Palais de Justice, appears to have been regarded at the time it was
built very much as the residence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New
York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town
is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if
you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it
you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must
have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate it offers to view
two big towers which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of
Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak--the square in front of
the post-office--the palace of Jacques Coeur looks very big and strong
and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very
handsome and delicate. To this street it presents two tiers and a
considerable length of façade; and it has both within and without a
great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the
stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a
woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as
looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and
the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for
having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at
the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master,
who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.
The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been written by M. Pierre
Clément in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and
interesting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more
curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling
from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods
grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker,
ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the
East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the
globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant
operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty,
imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been
elucidated by M. Clément, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture
of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the
fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great
merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed
him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous
set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of
high-handed rapacity--the crudest possible assertion of the right of the
stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his
life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered
his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he
enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that
Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which
his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques Coeur, however,
was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after the
expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house at
Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and
splendour, though it has in parts that want of space which is striking
in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court indeed is on a
large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful
windows and with sculptures inserted in the walls, representing the
various sources of the great fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clément
describes this part of the house as having been of an "incomparable
richesse"--an estimate of its charms which seems slightly exaggerated
to-day. There is, however, something delicate and familiar in the
bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little scenes of agriculture and
industry which show that the proprietor was not ashamed of calling
attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day we should question the
taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in the house of a
"merchant prince" however self-made. Why should it be, accordingly, that
these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease us? It is perhaps
because things very ancient never, for some mysterious reason, appear
vulgar. This fifteenth-century millionaire, with his palace, his
"swagger" sculptures, may have produced that impression on some critical
spirits of his own day.
The portress who showed me into the building was a dear little old
woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face--a little white, aged
face, with dark, pretty eyes--and the most considerate manner. She took
me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious
chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the
hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of
Bourges--an inland town if ever there was one, without even a river (to
call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions--having found his end as
admiral of a fleet; but this boat-shaped roof, which is extremely
graceful and is repeated in another apartment, would suggest that the
imagination of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as he
trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is probable
that he was personally as much at home in certain Mediterranean ports
as in the capital of the pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at the
ceilings of his mansion, he saw his boats upside down, this was only a
suggestion of the shortest way of emptying them of their treasures. He
is presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in
company with his wife, Macée de Léodepart--I like to write such an
extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess
at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention
much more to the passers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in
other attitudes; though I do not recognise them in the composition on
top of one of the fireplaces which represents the battlements of a
castle, with the defenders (little figures between the crenellations)
hurling down missiles with a great deal of fury and expression. It would
have been hard to believe that the man who surrounded himself with these
friendly and humorous devices had been guilty of such wrong-doing as to
call down the heavy hand of justice.
It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal associations
of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques Coeur, which, in spite
of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have
terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his
quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hôtel Cujas,
one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of
the great jurisconsult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of
the Roman law and professed it during the close of his life in the
university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of
his sedentary pursuits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in
the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits are perhaps not exactly
[Illustration: BOURGES--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle"
(sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual
manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did
not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so
grave a work) an amusing picture of the short, fat, untidy scholar
dragging himself _à plat ventre_, across his room, from one pile of
books to the other. The house in which these singular gymnastics took
place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of
the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discoloured, it has a
charming Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street,
and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched
two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court,
beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with
turrets, with fine old windows and with a beautiful tone of faded red
brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial
by-street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller
with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on
the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A
brawny gendarme in his shirtsleeves was polishing his boots in the
court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its clusters, hung itself
over a doorway and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall.
The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was
almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to
exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I
had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a
_ville de province_ in the full force of the term, especially as
applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have
very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby,
without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor
antique--a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number
of blank walls--walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses--that
avert themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being
so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on
which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness
and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately
add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a
colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city
may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six
weeks spent _en province_, however, I saw few places that had not more
expression than Bourges.
I went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I
returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual,
with the _commis-voyageurs_, who cut their bread on their thumb and
partook of every course; and after this repast I repaired for a while to
the café, which occupied a part of the basement of the inn and opened
into its court. This café was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where
it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to _tutoyer_ his
customers and the practice of the customers to _tutoyer_ the waiter.
Under these circumstances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting
down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him
for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little
portfolio covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets
of
[Illustration: BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)]
thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which
pass in France for pens--these being the utensils invariably evoked by
such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself
opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident
reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I
received an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in
which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended
with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavoured every now and then with
a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he
was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very
facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game
went on and he lost and had to pay the _consommation_, he dropped his
amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and
went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than
the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend,
one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the
jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold
the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all
fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their
inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking
cad; just as the bright little café where a robust materfamilias, doling
out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror
behind the _comptoir_, was a much more civilised spot than a British
public-house or a "commercial room," with pipes and whisky, or even than
an American saloon.
[Illustration]
Chapter xiii
[Le Mans]
It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey
and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The
question indeed was to get away, no easy matter in France in the early
days of October, when the whole _jeunesse_ of the country is returning
to school. It is accompanied, apparently, with parents and grandparents,
and it fills the trains with little pale-faced _lycéens_, who gaze out
of the windows with a longing, lingering air not unnatural on the part
of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be
restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our
American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood. The train stopped
every five minutes; but fortunately the country was charming--hilly and
bosky, eminently good-humoured, and dotted here and there with a smart
little château. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has
given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interesting town,
but I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My
expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular
reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed--a
much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however,
is not steep in all directions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was
not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that,
on the other hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better
inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small
market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be
slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an
ugly _halle_, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le
Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which
I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to
the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble
features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls
straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling
behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly
numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through
the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very
crooked and untidy lane, of really mediæval aspect, honoured with the
denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria--an
absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later
than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument in
the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question--very
sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it--is an
elaborate little dusky façade, overhanging the street, ornamented with
panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.
A fat old woman standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to
it--a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming
manner--told me what the house was, and also indicated to me a
rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same street, nearer the
cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique" and
of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some years, in the early part
of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a
right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd
canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic
muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position--he was
unable even to go down on his knees--prosecuted that other suit which
made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the
second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon;
though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been
in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an
epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":
"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
Fit plus de pitié que d'envie,
Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
Avant que de perdre la vie.
Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
Et garde bien qu'il ne s'éveille.
Car voicy la première nuit,
Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."
There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front of the cathedral,
with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the
towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which
it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little
pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of
having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are
houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture
of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the
characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the
hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as
it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have
communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral,
which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from
without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church--the disparity
between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century,
and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred
years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave,
which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and
curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow
but very lofty, display to the spectators in the _place_ the reach of
their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse
of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is
the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the
choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a
point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the
stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found
nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with
Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of
double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them supported
on very thick round columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in
this passage, and a charming little lady-chapel filled with gorgeous old
glass. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble;
its lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to
places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like
Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and
unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The
beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of
pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that
contains the formless image--a clumsy stone woman lying on her
back--which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.
The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small
garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large
_place de foire_, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known
as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a
while in rectangular alleys destitute of herbage and received a deeper
impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its
hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins,
between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may
admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should
remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away
and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This
sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded
now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown façade and a portal fretted with
early sculptures; but the
[Illustration: LE MANS--THE CATHEDRAL]
details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have
stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le
Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had
looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply
in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good
reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has
a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of
old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,
accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English
Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self
in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be
assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of
disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat
before dinner at the door of one of the cafés in the market-place with a
_bitter-et-curaçao_ (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me
company. I remember that in this situation there came over me an
impression which both included and excluded all possible
disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably
soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near
me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the
detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in
particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet
I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of
French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air,
together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a
positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have
descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of
the café, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is
perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans.
[Illustration]
Chapter xiv
[Angers]
I am shocked at finding, just after this noble declaration of
principles, that in a little note-book which at that time I carried
about with me the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell." I
reproduce this vulgar word with the greatest hesitation, and only
because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers
belongs to the disagreeable class of old towns that have been, as the
English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place
is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with
irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for
absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern
improvements and quite unworthy of its admirable name--a name which,
like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque
value. It looks particularly well on the Shakespearean page (in "King
John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the
utterance of the period) with a fine grinding insular accent. Angers
figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital
city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who
married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and
competitor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the
Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. These facts create
a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over
in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country
that was really pretty and looked more like the usual English than like
the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a
considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the
hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for
passing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have
contented myself before the end of the day. I remained at the White
Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally good
provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks
spent in these establishments.