A Distant Mirror (94 page)

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.