JEANNE D'ARC--PARIS UNDER THE ENGLISH--END OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION
The occupation of Paris by the English was the darkest hour in French
history, yet amid the universal misery and dejection the treaty of
Troyes was hailed with joy. When the two kings entered Paris after its
signature, the whole way from the Porte St. Denis to Notre Dame was
filled with people crying, "_Noël, noël!_"
The university, the parlement, the queen-mother, the whole of North
France, from Brittany and Normandy to Flanders, from the Channel to the
line of the Loire, accepted the situation, and the Duke of Burgundy,
most powerful of the royal princes, was a friend of the English. Yet a
few French hearts beat true. While the regent Duke of Bedford was
entering Paris, a handful of knights unfurled the royal banner at Melun,
crying--"Long live King Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of
God king of France!" And what a pitiful incarnation of national
independence was this to whom the devoted sons of France were now called
to rally!--a feeble youth of nineteen, indolent, licentious, mocked at
by the triumphant English as the "little king of Bourges."
The story of the resurrection of France at the call of an untutored
village girl is one of the most enthralling dramas of history. When all
men had despaired; when the cruelty, ambition and greed of the princes
of France had wrought her destruction; when the miserable dauphin at
Chinon was prepared to seek safety by an ignominious flight to Spain or
Scotland; when Orleans, the key to the southern provinces, was about to
fall into English hands--the means of salvation were revealed in the
ecstatic visions of a simple peasant maid. With that divine inspiration
vouchsafed alone to faith and fervent love, she saw with piercing
insight the essential things to be done. The siege of Orleans must be
raised and the dauphin anointed king at Rheims. "The originality of the
Maid," says Michelet, "and the cause of her success was her good sense
amid all her enthusiasm and exaltation." We may not here narrate the
story of those miraculous three months of the year 1429 (27th April-16th
July), which saw the relief of Orleans, the victories of Jargeau, of
Patay (where invincible Talbot was made prisoner), of the surrender of
ill-omened Troyes and of the solemn coronation at Rheims. Jeanne deemed
her mission over after Rheims, but to her ill-hap was persuaded to
follow the royal army after the retreat of the English from Senlis, and
on 23rd August she occupied St. Denis. She declared at her trial that
her voices told her to remain at St. Denis, but that the lords made her
attack Paris. On the 8th September the assault was made, but it was
foiled by the king's apathy, the incapacity and bitter jealousy of his
counsellors, and the action of double-faced Burgundy. In the afternoon
Jeanne, while sounding the depth of the fosse with her lance,[91] was
wounded by an arrow in the thigh. She remained till late evening, when
she was carried away to St. Denis, at whose shrine she hung up her
arms--her mysterious sword from St. Catherine de Fierbois and her banner
of pure white, emblazoned with the fleur-de-lys and the figure of the
Saviour, with the device "Jesu Maria."
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME FROM THE NORTH]
Six months later, while Charles was sunk in sloth at the château of
Sully, Jeanne was captured by the Burgundians at the siege of Compiègne,
and her enemies closed on her like bloodhounds. The university and the
Inquisition wrangled for her body, but English gold bought her from her
Burgundian captors and sent her to a martyr's death at Rouen. Those
who would read the sad record of her trial may do so in the pages of Mr
Douglas Murray's translation of the minutes of the evidence, and may
assist in imagination at the eighteen days' forensic baiting of the
hapless child (she was but nineteen years of age), whose lucid
simplicity broke through the subtle web of theological chicanery which
was spun to entrap her by the most cunning of the Sorbonne doctors.
A summary of Jeanne's answers was sent to "Our Mother, the University of
Paris." The condemnation was a foregone conclusion[92] and after a
forced retractation, the virgin saviour of France was led to her doom in
the market-place of Rouen. As she passed the lines of English soldiers,
their eyes flashing fierce hatred upon her, a cry escaped her, "O Rouen,
Rouen, must I then die here?" With her last breath she protested that
her voices had not deceived her and were of God; and calling on "Jesus!"
her head sank in the flames. "We are lost," said an English spectator;
"we have burnt a saint!"
Some contemporary letters from Venetian merchants in the cities of
France have recently been published, which give valuable testimony to
the sympathy evoked among foreign residents by the career of Jeanne the
Maid. To them she was a _zentil anzolo_, "a gentle angel sent of God to
save the good land of France, the most noble country in the world, which
having purged its sins and pride God snatched from the brink of utter
destruction. For even as by a woman, our Lady St. Mary, He saved the
human race, so by this young maiden pure and spotless He hath saved the
fairest pearl of Christendom."
"The English burnt her," says one of the merchants, writing from Bruges,
"thinking that fortune would turn in their favour, but may it please
Christ the Lord that the contrary befall them!" And so in truth it
happened. Disaster after disaster wrecked the English cause; the Duke of
Bedford died, Philip of Burgundy and Charles were reconciled and Queen
Isabella went to a dishonoured grave. The English were driven out of
Paris, and in 1453, of all the "large and ample empery" of France, won
at the cost of a hundred years of bloodshed and cruel devastation, a
little strip of land at Calais and Guines alone remained to the English
crown. Charles, who with despicable cowardice had suffered the heroic
Maid to be done to death by the English without a thought of
intervention, was moved to call for a tardy reparation of the atrocious
injustice at Rouen; and a quarter of a century after the Te Deum sung in
Notre Dame for her capture, another, a very different scene, was
witnessed in the cathedral. "The case for her rehabilitation," says Mr
Murray, "was solemnly opened there, and the mother and brothers of the
Maid came before the court to present their humble petition for a
revision of her sentence, demanding only 'the triumph of truth and
justice.' The court heard the request with some emotion. When Isabel
d'Arc threw herself at the feet of the Commissioners, showing the papal
rescript and weeping aloud, so many joined in the petition that at last,
we are told, it seemed that one great cry for justice broke from the
multitude."
The story of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite the
rigid justice and enlightened policy of Bedford's regency they failed to
win the affection of the Parisians. Rewards to political friends,
punishments and confiscations inflicted on the disaffected, the riotous
and homicidal conduct of some of the English garrison, the depression in
commerce and depreciation of property brought their inevitable
consequences--a growing hatred of the English name.[93] The chapter of
Notre Dame was compelled to sell the gold vessels from the treasury.
Hundreds of houses were abandoned by their owners, who were unable to
meet the charges upon them. In 1427 by a royal instrument the rent of
the Maison des Singes was reduced from twenty-six livres to fourteen,
"seeing the extreme diminution of rents."
[Illustration: CLOISTER OF THE BILLETES, FIFTEENTH CENTURY, RUE DE
L'HOMME ARMÉ.]
Some curious details of life in Paris under the English have come down
to us. By a royal pardon granted to Guiot d'Eguiller, we learn that he
and four other servants of the Duke of Bedford, and of our "late very
dear and very beloved aunt the Duchess of Bedford whom God pardon," were
drinking one night at ten o'clock in a tavern where hangs the sign of
_L'Homme Armé_.[94] Hot words arose between them and some other
tipplers, to wit, Friars Robert, Peter and William of the Blancs
Manteaux, who were disguised as laymen and wearing swords. Friar Robert
lost his temper and struck at the servants with his naked sword. The
friar, owing to the strength of the wine or to inexperience in the use
of secular weapons, cut off the leg of a dog instead of hitting his man;
the friars then ran away, pursued by three of the servants--Robin the
Englishman, Guiot d'Eguiller and one Guillaume. The fugitive friars took
refuge in a deserted house in the Rue du Paradis (now des Francs
Bourgeois), and threw stones at their pursuers. There was a fight,
during which Guillaume lost his stick and snatching Guiot's sword struck
at Friar Robert through the door of the house. He only gave one "_cop_,"
but it was enough, and there was an end of Friar Robert.
A certain Gilles, a _povre homme laboureur_, went to amuse himself at a
game of tennis in the hostelry kept by Guillaume Sorel, near the Porte
St. Honoré, and fell a-wrangling with Sorel's wife concerning some lost
tennis balls. Madame Sorel clutched him by the hair and tore out some
handfuls. Gilles seized her by the hood, disarranged her coif, so that
it fell about her shoulders, "and in his anger cursed God our Creator."
This came to the bishop's ears, and Gilles was cast for blasphemy into
the bishop's oven, as the episcopal prison was called, where he lay in
great misery. He was examined and released on promising to offer a wax
candle of two pounds' weight before the image of our Lady of Paris at
the entrance of the choir of Notre Dame.
Many of the religious foundations had suffered by the wars, for in 1426
the glovers of Paris were authorised to re-establish the guild of the
blessed St. Anne, founded by some good people, smiths and ironmongers,
which during the wars and mutations of the last twenty years had come to
an end. In 1427, "our well-beloved, the money-changers of the Grand Pont
in our good town of Paris were permitted to found a guild in the church
of St. Bartholomew in honour of our Creator and His very glorious Mother
and St. Matthew their patron." In 1430 was granted the humble
supplication of the shoemakers, who desired to found a confraternity to
celebrate mass in the chapel at Notre Dame, dedicated to "the blessed
and glorious martyrs, Monseigneur Crispin the Great, and Monseigneur
Crispin the Less, who in this life were shoemakers."
[Illustration: OUR LADY OF PARIS--EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY.]
The fifteen years of English rule at Paris came to a close in 1446.
In 1443 a goldsmith was at _déjeuner_ with a baker and a shoemaker, and
they fell a-talking of the state of trade, of the wars and of the
poverty of the people of Paris. The goldsmith[95] grumbled loudly and
said that his craft was the poorest of all; people must have shoes and
bread, but none could afford to employ a goldsmith. Then, thinking no
evil, he said that good times would never return in Paris until there
were a French king, the university full again, and the Parlement obeyed
as in former times. Whereupon Jean Trolet, the shoemaker, added that
things could not last in their present state, and that if there were
only five hundred men who would agree to begin a revolution, they would
soon find thousands leagued with them. The general unrest which this
incident illustrates soon burst forth in plot after plot, and on 13th
April, 1446, the Porte St. Jacques was opened by some citizens to the
Duke of Richement, Constable of France, who, with 2000 knights and
squires, entered the city and, to the cry of _Ville gagnée_! the
fleur-de-lys waved again from the ramparts of Paris. The English
garrison under Lord Willoughby fortified themselves in the Bastille of
St. Antoine but capitulated after two days. Bag and baggage, out they
marched, circled the walls as far as the Louvre, and embarked for Rouen
amid the execrations of the people. Never again did an English army
enter Paris until the allies marched in after Waterloo in 1815.