LOUIS XI. AT PARIS--THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING
Six centuries have failed to efface from the memory of the French people
the misery and devastation wrought by the hundred years' wars, as
travellers in rural France will know. Paris saw little of Charles who,
after the temporary activity excited by the expulsion of the English,
had sunk into his habitual torpor, and his 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. The "Universal
Spider," as the Duke of Burgundy called Louis, was ever on the move
about France, riding on his mule from dawn to eve. "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!" 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.
It is not within our province to describe in detail 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 at first were sullen and would not
be wooed, for they remembered his refusal to accord them some privileges
granted to other cities. The university declined to arm her scholars,
Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle, vagabond _clercs_ of the
Palais and the Cité 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 chose
six members from the Burgesses, six from the Parlement and six from the
university, to form his Council. With daring confidence, he 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.
The king refused to occupy the palace of the Louvre and chose to dwell
in the new Hôtel 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.
The institution of the mid-day Angelus, in 1472, was due to Louis'
devotion to the Virgin. He ordained that the great bell of Notre Dame
should be rung at noon as a signal that the good people of Paris should
recite the Ave Maria. When in Paris scarcely a day passed without the
king being seen at mass, and at leaving he always gave an offering.
In 1475, Louis' old enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, was seeking an alliance
with Edward IV. of England, and once more a mighty army entered France
to reassert the claims of the English kings to the French crown. Louis,
by his usual policy of flattery and bribery, succeeded in leading Edward
to negotiate. If he had had to meet in the flesh the lion rampant on the
English king's escutcheon, he could not have taken ampler precautions. A
bridge was built over the Somme, near Amiens, "and in the middle thereof
was a strong trellis of wood such as is made for cages of lions, and the
holes between the bars were no larger than a man could put his arm
through." On either side of this cage the monarchs and a score of
courtiers met and conversed. Louis had divided his enemies; each in turn
was cajoled and bribed, and the "Hucksters' Peace" was concluded.
[Illustration: PORCH OF ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS]
"When King Louis," says De Comines, "retired from the interview 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 predecessor 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." De Comines was informed next
day by some English that the peace had been made by the Holy Ghost, for
a white dove was seen resting on the king of England's tent during the
interview, and for no noise soever would she move; "but," said a
sceptical Gascon gentleman, "it simply happened to have rained during
the day, and the dove settled on the tent which was highest to dry her
wings in the sun."
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 Grève his
head rolled from his body, 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, commanded his jailer not to let him budge from his
cage except to be tortured (_gehenné_) 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.
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,[96] 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. The great provinces of Burgundy, of Anjou, of Maine,
Provence, Alençon and Guienne soon fell under the sovereignty of France,
whose boundaries now touched the Alps. But in the very culmination of
his success Louis 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.
When at last the king took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier,
told him that most surely his hour was come. Louis made his confession,
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, Schöffer, 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
Schöffer 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 Vérard, Du Pré, 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 Angoulême,
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 Hôtel Dieu
in Paris. So great was the re-action 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.