Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes
Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos."
The bees that adorned the imperial mantle of Napoléon were found in the tomb of Childeric. A similar expectation excited the Huguenots, at Caen. They dug up the coffin: the hollow stone rung to the strokes of their daggers: the vibration proved that it was not filled by the corpse; and nothing more was wanted to seal its destruction.
De Bourgueville, who went to the spot and exerted his eloquence to check this last act of violence, witnessed the opening of the coffin. It contained the bones of the king, wrapped up in red taffety, and still in tolerable preservation; but nothing else. He collected them, with care, and consigned them to one of the monks of the abbeys who kept them in his chamber, till the Admiral de Châtillon entered Caen at the head of his mercenaries, on which occasion the whole abbey was plundered, and the monks put to flight, and the bones lost. "Sad doings, these," says De Bourgueville, "et bien peu réformez!"--He adds, that one of the thigh-bones was preserved by the Viscount of Falaise, who was there with him, and begged it from the rioters, and that this bone was longer by four fingers' breadth than that of a tall man. The bone thus preserved, was re-interred, after the cessation of the troubles: it is the same that is alluded to in the inscription, which also informs us that a monument was raised over it in 1642, but was removed in 1742, it being then considered as an incumbrance in the choir.
With this detail I close my letter. The melancholy end of the Conqueror, the strange occurrences at his interment, the violation of his grave, the dispersion of his remains, and the demolition and final removal of his monument, are circumstances calculated to excite melancholy emotions in the mind of every one, whatever his condition in life. In all these events, the religious man traces the hand of retributive justice; the philosopher regards the nullity of sublunary grandeur; the historian finds matter for serious reflection; the poet for affecting narrative; the moralist for his tale; and the school-boy for his theme.--Ordericus Vitalis sums the whole up admirably. I should spoil his language were I to attempt to translate it; I give it you, therefore, in his own words:--"Non fictilem tragoediam venundo, non loquaci comoedia cachinnantibus parasitis faveo: sed studiosis lectoribus varios eventus veraciter intimo. Inter prospera patuerunt adversa, ut terrerentur terrigenarum corda. Rex quondam potens et bellicosus, multisque populis per plures Provincias metuendus, in area jacuit nudus, et a suis, quos genuerat vel aluerat, destitutus. Aere alieno in funebri cultu indiguit, ope gregarii pro sandapila et vespilionibus conducendis eguit, qui tot hactenus et superfluis opibus nimis abundavit. Secus incendium a formidolosis vectus est ad Basilicam, liberoque solo, qui tot urbibus et oppidis et vicis principatus est, caruit ad sepulturam. Arvina ventris ejus tot delectamentis enutrita cum dedecore patuit, et prudentes ac infrunitos, qualis sit gloria carnis, edocuit[[79]]."
Footnotes:
[76] Anglo-Norman Antiquities, p. 45.
[77] See Cotman's Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, t. 24-33.
[78] A detailed account of the proceedings on this occasion, is given in the Journal Politique du Département du Calvados, for March 21, and May 6, 1819.--The first attempt at the discovery of Matilda's coffin, was made in March, 1818, and was confined to the chapter-house: the matter then slept till the following March, when Count de Montlivault, attended by the Bishop of Bayeux, Mr. Spencer Smythe, and other gentlemen, prosecuted his inquiries within the church itself, and, immediately under the spot where her monument stood, discovered a stone coffin, five feet four inches long, by eleven inches deep, and varying in width from twenty inches to eleven. Within this coffin was a leaden box, soldered down; and, in addition to the box, the head of an effigy of a monk, in stone, and a portion of a skull-bone filled with aromatic herbs, and covered with a yellowish-white membrane, which proved, upon examination, to be the remains of a linen cloth. The box contained various bones, that had belonged to a person of nearly the same height as Matilda is described to have been. No doubt seemed to remain but that the desideratum was discovered. The whole was therefore carefully replaced; and the prefect ordered that a new tomb should be raised, similar to that which was destroyed at the revolution; and that the slab, with the original epitaph, should be laid on the top; that copies of the former inscription, stating how the queen's remains had been re-interred by the abbess, in 1707, should be added to two of the sides; that to the third should be affixed the ducal arms of Normandy; and that the fourth should bear the following inscription:--