Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

Paris, so gloriously endowed with the revenues of seven noble bailiwicks? Can you conceive of anything
more gratifying than to mete out judgment and sentence, as Messire Robert d’Estouteville did every day
in the Grand Châtelet, under the wide, low-pitched Gothic arches of Philip Augustus; and to retire, as he
was wont, every evening to that charming house in Rue Galilée, within the purlieus of the Palais Royal,
which he held by right of his wife, Dame Ambroise de Loré, where he could rest from the fatigues of
having sent some poor devil to pass the night on his part in that “little cell of the Rue de l’Escorcherie,
which 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?” 62
And not only had Messire Robert d’Estouteville his special jurisdictional offices as Provost of Paris, but
also he had his seat, with power over life and death, in the King’s Supreme Court. There was no head of
any account but had passed through his hands before falling to the executioner. It was he who had
fetched the Comte de Nemours from the Bastille Saint-Antoine, to convey him to the Halles; he who had
escorted the Comte de Saint-Pol to the Place de Grève, who stormed and wept, to the huge delight of
Monsieur the Provost, who bore no love to Monsieur the Constable.
Here, assuredly, was more than sufficient to make a man’s life happy and illustrious and to merit some
day a noteworthy page in that interesting chronicle of the Provosts of Paris, from which we learn that
Oudard de Villeneuve owned a house in the Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangast bought the
great and the little Savoie mansion, that Guillaume Thiboust gave his houses in the Rue Clopin to the
Sisters of Sainte-Geneviève, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du Porc-epic, and other facts of a
domestic character.
Nevertheless, in spite of all these reasons for taking life easily and pleasantly, Messire Robert
d’Estouteville had risen on the morning of January 7, 1482, feeling as sulky and dangerous in temper as a
bear with a sore head; why, he would have been at a loss to say. Was it because the sky was gloomy?
because the buckle of his old sword-belt—another relic of Montlhéry—was clasped too tight, and girded
up his fair, round, provostorial port in all too military a fashion—or because he had just seen a band of
tattered varlets, who had jeered at him as they passed below his windows walking four abreast, in
doublets without shirts, in hats without brims, and wallet and bottle hanging at their sides?
Or was it the vague premonition of the loss of those three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sols, eight
deniers, of which in the following year the future King Charles VIII was going to dock the revenues of
the Provostry? The reader may take his choice, but for our part we are inclined to the opinion that he was
in bad temper because—he was in a bad temper.
Besides, it was the day after a holiday, a day distasteful to everybody, especially to the magistrate
whose business it was to sweep up all the dirt—literally and figuratively—which a Paris holiday
inevitably brings with it. Then, too, he was to sit that day at the Grand Châtelet; and we have noticed that
the judges generally manage that their day of sitting shall also be their day of ill-humour, in that they
may have some one on whom conveniently to vent their spleen in the name of the King, justice, and the
law.
The sitting, however, had begun without him. His deputies in civil, criminal, and private causes were
acting for him as usual; and by eight o’clock in the morning, some scores of townsfolk, men and women,
crowded up between the wall and a strong barrier of oak in a dark corner of the court of the Châtelet,
were blissfully assisting at the varied and exhilarating spectacle of the law, civil and criminal, as
administered by Maître Florian Barbedienne, examining judge at the Châtelet, and deputy for Monsieur