Paris and Its Story
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Title: Paris and Its Story
Author: Thomas Okey
Illustrator: Katharine Kimball
O. F. M. Ward
Release date: April 6, 2014 [eBook #45336]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
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The illustrations have been moved from mid-paragraph for ease of
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PARIS AND ITS STORY
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: RUE ST. ANTOINE.]
PARIS
AND ITS STORY
BY
T. OKEY
[Illustration: colophon]
ILLUSTRATED BY
KATHERINE KIMBALL
& O. F. M. WARD
1904
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
"I will not here omit, that I never rail so much against France as
to be out of humour with _Paris_; that city has ever had my heart
from my infancy; and it has fallen out to me, as of excellent
things, that the more of other fine cities I have seen since, the
more the beauty of this gains upon my affections. I love it for its
own sake, and more for its own native being than the addition of
foreign pomp; I love it tenderly even with all its warts and
blemishes. I am not a Frenchman but by this great city great in
people, great in the felicity or her situation, but above all great
and incomparable in variety and diversity of commodities; the glory
of France and one of the most noble ornaments of the world."
MONTAIGNE.
"Quand Dieu eslut nonante et dix royaumes
Tot le meillor torna en douce France."
COURONNEMENT LOYS.
PREFACE
The History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French
monarchy. The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to
narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus
indicated, dwelling, however, in the earlier chapters rather more on its
legendary aspect than perhaps an austere historical conscience would
approve. But it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories,
which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner
in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and
in painting on the decoration of her architecture both modern and
ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways. Within the limits
of time and space allotted for the work no more than an imperfect
outline of a vast subject has been possible. The writer has essayed to
compose a story of, not a guide to, Paris. Those who desire the latter
may be referred to the excellent manuals of Murray, Bædeker and of Grant
Allen--the last named being an admirable companion for the
artistically-minded traveller. In controversial matter, such, for
instance, as the position of the ancient Grand Pont, the writer has
adopted the opinions of the most recent authorities.
The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian
city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris
is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young
giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her outworn
garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown
squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride
abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the
mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic
tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death. Paris has more
than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman, and Briton,
Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of
civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from
her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.
Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a two-fold calamity of foreign
invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble
insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has
doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in
1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe
to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most
delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet
withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and
peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to
the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic
consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference,
and over her gates to-day one may read, _Entrée de Paris_. The Parisian
is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his
city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials
of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediæval times. Busy multitudes
of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students
stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost
parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University.
The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely
taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his
satchel a prime minister's portfolio or the insignia of a president of
the republic, even as his mediæval prototype bore a bishop's mitre or a
cardinal's hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still
vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois
placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of
a François Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul
Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of
Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the
Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crisis of her
history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us
remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with
that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have
been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by
social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for
which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.
Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits
through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in
ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause
of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat,
easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual
culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so
intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official
charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an
interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress.
If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediæval and modern, be
of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the
prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, "Now, was there ever people so
vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far."[2] Of their
imperturbable gaiety and the avidity for new things we have ample
testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France,
and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of
Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the
parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the
ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of
coming changes. The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt
Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours a century and a
half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had
organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris
became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of
the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large
measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in
art, science and literature was drawn within her walls until, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning,
taste and culture in Europe.[3] During the first Empire and the
Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the
Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific,
artistic and literary activity made Paris the _Ville Lumière_ of Europe.
Paris is still the city in Europe where the things of the mind and of
taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and
pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social
existence, _l'art des plaisirs fins_, are most highly developed and most
widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris
that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent
of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates
the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could
estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of
the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more
intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and
material phases, is less gross and coarse,[4] its pleasures more refined
than in London. It is impossible to conceive the pit of a London
theatre stirred to fury by a misplaced adjective in a poetical drama, or
to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at
the cheap holiday performances at the Français or the Odéon, where the
severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the
well-worn comedies of Molière or of Beaumarchais are played with small
lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a
popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of
phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle
comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a _première_ at the
Français is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and
stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the
points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between
the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the
whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured
"overture"--three knocks on the boards--dating back to Roman times when
the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the
audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor's approach to the
front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and
Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the
press, that "the piece we have had the honour of playing" is by such a
one--all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the
foreign spectator.
The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The
custom of the _queue_ is a spontaneous expression of his love of
fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A
spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885,
the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in
London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the
clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth
to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc
de Triomphe, and by their multitudinous presence honoured his remains
borne on a poor bare hearse to their last resting-place in the Panthéon.
Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the
_petite bourgeoisie_, assembled to do homage to the memory of the poet
of democracy, scarcely an _agent_ was seen; the people were their own
police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the
sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the
most advanced in Europe, and it is to Paris that the dearest hopes and
deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in
"The struggle, and the daring rage divine for liberty,
Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast dreams of brotherhood."
It now remains for the writer to acknowledge his indebtedness to the
following among other authorities, which are here enumerated to obviate
the necessity for the use of repeated footnotes, and to indicate to
readers who may desire to pursue the study of the history of Paris in
more detail, some works among the enormous mass of literature on the
subject that will repay perusal.
For the general history of France the monumental _Histoire de France_
now in course of publication, edited by E. Lavisse; Michelet's _Histoire
de France_, _Récits de l'Histoire de France_, and _Procès des
Templiers_; Victor Duruy, _Histoire de France_; _Histoire de France
racontée par les Contemporains_, edited by B. Zeller; Carl Faulmann,
_Illustrirte Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst_; the Chronicles of Gregory
of Tours, Richer, Abbo, Joinville, Villani, Froissart, Antonio Morosini;
De Comines; _Géographie Historique_, by A. Guerard; Froude's essay on
the Templars; Jeanne d'Arc, Maid of Orleans, by T. Douglas Murray;
_Paris sous Philip le Bel_, edited by H. Geraud.
For the later Monarchy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the
Histories of Carlyle, Mignet, Michelet and Louis Blanc; the _Origines de
la France Contemporaine_, by Taine; the _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol.
VIII.; the Memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon, of Madame Campan, Madame
Vigée-Lebrun, of Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Paul Louis Courier;
the _Journal de Perlet_; _Histoire de la Societé Française pendant la
Revolution,_ by J. de Goncourt; Goethe's _Die Campagne in Frankreich_,
1792; _Légendes et Archives de la Bastille_, by F. Funck Brentano; Life
of Napoleon I., by J. Holland Rose; _L'Europe et la Revolution
Française_ by Albert Sorel; _Contemporary American Opinion of the French
Revolution_, by C. D. Hazen. For the particular history of Paris, the
exhaustive and comprehensive _Histoire de la Ville de Paris_, by the
learned Benedictine priests, Michel Félibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau;
the so-called _Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris_, edited by L. Lalanne;
_Paris Pendant la Domination Anglaise_, by A. Longnon; the more modern
_Paris à Travers les Ages_, by M. F. Hoffbauer, E. Fournier and others;
the _Topographie Historique du Vieux Paris_, by A. Berty and H. Legrand.
Howell's _Familiar Letters_, Coryat's _Crudities_, and Evelyn's _Diary_,
contain useful matter. For the chapters on Historical Paris, E.
Fournier's _Promenade Historique dans Paris_, _Chronique des Rues de
Paris_, _Enigmes des Rues des Paris_; the Marquis de Rochegude's _Guide
Pratique à Travers le Vieux Paris_, and the excellent _Nouvel Itinéraire
Guide Artistique et Archéologique de Paris_, by C. Normand, now
appearing in fascicules published by the _Société des Amis des Monuments
Parisiens_, have been largely drawn upon and supplemented by
affectionate memories of an acquaintance with the city dating back for
more than thirty years, and by notes of pilgrimages, under the guidance
of a member of the Positivist Society of Paris, made in 1891 through
revolutionary Paris and Versailles.
For personal help and information the writer desires to express his
obligations to Monsieur Lafenestre, Director of the Louvre: Monsieur L.
Bénédite, Director of the Luxembourg; Monsieur G. Redon, architect of
the Louvre and the Tuileries; Professor A. Legros; and for help in
proof-reading to Mr James Britten.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
GALLO-ROMAN PARIS 1
CHAPTER II
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS--ST. GENEVIEVE--THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS--THE
MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY 12
CHAPTER III
THE CARLOVINGIANS--THE GREAT SIEGE OF PARIS BY THE NORMANS--THE GERMS OF
FEUDALISM 29
CHAPTER IV
THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS 45
CHAPTER V
PARIS UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS 61
CHAPTER VI
ART AND LEARNING AT PARIS 79
CHAPTER VII
THE PARLEMENT--THE STATES-GENERAL--CONFLICT WITH BONIFACE VIII.--THE
DESTRUCTION OF THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS 103
CHAPTER VIII
ETIENNE MARCEL--THE ENGLISH INVASIONS--THE MAILLOTINS--MURDER OF THE
DUKE OF ORLEANS--ARMAGNACS AND BURGUNDIANS 117
CHAPTER IX
JEANNE D'ARC--PARIS UNDER THE ENGLISH--END OF THE ENGLISH
OCCUPATION 131
CHAPTER X
LOUIS XI. AT PARIS--THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING 138
CHAPTER XI
FRANCIS I.--THE RENAISSANCE AT PARIS 145
CHAPTER XII
RISE OF THE GUISES--HUGUENOT AND CATHOLIC--THE MASSACRE OF ST.
BARTHOLOMEW 161
CHAPTER XIII
HENRY III.--THE LEAGUE--SIEGE OF PARIS BY HENRY IV.--HIS CONVERSION,
REIGN, AND ASSASSINATION 175
CHAPTER XIV
PARIS UNDER RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 192
CHAPTER XV
THE GRAND MONARQUE--VERSAILLES AND PARIS 209
CHAPTER XVI
PARIS UNDER THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV.--THE BROODING STORM 227
CHAPTER XVII
LOUIS XVI.--THE GREAT REVOLUTION--FALL OF THE MONARCHY 243
CHAPTER XVIII
EXECUTION OF THE KING--PARIS UNDER THE FIRST REPUBLIC--THE
TERROR--NAPOLEON--REVOLUTIONARY AND MODERN PARIS 259
CHAPTER XIX
HISTORICAL PARIS--THE CITÉ--THE UNIVERSITY QUARTER--THE VILLE--THE
LOUVRE--THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE--THE BOULEVARDS 281
CHAPTER XX
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE--THE OPERA--SOME FAMOUS CAFÉS--CONCLUSION 321
INDEX 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS
BY O. F. M. WARD
RUE ST. ANTOINE _Frontispiece_
POINT DU JOUR _facing page_ 5
ROMAN BATHS IN MUSÉE DE CLUNY " " 8
BOIS DE BOULOGNE--LAC SUPÉRIEUR " " 19
RUE ST. JACQUES " " 23
ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE " " 26
PORT DES ORMES " " 37
L'INSTITUT DE FRANCE " " 44
HOTEL GEROUILHAC " " 51
ST. ETIENNE DU MONT AND TOUR DE CLOVIS " " 62
VINCENNES " " 68
RUE DE VENISE " " 77
LA SAINTE CHAPELLE " " 86
THE SEINE FROM PONT DA LA CONCORDE " " 93
LE PETIT PONT " " 100
ILE DE LA CITÉ " " 109
THE SEINE AT ALFORTVILLE " " 117
ON THE QUAI DES GRANDS AUGUSTINS " " 124
NOTRE DAME FROM THE NORTH " " 132
PORCH OF ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS " " 141
RUE ROYALE " " 146
BOULEVARD ST. MICHEL " " 155
LUXEMBOURG GARDENS " " 165
THE LOUVRE--GALERIE D'APOLLON " " 172
ST. GERVAIS " " 178
LUXEMBOURG PALACE " " 181
PLACE DES VOSGES " " 188
PONT ST. MICHEL " " 191
PONT NEUF " " 194
NOTRE DAME " " 207
PLACE DU CARROUSEL " " 211
VERSAILLES--LE TAPIS VERT " " 214
GRAND PALAIS AND PONT ALEXANDRE " " 219
HOTEL DES INVALIDES " " 222
COLONNE VENDÔME " " 230
PLACE DU CHÂTELET AND TOUR ST. JACQUES " " 235
MONT S. GENEVIÈVE FROM L'ILE S. LOUIS " " 238
ST. SULPICE " " 241
MONTMARTRE FROM BUTTES CHAMONT " " 251
PLACE DE LA CONCORDE " " 256
EIFFEL TOWER " " 261
ARC DE TRIOMPHE, PLACE DU CARROUSEL " " 268
THE LOUVRE, EASTERN ENTRANCE " " 274
RUE DROUOT AND SACRÉ COEUR " " 278
VERSAILLES--BASSIN DE NEPTUNE " " 283
THE OBSERVATORY " " 287
THE LOUVRE FROM THE SOUTH-EAST " " 293
ST. EUSTACHE " " 300
THE TROCADERO " " 327
ARC DE TRIOMPHE--PLACE DE L'ETOILE " " 330
IN THE GARDEN OF THE TUILERIES " " 334
REPRODUCTIONS OF PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE
THIRTEENTH CENTURY SCULPTURES FROM ST. DENIS (Restored) 84
OUR LADY OF PARIS. Early Fifteenth Century " " 136
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS I. JEAN CLOUET " " 150
TRITONS AND NEREIDS FROM THE OLD FONTAINE DES
INNOCENTS. JEAN GOUJON " " 166
PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH OF AUSTRIA, WIFE OF
CHARLES IX. FRANÇOIS CLOUET " " 168
CATHERINE DE' MEDICI. French School,
Sixteenth Century " " 176
PORTION OF THE EAST FAÇADE OF THE LOUVRE.
From BLONDEL'S Drawing, showing PERRAULT'S Base.
(_Reproduced by permission of_ M. LAMPUE) " " 220
WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE " " 302
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. MICHEL COLOMBE " " 302
CARDINAL VIRTUES. GERMAIN PILON " " 304
DIANA AND THE STAG. JEAN GOUJON
(_Photogravure_) " " 304
THE BURNING BUSH. NICOLAS FROMENT
(_Photogravure_) " " 306
TRIPTYCH OF MOULINS. LE MAÎTRE DE MOULINS " " 308
JUVENAL DES URSINS. FOUQUET " " 308
SHEPHERDS OF ARCADY. POUSSIN " " 310
A SEAPORT. CLAUDE LORRAIN " " 312
LANDING OF CLEOPATRA AT TARSUS.
CLAUDE LORRAIN " " 312
THE EMBARKATION FOR THE ISLAND OF CYTHERA
WATTEAU " " 314
GRACE BEFORE MEAT. CHARDIN " " 316
MADAME RÉCAMIER. DAVID " " 316
LANDSCAPE. COROT " " 318
LICTORS BRINGING TO BRUTUS THE BODIES
OF HIS SONS. DAVID " " 320
THE POND. ROUSSEAU " " 322
THE BINDERS. MILLET " " 324
The majority of the photographs of sculpture have been taken by
Messrs. HAWEIS & COLES, while most of the other photographs are
reproduced by permission of Messrs. GIRAUDON.
LINE ILLUSTRATIONS
BY KATHARINE KIMBALL
PAGE
THE CITÉ 3
REMAINS OF ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE 6
TOWER OF CLOVIS 16
ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS 26
ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE 32
ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS 39
WALL OF PHILIPPE AUGUSTE, COUR DE ROUEN 64
LA SAINTE CHAPELLE 70
REFECTORY OF THE CORDELIERS 74
CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS 80
NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE 82
NOTRE DAME--SOUTHERN SIDE 85
NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT 91
TOWER IN RUE NAVARRE IN WHICH CALVIN IS SAID
TO HAVE LIVED 94
HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS 96
PALAIS DE JUSTICE, CLOCK TOWER AND CONCIERGERIE 105
PALACE OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF SENS 113
CHAPEL OF FORT VINCENNES 122
TOWER AT THE CORNER OF THE RUE VIEILLE DU TEMPLE AND
THE RUE BARBETTE 126
TOWER OF JEAN SANS PEUR 128
CLOISTER OF THE BILLETES, FIFTEENTH CENTURY, RUE DE
L'HOMME ARMÉ 135
TOWER OF ST. JACQUES 147
PONT NOTRE DAME 149
CHAPEL, HÔTEL DE CLUNY 151
WEST DOOR OF ST. MERRI 152
TOWER OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT 153
LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS 161
WEST WING OF LOUVRE BY PIERRE LESCOT 163
PETITE GALERIE OF THE LOUVRE 174
HÔTEL DE SULLY 183
PLACE DES VOSGES 188
OLD HOUSES NEAR PONT ST. MICHEL,
SHOWING SPIRE OF THE STE. CHAPELLE 190
THE MEDICI FOUNTAIN, LUXEMBOURG GARDENS 196
PONT NEUF 198
THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE 208
RIVER AND PONT ROYAL 225
SOUTH DOOR OF NOTRE DAME 237
INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT 239
HÔTEL DE VILLE FROM RIVER 279
NOTRE DAME, SOUTH SIDE 282
ST. SÉVERIN 285
TOWER AND COURTYARD OF HOTEL CLUNY 287
OLD ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 289
COUR DU DRAGON 292
ST. GERVAIS 294
PLACE DES VOSGES, MAISON DE VICTOR HUGO 296
ARCHIVES NATIONALES IN HÔTEL SOUBISE,
SHOWING TOWERS OF HÔTEL DE CLISSON 298
NEAR THE PONT NEUF 303
ARCHES IN THE COURTYARD OF THE HÔTEL CLUNY 322
_The majority of the three-colour, half-tone and line blocks used
in this book have been made by the Graphic Photo-Engraving Co.,
London._
LIST OF MAPS
PLAN OF THE HISTORIC LOUVRE FROM BLONDEL'S DRAWING xxiii
MAP OF THE SUCCESSIVE WALLS OF PARIS xxiv
PLAN OF PARIS WHEN BESIEGED BY HENRY IV. IN 1590, _facing page_ 175
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE HISTORIC LOUVRE FROM BLONDEL'S DRAWING THE
SITE OF THE OLD LOUVRE BEING ADDED.]
[Illustration: MAP OF THE SUCCESSIVE WALLS OF PARIS]
PARIS AND ITS STORY
CHAPTER I
GALLO-ROMAN PARIS
The mediæval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is
wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion
of tongues, to trace the building of Troy by the descendants of Japheth,
and the foundation of his own native city by one of the Trojan princes
made a fugitive in Europe by proud Ilion's fall. Such, he was very sure,
was the origin of Padua, founded by Antenor and by Priam, son of King
Priam, whose grandson, yet another Priam, by his great valour and wisdom
became the monarch of a mighty people, called from their fair hair,
Galli or Gallici. And of the strong city built on the little island in
the Seine who could have been its founder but the ravisher of fair
Helen--Sir Paris himself? The naïve etymology of the time was evidence
enough.
But the modern writer, as he compares the geographical position of the
capitals of Europe, is tempted to exclaim, _Cherchez le marchand!_ for
he perceives that their unknown founders were dominated by two
considerations--facilities for commerce and protection from enemies: and
before the era of the Roman roadmakers, commerce meant facilities for
water carriage. As the early settlers in Britain sailed up the Thames,
they must have observed, where the river's bed begins somewhat to
narrow, a hill rising from the continuous expanse of marshes from its
mouth, easily defended on the east and west by those fortified posts
which, in subsequent times, became the Tower of London and Barnard's
Castle. If we scan a map of France, we shall see that the group of
islands on and around which Paris now stands, lies in the fruitful basin
of the Seine, known as the Isle de France, near the convergence of three
rivers; for on the east the Marne and the Oise, and on the south the
Yonne, discharge their waters into the main stream on its way to the
sea. In ancient times the great line of Phoenician, Greek and Roman
commerce followed northwards the valleys of the Rhone and of the Saone,
whose upper waters are divided from those of the Yonne only by the
plateau of Dijon and the calcareous slopes of Burgundy. The Parisii were
thus admirably placed for tapping the profitable commerce of north-west
Europe, and by the waters of the Eure, lower down the Seine, were able
to touch the fertile valley of the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul
were all navigable by the small boats of the early traders, and, in
contrast with the impetuous sweep of the Rhone and the Loire in the
south and west, flowed with slow and measured stream:[5] they were
rarely flooded, and owing to the normally mild winters, still more
rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the Parisian settlement stood near the
rich corn-land of La Beauce, and to the north-east, over the open plain
of La Valois, lay the way to Flanders. It was one of the river stations
on the line of the Phoenician traders in tin, that most precious and
rare of ancient metals, between Marseilles and Britain, and in the early
Middle Ages became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of
that historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still
follow to-day. The island now known as the Cité, which the founders of
Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which lay
involved in the many windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a
natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and
forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for
defence and for commerce.
[Illustration: THE CITÉ.]
[Illustration: POINT DU JOUR.]
The Parisii were a small tribe of Gauls who were content to place
themselves under the protection of the more powerful Senones. Their
island city was the home of a prosperous community of shipmen and
merchants, but it is not until the Conquest of Gaul by the Romans that
Lutetia, for such was its Gallic name, enters the great pageant of
written history. It was--
"Armèd Cæsar falcon-eyed,"[6]
who saw its great military importance, built a permanent camp there and
made it a central _entrepôt_ for food and munitions of war. And when in
52 B.C. the general rising of the tribes under Vercingetorix threatened
to scour the Romans out of Gaul and to destroy the whole fabric of
Cæsar's ambition, he sent his favourite lieutenant, Labienus, to seize
Lutetia where the Northern army of the Gauls was centred. Labienus
crossed the Seine at Melun, fixed his camp on a spot near the position
of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and began the first of the
historic sieges for which Paris is so famous. But the Gaulish commander
burnt the bridges, fired the city and took up his position on the slopes
of the hill of Lutetius (St. Genevieve) in the south, and aimed at
crushing his enemy between his own forces and an army advancing from the
north. Labienus having learnt that Cæsar was in a tight place, owing to
a check at Clermont and the defection of the Eduans, by a masterly piece
of engineering recrossed the Seine by night at the Point du Jour, and
when the Gauls awoke in the morning they beheld the Roman legions in
battle array on the plain of Grenelle beneath. They made a desperate
attempt to drive them against the river, but they lost their leader and
were almost annihilated by the superior arms and strategy of the Romans.
Labienus was able to join his master at Sens, and the irrevocable
subjugation of the Gauls soon followed. With the tolerant and
enlightened conquerors came the Roman peace, Roman law, Roman roads, the
Roman schoolmaster; and a more humane religion abolished the Druidical
sacrifices. Lutetia was rebuilt and became a prosperous and, next to
Lyons, the most important of Gallo-Roman cities. It lay equidistant from
Germany and Britain and at the issue of valleys which led to the upper
and lower Rhine. The quarries of Mount Lutetius produced an admirable
building stone, kind to work and hardening well under exposure to the
air. Its white colour may have won for Paris the name of Leucotia, or
the White City, by which it is sometimes called by ancient writers.
Cæsar had done his work well, for so completely were the Gauls
Romanised, that by the fifth or sixth century their very language had
disappeared.[7]
But towards the end of the third century three lowly wayfarers were
journeying from Rome along the great southern road to Paris, charged by
the Pope with a mission fraught with greater issues to Gaul than the
Cæsars and all their legions. Let us recall somewhat of the appearance
of the city which Dionysius, Rusticus and Eleutherius saw as they neared
its suburbs and came down what is now known as the Rue St. Jacques.
After passing the arches of the aqueduct, two of which exist to this
day, that crossed the valley of Arcueil and brought the waters of
Rungis,[8] Paray and Montjean to the baths of the imperial palace, they
would discern on the hill of Lutetius to their right the Roman camp,
garrison and cemetery. Lower down on its eastern slopes they would catch
a glimpse of a great amphitheatre, capable of accommodating 10,000
spectators, part of which was laid bare in 1869 by some excavations made
for the Campagnie des Omnibus between the Rues Monge and Linné.
Unhappily, the public subscription initiated by the Académie des
Inscriptions to purchase the property proved inadequate, and the Company
retained possession of the land. In 1883, however, other excavations
were undertaken in the Rue de Navarre, which resulted in the discovery
of the old aqueduct that drained the amphitheatre, and some other
remains, which have been preserved and made into a public park.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE.]
On their left, where now stands the Lycée St. Louis, would be the
theatre of Lutetia, and further on the imposing and magnificent palace
of the Cæsars, with its gardens sloping down to the Seine. The turbulent
little stream of the Bièvre flowed by the foot of Mons Lutetius on the
east, entering the main river opposite the eastern limit of the
_civitas_ of Lutetia, gleaming white before them and girdled by
Aurelian's wall[9] and the waters of the Seine. A narrow eel-shaped
island, subsequently known as the Isle de Galilée,[10] lay between the
Isle of the Cité and the southern bank; two islands, the Isles de Notre
Dame and des Vaches, divided by a narrow channel to the east, and two
small islets, the Isles des Juifs and de Bussy, to the west. Another
islet, the Isle de Louviers, lay near the northern bank beyond the two
eastern islands. Crossing a wooden bridge, where now stands the Petit
Pont, they would enter the forum (Place du Parvis Notre Dame) under a
triumphal arch. Here would be the very foyer of the city; a little way
to the left the governor's palace and the basilica, or hall of
justice;[11] to the right the temple of Jupiter. As they crossed the
island they would find it linked to the northern bank by another wooden
bridge, replaced by the present Pont Notre Dame.[12] In the distance to
the north stood Mons Martis (Montmartre) crowned with the temples of
Mars and Mercury, four of whose columns are preserved in the church of
St. Pierre; and to the west the aqueduct from Passy bringing its waters
to the mineral baths located on the site of the present Palais Royal. A
road, now the Rue St. Martin, led to the north; to the east lay the
marshy land which is still known as the quarter of the Marais.
Denis and his companions preached and taught the new faith unceasingly
and met martyrs' deaths. By the mediæval hagiographers St. Denis is
invariably confused with Dionysius, the Areopagite, said to have been
converted by St. Paul and sent on his mission to France by Pope Clement.
In the _Golden Legend_ he is famed to have converted much people to the
faith, and "did do make many churches," and at length was brought before
the judge who "did do smite off the heads of the three fellows by the
temple of Mercury. And anon the body of St. Denis raised himself up and
bare his head between his arms, as the angels led him two leagues from
the place which is said the hill of the martyrs unto the place where he
now resteth by his election and the purveyance of God, when was heard so
great and sweet a melody of angels that many that heard it believed in
our Lord." In an interesting picture, No. 995 in Room X. of the Louvre,
said to have been painted for Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, by
Malouel, and finished at his death in 1415 by Bellechose, St. Denis in
bishop's robes is seen kneeling before the block; the headsman raises
his axe; one of the saint's companions has already met his fate, the
other awaits it resignedly. To the left, St. Denis in prison is
receiving the Sacred Host from the hands of Christ.
[Illustration: ROMAN BATHS IN MUSÉE DE CLUNY.]
The work that Denis and his companions began was more fully achieved in
the fourth century by the rude Pannonion soldier, St. Martin, who also
evangelised at Paris. He is the best-known of Gallic saints, and the
story of his conversion one of the most popular in Christendom. When
stationed at Amiens he was on duty one bitter cold day at the city gate,
and espied a poor naked beggar asking alms. Soldiers in garrison are
notoriously impecunious, and Martin had nothing to give; but drawing his
sword he cleaved his mantle in twain, and bestowed half upon the
shivering wretch at his feet. That very night the Lord Jesus appeared to
him in a dream surrounded by angels, having on His shoulders the half of
the cloak which Martin had given to the beggar. Turning to the angels,
Jesus said: "Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me? My servant Martin, though
yet unbaptised, hath done this." After this vision Martin received
baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. At length, desiring to
devote himself wholly to Christ, he begged permission to leave the army.
The Emperor Julian, who deemed the Christian faith fit only to form
souls of slaves, reproached him for his cowardice, for he was yet in the
prime of life, being forty years of age. "Put me," exclaimed Martin,
"naked and without defence in the forefront of the battle, and armed
with the Cross alone I will not fear to face the enemy." Early on the
following morning the barbarians submitted to the emperor without
striking a blow, and thus was victory vouchsafed to Martin's faith and
courage, and he was permitted to leave the army. The illiterate and
dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous
iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their
altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury,
he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[13]
and brutish, and gave him least trouble. Martin was a democratic saint,
of ardent charity and austere devotion. Later in life he founded the
monastery of Marmoutier, which grew to be one of the richest in France.
His rule was severe; when his monks murmured at the hard fare he bade
them remember that cooked herbs and barley bread was the food of the
hermits of Africa. "That may be," answered they, "but we cannot live
like the angels."
On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a tomb for the
archbishop of Paris in the choir of Notre Dame, came upon the walls, six
feet below the pavement, of the original Christian basilica over which
the modern cathedral is built. In the fabric of these walls the early
builders had incorporated the remains of the still earlier temple of
Jupiter, which had been destroyed to give place to the Christian church,
and among the _débris_ were found the fragments of an altar raised to
Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the _Nautæ_, a guild of Parisian
merchant-shippers, an altar on whose foyer still remained some of the
very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. The
mutilated stones, with their rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions,
may be seen in the Frigidarium of the Thermæ, the old Roman baths by the
Hôtel de Cluny, and are among the most interesting of historical
documents in Paris. The Corporation of _Nautæ_ who dedicated this altar
to Jove, were the origin of the Commune or Civil Council of Paris, and
in later time gave way to the provost[14] of the merchants and the
sheriffs of that city. Their device was the _Nef_, or ship, which is and
has been throughout the ages the arms of Paris, and which to this day
may be seen carved on the vaultings of the Roman baths.
In the great palace of which these baths formed but a part was enacted
that scene so vividly described in the pages of Gibbon, when Julian,
after his victories over the Alemanni and the Franks, was acclaimed
Augustus by the rebellious troops of Constantius. On a plain outside
Paris Julian had admonished the sullen legions, angry at being detached
from their victorious and darling commander for service on the Persian
frontier, and had urged them to obedience. But at midnight the young
Cæsar was awakened by a clamorous and armed multitude besieging the
palace, and at early dawn its doors were forced; the reluctant Julian
was seized and carried in triumph through the streets to be enthroned
and saluted as emperor. He was lifted on a shield, and for diadem,
crowned with a military collar. In after life the emperor-philosopher
looked back with tender regret to the three winters he spent in Paris
before his elevation to the imperial responsibilities and anxieties. He
writes of the busy days and meditative nights he passed in his dear
Lutetia, with its two wooden bridges, its pure and pleasant waters, its
excellent wine. He dwells on the mildness of its climate, where the
fig-tree, protected by straw in the winter, grew and fruited. One
rigorous season, however, the emperor well remembered[15] when the Seine
was blocked by huge masses of ice. Julian, who prided himself on his
endurance, at first declined the use of those charcoal fires which to
this day are a common and deadly method of supplying heat in Paris. But
his rooms were damp and his servants were allowed to introduce them into
his sleeping apartment. The Cæsar was almost asphyxiated by the fumes,
and his physicians to restore him administered an emetic. Julian in his
time was beloved of the Lutetians, for he was a just and tolerant prince
whose yoke was easy. He had purged the soil of Gaul from the barbarian
invaders, given Lutetia peace and security, and made of it an important,
imperial city. His statue, found near Paris, still recalls his memory in
the hall of the great baths of the Lutetia he loved so well.
The so-called apostasy of this lover of Plato and worshipper of the Sun,
who never went to the wars or travelled without dragging a library of
Greek authors after him, was a philosophic reaction against the harsh
measures,[16] the bloody and treacherous natures of the Christian
emperors, and the fierceness of the Arian controversy. The movement was
but a back-wash in the stream of history, and is of small importance.
Julian's successors, Valentinian and Gratian, reversed his policy but
shared his love for the fair city on the Seine, and spent some winters
there. Lutetia had now become a rich and cultured Gallo-Roman city.
CHAPTER II
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS--ST. GENEVIEVE--THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS--THE
MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY
In the Prologue to _Faust_ the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of
the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man's activity is
all too prone to flag,--
"_Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh._"[17]
As with men so with empires: riches and inaction are hard to bear. It
was not so much a corruption of public morals as a growing slackness and
apathy in public life and an intellectual sloth that hastened the fall
of the Roman Empire. Owing to the gradual exhaustion of the supply of
slaves its economic basis was crumbling away. The ruling class was
content to administer rather than to govern and unwilling or incompetent
to grapple with the new order of things.[18] For centuries the Gauls had
been untrained in arms and habituated to look to the imperial legions
for defence against the half-savage races of men, giants in stature and
strength, surging like an angry sea against their boundaries. Towards
the end of the fourth century Vandals and Burgundians, Suevi and
Alemanni, Goth and Hun, treading on each other's heels, burst through
the Rhine frontier, destroyed the Roman garrisons and forts, and
inundated Gaul. Two of these races stayed to form kingdoms: the
Burgundians in the fertile plains of the Rhine; the Visigoths in
Aquitaine and North Spain, whose aid the Romans were fain to seek to
roll back the hordes of Attila's Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. This was the
last achievement of Roman arms in Gaul, and even that victory was
largely due to the courage of the Goths. In the fifth century the
confederation of Frankish tribes who had conquered and settled in
Belgium saw successive waves of invasion pass by, and determined to have
their part in the spoils of Gaul. They soon overran Flanders and the
north, and at length under Clovis captured Paris and conquered nearly
the whole of Gaul.
The end of the fifth century is the beginning of the evil times of
Gallic story. That fair land of France, "one of Nature's choicest
masterpieces, one of Ceres' chiefest barns for corn, one of Bacchus'
prime wine cellars and of Neptune's best salt-pits," became the prey of
the barbarian. The whole fabric of civilisation seem doomed to
destruction. Gaul had become the richest and most populous of Roman
provinces; its learning and literature were noised in Rome; its schools
drew students from the mother city herself. But at the end of the sixth
century Gregory of Tours deplores the fact that in his time there were
neither books, nor readers, nor scholar who could compose in verse or
prose, and that only the speech of the rustic was understood. He
playfully scolds himself for muddling prepositions and confusing genders
and cases, but his duty as a Christian priest is to instruct, not to
charm, and so he tells the story of his times in such rustic Latin as he
knows. He draws for us a vivid picture of Clovis, the founder of the
French monarchy, his savage valour, his astuteness, his regal passion.
After the victory over Syagrius, the shadowy king of the Romans, at
Soissons, Clovis was met by St. Rémi, who prayed that a vase of great
price and wondrous beauty among the spoil might be returned to him.
"Follow us," said the king, "to Soissons, where the booty will be
shared." Before the division took place Clovis begged that the vase
might be accorded to him. His warriors answered: "All, glorious king,
is thine." But before the king could grasp the vase, one, jealous and
angry, threw his _francisque_[19] at it, exclaiming: "Thou shalt have no
more than falls to thy lot." The broken vase was however apportioned to
the king, who restored it to the bishop. But Clovis hid the wound in his
heart. At the annual review in the Champ de Mars near Paris, the king
strode along the line inspecting the weapons of his warriors. He stopped
in front of the uncourtly soldier, took his axe from him, complained of
its foul state, and flung it angrily on the ground. As the man stooped
to pick it up Clovis, with his own axe, cleft his skull in twain,
exclaiming: "Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons." "Even so," says
Gregory quaintly, "did he inspire all with great fear."
At this point of our story we meet the first of those noble women,
heroic and wise, for whom French history is pre-eminent. In the first
half of the fifth century St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Lew of Troyes,
chosen by the prelates of France "for to go and quench an heresy that
was in Great Britain, now called England, came to Nanterre for to be
lodged and harboured and the people came against them for to have their
benison. Among the people, St. Germain, by the enseignements of the Holy
Ghost, espied out the little maid St. Genevieve, and made her come to
him, and kissed her head and demanded her name, and whose daughter she
was, and the people about her said that her name was Genevieve, and her
father Severe, and her mother Geronce, which came unto him, and the holy
man said: Is this child yours? They answered: Yea. Blessed be ye, said
the holy man, when God hath given to you so noble lineage, know ye for
certain that the day of her nativity the angels sang and hallowed great
mystery in heaven with great joy and gladness."
When on the morn she was brought to him again, he saw in her a sign
celestial, commended her to God, and prayed that she would remember him
in her orisons, and on his return to Paris, finding her in the city, he
commended her to its people. Tidings came that "Attila, the felon knight
of Hungary, had enterprised to destroy and waste the parts of France,"
and the burgesses of Paris for great dread they had, sent their goods
into cities more sure. Genevieve caused the good women of the town "to
wake in fastings and orisons, and bade the merchants not to remove their
goods for the city should have none harm." At first the people hardened
their hearts and reviled her, but at St. Germain's prayers they believed
in her, and our Lord "for her love did so much that the tyrants
approached not Paris, thanks and glory to God and honour to the virgin."
At the siege of Paris by Childeric and his Franks, when the people were
wasted by sickness and famine, "the holy virgin, that pity constrained,
went by the Seine to Arcy and Troyes for to go fetch by ship some
victuals. She stilled by her prayers a furious tempest and brought the
ships back laden with wheat." When the city was at length captured, King
Childeric, although a paynim, saved at her intercession the lives of his
prisoners, and one day, to escape her importunate pleadings for the
lives of some criminals, fled out of the gates of Paris and shut them
behind him.
The saint lived to build a church over the tomb of St. Denis and to see
Clovis become a Christian. She died in 509, and was buried on the hill
of Lutetius, which ever since has borne her name.
[Illustration: TOWER OF CLOVIS.]
"Her hope," says the _Golden Legend_, from which we have chiefly drawn
her story, "was nothing in worldly things, but in heavenly, for she
believed in the holy scriptures that saith: Whoso giveth to the poor
liveth for availe. The reward which they receive that give to poor
people, the Holy Ghost had showed to her long tofore, and therefore she
ceased not to weep, to adore and to do works of pity, for she knew
well that she was none other in this world but a pilgrim passing."
The faithful built a little wooden oratory over her tomb, which Clovis
and his wife Clotilde replaced by a great basilica and monastery which
became their burial-place. All that now recalls the church, whose length
the king measured by the distance he could hurl his axe, is the
so-called Tower of Clovis, a thirteenth-century structure in the Rue
Clovis. The golden shrine of the saint,[20] which reached thirty feet
above the high altar, was confiscated by the Revolutionists to pay their
armies, and what remains of her relics is now treasured in the
neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont.
The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history.
His queen Clotilde, niece of the Burgundian king, had long[21]
importuned him to declare himself a Christian. He had consented to the
baptism of their firstborn, but the infant's death within a week seemed
an admonition from his own jealous gods. A second son, however,
recovered from grievous sickness at his wife's prayers and this, aided
perhaps by a shrewd insight into the trend of events, induced him to
lend a more willing ear to the teachers of the new Faith. In 496 the
Franks were at death grapple with their German foes at Tolbiac. Clovis,
when the fight went against him, invoked the God of the Christians and
prayed to be delivered from his enemies. His cry was heard and the
advent of the new Lord of Battles was winged with victory.
There was a stirring scene that Christmas at Rheims, when Clovis with
his two sisters and three thousand of his warriors marched through the
streets, all hung with cloth of many colours, into the cathedral which
was glittering with innumerable candles and perfumed with incense of
divine odour. Clovis was the first to be baptised. "Bend thy neck,
gentle Sicamber," cried St. Rémi. "Adore what thou didst burn: burn what
thou didst adore." When the bishop was reading the Gospel story of the
Passion, the king, thrilled with indignation, cried out: "Ah! had I been
there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ."
The conversion of Clovis was a triumph for the Church: in her struggle
with the Arian heresy in Gaul, she was now able to enforce the arguments
of the pen by the edge of the sword. The enemies of Clovis were the
enemies of the Church, and as the representative of the Eastern emperor,
she arrayed him, after the defeat of the Arian Goths in the South, in
purple and hailed him Consul and Augustus at Tours. Her scribes are
tender to his memory, for his Christianity was marked by few signs of
grace. He remained the same savage monarch as before, and did not
scruple to affirm his dynasty and extend his empire by treachery and by
the assassination of his kinsmen. To the Franks, Jesus was but a new and
more puissant tribal deity. "Long live the Christ who loves the Franks,"
writes the author of the prologue to the Salic law; and Clothaire I.,
when the pangs of death seized him in his villa at Compiègne, cried out,
"Who is this God of Heaven that thus allows the greatest kings of the
earth to perish?" Nor was their ideal of kingship any loftier. Their
kingdom was not a trust, but a possession to be divided among their
heirs, and the jealousy and strife excited by the repeated partition
among sons, make the history of the Merovingian[22] dynasty a tale of
cruelty and treachery whose every page is stained with blood.
[Illustration: BOIS DE BOULOGNE--LAC SUPÉRIEUR]
In the ninth century a story was current among the people of France
which admirably symbolises the fate of the dynasty. One night as
Childeric, father of Clovis, lay by the side of Basine, his wife, she
awoke him and said, "Arise, O king, look in the courtyard of thy
dwelling and tell thy servant what thou shalt see." Childeric arose and
saw beasts pass by that seemed like unto lions, unicorns and leopards.
He returned to his wife and told her what he had seen. And Basine said
to him: "Master, go once again and tell thy servant what thou shalt
see." Childeric went forth anew and saw beasts passing by like unto
bears and wolves. Having related this to his wife she bade him go forth
yet a third time. He now saw dogs and other baser animals rending each
other to pieces. Then said Basine to Childeric: "What thou hast seen
with thine eyes shall verily come to pass. A son shall be born to us who
will be a lion for courage: the sons of our sons shall be like unto
leopards and unicorns: they in their turn shall bring forth children
like unto bears and wolves for their voracity. The last of those whom
thou sawest shall come for the end and destruction of the kingdom."
Clovis, in 508, made Paris the official capital of his realm, and at his
death in 511 divided his possessions between his four sons--Thierry,
Clodomir, Childebert, and Clothaire. Clodomir after a short reign met
his death in battle, leaving his children to the guardianship of their
grandmother, Clotilde. One day messengers came to her in the palace of
the Thermæ from Childebert and Clothaire praying that their nephews
might be entrusted to them. Believing they were to be trained in kingly
offices that they might succeed their father in due time, Clotilde
granted their prayer and two of the children were sent to them in the
palace of the Cité. Soon came another messenger, bearing a pair of
shears and a naked sword, and Clotilde was bidden to determine the fate
of her wards and to choose for them between the cloister and the edge of
the sword. An angry exclamation escaped her: "If they are not to be
raised to the throne, I would rather see them dead than shorn." The
messenger waited to hear no more and hastened back to the two kings.
Clothaire then seized the elder of the children and stabbed him under
the armpit. The younger, at the sight of his brother's blood, flung
himself at Childebert's feet, burst into tears, and cried: "Help me,
dear father, let me not die even as my brother." Childebert's heart was
softened and he begged for the child's life. Clothaire's only answer was
a volley of insults and a threat of death if he protected the victim.
Childebert then disintwined the child's tender arms clasping his
knees--he was but six years of age--and pushed him to his brother, who
drove a dagger into his breast. The tutors and servants of the children
were then butchered, and Clothaire rode calmly to his palace, to become
at his brother's death, in 558, sole king of the Franks. The third
child, Clodoald, owing to the devotion of faithful servants escaped, and
was hidden for some time in Provence. Later in life he returned to Paris
and built a monastery at a place still known by his name (St. Cloud)
about two leagues from the city.
Clothaire himself had narrowly escaped assassination when allied with
Thierry during the wars with the Thuringians. Thierry invited his
brother one day to a conference, having previously hidden some armed men
behind the hangings in his tent. But the drapery was too short, and
Clothaire as he entered caught sight of the assassins' feet peeping
through. He retained his arms and his escort. Thierry invented some
fable to explain the interview, embraced his brother and bestowed on him
a heavy silver plate.
The fruits of kingship were bitter to Clothaire. Ere two years were past
his rebellious and adulterous son, Chramm, escaped to Brittany and
raised an army against him. Chramm and his allies were defeated,
himself, his wife and children captured. Clothaire spared none. Chramm
was strangled with a handkerchief, and his wife and children were cast
into a peasant's hut which was set on fire and all perished in the
flames. Next year the king took cold while hunting near Compiègne, fell
sick of a fever and died.
Four out of seven sons had survived him, and again the kingdom was
divided. Charibert, king of Paris, soon died, and yet again a partition
was made among the three survivors. To Siegbert fell Austrasia or
Eastern France as far as the Rhine: to Chilperic, Neustria or Western
France to the borders of Brittany and the Loire: Gontram's lot was
Burgundy. Once more the consuming flames of passion and greed burst
forth, this time fanned by the fierce breath of feminine rivalry.
Siegbert had married Brunehaut, daughter of the Visigoth king of Spain:
Chilperic had espoused her sister, Galowinthe, after repudiating his
first wife, Adowere. When the new queen of Neustria came to her throne
she found herself the rival of Fredegonde, a common servant, with whom
Chilperic had been living. He soon tired of his new wife, a gentle and
pliant creature; Fredegonde regained her supremacy and one morning
Galowinthe was found strangled in bed. The news came to the court of
Austrasia and Brunehaut goaded King Siegbert to avenge her sister's
death. Meanwhile Chilperic had married Fredegonde, who quickly compassed
the murder of her only rival, the repudiated queen, Adowere. At the
intervention of Gontram war was, for a time, averted, and Chilperic, by
the judgment of the whole people, made to compensate Brunehaut by the
restoration of her sister's dowry. But Chilperic soon drew the sword and
civil war again devastated the land. By foreign aid Siegbert captured
and spoiled Paris and compelled a peace. Scarcely, however, had the
victor dismissed his German allies, when Chilperic fell upon him again.
Siegbert now determined to make an end. He entered Paris, and the
Neustrians having accepted him as king, he prepared to crush his enemy
at Tournay. As he set forth, St. Germain, bishop of Paris, seized his
horse's bridle and warned him that the grave he was digging for his
brother would swallow him too. It was of no avail. He marched to Vitry
and was proclaimed king of Neustria. After the proclamation two
messengers desired to see him. As he stood between them listening to
their suit he was stabbed on either side by two long poisoned knives:
the assassins had been sent by Fredegonde. Chilperic now hastened to
Paris and seized the royal treasure. Brunehaut's son, Childebert II., a
child of five, was, however, stolen away from the palace in a basket by
one of Siegbert's faithful servants and proclaimed king by the warriors.
But Fredegonde's tale of blood was not yet complete. She soon learned
that Merovée, one of Chilperic's two sons by Adowere, had married
Brunehaut. Merovée followed the rest of her victims, and Clovis, the
second son, together with a sister of Adowere, next glutted her
vengeance. "One day, after leaving the Synod of Paris," writes St.
Gregory, "I had bidden King Chilperic adieu and had withdrawn conversing
with the bishop of Albi. As we crossed the courtyard of the palace[23]
he said: 'Seest thou not what I perceive above this roof?' I answered,
'I see only a second building which the king has had built.' He asked
again, 'Seest thou naught else?' I weened he spoke in jest and did but
answer--'If thou seest aught else, prithee show it unto me.' Then
uttering a deep sigh, he said: 'I see the sword of God's wrath suspended
over this house.'" Shortly after this conversation Chilperic having
returned from the chase to his royal villa of Chelles, was leaning on
the shoulder of one of his companions to descend from his horse, when
Landeric, servant of Fredegonde, stabbed him to death.
Thirty years were yet to pass before the curtain falls on the acts of
the rival queens, their sons and grandsons, but the heart revolts at the
details of the wars and lusts of these savage potentates. Gregory begins
the fifth book of his _Annals_ by expressing the weariness that falls
upon him when he recalls the manifold civil wars of the Franks.
[Illustration: RUE ST. JACQUES.]
Let us make an end of this part of our story. By her son, Clothaire II.,
Fredegonde continued to dominate Neustria: Brunehaut ruled over
Austrasia and Burgundy through her sons Theodobert II. and Thierry II.
Battle and murder had destroyed Brunehaut's children and her children's
children until none were left to rule over the realms but herself and
the four sons of Thierry II. The nobles, furious at the further tyranny
of a cruel and imperious woman, plotted her ruin, and in 613, when
Brunehaut, sure of victory, marched with two armies against Clothaire
II., she was betrayed to him, her implacable enemy. He reproached her
with the death of ten kings, and set her on a camel for three days to be
mocked and insulted by the army. The old and fallen queen was then tied
to the tail of a horse: the creature was lashed into fury and soon all
that remained of the proud queen was a shapeless mass of carrion. The
traditional place where Brunehaut met her death is still shown at the
corner of the Rue St. Honoré and the Rue de l'Arbre Sec. Thierry's four
sons had already been put to death.
In 597 her rival Fredegonde, at the height of her prosperity, had died
peacefully in bed, full of years, and was buried in the church of St.
Vincent (St. Germain des Prés) by the side of Chilperic, her husband,
and Clothaire II. became sole monarch of the three kingdoms.
Amid all this ruin and desolation, when the four angels of the Euphrates
seem to have been loosed on Gaul, one force was silently at work
knitting up the ravelled ends of the rent fabric of civilisation and
tending a lamp which burned with the promise of ideals nobler far than
those which fed the ancient faith and polity. The Christian bishops were
everywhere filling the empty curule chairs in the cities and provinces
of Gaul. At the end of the sixth century society lived in the Church and
by the Church, and the sees of the archbishops and bishops corresponded
to the Roman administrative divisions. All that was best in the old
Gallo-Roman aristocracy was drawn into her bosom, for she was the one
power making for unity and good government. From one end of the land to
the other the bishops visited and corresponded with each other. They
alone had communion of ideas, common sentiments and common interests.
St. Gregory, bishop of Tours, was the son of a senator; St. Germain of
Auxerre was a man of noble lineage, who had already exercised high
public functions before he was made a bishop. St. Germain of Autun was
ever on the move, now in Brittany, now at Paris, now at Arles, to crush
heresy, to threaten a barbarian potentate, or to sear the conscience
and, if need were, ban the person of a guilty Christian king. The bishop
of Trèves, seeing the horses of some royal Frankish envoys grazing in
the wheat-fields of the peasants, threatened to excommunicate them if
they spoiled the substance of the poor, and himself drove the horses
away.
By the end of the sixth century two hundred and thirty-eight monastic
institutions had been founded in Gaul, and from the sixth to the eighth
century, eighty-three churches were built. The monasteries were so many
nurseries of the industry, knowledge and learning which had not perished
in the barbarian invasions; so many cities of refuge from violence and
rapine, where the few who thirsted after righteousness and burned with
charity might find shelter and protection. "Every letter traced on
paper," said an old abbot, "is a blow to the devil." The ecclesiastical
and monastic schools took the place of the destroyed Roman day-schools,
and whatever modicum of learning the Frankish courts could boast of, was
due to the monks and nuns of their time; for some at least of these
potentates when not absorbed in the gratification of their lusts, their
vengeance, greed, or ambition, were possessed by nobler instincts.
Brunehaut, nurtured in the more cultured atmosphere of the Visigoth
court of Spain, protected commerce and kept the Roman roads[24] in
repair, founded monasteries and corresponded with Gregory the Great, who
commended to her care the safety of his missionaries passing through
her dominions to convert the Angles across the straits.
Chilperic, whom Gregory of Tours brands as the Herod and Nero of his
time, plumed himself on his piety, was concerned at the blasphemies of
the Jews, and forced on them conversion or exile at the sword's point.
He composed Latin hymns, and discussed the nature of the Trinity with
Gregory and the bishop of Albi. He sought to reform the alphabet by the
addition of new letters which corresponded to the guttural sounds in the
Frankish tongue, and ordered that the old alphabet should be erased from
the children's books with pumice stone in all the cities of his kingdom,
and the reformed alphabet substituted for it.
Among the wives of Clothaire I. was the gentle Radegonde, who turned
with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of
charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests
and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Medard,
donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the
poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her.
Radegonde's memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company
of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below
Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic
buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the
nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496.
[Illustration: ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS.]
[Illustration: ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.]
To St. Germain of Autun, made bishop in 555, Paris owes one of her
earliest ecclesiastical foundations. His influence over Childebert, king
of Paris, was great. He obtained an order that those who refused to
destroy pagan idols in their possession were to answer to the king, and
when Childebert and his warriors, seized by an irresistible fighting
impulse, marched into Spain, and were bought off the siege and sack of
Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the
king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des
Prés), to receive the relic. In Childebert's reign was begun on the
site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame a splendid basilica, so
magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon's Temple for the
beauty and the delicacy of its art. During this great outburst of zeal
and devotion another monastery was established and dedicated to St.
Vincent, which subsequently became associated with the name of the
earlier St. Germain of Auxerre (l'Auxerrois).
A curious episode is found in Gregory's _Chronicle_, which is
characteristic of the times, and proves that a monastery and church of
St. Julien le Pauvre were already in existence. An impostor, claiming to
have the relics of St. Vincent and St. Felix, came to Paris, but refused
to deposit them with the bishop for verification. He was arrested and
searched, and the so-called relics were found to consist of mole's
teeth, the bones of mice, some bear's claws and other rubbish. They were
flung into the Seine and the impostor was put in prison. Gregory, who
was lodging in the monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre, went into the
church shortly after midnight to say matins, and found the creature, who
had escaped from the bishop's prison, dead drunk on the pavement. He had
him dragged away into a corner, but so intolerable was the stench that
the pavement was purified with water and sweet smelling herbs. When the
bishops, who were at Paris for a synod, met at dinner the next day, the
impostor was identified as a fugitive slave of the bishop of Tarbes.
At the end of the sixth century we bid adieu to St. Gregory of Tours,
gentlest of annalists. Courageous and independent before kings, he had a
pitying heart for the poor and suffering, and bewails the loss of many
sweet little babes of Christ, during the plague of 580, whom he had
warmed at his breast, carried in his arms, and fed tenderly with his
hands.
Clothaire II. was a pious king in his way, interested in letters, a
munificent patron of the Church, but overfond of the chase and
inheriting the savage instincts of his race in dealing with enemies.
After quelling a Saxon revolt he is said to have killed all the warriors
whose stature exceeded the length of his sword. Dagobert the Great, his
son, who succeeded him in 628, was the most enlightened and mightiest of
the Merovingian kings. He and his favourite minister, St. Eloy,
goldsmith and bishop (founder of the convent which long bore his name),
are enshrined in the hearts of the people in many a song and
ballad:--St. Eloy, with his good humour, his happy countenance, his
eloquence, gentleness, modesty, wit, and wide charity; Dagobert, the
Solomon of the Franks, the terror of the oppressor, the darling of the
poor. The great king was fond of Paris and established himself there
when not scouring his kingdom to administer justice or to crush his
enemies. He was the second founder of the monastery of St. Denis, which
he rebuilt and endowed, and to which he gave much importance by the
establishment there of a great fair, which soon drew merchants from all
parts of Europe. He was a patron of the arts and employed St. Eloy to
make reliquaries[25] for the churches in Paris of such richness and
beauty that they were admired of the whole of France.
Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert. In half a
century his race had faded into the feeble _rois fainéants_, degenerate
by precocious debauchery, some of whom were fathers at fourteen or
fifteen years of age and in their graves before they were thirty.[26]
In an age when human passions are untamed, the one unpardonable vice in
a king is weakness, and soon the incapable, impotent and irresolute
Merovingians were thrust aside by a more puissant race.
CHAPTER III
THE CARLOVINGIANS--THE GREAT SIEGE OF PARIS BY THE NORMANS--THE GERMS OF
FEUDALISM
At the head of the establishment of every Merovingian chief was his
mayor, or major domus, who administered his domains and acted as deputy
when his master was non-resident or away at the wars. A similar official
of the king's household, the mayor of the palace, likewise presided over
the royal council and tribunal in the absence or during the minority of
the king.
In 622, when Dagobert became king of Austrasia, one Pepin of Landen,
known as Pepin le Vieux, was made mayor of the palace and, associated
with St. Arnoulf, bishop of Metz, was appointed ward of the young king.
A marriage between Pepin's daughter and the son of St. Arnoulf resulted
in the birth of Pepin of Heristal, who in the anarchy that followed on
Dagobert's death succeeded in crushing Ebroin,[27] the king-maker, mayor
of the palace of Neustria. Pepin then seized the royal treasury,
installed Thierry III. as king of the Franks and himself as mayor of the
palace. Pepin's successor, for the office of mayor had now become
hereditary, was Charles Martel, his son by Alfaide, a fair and noble
concubine. He it was, who by his valour and address saved Western Europe
from the Mussulman at Tours, and made glorious his name in Christendom.
At his death, when crossing the Alps to defend the Pope against the
Arian Lombards, the leadership of the Franks passed to his sons
Carloman and Pepin the Short, of whom the latter, on his brother's
retirement to the cloister at the famous Italian Benedictine monastery
at Monte Cassino, held undivided sway.
Charles Martel, although buried with the Frankish kings at St. Denis,
was content with the title of Duke of the Franks, and hesitated to
proclaim himself king. He, like the other mayors of the palace, ruled
through feeble and pensioned puppets when they did not contemptuously
leave the throne vacant. In 751 Pepin sent two prelates to sound Pope
Zacchary, who, being hard pressed by the Lombards, lent a willing ear to
their suit, agreed that he who was king in fact should be made so in
name, and authorised Pepin to assume the title of king. Chilperic III.,
like a discarded toy, was relegated to a monastery at St. Omer, and
Pepin the Short anointed at Soissons by St. Boniface, bishop of Mayence,
from that sacred "ampul full of chrism" which an angel of Paradise had
brought to St. Rémi wherewith to anoint Clovis at Rheims. In the year
754 Stephen III., the first pope who had honoured Paris by his presence,
came to ask the reward of his predecessor's favour and was lodged at St.
Denis. There he anointed Pepin anew, with his sons Charles and Carloman,
and compelled the Frankish chieftains, under pain of excommunication, to
swear allegiance to them and their descendants.
The city of Lutetia had much changed since the messengers of Pope
Fabianus entered five centuries before. On that southern hill where
formerly stood the Roman camp and cemetery were now the great basilica
and abbey of St. Genevieve. The amphitheatre and probably much of the
palace of the Cæsars were in ruins, all stripped of their marbles to
adorn the new Christian churches. Extensive abbatial buildings and a
church resplendent with marble and gold, on the west, were dedicated to
St. Vincent, and were henceforth to be known as St. Germain of the
Meadows (_des Prés_), for the saint's body had been translated from the
chapel of St. Symphorien in the vestibule to the high altar of the abbey
church a few weeks before the pope's arrival at St. Denis. The Cité[28]
was still held within the decayed Roman walls, and a wooden bridge, the
Petit Pont, crossed the south arm of the Seine. On the site of the old
pagan temple to Jupiter by the market-place stood a new and magnificent
basilica to Our Lady. The devotion of the _Nautæ_ had been transferred
from Apollo to St. Nicholas, patron of shipmen, and Mercury had given
place to St. Michael, and to each of those saints oratories were
erected. Other churches and oratories adorned the island, dedicated to
St. Stephen, St. Gervais, and St. Denis of the Prison (_de la chartre_),
built where the saint was imprisoned by the north wall and where,
abandoned by his followers, he was visited by his divine Lord, who
Himself administered the sacred Host. A nunnery dedicated to St. Eloy,
where three hundred pious nuns diffused the odour of Jesus Christ
through the whole city, occupied a large site opposite the west front of
Notre Dame. Near by stood a hospital, founded and endowed a century
before by St. Landry, bishop of Paris, for the sick poor, which soon
became known as the Hostel of God (_Hôtel Dieu_). The old Roman palace
and basilica had been transformed into the official residence and
tribunal of justice of the Frankish kings. On the south bank stood the
church and monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre. A new Frankish city was
growing on the north bank, bounded on the west by the abbey of St.
Vincent le Rond, later known as St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and on the east
by the abbey of St. Lawrence. Houses clustered around the four great
monasteries, and suburbs were in course of formation. The Cité was still
largely inhabited by opulent merchants of Gallo-Roman descent, who were
seen riding along the streets in richly-decorated chariots drawn by
oxen.
[Illustration: ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.]
King Pepin, after proving himself a valiant champion of orthodoxy by
defeating the Arian Lombards, and bestowing Ravenna on the pope in
perpetual sovereignty, died at Paris in 768. The kingdom of France was
then shared by his sons, Charles and Carloman, and on the latter's death
in 771 Charles, surnamed the Great, began his tremendous career during
which the interest of the French Monarchy shifts from Paris to
Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlemagne during his long reign of nearly half a
century was too preoccupied with his noble but ineffectual purpose of
cementing by blood and iron the warring races of Europe into a united
_populus Christianus_, and establishing, under the dual lordship of
emperor and pope, a city of God on earth, to give much attention to
Paris. He did, however, spend a few Christmases there, and was present
at the dedication of the new church of St. Denis, completed in 775 under
Abbot Fulrad. It was a typical Frankish prince whom the Parisians saw
enthroned at St. Denis. He had the abundant fair hair, shaven chin and
long moustache we see in the traditional pictures of Clovis. Above
middle height, with bright piercing eyes and short neck, he impressed
all by the majesty of his bearing in spite of a rather shrill and feeble
voice and a certain asymmetrical rotundity below the belt. Abbot Fulrad
was a sturdy prince and for long disputed the possession of some lands
at Plessis with the bishop of Paris. The decision of the case is
characteristic of the times. Two champions were deputed to act for the
litigants, and met before the Count of Paris[29] in the king's chapel of
St. Nicholas in the Palace of the Cité, and a solemn judgment by the
Cross was held. While the royal chaplain recited psalms and prayers, the
two champions stood forth and held their arms outstretched in the form
of a cross. In this trial of endurance the bishop's deputy was the first
to succumb. His fainting arms drooped and the abbot won his cause.
Paris grew but slowly under the Frankish kings. They lived ill at ease
within city walls. Children of the fields and the forest, whose delight
was in the chase or in war, they were glad to escape from Paris to their
villas at Chelles or Compiègne.
But the civil power of the Church grew apace. In the early sixth century
one-third of the land of France was held and administered by the
monasteries. The abbots of St. Germain des Prés held possession of
nearly 90,000 acres of land, mostly arable, in various provinces of
France. Their annual revenue amounted to about £24,000 of our money:
they ruled over more than 10,000 serfs. From a list of the lands held in
the ninth century by the abbey of St. Pierre des Fossés,[30] founded by
Clovis II. about eight miles from Paris, and published in the _Trésor
des pièces rares ou inédites_, we are able to form some idea of the vast
extent of monastic possessions in the city. The names of the various
properties whose boundaries touch those of the abbey lands are given.
Private owners are mentioned only four times, whereas to ecclesiastical
and monastic domains there are no less than ninety references.
These monastic settlements were veritable garden cities, where most of
our modern fruits, flowers and vegetables were cultivated; where flocks
and herds were bred and all kinds of poultry, including pheasants and
peacocks, reared. Guilds of craftsmen worked and flourished; markets
were held generally on saints' days, and pilgrimages were fostered.
Charlemagne was an honest coiner and a protector of foreign traders; he
was tolerant of the Jews, the only capitalists of the time, and under
him Paris became the "market of the peoples," and Venetian and Syrian
merchants sought her shores.
In Gallo-Roman days few were the churches outside the cities, but in the
great emperor's time every villa[31] is said to have had its chapel or
oratory served by a priest. Charlemagne was a zealous patron of such
learning as the epoch afforded, and sought out scholars in every land.
English, Irish, Scotch, Italian, Goth and Bavarian--all were welcomed.
The English scholar Alcuin, master of the Cloister School at York,
became his chief adviser and tutor. He would have every child in his
empire to know at least his paternoster. Every abbot on election was
required to endow the monastery with some books. The choice of authors
was not a wide one: the Old and New Testaments; the writings of the
Fathers, especially St. Augustine, the emperor's favourite author;
Josephus; the works of Bede; some Latin authors, chiefly Virgil; some
scraps of Plato translated into Latin--a somewhat exiguous and austere
library, but one which reared a noble and valiant line of scholars and
statesmen to rule the minds and bridle the savage lusts of the coming
generations of men. Under Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences the cramped,
minute script of the Merovingian scribes grew in beauty and lucidity:
gold and silver and colour illuminated the pages of their books. The
golden age of the Roman peace seemed dawning again in a new _Imperium
Christianorum_.
Towards the end of his reign the old emperor was dining with his court
in a seaport town in the south of France, when news came that some
strange, black, piratical craft had dared to attack the harbour. They
were soon scattered, but the emperor was seen to rise from the table and
go to a window, where he stood gazing fixedly at the retreating pirates.
Tears trickled down his cheeks and none dared to approach him. At length
he turned and said: "Know ye, my faithful servants, wherefore I weep
thus bitterly? I fear not these wretched pirates, but I am afflicted
that they should dare to approach these shores, and sorely do grieve
when I foresee what evil they will work on my sons and on my people."
His courtiers deemed they were Breton or Saracen pirates, but the
emperor knew better. They were the terrible Northmen, soon to prove a
bloodier scourge to Gaul than Hun or Goth or Saracen; and to meet them
Charlemagne left an empire distracted by civil war and a nerveless,
feeble prince, Louis the Pious, Louis the Forgiving, fitter for the
hermit's cell than for the throne and sword of an emperor.
In 841 the black boats of the sea-rovers for the first time entered the
Seine, and burnt Rouen and Fontenelle. In 845 a fleet of one hundred and
twenty vessels swept up its higher waters and on Easter Eve captured,
plundered and burnt Paris, sacked its monasteries and churches and
butchered their monks and priests. The futile Emperor Charles the Bald
bought them off at St. Denis with seven thousand livres of silver, and
they went back to their Scandinavian homes gorged with plunder--only to
return year by year, increased in numbers and ferocity. Words cannot
picture the terror of the citizens and monks when the dread squadrons,
with the monstrous dragons carved on their prows, their great sails and
three-fold serried ranks of men-of-prey, were sighted. Everyone left his
home and sought refuge in flight. The monks hurried off with the bodies
of the saints, the relics and treasures of the sanctuary, to hide them
in far-away cities. In 852 Charles the Bald's soldiers refused to fight,
and for two hundred and eighty-seven days the pirates ravaged the valley
of the Seine at their will. Never within memory or tradition were such
things known. Rouen, Bayeux, Beauvais, Paris, Meaux, Melun, Chartres,
Evreux, were devastated. The islands of the Seine were whitened by the
bones of the victims. Similar horrors were wrought along the other
rivers of France. Whole districts reverted to paganism. In 858 a body of
the freebooters settled on the island of Oissel, below Rouen, and issued
forth _en excursion_ to spoil and slay and burn at their pleasure. They
made of the once rich city of Paris a cinder heap; the cathedrals of St.
Germain des Prés and of St. Denis alone escaped at the cost of immense
bribes. Charles ordered two fortresses to be built for the defence of
the approaches to the bridges, and continued his feeble policy of paying
blackmail.
[Illustration: PORT DES ORMES.]
In 866 Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, had won the title of the
Maccabeus of France, by daring to stand against the fury of the Northmen
and to defeat them; but having in the heat of battle with the terrible
Hastings taken off his cuirass, he was killed. In 876 began a second
period of raids of even greater ferocity under the Norwegian Rollo the
Gangr[32] (the walker), a colossus so huge that no horse could be found
to bear him. In 884 the whole Christian people seemed doomed to perish.
Flourishing cities and monasteries became heaps of smoking ruins; along
the roads lay the bodies of priests and laymen, noble and peasant,
freeman and serf, women and children and babes at the breast to be
devoured of wolves and vultures. The very sanctuaries[33] were become
the dens of wild beasts, the haunt of serpents and creeping things.
Packs of wolves, three hundred strong, harried Aquitaine.
In 885 a great league of pirates--Danes, Normans, Saxons, Britons and
renegade French--on their way to ravage the rich cities of Burgundy drew
up before Paris; and their leader, Siegfroy, demanded passage to the
higher waters. For Paris had now been put in a state of defence, the
Roman walls repaired, the bridges fortified and protected by towers on
the north and south banks. Bishop Gozlin, in whom great learning was
wedded to incomparable fortitude, defied the pirates, warning them that
the citizens were determined to resist and to hold Paris for a bulwark
to the other cities of France.
Paris, forsaken by her kings and emperors for more than a century,
scarred and bled by three sieges, was now to become a beacon of hope to
the wretched land of France. Of the fourth and most terrible of the
Norman sieges of Paris, we have fuller record. A certain monk of St.
Germain des Prés, Abbo by name, had endured the siege and was one day
sitting in his cell reading his Virgil. Desiring to exercise his Latin,
and give an example to other cities, he determined to sing of a great
siege with happier issue than that of Troy.[34] Abbo saw the black hulls
and horrid prows of the pirates' boats as they turned the arm of the
Seine below Paris, seven hundred strong vessels, and many more of
lighter build. For two leagues and a half the very waters of the Seine
were covered with them, and men asked into what mysterious caves the
river had retreated. On November 26th, the attack began at the
unfinished tower on the north bank. Three leaders stand eminent among
the defenders of the city. Bishop Gozlin, the great warrior priest; his
nephew, Abbot Ebles of St. Denis; and Count Eudes (Hugh) of Paris, son
of Robert the Strong. The air is darkened with javelins and arrows. The
abbot with one shaft spits seven of the besiegers, and mockingly bids
their fellows take them to the kitchen to be cooked. Bishop Gozlin is
wounded by a javelin early in the attack. On the morrow, reinforced by
fresh troops, the assault is renewed, stones are hurled, arrows whistle:
the air is filled with groans and cries. The defenders pour down boiling
oil and melted wax and pitch. The hair of some of the Normans takes
fire: they burn and the Parisians shout--"Jump into the Seine to cool
yourselves." One well-aimed millstone, says Abbo, sends the souls of six
to hell. The baffled Northmen retire, entrench a camp at St. Germain
l'Auxerrois, and prepare rams and other siege artillery.
[Illustration: ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS.]
Abbo now pauses to bewail the state of France: no lord to rule her,
everywhere devastation wrought by fire and sword, God's people paralysed
at the advancing phalanx of death, Paris alone tranquil, erect and
steadfast in the midst of all their thunderbolts, _polis ut regina
micans omnes super urbes_, like a queenly city resplendent above all
towns. The second attack begins with redoubled fury. After battering the
walls of the north tower, monstrous machines on sixteen wheels are
advanced and the besiegers strive to fill the fosse. Trees, shrubs,
slaughtered cattle, wounded horses, the very captives slain before the
eyes of the besieged, are cast in to fill the void. Bishop Gozlin brings
down a Norman chieftain by a well-aimed arrow: his body, too, is flung
into the fosse. The enemy cover the plain with their swords and the
river with their bucklers. Fireships are loosed against the bridge. In
the city women fly to the sanctuaries: they roll their hair in the dust,
beat their breasts and rend their faces. They call on St. Germain:
"Blessed St. Germain, succour thy servants." The fighters on the walls
take up the cry. Bishop Gozlin invokes the Virgin, Mother of the
Redeemer, Star of the Sea, bright above all other stars, to save them
from the cruel Danes.
On February 6th, 886, a sudden flood sweeps away the Petit Pont, and its
tower, with twelve defenders, is isolated. With shouts of triumph the
Northmen cross the river and surround it. The twelve refuse to yield,
and fire is brought. The warriors (a touching detail) fearing lest their
falcons be stifled, cut them loose. There is but one vessel wherewith to
quench the flames and that soon drops from their hands. The little band
rush forth, place themselves against the ruins of the bridge, and
prepare to sell their lives dearly--terrible against terrible foes. The
walls of the city are lined with their kinsmen and friends impotent to
help. The enemies of God, doomed one day to dine at Pluto's cauldron,
press upon them. They fight till Phoebus sinks to the depths of the
sea, so great is the courage of despair. They are promised their lives
if they will yield, are disarmed, then treacherously slain, and their
souls fly to heaven. But one, Hervé, of noble bearing and of great
beauty, deemed a prince, is spared for ransom. With thunderous voice he
refuses to bargain his life for gold, falls unarmed on his foes and is
cut to pieces. "These things," writes Monk Abbo, "I saw with mine eyes."
He gives the names of the heroic twelve who went to receive the palm of
martyrdom. They were exemplars to France and helped to save her by their
desperate courage and noble self-sacrifice. Their names are inscribed on
a tablet on the wing of the Hôtel Dieu in the Place au Petit Pont:
Ermenfroi, Hervé, Herland, Ouacre, Hervi, Arnaud, Seuil, Jobert, Hardre,
Guy, Aimard, Gossouin.
A temporary relief is afforded by the arrival of Henry of Saxony, sent
with supplies by the emperor. Count Eudes sallies forth to meet him, and
in his ardent courage outstrips his men, is surrounded and almost slain.
The little city is revictualled. Henry returns whence he came, and again
the Parisians are left to themselves. On the sixth of April Bishop
Gozlin, their shield, their two-edged axe, whose shaft and bow were
terrible, passes to the Lord. On May 12th, Eudes steals away to implore
further help from the emperor, and as soon as he sees the imperialists
on the march returns and cuts his way into Paris, to share the terrors
of the siege. Henry the Saxon again appears, but is ambushed and slain
and his army melts away. Yet again Paris is abandoned by her emperor and
seeks help of heaven. For the waters are low, the besiegers are able to
get footing on the island, they set fire to the gates and attack the
walls. The body of St. Genevieve is borne about the city, and at night
the ghostly figure of St. Germain is seen by the sentinels to pass along
the ramparts, sprinkling them with holy water and promising salvation.
Charles the Fat, the Lord's anointed, at length appears with a multitude
of a hundred tongues and encamps on Montmartre. While the Parisians are
preparing to second him in crushing their foes, they learn that the
cowardly emperor has bought them off with a bribe and permission to
winter in Burgundy, and for the first time they ravage that opulent
province. Next year, as Gozlin's successor, Bishop Antheric, was sitting
at table with Abbot Ebles, a fearful messenger brought news that the
_acephali_[35] were again in sight. Forgetting the repast, the two
churchmen seized their weapons, called the city to arms, hastened to the
ramparts, and the abbot slew their pilot with a well-aimed shaft. The
Normans are terrified, and at length a treaty is made with their
leaders, who promised not to ravage the Marne and some even entered
Paris. But the ill-disciplined hordes were hard to hold in and bands of
brigands, as soon as the ramparts were passed, began to plunder and slew
a score of Christian men. The Parisians in their indignation sought out
and--_Evax!_ Hurrah!--found five hundred Normans in the city and slew
them. But the bishop protected those that took refuge in his palace,
instead of killing them as he ought to have done--_potius concidere
debens_. For a time Paris had respite. Cowardly Charles the Fat was
deposed, and in 887 Count Eudes was acclaimed king of France after his
return from Aquitaine, whose duke he had brought to subjection. He
counselled a gathering of all the peoples near Paris to make common
cause against the Normans. Abbo saw the proud Franks march in with heads
erect, the skilful and polished Aquitaines, the Burgundians too prone to
flight. But nothing came of it.
At the extreme north-east of Paris the Rue du Crimée leads to a group of
once barren hills, part of which is now made into the Park of the Buttes
Chaumont. Here, by the Mount of the Falcon (Montfaucon[36]) in 892 King
Eudes fell upon an army of Northmen, who had come against Paris, and
utterly routed them. Antheric, the noble pastor, with his virgin-like
face, led three hundred footmen into the fight and slew six hundred of
the _acephali_. But Abbo's muse now fails him. Eudes, noble Eudes, is no
more worthy of his office, and Christ's sheep are perishing. Where is
the ancient prowess of France? Three vices are working her destruction:
pride, the sinful charms of Venus (_foeda venustas veneris_) and love
of sumptuous garments. Her people are arrayed in purple vesture, and
wear cloaks of gold; their loins are cinctured with girdles rich with
precious stones. Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of
noble Eudes are wanting. All the poet craves is another victory to
rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy.
But the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was
never captured again, but the _acephali_ were devouring the land. The
grim spectres of Famine and Plague made a charnel-house of whole regions
of France, while Eudes was fighting the Count of Flanders, a rival king,
and the ineffectual emperor, Charles the Simple. He it was who after
Eudes' death, by the treaty of St. Claire-sur-Epte in 902, surrendered
to the barbarians the fair province, subsequently to be known as
Normandy. The new prayer in the Litany, "From the fury of the Northmen,
good Lord deliver us," was heard. The dread name of Rollo now vanishes
from history to live again in song, and under the title of Robert,
assumed from his god-father, he reappears to win a dukedom and a king's
daughter. The Normans are broken in to Christianity, law and order;
their land becomes one of the most civilized regions of France; the
fiercest of church levellers are known as the greatest of church
builders in Christendom. They gave their name to a style of Christian
architecture in Europe and a line of kings to England,[37] Naples and
Sicily.
[Illustration: L'INSTITUT DE FRANCE.]
The new empire of Charlemagne had endured less than three generations;
from its wreck were formed the seven kingdoms of France, Navarre, the
two Burgundies, Lorraine, Italy and Germany. The people of France never
forgot the lesson of the dark century of the invasions. A subtle change
had been operating. The empire had decomposed into kingdoms; the
kingdoms were segregating into lordships. Men in their need were
attracted to the few strong and dominant lords whose courage and
resource afforded them a rallying point and shelter against
disintegrating forces: the poor and defenceless huddled for protection
to the seigneurs of strongholds which had withstood the floods of
barbarians that were devastating the land. The seeds of feudalism were
sown in the long winter of the Norman terror.
CHAPTER IV
THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS
From 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the
Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers of
France were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[38] grandson and
great-grandson of Robert the Strong. Lay abbots of St. Martin of Tours,
St. Denis, and St. Germain, Counts of Paris and Dukes of France, they
pursued the policy of the mayors of the palace in Merovingian times,
accepting the nominal kingship of the degenerate Carlovingians--Louis
from overseas, Lothaire, and Louis the Lazy--until the time was ripe to
pick up the fallen sceptre. They founded a new line of kings of France
which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the
guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom
Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of
Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust
and purging their avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.
Their patrimony was a small one--the provinces of the Isle de France, La
Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over the
land of the Langue d'oil, with its strenuous northern life, _le doux
royaume de la France_, the sweet realm of France, cradle of the great
French Monarchy and home of art, learning and chivalry. The globe of the
earth, symbol of universal empire, gives way to the hand of justice as
the emblem of kingship. They were, it is true, little more than
seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as
they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were
consecrated of the Church, contained within it a potency of future
grandeur. They were the Lord's anointed, supported by the Lord's Vicar
on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God. Tribal sovereignty had now
given way to territorial sovereignty. Feudal lords and abbots were
supreme within their own domains. The people, long forsaken by their
emperors, had in their turn forsaken them. In order "not to be at the
mercy of all the great ones they surrendered themselves to one of the
great ones" and in exchange for protection gave troth and service.
Cities, churches and monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had
demonstrated the value of a walled city, for the dread Rollo himself had
three times assaulted it in vain. During the latter part of the Norman
terror, from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had
brought their holy relics within its walls as to a city of refuge. Gone
were the lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into
the country. Fortifications were everywhere raised around the
dwelling-places of men. The ample spaces within cities were soon to give
place to crowded houses and narrow streets. The might of the
archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the councils of
kings and dominated the administration of justice; the moral, social and
political life of the country centred around them. Armed with the sword
and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little
republics; coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went
to the chase in almost regal state. The land bristled with castles and
fortified towns and abbeys, and was parcelled out into territories of
varying extent, from great duchies equal to a dozen modern departments,
to the small domain just enough to maintain a single knight.
The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in
Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the
end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life.
Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful
penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers
poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of
the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright
March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God,
the old world "seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her
out-worn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new
churches." Everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, men strove in
emulation to build the finest temples to God. The wooden roofs of the
Merovingian and Carlovingian basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of
war and fire. Stone took the place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof
led to increased mural strength, walls were buttressed, columns
thickened. Massive towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal,
then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred
vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack.
Soon spaces are clamant for decoration, the stone soars into the beauty
of Gothic vaulting and tracery, "the solid and lofty shafts ascend and
press onward in agile files, and in the sacred gloom are like unto an
army of giants that meditate war with invisible powers."[39]
The Capets are more intimately associated with the growth of Paris than
any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in French history is the
ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of Hugh's
son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries and seven
churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city. A new and
magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel dedicated
to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica and palace
in the Cité. The king was no less charitable than pious. Troops of the
poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and he fed a
thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety,
he was early made to feel the power of the Church. His union with Queen
Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before
his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was
summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted
the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40]
Everyone fled from him; only the servants are said to have remained, who
purged with fire all the vessels which were contaminated by the guilty
couple's touch. The misery of his people at length subdued the king's
spirit, and he cast off his faithful and beloved queen.
The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor,
proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas
of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her
southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded
the court and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the
corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their
licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute lives, but was
powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his new consort
became the torment of his life. He was forced even to conceal his acts
of charity. One day, on returning from prayers, he perceived that his
lance by the queen's orders had been adorned with richly chased silver.
He looked around his palace and was not long in finding a poor, tattered
wretch whom he ordered to search for a tool, and the pair locked
themselves in a room. The silver was soon stripped from the lance and
the king hastily thrust it into the beggar's wallet and bade him escape
before the queen discovered the loss. The poor whom he admitted to his
table, despite the angry protests of the queen, at times ill repaid his
charity. On one occasion a tassel of gold was cut from his robe, and on
the thief being discovered the king simply remarked: "Well, perhaps he
has greater need of it than I, may God bless its service to him." The
very fringe was sometimes stripped from his cloak as he walked abroad,
but he never could be induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of
his person. There is, however, an obverse to this ardent piety and noble
enthusiasm:--the merciless persecution and spoliation of the Jews and
the first executions of heretics[41] recorded in France.
In 1022 two priests, one of whom had been the queen's confessor, and
eleven laymen were condemned to be burnt at the stake at Orleans for
heresy. The king spent nine hours wrestling with them in prayer and
argument, but in vain. As the unhappy wretches were being led to
execution, Constance leaned forward, savagely struck at her old
confessor and gouged out one of his eyes. She was applauded for her
zeal.
The economic condition of the people was far from satisfactory. Famine
and pestilence claimed their victims with appalling frequency, and
between 970 and 1040, forty-eight famines and plagues are known to
historians; that of 1033 is recounted by the chronicler, Raoul Glaber,
with details so ghastly that the heart sickens and the hand faints at
their transcription. Slavery existed everywhere: it was regarded as an
integral part of the divine order of things. The Church aimed at
alleviating the lot of the slave, not at abolishing slavery. At a
division of serfs, held in common between the priors of two abbeys in
1087, the children were shared, male and female, without any reference
to their parents. Archbishops fulminated against serfs who tried to
escape from their lords, quoting the words of the apostle: "Serfs be
subject in all things to your masters." A serf was valued at so much
money, like a horse or an ox. The serfs of the Church at Paris were sent
to the law courts to give evidence for their bishop or prior, or to do
battle for them in the event of a judicial duel. The freemen in the
eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf,
and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century the king and
his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight
against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his
suit and suffer excommunication. The prelates exchanged serfs, used them
as substitutes in times of war, allowed them to marry outside their
church or abbey only by special permission and on condition that all
children were equally divided between the two proprietors. If a female
serf married a freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were
only permitted to make a will by consent of their master; every favour
was paid for and liberty bought at a great price. Whole _bourgades_ were
often in a state of serfdom. Merchants even and artizans in towns owed
part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh century burgesses
as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches, exchanged, sold or
left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of mediæval France is the
story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win their economic
freedom[42] and of her kings to tame the insolence of disobedient
vassals and to make their shadowy kingship a real thing. And the story
of mediæval France is closed only by the great Revolution.
[Illustration: HOTEL GEROUILHAC]
The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of
rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a
protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father
did not long survive his victory. He died in his palace at Melun in
1031, and the benisons and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his
spirit to its rest. If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert's
memory is enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched
with some beautiful compositions: he was often seen to enter St. Denis
in regal habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes
challenge the monks to a singing contest; once, it is said, when
importuned by his queen to immortalise her name in song, he began, "O
Constantia Martyrum!" The delighted Constance heard no further and was
satisfied.
Scarcely had the grave closed over the dead king at St. Denis when
Constance plotted with some of the nobles to place Robert, her youngest
and favourite son, on the throne in place of Henry, the rightful heir,
who fled to Normandy to implore the aid of Duke Robert. The cultivation
of the arts of peace had not enfeebled the fighting powers of the
Normans. Robert fell upon the queen's supporters with reckless[43]
bravery and crushed them in three decisive battles. Henry gained his
crown but at the cost of a big slice of territory which advanced the
Norman boundary to within twenty leagues of Paris. The queen survived
her humiliation but a short time, and her death at Melun in 1032 and
Henry's generosity to his enemies gave peace to the kingdom.
In 1053, towards the end of Henry's almost unchronicled reign, an
alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon
claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they alleged
had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The loss of a
province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry at once took
measures to convince France and Christendom that the true body was still
at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops, abbots, princes
and people, presided over by the king, his brother and the archbishops
of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis and his two
companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers in which they
had been placed, by Dagobert, together with a nail from the cross and
part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in a kind of
cupboard richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in
a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they
were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to
their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon, fortified
with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the
possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the
devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to
the relics at St. Denis.
The chief architectural event of Henry's reign at Paris was the
rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and
abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls
and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings
stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cité on the great Roman road
to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a leper. The
foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in France,
included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with a mill on
the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an oven.[44]
In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was secularised, the abbot
was patron of twenty-nine priories, three vicarates and thirty-five
parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some of the old building has been
incorporated in the existing Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The
Gothic priory chapel, with its fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a
machinery-room, and the refectory, one of the most precious and
beautiful creations attributed to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.
Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a
depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became
king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and dishonour
his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and brigandage. Early in
his career he followed the evil counsels of his provost Etienne, and
purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St. Germain des Prés to pay
for his dissolute pleasures. "As the sacrilegious pair," says the
chronicler, "drew near the relics, Etienne was smitten with blindness
and the terrified Philip fled." Simony filled his gaping purse;
bishoprics and other preferments were openly sold to the highest bidder,
and one day when an abbot complained that he had been kept waiting while
a rich competitor for a bishopric had been admitted, the king answered:
"Wait a while until I have made my money of him; I will then accuse him
of simony, and you shall have the reversion."
Regal irresponsibility led in 1092 to a greater crime. Most popular of
the twelfth-century stories sung by the _trouvères_ of North France was
that of Tortulf, the Breton outlaw, the Robin Hood of his day, who won
by his prowess against the Normans the lordship of rich lands by the
Loire, and with his son, Ingelar, founded the famous house of Anjou. In
1092 Foulques de Réchin, lord of Anjou--whose handsome grandson
Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet from the sprig of broom (_genêt_) he wore
in his helmet, was to father a race of English kings--had to wife
Bertrarde, fairest of the ladies of France, whose two predecessors had
been cast off like vile courtesans. Philip, when on a visit to the count
at Tours became inflamed with passion at beholding her, and she was
easily induced to elope with him under the promise that she should share
his throne. His queen, Bertha, mother of his two children, was
pitilessly driven from his bed and imprisoned at Montreuil, and two of
his venal bishops were found to bestow the blessings of the Church on
the new union. But the thunder of Rome came swift and terrible. Philip
laid aside his crown and sceptre, grovelled before the pontiff, and
implored forgiveness, but continued to live with his mistress. Next year
a new pope excommunicated the guilty pair and laid their kingdom under
the ban. The same Council, however, of Clermont, which fulminated
against Philip, stirred Christendom to the first crusade, and in the
magnificent enthusiasm of the moment Philip was permitted to live
outwardly submissive but secretly rebellious. He crowned Bertrarde at
Troyes, and lived on his vicious life, while Bertha was dying of a
broken heart in her prison at Montreuil. Monkish legends tell of the
excommunicated king languishing, a scrofulous wretch, in a deserted
court; but there is little doubt that the impious monarch died, tardily
repentant, at his palace at Melun, after a reign of nearly half a
century. It was a reign void of honour or profit to France. He left his
son Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to
little more than a baronage over a few _comtés_, whose cities of Paris,
Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by
insolent and rebellious vassals, one of whom, the Seigneur de Puisset,
had inflicted a disgraceful defeat on Philip in 1081. Many of the great
seigneurs were but freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and
lawlessness of these and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail
on merchants and travellers, made commerce almost impossible.
Corruption, too, had invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the
thrones of bishops, and a dual effort was made by king and Church to
remedy the evils of the times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power
at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep's clothing:
the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to
subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience.
In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of
Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on
his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up.
As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out--"Where is the
archbishop?" he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing
sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed
to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to
kiss the old man's hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard
him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such
as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to
enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and
abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay
potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make
and unmake kings.
The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw
the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France,
religious houses--the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Cîteaux,
Clairvaux--sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations
and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, "adorning the
deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and
righteousness." "How fair a thing it is," exclaims St. Bernard, "to live
in perfect unity! One weeps for his sins; another sings praises to the
Lord. One teaches the sciences; another prays. One leads the active;
another the contemplative, life. One burns with charity; another is
prone in humility. Nought is here but the house of God and the very gate
of heaven."
St. Bernard was the terror of mothers and of wives. His austerity, his
loving-kindness,[45] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his
absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate
eloquence, carried all before him. St. Bernard was the dictator of
Christendom; he it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his
eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice
in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful
hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very
ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and
comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than
seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century
Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich
ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting
garments[46] looked like harlots rather than monks.
In the polluting atmosphere of Philip's reign matters grew worse. St.
Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as "a house of Satan, a
den of thieves." "The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent
with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones
were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes
of the rich." "Bishops dressed like women; the successors of St. Peter
rode about on white mules, loaded with gold and precious stones,
apparelled in fine silk, surrounded with soldiers and followed by a
brilliant train. They were rather the successors of Constantine."
In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fossés seemed so
hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather than imperil his
soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In 1107 the bishop of
Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey of St. Eloy and
extirpate the evils there flourishing. The nuns, it was reported, had so
declined in grace, owing to the proximity of the court and intercourse
with the world, that they had lost all sense of shame and lived in open
sin, breaking the bonds of common decency. The scandal was so great that
the bishop determined to cut them off from the house of the Lord. The
abbey was reduced to a priory and given over to the abbot of the now
reformed monastery of St. Maur, and its vast lands were parcelled out
into several parishes.[47] The rights of the canons of Notre Dame were
to be maintained; on St. Eloy's day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish
them with six pigs, two and a half measures of wine and three of fine
wheat, and on St. Paul's day with eight sheep, the same quantity of
wine, six crowns and one obole. The present Rue de la Cité and the
Boulevard du Palais give approximately the east and west boundaries of
the suppressed abbey, part of whose site is now occupied by the
Prefecture de Police.
But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris,
1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting,
against the majority of the Council, the pope's decrees excluding
married clerics from the churches. The reform of the canons of Notre
Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent in 1128
to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and canons,
supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was stripped of
his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the archbishop of
Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the influence of St.
Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.
On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the
abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor were ambushed and
the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII.,
Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited
at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia. When celebrating mass
before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve the canons had
stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff's
knees might rest. When the pope retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his
officers claimed the carpet, according to usage; the canons and their
servants resisted, and there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks. The
king intervened, and anointed majesty himself was struck. A scuffle
ensued, during which the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war
between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided
to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The
dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their
voices by howling and other indignities, and only ceased on being
threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.
Louis the Lusty was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy. He had
none of Philip's indolence, and was ever on the move, hewing his way,
sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning
and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The
famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, and
led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan
militia. It was a poor bald _curé_ who, when all else despaired, led the
assault on the keep of the castle of Le Puisset; he seized on a plank of
wood, assailed the palisade, calling on the hesitating royal troops to
follow him; they were shamed by his bravery and the castle was won.
The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and
the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have
the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to
travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the
nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and
oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was
the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with
that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king,
destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the
vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the
mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.
It is in Louis VI.'s reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme
(golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin's cloak
as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable
army was menacing France. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him
and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. The abbot took from the altar
the standard--famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by
the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery
was in danger of attack--and handed it to the king. The sacred banner
was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire
and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.
There was a solemn ceremony, the _Remise des corps saints_, at the royal
abbey when the king returned with his court to give thanks and to
restore the banner to the altar. He carried the relics of the holy
martyrs on his shoulders in procession, then replaced them whence they
were taken and made oblations. A yet more superb spectacle was given to
the Parisians when Pope Innocent II., a refugee from the violence of the
anti-papal party at Rome, came to celebrate the Easter mass at St.
Denis. The pope and his cardinals were mounted on fair steeds, barons
and seigneurs on foot led the pope's white horse by the bridle. As he
passed, the Jews presented him with a scroll of the law wrapped in a
veil--"May it please God to remove the veil from your hearts," answered
the pope. The solemn mass ended, pope and cardinals repaired to the
cloisters where tables were spread with the Easter feast. They first
partook of the Paschal lamb, reclining on the carpet in the fashion of
the ancients, then, rising, took their places at table. After the repast
a magnificent procession went its way to Paris, to be met by the whole
city with King Louis and Prince Philip at their head.
The manner of the young prince's tragic death gives an insight into the
state of a mediæval town. He was riding one day for amusement in the
streets of Paris, attended by one esquire, when a pig ran between his
horse's feet; the lad was thrown and died before the last sacraments
could be administered. He was only fourteen years of age, and all France
wept for him.
The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris,
which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and
the seat of his government. The market, now known as Les Halles, was
established at a place called Champeaux, belonging to St. Denis of the
Prison. William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[48]
famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas
of Canterbury and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife
Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed
it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some
shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small _bourg_, still known
as Bourg-la-Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of
fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings
yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of
Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying
of the plague of the burning sickness (_les ardents_); of St. Jacques de
la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Boeufs, so named from the heads of
oxen carved on the portal, were also built.
CHAPTER V
PARIS UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS
During the twenty-eight years of the reign of Louis VII. no heir to the
crown was born. At length, on the 22nd of August, 1165, Adelaide of
Champagne, his third wife, lay in child-bed and excited crowds thronged
the palace. The king, "afeared of the number of his daughters and
knowing how ardently his people desired a child of the nobler sex," was
beside himself with joy when the desire of his heart was held up to him.
The chamber was closed, but curious eyes had espied the longed-for heir
through an aperture of the door and in a moment the good news was spread
abroad. There was a sound of clarions and of bells and the city as by
enchantment shone with an aureole of light. An English student roused by
the uproar and the glare of what seemed like a great conflagration leapt
to the window and beheld two old women hurrying by with lighted tapers.
He asked the cause. They answered "God has given us this night a royal
heir, by whose hand your king shall suffer shame and ill-hap." This was
the birth of Philip le Dieu donné--Philip sent of Heaven--better known
as Philip Augustus. Under him and Louis IX. mediæval Paris, faithfully
reflecting the fortunes of the French Monarchy, attained its highest
development.
When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the
little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and
practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than
half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now
divided. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the sea, subdued
the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of
Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and
Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle
of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The
English king was humiliated by the invasion of his territory by Prince
Louis, afterwards Louis VIII., who overran nearly the whole of the east
of England, captured Rochester and Winchester, and received the barons'
homage at London.
The victory of Bouvines evoked that ideal of moral and material and
national unity which the later kings of France were to realise. The
progress of Philip towards Paris was one long triumph. Peasants and
mechanics dropped their tools to gaze on the dread iron Count of
Flanders, captive and wounded. The king, who had owed his life to the
excellence of his armour,[49] was received in Paris with a frenzy of
joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his
path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the
churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed
itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national
event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new
fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample
leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. "Never after
was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace."
Two vast undertakings make the name of Philip Augustus memorable in
Paris--the beginning of the paving of the city and the building of its
girdle of walls and towers.
[Illustration: ST. ETIENNE DU MONT AND TOUR DE CLOVIS.]
One day as Philip stood at the window of his palace, where he was
wont to amuse himself by watching the Seine flow by, some carts rattled
along the muddy road beneath the window and stirred so foul and
overpowering an odour that the king almost fell sick. Next day the
provost and the sheriffs and chief citizens were sent for and ordered to
set about paving the city with stone. The work was not however completed
until the reign of Charles V., a century and a half later. It was done
well and lasted till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the
miserable cobbles, known as the pavement of the League. Whether the city
grew much sweeter is doubtful; certainly Paris in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was as evil-smelling as ever. Montaigne, in the
second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of
the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and
Howell writes in 1620, "the city is always dirty, and by perpetual
motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that
sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain
it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off,
if the wind be in one's face as one comes from the fresh air of the
country."
[Illustration: WALL OF PHILIPPE AUGUSTE, COUR DE ROUEN.]
The great fortified wall of Philip Augustus began at the north-west
water-tower, which stood just above the present Pont des Arts, and
passed through the quadrangle of the Louvre where a line on the paving
marks its course to the Porte St. Honoré, near the Oratoire. It
continued northwards by the Rue du Jour to the Porte Montmartre, whose
site is marked by a tablet on No. 30 Rue Montmartre. Turning eastward by
the Painters' Gate (135 Rue St. Denis) and the Porte St. Martin, near
the Rue Grenier St. Lazare, the fortification described a curve in a
south-easterly direction by the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, where traces
of the wall have been found in the Cour de l'Horloge of the Mont de
Piété, and of a tower at No. 57. The line of the wall continued in the
same direction by the Lycée Charlemagne, No. 131 Rue St. Antoine, where
stood another gate, to the north-east water-tower, known as the Tour
Barbeau, which stood near No. 32 Quai des Célestins. The opposite or
southern division began at the south-east water-tower, La Tournelle, and
the Gate of St. Bernard on the present Quai de la Tournelle, and went
southward by the Rues des Fossés, St. Bernard and Cardinal Lemoine, to
the Porte St. Victor, near No. 2 Rue des Ecoles. The wall then turned
westward by the Rue Clovis, where at No. 7 one of the largest and
best-preserved remains may be seen. It enclosed the abbey of St.
Geneviève, and the Pantheon stands on the site of the Porte Papale. The
south-western angle was turned near the end of the Rue Soufflot and the
beginning of the Rue Monsieur le Prince. In a northerly direction it
then followed the line of the latter street, crossing the Boulevard St.
Germain, and continued by the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. In the Cour de
Rouen, No. 61 Rue St. André des Arts, an important remnant may be seen
with the base of a tower. We may now trace the march of the wall and
towers by the Rues Mazarin and Guénégaud, where at No. 29 other
fragments exist, to the south-west water-tower, the notorious Tour de
Nesle[50] whose site is occupied by the Hôtel des Monnaies. The passage
of the Seine was blocked by chains, which were drawn at night from tower
to tower and fixed on boats and piles. The wall was twenty years
building and was completed in 1211. It was eight feet thick, pierced by
twenty-four gates and fortified by about five hundred towers. Much of
the land it enclosed was not built upon; the _marais_ (marshes) on the
north bank were drained and cultivated and became market and fruit
gardens.
The moated château of the Louvre, another of Philip's great buildings,
stood outside the wall and commanded the valley route to Paris. It was
at once a fortress, a palace and a prison. Parts of two wings of the
structure are incorporated in the present palace of the Louvre, and the
site of the remaining wings, the massive keep and the towers are marked
out on the pavement of the quadrangle.
Many are the stories of the great king's wisdom. One day, entering the
chapter-house of Notre Dame during the election of a bishop, Philip
seized a crozier and passing along the assembled canons thrust it into
the hands of one of lean and poor aspect, saying: "Here, take this, that
you may wax fat like your brethren." His jester once claimed to be of
his family through their common father Adam, and complained that the
heritage had been badly divided. "Well," said the king, "come to me
to-morrow and I will restore what is due to thee." Next day, in the
presence of his court, he handed the jester a farthing, saying: "Here is
thy just portion. When I shall have shared my wealth with each of thy
brothers, barely a farthing will remain to me."
One of the royal bailiffs coveted the land of a poor knight, who refused
to sell. The knight at length died, and the widow proving equally
stubborn, the bailiff went to the market-place, hired two porters whom
he dressed decently, and repaired with them by night to the cemetery
where the dead chevalier lay buried. His body was drawn from the tomb
and held upright while the bailiff abjured it to agree before the two
witnesses to a sale of the land. "Silence gives consent," said the
bailiff, and placed a coin in the corpse's hand. The tomb was closed and
the land seized on the morrow, despite the widow's protests. On the case
being brought before the judgment-seat of Philip in the palace of the
Cité, the two porters bore witness to the sale. The king, suspecting the
truth, led one of the witnesses aside and bade him recite a paternoster.
While the man was murmuring the prayer the king was heard of all the
court loudly saying: "Yes, that is so: you speak truly." The recital
over, the king assured him of pardon, and returning to the second
witness, admonished him also not to lie, for his friend had revealed all
as truly as if he had said a paternoster. The second witness confessed.
The bailiff, praying for mercy, fell prostrate before the king, who
condemned the guilty man to banishment for life, and ordered the whole
of his possessions to be escheated to the poor widow.
Of the impression that the Paris of Philip Augustus made on a provincial
visitor, we are able, fortunately, to give some account. "I am at
Paris," writes Guy of Bazoches, about the end of the twelfth century,
"in this royal city, where the abundance of nature's gifts not only
retains those that dwell there but invites and attracts those who are
afar off. Even as the moon surpasses the stars in brightness, so does
this city, the seat of royalty, exalt her proud head above all other
cities. She is placed in the bosom of a delicious valley, in the centre
of a crown of hills, which Ceres and Bacchus enrich with their gifts.
The Seine, that proud river which comes from the east, flows there
through wide banks and with its two arms surrounds an island which is
the head, the heart, and the marrow of the whole city. Two suburbs
extend to right and left, even the lesser of which would rouse the envy
of many another city. These suburbs communicate with the island by two
stone bridges; the Grand Pont towards the north in the direction of the
English sea, and the Petit Pont which looks towards the Loire. The
former bridge, broad, rich, commercial, is the centre of a fervid
activity, and innumerable boats surround it laden with merchandise and
riches. The Petit Pont belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and
down disputing. In the island adjacent to the king's palace, which
dominates the whole town, the palace of philosophy is seen where study
reigns alone as sovereign, a citadel of light and immortality."
After Louis VIII.'s brief reign of three years, there rises to the
throne of France one of the gentlest and noblest of the sons of men, a
prince indeed, who, amid all the temptations of absolute power
maintained a spotless life, and at death laid down an earthly crown to
assume a fairer and an imperishable diadem among the saints in heaven.
All that was best in mediævalism--its desire for peace and order and
justice; its fervent piety, its passion to effect unity among Christ's
people and to wrest the Holy Land from the pollution of the infidel; its
enthusiasm for learning and for the things of the mind; its love of
beauty--all are personified in the life of St. Louis.
The young prince was eleven years of age when his father died. During
his minority he was nurtured in learning and piety[51] by his mother,
Blanche of Castile, whose devotion to her son, and firm and wise regency
were a fitting prelude to the reign of a saintly king. Even after he
attained his majority, Louis always sought his mother's counsel and was
ever respectful and submissive to her will. When the news of her death
reached him in the Holy Land, he went to his oratory, fell on his knees
before the altar, submissive to the will of God, and cried out with
tears in his eyes, that he had loved the queen, "his most dear lady and
mother, beyond all mortal creatures."
The king's conception of his office was summed up in two
words--_Gouverner bien_. "Fair son," said he one day to Prince Louis,
his heir, "I pray thee win the affection of thy people. Verily, I would
rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and ruled the kingdom well
and loyally than that thou shouldst govern it ill." Joinville tells with
charming simplicity how the king after hearing mass in the chapel at
Vincennes was wont to walk in the woods for refreshment and then,
sitting at the foot of an old oak tree, would listen to the plaints of
his poorer people without let of usher or other official and administer
justice to them. At other times, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat
of wool (_tiretaine_) without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety, and a
hat with a peacock's plume, he would walk with his Council in the garden
of his palace in the Cité, and on the people crowding round him, would
call for a carpet to be spread on the ground, on which he would sit,
surrounded with his councillors, and judge the poor diligently.
So rigidly just was the good king that he would not lie even to the
Saracens. On his return from the crusade, being pressed by his Council
to leave a stranded ship, he called the mariners to him and asked them
if they would abandon the vessel if it were charged with merchandise.
All replied that they would risk their lives rather than forsake the
ship. "Then," said the king, "why am I asked to abandon it?" "Sire,"
they answered, "your royal person and your queen and children cannot be
valued in money nor weighed in the balance against our lives." "Well,"
said the king, "I have heard your counsel and that of my lords: now hear
mine. If I leave this ship there will remain on board five hundred men,
each of whom loves his life as dearly as I do mine, and who, perchance,
will never see their fatherland again. Therefore will I rather put my
person and my wife and children in God's hands than do hurt to so much
people."
[Illustration: VINCENNES.]
In 1238 the king was profoundly shocked by the news that the crown of
thorns was a forfeited pledge at Venice for an unpaid loan advanced by
some Venetian merchants to the Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople. Louis
paid the debt,[52] redeemed the pledge, and secured the relic for Paris.
The king met his envoys at Sens, and barefooted, himself carried the
sacred treasure enclosed in three caskets, one of wood, one of silver
and one of gold, to Paris. The procession took eight days to reach the
city, and so great were the multitudes who thronged to see it, that a
large platform was raised in a field outside the walls, from which
several prelates exposed it in turn to the veneration of the people.
Thence it was taken to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the king dressed in
a simple tunic, and barefoot still carrying the relic. From the
cathedral it was transferred to the royal chapel of St. Nicholas within
the precincts of the palace. A year later the Emperor Baldwin was
constrained to part with other relics, including a piece of the true
cross, the blade of the lance and the sponge of the Passion. To enshrine
them and the crown of thorns the chapel of St. Nicholas was demolished
and the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle built in its place. The upper chapel
was dedicated to the relics; the lower to the Blessed Virgin. On solemn
festivals the king would himself expose the relics to the people. Louis
was zealous in his devotion and for a time attended matins in the new
chapel at midnight, until, suffering much headache in consequence, he
was persuaded to have the office celebrated in the early morning before
prime. His piety, however, was by no means austere: he had all the
French gaiety of heart, dearly loved a good story, and was excellent
company at table, where he loved to sit conversing with Robert de
Sorbon, his chaplain. "It is a bad thing," he said one day to Joinville,
"to take another man's goods, because _rendre_ (to restore) is so
difficult, that even to pronounce the word makes the tongue sore by
reason of the r's in it."
[Illustration: LA SAINTE CHAPELLE.]
At another time they were talking of the duties of a layman towards Jews
and Infidels. "Let me tell you a story," said St. Louis. "The monks of
Cluny once arranged a great conference between some learned clerks and
Jews. When the conference opened, an old knight who for love of Christ
was given bread and shelter at the monastery, approached the abbot and
begged leave to say the first word. The abbot, after some protest
against the irregularity, was persuaded to grant permission, and the
knight, leaning on his stick, requested that the greatest scholar and
rabbi among the Jews might be brought before him. 'Master,' said the
knight, 'do you believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus
and held Him at her breast, and that she is the Virgin Mother of God?'
The Jew answered that he believed it not at all. 'Then,' said the
knight, 'fool that thou art to have entered God's house and His church,
and thou shalt pay for it.' Thereupon he lifted his stick, smote the
rabbi under the ear and felled him to the ground. The terrified Jews
fled, carrying their master with them, and so," said St. Louis, "ended
the conference. And I tell you, let none but a great clerk dispute: the
business of a layman when he hears the Christian religion defamed is to
defend it with his sharp sword and thrust his weapon into the
miscreant's body as far as it will go."
Louis, however, did not apply the moral in practice. Although severe in
exacting tribute from the Jews, he spent much money in converting them
and held many of their orphan children at the font. To others he gave
pensions, which became a heavy financial burden to himself and his
successors. He was stern with blasphemers, whose lips he caused to be
branded with a hot iron. "I have heard him say," writes Joinville, "with
his own mouth, that he would he were marked with a red-hot iron himself
if thereby he could banish all oaths and blasphemy from his kingdom.
Full twenty-two years have I been in his company, and never have I heard
him swear or blaspheme God or His holy Mother or any Saint, howsoever
angry he may have been: and when he would affirm anything, he would say,
'Verily it is so, or verily it is not so.' Before going to bed he would
call his children around him and recite the fair deeds and sayings of
ancient princes and kings, praying that they would remember them for
good ensample; for unjust and wicked princes lost their kingdoms through
pride and avarice and rapine." The good king essayed to deal with some
social evils at court, but in vain:[53] he could only give the example
of a pure and chaste life. When he was in the east he heard of a Saracen
lord of Egypt who caused all the best books of philosophy to be
transcribed for the use of young men, and he determined to do the like
for the youth of Paris. Scribes were sent to copy the Scriptures and the
writings of the Fathers, preserved in various abbeys in France. He had a
convenient and safe place built at the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle,
where he housed the books. Scholars had free access to them, and he
himself was wont in his leisure time to shut himself up there for study,
reading rather the Holy Fathers than the writings of the best doctors of
his own time.
Louis was a steadfast friend to the religious orders. On his return from
the Holy Land he brought with him six monks from Mount Carmel and
established them on the north bank of the Seine, near the present Quai
des Celestins; they were subsequently transferred to the University
quarter, on a site now occupied by the Marché aux Carmes. The prior of
the Grande Chartreuse was also prayed to spare a few brothers to found a
house in Paris; four were sent, and the king endowed them with his
Château de Vauvert, including extensive lands and vineyards. The château
was reputed to be haunted by evil spirits, and the street leading
thither as late as the last century was known as the Rue d'Enfer. Louis
began a great church for them, and the eight cells, each with its three
rooms and garden, were increased to thirty before the end of his reign;
in later times the order became one of the richest in Paris and occupied
a vast expanse of land to the south of the Luxembourg. The fine series
of paintings illustrating the life of St. Bruno, by Le Sueur, now in the
Louvre, was executed for the smaller cloister of the monastery. The
Grands Augustins were established on the south bank of the Seine, near
the present Pont Neuf, and the Serfs de la Vierge, known later as the
Blancs Manteaux, from their white cloaks, in the Marais. They were
subsequently amalgamated with the Guillelmites, or the Hermits of St.
William, and at no. 14 of the street of that name some remains of their
monastery may yet be seen. The church of the Blancs Manteaux, rebuilt
in the seventeenth century, also exists in the street of that name.
[Illustration: REFECTORY OF THE CORDELIERS.]
In 1217 the first of the Preaching Friars were seen at Paris. On the
12th of September seven friars, among whom were Laurence the Englishman
and a brother of St. Dominic, established themselves in a house near the
_parvis_ of Notre Dame. In 1218 the University gave them a home near St.
Genevieve, opposite the church of St. Etienne des Grez (St. Stephen of
the Greeks), and in the following year, when St. Dominic came to Paris,
the brothers had increased to thirty. The saint himself drew up the
plans of their monastery in the Rue St. Jacques, and always cherished a
particular affection for the Paris house. Their church was opened in
1220, and being dedicated to St. Jacques, the Dominicans were known as
Jacobins all over France. St. Louis endowed them with a school; they
soon became one of the most powerful and opulent of the religious
orders, and their church, a burial-place for kings and princes. The
Friars Minor soon followed. St. Francis himself, in his deep affection
for France, had determined to go to Paris and found a house of his
order, but being dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin, sent in 1216
a few of his disciples. These early friars, true _poverelli di Dio_,
would accept no endowment of house or money, and supporting themselves
by their hands, carried their splendid devotion among the poor, the
outcast, and the lepers of Paris. In 1230 the Cordeliers, as they were
called,[54] accepted the _loan_ of a house near the walls in the
south-western part of the city. St. Louis built them a church, and left
them at his death part of his library and a large sum of money.[55] They
too became rich and powerful and their church one of the largest and
most magnificent in Paris. St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus taught at
their school of theology. Their monastery in the sixteenth century was
the finest and most spacious in Paris, with cells for a hundred friars
and a vast refectory, which still exists. The king also founded the
hospital for 300 blind beggars, known as the Quinze-Vingts (15 × 20) now
in the Rue de Charenton, and left them an annual _rente_ of thirty
_livres parisis_, that every inmate might have a mess of good pottage at
his meals. Until Cardinal de Rohan, of diamond-necklace fame, effected
the sale of the buildings in 1779 to a syndicate of speculators, an act
of jobbery which brought his eminence a handsome commission, the
hospital was situated between the Palais Royal and the Louvre.
Originally it was a night shelter, whither the poor blind might repair
after their long quest in the streets of Paris. The king subsequently
gave them a dress on which Philip le Bel ordered a _fleur-de-lys_ to be
embroidered, that they might be known as the "king's poor folk." They
were privileged to place collecting-boxes and to beg inside the
churches. Since, however, the differences in the relative opulence of
churches was great, the right to beg in certain of the richer ones was
put up to auction every year, and those who promised to pay the highest
premium to the funds of the hospital were adjudicated the privilege of
begging there. This curious arrangement was in full vigour until the
latter half of the eighteenth century, when the foundation was removed.
Twelve blind brothers and twelve seeing brothers--husbands of blind
women who were lodged there on condition that they served as leaders
through the streets--had a share in the management of the institution.
Luxury seems to have sometimes invaded the hostel, for in 1579 a royal
decree forbade the sale of wine to the brethren and denounced the
blasphemy with which their conversation was often tainted. In 1631 they
were forbidden to use stuffs other than serge or cloth for their
garments, or to use velvet for ornament.
The establishment of the abbey of St. Antoine, of the Friars of the Holy
Cross and of the Sisters of St. Bega or Béguines, were also due to the
king's piety, and the whole city was surrounded with religious houses.
"Even as a scribe," says an old writer, "who hath written his book
illuminates it with gold and silver, so did the king illumine his
kingdom with the great quantity of the houses of God that he built."
Louis was, however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical
arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that
Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their
excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend
the secular arm to enforce their authority. "Yes," answered the king,
"if you will give me the particulars of each case that I may judge if
your sentence be just." They objected that that appertained to the
ecclesiastical courts, but Louis was inflexible, and they remained
unsatisfied.
Many were the king's benefactions to the great hospital of Paris, the
Hôtel Dieu. Rules, dating from 1217, for the treatment of the sick poor
were elaborated in his reign with admirable forethought. The sick, after
confession and communion, were to be put to bed and treated as if they
were the masters of the house. They were to be daily served with food
before the nursing friars and sisters, and all that they desired was to
be freely given if it could be obtained and were not prejudicial to
their recovery. If the sickness were dangerous the patient was to be set
apart and to be tended with especial solicitude. The sick were never to
be left unguarded and even to be kept seven days after they were healed,
lest they should suffer a relapse. The friars and sisters were to eat
twice a day: the sick whenever they had need. A nurse who struck a
patient was excommunicated. In later times, lax management and the
decline of piety which came with the religious and political changes of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made reform urgent, and in 1505
the Parliament appointed a committee of eight _bourgeois clercs_ to
control the receipts. The buildings were much increased in 1636, but
were never large enough, and in 1655 the priory of St. Julien was united
to the hospital. "As many as 6000 patients," says Félibien, writing in
1725, "have been counted there at one time, five or six in one bed." No
limitations of age or sex or station or religion or country were set.
Everybody was received, and in Félibien's time the upkeep amounted to
500,000 livres per annum. The old Hôtel Dieu was situated to the south
of Notre Dame, and stood there until rebuilt on its present site in
1878.
The king was ever solicitous for the earthly weal of his subjects and
made an unpopular peace with England against the advice of his Council.
"Sirs," he protested, "the land I give to the king of England I give
without being held to do so, that I may awaken love between his children
and mine who are cousins germain."
[Illustration: RUE DE VENISE.]
Louis sought diligently over all the land for the _grand sage homme_ who
would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without
regard to rank or riches;[56] and what he exacted of his officers he
practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for
having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to
make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy,
one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young
fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the
sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to
join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined
château:--it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous
seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade
the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to
police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of
the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade
guilds.
In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader's badge, "the dear
remembrance of his dying Lord," and met his death in the ill-fated
expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville
carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan
monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in
the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying
king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count
of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy
communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked
"Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve," crossed
his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to
his Creator. _Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de
ce saint prince_, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the
king's son--"A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away
of this holy prince."
The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57] had been removed by
boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the
place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58] his friend and
companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his
story thus:--"I make known to all readers of this little book that the
things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and
steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I
testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you,
praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please
Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for
our bodies as for our souls. Amen."
King Louis was tall of stature, with a spare and graceful figure; his
face was of angelic sweetness, with eyes as of a dove, and crowned with
abundant fair hair. As he grew older he became somewhat bald and held
himself slightly bent. "Never," says Joinville, when describing a charge
led by the king, which turned the tide of battle, "saw I so fair an
armed man. He seemed to sit head and shoulders above all his knights.
His helmet of gold was most fair to see, and a sword of Allemain was in
his hand. Four times I saw him put his body in danger of death to save
hurt to his people."
CHAPTER VI
ART AND LEARNING AT PARIS
Two epoch-making developments--the creation of Gothic architecture and
the rise of the university--synchronise with the period covered by the
reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now fitly be
considered.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF ST. DENIS.]
The memory of the Norman terror had long passed from men's minds. The
Isle de France had been purged of robber lords, and with peace and
security, wealth and population had increased. The existing churches
were becoming too small for the faithful and new and fairer temples
replaced the old: the massive square towers, the heavy walls and thick
pillars of the Norman builders blossomed into grace and light and
beauty. Already in the beginning of the twelfth century the church of
St. Denis was in urgent need of extension. On festival days so great
were the crowds pressing to view the relics that many people had been
trodden under foot, and Abbot Suger determined to build a larger and
nobler church. St. Denis is an edifice of profound interest to the
traveller. In the west façade (1140) we may see the round Norman arch
side by side with the pointed Gothic, and the choir completed in 1144
was the earliest example of a Gothic apse. But Suger's structure was
nearly destroyed by fire in 1219, and the upper part of the choir, the
nave and transepts, were rebuilt in 1231 in the pure Gothic of the time.
Great was the enthusiasm of the people as the new temple rose. Noble and
burgess, freeman and serf, harnessed themselves like beasts of burden to
the ropes and drew the stone from the quarry. All would lend their aid
in raising the new house of God and of His holy martyrs, and the
burial-place of their kings. In 1161 Maurice de Sully, a peasant's son,
who had risen to become bishop of Paris, determined to erect a great
minster in the place of Childebert's basilica, which was no longer
adequate to the demands of the time. The old church of St. Stephen[59]
and many houses were demolished together with the cathedral, and a new
street, called Notre Dame, was made. Sully devoted the greater part of
his life and private resources to the work. The king, the pope,
seigneurs, guilds of merchants and private persons, vied with each other
in making gifts. Two years were spent in digging the foundations, and in
1163 Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182,
the choir being finished, the papal legate consecrated the high altar.
At Sully's death, in 1196, the walls of the nave were erect and partly
roofed. The transepts and nave were completed in 1235.
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME: PORTAL OF ST. ANNE.]
In 1218 an ingenious and sacrilegious thief, climbing to the roof to
haul up the silver candlesticks from the altar by a noose in a rope, set
fire to the altar cloth, and the choir was seriously injured. Sully's
work had been Romanesque in style, and choir and apse were now rebuilt
in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. The
builders have preserved some of the best of the Romanesque
twelfth-century work in the portal of St. Anne's, under the south tower,
and the magnificent iron hinges of old St. Stephen's were used for its
doors. The chapels round the apse and the twenty-eight figures of the
royal benefactors from Childebert I. to Philip Augustus, on the west
front, were not completed until the end of the thirteenth century. The
choir of St. Germain des Prés and the exquisite little church of St.
Julien le Pauvre were built at the end of the twelfth century, and the
beautiful refectory of St. Martin des Champs was created about 1220. But
the culmination of Gothic art is reached in the wondrous sanctuary that
St. Louis built for the crown of thorns, "the most precious piece of
Gothic," says Ruskin, "in Northern Europe." Michelet saw a whole world
of religion and poetry--tears of piety, mystic ecstasy, the mysteries of
divine love--expressed in the marvellous little church, in the fragile
and precious paintings of its windows.[60] The narrow cell with an
aperture looking on the reliquary, which St. Louis used as an oratory,
is still shown. The work was completed in three years, and has been so
admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc that the visitor may gaze to-day on
this pure and peerless gem almost as St. Louis left it, for the gorgeous
interior faithfully reproduces the mediæval colour and gold. During the
Revolution it was used as an granary and then as a club. It narrowly
escaped destruction, and men now living can remember seeing the old
notices on the porch of the lower chapel--_Propriété nationale à
vendre_. Only once a year, when the "red mass" is said at the opening of
the Law Courts in November, is the church used; and all that remains of
the relics has long been transferred to the treasury of Notre Dame. The
old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the Cordeliers, St. Croix de la
Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs Manteaux, the Mathurins and other
masterpieces of the Gothic builders have all disappeared.
Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France. The
thirteenth century rivals the finest period of Greek art for purity,
simplicity, nobility and accurate science of construction. Imagination
was chastened by knowledge, but not systematised into rigid rules. Each
master solved his problem in his own way, and the result was a charm and
a variety, a fertility of invention, never surpassed in the history of
art. Early French sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which
made its way into France by the Phoenician trade route. French artists
achieved a perfection in the representation of the human form which
anticipated by a generation the work of the Pisani in Italy, for the
statues on the west front of Chartres Cathedral (1150-1160) are carved
with a naturalness and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed,
and the marvellously mature and beautiful thirteenth-century silver-gilt
figure of a king, in high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house
at Bourges and exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs Français at the
Louvre, was wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello.
Some fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other
twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the
museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile
Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of his _Art dans l'Italie
Meridionale_, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly
traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the
thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But
the names of those who created these wonderful productions no man
knoweth; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are anonymous.
Jean de Chelles, one of the masons of Notre Dame, has left his name on
the south portal and the date, Feb. 12, 1257, on which it was begun, "in
honour of the holy Mother of Christ," but nothing is known of him. The
Sainte-Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but the
attribution is a mere guess.
[Illustration: 13TH CENTURY SCULPTURES FROM ST. DENIS (RESTORED).]
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME--SOUTHERN SIDE.]
Nor did the love of beauty during this marvellous age express itself
solely in architecture. If we were asked to specify one trait which more
than any other characterises the "dark ages" and differentiates them
from modern times, we should be tempted to say, love of brightness and
colour. Within and without, the temples of God were resplendent with
silver and gold, with purple and crimson and blue; the saintly figures
and solemn legends on their porches, the capitals, the columns, the
groins of the vaultings were lustrous with colour and gold. Each window
was a complex of jewelled splendour: the pillars and walls were painted
or draped with lovely tapestries and gorgeous banners: the shrines and
altars glittered with precious stones--jasper and sardius and
chalcedony, sapphire and emerald, chrysolite and beryl, topaz and
amethyst and pearl. The Church illuminated her sacred books with
exquisite painting, bound them with precious fabrics, and clasped them
with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich
with embroideries. So insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes
of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a
building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to
realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain
rather than of delight possesses him and he averts his gaze.
[Illustration: LA SAINTE CHAPELLE.]
Nor were the churches of those early times anything more than an
exquisite expression of what men were surrounded by in their daily lives
and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were
rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings,
tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were
beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and
simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity
different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting
was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a
shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning.
Apothecaries and lawyers were artists: so was a tailor. Dante uses the
word _artista_ as denoting a workman or craftsman, and when he wishes to
emphasise the degeneracy of the citizens of his time as compared with
those of the old Florentine race, he does so by saying that in those
days their blood ran pure even _nell' ultimo artista_ (in the commonest
workman). Let us be careful how we speak of these ages as "dark"; at
least there were "retrievements out of the night." Already before the
tenth century the basilica of St. Germain des Prés was known as St.
Germain _le doré_ (the golden), from its glowing refulgence, and St.
Bernard declaimed against the resplendent colour and gold in the
churches of his time. Never since the age of Pericles has so great an
effusion of beauty descended on the earth as during the wondrous
thirteenth century in the Isle de France and especially in Paris.[62]
We pass from the enthusiasm of art to that of learning. From earliest
times, schools, free to the poor, had been attached to every great abbey
and cathedral in France. At the end of the eleventh century four were
eminent at Paris: the schools of St. Denis, where the young princes and
nobles were educated; of the Parvis Notre Dame, for the training of
young _clercs_,[63] the famous _Scola Parisiaca_, referred to by
Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William of
Champeaux. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from
the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter
Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and
dialectical subtlety he soon eclipsed his master's fame and was
appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William
of Champeaux, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and
after teaching for a while at Melun, Abelard returned to Paris and
opened a school on Mont St. Genevieve, whither crowds of students
followed him. So great was the fame of this brilliant lecturer and
daring thinker that his school was filled with eager listeners from all
countries of Europe, even from Rome herself.
Abelard was proud and ambitious, and the highest prizes of an
ecclesiastical and scholastic career seemed within his grasp. But
Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame, had a niece, accomplished and passing
fair, Héloïse by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great
teacher. It was proposed that Abelard should enter the canon's house as
her tutor, and Fulbert's avarice made the proposition an acceptable one.
Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue,
a facile master of _versi d'amore_, which he would sing with a voice
wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age:
Héloïse seventeen. _Amor al cor gentil ratio s'apprende_,[64] and
Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings. For a
time Fulbert was blind, but scandal cleared his eyes and Abelard was
expelled from the house. Héloïse followed and took refuge with her
lover's sister in Brittany, where a child, Astrolabe, was born.
Peacemakers soon intervened and a secret marriage was arranged, which
took place early one morning at Paris, Fulbert being present. But the
lovers continued to meet; scandal was again busy and Fulbert published
the marriage. Héloïse, that the master's advancement in the Church might
not be marred, gave the lie to her uncle and fled to the nuns of
Argenteuil. Fulbert now plotted a dastardly revenge. By his orders
Abelard was surprised in his bed, and the mutilation which, according to
Eusebius, Origen performed on himself, was violently inflicted on the
great teacher. All ecclesiastical preferment was thus rendered
canonically impossible: Abelard became the talk of Paris, and in bitter
humiliation retired to the abbey of St. Denis. Before he made his vows,
however, he required of Héloïse that she should take the veil. The
heart-broken creature reproached him for his disloyalty, and repeating
the lines which Lucan puts into the mouth of Cornelia weeping for
Pompey's death, burst into tears and consented to take the veil.
A savage punishment was inflicted by the ecclesiastical courts on
Fulbert's ruffians, who were made to suffer the _lex talionis_ and the
loss of their eyes: the canon's property was confiscated. The great
master, although forbidden to open a school at St. Denis, was importuned
by crowds of young men not to let his talents waste, and soon a country
house near by was filled with so great a company of scholars that food
could not be found for them. But enemies were vigilant and relentless,
and he had shocked the timid by doubting the truth of the legend that
Dionysius the Areopagite had come to France.
In 1124 certain of Abelard's writings on the Trinity were condemned, and
he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of
the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds,
the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young
nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they
might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set
upon him. He surrendered the Paraclete to Héloïse and a small
sisterhood, and accepted the abbotship of St. Gildes in his own
Brittany. A decade passed, and again he was seen in Paris. His enemies
now determined to silence him. St. Bernard, the dictator of Christendom,
denounced his writings. Abelard appealed for a hearing, and the two
champions met in St. Stephen's church at Sens before the king, the
hierarchy and a brilliant and expectant audience. Abelard, the
ever-victorious knight-errant of disputation, stood forth, eager for the
fray, but St. Bernard simply rose and read out seventeen propositions
from his opponent's works, which he declared to be heretical. Abelard in
disgust left the lists, and was condemned unheard to perpetual silence.
The pope, to whom he appealed, confirmed the sentence, and the weary
soldier of the mind, old and heart-broken, retired to Cluny. He gave up
the struggle, was reconciled to his opponents, and died absolved by the
pope near Chalons in 1142. His ashes were sent to Héloïse, and twenty
years later she was laid beside him at the Paraclete. A well-known path,
worn by generations of unhappy lovers, leads to a monument in
Père-la-Chaise Cemetery at Paris which marks the last resting-place of
Abelard and Héloïse, whose remains were transferred there in 1817.
It is commonly believed that Abelard's school on Mont St. Genevieve was
the origin of the Latin Quarter in Paris, but the migration to the south
had probably begun before Abelard came, and was rather due to the
overcrowding of the episcopal schools. Teachers and scholars began to
swarm to the new quarter over the bridge where quiet, purer air and
better accommodation were found. Ordinances of Bishop Gilbert, 1116, and
Stephen, 1124, transcribed by Félibien, make this clear. So disturbed
were the canons by the numbers of students in the cloister, that
_externes_ were to be no longer admitted, nor other schools allowed on
the north side where the canons lodged. The growing importance of the
new schools, which tended to the advantage of the abbey of St.
Genevieve, soon alarmed the bishops, and the theologians were ordered to
lecture only between the two bridges (the Petit and Grand Ponts.) But it
was Abelard's brilliant career that attracted like a lodestar the youth
of Europe to Paris, and made that city the "oven where the intellectual
bread of the world was baked." Providence, it was said, had given Empire
to Germany, Priestcraft to Italy, Learning to France. What a
constellation of great names glows in the spiritual firmament of Paris:
William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de
Chartreux, Abelard, Gilbert[65] l'Universel, John of Salisbury, Adrian
IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury. Small wonder that the youth of the
twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME AND PETIT PONT.]
[Illustration: THE SEINE FROM PONT DE LA CONCORDE.]
There was no discipline or college life among the earliest students.
Each master, having obtained his license from the bishop's chancellor,
rented a room at his own cost, and taught what he knew--even, it was
sometimes complained, what he did not know. We read of one Adam du Petit
Pont, who, in the twelfth century, expounded Aristotle in the back-room
of a house on the bridge amid the cackle of cocks and hens, whose
_clientèle_ had many a vituperative contest with the fish-fags of the
neighbourhood. The students grouped themselves according to
nationalities, and with their masters held meetings in any available
cloister, refectory, or church. When funds were needed, a general levy
was made; any balance that remained was spent in a festive gathering in
the nearest tavern. The aggregation of thousands of young men, some of
whom were cosmopolitan vagabonds, gave rise to many evils. Complaints
are frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of
riotous _clercs_, who lived by their wits or by their nimble fingers,
or by reciting or singing licentious ballads: the _paouvres escolliers_,
whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures,
remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by François
Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer
scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were
poor, some died of hunger. It was the spectacle of half-starving
_clercs_ begging for bread that evoked the compassion of pious founders
of colleges, which originally were simply hostels for needy scholars. On
the return of Louis VII. from a pilgrimage to Becket's shrine, his
brother Robert founded about 1180 the church of St. Thomas of Canterbury
and a hostel for fifteen students, who, in 1217, were endowed with a
chapel of their own, dedicated to St. Nicholas, and were then known as
the poor scholars of St. Nicholas.[66] In the same year a London
merchant, passing through Paris on his return from a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, was touched by the sight of some starving students begging
their bread. He founded a hostel for eighteen poor scholars at the Hôtel
Dieu, who in return for lodging and maintenance were to perform the last
Christian rites to the friendless dead. This was the college of the
Dix-huit, afterwards absorbed in the Sorbonne. In 1200 Etienne Belot and
his wife, burgesses of Paris, founded a hostel for thirteen poor
scholars who were known as the _bons enfants_. In all, some dozen
colleges were in being when St. Louis came to the throne. In 1253, St.
Louis' almoner, Robert of Cerbon or Sorbon, a poor Picardy village,
founded[67] a modest college of theology, and obtained from Blanche of
Castile a small house above the palace of the Thermæ. Here he was able
to maintain a few poor scholars of theology and to facilitate their
studies. Friends came to his aid and soon sixteen were accommodated,
to whom others, able to maintain themselves, were added. In 1269 a papal
bull confirmed the establishment of the _pauvres maistres estudiants_ in
the faculty of theology at Paris. Even when enriched by later founders
it was still called _la pauvre Sorbonne_. By the renown of their
erudition, the doctors of the Sorbonne were the great court of appeal in
the Middle Ages in matters of theology, and the Sorbonne became
synonymous with the university. Some of the hostels were on a larger
scale. The college of Cardinal Lemoine, founded in 1302 by the papal
legate, housed sixty students in arts and forty in theology. Most were
paying residents, but a number of _bourses_ (scholarships) were provided
for those whose incomes were below a certain amount. Each _boursier_ was
given daily two loaves of white bread of twelve ounces, "the common
weight in the windows of Paris bakers."
In 1304, Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, founded the college
of Navarre for seventy poor scholars, twenty in grammar, thirty in
philosophy, and twenty in theology. The maintenance fund seems, however,
to have been inadequate or mismanaged, for we soon read of the scholars
of the college walking the streets of Paris every morning
crying--"Bread, bread, good people, for the poor scholars of Madame of
Navarre!"
[Illustration: TOWER IN RUE NALETTE IN WHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE
LIVED.]
Some forty colleges were in existence by the end of the fourteenth
century and had increased to fifty by the end of the fifteenth; in the
seventeenth, Evelyn gives their number as sixty-five. In Félibien's time
some had disappeared, for in his map (1725) forty-four colleges only are
marked. Nearly the whole of these colleges clustered around the slopes
of Mont St. Genevieve, which at length became that Christian Athens that
Charlemagne dreamt of. Each college had its own rules. Generally
students were required to attend matins (in summer at 3 a.m., winter at
4), mass, vespers and compline. When the curfew of Notre Dame sounded,
they retired to their dormitories. Leave to sleep out was granted only
in very exceptional cases. Tennis was allowed, cards and dice were
forbidden. The college of Montaigue, which housed eighty-two poor
scholars in memory of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples, was
reformed in the fifteenth century; so severe was the discipline that the
college became the terror of the youth of Paris, and fathers were wont
to sober their libertine sons by threatening to make _capetes_[68] of
them. This was Calvin's college, where he was known as the "accusative,"
from his austere piety. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny
(1269) the scholar must pass an entrance examination. He then spent two
years at logic, three at metaphysics, two in Biblical studies; he held
weekly disputations and preached every fortnight in French; he was
interrogated every evening by the president on his studies during the
day. If students evinced no aptitude for learning they were dismissed;
if only moderate progress were made, the secular duties of the college
devolved upon them. It was the foundation of these colleges which
organised themselves, about 1200, into powerful corporations of masters
and scholars (_universitates magistrorum et scholiarum_) that gave the
university its definite character.
When the term "university" first came into use is unknown. It is met
with in the statutes (1215) which, among other matters, define the
limits of age for teaching. A master in the arts must not lecture under
twenty-one; of theology under thirty-five. Every master must undergo an
examination as to qualification and moral fitness at the Episcopal
Chancellor's court. Early in the twelfth century the four faculties of
Law, Medicine, Arts and Theology were formed and the national groups
reduced to four: French, Picards, Normans and English.[69] Each group
elected its own officers, and in 1245 at latest the _Quatre Nations_
were meeting in the church of St. Julien le Pauvre[70] to choose a
common head or rector, who soon superseded the chancellor as head of the
university. The rectors in process of time exercised almost sovereign
authority in the Latin Quarter. They ruled a population of ten thousand
masters and students, who were exempt from civic jurisdiction. In 1200
some German students ill-treated an innkeeper who had insulted their
servant. The provost of Paris and some armed citizens attacked the
students' houses and blood was shed, whereupon the masters of the
schools complained to the king, who was fierce in his anger, and ordered
the provost and his accomplices to be cast into prison, their houses
demolished and vines uprooted. The provost was given the choice of
imprisonment for life or the ordeal by water. Then followed a series of
ordinances which abolished secular jurisdiction over the students and
made them subject to ecclesiastical courts alone.
[Illustration: HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.]
In the reign of Philip le Bel a provost of Paris dared to hang a
scholar. The rector immediately closed all classes until reparation was
made, and on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin the _curés_ of
Paris assembled and went in procession, bearing a cross and holy water
to the provost's house, against which each cast a stone, crying, in a
loud voice--"Make honourable reparation, thou cursed Satan, to thy
mother Holy Church, whose privileges thou hast injured, or suffer the
fate of Dathan and Abiram." The king dismissed his provost, caused ample
compensation to be made, and the schools were reopened.
In 1404 some pages belonging to the royal chamberlain brutally spurred
their horses through a procession of scholars wending to the church of
St. Catherine. They were stoned by the angry scholars, whereupon they
drew sword and attacked them, pursuing them even into the church. The
rector demanded satisfaction, but the chamberlain, Charles de Savoisy,
was a court functionary, and nothing was done. The rector then closed
all the schools and the king ordered the Parlement to do instant
justice. The sentence was an exemplary one. The chamberlain's house was
to be demolished, an annuity of one hundred livres to be paid for the
maintenance of five chaplaincies under the patronage of the university,
a thousand livres compensation to be paid to the injured scholars and a
like sum to the university. Three of the chamberlain's men were to do
penance in their shirts, torch in hand, before the churches of St.
Genevieve, St. Catherine and St. Sévérin, to suffer a whipping at the
cross roads, and to be banished for three years. In 1406 permission was
given for the house to be rebuilt, but the university resisted the
decree and only gave way one hundred and twelve years later, on
condition that the terms of the original condemnation and sentence were
inscribed on the new house.
The famous Prés aux Clercs (Clerks' Meadow) was the theatre of many a
fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des Prés. From earliest
times the students had been wont to take the air in the meadow, which
lay between the monastery and the river, and soon claimed the privilege
as an acquired right. In 1192 the inhabitants of the monastic suburb
resented their insolence, and a free fight ensued, in which several
scholars were wounded and one was killed. The rector inculpated the
abbot, and each appealed to Rome, with what result is unknown. After
nearly a century of strained relations and minor troubles the abbots in
1278 had walls and other buildings erected on the way to the meadow. The
scholars met in force and demolished them. The abbot, who was equal to
the occasion, rang his bells, called his vassals to arms and sent a
force to seize the gates of the city that gave on the suburb, to prevent
reinforcements reaching the scholars. His retainers then attacked the
rioters, killed several and wounded many. The rector complained to the
papal legate and threatened to close the schools if reparation were not
made and justice done within fifteen days, whereupon the legate ordered
the provost of the monastery to be expelled for five years. The royal
council forced the abbot to exile ten of his vassals, to endow two
chantries for the repose of the souls of slain _clercs_ and compensate
their fathers by fines of two hundred and four hundred livres
respectively, and to pay the rector two hundred livres to be distributed
among poor scholars.
The rector claimed right of jurisdiction over the parchments exposed for
sale in Paris and its neighbourhood, and attended with his sworn experts
the great Fair of Landry at St. Denis, instituted in 877. The students
accompanied him with much uproar. At this season the Landry gifts were
made by the students to the masters, consisting of a lemon larded with
pieces of gold or silver in a crystal glass. The ceremony was
accompanied by the sound of drums and musical instruments and was
followed by a holiday. Innumerable were the complaints on this and other
occasions of the rowdyism of the scholars, their practical jokes and
dissolute habits.
Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the
intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has
ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared "to follow
where airy voices lead." The conception and enforcement of a Truce of
God (_Trève de Dieu_) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public
wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the
noble ideal of Christian chivalry; the first crusade--all had their
origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name
and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk
preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French
pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout "_Dieu le veut_"
became the crusader's war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was
organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight,
its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the
East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. In the thirteenth century
Brunetto Latini wrote his most famous work, the _Livres dou Trésor_, in
French, because it was _la parleure plus delitable, il plus commune à
toutes gens_ ("the most delightful of languages and the most common to
all peoples.") Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French
for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a
Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish
the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded
by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. "When inebriated with love and
compassion for Christ," says the writer of the _Speculum_, "and
overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find
utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings
which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous
exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing
in French of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such
passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty as
in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were analysed
and defined; everywhere was a search for new things. Conservative
Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and blasphemers
exercising their wits at every street corner. The four camel-loads of
manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle, brought by the
Jews from Spain--a monstrous and mutilated version translated from
Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin--became the battle-ground
of the schools. The Church at first forbade the study of Aristotle, then
by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and absorbed him. His works
became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball bandied between the
Averroists, who carried their teachings to a logical consequence, and
the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For three years the faculty was
torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger of Brabant, whose eternal
light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors of the Church in the heaven
of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger--
"Che leggendo nel vico degli strami
Sillogizzò invidiosi veri."[71]
The Rue du Fouarre (Straw), where Siger taught and perhaps Dante
studied, was the street of the Masters of the Arts. Every house in it
was a school. It still exists, though wholly modernised, opposite the
foot of the Petit Pont. Its name has been derived from the straw spread
on the floor of the schools or on which the students sat, but there is
little doubt that Benvenuto da Imola's[72] explanation, that it was so
named from a hay and straw market held there, is the correct one.
[Illustration: LE PETIT PONT.]
The wonderful thirteenth century saw the meridian glory of the
university. It was the age of the great Aristotelian schoolmen who all
taught at Paris--Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and
Roger Bacon, their candid critic, who carried the intellectual curiosity
of the age beyond the tolerance of his Franciscan superiors and twice
suffered disciplinary measures at Paris.
In the fourteenth century the university was as renowned as ever. Among
many tributes from great scholars we choose that of Richard de Bury,
bishop of Durham, who in his _Philobiblon_ writes: "O Holy God of gods
in Zion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever
we had leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger
there; where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love!
There are delightful libraries more aromatic than stores of spicery;
there are luxuriant parks of all manners of volumes; there are Academic
meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens;
walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the
Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle,
to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as
relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures
epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures
and numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour
Dionysius arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin
Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in
Phoenician letters; there indeed opening our treasures and unfastening
our purse-strings we scattered money with joyous heart and purchased
inestimable books with mud and sand."
In 1349 the number of professors (_maistres-regents_) on the rolls was
502: in 1403 they had increased to 709, to which must be added more than
200 masters of theology and canon law. "The University," wrote Pope
Alexander IV. in a papal bull, "is to the Church what the tree of life
was to the earthly Paradise, a fruitful source of all learning,
diffusing its wisdom over the whole universe; there the mind is
enlightened and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse
an eloquence which confounds all her enemies."
But already decadence had set in. The multiplication and enrichment of
colleges proved fatal to the old democratic vigour and equality. Some
colleges pretended to superiority and the movement lost its unity.
Scholasticism had done its work and no new movement took its place.
Teachers lost all originality and did but ruminate and comment on the
works of their great predecessors. Schools declined in numbers and
scholars in attendance. Ordinances were needed to correct the abuses
covered by the title of scholar. The Jacobin and Cordelier teachers,
moreover, had exhausted much life from the university; but its fame
continued, and Luther in his early conflicts with the papacy appealed
against the pope to the university. But it made the fatal blunder of
opposing the Reform and the Renaissance, instead of absorbing them, and
the interest of those great movements centres around the college of
France.
CHAPTER VII
THE PARLEMENT--THE STATES-GENERAL--CONFLICT WITH BONIFACE VIII.--THE
DESTRUCTION OF THE KNIGHTS-TEMPLARS
The court of Philip III., pitiful scion of a noble king, is associated
with a dramatic judicial murder at Paris. Among the late-repentant souls
temporarily exiled from purification who crowd around Dante at the foot
of the Mont of Purgatory is that of Pierre de la Brosse, "severed from
its body through hatred and envy and not for any sin committed." Unhappy
Pierre was St. Louis' chamberlain and had been present at his death. He
filled the same high office under his son, became his favourite minister
and all-powerful at court. In 1276 the king's eldest son by his first
queen died under suspicion of poison. The second queen, sister of the
Duke of Brabant, being envious of Pierre's ascendency, began insidiously
to abuse the king's ear. Pierre met the queen's move by clandestinely
spreading a report that the prince was sacrificed to secure the
succession to her own offspring. The king was then persuaded by the
queen's friends to consult a famous prophetess, who declared her
innocent, and Pierre's death was plotted by the queen, her brother of
Brabant, and some discontented and jealous nobles. One morning Paris was
startled by the arrest of the omnipotent minister, who was tried before
a commission packed by his enemies, and hanged on 30th June 1278, by the
common hangman, at the gibbet on Montfaucon, in the presence of the Duke
of Brabant and others of h
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