The character or the punishments inflicted for the commission of crime furnishes a convenient test of national civilization. If France in the sixteenth century be tried by this criterion, the conclusion is inevitable that for her the age of barbarism had not yet completely passed away. The catalogue of crimes to which death was affixed as the penalty is frightfully long; some of them were almost trivial offences. A boy less than sixteen years of age was hung for stealing jewelry from his master.[74] On the other hand, with flagrant inconsistency, a nobleman, René de Bonneville, superintendent of the royal mint, for the murder of his brother-in-law, was dragged to the place of execution on a hurdle, but suffered the less ignominious fate of decapitation. A part of his property was given to his sister, and the rest confiscated to the crown, with the exception of four hundred livres, reserved for the purchase of masses to be said for the benefit of the soul of his murdered victim.[75]
Especially for heresy.
For other culprits extraordinary refinements of cruelty were reserved. The aventuriers, when so ill-starred as to fall into the hands of justice, were customarily burned alive at the stake.[76] The same fate overtook those who were detected in frauds against the public treasury. More frightful than all the rest was the vengeance taken by the law upon the counterfeiter of the king's coin. The legal penalty, which is said to have become a dead letter on the pages of the statute-book long before the French revolution, was in the sixteenth century rigidly enforced: on the 9th of November, 1527, a rich merchant of Paris, having been found guilty of the crime in question, was boiled alive before the assembled multitude in the Marché-aux-pourceaux.[77] Heresy and blasphemy were treated with no greater degree of leniency than the most infamous of crimes. Even before the reformation a lingering death in the flames had been the doom pronounced upon the person who dared to accept or promulgate doctrines condemned by the church. But when the bitterness of strife had awakened the desire to enhance the punishment of dissent, new or extraordinary tortures were resorted to, of the application of which this history will furnish only too many examples. The forehead was branded, the tongue torn out, the hand cut off at the wrist, or the agonies of death prolonged by alternately dropping the wretched victim into the fire and drawing him out again, until exhausted nature found tardy release in death.
But if we can to some extent account for the excess of cruelty which blind frenzy inflicted on the inflexible martyr to his faith, it is certainly more difficult to explain the severity exercised upon the more pliable, whom the arguments of ghostly advisers, or the terrors of the Place de Grève, had induced to recant. Generally the judge did nothing more in their behalf than commute their punishment by ordering them to be strangled before their bodies were consigned to the flames.[78] Yet in one exceptional case—that of a servant whose master, a gentleman and one of the men-at-arms of the Regent of Scotland, was burned alive—the court went to such a length of leniency as to let the repentant heretic off with the sentence that he first be beaten with rods at the cart's end, and afterwards have his tongue cut out.[79] Even the clearest evidence of insanity did not suffice to remove or even mitigate the penalties of impiety. A poor, crazy woman, who had broken the consecrated wafer when administered to her in her illness, and had applied to it some offensive but absurd epithet, was unhesitatingly condemned to the stake. An appeal to a superior court procuring no reversal of her sentence, she was burned at Tours in the year 1533.[80]
Belief in astrology.
Predictions of Nostradamus.
Other marks of a low stage of civilization were not wanting. The belief in judicial astrology was almost universal.[81] Pretenders like Nostradamus obtained respect and wealth at the hands of their dupes. All France trembled with Catharine de' Medici, when the astrologer gave out that the queen would see all her sons kings, and every one foreboded the speedy extinction of the royal line. The "prophecy," as it was gravely styled, obtained public recognition, and was discussed in diplomatic papers. When two of the queen's sons had in fact become kings of France, and a third had been elected to the throne of Poland, while the marriage of the fourth with Queen Elizabeth was under consideration, Catharine's allies saw grounds to congratulate her that the prediction which had so disquieted her was likely to obtain a more pleasing fulfilment than in the successive deaths of her male descendants.[82]
A still more pernicious form of superstition was noticeable in the credit enjoyed by charms and incantations, not merely among illiterate rustics, but even with persons of high social station. No phase of the magic art led to the commission of more terrible crimes or revealed a worse side of human character than that which pretended to secure the happiness or accomplish the ruin, to prolong the life or hasten the death, of the objects of private love or hatred. While systematically practising upon the credulity of his dupes, the professed master of this ill-omened art frequently resorted to assassination by poison or dagger in the accomplishment of his schemes. Sorcery by means of waxen images was particularly in vogue. Thus, the Queen of Navarre, the sister of Francis the First, in her singular collection of tales, the "Heptameron," gives a circumstantial account of the mode in which her own life was sought by this species of witchcraft.[83] Five puppets had been provided: three, representing enemies (the queen being one of the number), had their arms hanging down; the other two, representing persons whose favor was desired, had them raised aloft. With certain cabalistic words and occult rites the puppets were next secretly hidden beneath an altar whereon the mass was celebrated, and the mysterious "sacrifice" was believed to complete the efficacy of the charm. It was no new superstition imported from abroad, but one that had existed in France for centuries.[84]
Reverence for relics.
The French were behind no other nation in reverence for relics of saints and for pictures and images representing them. In the partial list, compiled by a contemporary, of the curiosities of this nature scattered through Christendom,[85] the majority of the relics mentioned are selected from the immense treasures laid up in the thousands of cathedrals, parish churches, and abbeys within the domains of the "Very Christian King." In one place the hair of the blessed Virgin was carefully preserved; in another the sword of the archangel Michael, or the entire body of St. Dionysius. It was true that the Pope had by solemn bull, about a century before, declared, in the presence of the French ambassador, that the entire body of this last-named saint was in the possession of the inhabitants of Ratisbon; but, had any one been so rash as to affirm at Saint Denis, near Paris, that the veritable remains were not there, he would certainly have been stoned.[86] At Notre-Dame de l'Ile, above Lyons, no little account was made of the twelve combs of the apostles![87]