The Infant's Skull; Or, The End of the World. A Tale of the Millennium
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CHAPTER I.
THE APOCALYPTIC FRENZY.
Two months after the poisoning of Louis the Do-nothing in 987, Hugh theCapet, Count of Paris and Anjou, Duke of Isle-de-France, and Abbot ofSt. Martin of Tours and St. Germain-des-Pres, had himself proclaimedKing by his bands of warriors, and was promptly consecrated by theChurch. By his ascension to the throne, Hugh usurped the crown ofCharles, Duke of Lorraine, the uncle of Blanche's deceased husband.Hugh's usurpation led to bloody civil strifes between the Duke ofLorraine and Hugh the Capet. The latter died in 996 leaving as hissuccessor his son Rothbert, an imbecile and pious prince. Rothbert'slong reign was disturbed by the furious feuds among the seigneurs;counts, dukes, abbots and bishops, entrenched in their fortifiedcastles, desolated the country with their brigandage. Rothbert, Hugh'sson, died in 1031 and was succeeded by his son Henry I. His advent tothe throne was the signal for fresh civil strife, caused by his ownbrother, who was incited thereto by his mother. Another Rothbert,surnamed the Devil, Duke of Normandy, a descendant of old Rolf thepirate, took a hand in these strifes and made himself master of Gisors,Chaumont and Pontoise. It was under the reign of Hugh the Capet'sgrandson, Henry I, that the year 1033 arrived, and with it unheard-of,even incredible events--a spectacle without its equal until then--whichwas the culmination of the prevalent myth regarding the end of the worldwith the year 1000.
The Church had fixed the last day of the year 1000 as the final term forthe world's existence. Thanks to the deception, the clergy came intopossession of the property of a large number of seigneurs. During thelast months of that year an immense saturnalia was on foot. The wildestpassions, the most insensate, the drollest and the most atrocious actsseemed then unchained.
"The end of the world approaches!" exclaimed the clergy. "Did not St.John the Divine prophesy it in the Apocalypse saying: '_When thethousand years are expired, Satan will be loosed out of his prison, andshall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters ofthe earth; the book of life will be opened; the sea will give up thedead which were in it; death and hell will deliver up the dead whichwere in them; they will be judged every man according to his works; theywill be judged by Him who is seated upon a brilliant throne, and therewill be a new heaven and a new earth._'--Tremble, ye peoples!" theclergy repeated everywhere, "the one thousand years, announced by St.John, will run out with the end of this year! Satan, the anti-Christ isto arrive! Tremble! The trumpet of the day of judgment is about tosound; the dead are about to arise from their tombs; in the midst ofthunder and lightning, and surrounded by archangels carrying flamingswords, the Eternal is about to pass judgment upon us all! Tremble, yemighty ones of the earth: in order to conjure away the implacable angerof the All-Mighty, give your goods to the Church! It is still time! Itis still time! Give your goods and your treasures to the priests of theLord! Give all you possess to the Church!"
The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs byignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjureaway the vengeance of the Eternal, assigned to the clergy by means ofauthentic documents, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law,lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle,their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues,their sumptuous robes.
Some of the shrewder ones said: "We have barely a year, a month, a weekto live! We are full of youth, of desires, of ardor! Let us put theshort period to profit! Let us stave-in our wine casks, let us indulgeourselves freely in wine and women!"
"The end of the world is approaching!" exclaimed with delirious joymillions of serfs of the domains of the King, of the lay and of theecclesiastical seigneurs. "Our poor bodies, broken with toil, will atlast take rest in the eternal night that is to emancipate us. A blessingon the end of the world! It is the end of our miseries and oursufferings!"
And those poor serfs, having nothing to spend and nothing to assignaway, sought to anticipate the expected eternal repose. The largernumber dropped their plows, their hoes and their spades so soon asautumn set in. "What is the use," said they, "of cultivating a fieldthat, long before harvest time, will have been swallowed up in chaos?"
As a consequence of this universal panic, the last days of the year 999presented a spectacle never before seen; it was even fabulous!Light-headed indulgence and groans; peals of laughter and lamentations;maudlin songs and death dirges. Here the shouts and the frantic dancesof supposed last and supreme orgies; yonder the lamentations of piouscanticles. And finally, floating above this vast mass of terror, rosethe formidable popular curiosity to see the spectacle of the destructionof the world. It came at last, that day said to have been prophesied bySt. John the Divine! The last hour arrived, the last minute of thatfated year of 999! "Tremble, ye sinners!" the warning redoubled;"tremble, ye peoples of the earth! the terrible moment foretold in theholy books is here!" One more second, one more instant, midnightsounds--and the year 1000 begins.
In the expectation of that fatal instant, the most hardened hearts, thesouls most certain of salvation, the dullest and also the mostrebellious minds experienced a sensation that never had and never willhave a name in any language--
Midnight sounded!... The solemn hour.... Midnight!
The year 1000 began!
Oh, wonder and surprise!... The dead did not leave their tombs, thebowels of the earth did not open, the waters of the ocean remainedwithin their basins, the stars of heaven were not hurled out of theirorbits and were not striking against one another in space. Aye, therewas not even a tame flash of lightning! No thunder rolled! No trace ofthe cloud of fire in the midst of which the Eternal was to appear.Jehovah remained invisible. Not one of the frightful prodigies foretoldby St. John the Divine for midnight of the year 1000 was verified. Thenight was calm and serene; the moon and stars shone brilliantly in theazure sky, not a breath of wind agitated the tops of the trees, and thepeople, in the silence of their stupor, could hear the slightest rippleof the mountain streams gliding under the grass. Dawn came ... and day... and the sun poured upon creation the torrents of its light! As tomiracles, not a trace of any!
Impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling at the universaldisappointment. It was an explosion of regret, of remorse, ofastonishment, of recrimination and of rage. The devout people whobelieved themselves cheated out of a Paradise that they had paid for tothe Church in advance with hard cash and other property; others, who hadsquandered their treasures, contemplated their ruin with trembling. Themillions of serfs who had relied upon slumbering in the restfulness ofan eternal night saw rising anew before their eyes the ghastly dawn ofthat long day of misery and sufferings, of which their birth was themorning and only their death the evening. It now began to be realizedthat, left uncultivated in the expectation of the end of the world, theland would not furnish sustenance to the people, and the horrors offamine were foreseen. A towering clamor rose against the clergy; theclergy, however, knew how to bring public opinion back to its side. Itdid so by a new and fraudulent set of prophecies.
"Oh, these wretched people of little faith," thus now ran the amendedprophecy and invocation; "they dare to doubt the word of theAll-powerful who spoke to them through the voice of His prophet! Oh,these wretched blind people, who close their eyes to divine light! Theprophets have announced the end of time; the Holy Writ foretold that theday of the last judgment would come a thousand years after the Saviourof the world!... But although Christ was born a thousand years beforethe year 1000, he did not reveal himself as God until his death, that isthirty-two years after his birth. Accordingly it will be in the year1032 that the end of time will come!"
Such was the general state of besottedness that many of the faithfulblissfully accepted the new prediction. Several seigneurs, however,rushed at the "men of God" to take back by force the property they hadbequeathed to them. The "men of God," however, well entrenched behindfortified walls, defended themselves stoutly against the dispossessedclaimants. Hence a series of bloody wars between the scheming bishops,on the one hand
, and the despoiled seigneurs, on the other, to whichdisasters were now superadded the religious massacres instigated by theclergy. The Church had urged Clovis centuries ago to the exterminationof the then Arian heretics; now the Church preached the extermination ofthe Orleans Manichaeans and the Jews. A conception of these abominableexcesses may be gathered from the following passages in the account leftby Raoul Glaber, a monk and eye-witness. He wrote:
"A short time after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in theyear 1010, it was learned from unquestionable sources that the calamityhad to be charged to the perverseness of Jews of all countries. When thesecret leaked out throughout the world, the Christians decided with acommon accord that they would expel all the Jews, down to the last, fromtheir territories and towns. The Jews thereby became the objects ofuniversal execration. Some were chased from the towns, others massacredwith iron, or thrown into the rivers, or put to death in some othermanner. This drove many to voluntary death. And thus, after the justvengeance wreaked upon them, there were but very few of them left in theRoman Catholic world."
Accordingly, the wretched Jews of Gaul were persecuted and slaughteredat the order of the clergy because the Saracens of Judea destroyed theTemple of Jerusalem! As to the Manichaeans of Orleans, another passagefrom the same chronicle expresses itself in these words:
"In 1017, the King and all his loyal subjects, seeing the folly of thesemiserable heretics of Orleans, caused a large pyre to be lighted nearthe town, in the hope that fear, produced by the sight, would overcometheir stubbornness; but seeing that they persisted, thirteen of themwere cast into the flames ... and all those that could not be convincedto abandon their perverse ways met the same fate, whereupon thevenerable cult of the Catholic faith, having triumphed over the foolishpresumption of its enemies, shone with all the greater luster on earth."
What with the wars that the ecclesiastical seigneurs plunged Gaul intoin their efforts to retain possession of the property of the layseigneurs whom they had despoiled by the jugglery of the "End of theWorld," and what with these religious persecutions, Gaul continued to bedesolated down to the year 1033, the new term that had been fixed forthe last day of judgment. The belief in the approaching dissolution ofthe world, which the clergy now again zealously preached, although notso universally entertained as that of the year 1000, was accompaniedwith results that were no less horrible. In 999, the expectation of theend of the world had put a stop to work; all the fields except thosebelonging to the ecclesiastical seigneurs, lay fallow. The formidablefamine of the year 1000 was then the immediate result, and that wasfollowed by a wide-spread mortality. Agriculture pined for laborers;every successive scarcity engendered an increased mortality; Gaul wasbeing rapidly depopulated; famine set in almost in permanence duringthirty years in succession, the more disastrous periods being those ofthe years 1003, 1008, 1010, 1014, 1027, 1029 and 1031; finally thefamine of 1033 surpassed all previous ones in its murderous effects. Theserfs, the villeins and the town plebs were almost alone the victims ofthe scourge. The little that they produced met the needs of theirmasters--the seigneurs, counts, dukes, bishops or abbots; the producersthemselves, however, expired under the tortures of starvation. Thecorpses of the wretches who died of inanition strewed the fields, roadsand highways; the decomposing bodies poisoned the air, engenderedillnesses and even pestilential epidemics until then unknown; thepopulation was decimated. Within thirty-three years, Gaul lost more thanone-half its inhabitants--the new-born babies died vainly pressing theirmother's breasts for nourishment.