Chapter III: 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.”

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_.

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 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_!”

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 _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.”

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.