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