COURT FOOLS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1932, 30 November 1888, Page 30

COURT FOOLS.

The Shah of Persia, probably alone among living sovereigns, keeps a Court fool. The man's picture, as given me by a friend who has recently been in Teheran, is not an inviting one. The fellow is humped-back, short, very fat, and very bow-legged. His head is immense; his face is large, flabby, and hideous; he squints; he as pock-marked; his lips are thick, and scarcely cover his irregular teeth ; his limbs are muscular ; the joints are so monstrous as to appear swollen ; aad, to cap the whole, the man's skin is of a dirty leathery tint. Yet, says my informant, this Court fool is one of the greatest wits, one of the best story tellers, and of the most powerful persons in Persia. He seems, in fact, to be a regular modern representative of the great Court fools of the Middle Ages, of the deformed playfellows and advisers of nealy all the European Kings up to the end of the sixteenth century. There is a great deal of

Interesting and Little-known Lore connected with these strange individuals, and especially with the fools of the Court of France, who, for a long period at a time, seem to have been members of one family, and who, , whatever their family, nearly always came from the province of Champagne. The Court fool had to be educated for his position. Quickness of wit and repartee, and the possession oi" plenty of wise saws and modern instances, were no less important points than ugliness and deformity of body. Even persons of rank on some few occasions became Court fools ; but the profession was formally forbidden to ecclesiastics ; and ecclesiastics, on the other hand, were formally forbidden to keep fools, as also, by the way, they were forbidded to keep hawks and hunting dogs, though it is well known that they often did keep all three. In the fifteenth century, in Germany as well as in France, the fools were so numerous that they formed corporations. They also wore recognised costumes, consisting generally of a pointed, long-eared cap, decorated with bells, a yellow and green jacket with incised edges, aud tight breeches and stockings, one leg being green and the other yellow. The fool carried either a gilt wooden sword or an inflated pig's bladder, tied by a short string to a stick, and containing a few dried peas. But Triboulet, the celebrated fool of Louis XII, dressed differently. His jacket was of blue and white. On its back it bore the arms of France. His " tights," too, were of blue and white ; his cap a lofty cone, ornamented with silver bells.

This Triboulet, whose real name was Nicolas Ferrial, has been immortalised by Victor Hugo in " Le Koi I' Amuse." He was first engaged by the Duke of Angouleme, afterwards Francis I. His pranks often cost him dearly. Once he was nailed by his ears to a gibbet, in return for having cut off a part of a royal page's coat ; and in this unhappy situation he was found by Louis XII. The poor fellow obtained pardon for his persecutors, and was soon afterwards taken into the King's service. He died in 1538, and was succeeded by Brusquet, who served in succession Henry 11, Francis 11, and Charles IX. Brusquet was

A Fool of a Rather Dangerous Character.

One of his jokes was to go into the country disguised as a physician, and to give to credulous patients drugs which, if not fatal, caused great pain and serious illness. An escapade of this kind nearly cost him his neck in 1536 ; but the Dauphin, hearing of his ready wit, saved him, and appointed him keeper of his wardrobe. Towards the end of his life, after having been Court fool for many years, he became Master of the Paris Post, and amassed a large fortune. When he died, in 1565, Thony had already taken his place. After Thony, followed Sibilot, and the great Chicot, and the female fool Mathurine, the favourite of Henry 111. She saved that monarch's life in 1594, and, after a long and, on the whole, honourable though frivolous career, died in 1627. Ohicot, the "jester," also served Henry 111 and Henry IV, the latter of whom he was always permitted to call "my friend." It is not clear that Chicot was physically deformed. He was, at all events, a notable warrior ; and at the siege of Eouen in 1592 he took prisoner the Count de Ohatigny. But this enterprise was fatal to the jester. He scornfully presented his captive to the King, and the nobleman was so exasperated by the fool's words that he turned upon his captor and mortally wounded him. What

The Court Fool in England

was may be judged from Shakespeare's sketches of such characters as Trinculo, Launcelot Gobbo, and Touchstone. The best known of the English Court fools was Will Summers or Somers, who served Henry VIII, and whose portrait, by Holbein, may be seen at Hampton Court Palace. He was originally a servant in the family of Eichard Farmor, a Northamptonshire gentleman, who for succouring proscribed priests was sent to Buckingham gaol. He seems to have been a fellow of infinite jest and of excellent heart. Though he enjoyed great influence he never sought his own interests. For years he laboured to procure the pardon of his old master, and at last he obtained it, though not until the King lay dying. Perhaps there can be no better proof of his loyalty and goodness. Perkeo, the fool of the Elector Charles Philip, has a wooden statue at Heidelberg. He was the most notable of the German fools. In Italy fools were as common as elsewhere. Pope Leo X was excessively fond of them. It is even recorded of him that he summoned them to amuse him on his death bed. At the Court of Russia there were official fools until very recent times. Peter the Great maintained several, the most celebrated of whom was Sotof. This man, ia 1703, was solemnly and by direction of the Czar, married to a deformed widow. The invitations to the ceremony were carried round by four humpbacks. Four of the biggest men in Kussia were the best men. In the procession was an orchestra seated on a car drawn by bears; and the wedding was performed by a blind, deaf priest, in spectacles. The affair seems to have been very congenial to Peter's coarse tastes. Later, the monarch created Sotof pope, the installation being managed by a body of fools from all parts of the empire,

headed bi four humpbacks, who "were sirmii taneously created cardinals. The Empress Anne, who reigned from 1736 to 1740, also had fools attached to her court Indeed, on more than one occasion, in order to humble a proud noble, she made him her fool. Such was the fate of Prince Galitzin, whom the Empress married to a washerwoman and condemned to spend his honeymoon in a palace of ice. The unfortunate pair were conducted to their chilly house in a cage carried by an elephant, and preceded by a drove of camels, pigs, dogs, and oxen Under Catherine the Great (1764-1796) Court fools were still in favour. That Empress in addition had

A Female Fool, Matrona Danilovna, whose tongno was so sharp and bitter that the gentlemen and ladies of the court paid hundred of thousands of roubles to keep it quiet.

I have said that the S'jiah is probably the only living sovereign who keeps a fool. But the Sultan kept one until quite recently ; so also did the Khedive. The minor potentates of Africa and Asia keep man> to this day, and are largely guided by their advice ; but the race of really clever fools, as typified by Touchstone, has long since, I fear, disap» peared from the face of the earth. The Court fools, even of the seventeenth century, were gross rather than witty, impudent rather than brilliant, self-seeking rather than loyal to their employers. The same may be said of most of their modern repre* sentatives.

RUSSIAN POVERTY AND MISERY.

St. Petersburg is European, and half the things which pain one there are felt to be in some sort of association with the evils and vices of the West. But Moscow has its own miseries, and they are so intensely Russian, so characteristic of the vaster Moscow of which the old Moscow is merely the tiny centre, that in becoming sensible to them one shudders not for a community.fmerely but for a whole people. The contrasts which life offers in St. Petersburg are contrasts merely between things which it is scarcely jusfc to compare — between a well-being that is foreign and a want that is native. : but in Moscow want is the elder brother to poverty, yet stands divided from it by a chasm that is as impenetrable as it is merciless. There is a distinct alliance of roughness and semiculture between the rich merchant who does business "daily in the White Town and the wretched street vendor whom he passes on his way a dozen times; yet the two are further apart than the poorest and the richest classes in Western Europe. Moreover, poverty is so unspeakably miserable in Moscow that it seems to be the characteristic rather of a distinct species of the animal man than of any par* tieular layer of the population. The streets daily yield figures which can only on general principles of anthropology be called human, The eye disentangles a face from these moving masses of rags but slowly and painfully, and unless the inspection is at long range the nose itself is apt to protest. The Russian summer calls innumerable peasant beggars and country paupers to Moscow. In the daytime they explore the city from gate to gate, halting from time to time to beg alms, or munch the fragments of black bread, which form the chief spoils of their diurnal quest. Many women of this class are young and robust, fresh from the labours of the field; but some. are old, infirm, and haggard. AH trudge along with the aid of a staff, and all wear a rude canvas bag tied around the neck. At night, long after the last vesper has died away, when the White Town is deserted, and the suburban residences are gay with lights, with music, and with the laughter of happy men and women, ,this vast army of the penniless and the miserable seeks its nocturnal reposeheaven knows where— on the forsaken field of the day's markets in the open air, on the steps of churches and cathedrals, or in the quadrangles and sourts of palaces and public buildings. To be unutterably wretched and yet tc be a nightly sojourner in the " outer courts of heaven," to be -poor and yet ' to fall asleep with only the thickness of a wall separating one from some of the most useless and costly accumulations of treasure in Europe, the conversion of which into money would furnish the means for banishing acute poverty from Russia altogether— such ex? periences as these are the lot of thousands to whom Moscow is less a place of pilgrimage than a centre of hot, weary, dusty life, a focus of burning despair. — " Atlantic | Monthly."