Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/235

Rh subdivided, and then illustrated by three examples. Lucifer, Absalom and Athalia rise up before the imagination of the hearers as the archetypes of a traitor. Eight truths are brought forward to justify tyrannicide. Referring to one of the eight, he says: “I shall prove this truth by twelve reasons in honour of the twelve apostles.” And he cites three sentences of the doctors, three of the philosophers, three of the jurists and three from Scripture. From the eight truths eight corollaries are derived, completed by a ninth. By the aid of allusions or insinuations he revives all the old suspicions which hung over the memory of the ambitious and debauched prince: his responsibility for the disaster of the “bal des ardents,” where the young king’s company, disguised as wild men, miserably perished by fire, while the king himself narrowly escaped; his plans of murder and poisoning, hatched in the Celestine monastery, in the course of his conversations with “the sorcerer,” Philippe de Mézières. The notorious leaning of the duke towards necromancy furnished an opportunity for describing very picturesque scenes of horror. Maître Petit is even familiar with the demons whom Orleans consulted; he knows their names and the way in which they were dressed. He goes so far as to ascribe a sinister meaning to the delirious utterances of the mad king.

All this makes up the major term of the syllogism. The minor follows it, point by point. Grounding themselves on the general propositions which had raised the case to the plane of fundamental ethics and had artfully roused a sentiment of shuddering horror, the direct accusations burst out in a flood of passionate hatred and defamation. The pleading lasted for four hours, and at the end Jean sans Peur pronounced the words: “I avouch you” (Je vous avoue). The justification was written out in four costly copies for the duke and his nearest relations, ornamented with gilding and miniatures, and bound in pressed leather. It was also for sale.

The tendency to give each particular case the character of a moral sentence or of an example, so that it becomes something substantial and unchallengeable, the crystallization of thought, in short, finds its most general and natural expression in the proverb. In the thought of the Middle Ages proverbs have performed a very living function. There were hundreds