances must be nigh on a hundred and
iil'ty years old.

CHAPTER XXIII

TWO GOOD MEN

Ah ! si de telles mains, justement aouveraines,
Toujours de cet empire avaient tenu fes renes !
L'tquite dairvoyante await regne sur nous,
Le/aible await ose respirer prcs de vous.

ANDRE CHENIER

Quand je montai sur ce trone edatant

Que me destina ma naissance,
Mon premier pas dans ce paste brillant

Fut un edit de lienfaisance.

MARQUISE DE TRAVANET

HE was plain ' Monsieur Turgot ' to the Court, and
there was a gulf of difference between him and
the crowd of elegant, luxurious, privileged nobles
who surrounded the young sovereigns, Louis XVI and
Marie-Antoinette. In the point of family, however, he
was no upstart and no outsider. He was a gentleman of
an old Norman house, and his ancestors, called Turgot
des Tourailles, Turgot de Saint-Clair, or by some other
territorial name, had served the State for at least two
hundred years. His father had been created a marquis by
Louis XV as a reward for his services as Provost of the
Merchants of Paris. While holding this office he under-
took and carried out a vast plan for draining the unhealthy
quarters of the city. He was a man of high cultivation,
the friend of all that was most enlightened in the France
of his day. He died a Councillor of State.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the youngest and most
famous of the Provost's sons, was intended for the Church

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and was known in his youth as the Abbe dc Laulne, but
tin- influences of the time, Voltaire, the philosophers, the
literary unions and the brilliant men he met there, turned
his mind against an ecclesiastical eareer. He was n»t the
kind of man who could lightly take Orders while uncon-
vinced, or lead the life of many a courtly young cleric in a
society ruled by Louis XV. Grave, shy. and awkward,
he was a keen observer and a careful student of France
and her history. He longed to administer public affairs.
to fight a thousand abuses. While still a young man. he
was appointed by the King Intcndant of Limoges, a poor
district overburdened with taxes and crushed by privileged
landlords. Here, at the cost of much unpopularity-
except among the peasantry — Turgot trained himself by
thirteen years of hard work for the object of his dreams,
the great reform that should transfigure his country.

At last his day was come. He found himself at Court,
Controller-General of Finance, which practically meant
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister in one,
for the actual head of the Government under Louis XVI,
M. de Maurcpas, a worthy and amiable old courtier, was
very little of a statesman.

The Court was at Compiegne when the new Minister
laid his plans before the new King. We can imagine
the two men and their surroundings. Turgot was a
man in the prime of life, with dark eyes and a strong.
resolute countenance. A judge of faces might have
guessed him over-confident in his own ideas and in-

tolerant of those of others. Louis XVI was an
awkward, heavy-looking youth of twenty, in appear-
ance perhaps the most unkingly of French kings, careless
and untidy in his dress, with hands scratched and
stained by the hard work he delighted in. But as to
heart, character, and honest intention, France never had

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Two Good Men

a better king. How he differed from his grandfather
Louis XV, for instance, is suggested by a little story told
by M. Stryienski in his book on the eighteenth century.

In the first days of the new reign a polite official of
Louis XV's Court presented himself.

" Who are you ? " said Louis XVI.

41 Sire, I am called La Ferte."

"What do you want?"

" Sire, I am come to take your orders."

"What for?"

" I am in charge of — of the Menus—

" What are the Menus ? "

" Sire, the Menus plaisirs (amusements) of your
Majesty."

" My amusement is to walk in the park. I don't want
you," said Louis XVI, and turned his back on the
gentleman.

Now, in a small room at the palace of Compiegne,
decorated with paintings and mosaic, looking out into the
August sunshine of gardens laid out under Loufs XV, the
young King met a man who offered him no personal
amusement, but called upon him to realize the state of
his country and by resolute self-sacrifice to work a great
reform. Turgot knew well that his success in his new
office depended on the support of the King, and he was
not without misgivings, frankly expressed to his friends.
The nearer he drew to his task of transforming the
State, of establishing equal justice for all, the more
formidable did it appear : a true labour of Hercules.

And now he found himself face to face with the good,
stupid boy of clumsy manners who was the centre of all
he wished to destroy ; all the heartless gaiety, luxury,
and Court extravagance inherited from Louis XV ; all the
mad race to destruction of an already bankrupt State.

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' I hear that you did not wish to be Controller-General,"
the King said to the new Minister.

Turgot replied by saying something of his inexperience
of so difficult an office, adding : " But it is not to the King
I give myself ; it is to the upright man."

Young Louis took both his hands. " You shall not be
disappointed. I give you my word of honour. I will
enter into all your views, and I will always support you in
any bold steps you may have to take."

Then M. Turgot, highly encouraged, laid his plans
before the King. They were wide and sweeping. Privi-
leges were to vanish : taxation was to become fair and
equal ; there was to be free trade between the provinces,
especially in com and wine. There was to be no more
State bankruptcy, no more borrowing, no more laying on
of fresh taxes. And above all things there must be no
more extravagance. Looking his King straight in the
face, Turgot said :

" Your Majesty, economy is a necessity. And it is you
yourself who must set the example. No more money
gifts to be bestowed on your courtiers ; no more expensive
favours drawn from the misery of others. I must fight
against your own generosity and that of those dear to
you. I shall be feared, hated, and calumniated at Court :
even the people may be deceived into distrust of me. Your
Majesty will remember that I rely solely on your personal
justice and kindness."

And King Louis said again : " Monsieur Turgot, you
have my confidence."

So Turgot set to work to regenerate France. But like
so many reformers with a high ideal, he left human nature
out of account. And French human nature at that time,
in spite of much philanthropic talk d la Rousseau, was by
no i nc; i us prepared for unselfish action. In unexpected
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Two Good Men

ways Turgot found himself opposed to his countrymen,
and not alone to the Court and the richer classes. The
people themselves were alarmed by the new law as to free
trade in corn, believing that it meant exportation and less
food for the country. This belief was encouraged by
Turgot's enemies and strengthened by two bad harvests
which kept up high prices and threatened famine. Riots
in all parts of the country, even in Paris and under the
King's windows at Versailles, did not shake Turgot's belief
in himself or that of King Louis in his Minister ; but they
foreshadowed his fall.

He did not add to his popularity by proposing that the
young King should be crowned in Paris, at Notre-Dame,
instead of in the cathedral of Reims, the sacred city of the
monarchy, where nearly all the French kings had been
crowned. A mere matter of economy : but Turgot did
not allow for national sentiment, strong in 1775, even
though M. de la Ferte and his crowd of underlings — a
coronation being reckoned among the Menus plaisirs
of royalty — were probably the chief persons who found
these expensive ceremonies to their advantage. On this
occasion Turgot did not have his own way. Louis XVI
was crowned at Reims with all the magnificence of a
bygone time.

The Finance Minister followed his determined course,
making enemies at every turn. We may fancy him at
one of the Court balls or -fetes, which he did his utmost, by
pulling the royal purse-strings tight, to deprive of their
splendour. There he stands, a dignified figure, soberly
dressed, speaking little, for men avoided his severe
presence and candid words. Among the throng at Court
he had, besides the King, only one friend and supporter,
M. de Malesherbes, the Minister of the Household,
who honestly tried to carry out his plans, and to some

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Stories from French History

extent, though a person of pleasanter manners, shared
his unpopularity.

Those Court balls were a wonderful sight of gorgeous
colour and flashing jewellery and waving, towering
feathers. Here and at the great fetes were to be seen
those ' monumental ' head-dresses which French society
adopted for a short time ; a fashion never likely to be
revived. Women's hair, piled up in a snowy powdered
mass, was crowned by, for instance, a miniature English
garden, " with grass-plots and streams " ; or real flowers
kept fresh in small glass bottles " curved to the shape of
the head " ; or a bird hovering over a rose ; or a shep-
herd, his dog, and his flock ; or some other original design.
Among these strange figures in hoops, wigs, and masks,
tall, fair, graceful, high-spirited, proud yet simple, a
' white soul ' in a Court of greatly mixed elements, moved
the young Queen of France, Marie- Antoinette.

She was a frank, generous girl, and there are many
stories of her kindness of heart to prove that she was very
capable of being touched by the sufferings of the nation
and of understanding the need for reform. ' Monsieur
Turgot is an honest man," she said. But she saw nothing
with her own eyes ; she was told little of the truth ; and
most of the influences round her were strong in a contrary
direction. She loved beauty and gaiety and the pleasures
that were heaped at her feet ; and she was a child of
eighteen.

Her friends, nearly all of them — for there were noble
exceptions — her merry, frivolous, mischievous ladies, her
smiling, witty gentlemen, were bitterly opposed to changes
and retrenchments which touched them personally by
crippling the royal power of scattering money and
favours. Many well-paid and useless offices were abolished
by Monsieur Turgot. His restraining hand was felt
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Two Good Men

everywhere, but especially among the Queen's friends ;
and in these young days of hers Marie-Antoinette was
passionately devoted to her friends.

A few months found Turgot's forebodings justified.
His reforms were faced by the opposition of all the great
people in the kingdom, of the Parliament, of the financiers,
of the Church, of the Court, and to a certain extent of the
Queen. Before two years had passed both he and Males-
herbes fell, for Louis XVI, with all his brave promises
and good intentions, was not strong enough to fight
against such a phalanx of enemies. The King was sorry.

' It is only Monsieur Turgot and I who love the people,"
he said regretfully.

;t Never forget, sire," Turgot wrote in his last letter
to the young master who had failed him, " that weak-
ness laid Charles I's head on the block ; that weakness
made Charles IX cruel ; that under Henri III it was the
cause of the League ; that it made a crowned slave of
Louis XIII ; that it brought about all the misfortunes
of the late reign."

So France rolled on her ancient way for a few more
years, while dark, red-flushed clouds, the curtain behind
which the sun of the Capet monarchy was soon to set,
climbed swiftly on the horizon.

225

CHAPTER XXIV
THE QUEEN AND HER SERVANTS

Onf. was my page, a lad I reared and bore ivith day by day.

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI

0 Richard ! 6 mon Roi !
L'univers t'abandonne,
Et sur la terre il n'est que moi
Qui xint(-res*e it ta personne.

MICHEL JEAN SEUAINE

ONE day in the summer of 1776 — the summer of
Turgot's fall — Queen Marie-Antoinette was driv-
ing with her ladies in the forest country near
Versailles. The royal coach with its outriders was
passing through a tiny village, a cluster of hovels
that crouched about the road in the shelter of the
great trees. A little boy three years old ran out to see
the sight and was knocked down by the leading horse
before the postilion had time to avoid him. Loud
shrieks : an old peasant woman rushes out from her
door to seize the child, whom the royal grooms have
already rescued unhurt from under the prancing horse's
feet. One of the gentlemen-in-waiting has dismounted
and taken him in his arms : the Queen, rising up in her
coach, stretches out both hands to the old dame in eager
kindness.

" The child is safe, mother ! All is well. He is your
grandson ? Is his mother living ? '

" No, madame. My daughter died last winter, leaving
me with the five children on my hands."

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The Queen and her Servants

" I will provide for them all. As to this one, will you
give him to me ? I have none of my own — he will be a
comfort to me — will you consent ? '

" Madame is too kind. The children are lucky — but
Jacques is a very naughty boy. I doubt if he will stay
with you."

Poor little Jacques, fair-haired and rosy, the picture of
a peasant child in his woollen cap, red frock, and sabots,
was lifted into the coach and taken screaming on the
Queen's lap.

" He will soon be accustomed to me," said Marie-
Antoinette, and after a few more kind words she ordered
her coachman to drive on.

But the story goes that the drive had to be consider-
ably shortened, so loud were Jacques' shrieks and so
violent the kicks he bestowed on the Queen and her ladies.
When the gentleman-in-waiting carried him into the
palace — by the way, we have met this young man before
as Monsieur Charles, the son of a certain chateau in the
woods, now and ever the devoted servant of Marie-
Antoinette, Dauphiness and Queen — the screams and
kicks went on, and it was a miserable, frightened, shriek-
ing child whom the Queen led into her own rooms, to the
great surprise of all her household.

Two or three days in the care of a kind nurse worked
wonders. Little Jacques became aware that he was
amazingly well off. He soon ceased to cry and struggle.
The beautiful child who was brought to the Queen at nine
o'clock every morning in a white frock trimmed with lace,
a pink sash with silver fringe, and a feathered hat, might
have been the little prince she so earnestly longed for.
Jacques, now known by the more elegant name of
Armand, soon forgot his grandmother and his brothers
and sisters and their forest home. He became the

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Stories from French History

life of that childless household, a merry, happy boy,
the Queen's petted plaything. Her waiting-woman who
tells the story says that he breakfasted and dined with
her Majesty, sometimes even with the King. He was
brought up in this fashion till the Queen's eldest child,
born two years later, was old enough to be carried
into the royal apartments. After that his position
was changed, but the Queen's kindness never failed :
he was educated at Versailles and always employed in
the palace.

When the great events of 1789, following on one another,
were leading France on her way to changes then un-
dreamed of, this young Armand, the Queen's adopted
child and servant, was a lad of sixteen. And of all the
spreaders of evil reports about Marie-Antoinette, of all
those who repaid her goodness with black ingratitude and
treachery, of all the jealous, mean, cowardly characters
who threw themselves into revolution for fear of being
compromised by the debt they owed to royalty — and
there were many of them — this young peasant was one of
the worst. It might have been kinder to leave him in his
grandmother's roadside hovel.

It was on those famous days, 5th and 6th October, 1789,
that he showed his true quality. The Revolution had
begun. The States-General, lawfully representing the
French people, had been summoned after an interval of a
hundred and seventy-five years to meet at Versailles, and
had transformed themselves into the National Assembly.
The old State prison of the Bastille had fallen, symbol of
tyranny, scene of legends now exploded. Reforms both
wide and deep had been agreed on, privileges voluntarily
resigned ; the King had accepted changes which disarmed
and fettered the monarchy, and had he been such a man
as Henri Quatre, a popular leader rather than a driven
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The Queen and her Servants

victim, the ' principles of 1789 ' might have triumphed
without the bloodshed and wholesale destruction of follow-
ing years. His own weakness and the loyalty of his friends
and officers, who justly feared the violence of the Assembly,
hurried on catastrophes which suited the ends of his
enemies ; and the most powerful, the most cunning of
these were to be found in his own circle. The men of the
Terror, into whose hands the Revolution fell — it is the way
of revolutions — were not yet rulers of France. Modern
evidence goes to show that Philippe, Duke of Orleans, the
King's disloyal cousin, was the chief mover in a plot to
bring about the fall of royalty by sending the Parisian mob
to Versailles. The cry of dear and scarce bread was an
excuse for the ignorant, who were told that they had only to
fetch their King and Queen to Paris and all would be well.
Everything seemed peaceful enough on that autumn
afternoon. At Versailles the gardens and the park lay
quiet under a grey sky, yellow leaves drifting down from
the tall elms, fountains playing softly. Louis XVI was
shooting at Meudon, some miles away, tired of stormy
debate. Marie-Antoinette was alone at her beloved
Little Trianon. This small chateau and its surroundings,
given to her by the King long ago, had for some years been
her chief delight ; she had laid out the gardens in English
fashion, with winding walks and bridges and streams, had
built her little hamlet and toy farm, and with her children
and ladies had lived the ' simple life ' there as often as
Court engagements would allow. All the old eccentric
and gorgeous fashions had disappeared. A straw hat, a
plain muslin gown, a lace scarf: thus the Queen was
dressed as she walked in her garden and sat in her grotto
at Trianon on that October day, the last day of peace that
she was ever to know in this world. As to happiness, that
had long deserted her. The death of her eldest son, the

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Stories from French History

political troubles of the kingdom, the riots in the provinces
and the destruction of chateaux which had already led to
the emigration of many who should have been the King's
loyal friends ; the deaths of others who stood to their
posts ; the cruel insults levelled at herself and all dear
to her : no wonder that she sat thoughtful and uneasy,
wondering what the future had in store. Irresolute and
inactive as the King was, what fair judge could fail to see
that he meant to do his duty both to the nation in its new
needs and to the old trust of monarchy, the French
tradition handed down through so many centuries ? But
Louis was weak, and no one knew him better or mourned
his weakness more sadly than she. Mirabeau, a brilliant
observer, said later that the Queen was " the only man '
the King had about him.

As she sat there thinking, a letter was brought from the
palace begging her to return at once, for the people of
Paris were marching on Versailles with pikes and guns.
In the King's absence there was no one to give orders :
the Assembly was as much disturbed as the royal house-
hold itself.

The messenger vanished and Monsieur Charles stood
in his place : he had attended the Queen to Trianon, as
one of her most faithful servants and trusted friends. He
was now nearly forty years old. and twenty years of Court
life had altered him little : he seemed still the quiet native
of west-country woods. His father had died, luckily for
himself, before that rising of the peasants which left the
old manor a blazing ruin ; his mother, with his sisters and
brothers-in-law, had escaped with difliculty to the coast,
whence a friendly ship's captain carried them to England.
Charles had not married, in his own rank or any other.

As they returned to the palace the Queen asked him
what had become of young Armand, whose duty it would
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The Queen and her Servants

naturally have been to bring her the letter she had just
received.

" Madame, no one knows. Armand disappeared three
days ago."

" Not for the first time."

;'No, madame. It appears that Armand finds Paris
irresistible."

'What will be the end of it ! " said Marie- Antoinette
dreamily. " He is too young, poor boy : bad companions
may ruin him. You have often protected him, Charles,
but I have indulged him too far."

;' I fear, your Majesty, he is an ungrateful little hound."

The Queen smiled and sighed. " In these days, who
knows ! " she said. "My servants may be wise if they
seek more profitable service. But Armand is young to be
faithless. These new riots may bring him back to me."

Rain was softly beginning, twilight falling, as she went
forward to meet the hunger-army of Paris, storming at her
doors.

Where was Armand ?

Many accounts have been written, many pictures
painted, of the march of the women from Paris to Ver-
sailles. We see the mixed multitude, trampling through
the mud, up and down hill, between the misty masses of
autumn forest that covered heights and valleys to each
horizon. Thousands of the lowest women in Paris are
mingled with the thieves and bad characters of the city.
A few are on horseback, most on foot, ragged, barefooted,
an immense number hardly knowing why they are there,
except for the wild cries of " Bread, bread ! " but carried
along in the crowd to the rattle of drums, the rumble of
cannon-wheels ; for not content with nourishing pikes,
scythes, and muskets, the leaders are dragging along with
them three guns taken from the Hotel de Ville.

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Stories from French History

The crowd is split into groups, some far wilder and more
angry than others. Strange figures appear in these :
rouged, powdered, painted, wearing women's gowns ;
but men's feet in heavy shoes are plainly seen under the
draperies. Names are given to some of these people ;
names well known later in revolutionary history as be-
longing to Philippe Egalit^'s crew. To some of these
young men, no doubt, it was a merry adventure : to
go to Versailles in such company, bent on defying the
Assembly and insulting — if nothing worse — the King and
Queen. Worse, much worse, were the threats of one
desperate dancing group led by a tall lad with fair curls,
whose pretty baby face might indeed have belonged to the
slender woman whose skirts he wore. His pocket full of
bribes, his mouth of curses, and his envious heart eager for
some cruel vengeance on his best friends, young Armand
headed that group of Marie-Antoinette's enemies. In
this fashion did the riots bring him back to her.

Under heavy rain and darkening skies the procession
reached the Avenue de Paris, the stately approach between
formal rows of elms which led straight to the chateau ; and
we are told that as they advanced they shouted : " Vive le
Roi ! "

It was not that night, while the muddy and bedraggled
crowd were sleeping exhausted in the streets and courts of
Versailles or howling their threats under the windows, La
Fayette and his National Guards arriving from Paris,
those within the chateau wondering what the next few
hours might bring forth — it was not that night, but the
early morning, which found Armand ready to keep his
promise to his new friends, that he would lead them
straight to the Queen's bed-chamber ; and once there,
they might do what they pleased ! He was a valuable
all}-, for he knew every turn and corner in the labyrinth of
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The Queen and her Servants

rooms and passages which surrounded the royal apart-
ments. He knew a secret way into the gardens too, by
which he had more than once escaped and returned. By
that way, in the chilly dawn of the October morning, he
led a party of savage women, real and disguised, crying
in horrible language for the blood of Marie-Antoinette.
They were the first to enter the chateau, the vanguard of a
wild crowd that stormed its way in through the Courtyard
of the Princes and up the marble staircase between the
guardrooms and anterooms of the King and the Queen.

All the chateau was practically unguarded, for Louis XVI
had been advised by La Fayette to send his soldiers away,
except a few of the bodyguard who were to keep the
principal doors — but were ordered by the King not to fire
on the attacking crowd, or even to defend themselves.
He still trusted his people, and was probably the only
person in the chateau who slept that night.

One after another the brave guards were struck down.
Armand and his group were thundering at the doors of the
Queen's apartments, and her defenders had already the
worst of it when Monsieur Charles came flying to join
them.

" Time, time ! We must gain time ! " he cries to his
friends ; and then he turns on the leader of the mob.

" What, you, Armand ! You here, dressed up like a
miserable girl ! Do the ladies from Paris know that you
are one of her Majesty's favourite pages — that she saved
you from starvation, carried you in her arms, treated you
as a child of her own ! So false to her, can these ladies
know that you will not trick and deceive them ? '

The attack is so sudden and so strong, Charles's voice
rings so high and clear, that for an instant the fierce
creatures fall back. One even cries : " Then she is good,
the Queen ? ' Armand, glancing round in sudden terror,

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Stories from French History

sees scowling faces. Then he yells out : " Lies, lies ! I
hate the woman ! I have nothing to do with her ! '
swings his musket in the air and deals Monsieur Charles
a blow on the head which lays him senseless at his feet.
And the crowd storms on, shrieking with furious laughter.

We know that by a few minutes gained through the
heroic martyrdom of several of her loyal guards and
servants Marie-Antoinette was saved from the actual
hands of her enemies. But we can well believe that she
tasted something of the bitterness of death when she
looked down from the balcony of the chateau on the vast,
swaying, wavering, terrible crowd by which she and
Louis XVI and their children were to be escorted to Paris :
that crowd who bore the heads of faithful men on pikes,
and among whom, pressing on the coach, singing, laugh-
ing, triumphant, her tired eyes may have recognized in a
mad boy decked out like a girl the darling rosy Jacques
who once sat upon her knee.

Perhaps she foresaw that Armand would one day re-
deem himself. And indeed he did so in a measure three
years later, when, still a lad under twenty, he fought and
fell for France under General Dumouriez at the battle of
Jemappes.

That tragic journey of the King and Queen to Paris was
the end of the old monarchy of France and also of the glory
of Versailles.

23i

CHAPTER XXV

KING TERROR

He stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form.

ROBERT BROWNING

Uonibre livide

D'un peuple d'innoctnts qu'un tribunal perjide
Precipite dans le cercueil.

ANDRE CHEMER

WHAT was the Reign of Terror ?
Kings had ruled in France for many centuries,
but of not one of their reigns could it be justly
said that it was a reign of terror. Old times and old
traditions made the king the father of his people. Some-
times a bad father : selfish, luxurious, tyrannical, greedy,
thoughtless; sometimes just, generous, and kind. But
always the father : and even when incapable or unworthy,
as in the case of Charles VI or of Louis XV, still the Bien-
aime of his people. In their view he stood between them
and their oppressors, were these either foreign enemies or
feudal masters or the courtiers and tax-gatherers of later
centuries. The people of France were never afraid of
their kings, nor their kings of them. Louis XI was the
only one to whose reign the word ' terror ' applied ; and
then chiefly to his struggle with ambitious nobles ; citizen
and peasant had little cause for complaint.

When we look at the years from 1792 to 1704, during
which ' terror ' was the ruling power in France, and try
to understand what this vague and awful thing really
was, it is well to glance back to those first months of the

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Stories from French History

Revolution, when France was trembling in the shadow of
' the Great Fear.' Immediately after the destruction of
the Bastille, which foreshadowed to France the downfall
of her monarchy, a mysterious panic seized upon nearly
all the provinces. It was rumoured — few knew how or
whence — that armies of brigands were coming to destroy
everything ; that there was no longer any authority or
any safety in the kingdom. And then the peasants flew
to arms — not for the King's sake, who had lost his power,
but for their own ; then, in their madness, led on, some
say, by emissaries of the Revolution, they attacked the
chateaux to revenge old grievances by burning feudal
documents, thus thinking to protect themselves from
future demands for service or payment. The consequence
was that all went up in flames : papers, houses, possessions
of every kind ; and the owners were lucky if they escaped
with their lives. This was the work of la Grande Pcur.

The Terror, like the Fear, was panic. It threw the
Revolution into the hands of a few blood-stained fanatics,
afraid of a monarchist reaction, afraid of defeat by enemies
on the frontier, afraid of each other, afraid that France
would come to her senses and demand an account of their
desperate tyranny : afraid of any just comparison of the
present with the past. Its spirit can be judged by the
words of Robespierre : " The generation which has seen
the old regime will always regret it ; therefore every
individual who was more than fifteen years old in 1781)
ought to be killed." "Destroy them all," cries Collot
d'Herbois, another of the leaders. "Destroy them all,
and bury them in the soil of liberty."

All over France terror reigned, with its inseparable
companions, cruelly and general destruction. Let us
look especially at Paris, ' the city of light,' in those dark
days when the old world was crumbling. At first sight
23C

King Terror

you would say that she had not lost her gaiety. Her older
streets, mostly a tangle of cobbled lanes within a circle of
modern walls and gates, were still the " mixture of pomp
and beggary, filth and magnificence " described by an
English traveller not long before the fall of the Bastille.
The south bank of the Seine was still covered with con-
vents and colleges, old abbeys with their gardens, old
houses of the nobility with courtyards leading into narrow
streets. The great churches stood open, not now for re-
ligious services, but for political meetings, balls, banquets,
and the worship of the goddess ' Reason ' ; their ancient
tombs were rifled, their shrines and other treasures pillaged
or destroyed. Theatres and cafes were crowded ; shops
were besieged by queues of people, and after their market-
ing they danced and sang in the streets as of old, affecting
ignorance, says an eye-witness, of the horrors they dared
not oppose.

This may have been possible during the massacres at
the prisons, but was so no longer when the tall red machine,
the guillotine, invented as a humane substitute for the
axe and block of former ages, was doing its awful work in
the Place Louis- Quinze, now the Place de la Revolution.
There Louis XVI, long imprisoned with his family in the
tower of the Temple, was executed in the presence of a
great crowd on 21st January, 1793. The death of the good
King committed the Revolutionary leaders to the ' dark
frenzy ' of the Reign of Terror.

When Terror became, literally, ' the order of the day,'
the populace developed a kind of callous savagery. If
they wanted bread — and these were years of scarcity —
they pillaged the shops ; if they wanted amusement, what
could be more thrilling than the daily drama of life and
death acted before their staring eyes — from the mock
trials at the old palace on the Island, where Fouquier-

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Tinville, the infamous Public Accuser, demanded the
death penalty for batches of helpless victims, their ages
varying between eighty-eight and sixteen, to the passage
of the condemned through the streets and the shocking
spectacle of the executions ?

For the Parisian crowd the excitement of each day
began about four o'clock in the afternoon. Sanson, the
executioner, arrived at the Conciergerie, the prison close
to the Palais de Justice, whither hundreds of unfortunate
creatures of every age, every rank, and from every part of
the kingdom had been transferred on the previous day
from the other prisons of Paris to stand the trial at which
acquittal was a miracle : a miracle that did not happen
as the Terror went on deepening. They were marched
out now into the courtyard : a few weeping, the great
majority calm and brave ; they were crowded into the
carts, whips were cracked, wheels creaked and groaned ;
the slow progress through the streets began. The spring-
less carts with their tragic loads jolted and rumbled through
the deep uneven lanes of the Cite. Slowly, we are told,
they gained the Pont-Neuf, where the statue of Henri IV
stood no longer ; the Revolution had melted it down with
the church bells to make cannon. Slowly along the quays
and through the narrow streets they reached the old and
busy thoroughfare, the Rue Saint-Honore. A pushing
crowd kept them company with mockery and insulting
songs, pressing upon them as near as the armed guards
would permit. The windows were full of spectators, and
for the moment the shops were closed, but as soon as the
carts had passed on life resumed its ordinary course :
people went about their business, some hastening to hide
their tears in dark rooms or lonely lanes — for pity was a
crime — some marketing, some gossiping, some strolling
off in search of a new pastime : there were plenty to be
238

oo
m

_ H

m t5
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King Terror

found in the days before King Terror's hand became so
heavy that the boldest Republican dared hardly venture
outside his own door for fear of arrest and death.

All through the autumn and winter of 1793 to 1794, at
the hour of approaching sunset and reddening skies, with
jingling of harness and horses whipped into a gallop, that
awful cavalcade went plunging from the streets into the
wide open square, the Place de la Revolution. " There,"
says a French writer, " round the high guillotine, round
the plaster statue of Liberty already bronzed by the smoke
of blood, thousands of red-capped heads undulated like
a field of poppies. All those heads were gazing. . . ."
Idlers looked on from the Tuileries gardens, from the
Champs Elysees, from every window within sight.

The carts were emptied and the victims mounted the
steps. One after another they were bound, strapped,
flung down ; on one after another the knife descended.
Man, woman, or child, old or young, strong or helpless, all
met the same fate ; and as each head fell the crowd
shouted, waving caps and sticks. The same writer
declares that in the very shadow of the guillotine street-
criers were tinkling their little bells and selling cakes and
drinks, while pickpockets drove a lively trade.

Queen Marie-Antoinette travelled that way of the Cross
alone, exactly four years and ten days after the drive from
Versailles, and in the same sad weather of drizzling rain.
Who can forget the picture of ' the Widow Capet ' dressed
in white, a few grey locks, under the coarse cap, remaining
of her beautiful fair hair ; her hands tied, her worn face
fixed in proud unconsciousness, neither seeing nor hearing
the enormous crowd to whom, set high in the death-cart,
she is offered as a spectacle !

It was a strange Court that attended French royalty in
its progress into the unknown. There were personages of

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royal blood : the King's sister, the saintly Madame Elisa-
beth ; his cousin the traitor Duke of Orleans, who had
voted for his death. There were hundreds of men and
women bearing old, noble names, who had been too loyal
or too proud to save themselves by emigration. There
were bishops and priests, abbesses with their nuns. There
were men high in the law, among them the good and
courageous M. de Malesherbes, Turgot's friend, who came
forward in his old age to defend Louis XVI at his trial.
There were philosophers, men of science, men of business,
some of them the best and most liberal of citizens. There
were brave and enthusiastic women such as Charlotte
Corday and Madame Roland ; unhappy cowards such as
Madame du Barry. There were whole companies of the
men who in turn ruled the Revolution and were destroyed
by their rivals ; Girondins in the autumn followed by
Jacobins in the spring. Through the first half of the year
1794 no one was safe; every one was suspect; in that ex-
tremity of Terror it became necessary to keep the prisons
full. Madame la Guillotine must not be cheated of her daily
toll of heads ; for the safety of the rulers of the moment
depended on her. No wonder that pity was a crime.

There is no end to the romantic stories that have been
and will be told of tragic adventures and wonderful escapes
during those days. Most of them are founded on fact,
and many of them, in their pictures of gay courage and
unselfishness, are an honour to human nature. The fate
of one little family may be taken as typical of what many
had to expect and to endure.

A small, bright-eyed woman, plainly dressed in black,
carrying a milliner's box in one hand and clutching a
voung girl with the other, had hurried across the bridge
from the south bank and was now pushing her way along
the Rue Saint-Honore. Her errand was to a small shop

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King Terror

not far beyond the Church of Saint-Roch, a shop much
patronized by the ladies of the Revolution. The pro-
prietor, a leading Terrorist, knew Citoyenne Mercier as
the wife of a poor and crippled friend of his who lived near
the Luxembourg, and admired the nimble fingers which
twisted a bonnet-ribbon or twirled up a cockade to per-
fection. He also knew that this perfection had been learnt
in the workrooms of Mademoiselle Bertin, the late Queen's
milliner, who had escaped to England early in the Revolu-
tion. He kept the secret in his own interest and that of
Jeanne Mercier 's husband.

The little woman worked hard to keep her Jules and the
one child left to them : two had died in that winter of
sickness and privation. Natalie had recovered in the
sunshine of a lovely spring, and now Citoyen Picot, the
man-milliner, had offered to take her as an apprentice
without premium. It was a favour : for in May 1794 his
trade was at a low ebb. Paris was half empty and
wrapped in gloom ; every life lay at the mercy of Robes-
pierre, Fouquier, and their small gang, of whom Picot
was one. But he and they believed in a better time com-
ing, ' the Reign of Virtue,' France being purified in blood.
And Natalie, with her mother's clever ringers, inherited
her mother's dainty taste. She was her father's child in
enthusiasm for the new world that was dawning so darkly.
She was willing to push him about the streets in his chair,
even as far as the dreadful precincts of the guillotine itself.
He told her that all the wicked people in France were
being destroyed there. So little Natalie, with her jaunty
red cap and cockade, was a child of the Revolution.
Citoyen Picot risked nothing by employing her.

Jeanne Mercier went about her business silently, a faith-
ful wife and mother. Jules and Natalie understood that
she hated the sight and smell of blood. It seemed less

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reasonable that she should catch at any chance of avoiding
the death-carts, so common a spectacle in the Rue Saint-
Ilonore and so entertaining in the variety of their loads.

On that stormy 10th of May— 21st Floreal by the Re-
publican calendar — at least one victim of real distinction
was to make her last journey. Jules Mercier knew this ;
and he and Natalie conspired to delay Jeanne in starting,
so that she and the girl might be overtaken by the carts
before they reached Picot's shop. It happened as they
had planned. About the Church of Saint-Roch — its front
now decorated with tricolour flags and red caps on pikes-
the crowd was so dense that Jeanne and Natalie could go
no farther.

They stood at the foot of the steps and watched and
listened, Natalie in eager curiosity, Jeanne nervous and
trembling, while rumbling from the east, through lines of
strangely silent people, the procession of carts came jolt-
ing over the stones. There were twenty-four persons to
be guillotined that day. Among them were old ladies,
jroung officers, an archbishop, a canon of Notre-Pame, a
chemist of the Rue Saint-Honore, several servants and poor
people. But one held all eyes, bare-headed, for the strong
wind on the bridge had torn away the handkerchief that
covered her hair, and now the soft curls were blown about
her fine, delicate face. Elisabeth of France had for years
been known as a saint, even by the rough fish-women of
Paris. In her peace and innocence, serenity and courage, she
was like a guardian angel that day among her companions,
and the beautiful sight of her struck the crowd dumb.

Poor little Jeanne Mercier turned aside and sobbed.
Natalie grasped her arm.

" Mother, mother, what are you doing ? '

" I cannot bear it. I went once to her house — Made-
moiselle Bertin sent me. She was so kind, so sweet, so
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King Terror

pleased with the pretty hat — these hands made it — oh,
mv God, what horrors ! "

V '

The carts had passed on. Some one touched Jeanne on
the shoulder and her tearful eyes looked up into the dark,
wild face of a Jacobin commissary.

"What, weeping for the tyrant's sister? Thou
shouldst be in the cart with her ! '

' No, no ! We are employed by Citoyen Picot," cried
Natalie.

The face became cruel. "Ha! Suspect! We must
see to this."

On a later day Jeanne learned that the zealous com-
missary was not only a friend of Fouquier-Tinville the in-
satiable, but an enemy of Picot, who had helped to send
his brother to the scaffold a month before in the same
batch with Danton and Camille Desmoulins. But that
night it was like an awful, impossible dream to find herself
and Natalie, with Jules Mercier and Citizen Picot and his
family, sleeping in a prison instead of under their own roof.

Jeanne, who had been touched by human sympathy and
the pity of it all, who had shrunk trembling from the sight of
blood and the mocking multitude, and yet had gone duti-
fully to her work each day, now showed herself the bravest
of that sad little company. Picot raged ; Jules, the cynical,
laughed and sobbed alternately; Natalie wept and shivered,
her fair head in her mother's arms ; Jeanne alone was calmly
courageous. She did but follow the example of nearly all
the prisoners, most of them there for no better reason. As
an instance, one poor little couple who owned a marionette-
show had been arrested because their ' Charlotte Corday '
was too pretty. She cost them their lives.

In the black and poisonous underground rooms where
all were flung together, high and low, sick and well, ill-
lodged, ill-fed ; where no gleam of May sunshine could

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reach them ; where doors and gates were only thrown
open for the entry of more prisoners or the going forth of
those who passed on to the Conciergerie and the guillotine
—in these rooms men and women talked and laughed
agreeably, invented little occupations, showed kindness to
the helpless and suffering, comforted the sad. Thus they
kept themselves ready for the roll-call that thinned their
numbers day by day.

As summer days lengthened and shortened the group
swept in on 10th May grew smaller. Picot and his wife
were the first to go : the commissary wanted his revenge.
Jules Mercier the cripple, Picot's friend, followed him a
week later. Then Jeanne and Natalie expected that every
morning would be their last, not guessing that their enemy
himself had travelled the same road.

The oppressive days dragged on and on ; and at length,
when July was nearly over, one of the great dates in
French history — 9th Thermidor — gave France freedom to
breathe and to speak again. For Robespierre was dead,
and King Terror died with him.

The prison doors were soon opened, and among the
liberated captives two little women set out for their home,
dizzy in the fresh air, limbs shaking, and eyes dazzled by
the sunshine. A young fellow-prisoner, Picot's son, whose
existence had luckily been forgotten, walked beside them
and helped Jeanne with his strong arm. He and Natalie
had discovered in prison that they loved each other, and
for them the future was bright with hope.

"We will open the shop again," he said. ' We will make
our fortune. Thy mother is the best milliner in France,
Natalie; she made becoming hats and caps for les ci-dcvanln.
Yes : I have heard my father say so, when he did not know
I was there. Courage, citoyennes ; our day is coining ! '

" Your day, my children ! " Jeanne Mercier sighed.
244

CHAPTER XXVI
VIVE L'EMPEREUR!

To-day there is no cloud upon thy face,

Paris, fair city of romance and doom !
Thy memories do not grieve thee, and no trace

Lives of their tears for us who after come.

For thus it is. You flout at kings to-day.

To-morrow in your pride you shall stoop low
To a new tyrant who shall come your way.

WILFRID SCAWEX BLUNT

On parhra de sa yloire

Sous le chaume lien longtemps.

P. J. DE BEKANGER

PERHAPS, in some old French town, some of us
may have stood at a window to watch a students'
pageant winding along the narrow street : one of
those educational pageants known as promenades d travers
les ages and intended as object-lessons in French history.
The characters, riding or walking, were dressed for their
parts in the fashion of each time, and their ornaments and
weapons flashed in the sunlight. There were Gauls,
fiercely helmeted ; Roman warriors with gleaming shields ;
long-haired Merovingians ; medieval kings ; Jeanne the
Maid with her banner ; splendid monarchs of the Renais-
sance ; Henri Quatre with his traditional white plume ;
Louis Quatorze in the majesty of the Grand Siecle. Then
followed the men of the Revolution, when the great wheel
had turned and all those splendours had passed away ;
red caps and pikes surrounding a model of la sainte Guillo-
tine. And last of all a short man riding a white horse ; a

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man with straight black hair, straight pale features, dark
glowing eyes ; dressed in a grey greatcoat open over a
green coat with a star, white breeches and high boots and
a plain cocked hat. And for us who gazed from the
window it was a striking fact that the crowd up and down
the street, who had been content to stare silently while
eighteen centuries of their national history passed by,
broke into sudden applause with clapping of hands at the
sight of Napoleon.

Seldom in the world have the man and the opportunity
met more remarkably than in the case of that little
Corsican soldier. The great country of France with its
far-extended frontiers and its thirty-four old provinces—
lately subdivided into departments, but all, from Beam,
Roussillon, and Provence to Normandy, Picardy, and
Artois, from Brittany and Poitou to Alsace and Franchc-
Comte, differing in thousands of ways, soil, character,
customs, industries — had been profoundly shaken by the
Revolutionary earthquake. And France was at war with
Europe ; and, heroic and often victorious as her armies
were, she needed a different rule from that of the
National Convention if she was to keep her place in the
front rank of the nations. The Convention had pulled
the ancient fabric down : other hands must restore
and build up. This was the situation that gave genius
its opportunity ; and genius came from the southern sea
in the shape of a young Artillery officer, Napoleon
Buonaparte.

He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1795 to find the
strangest state of things, both in politics and society, that
the brilliant and changeable city ever knew. The Terror
was past, but the men of the Terror, those who survived
the 9th Thermidor, were still in power, and now busy
arranging for their own permanent rule by re-electing

Vive PEmpereur !

themselves with a new Constitution and a gorgeous figure-
head of five Directors dressed in Court costume of Fran-
cois I, velvet and gold embroidery, coloured sashes, cloaks
of the finest cloth, velvet caps with white curling feathers.
This absurd masquerade expressed the violent reaction
from red caps and carmagnole jackets and the gloom of the
Revolution which had flung Paris and all France into a
whirl of mad gaiety. Paris was dancing, banqueting,
gambling, speculating, making fortunes, while her poorer
people were starving and wild with discontent, her streets
falling into decay and her shops crammed with relics of
the old ruined aristocracy, furniture, pictures, clothes, to
be bought for a mere song. The beautiful hair of many
victims of the guillotine, made into fashionable wigs,
adorned the silly heads of the women in clinging garments
and sandals who danced with the ridiculous young men in
long coats, short waistcoats, tight trousers, pointed shoes,
immense cravats covering their chins ; young men nick-
named incroyables, who lisped fashionably and cultivated
affectation as a fine art. If this new society meant a
certain degree of political reaction, the elegance, good
taste, and cultivation of a former regime were conspicuously
absent. And with such a man as Barms, ci-devant noble
and first of the Directors, as its leader, the new society's
morals did not gain by the change.

Napoleon Buonaparte's fortunes were at a low ebb when
he came to Paris, where Barras was almost his only friend.
Yet he had served and gained his experience in the
Republican army. But an admirer of Robespierre could
expect no favour in 1795, and though already a general,
he had been dismissed from active service and was poor
and desperate enough when he told Barras that he meant
to volunteer into the Turkish army. It was his idea that
the East was the most certain path to glory. History

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might have been oddly changed if Napoleon had con-
quered Europe from Constantinople.

Then came the riots of 4th and 5th October (12th and
13th Vendemiaire), when several of the Paris ' sections ' rose
against the new Constitution and marched 40,000 strong
to attack the National Convention at the Tuileries. The
Government troops having at first given way — possibly
that mingled crowd of strange allies, extreme Jacobins
and returned or hidden Royalists, found sympathizers
among them — Barras, in the name of the Convention, called
upon little General Buonaparte, sitting in the gallery, who
would not, he said, be hindered by scruples in doing his
duty. This was in the evening. While their new com-
mander made his preparations, collecting his guns and
posting his men, the Convention spent an uncomfortable
night of anxiety. In the morning things looked serious,
for the insurgents were on the way to surround the
Tuileries, having occupied the Pont-Neuf and the Rue
Saint-Honore. The day wore on ; the Convention was
terrified ; but Napoleon would not move till he was ready.
No weakness or humanity delayed the soldier who meant
to make sure of success. At four o'clock his guns blazed
from the bridges and in the narrow streets. A picture of
the time shows the work of that " whiff of grape-shot '
which first made Paris acquainted with Napoleon : the
tall houses in the Rue Saint-Honore, their fronts obscured
by smoke ; the steps under the pillared front of Saint-
Roch, hotly defended and strewn with dead and
wounded men. This, it seems, was the centre of the
fighting. Saint-Roch bears the marks to this da)'.
Thus Napoleon saved the worn-out Convention and
gave the Directory those few years of power, foolishly
and dishonestly used, which wearied France of the dis-
orders of so-called liberty and prepared her for a soldier's
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Vive PEmpereur !

rule. " No one regretted the Directory, except the five
Directors."

In the autumn of 1799 the brilliant victor of Italy and
Egypt destroyed this helpless Government and made him-
self First Consul of the French Republic. And if Napoleon
could have been contented to use the political side of his
marvellous genius, restoring his exhausted country, re-
establishing religion, making the wise laws which are the
foundation of French life to-day, his name would have
stood high among the world's benefactors. But his
ambition soared beyond all this, and his chief passion was
for ' glory ' of another kind.

The year 1802 sees him, one may say, at the real
zenith of his career. He is now at the beginning of the
thirteen years during which his name was to dominate
Europe, and in course of which, in spite of all his triumphs
and conquests, its first fine lustre was gradually to be
dimmed. But no shadow of the future falls on the most
gorgeous scene of his whole life and perhaps the most
splendid the old cathedral ever saw, his coronation in
Notre-Dame on 2nd December, 1804. Pope Pius VII
travelled from Rome to give him the Imperial crown
with the " sceptre of Charlemagne."

Notre-Dame glows with colour and gilding : its old
walls and arches are hung with magnificent tapestry ;
nave and choir wave with feathers, flash with jewels,
rustle with satin and brocade. All Napoleon's new
princes and princesses, dukes, counts and barons, generals
and marshals, make a dazzling congregation such as the
old Court never surpassed, if it ever equalled. Stately
music rolls down the aisles, while the dim light of the
December day steals in through rich windows paled by
the flame of a thousand candles.

It is very cold. The aged Pope in his white vestments,

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majestic, frail to look upon, his dark eyes veiled with sad-
ness, has long to wait and to shiver before the new master
of France, who has not learned that " punctuality is the
politeness of kings," enters the cathedral with his wife
Josephine at the end of a splendid procession. Napoleon's
appearance in his coronation robes is singularly fine.
Once, in poverty and shabbiness, so yellow and haggardly
thin as to be almost ugly, ease and triumphant fortune
now show his Greek features and clear olive skin in their
natural beauty. Already he wears a crown of gold laurel
leaves. His long robe is of crimson velvet embroidered
with gold ; over it hangs the collar of his new order, the
Legion of Honour, in large diamonds ; the Imperial robe
of purple velvet and ermine sweeps from his shoulders.
The Empress Josephine, on that day the proudest and
happiest woman in France, wears white satin and blazes
with jewels. When she married the little Corsican officer
in 1796, who could have foretold this ? And who, in 1804,
could be bold enough to prophesy a hidden future ?

As the Imperial procession enters Notre-Dame a sudden
and tremendous shout of " Vive VEmpereur ! ' bursts
from the multitude gathered there. And presently, after
the anointing and blessing of Emperor and Empress, when
the Pope is about to proceed to the actual coronation,
Napoleon — the colossal pawenu, a great French writer
called him — takes the crown and places it on his own
head, afterward with his own hands crowning Josephine.
And then those old walls echo back the selfsame chant
that saluted the Emperor Charlemagne in St Peter's at
Rome on Christmas Day a thousand years before : ' Vival
in ceternum semper Augustus! '

Truly an amazing sequel to the Revolution !

Let us glance on through eight years of what Napoleon
called ' glory.' His great army with its eagle standards

The Coronation of Napoleon
Baron Myrbach

250

Vive 1'Empereur !

victorious everywhere ; his soldiers, especially the famous
Old Guard, his personal slaves ; his Empire extending
east, north, and south ; his brothers and sisters reigning
over the kingdoms of Europe ; his subjects dazzled and
breathless, some adoring, others, chiefly women, suffering
too sharply under the sacrifice of all the brave youth of
France that his conquests demanded ; but all proud of
the hero who made the nation invincible. All had to
give way, at home and abroad, before his conquering
march : Josephine, divorced and forsaken, saw an
Austrian princess in her place and a baby heir at the
Tuileries. Society bowed before a ruler more absolute
and more tyrannical than any king ; gentle by birth, it is
true, yet without the instincts or the manners of a gentle-
man ; fascinating yet brutal ; of boundless genius and
equally boundless selfishness.

And then came the beginning of Napoleon's downfall :
the Russian campaign where he really met his match for
the first time, not in the shape of any mortal magnate's
army, but in that of Winter, a stronger monarch than all.

November 1812 : the eagles in full retreat ; blazing
Moscow and great tracts of devastated country behind the
Grand Army, which had marched into Russia in the heat
of early autumn and was now struggling back toward
Smolensk and the rivers Dnieper, Beresina, and Niemen ;
no longer in military array, but wandering in scattered
bands through the fog-bound forests, tormented by hover-
ing Cossacks and hungry wolves, fighting blinding snow-
storms which blotted out the only road, paralysed by
bitter frost, no shelter, no food. It was a large army, for
those days, that had set out with Napoleon to conquer
Russia : 600,000 men. Long before the disastrous retreat
had crossed the frontier the numbers had gone down to
55,000. Only 20,000 reached Kovno on the Niemen ;

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and most of these were living skeletons who had thrown
away their weapons.

But in the many stories of that time one never reads
that the soldiers of the Grand Army — certainly not those
of the Old or the Young Guard — had a word of reproach
for the Emperor who was the cause of all their sufferings.
They never lost faith in him. Nothing was impossible to
him. He must succeed in the end ; and all these terrible
scenes were part of the fortune of war.

Two young grenadiers of the Guard, neighbours at
home in France, went through the horrors of the Russian
retreat together. They saw and suffered strange things
in a world like the wildest visions of poets such as Dante
or Victor Hugo. It was dark, and the whirling wind was
full of thick snow which made all objects invisible, except
at moments the tall pine and birch trees, beneath whose
great stems and dark canopied heads no clear path could
be found. Once away from the road, its sides heaped
with dead horses and men, white frozen mounds glimmer-
ing in the ghastly twilight, it was soon impossible to find
the way back to that small chance of safety. Plunging
among the trees, their comrades lost, their uniform in
rags, sometimes up to their shoulders in snow, these two
friends dragged each other out of icy hollows, tried to help
the wounded who were of necessity left behind, tried to
light fires, to make soup of horse-flesh, to gain a little of
that blessed sleep from which thousands like them never
woke again. They had many wild adventures and saw
many unforgettable sights. They saw miserable wounded
men trying to shelter themselves within the bodies of dead
horses ; whole circles of dead men lying with their feet to
a dead fire, while ravens hovered above. They saw a
trumpeter standing erect, frozen in death, his trumpet at
his lips. They saw soldiers carrying their wounded

Vive PEmpereur !

officers for leagues on their shoulders, or passing the night
grouped round a young commander to save his life by the
warmth of their own bodies. And it snowed and snowed :
and the lost army seemed to be following a lost leader.

One day at dawn, when the fugitive host was not far
from the fatal crossing of the Beresina, the two grenadiers
saw their hero again. They had regained the road, and
the head of the Imperial column loomed up a pale phan-
tom through the mist. A number of officers, some on
horseback, many on foot, lame, and worn with hunger ;
a few of the cavalry of the Guard ; and then Napoleon
walking, surrounded by his princes and generals, wrapped
in a great fur cloak, a stick in his hand, and on his head
a velvet cap edged with black fox fur. The young men's
tears ran down to make fresh icicles on their frozen
moustaches.

" Am I asleep or awake ? " said one to the other. " I
weep to see our Emperor marching on foot — he who is so
great, he of whom we are so proud ! Vive rEmpereitr ! '

Napoleon turned and looked at them : he never forgot
a soldier of his Guard.

After the Beresina, when most of the men and horses
remaining to the Grand Army were whirling down its ice-
laden torrent amid storms of wind and snow, the Emperor's
staff could not find fuel enough to keep him warm in his
plank shelter. They sent round to the bivouacs of the
shivering soldiers to ask for dry wood ; and there was not
a man, we are told, who refused to give the best he had.
"Even the dying lifted their heads once more to say:
' Take it for the Emperor.' "

And Napoleon left the remnant of his ruined army to
live or die as they might, and started off in furious haste
for Paris, where the plots of the discontented were already
threatening his dynasty. Fresh armies must be raised

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Stories from French History

in exhausted France : fresh victories must make him
secure. Hut all this could only delay by a few months
the day when the conqueror of Europe, defeated and for-
saken, was to find his rule limited to the little island of
Elba.

The end was not yet : " the violet returns with the
spring." Such words as these were whispered through-
out France before the coast of old Provence had witnessed
one of the most striking scenes in its long history. In his
boyhood Napoleon had sailed to France over that tideless
sea ; its waves had carried him lately into banishment ;
and now, on a cloudless March afternoon in 1815, he
landed in the Golfe Jouan with 11,000 men to reconquer
his Empire. The sun shone brilliantly ; the Mediterranean
trembled under the cold wind, all dark blue ripples edged
with silver foam. The pine-trees and the grey olives
threw a warm sheltering shadow, and as the day advanced
the sunlight touched the snowy range of the Maritime Alps
with gold and red.

Napoleon ordered his men to light a fire on the shore,
and he waited there through the evening and part of the
night, his ships anchored in the bay, detachments of his
Guard visiting Cannes and Antibes and other towns and
villages in search of food and horses. They met with
little resistance, though little welcome. France was UOAV
ruled by Louis XVIII, and though the returned Bourbons
and their followers were hardly popular, France for the
time seemed tired of war and of ' glory.'

It was a romantic scene that night on the shore of the
little bay. Bright stars were shining ; the wind ruffled
the flames of Napoleon's bivouac fire. He sat near it on
a military chest, wrapped in his greatcoat, surrounded
by maps of the country, buried in anxious and gloomy
thought ; for though he had assured his officers and men
254

Vive 1'Empereur !

that he would return to Paris without firing a shot, he was
far too clever not to realize the difficulties of his adventure.
As he sat there the bells of the old church at Cannes
clanged out the angelus and the curfew. The dark masses
of the woods, olives below, pines above, hid the valleys
and the roads that climbed to the mountain wall, the wall
of France against a southern invader. All Napoleon's
hopes and ambitions lay beyond that high mysterious
wall. He meant to cross it, confident in his star, in the
magic of his name and the love of his old soldiers. He
would speak to them as a son of the Revolution of 1789,
as the healer of the wounds the Terror had left, and the
soldier whom the powers of nature alone had been able
utterly to overwhelm.

They say that an old Royalist of Cannes crept down to
the shore that night with his old gun, intending to shoot
the returned usurper. But he was stopped in the very
moment of taking aim by a friend who had followed him,
fearing the consequences of such a deed. For Cannes was
undefended, and Napoleon's Old Guard would have taken
a speedy revenge.

We may follow Napoleon a little farther. In a few days
he had crossed the mountains and was approaching
Grenoble, the fortified capital of Dauphine, strongly garri-
soned by Royalist troops. Napoleon and his escort were
met by a detachment sent out to prevent his advance to
the walls. He walked forward alone to meet them.

" Comrades, do you know me ? I am your Emperor,
your father. Fire on me if you will ! '

" Vive VEmpereur ! "

The troops of Grenoble are at Napoleon's feet. Eagle
standards and tricolour cockades appear as if by magic,
and he marches triumphant on his way.

At Lyons it is the same story : and the journey on to

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Stories from French History

Fontainebleau and Paris, ending in a wonderful reception
at the Tuileries, is one of ever-increasing enthusiasm.
Once again kings and princes fly before the conquering
name of Napoleon.

The news of that month of March 1815, one startling
event following another, was announced by the journals
with swift changes of tone such as these :

" The Monster has escaped from Elba."

' General Buonaparte has reached Grenoble."
' Napoleon is at Lyons."

" His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Napoleon has
arrived at the Tuileries."

A hundred days later Napoleon fought and lost the
battle of Waterloo. And then,

O wild St Helen ! very still she kept him,

till his bones were brought back to Paris and laid in that
tomb under the stately dome of Louis XIV's Invalides
which is to this day, and for all the nations of the world,
a place of pilgrimage.

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