repudiated, in order that her _fiancé_ might marry Anne of Brittany--an
alliance so magnificently political that we almost condone the offence
to a sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for husbands, however,
inasmuch as before her marriage to Philibert she had been united to John
of Castile, son of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon--an episode terminated
by the death of the Spanish prince within a year. She was twenty-two
years regent of the Netherlands and died, at fifty-one, in 1530. She
might have been, had she chosen, the wife of Henry VII. of England. She
was one of the signers of the League of Cambray against the Venetian
Republic, and was a most politic, accomplished, and judicious princess.
She undertook to build the church of Brou as a mausoleum for her second
husband and herself, in fulfilment of a vow made by Margaret of Bourbon,
mother of Philibert, who died before she could redeem her pledge and who
bequeathed the duty to her son. He died shortly afterwards, and his
widow assumed the pious task. According to Murray, she entrusted the
erection of the church to "Maistre Loys von Berghem," and the sculpture
to "Maistre Conrad." The author of a superstitious but carefully
prepared little Notice which I bought at Bourg calls the architect and
sculptor (at once) Jehan de Paris, author (_sic_) of the tomb of Francis
II. of Brittany, to which we gave some attention at Nantes, and which
the writer of my pamphlet ascribes only subordinately to Michel Colomb.
The church, which is not of great size, is in the last and most
flamboyant phase of gothic and in admirable preservation; the west
front, before which a quaint old sun-dial is laid out on the ground--a
circle of numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into
the earth--is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however
(the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the
warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as
if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art,
told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply
the quality of the stone)--the great feature is the admirable choir, in
the midst of which the three monuments have bloomed under the chisel
like exotic plants in a conservatory. I saw the place to small
advantage, for the stained glass of the windows, which are fine, was
under repair, and much of it was masked with planks.
In the centre lies Philibert-le-Bel, a figure of white marble on a great
slab of black, in his robes and his armour, with two boy-angels holding
a tablet at his head, and two more at his feet. On either side of him is
another cherub; one guarding his helmet, the other his stiff gauntlets.
The attitudes of these charming children, whose faces are all bent upon
him in pity, have the prettiest tenderness and respect. The table on
which he lies is supported by elaborate columns adorned with niches
containing little images and with every other imaginable elegance; and
beneath it he is represented in that other form so common in the tombs
of the Renaissance--a man naked and dying, with none of the state and
splendour of the image above. One of these figures embodies the duke,
the other simply the mortal; and there is something very strange and
striking in the effect of the latter, seen dimly and with difficulty
through the intervals of the rich supports of the upper slab. The
monument of Margaret herself is on the left, all in white marble
tormented into a multitude of exquisite patterns, the last extravagance
of a gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return
upon itself. Unlike her husband, who has only the high roof of the
church above him, she lies under a canopy supported and covered by a
wilderness of embroidery--flowers, devices, initials, arabesques,
statuettes. Watched over by cherubs, she is also in her robes and
ermine, with a greyhound sleeping at her feet (her husband, at his, has
a waking lion); and the artist has not, it is to be presumed,
represented her as more beautiful than she was. She looks indeed like
the regent of a turbulent realm. Beneath her couch is stretched another
figure--a less brilliant Margaret, wrapped in her shroud, with her long
hair over her shoulders. Round the tomb is the battered iron railing
placed there originally, with the mysterious motto of the duchess worked
into the top--_fortune infortune fort une_. The other two monuments are
protected by barriers of the same pattern. That of Margaret of Bourbon,
Philibert's mother, stands on the right of the choir; and I suppose its
greatest distinction is that it should have been erected to a
mother-in-law. It is but little less florid and sumptuous than the
others; it has, however, no second recumbent figure. On the other hand,
the statuettes that surround the base of the tomb are of even more
exquisite workmanship: they represent weeping women, in long mantles and
hoods, which latter hang forward over the small face of the figure,
giving the artist a chance to carve the features within this hollow of
drapery--an extraordinary play of skill. There is a high, white marble
shrine of the Virgin, as extraordinary as all the rest (a series of
compartments representing the various scenes of her life, with the
Assumption in the middle); and there is a magnificent series of stalls,
which are simply the intricate embroidery of the tombs translated into
polished oak. All these things are splendid, ingenious, elaborate,
precious; it is goldsmith's work on a monumental scale, and the general
effect is none the less beautiful and solemn because it is so rich. But
the monuments of the church of Brou are not the noblest that one may
see; the great tombs of Verona are finer, and various other early
Italian work. These things are not insincere, as Ruskin would say; but
they are pretentious, and they are not positively _naïfs_. I should
mention that the walls of the choir are embroidered in places with
Margaret's tantalising device, which--partly perhaps because it is
tantalising--is so very decorative, as they say in London. I know not
whether she was acquainted with this epithet, but she had anticipated
one of the fashions most characteristic of our age.
One asks one's self how all this decoration, this luxury of fair and
chiselled marble, survived the French Revolution. An hour of liberty in
the choir of Brou would have been a carnival for the image-breakers. The
well-fed Bressois are surely a good-natured people. I call them well-fed
both on general and on particular grounds. Their province has the most
savoury aroma, and I found an opportunity to test its reputation. I
walked back into the town from the church (there was really nothing to
be seen by the way), and as the hour of the midday breakfast had struck,
directed my steps to the inn. The table d'hôte was going on, and a
gracious, bustling, talkative landlady welcomed me. I had an excellent
repast--the best repast possible--which consisted simply of boiled eggs
and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients
that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am
ashamed to say how many of them I consumed. "La plus belle fille du
monde," as the French proverb says, "ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a;"
and it might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has
done all that can reasonably be expected of it. But there was a bloom of
punctuality, so to speak, about these eggs of Bourg, as if it had been
the intention of the very hens themselves that they should be promptly
served. "Nous sommes en Bresse, et le beurre n'est pas mauvais," the
landlady said with a sort of dry coquetry, as she placed this article
before me. It was the poetry of butter, and I ate a pound or two of it;
after which I came away with a strange mixture of impressions of late
gothic sculpture and thick _tartines_. I came away through the town,
where, on a little green promenade, facing the hotel, is a bronze statue
of Bichat the physiologist, who was a Bressois. I mention it not on
account of its merit (though, as statues go, I don't remember that it is
bad), but because I learned from it--my ignorance, doubtless, did me
little honour--that Bichat had died at thirty years of age, and this
revelation was almost agitating. To have done so much in so short a life
was to be truly great. This reflection, which looks deplorably trite as
I write it here, had the effect of eloquence as I uttered it for my own
benefit on the bare little mall at Bourg.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxix
[Beaune]
On my return to Macon I found myself fairly face to face with the fact
that my tour was near its end. Dijon had been marked by fate as its
farthest limit, and Dijon was close at hand. After that I was to drop
the tourist and re-enter Paris as much as possible like a Parisian. Out
of Paris the Parisian never loiters, and therefore it would be
impossible for me to stop between Dijon and the capital. But I might be
a tourist a few hours longer by stopping somewhere between Macon and
Dijon. The question was where I should spend these hours. Where better,
I asked myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me), than at
Beaune? On my way to this town I passed the stretch of the Côte d'Or,
which, covered with a mellow autumn haze, with the sunshine shimmering
through, looked indeed like a golden slope. One regards with a kind of
awe the region in which the famous _crûs_ of Burgundy (Vougeot,
Chambertin, Nuits, Beaune) are, I was going to say, manufactured. Adieu,
paniers; vendanges sont faites! The vintage was over; the shrunken
russet fibres alone clung to their ugly stick. The horizon on the left
of the road had a charm, however; there is something picturesque in the
big, comfortable shoulders of the Côte. That delicate critic M. Emile
Montégut, in a charming record of travel through this region published
some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of
"waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point.
I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost
have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy
Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always
oblique, and steep, moss covered roofs. The principal lion is the
Hôpital-Saint-Esprit, or the Hôtel-Dieu simply, as they call it there,
founded in 1443 by Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of Burgundy. It is
administered by the sisterhood of the Holy Ghost, and is one of the most
venerable and stately of hospitals. The face it presents to the street
is simple, but striking--a plain, windowless wall, surmounted by a vast
slate roof, of almost mountainous steepness. Astride this roof sits a
tall, slate-covered spire, from which, as I arrived, the prettiest
chimes I ever heard (worse luck to them, as I will presently explain)
were ringing. Over the door is a high, quaint canopy, without supports,
with its vault painted blue and covered with gilded stars. (This, and
indeed the whole building, have lately been restored, and its antiquity
is quite of the spick-and-span order. But it is very delightful.) The
treasure of the place is a precious picture--a Last Judgment, attributed
equally to John van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden--given to the hospital
in the fifteenth century by Nicholas Rollin aforesaid.
I learned, however, to my dismay, from a sympathising but inexorable
concierge, that what remained to me of the time I had to spend at
Beaune, between trains--I had rashly wasted half an hour of it in
breakfasting at the station--was the one hour of the day (that of the
dinner of the nuns; the picture is in their refectory) during which the
treasure could not be shown. The purpose of the musical chimes to which
I had so artlessly listened was to usher in this fruitless interval. The
regulation was absolute, and my disappointment relative, as I have been
happy to reflect since I "looked up" the picture. Crowe and Cavalcaselle
assign it without hesitation to Roger van der Weyden, and give a weak
little drawing of it in their "Flemish Painters." I learn from them
also--what I was ignorant of--that Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of
Burgundy and founder of the establishment at Beaune, was the original of
the worthy kneeling before the Virgin in the magnificent John van Eyck
of the Salon Carré. All I could see was the court of the hospital and
two or three rooms. The court, with its tall roofs, its pointed gables
and spires, its wooden galleries, its ancient well, with an elaborate
superstructure of wrought iron, is one of those places into which a
sketcher ought to be let loose. It looked Flemish or English rather than
French, and a splendid tidiness pervaded it. The porter took me into
two
[Illustration: BEAUNE--THE HOSPITAL.]
rooms on the ground-floor, into which the sketcher should also be
allowed to penetrate, for they made irresistible pictures. One of them,
of great proportions, painted in elaborate "subjects" like a ball-room
of the seventeenth century, was filled with the beds of patients, all
draped in curtains of dark red cloth, the traditional uniform of these
eleemosynary couches. Among them the sisters moved about in their robes
of white flannel with big white linen hoods. The other room was a
strange, immense apartment, lately restored with much splendour. It was
of great length and height, had a painted and gilded barrel-roof, and
one end of it--the one I was introduced to--appeared to serve as a
chapel, as two white-robed sisters were on their knees before an altar.
This was divided by red curtains from the larger part; but the porter
lifted one of the curtains and showed me that the rest of it, a long,
imposing vista, served as a ward lined with little red-draped beds.
"C'est l'heure de la lecture," remarked my guide; and a group of
convalescents--all the patients I saw were women--were gathered in the
centre around a nun, the points of whose white hood nodded a little
above them and whose gentle voice came to us faintly, with a little
echo, down the high perspective. I know not what the good sister was
reading--a dull book, I am afraid--but there was so much colour and such
a fine, rich air of tradition about the whole place that it seemed to me
I would have risked listening to her. I turned away, however, with that
sense of defeat which is always irritating to the appreciative tourist,
and pottered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my hour: looked
at the statue of Gaspard Monge, the mathematician, in the little _place_
(there is no _place_ in France too little to contain an effigy to a
glorious son); at the fine old porch--completely despoiled at the
Revolution--of the principal church; and even at the meagre treasures of
a courageous but melancholy little museum, which has been arranged--part
of it being the gift of a local collector--in a small hôtel de ville. I
carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly
autumnal--something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet
pear.
[Illustration: DIJON.]
[Illustration]
Chapter xl
[Dijon]
It was very well that my little tour was to terminate at Dijon, for I
found, rather to my chagrin, that there was not a great deal, from the
pictorial point of view, to be done with Dijon. It was no great matter,
for I held my proposition to have been by this time abundantly
demonstrated--the proposition with which I started: that if Paris is
France, France is by no means Paris. If Dijon was a good deal of a
disappointment, I felt therefore that I could afford it. It was time for
me to reflect, also, that for my disappointments, as a general thing, I
had only myself to thank. They had too often been the consequence of
arbitrary preconceptions produced by influences of which I had lost the
trace. At any rate, I will say plumply that the ancient capital of
Burgundy is wanting in character; it is not up to the mark. It is old
and narrow and crooked, and it has been left pretty well to itself: but
it is not high and overhanging; it is not, to the eye, what the
Burgundian capital should be. It has some tortuous vistas, some mossy
roofs, some bulging fronts, some grey-faced hotels, which look as if in
former centuries--in the last, for instance, during the time of that
delightful Président de Brosses whose Letters from Italy throw an
interesting sidelight on Dijon--they had witnessed a considerable amount
of good living. But there is nothing else. I speak as a man who, for
some reason which he doesn't remember now, did not pay a visit to the
celebrated Puits de Moïse, an ancient cistern embellished with a
sculptured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.
The ancient palace of the dukes of Burgundy, long since converted into
an hôtel de ville, presents to a wide, clean court, paved with
washed-looking stones, and to a small semicircular _place_, opposite,
which looks as if it had tried to be symmetrical and had failed, a
façade and two wings characterised by the stiffness, but not by the
grand air, of the early part of the eighteenth century. It contains,
however, a large and rich museum--a museum really worthy of a capital.
The gem of this collection is the great banqueting hall of the old
palace, one of the few features of the place that has not been
essentially altered. Of great height, roofed with the old beams and
cornices, it exhibits,
[Illustration: DIJON--THE PARK.]
filling one end, a colossal gothic chimney-piece with a fireplace large
enough to roast, not an ox, but a herd of oxen. In the middle of this
striking hall, the walls of which are covered with objects more or less
precious, have been placed the tombs of Philippe-le-Hardi and
Jean-sans-Peur. These monuments, very splendid in their general effect,
have a limited interest. The limitation comes from the fact that we see
them to-day in a transplanted and mutilated condition. Placed originally
in a church which has disappeared from the face of the earth, demolished
and dispersed at the Revolution, they have been reconstructed and
restored out of fragments recovered and pieced together. The piecing has
been beautifully done; it is covered with gilt and with brilliant paint;
the whole result is most artistic. But the spell of the old mortuary
figures is broken, and it will never work again. Meanwhile the monuments
are immensely decorative.
I think the thing that pleased me best at Dijon was the little old Parc,
a charming public garden, about a mile from the town, to which I walked
by a long, straight autumnal avenue. It is a _jardin français_ of the
last century--a dear old place, with little blue-green perspectives and
alleys and _rond-points_, in which everything balances. I went there
late in the afternoon, without meeting a creature, though I had hoped I
should meet the Président de Brosses. At the end of it was a little
river that looked like a canal, and on the farther bank was an
old-fashioned villa, close to the water, with a little French garden of
its own. On the hither side was a bench, on which I seated myself,
lingering a good while; for this was just the sort of place I like. It
was the farthermost point of my little tour. I thought that over, as I
sat there, on the eve of taking the express to Paris; and as the light
faded in the Parc the vision of some of the things I had enjoyed became
more distinct.
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