PART I

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A MOTOR-FLIGHT

THROUGH FRANCE

[Illustration: CHAUVIGNY: RUINS OF CASTLE]

A MOTOR-FLIGHT

THROUGH FRANCE

BY

EDITH WHARTON

ILLUSTRATED

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1908

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published October, 1908

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BOULOGNE TO AMIENS 1

II. BEAUVAIS AND ROUEN 15

III. FROM ROUEN TO FONTAINEBLEAU 24

IV. THE LOIRE AND THE INDRE 34

V. NOHANT TO CLERMONT 48

VI. IN AUVERGNE 56

VII. ROYAT TO BOURGES 66

PART II

I. PARIS TO POITIERS 73

II. POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES 95

III. THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE 117

IV. THE RHONE TO THE SEINE 143

PART III

A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST 172

ILLUSTRATIONS

Chauvigny: Ruins of castle Frontispiece

Facing page

Arras: Hôtel de Ville 2

Amiens: West front of the Cathedral 6

Amiens: Ambulatory of the Cathedral 10

Beauvais: West front of the Cathedral 14

Rouen: Rue de l’Horloge 18

Rouen: The façade of the Church of Saint-Maclou 22

Rouen: Monument of the Cardinals of Amboise in the Cathedral 26

Le Petit Andely: View of the town and Château Gaillard 30

Orléans: General view of the town 38

Nohant: Château of George Sand 42

Nohant: Garden pavilion 44

Clermont-Ferrand: Notre-Dame du Port 50

Orcival: The church 62

Moulins: Place del’Hôtel-de-Ville and the Jacquemart tower 70

Bourges: Apse of the Cathedral 74

Château of Maintenon 76

Neuvy Saint-Sépulcre: Church of the Precious Blood 84

Neuvy Saint-Sépulcre: Interior of the church 88

Poitiers: Baptistery of St. John 90

Poitiers: The Church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande 92

Angoulême: Façade of the Cathedral 96

Thiers: View of the town from the Pont de Seychalles 98

Bordeaux: Church of The Holy Cross 100

Bétharram: The bridge 106

Argelès-Gazost: The old bridge 108

Salies de Béarn: View of old town 110

St. Bertrand-de-Comminges: Pier of the Four Evangelists in the

Cloister 116

Albi: General view of the Cathedral 118

Albi: Interior of the Cathedral 120

Nîmes: The Baths of Diana--public gardens 122

Carcassonne: The Porte de l’Aude 124

Saint-Remy: The Mausoleum 126

St. Maximin: Choir stalls in the church 130

Toulon: The House of Puget 134

Orange: The Arch of Marius 136

Grignan: Gate of the castle 138

Valence: The Cathedral 142

Vienne: General view of the town 146

Brou: Tomb of Margaret of Austria in the church 150

Dijon: Mourners on the tomb of Jean Sans Peur 154

Avallon: General view of the town 158

Vézelay: Narthex of the Church of the Madeleine 160

Sens: Apse of the Cathedral 168

Noyon: Hôtel de Ville 186

St. Quentin: Hôtel de Ville 188

Laon: General view of the town and Cathedral 192

Soissons: Ruined church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes 196

A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE

PART I

I

BOULOGNE TO AMIENS

The motor-car has restored the romance of travel.

Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway,

the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to

each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the

railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the

novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grand-parents. Above

all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a

town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and

surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette

hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway

embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages that

we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train--the unseen

villages have been given back to us!--and nowhere could the importance

of the recovery have been more delightfully exemplified than on a May

afternoon in the Pas-de-Calais, as we climbed the long ascent beyond

Boulogne on the road to Arras.

It is a delightful country, broken into wide waves of hill and

valley, with hedge-rows high and leafy enough to bear comparison

with the Kentish hedges among which our motor had left us a day or

two before; and the villages, the frequent, smiling, happily-placed

villages, will also meet successfully the more serious challenge of

their English rivals--meet it on other grounds and in other ways, with

paved market-places and clipped _charmilles_ instead of gorse-fringed

commons, with soaring belfries instead of square church towers, with

less of verdure, but more, perhaps, of outline--certainly of line.

[Illustration: ARRAS: HÔTEL DE VILLE]

The country itself--so green, so full and close in texture, so

pleasantly diversified by clumps of woodland in the hollows, and

by streams threading the great fields with light--all this, too,

has the English, or perhaps the Flemish quality--for the border is

close by--with the added beauty of reach and amplitude, the deliberate

gradual flow of level spaces into distant slopes, till the land breaks

in a long blue crest against the seaward horizon.

There was much beauty of detail, also, in the smaller towns through

which we passed: some of them high-perched on ridges that raked the

open country, with old houses stumbling down at picturesque angles from

the central market-place; others tucked in the hollows, among orchards

and barns, with the pleasant country industries reaching almost to the

doors of their churches. In the little villages a deep delicious thatch

overhangs the plastered walls of cottages espaliered with pear-trees,

and ducks splash in ponds fringed with hawthorn and laburnum; and

in the towns there is almost always some note of character, of

distinction--the gateway of a seventeenth century _hôtel_, the triple

arch of a church-front, the spring of an old mossy apse, the stucco and

black cross-beams of an ancient guild-house--and always the straight

lime-walk, square-clipped or trained _en berceau_, with its sharp green

angles and sharp black shade acquiring a value positively architectural

against the high lights of the paved or gravelled _place_. Everything

about this rich juicy land bathed in blond light is characteristically

Flemish, even to the slow-moving eyes of the peasants, the bursting

red cheeks of the children, the drowsy grouping of the cattle in

flat pastures; and at Hesdin we felt the architectural nearness of

the Low Countries in the presence of a fine town-hall of the late

Renaissance, with the peculiar “movement” of volutes and sculptured

ornament--lime-stone against warm brick--that one associates with the

civic architecture of Belgium: a fuller, less sensitive line than the

French architect permits himself, with more massiveness and exuberance

of detail.

This part of France, with its wide expanse of agricultural landscape,

disciplined and cultivated to the last point of finish, shows how

nature may be utilized to the utmost clod without losing its freshness

and naturalness. In some regions of this supremely “administered”

country, where space is more restricted, or the fortunate accidents

of water and varying levels are lacking, the minute excessive culture,

the endless ranges of _potager_ wall, and the long lines of fruit-trees

bordering straight interminable roads, may produce in the American

traveller a reaction toward the unkempt, a momentary feeling that

ragged road-sides and weedy fields have their artistic value. But here

in northern France, where agriculture has mated with poetry instead

of banishing it, one understands the higher beauty of land developed,

humanised, brought into relation to life and history, as compared with

the raw material with which the greater part of our own hemisphere is

still clothed. In France everything speaks of long familiar intercourse

between the earth and its inhabitants; every field has a name, a

history, a distinct place of its own in the village polity; every

blade of grass is there by an old feudal right which has long since

dispossessed the worthless aboriginal weed.

As we neared Arras the road lost its pleasant windings and ran straight

across a great plateau, with an occasional long dip and ascent that

never deflected it from its purpose, and the villages became rarer,

as they always do on the high wind-swept plains of France. Arras,

however, was full of compensations for the dullness of the approach: a

charming old grey town, with a great air of faded seventeenth-century

opulence, in which one would have liked to linger, picking out details

of gateway and courtyard, of sculptured masks and wrought-iron

balconies--if only a brief peep into the hotel had not so promptly

quenched the impulse to spend a night there.

To Amiens therefore we passed on, passing again, toward sunset, into a

more broken country, with lights just beginning to gleam through the

windows of the charming duck-pond villages, and tall black crucifixes

rising ghostly at the cross-roads; and night was obliterating the

mighty silhouette of the cathedral as we came upon it at length by a

long descent.

[Illustration: AMIENS: WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL]

It is always a loss to arrive in a strange town after dark, and miss

those preliminary stages of acquaintance that are so much more likely

to be interesting in towns than in people; but the deprivation is

partly atoned for by the sense of adventure with which, next morning,

one casts one’s self upon the unknown. There is no conjectural first

impression to be modified, perhaps got rid of: one’s mind presents a

blank page for the town to write its name on.

At Amiens the autograph consists of one big word: the cathedral. Other,

fainter writing may come out when one has leisure to seek for it; but

the predominance of those mighty characters leaves, at first, no time

to read between the lines. And here it may be noted that, out of Italy,

it takes a town of exceptional strength of character to hold its own

against a cathedral. In England, the chapter-house and the varied

groupings of semi-ecclesiastical buildings constituting the close,

which seem to form a connecting link between town and cathedral, do no

more, in reality, than enlarge the skirts of the monument about which

they are clustered; and even at Winchester, which has its college and

hospital to oppose to the predominance of the central pile, there

is, after all, very little dispersal of interest: so prodigious,

so unparalleled, as mere feats of human will-power, are these vast

achievements of the Middle Ages. In northern France, where the great

cathedrals were of lay foundation, and consequently sprang up alone,

without the subordinate colony of monastic buildings of which the

close is a survival--and where, as far as monuments of any importance

are concerned, the architectural gap sometimes extends from Louis the

Saint to Louis the Fourteenth--the ascendancy of the diocesan church

is necessarily even more marked. Rouen alone, perhaps, opposes an

effectual defence to this concentration of interest, will not for a

moment let itself be elbowed out of the way by the great buttresses

of its cathedral; and at Bourges--but Bourges and Rouen come later in

this itinerary, and meanwhile here we are, standing, in a sharp shower,

under a _notaire’s_ doorway, and looking across the little square at

the west front of Amiens.

Well! No wonder such a monument has silenced all competitors. It would

take a mighty counter-blast to make itself heard against “the surge

and thunder” of that cloud of witnesses choiring forth the glories of

the Church Triumphant. Is the stage too crowded? Is there a certain

sameness in the overarching tiers of the stone hierarchy, each figure

set in precise alignment with its neighbours, each drapery drawn within

the same perpendicular bounds? Yes, perhaps--if one remembers Rheims

and Bourges; but if, setting aside such kindred associations, one

surrenders one’s self uncritically to the total impression produced, if

one lets the fortunate accidents of time and weather count for their

full value in that total--for Amiens remains mercifully unscrubbed, and

its armies of saints have taken on the richest _patina_, that northern

stone can acquire--if one views the thing, in short, partly as a symbol

and partly as a “work of nature” (which all ancient monuments by grace

of time become), then the front of Amiens is surely one of the most

splendid spectacles that Gothic art can show.

On the symbolic side especially it would be tempting to linger; so

strongly does the contemplation of the great cathedrals fortify

the conviction that their chief value, to this later age, is not

so much æsthetic as moral. The world will doubtless always divide

itself into two orders of mind: that which sees in past expressions

of faith, political, religious or intellectual, only the bonds cast

off by the spirit of man in its long invincible struggle for “more

light”; and that which, while moved by the spectacle of the struggle,

cherishes also every sign of those past limitations that were, after

all, each in its turn, symbols of the same effort toward a clearer

vision. To the former kind of mind the great Gothic cathedral will be

chiefly interesting as a work of art and a page of history; and it

is perhaps proof of the advantage of cultivating the other--the more

complex--point of view, in which enfranchisement of thought exists in

harmony with atavism of feeling, that it permits one to appreciate

these archæological values to the full, yet subordinates them to

the more impressive facts of which they are the immense and moving

expression. To such minds, the rousing of the sense of reverence is

the supreme gift of these mighty records of mediæval life: reverence

for the persistent, slow-moving, far-reaching forces that brought them

forth. A great Gothic cathedral sums up so much of history, it has cost

so much in faith and toil, in blood and folly and saintly abnegation,

it has sheltered such a long succession of lives, given collective

voice to so many inarticulate and contradictory cravings, seen so much

that was sublime and terrible, or foolish, pitiful and grotesque,

that it is like some mysteriously preserved ancestor of the human race,

some Wandering Jew grown sedentary and throned in stony contemplation,

before whom the fleeting generations come and go.

[Illustration: AMIENS: AMBULATORY OF THE CATHEDRAL]

Yes--reverence is the most precious emotion that such a building

inspires: reverence for the accumulated experiences of the past,

readiness to puzzle out their meaning, unwillingness to disturb rashly

results so powerfully willed, so laboriously arrived at--the desire,

in short, to keep intact as many links as possible between yesterday

and to-morrow, to lose, in the ardour of new experiment, the least that

may be of the long rich heritage of human experience. This, at any

rate, might seem to be the cathedral’s word to the traveller from a

land which has undertaken to get on without the past, or to regard it

only as a “feature” of æsthetic interest, a sight to which one travels

rather than a light by which one lives.

The west front of Amiens says this word with a quite peculiar

emphasis, its grand unity of structure and composition witnessing

as much to constancy of purpose as to persistence of effort. So

steadily, so clearly, was this great thing willed and foreseen, that

it holds the mind too deeply subject to its general conception to

be immediately free for the delighted investigation of detail. But

within the building detail reasserts itself: detail within detail,

worked out and multiplied with a prodigality of enrichment for which

a counterpart must be sought beyond the Alps. The interiors of the

great French cathedrals are as a rule somewhat gaunt and unfurnished,

baring their structural nakedness sublimely but rather monotonously to

eyes accustomed to the Italian churches “all glorious within.” Here

at Amiens, however, the inner decking of the shrine has been piously

continued from generation to generation, and a quite extraordinary

wealth of adornment bestowed on the choir and its ambulatory. The

great sculptured and painted frieze encircling the outer side of the

choir is especially surprising in a French church, so seldom were

the stone histories lavished on the exterior continued within the

building; and it is a farther surprise to find the same tales in

bas-relief animating and enriching the west walls of the transepts.

They are full of crowded expressive incidents, these stories of local

saints and Scriptural personages; with a Burgundian richness and

elaborateness of costume, and a quite charming, childish insistence

on irrelevant episode and detail--the reiterated “And so,” “And then”

of the fairy-tale calling off one’s attention into innumerable little

by-paths, down which the fancy of fifteenth-century worshippers

must have strayed, with oh! what blessedness of relief, from the

unintelligible rites before the altar.

Of composition there is none: it is necessarily sacrificed to the

desire to stop and tell everything; to show, for instance, in an

interesting parenthesis, exactly what Herod’s white woolly dog was

about while Salome was dancing away the Baptist’s head. And thus one is

brought back to the perpetually recurring fact that all northern art

is anecdotic, and has always been so; and that, for instance, all the

elaborate theories of dramatic construction worked out to explain why

Shakespeare crowded his stage with subordinate figures and unnecessary

incidents, and would certainly, in relating the story of Saint John,

have included Herod’s “Tray and Sweetheart” among the dramatis

personæ--that such theories are but an unprofitable evasion of the

ancient ethnological fact _that the Goth has always told his story in

that way_.

[Illustration: BEAUVAIS: WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL]

II

BEAUVAIS AND ROUEN

The same wonderful white road, flinging itself in great coils and

arrow-flights across the same spacious landscape, swept us on the

next day to Beauvais. If there seemed to be fewer memorable incidents

by the way--if the villages had less individual character, over and

above their general charm of northern thrift and cosiness--it was

perhaps because the first impression had lost its edge; but we caught

fine distant reaches of field and orchard and wooded hillside, giving

a general sense that it would be a good land to live in--till all

these minor sensations were swallowed up and lost in the overwhelming

impression of Beauvais.

The town itself--almost purposely, as we felt afterward--failed to put

itself forward, to arrest us by any of the minor arts which Arras,

for instance, had so seductively exerted. It maintained an attitude

of calm aloofness, of affected ignorance of the traveller’s object in

visiting it--suffering its little shuttered non-committal streets to

lead us up, tortuously, to the drowsiest little provincial _place_,

with the usual lime-arcades, and the usual low houses across the way;

where suddenly there soared before us the great mad broken dream

of Beauvais choir--the cathedral without a nave--the Kubla Khan of

architecture....

It seems in truth like some climax of mystic vision, miraculously

caught in visible form, and arrested, broken off, by the intrusion of

the Person from Porlock--in this case, no doubt, the panic-stricken

mason, crying out to the entranced creator: “We simply can’t keep

it up!” And because it literally couldn’t be kept up--as one or two

alarming collapses soon attested--it had to check there its great wave

of stone, hold itself for ever back from breaking into the long ridge

of the nave and flying crests of buttress, spire and finial. It is

easy for the critic to point out its structural defects, and to cite

them in illustration of the fact that your true artist never seeks to

wrest from their proper uses the materials in which he works--does

not, for instance, try to render metaphysical abstractions in stone

and glass and lead; yet Beauvais has at least none of the ungainliness

of failure: it is like a great hymn interrupted, not one in which the

voices have flagged; and to the desultory mind such attempts seem to

deserve a place among the fragmentary glories of great art. It is, at

any rate, an example of what the Gothic spirit, pushed to its logical

conclusion, strove for: the utterance of the unutterable; and he who

condemns Beauvais has tacitly condemned the whole theory of art from

which it issued. But shall we not have gained greatly in our enjoyment

of beauty, as well as in serenity of spirit, if, instead of saying

“this is good art,” or “this is bad art,” we say “this is classic” and

“that is Gothic”--this transcendental, that rational--using neither

term as an epithet of opprobrium or restriction, but content, when

we have performed the act of discrimination, to note what forms of

expression each tendency has worked out for itself?

Beyond Beauvais the landscape became more deeply Norman--more thatched

and green and orchard-smothered--though, as far as the noting of

detail went, we did not really get _beyond Beauvais_ at all, but

travelled on imprisoned in that tremendous memory till abruptly, from

the crest of a hill, we looked down a long green valley to Rouen

shining on its river--belfries, spires and great arched bridges

drenched with a golden sunset that seemed to shoot skyward from the

long illuminated reaches of the Seine. I recall only two such magic

descents on famous towns: that on Orvieto, from the last hill of the

Viterbo road, and the other-pitched in a minor key, but full of a small

ancient majesty--the view of Wells in its calm valley, as the Bath road

gains the summit of the Mendip hills.

[Illustration: ROUEN: RUE DE L’HORLOGE]

The poetry of the descent to Rouen is, unhappily, dispelled by the

long approach through sordid interminable outskirts. Orvieto and

Wells, being less prosperous, do not subject the traveller to this

descent into prose, which leaves one reflecting mournfully on the

incompatibility, under our present social system, between prosperity

and beauty. As for Rouen itself, as one passes down its crowded

tram-lined quays, between the noisy unloading of ships and the clatter

of innumerable cafés, one feels that the old Gothic town one used

to know cannot really exist any more, must have been elbowed out of

place by these spreading commercial activities; but it turns out to be

there, after all, holding almost intact, behind the dull mask of modern

streets, the surprise of its rich mediævalism.

Here indeed the traveller finds himself in no mere “cathedral town”;

with one street leading to Saint Ouen, another to Saint Maclou, a third

to the beautiful Palais de Justice, the cathedral itself has put forth

the appeal of all its accumulated treasures to make one take, first

of all, the turn to its doors. There are few completer impressions in

Europe than that to be received as one enters the Lady Chapel of Rouen,

where an almost Italian profusion of colour and ornament have been

suffered to accumulate slowly about its central ornament--the typically

northern monument of the two Cardinals of Amboise. There could hardly

be a better example of the æsthetic wisdom of “living and letting live”

than is manifested by the happy way in which supposedly incompatible

artistic ideals have contrived to make _bon ménage_ in this delicious

corner. It is a miracle that they have been allowed to pursue their

happy experiment till now, for there must have been moments when, to

the purist of the Renaissance, the Gothic tomb of the Cardinals seemed

unworthy to keep company with the Sénéchal de Brézé’s monument, in

which the delicate note of classicalism reveals a France so profoundly

modified by Italy; just as, later, the great Berniniesque altar-piece,

with its twisted columns and exuberance of golden rays, must have

narrowly escaped the axe of the Gothic reactionary. But there they

all are, blending their supposed discords in a more complex harmony,

filling the privileged little edifice with an overlapping richness

of hue and line through which the eye perpetually passes back to the

central splendour of the Cardinals’ tomb.

A magnificent monument it is, opposing to the sober beauty of Germain

Pilon’s composition its insolence of varied detail--the “this, and

this, and this” of the loquacious mediæval craftsman--all bound

together by the pew constructive sense which has already learned

how to bring the topmost bud of the marble finials into definite

relation with the little hooded mourners bowed in such diversity of

grief in their niches below the tomb. A magnificent monument--and

to my mind the finest thing about it is the Cardinal Uncle’s nose.

The whole man is fine in his sober dignity, humbly conscious of the

altar toward which he faces, arrogantly aware of the purple on his

shoulders; and the nose is the epitome of the man. We live in the day

of little noses: that once stately feature, intrinsically feudal and

aristocratic in character--the _maschio naso_ extolled of Dante--has

shrunk to democratic insignificance, like many another fine expression

of individualism. And so one must look to the old painters and

sculptors to see what a nose was meant to be--the prow of the face;

the evidence of its owner’s standing, of his relation to the world,

and his inheritance from the past. Even in the profile of the Cardinal

Nephew, kneeling a little way behind his uncle, the gallant feature is

seen to have suffered a slight diminution: its spring, still bold, is

less commanding; it seems, as it were, to have thrust itself against

a less yielding element. And so the deterioration has gone on from

generation to generation, till the nose has worn itself blunt against

the increasing resistances of a democratic atmosphere, and stunted,

atrophied and amorphous, serves only, now, to let us know when we have

the influenza.

With the revisiting of the Cardinal’s nose the first object of our

visit to Rouen had been accomplished; the second led us, past objects

of far greater importance, to the well-arranged but dull gallery where

Gerhard David’s “Virgin of the Grapes” is to be seen. Every wanderer

through the world has these pious pilgrimages to perform, generally to

shrines of no great note--how often, for instance, is one irresistibly

drawn back to the Transfiguration or to the Venus of Milo?--but to

lesser works, first seen, perhaps, at a fortunate moment, or having

some special quality of suggestion and evocation that the perfect

equilibrium of the masterpieces causes them to lack. So I know of

some who go first to “The Death of Procris” in the National Gallery;

to the little “Apollo and Marsyas” of the Salon Carré; to a fantastic

allegorical picture, subject and artist unknown, in an obscure corner

of the Uffizi; and who would travel more miles to see again, in the

little gallery of Rimini, an Entombment of the school of Mantegna, than

to sit beneath the vault of the Sistine.

[Illustration: ROUEN: THE FAÇADE OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT-MACLOU]

All of which may seem to imply an unintentional disparagement of

Gerhard David’s picture, which is, after all, a masterpiece of its

school; but the school is a subordinate one, and, save to the student

of Flemish art, his is not a loud-sounding name: one does not say, for

instance, with any hope of general recognition--“Ah, yes; that reminds

me of such and such a bit in ‘The Virgin of the Grapes.’”

All the more, therefore, may one enjoy his picture, in the empty

room of the Rouen gallery, with that gentle sense of superiority

and possessorship to which the discerner of obscure merit is surely

entitled. How much of its charm this particular painting owes to its

not having become the picnic-ground of the art-excursionist, how

much to its own intrinsic beauty, its grave serenities of hue and

gesture--how much, above all, to the heavenly translucence of that

bunch of grapes plucked from the vines of Paradise--it is part of its

very charm to leave unsettled, to keep among the mysteries whereby it

draws one back. Only one trembles lest it should cease to shine in its

own twilight heaven when it has become a star in Baedeker....

III

FROM ROUEN TO FONTAINEBLEAU

The Seine, two days later, by the sweetest curves, drew us on from

Rouen to Les Andelys, past such bright gardens terraced above its

banks, such moist poplar-fringed islands, such low green promontories

deflecting its silver flow, that we continually checked the flight of

the motor, pausing here, and here, and here again, to note how France

understands and enjoys and lives with her rivers.

With her great past, it seems, she has partly ceased to live; for,

ask as we would, we could not, that morning, learn the way to King

Richard’s Château Gaillard on the cliff above Les Andelys. Every turn

from the route de Paris seemed to lead straight into the unknown;

“_mais c’est tout droit pour_ Paris” was the invariable answer when we

asked our way. Yet a few miles off were two of the quaintest towns

of France--the Little and Great Andely--surmounted by a fortress

marking an epoch in military architecture, and associated with the

fortunes of one of the most romantic figures in history; and we

knew that if we clung to the windings of the Seine they must lead

us, within a few miles, to the place we sought. And so, having with

difficulty disentangled ourselves from the route de Paris, we pushed

on, by quiet by-roads and unknown villages, by _manoirs_ of grey stone

peeping through high thickets of lilac and laburnum, and along shady

river-reaches where fishermen dozed in their punts, and cattle in the

meadow-grass beneath the willows--till the soft slopes broke abruptly

into tall cliffs shaggy with gorse, and the easy flow of the river was

forced into a sharp twist at their base. There is something fantastic

in this sudden change of landscape near Les Andelys from the familiar

French river-scenery to what might be one of Piero della Francesca’s

backgrounds of strangely fretted rock and scant black vegetation; while

the Seine, roused from its progress through yielding meadows, takes a

majestic bend toward the Little Andely in the bay of the cliffs, and

then sweeps out below the height on which Cœur-de-Lion planted his

subtly calculated bastions.

[Illustration: ROUEN: MONUMENT OF THE CARDINALS OF AMBOISE IN THE

CATHEDRAL]

Ah--poor fluttering rag of a ruin, so thin, so time-worn, so riddled

with storm and shell, that it droops on its rock like a torn banner

with forgotten victories in its folds! How much more eloquently these

tottering stones tell their story, how much deeper into the past they

take us, than the dapper weather-tight castles--Pierrefonds, Langeais,

and the rest--on which the arch-restorer has worked his will, reducing

them to mere museum specimens, archæological toys, from which all

the growths of time have been ruthlessly stripped! The eloquence of

the Château Gaillard lies indeed just there--in its telling us so

discursively, so plaintively, the _whole_ story of the centuries--how

long it has stood, how much it has seen, how far the world has

travelled since then, and to what a hoarse, cracked whisper the voice

of feudalism and chivalry has dwindled....

The town that once cowered under the protection of those fallen

ramparts still groups its stout old houses about a church so grey

and venerable, yet so sturdily planted on its ancient piers, that

one might fancy its compassionately bidding the poor ghost of a

fortress come down and take shelter beneath its vaultings. Commune and

castle, they have changed places with the shifting fortunes of the

centuries, the weak growth of the town outstripping the arrogant brief

bloom of the fortress--Richard’s “fair daughter of one year”--which had

called it arbitrarily into being. The fortress itself is now no more

than one of the stage-properties of the Muse of History; but the town,

poor little accidental offshoot of a military exigency, has built up a

life for itself, become an abiding centre of human activities--though,

by an accident in which the traveller cannot but rejoice, it still

keeps, in spite of its sound masonry and air of ancient health, that

almost unmodernised aspect which makes some little French burghs recall

the figure of a lively centenarian, all his faculties still active, but

wearing the dress of a former day.

Regaining the route de Paris, we passed once more into the normal Seine

landscape, with smiling towns close-set on its shores, with lilac

and wistaria pouring over high walls, with bright little cafés on

sunny village squares, with flotillas of pleasure-boats moored under

willow-shaded banks.

Never more vividly than in this Seine country does one feel the amenity

of French manners, the long process of social adaptation which has

produced so profound and general an intelligence of life. Every one

we passed on our way, from the canal-boatman to the white-capped

baker’s lad, from the _marchande des quatre saisons_ to the white dog

curled philosophically under her cart, from the pastry-cook putting

a fresh plate of _brioches_ in his appetising window to the curé’s

_bonne_ who had just come out to drain the lettuce on the curé’s

doorstep--all these persons (under which designation I specifically

include the dog) took their ease or pursued their business with that

cheerful activity which proceeds from an intelligent acceptance of

given conditions. They each had their established niche in life, the

frankly avowed interests and preoccupations of their order, their pride

in the smartness of the canal-boat, the seductions of the show-window,

the glaze of the _brioches_, the crispness of the lettuce. And this

admirable _fitting into the pattern_, which seems almost as if it were

a moral outcome of the universal French sense of form, has led the race

to the happy, the momentous discovery that good manners are a short

cut to one’s goal, that they lubricate the wheels of life instead of

obstructing them. This discovery--the result, as it strikes one, of the

application of the finest of mental instruments to the muddled process

of living--seems to have illuminated not only the social relation but

its outward, concrete expression, producing a finish in the material

setting of life, a kind of conformity in inanimate things--forming,

in short, the background of the spectacle through which we pass, the

canvas on which it is painted, and expressing itself no less in the

trimness of each individual garden than in that insistence on civic

dignity and comeliness so miraculously maintained, through every

torment of political passion, every change of social conviction, by a

people resolutely addressed to the intelligent enjoyment of living.

By Vernon, with its trim lime-walks _en berceau_, by Mantes with its

bright gardens, and the graceful over-restored church which dominates

its square, we passed on to Versailles, forsaking the course of the

Seine that we might have a glimpse of the country about Fontainebleau.

At the top of the route du Buc, which climbs by sharp windings from

the Place du Château at Versailles, one comes upon the arches of the

aqueduct of Buc--one of the monuments of that splendid folly which

created the “Golden House” of Louis XIV, and drew its miraculous

groves and gardens from the waterless plain of Versailles. The

aqueduct, forming part of the extravagant scheme of irrigation of which

the Machine de Marly and the great canal of Maintenon commemorate

successive disastrous phases, frames, in its useless lofty openings,

such charming glimpses of the country to the southwest of Versailles,

that it takes its place among those abortive architectural experiments

which seem, after all, to have been completely justified by time.

[Illustration: LE PETIT ANDELY: VIEW OF THE TOWN AND CHÂTEAU GAILLARD]

The landscape upon which the arches look is a high-lying region of

wood and vale, with châteaux at the end of long green vistas, and old

flowery villages tucked into folds of the hills. At the first turn of

the road above Versailles the well-kept suburbanism of the Parisian

environ gives way to the real look of the country--well-kept and

smiling still, but tranquil and sweetly shaded, with big farmyards,

quiet country lanes, and a quiet country look in the peasants’ faces.

In passing through some parts of France one wonders where the

inhabitants of the châteaux go when they emerge from their gates--so

interminably, beyond those gates, do the flat fields, divided by

straight unshaded roads, reach out to every point of the compass; but

here the wooded undulations of the country, the friendliness of the

villages, the recurrence of big rambling farm-steads--some, apparently,

the remains of fortified monastic granges--all suggest the possibility

of something resembling the English rural life, with its traditional

ties between park and fields.

The brief journey between Versailles and Fontainebleau offers--if

one takes the longer way, by Saint Rémy-les-Chevreuse and Etampes--a

succession of charming impressions, more varied than one often finds in

a long day’s motor-run through France; and midway one comes upon the

splendid surprise of Dourdan.

Ignorance is not without its æsthetic uses; and to drop down into the

modest old town without knowing--or having forgotten, if one prefers

to put it so--the great castle of Philip Augustus, which, moated,

dungeoned, ivy-walled, still possesses its peaceful central square--to

come on this vigorous bit of mediæval arrogance, with the little houses

of Dourdan still ducking their humble roofs to it in an obsequious

circle--well! to taste the full flavour of such sensations, it is worth

while to be of a country where the last new grain-elevator or office

building is the only monument that receives homage from the surrounding

architecture.

Dourdan, too, has the crowning charm of an old inn facing its

_château-fort_--such an inn as Manon and des Grieux dined in on the

way to Paris--where, in a large courtyard shaded by trees, one may

feast on strawberries and cheese at a table enclosed in clipped shrubs,

with dogs and pigeons amicably prowling for crumbs, and the host and

hostess, their maid-servants, ostlers and _marmitons_ breakfasting at

another long table, just across the hedge. Now that the demands of

the motorist are introducing modern plumbing and Maple furniture into

the uttermost parts of France, these romantic old inns, where it is

charming to breakfast, if precarious to sleep, are becoming as rare

as the mediæval keeps with which they are, in a way, contemporaneous;

and Dourdan is fortunate in still having two such perfect specimens to

attract the attention of the archæologist.

Etampes, our next considerable town, seemed by contrast rather

featureless and disappointing; yet for that very reason, so typical

of the average French country town--dry, compact, unsentimental, as

if avariciously hoarding a long rich past--that its one straight

grey street and squat old church will hereafter always serve for the

_ville de province_ background in my staging of French fiction. Beyond

Etampes, as one approaches Fontainebleau, the scenery grows extremely

picturesque, with bold outcroppings of blackened rock, fields of

golden broom, groves of birch and pine--first hints of the fantastic

sandstone scenery of the forest. And presently the long green aisles

opened before us in all the freshness of spring verdure--tapering away

right and left to distant _ronds-points_, to mossy stone crosses and

obelisks--and leading us toward sunset to the old town in the heart of

the forest.

IV

THE LOIRE AND THE INDRE

Fontainebleau is charming in May, and at no season do its glades more

invitingly detain the wanderer; but it belonged to the familiar,

the already-experienced part of our itinerary, and we had to press

on to the unexplored. So after a day’s roaming of the forest, and a

short flight to Moret, mediævally seated in its stout walls on the

poplar-edged Loing, we started on our way to the Loire.

Here, too, our wheels were still on beaten tracks; though the morning’s

flight across country to Orléans was meant to give us a glimpse of a

new region. But on that unhappy morning Boreas was up with all his

pack, and hunted us savagely across the naked plain, now behind, now

on our quarter, now dashing ahead to lie in ambush behind a huddled

village, and leap on us as we rounded its last house. The plain

stretched on interminably, and the farther it stretched the harder

the wind raced us; so that Pithiviers, spite of dulcet associations,

appeared to our shrinking eyes only as a wind-break, eagerly striven

for and too soon gained and passed; and when, at luncheon-time, we beat

our way, spent and wheezing, into Orléans, even the serried memories of

that venerable city endeared it to us less than the fact that it had an

inn where we might at last find shelter.

The above wholly inadequate description of an interesting part of

France will have convinced any rational being that motoring is no way

to see the country. And that morning it certainly was not; but then,

what of the afternoon? When we rolled out of Orléans after luncheon,

both the day and the scene had changed; and what other form of travel

could have brought us into such communion with the spirit of the Loire

as our smooth flight along its banks in the bland May air? For, after

all, if the motorist sometimes misses details by going too fast, he

sometimes has them stamped into his memory by an opportune puncture

or a recalcitrant “magneto”; and if, on windy days, he has to rush

through nature blindfold, on golden afternoons such as this he can

drain every drop of her precious essence.

Certainly we got a great deal of the Loire as we followed its windings

that day: a great sense of the steely breadth of its flow, the amenity

of its shores, the sweet flatness of the richly gardened and vineyarded

landscape, as of a highly cultivated but slightly insipid society; an

impression of long white villages and of stout conical towns on little

hills; of old brown Beaugency in its cup between two heights, and

Madame de Pompadour’s Ménars on its bright terraces; of Blois, nobly

bestriding the river at a noble bend; and farther south, of yellow

cliffs honeycombed with strange dwellings; of Chaumont and Amboise

crowning their heaped-up towns; of _manoirs_, walled gardens, rich

pastures, willowed islands; and then, toward sunset, of another long

bridge, a brace of fretted church-towers, and the widespread roofs of

Tours.

Had we visited by rail the principal places named in this itinerary,

necessity would have detained us longer in each, and we should have

had a fuller store of specific impressions; but we should have missed

what is, in one way, the truest initiation of travel, the sense of

continuity, of relation between different districts, of familiarity

with the unnamed, unhistoried region stretching between successive

centres of human history, and exerting, in deep unnoticed ways, so

persistent an influence on the turn that history takes. And after

all--though some people seem to doubt the fact--it is possible to

stop a motor and get out of it; and if, on our way down the Loire, we

exercised this privilege infrequently, it was because, here again, we

were in a land of old acquaintance, of which the general topography was

just the least familiar part.

It was not till, two days later, we passed out of Tours--not, in fact,

till we left to the northward the towered pile of Loches--that we

found ourselves once more in a new country. It was a cold day of high

clouds and flying sunlight: just the sky to overarch the wide rolling

landscape through which the turns of the Indre were leading us. To the

south, whither we were bound, lay the Berry--the land of George Sand;

while to the northwest low acclivities sloped away, with villages

shining on their sides. One arrow of sunlight, I remember, transfixed

for a second an unknown town on one of these slopes: a town of some

consequence, with walls and towers that flashed far-off and mysterious

across the cloudy plain. Who has not been tantalised in travelling,

by the glimpse of such cities--unnamed, undiscoverable afterward by

the minutest orientations of map and guide-book? Certainly, to the

uninitiated, no hill-town is visible on that particularly level section

of the map of France; yet there sloped the hill, there shone the

town--not a moment’s mirage, but the companion of an hour’s travel,

dominating the turns of our road, beckoning to us across the increasing

miles, and causing me to vow, as we lost the last glimpse of its

towers, that next year I would go back and make it give up its name.

[Illustration: ORLÉANS: GENERAL VIEW OF THE TOWN]

But now we were approaching a town with a name--a name so encrusted

and overgrown with associations that it was undeniably disappointing,

as we reached its outskirts, to find Châteauroux--aside from its fine

old château on the Indre--so exactly like other dull French towns,

so provokingly unconscious of being one of the capital cities of

literature. And it seems, in fact, literally as well as figuratively

unaware of its distinction. Fame throws its circles so wide that it

makes not a ripple near home; and even the alert landlady of the Hôtel

Sainte Catherine wrinkled her brows perplexedly at our question: “Is

one permitted to visit the house of George Sand?”

“_Le château de George Sand?_ (A pause of reflection.) _C’est

l’écrivain, n’est-ce pas?_ (Another pause.) _C’est à Nohant, le

château? Mais, Madame, je ne saurais vous le dire._”

Yet here was the northern gate of the Sand country--it was here that,

for years, the leaders of the most sedentary profession of a sedentary

race--the _hommes de lettres_ of France--descended from the Paris

express, and took a diligence on their pilgrimage to the oracle. When

one considers the fatigue of the long day’s railway journey, and the

French dread of _déplacements_, the continual stream of greatness that

Paris poured out upon Nohant gives the measure of what Nohant had to

offer in return.

As we sat at breakfast in the inn dining-room we irreverently pictured

some of these great personages--Liszt, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Dumas

fils, Flaubert--illustrious figures in the queer dishabille of travel,

unwinding strange _cache-nez_, solicitous for embroidered carpet-bags,

seated in that very room over their coffee and omelette, or climbing

to the coupé of the diligence outside. And then we set out on the same

road.

Straight as an arrow, after the unvarying fashion of the French

government highway, it runs southeast through vast wheatfields, past

barns and farmhouses grouped as in the vanished “drawing-books” of

infancy--now touching, now deserting the Indre banks, as the capricious

river throws its poplar-edged loops across the plain. But presently we

began to mount insensibly; till at length a sharp turn, and an abrupt

fall of the land, brought us out on a ridge above the plain of the

Berry, with the river reappearing below, and far, far south a blue haze

of mountains.

The road, after that, descends again by gentle curves, acquainting

one gradually with the charming details of the foreground--pale-green

copses, fields hedged with hawthorn, long lines of poplars in the

plain--while, all the way, the distant horizon grows richer, bluer

and more mysterious. It is a wide lonely country, with infrequent

villages--mere hamlets--dotting the fields; one sees how the convivial

Dudevant, coming from the livelier Gascony, might have found it, for

purposes of pot-house sociability, a little thinly settled. At one of

these small lonely villages--Vicq--just where the view spreads widest,

the road loses it again by a gradual descent of a mile or so; and at

the foot of the hill, among hawthorn and lilac hedges, through the

boughs of budding trees, a high slate roof shows to the left--the roof

of a plain-faced fawn-coloured house, the typical _gentilhommière_ of

the French country-side.

No other house is in sight: only, from behind the trees, peep two or

three humble tiled cottages, dependencies of the larger pile. There

is nothing to tell us the name of the house--nothing to signalise

it, to take it out of the common. It stands there large, placid,

familiarly related to the high-road and the farm, like one side of

the extraordinary woman it sheltered; and perhaps that fact helps to

suggest its name, to render almost superfluous our breathless question

to the pretty goose-girl knitting under the hedge.

“_Mais oui, Madame--c’est Nohant._”

The goose-girl--pink as a hawthorn bud, a “kerchief” tied about her

curls--might really, in the classic phrase of sentimental travel, have

“stepped out” of one of the novels written yonder, under the high roof

to which she pointed: she had the honest savour of the _terroir_,

yet with that superadded grace that the author of the novels has

been criticised for bestowing on her peasants. She formed, at any

rate, a charming link between our imagination and the famous house;

and we presently found that the miracle which had preserved her in

all her 1830 grace had been extended to the whole privileged spot,

which seemed, under a clear glass bell of oblivion, to have been kept

intact, unchanged, like some wonderful “exhibit” illustrative of the

extraordinary history lived within it.

[Illustration: NOHANT: CHÂTEAU OF GEORGE SAND]

The house faces diagonally toward the road, from which a high wall

once screened it; but it is written in the _Histoire de ma vie_ that

M. Dudevant, in a burst of misdirected activity, threw down several

yards of this wall, and filled the opening with a hedge. The hedge

is still there; and thanks to this impulse of destruction, the

traveller obtains a glimpse of grass terraces and stone steps, set in

overgrown thickets of lilac, hawthorn and acacia, and surmounted by the

long tranquil front of the château. On each side, beyond the stretch

of hedge, the wall begins again; terminating, at one corner of the

property, in a massive old cow-stable with a round pepper-pot tower;

at the opposite end is a charming conical-roofed garden-pavilion, with

mossy steps ascending to it from the road.

At right angles to the highway, a shady lane leads down past the farm

buildings; and following this, one comes, around their flank, on a

large pleasant untidy farm-yard, full of cows and chickens, and divided

by the long range of the _communs_ from the entrance-court of the

château. Farm-yard and court both face on a small grassy place--what,

in England, would pass for a diminutive common--in the centre of which,

under an ancient walnut-tree, stands a much more ancient church--a

church so tiny, black and shrunken that it somehow suggests a blind

old peasant woman mumbling and dozing in the shade. This is the parish

church of Nohant; and a few yards from it, adjoining the court of

the château, lies the little walled graveyard which figures so often

in the _Histoire de ma vie_, and where she who described it now rests

with her kin. The graveyard is defended from intrusion by a high wall

and a locked gate; and after all her spirit is not there, but in the

house and the garden--above all, in the little cluster of humble old

cottages enclosing the shady place about the church, and constituting,

apparently, the whole village of Nohant. Like the goose-girl, these

little houses are surprisingly picturesque and sentimental; and their

mossy roofs, their clipped yews, the old white-capped women who sit

spinning on their doorsteps, supply almost too ideal an answer to one’s

hopes.

[Illustration: NOHANT: GARDEN PAVILION]

And when, at last, excitedly and enchantedly, one has taken in the

quiet perfection of it all, and turned to confront the great question:

Does a sight of Nohant deepen the mystery, or elucidate it?--one can

only answer, in the cautious speech of the New England casuist: _Both._

For if it helps one to understand one side of George Sand’s life, it

seems actually to cast a thicker obscurity over others--even if, among

the different sides contemplated, one includes only those directly

connected with the place, and not the innumerable facets that reflected

Paris, Venice, Fontainebleau and Majorca.

The first surprise is to find the place, on the whole, so much

more--shall one say?--dignified and decent, so much more conscious

of social order and restraints, than the early years of the life led

in it. The pictures of Nohant in the _Histoire de ma vie_ are unlike

any other description of French provincial manners at that period,

suggesting rather an affinity with the sombre Brontë background than

the humdrum but conventional and orderly existence of the French rural

gentry.

When one recalls the throng of motley characters who streamed in and

out of that quiet house--the illegitimate children of both sides,

living in harmony with one another and with the child of wedlock,

the too-intimate servants, the peasant playmates, the drunken boon

companions--when one turns to the Hogarthian pictures of midnight

carouses presided over by the uproarious Hippolyte and the sombrely

tippling Dudevant, while their wives sat disgusted, but apparently

tolerant, above stairs, one feels one’s self in the sinister gloom

of Wildfell Hall rather than in the light temperate air of a French

province. And somehow, unreasonably of course, one expects the

house to bear, even outwardly, some mark of that dark disordered

period--or, if not, then of the cheerful but equally incoherent and

inconceivable existence led there when the timid Madame Dudevant was

turning into the great George Sand, and the strange procession which

continued to stream through the house was composed no longer of drunken

gentlemen-farmers and left-handed peasant relations, but of an almost

equally fantastic and ill-assorted company of ex-priests, naturalists,

journalists, Saint-Simonians, riders of every conceivable religious,

political and literary hobby, among whom the successive tutors of

the adored Maurice--forming in themselves a line as long as the

kings in _Macbeth_!--perhaps take the palm for oddness of origin and

adaptability of manners.

One expected the scene of these confused and incessant comings and

goings to wear the injured _déclassé_ air of a house which has never

had its rights respected--a house long accustomed to jangle its

dinner-bell in vain and swing its broken hinges unheeded; and instead,

one beholds this image of aristocratic well-being, this sober edifice,

conscious in every line of its place in the social scale, of its

obligations to the church and cottages under its wing, its rights over

the acres surrounding it. And so one may, not too fancifully, recognise

in it the image of those grave ideals to which George Sand gradually

conformed the passionate experiment of her life; may even indulge one’s

self by imagining that an old house so marked in its very plainness,

its conformity, must have exerted, over a mind as sensitive as hers,

an unperceived but persistent influence, giving her that centralising

weight of association and habit which is too often lacking in modern

character, and standing ever before her as the shrine of those

household pieties to which, inconsistently enough, but none the less

genuinely, the devotion of her last years was paid.

V

NOHANT TO CLERMONT

There happened to us, on leaving Nohant, what had happened after

Beauvais: the quiet country house by the roadside, like the mighty

Gothic choir, possessed our thoughts to the exclusion of other

impressions. As far as La Châtre, indeed--the little town on the Indre,

where young Madame Dudevant spent a winter to further her husband’s

political ambitions--we were still within the Nohant radius; and it was

along the straight road we were travelling that poor old Madame Dupin

de Francueil--_si douillette_ that she could hardly make the round of

the garden--fled in her high-heeled slippers on the fatal night when

her son, returning from a gay supper at La Châtre, was flung from his

horse and killed at the entrance to the town. These scenes from the

_Histoire de ma vie_ are so vivid, they live so poignantly in memory,

that in reliving them on the spot one feels, with Goncourt, how great

their writer would have been had her intrepid pen more often remained

_dans le vrai_.

La Châtre is a charming town, with a remarkably picturesque approach,

on the Nohant side, across an old bridge out of which an old house,

with a steep terraced garden, seems to grow with the conscious

pleasure of well-grouped masonry; and the streets beyond have an air

of ripe experience tempered by gaiety, like that of those ironic old

eighteenth-century faces wherein the wrinkles are as gay as dimples.

Southward from La Châtre, the road runs through a beautiful hilly

country to Montluçon on the Cher: a fine old border town, with a

brave fighting past, and interesting relics of Bourbon ascendancy;

but now deeply disfigured by hideous factories and long grimy streets

of operatives’ houses. In deploring the ravages of modern industry

on one of these rare old towns, it is hard to remember that they

are not museum pieces, but settlements of human beings with all the

normal desire to prosper at whatever cost to the physiognomy of their

birthplace; and Montluçon in especial seems to have been a very

pelican to the greed of her offspring.

We had meant to spend the night there, but there was a grimness about

the inn--the special grimness of which the commercial travellers’ hotel

in the French manufacturing town holds the depressing secret--that

forbade even a glance at the bedrooms; and though it was near sunset

we pressed on for Vichy. We had, in consequence, but a cold twilight

glimpse of the fine gorge of Montaigut, through which the road cuts

its way to Gannat, the first town to the north of the Limagne; and

night had set in when we traversed the plain of the Allier. On good

French roads, however, a motor-journey by night is not without its

compensations; and our dark flight through mysterious fields and

woods terminated, effectively enough, with the long descent down a

lamp-garlanded boulevard into the inanimate white watering-place.

[Illustration: CLERMONT-FERRAND: NOTRE-DAME DU PORT]

Vichy, in fact, had barely opened the shutters of its fashionable

hotels: the season does not begin till June, and in May only a few

premature bathers--mostly English--shiver in corners of the marble

halls, or disconsolately peruse last year’s news in the deserted

reading-rooms. But even in this semi-chrysalis stage the town presented

itself, the next morning, as that rarest of spectacles--grace

triumphant over the processes of the toilet. Only a pretty woman and a

French _ville d’eau_ can look really charming in morning dishabille;

and the way in which Vichy accomplishes the feat would be a lesson to

many pretty women.

The place, at all seasons, is an object-lesson to less enlightened

municipalities; and when one finds one’s self vainly wishing that art

and history, and all the rich tapestry of the past, might somehow be

brought before the eyes of our self-sufficient millions, one might

pause to ask if the sight of a well-kept, self-respecting French town,

carefully and artistically planned as a setting to the amenities of

life, would not, after all, offer the more salutary and surprising

example.

Vichy, even among French towns, stands out as a singularly finished

specimen of what such municipal pride can accomplish. From its broad

plane-shaded _promenade_, flanked by bright-faced hotels, and by

the arcades of the Casino, to the park on the Allier, and the wide

circumjacent boulevards, it wears, at every turn, the same trim holiday

air, the rouge and patches of smooth gravel, bright flower-borders,

gay shops, shady benches, inviting cafés. Even the cab-stands, with

their smart vis-à-vis and victorias drawn by plump cobs in tinkling

harnesses, seem part of a dream-town, where all that is usually sordid

and shabby has been touched by the magic wand of trimness; or where

some utopian millionaire has successfully demonstrated that the sordid

and shabby need never exist at all.

But, to the American observer, Vichy is perhaps most instructive just

because it is not the millionaire’s wand which has worked the spell;

because the town owes its gaiety and its elegance, not to the private

villa, the rich man’s “showplace,” but to wise public expenditure of

the money which the bathers annually pour into its exchequer.

It was, however, rather for the sake of its surroundings than for

the study of its unfolding season, that we had come there; and the

neighbouring country offered the richest return for our enterprise.

From the plain of the Limagne the hills slope up behind Vichy in a

succession of terraces divided by streams and deeply-wooded glens, and

connected by the interlacing of admirable roads that civilises the

remotest rural districts of France. Climbing these gradual heights to

the hill-village of Ferrières, we had, the day after our arrival, our

first initiation into what the near future held for us--a glorious

vision, across the plain, of the Monts Dore and the Monts de Dôme.

The blue mountain haze that had drawn us steadily southward, from our

first glimpse of it on the heights of the Berry, now resolved itself

into a range of wild volcanic forms, some curved like the bell-shaped

apses of the churches of Auvergne, some slenderly cup-like, and

showing the hollow rim of the spent crater; all fantastic, individual,

indescribably differentiated in line and colour from mountain forms

of less violent origin. And between them and us lay the richest

contrasting landscape, the deep meadows and luxuriant woodlands of the

Allier vale, with here and there a volcanic knoll lifting on its crest

an old town or a Rhenish-looking castle. The landscape, thus viewed,

presents a perplexing mixture of suggestions, recalling now the brown

hill-villages of Umbria, now the robber castles of the Swiss Rhineland;

with a hint, again, of the Terra di Lavore in its bare mountain lines,

and the prodigal fertility of their lower slopes; so that one felt

one’s self moving in a confusion of scenes romantically combined, as in

the foreground of a Claude or a Wilson, for the greater pleasure of the

eclectic eye.

The only landscape that seems to have been excluded from the

composition is that of France; all through Auvergne, we never

felt ourselves in France. But that is, of course, merely because

the traveller’s France is apt to be mainly made up of bits of the

Ile-de-France and Normandy and Brittany; and not till one has

explored the central and southwestern provinces does one learn of the

countless Frances within France, and realise that one may find one’s

“Switzerland, one’s Italy” without crossing the Alps to reach them.

We had, the next day, a closer impression of the scene we had looked

down on from Ferrières; motoring first along the high ridge above

the Limagne to the ancient black hill-town of Thiers, and thence

descending again to the plain. Our way led across it, by the charming

castled town of Pont-de-Château, to Clermont-Ferrand, which spreads its

swarthy mass at the base of the Puy de Dôme--that strangest, sternest

of cities, all built and paved in the black volcanic stone of Volvic,

and crowned by the sinister splendour of its black cathedral. It was

Viollet-le-Duc who added the west front and towers to this high ancient

pile; and for once his rash hand was so happily inspired that, at the

first glimpse of his twin spires soaring above the roofs of Clermont,

one forgives him--for the moment--the wrong he did to Blois, to

Pierrefonds and Vézelay.

VI

IN AUVERGNE

At last we were really in Auvergne. On our balcony at Royat, just

under the flank of the Puy de Dôme, we found ourselves in close

communion with its tossed heights, its black towns, its threatening

castles. And Royat itself--even the dull new watering-place quarter--is

extremely characteristic of the region: hanging in a cleft of the great

volcanic upheaval, with hotels, villas, gardens, vineyards clutching

precariously at every ledge and fissure, as though just arrested in

their descent on the roofs of Clermont.

As a watering-place Royat is not an ornamental specimen of its class;

and it has the farther disadvantage of being connected with Clermont

by a long dusty suburb, noisy with tram-cars; but as a centre for

excursions it offers its good hotels and “modern conveniences” at the

precise spot most favourable to the motorist, who may radiate from it

upon almost every centre of interest in Auvergne, and return at night

to digestible food and clean beds--two requisites for which, in central

France, one is often doomed to pine.

Auvergne, one of the most interesting, and hitherto almost the least

known, of the old French provinces, offers two distinct and equally

striking sides to the appreciative traveller: on the one hand, its

remarkably individual church architecture, and on the other, the

no less personal character of its landscape. Almost all its towns

are distinguished by one of those ancient swarthy churches, with

western narthex, great central tower, and curious incrustations of

polychrome lava, which marked, in Auvergne, as strongly distinctive

an architectural impulse as flowered, on a vastly larger scale, and

a century or more later, in the Gothic of the Ile de France. And the

towns surrounding these churches, on the crest or flank of one of the

volcanic eminences springing from the plain--the towns themselves, with

their narrow perpendicular streets and tall black houses, are so darkly

individual, so plainly akin to the fierce predatory castles on the

neighbouring hills, that one is arrested at every turn by the desire

to follow up the obscure threads of history connecting them with this

little-known portion of the rich French past.

But to the traveller restricted by time, the other side of the

picture--its background, rather, of tormented blue peaks and

wide-spread forest--which must assert itself, at all seasons, quite as

distinctively as the historic and architectural character of the towns,

is likely, in May, to carry off the victory. We had come, at any rate,

with the modest purpose of taking a mere bird’s-eye view of the region,

such a flight across the scene as draws one back, later, to brood and

hover; and our sight of the landscape from the Royat balcony confirmed

us in the resolve to throw as sweeping a glance as possible, and defer

the study of details to our next--our already-projected!--visit.

The following morning, therefore, we set out early for the heart of the

Monts Dore. Our road carried us southward, along a series of ridges

above the wide Allier vale, and then up and down, over wild volcanic

hills, now densely wooded, now desolately bare. We were on the road

to Issoire and La Chaise Dieu, two of the most notable old towns of

southern Auvergne; but, in pursuit of scenery, we reluctantly turned

off at the village of Coudes, at the mouth of a lateral valley, and

struck up toward the western passes which lead to the Pic de Sancy.

Some miles up this valley, which follows the capricious windings of

the Couzes, lie the baths of Saint Nectaire-le-Bas, romantically

planted in a narrow defile, beneath the pyramidal Romanesque church

which the higher-lying original village lifts up on a steep splinter

of rock. The landscape beyond Saint Nectaire grows more rugged and

Alpine in character: the pastures have a Swiss look, and the shaggy

mountain-sides are clothed with a northern growth of beech and pine.

Presently, at a turn of the road, we came on the little crater-lake

of Chambon, its vivid blueness set in the greenest of meadows, and

overhung by the dark basalt cliff which carries on its summit the

fortified castle of Murols. The situation of Murols, lifted on its

shaft of rock above that lonely upland valley, is in itself impressive

enough to bring out the full value of such romantic suggestions as it

has to offer; and the monument is worthy of its site. It is in fact a

very noble ruin, raising its central keep above two outer circuits of

battered masonry, the ampler and later of which shows the classical

pilasters and large fenestration of what must have been one of the

stateliest specimens of the last stage of French feudal architecture.

Though the guidebooks record a mention of Murols as early as the

thirteenth century, the castle now standing is all of later date,

and the great rectangular exterior is an interesting example of the

transitional period when Italian palace architecture began to be

grafted on the rugged stock of French military construction.

Just beyond the lake of Chambon the road begins to mount the long

curves of the Col de Diane, the pass which leads over into the valley

of Mont Dore. As we rose through bleak meadows and patches of scant

woodland, the mountains of Auvergne unrolled themselves to the east

in one of those lonely tossing expanses of summit and ridge and chasm

that suggest the mysterious undulations of some uninhabited planet.

Though the Col de Diane is not a high pass, it gives, from its yoke,

a strangely memorable impression of distance and mystery; partly,

perhaps, because in that desert region there is neither village nor

house to break the labyrinth of peaks; but chiefly because of the

convulsed outlines into which they have been tossed by subterranean

fires.

A cold wind swept the top of the pass, and snow still lay under the

rocks by the roadside; so that it was cheering to the spirits, as well

as to the eye, when we presently began our descent through dark pine

forests into the vale of the Dordogne. The baths of Mont Dore lie

directly beneath the pass, at the mouth of a valley hollowed out of

the side of the Pic de Sancy, the highest peak in Auvergne. In spite

of milder air and bright spring foliage we were still distinctly in

high places; and Mont Dore itself, not yet decked for the entertainment

of its bathers, had the poverty-stricken look which everywhere marks

the real mountain village. Later, no doubt, when its hotels are

open, and its scanty gardens in bloom, it takes on a thin veneer of

frivolity; but it must always be an austere-looking village, with its

ill-kept cobble-stone streets, and gaunt stone houses grouped against

a background of Alpine pastures. We were not sorry, therefore, that

its few restaurants presented barred shutters to our mid-day hunger,

and that we were obliged to follow the first footsteps of the infant

Dordogne down the valley to the lower-lying baths of Bourboule.

The Dordogne is a child of lusty growth, and at its very leap from the

cradle, under the Pic de Sancy, it rolls a fine brown torrent beneath

steeply wooded banks. Its course led us rapidly down the mountain

glen to the amiable but somewhat characterless little watering-place

of La Bourboule, set in a depression of the hills, with a background

of slopes which, in summer, might offer fairly pleasant walks between

one’s douches; and here, at a fresh white hotel with an affable

landlady, we lunched on trout that must have leapt straight from the

Dordogne into the frying-pan.

[Illustration: ORCIVAL: THE CHURCH]

After luncheon we once more took our way along the lively curves of the

river; to part with them at last, reluctantly, a few miles down the

valley, and strike out across a dull plateau to the mountain town of

Laqueille--a gaunt wind-beaten place, with nothing of note to offer

except its splendid view from the dizzy verge of a high cornice which

overhangs the valley running south from the chain of the Dôme. Beyond

Laqueille, again, we began to descend by long windings; and at last,

turning off from the direct road to Royat, we engaged ourselves in a

series of wooded gorges, in search of the remote village of Orcival.

The church of Orcival is one of the most noted of that strange group

of Auvergnat churches which some students of French Romanesque are

disposed to attribute, not only to one brief period of time, but to

the hand of one architect; so closely are they allied, not alone in

plan and construction, but in their peculiar and original decorative

details. We had resolved, therefore, not to return to Royat without a

sight of Orcival; and spite of the misleading directions plentifully

bestowed on us by the way, and resulting in endless doublings through

narrow lonely glens, we finally came, in the neck of the last and

narrowest, upon a huddled group of stone roofs with a church rising

nobly above them.

Here it was at last--and our first glance told us how well worth the

search we had made for it. But a second made evident the disturbing

fact that a cattle-fair was going on in the village; and though this is

not an unusual event in French towns, or one calculated, in general, to

interfere with the movements of the sightseer, we soon saw that, owing

to the peculiar position of Orcival, which is jammed into the head of

its glen as tightly as a cork in a bottle, the occupation of the square

about the church formed a complete check to circulation.

And the square was fully occupied: it presented, as we descended on it,

an agitated surface of blue human backs, and dun and white bovine ones,

so closely and inextricably mixed that any impact from without merely

sent a wave across the mass, without making the slightest break in its

substance. On its edge, therefore, we halted; the church, with its

beautiful rounded _chevet_ and central pyramid-tower, islanded a few

yards away across a horned sea which divided it from us as hopelessly

as Egypt from Israel; and the waves of the sea setting toward us with

somewhat threatening intent at the least sign of our attempting to

cross it. There was therefore nothing to be done but to own ourselves

intruders, and defer a sight of Orcival till our next visit; and with

much backing and wriggling, and some unfavourable comment on the part

of the opposition, we effected a crestfallen exit from that interesting

but inhospitable village.

The road thence to Royat climbs over the long Col de Ceyssat, close

under the southern side of the Puy de Dôme, and we looked up longingly

at the bare top of the mountain, yearning to try the ascent, but

fearing that our “horse-power” was not pitched to such heights. That

adventure too was therefore deferred till our next visit, which every

renunciation of the kind was helping to bring nearer and make more

inevitable; and we pushed on to Royat across the plain of Laschamp,

noted in the records of motoring as the starting-point of the perilous

_circuit d’Auvergne_.

VII

ROYAT TO BOURGES

The term of our holiday was upon us and, stern necessity took us back,

the next day, to Vichy. We followed, this time, the road along the

western side of the Limagne, passing through the old towns of Riom

and Aigueperse. Riom, thanks to its broad boulevards and bright open

squares, struck us as the most cheerful and animated place we had seen

in Auvergne; and it has, besides, a great air of Renaissance elegance,

many of its old traceried hôtels having been built in the sixteenth

century, which saw the chief development of the town.

Aigueperse, on the contrary, spite of its situation in the same sunny

luxuriant plain, presents the morose aspect of the typical town of

Auvergne, without many compensating merits, save that of two striking

pictures of the Italian school which are to be seen in its modernised

cathedral. From Aigueperse our road struck eastward across the Limagne

to Gannat; and thence, through pleasant fields and woods, we returned

to Vichy, on the opposite edge of the plain.

We started early the next morning on our journey to the north, for

our slight experience of the inns of central France made us anxious

to reach Orléans by night. Such long runs cannot be made without the

sacrifice of much that charms and arrests one by the way; and this part

of the country should be seen at leisure, in the long summer days, when

the hotels are less sepulchrally damp, and when one can remain late out

of doors, instead of having to shiver through the evening hours around

a smoky oil-lamp, in a room which will not bear inspection even by that

inadequate light.

We suffered, I remember, many pangs by the way; and not least, that of

having to take as a mere parenthesis the charmingly complete little

town of La Palisse on the Bèbre, with the ruined ivied castle of the

Comtes de Chabannes overhanging a curve of the river, and grouping

itself in a memorable composition with the picturesque houses below it.

Farther north, again, Moulins on the Allier inflicted a still deeper

pang; for this fine old town has considerable claims to distinction

besides the great triptych that made its name known through Europe

after the recent exhibition of French Primitives in Paris. The Virgin

of Moulins, gloriously enthroned in the cathedral among her soft-faced

Lombard angels, remains undoubtedly the crowning ornament of the town,

if only on account of the problem which she holds out, so inscrutably,

to explorers of the baffling annals of early French art. But aside

from this preëminent possession, and the interest of several minor

relics, Moulins has the attraction of its own amiable and distinguished

physiognomy. With its streets of light-coloured stone, its handsome

eighteenth-century hôtels and broad well-paved _cours_, it seemed,

after the grim black towns of the south, a singularly open and cheerful

place; and one was conscious, behind the handsome stone gateways and

balconied façades, of the existence of old panelled drawing-rooms with

pastel portraits and faded tapestry furniture.

The approach to Nevers, the old capital of the Nivernais, carried

us abruptly back to the Middle Ages, but to an exuberant northern

mediævalism far removed from the Gallo-Roman tradition of central

France. The cathedral of Nevers, with its ornate portals and

fantastically decorated clock-tower, has, in the old ducal palace

across the square, a rival more than capable of meeting its challenge

on equal grounds: a building of really gallant exterior, with fine

angle towers, and within, a great staircase commemorating in luxuriant

sculpture the legendary beginnings of that ancient house of Cleves

which, in the fifteenth century, allied itself by marriage with the

dukes of Burgundy.

At Nevers we found ourselves once more on the Loire; but only to

break from it again in a long dash across country to Bourges. At this

point we left behind us the charming diversified scenery which had

accompanied us to the borders of the Loire, and entered on a region

of low monotonous undulations, flattening out gradually into the vast

wheat-fields about Bourges. But who would wish any other setting

for that memorable silhouette, throned, from whichever point of the

compass one approaches it, in such proud isolation above the plain? One

forgets even, in a distant view of Bourges, that nature has helped, by

an opportune rise of the ground, to lift the cathedral to its singular

eminence: the hill, and the town upon it, seem so merely the unremarked

pedestal of the monument. It is not till one climbs the steep street

leading up from the Place Saint Bonnet that one realises the peculiar

topographical advantages of such a site; advantages which perhaps

partly account for the overwhelming and not quite explicable effect of

a first sight of the cathedral.

[Illustration: MOULINS: PLACE DE L’HÔTEL-DE-VILLE AND THE JACQUEMART

TOWER]

Even now, on a second visit, with the great monuments of the Ile

de France fresh in memory, we felt the same effect, and the same

difficulty in running it down, in differentiating it from the

richer, yet perhaps less deeply Gothic impression produced by the

rival churches of the north. For, begin as one will by admitting, by

insisting upon, the defects of Bourges--its irregular inharmonious

façade, its thin piers, its mean outer aisles--one yet ends in a state

where criticism perforce yields to sensation, where one surrenders

one’s self wholly to the spell of its spiritual suggestion. Certainly

it would be hard to put a finger, either within or without, on the

specific tangible cause of this feeling. Is it to be found in the

extraordinary beauty of the five western portals, so crowded with noble

and pathetic imagery and delicate ornamental detail? But the doors

of Chartres surpass even these! Is it then, if one looks within, the

rich blue and red of its dense ancient glass? But Chartres, again, has

finer glass of that unmatched period. Is it the long clear sweep of

the nave and aisles, uninterrupted by the cross-lines of transept or

chancel-screen? But if one recalls the wonderful convolutions of the

ambulatory of Canterbury, one has to confess that Gothic art--even in

its conventionalised English form--has created curves of greater poetry

and mystery, produced a more thrilling sense of shadowy consecrated

distances. Perhaps the spell of Bourges resides in a fortunate

accidental mingling of many of the qualities that predominate in this

or that more perfect structure--in the mixing of the ingredients so

that there rises from them, as one stands in one of the lofty inner

aisles, with one’s face toward the choir, that breath of mystical

devotion which issues from the very heart of mediæval Christianity.

“With this sweetness,” wrote Saint Theresa, of the Prayer of Quiet,

“the whole inner and outer man seems to be delighted, as though

some delicious ointment were poured into the soul like an exquisite

perfume ... as if we suddenly came to a place where it is exhaled,

not only from one, but from many things; and we know not what it is,

or from which one of them it comes, but they all penetrate us”.... If

Amiens, in its harmony of conception and vigour of execution, seems

to embody the developing will-power of a people passionate in belief,

and indomitable in the concrete expression of their creed, here at

Bourges one feels that other, less expressible side of the great ruling

influence of the Middle Ages--the power that willed mighty monuments

and built them, yet also, even in its moments of most brutal material

ascendancy, created the other houses, not built with hands, where the

spirits of the saints might dwell.