a foreigner should acquire France by a marriage; and the States-General, applying to the Crown the rule of succession formerly established for the Salic domains, excluded the daughter of Louis X from the throne. Thus the right of inheritance recognized for daughters for the fiefs was denied for the Crown."
Philippe le Long, also, had only daughters, and their uncle, Charles IV, accordingly succeeded, only to see the same fate befall his children. On his death-bed he said to his barons: "If the queen give birth to a son, he will be your king; if a daughter, the crown will belong to Philippe de Valois, whom I declare your regent." Another branch of the Capétiens, the Valois, thus assumed the sceptre. But this interpretation, thus three times renewed in twelve years, was contested abroad. Philippe VI of Valois was a cousin of Charles IV, nephew of Philippe le Bel and grandson of Philippe III. Edward III, King of England, was a grandson of Philippe IV by his mother Isabella, and he protested against this decision and asserted his right to the throne of France, mildly in 1328, on the accession of Philippe VI, and strongly eight years later. Thus came about the Hundred Years' War, and, incidentally, the residence in Paris, as if in his capital, of an English king.
Unfortunately, the French nobility were divided in these evil days coming upon the capital and the nation. In 1329, the Comtesse de Mahaut, who held the comté d'Artois, died in Paris, poisoned. Robert d'Artois, a prince of the blood, one of the royaux de France, claimed the succession, but the king awarded it to the queen Jeanne, widow of Philippe le Long; a month later, as she was about to take possession of the comté, she also died suddenly, poisoned by one of the officers of her table, in the hippocras, or medicated wine, which he handed her. Whereupon Robert produced documents, duly signed and sealed by his grandfather, Robert I, in which he was designated as the successor to his title to the comté; these letters were recognized as forgeries, and Robert was banished from the kingdom forever by the Court of Peers, and his property confiscated. The false witnesses whom he had suborned were arrested—a demoiselle, Jeanne de Divion; his clerk, Perrot de Sanis; his fille de chambre, Jeannette des Chaînes, and Pierre Tesson, notary. All this made a tremendous sensation in Paris; a Jacobin, called as one of the witnesses, refused to reveal the secrets of the confessional; he was threatened with the rack by the Bishop of Paris; the doctors in theology assembled and decided that he must testify, in the interests of justice, which he did, and was accordingly confined in prison for the rest of his days. The demoiselle La Divion was burned alive on the Place of the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, in the presence of the prévôt of Paris and a great multitude of people; the same fate finally befell Jeannette de Chaînes, after having concealed herself in various localities, in 1334, on the same place; eight other false witnesses were condemned to the pillory and other punishments, the notary to perpetual imprisonment, and others to make amende honorable.
This ceremony, so usual in the Middle Ages, consisted in the culprit walking in his shirt, bareheaded and barefoot, conducted by the public executioner, a rope around his neck, a candle of yellow wax in his hand, a placard explaining his crime on his chest, another on his back, to some public place, usually the Parvis-Notre-Dame, and there, in an audible voice, avowing his crime and professing repentance. No rank of society, not even the monarch himself, was exempt from this punishment, which frequently was only the prelude to execution. The chief criminal, in this case, took refuge in Brabant, and there, to revenge himself, envoulta the king's son.
This was the familiar process in witchcraft by which an image of the person attacked being made in wax, baptized, and the voult duly performed, with a mass said and religious consecration, it is then melted before a fire, or in the sun, or pierced with a needle. This was discovered. Robert, afraid of prosecution for sorcery, thought himself too near France and escaped to England, where he urged Edward III to war against his native country.
Notwithstanding the national troubles, the court and the Parisians seemed disposed to give themselves up to pleasure. The marriage of the king's second son, Philippe, with Blanche, daughter of Charles le Bel, was celebrated with great pomp, and with a tournament at which assisted the most illustrious knights of France and many from abroad. Among these was the Duc de Normandie, against whom the king pitted the Seigneur de Saint-Venant, and the duke was overthrown, horse and man. The Comte d'Eu, Constable of France, received a lance-thrust in the chest, from which he died that night. These casualties were only too common in these celebrations, which were constantly discouraged by the popes, and even forbidden by some of the kings of France. At the close of these particular exercises, Olivier de Clisson, the Baron d'Avangour, Geoffroi and Georges de Malestroit, and other Breton chevaliers were arrested and conducted to the prisons of the Châtelet on charges of high treason and of conspiring with the king of England.
The historian Mézeray declares that in the capital the sumptuousness of apparel, the lascivious dances, the multiplication of entertainments, were common both to the court and the citizens. Nothing was to be seen but jongleurs, farceurs, and other actors and buffoons, extravagance, debauchery, and constant change. "All the misfortunes of the nation did not serve to correct them; the spectacles, the games, and the tourneys constantly succeeded each other. The French danced, as it were, on the bodies of their relatives. They seemed to rejoice at the conflagration of their châteaux and their houses, and at the death of their friends. Whilst some of them were having their throats cut in the country, the others were feasting in the cities. The sound of the violins was not interrupted by that of the trumpets, and there could be heard at the same time the voices of those singing in the balls, and the pitiful cries of those who perished in the flames or under the edge of the sword."
Another chronicler, Robert Gaguin, writing in the fifteenth century, dilates on the constant changes in the Parisian fashions in 1346. "In those times, the garments differed very much from each other. When you saw the manner in which the French clothed themselves, you would have taken them for mountebanks. Sometimes the vestments which they adopted were too large, sometimes they were too narrow; at one period they were too long, at another, too short. Always eager for novelties, they could not retain for ten years the same style of apparel."
Jean II succeeded his father Philippe in 1350, and has preserved his surname of le Bon, or the Good, though his reign was one of the most disastrous in history. One of his very first acts was to cause the arrest, in the Hôtel de Nesle, of Raoul, Comte d'Eu, Constable of France, whom he accused of high treason, and, without any form of law, had him beheaded at night in the presence of the Duc de Bourbon, the Comte d'Armagnac, the Comte de Montfort, and several other high personages of the court. All his property was confiscated, his comté was given to the king's cousin, Jean d'Artois, and the king kept the rest. In the following year he founded an order of knighthood, in imitation of that of the Garter, established by Edward III in England, and which, in its turn, served as a model for that of the Toison d'Or, the Golden Fleece, instituted in 1439 by the Duke of Burgundy. King Jean gave to his order the name of Notre-Dame de la Noble maison, but it was more generally known as that of l'Étoile, the Star. According to Froissart, it was "a company after the manner of the Round Table, which should be constituted of three hundred of the most worthy chevaliers." They took an oath never to flee in battle more than four arpents—about four hundred perches—and there to die or to yield themselves prisoners; the king gave them for a residence the royal lodging of Saint-Ouen, near Paris. "True chivalry was departing, since the kings endeavored to create an official chivalry."
Ten days after the battle of Poitiers, in which the king and his youngest son, Philippe le Hardi, were taken prisoners, the Dauphin Charles, Duc de Normandie, returned to Paris, took the title of lieutenant of the King of France, and convoked the estates, which assembled in October. The bourgeoisie, irritated at the ineptitude of the royal power, assumed the authority under the prévôt of the merchants, Etienne Marcel, and the civil war followed. On the side of the dauphin were the nobility and all those attached to the court; on that of the prévôt, the bourgeoisie, the shop-keepers, artisans, and common people. The latter
