When the Jews were expelled from Normandy, in 1181, the Close, or Jewry, in which they dwelled, escheated to the king. The sons of Japhet spoiled the sons of Shem with pious alacrity. The debtor burnt his bond; the bailie seized the store of bezants; the synagogue was razed to the ground. In this Close the palace was afterwards built. The wise custom of Normandy was mooted on the spot where the law of Moses had once been taught; and, by a strange, perhaps an ominous, fatality, the judge held the scales of justice, where whilome the usurer had poised his balance.
The palace forms three sides of a quadrangle. The fourth is occupied by an embattled wall and an elaborate gate-way. The building was erected about the beginning of the sixteenth century; and, with all its faults, it is a fine adaptation of Gothic architecture to civil purposes. It is in the style which a friend of mine chooses to distinguish by the name of Burgundian architecture; and he tells me that he considers it as the parent of our Tudor style. Here, the windows in the body of the building take flattened elliptic heads; and they are divided by one mullion and one transom. The mouldings are highly wrought, and enriched with foliage. The lucarne windows are of a different design, and form the most characteristic feature of the front: they are pointed and enriched with mullions and tracery, and are placed within triple canopies of nearly the same form, flanked by square pillars, terminating in tall crocketed pinnacles, some of them fronted with open arches crowned with statues. The roof, as is usual in French and Flemish buildings of this date, is of a very high pitch, and harmonizes well with the proportions of the building. An oriel, or rather tower, of enriched workmanship projects into the court, and varies the elevations. On the left-hand side of the court, a wide flight of steps leads to the hall called la Salle des Procureurs, a place originally designed as an Exchange for the merchants of the city, who had previously been in the habit of assembling for that purpose in the cathedral. It is one hundred and sixty feet in length, by fifty in breadth.
"In this great hall," says Peter Heylin, "are the seats and desks of the procurators; every one's name written in capital letters over his head. These procurators are like our attornies; they prepare causes, and make them ready for the advocates. In this hall do suitors use, either to attend on, or to walk up and down, and confer with, their pleaders."—The attornies had similar seats in the ancient English courts of justice; and these seats still remain in the hall at Westminster, in which the Court of Exchequer holds its sittings. The walls of the Salle des Procureurs are adorned with chaste niches. The coved roof is of timber, plain and bold, and destitute either of the open tie-beams and arches, or the knot-work and cross timber which adorn our old English roofs. If the roof of our priory church was not ornamented, as last mentioned, it would nearly resemble that in question.—Below the hall is a prison; to its right is the room where the parliament formerly held its sittings, but which is now appropriated to the trial of criminal causes. The unfortunate Mathurin Bruneau, the soi-disant dauphin, was last year tried here, and condemned to imprisonment. He is treated in his place of confinement with ambiguous kindness. The poor wretch loves his bottle; and, being allowed to intoxicate himself to his heart's content, he is already reduced to a state of idiotism.—Heylin, who saw the building when it was in perfection, says, speaking of this Great Chamber, "that it is so gallantly and richly built, that I must needs confess it surpasseth all the rooms that ever I saw in my life. The palace of the Louvre hath nothing in it comparable; the ceiling is all inlaid with gold, yet doth the workmanship exceed the matter."—The ceiling which excited Heylin's admiration still exists. It is a grand specimen of the interior decoration of the times. The oak, which age has rendered almost as dark as ebony, is divided into compartments, covered with rich but whimsical carving, and relieved with abundance of gold. Over the bench is a curious old picture, a Crucifixion. Joseph and the Virgin are standing by the cross: the figures are painted on a gold ground; the colors deep and rich; the drawing, particularly in the arms, indifferent; the expression of the faces good. It was upon this picture that witnesses took the oaths before the revolution; and it is the only one of the six formerly in this situation that escaped destruction[[105]]. Round the apartment are gnomic sentences in letters of gold, reminding judges, juries, witnesses, and suitors, of their duties. The room itself is said to be the most beautiful in France for its proportions and quantity of light. In the Antiquités Nationales, is described and figured an elaborately wrought chimney-piece in the council-chamber, now destroyed, as are some fine Gothic door-ways, which opened into the chamber. The ceiling of the apartment called la seconde Chambre des Enquêtes, painted by Jouvenet, with a representation of Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts at Vice, is also unfortunately no more. It fell in, from a failure in the woodwork of the roof, on the first of April, 1812. It was among the most highly-esteemed productions of this master, and not the less remarkable for having been executed with the left hand, after a paralytic stroke had deprived him of the use of the other.
Millin observes, with much justice, that one of the most remarkable of the decrees that issued from this palace, was that which authorized the meetings of the Conards, a name given to a confraternity of buffoons, who, disguised in grotesque dresses, performed farces in the streets on Shrove Tuesday and other holidays. Nor is it a little indicative of the taste of the times, that men of rank, character, and respectability entered into this society, the members of which, amounting to two thousand five hundred, elected from among themselves a president, whom they dressed as an abbot[[106]], with a crozier and mitre, and, placing him on a car drawn by four horses, led him, thus attired, in great pomp through the streets; the whole of the party being masked, and personating not only the allegorical characters of avarice, lust, &c. but the more tangible ones of pope, king, and emperor, and with them those of holy writ. The seat of this guild was at Notre Dame de Bonnes Nouvelles.
In the cathedral itself the more notorious Procession des Fous was also formerly celebrated, in which, as you know, the ass played the principal part, and the choir joined in the hymn[[107]],—
"Orientis partibus
Adventavit Asinus," &c.