SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS, ÉPOISSES AND BOURBILLY
Due east from Avallon some thirty odd kilometres is Semur-en-Auxois. It
is well described as a feudal city without and a banal one within. Its
mediæval walls and gates lead one to expect the same old-world
atmosphere over all, but, aside from its churches and an occasional
architectural display of a Renaissance house-front, its cast of
countenance, when seen from its decidedly bourgeois point of view, is,
if not modern, at least matter-of-fact and unsympathetic.
In spite of this its historical recollections are many and varied, and
there are fragments galore of its once proud architectural glories which
bespeak their prime importance, and also that the vandal hand of
so-called progress and improvement has fallen heavily on all sides.
The site of Semur to a great extent gives it that far-away mediæval
look; that, at least, could not be taken away from it. It possesses,
moreover, one of the most astonishing
[Illustration: _Semur-en-Auxois_]
silhouettes of any hill-top town in France. Like Constantine in North
Africa it is walled and battlemented by a series of natural defences in
the form of ravines or gorges so profound that certainly no ordinary
invading force could have entered the city.
Semur was formerly the capital of the Auxois, and for some time held the
same rank in the Burgundian Duchy.
The city from within suggests little of mediævalism. Prosperity and
contentment do not make for a picturesque and romantic environment of
the life of the twentieth century. It was different in the olden time.
Semur, by and large, is of the age of mediævalism, however, though one
has to delve below the surface to discover this after having passed the
great walls and portals of its natural and artificial ramparts.
Semur's bourg, donjon and chateau, as the respective quarters of the
town are known, tell the story of its past, but they tell it only by
suggestion. The ancient fortifications, as entire works, have
disappeared, and the chateau has become a barracks or a hospital. Only
the chateau donjon and immediate dependencies, a group of towering
walls, rise grim and silent as of old above the great arch of the bridge
flung so daringly across the Armançon at the bottom of the gorge.
The last proprietor of Semur's chateau was the Marquis du Chatelet, the
husband of the even more celebrated Madame du Chatelet, who held so
great a place in the life of Voltaire. The philosopher, it seems,
resided here for a time, and his room is still kept sacred and shown to
visitors upon application.
Semur as much as anything is a reminder of the past rather than a living
representation of what has gone before. Within the city walls were
enacted many momentous events of state while still it was the Burgundian
capital. Again during the troublous times of the "Ligue," Henri IV
transferred to its old chateau the Parliament which had previously held
its sittings at Dijon.
Semur's monuments deserved a better fate than has befallen them, for
they were magnificent and epoch-making, if not always from an artistic
point of view, at least from an historic one.
We made Semur our headquarters for a little journey to Époisses,
Bourbilly and Montbard, where formerly lived and died the naturalist
Buffon, in the celebrated Chateau de Montbard.
Époisses lies but a few kilometres west of Semur. Its chateau is a
magnificently artistic and historic shrine if there ever was such. In
1677 Madame de Sévigné wrote that she "here descended from her carriage:
_chez son Seigneur d'Époisses_." Here she found herself so comfortably
off that she forgot to go on to Bourbilly, where she was expected and
daily awaited. It was ten days later that she finally moved on; so one
has but the best of opinions regarding the good cheer which was offered
her. At the time it must have been an ideal country house, this mansion
of the Seigneur d'Époisses, as indeed it is to-day. The lady wrote
further: "Here there is the greatest liberty; one reads or walks or
talks or works as he, or she, pleases." This is what everyone desires
and so seldom gets when on a visit. As for the other natural and
artificial charms which surrounded the place, one may well judge by a
contemplation of it to-day.
Here in the chateau, or manor, or whatever manner of rank it actually
takes in one's mind, you may see the room occupied by Madame de Sévigné
on the occasion of her "pleasant visit." It is a "Chambre aux Fleurs" in
truth, and that, too, is the name by which the apartment is officially
known.
Above the mantel, garlanded with flowers carved in wood, one reads the
following attributed to the fascinating Marquise herself. The
circumstance is authenticated in spite of the fantastic orthography. As
a letter writer, at any rate, she made no such faults.
"_Nos plaisirs ne sont capparence_
_Et souvent se cache nos pleurs_
_Sous l'éclat de ces belles fleurs_
_Qui ne sont que vaine éperance._"
The Chateau de Bourbilly, where Madame de Sévigné was really bound at
the time she lingered on "_chez son cher seigneur_," is a near neighbour
of Époisses. It was the retreat of Madame de Chantal, the ancestress of
Madame de Sévigné, the founder of the Order of the Visitation who has
since become a saint of the church calendar--Sainte Jeanne-de-Chantal.
This fine seventeenth century chateau, with its pointed towers and its
mansard, belonged successively to the families Marigny, de Mello, de
Thil, de Savace, de la Tremouille and Rabutin-Chantel, of which the
sanctified Jeanne and Madame de Sévigné were the most illustrious
members.
Madame de Sévigné, the amiable letter writer, sojourned here often on
her voyages up and down France. She herself lived in the
[Illustration: _Chateau d'Époisses_]
Chateau des Rochers in Brittany and her daughter, the Comtesse de
Grignan, in Provence, and they did not a little visiting between the
two. Bourbilly was a convenient and delightful halfway house.
Madame de Sévigné can not be said to have made Bourbilly her residence
for long at any time. For a fact she was as frequently a guest at the
neighbouring Chateau de Guitant, a feudal dwelling still inhabited by
the de Guitants, or at Époisses, as she was at Bourbilly.
In the chapel, which is of the sixteenth century, is the tomb of the
Baron de Bussy-Rabutin and some _reliques_ of Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal.
The latter has served to make of Bourbilly a pilgrim shrine which, on
the 21st August, draws a throng from all parts for the annual fête.
There was a popular impression long current among French writers that
Madame de Sévigné was born in the Chateau de Bourbilly. A line or two of
that indefatigable penman, Bussy, tended to make this ready of belief
when he wrote of his cousin as "_Une demoiselle de Bourgogne egarée en
Bretagne_." She herself claimed to have been "transplanted," but it was
a transplantation by marriage; she was most certainly not born at
Bourbilly, at any rate, for history, better informed than an
unconvincing scribbler, states that she was born in Paris, like Molière
and Voltaire, who also have finally been claimed by the capital as her
own.
At all events, at Bourbilly Madame de Sévigné was true enough on the
land of the "_vieux chateau de ses pères, ses belles prairies, sa petite
rivière, ses magnifiques bois_." It was her property in fact, or came to
be, and she might have lived there had she chosen. She would not dispose
of it when importuned to do so, and replied simply, but coldly (one
reads this in the "Letters"), "I will not sell the property for the
reason that I wish to hand it down to my daughter." From this one would
think that she had a great affection for it, but at times it was a
"_vieux chateau_" and at others it was a "_horrible maison_." Capricious
woman! The letters of Madame de Sévigné written from here were not
numerous, as she only "stopped over" on her various journeyings. When
one recognizes the tastes and habits of the Marquise, it is not to be
wondered at that her visits to Bourbilly were neither prolonged nor
multiplied.
Turning one's itinerary south from Semur one comes shortly to
Cussy-la-Colonne, where "la Colonne" is recognized by the archæologists
as one of the most celebrated and most ancient monuments of Burgundy.
One learns from the inscription in Franco-Latin that the ancient
monument (_antiquissimum hoc monumentum_) much damaged by the flapping
wings of time, was rebuilt, as nearly as possible in its original form,
by a prefect of the Department of the Côte d'Or (Collis Aurei
Praefectus), M. Charles Arbaud, in the reign (sous l'empire) of Charles
X (imperante Carolo X.... Anno Salutis MDCCCXXV.) An astonishing mélange
this of the tongue of Cicero and modern administrative _patois_.
The Colonne de Cussy, is rather a pagan memorial of a victory of the
Romans in the reign of Diocletian, or, from another surmise, a funeral
monument to a Roman general dead on the eve of victory. In either case,
there it stands fragmentary and wind and weather worn like the pillars
of Hercules or Pompey.
One simply notes Cussy and its "colonne" _en passant_ on the road to
Saulieu and Arnay-le-Duc, where the Ducs de Bourgogne had one of their
most favoured country houses, or manors.
We only stopped at Saulieu by chance anyway; we stopped for the night in
fact because it was getting too late to push on farther, and we were
glad indeed that we did.
Saulieu is a most ancient town and owes its name to a neighbouring wood.
Here was first erected a pagan temple to the sun; fragments of it have
recently been found; and here one may still see the tracings of the old
Roman way crossing what was afterwards,--to the powerful colony at
Autun,--the Duchy of Burgundy.
As a fortified place Saulieu was most potent, but in 1519 a pest
destroyed almost its total population. Disaster after disaster fell upon
it and the place never again achieved the prominence of its neighbouring
contemporaries.
It was here at Saulieu in Revolutionary times that the good people, as
if in remembrance of the disasters which had befallen them under
monarchial days, hailed with joy the arrival of the men of the
Marseilles Battalion as they were marching on Paris "to help capture
Capet's castle." Before the church of Saint Saturnin the Patriots' Club
had lighted a big bonfire, and the "Men of the Midi" were received with
open arms and a warm welcome.
"How good they were to us at Saulieu," said one of the number,
recounting his adventures upon his arrival at Paris; "they gave us all
the wine we could swallow and all the good things we could eat,--we had
enough boeuf-à-la-daub to rise over our ears...."
To-day the good folk of Saulieu treat the stranger in not unsimilar
fashion, and though the town lacks noble monuments it makes up for the
deficiency in its good cheer. Saulieu in this respect quite lives up to
its reputation of old. This little capital of the Morvan-Bourguignon has
ever owned to one or more distinguished Vatel's. Madame de Sévigné, in
1677, stopped here at a friend's country house, and, as she wrote, "_le
fermier donne à tous un grand diner_." This was probably the Manoir de
Guitant between Bourbilly and Saulieu. They were long at table, for it
was a _diner des adieux_ given by her friend Guitant to his visitors.
She wrote further: "With the dinner one drank a great deal, and
afterwards a great deal more; all went off with the greatest possible
éclat. Voila l'affaire!"
Evidently such a manner of parting did not produce sadness!
A donjon tower with a duck-pond before it, opposite the Hotel de la
Poste is all the mediævalism that one sees within the town at Saulieu
to-day. It is all that one's imagination can conjure up of the ideal
donjon of mediævalism and interesting withal, though its history is most
brief, indeed may be said to exist not at all in recorded form, for the
chief references to Saulieu's historic past date back to the pagan
temple and the founding of the Abbey of Saint Andoche in the eighth
century.
Still heading south one comes in a dozen kilometres to a chateau of the
fourteenth century, and the restorations of Henri IV at
Thoisy-la-Berchere. Later restorations, by the Marquis de Montbossier,
who occupies it to-day, have made of it one of the most attractive of
the minor chateaux of France. One may visit it under certain conditions,
whether the family is in residence or not, and will carry away memories
of many splendid chimney pieces and wall tapestries. For the rest the
furnishings are modern, which is saying that they are banal. This of
course need not always be so, but when the Renaissance is mixed with the
art nouveau and the latest fantasies of Dufayal it lacks appeal. This is
as bad as "Empire" and "Mission," which seem to have set the pace for
"club furniture" during the past decade.
Arnay-le-Duc still to the south was the site of a ducal Burgundian manor
which almost reached the distinction of a palace. Here the country
loving dukes spent not a little of their leisure time when away from
their capital.
Arnay-le-Duc, more than any other town of its class in France, retains
its almost undefiled feudal aspect to-day when viewed from beyond the
walls. Formerly it was the seat of a _bailliage_ and has conserved the
débris of the feudal official residence. This is supported in addition
by many fine examples of Renaissance-Burgundian architectural treasures
which give the town at once the stamp of genuineness which it will take
many years of progress to wholly eradicate.
None of these fine structures, least of all the ducal manor, is
perfectly conserved, but the remains are sufficiently ample and well
cared for to merit the classification of still being reckoned habitable
and of importance. The old manor of the dukes has now descended to more
humble uses, but has lost little of the aristocratic bearing which it
once owned.
It was near this fortified bourgade of other days--fortified that the
dukes might rest in peace when they repaired thither--that the infant
Henri IV, at the age of sixteen, received his baptism of fire and first
gained his stripes under the direction of Maréchal de Cossé-Brissac.