At the solemn funeral in the Church of the Célestins, Jean sans Peur was one of those who bore the pall.[159] He was to bear that pall for the remainder of his life.[160] Of hundreds who watched him there, clothed in deep mourning, and weeping bitterly,[161] how many guessed the truth. Yet the truth was not long concealed. When the hue and cry was raised, it soon became known that the assassins had fled towards Rue Mauconseil, where was the Palace of the Duke of Burgundy; and the Provost of Paris suggested that he could soon lay hands on his men, were he permitted to search the hotels of the Princes. Then the Duke of Burgundy's countenance was observed to pale. Drawing aside the Duke of Berri and the King of Sicily, he whispered to them: "'Twas I, the Devil tempted me." They shrank from him; the Duke of Berri burst into tears. "I have lost both my nephews," he murmured.
A few hours later the scene was changed. Pride had conquered remorse in the heart of Jean sans Peur. Denied access to the Council, the murderer mounted horse, and galloped ventre à terre, into Flanders, there to steel his conscience against a deed which was to darken his shortened days with the shadow of impending death, and for thirty years was to drench the fields of France in the blood of her best.
The absent Duke entrusted to a certain learned doctor of Theology, Jean Petit, the duty of whitewashing his master—a task less formidable than it sounds to those unversed in the casuistry of the schools of that day. To do Petit justice, he seems to have acquitted himself as well as the obvious weakness of his case would permit.
Starting from the principal that it is "licit and meritorious to slay a tyrant traitorous and disloyal to his king and sovereign lord," he proceeded to show, to his own satisfaction, that the murder of the "criminal" Duke of Orleans "was perpetrated for the very great good of the king's person, and that of his children and all the kingdom," and held that the king should not only be pleased thereat, but should pardon the Seigneur de Bourgogne, "and remunerate him in every way, that is to say in love, honour, and riches, following the example of remunerations made to Monseigneur Michael the Archangel and the valiant man Phineas."
This extraordinary document, which, to the modern mind, is a jumble of unconscious humour and deliberate blasphemy, aroused, not unnaturally, "much murmuring within the town of Paris." The quarrel was taken up far and wide, and soon all France was divided into two camps, the Armagnacs,[162] known by the white scarf, and the Burgundians, whose badge was the Cross of St. Andrew.
We have no space in which to follow here the varying fortunes of the two parties. For long years, in town and country, they fought it out; the children of the villages with fists, feet, stones, and sticks; their elders in the towns, with sword, dagger, and club. In the autumn of 1418 the Burgundians effected an entry into Paris, and the excited mob commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of their opponents. Two presidents of parliament, magistrates, bishops, even, fell. Sixteen hundred persons perished in a day. They were slain in the prisons, they were slain in the street. "Did you see your enemy passing on the other side of the way, you had but to cry "À l'Armagnac" and he was dead." A woman, about to become a mother, was ripped open; within her dead body, as she lay in the street, the child could be seen to move. "Vois donc," said the canaille, "this little dog still stirs." But none durst take the child. No Burgundian priest would baptise a little Armagnac. Why should he save an enemy's brat from damnation?
"The children played with the corpses in the streets. The body of the Constable and others lay for three days in the palace, a butt for the jests of the passers by. Some of them remembered to take a strip of skin from his back, so that he, too, might wear in death, the white emblem of the living Armagnacs." At last the stench forced them to throw all the debris into the tomberaux; thence, without priest or prayer, into an open ditch in the pig-market.[163]