A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [203]
Last came the scrawny long-nosed King riding a white palfrey and wearing a fur-lined scarlet mantle and beaked hat “after the ancient manner.” The length of the procession took half an hour to leave the palace, and because of the press of people, it was even longer before the two sovereigns came face to face. Both doffed their hats as they met. Taking care not to rub against the painful legs of his uncle, Charles placed himself between the Emperor and Wenceslas, and so they rode three abreast back through the city to the palace.
Seated in a gold-draped chair in the courtyard where once Provost Marcel had dumped the bodies of the murdered Marshals, the Emperor heard an address of welcome by his host, and afterward in their chambers “they removed their hats and spoke together with great friendship and joy of meeting.” The next days were filled with banquets, conferences, gift-giving by the goldsmiths of Paris of their finest art, and special services and viewing of relics in the Sainte Chapelle, so richly decorated and lighted that “it was a marvel to see.” In between, the sovereigns held private talks, one lasting three hours “without even the Chancellor present,” as the Chancellor’s chronicler took care to note, “and what they said no one knows.”
The state dinners drew on all the resources of the 14th century to delight, amaze, and glut the guests. So many torchbearers stood like living candlesticks against the pillars of the great stone hall that “one could see as well as if it were day.” So many courses and dishes were served that for once there were “too many to tell,” and indeed too many for the ailing guest of honor. The King had ordered four courses of ten pairs of dishes in each, but thoughtfully eliminated one course of ten to reduce the time the Emperor would have to sit at table. As it was, he would have had to partake of thirty pair of such dishes as roast capons and partridges, civet of hare, meat and fish aspics, lark pasties and rissoles of beef marrow, black puddings and sausages, lampreys and savory rice, entremet of swan, peacock, bitterns, and heron “borne on high,” pasties of venison and small birds, fresh- and salt-water fish with a gravy of shad “the color of peach blossom,” white leeks with plovers, duck with roast chitterlings, stuffed pigs, eels reversed, frizzled beans—finishing off with fruit wafers, pears, comfits, medlars, peeled nuts, and spiced wine.
So well ordered was the service for 800 guests at the banquet of January 6 that the low tables were served at the same time and with the same dishes as the high, and all alike were set with gold and silver plate. The crowned heads and guests of highest rank sat at five tables on raised platforms, each under an individual canopy of cloth of gold, with the Emperor, King, and Archbishop of Reims at a marble table in the center. Cloth of gold adorned with fleurs-de-lys made the tablecloths and festooned pillars and windows. Tapestries covered the walls between. Coucy sat with the Duc de Bourbon at the table of the nine-year-old Dauphin “to keep him company and guard him from the great multitude.” Young Marie de Coucy was among the “great ladies” attending the Queen. At late refreshment after entertainment by minstrels, the Duc de Berry and his brother of Burgundy served wine and spices to the King and Emperor, but whether on horseback, as was often the custom of noble servitors, the exhausted chronicler fails to say. On a previous visit by the Emperor to the Count of Savoy in 1365, mounted nobles had served platters of food poised on the ends of lances especially fitted with brackets for the purpose. Whatever its moral limitations, chivalry required a strong wrist.
For the grand climax, all 800 guests moved to the Hall of Parlement, where the spectacle presented to them, representing the taking of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, was a triumph of the stagecraft in which the 14th century excelled. Artificers at banquets, as described in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, could bring bodies of water into the hall, make boats row up