A handful of gray dust, all that was left of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, was flung to the wind, and one after another, Capetians, Valois, and Bourbons were dragged from the tomb and tumbled into a trench. On the pavement, one eye-witness says, rolled the heads of Louis XII and Francis I, of Marshal Turenne and of the great Constable Duguesclin.
For a short time the corpse of Henry IV, the most popular of all the long line of French kings, was respected. Embalmed with the best Italian skill, and so well preserved that the two fatal dagger wounds in the chest were still plainly visible, the body lay untouched for two days. Then some one shouted that Henry, like all the rest, had deceived the people, and his body, too, was flung into the trench.
After the Restoration an attempt was made to return the royal bodies to their tombs, but it was not altogether successful.
St. Swithin’s Troubled Rest.
If one passes from secular history to the legends of the saints, the exhumations become innumerable. It is, tradition asserts, on account of an attempt to remove the body of St. Swithin that we owe the prediction:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain na mair.
St. Swithin, chiefly notable for his mildness and humility, ordered that he should not be buried in his cathedral of Winchester, but in a “vile and unworthy place” among the common people in the churchyard. This the monks could not bring themselves to consider right, and on one July 15, they attempted to move the body of the bishop into the cathedral. But on that day and for forty days thereafter it rained so hard that they finally recognized in the weather the anger of the saint and abandoned their idea.