Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of
the Saint-Jean, the discharge of twenty arquebuses on
supports, the detonation of that famous serpentine of the Tower
of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, the
twenty-sixth of September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at
one blow, the explosion of all the powder stored at the gate
of the Temple, would have rent his ears less rudely at that
solemn and dramatic moment, than these few words, which
fell from the lips of the usher, "His eminence, Monseigneur
the Cardinal de Bourbon."
It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained
monsieur the cardinal. He had neither the weakness nor the
audacity for that. A true eclectic, as it would be expressed
nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty, moderate
and calm spirits, which always know how to bear themselves
amid all circumstances (~stare in dimidio rerum~), and who
are full of reason and of liberal philosophy, while still setting
store by cardinals. A rare, precious, and never interrupted
race of philosophers to whom wisdom, like another
Ariadne, seems to have given a clew of thread which they
have been walking along unwinding since the beginning of
the world, through the labyrinth of human affairs. One finds
them in all ages, ever the same; that is to say, always according
to all times. And, without reckoning our Pierre Gringoire,
who may represent them in the fifteenth century if we
succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which he
deserves, it certainly was their spirit which animated Father
du Breul, when he wrote, in the sixteenth, these naively sublime
words, worthy of all centuries: "I am a Parisian by
nation, and a Parrhisian in language, for ~parrhisia~ in Greek
signifies liberty of speech; of which I have made use even
towards messeigneurs the cardinals, uncle and brother to
Monsieur the Prince de Conty, always with respect to their
greatness, and without offending any one of their suite, which
is much to say."
There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain
for his presence, in the disagreeable impression produced
upon Pierre Gringoire. Quite the contrary; our poet had
too much good sense and too threadbare a coat, not to
attach particular importance to having the numerous allusions
in his prologue, and, in particular, the glorification of the
dauphin, son of the Lion of France, fall upon the most eminent
ear. But it is not interest which predominates in the noble
nature of poets. I suppose that the entity of the poet may
be represented by the number ten; it is certain that a chemist
on analyzing and pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says, would
find it composed of one part interest to nine parts of
self-esteem.
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit
the cardinal, the nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire,
swollen and expanded by the breath of popular admiration,
were in a state of prodigious augmentation, beneath which
disappeared, as though stifled, that imperceptible molecule of
which we have just remarked upon in the constitution of
poets; a precious ingredient, by the way, a ballast of
reality and humanity, without which they would not touch
the earth. Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to
speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters
that?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in
the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up
every instant from all parts of his bridal song. I affirm that
he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of
La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the
"Florentine," asked, "Who is the ill-bred lout who made
that rhapsody?" Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his
neighbor, "Whose masterpiece is this?"
The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him
by the abrupt and unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.
That which he had to fear was only too fully realized.
The entrance of his eminence upset the audience. All heads
turned towards the gallery. It was no longer possible to
hear one's self. "The cardinal! The cardinal!" repeated
all mouths. The unhappy prologue stopped short for the
second time.
The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of
the estrade. While he was sending a rather indifferent
glance around the audience, the tumult redoubled. Each
person wished to get a better view of him. Each man vied
with the other in thrusting his head over his neighbor's
shoulder.
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was
well worth any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon,
Archbishop and Comte of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was
allied both to Louis XI., through his brother, Pierre, Seigneur
de Beaujeu, who had married the king's eldest daughter, and
to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy.
Now, the dominating trait, the peculiar and distinctive trait
of the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit
of the courtier, and devotion to the powers that be. The
reader can form an idea of the numberless embarrassments
which this double relationship had caused him, and of all
the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been
forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either
Louis or Charles, that Scylla and that Charybdis which had
devoured the Duc de Nemours and the Constable de Saint-Pol.
Thanks to Heaven's mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But
although he was in port, and precisely because he was in
port, he never recalled without disquiet the varied haps of
his political career, so long uneasy and laborious. Thus, he
was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been
"white and black" for him--meaning thereby, that in the
course of that year he had lost his mother, the Duchesse de
la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and
that one grief had consoled him for the other.
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's
life, liked to enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau,
did not hate Richarde la Garmoise and Thomasse la
Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty girls rather than on old
women,--and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the
populace of Paris. He never went about otherwise than surrounded
by a small court of bishops and abb¨¦s of high lineage,
gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on occasion; and more
than once the good and devout women of Saint Germain
d' Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly illuminated
windows of Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the
same voices which had intoned vespers for them during the
day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic proverb of
Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the
Tiara--~Bibamus papaliter~.
It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved
him on his entrance from any bad reception at the
hands of the mob, which had been so displeased but a moment
before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on
the very day when it was to elect a pope. But the Parisians
cherish little rancor; and then, having forced the beginning
of the play by their authority, the good bourgeois had got the
upper hand of the cardinal, and this triumph was sufficient
for them. Moreover, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome
man,--he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he carried off
very well,--that is to say, he had all the women on his side,
and, consequently, the best half of the audience. Assuredly,
it would be injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for having
come late to the spectacle, when he is a handsome man,
and when he wears his scarlet robe well.
He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary
smile of the great for the people, and directed his course
slowly towards his scarlet velvet arm-chair, with the air of
thinking of something quite different. His cortege--what
we should nowadays call his staff--of bishops and abb¨¦s
invaded the estrade in his train, not without causing redoubled
tumult and curiosity among the audience. Each
man vied with his neighbor in pointing them out and naming
them, in seeing who should recognize at least one of them:
this one, the Bishop of Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory
serves me right);--this one, the primicier of Saint-Denis;--this
one, Robert de Lespinasse, Abb¨¦ of Saint-Germain des
Pr¨¦s, that libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI.; all
with many errors and absurdities. As for the scholars, they
swore. This was their day, their feast of fools, their saturnalia,
the annual orgy of the corporation of Law clerks and of
the school. There was no turpitude which was not sacred on
that day. And then there were gay gossips in the crowd--Simone
Quatrelivres, Agnes la Gadine, and Rabine Pi¨¦debou.
Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one's ease
and revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such
good company as dignitaries of the church and loose women?
So they did not abstain; and, in the midst of the uproar, there
was a frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities of all
the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students
restrained during the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot
iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis! how they set him at
defiance in his own court of law! Each one of them selected
from the new-comers on the platform, a black, gray, white,
or violet cassock as his target. Joannes Frollo de Molendin,
in his quality of brother to an archdeacon, boldly
attacked the scarlet; he sang in deafening tones, with his
impudent eyes fastened on the cardinal, "~Cappa repleta
mero~!"
All these details which we here lay bare for the edification
of the reader, were so covered by the general uproar, that
they were lost in it before reaching the reserved platforms;
moreover, they would have moved the cardinal but little, so
much a part of the customs were the liberties of that day.
Moreover, he had another cause for solicitude, and his mien
as wholly preoccupied with it, which entered the estrade
the same time as himself; this was the embassy from
Flanders.
Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing
trouble about the possible consequences of the marriage of
his cousin Marguerite de Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles,
Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how long the good understanding
which had been patched up between the Duke of Austria
and the King of France would last; nor how the King of
England would take this disdain of his daughter. All that
troubled him but little; and he gave a warm reception every
evening to the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without
a suspicion that several flasks of that same wine (somewhat
revised and corrected, it is true, by Doctor Coictier), cordially
offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI., would, some fine morning,
rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. "The much honored embassy
of Monsieur the Duke of Austria," brought the cardinal
none of these cares, but it troubled him in another direction.
It was, in fact, somewhat hard, and we have already hinted
at it on the second page of this book,--for him, Charles de
Bourbon, to be obliged to feast and receive cordially no one
knows what bourgeois;--for him, a cardinal, to receive
aldermen;--for him, a Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to
receive Flemish beer-drinkers,--and that in public! This
was, certainly, one of the most irksome grimaces that he had
ever executed for the good pleasure of the king.
So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in
the world (so well had he trained himself to it), when the
usher announced, in a sonorous voice, "Messieurs the Envoys
of Monsieur the Duke of Austria." It is useless to add that
the whole hall did the same.
Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a
contrast in the midst of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of
Charles de Bourbon, the eight and forty ambassadors of Maximilian
of Austria, having at their head the reverend Father
in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the
Golden Fleece, and Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff
of Ghent. A deep silence settled over the assembly, accompanied
by stifled laughter at the preposterous names and all
the bourgeois designations which each of these personages
transmitted with imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then
tossed names and titles pell-mell and mutilated to the crowd
below. There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of the city
of Louvain; Messire Clays d'Etuelde, alderman of Brussels;
Messire Paul de Baeust, Sieur de Voirmizelle, President of
Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens, burgomaster of the city
of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, first alderman of the
kuere of the city of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage,
first alderman of the ~parchous~ of the said town; and the
Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock, and Jehan Dymaerzelle,
etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters; burgomasters,
aldermen, bailiffs--all stiff, affectedly grave, formal,
dressed out in velvet and damask, hooded with caps of black
velvet, with great tufts of Cyprus gold thread; good Flemish
heads, after all, severe and worthy faces, of the family which
Rembrandt makes to stand out so strong and grave from the
black background of his "Night Patrol "; personages all of
whom bore, written on their brows, that Maximilian of Austria
had done well in "trusting implicitly," as the manifest
ran, "in their sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good
wisdom."
There was one exception, however. It was a subtle, intelligent,
crafty-looking face, a sort of combined monkey and diplomat
phiz, before whom the cardinal made three steps and a
profound bow, and whose name, nevertheless, was only,
"Guillaume Rym, counsellor and pensioner of the City of
Ghent."
Few persons were then aware who Guillaume Rym was. A
rare genius who in a time of revolution would have made a
brilliant appearance on the surface of events, but who in the
fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous intrigues, and to
"living in mines," as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it.
Nevertheless, he was appreciated by the "miner" of Europe;
he plotted familiarly with Louis XI., and often lent a hand to
the king's secret jobs. All which things were quite unknown
to that throng, who were amazed at the cardinal's politeness
to that frail figure of a Flemish bailiff.
CHAPTER IV.