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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Little Tour in France, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Little Tour in France
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2009 [EBook #28004]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by the
+Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr)
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Novels by
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+_Six Shillings each_
+
+THE AWKWARD AGE
+
+THE TWO MAGICS
+
+WHAT MAISIE KNEW
+
+THE OTHER HOUSE
+
+THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
+
+EMBARRASSMENTS TERMINATIONS
+
+LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 Bedford Street, W.C.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE
+
+By HENRY JAMES
+
+[Illustration]
+
+WITH NINETY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+LONDON
+
+WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+
+1900
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+_The notes presented in this volume were gathered, as will easily be
+perceived, a number of years ago and on an expectation not at that time
+answered by the event, and were then published in the United States. The
+expectation had been that they should accompany a series of drawings,
+and they themselves were altogether governed by the pictorial spirit.
+They made, and they make in appearing now, after a considerable interval
+and for the first time, in England, no pretension to any other; they are
+impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited; if the written
+word may ever play the part of brush or pencil, they are sketches on
+"drawing-paper" and nothing more. From the moment the principle of
+selection and expression, with a tourist, is not the delight of the eyes
+and the play of fancy, it should be an energy in every way much larger;
+there is no happy mean, in other words, I hold, between the sense and
+the quest of the picture, and the surrender to it, and the sense and
+the quest of the constitution, the inner springs of the subject--springs
+and connections social, economic, historic._
+
+_One must really choose, in other words, between the benefits of the
+perception of surface--a perception, when fine, perhaps none of the most
+frequent--and those of the perception of very complex underlying
+matters. If these latter had had, for me, to be taken into account, my
+pages would not have been collected. At the time of their original
+appearance the series of illustrations to which it had been their policy
+to cling for countenance and company failed them, after all, at the last
+moment, through a circumstance not now on record; and they had suddenly
+to begin to live their little life without assistance. That they have
+seemed able in any degree still to prolong even so modest a career might
+perhaps have served as a reason for leaving them undisturbed. In fact,
+however, I have too much appreciated--for any renewal of
+inconsistency--the opportunity of granting them at last, in an
+association with Mr. Pennell's admirable drawings, the benefit they have
+always lacked. The little book thus goes forth finally as the
+picture-book it was designed to be. Text and illustrations are,
+altogether and alike, things of the play of eye and hand and
+fancy--views, head-pieces, tail-pieces; through the artist's work,
+doubtless, in a much higher degree than the author's._
+
+_But these are words enough on a minor point. Many things come back to
+me on reading my pages over--such a world of reflection and emotion as I
+can neither leave unmentioned nor yet, in this place, weigh them down
+with the full expression of. Difficult indeed would be any full
+expression for one who, deeply devoted always to the revelations of
+France, finds himself, late in life, making of the sentiment no more
+substantial, no more direct record than this mere revival of an
+accident. Not one of these small chapters but suggests to me a regret
+that I might not, first or last, have gone farther, penetrated deeper,
+spoken oftener--closed, in short, more intimately with the great general
+subject; and I mean, of course, not in such a form as the present, but
+in many another, possible and impossible. It all comes back, doubtless,
+this vision of missed occasions and delays overdone, to the general
+truth that the observer, the enjoyer, may, before he knows it, be
+practically too far_ in _for all that free testimony and pleasant, easy
+talk that are incidental to the earlier or more detached stages of a
+relation. There are relations that soon get beyond all merely showy
+appearances of value for us. Their value becomes thus private and
+practical, and is represented by the process--the quieter, mostly, the
+better--of absorption and assimilation of what the relation has done for
+us. For persons thus indebted to the genius of France--however, in its
+innumerable ways, manifested--the profit to be gained, the lesson to be
+learnt, is almost of itself occupation enough. They feel that they bear
+witness by the intelligent use and application of their advantage, and
+the consciousness of the artist is therefore readily a consciousness of
+pious service. He may repeatedly have dreamt of some such happy
+combination of mood and moment as shall launch him in a profession of
+faith, a_ demonstration _of the interesting business; he may have had
+inner glimpses of an explicit statement, and vaguely have sketched it to
+himself as one of the most candid and charming ever drawn up; but time,
+meanwhile, has passed, interruptions have done their dismal work, the
+indirect tribute, too, has perhaps, behind the altar, grown and grown;
+and the reflection has at all events established itself that honour is
+more rendered by seeing and doing one's work in the light than by
+brandishing the torch on the house-tops. Curiosity and admiration have
+operated continually, but with as little waste as they could. The
+drawback is only that in this case, to be handsomely consequent, one
+would perhaps rather not have appeared to celebrate_ any _rites. The
+moral of all of which is that those here embodied must pass, at the
+best, but for what they are worth._
+
+_H. J._
+
+_August 9, 1900._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                             PAGE
+
+      Introductory                                                     1
+
+   I. Tours                                                            3
+
+  II. Tours: the Cathedral                                            12
+
+ III. Tours: Saint Martin                                             17
+
+        "    Saint Julian                                             20
+
+        "    Plessis-les-Tours                                        22
+
+        "    Marmoutier                                               23
+
+  IV. Blois                                                           26
+
+   V. Chambord                                                        36
+
+  VI. Amboise                                                         47
+
+         Chaumont                                                     51
+
+ VII. Chenonceaux                                                     54
+
+VIII. Azay-le-Rideau                                                  64
+
+  IX. Langeais                                                        68
+
+     X. Loches                                                        72
+
+    XI. Bourges                                                       77
+
+           "     The Cathedral                                        80
+
+   XII. Bourges: Jacques Coeur                                      86
+
+  XIII. Le Mans                                                       94
+
+   XIV. Angers                                                       101
+
+    XV. Nantes                                                       107
+
+   XVI. La Rochelle                                                  115
+
+  XVII. Poitiers                                                     122
+
+ XVIII. Angouleme                                                    130
+
+             Bordeaux                                                132
+
+   XIX. Toulouse                                                     136
+
+    XX. Toulouse: the Capitol                                        141
+
+   XXI. Toulouse: Saint-Sernin                                       145
+
+  XXII. Carcassonne                                                  150
+
+ XXIII. Carcassonne                                                  157
+
+  XXIV. Narbonne                                                     163
+
+   XXV. Montpellier                                                  170
+
+  XXVI. The Pont du Gard                                             178
+
+ XXVII. Aigues-Mortes                                                183
+
+XXVIII. Nimes                                                        188
+
+  XXIX. Tarascon                                                     195
+
+   XXX. Arles                                                        202
+
+          "     The Theatre                                          205
+
+  XXXI. Arles: the Museum                                            209
+
+ XXXII. Les Baux                                                     213
+
+XXXIII. Avignon                                                      223
+
+           " The Palace of the Popes                                 226
+
+ XXXIV. Villeneuve-les-Avignon                                       230
+
+  XXXV. Vaucluse                                                     235
+
+ XXXVI. Orange                                                       243
+
+ XXXVII. Macon                                                       249
+
+XXXVIII. Bourg-en-Bresse                                             254
+
+               The Church at Brou                                    255
+
+ XXXIX. Beaune                                                       262
+
+    XL. Dijon                                                        267
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+List of Illustrations
+
+
+Nimes: the Garden (_Photogravure_)                        _Frontispiece_
+
+Tours: the House of Balzac                _To face page_               8
+
+Tours: the Cathedral (_Photogravure_)              "                  14
+
+Tours: the Towers of St. Martin                    "                  18
+
+Blois (_Photogravure_)                             "                  26
+
+Blois: the Chateau                                 "                  28
+
+Chambord                                           "                  38
+
+Amboise: the Chateau                               "                  48
+
+Chenonceaux (_Photogravure_)                       "                  56
+
+Azay-le-Rideau                                     "                  64
+
+Loches                                             "                  72
+
+Loches: the Church                                 "                  74
+
+Bourges: the House of Jacques Coeur (_Photogravure_) "              86
+
+Bourges: Doorway, House of Jacques Coeur         "                  90
+
+Bourges: the Cathedral (West Front)                "                  92
+
+Le Mans: the Cathedral                             "                  98
+
+Angers: Old Timbered Houses                        "                 104
+
+La Rochelle                                        "                 118
+
+La Rochelle: the Hotel de Ville (_Photogravure_)   "                 120
+
+Poitiers: Church of St. Radegonde (_Photogravure_) "                 126
+
+Bordeaux: the Quay (_Photogravure_)     _To face page_               134
+
+Toulouse: St. Sernin (the Transept)                "                 146
+
+Toulouse: the Garonne (_Photogravure_)             "                 148
+
+Carcassonne                                        "                 158
+
+Carcassonne (another View)                         "                 160
+
+Narbonne: the Washing Place                        "                 166
+
+Narbonne: the Cathedral and Hotel de Ville (_Photogravure_)  "       168
+
+The Pont du Gard                                   "                 180
+
+Aigues-Mortes                                      "                 186
+
+Nimes: the Cathedral                               "                 190
+
+Nimes: the Amphitheatre                            "                 192
+
+Tarascon: the Castle                               "                 198
+
+Arles: St. Trophimus                               "                 204
+
+Arles: Ruins of the Roman Theatre                  "                 206
+
+Arles: Door of St. Trophimus                       "                 210
+
+Arles: the Cloisters (_Photogravure_)              "                 212
+
+Avignon: the Church                                "                 226
+
+Vaucluse: Ruins of Castle                          "                 240
+
+Orange: the Theatre                                "                 246
+
+Lyons                                              "                 250
+
+Brou: the Church (_Photogravure_)                  "                 256
+
+Beaune: the Hospital                               "                 264
+
+Dijon                                              "                 266
+
+Dijon: the Park                                    "                 268
+
+Courtyard, House of Jacques Coeur                         _Half-title_
+
+Angers from the Bridge                                      _Title-page_
+
+Aigues-Mortes                                                          v
+
+Isle-sur-Sorgues                                                    viii
+
+Saint-Benazet: the Broken Bridge                                      ix
+
+Villeneuve-les-Avignon                                                xi
+
+Narbonne: the Fish Market                                            xii
+
+Avignon from Villeneuve                                             xiii
+
+Toulouse: Hotel d'Assezat                                            xvi
+
+Nantes                                                                 1
+
+Tours from the River                                                   3
+
+Langeais                                                               3
+
+Chaumont from the River                                               17
+
+Blois                                                                 26
+
+Chambord                                                              36
+
+Chaumont from the Bridge                                              47
+
+Chenonceaux                                                           54
+
+Azay-le-Rideau                                                        64
+
+Langeais from the Loire                                               68
+
+Loches                                                                72
+
+Bourges                                                               77
+
+Bourges: the Hotel Lallemont                                          86
+
+Le Mans                                                               94
+
+Angers: the Castle                                                   101
+
+Nantes: the Quay                                                     107
+
+La Rochelle: Tour de la Lanterne                                     115
+
+Poitiers: the Cathedral                                              122
+
+Bordeaux                                                             130
+
+Toulouse: the Cathedral                                              136
+
+Toulouse: the Place de Capitol                                       141
+
+Toulouse: Saint-Sernin                                               145
+
+Carcassonne from the River                                           150
+
+Carcassonne                                                          157
+
+Arles, Landscape near                                                163
+
+Montpellier: the Aqueduct                                            170
+
+The Pont du Gard                                                     178
+
+Aigues-Mortes                                                        183
+
+Nimes: the Maison Carree                                             188
+
+Tarascon and Beaucaire                                               195
+
+Provencal Landscape                                                  202
+
+Montmajeur                                                           209
+
+Les Baux                                                             213
+
+Villeneuve-les-Avignon                                               218
+
+Avignon                                                              223
+
+Vaucluse, Approach to                                                235
+
+Orange: the Gateway                                                  243
+
+Valence                                                              249
+
+Macon                                                                254
+
+Macon: the Bridge                                                    262
+
+Beaune: the Hospital                                                 267
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Introductory
+
+
+Though the good city of Paris appears to be less in fashion than in
+other days with those representatives of our race--not always, perhaps,
+acknowledged as the soundest and stiffest--curious of foreign
+opportunity and addicted to foreign sojourns, it probably none the less
+remains true that such frequentations of France as may be said still to
+flourish among us have as much as ever the wondrous capital, and the
+wondrous capital alone, for their object. The taste for Paris, at all
+events, is--or perhaps I should say was, alluding as I do, I fear, to a
+vanished order--a taste by itself; singularly little bound up, of
+necessity, with such an interest in the country at large as would be
+implied by an equal devotion, in other countries, to other capitals.
+Putting aside the economic inducement, which may always operate, and
+limiting the matter to the question of free choice, it is sufficiently
+striking that the free chooser would have to be very fond of England to
+quarter himself in London, very fond of Germany to quarter himself in
+Berlin, very fond of America to quarter himself in New York. It had, on
+the other hand, been a common reflection for the author of these light
+pages that the fondness for France (throughout the company of strangers
+more or less qualified) was oddly apt to feed only on such grounds for
+it as made shift to spread their surface between the Arc de Triomphe and
+the Gymnase Theatre: as if there were no good things in the _doux pays_
+that could not be harvested in that field. It matters little how the
+assumption began to strike him as stupid, especially since he himself
+had doubtless equally shared in the guilt of it. The light pages in
+question are but the simple record of a small personal effort to shake
+it off. He took, it must be confessed, no extraordinary measures; he
+merely started, one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
+little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as immediately as
+anywhere else see it demonstrated that, though France might be Paris,
+Paris was by no means France. The beauty of the demonstration--quite as
+prompt as he could have desired--drew him considerably farther, and his
+modest but eminently successful adventure begot, as aids to amused
+remembrance, a few informal notes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter i
+
+[Tours]
+
+
+I am ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France;
+that remark has long ago lost its bloom. The town of Tours, however, has
+something sweet and bright, which suggests that it is surrounded by a
+land of fruits. It is a very agreeable little city; few towns of its
+size are more ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better
+humour with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of
+bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region
+of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic,
+rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real
+Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in
+search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources
+of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague conviction that he can
+only lose by almost any change. Fortune has been kind to him: he lives
+in a temperate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the banks of a river
+which, it is true, sometimes floods the country around it, but of which
+the ravages appear to be so easily repaired that its aggressions may
+perhaps be regarded (in a region where so many good things are certain)
+merely as an occasion for healthy suspense. He is surrounded by fine old
+traditions, religious, social, architectural, culinary; and he may have
+the satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of
+his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is
+Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is
+essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac,
+of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses.
+George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the
+convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France--"son
+climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et courtes." In the autumn
+of 1882 the rains perhaps were less short than abundant; but when the
+days were fine it was impossible that anything in the way of weather
+could be more charming. The vineyards and orchards looked rich in the
+fresh, gay light; cultivation was everywhere, but everywhere it seemed
+to be easy. There was no visible poverty; thrift and success presented
+themselves as matters of good taste. The white caps of the women
+glittered in the sunshine, and their well-made sabots clicked cheerfully
+on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old chateaux,--a gallery
+of architectural specimens and of large hereditary properties. The
+peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in most other parts
+of France; though they have enough of it to give them quite their share
+of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little chaffering
+_place_ of the market-town, the stranger observes so often in the
+wrinkled brown masks that surmount the agricultural blouse. This is,
+moreover, the heart of the old French monarchy; and as that monarchy was
+splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splendour still glitters
+in the current of the Loire. Some of the most striking events of French
+history have occurred on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters
+bloomed for a while with the flowering of the Renaissance. The Loire
+gives a great "style" to a landscape of which the features are not, as
+the phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye to distances even more
+poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream,
+and is sometimes observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of
+its channel--a great defect certainly in a river which is so much
+depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of it
+as I saw it last; full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large slow curves
+and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than
+the view of its course which you get from the battlements and terraces
+of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that elevation one lovely Sunday
+morning, through a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very
+model of a generous, beneficent stream. The most charming part of Tours
+is naturally the shaded quay that overlooks it, and looks across too at
+the friendly faubourg of Saint Symphorien and at the terraced heights
+which rise above this. Indeed, throughout Touraine it is half the charm
+of the Loire that you can travel beside it. The great dyke which
+protects it, or protects the country from it, from Blois to Angers, is
+an admirable road; and on the other side as well the highway constantly
+keeps it company. A wide river, as you follow a wide road, is excellent
+company; it brightens and shortens the way.
+
+The inns at Tours are in another quarter, and one of them, which is
+midway between the town and the station, is very good. It is worth
+mentioning for the fact that every one belonging to it is
+extraordinarily polite--so unnaturally polite as at first to excite your
+suspicion that the hotel has some hidden vice, so that the waiters and
+chambermaids are trying to pacify you in advance. There was one waiter
+in especial who was the most accomplished social being I have ever
+encountered; from morning till night he kept up an inarticulate murmur
+of urbanity, like the hum of a spinning-top. I may add that I discovered
+no dark secrets at the Hotel de l'Univers; for it is not a secret to any
+traveller to-day that the obligation to partake of a lukewarm dinner in
+an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest,
+at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the
+monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all
+alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It
+connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in
+the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire--the spacious,
+solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the
+finest monuments of French architecture." The Palais de Justice was the
+seat of the Government of Leon Gambetta in the autumn of 1870, after the
+dictator had been obliged to retire in his balloon from Paris and before
+the Assembly was constituted at Bordeaux. The Germans occupied Tours
+during that terrible winter: it is astonishing, the number of places
+the Germans occupied. It is hardly too much to say that, wherever one
+goes in certain parts of France, one encounters two great historic
+facts: one is the Revolution; the other is the German invasion. The
+traces of the Revolution remain in a hundred scars and bruises and
+mutilations, but the visible marks of the war of 1870 have passed away.
+The country is so rich, so living, that she has been able to dress her
+wounds, to hold up her head, to smile again, so that the shadow of that
+darkness has ceased to rest upon her. But what you do not see you still
+may hear; and one remembers with a certain shudder that only a few short
+years ago this province, so intimately French, was under the heel of a
+foreign foe. To be intimately French was apparently not a safeguard; for
+so successful an invader it could only be a challenge. Peace and plenty,
+however, have succeeded that episode; and among the gardens and
+vineyards of Touraine it seems only a legend the more in a country of
+legends.
+
+It was not, all the same, for the sake of this chequered story that I
+mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale. The most interesting
+fact, to my mind, about the high-street of Tours was that as you walk
+toward the bridge on the right hand _trottoir_ you can look up at the
+house, on the other side of the way, in which Honore de Balzac first saw
+the light. That violent and complicated genius was a child of the
+good-humoured and succulent Touraine. There is something anomalous in
+this fact, though, if one thinks about it a little, one may discover
+certain correspondences between his character and that of his native
+province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly infelicitous in spite of his
+great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of
+influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding side--the side that
+comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the romantic and
+epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region. And he
+was, moreover, the product of a soil into which a great deal of history
+had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly
+monarchical, and he was saturated with a sense of the past. Number 39
+Rue Royale--of which the basement, like all the basements in the Rue
+Royale, is occupied by a shop--is not shown to the public; and I know
+not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of "Le
+Lys dans la Vallee" opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see
+and to imagine such extraordinary things. If this were the case I would
+willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any relic of
+the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of
+any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls, but
+simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to
+give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour. Balzac, in
+the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than any one,
+since Shakspeare, who has attempted to tell us stories about it; and the
+very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the
+immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a little to
+find that he was born in a house "in a row"--a house, moreover, which at
+the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old. All
+that is contradictory. If the tenement selected for this honour could
+not be ancient and embrowned, it should at least have been detached.
+
+There is a charming description in his little tale of "La Grenadiere" of
+the view of the opposite side of
+
+[Illustration: TOURS--THE HOUSE OF BALZAC]
+
+the Loire as you have it from the square at the end of the Rue Royale--a
+square that has some pretensions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the
+Hotel de Ville and the Musee, a pair of edifices which directly
+contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble images of Francois
+Rabelais and Rene Descartes. The former, erected a few years since, is a
+very honourable production; the pedestal of the latter could, as a
+matter of course, only be inscribed with the _Cogito ergo Sum_. The two
+statues mark the two opposite poles to which the wondrous French mind
+has travelled; and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours it ought
+to stand midway between them. Not that he by any means always struck the
+happy mean between the sensible and the metaphysical; but one may say of
+him that half of his genius looks in one direction and half in the
+other. The side that turns toward Francois 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 Grenadiere" 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 Vallee." 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 chateaux in Touraine commemorated in history that it
+would take one too far to look up those which have been commemorated in
+fiction. The most I did was to endeavour to identify the former
+residence of Mademoiselle Gamard, the sinister old maid of "Le Cure de
+Tours." This terrible woman occupied a small house in the rear of the
+cathedral, where I spent a whole morning in wondering rather stupidly
+which house it could be. To reach the cathedral from the little _place_
+where we stopped just now to look across at the Grenadiere, without, it
+must be confessed, very vividly seeing it, you follow the quay to the
+right and pass out of sight of the charming _coteau_ which, from beyond
+the river, faces the town--a soft agglomeration of gardens, vineyards,
+scattered villas, gables and turrets of slate-roofed chateaux, 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 mediaeval tower, a relic of the
+ancient fortifications, known to the Tourangeaux of to-day as the Tour
+de Guise. The young Prince of Joinville, son of that Duke of Guise who
+was murdered by the order of Henry II. at Blois, was, after the death of
+his father, confined here for more than two years, but made his escape
+one summer evening in 1591, under the nose of his keepers, with a
+gallant audacity which has attached the memory of the exploit to his
+sullen-looking prison. Tours has a garrison of five regiments, and the
+little red-legged soldiers light up the town. You see them stroll upon
+the clean, uncommercial quay, where there are no signs of navigation,
+not even by oar, no barrels nor bales, no loading nor unloading, no
+masts against the sky nor booming of steam in the air. The most active
+business that goes on there is that patient and fruitless angling in
+which the French, as the votaries of art for art, excel all other
+people. The little soldiers, weighed down by the contents of their
+enormous pockets, pass with respect from one of these masters of the rod
+to the other, as he sits soaking an indefinite bait in the large,
+indifferent stream. After you turn your back to the quay you have only
+to go a little way before you reach the cathedral.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter ii
+
+[Tours: the Cathedral]
+
+
+It is a very beautiful church of the second order of importance, with a
+charming mouse-coloured complexion and a pair of fantastic towers. There
+is a commodious little square in front of it, from which you may look up
+at its very ornamental face; but for purposes of frank admiration the
+sides and the rear are perhaps not sufficiently detached. The cathedral
+of Tours, which is dedicated to Saint Gatianus, took a long time to
+build. Begun in 1170, it was finished only in the first half of the
+sixteenth century; but the ages and the weather have interfused so well
+the tone of the different parts that it presents, at first at least, no
+striking incongruities, and looks even exceptionally harmonious and
+complete. There are many grander cathedrals, but there are probably few
+more pleasing; and this effect of delicacy and grace is at its best
+towards the close of a quiet afternoon, when the densely decorated
+towers, rising above the little Place de l'Archeveche, lift their
+curious lanterns into the slanting light and offer a multitudinous perch
+to troops of circling pigeons. The whole front, at such a time, has an
+appearance of great richness, although the niches which surround the
+three high doors (with recesses deep enough for several circles of
+sculpture) and indent the four great buttresses that ascend beside the
+huge rose-window, carry no figures beneath their little chiselled
+canopies. The blast of the great Revolution blew down most of the
+statues in France, and the wind has never set very strongly towards
+putting them up again. The embossed and crocketed cupolas which crown
+the towers of Saint Gatien are not very pure in taste; but, like a good
+many impurities, they have a certain character. The interior has a
+stately slimness with which no fault is to be found and which in the
+choir, rich in early glass and surrounded by a broad passage, becomes
+very bold and noble. Its principal treasure perhaps is the charming
+little tomb of the two children (who died young) of Charles VIII. and
+Anne of Brittany, in white marble embossed with symbolic dolphins and
+exquisite arabesques. The little boy and girl lie side by side on a slab
+of black marble, and a pair of small kneeling angels, both at their head
+and at their feet, watch over them. Nothing could be more elegant than
+this monument, which is the work of Michel Colomb, one of the earlier
+glories of the French Renaissance; it is really a lesson in good taste.
+Originally placed in the great abbey-church of Saint Martin, which was
+for so many ages the holy place of Tours, it happily survived the
+devastation to which that edifice, already sadly shattered by the wars
+of religion and successive profanations, finally succumbed in 1797. In
+1815 the tomb found an asylum in a quiet corner of the cathedral.
+
+I ought perhaps to be ashamed to acknowledge that I found the profane
+name of Balzac capable of adding an interest even to this venerable
+sanctuary. Those who have read the terrible little story of "Le Cure de
+Tours" will perhaps remember that, as I have already mentioned, the
+simple and childlike old Abbe Birotteau, victim of the infernal
+machinations of the Abbe 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 Gregoire de Tours. All this part
+of the exterior of the cathedral is very brown, ancient, Gothic,
+grotesque; Balzac calls the whole place "a desert of stone." A
+battered and gabled wing or out-house (as it appears to be) of the
+hidden palace, with a queer old stone pulpit jutting out from it, looks
+down on this melancholy spot, on the other side of which is a seminary
+for young priests, one of whom issues from a door in a quiet corner,
+and, holding it open a moment behind him, shows a glimpse of a sunny
+garden, where you may fancy other black young figures strolling up and
+down. Mademoiselle Gamard's house, where she took her two abbes to
+board, and basely conspired with one against the other, is still farther
+round the cathedral. You cannot quite put your hand upon it to-day, for
+the dwelling of which you say to yourself that it must have been
+Mademoiselle Gamard's does not fulfil all the conditions mentioned in
+Balzac's description. The edifice in question, however, fulfils
+conditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to
+the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with
+this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept),
+is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side
+of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to
+pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very
+genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the
+church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated; but it
+nestles with a kind of wasted friendliness beneath the big walls of the
+cathedral. Its lower arcades have been closed, and it has a small plot
+of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I should imagine to be
+too much overshadowed. In one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret,
+the cage of a winding staircase which ascends (no great distance) to an
+upper gallery, where an old priest, the _chanoine-gardien_ of the
+church, was walking to and fro with his breviary. The turret, the
+gallery, and even the chanoine-gardien, belonged, that sweet September
+morning, to the class of objects that are dear to painters in
+water-colours.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter iii
+
+[Tours: Saint Martin]
+
+
+I have mentioned the church of Saint Martin, which was for many years
+the sacred spot, the shrine of pilgrimage, of Tours. Originally the
+simple burial-place of the great apostle who in the fourth century
+Christianised Gaul and who, in his day a brilliant missionary and worker
+of miracles, is chiefly known to modern fame as the worthy that cut his
+cloak in two at the gate of Amiens to share it with a beggar (tradition
+fails to say, I believe, what he did with the other half), the abbey of
+Saint Martin, through the Middle Ages, waxed rich and powerful, till it
+was known at last as one of the most luxurious religious houses in
+Christendom, with kings for its titular abbots (who, like Francis I.,
+sometimes turned and despoiled it) and a great treasure of precious
+things. It passed, however, through many vicissitudes. Pillaged by the
+Normans in the ninth century and by the Huguenots in the sixteenth, it
+received its death-blow from the Revolution, which must have brought to
+bear upon it an energy of destruction proportionate to its mighty bulk.
+At the end of the last century a huge group of ruins alone remained, and
+what we see to-day may be called the ruin of a ruin. It is difficult to
+understand how so vast an edifice can have been so completely
+obliterated. Its site is given up to several ugly streets, and a pair of
+tall towers, separated by a space which speaks volumes as to the size of
+the church and looking across the close-pressed roofs to the happier
+spires of the cathedral, preserve for the modern world the memory of a
+great fortune, a great abuse, perhaps, and at all events a great
+penalty. One may believe that to this day a considerable part of the
+foundations of the great abbey is buried in the soil of Tours. The two
+surviving towers, which are dissimilar in shape, are enormous; with
+those of the cathedral they form the great landmarks of the town. One of
+them bears the name of the Tour de l'Horloge; the other, the so-called
+Tour Charlemagne, was erected (two centuries after her death) over the
+tomb of Luitgarde, wife of the great Emperor, who died at Tours in 800.
+I do not pretend to understand in what relation these very mighty and
+effectually detached masses of masonry stood to each other, but in their
+grey elevation and loneliness they are striking and suggestive to-day;
+holding their hoary heads far above the modern life of the town and
+looking sad and conscious, as they had outlived all uses. I know not
+what is supposed to have become of the bones
+
+[Illustration: TOURS--THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN]
+
+of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which
+they may have got mislaid; but a mystic connection with his
+wonder-working relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on
+the left of the street, which opens in front of the Tour
+Charlemagne--whose immemorial base, by the way, inhabited like a cavern,
+with a diminutive doorway where, as I passed, an old woman stood
+cleaning a pot, and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers,
+would be appreciated by a painter in search of "bits." The present
+shrine of Saint Martin is enclosed (provisionally, I suppose) in a very
+modern structure of timber, where in a dusky cellar, to which you
+descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper
+roses, is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and
+prostrate worshippers. Even this crepuscular vault, however, fails, I
+think, to attain solemnity; for the whole place is strangely vulgar and
+garish. The Catholic Church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the
+most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of
+impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of
+sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the
+grotesqueness of such an establishment as the last link in the chain of
+a great ecclesiastical tradition.
+
+In the same street, on the other side, a little below, is something
+better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at a high
+door in a white wall (there is a cross above it), and a fresh-faced
+sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the
+charming little cloister, or rather fragment of cloister. Only one side
+of this surpassing structure remains, but the whole place is effective.
+In front of the beautiful arcade, which is terribly bruised and
+obliterated, is one of those walks of interlaced _tilleuls_ which are so
+frequent in Touraine, and into which the green light filters so softly
+through a lattice of clipped twigs. Beyond this is a garden, and beyond
+the garden are the other buildings of the convent, where the placid
+sisters keep a school--a test, doubtless, of placidity. The imperfect
+arcade, which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century (I know
+nothing of it but what is related in Mrs. Pattison's "Renaissance in
+France"), is a truly enchanting piece of work; the cornice and the
+angles of the arches being covered with the daintiest sculpture of
+arabesques, flowers, fruit, medallions, cherubs, griffins, all in the
+finest and most attenuated relief. It is like the chasing of a bracelet
+in stone. The taste, the fancy, the elegance, the refinement, are of the
+order that straightens up again our drooping standard of distinction.
+Such a piece of work is the purest flower of the French Renaissance;
+there is nothing more delicate in all Touraine.
+
+[Tours: Saint Julian]
+
+There is another fine thing at Tours which is not particularly delicate,
+but which makes a great impression--the very interesting old church of
+Saint Julian, lurking in a crooked corner at the right of the Rue
+Royale, near the point at which this indifferent thoroughfare emerges,
+with its little cry of admiration, on the bank of the Loire. Saint
+Julian stands to-day in a kind of neglected hollow, where it is much
+shut in by houses; but in the year 1225, when the edifice was begun, the
+site was doubtless, as the architects say, more eligible. At present
+indeed, when once you have caught a glimpse of the stout, serious
+Romanesque tower--which is not high, but strong--you feel that the
+building has something to say and that you must stop to listen to it.
+Within, it has a vast and splendid nave, of immense height, the nave of
+a cathedral, with a shallow choir and transepts and some admirable old
+glass. I spent half an hour there one morning, listening to what the
+church had to say, in perfect solitude. Not a worshipper entered, not
+even an old man with a broom. I have always thought there be a sex in
+fine buildings; and Saint Julian, with its noble nave, is of the gender
+of the name of its patron.
+
+It was that same morning, I think, that I went in search of the old
+houses of Tours; for the town contains several goodly specimens of the
+domestic architecture of the past. The dwelling to which the average
+Anglo-Saxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have
+space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l'Hermite--a
+gentleman whom the readers of "Quentin Durward" will not have
+forgotten--the hangman-in-ordinary to that great and prompt chastener
+Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan
+at all; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions
+left at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis XI. His
+terrible castle of Plessis, the picture of which sends a shiver through
+the youthful reader of Scott, has been reduced to suburban
+insignificance; and the residence of his _triste compere_, 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 facade, to which you pick your way
+through a narrow and tortuous street--a street terminating, a little
+beyond it, in the walk beside the river. An elegant Gothic doorway is
+let into the rusty-red brickwork, and strange little beasts crouch at
+the angles of the windows, which are surmounted by a tall graduated
+gable, pierced with a small orifice, where the large surface of brick,
+lifted out of the shadow of the street, looks yellow and faded. The
+whole thing is disfigured and decayed; but it is a capital subject for a
+sketch in colours. Only I must wish the sketcher better luck--or a
+better temper--than my own. If he ring the bell to be admitted to see
+the court, which I believe is more sketchable still, let him have
+patience to wait till the bell is answered. He can do the outside while
+they are coming.
+
+[Tours: Plessis-les-Tours]
+
+The Maison de Tristan, I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly
+know for what the remnants of Plessis-les-Tours may be investigated. To
+reach them you wander through crooked suburban lanes, down the course of
+the Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incongruous spot, where a small,
+crude building of red brick is pointed out to you by your cabman (if you
+happen to drive) as the legendary frame of the grim portrait, and where
+a strong odour of pigsties and other unclean things so prostrates you
+for the moment that you have no energy to protest against this obvious
+fiction. You enter a yard encumbered with rubbish and a defiant dog, and
+an old woman emerges from a shabby lodge and assures you that you stand
+deep in historic dust. The red brick building, which looks like a small
+factory, rises on the ruins of the favourite residence of the dreadful
+Louis. It is now occupied by a company of night-scavengers, whose huge
+carts are drawn up in a row before it. I know not whether this be what
+is called the irony of fate; in any case, the effect of it is to
+accentuate strongly the fact (and through the most susceptible of our
+senses) that there is no honour for the authors of great wrongs. The
+dreadful Louis is reduced simply to an offence to the nostrils. The old
+woman shows you a few fragments--several dark, damp, much-encumbered
+vaults, denominated dungeons, and an old tower staircase in good
+condition. There are the outlines of the old moat; there is also the
+outline of the old guard-room, which is now a stable; and there are
+other silhouettes of the undistinguishable, which I have forgotten. You
+need all your imagination, and even then you cannot make out that
+Plessis was a castle of large extent, though the old woman, as your eye
+wanders over the neighbouring _potagers_, discourses much of the gardens
+and the park. The place looks mean and flat; and as you drive away you
+scarcely know whether to be glad or sorry that all those bristling
+horrors have been reduced to the commonplace.
+
+[Tours: Marmoutier]
+
+A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at
+Marmoutier, which is the other indispensable excursion in the near
+neighbourhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the
+other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from the town. You
+follow the edge of the big brown river; of a fine afternoon you will be
+glad to go farther still. The abbey has gone the way of most abbeys; but
+the place is a restoration as well as a ruin, inasmuch as the Sisters of
+the Sacred Heart have erected a terribly modern convent here. A large
+Gothic doorway, in a high fragment of ancient wall, admits you to a
+garden-like enclosure, of great extent, from which you are further
+introduced into an extraordinarily tidy little parlour, where two good
+nuns sit at work. One of these came out with me and showed me over the
+place--a very definite little woman, with pointed features, an intensely
+distinct enunciation, and those pretty manners which (for whatever other
+teachings it may be responsible) the Catholic Church so often instils
+into its functionaries. I have never seen a woman who had got her lesson
+better than this little trotting, murmuring, edifying nun. The interest
+of Marmoutier to-day is not so much an interest of vision, so to speak,
+as an interest of reflection--that is, if you choose to reflect (for
+instance) upon the wondrous legend of the seven sleepers (you may see
+where they lie in a row), who lived together--they were brothers and
+cousins--in primitive piety, in the sanctuary constructed by the blessed
+Saint Martin (emulous of his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the face of
+the hillside that overhung the Loire, and who, twenty-five years after
+his death, yielded up their seven souls at the same moment and enjoyed
+the rare convenience of retaining in their faces, in spite of mortality,
+every aspect of health. The abbey of Marmoutier, which sprang from the
+grottos in the cliff to which Saint Gatianus and Saint Martin retired to
+pray, was therefore the creation of the latter worthy, as the other
+great abbey, in the town proper, was the monument of his repose. The
+cliff is still there; and a winding staircase, in the latest taste,
+enables you conveniently to explore its recesses. These sacred niches
+are scooped out of the rock, and will give you an impression if you
+cannot do without one. You will feel them to be sufficiently venerable
+when you learn that the particular pigeon-hole of Saint Gatianus, the
+first Christian missionary to Gaul, dates from the third century. They
+have been dealt with as the Catholic Church deals with most of such
+places to-day; polished and furbished up, labelled and
+ticketed--_edited_, with notes, in short, like an old book. The process
+is a mistake--the early editions had more sanctity. The modern buildings
+(of the Sacred Heart), on which you look down from these points of
+vantage, are in the vulgar taste which sets its so mechanical stamp on
+all new Catholic work; but there was nevertheless a great sweetness in
+the scene. The afternoon was lovely, and it was flushing to a close. The
+large garden stretched beneath us, blooming with fruit and and wine and
+succulent promise, and beyond it flowed the shining river. The air was
+still, the shadows were long, and the place, after all, was full of
+memories, most of which might pass for virtuous. It certainly was better
+than Plessis-les-Tours.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter iv
+
+[Blois]
+
+
+Your business at Tours is to make excursions; and if you make them all
+you will be always under arms. The land is a rich reliquary, and an
+hour's drive from the town in almost any direction will bring you to the
+knowledge of some curious fragment of domestic or ecclesiastical
+architecture, some turreted manor, some lonely tower, some gabled
+village, some scene of something. Yet even if you do everything--which
+was not my case--you cannot hope to tell everything, and, fortunately
+for you, the excursions divide themselves into the greater and the less.
+You may achieve most of the greater in a week or two; but a summer in
+Touraine (which, by the way, must be a
+
+[Illustration: BLOIS]
+
+delectable thing) would hold none too many days for the others. If you
+come down to Tours from Paris your best economy is to spend a few days
+at Blois, where a clumsy but rather attractive little inn on the edge of
+the river will offer you a certain amount of that familiar and
+intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces
+teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation.
+Such an economy I was unable to practise. I could only go to Blois (from
+Tours) to spend the day; but this feat I accomplished twice over. It is
+a very sympathetic little town, as we say nowadays, and a week there
+would be sociable even without company. Seated on the north bank of the
+Loire, it presents a bright, clean face to the sun and has that aspect
+of cheerful leisure which belongs to all white towns that reflect
+themselves in shining waters. It is the water-front only of Blois,
+however, that exhibits this fresh complexion; the interior is of a
+proper brownness, as old sallow books are bound in vellum. The only
+disappointment is perforce the discovery that the castle, which is the
+special object of one's pilgrimage, does not overhang the river, as I
+had always allowed myself to understand. It overhangs the town, but is
+scarcely visible from the stream. That peculiar good fortune is reserved
+for Amboise and Chaumont.
+
+The Chateau de Blois is one of the most beautiful and elaborate of all
+the old royal residences of this part of France, and I suppose it should
+have all the honours of my description. As you cross its threshold you
+step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance. But
+it is too rich to describe--I can only pick out the high lights. It must
+be premised that in speaking of it as we see it to-day we speak of a
+monument unsparingly restored. The work of restoration has been as
+ingenious as it is profuse, but it rather chills the imagination. This
+is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle
+from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they leave the
+river, have pretensions to romantic steepness; one of them, indeed,
+which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the
+_escalier monumental_), achieved this result so successfully as to
+remind me vaguely--I hardly know why--of the great slope of the Capitol,
+beside the Ara Coeli, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle which
+figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced)
+exhibits the marks of restoration with the greatest assurance. The long
+facade, 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 chateaux of Touraine (always excepting the colossal Chambord,
+which is not in Touraine), there is less vastness than one had expected,
+the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive. Here, as
+elsewhere, lightness and grace are the keynote; and the recesses of the
+windows, with their happy proportions, their sculpture and their colour,
+are the hollow sockets of the human ornament. They need the figure of a
+Francis I. to complete them, or of a Diane de Poitiers, or even of a
+Henry III. The stand of this empty gilt cage emerges from a bed of light
+verdure which has been allowed to mass itself there and which
+contributes
+
+[Illustration: BLOIS--THE CHATEAU]
+
+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'Orleans. This fine
+frigid mansion--the proper view of it is from the court within--is one
+of the masterpieces of Francois Mansard, whom a kind providence did not
+allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his
+superior age. That had been a part of Gaston's plan--he was a blunderer
+born, and this precious project was worthy of him. This execution of it
+would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history. Partially
+performed, the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted; for as one
+stands in the court of the castle and lets one's eye wander from the
+splendid wing of Francis I.--which is the last word of free and joyous
+invention--to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous pavilion
+of Mansard, one makes one's reflections upon the advantage, in even the
+least personal of the arts, of having something to say, and upon the
+stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of
+negatives. Gaston's wing, taken by itself, has much of the _bel air_
+which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV.; but, taken in
+contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbour, it marks the
+difference between inspiration and calculation. We scarcely grudge it
+its place, however, for it adds a price to the rest of the pile.
+
+We have entered the court, by the way, by jumping over the walls. The
+more orthodox method is to follow a modern terrace which leads to the
+left, from the side of the edifice that I began by speaking of, and
+passes round, ascending, to a little square on a considerably higher
+level, a square not, like the rather prosaic space on which the back (as
+I have called it) looks out, a thoroughfare. This small empty _place_,
+oblong in form, at once bright and quiet, and which ought to be
+grass-grown, offers an excellent setting to the entrance-front of the
+palace--the wing of Louis XII. The restoration here has been lavish; but
+it was perhaps but an inevitable reaction against the injuries, still
+more lavish, by which the unfortunate building had long been
+overwhelmed. It had fallen into a state of ruinous neglect, relieved
+only by the misuse proceeding from successive generations of soldiers,
+for whom its charming chambers served as barrack-room. Whitewashed,
+mutilated, dishonoured, the castle of Blois may be said to have escaped
+simply with its life. This is the history of Amboise as well, and is to
+a certain extent the history of Chambord. Delightful, at any rate, was
+the refreshed facade of Louis XII. as I stood and looked at it one
+bright September morning. In that soft, clear, merry light of Touraine,
+everything shows, everything speaks. Charming are the taste, the happy
+proportions, the colour of this beautiful front, to which the new
+feeling for a purely domestic architecture--an architecture of security
+and tranquillity, in which art could indulge itself--gave an air of
+youth and gladness. It is true that for a long time to come the castle
+of Blois was neither very safe nor very quiet; but its dangers came from
+within, from the evil passions of its inhabitants, and not from siege or
+invasion. The front of Louis XII. is of red brick, crossed here and
+there with purple; and the purple slate of the high roof, relieved with
+chimneys beautifully treated and with the embroidered caps of pinnacles
+and arches, with the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and the festooned
+rope which formed the devices of Anne of Brittany--the tone of this
+decorative roof carries out the mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair
+windows open as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the
+Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the
+chateaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in
+the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which gives
+this line the look, above the expressive aperture, of a pencilled
+eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
+which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped
+charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had
+been--the father of his people, as he was called (I believe he remitted
+various taxes)--he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution;
+and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of
+the primitive statue demolished at that period.
+
+Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round
+you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces
+of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to peep
+out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage
+of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that fronts
+toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the
+wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which
+you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant,
+this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of
+the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in
+which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle
+of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding
+staircase (plausibly, but I believe not religiously, restored), which
+even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms
+a kind of chiselled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the stairs
+are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its balconies, its
+pillars, its great central columns, is wrought over with lovely images,
+strange and ingenious devices, prime among which is the great heraldic
+salamander of Francis I. The salamander is everywhere at Blois--over the
+chimneys, over the doors, on the walls. This whole quarter of the castle
+bears the stamp of that eminently pictorial prince. The running cornice
+along the top of the front is like an unfolded, an elongated bracelet.
+The windows of the attic are like shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the
+medallions, the statuettes, the festoons are like the elaboration of
+some precious cabinet rather than the details of a building exposed to
+the weather and to the ages. In the interior there is a profusion of
+restoration, and it is all restoration in colour. This has been,
+evidently, a work of great energy and cost, but it will easily strike
+you as overdone. The universal freshness is a discord, a false note; it
+seems to light up the dusky past with an unnatural glare. Begun in the
+reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible process--the more terrible always
+the better case you conceive made out for it--has been carried so far
+that there is now scarcely a square inch of the interior that preserves
+the colour of the past. It is true that the place had been so coated
+over with modern abuse that something was needed to keep it alive; it is
+only perhaps a pity the clever doctors, not content with saving its
+life, should have undertaken to restore its bloom. The love of
+consistency, in such a business, is a dangerous lure. All the old
+apartments have been rechristened, as it were; the geography of the
+castle has been re-established. The guard-rooms, the bedrooms, the
+closets, the oratories have recovered their identity. Every spot
+connected with the murder of the Duke of Guise is pointed out by a
+small, shrill boy, who takes you from room to room and who has learned
+his lesson in perfection. The place is full of Catherine de'Medici, of
+Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of echoes, of possible evocations
+and revivals. It is covered with crimson and gold. The fireplaces and
+the ceilings are magnificent; they look like expensive "sets" at the
+grand opera.
+
+I should have mentioned that below, in the court, the front of the wing
+of Gaston d'Orleans faces you as you enter, so that the place is a
+course of French history. Inferior in beauty and grace to the other
+portions of the castle, the wing is yet a nobler monument than the
+memory of Gaston deserves. The second of the sons of Henry IV.--who was
+no more fortunate as a father than as a husband--younger brother of
+Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated,
+most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful _fille a
+marier_ in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle
+of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal
+Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his pusillanimity
+and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after
+so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the
+project--begun, but not completed--of demolishing the beautiful
+habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston
+d'Orleans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the
+Chateau de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of
+religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the
+principal events of his depraved and dramatic rule. It has been restored
+more than enough, as I have said, by architects and decorators; the
+visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are at once
+brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished), undertakes a
+little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself from the
+things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in
+its form and dress--its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates,
+its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude of personal
+development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of
+costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled
+picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light
+and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is
+the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it
+complete. What episode was ever more perfect--looked at as a dramatic
+occurrence--than the murder of the Duke of Guise? The insolent
+prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the
+author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation
+of horror in what followed it--render it, as a crime, one of the classic
+things.
+
+But we must not take the Chateau de Blois too hard: I went there, after
+all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories your
+visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
+removing the impression. You may treat yourself at Blois to a very
+cheerful afterpiece. There is a charming industry practised there, and
+practised in charming conditions. Follow the bright little quay down the
+river till you get quite out of the town and reach the point where the
+road beside the Loire becomes sinuous and attractive, turns the corner
+of diminutive headlands and makes you wonder what is beyond. Let not
+your curiosity induce you, however, to pass by a modest white villa
+which overlooks the stream, enclosed in a fresh little court; for here
+dwells an artist--an artist in faience. There is no sort of sign, and
+the place looks peculiarly private. But if you ring at the gate you will
+not be turned away. You will, on the contrary, be ushered upstairs into
+a parlour--there is nothing resembling a shop--encumbered with specimens
+of remarkably handsome pottery. The ware is of the best, a careful
+reproduction of old forms, colours, devices; and the master of the
+establishment is one of those completely artistic types that are often
+found in France. His reception is as friendly as his work is ingenious;
+and I think it is not too much to say that you like the work better
+because he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars, lamps, platters,
+_plaques_, with their brilliant glaze, their innumerable figures, their
+family likeness and wide variations, are scattered through his occupied
+rooms; they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and as household
+ornament. As we all know, this is an age of prose, of machinery, of
+wholesale production, of coarse and hasty processes. But one brings away
+from the establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse the sense of a
+less eager activity and a greater search for perfection. He has but a
+few workmen and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little
+vignette, leaves an impression--the quiet white house in its garden on
+the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the
+ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort
+Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris--though that be
+much to say--have forgiven.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter v
+
+[Chambord]
+
+
+The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord, and came
+back by the Chateau de Cheverny and the forest of Russy--a charming
+little expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a
+rainy season that was spotted with bright days) contributed not a
+little. To go to Chambord you cross the Loire, leave it on one side and
+strike away through a country in which salient features become less and
+less numerous and which at last has no other quality than a look of
+intense and peculiar rurality--the characteristic, even when it be not
+the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the
+appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply
+the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a
+deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in
+England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and
+sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great _potager_,
+without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long,
+low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, fences, signs of
+property; everything is absorbed in the general flatness--the patches of
+vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children (planted
+and staring and almost always pretty), the women in the fields, the
+white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's
+drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend
+double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall which does
+duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed
+a straight avenue through a disfeatured park--the park of Chambord has
+twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy
+plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and
+is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in
+France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutions.
+Nevertheless its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues
+give this frugal shrubbery a certain state; just as its shabbiness
+places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions awaiting
+you. You pursue one of these long perspectives a proportionate time, and
+at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently
+out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that formerly
+surrounded it has, in vulgar parlance, let it down and given it a
+monstrous over-crowned air that is at the same time a magnificent
+Orientalism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the
+lanterns, the chimneys look more like the spires of a city than the
+salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and
+find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
+strange mixture of society and solitude. A little village clusters
+within view of its liberal windows, and a couple of inns near by offer
+entertainment to pilgrims. These things of course are incidents of the
+political proscription which hangs its thick veil over the place.
+Chambord is truly royal--royal in its great scale, its grand air, its
+indifference to common considerations. If a cat may look at a king, a
+tavern may look at a palace. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary
+structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed there is
+something interesting in any monument of a great system, any bold
+presentation of a tradition.
+
+You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and
+tidy and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect
+the neighbourhood of a Court veritably set the fashion, and you proceed
+across the grass and the gravel to a small door, a door infinitely
+subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.
+Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a
+person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime), after which
+she ushers you over a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the
+strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this
+court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my
+guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round
+towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each
+angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in
+the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of
+these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its
+shadow
+
+[Illustration: CHAMBORD]
+
+over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables,
+the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was
+empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections,
+were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole
+thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a
+rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient
+and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to
+understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire
+to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so
+easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a
+wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled
+prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four
+hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The
+repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his
+revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double
+staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of
+steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This
+staircase is a truly majestic piece of humour; it gives you the note, as
+it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in
+four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to
+the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the
+termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),
+forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of the pile. This lantern is
+tipped with a huge _fleur-de-lis_ in stone--the only one, I believe,
+that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow
+windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled,
+melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you
+walk about the roof in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies,
+through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in
+itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous
+quality, and with its profuse ornamentation--the salamander of Francis
+I. is a constant motive--its lonely pavements, its sunny niches, the
+balcony that looks down over the closed and grass-grown main entrance, a
+strange, half-sad, half-brilliant charm. The stonework is covered with
+fine mould. There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet
+mildewed corners of courts and terraces into which the traveller who
+wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows. They show
+you two or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon portraits, hideous
+tapestries from the ladies of France, a collection of the toys of the
+_enfant du miracle_, all military and of the finest make. "Tout cela
+fonctionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons; and I wondered,
+if he should take it into his head to fire off his little cannon, how
+much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.
+
+From below the castle would look crushed by the redundancy of its upper
+protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers,
+which appear to give it a robust lateral development. These towers,
+however, fine as they are in their way, struck me as a little stupid;
+they are the exaggeration of an exaggeration. In a building erected
+after the days of defence and proclaiming its peaceful character from
+its hundred embroideries and cupolas, they seem to indicate a want of
+invention. I shall risk the accusation of bad taste if I say that,
+impressive as it is, the Chateau de Chambord seemed to me to have
+altogether a touch of that quality of stupidity. The trouble is that it
+stands for nothing very momentous; it has not happened, in spite of
+sundry vicissitudes, to have a strongly-marked career. Compared with
+that of Blois and Amboise its past is rather vacant; and one feels to a
+certain extent the contrast between its pompous appearance and its
+spacious but somewhat colourless annals. It had indeed the good fortune
+to be erected by Francis I., whose name by itself expresses a good deal
+of history. Why he should have built a palace in those sandy plains will
+ever remain an unanswered question, for kings have never been obliged to
+give reasons. In addition to the fact that the country was rich in game
+and that Francis was a passionate hunter, it is suggested by M. de la
+Saussaye, the author of the very complete little account of the place
+which you may buy at the bookseller's at Blois, that he was governed in
+his choice of the site by the chance that a charming woman had
+previously lived there. The Comtesse de Thoury had a manor in the
+neighbourhood, and the Comtesse de Thoury had been the object of a
+youthful passion on the part of the most susceptible of princes before
+his accession to the throne. This great pile was reared, therefore,
+according to M. de la Saussaye, as a _souvenir de premieres amours_! It
+is certainly a very massive memento; and if these tender passages were
+proportionate to the building that commemorates them, the flame blazed
+indeed. There has been much discussion as to the architect employed by
+Francis I., and the honour of having designed this splendid residence
+has been claimed for several of the Italian artists who early in the
+sixteenth century came to seek patronage in France. It seems well
+established to-day, however, that Chambord was the work neither of
+Primaticcio, of Vignola, nor of Il Rosso, all of whom have left some
+trace of their sojourn in France; but of an obscure yet very complete
+genius, Pierre Nepveu, known as Pierre Trinqueau, who is designated in
+the papers which preserve in some degree the history of the origin of
+the edifice, as the _maistre de l'oeuvre de maconnerie_. Behind this
+modest title, apparently, we must recognise one of the most original
+talents of the French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigour of
+the artistic life of that period that, brilliant production being
+everywhere abundant, an artist of so high a value should not have been
+treated by his contemporaries as a celebrity. We make our celebrities
+to-day at smaller cost.
+
+The immediate successors of Francis I. continued to visit Chambord; but
+it was neglected by Henry IV. and was never afterwards a favourite
+residence of any French king. Louis XIV. appeared there on several
+occasions, and the apparition was characteristically brilliant; but
+Chambord could not long detain a monarch who had gone to the expense of
+creating a Versailles ten miles from Paris. With Versailles,
+Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain and Saint-Cloud within easy reach of their
+capital, the later French sovereigns had little reason to take the air
+in the dreariest province of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered
+from royal indifference, though in the last century a use was found for
+its deserted halls. In 1725 it was occupied by the luckless Stanislaus
+Leczynski, who spent the greater part of his life in being elected King
+of Poland and being ousted from his throne, and who, at this time a
+refugee in France, had found a compensation for some of his misfortunes
+in marrying his daughter to Louis XV. He lived eight years at Chambord
+and filled up the moats of the castle. In 1748 it found an illustrious
+tenant in the person of Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who,
+however, two years after he had taken possession of it, terminated a
+life which would have been longer had he been less determined to make it
+agreeable. The Revolution, of course, was not kind to Chambord. It
+despoiled it in so far as possible of every vestige of its royal origin,
+and swept like a whirlwind through apartments to which upwards of two
+centuries had contributed a treasure of decoration and furniture. In
+that wild blast these precious things were destroyed or for ever
+scattered. In 1791 an odd proposal was made to the French Government by
+a company of English Quakers, who had conceived the bold idea of
+establishing in the palace a manufacture of some peaceful commodity not
+to-day recorded. Napoleon allotted Chambord, as a "dotation," to one of
+his marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it was converted, in
+Napoleonic fashion, into the so-called principality of Wagram. By the
+Princess of Wagram, the marshal's widow, it was, after the Restoration,
+sold to the trustees of a national subscription which had been
+established for the purpose of presenting it to the infant Duke of
+Bordeaux, then prospective King of France. The presentation was duly
+made; but the Comte de Chambord, who had changed his title in
+recognition of the gift, was despoiled of his property by the government
+of Louis Philippe. He appealed for redress to the tribunals of his
+country; and the consequence of his appeal was an interminable
+litigation, by which, however, finally, after the lapse of twenty-five
+years, he was established in his rights. In 1871 he paid his first visit
+to the domain which had been offered him half a century before, a term
+of which he had spent forty years in exile. It was from Chambord that
+he dated his famous letter of the 5th of July of that year--the letter,
+directed to his so-called subjects, in which he waves aloft the white
+flag of the Bourbons. This rare miscalculation--virtually an invitation
+to the French people to repudiate, as their national ensign, that
+immortal tricolour, the flag of the Revolution and the Empire, under
+which they have won the glory which of all glories has hitherto been
+dearest to them and which is associated with the most romantic, the most
+heroic, the epic, the consolatory, period of their history--this
+luckless manifesto, I say, appears to give the measure of the political
+wisdom of the excellent Henry V. The proposal should have had less
+simplicity or the people less irony.
+
+On the whole Chambord makes a great impression; and the hour I was
+there, while the yellow afternoon light slanted upon the September
+woods, there was a dignity in its desolation. It spoke, with a muffled
+but audible voice, of the vanished monarchy, which had been so strong,
+so splendid, but to-day had become a vision almost as fantastic as the
+cupolas and chimneys that rose before me. I thought, while I lingered
+there, of all the fine things it takes to make up such a monarchy; and
+how one of them is a superfluity of mouldering, empty palaces. Chambord
+is touching--that is the best word for it; and if the hopes of another
+restoration are in the follies of the Republic, a little reflection on
+that eloquence of ruin ought to put the Republic on its guard. A
+sentimental tourist may venture to remark that in presence of all the
+haunted houses that appeal in this mystical manner to the retrospective
+imagination it cannot afford to be foolish. I thought of all this as I
+drove back to Blois by the way of the Chateau de Cheverny. The road took
+us out of the park of Chambord, but through a region of flat woodland,
+where the trees were not mighty, and again into the prosy plain of the
+Sologne--a thankless soil to sow, I believe, but lately much amended by
+the magic of cheerful French industry and thrift. The light had already
+begun to fade, and my drive reminded me of a passage in some rural novel
+of Madame Sand. I passed a couple of timber and plaster churches, which
+looked very old, black and crooked, and had lumpish wooden porches and
+galleries encircling the base. By the time I reached Cheverny the clear
+twilight had approached. It was late to ask to be allowed to visit an
+inhabited house; but it was the hour at which I like best to visit
+almost anything. My coachman drew up before a gateway, in a high wall,
+which opened upon a short avenue, along which I took my way on foot; the
+coachmen in those parts being, for reasons best known to themselves,
+mortally averse to driving up to a house. I answered the challenge of a
+very tidy little portress who sat, in company with a couple of children,
+enjoying the evening air in front of her lodge, and who told me to walk
+a little farther and turn to the right. I obeyed her to the letter, and
+my turn brought me into sight of a house as charming as an old manor in
+a fairy tale. I had but a rapid and partial view of Cheverny; but that
+view was a glimpse of perfection. A light, sweet mansion stood looking
+over a wide green lawn, over banks of flowers and groups of trees. It
+had a striking character of elegance, produced partly by a series of
+Renaissance busts let into circular niches in the facade. The place
+looked so private, so reserved, that it seemed an act of violence to
+ring, a stranger and foreigner, at the graceful door. But if I had not
+rung I should be unable to express--as it is such a pleasure to do--my
+sense of the exceeding courtesy with which this admirable house is
+shown. It was near the dinner-hour--the most sacred hour of the day; but
+I was freely conducted into the inhabited apartments. They are extremely
+beautiful. What I chiefly remember is the charming staircase of white
+embroidered stone, and the great _salle des gardes_ and _chambre a
+coucher du roi_ on the second floor. Cheverny, built in 1634, is of a
+much later date than the other royal residences of this part of France;
+it belongs to the end of the Renaissance and has a touch of the rococo.
+The guard-room is a superb apartment; and as it contains little save its
+magnificent ceiling and fireplace and certain dim tapestries on its
+walls, you the more easily take the measure of its noble proportions.
+The servant opened the shutters of a single window, and the last rays of
+the twilight slanted into the rich brown gloom. It was in the same
+picturesque fashion that I saw the bedroom (adjoining) of Henry IV.,
+where a legendary-looking bed, draped in folds long unaltered, defined
+itself in the haunted dusk. Cheverny remains to me a very charming, a
+partly mysterious vision. I drove back to Blois in the dark, some nine
+miles, through the forest of Russy, which belongs to the State and
+which, though consisting apparently of small timber, looked under the
+stars sufficiently vast and primeval. There was a damp autumnal smell
+and the occasional sound of a stirring thing; and as I moved through the
+evening air I thought of Francis I. and Henry IV.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter vi
+
+[Amboise]
+
+
+You may go to Amboise either from Blois or from Tours; it is about
+half-way between these towns. The great point is to go, especially if
+you have put it off repeatedly; and to go, if possible, on a day when
+the great view of the Loire, which you enjoy from the battlements and
+terraces, presents itself under a friendly sky. Three persons, of whom
+the author of these lines was one, spent the greater part of a perfect
+Sunday morning in looking at it. It was astonishing, in the course of
+the rainiest season in the memory of the oldest Tourangeau, how many
+perfect days we found to our hand. The town of Amboise lies, like Tours,
+on the left bank of the river--a little white-faced town staring across
+an admirable bridge and leaning, behind, as it were, against the
+pedestal of rock on which the dark castle masses itself. The town is so
+small, the pedestal so big and the castle so high and striking, that
+the clustered houses at the base of the rock are like the crumbs that
+have fallen from a well-laden table. You pass among them, however, to
+ascend by a circuit to the chateau, 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 Penthievre, who toward the close of the last
+century bought it from the Crown, which had recovered it after a lapse.
+Like the castle of Blois, it has been injured and defaced by base uses,
+but, unlike the castle of Blois, it has not been completely restored.
+"It is very, very dirty, but very curious"--it is in these terms that I
+heard it described by an English lady who was generally to be found
+engaged upon a tattered Tauchnitz in the little _salon de lecture_ of
+the hotel at Tours. The description is not inaccurate; but it should be
+said that if part of the dirtiness of Amboise is the result of its
+having served for years as a barrack and as a prison, part of it comes
+from the presence of restoring stonemasons, who have woven over a
+considerable portion of it a mask of scaffolding. There is a good deal
+of neatness as well, and the restoration of some of the parts seems
+finished. This process, at Amboise, consists for the most part simply of
+removing the vulgar excrescences of the last two centuries.
+
+The interior is virtually a blank, the old apartments having been
+chopped up into small modern rooms; it will have to be completely
+reconstructed. A worthy woman with a military profile and that sharp,
+positive manner which the goodwives who show you through the chateaux of
+Touraine are rather apt to have, and in whose high respectability, to
+say nothing of the frill of
+
+[Illustration: AMBOISE--THE CHATEAU]
+
+her cap and the cut of her thick brown dress, my companions and I
+thought we discovered the particular note, or _nuance_, of Orleanism--a
+competent, appreciative, peremptory person, I say--attended us through
+the particularly delightful hour we spent upon the ramparts of Amboise.
+Denuded and disfeatured within and bristling without with bricklayers'
+ladders, the place was yet extraordinarily impressive and interesting. I
+should mention that we spent a great deal of time in looking at the
+view. Sweet was the view, and magnificent; we preferred it so much to
+certain portions of the interior, and to occasional effusions of
+historical information, that the old lady with the profile sometimes
+lost patience with us. We laid ourselves open to the charge of
+preferring it even to the little chapel of Saint Hubert, which stands on
+the edge of the great terrace and has, over the portal, a wonderful
+sculpture of the miraculous hunt of that holy man. In the way of plastic
+art this elaborate scene is the gem of Amboise. It seemed to us that we
+had never been in a place where there are so many points of vantage to
+look down from. In the matter of position Amboise is certainly supreme
+in the list of perched places; and I say this with a proper recollection
+of the claims of Chaumont and of Loches--which latter, by the way (the
+afterthought is due), is not on the Loire. The platforms, the bastions,
+the terraces, the high-niched windows and balconies, the hanging gardens
+and dizzy crenellations, of this complicated structure, keep you in
+perpetual intercourse with an immense horizon. The great feature of the
+place is the obligatory round tower which occupies the northern end of
+it, and which has now been completely restored. It is of astounding
+size, a fortress in itself, and contains, instead of a staircase, a
+wonderful inclined plane, so wide and gradual that a coach and four may
+be driven to the top. This colossal cylinder has to-day no visible use;
+but it corresponds, happily enough, with the great circle of the
+prospect. The gardens of Amboise, lifted high aloft, covering the
+irregular remnants of the platform on which the castle stands and making
+up in picturesqueness what they lack in extent, constitute of course but
+a scanty domain. But bathed, as we found them, in the autumn sunshine
+and doubly private from their aerial site, they offered irresistible
+opportunities for a stroll interrupted, as one leaned against their low
+parapets, by long contemplative pauses. I remember in particular a
+certain terrace planted with clipped limes upon which we looked down
+from the summit of the big tower. It seemed from that point to be
+absolutely necessary to one's happiness to go down and spend the rest of
+the morning there; it was an ideal place to walk to and fro and talk.
+Our venerable conductress, to whom our relation had gradually become
+more filial, permitted us to gratify this innocent wish--to the extent,
+that is, of taking a turn or two under the mossy _tilleuls_. At the end
+of this terrace is the low door, in a wall, against the top of which, in
+1498, Charles VIII., according to an accepted tradition, knocked his
+head to such good purpose that he died. It was within the walls of
+Amboise that his widow, Anne of Brittany, already in mourning for three
+children, two of whom we have seen commemorated in sepulchral marble at
+Tours, spent the first violence of that grief which was presently
+dispelled by a union with her husband's cousin and successor, Louis XII.
+Amboise was a frequent resort of the French Court during the sixteenth
+century; it was here that the young Mary Stuart spent sundry hours of
+her first marriage. The wars of religion have left here the ineffaceable
+stain which they left wherever they passed. An imaginative visitor at
+Amboise to-day may fancy that the traces of blood are mixed with the red
+rust on the crossed iron bars of the grim-looking balcony to which the
+heads of the Huguenots executed on the discovery of the conspiracy of La
+Renaudie are rumoured to have been suspended. There was room on the
+stout balustrade--an admirable piece of work--for a ghastly array. The
+same rumour represents Catherine de'Medici and the young queen as
+watching from this balcony the _noyades_ of the captured Huguenots in
+the Loire. The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if
+possible, worse; but there is little doubt that the future Queen of
+Scots learnt the first lessons of life at a horrible school. If in
+subsequent years she was a prodigy of innocence and virtue, it was not
+the fault of her whilom mother-in-law, of her uncles of the house of
+Guise, or of the examples presented to her either at the windows of the
+castle of Amboise or in its more private recesses. It was difficult to
+believe in these dark deeds, however, as we looked through the golden
+morning at the placidity of the far-shining Loire. The ultimate
+consequence of this spectacle was a desire to follow the river as far as
+the castle of Chaumont. It is true that the cruelties practised of old
+at Amboise might have seemed less phantasmal to persons destined to
+suffer from a modern form of inhumanity. The mistress of the little inn
+at the base of the castle-rock--it stands very pleasantly beside the
+river, and we had breakfasted there--declared to us that the Chateau de
+Chaumont, which is often during the autumn closed to visitors, was at
+that particular moment standing so wide open to receive us that it was
+our duty to hire one of her carriages and drive thither with speed. This
+assurance was so satisfactory that we presently found ourselves seated
+in this wily woman's most commodious vehicle and rolling, neither too
+fast nor too slow, along the margin of the Loire. The drive of about an
+hour, beneath constant clumps of chestnuts, was charming enough to have
+been taken for itself; and indeed when we reached Chaumont we saw that
+our reward was to be simply the usual reward of virtue, the
+consciousness of having attempted the right. The Chateau de Chaumont was
+inexorably closed; so we learned from a talkative lodge-keeper, who gave
+what grace she could to her refusal. This good woman's dilemma was
+almost touching; she wished to reconcile two impossibles. The castle was
+not to be visited, for the family of its master was staying there; and
+yet she was loath to turn away a party of which she was good enough to
+say that it had a _grand genre_; for, as she also remarked, she had her
+living to earn. She tried to arrange a compromise, one of the elements
+of which was that we should descend from our carriage and trudge up a
+hill which would bring us to a designated point where, over the paling
+of the garden, we might obtain an oblique and surreptitious view of a
+small portion of the castle walls. This suggestion led us to inquire (of
+each other) to what degree of baseness it is lawful for an enlightened
+lover of the picturesque to resort in order not to have a blank page in
+his collection. One of our trio decided characteristically against any
+form of derogation; so she sat in the carriage and sketched some object
+that was public property while her two companions, who were not so
+proud, trudged up a muddy ascent which formed a kind of back-stairs. It
+is perhaps no more than they deserved that they were disappointed.
+Chaumont is feudal, if you please; but the modern spirit is in
+possession. It forms a vast clean-scraped mass, with big round towers,
+ungarnished with a leaf of ivy or a patch of moss, surrounded by gardens
+of moderate extent (save where the muddy lane of which I speak passes
+near it), and looking rather like an enormously magnified villa. The
+great merit of Chaumont is its position, which almost exactly resembles
+that of Amboise; it sweeps the river up and down and seems to look over
+half the province. This, however, was better appreciated as, after
+coming down the hill and re-entering the carriage, we drove across the
+long suspension-bridge which crosses the Loire just beyond the village
+and over which we made our way to the small station of Onzain, at the
+farther end, to take the train back to Tours. Look back from the middle
+of this bridge; the whole picture composes, as the painters say. The
+towers, the pinnacles, the fair front of the chateau, perched above its
+fringe of garden and the rusty roofs of the village and facing the
+afternoon sky, which is reflected also in the great stream that sweeps
+below, all this makes a contribution to your happiest memories of
+Touraine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter vii
+
+[Chenonceaux]
+
+
+We never went to Chinon; it was a fatality. We planned it a dozen times;
+but the weather interfered, or the trains didn't suit, or one of the
+party was fatigued with the adventures of the day before. This excursion
+was so much postponed that it was finally postponed to everything.
+Besides, we had to go to Chenonceaux, to Azay-le-Rideau, to Langeais, to
+Loches. So I have not the memory of Chinon; I have only the regret. But
+regret, as well as memory, has its visions; especially when, like
+memory, it is assisted by photographs. The castle of Chinon in this form
+appears to me as an enormous ruin, a mediaeval fortress of the extent
+almost of a city. It covers a hill above the Vienne, and after being
+impregnable in its time is indestructible to-day. (I risk this phrase in
+the face of the prosaic truth. Chinon, in the days when it was a prize,
+more than once suffered capture, and at present it is crumbling inch by
+inch. It is apparent, however, I believe, that these inches encroach
+little upon acres of masonry.) It was in the castle that Jeanne Dare had
+her first interview with Charles VII., and it is in the town that
+Francois Rabelais is supposed to have been born. To the castle,
+moreover, the lover of the picturesque is earnestly recommended to
+direct his steps. But one always misses something, and I would rather
+have missed Chinon than Chenonceaux. Fortunate exceedingly were the few
+hours we passed on the spot on which we missed nothing.
+
+"In 1747," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his "Confessions," "we went to
+spend the autumn in Touraine, at the Chateau of Chenonceaux, a royal
+residence upon the Cher, built by Henry II. for Diana of Poitiers, whose
+initials are still to be seen there, and now in possession of M. Dupin,
+the farmer-general. We amused ourselves greatly at this fine place; the
+living was of the best, and I became as fat as a monk. We made a great
+deal of music and acted comedies."
+
+This is the only description that Rousseau gives of one of the most
+romantic houses in France and of an episode that must have counted as
+one of the most agreeable in his uncomfortable career. The eighteenth
+century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques
+has said that Chenonceaux was a "beau lieu," he thinks himself absolved
+from further characterisation. We later sons of time have, both for our
+pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am
+afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute
+than this to the architectural gem of Touraine. Fortunately I can
+discharge my debt with gratitude. In going from Tours you leave the
+valley of the Loire and enter that of the Cher, and at the end of about
+an hour you see the turrets of the castle on your right, among the
+trees, down in the meadows, beside the quiet little river. The station
+and the village are about ten minutes' walk from the chateau, 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 chateau need
+know nothing of passing trains--which pass, indeed, though the grounds
+are not large, at a very sufficient distance. I may add that the trains
+throughout this part of France have a noiseless, desultory, dawdling,
+almost stationary quality, which makes them less of an offence than
+usual. It was a Sunday afternoon and the light was yellow save under the
+trees of the avenue, where, in spite of the waning of September, it was
+duskily green. Three or four peasants, in festal attire, were strolling
+about. On a bench at the beginning of the avenue sat a man with two
+women. As I advanced with my companions he rose, after a sudden stare,
+and approached me with a smile in which (to be Johnsonian for a moment)
+certitude was mitigated by modesty and eagerness was embellished with
+respect. He came toward me with a salutation that I had seen before, and
+I am happy to say that after an instant I ceased to be guilty of the
+brutality of not knowing where. There was only one place in the world
+where people smile like that, only one place where the art of salutation
+has that perfect grace. This excellent creature used to crook his arm,
+
+[Illustration: CHENONCEAUX]
+
+in Venice, when I stepped into my gondola; and I now laid my hand on
+that member with the familiarity of glad recognition; for it was only
+surprise that had kept me even for a moment from accepting the genial
+Francesco as an ornament of the landscape of Touraine. What on
+earth--the phrase is the right one--was a Venetian gondolier doing at
+Chenonceaux? He had been brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the
+mistress of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher. Our meeting
+was affectionate, though there was a kind of violence in seeing him so
+far from home. He was too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown
+stout, and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He remarked that the
+life of the household to which he had the honour to belong was that of a
+_casa regia_; which must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
+habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was the sympathetic Checco
+still; and for five minutes after I left him I thought less about the
+little pleasure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
+Adriatic.
+
+But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure
+that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the chateau, the
+small scale of which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
+court, at the entrance of which a massive and detached round tower, with
+a turret on its brow (a relic of the building that preceded the actual
+villa), appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed--or is
+enclosed at least only by the gardens, portions of which are at present
+in process of radical readjustment. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no
+great height, its delicate facade stands up boldly enough. This facade,
+one of the most finished things in Touraine, consists of two storeys,
+surmounted by an attic which, as so often in the buildings of the
+French Renaissance, is the richest part of the house. The high-pitched
+roof contains three windows of beautiful design, covered with
+embroidered caps and flowering into crocketed spires. The window above
+the door is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in the form of a
+double pulpit--one of the most charming features of the front.
+Chenonceaux is not large, as I say, but into its delicate compass is
+packed a great deal of history--history which differs from that of
+Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sentimental kind. The
+echoes of the place, faint and far as they are to-day, are not
+political, but personal. Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the
+year 1515, when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary who had
+grown rich in handling the finances of Normandy and had acquired the
+estate from a family which, after giving it many feudal lords, had
+fallen into poverty, erected the present structure on the foundations of
+an old mill. The design is attributed, with I know not what justice, to
+Pierre Nepveu, _alias_ Trinqueau, the audacious architect of Chambord.
+On the death of Bohier the house passed to his son, who, however, was
+forced, under cruel pressure, to surrender it to the Crown in
+compensation for a so-called deficit in the official accounts of this
+rash parent and predecessor. Francis I. held the place till his death;
+but Henry II., on ascending the throne, presented it out of hand to that
+mature charmer, the admired of two generations, Diana of Poitiers. Diana
+enjoyed it till the death of her protector; but when this event occurred
+the widow of the monarch, who had been obliged to submit in silence, for
+years, to the ascendency of a rival, took the most pardonable of all the
+revenges with which the name of Catherine de'Medici is associated and
+turned her out of doors. Diana was not in want of refuges, Catherine
+went through the form of giving her Chaumont in exchange; but there was
+only one Chenonceaux. Catherine devoted herself to making the place more
+completely unique. The feature that renders it sole of its kind is not
+appreciated till you wander round to either side of the house. If a
+certain springing lightness is the characteristic of Chenonceaux, if it
+bears in every line the aspect of a place of recreation--a place
+intended for delicate, chosen pleasures--nothing can confirm this
+expression better than the strange, unexpected movement with which, from
+behind, it carries itself across the river. The earlier building stands
+in the water; it had inherited the foundations of the mill destroyed by
+Thomas Bohier. The first step therefore had been taken upon solid piles
+of masonry; and the ingenious Catherine--she was a _raffinee_--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 chateau, which mainly resembles a house
+built upon a bridge and occupying its entire length, is of course the
+great curiosity of Chenonceaux. It forms on each floor a charming
+corridor, which, within, is illuminated from either side by the
+flickering river-light. The architecture of these galleries, seen from
+without, is less elegant than that of the main building, but the aspect
+of the whole thing is delightful. I have spoken of Chenonceaux as a
+"villa," using the word advisedly, for the place is neither a castle nor
+a palace. It is a very exceptional villa, but it has the
+villa-quality--the look of being intended for life in common. This look
+is not at all contradicted by the wing across the Cher, which only
+suggests indoor perspectives and intimate pleasures--walks in pairs on
+rainy days; games and dances on autumn nights; together with as much as
+may be of moonlighted dialogue (or silence) in the course of evenings
+more genial still, in the well-marked recesses of windows.
+
+It is safe to say that such things took place there in the last century,
+during the kindly reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin. This period
+presents itself as the happiest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I know not
+what festive train the great Diana may have led, and my imagination, I
+am afraid, is only feebly kindled by the records of the luxurious
+pastimes organised on the banks of the Cher by that terrible daughter of
+the Medici whose appreciation of the good things of life was perfectly
+consistent with a failure to perceive why others should live to enjoy
+them. The best society that ever assembled there was collected at
+Chenonceaux during the middle of the eighteenth century. This was
+surely, in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the
+"right people" made every haste to be born in time. Such people must of
+course have belonged to the fortunate few--not to the miserable many;
+for if a society be large enough to be good, it must also be small
+enough. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age
+of fireside talk and of those amenities that proceed from the presence
+of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The
+women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested
+in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free
+conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the
+liquid murmur of the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only a great man of
+business, but a man of honour and a patron of knowledge; and his wife
+was gracious, clever, and wise. They had acquired this famous property
+by purchase (from one of the Bourbons, as Chenonceaux, for two centuries
+after the death of Catherine de'Medici, remained constantly in princely
+hands), and it was transmitted to their son, Dupin de Francueil,
+grandfather of Madame George Sand. This lady, in her Correspondence,
+lately published, describes a visit that she paid more than thirty years
+ago to those members of her family who were still in possession. The
+owner of Chenonceaux to-day[a] is the daughter of an Englishman
+naturalised in France. But I have wandered far from my story, which is
+simply a sketch of the surface of the place. Seen obliquely, from either
+side, in combination with its bridge and gallery, the structure is
+singular and fantastic, a striking example of a wilful and capricious
+conception. Unfortunately all caprices are not so graceful and
+successful, and I grudge the honour of this one to the false and
+blood-polluted Catherine. (To be exact, I believe the arches of the
+bridge were laid by the elderly Diana. It was Catherine, however, who
+completed the monument.) Within, the house has been, as usual, restored.
+The staircases and ceilings, in all the old royal residences of this
+part of France, are the parts that have suffered least; many of them
+have still much of the life of the old time about them. Some of the
+chambers of Chenonceaux, however, encumbered as they are with modern
+detail, derive a sufficiently haunted and suggestive look from the deep
+setting of their beautiful windows, which thickens the shadows and makes
+dark corners. There is a charming little Gothic chapel, with its apse
+hanging over the water, fastened to the left flank of the house. Some of
+the upper balconies, which look along the outer face of the gallery and
+either up or down the river, are delightful protected nooks. We walked
+through the lower gallery to the other bank of the Cher; this fine
+apartment appeared to be for the moment a purgatory of ancient
+furniture. It terminates rather abruptly; it simply stops, with a blank
+wall. There ought, of course, to have been a pavilion here, though I
+prefer very much the old defect to any modern remedy. The wall is not so
+blank, however, but that it contains a door which opens on a rusty
+drawbridge. This drawbridge traverses the small gap which divides the
+end of the gallery from the bank of the stream. The house, therefore,
+does not literally rest on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests on one
+and just fails to rest on the other. The pavilion would have made that
+up; but after a moment we ceased to miss this imaginary feature. We
+passed the little drawbridge, and wandered awhile beside the river. From
+this opposite bank the mass of the chateau 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 _meler les genres_. A gondola
+in a little flat French river? The image was not less irritating, if
+less injurious, than the spectacle of a steamer in the Grand Canal,
+which had driven me away from Venice a year and a half before. We took
+our way back to the Bon Laboureur, and waited in the little inn-parlour
+for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an
+excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were still
+content to sit awhile and exchange remarks upon the superior
+civilisation of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have
+fared so well? Where else should we have sat down to our refreshment
+without condescension? There were a couple of countries in which it
+would not have been happy for us to arrive hungry, on a Sunday evening,
+at so modest an hostelry. At the little inn at Chenonceaux the _cuisine_
+was not only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on
+by mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to
+the elder lady as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux. We
+were very comfortable, very genial; we even went so far as to say to
+each other that Vouvray mousseux was a delightful wine. From this
+opinion indeed one of our trio differed; but this member of the party
+had already exposed herself to the charge of being too fastidious by
+declining to descend from the carriage at Chaumont and take that
+back-stairs view of the castle.
+
+[a] 1884.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter viii
+
+[Azay-le-Rideau]
+
+
+Without fastidiousness it was fair to declare on the other hand that the
+little inn at Azay-le-Rideau was very bad. It was terribly dirty and it
+was in charge of a fat _megere_ whom the appearance of four trustful
+travellers--we were four, with an illustrious fourth, on that
+occasion--roused apparently to fury. I attached great importance to this
+incongruous hostess, for she uttered the only uncivil words I heard
+spoken (in connection with any business of my own) during a tour of some
+six weeks in France. Breakfast not at Azay-le-Rideau therefore, too
+trustful traveller; or if you do so, be either very meek or very bold.
+Breakfast not, save under stress of circumstance; but let no
+circumstance whatever prevent your going to see the great house of the
+place, which is a fair rival to Chenonceaux. The village lies close to
+the gates, though after you pass these gates you leave it well behind. A
+little avenue, as at Chenonceaux, leads to the castle,
+
+[Illustration: AZAY-LE-RIDEAU]
+
+making a pretty vista as you approach the sculptured doorway. Azay is a
+most perfect and beautiful thing; I should place it third in any list of
+the great houses of this part of France in which these houses should be
+ranked according to charm. For beauty of detail it comes after Blois and
+Chenonceaux, but it comes before Amboise and Chambord. On the other
+hand, of course it is inferior in majesty to either of these vast
+structures. Like Chenonceaux, it is a watery place, though it is more
+meagrely moated than the small chateau on the Cher. It consists of a
+large square _corps de logis_, with a round tower at each angle, rising
+out of a somewhat too slumberous pond. The water--the water of the
+Indre--surrounds it, but it is only on one side that it bathes its feet
+in the moat. On one of the others stretches a little terrace, treated as
+a garden, and in front prevails a wide court formed by a wing which, on
+the right, comes forward. This front, covered with sculptures, is of the
+richest, stateliest effect. The court is approached by a bridge over the
+pond, and the house would reflect itself in this wealth of water if the
+water were a trifle less opaque. But there is a certain stagnation--it
+affects more, senses than one--about the picturesque pools of Azay. On
+the hither side of the bridge is a garden overshadowed by fine old
+sycamores--a garden shut in by greenhouses and by a fine last-century
+gateway flanked with twin lodges. Beyond the chateau and the standing
+waters behind it is a so-called _parc_, which, however, it must be
+confessed, has little of park-like beauty. The old houses--a large
+number--remain in France; but the old timber does not remain, and the
+denuded aspect of the few acres that surround the chateaux of Touraine
+is pitiful to the traveller who has learned to take the measure of such
+things from the country of "stately homes." The garden-ground of the
+lordly Chaumont is that of an English suburban villa; and in that and in
+other places there is little suggestion, in the untended aspect of walk
+and lawns, of the gardener the British Islands know. The manor as we see
+it dates from the early part of the sixteenth century; and the
+industrious Abbe Chevalier, in his very entertaining though slightly
+rose-coloured book on Touraine,[b] speaks of it as "perhaps the purest
+expression of the _belle Renaissance francoise_." "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 Abbe speaks of the
+admirable staircase which adorns the north front and which, with its
+extension inside, constitutes the principal treasure of Azay. The
+staircase passes beneath one of the richest of porticos--a portico over
+which a monumental salamander indulges in the most decorative
+contortions. The sculptured vaults of stone which cover the windings of
+the staircase within, the fruits, flowers, ciphers, heraldic signs, are
+of the noblest effect. The interior of the chateau is rich, comfortable,
+extremely modern; but it makes no picture that compares with its
+external face, about which, with its charming proportions, its profuse
+yet not extravagant sculpture, there is something very tranquil and
+pure.
+
+[b] "Promenades pittoresques en Touraine." Tours: 1869.
+
+I took a particular fancy to the roof, high, steep, old, with its slope
+of bluish slate, and the way the weather-worn chimneys seemed to grow
+out of it--living things in a deep soil. The single defect of the house
+is the blankness and bareness of its walls, which have none of that
+delicate parasitic deposit that agrees so well--to the eye--with the
+surface of old dwellings. It is true that this bareness results in a
+kind of silvery whiteness of complexion which carries out the tone of
+the quiet pools and even that of the scanty and shadeless park.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter ix
+
+[Langeais]
+
+
+I hardly know what to say about the tone of Langeais, which, though I
+have left it to the end of my sketch, formed the objective point of the
+first excursion I made from Tours. Langeais is rather dark and grey; it
+is perhaps the simplest and most severe of all the castles of the Loire.
+I don't know why I should have gone to see it before any other, unless
+it be because I remembered that Duchesse de Langeais who figures in
+several of Balzac's novels, and found this association very potent. The
+Duchesse de Langeais is a somewhat transparent fiction; but the castle
+from which Balzac borrowed the title of his heroine is an extremely
+solid fact. My doubt just above as to whether I should pronounce it
+exceptionally grey came from my having seen it under a sky which made
+most things look dark. I have, however, a very kindly memory of that
+moist and melancholy afternoon, which was much more autumnal than many
+of the days that followed it. Langeais lies down the Loire, near the
+river, on the opposite side from Tours, and to go to it you will spend
+half an hour in the train. You pass on the way the Chateau de Luynes,
+which, with its round towers catching the afternoon light, looks
+uncommonly well on a hill at a distance; you pass also the ruins of the
+castle of Cinq-Mars, the ancestral dwelling of the young favourite of
+Louis XIII., the victim of Richelieu, the hero of Alfred de Vigny's
+novel, which is usually recommended to young ladies engaged in the study
+of French. Langeais is very imposing and decidedly sombre; it marks the
+transition from the architecture of defence to that of elegance. It
+rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to
+which it gives its name and which it entirely dominates; so that as you
+stand before it in the crooked and empty street there is no resource for
+you but to stare up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge
+towers surmounted with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street
+to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments
+of a French village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on
+the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen; brown old
+crones, the tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps (worn by
+day) look dazzling; little alleys perforating the thickness of a row of
+cottages and showing you behind, as a glimpse, the vividness of a green
+garden. In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formerly have
+been occupied by some of its appurtenances and which indeed is still
+partly enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence,
+which, with the small houses of the village at its base, shuts in the
+castle from behind. The enclosure is not defiantly guarded, however; for
+a small, rough path, which you presently reach, leads up to an open
+gate. This gate admits you to a vague and rather limited _parc_, which
+covers the crest of the hill and through which you may walk into the
+gardens of the castle. These gardens, of small extent, confront the dark
+walls with their brilliant parterres and, covering the gradual slope of
+the hill, form, as it were, the fourth side of the court. This is the
+stateliest view of the structure, which looks to you sufficiently grim
+and grey as, after asking leave of a neat young woman who sallies out to
+learn your errand, you sit there on a garden bench and take the measure
+of the three tall towers attached to this inner front and forming
+severally the cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cornice (one of
+the features of Langeais), which is merely ornamental, as it is not
+machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as
+well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on
+the ruins of feudalism.
+
+The main event in the history of the castle is the marriage of Anne of
+Brittany to her first husband, Charles VIII., which took place in its
+great hall in 1491. Into this great hall we were introduced by the neat
+young woman--into this great hall and into sundry other halls, winding
+staircases, galleries, chambers. The cicerone of Langeais is in too
+great a hurry; the fact is pointed out in the excellent Guide-Joanne.
+This ill-dissimulated vice, however, is to be observed, in the country
+of the Loire, in every one who carries a key. It is true that at
+Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weakness
+of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds
+and ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and
+musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all
+apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in
+the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to
+read the name on the frame of some simpering portrait.
+
+To return to Tours my companion and I had counted on a train which (as
+is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins
+de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take
+us home. A sorry _carriole_ or _patache_ it proved to be, with the
+accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient
+peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of
+extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic
+woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the
+Blesois appearing to have the best of it in the business of letting
+vehicles, as well as in many other industries. There is, in fact, no
+branch of human activity in which one is not liable, in France, to find
+a woman engaged. Women, indeed, are not priests; but priests are, more
+or less, women. They are not in the army, it may be said but then they
+_are_ the army. They are very formidable. In France one must count with
+the women. The drive back from Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold;
+we had an occasional spatter of rain. But the road passes most of the
+way close to the Loire, and there was something in our jog-trot through
+the darkening land, beside the flowing river, which it was very possible
+to enjoy.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter x
+
+[Loches]
+
+
+The consequence of my leaving to the last my little mention of Loches is
+that space and opportunity fail me; and yet a brief and hurried account
+of that extraordinary spot would after all be in best agreement with my
+visit. We snatched a fearful joy, my companion and I, the afternoon we
+took the train for Loches. The weather this time had been terribly
+against us: again and again a day that promised fair became hopelessly
+foul after lunch. At last we determined that if we could not make this
+excursion in the sunshine we would make it with the aid of our
+umbrellas. We grasped them firmly and started for the station, where we
+were detained an unconscionable time by the evolutions, outside, of
+certain trains laden with liberated (and exhilarated) conscripts, who,
+their term of service ended, were about to be restored to civil life.
+The trains in Touraine are provoking; they
+
+[Illustration: LOCHES]
+
+serve as little as possible for excursions. If they convey you one way
+at the right hour, it is on the condition of bringing you back at the
+wrong; they either allow you far too little time to examine the castle
+or the ruin, or they leave you planted in front of it for periods that
+outlast curiosity. They are perverse, capricious, exasperating. It was a
+question of our having but an hour or two at Loches, and we could ill
+afford to sacrifice to accidents. One of the accidents, however, was
+that the rain stopped before we got there, leaving behind it a moist
+mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky which were in
+perfect agreement with the grey old city. Loches is certainly one of the
+greatest impressions of the traveller in central France--the largest
+cluster of curious things that presents itself to his sight. It rises
+above the valley of the Indre, the charming stream set in meadows and
+sedges, which wanders through the province of Berry and through many of
+the novels of Madame George Sand; lifting from the summit of a hill,
+which it covers to the base, a confusion of terraces, ramparts, towers,
+and spires. Having but little time, as I say, we scaled the hill amain
+and wandered briskly through this labyrinth of antiquities. The rain had
+decidedly stopped and, save that we had our train on our minds, we saw
+Loches to the best advantage. We enjoyed that sensation with which the
+conscientious tourist is--or ought to be--well acquainted and for which,
+at any rate, he has a formula in his rough-and-ready language. We
+"experienced," as they say (most irregular of verbs), an "agreeable
+disappointment." We were surprised and delighted; we had for some reason
+suspected that Loches was scarce good.
+
+I hardly know what is best there: the strange and impressive little
+collegial church, with its romanesque atrium or narthex, its doorways
+covered with primitive sculpture of the richest kind, its treasure of a
+so-called pagan altar embossed with fighting warriors, its three
+pyramidal domes, so unexpected, so sinister, which I have not met
+elsewhere in church architecture; or the huge square keep of the
+eleventh century--the most cliff-like tower I remember, whose
+immeasurable thickness I did not penetrate; or the subterranean
+mysteries of two other less striking but not less historic dungeons,
+into which a terribly imperative little cicerone introduced us, with the
+aid of downward ladders, ropes, torches, warnings, extended hands, and
+many fearful anecdotes--all in impervious darkness. These horrible
+prisons of Loches, at an incredible distance below daylight, enlivened
+the consciousness of Louis XI. and were for the most part, I believe,
+constructed by him. One of the towers of the castle is garnished with
+the hooks or supports of the celebrated iron cage in which he confined
+the Cardinal La Balue, who survived so much longer than might have been
+expected this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure. All these
+things form part of the castle of Loches, whose enormous _enceinte_
+covers the whole of the top of the hill and abounds in dismantled
+gateways, in crooked passages, in winding lanes that lead to postern
+doors, in long facades 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 Chateau de Loches and who has also the
+enjoyment of a garden--a garden compressed and curtailed, as those of
+old castles that perch on hill-tops are apt to be--containing a
+horse-chestnut tree of fabulous size,
+
+[Illustration: LOCHES--THE CHURCH]
+
+a tree of a circumference so vast and so perfect that the whole
+population of Loches might sit in concentric rows beneath its boughs.
+The gem of the place, however, is neither the big _marronier_, nor the
+collegial church, nor the mighty dungeon, nor the hideous prisons of
+Louis XI.; it is simply the tomb of Agnes Sorel, _la belle des belles_,
+so many years the mistress of Charles VII. She was buried in 1450, in
+the collegial church, whence, in the beginning of the present century,
+her remains, with the monument that marks them, were transferred to one
+of the towers of the castle. She has always, I know not with what
+justice, enjoyed a fairer fame than most ladies who have occupied her
+position, and this fairness is expressed in the delicate statue that
+surmounts her tomb. It represents her lying there in lovely demureness,
+her hands folded with the best modesty, a little kneeling angel at
+either side of her head, and her feet, hidden in the folds of her decent
+robe, resting upon a pair of couchant lambs, innocent reminders of her
+name. Agnes, however, was not lamb-like, inasmuch as, according to
+popular tradition at least, she exerted herself sharply in favour of the
+expulsion of the English from France. It is one of the suggestions of
+Loches that the young Charles VII., hard put to it as he was for a
+treasury and a capital--"le roi de Bourges," he was called at Paris--was
+yet a rather privileged mortal, to stand up as he does before posterity
+between the noble Joan and the _gentille Agnes_; deriving, however, much
+more honour from one of these companions than from the other. Almost as
+delicate a relic of antiquity as this fascinating tomb is the exquisite
+oratory of Anne of Brittany, among the apartments of the castle the only
+chamber worthy of note. This small room, hardly larger than a closet,
+and forming part of the addition made to the edifice by Charles VIII.,
+is embroidered over with the curious and remarkably decorative device of
+the ermine and festooned cord. The objects in themselves are not
+especially graceful, but the constant repetition of the figure on the
+walls and ceiling produces an effect of richness in spite of the modern
+whitewash with which, if I remember rightly, they have been endued. The
+little streets of Loches wander crookedly down the hill and are full of
+charming pictorial "bits:" an old town-gate, passing under a medieval
+tower, which is ornamented by Gothic windows and the empty niches of
+statues; a meagre but delicate _hotel de ville_ of the Renaissance
+nestling close beside it; a curious _chancellerie_ of the middle of the
+sixteenth century, with mythological figures and a Latin inscription on
+the front--both of these latter buildings being rather unexpected
+features of the huddled and precipitous little town. Loches has a suburb
+on the other side of the Indre, which we had contented ourselves with
+looking down at from the heights while we wondered whether, even if it
+had not been getting late and our train were more accommodating, we
+should care to take our way across the bridge and look up that bust in
+terra-cotta of Francis I. which is the principal ornament of the Chateau
+de Sansac and the faubourg of Beaulieu. I think we decided that we
+should not, that we had already often measured the longest nose in
+history.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xi
+
+[Bourges]
+
+
+I know not whether the exact limits of an excursion as distinguished
+from a journey have ever been fixed; at any rate, it seemed none of my
+business at Tours to settle the question. Therefore, though the making
+of excursions had been the purpose of my stay, I thought it vain, while
+I started for Bourges, to determine to which category that little
+expedition might belong. It was not till the third day that I returned
+to Tours; and the distance, traversed for the most part after dark, was
+even greater than I had supposed. That, however, was partly the fault of
+a tiresome wait at Vierzon, where I had more than enough time to dine,
+very badly, at the _buffet_ and to observe the proceedings of a family
+who had entered my railway carriage at Tours and had conversed
+unreservedly, for my benefit, all the way from that station--a family
+whom it entertained me to assign to the class of _petite noblesse de
+province_. Their noble origin was confirmed by the way they all "made
+_maigre_" in the refreshment-room (it happened to be a Friday), as if it
+had been possible to do anything else. They ate two or three omelets
+apiece and ever so many little cakes, while the positive, talkative
+mother watched her children as the waiter handed about the roast fowl. I
+was destined to share the secrets of this family to the end; for while I
+took my place in the empty train that was in waiting to convey us to
+Bourges the same vigilant woman pushed them all on top of me into my
+compartment, though the carriages on either side contained no travellers
+at all. It was better, I found, to have dined (even on omelets and
+little cakes) at the station at Vierzon than at the hotel at Bourges,
+which, when I reached it at nine o'clock at night, did not strike me as
+the prince of hotels. The inns in the smaller provincial towns in France
+are all, as the term is, commercial, and the _commis-voyageur_ is in
+triumphant possession. I saw a great deal of him for several weeks after
+this; for he was apparently the only traveller in the southern
+provinces, and it was my daily fate to sit opposite to him at tables
+d'hote and in railway trains. He may be known by two infallible
+signs--his hands are fat and he tucks his napkin into his shirt-collar.
+In spite of these idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me a reserved and
+inoffensive person, with singularly little of the demonstrative
+good-humour that he has been described as possessing. I saw no one who
+reminded me of Balzac's "illustre Gaudissart;" and indeed in the course
+of a month's journey through a large part of France I heard so little
+desultory conversation that I wondered whether a change had not come
+over the spirit of the people. They seemed to me as silent as Americans
+when Americans have not been "introduced," and infinitely less addicted
+to exchanging remarks in railway trains and at tables d'hote than the
+colloquial and cursory English; a fact perhaps not worth mentioning were
+it not at variance with that reputation which the French have long
+enjoyed of being a pre-eminently sociable nation. The common report of
+the character of a people is, however, an indefinable product, and is
+apt to strike the traveller who observes for himself as very wide of the
+mark. The English, who have for ages been described (mainly by the
+French) as the dumb stiff, unapproachable race, present to-day a
+remarkable appearance of good-humour and garrulity and are distinguished
+by their facility of intercourse. On the other hand, any one who has
+seen half-a-dozen Frenchmen pass a whole day together in a
+railway-carriage without breaking silence is forced to believe that the
+traditional reputation of these gentlemen is simply the survival of some
+primitive formula. It was true, doubtless, before the Revolution; but
+there have been great changes since then. The question of which is the
+better taste, to talk to strangers or to hold your tongue, is a matter
+apart; I incline to believe that the French reserve is the result of a
+more definite conception of social behaviour. I allude to it only
+because it is at variance with the national fame and at the same time
+compatible with a very easy view of life in certain other directions. On
+some of these latter points the Boule d'Or at Bourges was full of
+instruction; boasting as it did of a hall of reception in which, amid
+old boots that had been brought to be cleaned, old linen that was being
+sorted for the wash, and lamps of evil odour that were awaiting
+replenishment, a strange, familiar, promiscuous household life went
+forward. Small scullions in white caps and aprons slept upon greasy
+benches; the Boots sat staring at you while you fumbled, helpless, in a
+row of pigeon-holes, for your candlestick or your key; and, amid the
+coming and going of the _commis-voyageurs_, a little sempstress bent
+over the under-garments of the hostess--the latter being a heavy, stern,
+silent woman, who looked at people very hard.
+
+[Bourges: the Cathedral]
+
+It was not to be looked at in that manner that one had come all the way
+from Tours; so that within ten minutes after my arrival I sallied out
+into the darkness to form somehow and somewhere a happier relation.
+However late in the evening I may arrive at a place, I never go to bed
+without my impression. The natural place at Bourges to look for it
+seemed to be the cathedral; which, moreover, was the only thing that
+could account for my presence _dans cette galere_. I turned out of a
+small square in front of the hotel and walked up a narrow, sloping
+street paved with big, rough stones and guiltless of a footway. It was a
+splendid starlight night; the stillness of a sleeping _ville de
+province_ was over everything; I had the whole place to myself. I turned
+to my right, at the top of the street, where presently a short, vague
+lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely,
+from behind; it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous and sublime.
+It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which
+Bourges is scattered--a very good position as French cathedrals go, for
+they are not all so nobly situated as Chartres and Laon. On the side on
+which I approached it (the south) it is tolerably well exposed, though
+the precinct is shabby; in front, it is rather too much shut in. These
+defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it
+presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the
+Archeveche, which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual
+formal alleys of the _jardin francais_. I must add that I appreciated
+these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of
+the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were
+shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church
+overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea
+would overhang a solitary swimmer. It seemed colossal, stupendous, a
+dark leviathan.
+
+The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it,
+and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The
+cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good
+deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more
+imposing. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it was
+projected "_des_ 1172," but commenced only in the first years of the
+thirteenth century. "The nave," the writer adds, "was finished _tant
+bien que mal, faute de ressources_; the facade is of the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its
+upper." The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.
+The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers; one of which
+(the south) is immensely buttressed, so that its outline slopes forward
+like that of a pyramid. This is the taller of the two. If they had
+spires these towers would be prodigious; as it is, given the rest of the
+church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed
+portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the
+central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the
+measure of its width, the front rears itself,
+
+
+
+piles itself, on a great scale, carried up by galleries, arches,
+windows, sculptures, and supported by the extraordinarily thick
+buttresses of which I have spoken and which, though they embellish it
+with deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not improve its style. The
+portals, especially the middle one, are extremely interesting; they are
+covered with curious early sculptures. The middle one, however, I must
+describe alone. It has no less than six rows of figures--the others have
+four--some of which, notably the upper one, are still in their places.
+The arch at the top has three tiers of elaborate imagery. The upper of
+these is divided by the figure of Christ in judgment, of great size,
+stiff and terrible, with outstretched arms. On either side of him are
+ranged three or four angels, with the instruments of the Passion.
+Beneath him in the second frieze stands the angel of justice with the
+scales; and on either side of him is the vision of the last judgment.
+The good prepare, with infinite titillation and complacency, to ascend
+to the skies; while the bad are dragged, pushed, hurled, stuffed,
+crammed, into pits and caldrons of fire. There is a charming detail in
+this section. Beside the angel, on the right, where the wicked are the
+prey of demons, stands a little female figure, that of a child, who,
+with hands meekly folded and head gently raised, waits for the stern
+angel to decide upon her fate. In this fate, however, a dreadful big
+devil also takes a keen interest: he seems on the point of appropriating
+the tender creature; he has a face like a goat and an enormous hooked
+nose. But the angel gently lays a hand upon the shoulder of the little
+girl--the movement is full of dignity--as if to say: "No; she belongs to
+the other side." The frieze below represents the general resurrection,
+with the good and the wicked emerging from their sepulchres. Nothing
+can be more quaint and charming than the difference shown in their way
+of responding to the final trump. The good get out of their tombs with a
+certain modest gaiety, an alacrity tempered by respect; one of them
+kneels to pray as soon as he has disinterred himself. You may know the
+wicked, on the other hand, by their extreme shyness; they crawl out
+slowly and fearfully; they hang back, and seem to say "Oh, dear!" These
+elaborate sculptures, full of ingenuous intention and of the reality of
+early faith, are in a remarkable state of preservation; they bear no
+superficial signs of restoration and appear scarcely to have suffered
+from the centuries. They are delightfully expressive; the artist had the
+advantage of knowing exactly the effect be wished to produce.
+
+The interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty and,
+above all, a tremendous height. The nave is extraordinary in this
+respect; it dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I
+am in architecture always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great
+building seems to me while I look at it the ultimate expression. At any
+rate, during the hour that I sat gazing along the high vista of Bourges
+the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the
+evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude,
+about such an edifice; it soothes and purifies the spirit, it
+illuminates the mind. There are two aisles, on either side, in addition
+to the nave--five in all--and, as I have said, there are no transepts;
+an omission which lengthens the vista, so that from my place near the
+door the central jewelled window in the depths of the perpendicular
+choir seemed a mile or two away. The second or outward of each pair of
+aisles is too low and the first too high; without this inequality the
+nave would appear to take an even more prodigious flight. The double
+aisles pass all the way round the choir, the windows of which are
+inordinately rich in magnificent old glass. I have seen glass as fine in
+other churches, but I think I have never seen so much of it at once.
+
+Beside the cathedral, on the north, is a curious structure of the
+fourteenth or fifteenth century, which looks like an enormous flying
+buttress, with its support, sustaining the north tower. It makes a
+massive arch, high in the air, and produces a romantic effect as people
+pass under it to the open gardens of the Archeveche, which extend to a
+considerable distance in the rear of the church. The structure
+supporting the arch has the girth of a largeish house, and contains
+chambers with whose uses I am unacquainted, but to which the deep
+pulsations of the cathedral, the vibration of its mighty bells and the
+roll of its organ-tones must be transmitted even through the great arm
+of stone.
+
+The archiepiscopal palace, not walled in as at Tours, is visible as a
+stately habitation of the last century, at the time of my visit under
+repair after a fire. From this side and from the gardens of the palace
+the nave of the cathedral is visible in all its great length and height,
+with its extraordinary multitude of supports. The gardens aforesaid,
+accessible through tall iron gates, are the promenade--the Tuileries--of
+the town, and, very pretty in themselves, are immensely set off by the
+overhanging church. It was warm and sunny; the benches were empty; I sat
+there a long time in that pleasant state of mind which visits the
+traveller in foreign towns, when he is not too hurried, while he
+wonders where he had better go next. The straight, unbroken line of the
+roof of the cathedral was very noble; but I could see from this point
+how much finer the effect would have been if the towers, which had
+dropped almost out of sight, might have been carried still higher. The
+archiepiscopal gardens look down at one end over a sort of esplanade or
+suburban avenue lying on a lower level on which they open, and where
+several detachments of soldiers (Bourges is full of soldiers) had just
+been drawn up. The civil population was also collecting, and I saw that
+something was going to happen. I learned that a private of the Chasseurs
+was to be "broken" for stealing, and every one was eager to behold the
+ceremony. Sundry other detachments arrived on the ground, besides many
+of the military who had come as a matter of taste. One of them described
+to me the process of degradation from the ranks, and I felt for a moment
+a hideous curiosity to see it, under the influence of which I lingered a
+little. But only a little; the hateful nature of the spectacle hurried
+me away at the same that others were hurrying forward. As I turned my
+back upon it I reflected that human beings are cruel brutes, though I
+could not flatter myself that the ferocity of the thing was exclusively
+French. In another country the concourse would have been equally great,
+and the moral of it all seemed to be that military penalties are as
+terrible as military honours are gratifying.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xii
+
+[Bourges: Jacques Coeur]
+
+
+The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques
+Coeur awaits you in posture scarcely less leonine. This remarkable man
+had a very strange history, and he too was "broken" like the wretched
+soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been rehabilitated, however,
+by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble
+statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret
+him according to this image--a womanish figure in a long robe and a
+turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose--would be to think of him
+as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his
+spirit was very modern; he was a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the
+fifteenth century. He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to
+pay the troops who, under the heroic Maid,
+
+[Illustration: Bourges--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
+
+drove the English from French soil. His house, which to-day is used as a
+Palais de Justice, appears to have been regarded at the time it was
+built very much as the residence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New
+York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town
+is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if
+you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it
+you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must
+have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate it offers to view
+two big towers which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of
+Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak--the square in front of
+the post-office--the palace of Jacques Coeur looks very big and strong
+and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very
+handsome and delicate. To this street it presents two tiers and a
+considerable length of facade; and it has both within and without a
+great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the
+stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a
+woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as
+looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and
+the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for
+having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at
+the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master,
+who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.
+
+The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been written by M. Pierre
+Clement in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and
+interesting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more
+curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling
+from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods
+grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker,
+ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the
+East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the
+globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant
+operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty,
+imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been
+elucidated by M. Clement, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture
+of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the
+fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great
+merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed
+him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous
+set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of
+high-handed rapacity--the crudest possible assertion of the right of the
+stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his
+life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered
+his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he
+enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that
+Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which
+his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques Coeur, however,
+was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after the
+expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house at
+Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and
+splendour, though it has in parts that want of space which is striking
+in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court indeed is on a
+large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful
+windows and with sculptures inserted in the walls, representing the
+various sources of the great fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clement
+describes this part of the house as having been of an "incomparable
+richesse"--an estimate of its charms which seems slightly exaggerated
+to-day. There is, however, something delicate and familiar in the
+bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little scenes of agriculture and
+industry which show that the proprietor was not ashamed of calling
+attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day we should question the
+taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in the house of a
+"merchant prince" however self-made. Why should it be, accordingly, that
+these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease us? It is perhaps
+because things very ancient never, for some mysterious reason, appear
+vulgar. This fifteenth-century millionaire, with his palace, his
+"swagger" sculptures, may have produced that impression on some critical
+spirits of his own day.
+
+The portress who showed me into the building was a dear little old
+woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face--a little white, aged
+face, with dark, pretty eyes--and the most considerate manner. She took
+me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious
+chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the
+hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of
+Bourges--an inland town if ever there was one, without even a river (to
+call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions--having found his end as
+admiral of a fleet; but this boat-shaped roof, which is extremely
+graceful and is repeated in another apartment, would suggest that the
+imagination of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as he
+trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is probable
+that he was personally as much at home in certain Mediterranean ports
+as in the capital of the pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at the
+ceilings of his mansion, he saw his boats upside down, this was only a
+suggestion of the shortest way of emptying them of their treasures. He
+is presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in
+company with his wife, Macee de Leodepart--I like to write such an
+extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess
+at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention
+much more to the passers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in
+other attitudes; though I do not recognise them in the composition on
+top of one of the fireplaces which represents the battlements of a
+castle, with the defenders (little figures between the crenellations)
+hurling down missiles with a great deal of fury and expression. It would
+have been hard to believe that the man who surrounded himself with these
+friendly and humorous devices had been guilty of such wrong-doing as to
+call down the heavy hand of justice.
+
+It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal associations
+of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques Coeur, which, in spite
+of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have
+terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his
+quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hotel Cujas,
+one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of
+the great jurisconsult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of
+the Roman law and professed it during the close of his life in the
+university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of
+his sedentary pursuits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in
+the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits are perhaps not exactly
+
+[Illustration: BOURGES--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
+
+what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle"
+(sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual
+manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did
+not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so
+grave a work) an amusing picture of the short, fat, untidy scholar
+dragging himself _a plat ventre_, across his room, from one pile of
+books to the other. The house in which these singular gymnastics took
+place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of
+the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discoloured, it has a
+charming Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street,
+and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched
+two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court,
+beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with
+turrets, with fine old windows and with a beautiful tone of faded red
+brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial
+by-street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller
+with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on
+the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A
+brawny gendarme in his shirtsleeves was polishing his boots in the
+court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its clusters, hung itself
+over a doorway and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall.
+The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was
+almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to
+exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I
+had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a
+_ville de province_ in the full force of the term, especially as
+applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have
+very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby,
+without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor
+antique--a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number
+of blank walls--walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses--that
+avert themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being
+so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on
+which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness
+and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately
+add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a
+colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city
+may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six
+weeks spent _en province_, however, I saw few places that had not more
+expression than Bourges.
+
+I went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I
+returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual,
+with the _commis-voyageurs_, who cut their bread on their thumb and
+partook of every course; and after this repast I repaired for a while to
+the cafe, which occupied a part of the basement of the inn and opened
+into its court. This cafe was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where
+it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to _tutoyer_ his
+customers and the practice of the customers to _tutoyer_ the waiter.
+Under these circumstances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting
+down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him
+for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little
+portfolio covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets
+of
+
+[Illustration: BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)]
+
+thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which
+pass in France for pens--these being the utensils invariably evoked by
+such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself
+opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident
+reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I
+received an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in
+which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended
+with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavoured every now and then with
+a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he
+was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very
+facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game
+went on and he lost and had to pay the _consommation_, he dropped his
+amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and
+went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than
+the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend,
+one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the
+jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold
+the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all
+fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their
+inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking
+cad; just as the bright little cafe where a robust materfamilias, doling
+out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror
+behind the _comptoir_, was a much more civilised spot than a British
+public-house or a "commercial room," with pipes and whisky, or even than
+an American saloon.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xiii
+
+[Le Mans]
+
+
+It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey
+and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The
+question indeed was to get away, no easy matter in France in the early
+days of October, when the whole _jeunesse_ of the country is returning
+to school. It is accompanied, apparently, with parents and grandparents,
+and it fills the trains with little pale-faced _lyceens_, who gaze out
+of the windows with a longing, lingering air not unnatural on the part
+of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be
+restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our
+American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood. The train stopped
+every five minutes; but fortunately the country was charming--hilly and
+bosky, eminently good-humoured, and dotted here and there with a smart
+little chateau. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has
+given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interesting town,
+but I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My
+expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular
+reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed--a
+much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however,
+is not steep in all directions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was
+not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that,
+on the other hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better
+inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small
+market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be
+slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an
+ugly _halle_, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le
+Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which
+I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to
+the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble
+features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls
+straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling
+behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly
+numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through
+the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very
+crooked and untidy lane, of really mediaeval aspect, honoured with the
+denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria--an
+absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later
+than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument in
+the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question--very
+sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it--is an
+elaborate little dusky facade, overhanging the street, ornamented with
+panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.
+A fat old woman standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to
+it--a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming
+manner--told me what the house was, and also indicated to me a
+rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same street, nearer the
+cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique" and
+of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some years, in the early part
+of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a
+right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd
+canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic
+muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position--he was
+unable even to go down on his knees--prosecuted that other suit which
+made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the
+second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon;
+though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been
+in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an
+epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":
+
+    "Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
+     Fit plus de pitie que d'envie,
+     Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
+     Avant que de perdre la vie.
+     Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
+     Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eveille.
+     Car voicy la premiere nuit,
+     Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."
+
+There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front of the cathedral,
+with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the
+towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which
+it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little
+pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of
+having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are
+houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture
+of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the
+characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the
+hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as
+it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have
+communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,
+which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
+romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from
+without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church--the disparity
+between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century,
+and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred
+years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave,
+which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and
+curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow
+but very lofty, display to the spectators in the _place_ the reach of
+their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse
+of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is
+the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the
+choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a
+point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the
+stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found
+nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with
+Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of
+double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them supported
+on very thick round columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in
+this passage, and a charming little lady-chapel filled with gorgeous old
+glass. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble;
+its lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to
+places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like
+Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and
+unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The
+beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of
+pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that
+contains the formless image--a clumsy stone woman lying on her
+back--which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.
+
+The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small
+garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large
+_place de foire_, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known
+as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a
+while in rectangular alleys destitute of herbage and received a deeper
+impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its
+hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins,
+between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may
+admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should
+remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away
+and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This
+sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded
+now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown facade and a portal fretted with
+early sculptures; but the
+
+[Illustration: LE MANS--THE CATHEDRAL]
+
+details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have
+stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le
+Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had
+looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply
+in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good
+reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has
+a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of
+old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,
+accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English
+Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self
+in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be
+assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of
+disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat
+before dinner at the door of one of the cafes in the market-place with a
+_bitter-et-curacao_ (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me
+company. I remember that in this situation there came over me an
+impression which both included and excluded all possible
+disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably
+soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near
+me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the
+detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in
+particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet
+I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of
+French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air,
+together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a
+positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have
+descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of
+the cafe, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is
+perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xiv
+
+[Angers]
+
+
+I am shocked at finding, just after this noble declaration of
+principles, that in a little note-book which at that time I carried
+about with me the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell." I
+reproduce this vulgar word with the greatest hesitation, and only
+because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers
+belongs to the disagreeable class of old towns that have been, as the
+English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place
+is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with
+irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for
+absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern
+improvements and quite unworthy of its admirable name--a name which,
+like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque
+value. It looks particularly well on the Shakespearean page (in "King
+John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the
+utterance of the period) with a fine grinding insular accent. Angers
+figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital
+city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who
+married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and
+competitor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the
+Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. These facts create
+a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over
+in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country
+that was really pretty and looked more like the usual English than like
+the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a
+considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the
+hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for
+passing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have
+contented myself before the end of the day. I remained at the White
+Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally good
+provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks
+spent in these establishments.
+
+"Stupidly and vulgarly modernised"--that is another flower from my
+note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are
+some narrow and tortuous streets, with a few curious old houses," I
+continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the exterior is most
+extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest." It is
+fair to say that the Chateau d'Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage;
+the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You
+cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It
+has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you;
+it is simply very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple
+impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a
+perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of
+the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained
+the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front
+of Angers is poor--wanting in colour and in movement; and there is
+always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and
+yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents
+itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally
+much better when the vast dark bulk of the castle, with its seventeen
+prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of
+tremendous girth and solidity; they are encircled with great bands, or
+hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them
+hang high curtains of infinitely old-looking masonry, apparently a dense
+conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally
+built (thanks to rich quarries in the neighbourhood), and to which it
+owed its appellation of the Black. There are no windows, no apertures,
+and to-day no battlements nor roofs. These accessories were removed by
+Henry III., so that, in spite of its grimness and blackness, the place
+has not even the interest of looking like a prison; it being, as I
+suppose, the essence of a prison not to be open to the sky. The only
+features of the enormous structure are the blank, sombre stretches and
+protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on so large a scale, is
+strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus and terminated by St.
+Louis, the Chateau d'Angers has of course a great deal of history. The
+luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of Louis XIV.,
+whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and complete, was
+confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had taken place at
+Nantes. Here also Huguenots and Vendeans suffered effective captivity.
+
+I walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it
+is all up-hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the
+entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the
+rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to
+see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard
+contains a multitude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk
+round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the
+weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So
+I came out and took another look at the big, black exterior, buttressed
+with white-ribbed towers, and perceived that a desperate sketcher might
+extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they
+say, the little black bronze statue of the good King Rene (a weak
+production of
+
+[Illustration: ANGERS--OLD TIMBERED HOUSES]
+
+David d'Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy
+faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old
+timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the
+Maison d'Adam and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic
+architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the
+town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really
+imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen-draper, who
+flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mere de Famille; and above
+his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house
+occupies the angle of a little _place_, this front is double, and the
+black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and
+carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is
+quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
+history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as
+"moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge
+was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave,
+without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a
+form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather
+inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely
+simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big,
+serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very
+shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is
+original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that
+the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high
+west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two
+elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern
+pavilion has been inserted.
+
+I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Cafe Serin, where,
+after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train
+which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of
+hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its
+air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as
+also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an
+unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place
+where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented
+itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of
+the historical monuments of Angers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xv
+
+[Nantes]
+
+
+If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience
+rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular
+room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled
+me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn
+(it had a huge windy _porte-cochere_, and you climbed a vast black stone
+staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded
+with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a
+pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes
+belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and
+its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much
+commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in
+the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It
+derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,
+which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous
+too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched
+windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These
+features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux
+aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has
+the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French
+water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French
+landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an
+eminently well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I
+had time to go to the Musee; the more so that I have a weakness for
+provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality
+of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often
+curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind,
+there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably
+old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity,
+for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is
+of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent
+collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused
+light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the
+snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain
+to show you the lustreless gem of the museum--these things have a mild
+historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate
+something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of
+a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's
+marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is
+the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled
+from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State.
+Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very
+honourable practice--the purchase by the Government of a certain number
+of "pictures of the year," which are presently distributed in the
+provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for success by
+different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should
+say here, in every platform. The works of art are often
+ill-selected--there is an official taste which you immediately
+recognise--but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which
+should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing
+in this particular Musee that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman
+by Ingres--very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a
+great deal of style.
+
+There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of
+Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size,
+and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the
+remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic--a tall elegant building of
+the sixteenth century. The chateau 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 Marechal de Retz, who in the
+fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of
+hundred young children, sacrificed in abominable rites, to the ardent
+Duchess of Berry, mother of the Count of Chambord, who was confined
+there for a few hours in 1832, just after her arrest in a neighbouring
+house. I looked at the house in question--you may see it from the
+platform in front of the chateau--and tried to figure to myself that
+embarrassing scene. The Duchess, after having unsuccessfully raised the
+standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons) in the legitimist Bretagne,
+and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe,
+had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the
+end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the
+austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.
+For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an
+interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into
+the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the
+castle indicated also another historic spot, a house with little
+_tourelles_ on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have
+signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not in a position
+to answer for this pedigree.
+
+There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which
+command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that
+is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the
+horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier
+and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution
+was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in
+couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
+The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air noble_, in France
+always reminds me of those dreadful years--of the street-scenes of the
+Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing
+could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these
+eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on
+tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of
+groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed
+coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the
+architecture of the period--the clear grey stone, the high pilasters,
+the arching lines of the _entresol_, the classic pediment, the
+slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the
+domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers,
+makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best
+to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold.
+Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I
+discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but
+of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no
+choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a
+cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only
+the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have
+a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.
+Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face
+and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty
+and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.
+
+The great treasure of Nantes is the two noble sepulchral monuments which
+occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its nobleness) the
+rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south
+side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany,
+and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their
+daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Chateau de
+Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first
+husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her
+second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make
+room for her, and where she herself died. Transferred to the cathedral
+from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel
+Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and
+the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of
+the most brilliant works of the French Renaissance. It has a splendid
+effect and is in perfect preservation. A great table of black marble
+supports the reclining figures of the duke and duchess, who lie there
+peacefully and majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads
+each on a cushion, the pair of which are supported from behind by three
+charming little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a
+lion and a greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of
+the table is a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately
+dressed, with a symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their
+contemporary faces and clothes, which give them the air of realistic
+portraits, are truthful and living, if not remarkably beautiful. Round
+the sides of the tomb are small images of the apostles. There is a kind
+of masculine completeness in the work, and a certain robustness of
+taste.
+
+In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in
+being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to
+say in regard to the great final contrast--the contrast between the
+immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They
+expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the
+solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the
+personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption,
+of his memory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is a sceptical affair; it
+insists too little on the honours. I say this in the face of the fact
+that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the
+presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs.
+Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one
+of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoriciere, the defender of
+the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble work, from the
+hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation
+of sculptors who have revived in France an art of which our over-dressed
+century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a
+certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune--an echo with a
+beautiful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble
+elaborately worked with arabesques and cherubs, in a relief so low that
+it gives the work a certain look of being softened and worn by time,
+lies the body of the Breton soldier with a crucifix clasped to his
+breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a
+figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and
+Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were
+exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast
+and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene, robust young mother,
+beautiful in line and attitude; the other a lean and vigilant young man,
+in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched
+arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These
+figures contain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been
+attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a splendid
+example and a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more
+or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'Medici at
+Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The interest of
+the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind of moral
+good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art, and which,
+united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a remarkable
+sense of form, produces an impression of deep refinement. The whole
+monument is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that
+this impression on the part of the spectator is the happiest possible.
+It explains much of the great beauty, and it also explains perhaps a
+little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely in place;
+I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which has visibly
+triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern
+genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element
+is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in
+admiration of the deep aesthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste,
+revealed by such work. After that I only hope that, Giuseppe Garibaldi
+may have somewhere or other some commemoration as distinguished.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xvi
+
+[La Rochelle]
+
+
+To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward across
+the historic _bocage_ of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting.
+The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses,
+orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the
+traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that
+as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there
+was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment
+beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay
+(from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La
+Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway
+kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalised river,
+bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet
+old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther
+side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf.
+The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,
+though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle,
+which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating
+little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of
+its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean--in which,
+after all, it _is_ Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at
+Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only
+twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to
+find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of which it
+may be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern.
+To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft
+a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and to go from
+New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and
+warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter
+myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to
+perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the _caractere
+meridional_. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For that
+matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound--to wake up
+there, as it were--would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure
+is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive
+shades of difference by which it ceases 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--we imagine him boldly
+as liberated from Boston--how could he fail to perceive them at La
+Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are lined with
+arcades--good, big, straddling arcades of stone, 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 _place d'armes_
+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 cafe 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.
+
+The 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--a _mail_,
+as the French say, as well as a _champ de manoeuvre_--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 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 _hotel
+de ville_. The inn had a long narrow garden behind it, with some very
+tall trees; and passing through this garden to a dim and secluded _salle
+a manger_, 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.
+
+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 _hotel de ville_, 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
+
+[Illustration: LA ROCHELLE]
+
+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 _hotel de ville_ 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 _grande salle_,
+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 soirees in the town hall! The said _grande salle_,
+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--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
+_haute societe_ and in a single place of worship. There was nothing
+particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as, after leaving the
+_hotel de ville_, 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.
+
+The 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--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
+
+[Illustration]
+
+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 Etablissement des Bains.
+It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Etablissement 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 _station de bains_ for a modest provincial society; and,
+putting aside the question of inns, it must be charming on summer
+afternoons.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xvii
+
+[Poitiers]
+
+
+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 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 mediaeval 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 ornee 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--it has so many opportunities to
+betray itself.
+
+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 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 _place_, with an approach of
+crooked lanes and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking
+dimension is the width of its facade. 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--that is, in the sixth or seventh century--a baptistery,
+but converted into a church while the Christian era was still
+comparatively young. The Temple de Saint-Jean is 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.
+
+Not 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--a
+lady who found means to be a saint even 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.
+
+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 _salle des pas perdus_, 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--the
+French deal in much finer names than we--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 chamber, and make one think of the groups
+that must formerly have gathered there--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 _calorifere_, 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--I forget where; perhaps to the
+roof of the edifice. The whole side of the _salle_ 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.
+
+The most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de
+Blossac--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 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--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 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: _a
+la mort ne pensai-je mye_. 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xviii
+
+[Angouleme]
+
+
+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
+Angouleme for the sake of David and Eve Sechard, of Lucien de Rubempre
+and of Madame de Bargeton, who when she wore a _toilette etudiee_
+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 "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 Angouleme 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, Angouleme 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 "Comedie Humaine." One of these was a very genial and
+dirty old priest, and the other was a reserved and concentrated young
+monk--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 _Figaro_ 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.
+
+When he was not reading the _Figaro_ 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--a kind of
+secular reliquary--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 cure, 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 _Figaro_ as seriously as if it had been an encyclical, I should
+have entered into conversation with him.
+
+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--an hotel not
+good enough, however, 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--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 _clos_. But the principal picture, within the town, is that of
+the vast curving quays, bordered with houses that look like the _hotels_
+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--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 _douanier_ said to 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--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 _place_ which surrounds the
+Grand-Theatre--an establishment of the highest style, encircled with
+columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafes. 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 Allees d'Orleans, and
+regarded by the Bordelais for the moment as the most brilliant feature
+of their city. Here were pyramids of bottles, mountains
+
+[Illustration: BORDEAUX--THE QUAY]
+
+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 _article_
+becomes at last as irritating as the refrain of a popular song. The poor
+"Indiens Galibis" struck me as really more interesting--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xix
+
+[Toulouse]
+
+
+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 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--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--and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I
+hold the taste to be most legitimate--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, of a village, a church, a chateau, 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.
+
+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--suggests
+something highly _meridional_. 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 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 _bien-g_ and
+_maison-g_ 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 Hotel d'Assezat, 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--inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xx
+
+[Toulouse: the Capitol]
+
+
+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--meetings at which
+poems in the fine old _langue d'oc_ 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 _capitoul_, and of all
+the pretty women as well--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
+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
+_opera-bouffe_. Her talk was all in _n_'s, _g_'s and _d_'s, and in mute
+_e_'s strongly accented, as _autre_, _theatre_, _splendide_--the last
+being an epithet she applied to everything the Capitol contained, and
+especially to a horrible picture representing the famous Clemence
+Isaure, the reputed foundress of the poetical contest, presiding on one
+of these occasions. I wondered whether Clemence 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--a shapeless effigy transferred to the Capitol from the so-called
+tomb of Clemence 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 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--that of Rome (if I
+may call the present structure modern) and those of Washington and
+Albany!
+
+The only Roman remains at Toulouse are to be found in the museum--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 Mercie. 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--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 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxi
+
+[Toulouse: Saint-Sernin]
+
+
+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--the Toulousains have
+abbreviated--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 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
+
+[Illustration: TOULOUSE SAINT-SERNIN (THE TRANSEPT)]
+
+the sacristans hang about and offer to take you into it for ten sous--I
+was accosted by two and escaped from another--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--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--a lady--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? 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--all of brick--along the
+quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness, as well as the fashion
+of the open _loggia_ in the top-storey. The river, with another bridge
+or two, might be the Arno, and the buildings on the other side of it--a
+hospital, a suppressed convent--dip their feet into it with real
+southern cynicism. I have spoken of the old Hotel d'Assezat 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.
+
+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
+
+[Illustration: TOULOUSE--THE GARONNE]
+
+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--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxii
+
+[Carcassonne]
+
+
+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.
+
+The country after you leave Toulouse continues to be charming; the more
+so that it merges its flatness in the distant Cevennes on one side, and
+on the other, 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--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 Cite. You see nothing of the Cite from the
+station; it is masked by the agglomeration of the _ville-basse_, which
+is relatively (but only relatively) new. A wonderful avenue of acacias
+leads to it from the station--leads past it, rather, and conducts you to
+a little high-backed bridge over the Aude, beyond which, detached and
+erect, a distinct mediaeval silhouette, the Cite 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 Cite is what first strikes you. To take leave, without
+delay, of the _ville-basse_, 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. 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 Dore, a
+couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect--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--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--putting aside a small sally-port, protected by a great
+bastion, on the quarter that looks toward the Pyrenees.
+
+As a votary, always, in the first instance, of a general impression, I
+walked all round the outer enceinte--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: 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 Cite 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 _ville-basse_, and sundry octogenarians of
+both sexes, who are dying where they have lived and contribute much to
+the pictorial effect--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 Cite. 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 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 Cite, 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 mediaeval city where
+he had played as a child. All this struck me as a great deal of history
+for so modest a figure--a poor little figure that could only just
+unclose its palm for a small silver coin.
+
+He 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 _ville-basse_, a gentleman, and, as I
+afterwards learned, an employe at the prefecture--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 was
+_amoureux-fou de la Cite_--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--which is the specialty of Carcassonne and the great
+curiosity--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--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 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 cafe, where the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the
+old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little chateau and
+the little cathedral. Everything in the Cite is little; you can walk
+round the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the chateau,
+which, with a picturesque old face, flanking towers, and a dry moat, is
+to-day simply a bare _caserne_, 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 Cite
+and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxiii
+
+[Carcassonne]
+
+
+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 no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc--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 Beziers
+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 Beziers; 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.
+
+I have mentioned that my obliging friend the _amoureux-fou_ handed me
+over to the doorkeeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first
+committed
+
+[Illustration: CARCASSONNE.]
+
+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
+Cite. There was something brilliant certainly in that. The _gardien_ 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 every turn, of the democratic conditions of French life:
+a man of the people, with a wife _en bonnet_, 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--who can know nothing of the liberties I am taking with him--is
+actually devoted to these ideals; I only mean that many such devotees
+must have his qualities.) In just the _nuance_ 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
+_nettete_, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is
+rarely either blessed or cursed with.
+
+This 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 _place forte_ 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 _chemins de ronde_,
+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
+
+[Illustration: CARCASSONNE]
+
+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 Cite. 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--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--those in the form of the hideous little
+_album-panorama_--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 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--or seemed at that hour--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 Cite. It is certainly this general impression
+that is most striking--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--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--Narbonne,
+the richest city in Roman Gaul.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxiv
+
+[Narbonne]
+
+At Narbonne I took up my abode at the house of a _serrurier mecanicien_,
+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. 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 a qui la vente de leur vin rapporte jusqu'a 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 _sale petite
+ville_ 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--a darkness not so dense,
+however, but that I was able to make out, as we passed it, the great
+figure of Beziers, whose ancient roofs and towers, clustered on a goodly
+hill-top, looked as fantastic as you please. I know not what appearance
+Beziers 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 speak of
+the activity of women in France--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 Hotel 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 Beziers, 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 Beziers, 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 Hotel 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 _maison bourgeoise_. 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 Hotel de France. I was obliged to cultivate
+relations with the cuisine of this establishment. Nothing could have
+been more _meridional_; 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 Hotel 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--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
+_voyageurs de commerce_. At ten o'clock in the morning there was a table
+d'hote for breakfast--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 _gras-double_, 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
+
+[Illustration: NARBONNE--THE WASHING PLACE]
+
+remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to
+whether or no the maid-servant were _sage_--a discussion which went on
+under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful
+_gras-double_, and to which she contributed the most convincing blushes.
+It was thoroughly _meridional_.
+
+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 hotel 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 mediaeval tower which rises beside it with turrets at the
+angles--always a picturesque thing. The rest of the market was held in
+another _place_, 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--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--a long row of washerwomen, on their knees on the edge of the
+canal, pounding and wringing the dirty linen of Narbonne--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 cafes. They were mostly fat and brown and
+unshaven; they ground their teeth as they talked; they were very
+_meridionaux_.
+
+The only two lions at Narbonne are the cathedral and the museum, the
+latter of which is quartered in the hotel 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 _archeveche_, which is
+beside it and which connects it with the hotel 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 hotel 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
+
+[Illustration: NARBONNE--THE CATHEDRAL AND HOTEL DE VILLE.]
+
+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 hotel de ville, and is not an imposing
+collection. It was closed, but I induced the portress to let me in--a
+silent, cadaverous person, in a black coif, like a _beguine_, 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--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxv
+
+    "Cette, with its glistening houses white,
+      Curves with the curving beach away
+     To where the lighthouse beacons bright,
+        Far in the bay."
+
+[Montpellier]
+
+
+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 _bouillon_ of which I partook at the buffet aforesaid; for, since
+the morning, I had not ventured to return to the table d'hote at
+Narbonne. The Hotel Nevet at Montpellier, which I reached an hour later,
+has an ancient renown all over the south of France--advertises itself, I
+believe, as _le plus vastedu midi_. 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 _bon temps_, 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 facades of its school, but these are
+its only definite treasures. Its cathedral 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 _gemuethlich_. I spent two
+days there, mostly in the rain, and even under these circumstances I
+carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hotel 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.
+
+The gem of the place is the Musee Fabre, one of the best collections of
+paintings in a provincial city. Francois 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--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 be
+said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been
+written by M. Saint-Rene-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
+"Memoires 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 "Memoires 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 want of appreciation of the picturesque--want of the sketcher's
+sense--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 "Memoires 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 chateaux 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.
+
+The 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
+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 Musee 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--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--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 _bien vus_. This is the 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 Cevennes, to which they of the
+religion fled for safety and out of which they were hunted and harried.
+
+I have only to add, in regard to the Musee Fabre, that it contains the
+portrait of its founder--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 _culotte_ that exhibits a good leg--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--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--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 _place_ by which you approach it from the
+town), an 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 _chateau d'eau_, 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--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--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--_sent bien son dix-huitieme siecle_; 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxvi
+
+[The Pont du Gard]
+
+
+It was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again--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 Nimes I engaged a caleche
+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 Provencal 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 Nimes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is
+superb; broad enough for 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 chateau in the neighbourhood, which
+he had the happiness--not the greatest in the world, he intimated--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 Nimes 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.
+
+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--at the time--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
+
+[Illustration: THE PONT DU GARD.]
+
+beauty--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 Provencal 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.
+
+I feel as if it were scarcely discreet to indicate the whereabouts of
+the chateau of the obliging young man I had met on the way from Nimes; I
+must content myself with saying that it nestled in an enchanting
+valley--_dans le fond_, as they say in France--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 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
+_castel_ 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 mere!" 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
+_manege_ 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 Nimes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness
+to the constant sheen of the Provencal landscape.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxvii
+
+[Aigues-Mortes]
+
+
+The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an
+imprudence not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes. Nimes itself could wait;
+at a pinch I could attend to Nimes 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 Nimes for dinner; the run--or rather the walk, for the train
+doesn't run--is of about an hour. I found the little journey charming
+and looked out of the carriage window, on my right, at the distant
+Cevennes, 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.
+
+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.
+
+Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide _etang_, 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 _pendant_, 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--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 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 _etang_; 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 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 _disponibles_, and that
+Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.
+
+Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not
+crumbled like the Cite 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 _place_, with
+two or three cafes decorated by wide awnings--a little _place_ 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 _chemin de ronde_, 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
+
+[Illustration: AIGUES-MORTES]
+
+and standing at the north-west angle of the town. I called upon the
+_casernier_--the custodian of the walls--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--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxviii
+
+[Nimes]
+
+
+After this I was free to look about me at Nimes, 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 Nimes 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--a
+square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical
+_palais de justice_ embellished with trees and parapets and occupied in
+the centre with a group of allegorical statues such as one encounters
+only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure
+by Pradier representing Nimes. 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 _villes de province_ in the
+country of which I write, Nimes 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
+Nimes 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--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 _nymphaeum_, 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 that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in
+it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high _grille_,
+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 _tried_; 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--Roman baths;
+those words alone were a scene. Everything was changed: I was strolling
+in a _jardin francais_; 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 mediaeval 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--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.
+
+The fountain proper--the source of all these distributed waters--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
+
+[Illustration: NIMES--THE CATHEDRAL]
+
+from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudged up the Mont
+Cavalier--it is a matter of five minutes--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--the image, disastrously
+confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left
+at Nimes 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
+Nimes, 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 archaeologist; 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 Nimes, after all dilapidation
+is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arenes 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 Nimes, 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--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 Arenes at
+Nimes were arranged for a bull-fight--a form of recreation that, as I
+was informed, is much _dans les habitudes Nimoises_, and very common
+throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the
+usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nimes 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
+Nimes 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--being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of
+course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which
+I
+
+[Illustration: NIMES--THE AMPHITHEATRE]
+
+spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nimes is mainly represented by the
+famous Maison Carree. 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--admiration of a
+familiar and even slightly patronising kind. The Maison Carree 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 cafes 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; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than
+to "have" in that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece."
+Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a
+_commis-voyageur_, and sometimes it occurs to his reader that he really
+was one.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxix
+
+[Tarascon]
+
+
+On my way from Nimes 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 Provencal 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 Provencal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of
+women, a true "_produit du midi_," 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 Nimes, 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 Rene 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 Chaussee--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 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.
+
+The chateau of King Rene 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 Rene 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
+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--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 Rene.
+
+I strolled over his dusky habitation--it must have taken all his good
+humour to light it up--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
+
+[Illustration: TARASCON--THE CASTLE]
+
+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 Francois 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--for the whole place forms the public promenade of the
+townsfolk--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--a very gentle, 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 Provencal horizon--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.
+
+Beaucaire 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 Provencal 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 _pays d'Arles_ are renowned. The Arlesian head-dress was
+visible in the streets; and this delightful coiffure is so associated
+with a charming facial oval, a 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 chateau) 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxx
+
+[Arles]
+
+
+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 Hotel du Forum,
+the Hotel 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 Hotel 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 Arlesiennes account for it in some degree; and the
+remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena 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 cafes. 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 _cailloux_, 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 _gras-double_
+might have appeared at the table d'hote, as it had done at Narbonne.
+Nevertheless I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless too--and
+this is the moral of my simple anecdote--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. _Vieilles auberges de France_, 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.
+
+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 cafe 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 Arlesienne, 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 cafe, to fix one's eyes upon the
+_dame de comptoir_; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your
+_consummation_. We were therefore free to
+
+[Illustration: ARLES--ST. TROPHIMUS]
+
+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 Caesar. 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.
+
+This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little,
+for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the cafe 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 mediaeval
+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 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--part of the decoration of the back of the
+stage--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 Nimes; 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--what is
+called in America a "variety-show"--as it entered only into the Roman
+mind to make such establishments. The _podium_ is much higher than at
+Nimes, 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.
+
+[Illustration: ARLES--RUINS OF THE ROMAN THEATRE]
+
+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--the arena may be called a
+skeleton--for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the
+row of columns which formed the scene--the permanent back-scene--remain;
+two marble pillars--I just mentioned them--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--half a cup--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--red, yellow and green--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 locked, but we effected an easy _escalade_, 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--makes the present
+and the past touch each other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxi
+
+[Arles: the Museum]
+
+
+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 _place_--a
+_place_ otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering
+obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the hotel de ville and the
+museum--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 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--or almost--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--if it doesn't sound too profane--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
+
+[Illustration: ARLES--DOOR OF ST. TROPHIMUS.]
+
+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.
+
+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 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.
+
+[Illustration: ARLES--THE CLOISTERS]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxii
+
+[Les Baux]
+
+
+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--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 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 mediaeval 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 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.
+
+About 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 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 "delicieuse chapelle de Sainte-Croix" is a
+"veritable 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 impression of the little superannuated temple, with
+its four apses and its perceptible odour of antiquity--the odour of the
+eleventh century.
+
+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--that is, from the direction of Arles--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--that is, what remains of it--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--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.
+
+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 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 Provencal house has been written, in a style
+somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the
+little book--a modest pamphlet--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 _parloir_ 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 mediaeval
+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. The church was small and brown
+and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this, however, is no
+general description of Les Baux.
+
+I 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--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 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 Provencal 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 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 _bonne
+pensee_ of coming up for us with an umbrella which certainly belonged,
+in former ages, to one of the Stephanettes or Berangeres 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--by
+bequest of one of its lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his
+time--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 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--it had beckoned to us in the morning, when we
+came in sight of it, almost irresistibly--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxiii
+
+[Avignon]
+
+
+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--fairly
+spinning--with the _mistral_. I find in my journal of the other day a
+reference to the acuteness of my reluctance in January 1870. France,
+after Italy, appeared in the language of the latter country _poco
+simpatica_; and I thought it necessary, for reasons now inconceivable,
+to read the _Figaro_, which was filled with descriptions of the horrible
+Troppmann, the murderer of the _famille_ Kink. Troppmann, Kink, _le
+crime de Pantin_--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?
+
+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--for in genial
+Avignon, in October, I had to have a fire--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 _ci-devant_ 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 _Figaro_. 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. 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
+_musee_ 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 _gardien_, 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 Nimes, it is a blank. But a
+great many small objects have been found in its soil--pottery, glass,
+bronzes, lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The glass is
+especially charming--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 _casseroles_, with
+chiselled handles, in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the
+most charming survivals of antiquity.
+
+[Avignon the Palace of the Popes]
+
+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
+
+[Illustration: AVIGNON--THE CHURCH]
+
+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-Benazet
+(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--which,
+approached in each case by a flight of steps, seemed to defend the
+precinct--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.
+
+As 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 barrack for regiments of
+the line, and the main characteristics of a barrack--an extreme nudity
+and a very queer smell--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 mediaeval bakehouse), not of the tower of
+the _glaciere_ 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 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxiv
+
+[Villeneuve-les-Avignon]
+
+
+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--on foot, to the lonely tower which
+forms one of the outworks of Villeneuve-les-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 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--the
+Benedictine abbey of Saint-Andre, 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, 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--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 Middle Ages every one did go mad--every one
+_was_ mad. The theory that this was a period of general dementia is not
+altogether untenable.
+
+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--the delicate grey branches were
+not much above my head--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. When 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 that it would be a beautiful evening to walk
+round the walls of Avignon--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxv
+
+[Vaucluse]
+
+
+It was the morning after this, I think (a certain Saturday), that when I
+came out of the Hotel de l'Europe, which lies in shallow concavity just
+within the city gate that opens on the Rhone--came out to look at the
+sky from the little _place_ before the inn and see how the weather
+promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse--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 Hotel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to
+within a few feet of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long
+board which had served for so many a table d'hote floated disreputably,
+with its legs in the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the
+Ardeche, 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--on the
+occasion of a rise of the Arno, at Pisa--appear to consider the prospect
+of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours"--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 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.--if vexed
+I was--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 _fioriture_.
+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--a fountain which would
+be indistinguishable in the general cataract. 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.
+
+    "For tasks in hours of insight willed
+     May be in hours of gloom fulfilled."
+
+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.
+
+There was no rain; there was only, all the afternoon, a mild, moist wind
+and a sky magnificently black; which made a _repoussoir_ 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 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 _platanes_ (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.
+
+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 _cafe_, 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 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 _immortelles_--I don't know what one is
+to do with the immortelles--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
+
+[Illustration: VAUCLUSE--RUINS OF CASTLE]
+
+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--a
+huge forehead of bare stone--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--the vast sad cliff,
+covered with the afternoon light, still and solid for ever, while the
+liquid element rages and roars at its base--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.
+
+The aridity of the hills that shut in the valley is complete, and the
+whole impression is best conveyed by that very expressive French epithet
+_morne_. 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 _diligence_, 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 _amant de Laure_, 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxvi
+
+[Orange]
+
+
+Mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hotel de Petrarque 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 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 cafes--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 _populations rurales_ 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.
+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--which, as I have mentioned, is several miles
+distant--to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things
+that this obscure French borough--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--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 Carree at
+Nimes. It has three passages--the middle much higher than the
+others--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 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 _chaussee_; 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.
+
+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--I quote from Murray--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
+
+[Illustration: ORANGE--THE THEATRE.]
+
+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--it is bigger than all Orange put together--and
+its permanent massiveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it
+presents to the town--the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets
+perforated with holes to receive the staves of the _velarium_--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--which seems in
+proportion about as high as the entrance of a rabbit-hutch--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 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--
+
+"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."
+
+At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--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, _as you_
+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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxvii
+
+[Macon]
+
+
+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 Montelimart
+(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--past Valence,
+past Tournon, past Vienne--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--grievances 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 _gare_: the deadly _salle d'attente_, 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
+
+[Illustration: LYONS.]
+
+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 _ei_. 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 cafe, and various votaries
+of the comparatively innocuous _petit verre_ 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 _Intransigeant_ and the
+_Rappel_ 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 which should have blown up everything else. A few days
+later the water went down at Lyons; but the democracy has not gone down.
+
+I remember vividly the remainder of that evening which I spent at
+Macon--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--an extraordinary structure, all facade, which exposes an
+uncovered rear to the gaze of nature. There is a demonstrative, voluble
+landlady, who is of course part of the facade; 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--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, 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
+_place_, 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. Falguiere, 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 _amant
+d'Elvire_, 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 _place_,
+adorned with iron clamps, with a _porte haute et large_ 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 _place_, 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxviii
+
+[Bourg-en-Bresse]
+
+
+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--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 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
+_quelconque_, 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, 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--I scarcely know why--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--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 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--or at least in the effect of which on the tourist-mind of
+to-day--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.
+
+[The Church of Brou]
+
+The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the Duchess
+Margaret--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--that of
+
+[Illustration: BROU--THE CHURCH.]
+
+her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was eventually
+repudiated, in order that her _fiance_ might marry Anne of Brittany--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--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
+prepared little Notice which I bought at Bourg calls the architect and
+sculptor (at once) Jehan de Paris, author (_sic_) 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--a
+circle of numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into
+the earth--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)--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.
+
+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--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
+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--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--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--_fortune infortune fort une_. 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--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); 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 _naifs_. I should
+mention that the walls of the choir are embroidered in places with
+Margaret's tantalising device, which--partly perhaps because it is
+tantalising--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.
+
+One 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'hote was going on, and a
+gracious, bustling, talkative landlady welcomed me. I had an excellent
+repast--the best repast possible--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 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 _tartines_. 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--my ignorance, doubtless, did me
+little honour--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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xxxix
+
+[Beaune]
+
+
+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 myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me), than at
+Beaune? On my way to this town I passed the stretch of the Cote 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 _crus_ 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 Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile
+Montegut, 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
+Hopital-Saint-Esprit, or the Hotel-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--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,
+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--a Last Judgment, attributed
+equally to John van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden--given to the hospital
+in the fifteenth century by Nicholas Rollin aforesaid.
+
+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--I had rashly wasted half an hour of it in
+breakfasting at the station--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--what I was ignorant of--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 Carre. 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
+
+[Illustration: BEAUNE--THE HOSPITAL.]
+
+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--the one I was introduced to--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--all the patients I saw were women--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--a dull book, I am afraid--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 _place_
+(there is no _place_ in France too little to contain an effigy to a
+glorious son); at the fine old porch--completely despoiled at the
+Revolution--of the principal church; and even at the meagre treasures of
+a courageous but melancholy little museum, which has been arranged--part
+of it being the gift of a local collector--in a small hotel de ville. I
+carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly
+autumnal--something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet
+pear.
+
+[Illustration: DIJON.]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter xl
+
+[Dijon]
+
+
+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--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, 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--in the last, for instance, during the time of that
+delightful President de Brosses whose Letters from Italy throw an
+interesting sidelight on Dijon--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 Moise, an ancient cistern embellished with a
+sculptured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.
+
+The ancient palace of the dukes of Burgundy, long since converted into
+an hotel de ville, presents to a wide, clean court, paved with
+washed-looking stones, and to a small semicircular _place_, opposite,
+which looks as if it had tried to be symmetrical and had failed, a
+facade 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--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,
+
+[Illustration: DIJON--THE PARK.]
+
+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.
+
+I 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 _jardin francais_ of the
+last century--a dear old place, with little blue-green perspectives and
+alleys and _rond-points_, in which everything balances. I went there
+late in the afternoon, without meeting a creature, though I had hoped I
+should meet the President 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 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.
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Little Tour in France, by Henry James
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