Chapter 3 — <br>CHAPTER III.<br>MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL.

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.”

stare in dimidio rerum

parrhisia

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 abbés 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.

populace

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.

bourgeois

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 abbés 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, Abbé of Saint-Germain des Prés,
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, Agnès la Gadine,
and Rabine Piédebou. 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!”

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.

bourgeois

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 parchons 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.”

bourgeois

parchons

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.