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+---
+date: 2017-04-12T11:14:48-04:00
+description: "Master Jacques Coppenole"
+featured_image: ""
+tags: ["scene"]
+title: "Chapter IV: Master Jacques Coppenole"
+---
+While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were exchanging very low
+bows and a few words in voices still lower, a man of lofty stature, with a
+large face and broad shoulders, presented himself, in order to enter
+abreast with Guillaume Rym; one would have pronounced him a bull-dog by
+the side of a fox. His felt doublet and leather jerkin made a spot on the
+velvet and silk which surrounded him. Presuming that he was some groom who
+had stolen in, the usher stopped him.
+
+“Hold, my friend, you cannot pass!”
+
+The man in the leather jerkin shouldered him aside.
+
+“What does this knave want with me?” said he, in stentorian tones, which
+rendered the entire hall attentive to this strange colloquy. “Don’t you
+see that I am one of them?”
+
+“Your name?” demanded the usher.
+
+“Jacques Coppenole.”
+
+“Your titles?”
+
+“Hosier at the sign of the ‘Three Little Chains,’ of Ghent.”
+
+The usher recoiled. One might bring one’s self to announce aldermen and
+burgomasters, but a hosier was too much. The cardinal was on thorns. All
+the people were staring and listening. For two days his eminence had been
+exerting his utmost efforts to lick these Flemish bears into shape, and to
+render them a little more presentable to the public, and this freak was
+startling. But Guillaume Rym, with his polished smile, approached the
+usher.
+
+“Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the city of
+Ghent,” he whispered, very low.
+
+“Usher,” interposed the cardinal, aloud, “announce Master Jacques
+Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious city of Ghent.”
+
+This was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone might have conjured away the
+difficulty, but Coppenole had heard the cardinal.
+
+“No, cross of God?” he exclaimed, in his voice of thunder, “Jacques
+Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more, nothing less. Cross
+of God! hosier; that’s fine enough. Monsieur the Archduke has more than
+once sought his _gant_\* in my hose.”
+
+_* Got the first idea of a timing._
+
+Laughter and applause burst forth. A jest is always understood in Paris,
+and, consequently, always applauded.
+
+Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that the auditors which
+surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the communication between him
+and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on a level. The
+haughty air of the Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had
+touched in all these plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still
+vague and indistinct in the fifteenth century.
+
+This hosier was an equal, who had just held his own before monsieur the
+cardinal. A very sweet reflection to poor fellows habituated to respect
+and obedience towards the underlings of the sergeants of the bailiff of
+Sainte-Geneviève, the cardinal’s train-bearer.
+
+Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the salute of the
+all-powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI. Then, while Guillaume Rym, a
+“sage and malicious man,” as Philippe de Comines puts it, watched them
+both with a smile of raillery and superiority, each sought his place, the
+cardinal quite abashed and troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty, and
+thinking, no doubt, that his title of hosier was as good as any other,
+after all, and that Marie of Burgundy, mother to that Marguerite whom
+Coppenole was to-day bestowing in marriage, would have been less afraid of
+the cardinal than of the hosier; for it is not a cardinal who would have
+stirred up a revolt among the men of Ghent against the favorites of the
+daughter of Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who could have
+fortified the populace with a word against her tears and prayers, when the
+Maid of Flanders came to supplicate her people in their behalf, even at
+the very foot of the scaffold; while the hosier had only to raise his
+leather elbow, in order to cause to fall your two heads, most illustrious
+seigneurs, Guy d’Hymbercourt and Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet.