Chapter V: Part 5

Much of life’s brilliant panorama was seen from the elevation of the scaffold in the days when men had no chance nor leisure to die lingeringly in their beds. They fell fighting, or by the assassin’s hand, or by the help of what was then termed law; and the headsman, standing ever ready for his rôle, beheld human nature in its worst and noblest aspects, in moments of stern endurance and supreme emotion, of heroic ecstasy and blank despair. Had he a turn for the marvellous, it was gratified. He saw Saint Denis arise and carry his severed head from Montmartre to the site of the church which bears his name to-day. He saw Saint Felix and Saint Alban repeat the miracle. He heard Lucretia of Ancona pronounce the sacred name three times after decapitation. Ordericus Vitalis, that most engaging of historians, tells us the story of the fair Lucretia; and also of the Count de Galles, who asked upon the scaffold for time in which to say his _Pater Noster_. When he reached the words, _Et ne nos inducas in tentationem_, the headsman--all unworthy of his office--grew impatient, and brought down his shining sword. The Count’s head rolled on the ground, but from his open lips came with terrible distinctness the final supplication, _Sed libera nos a malo_.

These were not trivial experiences. What a tale to tell o’ nights was that of Théodoric Schawembourg, whose headless trunk arose and walked thirty paces from the block! Auberive, who has preserved this famous legend, embroiders it with so many fantastic details that the salient point of the narrative is well-nigh lost; but the dead and forgotten headsman beheld the deed in all its crude simplicity. Had he, on the other hand, a taste for experimental science, it was given him to watch the surgeons of Prague, who in 1679 replaced a severed head upon a young criminal’s shoulders, and kept the lad alive for half an hour. Panurge, it will be remembered, was permanently successful in a similar operation; but Panurge was a man of genius. We should hardly expect to find his like among the doctors of Prague.

Strange and unreasonable laws guaranteed to the headsman his full share of emoluments. He was well paid for his work, and never suffered from a dull season. From the towns he received poultry and fodder, from the monasteries, fish and game. The Abbaye de Saint-Germain gave him every year a pig’s head; the Abbaye de Saint-Martin five loaves of bread and five bottles of wine. Cakes were baked for him on the eve of Epiphany. From each leper in the community he exacted--Heaven knows why!--a tax at Christmastime. _Les filles de joie_ were his vassals, and paid him tribute. He had the power to save from death any woman on her way to the scaffold, provided he were able and willing to marry her. He was the first official summoned to the body of a suicide; and standing on the dead man’s breast, he claimed as his own everything he could touch with the point of his long sword. He might, if he chose, arrest the little pigs that strayed in freedom through the streets of Paris,--like the happy Plantagenet pigs of London,--and carry them as prisoners to the Hôtel Dieu. Here, unless it could be shown that they belonged to the monks of Saint Anthony, and so, for the sake of the good pig that loved the blessed hermit, were free from molestation, their captor demanded their heads, or a fine of five sous for every ransomed innocent. It was his privilege to snatch in the market-place as much corn as he could carry away in his hands, and the peasants thus freely robbed submitted without a murmur, crossing themselves with fervour as he passed. The representative of law and order was not unlike a licensed libertine in the easy day of old.

The element of picturesqueness entered into this life, sombre traditions enriched it, terror steeped it in gloom, the power for which it stood lent to it dignity and weight. In Spain the headsman wore a distinctive dress, and his house was painted a deep and ominous red. In France the ancient title “_Exécuteur de la haute justice_” had a full-blown majesty of sound. In Germany superstition grew like a fungus beneath the scaffold’s shade, until even the sword was believed to be a sentient thing with strange powers of its own. Who can forget the story of the child Annerl, whose mother took her to the headsman’s house, whereupon the great weapon stirred uneasily in its cupboard, thirsting for her blood. Then the headsman besought the mother to allow him to cut the little girl very lightly, that the sword might be appeased; but she shudderingly refused, and Annerl, abandoned to her destiny, was led thirty years later to the block. Executions at night were long in favour, and by the flare of torches the scaffold stood revealed to a great and gaping crowd. For centuries _la place de Grève_ was the theatre for this ghastly drama, until every foot of the soil was saturated with blood. Only in 1633 were these torchlight decapitations forbidden throughout France. They had grown too turbulently entertaining.

The headsman’s office was hereditary, and if there were no sons, a son-in-law succeeded to the post. Henri Sanson, the last of his dread name, claimed that he was of good blood, and that the far-off ancestor who handed down his sword to nine generations had been betrayed by love to this dark destiny. He had married a headsman’s daughter, and could not escape the terrible dowry she brought him. It is not possible to attach much weight to the Sanson memoirs,--they are so plainly apocryphal; but we know that the family plied its craft for nearly two hundred years, and that one woman of the race bore seven sons, who all became executioners. In 1726 Charles Sanson died, leaving a little boy, Jean Baptiste, only seven years old. Upon him devolved his father’s office; but, in view of his tender infancy, an assistant was appointed to do the work until he came of age. It was required, however, that the child should stand upon the scaffold at every execution, sanctioning it with his presence.

The pride of the headsman lay in his dexterity. The sword was heavy, the stroke was sure. Capeluche, who during the furious struggle between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians severed many a noble head, was a true enthusiast, practising his art _con amore_, and with incredible delicacy and skill. When the fortunes of war brought him in turn upon the scaffold, he proved no craven; but took a lively and intelligent interest in his own decapitation. His last moments were spent in giving a practical lesson to the executioner; showing him where to stand, where to place the block, and how best to handle his weapon.

The vast audience that assembled so often to witness a drama never staled by repetition was wont to be exceedingly critical. Bungling work drew down upon the headsman the execrations of the mob, and not infrequently placed his own life in danger. De Thou’s head fell only at the eleventh stroke, the Duke of Monmouth was mangled piteously, and in both these instances the fury of the mob rose to murder point. It was ostensibly to save such sufferings and such scenes that the guillotine was adopted in France; but for the guillotine it is impossible to cherish any sentiment save abhorrence. Vile, vulgar, and brutalizing, its only merit was the hideous speed with which it did its work; a speed which the despots of the Terror never found fast enough. In October, 1792, twenty-one Girondists were beheaded in thirty-one minutes; but as practice made perfect, these figures were soon outdistanced. The highest record reached was sixty-two decapitations in forty-five minutes, which sounds like the work of the shambles.

Charles Henri Sanson, the presiding genius of the guillotine, has been lifted to notoriety by the torrents of blood he shed; but his is a contemptible figure, without any of the dark distinction that marked his predecessors. His pages of the family memoirs are probably mendacious, and certainly, as M. Loye pathetically laments, “insipid.” He poses as a physiologist, and tells strange tales of the condemned who long survived beheading, as though sixty-two executions in forty-five minutes left leisure for the study of such phenomena. He also affects the tone of a philanthropist, commiserates the king who died by his hands, and is careful to assure us that it was an assistant named Legros who, holding up the severed head of Charlotte Corday, struck the fair cheek which blushed beneath the blow. We are even asked to believe that he, Sanson, whispered to Marie Antoinette as she descended from the cart, “Have courage, Madame!”--counsel of which that daughter of the Cæsars stood in little need.

The contrast is sharp between this business-like butchery, where the condemned were begrudged the time it took to die, and the earlier executions, so full of dignity and composure. The vilest criminals felt intuitively that the fulness of their atonement consecrated those last sad moments, and behaved often with unexpected propriety and grace. Mme. de Brinvilliers was a full half hour upon the scaffold. The headsman prepared her for death, untying her cap-strings, cutting off her hair, baring her shoulders, and binding her hands. She was composed without bravado, contrite without sanctimoniousness. “I doubt,” wrote her confessor, the Abbé Piron, “whether in all her life she had ever been so patient under the hands of her maid.” Some natural scorn she expressed at sight of the crowd straining with curiosity to see her die: “Un beau spectacle, Mesdames et Messieurs!”--but this was all. The executioner swept off her head with one swift stroke; then, hastily opening a flask, took a deep draught of wine. “That was a good blow,” he said to the Abbé. “At these times I always recommend myself to God, and He has never failed me. This lady has been on my mind for a week past. I will have six Masses said for her soul.” Surely such a headsman ennobled in some degree the direful post he bore.

If a murderess, inconceivably callous and cruel, could die with dignity, what of the countless scenes where innocence was sacrificed to ambition, and where the best and noblest blood of Europe was shed upon the block? What of the death of Conradin on a Neapolitan scaffold? In the thirteenth century, boys grew quickly into manhood, and Conradin was seventeen. He had embarked early upon that desperate game, of which the prize was a throne, and the forfeit, life. He had missed his throw, and earned his penalty. But he was the grandson of an emperor, the heir of an imperial crown, and the last of a proud race. There was a pathetic boyishness in the sudden defiance with which he hurled his glove into the throng, and in the low murmur of his mother’s name. The headsman had a bitter part to play that day, for Conradin’s death is one of the world’s tragedies; but there are other scaffolds upon which we still glance back with a pity fresh enough for pain. When Count Egmont and Admiral Horn were beheaded in the great square of Brussels, the executioner wisely hid beneath the black draperies until it was time for him to do his work. He had no wish to parade himself as part of that sad show.

In England the rules of etiquette were never more binding than upon those who were about to be beheaded. When the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and Lord Capel went to the block together, they were told they must die in the order of their rank, as though they were going in to dinner; and upon Lord Capel’s offering to address the crowd without removing his hat, it was explained to him that this was incorrect. The scaffold was not the House of Parliament, and those who graced it were expected to uncover. On a later and very memorable occasion, the Earl of Kilmarnock, “with a most just mixture of dignity and submission,” offered the melancholy precedence to Lord Balmerino. That gallant soldier--“a natural, brave old gentleman,” says Horace Walpole, though he was but fifty-eight--would have mounted first, but the headsman interfered. Even upon the scaffold, a belted earl enjoyed the privileges of his rank.

All this formality must have damped the spirits of the condemned; but it seems to have been borne with admirable gayety and good temper. Lord Balmerino, “decently unmoved,” was ready to die first or last, and he gave the punctilious executioner three guineas, to prove that he was not impatient. “He looked quite unconcerned,” says an eye-witness, “and like some one going on a party of pleasure, or upon some business of little or no importance.” Lord Lovat, beheaded at eighty for his active share in the Jacobite rising of ‘forty-five, derived much amusement from the vast concourse of people assembled to witness his execution;--an amusement agreeably intensified by the giving way of some scaffolding, which occasioned the unexpected death of several eager sight-seers. “The more mischief, the better sport,” said the old lord grimly, and proceeded to quote Ovid and Horace with fine scholarly zest. If the executioner were seldom a person of education, it was from no lack of opportunity. He might, had he chosen, have learned at his post much law and more theology. When Archbishop Laud stood waiting by the block, Sir John Clotworthy conceived it to be a seasonable occasion for propounding some knotty points of doctrine. The prelate courteously answered one or two questions, but time pressed, and controversy had lost its charms. Even so good a churchman may be pardoned for turning wearily away from polemics, when his life’s span had narrowed down to minutes, and the headsman waited by his side.

In the burial registry of Whitechapel, under the year 1649, is the following entry:--

“June 21st, Richard Brandon, a man out of Rosemary Lane. This Brandon is held to be the man who beheaded Charles the First.”

“Held to be” only, for the mystery of the King’s executioner was one which long excited and baffled curiosity. Wild whispers credited the deed to men of rank and station, among them Viscount Stair, the type of strategist to whom all manner of odium naturally and reasonably clings. A less distinguished candidate for the infamy was one William Hewlett, actually condemned to death after the Restoration for a part he never played, and saved from the gallows only by the urgent efforts of a few citizens who swore that Brandon did the deed. Brandon was not available for retribution. He had died in his bed, five months after Charles was beheaded, and had been hurried ignominiously into his grave in Whitechapel churchyard. As public executioner of London, he could hardly escape his destiny; but it is said that remorse and horror shortened his life. In his supposed “Confession,” a tract widely circulated at the time, he claimed that he was “fetched out of bed by a troup of horse,” and carried against his will to the scaffold. Also that he was paid thirty pounds, all in half-crowns, for the work; and had “an orange stuck full of cloves, and a handkerchief out of the King’s pocket.” The orange he sold for ten shillings in Rosemary Lane.

The shadow that falls across the headsman’s path deepens in horror when we contemplate the scaffolds of Charles, of Louis, of Marie Antoinette, and of Mary Stuart. The hand that has shed royal blood is stained forever, yet the very magnitude of the offence lends to it a painful and terrible distinction. It is the zenith as well as the nadir of the headsman’s history; it is the corner-stone of the impassable barrier which divides the axe and the sword from the hangman’s noose, the death of Strafford from the death of Jonathan Wild.

If we turn the page, and look for a moment at the “gallows tree,” we find that it has its romantic and its comic side, but the comedy is boisterous, the romance savours of melodrama. For centuries one of the recognized amusements of the English people was to see men hanged, and the leading features of the entertainment were modified from time to time to please a popular taste. Dr. Johnson, the sanest as well as the best man of his day, highly commended these public executions as “satisfactory to all parties. The public is gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it.” That the enjoyment was often mutual, it is impossible to deny. There was a world of meaning in the gentle custom, supported for years by a very ancient benefaction, of giving a nosegay to the condemned man on his way to Tyburn. Before the cart climbed Holborn Hill,--“the heavy hill” as it was called, with a touch of poetry rivalling the “Bridge of Sighs,”--it stopped at Saint Sepulchre’s church, and on the church steps stood one bearing in his hands the flowers that were to yield their fresh fragrance to the dying. Nor were the candidates without their modest pride. When the noted chimney-sweep, Sam Hall, achieved the honour of a hanging, he was rudely jostled, and bidden to stand off by a highwayman, stepping haughtily into the cart, and annoyed at finding himself in such low company. “Stand off, yourself!” was the indignant answer of the young sweep. “I have as good a right to be here as you have.”

“Nothing,” says Voltaire, “is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged,” and the loneliness which in this moral age encompasses the felon’s last hours should be as salutary as it is depressing. Mr. Housman, who gets closer to the plain thoughts of plain men than any poet of modern times, has given stern expression to the awful aloofness of the condemned criminal from his fellow creatures, an aloofness unknown in the cheerful, brutal days of old.

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men who die at morn.

The sociability of Tyburn, if somewhat vehement in character, was a jocund thing by the side of such solitude as this.

Parish registers make curious reading. They tell so much in words so scant and bald that they set us wondering on our own accounts over the unknown details of tragedies which even in their day won no wide hearing, and which have been wholly forgotten for centuries. Mr. Lang quotes two entries that are briefly comprehensive; the first from the register of Saint Nicholas, Durham, August 8, 1592: “Simson, Arington, Featherston, Fenwick, and Lancaster, were hanged for being Egyptians.”

Featherston and Fenwick might have been hanged on the evidence of their names, good gypsy names both of them, and famous for years in the dark annals of the race; but were these men guilty of no other crime, no indiscretion even, that has escaped recording? Five stalwart rogues might have served the queen in better fashion than by dangling idly on a gallows. The second entry, from the parish church of Richmond in Yorkshire, 1558, is still shorter, a model of conciseness: “Richard Snell b’rnt, bur. 9 Sept.”

Was Snell a martyr, unglorified by Fox, or a particularly desperate sinner; and if a sinner, what was the nature of his sin? Warlocks were commonly hanged in the sixteenth century, even when their sister witches were burned. “_C’est la loi de l’homme._” In fact, burning was an unusual, and--save in Queen Mary’s mind--an unpopular mode of punishment. “You are burnt for heresy,” says Mr. Birrell with great good humour. “That is right enough. No one would complain of that. Hanging is a different matter. It is very easy to get hung; but to be burnt requires a combination of circumstances not always forthcoming.”

Yet Richard Snell, yeoman of Yorkshire, mastered these circumstances; and a single line in a parish register is his meagre share of fame.

CONSECRATED TO CRIME

The breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there,
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration.

--FRA LIPPO LIPPI.

Not long ago I saw these lines quoted to show the blessedness of sanctuary; quoted with a serious sentimentality which left no room for their more startling significance. The writer drew a parallel between the ruffian sheltered by his church and the soldier sheltered by his flag, forgiven much wrong-doing for the sake of the standard under which he has served and suffered. But Mr. Browning’s murderer has not served the church. He is unforgiven, and, let us hope, eventually hanged. In the interval, however, he poses as a hero to the children, and as an object of lively interest to the pious and Mass-going Florentines. A lean monk praying on the altar steps would have awakened no sentiment in their hearts; yet even the frequency, the cheapness of crime failed to rob it of its lustre. It was not without reason that Plutarch preferred to write of wicked men. He had the pardonable desire of an author to be read.

In these less vivid days we are seldom brought into such picturesque contact with assassins. The majesty of the law is strenuously exerted to shield them from open adulation. We have grown sensitive, too, and prone to consider our own safety, which we call the welfare of the public. Some of us believe that criminals are madmen, or sick men, who should be doctored rather than punished. On the whole, our emotions are too complex for the straightforward enjoyment with which our robust ancestors contemplated--and often committed--deeds of violence. Murder is to us no longer as

... a dish of tea,
And treason, bread and butter.

We have ceased to stomach such sharp condiments.

Yet something of the old glamour, the glamour with which the Serpent beguiled Eve, still hangs about historic sins, making them--as Plutarch knew--more attractive than historic virtues. Places consecrated to the memory of crime have so keen an interest that travellers search for them painstakingly, and are often both grieved and indignant because some blood-soaked hovel has not been carefully preserved by the ungrateful community which harboured--and hanged--the wretch who lived in it. I met in Edinburgh a disappointed tourist,--a woman and an American,--who had spent a long day searching vainly for the house in which Burke and Hare committed their ghastly murders, and for the still more hideous habitation of Major Weir and his sister. She had wandered for hours through the most offensive slums that Great Britain has to show; she had seen and heard and smelt everything that was disagreeable; she had made endless inquiries, and had been regarded as a troublesome lunatic; and all that she might look upon the dilapidated walls, behind which had been committed evils too vile for telling. And this in Edinburgh, the city of great and sombre tragedies, where Mary Stuart held her court, and Montrose rode to the scaffold. With so many dark pages in her chronicles, one has scant need to burrow for ignoble guilt.

There are deeds, however, that have so coloured history, stained it so redly and so imperishably, that their seal is set upon the abodes that witnessed them, and all other associations grow dim and trivial by comparison. The murder of a Douglas or of a Guise by his sovereign is the apotheosis of crime, the zenith of horror. As long as the stones of Stirling or of Blois shall hold together, that horror shall be their dower. The walls shriek their tale. They make a splendid and harmonious background for the tragedy that gives them life. They are fitting guardians of their fame. It can never be sufficiently regretted that the murder of Darnley had so mean a setting, and that the methods employed by the murderers have left us little even of that meanness. Some bleak fortress in the north should have sheltered a crime so long impending, and so grimly wrought; but perhaps the paltriness of the victim merited no better _mise en scène_. The Douglas and the Guise were made of sterner stuff, and the world--the tourist world--pays in its vapouring fashion a tribute to their strength. It buys pathetically incongruous souvenirs of the “Douglas room;” and it traces every step by which the great Duke, the head and the heart of the League, went scornfully to his death.

Blois _has_ associations that are not murderous. It saw the solemn consecration of the standard of Joan of Arc, and the splendid feasts which celebrated the auspicious betrothal of Henry of Navarre to his Valois bride. The statue of Louis the Twelfth, “Father of his people,” sits stiffly astride of its caparisoned charger above the entrance gate. But it is not upon Joan, nor upon Navarre, nor upon good King Louis that the traveller wastes a thought. The ghosts that dominate the château are those of Catherine de Medici, of her son, wanton in wickedness, and of the murdered Guise. Castle guides are notoriously short of speech, sparing of time, models of bored indifference. But the guardian of Blois waxes eloquent over the tale he has to tell, and, with the dramatic instinct of his race, strives to put its details vividly before our eyes. He assigns to each assassin his post, shows where the wretched young king concealed himself until the deed was done, and points out the exact spot in the Cabinet Vieux where the first blow was struck. “Behold the perfect tableau!” he winds up enthusiastically, and we are forced to admit that, as a tableau, it lacks no element of success. Mr. Henry James’s somewhat cynical appreciation of this “perfect episode”--perfect, from the dramatist’s point of view--recurs inevitably to our minds:--

“The picture is full of light and darkness, full of movement, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it complete. The insolent prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors of the author of the deed; the admirable execution of the plot; the accumulation of horror in what followed,--render it, as a crime, one of the classic things.”

Classic surely were the repeated warnings, so determinedly ignored. Cæsar was not more plainly cautioned of his danger than was the Duke of Guise. Cæsar was not more resolved to live his life fearlessly, or to die. Cæsar was not harder to kill. It takes many a dagger stroke to release a strong spirit from its clay.

There were dismal prophecies months ahead, advance couriers of the slowly maturing plot. “Before the year dies, you shall die,” was the message sent to the Duke when the States-General were summoned to Blois. His mother, ceaselessly apprehensive, his mistress, Charlotte de Sauves, besought him to leave the château. Nine ominous notes, crumpled bits of paper, each written at the peril of a life, admonished him of his fate. The ninth was thrust into his hand as he made his way for the last time to the council chamber. “_Le ciel sombre et triste_” frowned forebodingly upon him as he crossed the terrace, and La Salle and D’Aubercourt strove even then to turn him back. At the foot of the beautiful spiral staircase sat the jester, Chicot, singing softly under his breath a final word of warning, “_Hé, j’ay Guise._” He dared no more, and he dared that much in vain. The Duke passed him disdainfully, and--smitten by the gods with madness--went lightly up the steps to meet his doom.

This is the story that Blois has to tell, and she tells it with terrible distinctness. She is so steeped in blood, so shadowed by the memory of her crime, that there is scant need for her guides to play their official parts, nor for her museum walls to be hung round with feeble representations of the tragedy. But it is strange, after all, that the beautiful home of Francis the First should not speak to us more audibly of him. He built its right wing, “the most joyous utterance of the French Renaissance.” He stamped his own exuberant gayety upon every detail. His salamander curls its carven tail over stairs and doors and window sills. He is surely a figure striking enough, and familiar enough to enchain attention. Why do we not think about him, and about those ladies of “mutable connections” whose names echo buoyantly from his little page of history? Why do our minds turn obstinately to the Cabinet Vieux, or to those still more mirthless rooms above where Catherine de Medici lived and died. “_Il y a de méchantes qualités qui font de grandes talents_,” but these qualities were noticeably lacking in the Queen Mother. It is not the good she tried and failed to do, but the evil that she wrought which gives her a claim to our magnetized interest and regard.

To the tolerant observer it seems a work of supererogation, a gilding of refined gold, to add to the sins of really accomplished sinners like Catherine and Louis the Eleventh. These sombre souls have left scant space for our riotous imaginations to fill in. Their known deeds are terrible enough to make us quail. It might be more profitable--as it is certainly more irksome--to search for their redeeming traits: the tact, the mental vigour of the queen, and the efforts she made to bind together the distracted factions of France; the courage, sagacity, and unflinching resolution with which Louis strengthened his kingdom, and protected those whose mean estate made them wholly uninteresting to nobler monarchs. These things are worth consideration, but far be it from us to consider them. High lights and heavy shadows please us best; and by this time the shadows have been so well inked that their blackness is impenetrable. It can never be said of Catherine de Medici, as it is said of Mary Stuart, that she has been injured by the zeal of her friends, and helped by the falsehoods of her enemies. Catherine has few friends, and none whose enthusiasm is burdensome to bear. She has furnished easily-used material for writers of romance, who commonly represent her as depopulating France with poisoned gloves and perfumery; and she has served as a target--too big to be missed--for tyros in historical invective. We have come to regard her in a large, loose, picturesque way as an embodiment of evil,--very much, perhaps, as Mr. John Addington Symonds regards Clytemnestra,--fed and nourished by her sins, waxing fat upon iniquity, and destitute alike of conscience and of shame. And this is the reason that women who have spent their lives in the practice of laborious virtues stand fluttering with delight in that dark Medicean bedchamber. “Blois is the most interesting of all the châteaux,” said one of them to me;--she looked as if she could not even tell a lie;--“you see the very bed in which Catherine de Medici died.” And I thought of the Florentine children at the altar steps.

Mr. Andrew Lang is of the opinion that if an historical event could be discredited, like a ghost story, by discrepancies in the evidence, we might maintain that Darnley was never murdered at all. We might also be led to doubt the existence of Cardinal Balue’s cage, that ingenious torture-chamber which has added so largely and so deservedly to the reputation of Louis the Eleventh. There is a drawing of the cage, or rather of _a_ cage, still to be seen, and there is the bill for its making;--what a prop to history are well-kept household accounts!--while, on the other hand, its ubiquitous nature staggers our trusting faith. Loches claims it as one of her traditions, and so does Plessis-les-Tours. Loches is so rich in horrors that she can afford to dispense with a few; but the cage, if it ever existed at all, was undoubtedly one of the permanent decorations of her tower. The room in which it hung is cheerful and commodious when compared to the black prison of Saint Valier, or to the still deeper dungeon of the Bishops of Puy and Autun. The cardinal could at least see and be seen, if that were any amelioration of his lot, and we are still shown the turret stairs down which the king stepped warily when he came to visit his prisoner.

But Plessis-les-Tours covets the distinction of the cage. She is not without some dismal memories of her own, though she looks like a dismantled factory, and she strives with pardonable ambition to make them dismaler. The energetic and intelligent woman who conducts visitors around her mouldering walls has, in a splendid spirit of assurance, selected for this purpose a small dilapidated cellar, open to the sky, and a small dilapidated flight of steps, not more than seven in number. Beneath these steps--where a terrier might perhaps curl himself in comfort--she assured us with an unflinching front the cardinal’s cage was tucked; and reading the doubt in our veiled eyes, she stooped and pointed out a rusty bit of iron riveted in the wall. “See,” she said triumphantly, “there still remains one of the fastenings of the cage.” The argument was irresistible:

Behold this Walrus tooth.

The fact is that it has been found necessary to exert a great deal of ingenuity in order to meet the popular demand for cold-blooded cruelty where Louis the Eleventh is concerned. He is an historic bugbear, a hobgoblin, at whose grim ghost we grown-up children like to shudder apprehensively. Scott, with a tolerance as wide as Shakespeare’s own, has dared to give a finer colour to the picture, has dared to engage our sympathy for this implacable old man who knew how to “hate and wait,” how to lie in ambush, and how to drive relentlessly to his goal. But even Scott has been unable to subdue our cherished antipathy, or to modify the deep prejudices instilled early into our minds. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, who of all writers has least patience with schoolbook verdicts, hits hard at our narrow fidelity to censorship. “It is probably more instructive,” he says, “to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices.”

Now a more unpopular, a more comprehensively unlovable person than Louis it would be hard to find. He did much for France, yet France drew a deep breath of relief when he died.

Il n’est pas sire de son pays,
Quy de son peple n’est pas amez.

Those who fail to entertain the “sneaking kindness” recommended by Mr. Stevenson may shelter themselves behind this ancient couplet. “Of him there is an end. God pardon him his sins,” is Froissart’s fashion of summing up every man’s career. It will serve as well for Louis as for another.

But to gratify at once our prejudices and our emotions, a generous mass of legend has been added to the chronicles of Loches, Blois, Amboise, and other castles that are consecrated to the crimes of kings. History, though flexible and complaisant up to a certain point, has her limits of accommodation. She has also her cold white lights, and her disconcerting truths, so annoying, and so invariably ill-timed in their revelations. We can never be quite sure that History, however obliging she seems, will not suddenly desert our rightful cause, and go over to our opponents. We have but to remember what trouble she has given, and in what an invidious, not to say churlish spirit she has contradicted the most masterly historians. It is best to ignore her altogether, and to tell our stories without any reference to her signature.

So thought the sensible young woman who led us captive through the collegiate church at Loches, and who insisted upon our descending into the crypt, at one time connected with the fortress by a subterranean gallery. Its dim walls are decorated here and there with mural paintings, rude and half effaced. She pointed out the shadowy outline of a saint in cope and mitre, his stiff forefinger raised in benediction. “That,” she said with startling composure, “is the bishop who was the confessor of Louis the Eleventh. The king had him buried alive in this chapel, so that he might not betray the secrets of his confession.”

“And did the king have him painted on the wall afterwards, to commemorate the circumstance?” asked the scoffer of the party, at whom others gazed reproachfully, while I wondered how the story of Saint John of Nepomuk had travelled so far afield, and why it had been so absurdly reset to add another shade to Louis’s memory. It hardly seemed worth while, in view of the legitimate darkness of the horizon. It even seemed a pity. It forced a laugh, and laughter is inharmonious beneath the walls of Loches. But if the king, whose piety was of a vigorous and active order, had the habit of walling up his confessors, there must have been some rational hesitation on the part of even the most devoted clerics when his Majesty sought to be shriven; and the stress of royal conscientiousness--combined with royal apprehension--must have shortened the somewhat hazardous road to church preferment. The fact that Louis never wasted his cruelties, that they were one and all the fruits of deep and secret hostility, might have saved him from being the hero of such fantastic myths.

It was more amusing to visit the picturesque old house in Tours, known as le Maison de Tristan l’Ermite. How it came to be associated with that melancholy and industrious hangman, who had been dead half a century when its first stone was laid, has never been made clear; unless, indeed, the familiar device of the festooned cord, the emblem of Anne de Bretagne, which is carved over door and windows, may be held responsible for the suggestion. Once christened, however, it has become a centre of finely imaginative romance,--romance of a high order, which for finish of detail may be recommended to the careless purveyors of historic fiction. Passing through the heavy doorway into a beautiful sombre courtyard, we had hardly time to admire its proportions, and the curious little stone beasts which wanton wickedly in dark corners, before a gaunt woman, who is the guardian spirit of the place, summoned us to ascend an interminable flight of steps, much worn and dimly lit. They had an ominous look, and the woman’s air of mystery, subtly blent with resolution, was in admirable accord with her surroundings. From time to time she paused to point out a shallow niche which had formerly held a lamp, or a broken place in the wall’s rough masonry. “_L’oubliette_,” she whispered grimly, pointing to the hole which revealed--and gainsaid--nothing. There was a small walled-up door, equally reserved, which she said was, or had been, the opening of a secret passage connecting the house with the château of Plessis-les-Tours, more than two miles away. The full significance of this remark failed to dawn upon us until we had climbed up, up, up, and emerged at last upon a narrow balcony overlooking the sad courtyard far below, and protected by a heavy iron railing. It was a disagreeable place, not without its suggestions of horror; yet were we in no wise prepared for the recital that followed. From this railing, said our guide, Tristan l’Ermite was in the habit of hanging the victims whom Louis the Eleventh, “that great and prompt chastener,” confided to his mercy. I could not help murmuring at the cruelty which compelled the unfortunates to mount nearly two hundred steps to be hanged, when the courtyard beneath offered every reasonable accommodation; but, even as I spoke, I recognized the poverty of imagination which could prompt such a stupid speech. Perhaps some direful memory of the _Balcon des Conjures_ at Amboise may be held responsible for the web of fiction which has been woven about this grim eyrie of Tours; and if the picture lacks the magnificent setting of the Amboise tragedy, it is by no means destitute of power. There is a certain grandeur in being hanged from such a dizzy height.

Our guide next pointed out the opening of the mythical oubliette. If the condemned toiled wearily up to their beetling scaffold, the executioners were spared at least the labour of carrying their bodies down again. After they had been picturesquely hanged under the king’s own eye,--for we were asked to believe that Louis walked two miles along a subterranean passage to inspect the ordinary, and by no means infrequent, processes of justice,--the corpses were tumbled into the oubliette, and made their own headlong way to the Loire.

One more detail was added to this interesting and deeply coloured fable. The right-hand wall of the courtyard was studded, on a level with the balcony, with huge rusty iron nails. There were rows upon rows of these unlovely and apparently useless objects which tradition had not failed to turn to good account. For every man hanged on that spot by the indefatigable Tristan, a nail was, it seems, driven into the wall, which thus became a sort of baker’s tally or tavern slate. We counted forty-four nails. The woman nodded her head with serious satisfaction. Frequent repetitions of her story had brought her almost to the point of believing it. She had ministered so long to the tastes of tourists--who like to think that Louis hanged his subjects as liberally as Catherine de Medici poisoned hers--that she had gradually moulded her narrative into symmetry, making use of every available feature to give it consistency and grace. The fine old house--which may have harboured tragedies of its own as sombre as any wrought by Tristan’s hand--lent itself with true architectural sympathy to the illusion. Some habitations can do this thing, can look to perfection the parts assigned them by history or by tradition. Who that has ever seen the “Jew’s House” at Lincoln can forget the peculiar horror that broods over the dark, ill-omened doorway? The place is peopled by ghosts. Beneath its heavy lintel pass little trembling feet. From out the shadows comes a strangled cry. It tells its tale better than Chaucer or the balladists; with less pity and more fear, less detail and more suggestiveness. We shudder as we peer into its gloom, yet we linger, magnetized by the subtlety of association. It may be innocent,--poor, huddled mass of stone,--but we hope not. We are like the children at the altar-foot, spellbound by the vision of a crime.

ALLEGRA

A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;
A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being;
Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;
With eyes--Oh! speak not of her eyes! which seem
Two mirrors of Italian heaven.

In these Wordsworthian lines Shelley describes Lord Byron’s little daughter, Allegra, then under two years of age; and the word “toy”--so keenly suggestive of both the poetic and the masculine point of view--has in this case an unconscious and bitter significance. Allegra was a toy at which rude hands plucked violently, until death lifted her from their clutches, and hid her away in the safety and dignity of the tomb. “She is more fortunate than we are,” said her father, with a noble and rare lapse into simplicity, and the words were sadly true. Never did a little child make a happier escape from the troublesome burden of life.

In the winter of 1816, a handsome, vivacious, dark-eyed girl sought the acquaintance of Lord Byron, and begged him to use his influence in obtaining for her an engagement at Drury Lane. She was the type of young woman who aspires to a career on the stage, or in any other field, without regard to qualifications, and without the burden of study. She wrote in her first letter (it had many successors): “The theatre presents an easy method of independence.” She objected vehemently to “the intolerable drudgery of provincial boards.” She wanted to appear at once in London. And she signed her name, “Clara Clairmont,” which was prettily alliterative, and suited her better than Jane.

It was an inauspicious beginning of an unhappy intimacy, destined to bring nothing but disaster in its train. Miss Clairmont’s stepfather, William Godwin, had confessed, not without reason, “a feeling of incompetence for the education of daughters.” His own child, Mary, had fled to Europe eighteen months before, with the poet Shelley. Miss Clairmont accompanied their flight; and their inexplicable folly in taking her with them was punished--as folly always is--with a relentless severity seldom accorded to sin. To the close of Shelley’s life, his sister-in-law continued to be a source of endless irritation and anxiety.

No engagement at Drury Lane was procurable. Indeed, Miss Clairmont soon ceased to desire one. Her infatuation for Lord Byron drove all other thoughts and hopes and ambitions from her heart. She wrote to him repeatedly,--clever, foolish, half-mad, and cruelly long letters. She praised the “wild originality of his countenance.” She sent him her manuscripts to read. There is something pathetic in Byron’s unheeded entreaty that she should “write short.” There is something immeasurably painful in his unconcealed indifference, in his undisguised contempt. The glamour of his fame as a poet gave a compelling power to that fatal beauty which was his undoing. When we read what _men_ have written about Byron’s head; when we recall the rhapsodies of Moore, the reluctant praise of Trelawney, the eloquence of Coleridge; when we remember that Scott--the sanest man in Great Britain--confessed ruefully that Byron’s face was a thing to dream of, we are the less surprised that women should have flung themselves at his feet in a frenzy of self-surrender, which a cold legacy of busts and portraits does little to explain. Miss Clairmont--to use one of Professor Dowden’s flowers of speech--“was lightly whirled out of her regular orbit.” In the spring she travelled with Shelley and Mary Godwin to Switzerland, and at Sécheron, a little suburb of Geneva, they met Lord Byron, who was then writing the splendid third canto of “Childe Harold.” His letter to his sister, the Hon. Augusta Leigh, bears witness to his annoyance at the encounter; but the two poets became for a season daily companions, and, in some sort, friends. Shelley thought Byron “as mad as the winds” (an opinion which was returned with interest), and deeply regretted his slavery “to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices;”--among them a prejudice in favour of Christianity, for which ancient institution Byron always entertained a profound though unfruitful reverence. Indeed, despite the revolutionary impetus of his verse, and despite the fact that he died for revolting Greece, the settled order of things appealed with force to his eminently practical nature. “Sanity and balance,” says Mr. Morley, “mark the foundations of his character. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance.”

Miss Clairmont did not confide to her guardians the secret of her intimacy with Lord Byron until after the meeting at Geneva. When her relations with him were understood, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin saw at first any occasion for distress. They cared nothing for the broken marriage bond, and they believed, or hoped, that some true affection had been--as in their own case--the impelling and upholding power. It was the swift withering of this hope which filled their hearts with apprehension. They carried Miss Clairmont back to England in the autumn (“I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back,” wrote Byron to his sister); and in Bath, the following January, her little daughter was born.

It was a blue-eyed baby of exceptional loveliness. Mrs. Shelley (Mary Godwin had been married to the poet on the death of his wife, two months earlier) fills her letters with praises of its beauty. Miss Clairmont wrote to Byron in 1820 that her health had been injured by her “attentions” to her child during its first year; but she found time to study Italian, and to write a book, for which Shelley tried in vain to find a publisher, and the very title of which is now forgotten. The little household at Great Marlow was not a tranquil one. Mrs. Shelley had grown weary of her step-sister’s society. Her diary--all these young people kept diaries with uncommendable industry--abounds in notes, illustrative of Claire’s ill-temper, and of her own chronic irritation. “Clara imagines that I treat her unkindly.” “Clara in an ill-humour.” “Jane[1] gloomy.” “Jane for some reason refuses to walk.” “Jane is not well, and does not speak the whole day.”

[1] Clara Mary Jane Clairmont was “Claire’s” full name.

This was bad enough, but there were other moods more trying than mere sulkiness. Miss Clairmont possessed nerves. She had “the horrors” when “King Lear” was read aloud. She was, or professed to be, afraid of ghosts. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell Shelley that an invisible hand had lifted her pillow from her bed, and dumped it on a chair. To such thrilling recitals the poet lent serious attention. “Her manner,” he wrote in his journal, “convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaged in awful conversation, relative to the nature of these mysteries;”--that is, to the migrations of the pillow. As a result of sympathetic treatment, Claire would wind up the night with hysterics, writhing in convulsions on the floor, and shrieking dismally, until poor Mrs. Shelley would be summoned from a sick-bed to soothe her to slumber. “Give me a garden, and _absentia_ Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours,” is the weary comment of the wife, after months of inextinguishable agitation.

There was no loophole of escape, however, from a burden so rashly shouldered. Miss Clairmont made one or two ineffectual efforts at self-support; but found them little to her liking. She could not, and she would not, live with her mother, Mrs. Godwin;--“a very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles,” is Charles Lamb’s description of this lady, whom, in common with most of her acquaintances, he cordially disliked. When Byron wrote, offering to receive and provide for his little daughter, Shelley vehemently opposed the plan, thinking it best that so young an infant should remain under its mother’s care. But his wife, who was at heart a singularly sagacious woman, never ceased to urge the advisability of the step. Claire, though reluctant to part from her baby, yielded to these persuasions; and the journey to Italy in the spring of 1818 was undertaken mainly as a sure though expensive method of conveying Allegra to her father.

That Byron wanted the child, there is no doubt, nor that he had been from the first deeply concerned for her uncertain future. Three months after her birth, he wrote to his sister that he had resolved to send for her, and place her in a convent, “to become a good Catholic, and (it may be) a nun,--being a character somewhat needed in our family.” “They tell me,” he adds, “that she is very pretty, with blue eyes and dark hair; and although I never was attached, nor pretended attachment to the mother, still, in case of the eternal war and alienation which I foresee about my legitimate daughter, Ada, it may be as well to have something to repose a hope upon. I must love something in my old age; and circumstances may render this poor little creature a great, and perhaps my only, comfort.”

It is not often that Byron’s letters reveal this grace of sentiment. Never, after Allegra’s arrival, does he allude to any affection he bears her, and he once assured Moore that he did not bear any;--a statement which that partial biographer thought fit to disregard. On the other hand, he dwells over and over again, both in his correspondence and in his journal, upon plans for her education and future settlement. He was at all times sternly practical, and pitilessly clear-sighted. He never regarded his daughter as a “lovely toy,” but as a very serious and troublesome responsibility. The poetic view of childhood failed to appeal to him. “Any other father,” wrote Claire bitterly, “would have made of her infancy a sweet idyl of flowers and innocent joy.” Byron was not idyllic. He dosed Allegra with quinine when she had a fever. He abandoned a meditated journey because she was ill. He dismissed a servant who had let her fall. He added a codicil to his will, bequeathing her five thousand pounds. These things do not indicate any stress of emotion, but they have their place in the ordinary calendar of parental cares.