_Louis XI. at Paris--The Introduction of Printing_
Paris saw little of Charles VII. who, after the temporary activity
excited by the expulsion of the English, had sunk into his habitual
torpor and bondage to women. In 1461 the wretched monarch, morbid and
half-demented, died of a malignant disease, all the time haunted by
fears of poison and filial treachery. The people named him Charles _le
bien servi_ (the well-served), for small indeed was the praise due to
him for the great deliverance.
When the new king, Louis XI., quitted his asylum at the Burgundian
court to be crowned at Rheims and to repair to St. Denis, he was
shocked by the contrast between the rich cities and plains of Flanders
and the miserable aspect of the country he traversed--ruined villages,
fields that were so many deserts, starving creatures clothed in rags,
and looking as if they had just escaped from dungeons.
It is beyond the scope of the present work to describe the successful
achievement of Louis' policy of concentrating the whole government in
himself as absolute sovereign of France, by the overthrow of feudalism
and the subjection of the great nobles with their almost royal power
and state. His indomitable will, his consummate patience, his profound
knowledge of human motives and passions, his cynical indifference to
means, make him one of the most remarkable of the kings of France. In
1465, menaced by a coalition of nobles, the so-called League of the
Public Good, Louis hastened to the capital. Letters expressing his
tender affection for his dear city of Paris preceded him--he was
coming to confide to them his queen and hoped-for heir; rather than
lose his Paris, which he loved beyond all cities of the world, he
would sacrifice half his kingdom. But the Parisians were far from
being impressed by the majesty of their new monarch. "Our king," says
De Comines, "used to dress so ill that worse could not be--often
wearing bad cloth and a shabby hat with a leaden image stuck in it."
When he entered Abbeville with the magnificent Duke of Burgundy, the
people said "_Benedicite!_ is that a king of France? Why, his horse
and clothes together are not worth twenty francs!" and a Venetian
ambassador was amazed to see the most mighty and most Christian king
take his dinner in a tavern on the market-place of Tours, after
hearing mass in the cathedral. The citizens remembered, too, his
refusal to accord them some privileges granted to other cities; they
were sullen at first and would not be wooed. The university declined
to arm her scholars, Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle,
vagabond _clercs_ of the Palais and the Cite composed coarse gibes and
satirical songs and ballads against his person. Louis, however, set
himself with his insinuating grace of speech to win the favour of the
Parisians. He supped with the provost and sheriffs and their wives at
the Hotel de Ville. He chose six members from the burgesses, six from
the Parlement and six from the university, to form his Council, and
with daring confidence, decided to arm Paris. A levy of every male
able to bear arms between sixteen and sixty years of age was made, and
the citizen army was reviewed near St. Antoine des Champs, in the
presence of the king and queen. From 60,000 to 80,000 men, half of
them well-armed, marched past, with sixty-seven banners of the trades
guilds, not counting those of the municipal officers, the Parlement
and the university. The nobles were checkmated, and they were glad to
accede to a treaty which gave them ample spoils, and Louis, time to
recover himself. The "Public Good" was barely mentioned.
Louis, when at Paris, refused to occupy the Louvre and chose to dwell
in the new Hotel des Tournelles, near the Porte St. Antoine, built for
the Duke of Bedford and subsequently presented to Louis when Dauphin
by his royal father; for thither a star led him one evening as he left
Notre Dame. Often would he issue _en bourgeois_ from the Tournelles to
sup with his gossips in Paris and scarcely a day passed without the
king being seen at mass in Notre Dame.
"When King Louis," says De Comines, "retired from the interview[97]
with Edward IV. of England, he spake with me by the way and said he
found the English king too ready to visit Paris, which thing was not
pleasing to him. The king was a handsome man and very fond of women;
he might find some affectionate mistress there, who would speak him so
many fair words that she would make him desire to return; his
predecessors had come too often to Paris and Normandy, and he did not
like his company this side the sea, but beyond the sea he was glad to
have him for friend and brother."
[Footnote 97: At the conclusion of the Hucksters' Peace at Amiens.]
Louis had long desired to punish the Count of St. Pol for treachery,
and as a result of a treaty with Charles of Burgundy, in 1475, had him
at length in the Bastille. Soon on a scaffold in the Place de Greve
his head rolled from his body at a tremendous _coup_ of Petit Jean's
sword, and a column of stone twelve feet high erected where he fell,
gave terrible warning to traitorous princes, however mighty; for the
count was Constable of France, the king's brother-in-law, a member of
the Imperial House of Luxemburg, and connected with many of the
sovereign families of Europe.
Two years later another noble victim, the Duke of Nemours, fell into
the king's power and saw the inside of one of Louis' iron cages in the
Bastille. The king, who had learnt that the chains had been removed
from the prisoner's legs, that he might go to hear mass, commanded his
jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured
(_gehenne_) and the duke wrote a piteous letter, praying for clemency
and signing himself _le pauvre Jacques_. In vain: him, too, the
headsman's axe sent to his account at the Halles.
The news of the humiliating Peace of Peronne, after the king had
committed the one great folly of his career by gratuitously placing
himself in Charles the Bold's power,[98] was received by the Parisians
with many gibes. The royal herald proclaimed at sound of trumpet by
the crossways of Paris: "Let none be bold or daring enough to say
anything opprobrious against the Duke of Burgundy, either by word of
mouth, by writing, by signs, paintings, roundelays, ballads, songs or
gestures." On the same day a commission seized all the magpies and
jackdaws in Paris, whether caged or otherwise, which were to be
registered according to their owners, with all the pretty words that
the said birds could repeat and that had been taught them: the pretty
word that these chattering birds had been taught to say was "Peronne."
Louis' abasement at Peronne was, however, amply avenged by the battle
of Granson, when the mighty host of "invincible" Charles was
overwhelmed by the Switzers in 1476. A year later, the whole fabric
of Burgundian ambition was shattered and the great duke lay a
mutilated and frozen corpse before the walls of Nancy. Louis' joy at
the destruction of his enemy was boundless, but in the very
culmination of his success he was struck down by paralysis, and though
he rallied for a time the end was near. Haunted by fear of treachery,
he immured himself in the gloomy fortress of Plessis. The saintly
Francesco da Calabria, relics from Florence, from Rome, the Holy Oil
from Rheims, turtles from Cape Verde Islands--all were powerless; the
arch dissembler must now face the ineluctable prince of the dark
realms, who was not to be bribed or cajoled even by kings.
[Footnote 98: The reader will hardly need to be reminded that this
amazing folly forms one of the principal episodes in Scott's _Quentin
Durward_.]
When at last Louis took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier,
told him that most surely his hour was come. Confession made, he gave
much political counsel and some orders to be observed by _le Roi_, as
he now called his son, and spoke, says De Comines, "as dryly as if he
had never been ill. And after so many fears and suspicions Our Lord
wrought a miracle and took him from this miserable world in great
health of mind and understanding. Having received all the sacraments
and suffering no pain and always speaking to within a paternoster of
his death, he gave orders for his sepulture. May the Lord have his
soul and receive him in the realm of Paradise!"
It was in Louis' reign that the art of printing was introduced into
Paris. As early as 1458 the master of the mint had been sent to Mainz
to learn something of the new art, but without success. In 1463, Fust
and his partner, Schoeffer, had brought some printed books to Paris,
but the books were confiscated and the partners were driven out of the
city, owing to the jealousy of the powerful corporation of the scribes
and booksellers, who enjoyed a monopoly from the Sorbonne of the sale
of books in Paris; and in 1474 Louis paid an indemnity of 2500 crowns
to Schoeffer for the confiscation of his books and for the trouble he
had taken to introduce printed books into his capital. In 1470, at the
invitation of two doctors of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet and Jean
de la Puin, Ulmer Gering of Constance and two other Swiss printers set
up a press near Fichet's rooms in the Sorbonne. In 1473 a press was at
work at the sign of the Soleil d'Or (Golden Sun), in the Rue St.
Jacques, under the management of two Germans, Peter Kayser, Master of
Arts, and John Stohl, assisted by Ulmer Gering. In 1483 the last-named
removed to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the doctors granted to him
and his new partner, Berthold Rumbolt of Strassburg, a lease for the
term of their lives. They retained their sign of the Soleil d'Or,
which long endured as a guarantee of fine printing. The earliest works
had been printed in beautiful Roman type, but unable to resist the
favourite Gothic introduced from Germany, Gering was led to adopt it
towards the year 1480, and the Roman was soon superseded. From 1480 to
1500 we meet with many French printers' names: Antoine Verard, Du Pre,
Cailleau, Martineau, Pigouchet--clearly proving that the art had then
been successfully transplanted.
The re-introduction of Roman characters about 1500 was due to the
famous house of the Estiennes, whose admirable editions of the Latin
and Greek classics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne
was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin classics outside
his shop, offering a reward to any passer-by who pointed out a
misprint or corrupt reading. Their famous house was the meeting-place
of scholars and patrons of literature. Francis I. and his sister
Margaret of Angouleme, authoress of the Heptameron, were seen there,
and legend says that the king was once kept waiting by the
scholar-printer while he finished correcting a proof. All the
Estienne household, even the children, conversed in Latin, and the
very servants are said to have grown used to it. In 1563 Francis I.
remitted 30,000 livres of taxes to the printers of Paris, as an act of
grace to the professors of an art that seemed rather divine than
human. But in spite of royal favour printing was a poor career. The
second Henry Estienne, who composed a Greek-Latin lexicon, died in
poverty at a hospital in Lyons; the last of the family, the third
Robert Estienne, met a similar miserable end at the Hotel Dieu in
Paris. So great was the reaction in the university against the
violence of the Lutherans and the daring of the printers, that in 1534
all the presses were ordered to be closed. In 1537 no book was allowed
to be printed without permission of the Sorbonne, and in 1556 an order
was made, it is said at the instance of Diane de Poitiers, that a copy
in vellum of every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited
at the royal library. After Gering's death the forty presses then
working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every
printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by
poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior
printing.