ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

BY FRANCIS AVELING, D.D.

CHAPTER XIV.

HE sun rose smiling and fair on a fair and smiling city. Paris hardly knew herself, she was so gay and garlanded. The streets had been swept clean-so clean that one could have spread one's best velvet cloak upon the cobbles without a trace of dust. All garbage and mud, the litter of the straw merchants, and the scraps and odds and ends that would make the way unsightly, had been carefully removed. The houses and churches that lined the road from the Porte Papale to the Petit Pont, and on, across through the city, to the Pont au Change, and on again, passing under the frowning arches of the Grand Chatelet, through the town and out by the Porte St. Martin, were adorned with festoons of leaves and flowers. Flowers and leafy branches were everywhere, in the windows and over the doors, looped across on ropes from one side of the road to the other, and hanging, bright with interwoven bits of cloth and painted devices, over the route of the royal progress. The bells of Notre Dame were pealing; and all the Abbey bells and church bells, bells little and great, bells high and low, sonorous and cracked, answered in chorus.

All Paris was afoot and making its way, with smiles and laughter and jests, towards the Porte Papale-Paris; that is to say, the University; for the sun looked down this cloudless morning, upon three distinct gatherings of human beings; and the one at the southern gate was of scholars and students.

The living units of this first-and they undoubtedly thought themselves the most important of all-were converging from every direction upon the Papal Gate. The colleges and the friaries, the lodging houses and monasteries and abbeys, within

*Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York.

and without the wall, were pouring out their occupants in continuous streams that filtered through the crooked channels of the lesser streets, and grew and gathered and swelled into one. great rush as they all came together in the Rue St. Jacques and surged towards the great gate.

The burghers of St. Germain's and the inhabitants of the newly-building Terre de Laas on the west, the burghers of St. Marcel and St. Victor on the south and east, came trooping in by lateral gates, still further contributing to the confused mass of clerks and friars, monks and University officials, boys, women, men, and girls, that were gathering with such great good humor to welcome the kings of England, France, and Navarre.

From the four quarters of the city proper, a smaller crowd was coming together at the head of the wooden bridge. This was distinctly a courtly and ecclesiastical assembly, more brilliant in color and more grave in feature than that at the Porte Papale. Here were the officials of the Old Palace who had not gone in the train of King Louis to meet King Henry at Chartres. Here was the Archbishop, with the chapter of his Cathedral, the Cardinal Dean of the Church of Paris and the Cantor, the three Archdeacons, the sub-Cantor, the Chancellor, the Penitentiary, and forty-three of the fifty-two Prebendaries of Notre Dame, each clothed in the rich ecclesiastical garments that belonged to his particular rank and station.

Besides this gorgeous nucleus, standing together in a compact body of rich color, there were other dignitaries. Four or five bishops with their attendants, a number of abbots and priors of the various orders, in white or black habits, and monks were. scattered about in little groups.

The prior of the temple, at the head of a little band of his knights, rode up into a conspicuous position.

A metal crucifix gleamed in the sun's rays high above the crowd; and in front of the choir of singing boys and men in their white surplices were two lads carrying, respectively, a vessel of holy water with the aspergillum, and a smoking thurible.

They were not so noisy as the crowd at the Porte Papale; but they were conversing and chatting, none the less, as they waited to receive the royal party and conduct the kings to the cathedral.

A third gathering, of considerably larger dimensions than

either of the former, had collected in front of the Grand Chatelet. It was composed of the burghers-citizens, traders, merchants, Jews, apprentices, and master craftsmen, with their wives and daughters; together with a fair sprinkling of countrymen and women who had come in through the town gates to see the pageant.

While this crowd could not boast the select magnificence of the ecclesiastical gathering upon the island, nor all the festive youth of the University .contingent, it made up for what it lacked by the motley variety of dress and feature that it displayed. All the trades-though the trade guilds had not yet been formed by the Provost, Stephen Boileau-were represented; for all the town of Paris was gathered together at the Grand Chatelet and in its vicinity. Those who came late had to be content with a place in the Place de Grève or by the Porte Pepin. Dogs were barking and children were wild with excitement and delight. Proud mothers rocked their screaming babies in their arms and lifted them up to see the pretty crowd, a proceeding that made them scream all the more.

The Provost of the merchants, with his subordinate officers, was there, solemn and dignified in his dress of state, frowning at the screaming children, fussing with the hang of his robes, bestowing a smile now and again upon some prominent member of his little kingdom, conscious of his own importance.

There was a continuous buzz of talk, howling, barking, stamping, shuffling, movement.

Those who had had the forethought to bring food were rapidly disposing of it with laughter and jokes, to the envy of their less provident neighbors.

The sun played upon the concourse, bringing the patchwork of color out in strong light-yellow and red and blue and green; furs and cloth, with silks here and there; and ornament of sil ver and ornament of gold; tall hats and low coifs, and wimples and flat bonnets; talking and laughter and snatches of song; garland and green bough and tapestry hanging from the windows.

This was the assembly of burghers in front of the Grand Chatelet, waiting to meet their sovereign lord and master and his royal guest, Henry III., King of England.

But to return to the gathering at the Porte Papale. Arnoul had taken his stand near the gate, in the centre of a little

group of his friends. As he looked round him, at the vast concourse coming together from every side, he saw the strangest collection of gala dresses imaginable. There were the Procurators of the Four Nations standing apart, with their attorneys, and the beadles waiting to collect the scholars into orderly bands. There was a white-robed group of Premonstratensians, headed by their abbot, from the convent in the Rue Hautefeuille; and a brown group of Cordeliers with their sandals and knotted cords. There were the friars from St. Jacques with their black cloaks, and the Carmelites beside them in their white ones; and near by stood a rank of Bernardines from the abbey beyond the Bièvre. Arnoul recognized the two Buckfast brothers in this last group.

And then there were the scholars-tens of thousands of them, it seemed to him-in every conceivable variety of cassock and habit, going in and out among the compact groups of the religious, surging backwards and forwards towards the flower-bedecked gate, pushing, shoving, laughing, calling out, shouting to each other, waving the branches and bunches of flowers they held in their hands high above their heads.

They were a jolly crowd, these scholars of the Four Nations, ready for any emergency, but doubly ready to welcome kings. They would turn out in their thousands for a funeral, or for a feast, and swell the ranks of a procession, so that when its head was entering Notre Dame its tail was still forming itself at St. Methurins. But it was not every day in the year that they had a chance like this! And so, remembering their importance and their privileges, they shouted themselves hoarse, and waved their green branches and bright-colored cloaks, when they had them, and pushed and jostled each other in high good humor, singing snatches of the songs with which, roaring their loudest in chorus, they would welcome the royal train as soon as it should come into sight.

The nations were slowly sorting themselves out of the general confusion and beginning to group themselves in the rear of their Procurators, when a strident voice broke in upon the clamor and babel of tongues.

"Room!

Make room there for the Rector! Room for the Deans! Room for the Professors of the University!"

The crowd parted right and left as the splendidly robed procession of University officials made its way, preceded by the

beadles, from the University Church of St. Mathurin. There was the Rector himself-the Englishman, John of Gectevilleand lusty cheers rang out for him from English throats as he advanced, gorgeous in his rectorial robes at the head of the professorial body.

In the University he had precedence over bishops and cardinals, and even papal legates; and scholars, masters, monks, and friars-though the Four Nations had elected him from among the artists and had made him what he was, the Capital Scholarum-gave way before him as he passed onward to the gate.

Then there were the Syndic, the Deans and the Doctors of the Faculties; the twelve theologians walking in front in their ermine tippets and with their doctor's bonnets upon their heads. After them came the Scholasticus of St. Genevieve in his canon's robes, severe of visage and mien as one who sat with the Chancellor of Notre Dame for the examinations of the University teachers.

Robert de Sorbon was there too, and the two Dominican professors. And then, as the many eyes of the throng watched the passage of the official body, the well-known figure of St. Amour came into sight.

There he was-the thin, angular face, almost ascetic in its fierce compression and energy; the high forehead with the pen. ciled brows slightly contracted, as they always were, giving him an habitual air of pride and obstinacy; those dark and gleaming eyes, shining with intelligence and audacity.

Clad in his doctor's robes of cloth and fur, he walked straight along the path made before him through the crowd, looking neither to the right nor left, as though seeing nothing of all the people whose eyes were bent upon him.

A Dominican friar spoke under his breath when he had passed, calling him blasphemer, mocker, reviler, and consigning him with all his party to the depths of the nether pit.

And then, the procession passed, the crowd surged together again.

Arnoul caught scraps of conversation as he threaded his way through the press to take up his stand in the ranks of the English, to whom the first place, near the gate, was allotted.

"They say "-it was a Franciscan speaking-"that the King of the English has translated his mother-whom may God assoil-into the church at Fontevraud."