A little tour in France
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Title: A little tour in France
Author: Henry James
Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE ***
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
[Illustration]
Novels by
HENRY JAMES
_Six Shillings each_
THE AWKWARD AGE
THE TWO MAGICS
WHAT MAISIE KNEW
THE OTHER HOUSE
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
EMBARRASSMENTS TERMINATIONS
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
[Illustration]
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
By HENRY JAMES
[Illustration]
WITH NINETY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1900
[Illustration]
Preface
_The notes presented in this volume were gathered, as will easily be
perceived, a number of years ago and on an expectation not at that time
answered by the event, and were then published in the United States. The
expectation had been that they should accompany a series of drawings,
and they themselves were altogether governed by the pictorial spirit.
They made, and they make in appearing now, after a considerable interval
and for the first time, in England, no pretension to any other; they are
impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited; if the written
word may ever play the part of brush or pencil, they are sketches on
"drawing-paper" and nothing more. From the moment the principle of
selection and expression, with a tourist, is not the delight of the eyes
and the play of fancy, it should be an energy in every way much larger;
there is no happy mean, in other words, I hold, between the sense and
the quest of the picture, and the surrender to it, and the sense and
the quest of the constitution, the inner springs of the subject--springs
and connections social, economic, historic._
_One must really choose, in other words, between the benefits of the
perception of surface--a perception, when fine, perhaps none of the most
frequent--and those of the perception of very complex underlying
matters. If these latter had had, for me, to be taken into account, my
pages would not have been collected. At the time of their original
appearance the series of illustrations to which it had been their policy
to cling for countenance and company failed them, after all, at the last
moment, through a circumstance not now on record; and they had suddenly
to begin to live their little life without assistance. That they have
seemed able in any degree still to prolong even so modest a career might
perhaps have served as a reason for leaving them undisturbed. In fact,
however, I have too much appreciated--for any renewal of
inconsistency--the opportunity of granting them at last, in an
association with Mr. Pennell's admirable drawings, the benefit they have
always lacked. The little book thus goes forth finally as the
picture-book it was designed to be. Text and illustrations are,
altogether and alike, things of the play of eye and hand and
fancy--views, head-pieces, tail-pieces; through the artist's work,
doubtless, in a much higher degree than the author's._
_But these are words enough on a minor point. Many things come back to
me on reading my pages over--such a world of reflection and emotion as I
can neither leave unmentioned nor yet, in this place, weigh them down
with the full expression of. Difficult indeed would be any full
expression for one who, deeply devoted always to the revelations of
France, finds himself, late in life, making of the sentiment no more
substantial, no more direct record than this mere revival of an
accident. Not one of these small chapters but suggests to me a regret
that I might not, first or last, have gone farther, penetrated deeper,
spoken oftener--closed, in short, more intimately with the great general
subject; and I mean, of course, not in such a form as the present, but
in many another, possible and impossible. It all comes back, doubtless,
this vision of missed occasions and delays overdone, to the general
truth that the observer, the enjoyer, may, before he knows it, be
practically too far_ in _for all that free testimony and pleasant, easy
talk that are incidental to the earlier or more detached stages of a
relation. There are relations that soon get beyond all merely showy
appearances of value for us. Their value becomes thus private and
practical, and is represented by the process--the quieter, mostly, the
better--of absorption and assimilation of what the relation has done for
us. For persons thus indebted to the genius of France--however, in its
innumerable ways, manifested--the profit to be gained, the lesson to be
learnt, is almost of itself occupation enough. They feel that they bear
witness by the intelligent use and application of their advantage, and
the consciousness of the artist is therefore readily a consciousness of
pious service. He may repeatedly have dreamt of some such happy
combination of mood and moment as shall launch him in a profession of
faith, a_ demonstration _of the interesting business; he may have had
inner glimpses of an explicit statement, and vaguely have sketched it to
himself as one of the most candid and charming ever drawn up; but time,
meanwhile, has passed, interruptions have done their dismal work, the
indirect tribute, too, has perhaps, behind the altar, grown and grown;
and the reflection has at all events established itself that honour is
more rendered by seeing and doing one's work in the light than by
brandishing the torch on the house-tops. Curiosity and admiration have
operated continually, but with as little waste as they could. The
drawback is only that in this case, to be handsomely consequent, one
would perhaps rather not have appeared to celebrate_ any _rites. The
moral of all of which is that those here embodied must pass, at the
best, but for what they are worth._
_H. J._
_August 9, 1900._
[Illustration]
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Introductory 1
I. Tours 3
II. Tours: the Cathedral 12
III. Tours: Saint Martin 17
" Saint Julian 20
" Plessis-les-Tours 22
" Marmoutier 23
IV. Blois 26
V. Chambord 36
VI. Amboise 47
Chaumont 51
VII. Chenonceaux 54
VIII. Azay-le-Rideau 64
IX. Langeais 68
X. Loches 72
XI. Bourges 77
" The Cathedral 80
XII. Bourges: Jacques Coeur 86
XIII. Le Mans 94
XIV. Angers 101
XV. Nantes 107
XVI. La Rochelle 115
XVII. Poitiers 122
XVIII. Angoulême 130
Bordeaux 132
XIX. Toulouse 136
XX. Toulouse: the Capitol 141
XXI. Toulouse: Saint-Sernin 145
XXII. Carcassonne 150
XXIII. Carcassonne 157
XXIV. Narbonne 163
XXV. Montpellier 170
XXVI. The Pont du Gard 178
XXVII. Aigues-Mortes 183
XXVIII. Nîmes 188
XXIX. Tarascon 195
XXX. Arles 202
" The Theatre 205
XXXI. Arles: the Museum 209
XXXII. Les Baux 213
XXXIII. Avignon 223
" The Palace of the Popes 226
XXXIV. Villeneuve-lès-Avignon 230
XXXV. Vaucluse 235
XXXVI. Orange 243
XXXVII. Macon 249
XXXVIII. Bourg-en-Bresse 254
The Church at Brou 255
XXXIX. Beaune 262
XL. Dijon 267
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
List of Illustrations
Nîmes: the Garden (_Photogravure_) _Frontispiece_
Tours: the House of Balzac _To face page_ 8
Tours: the Cathedral (_Photogravure_) " 14
Tours: the Towers of St. Martin " 18
Blois (_Photogravure_) " 26
Blois: the Château " 28
Chambord " 38
Amboise: the Château " 48
Chenonceaux (_Photogravure_) " 56
Azay-le-Rideau " 64
Loches " 72
Loches: the Church " 74
Bourges: the House of Jacques Coeur (_Photogravure_) " 86
Bourges: Doorway, House of Jacques Coeur " 90
Bourges: the Cathedral (West Front) " 92
Le Mans: the Cathedral " 98
Angers: Old Timbered Houses " 104
La Rochelle " 118
La Rochelle: the Hôtel de Ville (_Photogravure_) " 120
Poitiers: Church of St. Radegonde (_Photogravure_) " 126
Bordeaux: the Quay (_Photogravure_) _To face page_ 134
Toulouse: St. Sernin (the Transept) " 146
Toulouse: the Garonne (_Photogravure_) " 148
Carcassonne " 158
Carcassonne (another View) " 160
Narbonne: the Washing Place " 166
Narbonne: the Cathedral and Hôtel de Ville (_Photogravure_) " 168
The Pont du Gard " 180
Aigues-Mortes " 186
Nîmes: the Cathedral " 190
Nîmes: the Amphitheatre " 192
Tarascon: the Castle " 198
Arles: St. Trophimus " 204
Arles: Ruins of the Roman Theatre " 206
Arles: Door of St. Trophimus " 210
Arles: the Cloisters (_Photogravure_) " 212
Avignon: the Church " 226
Vaucluse: Ruins of Castle " 240
Orange: the Theatre " 246
Lyons " 250
Brou: the Church (_Photogravure_) " 256
Beaune: the Hospital " 264
Dijon " 266
Dijon: the Park " 268
Courtyard, House of Jacques Coeur _Half-title_
Angers from the Bridge _Title-page_
Aigues-Mortes v
Isle-sur-Sorgues viii
Saint-Bénazet: the Broken Bridge ix
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon xi
Narbonne: the Fish Market xii
Avignon from Villeneuve xiii
Toulouse: Hôtel d'Assézat xvi
Nantes 1
Tours from the River 3
Langeais 3
Chaumont from the River 17
Blois 26
Chambord 36
Chaumont from the Bridge 47
Chenonceaux 54
Azay-le-Rideau 64
Langeais from the Loire 68
Loches 72
Bourges 77
Bourges: the Hôtel Lallemont 86
Le Mans 94
Angers: the Castle 101
Nantes: the Quay 107
La Rochelle: Tour de la Lanterne 115
Poitiers: the Cathedral 122
Bordeaux 130
Toulouse: the Cathedral 136
Toulouse: the Place de Capitol 141
Toulouse: Saint-Sernin 145
Carcassonne from the River 150
Carcassonne 157
Arles, Landscape near 163
Montpellier: the Aqueduct 170
The Pont du Gard 178
Aigues-Mortes 183
Nîmes: the Maison Carrée 188
Tarascon and Beaucaire 195
Provençal Landscape 202
Montmajeur 209
Les Baux 213
Villeneuve-lès-Avignon 218
Avignon 223
Vaucluse, Approach to 235
Orange: the Gateway 243
Valence 249
Macon 254
Macon: the Bridge 262
Beaune: the Hospital 267
[Illustration]
Introductory
Though the good city of Paris appears to be less in fashion than in
other days with those representatives of our race--not always, perhaps,
acknowledged as the soundest and stiffest--curious of foreign
opportunity and addicted to foreign sojourns, it probably none the less
remains true that such frequentations of France as may be said still to
flourish among us have as much as ever the wondrous capital, and the
wondrous capital alone, for their object. The taste for Paris, at all
events, is--or perhaps I should say was, alluding as I do, I fear, to a
vanished order--a taste by itself; singularly little bound up, of
necessity, with such an interest in the country at large as would be
implied by an equal devotion, in other countries, to other capitals.
Putting aside the economic inducement, which may always operate, and
limiting the matter to the question of free choice, it is sufficiently
striking that the free chooser would have to be very fond of England to
quarter himself in London, very fond of Germany to quarter himself in
Berlin, very fond of America to quarter himself in New York. It had, on
the other hand, been a common reflection for the author of these light
pages that the fondness for France (throughout the company of strangers
more or less qualified) was oddly apt to feed only on such grounds for
it as made shift to spread their surface between the Arc de Triomphe and
the Gymnase Theatre: as if there were no good things in the _doux pays_
that could not be harvested in that field. It matters little how the
assumption began to strike him as stupid, especially since he himself
had doubtless equally shared in the guilt of it. The light pages in
question are but the simple record of a small personal effort to shake
it off. He took, it must be confessed, no extraordinary measures; he
merely started, one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as immediately as
anywhere else see it demonstrated that, though France might be Paris,
Paris was by no means France. The beauty of the demonstration--quite as
prompt as he could have desired--drew him considerably farther, and his
modest but eminently successful adventure begot, as aids to amused
remembrance, a few informal notes.
[Illustration]
Chapter i
[Tours]
I am ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France;
that remark has long ago lost its bloom. The town of Tours, however, has
something sweet and bright, which suggests that it is surrounded by a
land of fruits. It is a very agreeable little city; few towns of its
size are more ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better
humour with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of
bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region
of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic,
rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real
Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in
search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources
of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague conviction that he can
only lose by almost any change. Fortune has been kind to him: he lives
in a temperate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the banks of a river
which, it is true, sometimes floods the country around it, but of which
the ravages appear to be so easily repaired that its aggressions may
perhaps be regarded (in a region where so many good things are certain)
merely as an occasion for healthy suspense. He is surrounded by fine old
traditions, religious, social, architectural, culinary; and he may have
the satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of
his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is
Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is
essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac,
of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses.
George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the
convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France--"son
climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et courtes." In the autumn
of 1882 the rains perhaps were less short than abundant; but when the
days were fine it was impossible that anything in the way of weather
could be more charming. The vineyards and orchards looked rich in the
fresh, gay light; cultivation was everywhere, but everywhere it seemed
to be easy. There was no visible poverty; thrift and success presented
themselves as matters of good taste. The white caps of the women
glittered in the sunshine, and their well-made sabots clicked cheerfully
on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old châteaux,--a gallery
of architectural specimens and of large hereditary properties. The
peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in most other parts
of France; though they have enough of it to give them quite their share
of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little chaffering
_place_ of the market-town, the stranger observes so often in the
wrinkled brown masks that surmount the agricultural blouse. This is,
moreover, the heart of the old French monarchy; and as that monarchy was
splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splendour still glitters
in the current of the Loire. Some of the most striking events of French
history have occurred on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters
bloomed for a while with the flowering of the Renaissance. The Loire
gives a great "style" to a landscape of which the features are not, as
the phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye to distances even more
poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream,
and is sometimes observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of
its channel--a great defect certainly in a river which is so much
depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of it
as I saw it last; full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large slow curves
and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than
the view of its course which you get from the battlements and terraces
of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that elevation one lovely Sunday
morning, through a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very
model of a generous, beneficent stream. The most charming part of Tours
is naturally the shaded quay that overlooks it, and looks across too at
the friendly faubourg of Saint Symphorien and at the terraced heights
which rise above this. Indeed, throughout Touraine it is half the charm
of the Loire that you can travel beside it. The great dyke which
protects it, or protects the country from it, from Blois to Angers, is
an admirable road; and on the other side as well the highway constantly
keeps it company. A wide river, as you follow a wide road, is excellent
company; it brightens and shortens the way.
The inns at Tours are in another quarter, and one of them, which is
midway between the town and the station, is very good. It is worth
mentioning for the fact that every one belonging to it is
extraordinarily polite--so unnaturally polite as at first to excite your
suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and
chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter
in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever
encountered; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur
of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning-top. I may add that I discovered
no dark secrets at the Hôtel de l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any
traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in
an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest,
at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the
monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all
alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It
connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in
the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire--the spacious,
solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Curé de Tours," "one of the
finest monuments of French architecture." The Palais de Justice was the
seat of the Government of Léon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870, after the
dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris and before
the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied Tours
during that terrible winter: it is astonishing, the number of places
the Germans occupied. It is hardly too much to say that, wherever one
goes in certain parts of France, one encounters two great historic
facts: one is the Revolution; the other is the German invasion. The
traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred scars and bruises and
mutilations, but the visible marks of the war of 1870 have passed away.
The country is so rich, so living, that she has been able to dress her
wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again, so that the shadow of that
darkness has ceased to rest upon her. But what you do not see you still
may hear; and one remembers with a certain shudder that only a few short
years ago this province, so intimately French, was under the heel of a
foreign foe. To be intimately French was apparently not a safeguard; for
so successful an invader it could only be a challenge. Peace and plenty,
however, have succeeded that episode; and among the gardens and
vineyards of Touraine it seems only a legend the more in a country of
legends.
It was not, all the same, for the sake of this chequered story that I
mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale. The most interesting
fact, to my mind, about the high-street of Tours was that as you walk
toward the bridge on the right hand _trottoir_ you can look up at the
house, on the other side of the way, in which Honoré de Balzac first saw
the light. That violent and complicated genius was a child of the
good-humoured and succulent Touraine. There is something anomalous in
this fact, though, if one thinks about it a little, one may discover
certain correspondences between his character and that of his native
province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly infelicitous in spite of his
great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of
influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding side--the side that
comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the romantic and
epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region. And he
was, moreover, the product of a soil into which a great deal of history
had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly
monarchical, and he was saturated with a sense of the past. Number 39
Rue Royale--of which the basement, like all the basements in the Rue
Royale, is occupied by a shop--is not shown to the public; and I know
not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of "Le
Lys dans la Vallée" opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see
and to imagine such extraordinary things. If this were the case I would
willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any relic of
the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of
any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls, but
simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to
give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour. Balzac, in
the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than any one,
since Shakspeare, who has attempted to tell us stories about it; and the
very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the
immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a little to
find that he was born in a house "in a row"--a house, moreover, which at
the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old. All
that is contradictory. If the tenement selected for this honour could
not be ancient and embrowned, it should at least have been detached.
There is a charming description in his little tale of "La Grenadière" of
the view of the opposite side of
[Illustration: TOURS--THE HOUSE OF BALZAC]
the Loire as you have it from the square at the end of the Rue Royale--a
square that has some pretensions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the
Hôtel de Ville and the Musée, a pair of edifices which directly
contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of François
Rabelais and René Descartes. The former, erected a few years since, is a
very honourable production; the pedestal of the latter could, as a
matter of course, only be inscribed with the _Cogito ergo Sum_. The two
statues mark the two opposite poles to which the wondrous French mind
has travelled; and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours it ought
to stand midway between them. Not that he by any means always struck the
happy mean between the sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of
him that half of his genius looks in one direction and half in the
other. The side that turns toward François Rabelais would be, on the
whole, the side that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac at
Tours; there is only in one of the chambers of the melancholy museum a
rather clever, coarse bust. The description in "La Grenadière" of which
I just spoke is too long to quote; neither have I space for anyone of
the brilliant attempts at landscape-painting which are woven into the
shimmering texture of "Le Lys dans la Vallée." The little manor of
Clochegourde, the residence of Madame de Mortsauf, the heroine of that
extraordinary work, was within a moderate walk of Tours, and the picture
in the novel is presumably a copy from an original which it would be
possible to-day to discover. I did not, however, even make the attempt.
There are so many châteaux in Touraine commemorated in history that it
would take one too far to look up those which have been commemorated in
fiction. The most I did was to endeavour to identify the former
residence of Mademoiselle Gamard, the sinister old maid of "Le Curé de
Tours." This terrible woman occupied a small house in the rear of the
cathedral, where I spent a whole morning in wondering rather stupidly
which house it could be. To reach the cathedral from the little _place_
where we stopped just now to look across at the Grenadière, without, it
must be confessed, very vividly seeing it, you follow the quay to the
right and pass out of sight of the charming _côteau_ which, from beyond
the river, faces the town--a soft agglomeration of gardens, vineyards,
scattered villas, gables and turrets of slate-roofed châteaux, terraces
with grey balustrades, moss-grown walls draped in scarlet
Virginia-creeper. You turn into the town again beside a great military
barrack which is ornamented with a rugged mediæval tower, a relic of the
ancient fortifications, known to the Tourangeaux of to-day as the Tour
de Guise. The young Prince of Joinville, son of that Duke of Guise who
was murdered by the order of Henry II. at Blois, was, after the death of
his father, confined here for more than two years, but made his escape
one summer evening in 1591, under the nose of his keepers, with a
gallant audacity which has attached the memory of the exploit to his
sullen-looking prison. Tours has a garrison of five regiments, and the
little red-legged soldiers light up the town. You see them stroll upon
the clean, uncommercial quay, where there are no signs of navigation,
not even by oar, no barrels nor bales, no loading nor unloading, no
masts against the sky nor booming of steam in the air. The most active
business that goes on there is that patient and fruitless angling in
which the French, as the votaries of art for art, excel all other
people. The little soldiers, weighed down by the contents of their
enormous pockets, pass with respect from one of these masters of the rod
to the other, as he sits soaking an indefinite bait in the large,
indifferent stream. After you turn your back to the quay you have only
to go a little way before you reach the cathedral.
[Illustration]
Chapter ii
[Tours: the Cathedral]
It is a very beautiful church of the second order of importance, with a
charming mouse-coloured complexion and a pair of fantastic towers. There
is a commodious little square in front of it, from which you may look up
at its very ornamental face; but for purposes of frank admiration the
sides and the rear are perhaps not sufficiently detached. The cathedral
of Tours, which is dedicated to Saint Gatianus, took a long time to
build. Begun in 1170, it was finished only in the first half of the
sixteenth century; but the ages and the weather have interfused so well
the tone of the different parts that it presents, at first at least, no
striking incongruities, and looks even exceptionally harmonious and
complete. There are many grander cathedrals, but there are probably few
more pleasing; and this effect of delicacy and grace is at its best
towards the close of a quiet afternoon, when the densely decorated
towers, rising above the little Place de l'Archevêché, lift their
curious lanterns into the slanting light and offer a multitudinous perch
to troops of circling pigeons. The whole front, at such a time, has an
appearance of great richness, although the niches which surround the
three high doors (with recesses deep enough for several circles of
sculpture) and indent the four great buttresses that ascend beside the
huge rose-window, carry no figures beneath their little chiselled
canopies. The blast of the great Revolution blew down most of the
statues in France, and the wind has never set very strongly towards
putting them up again. The embossed and crocketed cupolas which crown
the towers of Saint Gatien are not very pure in taste; but, like a good
many impurities, they have a certain character. The interior has a
stately slimness with which no fault is to be found and which in the
choir, rich in early glass and surrounded by a broad passage, becomes
very bold and noble. Its principal treasure perhaps is the charming
little tomb of the two children (who died young) of Charles VIII. and
Anne of Brittany, in white marble embossed with symbolic dolphins and
exquisite arabesques. The little boy and girl lie side by side on a slab
of black marble, and a pair of small kneeling angels, both at their head
and at their feet, watch over them. Nothing could be more elegant than
this monument, which is the work of Michel Colomb, one of the earlier
glories of the French Renaissance; it is really a lesson in good taste.
Originally placed in the great abbey-church of Saint Martin, which was
for so many ages the holy place of Tours, it happily survived the
devastation to which that edifice, already sadly shattered by the wars
of religion and successive profanations, finally succumbed in 1797. In
1815 the tomb found an asylum in a quiet corner of the cathedral.
I ought perhaps to be ashamed to acknowledge that I found the profane
name of Balzac capable of adding an interest even to this venerable
sanctuary. Those who have read the terrible little story of "Le Curé de
Tours" will perhaps remember that, as I have already mentioned, the
simple and childlike old Abbé Birotteau, victim of the infernal
machinations of the Abbé Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard, had his
quarters in the house of that lady (she had a specialty of letting
lodgings to priests), which stood on the north side of the cathedral, so
close under its walls that the supporting pillar of one of the great
flying buttresses was planted in the spinster's garden. If you wander
round behind the church in search of this more than historic habitation
you will have occasion to see that the side and rear of Saint Gatien
make a delectable and curious figure. A narrow lane passes beside the
high wall which conceals from sight the palace of the archbishop and
beneath the flying buttresses, the far-projecting gargoyles, and the
fine south porch of the church. It terminates in a little dead
grass-grown square entitled the Place Grégoire de Tours. All this part
of the exterior of the cathedral is very brown, ancient, Gothic,
grotesque; Balzac calls the whole place "a desert of stone." A
battered and gabled wing or out-house (as it appears to be) of the
hidden palace, with a queer old stone pulpit jutting out from it, looks
down on this melancholy spot, on the other side of which is a seminary
for young priests, one of whom issues from a door in a quiet corner,
and, holding it open a moment behind him, shows a glimpse of a sunny
garden, where you may fancy other black young figures strolling up and
down. Mademoiselle Gamard's house, where she took her two abbés to
board, and basely conspired with one against the other, is still farther
round the cathedral. You cannot quite put your hand upon it to-day, for
the dwelling of which you say to yourself that it must have been
Mademoiselle Gamard's does not fulfil all the conditions mentioned in
Balzac's description. The edifice in question, however, fulfils
conditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to
the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with
this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept),
is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side
of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to
pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very
genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the
church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated; but it
nestles with a kind of wasted friendliness beneath the big walls of the
cathedral. Its lower arcades have been closed, and it has a small plot
of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I should imagine to be
too much overshadowed. In one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret,
the cage of a winding staircase which ascends (no great distance) to an
upper gallery, where an old priest, the _chanoine-gardien_ of the
church, was walking to and fro with his breviary. The turret, the
gallery, and even the chanoine-gardien, belonged, that sweet September
morning, to the class of objects that are dear to painters in
water-colours.
[Illustration]
Chapter iii
[Tours: Saint Martin]
I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin, which was for many years
the sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the
simple burial-place of the great apostle who in the fourth century
Christianised Gaul and who, in his day a brilliant missionary and worker
of miracles, is chiefly known to modern fame as the worthy that cut his
cloak in two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar (tradition
fails to say, I believe, what he did with the other half), the abbey of
Saint Martin, through the Middle Ages, waxed rich and powerful, till it
was known at last as one of the most luxurious religious houses in
Christendom, with kings for its titular abbots (who, like Francis I.,
sometimes turned and despoiled it) and a great treasure of precious
things. It passed, however, through many vicissitudes. Pillaged by the
Normans in the ninth century and by the Huguenots in the sixteenth, it
received its death-blow from the Revolution, which must have brought to
bear upon it an energy of destruction proportionate to its mighty bulk.
At the end of the last century a huge group of ruins alone remained, and
what we see to-day may be called the ruin of a ruin. It is difficult to
understand how so vast an edifice can have been so completely
obliterated. Its site is given up to several ugly streets, and a pair of
tall towers, separated by a space which speaks volumes as to the size of
the church and looking across the close-pressed roofs to the happier
spires of the cathedral, preserve for the modern world the memory of a
great fortune, a great abuse, perhaps, and at all events a great
penalty. One may believe that to this day a considerable part of the
foundations of the great abbey is buried in the soil of Tours. The two
surviving towers, which are dissimilar in shape, are enormous; with
those of the cathedral they form the great landmarks of the town. One of
them bears the name of the Tour de l'Horloge; the other, the so-called
Tour Charlemagne, was erected (two centuries after her death) over the
tomb of Luitgarde, wife of the great Emperor, who died at Tours in 800.
I do not pretend to understand in what relation these very mighty and
effectually detached masses of masonry stood to each other, but in their
grey elevation and loneliness they are striking and suggestive to-day;
holding their hoary heads far above the modern life of the town and
looking sad and conscious, as they had outlived all uses. I know not
what is supposed to have become of the bones
[Illustration: TOURS--THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN]
of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which
they may have got mislaid; but a mystic connection with his
wonder-working relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on
the left of the street, which opens in front of the Tour
Charlemagne--whose immemorial base, by the way, inhabited like a cavern,
with a diminutive doorway where, as I passed, an old woman stood
cleaning a pot, and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers,
would be appreciated by a painter in search of "bits." The present
shrine of Saint Martin is enclosed (provisionally, I suppose) in a very
modern structure of timber, where in a dusky cellar, to which you
descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper
roses, is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and
prostrate worshippers. Even this crepuscular vault, however, fails, I
think, to attain solemnity; for the whole place is strangely vulgar and
garish. The Catholic Church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the
most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of
impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of
sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the
grotesqueness of such an establishment as the last link in the chain of
a great ecclesiastical tradition.
In the same street, on the other side, a little below, is something
better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at a high
door in a white wall (there is a cross above it), and a fresh-faced
sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the
charming little cloister, or rather fragment of cloister. Only one side
of this surpassing structure remains, but the whole place is effective.
In front of the beautiful arcade, which is terribly bruised and
obliterated, is one of those walks of interlaced _tilleuls_ which are so
frequent in Touraine, and into which the green light filters so softly
through a lattice of clipped twigs. Beyond this is a garden, and beyond
the garden are the other buildings of the convent, where the placid
sisters keep a school--a test, doubtless, of placidity. The imperfect
arcade, which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century (I know
nothing of it but what is related in Mrs. Pattison's "Renaissance in
France"), is a truly enchanting piece of work; the cornice and the
angles of the arches being covered with the daintiest sculpture of
arabesques, flowers, fruit, medallions, cherubs, griffins, all in the
finest and most attenuated relief. It is like the chasing of a bracelet
in stone. The taste, the fancy, the elegance, the refinement, are of the
order that straightens up again our drooping standard of distinction.
Such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance;
there is nothing more delicate in all Touraine.
[Tours: Saint Julian]
There is another fine thing at Tours which is not particularly delicate,
but which makes a great impression--the very interesting old church of
Saint Julian, lurking in a crooked corner at the right of the Rue
Royale, near the point at which this indifferent thoroughfare emerges,
with its little cry of admiration, on the bank of the Loire. Saint
Julian stands to-day in a kind of neglected hollow, where it is much
shut in by houses; but in the year 1225, when the edifice was begun, the
site was doubtless, as the architects say, more eligible. At present
indeed, when once you have caught a glimpse of the stout, serious
Romanesque tower--which is not high, but strong--you feel that the
building has something to say and that you must stop to listen to it.
Within, it has a vast and splendid nave, of immense height, the nave of
a cathedral, with a shallow choir and transepts and some admirable old
glass. I spent half an hour there one morning, listening to what the
church had to say, in perfect solitude. Not a worshipper entered, not
even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there be a sex in
fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the gender
of the name of its patron.
It was that same morning, I think, that I went in search of the old
houses of Tours; for the town contains several goodly specimens of the
domestic architecture of the past. The dwelling to which the average
Anglo-Saxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have
space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l'Hermite--a
gentleman whom the readers of "Quentin Durward" will not have
forgotten--the hangman-in-ordinary to that great and prompt chastener
Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan
at all; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions
left at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis XI. His
terrible castle of Plessis, the picture of which sends a shiver through
the youthful reader of Scott, has been reduced to suburban
insignificance; and the residence of his _triste compère_, on the front
of which a festooned rope figures as a motive for decoration, is
observed to have been erected in the succeeding century. The Maison de
Tristan may be visited for itself, however, if not for Sir Walter; it is
an exceedingly picturesque old façade, to which you pick your way
through a narrow and tortuous street--a street terminating, a little
beyond it, in the walk beside the river. An elegant Gothic doorway is
let into the rusty-red brickwork, and strange little beasts crouch at
the angles of the windows, which are surmounted by a tall graduated
gable, pierced with a small orifice, where the large surface of brick,
lifted out of the shadow of the street, looks yellow and faded. The
whole thing is disfigured and decayed; but it is a capital subject for a
sketch in colours. Only I must wish the sketcher better luck--or a
better temper--than my own. If he ring the bell to be admitted to see
the court, which I believe is more sketchable still, let him have
patience to wait till the bell is answered. He can do the outside while
they are coming.
[Tours: Plessis-les-Tours]
The Maison de Tristan, I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly
know for what the remnants of Plessis-les-Tours may be investigated. To
reach them you wander through crooked suburban lanes, down the course of
the Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incongruous spot, where a small,
crude building of red brick is pointed out to you by your cabman (if you
happen to drive) as the legendary frame of the grim portrait, and where
a strong odour of pigsties and other unclean things so prostrates you
for the moment that you have no energy to protest against this obvious
fiction. You enter a yard encumbered with rubbish and a defiant dog, and
an old woman emerges from a shabby lodge and assures you that you stand
deep in historic dust. The red brick building, which looks like a small
factory, rises on the ruins of the favourite residence of the dreadful
Louis. It is now occupied by a company of night-scavengers, whose huge
carts are drawn up in a row before it. I know not whether this be what
is called the irony of fate; in any case, the effect of it is to
accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our
senses) that there is no honour for the authors of great wrongs. The
dreadful Louis is reduced simply to an offence to the nostrils. The old
woman shows you a few fragments--several dark, damp, much-encumbered
vaults, denominated dungeons, and an old tower staircase in good
condition. There are the outlines of the old moat; there is also the
outline of the old guard-room, which is now a stable; and there are
other silhouettes of the undistinguishable, which I have forgotten. You
need all your imagination, and even then you cannot make out that
Plessis was a castle of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye
wanders over the neighbouring _potagers_, discourses much of the gardens
and the park. The place looks mean and flat; and as you drive away you
scarcely know whether to be glad or sorry that all those bristling
horrors have been reduced to the commonplace.
[Tours: Marmoutier]
A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at
Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near
neighbourhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the
other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from the town. You
follow the edge of the big brown river; of a fine afternoon you will be
glad to go farther still. The abbey has gone the way of most abbeys; but
the place is a restoration as well as a ruin, inasmuch as the Sisters of
the Sacred Heart have erected a terribly modern convent here. A large
Gothic doorway, in a high fragment of ancient wall, admits you to a
garden-like enclosure, of great extent, from which you are further
introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlour, where two good
nuns sit at work. One of these came out with me and showed me over the
place--a very definite little woman, with pointed features, an intensely
distinct enunciation, and those pretty manners which (for whatever other
teachings it may be responsible) the Catholic Church so often instils
into its functionaries. I have never seen a woman who had got her lesson
better than this little trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The interest
of Marmoutier to-day is not so much an interest of vision, so to speak,
as an interest of reflection--that is, if you choose to reflect (for
instance) upon the wondrous legend of the seven sleepers (you may see
where they lie in a row), who lived together--they were brothers and
cousins--in primitive piety, in the sanctuary constructed by the blessed
Saint Martin (emulous of his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the face of
the hillside that overhung the Loire, and who, twenty-five years after
his death, yielded up their seven souls at the same moment and enjoyed
the rare convenience of retaining in their faces, in spite of mortality,
every aspect of health. The abbey of Marmoutier, which sprang from the
grottos in the cliff to which Saint Gatianus and Saint Martin retired to
pray, was therefore the creation of the latter worthy, as the other
great abbey, in the town proper, was the monument of his repose. The
cliff is still there; and a winding staircase, in the latest taste,
enables you conveniently to explore its recesses. These sacred niches
are scooped out of the rock, and will give you an impression if you
cannot do without one. You will feel them to be sufficiently venerable
when you learn that the particular pigeon-hole of Saint Gatianus, the
first Christian missionary to Gaul, dates from the third century. They
have been dealt with as the Catholic Church deals with most of such
places to-day; polished and furbished up, labelled and
ticketed--_edited_, with notes, in short, like an old book. The process
is a mistake--the early editions had more sanctity. The modern buildings
(of the Sacred Heart), on which you look down from these points of
vantage, are in the vulgar taste which sets its so mechanical stamp on
all new Catholic work; but there was nevertheless a great sweetness in
the scene. The afternoon was lovely, and it was flushing to a close. The
large garden stretched beneath us, blooming with fruit and and wine and
succulent promise, and beyond it flowed the shining river. The air was
still, the shadows were long, and the place, after all, was full of
memories, most of which might pass for virtuous. It certainly was better
than Plessis-les-Tours.
[Illustration]
Chapter iv
[Blois]
Your business at Tours is to make excursions; and if you make them all
you will be always under arms. The land is a rich reliquary, and an
hour's drive from the town in almost any direction will bring you to the
knowledge of some curious fragment of domestic or ecclesiastical
architecture, some turreted manor, some lonely tower, some gabled
village, some scene of something. Yet even if you do everything--which
was not my case--you cannot hope to tell everything, and, fortunately
for you, the excursions divide themselves into the greater and the less.
You may achieve most of the greater in a week or two; but a summer in
Touraine (which, by the way, must be a
[Illustration: BLOIS]
delectable thing) would hold none too many days for the others. If you
come down to Tours from Paris your best economy is to spend a few days
at Blois, where a clumsy but rather attractive little inn on the edge of
the river will offer you a certain amount of that familiar and
intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces
teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation.
Such an economy I was unable to practise. I could only go to Blois (from
Tours) to spend the day; but this feat I accomplished twice over. It is
a very sympathetic little town, as we say nowadays, and a week there
would be sociable even without company. Seated on the north bank of the
Loire, it presents a bright, clean face to the sun and has that aspect
of cheerful leisure which belongs to all white towns that reflect
themselves in shining waters. It is the water-front only of Blois,
however, that exhibits this fresh complexion; the interior is of a
proper brownness, as old sallow books are bound in vellum. The only
disappointment is perforce the discovery that the castle, which is the
special object of one's pilgrimage, does not overhang the river, as I
had always allowed myself to understand. It overhangs the town, but is
scarcely visible from the stream. That peculiar good fortune is reserved
for Amboise and Chaumont.
The Château de Blois is one of the most beautiful and elaborate of all
the old royal residences of this part of France, and I suppose it should
have all the honours of my description. As you cross its threshold you
step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance. But
it is too rich to describe--I can only pick out the high lights. It must
be premised that in speaking of it as we see it to-day we speak of a
monument unsparingly restored. The work of restoration has been as
ingenious as it is profuse, but it rather chills the imagination. This
is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle
from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they leave the
river, have pretensions to romantic steepness; one of them, indeed,
which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the
_escalier monumental_), achieved this result so successfully as to
remind me vaguely--I hardly know why--of the great slope of the Capitol,
beside the Ara Coeli, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle which
figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced)
exhibits the marks of restoration with the greatest assurance. The long
façade, consisting only of balconied windows deeply recessed, erects
itself on the summit of a considerable hill, which gives a fine,
plunging movement to its foundations. The deep niches of the windows are
all aglow with colour. They have been repainted with red and blue,
relieved with gold figures; and each of them looks more like the royal
box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with memories.
For all this, however, and in spite of the fact that, as in some others
of the châteaux of Touraine (always excepting the colossal Chambord,
which is not in Touraine), there is less vastness than one had expected,
the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive. Here, as
elsewhere, lightness and grace are the keynote; and the recesses of the
windows, with their happy proportions, their sculpture and their colour,
are the hollow sockets of the human ornament. They need the figure of a
Francis I. to complete them, or of a Diane de Poitiers, or even of a
Henry III. The stand of this empty gilt cage emerges from a bed of light
verdure which has been allowed to mass itself there and which
contributes
[Illustration: BLOIS--THE CHÂTEAU]
to the springing look of the walls; while on the right it joins the most
modern portion of the castle, the building erected, on foundations of
enormous height and solidity, in 1635, by Gaston d'Orléans. This fine
frigid mansion--the proper view of it is from the court within--is one
of the masterpieces of François Mansard, whom a kind providence did not
allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his
superior age. That had been a part of Gaston's plan--he was a blunderer
born, and this precious project was worthy of him. This execution of it
would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history. Partially
performed, the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted; for as one
stands in the court of the castle and lets one's eye wander from the
splendid wing of Francis I.--which is the last word of free and joyous
invention--to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous pavilion
of Mansard, one makes one's reflections upon the advantage, in even the
least personal of the arts, of having something to say, and upon the
stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of
negatives. Gaston's wing, taken by itself, has much of the _bel air_
which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV.; but, taken in
contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbour, it marks the
difference between inspiration and calculation. We scarcely grudge it
its place, however, for it adds a price to the rest of the pile.
We have entered the court, by the way, by jumping over the walls. The
more orthodox method is to follow a modern terrace which leads to the
left, from the side of the edifice that I began by speaking of, and
passes round, ascending, to a little square on a considerably higher
level, a square not, like the rather prosaic space on which the back (as
I have called it) looks out, a thoroughfare. This small empty _place_,
oblong in form, at once bright and quiet, and which ought to be
grass-grown, offers an excellent setting to the entrance-front of the
palace--the wing of Louis XII. The restoration here has been lavish; but
it was perhaps but an inevitable reaction against the injuries, still
more lavish, by which the unfortunate building had long been
overwhelmed. It had fallen into a state of ruinous neglect, relieved
only by the misuse proceeding from successive generations of soldiers,
for whom its charming chambers served as barrack-room. Whitewashed,
mutilated, dishonoured, the castle of Blois may be said to have escaped
simply with its life. This is the history of Amboise as well, and is to
a certain extent the history of Chambord. Delightful, at any rate, was
the refreshed façade of Louis XII. as I stood and looked at it one
bright September morning. In that soft, clear, merry light of Touraine,
everything shows, everything speaks. Charming are the taste, the happy
proportions, the colour of this beautiful front, to which the new
feeling for a purely domestic architecture--an architecture of security
and tranquillity, in which art could indulge itself--gave an air of
youth and gladness. It is true that for a long time to come the castle
of Blois was neither very safe nor very quiet; but its dangers came from
within, from the evil passions of its inhabitants, and not from siege or
invasion. The front of Louis XII. is of red brick, crossed here and
there with purple; and the purple slate of the high roof, relieved with
chimneys beautifully treated and with the embroidered caps of pinnacles
and arches, with the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and the festooned
rope which formed the devices of Anne of Brittany--the tone of this
decorative roof carries out the mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair
windows open as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the
Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the
châteaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in
the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which gives
this line the look, above the expressive aperture, of a pencilled
eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped
charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had
been--the father of his people, as he was called (I believe he remitted
various taxes)--he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution;
and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of
the primitive statue demolished at that period.
Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round
you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces
of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to peep
out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage
of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that fronts
toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the
wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which
you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant,
this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of
the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in
which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle
of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding
staircase (plausibly, but I believe not religiously, restored), which
even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms
a kind of chiselled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the stairs
are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its balconies, its
pillars, its great central columns, is wrought over with lovely images,
strange and ingenious devices, prime among which is the great heraldic
salamander of Francis I. The salamander is everywhere at Blois--over the
chimneys, over the doors, on the walls. This whole quarter of the castle
bears the stamp of that eminently pictorial prince. The running cornice
along the top of the front is like an unfolded, an elongated bracelet.
The windows of the attic are like shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the
medallions, the statuettes, the festoons are like the elaboration of
some precious cabinet rather than the details of a building exposed to
the weather and to the ages. In the interior there is a profusion of
restoration, and it is all restoration in colour. This has been,
evidently, a work of great energy and cost, but it will easily strike
you as overdone. The universal freshness is a discord, a false note; it
seems to light up the dusky past with an unnatural glare. Begun in the
reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible process--the more terrible always
the better case you conceive made out for it--has been carried so far
that there is now scarcely a square inch of the interior that preserves
the colour of the past. It is true that the place had been so coated
over with modern abuse that something was needed to keep it alive; it is
only perhaps a pity the clever doctors, not content with saving its
life, should have undertaken to restore its bloom. The love of
consistency, in such a business, is a dangerous lure. All the old
apartments have been rechristened, as it were; the geography of the
castle has been re-established. The guard-rooms, the bedrooms, the
closets, the oratories have recovered their identity. Every spot
connected with the murder of the Duke of Guise is pointed out by a
small, shrill boy, who takes you from room to room and who has learned
his lesson in perfection. The place is full of Catherine de'Medici, of
Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of echoes, of possible evocations
and revivals. It is covered with crimson and gold. The fireplaces and
the ceilings are magnificent; they look like expensive "sets" at the
grand opera.
I should have mentioned that below, in the court, the front of the wing
of Gaston d'Orléans faces you as you enter, so that the place is a
course of French history. Inferior in beauty and grace to the other
portions of the castle, the wing is yet a nobler monument than the
memory of Gaston deserves. The second of the sons of Henry IV.--who was
no more fortunate as a father than as a husband--younger brother of
Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated,
most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful _fille à
marier_ in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle
of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal
Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his pusillanimity
and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after
so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the
project--begun, but not completed--of demolishing the beautiful
habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston
d'Orléans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the
Château de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of
religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the
principal events of his depraved and dramatic rule. It has been restored
more than enough, as I have said, by architects and decorators; the
visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are at once
brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished), undertakes a
little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself from the
things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in
its form and dress--its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates,
its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude of personal
development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of
costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled
picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light
and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is
the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it
complete. What episode was ever more perfect--looked at as a dramatic
occurrence--than the murder of the Duke of Guise? The insolent
prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the
author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation
of horror in what followed it--render it, as a crime, one of the classic
things.
But we must not take the Château de Blois too hard: I went there, after
all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories your
visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
removing the impression. You may treat yourself at Blois to a very
cheerful afterpiece. There is a charming industry practised there, and
practised in charming conditions. Follow the bright little quay down the
river till you get quite out of the town and reach the point where the
road beside the Loire becomes sinuous and attractive, turns the corner
of diminutive headlands and makes you wonder what is beyond. Let not
your curiosity induce you, however, to pass by a modest white villa
which overlooks the stream, enclosed in a fresh little court; for here
dwells an artist--an artist in faience. There is no sort of sign, and
the place looks peculiarly private. But if you ring at the gate you will
not be turned away. You will, on the contrary, be ushered upstairs into
a parlour--there is nothing resembling a shop--encumbered with specimens
of remarkably handsome pottery. The ware is of the best, a careful
reproduction of old forms, colours, devices; and the master of the
establishment is one of those completely artistic types that are often
found in France. His reception is as friendly as his work is ingenious;
and I think it is not too much to say that you like the work better
because he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars, lamps, platters,
_plaques_, with their brilliant glaze, their innumerable figures, their
family likeness and wide variations, are scattered through his occupied
rooms; they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and as household
ornament. As we all know, this is an age of prose, of machinery, of
wholesale production, of coarse and hasty processes. But one brings away
from the establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse the sense of a
less eager activity and a greater search for perfection. He has but a
few workmen and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little
vignette, leaves an impression--the quiet white house in its garden on
the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the
ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort
Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris--though that be
much to say--have forgiven.
[Illustration]
Chapter v
[Chambord]
The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord, and came
back by the Château de Cheverny and the forest of Russy--a charming
little expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a
rainy season that was spotted with bright days) contributed not a
little. To go to Chambord you cross the Loire, leave it on one side and
strike away through a country in which salient features become less and
less numerous and which at last has no other quality than a look of
intense and peculiar rurality--the characteristic, even when it be not
the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the
appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply
the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in
England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and
sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great _potager_,
without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long,
low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, fences, signs of
property; everything is absorbed in the general flatness--the patches of
vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children (planted
and staring and almost always pretty), the women in the fields, the
white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's
drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend
double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall which does
duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed
a straight avenue through a disfeatured park--the park of Chambord has
twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy
plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and
is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in
France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutions.
Nevertheless its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues
give this frugal shrubbery a certain state; just as its shabbiness
places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions awaiting
you. You pursue one of these long perspectives a proportionate time, and
at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently
out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that formerly
surrounded it has, in vulgar parlance, let it down and given it a
monstrous over-crowned air that is at the same time a magnificent
Orientalism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the
lanterns, the chimneys look more like the spires of a city than the
salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and
find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
strange mixture of society and solitude. A little village clusters
within view of its liberal windows, and a couple of inns near by offer
entertainment to pilgrims. These things of course are incidents of the
political proscription which hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal--royal in its great scale, its grand air, its
indifference to common considerations. If a cat may look at a king, a
tavern may look at a palace. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary
structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed there is
something interesting in any monument of a great system, any bold
presentation of a tradition.
You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and
tidy and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect
the neighbourhood of a Court veritably set the fashion, and you proceed
across the grass and the gravel to a small door, a door infinitely
subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.
Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a
person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime), after which
she ushers you over a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the
strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this
court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my
guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round
towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each
angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in
the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of
these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its
shadow
[Illustration: CHAMBORD]
over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables,
the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was
empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections,
were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole
thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a
rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient
and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to
understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire
to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so
easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a
wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled
prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four
hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The
repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his
revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double
staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of
steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This
staircase is a truly majestic piece of humour; it gives you the note, as
it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in
four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to
the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the
termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),
forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of the pile. This lantern is
tipped with a huge _fleur-de-lis_ in stone--the only one, I believe,
that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow
windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled,
melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you
walk about the roof in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies,
through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in
itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous
quality, and with its profuse ornamentation--the salamander of Francis
I. is a constant motive--its lonely pavements, its sunny niches, the
balcony that looks down over the closed and grass-grown main entrance, a
strange, half-sad, half-brilliant charm. The stonework is covered with
fine mould. There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet
mildewed corners of courts and terraces into which the traveller who
wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows. They show
you two or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon portraits, hideous
tapestries from the ladies of France, a collection of the toys of the
_enfant du miracle_, all military and of the finest make. "Tout cela
fonctionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons; and I wondered,
if he should take it into his head to fire off his little cannon, how
much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.
From below the castle would look crushed by the redundancy of its upper
protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers,
which appear to give it a robust lateral development. These towers,
however, fine as they are in their way, struck me as a little stupid;
they are the exaggeration of an exaggeration. In a building erected
after the days of defence and proclaiming its peaceful character from
its hundred embroideries and cupolas, they seem to indicate a want of
invention. I shall risk the accusation of bad taste if I say that,
impressive as it is, the Château de Chambord seemed to me to have
altogether a touch of that quality of stupidity. The trouble is that it
stands for nothing very momentous; it has not happened, in spite of
sundry vicissitudes, to have a strongly-marked career. Compared with
that of Blois and Amboise its past is rather vacant; and one feels to a
certain extent the contrast between its pompous appearance and its
spacious but somewhat colourless annals. It had indeed the good fortune
to be erected by Francis I., whose name by itself expresses a good deal
of history. Why he should have built a palace in those sandy plains will
ever remain an unanswered question, for kings have never been obliged to
give reasons. In addition to the fact that the country was rich in game
and that Francis was a passionate hunter, it is suggested by M. de la
Saussaye, the author of the very complete little account of the place
which you may buy at the bookseller's at Blois, that he was governed in
his choice of the site by the chance that a charming woman had
previously lived there. The Comtesse de Thoury had a manor in the
neighbourhood, and the Comtesse de Thoury had been the object of a
youthful passion on the part of the most susceptible of princes before
his accession to the throne. This great pile was reared, therefore,
according to M. de la Saussaye, as a _souvenir de premières amours_! It
is certainly a very massive memento; and if these tender passages were
proportionate to the building that commemorates them, the flame blazed
indeed. There has been much discussion as to the architect employed by
Francis I., and the honour of having designed this splendid residence
has been claimed for several of the Italian artists who early in the
sixteenth century came to seek patronage in France. It seems well
established to-day, however, that Chambord was the work neither of
Primaticcio, of Vignola, nor of Il Rosso, all of whom have left some
trace of their sojourn in France; but of an obscure yet very complete
genius, Pierre Nepveu, known as Pierre Trinqueau, who is designated in
the papers which preserve in some degree the history of the origin of
the edifice, as the _maistre de l'oeuvre de maçonnerie_. Behind this
modest title, apparently, we must recognise one of the most original
talents of the French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigour of
the artistic life of that period that, brilliant production being
everywhere abundant, an artist of so high a value should not have been
treated by his contemporaries as a celebrity. We make our celebrities
to-day at smaller cost.
The immediate successors of Francis I. continued to visit Chambord; but
it was neglected by Henry IV. and was never afterwards a favourite
residence of any French king. Louis XIV. appeared there on several
occasions, and the apparition was characteristically brilliant; but
Chambord could not long detain a monarch who had gone to the expense of
creating a Versailles ten miles from Paris. With Versailles,
Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud within easy reach of their
capital, the later French sovereigns had little reason to take the air
in the dreariest province of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered
from royal indifference, though in the last century a use was found for
its deserted halls. In 1725 it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus
Leczynski, who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King
of Poland and being ousted from his throne, and who, at this time a
refugee in France, had found a compensation for some of his misfortunes
in marrying his daughter to Louis XV. He lived eight years at Chambord
and filled up the moats of the castle. In 1748 it found an illustrious
tenant in the person of Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who,
however, two years after he had taken possession of it, terminated a
life which would have been longer had he been less determined to make it
agreeable. The Revolution, of course, was not kind to Chambord. It
despoiled it in so far as possible of every vestige of its royal origin,
and swept like a whirlwind through apartments to which upwards of two
centuries had contributed a treasure of decoration and furniture. In
that wild blast these precious things were destroyed or for ever
scattered. In 1791 an odd proposal was made to the French Government by
a company of English Quakers, who had conceived the bold idea of
establishing in the palace a manufacture of some peaceful commodity not
to-day recorded. Napoleon allotted Chambord, as a "dotation," to one of
his marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it was converted, in
Napoleonic fashion, into the so-called principality of Wagram. By the
Princess of Wagram, the marshal's widow, it was, after the Restoration,
sold to the trustees of a national subscription which had been
established for the purpose of presenting it to the infant Duke of
Bordeaux, then prospective King of France. The presentation was duly
made; but the Comte de Chambord, who had changed his title in
recognition of the gift, was despoiled of his property by the government
of Louis Philippe. He appealed for redress to the tribunals of his
country; and the consequence of his appeal was an interminable
litigation, by which, however, finally, after the lapse of twenty-five
years, he was established in his rights. In 1871 he paid his first visit
to the domain which had been offered him half a century before, a term
of which he had spent forty years in exile. It was from Chambord that
he dated his famous letter of the 5th of July of that year--the letter,
directed to his so-called subjects, in which he waves aloft the white
flag of the Bourbons. This rare miscalculation--virtually an invitation
to the French people to repudiate, as their national ensign, that
immortal tricolour, the flag of the Revolution and the Empire, under
which they have won the glory which of all glories has hitherto been
dearest to them and which is associated with the most romantic, the most
heroic, the epic, the consolatory, period of their history--this
luckless manifesto, I say, appears to give the measure of the political
wisdom of the excellent Henry V. The proposal should have had less
simplicity or the people less irony.
On the whole Chambord makes a great impression; and the hour I was
there, while the yellow afternoon light slanted upon the September
woods, there was a dignity in its desolation. It spoke, with a muffled
but audible voice, of the vanished monarchy, which had been so strong,
so splendid, but to-day had become a vision almost as fantastic as the
cupolas and chimneys that rose before me. I thought, while I lingered
there, of all the fine things it takes to make up such a monarchy; and
how one of them is a superfluity of mouldering, empty palaces. Chambord
is touching--that is the best word for it; and if the hopes of another
restoration are in the follies of the Republic, a little reflection on
that eloquence of ruin ought to put the Republic on its guard. A
sentimental tourist may venture to remark that in presence of all the
haunted houses that appeal in this mystical manner to the retrospective
imagination it cannot afford to be foolish. I thought of all this as I
drove back to Blois by the way of the Château de Cheverny. The road took
us out of the park of Chambord, but through a region of flat woodland,
where the trees were not mighty, and again into the prosy plain of the
Sologne--a thankless soil to sow, I believe, but lately much amended by
the magic of cheerful French industry and thrift. The light had already
begun to fade, and my drive reminded me of a passage in some rural novel
of Madame Sand. I passed a couple of timber and plaster churches, which
looked very old, black and crooked, and had lumpish wooden porches and
galleries encircling the base. By the time I reached Cheverny the clear
twilight had approached. It was late to ask to be allowed to visit an
inhabited house; but it was the hour at which I like best to visit
almost anything. My coachman drew up before a gateway, in a high wall,
which opened upon a short avenue, along which I took my way on foot; the
coachmen in those parts being, for reasons best known to themselves,
mortally averse to driving up to a house. I answered the challenge of a
very tidy little portress who sat, in company with a couple of children,
enjoying the evening air in front of her lodge, and who told me to walk
a little farther and turn to the right. I obeyed her to the letter, and
my turn brought me into sight of a house as charming as an old manor in
a fairy tale. I had but a rapid and partial view of Cheverny; but that
view was a glimpse of perfection. A light, sweet mansion stood looking
over a wide green lawn, over banks of flowers and groups of trees. It
had a striking character of elegance, produced partly by a series of
Renaissance busts let into circular niches in the façade. The place
looked so private, so reserved, that it seemed an act of violence to
ring, a stranger and foreigner, at the graceful door. But if I had not
rung I should be unable to express--as it is such a pleasure to do--my
sense of the exceeding courtesy with which this admirable house is
shown. It was near the dinner-hour--the most sacred hour of the day; but
I was freely conducted into the inhabited apartments. They are extremely
beautiful. What I chiefly remember is the charming staircase of white
embroidered stone, and the great _salle des gardes_ and _chambre à
coucher du roi_ on the second floor. Cheverny, built in 1634, is of a
much later date than the other royal residences of this part of France;
it belongs to the end of the Renaissance and has a touch of the rococo.
The guard-room is a superb apartment; and as it contains little save its
magnificent ceiling and fireplace and certain dim tapestries on its
walls, you the more easily take the measure of its noble proportions.
The servant opened the shutters of a single window, and the last rays of
the twilight slanted into the rich brown gloom. It was in the same
picturesque fashion that I saw the bedroom (adjoining) of Henry IV.,
where a legendary-looking bed, draped in folds long unaltered, defined
itself in the haunted dusk. Cheverny remains to me a very charming, a
partly mysterious vision. I drove back to Blois in the dark, some nine
miles, through the forest of Russy, which belongs to the State and
which, though consisting apparently of small timber, looked under the
stars sufficiently vast and primeval. There was a damp autumnal smell
and the occasional sound of a stirring thing; and as I moved through the
evening air I thought of Francis I. and Henry IV.
[Illustration]
Chapter vi
[Amboise]
You may go to Amboise either from Blois or from Tours; it is about
half-way between these towns. The great point is to go, especially if
you have put it off repeatedly; and to go, if possible, on a day when
the great view of the Loire, which you enjoy from the battlements and
terraces, presents itself under a friendly sky. Three persons, of whom
the author of these lines was one, spent the greater part of a perfect
Sunday morning in looking at it. It was astonishing, in the course of
the rainiest season in the memory of the oldest Tourangeau, how many
perfect days we found to our hand. The town of Amboise lies, like Tours,
on the left bank of the river--a little white-faced town staring across
an admirable bridge and leaning, behind, as it were, against the
pedestal of rock on which the dark castle masses itself. The town is so
small, the pedestal so big and the castle so high and striking, that
the clustered houses at the base of the rock are like the crumbs that
have fallen from a well-laden table. You pass among them, however, to
ascend by a circuit to the château, which you attack, obliquely, from
behind. It is the property of the Comte de Paris, another pretender to
the French throne; having come to him remotely, by inheritance, from his
ancestor, the Duc de Penthièvre, who toward the close of the last
century bought it from the Crown, which had recovered it after a lapse.
Like the castle of Blois, it has been injured and defaced by base uses,
but, unlike the castle of Blois, it has not been completely restored.
"It is very, very dirty, but very curious"--it is in these terms that I
heard it described by an English lady who was generally to be found
engaged upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little _salon de lecture_ of
the hotel at Tours. The description is not inaccurate; but it should be
said that if part of the dirtiness of Amboise is the result of its
having served for years as a barrack and as a prison, part of it comes
from the presence of restoring stonemasons, who have woven over a
considerable portion of it a mask of scaffolding. There is a good deal
of neatness as well, and the restoration of some of the parts seems
finished. This process, at Amboise, consists for the most part simply of
removing the vulgar excrescences of the last two centuries.
The interior is virtually a blank, the old apartments having been
chopped up into small modern rooms; it will have to be completely
reconstructed. A worthy woman with a military profile and that sharp,
positive manner which the goodwives who show you through the châteaux of
Touraine are rather apt to have, and in whose high respectability, to
say nothing of the frill of
[Illustration: AMBOISE--THE CHÂTEAU]
her cap and the cut of her thick brown dress, my companions and I
thought we discovered the particular note, or _nuance_, of Orleanism--a
competent, appreciative, peremptory person, I say--attended us through
the particularly delightful hour we spent upon the ramparts of Amboise.
Denuded and disfeatured within and bristling without with bricklayers'
ladders, the place was yet extraordinarily impressive and interesting. I
should mention that we spent a great deal of time in looking at the
view. Sweet was the view, and magnificent; we preferred it so much to
certain portions of the interior, and to occasional effusions of
historical information, that the old lady with the profile sometimes
lost patience with us. We laid ourselves open to the charge of
preferring it even to the little chapel of Saint Hubert, which stands on
the edge of the great terrace and has, over the portal, a wonderful
sculpture of the miraculous hunt of that holy man. In the way of plastic
art this elaborate scene is the gem of Amboise. It seemed to us that we
had never been in a place where there are so many points of vantage to
look down from. In the matter of position Amboise is certainly supreme
in the list of perched places; and I say this with a proper recollection
of the claims of Chaumont and of Loches--which latter, by the way (the
afterthought is due), is not on the Loire. The platforms, the bastions,
the terraces, the high-niched windows and balconies, the hanging gardens
and dizzy crenellations, of this complicated structure, keep you in
perpetual intercourse with an immense horizon. The great feature of the
place is the obligatory round tower which occupies the northern end of
it, and which has now been completely restored. It is of astounding
size, a fortress in itself, and contains, instead of a staircase, a
wonderful inclined plane, so wide and gradual that a coach and four may
be driven to the top. This colossal cylinder has to-day no visible use;
but it corresponds, happily enough, with the great circle of the
prospect. The gardens of Amboise, lifted high aloft, covering the
irregular remnants of the platform on which the castle stands and making
up in picturesqueness what they lack in extent, constitute of course but
a scanty domain. But bathed, as we found them, in the autumn sunshine
and doubly private from their aerial site, they offered irresistible
opportunities for a stroll interrupted, as one leaned against their low
parapets, by long contemplative pauses. I remember in particular a
certain terrace planted with clipped limes upon which we looked down
from the summit of the big tower. It seemed from that point to be
absolutely necessary to one's happiness to go down and spend the rest of
the morning there; it was an ideal place to walk to and fro and talk.
Our venerable conductress, to whom our relation had gradually become
more filial, permitted us to gratify this innocent wish--to the extent,
that is, of taking a turn or two under the mossy _tilleuls_. At the end
of this terrace is the low door, in a wall, against the top of which, in
1498, Charles VIII., according to an accepted tradition, knocked his
head to such good purpose that he died. It was within the walls of
Amboise that his widow, Anne of Brittany, already in mourning for three
children, two of whom we have seen commemorated in sepulchral marble at
Tours, spent the first violence of that grief which was presently
dispelled by a union with her husband's cousin and successor, Louis XII.
Amboise was a frequent resort of the French Court during the sixteenth
century; it was here that the young Mary Stuart spent sundry hours of
her first marriage. The wars of religion have left here the ineffaceable
stain which they left wherever they passed. An imaginative visitor at
Amboise to-day may fancy that the traces of blood are mixed with the red
rust on the crossed iron bars of the grim-looking balcony to which the
heads of the Huguenots executed on the discovery of the conspiracy of La
Renaudie are rumoured to have been suspended. There was room on the
stout balustrade--an admirable piece of work--for a ghastly array. The
same rumour represents Catherine de'Medici and the young queen as
watching from this balcony the _noyades_ of the captured Huguenots in
the Loire. The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if
possible, worse; but there is little doubt that the future Queen of
Scots learnt the first lessons of life at a horrible school. If in
subsequent years she was a prodigy of innocence and virtue, it was not
the fault of her whilom mother-in-law, of her uncles of the house of
Guise, or of the examples presented to her either at the windows of the
castle of Amboise or in its more private recesses. It was difficult to
believe in these dark deeds, however, as we looked through the golden
morning at the placidity of the far-shining Loire. The ultimate
consequence of this spectacle was a desire to follow the river as far as
the castle of Chaumont. It is true that the cruelties practised of old
at Amboise might have seemed less phantasmal to persons destined to
suffer from a modern form of inhumanity. The mistress of the little inn
at the base of the castle-rock--it stands very pleasantly beside the
river, and we had breakfasted there--declared to us that the Château de
Chaumont, which is often during the autumn closed to visitors, was at
that particular moment standing so wide open to receive us that it was
our duty to hire one of her carriages and drive thither with speed. This
assurance was so satisfactory that we presently found ourselves seated
in this wily woman's most commodious vehicle and rolling, neither too
fast nor too slow, along the margin of the Loire. The drive of about an
hour, beneath constant clumps of chestnuts, was charming enough to have
been taken for itself; and indeed when we reached Chaumont we saw that
our reward was to be simply the usual reward of virtue, the
consciousness of having attempted the right. The Château de Chaumont was
inexorably closed; so we learned from a talkative lodge-keeper, who gave
what grace she could to her refusal. This good woman's dilemma was
almost touching; she wished to reconcile two impossibles. The castle was
not to be visited, for the family of its master was staying there; and
yet she was loath to turn away a party of which she was good enough to
say that it had a _grand genre_; for, as she also remarked, she had her
living to earn. She tried to arrange a compromise, one of the elements
of which was that we should descend from our carriage and trudge up a
hill which would bring us to a designated point where, over the paling
of the garden, we might obtain an oblique and surreptitious view of a
small portion of the castle walls. This suggestion led us to inquire (of
each other) to what degree of baseness it is lawful for an enlightened
lover of the picturesque to resort in order not to have a blank page in
his collection. One of our trio decided characteristically against any
form of derogation; so she sat in the carriage and sketched some object
that was public property while her two companions, who were not so
proud, trudged up a muddy ascent which formed a kind of back-stairs. It
is perhaps no more than they deserved that they were disappointed.
Chaumont is feudal, if you please; but the modern spirit is in
possession. It forms a vast clean-scraped mass, with big round towers,
ungarnished with a leaf of ivy or a patch of moss, surrounded by gardens
of moderate extent (save where the muddy lane of which I speak passes
near it), and looking rather like an enormously magnified villa. The
great merit of Chaumont is its position, which almost exactly resembles
that of Amboise; it sweeps the river up and down and seems to look over
half the province. This, however, was better appreciated as, after
coming down the hill and re-entering the carriage, we drove across the
long suspension-bridge which crosses the Loire just beyond the village
and over which we made our way to the small station of Onzain, at the
farther end, to take the train back to Tours. Look back from the middle
of this bridge; the whole picture composes, as the painters say. The
towers, the pinnacles, the fair front of the château, perched above its
fringe of garden and the rusty roofs of the village and facing the
afternoon sky, which is reflected also in the great stream that sweeps
below, all this makes a contribution to your happiest memories of
Touraine.
[Illustration]
Chapter vii
[Chenonceaux]
We never went to Chinon; it was a fatality. We planned it a dozen times;
but the weather interfered, or the trains didn't suit, or one of the
party was fatigued with the adventures of the day before. This excursion
was so much postponed that it was finally postponed to everything.
Besides, we had to go to Chenonceaux, to Azay-le-Rideau, to Langeais, to
Loches. So I have not the memory of Chinon; I have only the regret. But
regret, as well as memory, has its visions; especially when, like
memory, it is assisted by photographs. The castle of Chinon in this form
appears to me as an enormous ruin, a mediæval fortress of the extent
almost of a city. It covers a hill above the Vienne, and after being
impregnable in its time is indestructible to-day. (I risk this phrase in
the face of the prosaic truth. Chinon, in the days when it was a prize,
more than once suffered capture, and at present it is crumbling inch by
inch. It is apparent, however, I believe, that these inches encroach
little upon acres of masonry.) It was in the castle that Jeanne Dare had
her first interview with Charles VII., and it is in the town that
François Rabelais is supposed to have been born. To the castle,
moreover, the lover of the picturesque is earnestly recommended to
direct his steps. But one always misses something, and I would rather
have missed Chinon than Chenonceaux. Fortunate exceedingly were the few
hours we passed on the spot on which we missed nothing.
"In 1747," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his "Confessions," "we went to
spend the autumn in Touraine, at the Château of Chenonceaux, a royal
residence upon the Cher, built by Henry II. for Diana of Poitiers, whose
initials are still to be seen there, and now in possession of M. Dupin,
the farmer-general. We amused ourselves greatly at this fine place; the
living was of the best, and I became as fat as a monk. We made a great
deal of music and acted comedies."
This is the only description that Rousseau gives of one of the most
romantic houses in France and of an episode that must have counted as
one of the most agreeable in his uncomfortable career. The eighteenth
century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques
has said that Chenonceaux was a "beau lieu," he thinks himself absolved
from further characterisation. We later sons of time have, both for our
pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am
afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute
than this to the architectural gem of Touraine. Fortunately I can
discharge my debt with gratitude. In going from Tours you leave the
valley of the Loire and enter that of the Cher, and at the end of about
an hour you see the turrets of the castle on your right, among the
trees, down in the meadows, beside the quiet little river. The station
and the village are about ten minutes' walk from the château, and the
village contains a very tidy inn, where, if you are not in too great a
hurry to commune with the shades of the royal favourite and the jealous
queen, you will perhaps stop and order a dinner to be ready for you in
the evening. A straight, tall avenue leads to the grounds of the castle;
what I owe to exactitude compels me to add that it is crossed by the
railway-line. The place is so arranged, however, that the château need
know nothing of passing trains--which pass, indeed, though the grounds
are not large, at a very sufficient distance. I may add that the trains
throughout this part of France have a noiseless, desultory, dawdling,
almost stationary quality, which makes them less of an offence than
usual. It was a Sunday afternoon and the light was yellow save under the
trees of the avenue, where, in spite of the waning of September, it was
duskily green. Three or four peasants, in festal attire, were strolling
about. On a bench at the beginning of the avenue sat a man with two
women. As I advanced with my companions he rose, after a sudden stare,
and approached me with a smile in which (to be Johnsonian for a moment)
certitude was mitigated by modesty and eagerness was embellished with
respect. He came toward me with a salutation that I had seen before, and
I am happy to say that after an instant I ceased to be guilty of the
brutality of not knowing where. There was only one place in the world
where people smile like that, only one place where the art of salutation
has that perfect grace. This excellent creature used to crook his arm,
[Illustration: CHENONCEAUX]
in Venice, when I stepped into my gondola; and I now laid my hand on
that member with the familiarity of glad recognition; for it was only
surprise that had kept me even for a moment from accepting the genial
Francesco as an ornament of the landscape of Touraine. What on
earth--the phrase is the right one--was a Venetian gondolier doing at
Chenonceaux? He had been brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the
mistress of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher. Our meeting
was affectionate, though there was a kind of violence in seeing him so
far from home. He was too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown
stout, and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He remarked that the
life of the household to which he had the honour to belong was that of a
_casa regia_; which must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was the sympathetic Checco
still; and for five minutes after I left him I thought less about the
little pleasure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
Adriatic.
But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure
that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the château, the
small scale of which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
court, at the entrance of which a massive and detached round tower, with
a turret on its brow (a relic of the building that preceded the actual
villa), appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed--or is
enclosed at least only by the gardens, portions of which are at present
in process of radical readjustment. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no
great height, its delicate façade stands up boldly enough. This façade,
one of the most finished things in Touraine, consists of two storeys,
surmounted by an attic which, as so often in the buildings of the
French Renaissance, is the richest part of the house. The high-pitched
roof contains three windows of beautiful design, covered with
embroidered caps and flowering into crocketed spires. The window above
the door is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in the form of a
double pulpit--one of the most charming features of the front.
Chenonceaux is not large, as I say, but into its delicate compass is
packed a great deal of history--history which differs from that of
Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sentimental kind. The
echoes of the place, faint and far as they are to-day, are not
political, but personal. Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the
year 1515, when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary who had
grown rich in handling the finances of Normandy and had acquired the
estate from a family which, after giving it many feudal lords, had
fallen into poverty, erected the present structure on the foundations of
an old mill. The design is attributed, with I know not what justice, to
Pierre Nepveu, _alias_ Trinqueau, the audacious architect of Chambord.
On the death of Bohier the house passed to his son, who, however, was
forced, under cruel pressure, to surrender it to the Crown in
compensation for a so-called deficit in the official accounts of this
rash parent and predecessor. Francis I. held the place till his death;
but Henry II., on ascending the throne, presented it out of hand to that
mature charmer, the admired of two generations, Diana of Poitiers. Diana
enjoyed it till the death of her protector; but when this event occurred
the widow of the monarch, who had been obliged to submit in silence, for
years, to the ascendency of a rival, took the most pardonable of all the
revenges with which the name of Catherine de'Medici is associated and
turned her out of doors. Diana was not in want of refuges, Catherine
went through the form of giving her Chaumont in exchange; but there was
only one Chenonceaux. Catherine devoted herself to making the place more
completely unique. The feature that renders it sole of its kind is not
appreciated till you wander round to either side of the house. If a
certain springing lightness is the characteristic of Chenonceaux, if it
bears in every line the aspect of a place of recreation--a place
intended for delicate, chosen pleasures--nothing can confirm this
expression better than the strange, unexpected movement with which, from
behind, it carries itself across the river. The earlier building stands
in the water; it had inherited the foundations of the mill destroyed by
Thomas Bohier. The first step therefore had been taken upon solid piles
of masonry; and the ingenious Catherine--she was a _raffinée_--simply
proceeded to take the others. She continued the piles to the opposite
bank of the Cher, and over them she threw a long, straight gallery of
two tiers. This part of the château, which mainly resembles a house
built upon a bridge and occupying its entire length, is of course the
great curiosity of Chenonceaux. It forms on each floor a charming
corridor, which, within, is illuminated from either side by the
flickering river-light. The architecture of these galleries, seen from
without, is less elegant than that of the main building, but the aspect
of the whole thing is delightful. I have spoken of Chenonceaux as a
"villa," using the word advisedly, for the place is neither a castle nor
a palace. It is a very exceptional villa, but it has the
villa-quality--the look of being intended for life in common. This look
is not at all contradicted by the wing across the Cher, which only
suggests indoor perspectives and intimate pleasures--walks in pairs on
rainy days; games and dances on autumn nights; together with as much as
may be of moonlighted dialogue (or silence) in the course of evenings
more genial still, in the well-marked recesses of windows.
It is safe to say that such things took place there in the last century,
during the kindly reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin. This period
presents itself as the happiest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I know not
what festive train the great Diana may have led, and my imagination, I
am afraid, is only feebly kindled by the records of the luxurious
pastimes organised on the banks of the Cher by that terrible daughter of
the Medici whose appreciation of the good things of life was perfectly
consistent with a failure to perceive why others should live to enjoy
them. The best society that ever assembled there was collected at
Chenonceaux during the middle of the eighteenth century. This was
surely, in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the
"right people" made every haste to be born in time. Such people must of
course have belonged to the fortunate few--not to the miserable many;
for if a society be large enough to be good, it must also be small
enough. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age
of fireside talk and of those amenities that proceed from the presence
of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The
women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested
in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free
conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the
liquid murmur of the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only a great man of
business, but a man of honour and a patron of knowledge; and his wife
was gracious, clever, and wise. They had acquired this famous property
by purchase (from one of the Bourbons, as Chenonceaux, for two centuries
after the death of Catherine de'Medici, remained constantly in princely
hands), and it was transmitted to their son, Dupin de Francueil,
grandfather of Madame George Sand. This lady, in her Correspondence,
lately published, describes a visit that she paid more than thirty years
ago to those members of her family who were still in possession. The
owner of Chenonceaux to-day[a] is the daughter of an Englishman
naturalised in France. But I have wandered far from my story, which is
simply a sketch of the surface of the place. Seen obliquely, from either
side, in combination with its bridge and gallery, the structure is
singular and fantastic, a striking example of a wilful and capricious
conception. Unfortunately all caprices are not so graceful and
successful, and I grudge the honour of this one to the false and
blood-polluted Catherine. (To be exact, I believe the arches of the
bridge were laid by the elderly Diana. It was Catherine, however, who
completed the monument.) Within, the house has been, as usual, restored.
The staircases and ceilings, in all the old royal residences of this
part of France, are the parts that have suffered least; many of them
have still much of the life of the old time about them. Some of the
chambers of Chenonceaux, however, encumbered as they are with modern
detail, derive a sufficiently haunted and suggestive look from the deep
setting of their beautiful windows, which thickens the shadows and makes
dark corners. There is a charming little Gothic chapel, with its apse
hanging over the water, fastened to the left flank of the house. Some of
the upper balconies, which look along the outer face of the gallery and
either up or down the river, are delightful protected nooks. We walked
through the lower gallery to the other bank of the Cher; this fine
apartment appeared to be for the moment a purgatory of ancient
furniture. It terminates rather abruptly; it simply stops, with a blank
wall. There ought, of course, to have been a pavilion here, though I
prefer very much the old defect to any modern remedy. The wall is not so
blank, however, but that it contains a door which opens on a rusty
drawbridge. This drawbridge traverses the small gap which divides the
end of the gallery from the bank of the stream. The house, therefore,
does not literally rest on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests on one
and just fails to rest on the other. The pavilion would have made that
up; but after a moment we ceased to miss this imaginary feature. We
passed the little drawbridge, and wandered awhile beside the river. From
this opposite bank the mass of the château looked more charming than
ever; and the little peaceful, lazy Cher, where two or three men were
fishing in the eventide, flowed under the clear arches and between the
solid pedestals of the part that spanned it, with the softest, vaguest
light on its bosom. This was the right perspective; we were looking
across the river of time. The whole scene was deliciously mild. The moon
came up; we passed back through the gallery and strolled about a little
longer in the gardens. It was very still. I met my old gondolier in the
twilight. He showed me his gondola, but I hated, somehow, to see it
there. I don't like, as the French say, to _mêler les genres_. A gondola
in a little flat French river? The image was not less irritating, if
less injurious, than the spectacle of a steamer in the Grand Canal,
which had driven me away from Venice a year and a half before. We took
our way back to the Bon Laboureur, and waited in the little inn-parlour
for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an
excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were still
content to sit awhile and exchange remarks upon the superior
civilisation of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have
fared so well? Where else should we have sat down to our refreshment
without condescension? There were a couple of countries in which it
would not have been happy for us to arrive hungry, on a Sunday evening,
at so modest an hostelry. At the little inn at Chenonceaux the _cuisine_
was not only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on
by mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to
the elder lady as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux. We
were very comfortable, very genial; we even went so far as to say to
each other that Vouvray mousseux was a delightful wine. From this
opinion indeed one of our trio differed; but this member of the party
had already exposed herself to the charge of being too fastidious by
declining to descend from the carriage at Chaumont and take that
back-stairs view of the castle.
[a] 1884.
[Illustration]
Chapter viii
[Azay-le-Rideau]
Without fastidiousness it was fair to declare on the other hand that the
little inn at Azay-le-Rideau was very bad. It was terribly dirty and it
was in charge of a fat _mégère_ whom the appearance of four trustful
travellers--we were four, with an illustrious fourth, on that
occasion--roused apparently to fury. I attached great importance to this
incongruous hostess, for she uttered the only uncivil words I heard
spoken (in connection with any business of my own) during a tour of some
six weeks in France. Breakfast not at Azay-le-Rideau therefore, too
trustful traveller; or if you do so, be either very meek or very bold.
Breakfast not, save under stress of circumstance; but let no
circumstance whatever prevent your going to see the great house of the
place, which is a fair rival to Chenonceaux. The village lies close to
the gates, though after you pass these gates you leave it well behind. A
little avenue, as at Chenonceaux, leads to the castle,
[Illustration: AZAY-LE-RIDEAU]
making a pretty vista as you approach the sculptured doorway. Azay is a
most perfect and beautiful thing; I should place it third in any list of
the great houses of this part of France in which these houses should be
ranked according to charm. For beauty of detail it comes after Blois and
Chenonceaux, but it comes before Amboise and Chambord. On the other
hand, of course it is inferior in majesty to either of these vast
structures. Like Chenonceaux, it is a watery place, though it is more
meagrely moated than the small château on the Cher. It consists of a
large square _corps de logis_, with a round tower at each angle, rising
out of a somewhat too slumberous pond. The water--the water of the
Indre--surrounds it, but it is only on one side that it bathes its feet
in the moat. On one of the others stretches a little terrace, treated as
a garden, and in front prevails a wide court formed by a wing which, on
the right, comes forward. This front, covered with sculptures, is of the
richest, stateliest effect. The court is approached by a bridge over the
pond, and the house would reflect itself in this wealth of water if the
water were a trifle less opaque. But there is a certain stagnation--it
affects more, senses than one--about the picturesque pools of Azay. On
the hither side of the bridge is a garden overshadowed by fine old
sycamores--a garden shut in by greenhouses and by a fine last-century
gateway flanked with twin lodges. Beyond the château and the standing
waters behind it is a so-called _parc_, which, however, it must be
confessed, has little of park-like beauty. The old houses--a large
number--remain in France; but the old timber does not remain, and the
denuded aspect of the few acres that surround the châteaux of Touraine
is pitiful to the traveller who has learned to take the measure of such
things from the country of "stately homes." The garden-ground of the
lordly Chaumont is that of an English suburban villa; and in that and in
other places there is little suggestion, in the untended aspect of walk
and lawns, of the gardener the British Islands know. The manor as we see
it dates from the early part of the sixteenth century; and the
industrious Abbé Chevalier, in his very entertaining though slightly
rose-coloured book on Touraine,[b] speaks of it as "perhaps the purest
expression of the _belle Renaissance françoise_." "Its height," he goes
on "is divided between two storeys, terminating under the roof in a
projecting entablature which imitates a row of machicolations. Carven
chimneys and tall dormer windows, covered with imagery, rise from the
roofs; turrets on brackets, of elegant shape, hang with the greatest
lightness from the angles of the building. The soberness of the main
lines, the harmony of the empty spaces and those that are filled out,
the prominence of the crowning parts, the delicacy of all the details,
constitute an enchanting whole." And then the Abbé speaks of the
admirable staircase which adorns the north front and which, with its
extension inside, constitutes the principal treasure of Azay. The
staircase passes beneath one of the richest of porticos--a portico over
which a monumental salamander indulges in the most decorative
contortions. The sculptured vaults of stone which cover the windings of
the staircase within, the fruits, flowers, ciphers, heraldic signs, are
of the noblest effect. The interior of the château is rich, comfortable,
extremely modern; but it makes no picture that compares with its
external face, about which, with its charming proportions, its profuse
yet not extravagant sculpture, there is something very tranquil and
pure.
[b] "Promenades pittoresques en Touraine." Tours: 1869.
I took a particular fancy to the roof, high, steep, old, with its slope
of bluish slate, and the way the weather-worn chimneys seemed to grow
out of it--living things in a deep soil. The single defect of the house
is the blankness and bareness of its walls, which have none of that
delicate parasitic deposit that agrees so well--to the eye--with the
surface of old dwellings. It is true that this bareness results in a
kind of silvery whiteness of complexion which carries out the tone of
the quiet pools and even that of the scanty and shadeless park.
[Illustration]
Chapter ix
[Langeais]
I hardly know what to say about the tone of Langeais, which, though I
have left it to the end of my sketch, formed the objective point of the
first excursion I made from Tours. Langeais is rather dark and grey; it
is perhaps the simplest and most severe of all the castles of the Loire.
I don't know why I should have gone to see it before any other, unless
it be because I remembered that Duchesse de Langeais who figures in
several of Balzac's novels, and found this association very potent. The
Duchesse de Langeais is a somewhat transparent fiction; but the castle
from which Balzac borrowed the title of his heroine is an extremely
solid fact. My doubt just above as to whether I should pronounce it
exceptionally grey came from my having seen it under a sky which made
most things look dark. I have, however, a very kindly memory of that
moist and melancholy afternoon, which was much more autumnal than many
of the days that followed it. Langeais lies down the Loire, near the
river, on the opposite side from Tours, and to go to it you will spend
half an hour in the train. You pass on the way the Château de Luynes,
which, with its round towers catching the afternoon light, looks
uncommonly well on a hill at a distance; you pass also the ruins of the
castle of Cinq-Mars, the ancestral dwelling of the young favourite of
Louis XIII., the victim of Richelieu, the hero of Alfred de Vigny's
novel, which is usually recommended to young ladies engaged in the study
of French. Langeais is very imposing and decidedly sombre; it marks the
transition from the architecture of defence to that of elegance. It
rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to
which it gives its name and which it entirely dominates; so that as you
stand before it in the crooked and empty street there is no resource for
you but to stare up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge
towers surmounted with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street
to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments
of a French village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on
the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen; brown old
crones, the tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps (worn by
day) look dazzling; little alleys perforating the thickness of a row of
cottages and showing you behind, as a glimpse, the vividness of a green
garden. In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formerly have
been occupied by some of its appurtenances and which indeed is still
partly enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence,
which, with the small houses of the village at its base, shuts in the
castle from behind. The enclosure is not defiantly guarded, however; for
a small, rough path, which you presently reach, leads up to an open
gate. This gate admits you to a vague and rather limited _parc_, which
covers the crest of the hill and through which you may walk into the
gardens of the castle. These gardens, of small extent, confront the dark
walls with their brilliant parterres and, covering the gradual slope of
the hill, form, as it were, the fourth side of the court. This is the
stateliest view of the structure, which looks to you sufficiently grim
and grey as, after asking leave of a neat young woman who sallies out to
learn your errand, you sit there on a garden bench and take the measure
of the three tall towers attached to this inner front and forming
severally the cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cornice (one of
the features of Langeais), which is merely ornamental, as it is not
machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as
well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on
the ruins of feudalism.
The main event in the history of the castle is the marriage of Anne of
Brittany to her first husband, Charles VIII., which took place in its
great hall in 1491. Into this great hall we were introduced by the neat
young woman--into this great hall and into sundry other halls, winding
staircases, galleries, chambers. The cicerone of Langeais is in too
great a hurry; the fact is pointed out in the excellent Guide-Joanne.
This ill-dissimulated vice, however, is to be observed, in the country
of the Loire, in every one who carries a key. It is true that at
Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weakness
of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds
and ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and
musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all
apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in
the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to
read the name on the frame of some simpering portrait.
To return to Tours my companion and I had counted on a train which (as
is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins
de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take
us home. A sorry _carriole_ or _patache_ it proved to be, with the
accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient
peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of
extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic
woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the
Blésois appearing to have the best of it in the business of letting
vehicles, as well as in many other industries. There is, in fact, no
branch of human activity in which one is not liable, in France, to find
a woman engaged. Women, indeed, are not priests; but priests are, more
or less, women. They are not in the army, it may be said but then they
_are_ the army. They are very formidable. In France one must count with
the women. The drive back from Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold;
we had an occasional spatter of rain. But the road passes most of the
way close to the Loire, and there was something in our jog-trot through
the darkening land, beside the flowing river, which it was very possible
to enjoy.
[Illustration]
Chapter x
[Loches]
The consequence of my leaving to the last my little mention of Loches is
that space and opportunity fail me; and yet a brief and hurried account
of that extraordinary spot would after all be in best agreement with my
visit. We snatched a fearful joy, my companion and I, the afternoon we
took the train for Loches. The weather this time had been terribly
against us: again and again a day that promised fair became hopelessly
foul after lunch. At last we determined that if we could not make this
excursion in the sunshine we would make it with the aid of our
umbrellas. We grasped them firmly and started for the station, where we
were detained an unconscionable time by the evolutions, outside, of
certain trains laden with liberated (and exhilarated) conscripts, who,
their term of service ended, were about to be restored to civil life.
The trains in Touraine are provoking; they
[Illustration: LOCHES]
serve as little as possible for excursions. If they convey you one way
at the right hour, it is on the condition of bringing you back at the
wrong; they either allow you far too little time to examine the castle
or the ruin, or they leave you planted in front of it for periods that
outlast curiosity. They are perverse, capricious, exasperating. It was a
question of our having but an hour or two at Loches, and we could ill
afford to sacrifice to accidents. One of the accidents, however, was
that the rain stopped before we got there, leaving behind it a moist
mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky which were in
perfect agreement with the grey old city. Loches is certainly one of the
greatest impressions of the traveller in central France--the largest
cluster of curious things that presents itself to his sight. It rises
above the valley of the Indre, the charming stream set in meadows and
sedges, which wanders through the province of Berry and through many of
the novels of Madame George Sand; lifting from the summit of a hill,
which it covers to the base, a confusion of terraces, ramparts, towers,
and spires. Having but little time, as I say, we scaled the hill amain
and wandered briskly through this labyrinth of antiquities. The rain had
decidedly stopped and, save that we had our train on our minds, we saw
Loches to the best advantage. We enjoyed that sensation with which the
conscientious tourist is--or ought to be--well acquainted and for which,
at any rate, he has a formula in his rough-and-ready language. We
"experienced," as they say (most irregular of verbs), an "agreeable
disappointment." We were surprised and delighted; we had for some reason
suspected that Loches was scarce good.
I hardly know what is best there: the strange and impressive little
collegial church, with its romanesque atrium or narthex, its doorways
covered with primitive sculpture of the richest kind, its treasure of a
so-called pagan altar embossed with fighting warriors, its three
pyramidal domes, so unexpected, so sinister, which I have not met
elsewhere in church architecture; or the huge square keep of the
eleventh century--the most cliff-like tower I remember, whose
immeasurable thickness I did not penetrate; or the subterranean
mysteries of two other less striking but not less historic dungeons,
into which a terribly imperative little cicerone introduced us, with the
aid of downward ladders, ropes, torches, warnings, extended hands, and
many fearful anecdotes--all in impervious darkness. These horrible
prisons of Loches, at an incredible distance below daylight, enlivened
the consciousness of Louis XI. and were for the most part, I believe,
constructed by him. One of the towers of the castle is garnished with
the hooks or supports of the celebrated iron cage in which he confined
the Cardinal La Balue, who survived so much longer than might have been
expected this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure. All these
things form part of the castle of Loches, whose enormous _enceinte_
covers the whole of the top of the hill and abounds in dismantled
gateways, in crooked passages, in winding lanes that lead to postern
doors, in long façades that look upon terraces interdicted to the
visitor, who perceives with irritation that they command magnificent
views. These views are the property of the sub-prefect of the
department, who resides at the Château de Loches and who has also the
enjoyment of a garden--a garden compressed and curtailed, as those of
old castles that perch on hill-tops are apt to be--containing a
horse-chestnut tree of fabulous size,
[Illustration: LOCHES--THE CHURCH]
a tree of a circumference so vast and so perfect that the whole
population of Loches might sit in concentric rows beneath its boughs.
The gem of the place, however, is neither the big _marronier_, nor the
collegial church, nor the mighty dungeon, nor the hideous prisons of
Louis XI.; it is simply the tomb of Agnes Sorel, _la belle des belles_,
so many years the mistress of Charles VII. She was buried in 1450, in
the collegial church, whence, in the beginning of the present century,
her remains, with the monument that marks them, were transferred to one
of the towers of the castle. She has always, I know not with what
justice, enjoyed a fairer fame than most ladies who have occupied her
position, and this fairness is expressed in the delicate statue that
surmounts her tomb. It represents her lying there in lovely demureness,
her hands folded with the best modesty, a little kneeling angel at
either side of her head, and her feet, hidden in the folds of her decent
robe, resting upon a pair of couchant lambs, innocent reminders of her
name. Agnes, however, was not lamb-like, inasmuch as, according to
popular tradition at least, she exerted herself sharply in favour of the
expulsion of the English from France. It is one of the suggestions of
Loches that the young Charles VII., hard put to it as he was for a
treasury and a capital--"le roi de Bourges," he was called at Paris--was
yet a rather privileged mortal, to stand up as he does before posterity
between the noble Joan and the _gentille Agnes_; deriving, however, much
more honour from one of these companions than from the other. Almost as
delicate a relic of antiquity as this fascinating tomb is the exquisite
oratory of Anne of Brittany, among the apartments of the castle the only
chamber worthy of note. This small room, hardly larger than a closet,
and forming part of the addition made to the edifice by Charles VIII.,
is embroidered over with the curious and remarkably decorative device of
the ermine and festooned cord. The objects in themselves are not
especially graceful, but the constant repetition of the figure on the
walls and ceiling produces an effect of richness in spite of the modern
whitewash with which, if I remember rightly, they have been endued. The
little streets of Loches wander crookedly down the hill and are full of
charming pictorial "bits:" an old town-gate, passing under a medieval
tower, which is ornamented by Gothic windows and the empty niches of
statues; a meagre but delicate _hotel de ville_ of the Renaissance
nestling close beside it; a curious _chancellerie_ of the middle of the
sixteenth century, with mythological figures and a Latin inscription on
the front--both of these latter buildings being rather unexpected
features of the huddled and precipitous little town. Loches has a suburb
on the other side of the Indre, which we had contented ourselves with
looking down at from the heights while we wondered whether, even if it
had not been getting late and our train were more accommodating, we
should care to take our way across the bridge and look up that bust in
terra-cotta of Francis I. which is the principal ornament of the Château
de Sansac and the faubourg of Beaulieu. I think we decided that we
should not, that we had already often measured the longest nose in
history.
[Illustration]
Chapter xi
[Bourges]
I know not whether the exact limits of an excursion as distinguished
from a journey have ever been fixed; at any rate, it seemed none of my
business at Tours to settle the question. Therefore, though the making
of excursions had been the purpose of my stay, I thought it vain, while
I started for Bourges, to determine to which category that little
expedition might belong. It was not till the third day that I returned
to Tours; and the distance, traversed for the most part after dark, was
even greater than I had supposed. That, however, was partly the fault of
a tiresome wait at Vierzon, where I had more than enough time to dine,
very badly, at the _buffet_ and to observe the proceedings of a family
who had entered my railway carriage at Tours and had conversed
unreservedly, for my benefit, all the way from that station--a family
whom it entertained me to assign to the class of _petite noblesse de
province_. Their noble origin was confirmed by the way they all "made
_maigre_" in the refreshment-room (it happened to be a Friday), as if it
had been possible to do anything else. They ate two or three omelets
apiece and ever so many little cakes, while the positive, talkative
mother watched her children as the waiter handed about the roast fowl. I
was destined to share the secrets of this family to the end; for while I
took my place in the empty train that was in waiting to convey us to
Bourges the same vigilant woman pushed them all on top of me into my
compartment, though the carriages on either side contained no travellers
at all. It was better, I found, to have dined (even on omelets and
little cakes) at the station at Vierzon than at the hotel at Bourges,
which, when I reached it at nine o'clock at night, did not strike me as
the prince of hotels. The inns in the smaller provincial towns in France
are all, as the term is, commercial, and the _commis-voyageur_ is in
triumphant possession. I saw a great deal of him for several weeks after
this; for he was apparently the only traveller in the southern
provinces, and it was my daily fate to sit opposite to him at tables
d'hôte and in railway trains. He may be known by two infallible
signs--his hands are fat and he tucks his napkin into his shirt-collar.
In spite of these idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me a reserved and
inoffensive person, with singularly little of the demonstrative
good-humour that he has been described as possessing. I saw no one who
reminded me of Balzac's "illustre Gaudissart;" and indeed in the course
of a month's journey through a large part of France I heard so little
desultory conversation that I wondered whether a change had not come
over the spirit of the people. They seemed to me as silent as Americans
when Americans have not been "introduced," and infinitely less addicted
to exchanging remarks in railway trains and at tables d'hôte than the
colloquial and cursory English; a fact perhaps not worth mentioning were
it not at variance with that reputation which the French have long
enjoyed of being a pre-eminently sociable nation. The common report of
the character of a people is, however, an indefinable product, and is
apt to strike the traveller who observes for himself as very wide of the
mark. The English, who have for ages been described (mainly by the
French) as the dumb stiff, unapproachable race, present to-day a
remarkable appearance of good-humour and garrulity and are distinguished
by their facility of intercourse. On the other hand, any one who has
seen half-a-dozen Frenchmen pass a whole day together in a
railway-carriage without breaking silence is forced to believe that the
traditional reputation of these gentlemen is simply the survival of some
primitive formula. It was true, doubtless, before the Revolution; but
there have been great changes since then. The question of which is the
better taste, to talk to strangers or to hold your tongue, is a matter
apart; I incline to believe that the French reserve is the result of a
more definite conception of social behaviour. I allude to it only
because it is at variance with the national fame and at the same time
compatible with a very easy view of life in certain other directions. On
some of these latter points the Boule d'Or at Bourges was full of
instruction; boasting as it did of a hall of reception in which, amid
old boots that had been brought to be cleaned, old linen that was being
sorted for the wash, and lamps of evil odour that were awaiting
replenishment, a strange, familiar, promiscuous household life went
forward. Small scullions in white caps and aprons slept upon greasy
benches; the Boots sat staring at you while you fumbled, helpless, in a
row of pigeon-holes, for your candlestick or your key; and, amid the
coming and going of the _commis-voyageurs_, a little sempstress bent
over the under-garments of the hostess--the latter being a heavy, stern,
silent woman, who looked at people very hard.
[Bourges: the Cathedral]
It was not to be looked at in that manner that one had come all the way
from Tours; so that within ten minutes after my arrival I sallied out
into the darkness to form somehow and somewhere a happier relation.
However late in the evening I may arrive at a place, I never go to bed
without my impression. The natural place at Bourges to look for it
seemed to be the cathedral; which, moreover, was the only thing that
could account for my presence _dans cette galère_. I turned out of a
small square in front of the hotel and walked up a narrow, sloping
street paved with big, rough stones and guiltless of a footway. It was a
splendid starlight night; the stillness of a sleeping _ville de
province_ was over everything; I had the whole place to myself. I turned
to my right, at the top of the street, where presently a short, vague
lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely,
from behind; it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous and sublime.
It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which
Bourges is scattered--a very good position as French cathedrals go, for
they are not all so nobly situated as Chartres and Laon. On the side on
which I approached it (the south) it is tolerably well exposed, though
the precinct is shabby; in front, it is rather too much shut in. These
defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it
presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the
Archevêché, which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual
formal alleys of the _jardin français_. I must add that I appreciated
these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of
the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were
shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church
overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea
would overhang a solitary swimmer. It seemed colossal, stupendous, a
dark leviathan.
The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it,
and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The
cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good
deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more
imposing. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it was
projected "_dès_ 1172," but commenced only in the first years of the
thirteenth century. "The nave," the writer adds, "was finished _tant
bien que mal, faute de ressources_; the façade is of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its
upper." The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.
The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers; one of which
(the south) is immensely buttressed, so that its outline slopes forward
like that of a pyramid. This is the taller of the two. If they had
spires these towers would be prodigious; as it is, given the rest of the
church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed
portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the
central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the
measure of its width, the front rears itself,
piles itself, on a great scale, carried up by galleries, arches,
windows, sculptures, and supported by the extraordinarily thick
buttresses of which I have spoken and which, though they embellish it
with deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not improve its style. The
portals, especially the middle one, are extremely interesting; they are
covered with curious early sculptures. The middle one, however, I must
describe alone. It has no less than six rows of figures--the others have
four--some of which, notably the upper one, are still in their places.
The arch at the top has three tiers of elaborate imagery. The upper of
these is divided by the figure of Christ in judgment, of great size,
stiff and terrible, with outstretched arms. On either side of him are
ranged three or four angels, with the instruments of the Passion.
Beneath him in the second frieze stands the angel of justice with the
scales; and on either side of him is the vision of the last judgment.
The good prepare, with infinite titillation and complacency, to ascend
to the skies; while the bad are dragged, pushed, hurled, stuffed,
crammed, into pits and caldrons of fire. There is a charming detail in
this section. Beside the angel, on the right, where the wicked are the
prey of demons, stands a little female figure, that of a child, who,
with hands meekly folded and head gently raised, waits for the stern
angel to decide upon her fate. In this fate, however, a dreadful big
devil also takes a keen interest: he seems on the point of appropriating
the tender creature; he has a face like a goat and an enormous hooked
nose. But the angel gently lays a hand upon the shoulder of the little
girl--the movement is full of dignity--as if to say: "No; she belongs to
the other side." The frieze below represents the general resurrection,
with the good and the wicked emerging from their sepulchres. Nothing
can be more quaint and charming than the difference shown in their way
of responding to the final trump. The good get out of their tombs with a
certain modest gaiety, an alacrity tempered by respect; one of them
kneels to pray as soon as he has disinterred himself. You may know the
wicked, on the other hand, by their extreme shyness; they crawl out
slowly and fearfully; they hang back, and seem to say "Oh, dear!" These
elaborate sculptures, full of ingenuous intention and of the reality of
early faith, are in a remarkable state of preservation; they bear no
superficial signs of restoration and appear scarcely to have suffered
from the centuries. They are delightfully expressive; the artist had the
advantage of knowing exactly the effect be wished to produce.
The interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty and,
above all, a tremendous height. The nave is extraordinary in this
respect; it dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I
am in architecture always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great
building seems to me while I look at it the ultimate expression. At any
rate, during the hour that I sat gazing along the high vista of Bourges
the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the
evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude,
about such an edifice; it soothes and purifies the spirit, it
illuminates the mind. There are two aisles, on either side, in addition
to the nave--five in all--and, as I have said, there are no transepts;
an omission which lengthens the vista, so that from my place near the
door the central jewelled window in the depths of the perpendicular
choir seemed a mile or two away. The second or outward of each pair of
aisles is too low and the first too high; without this inequality the
nave would appear to take an even more prodigious flight. The double
aisles pass all the way round the choir, the windows of which are
inordinately rich in magnificent old glass. I have seen glass as fine in
other churches, but I think I have never seen so much of it at once.
Beside the cathedral, on the north, is a curious structure of the
fourteenth or fifteenth century, which looks like an enormous flying
buttress, with its support, sustaining the north tower. It makes a
massive arch, high in the air, and produces a romantic effect as people
pass under it to the open gardens of the Archevêché, which extend to a
considerable distance in the rear of the church. The structure
supporting the arch has the girth of a largeish house, and contains
chambers with whose uses I am unacquainted, but to which the deep
pulsations of the cathedral, the vibration of its mighty bells and the
roll of its organ-tones must be transmitted even through the great arm
of stone.
The archiepiscopal palace, not walled in as at Tours, is visible as a
stately habitation of the last century, at the time of my visit under
repair after a fire. From this side and from the gardens of the palace
the nave of the cathedral is visible in all its great length and height,
with its extraordinary multitude of supports. The gardens aforesaid,
accessible through tall iron gates, are the promenade--the Tuileries--of
the town, and, very pretty in themselves, are immensely set off by the
overhanging church. It was warm and sunny; the benches were empty; I sat
there a long time in that pleasant state of mind which visits the
traveller in foreign towns, when he is not too hurried, while he
wonders where he had better go next. The straight, unbroken line of the
roof of the cathedral was very noble; but I could see from this point
how much finer the effect would have been if the towers, which had
dropped almost out of sight, might have been carried still higher. The
archiepiscopal gardens look down at one end over a sort of esplanade or
suburban avenue lying on a lower level on which they open, and where
several detachments of soldiers (Bourges is full of soldiers) had just
been drawn up. The civil population was also collecting, and I saw that
something was going to happen. I learned that a private of the Chasseurs
was to be "broken" for stealing, and every one was eager to behold the
ceremony. Sundry other detachments arrived on the ground, besides many
of the military who had come as a matter of taste. One of them described
to me the process of degradation from the ranks, and I felt for a moment
a hideous curiosity to see it, under the influence of which I lingered a
little. But only a little; the hateful nature of the spectacle hurried
me away at the same that others were hurrying forward. As I turned my
back upon it I reflected that human beings are cruel brutes, though I
could not flatter myself that the ferocity of the thing was exclusively
French. In another country the concourse would have been equally great,
and the moral of it all seemed to be that military penalties are as
terrible as military honours are gratifying.
[Illustration]
Chapter xii
[Bourges: Jacques Coeur]
The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques
Coeur awaits you in posture scarcely less leonine. This remarkable man
had a very strange history, and he too was "broken" like the wretched
soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been rehabilitated, however,
by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble
statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret
him according to this image--a womanish figure in a long robe and a
turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose--would be to think of him
as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his
spirit was very modern; he was a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the
fifteenth century. He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to
pay the troops who, under the heroic Maid,
[Illustration: Bourges--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
drove the English from French soil. His house, which to-day is used as a
Palais de Justice, appears to have been regarded at the time it was
built very much as the residence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New
York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town
is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if
you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it
you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must
have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate it offers to view
two big towers which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of
Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak--the square in front of
the post-office--the palace of Jacques Coeur looks very big and strong
and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very
handsome and delicate. To this street it presents two tiers and a
considerable length of façade; and it has both within and without a
great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the
stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a
woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as
looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and
the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for
having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at
the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master,
who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.
The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been written by M. Pierre
Clément in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and
interesting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more
curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling
from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods
grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker,
ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the
East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the
globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant
operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty,
imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been
elucidated by M. Clément, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture
of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the
fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great
merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed
him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous
set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of
high-handed rapacity--the crudest possible assertion of the right of the
stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his
life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered
his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he
enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that
Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which
his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques Coeur, however,
was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after the
expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house at
Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and
splendour, though it has in parts that want of space which is striking
in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court indeed is on a
large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful
windows and with sculptures inserted in the walls, representing the
various sources of the great fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clément
describes this part of the house as having been of an "incomparable
richesse"--an estimate of its charms which seems slightly exaggerated
to-day. There is, however, something delicate and familiar in the
bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little scenes of agriculture and
industry which show that the proprietor was not ashamed of calling
attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day we should question the
taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in the house of a
"merchant prince" however self-made. Why should it be, accordingly, that
these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease us? It is perhaps
because things very ancient never, for some mysterious reason, appear
vulgar. This fifteenth-century millionaire, with his palace, his
"swagger" sculptures, may have produced that impression on some critical
spirits of his own day.
The portress who showed me into the building was a dear little old
woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face--a little white, aged
face, with dark, pretty eyes--and the most considerate manner. She took
me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious
chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the
hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of
Bourges--an inland town if ever there was one, without even a river (to
call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions--having found his end as
admiral of a fleet; but this boat-shaped roof, which is extremely
graceful and is repeated in another apartment, would suggest that the
imagination of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as he
trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is probable
that he was personally as much at home in certain Mediterranean ports
as in the capital of the pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at the
ceilings of his mansion, he saw his boats upside down, this was only a
suggestion of the shortest way of emptying them of their treasures. He
is presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in
company with his wife, Macée de Léodepart--I like to write such an
extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess
at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention
much more to the passers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in
other attitudes; though I do not recognise them in the composition on
top of one of the fireplaces which represents the battlements of a
castle, with the defenders (little figures between the crenellations)
hurling down missiles with a great deal of fury and expression. It would
have been hard to believe that the man who surrounded himself with these
friendly and humorous devices had been guilty of such wrong-doing as to
call down the heavy hand of justice.
It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal associations
of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques Coeur, which, in spite
of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have
terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his
quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hôtel Cujas,
one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of
the great jurisconsult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of
the Roman law and professed it during the close of his life in the
university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of
his sedentary pursuits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in
the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits are perhaps not exactly
[Illustration: BOURGES--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle"
(sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual
manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did
not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so
grave a work) an amusing picture of the short, fat, untidy scholar
dragging himself _à plat ventre_, across his room, from one pile of
books to the other. The house in which these singular gymnastics took
place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of
the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discoloured, it has a
charming Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street,
and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched
two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court,
beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with
turrets, with fine old windows and with a beautiful tone of faded red
brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial
by-street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller
with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on
the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A
brawny gendarme in his shirtsleeves was polishing his boots in the
court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its clusters, hung itself
over a doorway and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall.
The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was
almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to
exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I
had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a
_ville de province_ in the full force of the term, especially as
applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have
very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby,
without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor
antique--a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number
of blank walls--walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses--that
avert themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being
so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on
which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness
and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately
add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a
colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city
may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six
weeks spent _en province_, however, I saw few places that had not more
expression than Bourges.
I went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I
returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual,
with the _commis-voyageurs_, who cut their bread on their thumb and
partook of every course; and after this repast I repaired for a while to
the café, which occupied a part of the basement of the inn and opened
into its court. This café was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where
it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to _tutoyer_ his
customers and the practice of the customers to _tutoyer_ the waiter.
Under these circumstances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting
down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him
for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little
portfolio covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets
of
[Illustration: BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)]
thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which
pass in France for pens--these being the utensils invariably evoked by
such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself
opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident
reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I
received an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in
which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended
with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavoured every now and then with
a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he
was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very
facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game
went on and he lost and had to pay the _consommation_, he dropped his
amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and
went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than
the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend,
one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the
jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold
the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all
fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their
inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking
cad; just as the bright little café where a robust materfamilias, doling
out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror
behind the _comptoir_, was a much more civilised spot than a British
public-house or a "commercial room," with pipes and whisky, or even than
an American saloon.
[Illustration]
Chapter xiii
[Le Mans]
It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey
and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The
question indeed was to get away, no easy matter in France in the early
days of October, when the whole _jeunesse_ of the country is returning
to school. It is accompanied, apparently, with parents and grandparents,
and it fills the trains with little pale-faced _lycéens_, who gaze out
of the windows with a longing, lingering air not unnatural on the part
of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be
restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our
American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood. The train stopped
every five minutes; but fortunately the country was charming--hilly and
bosky, eminently good-humoured, and dotted here and there with a smart
little château. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has
given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interesting town,
but I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My
expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular
reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed--a
much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however,
is not steep in all directions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was
not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that,
on the other hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better
inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small
market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be
slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an
ugly _halle_, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le
Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which
I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to
the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble
features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls
straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling
behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly
numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through
the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very
crooked and untidy lane, of really mediæval aspect, honoured with the
denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria--an
absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later
than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument in
the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question--very
sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it--is an
elaborate little dusky façade, overhanging the street, ornamented with
panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.
A fat old woman standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to
it--a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming
manner--told me what the house was, and also indicated to me a
rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same street, nearer the
cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique" and
of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some years, in the early part
of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a
right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd
canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic
muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position--he was
unable even to go down on his knees--prosecuted that other suit which
made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the
second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon;
though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been
in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an
epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":
"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
Fit plus de pitié que d'envie,
Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
Avant que de perdre la vie.
Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
Et garde bien qu'il ne s'éveille.
Car voicy la première nuit,
Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."
There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front of the cathedral,
with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the
towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which
it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little
pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of
having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are
houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture
of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the
characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the
hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as
it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have
communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,
which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from
without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church--the disparity
between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century,
and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred
years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave,
which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and
curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow
but very lofty, display to the spectators in the _place_ the reach of
their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse
of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is
the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the
choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a
point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the
stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found
nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with
Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of
double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them supported
on very thick round columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in
this passage, and a charming little lady-chapel filled with gorgeous old
glass. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble;
its lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to
places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like
Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and
unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The
beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of
pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that
contains the formless image--a clumsy stone woman lying on her
back--which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.
The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small
garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large
_place de foire_, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known
as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a
while in rectangular alleys destitute of herbage and received a deeper
impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its
hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins,
between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may
admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should
remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away
and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This
sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded
now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown façade and a portal fretted with
early sculptures; but the
[Illustration: LE MANS--THE CATHEDRAL]
details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have
stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le
Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had
looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply
in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good
reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has
a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of
old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,
accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English
Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self
in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be
assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of
disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat
before dinner at the door of one of the cafés in the market-place with a
_bitter-et-curaçao_ (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me
company. I remember that in this situation there came over me an
impression which both included and excluded all possible
disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably
soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near
me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the
detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in
particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet
I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of
French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air,
together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a
positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have
descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of
the café, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is
perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans.
[Illustration]
Chapter xiv
[Angers]
I am shocked at finding, just after this noble declaration of
principles, that in a little note-book which at that time I carried
about with me the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell." I
reproduce this vulgar word with the greatest hesitation, and only
because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers
belongs to the disagreeable class of old towns that have been, as the
English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place
is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with
irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for
absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern
improvements and quite unworthy of its admirable name--a name which,
like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque
value. It looks particularly well on the Shakespearean page (in "King
John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the
utterance of the period) with a fine grinding insular accent. Angers
figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital
city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who
married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and
competitor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the
Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. These facts create
a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over
in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country
that was really pretty and looked more like the usual English than like
the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a
considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the
hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for
passing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have
contented myself before the end of the day. I remained at the White
Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally good
provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks
spent in these establishments.
"Stupidly and vulgarly modernised"--that is another flower from my
note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are
some narrow and tortuous streets, with a few curious old houses," I
continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the exterior is most
extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest." It is
fair to say that the Château d'Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage;
the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You
cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It
has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you;
it is simply very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple
impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a
perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of
the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained
the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front
of Angers is poor--wanting in colour and in movement; and there is
always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and
yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents
itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally
much better when the vast dark bulk of the castle, with its seventeen
prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of
tremendous girth and solidity; they are encircled with great bands, or
hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them
hang high curtains of infinitely old-looking masonry, apparently a dense
conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally
built (thanks to rich quarries in the neighbourhood), and to which it
owed its appellation of the Black. There are no windows, no apertures,
and to-day no battlements nor roofs. These accessories were removed by
Henry III., so that, in spite of its grimness and blackness, the place
has not even the interest of looking like a prison; it being, as I
suppose, the essence of a prison not to be open to the sky. The only
features of the enormous structure are the blank, sombre stretches and
protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on so large a scale, is
strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus and terminated by St.
Louis, the Château d'Angers has of course a great deal of history. The
luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of Louis XIV.,
whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and complete, was
confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had taken place at
Nantes. Here also Huguenots and Vendeans suffered effective captivity.
I walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it
is all up-hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the
entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the
rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to
see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard
contains a multitude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk
round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the
weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So
I came out and took another look at the big, black exterior, buttressed
with white-ribbed towers, and perceived that a desperate sketcher might
extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they
say, the little black bronze statue of the good King René (a weak
production of
[Illustration: ANGERS--OLD TIMBERED HOUSES]
David d'Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy
faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old
timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the
Maison d'Adam and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic
architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the
town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really
imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen-draper, who
flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mère de Famille; and above
his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house
occupies the angle of a little _place_, this front is double, and the
black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and
carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is
quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as
"moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge
was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave,
without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a
form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather
inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely
simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big,
serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very
shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is
original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that
the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high
west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two
elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern
pavilion has been inserted.
I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Café Serin, where,
after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train
which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of
hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its
air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as
also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an
unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place
where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented
itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of
the historical monuments of Angers.
[Illustration]
Chapter xv
[Nantes]
If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience
rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular
room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled
me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn
(it had a huge windy _porte-cochère_, and you climbed a vast black stone
staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded
with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a
pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes
belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and
its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much
commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in
the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It
derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,
which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous
too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched
windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These
features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux
aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has
the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French
water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French
landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an
eminently well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I
had time to go to the Musée; the more so that I have a weakness for
provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality
of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often
curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind,
there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably
old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity,
for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is
of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent
collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused
light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the
snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain
to show you the lustreless gem of the museum--these things have a mild
historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate
something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of
a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's
marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is
the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled
from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State.
Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very
honourable practice--the purchase by the Government of a certain number
of "pictures of the year," which are presently distributed in the
provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for success by
different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should
say here, in every platform. The works of art are often
ill-selected--there is an official taste which you immediately
recognise--but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which
should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing
in this particular Musée that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman
by Ingres--very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a
great deal of style.
There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of
Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size,
and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the
remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic--a tall elegant building of
the sixteenth century. The château is naturally not wanting in history.
It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought, with
the rest of the province, by the Duchess Anne, the last representative
of that race, as her dowry, to Charles VIII. I read in the excellent
handbook of M. Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of
the kings of France, from Louis XI. downward; and also that it has
served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other
distinguished persons, from the horrible Maréchal de Retz, who in the
fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of
hundred young children, sacrificed in abominable rites, to the ardent
Duchess of Berry, mother of the Count of Chambord, who was confined
there for a few hours in 1832, just after her arrest in a neighbouring
house. I looked at the house in question--you may see it from the
platform in front of the château--and tried to figure to myself that
embarrassing scene. The Duchess, after having unsuccessfully raised the
standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons) in the legitimist Bretagne,
and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe,
had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the
end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the
austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.
For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an
interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into
the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the
castle indicated also another historic spot, a house with little
_tourelles_ on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have
signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not in a position
to answer for this pedigree.
There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which
command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that
is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the
horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier
and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution
was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in
couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air noble_, in France
always reminds me of those dreadful years--of the street-scenes of the
Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing
could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these
eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on
tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of
groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed
coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the
architecture of the period--the clear grey stone, the high pilasters,
the arching lines of the _entresol_, the classic pediment, the
slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the
domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers,
makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best
to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold.
Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I
discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but
of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no
choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a
cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only
the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have
a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.
Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face
and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty
and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.
The great treasure of Nantes is the two noble sepulchral monuments which
occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its nobleness) the
rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south
side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany,
and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their
daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Château de
Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first
husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her
second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make
room for her, and where she herself died. Transferred to the cathedral
from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel
Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and
the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of
the most brilliant works of the French Renaissance. It has a splendid
effect and is in perfect preservation. A great table of black marble
supports the reclining figures of the duke and duchess, who lie there
peacefully and majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads
each on a cushion, the pair of which are supported from behind by three
charming little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a
lion and a greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of
the table is a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately
dressed, with a symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their
contemporary faces and clothes, which give them the air of realistic
portraits, are truthful and living, if not remarkably beautiful. Round
the sides of the tomb are small images of the apostles. There is a kind
of masculine completeness in the work, and a certain robustness of
taste.
In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in
being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to
say in regard to the great final contrast--the contrast between the
immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They
expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the
solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the
personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption,
of his memory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is a sceptical affair; it
insists too little on the honours. I say this in the face of the fact
that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the
presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs.
Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one
of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoricière, the defender of
the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble work, from the
hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation
of sculptors who have revived in France an art of which our over-dressed
century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a
certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune--an echo with a
beautiful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble
elaborately worked with arabesques and cherubs, in a relief so low that
it gives the work a certain look of being softened and worn by time,
lies the body of the Breton soldier with a crucifix clasped to his
breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a
figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and
Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were
exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast
and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene, robust young mother,
beautiful in line and attitude; the other a lean and vigilant young man,
in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched
arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These
figures contain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been
attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a splendid
example and a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more
or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'Medici at
Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The interest of
the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind of moral
good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art, and which,
united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a remarkable
sense of form, produces an impression of deep refinement. The whole
monument is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that
this impression on the part of the spectator is the happiest possible.
It explains much of the great beauty, and it also explains perhaps a
little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely in place;
I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which has visibly
triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern
genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element
is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in
admiration of the deep æsthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste,
revealed by such work. After that I only hope that, Giuseppe Garibaldi
may have somewhere or other some commemoration as distinguished.
[Illustration]
Chapter xvi
[La Rochelle]
To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward across
the historic _bocage_ of La Vendée, the home of royalist bush-fighting.
The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses,
orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the
traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that
as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there
was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment
beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay
(from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La
Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway
kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalised river,
bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet
old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther
side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf.
The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,
though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle,
which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating
little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of
its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean--in which,
after all, it _is_ Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at
Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only
twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to
find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of which it
may be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft
a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and to go from
New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and
warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter
myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to
perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the _caractère
méridional_. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For that
matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound--to wake up
there, as it were--would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure
is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive
shades of difference by which it ceases
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