I do not know that there is much to choose between these two murders, or that we need greatly sorrow for either victim. Probably neither gentleman would be at large, had he lived in our time.
And now Henry of Monmouth was king indeed. A few months, and the Treaty of Troyes was signed, and Henry entered Paris in triumph, riding between King Charles (who whispered and muttered and knew little about the matter) and the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, son of the murdered man. To that ill-omened Palace of St. Paul they rode, and there lodged together for a while. Henry's banner bore the device of a fox's brush, "in which," says Monstrelêt, the chronicler, "the wise noted many things." Henry had long been a hunter of the fox; now he came to hunt the French. Paris, still torn and bleeding from the wounds of opposing factions, welcomed anything that looked like peace with power; justice was not looked for in those days. Yet it was in the name of Justice that the two kings, sitting side by side on the same throne, heard the solemn appeal of Philip of Burgundy and his mother for judgment upon the murderers of John the Fearless. They demanded that the soi-disant Dauphin, Duchâtel and the other assassins of the Duke, in garb of penance and torch in hand, should be dragged in tumbrils round the city, in token of their shame and their repentance. The Estates of the Realm, summoned in haste, and the University of Paris, supported the demand; the two kings agreed to it. Nothing was needed save the culprits themselves, but they were not forthcoming. Appear before King and Parliament to receive his just doom? The Dauphin thanked them! If the King of England could play the hunter, Charles of Valois could play the fox; et voilà tout! "I appeal," said the Dauphin, "to the sharp end of my sword!" Thereupon he was denounced as a treacherous assassin, to be deprived of all rights to the Crown and of all property. The confiscation extended to his followers, and to all the Armagnac party, living or dead; and the good citizens of Paris, fleeced to the bare skin, helped themselves as best they might from the possessions of the outlawed Prince and his recreant nobles.
The Palace of St. Paul saw in those days the soldier-wooing of Henry V. and his wedding to Catherine of Valois, the daughter of Charles VI.: saw, two years later, the death of Charles himself, who faded out of life some two months after his great conqueror; later still, in one of its obscure chambers, neglected and despairing, the death of Isabel of Bavaria. After that it saw little of note, for people avoided it; it was an unlucky place, haunted forever by those twin shadows of Madness and Terror. Gradually it crumbled, passed finally into the dimness of forgotten things. To-day no stone of it stands upon another.
CHAPTER III
DOMRÉMY
"Quand j'étais chez mon père, petite Jeanneton …"
"I thought this was a life of Joan of Arc!" some bewildered reader may protest. "I don't want to read a History of France!"
Patience, gentle one! the Maid and her France may not be separated.
Now, however, it is time to go back a little to the year 1412, and make our way to the village of Domrémy on the banks of the Meuse, near the border of Lorraine.
Domrémy is not an important place: it has to-day, as it had four hundred years ago, about forty or fifty houses. It lies pleasantly enough by the river side, amid green meadows; a straggling line of stone cottages, with roofs of thatch or tile; behind it rise low hills, now bare, once covered with forests of oak and beech. Its people are, as they have always been, grave and God-fearing; there is a saying about them that they "seldom die and never lie." They have always been farming people, growing corn, planting vineyards, raising cattle. In old times, as to-day, the cattle fed on the rich pastures of the river valley; the village children tended them by day, and at nightfall drove them back to the little stone-walled farms.
The houses were "small, of one or two or three rooms, and sometimes there was a low garret overhead. The furniture was simple: a few stools and benches, a table or a pair of trestles with a board to cover them, a few pots and pans of copper, and some pewter dishes. The housewife had in her chest two or three sheets for her feather-bed, two or three kerchiefs, a cloak, a piece of cloth ready to be made into whatever garment was most needed, and a few buttons and pins. Often there was a sword in the corner, or a spear or an arblast, but the peasants were peaceful, seldom waged war, and often were unable even to resist attack."6
The people of Domrémy were vassals of the lords of Bourlemont, whose castle still overlooks the Meuse valley. The relationship was a friendly one in the main. The dues were heavy, to be sure. "Twice a year a tax must be paid on each animal drawing a cart; the lord's harvest must be gathered, his hay cut and stored, firewood drawn to his house, fowls and beef and bacon furnished to his table. Those who had no carts must carry his letters."7
But this was the common lot of French peasants. In return, the lord of Bourlemont recognized certain responsibilities for them in time of trouble. His own castle was four miles distant, but in the village itself he owned a little fortress called the Castle of the Island, which the villagers guarded for him in time of peace and where they could take refuge in time of danger. Sometimes even, the Seigneur seems to have had pangs of conscience concerning his villagers, as when, in 1399, the then lord provided in his will that "if the people of Domrémy can show that they have been unjustly compelled to give him two dozen goslings, restitution shall be made."8
In one of the stone cottages (standing still, though overmuch restored) lived, early in the fifteenth century, Jacques d'Arc and Isabel his wife. Jacques was a responsible man, liked and respected by his neighbors. As dean of the village, he inspected weights and measures, commanded the watch, collected the taxes. Dame Isabel had enough learning to teach her five children their Credo, Pater and Ave, but probably little more; she spun and wove, and was doubtless a good house-mother. With four of the children we have little concern; our affair is with the fifth, a daughter born (probably) in January, 1412, and named Jeanne or Jehane. All her names are beautiful: "Jeanne la Pucelle," "the Maid of Orleans," "the Maid of France"; most familiar of all to our Anglo-Saxon ears, "Joan of Arc."
Joan was three years old when Agincourt was lost and won. It was a far cry from upper Normandy to the province of Bar where Domrémy lay; the Meuse flowed tranquilly by, but no echoes of the English war reached it at this time. Life went peacefully on; the children, as I have said, drove the cattle to the river meadows, frolicked beside the clear stream, gathering flowers, singing the immemorial songs of France; and as evening closed, drove them home again to the farm: or they tended their sheep on the Common, or followed their pigs through the oak forest that stretched behind and above it. In the forest lurked romance and adventure, possible danger. There were wolves there; no doubt about that. There were also, most people thought, fairies, both good and bad. Near the village itself stood the great beech tree known as "the Ladies' Tree," or the "Fairies' Tree," with its fountain close by, the Fountain of the Gooseberry Bushes, where people came to be healed of various diseases. Another great tree was called "Le Beau Mai," and was even more mystical. Who knows from what far Druid time came the custom of dancing around its huge trunk and hanging garlands on its gnarled boughs? They were pious garlands now, dedicated to Our Lady of Domrémy; but it was whispered that the fairies still held their revels there. The lord of Bourlemont and his lady sometimes joined the dancing; had not his ancestor loved a fairy when time was, and been loved of her? They never failed to join the rustic festival that was held under the Fairy Tree on the "Sunday in Lent called Laetere, or des Fontaines." One of Joan's godmothers said she had seen the fairies: Joan never did. She hung garlands, with the other little girls; danced with them hand in hand, singing. One would like to know the songs they sang. Was one of them the quaint ditty whose opening lines head this chapter?
"Quand j'étais chez mon père, petite Jeanneton,
La glin glon glon,
M'envôit a la fontaine pour remplir mon cruchon!"
Or was it the story of that vigneron who had a daughter whom he would give to neither poor nor rich, lon la, and whom he finally saw carried off by a cavalier of Hungary,
"La prit et l'importa,
Sur son cheval d'Hongrie, lon la!"
A warning to selfish Papas. Or did there come to Domrémy, wandering down the Meuse as the wind wanders, some of those wild, melancholy sea-songs that the Corsairs and the fishermen sang, as they sharpened their cutlasses or drew their nets in harbor?
"Il était trois mâtelots de Grois,
Embarqués sur le Saint Francois,
Tra la derida la la la!"
Olivier Basselin, of Val-de-Vire, died when Joan was six years old, but his songs are alive to-day: gay little songs, called from the place of their origin "Vaux-de-Vire," whence the modern word vaudeville. Perhaps Joan and her playmates sang his songs; I do not know.
In later, sadder years, Joan's enemies made, as we shall see, all that could be made out of these simple woodland frolics. "Le Beau Mai," which in spring was "fair as lily flowers, the leaves and branches sweeping the ground"9 became a tree of doom, a gathering-place of witches, of worse than witches. Joan herself, hanging her pretty garlands to the Virgin, as sweet a child-figure as lives in history, became a dark sorceress, ringed with flame, summoning to her aid the fiends of the pit. We need not yet turn that page; we may see her as her neighbors saw her, a grave, brown-eyed child, beloved by old and young: industrious, as all her people were; guiding the plough, watching the sheep or cattle, gathering flowers, acorns, fagots: or indoors, spinning, sewing, learning all household work under her mother's guidance. She loved to go to church, and hastened thither when the bell rang for mass; preferring it to dance or play.
"There was not a better girl," the neighbors said, "in the two villages (Domrémy and Greux). For the love of God she gave alms; and if she had money would have given it to the curé for masses to be said."
The village beadle being a trifle lax in his ways, she would bribe him with little presents to ring the church bell punctually. The children did not always understand her, would laugh sometimes when she left the games and went to kneel in the little gray church; but the sick and the poor understood her well enough. She loved nursing, and had a light hand with the sick; they never forgot her care of them; it was her way, if any poor homeless body came wandering by (there were many such in France then, almost as many as to-day) to give up her bed to the vagrant and sleep on the hearth all night.
Joan was eight years old when the Treaty of Troyes was signed, by which France virtually passed into the hands of England. Not long after, the miseries of war invaded the quiet valley of the Meuse; Burgundian and Armagnac began to burn, harry and slay here as they had long been doing elsewhere. The latter were headed by Stephen de Vignolles, better known as La Hire, a man as brave as he was brutal, and with a spark of humor which lights his name yet on the clouded page of the time. It is told how one day, starting out to relieve Montargis, besieged by the English, he met a priest on the way, and thinking it might be well to add spiritual armor to "helm and hauberk's twisted mail," demanded absolution. The priest demurred; confession must come first. "I have no time for that!" said La Hire, "I'm in a hurry; I have done in the way of sins all that men of war are in the habit of doing." "Whereupon," says the chronicler, "the chaplain gave him absolution for what it was worth, and the knight, putting his hands together, prayed thus, 'God, I pray thee to do for La Hire this day as much as thou wouldest have La Hire do for thee if he were God and thou La Hire!'"
Similar stories are told of many men in many lands; this may be as true as the rest of them.
La Hire's valiant doings by the side of Joan and Dunois at Orleans and elsewhere, are on the credit side of his book of life; but in the years following 1420, he and his like wrought dreadful havoc in the valley of the Meuse. They pretended to seek redress for hostile acts; in reality, they wanted blood and plunder, and took both without stint. They drove off the cattle and burned the crops; this was the least of it. "These men," wrote Juvenal des Ursins, "under pretence of blackmail and so forth, seized men, women, and little children, regardless of age and sex; violated women and girls; killed husbands and fathers before their wives and daughters; carried off nurses, and left their children to die of hunger; seized priests and monks, put them to the torture, and beat them until they were maimed or driven mad. Some they roasted, dashed out the teeth of others, and others they beat with great clubs. God knows what cruelty they wrought."
Jacques d'Arc and another man of means (as means went in Domrémy!) hired the Castle of the Island from the lady of Bourlemont, at a considerable rent, for the safekeeping of their families and their flocks and herds in case of attack. A year or two later, the men of Domrémy bound themselves to pay a hearth-tax to the lord of Commercy, a highborn ruffian of the neighborhood, so long as he abstained from burning and pillaging their homes. The bond declares itself to be given "with good will, and without any force, constraint, or guile whatsoever." No need for an Artemas Ward to add, "This is rote sarkasticul!" The villagers knew well enough that if the blackmail were not paid, houses, church and all would go up in smoke and flame.
Joan, as she herself says, "helped well to drive the cattle and sheep to the Island," when news came of raiders prowling up or down the valley. Burgundian or Armagnac, it mattered little which; neither boded any good to the village. The Castle itself was uninhabited: its blank windows looked down on a garden, with great poplar trees here and there, and neglected flower-beds, once the delight of the Lady and her children. Bees hummed in the lilies, birds flitted from branch to branch, caring nothing for Burgundian or Armagnac; all was peace and tranquillity. Here the dreamy child wandered, looking up at the silent walls, seeing in thought, it may be, shadowy figures of knight and lady gazing down on her, the child of France who was to be her country's saviour.
Doubtless she watched the boys playing at siege and battle in and around the little fortress: for aught we know, she may have joined their play, and so learned her first lessons in arms. In any case, tales of blood and rapine must have been daily in her ears; emphasized about this time by news of the death of a cousin, "struck by a ball or stone from a gun."
Other tales were doubtless in her ears. Among the wanderers who sat by the kindly fireside of Jacques d'Arc would be mendicant friars, Franciscan or Cordelier, making their way from door to door, from village to village, giving in return for food and shelter what they had to give: a blessing for the hospitable house, a prayer for its inmates, and news of the countryside. The last raid discussed, the next prognosticated, the general state of country and world deplored, there might be talk of things spiritual. The d'Arc family would naturally tell of their patron St. Rémy, who, watching over the holy city of Rheims, was so kind as to extend his protection over Domrémy. What a learned, what a wonderful man! how bold in his admonition to King Clovis at the latter's baptism! "Bow thy head meekly, O Sicambrian! adore what thou hast burnt, and burn what thou hast adored!" Yes! yes! brave words!
Then the guest might ask, was not this the country of the Oak Wood, "le Bois Chesnu?" Had they heard the prophecy that a Maid should be born in the neighborhood, who should do great deeds? Yes, truly, there was such a prophecy. It was made by Merlin the Wise. In Latin he made it; Nemus Canutum, the place; surely an oak wood, on the borders of Lorraine. That was long and long ago, and had been well-nigh forgotten; but a generation ago only – surely they had heard this? – a holy woman, Marie of Avignon, had made her way to his sacred Majesty, then suffering cruelly under the dispensations of God and also under that wicked Queen Isabeau, on whom might his sufferings be avenged, amen! made her way to him, and told of a dream she had dreamed, a terrible dream, full of clashing of swords. She saw shining armor, and cried out, alas! she could not use it! but a voice said that it was for a Maid who should restore France. Yes, indeed, that would be a fine thing, if our fair country, ruined by a woman, should be restored by a woman from the marches of Lorraine. Pax vobiscum!
These things, and others like them, no doubt Joan heard, sitting quietly by with her sewing or knitting while the elders talked. These things by and by were to be a sword in her hand, and – later still – a torch in the hands of her enemies.
CHAPTER IV
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,"10 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."11
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!'"12
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.13 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."14 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.