The Red Book of Heroes Part 27

In the long line of the emperors of the East there were few more honest and able than Theodosius. He found his dominions in a state of confusion, the prey of the barbarian hordes that were always pouring westwards from the wide plains of Scythia, while internally the strife in the church was fiercer than ever. Quietly and steadily the emperor took his measures. Here he pardoned, there he punished, and men felt that both pardon and punishment were just. He was not yet strong enough to fight against the rebel Maximus, as he would have liked to do, but he determined that, cost what it might, he would never forsake the young Valentinian. Maximus had s.n.a.t.c.hed at some excuse to invade Milan, which on his entrance he had found abandoned by its chief men, save only Ambrose, who treated him with contempt and went his own way. The intruder's efforts to buy support by conciliation failed miserably, and in a few weeks there came the news that Theodosius was preparing to meet him on the borders of Hungary, or Pannonia. Then Maximus a.s.sembled what forces he could, and set out across the pa.s.s of the Brenner.

Two battles were lost, for the legions of Maximus were but half-hearted; in the third he was taken prisoner and brought before the emperor.

Theodosius was a merciful man, but his heart was hard towards the murderer of Gratian. 'Let him die!' he said, and without delay the order was carried out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 'Let him die!' he said.]

Now that Maximus was dead the legions were quite ready to return to their rightful emperor, and as soon as he had settled matters Theodosius went on to Milan. There he and Ambrose became great friends; the bishop was much the cleverer of the two, but they were both honest and straightforward, with great common-sense, and it must have been a relief to Ambrose, who did not in the least care for being an important person, to feel that he could at last mind his own business, and leave affairs of state to the emperor.

It was while all seemed going so smoothly that the supreme crisis in the lives of both men took place--the event which has linked the names of Ambrose and Theodosius for evermore.

Thessalonica, the chief town of Macedonia, was a beautiful city, and its Governor, Count Botheric, a special friend of the Emperor, who constantly went to pay him a visit when wearied out with the cares of state, which pressed on him so heavily in Constantinople. The people were gay and light-hearted, loving shows and pageants of all sorts, but more especially the games of the circus. In order to celebrate the defeat of Maximus, Botheric had arranged a series of special displays, and in the chariot races most of the prizes were carried off by one man, who became the idol of the moment. Furious, therefore, was the indignation which ran through the city when, immediately after the festival was over, the charioteer was accused of some disgraceful crime, and being found guilty, was thrown into prison by Botheric. In a body the populace surged up to the house of the Governor and demanded his release. But Botheric was not the man to be turned from what he knew to be right by an excited crowd. He absolutely refused to give way, and told them that the man had deserved the punishment he had given him, and more too. Then the pa.s.sion of the mob broke loose. They attacked the Governor's house and the houses of all who were in authority. The soldiers who were ordered out were too few to cope with their violence.

In the struggle Botheric was killed, and many of his friends also, and their bodies subjected to every kind of insult that madness could suggest.

Theodosius was in Milan when the news reached him, and after a few moments of stony horror he was seized with such terrific pa.s.sion that it almost seemed as if he would die of rage. At last he spoke; to those who stood around the voice sounded as the voice of a stranger.

'The crime was committed by the whole town,' he said, 'and the whole town shall suffer.' Then, and without giving himself time to change his mind, he sat down and wrote the order for a ma.s.sacre to one of the few magistrates left alive.

His words were probably reported to Ambrose, and no doubt the bishop tried his best to calm the wrath of the emperor. But Theodosius was in no mood to be reasoned with. He declined to see his friend, and left Milan, shutting himself up in silence till the terrible tale of vengeance was told.

In obedience to his instructions, games, and especially chariot races, were announced to take place in the circus. We do not know if the mob had broken open the prison and released the charioteer in whose honour so much blood had been shed; but if so we may be sure that he was present, and was hailed with shouts of welcome. The circus was crowded from end to end--not a single seat was vacant. The eyes of the spectators were fixed on the line of chariots drawn up at the starting-point, and drivers and lookers-on awaited breathlessly the signal. In their absorption they never noticed that soldiers had drawn silently up and had surrounded them. A moment later, and a signal was indeed given, but it was the signal for one of the bloodiest ma.s.sacres that ever shocked the ancient world. Probably the authorities who carried out the emperor's orders went further than he intended, even in the first pa.s.sion of his anger. But of one thing we may be quite sure, and that is that remorse and shame filled his soul when the hideous story reached him. Not that he would confess it; to the public he would say he was justified in what he had done, but none the less he would have given all he had to undo his actions. He came back one night to Milan, and shut himself up again in his palace.

At the time of the emperor's return Ambrose happened to be staying with a friend in the country, for his health had suffered from his hard work, and also from this last blow, and his uncertainty how best to bring Theodosius to a sense of his crime. When he entered Milan once more, he waited, in the hope that the emperor might send for him, as he was used to do; but as no messenger arrived, the bishop understood that Theodosius refused to see him, and the only course open was to write a letter.

The occasion was not one for polite phrases, neither was Ambrose the man to use them. In the plainest words he set his guilt before Theodosius and besought him to repent. And as his sin had been public, his repentance must be public too. But this letter remained unanswered.

Theodosius was resolved to brave the matter out, and next day, accompanied by his usual attendants, he went to the great church.

At the porch Ambrose met him, and refused to let him pa.s.s.

'Go back,' he said, 'lest you add another sin to those you have already committed. You are blinded by power, and even now your heart is hard, and you do not understand that your hands are steeped in blood. Go back.'

And Theodosius went back, feeling in his soul the truth of the bishop's words, but prevented by pride from humbling himself.

Months went on, and the two men still lived as strangers, and now Christmas was near. Rufinus, prefect of the palace, who was suspected of having inflamed the wrath of the Emperor in the matter of Thessalonica, upbraided his master with showing so sad a face while the whole world was rejoicing. Theodosius then opened his soul to him, and acknowledged that at length he had repented of his crime and was ready to confess it before the bishop and the people. Once having spoken, he would not delay, and there and then went on foot to the church. As before, Ambrose, who had been warned of his intention, met him in the porch, thinking that the emperor meant to force his way in, and in that case the bishop was prepared to put him out with his own hands.

But Theodosius stood with bowed head, and in a low voice confessed his guilt and entreated forgiveness. 'What signs can you show me that your repentance is real?' asked Ambrose. 'A crime like yours is not to be expiated lightly.'

'Tell me what to do, and I will do it,' said Theodosius.

And the proof that Ambrose demanded was neither fasting nor scourging nor gifts to the church. 'It was that the emperor should write where now he stood, on the tablets that he always took with him, an order delaying for thirty days the announcement of any decree pa.s.sed by a reigning emperor which carried sentence of death or confiscation of property to his subjects.' Further, that after the thirty days had pa.s.sed the sentence and the circ.u.mstances which called it forth must be considered over again, to make quite sure that no injustice should be committed. To this Theodosius willingly agreed; not only because it was the token of repentance imposed on him by Ambrose, but because his own sense of right and justice made him welcome a law by which the people no longer should be at the mercy of one man's rage.

The law was written down and read out so that those who stood around might hear; then Ambrose drew back the bar across the porch, and Theodosius once more entered the church.

PALISSY THE POTTER

Four hundred years ago a little boy called Bernard Palissy was born in a village of France, not very far from the great river Garonne. The country round was beautiful at all times of year--in spring with orchards in flower, in summer with fields of corn, in autumn with heavy-laden vines climbing up the sides of the hills, down which rus.h.i.+ng streams danced and gurgled. Further north stretched wide heaths gay with broom, and vast forests of walnut and chestnut, through which roamed hordes of pigs, greedy after the fallen chestnuts that made them so fat, or burrowing about the roots of the trees for the truffles growing just out of sight. When the peasants who owned the pigs saw them sniffing and scratching in certain places, they went out at once and dug for themselves, for, truffles as well as pigs, were thought delicious eating, and fetched high prices from the rich people in Perigueux or even Bordeaux.

But the forests of the province of Perigord contained other inhabitants than the pigs and their masters, and these were the workers in gla.s.s, the people who for generations had made those wonderful coloured windows which are the glory of French cathedrals. The gla.s.s-workers of those days were set apart from all other traders, and in Italy as well as in France a n.o.ble might devote himself to this calling without bringing down on himself the insults and scorn of his friends. Still, at a time when the houses of the poor were generally built of wood, it was considered very dangerous to have gla.s.s furnaces, with the fire often at a white heat, in the middle of a town, and so a law was pa.s.sed forcing them to carry on their trade at a distance. In Venice the gla.s.s-workers were sent to the island of Murano, where the factories still are; in Perigord they were kept in the forest, where they could cut down the logs they needed for their kilns, and where certain sorts of trees and ferns grew which, when reduced to powder, were needed in the manufacture of the gla.s.s.

Whether the father of Palissy was a gla.s.s-maker or not--for nothing is quite certain about the boy's early years--Bernard must of course have had many companions among the children of the forest workers, and as he went through the world with his eyes always open, he soon learnt a great deal of all that had to be done in order to turn out the bits of gla.s.s that blazed like jewels when the sun shone through them. There were special kinds of earth, or rocks, or plants to be sought for, and when found the gla.s.s-maker must know how to use them, so as to get exactly the colour or thickness of material that he wanted. And when he had spent hours and hours mixing his substances and seeing that he had put in just the right quant.i.ty of each, and no more, perhaps the fire would be a little too hot and the gla.s.s would crack, or a little too cold and the mixture would not become solid gla.s.s, and then the poor man had to begin the whole process again from the beginning. Bernard stood by and watched, and noted the patience under failure, as well as the way that gla.s.s was made, and when his turn came the lesson bore fruit.

But Bernard learned other things besides how to make gla.s.s. He was taught to read and write, and by-and-by to draw. In his walks through the woods or over the hills, his eyes were busy wandering through the fallen leaves or glancing up at the branches of the trees in search of anything that might be hidden there. The bright-eyed lizards he especially loved, and sometimes he would persuade them to stay quiet for a few minutes by singing some country songs, while he took out his roll of paper and made rough sketches of them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The bright-eyed lizards he especially loved.]

But after a while Palissy grew restless, and before he was twenty he left home and travelled on foot over the south of France, gaining fresh knowledge at every step, as those do who keep their wits about them. He had no money, so he paid his way by the help of his pencil, as he was later to do in the little town of Saintes, taking portraits of the village innkeeper or his wife, or drawing plans for the new rooms the good man meant to build now that business was so thriving, and measuring the field at the back of the house, that he thought of laying out as a garden of fruits and herbs. And as the young man went he visited the cathedrals in the towns as well as the forges and the manufactories, and never rested till he found out why this city made cloth, and that one silk, and a third wonderful patterns of wrought iron.

We do not know exactly how long Palissy remained on his travels, but as there was no need for him to hurry and so much for him to see he probably was away for some years. On his return he seems to have settled down in the little town of Saintes, on the river Charente, where he supported himself by doing what we should call surveying work, measuring the lands of the whole department, and reporting on the kind of soil of which they were made, so that the government might know how to tax them.

In the year 1538 Palissy married, and a year later came the event which influenced more than any other the course of his future life. A French gentleman named Pons, who had spent a long while at the Italian court of Ferrara, returned to France, bringing with him many beautiful things, among others an 'earthenware cup, wonderfully shaped and enamelled.'

Pons happened to meet Palissy, and finding that the same subjects interested them both, he showed him the cup. The young man could scarcely contain himself at the sight. For some time he had been turning over in his mind the possibility of discovering enamel, or glaze, to put on the earthen pots, and now here, in perfection, was the very thing he was looking for.

During the next two or three years, when he was busy surveying the lands about Saintes, in order to support his wife and little children, his thoughts were perpetually occupied with the enamelled cup, and how to make one like it. If he could only see a few more, perhaps something might give him a clue; but how was he to do that? Then one day in the winter of 1542 a pirate boat from La Roch.e.l.le, on the coast, sailed into port with a great Spanish s.h.i.+p in tow, filled with earthenware cups from Venice, and plates and goblets from the Spanish city of Valencia, famous for its marvellously beautiful glaze. The news of the capture soon reached Palissy, and we may be sure he had made a study of the best of the pots before they were bought by the king, Francis I., and given away to the ladies of the French court. But the Venetian and Spanish treasures still kept their secret, and Palissy was forced to work on in the dark, buying cheap earthen pots and breaking them, and pounding the pieces in a mortar, so as to discover, if he could, the substances of which they were made.

All this took a long time, and Palissy gave up his surveying in order to devote his whole days to this labour of love. The reward, however, was very slow in coming, and if he had not contrived to save a little money while he was still a bachelor his wife and children would have starved.

Week after week went by, and Palissy was to be seen in his little workshop, making experiments with pieces of common pots, over which he spread the different mixtures he had made. These pieces, he tells us, 'he baked in his furnace, hoping that some of these mixtures might, when hot, produce a colour'; white was, however, what he desired above all, as he had heard that if once you had been able to procure a fine white, it was comparatively easy to get the rest. Remembering how as a boy he had used certain chemical substances in staining the gla.s.s, he put these into some of his mixtures, and hopefully awaited the result.

But, alas! he 'had never seen earth baked,' and had no idea how hot the fire of his furnace should be, or in what way to regulate it. Sometimes the substance was baked too much, and sometimes too little; and every day he was building fresh furnaces in place of the old ones which had cracked, collecting fresh materials, making fresh failures, and altogether wasting a great deal of time and money.

Thus pa.s.sed several years, and it is a marvel how the family contrived to live at all, and madame Palissy had reason for the reproaches and hard words which she heaped on her husband. The amount of wood alone necessary to feed the furnaces was enormous, and when Palissy could no longer afford to buy it, he cut down all the trees and bushes in his garden, and when they were exhausted burned all the tables and chairs in the house and tore up the floors. Fancy poor madame Palissy's feelings one morning when this sight met her eyes. His friends laughed at him and told tales of his folly in the neighbouring town, which hurt his feelings; but nothing turned him from his purpose, and except for the few hours a week when he worked at something which _would_ bring in money enough to keep his family alive, every moment, as well as every thought, was given up to the discovery which was so slow in being made.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fancy poor madame Palissy's feelings.]

Again he bought some cheap pots, which he broke in pieces, and covered three or four hundred fragments with his mixtures. These he carried, with the help of a man, to a kiln belonging to some potters in the forest, and asked leave to bake them. The potters willingly gave him permission, and the pieces were laid carefully in the furnace. After four hours Palissy ventured to examine them, and found one of the fragments perfectly baked, and covered with a splendid white glaze. 'My joy was such,' he writes, 'that I felt myself another man'; but he rejoiced too soon, for success was still far distant. The mixture which produced the white glaze was probably due to Palissy having added unconsciously a little more of some special substance, because when he tried to make a fresh mixture to spread over the rest of the pieces he failed to obtain the same result. Still, though the disappointment was great, he did not quite cease to 'feel another man.' He had done what he had wanted once, and some day he would do it again and always.

It seems strange that Palissy did not go to Limoges, which was not very far off, and learn the trade of enamelling at the old-established manufactory there. It would have saved him from years of toil and heartsickness, and his family from years of poverty. But no! he wished to discover the secret _for himself_, and this he had no right to do at the expense of other people.

However, we must take the man as he was, and as we read the story of his incessant toils we wonder that any human being should have lived to tell the tale. He was too poor to get help; perhaps he did not want it; but 'he worked for more than a month night and day,' grinding into powder the substances such as he had used at the moment of his success. But heat the furnace as he might, it would not bake, and again he was beaten. He had found the secret of the enamel, but not how to make it form part of the pots.