Morbid Fact Du Jour For April 12, 2011

Today’s Festive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On January 29, 1393, at the behest of French king Charles VI, a grand party was organized to celebrate the wedding of one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting at the Hotel de Saint Pol. The lady, twice widowed, was being married for the third time. A woman’s re-marriage was considered an occasion for mockery and often celebrated with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders, and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the bridal chamber. King Charles had let himself be persuaded by friends to join in a charade. Six young men, including the King, disguised themselves as “wood savages,” in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, “so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” Face masks entirely concealed their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-filled halls, they forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. The deviser of the affair, “cruelest and most insolent of men,” was Huguet de Guisay, a man of wicked life who held commoners and the poor in hatred and contempt. If a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the ground and, standing on his back, would kick him with spurs, crying, “Bark, dog!’ in response to his cries of pain.

In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the 15-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Phillipe de Bar entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger, Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchese de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the constumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only one other man, who flung himself into a large winecooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot. Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lives for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!”

Culled from: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century