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The spell of the heart of France: the towns, villages and châteaux about Paris

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Title: The spell of the heart of France: the towns, villages and châteaux about Paris

Author: André Hallays

Translator: Frank Roy Fraprie


        
Release date: July 19, 2014 [eBook #46321]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46321

Credits: David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPELL OF THE HEART OF FRANCE: THE TOWNS, VILLAGES AND CHÂTEAUX ABOUT PARIS ***

THE SPELL OF THE HEART OF FRANCE

The Towns, Villages and Chateaux about Paris

By André Hallays

The Page Company

1920

[Illustration: 0010]

[Illustration: 0013]





INTRODUCTION

Whoever has read "The Spell of Alsace" by André Hallays will need
no introduction to the present book. While the work on Alsace was
undoubtedly read by many because of its timely publication just at the
close of the Great War, when Alsace and all things French were uppermost
in the public mind, these readers found themselves held and charmed as
much by Monsieur Hallays' wondrous talent for visualizing landscape
and for infusing the breath of life into images of the past as by the
inherent interest of the subjects on which he discoursed.

His books are not travel books in the hackneyed sense of the word. He
does not catalogue the things which should be seen, or describe in
guidebook fashion those objects which are starred by Baedeker. He does
not care to take us to see the things which "every traveler ought to
see." He specializes in the obscure and the little-known. He finds that
the beauty of out-of-the-way places and objects far from the beaten
track of tourist traffic is as great as can be found in famous spots,
and far more gratifying because of the fact that it can be observed in
solitude and enjoyed in moods undisturbed by the multitude.

His manner of depicting landscapes is not by meticulous description,
but by apparently casual touches of color, brilliantly illuminating what
might to the ordinary observer seem monotonous and colorless landscapes.
The inspired flash of description clings in the mind and gives an
unforgetable impression of landscape or architectural beauty. In Alsace
he saw everywhere the red-tiled roofs, the pink sandstone of the Vosges,
sharply contrasted against the green foliage of lush summer or the
golden light of the declining sun. In the heart of France, as indeed
also in Alsace, he sees, especially, architectural delights which are
unknown to the guidebook and the multitude.

In fact, it is with the eye of an architect that Monsieur Hallays has
traveled through the outer suburbs of Paris, to write the essays which
are included in this book. Everywhere he is impressed by the marvelous
perfection of French architectural styles at their best, as he has found
them in the regions which he traversed. He makes us see new beauty in
churches and châteaux which we might pass with a casual glance had not
his illuminating vision and description marked that which we might see
and wonder at.

The architectural settings, however, much as they may appeal to his
professional eye, are but the beautiful frames in which to set a
multitude of charming portraits of French worthies, from the most
famous to the most obscure. He knows his French literature, and more
particularly the memoirs and the letters which shed so vital a light
on men and motives. He has resurrected more than one character from
obscurity and forgetfulness. His pathetic picture of Bosc, the lover
of nature, choosing his grave in the woods which he loved so well, in
defiance of the immemorial custom of his race, will seem perhaps more
unusual to the European mind than to the American, for the New
England pioneer of necessity made his own family graveyard in the
most accessible spot, and these little plots on farms and in woods
dot American soil. His portrait of the mystic Martin of Gallardon is
particularly timely in this era of revival of interest in psychical
research.

Written, as these essays were, through a series of years, his
descriptions of Soissons and the valley of the Oise tell us of
since-devastated regions as they were before the whirlwind and havoc of
war swept over heroic France. Doubtless the visitor today would find but
a memory of some of the architectural beauties here described.

Their memories are imperishable, and not the least of the merits of the
book is that the guns of the Hun cannot destroy the written records of
this beauty, though they may have blasted from the earth the stones and
mortar which composed those sacred edifices.

Frank Roy Fraprie.

Boston, June 23,1920.





The SPELL of the HEART of FRANCE

[Illustration: 0025]





I. MAINTENON

[Illustration: 0029]

|THERE is in _L' Education Sentimentale_ a brief dialogue which recurs
to my memory whenever I enter a historic home.

Frédéric and Rosanette were visiting the château of Fontainebleau. As
they stood before the portrait of Diane de Poitiers as Diana of the
Nether World, Frédéric "looked tenderly at Rosanette and asked her if
she would not like to have been this woman."

"'What woman?'

"'Diane de Poitiers!'

"He repeated: 'Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II.'

"She answered with a little, 'Ah!' That was all.

"Her silence proved clearly that she knew nothing and did not
understand, so to relieve her embarrassment he said to her,

"'Perhaps you are tired?'

"'No, no, on the contrary!'

"And, with her chin raised, casting the vaguest of glances around her,
Rosanette uttered this remark:

"'That brings back memories!'

"There could be perceived on her countenance, however, an effort, an
intention of respect...

"That brings back memories." Rosanette does not know exactly what they
are. But her formula translates--and with what sincerity!--the charm
of old châteaux and old gardens about which floats the odor of past
centuries. She "yawns immoderately" while breathing this vague
perfume, because she is unfamiliar with literature. Nevertheless,
she instinctively feels and respects the melancholy and distinguished
reveries of those who know the history of France. And besides, if these
latter in their turn desired to express the pleasure which they feel in
visiting historic places, I would defy them to find any other words than
those which Rosanette herself uses.

This pleasure is one of the most lively which can be felt by a loiterer
who loves the past, but whose listless imagination requires, to set
it in motion, the vision of old architecture and the suggestion
of landscapes. It is also one of those which can most easily be
experienced. The soil of France is so impregnated with history!
Everywhere, "that brings back memories."

It is, therefore, to seek "memories" that I visited Maintenon and its
park on a clear and limpid October afternoon. I had previously read once
more the correspondence of Madame de Maintenon and run through a few
letters of Madame de Sévigné. My memory is somewhat less untrained than
that of Rosanette. But, nevertheless, I am startled, on the day when I
wish to learn again, to perceive how many things I have unlearned, if I
ever knew them.

*****

The Chateau of Maintenon dates from the sixteenth century. Since then
it has been continued and enlarged without rigorous following of the
original plan. It is built of stone and brick, worked and chiseled
like the jewels of the French Renaissance. Its two unsymmetrical wings
terminate, the one in a great donjon of stone, the other in a round
tower of brick. Some parts have been restored, others have preserved
their aspect of ancientness.... But here, as everywhere else, time has
performed its harmonizing work, and what the centuries have not yet
finished, the soft October light succeeds in completing. Diversity
of styles, discordances between different parts of the construction,
bizarre and broken lines traced against the sky by the inequalities of
the roofs, the turrets, the towers and the donjon, neither disconcert
nor shock us. All these things fuse into a robust and elegant whole. The
very contrasts, born of chance, appear like the premeditated fancy of an
artist who conceived a work at once imposing and graceful. The artist is
the autumn sun.

Before the chateau extends a great park which also offers singular
contrasts. Near the building are stiff parterres in the French style.
Beyond, a long canal, straight and narrow, between two grassy banks,
is pure Le Nôtre. But, on both sides of the canal, these stiff designs
disappear and are replaced by vast meadows, fat and humid, sown with
admirable clumps of trees; Le Nôtre never passed here. Nature and
the seventeenth century are now reconciled, and the park of Maintenon
presents that seductiveness common to so many old French parks which are
ennobled by their majestic remnants of the art of Versailles.

Its unusual beauty springs from the ruined aqueduct which crosses its
whole width. These immense arcades, half crumbled to ruin, clothed with
ivy and Virginia creeper, give a solemn melancholy to the spot. They
are the remains of the aqueduct which Louis XIV started to construct, to
bring to Versailles the waters of the Eure, a gigantic enterprise which
was one of the most disastrous of his reign. The gangs employed in this
work were decimated by terrible epidemics caused by the effluvia of the
broken soil. It is said that ten thousand men there met their death and
fifty million francs were wasted. War in 1688 interrupted these works,
"which," says Saint-Simon, "have not since been resumed; there remain of
them only shapeless monuments which will make eternal the memory of this
cruel folly." And, in 1687, Racine, visiting at Maintenon, described
to Boileau these arcades as "built for eternity!" In the eighteenth
century, the architects who were commissioned to construct the château
of Crécy for Madame de Pompadour came to seek materials in the ancient
domain of Madame de Maintenon.... These different memories are an
excellent theme for meditation upon the banks of the grand canal,
in whose motionless waters is reflected this prodigious romantic
decoration.

Within the château, we are allowed to visit the oratory, in which are
collected some elegant wood carvings of the sixteenth century; the
king's chamber, which contains some paintings of the seventeenth
century; a charming portrait of Madame de Maintenon in her youth and
another of Madame de Thianges, the sister of Madame de Montespan; and
lastly, the apartment of Madame de Maintenon.

What is called the apartment of Madame de Maintenon consists of two
narrow chambers, containing furniture of the seventeenth century; I
know not if these are originals or copies. Two portraits attract our
attention, one of Madame de Maintenon, the other of Charles X.

The portrait of Madame de Maintenon is a copy of that by Mignard in
the Louvre. "She is dressed in the costume of the Third Order of St.
Francis; Mignard has embellished her; but it lacks insipidity, flesh
color, whiteness, the air of youth; and without all these perfections it
shows us a face and an expression surpassing all that one can describe;
eyes full of animation, perfect grace, no finery and, with all this, no
portrait surpasses his." (Letter from Madame de Cou-langes to Madame
de Sévigné, October 26, 1694.) Madame de Coulanges does not consider as
finery the mantle of ermine, the royal mantle thrown over the shoulders
of the Franciscan sister.

[Illustration: 0035]

Louis XIV had required this of the painter, and it was one of the
rare occasions on which he almost officially admitted the mysterious
marriage. This portrait, in truth, is one of the best works of Mignard.
But, even without the witness of Madame de Coulanges, we would not have
doubted that the artist had embellished his model. In 1694, Madame de
Maintenon was fifty-nine.

As to the portrait of Charles X, it is placed here to call to memory
the fact that in 1830 the last of the Bourbons, flying from Rambouillet,
came hither, "in the midst of the dismal column which was scarcely
lighted by the veiled moon" (Chateaubriand), and that he found asylum
for a night in the chamber of Madame de Maintenon.

*****

It was on December 27, 1674, that Madame Scarron became owner of the
château, and the domain of Maintenon, for the sum of two hundred and
fifty thousand livres. Louis XIV gave her this present in recognition of
the care which she had given for five years to the children of Madame de
Montespan. At this time the mission of the governess, at first secret,
had become a sort of official charge. The illegitimate offspring had
been acknowledged in 1673. Madame Scarron had then left the
mysterious house in which she dwelt "at the very end of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain... quite near Vaugirard." She appeared at court. But she
had calculated the danger of her position; she dreamt of putting herself
out of reach of changes of fortune and of acquiring an "establishment."

The letters which she then addressed to her spiritual director, Abbé
Gobelin, were full of the tale of her fears and her sorrows. She desired
a piece of property to which she could retire to lead the life of
solitude and devotion, to which she then aspired. She finally obtained
from Madame de Montespan and the King the gift of Maintenon, and, two
months later, she wrote to her friend, Madame de Coulanges, her first
impressions as a landed proprietor:

"I am more impatient to give you news of Maintenon than you are to hear
them. I have been here two days which seemed only a moment; my heart is
fixed here. Do you not find it admirable that at my age I should attach
myself to these things like a child? The house is very beautiful: a
little too large for the way I propose to run it. It has very beautiful
surroundings, woodlands where Madame de Sévigné might dream of Madame
de Grignan very comfortably. I would like to live here; but the time for
that has not yet arrived."

It never came. Madame de Maintenon--the King had given this name to
Scarron's widow--remained at court to carry out her great purpose: the
conversion of Louis XIV. Not that this project was then clearly formed
in her mind. But, little by little, she saw her favor increase, the King
detach himself from Madame de Monte-span, and all things work together
to assure her victory, which was to be that of God. So it was necessary
for her to abandon her project of living in retirement, and to remain
at Versailles upon the field of battle. She had hours of weariness and
sadness; but, sustained by pride and devotion, she always returned to
this court life, which, as La Bruyère expresses it, is a "serious and
melancholy game which requires application."

At first it was necessary that she should struggle against the caprices,
the angers and the jealousies of Madame de Montespan; for a profound
aversion separated the two women. "It is a bitterness," says Madame de
Sévigné, "it is an antipathy, they are as far apart as white is from
black. You ask what causes that? It is because the friend (Madame
de Maintenon) has a pride which makes her revolt against the other's
orders. She does not like to obey. She will mind father, but not
mother." At one time, the preaching of Bourdaioue and the imprecations
of Bossuet had determined the King to break with Madame de Montespan
(during Lent of 1675), and, before departing for the campaign in
Flanders, Louis XIV had bidden farewell to the favorite in a glazed
room, under the eyes of the whole court. But when the King returned
the work of the bigots was in vain. Madame de Montespan regained her
ascendancy. "What triumph at Versailles! What redoubled pride! What a
solid establishment! What a Duchess of Valentinois! What a relish, even
because of distractions and absence! What a retaking of possession!" (No
one has expressed like Madame de Sévigné the dramatic aspect of these
spectacles of the court.) After this dazzling reentry into favor, every
one expected to see the position of Madame de Maintenon become less
favorable. But she had patience and talent. Her moderation and good
sense charmed the King, who wearied of the passionate outbursts of his
mistress and who was soon to be troubled by the frightful revelations of
the La Voisin affair. It is true that the Montespan was succeeded by a
new favorite, Mlle, de Fontanges. But she was "as beautiful as an angel
and as foolish as a basket." She was little to be feared; her reign was
soon over. And Madame de Maintenon continued to make the King acquainted
with "a new country which was unknown to him, which is the commerce of
friendship and conversation, without constraint and without evasion."
But how many efforts and cares there still were before the day of
definite triumph, that is, until the secret marriage!

In going through her correspondence, we find very few letters dated from
Maintenon. During the ten years which it took her to conquer and fix the
King's affection, she made only rare and brief visits to her château.
It is true that Louis XIV had commissioned Le Nôtre "to adjust this
beautiful and ugly property." The domain had been increased by new
acquisitions. But her position as governess, and later when she was
lady of the bed-chamber to the Dauphiness, the wishes of Louis XIV kept
Madame de Maintenon at court.

[Illustration: 0041]

The only time when she remained several months at Maintenon seems to
have been in the spring of 1779; Madame de Montespan, whom the King was
neglecting at the moment for Mile, de Ludres, had come to beg shelter of
the friend of her friend, in order to be delivered under her roof of her
sixth child, Mlle, de Blois. This memory has a special value, if we
wish to become well acquainted with the characteristic morality of the
seventeenth century. Observe, in fact, that this child was adulterous on
both sides; that Madame de Montespan, abandoned, could only hate Madame
de Maintenon, more in favor than ever; that, five years later, Madame
de Maintenon was to marry Louis XIV, and finally that, in spite of this
curious complaisance, Madame de Maintenon had none the less the most
sure and vigilant conscience in regard to everything which touched on
honor.... It is most likely that others will discover some day terrible
indelicacies in acts which we today think very innocent. There is an
evolution in casuistry.

From the epoch of the foundation of Saint Cyr, Madame de Maintenon had
less time than ever for her property. She lived her life elsewhere,
divided between the King and the House of St. Louis. When her niece
married the Duke of Ayen she gave her Maintenon, but reserved the income
for herself but it was to St. Cyr that she retired and there she died.

*****

Under the great trees of the park, where the verdure is already touched
with pale gold, in the long avenue which is called the Alley of Racine,
because the poet is supposed to have planned Athalie there (I do not
know if tradition speaks the truth), I recall that letter to Madame
de Coulanges which I transcribed a little way back. "My heart is fixed
here," said Madame de Main-tenon. But, the more I think of it the less
it seems to me that her heart was ever capable of becoming attached to
the beauty of things. The "very beautiful surroundings" of Maintenon
pleased her because this château was the proof of the King's favor,
because, after the miseries of her childhood, after the years of trials
and anxieties, she finally felt that her "establishment" was a fact. But
there is something like an accent of irony in her way of vaunting the
"woodlands where Madame de Sévigné might dream of Madame de Grignan very
comfortably," for there never was a woman who dreamed less and scorned
dreaming more than this beautiful tutoress, possessed of good sense,
sound reason and a poor imagination.

She was very beautiful and remained so even to an advanced age. She was
about fifty when the Ladies of Saint Cyr drew this marvelous portrait
of her: "She had a voice of the most agreeable quality, an affectionate
tone, an open and smiling countenance, the most natural gestures of
the most beautiful hands, eyes of fire, such affectionate and regular
motions of a free figure that she outshone the most beautiful women
of the court.... Her first glance was imposing and seemed to conceal
severity.... Her smile and her voice opened the cloud...." (This is
better than all the Mignards.) Her conversation was delightful: Madame
de Sévigné bears witness to it, and that at a time when her testimony
cannot be questioned, since nothing could then cause her to foresee the
prodigious destiny of Madame Scarron. She had a sovereign grace in her
apparel, although the material of her clothing was always of extreme
simplicity; and this amazed her confessor, the excellent and respectful
Abbé Gobelin, who said to her: "When you kneel before me I see a mass of
drapery falling at my feet with you, which is so graceful that I find it
almost too much for me."

She knew that she was irresistibly beautiful, and her confessor had
assuredly taught her nothing by telling her that her commonest
robes fell into folds about her with royal elegance. There was no
coquettishness in her.

No one today can have any doubt of her integrity and her virtue.
Bussy-Rabutin has certified this and he was not accustomed to give
such a brevet without good reasons. But, to refute the calumnies of
Saint-Simon, nothing more is required than to read the letters of Madame
de Maintenon. They have a turn and an accent which cannot deceive.

The whole rule of her conduct was double. She was virtuous from devotion
and from care for her reputation. The second sentiment was certainly
much more important to her than the first. She has herself confessed it:
"I would like to have done for God all that I have done in the world to
keep my reputation."

[Illustration: 0047]

"I wanted to be somebody of importance," she said. This explains
everything: her ambition, her prudence, her moderation and her scruples.
She cares little for the advantages which her high position could give
her; she seeks neither titles, nor honors, nor donations. She wishes for
the approbation of honest men; she desires "good glory, _bonne gloire_,"
as Fénelon has expressed it. We find in her, mingled in proportions
which it is impossible to measure, a passion for honor quite in the
manner of Corneille, and a much less noble apprehension of what people
will say about her. But if this is truly her character--and, when
we have read her letters, it is impossible to retain a doubt on this
point--she is incapable of the weaknesses of which she has been accused.
"I have a desire to please and to be well thought of, which puts me
on my guard against all my passions." That is truth itself, and good
psychology. But even more fine and more penetrating appears to me the
remark once made about Madame de Maintenon by a woman of intellect:
"This is what has passed through my mind... and has made me believe that
all the evil they have said about her is quite false: it is that if she
had had something to reproach herself about in regard to her morals, if
she had had weaknesses of a certain kind, she would have had to fight
less against vainglory. Humility would have been as natural to her as it
was-; foreign to her, I mean in the bottom of her heart; for externally
every appearance denied that secret pride of which she complains to her
spiritual director. It was therefore necessary that this should have
been a secret esteem for herself. Now how could she esteem herself, with
the uprightness which was part of her, if she had not known herself to
be estimable, she who in her conversations paints so well those whose
reputation has been tarnished by evil conduct.... I do not know if my
thought is good; but it has pleased me." Thus in the eighteenth century,
Madame de Louvigny wrote to La Beaumelle, the first historian of Madame
de Maintenon. The analysis is just and delicate.

One of the grievances of Saint-Simon against Madame de Maintenon is
the manner in which she used her credit to displace certain prelates of
noble birth, preferring to them "the crass ignorance of the Sulpicians,
their supreme platitude... the filthy beards of Saint-Sulpice." Chance
has brought to my notice a copy of the letters of Madame de Maintenon
which belonged to Scherer and which he annotated when reading it. I find
there this remark penciled upon a page: "Neither Jesuit, nor Jansenist,
but Sulpician." It is impossible to give a better definition of the
devotion of Madame de Maintenon. She had the reasonable piety which is
the mark of Saint Sulpice. From her family and from her infancy she had
preserved a sort of remnant of Calvinism: she did not like the mass
and was pleased with psalm singing. This was to estrange her from the
Jesuits. On the other hand, Jansenism had an air of independence, almost
of revolt, which must have displeased her intelligence, with its love of
order. She was wisely and irreproachably orthodox. Her grave, tranquil,
active piety reveals a conscience without storms and an imagination
without fever.

Thus she had great pride and little vanity, great devotion and little
fervor. She had much common sense in everything. She loved her glory
passionately and her God seriously. She was charitable, as was enjoined
by the religion which she practiced with a submissive heart. But we know
neither a movement of sensitiveness nor an outburst of tenderness in her
life. She had a very lofty soul, a very clear intelligence, a very rigid
will. She was desperately dry.

Did this Sulpician, spiritual, cold and ambitious, ever feel the charm
of the great trees of her park? I doubt it.




$II. LA FERTÉ-MILON

|RACINE was about twelve years old when he left La Ferté-Milon, to go
first to the college of Beauvais and later to Port-Royal des Champs. He
passed his infancy there in the house of his paternal grandmother, Marie
des Moulins, the wife of Jean Racine, controller of the salt warehouse;
he was thirteen months old when his mother died and three years old at
the death of his father. Of these early years we know nothing except
that the grandmother loved the orphan more than any of her own children,
an affection of which Racine retained the most tender memory.

[Illustration: 0053]

He later often returned to the town of his birth, where his sister Marie
had remained and had married Antoine Rivière. The two families remained
united; Racine handled the interests of his brother-in-law at Paris; the
Rivières sent Racine skylarks and cheeses; and when Racine's children
were ill, they were sent to their aunt to be cared for in the open air.
And these were almost all the bonds between Racine and La Ferté-Milon.

It is therefore probable that almost nothing at La Ferté-Milon today
will awaken reminiscences of the poet. However, let us seek.

At the exit from the station a long street, a sort of _faubourg_ of low
houses, with their naïve signs swinging in the wind, leads us to the
bridge across the Ourcq. On the opposite bank, the little old town with
its little old houses clambers up the abrupt slope of a hill which is
crowned by the formidable ruin of the stronghold. Here and there, at the
water's edge are remnants of walls, towers and terraced gardens, which,
with the meadows and the poplars of the valley, compose a ravishing
landscape.

Once across the bridge, behold Racine. It is a statue by David d'Angers.
It is backed by the mayoralty and surrounded by a portico. Racine wears
a great wig, which is not surprising; but, notwithstanding his great
wig, he is half naked, holding up with his hand a cloth which surrounds
his body and forms "harmonious" folds. It is Racine at the bath. Near
him stands a cippus, on which are inscribed the names of his dramatic
works, from _Athalie to Les frères ennemis_, the title of which latter
is half concealed by the inevitable laurels.

While I was contemplating this academic but ridiculous image, a peasant,
carrying a basket on his arm, approached me and delivered the following
discourse: "This is Jean Racine, born in 1639, died in 1699. And you
read upon this marble the list of his dramatic works. He was bom at La
Ferté-Milon and I have at home parchments where one may see the names of
the persons of his family; I possess also his baptismal font. I am,
so to speak, the keeper of the archives of La Ferté.... The _Comédie
française_ will come here April 23.... Racine had two boys and five
girls.... There was a swan in his coat of arms; the swan is the symbol
of purity. Fénelon, Bishop of Cambrai, has been compared to a swan.
Fénelon, born in 1651 and dead in 1715, is the author of _Télémaque_ and
of the _Maximes des Saints_. This last work embroiled him with Jacques
Bénigne Bossuet, in Latin Jacobus Benignus, Bishop of Meaux, who wrote
_Oraisons funèbres and the Discours sur V histoire universelle_, which
he was unfortunately unable to finish.... My name is Bourgeois Parent,
and here is my address. And you, what is your name? You would not belong
to the _Comédie française?_" All this uttered in the voice of a scholar
who has learned his lesson by heart, with sly and crafty winks.... I
thank this bystander for his erudition; I admit humbly that I do
not belong to the _Comédie française_ and I take leave, not without
difficulty, of this extraordinary "Ra-cinian," who truly has the genius
of transition, in the manner of Petit-Jean.

In what house was Racine born? The accepted tradition is that his mother
was brought to bed at No. 3, Rue de la Pescherie (now Rue Saint-Vaast);
in this house lived the Sconin couple, the father and mother of Madame
Racine. The old house has been demolished, and there remains of it
nothing more than a pretty medallion of stone which represents the
_Judgment of Paris_. This is inserted above a door in the garden of the
new house. But, in the same street, there stands another house (No. 14)
which belonged to the paternal grandparents of Jean Racine; it is here,
according to other conjectures, that the author of _Athalie_ was born.
And these two houses are not the only ones at La Ferté which dispute the
honor of having seen the birth of Racine.... I will not get mixed up
in the search for the truth. I have heard that the people of Montauban
recently had recourse to an ingenious means of ending a quarrel of the
same kind. No one knew in which house Ingres had been born; a furious
controversy had arisen between various proprietors of real estate. It
was ended by a referendum. Universal suffrage gave its decision. Now the
question is decided, irrevocably.

[Illustration: 0059]

There is another monument to the poet. Behind the apse of the church, in
a little square, on top of a column, is perched an old bust more or
less roughly repaired; at its foot has been placed a tawdry cast-iron
hydrant. This is called the Racine Fountain. Decidedly La Ferté is a
poor place of pilgrimage: few relics, and the images of the saint are
not beautiful!

Fortunately, to recompense the pilgrim, there are in the two churches
precious stained glass windows of the sixteenth century; those of Notre
Dame, despite grievous restorations, are brilliant in coloring and
free in design. The _Saint Hubert_ is a good picture of almost Germanic
precision, and, above the right-hand altar, the portraits of the donors
and their children are natural and graceful. Above all, there is the
admirable façade of the old castle of Louis of Orleans, an enormous
crenelated fortress, flanked with towers, whose naked grandeur is set
off by sculptures, marvelous but mutilated, alas! There are statues of
armed champions framed in elegant foliage, and, above the arch of
the great door, the celebrated _Coronation of the Virgin_, one of the
masterpieces of French sculpture; a cast of it can be studied at the
Trocadero, and there we can admire at full leisure the truth of the
attitudes and the freedom of the draperies. But no one can imagine the
beauty of this composition, unless he has seen it relieved against and
shining from the ferocious wall of the citadel, colored with the golden
green of mosses, while tufts of yellow wallflowers, growing among the
delicate carvings of the wide frame, give an exquisite sumptuousness to
the whole decoration.

Returning to the terrace on the other side of the castle, which
dominates the houses, the towers and the gardens of the village, I find
myself before the framework of a great tent which is being erected for
the approaching performance by the Comédie française, and find myself
brought back from the Middle Ages to Racine. These juxtapositions no
longer surprise us, since we are now so accustomed to ramble through
history and literature as through a great second-hand store, stopping at
all the curiosities which amuse our eclectic taste. I imagine, however,
that a man of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Racine, would
have been stupified to think that any one could enjoy the verses of
Bérénice and at the same time be sensitive to the charm of the old
Gothic images, carved upon the wall of this "barbarous" donjon. Time
has done its work; it has effaced the prejudices of centuries; it has
allowed us to perceive that the sculptor of the Coronation of the Virgin
and the poet who wrote Bérénice were, after all, sons of the same race
and servants of the same ideal. No, this is not a vain dream; there
is something Racinian in the statues of La Ferté-Milon. They possess
purity, nobility and elegance. Has not this Virgin, kneeling before the
throne of the Lord, while two angels ceremoniously hold up the train
of her royal mantle, has she not, I say, the attitude and the touching
grace of Racine's Esther at the feet of Ahasuerus?

At the edge of this terrace, I have before me the delightful landscape
of the little hills of the Ourcq valley, and, as I contemplate the soft
and beautiful undulations covered by the forest of Retz, I am more and
more struck by the harmony of this charming spot.

I think of the pages which Taine placed at the beginning of his essay
on La Fontaine, in which he discovers in the French landscape the very
qualities of the Gallic mind. You remember this picture of the land of
Champagne: "The mountains had become hills; the woods were no longer
more than groves.... Little brooks wound among bunches of alders with
gracious smiles.... All is medium-sized here, tempered, inclined rather
toward delicacy than toward strength." How exact all this is! There is a
perfect concordance between the genius of La Fontaine and the aspect of
the country of his birth. In the valley of the Marne, if we follow one
of those long highways which stretch, straight and white, between two
ranks of trembling poplars, it seems unnatural not to see the animals
leave the fields and come to talk to us upon the roadway.

These French landscapes have still another sort of beauty, and, in the
country of Racine, this beauty is more striking than elsewhere; its
design has an incomparable grace and nobleness. The fines of the
different planes intermingle without ever breaking one another. The
undulations unfold with a caressing, almost musical, slowness. These
hillocks which surround La Ferté-Milon have, in truth, the sweetness of
a verse of _Bérénice_. They have the flexibility of rhythm of a chorus
from _Esther_:

                   Just as a docile brook

          Obeys the hand which turns aside its course,

          And, allowing the aid of its waters to be divided,

                   Renders a whole field fertile;

          Oh, God, Thou sovereign master of our wills,

          The hearts of kings he thus within Thy hand.

We must repeat these verses upon the terrace of La Ferté-Milon, at the
foot of which the Ourcq ramifies among the gardens and the meadows; and
we must follow upon the horizon the elegant sinuosity of the low hills,
to appreciate the mysterious and subtle harmony which was established
for life between the imagination of Racine and the sweet countryside of
his infancy.

I did not wish to leave the town of Racine without following the
Faubourg de Saint-Vaast up to the wooded hillside where the Jansenists
who took refuge at La Ferté-Milon often came to pray. In 1638, the
recluses of Port-Royal had been dispersed; Lancelot had taken refuge at
La Ferté-Milon, with the parents of one of his pupils, Nicolas Yitart
(the Vitarts were relatives of the Racines); then M. Antoine Le Maître
and M. de Sericourt had come to join him. They long led a life of
complete seclusion in the little house of the Vitarts; but in the summer
of 1639 they sometimes decided to go out after supper. Then they went
into the neighboring wood, "upon the mountain," which overlooks the
town, and there they conversed of good things. They never spoke to
anybody; but when they returned at nine o'clock, walking in single file
and telling their beads, the townsfolk, seated before their doors, rose
in respect and kept silence as they passed. (It is still easy to imagine
this admirable scene in the little streets of La Ferté; the architecture
has changed so little!) The good odor, as Lancelot calls it, which was
spread by the three Jansenists, remained as a living influence in the
little town. And this sojourn of the hermits brought Port-Royal near to
the Racine family. The sister of the poet's grandmother was already
cellaress at the abbey; his aunt will later take the veil; his
grandmother will end her life at Port-Royal des Champs; and the young
Jean Racine (he entered the world only after the hermits had departed)
will have for masters Lancelot, Le Maître and Hamon.... Later he will
make a scandal at Port-Royal; he will rally his masters. But, in spite
of this, their lessons will remain ineffaceable; and the author of the
Cantiques spirituelles will desire to be buried at the foot of Hamon's
grave. On what did the destiny of the poet depend? Perhaps Esther and
Athalie would never have been written if these three hermits, fleeing
from persecution, had not come one day to "Jansenize" La Ferté and to
converse about good things upon the "Mountain," as they called this
pretty hillock of the Valois, with its soft and shadowy slopes.





III, MEAUX AND GERMIGNY

|WHILE the glacial downpours of this endless winter continue, I find
pleasure in running over and completing the notes collected in the
course of a stroll which I undertook on a warm and charming day last
autumn. In weather as bad as this one can ramble only in memory, unless
desirous of catching influenza.

*****

[Illustration: 0067]

I went to Meaux and to Germigny-l'Evêque to discover, either at the
episcopal residence or in Bossuet's country house, whatever may still
recall the memory of the "Eagle."

To tell the truth, it was not the "Eagle" who interested me on that day,
but the man himself. I had recently read the remarkable portrait which
forms the close of the beautiful study of M. Rebelliau, those pages
which are so vivid and in which is sketched with so much relief and
truth the figure "of an everyday Bossuet, sweet and simple." [1] It
seemed to me that nowhere could this Bossuet be better evoked than in
the garden of the bishop's house at Meaux and in the park of Germigny.
"_In Germiniaco nostro_," we read at the end of the Latin letters of "M.
de Meaux."

I recalled, besides, with what surprise I had read the _Mémoires_ of
Abbé Le Dieu, those notes, sometimes puerile, but so touching in their
familiar simplicity, which reveal to us a Bossuet very different from
that of Bausset. This cardinal, although he composed his book from the
manuscripts of Abbé Le Dieu, could not resign himself to the simplicity
of the faithful secretary. He has doubtless collected everything; he has
said everything; but he has thought it his duty to ascribe to his
model a continuous majesty and an inexhaustible pride. He has drawn the
Bossuet of Rigaud's portrait.

Shall we cite an example of the way in which Cardinal de Bausset
transposes the descriptions of Abbé Le Dieu? Bossuet invited his priests
to say the mass quickly: "_It is necessary to go roundly_, for fear of
tiring the people." This is the phrase reported by Abbé Le Dieu. And
this is how Cardinal de Bausset translates the expression to make it
more suitable to the gravity of the author of the _Oraisons funèbres_:
"It is necessary to perform all the ceremonies with dignity," said
Bossuet, "but with suitable speed. It is not necessary to tire the
people." A simple shading; but a characteristic trait is effaced.

*****

I commenced my pilgrimage by a visit to the cathedral of Meaux.

"He had taken possession of the bishopric of Meaux on Sunday, February
8, 1682, and, on Ash Wednesday in the following week, preaching in his
cathedral to signalize the beginning of Lent, he declared that he
would devote himself entirely to his flock and would consecrate all his
talents to their instruction. He promised to preach on every occasion
when he should pontificate; and that no business, however pressing,
should ever prevent him from coming to celebrate the high, feasts with
his people and to preach the word of God to them. He never failed in
this, not even to exercise his office of Grand Almoner. He took leave of
the princesses to whom he had been attached with much respect, and left
to others the charge of administering Holy Communion to them on the high
feasts." (_Mémoires_ of Abbé Le Dieu, Volume I, page 182.)

[Illustration: 0071]

The pulpit from which Bossuet preached so many sermons no longer exists.
Its panels have been found and reassembled to form a new pulpit.

Otherwise, in this beautiful Gothic cathedral there is nothing to arouse
the emotions or to speak to the imagination. Externally and internally,
all has been "freshly restored." The soul of the past has departed from
it.

There is soon to be placed under the roof of the church a commemorative
monument which was recently exhibited in the Grand Palace, in the midst
of an amusing crowd of statues. I was told that the authorities have not
yet selected the place which this monument will occupy in the cathedral.
How admirable! The monument has been conceived and executed for an
undetermined position! This formidable pile of sculpture has been
treated like a simple mantelpiece ornament.... But let us pass; this
does not concern in the least the memory of Bossuet.

* * * * *

In the bishopry, the episcopal apartments are on the second floor.
Bossuet did not live there very much. He voluntarily gave up the house
to his nephews and his niece, Madame Bossuet. His family had undertaken
the management of the household; he was a spendthrift and gave little
attention to the cares of daily life, devoting all his time to his
formidable labors. "I would lose more than half of my mental ability,"
he wrote to Marshal de Beliefonds, "if I restricted myself in my
household expenses."

Madame Bossuet knew how to take advantage of this weakness of her uncle,
inability to take care of his income. She had become mistress of the
episcopal mansion; she led a worldly life there; she entertained; she
gave suppers and concerts.

During Lent of 1704, Bossuet lay at death's door. The terrible agonies
of illness had caused him to lose sleep. See what happened just outside
of the room where he lay in agony: "This evening Madame Bossuet gave an
entertainment to the Bishop of Troyes, Madame de La Briffe, the dowager,
Madame Amelot, President Larcher, and other male and female company, to
the number of eight. There was a magnificent repast for those who were
fasting and those who were not, with all the noise which attends such
assemblies, and yet this went on in the very antechamber of M. de
Meaux and in his hearing, when he longed for sleep with the greatest
inquietude." (Mémoires of Abbé le Dieu, Volume III, page 74.)

It is easy to understand that Bossuet did not find in such surroundings
the peace and quiet necessary for his immense labors. He had to find a
retreat where he could escape the sounds of feasting and conversation
which filled the episcopal house.

Let us cross the garden which was once laid out by Le Nôtre. Beyond
the flower beds, overlooking the ancient ramparts of the town of
Meaux, an avenue of clipped yews offers a sure and austere asylum for
meditation. This was, it is said, the bishop's promenade. At the very
end, upon the platform of a former bastion, a little pavilion served
as his study. Its old wainscot-ings have disappeared, but the original
division of the pavilion into two rooms has remained; one contained his
bed, the other his worktable.

Here Bossuet shut himself up every evening. In the middle of the night,
after sleeping four or five hours, he waked up of his own accord, for
he was master of his hours of sleep. He found his desk in readiness,
his armchair in position, his books piled upon chairs, his portfolio of
papers, his pens, his writing pad and his lighted lamp; and he commenced
to think and to write. On winter nights he buried himself to his waist
in a bearskin bag. After a vigil of three hours, he said his matins and
returned to slumber.

While, in the silence of the night, M. de Meaux wrote against heretics
and prayed for them, armed himself for the eternal combat and worked
for the welfare of the souls which were in his charge, the salons of the
episcopal house were made gay by lights and violins.

*****

Bossuet remained faithfully in his diocese during the twenty-two years
that he was bishop of Meaux.

But he always preferred to live in his country house at Germigny rather
than in his episcopal palace.

Two leagues across a pleasant and slightly undulating country, the road
crosses the Marne by a stone bridge. In the seventeenth century there
was only a ferry. On the left bank appears the little village of
Germigny with its few houses dotted pleasantly along the hillside. The
landscape has the grace and freshness which is characteristic of the
whole valley of the Marne: a horizon of tiny hills, humble and smiling,
a fertile and regularly cultivated plain, an old mill lost among the
willows, a line of great poplars, a sluggish, grassy rivulet, resigned
to continual detours, and finally, spread over all these things, a
somewhat humid light which imparts to them a delicate charm--a lovable
spectacle of which the eye cannot tire, since its subtle seductiveness
lies wholly in the changes of the height and the flight of the clouds.

From the twelfth century, the pleasure house of the Bishops of Meaux was
at Germigny, on the banks of the Marne. Kings often stopped there when
they came to hunt in the neighboring forests. Bossuet's predecessor, M.
de Ligny, spent fifty thousand crowns in transforming the old house into
a veritable château. The domain was sold at the time of the Revolution.
But Msr. de Briey has bought back a part of it and has thus renewed the
tradition of the former bishops of Meaux.

What remains of the old château? The park has been cut up. Of the
gardens a lawn and a few alleys remain. The buildings have been ruined.
A dovecote and an old turret are still standing, and the wreckers have
respected the long terrace whose foot was formerly bathed by the Marne;
it is today separated from the river by a highway. This is shaded by
great trees, a charming place which seems to have been made especially
for the meditative promenade of an orator or the relaxation of a
theologian.

Bossuet loved Germigny. In his letters he often celebrated the charm of
"his solitude." He even sung it in Latin in a hymn which he composed in
honor of Saint Barthélémy, the patron of his parish. Every year he came
to his country house to realize that dream of his youth which he had
ingenuously expressed in a sermon: "What an agreeable diversion to
contemplate how the works of nature advance to perfection by insensible
increase! How much pleasure we can have in observing the success of the
trees which we have grafted in a garden, the growth of the wheat, the
flow of a river!" For he was sensitive to the spectacles of nature.

"Do you desire to see a sight worthy of your eyes? Chant with David:
'When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the
stars, which thou hast ordained.' Listen to the word of Jesus Christ who
said to you: 'Consider the lily of the field and the flowers which pass
in a day. Verily, verily, I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory
and with that beautiful diadem with which his mother crowned his head,
was not arrayed like one of these.' See these rich carpets with which
the earth covers itself in the spring. How petty is everything in
comparison with these great works of God! There we see simplicity joined
with grandeur, abundance, profusion, inexhaustible riches, which were
created by a word and which a word sustains...."

And, in this same _Traité de la concupiscence_ from which I have just
extracted these lines, written with a grace almost worthy of Saint
Francis, do you recall the admirable picture of a sunrise: "The sun
advanced, and his approach was made known by a celestial whiteness which
spread on all sides; the stars had disappeared and the moon had arisen
as a crescent, of a silver hue so beautiful and so lively that the
eyes were charmed by it.... In proportion as he approached, I saw her
disappear; the feeble crescent diminished little by little; and when the
sun was entirely visible, her pale and feeble light, fading away,
lost itself in that of the great luminary in which it seemed to
be absorbed..." Is not this the work of an attentive and passionate
observer?

The numerous letters and decrees dated at Germigny show how much this
retreat pleased Bossuet. His books followed him there. Labor seemed
easier to him in this salubrious air and at this delicious spot. There
he received, in noble and courteous fashion, the illustrious personages
who came to visit him. The Great Condé, the Duc de Bourbon, the
Prince de Conti, the Comte de Toulouse, the Duc de Maine, Cardinal
Noailles, Marshal de Villars, Madame de Montespan, and her sister, the
Abbess of Fontevrault, were the guests of Bossuet at Germigny. In 1690,
the Dauphin, on his way to the army in Germany, had wished to make his
first halt at Germigny, at the home of his ancient tutor.

The most celebrated preachers were invited by the Archbishop of Meaux to
preach at his cathedral, and were afterward entertained in his country
house. It was in this way that the Abbé de Fénelon often came to
Germigny. At this period the bishop and the abbé esteemed and loved each
other. "When you come," the Abbé de Fénelon wrote from Versailles to the
Bishop of Meaux, "you will tell us of the marvels of spring at Germigny.
Ours commences to be beautiful: if you do not wish to believe it,
Monsignor, come to see it." (April 25, 1692.) And on another occasion,
Fénelon sent to Bossuet verses upon his countryside which are,
alas!--verses by Fénelon! Nine years later the springtimes of Germigny
were forgotten. The _Maximes des Saints_ had been condemned. _Têlêmaque_
had been published; Têlémaque which Bossuet read at this very Germigny,
under the trees which had witnessed the former friendship now broken,
Télémaque which he declared "unworthy not only of a bishop, but of a
priest and of a Christian." And one day, he said to Abbé Le Dieu that
Fénelon "had been a perfect hypocrite all his life...."

[Illustration: 0081]

Among the visitors at Germigny, we must not forget Malebranche,
whose name was given to one of the avenues of the garden; Rigaud, who
commenced in this country house the portrait of Bossuet which today may
be found in the Louvre; Santeul, "the gray-haired child," who made Latin
verses to describe and celebrate the chateau and the park of Germigny.
How many verses Germigny has inspired!

*****

This beautiful terrace which overlooks the Marne and where so many
illustrious shades surround that of "M. de Meaux," is the very place to
evoke the "sweet and simple" Bossuet! When we see that he has so many
friends and know this taste for retreat and country life, the man loses
at once a little of that solemnity and that inflexible arrogance which
have come down in legend as characteristic of his personality.

We also seem to sustain a paradox, even after M. Brunetière, even after
M. Rebelliau, in speaking today of the sweetness and the humanity of
Bossuet. The entire eighteenth century labored to blacken and calumniate
the victorious adversary of "sweet Fénelon." It is not in the course
of a promenade upon the banks of the Marne that I pretend to study the
quarrel of quietism. Nevertheless, however little we may wish to recall
the vicissitudes of the dispute, we must admit that the excess of
shiftiness of the crafty Perigordian sufficiently justified the excess
of hardness of the impetuous Burgundian. But, in addition, we are not
dealing here with Bossuet as a polemist. The profundity as well as the
ingenuousness of his faith would excuse the vehemence of his arguments,
if we could permit ourselves to be scandalized by so courteous a
vehemence, we who, unbelieving or Christian, cannot discuss the most
insignificant problems of politics without resorting to extremes of
insult. Bossuet had neither hatred nor rancor. When he recovered from
the emotion of the combat, he resumed his natural mood, which was all
charity and sweetness.

He was nearer to the gospel than Fénelon ever was with his artistic
vanity. He had in him something simple and awkward which brought him
nearer to the people than to the great ones among whom he had lived. At
court, he made more than one false move. In his diocese, he was loved
for his goodness.

By regarding Bossuet as a persecutor, Jurieu and the philosophers in his
train have obliged the historians to examine closely what the conduct
of the Bishop of Meaux had been in regard to the Protestants of his
diocese. Now it has appeared that, of all the prelates of France who
were charged with assuring the execution of the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, not one showed more humanity. Bossuet condemned violence
and constraint, and there was only a single military execution in the
diocese of Meaux. It would be childish to reproach a Catholic bishop of
the seventeenth century for not having criticized the Revocation, of the
Edict, especially since this bishop, the author of _Politique tirée de
l'Ecriture sainte_, should have been, more than any other, impressed
by the perils which the republican spirit of the French Protestants
threatened to the monarchy. He preached to the Protestants as eloquently
as he could, turned persecution aside from them, and gave alms to them.
He received at Germigny a great number of ministers who had come to
dispute with him; and it was in the little chapel of his chateau that
Joseph Saurin and Jacques Bénigne Winslow abjured Protestantism beneath
his hands.

All of this, I know, you can read in the biographies of Bossuet and, if
you have not already done it, do not fail to read it in M. Rebelliau's
book. But things have mysterious suggestiveness, and when we have seen
the beautiful garden of the bishop's house at Meaux and the charming
country about Germigny, we are more disposed to believe that the Bossuet
of the modern historians is the true Bossuet. I have not verified their
researches; but I have read Le Dieu and I have walked upon the terrace
along the Marne; that is sufficient.

And I would be ungrateful if I failed to add that I had the most amiable
and the best informed of guides in my promenade: the Abbé Formé, priest
of Germigny, deserving of the parish of Bossuet, in all simplicity.






IV. SAINTE RADEGONDE

|I HAD heard that, deep in the forest of Montmorency, near the hermitage
of Sainte Radegonde, there might be found a little cemetery lost in
the midst of the woods. I wondered who had chosen this romantic burial
place. One of my friends, to whom I had imparted my curiosity, sent me
a book by M. Auguste Rey, entitled _Le Naturaliste Bosc_, and assured me
that I would there find enlightenment on the mystery which intrigued me.
I read it, and the story told by M. Auguste Rey increased my desire to
become acquainted with the cemetery of Sainte Radegonde. [2]

So, on an October afternoon, I wandered in the forest seeking tombs.
The search was long and charming. As the forest of Montmorency is not
provided with guideposts, it is impossible not to get lost in it. But
the magnificence of the weather, the miraculous splendor of the golden
and coppery foliage, the lightness of the luminous mists which float
over the reddened forest, the perfume of the softened earth and of the
moist leaves, make one quickly forget the humiliation of having lost his
way.

Following one path after another, I ended by stumbling upon Sainte
Radegonde. The place is well known to all walkers. Of the ancient
priory, which was founded here in the thirteenth century by the monks
of the Abbey of Saint Victor, there is left no more than a tumbledown
building which serves today as a ranger's house. It is surrounded by
a wall, so that it is no longer possible to approach the well which
formerly attracted numerous pilgrims to Sainte Radegonde, for this saint
cured, it is said, the itch and sterility.

Before the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde (the word hermitage was made
fashionable in this country by Jean Jacques Rousseau) there opens a vast
glade, whose slope descends to the brooklet called Ru du Nid-de-l'Aigle,
which flows in the midst of a scrub of blackberries and hawthorns. At
the end of the meadow, half hidden by copses, there rises a little bluff
which elbows the stream aside. Here is the cemetery. A few very simple
graves surround a little boulder on which is carved: "Bosc, Member
of the Institute." Four great cedars overlook them with their superb
shafts.

The site possesses an inexpressible beauty, at the hour when the forest
loses the splendor with which it was but recently decked by the sun's
rays, while a cold breeze shakes the half-naked branches, announcing the
approaching frosts and sorrows of winter.

The scene is set. Now listen to the story, which I borrow almost
entirely from the interesting study of M. Auguste Rey.

[Illustration: 0089]

Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, whose mortal remains repose in the
cemetery of Sainte Radegonde, was born at Paris January 29, 1759. His
family, originally from the Cevennes, belonged to the reformed religion.
His father was one of the physicians of the king.

At Dijon, where he had been sent to college, he followed the courses of
the naturalist Durande, became enthusiastic over the Linnæan system, and
discovered his vocation. When, after returning to Paris, he was obliged
by reverses of fortune to accept a very modest position in the post
office, he continued the studies of his choice and took the public
courses given by the professors and demonstrators of the King's Garden.

In 1780, it was proper to have a republican soul and a taste for botany.
It was good form to attend the lectures of M. de Jussieu and to read
Plutarch. Rousseau had made the love of flowers fashionable, for he had
said: "While I collect plants I am not unfortunate." Madame de Genlis
composed a _Moral Herbal_. Amateurs added a museum of natural history to
their collection of paintings. One might then meet in the alleys of the
King's Garden a great number of personages who were later to take part
in the revolutionary assemblies. Bosc needed to make no effort to follow
the fashion. Being a Huguenot, he was republican from birth. As to
botany, he cherished it with a deep and ingenuous passion, and not as a
pastime.

It was in the Botanic Garden, either at Jussieu's lectures or in André
Thouin's home, that he sealed the great friendships of his life. He was,
in fact, among the frequenters of the hospitable apartment where lived
the four brothers Thouin, with their sisters, their wives and their
daughters; this family of scientist gardeners received their friends in
winter in the kitchen and in summer before the greenhouses. Celebrated
men came to converse with and learn from these worthy men, who were
the true masters of the King's Garden; and the "venerable" Malesherbes,
seated upon a trough, often conversed with Madam Guillebert, the sister
of André Thouin, for whom he had a particular esteem. [3]

Bosc at that time entered into friendship with three future members of
the Convention, from whom he had acquired the taste of studying plants:
Creuzé-Latouche, Garan de Coulon and Bancal des Issarts. The first two
died Senators of the Empire. As to Bancal, we will soon run across him
again.

It was in the same surroundings that he met Roland, an inspector of
manufactures, and his young wife, then in all the flower of her robust
beauty. The husband was forty-eight; the wife was twenty-six; Bosc was
twenty; naturally he fell in love. Madame Roland gave him to understand
that he had nothing to hope for from her; but she mockingly added
that in eighteen years it would be allowable for him to make a like
declaration to her daughter Eudora. Bosc resigned himself to the
situation and consented to the friendship which was offered him; but he
committed the folly, later, of taking seriously the raillery with which
he had been dismissed.

For ten years Bosc continued a correspondence with Madame Roland which
was full of confidence and freedom. These letters no longer exist,
and it is a pity; for this republican botanist seems to have possessed
sensitiveness, tenderness and judgment. We do possess, however, most of
the letters which were written to him by Madame Roland.

[Illustration: 0093]

Without these letters and various others of the same period, we would
never have had any other means of knowing Madame Roland than the image
drawn by herself in her Memoirs, her intolerable Memoirs. We would
always have seen her behind the tragic mask, heroic, unapproachable and
full of vanity, and we would have remained almost unconscious of the
frightful tragedy of her death if she had not left us these intimate and
familiar effusions, in which are revealed the heart and the mind of a
woman who was truly feminine. We are very little moved by the celebrated
letter which she wrote one day to Bancal, Bosc's friend, to spurn his
love, although she confessed to "tumultuous sentiments" which agitated
her, and to tears which obscured her vision. I know that Michelet cries:
"The cuirass of the warrior opens, and it is a woman that we see, the
wounded bosom of Clorinda." But we must doubt, after all, the severity
of the wound which leaves Clorinda cool enough to call to witness "the
absolute irreproachability" of her life. There is something theatrical
in such half-avowals. On the contrary, her letters to Bosc are simple
in diction and ofttimes charming. They are spontaneous: "Seated in the
ingle nook, but at eleven o'clock in the morning, after a peaceful night
and the different cares of the day's work, my friend (that is, Roland)
at his desk, my little girl knitting, and myself talking to one,
watching over the work of the other, savoring the happiness of existing
warmly in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to a friend, while
the snow falls upon so many poor devils loaded down with misery and
grief, I grieve over their fate; I turn back with pleasure to my own..."
And elsewhere: "Now, know that Eudora reads well; begins to know no
other plaything than the needle; amuses herself by drawing geometrical
figures; does not know what shackles clothes of any kind may be; has
no idea of the price one has to pay for rags for adornment; believes
herself beautiful when she is told that she is a good girl and that
she has a perfectly white dress, remarkable for its cleanness; that she
finds the greatest prize in life to be a bonbon given with a kiss; that
her naughty spells become rarer and shorter; that she walks through the
darkness as in the daylight, fears nothing and has no idea that it is
worth while to tell a lie about anything; add that she is five years
and six weeks old; that I am not aware that she has false ideas on any
subject, that is important at least; and agree that, if her stiffness
has fatigued me, if her fancies have worried me, if her carelessness
has made it more difficult for us to influence her, we have not entirely
lost our pains..." And it would be possible to quote twenty other
passages written with the same grace and the same simplicity....

As for the young friend to whom were addressed these nice letters, here
is his portrait: "As for you, whom I see even at this distance talking
quickly, going like lightning, with an air sometimes sensible and
sometimes heedless, but never imposing when you try to be grave, because
then you make grimaces derived from Lavater, and because activity alone
suits your face; you whom we love well and who merit it from us, tell us
if the present is supportable to you and the future gracious."

*****

Let us return to Sainte-Radegonde. While botanizing through the woods
which surround Paris, Bosc had discovered this retreat. The little
house, last relic of a priory long since abandoned, was inhabited by
an old peasant woman who gladly offered hospitality to strollers from
Paris, when the Revolution broke out.

Bosc, by his temperament, his tastes and his friendships, was led to
the new ideas. He was not satisfied with presiding over the Society
of Natural History; he likewise joined the Society of Friends of the
Constitution and, later, he became a member of the Jacobin Club. On
September 25, 1791, we find him taking part in a festival given at
Montmorency to celebrate the inauguration of a bust of Rousseau: before
the dances and illuminations, he made a speech and offered periwinkles
to the spirit of the philosopher.

Meanwhile, the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde, confiscated as
ecclesiastical property, was about to be offered for sale, and Bosc
was desolated at the thought that a new owner would perhaps forbid him
access to the wood where he was accustomed to dream and work. He was
poor and could not dream of buying the little property, valued at more
than four thousand livres by the experts of the district of Gonesse. So
he persuaded his friend Bancal to acquire Sainte Radegonde at the public
auction, February 14, 1792. We do not know if he was a partner in the
transaction. What seems certain is that Bancal never came to dwell in
his hermitage.

A few days later Roland became Minister of the Interior and he named
Bosc Administrator of Posts; it was a question of "disaristocratizing"
this service. Bosc used his best talents toward it.... But, at the end
of a year, the Gironde was overthrown, the Girondins were under warrants
of arrest, and Bosc took refuge at Sainte Radegonde.

[Illustration: 0099]

He did not arrive there alone. Roland accompanied him; tracked by the
revolutionists of the Commune, separated from his wife, who had been
imprisoned in the Abbaye, he concealed himself for fifteen days with
his friend before seeking a safer asylum at Rouen, in the home of the
Demoiselles Malortie.

After having assured the escape of Roland, Bosc gets hold of his
daughter Eudora, who was then twelve years old, and confides her to the
wife of his friend Creuzé-Latouche; then he succeeds in entering the
prison, where he reassures Madame Roland as to the fate of her child.

After being temporarily released, this lady is again arrested and shut
up at Sainte Pélagie. Bosc continues to come and see her at the peril
of his life. He brings her flowers, for which he goes to the Botanical
Garden; but, one day, he understands the danger of thus going to visit
the Thouins, and then it is the flowers of Sainte Radegonde that he
brings to the prisoner in a basket. It is to him that Madame Roland
confides _Les Notices Historiques_--these are her _Memoirs_,--written in
her prison. Finally, when her sentence has become inevitable, she begs
from him poison, by which she may escape the insults of the judges and
the populace: "Behold my firmness, weigh the reasons, calculate coldly,
and appreciate how little is the worth of the canaille, greedy for
spectacles." Bosc decides that for her own glory and for the sake of the
Republic his friend must accept all: the outrages of the tribunal, the
clamors of the crowd and the horror of the last agony. She submits. A
few days later Bosc returns to Paris and hears of her execution.

Sainte Radegonde sheltered others who were proscribed.

One day when Bosc visited Creuzé-Latouche, he met there
Laréveillière-Lépeaux. The latter, sought for at the same time as his
two inseparable friends, Urbain Pilastre and Jean Baptiste Leclerc, had
just learned of the flight of Pilastre and the arrest of Leclerc. He
wished to return to his home, be arrested, and partake the fate of his
friend. Creuzé dissuaded him from this act of despair....

Bosc knew Laréveillière from having formerly seen him at the home of
André Thouin, for the future high priest of the Theophilanthropists had
become quite expert in botany. He offered to share his hiding place with
him. Laréveillière accepted. Both succeeded in leaving Paris without
being noticed, and reached Sainte Radegonde.

For three weeks Laréveillière remained hidden in the forest of Emile.
(At this time Montmorency was called Emile, in honor of Rousseau.)
Neither he nor Bosc had a red cent. They had to live on bread, roots
and snails. Besides, their hiding place was not safe; there was nothing
unusual in the presence of Bosc in this solitude, but Laré-veillière
might any day excite the curiosity of the patriots of Emile. The
ugliness of his countenance and the deformity of his figure caused him
to be noticed by every passer-by. Robespierre was then living in the
hermitage of Jean Jacques; it has even been related that he met the
fugitive face to face one day; at all events such an encounter was to be
dreaded. The administrators of Seine-et-Oise sometimes took a fancy to
hunt in the neighborhood of Sainte Radegonde.... The peril increased
from day to day. A faithful friend, Pincepré de Buire, invited
Laréveillère to take refuge at his home near Péronne. He left Sainte
Radegonde.

"The good Mile. Letourneur," he has related, "gave me two or three
handkerchiefs; Rozier, today a counselor at the royal court of
Montpellier, then judge of the district of Montmorency, whose
acquaintance we had made at Mile. Letourneur's, put one of his shirts in
my pocket. Poor Bosc gave me the widow's mite--he put a stick of white
crab in my hand and guided me through the forest to the highway. To
use the English expression, on leaving him I tore myself from him' with
extreme grief." [4]

Laréveillière arrived without difficulty at the village of Buire.

On the same day that he left Sainte Radegonde, another deputy of the
Convention, Masuyer, came to take his place; he was accused because he
had assisted at the escape of Pétion; but his greatest crime was that
he had, in full Assembly, said to Pache, who insisted on proscriptions:
"Haven't you got a little place for me on your list? There would be
a hundred crowns in it for you!" Masuyer, disregarding Bosc's advice,
wished to enter Paris. He was arrested near the Neuilly Bridge. Bosc,
who had insisted on accompanying him, had just time to plunge into
the Bois de Boulogne, escaped, and returned to his hermitage, where he
awaited the end of the Terror.

*****

When he returned to Paris, in the autumn of 1794, Bosc devoted his
entire time to the labors imposed upon him by the last will of Madame
Roland. He withdrew the manuscript of her Memoirs from the hiding place
where he had left it, on top of the beam over the stable door of Sainte
Radegonde, and published the first part of it in April, 1795. At the
same time he endeavored to collect the remnants of the patrimony of
Eudora, whose guardianship he had accepted.

Here begins the most melancholy episode of the life of this worthy man.
He became smitten with his pupil. He allowed himself to be blinded by
some marks of gratitude. "She is tenderly attached to me," he wrote to
one of his friends, "and shows the happiest disposition; so I can no
longer fail to meet her wishes and take her for my wife, despite the
disproportion of our ages." Nevertheless, he still had scruples, and
sent Eudora for several months to the Demoiselles Malortie, who had
given asylum to Roland when a fugitive. It was well for him that he did,
for his illusion was of short duration. Eudora did not love him....

Without employment, without means, his heart broken, he resolved to
expatriate himself. He reached Bordeaux on foot, paid calls on the
widows of his friends of the Gironde, and took passage on a ship
departing for America. He left France in despair, without receiving a
single word of farewell from Eudora. When he landed at Charleston,
he learned of the marriage of his pupil to the son of a certain
Champagneux, a friend of Madame Roland, to whom he had intrusted the
guardianship of the young girl.

Laréveillière, who had become a Director, had him appointed vice-consul
at Wilmington, and later consul at New York. But there were great
difficulties between the United States and France; he could not obtain
his exequatur. He tried to console himself by devotion to botany. But
the wound which he had received still bled. "I do not know," he wrote to
Madame Louvet, "when the wound of my heart will be sufficiently healed
to allow me to revisit without too much bitterness the places and the
individuals still dear to me, whose presence will bring back to me cruel
memories. Although I am much more calm than when I left, although I am
actually easily distracted by my scientific labors and even by manual
occupations, I do not feel that I have courage to return to Paris. I
still need to see persons to whom I am indifferent, in order to accustom
myself to facing certain persons whom I have loved and whom I cannot
forget, whatever injustice they may have done to me or to the Republic,
without counting my Eudora...." And his memory takes him back to the
dear retreat of Sainte Radegonde; he writes to Bancal: "Well! Then
you no longer go to visit Sainte Radegonde? Do you then take no more
interest in it? I conclude from that that you will undergo no further
expense on account of it and that you will soon get rid of it.
Nevertheless I had the project of planting there many trees from this
country, since it is the soil most similar to that of South Carolina
that I know in the neighborhood of Paris..."

Bosc did see Sainte Radegonde again. At the end of two years he returned
to France and married one of his cousins. The Revolution was over and
Eudora was forgotten.

From that time on, he gave himself up entirely to his work as a
naturalist. He became Inspector of the nurseries of Versailles and also
of those which were maintained by the Ministry of the Interior. In
1806 he was elected a member of the Institute. In 1825 he succeeded
his friend André Thouin as Professor of Horticulture at the Botanical
Garden, and after a long and cruel illness, which prevented him from
lecturing, he died in 1828.

In 1801, when the first daughter born of his marriage had died in
infancy, he had begged Bancal to transfer to him two perches of land in
his domain of Sainte. Radegonde, in order that he might bury his child
there. Such was the origin of the little cemetery where Bosc reposes in
the midst of his children and his grandchildren.

I have not regretted making a pilgrimage and evoking, in the autumnal
forest, the phantoms of these Revolutionists and these botanists.

How touching a figure is that of this Bosc, whose name recalls--it is
Laréveillière-Lépeaux who speaks--"the most generous friendship, the
most heroic courage, the purest patriotism, the most active humanity,
the most austere probity, the most determined boldness, and at the
same time the most extended knowledge in natural science and different
branches of administration as well as in political, domestic and rural
economy..." and also, let us add, the eternal blindness of the amorous
Arnolphe!





V. SENLIS

|THE spire of the ancient cathedral of Senlis overlooks an immense
horizon. This belfry is the lightest, the most elegant, the most
harmonious that Gothic art has given us. It rises with a flight so
magnificent and so perfectly rhythmical that at the first glance one
might think it a growth of nature; it seems to live with the same life
as the heavens, the clouds and the birds. This masterly grace, this warm
beauty, are, however, the work of time and of men. An architect endowed
with genius thought out this miraculous plan, proportioned with
this infallible precision the elevation of the different landings,
distributed the openings and the surfaces, invented the pointed turrets
and the frail columns which flank the edifice, taper off its structure,
precipitate its flight and make it impossible to perceive the point at
which the square tower is transformed into an octagonal spire, so that
the highest pyramid seems to burst forth from a long corolla. Then the
centuries have painted the stones with the pale gold of lichens, and
have completed the masterpiece.

The whole of Senlis seems to have been built for the glory of its spire.
Streets, gardens, squares, monuments, houses, all seem to be arranged
by a mysterious artist, who persists in incessantly bringing back our
glance to the dominating spire, the better to reveal to us all its
graces and all its magnificence, at all times and under all lights.

We wander at random about the little episcopal city: it is charming,
tortuous and taciturn, with its moss-covered pavements, its deserted
alleys, its flowering orchards, its shadowed promenades, its ancient
houses. We discover at every step houses of earlier days which the
barbarism of the men of the present time has spared: here turrets,
spiral staircases, doors surmounted by old escutcheons, long
half-grotesque gargoyles, mullioned windows, evoke the refined elegance
of the fifteenth century; yonder, a wall decorated with pilasters and
medallions, or a noble brick and stone crow-stepped façade, witness the
opulence of the citizenry at the time of the second Renaissance; there
are admirable remains of hospitals of the thirteenth century; heavy
Tuscan porches stand before beautiful hôtels of the eighteenth: and
all this rich and varied architecture is an excellent commentary on the
words of Jean de Jandun, the historian of Senlis: "To be at Senlis is
to dwell in magnificent homes, whose vigorous walls are built, not of
fragile plaster, but of the hardest and most selected stone, placed
with an industrious skill, and whose cellars, surrounded by solid
constructions of stone, so cool the wines during the summer season,
thanks to the degree of their freshness, that the throat and the stomach
of drinkers thereby experience a supreme delight." (Note 5.)

To the charm of the spectacle is added the charm of ancient names: the
sinuous streets have retained their antique appellations. (How wise
is Senlis to maintain these strange words, carved in the stone, at the
corners of its streets, rather than to inscribe upon ignoble blue plates
the names of all the celebrities dear to Larousse!) The beautiful houses
of former days seem in some undiscoverable way to be more living when we
discover them in the Street of the Red Mail, the Street of the Trellis,
the Street of the White Pigeons, the Street of Tiphaine's Well, the
Street of the Little Chaâlis, the Impasse du Courtillet, etc.... An
amusing sign which represents three scholars arguing with an ape
would no longer have any flavor if we had to seek for it in some Place
Garibaldi; it is delicious when found at Unicom Crossways. On the old
Town Hall, an inscription continues to indicate the position of the
rabbit and broom market; and it is very fine that the name of Louis
Blanc or of Gambetta has not been given to the Street of the Cheese
Makers, were it only out of consideration for that excellent Jean de
Jandun who, decidedly, well knew how to appreciate all the merits of
Senlis, for he wrote in regard to the cheeses of his native town:
"The sweetest milk, a butter without admixture, fat cheeses, served in
abundance to mean and minor purses, banish that furious activity of the
brain which fatigues almost without exception the majority of admirers
of highly spiced meats, and thus furnish the well-regulated habitude
of a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove." Façades, names and
souvenirs are exquisite; and one says to one's self in sauntering about
Senlis that, even without the assistance of the treatment recommended by
Jean de Jandun, the silent and antique grace of the little town would be
sufficient to inspire in old neurasthenics "the regulated habitude of a
tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove...."

The promenade is charming. But neither the picturesqueness of the
streets, nor the beauty of the houses, nor the piquancy of the old
names, nor even the words of Jean de Jandun are worth as much as the
picture which here strike the glance at every turn: the spire, always
the spire of Notre Dame. It appears suddenly between two gables. It
projects above the old brownish tile roofs. Above the flower-covered
walls of the gardens it is framed between clumps of lilac and
horse-chestnut. It overlooks the houses, it dominates the parks. The
poor tower of Saint Peter, with its disgraceful lantern, sometimes
accompanies it at a distance, as if to make barbarians better appreciate
the grandeur and the slenderness of Notre Dame's incomparable spire.

Senlis has preserved the ruins of its royal château. It is a place which
abounds in memories, for a great number of the kings of France, from
the Carlovingians to Henri IV, came here to visit for a season. Even its
ruins are not without interest. They rest upon the Roman wall, which
has remained intact at this spot, and we find there a fireplace of the
thirteenth century, towers, casements.... But how completely indifferent
all this archaeology leaves us when we behold the spire of the cathedral
emerging from the greenery of the garden! The great trees conceal all
the rest of the church. We see only, mounting into the full heaven, the
golden pyramid, still finer and more aspiring in the midst of all these
spring greeneries. A mysterious harmony exists between the youthful
boldness, the robust lightness of the human work, and the triumphant
freshness of the new vegetation. Besides, the monuments of Gothic art
are as marvelously suited to intimacy with nature as to familiarity with
life.

This familiarity, which has so often been destroyed by foolishly
clearing away the surroundings of cathedrals, proves its value to us at
Senlis on the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame. This is a rectangular space,
where grass grows between the paving stones. The façade of the church is
framed by two rows of noble chestnuts. Behind a venerable wall rise the
turret and the gable of a fifteenth-century house. One might suppose it
to be the deserted and well-kept courtyard of a Flemish _béguinage_.
In this ancient frame, in the midst of this solitude, the cathedral
preserves all its youth. Here there is a perfect unison between the
building and its surroundings. Not only are the trees, the walls, the
houses, in harmony with the architecture, but this architecture itself
remains alive, because its proportions have not been falsified. The
dimensions of the square are exactly those which are needed in order
that our eye may be able to discover in their beauty of propinquity the
portal, the unfinished tower and the spire. All this is so perfect that
its grace is eternal.

This cathedral of Senlis would be an incomparable edifice even if it did
not possess its sublime spire.

The western portal is one of the most beautiful works of mediaeval
sculpture. On the two sides of the porch, as on the northern door of
Chartres, are arranged the kings and the prophets who foreshadowed the
Saviour in the Old Testament. Vandals have mutilated these statues in
olden times. In the nineteenth century other savages have restored them
and have put in the place of the broken heads masterpieces of bad taste
and silliness. Happily these malefactors have spared the rest of
the sculptures; they have touched neither the ruins of the charming
calendar, whose popular scenes unfold themselves above the kings and the
prophets, nor the marvelous statuettes, still almost intact, which adorn
the voussoirs of the portal, nor the bas-reliefs of the tympan where
angels huddle about the dead Virgin, that some may carry to heaven her
body and others her soul. As to the _Coronation of the Virgin_, which
occupies the upper part of the tympan, it also has been respected alike
by iconoclasts and by restorers. Of all the images of the Mother of God
which the sculpture of the thirteenth century has left us, I know none
more moving than this Virgin of Senlis. She is a peasant girl, a simple
country maid, with heavy features, and resignation in her face; her
unaccustomed hands can scarcely hold the scepter and the book; she is
ready for all dolors and for all beatitudes, extenuated by miracles,
harassed by maternity, still and always _ancilla Domini_, even in the
midst of the glories of the coronation and of the splendors of Paradise.

The church of the twelfth century, to which this doorway belongs, was
finished in the thirteenth, burned in the fourteenth, rebuilt in the
fifteenth, and again ruined by fire at the beginning of the sixteenth.
It is possible to discover in the cathedral of today the traces of these
various reconstructions. But, however interesting it may be to follow,
upon the stones of the monuments, the history of their vicissitudes, I
will spare you this somewhat austere amusement. Continuous archaeology
is tiresome.

I stop at the sixteenth century. It was at this period that the church
took the form and the aspect which it has preserved to our time.

[Illustration: 0117]

In 1505, the Bishop Charles de Blanchefort, together with the chapter,
addressed the following request to the King: "May it please the King
to have pity and compassion on the poor church of Senlis... which,
by fortune and inconvenience of fire, in the month of June, 1504, was
burned, the bells melted, and the belfry which is great, magnificent
and one of the notable of the kingdom, by means of the said fire in such
wise damaged that it is in danger of falling." Louis XII showed himself
favorable to the request. Nobles, citizens and merchants contributed to
the work. The spire was made firm. The walls of the nave were raised,
the vaulting was reconstructed, the transept was built, and there were
constructed at the north and south sides those two finely chiseled
portals which give to Notre Dame de Senlis so much elegance and
sumptuousness. How, without diminishing the pure beauty of the old
cathedral, the architects of the Renaissance should have been able to
give it this luxurious attire, this festal clothing; how, without damage
to the ancient edifice, they should have been able to envelop it with
all these laces and jewels of stone, slender columns, balustrades,
carved copings, pierced lanterns, is a miracle of taste and ingenuity.
The French builders of the first half of the sixteenth century often
produced such prodigies; but nowhere, I believe, has the success been as
complete as at Senlis.

In the interior, even though the nave is very short and the choir very
deep, the same impression of unity. Nevertheless, the balustrades in
Renaissance style, which garnish the upper galleries, shock us for
a moment. The discrepancy in the styles is more visible inside the
edifice. Outside the light envelops all and softens the contrasts; the
sun creates harmony.

The chapels are poorly decorated. The architects and clergy have there
rivaled each other in bad taste. They have broken open the apse to add
to it a chapel of the Virgin, which breaks all the lines of the monument
inside and out. Two statues of the thirteenth century, one representing
Saint Louis and the other Saint Levain, have been ridiculously colored,
so that one would take them today for products of the Rue Bonaparte.
A pretty Virgin of the fourteenth century would have been better off
without the new gilding which has been inflicted on it.....

At the end of the church, I read on one of the pillars the following
inscription: "Nicolas Jourdain, administrator of this parish, deceased
January 30, 1799.--This church owes to him its restoration and its
embellishment. The grateful parishioners have erected this monument to
him.--Marie Françoise Truyart, his spouse, equally benefactress of this
church, deceased January 17, 1811.--Pray for their souls."

Who was M. Jourdain? What embellishments does the church of Senlis owe
to him? I would have liked to know. X looked for the sacristan, that he
might tell me, and also that he might allow me to enter the sacristy,
where one may see the Dance of Fools on a capital. But the sacristan of
Notre Dame de Senlis dwells very far from his church, on the banks of
the Nonette, in the place called the Asses' Backs; he goes home before
eleven o'clock in the morning to get his lunch, and is never seen again
at the cathedral, according to the bell-ringer, before four o'clock in
the afternoon. So I returned at four o'clock. The sacristan was still
eating breakfast at the Asses' Backs.... So I shall never know anything
about either M. Nicolas Jourdain nor Marie Françoise Truyart, his wife.

* * * *

On the other bank of the Nonette, turn about. A little bridge over
a little river; some orchards, still pink and white with their last
flowers; a street which climbs through the town, whose roofs and uneven
gables are outlined softly against a sky of pale blue; remnants of
ramparts starred with golden flowers; great clumps of verdure rising
everywhere among the rosy roofs, and finally the great belfry dominating
all, the little town, the little valley, the fields which rise and fall
to the horizon. Behold, and if you are "one of us," you will recognize
the most perfect, the most elegant, the finest, the best arranged of all
the landscapes of the world. Here is France, the France of Fouquet, the
France of Corot.

And I must also, before leaving Senlis, announce that this truly
aristocratic town has not a single statue in its squares.




$VI. JUILLY

|THE Oratorist Fathers founded the college of Juilly September 2, 1639.
They still directed it when these lines were written. The world knows
what fate has since come to the masters of this old institution.

Here we are deep in the soil and the history of France. Juilly, an
ancient monastery of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, is seven
leagues from Paris, four leagues from Meaux, in the Parisis, in the
heart of the region where France discovered that it had a conscience, a
destiny, a tongue and an art. The earth here is so opulent, so fat and
so heavy that six oxen harnessed to a plow labor over the furrow. The
rich plateau lifts here and there in slow and measured undulations
or sinks in laughing and umbrageous folds. The brooks are called the
Biberonne, the Ru du Rossignol (Nightingale Brook); the villages,
Thieux, Compans, Dam-martin, Nantouillet. Joan of Arc prayed in the
church of Thieux. Saint Geneviève, to slake the thirst of one of her
companions, called forth the limpid spring about which the monastery
grew. All the virtues and all the legends of France render the air more
gentle and more salubrious here.

[Illustration: 0125]

The valley of Juilly has the modest and penetrating grace of the
exquisite landscapes of the Ile-de-France. At the bottom of the valley
stretch lawns and a pool with formal banks. On one of the slopes, a
beautiful park displays its grand parallel avenues, which debouch
on wide horizons, a park made expressly for the promenade of a
metaphysician, a Cartesian park. On the opposite slope, a farm, a
dovecote, then the vast buildings of the college, massive constructions
of the seventeenth century, whose austere and naked façades are not
without grandeur.

On the edge of the pool rises a chestnut tree, thrice centenarian.
Tradition will have that it sheltered the reveries of Malebranche. It
is perhaps in this place that the Oratorist read Descartes, with such
transports "that he was seized with palpitations of the heart, which
sometimes obliged him to interrupt his reading," an extraordinary
emotion which inspired Fontenelle with this delicious remark:
"The invisible and useless truth is not accustomed to find so much
sensitiveness among men, and the most ordinary objects of their passions
would hold themselves happy to be the object of as much."

The chestnut tree of Malebranche has been pruned. Under the weight of
centuries, its branches bent and broke. They have been cut, and the
venerable trunk now stretches toward the sky only the wounded stumps.
This spectacle in this place makes one think of the destiny of a
philosophy. The decaying branches of the system have been broken, the
soil has been strewn with the great branches under which men formerly
enjoyed the repose of certainty. But, when the pruner has finished his
task, we still admire the structure of the old tree and the fecundity of
the soil whence it grew.

The college, with its long corridors and its vast staircases,
preserves a monastic appearance, which would be severe and harsh if
the countryside, the grass plots, the park and the pool did not display
their gayety about the old walls. When M. Demolins and his imitators
created their new schools, they followed the example of England; but,
in a certain manner, they revived a French tradition. Before any
one thought of crowding children into the university barracks of the
nineteenth century, there were in France colleges where life was lived
in the open air, in the midst of a beautiful park.

Within, the house is grave and without luxury. The Oratorists were never
rich. The house has remained almost in the state in which it was in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapel only was rebuilt a few
years ago, for the ancient convent chapel of the thirteenth century had
fallen to ruins. The magnificent wainscot-ings of oak in the strangers'
refectory enframe paintings of the time of Louis XV, representing
skating, fishing and hunting scenes; the staircase which leads to the
apartments of the Superior is ornamented with a beautiful railing of
iron and brass; these are the only traces of ancient decoration to be
met with in the whole college.

But the ancient home is rich in memories. Before entering, we have
already half seen on the bank of the pool the meditative shade of
Malebranche. Other ghosts rise on every side. The Oratory of France
lives again at Juilly.

Here, in the chapel, is the image of Cardinal de Bérulle. This statue,
an admirable work by Jacques Sarazin, is the upper portion of a
mausoleum which the Oratorist Fathers of Paris had erected in their
institution to the memory of their founder. The cardinal, in full
canonicals, kneels on a _prie-dieu_, in the attitude of prayer, with an
open book before him. His head and the upper portion of his body turn
toward the left in a curious way, but the face is a prodigy of life and
expression. The coarse features, strongly accentuated, breathe good-will
and kindness. He has the magnificent ugliness of a saint.

The concordat of Francis I had caused the moral ruin of the convents of
France; the secular clergy, among the troubles of the religious wars,
had fallen into the most miserable condition, without piety, without
knowledge, and without manners, when, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Pierre de Bérulle, Madame Acarie and Saint Vincent de Paul
undertook the religious restoration of France, which the adjuration of
Henri IV had just definitely restored to Catholicism. Bérulle founded
the Oratory of France on the model of the Oratory of Rome, instituted by
Saint Philip Néri.

On November 11, 1611, Saint Martin's Day, in a house of the Faubourg
Saint Jacques, called the House of Petit Bourbon (the Val-de-Grâce was
later built on this same spot), Bérulle and five other priests assembled
to constitute a congregation. The aim of this was to "increase the
perfection of the priestly calling." But its rule and its spirit had
nothing in common with the rule and the spirit of the monastic orders.
The Oratorist does not pronounce special vows, and remains under the
jurisdiction of his bishop.

Bossuet, in his funeral oration on Father Bour-going, splendidly
summarized the constitution of the Oratory:

"The immense love of Pierre de Bérulle for the Church inspired him with
the design of forming a company to which he desired to give no other
spirit than the very spirit of the Church nor any other rules than its
canons, nor any other superiors than its bishops, nor any other bonds
than its charity, nor any other solemn vows than those of baptism and of
the priesthood.

"There, a holy liberty makes a holy engagement. One obeys without
dependence, one governs without commands; all authority is in
gentleness, and respect exists without the aid of fear. The charity
which banishes fear operates this great miracle, and, with no other yoke
than itself, it knows how, not only to capture, but even to annihilate
personal will."

The Jesuits had returned to France seven years before Pierre de Bérulle
created the Oratory. He was not the enemy of the Company of Jesus, since
he himself had labored to procure its return to France. His work was
none the less opposed to that of Saint Ignatius. "In our body," said
a century later an Oratorist who was faithful to the spirit of his
congregation, "liberty consists....in wishing and in doing freely what
one ought, _quasi liberi_." This _quasi liberi_ is exactly the opposite
of the famous _perinde ac cadaver_. We may understand sufficiently why,
in the course of time, the Jesuits showed little sympathy for the
Oratorists. The work of Pierre de Bérulle must have appeared to them a
perilous compromise between Catholic orthodoxy and the detested
principles of the Reformation: what good is it to renew, at every moment
of one's life, one's adhesion to a rule to which it is more simple and
more sure to enchain one's self once for all? Why wish to give one's
self at any cost the haughty joy of feeling and exercising one's
liberty? And what is this annihilation which allows the will to reassert
itself incessantly, vivacious and active? The Jesuits, therefore, were
not surprised to see the Oratory threatened by the Jansenist contagion.

We might be tempted to say, employing a vocabulary which is too modern,
that the spirit of the Oratory was, from its inception, a liberal
spirit. Let us rather say: It was a _Cartesian_ spirit. Pierre de
Bérulle loved and admired Descartes and urged him to publish his
writings. The greatest of disciples of Descartes, Malebranche, was an
Oratorist.... A Jesuit would not have failed to call our attention also
to the fact that here is displayed the imprudence of Pierre de

Bérulle and of his successors; for from _methodical doubt_ came all the
rationalism of the eighteenth century....

Let us return to Juilly.

On the walls of the masters' refectory hangs a long series of portraits:
they are those of the Generals Superior of the Oratory and of some
illustrious Oratorists. The most beautiful is that of Malebranche:
this long, meager face witnesses the candid and simple soul of
the metaphysician, who saw "all in God." Other paintings are less
attractive. But they are all precious for the history of the Oratory and
of Juilly.... Let us stop before some of these images.

Father de Condren. "God had rendered him," said Saint Chantai, "capable
of instructing angels." His features are impressed with infinite
gentleness; but the height of his forehead and the veiled splendor of
his glance reveal an unconquerable tenacity, and thanks to this contrast
the whole face assumes a strange delicacy.

Pierre de Bérulle died at the age of fifty-four, overcome by fatigue;
his labor had been immense; he had created and guided his congregation,
founded seminaries,'' delivered sermons, written books, guided
consciences, and he had been mixed up in affairs of state. It was Father
de Condren who succeeded him in the office of Superior General. He gave
to the Oratory its permanent constitution and founded Juilly.

With Father de Condren, the Oratory abandoned the path which its founder
had traced for it. It was less occupied in forming the clergy and
instituting seminaries than in giving instruction to lay youth. The
original purpose of the congregation was thereafter followed and
achieved by M. Olier and the priests of Saint Sulpice. The wishes of
Louis XIII were not averse to this change, for which in any case Father
de Condren had no dislike; he had taste and talent for teaching. The
ancient abbey of Juilly was thus transformed into a model college called
the Royal Academy (1638). The King authorized the institution to add the
arms of France to the arms of the Oratory.

Father de Condren himself prepared the new regulations for study and
discipline of the young Academy. These regulations were a veritable
reform in French education,--a durable and profound reform, for the
programs of the University in the nineteenth century were drawn up in
accordance with the principles of the Oratory.

At that period the Jesuits were masters of education and instruction.
They considered as the foundation of all studies a grammatical knowledge
of the dead languages, and gave little attention to history and the
exact sciences. They had instituted that classical education which is so
appropriate to the very genius of our nation that its ruin would
perhaps be the downfall of our language, our taste and our literature.
Nevertheless, their method in certain respects was narrow and
antiquated: they excluded the history and the language of France from a
college training.

The work of the Oratorists was in a certain measure to Frenchify and
modernize the instruction of the Jesuits. They remained faithful to
classic antiquity. A year before his death, Father de Condren said to
Thomassin that he did not desire to leave this world until he had once
more read the entire works of Cicero. However, the Ratio Studiorum, at
Juilly, introduced great novelties in the college course. The masters
were required to address the youths in their mother tongue and to put in
their hands Latin grammars written in French. From that time they began
by learning the rules of French orthography. Latin became obligatory
only from the fourth class on. The Catechism was given in Latin only in
the second class. History lessons were always given in French. In the
study of Latin, without abandoning the use of themes, translations were
preferred. Greek was taught in the same way, but its knowledge was not
pushed as far, A special chair of history was instituted. The history
of France was given first place, and became the object of a three-year
course. The private library of the pupils contained principally books on
ancient and modern history. There were also geography lessons. Finally,
in this Cartesian house, mathematics and physics naturally received
great honor.

They also taught drawing, music, horsemanship, fencing and dancing.
But comedies and ballets, which the Jesuits allowed their pupils, were
replaced at Juilly by the sessions of a sort of literary Academy where
the most advanced pupils imitated the French Academy.

Richelieu, who had so profound and just an instinct for the interest of
France in all directions, could not be indifferent to the enterprise of
Father de Condren. He understood that the Oratorists were associating
themselves with his great work, gave their methods "applause such as
one could scarcely believe," and, when he founded a college in his natal
town of Richelieu, laid out the regulations and the program in imitation
of those which were in use at Juilly.

Sainte-Beuve has done honor to the little schools of Port-Royal for
this great revolution in teaching: "It is indeed," he says, "to these
gentlemen of Port-Royal that the honor is due of having put education in
accord with the literary progress which the French Academy accomplished
about the same time, and for having first introduced the regularity and
elegance of French into the current of learned studies. To get rid of
pedantry without ruining solidity, might have been their motto.... So, a
great innovation! To teach children to read in French, and to choose
in French the words which stood for the objects with which they were
already acquainted and of which they knew the meaning: this was the
point of departure of Port-Royal...." [6]

[Illustration: 0137]

A historian of Juilly (M. Charles Hamel) has observed that the lower
schools were opened only four years after the foundation of Juilly, and
that we must restore to Father de Condren the glory of having been the
first "to get rid of pedantry without ruining solidity," and to cause
French to be spoken in the schools of France. [7]

_Father Bourgoing_. This third superior was a harsh and absolute
master. He was also a rather rough man of business and one who was not
embarrassed by an excess of power. He imposed the authority of the rules
in all possible ways. His conduct had a tinge of superb vehemence which
contrasted strongly with the modesty and gentleness of his predecessors.
The Jansenist heresy was commencing to hover around the Oratory. Father
Bourgoing drew back those who were straying, with a rough and heavy
crook. He was, besides, as Cardinal Perraud says, in _L'Oratoire de
France,_ "the living model of the virtues which he desired that others
should practice." [8] He inflicted terrible penances. We behold him to
his very last day "shorten his sleep in spite of his need; endure the
rigors of cold despite his advanced years; continue his fasts in spite
of his labors; finally afflict his body by all sorts of austerities
without considering his bodily infirmities." Thus Bossuet expressed
himself in his funeral oration for Father Bourgoing, one of the least
celebrated, but one of the most magnificent, that he composed. We have
only to read it to know the men and the spirit of the Oratory in the
seventeenth century.

_Father de Sainte-Marthe_. This man seems to have been a student, full
of virtue, good sense and good fellowship, but a man who found himself
very much at a loss in the midst of vexations. And it was exactly at
the period of his government that the tempests were unloosed upon the
Oratory. Jansenism had entered the house. Fathers Quesnel and Du Guet
were expelled from the community. But these punishments did not satisfy
the Archbishop of Paris, M. de Harlay, who wished to govern the Oratory
with a strong hand. In the midst of these griefs and intrigues the
unfortunate Father de Sainte-Marthe exonerated himself, proclaimed his
submission, preached conciliation, sought to ward off the animosity
of the Archbishop and the King, defended his congregation against the
assaults of heresy, and went away in exile from province to province,
until the day came when it was necessary for him to resign his
office.... The more we look at the portrait of Father de Sainte-Marthe,
the more we pity this good priest, who was evidently born to live in fair
weather.

_Father de la Tour_. One of the most pleasing portraits in the refectory
of Juilly, full of grace and malice. Saint-Simon has also drawn a
portrait of Father de la Tour and the painter has added nothing to the
sketch of the writer. "He was tall of stature, well built, agreeable but
imposing of countenance, well known for his pliant but firm mind,
adroit but strong in his sermons, in the way he led in gay and amusing
conversation without departing from the character which he bore,
excelling by a spirit of wisdom, conduct and government, and held in the
greatest consideration."

*****

We have arrived at the threshold of the eighteenth century. Before
going farther, let us evoke once more the remembrance of two illustrious
guests of whom the old house was proud.

They still show at Juilly the room of Bossuet. It is lined with very
simple paneling and has an alcove. The furnishings are in the style of
the First Empire. It is here that Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, often slept
in the course of his pastoral visits, for Juilly was situated in his
diocese. He preached in the village chapel and presided at the exercises
of the Academy. On August 6, 1696, he wrote to his nephew, Abbé Bossuet:
"I came here to listen to a thesis which was dedicated to me. There are
here a number of worthy people, and the flower of the Oratory...."

The other "great man," whose memory has been preserved at Juilly is Jean
de La Fontaine.

He was scarcely twenty years old when a canon of Soissons, named
Héricart, lent him some religious books. The reading of these inflamed
him with great devotion and he believed that he was called to the
ecclesiastical state. He departed for Paris and entered the institution
at the Oratory on April 27, 1641. This was his first distraction.

A few weeks later his masters sent him to Juilly, under Father de
Vemeuil, who was to prepare him for ordination. La Fontaine read Marot
and looked out of the window. Now, as his room overlooked the farmyard,
he amused himself every day by watching the hens pick up their living.
To get the sympathy of the hen-keeper, he let down by a cord his cap
full of bread crumbs.

Father Bourgoing, then superior of the congregation, was not the man to
sympathize with the tastes and crotchets of Jean de La Fontaine; he sent
him back to Paris, to the seminary of Saint-Magloire. Then one fine day,
the young man went away as he had come, leaving behind him his brother,
Claude de La Fontaine, who, taking his example seriously, had also
entered the Oratory. His stay at Juilly does not seem to have left a
very deep trace in its memory. But he had at least furnished the future
students of the college with a very fine subject for Latin verses.

It is well known that Canon Héricart, as he had not been able to make
a priest of his friend, later decided to marry him to one of his
relatives. La Fontaine went to the marriage as he had gone to the
Oratory; he escaped from it in the same way.

[Illustration: 0143]

The fate of the Oratory of France was less glorious in the eighteenth
century than it had been in the seventeenth: the theological quarrels
which broke out as a result of the Bull _Unigenitus_ divided and
enfeebled the congregation. But the renown of Juilly did not suffer
from this, and the college founded by Father de Condren prospered. The
buildings of the old monastery were reconstructed and enlarged. The
methods of instruction remained the same. As to discipline, it is
said to have been quite paternal, and was exercised by reprimands or
affectionate chidings rather than by punishments. At Juilly, however, as
in all colleges, the children continued to be whipped.

In 1762, the Jesuits were expelled from France and their properties
sold. This was apparently a great advantage for the Oratory: the closing
of the colleges of the Company of Jesus made it the master of education.
But the thoughtful Oratorists did not fall into this illusion. "It is
the destruction of our congregation," said Father de la Valette at that
time; he understood that this brutal blow touched the Church itself,
even if some doubted this and others were unwilling to admit it.
Besides, the succession of the Jesuits was too heavy a burden to be
undertaken. The Oratory was not sufficiently numerous suddenly to take
charge of so many houses; it found it necessary to associate with itself
a great number of "lay brothers," whose vocation was doubtful; these
young "regents" were generally found to be unprepared to undergo the
constraints of a religious rule. This was being discovered when the
Revolution broke out.

An old student of Juilly, Antoine Vincent Arnault, a tragic poet, author
of _Marius à Miniurne, Lucrèce, Cincinnatus_, etc., whom Napoleon wished
to have as collaborator in writing a tragedy and who was the predecessor
of Scribe in the French Academy, left some interesting memoirs entitled
_Souvenirs d'un sexagénaire_. [9] He was born in 1766 and entered Juilly
in 1776. He has told us of his college years, "the eight un-happiest
years of his life." Thanks to him, we know the existence which was the
rule at Juilly from 1780 to 1784, and what professors had charge of the
instruction. The picture seems to me to be worth redrawing, now that we
know the architecture and the history of the school.

The superior of the house at that time was Father Petit. "A skilled
administrator, a prudent director, a mentality without prejudice or
illusions, more of a philosopher than he perhaps believed himself to be,
indulgent and malevolent at once, he guided this great house with
good words, and maintained admirable order in it for thirty years....
Religious, but not fanatical, he did not forget that he was director of
a boarding school and not of a seminary, and that the children who were
confided to him were to live in the world: so he was especially
anxious that they should be turned into worthy men: this was his own
expression."

In truth, this "admirable order" was sometimes troubled. The collegians
of 1780 played their parts: they wrote little verses and little
libels against their masters, became enthusiastic about the American
Revolution, and played at uprisings. The wisdom and moderation of Father
Petit did not always succeed in calming the revolutionary effervescence
of these youths. The wind which commenced to blow across France blew
hard even in the high monastic corridors of Juilly.

The middle classroom was the most turbulent and the promptest to revolt
against iniquity. One day these "middles" decided to hang their prefect
in effigy. The victim got angry, shut off recreation and ordered the
children to return to the schoolroom. Instantly the candles went out;
dictionaries, candlesticks, writing desks, became so many projectiles
which rained upon the prefect's back; struck down by a copy of the
Gradus, the pedant fled. The class then built barricades and lit a
bonfire, into which they threw the ferule, the mortarboard and the
scholarship record which the enemy had left upon the field of battle.
They refused to listen to overtures of peace, and remained deaf to the
warnings of the Superior, although they were in the habit of respecting
them.

From the viewpoint of a man who later went through several revolutions,
Arnault here makes this judicious remark: "Whoever may be the
individuals of which it is composed, the mob always obeys the same
principles. The breath of a child in a glass of water produces the same
effects as the blast of the hurricane upon the ocean."

It became necessary to turn the siege into a blockade. On the next day,
vanquished by hunger, the scholars surrendered. They were promised a
general amnesty. But, once in possession, the besiegers violated the
treaty. "Then," adds Arnault, "I understood what politics was; I saw
that it was not always in accord with the morality which we were so
eloquently advised to respect as the equal of religion." And this was
doubtless the reason why there were so many prefects of the Empire among
the former pupils of Juilly!

Father Petit was not the only Oratorist of whom Arnault handed down
a good report. Father Viel, the translator of _Télémaque_ into Latin
verse, showed so much justice and goodness in the college that the
students always arranged to rebel while he was traveling, thus showing
how much they respected him. Father Dotteville, the translator of
Sallust and of Tacitus, built at Juilly a charming retreat where
he cultivated literature and flowers. Father Prioleau, who taught
philosophy, knew how to make all work lovable, even the study of
Aristotle's Categories. Father Mandar, who later became superior of the
college, was famous as a preacher--he was compared to Massillon--and as
a poet--he was compared to Gresset. His lively muse, fertile in songs,
rose even to descriptive poetry. Father Mandar wrote a poem called the
Chartreuse; for he was sensitive to the beauties of nature and Jean
Jacques had sought his company.... These remained, even to the end of
their life, faithful to their vocation. Others failed in this, and owed
their great celebrity neither to translations nor to the practice
of oratorical virtues. Juilly was a nursery of Revolutionists and of
Conventionals.

One day--science was still honored in this Cartesian college--it was
decided to give the pupils a scientific recreation. Under the direction
of their professor of physics, they built a fire balloon of paper, upon
which a prefect of studies who indulged in fugitive verse wrote this
quatrain of his own composition:

               We have grown too old for soap bubbles;

               In changing balloons we change pleasures.

               If this carried our first homage to King Lotus,

               The winds would blow it to the goal of our desires.

We do not know if the fire balloon came down in the park of Versailles.
But we do know the names of the physicist and the poet of Juilly.
The physicist was Father Fouché, and the poet was Father Billaud
(Billaud-Varennes). Arnault remarks in this connection: "Ten years
afterward, they showed themselves less gracious toward the monarch."

Father Billaud, good Father Billaud, as he was called at Juilly, was a
young man of twenty-one years. He was the son of a lawyer of La Rochelle
who had neither fortune nor clients. He had scarcely left college
when he abducted a young girl and then became a member of a troupe of
comedians. He was a failure on the stage and returned to La Rochelle.
There he put on the stage a satirical comedy: _La Femme comme il n'y en
a plus_, in which he defamed all the women of his town. It was hissed
off the boards and he had to flee to Paris. As he was penniless,
he entered the Oratory; and, as the Oratory needed regents for its
colleges, they sent him to Juilly as prefect of studies. His pupils
loved his good fellowship. But his superiors had very quickly seen what
was under the mask. "Billaud--To judge by the way in which he reads
Latin, he does not know it very well. Has he brains? I have not had
sufficient time to find out. But he has a high opinion of himself, and
I regard him as only a worldly man, clothed in the habit of the Oratory,
coolly regular and honest, who has tried hard not to compromise himself
in the last few? months, for when he first came here his behavior was
not of the best. Though he may be judicious in his conduct, I do not
think that he is suited to the Oratory, because of his age, of what he
has been, and of what he is." Such was the judgment passed upon him by
his superior, for the Superior General of the congregation, in 1784.
Shortly afterward it was learned that Father Billaud had offered
a tragedy to the comedian Larive: he was expelled.... We know what
followed: his entry of the bar at Paris, his marriage to the natural
daughter of a farmer-general, his friendship with Marat and Robespierre,
his complicity in the massacres of September, his ferocities and
cowardices, his turnabout on the ninth of Thermidor, his banishment to
Guiana, his escape, his death in San Domingo. He ended his career as a
teacher of parrots.

Was good Father Billaud of Juilly a hypocrite? Did he already
dissimulate under the appearance of cold regularity the wild passions
of the Jacobin of '93.... I prefer the explanation of Arnault who,
decidedly, does not lack judgment: "Father Billaud, who later became so
frightfully famous under the name of Billaud-Varennes, also appeared to
be a very good man at that time, and perhaps he was so; perhaps he would
even have been so all his life, if he had remained a private citizen,
if the events which provoked the development of his atrocious policy
and the application of his frightful theories had never presented
themselves. I would prefer to believe that morally, as physically, we
all carry in ourselves the germs of more than one grave malady, from
which we seem to be exempt as long as we do not meet the circumstance
which is capable of provoking the explosion." Father Fouché, professor
of physics, was a year older than Father Billaud. He also passed at
Juilly as a good fellow, and interested his pupils by showing them
spectacular physical experiments. He, however, did not enter the Oratory
from necessity or caprice. He was brought up by the Oratorists of
Nantes, and had come to the institution at Paris with the intention
of devoting himself to the teaching of science. He had no bent for
theology, but was fond of studying Horace, Tacitus and Euclid's
Commentaries. He was soon to abandon Euclid; but he did not forget the
examples of perfect wickedness which were presented to him by Tacitus,
and he served the Terror, the Directory and Napoleon with the cold
infamy of a freedman; as for Horace, he was never faithless to him, for
he had a taste for gardens and for friendship.

He was regent at Vendôme, then at Juilly, then at Arras, where he made
the acquaintance of Robespierre. He was prefect of studies at Nantes
when the Revolution threw him into public life.

[Illustration: 0153]

He never forgot Juilly. Perhaps some of the verses of Horace were
associated in his mind with the memory of the trees of the park and
the waters of the pool.... In 1802, when he was Minister of the General
Police, he wished to come to visit his old college, he who, in the
time of the Terror, in the Nièvre and at Lyons, had added to the most
frightful massacres the most childish sacrilege. Events then passed
easily over the imagination of men, and even more quickly over
the imagination of a Fouché. An ex-Oratorist, Father Dotte-ville,
accompanied him to Juilly. The pupils received the visitors by singing
verses of their own composition:

                   Leaving, to revisit your friends,

                   The worries of the ministry,

                   Such leisures as are allowed you

                   In that solitary asylum;

                   Our forebears had the good fortune

                   To profit by your lessons....

This last allusion appeared a little too precise to Fouché, who turned
his back on the singers. But, after this moment of ill humor, his
Excellency showed himself very amiable. Fathers Lombois and Crenière,
his former associates, who still lived at Juilly, refused to speak to
him, however. But he did not despair of weakening their determination,
and it was he who in 1806 gave to the chapel of the college the
magnificent statue of Bérulle, of which I have spoken to you.

It was natural that Fouché, when he became an official under Bonaparte,
should show himself less vehemently irreligious than at the period when
he was the colleague of Collot d'Herbois. It was even necessary for
him to pretend devotion when Louis XVIII consented to give him a civil
position. But it is impossible to read without smiling the following
lines written to M. Charles Hamel, the historian of Juilly, by L.
Roberdeau, the former secretary of Fouché: "Here are the facts, whose
exactness I can guarantee to you. The curate of Ferrières always had a
place set for him at the chateau, when the Duke of Otranto was there. He
received from him annually a supplementary salary of six hundred francs
and was allowed to sign wood, bread and meat tickets ad libitum, as well
as to call for any other kind of aid or to distribute arms. The Duke
also gave a magnificent dais to the church. [This touch is exquisite,
when attributed to the former conventional who had methodically
plundered and wrecked all the churches of the Nièvre.] The doctor of
the château was required to take care of all the invalid poor of his
domains; he exacted that they should receive the same attention as
himself, etc." But this is the most admirable: "I do not know in what
sentiments the Duke of Otranto died; but I know that, when Louis XVIII
offered him an ambassadorship of the first rank, _he chose the humble
court of Dresden because the King of Saxony was known to be a sincerely
religious man._" I do not doubt that Fouché may have thus talked to his
credulous secretary. It is possible that he even said the same thing to
Louis XVIII. But the Kins: assuredly did not believe it, and was right.

I cannot decide to leave Fouché without quoting in this place some lines
from a magnificent portrait drawn by Charles Nodier. This passage is
almost unknown, being buried in the _Dictionnaire de la conversation_;
M. Charles Hamel has quoted it in his book: "There was not a feature in
his face, not a line in all its structure, on which work or care had
not left their imprint. His visage was pale, with a paleness which was
peculiar to himself. It was a cold but living tone, like that which time
gives to monuments. The power of his eyes, which were of a very clear
blue, but deprived of any light in their glance, soon prevailed over all
the impressions which his first aspect produced on one. Their curious,
exacting, profound, but immutably dull fixedness, had a quality which
was frightful.... I asked myself by what operation of the will he could
thus succeed in extinguishing his soul, in depriving the pupil of its
animated transparency, in withdrawing his glance into an invisible
sheath as a cat retracts its claws." This is wonderful!

*****

Father Fouché and Father Billaud were not the only masters of Juilly who
played a part in the Revolution. About the same time Father Gaillard
was regent of the sixth class, and Father Bailly was prefect of studies.
This Father Gaillard was a terrible man; he frightened his pupils by his
severity and his intractable piety. "Here is a man who, if justice had
been done, would have been burned, together with his writings," he
said before a portrait of Jean Jacques. In 1792 he left Juilly, having
exchanged his robe for the uniform of the National Guard; he went with
his company to Melun, where he married and became president of the
criminal court. Later he found means of paying a compliment to the First
Consul, and had the good luck again to come in contact with his former
associate Fouché. The latter elevated him to the Court of Cassation, and
made him one of his agents; Gaillard rendered great services to the Duke
of Otranto, at the court of Ghent.

Father Bailly also left the Oratory to take part in public affairs; but
he had more moderate opinions. As a deputy to the Convention from Meaux,
he voted against the death of the King; he was one of the Thermidorians,
took part in the Eighteenth Brumaire, and became a prefect of the
Empire....

If we believe with Taine that the Revolution was entirely an outcome
of Cartesianism and of the classic spirit, what a beautiful allegory is
this assembly of future Revolutionists in square caps, under the wide
branches of Malebranche's chestnut tree!

*****

The Oratory did not survive the Revolution, but Juilly outlived the
Oratory.

After 1789, the congregation was divided against itself. Some fathers
were willing to take the oath; others refused it. Some of the young
associates scorned the authority of the Superior General. The law of
August 18, 1792, dissolved the Oratory. But the Oratorists remained at
Juilly at the very height of the tumult. One day mobs from Meaux invaded
the buildings and pillaged the chapel; even after this, a few priests
and a score of pupils again assembled in the college. They left it only
during three months in 1793, when a military hospital was installed
in place of the school. After the Terror was over, the woman who
had acquired Juilly as a national property returned it to its former
masters. The college peopled itself anew.

Napoleon dreamed for a time of reestablishing the Oratory and of putting
it in charge of all secondary education; Jérôme was brought up
at Juilly. But this project was abandoned. But at least, when he
reorganized the University, Fontanes was inspired by the rules and the
programs of the colleges of the Oratory.

The last Oratorists retired in 1828. Juilly passed under the direction
of the Abbés de Scorbiac and de Salinis. Then comes another of the
glorious moments of its history. In 1830 and in 1831 Lamennais became
the guest of Juilly. Enveloped in his long black quilted coat, following
by choice the path at the water's edge--doubtless to rediscover there
memories of the pool of La Chesnaie, Lamennais carried back and forth,
under the trees of the old park, his passionate dreams. It was here
that he meditated his articles for L'Avenir, conceived the plan of the
"General Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty," composed the
ardent diatribes in which he claimed independence for the Church, the
right of teaching for Catholics, freedom to associate for the monks. It
was here that he charmed his friends by the sensitiveness of his heart
and frightened them by the boldness of his imagination. It was from
Juilly that he returned to Paris to appear with Lacordaire before the
Court of Assizes. It was from Juilly that he left for Rome....

Abbé Bautain and Abbé Carl, then Abbé Maricourt, directed Juilly
after MM. de Scorbiac and de Salinis, up to the time (1867) when the
reconstituted Oratory reentered in possession of the college founded by
Father de Condren.

In 1852 a few priests had been united by Father Pétetot, ex-curate of
Saint Roch, for the purpose of restoring the congregation dispersed at
the time of the Revolution. They had sought and found the traditions
of the former Oratory, and slowly "reconstituted in its entirety the
pacific and studious city built more than two centuries before by Father
de Bérulle." "They could then," said Cardinal Perraud, "place a living
model under their eyes in order, to imitate it." The Oratory was thus
reborn with the ancient rule which had formerly been its originally--a
simple association of lay priests submissive to bishops, it asked of its
members neither the vow of obedience nor the vow of poverty. [10] It
was natural that it should undertake the direction of Juilly, the most
ancient and the most glorious of its houses....

Here I end the rather desultory notes which I have made while visiting
Juilly and rummaging through its history. I wish to speak neither of
yesterday, nor of today..., nor of tomorrow. I have not attempted
to plead for the masters of Juilly, now threatened with again being
expelled from their house. I have not the ability to defend them, and
besides one cannot plead against a position already taken, or folly, or
wickedness.

Nor have I the candor to believe that the illustrious phantoms with
which are populated the shady avenues and the long galleries of Juilly,
Malebranche, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Lamennais, can move the vulgar
pedants to whom France now belongs. But if by chance I have evoked "the
long, mobile and flat face... the physiognomy like an agitated fizgig...
the little bloody eyes... the restless and convulsive attitudes" of
Joseph Fouché, I have allowed myself this historical amusement, without
thinking that the President of the Council may be able to take the same
pleasure in it. Father Fouché and the representative of the Mountain,
the bad Oratorist and the good Jacobin, must be congenial to him,
without doubt; but there is also the Duke of Otranto: M. Combes has not
yet got to that point.

Finally, if I have tried to show that the Oratory is attached by a close
bond to the past of France, that the mold in which, for two centuries
and a half, French intelligence was founded was fabricated at Juilly,
and that the very basis of our education remains Oratorist in spite
of everything, I have not for a single instant dreamed that these
considerations based on history could awake the least respect or the
least gratitude among the politicians, for these gentlemen are sincerely
convinced that France was born on the day when a majority of three
votes, captured, bought or stolen, made them ward bosses.




VII. THE CHÂTEAU DE MAISONS

|NOT long ago the Château of Asay-le-Rideau, a masterpiece of the French
art of the sixteenth century, was in peril. Today it is the turn of the
Chateau de Maisons, a masterpiece of the French art of the seventeenth
century. But this time it is not a question of a peril which is more
or less distant. The destruction of Maisons is a fact which is decided
upon. The property has just fallen into the hands of a real estate
speculator. He intends to cut up what remains of the park into house
lots. As to the chateau, the wreckers will first rip out the magnificent
mantelpieces and the incomparable sculptures which adorn the walls; they
will sell them; then they will tear down the building. The fragments
will serve to fill the moats, and on the ground thus made level they
will build suburban villas.

[Illustration: 0167]

The Department of Fine Arts looks on powerlessly at this act of
abominable vandalism, for the Chateau de Maisons is not listed as a
national monument. And not one of those amateurs who spend fortunes
every day to buy childish ornaments, restored pictures and ragged
tapestries, not a single one of these can be found who will preserve for
France one of the monuments which are the glory of French architecture.
Not one of those public administrations which incessantly build at
enormous expense hospitals, asylums, colleges, has thought that it might
be able, by utilizing this vast building, to render at the same stroke a
brilliant service to art and to history! It is said that the department
of Seine-et-Oise is looking for a site on which to build a hospital;
why did it not long ago decide to appropriate the Chateau de Maisons for
this purpose?

It is intolerable to think that one of the most beautiful residences of
old France, situated at the very gates of Paris, is going to be stupidly
demolished, at a time when the curators of our museums can find the
necessary money to purchase archaeological curiosities and foreign
trifles! [11] And you will see that, as soon as Maisons is stripped by
the house wreckers, it will be found very proper to purchase at
great expense for the Louvre a few of the statues and a part of the
bas-reliefs which vandals will have been permitted to tear from the
place where François Mansart had them placed!

The agony of Maisons will have lasted more than seventy years. It was
the banker Laffitte who, after 1830, commenced the work of destruction,
made way with the terraces and the cascades which were placed between
the château and the Seine, and demolished the great stables, a
magnificent building decorated with precious sculptures, which was the
marvel of Maisons. It was he who cut up the greater part of the park,
five hundred hectares, and cut down the centenarian trees of the domain
of the Longueils.

After Laffitte, what remained of Maisons passed to less barbarous hands.
Another proprietor tried to restore some beauty to the fragments of park
which had been preserved. Even today there remain pretty thickets,
a fine greensward, avenues lined with great antique busts, while the
château itself is almost intact.

Every Parisian knows, at least by having seen it from the window of a
railway train, this superb construction which tomorrow will be no more
than a pile of rubble and plaster. It ravishes us by the beauty of its
lines, by the happy choice of the site where it is placed, by the just
proportion of the architecture to the hillside on which it is seated.

The façade facing the court of honor is composed of two superposed
orders. In the pediments of the windows are sculptured eagles, and
women, terminated like sphinxes, as lions or dogs. To the right and
left, before the pavilions of the wings, rise two projections which
form terraces at the height of the first story. The whole monument has a
charming air of nervous elegance.

The vestibule (here was formerly the marvelous grille which today closes
the gallery of Apollo in the Louvre) rests on beautiful Doric columns.
The vault is decorated, on its four faces, with grand bas-reliefs
representing four divinities: never did sculptures show more docility,
more suppleness, in clothing architectural forms without overloading
them, without injuring the purity of their lines. And everywhere the
eagle of the Longueils unfolds its great wings of stone.

In the halls of this devastated château, there remains nothing but the
sculptured decoration. But what a masterpiece! Under the strong and
intelligent discipline of François Mansart, Gilles Guérin, Buyster, Van
Obstal and Sarazin surpassed themselves. The great mantelpiece where,
under a medallion of the great Condé, an antique triumph is marshaled,
the adorable playing children which Van Obstal carved above the cornice
of the grand stone staircase, the noble caryatides which sustain the
dome of the bedchamber, all the decoration of the guardroom where, about
1840, a poor painter called Bidault painted tiresome views of the Bay of
Naples, all the sculptures scattered through the different rooms of
the chateau, form one of the most perfect achievements, if not the most
perfect, which the seventeenth century has left us. The wreckers are
going to ruin it, they are going to annihilate it.

And they will annihilate also that admirable dining hall where the Count
of Artois set up, at the end of the eighteenth century, Houdon's Ceres,
Boizot's Vertumnus, Clodion's Erigone, and Foucou's Flora. Plaster casts
have replaced the originals on the ancient pedestals. But the hall has
retained its coffered ceiling, whose bas-reliefs equal, in grace, fancy
and richness of invention, the most delicate works of the Renaissance,
in surety and simplicity of execution, the purest works of Greek genius.
They will find wretches who will pull down these sacred stones with pick
and crowbar! And they will also find those who will tear from the little
oratory of Maisons its exquisite, its delicious marquetries!

When we wander through the deserted apartments of the old mansion, now
devoted to demolition, the heart contracts, and we ask with anger how
such vandalism is still possible in a period when everybody, even to the
least politician, talks of art and beauty!

The Château de Maisons was built by François Mansart, between 1642 and
1651, for René de Longueil.

The family of Longueil, originating in Normandy, where its feudal
possessions were near Dieppe, possessed the territory of Maisons from
the end of the fourteenth century. It has increased it by successive
acquisitions.

René de Longueil, Councilor in Parliament, had just been named president
of a court, when he commissioned Mansart to build him a new chateau
on his domain. He gave entire freedom to his architect in plan and
decoration. It is related that Mansart, after he had built the right
wing, leveled it with the ground to begin it over again on a new plan,
because he was not satisfied with his work. The expense was enormous:
it has been estimated at more than six millions. Maisons, when it was
finished, was considered one of the most beautiful châteaux of France.
How could Longueil afford this royal fancy? We are very ill-informed on
this point today. All that is known is that in 1650 the president
was named superintendent of finance; when, shortly afterward, he was
dismissed, he was responsible for this charming and significant remark:
"They are wrong; I have taken care of my own business; I was about to
look out for theirs."

Louis XIV sometimes visited Maisons. He came there unexpectedly with
the court, July 10, 1671, fleeing from Saint-Germain, where the Duke of
Anjou was dying. Bossuet brought the King the news of the death, and the
Queen's fool, Tricomini, transmitted it to Mlle, de Montpensier in these
terms: "You, great lords, you will all die like the least of men; here
is one who comes to say that your nephew is dead." This fool talked like
Bossuet. Mlle, de Montpensier adds that she went to pay her respects to
the King and that she wept bitterly with him. "He was deeply afflicted,
and with reason, for this child was very pretty." After the death of
René de Longueil, the chateau passed to his descendants, the last of
whom died in 1732. It then passed to the Marquis of Soye-court, who let
it fall into ruin; but in 1777 the Count of Artois bought it, restored
it, and embellished it magnificently.

We reach the upper stories of the château by a narrow and winding
staircase, ensconced in the thickness of the wall. Here is a maze of
corridors and tiny chambers. A larger apartment, however, exists in the
center of the building, below the lantern which crowns the roof. It is
ornamented with mythological paintings and Danae adorns the ceiling over
the bed in the alcove. This is the chamber of Voltaire.

[Illustration: 0175]

The great intimacy between Voltaire and the President de Maisons is well
known. The latter, great-grandson of the creator of the chateau, was a
studious young man of delicate tendencies. At the age of eighteen he
was President of Parliament. Re was said to be a good Latinist. His
education had been irreligious and he loved science. He had established
a chemical laboratory, where he manufactured the most perfect Prussian
blue which could be found in Europe, and a botanic garden of rare plants
where he cultivated coffee. He belonged to the Academy of Science, and
also possessed a collection of coins.

In 1723 Voltaire came to make his home with his friend. He found there
a good reception and a society ready to admire him. He knew, above all,
that the President was the nephew of Madame de Villars, and Voltaire was
then in all the heat of his passion for the Marshal's wife....

He arrived at Maisons in the month of November. He planned to finish his
tragedy of Marianne in this retreat. But he was immediately taken sick
with the smallpox and thought he would die. So he sent for the curate
of Maisons and confessed. The Danaë of the alcove possibly heard the
confession of Voltaire! Doctor Gervasi saved the dying man by making
him drink "two hundred pints of lemonade." As soon as he was cured,
to disembarrass his hosts and not abuse their goodness, Voltaire had
himself taken to Paris. Then occurred an episode which almost became
tragic. We must let Voltaire tell it:

"I was scarcely two hundred yards from the château when a part of the
ceiling of the chamber where I had lain fell in flames. The neighboring
chambers, the apartments which were below them, the precious furniture
with which they were adorned, all were consumed by the fire. The loss
amounted to a hundred thousand livres and, without the help of the
engines for which they sent to Paris, one of the most beautiful edifices
of the kingdom would have been destroyed. They hid this strange news
from me on my arrival; I knew it when I awoke; you cannot imagine how
great was my despair; you know the generous care which M. de Maisons
had taken of me; I had been treated like a brother in his house, and the
reward of so much goodness was the burning of his chateau. I could not
conceive how the fire had been able to catch so suddenly in my chamber,
where I had left only an almost extinguished brand. I learned that the
cause of this conflagration was a beam which passed exactly under the
fireplace.... The beam of which I speak had charred little by little
from the heat of the hearth....

"Madame and Monsieur de Maisons received the news more tranquilly than I
did; their generosity was as great as their loss and as my grief. M.
de Maisons crowned his bounty by giving me the news himself in letters
which make very evident that he excels in heart as in mind; he occupied
himself with the care of consoling me and it almost seemed as if it had
been my chateau which was burned."

And it is not only the shade of Voltaire which haunts the apartments
of Maisons! We may also be shown the chamber of Lafayette. In addition,
decorations in Empire style recall to us that in 1804 the château was
bought and inhabited by Lannes....

But what good is it to evoke these memories, since the admirable beauty
of the architecture and of the decorations has not sufficed to arrest
the enterprise of the housebreakers? [12]




VIII. THE VALLEY OF THE OISE

|WHEN the first automobiles made their appearance upon the highways,
some persons thought that, thanks to this new mode of locomotion, the
French were finally going to discover the thousand beauties of France.
They awoke from their dream when they heard the conversations of
automobilists. The latter, when they returned from their excursions,
told of the achievements of the engine, the misfortunes of the
tires, the treacheries of the road. They computed distances, counted
kilometers, passed judgment on macadam; but of the country traversed
they had seen, it was manifest, only the wide ribbon of the
road unrolling before their cars. If one talked to them of the
picturesqueness of a region through which they had passed, they replied:
"Too steep grades!"; and they cursed the rough cobbles when one praised
to them the pretty church in a village through which they had passed.
They were full of stories of autos, as hunters are of hunting yarns; but
every one knows that the beauty of the forest is the last thing a
hunter thinks of. The chauffeurs went into ecstasies at the memory of
a straight, smooth, deserted highway, drawn like an arrow for leagues
across an endless plain, far from the villages which are populated
by hens, children and straying dogs. The most romantic celebrated
the pleasure of speed, the intoxication of danger. In all of them one
guessed, though none would consent to avow it, the wild pride of hurling
themselves across the world, with a terrible uproar, in the midst of
universal fright, like petty scourges of God.

Some protested, and swore that it is easy to avoid the contagion of this
delirium, that they themselves had succeeded in using their machine as a
commodious vehicle and not as a simple instrument of sport. I only half
believed them. Some experiences had shown me that one feels
himself becoming an automobilist an hour after one is seated in an
automobile....

But recently one of my friends asserted: "Your experiences prove
nothing. You chose your auto badly, or perhaps your chauffeur, or even
your companions. Three conditions are indispensable for traveling,
or rather for loitering, in an automobile: 1. A firm decision to see
everything, which depends on you alone; 2. A docile chauffeur; 3. A
comfortable auto of moderate speed. My chauffeur and my machine fulfil
the two latter conditions. Arrange the itinerary yourself. We will stop
as often as you please. Will an experience of three days consecrated to
archaeology seem conclusive to you?"

I proposed to my friend to pass in review all the churches of the Oise
Valley from Saint Leu d'Esserent to Noyon.... There is not in this part
of France a single village whose church is not worthy of a visit. It is
the cradle of Gothic art.

My friend was right. You can loiter in an automobile; but it is
necessary, to be successful, to be a lover of loafing almost to a mania,
and to be a lover of sightseeing until it is a passion.

If you are not sustained by a tenacious and obstinate curiosity, you
immediately succumb to the mania of automobilism. Do not speak of the
attraction of rapidity; for, to get rid of this, there is a sure and
simple means, that of choosing a machine of medium speed. But, whatever
may be the rapidity of the machine, you remain exposed to a double
obsession. There is at first the search for a good road, the hatred
of cobblestones, dirt roads and badly kept pavements; doubtless an
automobile, well built and prudently driven, can overcome the most
difficult roads; but the fear of jolts and the terror of breakdowns
cause us to see, always and everywhere, the good road, where the machine
reaches its maximum of speed. Every detour becomes odious if it compels
the abandonment of a smooth road for more dangerous crossroads. The
chauffeur is therefore desirous of following blindly the line marked
on his special map. (Let us remark in passing that maps for the use of
automobilists are generally detestable.) But the essential peculiarity of
the state of mind common to automobilists is a disgust with halts. "Keep
on, keep on!" a mysterious voice seems to cry to us whenever there comes
a desire to stop. Nothing hurries us; we are loafing; we have long hours
ahead of us before we reach the end of the day's rim; nevertheless the
briefest stop seems to be an unnecessary delay. We can no longer admit
the idea of immobility; we experience a sort of ennui when trees, houses
and men cease their regular flight along both sides of the road. Then
we understand how it is that so many automobilists are happy in driving
between moving pictures, without looking at anything, and how they get
from it a pleasure which is both careless and frenzied.

These are unfortunate circumstances for the contemplation of landscapes
and of monuments. It is, however, possible to triumph over them. The
slavery of the good road can be escaped, But do not count upon it
without a veritable effort of the will.

If one is master of himself as of his machine, then traveling in an auto
becomes delightful, for one can modify, shorten, lengthen, the itinerary
of the excursion according to one's fancy. We turn aside at a crossroad
to climb a hill, from which we hope to discover an agreeable outlook,
or perhaps to visit a church of whose spire, rising in the midst of the
woods, a glimpse has been caught. If we perceive that we have passed,
without noticing it, a monument or a picturesque site, we turn back.
Yes, we turn back. This assertion will leave more than one chauffeur
incredulous. But everything is possible when one really has the taste
of travel, even to losing two minutes by turning his machine around on a
straight road.

This way of traversing the highroads of France has, I admit, its
inconveniences, the most serious of which is the necessity of
incessantly watching the map to guide the chauffeur at every fork. The
signboard always appears too late, when the machine has already made
the wrong turn. The speed of the auto is such that it is not possible to
study the map and to enjoy the view at the same time. It is necessary
to choose. The wisest plan is to make up your mind to miss the road
occasionally. The mistake is so quickly corrected!

I also recognize that traveling in an auto will never replace the slow
promenade, in which one stopped at every turn of the route, amused by
people and by things. But it has the great advantage of annihilating
distance, of bringing sites and monuments close to one another, of
permitting rapid comparisons without any effort of memory, and of
revealing the general characteristics of a whole region. It suits
synthetic minds. It repels a little those who have the passion of
analysis. In short it makes us acquainted with the forest, but leaves us
ignorant of the beauty of the trees....

*****

From Paris to Chantilly there is at first the monotonous plateau which
separates the valley of the Marne from that of the Oise. In this gently
rolling plain the villages are numerous, and everywhere, overlooking
the housetops, rise the pointed or saddle-roofed spires of old belfries.
There is not a hamlet of the Ile-de-France which does not possess a
precious and exquisite church. It is here, on the soil of the royal
domain, that the soul of France was formed. It is here that its national
art was born.

We will stop, as the luck of the road wills.

Louvres formerly possessed two churches: one of them has disappeared and
of it there remains only a fine Romanesque belfry; in the other, which
shows the somewhat absurd elegance of the fifteenth century, we see a
frieze of vine leaves running all around the wall. And behold, at the
very first stop, in this petty village, a charming résumé of the whole
of French art; a robust Romanesque tower, finished in the first period
of pointed Gothic and, beside the gray belfry, the excessive and
delightful luxury of flamboyant Gothic. A league farther on, the church
of Marly-la-Ville offers a perfect example of the art of the thirteenth
century; with its little flying buttresses and its low triforium, one
might say that it was the tiny model for a great cathedral. By the side
of the road, a poor half-ruined shed, with a broken roof, a hollowed
pavement and moldy walls, is the church of Fosses; in its misery and its
degradation, the humble nave of the twelfth century still preserves some
remnants of its pure beauty....

A glance at the pleasing Renaissance façade of the church of
Luzarches.... The automobile rolls along the edge of the forest....
Villas of horsebreeders and jockeys.... Some English cottages.... The
immense greensward and the very uneven cobbled street of Chantilly.... A
few more woods, and we behold the wide valley of the Oise.

On the opposite hill rises the church of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, on a
large terrace, above the houses and the gardens of the town. The apse
turned toward the Oise, the robust flying buttresses and the radiating
chapels, two great square towers which flank the choir, the tower of the
porch with its tapering steeple, the grand and harmonious mass of the
edifice, all give to this church the aspect of a proud and gracious
citadel.

Saint-Leu-d'Esserent is one of the most moving types of the architecture
of the twelfth century, of that architecture which is called
transitional. The façade is still semi-Romanesque, but its openings are
already finer and more numerous. Internally, the mixture of Romanesque
and pointed gives to the monument an extraordinarily varied aspect; the
arches which separate the nave from the low side aisles are broken; the
full semicircle reappears in the triforium, and in the upper windows
the arch is pointed again. The vaulting is formed by the intersection
of pointed arches; but in the chapels of the apse there are trilobes
inscribed in circular arches. And this diversity of styles is here
the result neither of gropings nor of fresh starts; it results from a
marvelously conceived plan in which the builders knew how to mingle and
harmonize the beauties of tradition and the audacities of the new art.
The Romanesque architecture had no period of decadence and, on the other
hand, at the period when Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was built, the time
of research and of trial whence emerged the pointed architecture was
already past. It is the meeting of the two styles which renders
so magnificent certain churches of the twelfth century, such as
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Noyons.

[Illustration: 0189]

The ambulatory of the choir was enriched in a free and infinitely
harmonious style; the columns and the capitals, even as early as this,
show an admirable purity of style.

Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was an important priory of the Cluniac order. Some
arcades of the cloister still adhere to the wall of the church. Other
remains of the monastery exist on private property. We would have been
pleased to visit them. The proprietor answered us: "It is impossible;
this is the day I dry my washing." An inhabitant of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent
said to us a few moments later, in a mysterious tone: "The monks were
rich. There is buried treasure there. That man is sifting all the soil
on his land: he is looking for gold..." (Saint-Leu is sixty kilometers
from Paris.)

*****

For two days we are going to follow the valley where the river slowly
coils its long bends through the wheat fields and the poplars. The low
hills, covered with forests, lie in the distance and never come near
enough to force the Oise to sudden detours. This river is not like
the Marne, incessantly turned aside by the spur of a hill. It flows
indolently under a pale horizon, in a vast landscape whose shades are
infinitely delicate, and whose lines are infinitely soft. It bears
silent barges through the fertile plains. Daughter of the north, it
reflects in its clear green waters villages of brick. The smoke of
workshops mingles with the mist-banks of its sky. At night the lights of
the glass furnaces brighten its banks. By talking with the men who drive
their horses upon the towpath, it is easy to guess that the Oise is born
in Belgium.

Bell-towers dot the valley on both banks of the river. That of
Montataire rises above the trees of a park at the top of a bluff.
The church possesses an exquisite portal surmounted by a frightfully
mutilated bas-relief of the Annunciation; but how much grace the
draperies still possess!

It is useless to stop at Creil, since a barbarous municipality thought
it advisable to pull down the church of Saint Evremont, one of the most
beautiful specimens of the architecture of the twelfth century.

The people of Nogent-les-Vierges are not barbarians: they have preserved
their church. It is not as pure in style as that of Saint Evremont. But
its belfry--terribly restored--is adorned with original details. The
rectangular choir, which the thirteenth century added to the Romanesque
nave, possesses a rare elegance, with its slender pillars. What
a diversity there is in the creations of Gothic architecture! How
inventions in construction permitted infinite variation in the plans of
churches! It is only by thus traversing the countrysides of France
that one can admire the abundant imagination of the builders of the
thirteenth century. There are many churches, especially in the north,
which, like that of Nogent-les-Vierges, possess a choir terminated by a
flat wall. But the type is diversified from edifice to edifice. Open a
manual of archæology; take the most recent and the most complete of all,
that of M. Enlart, and you will observe what difficulty the author has
in classing and characterizing such work, after the last years of the
twelfth century. At no other period was architecture so profoundly
individual an art. We may say that every building was then original, not
only in the details, but especially in the plan.

I have written that the people of Nogent-les-Vierges were not
barbarians, but I am on the point of taking it back, when I think of a
sort of panoramic Calvary which they have installed in their beautiful
church. Let them look at this picture which might seem beautiful to
a Kanaka: then let them look at the two beautiful bas-reliefs of the
fifteenth century which are placed at the extremity of the nave, and let
them blush!

A little farther on, the church of Villers-Saint-Paul also possesses a
Romanesque nave on low, squat pillars, and a Gothic choir whose columns
expand into wide branches of stone. This choir is square, like that of
Nogent-les-Vierges. The two villages are only a league apart; without
doubt only a few years separated the two buildings, yet it will always
be impossible for us to confound these two churches in our memory!

Rieux also had its Romanesque nave and its Gothic choir. The nave has
been made into a schoolhouse. As to the choir, it is being restored, but
the orientation of the altar is being changed in the process, so that
the width of the choir becomes the length of the church. And they are
executing this lovely transformation without any thought of the ancient
plans, or any more respect for the wishes of the dead who, buried under
the pavement of the sanctuary, will no longer occupy the position with
respect to the altar in which they had wished to rest forever.

On the left bank of the Oise, Pont-Sainte Maxence: a pointed-arched
church of the Renaissance, heavy, massive. This type of architecture,
which has produced so many elegant works in Normandy, has been less
happy in the Isle of France. Pontpoint: a Romanesque nave, a pointed
choir, at the end of which they have preserved an old apse of the
eleventh century, and these patchings are delightful! We salute at the
portal of the church of Yerberie an adorable statue of the Virgin. We
cross back to the right bank of the Oise to admire the stone steeple of
Venette, pleasingly planted on the pedestal of a Romanesque tower: we
reach Compiègne.

*****

[Illustration: 0195]

Compiègne has a beautiful château which everybody knows, and Compiègne
is a charming town which many sojourners do not know. More than one
traveler has gone through it without ever having seen the chapel of the
ancient Hôtel-Dieu, whose grand reredos of carved wood is one of the
most brilliant masterpieces of the French sculpture of the seventeenth
century.

Compiègne possesses a historical society, which shows much zeal in
causing the preservation of the appearance and the monuments of the old
town. Let us praise in passing the efforts of these worthy men: we must
not lose a chance for exalting the good and saying evil of the wicked,
On one occasion this historical society intervened to prevent that,
under pretext of straightening a line, the remnants of an old bastion
should be destroyed because they injured, it was said, the beautiful
perspective of the subprefecture. It also undertook the defense of the
old tower called the Tower of Joan of Arc, and succeeded in saving this
venerable monument. Alas, it did not succeed in protecting the bridge
of Compiègne against the engineers who wrapped it up in an iron apron,
under pretext of facilitating traffic.... Yes, the traffic of the bridge
of Compiègne!

From belfry to belfry, we continue our route toward Noyon.

At the junction of the Aisne, in a pleasing landscape, the church of
Choisy-au-Bac seems to watch over the tombs of a little cemetery filled
with flowers. It is Romanesque, fairly well restored, and charmingly
picturesque.

At Longueil-sous-Thourotte, the poor old church is about to
disappear. By its side they have built a grand new church, a copy of
twelfth-century architecture. Was it worth while to demolish the modest
and venerable edifice of earlier days? Could it not be preserved
beside the proud modern construction, even if it were tottering
and dilapidated? It contained beautiful funeral slabs of the
Renaissance, which are going to be exiled, no one knows where; it
contained, above all, superb stained glass of the thirteenth century.
Two windows have been placed in the new church; but there remains a
third, and there remain also remarkable monochromatic frescoes. What is
going to be done with these precious remnants? They have not been listed
as national treasures.

... Tomorrow, perhaps, they will go to decorate the dining room of a
Chicago millionaire: what a disgrace! And all the windows of the new
church are adorned with stained glass whose banal horror makes the
magnificence of these ancient windows apparent to every eye!

The church of Thourotte--it is of the twelfth century, but has lost
much of its character--contains a fine altar screen of gilded wood,
representing the different scenes of the Passion. It is said to be
Flemish work; judging by the types of certain personages, this might
be doubted; but the shutters which close upon the screen bear paintings
whose origin is not in the least doubtful. Poor paintings, whose
restoration was confided by a too-zealous curate to a pitiable dauber!
Now, the Commission of Historic Monuments has fisted the beautiful
sculptures and has put them under glass: the effect of this is
abominable, but we live among barbarians and second-hand dealers, and we
are actually forced to put our works of art under lock and key to defend
them. As for the painted shutters, they are hung up on the wall: a
few were spared by the dauber. In the same church we may still see two
beautiful altars supported by torsos of the seventeenth century. How
many beautiful works of art still remain in our little churches of
France, in spite of revolutions and dealers in antiques!

The Cistercian abbey of Ourscamp is now a cotton spinning mill. Behind
a magnificent iron fence stretch vast buildings of the seventeenth
century. In the center rises a grand pavilion. We pass through an open
door between the high columns which support the balcony of the upper
story, and suddenly discover that this immense construction is a mere
veneer to hide the old church of the monastery. Of the nave there is no
longer anything remaining; but a little farther on, in the midst of
the park, the choir still lifts its arches of magnificently pure
architecture. The roof has fallen, but the columns and the walls still
stand. It is a picture like that of the church of Long-pont, in the
forest of Villers-Cotterets. (There is also great similarity between
the architecture of Longpont and that of Ourscamp.) It seems that the
intimate beauty of Gothic art is better revealed to us when we thus
discover the ruin of one of its masterpieces among the trunks and
branches of trees; we then can better feel the living grace of its
columns and the freedom of its arches.... There is so much truth in this
admirable page from the _Génie du christianisme_: "The forests of the
Gauls have passed in their turn into the temples of our fathers, and our
forests of oak have thus maintained their sacred origin. These vaults
carved into foliage, these jambs which support the walls and end
suddenly like broken trunks, the coolness of the vaults, the darknesses
of the sanctuary, the obscure wings, the secret passages, the lowly
doorways, all retrace the labyrinths of the woods in the Gothic church:
everything makes us feel in it religious horror, mysteries and divinity,
etc...." The centuries have accomplished their work, and, in the ruins
of the edifice, which is surrounded and invaded by the verdure of the
forest, we recognize still better what art learns from nature. [13]

Of the old abbey, there still remains a superb hall with Gothic vaults
and a triple nave. It is called the "Hall of the Dead," because it is
said that the bodies of the monks were placed there for two days before
the funeral. So great a room for this use? Was it not rather the chapter
room of the monastery?

I will say nothing of Noyon today. On another occasion we will return
to this lovable and silent town, which is adorned with one of the most
perfect religious edifices of our country.

* * * * *

Upon the return trip, in the forest and valleys adjacent to the valley
of the Oise, the obedient auto stopped before many other exquisite
churches.

[Illustration: 0201]

The belfry of Tracy-le-Val is one of the pearls of French art. The tower
rests upon a square subbasement; when it has reached the height of the
apse, two long, narrow windows open upon each side, framed by little
columns of adorably fine workmanship, and monsters and grotesques
grimace on all sides under the arches and upon the capitals. Above these
strange details, the tower suddenly becomes octagonal, but, to mask the
abrupt change in the architectural scheme, statues with outstretched
wings are placed at the four angles. A conical tower of stone crowns
this strange belfry, twice admirable, by the richness of its decoration
and by the grace of its proportions.

Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, in the midst of the forest of Compiègne, is a
church of the twelfth century which the restorers have rebuilt. Perhaps
it will still interest a few archaeologists by the originality of its
plan: designed in the form of a Latin cross, its crossarms have double
bays, like the nave; but this singularity of construction is the only
merit which the church retains today: it is clean, new, frozen and dead.

Morienval, with its three towers, its triple nave, and its ambulatory,
is a beautiful church. In the interminable controversies which have
raged over the date and the place of the origin of the Gothic style,
Morienval has been cited a hundred times, and it has been much discussed
because of its ambulatory, which is vaulted with pointed arches and
which certain historians affirm to have been built in the middle of the
'eleventh century.... I do not know. But what I know well, is that, in
future controversies, one will do well to hold to the texts and to the
drawings, and not to attempt to reason from the monument itself; for
this exists no longer, or at least it is restored, which amounts to the
same thing. Yes, they have restored the ambulatory of Morienval,
and they have not half restored it, I can assure you. For they have
completely recarved certain capitals.... It is truly a singular
spectacle to see in the twentieth century so many stone carvers
occupied, some in producing Romanesque, others Gothic, and still others
classical architecture. It is also diverting to think of the mistakes
into which future archaeologists will fall, led astray by all these
copies. But, in spite of all, as it is the old monuments which pay
for these debauches of sculpture, as it is at the expense of their
conservation that this fury of restoration is exercised, we would
willingly renounce these ironical joys. Oh, if the restorers would only
consecrate each year to the placing of tiles or slates the sums which
they squander in having capitals recarved!

Since the fancy of this archaeological excursion has taken me into the
valley of the Authonne, a pretty name for a pretty brook, I desire to
see that chateau of Vez which its owner, M. Dru, recently bequeathed to
the nation. It is a magnificent fortress on the summit of a wooded hill.
The donjon and the encircling wall have been skillfully restored. Of the
main body of the building, of which only ruins remain, a part only was
rebuilt by M. Dru.... Will the nation accept the legacy? I hope so,
because it appears that M. Dru left a sum sufficient to finish the work.
This sort of archaeological restitution seems to me very unnecessary; it
would be far better to leave such things to theatrical scene builders.
But it is not necessary to discourage the worthy who diminish the
profits of the house wreckers by bequeathing their castles to the
public.

Irony of geographical names! At the foot of the hill which sustains the
donjon of Vez, we see, in the midst of the fields, a Gothic church of
the flamboyant period, remnant of a Premonstraten-sian monastery. It
is now used as a farmstead. Ï consult my map to know the name of the
hamlet: it is called _Lieu-Restauré _(Restored Place).

I took the road back to Paris through the great plains of Valois,
overlooked by the sublime spire of the cathedral of Senlis.





IX. GALLARDON

[Illustration: 0207]

|GALLARDON, a town of the region of Chartres, is built upon the spine
formed by the valleys of the Ocre and the Voise, two of those narrow
and sinuous ravines, clothed with trembling alders and poplars, which
traverse the immense plateau of La Beauce. The houses rise, stage
above stage, on the side of the hill; then, at the summit of the slope,
commences the endless plain, the ocean of harvests, dotted with the
whirling iron arms of water-pumping windmills, where the towers of the
cathedral of Chartres are dimly seen above the horizon. Gallardon was
formerly a strong defensive position, and the ruin of its old donjon,
"the shoulder of Gallardon," still sketches curious outlines against the
sky. Gallardon possesses a remarkable church, whose choir is a marvel
of elegance, and whose nave is covered with a beautiful vault of painted
wood. It also boasts of a beautiful Renaissance house.... Finally, it is
noted for the richness of its fields and above all for the excellence of
its beans.

But, today, neglecting the picturesque, archaeological and horticultural
merits of Gallardon, I wish to tell the story of a singular personage
who was born in this tiny village of La Beauce, Thomas Ignatius Martin,
a visionary laborer, known under the name of Martin of Gallardon. [14]

*****

In 1816, the White Terror reigned in La Beauce as in other places.
Gallardon had not escaped the fever which torments the least village
of France on the morrow of every revolution. Conquered and furious, the
Liberals met in the hall of an inn to exchange their regrets and their
rancors; with airs of bravado they evoked the memories of the Revolution
and the glories of the Empire. Opposite them, and in opposition to them,
the Royalist Committee celebrated the victory of its party and exploited
it. It annoyed and threatened its adversaries, bombarded the Chamber
with petitions, and the ministers with denunciations. It was the
appointed hour for all reprisals, all enthusiasms and all credulities.

Thomas Ignatius Martin was born at Gallardon of a family of small
farmers who had been known there from time immemorial. He was
thirty-three years old and the father of four children. He was a robust,
simple, upright, easy-going and open-hearted citizen. In the midst
of aroused passions he had never mixed in political affairs. On the
testimony of the mayor of Gallardon, "the Revolution always seemed to
displease him, especially on account of the disorders which it caused,
in which he never took part. He remained tranquil in all these events,
even on the 20th of March, when Bonaparte returned; he seemed, however,
to be angry at the banishment of the King; but he also took tranquilly
the return of the King in the month of July, rejoicing at it, but
without ostentation." In short, he was a wise man. He fulfilled his
religious duties exactly, but without fervor, went to mass, kept Lent,
read nothing but his prayer book and when, passing by his fields, the
curate asked of him: "How goes the work?" he replied: "Much obliged, M.
Curé, it goes well." He was never seen at the tavern.

Now, on February 15, 1816, about half-past two in the afternoon, Thomas
was in his fields busy in spreading manure on his land, when he suddenly
saw an unknown man appear before him. This man, who appeared to be about
five feet two inches high, was slim of figure, with a tapering, delicate
and very white face; he was enveloped to his feet in a long frock coat
of blonde color, was shod with boots tied with strings, and wore a high
silk hat. He said to Martin in a very gentle voice:

"It is necessary that you should go to see the King; that you should say
to him that his life is in danger, as well as that of the princes; that
evil men are still attempting to overturn the government; that several
writings or letters are already in circulation in some provinces of his
States on this subject; that it is necessary that he shall have an exact
and general watch kept in all his States, and especially in the capital;
that it is also necessary that he should exalt the day of the Lord, that
it may be kept holy; that this holy day is misused by a great portion
of his people; that it is necessary that he shall cause public works to
stop on that day; that he shall cause public prayers to be ordered for
the conversion of the people; that he shall exhort them to penitence;
that he shall abolish and annihilate all the disorders which are
committed on all the days which precede the holy forty days of Lent:
that if he does not do all these things, France will fall into new
evils. It is necessary that the King should behave towards his people as
a father to his child who deserves to be punished; that he shall punish
a small number of the most culpable among them to intimidate the others.
If the King does not do what is said, there will be made so great a hole
in his crown that this will bring him entirely to ruin."

To this discourse Martin replied very judiciously: "But you can
certainly go away and find others than me to undertake such a commission
as that."

"No," replied the unknown, "it is you who shall go." Martin replied
still more judiciously: "But since you know it so well, you can indeed
go yourself to find the King and say all that to him; why do you
address yourself to a poor man like me, who does not know how to explain
himself?" The unknown showed himself inflexible: "It is not I," said he,
"who shall go, it will be you; pay attention to what I say to you, for
you shall do all that I command you." Then his feet appeared to lift
from the earth, his head to sink, his body to shrink, and the apparition
disappeared. A mysterious force prevented Martin from quitting his field
and made him finish his work much more rapidly than was usual.

When he returned to Gallardon, Martin went to his priest to relate the
adventure to him. The curate, who was called M. Laperruque, advised him
to eat, drink and sleep well, without worrying about this chimera. But,
on the following day, the unknown presented himself on several occasions
before the more and more frightened peasant, and repeated to him the
order to go and find the King.

Martin, on the advice of the curate, visited the Bishop of Versailles,
who questioned him and sent him back to Gallardon. A new apparition: the
unknown declares that he will not tell his name, that he is sent from
heaven, and that if Martin is chosen above all to speak to Louis XVIII,
"it is to lower pride." From this day he does not cease to lecture
Martin: "It is not necessary to believe that it is by the will of men
that the usurper came last year, it is to punish France.... France is in
a state of delirium: it shall be delivered to all sorts of evils...." At
the same time he warned him "that he would be led before the King, that
he would discover to him the secret things of the period of his exile,
but that the knowledge of them would only be given to him at the moment
when he would be introduced into the King's presence." Whether he
cultivates his fields, or whether he remains in the barn to thresh his
wheat, the unfortunate farmer always finds himself in the presence of
the haunting apparition.

Meanwhile, the curate Laperruque corresponds with the Bishop of
Versailles, who corresponds with the Minister of Police. The latter
requests the prefect of Eure-et-Loir to verify "if these apparitions,
said to be miraculous, were not rather a flight of the imagination of
Martin, a veritable illusion of his exalted spirit; or if possibly
the pretended apparition, or perhaps Martin himself, ought not to be
severely questioned by the police and then turned over to the courts."

[Illustration: 0215]

Warned by the unknown that he is soon going to appear "before the first
magistrate of his arrondissement," Martin repairs to Chartres with his
curate, and goes to see the prefect; he relates to him his visions,
announces himself as ready to repeat the story of them to the Minister
of Police and to the King himself, and on March 7, at five o'clock in
the morning, departs from Chartres by the diligence, in the company
of M. André, lieutenant of gendarmes. They both arrive at Paris at
half-past five and take rooms at the Hôtel de Calais, Rue Montmartre.

On the next morning, the lieutenant of gendarmes takes his man to the
General Police Headquarters. In the courtyard, the unknown appears again
to Martin: "You are going," says he, "to be questioned in several ways;
have neither fear nor inquietude, but tell the things as they are."
It is nine o'clock; the minister, M. Decazes, has not yet arisen. A
secretary makes Martin undergo a preliminary interrogatory. The latter
allows himself to be neither intimidated nor disconcerted. Then he is
introduced into the private room of the minister, to whom he relates
again the series of apparitions, and describes the countenance and the
clothing of the unknown. "Well," the minister then says to him, "you
will see him no more, for I am going to have you arrested and taken
to prison." This news leaves Martin very incredulous.... And, having
returned to the Hôtel de Calais, he again hears the unknown assure him
that the police have no power over him, and that it is high time to warn
the King.

The minister begins to be embarrassed. It is evident that the words of
the unknown are not unlike--even to style--the discourses uttered by M.
de Marcellus, M. de Chateaubriand, the ultras who meet every evening in
the Rue Thérèse, in the salon of M. Piet, in short, all the enemies
of M. Decazes. On the other hand, the simplicity of Martin, his air of
frankness, the concordance of his stories, all preclude the idea of an
imposture. Could this peasant, then, be playing a part in some
political machination? But it is impossible to discover who could be the
instigators of the mystification. M. Decazes, to get to the bottom of
the affair, then orders Pinel, physician in chief of the Salpêtrière,
to repair to the Hôtel de Calais and examine the individual in question.
After a long conversation, Pinel decides that Martin is afflicted
with an "intermittent alienation"; then he reflects and writes to the
minister that the wisest course is to take the subject to Charenton
for a few days, in order that it may be possible to observe him and
pronounce upon his case.

Meanwhile, the unknown continues to appear to Martin and to announce to
him the worst catastrophes. Suddenly, on March 10, he decides to reveal
his name: "I had told you that my name would remain unknown; but, since
incredulity is so great, it is necessary that I discover my name to you;
I am the Archangel Raphael, an angel very celebrated at the throne
of God; I have received the power to strike France with all sorts of
plagues." And he adds that peace will not return to France before the
year 1840. These words terrify Martin.

Three days later, the lieutenant of gendarmes causes him to enter a
hired carriage and, under pretext of a drive, conducts him to Charenton.
Martin, however, displays no astonishment at this: the supernatural
voice has warned him of it.

Martin remained about three weeks at Charenton, observed and studied
very closely by Doctor Royer-Collard, chief physician of the hospital.
He set down his observations and his conclusions in a long report, which
he signed with Pinel. It is from this document that I have just related
the first visions of Martin.

This report gives us a high idea of the prudence, the method and the
scruples of the physicians who prepared it. As we read these clear and
judicious pages, we are obliged to recognize that if the science of
mental maladies has made little progress since 1816, the specialists
resort to boldness of diagnosis and obscurities of language which Pinel
and Royer-Collard knew nothing of. These two doctors knew that their
work would pass under the King's eyes, and they doubtless put particular
care into it. Nevertheless, not one of our most famous alienists would
consent today to sign such an avowal of uncertainty, nor, above all,
to express his doubts and reserves in a fashion as limpid and as
intelligible, without once dissimulating by a barbarous jargon the
fragility of his knowledge.

The doctors begin by an exposition of the facts, the apparitions of the
archangel, the confidences of Martin to his curate, his trip to Paris
and his arrival at Charenton. They report that after having submitted
him to a detailed examination, they had found in him no sign of malady
nor any symptom of derangement of mind: he is sound of body, reasons
well, manifests neither overexcitement nor violence; he accepts his
internment with resignation and asks only that he be permitted to
accomplish his mission, for he continues to receive the visits and the
admonitions of the archangel. We shall see that he finally obtained
entry to the presence of the King. But let us see first, according
to expert medical testimony, whether Martin was an impostor or an
illuminate.

"If Martin is an impostor," say the doctors, "he can have become so only
in one of two ways: either by imagining his rôle alone and executing
it without any outside assistance, or by obeying the influence of other
persons more enlightened than himself and by receiving their counsel and
their instruction."

The physicians discard the first hypothesis; what they themselves have
observed of the character of Martin and what they have learned through
information brought from Gallardon, prevents their believing in
trickery. "Martin was the last man in the world whom one would suspect
of forming a project such as this and of cleverly bringing together
all the parties to it; he did not have the religious and political
acquaintances which this requires, and he would never have been able
to compose by himself alone the discourses which he assures us were
addressed to him; but even supposing, contrary to all probability, that
he might have been capable of conceiving such a plan, his skill would
have come to an end at the first difficulty of execution. Let us imagine
him in this contingency face to face with the different persons who have
questioned him; let one oppose his inexperience to their penetration,
his ignorance to the artifice of their questions, his timidity to the
impression of respect which the exercise of authority always calls
forth, and let one ask one's self if he would not have been disconcerted
a score of times and fallen into the traps which were laid for him in
all directions. Let us add that, if he had only been an adroit rogue, he
would have infallibly sought to turn this roguery to his own profit by
making it a means of fortune or of credit. Now, he has not dreamed for
a single instant of taking advantage of the extraordinary things which
happened to him; he has not even been willing to accept a small sum of
money which was offered him for his traveling expenses; he has never
worked to acquire partisans, and finally, he has returned to his village
as simple and with as little pretension as before. Has one ever seen
rogues so disinterested?"

Must we believe that Martin is not the sole author of the imposture and
that he was guided by outside advice? The physicians combat equally this
hypothesis which would have made policemen smile in the beginning.
Here is their reasoning, and it is very strong: "To admit this second
hypothesis, it is necessary to admit also that a certain number of
men, attached to some political or religious faction and knowing Martin
directly or indirectly, should have entered into close relations with
him at some time before January 15, and have continued these relations
from January 15 up to the time of Martin's removal to Paris, and also
in Paris itself, during the sojourn which he made there, and even at
Charenton during the three weeks which he passed there...." Without these
precautions, Martin, abandoned to himself and now obedient only to vague
and insufficient guidance, would not have been able to escape the perils
which surrounded him.... Previous to January 15, Martin associated only
with his family or the people of his village; he has never been known to
have had any acquaintance or association with persons of a higher class;
consequently he has not had them; for in a village nothing remains
secret; every one knows what his neighbor is doing. From January 15 up
to the time of his removal to Paris, the most authentic reports certify
that he has seen only his curate, the Bishop of Versailles and the
prefect of Eure-et-Loir, and we know exactly what passed between them
and Martin. In the journey from Gallardon to Paris, and during the stay
which he made in that city, Martin was accompanied by an officer of
gendarmes who left him neither by day nor by night, and who affirms
that, with the exception of M. Pinel, no one at all has had an interview
with him. As to Charenton, we certify that he there met only three
strangers: one was the commandant and the two others [M. Sosthène de La
Rochefoucauld and the Abbé Dulondel, sent by the Archbishop of Rheims,
to whom the King had entrusted the care and the solution of the Martin
affair.], discreet persons, incapable of becoming the instruments of
trickery; that all three have had communication with Martin only in the
presence of the director, and that they were rigorously restricted
to addressing a few questions to him without making any kind of
insinuation.... Martin talked of his visions neither to the patients,
nor to the attendants, nor to the gardeners. Besides, no letter, no
advice, had reached him from outside... Then Martin is neither an
impostor nor an accomplice in an imposture. He thus actually experienced
the sensations which he reports.

Having established the sincerity of Martin, the physicians asked
themselves how his intellectual condition should be characterized.

Martin is the puppet of hallucinations. Therefore his affection
approaches insanity in certain characteristics. "It is for this reason,"
adds Royer-Collard, "that M. Pinel and myself did not hesitate at first
sight to regard this affection as a particular kind of insanity, and it
is probable that any other physician would have thought as we do on
this point. But if Martin's affection approaches insanity in some
particulars, it also differs from it in important and basic respects..."
What were they? "In the case of ordinary mental patients, the
hallucination of the senses is almost always led up to and brought on
by causes which have acted strongly upon their imagination, or disturbed
more or less the exercise of their intellectual faculties; it never
manifests itself without a special concentration of efforts of the
attention or the imagination upon a single idea or upon a particular
series of ideas, at least in the period which immediately precedes
the vision." Now, in Martin's case, there is nothing like this. He has
religious visions, although he had a mind little inclined to the
mystic and was even a rather lukewarm Christian. His visions relate to
politics, yet he was a stranger to the passions of his fellow citizens
and did not read the newspapers. Among ordinary insane, visions are
always accompanied by a certain ecstatic exaltation which gives the seer
the attitude of the inspired, of the prophet, and never permit him to
relate his visions with calmness and tranquillity. Now Martin remains
constantly the same. He confides his visions only to his superiors,
he appears more annoyed than glorified by them, he relates them
with simplicity; he is not turned for one instant from his habitual
occupations. Singular coincidences justified certain of the prophecies
of Martin: "If it is necessary to make use of the testimony of the
officer of gendarmes who accompanied him, Martin announced to him in the
morning the visit which M. Pinel was to make in the afternoon, without
there being any way in which he could learn of this.... We are equally
assured that he had actually written to his brother under date of March
12, to warn him that the authorities were going to have information
collected in his neighborhood, in regard to the persons with whom he
habitually associated there, while the letter by which these inquiries
were ordered was not written until the sixteenth of the same month...."
Pinel and Royer-Collard willingly admit that there exist "incontestable
occurrences of previsions and presentiments which were later realized by
the event." But what appears not less certain "is that these occurrences
are met with only in the case of persons who enjoy all their faculties
and never among the mentally afflicted. This is a side of our nature
which remains inexplicable to us even to this day and which will
probably long escape our researches." Finally, Martin is distinguished
by his excellent health from other hallucinate insane, who are always
the victims of physical troubles.

What can then be the nature of this condition, so individual and so
different from insanity as it is usually observed?

I have had to abridge this long scientific discussion, but I will copy
the conclusions of the report verbatim:

"We here find ourselves arrested by important considerations. On the
one hand, it very often happens that true insanity shows itself at first
only by indefinite symptoms and takes its real form and its complete
development only at a period more or less remote from its first
appearance; on the other hand, the methods of classification applied
even to this day in medicine are still very imperfect, and lack much of
that degree of precision which seems to belong especially to the other
physical sciences.... The external and tangible properties of objects
are the only ones which receive the attention of the doctor: it is
by the examination of these that he regulates his ministry, and
intellectual facts are almost always surrounded with so many obscurities
that it is extremely difficult to assert rigorously exact analogies or
differences.

"If these reflections are true, in general, they are especially so with
respect to the facts observed in Martin's case, and the mere statement
of these facts furnishes a sufficient proof of this. We consequently
think that Martin's condition may change. It would be rash to pronounce
upon this condition before the lapse of a year, and until then we think
it is proper that we should abstain from judging him. We also think
that this condition, as we have observed it, cannot, taking
into consideration the present imperfection of our knowledge, be
characterized in a precise manner, and that even if we suppose that it
would always remain the same, it would still be necessary to wait, in
order to determine its nature, until facts of the same kind, observed
and recorded with care, should have been discovered in sufficient
quantity to spread new light upon this still obscure portion of our
knowledge."

Consequently, Pinel and Royer-Collard declare that they have found it
necessary to refrain from giving any treatment, they decide that the
minister has done "an act of justice and humanity" in returning Martin
to his family, and request that, during a period of considerable
duration, he should be the subject of "enlightened observation."

When Louis XVIII decided to summon Martin to the Tuileries, he had not
yet read this report, which was not drawn up until several days later.

But M. Decazes had communicated to him the observations of the
physicians, and the Archbishop of Rheims in like manner the impressions
of his emissary, Abbé Dulondel. To what sentiment did he respond in
summoning Martin? Probably to simple curiosity. "Infected with his
century, it is to be feared that religion was for the Very Christian
king' only an elixir suitable for the amalgamation of the drugs of which
royalty is composed." (This admirable formula is by Chateaubriand.)

On April 2, Martin was conducted from Charen-ton to police headquarters.
The minister announced to him that he was about to be taken to see
the King, then went into a neighboring room. Then Martin beheld the
archangel, and heard these words: "You are going to speak to the King
and you will be alone with him; have no fear in appearing before the
King because of what you have to say to him." A carriage was ready.
But the peasant preferred to go to the Tuileries on foot, and the first
gentleman in waiting introduced him into the King's apartment.

*****

Martin was in the presence of Louis XVIII; he was finally going to be
able to acquit himself of his mission and to transmit to the King the
warnings of the archangel.

He himself reported this interview to Doctor Royer-Collard; then, after
returning to Gallardon, he made a more detailed statement to his curate,
M. Laperruque; the latter wrote down the relation under the dictation of
Martin, who certified to its exactness, and the manuscript was sent to
the prefecture of Chartres. We are obliged to confine ourselves to the
statements of the laborer of La Beauce, for the scene had no witness.
To the Duchess of Berry, who questioned him about this personage, Louis
XVIII merely replied that _Martin was a very worthy man who had given
him good advice from which he hoped to be able to profit._

Martin finds the King seated at a table "upon which," he says, "there
were many papers and pens." He bows, hat in hand.

"Sire, I salute you."

"Good morning, Martin."

"You surely know, Sire, why I come."

"Yes, I know that you have something to tell me and I have been told
that it was something which you could say only to me. Be seated." Martin
takes an armchair, sits down on the other side of the table, facing the
King, and begins the conversation.

[Illustration: 0231]

"How is your health, Sire?"

"I feel a little better than I have for some time; and how are you
getting along?"

"I am very well, thank you."

"What is the reason for your coming here?" And the seer commences to
relate the admonitions and the prophecies of the archangel, all that had
happened to him since January 15, the date of the first apparition. He
adds:

"It has also been said to me: One has betrayed the King and will betray
him again; a man has escaped from prison; the King has been made to
believe that this occurred through subtleness, skill and chance; but the
thing is not so, it was premeditated; those who should have attempted
to recapture him have neglected the matter; they have used in their task
much slowness and negligence; they have caused him to be pursued when
it was no longer possible to recapture him. I do not know who, they have
not told me this."

"I know him well, it is Lavalette."

"It has been said to me that the King examines all his employees, and
especially his ministers."

"Have they not named the persons to you?"

"No, it has been said to me that it was easy for the King to know them;
as for myself I do not know them."

Martin pretends that, at this moment, Louis XVIII lifted his eyes to
heaven, saying: "Ah! it is necessary!"... and began to weep. Seeing
which, he himself wept with the King to the end of the interview. But
his emotion does not prevent him from continuing.

"It has also been said to me that the King should send into his
provinces confidential officials to examine the administrations, without
their being warned, without their even knowing that any one has been
sent; and you will be feared and respected by your subjects. It has been
said to me that I should say to you that the King should remember his
distress and his adversity in the time of his exile. The King has wept
for France; there has been a time when the King no longer had any hope
of returning hither, seeing France allied with all its neighbors."

"Yes, there was a time when I no longer had any hope, seeing all the
States which no longer had any support."

"God has not wished to destroy the King; he has recalled him into his
States at the moment when he least expected it. At last the King has
returned to his legitimate possessions. What are the acts of grace which
have been returned for such a benefit? To punish France once more, the
usurper has been drawn from his exile: it was not by the will of men,
nor by the effect of chance that things were permitted thus. He returned
without forces, without arms, without any defense being made against
him. The legitimate King was obliged to abandon his capital, and
although he believed that he could still hold one city in his States, he
was obliged to abandon it."

"It is very true, I intended to remain at Lille."

"When the usurper returned... [let us omit these historic matters]. The
King again reëntered his States. Where are the acts of grace which have
been rendered to God for so glorious a miracle?" And Louis XVIII still
weeps.... Then Martin recalls to him private facts regarding his exile.

"Keep the secret of them," returns the King; "there will only be God,
you and myself who will ever know that.... Has it not been said to you
how it is necessary that I should conduct myself in governing France?"

"No, he has made no mention to me of all that which is in the writings;
the minister has the writings, as the things have been announced."

"Has he not said to you that I have already sent forth decrees for all
that you have spoken of to

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