CHAPTER X

LOUIS XI. AT PARIS--THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING

Six centuries have failed to efface from the memory of the French people the misery and devastation wrought by the hundred years' wars, as travellers in rural France will know. Paris saw little of Charles who, after the temporary activity excited by the expulsion of the English, had sunk into his habitual torpor, and his bondage to women. In 1461 the wretched monarch, morbid and half-demented, died of a malignant disease, all the time haunted by fears of poison and filial treachery. The people named him Charles _le bien servi_ (the well-served), for small indeed was the praise due to him for the great deliverance.

When the new king, Louis XI., quitted his asylum at the Burgundian court to be crowned at Rheims and to repair to St. Denis, he was shocked by the contrast between the rich cities and plains of Flanders and the miserable aspect of the country he traversed--ruined villages, fields that were so many deserts, starving creatures clothed in rags, and looking as if they had just escaped from dungeons. The "Universal Spider," as the Duke of Burgundy called Louis, was ever on the move about France, riding on his mule from dawn to eve. "Our king," says De Comines, "used to dress so ill that worse could not be--often wearing bad cloth and a shabby hat with a leaden image stuck in it." When he entered Abbeville with the magnificent Duke of Burgundy, the people said "_Benedicite!_ is that a king of France? Why, his horse and clothes together are not worth twenty francs!" A Venetian ambassador was amazed to see the most mighty and most Christian king take his dinner in a tavern on the market-place of Tours, after hearing mass in the cathedral.

It is not within our province to describe in detail the successful achievement of Louis' policy of concentrating the whole government in himself as absolute sovereign of France by the overthrow of feudalism and the subjection of the great nobles with their almost royal power and state. His indomitable will, his consummate patience, his profound knowledge of human motives and passions, his cynical indifference to means, make him one of the most remarkable of the kings of France. In 1465, menaced by a coalition of nobles, the so-called League of the Public Good, Louis hastened to the capital. Letters expressing his tender affection for his dear city of Paris preceded him--he was coming to confide to them his queen and hoped-for heir; rather than lose his Paris, which he loved beyond all cities of the world, he would sacrifice half his kingdom. But the Parisians at first were sullen and would not be wooed, for they remembered his refusal to accord them some privileges granted to other cities. The university declined to arm her scholars, Church and Parlement were hostile. The idle, vagabond _clercs_ of the Palais and the Cité composed coarse gibes and satirical songs and ballads against his person. Louis, however, set himself with his insinuating grace of speech to win the favour of the Parisians. He chose six members from the Burgesses, six from the Parlement and six from the university, to form his Council. With daring confidence, he decided to arm Paris. A levy of every male able to bear arms between sixteen and sixty years of age was made, and the citizen army was reviewed near St. Antoine des Champs, in the presence of the king and queen. From 60,000 to 80,000 men, half of them well-armed, marched past, with sixty-seven banners of the trades guilds, not counting those of the municipal officers, the Parlement and the university. The nobles were checkmated, and they were glad to accede to a treaty which gave them ample spoils and Louis, time to recover himself. The "Public Good" was barely mentioned.

The king refused to occupy the palace of the Louvre and chose to dwell in the new Hôtel des Tournelles, near the Porte St. Antoine, built for the Duke of Bedford and subsequently presented to Louis when Dauphin by his royal father; for thither a star led him one evening as he left Notre Dame. Often would he issue _en bourgeois_ from the Tournelles to sup with his gossips in Paris.

The institution of the mid-day Angelus, in 1472, was due to Louis' devotion to the Virgin. He ordained that the great bell of Notre Dame should be rung at noon as a signal that the good people of Paris should recite the Ave Maria. When in Paris scarcely a day passed without the king being seen at mass, and at leaving he always gave an offering.

In 1475, Louis' old enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, was seeking an alliance with Edward IV. of England, and once more a mighty army entered France to reassert the claims of the English kings to the French crown. Louis, by his usual policy of flattery and bribery, succeeded in leading Edward to negotiate. If he had had to meet in the flesh the lion rampant on the English king's escutcheon, he could not have taken ampler precautions. A bridge was built over the Somme, near Amiens, "and in the middle thereof was a strong trellis of wood such as is made for cages of lions, and the holes between the bars were no larger than a man could put his arm through." On either side of this cage the monarchs and a score of courtiers met and conversed. Louis had divided his enemies; each in turn was cajoled and bribed, and the "Hucksters' Peace" was concluded.

"When King Louis," says De Comines, "retired from the interview he spake with me by the way and said he found the English king too ready to visit Paris, which thing was not pleasing to him. The king was a handsome man and very fond of women; he might find some affectionate mistress there, who would speak him so many fair words that she would make him desire to return; his predecessor had come too often to Paris and Normandy, and he did not like his company this side the sea, but beyond the sea he was glad to have him for friend and brother." De Comines was informed next day by some English that the peace had been made by the Holy Ghost, for a white dove was seen resting on the king of England's tent during the interview, and for no noise soever would she move; "but," said a sceptical Gascon gentleman, "it simply happened to have rained during the day, and the dove settled on the tent which was highest to dry her wings in the sun."

Louis had long desired to punish the Count of St. Pol for treachery, and as a result of a treaty with Charles of Burgundy, in 1475, had him at length in the Bastille. Soon on a scaffold in the Place de Grève his head rolled from his body, and a column of stone twelve feet high erected where he fell, gave terrible warning to traitorous princes, however mighty; for the count was Constable of France, the king's brother-in-law, a member of the Imperial House of Luxemburg, and connected with many of the sovereign families of Europe.

Two years later another noble victim, the Duke of Nemours, fell into the king's power and saw the inside of one of Louis' iron cages in the Bastille. The king, who had learnt that the chains had been removed from the prisoner's legs, commanded his jailer not to let him budge from his cage except to be tortured (_gehenné_) and the duke wrote a piteous letter, praying for clemency and signing himself _le pauvre Jacques_. In vain: him, too, the headsman's axe sent to his account.

The news of the humiliating Peace of Peronne, after the king had committed the one great folly of his career by gratuitously placing himself in Charles the Bold's power,[96] was received by the Parisians with many gibes. The royal herald proclaimed at sound of trumpet by the crossways of Paris: "Let none be bold or daring enough to say anything opprobrious against the Duke of Burgundy, either by word of mouth, by writing, by signs, paintings, roundelays, ballads, songs or gestures." On the same day a commission seized all the magpies and jackdaws in Paris, whether caged or otherwise, which were to be registered according to their owners, with all the pretty words that the said birds could repeat and that had been taught them: the pretty word that these chattering birds had been taught to say was "Peronne." Louis' abasement at Peronne was, however, amply avenged by the battle of Granson, when the mighty host of "invincible" Charles was overwhelmed by the Switzers in 1476. A year later, the whole fabric of Burgundian ambition was shattered and the great duke lay a mutilated and frozen corpse before the walls of Nancy. Louis' joy at the destruction of his enemy was boundless. The great provinces of Burgundy, of Anjou, of Maine, Provence, Alençon and Guienne soon fell under the sovereignty of France, whose boundaries now touched the Alps. But in the very culmination of his success Louis was struck down by paralysis, and though he rallied for a time the end was near. Haunted by fear of treachery, he immured himself in the gloomy fortress of Plessis. The saintly Francesco da Calabria, relics from Florence, from Rome, the Holy Oil from Rheims, turtles from Cape Verde Islands--all were powerless; the arch dissembler must now face the ineluctable prince of the dark realms, who was not to be bribed or cajoled even by kings.

When at last the king took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier, told him that most surely his hour was come. Louis made his confession, gave much political counsel and some orders to be observed by _le Roi_, as he now called his son, and spoke, says De Comines, "as dryly as if he had never been ill. And after so many fears and suspicions Our Lord wrought a miracle and took him from this miserable world in great health of mind and understanding. Having received all the sacraments and suffering no pain and always speaking to within a paternoster of his death, he gave orders for his sepulture. May the Lord have his soul and receive him in the realm of Paradise!"

It was in Louis' reign that the art of printing was introduced into Paris. As early as 1458 the master of the mint had been sent to Mainz to learn something of the new art, but without success. In 1463, Fust and his partner, Schöffer, had brought some printed books to Paris, but the books were confiscated and the partners were driven out of the city, owing to the jealousy of the powerful corporation of the scribes and booksellers, who enjoyed a monopoly from the Sorbonne of the sale of books in Paris; and in 1474 Louis paid an indemnity of 2500 crowns to Schöffer for the confiscation of his books and for the trouble he had taken to introduce printed books into his capital. In 1470, at the invitation of two doctors of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet and Jean de la Puin, Ulmer Gering of Constance and two other Swiss printers set up a press near Fichet's rooms in the Sorbonne. In 1473 a press was at work at the sign of the Soleil d'Or (Golden Sun), in the Rue St. Jacques, under the management of two Germans, Peter Kayser, Master of Arts, and John Stohl, assisted by Ulmer Gering. In 1483 the last-named removed to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the doctors granted to him and his new partner, Berthold Rumbolt of Strassburg, a lease for the term of their lives. They retained their sign of the Soleil d'Or, which long endured as a guarantee of fine printing. The earliest works had been printed in beautiful Roman type, but unable to resist the favourite Gothic introduced from Germany, Gering was led to adopt it towards the year 1480, and the Roman was soon superseded. From 1480 to 1500 we meet with many French printers' names: Antoine Vérard, Du Pré, Cailleau, Martineau, Pigouchet--clearly proving that the art had then been successfully transplanted.

The re-introduction of Roman characters about 1500 was due to the famous house of the Estiennes, whose admirable editions of the Latin and Greek classics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin classics outside his shop, offering a reward to any passer-by who pointed out a misprint or corrupt reading. Their famous house was the meeting-place of scholars and patrons of literature. Francis I. and his sister Margaret of Angoulême, authoress of the Heptameron, were seen there, and legend says that the king was once kept waiting by the scholar-printer while he finished correcting a proof. All the Estienne household, even the children, conversed in Latin, and the very servants are said to have grown used to it. In 1563 Francis I. remitted 30,000 livres of taxes to the printers of Paris, as an act of grace to the professors of an art that seemed rather divine than human. But in spite of royal favour printing was a poor career. The second Henry Estienne, who composed a Greek-Latin lexicon, died in poverty at a hospital in Lyons; the last of the family, the third Robert Estienne, met a similar miserable end at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. So great was the re-action in the university against the violence of the Lutherans and the daring of the printers, that in 1534 all the presses were ordered to be closed. In 1537 no book was allowed to be printed without permission of the Sorbonne, and in 1556 an order was made, it is said at the instance of Diane de Poitiers, that a copy in vellum of every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited at the royal library. After Gering's death the forty presses then working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior printing.