The last banquet prepared by the culinary officers of Francis I. for that royal personage, was one at which my readers would not have cared to sit in fellowship with the king, nor was it one which that monarch himself could be said to have perfectly enjoyed. He made, indeed, no remark or complaint, but that was for the natural reason that he was dead when he presided at it! How this came to pass I will proceed to relate.
On the 1st day of March, 1546, Francis I. died in the Château de Rambouillet. The whole of the following day his body was in the hands of the surgeon-embalmers, who vainly exercised their office to render that sweet when dead which had by no means been so when living. During six weeks the corpse was deposited at the neighbouring Abbey of Haute-Bruyère. It was then transported to the house of the Archbishop of Paris at St. Cloud, where there was a duplicate “lying in state.” The dead king, extended on a couch of richly embroidered crimson satin, was surrounded by a thickly-wedged mass of priests, who, night and day, offered up prayers for the repose of his soul. In the adjacent chamber was the “counterfeit presentment,” or effigy of the monarch, made “after nature,” reclining on a bed of the most gorgeous description, on and about which was displayed all that could lend additional solemn glory to the scene. The waxen effigy, with hands joined, was decked in a crimson silk shirt, covered by a light blue tunic powdered with fleurs de lis. The royal mantle, of a deep violet, lay across the feet; and near it were the orders, chains, and other “bravery” worn by Francis in his lifetime. On the head was a violet velvet scull-cap, and above that the crown. The legs were thrust into boots of cloth of gold, with crimson satin soles,—but then they were not made for walking in. In the room, and particularly near the bed, there was a blaze of gold and jewellery, such as dazzled the sight only to look at it. The upper portion of the bed was fashioned like a tent. Sentinels guarded it from without, and priests kept watch with much prayer within. They were of all grades, from cardinals and princes of the Church down to bare-footed friars, who would have been more thankful for a scarlet hat than for a pair of the newest sandals. These were the guests at a banquet where the king was the highly honoured host.
We are told by old Pierre de Chastel, Bishop of Macon, that the ordinary etiquette of service was rigorously maintained every day, during eleven days, as if the king had been living and laughing in the midst of them. The royal dinner-table was laid out at the side of the bed; a cardinal blessed the viands; and a gentleman of various quarterings presented to the unconscious image a full ewer, wherewith to wash the hands which, folded as they were, seemed like those of the father of Miss Kilmansegg, to be already washing themselves with invisible soap in imperceptible water!
A second gentleman offered to the representative of the defunct king a vase mantling with wine; and a third wiped his lips and fingers, as if either could have been soiled by not coming in contact with the cates and the goblet! These functions, and others that may very well be passed over, were performed amid a most death-like silence, and by the fitful light of funereal torches,—the only dinner lamps in use while the dead king was engaged in not dining. And such were the clever funeral banquets presided over by the waxen similitude of a defunct king. And here it should be my office to pass to other subjects more immediately connected with Table Traits, but I may perhaps, be pardoned if I add, that the royal corpse, after the copious feeding which its effigy was mocked with, was raised with incredible pomp, and borne into Paris with an attendant mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It was preceded by beggars, nobles, cavaliers, and cooks, (“officiers de bouche,”) pages, surgeons, and valets de chambre, grooms, heralds, and archbishops. The followers behind the car were of more uniform and exalted rank; and when the procession reached Vaugérard, it was met by the twenty-four town-criers of Paris, who took immediate precedence of the five hundred beggars. The funeral service in the cathedral was conducted with similar magnificence; but what is most singular is the fact, that the solemn ceremony was no sooner concluded, than it was recommenced with all gravity, for the benefit of the waxen effigy that had been served for eleven days with an “omelette fantastique!” and more than this, two of the sons of the deceased king, having been previously interred, but with maimed rites, a newly organized procession and service took place on this occasion, not only for themselves, but for their effigies also! There was an ocean of holy water scattered on these exaggerated dolls; the aspersion, however, was borne with a calmness worthy of their dignity! And at these ceremonies the English ambassador, with other Christian representatives, appeared on horseback, each with a prelate mounted also at his side. The union represented that which ought to exist between church and state everywhere, but which does not even in the Duchy of Baden. When the lengthened solemnities had come to a conclusion, the merry pages, as hungry as they were joyous, scrambled for sweetmeats, and that was the last of the feasting or fasting of Francis I.
All this seems barbarous and antique: it is the former rather than the latter. The custom, with some attendant exaggerations, is still prevalent in China, where only two years ago the defunct aunt of the sun and moon, mother to the reigning monarch, was feasted with a solemn parade of magnificent nonsense, the details of which make those of the banquet of the deceased Francis look extremely poor indeed. I believe that the Chinese idea with regard to their poor dead princess was, that she, or the immortal part in her, could not possibly take flight upon the celestial dragon waiting to convey her to the pagoda—paradise of Cathay—until this farewell banquet had been given to her by those who had loved her upon earth.
It is the easiest thing in the world, and perhaps it is the most natural, to smile superciliously at these customs, and dismiss them with the definite remark, that they were heathenish and superstitious. But our grandmothers, or their mothers rather, saw something very like it in England. In the latter case, it was not the consequence of a law that ruled in such matters, but a spontaneous act of a sublimely ridiculous, or a ridiculously sublime, affection. Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, we are told, demonstrated her affection for Congreve in a manner indicative of absolute insanity. “Common fame reports,” says Kippis, in the “Biographia Britannica,” “that she had his figure made in wax, talked to it as if it had been alive, placed it at table with her, took great care to help it with different sorts of food, had an imaginary sore in its leg regularly dressed, and, to complete all, consulted physicians with regard to its health.”
An invitation from the duchess to dinner, to meet her simulative friend, who could hardly be said to have waxed wittier after his metempsychosis, would not have been a lively thing. I am not sure that I would not rather have been in the place of the Hetman of the Zaparogue Cossacks, who was strangely treated and dieted when he was elected to the chief command over his own wild hordes. His followers besmeared (and the fashion is not yet obsolete) his face with mud, placed a symbolic baton in his hand, and a saucy-looking crane’s feather in his bonnet. They then gave him a cupful of tar (a process that would have delighted Bishop Berkeley), and after pitching greatness into him in this manner, he was allowed a draught of mead by way of purifying his palate. When Shakspere said, “Take physic, pomp,” he was little aware of the custom to that effect among the Zaparogues. It was sweetened, indeed, by the conclusive draught of mead, as Berkeley’s dissertation on tar water was wound up by a sermon on the Trinity; but I think I would have preferred swallowing the tar, with nothing to qualify it but the title, rather than have sat down to the most sumptuous of banquets, between the mad duchess and her wax lover with an issue in his leg!
William Howitt tells of an old countrywoman whom he sought to initiate into the simple elements of religion, and to whom he presented a Testament. When the latter had been read through, the worthy teacher asked her what she thought of the solemn record: “Ah, well!” was the graceless comment, “it all happened so long ago, and so far off, that I don’t believe a word of it!” Some such witticism may, perhaps, apply to my stories just told, some of which have distant scenes for their locality, and others distant periods for their times of actions. But, in the way of barbarous banquets, examples may be cited less open to this objection; and if the far-off Zaparogue chiefs have a cruelly nasty inauguration into greatness, I do not know if the children in the Scottish Highlands, to whom the wise women there administer a mixture of whisky and earth as their first food, have not a nastier inauguration into life. Having mentioned Scotland, I may, while on the subject of strange banquets, show how they cooked and fed in the days of Edward III. “Nor yet had they,” says old Joshua Barnes, “any cauldrons or pans to dress their meat in; for what beasts they found (as they always had good store in those northern parts), they would seethe them in their own (the beasts’!) skins, stretched out bellying on stakes, in the manner of cauldrons; and having thus sodden their meat, they would take out a little plate of metal, which they used to truss somewhere in or under their saddles, and laying it on the fire, take forth some oatmeal (which they carried in little bags behind them for that purpose), and having kneaded and tempered it with water, spread that thereon. This being thus baked they used for bread, to comfort and strengthen their stomachs a little when they eat flesh.”
Stomachs that needed no other comforting than this must have belonged to men of irresistible arms. They devoured the bullocks, and afterwards dressed themselves in the cauldrons. They remind us of those nomade people of whom the poet asks,—
“Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel