History never more cruelly demonstrated the vulnerability of a nation to the person of its chief of state than in the affliction of France beginning in 1392.
The circumstances that brought on the crisis arose from a struggle for power centering on the figure of Clisson, the Constable. As the main prop of the ministerial party, he was the object of the uncles’ political enmity as well as of the Duke of Brittany’s undying hatred. For as long as he retained the controlling military post with access to its immense financial advantages, and remained in partnership with the Marmosets and the King’s brother, the uncles saw themselves kept at a distance from power. The Duke of Brittany feared him as a rival in Breton affairs and hated him the more fiercely because he had failed to kill him when he had had the chance. In their common desire to destroy Clisson, the interests of Brittany and the King’s uncles met, and they maintained clandestine contact with each other.
Serving as a link between them was a Burgundian protégé, related to both the Duchess of Burgundy and the Duke of Brittany, the same sinister Pierre de Craon who had embezzled the Duc d’Anjou’s funds in the Naples campaign. Since then he had flouted a court order to reimburse Anjou’s widow, and had assassinated a knight of Laon but used his influence to secure a pardon. These derelictions had not prevented his finding favor in the royal circle of pleasure seekers. He evidently possessed the charm of wickedness. However, he angered Louis d’Orléans by informing his wife—apparently from an irresistible impulse to mischief—of an extra-marital passion which Louis had confided to him. Louis had even taken Craon to visit the beautiful, if too virtuous, lady who had resisted an offer of 1,000 gold crowns for her favors. On discovering Craon’s betrayal, Louis in a rage took the tale to the King, who compliantly banished the troublemaker. Craon claimed he was removed because he had tried to make Louis give up engaging in occult practices and consorting with sorcerers.
Burning with resentment, he took refuge with the Duke of Brittany, who was his cousin. In Craon the Duke found the agent for another attempt to ruin Clisson. Because Clisson was married to a niece of the Duchess d’Anjou, he automatically shared that family’s mortal enmity for Craon. On this basis Craon already suspected, and the Duke of Brittany easily persuaded him, that Clisson’s hand was behind his banishment—which may have been true. Clisson is said to have discovered secret correspondence between Craon and the Dukes. In any event, Craon now “breathed only for vengeance.”
On the night of June 13, 1392, having returned secretly to Paris, Craon waited in ambush at a street crossing where Clisson would pass on the way to his hôtel. With Craon in the darkness was a party of forty armored followers, enough to ensure overwhelming odds against an opponent in civilian circumstances. When a man really intended the death of a fellow noble, chivalry’s codes were surprisingly non-inhibiting. Rather than challenge his enemy to open combat, Craon preferred to strike in the dark. Judging by his record, he was a man without moral sense, but he was not alone. Montfort too had violated honor, loyalty, and every other principle of chivalry when he had kidnapped Clisson. Clisson himself was no Roland. In the lifetime of these men, under the disruptive effects of plague, brigandage, and schism, normal codes of conduct disintegrated.
Escorted by eight attendants with torches but unarmed for combat, Clisson was returning on horseback from a party given by the King at St. Pol. He was discussing with his squires a dinner he was to give next day for Coucy, Orléans, and Vienne when suddenly the torchlight fell upon a dark mass of mounted men and on the faint gleam of helmet and cuirass. The assailants charged, extinguishing Clisson’s torches and crying, “A mort! A mort!” Craon’s men did not know whom they were attacking because the identity of the victim had been kept secret. They were appalled to hear their chief shout in his excitement, as with brandished sword he urged them forward, “Clisson, you must die!”
Clisson cried out to his unknown assailant, “Who are you?”
“I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy!” replied the leader openly, for he anticipated a corpse and an overturn of government in consequence. His men, stunned to discover themselves engaged in murdering the Constable of France, were hesitant in pressing the attack, “for treason is never bold.” Armed only with a dagger, Clisson desperately defended himself until, struck by many blows, he was unhorsed. He fell into the doorway of a baker’s shop, forcing open the door by the weight of his fall, just as the baker, hearing the racket, appeared in time to pull him into the house. Believing they had killed him, Craon and his party hastened away. The survivors among Clisson’s squires found him in the shop, slashed by sword cuts, bathed in blood, and apparently lifeless. By the time the King, aroused from bed and informed of the awful news, reached the baker’s shop, Clisson had recovered consciousness.
“How goes it with you, Constable?” pleaded Charles, stricken at the sight.
“Feebly, Sire.”
“Who has done this to you?” When Clisson named his assassin, Charles swore that “no deed shall ever be so expiated as this, nor so heavily punished.” He called for surgeons, who, on examining the Constable’s hardened body, survivor of a hundred combats, promised his recovery. Carried to his residence, Clisson was “much cheered” by a visit from Coucy, who as his brother-in-arms was the first to be informed after the King.
Orders for the capture of Craon failed because the gates of Paris, still stripped of their bars since the insurrection, could not be closed. Learning that, unbelievably, Clisson lived, Craon escaped from the city, galloped as far as Chartres and thence to Brittany. “It is diabolic,” he told the Duke in explaining his failure. “I believe all the devils of Hell, to whom the Constable belongs, guarded and delivered him out of my hands, for he suffered more than sixty blows by swords or knives and I truly believed him dead.”
King Charles, feeling himself attacked in the person of the state’s chief defender, pursued the assassin with insatiable fury. Two of Craon’s squires and a page were beheaded on capture, as was the steward of his Paris residence for failing to report his return to the capital. A canon of Chartres who had given him shelter was deprived of his benefices and condemned to perpetual abstinence in prison on bread and water. Craon’s properties and revenues were confiscated to the benefit of the Royal Treasury; his residences and castles were ordered razed. The King’s excited state of mind communicated itself, as royal rage will, to his deputies. Admiral de Vienne, charged with making an inventory of Craon’s fortune, reportedly evicted his wife and daughter without possessions or money, in nothing but the clothes they wore—after raping the daughter, according to one report—and helped himself to the rich furnishings and valuables of their residence. Perhaps he felt that Craon’s treason justified this indecency, though his conduct was widely condemned by fellow nobles. Strange excesses flowed from the attempted murder of the Constable, as if Craon’s act had released a contagion of evil.
Events moved from murder to war when the Duke of Brittany, on being ordered to surrender the culprit, denied all knowledge of him and refused to concern himself in any way. Thus defied, the King called for war on the Duke. Barely recovered from his illness at Amiens, Charles appeared often distraught and disconnected in speech. His physicians advised against a campaign, but, encouraged by his brother, he insisted. Burgundy and Berry, who depended on the Duke of Brittany as their ally in the political struggle, bent every endeavor to prevent it. The heat of family partisanship was added to the conflict by the Duchess of Burgundy, who was Montfort’s niece and therefore took his side and hated Clisson with venomous intensity. Burgundian influence was certainly behind the asylum given to Craon. Berry, for his part, was said to have had prior knowledge of Craon’s assault.
When it was learned that Clisson’s will, dictated after the attack, left a fortune of 1,700,000 francs, not counting lands, the uncles’ jealous rage at finding themselves outdone in the rewards of avarice knew no bounds. Such a fortune—greater than the King’s, they let it be known—could have come from no honest source. The public was ready enough to believe it, for Rivière and Mercier, too, had amassed fortunes from government service and were generally disliked as both arrogant and venal. All these strifes and rancors festered behind the unstable King as he clamored for war.
The Council approved the campaign; the uncles, left out of the decision but bound to join the King, were augmented in their hatred of the ministers. “They dreamed of nothing but how to destroy them.” The King, accompanied by Bourbon and Coucy, left Paris on July 1, moving westward by slow stages as knights and their retinues came up to join the march. Charles’s ill health required protracted stops, and further delay was caused by waiting for the uncles. Hoping to forestall the war, they dallied and procrastinated, putting Charles in a frenzy of impatience. Scarcely eating or drinking, he was in Council every day, harping on the insult to him through his Constable, upset at any contradictions, refusing absolutely to be swerved from punishing the Duke of Brittany. Discord, arriving with Burgundy and Berry, spread to the army, where knights disputed the rights and wrongs of the enterprise. In reply to a second demand for Craon’s surrender, Montfort again denied knowing anything about him. Charles, although declared “feverish and unfit to ride” by his physicians, would wait no longer.
In the heat of mid-August the march began from Le Mans on the borders of Brittany. On a sandy road under blazing sun, the King, wearing a black velvet jacket and a hat of scarlet velvet ornamented with pearls, rode apart from the others to avoid the dust. Two pages rode behind, one carrying his helmet, the other his lance. Ahead rode the two uncles in one group, and Louis d’Orléans with Coucy and Bourbon in another. As the party passed through the forest of Mans, a rough barefoot man in a ragged smock suddenly stepped from behind a tree and seized the King’s bridle, crying in a voice of doom, “Ride no further, noble King! Turn back! You are betrayed!” Charles shrank in alarm. Escorts beat the man’s hand from the bridle but because he appeared no more than a poor madman did not arrest him, not even when he followed the company for half an hour crying betrayal in the King’s ears.
Emerging from the forest, the riders came out on an open plain at high noon. Men and horses suffered under the sun’s rays. One of the pages, dozing in the saddle, let fall the King’s lance, which struck the steel helmet carried by his companion with a loud clang. The King shuddered, then, suddenly drawing his sword, spurred his horse to a charge with the cry, “Forward against the traitors! They wish to deliver me to the enemy!” Wheeling and charging, he struck at anyone within reach.
“My God,” cried Burgundy, “the King is out of his mind! Hold him, someone!” No one dared try. Warding off the blows but unable to strike back against the King’s person, they milled around in horror while Charles rushed wildly against this one and that until he was exhausted, panting, and drenched in sweat. Then his chamberlain, Guillaume de Martel, whom he much loved, clasped him from behind while others took his sword and, lifting him from his horse, laid him gently on the ground. He lay motionless and speechless, staring with open eyes, recognizing no one. One or more knights (the number differs in different versions) whom he had killed in his frenzy lay near him in the dust.
Bold as always, Philip of Burgundy seized authority. “We must return to Mans,” he decided. “This finishes the march on Brittany.” Laid in a passing oxcart, the King of France was carried back while an appalled company, some already thinking furiously of the future, rode alongside. With scarcely a sign of life but his heartbeat, Charles remained in a coma for four days during which he was thought to be on his deathbed. His physicians could offer no hope, and other doctors who were called—Burgundy’s, Orléans’, Bourbon’s—agreed after consultation that their science was powerless.
As the awful report of the King’s madness spread, rumors of sorcery and poison were on every tongue, and popular emotion so aroused that the sick chamber had to be kept open to the public. All the tears and grief attending a royal demise filled the room and “all good Frenchmen wept as for an only son, for the health of France was tied to that of her King.” Sobbing clergy conducted prayers, bishops led barefoot processions carrying life-size wax figures of the King to the churches, the people heaped their offerings on relics known for healing powers, and prostrated themselves before Christ and the saints to beseech a cure.
Few believed the affliction had natural causes. Some saw it as Divine anger at the King’s failure to take up arms to end the schism; others, as God’s warning against that very intention; still others, as Divine punishment for heavy taxes. Most believed the cause was sorcery, the more so because a great drought that summer dried up the ponds and rivers so that cattle died of thirst, waterborne transport ceased, and merchants claimed the worst losses in twenty years.
In a morbid time, belief in conspiracy rose to the surface. Whispers circulated against the Dukes. Why had the “phantom of the forest” not been arrested and interrogated? Had he been planted by the Duke of Brittany or by the uncles to cause the King to turn back? Had the King’s excess of anger caused by the Dukes’ delay brought on his madness? To allay public suspicions, Burgundy held a formal inquiry at which the King’s doctors testified to Charles’s previous illnesses.
Coucy too had summoned his personal physician, the most venerable and learned in France. He was Guillaume de Harsigny, a native of Laon aged 92, the same age as the century. After earning his degree at the University of Paris, he had traveled widely to enlarge his knowledge, studied under Arab professors at Cairo and Italians at Salerno, and eventually returned loaded with renown to his native Picardy. Nothing in human ills was unknown to him. Under his care—or by natural process coinciding with it—the King’s fever subsided and intervals of reason returned in which the poor young man, not yet 25, recognized with horror what had befallen him. Within a month Charles’s physical recovery had progressed well enough for Harsigny to take him to the castle of Creil high above the river Oise, where he could enjoy “the best air in the region of Paris.” The court overflowed with joy and with praise for the skills of Coucy’s physician.
The first four days, when Charles had been expected to die, gave the uncles their opportunity against the Marmosets. “Now is the hour,” said Berry, “when I shall pay them back in kind.” On the very day of the King’s attack, someone with quick perception of Fortune’s Wheel warned the Marmosets to be gone. On the next day while still at Le Mans, Berry and Burgundy, claiming authority as the King’s eldest relatives, although in fact Louis was closer to the crown, dismissed the entire Council, disbanded the army, and seized the reins of government. Returning to Paris within two weeks, they convened a subservient Council which duly gave the government to Philip the Bold on the ground that Louis d’Orléans was too young, and deposed the Marmosets by judicial process. Rivière and Mercier, who had been unready to abandon power in time, were arrested and imprisoned, and their lands, houses, furnishings, and fortune confiscated. A more prescient colleague, Jean de Montagu, reputed to be a natural son of Charles V, took himself and his fortune to Avignon the moment he heard of the King’s attack.
The ease of the overturn is almost baffling. Only the eclipse of the King and Clisson’s wounds made it possible. Without royal authority to support them, Rivière and Mercier had no independent status; no regent had been named for the six-month-old Dauphin; Louis lacked the assurance and decisiveness to act, although he might have taken control if Coucy and Bourbon and the rest of the Council had been prepared to force the issue against the Dukes. Clearly, they were not. They could not be sure of military support because the leading nobles lacked cohesion. In the uncertainty of the King’s condition, no one knew which way power would jump. Above all, the Constable was hors de combat.
With sure instinct Coucy seems to have made his choice quickly, for on August 25 he accepted a mission along with Burgundy’s chamberlain, Guy de Tremoille, to inform the Duke of Brittany that the war against him was called off. In the fate of Rivière and Mercier he played a darker role. Although he had served closely with Rivière in many joint missions over the past fifteen years, Coucy was one of a group sent to seize his former partner in his castle, to which he had fled before the order for his arrest. Rivière was said to have opened his own door to his captors. Ten years later, after her husband and Coucy were both dead, Rivière’s widow claimed that Coucy had taken coffers containing silver and gold plate and tapestries from the castle, although no such charge was ever made during the lifetime of the principals.
In the case of Mercier, however, Coucy benefited openly. By way of putting him under obligation, the Dukes gave him Mercier’s principal castle of Nouvion-le-Comte in the diocese of Laon with all its rents and revenues. A ruler’s bestowal upon one noble of the confiscated property of another was a routine means of attaching support. Whether or not Coucy had compunctions about accepting, to have refused would have marked him as an overt opponent of the Dukes.
In prison, Rivière and Mercier daily expected torture and execution, the normal fate of those who lost power. Rivière remained stoic, but Mercier was reputed to have cried so many tears that he almost lost his eyesight. Every day people came to the Place de Grève expecting to watch the dispatch of the prisoners. “Prudent, cold and far-seeing,” Burgundy did not exact the final penalty. He preferred to be circumspect while there was still a chance of the King recovering sovereignty. Charles, as he improved, pressed for the release of his former councillors, and public opinion, in love and pity for the King, swung in their favor. Now it was remembered that Rivière had always been “gentle, courteous, debonair and patient with poor people.” After eighteen months in prison both were finally released and banished from court, although their property was restored, presumably including Coucy’s temporary acquisition.
The dismissal of Clisson was to be Burgundy’s triumph. Forcing the issue, Clisson came to see him to inquire as Constable about measures for government of the realm. Philip looked at him malevolently. “Clisson, Clisson,” he said between his teeth, “you need not busy yourself with that; the kingdom will be governed without your office.” Then, unable to conceal the real source of his anger, he demanded “where the Devil” Clisson had amassed so great a fortune, more than his and Berry’s put together. “Get out of my sight,” he exploded, “for were it not for my honor I would put out your other eye!” Clisson rode home reflectively. That night, under cover of darkness, he left his hôtel with two attendants by the back gate and rode to his castle of Montlhéry, just south of Paris, where he could defend himself.
Raging at his escape, Burgundy again chose Coucy as agent against his own brother-in-arms. Along with Guy de Tremolile, he was named to command a force of 300 lances including many former comrades of the Constable, who were ordered to march by five different roads and not to return without Clisson dead or alive. This does not seem to have been one of Burgundy’s more intelligent moves. Naturally warned by his friends in the party, Clisson escaped to his fortress of Josselin in Brittany, where on his own ground he could withstand attack. But his flight enabled Burgundy to use him as a scapegoat. He was tried in absentia, convicted as a “false and wicked traitor,” deposed as Constable, banished, and fined 100,000 marks. Louis d’Orléans refused to ratify the proceedings, but throughout the overturn he never dared openly challenge his uncles.
Once again the Constable’s sword was offered to Coucy, whom Burgundy was clearly anxious to have in his camp. If the post had not appealed to him in the last days of Charles V, it had even less attraction now, nor did he wish to become the beneficiary of his friend’s fall. He “refused positively” to accept it, “even if it meant that he should be forced to leave France.” The implied risk did not materialize. Finding Coucy adamant, the uncles gave the post to the young Comte d’Eu, reportedly so that he might become wealthy enough to marry Berry’s daughter.
Under the care of Coucy’s physician, the King seemed restored to sanity by the end of September. Escorted by Coucy, he made a pilgrimage of thanks to Notre Dame de Liesse, a little church near Laon commemorating the miracle of three crusaders from Picardy who, while captives of the Saracens, had converted the daughter of the Sultan to Christianity and given her a statue of the Virgin, upon which they were promptly transported by air, along with the princess, to their native land. Charles returned via Coucy-le-Château, where in company with the Duke of Burgundy he dined on October 4, and still escorted by Coucy worshiped at St. Denis on his way back to Paris. Under the new regime, Coucy remained a leading member of the Council, dividing his time between attendance at its sessions and his functions as Lieutenant-General of Auvergne.
To the distress of the court, the wise and ancient Harsigny, refusing all pleas and offers of riches to remain, insisted on returning to the quiet of his home at Laon. He was awarded 2,000 gold crowns and the privilege of using four horses from the royal stables free of charge whenever he might wish to revisit the court. He never did. Several months later he died, leaving a historic effigy.
Harsigny’s tomb was the first of its kind in the cult of death that was a legacy of the 14th century. His marble image does not show him in the pride of life at 33, as was customary in the hope of resurrection, when the chosen were expected to rise at the same age as Jesus Christ. Rather, following his specific instructions, the effigy is the visible image of the corpse inside the coffin. The recumbent body is shown exactly as it was in death, naked, in the extreme thinness of very old age with wrinkled skin stretched over the bones, hands crossed over the genitals, no drapery or covering of any kind, a stark confession of the nothingness of mortal life.
Before leaving his royal patient, Harsigny had advised against burdening him with the responsibilities of state. “I give him back to you in good health,” he had said, “but be careful not to worry or irritate him. His mind is not yet strong; little by little it will improve. Burden him with work as little as you can; pleasure and forgetfulness will be better for him than anything else.” This advice perfectly suited the Dukes. Sovereign in name only, Charles returned to Paris to dally with the ladies in the gardens of St. Pol and enjoy the amusements and festivities organized every night by his wife and brother. In relief from madness, frivolity abounded and the uncles did not interfere, “for so long as the Queen and the Duc d’Orléans danced, they were not dangerous nor even annoying.”
Court purveyors and moneylenders throve, mystery plays and magicians filled every hour, sorcerers and impostors found unlimited credulity, fashions went to extremes especially in hairdressing. Young men curled their locks and trimmed their beards in two points, while the elaborate braided shells worn by the ladies over their ears grew so fantastic and enormous that they had to turn sideways when passing through a doorway. Queen Isabeau and her sister-in-law Valentina vied with each other in novelties and opulence; dresses were loaded with jewels, fringes, and fantastical emblems. In the taverns people murmured against the extravagance and license. They loved the crowned youth, who for his affability and openhandedness and easy conversation with all ranks, was called Charles le Bien-aimé (the Well-beloved), but they deplored the “foreigners” from Bavaria and Italy and blamed the uncles for allowing dissipations unbecoming to the King of France.
Thrust to the head of the court as young boys not yet in their teens, Charles and Louis had none of their father’s care for the dignity of the crown; they had neither discipline nor sense of decorum. Deprived of major responsibility, they made up for it in play, and adults’ play requires constant new excesses to be entertaining.
On the night when these culminated in horror, Coucy was not present because he was in Savoy, using his negotiating talents to settle a tremendous family quarrel which had split the ruling house and all related noble families and created a crisis of hostility that threatened to block passage for the march on Rome. The issue, involving ducal families, dower rights, and of course property, derived from the fact that the Red Count, Amadeus VII, who had recently died at the age of 31, had left the guardianship of his son to his mother, a sister of the Duc de Bourbon, instead of to his wife, a daughter of the Duc de Berry. It was to take three months before Coucy and Guy de Tremoille succeeded in negotiating a treaty that brought the overblown fracas to an end and left the rival Countesses in “peaceable accord with their subjects.”
On the Tuesday before Candlemas Day (January 28, 1393), four days after Coucy had left Paris, the Queen gave a masquerade to celebrate the wedding of a favorite lady-in-waiting who, twice widowed, was now being married for the third time. A woman’s re-marriage, according to certain traditions, was considered an occasion for mockery and often celebrated by a charivari for the newlyweds with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders, and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the bridal chamber. Although this was a usage “contrary to all decency,” says the censorious Monk of St. Denis, King Charles had let himself be persuaded by dissolute friends to join in such a charade.
Six young men including the King and Yvain, bastard son of the Count of Foix, disguised themselves as “wood savages,” in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, “so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” Face masks entirely concealed their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-filled halls, they forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. Plainly, an element of Russian roulette was involved, the tempting of death that has repeatedly been the excitement of highborn and decadent youth. Certain ways of behavior vary little across the centuries. Plainly, too, there was an element of cruelty in involving as one of the actors a man thinly separated from madness.
The deviser of the affair, “cruelest and most insolent of men,” was one Huguet de Guisay, favored in the royal circle for his outrageous schemes. He was a man of “wicked life” who “corrupted and schooled youth in debaucheries,” and held commoners and the poor in hatred and contempt. He called them dogs, and with blows of sword and whip took pleasure in forcing them to imitate barking. If a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the ground and, standing on his back, would kick him with spurs, crying, “Bark, dog!” in response to his cries of pain.
In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the fifteen-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger—accounts of the episode differ—Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who flung himself into a large wine-cooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot, Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!”
This ghastly affair, coming so soon after the King’s madness, was like an exclamation point to the malign succession of events that had tormented the century. Charles’s narrow escape threw Paris into a “great commotion,” and anger swept the citizens at the appalling frivolity which had so casually endangered the life and honor of the King. Had he died, they said, the people would have massacred the uncles and all the court; “not one of them would have escaped death, nor any knight found in Paris.” Alarmed at these dangerous sentiments with their echo of the Maillotins’ rebellion barely ten years past, the uncles prevailed on the King to ride in solemn procession to Notre Dame to appease the people. Behind Charles on horseback, his uncles and brother followed barefoot as penitents. As the involuntary agent of the tragedy, Louis was widely reproached for his dissolute habits. In expiation he built a chapel for the Célestins with marvelous stained glass and rich altar furnishings and an endowment for perpetual prayers. He paid for it with revenues given him by the King from Craon’s confiscated property, leaving it a question as to whose soul was absolved.
The fatal masquerade came to be called the Bal des Ardents—Dance of the Burning Ones—but it could as well have been called the Danse Macabre, after a new kind of processional play on the theme of death that had lately come into vogue. Of uncertain origin and meaning, the name Macabre first appeared in writing in a poem of 1376 by Anjou’s chancellor, Jean le Fèvre, containing the line, “Je fis de Macabré le danse (I do the Danse Macabre). It may have derived from an older Danse Machabreus, meaning “of the Maccabees,” or from similarity to the Hebrew word for grave-diggers and the fact that Jews worked as grave-diggers in medieval France. The dance itself probably developed under the influence of recurring plague, as a street performance to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler. In murals illustrating the dance at the Church of the Innocents in Paris, fifteen pairs of figures, clerical and lay, from pope and emperor down the scale to monk and peasant, friar and child, make up the procession.
“Advance, see yourselves in us,” they say in the accompanying verses, “dead, naked, rotten and stinking. So will you be.… To live without thinking of this risks damnation.… Power, honor, riches are naught; at the hour of death only good works count.… Everyone should think at least once a day of his loathsome end,” to remind him to do good deeds and go to mass if he wishes to be redeemed and escape “the dreadful pain of hell without end which is unspeakable.”
Each figure speaks his piece: the constable knows that Death carries off the bravest, even Charlemagne; the knight, once loved by the ladies, knows that he will make them dance no more; the plump abbot, that “the fattest rots first”; the astrologer, that his knowledge cannot save him; the peasant who has lived all his days in care and toil and often wished for death, now when the hour has come would much rather be digging in the vineyards “even in rain and wind.” The point is made over and over, that here is you and you and you. The cadaverous figure who leads the procession is not Death but the Dead One. “It is yourself,” says the inscription under the murals of the dance at La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne.
The cult of death was to reach its height in the 15th century, but its source was in the 14th. When death was to be met any day around any corner, it might have been expected to become banal; instead it exerted a ghoulish fascination. Emphasis was on worms and putrefaction and gruesome physical details. Where formerly the dominant idea of death was the spiritual journey of the soul, now the rotting of the body seemed more significant. Effigies of earlier centuries were serene, with hands joined in prayer and eyes open, anticipating eternal life. Now, following Harsigny’s example, great prelates often had themselves shown as cadavers in realistic detail. To accomplish this, death masks and molds of bodily parts were made of wax, incidentally promoting portraiture and a new recognition of individual traits. The message of the effigies was that of the Danse Macabre. Over the scrawny, undraped corpse of Cardinal Jean de La Grange, who was to die in Avignon in 1402, the inscription asks observers, “So, miserable one, what cause for pride?”
The cult of the lugubrious in coming decades made the cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, with the Danse Macabre painted on its walls, the most desirable burial place and popular meeting place in Paris. Charnel houses built into the 48 arches of the cloister were donated by rich bourgeois and nobles—among them Boucicaut and Berry—to hold their remains. Because twenty parishes had the right of burial at the Innocents, the old dead had to be continually disinterred and their tombstones sold to make room for the new. Skulls and bones piled up under the cloister arches were an attraction for the curious, and bleak proof of ultimate leveling. Shops of all kinds found room in and around the cloister; prostitutes solicited there, alchemists found a market place, gallants made it a rendezvous, dogs wandered in and out. Parisians came to tour the charnel houses, watch burials and disinterments, gaze at the murals, and read the verses. They listened to daylong sermons and shuddered as the Dead One blowing his horn entered from the Rue St. Denis leading his procession of awful dancers.
Art followed the lugubrious. The crown of thorns, rarely pictured before, became a realistic instrument of pain drawing blood in the paintings of the second half of the century. The Virgin acquired seven sorrows, ranging from the flight into Egypt to the Pietà—the limp dead body of her son lying across her knees. Claus Sluter, sculptor to the Duke of Burgundy, made the first known Pietà in France in 1390 for the convent of Champmol at Dijon. At the same time, the playful smiling faces of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas with their gentle draperies and happy infants appear amid the gloom. Secular painting is gay and exquisite; Death never disturbs those lyrical picnics beneath enchanted towers.
The Black Death returned for the fourth time in 1388–90. Earlier recurrences had affected chiefly children who had not acquired immunity, but in the fourth round a new adult generation fell under the swift contagion. By this time Europe’s population was reduced to between 40 and 50 percent of what it had been when the century opened, and it was to fall even lower by mid-15th century. People of the time rarely mention this startling diminution of their world, although it was certainly visible to them in reduced trade, in narrowed areas of cultivation, in abbeys and churches abandoned or unable to maintain services for lack of revenue, in urban districts destroyed in war and left unrepaired after sixty years.
On the other hand, it may be that when people were fewer they ate better, and proportionately more money circulated. Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence of growing business exists alongside that of lowered trade. An Italian merchant who died in 1410 left 100,000 documents of correspondence with agents in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Tunisia. The merchant class had more money at its command than before, and its expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance. The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras, Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative art. Mariners’ maps reached new efficiency, allowing sea monsters to disappear from the lower corner in favor of accurate coastlines and navigational aids. Bourgeois money created a new audience for writers and poets and encouraged literature through the buying of books. Several thousand scribes were employed turning out copies to meet the demand of the 25 booksellers and stationarii of Paris. The flamboyant in architecture, with its lavish multitude of attenuated pinnacles, canopied niches, and lacy buttresses, expressed not only a technical exuberance but a denial, even a defiance, of decline. How to reconcile with pessimism the Milan Cathedral, that fantastic mountain of filigree in stone begun in the last quarter of the century?
Psychological effects are clearer than the physical. Never was so much written about the miseria of human life, and the sense of dwindling numbers, even if unmentioned, promoted pessimism about human fate. “What schal befalle hiereafter, God wot,” wrote John Gower in England in 1393,
—for now upon this tyde
men se the world on every syde
In sondry wyse so dyversed
That it welnyh stant all reversed.
For men of affairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time allowed little confidence in the future. The letters of Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato, show him living in daily dread of war, pestilence, famine, and insurrection, believing neither in the stability of government nor in the honesty of colleagues. “The earth and the sea are full of robbers,” he wrote to one of his partners, “and the great part of mankind is evilly disposed.”
Gerson believed he lived in the senility of the world when society, like some delirious old man, suffered from fantasies and illusions. He, like others, felt the time was at hand for the coming of Anti-Christ and the end of the world—to be followed by a better one. In popular expectation, Apocalypse would bring the return of a great emperor—a second Charlemagne, a third Frederick, an imperial messiah—who, coupled with an angelic pope, would reform the Church, renew society, and save Christendom. Churchmen and moralists in apocalyptic mood stressed more than ever the vanity of worldly things—though without visibly diminishing anyone’s desire for, and pride in, possessions.
A pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in order to prove the need of salvation. It was by no means new to the 14th century. If Cardinal d’Ailly thought the time of Anti-Christ was at hand, so had Thomas Aquinas a hundred years before. If the corruption of the Church dismayed the devout, it had done so no less in the year 1040 when a monk of Cluny wrote, “For whensoever religion hath failed among the pontiffs … what can we think but that the whole human race, root and branch, is sliding willingly down again into the gulf of primaeval chaos?” If in a waning period Mézières’ favorite dictum was “The things of this fleeting world go ever from bad to worse,” he was matched by Roger Bacon, who had asserted in 1271, at the height of a dynamic period, “More sins reign in these days than in any past age … justice perisheth, all peace is broken.”
The sentiments were not new, but in the 14th century they were more pervasive and more disparaging of the human kind. “Time past had virtue and righteousness, but today reigns only vice,” is Deschamps’ lament. How may safe-conducts be trusted? asks Christine de Pisan, discussing the failures of chivalry, “seeing the little truth and fidelity that this day runneth through all the world.” Elsewhere she writes, “All good customs fail and virtues are held at discount. Learning which once governed is now of no account.” Her complaint had some justification, for even the University had taken to selling degrees in theology to candidates unwilling to undertake its long and difficult studies or fearful of failing the examination. License to grant the degree was extended to other universities, even to towns which had no university, giving rise to the sarcastic saying, “Why not [a degree] from a pigsty?” Denouncing the age for decadence was in fashion, but the decadence was felt as real, and the sense of a moral decline from some better day in the past was insistent. The poets wrote for the very circles they denounced and they must have touched some responsive chord. Deschamps—who never left off scolding—was made chamberlain to Louis d’Orléans in 1382.
All ranks of life shared in the blame. Deeply shaken by the Peasants’ Revolt, Gower wrote a jeremiad on the corruptions of the age called Vox Clamantis, in which he unfolds a “manifold pestilence of vices” among poor as well as rich. The unknown author of another indictment entitled it “Vices of the Different Orders of Society,” and found all equally at fault: the Church is sunk in schism and simony, clergy and monks are in darkness, kings, nobles, and knights given over to indulgence and rapine, merchants to usury and fraud; law is a creature of bribery; the commons are plunged in ignorance and oppressed by robbers and murderers.
Mankind was at one of history’s ebbs. At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God’s hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the miseria of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society.
The yearning for peace and for an end to the schism was widely voiced. A notary of Cahors said at this time that in all 36 years of his life he had never known his diocese without war. Thoughtful observers, conscious of social damage, called for peace as the only hope of reform, of re-uniting the Church, and of resisting the Turks, who had reached the Danube. In his Dream of the Old Pilgrim, written in 1389 to persuade Charles VI and Richard II to make peace, Mézières draws a pathetic and dramatic picture of an old woman in torn clothes, with disheveled gray hair, leaning on a cane and carrying a little book gnawed by rats. She was called Devotion, but is now called Despair because dwellers of her kingdom are in slavery to Mohammed, Christian trade is endangered, the eastern ramparts of Christendom menaced by enemies of the Faith.
“Veniat Pax!,” the cry of Gerson’s famous sermon of fifteen years later, was already sounding in people’s minds. Few could tell what the war was fought for. In England, Gower thought it no longer a just war but one prolonged by “greedy lords” for gain. Let it be over, he cried, “so that the world may stand appeased.” French peasants may be heard, if Deschamps is a good reporter, discussing the war as they reap. “It has gone on long enough,” says Robin, “I know no one who does not fear it. Surely the whole thing is not worth a scallion.”
“Nevertheless,” replies hunchback Henry, sadly wise,
“Each will have to take up his shield,
For we’ll have no peace till they give back Calais.”
That is the refrain of each stanza and that was the sticking point. Anxious as they might be for an end to the state of war, the rulers of France were not prepared to conclude a permanent peace that left the open gate of Calais in English hands.
For the Duke of Burgundy, peace was a pressing necessity in order to restore the commerce between Flanders and England. It could only have been with his approval that a holy man called Robert the Hermit appeared at court, sponsored by the King’s chamberlain, Guillaume Martel, to bring word that peace was Heaven’s command. When returning from Palestine, the Hermit said, a voice had spoken to him out of a terrible storm at sea, telling him that he would survive the peril and that on reaching land he must go to the King and tell him to make peace with England, and warn that all who opposed it would pay dearly. Peace had its opponents as well as advocates.
The most important advocate—and most significant change in the situation—was the King of England. As autocratic as his father, but no soldier, Richard II wanted to end the war in order to reduce the power of the barons and promote a more absolute monarchy. His wish coincided with that of the Duke of Lancaster, who, having established his daughters as Queens of Castile and Portugal, wanted peace with France to protect their interests. “Let my brother Gloucester go make war on Sultan Bajazet, who is menacing Christendom on the frontiers of Hungary,” he said; that was the proper sphere for those anxious to fight.
Through the joint efforts of Lancaster and Burgundy, parley was resumed in May 1393 at Leulinghen, a war-torn village on the banks of the Somme near Abbeville. For lack of housing, the delegates—Burgundy and Berry for France, Lancaster, Gloucester, and the Archbishop of York for England—and their retinues lived in tents, among which Philip of Burgundy’s was naturally the focus of all eyes. It was made of painted canvas in the form of a castle with turrets and crenellated walls and a portcullis guarding the entrance beween two towers of wood. The main hall inside gave onto many separate apartments divided by little streets.
King Charles was theoretically if not actively present, housed in a nearby Benedictine abbey with a fine enclosed garden on the banks of the beautiful river. With his mind fixed on the adventure of crusade, the King of France, like the King of England, was ready to close a struggle begun before either of them had been born. Meetings of the parley were held in a chapel with a thatched roof and walls hung with tapestries depicting ancient battles to conceal the ruined murals behind. When Lancaster remarked that the delegates should not be looking at scenes of war when treating of peace, the tapestries were hurriedly removed and replaced by scenes of the last days of Christ. As senior uncles, Berry and Lancaster sat on elevated chairs with Burgundy and Gloucester next to them, and counts, prelates, knights, learned lawyers, and clerks ranged along the walls. Among the delegates moved a royal visitor, Leon V de Lusignan, called King of Armenia although in fact all that remained of his realm was Cyprus. Having lost that too to the Turks, he was a fervent voice importuning both the French Dukes and the English for a crusade.
The schism became an issue when Pope Clement sent the noble Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna, well supplied with gold and magnificent gifts, to urge the legitimacy of the Avignonese papacy on the English. Angrily Lancaster said to him, “It is you, Cardinals of Avignon, who gave [the schism] birth, you who sustain it, you who augment it every day. Woe to you!” Burgundy did not argue the issue. He offered to ignore the schism in order to move the parley toward a treaty, leaving it to the University to work out the means of re-uniting the Church.
When it came to the French demand for the razing of Calais and the English demand for fulfillment of all the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, the parties were as far apart as ever. Calais was “the last town we would ever give up,” the English said, while the French insisted that territories which had resolutely refused to give their allegiance to England could not be forcibly transferred. At this impasse each side discreetly dropped pursuit of its major demand and moved to take up smaller issues one by one.
Dour and suspicious, Gloucester resisted every proposal. He complained that the French used ambiguous language, filled with “subtle cloaked words of double understanding” which they turned and twisted to their advantage—such words as Englishmen did not use, “for their speech and intent is plain.” Already the stereotype of the crafty Frenchman and bluff Englishman was operating. At Gloucester’s insistence, the English required that all proposals be reduced to writing so that they could carefully examine any wording which they found obscure or susceptible of two constructions. Then they would send their clerks to learn how the French understood it, and afterward require it to be either amended or removed, thereby lengthening procedures tediously.
Here was a real cause of difficulty in peace-making. Although English lords were French-speaking, the language was acquired, not native, and they did not feel secure in it. So great a noble as the first Duke of Lancaster, who wrote the Livre des sainctes médecines, says of his work, “If the French is not good I should be excused, because I am English and not well versed in French.” Gloucester made the language problem an excuse for dragging his heels and delaying agreement, but mistrust of the French was real. Ever since Charles V’s manipulation of the clauses of the Treaty of Brétigny, the English had approached—and balked at—settlements in fear of being gulled.
To influence Gloucester by his divine mission and eloquence, Robert the Hermit was summoned to the conference by Burgundy. In passionate words the holy man begged the Duke, “For the love of God, do not longer oppose the peace.” While the war of English and French tore Christianity apart, Bajazet and his Turks advanced. The duty of Christians, he pleaded, was to unite against the infidel.
“Ha, Robert,” replied Gloucester, “I wish not to prevent a peace, but you Frenchmen use so many colored words beyond our understanding that, when you will, you make them signify war or peace as you shall choose … dissembling always until you have gained your end.” Nevertheless, Gloucester had to subdue his intransigence in deference to the wishes of the royal nephew he despised. Short of an agreement on Calais, permanent peace was still elusive, but some progress was made in that the truce was extended for four years, during which various disputed territories were to revert to either side, clearing the way for final settlement.
In June, while the last clauses were being argued, madness again engulfed the King of France. Like the illness at Amiens foreshadowing his first attack, the second seizure coincided with a peace parley. Perhaps impatience at the long-drawn-out proceedings was a disturbing factor. This time the insanity returned more seriously than before and lasted for a longer period of eight months. For the rest of his life, which was not to end until 1422, thirty years after the first attack, Charles was intermittently mad, with remissions just often enough to preclude any stable government and to exacerbate the power struggle around a half-empty throne. In these thirty years the vicious contest between the factions of Orléans and Burgundy and the successors of each was to bring back the English and reduce France to a state as shattered and helpless as in the aftermath of Poitiers.
In the fit of 1393 the King’s spirit “was covered by such heavy shadows” that he could not remember who or what he was. He did not know he was King, that he was married, that he had children, or that his name was Charles. He displayed two pronounced aversions: for the fleur-de-lys entwined with his own name or initials in the royal coat-of-arms, which he tried to deface in rage wherever he saw it, and for his wife, from whom he fled in terror. If she approached him, he would cry, “Who is that woman the sight of whom torments me? Find out what she wants and free me from her demands if you can, that she may follow me no more.” When he saw the arms of Bavaria, he danced in front of them, making rude gestures. He failed to recognize his children although he knew his brother, uncles, councillors, and servants, and remembered the names of those long dead. Only his brother’s neglected wife, sad Valentina, for whom he asked constantly, calling her his “dear sister,” could soothe him. This preference naturally gave rise to rumors, fostered by the Burgundian faction, that Valentina had bewitched him by subtle poison. Given credence by the record of Visconti crimes and the Italian reputation for poisoning, the whisperers charged that Valentina was ambitious for greater place, having been told by her notorious father to make herself Queen of France.
Madness was familiar in the Middle Ages in all its varieties. William of Hainault-Bavaria, a nephew of Queen Philippa of England, “tall, young, strong, dark and lively,” had been a raving maniac confined in a castle for thirty years, most of the time with both hands and feet tied. Sufferers from lesser derangement were generally not confined but moved among their neighbors like the deformed, the spastic, the scrofulous, and other misfits, and joined in the pilgrimages to Rocamadour in search of a cure. Madness as often as not was seen as curable and understood as a natural phenomenon caused by mental or emotional stress. Rest and sleep were prescribed, as well as bleeding, baths, ointments, potions made from metal, and happiness. Equally, it was seen as an affliction by God or the Devil to be treated by exorcism or by shaving a cross in the hair of the victim’s head or tying him to the rood screen in church so that his condition might be improved by hearing mass.
No physician or treatment helped Charles VI in his later seizures. An unkempt, evil-eyed charlatan and pseudo-mystic named Arnaut Guilhem was allowed to treat Charles on his claim of possessing a book given by God to Adam by means of which man could overcome all affliction resulting from original sin. A prototype Rasputin who had gained the confidence of the Queen and courtiers, he insisted that the King’s malady was caused by sorcery, but, failing himself to summon superior forces, was eventually ousted. Other quacks and remedies of all kinds were tried to no avail. Even doctors of the University called for discovery and punishment of the “sorcerers.” On one occasion two Augustinian friars, after gaining no results from magic incantations and a liquid made from powdered pearls, proposed to cut incisions in the King’s head. When this was disallowed, the friars accused the King’s barber and the Duc d’Orléans’ concierge of sorcery and, when they were acquitted, rashly transferred the accusation against Orléans himself. In consequence, the friars were brought to trial and torture, confessed themselves liars, sorcerers, and idolators in league with the Devil, and, on being divested of clerical status, were handed over to the secular arm and executed.
The obsession with sorcery in Charles’s case reflected a rising belief in the occult and demonic. Times of anxiety nourish belief in conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid. Hence the rising specter of the witch. By the 1390s witchcraft had been officially recognized by the Inquisition as equivalent to heresy. The Church was on the defensive, torn apart by the schism, challenged in authority and doctrine by aggressive movements of dissent, beset by cries for reform. Like the ordinary man, it felt surrounded by malevolent forces, of which sorcerers and witches were seen as the agents carrying out the will of the Evil One. It was during this time, in 1398, that theologians of the University of Paris held the solemn conclave which declared the black arts to be infecting society with renewed vigor.
The poor mad King was a victim of these beliefs. “In the name of Jesus Christ,” he cried, weeping in his agony, “if there is any one of you who is an accomplice in this evil I suffer, I beg him to torture me no longer but let me die!” After this piteous outburst, the government, in the hope of appeasing the anger of Heaven, passed an ordinance providing severe penalties for blasphemers and permitting confessors to attend prisoners condemned to die. Further, the Porte de l’Enfer (Gate of Hell) was renamed the Porte St. Michel.
In later years the King’s seizures came and went unpredictably. In one year, 1399, he suffered six attacks, each more serious than the last until he was cowering in a corner believing himself made of glass or roaming the corridors howling like a wolf. In his intervals of sanity Charles wished to resume the function of kingship, though it had to be in mainly ceremonial capacity. At these times he is said to have resumed marital relations with Isabeau, who gave birth to four more children between 1395 and 1401—in itself no proof of paternity.
Frivolous and sensuous, still an alien with a thick German accent, humiliated by her husband’s mad aversion, Isabeau abandoned Charles to his valets and to a girl she supplied to fill her place, a horse-dealer’s daughter named Odette de Champdivers, who resembled her and was called by the public “the little Queen.” The Queen herself turned to frantic pleasures and to adultery combined with political intrigue and a passionate pursuit of money. Insecure in France, she devoted herself to amassing a personal fortune and promoting the enrichment and interests of her Bavarian family. She extracted from Charles, lucid or not, assignments in her own and her children’s names of land, revenues, residences, and separate household accounts. She acquired coffers of treasure and jewels which she stored in a variety of vaults. Her sway at court grew ever more extravagant and hectic, the ladies’ dresses more low-necked, the amours more scandalous, the festivities more extreme. The Queen established a Court of Love at which both sexes took the parts of advocates and judges and discussed, according to a scornful contemporary, “in this ridiculous tribunal the most ridiculous questions.”
Court life can produce ennui and disgust even in a Queen. In nostalgia for the bucolic, 400 years before Marie Antoinette, Isabeau built a Hotel des Bergères (House of the Shepherds) at her property of St. Ouen, complete with gardens and fields, barn, stable, sheepfold, and dovecote, where she played at farming and took care of chickens and livestock. The King, as time went on, was rumored to be neglected to the point of penury, living unclean and even hungry in apartments where the paper windowpanes were torn and pigeons entered to leave their droppings. During one return of sanity he arrested the Queen’s chamberlain and current paramour, had him imprisoned in chains, questioned under torture, and afterward secretly drowned in the Seine.
In the political struggle Isabeau attached herself where power lay. When Louis d’Orléans was named Regent, she joined him against Burgundy and was generally supposed to have become his mistress. When he was assassinated by Burgundy’s son and successor, John the Fearless, she changed sides and moved into the camp and bed of Louis’ murderer. In the vacuum created by a living but helpless King, France floundered, and the Queen, lacking any capacity to cope, became the tool of the ruthless forces—Burgundy and England—which moved into the vacuum. Hard-pressed in Paris, separated geographically and politically from the Dauphin, unable to mobilize support, she finally agreed to the infamous treaty which named the King of England heir to the throne of France in place of her own son. In the end, obese and depraved, she outlived her husband by fifteen years and was eventually to find an all too imaginative biographer in the Marquis de Sade.
Looking back from a perspective of some 200 years, the Duc de Sully, Henri IV’s chief minister, characterized the reign of Charles VI as “pregnant with sinister events … the grave of good laws and good morals in France.”