Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3: Essays on Literature, Biography, and AntiquitiesMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3: Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
Philip le Bel, and became Queen of France, she made Joinville Governor of
Champagne, which she had brought as her dowry to the grandson of St.
Louis. Surely, then, when the old Crusader, the friend and counselor of
many kings, closed his earthly career, at the good age of ninety-five, he
might have looked forward to an honored grave in the Church of St.
Laurent, and to an eminent place in the annals of his country, which were
then being written in more or less elegant Latin by the monks of St.
Denis.
But what has happened? The monkish chroniclers, no doubt, have assigned
him his proper place in their tedious volumes, and there his memory would
have lived with that kind of life which belongs to the memory of Geoffroi,
his illustrious uncle, the friend of Philip Augustus, the companion of
Richard Cœur de Lion, whose arms were to be seen in the Church of St.
Laurent, at Joinville, quartered with the royal arms of England. Such
parchment or hatchment glory might have been his, and many a knight, as
good as he, has received no better, no more lasting reward for his loyalty
and bravery. His family became extinct in his grandson. Henri de
Joinville, his grandson, had no sons; and his daughter, being a wealthy
heiress, was married to one of the Dukes of Lorraine. The Dukes of
Lorraine were buried for centuries in the same Church of St. Laurent where
Joinville reposed, and where he had founded a chapel dedicated to his
companion in arms, Louis IX., the Royal Saint of France; and when, at the
time of the French Revolution, the tombs of St. Denis were broken open by
an infuriated people, and their ashes scattered abroad, the vaults of the
church at Joinville, too, shared the same fate, and the remains of the
brave Crusader suffered the same indignity as the remains of his sainted
King. It is true that there were some sparks of loyalty and self-respect
left in the hearts of the citizens of Joinville. They had the bones of the
old warrior and of the Dukes of Lorraine reinterred in the public
cemetery; and there they now rest, mingled with the dust of their faithful
lieges and subjects. But the Church of St. Laurent, with its tombs and
tombstones, is gone. The property of the Joinvilles descended from the
Dukes of Lorraine to the Dukes of Guise, and, lastly, to the family of
Orleans. The famous Duke of Orleans, Egalité, sold Joinville in 1790, and
stipulated that the old castle should be demolished. Poplars and fir-trees
now cover the ground of the ancient castle, and the name of Joinville is
borne by a royal prince, the son of a dethroned king, the grandson of
Louis Egalité, who died on the guillotine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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