Letter from Paris 14 February 2006
Thirza Vallois is the author of Around and About Paris, Volume I, II, III published by Iliad Books, UK.Romantic Paris, co-published by Interlink (US) and Arris Books (UK).
To find out more and order Thirza Vallois's books, visit her website:
http://www.thirzavallois.com
Weatherwise, a Parisian Valentine is touch and go, but with a bit of luck, spring may make a premature appearance on the day. If that's the case, and if you happen to be in Paris, make your way to the Seine on that crisp, blue morning. Just make sure to be warmly dressed. Take the river from behind Notre Dame and follow it leisurely downstream heading west, so as to have the sun wash the water and honey-coloured stone from behind - you are unlikely to forget that moment of grace. On the other hand, if you are not in Paris at present, relax into your armchair and dream your way to the romantic footbridge, le Pont des Arts, which links the Louvre to the Institut de France, where one of the city's celebrated love stories was played out back in the 14th century, as related in Around and About Paris, Volume 1 and in Romantic Paris:
By the end of the 12th century, a wall girdled Paris north of the river. On its westernmost point, the fortification of the Louvre, surmounted by a tall tower, stood guard by the Seine, just west of the little island. In 1210, when the city walls were completed south of the river, another tower was erected across the river from the Louvre, to help stave off a potential attack by the perfidious English. This was the notorious Tour de Nesle, which changed hands for several centuries before finally landing under the quill of Alexandre Dumas. It was still standing in 1663, when it was replaced by Mazarin's Collège des Quatre Nations, and surmounted by a beautiful dome (now the Institut de France and home to the Académie Française).
Named after the Lord of Nesle, who incorporated it as the Hôtel de Nesle, the tower became the property of the crown in the early 14th century. Although the English threat had by no means abated, it seems that the tower gained notoriety for feats other than military. Apparently the royal household's female members had been left pining away by their sexually deficient husbands. Understandably, they sought outlets elsewhere, in hide-and-seek sprees and similar frolics, all of which took place in the formidable tower. When the frolics escalated into outright adulterous liaisons, in which all three daughters-in-law of Philip the Fair were implicated, the princesses' lovers were tortured, castrated, decapitated, hanged by the armpits and then left to rot, while the two guiltiest of the princesses, Marguerite and Blanche de Bourgogne, had their heads shaved and were jailed in the fortress of Château-Gaillard overlooking the Seine, by Andelys, in Normady. Marguerite was later suffocated to death between two mattresses by order of her husband; Blanche ended by perishing in her humid cell, apparently pregnant, after having been left at the disposal of her jailer. Both were in their twenties when they died. Jeanne de Bourgogne was kept in the Château of Dourdan, southeast of Paris, but having never been proved guilty, was released and allowed to accede to the throne as the wife of Philip V. Even better : between the years 1322 and 1329, good fortune granted her seven years of merry widowhood, of which she made good use once more in the formidable Tower of Nesle.
Rising conveniently above the Left Bank, the tower's window served as an excellent lookout for a student who would be called up to serve her needs and who, once exhausted, would be tied up in a sac and hurled down the tower into the Seine - or so reports the 17th-century chronicler Brantôme. In 1461, the renowned poet François Villon also alluded to these goings-on in his Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Ballad of the ladies of days of yore), which was put to music by Georges Brassens, as any of his aficionados is sure to know. Villon even specified the name of the victim, though not the name of the queen, which led to a lot of cofusion regarding her identity and enabled Alexandre Dumas to replace her with Marguerite.
Semblablement où est la reine
Qui commanda
que Buridan
Fut jeté en un sac en Seine?
Similarly, where is the queen
Who ordered
Buridan
To be hurled in a sack into the Seine?
Buridan, a quick-blooded fellow, actually managed to survive, having landed on a boat piled up with hay, and soon after got himself involved in another relationship, which came to a head in a duel and the near death of his rival. Some twenty years later Buridan was to be appointed the Rector of the University of Paris. As for his opponent, he reached no lesser heights as Pope Clement VI.
More about King Philip the Fair and Pope Clement VI in my next Letter from Paris.
