The Infant's Skull Part 5

THE APOCALYPTIC FRENZY.

Two months after the poisoning of Louis the Do-nothing in 987, Hugh the Capet, Count of Paris and Anjou, Duke of Isle-de-France, and Abbot of St. Martin of Tours and St. Germain-des-Pres, had himself proclaimed King by his bands of warriors, and was promptly consecrated by the Church. By his ascension to the throne, Hugh usurped the crown of Charles, Duke of Lorraine, the uncle of Blanche's deceased husband.

Hugh's usurpation led to b.l.o.o.d.y civil strifes between the Duke of Lorraine and Hugh the Capet. The latter died in 996 leaving as his successor his son Rothbert, an imbecile and pious prince. Rothbert's long reign was disturbed by the furious feuds among the seigneurs; counts, dukes, abbots and bishops, entrenched in their fortified castles, desolated the country with their brigandage. Rothbert, Hugh's son, died in 1031 and was succeeded by his son Henry I. His advent to the throne was the signal for fresh civil strife, caused by his own brother, who was incited thereto by his mother. Another Rothbert, surnamed the Devil, Duke of Normandy, a descendant of old Rolf the pirate, took a hand in these strifes and made himself master of Gisors, Chaumont and Pontoise. It was under the reign of Hugh the Capet's grandson, Henry I, that the year 1033 arrived, and with it unheard-of, even incredible events--a spectacle without its equal until then--which was the culmination of the prevalent myth regarding the end of the world with the year 1000.

The Church had fixed the last day of the year 1000 as the final term for the world's existence. Thanks to the deception, the clergy came into possession of the property of a large number of seigneurs. During the last months of that year an immense saturnalia was on foot. The wildest pa.s.sions, the most insensate, the drollest and the most atrocious acts seemed then unchained.

"The end of the world approaches!" exclaimed the clergy. "Did not St.

John the Divine prophesy it in the Apocalypse saying: '_When the thousand years are expired, Satan will be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth; the book of life will be opened; the sea will give up the dead which were in it; death and h.e.l.l will deliver up the dead which were in them; they will be judged every man according to his works; they will be judged by Him who is seated upon a brilliant throne, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth._'--Tremble, ye peoples!" the clergy repeated everywhere, "the one thousand years, announced by St.

John, will run out with the end of this year! Satan, the anti-Christ is to arrive! Tremble! The trumpet of the day of judgment is about to sound; the dead are about to arise from their tombs; in the midst of thunder and lightning, and surrounded by archangels carrying flaming swords, the Eternal is about to pa.s.s judgment upon us all! Tremble, ye mighty ones of the earth: in order to conjure away the implacable anger of the All-Mighty, give your goods to the Church! It is still time! It is still time! Give your goods and your treasures to the priests of the Lord! Give all you possess to the Church!"

The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs by ignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjure away the vengeance of the Eternal, a.s.signed to the clergy by means of authentic doc.u.ments, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law, lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle, their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues, their sumptuous robes.

Some of the shrewder ones said: "We have barely a year, a month, a week to live! We are full of youth, of desires, of ardor! Let us put the short period to profit! Let us stave-in our wine casks, let us indulge ourselves freely in wine and women!"

"The end of the world is approaching!" exclaimed with delirious joy millions of serfs of the domains of the King, of the lay and of the ecclesiastical seigneurs. "Our poor bodies, broken with toil, will at last take rest in the eternal night that is to emanc.i.p.ate us. A blessing on the end of the world! It is the end of our miseries and our sufferings!"

And those poor serfs, having nothing to spend and nothing to a.s.sign away, sought to antic.i.p.ate the expected eternal repose. The larger number dropped their plows, their hoes and their spades so soon as autumn set in. "What is the use," said they, "of cultivating a field that, long before harvest time, will have been swallowed up in chaos?"

As a consequence of this universal panic, the last days of the year 999 presented a spectacle never before seen; it was even fabulous!

Light-headed indulgence and groans; peals of laughter and lamentations; maudlin songs and death dirges. Here the shouts and the frantic dances of supposed last and supreme orgies; yonder the lamentations of pious canticles. And finally, floating above this vast ma.s.s of terror, rose the formidable popular curiosity to see the spectacle of the destruction of the world. It came at last, that day said to have been prophesied by St. John the Divine! The last hour arrived, the last minute of that fated year of 999! "Tremble, ye sinners!" the warning redoubled; "tremble, ye peoples of the earth! the terrible moment foretold in the holy books is here!" One more second, one more instant, midnight sounds--and the year 1000 begins.

In the expectation of that fatal instant, the most hardened hearts, the souls most certain of salvation, the dullest and also the most rebellious minds experienced a sensation that never had and never will have a name in any language--

Midnight sounded!... The solemn hour.... Midnight!

The year 1000 began!

Oh, wonder and surprise!... The dead did not leave their tombs, the bowels of the earth did not open, the waters of the ocean remained within their basins, the stars of heaven were not hurled out of their orbits and were not striking against one another in s.p.a.ce. Aye, there was not even a tame flash of lightning! No thunder rolled! No trace of the cloud of fire in the midst of which the Eternal was to appear.

Jehovah remained invisible. Not one of the frightful prodigies foretold by St. John the Divine for midnight of the year 1000 was verified. The night was calm and serene; the moon and stars shone brilliantly in the azure sky, not a breath of wind agitated the tops of the trees, and the people, in the silence of their stupor, could hear the slightest ripple of the mountain streams gliding under the gra.s.s. Dawn came ... and day ... and the sun poured upon creation the torrents of its light! As to miracles, not a trace of any!

Impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling at the universal disappointment. It was an explosion of regret, of remorse, of astonishment, of recrimination and of rage. The devout people who believed themselves cheated out of a Paradise that they had paid for to the Church in advance with hard cash and other property; others, who had squandered their treasures, contemplated their ruin with trembling. The millions of serfs who had relied upon slumbering in the restfulness of an eternal night saw rising anew before their eyes the ghastly dawn of that long day of misery and sufferings, of which their birth was the morning and only their death the evening. It now began to be realized that, left uncultivated in the expectation of the end of the world, the land would not furnish sustenance to the people, and the horrors of famine were foreseen. A towering clamor rose against the clergy; the clergy, however, knew how to bring public opinion back to its side. It did so by a new and fraudulent set of prophecies.

"Oh, these wretched people of little faith," thus now ran the amended prophecy and invocation; "they dare to doubt the word of the All-powerful who spoke to them through the voice of His prophet! Oh, these wretched blind people, who close their eyes to divine light! The prophets have announced the end of time; the Holy Writ foretold that the day of the last judgment would come a thousand years after the Saviour of the world!... But although Christ was born a thousand years before the year 1000, he did not reveal himself as G.o.d until his death, that is thirty-two years after his birth. Accordingly it will be in the year 1032 that the end of time will come!"

Such was the general state of besottedness that many of the faithful blissfully accepted the new prediction. Several seigneurs, however, rushed at the "men of G.o.d" to take back by force the property they had bequeathed to them. The "men of G.o.d," however, well entrenched behind fortified walls, defended themselves stoutly against the dispossessed claimants. Hence a series of b.l.o.o.d.y wars between the scheming bishops, on the one hand, and the despoiled seigneurs, on the other, to which disasters were now superadded the religious ma.s.sacres instigated by the clergy. The Church had urged Clovis centuries ago to the extermination of the then Arian heretics; now the Church preached the extermination of the Orleans Manichaeans and the Jews. A conception of these abominable excesses may be gathered from the following pa.s.sages in the account left by Raoul Glaber, a monk and eye-witness. He wrote:

"A short time after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 1010, it was learned from unquestionable sources that the calamity had to be charged to the perverseness of Jews of all countries. When the secret leaked out throughout the world, the Christians decided with a common accord that they would expel all the Jews, down to the last, from their territories and towns. The Jews thereby became the objects of universal execration. Some were chased from the towns, others ma.s.sacred with iron, or thrown into the rivers, or put to death in some other manner. This drove many to voluntary death. And thus, after the just vengeance wreaked upon them, there were but very few of them left in the Roman Catholic world."

Accordingly, the wretched Jews of Gaul were persecuted and slaughtered at the order of the clergy because the Saracens of Judea destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem! As to the Manichaeans of Orleans, another pa.s.sage from the same chronicle expresses itself in these words:

"In 1017, the King and all his loyal subjects, seeing the folly of these miserable heretics of Orleans, caused a large pyre to be lighted near the town, in the hope that fear, produced by the sight, would overcome their stubbornness; but seeing that they persisted, thirteen of them were cast into the flames ... and all those that could not be convinced to abandon their perverse ways met the same fate, whereupon the venerable cult of the Catholic faith, having triumphed over the foolish presumption of its enemies, shone with all the greater l.u.s.ter on earth."

What with the wars that the ecclesiastical seigneurs plunged Gaul into in their efforts to retain possession of the property of the lay seigneurs whom they had despoiled by the jugglery of the "End of the World," and what with these religious persecutions, Gaul continued to be desolated down to the year 1033, the new term that had been fixed for the last day of judgment. The belief in the approaching dissolution of the world, which the clergy now again zealously preached, although not so universally entertained as that of the year 1000, was accompanied with results that were no less horrible. In 999, the expectation of the end of the world had put a stop to work; all the fields except those belonging to the ecclesiastical seigneurs, lay fallow. The formidable famine of the year 1000 was then the immediate result, and that was followed by a wide-spread mortality. Agriculture pined for laborers; every successive scarcity engendered an increased mortality; Gaul was being rapidly depopulated; famine set in almost in permanence during thirty years in succession, the more disastrous periods being those of the years 1003, 1008, 1010, 1014, 1027, 1029 and 1031; finally the famine of 1033 surpa.s.sed all previous ones in its murderous effects. The serfs, the villeins and the town plebs were almost alone the victims of the scourge. The little that they produced met the needs of their masters--the seigneurs, counts, dukes, bishops or abbots; the producers themselves, however, expired under the tortures of starvation. The corpses of the wretches who died of inanition strewed the fields, roads and highways; the decomposing bodies poisoned the air, engendered illnesses and even pestilential epidemics until then unknown; the population was decimated. Within thirty-three years, Gaul lost more than one-half its inhabitants--the new-born babies died vainly pressing their mother's b.r.e.a.s.t.s for nourishment.

CHAPTER II.

YVON THE FORESTER'S HUT.

Yvon--now no longer the Calf, but the Forester, since his appointment over the canton of the Fountain of the Hinds--and his family did not escape the scourge.

About five years before the famine of 1033, his beloved wife Marceline died. He still inhabited his hut, now shared with him by his son Den-Brao and the latter's wife Gervaise, together with their three children, of whom the eldest, Nominoe, was nine, the second, Julyan, seven, and the youngest, Jeannette, two years of age. Den-Brao, a serf like his father, was since his youth employed in a neighboring stone quarry. A natural taste for masonry developed itself in the lad. During his hours of leisure he loved to carve in certain not over hard stones the outlines of houses and cottages, the structure of which attracted the attention of the master mason of Compiegne. Observing Den-Brao's apt.i.tude, the artisan taught him to hew stone, and soon confided to him the plans of buildings and the overseers.h.i.+p in the construction of several fortified donjons that King Henry I ordered to be erected on the borders of his domains in Compiegne. Den-Brao, being of a mild and industrious disposition and resigned to servitude, had a pa.s.sionate love for his trade. Often Yvon would say to him:

"My child, these redoubtable donjons, whose plans you are sketching and which you build with so much care, either serve now or will serve some day to oppress our people. The bones of our oppressed and martyrized brothers will rot in these subterraneous cells reared above one another with such an infernal art!"

"Alack! You are right, father," Den-Brao would at such times answer, "but if not I, some others will build them ... my refusal to obey my master's orders would have no other consequence than to bring upon my head a beating, if not mutilation and even death."

Gervaise, Den-Brao's wife, an industrious housekeeper, adored her three children, all of whom, in turn, clung affectionately to Yvon.

The hut occupied by Yvon and his family lay in one of the most secluded parts of the forest. Until the year 1033, they had suffered less than other serf families from the devastations of the recurring famine.

Occasionally Yvon brought down a stag or doe. The meat was smoked, and the provision thus laid by kept the family from want. With the beginning of the year 1033, however, one of the epidemics that often afflict the beasts of the fields attacked the wild animals of the forest of Compiegne. They grew thin, lost their strength, and their flesh that speedily decomposed, dropped from their bones. In default of venison, the family was reduced towards the end of autumn to wild roots and dried berries. They also ate up the snakes that they caught and that, fattened, crawled into their holes for the winter. As hunger pressed, Yvon killed and ate his hunting dog that he had named Deber-Trud in memory of the war-dog of his ancestor Joel. Subsequently the family was thrown upon the juice of barks, and then upon the broth of dried leaves.

But the nourishment of dead leaves soon became unbearable, and likewise did the sap-wood, or second rind of young trees, such as elders and aspen trees, which they beat to a pulp between stones, have to be given up. At the time of the two previous famines, some wretched people were said to have supported themselves with a kind of fattish clay. Not far from Yvon's hut was a vein of such clay. Towards the end of December, Yvon went out for some of it. It was a greenish earth of fine paste, soft but heavy, and of insipid taste. The family thought themselves saved. All its members devoured the first meal of the clay. But on the morrow their contracted stomachs refused the nourishment that was as heavy as lead.

CHAPTER III.

ON THE BUCK'S TRACK.

Thirty-six hours of fast had followed upon the meal of clay in Yvon's hut. Hunger gnawed again at the family's entrails.

During these thirty-six hours a heavy snow had fallen. Yvon went out.

His family was starving within. He had death on his soul. He went towards the nets that he had spread in the hope of snaring some bird of pa.s.sage during the snow storm. His expectations were deceived. A little distance from the nets lay the Fountain of the Hinds, now frozen hard.

Snow covered its borders. Yvon perceived the imprint of a buck's feet.

The size of the imprint on the snow announced the animal's bulk. Yvon estimated its weight by the cracks in the ice on the stream that it had just crossed, the ice being otherwise thick enough to support Yvon himself. This was the first time in many months that the forester had run across a buck's track. Could the animal, perhaps, have escaped the general mortality of its kind? Did it come from some distant forest?

Yvon knew not, but he followed the fresh track with avidity. Yvon had with him his bow and arrows. To reach the animal, kill it and smoke its flesh meant the saving of the lives of his family, now on the verge of starvation. It meant their life for at least a month. Hope revivified the forester's energies; he pursued the buck; the regular impress of its steps showed that the animal was quietly following one of the beaten paths of the forest; moreover its track lay so clearly upon the snow that he could not have crossed the stream more than an hour before, else the edges of the imprint that he left behind him would have been less sharp and would have been rounded by the temperature of the air.

Following its tracks, Yvon confidently expected to catch sight of the buck within an hour and bring the animal down. In the ardor of the chase, the forester forgot his hunger. He had been on the march about an hour when suddenly in the midst of the profound silence that reigned in the forest, the wind brought a confused noise to his ears. It sounded like the distant bellowing of a stag. The circ.u.mstance was extraordinary. As a rule the beasts of the woods do not cry out except at night. Thinking he might have been mistaken, Yvon put his ear to the ground.... There was no more room for doubt. The buck was bellowing at about a thousand yards from where Yvon stood. Fortunately a turn of the path concealed the hunter from the game. These wild animals frequently turn back to see behind them and listen. Instead of following the path beyond the turning that concealed him, Yvon entered the copse expecting to make a short cut, head off the buck, whose gait was slow, hide behind the bushes that bordered the path, and shoot the animal when it hove in sight.

The sky was overcast; the wind was rising; with deep concern Yvon noticed several snow flakes floating down. Should the snow fall heavily before the buck was shot, the animal's tracks would be covered, and if opportunity failed to dart an arrow at it from the forester's ambuscade, he could not then expect to be able to trace the buck any further.

Yvon's fears proved correct. The wind soon changed into a howling storm surcharged with thick snow. The forester quitted the thicket and struck for the path beyond the turning and at about a hundred paces from the clearing. The buck was nowhere to be seen. The animal had probably caught wind of its pursuer and jumped for safety into the thicket that bordered the path. It was impossible to determine the direction that it had taken. Its tracks vanished under the falling snow, that lay in ever thicker layers.

A prey to insane rage, Yvon threw himself upon the ground and rolled in the snow uttering furious cries. His hunger, recently forgotten in the ardor of the hunt, tore at his entrails. He bit one of his arms and the pain thus felt recalled him to his senses. Almost delirious, he rose with the fixed intent of retracing the buck, killing the animal, spreading himself beside its carca.s.s, devouring it raw, and not rising again so long as a shred of meat remained on its bones. At that moment, Yvon would have defended his prey with his knife against even his own son. Possessed by the fixed and delirious idea of retracing the buck, Yvon went hither and thither at hap-hazard, not knowing in what direction he walked. He beat about a long time, and night began to approach, when a strange incident came to his aid and dissipated his mental aberration.

CHAPTER IV.

GREGORY THE HOLLOW-BELLIED.

Driven by the gale, the snow continued to fall, when suddenly Yvon's nostrils were struck by the exhalations emitted by frying meat. The odor chimed in with the devouring appet.i.te that was troubling his senses, and at least bestowed back upon him the instinct of seeking to satisfy his hunger. He stood still, whiffed the air hither and thither like a wolf that from afar scents carrion, and looked about in order to ascertain by the last glimmerings of the daylight where he was. Yvon was at the crossing of a path in the forest that led from the little village of Ormesson. The road ran before a tavern where travelers usually put up for the night. It was kept by a serf of the abbey of St. Maximim named Gregory, and surnamed the Hollow-bellied, because, according to him, nothing could satisfy his insatiable appet.i.te. An otherwise kind-hearted and cheerful man, the serf often, before these distressful times, and when Yvon carried his t.i.the of game to the castle, had accommodatedly offered him a pot of hydromel. A prey now to the las.h.i.+ngs of hunger and exasperated by the odor of fried meat which escaped from the tavern, Yvon carefully approached the closed door. In order to allow the smoke to escape, Gregory had thrown the window half open without fear of being seen. By the light of a large fire that burned in the hearth, Yvon saw Gregory seated on a stool placidly surveying the broiling of a large piece of meat whose odor had so violently a.s.sailed the nostrils of the famis.h.i.+ng forester.