note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are
some narrow and tortuous streets, with a few curious old houses," I
continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the exterior is most
extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest." It is
fair to say that the Château d'Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage;
the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You
cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It
has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you;
it is simply very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple
impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a
perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of
the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained
the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front
of Angers is poor--wanting in colour and in movement; and there is
always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and
yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents
itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally
much better when the vast dark bulk of the castle, with its seventeen
prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of
tremendous girth and solidity; they are encircled with great bands, or
hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them
hang high curtains of infinitely old-looking masonry, apparently a dense
conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally
built (thanks to rich quarries in the neighbourhood), and to which it
owed its appellation of the Black. There are no windows, no apertures,
and to-day no battlements nor roofs. These accessories were removed by
Henry III., so that, in spite of its grimness and blackness, the place
has not even the interest of looking like a prison; it being, as I
suppose, the essence of a prison not to be open to the sky. The only
features of the enormous structure are the blank, sombre stretches and
protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on so large a scale, is
strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus and terminated by St.
Louis, the Château d'Angers has of course a great deal of history. The
luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of Louis XIV.,
whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and complete, was
confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had taken place at
Nantes. Here also Huguenots and Vendeans suffered effective captivity.
I walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it
is all up-hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the
entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the
rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to
see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard
contains a multitude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk
round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the
weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So
I came out and took another look at the big, black exterior, buttressed
with white-ribbed towers, and perceived that a desperate sketcher might
extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they
say, the little black bronze statue of the good King René (a weak
production of
[Illustration: ANGERS--OLD TIMBERED HOUSES]
David d'Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy
faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old
timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the
Maison d'Adam and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic
architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the
town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really
imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen-draper, who
flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mère de Famille; and above
his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house
occupies the angle of a little _place_, this front is double, and the
black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and
carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is
quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what
history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as
"moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge
was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave,
without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a
form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather
inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely
simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big,
serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very
shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is
original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that
the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high
west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two
elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern
pavilion has been inserted.
I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Café Serin, where,
after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train
which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of
hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its
air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as
also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an
unassuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place
where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented
itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of
the historical monuments of Angers.
[Illustration]
Chapter xv
[Nantes]
If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience
rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular
room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled
me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned inn
(it had a huge windy _porte-cochère_, and you climbed a vast black stone
staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded
with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a
pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes
belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and
its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much
commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in
the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It
derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,
which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous
too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched
windows, classic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These
features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux
aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has
the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French
water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French
landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an
eminently well-established, air. During a day passed in it of course I
had time to go to the Musée; the more so that I have a weakness for
provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality
of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often
curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind,
there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably
old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity,
for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is
of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent
collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused
light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the
snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain
to show you the lustreless gem of the museum--these things have a mild
historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate
something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of
a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's
marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is
the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled
from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State.
Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very
honourable practice--the purchase by the Government of a certain number
of "pictures of the year," which are presently distributed in the
provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for success by
different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should
say here, in every platform. The works of art are often
ill-selected--there is an official taste which you immediately
recognise--but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which
should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing
in this particular Musée that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman
by Ingres--very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a
great deal of style.
There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of
Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size,
and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the
remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic--a tall elegant building of
the sixteenth century. The château is naturally not wanting in history.
It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought, with
the rest of the province, by the Duchess Anne, the last representative
of that race, as her dowry, to Charles VIII. I read in the excellent
handbook of M. Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of
the kings of France, from Louis XI. downward; and also that it has
served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other
distinguished persons, from the horrible Maréchal de Retz, who in the
fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of
hundred young children, sacrificed in abominable rites, to the ardent
Duchess of Berry, mother of the Count of Chambord, who was confined
there for a few hours in 1832, just after her arrest in a neighbouring
house. I looked at the house in question--you may see it from the
platform in front of the château--and tried to figure to myself that
embarrassing scene. The Duchess, after having unsuccessfully raised the
standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons) in the legitimist Bretagne,
and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe,
had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the
end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the
austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.
For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an
interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into
the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the
castle indicated also another historic spot, a house with little
_tourelles_ on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have
signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not in a position
to answer for this pedigree.
There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which
command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that
is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the
horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier
and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution
was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in
couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air noble_, in France
always reminds me of those dreadful years--of the street-scenes of the
Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing
could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these
eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on
tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of
groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed
coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the
architecture of the period--the clear grey stone, the high pilasters,
the arching lines of the _entresol_, the classic pediment, the
slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the
domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers,
makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best
to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold.
Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I
discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but
of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no
choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a
cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only
the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have
a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.
Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face
and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty
and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.
The great treasure of Nantes is the two noble sepulchral monuments which
occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its nobleness) the
rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south
side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany,
and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their
daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Château de
Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first
husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her
second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make
room for her, and where she herself died. Transferred to the cathedral
from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel
Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and
the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of
the most brilliant works of the French Renaissance. It has a splendid
effect and is in perfect preservation. A great table of black marble
supports the reclining figures of the duke and duchess, who lie there
peacefully and majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads
each on a cushion, the pair of which are supported from behind by three
charming little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a
lion and a greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of
the table is a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately
dressed, with a symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their
contemporary faces and clothes, which give them the air of realistic
portraits, are truthful and living, if not remarkably beautiful. Round
the sides of the tomb are small images of the apostles. There is a kind
of masculine completeness in the work, and a certain robustness of
taste.
In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in
being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to
say in regard to the great final contrast--the contrast between the
immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They
expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the
solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the
personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption,
of his memory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is a sceptical affair; it
insists too little on the honours. I say this in the face of the fact
that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the
presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs.
Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one
of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoricière, the defender of
the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble work, from the
hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation
of sculptors who have revived in France an art of which our over-dressed
century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a
certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune--an echo with a
beautiful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble
elaborately worked with arabesques and cherubs, in a relief so low that
it gives the work a certain look of being softened and worn by time,
lies the body of the Breton soldier with a crucifix clasped to his
breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a
figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and
Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were
exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast
and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene, robust young mother,
beautiful in line and attitude; the other a lean and vigilant young man,
in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched
arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These
figures contain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been
attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a splendid
example and a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more
or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'Medici at
Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The interest of
the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind of moral
good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art, and which,
united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a remarkable
sense of form, produces an impression of deep refinement. The whole
monument is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that
this impression on the part of the spectator is the happiest possible.
It explains much of the great beauty, and it also explains perhaps a
little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely in place;
I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which has visibly
triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern
genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element
is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in
admiration of the deep æsthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste,
revealed by such work. After that I only hope that, Giuseppe Garibaldi
may have somewhere or other some commemoration as distinguished.
[Illustration]
Chapter xvi
[La Rochelle]
To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward across
the historic _bocage_ of La Vendée, the home of royalist bush-fighting.
The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses,
orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the
traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that
as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there
was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment
beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay
(from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La
Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway
kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalised river,
bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet
old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther
side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf.
The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful,
though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle,
which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating
little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of
its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean--in which,
after all, it _is_ Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at
Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only
twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to
find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of which it
may be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft
a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and to go from
New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and
warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter
myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to
perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the _caractère
méridional_. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For that
matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound--to wake up
there, as it were--would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure
is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive
shades of difference by which it ceases 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 café with a striped awning, a tall, cold, florid,
uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on one side, and on
the other a shady walk which forms part of an old rampart. I followed
this walk for some time, under the stunted trees, beside the
grass-covered bastions; it is very charming, winding and wandering,
always with trees. Beneath the rampart is a tidal river, and on the
other side, for a long distance, the mossy walls of the immense garden
of a seminary. Three hundred years ago La Rochelle was the great French
stronghold of Protestantism, but to-day it appears to be a nursery of
Papists.