CHAPTER XVI.
There are no truer chameleons than words, changing hue and aspect as the circumstances change around them, and leaving scarce a shade of their original meaning. Piety has at present many acceptations, according to the various lips that pronounce it, and the ears that hear; but in the time of the commonwealth, it meant the grossest fanaticism; and in the time of Philip Augustus, the grossest superstition.
An age where knowledge and civilisation have made some progress, yet not produced a cold fondness for abstract facts, may be called the period of imagination in a nation; and then it will generally be found that, in matters of religion, a brooding, a melancholy, and a fanatical spirit reigns. Sectarian enthusiasm is then sufficient to keep itself alive in each man's breast, without imagination requiring any aid from external stimulants; and though the language of the pulpit may be flowery and extravagant, the manners are rigid and austere, and the rites simple and unadorned.
In more remote periods, however, where brutal ignorance is the general character of society, the only means of communicating with the dull imagination of the people is by their outward senses. Pomp, pageant, and display, music and ceremony, accompany each rite of the church, to give it dignity in the eyes of the multitude, who, if they do not understand the spirit, at least worship the form. Such was the case in the days of Philip Augustus. The people, with very few exceptions,--barons, knights, serfs and ecclesiastics,--beheld, felt, and understood little else in religion than the ceremonies of the church of Rome. Each festival of that church was for them a day of rejoicing; each saint was an object of the most profound devotion; and each genuflexion of the priest (though the priest himself was often bitterly satirised in the sirventes of the trouvères and troubadours) was a sacred rite, that the populace would not have seen abrogated for the world. The ceremonies of the church were the link--the only remaining link--between the noble and the serf; and, common to all,--the high, the low, the rich, the poor,--they were revered and loved by all classes of the community.
Such was the general state of France, in regard to religious feelings, when the kingdom was menaced with interdict by pope Innocent the Third. The very rumour cast a gloom over the whole nation; but when the legate, proceeding according to the rigid injunctions of the pope, called the bishops, archbishops, and abbots of France to a council at Dijon, for the purpose of putting the threat in execution, murmurs and lamentations burst forth all over France.
Philip Augustus, however, remained inflexible in his resolution of resistance; and, though he sent two messengers to protest against the proceedings of the council, he calmly suffered its deliberations to proceed, without a change of purpose. The pope was equally unmoved; and the cardinal of St. Mary's proceeded to the painful task which had been imposed upon him; declaring to the assembled bishops the will of the sovereign pontiff, and calling upon them to name the day themselves on which the interdict should be pronounced. The bishops and abbots found all opposition in vain, and the day was consequently named.
It was about this period that Count Thibalt d'Auvergne, having laid the ashes of his father in the grave, prepared to retrace his steps to Paris. His burden upon earth was a heavy one; yet, like the overloaded camel in the desert, he resolutely bore it on without murmur or complaint, waiting till he should drop down underneath it, and death should give him relief. A fresh furrow might be traced on his brow, a deeper shade of stern melancholy in his eye; but that was all by which one might guess how painfully he felt the loss of what he looked on as his last tie to earth. His voice was calm and firm, his manner clear and collected: nothing escaped his remembrance; nothing indicated that his thoughts were not wholly in the world wherein he stood, except the fixed contraction of his brow, and the sunshineless coldness of his lips.
When, as we have before said, he had given his power, as suzerain of Auvergne, into the hands of his uncle, he himself mounted his horse, and, followed by a numerous retinue, set out from Vic le Comte.
He turned not, however, his steps towards Paris in the first instance, but proceeded direct to Dijon. Here he found no small difficulty in obtaining a lodging for himself and train: the monasteries, on whose hospitality he had reckoned, being completely occupied by the great influx of prelates, which the council had brought thither; and the houses of public entertainment being, in that day, unmeet dwellings for persons of his rank. Nevertheless, dispersing his followers through the town, with commands to keep his name secret, the Count d'Auvergne took up his abode at the house of a tavernier, or vintner, and proceeded to make the inquiries which had caused him so far to deviate from his direct road.
These referred entirely to--and he had long before determined to make them--the property of the Count de Tankerville; on which, however, he soon found that king Philip had laid his hands; and therefore, the story of Gallon the fool being confirmed in this point, he gave up all farther questions upon the subject, as not likely to produce any benefit to his friend De Coucy.
Occupied as he had been in Auvergne, the progress of the council of bishops had but reached his ears vaguely; and he determined that the very next day he would satisfy himself in regard to its deliberations, which, though indeed they could take no atom from the load on his heart, nor restore one drop of happiness to his cup, yet interested him, perhaps, as much as any human being in France.
The day had worn away in his other inquiries, the evening had passed in bitter thoughts; and midnight had come, without bringing even the hope of sleep to his eyelids; when suddenly he was startled by hearing the bells of all the churches in Dijon toll, as for the dead. Immediately rising, he threw his cloak about him, and, drawing the hood over his head and face, proceeded into the street to ascertain whether the fears which those sounds had excited in his bosom were well founded.
In the street he found a multitude of persons flocking towards the cathedral; and, hurrying on with the rest, he entered at one of the side-doors, and crossed to the centre of the nave.
The sight that presented itself was certainly awful. No tapers were lighted at the high altar, not a shrine gave forth a single ray; but on the steps before the table stood the cardinal legate, dressed in the deep purple stole worn on the days of solemn fast in the church of Rome. On each hand, the steps, and part of the choir, were crowded with bishops and mitred abbots, each in the solemn habiliments appropriated by his order to the funeral fasts; and each holding in his hand a black and smoky torch of pitch, which spread through the whole church their ungrateful odour and their red and baleful light. The space behind the altar was crowded with ecclesiastics and monks, on the upper part of whose pale and meagre faces the dim and ill-favouring torch-light cast an almost unearthly gleam; while streaming down the centre of the church, over the kneeling congregation, on whose dark vestments it seemed to have no effect, the red glare spread through the nave and aisles, catching faintly on the tall pillars and Gothic tracery of the cathedral, and losing itself, at last, in the deep gloom all around.
The choir of the cathedral were in the act of singing the Miserere as the Count d'Auvergne entered; and the deep and solemn notes of the chant, echoed by the vaulted roofs, and long aisles, and galleries, while it harmonised well with the gloominess of the scene, offered frightful discord when the deep toll of the death-bell broke across, with sounds entirely dissonant. No longer doubting that his apprehensions were indeed true, and that the legate was about to pronounce the realm in interdict, Thibalt d'Auvergne advanced as far as he could towards the choir, and, placing himself by one of the pillars, prepared, with strange and mingled emotions, to hear the stern thunder of the church launched at two beings whose love had made his misery, and whose happiness was built upon his disappointment.
It were too cruel an inquest of human nature to ask if, at the thought of Agnes de Meranie being torn from the arms of her royal lover, a partial gleam of undefined satisfaction did not thrill through the heart of the Count d'Auvergne; but this at least is certain, that could he, by laying down his life, have swept away the obstacles between them, and removed the agonising difficulties of Agnes's situation, Thibalt d'Auvergne would not have hesitated--no, not for a moment!
At the end of the Miserere, the legate advanced, and in a voice that trembled even at the sentence it pronounced, placed the whole realm of France in interdict,--bidding the doors of the churches to be closed; the images of the saints, and the cross itself, to be veiled; the worship of the Almighty to be suspended; marriage to the young, the eucharist to the old and dying, and sepulture to the dead, to be refused; all the rites, the ceremonies, and the consolations of religion to be denied to every one; and France to be as a dead land, till such time as Philip the king should separate himself from Agnes his concubine, and take again to his bosom Ingerburge, his lawful wife.
At that hard word, concubine, applied to Agnes de Meranie, the Count d'Auvergne's hand naturally grasped his dagger; but the legate was secure in his sacred character, and he proceeded to anathematise and excommunicate Philip, according to the terrible form of the church of Rome, calling down upon his head the curses of all the powers of Heaven!
"May he be cursed in the city, and in the field, and in the highway! in living, and in dying!" said the legate; "cursed be his children, and his flocks, and his domaines! Let no man call him brother, or give him the kiss of peace! Let no priest pray for him, or admit him to God's altar! Let all men flee from him living, and let consolation and hope abandon his death-bed! Let his corpse remain unburied, and his bones whiten in the wind! Cursed be he on earth, and under the earth! in this life, and to all eternity!"
Such was in some degree, though far short of the tremendous original, the anathema which the legate pronounced against Philip Augustus--to our ideas, unchristian, and almost blasphemous; but then the people heard it with reverence and trembling; and even when he summed up the whole, by announcing it in the name of the Holy Trinity--of the Father--of all mercy!--of the Son--the Saviour of the world!--and of the Holy Ghost--the Lord and Giver of Life! the people, instead of starting from the impious mingling of Heaven's holiest attributes with the violent passions of man, joined the clergy in a loud and solemn Amen!
At the same moment all the sounds ceased, the torches were extinguished; and in obscurity and confusion, the dismayed multitude made their way out of the cathedral.