Part 7 (1/2)
If, on the other hand, we glance at the literature which flourished in France during the period of the revival of learning, we can not but infer that the morals of the people at large were not pure. During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the standard reading of the educated cla.s.ses among the French was the celebrated _Roman de la Rose_, a work of remarkable talent, but, at the same time, distinguished by a cynic vein of philosophy and a singular obscenity of language. No portion of that work was wholly free from lewd expressions, and it would be impossible to quote fifty lines of it to-day in a modern language. The doctrine of the author with regard to women was insulting and cynical.[176] They were uniformly depicted as being restrained only by legal difficulties from giving way to the loosest pa.s.sions; and all men, in like manner, were painted as seducers, adulterers, and violators of young girls. Such was the reading of the best society in France. The _Roman de la Rose_ was to them what Shakspeare is to us.
Nor was it alone of its kind. Of the works which that age has bequeathed to us, nearly all are tainted with the same grossness of language and pruriency of idea. All, or nearly all, breathe the air of the brothel. It was rather a matter of boasting than of shame with the authors. Villon and Regnier seem to plume themselves on their familiarity with scenes of debauch, and their extensive acquaintance among the prost.i.tute cla.s.s. The best of their works are descriptions of episodes of dissipation; their most lively sketches have prost.i.tutes, or their fortunes, or their diseases, for the themes. They seemed to fancy they were imitating Horace when they borrowed his most odious blemishes. Some of them were actors as well as poets, and used the machinery of the stage to disseminate their lewd compositions. Though it was still unusual, or even unlawful, for women to appear on the stage in their time, the boys who played female parts were well drilled to the business, and the performances which delighted the towns and villages of France fell but little short, in point of grossness, of the theatrical enormities of the imperial era at Rome.
One may form some idea of the popularity of erotic literature at this period in France from the amazing vocabulary of erotic terms which is gathered from the works of Rabelais, Beroald de Verville, Regnier, Brantome, and their contemporaries. There was not a form of lewdness for which an appropriate name had not been invented; and as to the ordinary acts and instruments of prost.i.tution, a dictionary of synonyms might have been compiled without embracing all of them. Monsieur Dufour, in his conscientious work, fills a couple of pages with the mere words that were employed to express the act of fornication.
Many events likewise indicate a loose state of morals. The history of the _incubes_ and _succubes_, filling some s.p.a.ce in every treatise on demonology, is a most curious feature of the morals of the day. The existence of demons who made a practice of a.s.sailing the virtue of girls and boys was admitted by some of the fathers of the Church,[177] who quoted the words of Genesis in support of the singular doctrine. They were of two kinds: _incubi_, from the Latin _incubare_, male demons who a.s.sailed the chast.i.ty of girls; and _succubae_, female demons who robbed boys of their innocence. The old chronicles are full of accounts of the mischievous deeds of these evil spirits. As might be expected, the _incubi_ were more numerous and more enterprising than the _succubae_. For one boy who confessed that a female demon had attacked him in his sleep, and compelled him to minister to her sensuality, there were a score of girls who furnished very tolerable evidence of having yielded their virginity to creatures of the male gender, who, they were satisfied, could be none other than devils. The ecclesiastical writers of the period have preserved a number of scandalous stories of the kind, which were so well credited that Pope Innocent VIII. felt impelled to issue a bull on the subject, and provide the faithful with an efficacious formula of exorcism.
Females, most of whom appeared to be nuns, confessed that they had been subject to the scandalous visits of the demons for long periods of time, and that neither fasting, nor prayer, nor spiritual exercise could release them from the hated plague. Some girls were brought to admit a similar intercourse, and were burnt at the stake as partakers of the nature of sorceresses.[178] Married women made similar confessions. They stated that they were able to affirm that intercourse with demons was extremely painful; that their frigid nature, combined with their monstrous proportions, rendered their society a severe affliction, independently of the sin. It was noticed that the women, married or single, who applied to the ecclesiastical authorities for relief from this curious form of torment were almost invariably young and pretty.
In the year 1637 a public discussion took place at Paris on the question, Whether there exist _succubae_ and _incubi_, and whether they can procreate their species? The discussion was long and elaborate. It was conducted by a body of learned doctors, in presence of a large audience, composed partly of ladies; and while the judgment of the tribunal appeared to be in the negative, it was not so emphatic as to settle the question.[179] Even a century later, when one of the royal physicians undertook to explode the theory of lewd demons, and to prove that girls had endeavored to conceal their intercourse with lovers by attributing to them a devilish character, the public was not convinced, and the _incubi_ were not left without believers. The laws still p.r.o.nounced the penalty of death against all persons, male or female, who had commerce with demons.
Another practice which was brought to a close about the same time was ent.i.tled ”_Le sabat des sorciers_,” the witches' vigil. It appears that, at the earliest times of which we have any record, the inhabitants of France and Germany were in the habit of frequenting nocturnal a.s.semblies in which witchcraft was believed or pretended to occupy a prominent place.
In the thirteenth century they were denounced by Pope Gregory IX.,[180]
who was satisfied that the devil had to do with them, and that their prime object was the gratification of sensuality. His bull did not attain its object. The witches' meetings were still held, or believed to have been held throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and part of the sixteenth centuries. The popular belief was that the persons in league with witches anointed their bodies with magical ointment, bestrode a broom, and were forthwith carried through the air to the place of meeting; that Satan was present at the ceremony in the form of a huge he-goat, and received the homage of the witches and their proselytes; that songs and dances followed next in order, and that the whole performance was closed with a scene of promiscuous debauchery.[181] The Inquisition took the matter in hand, and obtained affidavits from several females averring that they had had commerce with demons on these occasions, and relating with singular crudity the peculiar sensations they experienced.[182] On the strength of this evidence prosecutions were inst.i.tuted, and many persons were condemned and executed.
It has been usual in modern times to regard the persecution of the witches as a proof of the barbarous intolerance of the ancient Church; but, in truth, a careful examination of the evidence leaves no room for doubting that witchcraft was only the cloak of real vices. Most of the persons who were burned in France as sorcerers had really used the popular belief in magic to hide their own debaucheries, and had succeeded in depraving large numbers of youth of both s.e.xes. It was stated by a theological writer of the time of Francis I., that in his day there were one hundred thousand persons sold to Satan in France.[183] Allowing for some exaggeration, it must still be inferred from this statement that this form of prost.i.tution had a.s.sumed alarming proportions. Nor is there any good reason for doubting but priests and other persons of lewd propensities turned the simplicity of the village girls to account in very many instances, and richly earned the severe penalty that was inflicted upon them by the arm of the Church. The vigil, or _sabat_, disappears from history during the sixteenth century. That it had been for some time before its extinction a haunt of debauchees and a fertile source of prost.i.tution, the writers on demonology and the old chroniclers establish incontrovertibly.
Other aids to prost.i.tution were obtained from the very ranks of the Church. During the Middle Ages numbers of strange sects appeared, many of which relied for success on the favor they allowed to sensuality. At the present day it is not easy to determine what proportion of the stories that are in print respecting many of these sects were the fruit of sectarian jealousy on the part of their rivals; some of them were doubtless calumniated, but there are others about whose character and practices there is no room for controversy. The Flagellants, for instance, who counted eight hundred thousand proselytes in France in the fourteenth century, were unquestionably depraved. They marched in procession, men and women together, through the cities of France, each member of the society using the whip freely on the bare back of the person before him; and at night they a.s.sembled in country places, and proceeded to more serious flagellations. The opinion of learned persons ascribed erotic effects to these flagellations, it being said, apparently with truth, that when the flagellants had excited their senses by their discipline, they gave way to frantic debauchery. However this be, it is plain that the spectacle of naked men and women marching in procession and scourging one another can not but have been provocative of prost.i.tution.[184]
Another similar sect was the Adamites, who argued that nudity was the law of nature, and that clothes were an abomination in the sight of G.o.d. It is said that, at first, the Adamites insisted on nudity only during their religious exercises, and that their proselytes stripped themselves within the place of wors.h.i.+p; but one, Picard, who became a leading authority in the sect, took the ground that their principles should be carried out boldly in the face of the world. He and his followers, male and female, accordingly appeared in the streets in the costume in which they were born. The Inquisition very properly laid hands on them, punished some, and exiled the others.[185]
Again: if we pa.s.s from individual accidents to the state of society at large, we shall find many features that can not have been aids to virtue.
Allusion has already been made to the obscene character of much of the early poetry of France, and to the excessive grossness of those works especially which obtained, and perhaps deserved, the widest popularity.
Many of the customs of the day were equally adverse to sound morals. To cite one by way of example: On the _Jour des Innocents_, which fell on the 28th of December, men were allowed to invade the bed-chambers of girls, and, if they could find them in bed, to administer the chastis.e.m.e.nt which used to be common in schools. Hence arose the proverbial expression, _Donner les innocents a quelqu'un_, which meant to birch a person on the bare skin. No doubt the old chroniclers were justified in saying that when the girl was worth the trouble, the invader of the chamber was not satisfied with inflicting a chastis.e.m.e.nt.[186]
Marriages were attended with ceremonies far grosser than any that were practiced in Rome. It was not only decorous, it was fas.h.i.+onable, both for men and women, to spy out the bed-chamber of the newly-wedded couple, and the fortunate man or girl who had contrived to see the interior of the room through a c.h.i.n.k in the wall or a hole in the door was loudly applauded when the result of his or her discoveries was made known.[187]
The invention of bridal chambers is therefore not original in America, as some have supposed.
Strange to say, neither the lewdness of the poets nor the grossness of the social habits of the times strikes one as more singular than the tone of the sermons which were delivered in Paris at the same period. One of the most famous preachers of the day was Maillard, who rose to eminence under Louis XI. His sermons on the luxury and corruptions of the times were very popular. We find him cursing the ”burgesses” who, for the sake of gain, let their houses to prost.i.tutes: ”_Vultis vivere de posterioribus meretric.u.m_,” he cries, indignantly. He denounces with extraordinary virulence the ”crimes of impudicity which are committed in churches,” and which ”the pillars and nave would denounce, if they had eyes and a voice.”
He did not spare his congregation. Turning fiercely to the women who sat before him, he apostrophized them: ”Dicatis, vos, mulieres, posuistis, posuistis filias ad peccandum? vos, mulieres, per vestros traitus impudiae, provocastis alios ad peccandum? Et vos, maquerellae, quid dicitis?” He thunders against this latter cla.s.s, the procuresses, who ought, he says, to be burned at the stake, especially when, as is often the case, they are both the mothers and the venders of their daughters. Words fail him to denounce the intercourse of abandoned women with ecclesiastics; he invokes the divine wrath upon those of his congregation _quae dant corpus curialibus, monachis, presbyteris_. Both he and other famous preachers of the day p.r.o.nounced maledictions upon lewd convents, which some of them say are mere seraglios for the bishops and monks, where every abomination is practiced.
It was estimated that at this time, say the fifteenth century, when Paris was comparatively a small city, it contained five to six thousand prost.i.tutes, who were said by an Italian to be far more beautiful and attractive than any prost.i.tutes he had seen elsewhere.
CHAPTER VII.
FRANCE.--HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO LOUIS XIII.
The Court.--Louis IX. to Charles V.--Charles VI.--Agnes Sorel.--Louis XI.--Charles VIII.--Louis XII.--Francis I.--La Belle Feronniere.-- Henry II.--Diana de Poictiers.--Lewd Books and Pictures.--Catharine of Medicis.--Margaret.--Henry IV.--Mademoiselle de Entragues.--Henry III.--Mignons.--Influence of the Ligue.--Indecency of Dress.-- Theatricals.--Ordinance of 1560.--Police Regulations.
The memoranda we have already given will enable the reader to form an idea of the state of society at large. It remains to say something of the court, which, in some respects, was France.
From Louis IX. to Charles V. inclusive, it is said that the kings of France set no example of debauchery, and that the court rather encouraged virtue than vice. When the sisters-in-law of Philip the Handsome scandalized Paris by their loose life in the Tour de Nesle, into which they were said to make a practice of inveigling students, whom they a.s.sa.s.sinated when their lubricity was satiated, the king had them brought to punishment and dealt with as though the popular scandal was well founded in fact. When Charles VI. ascended the throne the scene changed.
This unfortunate monarch was not only himself weak and depraved, but his wife, Isabel of Bavaria, was more vicious still. The pair encouraged every practice that could shock modesty or outrage decency. The queen lived almost openly with her lover, the Duke of Orleans. The king, so long as he retained his reason, was a leading actor in the scandalous masquerades of the court, and narrowly escaped losing his life on one occasion when he disguised himself as a devil, and danced immodestly before the ladies of the court. Round his loins, as round those of his fellow-demons, a sort of girdle of tow had been fastened, and all the masqueraders were chained together. In the midst of their dances, some foolish person threw a lighted torch at them. Their girdles took fire, and all were burned to death except the king, whom the d.u.c.h.ess of Berri saved by courageously raising her skirts and throwing them over the burning monarch.
Charles had had many mistresses in his youth. When he went mad, the physicians directed the queen to refuse to discharge her conjugal duty.
Charles had enough of his former nature left to resent this privation. He even employed force, and succeeded at last in compelling his wife to resume her place in the royal couch. She contrived, however, to defraud him by hiring a pretty girl to take her place. It is said Charles never detected the fraud. His wife, meanwhile, gave the reins to her loose pa.s.sions, and was known to have had at least a score of lovers.