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By Root 1535 0

of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the fifteen-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger—accounts of the episode differ—Louis held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the King, threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who flung himself into a large wine-cooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot, Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it with cries of “Bark, dog!”

This ghastly affair, coming so soon after the King’s madness, was like an exclamation point to the malign succession of events that had tormented the century. Charles’s narrow escape threw Paris into a “great commotion,” and anger swept the citizens at the appalling frivolity which had so casually endangered the life and honor of the King. Had he died, they said, the people would have massacred the uncles and all the court; “not one of them would have escaped death, nor any knight found in Paris.” Alarmed at these dangerous sentiments with their echo of the Maillotins’ rebellion barely ten years past, the uncles prevailed on the King to ride in solemn procession to Notre Dame to appease the people. Behind Charles on horseback, his uncles and brother followed barefoot as penitents. As the involuntary agent of the tragedy, Louis was widely reproached for his dissolute habits. In expiation he built a chapel for the Célestins with marvelous stained glass and rich altar furnishings and an endowment for perpetual prayers. He paid for it with revenues given him by the King from Craon’s confiscated property, leaving it a question as to whose soul was absolved.

The fatal masquerade came to be called the Bal des Ardents—Dance of the Burning Ones—but it could as well have been called the Danse Macabre, after a new kind of processional play on the theme of death that had lately come into vogue. Of uncertain origin and meaning, the name Macabre first appeared in writing in a poem of 1376 by Anjou’s chancellor, Jean le Fèvre, containing the line, “Je fis de Macabré le danse (I do the Danse Macabre). It may have derived from an older Danse Machabreus, meaning “of the Maccabees,” or from similarity to the Hebrew word for grave-diggers and the fact that Jews worked as grave-diggers in medieval France. The dance itself probably developed under the influence of recurring plague, as a street performance to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler. In murals illustrating the dance at the Church of the Innocents in Paris, fifteen pairs of figures, clerical and lay, from pope and emperor down the scale to monk and peasant, friar and child, make up the procession.

“Advance, see yourselves in us,” they say in the accompanying verses, “dead, naked, rotten and stinking. So will you be.… To live without thinking of this risks damnation.… Power, honor, riches are naught; at the hour of death only good works count.… Everyone should think at least once a day of his loathsome end,” to remind him to do good