Part 26

Very shortly, the duke de Mayenne, brother and heir to the power of the duke de Guise, arrived in Paris with a reinforcement of troops. This prince, intrepid and intelligent, but indolent, was still employed in placing the capital in a state of defence, when the two kings of France and Navarre appeared at its gates with an army of forty thousand men. Henry III. took possession of the bridge of St. Cloud, and formed the blockade of the faubourg St. Honoré and the whole quarter of the Louvre as far as the river; the king of Navarre, on the other side, besieged the faubourg St. Marceau to that of St. Germain. The consternation and the fury of the Parisians were extreme when they found themselves surrounded in this manner by the royal troops. The priests recommenced their seditious declamations; to strike the vulgar, they caused little figures of wax to be made, representing the two monarchs, which they placed upon the altar during mass, and pricked them with knives. All priests carried arms, and mounted guard with the other citizens. But this aimless and blind fury could not have protected the capital from the just anger of the king, had it not been prevented by the most infamous of crimes. Jacques Clement, a priest and Dominican, devoted himself, as he said, to the task of killing the tyrant. He communicated his project to the doctors, the Jesuits, the leaders of the League, and the principals of the Sixteen; all encouraged him, all promised him the greatest dignities, if he survived this generous action; and if he became a martyr to it, a place in Heaven, above the apostles. On the 31st of July he went to St. Cloud, where the king’s quarters were. He was arrested by the sieur de Coublan, and conducted to the procureur-général De la Guesle. This magistrate introduced him the next day into the king’s apartment. With a simple and respectful air he presented the king an intercepted letter to the president De Harley. The monarch having read it, and being separated from the Dominican by La Guesle, asked him if he had nothing else to say to him. “I have many important things to reveal to the king,” replied Clement, “but I can only do it in a whisper to his own ear.” “Speak out!” cried the procureur-général two or three times, as he began to mistrust the good father. “Speak aloud, and before me; there is no one here in whom the king has not confidence.” Henry then told him to approach. The villain obeyed, and instead of communicating secrets, plunged a knife, expressly forged for the purpose, into his bowels, and left it sticking in the wound. The astonished king immediately drew out the knife, and springing upon the assassin, stabbed him in the forehead. La Guesle put the finishing stroke with his sword. His body was thrown out at the window, torn in pieces, burnt, and his ashes cast into the Seine.

In proportion as this parricide spread consternation in the army, so did it give cause of triumph to the Parisians. A relation of the martyrdom of Brother Jacques Clement was printed; he was canonized, and lauded at Rome from the very pulpit in which the funeral oration of Henry III. ought to have been pronounced. The object was by such means to incite fresh assassinations. The king died of his wound on the 2nd of August, at two o’clock in the morning; and Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, whom he had proclaimed his successor as he was dying, was acknowledged by a part of the army, and by all who deserved the name of Frenchmen. The new monarch was obliged to interrupt the attacks upon Paris to disperse the different armies of the League; and it was not till after he had rendered himself master of the places which served as magazines to the capital, that he formed the blockade of it with less than twenty thousand men. He commenced by attacking the faubourgs: his army, divided into ten bodies, attacked ten different quarters of Paris. In order to witness the operations, he placed himself in the abbey of Montmartre, and at midnight gave the signal. The artillery was immediately heard to roar on both sides. “There is nobody,” says Sully, “who would not have supposed that that immense city was about to perish by fire, or by an infinite number of mines ignited in its entrails; there perhaps never was a spectacle more capable of inspiring horror. Dense masses of smoke, through which pierced at intervals sparks or long trains of flame, shrouded all the surface of that sort of world which, by the vicissitudes of light and darkness, appeared either plunged in black night or covered with a sea of fire. The roar of the artillery, the clash of arms, the cries of combatants, added everything to this scene that can be imagined that is terrifying; and the natural horror of night redoubled it still more. This lasted two whole hours, and ended by the reduction of all the faubourgs, even of that of St. Antoine, though, from its extent, it was obliged to be attacked from a great distance.”

The king’s success did not relax the mad courage and the blind fury of the Parisians; the leaders set the same springs to work that had been employed the preceding year: sacrilegious sermons, the confirmation of the Sorbonne, and the excommunication of the king.

As soon as Henry IV. had closed all the issues from the city, provisions began to fail, and more than two hundred thousand persons of all conditions were reduced to the most awful extremity, but without losing any of that factious ardour which had seized all minds. To animate the people still further, a kind of regiment of ecclesiastics was formed, to the number of thirteen hundred; they appeared on the bridge of Notre Dame in battle-array, and made a general review, which was called the Procession of the League. The leaders carried in one hand a crucifix, and in the other a halbert, the rest having all sorts of arms.

The Pope’s legate, by his presence, approved of a proceeding at once so extraordinary and so laughable; but one of these new soldiers, who was no doubt ignorant that his arquebuss was loaded with ball, wishing to salute the legate in his carriage, fired into it, and killed his almoner. The legate, in consequence of this accident, made as speedy a retreat as possible; but the people exclaimed that it was a great blessing for the almoner to be killed in such a holy cause. Such was the frightful persuasion of this populace, whom impunity had rendered formidable. They believed themselves invincible under the orders of the duke de Nemours, a skilful, courageous, and prudent general, whom the duke de Mayenne, his brother, had left in Paris during his absence; they were backed by three or four thousand good troops, and by several nobles of high courage. They every day skirmished against the royal army, or fought small battles; the Chevalier d’Aumale, of the blood of Lorraine, being always at the head of their sorties, and imparting his impetuous valour to his followers. Henry IV. satisfied himself with repulsing these attacks, convinced that famine would soon open the gates of the capital to him.

In fact, this terrible scourge began to make rapid progress; there was neither wheat, barley, nor oats left; more than fifty thousand persons had already died of want; the sad remains of this numerous population, nobles, plebeians, rich or poor, languidly crawled through the streets to seek for and devour the grass and weeds that grew in them. Mules, horses, cats, dogs, all the domestic animals,--even beasts that are reckoned unclean,--served for food. The leather of shoes was sold for its weight in gold; it was boiled and devoured in secret, for fear some wretch, stronger and more hungry, should tear it from the mouth of the purchaser. Mothers were seen feeding upon the flesh of their children, and miserable beings flew like vultures upon a newly-dead body that had fallen in the streets. The Spanish ambassador to the League advised that bread should be made of the ground bones of the dead, and his plan was eagerly adopted; but this shocking aliment cost the lives of most of those who partook of it. In this general desolation, the priests and monks enjoyed the comforts of abundance; on visiting their abodes, there was generally enough for the present discovered, and, in many instances, a good provision for the future. At length the leaders of the League, to appease the people, who now never ceased crying, “Bread or peace!” charged the bishop of Paris and the archbishop of Lyons with proposals to the king. “I am no dissembler,” said the monarch, “I speak plainly and without deceit what I think. I should be wrong if I told you I did not wish for a general peace; I do wish for it, I ardently desire it, that I may have the power of enlarging and settling the limits of my kingdom. For a battle I would give a finger, for a general peace I would give two. I love my city of Paris; it is my eldest daughter; I am jealous of her. I am anxious to confer upon her more good, more kindness, more pity than she could ask of me; but I desire that she should owe them to me and to my clemency, and not to the duke de Mayenne or the king of Spain. When you ask me to defer the capitulation and surrender of Paris till a universal peace, which cannot take place till after many journeys, backwards and forwards, you ask for a thing highly prejudicial to my city of Paris, which cannot wait so long. So many persons have already died of hunger, that if a further delay of ten or twelve days took place, vast numbers must die, which would be a great pity (_une éstrange pitié_). I am the father of my people, and I am like the mother of old before Solomon, I would almost prefer having no Paris at all to having it ruined and dissipated by the death of so many Parisians. You, Monsieur le Cardinal, ought to have pity on them; they are your flock. I am not a remarkably good theologian; but I know enough of divinity to be able to tell you that God is not pleased that you should treat thus the poor people he has consigned to you. How can you hope to convert me to your religion, if you set so little store by the safety and lives of your flock? It is giving me but a poor proof of your holiness; I am but little edified by it.”

Of all the monarchs that ever lived, we like to hear Henry IV. of France speak. His words come forth with that unstudied frankness which proves that they flow from a manly heart and a right mind. He had his faults--what human creature has not? but neither the annals of France nor England describe a king with whom we would rather have sat in council; have followed his white _panache_ in the battle-field; have crossed the hand of friendship, or chatted in a lady’s bower, than with the good, valiant, and witty Béarnais. We verily think that delightful word of the French language, _bonhomie_, was coined to express the character of Henry IV.

“Such,” says the historian, “were the words and sentiments of this generous prince; the evils which oppressed his people penetrated his compassionate and tender heart. He could not endure the idea,” says Sully, “of seeing that city, of which Providence had destined him the empire, become one vast cemetery; he held out his hands to all he could secretly assist, and shut his eyes upon the supplies of provisions which his officers and soldiers frequently stole in, whether out of compassion for relations or friends, or for the sake of the heavy prices they made the citizens pay for them.”

He could have carried Paris by the sword; and his soldiers, the Huguenots in particular, demanded that favour of him with loud cries; but he resisted all their entreaties. The duke de Nemours having turned out a vast number of useless mouths, the council advised the king to refuse them a passage. Henry, deeply affected by their melancholy fate, gave orders to let them go where they liked.

“I am not astonished,” said he, “that the chiefs of the League, or the Spaniards, should have so little compassion on these poor people, they are but their tyrants; but as for me, I am their father and their king, and I cannot behold them without being moved to my inward heart.” But he was deceived, if he thought these kindnesses would make any impression upon the Parisians. They availed themselves of his benevolence, without ceasing to regard him as the author of all the public calamities; and when, a short time after, the prince of Parma and the duke de Mayenne, at the head of an army, obliged him to pause in his enterprise, they insulted him who had only raised the siege because he was too sensible to the misfortunes of the besieged.

Paris persisted in its revolt to the month of March, 1594; when the duke de Brissac, who had joined the League because Henry III. had told him that he was good for nothing, either by land or sea, negotiated with Henry IV. and opened the gates of Paris to him, for the reward of the baton of a marshal of France. Henry IV. made his _entrée_, which only cost the lives of a small body of lansquenets, and of two or three citizens, who endeavoured to induce the people to take up arms against a king who was willing to treat them as a father.

Of the policy or propriety of Henry’s changing his religion, to insure the peaceful possession of his throne, it is not our province to speak.

When Brissac had thrown open the gates, Henry’s troops marched in in silence, keeping close and careful order, and took possession of the squares, public places, and great thoroughfares. After the prévôt des marchands and De Brissac had presented the keys to him, he advanced at the head of a large troop of the nobility, with lances lowered: his march was a triumph, and, from that day, he considered himself among the Parisians, as in the midst of his children. “Let them alone!” cried he, to those who wished to drive back the crowd; “let them alone! they want to see a king.” His clemency extended to all classes, even to his worst enemies, the fanatical preachers. The Spanish garrison quitted Paris the day of his _entrée_, with the honours of war; Philip’s ministers departing with them. The king placed himself at a window to see them pass, and when they were at a distance, he laughingly cried to them: “Make my compliments to your master, gentlemen, but don’t come back any more.” He received the Bastille by capitulation, welcomed the repentant and submissive Sorbonne, and joined to the parliament of Paris the magistrates of the parliament he had established at Châlons and Tours.

The ridiculous yet bloody war of the Fronde, though it maddened and for a time half-starved the Parisians, and although its two parties were headed by a Condé and a Turenne, does not furnish us with a regular siege.

SEVENTH SIEGE, A.D. 1814.

When the inordinate ambition of Buonaparte, and, still more, his misfortunes in Russia, had banded all Europe against him, Paris may be said to have again experienced a short siege.

When Napoleon opened the campaign on the 25th of January, he confided the command of the capital to his brother Joseph. His enemies were numerous and powerful. The English advanced on the south; a hundred and fifty thousand men, under Schwartzenberg, poured into France by way of Switzerland; a large army of Prussians, commanded by Blucher, arrived from Frankfort; and a hundred thousand Swedes and Germans penetrated into Belgium, under Bernadotte. Here was work cut out for even the genius of a Hannibal; and Buonaparte seemed to be duly roused by the perils which surrounded him. He redoubled his activity and energy, and never had his strategic calculations been more skilful. He was near destroying the two most formidable armies of his enemies by isolating them, and attacking them by turns. But Buonaparte’s successes became fatal to him, by inspiring him with too much confidence: he would not listen to the proposals of the allies for France to return within her ancient limits, and revoked the powers he had given to the duke of Vicenza to conclude a peace at Châtillon. Wherever he did not command in person, the allies triumphed: the English entered Bordeaux, which declared for the Bourbons; the Austrians occupied Lyons; and the united armies marched towards Paris. Napoleon then subscribed to the demands of the Congress; but it was too late: the conferences were broken up. Joseph received orders to defend Paris to the last extremity; the emperor depended upon him, and conceived the almost wildly brave project of cutting off the retreat of the allies, by marching rapidly behind them to St. Dizier. By this march he lost precious time; but by it, if he had been seconded, Napoleon might have saved his crown. The two grand armies of the allies had effected their junction, and drew near to the capital. To secure the success of the emperor’s manœuvres, it ought to have been defended till his arrival; but timid councillors surrounded the regent, Maria Louisa, and persuaded her to retire to the Loire. In vain Talleyrand and Montalivet expressed a courageous opinion, and represented to the empress that the safety of France was in Paris: fear alone was listened to; Maria Louisa quitted the capital, and transported the regency to Blois. In the mean time Napoleon approached Paris by forced marches; but it was no longer time: Marshals Marmont and Mortier, on the 30th of March, fought a desperate battle under the walls of the city with forces very inferior to the allies. Ignorant of the emperor’s proximity, Joseph gave orders for a capitulation; he abandoned his post, and set out for Orléans. On the 31st of March, the allies entered Paris. Napoleon was hastening to the defence of his capital, when, on the 1st of April, he received this terrible news; he immediately fell back upon Fontainebleau, where his army took up a position. There he learnt that the senate, till that time guilty of so much servility and adulation towards him, had proclaimed him a tyrant, and that, guided by Talleyrand, it had declared Napoleon deposed from the throne, the hereditary right of his family abolished, and the French people and the army liberated from their oath of fidelity to him.

The capitulation of 1814, and the celebrated day of the Barricades, July, 1830, do not come under the head of sieges.

RIMINI.

A.C. 49.

Cæsar, forgetting his virtues in order to sacrifice everything to his ambition, prepared to march against his country. But this was not done without a mental struggle. When he arrived on the banks of the Rubicon, he was a prey to a thousand conflicting thoughts; he stopped all at once, and turning to his friends, said: “We have it still in our power to retract; but if we cross this rivulet, the enterprise must be carried out by force of arms.” According to Suetonius, there appeared at that moment a man of extraordinary height, playing upon a rustic flute, and the soldiers flocked round him to listen to him. This wonderful man, seizing a trumpet, applied it to his mouth, and sounding a charge, crossed the river. This was most likely a _ruse_ of Cæsar’s to encourage his troops; be that as it may, he immediately cried out,--“Forward! let us go whither the voice of the gods and the injustice of our enemies call us;--the die is cast!” And he crossed the Rubicon. The short siege and the capture of Rimini were the consequences of this determination, followed by the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey, which annihilated the liberties of Rome.

SECOND SIEGE, A.D. 538.

Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths, appeared before Rimini, and laid siege to it. He brought towards the walls an enormous tower, at the top of which was a large drawbridge, to be let down when within reach of the parapets. The inhabitants were in a terrible fright; but the commander rendered the tower useless by having the ditch widened during the night; and by a spirited and unexpected attack upon the enemy’s camp, he raised as much dread among them as the machine had created in Rimini. Some of the bravest of the Goths fell in this sortie, and their leader turned the siege into a blockade. The arrival of Belisarius compelled him to abandon the enterprise altogether.

MARSEILLES.

A.C. 49.

The inhabitants of Marseilles being under great obligations to Pompey, were not willing to open their gates to Cæsar. Irritated by this affront, Cæsar laid siege to their city. It was long, because that great general did not at first conduct it in person; but as soon as he presented himself before the place, it surrendered. The conqueror was satisfied with disarming the citizens, and ordering them to bring to him all the money in the public treasury.

SECOND SIEGE, A.C. 310.

Notwithstanding his repeated abdications, Maximian Hercules was again anxious for power, and, for the third time, to remount the throne of the Cæsars. In order to engage the Gauls to declare in his favour, he caused a report of the death of Constantine to be circulated. This report had not time to be accredited, for Constantine, at the head of a numerous army, presented himself before Marseilles, into which place Maximian had retired. He at once led on an assault, and would have taken the city if his ladders had not proved too short. Several soldiers, however, succeeded in gaining the top of the walls, but the emperor, to spare the blood of the troops and of the inhabitants, sounded a retreat. Maximian appeared upon the walls; Constantine drew near to them, and represented to the ex-emperor the injustice and futility of his proceedings. Whilst the old man was pouring forth invectives, some of the inhabitants, unknown to him, opened one of the gates, and admitted the soldiers of Constantine. They seized Maximian, led him before the emperor, and terminated this short and foolish war.

THIRD SIEGE, A.D. 1544.