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 _hôtels_
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-Théatre--an establishment of the highest style, encircled with
columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafés. One feels it to be a monument to
the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If I had not forbidden myself to
linger, I should venture to insist on this and, at the risk of being
called fantastic, trace an analogy between good claret and the best
qualities of the French mind; pretend that there is a taste of sound
Bordeaux in all the happiest manifestations of that fine organ, and
that, correspondingly, there is a touch of French reason, French
completeness, in a glass of Pontet-Canet. The danger of such an
excursion would lie mainly in its being so open to the reader to take
the ground from under my feet by saying that good claret doesn't exist.
To this I should have no reply whatever. I should be unable to tell him
where to find it. I certainly didn't find it at Bordeaux, where I drank
a most vulgar fluid; and it is of course notorious that a large part of
mankind is occupied in vainly looking for it. There was a great pretence
of putting it forward at the Exhibition which was going on at Bordeaux
at the time of my visit, an "exposition philomathique," lodged in a
collection of big temporary buildings in the Allées d'Orléans, and
regarded by the Bordelais for the moment as the most brilliant feature
of their city. Here were pyramids of bottles, mountains
[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 château, that seemed to look down at
the plain from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the
bright-faced flat-roofed houses, covered with tiles, the softness and
sweetness of the light and air, recalled the prosier portions of the
Lombard plain. Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression,
but not enough to give a colour to its dark, dirty, crooked streets,
which are irregular without being eccentric, and which, if it were not
for the superb church of Saint-Sernin, would be quite destitute of
monuments.
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 _méridional_. 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 Hôtel d'Assézat, Toulouse has no architecture; the
houses are for the most part of brick, of a greyish-red colour, and have
no particular style. The brickwork of the place is in fact very
poor--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
_opéra-bouffe_. Her talk was all in _n_'s, _g_'s and _d_'s, and in mute
_e_'s strongly accented, as _autré_, _théâtré_, _splendidé_--the last
being an epithet she applied to everything the Capitol contained, and
especially to a horrible picture representing the famous Clémence
Isaure, the reputed foundress of the poetical contest, presiding on one
of these occasions. I wondered whether Clémence Isaure had been anything
like this terrible Toulousaine of to-day, who would have been a capital
figure-head for a floral game. The lady in whose honour the picture I
have just mentioned was painted is a somewhat mythical personage, and
she is not to be found in the "Biographie Universelle." She is, however,
a very graceful myth; and if she never existed, her statue at least
does--a shapeless effigy transferred to the Capitol from the so-called
tomb of Clémence in the old church of La Daurade. The great hall in
which the Floral Games are held was encumbered with scaffoldings, and I
was unable to admire the long series of busts of the bards who have won
prizes and the portraits of all the capitouls of Toulouse. As a
compensation I was introduced to a big bookcase filled with the poems
that have been crowned since the days of the troubadours (a portentous
collection), and the big butcher's knife with which, according to the
legend, Henry, Duke of Montmorency, who had conspired against the great
cardinal with Gaston of Orleans and Mary de'Medici, was, in 1632,
beheaded on this spot by the order of Richelieu. With these objects the
interest of the 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 Mercié. These things have
been set out in the church of an old monastery, long since suppressed,
and the rest of the collection occupies the cloisters. These are two in
number--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 Hôtel d'Assézat as the best
house at Toulouse; with the exception of the cloister of the museum, it
is the only "bit" I remember. It has fallen from the state of a noble
residence of the sixteenth century to that of a warehouse and a set of
offices; but a certain dignity lingers in its melancholy court, which is
divided from the street by a gateway that is still imposing and in which
a clambering vine and a red Virginia-creeper were suspended to the rusty
walls of brick and stone.
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]