The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

In a tumultuous and cheering crowd, the citizens poured towards the centre of their civic life, in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge; Robert Deschamps, the Mayor, was put to instant flight for daring to give halting counsels, and his private prisons were broken open. "No King can make the people," cried the mob, "but we are going to make a King," and forthwith they seized on poor honest Jehan le Gras, a quiet, seemly draper; they robed him in a cloak that had just served its turn in the last Mystery Play, and they bore him in raucous triumph to the open square before St. Ouen. "I forthwith abolish the taxes!" stuttered the royal phantom in high dismay, while his subjects cheered vociferously, and every market-place roared approbation. "I deliver up the tax-gatherers to justice!" and in a trice every tax-gatherer, and Jew, and usurer, and fiscal agent was haled towards the bridge and there beheaded, till the Seine ran red beneath. "I deliver up your cruel Mayors to justice!" went on the quavering monarch, and forthwith five miserable men who had once been mayors of Rouen, fled from the Rue du Grand Pont, from the Rue Damiette, and from the Rue aux Gantiers, and took shelter in the nearest cemeteries, while their burning houses lighted up the town. "I deliver up the proud monks of St. Ouen to justice!" continued poor Jehan le Gras, seeing that the mob had already begun to batter in the monastery gates,[34] and in a moment more the archives and the ancient charters of the privileges of St. Ouen were in tatters on the ground, or burning among the desecrated walls they had protected for so many centuries. In his death-agony the trembling abbot signed the renunciation of his powers, while the crowd screamed at him till he was borne back to die.

And now the mob was parted here and there by a procession of strong men who bore something with great pride and mystery, and held it, enveloped from all harm, above their heads. A whisper went round that grew at last into a shout of welcome and drowned all other sounds. "The Charter of the Normans! Hats off to the Charter! God bless the good King Louis! God save the Charter!" From the inmost shrine of the Cathedral, where it was kept beside the relics of St. Romain, the famous charter had been brought by four burgesses, bareheaded, upon a stand with golden feet. For seven and sixty years it had remained in holy keeping, with the great green seal of Louis X. hanging from its yellow parchment, and now the dean followed it into the streets with all his trembling canons behind him. There was business to be done with them too, and they knew it only too well. "The Chapter will forthwith renounce," says Jehan le Gras, "that rent of 300 livres on the market-halls of Rouen; you will sign the deed or take the consequences." So they signed, and the crowd passed on breathlessly to the next entertainment; for on a scaffold hastily erected, there stood the King's Bailli, Thomas Poignant, reading (much against his will) the provisions of the sacred charter, while the crowd waited with pickaxes and hammers ready to rush and pull down his house at the least sign of hesitation.

So in a silence that was filled with possibilities, and broken only by the sound of the indefatigable "Rouvel," who continued tolling feverishly night and day, the sentences of the charter of Normandy echoed over the square before St. Ouen, and when it was ended all the company swore upon the sacred cross to keep it faithfully, the royal draper first, then what few remnants of civic magistracy were present, then the canons and the whole clergy of the town, then the men of law, and lastly every citizen in sight. Before night ended all the bloody doings of the day, the gibbet of St. Ouen (called the "fourches Patibulaires") had been torn down and burnt at Bihorel, and a solemn oath of amnesty for all acts of violence was exacted from every one who had suffered from the outrages of the mob, and at last poor Jehan le Gras was allowed to go home to his shop, without the faintest notion of what all the uproar had been about, and very thankful to give up his royalty and be an ordinary draper as before.

Unfortunately the crowd, drunk with success, did not cease their riot with the deposition of their King. The next morning they attacked the castle Philip Augustus had set up in the Place Bouvreuil. But the garrison repulsed them; Jean de Vienne, High Admiral of France, brought troops into the town; the King's Commissioners were sent down in haste with reinforcements, and heads began to fall with startling rapidity on the scaffold in the Vieux Marché, for the town prisons were choked with the rebels who had been arrested. To all demands for pardon, the quieter sort of the inhabitants were ruthlessly told, "Go to your own King, Jehan le Gras, and let him save you." But the worthy draper had taken care to fly from Rouen as soon as he could get out of his house, for he found the pains of royalty far outweighed its privileges. At last when Easter Eve dawned on a most unhappy town, news came that the young King with his uncles the Regents was waiting at Pont de l'Arche and would only enter armed and by a breach, into the town which had rebelled against him.

So they battered down the walls by the Porte Martainville, and the wives and mothers and sisters of the men condemned to death in prison helped the work, weeping at their task; and as they wrought, it was sure some woman's heart that had the sweet imagination to deck the town with joyous emblems, that so, by the mercy of God this young monarch of only thirteen years might perchance be moved to compassion, and bethink him of their former loyalty. So when the King came in, his eyes lighted only upon banners, and tapestries, and evergreens; and flowers fell upon him from the windows, and the leaves of the forest strewed the roads beneath him, and from every corner came the cry of "Noël, Noël, long live the King!" The welcome had at first been the desperate cry of people in sore straits; but at the sight of the boy himself, it turned into a genuine shout of admiration, for, says the chronicle, "he was of sovereign beauty both in face and body, and full of loving-kindness, and sweet charity, insomuch that all men who saw him were in great joy and love of him."

But the Duke of Anjou would not allow the young King's feelings to be moved; and it was the Duke who as they passed the belfry bade "Rouvel" to be taken down, because he had rung out the signal for revolt. Yet the cries of "Noël, Noël!" continued every step of the progress through the town, until they gave way to a silence that had an even greater effect upon the impressionable boy. For he was welcomed at the great western gate of the Cathedral by the Archbishop Guillaume de Lestrange, and by him was led before the sepulchre in which the heart of Charles V. lay buried, bearing testimony for ever to his love for Rouen. Then the King remembered how his father, each holy week, had signed many pardons, in memory of the God who had pardoned in those days the sins of the whole world. So he spoke the words of deliverance to Lestrange beside him, while the population crowded, still terror-stricken and uncertain of their fate, into the Cathedral, and filled its aisles with anxious faces, and climbed upon the pillars to try and get some view of the little King near the altar, upon whose will so many lives depended. Then at last appeared the Archbishop, standing high where all might see him, and as he read the words of pardon which had just received the royal signature, you may imagine how the roof rang with a greater "Noël," a louder "Vive le Roi" than ever had sounded in the Cathedral before.

From every prison and jail in the city the prisoners were hurried to the Mother-church; with their fetters still upon them they fell on their knees and thanked God and the King for their deliverance, while their families hung round their necks and sobbed for joy to see them again alive. It was that moment on the eve of the great festival when all the bells of Rouen began to herald the coming of Easter. The great paschal candle had been lit in the Cathedral, and as the Archbishop turned from the joyful throng before him to the King still standing by the altar-steps, he welcomed the beginning of a reign that was blessed by the giving of such happiness. And as the people crowded noisily out into the Parvis, and each wife took her husband home again, few thought of the misery, and the madness worse than death, that was coming upon the young King who had set the prisoners free.

There is one more tale, a very different one, that I must tell of this same life of the people round the belfry of the Grosse Horloge, if only to give you the contrast of the dealings of Louis XI. with the good citizens of Rouen, and to emphasise the moral of their sturdy independence. For though the commune was practically suppressed, in spite of the King's pardon, and though the results of this famous "Revoke de la Harelle" were felt until the society in which it had occurred had almost ceased to be, yet the character of the burgesses remained the same under whatever laws they lived, and their freedom of opinion continued under every rule. So that when every door in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge flew open on a morning in 1490, when every shop was filled with gossips eager for the news, and even "Rouvel" himself was tingling faintly with suppressed excitement, you might be sure that another royal attempt was being made upon the liberty of these touchy subjects. And indeed a most astonishing thing had happened. For a horseman of the King had suddenly spurred hot-foot through the town, and alighted at the shop of Maître Jehan le Tellier, with the stupefying request for the hand of his only daughter Alice in marriage, by virtue of the King's command signed and sealed in his pocket. The belfry-fountain was humming like a swarm of bees as all the chambermaids and goodwives in the street rushed up to fill their pitchers at the very moment when Le Tellier's housemaid happened to be filling hers.

But the loudest in outcry of them all was a young merchant whose shop happened to be opposite, and whose complaints against these outrages on civic independence and unwarrantable extensions of the royal prerogative would have warmed the heart of the most crabbed constitutional lawyer. His appeals to the sacred charter of Normandy were far louder than the rest, his invocations of the sanctity of the paternal tie far shriller. "What right," he cried, "had this Louis XI. to reward the ruffians of his Court with pretty girls and dowries when his royal purse was empty? What had made him choose Rouen, of all towns, for so unjustifiable a caprice?" As a matter of fact, it was about the worst choice he could have made, and Madame Estiennotte about the most unlikely mother he could have picked out for the prosperity of his experiment. She began by putting off the horseman until her husband should come back from market, and the moment his back was turned, she flew down the street to the Hôtel de Ville, with half her neighbours at her heels, and laid the King's letter before the Town Councillors. Many of them were at once appalled by the royal seals and sign-manual. But fortunately, one, Roger Gouël, spoke up for the ancient privileges of the charter, loudly proclaimed that the business was not one of the public weal, but of private concern to Dame Estiennotte alone, and avowed himself her champion. It was perhaps lucky for Councillor Gouël that Tristan l'Hermite was out of the way, but the citizens were soon ready with their plan.