The breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there,
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration.
--FRA LIPPO LIPPI.
Not long ago I saw these lines quoted to show the blessedness of
sanctuary; quoted with a serious sentimentality which left no room for
their more startling significance. The writer drew a parallel between
the ruffian sheltered by his church and the soldier sheltered by his
flag, forgiven much wrong-doing for the sake of the standard under
which he has served and suffered. But Mr. Browning’s murderer has not
served the church. He is unforgiven, and, let us hope, eventually
hanged. In the interval, however, he poses as a hero to the children,
and as an object of lively interest to the pious and Mass-going
Florentines. A lean monk praying on the altar steps would have awakened
no sentiment in their hearts; yet even the frequency, the cheapness of
crime failed to rob it of its lustre. It was not without reason that
Plutarch preferred to write of wicked men. He had the pardonable desire
of an author to be read.
In these less vivid days we are seldom brought into such picturesque
contact with assassins. The majesty of the law is strenuously exerted
to shield them from open adulation. We have grown sensitive, too, and
prone to consider our own safety, which we call the welfare of the
public. Some of us believe that criminals are madmen, or sick men, who
should be doctored rather than punished. On the whole, our emotions are
too complex for the straightforward enjoyment with which our robust
ancestors contemplated--and often committed--deeds of violence. Murder
is to us no longer as
... a dish of tea,
And treason, bread and butter.
We have ceased to stomach such sharp condiments.
Yet something of the old glamour, the glamour with which the Serpent
beguiled Eve, still hangs about historic sins, making them--as
Plutarch knew--more attractive than historic virtues. Places
consecrated to the memory of crime have so keen an interest that
travellers search for them painstakingly, and are often both grieved
and indignant because some blood-soaked hovel has not been carefully
preserved by the ungrateful community which harboured--and hanged--the
wretch who lived in it. I met in Edinburgh a disappointed tourist,--a
woman and an American,--who had spent a long day searching vainly for
the house in which Burke and Hare committed their ghastly murders, and
for the still more hideous habitation of Major Weir and his sister.
She had wandered for hours through the most offensive slums that Great
Britain has to show; she had seen and heard and smelt everything
that was disagreeable; she had made endless inquiries, and had been
regarded as a troublesome lunatic; and all that she might look upon the
dilapidated walls, behind which had been committed evils too vile for
telling. And this in Edinburgh, the city of great and sombre tragedies,
where Mary Stuart held her court, and Montrose rode to the scaffold.
With so many dark pages in her chronicles, one has scant need to burrow
for ignoble guilt.
There are deeds, however, that have so coloured history, stained it
so redly and so imperishably, that their seal is set upon the abodes
that witnessed them, and all other associations grow dim and trivial
by comparison. The murder of a Douglas or of a Guise by his sovereign
is the apotheosis of crime, the zenith of horror. As long as the
stones of Stirling or of Blois shall hold together, that horror shall
be their dower. The walls shriek their tale. They make a splendid and
harmonious background for the tragedy that gives them life. They are
fitting guardians of their fame. It can never be sufficiently regretted
that the murder of Darnley had so mean a setting, and that the methods
employed by the murderers have left us little even of that meanness.
Some bleak fortress in the north should have sheltered a crime so long
impending, and so grimly wrought; but perhaps the paltriness of the
victim merited no better _mise en scène_. The Douglas and the Guise
were made of sterner stuff, and the world--the tourist world--pays in
its vapouring fashion a tribute to their strength. It buys pathetically
incongruous souvenirs of the “Douglas room;” and it traces every step
by which the great Duke, the head and the heart of the League, went
scornfully to his death.
Blois _has_ associations that are not murderous. It saw the solemn
consecration of the standard of Joan of Arc, and the splendid feasts
which celebrated the auspicious betrothal of Henry of Navarre to his
Valois bride. The statue of Louis the Twelfth, “Father of his people,”
sits stiffly astride of its caparisoned charger above the entrance
gate. But it is not upon Joan, nor upon Navarre, nor upon good King
Louis that the traveller wastes a thought. The ghosts that dominate
the château are those of Catherine de Medici, of her son, wanton in
wickedness, and of the murdered Guise. Castle guides are notoriously
short of speech, sparing of time, models of bored indifference. But the
guardian of Blois waxes eloquent over the tale he has to tell, and,
with the dramatic instinct of his race, strives to put its details
vividly before our eyes. He assigns to each assassin his post,
shows where the wretched young king concealed himself until the deed
was done, and points out the exact spot in the Cabinet Vieux where
the first blow was struck. “Behold the perfect tableau!” he winds
up enthusiastically, and we are forced to admit that, as a tableau,
it lacks no element of success. Mr. Henry James’s somewhat cynical
appreciation of this “perfect episode”--perfect, from the dramatist’s
point of view--recurs inevitably to our minds:--
“The picture is full of light and darkness, full of movement, full
altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is the great
theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it complete.
The insolent prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the
terrors of the author of the deed; the admirable execution of the plot;
the accumulation of horror in what followed,--render it, as a crime,
one of the classic things.”
Classic surely were the repeated warnings, so determinedly ignored.
Cæsar was not more plainly cautioned of his danger than was the Duke
of Guise. Cæsar was not more resolved to live his life fearlessly, or
to die. Cæsar was not harder to kill. It takes many a dagger stroke to
release a strong spirit from its clay.
There were dismal prophecies months ahead, advance couriers of the
slowly maturing plot. “Before the year dies, you shall die,” was the
message sent to the Duke when the States-General were summoned to
Blois. His mother, ceaselessly apprehensive, his mistress, Charlotte de
Sauves, besought him to leave the château. Nine ominous notes, crumpled
bits of paper, each written at the peril of a life, admonished him of
his fate. The ninth was thrust into his hand as he made his way for
the last time to the council chamber. “_Le ciel sombre et triste_”
frowned forebodingly upon him as he crossed the terrace, and La Salle
and D’Aubercourt strove even then to turn him back. At the foot of the
beautiful spiral staircase sat the jester, Chicot, singing softly under
his breath a final word of warning, “_Hé, j’ay Guise._” He dared no
more, and he dared that much in vain. The Duke passed him disdainfully,
and--smitten by the gods with madness--went lightly up the steps to
meet his doom.
This is the story that Blois has to tell, and she tells it with
terrible distinctness. She is so steeped in blood, so shadowed by
the memory of her crime, that there is scant need for her guides to
play their official parts, nor for her museum walls to be hung round
with feeble representations of the tragedy. But it is strange, after
all, that the beautiful home of Francis the First should not speak
to us more audibly of him. He built its right wing, “the most joyous
utterance of the French Renaissance.” He stamped his own exuberant
gayety upon every detail. His salamander curls its carven tail over
stairs and doors and window sills. He is surely a figure striking
enough, and familiar enough to enchain attention. Why do we not think
about him, and about those ladies of “mutable connections” whose names
echo buoyantly from his little page of history? Why do our minds turn
obstinately to the Cabinet Vieux, or to those still more mirthless
rooms above where Catherine de Medici lived and died. “_Il y a de
méchantes qualités qui font de grandes talents_,” but these qualities
were noticeably lacking in the Queen Mother. It is not the good she
tried and failed to do, but the evil that she wrought which gives her a
claim to our magnetized interest and regard.
To the tolerant observer it seems a work of supererogation, a gilding
of refined gold, to add to the sins of really accomplished sinners like
Catherine and Louis the Eleventh. These sombre souls have left scant
space for our riotous imaginations to fill in. Their known deeds are
terrible enough to make us quail. It might be more profitable--as it
is certainly more irksome--to search for their redeeming traits: the
tact, the mental vigour of the queen, and the efforts she made to bind
together the distracted factions of France; the courage, sagacity,
and unflinching resolution with which Louis strengthened his kingdom,
and protected those whose mean estate made them wholly uninteresting
to nobler monarchs. These things are worth consideration, but far be
it from us to consider them. High lights and heavy shadows please
us best; and by this time the shadows have been so well inked that
their blackness is impenetrable. It can never be said of Catherine
de Medici, as it is said of Mary Stuart, that she has been injured by
the zeal of her friends, and helped by the falsehoods of her enemies.
Catherine has few friends, and none whose enthusiasm is burdensome to
bear. She has furnished easily-used material for writers of romance,
who commonly represent her as depopulating France with poisoned
gloves and perfumery; and she has served as a target--too big to be
missed--for tyros in historical invective. We have come to regard her
in a large, loose, picturesque way as an embodiment of evil,--very
much, perhaps, as Mr. John Addington Symonds regards Clytemnestra,--fed
and nourished by her sins, waxing fat upon iniquity, and destitute
alike of conscience and of shame. And this is the reason that women
who have spent their lives in the practice of laborious virtues stand
fluttering with delight in that dark Medicean bedchamber. “Blois is the
most interesting of all the châteaux,” said one of them to me;--she
looked as if she could not even tell a lie;--“you see the very bed
in which Catherine de Medici died.” And I thought of the Florentine
children at the altar steps.
Mr. Andrew Lang is of the opinion that if an historical event could
be discredited, like a ghost story, by discrepancies in the evidence,
we might maintain that Darnley was never murdered at all. We might
also be led to doubt the existence of Cardinal Balue’s cage, that
ingenious torture-chamber which has added so largely and so deservedly
to the reputation of Louis the Eleventh. There is a drawing of the
cage, or rather of _a_ cage, still to be seen, and there is the bill
for its making;--what a prop to history are well-kept household
accounts!--while, on the other hand, its ubiquitous nature staggers our
trusting faith. Loches claims it as one of her traditions, and so does
Plessis-les-Tours. Loches is so rich in horrors that she can afford
to dispense with a few; but the cage, if it ever existed at all, was
undoubtedly one of the permanent decorations of her tower. The room in
which it hung is cheerful and commodious when compared to the black
prison of Saint Valier, or to the still deeper dungeon of the Bishops
of Puy and Autun. The cardinal could at least see and be seen, if that
were any amelioration of his lot, and we are still shown the turret
stairs down which the king stepped warily when he came to visit his
prisoner.
But Plessis-les-Tours covets the distinction of the cage. She is
not without some dismal memories of her own, though she looks like
a dismantled factory, and she strives with pardonable ambition to
make them dismaler. The energetic and intelligent woman who conducts
visitors around her mouldering walls has, in a splendid spirit of
assurance, selected for this purpose a small dilapidated cellar, open
to the sky, and a small dilapidated flight of steps, not more than
seven in number. Beneath these steps--where a terrier might perhaps
curl himself in comfort--she assured us with an unflinching front
the cardinal’s cage was tucked; and reading the doubt in our veiled
eyes, she stooped and pointed out a rusty bit of iron riveted in the
wall. “See,” she said triumphantly, “there still remains one of the
fastenings of the cage.” The argument was irresistible:
Behold this Walrus tooth.
The fact is that it has been found necessary to exert a great deal of
ingenuity in order to meet the popular demand for cold-blooded cruelty
where Louis the Eleventh is concerned. He is an historic bugbear, a
hobgoblin, at whose grim ghost we grown-up children like to shudder
apprehensively. Scott, with a tolerance as wide as Shakespeare’s own,
has dared to give a finer colour to the picture, has dared to engage
our sympathy for this implacable old man who knew how to “hate and
wait,” how to lie in ambush, and how to drive relentlessly to his goal.
But even Scott has been unable to subdue our cherished antipathy, or to
modify the deep prejudices instilled early into our minds. Mr. Robert
Louis Stevenson, who of all writers has least patience with schoolbook
verdicts, hits hard at our narrow fidelity to censorship. “It is
probably more instructive,” he says, “to entertain a sneaking kindness
for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral
indignation against his abstract vices.”
Now a more unpopular, a more comprehensively unlovable person than
Louis it would be hard to find. He did much for France, yet France
drew a deep breath of relief when he died.
Il n’est pas sire de son pays,
Quy de son peple n’est pas amez.
Those who fail to entertain the “sneaking kindness” recommended by Mr.
Stevenson may shelter themselves behind this ancient couplet. “Of him
there is an end. God pardon him his sins,” is Froissart’s fashion of
summing up every man’s career. It will serve as well for Louis as for
another.
But to gratify at once our prejudices and our emotions, a generous
mass of legend has been added to the chronicles of Loches, Blois,
Amboise, and other castles that are consecrated to the crimes of kings.
History, though flexible and complaisant up to a certain point, has her
limits of accommodation. She has also her cold white lights, and her
disconcerting truths, so annoying, and so invariably ill-timed in their
revelations. We can never be quite sure that History, however obliging
she seems, will not suddenly desert our rightful cause, and go over to
our opponents. We have but to remember what trouble she has given, and
in what an invidious, not to say churlish spirit she has contradicted
the most masterly historians. It is best to ignore her altogether, and
to tell our stories without any reference to her signature.
So thought the sensible young woman who led us captive through the
collegiate church at Loches, and who insisted upon our descending
into the crypt, at one time connected with the fortress by a
subterranean gallery. Its dim walls are decorated here and there with
mural paintings, rude and half effaced. She pointed out the shadowy
outline of a saint in cope and mitre, his stiff forefinger raised in
benediction. “That,” she said with startling composure, “is the bishop
who was the confessor of Louis the Eleventh. The king had him buried
alive in this chapel, so that he might not betray the secrets of his
confession.”
“And did the king have him painted on the wall afterwards, to
commemorate the circumstance?” asked the scoffer of the party, at whom
others gazed reproachfully, while I wondered how the story of Saint
John of Nepomuk had travelled so far afield, and why it had been so
absurdly reset to add another shade to Louis’s memory. It hardly seemed
worth while, in view of the legitimate darkness of the horizon. It even
seemed a pity. It forced a laugh, and laughter is inharmonious beneath
the walls of Loches. But if the king, whose piety was of a vigorous
and active order, had the habit of walling up his confessors, there
must have been some rational hesitation on the part of even the most
devoted clerics when his Majesty sought to be shriven; and the stress
of royal conscientiousness--combined with royal apprehension--must have
shortened the somewhat hazardous road to church preferment. The fact
that Louis never wasted his cruelties, that they were one and all the
fruits of deep and secret hostility, might have saved him from being
the hero of such fantastic myths.
It was more amusing to visit the picturesque old house in Tours,
known as le Maison de Tristan l’Ermite. How it came to be associated
with that melancholy and industrious hangman, who had been dead half
a century when its first stone was laid, has never been made clear;
unless, indeed, the familiar device of the festooned cord, the emblem
of Anne de Bretagne, which is carved over door and windows, may be
held responsible for the suggestion. Once christened, however, it has
become a centre of finely imaginative romance,--romance of a high
order, which for finish of detail may be recommended to the careless
purveyors of historic fiction. Passing through the heavy doorway
into a beautiful sombre courtyard, we had hardly time to admire its
proportions, and the curious little stone beasts which wanton wickedly
in dark corners, before a gaunt woman, who is the guardian spirit of
the place, summoned us to ascend an interminable flight of steps,
much worn and dimly lit. They had an ominous look, and the woman’s
air of mystery, subtly blent with resolution, was in admirable accord
with her surroundings. From time to time she paused to point out a
shallow niche which had formerly held a lamp, or a broken place in the
wall’s rough masonry. “_L’oubliette_,” she whispered grimly, pointing
to the hole which revealed--and gainsaid--nothing. There was a small
walled-up door, equally reserved, which she said was, or had been,
the opening of a secret passage connecting the house with the château
of Plessis-les-Tours, more than two miles away. The full significance
of this remark failed to dawn upon us until we had climbed up, up, up,
and emerged at last upon a narrow balcony overlooking the sad courtyard
far below, and protected by a heavy iron railing. It was a disagreeable
place, not without its suggestions of horror; yet were we in no wise
prepared for the recital that followed. From this railing, said our
guide, Tristan l’Ermite was in the habit of hanging the victims whom
Louis the Eleventh, “that great and prompt chastener,” confided to his
mercy. I could not help murmuring at the cruelty which compelled the
unfortunates to mount nearly two hundred steps to be hanged, when the
courtyard beneath offered every reasonable accommodation; but, even as
I spoke, I recognized the poverty of imagination which could prompt
such a stupid speech. Perhaps some direful memory of the _Balcon des
Conjures_ at Amboise may be held responsible for the web of fiction
which has been woven about this grim eyrie of Tours; and if the
picture lacks the magnificent setting of the Amboise tragedy, it is
by no means destitute of power. There is a certain grandeur in being
hanged from such a dizzy height.
Our guide next pointed out the opening of the mythical oubliette.
If the condemned toiled wearily up to their beetling scaffold, the
executioners were spared at least the labour of carrying their bodies
down again. After they had been picturesquely hanged under the king’s
own eye,--for we were asked to believe that Louis walked two miles
along a subterranean passage to inspect the ordinary, and by no means
infrequent, processes of justice,--the corpses were tumbled into the
oubliette, and made their own headlong way to the Loire.
One more detail was added to this interesting and deeply coloured
fable. The right-hand wall of the courtyard was studded, on a level
with the balcony, with huge rusty iron nails. There were rows upon
rows of these unlovely and apparently useless objects which tradition
had not failed to turn to good account. For every man hanged on that
spot by the indefatigable Tristan, a nail was, it seems, driven into
the wall, which thus became a sort of baker’s tally or tavern slate.
We counted forty-four nails. The woman nodded her head with serious
satisfaction. Frequent repetitions of her story had brought her almost
to the point of believing it. She had ministered so long to the tastes
of tourists--who like to think that Louis hanged his subjects as
liberally as Catherine de Medici poisoned hers--that she had gradually
moulded her narrative into symmetry, making use of every available
feature to give it consistency and grace. The fine old house--which
may have harboured tragedies of its own as sombre as any wrought by
Tristan’s hand--lent itself with true architectural sympathy to the
illusion. Some habitations can do this thing, can look to perfection
the parts assigned them by history or by tradition. Who that has ever
seen the “Jew’s House” at Lincoln can forget the peculiar horror
that broods over the dark, ill-omened doorway? The place is peopled
by ghosts. Beneath its heavy lintel pass little trembling feet. From
out the shadows comes a strangled cry. It tells its tale better
than Chaucer or the balladists; with less pity and more fear, less
detail and more suggestiveness. We shudder as we peer into its gloom,
yet we linger, magnetized by the subtlety of association. It may be
innocent,--poor, huddled mass of stone,--but we hope not. We are like
the children at the altar-foot, spellbound by the vision of a crime.