Church do not sanction, “fools,” the latter particularly when they are
members also of the clerical profession; yet the jester does not lack
a protector among the Saints. The Church, indeed, has been, if one may
say so without being impertinent, a little inconsistent towards the
professional merrymen, when it is recollected, that in the roll of
Saints there are two who especially favour fools. One is St. Mathurin,
who was always invoked by them in sickness. He was a very good man,
who lived at Montargis, in the fourth century, and who condescended
to be the physician of all professional jesters, till the vocation
became extinct. The other, and more especially patron-saint, was St.
Julian; but which of the half-dozen of solemn and shadowy men who bear
that name on the calendar, I am unable to say. Probably it was the
Julian who, in the seventh century, was Archbishop of Toledo. This
prelate not only lived at the court of King Wemba, but he talked him
into abdicating the crown, and assuming the cowl. There was no other
but a fool who could have had such liberty of speech, or was likely to
have used it so effectually,--and from this circumstance is, perhaps,
derived the alleged fact of St. Julian’s patronage of the professors of
folly.
Whatever the Saint may have thought of the community, it is very clear
that the Church did not regard its members with so much complacency as
certain individual priests, who loved to have a “fun-maker” in their
household. I suppose the liking and the practices to which it led were
abused, or solemn councils would hardly have issued stern prohibitions,
by which prelates were forbidden to retain the professional fool. The
prohibition was referred to during many centuries, and we are told that
Antony Sanderus, as late as 1624, reproached the clergy of his time
with their love for buffoons, and for young ladies whose wit might be
heavier, but whose principles were lighter than any ever professed
beneath the party-coloured gabardine.
There was a time when _some_ church corporations peculiarly honoured
the votary of St. Julian. At Tournay, for instance, at the annual
procession of the Holy Sacrament, the pompous line of march was opened
by the official _fou de la ville_, who was paid by the municipality.
When we read that his dress, acts, and words were all of the most
extravagant description, we are surprised to learn that the office
was sometimes filled by a wealthy banker of the city. At _that_ time
perhaps bankers were more fools than knaves.
A reminiscence of this custom was exhibited in Belgium as late as 1834,
at the musical contest in Brussels, when several troops of musicians
from various provinces entered the city, with their especial “fou” at
the head of every company.
Among the Popes, there was none who so liberally patronized jesters as
Leo X. It has been said of this prelate that a witty fool had always
a much better chance of obtaining an audience of him than a grave
philosopher. Jovius and Guicciardini agree in the fact of the papal
predilection for fellows who could afford him mirth, not merely by
their light learning, but by their gross and heavy appetites. The same
writers especially allude to the favour which Leo extended to buffoons,
and to those so-called arch-poets who played the fool and miserably
degraded themselves for the sake of a half-gnawed bone and a handful
of ducats. The most famous, yet not the grossest of these mirthmakers,
was Querno, a Neapolitan by birth, with a diminutive figure, a huge
appetite, and an unquenchable thirst. The mock ovation of this
arch-poet, his march to the Capitol, crowned with a wreath of vine,
carrot, and cabbage-leaves, and mounted on an elephant, is a well-known
incident, as is also his bandying of indifferent Latin verses,
improvised for the nonce, with Leo himself. This buffoon, although by
no means devoid of mental endowments, was content to stand by at papal
banquets, and amuse the godly company by the greedy avidity with which
he swallowed the fragments and half-consumed dishes despatched to him
from the pontiff’s table. If Querno was a buffoon, he was at least that
sort of fool to perform whose part efficiently requires a certain sort
of wit. But Leo had other jesters who had no merit but the sorry one of
being disagreeable fools. Of these we may judge by what is said of two
of them, a greedy, insatiable fellow named Martinus, and a mendicant
brother called Marianus. They certainly were wonderful buffoons in
their way, for one could take a pigeon, roasted or stewed, compress it
into a species of gigantic bolus, and swallow it whole, at one gulp.
The other made no difficulty of devouring forty eggs at a meal, and
indeed on high festive days, wondering and applauding guests saw him
deliberately devour a score of capons!
Of the extravagance of Leo’s table, his successor, Adrian VI., was
heartily ashamed, having a sort of disgust for a pontiff who, in the
company of buffoons like Querno, Gazoldo, Britonio, and Baraballo,
could eat himself into an indigestion, or see others do so, on costly
dishes of peacock-sausages. But in this case we have an instance of
that easy compounding for one’s own sins by denouncing those of our
neighbours. Adrian did not care for costly dishes or jesters; but his
appetite was under less control than that of Leo, if it be true, as
Jovius says of him, that the Flemish pontiff drank himself into chronic
disease on strong beer. “Contrahisse morbum assiduum cerevisiæ potu.”
According to some writers, it was the fool Baraballo, and not Querno,
who was processionally conducted in mock pomp through the streets of
Rome, to be crowned in the Capitol. The absurd verses of this jester
procured for him this doubtful honour; but when he uttered dull jokes
in bad measure, Leo would order him to be bastinadoed,--and to such
depth could one of the most intellectual of pontiffs stoop to find
relaxation from heavy duties and oblivion of as heavy responsibilities.
But he might cite as example and excuse the Pontiff Paul II., who from
1458 to 1464 found exquisite delight in the poor jests of his official
fools. But Paul was at least more orthodox than Leo, and in that
distinction there is a world of difference.
Both these pontiffs differed from Benedict XIV., who was Pope from
1740 to 1758. Benedict loved a joke, but he loved to make it himself,
and he might therefore be set down among those potentates who have
been their own fools. When he was yet but Consistorial Advocate--a
sufficiently grave and responsible dignitary--the spirit of fun so
strongly influenced him, that at carnival-time he would issue into the
thronged streets in the burlesqued costume of a doctor of divinity,
and, mounting on a stool, would hold forth to the other gay masquers,
denouncing their sins so pleasantly that their only regret was, that
they were not fathoms deeper in iniquity, that they might laugh the
more at the comic recapitulation of their offences. When Benedict
became Pope, he endeavoured to suppress the carnival orgies; but the
popular voice expressed itself so menacingly that he was content to
leave others to enjoy what he could no longer participate in himself.
He then confined himself to playing tricks on the Cardinals. His chief
butt was Cardinal Passionei, a patient, orthodox man, who equally hated
heresy and the Jesuits. The papal jokes were practical; as when the
Pope, hearing that his Eminence had ordered a chest of books to be sent
to him, contrived that a chest should reach him full of the most famous
heretical and condemned volumes. The papal enjoyment here consisted in
beholding the horror of the Cardinal on opening the case, and in seeing
the delicate disgust with which he seized each work with a pair of
tongs, and tossed it into the fire.
The spiritual prince-electors followed the fashion, and retained fools
who seem to have been pretty plainly spoken. Thus, when the Elector
Brendal of Mayence asked his jester what he thought of the newly-gilded
chancel of the cathedral, Sir Motley replied, “I think it is very
like the golden goblet in which the Hessians drink sour beer. Your
newly-gilded chancel will be filled by dirty thieves of monks.”
Far bolder, however, was the reply of the electoral buffoon, Witzel,
to Wolfgang, another Elector of Mayence, who asked him of what
gender the word _Mater_ was. “Well,” answered the fool, “mine is
_generis feminini_; but your Electoral Highness’s _mater_ is _generis
communis_.” The fools of the Mayence Electors, it may be added, were
not all remarkable only for wit; one at least, Pastore, fool to Albert
of Mayence, was a kindly and brave-hearted man. When he knew there was
a design on foot to make away with a Reforming preacher named Winkel,
who, in 1527, had been summoned to Mayence to render account of his
stewardship, Pastore aided him to escape. Poor Winkel was ultimately
murdered; but the good deed of Pastore was not forgotten by the
Reformers in their indignation against the more wicked agents of his
unscrupulous master.
The electors of Cologne kept so princely a court that the uniform
of the jesters rubbed against that of the body-guard. Such samples,
however, as I can find of their wit do not say much for their humour or
delicacy. That wit appears to have been exercised chiefly against their
ghostly masters’ vices, and in this respect they had no sinecure. Or
it was exhibited in rather uncleanly practical jokes, or as uncleanly
repartees, and a record of the fact may well take place of a sample
from the measure.
In treating of the jesters of foreign countries, there is some
difficulty in conveying a fair idea of their wit, as by mere
translation the point is ordinarily lost. The jests of Crafulla, a
clever buffoon, yet not an official fool, who was constantly in the
society of the Cardinal de’ Medici, are exactly in this condition. It
is not much better with Barciacca, the house fool of Cardinal Ippolito
de’ Medici. Such wit as he had will not bear, and is hardly worthy,
translation; while his practical jokes are really not worth narrating.
One can only wonder how any of the Medici, refined and learned men,
could laugh at such sorry amusement. Barciacca once compared himself
with the Cardinal, on the ground that he daily fed as many as his
Eminence; and when the latter expressed doubt of the fact, the fool
stripped himself to the drawers, to exhibit the marks of the thousands
that began feeding on him as soon as he lay down to sleep in the bed
assigned him in the Cardinal’s palace. Ippolito laughed at this till he
nearly lost breath. The joke only shows that the _palazzo Cardinale_
was not of the cleanest, and that in point of humour his Eminence was
easily pleased.
Again, if we look to the fools of Cardinals in England, we shall not
find them particularly distinguished for happiness of wit. The best
thing uttered by Cardinal Wolsey’s jester, Saxton, was his wish that
Wolsey might become Pope. “For you see,” said he, “Peter’s father being
a fisherman, he ordered all men to eat fish in Lent, for the sake of
his father’s trade; now, your Eminence’s father having been a butcher,
we should hope, for a similar reason, to be ordered to eat meat all
the year round.” This is at least as good as anything that is told of
foreign fools in the palaces of Cardinals; and I may add, that Wolsey’s
fool was prophet also, if we may credit the story in which we are told,
that, once, as the Cardinal was contemplating the design for a tomb
intended for himself, the fool remarked, “The tomb is well enough, but
your Eminence’s bones will never lie in it,” which proved to be true.
Cardinal Richelieu possessed a better taste in jesters than Wolsey. His
buffoons were men of wit and learning, and the latter were admirably
combined in the Abbé de Boisrobert, who brought to the Cardinal his
daily dish of city scandal, amused him by his imitations of the
peculiarities of Richelieu’s friends, wrote half his tragedies for him,
knew more of the drama than of divinity, was so constantly present at
the theatre that it came to be called the “Cathedral of Boisrobert,”
and finally, who founded the French Academy. The Abbé was no ordinary
fool, but an incomparable wit; and when he was out of favour with
Richelieu, and the latter was ill, his physician wrote the simple but
indispensable prescription, “Recipe Boisrobert!”
If Cardinals had their jesters, we must not be surprised to find them
in episcopal houses. In Germany, in the 16th and 17th centuries,
some of them exhibited the usual bent of the class for practical
joking; some were famous for their feats of strength; others for their
blasphemy; one or two were remarkable for their simplicity; but none of
them can be said to have been distinguished for wit. I have already
mentioned Klaus Narr in a ducal household; he was subsequently jester
to Ernst, Archbishop of Magdeburg. In this service, if he did nothing
else, he at least gave rise to a proverbial saying. He had covered the
floor of the Archbishop’s room with feathers from a bed which he had
ripped open. The prelate, on entering the apartment, angrily inquired
who had done this; and as, at the moment, the Archbishop’s dog Lepsch,
which had been in the chamber the whole time of Klaus Narr’s freak,
rose from his couchant position, and opened his mouth, Klaus called
to him angrily, “Lepsch, boy, don’t let out the secret!” The prelate
laughed; and the expression became a proverb, to be applied in cases
where silence was recommended.
The Bishop of Bamberg was less choice in his fool than his brother
of Magdeburg. He kept a jester whose chief wit consisted in passing
himself off as the brother of our Saviour. This poor wretch prattled
incessantly of incidents in the household of his supposed family,
and drew laughter from his reverend master by chatting with fearful
familiarity of the events of a life, death, and resurrection which no
Christian can ever think of without emotions of sympathy, love, and
gratitude. This sorry fool, once seeing his godly patron treating with
immense demonstration of friendship a deputation of Nurembergers whom
he intended to fleece, imprison, and hang, the jester exclaimed, “Ay,
ay! I remember how my good brother Jesus was superbly treated when he
entered Jerusalem in triumph; but those rascally Jews plundered and
executed him nevertheless!” The blasphemy certainly served the purpose
of putting the Nurembergers on their guard; and the Bishop was only
annoyed at it because it frustrated a cherished purpose.
The bad taste of the Bamberg bishops with respect to their jesters,
is illustrated in another diocesan, who lived in part of the 16th and
beginning of the 17th centuries. This exemplary divine maintained a
coarse, strong, active, semi-savage peasant, who amused the episcopal
court and guests by going about on all-fours, and often with a dwarf
on his back, like a young knight on a huge steed. The fun consisted in
the steed trying to unhorse the cavalier. Sometimes this huge fellow
would leap on to the table without upsetting a goblet; at other times
he was baited in the Bishop’s dining-room by dogs, and they generally
had the worst of it. Springing at them in his wild attire, and uttering
unearthly howls, he would pull down with his teeth even the fiercest
bull-dogs, and so terribly maul them that they would not try a second
attack. As for dogs of less ferocious breed, they flew at once from
his terrific bellowing, seldom waiting to try the effect of his teeth.
The agility of this savage was equal to his strength, and he would
run along the uppermost parapet of the episcopal palace, and throw
somersaults upon it as carelessly as if he had been on the ground, to
the wild delight of the Bambergers, who were not very superior in moral
qualities to the people of Munster. The latter had more regard for
the fool of their Bishop than the fool had for them. One morning, the
prelate’s jester was seen in a field belonging to his master, sowing
pebbles. “It would be more profitable,” remarked a spectator, “if you
could sow seed that should bring a crop of honest men.” “Ah,” answered
the joker, “that’s a crop that the land of Munster is of too bad a
quality to produce.”
Julius, Bishop of Wurtzburg, had as witty a fool as his brother of
Munster. This jester was very much petted; but like spoiled favourites,
he sometimes offended grievously by his impertinence, and the Bishop
once ordered him to prison. While the gaoler was strewing some straw on
the ground of the cell for the condemned jester to lie upon, the latter
slipped out, locked the keeper in, and carried the key to the Bishop,
with the remark that it was “all right.” “All right?” exclaimed the
prelate. “It is all wrong, since you are not in prison, sirrah, and the
gaoler is.” “There may be some mistake,” answered the joker; “but I can
hardly think so. You ordered a fool to prison, and I am sure you will
find one there, if you will only look for him.”
The prelates who kept fools about their hearth, had not unfrequently
a taste of their office which was more likely to excite anger than
merriment. These prelates occasionally even slept with their jesters.
The former could not have been much given to meditation, since they
depended on the latter to laugh them into sleep, or to solace them by
merriment when they were wakeful. One of the princely Archbishops of
Cologne followed this very indifferent fashion.
Were not my space becoming so limited, I might here fittingly notice
those “Festivals of Fools” in which whole cities once took part, and of
which the church was the principal scene. I allude especially to those
_Fêtes des Fous_, Saturnalia established or continued to conciliate
semi-converted pagans, and which were not entirely abolished till the
end of the sixteenth century. This subject, however, would require a
volume, and in some countries has had _volumes_ devoted to it. The
chief characteristic of a _Fête des Fous_ was, insult to the Church,
and it is astonishing that a powerful Church bore with the nuisance
for so long a period. A boy was, generally at the Epiphany, elected
as Bishop, mounted on an ass, and escorted to church, where the
people would interrupt the priest at his office, by unseemly songs,
jeers, and profane and filthy conversation. Some would play at dice
upon the altar, while others would feign to denounce them, or pretend
to assist the priest, by mock exhortations or obscene lectures. The
procession of fools, on leaving the church, greeted the open-mouthed
starers by flinging bran in their faces, as they passed; and amused
others by jumping over brooms, and chanting so-called hymns,--that
were not for edification. This abomination lasted so long that many
conservatively-minded persons saw a mystery in it, and when the church
authorities aided the secular government to suppress the iniquity,
there were not wanting individuals who maintained that this festival
of fools was as pleasing to God, as the holiest festival of the year!
Among these objectors to the suppression of this custom, were many
clerics, who either enjoyed the uproarious holiday or made profit by
being actors on the occasion.
In connection with jests and jesters near the Church, I could not well
avoid mentioning this festival, where the buffoons exceeded any license
assumed by official fools in royal and imperial courts. There are,
however, so many well-known works or essays devoted to this matter,
that I gladly leave the subject, trusting that if there be a reader
who has gone with me thus far, he will accompany me through one more
chapter before we finally part.
PRINCES WHO HAVE BEEN THEIR OWN FOOLS.
Although I have made almost an encyclopædia of notes touching exalted
personages who, since the decline or the suppression of official fools,
have shown a disposition to perform the office on their own account,
neither my space nor my sympathy for the persevering reader who has
thus far accompanied me, will admit of my placing a hundredth part
of them before the public. A few instances, however, I will at once
proceed to give, only premising, that it was lucky for a people when
the Prince, in playing the Fool, enacted his part without inflicting
anything very detrimental upon his subjects. Among those whose follies
may be said to have been comparatively harmless, is to be reckoned that
Prince who was called the Fool of his Health, namely, Ferdinand II.,
Grand Duke of Tuscany, who died in 1670, and was remarkable for the
anxiety with which he attended to his health. “I have frequently seen
him,” says the Abbé Arnauld, “pacing up and down his chamber between
two large thermometers, upon which he would keep his eyes constantly
fixed, unceasingly employed in taking off and putting on a variety of
skull-caps of different degrees of warmth, of which he had always five
or six in his hand, according to the degree of heat or cold registered
by the instruments. This, I can assure you, was a mighty pleasant
sight to behold, for there was not a conjuror in all his dominions
more dexterous in handling his cups and balls than was this prince in
shifting his caps.”
If this was silly, it at least was in better taste than characterized
the proceeding of the Princess of the Asturias, at Madrid, when
Saint-Simon took ceremonious leave of her before he returned to
France, in 1722. In full court, and to all his formal compliments and
speeches, her Royal Highness only replied by a loud rattling noise in
the trachea, which she repeated as he concluded each of his addresses
to her. The poor Duke was stupefied, but the court was in fits of
laughter, and hilariously admired the jest.
The great Condé furnishes us with another example of this class of
fools. A village schoolmaster once came to him with an address. As the
speaker bowed low, on commencing his speech, Condé, quick as thought,
vaulted over his back. With equal rapidity, the orator turned and
continued his speech, but Condé’s folly was uppermost, and laying
a light hand upon the pedagogue’s shoulder, over he bounded again,
lightly as an equestrian in a “daring act” of the harmless arena. The
baffled speaker then gave up the attempt, and left the princely fool to
the enjoyment of the recollection of his folly.
The father of the last Duke of Mantua, Charles III., was another of
those illustrious personages who preferred being his own fool, and
after a singular fashion too. He loved to go abroad in the dirtiest
of disguises, and accompanied by an escort of equally ill clad
bullies for his defence. It was his sport to assail all he met in the
coarsest terms, and when some persons thus assaulted, more impatient
than others, fell upon him in return, with tongue or cudgel, he would
laugh till he was sore, and then his escort came to the rescue. On
other occasions, he would enter the shops of vendors of very breakable
materials, and taking up mirrors or drinking glass, or any other
fragile matter that came to hand, he would let it fall to the ground,
and find double provocation to laughter in the ruin he had committed
and in the expressions of unrestrained abuse which were showered on him
in consequence.
Something of madness must have lurked under this; but in the next
buffoon we shall only see a development of natural disposition.
The dexterity of a quack doctor at a fair made of Peter the Great his
own fool, when the humour took him to play the character. The Czar had
seen the fellow, on a platform, skilfully pushing out teeth with the
end of a ladle, or picking them out with the point of a dagger. Peter
paid for instruction in the art, and forthwith began to practise it
on his courtiers, whose teeth were never safe within their lips. It
happened on one occasion that a Russian officer had exposed himself
to the Czar’s wrath, by being absent from a post at which Peter had
especially placed him. It was necessary that the offender should meet
his enraged sovereign, and his friends gave him up for lost, when
he entered the audience chamber. But the officer, as he crossed the
threshold, pulled out his handkerchief, pressed it to his cheek, and
advanced towards the Czar with a growl of agony. Peter, delighted at
the prospect of a patient, pushed him into a chair; the officer opened
wide his jaws, and the Czar tugged at his gums with a fury that made
the sufferer roar as if he had been under the knout, but which was
attended by the extraction of two useful and stupendous grinders. Peter
looked at the teeth, and then at his patient, whose lips were still
open with pain and discoloured by blood. The Imperial surgeon laughed
and danced with delight; but looking in the face of the officer, his
own darkened with rage, on recognizing the offender. The latter,
shuddering at the look, sank back in his chair and opened his jaws
wider, indicative of another offering from the same source. What could
the amateur dentist do? He laughed louder, danced more wildly with
ecstasy, pulled out another tooth, and dismissed the crafty but clever
patient, with full pardon.