initial commit of ebook 28004HEAD main

author: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-15 02:37:00 -0700
committer: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-15 02:37:00 -0700
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+      A Little Tour In France | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 28004 ***</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h3 class="c">A LITTLE<br />TOUR IN FRANCE</h3>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_001.png" width="200" height="291" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="c">Novels by<br />
+<span class="lt">HENRY JAMES</span><br />
+<i>Six Shillings each</i></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a></span></p>
+<table summary="works"
+cellpadding="0"
+style="border:2px solid black;padding:3%;"
+cellspacing="0">
+<tr><td>THE AWKWARD AGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE TWO MAGICS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>WHAT MAISIE KNEW</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE OTHER HOUSE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE SPOILS OF POYNTON</td></tr>
+<tr><td>EMBARRASSMENTS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>TERMINATIONS</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="c smcap">london: william heinemann<br />
+21 Bedford Street, W.C.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 343px;">
+<img src="images/ill_002_th.png" width="343" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+<a href="images/ill_002.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1 class="top15">A LITTLE</h1>
+<h1>TOUR IN FRANCE</h1>
+
+<p class="c">By</p>
+
+<h2>HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_003.png" width="200" height="312" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c smcap">with ninety-four illustrations by</p>
+
+<h3 class="c top5">JOSEPH PENNELL</h3>
+
+<p class="c">LONDON<br />
+WILLIAM HEINEMANN<br />
+1900</p>
+
+<table summary="cont"
+cellspacing="0"
+cellpadding="0"
+style="border:4px solid gray;
+padding:2%;text-align:center;
+margin:5% auto 5% auto;">
+<tr><td><a href="#Preface">Preface</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#Contents">Contents</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#List_of_Illustrations">List of Illustrations</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#Introductory">Introductory</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#FOOTNOTES">Footnotes</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_004.png" width="450" height="284" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Preface" id="Preface"></a>Preface</h3>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Preface</div>
+
+
+<p><i>The notes presented in this volume were gathered, as will easily be
+perceived, a number of years ago and on an expectation not at that time
+answered by the event, and were then published in the United States. The
+expectation had been that they should accompany a series of drawings,
+and they themselves were altogether governed by the pictorial spirit.
+They made, and they make in appearing now, after a considerable interval
+and for the first time, in England, no pretension to any other; they are
+impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited; if the written
+word may ever play the part of brush or pencil, they are sketches on
+"drawing-paper" and nothing more. From the moment the principle of
+selection and expression, with a tourist, is not the delight of the eyes
+and the play of fancy, it should be an energy in every way much larger;
+there is no happy mean, in other words, I hold, between the sense and
+the quest of the picture, and the surrender to it, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span> the sense and
+the quest of the constitution, the inner springs of the subject&mdash;springs
+and connections social, economic, historic.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>One must really choose, in other words, between the benefits of the
+perception of surface&mdash;a perception, when fine, perhaps none of the most
+frequent&mdash;and those of the perception of very complex underlying
+matters. If these latter had had, for me, to be taken into account, my
+pages would not have been collected. At the time of their original
+appearance the series of illustrations to which it had been their policy
+to cling for countenance and company failed them, after all, at the last
+moment, through a circumstance not now on record; and they had suddenly
+to begin to live their little life without assistance. That they have
+seemed able in any degree still to prolong even so modest a career might
+perhaps have served as a reason for leaving them undisturbed. In fact,
+however, I have too much appreciated&mdash;for any renewal of
+inconsistency&mdash;the opportunity of granting them at last, in an
+association with Mr. Pennell's admirable drawings, the benefit they have
+always lacked. The little book thus goes forth finally as the
+picture-book it was designed to be. Text and illustrations are,
+altogether and alike, things of the play of eye and hand and
+fancy&mdash;views, head-pieces, tail-pieces; through the artist's work,
+doubtless, in a much higher degree than the author's.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But these are words enough on a minor point. Many things come back to
+me on reading my pages over&mdash;such a world of reflection and emotion as I
+can neither leave unmentioned nor yet, in this place, weigh them down
+with the full expression of. Difficult indeed would be any full
+expression for one who, deeply devoted always to the revela<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span>tions of
+France, finds himself, late in life, making of the sentiment no more
+substantial, no more direct record than this mere revival of an
+accident. Not one of these small chapters but suggests to me a regret
+that I might not, first or last, have gone farther, penetrated deeper,
+spoken oftener&mdash;closed, in short, more intimately with the great general
+subject; and I mean, of course, not in such a form as the present, but
+in many another, possible and impossible. It all comes back, doubtless,
+this vision of missed occasions and delays overdone, to the general
+truth that the observer, the enjoyer, may, before he knows it, be
+practically too far</i> in <i>for all that free testimony and pleasant, easy
+talk that are incidental to the earlier or more detached stages of a
+relation. There are relations that soon get beyond all merely showy
+appearances of value for us. Their value becomes thus private and
+practical, and is represented by the process&mdash;the quieter, mostly, the
+better&mdash;of absorption and assimilation of what the relation has done for
+us. For persons thus indebted to the genius of France&mdash;however, in its
+innumerable ways, manifested&mdash;the profit to be gained, the lesson to be
+learnt, is almost of itself occupation enough. They feel that they bear
+witness by the intelligent use and application of their advantage, and
+the consciousness of the artist is therefore readily a consciousness of
+pious service. He may repeatedly have dreamt of some such happy
+combination of mood and moment as shall launch him in a profession of
+faith, a</i> demonstration <i>of the interesting business; he may have had
+inner glimpses of an explicit statement, and vaguely have sketched it to
+himself as one of the most candid and charming ever drawn up; but time,
+meanwhile, has passed, interruptions have done their dismal work, the
+indirect tribute, too, has perhaps, behind the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span> altar, grown and grown;
+and the reflection has at all events established itself that honour is
+more rendered by seeing and doing one's work in the light than by
+brandishing the torch on the house-tops. Curiosity and admiration have
+operated continually, but with as little waste as they could. The
+drawback is only that in this case, to be handsomely consequent, one
+would perhaps rather not have appeared to celebrate</i> any <i>rites. The
+moral of all of which is that those here embodied must pass, at the
+best, but for what they are worth.</i></p>
+
+<p class="r"><i>H. J.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>August 9, 1900.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_005.png" width="200" height="350" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_006.png" width="450" height="348" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<h3 class="c"><a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a>Contents</h3>
+
+<table summary="toc"
+cellspacing="2"
+cellpadding="2">
+<tr><td class="smcap">chapter</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><span class="smcap">page</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>Introductory</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_i">I</a>.</td><td>Tours</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_ii">II</a>.</td><td>Tours: the Cathedral</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_iii">III</a>.</td><td>Tours: Saint Martin</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Saint Julian</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Plessis</span>-les-Tours</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Marmoutier</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_iv">IV</a>.</td><td>Blois</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_v">V</a>.</td><td>Chambord</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_vi">VI</a>.</td><td>Amboise</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Chaumont</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_vii">VII</a>.</td><td>Chenonceaux</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_viii">VIII</a>.</td><td>Azay-le-Rideau</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_ix">IX</a>.</td><td>Langeais</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_68">68</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_x">X</a>.</td><td>Loches</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xi">XI</a>.</td><td>Bourges</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">The</span> Cathedral</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xii">XII</a>.</td><td>Bourges: Jacques C&#339;ur</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xiii">XIII</a>.</td><td>Le Mans</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xiv">XIV</a>.</td><td>Angers</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xv">XV</a>.</td><td>Nantes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xvi">XVI</a>.</td><td>La Rochelle</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xvii">XVII</a>.</td><td>Poitiers</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xviii">XVIII</a>.</td><td>Angoulême</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">Bordeaux</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xix">XIX</a>.</td><td>Toulouse</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xx">XX</a>.</td><td>Toulouse: the Capitol</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxi">XXI</a>.</td><td>Toulouse: Saint-Sernin</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxii">XXII</a>.</td><td>Carcassonne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxiii">XXIII</a>.</td><td>Carcassonne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxiv">XXIV</a>.</td><td>Narbonne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxv">XXV</a>.</td><td>Montpellier</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxvi">XXVI</a>.</td><td>The Pont du Gard</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxvii">XXVII</a>.</td><td>Aigues-Mortes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxviii">XXVIII</a>.</td><td>Nîmes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxix">XXIX</a>.</td><td>Tarascon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxx">XXX</a>.</td><td>Arles</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">The</span> Theatre</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxi">XXXI</a>.</td><td>Arles: the Museum</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxii">XXXII</a>.</td><td>Les Baux</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxiii">XXXIII</a>.</td><td>Avignon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">The</span> Palace of the Popes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxiv">XXXIV</a>.</td><td>Villeneuve-lès-Avignon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxv">XXXV</a>.</td><td>Vaucluse</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxvi">XXXVI</a>.</td><td>Orange</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxvii">XXXVII</a>.</td><td>Macon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxviii">XXXVIII</a>.</td><td>Bourg-en-Bresse</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">The Church at Brou</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_255">255</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xxxix">XXXIX</a>.</td><td>Beaune</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_262">262</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_xl">XL</a>.</td><td>Dijon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_007.png" width="200" height="333" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_008.png" width="200" height="304" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_009.png" width="450" height="185" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<h3 class="c"><a name="List_of_Illustrations" id="List_of_Illustrations"></a>List of Illustrations</h3>
+
+
+<table summary="ills"
+cellspacing="1"
+cellpadding="0">
+<tr><td>Nîmes: the Garden (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td><i>Frontispiece</i></td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tours: the House of Balzac</td><td><i>To face page</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_8">8</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tours: the Cathedral (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tours: the Towers of St. Martin</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Blois (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Blois: the Château</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Chambord</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_38">38</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Amboise: the Château</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Chenonceaux (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Azay-le-Rideau</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Loches</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Loches: the Church</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bourges: the House of Jacques C&#339;ur (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bourges: Doorway, House of Jacques C&#339;ur</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bourges: the Cathedral (West Front)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Le Mans: the Cathedral</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_98">98</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Angers: Old Timbered Houses</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>La Rochelle</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>La Rochelle: the Hôtel de Ville (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Poitiers: Church of St. Radegonde (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Bordeaux: the Quay (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Toulouse: St. Sernin (the Transept)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Toulouse: the Garonne (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Carcassonne</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Carcassonne (another View)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Narbonne: the Washing Place</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Narbonne: the Cathedral and Hôtel de Ville (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>The Pont du Gard</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Aigues-Mortes</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Nîmes: the Cathedral</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Nîmes: the Amphitheatre</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Tarascon: the Castle</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Arles: St. Trophimus</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_204">204</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Arles: Ruins of the Roman Theatre</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Arles: Door of St. Trophimus</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Arles: the Cloisters (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Avignon: the Church</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Vaucluse: Ruins of Castle</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Orange: the Theatre</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_246">246</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Lyons</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brou: the Church (<i>Photogravure</i>)</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_256">256</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Beaune: the Hospital</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dijon</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Dijon: the Park</td><td align="center">"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Courtyard, House of Jacques C&#339;ur</td><td><i>Half-title</i></td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td>Angers from the Bridge</td><td><i>Title-page</i></td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Aigues-Mortes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Isle-sur-Sorgues</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_viii">viii</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Saint-Bénazet: the Broken Bridge</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_ix">ix</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Villeneuve-lès-Avignon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_xi">xi</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Narbonne: the Fish Market</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_xii">ix</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Avignon from Villeneuve</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_xiii">xiii</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Toulouse: Hôtel d'Assézat</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_xvi">xvi</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Nantes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Tours from the River</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Langeais</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Chaumont from the River</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Blois</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Chambord</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Chaumont from the Bridge</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Chenonceaux</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Azay-le-Rideau</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Langeais from the Loire</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Loches</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Bourges</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Bourges: the Hôtel Lallemont</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Le Mans</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Angers: the Castle</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Nantes: the Quay</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">La Rochelle: Tour de la Lanterne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Poitiers: the Cathedral</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Bordeaux</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Toulouse: the Cathedral</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Toulouse: the Place de Capitol</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Toulouse: Saint-Sernin</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Carcassonne from the River</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Carcassonne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Arles, Landscape near</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Montpellier: the Aqueduct</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">The Pont du Gard</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Aigues-Mortes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Nîmes: the Maison Carrée</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Tarascon and Beaucaire</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Provençal Landscape</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Montmajeur</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Les Baux</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Villeneuve-lès-Avignon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Avignon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Vaucluse, Approach to</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Orange: the Gateway</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Valence</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Macon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Macon: the Bridge</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_262">262</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="left">Beaune: the Hospital</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Page xvi]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;">
+<img src="images/ill_010.png" width="200" height="327" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Page 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_011.png" width="450" height="283" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<h3><a name="Introductory" id="Introductory"></a>Introductory</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Introductory</div>
+
+<p>Though the good city of Paris appears to be less in fashion than in
+other days with those representatives of our race&mdash;not always, perhaps,
+acknowledged as the soundest and stiffest&mdash;curious of foreign
+opportunity and addicted to foreign sojourns, it probably none the less
+remains true that such frequentations of France as may be said still to
+flourish among us have as much as ever the wondrous capital, and the
+wondrous capital alone, for their object. The taste for Paris, at all
+events, is&mdash;or perhaps I should say was, alluding as I do, I fear, to a
+vanished order&mdash;a taste by itself; singularly little bound up, of
+necessity, with such an interest in the country at large as would be
+implied by an equal devotion, in other countries, to other capitals.
+Putting aside the economic inducement, which may always operate, and
+limiting the matter to the question of free choice, it is sufficiently
+striking that the free chooser would have to be very fond of England to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+quarter himself in London, very fond of Germany to quarter himself in
+Berlin, very fond of America to quarter himself in New York. It had, on
+the other hand, been a common reflection for the author of these light
+pages that the fondness for France (throughout the company of strangers
+more or less qualified) was oddly apt to feed only on such grounds for
+it as made shift to spread their surface between the Arc de Triomphe and
+the Gymnase Theatre: as if there were no good things in the <i>doux pays</i>
+that could not be harvested in that field. It matters little how the
+assumption began to strike him as stupid, especially since he himself
+had doubtless equally shared in the guilt of it. The light pages in
+question are but the simple record of a small personal effort to shake
+it off. He took, it must be confessed, no extraordinary measures; he
+merely started, one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
+little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as immediately as
+anywhere else see it demonstrated that, though France might be Paris,
+Paris was by no means France. The beauty of the demonstration&mdash;quite as
+prompt as he could have desired&mdash;drew him considerably farther, and his
+modest but eminently successful adventure begot, as aids to amused
+remembrance, a few informal notes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_012.png" width="450" height="306" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_i" id="Chapter_i"></a>Chapter i</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours</div>
+
+<p>I AM ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France;
+that remark has long ago lost its bloom. The town of Tours, however, has
+something sweet and bright, which suggests that it is surrounded by a
+land of fruits. It is a very agreeable little city; few towns of its
+size are more ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better
+humour with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of
+bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region
+of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic,
+rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real
+Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in
+search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources
+of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague conviction that he can
+only lose by almost any change. Fortune has been kind to him: he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+lives in a temperate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the banks of a
+river which, it is true, sometimes floods the country around it, but of
+which the ravages appear to be so easily repaired that its aggressions
+may perhaps be regarded (in a region where so many good things are
+certain) merely as an occasion for healthy suspense. He is surrounded by
+fine old traditions, religious, social, architectural, culinary; and he
+may have the satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No
+part of his admirable country is more characteristically national.
+Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but
+Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of
+Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good
+dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage
+about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions
+of central France&mdash;"son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et
+courtes." In the autumn of 1882 the rains perhaps were less short than
+abundant; but when the days were fine it was impossible that anything in
+the way of weather could be more charming. The vineyards and orchards
+looked rich in the fresh, gay light; cultivation was everywhere, but
+everywhere it seemed to be easy. There was no visible poverty; thrift
+and success presented themselves as matters of good taste. The white
+caps of the women glittered in the sunshine, and their well-made sabots
+clicked cheerfully on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old
+châteaux,&mdash;a gallery of architectural specimens and of large hereditary
+properties. The peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in
+most other parts of France; though they have enough of it to give them
+quite their share of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the
+little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+chaffering <i>place</i> of the market-town, the stranger observes so often in
+the wrinkled brown masks that surmount the agricultural blouse. This is,
+moreover, the heart of the old French monarchy; and as that monarchy was
+splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splendour still glitters
+in the current of the Loire. Some of the most striking events of French
+history have occurred on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters
+bloomed for a while with the flowering of the Renaissance. The Loire
+gives a great "style" to a landscape of which the features are not, as
+the phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye to distances even more
+poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream,
+and is sometimes observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of
+its channel&mdash;a great defect certainly in a river which is so much
+depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of it
+as I saw it last; full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large slow curves
+and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than
+the view of its course which you get from the battlements and terraces
+of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that elevation one lovely Sunday
+morning, through a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very
+model of a generous, beneficent stream. The most charming part of Tours
+is naturally the shaded quay that overlooks it, and looks across too at
+the friendly faubourg of Saint Symphorien and at the terraced heights
+which rise above this. Indeed, throughout Touraine it is half the charm
+of the Loire that you can travel beside it. The great dyke which
+protects it, or protects the country from it, from Blois to Angers, is
+an admirable road; and on the other side as well the highway constantly
+keeps it company. A wide river, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+<span class="sidenote">Tours</span>
+you follow a wide road, is excellent company; it brightens and shortens
+the way.</p>
+
+<p>The inns at Tours are in another quarter, and one of them, which is
+midway between the town and the station, is very good. It is worth
+mentioning for the fact that every one belonging to it is
+extraordinarily polite&mdash;so unnaturally polite as at first to excite your
+suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and
+chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter
+in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever
+encountered; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur
+of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning-top. I may add that I discovered
+no dark secrets at the Hôtel de l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any
+traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in
+an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest,
+at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the
+monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all
+alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It
+connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in
+the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire&mdash;the spacious,
+solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Curé de Tours," "one of the
+finest monuments of French architecture." The Palais de Justice was the
+seat of the Government of Léon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870, after the
+dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris and before
+the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied Tours
+during that terrible winter: it is astonishing, the number of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>places
+the Germans occupied. It is hardly too much to say that, wherever one goes in certain parts of France, one
+encounters two great historic facts: one is the Revolution; the other is
+the German invasion. The traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred
+scars and bruises and mutilations, but the visible marks of the war of
+1870 have passed away. The country is so rich, so living, that she has
+been able to dress her wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again, so
+that the shadow of that darkness has ceased to rest upon her. But what
+you do not see you still may hear; and one remembers with a certain
+shudder that only a few short years ago this province, so intimately
+French, was under the heel of a foreign foe. To be intimately French was
+apparently not a safeguard; for so successful an invader it could only
+be a challenge. Peace and plenty, however, have succeeded that episode;
+and among the gardens and vineyards of Touraine it seems only a legend
+the more in a country of legends.</p>
+
+<p>It was not, all the same, for the sake of this chequered story that I
+mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale. The most interesting
+fact, to my mind, about the high-street of Tours was that as you walk
+toward the bridge on the right hand <i>trottoir</i> you can look up at the
+house, on the other side of the way, in which Honoré de Balzac first saw
+the light. That violent and complicated genius was a child of the
+good-humoured and succulent Touraine. There is something anomalous in
+this fact, though, if one thinks about it a little, one may discover
+certain correspondences between his character and that of his native
+province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly infelicitous in spite of his
+great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of
+influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+side&mdash;the side that comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the
+romantic and epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this
+region. And he was, moreover, the product of a soil into which a great
+deal of history had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as
+affectedly monarchical, and he was saturated with a sense of the past.
+Number 39 Rue Royale&mdash;of which the basement, like all the basements in
+the Rue Royale, is occupied by a shop&mdash;is not shown to the public; and I
+know not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of
+"Le Lys dans la Vallée" opened his eyes into a world in which he was to
+see and to imagine such extraordinary things. If this were the case I
+would willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any
+relic of the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for
+that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its
+walls, but simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly
+fail to give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour.
+Balzac, in the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than
+any one, since Shakspeare, who has attempted to tell us stories about
+it; and the very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one
+end of the immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a
+little to find that he was born in a house "in a row"&mdash;a house,
+moreover, which at the date of his birth must have been only about
+twenty years old. All that is contradictory. If the tenement selected
+for this honour could not be ancient and embrowned, it should at least
+have been detached.</p>
+
+<p>There is a charming description in his little tale of "La Grenadière" of
+the view of the opposite side of</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 249px;">
+<img src="images/ill_013_th.png" width="249" height="550" alt="TOURS&mdash;THE HOUSE OF BALZAC" />
+<span class="caption">TOURS&mdash;THE HOUSE OF BALZAC</span>
+<a href="images/ill_013.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours</div>
+
+<p class="non">the Loire as you have it from the square at the end of the Rue Royale&mdash;a
+square that has some pretensions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the
+Hôtel de Ville and the Musée, a pair of edifices which directly
+contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of François
+Rabelais and René Descartes. The former, erected a few years since, is a
+very honourable production; the pedestal of the latter could, as a
+matter of course, only be inscribed with the <i>Cogito ergo Sum</i>. The two
+statues mark the two opposite poles to which the wondrous French mind
+has travelled; and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours it ought
+to stand midway between them. Not that he by any means always struck the
+happy mean between the sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of
+him that half of his genius looks in one direction and half in the
+other. The side that turns toward François Rabelais would be, on the
+whole, the side that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac at
+Tours; there is only in one of the chambers of the melancholy museum a
+rather clever, coarse bust. The description in "La Grenadière" of which
+I just spoke is too long to quote; neither have I space for anyone of
+the brilliant attempts at landscape-painting which are woven into the
+shimmering texture of "Le Lys dans la Vallée." The little manor of
+Clochegourde, the residence of Madame de Mortsauf, the heroine of that
+extraordinary work, was within a moderate walk of Tours, and the picture
+in the novel is presumably a copy from an original which it would be
+possible to-day to discover. I did not, however, even make the attempt.
+There are so many châteaux in Touraine commemorated in history that it
+would take one too far to look up those which have been commemorated in
+fiction. The most I did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+was to endeavour to identify the former residence of Mademoiselle
+Gamard, the sinister old maid of "Le Curé de Tours." This terrible woman
+occupied a small house in the rear of the cathedral, where I spent a
+whole morning in wondering rather stupidly which house it could be. To
+reach the cathedral from the little <i>place</i> where we stopped just now to
+look across at the Grenadière, without, it must be confessed, very
+vividly seeing it, you follow the quay to the right and pass out of
+sight of the charming <i>côteau</i> which, from beyond the river, faces the
+town&mdash;a soft agglomeration of gardens, vineyards, scattered villas,
+gables and turrets of slate-roofed châteaux, terraces with grey
+balustrades, moss-grown walls draped in scarlet Virginia-creeper. You
+turn into the town again beside a great military barrack which is
+ornamented with a rugged mediæval tower, a relic of the ancient
+fortifications, known to the Tourangeaux of to-day as the Tour de Guise.
+The young Prince of Joinville, son of that Duke of Guise who was
+murdered by the order of Henry II. at Blois, was, after the death of his
+father, confined here for more than two years, but made his escape one
+summer evening in 1591, under the nose of his keepers, with a gallant
+audacity which has attached the memory of the exploit to his
+sullen-looking prison. Tours has a garrison of five regiments, and the
+little red-legged soldiers light up the town. You see them stroll upon
+the clean, uncommercial quay, where there are no signs of navigation,
+not even by oar, no barrels nor bales, no loading nor unloading, no
+masts against the sky nor booming of steam in the air. The most active
+business that goes on there is that patient and fruitless angling in
+which the French, as the votaries of art for art, excel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+all other people. The little soldiers, weighed down by the contents of
+their enormous pockets, pass with respect from one of these masters of
+the rod to the other, as he sits soaking an indefinite bait in the
+large, indifferent stream. After you turn your back to the quay you have
+only to go a little way before you reach the cathedral.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 189px;">
+<img src="images/ill_014.png" width="189" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_ii" id="Chapter_ii"></a>Chapter ii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: the Cathedral</div>
+
+<p>IT IS a very beautiful church of the second order of importance, with a
+charming mouse-coloured complexion and a pair of fantastic towers. There
+is a commodious little square in front of it, from which you may look up
+at its very ornamental face; but for purposes of frank admiration the
+sides and the rear are perhaps not sufficiently detached. The cathedral
+of Tours, which is dedicated to Saint Gatianus, took a long time to
+build. Begun in 1170, it was finished only in the first half of the
+sixteenth century;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+but the ages and the weather have interfused so well the tone of the
+different parts that it presents, at first at least, no striking
+incongruities, and looks even exceptionally harmonious and complete.
+There are many grander cathedrals, but there are probably few more
+pleasing; and this effect of delicacy and grace is at its best towards
+the close of a quiet afternoon, when the densely decorated towers,
+rising above the little Place de l'Archevêché, lift their curious
+lanterns into the slanting light and offer a multitudinous perch to
+troops of circling pigeons. The whole front, at such a time, has an
+appearance of great richness, although the niches which surround the
+three high doors (with recesses deep enough for several circles of
+sculpture) and indent the four great buttresses that ascend beside the
+huge rose-window, carry no figures beneath their little chiselled
+canopies. The blast of the great Revolution blew down most of the
+statues in France, and the wind has never set very strongly towards
+putting them up again. The embossed and crocketed cupolas which crown
+the towers of Saint Gatien are not very pure in taste; but, like a good
+many impurities, they have a certain character. The interior has a
+stately slimness with which no fault is to be found and which in the
+choir, rich in early glass and surrounded by a broad passage, becomes
+very bold and noble. Its principal treasure perhaps is the charming
+little tomb of the two children (who died young) of Charles VIII. and
+Anne of Brittany, in white marble embossed with symbolic dolphins and
+exquisite arabesques. The little boy and girl lie side by side on a slab
+of black marble, and a pair of small kneeling angels, both at their head
+and at their feet, watch over them. Nothing could be more elegant than
+this monument, which is the work of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: the Cathedral</div>
+
+<p>Michel Colomb, one of the earlier glories of the French Renaissance; it
+is really a lesson in good taste. Originally placed in the great
+abbey-church of Saint Martin, which was for so many ages the holy place
+of Tours, it happily survived the devastation to which that edifice,
+already sadly shattered by the wars of religion and successive
+profanations, finally succumbed in 1797. In 1815 the tomb found an
+asylum in a quiet corner of the cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>I ought perhaps to be ashamed to acknowledge that I found the profane
+name of Balzac capable of adding an interest even to this venerable
+sanctuary. Those who have read the terrible little story of "Le Curé de
+Tours" will perhaps remember that, as I have already mentioned, the
+simple and childlike old Abbé Birotteau, victim of the infernal
+machinations of the Abbé Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard, had his
+quarters in the house of that lady (she had a specialty of letting
+lodgings to priests), which stood on the north side of the cathedral, so
+close under its walls that the supporting pillar of one of the great
+flying buttresses was planted in the spinster's garden. If you wander
+round behind the church in search of this more than historic habitation
+you will have occasion to see that the side and rear of Saint Gatien
+make a delectable and curious figure. A narrow lane passes beside the
+high wall which conceals from sight the palace of the archbishop and
+beneath the flying buttresses, the far-projecting gargoyles, and the
+fine south porch of the church. It terminates in a little dead
+grass-grown square entitled the Place Grégoire de Tours. All this part
+of the exterior of the cathedral is very brown, ancient, Gothic,
+grotesque; Balzac calls the whole place "a desert<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 366px;">
+<img src="images/ill_015_th.png" width="366" height="550" alt="TOURS&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL" />
+<br /><span class="caption">TOURS&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL</span>
+<a href="images/ill_015.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: the Cathedral</div>
+
+<p class="non">of stone." A battered and gabled wing or out-house (as it appears to be)
+of the hidden palace, with a queer old stone pulpit jutting out from it,
+looks down on this melancholy spot, on the other side of which is a
+seminary for young priests, one of whom issues from a door in a quiet
+corner, and, holding it open a moment behind him, shows a glimpse of a
+sunny garden, where you may fancy other black young figures strolling up
+and down. Mademoiselle Gamard's house, where she took her two abbés to
+board, and basely conspired with one against the other, is still farther
+round the cathedral. You cannot quite put your hand upon it to-day, for
+the dwelling of which you say to yourself that it must have been
+Mademoiselle Gamard's does not fulfil all the conditions mentioned in
+Balzac's description. The edifice in question, however, fulfils
+conditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to
+the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with
+this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept),
+is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side
+of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to
+pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very
+genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the
+church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated; but it
+nestles with a kind of wasted friendliness beneath the big walls of the
+cathedral. Its lower arcades have been closed, and it has a small plot
+of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I should imagine to be
+too much overshadowed. In one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret,
+the cage of a winding staircase which ascends (no great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+distance) to an upper gallery, where an old priest, the
+<i>chanoine-gardien</i> of the church, was walking to and fro with his
+breviary. The turret, the gallery, and even the chanoine-gardien,
+belonged, that sweet September morning, to the class of objects that are
+dear to painters in water-colours.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 203px;">
+<img src="images/ill_016.png" width="203" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_iii" id="Chapter_iii"></a>Chapter iii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: Saint Martin</div>
+
+<p>I HAVE mentioned the church of Saint Martin, which was for many years
+the sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the
+simple burial-place of the great apostle who in the fourth century
+Christianised Gaul and who, in his day a brilliant missionary and worker
+of miracles, is chiefly known to modern fame as the worthy that cut his
+cloak in two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar (tradition
+fails to say, I believe, what he did with the other half), the abbey of
+Saint Martin, through the Middle Ages, waxed rich and powerful, till it
+was known at last as one of the most luxurious religious houses in
+Christendom, with kings for its titular abbots<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+(who, like Francis I., sometimes turned and despoiled it) and a great
+treasure of precious things. It passed, however, through many
+vicissitudes. Pillaged by the Normans in the ninth century and by the
+Huguenots in the sixteenth, it received its death-blow from the
+Revolution, which must have brought to bear upon it an energy of
+destruction proportionate to its mighty bulk. At the end of the last
+century a huge group of ruins alone remained, and what we see to-day may
+be called the ruin of a ruin. It is difficult to understand how so vast
+an edifice can have been so completely obliterated. Its site is given up
+to several ugly streets, and a pair of tall towers, separated by a space
+which speaks volumes as to the size of the church and looking across the
+close-pressed roofs to the happier spires of the cathedral, preserve for
+the modern world the memory of a great fortune, a great abuse, perhaps,
+and at all events a great penalty. One may believe that to this day a
+considerable part of the foundations of the great abbey is buried in the
+soil of Tours. The two surviving towers, which are dissimilar in shape,
+are enormous; with those of the cathedral they form the great landmarks
+of the town. One of them bears the name of the Tour de l'Horloge; the
+other, the so-called Tour Charlemagne, was erected (two centuries after
+her death) over the tomb of Luitgarde, wife of the great Emperor, who
+died at Tours in 800. I do not pretend to understand in what relation
+these very mighty and effectually detached masses of masonry stood to
+each other, but in their grey elevation and loneliness they are striking
+and suggestive to-day; holding their hoary heads far above the modern
+life of the town and looking sad and conscious, as they had outlived all
+uses. I know not what is supposed to have become of the bones<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 351px;">
+<img src="images/ill_017_th.png" width="351" height="550" alt="TOURS&mdash;THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN" />
+<br /><span class="caption">TOURS&mdash;THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN</span>
+<a href="images/ill_017.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: Saint Martin</div>
+
+<p class="non">of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which
+they may have got mislaid; but a mystic connection with his
+wonder-working relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on
+the left of the street, which opens in front of the Tour
+Charlemagne&mdash;whose immemorial base, by the way, inhabited like a cavern,
+with a diminutive doorway where, as I passed, an old woman stood
+cleaning a pot, and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers,
+would be appreciated by a painter in search of "bits." The present
+shrine of Saint Martin is enclosed (provisionally, I suppose) in a very
+modern structure of timber, where in a dusky cellar, to which you
+descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper
+roses, is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and
+prostrate worshippers. Even this crepuscular vault, however, fails, I
+think, to attain solemnity; for the whole place is strangely vulgar and
+garish. The Catholic Church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the
+most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of
+impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of
+sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the
+grotesqueness of such an establishment as the last link in the chain of
+a great ecclesiastical tradition.</p>
+
+<p>In the same street, on the other side, a little below, is something
+better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at a high
+door in a white wall (there is a cross above it), and a fresh-faced
+sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the
+charming little cloister, or rather fragment of cloister. Only one side
+of this surpassing structure remains, but the whole place is effective.
+In front of the beautiful arcade, which is terribly bruised and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+obliterated, is one of those walks of interlaced <i>tilleuls</i> which are so
+frequent in Touraine, and into which the green light filters so softly
+through a lattice of clipped twigs. Beyond this is a garden, and beyond
+the garden are the other buildings of the convent, where the placid
+sisters keep a school&mdash;a test, doubtless, of placidity. The imperfect
+arcade, which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century (I know
+nothing of it but what is related in Mrs. Pattison's "Renaissance in
+France"), is a truly enchanting piece of work; the cornice and the
+angles of the arches being covered with the daintiest sculpture of
+arabesques, flowers, fruit, medallions, cherubs, griffins, all in the
+finest and most attenuated relief. It is like the chasing of a bracelet
+in stone. The taste, the fancy, the elegance, the refinement, are of the
+order that straightens up again our drooping standard of distinction.
+Such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance;
+there is nothing more delicate in all Touraine.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: Saint Julian</div>
+
+<p>There is another fine thing at Tours which is not particularly delicate,
+but which makes a great impression&mdash;the very interesting old church of
+Saint Julian, lurking in a crooked corner at the right of the Rue
+Royale, near the point at which this indifferent thoroughfare emerges,
+with its little cry of admiration, on the bank of the Loire. Saint
+Julian stands to-day in a kind of neglected hollow, where it is much
+shut in by houses; but in the year 1225, when the edifice was begun, the
+site was doubtless, as the architects say, more eligible. At present
+indeed, when once you have caught a glimpse of the stout, serious
+Romanesque tower&mdash;which is not high, but strong&mdash;you feel that the
+building has something to say and that you must stop to listen to it.
+Within, it has a vast and splendid nave,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+of immense height, the nave of a cathedral, with a shallow choir and
+transepts and some admirable old glass. I spent half an hour there one
+morning, listening to what the church had to say, in perfect solitude.
+Not a worshipper entered, not even an old man with a broom. I have
+always thought there be a sex in fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with
+its noble nave, is of the gender of the name of its patron.</p>
+
+<p>It was that same morning, I think, that I went in search of the old
+houses of Tours; for the town contains several goodly specimens of the
+domestic architecture of the past. The dwelling to which the average
+Anglo-Saxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have
+space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l'Hermite&mdash;a
+gentleman whom the readers of "Quentin Durward" will not have
+forgotten&mdash;the hangman-in-ordinary to that great and prompt chastener
+Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan
+at all; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions
+left at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis XI. His
+terrible castle of Plessis, the picture of which sends a shiver through
+the youthful reader of Scott, has been reduced to suburban
+insignificance; and the residence of his <i>triste compère</i>, on the front
+of which a festooned rope figures as a motive for decoration, is
+observed to have been erected in the succeeding century. The Maison de
+Tristan may be visited for itself, however, if not for Sir Walter; it is
+an exceedingly picturesque old façade, to which you pick your way
+through a narrow and tortuous street&mdash;a street terminating, a little
+beyond it, in the walk beside the river. An elegant Gothic doorway is
+let into the rusty-red brickwork, and strange little beasts crouch at
+the angles of the windows,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+which are surmounted by a tall graduated gable, pierced with a small
+orifice, where the large surface of brick, lifted out of the shadow of
+the street, looks yellow and faded. The whole thing is disfigured and
+decayed; but it is a capital subject for a sketch in colours. Only I
+must wish the sketcher better luck&mdash;or a better temper&mdash;than my own. If
+he ring the bell to be admitted to see the court, which I believe is
+more sketchable still, let him have patience to wait till the bell is
+answered. He can do the outside while they are coming.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: Plessis-les-Tours</div>
+
+<p>The Maison de Tristan, I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly
+know for what the remnants of Plessis-les-Tours may be investigated. To
+reach them you wander through crooked suburban lanes, down the course of
+the Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incongruous spot, where a small,
+crude building of red brick is pointed out to you by your cabman (if you
+happen to drive) as the legendary frame of the grim portrait, and where
+a strong odour of pigsties and other unclean things so prostrates you
+for the moment that you have no energy to protest against this obvious
+fiction. You enter a yard encumbered with rubbish and a defiant dog, and
+an old woman emerges from a shabby lodge and assures you that you stand
+deep in historic dust. The red brick building, which looks like a small
+factory, rises on the ruins of the favourite residence of the dreadful
+Louis. It is now occupied by a company of night-scavengers, whose huge
+carts are drawn up in a row before it. I know not whether this be what
+is called the irony of fate; in any case, the effect of it is to
+accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our
+senses) that there is no honour for the authors of great wrongs. The
+dreadful Louis is reduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+simply to an offence to the nostrils. The old woman shows you a few
+fragments&mdash;several dark, damp, much-encumbered vaults, denominated
+dungeons, and an old tower staircase in good condition. There are the
+outlines of the old moat; there is also the outline of the old
+guard-room, which is now a stable; and there are other silhouettes of
+the undistinguishable, which I have forgotten. You need all your
+imagination, and even then you cannot make out that Plessis was a castle
+of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye wanders over the
+neighbouring <i>potagers</i>, discourses much of the gardens and the park.
+The place looks mean and flat; and as you drive away you scarcely know
+whether to be glad or sorry that all those bristling horrors have been
+reduced to the commonplace.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tours: Marmoutier</div>
+
+<p>A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at
+Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near
+neighbourhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the
+other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from the town. You
+follow the edge of the big brown river; of a fine afternoon you will be
+glad to go farther still. The abbey has gone the way of most abbeys; but
+the place is a restoration as well as a ruin, inasmuch as the Sisters of
+the Sacred Heart have erected a terribly modern convent here. A large
+Gothic doorway, in a high fragment of ancient wall, admits you to a
+garden-like enclosure, of great extent, from which you are further
+introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlour, where two good
+nuns sit at work. One of these came out with me and showed me over the
+place&mdash;a very definite little woman, with pointed features, an intensely
+distinct enunciation, and those pretty manners which (for whatever other
+teachings it may be responsible)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+the Catholic Church so often instils into its functionaries. I have
+never seen a woman who had got her lesson better than this little
+trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The interest of Marmoutier to-day is
+not so much an interest of vision, so to speak, as an interest of
+reflection&mdash;that is, if you choose to reflect (for instance) upon the
+wondrous legend of the seven sleepers (you may see where they lie in a
+row), who lived together&mdash;they were brothers and cousins&mdash;in primitive
+piety, in the sanctuary constructed by the blessed Saint Martin (emulous
+of his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the face of the hillside that
+overhung the Loire, and who, twenty-five years after his death, yielded
+up their seven souls at the same moment and enjoyed the rare convenience
+of retaining in their faces, in spite of mortality, every aspect of
+health. The abbey of Marmoutier, which sprang from the grottos in the
+cliff to which Saint Gatianus and Saint Martin retired to pray, was
+therefore the creation of the latter worthy, as the other great abbey,
+in the town proper, was the monument of his repose. The cliff is still
+there; and a winding staircase, in the latest taste, enables you
+conveniently to explore its recesses. These sacred niches are scooped
+out of the rock, and will give you an impression if you cannot do
+without one. You will feel them to be sufficiently venerable when you
+learn that the particular pigeon-hole of Saint Gatianus, the first
+Christian missionary to Gaul, dates from the third century. They have
+been dealt with as the Catholic Church deals with most of such places
+to-day; polished and furbished up, labelled and ticketed&mdash;<i>edited</i>, with
+notes, in short, like an old book. The process is a mistake&mdash;the early
+editions had more sanctity. The modern buildings (of the Sacred Heart),
+on which you look down from these points of vantage,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+are in the vulgar taste which sets its so mechanical stamp on all new
+Catholic work; but there was nevertheless a great sweetness in the
+scene. The afternoon was lovely, and it was flushing to a close. The
+large garden stretched beneath us, blooming with fruit and and wine and
+succulent promise, and beyond it flowed the shining river. The air was
+still, the shadows were long, and the place, after all, was full of
+memories, most of which might pass for virtuous. It certainly was better
+than Plessis-les-Tours.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 207px;">
+<img src="images/ill_018.png" width="207" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_iv" id="Chapter_iv"></a>Chapter iv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Blois</div>
+
+<p>YOUR business at Tours is to make excursions; and if you make them all
+you will be always under arms. The land is a rich reliquary, and an
+hour's drive from the town in almost any direction will bring you to the
+knowledge of some curious fragment of domestic or ecclesiastical
+architecture, some turreted manor, some lonely tower, some gabled
+village, some scene of something. Yet even if you do everything&mdash;which
+was not my case&mdash;you cannot hope to tell everything, and, fortunately
+for you, the excursions divide themselves into the greater and the less.
+You may achieve most of the greater in a week or two; but a summer in
+Touraine (which, by the way, must be a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 344px;">
+<img src="images/ill_019_th.png" width="344" height="550" alt="BLOIS" />
+<span class="caption">BLOIS</span>
+<a href="images/ill_019.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+<p class="non">delectable thing) would hold none too many days for the others. If you
+come down to Tours from Paris your best economy is to spend a few days
+at Blois, where a clumsy but rather attractive little inn on the edge of
+the river will offer you a certain amount of that familiar and
+intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces
+teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation.
+Such an economy I was unable to practise. I could only go to Blois (from
+Tours) to spend the day; but this feat I accomplished twice over. It is
+a very sympathetic little town, as we say nowadays, and a week there
+would be sociable even without company. Seated on the north bank of the
+Loire, it presents a bright, clean face to the sun and has that aspect
+of cheerful leisure which belongs to all white towns that reflect
+themselves in shining waters. It is the water-front only of Blois,
+however, that exhibits this fresh complexion; the interior is of a
+proper brownness, as old sallow books are bound in vellum. The only
+disappointment is perforce the discovery that the castle, which is the
+special object of one's pilgrimage, does not overhang the river, as I
+had always allowed myself to understand. It overhangs the town, but is
+scarcely visible from the stream. That peculiar good fortune is reserved
+for Amboise and Chaumont.</p>
+
+<p>The Château de Blois is one of the most beautiful and elaborate of all
+the old royal residences of this part of France, and I suppose it should
+have all the honours of my description. As you cross its threshold you
+step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance. But
+it is too rich to describe&mdash;I can only pick out the high lights. It must
+be premised that in speaking of it as we see it to-day we speak of a
+monument unsparingly restored. The work of restoration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> has been as
+ingenious as it is profuse, but it rather chills the imagination. This
+is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle
+from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they leave the
+river, have pretensions to romantic steepness; one of them, indeed,
+which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the
+<i>escalier monumental</i>), achieved this result so successfully as to
+remind me vaguely&mdash;I hardly know why&mdash;of the great slope of the Capitol,
+beside the Ara C&#339;li, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle
+which figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen
+reproduced) exhibits the marks of restoration with the greatest
+assurance. The long façade, consisting only of balconied windows deeply
+recessed, erects itself on the summit of a considerable hill, which
+gives a fine, plunging movement to its foundations. The deep niches of
+the windows are all aglow with colour. They have been repainted with red
+and blue, relieved with gold figures; and each of them looks more like
+the royal box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with
+memories. For all this, however, and in spite of the fact that, as in
+some others of the châteaux of Touraine (always excepting the colossal
+Chambord, which is not in Touraine), there is less vastness than one had
+expected, the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive.
+Here, as elsewhere, lightness and grace are the keynote; and the
+recesses of the windows, with their happy proportions, their sculpture
+and their colour, are the hollow sockets of the human ornament. They
+need the figure of a Francis I. to complete them, or of a Diane de
+Poitiers, or even of a Henry III. The stand of this empty gilt cage
+emerges from a bed of light verdure which has been allowed to mass
+itself there and which contributes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 375px;">
+<img src="images/ill_020_th.png" width="375" height="550" alt="BLOIS&mdash;THE CHÂTEAU" />
+<span class="caption">BLOIS&mdash;THE CHÂTEAU</span>
+<a href="images/ill_020.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Blois</div>
+
+<p class="non">to the springing look of the walls; while on the right it joins the most
+modern portion of the castle, the building erected, on foundations of
+enormous height and solidity, in 1635, by Gaston d'Orléans. This fine
+frigid mansion&mdash;the proper view of it is from the court within&mdash;is one
+of the masterpieces of François Mansard, whom a kind providence did not
+allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his
+superior age. That had been a part of Gaston's plan&mdash;he was a blunderer
+born, and this precious project was worthy of him. This execution of it
+would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history. Partially
+performed, the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted; for as one
+stands in the court of the castle and lets one's eye wander from the
+splendid wing of Francis I.&mdash;which is the last word of free and joyous
+invention&mdash;to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous pavilion
+of Mansard, one makes one's reflections upon the advantage, in even the
+least personal of the arts, of having something to say, and upon the
+stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of
+negatives. Gaston's wing, taken by itself, has much of the <i>bel air</i>
+which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV.; but, taken in
+contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbour, it marks the
+difference between inspiration and calculation. We scarcely grudge it
+its place, however, for it adds a price to the rest of the pile.</p>
+
+<p>We have entered the court, by the way, by jumping over the walls. The
+more orthodox method is to follow a modern terrace which leads to the
+left, from the side of the edifice that I began by speaking of, and
+passes round, ascending, to a little square on a considerably higher
+level, a square not, like the rather prosaic space on which the back (as
+I have called it) looks out,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+a thoroughfare. This small empty <i>place</i>, oblong in form, at once bright
+and quiet, and which ought to be grass-grown, offers an excellent
+setting to the entrance-front of the palace&mdash;the wing of Louis XII. The
+restoration here has been lavish; but it was perhaps but an inevitable
+reaction against the injuries, still more lavish, by which the
+unfortunate building had long been overwhelmed. It had fallen into a
+state of ruinous neglect, relieved only by the misuse proceeding from
+successive generations of soldiers, for whom its charming chambers
+served as barrack-room. Whitewashed, mutilated, dishonoured, the castle
+of Blois may be said to have escaped simply with its life. This is the
+history of Amboise as well, and is to a certain extent the history of
+Chambord. Delightful, at any rate, was the refreshed façade of Louis
+XII. as I stood and looked at it one bright September morning. In that
+soft, clear, merry light of Touraine, everything shows, everything
+speaks. Charming are the taste, the happy proportions, the colour of
+this beautiful front, to which the new feeling for a purely domestic
+architecture&mdash;an architecture of security and tranquillity, in which art
+could indulge itself&mdash;gave an air of youth and gladness. It is true that
+for a long time to come the castle of Blois was neither very safe nor
+very quiet; but its dangers came from within, from the evil passions of
+its inhabitants, and not from siege or invasion. The front of Louis XII.
+is of red brick, crossed here and there with purple; and the purple
+slate of the high roof, relieved with chimneys beautifully treated and
+with the embroidered caps of pinnacles and arches, with the porcupine of
+Louis, the ermine and the festooned rope which formed the devices of
+Anne of Brittany&mdash;the tone of this decorative roof <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>carries out the mild
+glow of the wall. The wide, fair
+windows open as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the
+Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the
+châteaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in
+the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which gives
+this line the look, above the expressive aperture, of a pencilled
+eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
+which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped
+charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had
+been&mdash;the father of his people, as he was called (I believe he remitted
+various taxes)&mdash;he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution;
+and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of
+the primitive statue demolished at that period.</p>
+
+<p>Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round
+you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces
+of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to peep
+out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage
+of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that fronts
+toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the
+wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which
+you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant,
+this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of
+the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in
+which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle
+of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding
+staircase (plausibly, but I believe not religiously, restored), which
+even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms
+a kind of chiselled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+stairs are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its
+balconies, its pillars, its great central columns, is wrought over with
+lovely images, strange and ingenious devices, prime among which is the
+great heraldic salamander of Francis I. The salamander is everywhere at
+Blois&mdash;over the chimneys, over the doors, on the walls. This whole
+quarter of the castle bears the stamp of that eminently pictorial
+prince. The running cornice along the top of the front is like an
+unfolded, an elongated bracelet. The windows of the attic are like
+shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the medallions, the statuettes, the
+festoons are like the elaboration of some precious cabinet rather than
+the details of a building exposed to the weather and to the ages. In the
+interior there is a profusion of restoration, and it is all restoration
+in colour. This has been, evidently, a work of great energy and cost,
+but it will easily strike you as overdone. The universal freshness is a
+discord, a false note; it seems to light up the dusky past with an
+unnatural glare. Begun in the reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible
+process&mdash;the more terrible always the better case you conceive made out
+for it&mdash;has been carried so far that there is now scarcely a square inch
+of the interior that preserves the colour of the past. It is true that
+the place had been so coated over with modern abuse that something was
+needed to keep it alive; it is only perhaps a pity the clever doctors,
+not content with saving its life, should have undertaken to restore its
+bloom. The love of consistency, in such a business, is a dangerous lure.
+All the old apartments have been rechristened, as it were; the geography
+of the castle has been re-established. The guard-rooms, the bedrooms,
+the closets, the oratories have recovered their identity. Every spot
+connected with the murder of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Blois</div>
+
+<p>Duke of Guise is pointed out by a small, shrill boy, who takes you from
+room to room and who has learned his lesson in perfection. The place is
+full of Catherine de'Medici, of Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of
+echoes, of possible evocations and revivals. It is covered with crimson
+and gold. The fireplaces and the ceilings are magnificent; they look
+like expensive "sets" at the grand opera.</p>
+
+<p>I should have mentioned that below, in the court, the front of the wing
+of Gaston d'Orléans faces you as you enter, so that the place is a
+course of French history. Inferior in beauty and grace to the other
+portions of the castle, the wing is yet a nobler monument than the
+memory of Gaston deserves. The second of the sons of Henry IV.&mdash;who was
+no more fortunate as a father than as a husband&mdash;younger brother of
+Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated,
+most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful <i>fille à
+marier</i> in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle
+of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal
+Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his pusillanimity
+and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after
+so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the
+project&mdash;begun, but not completed&mdash;of demolishing the beautiful
+habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston
+d'Orléans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the
+Château de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of
+religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the
+principal events of his depraved and dramatic rule. It has been restored
+more than enough, as I have said, by architects and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+decorators; the visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are
+at once brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished),
+undertakes a little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself
+from the things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth
+century in its form and dress&mdash;its turbulence, its passions, its loves
+and hates, its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude
+of personal development, its presentation of the whole nature, its
+nobleness of costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled
+picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light
+and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is
+the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it
+complete. What episode was ever more perfect&mdash;looked at as a dramatic
+occurrence&mdash;than the murder of the Duke of Guise? The insolent
+prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the
+author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation
+of horror in what followed it&mdash;render it, as a crime, one of the classic
+things.</p>
+
+<p>But we must not take the Château de Blois too hard: I went there, after
+all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories your
+visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
+removing the impression. You may treat yourself at Blois to a very
+cheerful afterpiece. There is a charming industry practised there, and
+practised in charming conditions. Follow the bright little quay down the
+river till you get quite out of the town and reach the point where the
+road beside the Loire becomes sinuous and attractive, turns the corner
+of diminutive headlands and makes you wonder what is beyond. Let not
+your curiosity induce you, however, to pass by a modest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+white villa which overlooks the stream, enclosed in a fresh little
+court; for here dwells an artist&mdash;an artist in faience. There is no sort
+of sign, and the place looks peculiarly private. But if you ring at the
+gate you will not be turned away. You will, on the contrary, be ushered
+upstairs into a parlour&mdash;there is nothing resembling a shop&mdash;encumbered
+with specimens of remarkably handsome pottery. The ware is of the best,
+a careful reproduction of old forms, colours, devices; and the master of
+the establishment is one of those completely artistic types that are
+often found in France. His reception is as friendly as his work is
+ingenious; and I think it is not too much to say that you like the work
+better because he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars, lamps,
+platters, <i>plaques</i>, with their brilliant glaze, their innumerable
+figures, their family likeness and wide variations, are scattered
+through his occupied rooms; they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and
+as household ornament. As we all know, this is an age of prose, of
+machinery, of wholesale production, of coarse and hasty processes. But
+one brings away from the establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse
+the sense of a less eager activity and a greater search for perfection.
+He has but a few workmen and he gives them plenty of time. The place
+makes a little vignette, leaves an impression&mdash;the quiet white house in
+its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the
+bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as
+an effort Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris&mdash;though
+that be much to say&mdash;have forgiven.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_021.png" width="450" height="298" alt="21" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_v" id="Chapter_v"></a>Chapter v</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chambord</div>
+
+<p>THE second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord, and came
+back by the Château de Cheverny and the forest of Russy&mdash;a charming
+little expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a
+rainy season that was spotted with bright days) contributed not a
+little. To go to Chambord you cross the Loire, leave it on one side and
+strike away through a country in which salient features become less and
+less numerous and which at last has no other quality than a look of
+intense and peculiar rurality&mdash;the characteristic, even when it be not
+the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the
+appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply
+the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a
+deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in
+England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a
+great <i>potager</i>, without interruptions, without an eminence, with here
+and there a long, low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges,
+fences, signs of property; everything is absorbed in the general
+flatness&mdash;the patches of vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages,
+the children (planted and staring and almost always pretty), the women
+in the fields, the white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the
+end of an hour's drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two
+horses you will spend double that time), I passed through a sort of gap
+in a wall which does duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed
+pretender. I followed a straight avenue through a disfeatured park&mdash;the
+park of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy,
+scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which the timber must have been cut
+many times over and is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so
+many spots in France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of
+revolutions. Nevertheless its great extent and the long perspective of
+its avenues give this frugal shrubbery a certain state; just as its
+shabbiness places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions
+awaiting you. You pursue one of these long perspectives a proportionate
+time, and at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise
+apparently out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that
+formerly surrounded it has, in vulgar parlance, let it down and given it
+a monstrous over-crowned air that is at the same time a magnificent
+Orientalism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the
+lanterns, the chimneys look more like the spires of a city than the
+salient points of a single building. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+emerge from the avenue and find yourself at the foot of an enormous
+fantastic mass. Chambord has a strange mixture of society and solitude.
+A little village clusters within view of its liberal windows, and a
+couple of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims. These things of
+course are incidents of the political proscription which hangs its thick
+veil over the place. Chambord is truly royal&mdash;royal in its great scale,
+its grand air, its indifference to common considerations. If a cat may
+look at a king, a tavern may look at a palace. I enjoyed my visit to
+this extraordinary structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and
+indeed there is something interesting in any monument of a great system,
+any bold presentation of a tradition.</p>
+
+<p>You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and
+tidy and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect
+the neighbourhood of a Court veritably set the fashion, and you proceed
+across the grass and the gravel to a small door, a door infinitely
+subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.
+Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a
+person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime), after which
+she ushers you over a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the
+strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this
+court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my
+guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round
+towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each
+angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in
+the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of
+these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its
+shadow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 324px;">
+<img src="images/ill_022.png" width="324" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chambord</div>
+
+<p class="non">over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables,
+the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was
+empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections,
+were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole
+thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a
+rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient
+and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to
+understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire
+to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so
+easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a
+wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled
+prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four
+hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The
+repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his
+revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double
+staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of
+steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This
+staircase is a truly majestic piece of humour; it gives you the note, as
+it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in
+four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to
+the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the
+termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),
+forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of the pile. This lantern is
+tipped with a huge <i>fleur-de-lis</i> in stone&mdash;the only one, I believe,
+that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow
+windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you
+walk about the roof in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies,
+through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in
+itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous
+quality, and with its profuse ornamentation&mdash;the salamander of Francis
+I. is a constant motive&mdash;its lonely pavements, its sunny niches, the
+balcony that looks down over the closed and grass-grown main entrance, a
+strange, half-sad, half-brilliant charm. The stonework is covered with
+fine mould. There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet
+mildewed corners of courts and terraces into which the traveller who
+wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows. They show
+you two or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon portraits, hideous
+tapestries from the ladies of France, a collection of the toys of the
+<i>enfant du miracle</i>, all military and of the finest make. "Tout cela
+fonctionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons; and I wondered,
+if he should take it into his head to fire off his little cannon, how
+much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.</p>
+
+<p>From below the castle would look crushed by the redundancy of its upper
+protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers,
+which appear to give it a robust lateral development. These towers,
+however, fine as they are in their way, struck me as a little stupid;
+they are the exaggeration of an exaggeration. In a building erected
+after the days of defence and proclaiming its peaceful character from
+its hundred embroideries and cupolas, they seem to indicate a want of
+invention. I shall risk the accusation of bad taste if I say that,
+impressive as it is, the Château de Chambord seemed to me to have
+altogether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+a touch of that quality of stupidity. The trouble is that it stands for
+nothing very momentous; it has not happened, in spite of sundry
+vicissitudes, to have a strongly-marked career. Compared with that of
+Blois and Amboise its past is rather vacant; and one feels to a certain
+extent the contrast between its pompous appearance and its spacious but
+somewhat colourless annals. It had indeed the good fortune to be erected
+by Francis I., whose name by itself expresses a good deal of history.
+Why he should have built a palace in those sandy plains will ever remain
+an unanswered question, for kings have never been obliged to give
+reasons. In addition to the fact that the country was rich in game and
+that Francis was a passionate hunter, it is suggested by M. de la
+Saussaye, the author of the very complete little account of the place
+which you may buy at the bookseller's at Blois, that he was governed in
+his choice of the site by the chance that a charming woman had
+previously lived there. The Comtesse de Thoury had a manor in the
+neighbourhood, and the Comtesse de Thoury had been the object of a
+youthful passion on the part of the most susceptible of princes before
+his accession to the throne. This great pile was reared, therefore,
+according to M. de la Saussaye, as a <i>souvenir de premières amours</i>! It
+is certainly a very massive memento; and if these tender passages were
+proportionate to the building that commemorates them, the flame blazed
+indeed. There has been much discussion as to the architect employed by
+Francis I., and the honour of having designed this splendid residence
+has been claimed for several of the Italian artists who early in the
+sixteenth century came to seek patronage in France. It seems well
+established to-day, however, that Chambord was the work neither of
+Primaticcio, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chambord</div>
+
+<p>Vignola, nor of Il Rosso, all of whom have left some trace of their
+sojourn in France; but of an obscure yet very complete genius, Pierre
+Nepveu, known as Pierre Trinqueau, who is designated in the papers which
+preserve in some degree the history of the origin of the edifice, as the
+<i>maistre de l'&#339;uvre de maçonnerie</i>. Behind this modest title,
+apparently, we must recognise one of the most original talents of the
+French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigour of the artistic life
+of that period that, brilliant production being everywhere abundant, an
+artist of so high a value should not have been treated by his
+contemporaries as a celebrity. We make our celebrities to-day at smaller
+cost.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate successors of Francis I. continued to visit Chambord; but
+it was neglected by Henry IV. and was never afterwards a favourite
+residence of any French king. Louis XIV. appeared there on several
+occasions, and the apparition was characteristically brilliant; but
+Chambord could not long detain a monarch who had gone to the expense of
+creating a Versailles ten miles from Paris. With Versailles,
+Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud within easy reach of their
+capital, the later French sovereigns had little reason to take the air
+in the dreariest province of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered
+from royal indifference, though in the last century a use was found for
+its deserted halls. In 1725 it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus
+Leczynski, who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King
+of Poland and being ousted from his throne, and who, at this time a
+refugee in France, had found a compensation for some of his misfortunes
+in marrying his daughter to Louis XV. He lived eight years at Chambord
+and filled up the moats of the castle. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+1748 it found an illustrious tenant in the person of Maurice de Saxe,
+the victor of Fontenoy, who, however, two years after he had taken
+possession of it, terminated a life which would have been longer had he
+been less determined to make it agreeable. The Revolution, of course,
+was not kind to Chambord. It despoiled it in so far as possible of every
+vestige of its royal origin, and swept like a whirlwind through
+apartments to which upwards of two centuries had contributed a treasure
+of decoration and furniture. In that wild blast these precious things
+were destroyed or for ever scattered. In 1791 an odd proposal was made
+to the French Government by a company of English Quakers, who had
+conceived the bold idea of establishing in the palace a manufacture of
+some peaceful commodity not to-day recorded. Napoleon allotted Chambord,
+as a "dotation," to one of his marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it
+was converted, in Napoleonic fashion, into the so-called principality of
+Wagram. By the Princess of Wagram, the marshal's widow, it was, after
+the Restoration, sold to the trustees of a national subscription which
+had been established for the purpose of presenting it to the infant Duke
+of Bordeaux, then prospective King of France. The presentation was duly
+made; but the Comte de Chambord, who had changed his title in
+recognition of the gift, was despoiled of his property by the government
+of Louis Philippe. He appealed for redress to the tribunals of his
+country; and the consequence of his appeal was an interminable
+litigation, by which, however, finally, after the lapse of twenty-five
+years, he was established in his rights. In 1871 he paid his first visit
+to the domain which had been offered him half a century before, a term
+of which he had spent forty years in exile. It was from Chambord that
+he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+dated his famous letter of the 5th of July of that year&mdash;the letter,
+directed to his so-called subjects, in which he waves aloft the white
+flag of the Bourbons. This rare miscalculation&mdash;virtually an invitation
+to the French people to repudiate, as their national ensign, that
+immortal tricolour, the flag of the Revolution and the Empire, under
+which they have won the glory which of all glories has hitherto been
+dearest to them and which is associated with the most romantic, the most
+heroic, the epic, the consolatory, period of their history&mdash;this
+luckless manifesto, I say, appears to give the measure of the political
+wisdom of the excellent Henry V. The proposal should have had less
+simplicity or the people less irony.</p>
+
+<p>On<span class="sidenote">Chambord</span> the whole Chambord makes a great impression; and the hour I was
+there, while the yellow afternoon light slanted upon the September
+woods, there was a dignity in its desolation. It spoke, with a muffled
+but audible voice, of the vanished monarchy, which had been so strong,
+so splendid, but to-day had become a vision almost as fantastic as the
+cupolas and chimneys that rose before me. I thought, while I lingered
+there, of all the fine things it takes to make up such a monarchy; and
+how one of them is a superfluity of mouldering, empty palaces. Chambord
+is touching&mdash;that is the best word for it; and if the hopes of another
+restoration are in the follies of the Republic, a little reflection on
+that eloquence of ruin ought to put the Republic on its guard. A
+sentimental tourist may venture to remark that in presence of all the
+haunted houses that appeal in this mystical manner to the retrospective
+imagination it cannot afford to be foolish. I thought of all this as I
+drove back to Blois by the way of the Château de Cheverny. The road took
+us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+out of the park of Chambord, but through a region of flat woodland,
+where the trees were not mighty, and again into the prosy plain of the
+Sologne&mdash;a thankless soil to sow, I believe, but lately much amended by
+the magic of cheerful French industry and thrift. The light had already
+begun to fade, and my drive reminded me of a passage in some rural novel
+of Madame Sand. I passed a couple of timber and plaster churches, which
+looked very old, black and crooked, and had lumpish wooden porches and
+galleries encircling the base. By the time I reached Cheverny the clear
+twilight had approached. It was late to ask to be allowed to visit an
+inhabited house; but it was the hour at which I like best to visit
+almost anything. My coachman drew up before a gateway, in a high wall,
+which opened upon a short avenue, along which I took my way on foot; the
+coachmen in those parts being, for reasons best known to themselves,
+mortally averse to driving up to a house. I answered the challenge of a
+very tidy little portress who sat, in company with a couple of children,
+enjoying the evening air in front of her lodge, and who told me to walk
+a little farther and turn to the right. I obeyed her to the letter, and
+my turn brought me into sight of a house as charming as an old manor in
+a fairy tale. I had but a rapid and partial view of Cheverny; but that
+view was a glimpse of perfection. A light, sweet mansion stood looking
+over a wide green lawn, over banks of flowers and groups of trees. It
+had a striking character of elegance, produced partly by a series of
+Renaissance busts let into circular niches in the façade. The place
+looked so private, so reserved, that it seemed an act of violence to
+ring, a stranger and foreigner, at the graceful door. But if I had not
+rung I should be unable to express&mdash;as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+it is such a pleasure to do&mdash;my sense of the exceeding courtesy with
+which this admirable house is shown. It was near the dinner-hour&mdash;the
+most sacred hour of the day; but I was freely conducted into the
+inhabited apartments. They are extremely beautiful. What I chiefly
+remember is the charming staircase of white embroidered stone, and the
+great <i>salle des gardes</i> and <i>chambre à coucher du roi</i> on the second
+floor. Cheverny, built in 1634, is of a much later date than the other
+royal residences of this part of France; it belongs to the end of the
+Renaissance and has a touch of the rococo. The guard-room is a superb
+apartment; and as it contains little save its magnificent ceiling and
+fireplace and certain dim tapestries on its walls, you the more easily
+take the measure of its noble proportions. The servant opened the
+shutters of a single window, and the last rays of the twilight slanted
+into the rich brown gloom. It was in the same picturesque fashion that I
+saw the bedroom (adjoining) of Henry IV., where a legendary-looking bed,
+draped in folds long unaltered, defined itself in the haunted dusk.
+Cheverny remains to me a very charming, a partly mysterious vision. I
+drove back to Blois in the dark, some nine miles, through the forest of
+Russy, which belongs to the State and which, though consisting
+apparently of small timber, looked under the stars sufficiently vast and
+primeval. There was a damp autumnal smell and the occasional sound of a
+stirring thing; and as I moved through the evening air I thought of
+Francis I. and Henry IV.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_023.png" width="450" height="306" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_vi" id="Chapter_vi"></a>Chapter vi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Amboise</div>
+
+<p>YOU may go to Amboise either from Blois or from Tours; it is about
+half-way between these towns. The great point is to go, especially if
+you have put it off repeatedly; and to go, if possible, on a day when
+the great view of the Loire, which you enjoy from the battlements and
+terraces, presents itself under a friendly sky. Three persons, of whom
+the author of these lines was one, spent the greater part of a perfect
+Sunday morning in looking at it. It was astonishing, in the course of
+the rainiest season in the memory of the oldest Tourangeau, how many
+perfect days we found to our hand. The town of Amboise lies, like Tours,
+on the left bank of the river&mdash;a little white-faced town staring across
+an admirable bridge and leaning, behind, as it were, against the
+pedestal of rock on which the dark castle masses itself. The town is so
+small, the pedestal so big and the castle so high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+and striking, that the clustered houses at the base of the rock are like
+the crumbs that have fallen from a well-laden table. You pass among
+them, however, to ascend by a circuit to the château, which you attack,
+obliquely, from behind. It is the property of the Comte de Paris,
+another pretender to the French throne; having come to him remotely, by
+inheritance, from his ancestor, the Duc de Penthièvre, who toward the
+close of the last century bought it from the Crown, which had recovered
+it after a lapse. Like the castle of Blois, it has been injured and
+defaced by base uses, but, unlike the castle of Blois, it has not been
+completely restored. "It is very, very dirty, but very curious"&mdash;it is
+in these terms that I heard it described by an English lady who was
+generally to be found engaged upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little
+<i>salon de lecture</i> of the hotel at Tours. The description is not
+inaccurate; but it should be said that if part of the dirtiness of
+Amboise is the result of its having served for years as a barrack and as
+a prison, part of it comes from the presence of restoring stonemasons,
+who have woven over a considerable portion of it a mask of scaffolding.
+There is a good deal of neatness as well, and the restoration of some of
+the parts seems finished. This process, at Amboise, consists for the
+most part simply of removing the vulgar excrescences of the last two
+centuries.</p>
+
+<p>The interior is virtually a blank, the old apartments having been
+chopped up into small modern rooms; it will have to be completely
+reconstructed. A worthy woman with a military profile and that sharp,
+positive manner which the goodwives who show you through the châteaux of
+Touraine are rather apt to have, and in whose high respectability, to
+say nothing of the frill of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 381px;">
+<img src="images/ill_024_th.png" width="381" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+<a href="images/ill_024.png"><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="non">her cap and the cut of her thick brown dress, my companions and I
+thought we discovered the particular note, or <i>nuance</i>, of Orleanism&mdash;a
+competent, appreciative, peremptory person, I say&mdash;attended us through
+the particularly delightful hour we spent upon the ramparts of Amboise.
+Denuded and disfeatured within and bristling without with bricklayers'
+ladders, the place was yet extraordinarily impressive and interesting. I
+should mention that we spent a great deal of time in looking at the
+view. Sweet was the view, and magnificent; we preferred it so much to
+certain portions of the interior, and to occasional effusions of
+historical information, that the old lady with the profile sometimes
+lost patience with us. We laid ourselves open to the charge of
+preferring it even to the little chapel of Saint Hubert, which stands on
+the edge of the great terrace and has, over the portal, a wonderful
+sculpture of the miraculous hunt of that holy man. In the way of plastic
+art this elaborate scene is the gem of Amboise. It seemed to us that we
+had never been in a place where there are so many points of vantage to
+look down from. In the matter of position Amboise is certainly supreme
+in the list of perched places; and I say this with a proper recollection
+of the claims of Chaumont and of Loches&mdash;which latter, by the way (the
+afterthought is due), is not on the Loire. The platforms, the bastions,
+the terraces, the high-niched windows and balconies, the hanging gardens
+and dizzy crenellations, of this complicated structure, keep you in
+perpetual intercourse with an immense horizon. The great feature of the
+place is the obligatory round tower which occupies the northern end of
+it, and which has now been completely restored. It is of astounding
+size, a fortress in itself, and contains, instead of a staircase, a
+wonderful inclined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+plane, so wide and gradual that a coach and four may be driven to the
+top. This colossal cylinder has to-day no visible use; but it
+corresponds, happily enough, with the great circle of the prospect. The
+gardens of Amboise, lifted high aloft, covering the irregular remnants
+of the platform on which the castle stands and making up in
+picturesqueness what they lack in extent, constitute of course but a
+scanty domain. But bathed, as we found them, in the autumn sunshine and
+doubly private from their aerial site, they offered irresistible
+opportunities for a stroll interrupted, as one leaned against their low
+parapets, by long contemplative pauses. I remember in particular a
+certain terrace planted with clipped limes upon which we looked down
+from the summit of the big tower. It seemed from that point to be
+absolutely necessary to one's happiness to go down and spend the rest of
+the morning there; it was an ideal place to walk to and fro and talk.
+Our venerable conductress, to whom our relation had gradually become
+more filial, permitted us to gratify this innocent wish&mdash;to the extent,
+that is, of taking a turn or two under the mossy <i>tilleuls</i>. At the end
+of this terrace is the low door, in a wall, against the top of which, in
+1498, Charles VIII., according to an accepted tradition, knocked his
+head to such good purpose that he died. It was within the walls of
+Amboise that his widow, Anne of Brittany, already in mourning for three
+children, two of whom we have seen commemorated in sepulchral marble at
+Tours, spent the first violence of that grief which was presently
+dispelled by a union with her husband's cousin and successor, Louis XII.
+Amboise was a frequent resort of the French Court during the sixteenth
+century; it was here that the young Mary Stuart spent sundry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+hours of her first marriage. The wars of religion have left here the
+ineffaceable stain which they left wherever they passed. An imaginative
+visitor at Amboise to-day may fancy that the traces of blood are mixed
+with the red rust on the crossed iron bars of the grim-looking balcony
+to which the heads of the Huguenots executed on the discovery of the
+conspiracy of La Renaudie are rumoured to have been suspended. There was
+room on the stout balustrade&mdash;an admirable piece of work&mdash;for a ghastly
+array. The same rumour represents Catherine de'Medici and the young
+queen as watching from this balcony the <i>noyades</i> of the captured
+Huguenots in the Loire. The facts of history are bad enough; the
+fictions are, if possible, worse; but there is little doubt that the
+future Queen of Scots learnt the first lessons of life at a horrible
+school. If in subsequent years she was a prodigy of innocence and
+virtue, it was not the fault of her whilom mother-in-law, of her uncles
+of the house of Guise, or of the examples presented to her either at the
+windows of the castle of Amboise or in its more private recesses.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chaumont</div>
+
+<p>It was difficult to believe in these dark deeds, however, as we looked
+through the golden morning at the placidity of the far-shining Loire.
+The ultimate consequence of this spectacle was a desire to follow the
+river as far as the castle of Chaumont. It is true that the cruelties
+practised of old at Amboise might have seemed less phantasmal to persons
+destined to suffer from a modern form of inhumanity. The mistress of the
+little inn at the base of the castle-rock&mdash;it stands very pleasantly
+beside the river, and we had breakfasted there&mdash;declared to us that the
+Château de Chaumont, which is often during the autumn closed to
+visitors, was at that particular moment standing so wide open to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+receive us that it was our duty to hire one of her carriages and drive
+thither with speed. This assurance was so satisfactory that we presently
+found ourselves seated in this wily woman's most commodious vehicle and
+rolling, neither too fast nor too slow, along the margin of the Loire.
+The drive of about an hour, beneath constant clumps of chestnuts, was
+charming enough to have been taken for itself; and indeed when we
+reached Chaumont we saw that our reward was to be simply the usual
+reward of virtue, the consciousness of having attempted the right. The
+Château de Chaumont was inexorably closed; so we learned from a
+talkative lodge-keeper, who gave what grace she could to her refusal.
+This good woman's dilemma was almost touching; she wished to reconcile
+two impossibles. The castle was not to be visited, for the family of its
+master was staying there; and yet she was loath to turn away a party of
+which she was good enough to say that it had a <i>grand genre</i>; for, as
+she also remarked, she had her living to earn. She tried to arrange a
+compromise, one of the elements of which was that we should descend from
+our carriage and trudge up a hill which would bring us to a designated
+point where, over the paling of the garden, we might obtain an oblique
+and surreptitious view of a small portion of the castle walls. This
+suggestion led us to inquire (of each other) to what degree of baseness
+it is lawful for an enlightened lover of the picturesque to resort in
+order not to have a blank page in his collection. One of our trio
+decided characteristically against any form of derogation; so she sat in
+the carriage and sketched some object that was public property while her
+two companions, who were not so proud, trudged up a muddy ascent which
+formed a kind of back-stairs. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+is perhaps no more than they deserved that they were disappointed.
+Chaumont is feudal, if you please; but the modern spirit is in
+possession. It forms a vast clean-scraped mass, with big round towers,
+ungarnished with a leaf of ivy or a patch of moss, surrounded by gardens
+of moderate extent (save where the muddy lane of which I speak passes
+near it), and looking rather like an enormously magnified villa. The
+great merit of Chaumont is its position, which almost exactly resembles
+that of Amboise; it sweeps the river up and down and seems to look over
+half the province. This, however, was better appreciated as, after
+coming down the hill and re-entering the carriage, we drove across the
+long suspension-bridge which crosses the Loire just beyond the village
+and over which we made our way to the small station of Onzain, at the
+farther end, to take the train back to Tours. Look back from the middle
+of this bridge; the whole picture composes, as the painters say. The
+towers, the pinnacles, the fair front of the château, perched above its
+fringe of garden and the rusty roofs of the village and facing the
+afternoon sky, which is reflected also in the great stream that sweeps
+below, all this makes a contribution to your happiest memories of
+Touraine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_025.png" width="450" height="311" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_vii" id="Chapter_vii"></a>Chapter vii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chenonceaux</div>
+
+<p>WE never went to Chinon; it was a fatality. We planned it a dozen times;
+but the weather interfered, or the trains didn't suit, or one of the
+party was fatigued with the adventures of the day before. This excursion
+was so much postponed that it was finally postponed to everything.
+Besides, we had to go to Chenonceaux, to Azay-le-Rideau, to Langeais, to
+Loches. So I have not the memory of Chinon; I have only the regret. But
+regret, as well as memory, has its visions; especially when, like
+memory, it is assisted by photographs. The castle of Chinon in this form
+appears to me as an enormous ruin, a mediæval fortress of the extent
+almost of a city. It covers a hill above the Vienne, and after being
+impregnable in its time is indestructible to-day. (I risk this phrase in
+the face of the prosaic truth. Chinon, in the days when it was a prize,
+more than once suffered capture, and at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+present it is crumbling inch by inch. It is apparent, however, I
+believe, that these inches encroach little upon acres of masonry.) It
+was in the castle that Jeanne Dare had her first interview with Charles
+VII., and it is in the town that François Rabelais is supposed to have
+been born. To the castle, moreover, the lover of the picturesque is
+earnestly recommended to direct his steps. But one always misses
+something, and I would rather have missed Chinon than Chenonceaux.
+Fortunate exceedingly were the few hours we passed on the spot on which
+we missed nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"In 1747," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his "Confessions," "we went to
+spend the autumn in Touraine, at the Château of Chenonceaux, a royal
+residence upon the Cher, built by Henry II. for Diana of Poitiers, whose
+initials are still to be seen there, and now in possession of M. Dupin,
+the farmer-general. We amused ourselves greatly at this fine place; the
+living was of the best, and I became as fat as a monk. We made a great
+deal of music and acted comedies."</p>
+
+<p>This is the only description that Rousseau gives of one of the most
+romantic houses in France and of an episode that must have counted as
+one of the most agreeable in his uncomfortable career. The eighteenth
+century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques
+has said that Chenonceaux was a "beau lieu," he thinks himself absolved
+from further characterisation. We later sons of time have, both for our
+pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am
+afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute
+than this to the architectural gem of Touraine. Fortunately I can
+discharge my debt with gratitude. In going from Tours you leave the
+valley of the Loire and enter that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+of the Cher, and at the end of about an hour you see the turrets of the
+castle on your right, among the trees, down in the meadows, beside the
+quiet little river. The station and the village are about ten minutes'
+walk from the château, and the village contains a very tidy inn, where,
+if you are not in too great a hurry to commune with the shades of the
+royal favourite and the jealous queen, you will perhaps stop and order a
+dinner to be ready for you in the evening. A straight, tall avenue leads
+to the grounds of the castle; what I owe to exactitude compels me to add
+that it is crossed by the railway-line. The place is so arranged,
+however, that the château need know nothing of passing trains&mdash;which
+pass, indeed, though the grounds are not large, at a very sufficient
+distance. I may add that the trains throughout this part of France have
+a noiseless, desultory, dawdling, almost stationary quality, which makes
+them less of an offence than usual. It was a Sunday afternoon and the
+light was yellow save under the trees of the avenue, where, in spite of
+the waning of September, it was duskily green. Three or four peasants,
+in festal attire, were strolling about. On a bench at the beginning of
+the avenue sat a man with two women. As I advanced with my companions he
+rose, after a sudden stare, and approached me with a smile in which (to
+be Johnsonian for a moment) certitude was mitigated by modesty and
+eagerness was embellished with respect. He came toward me with a
+salutation that I had seen before, and I am happy to say that after an
+instant I ceased to be guilty of the brutality of not knowing where.
+There was only one place in the world where people smile like that, only
+one place where the art of salutation has that perfect grace. This
+excellent creature used to crook his arm,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/ill_026_th.png" width="550" height="381" alt="image not available" />
+<a href="images/ill_026.png"><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="non">in Venice, when I stepped into my gondola; and I now laid my hand on
+that member with the familiarity of glad recognition; for it was only
+surprise that had kept me even for a moment from accepting the genial
+Francesco as an ornament of the landscape of Touraine. What on
+earth&mdash;the phrase is the right one&mdash;was a Venetian gondolier doing at
+Chenonceaux? He had been brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the
+mistress of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher. Our meeting
+was affectionate, though there was a kind of violence in seeing him so
+far from home. He was too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown
+stout, and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He remarked that the
+life of the household to which he had the honour to belong was that of a
+<i>casa regia</i>; which must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
+habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was the sympathetic Checco
+still; and for five minutes after I left him I thought less about the
+little pleasure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
+Adriatic.</p>
+
+<p>But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure
+that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the château, the
+small scale of which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
+court, at the entrance of which a massive and detached round tower, with
+a turret on its brow (a relic of the building that preceded the actual
+villa), appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed&mdash;or is
+enclosed at least only by the gardens, portions of which are at present
+in process of radical readjustment. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no
+great height, its delicate façade stands up boldly enough. This façade,
+one of the most finished things in Touraine, consists of two storeys,
+surmounted by an attic which, as so often in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+buildings of the French Renaissance, is the richest part of the house.
+The high-pitched roof contains three windows of beautiful design,
+covered with embroidered caps and flowering into crocketed spires. The
+window above the door is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in
+the form of a double pulpit&mdash;one of the most charming features of the
+front. Chenonceaux is not large, as I say, but into its delicate compass
+is packed a great deal of history&mdash;history which differs from that of
+Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sentimental kind. The
+echoes of the place, faint and far as they are to-day, are not
+political, but personal. Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the
+year 1515, when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary who had
+grown rich in handling the finances of Normandy and had acquired the
+estate from a family which, after giving it many feudal lords, had
+fallen into poverty, erected the present structure on the foundations of
+an old mill. The design is attributed, with I know not what justice, to
+Pierre Nepveu, <i>alias</i> Trinqueau, the audacious architect of Chambord.
+On the death of Bohier the house passed to his son, who, however, was
+forced, under cruel pressure, to surrender it to the Crown in
+compensation for a so-called deficit in the official accounts of this
+rash parent and predecessor. Francis I. held the place till his death;
+but Henry II., on ascending the throne, presented it out of hand to that
+mature charmer, the admired of two generations, Diana of Poitiers. Diana
+enjoyed it till the death of her protector; but when this event occurred
+the widow of the monarch, who had been obliged to submit in silence, for
+years, to the ascendency of a rival, took the most pardonable of all the
+revenges with which the name of Catherine de'Medici is associated and
+turned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+her out of doors. Diana was not in want of refuges, Catherine went
+through the form of giving her Chaumont in exchange; but there was only
+one Chenonceaux. Catherine devoted herself to making the place more
+completely unique. The feature that renders it sole of its kind is not
+appreciated till you wander round to either side of the house. If a
+certain springing lightness is the characteristic of Chenonceaux, if it
+bears in every line the aspect of a place of recreation&mdash;a place
+intended for delicate, chosen pleasures&mdash;nothing can confirm this
+expression better than the strange, unexpected movement with which, from
+behind, it carries itself across the river. The earlier building stands
+in the water; it had inherited the foundations of the mill destroyed by
+Thomas Bohier. The first step therefore had been taken upon solid piles
+of masonry; and the ingenious Catherine&mdash;she was a <i>raffinée</i>&mdash;simply
+proceeded to take the others. She continued the piles to the opposite
+bank of the Cher, and over them she threw a long, straight gallery of
+two tiers. This part of the château, which mainly resembles a house
+built upon a bridge and occupying its entire length, is of course the
+great curiosity of Chenonceaux. It forms on each floor a charming
+corridor, which, within, is illuminated from either side by the
+flickering river-light. The architecture of these galleries, seen from
+without, is less elegant than that of the main building, but the aspect
+of the whole thing is delightful. I have spoken of Chenonceaux as a
+"villa," using the word advisedly, for the place is neither a castle nor
+a palace. It is a very exceptional villa, but it has the
+villa-quality&mdash;the look of being intended for life in common. This look
+is not at all contradicted by the wing across the Cher, which only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+suggests indoor perspectives and intimate pleasures&mdash;walks in pairs on
+rainy days; games and dances on autumn nights; together with as much as
+may be of moonlighted dialogue (or silence) in the course of evenings
+more genial still, in the well-marked recesses of windows.</p>
+
+<p>It<span class="sidenote">Chenonceaux</span> is safe to say that such things took place there in the last century,
+during the kindly reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin. This period
+presents itself as the happiest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I know not
+what festive train the great Diana may have led, and my imagination, I
+am afraid, is only feebly kindled by the records of the luxurious
+pastimes organised on the banks of the Cher by that terrible daughter of
+the Medici whose appreciation of the good things of life was perfectly
+consistent with a failure to perceive why others should live to enjoy
+them. The best society that ever assembled there was collected at
+Chenonceaux during the middle of the eighteenth century. This was
+surely, in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the
+"right people" made every haste to be born in time. Such people must of
+course have belonged to the fortunate few&mdash;not to the miserable many;
+for if a society be large enough to be good, it must also be small
+enough. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age
+of fireside talk and of those amenities that proceed from the presence
+of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The
+women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested
+in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free
+conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the
+liquid murmur of the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only a great man of
+business, but a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+of honour and a patron of knowledge; and his wife was gracious, clever,
+and wise. They had acquired this famous property by purchase (from one
+of the Bourbons, as Chenonceaux, for two centuries after the death of
+Catherine de'Medici, remained constantly in princely hands), and it was
+transmitted to their son, Dupin de Francueil, grandfather of Madame
+George Sand. This lady, in her Correspondence, lately published,
+describes a visit that she paid more than thirty years ago to those
+members of her family who were still in possession. The owner of
+Chenonceaux to-day<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[a]</a> is the daughter of an Englishman naturalised in
+France. But I have wandered far from my story, which is simply a sketch
+of the surface of the place. Seen obliquely, from either side, in
+combination with its bridge and gallery, the structure is singular and
+fantastic, a striking example of a wilful and capricious conception.
+Unfortunately all caprices are not so graceful and successful, and I
+grudge the honour of this one to the false and blood-polluted Catherine.
+(To be exact, I believe the arches of the bridge were laid by the
+elderly Diana. It was Catherine, however, who completed the monument.)
+Within, the house has been, as usual, restored. The staircases and
+ceilings, in all the old royal residences of this part of France, are
+the parts that have suffered least; many of them have still much of the
+life of the old time about them. Some of the chambers of Chenonceaux,
+however, encumbered as they are with modern detail, derive a
+sufficiently haunted and suggestive look from the deep setting of their
+beautiful windows, which thickens the shadows and makes dark corners.
+There is a charming little Gothic chapel, with its apse hanging over the
+water, fastened to the left flank of the house. Some of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+upper balconies, which look along the outer face of the gallery and
+either up or down the river, are delightful protected nooks. We walked
+through the lower gallery to the other bank of the Cher; this fine
+apartment appeared to be for the moment a purgatory of ancient
+furniture. It terminates rather abruptly; it simply stops, with a blank
+wall. There ought, of course, to have been a pavilion here, though I
+prefer very much the old defect to any modern remedy. The wall is not so
+blank, however, but that it contains a door which opens on a rusty
+drawbridge. This drawbridge traverses the small gap which divides the
+end of the gallery from the bank of the stream. The house, therefore,
+does not literally rest on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests on one
+and just fails to rest on the other. The pavilion would have made that
+up; but after a moment we ceased to miss this imaginary feature. We
+passed the little drawbridge, and wandered awhile beside the river. From
+this opposite bank the mass of the château looked more charming than
+ever; and the little peaceful, lazy Cher, where two or three men were
+fishing in the eventide, flowed under the clear arches and between the
+solid pedestals of the part that spanned it, with the softest, vaguest
+light on its bosom. This was the right perspective; we were looking
+across the river of time. The whole scene was deliciously mild. The moon
+came up; we passed back through the gallery and strolled about a little
+longer in the gardens. It was very still. I met my old gondolier in the
+twilight. He showed me his gondola, but I hated, somehow, to see it
+there. I don't like, as the French say, to <i>mêler les genres</i>. A gondola
+in a little flat French river? The image was not less irritating, if
+less injurious, than the spectacle of a steamer in the Grand Canal,
+which had driven me away from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Chenonceaux</div>
+
+<p>Venice a year and a half before. We took our way back to the Bon
+Laboureur, and waited in the little inn-parlour for a late train to
+Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an excellent dinner to occupy
+us; and even after we had dined we were still content to sit awhile and
+exchange remarks upon the superior civilisation of France. Where else,
+at a village inn, should we have fared so well? Where else should we
+have sat down to our refreshment without condescension? There were a
+couple of countries in which it would not have been happy for us to
+arrive hungry, on a Sunday evening, at so modest an hostelry. At the
+little inn at Chenonceaux the <i>cuisine</i> was not only excellent, but the
+service was graceful. We were waited on by mademoiselle and her mamma;
+it was so that mademoiselle alluded to the elder lady as she uncorked
+for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux. We were very comfortable, very
+genial; we even went so far as to say to each other that Vouvray
+mousseux was a delightful wine. From this opinion indeed one of our trio
+differed; but this member of the party had already exposed herself to
+the charge of being too fastidious by declining to descend from the
+carriage at Chaumont and take that back-stairs view of the castle.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_027.png" width="450" height="283" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_viii" id="Chapter_viii"></a>Chapter viii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Azay-le-Rideau</div>
+
+<p>WITHOUT fastidiousness it was fair to declare on the other hand that the
+little inn at Azay-le-Rideau was very bad. It was terribly dirty and it
+was in charge of a fat <i>mégère</i> whom the appearance of four trustful
+travellers&mdash;we were four, with an illustrious fourth, on that
+occasion&mdash;roused apparently to fury. I attached great importance to this
+incongruous hostess, for she uttered the only uncivil words I heard
+spoken (in connection with any business of my own) during a tour of some
+six weeks in France. Breakfast not at Azay-le-Rideau therefore, too
+trustful traveller; or if you do so, be either very meek or very bold.
+Breakfast not, save under stress of circumstance; but let no
+circumstance whatever prevent your going to see the great house of the
+place, which is a fair rival to Chenonceaux. The village lies close to
+the gates, though after you pass these gates you leave it well behind. A
+little avenue, as at Chenonceaux, leads to the castle,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 342px;">
+<img src="images/ill_028_th.png" width="342" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+<span class="caption">AZAY-LE-RIDEAU</span>
+<a href="images/ill_028.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">making a pretty vista as you approach the sculptured doorway. Azay is a
+most perfect and beautiful thing; I should place it third in any list of
+the great houses of this part of France in which these houses should be
+ranked according to charm. For beauty of detail it comes after Blois and
+Chenonceaux, but it comes before Amboise and Chambord. On the other
+hand, of course it is inferior in majesty to either of these vast
+structures. Like Chenonceaux, it is a watery place, though it is more
+meagrely moated than the small château on the Cher. It consists of a
+large square <i>corps de logis</i>, with a round tower at each angle, rising
+out of a somewhat too slumberous pond. The water&mdash;the water of the
+Indre&mdash;surrounds it, but it is only on one side that it bathes its feet
+in the moat. On one of the others stretches a little terrace, treated as
+a garden, and in front prevails a wide court formed by a wing which, on
+the right, comes forward. This front, covered with sculptures, is of the
+richest, stateliest effect. The court is approached by a bridge over the
+pond, and the house would reflect itself in this wealth of water if the
+water were a trifle less opaque. But there is a certain stagnation&mdash;it
+affects more, senses than one&mdash;about the picturesque pools of Azay. On
+the hither side of the bridge is a garden overshadowed by fine old
+sycamores&mdash;a garden shut in by greenhouses and by a fine last-century
+gateway flanked with twin lodges. Beyond the château and the standing
+waters behind it is a so-called <i>parc</i>, which, however, it must be
+confessed, has little of park-like beauty. The old houses&mdash;a large
+number&mdash;remain in France; but the old timber does not remain, and the
+denuded aspect of the few acres that surround the châteaux of Touraine
+is pitiful to the traveller who has learned to take the measure of such
+things from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+country of "stately homes." The garden-ground of the lordly Chaumont is
+that of an English suburban villa; and in that and in other places there
+is little suggestion, in the untended aspect of walk and lawns, of the
+gardener the British Islands know. The manor as we see it dates from the
+early part of the sixteenth century; and the industrious Abbé Chevalier,
+in his very entertaining though slightly rose-coloured book on
+Touraine,<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[b]</a> speaks of it as "perhaps the purest expression of the
+<i>belle Renaissance françoise</i>." "Its height," he goes on "is divided
+between two storeys, terminating under the roof in a projecting
+entablature which imitates a row of machicolations. Carven chimneys and
+tall dormer windows, covered with imagery, rise from the roofs; turrets
+on brackets, of elegant shape, hang with the greatest lightness from the
+angles of the building. The soberness of the main lines, the harmony of
+the empty spaces and those that are filled out, the prominence of the
+crowning parts, the delicacy of all the details, constitute an
+enchanting whole." And then the Abbé speaks of the admirable staircase
+which adorns the north front and which, with its extension inside,
+constitutes the principal treasure of Azay. The staircase passes beneath
+one of the richest of porticos&mdash;a portico over which a monumental
+salamander indulges in the most decorative contortions. The sculptured
+vaults of stone which cover the windings of the staircase within, the
+fruits, flowers, ciphers, heraldic signs, are of the noblest effect. The
+interior of the château is rich, comfortable, extremely modern; but it
+makes no picture that compares with its external face, about which, with
+its charming proportions, its profuse yet not extravagant sculpture,
+there is something very tranquil and pure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Azay-le-Rideau</div>
+
+<p>I took a particular fancy to the roof, high, steep, old, with its slope
+of bluish slate, and the way the weather-worn chimneys seemed to grow
+out of it&mdash;living things in a deep soil. The single defect of the house
+is the blankness and bareness of its walls, which have none of that
+delicate parasitic deposit that agrees so well&mdash;to the eye&mdash;with the
+surface of old dwellings. It is true that this bareness results in a
+kind of silvery whiteness of complexion which carries out the tone of
+the quiet pools and even that of the scanty and shadeless park.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_029.png" width="450" height="282" alt="29" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_ix" id="Chapter_ix"></a>Chapter ix</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Langeais</div>
+
+<p>I HARDLY know what to say about the tone of Langeais, which, though I
+have left it to the end of my sketch, formed the objective point of the
+first excursion I made from Tours. Langeais is rather dark and grey; it
+is perhaps the simplest and most severe of all the castles of the Loire.
+I don't know why I should have gone to see it before any other, unless
+it be because I remembered that Duchesse de Langeais who figures in
+several of Balzac's novels, and found this association very potent. The
+Duchesse de Langeais is a somewhat transparent fiction; but the castle
+from which Balzac borrowed the title of his heroine is an extremely
+solid fact. My doubt just above as to whether I should pronounce it
+exceptionally grey came from my having seen it under a sky which made
+most things look dark. I have, however, a very kindly memory of that
+moist and melancholy afternoon, which was much more autumnal than many
+of the days that followed it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Langeais lies down the Loire, near the river, on the opposite side from
+Tours, and to go to it you will spend half an hour in the train. You
+pass on the way the Château de Luynes, which, with its round towers
+catching the afternoon light, looks uncommonly well on a hill at a
+distance; you pass also the ruins of the castle of Cinq-Mars, the
+ancestral dwelling of the young favourite of Louis XIII., the victim of
+Richelieu, the hero of Alfred de Vigny's novel, which is usually
+recommended to young ladies engaged in the study of French. Langeais is
+very imposing and decidedly sombre; it marks the transition from the
+architecture of defence to that of elegance. It rises, massive and
+perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to which it gives its
+name and which it entirely dominates; so that as you stand before it in
+the crooked and empty street there is no resource for you but to stare
+up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge towers surmounted
+with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street to the end,
+however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments of a French
+village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on the brink,
+pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen; brown old crones, the
+tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps (worn by day) look
+dazzling; little alleys perforating the thickness of a row of cottages
+and showing you behind, as a glimpse, the vividness of a green garden.
+In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formerly have been
+occupied by some of its appurtenances and which indeed is still partly
+enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence, which, with
+the small houses of the village at its base, shuts in the castle from
+behind. The enclosure is not defiantly guarded, however; for a small,
+rough path, which you presently reach, leads up to an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+open gate. This gate admits you to a vague and rather limited <i>parc</i>,
+which covers the crest of the hill and through which you may walk into
+the gardens of the castle. These gardens, of small extent, confront the
+dark walls with their brilliant parterres and, covering the gradual
+slope of the hill, form, as it were, the fourth side of the court. This
+is the stateliest view of the structure, which looks to you sufficiently
+grim and grey as, after asking leave of a neat young woman who sallies
+out to learn your errand, you sit there on a garden bench and take the
+measure of the three tall towers attached to this inner front and
+forming severally the cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cornice
+(one of the features of Langeais), which is merely ornamental, as it is
+not machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as
+well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on
+the ruins of feudalism.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Langeais</span> main event in the history of the castle is the marriage of Anne of
+Brittany to her first husband, Charles VIII., which took place in its
+great hall in 1491. Into this great hall we were introduced by the neat
+young woman&mdash;into this great hall and into sundry other halls, winding
+staircases, galleries, chambers. The cicerone of Langeais is in too
+great a hurry; the fact is pointed out in the excellent Guide-Joanne.
+This ill-dissimulated vice, however, is to be observed, in the country
+of the Loire, in every one who carries a key. It is true that at
+Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weakness
+of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds
+and ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and
+musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all
+apartments should be through which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+the insatiate American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, pausing
+to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some
+simpering portrait.</p>
+
+<p>To return to Tours my companion and I had counted on a train which (as
+is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins
+de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take
+us home. A sorry <i>carriole</i> or <i>patache</i> it proved to be, with the
+accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient
+peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of
+extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic
+woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the
+Blésois appearing to have the best of it in the business of letting
+vehicles, as well as in many other industries. There is, in fact, no
+branch of human activity in which one is not liable, in France, to find
+a woman engaged. Women, indeed, are not priests; but priests are, more
+or less, women. They are not in the army, it may be said but then they
+<i>are</i> the army. They are very formidable. In France one must count with
+the women. The drive back from Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold;
+we had an occasional spatter of rain. But the road passes most of the
+way close to the Loire, and there was something in our jog-trot through
+the darkening land, beside the flowing river, which it was very possible
+to enjoy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_030.png" width="450" height="300" alt="30" />
+</div>
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_x" id="Chapter_x"></a>Chapter x</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Loches</div>
+
+<p>THE consequence of my leaving to the last my little mention of Loches is
+that space and opportunity fail me; and yet a brief and hurried account
+of that extraordinary spot would after all be in best agreement with my
+visit. We snatched a fearful joy, my companion and I, the afternoon we
+took the train for Loches. The weather this time had been terribly
+against us: again and again a day that promised fair became hopelessly
+foul after lunch. At last we determined that if we could not make this
+excursion in the sunshine we would make it with the aid of our
+umbrellas. We grasped them firmly and started for the station, where we
+were detained an unconscionable time by the evolutions, outside, of
+certain trains laden with liberated (and exhilarated) conscripts, who,
+their term of service ended, were about to be restored to civil life.
+The trains in Touraine are provoking; they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 377px;">
+<img src="images/ill_031_th.png" width="377" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+<a href="images/ill_031.png"><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="non">serve as little as possible for excursions. If they convey you one way
+at the right hour, it is on the condition of bringing you back at the
+wrong; they either allow you far too little time to examine the castle
+or the ruin, or they leave you planted in front of it for periods that
+outlast curiosity. They are perverse, capricious, exasperating. It was a
+question of our having but an hour or two at Loches, and we could ill
+afford to sacrifice to accidents. One of the accidents, however, was
+that the rain stopped before we got there, leaving behind it a moist
+mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky which were in
+perfect agreement with the grey old city. Loches is certainly one of the
+greatest impressions of the traveller in central France&mdash;the largest
+cluster of curious things that presents itself to his sight. It rises
+above the valley of the Indre, the charming stream set in meadows and
+sedges, which wanders through the province of Berry and through many of
+the novels of Madame George Sand; lifting from the summit of a hill,
+which it covers to the base, a confusion of terraces, ramparts, towers,
+and spires. Having but little time, as I say, we scaled the hill amain
+and wandered briskly through this labyrinth of antiquities. The rain had
+decidedly stopped and, save that we had our train on our minds, we saw
+Loches to the best advantage. We enjoyed that sensation with which the
+conscientious tourist is&mdash;or ought to be&mdash;well acquainted and for which,
+at any rate, he has a formula in his rough-and-ready language. We
+"experienced," as they say (most irregular of verbs), an "agreeable
+disappointment." We were surprised and delighted; we had for some reason
+suspected that Loches was scarce good.</p>
+
+<p>I hardly know what is best there: the strange and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+impressive little collegial church, with its romanesque atrium or
+narthex, its doorways covered with primitive sculpture of the richest
+kind, its treasure of a so-called pagan altar embossed with fighting
+warriors, its three pyramidal domes, so unexpected, so sinister, which I
+have not met elsewhere in church architecture; or the huge square keep
+of the eleventh century&mdash;the most cliff-like tower I remember, whose
+immeasurable thickness I did not penetrate; or the subterranean
+mysteries of two other less striking but not less historic dungeons,
+into which a terribly imperative little cicerone introduced us, with the
+aid of downward ladders, ropes, torches, warnings, extended hands, and
+many fearful anecdotes&mdash;all in impervious darkness. These horrible
+prisons of Loches, at an incredible distance below daylight, enlivened
+the consciousness of Louis XI. and were for the most part, I believe,
+constructed by him. One of the towers of the castle is garnished with
+the hooks or supports of the celebrated iron cage in which he confined
+the Cardinal La Balue, who survived so much longer than might have been
+expected this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure. All these
+things form part of the castle of Loches, whose enormous <i>enceinte</i>
+covers the whole of the top of the hill and abounds in dismantled
+gateways, in crooked passages, in winding lanes that lead to postern
+doors, in long façades that look upon terraces interdicted to the
+visitor, who perceives with irritation that they command magnificent
+views. These views are the property of the sub-prefect of the
+department, who resides at the Château de Loches and who has also the
+enjoyment of a garden&mdash;a garden compressed and curtailed, as those of
+old castles that perch on hill-tops are apt to be&mdash;containing a
+horse-chestnut tree of fabulous size,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 374px;">
+<img src="images/ill_032_th.png" width="374" height="550" alt="32" />
+<span class="caption">LOCHES&mdash;THE CHURCH</span>
+<a href="images/ill_032.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">a tree of a circumference so vast and so perfect that the whole
+population of Loches might sit in concentric rows beneath its boughs.
+The gem of the place, however, is neither the big <i>marronier</i>, nor the
+collegial church, nor the mighty dungeon, nor the hideous prisons of
+Louis XI.; it is simply the tomb of Agnes Sorel, <i>la belle des belles</i>,
+so many years the mistress of Charles VII. She was buried in 1450, in
+the collegial church, whence, in the beginning of the present century,
+her remains, with the monument that marks them, were transferred to one
+of the towers of the castle. She has always, I know not with what
+justice, enjoyed a fairer fame than most ladies who have occupied her
+position, and this fairness is expressed in the delicate statue that
+surmounts her tomb. It represents her lying there in lovely demureness,
+her hands folded with the best modesty, a little kneeling angel at
+either side of her head, and her feet, hidden in the folds of her decent
+robe, resting upon a pair of couchant lambs, innocent reminders of her
+name. Agnes, however, was not lamb-like, inasmuch as, according to
+popular tradition at least, she exerted herself sharply in favour of the
+expulsion of the English from France. It is one of the suggestions of
+Loches that the young Charles VII., hard put to it as he was for a
+treasury and a capital&mdash;"le roi de Bourges," he was called at Paris&mdash;was
+yet a rather privileged mortal, to stand up as he does before posterity
+between the noble Joan and the <i>gentille Agnes</i>; deriving, however, much
+more honour from one of these companions than from the other. Almost as
+delicate a relic of antiquity as this fascinating tomb is the exquisite
+oratory of Anne of Brittany, among the apartments of the castle the only
+chamber worthy of note. This small room, hardly larger than a closet,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+forming part of the addition made to the edifice by Charles VIII., is
+embroidered over with the curious and remarkably decorative device of
+the ermine and festooned cord. The objects in themselves are not
+especially graceful, but the constant repetition of the figure on the
+walls and ceiling produces an effect of richness in spite of the modern
+whitewash with which, if I remember rightly, they have been endued. The
+little streets of Loches wander crookedly down the hill and are full of
+charming pictorial "bits:" an old town-gate, passing under a medieval
+tower, which is ornamented by Gothic windows and the empty niches of
+statues; a meagre but delicate <i>hotel de ville</i> of the Renaissance
+nestling close beside it; a curious <i>chancellerie</i> of the middle of the
+sixteenth century, with mythological figures and a Latin inscription on
+the front&mdash;both of these latter buildings being rather unexpected
+features of the huddled and precipitous little town. Loches has a suburb
+on the other side of the Indre, which we had contented ourselves with
+looking down at from the heights while we wondered whether, even if it
+had not been getting late and our train were more accommodating, we
+should care to take our way across the bridge and look up that bust in
+terra-cotta of Francis I. which is the principal ornament of the Château
+de Sansac and the faubourg of Beaulieu. I think we decided that we
+should not, that we had already often measured the longest nose in
+history.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_033.png" width="450" height="287" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xi" id="Chapter_xi"></a>Chapter xi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Bourges</div>
+
+<p>I KNOW not whether the exact limits of an excursion as distinguished
+from a journey have ever been fixed; at any rate, it seemed none of my
+business at Tours to settle the question. Therefore, though the making
+of excursions had been the purpose of my stay, I thought it vain, while
+I started for Bourges, to determine to which category that little
+expedition might belong. It was not till the third day that I returned
+to Tours; and the distance, traversed for the most part after dark, was
+even greater than I had supposed. That, however, was partly the fault of
+a tiresome wait at Vierzon, where I had more than enough time to dine,
+very badly, at the <i>buffet</i> and to observe the proceedings of a family
+who had entered my railway carriage at Tours and had conversed
+unreservedly, for my benefit, all the way from that station&mdash;a family
+whom it entertained me to assign to the class of <i>petite noblesse de
+province</i>. Their noble origin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+was confirmed by the way they all "made <i>maigre</i>" in the
+refreshment-room (it happened to be a Friday), as if it had been
+possible to do anything else. They ate two or three omelets apiece and
+ever so many little cakes, while the positive, talkative mother watched
+her children as the waiter handed about the roast fowl. I was destined
+to share the secrets of this family to the end; for while I took my
+place in the empty train that was in waiting to convey us to Bourges the
+same vigilant woman pushed them all on top of me into my compartment,
+though the carriages on either side contained no travellers at all. It
+was better, I found, to have dined (even on omelets and little cakes) at
+the station at Vierzon than at the hotel at Bourges, which, when I
+reached it at nine o'clock at night, did not strike me as the prince of
+hotels. The inns in the smaller provincial towns in France are all, as
+the term is, commercial, and the <i>commis-voyageur</i> is in triumphant
+possession. I saw a great deal of him for several weeks after this; for
+he was apparently the only traveller in the southern provinces, and it
+was my daily fate to sit opposite to him at tables d'hôte and in railway
+trains. He may be known by two infallible signs&mdash;his hands are fat and
+he tucks his napkin into his shirt-collar. In spite of these
+idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me a reserved and inoffensive person, with
+singularly little of the demonstrative good-humour that he has been
+described as possessing. I saw no one who reminded me of Balzac's
+"illustre Gaudissart;" and indeed in the course of a month's journey
+through a large part of France I heard so little desultory conversation
+that I wondered whether a change had not come over the spirit of the
+people. They seemed to me as silent as Americans when Americans have not
+been "introduced,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+and infinitely less addicted to exchanging remarks in railway trains and
+at tables d'hôte than the colloquial and cursory English; a fact perhaps
+not worth mentioning were it not at variance with that reputation which
+the French have long enjoyed of being a pre-eminently sociable nation.
+The common report of the character of a people is, however, an
+indefinable product, and is apt to strike the traveller who observes for
+himself as very wide of the mark. The English, who have for ages been
+described (mainly by the French) as the dumb stiff, unapproachable race,
+present to-day a remarkable appearance of good-humour and garrulity and
+are distinguished by their facility of intercourse. On the other hand,
+any one who has seen half-a-dozen Frenchmen pass a whole day together in
+a railway-carriage without breaking silence is forced to believe that
+the traditional reputation of these gentlemen is simply the survival of
+some primitive formula. It was true, doubtless, before the Revolution;
+but there have been great changes since then. The question of which is
+the better taste, to talk to strangers or to hold your tongue, is a
+matter apart; I incline to believe that the French reserve is the result
+of a more definite conception of social behaviour. I allude to it only
+because it is at variance with the national fame and at the same time
+compatible with a very easy view of life in certain other directions. On
+some of these latter points the Boule d'Or at Bourges was full of
+instruction; boasting as it did of a hall of reception in which, amid
+old boots that had been brought to be cleaned, old linen that was being
+sorted for the wash, and lamps of evil odour that were awaiting
+replenishment, a strange, familiar, promiscuous household life went
+forward. Small scullions in white caps and aprons slept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+upon greasy benches; the Boots sat staring at you while you fumbled,
+helpless, in a row of pigeon-holes, for your candlestick or your key;
+and, amid the coming and going of the <i>commis-voyageurs</i>, a little
+sempstress bent over the under-garments of the hostess&mdash;the latter being
+a heavy, stern, silent woman, who looked at people very hard.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Bourges: the Cathedral</div>
+
+<p>It was not to be looked at in that manner that one had come all the way
+from Tours; so that within ten minutes after my arrival I sallied out
+into the darkness to form somehow and somewhere a happier relation.
+However late in the evening I may arrive at a place, I never go to bed
+without my impression. The natural place at Bourges to look for it
+seemed to be the cathedral; which, moreover, was the only thing that
+could account for my presence <i>dans cette galère</i>. I turned out of a
+small square in front of the hotel and walked up a narrow, sloping
+street paved with big, rough stones and guiltless of a footway. It was a
+splendid starlight night; the stillness of a sleeping <i>ville de
+province</i> was over everything; I had the whole place to myself. I turned
+to my right, at the top of the street, where presently a short, vague
+lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely,
+from behind; it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous and sublime.
+It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which
+Bourges is scattered&mdash;a very good position as French cathedrals go, for
+they are not all so nobly situated as Chartres and Laon. On the side on
+which I approached it (the south) it is tolerably well exposed, though
+the precinct is shabby; in front, it is rather too much shut in. These
+defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it
+presents<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the Archevêché,
+which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual formal alleys
+of the <i>jardin français</i>. I must add that I appreciated these points
+only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of the stars,
+many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were shooting over
+the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church overhung me in very
+much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea would overhang a
+solitary swimmer. It seemed colossal, stupendous, a dark leviathan.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it,
+and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The
+cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good
+deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more
+imposing. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it was
+projected "<i>dès</i> 1172," but commenced only in the first years of the
+thirteenth century. "The nave," the writer adds, "was finished <i>tant
+bien que mal, faute de ressources</i>; the façade is of the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its
+upper." The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.
+The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers; one of which
+(the south) is immensely buttressed, so that its outline slopes forward
+like that of a pyramid. This is the taller of the two. If they had
+spires these towers would be prodigious; as it is, given the rest of the
+church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed
+portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the
+central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the
+measure of its width, the front rears itself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+piles itself, on a great scale, carried up by galleries, arches,
+windows, sculptures, and supported by the extraordinarily thick
+buttresses of which I have spoken and which, though they embellish it
+with deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not improve its style. The
+portals, especially the middle one, are extremely interesting; they are
+covered with curious early sculptures. The middle one, however, I must
+describe alone. It has no less than six rows of figures&mdash;the others have
+four&mdash;some of which, notably the upper one, are still in their places.
+The arch at the top has three tiers of elaborate imagery. The upper of
+these is divided by the figure of Christ in judgment, of great size,
+stiff and terrible, with outstretched arms. On either side of him are
+ranged three or four angels, with the instruments of the Passion.
+Beneath him in the second frieze stands the angel of justice with the
+scales; and on either side of him is the vision of the last judgment.
+The good prepare, with infinite titillation and complacency, to ascend
+to the skies; while the bad are dragged, pushed, hurled, stuffed,
+crammed, into pits and caldrons of fire. There is a charming detail in
+this section. Beside the angel, on the right, where the wicked are the
+prey of demons, stands a little female figure, that of a child, who,
+with hands meekly folded and head gently raised, waits for the stern
+angel to decide upon her fate. In this fate, however, a dreadful big
+devil also takes a keen interest: he seems on the point of appropriating
+the tender creature; he has a face like a goat and an enormous hooked
+nose. But the angel gently lays a hand upon the shoulder of the little
+girl&mdash;the movement is full of dignity&mdash;as if to say: "No; she belongs to
+the other side." The frieze below represents the general resurrection,
+with the good and the wicked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+emerging from their sepulchres. Nothing can be more quaint and charming
+than the difference shown in their way of responding to the final trump.
+The good get out of their tombs with a certain modest gaiety, an
+alacrity tempered by respect; one of them kneels to pray as soon as he
+has disinterred himself. You may know the wicked, on the other hand, by
+their extreme shyness; they crawl out slowly and fearfully; they hang
+back, and seem to say "Oh, dear!" These elaborate sculptures, full of
+ingenuous intention and of the reality of early faith, are in a
+remarkable state of preservation; they bear no superficial signs of
+restoration and appear scarcely to have suffered from the centuries.
+They are delightfully expressive; the artist had the advantage of
+knowing exactly the effect be wished to produce.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Bourges: the Cathedral</span> interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty and,
+above all, a tremendous height. The nave is extraordinary in this
+respect; it dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I
+am in architecture always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great
+building seems to me while I look at it the ultimate expression. At any
+rate, during the hour that I sat gazing along the high vista of Bourges
+the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the
+evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude,
+about such an edifice; it soothes and purifies the spirit, it
+illuminates the mind. There are two aisles, on either side, in addition
+to the nave&mdash;five in all&mdash;and, as I have said, there are no transepts;
+an omission which lengthens the vista, so that from my place near the
+door the central jewelled window in the depths of the perpendicular
+choir seemed a mile or two away. The second or outward of each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+pair of aisles is too low and the first too high; without this
+inequality the nave would appear to take an even more prodigious flight.
+The double aisles pass all the way round the choir, the windows of which
+are inordinately rich in magnificent old glass. I have seen glass as
+fine in other churches, but I think I have never seen so much of it at
+once.</p>
+
+<p>Beside the cathedral, on the north, is a curious structure of the
+fourteenth or fifteenth century, which looks like an enormous flying
+buttress, with its support, sustaining the north tower. It makes a
+massive arch, high in the air, and produces a romantic effect as people
+pass under it to the open gardens of the Archevêché, which extend to a
+considerable distance in the rear of the church. The structure
+supporting the arch has the girth of a largeish house, and contains
+chambers with whose uses I am unacquainted, but to which the deep
+pulsations of the cathedral, the vibration of its mighty bells and the
+roll of its organ-tones must be transmitted even through the great arm
+of stone.</p>
+
+<p>The archiepiscopal palace, not walled in as at Tours, is visible as a
+stately habitation of the last century, at the time of my visit under
+repair after a fire. From this side and from the gardens of the palace
+the nave of the cathedral is visible in all its great length and height,
+with its extraordinary multitude of supports. The gardens aforesaid,
+accessible through tall iron gates, are the promenade&mdash;the Tuileries&mdash;of
+the town, and, very pretty in themselves, are immensely set off by the
+overhanging church. It was warm and sunny; the benches were empty; I sat
+there a long time in that pleasant state of mind which visits the
+traveller in foreign towns, when he is not too hurried,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+while he wonders where he had better go next. The straight, unbroken
+line of the roof of the cathedral was very noble; but I could see from
+this point how much finer the effect would have been if the towers,
+which had dropped almost out of sight, might have been carried still
+higher. The archiepiscopal gardens look down at one end over a sort of
+esplanade or suburban avenue lying on a lower level on which they open,
+and where several detachments of soldiers (Bourges is full of soldiers)
+had just been drawn up. The civil population was also collecting, and I
+saw that something was going to happen. I learned that a private of the
+Chasseurs was to be "broken" for stealing, and every one was eager to
+behold the ceremony. Sundry other detachments arrived on the ground,
+besides many of the military who had come as a matter of taste. One of
+them described to me the process of degradation from the ranks, and I
+felt for a moment a hideous curiosity to see it, under the influence of
+which I lingered a little. But only a little; the hateful nature of the
+spectacle hurried me away at the same that others were hurrying forward.
+As I turned my back upon it I reflected that human beings are cruel
+brutes, though I could not flatter myself that the ferocity of the thing
+was exclusively French. In another country the concourse would have been
+equally great, and the moral of it all seemed to be that military
+penalties are as terrible as military honours are gratifying.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 240px;">
+<img src="images/ill_034.png" width="240" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xii" id="Chapter_xii"></a>Chapter xii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Bourges: Jacques C&#339;ur</div>
+
+<p>THE cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques
+C&#339;ur awaits you in posture scarcely less leonine. This remarkable man
+had a very strange history, and he too was "broken" like the wretched
+soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been rehabilitated, however,
+by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble
+statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret
+him according to this image&mdash;a womanish figure in a long robe and a
+turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose&mdash;would be to think of him
+as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his
+spirit was very modern; he was a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the
+fifteenth century. He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to
+pay the troops who, under the heroic Maid,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 390px;">
+<img src="images/ill_035_th.png" width="390" height="550" alt="Bourges&mdash;THE HOUSE OF JACQUES C&#338;UR" />
+<span class="caption">Bourges&mdash;THE HOUSE OF JACQUES C&#338;UR</span>
+<a href="images/ill_035.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">drove the English from French soil. His house, which to-day is used as a
+Palais de Justice, appears to have been regarded at the time it was
+built very much as the residence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New
+York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town
+is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if
+you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it
+you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must
+have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate it offers to view
+two big towers which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of
+Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak&mdash;the square in front of
+the post-office&mdash;the palace of Jacques C&#339;ur looks very big and strong
+and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very
+handsome and delicate. To this street it presents two tiers and a
+considerable length of façade; and it has both within and without a
+great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the
+stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a
+woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as
+looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and
+the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for
+having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at
+the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master,
+who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Bourges: Jacques C&#339;ur</span> history of Jacques C&#339;ur, which has been written by M. Pierre
+Clément in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and
+interesting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more
+curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+crumbling from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that
+the gods grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker,
+ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the
+East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the
+globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant
+operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty,
+imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been
+elucidated by M. Clément, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture
+of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the
+fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great
+merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed
+him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous
+set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of
+high-handed rapacity&mdash;the crudest possible assertion of the right of the
+stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his
+life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered
+his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he
+enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that
+Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which
+his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques C&#339;ur,
+however, was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after
+the expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house
+at Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and
+splendour, though it has in parts that want of space which is striking
+in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court indeed is on a
+large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful
+windows and with sculptures<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+inserted in the walls, representing the various sources of the great
+fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clément describes this part of the house
+as having been of an "incomparable richesse"&mdash;an estimate of its charms
+which seems slightly exaggerated to-day. There is, however, something
+delicate and familiar in the bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little
+scenes of agriculture and industry which show that the proprietor was
+not ashamed of calling attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day
+we should question the taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in
+the house of a "merchant prince" however self-made. Why should it be,
+accordingly, that these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease
+us? It is perhaps because things very ancient never, for some mysterious
+reason, appear vulgar. This fifteenth-century millionaire, with his
+palace, his "swagger" sculptures, may have produced that impression on
+some critical spirits of his own day.</p>
+
+<p>The portress who showed me into the building was a dear little old
+woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face&mdash;a little white, aged
+face, with dark, pretty eyes&mdash;and the most considerate manner. She took
+me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious
+chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the
+hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of
+Bourges&mdash;an inland town if ever there was one, without even a river (to
+call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions&mdash;having found his end as
+admiral of a fleet; but this boat-shaped roof, which is extremely
+graceful and is repeated in another apartment, would suggest that the
+imagination of Jacques C&#339;ur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as
+he trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is
+probable that he was personally as much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+at home in certain Mediterranean ports as in the capital of the pastoral
+Berry. If, when he looked at the ceilings of his mansion, he saw his
+boats upside down, this was only a suggestion of the shortest way of
+emptying them of their treasures. He is presented in person above one of
+the great stone chimney-pieces, in company with his wife, Macée de
+Léodepart&mdash;I like to write such an extraordinary name. Carved in white
+stone, the two sit playing at chess at an open window, through which
+they appear to give their attention much more to the passers-by than to
+the game. They are also exhibited in other attitudes; though I do not
+recognise them in the composition on top of one of the fireplaces which
+represents the battlements of a castle, with the defenders (little
+figures between the crenellations) hurling down missiles with a great
+deal of fury and expression. It would have been hard to believe that the
+man who surrounded himself with these friendly and humorous devices had
+been guilty of such wrong-doing as to call down the heavy hand of
+justice.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal associations
+of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques C&#339;ur, which, in spite
+of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have
+terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his
+quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hôtel Cujas,
+one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of
+the great jurisconsult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of
+the Roman law and professed it during the close of his life in the
+university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of
+his sedentary pursuits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in
+the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits are perhaps not exactly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 368px;">
+<img src="images/ill_036_th.png" width="368" height="550" alt="BOURGES&mdash;THE HOUSE OF JACQUES C&#338;UR" />
+<span class="caption">BOURGES&mdash;THE HOUSE OF JACQUES C&#338;UR</span>
+<a href="images/ill_036.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle"
+(sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual
+manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did
+not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so
+grave a work) an amusing picture of the short, fat, untidy scholar
+dragging himself <i>à plat ventre</i>, across his room, from one pile of
+books to the other. The house in which these singular gymnastics took
+place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of
+the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discoloured, it has a
+charming Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street,
+and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched
+two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court,
+beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with
+turrets, with fine old windows and with a beautiful tone of faded red
+brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial
+by-street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller
+with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on
+the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A
+brawny gendarme in his shirtsleeves was polishing his boots in the
+court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its clusters, hung itself
+over a doorway and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall.
+The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was
+almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to
+exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I
+had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a
+<i>ville de province</i> in the full force of the term, especially as
+applied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide
+cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, without local
+colour. The look of things is neither modern nor antique&mdash;a kind of
+mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank
+walls&mdash;walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses&mdash;that avert
+themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being so
+little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on
+which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness
+and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately
+add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a
+colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city
+may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six
+weeks spent <i>en province</i>, however, I saw few places that had not more
+expression than Bourges.</p>
+
+<p>I<span class="sidenote">Bourges: Jacques C&#339;ur</span> went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I
+returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual,
+with the <i>commis-voyageurs</i>, who cut their bread on their thumb and
+partook of every course; and after this repast I repaired for a while to
+the café, which occupied a part of the basement of the inn and opened
+into its court. This café was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where
+it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to <i>tutoyer</i> his
+customers and the practice of the customers to <i>tutoyer</i> the waiter.
+Under these circumstances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting
+down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him
+for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little
+portfolio covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 369px;">
+<img src="images/ill_037_th.png" width="369" height="550" alt="BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)" />
+<span class="caption">BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)</span>
+<a href="images/ill_037.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="non">thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which
+pass in France for pens&mdash;these being the utensils invariably evoked by
+such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself
+opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident
+reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I
+received an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in
+which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended
+with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavoured every now and then with
+a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he
+was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very
+facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game
+went on and he lost and had to pay the <i>consommation</i>, he dropped his
+amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and
+went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than
+the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend,
+one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the
+jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold
+the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all
+fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their
+inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking
+cad; just as the bright little café where a robust materfamilias, doling
+out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror
+behind the <i>comptoir</i>, was a much more civilised spot than a British
+public-house or a "commercial room," with pipes and whisky, or even than
+an American saloon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_038.png" width="450" height="280" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xiii" id="Chapter_xiii"></a>Chapter xiii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Le Mans</div>
+
+<p>IT IS very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey
+and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The
+question indeed was to get away, no easy matter in France in the early
+days of October, when the whole <i>jeunesse</i> of the country is returning
+to school. It is accompanied, apparently, with parents and grandparents,
+and it fills the trains with little pale-faced <i>lycéens</i>, who gaze out
+of the windows with a longing, lingering air not unnatural on the part
+of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be
+restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our
+American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood. The train stopped
+every five minutes; but fortunately the country was charming&mdash;hilly and
+bosky, eminently good-humoured, and dotted here and there with a smart
+little château. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has
+given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interesting town,
+but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My
+expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular
+reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed&mdash;a
+much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however,
+is not steep in all directions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was
+not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that,
+on the other hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better
+inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small
+market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be
+slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an
+ugly <i>halle</i>, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le
+Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which
+I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to
+the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble
+features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls
+straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling
+behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly
+numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through
+the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very
+crooked and untidy lane, of really mediæval aspect, honoured with the
+denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria&mdash;an
+absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later
+than the wife of Richard C&#339;ur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument
+in the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question&mdash;very
+sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it&mdash;is an
+elaborate little dusky façade, overhanging the street,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+ornamented with panels of stone, which are covered with delicate
+Renaissance sculpture. A fat old woman standing in the door of a small
+grocer's shop next to it&mdash;a most gracious old woman, with a bristling
+moustache and a charming manner&mdash;told me what the house was, and also
+indicated to me a rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same
+street, nearer the cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the
+"Roman Comique" and of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some
+years, in the early part of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le
+Mans, which gave him a right to reside in one of the canonical houses.
+He was rather an odd canon, but his history is a combination of
+oddities. He wooed the comic muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and
+in the same position&mdash;he was unable even to go down on his
+knees&mdash;prosecuted that other suit which made him the first husband of a
+lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the second. There was little of comedy
+in the future Madame de Maintenon; though, after all, there was
+doubtless as much as there need have been in the wife of a poor man who
+was moved to compose for his tomb such an epitaph as this, which I quote
+from the "Biographie Universelle":</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Fit plus de pitié que d'envie,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et souffrit mille fois la mort,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Avant que de perdre la vie.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Et garde bien qu'il ne s'éveille.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Car voicy la première nuit,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>There<span class="sidenote">Le Mans</span> is rather a quiet, satisfactory <i>place</i> in front of the cathedral,
+with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the
+towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which
+it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little
+pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of
+having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are
+houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture
+of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the
+characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the
+hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as
+it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have
+communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,
+which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
+romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from
+without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church&mdash;the disparity
+between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century,
+and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred
+years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave,
+which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and
+curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow
+but very lofty, display to the spectators in the <i>place</i> the reach of
+their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse
+of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is
+the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the
+choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a
+point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the
+stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found
+nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with
+Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of
+double aisles surrounds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+it, with the arches that divide them supported on very thick round
+columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in this passage, and a
+charming little lady-chapel filled with gorgeous old glass. The
+sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble; its
+lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to places in
+the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like Chartres,
+like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and unlike
+several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The beautiful
+upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of pictures,
+blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that contains the
+formless image&mdash;a clumsy stone woman lying on her back&mdash;which purports
+to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Le Mans</span>
+view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small
+garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large
+<i>place de foire</i>, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known
+as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a
+while in rectangular alleys destitute of herbage and received a deeper
+impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its
+hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins,
+between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may
+admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should
+remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away
+and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This
+sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded
+now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown façade and a portal fretted with
+early sculptures; but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 367px;">
+<img src="images/ill_039_th.png" width="367" height="550" alt="LE MANS&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL" />
+<span class="caption">LE MANS&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL</span>
+<a href="images/ill_039.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have
+stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le
+Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had
+looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply
+in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good
+reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has
+a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of
+old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,
+accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English
+Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self
+in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be
+assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of
+disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat
+before dinner at the door of one of the cafés in the market-place with a
+<i>bitter-et-curaçao</i> (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me
+company. I remember that in this situation there came over me an
+impression which both included and excluded all possible
+disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably
+soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near
+me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the
+detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in
+particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet
+I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of
+French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air,
+together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a
+positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+should have descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in
+front of the café, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human
+sounds, is perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 190px;">
+<img src="images/ill_040.png" width="190" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xiv" id="Chapter_xiv"></a>Chapter xiv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Angers</div>
+
+<p>I AM shocked at finding, just after this noble declaration of
+principles, that in a little note-book which at that time I carried
+about with me the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I reproduce this vulgar word with the greatest hesitation, and only
+because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers
+belongs to the disagreeable class of old towns that have been, as the
+English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place
+is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with
+irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for
+absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern
+improvements and quite unworthy of its admirable name&mdash;a name which,
+like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque
+value. It looks particularly well on the Shakespearean page (in "King
+John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the
+utterance of the period) with a fine grinding insular accent. Angers
+figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital
+city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who
+married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and
+competitor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the
+Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. These facts create
+a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over
+in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country
+that was really pretty and looked more like the usual English than like
+the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a
+considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the
+hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for
+passing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have
+contented myself before the end of the day. I remained at the White
+Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+good provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks
+spent in these establishments.</p>
+
+<p>"Stupidly and vulgarly modernised"&mdash;that is another flower from my
+note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are
+some narrow and tortuous streets, with a few curious old houses," I
+continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the exterior is most
+extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest." It is
+fair to say that the Château d'Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage;
+the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You
+cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It
+has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you;
+it is simply very old and very big&mdash;so big and so old that this simple
+impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a
+perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of
+the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained
+the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front
+of Angers is poor&mdash;wanting in colour and in movement; and there is
+always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and
+yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents
+itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally
+much better when the vast dark bulk of the castle, with its seventeen
+prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of
+tremendous girth and solidity; they are encircled with great bands, or
+hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them
+hang high curtains of infinitely old-looking masonry, apparently a dense
+conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally
+built (thanks to rich quarries in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+the neighbourhood), and to which it owed its appellation of the Black.
+There are no windows, no apertures, and to-day no battlements nor roofs.
+These accessories were removed by Henry III., so that, in spite of its
+grimness and blackness, the place has not even the interest of looking
+like a prison; it being, as I suppose, the essence of a prison not to be
+open to the sky. The only features of the enormous structure are the
+blank, sombre stretches and protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on
+so large a scale, is strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus and
+terminated by St. Louis, the Château d'Angers has of course a great deal
+of history. The luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of
+Louis XIV., whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and
+complete, was confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had
+taken place at Nantes. Here also Huguenots and Vendeans suffered
+effective captivity.</p>
+
+<p>I<span class="sidenote">Angers</span> walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it
+is all up-hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the
+entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the
+rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to
+see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard
+contains a multitude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk
+round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the
+weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So
+I came out and took another look at the big, black exterior, buttressed
+with white-ribbed towers, and perceived that a desperate sketcher might
+extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they
+say, the little black bronze statue of the good King René (a weak
+production of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 359px;">
+<img src="images/ill_041_th.png" width="359" height="550" alt="ANGERS&mdash;OLD TIMBERED HOUSES" />
+<span class="caption">ANGERS&mdash;OLD TIMBERED HOUSES</span>
+<a href="images/ill_041.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>David d'Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy
+faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old
+timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the
+Maison d'Adam and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic
+architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the
+town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really
+imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen-draper, who
+flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mère de Famille; and above
+his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house
+occupies the angle of a little <i>place</i>, this front is double, and the
+black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and
+carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is
+quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
+history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as
+"moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge
+was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave,
+without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a
+form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather
+inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely
+simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big,
+serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very
+shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is
+original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that
+the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high
+west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two
+elegant tapering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern pavilion has been
+inserted.</p>
+
+<p>I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Café Serin, where,
+after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train
+which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of
+hours, to Nantes&mdash;an establishment remarkable for its great size and its
+air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as
+also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an
+unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place
+where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented
+itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of
+the historical monuments of Angers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_042.png" width="450" height="286" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xv" id="Chapter_xv"></a>Chapter xv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Nantes</div>
+
+<p>IF I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience
+rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular
+room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look&mdash;a look that consoled
+me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn
+(it had a huge windy <i>porte-cochère</i>, and you climbed a vast black stone
+staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded
+with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a
+pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes
+belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and
+its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much
+commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in
+the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It
+derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,
+which are overhung with tall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+eighteenth-century houses (very numerous too in the other
+streets)&mdash;houses with big <i>entresols</i> marked by arched windows, classic
+pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These features exist in
+still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is
+quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has the cool,
+neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French water-side
+places&mdash;the bright greyness which is the tone of French landscape art.
+The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an eminently
+well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I had time to
+go to the Musée; the more so that I have a weakness for provincial
+museums&mdash;a sentiment that depends but little on the quality of the
+collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often curious; and
+indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind, there is a
+degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably old they
+are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I
+confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of
+recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent
+collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused
+light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the
+snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain
+to show you the lustreless gem of the museum&mdash;these things have a mild
+historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate
+something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of
+a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's
+marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is
+the usual number of specimens of the contemporary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>French school, culled from the annual Salons and presented to the museum
+by the State. Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of
+this very honourable practice&mdash;the purchase by the Government of a
+certain number of "pictures of the year," which are presently
+distributed in the provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for
+success by different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as
+we should say here, in every platform. The works of art are often
+ill-selected&mdash;there is an official taste which you immediately
+recognise&mdash;but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which
+should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing
+in this particular Musée that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman
+by Ingres&mdash;very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a
+great deal of style.</p>
+
+<p>There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of
+Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size,
+and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the
+remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic&mdash;a tall elegant building of
+the sixteenth century. The château is naturally not wanting in history.
+It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought, with
+the rest of the province, by the Duchess Anne, the last representative
+of that race, as her dowry, to Charles VIII. I read in the excellent
+handbook of M. Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of
+the kings of France, from Louis XI. downward; and also that it has
+served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other
+distinguished persons, from the horrible Maréchal de Retz, who in the
+fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+the murder of a couple of hundred young children, sacrificed in
+abominable rites, to the ardent Duchess of Berry, mother of the Count of
+Chambord, who was confined there for a few hours in 1832, just after her
+arrest in a neighbouring house. I looked at the house in question&mdash;you
+may see it from the platform in front of the château&mdash;and tried to
+figure to myself that embarrassing scene. The Duchess, after having
+unsuccessfully raised the standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons)
+in the legitimist Bretagne, and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the
+police of Louis Philippe, had hidden herself in a small but loyal house
+at Nantes, where, at the end of five months of seclusion, she was
+betrayed, for gold, to the austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an
+Alsatian Jew named Deutz. For many hours before her capture she had been
+compressed into an interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she
+was drawn forth into the light she had been ominously scorched. The man
+who showed me the castle indicated also another historic spot, a house
+with little <i>tourelles</i> on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is
+said to have signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not
+in a position to answer for this pedigree.</p>
+
+<p>There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which
+command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that
+is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the
+horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier
+and his infamous <i>noyades</i>. The most hideous episode of the Revolution
+was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in
+couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
+The tall<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+eighteenth-century house, full of the <i>air noble</i>, in France always
+reminds me of those dreadful years&mdash;of the street-scenes of the
+Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing
+could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these
+eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on
+tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of
+groups of heated <i>citoyennes</i> shaking their fists at closed
+coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the
+architecture of the period&mdash;the clear grey stone, the high pilasters,
+the arching lines of the <i>entresol</i>, the classic pediment, the
+slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the
+domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers,
+makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best
+to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold.
+Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I
+discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but
+of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no
+choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a
+cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only
+the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have
+a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.
+Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face
+and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty
+and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Nantes</span> great treasure of Nantes is the two noble sepulchral monuments which
+occupy either transept,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+and one of which has (in its nobleness) the rare distinction of being a
+production of our own time. On the south side stands the tomb of Francis
+II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany, and of his second wife, Margaret
+of Foix, erected in 1507 by their daughter Anne, whom we have
+encountered already at the Château de Nantes, where she was born; at
+Langeais, where she married her first husband; at Amboise, where she
+lost him; at Blois, where she married her second, the "good" Louis XII.,
+who divorced an impeccable spouse to make room for her, and where she
+herself died. Transferred to the cathedral from a demolished convent,
+this monument, the masterpiece of Michel Colomb, author of the charming
+tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and the aforesaid Anne, which we
+admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of the most brilliant works of
+the French Renaissance. It has a splendid effect and is in perfect
+preservation. A great table of black marble supports the reclining
+figures of the duke and duchess, who lie there peacefully and
+majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads each on a
+cushion, the pair of which are supported from behind by three charming
+little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a lion and a
+greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of the table is
+a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately dressed, with a
+symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their contemporary faces and
+clothes, which give them the air of realistic portraits, are truthful
+and living, if not remarkably beautiful. Round the sides of the tomb are
+small images of the apostles. There is a kind of masculine completeness
+in the work, and a certain robustness of taste.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in
+being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to
+say in regard to the great final contrast&mdash;the contrast between the
+immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They
+expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the
+solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the
+personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption,
+of his memory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is a sceptical affair; it
+insists too little on the honours. I say this in the face of the fact
+that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the
+presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs.
+Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one
+of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoricière, the defender of
+the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble work, from the
+hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation
+of sculptors who have revived in France an art of which our over-dressed
+century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a
+certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune&mdash;an echo with a
+beautiful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble
+elaborately worked with arabesques and cherubs, in a relief so low that
+it gives the work a certain look of being softened and worn by time,
+lies the body of the Breton soldier with a crucifix clasped to his
+breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a
+figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and
+Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were
+exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+admirably cast and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene,
+robust young mother, beautiful in line and attitude; the other a lean
+and vigilant young man, in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes,
+resting an outstretched arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt
+of a sword. These figures contain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois
+has been attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a
+splendid example and a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior
+is more or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo
+de'Medici at Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The
+interest of the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind
+of moral good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art,
+and which, united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a
+remarkable sense of form, produces an impression of deep refinement. The
+whole monument is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not
+sure that this impression on the part of the spectator is the happiest
+possible. It explains much of the great beauty, and it also explains
+perhaps a little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely
+in place; I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which
+has visibly triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our
+complicated modern genius contains treasures of intention. This
+fathomless modern element is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul
+Dubois. I am lost in admiration of the deep æsthetic experience, the
+enlightenment of taste, revealed by such work. After that I only hope
+that, Giuseppe Garibaldi may have somewhere or other some commemoration
+as distinguished.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 422px;">
+<img src="images/ill_042a.png" width="422" height="264" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xvi" id="Chapter_xvi"></a>Chapter xvi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">La Rochelle</div>
+
+<p>TO go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward across
+the historic <i>bocage</i> of La Vendée, the home of royalist bush-fighting.
+The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses,
+orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the
+traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that
+as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there
+was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment
+beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay
+(from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La
+Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway
+kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalised river,
+bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet
+old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther
+side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+patches of turf. The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being
+delightful, though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of
+La Rochelle, which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a
+fascinating little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and
+dulness. Part of its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily
+clean&mdash;in which, after all, it <i>is</i> Dutch; a virtue not particularly
+noticeable at Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if
+it be only twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as
+I am to find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of
+which it may be said that they may be south of something, but are not
+southern. To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is
+almost as soft a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps;
+and to go from New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical
+luxuriance and warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail
+to flatter myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the
+Midi, and to perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the
+<i>caractère méridional</i>. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For
+that matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound&mdash;to
+wake up there, as it were&mdash;would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full
+pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the
+successive shades of difference by which it ceases to be the north.
+These shades are exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye
+for them all. If he perceives them at New York and Philadelphia&mdash;we
+imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston&mdash;how could he fail to
+perceive them at La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are
+lined with arcades&mdash;good, big, straddling arcades of stone,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+such as befit a land of hot summers and which recalled to me, not to go
+further, the dusky porticos of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great
+wide <i>place d'armes</i> which looked for all the world like the piazza of
+some dead Italian town, empty, sunny, grass-grown, with a row of yellow
+houses overhanging it, an unfrequented café with a striped awning, a
+tall, cold, florid, uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on
+one side, and on the other a shady walk which forms part of an old
+rampart. I followed this walk for some time, under the stunted trees,
+beside the grass-covered bastions; it is very charming, winding and
+wandering, always with trees. Beneath the rampart is a tidal river, and
+on the other side, for a long distance, the mossy walls of the immense
+garden of a seminary. Three hundred years ago La Rochelle was the great
+French stronghold of Protestantism, but to-day it appears to be a
+nursery of Papists.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">La Rochelle</span> walk upon the rampart led me round to one of the gates of the town,
+where I found some small modern fortifications and sundry red-legged
+soldiers, and, beyond the fortifications, another shady walk&mdash;a <i>mail</i>,
+as the French say, as well as a <i>champ de man&#339;uvre</i>&mdash;on which latter
+expanse the poor little red-legs were doing their exercise. It was all
+very quiet and very picturesque, rather in miniature; and at once very
+tidy and a little out of repair. This, however, was but a meagre
+back-view of La Rochelle, or poor side-view at best. There are other
+gates than the small fortified aperture just mentioned; one of them, an
+old grey arch beneath a fine clock-tower, I had passed through on my way
+from the station. This substantial Tour de l'Horloge separates the town
+proper from the port; for beyond the old grey arch the place presents
+its bright, expressive little face to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+the sea. I had a charming walk about the harbour and along the stone
+piers and sea-walls that shut it in. This indeed, to take things in
+their order, was after I had had my breakfast (which I took on arriving)
+and after I had been to the <i>hôtel de ville</i>. The inn had a long narrow
+garden behind it, with some very tall trees; and passing through this
+garden to a dim and secluded <i>salle à manger</i>, buried in the heavy
+shade, I had, while I sat at my repast, a feeling of seclusion which
+amounted almost to a sense of incarceration. I lost this sense, however,
+after I had paid my bill, and went out to look for traces of the famous
+siege, which is the principal title of La Rochelle to renown. I had come
+thither partly because I thought it would be interesting to stand for a
+few moments in so gallant a spot, and partly because, I confess, I had a
+curiosity to see what had been the starting-point of the Huguenot
+emigrants who founded the town of New Rochelle in the State of New York,
+a place in which I had passed sundry memorable hours. It was strange to
+think, as I strolled through the peaceful little port, that these quiet
+waters, during the wars of religion, had swelled with a formidable naval
+power. The Rochelais had fleets and admirals, and their stout little
+Protestant bottoms carried defiance up and down.</p>
+
+<p>To say that I found any traces of the siege would be to misrepresent the
+taste for vivid whitewash by which La Rochelle is distinguished to-day.
+The only trace is the dent in the marble top of the table on which, in
+the <i>hôtel de ville</i>, Jean Guiton, the mayor of the city, brought down
+his dagger with an oath when in 1628 the vessels and regiments of
+Richelieu closed about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary was
+the soul of the resistance; he held out from February<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 349px;">
+<img src="images/ill_043_th.png" width="349" height="550" alt="LA ROCHELLE" />
+<span class="caption">LA ROCHELLE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_043.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">to October in the midst of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has
+a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a
+hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass. I limit my ambition
+in these light pages to speaking of those things of which I have
+personally received an impression, and I have no such impression of the
+defence of La Rochelle. The <i>hôtel de ville</i> is a pretty little
+building, in the style of the Renaissance of Francis I.; but it has left
+much of its interest in the hands of the restorers. It has been "done
+up" without mercy; its natural place would be at Rochelle the New. A
+sort of battlemented curtain, flanked with turrets, divides it from the
+street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always
+felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where you discover the
+face of the building. It has statues set into it and is raised upon a
+very low and very deep arcade. The principal function of the deferential
+old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your attention
+to the indented table of Jean Guiton; but she shows you other objects of
+interest besides. The interior is absolutely new and extremely
+sumptuous, abounding in tapestries, upholstery, morocco, velvet, satin.
+This is especially the case with a really beautiful <i>grande salle</i>,
+where, surrounded with the most expensive upholstery, the mayor holds
+his official receptions. (So at least said my worthy portress.) The
+mayors of La Rochelle appear to have changed a good deal since the days
+of the grim Guiton; but these evidences of municipal splendour are
+interesting for the light they throw on French manners. Imagine the
+mayor of an English or an American town of twenty thousand inhabitants
+holding magisterial soirées in the town hall! The said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+<i>grande salle</i>, which is unchanged in form and in its larger features,
+is, I believe, the room in which the Rochelais debated as to whether
+they should shut themselves up, and decided in the affirmative. The
+table and chair of Jean Guiton have been restored, like everything else,
+and are very elegant and coquettish pieces of furniture&mdash;incongruous
+relics of a season of starvation and blood. I believe that Protestantism
+is somewhat shrunken to-day at La Rochelle, and has taken refuge mainly
+in the <i>haute société</i> and in a single place of worship. There was
+nothing particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as, after
+leaving the <i>hôtel de ville</i>, I walked along the empty porticos and out
+of the Tour de l'Horloge, which I have already mentioned. If I stopped
+and looked up at this venerable monument, it was not to ascertain the
+hour, for I foresaw that I should have more time at La Rochelle than I
+knew what to do with; but because its high, grey, weather-beaten face
+was an obvious subject for a sketch.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">La Rochelle</span> little port, which has two basins and is accessible only to vessels
+of light tonnage, had a certain gaiety and as much local colour as you
+please. Fisher-folk of picturesque type were strolling about, most of
+them Bretons; several of the men with handsome, simple faces, not at all
+brutal, and with a splendid brownness&mdash;the golden-brown colour on cheek
+and beard that you see on an old Venetian sail. It was a squally,
+showery day, with sudden drizzles of sunshine; rows of rich-toned
+fishing-smacks were drawn up along the quays. The harbour is effective
+to the eye by reason of three battered old towers which at different
+points overhang it and look infinitely weather-washed and sea-silvered.
+The most striking of these, the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big grey mass<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 353px;">
+<img src="images/ill_044_th.png" width="353" height="550" alt="image not available" />
+<a href="images/ill_044.png"><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">of the fifteenth century, flanked with turrets and crowned with a Gothic
+steeple. I found it was called by the people of the place the Tour des
+Quatre Sergents, though I know not what connection it has with the
+touching history of the four young sergeants of the garrison of La
+Rochelle who were arrested in 1821 as conspirators against the
+Government of the Bourbons, and executed, amid general indignation, in
+Paris in the following year. The quaint little walk, with its label of
+Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge,
+leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it. This walk
+has the top of the old town-wall, towards the sea, for a parapet on one
+side, and is bordered on the other with decent but irregular little
+tenements of fishermen, where brown old women, whose caps are as white
+as if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In this direction
+there is a very pretty stretch of shore, out of the town, through the
+fortifications (which are Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a
+diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery which edges the water
+and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big Établissement des Bains.
+It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Établissement had the
+bankrupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season; so I
+turned my back upon it and gained, by a circuit in the course of which
+there were sundry water-side items to observe, the other side of the
+cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater and a still longer
+sea-wall, on which I walked a while, to inhale the strong, salt breath
+of the Bay of Biscay. La Rochelle serves, in the months of July and
+August, as a <i>station de bains</i> for a modest provincial society; and,
+putting aside the question of inns, it must be charming on summer
+afternoons.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_045.png" width="450" height="310" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xvii" id="Chapter_xvii"></a>Chapter xvii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Poitiers</div>
+
+<p>IT is an injustice to Poitiers to approach her by night, as I did some
+three hours after leaving La Rochelle; for what Poitiers has of best, as
+they would say at Poitiers, is the appearance she presents to the
+arriving stranger who puts his head out of the window of the train. I
+gazed into the gloom from such an aperture before we got into the
+station, for I remembered the impression received on another occasion;
+but I saw nothing save the universal night, spotted here and there with
+an ugly railway lamp. It was only as I departed, the following day, that
+I assured myself that Poitiers still makes something of the figure she
+ought on the summit of her considerable hill. I have a kindness for any
+little group of towers, any cluster of roofs and chimneys, that lift
+themselves from an eminence over which a long road ascends in zigzags;
+such a picture creates for the moment a presumption<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+that you are in Italy, and even leads you to believe that if you mount
+the winding road you will come to an old town-wall, an expanse of
+creviced brownness, and pass under a gateway surmounted by the arms of a
+mediæval despot. Why I should find it a pleasure in France to imagine
+myself in Italy, is more than I can say; the illusion has never lasted
+long enough to be analysed. From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks
+large and high; and indeed, the evening I reached it, the interminable
+climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had selected, which I found at the
+station, gave me the measure of its commanding position. This hotel,
+"magnifique construction ornée de statues," as the Guide-Joanne, usually
+so reticent, takes the trouble to announce, has an omnibus, and, I
+suppose, has statues, though I didn't perceive them; but it has very
+little else save immemorial accumulations of dirt. It is magnificent, if
+you will, but it is not even relatively proper; and a dirty inn has
+always seemed to me the dirtiest of human things&mdash;it has so many
+opportunities to betray itself.</p>
+
+<p>Poitiers covers a large space, and is as crooked and straggling as you
+please; but these advantages are not accompanied with any very salient
+features or any great wealth of architecture. Although there are few
+picturesque houses, however, there are two or three curious old
+churches. Notre Dame la Grande, in the market-place, a small romanesque
+structure of the twelfth century, has a most interesting and venerable
+exterior. Composed, like all the churches of Poitiers, of a light brown
+stone with a yellowish tinge, it is covered with primitive but ingenious
+sculptures, and is really an impressive monument. Within, it has lately
+been daubed over with the most hideous decorative painting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+that was ever inflicted upon passive pillars and indifferent vaults.
+This battered yet coherent little edifice has the touching look that
+resides in everything supremely old; it has arrived at the age at which
+such things cease to feel the years; the waves of time have worn its
+edges to a kind of patient dulness; there is something mild and smooth,
+like the stillness, the deafness, of an octogenarian, even in its
+rudeness of ornament, and it has become insensible to differences of a
+century or two. The cathedral interested me much less than Our Lady the
+Great, and I have not the spirit to go into statistics about it. It is
+not statistical to say that the cathedral stands half-way down the hill
+of Poitiers, in a quiet and grass-grown <i>place</i>, with an approach of
+crooked lanes and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking
+dimension is the width of its façade. This width is extraordinary, but
+it fails, somehow, to give nobleness to the edifice, which looks within
+(Murray makes the remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave and
+two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave; and there are some
+very fearful modern pictures, which you may see much better than you
+usually see those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glowing
+side-chapels, there being no fine old glass to diffuse a kindly gloom.
+The sacristan of the cathedral showed me something much better than all
+this bright bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the small
+Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious object at Poitiers. It
+is an early Christian chapel, one of the earliest in France; originally,
+it would seem&mdash;that is, in the sixth or seventh century&mdash;a baptistery,
+but converted into a church while the Christian era was still
+comparatively young. The Temple de Saint-Jean is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+therefore a monument even more venerable than Notre Dame la Grande, and
+that numbness of age which I imputed to Notre Dame ought to reside in
+still larger measure in its crude and colourless little walls. I call
+them crude, in spite of their having been baked through by the
+centuries, only because, although certain rude arches and carvings are
+let into them and they are surmounted at either end with a small gable,
+they have (so far as I can remember) little fascination of surface.
+Notre Dame is still expressive, still pretends to be alive; but the
+temple has delivered its message and is completely at rest. It retains a
+kind of atrium, on the level of the street, from which you descend to
+the original floor, now uncovered, but buried for years under a false
+bottom. A semicircular apse was, apparently at the time of its
+conversion into a church, thrown out from the east wall. In the middle
+is the cavity of the old baptismal font. The walls and vaults are
+covered with traces of extremely archaic frescoes, attributed, I
+believe, to the twelfth century. These vague, gaunt, staring fragments
+of figures are, to a certain extent, a reminder of some of the early
+Christian churches in Rome; they even faintly recalled to me the great
+mosaics of Ravenna. The Temple de Saint-Jean has neither the antiquity
+nor the completeness of those extraordinary monuments, nearly the most
+impressive in Europe; but, as one may say, it is very well for Poitiers.</p>
+
+<p>Not<span class="sidenote">Poitiers</span> far from it, in a lonely corner which was animated for the moment by
+the vociferations of several old women who were selling tapers,
+presumably for the occasion of a particular devotion, is the graceful
+romanesque church erected in the twelfth century to Saint Radegonde&mdash;a
+lady who found means to be a saint even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+in the capacity of a Merovingian queen. It bears a general resemblance
+to Notre Dame la Grande, and, as I remember it, is corrugated in
+somewhat the same manner with porous-looking carvings; but I confess
+that what I chiefly recollect is the row of old women sitting in front
+of it, each with a tray of waxen tapers in her lap, and upbraiding me
+for my neglect of the opportunity to offer such a tribute to the saint.
+I know not whether this privilege is occasional or constant; within the
+church there was no appearance of a festival, and I see that the
+name-day of Saint Radegonde occurs in August, so that the importunate
+old women sit there always perhaps and deprive of its propriety the
+epithet I just applied to this provincial corner. In spite of the old
+women, however, I suspect that the place is lonely; and indeed it is
+perhaps the old women who have made the desolation.</p>
+
+<p>The lion of Poitiers in the eyes of the natives is doubtless the Palais
+de Justice, in the shadow of which the statue-guarded hotel, just
+mentioned, erects itself; and the gem of the court-house, which has a
+prosy modern front, with pillars and a high flight of steps, is the
+curious <i>salle des pas perdus</i>, or central hall, out of which the
+different tribunals open. This is a feature of every French court-house,
+and seems the result of a conviction that a palace of justice&mdash;the
+French deal in much finer names than we&mdash;should be in some degree
+palatial. The great hall at Poitiers has a long pedigree, as its walls
+date back to the twelfth century and its open wooden roof, as well as
+the remarkable trio of chimney-pieces at the right end of the room as
+you enter, to the fifteenth. The three tall fireplaces, side by side,
+with a delicate gallery running along the top of them, constitute the
+originality of this ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+chamber, and make one think of the groups that must formerly have
+gathered there&mdash;of all the wet boot-soles, the trickling doublets, the
+stiffened fingers, the rheumatic shanks, that must have been presented
+to such an incomparable focus of heat. To-day, I am afraid, these mighty
+hearths are for ever cold; justice is probably administered with the aid
+of a modern <i>calorifère</i>, and the walls of the palace are perforated
+with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts
+the three fireplaces are high Gothic windows, the tracery of which
+masks, in some sort, the chimneys; and in each angle of this and of the
+room to the right and left of the trio of chimneys is an open-work
+spiral staircase, ascending to&mdash;I forget where; perhaps to the roof of
+the edifice. The whole side of the <i>salle</i> is very lordly, and seems to
+express an unstinted hospitality, to extend the friendliest of all
+invitations, to bid the whole world come and get warm. It was the
+invention of John, Duke of Berry and Count of Poitou, about 1395. I give
+this information on the authority of the Guide-Joanne, from which source
+I gather much other curious learning; as, for instance, that it was in
+this building, when it had surely a very different front, that Charles
+VII. was proclaimed king in 1422; and that here Jeanne Darc was
+subjected, in 1429, to the inquisition of sundry doctors and matrons.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Poitiers</span> most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de
+Blossac&mdash;a small public garden at one end of the flat top of the hill.
+It has a happy look of the last century (having been arranged at that
+period), and a beautiful sweep of view over the surrounding country, and
+especially of the course of the little river Clain, which winds about a
+part of the base of the big mound of Poitiers. The limit of this dear
+little garden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+is formed, on the side that turns away from the town, by the rampart
+erected in the fourteenth century and by its big semicircular bastions.
+This rampart, of great length, has a low parapet; you look over it at
+the charming little vegetable-gardens with which the base of the hill
+appears exclusively to be garnished. The whole prospect is delightful,
+especially the details of the part just under the walls, at the end of
+the walk. Here the river makes a shining twist which a painter might
+have invented, and the side of the hill is terraced into several
+hedges&mdash;a sort of tangle of small blooming patches and little pavilions
+with peaked roofs and green shutters. It is idle to attempt to reproduce
+all this in words; it should be reproduced only in water-colours. The
+reader, however, will already have remarked that disparity in these
+ineffectual pages, which are pervaded by the attempt to sketch without a
+palette or brushes. He will doubtless also be struck with the grovelling
+vision which, on such a spot as the ramparts of Poitiers, peoples itself
+with carrots and cabbages rather than with images of the Black Prince
+and the captive king. I am not sure that in looking out from the
+Promenade de Blossac you command the old battle-field; it is enough that
+it was not far off, and that the great rout of Frenchmen poured into the
+walls of Poitiers, leaving on the ground a number of the fallen equal to
+the little army (eight thousand) of the invader. I did think of the
+battle. I wondered, rather helplessly, where it had taken place; and I
+came away (as the reader will see from the preceding sentence) without
+finding out. This indifference, however, was a result rather of a
+general dread of military topography than of a want of admiration of
+this particular victory, which I have always supposed to be one of the
+most brilliant on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+record. Indeed, I should be almost ashamed, and very much at a loss, to
+say what light it was that this glorious day seemed to me to have left
+for ever on the horizon, and why the very name of the place had always
+caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying the feeling of race to
+quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an
+emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one
+rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as
+well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to
+the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the
+Black Prince as he lies for ever at rest in the choir of Canterbury: <i>à
+la mort ne pensai-je mye</i>. Nevertheless, the victory of Poitiers
+declines to lose itself in these considerations; the sense of it is a
+part of our heritage, the joy of it a part of our imagination, and it
+filters down through centuries and migrations till it titillates a New
+Yorker who forgets in his elation that he happens at that moment to be
+enjoying the hospitality of France. It was something done, I know not
+how justly, for England; and what was done in the fourteenth century for
+England was done also for New York.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_046.png" width="450" height="277" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xviii" id="Chapter_xviii"></a>Chapter xviii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Angoulême</div>
+
+<p>IF it was really for the sake of the Black Prince that I had stopped at
+Poitiers (for my prevision of Notre Dame la Grande and of the little
+temple of St. John was of the dimmest), I ought to have stopped at
+Angoulême for the sake of David and Eve Séchard, of Lucien de Rubempré
+and of Madame de Bargeton, who when she wore a <i>toilette étudiée</i>
+sported a Jewish turban ornamented with an Eastern brooch, a scarf of
+gauze, a necklace of cameos, and a robe of "painted muslin," whatever
+that may be; treating herself to these luxuries out of an income of
+twelve thousand francs. The persons I have mentioned have not that
+vagueness of identity which is the misfortune of historical characters;
+they are real, supremely real, thanks to their affiliation to the great
+Balzac, who had invented an artificial reality which was as much better
+than the vulgar article as mock-turtle soup is than the liquid it
+emulates. The first time I read<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Les Illusions Perdues" I should have refused to believe that I was
+capable of passing the old capital of Anjou without alighting to visit
+the Houmeau. But we never know what we are capable of till we are
+tested, as I reflected when I found myself looking back at Angoulême
+from the window of the train just after we had emerged from the long
+tunnel that passes under the town. This tunnel perforates the hill on
+which, like Poitiers, Angoulême rears itself, and which gives it an
+elevation still greater than that of Poitiers. You may have a tolerable
+look at the cathedral without leaving the railway carriage, for it
+stands just above the tunnel and is exposed, much foreshortened, to the
+spectator below. There is evidently a charming walk round the plateau of
+the town commanding those pretty views of which Balzac gives an account.
+But the train whirled me away, and these are my only impressions. The
+truth is that I had no need, just at that moment, of putting myself into
+communication with Balzac, for opposite to me in the compartment were a
+couple of figures almost as vivid as the actors in the "Comédie
+Humaine." One of these was a very genial and dirty old priest, and the
+other was a reserved and concentrated young monk&mdash;the latter (by which I
+mean a monk of any kind) being a rare sight to-day in France. This young
+man indeed was mitigatedly monastic. He had a big brown frock and cowl,
+but he had also a shirt and a pair of shoes; he had, instead of a hempen
+scourge round his waist, a stout leather thong, and he carried with him
+a very profane little valise. He also read, from beginning to end, the
+<i>Figaro</i> which the old priest, who had done the same, presented to him;
+and he looked altogether as if, had he not been a monk, he would have
+made a distinguished officer of engineers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Angoulême</div>
+
+<p>When he was not reading the <i>Figaro</i> he was conning his breviary or
+answering, with rapid precision and with a deferential but discouraging
+dryness, the frequent questions of his companion, who was of quite
+another type. This worthy had a bored, good-natured, unbuttoned,
+expansive look; was talkative, restless, almost disreputably human. He
+was surrounded by a great deal of small luggage, and had scattered over
+the carriage his books, his papers, and fragments of his lunch, and the
+contents of an extraordinary bag which he kept beside him&mdash;a kind of
+secular reliquary&mdash;and which appeared to contain the odds and ends of a
+lifetime, as he took from it successively a pair of slippers, an old
+padlock (which evidently did not belong to it), an opera-glass, a
+collection of almanacs, and a large sea-shell, which he very carefully
+examined. I think that if he had not been afraid of the young monk, who
+was so much more serious than he, he would have held the shell to his
+ear like a child. Indeed, he was a very childish and delightful old
+priest, and his companion evidently thought him quite frivolous. But I
+liked him the better of the two. He was not a country curé, but an
+ecclesiastic of some rank, who had seen a good deal both of the church
+and of the world; and if I too had not been afraid of his colleague, who
+read the <i>Figaro</i> as seriously as if it had been an encyclical, I should
+have entered into conversation with him.</p>
+
+<p>All this while I was getting on to Bordeaux, where I permitted myself to
+spend three days. I am afraid I have next to nothing to show for them,
+and that there would be little profit in lingering on this episode,
+which is the less to be justified as I had in former years examined
+Bordeaux attentively enough. It contains a very good hotel&mdash;an hotel not
+good enough, however,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+to keep you there for its own sake. For the rest, Bordeaux is a big,
+rich, handsome, imposing commercial town, with long rows of fine old
+eighteenth-century houses which overlook the yellow Garonne. I have
+spoken of the quays of Nantes as fine, but those of Bordeaux have a
+wider sweep and a still more architectural air. The appearance of such a
+port as this makes the Anglo-Saxon tourist blush for the sordid
+water-fronts of Liverpool and New York, which, with their larger
+activity, have so much more reason to be stately. Bordeaux gives a great
+impression of prosperous industries, and suggests delightful ideas,
+images of prune-boxes and bottled claret. As the focus of distribution
+of the best wine in the world, it is indeed a sacred city&mdash;dedicated to
+the worship of Bacchus in the most discreet form. The country all about
+it is covered with precious vineyards, sources of fortune to their
+owners and of satisfaction to distant consumers: and as you look over to
+the hills beyond the Garonne you see them, in the autumn sunshine,
+fretted with the rusty richness of this or that immortal <i>clos</i>. But the
+principal picture, within the town, is that of the vast curving quays,
+bordered with houses that look like the <i>hôtels</i> of farmers-general of
+the last century, and of the wide, tawny river, crowded with shipping
+and spanned by the largest of bridges. Some of the types on the
+water-side are of the sort that arrest a sketcher&mdash;figures of stalwart,
+brown-faced Basques, such as I had seen of old in great numbers at
+Biarritz, with their loose circular caps, their white sandals, their air
+of walking for a wager. Never was a tougher, a harder race. They are not
+mariners nor watermen, but, putting questions of temper aside, they are
+the best possible dock-porters. "Il s'y fait un commerce terrible," a
+<i>douanier</i> said to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+me, as he looked up and down the interminable docks; and such a place
+has indeed much to say of the wealth, the capacity for production, of
+France&mdash;the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful
+country which produces, above all, the agreeable things of life, and
+turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold. The whole town has an
+air of almost depressing opulence, an appearance which culminates in the
+great <i>place</i> which surrounds the Grand-Théatre&mdash;an establishment of the
+highest style, encircled with columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafés. One
+feels it to be a monument to the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If
+I had not forbidden myself to linger, I should venture to insist on this
+and, at the risk of being called fantastic, trace an analogy between
+good claret and the best qualities of the French mind; pretend that
+there is a taste of sound Bordeaux in all the happiest manifestations of
+that fine organ, and that, correspondingly, there is a touch of French
+reason, French completeness, in a glass of Pontet-Canet. The danger of
+such an excursion would lie mainly in its being so open to the reader to
+take the ground from under my feet by saying that good claret doesn't
+exist. To this I should have no reply whatever. I should be unable to
+tell him where to find it. I certainly didn't find it at Bordeaux, where
+I drank a most vulgar fluid; and it is of course notorious that a large
+part of mankind is occupied in vainly looking for it. There was a great
+pretence of putting it forward at the Exhibition which was going on at
+Bordeaux at the time of my visit, an "exposition philomathique," lodged
+in a collection of big temporary buildings in the Allées d'Orléans, and
+regarded by the Bordelais for the moment as the most brilliant feature
+of their city. Here were pyramids of bottles, mountains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/ill_047_th.png" width="550" height="358" alt="BORDEAUX&mdash;THE QUAY" />
+<span class="caption">BORDEAUX&mdash;THE QUAY</span>
+<a href="images/ill_047.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">of bottles, to say nothing of cases and cabinets of bottles. The
+contemplation of these glittering tiers was of course not very
+convincing; and indeed the whole arrangement struck me as a high
+impertinence. Good wine is not an optical pleasure, it is an inward
+emotion; and if there was a chamber of degustation on the premises, I
+failed to discover it. It was not in the search for it, indeed, that I
+spent half an hour in this bewildering bazaar. Like all "expositions,"
+it seemed to me to be full of ugly things, and gave one a portentous
+idea of the quantity of rubbish that man carries with him on his course
+through the ages. Such an amount of luggage for a journey after all so
+short! There were no individual objects; there was nothing but dozens
+and hundreds, all machine-made and expressionless, in spite of the
+repeated grimace, the conscious smartness, of "the last new thing," that
+was stamped on all of them. The fatal facility of the French <i>article</i>
+becomes at last as irritating as the refrain of a popular song. The poor
+"Indiens Galibis" struck me as really more interesting&mdash;a group of
+stunted savages who formed one of the attractions of the place and were
+confined in a pen in the open air, with a rabble of people pushing and
+squeezing, hanging over the barrier, to look at them. They had no
+grimace, no pretension to be new, no desire to catch your eye. They
+looked at their visitors no more than they looked at each other, and
+seemed ancient, indifferent, terribly bored.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 193px;">
+<img src="images/ill_048.png" width="193" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xix" id="Chapter_xix"></a>Chapter xix</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Toulouse</div>
+
+<p>THERE is much entertainment in the journey through the wide, smiling
+garden of Gascony; I speak of it as I took it in going from Bordeaux to
+Toulouse. It is the south, quite the south, and had for the present
+narrator its full measure of the charm he is always determined to find
+in countries that may even by courtesy be said to appertain to the sun.
+It was, moreover, the happy and genial view of these mild latitudes,
+which, goodness knows, often have a dreariness of their own; a land
+teeming with corn and wine and speaking everywhere (that is everywhere
+the phylloxera had not laid it waste) of wealth and plenty. The road
+runs constantly near the Garonne, touching now and then its slow, brown,
+rather sullen stream, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+sullenness that encloses great dangers and disasters. The traces of the
+horrible floods of 1875 have disappeared, and the land smiles placidly
+enough while it waits for another immersion. Toulouse, at the period I
+speak of, was up to its middle (and in places above it) in water, and
+looks still as if it had been thoroughly soaked&mdash;as if it had faded and
+shrivelled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are
+more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charming Canal du
+Midi, which is as pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here
+and there occupies the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall
+trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a
+little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals&mdash;and, speaking from
+the pictorial standpoint, I hold the taste to be most legitimate&mdash;will
+delight in this admirable specimen of the class, which has a very
+interesting history, not to be narrated here. On the other side of the
+road (the left), all the way, runs a long, low line of hills, or rather
+one continuous hill, or perpetual cliff, with a straight top, in the
+shape of a ledge of rock, which might pass for a ruined wall. I am
+afraid the reader will lose patience with my habit of constantly
+referring to the landscape of Italy as if that were the measure of the
+beauty of every other. Yet I am still more afraid that I cannot
+apologise for it, and must leave it in its culpable nakedness. It is an
+idle habit; but the reader will long since have discovered that this was
+an idle journey and that I give my impressions as they came to me. It
+came to me, then, that in all this view there was something transalpine,
+with a greater smartness and freshness and much less elegance and
+languor. This impression was occasionally deepened by the appearance, on
+the long eminence of which I speak,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+of a village, a church, a château, that seemed to look down at the plain
+from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the bright-faced
+flat-roofed houses, covered with tiles, the softness and sweetness of
+the light and air, recalled the prosier portions of the Lombard plain.
+Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression, but not enough
+to give a colour to its dark, dirty, crooked streets, which are
+irregular without being eccentric, and which, if it were not for the
+superb church of Saint-Sernin, would be quite destitute of monuments.</p>
+
+<p>I have already alluded to the way in which the names of certain places
+impose themselves on the mind, and I must add that of Toulouse to the
+list of expressive appellations. It certainly evokes a vision&mdash;suggests
+something highly <i>méridional</i>. But the city, it must be confessed, is
+less pictorial than the word, in spite of the Place du Capitole, in
+spite of the quay of the Garonne, in spite of the curious cloister of
+the old museum. What justifies the images that are latent in the word is
+not the aspect, but the history, of the town. The hotel to which the
+well-advised traveller will repair stands in a corner of the Place du
+Capitole, which is the heart and centre of Toulouse, and which bears a
+vague and inexpensive resemblance to Piazza Castello at Turin. The
+Capitol, with a wide modern face, occupies one side, and, like the
+palace at Turin, looks across at a high arcade, under which the hotels,
+the principal shops, and the lounging citizens are gathered. The shops,
+are probably better than the Turinese, but the people are not so good.
+Stunted, shabby, rather vitiated looking, they have none of the personal
+richness of the sturdy Piedmontese; and I will take this occasion to
+remark that in the course of a journey of several weeks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+in the French provinces I rarely encountered a well-dressed male. Can it
+be possible that republics are unfavourable to a certain attention to
+one's boots and one's beard? I risk this somewhat futile inquiry because
+the proportion of neat coats and trousers seemed to be about the same in
+France and in my native land. It was notably lower than in England and
+in Italy, and even warranted the supposition that most good provincials
+have their chin shaven and their boots blacked but once a week. I hasten
+to add, lest my observation should appear to be of a sadly superficial
+character, that the manners and conversation of these gentlemen bore
+(whenever I had occasion to appreciate them) no relation to the state of
+their chin and their boots. They were almost always marked by an extreme
+amenity. At Toulouse there was the strongest temptation to speak to
+people simply for the entertainment of hearing them reply with that
+curious, that fascinating accent of the Languedoc, which appears to
+abound in final consonants and leads the Toulousians to say <i>bien-g</i> and
+<i>maison-g</i> like Englishmen learning French. It is as if they talked with
+their teeth rather than with their tongue. I find in my note-book a
+phrase in regard to Toulouse which is perhaps a little ill-natured, but
+which I will transcribe as it stands: "The oddity is that the place
+should be both animated and dull. A big, brown-skinned population,
+clattering about in a flat, tortuous town, which produces nothing
+whatever that I can discover. Except the church of Saint-Sernin and the
+fine old court of the Hôtel d'Assézat, Toulouse has no architecture; the
+houses are for the most part of brick, of a greyish-red colour, and have
+no particular style. The brickwork of the place is in fact very
+poor&mdash;inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+wanting in the wealth of tone which this homely material takes on in
+general in the climates of dampness and greenness." And then my
+note-book goes on to narrate a little visit to the Capitol, which was
+soon made, as the building was in course of repair and half the rooms
+were closed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_049.png" width="450" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xx" id="Chapter_xx"></a>Chapter xx</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Toulouse: the Capitol</div>
+
+<p>THE history of Toulouse is detestable, saturated with blood and perfidy;
+and the ancient custom of the Floral Games, grafted upon all sorts of
+internecine traditions, seems, with its false pastoralism, its mock
+chivalry, its display of fine feelings, to set off rather than to
+mitigate these horrors. The society was founded in the fourteenth
+century, and it has held annual meetings ever since&mdash;meetings at which
+poems in the fine old <i>langue d'oc</i> are declaimed and a blushing
+laureate is chosen. This business takes place in the Capitol, before the
+chief magistrate of the town, who is known as the <i>capitoul</i>, and of all
+the pretty women as well&mdash;a class very numerous at Toulouse. It is
+unusual to present a finer person than that of the portress who
+pretended to show me the apartments in which the Floral Games are held;
+a big, brown, expansive woman, still in the prime of life, with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+speaking eye, an extraordinary assurance, and a pair of magenta
+stockings, which were inserted into the neatest and most polished little
+black sabots, and which, as she clattered up the stairs before me,
+lavishly displaying them, made her look like the heroine of an
+<i>opéra-bouffe</i>. Her talk was all in <i>n</i>'s, <i>g</i>'s and <i>d</i>'s, and in mute
+<i>e</i>'s strongly accented, as <i>autré</i>, <i>théâtré</i>, <i>splendidé</i>&mdash;the last
+being an epithet she applied to everything the Capitol contained, and
+especially to a horrible picture representing the famous Clémence
+Isaure, the reputed foundress of the poetical contest, presiding on one
+of these occasions. I wondered whether Clémence Isaure had been anything
+like this terrible Toulousaine of to-day, who would have been a capital
+figure-head for a floral game. The lady in whose honour the picture I
+have just mentioned was painted is a somewhat mythical personage, and
+she is not to be found in the "Biographie Universelle." She is, however,
+a very graceful myth; and if she never existed, her statue at least
+does&mdash;a shapeless effigy transferred to the Capitol from the so-called
+tomb of Clémence in the old church of La Daurade. The great hall in
+which the Floral Games are held was encumbered with scaffoldings, and I
+was unable to admire the long series of busts of the bards who have won
+prizes and the portraits of all the capitouls of Toulouse. As a
+compensation I was introduced to a big bookcase filled with the poems
+that have been crowned since the days of the troubadours (a portentous
+collection), and the big butcher's knife with which, according to the
+legend, Henry, Duke of Montmorency, who had conspired against the great
+cardinal with Gaston of Orleans and Mary de'Medici, was, in 1632,
+beheaded on this spot by the order of Richelieu. With these objects the
+interest of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Toulouse: the Capitol</div>
+
+<p>Capitol was exhausted. The building indeed has not the grandeur of its
+name, which is a sort of promise that the visitor will find some
+sensible embodiment of the old Roman tradition that once nourished in
+this part of France. It is inferior in impressiveness to the other three
+famous Capitols of the modern world&mdash;that of Rome (if I may call the
+present structure modern) and those of Washington and Albany!</p>
+
+<p>The only Roman remains at Toulouse are to be found in the museum&mdash;a very
+interesting establishment, which I was condemned to see as imperfectly
+as I had seen the Capitol. It was being rearranged; and the gallery of
+paintings, which is the least interesting feature, was the only part
+that was not upside-down. The pictures are mainly of the modern French
+school, and I remember nothing but a powerful though disagreeable
+specimen of Henner, who paints the human body, and paints it so well,
+with a brush dipped in blackness; and, placed among the paintings, a
+bronze replica of the charming young David of Mercié. These things have
+been set out in the church of an old monastery, long since suppressed,
+and the rest of the collection occupies the cloisters. These are two in
+number&mdash;a small one, which you enter first from the street, and a very
+vast and elegant one beyond it, which, with its light gothic arches and
+slim columns (of the fourteenth century), its broad walk, its little
+garden with old tombs and statues in the centre, is by far the most
+picturesque, the most sketchable, spot in Toulouse. It must be doubly so
+when the Roman busts, inscriptions, slabs, and sarcophagi are ranged
+along the walls; it must indeed (to compare small things with great, and
+as the judicious Murray remarks) bear a certain resemblance to the Campo
+Santo at Pisa. But these things are absent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+now; the cloister is a litter of confusion, and its treasures have been
+stowed away confusedly in sundry inaccessible rooms. The custodian
+attempted to console me by telling me that when they are exhibited again
+it will be on a scientific basis and with an order and regularity of
+which they were formerly innocent. But I was not consoled. I wanted
+simply the spectacle, the picture, and I didn't care in the least for
+the classification. Old Roman fragments exposed to light in the open
+air, under a southern sky, in a quadrangle round a garden, have an
+immortal charm simply in their general effect; and the charm is all the
+greater when the soil of the very place has yielded them up.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 205px;">
+<img src="images/ill_050.png" width="205" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxi" id="Chapter_xxi"></a>Chapter xxi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Toulouse: Saint-Sernin</div>
+
+<p>MY real consolation was an hour I spent in Saint-Sernin, one of the
+noblest churches in southern France, and easily the first among those of
+Toulouse. This great structure, a masterpiece of twelfth-century
+romanesque and dedicated to Saint Saturninus&mdash;the Toulousains have
+abbreviated&mdash;is, I think, alone worth a journey to Toulouse. What makes
+it so is the extraordinary seriousness of its interior; no other term
+occurs to me as expressing so well the character of its clear grey nave.
+As a general thing, I favour little the fashion of attributing moral
+qualities to buildings; I shrink from talking about tender cornices and
+sincere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+campanili; but one feels that one can scarce get on without imputing
+some sort of morality to Saint-Sernin. As it stands to-day, the church
+has been completely restored by Viollet-le-Duc. The exterior is of
+brick, and has little charm save that of a tower of four rows of arches,
+narrowing together as they ascend. The nave is of great length and
+height, the barrel-roof of stone, the effect of the round arches and
+pillars in the triforium especially fine. There are two low aisles on
+either side. The choir is very deep and narrow; it seems to close
+together, and looks as if it were meant for intensely earnest rites. The
+transepts are most noble, especially the arches of the second tier. The
+whole church is narrow for its length and is singularly complete and
+homogeneous. As I say all this I feel that I quite fail to give an
+impression of its manly gravity, its strong proportions, or of the
+lonesome look of its renovated stones as I sat there while the October
+twilight gathered. It is a real work of art, a high conception. The
+crypt, into which I was eventually led captive by an importunate
+sacristan, is quite another affair, though indeed I suppose it may also
+be spoken of as a work of art. It is a rich museum of relics, and
+contains the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas wrapped up in a napkin and
+exhibited in a glass case. The sacristan took a lamp and guided me
+about, presenting me to one saintly remnant after another. The
+impression was grotesque, but some of the objects were contained in
+curious old cases of beaten silver and brass: these things at least,
+which looked as if they had been transmitted from the early church, were
+venerable. There was, however, a kind of wholesale sanctity about the
+place which overshot the mark; it pretends to be one of the holiest
+spots in the world. The effect is spoiled by the way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 412px;">
+<img src="images/ill_051_th.png" width="412" height="550" alt="TOULOUSE SAINT-SERNIN (THE TRANSEPT)" />
+<span class="caption">TOULOUSE SAINT-SERNIN (THE TRANSEPT)</span>
+<a href="images/ill_051.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">the sacristans hang about and offer to take you into it for ten sous&mdash;I
+was accosted by two and escaped from another&mdash;and by the familiar manner
+in which you pop in and out. This episode rather broke the charm of
+Saint-Sernin, so that I took my departure and went in search of the
+cathedral. It was scarcely worth finding, and struck me as an odd,
+dislocated fragment. The front consists only of a portal beside which a
+tall brick tower of a later period has been erected. The nave was
+wrapped in dimness, with a few scattered lamps. I could only distinguish
+an immense vault, like a high cavern, without aisles. Here and there in
+the gloom was a kneeling figure; the whole place was mysterious and
+lopsided. The choir was curtained off; it appeared not to correspond
+with the nave&mdash;that is, not to have the same axis. The only other
+ecclesiastical impression I gathered at Toulouse came to me in the
+church of La Daurade, of which the front, on the quay by the Garonne,
+was closed with scaffoldings; so that one entered it from behind, where
+it is completely masked by houses, through a door which has at first no
+traceable connection with it. It is a vast, high, modernised, heavily
+decorated church, dimly lighted at all times, I should suppose, and
+enriched by the shades of evening at the time I looked into it. I
+perceived that it consisted mainly of a large square, beneath a dome, in
+the centre of which a single person&mdash;a lady&mdash;was praying with the utmost
+absorption. The manner of access to the church interposed such an
+obstacle to the outer profanities that I had a sense of intruding and
+presently withdrew, carrying with me a picture of the vast, still
+interior, the gilded roof gleaming in the twilight, and the solitary
+worshipper. What was she praying for, and was she not almost afraid to
+remain there alone?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Toulouse</div>
+
+<p>For the rest, the picturesque at Toulouse consists principally of the
+walk beside the Garonne, which is spanned, to the faubourg of
+Saint-Cyprien, by a stout brick bridge. This hapless suburb, the
+baseness of whose site is noticeable, lay for days under the water at
+the time of the last inundations. The Garonne had almost mounted to the
+roofs of the houses, and the place continues to present a blighted,
+frightened look. Two or three persons with whom I had some conversation
+spoke of that time as a memory of horror. I have not done with my
+Italian comparisons; I shall never have done with them. I am therefore
+free to say that in the way in which Toulouse looks out on the Garonne
+there was something that reminded me vaguely of the way in which Pisa
+looks out on the Arno. The red-faced houses&mdash;all of brick&mdash;along the
+quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness, as well as the fashion
+of the open <i>loggia</i> in the top-storey. The river, with another bridge
+or two, might be the Arno, and the buildings on the other side of it&mdash;a
+hospital, a suppressed convent&mdash;dip their feet into it with real
+southern cynicism. I have spoken of the old Hôtel d'Assézat as the best
+house at Toulouse; with the exception of the cloister of the museum, it
+is the only "bit" I remember. It has fallen from the state of a noble
+residence of the sixteenth century to that of a warehouse and a set of
+offices; but a certain dignity lingers in its melancholy court, which is
+divided from the street by a gateway that is still imposing and in which
+a clambering vine and a red Virginia-creeper were suspended to the rusty
+walls of brick and stone.</p>
+
+<p>The most interesting house at Toulouse is far from being the most
+striking. At the door of No. 50 Rue des Filatiers, a featureless, solid
+structure, was found<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/ill_052.png" width="550" height="355" alt="TOULOUSE&mdash;THE GARONNE" />
+<span class="caption">TOULOUSE&mdash;THE GARONNE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">hanging, one autumn evening, the body of the young Marc-Antoine Calas,
+whose ill-inspired suicide was to be the first act of a tragedy so
+horrible. The fanaticism aroused in the townsfolk by this incident; the
+execution by torture of Jean Calas, accused as a Protestant of having
+hanged his son, who had gone over to the Church of Rome; the ruin of the
+family; the claustration of the daughters; the flight of the widow to
+Switzerland; her introduction to Voltaire; the excited zeal of that
+incomparable partisan and the passionate persistence with which, from
+year to year, he pursued a reversal of judgment till at last he obtained
+it and devoted the tribunal of Toulouse to execration and the name of
+the victims to lasting wonder and pity&mdash;these things form part of one of
+the most interesting and touching episodes of the social history of the
+eighteenth century. The story has the fatal progression, the dark
+rigour, of one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks. Jean Calas, advanced
+in life, blameless, bewildered, protesting his innocence, had been
+broken on the wheel; and the sight of his decent dwelling, which brought
+home to me all that had been suffered there, spoiled for me, for half an
+hour, the impression of Toulouse.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_053.png" width="450" height="286" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxii" id="Chapter_xxii"></a>Chapter xxii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Carcassonne</div>
+
+<p>I SPENT but a few hours at Carcassonne; but those hours had a rounded
+felicity, and I cannot do better than transcribe from my note-book the
+little record made at the moment. Vitiated as it may be by crudity and
+incoherency, it has at any rate the freshness of a great emotion. This
+is the best quality that a reader may hope to extract from a narrative
+in which "useful information" and technical lore even of the most
+general sort are completely absent. For Carcassonne is moving, beyond a
+doubt; and the traveller who in the course of a little tour in France
+may have felt himself urged, in melancholy moments, to say that on the
+whole the disappointments are as numerous as the satisfactions, must
+admit that there can be nothing better than this.</p>
+
+<p>The country after you leave Toulouse continues to be charming; the more
+so that it merges its flatness in the distant Cévennes on one side, and
+on the other,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+far away on your right, in the richer range of the Pyrenees. Olives and
+cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces on the roofs of houses, soft,
+iridescent mountains, a warm yellow light&mdash;what more could the difficult
+tourist want? He left his luggage at the station, warily determined to
+look at the inn before committing himself to it. It was so evident (even
+to a cursory glance) that it might easily have been much better, that he
+simply took his way to the town, with the whole of a superb afternoon
+before him. When I say the town, I mean the towns; there being two at
+Carcassonne, perfectly distinct, and each with excellent claims to the
+title. They have settled the matter between them, however, and the
+elder, the shrine of pilgrimage, to which the other is but a
+stepping-stone, or even, as I may say, a humble door-mat, takes the name
+of the Cité. You see nothing of the Cité from the station; it is masked
+by the agglomeration of the <i>ville-basse</i>, which is relatively (but only
+relatively) new. A wonderful avenue of acacias leads to it from the
+station&mdash;leads past it, rather, and conducts you to a little high-backed
+bridge over the Aude, beyond which, detached and erect, a distinct
+mediæval silhouette, the Cité presents itself. Like a rival shop on the
+invidious side of a street, it has "no connection" with the
+establishment across the way, although the two places are united (if old
+Carcassonne may be said to be united to anything) by a vague little
+rustic faubourg. Perched on its solid pedestal, the perfect detachment
+of the Cité is what first strikes you. To take leave, without delay, of
+the <i>ville-basse</i>, I may say that the splendid acacias I have mentioned
+flung a summerish dusk over the place, in which a few scattered remains
+of stout walls and big bastions looked venerable and picturesque.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Carcassonne</div>
+
+<p>A little boulevard winds round the town, planted with trees and
+garnished with more benches than I ever saw provided by a soft-hearted
+municipality. This precinct had a warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as
+if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal and wandered about in the
+stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town at these hours
+must be ghostly enough on its neighbouring hill. Even by day it has the
+air of a vignette of Gustave Doré, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is
+almost too perfect&mdash;as if it were an enormous model placed on a big
+green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads
+where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a
+double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these,
+elaborately fortified, are the more curious); and this congregation of
+ramparts, towers, bastions, battlements, barbicans, is as fantastic and
+romantic as you please. The approach I mention here leads to the gate
+that looks toward Toulouse&mdash;the Porte de l'Aude. There is a second, on
+the other side, called, I believe, the Porte Narbonnaise, a magnificent
+gate, flanked with towers thick and tall, defended by elaborate
+outworks; and these two apertures alone admit you to the place&mdash;putting
+aside a small sally-port, protected by a great bastion, on the quarter
+that looks toward the Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p>As a votary, always, in the first instance, of a general impression, I
+walked all round the outer enceinte&mdash;a process on the very face of it
+entertaining. I took to the right of the Porte de l'Aude, without
+entering it, where the old moat has been filled in. The filling-in of
+the moat has created a grassy level at the foot of the big grey towers,
+which, rising at frequent intervals, stretch their stiff curtain of
+stone from point to point:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+the curtain drops without a fold upon the quiet grass, which was dotted
+here and there with a humble native dozing away the golden afternoon.
+The natives of the elder Carcassonne are all humble; for the core of the
+Cité has shrunken and decayed, and there is little life among the ruins.
+A few tenacious labourers who work in the neighbouring fields or in the
+<i>ville-basse</i>, and sundry octogenarians of both sexes, who are dying
+where they have lived and contribute much to the pictorial effect&mdash;these
+are the principal inhabitants. The process of converting the place from
+an irresponsible old town into a conscious "specimen" has of course been
+attended with eliminations; the population has, as a general thing, been
+restored away. I should lose no time in saying that restoration is the
+great mark of the Cité. M. Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will upon it,
+put it into perfect order, revived the fortifications in every detail. I
+do not pretend to judge the performance, carried out on a scale and in a
+spirit which really impose themselves on the imagination. Few architects
+have had such a chance, and M. Viollet-le-Duc must have been the envy of
+the whole restoring fraternity. The image of a more crumbling
+Carcassonne rises in the mind, and there is no doubt that forty years
+ago the place was more affecting. On the other hand, as we see it to-day
+it is a wonderful evocation; and if there is a great deal of new in the
+old, there is plenty of old in the new. The repaired crenellations, the
+inserted patches of the walls of the outer circle, sufficiently express
+this commixture. My walk brought me into full view of the Pyrenees,
+which, now that the sun had begun to sink and the shadows to grow long,
+had a wonderful violet glow. The platform at the base of the walls has a
+greater width on this side, and it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+made the scene more complete. Two or three old crones had crawled out of
+the Porte Narbonnaise to examine the advancing visitor; and a very
+ancient peasant, lying there with his back against a tower, was tending
+half a dozen lean sheep. A poor man in a very old blouse, crippled and
+with crutches lying beside him, had been brought out and placed on a
+stool, where he enjoyed the afternoon as best he might. He looked so ill
+and so patient that I spoke to him; found that his legs were paralysed
+and he was quite helpless. He had formerly been seven years in the army,
+and had made the campaign of Mexico with Bazaine. Born in the old Cité,
+he had come back there to end his days. It seemed strange, as he sat
+there with those romantic walls behind him and the great picture of the
+Pyrenees in front, to think that he had been across the seas to the
+far-away new world, had made part of a famous expedition, and was now a
+cripple at the gate of the mediæval city where he had played as a child.
+All this struck me as a great deal of history for so modest a figure&mdash;a
+poor little figure that could only just unclose its palm for a small
+silver coin.</p>
+
+<p>He<span class="sidenote">Carcassonne</span> was not the only acquaintance I made at Carcassonne. I had not
+pursued my circuit of the walls much farther when I encountered a person
+of quite another type, of whom I asked some question which had just then
+presented itself, and who proved to be the very genius of the spot. He
+was a sociable son of the <i>ville-basse</i>, a gentleman, and, as I
+afterwards learned, an employé at the prefecture&mdash;a person, in short,
+much esteemed at Carcassonne. (I may say all this, as he will never read
+these pages.) He had been ill for a month, and in the company of his
+little dog was taking his first airing; in his own phrase, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+was <i>amoureux-fou de la Cité</i>&mdash;he could lose no time in coming back to
+it. He talked of it indeed as a lover, and, giving me for half an hour
+the advantage of his company, showed me all the points of the place. (I
+speak here always of the outer enceinte; you penetrate to the
+inner&mdash;which is the specialty of Carcassonne and the great
+curiosity&mdash;only by application at the lodge of the regular custodian, a
+remarkable functionary, who, half an hour later, when I had been
+introduced to him by my friend the amateur, marched me over the
+fortifications with a tremendous accompaniment of dates and technical
+terms.) My companion pointed out to me in particular the traces of
+different periods in the structure of the walls. There is a portentous
+amount of history embedded in them, beginning with Romans and Visigoths;
+here and there are marks of old breaches hastily repaired. We passed
+into the town&mdash;into that part of it not included in the citadel. It is
+the queerest and most fragmentary little place in the world, as
+everything save the fortifications is being suffered to crumble away in
+order that the spirit of M. Viollet-le-Duc alone may pervade it and it
+may subsist simply as a magnificent shell. As the leases of the wretched
+little houses fall in, the ground is cleared of them; and a mumbling old
+woman approached me in the course of my circuit, inviting me to condole
+with her on the disappearance of so many of the hovels which in the last
+few hundred years (since the collapse of Carcassonne as a stronghold)
+had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in the space between
+the two circles. These habitations, constructed of materials taken from
+the ruins, nestled there snugly enough. This intermediate space had
+therefore become a kind of street, which has crumbled in turn, as the
+fortress<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+has grown up again. There are other streets beside, very diminutive and
+vague, where you pick your way over heaps of rubbish and become
+conscious of unexpected faces looking at you out of windows as detached
+as the cherubic heads. The most definite thing in the place was the
+little café, where the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the old
+Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little château and the
+little cathedral. Everything in the Cité is little; you can walk round
+the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the château, which,
+with a picturesque old face, flanking towers, and a dry moat, is to-day
+simply a bare <i>caserne</i>, lounged half a dozen soldiers, unusually small.
+Nothing could be more odd than to see these objects enclosed in a
+receptacle which has much of the appearance of an enormous toy. The Cité
+and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_054.png" width="450" height="291" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxiii" id="Chapter_xxiii"></a>Chapter xxiii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Carcassonne</div>
+
+<p>CARCASSONE dates from the Roman occupation of Gaul. The place commanded
+one of the great roads into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and
+Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage. In the year 436
+Theodoric King of the Visigoths superseded both these parties; and it
+was during his occupation that the inner enceinte was raised upon the
+ruins of the Roman fortifications. Most of the Visigoth towers that are
+still erect are seated upon Roman substructions which appear to have
+been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion.
+The authors of these solid defences, though occasionally disturbed, held
+Carcassonne and the neighbouring country, in which they had established
+their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled
+by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four
+centuries, of which no traces remain. These facts I derive from a
+source<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc&mdash;a very luminous
+description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the
+accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when
+Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm of the viscounts of Béziers
+and infected by the Albigensian heresy, was besieged, in the name of the
+Pope, by the terrible Simon de Montfort and his army of crusaders. Simon
+was accustomed to success, and the town succumbed in the course of a
+fortnight. Thirty-one years later, having passed into the hands of the
+King of France, it was again besieged by the young Raymond de Trincavel,
+the last of the viscounts of Béziers; and of this siege M.
+Viollet-le-Duc gives a long and minute account, which the visitor who
+has a head for such things may follow, with the brochure in hand, on the
+fortifications themselves. The young Raymond de Trincavel, baffled and
+repulsed, retired at the end of twenty-four days. Saint Louis and Philip
+the Bold, in the thirteenth century, multiplied the defences of
+Carcassonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the
+Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being regarded as
+impregnable, the place had nothing to fear. It was not even attacked;
+and when in 1355 Edward the Black Prince marched into it, the
+inhabitants had opened the gates to the conqueror before whom all
+Languedoc was prostrate. I am not one of those who, as I said just now,
+have a head for such things, and having extracted these few facts, had
+made all the use of M. Viollet-le-Duc's pamphlet of which I was capable.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned that my obliging friend the <i>amoureux-fou</i> handed me
+over to the doorkeeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first
+committed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 358px;">
+<img src="images/ill_055_th.png" width="358" height="550" alt="CARCASSONNE." />
+<span class="caption">CARCASSONNE.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_055.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">to the wife of this functionary, a stout peasant-woman, who took a key
+down from a nail, conducted me to a postern door, and ushered me into
+the presence of her husband. Having just begun his rounds with a party
+of four persons, he was not many steps in advance. I added myself
+perforce to this party, which was not brilliantly composed, except that
+two of its members were gendarmes in full toggery, who announced in the
+course of our tour that they had been stationed for a year at
+Carcassonne and had never before had the curiosity to come up to the
+Cité. There was something brilliant certainly in that. The <i>gardien</i> was
+an extraordinarily typical little Frenchman, who struck me even more
+forcibly than the wonders of the inner enceinte; and as I am bound to
+assume, at whatever cost to my literary vanity, that there is not the
+slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public
+property. With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his
+flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice,
+extreme volubility, lucidity and neatness of utterance, he reminded me
+of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he
+was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure
+there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He
+knew absolutely what he was about, understood the place thoroughly, and
+constantly reminded his audience of what he himself had done in the way
+of excavations and reparations. He described himself as the brother of
+the architect of the work actually going forward (that which has been
+done since the death of M. Viollet-le-Duc, I suppose he meant), and this
+fact was more illustrative than all the others. It reminded me, as one
+is reminded at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+every turn, of the democratic conditions of French life: a man of the
+people, with a wife <i>en bonnet</i>, extremely intelligent, full of special
+knowledge, and yet remaining essentially of the people and showing his
+intelligence with a kind of ferocity, of defiance. Such a personage
+helps one to understand the red radicalism of France, the revolutions,
+the barricades, the sinister passion for theories. (I do not, of course,
+take upon myself to say that the individual I describe&mdash;who can know
+nothing of the liberties I am taking with him&mdash;is actually devoted to
+these ideals; I only mean that many such devotees must have his
+qualities.) In just the <i>nuance</i> that I have tried to indicate here it
+is a terrible pattern of man. Permeated in a high degree by
+civilisation, it is yet untouched by the desire which one finds in the
+Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to
+the figure of the gentleman. On the other hand, a <i>netteté</i>, a faculty
+of exposition, such as the English gentleman is rarely either blessed or
+cursed with.</p>
+
+<p>This<span class="sidenote">Carcassonne</span> brilliant, this suggestive warden of Carcassonne marched us about
+for an hour, haranguing, explaining, illustrating as he went; it was a
+complete little lecture, such as might have been delivered at the Lowell
+Institute, on the manner in which a first-rate <i>place forte</i> used to be
+attacked and defended. Our peregrinations made it very clear that
+Carcassonne was impregnable; it is impossible to imagine without having
+seen them such refinements of immurement, such ingenuities of
+resistance. We passed along the battlements and <i>chemins de ronde</i>,
+ascended and descended towers, crawled under arches, peered out of
+loopholes, lowered ourselves into dungeons, halted in all sorts of tight
+places while the purpose of something or other was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 348px;">
+<img src="images/ill_056_th.png" width="348" height="550" alt="CARCASSONNE" />
+<span class="caption">CARCASSONNE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_056.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">described to us. It was very curious, very interesting; above all it was
+very pictorial, and involved perpetual peeps into the little crooked,
+crumbling, sunny, grassy, empty Cité. In places, as you stand upon it,
+the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion; it looks
+as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge, at any
+rate, it flings down before you; it calls upon you to make up your mind
+on the matter of restoration. For myself I have no hesitation; I prefer
+in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however
+splendid. What is left is more precious than what is added; the one is
+history, the other is fiction; and I like the former the better of the
+two&mdash;it is so much more romantic. One is positive, so far as it goes;
+the other fills up the void with things more dead than the void itself,
+inasmuch as they have never had life. After that I am free to say that
+the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid achievement. The little
+custodian dismissed us at last, after having, as usual, inducted us into
+the inevitable repository of photographs. These photographs are a great
+nuisance all over the Midi. They are exceedingly bad for the most part;
+and the worst&mdash;those in the form of the hideous little
+<i>album-panorama</i>&mdash;are thrust upon you at every turn. They are a kind of
+tax that you must pay; the best way is to pay to be let off. It was not
+to be denied that there was a relief in separating from our accomplished
+guide, whose manner of imparting information reminded me of the
+energetic process by which I had seen mineral waters bottled. All this
+while the afternoon had grown more lovely; the sunset had deepened, the
+horizon of hills grown purple; the mass of the Canigou became more
+delicate, yet more distinct. The day had so far faded that the interior
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+the little cathedral was wrapped in twilight, into which the glowing
+windows projected something of their colour. This church has high beauty
+and value, but I will spare the reader a presentation of details which I
+myself had no opportunity to master. It consists of a romanesque nave,
+of the end of the eleventh century, and a Gothic choir and transepts of
+the beginning of the fourteenth; and, shut up in its citadel like a
+precious casket in a cabinet, it seems&mdash;or seemed at that hour&mdash;to have
+a sort of double sanctity. After leaving it and passing out of the two
+circles of walls, I treated myself, in the most infatuated manner, to
+another walk round the Cité. It is certainly this general impression
+that is most striking&mdash;the impression from outside, where the whole
+place detaches itself at once from the landscape. In the warm southern
+dusk it looked more than ever like a city in a fairy tale. To make the
+thing perfect, a white young moon, in its first quarter, came out and
+hung just over the dark silhouette. It was hard to come away&mdash;to
+incommode one's self for anything so vulgar as a railway train; I would
+gladly have spent the evening in revolving round the walls of
+Carcassonne. But I had in a measure engaged to proceed to Narbonne, and
+there was a certain magic in that name which gave me strength&mdash;Narbonne,
+the richest city in Roman Gaul.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_057.png" width="450" height="338" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxiv" id="Chapter_xxiv"></a>Chapter xxiv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Narbonne</div>
+
+<p>AT Narbonne I took up my abode at the house of a <i>serrurier mécanicien</i>,
+and was very thankful for the accommodation. It was my misfortune to
+arrive at this ancient city late at night, on the eve of market-day; and
+market-day at Narbonne is a very serious affair. The inns, on this
+occasion, are stuffed with wine-dealers; for the country round about,
+dedicated almost exclusively to Bacchus, has hitherto escaped the
+phylloxera. This deadly enemy of the grape is encamped over the Midi in
+a hundred places; blighted vineyards and ruined proprietors being quite
+the order of the day. The signs of distress are more frequent as you
+advance into Provence, many of the vines being laid under water in the
+hope of washing the plague away. There are healthy regions still,
+however, and the vintners find plenty to do at Narbonne.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Narbonne</div>
+
+<p>The traffic in wine appeared to be the sole thought of the Narbonnais;
+every one I spoke to had something to say about the harvest of gold that
+bloomed under its influence. "C'est inoui, monsieur, l'argent qu'il y a
+dans ce pays. Des gens à qui la vente de leur vin rapporte jusqu'à
+500,000 francs par an." That little speech addressed to me by a
+gentleman at the inn gives the note of these revelations. It must be
+said that there was little in the appearance either of the town or of
+its population to suggest the possession of such treasures. Narbonne is
+a <i>sale petite ville</i> in all the force of the term, and my first
+impression on arriving there was an extreme regret that I had not
+remained for the night at the lovely Carcassonne. My journey from that
+delectable spot lasted a couple of hours and was performed in
+darkness&mdash;a darkness not so dense, however, but that I was able to make
+out, as we passed it, the great figure of Béziers, whose ancient roofs
+and towers, clustered on a goodly hill-top, looked as fantastic as you
+please. I know not what appearance Béziers may present by day, but by
+night it has quite the grand air. On issuing from the station at
+Narbonne I found that the only vehicle in waiting was a kind of bastard
+tramcar, a thing shaped as if it had been meant to go upon rails; that
+is, equipped with small wheels, placed beneath it, and with a platform
+at either end, but destined to rattle over the stones like the most
+vulgar of omnibuses. To complete the oddity of this conveyance, it was
+under the supervision, not of a conductor, but of a conductress. A fair
+young woman with a pouch suspended from her girdle had command of the
+platform; and as soon as the car was full she jolted us into the town
+through clouds of the thickest dust I ever have swallowed. I have had
+occasion to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+speak of the activity of women in France&mdash;of the way they are always in
+the ascendant; and here was a signal example of their general utility.
+The young lady I have mentioned conveyed her whole company to the
+wretched little Hôtel de France, where it is to be hoped that some of
+them found a lodging. For myself, I was informed that the place was
+crowded from cellar to attic, and that its inmates were sleeping three
+or four in a room. At Carcassonne I should have had a bad bed, but at
+Narbonne, apparently, I was to have no bed at all. I passed an hour or
+two of flat suspense while fate settled the question of whether I should
+go on to Perpignan, return to Béziers, or still discover a modest couch
+at Narbonne. I shall not have suffered in vain, however, if my example
+serves to deter other travellers from alighting unannounced at that city
+on a Wednesday evening. The retreat to Béziers, not attempted in time,
+proved impossible, and I was assured that at Perpignan, which I should
+not reach till midnight, the affluence of wine-dealers was not less than
+at Narbonne. I interviewed every hostess in the town, and got no
+satisfaction but distracted shrugs. Finally, at an advanced hour, one of
+the servants of the Hôtel de France, where I had attempted to dine, came
+to me in triumph to proclaim that he had secured for me a charming
+apartment in a <i>maison bourgeoise</i>. I took possession of it gratefully,
+in spite of its having an entrance like a stable and being pervaded by
+an odour compared with which that of a stable would have been delicious.
+As I have mentioned, my landlord was a locksmith, and he had strange
+machines which rumbled and whirred in the rooms below my own.
+Nevertheless I slept, and I dreamed of Carcassonne. It was better to do
+that than to dream of the Hôtel de France.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Narbonne</div>
+
+<p>I was obliged to cultivate relations with the cuisine of this
+establishment. Nothing could have been more <i>méridional</i>; indeed, both
+the dirty little inn and Narbonne at large seemed to me to have the
+infirmities of the south without its usual graces. Narrow, noisy,
+shabby, belittered and encumbered, filled with clatter and chatter, the
+Hôtel de France would have been described in perfection by Alphonse
+Daudet. For what struck me above all in it was the note of the Midi as
+he has represented it&mdash;the sound of universal talk. The landlord sat at
+supper with sundry friends in a kind of glass cage, with a genial
+indifference to arriving guests; the waiters tumbled over the loose
+luggage in the hall; the travellers who had been turned away leaned
+gloomily against door-posts; and the landlady, surrounded by confusion,
+unconscious of responsibility, and animated only by the spirit of
+conversation, bandied high-voiced compliments with the <i>voyageurs de
+commerce</i>. At ten o'clock in the morning there was a table d'hôte for
+breakfast&mdash;a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every room and
+pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry
+marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of
+Languedoc adhering to their hands and their boots. I mention the latter
+articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very hot, and
+there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odour; there
+was in particular a horrible mixture known as <i>gras-double</i>, a light
+grey, glutinous, nauseating mess, which my companions devoured in large
+quantities. A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever saw; a
+collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a
+farmers' ordinary. The conversation was mainly bucolic; though a part of
+it, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 358px;">
+<img src="images/ill_058_th.png" width="358" height="550" alt="NARBONNE&mdash;THE WASHING PLACE" />
+<span class="caption">NARBONNE&mdash;THE WASHING PLACE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_058.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to
+whether or no the maid-servant were <i>sage</i>&mdash;a discussion which went on
+under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful
+<i>gras-double</i>, and to which she contributed the most convincing blushes.
+It was thoroughly <i>méridional</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In going to Narbonne I had of course counted upon Roman remains; but
+when I went forth in search of them I perceived that I had hoped too
+fondly. There is really nothing in the place to speak of; that is, on
+the day of my visit there was nothing but the market, which was in
+complete possession. "This intricate, curious, but lifeless town,"
+Murray calls it; yet to me it appeared overflowing with life. Its
+streets are mere crooked, dirty lanes, bordered with perfectly
+insignificant houses; but they were filled with the same clatter and
+chatter that I had found at the hotel. The market was held partly in the
+little square of the hôtel de ville, a structure which a flattering
+woodcut in the Guide-Joanne had given me a desire to behold. The reality
+was not impressive, the old colour of the front having been completely
+restored away. Such interest as it superficially possesses it derives
+from a fine mediæval tower which rises beside it with turrets at the
+angles&mdash;always a picturesque thing. The rest of the market was held in
+another <i>place</i>, still shabbier than the first, which lies beyond the
+canal. The Canal du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this
+point by a small suspension-bridge, presented a certain sketchability.
+On the farther side were the vendors and chafferers&mdash;old women under
+awnings and big umbrellas, rickety tables piled high with fruit, white
+caps and brown faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys. Beneath this picture was
+another&mdash;a long row of washerwomen, on their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+knees on the edge of the canal, pounding and wringing the dirty linen of
+Narbonne&mdash;no great quantity, to judge by the costume of the people.
+Innumerable rusty men, scattered all over the place, were buying and
+selling wine, straddling about in pairs, in groups, with their hands in
+their pockets, and packed together at the doors of the cafés. They were
+mostly fat and brown and unshaven; they ground their teeth as they
+talked; they were very <i>méridionaux</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Narbonne</span> only two lions at Narbonne are the cathedral and the museum, the
+latter of which is quartered in the hôtel de ville. The cathedral,
+closely shut in by houses and with the west front undergoing repairs, is
+singular in two respects. It consists exclusively of a choir, which is
+of the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the next, and
+of great magnificence. There is absolutely nothing else. This choir, of
+extraordinary elevation, forms the whole church. I sat there a good
+while; there was no other visitor. I had taken a great dislike to poor
+little Narbonne, which struck me as sordid and overheated, and this
+place seemed to extend to me, as in the Middle Ages, the privilege of
+sanctuary. It is a very solemn corner. The other peculiarity of the
+cathedral is that, externally, it bristles with battlements, having
+anciently formed part of the defences of the <i>archevêché</i>, which is
+beside it and which connects it with the hôtel de ville. This
+combination of the church and the fortress is very curious, and during
+the Middle Ages was not without its value. The palace of the former
+archbishops of Narbonne (the hôtel de ville of to-day forms part of it)
+was both an asylum and an arsenal during the hideous wars by which all
+Languedoc was ravaged in the thirteenth century. The whole mass of
+buildings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 346px;">
+<img src="images/ill_059_th.png" width="346" height="550" alt="NARBONNE&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL AND HÔTEL DE VILLE." />
+<span class="caption">NARBONNE&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL AND HÔTEL DE VILLE.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_059.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">is jammed together in a manner that from certain points of view makes it
+far from apparent which feature is which. The museum occupies several
+chambers at the top of the hôtel de ville, and is not an imposing
+collection. It was closed, but I induced the portress to let me in&mdash;a
+silent, cadaverous person, in a black coif, like a <i>béguine</i>, who sat
+knitting in one of the windows while I went the rounds. The number of
+Roman fragments is small, and their quality is not the finest; I must
+add that this impression was hastily gathered. There is, indeed, a work
+of art in one of the rooms which creates a presumption in favour of the
+place&mdash;the portrait (rather a good one) of a citizen of Narbonne, whose
+name I forget, who is described as having devoted all his time and his
+intelligence to collecting the objects by which the visitor is
+surrounded. This excellent man was a connoisseur, and the visitor is
+doubtless often an ignoramus.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_060.png" width="450" height="291" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxv" id="Chapter_xxv"></a>Chapter xxv</h3>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"Cette, with its glistening houses white,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Curves with the curving beach away</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">To where the lighthouse beacons bright,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Far in the bay."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Montpellier</div>
+
+<p>THAT stanza of Matthew Arnold's, which I happened to remember, gave a
+certain importance to the half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station
+at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left
+Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached Cette the darkness
+had descended. I therefore missed the sight of the glistening houses,
+and had to console myself with that of the beacon in the bay, as well as
+with a <i>bouillon</i> of which I partook at the buffet aforesaid; for, since
+the morning, I had not ventured to return to the table d'hôte at
+Narbonne. The Hôtel Nevet at Montpellier, which I reached an hour later,
+has an ancient renown all over the south of France&mdash;advertises itself, I
+believe, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+<i>le plus vastedu midi</i>. It seemed to me the model of a good provincial
+inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine
+corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence, in
+the <i>bon temps</i>, used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive
+than that of the new caravansaries. It dates from the days when
+Montpellier was still accounted a fine winter residence for people with
+weak lungs; and this rather melancholy tradition, together with the
+former celebrity of the school of medicine still existing there, but
+from which the glory has departed, helps to account for its combination
+of high antiquity and vast proportions. The old hotels were usually more
+concentrated; but the school of medicine passed for one of the
+attractions of Montpellier. Long before Mentone was discovered or
+Colorado invented, British invalids travelled down through France in the
+post-chaise or the public coach, to spend their winters in the wonderful
+place which boasted both a climate and a faculty. The air is mild, no
+doubt, but there are refinements of mildness which were not then
+suspected, and which in a more analytic age have carried the annual wave
+far beyond Montpellier. The place is charming, all the same; and it
+served the purpose of John Locke, who made a long stay there, between
+1675 and 1679, and became acquainted with a noble fellow-visitor, Lord
+Pembroke, to whom he dedicated the famous Essay. There are places that
+please without your being able to say wherefore, and Montpellier is one
+of the number. It has some charming views, from the great promenade of
+the Peyrou; but its position is not strikingly fine. Beyond this it
+contains a good museum and the long façades of its school, but these are
+its only definite treasures. Its cathedral<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+struck me as quite the weakest I had seen, and I remember no other
+monument that made up for it. The place has neither the gaiety of a
+modern nor the solemnity of an ancient town, and it is agreeable as
+certain women are agreeable who are neither beautiful nor clever. An
+Italian would remark that it is sympathetic; a German would admit that
+it is <i>gemüthlich</i>. I spent two days there, mostly in the rain, and even
+under these circumstances I carried away a kindly impression. I think
+the Hôtel Nevet had something to do with it, and the sentiment of relief
+with which, in a quiet, even a luxurious, room that looked out on a
+garden, I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne. The
+phylloxera has destroyed the vines in the country that surrounds
+Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the
+thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.</p>
+
+<p>The gem of the place is the Musée Fabre, one of the best collections of
+paintings in a provincial city. François Fabre, a native of Montpellier,
+died there in 1837, after having spent a considerable part of his life
+in Italy, where he had collected a good many valuable pictures and some
+very poor ones, the latter class including several from his own hand. He
+was the hero of a remarkable episode, having succeeded no less a person
+than Vittorio Alfieri in the affections of no less a person than Louise
+de Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of no less a person than Charles
+Edward Stuart, the second pretender to the British crown. Surely no
+woman ever was associated sentimentally with three figures more
+diverse&mdash;a disqualified sovereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad
+French painter. The productions of M. Fabre, who followed in the steps
+of David, bear the stamp of a cold mediocrity; there is not much to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+be said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been
+written by M. Saint-Réné-Taillandier, who depicts her as delightful),
+which hangs in Florence, in the gallery of the Uffizzi, and makes a
+pendant to a likeness of Alfieri by the same author. Stendhal, in his
+"Mémoires d'un Touriste," says that this work of art represents her as a
+cook who has pretty hands. I am delighted to having an opportunity of
+quoting Stendhal, whose two volumes of the "Mémoires d'un Touriste"
+every traveller in France should carry in his portmanteau. I have had
+this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes,
+at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the defect that
+he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and
+that his style is perversely colourless for a man so fond of
+contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of
+the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks
+surmounted with sentimental "subjects." Stendhal does not admire these
+clocks, but he almost does. He admires Domenichino and Guercino, he
+prizes the Bolognese school of painters because they "spoke to the
+soul." He is a votary of the new classic, is fond of tall, square,
+regular buildings, and thinks Nantes, for instance, full of the "air
+noble." It was a pleasure to me to reflect that five-and-forty years ago
+he had alighted in that city, at the very inn in which I spent a night
+and which looks down on the Place Graslin and the theatre. The hotel
+that was the best in 1837 appears to be the best to-day. On the subject
+of Touraine Stendhal is extremely refreshing; he finds the scenery
+meagre and much overrated, and proclaims his opinion with perfect
+frankness. He does, however, scant justice to the banks of the Loire;
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+want of appreciation of the picturesque&mdash;want of the sketcher's
+sense&mdash;causes him to miss half the charm of a landscape which is nothing
+if not "quiet," as a painter would say, and of which the felicities
+reveal themselves only to waiting eyes. He even despises the Indre, the
+river of Madame Sand. The "Mémoires d'un Touriste" are written in the
+character of a commercial traveller, and the author has nothing to say
+about Chenonceaux or Chambord, or indeed about any of the châteaux of
+that part of France; his system being to talk only of the large towns,
+where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his
+ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually
+excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne and strangely
+indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of
+things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt
+to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the
+Countess of Albany terribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died
+of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier. The Countess of
+Albany left her property to Fabre; and I suppose some of the pieces in
+the museum of his native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that
+fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out to the stranger
+in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Montpellier</span> institution has had other benefactors, notably a certain M. Bruyas,
+who has enriched it with an extraordinary number of portraits of
+himself. As these, however, are by different hands, some of them
+distinguished, we may suppose that it was less the model than the
+artists to whom M. Bruyas wished to give publicity. Easily first are two
+large specimens of David Teniers, which are incomparable for brilliancy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+and a glowing perfection of execution. I have a weakness for this
+singular genius, who combined the delicate with the grovelling, and I
+have rarely seen richer examples. Scarcely less valuable is a Gerard Dow
+which hangs near them, though it must rank lower, as having kept less of
+its freshness. This Gerard Dow did me good, for a master is a master,
+whatever he may paint. It represents a woman paring carrots, while a boy
+before her exhibits a mouse-trap in which he has caught a frightened
+victim. The goodwife has spread a cloth on the top of a big barrel which
+serves her as a table, and on this brown, greasy napkin, of which the
+texture is wonderfully rendered, lie the raw vegetables she is preparing
+for domestic consumption. Beside the barrel is a large caldron lined
+with copper, with a rim of brass. The way these things are painted
+brings tears to the eyes; but they give the measure, of the Musée Fabre,
+where two specimens of Teniers and a Gerard Dow are the jewels. The
+Italian pictures are of small value; but there is a work by Sir Joshua
+Reynolds, said to be the only one in France&mdash;an infant Samuel in prayer,
+apparently a repetition of the picture in England which inspired the
+little plaster image, disseminated in Protestant lands, that we used to
+admire in our childhood. Sir Joshua, somehow, was an eminently
+Protestant painter; no one can forget that, who in the National Gallery
+in London has looked at the picture in which he represents several young
+ladies as nymphs, voluminously draped, hanging garlands over a statue&mdash;a
+picture suffused indefinably with the Anglican spirit and exasperating
+to a member of one of the Latin races. It is an odd chance therefore
+that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been
+least <i>bien vus</i>. This is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV. and of the pastors of the
+desert. From the garden of the Peyrou, at Montpellier, you may see the
+hills of the Cévennes, to which they of the religion fled for safety and
+out of which they were hunted and harried.</p>
+
+<p>I have only to add, in regard to the Musée Fabre, that it contains the
+portrait of its founder&mdash;a little, pursy, fat-faced, elderly man, whose
+countenance contains few indications of the power that makes
+distinguished victims. He is, however, just such a personage as the
+mind's eye sees walking on the terrace of the Peyrou of an October
+afternoon in the early years of the century; a plump figure in a
+chocolate-coloured coat and a <i>culotte</i> that exhibits a good leg&mdash;a
+culotte provided with a watch-fob from which a heavy seal is suspended.
+This Peyrou (to come to it at last) is a wonderful place, especially to
+be found in a little provincial city. France is certainly the country of
+towns that aim at completeness; more than in other lands they contain
+stately features as a matter of course. We should never have ceased to
+hear about the Peyrou if fortune had placed it at a Shrewsbury or a
+Buffalo. It is true that the place enjoys a certain celebrity at home,
+which it amply deserves, moreover; for nothing could be more impressive
+and monumental. It consists of an "elevated platform," as Murray
+says&mdash;an immense terrace laid out, in the highest part of the town, as a
+garden, and commanding in all directions a view which in clear weather
+must be of the finest. I strolled there in the intervals of showers, and
+saw only the nearer beauties&mdash;a great pompous arch of triumph in honour
+of Louis XIV. (which is not, properly speaking, in the garden, but faces
+it, straddling across the <i>place</i> by which you approach it from the
+town), an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+equestrian statue of that monarch set aloft in the middle of the
+terrace, and a very exalted and complicated fountain, which forms a
+background to the picture. This fountain gushes from a kind of hydraulic
+temple, or <i>château d'eau</i>, to which you ascend by broad flights of
+steps, and which is fed by a splendid aqueduct, stretched in the most
+ornamental and unexpected manner across the neighbouring valley. All
+this work dates from the middle of the last century. The combination of
+features&mdash;the triumphal arch, or gate; the wide fair terrace, with its
+beautiful view; the statue of the grand monarch; the big architectural
+fountain, which would not surprise one at Rome, but does surprise one at
+Montpellier; and to complete the effect, the extraordinary aqueduct,
+charmingly fore-shortened&mdash;all this is worthy of a capital, of a little
+court-city. The whole place, with its repeated steps, its balustrades,
+its massive and plentiful stonework, is full of the air of the last
+century&mdash;<i>sent bien son dix-huitième siècle</i>; none the less so, I am
+afraid, that, as I read in my faithful Murray, after the revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes the block, the stake, the wheel had been erected
+here for the benefit of the desperate Camisards.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_061.png" width="450" height="277" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxvi" id="Chapter_xxvi"></a>Chapter xxvi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">The Pont du Gard</div>
+
+<p>IT was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again&mdash;the land where
+the silver-grey earth is impregnated with the light of the sky. To
+celebrate the event, as soon as I arrived at Nîmes I engaged a calèche
+to convey me to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young and was
+exceptionally fair; it appeared well, for a longish drive, to take
+advantage, without delay, of such security. After I had left the town I
+became more intimate with that Provençal charm which I had already
+enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet
+sunshine and the white rocks and lurked in the smoke puffs of the little
+olives. The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are
+neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as you have seen them
+beyond the Alps; but this mild colourless bloom seems the very texture
+of the country. The road from Nîmes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is
+superb; broad enough for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+an army and as white and firm as a dinner-table. It stretches away over
+undulations which have a kind of rhythmic value, and in the curves it
+makes through the wide, free country, where there is never a hedge or a
+wall and the detail is always exquisite, there is something majestic,
+almost processional. Some twenty minutes before I reached the little inn
+that marks the termination of the drive my vehicle met with an accident
+which just missed being serious, and which engaged the attention of a
+gentleman who, followed by his groom and mounted on a strikingly
+handsome horse, happened to ride up at the moment. This young man, who,
+with his good looks and charming manner, might have stepped out of a
+novel of Octave Feuillet, gave me some very intelligent advice in
+reference to one of my horses that had been injured, and was so good as
+to accompany me to the inn, with the resources of which he was
+acquainted, to see that his recommendations were carried out. The result
+of our interview was that he invited me to come and look at a small but
+ancient château in the neighbourhood, which he had the happiness&mdash;not
+the greatest in the world, he intimated&mdash;to inhabit, and at which I
+engaged to present myself after I should have spent an hour at the Pont
+du Gard. For the moment, when we separated, I gave all my attention to
+that great structure. You are very near it before you see it; the ravine
+it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the picture. The scene at this
+point grows extremely beautiful. The ravine is the valley of the Garden,
+which the road from Nîmes has followed some time without taking account
+of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct,
+deepens and expands and puts on those characteristics which are best
+suited to give it effect.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">The Pont du Gard</div>
+
+<p>The gorge becomes romantic, still and solitary, and, with its white
+rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear-coloured river, in whose
+slow course there is, here and there, a deeper pool. Over the valley,
+from side to side and ever so high in the air, stretch the three tiers
+of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing, and nothing
+could well be more Roman. The hugeness, the solidity, the
+unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leave you
+nothing to say&mdash;at the time&mdash;and make you stand gazing. You simply feel
+that it is noble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness. A
+road, branching from the highway, descends to the level of the river and
+passes under one of the arches. This road has a wide margin of grass and
+loose stones, which slopes upward into the bank of the ravine. You may
+sit here as long as you please, staring up at the light, strong piers;
+the spot is sufficiently "wild," though two or three stone benches have
+been erected on it. I remained there an hour and got a complete
+impression; the place was perfectly soundless and, for the time at
+least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a
+fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pass that at the
+same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality.
+That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in
+the nice adaptation of the means to the end. The means are always
+exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigour was
+apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing
+small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great. Of this Roman
+rigour the Pont du Gard is an admirable example. It would be a great
+injustice, however, not to insist upon its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 343px;">
+<img src="images/ill_062_th.png" width="343" height="550" alt="THE PONT DU GARD." />
+<span class="caption">THE PONT DU GARD.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_062.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">beauty&mdash;a kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to
+please but to serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it
+carries out this intention. The number of arches in each tier is
+different; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The
+preservation of the thing is extraordinary; nothing has crumbled or
+collapsed; every feature remains, and the huge blocks of stone, of a
+brownish-yellow (as if they had been baked by the Provençal sun for
+eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as
+evenly as the day they were laid together. All this to carry the water
+of a couple of springs to a little provincial city! The conduit on the
+top has retained its shape and traces of the cement with which it was
+lined. When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed
+to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty
+empire were still as erect as the supports of the aqueduct; and it was
+open to a solitary tourist, sitting there sentimental, to believe that
+no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as
+we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what
+they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the three or four deepest
+impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a manner with which
+they might have been satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>I feel as if it were scarcely discreet to indicate the whereabouts of
+the château of the obliging young man I had met on the way from Nîmes; I
+must content myself with saying that it nestled in an enchanting
+valley&mdash;<i>dans le fond</i>, as they say in France&mdash;and that I took my course
+thither on foot after leaving the Pont du Gard. I find it noted in my
+journal as "an adorable little corner." The principal feature of the
+place is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+couple of very ancient towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and mantled in
+scarlet Virginia-creeper. One of these towers, reputed to be of
+Saracenic origin, is isolated, and is only the more effective; the other
+is incorporated in the house, which is delightfully fragmentary and
+irregular. It had got to be late by this time, and the lonely <i>castel</i>
+looked crepuscular and mysterious. An old housekeeper was sent for, who
+showed me the rambling interior; and then the young man took me into a
+dim old drawing-room, which had no less than four chimney-pieces, all
+unlighted, and gave me a refection of fruit and sweet wine. When I
+praised the wine and asked him what it was, he said simply "C'est du vin
+de ma mère!" Throughout my little journey I had never yet felt myself so
+far from Paris; and this was a sensation I enjoyed more than my host,
+who was an involuntary exile, consoling himself with laying out a
+<i>manège</i> which he showed me as I walked away. His civility was great,
+and I was greatly touched by it. On my way back to the little inn where
+I had left my vehicle I passed the Pont du Gard and took another look at
+it. Its great arches made windows for the evening sky, and the rocky
+ravine, with its dusky cedars and shining river, was lonelier than
+before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried to swallow, a glass of horrible
+wine with my coachman; after which, with my reconstructed team, I drove
+back to Nîmes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness
+to the constant sheen of the Provençal landscape.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_063.png" width="450" height="284" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxvii" id="Chapter_xxvii"></a>Chapter xxvii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Aigues-Mortes</div>
+
+<p>THE weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an
+imprudence not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes. Nîmes itself could wait;
+at a pinch I could attend to Nîmes in the rain. It was my belief that
+Aigues-Mortes was a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems
+should have an opportunity to sparkle. This is an excursion of but a few
+hours, and there is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that
+will convey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town
+where the blessed Saint Louis twice embarked for the Crusades. You may
+get back to Nîmes for dinner; the run&mdash;or rather the walk, for the train
+doesn't run&mdash;is of about an hour. I found the little journey charming
+and looked out of the carriage window, on my right, at the distant
+Cévennes, covered with tones of amber and blue, and, all around, at
+vineyards red with the touch of October. The grapes were gone, but the
+plants had a colour of their own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Within a certain distance of Aigues-Mortes they give place to wide
+salt-marshes, traversed by two canals; and over this expanse the train
+rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, though you
+know you are near the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of
+anything but the horizon. Suddenly it appears, the towered and embattled
+mass, lying so low that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight
+out of the ground; and it is not till the train stops close before them
+that you are able to take the full measure of its walls.</p>
+
+<p>Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide <i>étang</i>, or shallow inlet of
+the sea, the farther side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast
+from the Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carcassonne, to which it forms an
+admirable <i>pendant</i>, it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France.
+It has a rival in the person of Avignon, but the ramparts of Avignon are
+much less effective. Like Carcassonne, it is completely surrounded with
+its old fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there
+is but one circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been
+filled up, and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table
+without pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass,
+Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a
+school-boy draws upon his slate or that we see in the background of
+early Flemish pictures&mdash;a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost
+absurdly bare, broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes.
+Such, literally speaking, is this delightful little city, which needs to
+be seen to tell its full story. It is extraordinarily pictorial, and if
+it is a very small sister of Carcassonne, it has at least the essential
+features of the family. Indeed, it is even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+more like an image and less like a reality than Carcassonne; for by
+position and prospect it seems even more detached from the life of the
+present day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it
+sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal
+beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing
+could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it
+practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye
+of a solitary douanier, who strolled on the little quay beneath the
+western wall. "C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible," said this
+worthy man, with whom I had some conversation; and pleasant and peaceful
+is the place indeed, though the former of these epithets may suggest an
+element of gaiety in which Aigues-Mortes is deficient. The sand, the
+salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy.
+There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on the
+southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three
+times (it doesn't take long), but lingered most under the southern wall,
+where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat
+down on an old stone and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and
+the still, shining surface of the <i>étang</i>; and, as I did so, reflected
+that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been
+chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous
+interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I. and Charles V.
+It was also not easy to perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he
+started for the Holy Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped
+channels. An hour later I purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M.
+Marius Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly and to show
+that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have
+sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that
+he points out, but was glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has
+not retreated from the town since the thirteenth century. It was
+comfortable to think that things are not so changed as that. M. Topin
+indicates that the other French ports of the Mediterranean were not then
+<i>disponibles</i>, and that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an
+embarkation.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not
+crumbled like the Cité of Carcassonne. It can hardly be said to be
+alive; but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of
+the restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at
+Carcassonne, had miracles to accomplish. The interior is very still and
+empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets tenanted by a stray dog, a
+stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little <i>place</i>, with
+two or three cafés decorated by wide awnings&mdash;a little <i>place</i> of which
+the principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by
+Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that
+bears the name of that pious monarch. You may walk round the enceinte of
+Aigues-Mortes both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carcassonne,
+make a portion of this circuit on the <i>chemin de ronde</i>, the little
+projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This
+footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order,
+and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a
+locked gate at the top of the steps makes access impossible, or at least
+unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its citadel, an immense tower,
+larger than any of the others, a little detached<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 355px;">
+<img src="images/ill_064_th.png" width="355" height="550" alt="AIGUES-MORTES" />
+<span class="caption">AIGUES-MORTES</span>
+<a href="images/ill_064.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">and standing at the north-west angle of the town. I called upon the
+<i>casernier</i>&mdash;the custodian of the walls&mdash;and in his absence I was
+conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild,
+meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague&mdash;a scourge which,
+as might be expected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters," enters
+freely at the nine gates. The Tour de Constance is of extraordinary
+girth and solidity, divided into three superposed circular chambers,
+with very fine vaults, which are lighted by embrasures of prodigious
+depth, converging to windows little larger than loopholes. The place
+served for years as a prison to many of the Protestants of the south
+whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had exposed to atrocious
+penalties, and the annals of these dreadful chambers in the first half
+of the last century were written in tears and blood. Some of the
+recorded cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what
+man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of
+extermination was to be put into practice this horrible tower was an
+obvious resource. From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted
+by an old disused lighthouse, you see the little compact rectangular
+town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath
+you, and follow the plain configuration of its defences. You take
+possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_065.png" width="450" height="280" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxviii" id="Chapter_xxviii"></a>Chapter xxviii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Nîmes</div>
+
+<p>AFTER this I was free to look about me at Nîmes, and I did so with such
+attention as the place appeared to require. At the risk of seeming too
+easily and too frequently disappointed, I will say that it required
+rather less than I had been prepared to give. It is a town of three or
+four fine features rather than a town with, as I may say, a general
+figure. In general Nîmes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman
+remains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail
+in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses
+are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which
+had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It
+is true that this church looked out on a square completely French&mdash;a
+square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical
+<i>palais de justice</i> embellished with trees and parapets and occupied in
+the centre with a group of allegorical statues such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+as one encounters only in the cities of France, the chief of these being
+a colossal figure by Pradier representing Nîmes. An English, an American
+town which should have such a monument, such a square as this would be a
+place of great pretensions; but, like so many little <i>villes de
+province</i> in the country of which I write, Nîmes is easily ornamental.
+What nobler element can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of
+Mont Cavalier and the delightful old garden that surrounds them? All
+that quarter of Nîmes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has
+been revealed to the world at large by copious photography. A clear,
+abundant stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees
+and laid out in paths), and is distributed into basins which
+sufficiently refer themselves to the period that gave them birth&mdash;the
+period that has left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we admired
+at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and steps and balustrades,
+and a system of waterworks less impressive perhaps, but very ingenious
+and charming. The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French
+eighteenth century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a
+measure incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this
+umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a
+temple of Diana, but was more apparently a <i>nymphæum</i>, and appears to
+have had a graceful connection with the adjacent baths. I learn from
+Murray that this little temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced
+to its present state of ruin in 1577;" the moment at which the
+townspeople, threatened with a siege by the troops of the Crown, partly
+demolished it lest it should serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains
+are very fragmentary, but they serve to show<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in it on a perfect
+Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high <i>grille</i>, carefully tended, and
+has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagination tried to
+reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days. I do
+wrong perhaps to say that I <i>tried</i>; from a flight so deliberate I
+should have shrunk. But there was a certain contagion of antiquity in
+the air; and among the ruins of baths and temples, in the very spot
+where the aqueduct that crosses the Gardon in the wondrous manner I had
+seen discharged itself, the picture of a splendid paganism seemed
+vaguely to glow. Roman baths&mdash;Roman baths; those words alone were a
+scene. Everything was changed: I was strolling in a <i>jardin français</i>;
+the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging
+over the place, is crowned with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to
+be of mediæval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet
+of one of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as
+the French say) descended into a basin full of dark, cool recesses,
+where the slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through the clear green
+water&mdash;as in this attitude I surrendered myself to contemplation and
+reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world.
+Such moments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my
+memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Nîmes</span> fountain proper&mdash;the source of all these distributed waters&mdash;is the
+prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up
+at the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises
+with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same
+circumstances, appears to issue<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 351px;">
+<img src="images/ill_066_th.png" width="351" height="550" alt="NÎMES&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL" />
+<span class="caption">NÎMES&mdash;THE CATHEDRAL</span>
+<a href="images/ill_066.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudged up the Mont
+Cavalier&mdash;it is a matter of five minutes&mdash;and having committed this
+cockneyism, enhanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid Tour
+Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a moment ago. The only
+feature of this dateless tube, except the inevitable collection of
+photographs to which you are introduced by the doorkeeper, is the view
+you enjoy from its summit. This view is of course remarkably fine, but I
+am ashamed to say I have not the smallest recollection of it; for while
+I looked into the brilliant spaces of the air I seemed still to see only
+what I saw in the depths of the Roman baths&mdash;the image, disastrously
+confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left
+at Nîmes a far more considerable memento than a few old stones covered
+with water-moss. The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of
+Arles; at a respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small
+Colosseum, if I may be allowed the expression, and is in much better
+preservation than the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of
+the external walls, with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add
+that one should not speak of preservation, in regard to the arena at
+Nîmes, without speaking also of repair. After the great ruin ceased to
+be despoiled it began to be protected, and most of its wounds have been
+dressed with new material. These matters concern the archæologist; and I
+felt here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in
+the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue.
+The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so
+much should have survived. What remains at Nîmes, after all dilapidation
+is estimated, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+astounding. I spent an hour in the Arènes on that same sweet Sunday
+morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the
+corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still
+virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose
+sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail. The
+seats at Nîmes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not
+that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them
+and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical
+sky-line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the rim of the monstrous
+cup&mdash;a cup that had been filled with horrors. And yet I made my
+reflections: I said to myself that though a Roman arena is one of the
+most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same
+stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is
+brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite. The Arènes at
+Nîmes were arranged for a bull-fight&mdash;a form of recreation that, as I
+was informed, is much <i>dans les habitudes Nîmoises</i>, and very common
+throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the
+usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nîmes it has a
+characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make
+a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves.
+I was surprised at the prevalence in mild Provence of the Iberian vice,
+and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at
+Nîmes and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls
+are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of
+the term&mdash;being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of
+course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which
+I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 353px;">
+<img src="images/ill_067_th.png" width="353" height="550" alt="NÎMES&mdash;THE AMPHITHEATRE" />
+<span class="caption">NÎMES&mdash;THE AMPHITHEATRE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_067.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nîmes is mainly represented by the
+famous Maison Carrée. The first impression you receive from this
+delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have
+already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals,
+have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with
+which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and
+perhaps deplorably, absent. Admiration remains, however&mdash;admiration of a
+familiar and even slightly patronising kind. The Maison Carrée does not
+overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great
+sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite
+of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously
+preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming
+compactness, seem to bring one nearer to the century that built it than
+the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest
+that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck.
+If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy
+production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard
+that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafés and tobacco-shops.
+Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations and with
+the theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square
+house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it
+first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if
+it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of
+a playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular
+wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes
+so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been
+rendered to its charms;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in that city
+"le Panthéon de Rome, quelques temples de Grèce." Stendhal found it
+amusing to write in the character of a <i>commis-voyageur</i>, and sometimes
+it occurs to his reader that he really was one.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_068.png" width="450" height="271" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxix" id="Chapter_xxix"></a>Chapter xxix</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Tarascon</div>
+
+<p>ON my way from Nîmes to Arles I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly
+for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial
+than "Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin," and the story of the
+"siege" of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the
+Prussians) in the "Contes du Lundi." In the introduction which, for the
+new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to "Tartarin," the
+author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the
+displeasure with which he has been visited by the ticklish Tarasconnais.
+Daudet relates that in his attempt to shed a humorous light upon some of
+the more vivid phases of the Provençal character he selected Tarascon at
+a venture; not because the temperament of its natives is more
+vainglorious than that of their neighbours, or their rebellion against
+the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a
+particular Provençal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true
+"<i>produit du midi</i>," as Daudet says, a character of the most
+extravagant, genial comedy. He is a minimised Don Quixote, with much
+less dignity but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is
+a little masterpiece of the free fantastic. The Tarasconnais, however,
+declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the
+mocking child of Nîmes, who would have been better employed, they
+doubtless thought, in showing up the infirmities of his own family. I am
+bound to add that when I passed through Tarascon they did not appear to
+be in the least out of humour. Nothing could have been brighter, easier,
+more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the picture it presented
+to my mind. It lies quietly beside the Rhone, looking across at
+Beaucaire, which seems very distant and independent, and tacitly
+consenting to let the castle of the good King René of Anjou, which
+projects very boldly into the river, pass for its most interesting
+feature. The other features are, primarily, a sort of vivid sleepiness
+in the aspect of the place, as if the September noon (it had lingered on
+into October) lasted longer there than elsewhere; certain low arcades
+which make the streets look grey and exhibit empty vistas; and a very
+curious and beautiful walk beside the Rhone, denominated the Chaussée&mdash;a
+long and narrow causeway, densely shaded by two rows of magnificent old
+trees planted in its embankment and rendered doubly effective at the
+moment I passed over it by a little train of collegians who had been
+taken out for mild exercise by a pair of young priests. Lastly one may
+say that a striking element of Tarascon, as of any town that lies on the
+Rhone, is simply the Rhone itself; the big brown flood, of uncertain
+temper, which has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+never taken time to forget that it is a child of the mountain and the
+glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great privileges.
+Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these privileges,
+chief among which was that of frightening the good people of the old
+papal city half out of their wits.</p>
+
+<p>The<span class="sidenote">Tarascon</span> château of King René serves to-day as the prison of a district, and
+the traveller who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at
+the Mairie of Tarascon. If he have had a certain experience of French
+manners, his application will be accompanied with the forms of a
+considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted
+as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a
+severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its
+construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have
+warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed
+for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It is a
+square and simple mass, composed of small yellow stones and perched on a
+pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the
+usual circular towers at the corners and a heavy cornice at the top, and
+immense stretches of sun-scorched wall relieved at wide intervals by
+small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme
+steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as
+sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large
+moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall
+fortress the good René retired in the middle of the fifteenth century,
+finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion
+which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a
+much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+his life for thrones he didn't care for, and exalted only to be quickly
+cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of
+his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon
+and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun
+earlier in the century&mdash;finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake,
+in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in
+accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his
+old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante,
+addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in
+the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both
+clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered
+him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet
+Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light
+tissue of legend around the memory of the good King René.</p>
+
+<p>I strolled over his dusky habitation&mdash;it must have taken all his good
+humour to light it up&mdash;at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the
+usual number of castle-properties: a deep, well-like court; a collection
+of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embrasures of whose
+windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness
+of wall. These things constitute the general identity of old castles;
+and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of
+step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and
+remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honourable
+limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the
+least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with
+Beaucaire, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 332px;">
+<img src="images/ill_069_th.png" width="332" height="550" alt="TARASCON&mdash;THE CASTLE" />
+<span class="caption">TARASCON&mdash;THE CASTLE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_069.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It
+stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and
+looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned
+brother. Its position is magnificent and its outline very gallant. I was
+well rewarded for my pilgrimage; for if the castle of Beaucaire is only
+a fragment, the whole place, with its position and its views, is an
+ineffaceable picture. It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys, and its
+last tenant was that rash Duke François whom Richelieu, seizing every
+occasion to trample on a great noble, caused to be beheaded at Toulouse,
+where we saw, in the Capitol, the butcher's knife with which the
+cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns. The castle, after the
+death of this victim, was virtually demolished. Its site, which nature
+to-day has taken again to herself, has an extraordinary charm. The mass
+of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town and is as
+precipitous as the side of the Rhone. A tall, rusty iron gate admits you
+from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild tangled garden covering the
+side of the hill&mdash;for the whole place forms the public promenade of the
+townsfolk&mdash;a garden without flowers, with little steep, rough paths that
+wind under a plantation of small, scrubby stone-pines. Above this is the
+grassy platform of the castle, enclosed on one side only (toward the
+river) by a large fragment of wall and a very massive dungeon. There are
+benches placed in the lee of the wall, and others on the edge of the
+platform, where one may enjoy a view, beyond the river, of certain
+peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting
+peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the
+castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the
+honours&mdash;a very gentle,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into
+an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big
+sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon and the barefaced,
+bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon
+the nudity of the Provençal horizon&mdash;too much considering that I have
+spoken of the prospect from the heights of Beaucaire as lovely. But it
+is an exquisite bareness; it seems to exist for the purpose of allowing
+one to follow the delicate lines of the hills and touch with the eyes,
+as it were, the smallest inflections of the landscape. It makes the
+whole thing wonderfully bright and pure.</p>
+
+<p>Beaucaire<span class="sidenote">Tarascon</span> used to be the scene of a famous fair, the great fair of the
+south of France. It has gone the way of most fairs, even in France,
+where these delightful exhibitions hold their own much better than might
+be supposed. It is still held in the month of July; but the bourgeoises
+of Tarascon send to the Magasin du Louvre for their smart dresses, and
+the principal glory of the scene is its long tradition. Even now,
+however, it ought to be the prettiest of all fairs, for it takes place
+in, a charming wood which lies just beneath the castle, beside the
+Rhone. The booths, the barracks, the platforms of the mountebanks, the
+bright-coloured crowd, diffused through this midsummer shade and spotted
+here and there with the rich Provençal sunshine, must be of the most
+pictorial effect. It is highly probable too that it offers a large
+collection of pretty faces; for even in the few hours that I spent at
+Tarascon I discovered symptoms of the purity of feature for which the
+women of the <i>pays d'Arles</i> are renowned. The Arlesian head-dress was
+visible in the streets; and this delightful coiffure is so associated
+with a charming facial oval, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+dark mild eye, a straight Greek nose, and a mouth worthy of all the
+rest, that it conveys a presumption of beauty which gives the wearer
+time either to escape or to please you. I have read somewhere, however,
+that Tarascon is supposed to produce handsome men, as Arles is known to
+deal in handsome women. It may be that I should have found the
+Tarasconnais very fine fellows if I had encountered enough specimens to
+justify an induction. But there are very few males in the streets, and
+the place presented no appearance of activity. Here and there the black
+coif of an old woman or of a young girl was framed by a low doorway; but
+for the rest, as I have said, Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta.
+There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha, which I
+made a point of visiting before I returned to the station, and which,
+with its fine romanesque side-portal and its pointed and crocketed
+gothic spire, is as curious as it need be in view of its tradition. It
+stands in a quiet corner where the grass grows between the small
+cobble-stones, and you pass beneath a deep archway to reach it. The
+tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed with her own hands and
+attached to her girdle a dreadful dragon who was known as the Tarasque
+and is reported to have given his name to the city on whose site (amid
+the rocks which form the base of the château) he had his cavern. The
+dragon perhaps is the symbol of a ravening paganism dispelled by the
+eloquence of a sweet evangelist. The bones of the interesting saint, at
+all events, were found, in the eleventh century, in a cave beneath the
+spot on which her altar now stands. I know not what had become of the
+bones of the dragon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_070.png" width="450" height="309" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxx" id="Chapter_xxx"></a>Chapter xxx</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Arles</div>
+
+<p>THERE are two shabby old inns at Arles which compete closely for your
+custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Hôtel du Forum,
+the Hôtel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle),
+watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the
+chances of its neighbour, the Hôtel du Forum seems to glare at you
+invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these
+establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it
+had been the other. The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a
+little public square of Arles which somehow quite misses its effect. As
+a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is
+a charming place, as I think it is, I can hardly tell the reason why.
+The straight-nosed Arlésiennes account for it in some degree; and the
+remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+and the theatre. Beyond this, I remember with affection the
+ill-proportioned little Place des Hommes; not at all monumental, and
+given over to puddles and to shabby cafés. I recall with tenderness the
+tortuous and featureless streets, which looked liked the streets of a
+village and were paved with villainous little sharp stones, making all
+exercise penitential. Consecrated by association is even a tiresome walk
+that I took the evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view
+of the Rhone. I had been to Arles before, years ago, and it seemed to me
+that I remembered finding on the banks of the stream some sort of
+picture. I think that on the evening on which I speak there was a watery
+moon, which it seemed to me would light up the past as well as the
+present. But I found no picture, and I scarcely found the Rhone at all.
+I lost my way, and there was not a creature in the streets to whom I
+could appeal. Nothing could be more provincial than the situation of
+Arles at ten o'clock at night. At last I arrived at a kind of embankment
+where I could see the great mud-coloured stream slipping along in the
+soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened
+to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I
+had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I
+groped my way back to the inn over the infernal <i>cailloux</i>, feeling like
+a discomfited Dogberry. I remember now that this hotel was the one
+(whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico
+inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this
+exceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty
+to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful <i>gras-double</i>
+might have appeared at the table d'hôte, as it had done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+at Narbonne. Nevertheless I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless
+too&mdash;and this is the moral of my simple anecdote&mdash;my pointless little
+walk (I don't speak of the pavement) suffuses itself, as I look back
+upon it, with a romantic tone. And in relation to the inn I suppose I
+had better mention that I am well aware of the inconsistency of a person
+who dislikes the modern caravansary and yet grumbles when he finds a
+hotel of the superannuated sort. One ought to choose, it would seem, and
+make the best of either alternative. The two old taverns at Arles are
+quite unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the
+modern world, when Stendhal passed that way and the lumbering diligence
+deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are
+to-day. <i>Vieilles auberges de France</i>, one ought to enjoy their gritty
+floors and greasy window-panes. Let it be put on record therefore that I
+have been, I won't say less comfortable, but at least less happy, at
+better inns.</p>
+
+<p>To be really historic, I should have mentioned that before going to look
+for the Rhone I had spent part of the evening on the opposite side of
+the little place, and that I indulged in this recreation for two
+definite reasons. One of these was that I had an opportunity of
+gossiping at a café with a conversable young Englishman whom I had met
+in the afternoon at Tarascon and more remotely, in other years, in
+London; the other was that there sat enthroned behind the counter a
+splendid mature Arlésienne, whom my companion and I agreed that it was a
+rare privilege to contemplate. There is no rule of good manners or
+morals which makes it improper, at a café, to fix one's eyes upon the
+<i>dame de comptoir</i>; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your
+<i>consummation</i>. We were therefore free to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 381px;">
+<img src="images/ill_071_th.png" width="381" height="550" alt="ARLES&mdash;ST. TROPHIMUS" />
+<span class="caption">ARLES&mdash;ST. TROPHIMUS</span>
+<a href="images/ill_071.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">admire without restriction the handsomest person I had ever seen give
+change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would
+never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully
+rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Though she
+was not really old, she was antique; and she was very grave, even a
+little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled
+coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Cæsar. I have seen
+washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she; but
+even the head-dress of the Roman contadina contributes less to the
+dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately
+Arlesian cap, which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head;
+which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a considerable part
+of the crown; and which, finally, accommodates itself indescribably well
+to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the
+ears.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Arles: the Theatre</div>
+
+<p>This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little,
+for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the café I
+had dined, and before dining I had found time to go and look at the
+arena. Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general
+physiognomy and, except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus,
+no architecture, and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the
+feet like knife-blades. It was not then, on the other hand, that I saw
+the arena best. The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a
+pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux, the mediæval
+Pompeii, of which I shall give myself the pleasure of speaking. The
+evening of that day, however (my friend and I returned in time for a
+late dinner), I wandered among the Roman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon and gathered an
+impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the
+evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present
+occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to
+linger beyond its time in the heavens in order to let us look at things
+comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of
+the way, in Rome itself, on evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon
+broken shafts and slabs of antique pavement. As we sat in the theatre
+looking at the two lone columns that survive&mdash;part of the decoration of
+the back of the stage&mdash;and at the fragments of ruin around them, we
+might have been in the Roman Forum. The arena at Arles, with its great
+magnitude, is less complete than that of Nîmes; it has suffered even
+more the assaults of time and the children of time, and it has been less
+repaired. The seats are almost wholly wanting; but the external walls,
+minus the topmost tier of arches, are massively, ruggedly complete; and
+the vaulted corridors seem as solid as the day they were built. The
+whole thing is superbly vast and as monumental, for a place of light
+amusement&mdash;what is called in America a "variety-show"&mdash;as it entered
+only into the Roman mind to make such establishments. The <i>podium</i> is
+much higher than at Nîmes, and many of the great white slabs that faced
+it have been recovered and put into their places. The proconsular box
+has been more or less reconstructed, and the great converging passages
+of approach to it are still majestically distinct; so that, as I sat
+there in the moon-charmed stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered
+parapet of the ring, it was not impossible to listen to the murmurs and
+shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 334px;">
+<img src="images/ill_072_th.png" width="334" height="550" alt="ARLES&mdash;RUINS OF THE ROMAN THEATRE" />
+<span class="caption">ARLES&mdash;RUINS OF THE ROMAN THEATRE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_072.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The theatre has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with
+a different music. The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the
+most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular
+fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton&mdash;the arena may be called a
+skeleton&mdash;for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the
+row of columns which formed the scene&mdash;the permanent back-scene&mdash;remain;
+two marble pillars&mdash;I just mentioned them&mdash;are upright, with a fragment
+of their entablature. Before them is the vacant space which was filled
+by the stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep
+groove impressed upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a
+high screen had been intended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by
+the seats&mdash;half a cup&mdash;rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly
+marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc
+of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by
+slabs of coloured marble&mdash;red, yellow and green&mdash;which, though terribly
+battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the
+interior. Everything shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep
+of its enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the
+auditorium and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way
+in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of
+our epochs, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of
+extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was
+after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we
+came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The principal
+entrance was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+locked, but we effected an easy <i>escalade</i>, scaled a low parapet, and
+descended into the place behind the scenes. It was as light as day, and
+the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat on the broken
+benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I called
+touching just now was the thought that here the human voice, the
+utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of
+intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven
+armour, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short,
+one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no
+profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of
+Arles, who use it to pass, by no means in great numbers, from one part
+of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor and brushing, if
+need be, the empty benches. This familiarity does not kill the place
+again; it makes it, on the contrary, live a little&mdash;makes the present
+and the past touch each other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_073.png" width="450" height="367" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxi" id="Chapter_xxxi"></a>Chapter xxxi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Arles: the Museum</div>
+
+<p>THE third lion of Arles has nothing to do with the ancient world, but
+only with the old one. The church of Saint Trophimus, whose wonderful
+romanesque porch is the principal ornament of the principal <i>place</i>&mdash;a
+<i>place</i> otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering
+obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the hôtel de ville and the
+museum&mdash;the interesting church of Saint Trophimus swears a little, as
+the French say, with the peculiar character of Arles. It is very
+remarkable, but I would rather it were in another place. Arles is
+delightfully pagan, and Saint Trophimus, with its apostolic sculptures,
+is rather a false note. These sculptures are equally remarkable for
+their primitive vigour and for the perfect preservation in which they
+have come down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+to us. The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the twelfth century is
+covered with quaint figures which have not lost a nose or a finger. An
+angular Byzantine-looking Christ sits in a diamond-shaped frame at the
+summit of the arch, surrounded by little angels, by great apostles, by
+winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols and grotesque ornaments. It
+is a dense embroidery of sculpture, black with time, but as uninjured as
+if it had been kept under glass. One good mark for the French
+Revolution! Of the interior of the church, which has a nave of the
+twelfth century and a choir three hundred years more recent, I chiefly
+remember the odd feature that the romanesque aisles are so narrow that
+you literally&mdash;or almost&mdash;squeeze through them. You do so with some
+eagerness, for your natural purpose is to pass out to the cloister. This
+cloister, as distinguished and as perfect as the porch, has a great deal
+of charm. Its four sides, which are not of the same period (the earliest
+and best are of the twelfth century), have an elaborate arcade,
+supported on delicate pairs of columns, the capitals of which show an
+extraordinary variety of device and ornament. At the corners of the
+quadrangle these columns take the form of curious human figures. The
+whole thing is a gem of lightness and preservation and is often cited
+for its beauty; but&mdash;if it doesn't sound too profane&mdash;I prefer,
+especially at Arles, the ruins of the Roman theatre. The antique element
+is too precious to be mingled with anything less rare. This truth was
+very present to my mind during a ramble of a couple of hours that I took
+just before leaving the place; and the glowing beauty of the morning
+gave the last touch to the impression. I spent half an hour at the
+Museum; then I took another look at the Roman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 338px;">
+<img src="images/ill_074_th.png" width="338" height="550" alt="ARLES&mdash;DOOR OF ST. TROPHIMUS." />
+<span class="caption">ARLES&mdash;DOOR OF ST. TROPHIMUS.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_074.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">theatre; after which I walked a little out of the town to the Aliscamps,
+the old Elysian Fields, the meagre remnant of the old pagan place of
+sepulture, which was afterwards used by the Christians, but has been for
+ages deserted and now consists only of a melancholy avenue of cypresses
+lined with a succession of ancient sarcophagi, empty, mossy and
+mutilated. An iron-foundry, or some horrible establishment which is
+conditioned upon tall chimneys and a noise of hammering and banging, has
+been established near at hand; but the cypresses shut it out well
+enough, and this small patch of Elysium is a very romantic corner.</p>
+
+<p>The door of the Museum stands ajar, and a vigilant custodian, with the
+usual batch of photographs on his mind, peeps out at you disapprovingly
+while you linger opposite, before the charming portal of Saint
+Trophimus, which you may look at for nothing. When you succumb to the
+silent influence of his eye and go over to visit his collection, you
+find yourself in a desecrated church, in which a variety of ancient
+objects disinterred in Arlesian soil have been arranged without any
+pomp. The best of these, I believe, were found in the ruins of the
+theatre. Some of the most curious of them are early Christian
+sarcophagi, exactly on the pagan model, but covered with rude yet
+vigorously wrought images of the apostles and with illustrations of
+scriptural history. Beauty of the highest kind, either of conception or
+of execution, is absent from most of the Roman fragments, which belong
+to the taste of a late period and a provincial civilisation. But a gulf
+divides them from the bristling little imagery of the Christian
+sarcophagi, in which, at the same time, one detects a vague emulation of
+the rich examples by which their authors were surrounded. There is a
+certain element<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+of style in all the pagan things; there is not a hint of it in the early
+Christian relics, among which, according to M. Joanne, of the Guide, are
+to be found more fine sarcophagi than in any collection but that of St.
+John Lateran. In two or three of the Roman fragments there is a
+noticeable distinction; principally in a charming bust of a boy, quite
+perfect, with those salient eyes that one sees in antique portraits, and
+to which the absence of vision in the marble mask gives a look, often
+very touching, as of a baffled effort to see; also in the head of a
+woman, found in the ruins of the theatre, who, alas! has lost her nose
+and whose noble, simple contour, barring this deficiency, recalls the
+great manner of the Venus of Milo. There are various rich architectural
+fragments which indicate that that edifice was a very splendid affair.
+This little Museum at Arles, in short, is the most Roman thing I know of
+out of Rome.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/ill_075_th.png" width="600" height="418" alt="ARLES&mdash;THE CLOISTERS" />
+<span class="caption">ARLES&mdash;THE CLOISTERS</span>
+<a href="images/ill_075.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_076.png" width="450" height="268" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxii" id="Chapter_xxxii"></a>Chapter xxxii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Les Baux</div>
+
+<p>I FIND that I declared one evening, in a little journal I was keeping at
+that time, that I was weary of writing (I was probably very sleepy), but
+that it was essential I should make some note of my visit to Les Baux. I
+must have gone to sleep as soon as I had recorded this necessity, for I
+search my small diary in vain for any account of that enchanting spot. I
+have nothing but my memory to consult&mdash;a memory which is fairly good in
+regard to a general impression, but is terribly infirm in the matter of
+details and items. We knew in advance, my companion and I, that Les Baux
+was a pearl of picturesqueness; for had we not read as much in the
+handbook of Murray, who has the testimony of an English nobleman as to
+its attractions? We also knew that it lay some miles from Arles, on the
+crest of the Alpilles, the craggy little mountains which, as I stood on
+the breezy platform of Beaucaire, formed to my eye a charming, if
+somewhat remote, background to Tarascon; this assurance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+having been given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles, of whom we
+hired a rather lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but
+it proved a good day for the mediæval Pompeii; a grey, melancholy,
+moist, but rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to
+flout, as the poet says, the dejected and pulverised past. The drive
+itself was charming, for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the
+grey-green landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat and yet is
+never really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and repose. It
+is in constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself
+easily to outline and profile. When I say the bareness I mean the
+absence of woods and hedges. It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and
+stunted olive, and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage
+has a brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky. Of course
+it needs the sunshine, for all southern countries look a little false
+under the ground-glass of incipient bad weather. This was the case on
+the day of my pilgrimage to Les Baux. Nevertheless I was glad to keep
+going, as I was to arrive; and as I went it seemed to me that true
+happiness would consist in wandering through such a land on foot, on
+September afternoons, when one might stretch one's self on the warm
+ground in some shady hollow and listen to the hum of bees and the
+whistle of melancholy shepherds; for in Provence the shepherds whistle
+to their flocks. I saw two or three of them, in the course of this drive
+to Les Baux, meandering about, looking behind and calling upon the sheep
+in this way to follow, which the sheep always did, very promptly, with
+ovine unanimity. Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd
+threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+his flock close behind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at
+his heels, bending and twisting as it goes and looking rather like the
+tail of a dingy comet.</p>
+
+<p>Abou<span class="sidenote">Les Baux</span>t four miles from Arles, as you drive northward towards the
+Alpilles, of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often and, as he might
+say, so intimately, stand on a hill that overlooks the road the very
+considerable ruins of the abbey of Montmajour, one of the innumerable
+remnants of a feudal and ecclesiastical (as well as an architectural)
+past that one encounters in the south of France; remnants which, it must
+be confessed, tend to introduce a certain confusion and satiety into the
+passive mind of the tourist. Montmajour, however, is very impressive and
+interesting; the only trouble with it is that, unless you have stopped
+and returned to Arles, you see it in memory over the head of Les Baux,
+which is a much more absorbing picture. A part of the mass of buildings
+(the monastery) dates only from the last century; and the stiff
+architecture of that period does not lend itself very gracefully to
+desolation: it looks too much as if it had been burnt down the year
+before. The monastery was demolished during the Revolution, and it
+injures a little the effect of the very much more ancient fragments that
+are connected with it. The whole place is on a great scale; it was a
+rich and splendid abbey. The church, a vast basilica of the eleventh
+century and of the noblest proportions, is virtually intact; I mean as
+regards its essentials, for the details have completely vanished. The
+huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been
+hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a
+cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one
+meets, looking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it
+always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and
+precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have
+destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the church of
+Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt, almost as big as the edifice
+above it and making a complete subterranean temple, surrounded with a
+circular gallery, or deambulatory, which expands at intervals into five
+square chapels. There are other things, of which I have but a confused
+memory: a great fortified keep; a queer little primitive chapel hollowed
+out of the rock beneath these later structures and recommended to the
+visitor's attention as the confessional of Saint Trophimus, who shares
+with so many worthies the glory of being the first apostle of the Gauls.
+Then there is a strange, small church, of the dimmest antiquity,
+standing at a distance from the other buildings. I remember that after
+we had let ourselves down a good many steepish places to visit crypts
+and confessionals, we walked across a field to this archaic cruciform
+edifice and went thence to a point farther down the road, where our
+carriage was awaiting us. The chapel of the Holy Cross, as it is called,
+is classed among the historic monuments of France; and I read in a
+queer, rambling, ill-written book which I picked at Avignon, and in
+which the author, M. Louis de Laincel, has buried a great deal of
+curious information on the subject of Provence under a style inspiring
+little confidence, that the "délicieuse chapelle de Sainte-Croix" is a
+"véritable bijou artistique." He speaks of "a piece of lace in stone"
+which runs from one end of the building to the other, but of which I am
+obliged to confess that I have no recollection. I retain, however, a
+sufficiently clear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+impression of the little superannuated temple, with its four apses and
+its perceptible odour of antiquity&mdash;the odour of the eleventh century.</p>
+
+<p>The ruins of Les Baux remain quite indistinguishable even when you are
+directly beneath them, at the foot of the charming little Alpilles,
+which mass themselves with a kind of delicate ruggedness. Rock and ruin
+have been so welded together by the confusions of time that as you
+approach it from behind&mdash;that is, from the direction of Arles&mdash;the place
+presents simply a general air of cragginess. Nothing can be prettier
+than the crags of Provence; they are beautifully modelled, as painters
+say, and they have a delightful silvery colour. The road winds round the
+foot of the hills on the top of which Les Baux is planted, and passes
+into another valley, from which the approach to the town is many degrees
+less precipitous and may be comfortably made in a carriage. Of course
+the deeply inquiring traveller will alight as promptly as possible, for
+the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the
+least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its
+extraordinary position, its picturesqueness, its steepness, its
+desolation and decay. It hangs&mdash;that is, what remains of it&mdash;to the
+slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for
+the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done
+so&mdash;for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the
+crumbled particles have sought the lower level, while the remainder
+still clings to its magnificent perch.</p>
+
+<p>If I called Les Baux a city, just above, it was not that I was
+stretching a point in favour of the small spot which to-day contains but
+a few dozen inhabitants. The history of the place is as extraordinary as
+its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state, but an
+empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign
+of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which
+its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les
+Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time
+during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer
+home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage. The chronicle of
+this old Provençal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous
+and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little book&mdash;a modest
+pamphlet&mdash;at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the
+church, in one of the highest parts of Les Baux. The sisters have a
+school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I heard piping their
+lessons while I waited in the cold <i>parloir</i> for one of the ladies to
+come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more perfect than the
+manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet her small religious
+house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the world. It was
+spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had lately been papered
+and painted: in this respect, at the mediæval Pompeii, they were rather
+a discord. They were, at any rate, the newest, freshest thing at Les
+Baux. I remember going round to the church after I had left the good
+sisters, and to a little quiet terrace which stands in front of it,
+ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall, breast-high,
+over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air and all about
+the neighbouring country. I remember saying to myself that this little
+terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist of taste
+keeps in his mind as a picture. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>The church was small and brown and
+dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this, however, is no general description of
+Les Baux.</p>
+
+<p>I<span class="sidenote">Les Baux</span> am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple
+reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in
+lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle,
+have become fragmentary not through the sudden destruction, but through
+the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but
+a deserted city; more deserted far than even Carcassonne and
+Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in the grass-grown
+element. It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its
+greatness, when its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and
+Neophantis, kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia and emperors of
+Constantinople&mdash;even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules
+Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the
+fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained
+at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who,
+however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject
+towns, most of them, though a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were
+seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals
+of the kingdom of Naples, and its ladies were sought in marriage by half
+the first princes in Europe. A considerable part of the little narrative
+of M. Canonge is taken up with the great alliances of the House of Baux,
+whose fortunes, matrimonial and other, he traces from the eleventh
+century down to the sixteenth. The empty shells of a considerable number
+of old houses, many of which must have been superb, the lines of certain
+steep little streets, the foundations of a castle, and ever so many
+splendid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+views, are all that remains to-day of these great titles. To such a list
+I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people who emerged from
+the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze at the two
+foreigners who had driven over from Arles and whose horses were being
+baited at the modest inn. The resources of this establishment we did not
+venture otherwise to test, in spite of the seductive fact that the sign
+over the door was in the Provençal tongue. This little group included
+the baker, a rather melancholy young man, in high boots and a cloak,
+with whom and his companions we had a good deal of conversation. The
+Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race, with
+a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this one,
+the traveller who is waiting for his horses to be put in or his dinner
+to be prepared observes in the charming people who lend themselves to
+conversation in the hill-towns of Tuscany. The spot where our
+entertainers at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most inhabited
+portion of the town; as I say, there were at least a dozen human figures
+within sight. Presently we wandered away from them, scaled the higher
+places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and looked down
+from the cliff overhanging that portion of the road which I have
+mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind. I was unable to trace the
+configuration of the castle as plainly as the writers who have described
+it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to say that I did not even
+perceive the three great figures of stone (the three Marys, as they are
+called; the two Marys of Scripture, with Martha) which constitute one of
+the curiosities of the place and of which M. Jules Canonge speaks with
+almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+hyperbolical admiration. A brisk shower, lasting some ten minutes, led
+us to take refuge in a cavity of mysterious origin, where the melancholy
+baker presently discovered us, having had the <i>bonne pensée</i> of coming
+up for us with an umbrella which certainly belonged, in former ages, to
+one of the Stéphanettes or Berangères commemorated by M. Canonge. His
+oven, I am afraid, was cold so long as our visit lasted. When the rain
+was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered space before the
+inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things. They took the form
+of narrow, precipitous streets bordered by empty houses with gaping
+windows and absent doors, through which we had glimpses of sculptured
+chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and vault. Some of the
+houses are still inhabited, but most of them are open to the air and
+weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others present to the
+street a front which enables one to judge of the physiognomy of Les Baux
+in the days of its importance. This importance had pretty well passed
+away in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the place ceased
+to be an independent principality. It became&mdash;by bequest of one of its
+lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his time&mdash;part of the
+appanage of the kings of France, by whom it was placed under the
+protection of Arles, which had formerly occupied with regard to it a
+different position. I know not whether the Arlesians neglected their
+trust, but the extinction of the sturdy little stronghold is too
+complete not to have begun long ago. Its memories are buried under its
+ponderous stones. As we drove away from it in the gloaming my friend and
+I agreed that the two or three hours we had spent there were among the
+happiest impressions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+of a pair of tourists very curious of the picturesque. We almost forgot
+that we were bound to regret that the shortened day left us no time to
+drive five miles farther, above a pass in the little mountains&mdash;it had
+beckoned to us in the morning, when we came in sight of it, almost
+irresistibly&mdash;to see the Roman arch and mausoleum of Saint Remy. To
+compass this larger excursion (including the visit to Les Baux) you must
+start from Arles very early in the morning; but I can imagine no more
+delightful day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_077.png" width="450" height="261" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxiii" id="Chapter_xxxiii"></a>Chapter xxxiii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Avignon</div>
+
+<p>I HAD been twice at Avignon before, and yet I was not satisfied. I
+probably am satisfied now; nevertheless I enjoyed my third visit. I
+shall not soon forget the first, on which a particular emotion set an
+indelible stamp. I was creeping northward, in 1870, after four months
+spent, for the first time, in Italy. It was the middle of January, and I
+had found myself unexpectedly forced to return to England for the rest
+of the winter. It was an insufferable disappointment; I was wretched and
+broken-hearted. Italy appeared to me at that time so much better than
+anything else in the world, that to rise from table in the middle of the
+feast was a prospect of being hungry for the rest of my days. I had
+heard a great deal of praise of the south of France; but the south of
+France was a poor consolation. In this state of mind I arrived at
+Avignon, which under a bright, hard winter sun was tingling&mdash;fairly
+spinning&mdash;with the <i>mistral</i>. I find in my journal of the other day a
+reference to the acuteness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+of my reluctance in January 1870. France, after Italy, appeared in the
+language of the latter country <i>poco simpatica</i>; and I thought it
+necessary, for reasons now inconceivable, to read the <i>Figaro</i>, which
+was filled with descriptions of the horrible Troppmann, the murderer of
+the <i>famille</i> Kink. Troppmann, Kink, <i>le crime de Pantin</i>&mdash;the very
+names that figured in this episode seemed to wave me back. Had I
+abandoned the sonorous south to associate with vocables so base?</p>
+
+<p>It was very cold the other day at Avignon, for though there was no
+mistral, it was raining as it rains in Provence, and the dampness had a
+terrible chill in it. As I sat by my fire late at night&mdash;for in genial
+Avignon, in October, I had to have a fire&mdash;it came back to me that
+eleven years before I had at that same hour sat by a fire in that same
+room and, writing to a friend to whom I was not afraid to appear
+extravagant, had made a vow that at some happier period of the future I
+would avenge myself on the <i>ci-devant</i> city of the Popes by taking it in
+a contrary sense. I suppose that I redeemed my vow on the occasion of my
+second visit better than on my third; for then I was on my way to Italy,
+and that vengeance, of course, was complete. The only drawback was that
+I was in such a hurry to get to Ventimiglia (where the Italian
+custom-house was to be the sign of my triumph), that I scarcely took
+time to make it clear to myself at Avignon that this was better than
+reading the <i>Figaro</i>. I hurried on almost too fast to enjoy the
+consciousness of moving southward. On this last occasion I was
+unfortunately destitute of that happy faith. Avignon was my southernmost
+limit, after which I was to turn round and proceed back to England. But
+in the interval I had been a great deal in Italy, and that made all the
+difference.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Avignon</div>
+
+<p>I had plenty of time to think of this, for the rain kept me practically
+housed for the first twenty-four hours. It had been raining in these
+regions for a month, and people had begun to look askance at the Rhone,
+though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant. The only
+excursion possible, while the torrent descended, was a kind of
+horizontal dive, accompanied with infinite splashing, to the little
+<i>musée</i> of the town, which is within a moderate walk of the hotel. I had
+a memory of it from my first visit; it had appeared to me more pictorial
+than its pictures. I found that recollection had flattered it a little,
+and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums. It
+has the usual musty chill in the air, the usual grass-grown forecourt,
+in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed, the usual red tiles
+on the floor and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the
+walls. I rang up the <i>gardien</i>, who arrived with a bunch of keys, wiping
+his mouth; he unlocked doors for me, opened shutters, and while (to my
+distress, as if the things had been worth lingering over) he shuffled
+about after me, he announced the names of the pictures before which I
+stopped in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls and
+seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure and grotesque
+when it pretended to be great. Then there were intervals of silence,
+while I stared absent-mindedly, at haphazard, at some indistinguishable
+canvas and the only sound was the downpour of the rain on the skylights.
+The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman
+fragments. The town has no Roman monuments to show; in this respect,
+beside its brilliant neighbours, Arles and Nîmes, it is a blank. But a
+great many small objects have been found in its soil&mdash;pottery, glass,
+bronzes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The glass is especially
+charming&mdash;small vessels of the most delicate shape and substance, many
+of them perfectly preserved. These diminutive, intimate things bring one
+near to the old Roman life; they seems like pearls strung upon the
+slender thread that swings across the gulf of time. A little glass cup
+that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the great vessel of an
+arena. There are two small silver <i>casseroles</i>, with chiselled handles,
+in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the most charming
+survivals of antiquity.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Avignon the Palace of the Popes</div>
+
+<p>I did wrong, just above, to speak of my attack on this establishment as
+the only recreation I took that first wet day; for I remember a terribly
+moist visit to the former palace of the Popes, which could have taken
+place only in the same tempestuous hours. It is true that I scarcely
+know why I should have gone out to see the Papal palace in the rain, for
+I had been over it twice before, and even then had not found the
+interest of the place so complete as it ought to be; the fact
+nevertheless remains that this last occasion is much associated with an
+umbrella, which was not superfluous even in some of the chambers and
+corridors of the gigantic pile. It had already seemed to me the
+dreariest of all historical buildings, and my final visit confirmed the
+impression. The place is as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as
+it is dirty. The imagination has, for some reason or other, to make more
+than the effort usual in such cases to restore and repeople it. The fact
+indeed is simply that the palace has been so incalculably abused and
+altered. The alterations have been so numerous that, though I have duly
+conned the enumerations, supplied in guide-books, of the principal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 571px;">
+<img src="images/ill_078_th.png" width="571" height="550" alt="AVIGNON&mdash;THE CHURCH" />
+<span class="caption">AVIGNON&mdash;THE CHURCH</span>
+<a href="images/ill_078.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">perversions, I do not pretend to carry any of them in my head. The huge
+bare mass, without ornament, without grace, despoiled of its battlements
+and defaced with sordid modern windows, covering the Rocher des Doms and
+looking down over the Rhone and the broken bridge of Saint-Bénazet
+(which stops in such a sketchable manner in mid-stream), and across at
+the lonely tower of Philippe le Bel and the ruined wall of Villeneuve,
+makes at a distance, in spite of its poverty, a great figure, the effect
+of which is carried out by the tower of the church beside it (crowned
+though the latter be, in a top-heavy fashion, with an immense modern
+image of the Virgin) and by the thick, dark foliage of the garden laid
+out on a still higher portion of the eminence. This garden recalls
+faintly and a trifle perversely the grounds of the Pincian at Rome. I
+know not whether it is the shadow of the Papal name, present in both
+places, combined with a vague analogy between the churches&mdash;which,
+approached in each case by a flight of steps, seemed to defend the
+precinct&mdash;but each time I have seen the Promenade des Doms it has
+carried my thoughts to the wider and loftier terrace from which you look
+away at the Tiber and Saint Peter's.</p>
+
+<p>As<span class="sidenote">Avignon: the Palace of the Popes</span> you stand before the Papal palace, and especially as you enter it,
+you are struck with its being a very dull monument. History enough was
+enacted here: the great schism lasted from 1305 to 1370, during which
+seven Popes, all Frenchmen, carried on the court of Avignon on
+principles that have not commended themselves to the esteem of
+posterity. But history has been whitewashed away, and the scandals of
+that period have mingled with the dust of dilapidations and repairs. The
+building has for many years been occupied as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+barrack for regiments of the line, and the main characteristics of a
+barrack&mdash;an extreme nudity and a very queer smell&mdash;prevail throughout
+its endless compartments. Nothing could have been more cruelly dismal
+than the appearance it presented at the time of this third visit of
+mine. A regiment, changing quarters, had departed the day before, and
+another was expected to arrive (from Algeria) on the morrow. The place
+had been left in the befouled and belittered condition which marks the
+passage of the military after they have broken camp, and it would offer
+but a melancholy welcome to the regiment that was about to take
+possession. Enormous windows had been left carelessly open all over the
+building, and the rain and wind were beating into empty rooms and
+passages, making draughts which purified, perhaps, but which scarcely
+cheered. For an arrival it was horrible. A handful of soldiers had
+remained behind. In one of the big vaulted rooms several of them were
+lying on their wretched beds, in the dim light, in the cold, in the
+damp, with the bleak bare walls before them and their overcoats, spread
+over them, pulled up to their noses. I pitied them immensely, though
+they may have felt less wretched than they looked. I thought not of the
+old profligacies and crimes, not of the funnel-shaped torture-chamber
+(which, after exciting the shudder of generations, has been ascertained
+now, I believe, to have been a mediæval bakehouse), not of the tower of
+the <i>glacière</i> and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution, but
+of the military burden of young France. One wonders how young France
+endures it, and one is forced to believe that the French conscript has,
+in addition to his notorious good-humour, greater toughness than is
+commonly supposed by those who consider only the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+more relaxing influences of French civilisation. I hope he finds
+occasional compensation for such moments as I saw those damp young
+peasants passing on the mattresses of their hideous barrack, without
+anything around to remind them that they were in the most civilised of
+countries. The only traces of former splendour now visible in the Papal
+pile are the walls and vaults of two small chapels, painted in fresco,
+so battered and effaced as to be scarcely distinguishable, by Simone
+Memmi. It offers of course a peculiarly good field for restoration, and
+I believe the Government intend to take it in hand. I mention this fact
+without a sigh, for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is
+at present.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_079.png" width="450" height="214" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxiv" id="Chapter_xxxiv"></a>Chapter xxxiv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Villeneuve-lès-Avignon</div>
+
+<p>FORTUNATELY it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining
+everywhere else in the department); otherwise I should not have been
+able to go to Villeneuve and to Vaucluse. The afternoon indeed was
+lovely when I walked over the interminable bridge that spans the two
+arms of the Rhone, divided here by a considerable island, and directed
+my course, like a solitary horseman&mdash;on foot, to the lonely tower which
+forms one of the outworks of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The picturesque,
+half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles farther up the river.
+The immense round towers of its old citadel and the long stretches of
+ruined wall covering the slope on which it lies are the most striking
+features of the nearer view, as you look from Avignon across the Rhone.
+I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a
+kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details
+to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with
+the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les
+Baux and to which I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+paid my respects in speaking of that excursion. Also the work of
+Philippe le Bel (built in 1307), it is amazingly big and stubborn, and
+formed the opposite limit of the broken bridge whose first arches (on
+the side of Avignon) alone remain to give a measure of the occasional
+volume of the Rhone. Half an hour's walk brought me to Villeneuve, which
+lies away from the river, looking like a big village half depopulated
+and occupied for the most part by dogs and cats, old women and small
+children; these last, in general, remarkably pretty, in the manner of
+the children of Provence. You pass through the place, which seems in a
+singular degree vague and unconscious, and come to the rounded hill on
+which the ruined abbey lifts its yellow walls&mdash;the Benedictine abbey of
+Saint-André, at once a church, a monastery, and a fortress. A large part
+of the crumbling enceinte disposes itself over the hill; but for the
+rest, all that has preserved any traceable cohesion is a considerable
+portion of the citadel. The defence of the place appears to have been
+entrusted largely to the huge round towers that flank the old gate; one
+of which, the more complete, the ancient warden (having first inducted
+me into his own dusky little apartment and presented me with a great
+bunch of lavender) enabled me to examine in detail. I would almost have
+dispensed with the privilege, for I think I have already mentioned that
+an acquaintance with many feudal interiors has wrought a sad confusion
+in my mind. The image of the outside always remains distinct; I keep it
+apart from other images of the same sort; it makes, a picture
+sufficiently ineffaceable. But the guard-rooms, winding staircases,
+loopholes, prisons, repeat themselves and intermingle; they have a
+wearisome family likeness. There are always black passages and corners,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+and walls twenty feet thick; and there is always some high place to
+climb up to for the sake of a "magnificent" view. The views, too, are
+apt to run together. These dense gate-towers of Philippe le Bel struck
+me, however, as peculiarly wicked and grim. Their capacity is of the
+largest, and they contain ever so many devilish little dungeons, lighted
+by the narrowest slit in the prodigious wall, where it comes over one
+with a good deal of vividness and still more horror that wretched human
+beings once lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons of Villeneuve
+made a particular impression on me&mdash;greater than any except those of
+Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in Europe. I hasten to
+add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I
+believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old
+castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist are
+unscrupulously played upon. There were plenty of black holes in the
+Middle Ages that were not dungeons, but household receptacles of various
+kinds; and many a tear dropped in pity for the groaning captive has
+really been addressed to the spirits of the larder and the faggot-nook.
+For all this, there are some very bad corners in the towers of
+Villeneuve, so that I was not wide of the mark when I began to think
+again, as I had often thought before, of the stoutness of the human
+composition in the Middle Ages and the tranquillity of nerve of people
+to whom the groaning captive and the blackness of a "living tomb" were
+familiar ideas which did not at all interfere with their happiness or
+their sanity. Our modern nerves, our irritable sympathies, our easy
+discomforts and fears, make one think (in some relations) less
+respectfully of human nature. Unless indeed it be true, as I have heard
+it maintained, that in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Villeneuve-lès-Avignon</div>
+
+<p>Middle Ages every one did go mad&mdash;every one <i>was</i> mad. The theory that
+this was a period of general dementia is not altogether untenable.</p>
+
+<p>Within the old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has
+built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was
+covered having been, i suppose, a quarry of material. There are no
+streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random
+over the uneven ground. The only important feature is a convent of
+cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls)
+behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into,
+or down at simply, from the battlements of the citadel. One or two of
+the nuns were passing in and out of the house; they wore grey robes with
+a bright red cape. I thought their situation most provincial. I came
+away and wandered a little over the base of the hill, outside the walls.
+Small white stones cropped through the grass, over which low olive-trees
+were scattered. The afternoon had a yellow brightness. I sat down under
+one of the little trees, on the grass&mdash;the delicate grey branches were
+not much above my head&mdash;and rested and looked at Avignon across the
+Rhone. It was very soft, very still and pleasant, though I am not sure
+it was all I once should have expected of that combination of elements:
+an old city wall for a background, a canopy of olives, and for a couch
+the soil of Provence.</p>
+
+<p>When<span class="sidenote">Avignon</span> I came back to Avignon the twilight was already thick, but I walked
+up to the Rocher des Doms. Here I again had the benefit of that amiable
+moon which had already lighted up for me so many romantic scenes. She
+was full, and she rose over the Rhone and made it look in the distance
+like a silver serpent. I remember saying to myself at this moment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+that it would be a beautiful evening to walk round the walls of
+Avignon&mdash;the remarkable walls which challenge comparison with those of
+Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, and which it was my duty, as an observer
+of the picturesque, to examine with some attention. Presenting
+themselves to that silver sheen, they could not fail to be impressive.
+So, at least, I said to myself; but unfortunately I did not believe what
+I said. It is a melancholy fact that the walls of Avignon had never
+impressed me at all, and I had never taken the trouble to make the
+circuit. They are continuous and complete, but for some mysterious
+reason they fail of their effect. This is partly because they are very
+low, in some places almost absurdly so, being buried in new
+accumulations of soil and by the filling in of the moat up to their
+middle. Then they have been too well tended; they not only look at
+present very new, but look as if they had never been old. The fact that
+their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than
+those of Carcassonne; but this is exactly, at the same time, what is
+fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven
+gates, they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare
+with the admirable little vignette of Carcassonne. I may mention, now
+that I am speaking of the general mass of Avignon, that nothing is more
+curious than the way in which, viewed from a distance, it is all reduced
+to naught by the vast bulk of the palace of the Popes. From across the
+Rhone, or from the train as you leave the place, this great grey block
+is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its
+shrunken population, as the city is.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_080.png" width="450" height="283" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxv" id="Chapter_xxxv"></a>Chapter xxxv</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Vaucluse</div>
+
+<p>IT was the morning after this, I think (a certain Saturday), that when I
+came out of the Hôtel de l'Europe, which lies in shallow concavity just
+within the city gate that opens on the Rhone&mdash;came out to look at the
+sky from the little <i>place</i> before the inn and see how the weather
+promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse&mdash;I found the whole
+town in a terrible taking. I say the whole town advisedly, for every
+inhabitant appeared to have taken up a position on the bank of the
+river, or on the uppermost parts of the promenade of the Doms, where a
+view of its course was to be obtained. It had risen surprisingly in the
+night, and the good people of Avignon had reason to know what a rise of
+the Rhone might signify. The town, in its lower portions, is quite at
+the mercy of the swollen waters; and it was mentioned to me that in 1856
+the Hôtel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to
+within a few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+feet of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long board which had
+served for so many a table d'hôte floated disreputably, with its legs in
+the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the Ardêche, where it
+had been raining for a month, had sent down torrents which, all that
+fine Friday night, by the light of the innocent-looking moon, poured
+themselves into the Rhone and its tributary the Durance. The river was
+enormous and continued to rise, and the sight was beautiful and
+horrible. The water in many places was already at the base of the city
+walls, the quay, with its parapet just emerging, being already covered.
+The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, resembled a vast lake, with
+protrusions of trees, houses, bridges, gates. The people looked at it in
+silence, as I had seen people before&mdash;on the occasion of a rise of the
+Arno, at Pisa&mdash;appear to consider the prospect of an inundation. "Il
+monte; il monte toujours"&mdash;there was not much said but that. It was a
+general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to profit, for
+sociability's sake, by any interruption of the commonplace (the popular
+mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates the sense of
+disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday. Suspense and
+anxiety were in the air, and it never is pleasant to be reminded of the
+helplessness of man. In the presence of a loosened river, with its
+ravaging, unconquerable volume, this impression is as strong as
+possible; and as I looked at the deluge which threatened to make an
+island of the Papal palace I perceived that the scourge of water is
+greater than the scourge of fire. A blaze may be quenched, but where
+could the flame be kindled that would arrest the quadrupled Rhone? For
+the population of Avignon a good deal was at stake, and I am<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+almost ashamed to confess that in the midst of the public alarm I
+considered the situation from the point of view of the little projects
+of a sentimental tourist. Would the prospective inundation interfere
+with my visit to Vaucluse, or make it imprudent to linger twenty-four
+hours longer at Avignon? I must add that the tourist was not perhaps,
+after all, so sentimental. I have spoken of the pilgrimage to the shrine
+of Petrarch as obligatory, and that was, in fact, the light in which it
+presented itself to me; all the more that I had been twice at Avignon
+without undertaking it. This is why I was vexed at the Rhone.&mdash;if vexed
+I was&mdash;for representing as impracticable an excursion which I cared
+nothing about. How little I cared was manifest from my inaction on
+former occasions. I had a prejudice against Vaucluse, against Petrarch,
+even against the incomparable Laura. I was sure that the place was
+cockneyfied and threadbare, and I had never been able to take an
+interest in the poet and the lady. I was sure that I had known many
+women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had
+been made; and I was convinced that her singer was factitious and
+literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that
+speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his <i>fioriture</i>.
+This was the crude state of mind in which I determined to go, at any
+risk, to Vaucluse. Now that I think it over, I seem to remember that I
+had hoped, after all, that the submersion of the roads would forbid it.
+Since morning the clouds had gathered again, and by noon they were so
+heavy that there was every prospect of a torrent. It appeared absurd to
+choose such a time as this to visit a fountain&mdash;a fountain which would
+be indistinguishable in the general cataract.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Vaucluse</div>
+
+<p>Nevertheless I took a vow, that if at noon the rain should not have
+begun to descend upon Avignon I would repair to the head-spring of the
+Sorgues. When the critical moment arrived the clouds were hanging over
+Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty
+themselves. The prick was not given, however; all nature was too much
+occupied in following the aberrations of the Rhone to think of playing
+tricks elsewhere. Accordingly I started for the station in a spirit
+which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing
+supply of sentiment, was shockingly perfunctory.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"For tasks in hours of insight willed</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">May be in hours of gloom fulfilled."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I remembered these lines of Matthew Arnold (written, apparently, in an
+hour of gloom), and carried out the idea, as I went, by hoping that with
+the return of insight I should be glad to have seen Vaucluse. Light has
+descended upon me since then, and I declare that the excursion is in
+every way to be recommended. The place makes a great impression, quite
+apart from Petrarch and Laura.</p>
+
+<p>There was no rain; there was only, all the afternoon, a mild, moist wind
+and a sky magnificently black; which made a <i>repoussoir</i> for the paler
+cliffs of the fountain. The road, by train, crosses a flat,
+expressionless country, towards the range of arid hills which lie to the
+east of Avignon, and which spring (says Murray) from the mass of the
+Mont-Ventoux. At Isle-sur-Sorgues, at the end of about an hour, the
+foreground becomes much more animated and the distance much more (or
+perhaps I should say much less) actual. I descended from the train and
+ascended to the top of an omnibus which was to convey me into the
+recesses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+of the hills. It had not been among my previsions that I should be
+indebted to a vehicle of that kind for an opportunity to commune with
+the spirit of Petrarch; and I had to borrow what consolation I could
+from the fact that at least I had the omnibus to myself. I was the only
+passenger; every one else was at Avignon watching the Rhone. I lost no
+time in perceiving that I could not have come to Vaucluse at a better
+moment. The Sorgues was almost as full as the Rhone, and of a colour
+much more romantic. Rushing along its narrowed channel under an avenue
+of fine <i>platanes</i> (it is confined between solid little embankments of
+stone), with the good wives of the village, on the brink, washing their
+linen in its contemptuous flood, it gave promise of high entertainment
+farther on.</p>
+
+<p>The drive to Vaucluse is of about three-quarters of an hour; and though
+the river, as I say, was promising, the big pale hills, as the road
+winds into them, did not look as if their slopes of stone and shrub were
+a nestling-place for superior scenery. It is a part of the merit of
+Vaucluse indeed that it is as much as possible a surprise. The place has
+a right to its name, for the valley appears impenetrable until you get
+fairly into it. One perverse twist follows another until the omnibus
+suddenly deposits you in front of the "cabinet" of Petrarch. After that
+you have only to walk along the left bank of the river. The cabinet of
+Petrarch is to-day a hideous little <i>café</i>, bedizened, like a signboard,
+with extracts from the ingenious "Rime." The poet and his lady are of
+course the stock-in-trade of the little village, which has had for
+several generations the privilege of attracting young couples engaged in
+their wedding-tour and other votaries of the tender passion. The place
+has long been familiar, on festal Sundays, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+the swains of Avignon and their attendant nymphs. The little fish of the
+Sorgues are much esteemed, and, eaten on the spot, they constitute, for
+the children of the once Papal city, the classic suburban dinner.
+Vaucluse has been turned to account, however, not only by sentiment, but
+by industry; the banks of the stream being disfigured by a pair of
+hideous mills for the manufacture of paper and of wool. In an
+enterprising and economical age the water-power of the Sorgues was too
+obvious a motive; and I must say that, as the torrent rushed past them,
+the wheels of the dirty little factories appeared to turn merrily
+enough. The footpath on the left bank, of which I just spoke, carries
+one fortunately quite out of sight of them, and out of sound as well,
+inasmuch as on the day of my visit the stream itself, which was in
+tremendous force, tended more and more, as one approached the fountain,
+to fill the valley with its own echoes. Its colour was magnificent, and
+the whole spectacle more like a corner of Switzerland than a nook in
+Provence. The protrusions of the mountain shut it in, and you penetrate
+to the bottom of the recess which they form. The Sorgues rushes and
+rushes; it is almost like Niagara after the jump of the cataract. There
+are dreadful little booths beside the path, for the sale of photographs
+and <i>immortelles</i>&mdash;I don't know what one is to do with the
+immortelles&mdash;where you are offered a brush dipped in tar to write your
+name withal on the rocks. Thousands of vulgar persons, of both sexes,
+and exclusively, it appeared, of the French nationality, had availed
+themselves of this implement, for every square inch of accessible stone
+was scored over with some human appellation. It is not only we in
+America, therefore, who besmirch our scenery; the practice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 327px;">
+<img src="images/ill_081_th.png" width="327" height="550" alt="VAUCLUSE&mdash;RUINS OF CASTLE" />
+<span class="caption">VAUCLUSE&mdash;RUINS OF CASTLE</span>
+<a href="images/ill_081.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">exists, in a more organised form (like everything else in France), in
+the country of good taste. You leave the little booths and stalls
+behind; but the bescribbled crag, bristling with human vanity, keeps you
+company even when you stand face to face with the fountain. This happens
+when you find yourself at the foot of the enormous straight cliff out of
+which the river gushes. It rears itself to an extraordinary height&mdash;a
+huge forehead of bare stone&mdash;looking as if it were the half of a
+tremendous mound split open by volcanic action. The little valley,
+seeing it there, at a bend, stops suddenly and receives in its arms the
+magical spring. I call it magical on account of the mysterious manner in
+which it comes into the world, with the huge shoulder of the mountain
+rising over it as if to protect the secret. From under the mountain it
+silently rises, without visible movement, filling a small natural basin
+with the stillest blue water. The contrast between the stillness of this
+basin and the agitation of the water directly after it has overflowed,
+constitutes half the charm of Vaucluse. The violence of the stream when
+once it has been set loose on the rocks is as fascinating and
+indescribable as that of other cataracts; and the rocks in the bed of
+the Sorgues have been arranged by a master-hand. The setting of the
+phenomenon struck me as so simple and so fine&mdash;the vast sad cliff,
+covered with the afternoon light, still and solid for ever, while the
+liquid element rages and roars at its base&mdash;that I had no difficulty in
+understanding the celebrity of Vaucluse. I understood it, but I will not
+say that I understood Petrarch. He must have been very self-supporting,
+and Madonna Laura must indeed have been much to him.</p>
+
+<p>The aridity of the hills that shut in the valley is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+<span class="sidenote">Vaucluse</span>
+complete, and the whole impression is best conveyed by that very
+expressive French epithet <i>morne</i>. There are the very fragmentary ruins
+of a castle (of one of the bishops of Cavaillon) on a high spur of the
+mountain, above the river; and there is another remnant of a feudal
+habitation on one of the more accessible ledges. Having half an hour to
+spare before my omnibus was to leave (I must beg the reader's pardon for
+this atrociously false note; call the vehicle a <i>diligence</i>, and for
+some undiscoverable reason the offence is minimised), I clambered up to
+this latter spot and sat among the rocks in the company of a few stunted
+olives. The Sorgues, beneath me, reaching the plain, flung itself
+crookedly across the meadows like an unrolled blue ribbon. I tried to
+think of the <i>amant de Laure</i>, for literature's sake; but I had no great
+success, and the most I could do was to say to myself that I must try
+again. Several months have elapsed since then, and I am ashamed to
+confess that the trial has not yet come off. The only very definite
+conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is indeed cockneyfied, but
+that I should have been a fool, all the same, not to come.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_082.png" width="450" height="350" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxvi" id="Chapter_xxxvi"></a>Chapter xxxvi</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Orange</div>
+
+<p>MOUNTED into my diligence at the door of the Hôtel de Pétrarque et de
+Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light.
+This village, where at six o'clock every one appeared to have gone to
+bed, was fairly darkened by its high, dense plane-trees, under which the
+rushing river, on a level with its parapets, looked unnaturally, almost
+wickedly, blue. It was a glimpse which has left a picture in my mind:
+the little closed houses, the place empty and soundless in the autumn
+dusk but for the noise of waters, and in the middle, amid the blackness
+of the shade, the gleam of the swift, strange tide. At the station every
+one was talking of the inundation being in many places an accomplished
+fact, and, in particular, of the condition of the Durance at some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
+point that I have forgotten. At Avignon, an hour later, I found the
+water in some of the streets. The sky cleared in the evening, the moon
+lighted up the submerged suburbs, and the population again collected in
+the high places to enjoy the spectacle. It exhibited a certain sameness,
+however, and by nine o'clock there was considerable animation in the
+Place Crillon, where there is nothing to be seen but the front of the
+theatre and of several cafés&mdash;in addition indeed to a statue of this
+celebrated brave, whose valour redeemed some of the numerous military
+disasters of the reign of Louis XV. The next morning the lower quarters
+of the town were in a pitiful state: the situation seemed to me odious.
+To express my disapproval of it I lost no time in taking the train to
+Orange, which, with its other attractions, had the merit of not being
+seated on the Rhone. It was destiny to move northward; but even if I had
+been at liberty to follow a less unnatural course I should not then have
+undertaken it, inasmuch as the railway between Avignon and Marseilles
+was credibly reported to be (in places) under water. This was the case
+with almost everything but the line itself on the way to Orange. The day
+proved splendid, and its brilliancy only lighted up the desolation.
+Farmhouses and cottages were up to their middle in the yellow liquidity;
+haystacks looked like dull little islands; windows and doors gaped open,
+without faces; and interruption and flight were represented in the
+scene. It was brought home to me that the <i>populations rurales</i> have
+many different ways of suffering, and my heart glowed with a grateful
+sense of cockneyism. It was under the influence of this emotion that I
+alighted at Orange to visit a collection of eminently civil monuments.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">Orange</div>
+
+<p>The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so
+fine that I will let the word pass. One of them is a triumphal arch,
+supposedly of the period of Marcus Aurelius; the other is a fragment,
+magnificent in its ruin, of a Roman theatre. But for these fine Roman
+remains and for its name, Orange is a perfectly featureless little town,
+without the Rhone&mdash;which, as I have mentioned, is several miles
+distant&mdash;to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things
+that this obscure French borough&mdash;obscure, I mean, in our modern era,
+for the Gallo-Roman Arausio must have been, judging it by its arches and
+theatre, a place of some importance&mdash;should have given its name to the
+heirs-apparent of the throne of Holland and been borne by a king of
+England who had sovereign rights over it. During the Middle Ages it
+formed part of an independent principality; but in 1531 it fell, by the
+marriage of one of its princesses, who had inherited it, into the family
+of Nassau. I read in my indispensable Murray that it was made over to
+France by the treaty of Utrecht. The arch of triumph, which stands a
+little way out of the town, is rather a pretty than an imposing vestige
+of the Romans. If it had greater purity of style one might say of it
+that it belonged to the same family of monuments as the Maison Carrée at
+Nîmes. It has three passages&mdash;the middle much higher than the
+others&mdash;and a very elevated attic. The vaults of the passages are richly
+sculptured, and the whole structure is covered with friezes and military
+trophies. This sculpture is rather mixed; much of it is broken and
+defaced, and the rest seemed to me ugly, though its workmanship is
+praised. The arch is at once well preserved and much injured. Its
+general mass is there, and as Roman monuments go it is remarkably
+perfect; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
+it has suffered, in patches, from the extremity of restoration. It is
+not, on the whole, of absorbing interest. It has a charm, nevertheless,
+which comes partly from its soft, bright yellow colour, partly from a
+certain elegance of shape, of expression; and on that well-washed Sunday
+morning, with its brilliant tone, surrounded by its circle of thin
+poplars, with the green country lying beyond it and a low blue horizon
+showing through its empty portals, it made, very sufficiently, a picture
+that hangs itself to one of the lateral hooks of the memory. I can take
+down the modest composition and place it before me as I write. I see the
+shallow, shining puddles in the hard, fair French road; the pale blue
+sky, diluted by days of rain; the disgarnished autumnal fields; the mild
+sparkle of the low horizon; the solitary figure in sabots, with a bundle
+under its arm, advancing along the <i>chaussée</i>; and in the middle I see
+the little ochre-coloured trio of apertures, which, in spite of its
+antiquity, looks bright and gay, as everything must look in France of a
+fresh Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that this was not exactly the appearance of the Roman
+theatre, which lies on the other side of the town; a fact that did not
+prevent me from making my way to it in less than five minutes, through a
+succession of little streets concerning which I have no observations to
+record. None of the Roman remains in the south of France are more
+impressive than this stupendous fragment. An enormous mound rises above
+the place, which was formerly occupied&mdash;I quote from Murray&mdash;first by a
+citadel of the Romans, then by a castle of the princes of Nassau, razed
+by Louis XIV. Facing this hill a mighty wall erects itself, thirty-six
+metres high and composed of massive blocks of dark brown stone simply
+laid one on the other; the whole naked, rugged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 329px;">
+<img src="images/ill_083_th.png" width="329" height="550" alt="ORANGE&mdash;THE THEATRE." />
+<span class="caption">ORANGE&mdash;THE THEATRE.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_083.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">surface of which suggests a natural cliff (say of the Vaucluse order)
+rather than an effort of human or even of Roman labour. It is the
+biggest thing at Orange&mdash;it is bigger than all Orange put together&mdash;and
+its permanent massiveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it
+presents to the town&mdash;the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets
+perforated with holes to receive the staves of the <i>velarium</i>&mdash;bears the
+traces of more than one tier of ornamental arches; though how these flat
+arches were applied, or incrusted, upon the wall, I do not profess to
+explain. You pass through a diminutive postern&mdash;which seems in
+proportion about as high as the entrance of a rabbit-hutch&mdash;into the
+lodge of the custodian, who introduces you to the interior of the
+theatre. Here the mass of the hill affronts you, which the ingenious
+Romans treated simply as the material of their auditorium. They inserted
+their stone seats, in a semicircle, in the slope of the hill, and
+planted their colossal wall opposite to it. This wall, from the inside,
+is, if possible, even more imposing. It formed the back of the stage,
+the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It
+contains three doors, the middle one being the highest and having above
+it, far aloft, a deep niche apparently intended for an imperial statue.
+A few of the benches remain on the hillside, which, however, is mainly a
+confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill,
+high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The
+whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any
+details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the
+back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the
+semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather
+less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
+than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very
+shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers
+placed in a line like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent
+skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and
+wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the
+softness of melancholy, of the theatre at Aries; but it is more
+extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being
+enacted there&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="c">"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."</p>
+
+<p>At<span class="sidenote">Orange</span> either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing&mdash;immense
+in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the
+other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, <i>as you</i>
+face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous
+altitude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The
+compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the
+traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to
+the theatre. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves
+plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome
+would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all
+I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic,
+bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand breakfast
+at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a
+stable of the Roman days.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_084.png" width="450" height="273" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxvii" id="Chapter_xxxvii"></a>Chapter xxxvii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Macon</div>
+
+<p>I HAVE been trying to remember whether I fasted all the way to Macon,
+which I reached at an advanced hour of the evening, and think I must
+have done so except for the purchase of a box of nougat at Montélimart
+(the place is famous for the manufacture of this confection, which, at
+the station, is hawked at the windows of the train) and for a bouillon,
+very much later, at Lyons. The journey beside the Rhone&mdash;past Valence,
+past Tournon, past Vienne&mdash;would have been charming, on that luminous
+Sunday, but for two disagreeable accidents. The express from Marseilles,
+which I took at Orange, was full to overflowing; and the only refuge I
+could find was an inside angle in a carriage laden with Germans who had
+command of the windows, which they occupied as strongly as they have
+been known to occupy other strategical positions. I scarcely know,
+however, why I linger on this particular discomfort, for it was but a
+single item in a considerable list of grievances&mdash;grievances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+dispersed through six weeks of constant railway-travel in France. I have
+not touched upon them at an earlier stage of this chronicle, but my
+reserve is not owing to any sweetness of association. This form of
+locomotion, in the country of the amenities, is attended with a dozen
+discomforts; almost all the conditions of the business are detestable.
+They force the sentimental tourist again and again to ask himself
+whether, in consideration of such mortal annoyances, the game is worth
+the candle. Fortunately a railway journey is a good deal like a
+sea-voyage; its miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive. That
+is why I completed, to my great satisfaction, my little tour in France.
+Let this small effusion of ill-nature be my first and last tribute to
+the whole despotic <i>gare</i>: the deadly <i>salle d'attente</i>, the
+insufferable delays over one's luggage, the porterless platform, the
+overcrowded and illiberal train. How many a time did I permit myself the
+secret reflection that it is in perfidious Albion that they order this
+matter best! How many a time did the eager British mercenary, clad in
+velveteen and clinging to the door of the carriage as it glides into the
+station, revisit my invidious dreams! The paternal porter and the
+responsive hansom are among the best gifts of the English genius to the
+world. I hasten to add, faithful to my habit (so insufferable to some of
+my friends) of ever and again readjusting the balance after I have given
+it an honest tip, that the bouillon at Lyons, which I spoke of above,
+was, though by no means an idea bouillon, much better than any I could
+have obtained at an English railway-station. After I had imbibed it I
+sat in the train (which waited a long time at Lyons) and, by the light
+of one of the big lamps on the platform, read all sorts of disagreeable
+things in certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/ill_085_th.png" width="336" height="550" alt="LYONS." />
+<span class="caption">LYONS.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_085.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">radical newspapers which I had bought at the bookstall. I gathered from
+these sheets that Lyons was in extreme commotion. The Rhone and the
+Saone, which form a girdle for the splendid town, were almost in the
+streets, as I could easily believe from what I had seen of the country
+after leaving Orange. The Rhone, all the way to Lyons, had been in all
+sorts of places where it had no business to be, and matters were
+naturally not improved by its confluence with the charming and copious
+stream which, at Macon, is said once to have given such a happy
+opportunity to the egotism of the capital. A visitor from Paris (the
+anecdote is very old), being asked on the quay of that city whether he
+didn't admire the Saone, replied good-naturedly that it was very pretty,
+but that in Paris they spelled it with the <i>ei</i>. This moment of general
+alarm at Lyons had been chosen by certain ingenious persons (I credit
+them perhaps with too sure a prevision of the rise of the rivers) for
+practising further upon the apprehensions of the public. A bombshell
+filled with dynamite had been thrown into a café, and various votaries
+of the comparatively innocuous <i>petit verre</i> had been wounded (I am not
+sure whether any one had been killed) by the irruption. Of course there
+had been arrests and incarcerations, and the <i>Intransigeant</i> and the
+<i>Rappel</i> were filled with the echoes of the explosion. The tone of these
+organs is rarely edifying, and it had never been less so than on this
+occasion. I wondered as I looked through them whether I was losing all
+my radicalism; and then I wondered whether, after all, I had any to
+lose. Even in so long a wait as that tiresome delay at Lyons I failed to
+settle the question, any more than I made up my mind as to the probable
+future of the militant democracy, or the ultimate form of a
+civilisation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
+which should have blown up everything else. A few days later the water
+went down at Lyons; but the democracy has not gone down.</p>
+
+<p>I<span class="sidenote">Macon</span> remember vividly the remainder of that evening which I spent at
+Macon&mdash;remember it with a chattering of the teeth. I know not what had
+got into the place; the temperature, for the last day of October, was
+eccentric and incredible. These epithets may also be applied to the
+hotel itself&mdash;an extraordinary structure, all façade, which exposes an
+uncovered rear to the gaze of nature. There is a demonstrative, voluble
+landlady, who is of course part of the façade; but everything behind her
+is a trap for the winds, with chambers, corridors, staircases all
+exhibited to the sky as if the outer wall of the house had been lifted
+off. It would have been delightful for Florida, but it didn't do for
+Burgundy even on the eve of November 1, so that I suffered absurdly from
+the rigour of a season that had not yet begun. There was something in
+the air; I felt it the next day, even on the sunny quay of the Saone,
+where in spite of a fine southerly exposure I extracted little warmth
+from the reflection that Alphonse de Lamartine had often trodden the
+flags. Macon struck me, somehow, as suffering from a chronic numbness,
+and there was nothing exceptionally cheerful in the remarkable extension
+of the river. It was no longer a river&mdash;it had become a lake; and from
+my window, in the painted face of the inn, I saw that the opposite bank
+had been moved back, as it were, indefinitely. Unfortunately the various
+objects with which it was furnished had not been moved as well, the
+consequence of which was an extraordinary confusion in the relations of
+things. There were always poplars to be seen, but the poplar had become
+an aquatic plant. Such phenomena,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
+however, at Macon attract but little attention, as the Saone, at certain
+seasons of the year, is nothing if not expansive. The people are as used
+to it as they appeared to be to the bronze statue of Lamartine, which is
+the principal monument of the <i>place</i>, and which, representing the poet
+in a frogged overcoat and top-boots, improvising in a high wind, struck
+me as even less casual in its attitude than monumental sculpture usually
+succeeds in being. It is true that in its present position I thought
+better of this work of art, which is from the hand of M. Falguière, than
+when I had seen it through the factitious medium of the Salon of 1876. I
+walked up the hill where the older part of Macon lies, in search of the
+natal house of the <i>amant d'Elvire</i>, the Petrarch whose Vaucluse was the
+bosom of the public. The Guide-Joanne quotes from "Les Confidences" a
+description of the birthplace of the poet, whose treatment of the
+locality is indeed poetical. It tallies strangely little with the
+reality, either as regards position or other features; and it may be
+said to be not an aid, but a direct obstacle, to a discovery of the
+house. A very humble edifice, in a small back street, is designated by a
+municipal tablet, set into its face, as the scene of Lamartine's advent
+into the world. He himself speaks of a vast and lofty structure, at the
+angle of a <i>place</i>, adorned with iron clamps, with a <i>porte haute et
+large</i> and many other peculiarities. The house with the tablet has two
+meagre storeys above the basement, and (at present, at least) an air of
+extreme shabbiness; the <i>place</i>, moreover, never can have been vast.
+Lamartine was accused of writing history incorrectly, and apparently he
+started wrong at first; it had never become clear to him where he was
+born. Or is the tablet wrong? If the house is small, the tablet is very
+big.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_086.png" width="450" height="268" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxviii" id="Chapter_xxxviii"></a>Chapter xxxviii</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Bourg-en-Bresse</div>
+
+<p>THE foregoing reflections occur, in a cruder form, as it were, in my
+note-book, where I find this remark appended to them: "Don't take leave
+of Lamartine on that contemptuous note; it will be easy to think of
+something more sympathetic!" Those friends of mine, mentioned a little
+while since, who accuse me of always tipping back the balance, could not
+desire a paragraph more characteristic; but I wish to give no further
+evidence of such infirmities, and will therefore hurry away from the
+subject&mdash;hurry away in the train which, very early on a crisp, bright
+morning, conveyed me, by way of an excursion, to the ancient city of
+Bourg-en-Bresse. Shining in early light, the Saone was spread, like a
+smooth white tablecloth, over a considerable part of the flat country
+that I traversed. There is no provision made in this image for the long,
+transparent screens of thin-twigged trees which rose at intervals out of
+the watery plain; but as, in all the conditions, there seemed to be no
+provision<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+for them in fact, I will let my metaphor go for what it is worth. My
+journey was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I passed
+no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly
+applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town <i>quelconque</i>, as M.
+Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands in the midst of the
+great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat county, sometime
+property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest capital. The blue
+masses of the Jura give it a creditable horizon, but the only nearer
+feature it can point to is its famous sepulchral church. This edifice
+lies at a fortunate distance from the town, which, though inoffensive,
+is of too common a stamp to consort with such a treasure. All I ever
+knew of the church of Brou I had gathered, years ago
+<span class="sidenote">The Church of Brou</span>
+from Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem which bears its name. I remember
+thinking, in those years, that it was impossible verses could be more
+touching than these; and as I stood before the object of my pilgrimage,
+in the gay French light (though the place was so dull), I recalled the
+spot where I had first read them and where I had read them again and yet
+again, wondering whether it would ever be my fortune to visit the church
+of Brou. The spot in question was an armchair in a window which looked
+out on some cows in a field; and whenever I glanced at the cows it came
+over me&mdash;I scarcely know why&mdash;that I should probably never behold the
+structure reared by the Duchess Margaret. Some of our visions never come
+to pass; but we must be just&mdash;others do. "So sleep, for ever sleep, O
+princely pair!" I remembered that line of Matthew Arnold's, and the
+stanza about the Duchess Margaret coming to watch the builders on her
+palfrey white. Then there came to me something in regard to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+the moon shining on winter nights through the cold clere-storey. The
+tone of the place at that hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and
+bright, but with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even with the
+fact of the unexpected remoteness of the church from the Jura added to
+it, did not prevent me from feeling that I looked at a monument in the
+production of which&mdash;or at least in the effect of which on the
+tourist-mind of to-day&mdash;Matthew Arnold had been much concerned. By a
+pardonable licence he has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of
+the Jura than it stands at present. It is very true that, though the
+mountains in the sixteenth century can hardly have been in a different
+position, the plain which separates the church from them may have been
+bedecked with woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the
+beautiful building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in
+that particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there
+are reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of
+Brou should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of a vague little
+town.</p>
+
+<p>The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the Duchess
+Margaret&mdash;Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and
+his wife Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has a
+high name in history, having been regent of the Netherlands in behalf of
+her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., of whose early education she had had
+the care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, to
+whom the province of Bresse belonged, and who died two years later. She
+had been betrothed, as a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and was kept
+for some time at the French court&mdash;that of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_087.png" width="450" height="464" alt="BROU&mdash;THE CHURCH." />
+<span class="caption">BROU&mdash;THE CHURCH.</span>
+</div><div class="figcenter" style="width: 336px;">
+<img src="images/ill_088_th.png" width="336" height="550" alt="BROU&mdash;THE CHURCH." />
+<span class="caption">BROU&mdash;THE CHURCH.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_088.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was eventually
+repudiated, in order that her <i>fiancé</i> might marry Anne of Brittany&mdash;an
+alliance so magnificently political that we almost condone the offence
+to a sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for husbands, however,
+inasmuch as before her marriage to Philibert she had been united to John
+of Castile, son of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon&mdash;an episode terminated
+by the death of the Spanish prince within a year. She was twenty-two
+years regent of the Netherlands and died, at fifty-one, in 1530. She
+might have been, had she chosen, the wife of Henry VII. of England. She
+was one of the signers of the League of Cambray against the Venetian
+Republic, and was a most politic, accomplished, and judicious princess.
+She undertook to build the church of Brou as a mausoleum for her second
+husband and herself, in fulfilment of a vow made by Margaret of Bourbon,
+mother of Philibert, who died before she could redeem her pledge and who
+bequeathed the duty to her son. He died shortly afterwards, and his
+widow assumed the pious task. According to Murray, she entrusted the
+erection of the church to "Maistre Loys von Berghem," and the sculpture
+to "Maistre Conrad." The author of a superstitious but carefully
+<span class="sidenote">The Church of Brou</span>
+prepared little Notice which I bought at Bourg calls the architect and
+sculptor (at once) Jehan de Paris, author (<i>sic</i>) of the tomb of Francis
+II. of Brittany, to which we gave some attention at Nantes, and which
+the writer of my pamphlet ascribes only subordinately to Michel Colomb.
+The church, which is not of great size, is in the last and most
+flamboyant phase of gothic and in admirable preservation; the west
+front, before which a quaint old sun-dial is laid out on the ground&mdash;a
+circle of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into the
+earth&mdash;is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however
+(the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the
+warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as
+if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art,
+told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply
+the quality of the stone)&mdash;the great feature is the admirable choir, in
+the midst of which the three monuments have bloomed under the chisel
+like exotic plants in a conservatory. I saw the place to small
+advantage, for the stained glass of the windows, which are fine, was
+under repair, and much of it was masked with planks.</p>
+
+<p>In the centre lies Philibert-le-Bel, a figure of white marble on a great
+slab of black, in his robes and his armour, with two boy-angels holding
+a tablet at his head, and two more at his feet. On either side of him is
+another cherub; one guarding his helmet, the other his stiff gauntlets.
+The attitudes of these charming children, whose faces are all bent upon
+him in pity, have the prettiest tenderness and respect. The table on
+which he lies is supported by elaborate columns adorned with niches
+containing little images and with every other imaginable elegance; and
+beneath it he is represented in that other form so common in the tombs
+of the Renaissance&mdash;a man naked and dying, with none of the state and
+splendour of the image above. One of these figures embodies the duke,
+the other simply the mortal; and there is something very strange and
+striking in the effect of the latter, seen dimly and with difficulty
+through the intervals of the rich supports of the upper slab. The
+monument of Margaret herself is on the left, all in white marble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
+tormented into a multitude of exquisite patterns, the last extravagance
+of a gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return
+upon itself. Unlike her husband, who has only the high roof of the
+church above him, she lies under a canopy supported and covered by a
+wilderness of embroidery&mdash;flowers, devices, initials, arabesques,
+statuettes. Watched over by cherubs, she is also in her robes and
+ermine, with a greyhound sleeping at her feet (her husband, at his, has
+a waking lion); and the artist has not, it is to be presumed,
+represented her as more beautiful than she was. She looks indeed like
+the regent of a turbulent realm. Beneath her couch is stretched another
+figure&mdash;a less brilliant Margaret, wrapped in her shroud, with her long
+hair over her shoulders. Round the tomb is the battered iron railing
+placed there originally, with the mysterious motto of the duchess worked
+into the top&mdash;<i>fortune infortune fort une</i>. The other two monuments are
+protected by barriers of the same pattern. That of Margaret of Bourbon,
+Philibert's mother, stands on the right of the choir; and I suppose its
+greatest distinction is that it should have been erected to a
+mother-in-law. It is but little less florid and sumptuous than the
+others; it has, however, no second recumbent figure. On the other hand,
+the statuettes that surround the base of the tomb are of even more
+exquisite workmanship: they represent weeping women, in long mantles and
+hoods, which latter hang forward over the small face of the figure,
+giving the artist a chance to carve the features within this hollow of
+drapery&mdash;an extraordinary play of skill. There is a high, white marble
+shrine of the Virgin, as extraordinary as all the rest (a series of
+compartments representing the various scenes of her life, with the
+Assumption in the middle);<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+and there is a magnificent series of stalls, which are simply the
+intricate embroidery of the tombs translated into polished oak. All
+these things are splendid, ingenious, elaborate, precious; it is
+goldsmith's work on a monumental scale, and the general effect is none
+the less beautiful and solemn because it is so rich. But the monuments
+of the church of Brou are not the noblest that one may see; the great
+tombs of Verona are finer, and various other early Italian work. These
+things are not insincere, as Ruskin would say; but they are pretentious,
+and they are not positively <i>naïfs</i>. I should mention that the walls of
+the choir are embroidered in places with Margaret's tantalising device,
+which&mdash;partly perhaps because it is tantalising&mdash;is so very decorative,
+as they say in London. I know not whether she was acquainted with this
+epithet, but she had anticipated one of the fashions most characteristic
+of our age.</p>
+
+<p>One<span class="sidenote">The Church of Brou</span> asks one's self how all this decoration, this luxury of fair and
+chiselled marble, survived the French Revolution. An hour of liberty in
+the choir of Brou would have been a carnival for the image-breakers. The
+well-fed Bressois are surely a good-natured people. I call them well-fed
+both on general and on particular grounds. Their province has the most
+savoury aroma, and I found an opportunity to test its reputation. I
+walked back into the town from the church (there was really nothing to
+be seen by the way), and as the hour of the midday breakfast had struck,
+directed my steps to the inn. The table d'hôte was going on, and a
+gracious, bustling, talkative landlady welcomed me. I had an excellent
+repast&mdash;the best repast possible&mdash;which consisted simply of boiled eggs
+and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients
+that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed. "La plus
+belle fille du monde," as the French proverb says, "ne peut donner que
+ce qu'elle a;" and it might seem that an egg which has succeeded in
+being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it. But
+there was a bloom of punctuality, so to speak, about these eggs of
+Bourg, as if it had been the intention of the very hens themselves that
+they should be promptly served. "Nous sommes en Bresse, et le beurre
+n'est pas mauvais," the landlady said with a sort of dry coquetry, as
+she placed this article before me. It was the poetry of butter, and I
+ate a pound or two of it; after which I came away with a strange mixture
+of impressions of late gothic sculpture and thick <i>tartines</i>. I came
+away through the town, where, on a little green promenade, facing the
+hotel, is a bronze statue of Bichat the physiologist, who was a
+Bressois. I mention it not on account of its merit (though, as statues
+go, I don't remember that it is bad), but because I learned from it&mdash;my
+ignorance, doubtless, did me little honour&mdash;that Bichat had died at
+thirty years of age, and this revelation was almost agitating. To have
+done so much in so short a life was to be truly great. This reflection,
+which looks deplorably trite as I write it here, had the effect of
+eloquence as I uttered it for my own benefit on the bare little mall at
+Bourg.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 450px;">
+<img src="images/ill_087.png" width="450" height="464" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xxxix" id="Chapter_xxxix"></a>Chapter xxxix</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Beaune</div>
+
+<p>ON my return to Macon I found myself fairly face to face with the fact
+that my tour was near its end. Dijon had been marked by fate as its
+farthest limit, and Dijon was close at hand. After that I was to drop
+the tourist and re-enter Paris as much as possible like a Parisian. Out
+of Paris the Parisian never loiters, and therefore it would be
+impossible for me to stop between Dijon and the capital. But I might be
+a tourist a few hours longer by stopping somewhere between Macon and
+Dijon. The question was where I should spend these hours. Where better,
+I asked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me), than at Beaune? On my
+way to this town I passed the stretch of the Côte d'Or, which, covered
+with a mellow autumn haze, with the sunshine shimmering through, looked
+indeed like a golden slope. One regards with a kind of awe the region in
+which the famous <i>crûs</i> of Burgundy (Vougeot, Chambertin, Nuits, Beaune)
+are, I was going to say, manufactured. Adieu, paniers; vendanges sont
+faites! The vintage was over; the shrunken russet fibres alone clung to
+their ugly stick. The horizon on the left of the road had a charm,
+however; there is something picturesque in the big, comfortable
+shoulders of the Côte. That delicate critic M. Emile Montégut, in a
+charming record of travel through this region published some years ago,
+praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish
+Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point. I stopped
+at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen
+the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian
+town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique,
+and steep, moss covered roofs. The principal lion is the
+Hôpital-Saint-Esprit, or the Hôtel-Dieu simply, as they call it there,
+founded in 1443 by Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of Burgundy. It is
+administered by the sisterhood of the Holy Ghost, and is one of the most
+venerable and stately of hospitals. The face it presents to the street
+is simple, but striking&mdash;a plain, windowless wall, surmounted by a vast
+slate roof, of almost mountainous steepness. Astride this roof sits a
+tall, slate-covered spire, from which, as I arrived, the prettiest
+chimes I ever heard (worse luck to them, as I will presently explain)
+were ringing. Over the door is a high, quaint canopy, without supports,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
+with its vault painted blue and covered with gilded stars. (This, and
+indeed the whole building, have lately been restored, and its antiquity
+is quite of the spick-and-span order. But it is very delightful.) The
+treasure of the place is a precious picture&mdash;a Last Judgment, attributed
+equally to John van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden&mdash;given to the hospital
+in the fifteenth century by Nicholas Rollin aforesaid.</p>
+
+<p>I learned, however, to my dismay, from a sympathising but inexorable
+concierge, that what remained to me of the time I had to spend at
+Beaune, between trains&mdash;I had rashly wasted half an hour of it in
+breakfasting at the station&mdash;was the one hour of the day (that of the
+dinner of the nuns; the picture is in their refectory) during which the
+treasure could not be shown. The purpose of the musical chimes to which
+I had so artlessly listened was to usher in this fruitless interval. The
+regulation was absolute, and my disappointment relative, as I have been
+happy to reflect since I "looked up" the picture. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
+assign it without hesitation to Roger van der Weyden, and give a weak
+little drawing of it in their "Flemish Painters." I learn from them
+also&mdash;what I was ignorant of&mdash;that Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of
+Burgundy and founder of the establishment at Beaune, was the original of
+the worthy kneeling before the Virgin in the magnificent John van Eyck
+of the Salon Carré. All I could see was the court of the hospital and
+two or three rooms. The court, with its tall roofs, its pointed gables
+and spires, its wooden galleries, its ancient well, with an elaborate
+superstructure of wrought iron, is one of those places into which a
+sketcher ought to be let loose. It looked Flemish or English rather than
+French, and a splendid tidiness pervaded it. The porter took me into
+two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 331px;">
+<img src="images/ill_089_th.png" width="331" height="550" alt="BEAUNE&mdash;THE HOSPITAL." />
+<span class="caption">BEAUNE&mdash;THE HOSPITAL.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_089.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p class="non">rooms on the ground-floor, into which the sketcher should also be
+allowed to penetrate, for they made irresistible pictures. One of them,
+of great proportions, painted in elaborate "subjects" like a ball-room
+of the seventeenth century, was filled with the beds of patients, all
+draped in curtains of dark red cloth, the traditional uniform of these
+eleemosynary couches. Among them the sisters moved about in their robes
+of white flannel with big white linen hoods. The other room was a
+strange, immense apartment, lately restored with much splendour. It was
+of great length and height, had a painted and gilded barrel-roof, and
+one end of it&mdash;the one I was introduced to&mdash;appeared to serve as a
+chapel, as two white-robed sisters were on their knees before an altar.
+This was divided by red curtains from the larger part; but the porter
+lifted one of the curtains and showed me that the rest of it, a long,
+imposing vista, served as a ward lined with little red-draped beds.
+"C'est l'heure de la lecture," remarked my guide; and a group of
+convalescents&mdash;all the patients I saw were women&mdash;were gathered in the
+centre around a nun, the points of whose white hood nodded a little
+above them and whose gentle voice came to us faintly, with a little
+echo, down the high perspective. I know not what the good sister was
+reading&mdash;a dull book, I am afraid&mdash;but there was so much colour and such
+a fine, rich air of tradition about the whole place that it seemed to me
+I would have risked listening to her. I turned away, however, with that
+sense of defeat which is always irritating to the appreciative tourist,
+and pottered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my hour: looked
+at the statue of Gaspard Monge, the mathematician, in the little <i>place</i>
+(there is no <i>place</i> in France too little to contain an effigy to a
+glorious son); at the fine old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
+porch&mdash;completely despoiled at the Revolution&mdash;of the principal church;
+and even at the meagre treasures of a courageous but melancholy little
+museum, which has been arranged&mdash;part of it being the gift of a local
+collector&mdash;in a small hôtel de ville. I carried away from Beaune the
+impression of something mildly autumnal&mdash;something rusty yet kindly,
+like the taste of a sweet russet pear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 330px;">
+<img src="images/ill_090_th.png" width="330" height="550" alt="DIJON." />
+<span class="caption">DIJON.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_090.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter2" style="width: 183px;">
+<img src="images/ill_091.png" width="183" height="300" alt="image not available" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3><a name="Chapter_xl" id="Chapter_xl"></a>Chapter xl</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote">Dijon</div>
+
+<p>IT was very well that my little tour was to terminate at Dijon, for I
+found, rather to my chagrin, that there was not a great deal, from the
+pictorial point of view, to be done with Dijon. It was no great matter,
+for I held my proposition to have been by this time abundantly
+demonstrated&mdash;the proposition with which I started: that if Paris is
+France, France is by no means Paris. If Dijon was a good deal of a
+disappointment, I felt therefore that I could afford it. It was time for
+me to reflect, also, that for my disappointments,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+as a general thing, I had only myself to thank. They had too often been
+the consequence of arbitrary preconceptions produced by influences of
+which I had lost the trace. At any rate, I will say plumply that the
+ancient capital of Burgundy is wanting in character; it is not up to the
+mark. It is old and narrow and crooked, and it has been left pretty well
+to itself: but it is not high and overhanging; it is not, to the eye,
+what the Burgundian capital should be. It has some tortuous vistas, some
+mossy roofs, some bulging fronts, some grey-faced hotels, which look as
+if in former centuries&mdash;in the last, for instance, during the time of
+that delightful Président de Brosses whose Letters from Italy throw an
+interesting sidelight on Dijon&mdash;they had witnessed a considerable amount
+of good living. But there is nothing else. I speak as a man who, for
+some reason which he doesn't remember now, did not pay a visit to the
+celebrated Puits de Moïse, an ancient cistern embellished with a
+sculptured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient palace of the dukes of Burgundy, long since converted into
+an hôtel de ville, presents to a wide, clean court, paved with
+washed-looking stones, and to a small semicircular <i>place</i>, opposite,
+which looks as if it had tried to be symmetrical and had failed, a
+façade and two wings characterised by the stiffness, but not by the
+grand air, of the early part of the eighteenth century. It contains,
+however, a large and rich museum&mdash;a museum really worthy of a capital.
+The gem of this collection is the great banqueting hall of the old
+palace, one of the few features of the place that has not been
+essentially altered. Of great height, roofed with the old beams and
+cornices, it exhibits,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 326px;">
+<img src="images/ill_092_th.png" width="326" height="550" alt="DIJON&mdash;THE PARK." />
+<span class="caption">DIJON&mdash;THE PARK.</span>
+<a href="images/ill_092.png"><br /><span class="lt2">[Click to view image enlarged.]</span></a>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="non">filling one end, a colossal gothic chimney-piece with a fireplace large
+enough to roast, not an ox, but a herd of oxen. In the middle of this
+striking hall, the walls of which are covered with objects more or less
+precious, have been placed the tombs of Philippe-le-Hardi and
+Jean-sans-Peur. These monuments, very splendid in their general effect,
+have a limited interest. The limitation comes from the fact that we see
+them to-day in a transplanted and mutilated condition. Placed originally
+in a church which has disappeared from the face of the earth, demolished
+and dispersed at the Revolution, they have been reconstructed and
+restored out of fragments recovered and pieced together. The piecing has
+been beautifully done; it is covered with gilt and with brilliant paint;
+the whole result is most artistic. But the spell of the old mortuary
+figures is broken, and it will never work again. Meanwhile the monuments
+are immensely decorative.</p>
+
+<p>I<span class="sidenote">Dijon</span> think the thing that pleased me best at Dijon was the little old Parc,
+a charming public garden, about a mile from the town, to which I walked
+by a long, straight autumnal avenue. It is a <i>jardin français</i> of the
+last century&mdash;a dear old place, with little blue-green perspectives and
+alleys and <i>rond-points</i>, in which everything balances. I went there
+late in the afternoon, without meeting a creature, though I had hoped I
+should meet the Président de Brosses. At the end of it was a little
+river that looked like a canal, and on the farther bank was an
+old-fashioned villa, close to the water, with a little French garden of
+its own. On the hither side was a bench, on which I seated myself,
+lingering a good while; for this was just the sort of place I like. It
+was the farthermost point of my little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
+tour. I thought that over, as I sat there, on the eve of taking the
+express to Paris; and as the light faded in the Parc the vision of some
+of the things I had enjoyed became more distinct.</p>
+
+<p class="c top15">Printed by <span class="smcap">Ballantyne, Hanson &amp; Co.</span> London &amp; Edinburgh</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3 class="c top5"><a name="FOOTNOTES" id="FOOTNOTES"></a>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[a]</span></a> 1884.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[b]</span></a> "Promenades pittoresques en Touraine." Tours: 1869.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 28004 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
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author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 02:37:00 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 02:37:00 -0700
commit	46f5e60ad84cd6eacd637971f134bef2d625108b (patch)
tree	274677cc9bcaf930443c0604029af02856d35c3f /28004-h