The blade did not penetrate to the depths of the mouth. In the relation of the proceedings preserved by Simon Goulart, the blow delivered within the Louvre slashed the upper lip of Henry IV; the King’s teeth arrested the knife before it could plunge further. The man who had struck the sovereign cast down the weapon and attempted flight. The encounter lasted but a few moments. Yet it was to afford the Parlement of Paris the matter for a trial in which the act of a solitary student was made the instrument of a collective proscription.
On Tuesday, 27 December 1594, between six and seven o’clock in the evening, Henry IV arrived in Paris, according to the text. Within the Louvre, he was stooping to embrace a gentleman who had just made his reverence. Jean Chastel thereupon stepped forward and struck the King in the face. The account gives the student’s age as nineteen years, stating he was born in Paris and bred at the Jesuit college. It depicts no protracted struggle: the wound was upon the lip, and the knife had encountered the teeth.
Chastel cast the weapon into the bedchamber and sought to make his exit. A captain of the guard seized him. The text ascribes to the King an instantaneous reaction: beholding the prisoner held fast, Henry commanded that he be released, declaring that he forgave him. Then, upon learning that the student had been instructed by the Jesuits, the King is reported to have inquired whether they must perforce be convicted out of his own mouth. These words belong to the published chronicle; from the very first page, they thrust the religious controversy directly into the scene of the arrest.
The relation does not represent the knife as a clandestine engine. Chastel averred that it was an ordinary knife, taken from his father’s house, and denied that it had been poisoned. At his first examination, he admitted his desire to kill the King, whom he acknowledged to have only wounded. He recounted that he had caught sight of a train of horses, footmen, and torches in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Not knowing which among the men was the sovereign, he had asked a gentleman to point him out. He subsequently followed the retinue into a chamber of the Louvre.
These particulars are reported as the prisoner’s own answers, not as the result of an independent inquiry into his several movements. The scene is nonetheless precise in the judicial record: the knife concealed within his sleeve, between shirt and skin; the blow struck at the visage as the King inclined his body; the weapon abandoned upon the floor. Chastel began by denying the deed, then confessed it. The interrogation thereupon shifted from what had occurred to the reason he assigned for his action.
The compilation introduces him as the son of Pierre Chastel, a draper, and places the family dwelling near the Palais de Justice. On the evening of the blow, according to his answers, he had returned to his father’s house after attending vespers. Earlier in the day, he had taken the knife from a dresser, carried it to his study, and then dined with his father, his mother Denise Hazard, and his sisters. His father and mother, he relates, exhorted him to live virtuously; he promised them he would do so. After the meal, he walked abroad with his father through the town, before going out again with the knife hidden within his doublet.
The confession attributed to him does not end with that day. Chastel declared that he had long contemplated the death of Henry IV and had renewed his design some eight days earlier. He explained the deed by the despair into which his sins had cast him: deeming himself damned, he imagined that a resounding blow would diminish his eternal torments. Such an inward architecture appears confounding to modern minds; the source does not allow us to fashion from it an infallible psychological portrait. It merely discloses what the printed record ascribed to him, couched in a religious and judicial idiom already heavy with condemnation.
The young man further avowed that he had confided his scruples to his father. Concerning Jean Guéret, a priest and former tutor at the Collège de Clermont, he recounted an interview arranged by his father to resolve a case of conscience. He stated that he had studied philosophy under Guéret for two and a half years, and had heard it asserted in sundry quarters that it was lawful to slay a king deemed a tyrant. When questioned on the instruction of the Jesuits, he imputed such doctrines to them. Yet the very same narrative has him declare that his father answered him that killing the King would be an evil deed. This counterpoint forbids us from reducing the whole matter to a domestic command.
The text enumerates several material objects identified by Chastel: the knife, three slips of paper bearing an abusive anagram of the royal name, and nine manuscript leaves upon which he had set down his sins. Their presence lent the examination a tangible foundation, but the compilation reproduces neither these leaves nor any deposition enabling the reader to verify their contents independently. It merely records that Chastel recognized them, summarizing what they were said to contain. Here again, the distinction remains paramount between an exhibit described by the narrator and an exhibit open to our own inspection.
On the morrow, the text indicates, the case passed from the Grand Provost of the Royal Household to the Court of Parlement. Chastel was conducted to the Conciergerie of the Palais, interrogated by the principal officers, and subsequently heard by the assembled Grand’Chambre and Tournelle. He repeated the essence of his responses. When pressed regarding the blade, he explained that he had intended to strike at the throat, fearing lest a knife fail to penetrate the King’s garments. He maintained that he had intended to kill Henry and had believed the deed service to the Catholic religion.
The proceedings accelerated. The Parlement also heard Chastel’s father and mother, as well as Guéret, whom the text designates as a priest of the Society of Jesus and former preceptor to the accused. Yet the volume does not include a separate transcription of their depositions in the pages preserved. Nor does it furnish the detailed journal of each sitting, or the adversarial debates as they were conducted. What we read is a relation of the proceedings followed by an extract of the decree, published in a volume that appeared in 1758, which states that the text had been in print as early as 1595.
The decree characterized the act as divine and human high treason. It ordered first an amende honorable before the great portal of Notre-Dame: Chastel was to appear there in his shirt, carrying a two-pound wax torch, upon his knees, there to confess the crime and crave mercy. Thence he was to be drawn in a dung-cart to the Place de Grève, pinched with red-hot irons on the arms and thighs, have his right hand severed, and be drawn and quartered by four horses. His limbs and trunk were to be consumed by fire and his ashes scattered to the winds. The punishment did not rest with the condemned alone: the text further pronounced the confiscation of his goods.
Another provision enlarged the decree’s scope. The Parlement prohibited the public repetition of the doctrines attributed to Chastel concerning the right to slay kings, declaring them seditious and heretical. It then commanded the priests and scholars of the Jesuit colleges to depart from Paris and all other cities wherein they taught within three days, and from the realm within fifteen days. The judgment styled them corrupters of youth and enemies of the King and the State. Such is the vocabulary of the decree as reproduced in a political compilation; it documents a sentence of banishment, but does not, of itself, constitute proof that Guéret or the Society at large participated in the assault.
The same text provided that Chastel be put to the question, both ordinary and extraordinary, prior to his execution, in order to extract his accomplices and other truths. The narrative does not record that this torture was actually administered. It concludes rather with the formal formula stating that the decree was pronounced and executed on Thursday, 29 December 1594. Thus, in the chronicle, two days separate the stroke at the Louvre from the convict’s death. The swiftness of this sequence lends the proceeding its dramatic force, while rendering all the more sensible the limitations of our source: we do not possess the original manuscript registers.
The knife had inflicted only a minor wound; the judicial blow, by contrast, fell upon a human body, upon goods confiscated from the condemned, and upon an entire religious order driven beyond the frontiers of the realm. Between the teeth that arrested the steel and the printed pages that assigned Chastel his motives, the narrative offers no disembodied truth: it transmits a procedure fashioned by an apprehensive monarchy and a Parlement locked in combat with the Catholic League. Its historical value lies in this twofold trace. We witness the regicide as it was recounted, and observe how a wound upon a lip became the instrument wherewith to crush an individual and strike down an entire institution.