The Seven Deadly Sins (Bowen)/Pride

RIDE is the first of the deadly sins and painted in the likeness of a peacock; there are few without this sin in great or small degree, and there is no sin so likely to catch a man by the heels and trip him into Hell’s Mouth.”

So spake the old monk, sitting by the fire, talking to the young novices on the long winter’s evening; they liked to listen to the holy stories the old monk told them, for there was always a good comforting moral and some matter of interest too, for he had been in the world once, and remembered it well enough, though he was now so far on the path to heaven.

“A man without pride,” he continued, “is a saint, and a man all pride is a devil, and a dangerous devil—especially if he be not a man at all, but a woman.”

“Ah,” said the novices wisely, and they looked into the fire and shook their heads and pursed their lips.

The monk finished his glass of Hippocras, wiped his lips and proceeded to tell the story of pride, the first deadly sin.

“When I was in Paris,” he said, “learning theology at the Sorbonne, I often saw—riding in a gilt chariot—the Queen.”

“The Queen!”

“As you may have heard, her name was Isabeau, and she came from the East; her clothes were a wonder, her life was a scandal; she was quite the proudest creature any man had ever seen or heard of; she boasted that she had never set her foot in the public street nor in the house of one who was of less than blood royal; there was always a body of the Scottish Archers about her car to prevent the mud from touching her wheels, and the foul breath of the baser sort from reaching her.

“But she did not mind their eyes; indeed, she was always raised high on her cushions that they might see her, and if she was in a litter, the curtains were drawn, and her beauty was displayed as freely, nay, as wantonly, as that of any common creature who goes about seeking her price.

“The treasury was empty because of her vesture and her servants and her dainty meats, her silk sheets, her baths of rose-water; the soldiers were few and so were the ships; the peasants were rioting in the country; the nobles pawned their plate, but the Queen went in cloth-of-gold and wore the keep of a regiment in a single ring.

“You will have heard of the King. … He was foolish in his mind, and played with clocks and cards all day long in his closet; his only company was his jester, and they were both in frayed robes and ill-nourished. He neither saw the Queen nor asked after her; they said that she had broken his heart and shattered his wits long ago.

“There were, of course, many cavaliers in her train—I have told you she was beautiful; her eyes and her hair were tawny, like a dark tiger-skin, her complexion was clear yet golden, the carnation deep in the cheeks. The whole effect of her face was golden; she sparkled and glowed without the aid of jewels.

“It was said she put dye upon her lips and cheeks, the juice of scarlet geranium petals; I do not know, nor did it matter; she was beautiful as only a proud, shameless woman can be—beautiful to strike the eye and hold the heart, to excite, to subdue, to awe, to lure.

“I often saw her ride past the Sorbonne; her head-dress three or four feet high, scarlet, sparkling with gems, and hung with a thin white gauze veil, that now floated away from her face and now obscured it. Across her shoulders the fine ermine robe, flecked here and there with black, would fall apart, disclosing the loveliness of her bosom beneath the thin cambric sewn with pearls that edged her purple velvet bodice, and then it would be drawn together by the fairest hand in all the world, aye, and on this hand there glittered the royal gems of France.

“She was always alone, always drawn by white horses, eight of them without a speck or flaw, and always followed by the most brilliant knights and nobles in the kingdom—her humble servants all of them, her lovers, some; Duke Francois or another of her favourites close behind her, almost as magnificent as she herself, and almost as proud. She ruled France in those days—ruled it hideously, without justice, without sense, without pity, her sole object the making of money for her own magnificence.

“Well—there was no one to gainsay her, and her splendour and her licence pleased the great nobles, I suppose—at least they supported her; in the streets and the country-side she was cursed with many oaths, for a foreign wanton, a tyrant, a creature who sucked the blood of the nation. What did she care?

“She never heard them, or, if she did, if any occasional murmur did penetrate the scented atmosphere she breathed, it made no impression on her gilded charm. She was cruel.

“She was also very like the peacock in this; there was little else but pride in that small head beneath the high crown.

“So it happened that she let her ruling vice destroy the only thing she cared for—if indeed it was possible for her to care; who knows?

“One day when she rode abroad she saw a young man looking from an upper window; his arms were folded on the sill and the sunlight was on his face.

“This was no unusual sight, nor was the admiration in his eyes.

“But the Queen looked at him a second longer than her usual wont.

“And the next time she rode that way (it was near the ‘Près aux clercs’ and May, and very sunny weather) he was there again, and yet again until in all it was seven times she had seen him leaning from the window in the full sunlight looking down at her. The Duke François saw him; he saw the Queen look up and the young man look down, but he thought naught of it, so serene was he in his pride; could he imagine Isabeau would ever smile on one not of royal blood, or the greatest among nobles?

“So the Duke went his way, swaggering through Paris, and there came a day, about the beginning of June, the court being then at Vincennes, when the young man climbed the palace wall and dropped right at the feet of the Queen where she sat alone in the orchard, in the daisied grass, with her psalter on her knee.

“What followed was a miracle—you may believe what I say, though, for I had it from the young man himself: she rose to her feet—she was in silk from head to foot, with gold on her hair, and he in his ordinary garb, for he was no more than a student at the Sorbonne—and she held out her arms and came to him and they kissed without a word.

“They loved each other; from the first instant their eyes had crossed they loved each other, She had never loved before—not even Duke François; yet her pride was still the stronger, for although she was a woman utterly without shame she kept this love secret—had she loved a Prince she would have flaunted it, but this was only a poor clerk and all her wit and her power were turned to conceal her passion.

“For a while she contrived it—for she had all France at her service, and who was there to spy on her, or to dare to speak if they did, and of whom should she be afraid?

“There was one—Duke François—but in her pride and her absorption in her new love, and her great haughtiness, she disdained him.

“She had dismissed him from her favour as lightly as she would have blown a feather from her sleeve, and his pride was sorely hit and his ambition also. I do not know what they had ever been, the one to the other, but she had given him her confidence, and made him virtually King of France, from which he had soaring hopes and delighted in the power her favour left in his hands. But there came a time when she must needs consult him on some affairs of State that she was too idle to attend to or too ignorant to understand, and the Duke perceived in her the effect of advice not his own, and this angered him. For her personal coldness to himself he cared little enough, I think. He was as proud as she and as cruel, but neither so reckless nor so foolish. It was said he schemed to take the place of the poor silly King and would have stopped at nothing to this end, if he could have cloaked his designs beyond discovery.

“He made no complaint now of the Queen’s waning favour, nor of the daily humiliations she put on him—for she was not a prudent woman, and too proud to conceal a changed feeling; he served her ever with the same graceful readiness, but his courtesies only masked the fact that he was employing all his wit and skill in finding out his rival, so that he might be revenged.

“At first he suspected the princes of the blood, the court gallants—yet he wondered at her secrecy, and his careful watching and spying convinced him that it was not one of these who had taken his place.

“For a while he was baffled, for she was most careful—cautious and secretive for the first time in her foolish life—and she had not a single confidante. …

“But the young clerk was also ambitious, and the excessive fears of discovery the Queen had began to gall him; he thought that she might have brought him to court, and let him ride openly beside her in cloth-of-gold through the streets of Paris. Yet he dared not even suggest such a thing; for when once he hinted to the Queen that she might gild his obscurity she told him that did he once lift his head out of the crowd, Duke François would set his heel on that head and crush it into the dust. So he had to content himself with his secret influence on the affairs of France—he wrought diligently and skilfully on the evil little Queen, and she trusted him with the secrets of the statecraft of France, and he advised her and gave her long scrolls of parchment covered with what she must do, and she meekly obeyed him; it seemed in those days as if she would do all to please him—all and anything save own him.

“You might think that he would have been content, yet he was not, for she had made him take a great oath that never, no matter at what pass, would he disclose that the Queen had loved him.

“This oath rankled within him day and night, till he began to irk and fret at the concealment and to consider what he might have achieved had she set him beside her on the throne of France—of how he might have been bowed down to and worshipped by those people who now took him as naught and never turned their heads to look at him.

“So in all these three pride became the one thing burning up all other passions: in Duke François, angry pride had been supplanted, killing all lingering tenderness for the Queen, humbled pride in her began to dim her true ardour for her plebeian lover, and baffled pride in the clerk began to stifle the passion he felt for Isabeau.

“As the months rolled round to another summer this conflict of pride with the softer emotions of their bosoms became a thing unbearable to all three.

“The Queen had a secret door in her apartments in the Louvre, and when the nights were moonless, and her women dismissed, she would take her lantern and in some cunning disguise or other go forth, let herself out of the Palace with her own keys, hurry along the dark streets of Paris and meet her lover either at the ‘Près aux clercs’ where his house stood, or in the cemetery of the Couvent des Innocents, which stood open day and night. In this ghastly place they met not only for love, for the young clerk, in defiance of God and eaten up and maddened by pride, was seeking to raise the Devil or one of his emissaries, who, as he hoped, might help him to thwart the Queen and gain the place he longed for in the councils of France.

“And Isabeau helped in these experiments—her design, which she kept as secret as her lover kept his, being to obtain the aid of the Devil in safely removing Duke François, whom at last she was growing to fear.

“Perhaps a woman’s instinct warned her that under his serene air of 1omage he might be working her fatal mischief.

“She was only afraid of one thing in the world, and that was the discovery of her common lover, and she knew that this very weak spot was that which Duke François would most like to strike.

“About the very heat and height of summer, when the war was faring badly (the English burning and slaying close within a hundred miles of Paris), the people bent beneath taxes heavier than any taxes had been yet even in the bad Queen’s time, the harvest poor and rotting on the stalk, the air filled often with storms and the echoes of riots and rebellions and fierce punishments in Picardy and Normandy and Provence, Duke François, after six months of spying and watching, saw, with his own eyes, Isabeau go forth and meet a common clerk in the graveyard of the Couvent des Innocents.

“And then Duke François began to raise the Devil, too, after his own fashion.

“The next day he was the Queen’s courtier as usual, bowing and humble at her side, and she was more than ever haughty and cold with him, for his quiet presence and soft manners were becoming daily more intolerable to her and an affront to her pride—yes, an affront to her pride to look at him and imagine his laughter did he know her secret—his laughter at her, the Queen!

“But that evening she was relieved of him; he went to Acquitaine, where his estates were, on the excuse of a rebellion among his vassals, and that he must go to punish with sword and fire those who murmured against his iron government.

“But he left behind him strange rumours-—it was said that Devil-worship and Devil-raising were going on in Paris, and that to these unholy dabblings in the black arts were to be traced the misfortunes and disasters overtaking France.

“The priests, who had been made desperate by the silence of the Blessed God to whom they prayed, and somewhat discomposed besides by the temper of the people, who began to complain of a scant return for all their offerings in the churches, were eager enough to catch at these rumours and to encourage and inflame with holy zeal the miserable citizens of Paris, who, in truth, between Queen Isabeau and the English required no Devil to plague them.

“In a short while the rage against Devil-worshippers and the search for them became so fierce in France, and especially in Paris, that Isabeau’s lover was frightened and begged her to desist.

“But she was the Queen—she could not imagine danger and herself in the same company; she was infatuate in her study of black magic, and mad to raise the Devil and learn from him how to be rid of Duke François—and how to get money—for she had wrung almost the last mavaredi out of France and she was one who needed to be gorged on gold to live.

“She would not turn back, and so it came about that on one night in August—the fourteenth day of August—in the year ’20, this scene took place in the cemetery of the Innocents.

“You may believe what I say, for I was there.

“It was a hot night, but thick, loose black clouds raced across the full yellow midsummer moon and the two figures crouched behind a gaunt tomb were sometimes in silver light and sometimes in complete darkness. One was the Queen and one the young student of the Sorbonne. …

“That night she looked most beautiful; she wore a red ‘cotehardie’ and black hose (she was habited like a man) and a short purple cloak and a purple hood drawn over her ebony hair—but no poor sentences of mine could describe the flash and sparkle of her face, the delicate carnation of her cheeks and lips, the velvet sweep of her brows, the shade and softness of her throat: she was a beautiful woman—beauty itself, sirs, the pure beauty of the flesh.

“They had made a horrid brew in an iron cauldron. There were loathsome ingredients in it, that the youth shuddered to handle, but Isabeau cared not; the cauldron stood against the tomb and round it were traced pentacles and mystic signs in white chalk.

“The Queen’s white hands were busy in setting fire to the sulphurous mass that she had piled beneath the cauldron, when the moon sailed languidly free of the clouds into the clear dark ocean of heaven, and glancing up, she saw she had raised the Devil indeed; he stood beside the dark wall of the tomb in the guise of Duke François.

“She raised her hand to shield her face—she thought of that even before she turned to flee; but he seized her upflung arm and dragged it down and held her fast. ‘Majesty!” he said, and in that one word she heard her degradation—and realised, for the first time perhaps, the utter depths of her fall.

“For the moment sheer terror was uppermost; she appealed to his manhood—the weaker to the stronger—an ancient instinct that had long lain dormant in her imperious soul. But it did not soften him to see her abasement; his pride was mounting as hers sank. He remembered how she had flouted him, and that this was his vengeance.

“He called up his men; they came, hurrying across the graveyard.

“Here mark his devilry—they were all fellows he had brought from Acquitaine—who had never seen the Queen—and who beheld now nothing more than a couple of youths caught in the infamous and deadly practices of black magic.

“After them came a whole pack of the baser sort, carrying torches and lanterns and accompanied by several of those fierce dogs of the kind men take with them when they hunt highwaymen and night ruffians, and these, with the enthusiasm of the chase, and the delight of seeing the quarry cornered, and the hope that now the Devil-worshippers were caught the misfortune of France would cease, were beside themselves, leaping, shouting and pushing forward across the gravestones, and only held in check by the pikes of the Duke’s men from Acquitaine.

“It may be imagined that though some of them may have glimpsed her golden chariot in the distance, none knew the Queen.

“And she stood with her back against the wall, facing them in the moonshine, so pale now compared with the angry red dancing light of the coarse resin torches of the crowd.

“As for the other youth, the student I mean, he stood numb and bewildered and frightened to death, yet (with the instinct to stand by the woman) staying where he was though none held him. Isabeau looked up at François.

“‘You must save me,’ she said haughtily, and she signed furiously to her lover to leave her—but he, poor fool! did not understand and instead drew nearer to her, clapping his hand to his outmatched sword.

“‘Why should I save you, little witch?” cried the Duke in a loud voice, and he beckoned his followers nearer. ‘See justice done to these two,’ he said, ‘who were so manifestly raising the Devil! What shall their punishment be?’

“And they shouted violently, ‘Death’—and Isabeau cowered a little, and then looked at François again and saw what revenge he had prepared for her—she must declare herself before these churls or be done to death by them; there was no pity in Duke François—she knew it in an instant.

“I think that in that instant, too, she had taken her resolve. Pride is a deadly sin, but always a brave one.

“She folded her arms on her bosom and looked sideways at the mob, who ever pressed nearer with shouts of hatred.

“‘Tell them who you are,’ said the Duke. ‘Give them, sweet, your name and quality.’

“She shot a glance up at him and hell-fire flashed in her eyes; she said nothing. He swung her round to face her persecutors. At that the student sprang forward, hardly knowing what he did—or what had happened. ‘Whom do you touch—do you know who this is?’ he cried, himself not knowing who Duke François was. But the Queen turned on him with all she knew of royalty in her looks and gesture.

“‘Silence!’ she commanded, ‘or I curse you!’

“He fell back at that and was seized by the Duke’s guard, He hung his head, he had no great desire to speak, nor for anything on the earth, for he saw that her love had vanished in a flash—that she thought no longer of him… that she was the Queen now, and no longer his lover. …

“‘Speak!’ cried François. ‘Will you not speak?’

“Surely he had never believed she would carry it so far … but her sole answer was to laugh.

“She stood full in the moonlight, a small figure, but dauntless; she slipped the royal signet from her finger and dropped it into the rank grass—she had only to show it to gain instant safety, remember.

“But she set her foot on it instead, and laughed at François.

“He had come to shame her and he saw she was minded to baulk him, and in his rage and his fury at the sight of pride carrying her so far he stepped aside and with a gesture offered her to the rage of the crowd.

“His men lowered their pikes and the people surged forward—little knowing on whom they were wreaking vengeance at last.

“And she did not speak … she put her cloak before her face and set her back against the tomb.

“And so died the Queen of France; when the crowd had finished with her she need not have feared recognition.

“Her tattered corse was flung into a ditch—and the Duke rode over it when he left the graveyard; maybe some of her blood was on his horse's hoofs.

“At least he respected her pride; it was given out that she was dead of sudden fever, and there was a gorgeous funeral—with a gorgeous doll in her place, while her bones were nosed by swine.

“The student escaped,” added the monk, “or how should I be telling you this?”

“And the next deadly sin is Greed, as shown in the tale of the Merchant and the Citron Pies. …”