_Death_
Sedentes in tenebris et in umbra mortis, vinctos in
mendicitate.
... Comme sur un drap noir
Sur la tristesse immense et sombre
Le blanc squelette se fait voir....
... Des cercueils lève le couvercle
Avec ses bras aux os pointus,
Dessine ses côtes en cercle
Et rit de son large rictus.
The artist who first truly understood the rendering of light is also
the workman whose shadows are the deepest in every scene he drew. If I
were to leave you with an impression of the sixteenth century either
in Rouen or elsewhere--that was composed of gorgeous ceremonial, of
exquisite architecture, of superabundant energy and life, and of these
only, you would neither appreciate the many influences which wrought
upon the men and women of those days, nor estimate at their true worth
the changing events, on which we now look back in the large
perspective of so many generations. And in that strange century the
sorrow and the pain of a world in travail are as evident as its joy.
The feverish excitement with which it grasped at life and pleasure is
counterbalanced, and explained by the ever-present horror of death in
its most ghastly forms.
When a fact of this eternal and natural significance is once frankly
recognised and bravely faced, men do not think much about it
afterwards, and say less. In the ages when the greatest of the
cathedrals were built the personification of death is practically
unknown. Archæologists may imagine they discover it; but I shall never
believe that a single carving of it existed before the close of the
fifteenth century. Life they knew, not only in all its varied forms,
but as the soul. Sin they knew, and carved not merely in the full
shame of the act but in the person of the father of sin, the devil,
bat-winged and taloned, hovering over his prey on earth, or driving
his victims after death into gaping Hellmouth where his torturers
awaited them. But it was only when printing excited men's
imaginations, when the first discovery of the ancient classics roused
their emulation and stimulated their unrest, when the Renaissance in
art increased their eagerness to express their thoughts and multiplied
their methods of expression, when the Reformation turned their
conscience to the latter end and to the unseen world--only at such a
time of speculation and disquiet did Death himself appear, personified
and hideously exultant. The waters were troubled and the slime beneath
them came up to the surface. Instead of the bold imaginations of God
or man or beast which the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knew,
you find a crowd of tiny imps and monkeys, like the verminous throng
upon the Portail des Marmousets at St. Ouen; the higher forms of
creation disappeared before the presence of the Arch-Enemy.
There arose not only a great contempt for the value of human life, but
a gross familiarity with death. The poor man, dying in his unregarded
thousands, clutched to his starved heart the one consolation that the
rich could not escape contagion. To the judge upon his bench, to the
queen in her palace, to the cardinal in his state, to the king at his
high festival, to the very Pope himself, death came as unerringly as
to the ploughman sweating in his furrow. And the rich made haste to
enjoy the little time they had. The best of that old life which
remains to us is its buildings. From them and from the carvings on
them we can imagine the fruitful, busy, breeding existence of that
hurrying sixteenth century. Painters and sculptors worked as in a
frenzy, covering canvas by the acre and striking whole armies of
statues into serried ranks of stone. Men fought with swords that
weaker generations can with difficulty flourish in the air; they wore
armour that would make a cart-horse stagger. Quarrels, duels, riots,
rapes, drinking-bouts, gallantries, and murders followed one another
in a hot succession that takes away the breath of modern strait-laced
commentators. Life that came easily into the world was spent as
recklessly, and blood flowed as plentifully as wine. Rough horseplay
and rude practical joking were of the essence of humorous courtliness.
Immense processions filled with life and colour, jesting at everything
sacred or profane, crowded with symbols decent and indecent, made up
the sum of public happiness. Close at men's elbow lay the heavy hand
of a merciless and blood-stained law. Once beneath the power of
"Justice" the miserable prisoner had little hope of escaping before
the legal Juggernaut had crushed him, and he was lucky who died
quickest at the executioner's hands. The very criminals themselves
sinned in a more stupendous fashion than they have had the courage to
do since.
If I have not wearied you with quotations from the record of the
Fierte St. Romain, I will pick out but two more instances in this
century to show you that I do not speak without book at Rouen. In
1516, Nicolas de la Rue, whose sister had been married in Guernsey,
discovered her in an intrigue with the commandant's son, and slew them
both with one stroke of his sword. Thereon the commandant of the
island called out 120 foot-soldiers, but De la Rue armed the crew of
his vessel, drove them off, killed two with his own hand and sailed
away to Normandy. There he fell desperately in love with a lady near
Surville-sur-Mer, and taking his men with him carried her off from the
Château de Commare. After keeping her with him for some time under
promise of marriage, he captured an English vessel on the high seas
after peace had been declared on both sides of the Channel, and was
condemned to two years' banishment. At the end of this time he
returned to Harfleur to recover some twenty thousand livres (the
produce of former piracies in the English Channel) which he had left
in the keeping of Mademoiselle de Commare.
But the lady had returned to her own family and carried off his money
with her. When he followed to her house, she offered him only ten
crowns, so he stayed in the village near by until he could devise a
plan to get back his treasure. The lady called her friends and
relations, and they tried to arrest De la Rue one morning in the
market, with the result that several of them were badly wounded. At
last a larger force managed to secure him, and threw him into a prison
at Rouen on the capital charge of abduction. While there it was proved
that he had stabbed a man to death in Harfleur in a quarrel about a
woman; that at Janval, near Arques, he had punished a fellow called
Bonnetot for insulting a comrade, by running him through with a
rapier, from which Bonnetot died; and that in a quarrel about another
woman he had dangerously wounded a naval officer with his dagger; and
in these little escapades no mention is made of the countless acts of
piracy on the high seas, which can seldom have been accomplished
without considerable loss of life.
But this record is nothing to the second and last example which I
shall take from the prisoners of the "Fierte." In 1541 a young
gentleman named François de Fontenay, Sieur de Saint-Remy, aged
twenty-nine, was pardoned by the canons after a career which I can
only sketch in the roughest outlines. When he was only fifteen, he got
some friends to help him and killed a sergeant who had displeased him
by carrying stories of his behaviour to his mother. When a little
older, in a village of the Côtentin, at the request of a young lady he
professed to love, he laid an ambush with some friends for a Monsieur
des Mostiers, but only succeeded in wounding him severely, and barely
escaped the execution that punished one of his comrades in the same
affair. Developing rapidly into a bravo of the first water, he
attacked a man "at the request of le sieur de Danmesnil," and wounded
him mortally with his rapier in the thigh. Being at a house in
Montgardon with his mother and brother, he held it against forty armed
men who had come in the name of the law to arrest them both, shot an
arquebusier with his own hand, and beat the troop off before the help
for which he managed to send had had time to arrive. Nor was he
without friends who were quite worthy of their company.
In the year before de Fontenay himself enjoyed the Privilège de St.
Romain, it had been extended, at the express wish of several members
of the royal family, to four sons of the Baron d'Aunay, the Duke of
Orléans being especially urgent in pointing out that these poor
fellows had done nothing in his opinion that should debar them from
the privilege. They were, as a matter of fact, merely charged with the
following peccadilloes, among others. In the course of rescuing a
friend from the Communal authorities at Saint-Avon, they used the
town-folk so roughly that a man and a woman fell into a well during
the dispute, and were drowned. On their way to the wars they met a man
with his wife upon the bridge near their home, and annoyed at not
having enough room left for their horses, they dismounted, tied up the
man's hands and feet, and beat the woman cruelly before her husband's
eyes. On the death of their grandmother, who had married twice, they
visited her second husband to get possession of certain legal papers,
and when he resisted they ran him through the stomach with a rapier.
Enlisted for once upon the side of justice, they were clamouring at a
house for the surrender of a murderer who had taken refuge there, and
when the owner opened the door they killed him with a slash across the
body. Pursued themselves by the officers, they waited till they were
on their own land, then turned and charged the men, sword in hand,
secured their horses, and thrashed one of them with knotted thorns.
Before they were finally taken by the sergeants of Rouen they had
thrown themselves into the church of Aulnay and defended it against
forty armed men, wounding several of them with crossbow-bolts before
they surrendered.
Our friend François de Fontenay was acquainted with this gallant band
of brothers through the house of Créance, with which both were
connected; and their sturdy resistance to the law of the land must
have soon created a strong feeling of sympathy and admiration; for the
five men are found all joined together to accomplish the murder of one
Boullart near Caen. Wherever de Fontenay went it soon became the
fashion among the villages to oppose his progress; but this made
little difference, for both at Neufbourg and at Fert-Macé, either by
his own hand or by his servants, several "common people," who were so
ill-advised as to get in the way were killed, and at Dun-le-Roy he
was compelled to fight his way out, using the edge of his rapier right
and left, "with considerable loss of life among the peasants." They
had been the centre (and their swords were never idle) of similar
riots, near Bourges, in the streets of Falaise, at Lisieux, and
elsewhere. More high-born foes were treated in just as summary a
fashion. With his brother Jehan, François attacked his enemy St.
Germain (a Côtentin magistrate) on the bridge at Lyons, wounded him
four times, and left him dead. His shoemaker was late in delivering
some boots, so François visited him, sword-in-hand, carried off two
other pairs, and "has not yet been known to pay for them." Other
necessities he had not scrupled to provide himself with in a similar
way. Oxen and sheep from a farmer called Lemoyne, chickens from a
priory near Bayeux, more sheep from the Sieur de Grosparmy, horses
from another farmer, flour from a third. A husband who objected to
giving up his wife at St. Lô was promptly wounded, so severely that he
could only watch her helplessly as she was carried off.
Such are a few of the crimes, of which Monsieur de Fontenay confessed
the astonishing number of forty-two. After his acquittal of them all,
by virtue of the Fierte, the canons were for some six months kept hard
at work dealing out similar deliverances to the crowd of his
accomplices who kept on appearing from every side, and clamouring for
the mercy of the Chapterhouse. Though I can conceive no worse
precedent for the future of the Fierte, I need make no further comment
upon the fact of de Fontenay's deliverance, except that he was so well
aware of the detestation he had inspired in many of his victims that
he was afraid to make any public appearance in the streets of Rouen
for fear of assassination.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE AÎTRE ST. MACLOU]
Remembering this man's career, turn out of the Place des Ponts de
Robec, down the Rue Damiette, southwards, and I will show you the
spot in Rouen that has made me tell you something of his history as a
type of the young gallant of the sixteenth century. As you pass the
"Rue du Rosier" (on your left at No. 54), the "Impasse des Hauts
Mariages" appears a little further on. Any budding romance the name
may suggest will not survive a walk of a few yards up its narrow and
noisome recesses. But at the end of the Rue Damiette, behind the vista
of old houses, the arches of St. Maclou will tempt you irresistibly
towards the end of the road that curves out at the north-west corner
of the church, just opposite the famous fountain which has been so
mutilated by the Huguenots. At this point turn sharply to the left,
down the Rue Martainville eastwards. To the south the Rue Molière
flings its quaint legendary shadows towards the river. A little
further on, a dark square opening makes a patch of black beneath the
gabled windows of No. 190. That is the entrance to the Aître St.
Maclou, the oldest cemetery in Rouen, and one of the most interesting
in Europe. Pass through the dark passage into the open space beyond
that is surrounded by old timbered houses, and go straight through to
the little stairway that is opposite the entrance. From that slight
eminence you may look back upon the strangest scene you have yet
visited; if it is an autumn afternoon the little charity children will
be running to and fro beneath the emblems of death carved on the
timbers above their heads, while the religious sisters, in their grey
gowns and wide white head-dresses move slowly to and fro beside them.
It is the picture of another century, in its appropriate setting.
As the sun sets slowly and the shadows gather, this aged sepulchre of
the dead of Rouen gradually gives up its secrets, and the ancient city
of past centuries reappears to the grating of the rebec of the "Danse
Macabre." The broad boulevards of the morning sink into the soil, and
in their place there gapes a mighty moat with massive buttresses above
it. The Seine of yesterday grows wider, pushing the Quais back to the
foot of the town walls, and above his youthful waters slope the
rounded arches built by the Empress Matilda, wife of Geoffrey
Plantagenet. The streets and houses shrink into a narrower limit,
bounded by a line of bastions, with crenelated towers at intervals,
and eight gates each with its watch-tower and drawbridge and
portcullis.
Above the battlemented walls, the airy spires and mighty pyramids of
the City of Churches rise from thirty-five parishes, and from four and
thirty monasteries. Three donjon keeps dominate the town. Upon the St.
Catherine's Mount a fortress holds the hill, and above it rise the
towers of the Abbey of St. Trinité du Mont. Within every church the
monuments and carvings are still fresh and unmutilated. The royal
statues, long since lost, sleep peacefully in the Cathedral choir, and
the pomp of death spreads its sombre magnificence in every sacred
building. The old fountains are playing in the squares and streets.
The fountain of St. Maclou, which had two figures like the Mannekin of
Brussels; the Croix de Pierre, with statues in every niche; the St.
Vincent, with its great daïs overshadowing a group of the Nativity,
and water spouting from the mouths of oxen in the manger; the Lacrosse
with the Virgin and her Child; the Lisieux, whereon was carved the
Mount Parnassus with Apollo and the Muses, Pegasus too, and a great
triple-headed matron for Philosophy, and two bronze salamanders
vomiting streams of water; all the fountains that Jacques Lelieur has
traced for us are perfect and are playing in the town whose streets he
drew in 1525.
The sky grows darker, and the rain falls, as it fell then, even more
frequently than now; but we can pass beneath the "avant-soliers,"
those covered galleries that line the squares and market-places to
give shade or shelter to the merchant and his purchasers, and behind
their heavy timbers we shall be safe from the great wains of country
produce, or the lumbering chariots of the town, with their leather
hangings stamped in gold, dragged by the heavy Norman horses. The
streets are as narrow as they were first built in Pompeii; sixteen
feet is thought enough for the principal arteries of traffic, others
measure but ten feet, or even six, across. They are so crooked and the
line of houses on each side is often so uneven that it seems as if the
windings of some country footpath have been left in all their
primitive irregularity, and decorated here and there with casual
dwellings, while the gaps are filled in roughly as time goes on and
space grows more precious every year. This haphazard arrangement has
no doubt resulted in a certain picturesqueness of disposition and
perspective, and even in a tortuous maze of buildings very difficult
for any foreign enemy to assault; but it is obvious that the city's
internal plan has owed nothing either to military or æsthetic
considerations at the outset. For these streets that were not paved at
all until the fifteenth century, are only covered with rude stones,
and look more like the interior of a vast open drain than anything;
pigs and other animals stroll into them from the open doorways of the
commoner houses, and even the richer families seem to consider that
the highway is little more than a commodious dust-bin.
Above the mire and stench of the street rise houses which seem to
topple forward into the morass beneath; each storey overhangs the
last, until the trowsy gables almost rub against each other at the
top, and nearly shut out every breath of air or glimpse of sky. Close
above the pavement, and swinging in the rain, a multitude of signs and
strange carvings blot out the little light remaining; Tritons, sirens
and satyrs are cheek by jowl with dragons, open-mouthed, their tails
in monstrous curves. Vast gilded barrels, bunches of grapes as huge as
ever came out of the Promised Land, images of the Three Kings of the
East, six-pointed stars, enormous fleurs de lys, great pillars painted
blue or red, cockatrices and popinjays and bears and elephants; a
whole menagerie of fabulous creatures hang over the lintels of almost
every house; for in the days when numbers are not, many habitations
have to be distinguished by a sign besides the taverns and the
hostelries and shops. Higher up still the long thin gargoyles peer
into the clouded air; clutching at the outmost edge of wall, they
stretch as far forward as they may and are every one in actual
service, spouting showers of rain and refuse from the roof into the
crowded road. Upon the walls themselves, in low relief, every panel
has its medallion, a classical head within a wreath of bay-leaves, a
more modern celebrity ringed by the mottoes and emblems of his
lineage. Above the doorway of the merchant is carved his galleon in
full sail; the armourer displays a brave scene, of a soldier hacking
his way with an irresistible rapier through the mob of caitiffs who
had been so foolish as to buy their swords at other shops; over the
next porch is carved a horse without a rider, hastening across the
bridge to bring the tidings of the murder of his master in the
suburbs; elsewhere is sculptured the Holy City with a humble wayfarer
approaching from one side, and a noble from the other. Every building
has a character of its own, a personality apart from other houses in
the street, and nearly all are gay with paint and gilding, and
instinct with a natural feeling for artistic decoration that was only
appreciated at its true worth after the Huguenot iconoclasts had
wrecked it.
Amid all this life and colour death and the taint of death are ever
present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and
in the crowded city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead.
Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through
the town by day; they are followed by the riot of the Mascarade des
Conards, a burlesque throng of some two thousand fantastic dresses
careering madly up and down the streets, chased by the "Clercs de la
Basoche," or racing after every sober citizen in sight. It is lucky if
the Huguenots have not seized the town and filled the churches with a
mob of fanatics, smashing everything with hammers, and making bonfires
of the sacred vestments in the streets, or if the Catholics are not
just taking their revenge by burning their enemies alive or murdering
Protestant children in their little beds. Even on ordinary days there
is horror enough only too visible. You need not go so far as the
gibbets just above the town where corpses are clattering in chains
beneath the wind; on the Place du Vieux Marché a sacrilegious priest
is being slowly strangled; in the Parvis Notre Dame a blasphemer's
throat is cut; close by the churchyard, a murderer's hand is chopped
off, and he is hurried away to execution on the scaffold by the
Halles. From a by-street the leper's bell sounds fitfully, and out of
the darkened house beyond, men in St. Michael's livery are bearing the
last victims of the Plague to burial within the city walls. In 1522
there were 50,000 of such burials in Rouen alone in six months. Every
gallant who goes by with his feathered cap and velvet cloak, his
tightly-fitting hose and slashed shoes, every lady in her purple hat
and stiff-starched ruff, her gold-brocaded stomacher, and her sweeping
skirt, every soldier swaggering his rapier, every sailor rolling home
from sea, every monk mumbling his prayers over a rosary--all alike are
breathing an infected poisonous air. The young girls from the country
feel it most and fly from it the quickest, coming in to sell their
eggs and chickens, with their woollen petticoats and gaily coloured
headdress, or meeting some lover of the town at a dark corner in the
narrow, damp, ill-ventilated streets. Here and there a silent figure
clad in blue stalks from one house to another and leaves the mark of a
great white cross upon the fast-shut door or shutters, for within
there is the Plague. And upon every passer-by outside there blows
continually the invisible blast of pestilence from the countless
graveyards pent up in the choking circuit of the walls. From the
thirteenth century onwards the city has been swept with the desolating
scourge of hideous disease. It was in 1348, when the ravages of the
Black Death were at their highest and 100,000 persons died of it in
Rouen that this cemetery of St. Maclou was founded.
[Illustration: THE CEMETERY OF ST. MACLOU]
Within the central space of the square court that you can see to-day
is the actual ground which formed this ancient graveyard. Formerly
there were two altars in it, one to the Slayer of the infernal Dragon,
the mighty Saint of Sepulchres, the protector of the dead, St.
Michael; the other to the souls of the dead themselves. In many a
country churchyard in France at the present day you may see a tall
lonely shaft that rises above the tombs, generally with a tiny belfry
at its summit, which holds the bell that rings at midnight to call the
wandering ghosts to rest; and at its base this "Lanterne des Morts"
carries a small slab of stone on which offerings were placed at night.
It was the Confrèrie de St. Michel who had charge of this, and of the
burying arrangements of the city, and they bore upon their hats the
image of their patron-saint as a badge of their sad calling. Twice
before 1505 this graveyard had to be enlarged; by 1526 three of the
galleries that now surround it had been built, those to the west and
south and east. The northern side was finished only in 1640. Of the
older work there are still thirty-one columns standing, some eleven
feet apart, carved with subjects from the famous "Dance of Death," the
"Danse Macabre" of Rouen.
But these curtains that circumscribe the Bed of Death have other
emblems carved upon them too; there is a double frieze of oak above
the pillars, and on it appears the skull and crossbones, the spade and
mattock, the fragments of pitiful anatomy that marked the ghastly
trade of sexton in the sixteenth century. In the covered galleries, as
they were originally, the richer burgesses were buried, though not one
of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the
poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross
upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous
burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were
the figures carved in high relief upon each pillar, groups that are so
mutilated now that only by the careful drawings and descriptions left
by M. Langlois long ago can we trace faintly what was placed there by
Denys Leselin the carver and his brother Adam, and by Gaultier
Leprevost, whose names are preserved in the church registers of St.
Maclou.
Each relief showed a group in which some living figure is dragged to
death by a triumphant skeleton, and chief among them were our first
parents Adam and Eve, the origins of death for every generation after.
"Mors qui venis de mors de pome
Primes en feme et puis en home
Tu bats le siècle comme toile."
On other pillars were an emperor, a king, a high constable, a duke, a
courtier, a pope, a cardinal, a bishop, and an abbot. They seem to
cry, like Villon, with a phrase that is especially appropriate to a
Rouen cemetery:
"Haro, haro, le grand et le mineur,
Et qu'est cecy--mourray, sans coup ferir?"
Without the power to struggle, they are haled from their high places
to the levelling tomb.
Reproductions of the first Todtentanz of Hans Holbein the younger are
now within the reach of everyone, and they have made these terrible
imaginations of the early sixteenth century the common property of all
who care to look at them. Designed just before 1526, when the horrors
of the Peasants' War and of innumerable outbreaks of pestilence and
famine had left fresh traces in the minds of everyone, they were not
published until 1538 at Lyons by Melchoir and Gaspar Trechsel. After
the sixth edition of 1562 no further addition to the plates is known.
They were cut with a knife upon wood, and not with the ordinary
graver, in 1527, or a little earlier, by Hans of Luxemburg, sometimes
called Franck, whose full signature is on Holbein's Alphabet in the
British Museum, which contains several sets of the impressions,
believed to be engraver's proofs from the original blocks, such as
exist also in Berlin, at Basle, in Paris, and at Carlsruhe. They have
been frequently copied, but the best modern imitations in wood
engraving are those made in 1833 for Douce's "Holbein's Dance of
Death," which come nearest to the incomparable skill of Hans of
Luxemburg, and have been reproduced again, only in this last year, by
George Bell of London.
The oldest representation of this idea is probably to be found at
Minden in Westphalia, and bears the date of 1383. But it was known
also at Dresden, at Lubeck, in Lucerne, in the château of Blois, in
Auvergne, and elsewhere in France. In all these places Death is shown
dancing with men of every age and condition, and carrying them off
with him to the grave. There is no doubt that the scene had its origin
not merely in the imagination of the sixteenth century, but reached
further back to the hideous "Danse Macabre" of the fourteenth century,
when the Black Death was slaying high and low so fast that men were
seized with a panic of hysterical convulsion and leaped frenziedly
about the streets and churches, even in the cemeteries themselves. The
numberless carvings on the cathedrals, representing the Devil and his
myrmidons struggling for mastery with a living soul, provided an easy
and instant suggestion. But by degrees the religious quality of the
mania lessened and grew weaker. At last the purely material horror of
extinction overcame everything else. It was no longer the Devil who
seized a maddened ring of men and women and danced them screaming into
hell. Now it was Death himself who clutched every man by the sleeve
and hurried him into the over-crowded ever-hungry sepulchre. If this
was one thought of the rich who thought at all, it was also the only
consolation of the poor, and therefore no more appropriate carvings
for the poor man's cemetery of St. Maclou could be imagined by the
workman of the sixteenth century.
But if the poor had their Danse Macabre, the great ones of the city
spared nothing to impress on their survivors that the magnificence of
their lives should follow them even to the tomb. In the Chapelle de la
Vierge of Rouen Cathedral are two of the most famous funereal
monuments of the sixteenth century, and in one of these you will
notice a very remarkable example of the way in which the sculptors of
the rich understood their task. Their orders, no doubt, were to give
of their best to celebrate the dead man's greatness; their designs
were evidently as unfettered by suggestion as by expense; and they had
their inevitable revenge. Beneath the magnificent figure of the knight
in armour lies the corpse, naked in death and as poor as the beggar in
the street. In the Louvre you may see a monument by Germain Pilon that
is even more suggestive of this feeling on the part of the artist. It
is the tomb of Madame de Birague, Valentina Balbiani.[64] Under a
sumptuous dress, covered with sculpture so delicate that the marble
looks like lace, a thin and shrunken form can be distinguished. The
wasted hand holds a tiny book whose pages it has no strength to turn.
Her little dog tries vainly to awake her from a slumber that is
eternal. A corpse that is almost a skeleton lies beneath. This is not
the sincere expression of the sorrow Villon knew; for we can easily
imagine the unhappy Valentina's fate from our knowledge of her
husband, one of the hell-hounds of Catherine de Médicis, who was
foremost in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. This is not the old
longing of the lover for his mistress:--
Mort, j'appelle de ta rigueur,
Qui m'as ma maistresse ravie,
Et n'est pas encore assouvie
Si tu ne me tiens en langueur.
Onc puis n'euz force ne vigneur;
Mais que te nuysoit-elle en vie
Mort?
Deux estions, et n'avions qu'ung cueur;
S'il est mort, force est que devie,
Voire, ou que je vive sans vie,
Comme les images, par cueur,
Mort!
[Footnote 64: This has been admirably described in Mrs Mark Pattison's
volumes on the "Renaissance of Art in France," though the authoress
refuses to admit that Michelet's view of Pilon's motive is correct.
But in Vol. I. compare pp. 236 and 21.]
It is the changed note of Ronsard's passionate regret that every
lovely feature must be marred by Death:--
"Pour qui gardes-tu tes yeux
Et ton sein délicieux
Ta joue et ta bouche belle
En veux-tu baiser Platon
Là-bas après que Charon
T'aura mise en sa nacelle?"
The work of Germain Pilon at the Louvre, and of the sculptor of the
dead de Brézé in Rouen Cathedral, whether that were Pilon himself, or
Jean Cousin, or Goujon, has none of the gentle regret that reverences
what it has once loved in life. There is in it all the fierce desire
for personified destruction, all the hideous mockery of the rich man
levelled with the poorest in a common corruption, which inspired the
"Danse Macabre"; but the sculptor's thought is expressed with the
subtle handicraft of a supersensitive age, with a fury of achievement
and a triumph over technical difficulties that is the very essence of
the best French Renaissance. In the same spirit Ronsard continues his
relentless comparison of the dead woman with the living mistress:--
"Ton teste n'aura plus de peau
Ny ton visaige tant beau
N'aura veines ny arteres
Tu n'auras plus que des dents
Telles qu'on les voit dedans
Les testes des cimetères."
This complicated mental attitude had evidently not been reached when
Rouland Leroux carved the great mausoleum for Cardinal d'Amboise,
which is on the south side of this chapel, or if it had been attained
by some men, neither Leroux himself nor Pierre Désaubeaulx his
fellow-workman had been touched by it. The very inscription proclaims
the exact reverse of that grisly triumph which is celebrated so
clearly on the opposite tomb; for the virtues of Georges d'Amboise are
said to be superior to death:--
"Pastor eram cleri populi pater aurea sese
Lilia subdebant quercus et ipsa mihi
Mortuus en jaceo morte extinguuntur honores
_At virtus mortis nescia morte viret_."
[Illustration: TOMB OF THE TWO CARDINALS D'AMBOISE IN THE CHAPELLE DE
LA SAINTE VIERGE IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL]
An optimism that may have been foreign to his age is appropriate to
this sturdy and ambitious ecclesiastic, who did not forget to do so
much material good for his town of Rouen, with waterworks, and even
drainage, and fair new buildings spaciously designed; all this in
spite of wider interests which did not stop at the tiara itself, of
which all men said the great cardinal was worthy. Of the two statues
that are now within the arched recess, the one on the right represents
him, and it must have been an excellent likeness. It has been called a
peasant face; and it is certainly no courtier who kneels there before
the carving of his patron saint slaying the dragon. The square head,
the deep brows, the heavy jaw and firm mouth, are not beautiful, but
they are impressive, and they show a character as far removed from the
peasant as it was from the voluptuary, as near akin to the
administrator of Normandy as to the Cardinal of the Holy Church. I
have little doubt that this was the handiwork of the Rouland Leroux
who must have often seen him in the Cathedral, and who helped to build
the great Palais de Justice, which was given to Rouen at his request.
In the statue on the left hand, it is more possible that Jean Goujon
(to whom so many things are ascribed without foundation) may have had
a hand. For this was put up in 1541, at least sixteen years after the
first one, in memory of the second Georges d'Amboise, the nephew of
the greater cardinal, and the last archbishop freely elected by the
Chapterhouse. Of the multitude of carvings that are in the alabaster
and marble round these statues, it is scarcely possible to give any
description that will be intelligible, and if their value in history
does not tempt you to visit them yourself, I can only point you to the
drawing that Miss James has done to make these pages more
intelligible. The niches on each side of the dragon contain six
statuettes; a bishop, a Virgin and child, St. John the Baptist, St.
Romain, a saint, and an archbishop blessing. Above them curves a
large arch, with three pierced pendentives and a frieze delicately
carved with birds and angels. Above this rises the highest division of
the monument, on the same plane as the sarcophagus below; seven small
niches of the prophets and sibyls divide the six larger panels, in
which the Apostles are shown in pairs. Beyond these again is a crown
of pinnacles in open-work, alternating with statuettes in smaller
niches. The lowest portion, the sarcophagus itself, is divided by
seven pilasters, each adorned with the figure of a monk, with six
compartments holding the statuettes of Faith, Charity, Prudence,
Strength, Temperance, and Justice. All this amazing complication of
delicate handiwork was done for the sum of 6952 livres, 16 sols, 4
deniers, which represents about 60,000 francs, or £2400 to-day.
[Illustration: TOMB OF LOUIS DE BRÉZÉ IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL]
On the opposite side of this chapel is the great tomb of Louis de
Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy, of which I have already spoken. As
an architectural composition it is, to my mind, infinitely finer than
the other, though there is not only a lack of the obvious sincerity
that inspired Leroux, but there is also the too evident appearance of
that triumph of Death which has been described in this chapter. Nor
can I help fancying that it represents too the somewhat sinister
triumph of a widow's cunning. For as I have drawn elsewhere the life
and the ambitions of Georges d'Amboise as the owner of Chaumont on the
Loire, so I have become acquainted with that typical figure of the
sixteenth century, Diane de Poitiers, at the home she took from Bohier
at Chenonceaux; and therefore her kneeling figure in the widow's weeds
of a conventional sorrow suggests nothing better to me than the
fashionable grief of the mistress of Henri II., the ostentation in
mourning of the most rapacious and unfeeling woman of her time.
Though the magnificent workmanship of the dead man at whose head she
kneels reminds me more of Germain Pilon's methods, I can well believe
that Jean Goujon may have been responsible for the general design of
the whole monument during the year we know he spent at Rouen in 1540,
when he was twenty years of age. Men seem to have matured more quickly
in those days than is possible in the slower generations that we know.
But even if the graceful caryatides and every other carving is his
work, I must still ascribe the strong treatment of the massive knight
in armour on his war horse to the same artist who conceived the dead
figure lying in its shroud beneath; and whether that artist were
Pilon or Jean Cousin, it is most improbable that it should have been
Goujon, for whom the work would have been just as much too early for
his own age, as that of Pilon would have been too late for the
suggested date of the entire monument. That the contrast of the dead
and living Seneschal was more than a mere court fashion of the time, I
have, of course, only advanced my own opinion; but even if it were not
so, in this case and in that of the Balbiani monument and many others,
the fact that so gruesome a custom should have prevailed at all is
even more significant than if it were the result of the imagination of
some few of the greatest sculptors.
[Illustration: A MONK PRAYING, FROM THE TOMB OF CARDINAL D'AMBOISE IN
ROUEN CATHEDRAL]
In sketching the more sombre features of this extraordinary century,
it is impossible to omit any reference to those religious troubles
which may have been already suggested to you by the kneeling monks
upon the tomb of Georges d'Amboise. They were as terrible in Rouen as
in almost every other town in France; the violent deaths and tortures
they made so common in the city cannot be omitted in any estimate of
the horrors of the time; and if I do not dilate upon them as their
importance in history might seem to demand, it is because they are
chiefly responsible for the destruction or debasement of most of those
great architectural monuments which it is my chief business to
describe. They were also responsible for the next two sieges in the
story of the town, and in the first of these there is a tale that I
must tell you, if only to show that if these men had the realisation
of death ever present before their eyes, they were also very hard to
kill, and did not yield to the Arch-Enemy so easily as many of their
descendants in an age which tries its hardest to forget him.
Encouraged by the news of the horrible massacre of Vassy, the
Huguenots under the Prince of Condé seized Rouen on the night of April
15, 1562, pillaged the churches, and stopped the services of the
Catholic religion. A few months afterwards the royal army marched to
the rescue under the Constable Anne de Montmorency, François de Guise,
and the father of Henri Quatre, Antoine de Navarre, who was shot in
the shoulder when directing the attack from the trenches, and died at
Andelys a month afterwards. While the Protestants were defending the
walls, a certain François de Civille was ordered with his company to
hold the ramparts near the Porte St. Hilaire, not far from the
Fourches de Bihorel. While at his post he was wounded by a shot from
an arquebus, which passed through his cheek and shattered the right
jaw-bone, at eleven in the morning on the 15th October. The bullet
came out behind his collar-bone and tore his ruff to pieces. He fell
down the glacis, and a foraging party stripped him and buried him
hurriedly in a ditch near by, and there he was left till six that
evening. His lacquey, Nicolas de la Barre, searching the ramparts for
his master after the assault had been repulsed, saw a human hand
sticking up out of the mud; his companion, Captain Jean de Cléré,
kicked the fingers as he walked, and a peculiar ring de Civille was
known to wear flashed in the light. The body was at once dug up and
carried to the house of the Sieur de Coqueraumont, in the Rue des
Capucins.
There for five days and five nights the servant watched by his master,
"who lay in a lethargy," and was just beginning to show feeble signs
of life when the enemy took the town by assault. On the twenty-eighth,
some Catholic soldiers broke into his place of refuge, and finding a
pestilent heretic lying ill, they threw him out of a window. Being
lucky enough to fall upon one of the many dunghills which were beneath
the windows of Rouen at that time, de Civille lay there in his shirt
and nightcap for three days and nights without food or drink, and no
one discovered him. At last, when the town was a little quieter, a
cousin fetched him away to the Château de Croisset, and by July in the
next year he had almost completely recovered his health. Though all
this happened when he was only twenty-six, he lived to write an
account of his adventures when he was seventy-four for the pleasure
and instruction of posterity; and he only expired for the last time at
the ripe age of eighty, from an inflammation of the lungs caught by
making love to a young woman underneath her window during a hard
frost.
The second siege in this century was occasioned by the troubles of the
League. In 1589 public anxiety had increased to such a pitch that the
royalist Court of Justice was removed to Caen, while the "Ligueurs"
held Rouen for the Duc de Mayenne. In July 1590 bands of armed men a
hundred strong went shouting through the streets, and would have
disarmed the town-guard on the Vieux Marché had they not been stopped
by Valdory, the district captain of the Burgess militia, who has left
a detailed account of the disturbances of that unhappy time in Rouen.
From his book it may be learnt that the "Vieux Palais" of the English
kings was still within the city walls by the river to the south-west,
that the fort had not long been rebuilt near the Abbey of St.
Catherine, that the Faubourgs were again destroyed as they were in
1417 to leave no shelter for the enemy, and that the investing troops
tried to cut off the stream of Robec, so as not merely to deprive
that quarter of its water supply, but to stop the public mills. In
November 1591 Henry of Navarre used some ships to help him in his
attack on Rouen, but the townsfolk, who refused to acknowledge a
Protestant as their king, seem to have paid little attention to the
naval demonstration, and finally chased his vessels out of the harbour
and got possession of most of their cargoes of sheep, oxen, wine and
other booty. The defence was brilliantly conducted throughout, and
Valdory relates that when three hundred musketeers were requested for
a forlorn hope, no less than two thousand men thronged to the
officers' houses demanding weapons to join in the sally. "Rouvel" was
very busy all the time in the town belfry, and rang furiously by night
or day whenever the scouts gave notice that the enemy were likely to
attack. Directly his notes were heard, every citizen rushed to his
appointed place upon the ramparts, and waited without confusion for
the enemy. They were good shots with an arquebus, too, for a captain
was reported to Valdory as having killed one of the enemy's sentinels
"at a distance of three hundred paces at least;" and an equally
successful shot is recorded at five hundred paces.
They were even vain-glorious; for Monsieur de Villars, says the same
authority, desirous of a little diversion outside the walls, rode out
with several gentlemen, and tilted at the ring beyond the ramparts
under a hot fire, until he had had his fill of amusement. When the
enemy could get to close quarters with the common folk they found them
no easier to handle; for as some of Henry of Navarre's soldiers were
foraging in a garden for herbs, the gardeners rushed out and "killed
them with large stones." The town never opened its gates until Henry
of Navarre repudiated his religion and became the King of France.
Rouen, as well as Paris, was evidently "well worth a mass."
One of the most interesting things about this fighting is the presence
of a numerous body of Englishmen who had joined Biron and Henry of
Navarre, under the Earl of Essex. Their Queen had offered a special
prize for the first man who should make a successful shot at the
defenders of the town; but they do not seem to have distinguished
themselves particularly, and at last a hundred of them (chiefly
squires) were killed. A hardy specimen of the race, however, is
mentioned by Valdory, who evidently kept his eyes open for good work,
whether of friend or foe. This Englishman, after receiving four wounds
from a cutlass on the head, "pretended to be dead, allowed himself to
be stripped by our soldiers, and dragged naked to the ramparts." While
he lay there, desirous to make quite sure of their man, the Rouen
sentinels (who must have been mariners from Dieppe) dropped a small
cannon ball on his stomach, "but he did not seem to feel it," and
continued obstinately to remain alive. However, when the Sieur de
Canonville took him prisoner and bound up his wounds, with the object,
apparently, of getting a ransom from his friends, he seems to have
determined that no foreigner should make money out of him, and died.
[Illustration: SIR CHRISTOPHER LYTCOT, HIGH SHERIFF OF BERKSHIRE,
KNIGHTED BY HENRI IV. AT THE SIEGE OF ROUEN IN 1591. FROM THE BRASS
UPON HIS TOMB IN WEST HANNEY CHURCH, NEAR WANTAGE, BERKSHIRE]
In the Church of West Hanney, near Wantage, in Berkshire, is the tomb
of one of these Englishmen who fought for Henry of Navarre before the
walls of Rouen, and it will be an appropriate ending to this chapter
of the dead if I close it with his epitaph:--
"Beneath this stone lyeth enterred the corps of Sir
Christopher Lytcot, Knight, twice high sheriff of the county
of Berk (Husband of two wives both in the sayd countye the
former Jane Essex widdowe of Thomas Essex of Beckett House
Eq. the later Catherine Young widdowe of Willm Younge of
Bastledon Eq) Knighted in the campe before Roane the xvi of
Novemb 1591 by the hands of the French Kinge Henry the
Fourth of yt name and King of Navarre. Who after his
travailes in Germany Italy and Fraunce and the execution of
justice unto the glory of God and the good of his country
ended his pilgrimage at Bastledon ye xxv of April 1599."
[Illustration: DES TODES WAPPENSCHILD]
[Illustration: VIEW OF ROUEN, DRAWN BY JACQUES LELIEUR IN 1525]