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  11

  SAINT-PAUL

  MÉTRO STOP NO. II, Saint-Paul, is the only station to serve the seventeenth-century quarter of the Marais, the most popular stalking ground in town. Jules Michelet, who was born here in 1798, loved it: its dark alleys and stove-bellied, pale yellow stone walls coloured his whole account of the French Révolution. Walking in some of its streets today you can still pick up something of the atmosphere he evoked. The station stands on the site where, in the early morning of 10 August 1792, crowds of armed artisans—"from the Bastille up to the church of Saint-Paul in this wide and open part of the Rue Saint-Antoine"—converged to the beat of drums and the tocsin bell of the Section Quatre-Vingts; onwards they marched to the Tuileries Palace, where, in a pitched battle, they overthrew the Bourbon monarchy The high ornate Jesuit façade of the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, on the south side of the street, towered over them—a reminder that, before the crowds in Paris were atheist revolutionaries, they were Catholics of the most radical, fervent kind.

  The Jesuits had been introduced into the Marais by the widow of the Constable of France, killed in battle in November 1569 defending Catholic Paris against the Protestant warriors who surrounded the city At the time there seemed nothing inconsistent about inviting the Jesuits into Paris; indeed Ignatius Loyola, with Francois Xavier and three Spanish priests, had founded the Society of Jesus in the crypt of the Sanctum Martyrium near the summit of Montmartre in 1534. No city in France was more Catholic than Paris in the sixteenth century.

  There exist a few remnants of that late Renaissance Catholic Paris in the area around here. To the west of Saint-Paul, on a black-and-white Louis Philippe wooden facade, is a sign, "The Auld Alliance, Scottish Pub," and it sells the best Scottish beers and the largest selection of whiskies in Paris, including the Dallas Dhu. On the walls hang old maps of Scotland and several historical documents, going back to the Treaty of Corbeil of 1326 between the King of France and Robert, by the Grace of God, King of the Scots. The documents prove, as the singing in the pub still demonstrates, that the ties between Scotland and France run deep— deep and religious.

  The singing leads back to a sixteenth-century ballad about a soldier called Montgomery. It is one of the saddest ballads I know.

  Moy très bien les congonois

  Qui naguères estois

  De Montgommery comte.

  Montgomery's ancestors were counts, starts the song in old French. In fact Gabriel de Montgomery's ancestors can be traced to Norman retainers of William the Bastard, who followed the Duke to England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The older branch established themselves as seigneurs in Normandy, while the younger branch had to carve out their fortune as warlords in Scotland, attachéd to King David I (1124-53). ft w a s poor Scottish lords like the Montgomeries who furnished the spearhead of the French royal armies that would eventually throw the English out of France. In recognition of their service Charles VII created the Hundred Archers of the Scottish Guard in 1422; a little over a century later, in 1543, Francis I promoted Gabriel's father, Jacques, to be their captain. It was one of the most powerful positions in the kingdom and was the reason why the Montgomeries, as the song goes, became counts.

  Gabriel, born on the family properties in Normandy or in the Beauce, either in 1526 or in 1530, was groomed to be a count. But fate decided otherwise.

  La France m'a cogneu,

  Chevalier bien reçeu

  Monté en fort bon ordre.

  As Lieutenant of the Scottish Archers the young Montgomery cut a dashing figure in court. Then, on a sweltering Friday, in the "wide and open part" of the Rue Saint-Antoine—not far from where the métro stop now stands—King Henri II of France challenged Gabriel de Montgomery to a joust. What occurred next was one of the most tragic riding accidents in history; the whole of Western Europe would be plunged into a generation of religious war and strife as a result of it.

  Par un fatal destin

  Le Roy voulant s'ébattre

  Me dist par un matin

  Qu'à moi voulait combattre.

  Not even the most talented playwright could pull together all the strands that fatal destiny suddenly combined on that day. Europe was at a turning point. The religious wars in what we today call Germany were over, the old Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, sworn enemy of France, had abdicated. In April 1559 Spanish and French envoys had met in Cateau-Cambrésis, on the French border with the Spanish Netherlands, to sign a treaty which ended sixty years of war in Italy. The great dynastic tensions that had dominated the first half of the century ended at Cateau-Cambrésis. The year 1559 should have ushered in peace for all of Western Europe, were it not for Montgomery's jousting lance.

  Two royal marriages had been negotiated at Cateau to seal the treaty Philip II, a widower since the death of Mary Tudor, Queen of England, the previous November, was to marry Henri IPs eldest daughter, Elisabeth; and the French king's thirty-six-year-old spinster sister, Marguerite, was to marry Philip's ally, Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy Henri II arranged a fabulous show in Paris, where the two marriages were to be celebrated in late June, the central event being a five-day jousting tournament held on the "wide and open part" of Rue Saint-Antoine, at that time the only open space in Paris, a favourite spot forpromeneurs that stretched from what is now Rue de Sévigné to the Bastille and northwards up to today's Place des Vosges, which was then occupied by the royal Château des Tournelles. Stands higher than many of the houses were built around the periphery of the space, decorated in the colours of France, Spain and Savoy; the paving stones were torn up and replaced by sand; and the open city sewer—today Rue de Turenne—was hidden from sight by a huge wooden cross. Elisabeth married Philip II, who had sent the haughty Duke of Alba as his proxy, on Thursday, 22 June, and on Wednesday, 28 June, the jousting began. The weather got hot and sultry.

  The heat had made the crowds uncomfortable and nervous on Friday afternoon—not morning as in the ballad—when King Henri was due to joust. At the centre of the royal box, dressed in bejewelled garments, sat his queen, Catherine de Medici; to her right was her eldest son, the future Francis II, with his recent wife, a tall lanky adolescent, Mary, Queen of Scots. Queen Catherine had passed a difficult night in the Château des Tournelles; she had dreamt of her husband lying on the ground in agony, his face covered in blood. Medieval superstition, magic and prophecy was never far from the surface in this late Renaissance world. The accumulating signs of the approaching catastrophe had a Shakespearean tone: Nostradamus, the King's seer, had written in 1555 in quatrain XXXV of his Centuries that

  The young lion will surmount the old

  In battle field in single duel,

  In a golden cage, his eyes shall be holed,

  Two wounds in one, then a death most cruel.

  The stars foretold a violent death by iron or by fire at the age of forty— Henri II was in his fortieth year; Bishop Luc Gauric, famous in Italy for his accurate predictions, had warned Henri to avoid all combat at the age of forty because he could suffer a wound in his head that might render him blind. It was the Habsburg emperor, Charles V, who had told Admiral de Coligny that the young Gabriel de Montgomery, to whom he had just been introduced, had a mark between his eyes that signified the death of a prince of the fleurdelis. Catherine, like her husband, was aware of all these tales, and would rather have been with the King on the banks of the Loire.

  But not King Henri, who carried the black-and-white colours of his mistress from Anet, Diane de Poitiers, when he rode out on to the field of contest. "Squeeze tight at your knees!" he shouted out at his first challenger, his future brother-in-law, Emmanuel-Philibert, "For I shall give you a good shaking, whatever our alliance and fraternity!" Henri wanted to show who was King. The two chargers raced towards each other, there was a crash, Emmanuel-Philibert tottered awhile — but remained in his saddle. Then it was the turn of Francois, Due de Guise, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. The chargers sped across the sanded course; another shock: neith
er man showed a sign of trembling. Henri was bitterly disappointed in his own performance. Against whom could he prove his royal virility?

  His eye alighted on the Lieutenant of the Scottish Archers, blond, athletic and ten years his junior. Trumpets and bugles brayed and they charged; the sound of the collision echoed around the square—but both men held fast to their mounts. By the rules of the game, the King's jousting for that day should have ended there. But his Valois blood was up. He demanded his challenger to play again. Montgomery refused, invoking the heat and the late hour of the day. "It is an order!" shouted the King. Queen Catherine sent a messenger begging him to stop. The Chief Marshal was called in to place the golden-coloured helmet on the King's head; as he lowered the visor, the Marshal said, "Sire, I swear by living God that for the last three days I have been dreaming that something terrible will happen to you, that this last day will be for you Fatal."

  Montgomery prepared himself. For some inexplicable reason his team forgot to replace his lance, as the rules required; he went into the field with the lance that had been cracked by the last rude encounter. As the King entered the course one report writes of a young boy running out screaming, "Sire, don't go!" The trumpets, strangely, did not play. Instead, there was a hush. A rumour spread like a menacing wave through the crowd. The horsemen faced each other, then set off at a gallop; there was a loud report as Montgomery's shaft shattered.

  The King swayed to left and right. Grabbing his horse's neck he managed to hold himself in his saddle. He slumped forward. The Queen, at her tribune, stood up; the crowd gasped. The Constable of France, Montmorency and Marshal de Tavannes rushed out and allowed their sovereign to slip into their arms. On the ground, they carefully removed the helmet; blood poured into the sand.

  What happened next is the subject of 450 years of debate. Some witnesses claim to have seen Montgomery beat a way through the throng that had gathered around the prostrate King and, beside himself with grief, ask for a pardon—which the King granted. Other contemporaries claim the King was already unconscious, which seems likely. What probably happened is that Montgomery was among the men who carried the King to the Château des Tournelles. At the entrance, despite the splinter in his right eye emerging from his temple, the King had regained consciousness sufficiently to mount the steps himself, with aid. Montgomery was at his bedside that evening and it was perhaps there that the King said to him: "Do not concern yourself, you have no need of a pardon. You obeyed your King and acted as a good knight and valiant man of arms."

  For a sixteenth-century chevalier like Montgomery that verbal acquittal was the equivalent of the voice of God. But the tension in the court, particularly in the vindictive sobbing of the women, was unbearable. Catherine de Medici never would forgive him—he was a regicide, an outcast. Montgomery fled Paris that night. The King died in agony on 9 July.

  A strong monarch like Henri may have held the kingdom together, though it would have been a repressive age for the Protestants because Henri had never been tolerant of the reformed faith. Catherine de Medici, on the other hand, though the niece of a pope, as Queen Dowager initially showed a surprising degree of indulgence. But the ultra-Catholic family, the Guises, managed to seize control of the government. Protestant circles spoke of a coup d'état. Their leaders, in February 1561, met at the port of Hugues, near Nantes, to discuss what to do. They decided that the best course of action was to capture the main members of the royal family and set up a regency in their favour. The plan went seriously wrong and fifty-two of the ringleaders, singing psalms as they queued up for the block, were beheaded in front of the royal family at Amboise in March. For France it was the beginning of civil war. In fanatical Catholic Paris it gave rise to a new derisive term for these treasonous heretics: the conspirators of Hugues became the "Huguenots"—a name soon applied to all Protestants in France.

  The regicide Montgomery had been on the run. First he had fled to his estate at Ducey in Lower Normandy, by the Baie de Saint-Michel. Obviously he was not safe there, so he set sail for that haven of liberty and latter-day adulterers, the island of Jersey, recently annexed to the diocese of Winchester, though there was nothing very English about the place in those days—its inhabitants spoke a Norman dialect that made Montgomery feel at home. Diplomatic correspondence proves he was in Venice in December 1559. By the following spring he was in London at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

  There he acquired a fine command of English; befriended Sir William Cecil, the brilliant humanist and now the Queen's Secretary of State; established an excellent rapport with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, shortly to be named ambassador to the Valois court; and earned the respect of the Queen herself. He also converted to the reformed religion, though exactly how this happened is not known. Montgomery became a Calvinist, the radical branch of Protestantism which was hardly in the spirit of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer that guided Elizabeth's resplendent court. But it was the strain that was spreading fast through his native lands of Lower Normandy Most likely, what prompted the conversion was an appeal he received in November 1561 from François de Bricqueville, Baron de Colombières, "to come to the assistance of the Protestants [les réformés] of Lower Normandy, who are persecuted and envisage taking up arms."

  Montgomery landed in Lower Normandy in December 1561 and began his career as a liberator of the Protestants; his new seigniorial arms were proudly emblazoned with a helmet pierced by a lance. Montgomery seized Avranches, in Lower Normandy, killed all the local nuns and priests and shipped the cathedral's gold and silver off to the island of Tombelaine, by Mont-Saint-Michel. He then marched his little army into the Loire Country, up the course of the river, to the cathedral town of Bourges, which he took without a fight. By late spring of 1562, the Huguenot armies—the soldiers dressed in white surcoats and chanting psalms as they went into battle—controlled the Loire, Saintonge, Poitou, Lyon, Dauphiné and the valley of the Rhône. But in June and July plague broke out in the towns and the Due de Guise's Catholic armies began to make progress. Montgomery conducted a brave defence of the Norman city, Rouen; Queen Catherine, knowing this, participated in the battle. The city was taken, the inhabitants slaughtered—but Montgomery made his escape by boat down the river.

  An English fleet arrived in Le Havre on 29 October subjecting the town to such a vigorous occupation under the Earl of Warwick—many inhabitants were forced to leave their homes, Frenchmen were excluded from government, the English pound sterling was the only acceptable currency—that even the Protestants were shocked. At Amboise, in March 1563, a peace between Protestants and Catholics was patched together and they joined forces to throw the English out of Le Havre on 30 June.

  Protestantism in France was still winning hordes of converts, many through contact with the Spanish Netherlands. In August 1567 Antwerp rose in rebellion, and from there the violence spread through the country, spilling over into France. In the Netherlands, King Philip II, not a tolerant Christian, used the vilest means of repression. In France, religious civil war broke out once more. Montgomery participated in the siege of Paris at which Montmorency, the Constable of France, was killed. Another peace was cobbled together at Longjumeau in March 1568, but as Throckmorton noted gloomily in a dispatch to Queen Elizabeth later that year, "there are more Protestants who have perished during this peace than during the preceding war."

  There began, in the summer of 1568, a huge exodus of Protestants from all parts of the country to the fortified port town of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast. It was known at the time as the "Flight from Egypt." The fulcrum of French Huguenot power in France thus shifted south-west. The Protestant spirit was further galvanized by the arrival ar La Rochelle on 28 September of Jeanne d'Albret. Her mother had been the elder sister of Francis I; her late husband, Antoine de Bourbon, was head of the Bourbon family, direct descendants of Louis XI, and thus heirs to the French throne should Catherine's unhealthy Valois children have no issue. Jeanne was Queen of the small Protestant kingdom of Navarre, in the Pyrenees,
which was at that moment overrun by Catholic forces. She was accompanied by her fifteen-year-old son, Henri—the future Henri IV Every Huguenot saw in this athletic figure their true sovereign, while his widowed mother acted as an excellent counter to the black-gowned Catholic dowager queen, Catherine.

  Catherine de Medici was becoming increasingly intolerant of heretics. In April 1569 the Spanish ambassador came to her chamber after learning that she had fallen ill. He told her that the time had come for la sonoria, the "death knell." This delightful image of la sonoria— annihilating all her main Protestant opponents with one ring of the bell—brought new life to the Queen Mother; she was soon on her feet again. The ambassador's sweet words of mass murder also encouraged her already pronounced tendency for the occult, her irrational "medievalism" one could justly call it. Catherine collaborated with an Italian sorcerer who kept his shop, Vallée de Misere, on the Quai de la Megisserie in Paris. His spells seemed to work particularly well when poison was added to the menu. Several Protestant leaders died of spasms in the month of May 1569. On 11 June Prince Wolfgang of Bavaria, who was bringing across France an army of German Reiters and lansquenets to the aid of the Huguenots, dropped dead after quaffing a goblet of wine.