[41] During the same changes, Pierre Poolin was given the office of Procureur-Général of Rouen, and Jean Segneult exercised the functions of the Mayoralty, though without the actual name.
[42] The prophetic word "Jamais" was in the device upon the tapestry above him.
[43] Eighteen million francs would represent the relative value of this sum nowadays. It was not fully paid eleven years later.
[44] No one has ever explained this to my satisfaction. But visitors to Heidelberg will remember the connection of a fox's brush with the Court Fool Perkeo, and various other legends of Renard which give the symbol, I fear, anything but a courteous significance for a foe beaten but not disgraced.
[45] The Englishmen recorded that some of their prisoners were put in the "Ostel de la Cloche dont avoit la garde Jehan Lemorgue." By this changed name is meant the humbled Hôtel de Ville, where prisons had been managed in the lower storeys early in the fifteenth century.
[46] After the Duke of Bedford had given the Célestins their Monastery, Charles VII. further assisted them by taking off all taxes on their wine. In recognition of this a monk used to dance and sing in front of the Monastic barrels as they were rolled past the Governor's house. Occasionally the combination of good claret and freedom from taxation overcame the monk's discretion, and the old proverb "Voilà un plaisant Célestin" preserves the memory of some such amiably festive ecclesiastic. The "Oison bridé" of the monks of St. Ouen was another instance of the way in which feudal privileges were commemorated by queer ceremonials which long outlived the society that gave them birth.
[47] In 1431 another prisoner, Souplis Lemire, of Yvetôt, was pardoned for exactly the same crime. By a lie he induced Jehanne Corvière to mount behind his horse, rode with her into a country lane, where in the words of the manuscript, "il la féry et frapa de plusieurs orbes coups, plus de l'espace de quatre heures, et lui fist la char toute noire et meudrie en plusieurs parties de son corps, et tant fist que il oult violemment et oultre le gré d'elle sa compaignie par grant force et à plusieurs clameurs de haro." In this case it was evidently the influence of the offender's family which procured him the Fierte, and his victim raised the "clameur de haro" during the ceremony itself. For this she was obliged to apologise to the canons, but Lemire's conduct throughout had been so disgraceful that, though the Fierte had absolved him definitely of all criminal penalty, after eight years of discussion he was condemned in the civil courts to pay damages of 250 livres tournois to Jehanne. In 1540 the same principle was upheld, and it generally seems to have been the custom that any prisoner chosen should give surety for the payment of his civil penalties before he was released by the Fierte from his criminal sentence.
[48] This Ellis was particularly lucky, for the first prisoner chosen had been Denisot le Charretier, who was claimed as an ecclesiastic by the Archbishop, Louis of Luxembourg, who was also Chancellor of France for the English King. They tried to secure his deliverance, but the Chancellor was too strong for them, and the dispute was settled by the intervention of Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who came in person to the Chapterhouse and persuaded the canons to renounce their right and choose another prisoner.
[49] These queerly distorted names are not the only ones that recall the English occupation. A still more vivid memory of it may be found in their old bowling green, which is still the "Boulingrin" of the Boulevard St. Hilaire (see [Map B]), a word with which Brachet compares "flibustier," "poulie," and others. The "redingote" for our riding-coat is at once a more familiar and more modern instance.
[50] There is a quaint suggestion of repentance for all this in the cathedral of to-day. If you enter by the Portail des Libraires and stand beside the north-east pillar of the great lantern, at your feet is the tombstone of one of these unjust judges, Denis Gastinel, and beneath it is the great Calorifère that warms the building, a suggestively gruesome foretaste of the punishment which the modern canons evidently think his conduct towards Jeanne d'Arc deserves.