1461

1461 is remembered as both a year of royal ceremony and a decisive rupture in Paquette la Chantefleurie’s life. In Mahiette’s account, the coronation year brings the young Paquette’s brief prosperity in appearance and her subsequent ruin, while the surrounding history presents a society shaped by sharply divided jurisdictions and privileges.

The Coronation Year

Mahiette identifies 1461 as the year of Louis XI’s coronation and recalls the splendor of the princes’ and royal party’s horses at the consecration at Reims. Their housings and caparisons included damask, cloth of gold, sable, velvet, ermine, goldsmiths’ work, and bells of gold and silver. The display of wealth forms a sharp counterpoint to the poverty she describes in Paquette’s household.

Paquette was the daughter of Guybertant, a minstrel who had performed before Charles VII during the king’s coronation journey on the river Vesle. After her father’s death, Paquette and her mother lived in Reims on Rue de Folle-Peine. Her mother taught her embroidery and toy-making, but these brought in only six farthings a week. Mahiette contrasts that meagre income with the twelve Parisian sous Guybertant had once earned from a song at a coronation: the family’s fortunes had fallen far below the ceremonial world associated with 1461.

Paquette’s Reversal

Mahiette places Paquette at fourteen in 1461. She remembers her as exceptionally cheerful and pretty, known as la Chantefleurie, or blossoming song. During a winter when the two women lacked firewood, the cold gave Paquette a pronounced flush, and people began calling her Paquette or Pàquerette. Mahiette marks this period as the beginning of the young woman’s ruin.

The first unmistakable sign, in Mahiette’s telling, was Paquette’s appearance at church wearing a gold cross. She describes Paquette’s subsequent association with a succession of men whose rank and standing diminished: first a young viscount, then a royal equerry, followed by men serving as a sergeant-at-arms, royal carver, barber, cook, minstrel, and lamplighter. The downward sequence turns social rank into a measure of Paquette’s increasingly precarious circumstances. Mahiette connects that decline to the coronation year itself, recalling that Paquette’s fate had reached its lowest point by the festivities surrounding the king’s coronation.

Parisian Society and Jurisdiction

The book places this recollection within a broader account of fifteenth-century Paris as three distinct towns: the City, the University, and the Town. Each had its own character and institutions, but none could function entirely apart from the others. Churches predominated in the City, palaces in the Town, and colleges in the University. Authority was divided among the bishop, the provost of the merchants, the Rector, and the royal provost of Paris.

That fragmentation shaped the administration of justice as well as the city’s landscape. Offences committed by scholars on the left bank were tried on the island and could be punished on the right bank, although university privileges could intervene. The narrative notes that many such privileges had been won through revolt and mutiny. This institutional background does not make 1461 a single political event; rather, it places Mahiette’s account of private hardship in a city where authority and privilege were themselves divided and contested.

The Date in Retrospect

Mahiette tells the story eighteen years after the events she associates with 1461. Her recollection moves from the spectacle of the coronation to the household’s poverty, then to the signs by which she believes Paquette’s ruin became visible. The date therefore functions as a hinge between public ceremony and private misfortune: the year remembered for the king’s consecration is also the year Mahiette identifies with the start of Paquette’s fall.

The book’s wider discussion of sanctuary and punishment supplies a further, later frame for this world. It describes the right of asylum and notes that Louis XI made all Paris a refuge in 1467, six years after the events Mahiette recalls. That later measure belongs to a distinct moment, but it underscores the changing and overlapping legal protections that governed life in medieval Paris.