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 _hôtel
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
à 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 _hôtel 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 _hôtel 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 soirées 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 société_ and in a single place of worship. There was nothing
particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as, after leaving the
_hôtel 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 Établissement des Bains.
It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Établissement had the
bankrupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season; so I
turned my back upon it and gained, by a circuit in the course of which
there were sundry water-side items to observe, the other side of the
cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater and a still longer
sea-wall, on which I walked a while, to inhale the strong, salt breath
of the Bay of Biscay. La Rochelle serves, in the months of July and
August, as a _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 mediæval despot. Why I
should find it a pleasure in France to imagine myself in Italy, is more
than I can say; the illusion has never lasted long enough to be
analysed. From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high;
and indeed, the evening I reached it, the interminable climb of the
omnibus of the hotel I had selected, which I found at the station, gave
me the measure of its commanding position. This hotel, "magnifique
construction ornée de statues," as the Guide-Joanne, usually so
reticent, takes the trouble to announce, has an omnibus, and, I suppose,
has statues, though I didn't perceive them; but it has very little else
save immemorial accumulations of dirt. It is magnificent, if you will,
but it is not even relatively proper; and a dirty inn has always seemed
to me the dirtiest of human things--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 façade. This width is extraordinary, but
it fails, somehow, to give nobleness to the edifice, which looks within
(Murray makes the remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave and
two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave; and there are some
very fearful modern pictures, which you may see much better than you
usually see those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glowing
side-chapels, there being no fine old glass to diffuse a kindly gloom.
The sacristan of the cathedral showed me something much better than all
this bright bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the small
Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious object at Poitiers. It
is an early Christian chapel, one of the earliest in France; originally,
it would seem--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 _calorifère_, 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: _à
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
[Angoulême]
If it was really for the sake of the Black Prince that I had stopped at
Poitiers (for my prevision of Notre Dame la Grande and of the little
temple of St. John was of the dimmest), I ought to have stopped at
Angoulême for the sake of David and Eve Séchard, of Lucien de Rubempré
and of Madame de Bargeton, who when she wore a _toilette étudiée_
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 Angoulême from the window of the train just after we had
emerged from the long tunnel that passes under the town. This tunnel
perforates the hill on which, like Poitiers, Angoulême rears itself, and
which gives it an elevation still greater than that of Poitiers. You may
have a tolerable look at the cathedral without leaving the railway
carriage, for it stands just above the tunnel and is exposed, much
foreshortened, to the spectator below. There is evidently a charming
walk round the plateau of the town commanding those pretty views of
which Balzac gives an account. But the train whirled me away, and these
are my only impressions. The truth is that I had no need, just at that
moment, of putting myself into communication with Balzac, for opposite
to me in the compartment were a couple of figures almost as vivid as the
actors in the "Comédie Humaine." One of these was a very genial and
dirty old priest, and the other was a reserved and concentrated young
monk--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 curé, but an
ecclesiastic of some rank, who had seen a good deal both of the church
and of the world; and if I too had not been afraid of his colleague, who
read the _Figaro_ as seriously as if it had been an encyclical, I should
have entered into conversation with him.