Eleanor Of Aquitaine (4 page)

On a Sunday, while Bernard was celebrating mass at the church of Parthenay, which lay in the ducal domains, Guillaume drew up with his escort to the narthex, beyond which he could not pass by reason of his ban, and waited for the exit of the abbé in order to assail him. Bernard, while at the altar, learned of Guillaume's assault upon the sanctuary. With one of the sudden miraculous inspirations for which he was famous, he seized the pyx and, brandishing it aloft, hastened down the aisle amidst the astonished worshipers and brought it swiftly before Guillaume's towering forehead, adjuring him meantime to abhor his sins, confess, restore the bishops. Guillaume, who had counted upon surprising the abbé with the first word, fell back in confusion. He suffered something like a stroke and measured his gigantic length upon the pavement at the feet of the frail little abbé where he lay groaning and foaming at the mouth. Frightened witnesses pressed about to get a sight of this miraculous performance Not a word or gesture of resistance remained in the prostrate count. The bishops were forthwith restored to their high seats, bells rang again in their dioceses. The miracle of regeneration by which the fear of the Lord was put into the stiff-necked house of Poitou greatly enhanced the abbés already high renown, not only in Poitou but in remote corners of Christendom. But his triumph planted a thorn in the flesh of the Poitevins.

Of course, queens were as grass to the abbé. But when he first had sight of Eleanor there must have been a special secular magnificence about her to draw his reluctant eye and his burning words. To whom if not to the queen and her suite does the abbé allude in that epistle in which he describes the practices of noble ladies to his nuns as an example of all they must take pains to avoid? The passage in some points takes substance from Isaiah's strictures on the harlots of Israel.

The garments of court ladies are fashioned from the finest tissues of wool or silk A costly fur between two layers of rich stuffs forms the lining and border of their cloaks Their arms are loaded with bracelets, from their ears hang pendants enshrining precious stones For head dress they have a kerchief of fine linen which they drape about their neck and shoulders, allowing one corner to fall over the left arm This is their wimple, ordinarily fastened to their brows by a chaplet, a fillet, or a circle of wrought gold. Gotten up in this way, they walk with mincing steps, their necks thrust forward and furnished and adorned as only temples should be, they drag after them a tail of precious stuff that raises a cloud of dust. Some you see who are not so much adorned as loaded down with gold, silver, and precious stones, and indeed with everything that pertains to queenly splendor.

This, it must be admitted, is a fairly circumstantial description for the introspective abbé, so little accustomed as he was to give eye to the false colors of the world. He cannot understand, he goes on, referring to the same ladies, how Christian women can borrow the skins of squirrels and the labor of worms to lend them a purely meretricious beauty. Silk and purple and rouge have a beauty of their own, no doubt, but he feels sure they cannot confer it elsewhere. Fie on a beauty that is put on in the morning and laid aside at night.

This makes the abbé's convictions clear, but does not define the temper of the queen. However, her state of mind was presently disclosed upon the plane of action.

*

A clash between royal and ecclesiastical authorities in 1141 brought matters to a head and marshaled all the forces of the church against the young dynasts. It was not merely that Abbé Bernard and the bishops were called out. Even the Pope took up the glaive of Saint Peter to rebuke the intransigence of the pious king, who so strangely emerged from his schooling in the cloister to flout the church that had bred and nourished him.

In that year the bishopric of Bourges fell vacant. Bourges as a palatine city near the borders of Poitou and the French domain was a favorite royal seat in which to assemble for ceremonious courts not only the vassals of the king, but those as well from the provinces of the queen It is said that it was here that Eleanor was formally crowned Queen of France and Louis was re-crowned with her. In the matter of the bishopric, Louis resolved, under some obscure influence that none of his mentors seemed able to fathom, to secure the election of his own chancellor to this important see. The chapter, however, proceeded to elect a Cluniac, Pierre de la Châtre, who was at the time of his election in Rome; and the Pope, following the nomination of the chapter, consecrated Pierre and sent him to Bourges without concern for Louis's nominee.

Upon Pierre's arrival from Rome to assume his administration, he found to his unmeasured surprise that the gates of the see to which he had been elevated were closed against him. The king, who held obstinately to his own candidate, had raised his sceptered arm against the advance of Pierre's epis copal
mesme
. Full of chagrin, the bishop-elect fell back upon the hospitality of Champagne, and thence communicated with Rome. Innocent thereupon sent him a second time to Bourges. At the same time His Holiness addressed a letter to the king's ministers in which he remarked that the King of France was, "behaving like a foolish schoolboy," and that the masters who had him in hand would better look to it that he got no bad habit of meddling with what was not his royal business. These words reached the king and had the effect of hardening his heart. The gates of the see remained closed to the papal candidate. Inside the city walls, Louis, placing his hands on the holiest relics, so that he could not be tempted to recant, vowed publicly that not while he breathed should Pierre de la Châtre set foot in the royal episcopal city of Bourges.

Pierre withdrew again to Champagne. In due time the rumble of anathema was heard on the far side of the Alps. In the face of this alarm, Loui,the foolish schoolboy," maintained that he could not, even under papal mandate, jeopardize his soul by renouncing the vows he had made directly to heaven with his hands upon the relics. The Pope for his part, as vicegerent of God, could not relinquish to the stripling king the sovereign instrument heaven had granted him of binding and loosing upon earth. Did not the king receive his glaive from the church before he could rule? Innocent found himself obliged to launch upon the household of the king the edict of excommunication and interdict. The mentors of the, "schoolboy," were appalled. How could it be that, in spite of the auspicious beginning of his reign, the pious Louis, the oblate of Notre Dame, the sworn protector of the church, should find himself excommunicate, excluded by office of book, bell, and candle, from all the sacraments upon which his soul's health depended?

While the affair at Bourges was at impasse, a scandal in another quarter spread alarm and drove the king's mentors to seek out the influences moving their sovereign to unnatural acts in defiance of Holy Church and to the jeopardy of his soul. In the queen's Poitevin household was her younger sister Petronilla, who, by virtue of her relation to the royal house and her dower properties in Burgundy, was an enviable marriage prize. The king's elder cousin, Count Raoul of Vermandois, with rich fiefs between Flanders and the Vexin, sought alliance with Petronilla, and the proposal, though in some respects astonishing, commended itself to the royal household as having advantages. The only difficulty was that Raoul, who was middle-aged, had some years before, with the very same object of attaching himself to the crown, married the niece of Louis the Fat's chief vassal, Thibault of Champagne. To the queen, who was eager for the marriage of her sister, Raoul's unfortunate ties with the house of Champagne were merely knots to be cut. For Louis, however, canonical sanctions had to be invoked. Legalists were shortly found who discovered a degree of consanguinity between Raoul and the heiress of Champagne prohibited by the church. On this safe ecclesiastical ground, Louis allied himself with the queen's party, eager to repair his cousin's conjugal, "irregularity." When, late in the summer of 1142, the court returned from a
chevauchée
in Poitou and Aquitaine, during which Petronilla and the Count of Vermandois were part of the retinue, the sovereigns found three bishops to the north of Paris, well out of the narrowly authoritative diocese of Sens, who annulled the count's marriage and almost at once united him to the Lady Petronilla.

When in consequence of these operations, Thibault of Champagne was summoned to receive into his own estates his niece, the late Countess of Vermandois, and her children, he was considerably taken aback. In his troubles Thibault very naturally had recourse to his friend, Abbé Bernard. And Abbé Bernard very naturally felt a just sympathy for Thibault in the circumstances, and of course he was scandalized that whom God had joined together, the Capets had put asunder. In behalf of Thibault and the sacraments, the abbé addressed himself to Rome. With incredible swiftness there came through the Alpine passes the thunder of anathema. It smote the bishops who had executed the royal plans, widowed the newly wed sister of the queen, and adjured the Count of Vermandois to return to his lawful wife on pain of excommunication and interdict on all his lands.

So far Louis's exploits in ecclesiastical diplomacy had brought him a miserable malaise. Yet he accepted no one of the occasions offered for retreat. Some demon of pride or obstinacy, as it was thought, drove him to extremity. At last he drew his sword. For all his spiritual humiliations he cast the blame on Thibault. The Count of Champagne had sheltered the exiled bishop-elect whom Louis had vowed on the relics never to receive in Bourges. And Thibault, interfering in the marriage of Raoul and Petronilla, which bishops of the church had been found to bless, had brought upon the noble house of Vermandois the consuming blight of anathema.

Leading the royal army himself, Louis invaded Champagne, the territory of his proudest vassal. He attacked the ill-defended town of Vitry on the Marne and set torches to its wooden houses and thatched roofs. In flight from their flaming dwellings, the people sought sanctuary in their church. But this too caught fire. The roof collapsed and Louis with horror viewed the scene where the populace of the defenseless town had been trapped and burned before the altar in a ghastly holocaust. More than a thousand souls, innocent burghers, with their women and children, were smothered in the ruins.
²⁸
The king was sickened by a sudden sense of guilt, a conviction that heaven in this catastrophe had declared its displeasure with him. Yet in spite of his compunction over the tragedy of Vitry, the royal armies continued to ravage the domain of Thibault.

Abbé Bernard, roused again from the quiet of Clairvaux to witness Louis's harrowing of Champagne, was confounded. How was it that this boy king, who had given every promise of sobriety, had so deceived the hopes of his poor people and the church his mother? And how was it that Abbé Suger and the Bishop of Soissons, who should have guided the young king's courses, had failed so signally? He wrote letters to discover and admonish. During this period of the king's rebelliousness, he wrote to Louis himself.

"You are evidently kicking," he said, "with too much haste and inconstancy against the wholesome advice you have received, and you are hurrying, under I know not what counsel of the devil, to your former evil courses… For from whom except the devil can I say that this counsel proceeds that adds fire to fire and slaughter to slaughter; which lifts the cry of the poor, the groanings of captives, the blood of the slain to the ears of the Father of the fatherless and the Judge of widows?… Do not, my King, with rash audacity lift your hand against the terrible Lord who takes away the breath of kings. I speak sharply, because I fear sharp things for you."

Presently Louis, who could not banish from his ears the horrible cries of the people of Vitry, the roar and crackling of the roof, the toppling of the altars, fell into a spiritual panic and depression from which nothing could raise him. He saw ever more plainly in that disaster the unmistakable wrath of heaven and the peril into which he had put his soul. He lost all interest in his military triumphs in Champagne and fell so ill that his spiritual physicians despaired of his life. He who had been so forward and impassioned lapsed into being the most desperate of creatures. Cut off from the consolations of religion by interdict, he suffered horribly.
³⁰
Though he continued to cherish the queen, "with an almost foolish fondness," not even she could longer support his morale. Not even the lifting of the ban revived his spirits.

*

It is only through symbols of beauty that our poor spirits can raise themselves from things temporal to things eternal.

Abbé Suger,
De Administrations

Abbé Bernard during all those woeful months had asked himself why Abbé Suger, who should have stayed the disastrous courses of his sovereign, had held himself aloof from the affairs that convulsed Champagne. The fact was that Abbé Suger was leaving affairs in Champagne to Abbé Bernard. He was himself engrossed in an experience so compelling that he could be insensible to the rash behavior of his ward and the ravages of the civil war at his very gates. Since his rebuke by Abbé Bernard some years before, he too had attained an inwardness. He had put off the worldly splendor of his dress, his retinue, his table. He had restored sobriety to his y and vied with his monkish brethren in the simplicity of his life. He had swept out of his precincts the war office and the chancellery and the secular luxuries and disorders that Louis the Fat had brought to Saint Denis. For himself he had taken one little room in the cloister, less severe certainly than Abbé Bernard's crooked nook in the angle of the stairs at Clairvaux, but modest, homely, serviceable.

He had not, however, like Abbé Bernard, succeeded in closing his senses to the alluring beauty of the world. He still felt the sensuous qualities of things, the preciousness of gems and embroidered stuffs, the veinings of marble, the gleam of gold and mosaic, the radiance of glass, the touching narrative of sculpture and fresco, the ecstasy of plain song. If to possess beauty were corrupting, then it might be dedicated to God the giver, and thus purified, become a means to lift the soul to grace. There were, he believed, diversities in the soul's progress suited to the several degrees of men's needs. In Saint Denis resplendent symbols of redemption lured sinners to salvation; in Clairvaux the absence of these, like the putting off of mortality itself, freed the spirits of the nearly ransomed to foretaste of heaven.