Henry M. Baird · 100 of 379

CHAPTER VIII · The tailor of the Rue St. Antoine.

Blood flowed in every part of the kingdom. Not only the capital, but also the provinces furnished their constant witnesses to the truth of the "Lutheran" doctrines. The noted trial and execution of John Brugière revealed to the First President of Parliament the humiliating fact that the Reformation had gained a strong foothold in his native Auvergne. At Paris, one Florence Venot was confined seven weeks in a cell upon the construction of which so much perverted ingenuity had been expended that the prisoner could neither lie down nor stand erect, and the hour of release from weary torture was waited for with ardent longing, even if it led to the stake. But the death of a nameless tailor has, by the singularity of its incidents, acquired a celebrity surpassing that of any other martyrdom in the early part of this reign. In the midst of the tourneys and other festivities provided to signalize the occasion of the queen's coronation and his own solemn entry into Paris, the desire seized Henry to see with his own eyes and to interrogate one of the members of the sect to whose account such serious charges were laid. A poor tailor, arrested in his shop in the Rue St. Antoine, a few paces from the royal palace, for the crime of working on a day which the church had declared holy, was brought before him. So contemptible a dialectician could do little, it was presumed, to shake the faith of the Very Christian King. But the result disappointed the expectations of the courtiers and ecclesiastics that were present. The tailor answered with respectful boldness to the questions propounded by Châtellain, Bishop of Macon, a prelate once favorable to the Reformation. Hereupon Diana of Poitiers, an interested opponent, whose coffers were being filled with the goods of condemned heretics, undertook to silence him with the tongue of a witty woman. The tailor, who had patiently borne the ridicule and scorn with which he had hitherto been treated, turned upon the mistress of the king a look of solemn warning as he said: "Madam, let it suffice you to have infected France, without desiring to mingle your poison and filth with so holy and sacred a thing as the true religion of our Lord Jesus Christ." The courtiers were thunderstruck at the turn taken by a discussion to which they had flocked as to a scene of diversion, and the enraged king ordered the tailor's instant trial and punishment. He even desired with his own eyes to see him undergo the extreme penalty of the law. A solemn procession had been ordered to proceed from St. Paul's to Notre Dame. The prayers there offered for the destruction of heresy were followed by an "exemplary demonstration" of the king's pious disposition, in the execution of four "Lutherans" in as many different squares of the city. In order the better to see the punishment inflicted upon the tailor of the Rue St. Antoine, Henry posted himself at a window that commanded the entire spectacle. But it was no coward's death that he beheld. Soon perceiving and recognizing the monarch before whom he had witnessed so good a profession, the tailor fixed his gaze upon him, nor would he avert his face, however much the king ordered that his position should be changed. Even in the midst of the flames he still continued to direct his dying glance toward the king, until the latter, abashed, was compelled to withdraw from the window. For days Henry declared that the spectre haunted his waking hours and drove sleep from his eyes at night; and he affirmed with an oath that never again would he witness so horrible a scene. Happy would it have been for his memory had he adhered, in the case of Anne du Bourg, to so wise a resolution!