GRAPES OF WRATH
"In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and
great mourning. Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be
comforted, because they are not."--_Jeremiah._
When the conqueror of Agincourt lay dying at Meaux, word was brought to
him that his queen, Catherine of France, had borne him a son at Windsor
Castle. "Alas!" he said; "Henry of Monmouth has reigned a short time and
conquered much. Henry of Windsor will reign long and lose all." Few
prophecies, perhaps, have been so literally fulfilled.
At the accession of Henry VI., the "meek usurper,"[13] France was as
near her death-agony as she had ever been. Since the first invasion of
Henry V., war, famine and pestilence had never ceased their ravages.
Whole districts, once peopled, had become solitary wastes. The peasants,
tired of sowing that others might reap, threw down pick and hoe, left
wife and children, in a despair that was near to madness, and took to
the woods, there to worship Satan in very truth. God and his saints
having forsaken them, they would see what Satan and his demons could do
for them. Things could not be worse, and at least in this service they
would stand where their masters and tyrants stood. In Paris, things were
no better. In the year 1418 there died in the city of the plague alone,
80,000 persons. "They are buried in layers of thirty and forty corpses
together, packed as bacon is."[14]
Two years later, when the English entered Paris, it was hoped that they
would bring with them not only peace and order, but food. The hope was
vain. "All through Paris you could hear the pitiable lamentation of the
little children. One saw upon one dungheap twenty, thirty children
dying of hunger and cold. No heart was so hard but had great pity upon
hearing their piteous cry throughout the night, 'I die of
starvation!'"[15]
By day, when the dog-killer passed through the streets, he was followed
by a throng of famished people, who fell upon each stray dog as it was
killed, and devoured it, leaving the bare bones: by night the wolves,
also hungry, the country being stripped, made their way into the city,
where they found ample provender in the scarcely-covered corpses.
A kind of death-madness sprang up and seized upon the people; a hideous
carnival of corruption began. People danced, as in the fairy-tales,
whether they would or no, sick and well, young and old, and their
dancing-green was the graveyard. A grinning skeleton was enthroned as
King Death, and round him the frantic people danced hand in hand,
shouting and singing, over the graves that held their friends and
kinsfolk. Soon there was no more room in the burial places; but still
the people died. Charnel houses were built, where corpses were stored,
being taken up a short time after burial to make room for fresh ones.
The soil of the Cemetery of the Innocents was piled eight feet high
above the surrounding streets.
Such was life--and death--for the common people, whom no man regarded.
We have already seen how it was with the noble in war; in private life
they were no less fanatic. That strange and hideous phenomenon known as
the blood-madness of tyrants, broke out like some frightful growth upon
the unhappy country. The chronicles of the time read like records of
nightmare. Great princes, noble knights, robbed, tortured, slew their
wives, fathers, brothers, no man saying them nay. The Sieur de Giac gave
his wife poison, and made her gallop on horseback behind him till she
dropped dead from the saddle. Adolf de Gueldres, "under the excuse that
parricide was the rule in the family," dragged his father from his bed,
compelled him to walk naked five miles, and then threw him down into a
horrible dungeon to die.[16] The time was past when the "_prudhommes_,"
the honest men of a village, might come before their lord and rebuke
him with "Messire, such and such a thing is not the custom of the good
people of these parts!" In the fourteenth century, they were listened
to; in the fifteenth, they would probably have their throats cut and be
thrown on the dungheap.
"Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honor and dishonor made,
Two sister vessels."
Say rather, of the same earth two flowers. From the same dreadful soil
of carnage that gave birth to the Lily of France springs up to enduring
infamy a supreme Flower of Evil, the figure of Gilles de Rais, Marshal
of France. His story reads like a fairy tale gone bad.
Born in 1404, grandnephew of Bertrand du Guesclin, neighbor and relative
of Olivier de Clisson; comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc. Orphaned in his
boyhood, he was left to the over-tender mercies of an adoring
grandfather who refused him nothing. In after years, when horror closed
round his once-shining name and men shrank from him as from a leper, he
cried out in his agony: "Fathers and mothers who hear me, beware, I
implore you, of rearing your children in softness. For me, if I have
committed such and such crimes, the cause of it is that in my youth I
was always allowed to do as I pleased." ("_L'on m'a toujours laissé
aller au gré de ma volonté._")
From a child, he showed distinction in the arts of war; appeared for a
time clad in all the warlike virtues. Enormously rich, in his own right
as well as by marriage, he was eagerly welcomed to the standard of
Charles the Dauphin, who was correspondingly poor. We shall see him at
Orleans, riding beside the Maid, one of her devoted admirers; through
all the period of his youth, his public acts shone bright and gallant as
his own sword.
The second period of his life shows the artist, the seeker, the man of
boundless ambitions. He aspired to be "_litterateur savant et
artiste_."[17] He had a passion for the beautiful, a passion for
knowledge; for manuscripts, music, drama, science, especially that
so-called science of the occult. When he traveled, he carried with him
his valuable library, from which he would not be separated: carried
also his two splendid organs, his chapel, his military household. He
kept his own court of over two hundred mounted men, knights, squires,
pages, all magnificently equipped and maintained at his expense. At two
of his cities, Machecoul and Tiffanges, he maintained all the clergy of
a cathedral and a collegiate church: dean, archdeacon, etc., etc.,
twenty-five to thirty persons, who (like the library) accompanied him on
his travels, no less splendidly dressed than the knights and squires.
Many pages of a bulky memoir are devoted to the various ways in which
Gilles squandered his princely fortune. Our concern is with his efforts
to restore it, or rather to make another when it was gone.
In the course of his studies, he had not neglected the
then-still-popular one of alchemy, and to this he turned when no more
money was to be had. Gold, it appeared, could be made; if so, he was the
man to make it. Workshops were set up at Tiffanges, perhaps in that
gloomy donjon tower which alone remains to-day of all that Arabian
Nights castle of splendor and luxury. Alchemists were summoned and
wrought night and day, spurred on by promises and threats. Night and
day they wrought; but no gold appeared. Fearing for their lives, they
hinted at other and darker things that might be necessary; at other
agencies which might produce the desired result. If my lord would call
in, for example, those who dealt in magic----?
Frantic in his quest, Gilles stopped at nothing. Necromancers were sent
for, and came; they in turn summoned "spirits from the vasty deep" or
elsewhere, who obediently appeared. Trembling, yet exultant, Gilles de
Rais spoke to the demons, asking for knowledge, power and riches
("_science, puissance, et richesse_"), promising in return anything and
everything except his life and his soul. The demons, naturally enough,
made no reply to this one-sided offer. It is curious to read of the
midnight scenes in that summer of 1439 when Gilles and his
magician-friend Prelati, with their three attendants, tried to strike
this bargain with the infernal powers. Torches, incense, pentacles,
crucibles, etc., etc.; nothing was omitted. They adjured Satan, Belial,
and Beelzebub to appear and "speak up"; adjured them, singularly enough,
in the name of the Holy Trinity, of the Blessed Virgin and all the
saints. The demons remained mute; nor were they moved by sacrifices of
dove, pigeon or kid. Finally, a demon called "Barron" made response: it
appeared that what the fiends desired was human sacrifice: that without
it no favors might be expected of them.
About this time the western provinces of France became afflicted with a
terrible scourge. A monster, it was whispered, a murderous beast, _bête
d'extermination_, was hiding in the woods, none knew where. Children
began to disappear; youths and maidens too, all young and tender human
creatures. They vanished, leaving no trace behind. At first the bereaved
parents lamented as over some natural accident. The little one had
strayed from home, had fallen into the river, had lost its way in the
forest. The friends mourned with them, but were hardly surprised: it was
not too strange for those wild days. But the thing spread. In the next
village, two children had disappeared; in the next again, four. The
creature, whatever it was, grew bolder, more ravenous. Terror seized the
people; the whole countryside was in an agony of fear and suspense.
Rumor spread far and wide; the beast took shape as a human monster; the
_ogre_ was evolved, _Croquemitaine_, who devoured children as we eat
bread. A little while, and the monster was localized. It was within such
a circle that the children were vanishing; near Tiffanges, near
Machecoul, the two fairy castles of the great Seigneur Gilles de Rais.
Slowly but surely the net of suspicion was drawn, closer, closer yet.
The whispers spread, grew bolder, finally broke into open speech. "The
beast of extermination" was none other than the Marshal of France, the
companion of Dunois and La Hire, and of the Maid herself, the great lord
and mighty prince, Gilles de Rais. Search was made in the chambers of
Machecoul, in the gloomy vaults of Tiffanges. The bones of the murdered
children were found, here lying in heaps on the floor, there hidden in
the depths of well or oubliette. It is not a tale to dwell upon; it is
enough to know that in a few years over three hundred children and young
people had been foully and cruelly done to death.
In 1440 the matter reached the drowsy ear of Public Justice. Gilles was
formally arrested (making no resistance, secure in his own power), was
tried, tortured, and after making full confession and expressing
repentance for his crimes, was condemned to be burned; but, meeting more
tender executioners than did the Maid of France, was strangled instead,
and his body piously buried by "certain noble ladies."
Every French child of education knows something of the "_jeune et beau
Dunois_"; every French child, educated or not, knows the story of Joan
of Arc; Anglo-Saxon children may not invariably attain this knowledge,
but they all know Gilles de Rais, though they never heard his name. Soon
after his death, he passed into the realm of Legend, and under the title
of Bluebeard he lives, and will live as long as there are children.
Legend, that enchanting but inaccurate dame, gave him his seven wives;
he had but one, and she survived him. His own name soon passed out of
use. Even in the town of Nantes, where he met his death, the expiatory
monument raised by Marie de Rais on the place of her father's torture
was called "_le monument de Barbe-Bleue_."
So, strangely enough, it is the children who keep alive the memory of
their slayer.
FOOTNOTES:
[13]
"Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murder fed,
Revere his Consort's faith, his Father's fame,
And spare the meek usurper's holy head!"
--_Gray_, the Bard.
[14] "Journal of a citizen of Paris."
[15] "Journal of a Citizen of Paris."
[16] Lt.-Col. A. C. P. Haggard, D. S. O. "The France of Joan of Arc."
[17] Gilles de Rais.