But Philip was not to be balked of his prey. The archbishop of Sens, who was also metropolitan of Paris held a special court in the Hôtel de Sens. This palace was replaced almost two centuries later by the Hôtel de Sens now to be
| HÔTEL DE CLUNY. See pages 197-198. | HÔTEL DE SENS. |
seen on the rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, a house well worth a visit from lovers of line and proportion as well as from antiquarians. To his court the archbishop summoned half a hundred of the knights who had denied their confessions, and the tribunal promptly convicted them of heresy and condemned them to be burned. The pope’s commissioners had no control over a local court and could not save the poor wretches. On a day in May, 1308, they were taken out of the city on the northeast and there suffered their cruel punishment, every one of them protesting to the assembled crowd the innocence of the Order. Six others were burned on the Grève.
Five years later the pope ordered the dispersal of the Order and Philip was at last able to take possession of their treasure—to repay himself for the heavy expenses of the trial!
While the Grand Master lived, however, even though he was in prison for life, the king did not feel secure in his ill-gotten gain. A year after the general dispersal the Parisians thronged one day into the Parvis de Notre Dame—the raised open space before the cathedral—where a representative of the pope, the archbishop of Sens and other church dignitaries sat enthroned. There Jacques de Molay and three other officers of the late Order were confronted with their false or extorted confessions. If it was done to harry them into some betrayal of feeling which could be taken advantage of for their destruction it was successful. De Molay protested against this untruth being again attributed to him. The crowd, eager for excitement, pressed closer to hear the ringing words of the old soldiers. Then, in the dusk of evening, noble and burgess and cleric pushed to the western end of the Cité where they could look across to some small islands, to-day walled and made a part of the land on which the Pont Neuf rests between the two arms of the Seine. On one of these islets the fagots were piled. A witness says; “The Grand Master, seeing the fire, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die, but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’”
While the flames leaped scarlet against the river and the sky the Grand Master summoned pope and king to appear with him before the bar of the Almighty. They who heard must have shuddered, and shuddered yet again when in fact Pope Clement died within forty days and Philip the Fair within the year.
In Paris the huge establishment of the Temple with its many buildings, its considerable fields and gardens and its walls, had been independent of the city, and over its inhabitants the Grand Master had power of life and death. When Philip took possession of its treasure he turned over the enclosure to the Knights of Saint John who held it as his subjects. In the course of time the quiet precincts of the Temple became a haven for impoverished nobles, for unlicensed doctors and for small manufacturers “independent” of the guilds, for all these found sanctuary here. Later the growth of the city smothered the grounds with streets and houses and did away with most of the buildings. In 1792 when Louis XVI was imprisoned in the large tower and the other members of the royal family in the smaller tower the few buildings that were left were torn down so that they might not serve as hiding places for any rescue party. Napoleon had the donjon demolished in 1811, and everything that was left of the once superb commandery melted into the Square du Temple under the beautifying process instituted by Napoleon III. Until a very few years ago one of the sights of Paris for seers in search of the unusual was the Temple Market edging the square, where old clothes, old curtains, old upholstery—every sort of second hand “dry goods”—offered a chance for the securing of occasional wonderful bargains provided the purchaser was either fluent in his own behalf or indifferent to what was said to him.