Part 11

They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable, and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his hands.

It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light, just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones, and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one man mounting guard upon the parapet.

Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round, certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate, little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning light, and cried out, “_Ville gagnée!_” Never was there an odder capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.

That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable, he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again--Notre-Dame--and, leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.

It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.

The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street, shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille, having saved his command. There he awaited terms.

The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once; put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies, strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master, the French king, Charles--a decree of general amnesty--and all the Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the 15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city wall.

As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late government, to whom they called out, “_Ah, the fox! The fox!_” But he grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.

LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD

(_January 5, 1477_)

In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen years younger or fifteen years older--he would have looked the same. He was simply dressed--it was winter--in warm grey clothes, and though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands. His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to himself.

One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.

It was the king--Louis XI.

To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely, stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks, was further stored the whole business of the realm.

In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges. In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.

It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in the same fashion to gold.

But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This, the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them--some quite unconsciously, none quite consciously--the agents of a great purpose, had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.

All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man--Charles the Bold--ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State, breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France halved.

This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning, tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail, patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle, square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a charge.

The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital, destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.

* * * * *

As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame, muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.

* * * * *

In the first light of a very cold morning the king rode out with half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the poorer sort. He was in grey, as always--a thick, coarse cloth--and on his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.

He rode out over the drawbridge toward Tours, in the bitterly cold mist as the day broadened. One hundred yards and more behind came the archers and the drivers of the wagons; for he had begun a journey.

The king and his little group of attendants halted for twenty minutes in the town for Mass. As he came out of Mass, he turned to the first poor inn of the market square, and ate the first short meal of the day, while the innkeeper and the serving-maid watched him in terror, and the passers-by in the streets huddled in corners, catching glimpses of him through the thick, small panes of the window.

And all during that meal he talked, and talked incessantly, to his companions, upon every point of his policy: upon the place they should visit, upon the chances of meeting the messenger whom he expected--upon all things.

They took the road again like a little company of poor pilgrims; they followed up the Loire.

They came at last to a place where the road, damp with melting snow but now lit by a pale morning sun, passed through a deep wood along the river bank, and there stood a hut which the foresters used. It was the appointed spot. The king halted, dismounted, and entered with but one companion. The rest stood without.

They had not long to wait. Another small group approached from the west, but these were splashed with mud, broken with fatigue, their fine horses hardly carrying them, and stumbling as they went. One of them was half in armour, and seemed to be their chief. He scrambled down stiffly from his beast, almost falling as he did so, entered the hut, and knelt before the king.

The king raised him, but before he could tell his great news Louis deluged him with yet another river of talk. How were the ways? What had he met? Had he passed through Bar, or had he come round north through Argonne? Had he heard what the common people were saying in either place?

Twice the newcomer attempted to tell his news, and twice he was swamped again by that ceaseless flood of clipped, tumbling words. At last he had his moment, and he took it to tell in three phrases the enormous thing which he had carried in silence through that night and through four desperate marches before.

Charles the Bold was dead. Nancy was relieved. Lorraine was master of his own again. The imagined new State was in ruins. Louis took up the ceaseless chatter again, patting the hand of his messenger as he did so, and smiling a thin but contented smile.

His work was accomplished. His great scheme was fulfilled, and yet such a moment led him to nothing more solemn than an endless cataract of words--save for one moment, when he fell again upon his knees on the earth floor of that hut and prayed as fervently as though he had been alone. He rose again to question and requestion, and to make his comments. He was exhausted before he was silent.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, far off in Lorraine, the battle had been brought to its conclusion, and the great Duke was dead.

It was upon Sunday, the 5th of January 1477, that René of Lorraine, coming out from his Mass in the Abbey Church of St. Nicholas, had ordered his armies--some few of the lords of the Barrois, some few more from the Charolais, some from the Jura were there; but the great mass of his rank and file were a hubbub of German talk from the Alsatian towns and from the Swiss mountains--ten thousand of them.

They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away, and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender, Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles.

It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles away, the spires of Nancy.

From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the Burgundians.

But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one. They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge.

Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no troops will stand--the sound of attack behind their line.

It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where none thought soldiers to be--far off and behind them to their right, from the woodside.

It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob, and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter.

Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford.

Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them of his nobility, but it could not stand--it was forced back in the general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.

A mile from the city gate there ran a brook, the brook of St. John. There, in the hurly-burly, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, parried right and left desperately, his lords about him, and in their midst were the enemy, ahorse and afoot, the long halberds of the Swiss, thrusting pikes, and the swing of swords.

None knew the great Duke Charles in such a confusion. They saw his rich armour, but they had no other sign; for the golden lion of Burgundy upon his helm had fallen even before the battle, and he himself, as he saw the crest tumble on his saddle bow, all those hours before, had muttered: “An omen--_signum dei_!”

So that man, unknown to the enemy, fought hard with his visor down. A thrust took him in the left thigh, another in the back. As he reeled he cried “Bourgoyne!” but one Claude, the Lord of Bauzemont, who was fighting there for Lorraine, hearing that cry, thrust a lance at him, not knowing whom he struck. The helm and its visor shattered. The face of the great Duke was gashed from ear to chin, and he went down. None knew who had so fallen, for all the nobles about him also were destroyed. And that was the end of Charles the Bold.

* * * * *

The press of the conquerors rushed up to the city gate, the Gate of St. Nicholas. The starving people ran to cheer, the garrison let down the bridge beyond the town, the last remnants of Charles’s force were massacred at the bridge of Bouxières.

The wintry sun was setting. The force had its hold again upon all the fields. The Duke of Lorraine held festival that night--back in his own city, and all his people eating again and drinking, and rejoicing in victory.

But one thing checked his triumph: whither had Charles gone? Was he in Metz, or fled perhaps into the Germanies, or got home among his own people in the Low Countries?

All the next day, Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, they searched the battlefield, heaps of naked bodies stripped by the spoilers, but none could say that they had found the great Duke. But that evening, as Lorraine rode back into Nancy, despondent and fearful, a captain brought to him a young page, one of the Colonnas of Rome, and said to him: “This lad knew the great Duke.”

So next morning, the Tuesday, the 7th of January, very early, they went out among the bodies in the snow, and the Italian boy would say first of one, then of another: “It is not he ... it is not he.” And with him also went one who had been a maid in the service of Charles. Then, at last, they came to the strong body, lying all wounds, with its dreadful gashed face, and the mass of thick, black hair against the snow, and the Italian page cried, “That is the Duke,” and the servant knelt down crying and sobbing, and they heard her say, “Ha! Burgundy, my Lord! my Lord!”

René of Lorraine had that famous body lifted with reverence, and wrapped in a linen shroud, and carried with pomp into Nancy.

* * * * *

Thenceforward, with whatever vicissitude of come and go, the Rhine was recovered for the Gauls.

TWO SATURDAYS

(_Montmartre and Amboise_)

(_August 15, 1534; March 16, 1560_)

Two scenes, half a lifetime apart, small, detailed, vivid, mark the enormous storm of the Reformation in the Gauls--that vast battle which was never wholly won or lost, no, not to this day; for France is the arena of Europe. Each of these little scenes was an origin: the one of the force that half-reconquered Europe for the Church, the Jesuits; the other of the force that, taking arms for Calvinism, all but conquered the crown--the force of the great nobles in rebellion, of the gentry, of the merchants in their towns, and of the peasants in the central hills, the Huguenots.

* * * * *

In the morning of Saturday, August the 15th, in the year 1534, the Feast of the Assumption, six men of various age came to the little room on the hill of the university, where lived, determined, eager, somewhat silent, a dark, square-headed Basque, whose military temper was to half change the world. An intense devotion, a burning life within, an absorption in divine things and in the fate of the soul, made this man single from all of his fellows. None met him but went away with an impression as of flame. It was Ignatius of Loyola in his forty-fourth year.

The six who thus came together up the stone stairs to that little room, with its crucifix, its narrow bed, its bare table, its empty walls, were all men who had come under that profound influence; men of the university, like himself--men already filled with the conception of a mission. There, leading them, was yet another Basque, called from his mother’s name Xavier, six years younger than the chief. There was young Salman of Toledo, a boy of nineteen; there was Laynez the Castilian, just of age; Alphonso of Valladolid; Rodriguez of Portugal; and (the only Gaul among them) a peasant from the hills of Savoy, long plunged into the study of the academies, not yet thirty: Faber, from the hamlet, and the Alpine huts of Villaret. He alone was a priest.

When they were thus assembled they set out about their purpose.

They went them down the university hill by that straight and narrow Roman street which crosses Paris from south to north, and is here the street of St. James, there of St. Martin. They traversed the twin bridges of the island, they went the full mile to the city wall, passed through St. Martin’s Gate, and, outside, were in the fields. The hill of Montmartre stood before them, its gypsum quarries, its crazy windmills, and on the summit a little old church--poor, for it had few parishioners. It was called Our Lady of the Martyrs, and thither were they bound upon this, Her feast day.

They climbed the hill. They went down by the little stair near the porch, which leads into the crypt of that strange place, and where the stones go back to the temple of the pagan days. Faber vested and began the Mass.

When he came to the Communion, the six laymen rose and knelt at the altar rails. Then, one by one in order each, before receiving the Host, took in a loud voice the vow of their companionship, and Faber himself, the last, pronounced those words. The Ablutions were received. The post-Communions read, the last Gospel recited. The Society of Jesus was founded.

* * * * *

The winter was not over in Blois--the winter of 1560. The old king, who had so sternly maintained the national religion, was dead; a boy of fifteen reigned--frail, incompetent, diseased--the son of that Medicean woman whom an enemy has called “the worm from the tomb of Italy.”