“Here, Orléans,” said Armagnac. “Here, boy, do not say now that your welfare and prosperity do not lie close to my heart.”
He moved quickly toward his son-in-law and pressed the crown upon his head. “If it depended upon me, I would soon call you ‘Sire, my Sovereign’, and have the king of France as my son-in-law.”
Charles snatched off the crown and flung it among the gold dishes and goblets. Armagnac, who had bent his knee before him, made a gesture of mock surprise.
“He throws away the Crown of France as though it were a wilted garland,” he said. “I see that Monseigneur still has much to learn.”
In the first week of November, a meeting took place in the slaughterhouse of Sainte-Geneviève under the chairmanship of the owners, the three brothers Legoix. In honor of the event the flagstones of the great room had been purged of blood and filth, the slaughtering blocks and tubs scoured clean. Pickaxes hung in the background. But the stench could not be driven away — the brackish smell, the sharp odor of thousands of pigs and catde which had been driven in here over the course of time.
The long, narrow slaughterhouse was crowded: by the bleak light of the November day which filtered through the windows mounted high in the wall, the participants in the gathering greeted one another: butchers and skinners, sausage fillers, pastry makers and peddlers, fell-mongers, cobblers and leather-workers; not only the bosses and masters, but also journeymen, servants and apprentices, bare-armed in grimy aprons.
A plank had been laid over a few slaughtering blocks; on it stood those in charge here: Thomas Legoix and both his brothers and the butcher bosses, Saint-Yon and Thibert of the great slaughtering houses.
The oldest Legoix, a giant of a man with a full florid face, kept his eyes fixed intendy on the door. From time to time he saluted those who entered with a distracted gesture and shook his head impatiently when his neighbor Thibert nudged him; it was obvious that he expected someone who had not yet arrived.
“Begin now, Legoix, before it gets too dark,” said Thibert. “Surely you can still open your mouth. God knows the surgeon must be drawing blood somewhere. An hour from now we won’t be able to see each other’s noses here.”
Legoix continued to shake his head.
“What do I have torches for?” he asked sourly. The answer awoke interest; one of the men who stood around the plank — a peddler — shouted loudly, “Where do you get your torches from, Legoix? There isn’t a chip of wood anywhere in Paris. The people in my neighborhood are burning doors and window sills. Do you wander off to Saint-Denis to get kindling wood?”
There was laughter, but without real humor; the effects of the long siege were beginning to be felt. Provisions in the city had run out quickly and the food supply had virtually ceased. As usual in bad times the herds of catde were the first to go; they were driven to safer quarters by the fleeing peasants to protect them from the besiegers and the roving packs of vandals. The cattle, pigs and sheep which had been wont to feed on the city ramparts had been slaughtered a year earlier to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Armagnacs. For the butchers and related guilds there was therefore precious little work; from time to time they saw an opportunity to bring, with a well-armed escort, a few hundred head of cattle into Paris from oudying districts. Legoix had made use of the encounter of both enemy armies at Montdidier to make hasty conveyance of another herd of cattle. But what did that signify in a city which yearly required 30,000 cattle and 20,000 sheep for subsistence? Prices had shot up fantastically; bread was nearly unobtainable at any price, and as for fruit and green vegetables — they simply did not exist. Those citizens who had gardens, plots of ground at their disposal, could save themselves; they had roots, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and herbs. A man of the people, however, had to do with less; he had to be content with the common people’s food in wartime: stinging nettles boiled in salt water.
Thomas Legoix leaped from the platform, shoving aside the bystanders in his haste to reach a man who had just entered: the surgeon, Maitre Jean de Troyes. A murmur of satisfaction arose; the surgeon, a lean, dour middle-aged man with extremely penetrating dark eyes, was greatly respected in the butchers’ guild; he had connections in the University, was eloquent and was considered both clever and learned.
He waved both his arms in greeting to this assembly and called out joyously, “God be with you, colleagues — for we are colleagues, aren’t we? In fact, we exercise the same calling.”
He gave Legoix, who led him to the platform, a sidelong glance, and grinned derisively.
“I belong to your guild, Legoix, because I can assert without hesitation that I bleed chiefly swine, catde and sheep. Greetings, Thibert; greetings, Saint-Yon; greetings, Legoix. Legoix,” he continued, waving his hand rapidly at the four men who already stood on the planks, “hoist me up, I am not as nimble as I was a year or so ago.”
Thomas Legoix lifted the surgeon as though he were a child and then leaped onto the board himself. The uproar in the butchers’ hall had subsided somewhat; the men pressed closer around the slaughtering block, their faces raised. In the front rows stood the guildmasters, the owners of the workshops and factories, the heads of the various branches of the meat and hide industries; men of various ages: some arrayed in furs and rich cloth, others in work clothes. Behind the masters pressed the apprentices, for the most part youths and men from the lowest classes, big-boned, with coarse features, whose doublets and aprons seemed to be permeated with the fetid stench of the work rooms.
The slaughterhouse was completely full; nevertheless still more spectators managed to squeeze inside: ragged students from the colleges of the University quarter, beggars and street loafers who had increased in number since the outbreak of war — they had apparently sensed that something was afoot. Even before Legoix’s servants could shut the doors of the slaughterhouse, a troop of vagrants, wrapped in rags, kicked and fought their way inside in frantic haste.
“Men!” roared Thomas Legoix, crossing his sinewy arms, “men, I have something to tell you. The day after tomorrow we leave the city with Burgundy’s troops to attack the Armagnacs in Saint-Cloud.”
A loud shout of approval greeted this announcement to which the butchers and their partisans had looked forward eagerly ever since the time, late in the summer, when they had accepted arms from Burgundy. Almost daily they patrolled Paris in groups, led by knights and horsemen from the retinue of Count de Saint-Pol, under the colors and emblems of Burgundy — a lily in the heart of a Saint Andrew’s cross against an azure field. They called themselves the army of Paris and marched with resounding steps through the streets.
“More than 2,000 of us are expected at Saint-Jacques’ gate at midnight,” Legoix went on. “Captain Saint-Pol says there are not more than 1,500 Armagnacs lying in Saint-Cloud. Together with Burgundy’s men we are surely three or five times as strong.”