At the time of the Revolution Notre Dame was dismantled—the pavement was torn up, the stained-glass windows were broken, and every kind of havoc was made, but the bare walls were left standing, and presently, when more tranquil times came, the old church was restored to public worship. As the beautiful flamboyant stalls which had once lined the choir had ere this been sold and carried away, it is said to England, it became necessary to procure new ones. It so happened that just before the French came, the monks of Eeckhout had ordered a new set of stalls for their abbey church. These, owing to the fact that they had not yet been erected, had escaped destruction, and by Napoleon’s orders they were set up in Notre Dame. The wood-carver, however, who had made them, had not received payment, and protested that the stalls were his, and by way of asserting his right, every Sunday and feast day, at High Mass and Vespers, until the day of his death some years after, he persisted in seating himself in the choir stalls at Notre Dame. Matter of little moment; after the Revolution there were no canons to occupy them.
From an artistic point of view there is nothing very remarkable about the stalls in question. They are sufficiently mediocre work of the period, but the hand of time has mellowed them, and their associations make them interesting. The carving of some of the miserere seats is very quaint, and is certainly ancient. Whether these formed part of the lost stalls of Notre Dame, or whether the redoubtable wood-carver employed some of the old Eeckhout work for his new stalls, it would be difficult to say.
CHAPTER VIII
William Cliton
WILLIAM OF LÖO, as we have seen, was the legitimate heir to the throne of Flanders, and if, when Charles fell, he had acted with energy and determination, there can be no doubt that he would have been able to grasp the prize he so much coveted, and retain it in spite of his enemies.
Fortune had been singularly kind to him. He was the only representative in the direct male line of the dynasty of Robert the Frisian, he was the favoured candidate of the great house of Erembald; his aunt, the countess dowager, was his staunch adherent. He had the goodwill of her second husband, his next-door neighbour, the powerful Duke of Brabant, who had given him his daughter in marriage. In Henry Beauclerc, who had married his wife’s sister, and whose Norman duchy adjoined the realm to which he laid claim, he had a friend who knew how to back fair promises with English gold; and lastly, when Charles was slain, he was within a stone’s throw of the capital. But ‘William saw a meteor on the horizon: the sword of Gervais Van Praet,’ and he was too dazzled by it to summon up courage to help his nearest friends, and when the Erembalds fell, the grandsons and great-grandsons of Baldwin the Devout took heart to dispute his claim. The number of them was legion. There was Charles’s nephew, Arnulph of Denmark, and his first cousin Dierick of Alsace; Baldwin of Mons, the representative of the dynasty of Baldwin the Good; William Cliton; Stephen of Blois, and perhaps too Henry of England himself.[16]
The Burgrave of Löo had sat with folded hands when the tide was at the flood, and in doing so he lost his one opportunity. In vain he now posed as Charles’s avenger. All the world knew of his intrigues with the Erembalds, and it was more than suspected that his own hands were red with Charles’s blood. His treachery gained for him no new friends, and disgusted the remnant which in spite of all still clung to him.