Now let the reader picture to himself that immense, oblong Hall under the wan light of a January morning and invaded by a motley, noisy crowd, pouring along the walls and eddying round the pillars, and he will have some idea of the scene as a whole, the peculiarities of which we will presently endeavour to describe more in detail.
Assuredly if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV there would have been no documents relating to his trial to be deposited in the Record office of the Palais de Justice; no accomplices interested in causing those documents to disappear, and consequently no incendiaries compelled, in default of a better expedient, to set fire to the Record office in order to destroy the documents, and to burn down the Palais de Justice in order to burn the Record office—in short, no conflagration of 1618. The old Palais would still be standing with its great Hall, and I could say to the reader “Go and see for yourself,” and we should both be exempt of the necessity, I of writing, he of reading this description, such as it is. All of which goes to prove the novel truth, that great events have incalculable consequences.
To be sure, it is quite possible that Ravaillac had no accomplices, also that, even if he had, they were in no way accessory to the fire of 1618. There exist two other highly plausible explanations. In the first place, the great fiery star a foot wide and an ell high, which, as every mother’s son knows, fell from heaven on to the Palais on the 7th of March just after midnight; and secondly, Thèophile’s quatrain, which runs:
“Certes, ce fut un triste jeu
Quand á Paris dame Justice,
Pour avoir mangè trop d’èpice
Se mit tout le palais en feu.”3
Whatever one may think of this triple explanation—political, physical, and poetical—of the burning of the Palais de Justice in 1618, about one fact there is unfortunately no doubt, and that is the fire itself.
Thanks to this disaster, and more still to the successive restorations which destroyed what the fire had spared, very little remains of this first residence of the Kings of France, of this original palace of the Louvre, so old even in the time of Philip the Fair, that in it they sought for traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and described by Helgaldus. Nearly all has gone. What has become of the Chancery Chamber in which St. Louis “consummated his marriage”? what of the garden where he administered justice, “clad in a jerkin of camlet, a surcoat of coarse woollen stuff without sleeves, and over all a mantle of black ’sandal,’ and reclining on a carpet with Joinville”? Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismund? where that of Charles IV? that of John Lackland? Where is the flight of steps from which Charles VI proclaimed his “Edict of Pardon”? the flag-stone whereon, in the presence of the Dauphin, Marcel strangled Robert de Clermont and the Marshal de Champange? the wicket where the bulls of the anti-Pope Benedict were torn up, and through which the bearers of them marched out, mitred and coped in mock state, to publicly make the amende honorable through the streets of Paris? and the great Hall with its blue and gold, its Gothic windows, its statues, its pillars, its immense vaulted roof so profusely carved —and the gilded chamber—and the stone lion kneeling at the door with head abased and tail between its legs, like the lions of Solomon’s throne, in that attitude of humility which beseems Strength in the presence of Justice? and the beautiful doors, and the gorgeous-hued windows, and the wrought iron-work which discouraged Biscornette—and the delicate cabinet-work of Du Hancy? How has time, how has man, served these marvels? What have they given us in exchange for all this, for this great page of Gallic history, for all this Gothic art? The uncouth, surbased arches of M. de Brosse, the clumsy architect of the great door of Saint-Gervais— so much for art; and as regards history, we have the gossipy memoirs of the Great Pillar, which still resounds with the old wives’ tales of such men as Patru.
Well, that is not much to boast of. Let us return to the real great Hall of the real old Palais.
The two extremities of this huge parallelogram were occupied, the one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, say the old territorial records in a style that would whet the appetite of a Gargantua, “Never was such a slab of marble seen in the world”; the other by the chapel in which Louis XI caused his statue to be sculptured kneeling in front of the Virgin, and to which he had transferred—indifferent to the fact that thereby two niches were empty in the line of royal statues—those of Charlemagne and Saint-Louis: two saints who, as Kings of France, he supposed to be high in favour in heaven. This chapel, which was still quite new, having been built scarcely six years, was carried out entirely in that charming style of delicate architecture, with its marvellous stone-work, its bold and exquisite tracery, which marks in France the end of the Gothic period, and lasts on into the middle of the sixteenth century in the ethereal fantasies of the Renaissance. The little fretted stone rose-window above the door was in particular a master-piece of grace and lightness—a star of lace.
In the centre of the Hall, opposite the great entrance, they had erected for the convenience of the Flemish envoys and other great personages invited to witness the performance of the Mystery, a raised platform covered with gold brocade and fixed against the wall, to which a special entrance had been contrived by utilizing a window into the passage from the Gilded Chamber.
According to custom, the performance was to take place upon the marble table, which had been prepared for that purpose since the morning. On the magnificent slab, all scored by the heels of the law-clerks, stood a high wooden erection, the upper floor of which, visible from every part of the Hall, was to serve as the stage, while its interior, hung round with draperies, furnished a dressing-room for the actors. A ladder, frankly placed in full view of the audience, formed the connecting link between stage and dressing-room, and served the double office of entrance and exit. There was no character however unexpected, no change of scene, no stage effect, but was obliged to clamber up this ladder. Dear and guileless infancy of art and of stage machinery!
Four sergeants of the provost of the Palais—the appointed superintendents of all popular holidays, whether festivals or executions—stood on duty at the four corners of the marble table.
The piece was not to commence till the last stroke of noon of the great clock of the Palais. To be sure, this was very late for a theatrical performance; but they had been obliged to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.
Now, all this multitude had been waiting since the early morning; indeed, a considerable number of these worthy spectators had stood shivering and chattering their teeth with cold since break of day before the grand stair-case of the Palais; some even declared that they had spent the night in front of the great entrance to make sure of being the first to get in. The crowd became denser every moment, and like water that overflows its boundaries, began to mount the walls, to surge round the pillars, to rise up and cover the cornices, the window-sills, every projection and every coign of vantage in architecture or sculpture. The all-prevailing impatience, discomfort, and weariness, the license of a holiday approvedly dedicated to folly, the quarrels incessantly arising out of a sharp elbow or an iron-shod heel, the fatigue of long waiting —all conduced to give a tone of bitterness and acerbity to the clamour of this closely packed, squeezed, hustled, stifled throng long before the hour at which the ambassadors were expected. Nothing was to be heard but grumbling and imprecations against the Flemings, the Cardinal de Bourbon, the Chief Magistrate, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the beadles, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Fools’ Pope, the pillars, the statues, this closed door, yonder open window—to the huge diversion of the bands of scholars and lackeys distributed through the crowd, who mingled their gibes and pranks with this seething mass of dissatisfaction, aggravating the general ill-humour by perpetual pin-pricks.
There was one group in particular of these joyous young demons who, after knocking out the glass of a window, had boldly seated themselves in the frame, from whence they could cast their gaze and their banter by turns at the crowd inside the Hall and that outside in the Place. By their aping gestures, their yells of laughter, by their loud interchange of opprobrious epithets with comrades at the other side of the Hall, it was very evident that these budding literati by no means shared the boredom and fatigue of the rest of the gathering, and that they knew very well how to extract out of the scene actually before them sufficient entertainment of their own to enable them to wait patiently for the other.
“Why, by my soul, ’tis Joannes Frollo de Molendino!” cried one of them to a little fair-haired imp with a handsome mischievous face, who had swarmed up the pillar and was clinging to the foliage of its capital; “well are you named Jehan of the Mill, for your two arms and legs are just like the sails of a wind-mill. How long have you been here?”
“By the grace of the devil,” returned Joannes Frollo, “over four hours, and I sincerely trust they may be deducted from my time in purgatory. I heard the eight chanters of the King of Sicily start High Mass at seven in the Sainte-Chapelle.”
“Fine chanters forsooth!” exclaimed the other, “their voices are sharper than the peaks of their caps! The King had done better, before founding a Mass in honour of M. Saint-John, to inquire if M. Saint-John was fond of hearing Latin droned with a Proven?al accent.”
“And was it just for the sake of employing these rascally chanters of the King of Sicily that he did that?” cried an old woman bitterly in the crowd beneath the window. “I ask you—a thousand livres parisis4 for a Mass, and that too to be charged on the license for selling salt-water fish in the fish-market of Paris.”
“Peace! old woman,” replied a portly and solemn personage, who was holding his nose as he stood beside the fishwife; “a Mass had to be founded. Would you have the King fall sick again?”
“Bravely said, Sir Gilles Lecornu,5 master furrier to the royal wardrobe!” cried the little scholar clinging to the capital.
A burst of laughter from the whole band of scholars greeted the unfortunate name of the hapless Court furrier.
“Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!” shouted some.
“Cornitus et hirsutus!” 6 responded another.
“Why, of course,” continued the little wretch on the capital. “But what is there to laugh about? A worthy man is Gilles Lecornu, brother to Master Jehan Lecornu, provost of the Royal Palais, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, head keeper of the Forest of Vincennes, all good citizens of Paris, married every one of them from father to son!”
The mirth redoubled. The portly furrier answered never a word, but did his best to escape the attention directed to him from all sides; but he puffed and panted in vain. Like a wedge being driven into wood, his struggles only served to fix his broad apoplectic face, purple with anger and vexation, more firmly between the shoulders of his neighbours.
At last one of these neighbours, fat, pursy, and worthy as himself, came to his aid.
“Out upon these graceless scholars who dare to address a burgher in such a manner! In my day they would have first been beaten with sticks, and then burnt on them.”
This set the whole band agog.
“Holá! hè! what tune’s this? Who’s that old bird of ill omen?”
“Oh, I know him!” exclaimed one; “it’s Ma?tre Andry Musnier.”
“Yes, he’s one of the four booksellers by appointment to the University,” said another.
“Everything goes by fours in that shop!” cried a third. “Four nations, four faculties, four holidays, four procurators, four electors, four booksellers.”
“Very good,” returned Jehan Frollo, “we’ll quadruple the devil for them.”
“Musnier, we’ll burn thy books.”
“Musnier, we’ll beat thy servants.”
“Musnier, we’ll tickle thy wife.”
“The good, plump Mlle. Oudarde.”
“Who is as buxom and merry as if she were already a widow.”
“The devil fly away with you all,” growled Ma?tre Andry Musnier.
“Ma?tre Andry,” said Jehan, still hanging fast to his capital, “hold thy tongue, or I fall plump on thy head.”
Ma?tre Andry looked up, appeared to calculate for a moment the height of the pillar and the weight of the little rascal, mentally multiplied that weight by the square of the velocity —and held his peace. Whereupon Jehan, left master of the field, added triumphantly, “And I’d do it too, though I am the brother of an archdeacon.”
“A fine set of gentlemen those of ours at the University, not even on a day like this do they see that we get our rights. There’s a may-pole and a bonfire in the town, a Fools’ Pope and Flemish ambassadors in the city, but at the University, nothing!”
“And yet the Place Maubert is large enough,” observed one of the youngsters, ensconced in a corner of the window-ledge.
“Down with the Rector, the electors, and the procurators!” yelled Jehan.
“We’ll make a bonfire to-night in the Champs-Gaillard with Ma?tre Andry’s books!” added another.
“And the desks of the scribes!” cried his neighbour.
“And the wands of the beadles!”
“And the spittoons of the deans!”
“And the muniment chests of the procurators!”
“And the tubs of the doctors!”
“And the stools of the Rector!”
“Down!” bellowed little Jehan in a roaring bass; “down with Ma?tre Andry, the beadles and the scribes; down with the theologians, the physicians, and the priests; down with the procurators, the electors, and the Rector!!”
“ ’Tis the end of the world!” muttered Ma?tre Andry, stopping his ears.
“Talk of the Rector—there he goes down the square!” cried one of those in the window. And they all strained to catch a glimpse.
“Is it in truth our venerable Rector, Ma?tre Thibaut?” inquired Jehan Frollo du Moulin, who from his pillar in the interior of the Hall could see nothing of what went on outside.
“Yes, yes,” responded the others in chorus, “it is Ma?tre Thibaut, the Rector himself.”
It was in fact the Rector, accompanied by all the dignitaries of the University going in procession to receive the ambassadors, and in the act of crossing the Place du Palais. The scholars crowding at the window greeted them as they passed with gibes and ironical plaudits. The Rector marching at the head of his band received the first volley—it was a heavy one.
“Good-day, Monsieur the Rector—Holá there! Good-day to you!”
“How comes it that the old gambler has managed to be here? Has he then actually left his dice?”
“Look at him jogging alone on his mule—its ears are not as long as his own!”
