Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton
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on the Butte des Moulins—afterward suppressed to make way for the opening of the Avenue de l'Opéra—drove in the English, sounded the depth of the moat with the staff of her banner, and fell wounded with an arbalist shaft through her thigh, in front of what is now the entrance to the Théâtre-Français. The chronicles of the time differ as to whether the French chiefs failed to support her through jealousy, or fought with acharnement to save her from falling into the hands of the besieged. The attempt was abandoned, and the Maid was carried to Saint-Denis to have her wound dressed.
In Paris, opinions were very much divided, and even those who favored the French king felt that they were too much compromised to open their gates to him without some stipulations. Two years later, Jeanne having been duly burned at Rouen, and the consecration of Charles VII, at Reims, "to which he had been conducted by an agent of the demon, being in itself and of its own nature null and void," the English monarch entered his city of Paris to receive an orthodox and irreprehensible coronation. As he rode by the Hôtel Saint-Pol, he perceived the Queen Isabeau on the balcony; he doffed his hat to her and she returned his salute, then burst into tears. On the 17th of December, he was anointed and crowned in Notre-Dame by Cardinal Winchester—which gave great offence to the Bishop of Paris—and surrounded entirely by English lords; there was no liberation of prisoners, no largess to the people, no removal of taxes. "A bourgeois who marries off his daughter would have done the thing better," said the Parisians. However, he manifested some desire to secure their good-will by confirming a number of their minor privileges, their right to acquire titles of nobility, etc.
The discontent grew among the citizens; no coronation of a king of France could be as sacred as that celebrated according to the ancient ceremonial at Reims; the English garrison felt constrained to take such strong measures of precaution as to forbid any one to leave the city without passports, or to mount upon the ramparts under penalty of being hanged. It was not till the 29th of May, 1436, that six citizens, whose names history has preserved, contrived to open the Porte Saint-Jacques, in the quarter of the Halles, to their countrymen outside; the Constable of France, Arthur de Bretagne, Comte de Richemont, with the Comte de Dunois and some two thousand horsemen, were waiting for them; the first twenty men introduced through a little postern gate opened the great doors and let down the drawbridge, all the cavalry trooped in without meeting the least resistance. "Then the Maréchal de l'Isle-Adam mounted upon the wall, unfurled the banner of France, and cried 'Ville gagnée!' [City taken!]."
Captain Willoughby, who commanded the English, finding the whole populace rising against him, was compelled to take refuge in the Bastile with some thousand or twelve hundred men, and soon after capitulated and left the city by the Porte Saint-Antoine, pursued by the hootings of the people. Charles VII made his triumphal entry in the following November, and was received with abundant demonstrations of welcome. It was, however, a city devastated by pestilence and famine and with troops of wolves in all the suburbs. Bands of brigands, largely made up of unpaid soldiers, and called, from their outrages, escorcheurs, traversed the country and the environs and were more feared even than the wolves. The universal demoralization caused by the war had removed all bounds to the cruelty of the nobles, and the chronicles of the time are replete with murder, open and secret. "The Duc de Bretagne caused the death of his brother; the Duc de Gueldre, that of his father; the Sire de Giac, that of his wife; the Comtesse de Foix, that of her sister; the King of Aragon, that of his son."
"Above this feudal aristocracy was placed another aristocracy, that of the princes, which royalty had elevated with its own hands, in constituting vast appanages for the royaux de France, the title given to the sons, the brothers, the relatives of the king. Hence those powerful houses of Bourgogne, of Orléans, of Anjou, of Bourbon, which joined to the spirit of independence of the ancient feudality the pride and the pretensions of a royal origin, and which said by one of its members: 'I esteem so much the kingdom of France, that, in the place of one king, I should like to see six.'"
Valuing only that which was acquired by the sword, or professing to do so, this feudal aristocracy affected to look down with disdain upon the great merchants and bankers—whose large fortunes, indeed, were not always acquired with the strictest probity—and they viewed with indifference the king's infamous robbery of his minister, Jacques Cœur, which, with his abandonment of Jeanne d'Arc, constitute the blackest stains upon his character. The gens de petit estat, the councillors of humble origin, with which the king surrounded himself, and who served him so well, were also a source of offence to these proud nobles. M. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, in his exhaustive history of this monarch, in six octavo volumes, dwells at length on the constantly increasing influence in the grand council, during the period of national reorganization in the latter part of the reign, of these humble councillors. "And it was, above all, the people of France themselves," says M. Funck-Brentano, "who, in the midst of all the secular struggles, acquired, little by little, the sentiment of its unity, of the common solidarity of the public welfare. The day on which they were found grouped, admirable in their energy and devotion, around the royal throne which, for them, was the concentrating point of these sentiments, the cause of the foreign enemy was lost."
Son though he was "of an imbecile father and a debauched mother," Charles VII did not lack for intelligence, and in his diplomacy, directed during the first part of his reign against a foreign enemy and, in the latter part, against a domestic one, the Burgundians, he gave proof of the highest qualities. He had a taste for letters, and was—"unique, doubtless, in this among the kings of France"—a good Latin scholar. His mistresses, of whom Agnès Sorel was only the first, were imposed upon his wife, Marie d'Anjou, and upon his court with unusual effrontery. The queen was even obliged to distribute gifts to the "filles joyeuses who followed the court in its peregrinations." This moral depravation, naturally, extended downward to the whole court. M. Brentano, who is one of the few French historians who venture to lay disrespectful hands on the grand Roi-soleil, says: "Charles VII was the original source of the crapulous debauchery of the last Valois; he traced the way for the crimes of Louis XIV, and the turpitudes of Louis XV." This, although the higher clergy of the reigns both of Charles and of Louis Quatorze did not fail in their duty, and did denounce openly from the pulpit the sins of these all-powerful monarchs.
On his re-entry into Paris, Charles did not take up his residence in the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the sorrowful lodging of his father, but in the Tournelles, which he made a "delightful sojourn," and where his successors installed themselves until François II, who established his dwelling in the Louvre. In the time of Louis XI, however, the Tournelles partook of the sordid and melancholy character of its master. "The king lived there alone and stingily," says the historian Michelet. "He had had the odd taste to retain some servitors whom he had brought from Brabant; he lived there as if in exile. … As soon as he was king, he assumed the pilgrim's habit, the cape of coarse gray cloth, with the gaiters of a travelling costume, and he took them off only at his death. … If he came out of the Tournelles, it was in the evening, like an owl, in his melancholy gray cape. His gossip, companion, and friend (he had a friend) was a certain Bische, whom he had formerly set as a spy on his father, Charles VII, and whom afterward he kept near the Comte de Charolais, to induce him to betray his father, the Duc de Bourgogne."
The king had, indeed been one of the worst of sons—at the period of his accession to the throne he was almost in open rebellion against his father, and had sought refuge at the court of Burgundy. The great nobles consequently looked with complacency upon his coming into power, and were very far from foreseeing that through him their privileges and authority throughout the kingdom were to be finally ruined. During his reign, the capital prospered—"the king made of it his refuge, his citadel and his arsenal for all his enterprises against the feudality." In one respect, he followed his father's example and even bettered it—his counsellors were chosen by preference among the tiers état, and frequently even among men of base extraction. When occasion required, he did not disdain any of the arts of the demagogue: on entering Paris after the indecisive battle of Montlhéry, with the Burgundians, almost under the walls of the capital, he took supper with the