"What shall be done with the ointment?" asked the disappointed official.
"Lock it up in the vestry and say no more about it," replied the king.
This was done, and the precious relics were restored to the tomb of St. Remy, whence they originally came; being placed there in a silver reliquary lined with white silk, and enclosed in a metal case, with three locks. And there they lay till 1825, when a new king came to the throne, in the person of Charles X.
Now, for the last time, the old ceremony was revived, the knights of the Sainte Ampoule being created, and their office duly performed. With such dignity as he could assume and such grandeur as he could display, Charles entered the choir of the cathedral and advanced to the grand altar, at whose foot he knelt. On rising, he was led to the centre of the sanctuary, and took his seat in a throne-like chair, placed there to receive him. In a semi-circle round him stood a richly-dressed group of nobles and courtiers.
Then came forward in stately procession the chevaliers of the Sainte Ampoule, bearing the minute remnants of that sacred oil which was claimed to have been first used in the anointing of Clovis, thirteen hundred years before. An imposing group of churchmen stood ready to receive the ointment, including three prelates, an archbishop, and two bishops. These dignitaries carried the precious relic to the high altar, consecrated it, and anointed the king with a solemn ceremony highly edifying to the observers, and greatly gratifying to the vanity of the new monarch.
It cannot be said that this ceremonious proceeding appealed to the people of France. It was the nineteenth century, and the Revolution lay between the new and the old age. All men of wit laughed at the pompous affair, and five years afterwards the people of Paris dispensed with Charles X. as their king, despite the flavor of coronation that hung about him. The dynasty of the Bourbons was at an end, and the knights of the Saint Ampoule had been created for the last time.
In conclusion, there is a story connected with the coronation ceremony which may be of interest. Legend or history tells us that at one time the English took the city of Rheims, plundered it, and, as part of their plunder, carried off the Saint Ampoule, which their desecrating hands had stolen from the tomb of St. Remy. The people of the suburb of Chène la Populeux pursued the invaders, fell upon them and recovered this precious treasure. From that time, in memory of their deed, the inhabitants of Chène claimed the right to walk in the procession of the Sainte Ampoule, and to fall heir to the horse ridden by the Grand Prior. This horse was furnished by the government, and was claimed by the prior as the property of the abbey, in recompense for his services. He denied the claim of the people of Chène, said that their story was a fable, and that at the best they were but low-born rogues. As a result of all this, hot blood existed between the rival claimants to the white horse of the coronation.
At the crowning of Louis XIV. the monks and the people of Chène came to blows, in support of their respective claims. The villagers pulled the prior from his horse, pummelled the monks who came to his aid, thrashed the knights out of every semblance of dignity, tore the canopy into shreds, and led off the white horse in triumph. Law followed blows; the cost of a dozen horses was wasted on the lawyers; in the end the monks won, and the people of Chène had to restore the four-footed prize to the prior.
At the subsequent coronations of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. they renewed their claim, and violence was again threatened. The trouble was overcome by special decrees, which prohibited the people of Chène from meddling with the claim of the prior. By the time of the coronation of Charles X., all such mediæval folly was at an end, and the stately old ceremony had become a matter of popular ridicule.
The story of the Sainte Ampoule is not without its interest in showing the growth of ideas. At the end of the ninth century, a bishop could gravely state, and a nation unquestionably accept his statement, that a dove had flown down from heaven bearing a vial of holy oil for the anointment of its kings. At the end of the nineteenth century the same nation has lost its last vestige of reverence for the "divinity which doth hedge a king," and has no longer any use for divinely-commissioned potentates or heaven-sent ointments.