A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [321]
Clisson cried out to his unknown assailant, “Who are you?”
“I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy!” replied the leader openly, for he anticipated a corpse and an overturn of government in consequence. His men, stunned to discover themselves engaged in murdering the Constable of France, were hesitant in pressing the attack, “for treason is never bold.” Armed only with a dagger, Clisson desperately defended himself until, struck by many blows, he was unhorsed. He fell into the doorway of a baker’s shop, forcing open the door by the weight of his fall, just as the baker, hearing the racket, appeared in time to pull him into the house. Believing they had killed him, Craon and his party hastened away. The survivors among Clisson’s squires found him in the shop, slashed by sword cuts, bathed in blood, and apparently lifeless. By the time the King, aroused from bed and informed of the awful news, reached the baker’s shop, Clisson had recovered consciousness.
“How goes it with you, Constable?” pleaded Charles, stricken at the sight.
“Feebly, Sire.”
“Who has done this to you?” When Clisson named his assassin, Charles swore that “no deed shall ever be so expiated as this, nor so heavily punished.” He called for surgeons, who, on examining the Constable’s hardened body, survivor of a hundred combats, promised his recovery. Carried to his residence, Clisson was “much cheered” by a visit from Coucy, who as his brother-in-arms was the first to be informed after the King.
Orders for the capture of Craon failed because the gates of Paris, still stripped of their bars since the insurrection, could not be closed. Learning that, unbelievably, Clisson lived, Craon escaped from the city, galloped as far as Chartres and thence to Brittany. “It is diabolic,” he told the Duke in explaining his failure. “I believe all the devils of Hell, to whom the Constable belongs, guarded and delivered him out of my hands, for he suffered more than sixty blows by swords or knives and I truly believed him dead.”
King Charles, feeling himself attacked in the person of the state’s chief defender, pursued the assassin with insatiable fury. Two of Craon’s squires and a page were beheaded on capture, as was the steward of his Paris residence for failing to report his return to the capital. A canon of Chartres who had given him shelter was deprived of his benefices and condemned to perpetual abstinence in prison on bread and water. Craon’s properties and revenues were confiscated to the benefit of the Royal Treasury; his residences and castles were ordered razed. The King’s excited state of mind communicated itself, as royal rage will, to his deputies. Admiral de Vienne, charged with making an inventory of Craon’s fortune, reportedly evicted his wife and daughter without possessions or money, in nothing but the clothes they wore—after raping the daughter, according to one report—and helped himself to the rich furnishings and valuables of their residence. Perhaps he felt that Craon’s treason justified this indecency, though his conduct was widely condemned by fellow nobles. Strange excesses flowed from the attempted murder of the Constable, as if Craon’s act had released a contagion of evil.
Events moved from murder to war when the Duke of Brittany, on being ordered to surrender the culprit, denied all knowledge of him and refused to concern himself in any way. Thus defied, the King called for war on the Duke. Barely recovered from his illness at Amiens, Charles appeared often distraught and disconnected in speech. His physicians advised against a campaign,