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diff --git a/themes/ananke/exampleSite/content/post/chapter-1.md b/themes/ananke/exampleSite/content/post/chapter-1.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ff2a14f --- /dev/null +++ b/themes/ananke/exampleSite/content/post/chapter-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +--- +date: 2017-04-09T10:58:08-04:00 +description: "The Grand Hall" +featured_image: "/images/Pope-Edouard-de-Beaumont-1844.jpg" +tags: ["scene"] +title: "Chapter I: The Grand Hall" +--- + +Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago +to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple +circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. + +The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has +preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus +set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. +It was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt +led along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor +an entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty +hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it +the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and +bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of that +nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the +marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its +entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, +who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an +amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and +to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality, +allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the +magnificent tapestries at his door. + +What put the “whole population of Paris in commotion,” as Jehan de Troyes +expresses it, on the sixth of January, was the double solemnity, united +from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools. + +On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole at +the Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. It had +been cried, to the sound of the trumpet, the preceding evening at all the +cross roads, by the provost’s men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless +coats of violet camelot, with large white crosses upon their breasts. + +So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed their houses and +shops, thronged from every direction, at early morn, towards some one of +the three spots designated. + +Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the maypole; another, +the mystery play. It must be stated, in honor of the good sense of the +loungers of Paris, that the greater part of this crowd directed their +steps towards the bonfire, which was quite in season, or towards the +mystery play, which was to be presented in the grand hall of the Palais de +Justice (the courts of law), which was well roofed and walled; and that +the curious left the poor, scantily flowered maypole to shiver all alone +beneath the sky of January, in the cemetery of the Chapel of Braque. + +The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in particular, because +they knew that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days +previously, intended to be present at the representation of the mystery, +and at the election of the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place +in the grand hall. + +It was no easy matter on that day, to force one’s way into that grand +hall, although it was then reputed to be the largest covered enclosure in +the world (it is true that Sauval had not yet measured the grand hall of +the Château of Montargis). The palace place, encumbered with people, +offered to the curious gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into +which five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged every +moment fresh floods of heads. The waves of this crowd, augmented +incessantly, dashed against the angles of the houses which projected here +and there, like so many promontories, into the irregular basin of the +place. In the centre of the lofty Gothic* façade of the palace, the grand +staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double current, which, +after parting on the intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves +along its lateral slopes,—the grand staircase, I say, trickled +incessantly into the place, like a cascade into a lake. The cries, the +laughter, the trampling of those thousands of feet, produced a great noise +and a great clamor. From time to time, this noise and clamor redoubled; +the current which drove the crowd towards the grand staircase flowed +backwards, became troubled, formed whirlpools. This was produced by the +buffet of an archer, or the horse of one of the provost’s sergeants, which +kicked to restore order; an admirable tradition which the provostship has +bequeathed to the constablery, the constablery to the _maréchaussée_, +the _maréchaussée_ to our _gendarmeri_ of Paris. |