WHEN Charles V lay on his death-bed he summoned his brothers, the dukes of Berri and Burgundy and his brother-in-law, the duke of Bourbon, and gave them detailed instructions concerning the guardianship of his son, the dauphin Charles, then twelve years old. He explained frankly that his brother, the duke of Anjou, was not asked to this conference, although next to himself in age, because of his grasping character. Undoubtedly there were other qualities upon which he did not need to dwell, for the duke of Anjou was that son of John the Good who had broken his word of honor, thereby compelling his father to return to his confinement in England.

The four brothers had no idea that Anjou was present other than in spirit, perhaps, at the council around the death-bed of the eldest. Yet he was concealed so near that he heard every word including the “no good to himself” which is the proverbial reward of the listener. He straightway went forth and turned to his own account the information so infamously acquired. Rushing from Vincennes to Paris he seized the king’s personal valuables, and, as soon as Charles was buried, he declared himself regent, because of his being the new king’s oldest uncle.

Charles VI (1380-1422) was only twelve years old, and, of course, was entirely in the hands of his guardians. The Parisians were disposed to be gentle toward the child, and received him with rejoicing when he entered the city after his coronation at Rheims. Their attitude was soon to change. Charles VI’s reign was one of such dissension and turbulence among his subjects, of such intrigue, hypocrisy and treachery among his friends and relatives, and of such advance by his external enemies who naturally took advantage of these internal troubles, that France has never been in worse case except during the horrors of the Revolution. Paris, where centered the initiative of the country, was torn by riot and insurrection, the burghers were manipulated by the lords, and the populace was at last declared subject to its chief enemy, the English.

The earliest trouble came when there was need of money for the meditated war with Flanders, and for the duke of Anjou’s secret preparations for an expedition to Naples where it was his life’s ambition to rule. As usual, the coffers of the Jews offered an irresistible temptation. The ghetto was in the heart of the CitÉ. Its houses were plundered and burned and many Hebrews lost their lives in trying to protect their property. To Anjou the citizens were more generous than to the king. A certain sum which they had promised to the royal treasury went into the avuncular pocketbook.

There had been fair words at first about the reduction of taxes, but when the words came to nothing the Parisians rose in hot rebellion. The immediate cause was the announcement of a new tax on all merchandise sold. When the tax-gatherers attempted to do their duty the people went to the HÔtel de Ville and the Arsenal and armed themselves with the mallets which Hugh Aubriot had prepared for the use of the militia when they should be called out against the English. For several days the people were masters of the city. Aubriot was released from the bishop’s prison and was put at the head of the rebellion, but he evidently regarded this as a doubtful honor, for he disappeared in the course of the night, seeming to think that an escape confirmed was better than a hazardous leadership. Prisoners for debt were released by the insurrectionists and the maillotins—mallet-bearers—committed many murders for which they were to suffer swift punishment.

Young Charles had had his first taste of war in Flanders and had gained the battle of Rosebecque. Returning to Paris the citizens came forth to meet him fully armed and with such martial demeanor that it looked as if they came to greet their lord in battle array. Charles sent an officer to them as they stood massed under Montmartre, to the north of the city, with a message to the effect that he had no desire to see them in any such guise, and ordering them back within the walls. When the young king had restored the oriflamme to its place beside the altar at Saint Denis he entered the city with every evidence of displeasure at the recent revolutionary behavior of the citizens. The barriers before the gates and the gates themselves were destroyed as if the monarch were making an entrance into the town of an enemy, and he rode haughtily through the streets, the only mounted soldier in the army, acknowledging neither by look or word the acclamations of his subjects. No sooner had he given thanks for his victories and had left Notre Dame than he issued stern orders of reprisal. He punished individuals by fine or imprisonment or death and the city by a loss of privileges which it had taken long to win. Among them, the Provost of Merchants became merely a minor officer of the king, the corporations lost the right of electing their heads, the chains which had been stretched across the streets at night and which could be serviceable as barricades were removed, and the burghers were disarmed.

Among the executions was that of Jean Desmarets, an old man who had served well and faithfully both king and people. His had been a soothing influence on many occasions when the citizens would have broken out in rebellion, but now he was caught in a position where his conviction was inevitable in the midst of a turmoil where discriminations were not made. On his way to execution some one shouted to him to ask King Charles for mercy. “God alone will I ask for mercy,” he said. “I served well and faithfully King Charles’s great-grandfather, and his grandfather, and his father, and they had nothing with which to reproach me. If the king had the age and knowledge of a man he would never have been guilty of such a judgment against me.”

When the Parisians piled up before the Louvre enough arms to furnish forth eight hundred thousand soldiers Charles knew that they were thoroughly penitent.

The king’s uncles soon wearied of guardianship which each must share with his brother, and they went off on their separate interests with the exception of the strongest of them all, the duke of Burgundy. He was that same Philip the Bold who had fought beside his father at Poitiers and who had received the duchy of Burgundy as his reward. He had made an advantageous marriage, and so firmly established was he and so conscious of his power that at the coronation of Charles VI he had sat down beside the king in the place which his brother Anjou should have occupied, and no one tried to dispossess him. Now he practically ruled the kingdom alone, though the other uncles returned now and then. Charles was but a lad still, and it was not unnatural that he should be lively, and his uncles were well content that he should be diverted from any attempt to learn anything of his business of government. Balls and jousts were frequent. There was a revival of the fashions of the days of chivalry, and old chronicles and tales were sought out to teach the ancient customs. The ladies wore extravagant head-dresses with veils and horns and the men decked themselves in tight nether garments and flowing sleeves.

Froissart tells in detail the events of the “First Entry” of Charles’s queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, into Paris. He is not right in saying that she never had been in the city. She had been married five years at the time: her wedding banquet had been given in the palace of the CitÉ, and she had been crowned in the Sainte Chapelle. This “Entry” was merely an excuse for especially gorgeous festivities.

Three years later Charles became insane, and it seemed as if no man was his friend thereafter. Undoubtedly a life of youthful dissipation and a naturally violent temper were the bases of his malady. The provoking causes seem to have been two. Urged by the bishop of Laon Charles had plucked up courage enough definitely to send away his uncles and to undertake to rule with the help of some of his father’s advisers, whom he recalled. One of these men, his Constable, Oliver de Clisson, was foully murdered at a little distance from the HÔtel Saint Paul, a few minutes after he had left a banquet given by the king. When Charles was told of the murder he rushed into the street in his night clothes and heard the name of the assassin, de Craon, from de Clisson’s own lips. The king burned with desire for vengeance. He set out as soon as he could in pursuit of de Craon who was supposed to have fled to Brittany. On an extremely hot day for which the king was unsuitably dressed in a thick black velvet jacket and heavy scarlet velvet cap, there dashed out at him from the roadside an old man, probably half-witted, who kept crying “Go no farther; thou art betrayed.” Charles was much startled by this gruesome warning, and when close upon it a page’s lance fell clattering against some piece of steel equipment he was seized with frenzy, wounded several of his followers, and when he was at last overpowered and taken from his horse, recognized no one.

Never again was he wholly sane. There were times of betterment, but never any real mental health. His people loved him—his nickname is Bien-AimÉ—as they would a helpless child, but after a while no one except a hired woman took any care of him. His clothes and his person were neglected and he had no medical care. Isabeau deserted him and he had a repugnance for her even when he did not recognize her. At other times he had lucid intervals when he took part in festivities prepared to divert him. It was at the wedding entertainment of a lady of the court, held at the HÔtel Saint Paul where he lived, that he came near being burned to death. He and five of his courtiers were sewed up in tarred skins and were supposed to represent satyrs. Some one, perhaps by accident, perhaps with the desire to get the king out of the way, set fire to these dresses. It was impossible to pull them off. One of the young men threw himself into a tub of water and was saved. The king escaped by being wrapped in the voluminous skirt of his very young aunt-in-law, the duchess of Berri.

With the head of the kingdom insane for thirty years and with court and political factions working against each other with all virulence it is not strange that the country became merely a ground for the display of individual passion. The duke of Burgundy of the moment was John the Fearless, son of Philip the Bold. Between John and Charles’s brother, Louis, duke of Orleans, raged a hot rivalry. Isabeau, whose relations with Louis were a public scandal, fed the fire of disturbance. At last, in November, 1407, only three days after a public reconciliation, Louis was assassinated at the hands of John’s bravos as he was decoyed by a false message purporting to be from Charles, from the HÔtel Barbette where he had been supping with the queen. The house with its charming little tower is still standing in a crowded street of the Marais. It is not hard to picture the rush of the assassins, the screams of onlookers aroused from sleep, the hiss of arrows shot at windows where eyes were seeing what was meant to be hid, and the final ordering away of the ruffians by a tall man in command.

The next day what member of the royal family more grief-stricken than the duke of Burgundy! Yet he admitted the deed to his uncle, the duke of Berri. In spite of that he had the audacity the day after to try to join the council of princes who met in the HÔtel de Nesle on the left bank to discuss the matter. To their credit be it said that they did not admit him. John rode away into Flanders, but so great was his confidence in the affection for him of the people of Paris that he ventured to return, to have his case defended by a monk—who argued for five hours justifying the murder of Louis as the murder of a tyrant—and to force the weak-minded king to forgive him the vile deed. He even practically ruled the city for a time in the absence of the queen. Indeed it was not long before he and Isabeau came to a secret understanding. A little later a marriage was arranged between the murderer’s daughter and one of the sons of his victim.

Louis of Orleans’ son Charles, better known as a poet than as a statesman or warrior, married for his second wife the daughter of the count of Armagnac of the south of France. The father-in-law was more energetic than Charles, and he headed the struggle with the Burgundians. The populace of Paris sided with the Burgundians, the court with the Armagnacs. For five years France, and especially Paris was rent with broils and battles. In Charles V’s day the corporations had grown strong enough to cause some concern to the king and the nobles. Now the powerful brotherhood of butchers entered with enthusiasm into the dissensions that were making Paris almost uninhabitable for the peacefully inclined. Accustomed to the sight of blood and its shedding they entered with enthusiasm into the reformation of the government and especially of such members of the Armagnac party as were prominent. Led by a slaughterer named Caboche they supported the Burgundians in every attack, always in the name of changes which the wisest men of the burghers saw to be beneficial, but which no one had the ability to bring to pass except by violence. The cry of “Armagnac” was enough to cause an attack on any passer in the street and many a private vengeance was accomplished by means of the party shout.

So bad did conditions become that the steadiest of the bourgeois at last summoned the Armagnacs to check the excesses of the Cabochiens. John the Fearless, who had been the real ruler, since he issued orders and proclamations purporting to come from the mad king, was driven out of the city.

His going was a relief to Paris but to the country as a whole it brought disaster, for the duke was not slow in joining forces with the English who had seen their opportunity in the disturbed condition of their enemy’s land. Henry V had recently succeeded his father and had all a newcomer’s and a young man’s enthusiasm for renewing the English claim upon the French crown. He himself headed the army and in October, 1415, inflicted upon the French the crushing defeat of Agincourt wherein 10,000 Frenchmen lay dead upon the field. Never since Agincourt has the oriflamme left the altar of Saint Denis.

The whole country was in a state of uproar, ready to change every existing arrangement in the hope that what succeeded it would be better. The populace of Paris rose against the Armagnacs and the treachery of a Burgundian sympathizer admitted the friends of John the Fearless. The guardian of the Porte de Buci (in the left bank wall just south of the Tour de Nesle) was an iron merchant whose place of business was on the Petit Pont, the western bridge connecting the CitÉ with the left bank. This man’s son stole his father’s keys and opened the gate to the Burgundians. They swarmed into the city and at once began a massacre so horrible that the streets were strewn with dead bodies which the children pulled about in play. The Provost of Paris seized the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, then a lad of fifteen, and carried him in his arms to the Bastille where he might be in safety. The insurgents broke in to the HÔtel Saint Paul, took out the mad king and led him about the city on a horse on the pretense that he was giving his approval to the change of rule. As a matter of fact he was a mere puppet in their hands.

As if these disturbances were not enough, Paris, toward the end of this same year (1418), underwent a severe attack of the plague during which the mortality was so great that the dead were buried in ditches, six hundred in each trench. Between September 8 and December 8, according to the city grave-diggers, a hundred thousand people were buried and of these all but about a dozen in every four or five hundred were children. It is small wonder that the Danse Macabre, picturing all men as followed through life by skeletons giving warning of death, was painted in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, even though the number stated by the grave-diggers would seem to have been increased by the proverbial libation-pouring habits of the profession. Probably fifty thousand is nearer the truth.

Queen Isabeau was ever on the side which she thought most profitable to herself. Just now she was in league with John the Fearless who had caused her to be named regent. With him she had reËntered Paris; she concurred in his getting rid of the Cabochiens by sending them out of the city to attack the Armagnacs outside, and shutting the gates behind them; but it is suspected that she was not ignorant of the plot to murder the duke which was carried out the next year.

John the Fearless was succeeded by his son, Philip the Good, and he became the queen’s adviser. The battle of Agincourt had given Henry

V of England the right to dictate the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. By it Queen Isabeau practically gave away the crown which belonged to her son Charles, bestowed her daughter, Catherine, in marriage on Henry, and yielded the regency of France to Henry during the lifetime of the mad king. Burgundians and English escorted Henry V into Paris at the end of December, 1420. He made the Louvre his residence and put English officers in charge of the Bastille and the other fortifications. The Parisians at first received the newcomers with delight, for so worn was the city with quarreling and fighting that the advent of a new element was looked upon with hope. It was not long, however, before Henry’s sternness and the arrogance of his followers made them disliked, and the new element was found to be an element of discord. Between the regent and the Church there were continual dissensions, for the bishops refused to confirm Henry’s appointments of prelates sympathetic with England.

In addition to the constant disturbances that agitated the streets the city was in a pitiable state in other ways. Famine and plague had done their work thoroughly, and the population was much reduced; the always exorbitant taxes drove property owners out of the city into the country, which they found in such bad case that even the wolves went from the country into the city, and made nightly raids upon the cemeteries. Children died in the streets from hunger, dogs were eaten as a delicacy, and the demands of beggars upon the seemingly well-to-do were more in the nature of threats than appeals.

Henry V died in August, 1422, and Charles the Well-Beloved followed him to the grave in October of the same year. Henry’s body lay in state at Saint Denis before it was taken to England. Charles’s subjects came to view the remains of their poor tortured king during the three weeks that it rested at the HÔtel Saint Paul before being taken to Notre Dame and then to Saint Denis. Over his grave at Saint Denis the little English prince, Henry VI, only a few months old, was acknowledged king of France. The duke of Bedford became regent, and the English rose was quartered on the arms of Paris.

The rightful king, Charles VII, crowded out of Paris, fought with small success through the middle of France, until Jeanne Darc, the inspired peasant of Domremy, led his forces to such success that she dared besiege Paris. She established her army on the northwest of the city before the St. HonorÉ Gate, and there she fell, wounded by a shaft, but a short distance from the spot where her equestrian statue stands now on the Place des Pyramides. It would have been easier for her if death had come to her then than later in the flames of the Rouen market place.

It was about a month before her trial—some seven years after the death of Charles VI—that Henry VI was crowned king of France in the cathedral of Notre Dame (1431). The English lords made a brave showing at the ceremony, but there were few of the French nobles present, though many sent representatives who wore their escutcheons. So niggardly were the English after the service at the church that the people, who were accustomed to liberal largesse on such occasions, declared that there would have been more generosity shown at the wedding of a bourgeois jeweler.

Charles, who had been consecrated at Rheims in 1429 as the fulfillment of the dearest wish of the Pucelle, tried once more, in 1436, to win his city from the English. This time his general, the Constable de Richemont, entered by the Porte Saint Jacques on the south and advanced through the city unresisted. The English, to the number of about fifteen hundred, took refuge in the Bastille, whence they were starved out in short order and escaped by the Porte Saint Antoine into the fields. A year later Charles made his official entry into the town which he had left nineteen years before when the provost rescued him from the onslaught of the Burgundians. It was a solemn scene when the restored king knelt before the altar of Notre Dame to give thanks for his return.

When he went to the palace on the CitÉ he must have stood in need of all the composure that religion could give him for there he saw among the statues of the kings of France the statue of Henry V of England! Charles did not have it taken down. It stood with mutilated face to make public show of his scorn.

The English captured at Pontoise were drowned at the GrÈve soon after. Paris no longer welcomed the stranger.

The city itself was forlorn enough. So poorly was it protected that again wolves made their way through the gates which their keepers were too languid or too indifferent to guard properly. It is said that in one week of the month of September, 1438, no fewer than forty persons were killed by the hungry beasts in Paris and its immediate neighborhood. Twenty-four thousand dwellings stood vacant.

Charles reorganized the administration of Paris, restoring the elections of city officials which his father had suppressed, and establishing a fairly satisfactory arrangement of taxes. A marked addition to the royal power lay in the organization of a standing army devoted to the royal interests. It was thus that he utilized the energy of the adventurers who had grown irresponsible through the disturbed state of the country. By the aid of these soldiers he was enabled to put down the nobility who tried to revolt from his new ordinances and place the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI, on the throne. Louis did not object, but Charles enlisted the good-will of the bourgeoisie, and, chiefly because he did not ask them for money or soldiers, they gave both to him with such willingness that the lords took heed that a new power was confirming the royal attitude. It was not the end of his troubles with the dauphin who remained ever rebelliously opposed to his father, but when one lord was obliged to let the Parliament of Paris arbitrate his quarrels, and when another was thrust into a sack and thrown into the Seine their turbulence was at least discouraged.

With his domestic troubles thus quieted Charles could devote his attention to the war with England, and he did so in painstaking contrast to the almost lethargic indifference of his earlier years. The contest dragged its weary length along until October, 1453 when Charles marched victorious into Bordeaux. Calais was all that was left to England.

Eight years later (1461) Charles “the Victorious,” who had spent little time in Paris, died elsewhere. Stormy as had been his reign and unworthy as had been his character, he nevertheless left his kingdom not only at peace but with the royal power strengthened by the friendliness of the burgher class and possessed of an efficient weapon in the standing army. France was ready for the new order which was to begin under Charles’s son, Louis XI.