Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton
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church services, he composed hymns, himself, which were long retained. Nevertheless, having espoused his cousin Berthe, he found himself excommunicated by the Pope, Gregory V. Among the earliest works of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens, long in the Luxembourg, is a graphic presentation of this unhappy couple, clinging to each other in the poor, bare splendor of the very early mediæval throne-room, the overturned great tapers of the excommunication service on the floor before them, the smoke rising like anathema, and the last of the implacable ministers of the Church departing through the open doorway. Every one deserted them, as though plague-stricken; only two poor domestics remained to serve them, and they purified by fire every vessel from which the unhappy monarch had taken food or drink. But Berthe was enceinte, and the king loved her, and so clung to her and would not obey. One morning as he went to pray, according to his custom, at the door of the church of Saint-Barthélemy, into which he was forbidden to enter, Abbon, Abbé de Fleury, followed by two women of the palace, carrying a great silver-gilt plate covered with a linen cloth, approached him, and announced that Berthe had been delivered. Then he uncovered the plate:
"See!" he exclaimed, "the effects of your disobedience to the decrees of the Church, and the seal of anathema on the fruit of your guilty love!"
And Robert recoiled in horror before a little monster with the head and neck of a duck! (Canard, it may be noted, in French, signifies both a duck and a highly improbable story.)
So the poor queen was repudiated, and Robert married Constance, daughter of the Comte de Toulouse, who made his life a burden to him. He hid himself from her to say his prayers, and feared her so much that he did not hesitate to deny his charities and good deeds to her—though he had such a horror of falsehood, that he had made a casket of crystal, mounted with gold, but in which he was careful not to put any holy relic, so that those who took their oaths on it before him might not perjure themselves.
His son Henri I, who succeeded him, married a daughter of the Grand Duke of Russia, in order that he might be certain of not taking a wife within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church. This princess, Anne, claimed to descend through her mother, daughter of the Emperor Romanus II, from Philip of Macedon.
The queen Constance brought with her from the Midi some of those troubadours whose romantic airs and graceful verses were so appreciated in the little courts of the south of France and, later, in the gloomy castles of the nobles of the north. Great was the prevalence of ennui in these fortresses, in which there was but little sunshine and a great dearth of all other refining and civilizing influences. It was impossible to be engaged in warfare or the chase all the time, and the wandering pilgrim, with his tales from afar, or, still more, the wandering minstrel, trouvère, as he was called in the north of France, was a welcome relief to the deadly monotony of the days of peace. "Seated at the hearth of the seigneur, he sang, during long evenings, the tragic adventures of the Dame de Fayel and of the Sire de Coucy, or the marvellous exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, of Renaud, and of Roland, of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers; unless, indeed, his audience, in a livelier mood, demanded of him some sarcastic fabliau, or the fine tricks played upon Master Isengrin by his shrewd gossip, Master Renard."
But these Aquitains in the train of Queen Constance, when they first appeared in the court of the good Robert, were singularly offensive to the Parisians by their elegance, their luxurious habits, and their light manners. "As soon as Constance appeared at the court," says Raoul Glaber, "you could have seen France inundated by a species of folk the most vain and the most frivolous of all possible men. Their fashion of living, their garments, their armor, the harness of their horses, were all equally fantastic. Their hair descended scarcely as low as the middle of the head [the northern French still retained the long flowing locks in the German fashion]: true theatricals, in whom the shaved chin, the small-clothes, the ridiculous boots, ending in a curved beak, and the whole outward appearance badly arranged, betrayed the disorder of their minds. Men without faith, without law, without shame, whose contagious example will corrupt the French nation, formerly so decent, and precipitate it into all kinds of debauchery and wickedness."
Notwithstanding Robert's piety, his reign was signalized by a cruel persecution of the Jews, in revenge for the destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem by the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, and by the first execution of heretics in France. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, the Jews, forbidden to hold any landed property, were constantly persecuted, plundered, and outraged, banished only to be called back again at the price of further exactions. The first thirteen heretics were burned at Orléans in 1022; one of them had been the confessor of Queen Constance, and as he passed her on his way to the stake, she put out one of his eyes with a long rod she held in her hand. Nevertheless, the historian Duruy considers that this certain mental movement, these deviations of the human intelligence from the beaten track, demonstrated that the period in which all thought seemed dead had passed, and that the first Renaissance began in this (eleventh) century.
A more recent writer distinguishes this century also by "that revolution in feudal France," the development of the commune. The great social fact was the disappearance of the three classes, serfs, semi-freemen, and free men (libres), which had existed since the ninth century, and their unity under subjection to the seigneur. This domination of the seigneur, at first justified by the protection afforded, lost its authority when it began to consult only its self-interest, and, toward the close of the century, stirred up revolts which led to the establishment of all kinds of popular associations, guilds, confraternities, charities, communities, etc.
The only church erected in Paris during the thirty years' reign of Henri I was that of Sainte-Marine, founded about 1036, and whose patron, according to the story, was a young virgin named Marine, who conceived a strong desire to be a monk. So she disguised herself as a man, and became Brother Marin in a convent. One of her duties was to go to the city for provisions, with an ox-cart, and on her journeys she frequently passed the night in the house of the Seigneur de Pandoche, whose daughter was found to be with child. To screen her lover, a soldier, she laid the blame on Brother Marin, and he was accordingly driven from his monastery. However, he took the child, which was sent him, nourished it, and the monks, touched by his meekness, finally received him back in their fold. Not till his death was his secret discovered, when he was interred with great religious pomp and canonized under his true name. Consequently, in the church of Sainte-Marine were celebrated all the forced marriages of couples found living together without the sanction of law, the public authorities compelling them to appear before the curé of Sainte-Marine, who wedded them with a ring of straw, slipped on the bride's finger.
Henri's son, Philippe I, contrived, like his grandfather, to get himself excommunicated because of his marriage, but for the space of ten years he seems to have concerned himself but little about the wrath of the Church. He had repudiated his wife, Berthe, and taken Bertrade, whom he had carried off from her husband, Foulque, Comte d'Angers. Finally, wearied of her, he presented himself as a penitent, barefooted, before the council of 1104, Bertrade doing the same; they protested their horror of their past conduct, their resolve to sin no more, and were accordingly absolved. It was this monarch who, by his unseemly jest concerning William the Conqueror, of whom he was both jealous and afraid, nearly brought down upon the Parisians again another Norman. "When is that fat man going to be delivered?" inquired Philippe, with the delicate humor of the Middle Ages. To which the Conqueror replied that he was coming to Paris for his "churching," with ten thousand lances instead of tapers. And, as was his fashion, he started to keep his word: his advance guard was burning villages up to the gates of Paris, when, according to the story, his horse stepped on some hot cinders at Mantes and in his sudden recoil so injured the monarch that he died soon after at Rouen.
The great national assemblies which Charlemagne had so often