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  1. ---
  2. date: 2017-04-11T11:13:32-04:00
  3. description: "Monsieur the Cardinal"
  4. featured_image: ""
  5. tags: []
  6. title: "Chapter III: Monsieur the Cardinal"
  7. ---
  8. Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of the Saint-Jean,
  9. the discharge of twenty arquebuses on supports, the detonation of that
  10. famous serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris,
  11. on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians
  12. at one blow, the explosion of all the powder stored at the gate of the
  13. Temple, would have rent his ears less rudely at that solemn and dramatic
  14. moment, than these few words, which fell from the lips of the usher, “His
  15. eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de Bourbon.”
  16. It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained monsieur the
  17. cardinal. He had neither the weakness nor the audacity for that. A true
  18. eclectic, as it would be expressed nowadays, Gringoire was one of those
  19. firm and lofty, moderate and calm spirits, which always know how to bear
  20. themselves amid all circumstances (_stare in dimidio rerum_), and who
  21. are full of reason and of liberal philosophy, while still setting store by
  22. cardinals. A rare, precious, and never interrupted race of philosophers to
  23. whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems to have given a clew of thread
  24. which they have been walking along unwinding since the beginning of the
  25. world, through the labyrinth of human affairs. One finds them in all ages,
  26. ever the same; that is to say, always according to all times. And, without
  27. reckoning our Pierre Gringoire, who may represent them in the fifteenth
  28. century if we succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which he
  29. deserves, it certainly was their spirit which animated Father du Breul,
  30. when he wrote, in the sixteenth, these naively sublime words, worthy of
  31. all centuries: “I am a Parisian by nation, and a Parrhisian in language,
  32. for _parrhisia_ in Greek signifies liberty of speech; of which I have
  33. made use even towards messeigneurs the cardinals, uncle and brother to
  34. Monsieur the Prince de Conty, always with respect to their greatness, and
  35. without offending any one of their suite, which is much to say.”
  36. There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain for his
  37. presence, in the disagreeable impression produced upon Pierre Gringoire.
  38. Quite the contrary; our poet had too much good sense and too threadbare a
  39. coat, not to attach particular importance to having the numerous allusions
  40. in his prologue, and, in particular, the glorification of the dauphin, son
  41. of the Lion of France, fall upon the most eminent ear. But it is not
  42. interest which predominates in the noble nature of poets. I suppose that
  43. the entity of the poet may be represented by the number ten; it is certain
  44. that a chemist on analyzing and pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says,
  45. would find it composed of one part interest to nine parts of self-esteem.
  46. Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit the cardinal, the
  47. nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire, swollen and expanded by the breath
  48. of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious augmentation, beneath
  49. which disappeared, as though stifled, that imperceptible molecule of which
  50. we have just remarked upon in the constitution of poets; a precious
  51. ingredient, by the way, a ballast of reality and humanity, without which
  52. they would not touch the earth. Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling,
  53. fingering, so to speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what
  54. matters that?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the
  55. presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from
  56. all parts of his bridal song. I affirm that he shared the general
  57. beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the
  58. presentation of his comedy of the “Florentine,” asked, “Who is the
  59. ill-bred lout who made that rhapsody?” Gringoire would gladly have
  60. inquired of his neighbor, “Whose masterpiece is this?”
  61. The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him by the abrupt and
  62. unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.
  63. That which he had to fear was only too fully realized. The entrance of his
  64. eminence upset the audience. All heads turned towards the gallery. It was
  65. no longer possible to hear one’s self. “The cardinal! The cardinal!”
  66. repeated all mouths. The unhappy prologue stopped short for the second
  67. time.
  68. The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the estrade. While he
  69. was sending a rather indifferent glance around the audience, the tumult
  70. redoubled. Each person wished to get a better view of him. Each man vied
  71. with the other in thrusting his head over his neighbor’s shoulder.
  72. He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was well worth
  73. any other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Comte of
  74. Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, was allied both to Louis XI., through his
  75. brother, Pierre, Seigneur de Beaujeu, who had married the king’s eldest
  76. daughter, and to Charles the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy.
  77. Now, the dominating trait, the peculiar and distinctive trait of the
  78. character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the spirit of the courtier, and
  79. devotion to the powers that be. The reader can form an idea of the
  80. numberless embarrassments which this double relationship had caused him,
  81. and of all the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had been
  82. forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either Louis or
  83. Charles, that Scylla and that Charybdis which had devoured the Duc de
  84. Nemours and the Constable de Saint-Pol. Thanks to Heaven’s mercy, he had
  85. made the voyage successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But
  86. although he was in port, and precisely because he was in port, he never
  87. recalled without disquiet the varied haps of his political career, so long
  88. uneasy and laborious. Thus, he was in the habit of saying that the year
  89. 1476 had been “white and black” for him—meaning thereby, that in the
  90. course of that year he had lost his mother, the Duchesse de la
  91. Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that one grief had
  92. consoled him for the other.