A broken tooth does not ordinarily bring down a house. That of Henry IV had this consequence, and many others besides. It had caught, along with his lip, the blow intended to take his life; behind the blade of Jean Châtel, the magistrates sought at once a doctrine, masters, and accomplices. The King remained among the living. The affair itself was to stretch far beyond the chamber where he had just been assaulted.
On the twenty-seventh of December, 1594, Châtel slipped among those pressing near to Henry. He was a very young man, the son of a draper from the Île de la Cité, who had studied at the Collège de Clermont where the Jesuits held their classes. Nothing that might reassure a family had been wanting in his early years: established parents, schooling, a future that the paternal trade did not compel him to seek upon the open roads. Yet he brought a knife into a gathering of courtiers.
A movement of the King foiled his own. Henry was bending low to receive a gentleman of his train; the blow struck him upon the mouth, slit the upper lip, and shattered a tooth. The fortune of the realm hung upon this shifting of the body. The youthful assailant had failed to kill. He was henceforth in the hands of a justice for which the intent of regicide did not diminish because the wound proved slight.
The interrogation led swiftly toward religion. In the early accounts, Châtel appears persuaded that he had the right to strike down a sovereign whose spiritual legitimacy he denied, notwithstanding the monarch's conversion to Catholicism. Voltaire, recounting the affair long after, relates that the lack of pontifical absolution weighed heavily in this reasoning. The knife had thus encountered a question over which preachers and polemicists had wrangled for years: at what precise moment did a king, in their eyes, cease to be a king?
Yet to pass from such rhetoric to the unmasking of an instigator demanded something more than a resemblance of ideas. Châtel had studied under the Jesuits; nonetheless, he did not name them as the contrivers of his deed. The early histories, divided on almost every other point, converge upon this essential truth: his answers yielded no admission of any personal counsel to commit murder given by his masters. Even Voltaire, far from defending the Society, distinguishes this absence of a direct command from the influence he attributes to their doctrines.
Inquiries turned, nonetheless, to the Collège de Clermont. Councillors examined the chambers and searched the papers. The prosecution, already holding the hand that had struck, sought to lay hold of the words that had guided it. In the writings attributed to Father Guignard, librarian of the college, were found assaults upon the authority of sovereigns and a justification of political assassination. These were no longer the rumours of the street, but manuscript sheets that could be laid before the judges.
They belonged, moreover, to a very recent past of civil warfare and of the Catholic League. This was what the apologists of the Jesuits would urge: texts once preserved without peril had suddenly become capital evidence. The account favourable to the Society published by Saint-Victor insists upon this altered state of affairs, with a vehemence precisely inverse to that of Voltaire. The dispute no longer concerned the knife. It turned upon the distance between preserving or penning a tract, teaching a perilous doctrine, and dispatching a scholar to slay his sovereign.
Father Guéret, who had taught philosophy to Châtel, was likewise questioned and put to the question by torture. He yielded none of the expected confessions. His standing as a former master sufficed, however, to enclose him within the circle of the suspected. Châtel’s education, which had also traversed other establishments, was narrowed to the sole precinct upon which animosities were fixed. A classroom became, in retrospect, the antechamber to the crime.
On the twenty-ninth of December, the Parlement condemned Châtel to death. Two days divided the outrage from the decree. The young man was executed according to the terrible torment reserved for regicide, by quartering. Justice did not halt with the condemned: his father was banished, the ancestral house pulled down. Upon the ground where the family had lived and held their place within the city, an inscribed pyramid was raised. Upon each of its faces, the architecture framed the accusations; above the mouldings rose a stone needle, surmounted by a cross. The draper’s trade was forced to yield to a political lesson.
The selfsame decree commanded the expulsion of the Jesuits. Three days were granted them to quit the towns wherein they maintained their colleges, followed by a fixed term to depart the realm; their goods were confiscated. It was likewise forbidden to the King’s subjects to send their children to study in their foreign establishments. This provision pursued the scholars even into the future choice of their schools. The trial of a former schoolboy came to alter the path of countless others.
On the eighth of January, 1595, the Jesuits departed Paris under the escort of a bailiff. Some made their way to Lorraine. Guéret escaped the scaffold, but suffered banishment; Guignard was hanged, and his body delivered to the flames. To the King’s slight wound answered several lives definitively shattered. The doctrine of tyrannicide was condemned together with its supposed conduits, and the pyramid made visible, in the heart of the Cité, this vast extension of the penalty.
Henry, however, was not to permit this monument to govern his policy for ever. When circumstances altered, he recalled the Jesuits. The pyramid was razed by his command. Saint-Victor relates that the demolition took place in broad daylight, despite those who counselled the cover of night for fear of tumults. That which had been reared to instruct the public was overturned before their very eyes. The surviving monarch took back possession of the meaning assigned to his own wound.
Though the stone was gone, the image remained. Engravings preserved the monument and its inscriptions; these could pass from cabinet to cabinet and keep the quarrel alive. The same chronicle recounts the seizure, at the premises of the printer Leclerc, of the copperplate from which they were struck. This second demolition was directed at an image. It bore witness, by the very effort it exacted, to how tenaciously a judicial cause could remain alive long after the death of the accused.
Châtel had not slain the King. Yet he had driven from their dwellings a father, churchmen, and scholars, and had set in the very heart of Paris a monument of hatred which the King himself would subsequently destroy. A lip might heal; the chain of consequences set in motion by that blow admitted of no such repair. When the passers-by once more looked upon a square cleared of the pyramid, the city had changed its inscription. The old prints, somewhere, still held fast the effaced text.