Royal visits to the town were not altogether wasteful. Not only did they, in the ordinary course of things, stimulate trade, but they also served the cause of sanitation. For on such great occasions, and on such occasions only, the streets were cleaned. Street police was still quite in its infancy; hygiene an art scarce beginning to be practised. We find mention of an order in 1526 forbidding swineherds to allow the animals in their charge (bêtes porchines de M. S. Antoine) to wander about the streets. But this was an unpopular measure, and stood rather as a pious opinion of the more enlightened than as an effective piece of legislation. Things were but little better than they had been when the heir of Louis-le-Gros, riding in the Rue S. Jean in Paris, was thrown from his horse by an abbot’s pig, and died of his injuries.
The vile odour that arose from the narrow, ill-paved, uncleansed passages called streets, filled with the rotting garbage which so tempted the pigs, is not pleasant even to imagine. Little wonder that here, as at Paris, where the same reign of mud and dirt obtained, the plague broke out again and again.
In one of these outbreaks Chartres lost no less than 8000 of its inhabitants. As in Paris, and later in London, the houses tainted by the plague were marked with a cross, and persons who were infected by it were obliged to carry a white wand in the streets. But people have always been curiously slow to learn the lessons of sanitation. The open sewer, the filthy water, the system of burial, the state of the dwelling-houses, the tradition of personal uncleanliness, these were all powerful friends of the pest in every mediæval town.
‘You have,’ Voltaire wrote later of Paris, ‘slaughter-houses in back streets with no issue, which give out in summer a cadaverous odour capable of poisoning an entire quarter.’ On this point at any rate Chartres was superior to Paris. For in the sixteenth century public slaughter-houses (massacre—the name still marks a section of the river) were erected in an appropriate place. But the butchers did not take kindly to them. In spite of frequent pains and penalties, it was long before the inveterate habit of slaughtering animals and throwing their blood into the streets was abandoned.
As to the streets, the authorities contented themselves for the most part with quite platonic aspirations that they should be watered and cleaned. But on great occasions, as I have said, cleaned they were, along with the roads, passages and bridges. Such an occasion was the visit of the King and Queen in 1550, with the Dauphin and his young fiancée, Mary Stuart.
The masters and companions of each trade and mystery, and the pages of honour to accompany the King on horse and foot were carefully selected; and costumes were as nicely chosen. The Lieutenant-General de Hérouad indeed issued an order calling upon the citizens, on pain of forfeit and arrest, to array themselves for the ceremony in velvet, satin, taffetas, and other rich garments. Triumphal arches were raised before the gates. At the cross roads scaffoldings were erected and decorated with tapestries and gilt, whereon plays and mysteries were to be performed.
These elaborate arrangements, however, ended in a lamentable fiasco. As the cortège wound its way out of the Porte Drouaise to meet the King and Queen a violent storm burst over them, and compelled them all, Lieutenant-General included, to seek refuge in the Church of S. Maurice and the neighbouring houses, in order to save their gala clothes from ruin. At the same moment, unfortunately, the King and Queen left the road of Josaphat, which they were following, and made a short cut for the town, where they arrived without meeting a soul to welcome them.
As the key and granary of Paris, Chartres began to be the favourite garrison town of the French army, and was obliged to contribute accordingly to the expenses of huge masses of men quartered on her.
