January 29 1393: Charles VI Attends the Bal des Ardents

...and his brother sets him on fire

It seems that the cards were against Charles VI of France from the start. At 11 years old he inherited the throne and the Hundred Years’ War. He inherited rivalries and strife. He started out with the name Charles the Beloved. He’d die as Charles the Mad.

It was on a military expedition in 1392 when things went sideways for Charles the Beloved. Tromping through a forest near Le Mans that August, Charles was accosted by a barefoot leper in a state of grievous consternation. Among the leper’s many obvious concerns (he had no shoes or face), what really seemed to have him in a state was the king’s well-being. He begged him to stop his expedition and go home – for the king had been ‘betrayed’.

Whether true or not, a seed had been planted in an already troubled mind. Later in the expedition Charles began to act erratically. He became paranoid. He came down with a fever and began to speak in a nonsensical and disconnected way. (Think Trump trying to explain calculus. Or shoes.) When a drowsy knight dropped a lance against a helmet, the clang sent Charles over the edge. He sprung to life and attacked his own men, killing a few (including the Bastard of Polignac, whose last thoughts were probably that being murdered by a king all but guaranteed that his unfortunate name was going to be in the history books). The king was put in a residence to recuperate and gather his wits. He did neither.  

Charles took to escaping from his Paris house to run into the streets. They had to wall up the entrances to keep him in. At times he didn’t know who he was or why he had to wear a big crown around the house. He recognized servants, but not his wife or family. He came to believe that his body was made of glass and, terrified that he would break, had metal rods sewn into his clothing. With the king’s mental decline came the desperate attempts to treat him. His wife called an eminent doctor who, among his many feats, had managed to reach the age of 92 in the 14^th century. The man might apply leaches to your genitals but he was basically considered a wizard. The doctor prescribed a ‘program of amusements’, whose core tenet was that if you filled your life with fun, games, and entertainment, you’d have no time to shatter if you bumped into a wall. It was one of these amusements that led his wife Joanna to arrange a masquerade ball called the Bal De Ardents – the Ball of the Burning Man.

The Bal de Ardents combined three of royalty’s favorite things – drinking, hiding behind masks, and doing bad stuff while drunk and incognito. Charles and five of his courtiers dressed as wildmen of the woods (woodwoses), their costumes were made of flax and pitch (plants and tar). They chained themselves together. The men danced and howled like wolves and shouted obscenities at the audience, who tried to guess their identities.

No open flames were allowed in the hall. Except nobody planned for the duke of Orléans – the king’s no-good drunken asshole of a brother. He entered the hall drunk (and late to boot) and, in order to get a closer look at the people covered in flammable wax and hair, raised a lit torch to the dancers. As you have no doubt surmised, a spark jumped onto one of the hair suits. As people are not well known to keep a cool head once they’ve been chained together and set on fire, the fire quickly spread to all the dancers – the king included.

Everyone has a tale of festivities gone wrong, a time when the ham was overcooked, the hosts had a fight in front of everyone, or the cat got onto the hors d'oeuvres table. The addition of alcohol only makes these bad parties decidedly juicier. That Thanksgiving one uncle brought his potato hunting rum and the other uncle wore his red hat. Go back in history and stories become less awkward and more murder-y. Go back to when human rights were a new and annoying obstacle to getting your own fiefdom and attending parties meant taking your life in your hands.

Rome was a great place to die at a party. Roman emperors were famous for throwing dinner parties which involved running through a guest or slaughtering a room of senators who had irked them. But if you weren’t murdered during the party, you’d have a hell of a time. Servants, decadence, luxury, lavish party favors. (After one party each senator was gifted the servant who had been assigned to serve them during the party.) Probably the most famous catastrophic party was the one thrown on a Friday in April in 33 AD. The Last Supper has everything one wants in a bad party story – intrigue, murder, wine, the incarnation of God and his only son, and a 13^th guest named Judas. At one party thrown by Tycho Brahe, famed astronomer and even more legendary drunkard, his elk got drunk, fell down some steps, and died. Yes, you read that correctly. To recap: his elk, drunk, steps, died. Brahe was such a drunk that he probably became an astronomer by default since he spent half his life lying on his back in fields. The point is, bad parties are a hallmark of history. Charles the Mad was just unlucky.      

With six men on fire and the fire spreading to the audience, things had to happen fast. Fortunately, the quick thinking of Charles’ niece, who covered him up in her skirts, Charles survived the ordeal. One other dancer jumped into a vat of wine. The other four dancers died in an unenviable way, in the words of the Monk of Saint Denis ‘they were burned alive – their flaming genitals dropped to the floor.’ In other words: ouch.

The tragedy had far-reaching consequences. Charles and his family were humiliated. A public outcry for retribution ran through the streets. They were forced to do an apologetic royal progress through the city in humility in history’s first known walk of shame. Charles lost his shit and expelled the Jews a few years later. His brother was blamed for the event and people already thought he was a sorcerer, and, cool as that might look on a Tinder profile now, at the time a thing like that made you less popular. Civil war ensued. 200 years of ineffective government followed. The French still strike every time someone overbakes a croissant.

To commemorate this event, we drink the flaming Dr. Pepper. In case you have no experience with this beverage, it is a shot set on fire and dunked in a beer.  

Ingredients

-        8 ounces beer

-        ¾ ounce amaretto

-        ¼ ounce overproof rum (151 is good. Do not drink this on its own unless you want to hear voices and those voices will be begging you to vomit.)

Instructions

Fill a pint glass halfway with beer. Drink the other half from the can or bottle. You are, after all, pretending you are royalty today so enjoy yourself. Send your cat off to the stocks. Punish your partner with your best disaffected royal accent in whatever language you speak or maybe even one you don’t speak. Add the amaretto to a shot glass and top with the rum. Do not sip this rum from the bottle. It will be unpleasant for you and all those you meet you on this day. Set the rum on fire – very, very carefully – and drop the shot glass into the beer – very, very carefully. Cheers to the fact that you live in a society that doesn’t welcome dressing up in gasoline suits and chug until you see through time. Didn’t work? Hide your car keys and make another.