The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

THE artist who first truly understood the rendering of light is also the workman whose shadows are the deepest in every scene he drew. If I were to leave you with an impression of the sixteenth century either in Rouen or elsewhere—that was composed of gorgeous ceremonial, of exquisite architecture, of superabundant energy and life, and of these only, you would neither appreciate the many influences which wrought upon the men and women of those days, nor estimate at their true worth the changing events, on which we now look back in the large perspective of so many generations. And in that strange century the sorrow and the pain of a world in travail are as evident as its joy. The feverish excitement with which it grasped at life and pleasure is counterbalanced, and explained by the ever-present horror of death in its most ghastly forms.

When a fact of this eternal and natural significance is once frankly recognised and bravely faced, men do not think much about it afterwards, and say less. In the ages when the greatest of the cathedrals were built the personification of death is practically unknown. Archæologists may imagine they discover it; but I shall never believe that a single carving of it existed before the close of the fifteenth century. Life they knew, not only in all its varied forms, but as the soul. Sin they knew, and carved not merely in the full shame of the act but in the person of the father of sin, the devil, bat-winged and taloned, hovering over his prey on earth, or driving his victims after death into gaping Hellmouth where his torturers awaited them. But it was only when printing excited men's imaginations, when the first discovery of the ancient classics roused their emulation and stimulated their unrest, when the Renaissance in art increased their eagerness to express their thoughts and multiplied their methods of expression, when the Reformation turned their conscience to the latter end and to the unseen world—only at such a time of speculation and disquiet did Death himself appear, personified and hideously exultant. The waters were troubled and the slime beneath them came up to the surface. Instead of the bold imaginations of God or man or beast which the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knew, you find a crowd of tiny imps and monkeys, like the verminous throng upon the Portail des Marmousets at St. Ouen; the higher forms of creation disappeared before the presence of the Arch-Enemy.

There arose not only a great contempt for the value of human life, but a gross familiarity with death. The poor man, dying in his unregarded thousands, clutched to his starved heart the one consolation that the rich could not escape contagion. To the judge upon his bench, to the queen in her palace, to the cardinal in his state, to the king at his high festival, to the very Pope himself, death came as unerringly as to the ploughman sweating in his furrow. And the rich made haste to enjoy the little time they had. The best of that old life which remains to us is its buildings. From them and from the carvings on them we can imagine the fruitful, busy, breeding existence of that hurrying sixteenth century. Painters and sculptors worked as in a frenzy, covering canvas by the acre and striking whole armies of statues into serried ranks of stone. Men fought with swords that weaker generations can with difficulty flourish in the air; they wore armour that would make a cart-horse stagger. Quarrels, duels, riots, rapes, drinking-bouts, gallantries, and murders followed one another in a hot succession that takes away the breath of modern strait-laced commentators. Life that came easily into the world was spent as recklessly, and blood flowed as plentifully as wine. Rough horseplay and rude practical joking were of the essence of humorous courtliness. Immense processions filled with life and colour, jesting at everything sacred or profane, crowded with symbols decent and indecent, made up the sum of public happiness. Close at men's elbow lay the heavy hand of a merciless and blood-stained law. Once beneath the power of "Justice" the miserable prisoner had little hope of escaping before the legal Juggernaut had crushed him, and he was lucky who died quickest at the executioner's hands. The very criminals themselves sinned in a more stupendous fashion than they have had the courage to do since.

If I have not wearied you with quotations from the record of the Fierte St. Romain, I will pick out but two more instances in this century to show you that I do not speak without book at Rouen. In 1516, Nicolas de la Rue, whose sister had been married in Guernsey, discovered her in an intrigue with the commandant's son, and slew them both with one stroke of his sword. Thereon the commandant of the island called out 120 foot-soldiers, but De la Rue armed the crew of his vessel, drove them off, killed two with his own hand and sailed away to Normandy. There he fell desperately in love with a lady near Surville-sur-Mer, and taking his men with him carried her off from the Château de Commare. After keeping her with him for some time under promise of marriage, he captured an English vessel on the high seas after peace had been declared on both sides of the Channel, and was condemned to two years' banishment. At the end of this time he returned to Harfleur to recover some twenty thousand livres (the produce of former piracies in the English Channel) which he had left in the keeping of Mademoiselle de Commare.

But the lady had returned to her own family and carried off his money with her. When he followed to her house, she offered him only ten crowns, so he stayed in the village near by until he could devise a plan to get back his treasure. The lady called her friends and relations, and they tried to arrest De la Rue one morning in the market, with the result that several of them were badly wounded. At last a larger force managed to secure him, and threw him into a prison at Rouen on the capital charge of abduction. While there it was proved that he had stabbed a man to death in Harfleur in a quarrel about a woman; that at Janval, near Arques, he had punished a fellow called Bonnetot for insulting a comrade, by running him through with a rapier, from which Bonnetot died; and that in a quarrel about another woman he had dangerously wounded a naval officer with his dagger; and in these little escapades no mention is made of the countless acts of piracy on the high seas, which can seldom have been accomplished without considerable loss of life.

But this record is nothing to the second and last example which I shall take from the prisoners of the "Fierte." In 1541 a young gentleman named François de Fontenay, Sieur de Saint-Remy, aged twenty-nine, was pardoned by the canons after a career which I can only sketch in the roughest outlines. When he was only fifteen, he got some friends to help him and killed a sergeant who had displeased him by carrying stories of his behaviour to his mother. When a little older, in a village of the Côtentin, at the request of a young lady he professed to love, he laid an ambush with some friends for a Monsieur des Mostiers, but only succeeded in wounding him severely, and barely escaped the execution that punished one of his comrades in the same affair. Developing rapidly into a bravo of the first water, he attacked a man "at the request of le sieur de Danmesnil," and wounded him mortally with his rapier in the thigh. Being at a house in Montgardon with his mother and brother, he held it against forty armed men who had come in the name of the law to arrest them both, shot an arquebusier with his own hand, and beat the troop off before the help for which he managed to send had had time to arrive. Nor was he without friends who were quite worthy of their company.

In the year before de Fontenay himself enjoyed the Privilège de St. Romain, it had been extended, at the express wish of several members of the royal family, to four sons of the Baron d'Aunay, the Duke of Orléans being especially urgent in pointing out that these poor fellows had done nothing in his opinion that should debar them from the privilege. They were, as a matter of fact, merely charged with the following peccadilloes, among others. In the course of rescuing a friend from the Communal authorities at Saint-Avon, they used the town-folk so roughly that a man and a woman fell into a well during the dispute, and were drowned. On their way to the wars they met a man with his wife upon the bridge near their home, and annoyed at not having enough room left for their horses, they dismounted, tied up the man's hands and feet, and beat the woman cruelly before her husband's eyes. On the death of their grandmother, who had married twice, they visited her second husband to get possession of certain legal papers, and when he resisted they ran him through the stomach with a rapier. Enlisted for once upon the side of justice, they were clamouring at a house for the surrender of a murderer who had taken refuge there, and when the owner opened the door they killed him with a slash across the body. Pursued themselves by the officers, they waited till they were on their own land, then turned and charged the men, sword in hand, secured their horses, and thrashed one of them with knotted thorns. Before they were finally taken by the sergeants of Rouen they had thrown themselves into the church of Aulnay and defended it against forty armed men, wounding several of them with crossbow-bolts before they surrendered.

Our friend François de Fontenay was acquainted with this gallant band of brothers through the house of Créance, with which both were connected; and their sturdy resistance to the law of the land must have soon created a strong feeling of sympathy and admiration; for the five men are found all joined together to accomplish the murder of one Boullart near Caen. Wherever de Fontenay went it soon became the fashion among the villages to oppose his progress; but this made little difference, for both at Neufbourg and at Fert-Macé, either by his own hand or by his servants, several "common people," who were so ill-advised as to get in the way were killed, and at Dun-le-Roy he was compelled to fight his way out, using the edge of his rapier right and left, "with considerable loss of life among the peasants." They had been the centre (and their swords were never idle) of similar riots, near Bourges, in the streets of Falaise, at Lisieux, and elsewhere. More high-born foes were treated in just as summary a fashion. With his brother Jehan, François attacked his enemy St. Germain (a Côtentin magistrate) on the bridge at Lyons, wounded him four times, and left him dead. His shoemaker was late in delivering some boots, so François visited him, sword-in-hand, carried off two other pairs, and "has not yet been known to pay for them." Other necessities he had not scrupled to provide himself with in a similar way. Oxen and sheep from a farmer called Lemoyne, chickens from a priory near Bayeux, more sheep from the Sieur de Grosparmy, horses from another farmer, flour from a third. A husband who objected to giving up his wife at St. Lô was promptly wounded, so severely that he could only watch her helplessly as she was carried off.

Such are a few of the crimes, of which Monsieur de Fontenay confessed the astonishing number of forty-two. After his acquittal of them all, by virtue of the Fierte, the canons were for some six months kept hard at work dealing out similar deliverances to the crowd of his accomplices who kept on appearing from every side, and clamouring for the mercy of the Chapterhouse. Though I can conceive no worse precedent for the future of the Fierte, I need make no further comment upon the fact of de Fontenay's deliverance, except that he was so well aware of the detestation he had inspired in many of his victims that he was afraid to make any public appearance in the streets of Rouen for fear of assassination.