Part 39

Here he broke off abruptly, bit his lip, as if to catch his half-escaped thought, rested his piercing eye in turn upon each of the five persons around him, and suddenly seizing his hat with both hands and looking it in the face, he said to it: "Oh! I would burn you if you knew what is in my head!"

Then, casting once more about him the attentive and uneasy glance of a fox stealthily returning to its earth:

"No matter! we will succor the bailiff. Unfortunately we have but few troops here at present against so many of the populace. We must wait until tomorrow. Order shall be restored in the City, and all who are taken shall be hanged roundly.

--By the way, Sire!" said Coictier the crony, "I forgot that in the first alarm; the watch has seized two stragglers of the band. If Your Majesty would see these men, they are there."

--"Would I see them!" cried the king. "How now! By God's body! you forget a thing like that!--Run quick, you, Olivier! go fetch them."

Master Olivier went out and returned a moment after with the two prisoners, surrounded by archers of the guard. The first had a gross, idiotic, drunk and astonished face. He was clad in rags and walked with a bending knee and a dragging foot. The second was a pale and smiling figure whom the reader already knows.

The king examined them for an instant without speaking, then abruptly addressing the first:

"What is your name?"

--"Gieffroy Pincebourde."

--"Your trade?"

--"A vagabond."

--"What were you going to do in that damnable sedition?"

The vagabond looked at the king, balancing his arms with a dazed air. He was one of those ill-shaped heads where intelligence is about as much at ease as light beneath a snuffer.

"I know not," said he. "They were going, I was going."

--"Were you not going to outrageously attack and pillage your lord the bailiff of the Palace?"

--"I know they were going to take something from somebody. That is all."

A soldier showed the king a pruning-knife that had been seized on the vagabond.

"Do you recognize this weapon?" asked the king.

--"Yes, it is my pruning-knife. I am a vine-dresser."

--"And do you recognize this man as your comrade?" added Louis XI, pointing to the other prisoner.

--"No. I do not know him."

--"That is enough," said the king. And making a sign with his finger to the silent, motionless person near the door, whom we have already pointed out to the reader:

"Crony Tristan, here is a man for you."

Tristan l'Hermite bowed. He gave a low order to two archers who led away the poor vagabond.

Meanwhile the king had approached the second prisoner, who was sweating great drops.

"Your name?"

--"Sire, Pierre Gringoire."

--"Your trade?"

--"A philosopher, Sire."

--"How do you dare, knave, to go and besiege our friend the bailiff of the Palace, and what have you to say of this popular commotion?"

--"Sire, I was not of it."

--"Now then! rogue, were you not apprehended by the watch in that evil company?"

--"No, Sire, there is a mistake. It is a fatality. I write tragedies. Sire, I beseech Your Majesty to hear me. I am a poet. It is the melancholy of men of my profession to go by the streets at night. I was passing by there this evening. It is a great chance. I was arrested wrongly. I am innocent of this civil tempest. Your Majesty sees that the vagabond did not recognize me. I conjure Your Majesty..."

--"Be silent!" said the king between two sips of his herbal drink. "You are breaking our head."

Tristan l'Hermite stepped forward and pointing to Gringoire with his finger:

"Sire, may one hang this one also?"

It was the first word he had uttered.

--"Pshaw!" answered the king negligently. "I see no objection."

--"I see many!" said Gringoire.

Our philosopher was at that moment greener than an olive. He saw by the cold and indifferent mien of the king that there was no resource left but in something very pathetic, and threw himself at the feet of Louis XI, crying with a desperate gesticulation:

"Sire! Your Majesty will deign to hear me! Sire! do not burst in thunder over so small a thing as myself. The great thunderbolt of God does not bombard a lettuce. Sire, you are an august monarch most powerful, have pity on a poor honest man, who would be more hindered from stirring up a revolt than an icicle from giving a spark! Most gracious Sire, gentleness is the virtue of lion and of king. Alas! rigor but frightens minds; the impetuous gusts of the north wind cannot make the passer-by quit his cloak, while the sun, little by little shedding its rays, so warms him that he will put it off in his shirt. Sire, you are the sun. I protest to you, my sovereign master and lord, I am not a vagabond companion, thieving and disorderly. Revolt and brigandage are not the trappings of Apollo. It is not I who shall go precipitate myself into those clouds which burst in sounds of sedition. I am a faithful vassal of Your Majesty. The same jealousy that a husband has for the honor of his wife, the resentment that a son has for the love of his father, a good vassal owes to the glory of his king; he must pine with zeal for his house, for the increase of his service. Any other passion that transported him could be but fury. Such, Sire, are my maxims of state. Therefore, judge me not seditious and plundering by my elbow-worn habit. If you grant me pardon, Sire, I shall wear it at the knees in praying to God night and morning! Alas! I am not exceedingly rich, it is true. I am even somewhat poor. But not vicious for that. It is not my fault. Everyone knows that great riches are not drawn from belles-lettres, and that those most consummate in good books have not always a great fire in winter. Only pettifogging takes all the grain and leaves the straw to other learned professions. There are forty most excellent proverbs on the holey cloak of philosophers. Oh! Sire, clemency is the only light that can illumine the interior of a great soul. Clemency bears the torch before all other virtues. Without it, they are blind men groping for God. Mercy, which is the same as clemency, wins the love of subjects, which is the most powerful bodyguard of the prince's person. What does it matter to you, Majesty whose countenance is dazzling, that there should be one poor man more upon the earth? a poor innocent philosopher, floundering in the darkness of calamity, with his empty purse rattling on his hollow belly? Besides, Sire, I am a man of letters. Great kings make a pearl in their crown of protecting letters. Hercules disdained not the title of Musagetes. Mathias Corvin favored Jehan de Monroyal, the ornament of mathematics. Now, to hang men of letters is a poor way of protecting letters. What a blot on Alexander, had he hanged Aristoteles! That deed would not be a little gnat on the face of his reputation to embellish it, but a malignant ulcer to disfigure it. Sire! I have made a very apt epithalamium for mademoiselle of Flanders and my lord the most august dauphin. This is not the work of a firebrand of rebellion. Your Majesty sees that I am not a scribbler, that I have studied excellently, and that I have much natural eloquence. Grant me pardon, Sire. In so doing, you shall perform a gallant action toward Our Lady, and I swear to you I am much frightened at the idea of being hanged!"

While speaking thus, the afflicted Gringoire kissed the king's slippers, and Guillaume Rym said low to Coppenole: "He does well to crawl on the ground. Kings are like the Jupiter of Crete, they have ears only at their feet." And, without heeding the Jupiter of Crete, the hosier answered with a heavy smile, his eye fixed on Gringoire: "Oh! that is well said! I think I hear chancellor Hugonet begging my pardon."

When Gringoire at last stopped, quite out of breath, he raised his head trembling toward the king, who was scratching with his nail a stain that his hose had at the knee. Then His Majesty fell to drinking from the cup of herbal drink. Moreover, he uttered not a word, and this silence tortured Gringoire. The king at length looked at him. "There is a terrible bawler!" said he. Then turning toward Tristan l'Hermite: "Bah! let him go!"

Gringoire fell on his back, all aghast with joy.

"At liberty!" grumbled Tristan. "Does not Your Majesty wish him kept a little in cage?"

--"Crony," replied Louis XI, "do you think it is for such birds that we have cages made at three hundred sixty-seven livres eight sous three deniers?--Let the knave go at once (Louis XI affected this word, which, with By God's body, formed the groundwork of his joviality), and put him out with a shove!"

--"Ouf!" cried Gringoire, "what a great king is here!"

And for fear of a counter-order, he precipitated himself toward the door which Tristan reopened with rather ill grace. The soldiers went out with him, pushing him before them with great blows of the fist, which Gringoire bore like a true stoic philosopher.

The king's good humor, since the revolt against the bailiff had been announced to him, shone through everything. This unusual clemency was no slight sign of it. Tristan l'Hermite in his corner wore the scowling look of a dog that has seen and has not had.

The king, however, beat gaily with his fingers on the arm of his chair the tune of Pont-Audemer. He was a dissembling prince, but one who knew much better how to hide his sorrows than his joys. These outward manifestations of joy at every good piece of news sometimes went very far; thus, at the death of Charles the Bold, to the point of vowing silver balustrades to Saint-Martin of Tours; at his accession to the throne, to the point of forgetting to order his father's obsequies.

"Ho! Sire!" suddenly cried Jacques Coictier, "what has become of the sharp point of illness for which Your Majesty sent for me?"

--"Oh!" said the king, "truly I suffer much, my crony. I have a whistling in the ear, and fire-rakes that scrape my chest."

Coictier took the king's hand, and began to feel his pulse with a knowing air.

"Look, Coppenole," said Rym in a low voice, "there he is between Coictier and Tristan. That is all his court. A physician for himself, a hangman for the others."

While feeling the king's pulse, Coictier wore an ever more alarmed look. Louis XI looked at him with some anxiety. Coictier grew gloomy visibly. The good man had no other estate than the king's ill health. He exploited it as best he could.

"Oh! oh!" he murmured at last, "this is grave indeed."

--"Is it not?" said the king uneasily.

--"Pulsus creber, anhelans, crepitans, irregularis," continued the physician.

--"By God's body!"

--"Within three days, this may carry off its man."

--"Our Lady!" cried the king. "And the remedy, crony?"

--"I am thinking of it, Sire."

He made Louis XI put out his tongue, shook his head, made a wry face, and in the midst of these antics:

"Pardieu," said he suddenly, "I must tell you that there is a vacancy in the regale benefices, and that I have a nephew."

--"I give my benefice to your nephew, crony Jacques," answered the king; "but draw this fire from my chest."

--"Since Your Majesty is so clement," resumed the physician, "she will not refuse to help me a little in the building of my house in the rue Saint-André-des-Arcs."

--"Hem!" said the king.

--"I am at the end of my means," pursued the doctor, "and it would be truly a pity that the house should have no roof. Not for the house, which is simple and wholly bourgeois, but for the paintings of Jehan Fourbault, which enliven its wainscot. There is a Diana in the air who flies, but so excellent, so tender, so delicate, of so ingenuous a bearing, her head so well dressed and crowned with a crescent, her flesh so white that she tempts those who look on her too curiously. There is also a Ceres. She is yet another very beautiful divinity. She is seated on sheaves of wheat, and crowned with a gallant garland of intertwined ears of corn and salsify and other flowers. Nothing can be seen more amorous than her eyes, rounder than her legs, nobler than her air, better draped than her skirt. She is one of the most innocent and most perfect beauties the brush has produced."

--"Hangman!" growled Louis XI, "where are you driving at?"

--"I need a roof over these paintings, Sire, and though it is a small thing, I have no more money."

--"How much is your roof?"

--"But... a roof of historical copper gilt, two thousand livres at most."

--"Ah! the assassin!" cried the king. "He does not pull a tooth from me that is not a diamond."

--"Do I have my roof?" said Coictier.

--"Yes! and go to the devil, but cure me."

Jacques Coictier bowed profoundly and said:

"Sire, it is a repercussive that will save you. We shall apply to your loins the great defensive plaster, composed with wax salve, Armenian bole, egg-white, oil and vinegar. You shall continue your herbal drink, and we answer for Your Majesty."

A candle that shines attracts not only a gnat. Master Olivier, seeing the king in a giving mood and thinking the moment good, approached in his turn: "Sire..."

--"What now?" said Louis XI.

--"Sire, Your Majesty knows that master Simon Radin is dead?"

--"Well?"

--"It is that he was counselor to the king in the matter of the justice of the treasury."

--"Well?"

--"Sire, his place is vacant."

While speaking thus, the haughty face of master Olivier had left the arrogant expression for the base one. It is the only change a courtier's face is capable of. The king looked him very full in the face, and said dryly: "I understand."

He resumed:

"Master Olivier, the marshal of Boucicaut used to say: 'There is no gift but of a king, there is no fishing but in the sea.' I see you are of monsieur de Boucicaut's opinion. Now hear this. We have a good memory. In 68, we made you varlet of our chamber; in 69, keeper of the castle of the bridge of Saint-Cloud at a hundred livres tournois of wages (you wanted them parisis). In November 73, by letters given at Gergeole, we instituted you concierge of the wood of Vincennes, in place of Gilbert Acle, esquire; in 75, gruyer of the forest of Rouvray-lez-Saint-Cloud, in place of Jacques Le Maire; in 78, we graciously seated you, by letters patent sealed with double tail of green wax, a rent of ten livres parisis, for you and your wife, on the merchants' place, situated at the school Saint-Germain; in 79, we made you gruyer of the forest of Senart, instead of that poor Jehan Daiz; then captain of the castle of Loches; then governor of Saint-Quentin; then captain of the bridge of Meulan, of which you style yourself count. On the five sous of fine paid by every barber who shaves on a feast-day, there are three sous for you, and we have the rest. We have willingly changed your name of Le Mauvais, which too much resembled your countenance. In 74, we granted you, to the great displeasure of our nobility, coat-of-arms of a thousand colors which make of your breast a peacock's. By God's body! are you not sated? Is not the fishery fair and miraculous enough? And do you not fear that one more salmon may capsize your boat? Pride will ruin you, my crony. Pride is ever dogged by ruin and shame. Consider this, and be silent."

These words, pronounced with severity, brought back to insolence the displeased physiognomy of master Olivier.

"Good," he murmured almost aloud, "one sees well the king is sick today. He gives all to the physician."

Louis XI, far from being angered at this sally, resumed with some gentleness: "See here, I forgot yet that I made you my ambassador at Ghent near madame Marie. Yes, gentlemen," added the king turning toward the Flemings, "this one has been ambassador.--There, my crony," he pursued, addressing master Olivier, "let us not be angry, we are old friends. See, it is very late. We have finished our work. Shave me."

Our readers have doubtless not waited until now to recognize in master Olivier that terrible Figaro whom providence, that great maker of dramas, has so artistically mingled in the long and bloody comedy of Louis XI. It is not here that we undertake to develop this singular figure. This barber of the king had three names. At court, he was politely called Olivier le Daim; among the people, Olivier the Devil. He was called by his true name Olivier le Mauvais.

Olivier le Mauvais then remained motionless, sulking at the king, and looking askance at Jacques Coictier.

"Yes, yes! the physician!" said he between his teeth.

"Eh! yes, the physician," resumed Louis XI with a singular good-nature, "the physician has more credit even than you. It is quite simple. He has hold on us by the whole body, and you hold us only by the chin. Go, my poor barber, that will come right again. What would you say then, and what would become of your office if I were a king like king Chilperic who had for a gesture to hold his beard with one hand?--Come, my crony, go about your office, shave me. Go fetch what you need."

Olivier, seeing that the king had taken the part of laughing and that there was not even means to anger him, went out grumbling to execute his orders.

The king rose, approached the window, and suddenly opening it with extraordinary agitation: "Oh! yes!" cried he, clapping his hands, "there is a redness in the sky over the City. It is the bailiff who burns. It can be nothing else. Ah! my good people! see then that you at last aid me in the downfall of the seignories!"

Then, turning toward the Flemings: "Gentlemen, come see this. Is it not a fire that glows red?"

The two Gantois approached.

"A great fire," said Guillaume Rym.

"Oh!" added Coppenole, whose eyes suddenly sparkled, "that recalls to me the burning of the house of the lord of Hymbercourt. There must be a great revolt yonder."

"You think so, master Coppenole?" And the look of Louis XI was almost as joyous as that of the hosier. "Will it not be difficult to resist there?"

"Cross of God! Sire! Your Majesty will chip many a company of men-at-arms upon that!"

"Ah! as for me, it is different," replied the king. "If I wished!..."

The hosier answered boldly:

"If this revolt is what I suppose, you might wish in vain, Sire!"

"Crony," said Louis XI, "with two companies of my guard and a volley of serpentine, one makes short work of a populace of churls."

The hosier, despite the signs Guillaume Rym made him, seemed determined to hold his ground against the king.

"Sire, the Swiss also were churls. Monsieur the duke of Burgundy was a great gentleman, and made light of that rabble. At the battle of Grandson, Sire, he cried: 'Gunners! fire on those knaves!' and he swore by Saint George. But the avoyer Scharnachtal rushed on the fair duke with his mace and his people, and at the encounter of the buffle-skinned peasants the shining Burgundian army burst like a pane at the shock of a pebble. There were many knights killed by marauders there; and they found monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest lord of Burgundy, dead with his great gray horse in a little marsh meadow."

"Friend," replied the king, "you speak of a battle. It is a mutiny here. And I shall come to the end of it when it pleases me to knit my brow."

The other rejoined with indifference:

"That may be, Sire. In that case, it is that the hour of the people is not come."

Guillaume Rym thought he ought to intervene.

"Master Coppenole, you speak to a powerful king."

"I know it," answered the hosier gravely.

"Let him speak, monsieur Rym my friend," said the king, "I love this free-spokenness. My father Charles Seventh used to say that truth was sick. I, for my part, thought she was dead, and had found no confessor. Master Coppenole undeceives me."

Then, laying familiarly his hand on Coppenole's shoulder:

"You were saying then, master Jacques?..."

"I say, Sire, that you may be right, that the hour of the people is not come with you."

Louis XI looked at him with his penetrating eye.

"And when will this hour come, master?"

"You will hear it strike."

"At what clock, if you please?"

Coppenole, with his calm and rustic bearing, made the king approach the window.

"Listen, Sire! There is here a keep, a belfry, cannons, burghers, soldiers. When the belfry shall hum, when the cannons shall rumble, when the keep shall crumble with great noise, when burghers and soldiers shall howl and cut each other's throats, that is the hour which will strike."

The face of Louis became gloomy and dreamy. He remained silent a moment, then gently struck with his hand, as one strokes the croup of a charger, the thick wall of the keep. "Oh! no!" said he. "You will not crumble so easily, my good Bastille?"

And turning with a brusque gesture toward the bold Fleming:

"Have you ever seen a revolt, master Jacques?"

"I have made one," said the hosier.

"How do you make one?" said the king.

"Ah!" answered Coppenole, "it is not very hard. There are a hundred ways. First, the city must be discontented. The thing is not rare. And then the character of the inhabitants. Those of Ghent are easy to revolt. They always love the prince's son, the prince never. Well! one morning, I suppose, one comes into my shop, one says to me: 'Father Coppenole, there is this, there is that, the damsel of Flanders wants to save her ministers, the grand bailiff doubles the truage, or something else.' What one will. I, I leave the work there, I go out of my hosiery, and I go into the street, and I cry: 'To sack!' There is always some broken cask there. I mount on it, and I say aloud the first words that come, what I have on my heart; and when one is of the people, Sire, one always has something on one's heart. Then they gather, they cry, they ring the tocsin, they arm the churls with the disarming of the soldiers, the market folk join in, and away we go! And it will always be thus, as long as there are lords in the lordships, burghers in the boroughs, and peasants in the country."

"And against whom do you rebel thus?" asked the king. "Against your bailiffs? against your lords?"

"Sometimes. It depends. Against the duke also, sometimes."

Louis XI went to sit down again, and said with a smile:

"Ah! here, they are only at the bailiffs!"

At this instant Olivier le Daim re-entered. He was followed by two pages who bore the king's toilet things; but what struck Louis XI was that he was moreover accompanied by the provost of Paris and the knight of the watch, who seemed consternated. The rancorous barber also looked consternated, but pleased underneath. It was he who spoke:

"Sire, I ask pardon of Your Majesty for the calamitous news I bring him."

The king, turning quickly, scraped the mat of the floor with the feet of his chair:

"What do you mean?"

"Sire," resumed Olivier le Daim with the malicious mien of a man rejoicing to deal a violent blow, "it is not upon the bailiff of the palace that this popular sedition rushes."

"And upon whom then?"

"Upon you, Sire."

The old king stood upright and straight as a young man:

"Explain yourself, Olivier! explain yourself! And keep your head well, my crony, for I swear to you by the cross of Saint-Lô that if you lie to us at this hour, the sword that cut off monsieur de Luxembourg's neck is not so notched that it would not still saw yours!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”