to us the atrocious cruelties of the Fifteenth Century. You do not
find those cruelties striking the imagination of the time. You find
injustice denounced, approaching chastisement prophesied, all the
symptoms of a diseased society in the rulers and great vitality that
perceived that disease among the oppressed, but what you do _not_ get
specifically mentioned, or at any rate not mentioned with reiteration,
is the cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite
remote from human habit or experience. Men and women are burnt alive in
numbers which steadily increase from that time to the first generation
of the Seventeenth Century. They are not thus tortured by the ferocity
of the mob. The thing is done quite quietly by process of law, exactly
as one might distrain for debt. You will perpetually hear vigorous
protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you
will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative, I should say
never) find men saying "just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution
is so revolting that I protest against it." Men believed something
with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements
which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand
save through glimpses, side-lights, and careful deductions from or
guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements.
Thus in the particular case of burning alive--a thing we can scarcely
bear to contemplate even in words--the framers of the statutes seem to
have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type
of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is
quite easy to prove, from numerous instances--Savonarola is one in
point--that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body
consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some
cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release
the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an
attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.
Now the moral of such suggestions (and they crop up innumerable all
over the surface of historical study) is that our own time lives in
such an atmosphere and cannot define it. One would imagine in the
torrent of printing and of record that everything concerning our time
would be fixed and known. The most fundamental thing of all will not
be fixed and known: it will have to be imperfectly guessed at. Some
chance student in some particular era of posterity will say: "These
people were more concerned with questions of property, apparently, than
with religion. That is madness--but let us see what kind of madness
it was and work out its nature, since they never clearly set down how
they got into such a frame of mind nor even what that frame of mind
was." Or another student will say in another epoch: "These people
hesitated before personal combat--the most rational and commonplace of
daily happenings. It is amazing, but it is true. Let me ferret out the
state of mind which can have produced such an abnormal result." And so
forth. Our time, like all those past times, will be watched curiously,
and this mysterious thing will be sought and hardly found. The irony
lies in this: that the spirit posterity will so seek is in us, here,
to-day--and we cannot express it.
ON THE AIR OF THE DORDOGNE
All countries are built in vast inclined planes which lean up against
one another and have ridges between. The great rivers run in the
hollows where these planes meet at their lowest, and the watersheds are
the lines along which their top edges come together--and there, you
might think, was the end of it: but there is much more.
You must not only say: "I have left the valley of the Thames, I have
found the valley of the Itchen," nor only: "I have come over St.
Leonards Forest; I am no longer among the Surrey rivers, I am on the
headwaters of the Sussex Weald," nor only: "I have left the great
fields of the Yonne and the Seine and I have come down on to the Plain
of Burgundy and the Eastern Rivers"--it is much more than that.
The slope that looks northward is one thing, the slope that looks
southward another. The slope that has been conquered or ordered by the
foreigner, or civilised from without, or in any way rearranged, may
march with, but will contrast violently against, the slope that has
been protected or isolated or left desert.
The very storms of Nature treat one and the other differently; the
rivers do a different work according to the treatment of forests by men
within their watershed; the soil sometimes, the air always, changes.
Above all, the houses of men change.
The accent of speech changes, if not the form of speech; nay, in the
transition from one such region to another I can believe that the
daylight seems to change.
All those subtle, permanent, and masterly things which we cannot
measure, but which are infinitely important compared with what we can
measure, are grouped in groups in those great depressions which look to
one sea or to one city, and the regions of Europe and its patriotisms
run ultimately with the valleys. So it is with the Loire, and the
Dordogne.
Whatever feeds the Loire is one. There are large uncultivated heaths
the size of a country; there are very quiet pastures, very rich and
silent, stretching for a hundred miles and as broad as a man would
care to walk in a day; and in the highlands of the watershed there
are rocks, and the trees of rocks, and at last sterile and savage
mountains. And the upper courses of all the rivers of the Loire are
torrents foaming in glens. Nevertheless, whatever feeds the Loire has a
unity. The Allier, the Vienne, the Creuse, the Loire itself (which is
only one stream out of many) are bound together.
Well, you go up into the sources of the watershed, you cross a confused
land of rounded hills and knobs of crested rock and short, sturdy,
sparse wood and heather and broom, and at last you see at your feet,
trickling southward, not northwards, a stream that knows its way. And
this at last, when it has worked its way through little waterfalls and
past the gates it knows, will be the River Isle. If you knew it only
from the map you would think it a stream like any other stream, but
when you go downwards with it upon your feet, and when you see it with
your eyes, tumbling and hurrying there, you know that everything has
changed--you are in the air of the Dordogne.
There is a louder noise in the village streets; the habit of summer
clings to them late into the winter time and re-arises in them early
with the spring--though the cold is sharp in all the hills of the
Limousin, whether to the north or to the south of that watershed, yet
the south of it has a tradition very different from the north, and
the sun is more kind or more worshipped. Here are lodges built beside
or over the humblest houses; the vine is not so disciplined; it has a
simpler and a more natural growth, it is an ornament and a shade. The
churches have flat roofs such as Italy and Spain will use. Their Gothic
is an attempt, their Romanesque is native.
The children and the birds are careless. Wealth is not spent in luxury
but in externals, and property is contented. All this is the air of the
Dordogne.
You feel what you have come to when you drink your first cup of wine on
the southward slope of the hill, for the wine of every country is the
soul of it. No Romans taught these men to plant the vine, it was surely
native here. Here the vine grudges nothing; the god who inhabits it is
not here a guest or a prisoner. Its juice is full and admirable. It
needs no age. In Burgundy, where an iron works in the earth, they need
nine years to breed perfection in their wine, but here, in the air of
the Dordogne, though so far south, they need not seven. Within twelve
months of the vintage a stranger can hardly tell its age, and for my
part I would drink it gladly in November with the people there.
God forbid that any one should blaspheme the wines of the Loire, the
cherished and difficult vineyards of Touraine. Great care and many
friends protect them, and an infinite labour brings them to maturity.
The wine of Chinon, which made Rabelais, the wine of Vouvray, which is
good for the studying of mathematics, the wine of Saumur, which teaches
men how to leap horses over gates--all these wines are of the north,
and yet it would be treason to malign them.
I will not be tempted to such a treason, but could I be tempted I
should be tempted by the generous invitation which, when one comes
down the southward slope and feels the air of the Dordogne, proceeds
and gathers from the vineyards of that delightful land. You may have
seen on bottles the word "St. Emilion," and if what was within was
from St. Emilion indeed, then you saw a great name upon the label;
for you must know that St. Emilion is built in a sacred hollow. There
Guadet, "who could not forgive," was born. Thence the noblest blood of
the Revolution proceeded. In its vineyards died by their own hand the
best of the Republicans, and this place still keeps, as in a kind of
chalice, the spirit of the Gironde. If you doubt it, drink the wine.
And St. Emilion is, as it were, the centre and navel of the country of
the Dordogne. Here there stands or stood a church built all out of one
rock. St. Martin, or some such person, beginning the monastic habit,
was pestered (I have heard) by the grand nobles whom he had persuaded
to monkishness in a fit of piety, for they said: "This life of yours is
all very well, but what is there to do?"
Then St. Martin, lifting up his eyes, saw a large rock, and said to the
youngest of them--
"Here is a great rock. Hack it about and chisel it until it has the
shape of a church outside, and then cut doors and windows and hack away
into it until it has the shape of a church inside, and you will have
plenty to do."
The story as it was told to me goes on to say that they lived to be so
old and so very old at their labour that they saw Charlemagne go riding
by before the first Mass was sung in that rock church; and that that
great soldier, coming in to their first Mass, thought the workers in
their extreme old age to be the spirits of another world.
Now the church of St. Emilion is a symbol of the air of the Dordogne on
account of its strength, its homogeneity, its legend, and its virtue of
delicate but profound age.
You have drunk Barsac--and in so drinking you drank (you thought) April
woods and the first flowers. Barsac would not be Barsac but for the
Dordogne, which helps to make the great Gironde. And you have drunk
Entremer, which is the name for a host of wines, but the kernel of
the whole thing is the full blood that dreams and ripens, and as it
were procreates, where the slope of the Dordogne is most the Dordogne,
although the Dordogne is not there: at St. Emilion.
The pen has the power to describe, not general, but particular things.
Though it may define what is general, it can call up only what is
particular, and in that extended province which is ruled by the
Dordogne St. Emilion has moved me to a particular description.
ON THE SITES OF THE REVOLUTION
There is not in travel an interest more fascinating than that of noting
with the eyes and proving by the memory and by books the exact place of
great or decisive actions. So have I just done in many places. Here (I
have said to myself) Abdul-ul-Rahman went up Aragon till he came to the
head of the Pass. Here he first saw the plains of Gaul from a height
and promised himself the conquest of all Europe for Islam. Here, where
the two rivers meet somewhat north of Poitiers, the two hosts watched
each other for a week, and that which was not ours was defeated.
Then again, in Toulouse it was amazing to collect, as one wandered
through, the memories of so many centuries. Here were the shrine where
the body of Saturninus was found dead, dragged to death by a bull
through the streets of the city; the quarter from which the populace
saw advancing the Northern Army that was to defeat the Visigoths; the
site of the wall whence the retreat of the Saracen was noted, a flood
of men pouring back towards the wall of the Pyrenees; the flat heights
beyond the city to the east, where the English Army came up from Spain
in the defeats of Napoleon and drove back the resistance of the defence.
All these, and many more, a man notes in a travel of but few days,
for all Europe--and no province more than this--is crammed with the
story of its own past; but perhaps that which, in such reminiscences
or resurrections, most moves one is to observe the obliteration of the
last and most immediate of our efforts. The sites of the Revolution
have disappeared.
One may walk about Paris--as I have walked to-day--and see stones and
windows that are still alive with the long business of the city. There
is the room where Madame de Sévigné wrote, there is the long gallery
where Sully paced, recognising the new power of artillery and planning
the greatness of his master. You may stand on the very floor where the
priests stood when St. Louis held the Crown of Thorns above them, more
than six hundred years ago; you may stand on the stone that covers
Geoffrey Plantagenet before the altar of the Cathedral; you may touch
the altar that the boatmen raised under Tiberius to their gods when our
Lord was preaching in Galilee, and as you marvel at that stone you may
note around you the little Roman bricks that stood in the same arches
when Julian saw them, sitting at the Council that saved the Faith for
the West.
All these old things remain in this moving, and yet unchanging,
town--except the things of its principal and most memorable feat of
will.
The Revolution is even now not old. Its effects are still in movement;
they are not yet accomplished. Of the fundamental quarrels which it
raised (some five or six) one at least, that of religion, is by no
means resolved.
It is not even old in time. I who write this have known some who saw
it; many who remembered its soldiers or its victims. I have but to-day
visited a room where a daughter of the Montgolfiers would tell me
in her extreme old age how the mob poured on the Bastille, and her
companion, nearer to me in blood, had seen, and in my boyhood talked
to me of, Napoleon. How many all round me, to-day or yesterday, were
filled with the light or fire of that time, saying, "My father died
in such and such a battle," in Spain, or in Italy, or beyond the
Vistula--at the ends of the world. It is not so very long ago. It was
much the chief business, for good or evil, that Europe has known since
the Empire accepted the Faith. And what visible relics of it remain?
Where the National Assembly sat at Versailles, the Salle des Menus
Plaisirs, there are a few houses or barracks, a place in building.
Where they sat in Paris, they and the first days of the Convention,
wrestling with and throwing Necessity, the Riding School, that vast
oval cavern in which they forged the modern world, has utterly gone.
I never pass the place, even hurriedly and on business to some work or
other, but I pause a moment to consider so great a change! It is where
the Rue Castiglione comes now into the Rue de Rivoli--two streets whose
very names are those of battles fought long after the atlantean work
was done. Not a trace remains. A drinking shop for foreign jockeys, a
cosmopolitan hotel, a milliner's where the rich of all nations (the
women of the rich, that is) go in and buy; these hold the place. Here
Mirabeau spoke his last words with effort and went home to die; here
Verginaud thundered; here Louis and Mary Antoinette took refuge in the
oven of the August days; here the long vote, a day and a night and yet
another day, dragged on and ended with the end of the Capétians--after
a thousand years.
The Tuileries saw more. They saw the outlawing of Thermidor, the
quarrels that ended in the dictatorship, the hard scuffle that killed
the monarchy. They have wholly disappeared. At the one end of them
still stands the room where the committee made war on the whole world,
and imposed upon the nation that leaden law of armies which we still
call the Terror. But for that room all has gone.
The town-hall has gone. It was the focus of the revolt, it led the
fever of the war against the kings. From it came the massacres of
September--by order, I believe,--into it retreated and was defeated the
last effort of extreme equality. This building at least (one might
have hoped) might have been spared for history. It had sprung from the
Renaissance, whole and beautiful. It had seen all the growths of the
Bourbons and of their power, all the growing consciousness of Paris. It
held half the documents of the city and more than half its destiny. It
was the head, and its Italian front was the face, of Paris. It has gone
altogether. It was burned when the Tuileries was burned.
The room where Danton pleaded so that his voice was heard beyond the
river; the room where the Queen, in a voice low and firm, replied to
the questions of her judges; the room where Marat was acquitted, and
where the Girondins sang--all that has gone in fire. The house where
Desmoulins first conspired is pulled down. The house where Danton sat
in his last hours watching the fire and caring little for life or death
has also gone. The Jacobins are a market-place. The temple was pulled
down by the order of Napoleon. That furious business seems to have
burnt out the very stones of its origin or to have burst the confines
wherein it was conceived.
Perhaps a fate rested upon them all.
I went to-day through woods that were quite lonely twenty years ago.
They stood near my home. Here, in the midst of the trees, and in a
deserted place reached by a dismantled and neglected road, rose a
country-house, regular in outline, monotonous, and faded. The windows
were open to the night, the floors rotten; green moss grew on the
plaster of the walls; the roof was ruinous. It was the house to which
the daughter of Marie Antoinette had come, reserved, and perhaps with
terrors in her mind, to find silence while the restoration still
endured. It was her refuge. Years after it stood as I have recalled it.
I saw it (I say) again to-day--or rather, I saw it no longer.
The woods are felled in regular great roads. There are villas built
and new inns, and pleasure-places. A new Paris has spread out towards
it and killed it. Here also the memory of the Revolution, the physical
memory, has disappeared.
I know of no wave like it in Europe or in the history of Europe: of no
such attempt, so great, so full of men and of creation, whose outward
garment in building has been so thrust away by the irony of Time.
A SECRET LETTER
I had promised Your Excellency in my last dispatch to let him know with
the least delay both the consequences of my appeal to the King in this
country and the events that might flow from his attitude.
It is with profound sorrow that I communicate to Your Excellency the
whole of this passage.
Upon Wednesday, St. James's Day, I was granted an audience by His
Majesty at seven in the morning, which is his usual hour for receiving
foreign envoys and all those accredited with public or secret powers
from another Court.
His Majesty, whom I had not met before, is a man tall in stature, but
stooping somewhat at the shoulders. His age is not apparent in his
features, his hair and beard (which is scanty) are still black, and his
eyes, though they betray an expression of weariness, are lively. He
was good enough to bid certain officials near him to go out into the
anteroom, where I trust my words could not be heard, though there is no
door separating the King's closet from that passage, but only a German
tapestry, presented, I think, at the time of the King's marriage by
the Elector, his father-in-law.
The King would first have me set before him what I had to say, which
I did as briefly as possible, and following exactly the instructions
given me by Your Excellency. I made no attempt to diminish, still
less to deny the crime of which My Lord had been guilty; nay, I
even exaggerated it, if that were possible, in order to prepare his
Sovereign for my plea, which was that My Lord's youth and the manner
in which the adventure was presented to him excused him in some part
for the action of which he had been guilty. I briefly spoke of the
campaigns in which he had fought since his sixteenth year, and I showed
how easily to a soldier the expedition which has had so disastrous
an ending might have appeared as a just and loyal war. I was careful
to omit any whisper of what the Emperor had threatened in case of a
refusal (for such were your instructions), and finally I laid at the
feet of His Majesty the plea of common mercy, dwelling upon My Lord's
household, the future of his young and innocent children, and all else
that would follow upon the sacrifice of such a life.
His Majesty listened to me gravely, and replied that he had fully
revolved My Lord's action, and its nature and consequence, in his mind,
as also the effect of the determination he himself had taken, which
determination could not be shaken by any argument that I or another
might put before him. It was (he said) a necessary example to others,
and the more highly placed the culprit the stronger the necessity of
the sentence appeared to him. He said further, that in the matter of
rebellion and treason (which, as Holy Writ discovered, was among the
most detestable of crimes, and compared even to witchcraft, against
which enormity His Majesty is especially watchful) it was a thing which
must be ended once and for all, and could not be dealt with in any
manner save by the extirpation of its authors and the total suppression
and extinction of the originators and begettors thereof. To be brief,
His Majesty would not be moved in any manner, but told me, speaking
as a man will who has no more to say, the date and hour were already
fixed, and had been communicated to me. With this His Majesty dismissed
me, and I left him.
Upon the Thursday, therefore, the morrow, which they reckon in this
country as the 15th of the month, I bade Charles, my attendant, go warn
My Lord that I would see him at his convenience, and My Lord answered
very graciously that my convenience was his own, whereupon I said I
would come at once, and did so, it being about an hour after noon, and
My Lord sitting at wine after his meal, which he had eaten alone in the
room assigned to him.
My Lord was well furnished in all particulars, and the clemency of the
season further lessened his discomforts of prison, but he was closely
guarded, and he complained to me, though without bitterness, that
when his wife had visited him but a week before, bringing with her
the little Count, my master, and his little sister also by the hand,
a man-at-arms had been present throughout their interview. He also
told me that for writing he might have what liberty he would, but that
he might fold over and seal no letter. I asked him what his regimen
had been in the matter of religion, at which he sighed and said that
he had been permitted to see the Carthusian whom Your Excellency had
sent to this part under a safeguard, but that no Mass might be said
in his room, nor within the precincts of the whole castle: which, as
he was told, was forbidden by a law of this realm; but this I would
hardly believe, and indeed we had permission of His Majesty (who is
indifferent to such things) that Mass should be privily said upon the
following morning, which was that on which My Lord was to suffer. And
for this purpose a table was set, he whom Your Excellency has sent
bringing with him a little altar stone and all that was necessary for
the Office.
My Lord dismissed me when I had spoken to him for perhaps half-an-hour,
asking him what I should do, but he bade me return a little before
sunrise on the morrow, which (Your Excellency) I very punctually did,
more sorrowful at heart than I could say, having not slept that night
for the multitude of letters that I must read and dispatch, and for the
weight of the business that was before me.
When therefore it was fully light, but the sun not yet risen, I went
over from my lodgings (which are not far from the Royal Mint) to the
Castle, and was admitted to My Lord's presence, where he sat with a
heavy look, and yet gallantly as it were, having with him My Lady and
the two little children, the Priest having said Mass and the table
being now in order, but he remaining for the last Offices.