Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago
to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple
circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has
preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus
set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning.
It was neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt
led along in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor
an entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,” nor even a pretty
hanging of male and female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it
the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and
bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the last cavalcade of that
nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the
marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had made its
entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. le Cardinal de Bourbon,
who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an
amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and
to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality,
allegorical satire, and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the
magnificent tapestries at his door.