Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton
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defends the entrance to the valley, or the passage of the ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the devastated frontier, sleeps on his arms, like the American lieutenant in a blockhouse in the far West, among the Sioux. His house is only a camp and a refuge; some straw and a pile of leaves are thrown on the pavement of the great hall; it is there that he sleeps with his horsemen, unbuckling a spur when he has a chance for repose; the loopholes scarcely allow the day-light to enter—it is important, above all, that the arrows do not. All inclinations, all sentiments, are subordinated to the service; there are posts on the European frontier where the boy of fourteen is called upon to march, and where the widow, up to sixty years of age, is compelled to marry again. Men in the ranks, to fill up the vacancies, men at the posts, to mount guard—this is the cry that issues at this moment from all human institutions, like the call of a voice of bronze." Thanks to these stout defenders, some form of society is again made possible.
A later historian, M. Flach, in his Origines de l'ancienne France, finds the germ from which sprang the whole feudal system in this patronage, the system of defence of the serf and vassal by the landed proprietor. In the great disorganization of the Roman Empire, a portion of the public authority passed into the hands of individuals; when the Frankish kings invaded Gaul, they found there a system of patronage similar to their own. These great proprietors were maintained under the first Merovingian kings, who kept them in due subjection; but as this regulation gradually weakened under the growing power of the land-owner, the private individual found himself ground between these two millstones. A private patron then became his only defence, and thus was hastened the strictly feudal system. With regard to the royal function, which crowned this feudal system, the historian cites two quotations in support of his thesis: "Under Louis d'Outre-mer, the legate of the Pope, Marin, defined the royal authority—he called it patronage [patrocinium]. Forty years later the decisive argument of the Archbishop of Reims, Adalbéron, in sustaining the claims of Hugues Capet to the throne, was: 'You will have in him a father. No one, up to the present time, has invoked in vain his patronage [patrocinium].'"
Quite apart from these valid, historical reasons, the British "love of a lord" is by no means confined to Great Britain. The Parisians, also, have a certain fondness for titles and distinctions of all sorts. For the English aristocracy they profess a genuine admiration, as affording the best example of the success of a certain élite in affecting the social conscience. They quote approvingly John Bright when he admits that his folk—trades-people and commoners—are quite willing to have their public affairs managed by a superior class, specially trained, enjoying an independent and commanding social station. Their titles and their pride of ancestry give them robes and plumes, and a troop follows its officers more readily when they are gorgeously uniformed. Only, it is required that this privilege shall not be abused; no favor to mediocrities, no nepotism. Victor Hugo was more proud of his title of vicomte Hugo than of his greatest work, and Balzac's obstinacy in clinging to his particle of de has lately been shown to have been completely unfounded. To Sainte-Beuve, who infuriated him by constantly speaking of him as M. Honoré Balzac, he wrote: "My name is on my register of birth, as M. Fitz-James's is on his." So it is, but without any de. In 1836, at the period of the legal process to which one of his works, Le Lys dans la vallée, gave rise, he wrote: "If my name is that of an old Gaulish family, it is not my fault; but my name, De Balzac, is my name patronymic, an advantage which is not enjoyed by many aristocratic families who called themselves Odet before they called themselves Châtillon, Riquet before Caraman, Duplessis before Richelieu, and which are none the less great families. … If my name resounds well in some ears, if it is envied by some who are not content with their own, I cannot therefore renounce it. … My father … found in the Trésor des Chartres the concession of land made in the fifth century by the De Balzacs to establish a monastery in the environs of the little town of Balzac (department of La Charente), a copy of which, he told me, was, by their action, enregistered by the Parliament of Paris." It appears that there are existing no Merovingian records of any kind dating earlier than the seventh century; and a keeper of archives, M. Ch. Portal, in the department of Tarn, in which the death of the great novelist's father, "Bernard-François Balzac, born at Nougaïris," is recorded, having looked the matter up, discovered that his ancestors were simple country-people, laborers, who had never dreamed of a de before their name, which, in fact, was really Balssa or Balsa!
The French have no word in their language which exactly translates "snob," so they adopt with enthusiasm the English syllable (mispronouncing it fearfully); and this curious weakness in so great a writer and so keen a student of humanity would be even more remarkable if it were not so very common among other civilized people. M. Jules Lemaître, a couple of years ago, read before the five Academies of the Institute a careful study of this particular social class; there were said to be a crowd of amateur playwrights besieging the managers with plays with this title, and the pretentious claimer of things that are not his in the great world, "the great nephew of Mascarille in the Précieuses ridicules," was honored with more analysis, comment, and reconstruction than he was probably entitled to.
In addition to the three great classes that have ruled over France, and which, with the commons or serfs, have been known to almost every European nation, a third class, the tiers état, still in process of formation elsewhere on the Continent, but which arose in Paris and other great cities in the thirteenth century, is claimed by the historians of this nation as peculiarly French.
Previous to Pepin and Charlemagne, Paris was generally recognized as the capital, though the wandering and barbaric Frankish kings much preferred as places of residence their great country-houses or villas, when they were neither hunting nor fighting. The court of Charlemagne, in the later years of his reign, was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favorite abode. In 775 he was present at the dedication of the new church of Saint-Denis, and the Parisians are said to have made a fête of the occasion. Louis le Débonnaire, his son, more monk than king, also neglected the city, excepting in the matter of founding churches and increasing the privileges of the clergy. But under the last of the Carlovingian emperors, Charles le Gros, the capital redeemed its right to that title by its gallant defence against the Northmen, or Normans, and its valiant count, Eudes, having brought the sluggish emperor to the heights of Montmartre only to see him conclude an unworthy peace with the invaders, founded himself the first national dynasty when his fat suzerain was deposed in the following year. "One of the greatest figures of the Carlovingian decadence," says M. Faure, in a recent monograph, "he continued the monarchy of Charlemagne without changing anything in the institutions, and he gave a precise form to a power that before him was still undecided, that of duke of the Franks."
The royal authority waxed and waned, the turbulent nobles exhausted themselves in war, in struggles amongst themselves and against the king, but the wealth and power of the Church steadily increased. Occasionally only, when its interference was too flagrantly unjust, its authority was defied. The first Capétiens, like the first Carlovingians, whether from motives of self-interest or sincere faith, were its faithful allies. Hugues Capet liked better to wear his cope as Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours than his crown, and he restored to the Church several abbeys which he possessed. His son, Robert the Pious, was almost a saint, and the princes of this dynasty, on the whole, merited the title which Rome gave them, of "eldest sons of the Church." Their piety was not altogether without reward: the bishops of the Ile-de-France and the abbots, chiefs of the abbeys founded by royal grace, brought more than once not only earthly weapons but a spiritual one, that of excommunication, to the defence of the sovereign.
Robert's first care, after his accession to the throne in 996, was to rebuild the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois and the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Près, which had been destroyed by the Northmen. He also erected in his palace a chapel dedicated to Saint Nicolas, which, in 1154, entirely restored, became the Sainte-Chapelle. He washed the feet of the poor, he fed, it is said, sometimes a thousand of them a day; nothing was too sacred for them, neither the silver ornaments of his lance nor the gold fringe of his robe. He was constant in his attendance