BOOK SIX
CHAPTER I
An Impartial Glance at the Ancient Magistracy A very lucky fellow, in the year of grace 1482, was that noble gentleman Robert d‘Estouteville, knight, Lord of Beyne, Baron of Ivry and St. Andry in La Marche, councillor and chamberlain to the king, and keeper of the provosty of Paris. It was some seventeen years since he received from the king, Nov. 7, 1465, the year of the comet,bw the handsome appointment of provost of Paris, which was regarded rather as a dignity than an office. “Dignitas,” says Joannes L?mn?us, “qu? cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque pra?rogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est.”bx It was an extraordinary thing in 1482 for a gentleman to hold a commission from the king; and a gentleman, too, whose appointment dated back to the time of the marriage of Louis XI’s natural daughter to the Bastard of Bourbon. On the same day that Robert d’Estouteville succeeded Jacques de Villiers as provost of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet took the place of Master Hélye de Thorrettes as first president of the court of Parliament, Jehan Jou venel des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of Lord Chancellor of France, Regnault des Dormans deprived Pierre Puy of his place as referendary in ordinary to the king’s household. Now, through how many hands had the presidency, chancellorship, and referendaryship not passed since Robert d‘Estouteville was made provost of Paris! The office was “granted into his keeping,” said the letters-patent; and certainly he kept it well. He clung to it, he identified himself with it, he made himself so much a part of it that he escaped that passion for change which possessed Louis XI, the suspicious, stingy, industrious king who insisted on keeping up the elasticity of his power by constant removals and appointments. Nay, more: the worthy knight had obtained the reversion of his office for his son, and for the last two years the name of the noble Jacques d‘Estouteville, Esquire, had figured beside his own at the head of the ordinary of the provosty of Paris. Assuredly a rare and signal mark of favor! True, Robert d’Estouteville was a good soldier; he had loyally raised his standard against “the league of the public weal,” and had offered the queen a very marvelous stag made of sweetmeats on the day she entered Paris, in 14—。 Besides, he had a good friend in Master Tristan l‘Hermite, provost of the marshals of the king’s household. Master Robert, therefore, led a very smooth and pleasant life. In the first place, he had a capital salary, to which were attached and hung, like so many additional bunches of grapes to his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal registries of the provostship, besides the civil and criminal revenues of the Inferior Courts of the Chatelet, not to mention some slight toll on the Pont de Mantes and Pont de Corbeil, the tax on all the onions, leeks, and garlic brought into Paris, and the tax on wood meters and salt measures. Add to this the pleasure of displaying his fine suit of armor within the city limits, and showing off among the party-colored red and tan robes of the sheriffs and district police which you may still admire carved upon his tomb at the Abbey of Valmont in Normandy, as you may also see his embossed morion at Montlhéry. And then,—was it nothing to have supreme power over the twelve sergeants, the porter and warder of the Chatelet, the two auditors of the Chatelet （auditores castelleti）， the sixteen commissaries of the sixteen quarters of the city, the jailer of the Chatelet, the four ennobled officers of the peace, the hundred and twenty mounted police, the hundred and twenty vergers, the captain of the watch, his under-watch, counter-watch, and rear-watch? Was it nothing to administer high and low justice, to exercise the right to turn, hang, and draw, to say nothing of the minor jurisdiction “in the first instance” （in prima instantia, as the charters say） of that viscounty of Paris, so gloriously provided with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything be imagined more agreeable than to give judgments and decrees, as Master Robert d’Estouteville did daily at the Grand-Chatelet, under the broad flat arches of Philip Augustus; and to return, as he was wont to do every evening, to that charming house in the Rue Galilée, within the precincts of the royal palace, which he held by right of his wife, Madame Ambroise de Lore, there to rest from the labor of sending some poor devil to pass his night in “that little lodge in the Rue de l‘Escorcherie, wherein the provosts and sheriffs of Paris frequently used as a prison,—the same measuring eleven feet in length, seven feet and four inches in width, and eleven feet in height?”by
And not only had Master Robert d‘Estouteville his private court as provost and viscount of Paris, but he also had his share, both active and passive, in the king’s own high justice. There was no head of any note but had passed through his hands before falling into those of the executioner. It was he who went to the Bastille Saint-Antoine, in search of M. de Nemours, to take him to the Halles; and he who conducted M. de Saint-Pol to the Place de Grève, the latter gentleman sulking and fretting, to the great delight of the provost, who had no love for the constable.