PART II

I

PARIS TO POITIERS

Spring again, and the long white road unrolling itself southward from

Paris. How could one resist the call?

We answered it on the blandest of late March mornings, all April in the

air, and the Seine fringing itself with a mist of yellowish willows

as we rose over it, climbing the hill to Ville d’Avray. Spring comes

soberly, inaudibly as it were, in these temperate European lands, where

the grass holds its green all winter, and the foliage of ivy, laurel,

holly, and countless other evergreen shrubs, links the lifeless to the

living months. But the mere act of climbing that southern road above

the Seine meadows seemed as definite as the turning of a leaf--the

passing from a black-and-white page to one illuminated. And every day

now would turn a brighter page for us.

Goethe has a charming verse, descriptive, it is supposed, of his first

meeting with Christiane Vulpius: “Aimlessly I strayed through the wood,

_having it in my mind to seek nothing_.”

Such, precisely, was our state of mind on that first day’s run. We were

simply pushing south toward the Berry, through a more or less familiar

country, and the real journey was to begin for us on the morrow, with

the run from Châteauroux to Poitiers. But we reckoned without our

France! It is easy enough, glancing down the long page of the Guide

Continental, to slip by such names as Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres

and Valençay, in one’s dash for the objective point; but there is no

slipping by them in the motor, they lurk there in one’s path, throwing

out great loops of persuasion, arresting one’s flight, complicating

one’s impressions, oppressing, bewildering one with the renewed,

half-forgotten sense of the hoarded richness of France.

[Illustration: BOURGES: APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL]

Versailles first, unfolding the pillared expanse of its north façade

to vast empty perspectives of radiating avenues; then Rambouillet,

low in a damp little park, with statues along green canals, and a

look, this moist March weather, of being somewhat below sea-level;

then Maintenon, its rich red-purple walls and delicate stone ornament

reflected in the moat dividing it from the village street. Both

Rambouillet and Maintenon are characteristically French in their way of

keeping company with their villages. Rambouillet, indeed, is slightly

screened by a tall gate, a wall and trees; but Maintenon’s warm red

turrets look across the moat, straight into the windows of the opposite

houses, with the simple familiarity of a time when class distinctions

were too fixed to need emphasising.

Our third château, Valençay--which, for comparison’s sake, one may

couple with the others though it lies far south of Blois--Valençay

bears itself with greater aloofness, bidding the town “keep its

distance” down the hill on which the great house lifts its heavy

angle-towers and flattened domes. A huge cliff-like wall, enclosing the

whole southern flank of the hill, supports the terraced gardens before

the château, which to the north is divided from the road by a vast

_cour d’honneur_ with a monumental grille and gateway. The impression

is grander yet less noble.

[Illustration: CHÂTEAU OF MAINTENON]

But France is never long content to repeat her effects; and between

Maintenon and Valençay she puts Chartres and Blois. Ah, these grey old

cathedral towns with their narrow clean streets widening to a central

_place_--at Chartres a beautiful oval, like the market-place in an

eighteenth-century print--with their clipped lime-walks, high garden

walls, Balzacian gables looking out on sunless lanes under the flanks

of the granite giant! Save in the church itself, how frugally all the

effects are produced--with how sober a use of greys and blacks, and

pale high lights, as in some Van der Meer interior; yet how intense a

suggestion of thrifty compact traditional life one gets from the low

house-fronts, the barred gates, the glimpses of clean bare courts,

the calm yet quick faces in the doorways! From these faces again

one gets the same impression of remarkable effects produced by the

discreetest means. The French physiognomy if not vividly beautiful is

vividly intelligent; but the long practice of manners has so veiled

its keenness with refinement as to produce a blending of vivacity

and good temper nowhere else to be matched. And in looking at it one

feels once more, as one so often feels in trying to estimate French

architecture or the French landscape, how much of her total effect

France achieves by elimination. If marked beauty be absent from the

French face, how much more is marked dulness, marked brutality, the

lumpishness of the clumsily made and the unfinished! As a mere piece of

workmanship, of finish, the French provincial face--the peasant’s face,

even--often has the same kind of interest as a work of art.

One gets, after repeated visits to the “show” towns of France, to feel

these minor characteristics, the incidental graces of the foreground,

almost to the exclusion of the great official spectacle in the

centre of the picture; so that while the first image of Bourges or

Chartres is that of a cathedral surrounded by a blur, later memories

of the same places present a vividly individual town, with doorways,

street-corners, faces intensely remembered, and in the centre a great

cloudy Gothic splendour.

At Chartres the cloudy splendour is shot through with such effulgence

of colour that its vision, evoked by memory, seems to beat with a

fiery life of its own, as though red blood ran in its stone veins.

It is this suffusion of heat and radiance that chiefly, to the

untechnical, distinguishes it from the other great Gothic interiors. In

all the rest, colour, if it exists at all, burns in scattered unquiet

patches, between wastes of shadowy grey stone and the wan pallor of

later painted glass; but at Chartres those quivering waves of unearthly

red and blue flow into and repeat each other in rivers of light, from

their source in the great western rose, down the length of the vast

aisles and clerestory, till they are gathered up at last into the

mystical heart of the apse.

A short afternoon’s run carried us through dullish country from

Chartres to Blois, which we reached at the fortunate hour when sunset

burnishes the great curves of the Loire and lays a plum-coloured bloom

on the slate roofs overlapping, scale-like, the slope below the castle.

There are few finer _roof-views_ than this from the wall at Blois: the

blue sweep of gables and ridge-lines billowing up here and there into a

church tower with its _clocheton_ mailed in slate, or breaking to let

through the glimpse of a carved façade, or the blossoming depths of a

hanging garden; but perhaps only the eye subdued to tin housetops and

iron chimney-pots can feel the full poetry of old roofs.

Coming back to the Berry six weeks earlier than on our last year’s

visit, we saw how much its wide landscape needs the relief and

modelling given by the varied foliage of May. Between bare woods and

scarcely budded hedges the great meadows looked bleak and monotonous;

and only the village gardens hung out a visible promise of spring. But

in the sheltered enclosure at Nohant, spring seemed much nearer; at

hand already in clumps of snow-drops and violets loosening the soil,

in young red leaves on the rose-standards, and the twitter of birds

in the heavy black-fruited ivy of the graveyard wall. A gate leads

from the garden into the corner of the graveyard where George Sand and

her children lie under an ancient yew. Feudal even in burial, they

are walled off from the village dead, and the tombstone of Maurice

Sand, as well as the monstrous stone chest over his mother’s grave,

bears the name of Dudevant and asserts a claim to the barony. Strange

inconsequence of human desires, that the woman who had made her

pseudonym illustrious enough to have it assumed by her whole family

should cling in death to the obscure name of a repudiated husband; more

inconsequent still that the descendant of kings, and the priestess of

democracy and Fourierism, should insist on a right to the petty title

which was never hers, since it was never Dudevant’s to give! On the

whole, the gravestones at Nohant are disillusioning; except indeed

that of the wretched Solange, with its four tragic words: _La mère de

Jeanne._

But the real meaning of the place must be sought close by, behind the

row of tall windows opening on the tangled mossy garden. They lead,

these windows, straight into the life of George Sand: into the big

cool dining-room, with its flagged floor and simple white-panelled

walls, and the _salon_ adjoining: the _salon_, alas, so radically

remodelled in the unhappy mid-century period of wall-papers, stuffed

furniture and centre table, that one seeks in vain for a trace of

the original chatelaine of Nohant--that high-spirited, high-heeled

old Madame Dupin who still haunts the panelled dining-room and the

box-edged garden. Yet the _salon_ has its special story to tell, for

in George Sand’s culminating time just such a long table with fringed

cover and encircling arm-chairs formed the centre of French indoor

life. About this elongated board sat the great woman’s illustrious

visitors, prolonging, as at a mental _table d’hôte_, that interminable

dinner-talk which still strikes the hurried Anglo-Saxon as the

typical expression of French sociability; and here the different

arts of the household were practised--the painting, carving and fine

needle-work which a stronger-eyed generation managed to carry on by

the light of a single lamp. Here, one likes especially to fancy,

Maurice Sand exercised his chisel on the famous marionettes for the

little theatre, while his mother, fitting their costumes with skilful

fingers, listened, silent _comme une bête_, to the dissertations

of Gautier, Flaubert or Dumas. The earlier life of the house still

speaks, moreover, from the walls of the drawing-room, with the voice of

jealously treasured ancestral portraits--pictures of the demoiselles

Verrières, of the great Marshal and the beautiful Aurora--strange

memorials of a past which explains so much in the history of George

Sand, even to the tempestuous face of Solange Clésinger, looking darkly

across the room at her simpering unremorseful progenitors.

Our guide, a close-capped brown-and-ruddy _bonne_, led us next, by

circuitous passages, to the most interesting corner of the house: the

little theatre contrived with artless ingenuity out of what might have

been a store-room or wine-cellar. One should rather say the little

theatres, however, for the mistress of revels had managed to crowd two

stages into the limited space at her disposal; one, to the left, an

actual _scène_, with “life-size” scenery for real actors, the other,

facing the entrance-door, the more celebrated marionette theatre,

raised a few feet from the floor, with miniature proscenium arch and

curtain; just such a _Puppen-theatre_ as Wilhelm Meister described to

Marianne, with a prolixity which caused that amiable but flighty young

woman to fall asleep.

Between the two stages about twenty spectators might have found

seats behind the front row of hard wooden benches reserved for the

châtelaine and her most distinguished guests. A clean emptiness

now pervades this temple of the arts: an emptiness made actually

pathetic by the presence, on shelves at the back of the room, of the

whole troupe of marionettes, brushed, spotless, well cared for, and

waiting only a touch on their wires to spring into life and populate

their little stage. There they stand in wistful rows, the duenna, the

Chimène, the _grande coquette_, Pantaloon, Columbine and Harlequin,

Neapolitan fishers, odalisques and peasants, brigands and soldiers

of the guard; all carved with a certain rude vivacity, and dressed,

ingeniously and thriftily, by the indefatigable fingers which drove the

quill all night upstairs.

It brought one close to that strange unfathomable life, which only at

Nohant grows clear, shows bottom, as it were; closer still to be told

by the red-brown _bonne_ that “Monsieur Maurice” had modelled many of

his humorous peasant-types on “_les gens du pays_”; closest of all when

she added, in answer to a question as to whether Madame Sand had really

made the little frocks herself: “Oh, yes, I remember seeing her at

work on them, and helping her with it. I was twelve years old when she

died.”

[Illustration: NEUVY SAINT-SÉPULCRE: CHURCH OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD]

Here, then, was an actual bit of the Nohant tradition, before us in

robust and lively middle age: one of the _berrichonnes_ whom George

Sand loved and celebrated, and who loved and served her in return. For

a moment it brought Nohant within touch; yet the final effect of the

contact, as one reflected on the vanished enthusiasms and ideals that

George Sand’s name revives, was the sense that the world of beliefs

and ideas has seldom travelled so fast and far as in the years between

“Indiana” and to-day.

* * * * *

From La Châtre, just south of Nohant, we turned due west along the

valley of the Creuse, through a country possessing some local fame

for picturesqueness, but which struck us, in its early spring nudity,

as somewhat parched and chalky-looking, without sufficient woodland

to drape its angles. It makes up, however, in architectural interest

for what its landscape lacks, and not many miles beyond La Châtre the

otherwise featureless little town of Neuvy-Saint-Sépulcre presents one

feature of unusual prominence. This is the ancient round church from

which the place is named: one of those copies of the church of the

Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem with which the returning crusader dotted

western Europe. Aside from their intrinsic interest, these “sepulchre”

churches have gained importance from the fact that but three or four

are still extant. The most typical, that of Saint Bénigne at Dijon, has

been levelled to a mere crypt, and that of Cambrige deviates from the

type by reason of its octagonal dome; so that the church of Neuvy is of

quite preëminent interest. A late Romanesque nave--itself sufficiently

venerable looking to stir the imagination in its own behalf--was

appended in the early thirteenth century to the circular shrine;

but the latter still presents to the dull old street its unbroken

cylindrical wall, built close on a thousand years ago, and surmounted,

some ninety years later, by a second story with a Romanesque exterior

arcade. At this stage, however, one is left to conjecture, with the

aid of expert suggestion, what manner of covering the building was

meant to have. The present small dome, perched on the inner drum of

the upper gallery, is an expedient of the most obvious sort; and the

archæologists have inferred that the thinness of this drum may have

made a more adequate form of roofing impossible.

To the idle sight-seer, at any rate, the interior of the church is

much more suggestive than its bare outer shell. We were happy enough

to enter it toward sunset, when dusk had gathered under the heavy

encircling columns, and lights twinkled yellow on the central altar

which has so regrettably replaced the “Grotto of the Sepulchre.” It was

our added good fortune that a small train of the faithful, headed by a

red-cassocked verger and a priest with a benignant Massillon-like head,

were just making a circuit of the stations of the cross affixed to the

walls of the aisle; and as we stood withdrawn, while the procession

wound its way between shining altar and shadowy columns, some of the

faces of the peasants seemed to carry us as far into the past as the

strange symbolic masks on the capitals above their heads.

But what carries one farthest of all is perhaps the fact, well known

to modern archæology, that the original church built by Constantine

over the grotto-tomb of Christ was not a round temple at all, but a

vast basilica with semi-circular apse. The Persians destroyed this

building in the seventh century, and the Christians who undertook to

restore it could do no more than round the circle of the apse, thus

at least covering over the sacred tomb in the centre. So swift was

the succession of demolition and reconstruction in that confused and

clashing age, so vague and soon obliterated were the records of each

previous rule, that when the crusaders came they found no memory of

this earlier transformation, and carried back with them that model of

the round temple which was henceforth to stand, throughout western

Europe, as the venerated image of the primitive church of Jerusalem.

Too much lingering in this precious little building brought twilight

on us soon after we joined the Creuse at Argenton; and when we left

it again at Le Blanc lights were in the windows, and the rest of our

run to Poitiers was a ghostly flight through a moon-washed landscape,

with here and there a church tower looming in the dimness, or a heap

of ruined walls rising mysteriously above the white bend of a river.

We suffered a peculiar pang when a long-roofed pile towering overhead

told us that we were passing the great Benedictine abbey of Saint

Savin, with its matchless lining of frescoes; but a certain mental

satiety urged us on to Poitiers.

Travellers accustomed to the marked silhouette of Italian cities--to

their immediate proffer of the picturesque impression--often find

the old French provincial towns lacking in physiognomy. Each Italian

city, whether of the mountain or the plain, has an outline easily

recognisable after individual details have faded, and it is, obviously,

much easier to keep separate one’s memories of Siena and Orvieto than

of Bourges and Chartres. Perhaps, therefore, the few French towns with

definite physiognomies seem the more definite from their infrequency;

and Poitiers is foremost in this distinguished group.

[Illustration: NEUVY SAINT-SÉPULCRE: INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH]

Not that it offers the distinctive _galbe_ of such bold hill-towns as

Angoulême or Laon. Though a hill-town in fact, it somehow makes next

to nothing of this advantage, and the late Mr. Freeman was justified

in grumbling at the lack of character in its sky-line. That character

reveals itself, in fact, not in any picturesqueness of distant

effect--in no such far-seen crown as the towers of Laon or the domes

of Périgueux--but in the homogeneous interest of the old buildings

within the city: the way they carry on its packed romantic history

like the consecutive pages of a richly illuminated chronicle. The

illustration of that history begins with the strange little “temple”

of Saint John, a baptistery of the fourth century, and accounted the

earliest Christian building in France--though this applies only to the

lower story (now virtually the crypt), the upper having been added

some three hundred years later, when baptism by aspersion had replaced

the primitive plunge. Unhappily the ancient temple has suffered the

lot of the too-highly treasured relic, and fenced about, restored, and

converted into a dry little museum, has lost all that colour and pathos

of extreme age that make the charm of humbler monuments.

This charm, in addition to many others, still clings to the expressive

west front of Notre Dame la Grande, the incomparable little Romanesque

church holding the centre of the market-place. Built of a dark grey

stone which has taken on--and been suffered to retain--a bloom of

golden lichen like the trace of ancient weather-worn gilding, it

breaks, at the spring of its portal-arches, into a profusion of

serried, overlapping sculpture, which rises tier by tier to the

splendid Christ Triumphant of the crowning gable, yet never once crowds

out and smothers the structural composition, as Gothic ornament, in

its most exuberant phase, was wont to do. Through all its profusion of

statuary and ornamental carving, the front of Notre Dame preserves that

subordination to classical composition that marks the Romanesque of

southern France; but between the arches, in the great spandrils of the

doorways, up to the typically Poitevin scales of the beautiful arcaded

angle turrets, what richness of detail, what splendid play of fancy!

[Illustration: POITIERS: BAPTISTERY OF ST. JOHN]

After such completeness of beauty as this little church presents--for

its nave and transept tower are no less admirable than the more

striking front--even such other monuments as Poitiers has to offer must

suffer slightly by comparison. Saint Hilaire le Grand, that notable

eleventh-century church, with its triple aisles and its nave roofed

by cupolas, and the lower-lying temple of Sainte Radegonde, which

dates from the Merovingian queen from whom it takes its name, have

both suffered such repeated alterations that neither carries the

imagination back with as direct a flight as the slightly less ancient

Notre Dame; and the cathedral itself, which one somehow comes to last

in an enumeration of the Poitiers churches, is a singularly charmless

building. Built in the twelfth century, by Queen Eleanor of Guyenne,

at the interesting moment of transition from the round to the pointed

arch, and completed later by a wide-sprawling Gothic front, it gropes

after and fails of its effect both without and within. Yet it has one

memorable possession in its thirteenth-century choir-stalls, almost

alone of that date in France--tall severe seats, their backs formed by

pointed arches with delicate low-relief carvings between the spandrils.

There is, in especial, one small bat, with outspread web-like wings, so

exquisitely fitted into its allotted space, and with such delicacy of

observation shown in the modelling of its little half-human face, that

it remains in memory as having the permanence of something classical,

outside of dates and styles.

Having lingered over these things, and taken in by the way an

impression of the confused and rambling ducal palace, with its

magnificent _grande salle_ completed and adorned by Jean de Berry, we

began to think remorsefully of the wonders we had missed on our run

from Le Blanc to Poitiers. We could not retrace the whole distance; but

at least we could return to the curious little town of Chauvigny, of

which we had caught a tantalising glimpse above a moonlit curve of the

Vienne.

[Illustration: POITIERS: THE CHURCH OF NOTRE-DAME-LA-GRANDE]

We found it, by day, no less suggestive, and full of unsuspected

riches. Of its two large Romanesque churches, the one in the lower

town, beside the river, is notable, without, for an extremely beautiful

arcaded apse, and contains within a striking fresco of the fifteenth

century, in which Christ is represented followed by a throng of the

faithful--kings, bishops, monks and clerks--who help to carry the

cross. The other, and larger, church, planted on the summit of the

abrupt escarpment which lifts the _haute ville_ above the Vienne, has

a strange body-guard composed of no fewer than five feudal castles,

huddled so close together on the narrow top of the cliff that their

outer walls almost touch. The lack, in that open country, of easily

fortified points doubtless drove the bishops of Poitiers (who were

also barons of Chauvigny) into this strange defensive alliance with

four of their noble neighbours; and one wonders how the five-sided

ménage kept the peace, when local disturbances made it needful to take

to the rock.

The gashed walls and ivy-draped dungeons of the rival ruins make an

extraordinarily romantic setting for the curious church of Saint

Pierre, staunchly seated on an extreme ledge of the cliff, and

gathering under its flank the handful of town within the fortified

circuit. There is nothing in architecture so suggestive of extreme

age, yet of a kind of hale durability, as these thick-set Romanesque

churches, with their prudent vaulting, their solid central towers, the

close firm grouping of their apsidal chapels. The Renaissance brought

the classic style into such permanent relationship to modern life that

eleventh-century architecture seems remoter than Greece and Rome; yet

its buildings have none of the perilous frailly of the later Gothic,

and one associates the idea of romance and ruin rather with the pointed

arch than with the round.

Saint Pierre is a singularly good example of this stout old school,

which saw the last waves of barbarian invasion break at its feet, and

seems likely to see the ebb and flow of so many other tides before

its stubborn walls go under. It is in their sculptures, especially,

that these churches reach back to a dim and fearful world of which few

clues remain to us: the mysterious baleful creatures peopling their

archivolts and capitals seem to have come out of some fierce vision of

Cenobite temptation, when the hermits of the desert fought with the

painted devils of the tombs.

The apsidal capitals of Saint Pierre are a very menagerie of such

strange demons--evil beasts grinning and mocking among the stocky

saints and angels who set forth, unconcerned by such hideous

propinquity, the story of the birth of Christ. The animals are much

more skilfully modelled than the angels, and at Chauvigny one slender

monster, with greyhound flanks, subhuman face, and long curved tail

ending in a grasping human hand, haunts the memory as an embodiment of

subtle malevolence.

II

POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES

The road from Poitiers to Angoulême carries one through a country

rolling and various in line--a country with a dash of Normandy in it,

but facing south instead of west.

The villages are fewer than in Normandy, and make less mark in the

landscape; but the way passes through two drowsy little towns, Civray

and Ruffec, each distinguished by the possession of an important church

of the typical Romanesque of Poitou. That at Civray, in particular,

is remarkable enough to form the object of a special pilgrimage,

and to find it precisely in one’s path seemed part of the general

brightness of the day. Here again are the sculptured archivolt and the

rich imagery of Poitiers--one strange mutilated figure of a headless

horseman dominating the front from the great arcade above the doorway,

as at the church of the Sainte Croix in Bordeaux; but the façade of

Civray is astonishingly topped by fifteenth-century machicolations,

which somehow, in spite of their later date, give it an air of greater

age, of reaching back to a wild warring past.

Angoulême, set on a promontory between Charente and Anguienne,

commands to the north, south and east a vast circuit of meadowy and

woody undulations. The interior of the town struck one as dull, and

without characteristic detail; but on the front of the twelfth-century

cathedral, perched near the ledge of the cliff above the Anguienne,

detail abounds as profusely as on the façade of Notre Dame at Poitiers.

It is, however, so much less subordinate to the general conception that

one remembers rather the garlanding of archivolts, the clustering of

figures in countless niches and arcades, than the fundamental lines

which should serve to bind them together; and the interior, roofed with

cupolas after the manner of Saint Hilaire of Poitiers, is singularly

stark and barren looking.

[Illustration: ANGOULÊME: FAÇADE OF THE CATHEDRAL]

But when one has paid due tribute to the cathedral one is called

on, from its doorway, to recognize Angoulême’s other striking

distinction: its splendid natural site, and the way in which art has

used and made the most of it. Starting from a long leafy _cours_ with

private hôtels, a great avenue curves about the whole length of the

walls, breaking midway into a terrace boldly hung above the valley,

and ending in another leafy _place_, beneath which the slope of the

hill has been skilfully transformed into a public garden. Angoulême

now thrives on the manufacture of paper, and may therefore conceivably

permit herself such civic adornments; but how of the many small

hill-towns of France--such as Laon or Thiers, for instance--which

apparently have only their past glory to subsist on, yet manage to lead

up the admiring pilgrim by way of these sweeping approaches, encircling

terraces and symmetrically planted esplanades? One can only salute once

again the invincible French passion for form and fitness, and conclude

that towns as well as nations somehow always manage to give themselves

what they regard as essential, and that happy is the race to whom these

things are the essentials.

On leaving Angoulême that afternoon we saw the first cypresses and

the first almond blossoms. We were in the south at last; not the hot

delicately pencilled Mediterranean south, which has always a hint of

the East in it, but the temperate Aquitanian _midi_ cooled by the

gulf of Gascony. As one nears Bordeaux the country grows less broken,

the horizon-line flatter; but there is one really noble impression,

when, from the bridge of Saint André de Cubzac, one looks out on the

lordly sweep of the Dordogne, just before it merges its waters with the

Garonne to form the great estuary of the Gironde. Soon after comes an

endless dusty faubourg, then the long stone bridge over the Garonne,

and the proud river-front of Bordeaux--a screen of eighteenth-century

buildings stretched along the crescent-shaped quay. Bordeaux, thus

approached, has indeed, as the guide-book says, _fort grand air_; and

again one returns thanks to the motor, which almost always, avoiding

the mean purlieus of the railway station, gives one these romantic or

stately first impressions.

[Illustration: THIERS: VIEW OF THE TOWN FROM THE PONT DE SEYCHALLES]

This river-front of Bordeaux is really little more than the

architectural screen, a street or two deep, of a bustling, bright but

featureless commercial town, which, from the Middle Ages to the

close of the eighteenth century, seems to have crowded all its history

along the curve of the Garonne. Even the early church of the Holy

Cross--contemporaneous with Notre Dame la Grande of Poitiers--lifts

its triple row of Romanesque arcades but a few yards from the river;

and close by is Saint Michel, a stately example of late Gothic, with

the unusual adjunct of a detached bell-tower, not set at an angle, in

Italian fashion, but facing the church squarely from a little green

enclosure across the street. But these vestiges of old Bordeaux,

in spite of their intrinsic interest, are, on the whole, less

characteristic, less personal, than the _mise-en-scène_ of its long

quay: a row of fine old hôtels with sculptured pediments and stately

doorways, broken midway by the symmetrical buildings of the Exchange

and the Custom House, and extending from the Arch of Triumph opposite

the Pont de Bordeaux to the great Place des Quinconces, with its

rostral columns and balustraded terrace above the river.

To the modern traveller there is food for thought in the fact that

Bordeaux owes this great decorative composition--in which should be

included the theatre unfolding its majestic peristyle at the head of

the Place de la Comédie--to the magnificent taste and free expenditure

of the Intendant Tourny, who ruled the province of Guyenne in the

eighteenth century. Except at such high moments of æsthetic sensibility

as produced the monuments of Greece and republican Italy all large

schemes of civic adornment have been due to the initiative of one man,

and executed without much regard to the rights of the tax-payer; and

should the citizen of a modern republic too rashly congratulate himself

on exemption from the pillage productive of such results, he might

with equal reason remark that the tribute lawfully extracted from him

sometimes seems to produce no results whatever.

[Illustration: BORDEAUX: CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROSS]

* * * * *

On leaving Bordeaux we deserted the _route nationale_ along the flat

west bank of the Garonne, and recrossing the Pont de Bordeaux ran

south through the white-wine region between Garonne and Dordogne--that

charming strip of country which, because of the brackishness of the

river tides, goes by the unexpected name of Entredeux-Mers. For

several miles we skirted a line of white houses, half villa, half

château, set in well-kept gardens; then came vineyards, as exquisitely

kept, and packed into every cranny of the rocky _coteaux_, save where

here and there a little town broke the view of the river--chief among

them Langoiron, with its fine fortress-ruin, and Cadillac enclosed in

stout quadrangular walls.

The latter place has the interest of being one of those symmetrically

designed towns which, toward the close of the Middle Ages, were founded

throughout southwestern France to draw “back to the land” a population

depleted and demoralised by long years of warfare and barbarian

invasion. These curious made-to-order towns--_bastides_, or _villes

neuves_--were usually laid out on a rectilinear plan, with a town-hall

forming the centre of an arcaded market-place, to which four streets

led from gateways in the four walls. Among the most characteristic

examples are Aigues Mortes, which Saint Louis called into existence to

provide himself with a Mediterranean port, and Cordes, near Gaillac,

founded a little later by Count Raymond of Toulouse, and somewhat

ambitiously named by him after the city of Cordova.

At Cadillac the specific physiognomy of the mediæval _bastide_ is

overshadowed by the lofty proportions and high-pitched roof of the

château which a sixteenth-century Duke of Epernon planted in an

angle of the walls. The adjoining parish church--itself of no mean

dimensions--was once but the private chapel of these same dukes, who

have left such a large architectural impress on their small shabby

town; and one grieves to learn that the chief monument of their rule

has fallen to base uses, and been stripped of the fine interior

decorations which its majestic roof once sheltered.

* * * * *

South-west of Cadillac the road passes through a vast stretch of

pine-forest with a dry aromatic undergrowth--an outskirt of the great

_landes_ that reach inward from the gulf of Gascony. On and on runs

the white shadow-barred highway, between ranges of red boles and

sun-flecked heathy clearings--and when, after long hours, one emerges

from the unwonted mystery and solitude of this piny desert into the

usual busy agricultural France, the land is breaking southward into

hilly waves, and beyond the hills are the Pyrenees.

Yet one’s first real sight of them--so masked are they by lesser

ranges--is got next day from the terrace at Pau, that astonishing

balcony hung above the great amphitheatre of southwestern France. Seen

thus, with the prosaic English-provincial-looking town at one’s back,

and the park-like green _coteaux_ intervening beyond the Gave, the

austere white peaks, seemingly afloat in heaven (for their base is

almost always lost in mist), have a disconcerting look of irrelevance,

of disproportion, of being subjected to a kind of indignity of

inspection, like caged carnivora in a zoo.

And Pau, on farther acquaintance, utterly refuses to be brought into

any sort of credible relation with its great southern horizon; conducts

itself, architecturally and socially, like a comfortable little spa in

a plain, and rises only by a great deal of hoisting on the part of the

imaginative sight-seer to the height of its own dapper brick castle,

which it has domesticated into an empty desultory museum, and tethered

down with a necklet of turf and flowers.

But Pau’s real purpose is to serve as the hub of a great wheel, of

which the spokes, made of smooth white roads, radiate away into every

fold and cleft of the country. As a centre for excursions there is

no place like it in France, because there is nothing in France that

quite matches the sweetness and diversity of the long Pyrenean border.

Nowhere else are the pastoral and sylvan so happily mated, nowhere the

villages so compact of thrift and romance, the foreground so sweet, the

distances so sublime and shining.

Whichever way one turns--down the winding southern valleys toward

Lourdes and Argelès, or to Oloron and the Eaux Chaudes; westward, over

low hills, to the old town of Orthez and the Salies de Béarn; or east,

again, to the plain of Tarbes in its great ring of snow-peaks--always

there is the same fulness of impressions, always the same brightness

and the same nobility.

For a culminating instance of these impressions one might choose, on

a spring afternoon, the run to Lourdes by the valley of the Gave and

Bétharram.

First rich meadows, hedgerows, village streets; then fields again and

hills; then the brown rush of the Gave between wooded banks; and,

where the river threads the arch of an ivied bridge, the turreted

monastery walls and pilgrimage church of Bétharram--a deserted

seventeenth-century Lourdes, giving one a hint of what the modern

sanctuary might have been had the millions spent on it been drawn from

the faithful when piety still walked with art.

Bétharram, since its devotees have forsaken it, is a quite negligible

“sight,” relegated to small type even in the copious Joanne; yet

in view of what is coming it is worth while to pause before its

half-Spanish, half-Venetian church front, and to obey the suave yet

noble gesture with which the Virgin above the doorway calls her

pilgrims in.

She has only a low brown church to show, with heavy stucco angels

spreading their gilded wings down a perspective of incense-fogged

baroque; but the image of it will come back when presently, standing

under the big dome of the Lourdes “Basilica,” one gives thanks that

modern piety chose to build its own shrine instead of laying hands on

an old one.

There are two Lourdes, the “grey” and the “white.” The former,

undescribed and unvisited, is simply one of the most picturesque and

feudal-looking hill villages in Europe. Planted on a steep rock at the

mouth of the valley, the mountains pressing it close to the west and

south, it opposes its unbroken walls and stern old keep to the other,

the “white” town sprawling on the river bank--the town of the Basilica,

the Rosary, the Grotto: a congeries of pietistic hotels, _pensions_,

pedlars’ booths and panoramas, where the Grand Hôtel du Casino or

du Palais adjoins the Pension de la Première Apparition, and the

blue-sashed Vierge de Lourdes on the threshold calls attention to the

electric light and _déjeuner par petites tables_ within.

[Illustration: BÉTHARRAM: THE BRIDGE]

Out of this vast sea of vulgarism--the more aggressive and intolerable

because its last waves break against one of the loveliest landscapes

of this lovely country--rises what the uninstructed tourist might

be pardoned for regarding as the casino of an eminently successful

watering-place--as the Grotto beneath, with its drinking-fountains,

baths, bottling-taps and _boutiques_, might stand for the “Source”

or “Brunnen” where the hypochondriac pays toll to Hygieia before

seeking relaxation in the gilded halls above. For the shrine of

Bernadette has long since been overlaid by the machinery of a vast

“business enterprise,” a scheme of life in which every heart-beat

is itemised, tariffed and exploited, so that even the invocations

encrusting by thousands the Basilica walls seem to record so many cases

of definite “give and take,” so many bargains struck with heaven--_en

souvenir de mon vœu, reconnaissance pour une guérison, souvenir d’une

prière exaucée_, and so on--and as one turns away from this monument of

a thriving industry one may be pardoned for remembering the plane-tree

by the Ilissus and another invocation:

“Ye gods, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the inner and the

outer man be one.”

But beyond Lourdes is Argelès, and at the first turn of the road one

is again in the fresh Pyrenean country, among budding crops, sleek

fawn-coloured cattle, and the grave handsome peasantry who make

one feel that the devotional _ville d’eaux_ one has just left is a

mushroom growth quite unrelated to the life of industry to which these

agricultural landscapes testify.

There is always an added interest--architectural and racial--about

the border regions where the idiosyncrasies of one people “run,” as

it were, into those adjoining; and a key to the character of each is

given by noting precisely what traits have survived in transplantation.

The Pyreneans have a certain Spanish seriousness, but so tempered by

Gallic good-humour that their address recalls the perfectly mingled

courtesy and self-respect of the Tuscan peasant. One feels in it, at

any rate, the result of an old civilisation blent with independence and

simplicity of living; and these bold handsome men, straight of feature

and limb, seem the natural product of their rich hill-country, so

disciplined by industry, yet so romantically free.

[Illustration: ARGELÈS-GAZOST: THE OLD BRIDGE]

Argelès is a charming old hill-town, which has kept itself quite aloof

from the new watering-place of Gazost in the plain; but the real object

of the excursion lies higher up the valley, in a chestnut forest on

the slope of the mountains. Here the tiny village of Saint Savin

swarms bee-like about its great Romanesque church--a naked massive

structure, like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal half emerging

from the rock. Old as it is, it is rooted in remains of greater

antiquity--the fallen walls of an abbey of Charlemagne’s building,

itself raised, the legend runs, on the site of a Roman villa which once

served as the hermitage of Saint Savin, son of a Count of Barcelona.

It has been the fate of too many venerable architectural relics to

sacrifice their bloom of _vetusté_ to the scrupulous care which

makes them look like conscious cossetted old ladies, of whom their

admiring relatives say: “Should you ever suspect her age?”--and only

in such remote monuments as that of Saint Savin does one get the

sense of undisguised antiquity, of a long stolid existence exposed

to every elemental influence. The result is an impression of rugged,

taciturn strength, and of mysterious memories striking back, as in

the holy-water basin of the transept, and the uncouth capitals of the

chapter-house, to those dark days when Christian civilisation hung in

the balance, and the horn of Roland sounded down the pass.

But a mediæval church is always more or less in the order of nature:

there is something more incongruous about a mediæval watering-place.

Yet the Pyrenees abound in them; and at Cauterets, farther up the same

valley, the monks of this very monastery of Saint Savin maintained, in

the tenth century, “habitations to facilitate the use of the baths.”

Of the original Cauterets, however, little remains, and to get an

impression of an old _ville d’eaux_ one must turn westward from Pau,

and strike across the hills, by ways of exceeding beauty, to the

Salies de Béarn. The frequentation of these saline springs dates back

as far as the monkish charter of Cauterets; and the old town of the

Salies, with its incredibly picturesque half-timbered houses, its black

balconies and gables above the river, looks much as it must have when,

in 1587, a charter was drawn up for the regular “exploitation” of the

baths.

[Illustration: SALIES DE BÉARN: VIEW OF OLD TOWN]

Pushing still farther westward one meets the highway to Bayonne and

Biarritz, and may thence pass south by Saint Jean de Luz and Hendaye

to the Spanish border. But the spokes of the wheel radiate in so many

different directions and lead to scenes so extraordinarily varied--from

the savage gorge of the Eaux-Chaudes to the smiling vale of Saint

Jean Pied-de-Port, from the romantic pass of the Pied de Roland to

Fontarrabia perched like a painted Spanish Virgin on its rock

above the gulf of Gascony--that to do them any sort of justice the

comet-flight of the motor would have to be bound down to an orbit

between Bidassoa and Garonne.

* * * * *

Familiarity cannot blunt the wonder of the climb from Pau to the crest

of the hills above Tarbes. Southward the Pyrenees unfold themselves in

a long line of snows, and ahead every turn of the road gives a fresh

glimpse of wood and valley, of thriving villages and farms, till the

last jut of the ridge shows Tarbes far off in the plain, with the dim

folds of the Cévennes clouding the eastern distance.

All along the northeastern skirt of the Pyrenees runs the same bright

and opulent country; and at the old market-town of Montrejeau, where

the Garonne cuts its way down the vale of Luchon, there is just such a

fortunate grouping of hill and river, and distant high-perched ruin,

as our grand-parents admired in landscapes of the romantic school.

It was our good luck to enter Montrejeau on Easter Monday, while the

market was going on, and the narrow streets were packed with mild

cream-coloured cattle and their lively blue-smocked drivers. Great

merriment and general good-humour marked our passage through the town

to the big inn with its open galleries and old-fashioned courtyard; and

here, the dining-room being as packed as the streets, our table was

laid in a sunny old walled garden full of spring flowers and clipped

yews.

It seemed impossible that any incident of the afternoon should be quite

at the height of this gay repast, consumed in fragrance and sunshine;

but we began to think differently when, an hour or two later, we took

the first curve of the long climb to Saint Bertrand de Comminges. This

atom of a town, hugging a steep wedge of rock at the mouth of the vale

of Luchon, was once--and for many centuries--a diocesan seat; and who,

by all the spirits of incongruousness, should one of its last bishops

be, but the uncle of that acute and lively Madame de Boigne whose

memoirs have recently shed such light on the last days of the Old

Régime?

By no effort of imagination can one project into the single

perpendicular street of Saint Bertrand, topped by its rugged Gothic

cathedral, the gallant figure of Monseigneur Dillon, one of those

philosophical prelates whom one instinctively places against the

_lambris dorés_ of an episcopal palace hung with Boucher tapestries.

But in truth the little town has too old and strange a history to be

conscious of so fugitive an incident of its past. For its foundations

were laid by the mountain tribes who harassed Pompey’s legions and were

driven back by him into the valley of the Garonne; and in due time

a great temple rose on what is now the rock of the cathedral. Walls

and ramparts presently enclosed it, and the passage of the Vandals

having swept the dwellers of the plain back into this impregnable

circuit, Comminges became an episcopal city when the Catholic Church

was organised in Gaul. Thereafter it underwent all the vicissitudes

of barbarian invasion, falling at last into such decay that for five

hundred years it is said to have been without inhabitants. Yet the

episcopal line was maintained without more than one long break, and

in the eleventh century the diocese woke to life at the call of its

saintly Bishop, Bertrand de l’Isle Jourdain. Saint Bertrand began the

cathedral and built about it the mediæval town which bears his name:

and two hundred years later another Bertrand de Comminges, raised

to the papacy as Clement V., but still mindful of the welfare of his

former diocese, completed the Romanesque pile by the addition of a vast

Gothic nave and choir.

It is the church of Clement V. that still crowns the rock of Comminges,

contrasting by its monumental proportions with the handful of houses

enclosed in the walls at its base. The inhabitants of Comminges

number at present but some five hundred, and the town subsists, the

guide-books tell one, only on its religious festivals, the fame of its

monuments, and the fidelity of a few “old families” who are kept there

_par le prestige des souvenirs_.

One wonders, climbing the steep street, which of its decrepit houses

are inhabited by these interesting devotees of the past. No life is

visible save that contributed by a few bleary old women squatted

under mouldering arches, and a fire-fly dance of children about the

stony square before the church; and the church itself seems withdrawn

immeasurably far into the past, sunk back upon dim ancient memories of

Gaul and Visigoth.

One gets an even intenser sense of these distances from the little

cloister wedged against the church-flank and overhanging the radiant

valley of the Garonne--a queer cramped _enceinte_, with squat arches

supported by monster-girdled capitals, and in one case by a strange

group of battered figures, supposedly the four Evangelists, one of

whom--the Saint John--is notable in Romanesque archæology for bearing

in his arms the limp lamb which is his attribute.

The effect of antiquity is enhanced, as at Saint Savin, by the

beneficent neglect which has allowed the exterior of the building

to take on all the scars and hues of age; so that one comes with a

start of surprise on the rich and carefully tended interior, where a

brilliant bloom of Renaissance decoration has overlaid the stout Gothic

framework.

This airy curtain, masking choir, rood-screen and organ-loft in a

lace-work of delicate yet hardy wood-carving, has kept, in the dry

Pyrenean air, all its sharpness of detail, acquiring only a lustre

of surface that gives it almost the texture of old bronze. It is

wonderfully free and fanciful, yet tempered by the southern sense of

form; subdued to the main lines of the composition, but breaking into

the liveliest ripples of leaf and flower, of bird and sprite and angel,

till its audacities culminate in the scaly undulations of the mermaids

on the terminal seats of the choir--creatures of bale and beauty, who

seem to have brought from across the Alps their pagan eyes and sidelong

Lombard smile.

[Illustration: ST. BERTRAND-DE-COMMINGES: PIER OF THE FOUR EVANGELISTS

IN THE CLOISTER]

The finger-tailed monster of Chauvigny, the plaintively real bat of the

choir-stall at Poitiers, and these siren evocations of a classic past

group themselves curiously in the mind as embodiments of successive

phases of human fancy, imaginative interpretations of life.

III

THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE

As one turns north-eastward from the Pyrenees the bright abundant

landscape passes gradually into a flattish grey-and-drab country that

has ceased to be Aquitaine and is yet not Provence.

A dull region at best, this department of Haute Garonne grows

positively forbidding when the mistral rakes it, whitening the

vineyards and mulberry orchards, and bowing the shabby cypresses

against a confused grey sky; nor is the landscape redeemed by the

sprawling silhouette of Toulouse--a dingy wind-ridden city, stretched

wide on the flat banks of the Garonne, and hiding its two precious

buildings in a network of mean brick streets.

One might venture the general axiom that France has never wholly

understood the use of brick, and that where stone construction ceases

architectural beauty ceases with it. Saint Sernin, the great church

of Toulouse, is noble enough in line, and full of interest as marking

the culmination of French Romanesque; but compared with the brick

churches of northern Italy it seems struck with aridity, parched and

bleached as a skeleton in a desert: The Capitoul, with its frivolous

eighteenth-century front, has indeed more warmth and relief than any

other building in Toulouse; but meanly surrounded by shabby brick

houses, it seems to await in vain the development of ramps and terraces

that should lead up to its long bright façade.

As the motor enters the hill-country to the northeast of Toulouse

the land breaks away pleasantly toward the long blue line of the

Cévennes; and presently a deep cleft fringed with green reveals the

nearness of the Tarn--that strange river gnawing its way through cheesy

perpendicular banks.

[Illustration: ALBI: GENERAL VIEW OF THE CATHEDRAL]

Along these banks fantastic brick towns are precariously piled:

L’Isle-sur-Tarn, with an octagonal brick belfry, and Rabastens, raised

on a series of bold arcaded terraces, which may be viewed to advantage

from a suspension-bridge high above the river. Aside from its

exceptionally picturesque site, Rabastens is notable for a curious

brick church with fortified tower and much-restored fourteenth-century

frescoes clothing its interior like a dim richly woven tissue. But

beyond Rabastens lies Albi, and after a mid-day halt at Gaillac, most

desolate and dusty of towns, we pressed on again through the parched

country.

Albi stood out at length upon the sky--a glaring mass of houses stacked

high above the deep cleft of the Tarn. The surrounding landscape was

all dust and dazzle; the brick streets were funnels for the swooping

wind; and high up, against the blinding blue, rose the flanks of the

brick cathedral, like those of some hairless pink monster that had just

crawled up from the river to bask on the cliff. This first impression

of animal monstrosity--of an unwieldly antediluvian mass of flesh--is

not dispelled by a nearer approach. From whatever angle one views the

astounding building its uncouth shape and fleshlike tint produce the

effect of a living organism--high-backed, swollen-thighed, wallowing--a

giant Tarasque or other anomalous offspring of the Bestiary; and if

one rejects the animal analogy as too grotesque, to what else may one

conceivably compare it?

Among the fortified churches of southwestern France this strange

monument is the strangest as it is the most vast, and none of the

accepted architectural categories seems to fit its huge vaulted hall

buttressed with tall organ-pipe turrets, and terminating to the west in

a massive dungeon-like tower flanked by pepper-pot pinnacles.

The interior of the great secular-looking _salle_ is covered by an

unbroken expanse of mural painting, and encrusted, overgrown almost,

from the choir and ambulatory to the arches of the lateral chapels,

with a prodigious efflorescence of late Gothic wood-carving and

sculpture, half Spanish in its dusky grey-brown magnificence. But even

this excess of ecclesiastical ornament does not avail to Christianise

the church--there is a pagan, a Saracenic quality about it that seems

to overflow from its pinnacled flushed exterior.

[Illustration: ALBI: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL]

To reach Carcassonne from Albi one must cross the central mass of the

Cévennes. The way leads first, by hill and dale, through a wooded

northern-looking landscape, to the town of Castres, distinguished by a

charming _hôtel de ville_ with a box-planted garden said to have been

laid out by Lenôtre; and soon after Castres the “wild-ridged steeps”

break away in widening undulations as the road throws its loops about

the sides of the Montagne Noire--black hollows deepening dizzily

below, and long grey vistas unfolding between the crowded peaks.

Unhappily a _bourrasque_ enveloped us before we reached the top of the

pass, so that we lost all the beauty of the long southern descent to

Carcassonne, and were aware of it only as a distant tangle of lights in

the plain, toward which we groped painfully through wind and rain.

The rain persisted the next day; but perhaps it is a not undesirable

accompaniment to a first view of Carcassonne, since it eliminates that

tout-and-tourist element which has so possessed itself of the ancient

_cité_, restoring to it, under a grey blurred light, something of its

narrow huddled mediæval life.

He who has gone there with wrath in his heart against Viollet-le-Duc

may even, under these mitigating conditions, go so far as to think

that the universal restorer has for once been justified by his

results--that, granting in advance the possibility of innumerable

errors of detail, his brilliant hypothesis still produces a total

impression of reality. Perhaps, too, all the floating tags of literary

mediævalism--the irresistible “connotations” of keep and rampart and

portcullis--help out the illusion, animate the serried little burgh,

and people it with such figures as Dante walked among when Bellincion

Berti went girt with leather. At any rate, the impression is there--for

those who have the hardihood to take it--there all the more palpably

on a day of such unbroken rain, when even the official custodians hug

their stove, and a beneficent mist hides the stacks of post-cards and

souvenirs waylaying the traveller from every window.

[Illustration: NÎMES: THE BATHS OF DIANA PUBLIC GARDENS]

The weather, however, so beneficent at Carcassonne, proved an obstacle

to the seeing of Narbonne and Béziers, and drove us relentlessly before

it to Nîmes, where it gave us, the next morning, one of those brilliant

southern days that are born of the southern deluges. Here was Provence

at last--dry, clear-edged, classic--with a sky like blue marble, low

red hills tufted by olives, stony hollows with thin threads of stream,

and a sun that picked out in gold the pure curves of the Maison Carrée.

Among the Greek towns of the Mediterranean there is none as Greek--or,

to speak more precisely, as Græco-Roman--as Nîmes. No other city of old

Gaul seems to have put itself so completely in harmony with its rich

nucleus of “remains”--eliminating or omitting the monuments of other

periods, and content to group its later growth subserviently about the

temple and the amphitheatre. It was very well for Arles to make its

Romanesque venture, for Rheims to crown itself with a glory of Gothic;

but with the tranquil lines of the Maison Carrée and the Nymphæum,

the rhythmic spring of the arena arches, to act as centralising

influences--above all with the overwhelming grandeur of the Pont du

Gard as a background--how could Nîmes, so far more deeply pledged to

the past, do otherwise than constitute herself the guardian of great

memories? The Pont du Gard alone would be enough to relegate any

town to a state of ancillary subjection. Its nearness is as subduing

as that of a great mountain, and next to the Mont Ventoux it is the

sublimest object in Provence. The solitude of its site, and the austere

lines of the surrounding landscape, make it appear as much on the outer

edge of civilisation as when it was first planted there; and its long

defile of arches seems to be forever pushing on into the wilderness

with the tremendous tread of the Roman legions.

By one of the charming oppositions of French travel, one may return

from this classic pilgrimage through the mediæval town of Uzès; and,

as if such contrasts were not fruitful enough, may pause on the way

to smile at the fantastic château d’Angivilliers--a half-ruined

eighteenth-century “Folly” with an anachronistic medley of kiosks,

arcades, pagodas, a chapel like a Roman temple, and a ruined box-garden

haunted by peacocks.

[Illustration: CARCASSONNE: THE PORTE DE L’AUDE]

Uzès itself, a steep town clustered about the ducal keep of the

Crussols, has a stately terrace above the valley, and some fine

eighteenth-century houses, in shabby streets insufficiently swept; but

its chief feature is of course the castle which, planted protectingly

in the centre of the town, thrusts up its central dungeon over a

fine feudal jumble of subsidiary masonry.

From Nîmes to the Mediterranean the impressions are packed too thick.

First the Rhone, with the castles of Tarascon and Beaucaire taunting

each other across its yellow flood, Beaucaire from a steep cliff,

Tarascon from the very brink of the river; then, after a short flight

through olive-orchards and vineyards, the pretty leafy town of Saint

Remy on the skirts of the Alpilles; and a mile to the south of Saint

Remy, on a chalky ledge of the low mountain-chain, the two surviving

monuments of the Roman city of Glanum. They are set side by side,

the tomb and the triumphal arch, in a circular grassy space enclosed

with olive-orchards and backed by delicate fretted peaks: not another

vestige of Roman construction left to connect them with the past. Was

it, one wonders, their singular beauty that saved them, that held

even the Visigoths’ hands when they wiped out every other trace of

the populous city of stone-quarriers, with its aqueducts, walls and

temples? Certainly, seeing the two buildings thus isolated under the

radiant lonely sky, one is tempted to exclaim that they might well

have checked even barbarian violence, and that never again did the

stout Roman trunk throw out two such flowers of grace and lightness. It

is as though, from that packed Provençal soil, some dust of Greece had

passed into the Latin stem, clearing a little its thick sap; yet it is

just because the monuments remain so sturdily Roman that the grace and

the lightness count so much.

This Alpilles country between Rhone and Durance is itself the most

Grecian thing west of Greece: Provence of Provence in every line of its

bare sharp-cut heights, tufted with a spare classic growth of olive,

cistus and myrtle, it explains why the Greek colonist found himself at

home on these ultimate shores, and why the Roman conqueror bowed here

to Attic influences.

Pushing southeast from Saint Remy, one comes, through a broadening

landscape, to the old town of Salon, where Nostradamus is buried, and

thence, by a winding road among the hills, to the wide valley where

Aix-en-Provence lies encircled in mountains.

[Illustration: SAINT-REMY: THE MAUSOLEUM]

For a town so nobly seated it seems, at first approach, a little

commonplace and insignificant; the eye, lighting on it from the

heights, seeks a sky-line like that of Clermont or Périgueux. Aix,

in this respect, remains inadequate; yet presents itself to closer

inspection as a charming faded old place, tinged with legal and

academic memories, with a fine double row of balconied and sculptured

hôtels along its leafy _cours_, and a number of scattered treasures in

the folds of its crooked streets.

Among these treasures the two foremost--the picture of the _Buisson

Ardent_ in the cathedral, and the Gobelin tapestries in the adjoining

Archbishop’s palace--belong to such widely sundered schools that

they might almost be said to represent the extreme points within

which French art has vibrated. It is therefore the more interesting

to note that both are intrinsically and preëminently decorative in

quality--devotional triptych and frivolous tapestry obeying the same

law of rigorously balanced lines and colours. The great picture of the

Burning Bush is, with the exception of the Virgin of Moulins, perhaps

the finest flower of that early French school of painting which was so

little known or considered that, until the recent Paris exhibition of

“Primitives,” many of its masterpieces were complacently attributed to

Italian painters. Hanging midway down the nave, where a golden light

strikes it when the sacristan flings open the splendid carved doors of

the west front, the triptych of Nicholas Froment unfolds itself like a

great three-petalled flower, each leaf burning with a rich limpidity of

colour that overflows from the Rosa Mystica of the central panel to the

pale prayerful faces of the royal donators in the wings.

The cathedral has its tapestries also--a series from the Brussels

looms, attributed to Quentin Matsys, and covering the choir with

intricately composed scenes from the life of Christ, in which the

melancholy grey-green of autumn leaves is mingled with deep jewel-like

pools of colour. But these are accidental importations from another

world, whereas the famous Don Quixote series in the Archbishop’s palace

represents the culminating moment of French decorative art.

They strike one perhaps, first of all--these rosy _chatoyantes_

compositions, where ladies in loosened bodices gracefully prepare to

be “surprised”--as an instructive commentary on ecclesiastical manners

toward the close of the eighteenth century; then one passes on to

abstract enjoyment of their colour-scheme and balance of line, to a

delighted perception of the way in which they are kept from being

(as tapestries later became) mere imitations of painting, and remain

imprisoned--yet so free!--in that fanciful textile world which has its

own flora and fauna, its own laws of colour and perspective, and its

own more-than-Shakespearian anachronisms in costume and architecture.

From Aix to the Mediterranean the south-eastern highway passes through

a land of ever-increasing loveliness. East of Aix the bare-peaked

mountain of Sainte Victoire dominates the fertile valley for long

miles. Then the hermit-haunted range of the Sainte Baume unfolds its

wooded flanks to the south, the highway skirting them as it gradually

mounts to the plateau where the town of Saint Maximin in clusters about

its unfinished Dominican church--a remarkable example of northern

Gothic strayed into the classic confines of Provence.

Saint Maximin owes its existence--or that part of it contingent on

possessing so important a church--to the ownership of the bones of

Saint Mary Magdalen, whose supposed relics were formerly venerated in

the great Burgundian church of Vézelay, but in the thirteenth century

were officially identified among the treasures of the Provençal town.

As the penitent saint is supposed to have spent her last years in a

grotto on the heights of the Sainte Baume, it seems more fitting that

she should now rest at its foot than on the far-off rock of the Morvan;

and one is glad that the belief was early enough established to produce

the picturesque anomaly of this fine fragment of northern art planted

against the classic slopes of the Maritime Alps.

The great Gothic church was never finished, without or within; but in

the seventeenth century a renewal of devotion to Saint Mary Magdalen

caused the interior of the choir to be clothed with a magnificent

_revêtement_ of wood-carving in the shape of ninety-two choir-stalls,

recounting in their sculptured medallions the history of the Dominican

order, and leading up to a sumptuous Berniniesque high-altar, all

jasper, porphyry and shooting rays of gold.

[Illustration: ST. MAXIMIN: CHOIR STALLS IN THE CHURCH]

Saint Maximin, though lying so remotely among bare fields and barer

mountains, still shows, outside its church, some interesting traces

of former activity and importance. A stout old Dominican monastery

extends its long row of ogival windows near the church, and here and

there a vigorous bit of ancient masonry juts from the streets--notably

in the sprawling arcades of the Jewish quarter, and where certain

fragments of wall attest that the mountain village was once a strongly

defended mediæval town.

Beyond Saint Maximin the _route nationale_ bears away between the

mountains to Nice; but at Brignoles--a city of old renown, the

winter residence of the Counts of Provence--one may turn southward,

by Roquebrussanne and the Chartreuse of Montrieux (where Petrarch’s

brother was abbot), to the radiant valley of the Gapeau, where the

stream-side is already white with cherry-blossoms, and so at length

come out, at Hyères, on the full glory of the Mediterranean spring.

One’s first feeling is that nothing else matches it--that no work of

man, no accumulated appeal of history, can contend a moment against

this joy of the eye so prodigally poured out. The stretch of coast from

Toulon to Saint Tropez, so much less familiar to northern eyes than

the more eastern portion of the Riviera, has a peculiar nobility, a

Virgilian breadth of composition, in marked contrast to the red-rocked

precipitous landscape beyond. Looking out on it from the pine-woods of

Costebelle, above Hyères, one is beset by classic allusions, analogies

of the golden age--so divinely does the green plain open to the sea,

between mountain lines of such Attic purity.

After packed weeks of historic and archæological sensation this

surrender to the spell of the landscape tempts one to indefinite

idling. It is the season when, through the winter verdure of the

Riviera, spring breaks with a hundred tender tints--pale green of

crops, white snow of fruit-blossoms, and fire of scarlet tulips under

the grey smoke of olive-groves. From heights among the cork-trees

the little towns huddled about their feudal keeps blink across the

pine-forests at the dazzling blue-and-purple indentations of the

coast. And between the heights mild valleys widen down--valleys with

fields of roses, acres of budding vine, meadows sown with narcissus,

and cold streams rushing from the chestnut forests below the bald grey

peaks. Among the peaks are lonely hermitages, ruined remains of old

monastic settlements, Carthusian and Benedictine; but no great names

are attached to these fallen shrines, and the little towns below have

no connection with the main lines of history. It is all a tranquil

backwater, thick with local tradition, little floating fragments of

association and legend; but art and history seem to have held back from

it, as from some charmed Elysian region, too calm, too complete, to be

rudely touched to great issues.

* * * * *

It was the mistral that drove us from this Eden, poisoning it with

dust and glare, and causing us to take refuge north of the sea-board

Alps. There, in a blander air and on a radiant morning, we left Aix

behind, and followed the Durance to Avignon. Approaching the papal

city from the east, one may get a memorable impression by following

the outer circuit of its walls to the Porte de l’Ouille, which opens

on the Place Crillon just below the great rock of the palace. Seen

thus from without, Avignon is like a toy model of a mediæval city;

and this impression of artificial completeness is renewed when, from

the rock-perched terrace below the palace, one looks out on the Rhone

valley and its enclosing amphitheatre of mountains. In the light

Provençal air, which gives a finely pencilled precision to the remotest

objects, the landscape has an extraordinarily topographical character,

an effect of presenting with a pre-Raphaëlite insistence on detail its

sharp-edged ruins, its turreted bridge, its little walled towns on

definite points of rock. The river winding through the foreground holds

its yellow curve between thin fringes of poplar and sharp calcareous

cliffs; and even the remoter hills have the clear silhouette of the

blue peaks in mediæval miniatures, the shoulder of the Mont Ventoux

rising above them to the north with the firmness of an antique marble.

[Illustration: TOULON: THE HOUSE OF PUGET]

This southern keenness of edge gives even to the Gothicism of the

piled-up church and palace an exotic, trans-Alpine quality, and makes

the long papal ownership of Avignon--lasting, it is well to remember,

till the general upheaval of 1790--a visible and intelligible fact.

Though the Popes of Avignon were Frenchmen, Avignon is unmistakably,

almost inexplicably, Italian: its Gothic vaguely suggests that of

the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, of the fortified arches and tombs of mediæval

Rome, and reconciles itself as easily to the florid façade of the

seventeenth-century Papal Mint in the square below as to the delicate

classic detail of the west door of the church.

Rome--but Imperial not Papal Rome--was still in the air as we left

Avignon and followed the Rhone valley northward to Orange. All this

part of France is thick with history, and in the ancient principality

of Orange the layers are piled so deep that one wonders to see so few

traces of successive dominations in the outward aspect of its capital.

Only the Rome of the Emperors has left a mark on the town which lived

with so vigorous and personal life from the days when it was a Gaulish

city and a trading station of Massaliote Greeks, and which, when it

grew too small for its adventurous brood, sent rulers to both shores

of the North Sea; and the fact that the theatre and the arch survive,

while the Orange of Carlovingian bishops and mediæval princes has been

quite wiped out, and even Maurice of Nassau’s great seventeenth-century

fortress razed to the ground--this permanence of the imperial

monuments, rising unshaken through the blown dust of nearly a thousand

years, gives a tangible image of the way in which the Roman spirit has

persisted through the fluctuations of history.

To learn that these very monuments have been turned to base uses by

barbarous prince-bishops--the arch converted into a fortified Château

de l’Arc, the theatre into an outwork of the main fortress--adds

impressiveness to their mutilated splendour, awing one with the image

of a whole reconstructed from such fragments.

[Illustration: ORANGE: THE ARCH OF MARIUS]

Among these, the theatre, now quite stripped of ornament, produces its

effect only by means of its size, and of the beautiful sweep of its

converging lines; but the great golden-brown arch--standing alone in a

wide grassy square--keeps on three sides a Corinthian mask of cornice

and column, and a rich embossing of fruit and flower-garlands, of

sirens, trophies and battle-scenes. All this decoration is typically

Roman--vigorously carved and somewhat indiscriminately applied. One

looks in vain for the sensitive ornament of the arch of Saint Remy, in

which Mérimée’s keen eye saw a germ of the coming Gothic: the sculpture

of Orange follows the conventional lines of its day, without showing

a hint of new forms. But that very absence of imaginative suggestion

makes it Roman and imperial to the core.

Ahead of us, all the way from Avignon to Orange, the Mont Ventoux

lifted into the pure light its denuded flanks and wrinkled

silvery-lilac summit. But at Orange we turned about its base, and bore

away north-eastward through a broken country rimmed with hills, passing

by Tulette, the seat of a Cluniac foundation--of which the great

Rovere, Julius II., was Prince and Prior--and by Valréas, which under

the Popes of Avignon became the capital of the Haut Comtat, the French

papal dominion in France.

Like too many old towns in this part of France, Valréas, once a

strongly fortified place, has suffered its castle to fall in ruins,

and swept away its towers and ramparts to make room for boulevards, as

though eager to efface all traces of its long crowded past. But one

such trace--nearer at hand and of more intimate connotations--remains

in the Hôtel de Simiane, now the _hôtel de ville_, but formerly the

house of that Marquis de Simiane who married Pauline de Grignan, the

grand-daughter of Madame de Sévigné.

This is the first reminder that we are in the Grignan country, and

that a turn of the road will presently bring us in full view of that

high-perched castle where the great lieutenant-governor of Provence,

Madame de Sévigné’s son-in-law, dispensed an almost royal hospitably

and ruled with more than royal arrogance.

[Illustration: GRIGNAN: GATE OF THE CASTLE]

The Comte de Grignan was counted a proud man, and there was much to

foster pride in the site and aspect of his ancestral castle--_ce

château royal de Grignan_. If Italy, and papal Italy, has been in

one’s mind at every turn of the way from Avignon to Tulette, it seems

actually to rise before one as the great ruin, springing suddenly from

its cliff in the plain, evokes a not too audacious comparison with the

rock of Caprarola. In France, at least, there is perhaps nothing as

suggestive of the fortified pleasure-houses of Italy as this gallant

castle on the summit of its rock, with the town clustering below, and

the vast terrace before it actually forming the roof of its church. And

the view from the terrace has the same illimitable sun-washed spaces,

flowing on every side into noble mountain-forms, from the Mont

Ventoux in the south to the range of the Ardèche in the west.

The ancient line of Adhémar, created Counts of Grignan by Henri II.,

had long been established on their rocky pedestal when they built

themselves, in the sixteenth century, the magnificent Renaissance

façade of which only the angle towers now subsist. Later still they

added the great gallery lined with full-length portraits of the

Adhémar, and under Louis XIV. Mansart built the so-called _Façade des

Prélats_, which, judging from its remains, did not yield in stateliness

to any of the earlier portions of the castle. From this side a fine

flight of double steps still descends to a garden set with statues and

fountains; and beyond it lies the vast stone terrace which forms the

roof of the collegial church, and is continued by a _chemin de ronde_

crowning the lofty ramparts on the summit of the rock.

This princely edifice remained in unaltered splendour for sixty years

after the house of Adhémar, in the person of Madame de Sévigné’s

grandson, had died out, ruined and diminished, in 1732. But when the

Revolution broke, old memories of the Comte de Grignan’s dealings with

his people--of unpaid debts, extorted loans, obscure lives devoured by

the greedy splendour on the rock--all these recollections, of which one

may read the record in various family memoirs, no doubt increased the

fury of the onslaught which left the palace of the Adhémar a blackened

ruin. If there are few spots in France where one more deeply resents

the senseless havoc of the Revolution, there are few where, on second

thoughts, one so distinctly understands what turned the cannon on the

castle.

The son-in-law of Madame de Sévigné was the most exorbitant as he

was the most distinguished of his race; and it was in him that the

splendour and disaster of the family culminated. But probably no

visions of future retribution disturbed the charming woman who spent--a

victim to her maternal passion--her last somewhat melancholy years in

the semi-regal isolation of Grignan. No one but La Bruyère seems, in

that day, to have noticed the “swarthy livid animal, crouched over

the soil, which he digs and turns with invincible obstinacy, but who,

when he rises to his feet, _shows a human countenance_”--certainly he

could not be visible, toiling so far below, from that proud terrace of

the Adhémar which makes the church its footstool. Least of all would

he be perceptible to the eyes--on other lines so discerning!--of the

lady whose gaze, when not on her daughter’s face, remained passionately

fixed on the barrier of northern mountains, and the highway that ran

through them to Paris. Paris! Grignan seems far enough from it even

now--what an Ultima Thule, a land of social night, it must have been

in the days when Madame de Sévigné’s heavy travelling carriage had to

bump over six hundred miles of rutty road to reach the doors of the

Hôtel Carnavalet! One had to suffer Grignan for one’s adored daughter’s

sake--to put up, as best one could, with the clumsy civilities of

the provincial nobility, and to console one’s self by deliciously

ridiculing the pretensions of Aix society--but it was an exile, after

all, and the ruined rooms of the castle, and the long circuit of the

_chemin de ronde_, are haunted by the wistful figure of the poor

lady who, though in autumn she could extol the “sugary white figs,

the Muscats golden as amber, the partridges flavoured with thyme and

marjoram, and all the scents of our sachets,” yet reached her highest

pitch of eloquence when, with stiff fingers and shuddering pen, she

pictured the unimaginable February cold, the “awful beauty of winter,”

the furious unchained Rhone, and “the mountains _charming in their

excess of horror_.”

[Illustration: VALENCE: THE CATHEDRAL]

IV

THE RHONE TO THE SEINE

From Montélimar to Lyons the “great north road” to Paris follows almost

continuously the east shore of the Rhone, looking across at the feudal

ruins that stud the opposite cliffs. The swift turns of the river, and

the fantastic outline of these castle-crowned rocks, behind which hang

the blue lines of the Cévennes, compose a foreground suggestive in its

wan colour and abrupt masses of the pictures of Patinier, the strange

Flemish painter whose ghostly calcareous landscapes are said to have

been the first in which scenery was painted for scenery’s sake. In all

the subtler elements of beauty, as well as in the power of historic

suggestion, this Rhone landscape far surpasses that of the Rhine; but,

like many of the most beautiful regions of France, it has a quality of

aloofness, of almost classic reserve, that defends it from the inroads

of the throng.

Midway to Lyons, Valence, the capital of Cæsar Borgia’s Valentinois,

rises above the river, confronted, on the opposite shore, by a wild

cliff bearing the ruined stronghold of Crussol, the cradle of the house

of Uzès. The compact little Romanesque cathedral of Saint Etienne,

scantily adorned by the light exterior arcade of its nave, is seated

on an open terrace overlooking the Rhone. As sober, but less mellow,

within, it offers--aside from the monument to Pius VI., who ended

his troubled days here--only the comparatively recondite interest of

typical constructive detail; and the impressionist sight-seer is likely

to wander out soon to the little square beyond the apse.

Here stands “Le Pendentif,” a curious little vaulted building of the

Renaissance, full of the note of character, though its original purpose

seems to be the subject of archæological debate. Like many buildings

of this part of the Rhone valley, it was unhappily constructed of a

stone on which the wear of the weather might suggest the literal action

of the “tooth of Time”--so scarred and gnawed is the whole charming

fabric. As to its original use, it appears to have been the mortuary

chapel of the noble family whose arms are discernible among the

incongruous animals of its decaying sculpture; for it is part of the

strangeness of the little monument that the spandrils of its elegant

classic order are inhabited by a rude Romanesque fauna which, combined

with the dusky hue and ravaged surface of the stone, confers on it, in

contrast to the rejuvenated church, a look of mysterious antiquity.

A few yards off, down a dark narrow street, the same savour of the

past is found in one of those minor relics which let the observer

so much deeper into by-gone institutions than the study of their

official monuments. This is simply an old private house of the early

Renaissance, with a narrow sculptured courtyard, a twisting staircase,

and vaulted stone passages and rooms of singularly robust construction.

It is still--appropriately enough--inhabited by _une très vieille dame_

who has receded so deeply into the farthest convolution of her stout

stone shell that her friendly portress had leave to conduct us from

basement to attic, giving us glimpses of dusky chambers with meagre

venerable furniture, and of kitchens and offices with stone floors,

scoured coppers and pots of herbs, all so saturated with the old

concentrated life of provincial France that it was like lifting to

one’s lips a glass of some ancient wine just at the turning-point of

its perfection.

[Illustration: VIENNE: GENERAL VIEW OF THE TOWN]

Not far from Valence, Tournon springs romantically from a cliff of the

west bank, surmounted by the ducal castle of Soubise; and the next

strong impression comes where Vienne, proudest of Rhone towns, lifts

its flamboyant cathedral on a vast flight of steps above the river.

The site of Vienne, and its long Roman past, prepare one for more

interest of detail than a closer inspection reveals. The Roman temple,

which may once have rivalled the Maison Carrée, was in the Middle Ages

(like the temple of Syracuse) incorporated in a Christian church, and

now, extricated lifeless from this fatal embrace, presents itself as

an impersonal block of masonry from which all significance of detail

is gone. The cathedral, too, has suffered in the same way, though

from other causes. In its early days it was savagely mutilated by the

Huguenots, and since then the weather, eating deeply into its friable

stone, has wrought such havoc with the finery and frippery of the

elaborate west front that the exterior attracts attention only as a

stately outline.

All the afternoon we had followed the Rhone under a cloudy sky; and

as we crossed the river at Vienne the clouds broke, and we pushed

northward through a deluge. Our day had been a long one, with its large

parenthesis at Grignan, and the rainy twilight soon closed in on us,

blotting out the last miles of the approach to Lyons. But even this

disappointment had its compensations, for in the darkness we took a

wrong turn, coming out on a high suburb of the west bank, with the

city outspread below in a wide network of lights against its holy hill

of Fourvière. Lyons passes, I believe, for the most prosaic of great

French towns; but no one can so think of it who descends on it thus

through the night, seeing its majestic bridges link quay to quay, and

the double sweep of the river reflecting the million lights of its

banks.

* * * * *

It was still raining when we continued on our journey the next day; but

the clouds broke as we climbed the hill above Lyons, and we had some

fine backward glimpses of the Rhone before our road began to traverse

the dull plain of the Bresse.

So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!

If the lines have pursued one from childhood, the easiest--and, alas,

the most final!--way of laying their lovely spectre is to turn aside

from the road to Dijon and seek out the church of Brou. To do so, one

must journey for two or three hours across one of the flat stretches of

central France; and the first disillusionment comes when Brou itself

is found to be no more than a faubourg of the old capital of the

Bresse--the big, busy, cheese-making town of Bourg, sprawling loosely

among boundless pastures, and detaining one only by the graceful

exterior of its somewhat heterogeneous church.

A straight road runs thence through dusty outskirts to the shrine of

Margaret of Austria, and the heart of the sentimentalist sank as we

began to travel it. Here, indeed, close to the roadside, stood “the new

pile,” looking as new as it may have when, from her white palfrey, the

widowed Duchess watched her “Flemish carvers, Lombard gilders” at work;

looking, in fact, as scrubbed, scraped and soaped as if its renovation

were a feat daily performed by the “seven maids with seven mops” on

whose purifying powers the walrus so ingeniously speculated. Matthew

Arnold’s poem does not prepare the reader for the unnatural gloss which

makes the unhappy monument look like a celluloid toy. Perhaps when he

saw it the cleansing process had not begun--but did he ever really see

it? And if so, where did he see the

Savoy mountain meadows,

By the stream below the pines?

And how could he have pictured the Duchess Margaret as being “in the

mountains” while she was supervising the work? Or the “Alpine peasants”

as climbing “up to pray” at the completed shrine, or the priest

ascending to it by the “mountain-way” from the walled town “below the

pass”?

Is Bourg the walled town, and its dusty faubourg the pass? And shall

we, when we pass under the traceries of the central door, and stand

beneath the vaulting of the nave, hear overhead the “wind washing

through the mountain pines”? It will have to travel a long way to make

itself heard!

Poor Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, so maligned for her imaginative

pictures of Lovere and Lake Iseo, may surely be forgiven for having

gilded the lily, for adding an extra touch of romance where the

romantic already so abounded; but it is less easy to explain how the

poet of the church of Brou could evoke out of the dusty plain of the

Bresse his pine-woods, streams and mountains. Perhaps (the pilgrim

reflects) the explanation will be found within the church, and standing

in the magic light of the “vast western window” we too shall hear the

washing of the wind in the pines, and understand why it travelled so

far to reach the poet’s ear.

[Illustration: BROU: TOMB OF MARGARET OF AUSTRIA IN THE CHURCH]

In this hope we enter; but only to discover that inside also the

archæological mops have been at work, and that the elaborate lining

of the shrine is as scoured and shiny as its exterior. Well! let us

affront this last disenchantment--and the little additional one of

buying a ticket for the choir from a gold-braided custodian at a desk

in the nave--and closing our eyes to the secularised, museumised aspect

of the monument, try to open them to a vision of what it may have

been before it was turned into a show.

Alas! even this last effort--this _bon mouvement_ of the

imagination--fails to restore an atmosphere of poetry to the church of

Brou, to put it in any other light than that of a kind of superlative

“Albert Memorial,” in which regardlessness of cost has frankly

predominated over æsthetic considerations. Yet it is manifestly unfair

to charge the Duchess Margaret with the indiscrimination of the

_parvenu_. One should rather ascribe to special conditions of time and

place that stifling confusion of ornament, that air of being, as Bacon

puts it, so terribly “daubed with cost,” which is both the first effect

and the final outcome of an inspection of Brou. If Arnold gave the

rein to fancy in his _mise-en-scène_, he was quite exact in picturing

the conditions in which the monument was produced, and his enumeration

of the “Flemish carvers, Lombard gilders, German masons, smiths from

Spain” who collaborated in its making, reminds one that artistic

unity could hardly result from so random an association of talents.

It was characteristic of the time, of the last boiling-over of the

heterogeneous Gothic pot, that this strange fellowship was not felt to

be any obstacle to the production of a work of art. One sees the same

result in almost all the monuments of the period, especially where the

Spanish-Netherlands influence has added a last touch of profusion--and

confusion. How could an art so evolved issue in anything but a chaos of

overdone ornament? How could line survive in such a deluge of detail?

The church of Brou is simply the most distressing because the most

expensive product of the period. Expiring Gothic changed its outline

as often as the dying dolphin is supposed to change his colours--every

ornament suggests a convulsion in stone.

And on all this extravagance of design, which could be real redeemed

only by the lightest touch of the chisel, lies the heavy hand of the

Flemish sculptor. Is it possible that the same phase of artistic

feeling produced the three tombs of Brou and those of the Dukes of

Burgundy at Dijon? Certainly, at least, the same hand did not carve

them. At Brou the innumerable subordinate figures--angels, mourners

and the rest--are turned out with the unerring facility of the

pastry-cook’s art: they represent the highest achievement in sugar

and white of egg. At Dijon, on the contrary, each _pleureur_ in the

arcade beneath the tomb of Duke Philip is a living, sentient creature,

a mourner whose grief finds individual utterance. Is there anything

in plastic art that more vividly expresses the passionate mediæval

brooding over death? Each little cowled figure takes his grief, his

sense of the _néant_, in his own way. Some are wrung and bowed with

it. One prays. Another, a serene young man, walks apart with head bent

above his book--the page of a Stoic, one conjectures. And so each, in

his few inches of marble, and in the confinement of his cramped little

niche, typifies a special aspect of the sense of mortality--above all

of its loneliness, the way it must be borne without help.

* * * * *

The thought came to one, the next day at Dijon, the more vividly by

contrast to the simpering sorrow of Brou. The tombs of the dukes of

Burgundy, so cruelly torn from the hallowed twilight of the Chartreuse,

and exposed to the cold illumination of museum windows, give one, even

in this impersonal light, a strong sense of personality. Even the

overladen detail of the period, the aimless striving of its frets and

finials, cannot obscure the serious purity of the central conception;

and one is led to the conclusion that a touch of free artistic emotion

will break through the strongest armour of stock formulas.

One sees them, of course, the ducal tombs, in a setting in a certain

sense their own, since this privileged city, in addition to its other

distinctions, has a mediæval palace for its museum, and the mailed

heels of the recumbent dukes may have rung on the stone flagging of the

Salle des Gardes where they now lie. But the great vaulted hall has

ceased to be a guard-room, as they have ceased to be its lords, and the

trail of label and number, of velvet cord and iron rail, is everywhere

in their democratised palace. It is noteworthy, therefore, that, as the

tombs have retained so much of their commemorative value, so the palace

itself has yielded as little as might be of its private character to

the encroachments of publicity: appearing almost, as one wanders from

one bright room to another, like the house of a great collector who

still lives among his treasures.

[Illustration: DIJON: MOURNERS ON THE TOMB OF JEAN SANS PEUR]

This felicitous impression is partly due to the beauty of the old

building, and partly also to the fact that it houses a number of small

collections, the spoils of local dilettanti, each kept together,

however diversified its elements, so that many of the rooms exhibit a

charming habitable mingling of old furniture, old porcelain and the

small unobtrusive pictures that are painted to be lived with, not

glanced up at from a catalogue.

The impression of happy coincidences, of really providential accidents,

which gives such life to the bright varied museum, persists and deepens

as one passes from it into the town--the astonishing town which seems

to sum up in itself almost every phase of French art and history. Even

the deep soil of France has hardly another spot where the past grows so

thick and so vigorously, where the ancient growths lift such hale heads

to the sunlight. The continuity of life at Dijon is as striking as its

diversity and its individuality. Old Dijon is not an archipelago of

relics in a sea of modern houses: it is like a vascular system, binding

the place together in its network of warm veins, and seeming, not to be

kept alive, but to be keeping life in the city.

It is to this vivid synthesis of the past that one reverts from even

the strongest single impressions--from the civic sumptuousness of the

Palais de Justice, the elegance of the Hôtel de Vogué, the mysterious

symbolism of the jutting row of gargoyles on the west front of Notre

Dame--suffering them to merge themselves, these and many more, into

a crowded splendid tapestry, the mere background of the old city’s

continuous drama of ducal, Imperial, parliamentary life.

The same impression of richness, of deep assimilated experience,

accompanies one on the way north through the Burgundian

province--giving to the trivial motorist, the mere snarer of haphazard

impressions, so annihilating a sense of his inability to render even

a superficial account of what he sees, and _feels beneath the thing

seen_, that there comes a moment when he is tempted to take refuge

in reporting the homely luxury, of the inns--though even here the

abundance of matter becomes almost as difficult to deal with.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that after a morning among the hills

and valleys of the Morvan, in sight, almost continuously, of that

astonishing Burgundian canal, with its long lines of symmetrical

poplars, its massive masonry, its charming lock-houses, all repeating

themselves like successive states of a precious etching--that after

such a morning I seek, and seem to find, its culminating astonishment

in the luncheon which crowned it in the grimy dining-room of the

_auberge_ at Précy-sous-Thil. But was it an _auberge_, even, and not

rather a _gargote_, this sandy onion-scented “public,” with waggoners

and soldiers grouped cheerfully about their _petit vin bleu_, while a

flushed hand-maid, in repeated dashes from the kitchen, laid before us

a succession of the most sophisticated dishes--the tenderest filet, the

airiest _pommes soufflées_, the plumpest artichokes that ever bloomed

on the buffet of a Parisian restaurant? It corresponded, at any rate,

to the kind of place where, in any Anglo-Saxon country, one would have

found the company as prohibitory as the food, and each equally a reason

for fleeing as soon as possible from the other.

So it is that Précy-sous-Thil may stand as a modest symbol of the

excessive amenity of this mellowest of French civilisations--the more

memorably to one party of hungry travellers because it formed, at the

same time, the final stage of their pilgrimage to Vézelay.

That thought, indeed, distracted us from the full enjoyment of the

filet, and tore us from the fragrant coffee that our panting waitress

carried after us to the motor’s edge; for more than half the short

April day was over, and we had still two hours of steep hill and vale

between ourselves and Vézelay.

The remainder of the way carried us through a region so romantically

broken, so studded with sturdy old villages perched on high ledges or

lodged in narrow defiles, that but for the expectation before us every

mile of the way would have left an individual impression. But on the

road to Vézelay what can one see but Vézelay? Nothing, certainly, less

challenging to the attention than the loftily seated town of Avallon

which, midway of our journey, caught and detained us for a wondrous

hour.

[Illustration: AVALLON: GENERAL VIEW OF THE TOWN]

The strain of our time-limit, and the manifold charms of the old town,

so finely planted above the gorge of the Cousin, had nearly caused us

to defer Vézelay, and end our day’s journey at the Hôtel du Chapeau

Rouge. But in the mild air, and on the extreme verge of the bright

sky, there was a threat of rain, and the longing to see the great

Benedictine abbey against such a sunset as the afternoon promised was

even stronger than the spell of Avallon. We carried away therefore

(with the fixed intention of returning) only the general impression of

a walled town set against a striking background of cliff and woodland,

and one small vivid vignette of a deserted square where aged houses of

incredible picturesqueness grouped themselves at scenic angles about

the sculptured front of the church of Saint Lazare.

From Avallon to Vézelay the road winds to the west, between the leafy

banks of the Cousin, through the town of Pontaubert, with its ancient

church of the Templars, past the bridge of the Cure, and out at last

into the valley dominated by the conical hill of Vézelay. All day the

vision of the Benedictine church had hung before us beyond each bend of

the road; and when at length we saw its mighty buttresses and towers

clenched in the rock, above the roofs and walls of the abbatial town,

we felt the impact of a great sensation--for the reality was nobler

than the vision.

The mere sight of Vézelay from the valley--quite apart from the rush

of associations it sets free--produces the immediate effect of one of

those perfect achievements in which art and nature interpret and fulfil

each other. The church stands just where such a building should stand,

and looks as a building should look to be worthy of such a site. The

landscape about it has the mingled serenity and ruggedness which its

own lines express, and its outline grows out of the hill-top without a

break between the structural harmony of the two.

[Illustration: VÉZELAY: NARTHEX OF THE CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE]

Before mounting up to compare the detailed impression with the first

effect, one is detained by the village of Saint Père (Pierre) sous

Vézelay, which lies just at the foot of the road leading up to the

abbey. Here, from a heap of sordid houses, and among stifling barnyard

exhalations, rises the sweet worn old church of Saint Pierre, younger

in date than the abbey church above, but stained and seamed by time.

From the stone embroideries of its triple porch and its graceful

fantastic narthex, it might pass, at first glance, for a more than

usually temperate specimen of flamboyant Gothic; but if one backs away

far enough to take in its whole outline, the upper façade and the

tower reveal themselves as an exquisite instance of thirteenth-century

transition. The tower, in particular, with its light ranges or arcades,

and the slender trumpeting angels that so surprisingly buttress its

angles, seems, as an observant traveller has already noted, more

Italian than Burgundian--though to find its match in Italy one would

have to seek, not among actual church-towers, but in the backgrounds of

early Tuscan pictures, where, against a sky of gold-leaf, such heralds

sound their call from the thatch of the manger.

After the mystical vision of the bell-tower of Saint Père it is almost

a drop back to prose to climb the hill to Vézelay and stand before

the church of the Magdelen--or rather it is like turning from the

raptures of Joachim of Flora or Hugo of Saint Victor to the close-knit

dialectic of Saint Thomas Aquinas. This vast creation of mediæval faith

might indeed be likened to the great doctrinal system out of which it

grew--such a strong, tight, complex structure, so studied, balanced

and mathematically exact it seems.

It has seen, the great church, in its well-nigh thousand years of

existence, sights so splendid and memorable that it seems at first a

mere background for its memories--for the figures of Saint Bernard and

Becket, of Philip Augustus and Cœur de Lion, with their interminable

train of clerical and secular dignitaries, monks, nobles, doctors of

the Church, and all the wild impassioned rout of the second and third

Crusades. To have seen so much, and now to stand so far apart from

life! One reflects on the happier fate of those other great churches of

lay growth, the French cathedrals, whose hearts beat warm for so many

centuries, through so many social and political alternations.

The situation of the church of Vézelay typifies this deeper solitude.

It stands alone on the crest of the hill, divided from the town

below by a wide stony square. Behind the apse, where the monastic

buildings lay, a shady grassy slope simulates the privacy of an

English close--and on all sides are the blue distances of the Morvan.

This loftiness and detachment of site give a peculiar majesty to

the building, and conduce no doubt to the impression that in all

church architecture there is nothing quite like it, nothing in which

the passive strength of the elder style so imperceptibly blends with

the springing grace of the new. The latter meets one first, in the

two-storied narthex, a church in itself, which precedes the magnificent

round-arched portals of the inner building. It is from the threshold of

this narthex that, looking down its lofty vista, and through the triple

doorways to the vast and stern perspective of the Romanesque nave, one

gets the keenest impression of the way in which, in this incomparable

building, the two styles have been wrought into an accord that shows

their essential continuity. In the nave itself, with the doors of the

narthex closed, another, subtler impression awaits one; for here one

seems to surprise the actual moment of transition, to see, as nowhere

else, the _folded wings of the Gothic_ stirring under the older forms.

More even than its rich mysterious sculptures, far more than its mere

pride of size and majesty, does this undefinable _fremissement_ of the

old static Romanesque lines remain with one as the specific note of

Vézelay: giving it, in spite of its age-long desertion, in spite of

the dead and staring look produced by indiscriminate restoration, an

inner thrill of vitality, the promise of “strange futures beautiful and

young,” such as the greatest art alone possesses.

The long spring sunset filled the sky when we turned from Vézelay and

began to wind through the valley of the Cure to Auxerre. The day had

been too rich in impressions to leave space for more than a deep sense

of changing loveliness as we followed the curves of the river through

poplar-planted meadows, by white chalk-cliffs and villages hanging on

the heights. But among these fugitive impressions is the vivid memory

of a white railway viaduct, so lightly yet securely flung across the

valley that in the golden blur of sunset it suggested one of Turner’s

dream-bridges spanning a vale of Tempe: a notable instance of the

almost invariable art with which, in French engineering, the arch is

still employed. After that the way grew indistinct, and night had

fallen when we entered Auxerre--feeling our way through a dimly lit

suburb, seeing the lights of the town multiplied in the quiet waters of

the Yonne, and reaching it at last by a bridge that led straight to

the steep central street.

* * * * *

Auxerre, the next day--even through the blinding rain which so

punctually confirmed our forebodings--revealed itself as one of those

close-knit, individual old French towns that are as expressive, as full

of vivacity and character, as certain French faces. Finely massed above

the river, in a pile culminating with the towers of the cathedral and

the detached shaft of Saint Jean, it confirms, and indeed exceeds, on

a nearer view, the promise of its distant aspect. A town which has had

the good fortune to preserve its walls and one or two of its fortified

gates, has always--and more especially if seated on a river--the

more obvious opportunities for picturesqueness; and at Auxerre the

narrow streets rising from the quay to the central group of buildings

contribute many isolated effects--carved door, steep gable or opportune

angle-turret--to the general distinction of the scene.

The cathedral itself is the heart of the charming old place--so rich in

tone, so impressive in outline, so profusely yet delicately adorned,

it rose at the end of the long market-square, shedding on it, even

through the grey sheets of rain, the warmth of its high tawny masses.

The design of the western front is so full and harmonious that it

effaces from memory the less salient impression of the interior. Under

a more favourable light, which would have brought out the colours of

the rich clerestory glass, and the modelling of shafts and vaulting, it

would have seemed, no doubt, less austere, more familiarly beautiful;

but veiled and darkened by rain-clouds it offered, instead of colour

and detail, only an unfolding of cavernous arches fading into the deep

shades of the sanctuary.

The adjoining Bishop’s palace, with its rugged Romanesque arcades

planted on a bit of Gallo-Roman city wall, and the interesting fragment

of the church of Saint Germain, beside the hospital, are among the

other notable monuments of Auxerre; but these too, masked by the

incessant downpour, remained in memory as mere vague masses of dripping

masonry, pressed upon by a low black sky.

The rain pursued us northward from Auxerre along the valley of the

Yonne, lifting a little toward noon to leave the landscape under

that grey-green blur through which the French _paysagistes_ have most

persistently seen it. Joigny, with this light at its softest, seemed,

even after Auxerre, one of the most individual of ancient French

towns: its long and stately quay, closed by a fine gate at each end of

the town, giving it in especial a quite personal character, and one

which presented itself as a singularly happy solution of the problem

of linking a town to its river. Above the quay the steep streets gave

many glimpses of mediæval picturesqueness, tucked away at almost

inaccessible angles; but the rain closed in on them, and drove us on

reluctantly to Sens.

Here the deluge hung a still denser curtain between us and the

amenities of this singularly charming town. Sens, instead of being,

like Joigny, packed tight between river and cliff, spreads out with

relative amplitude between Roman ramparts transformed into shady

promenades; and about midway of the town, at the end of a long

market-place like that of Auxerre, the cathedral rears itself in

such nobility and strength of line that one instantly revises one’s

classification of the great French churches to make room for this one

near the top.

Its beauties develop and multiply on a nearer view, and its kinship

with Canterbury makes it, to those under the spell of that noblest of

English choirs, of peculiar architectural interest. But when one has

done full justice to the long unfolding of the nave, to the delicate

pallour of Cousin’s glass, and to the associations attached to the

“altar of Becket” behind the choir, one returns finally to the external

composition of the apsidal chapels as the most memorable and perfect

thing at Sens. The development of the _chevet_, which Romanesque

architecture bequeathed to Gothic, is perhaps the happiest product of

the latter growth on French soil; and after studying so complex an

example of its possibilities as the apse of Sens presents, one feels

anew what English Gothic lost in committing itself to the square east

end.

[Illustration: SENS: APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL]

Of great historic interest is the so-called _Officialité_ which

adjoins the cathedral--a kind of diocesan tribunal built under Louis

IX.; but its pointed windows and floriated niches have been so

liberally restored that it has the too Gothic look of a mediæval

stage-setting. Sens has many other treasures, not only in its unusually

rich collection of church relics and tapestries, but among the

fragments of architecture distributed through its streets; and in the

eighteenth century gates of the archiepiscopal palace it can show a

specimen of wrought-iron work probably not to be matched short of Jean

Lamour’s gates at Nancy.

One of its most coveted possessions-Jean Cousin’s famous picture of

the _Eva prima Pandora_--has long been jealously secluded by its

present owner; and one wonders for what motive the inveterate French

hospitality to lovers of art has been here so churlishly reversed. The

curious mystical interest of the work, and its value as a link in the

history of French painting, make it, one may say, almost a _monument

historique_, a part of the national heritage; and perhaps the very

sense of its potential service to art gives a perverse savour to its

possessor’s peculiar mode of enjoying it.

From Sens to Fontainebleau the road follows the valley of the Yonne

through a tranquil landscape with level meadows and knots of slender

trees along the river, till the border of the forest is reached, and a

long green alley takes one straight to the granite cross on the edge of

the town. Toward afternoon the rain turned to a quiet drizzle, of the

kind that becomes the soft French landscape as a glass becomes certain

pictures; and through it we glided on, past the mossy walls of great

estates, past low-lying châteaux, green _pièces d’eau_, mid the long

grassy vistas that are cut in every direction through the forests about

Melun. This district of big “shootings” and carefully tended preserves

extends almost to the outer ring of environs. Beyond them Paris itself

soon rose smokily through the rain, and a succession of long straight

avenues, as carefully planted as if they had been the main arteries of

a fashionable suburb, led us thence to the Porte de Choisy.

To be back in the roar of traffic, to feel the terrific pressure of

those miles of converging masonry, gave us, after weeks of free air

and unbounded landscape, a sense of congestion that made the crowded

streets seem lowering and dangerous; but as we neared the river, and

saw before us the curves of the lifted domes, the grey strength of the

bridges, and all the amazing symmetry and elegance of what in other

cities is mean and huddled and confused, the touch of another beauty

fell on us--the spell of “_les seuils sacrés, la Seine qui coule_.”