Insult to an image.
An incident occurring in Paris, before the adjournment of the Council of Sens, gave Francis a specious excuse for inaugurating the more cruel system of persecution now demanded of him, and tended somewhat to conceal from the king himself, as well as from others, the mercenary motive of the change. Just after the solemnities of Whitsunday, an unheard of act of impiety startled the inhabitants of the capital, and fully persuaded them that no object of their devotions was safe from iconoclastic violence. One of those numerous statues of the Virgin Mary, with the infant Jesus in her arms, that graced the streets of Paris, was found to have been shockingly mutilated. The body had been pierced, and the head-dress trampled under foot. The heads of the mother and child had been broken off and ignominiously thrown in the rubbish.[286] A more flagrant act of contempt for the religious sentiment of the country had perhaps never been committed. The indignation it awakened must not be judged by the standard of a calmer age.[287] In the desire to ascertain the perpetrators of the outrage, the king offered a reward of a thousand crowns. But no ingenuity could ferret them out. A vague rumor, indeed, prevailed, that a similar excess had been witnessed in a village four or five leagues distant, and that the culprits when detected had confessed that they had been prompted to its commission by the promise of a paltry recompense of one hundred sous for every image destroyed. But, since no one seems ever to have been punished, it is probable that this report was a fabrication; and the question whether the mutilation of the Virgin of the Rue des Rosiers was the deliberate act of a religious enthusiast, or a freak of drunken revellers, or, as some imagined, a cunning device of good Catholics to inflame the popular passions against the "Lutherans," must, for the present, at least, remain a subject of profound doubt.
Expiatory processions.
But, whoever may have been the author, pains were taken to expiate the sacrilege. Successive processions visited the spot. In one of these, five hundred students of the university, chosen from different colleges and belonging to the first families, bore lighted tapers, which they placed on the temporary altar erected in front of the image. The clergy, both secular and regular, came repeatedly with all that was most precious in attire and relics. To add still more to the pomp of the propitiatory pilgrimages, Francis himself took part in a magnificent display, made on the Fête-Dieu, or Corpus Christi (the eleventh of June). He was preceded by heralds and by the Dukes of Cleves and Ferrara and other noblemen of high rank, while behind him walked the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Ambassadors of England, Venice, Florence, and other foreign states, the officers of parliament, and a crowd of gentlemen of the king's house, archers and persons of all conditions bringing up the rear. On reaching the spot where the mutilated statue still occupied its niche, Francis, after appropriate religious exercises, ascended the richly carpeted steps, and reverently substituted an effigy in solid silver, of similar size, in place of the image which had been the object of insult.[288]
Other icoconoclastic excesses.
From this time forward, iconoclastic demonstrations became more common. Paintings, also, when exposed to the public view, shared the perils to which unprotected statues were subjected. The Virgin, and such reputable saints as St. Roch and St. Fiacre, depicted on the walls of the Rue St. Martin, were wantonly disfigured, some two years later; so that at last, the Parliament of Paris, in despair of preventing the repetition of the act, or of discovering its authors, adopted the prudent course of forbidding that any sacred representation should be placed on the exterior walls of a house within ten feet of the ground![289]
Berquin's third arrest.
He disregards the cautions of Erasmus.
The repeated assurances whereby Francis had conciliated the clergy, and secured their contributions to the exchequer, embarrassed him in the exercise of leniency toward Louis de Berquin, now for the third time arraigned for heresy. Moreover, the audacity and violence of the iconoclasts, characteristics assumed by him to be indicative of a disposition to overturn all government, probably took away any inclination he would otherwise have had to interfere in the intrepid nobleman's behalf. De Berquin had no sooner been released from his former imprisonment than he set himself to prepare for new conflicts with his bigoted antagonists. He even resolved to assume the offensive. In vain did Erasmus entreat him to be prudent, suggest the propriety of his temporarily going abroad, and propose that he should apply for some diplomatic commission as a plausible excuse for absenting himself. Beda, he told him, was a monster with many heads, each breathing out poison, while in the "Faculty" he had to do with an immortal antagonist. The monks would secure his ruin were his cause more righteous than that of Jesus Christ. Finally, the tremulous scholar begged him, if no consideration of personal safety moved him, at least not to involve so ardent a lover of peace as Erasmus in a conflict for which he had no taste. But his reasoning had no weight with a man of high resolve and inflexible principle, who could see no honorable course but openly meeting and overthrowing error. "Do you ask," wrote Erasmus to a correspondent interested in learning De Berquin's fate, "what I accomplished? By every means I employed to deter him I only added to his courage."[290] If we may believe Erasmus's strong expressions—for his own writings have very nearly disappeared—De Berquin assailed the monks with a freedom almost equal to that employed by the Old Comedy in holding up to merited derision the foibles of Athenian generals and statesmen. He even extracted twelve blasphemous propositions from Beda's utterances, and obtained a letter from the king enjoining the Sorbonne either to pass sentence of condemnation on their syndic's assertions, or to prove their truth from the Holy Scriptures.[291] The Dutch philosopher, aghast at his friend's incredible temerity, besought him instantly to seek safety in flight; and, when this last appeal proved as ineffectual as all his frequent efforts in the past, he confessed that he almost regretted that a friendship had ever arisen which had occasioned him so much trouble and disquiet.[292]
A third time Louis de Berquin was arrested, on application of the officer known as the Promoteur de la foi. His trial was committed to twelve judges selected by parliament, among whom figured not only the first president and the vicar-general of the Bishop of Paris, but, strange to say, even so well-disposed and liberal a jurist as Guillaume Budé, the foremost French scholar of the age for broad and accurate learning.[293] The case advanced too slowly to meet De Berquin's impatience. In the assurance of ultimate success, he is even accused by a contemporary chronicler of having offered the court two hundred crowns to expedite the trial.[294] It soon became evident, however, from, the withdrawal of the liberties at first accorded, that Be Berquin would scarcely escape unless the king again interposed—a contingency less likely to occur in view of the incessant appeals with which Francis was plied, addressed at once to his interest, his conscience, and his pride. But the more desperate the cause of Berquin, and the more uncertain the king's disposition, the more urgent the intercessions of Margaret of Angoulême, whose character is nowhere seen to better advantage than in her repeated letters to her brother about this time.[295]