at Wilmington, and later consul at New York. But there were great
difficulties between the United States and France; he could not obtain
his exequatur. He tried to console himself by devotion to botany. But
the wound which he had received still bled. "I do not know," he wrote to
Madame Louvet, "when the wound of my heart will be sufficiently healed
to allow me to revisit without too much bitterness the places and the
individuals still dear to me, whose presence will bring back to me cruel
memories. Although I am much more calm than when I left, although I am
actually easily distracted by my scientific labors and even by manual
occupations, I do not feel that I have courage to return to Paris. I
still need to see persons to whom I am indifferent, in order to accustom
myself to facing certain persons whom I have loved and whom I cannot
forget, whatever injustice they may have done to me or to the Republic,
without counting my Eudora...." And his memory takes him back to the
dear retreat of Sainte Radegonde; he writes to Bancal: "Well! Then
you no longer go to visit Sainte Radegonde? Do you then take no more
interest in it? I conclude from that that you will undergo no further
expense on account of it and that you will soon get rid of it.
Nevertheless I had the project of planting there many trees from this
country, since it is the soil most similar to that of South Carolina
that I know in the neighborhood of Paris..."
Bosc did see Sainte Radegonde again. At the end of two years he returned
to France and married one of his cousins. The Revolution was over and
Eudora was forgotten.
From that time on, he gave himself up entirely to his work as a
naturalist. He became Inspector of the nurseries of Versailles and also
of those which were maintained by the Ministry of the Interior. In
1806 he was elected a member of the Institute. In 1825 he succeeded
his friend André Thouin as Professor of Horticulture at the Botanical
Garden, and after a long and cruel illness, which prevented him from
lecturing, he died in 1828.
In 1801, when the first daughter born of his marriage had died in
infancy, he had begged Bancal to transfer to him two perches of land in
his domain of Sainte. Radegonde, in order that he might bury his child
there. Such was the origin of the little cemetery where Bosc reposes in
the midst of his children and his grandchildren.
I have not regretted making a pilgrimage and evoking, in the autumnal
forest, the phantoms of these Revolutionists and these botanists.
How touching a figure is that of this Bosc, whose name recalls--it is
Laréveillière-Lépeaux who speaks--"the most generous friendship, the
most heroic courage, the purest patriotism, the most active humanity,
the most austere probity, the most determined boldness, and at the
same time the most extended knowledge in natural science and different
branches of administration as well as in political, domestic and rural
economy..." and also, let us add, the eternal blindness of the amorous
Arnolphe!
V. SENLIS
|THE spire of the ancient cathedral of Senlis overlooks an immense
horizon. This belfry is the lightest, the most elegant, the most
harmonious that Gothic art has given us. It rises with a flight so
magnificent and so perfectly rhythmical that at the first glance one
might think it a growth of nature; it seems to live with the same life
as the heavens, the clouds and the birds. This masterly grace, this warm
beauty, are, however, the work of time and of men. An architect endowed
with genius thought out this miraculous plan, proportioned with
this infallible precision the elevation of the different landings,
distributed the openings and the surfaces, invented the pointed turrets
and the frail columns which flank the edifice, taper off its structure,
precipitate its flight and make it impossible to perceive the point at
which the square tower is transformed into an octagonal spire, so that
the highest pyramid seems to burst forth from a long corolla. Then the
centuries have painted the stones with the pale gold of lichens, and
have completed the masterpiece.
The whole of Senlis seems to have been built for the glory of its spire.
Streets, gardens, squares, monuments, houses, all seem to be arranged
by a mysterious artist, who persists in incessantly bringing back our
glance to the dominating spire, the better to reveal to us all its
graces and all its magnificence, at all times and under all lights.
We wander at random about the little episcopal city: it is charming,
tortuous and taciturn, with its moss-covered pavements, its deserted
alleys, its flowering orchards, its shadowed promenades, its ancient
houses. We discover at every step houses of earlier days which the
barbarism of the men of the present time has spared: here turrets,
spiral staircases, doors surmounted by old escutcheons, long
half-grotesque gargoyles, mullioned windows, evoke the refined elegance
of the fifteenth century; yonder, a wall decorated with pilasters and
medallions, or a noble brick and stone crow-stepped façade, witness the
opulence of the citizenry at the time of the second Renaissance; there
are admirable remains of hospitals of the thirteenth century; heavy
Tuscan porches stand before beautiful hôtels of the eighteenth: and
all this rich and varied architecture is an excellent commentary on the
words of Jean de Jandun, the historian of Senlis: "To be at Senlis is
to dwell in magnificent homes, whose vigorous walls are built, not of
fragile plaster, but of the hardest and most selected stone, placed
with an industrious skill, and whose cellars, surrounded by solid
constructions of stone, so cool the wines during the summer season,
thanks to the degree of their freshness, that the throat and the stomach
of drinkers thereby experience a supreme delight." (Note 5.)
To the charm of the spectacle is added the charm of ancient names: the
sinuous streets have retained their antique appellations. (How wise
is Senlis to maintain these strange words, carved in the stone, at the
corners of its streets, rather than to inscribe upon ignoble blue plates
the names of all the celebrities dear to Larousse!) The beautiful houses
of former days seem in some undiscoverable way to be more living when we
discover them in the Street of the Red Mail, the Street of the Trellis,
the Street of the White Pigeons, the Street of Tiphaine's Well, the
Street of the Little Chaâlis, the Impasse du Courtillet, etc.... An
amusing sign which represents three scholars arguing with an ape
would no longer have any flavor if we had to seek for it in some Place
Garibaldi; it is delicious when found at Unicom Crossways. On the old
Town Hall, an inscription continues to indicate the position of the
rabbit and broom market; and it is very fine that the name of Louis
Blanc or of Gambetta has not been given to the Street of the Cheese
Makers, were it only out of consideration for that excellent Jean de
Jandun who, decidedly, well knew how to appreciate all the merits of
Senlis, for he wrote in regard to the cheeses of his native town:
"The sweetest milk, a butter without admixture, fat cheeses, served in
abundance to mean and minor purses, banish that furious activity of the
brain which fatigues almost without exception the majority of admirers
of highly spiced meats, and thus furnish the well-regulated habitude
of a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove." Façades, names and
souvenirs are exquisite; and one says to one's self in sauntering about
Senlis that, even without the assistance of the treatment recommended by
Jean de Jandun, the silent and antique grace of the little town would be
sufficient to inspire in old neurasthenics "the regulated habitude of a
tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove...."
The promenade is charming. But neither the picturesqueness of the
streets, nor the beauty of the houses, nor the piquancy of the old
names, nor even the words of Jean de Jandun are worth as much as the
picture which here strike the glance at every turn: the spire, always
the spire of Notre Dame. It appears suddenly between two gables. It
projects above the old brownish tile roofs. Above the flower-covered
walls of the gardens it is framed between clumps of lilac and
horse-chestnut. It overlooks the houses, it dominates the parks. The
poor tower of Saint Peter, with its disgraceful lantern, sometimes
accompanies it at a distance, as if to make barbarians better appreciate
the grandeur and the slenderness of Notre Dame's incomparable spire.
Senlis has preserved the ruins of its royal château. It is a place which
abounds in memories, for a great number of the kings of France, from
the Carlovingians to Henri IV, came here to visit for a season. Even its
ruins are not without interest. They rest upon the Roman wall, which
has remained intact at this spot, and we find there a fireplace of the
thirteenth century, towers, casements.... But how completely indifferent
all this archaeology leaves us when we behold the spire of the cathedral
emerging from the greenery of the garden! The great trees conceal all
the rest of the church. We see only, mounting into the full heaven, the
golden pyramid, still finer and more aspiring in the midst of all these
spring greeneries. A mysterious harmony exists between the youthful
boldness, the robust lightness of the human work, and the triumphant
freshness of the new vegetation. Besides, the monuments of Gothic art
are as marvelously suited to intimacy with nature as to familiarity with
life.
This familiarity, which has so often been destroyed by foolishly
clearing away the surroundings of cathedrals, proves its value to us at
Senlis on the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame. This is a rectangular space,
where grass grows between the paving stones. The façade of the church is
framed by two rows of noble chestnuts. Behind a venerable wall rise the
turret and the gable of a fifteenth-century house. One might suppose it
to be the deserted and well-kept courtyard of a Flemish _béguinage_.
In this ancient frame, in the midst of this solitude, the cathedral
preserves all its youth. Here there is a perfect unison between the
building and its surroundings. Not only are the trees, the walls, the
houses, in harmony with the architecture, but this architecture itself
remains alive, because its proportions have not been falsified. The
dimensions of the square are exactly those which are needed in order
that our eye may be able to discover in their beauty of propinquity the
portal, the unfinished tower and the spire. All this is so perfect that
its grace is eternal.
This cathedral of Senlis would be an incomparable edifice even if it did
not possess its sublime spire.
The western portal is one of the most beautiful works of mediaeval
sculpture. On the two sides of the porch, as on the northern door of
Chartres, are arranged the kings and the prophets who foreshadowed the
Saviour in the Old Testament. Vandals have mutilated these statues in
olden times. In the nineteenth century other savages have restored them
and have put in the place of the broken heads masterpieces of bad taste
and silliness. Happily these malefactors have spared the rest of
the sculptures; they have touched neither the ruins of the charming
calendar, whose popular scenes unfold themselves above the kings and the
prophets, nor the marvelous statuettes, still almost intact, which adorn
the voussoirs of the portal, nor the bas-reliefs of the tympan where
angels huddle about the dead Virgin, that some may carry to heaven her
body and others her soul. As to the _Coronation of the Virgin_, which
occupies the upper part of the tympan, it also has been respected alike
by iconoclasts and by restorers. Of all the images of the Mother of God
which the sculpture of the thirteenth century has left us, I know none
more moving than this Virgin of Senlis. She is a peasant girl, a simple
country maid, with heavy features, and resignation in her face; her
unaccustomed hands can scarcely hold the scepter and the book; she is
ready for all dolors and for all beatitudes, extenuated by miracles,
harassed by maternity, still and always _ancilla Domini_, even in the
midst of the glories of the coronation and of the splendors of Paradise.
The church of the twelfth century, to which this doorway belongs, was
finished in the thirteenth, burned in the fourteenth, rebuilt in the
fifteenth, and again ruined by fire at the beginning of the sixteenth.
It is possible to discover in the cathedral of today the traces of these
various reconstructions. But, however interesting it may be to follow,
upon the stones of the monuments, the history of their vicissitudes, I
will spare you this somewhat austere amusement. Continuous archaeology
is tiresome.
I stop at the sixteenth century. It was at this period that the church
took the form and the aspect which it has preserved to our time.
[Illustration: 0117]
In 1505, the Bishop Charles de Blanchefort, together with the chapter,
addressed the following request to the King: "May it please the King
to have pity and compassion on the poor church of Senlis... which,
by fortune and inconvenience of fire, in the month of June, 1504, was
burned, the bells melted, and the belfry which is great, magnificent
and one of the notable of the kingdom, by means of the said fire in such
wise damaged that it is in danger of falling." Louis XII showed himself
favorable to the request. Nobles, citizens and merchants contributed to
the work. The spire was made firm. The walls of the nave were raised,
the vaulting was reconstructed, the transept was built, and there were
constructed at the north and south sides those two finely chiseled
portals which give to Notre Dame de Senlis so much elegance and
sumptuousness. How, without diminishing the pure beauty of the old
cathedral, the architects of the Renaissance should have been able to
give it this luxurious attire, this festal clothing; how, without damage
to the ancient edifice, they should have been able to envelop it with
all these laces and jewels of stone, slender columns, balustrades,
carved copings, pierced lanterns, is a miracle of taste and ingenuity.
The French builders of the first half of the sixteenth century often
produced such prodigies; but nowhere, I believe, has the success been as
complete as at Senlis.
In the interior, even though the nave is very short and the choir very
deep, the same impression of unity. Nevertheless, the balustrades in
Renaissance style, which garnish the upper galleries, shock us for
a moment. The discrepancy in the styles is more visible inside the
edifice. Outside the light envelops all and softens the contrasts; the
sun creates harmony.
The chapels are poorly decorated. The architects and clergy have there
rivaled each other in bad taste. They have broken open the apse to add
to it a chapel of the Virgin, which breaks all the lines of the monument
inside and out. Two statues of the thirteenth century, one representing
Saint Louis and the other Saint Levain, have been ridiculously colored,
so that one would take them today for products of the Rue Bonaparte.
A pretty Virgin of the fourteenth century would have been better off
without the new gilding which has been inflicted on it.....
At the end of the church, I read on one of the pillars the following
inscription: "Nicolas Jourdain, administrator of this parish, deceased
January 30, 1799.--This church owes to him its restoration and its
embellishment. The grateful parishioners have erected this monument to
him.--Marie Françoise Truyart, his spouse, equally benefactress of this
church, deceased January 17, 1811.--Pray for their souls."
Who was M. Jourdain? What embellishments does the church of Senlis owe
to him? I would have liked to know. X looked for the sacristan, that he
might tell me, and also that he might allow me to enter the sacristy,
where one may see the Dance of Fools on a capital. But the sacristan of
Notre Dame de Senlis dwells very far from his church, on the banks of
the Nonette, in the place called the Asses' Backs; he goes home before
eleven o'clock in the morning to get his lunch, and is never seen again
at the cathedral, according to the bell-ringer, before four o'clock in
the afternoon. So I returned at four o'clock. The sacristan was still
eating breakfast at the Asses' Backs.... So I shall never know anything
about either M. Nicolas Jourdain nor Marie Françoise Truyart, his wife.
* * * *
On the other bank of the Nonette, turn about. A little bridge over
a little river; some orchards, still pink and white with their last
flowers; a street which climbs through the town, whose roofs and uneven
gables are outlined softly against a sky of pale blue; remnants of
ramparts starred with golden flowers; great clumps of verdure rising
everywhere among the rosy roofs, and finally the great belfry dominating
all, the little town, the little valley, the fields which rise and fall
to the horizon. Behold, and if you are "one of us," you will recognize
the most perfect, the most elegant, the finest, the best arranged of all
the landscapes of the world. Here is France, the France of Fouquet, the
France of Corot.
And I must also, before leaving Senlis, announce that this truly
aristocratic town has not a single statue in its squares.
$VI. JUILLY
|THE Oratorist Fathers founded the college of Juilly September 2, 1639.
They still directed it when these lines were written. The world knows
what fate has since come to the masters of this old institution.
Here we are deep in the soil and the history of France. Juilly, an
ancient monastery of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, is seven
leagues from Paris, four leagues from Meaux, in the Parisis, in the
heart of the region where France discovered that it had a conscience, a
destiny, a tongue and an art. The earth here is so opulent, so fat and
so heavy that six oxen harnessed to a plow labor over the furrow. The
rich plateau lifts here and there in slow and measured undulations
or sinks in laughing and umbrageous folds. The brooks are called the
Biberonne, the Ru du Rossignol (Nightingale Brook); the villages,
Thieux, Compans, Dam-martin, Nantouillet. Joan of Arc prayed in the
church of Thieux. Saint Geneviève, to slake the thirst of one of her
companions, called forth the limpid spring about which the monastery
grew. All the virtues and all the legends of France render the air more
gentle and more salubrious here.
[Illustration: 0125]
The valley of Juilly has the modest and penetrating grace of the
exquisite landscapes of the Ile-de-France. At the bottom of the valley
stretch lawns and a pool with formal banks. On one of the slopes, a
beautiful park displays its grand parallel avenues, which debouch
on wide horizons, a park made expressly for the promenade of a
metaphysician, a Cartesian park. On the opposite slope, a farm, a
dovecote, then the vast buildings of the college, massive constructions
of the seventeenth century, whose austere and naked façades are not
without grandeur.
On the edge of the pool rises a chestnut tree, thrice centenarian.
Tradition will have that it sheltered the reveries of Malebranche. It
is perhaps in this place that the Oratorist read Descartes, with such
transports "that he was seized with palpitations of the heart, which
sometimes obliged him to interrupt his reading," an extraordinary
emotion which inspired Fontenelle with this delicious remark:
"The invisible and useless truth is not accustomed to find so much
sensitiveness among men, and the most ordinary objects of their passions
would hold themselves happy to be the object of as much."
The chestnut tree of Malebranche has been pruned. Under the weight of
centuries, its branches bent and broke. They have been cut, and the
venerable trunk now stretches toward the sky only the wounded stumps.
This spectacle in this place makes one think of the destiny of a
philosophy. The decaying branches of the system have been broken, the
soil has been strewn with the great branches under which men formerly
enjoyed the repose of certainty. But, when the pruner has finished his
task, we still admire the structure of the old tree and the fecundity of
the soil whence it grew.
The college, with its long corridors and its vast staircases,
preserves a monastic appearance, which would be severe and harsh if
the countryside, the grass plots, the park and the pool did not display
their gayety about the old walls. When M. Demolins and his imitators
created their new schools, they followed the example of England; but,
in a certain manner, they revived a French tradition. Before any
one thought of crowding children into the university barracks of the
nineteenth century, there were in France colleges where life was lived
in the open air, in the midst of a beautiful park.
Within, the house is grave and without luxury. The Oratorists were never
rich. The house has remained almost in the state in which it was in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapel only was rebuilt a few
years ago, for the ancient convent chapel of the thirteenth century had
fallen to ruins. The magnificent wainscot-ings of oak in the strangers'
refectory enframe paintings of the time of Louis XV, representing
skating, fishing and hunting scenes; the staircase which leads to the
apartments of the Superior is ornamented with a beautiful railing of
iron and brass; these are the only traces of ancient decoration to be
met with in the whole college.
But the ancient home is rich in memories. Before entering, we have
already half seen on the bank of the pool the meditative shade of
Malebranche. Other ghosts rise on every side. The Oratory of France
lives again at Juilly.
Here, in the chapel, is the image of Cardinal de Bérulle. This statue,
an admirable work by Jacques Sarazin, is the upper portion of a
mausoleum which the Oratorist Fathers of Paris had erected in their
institution to the memory of their founder. The cardinal, in full
canonicals, kneels on a _prie-dieu_, in the attitude of prayer, with an
open book before him. His head and the upper portion of his body turn
toward the left in a curious way, but the face is a prodigy of life and
expression. The coarse features, strongly accentuated, breathe good-will
and kindness. He has the magnificent ugliness of a saint.
The concordat of Francis I had caused the moral ruin of the convents of
France; the secular clergy, among the troubles of the religious wars,
had fallen into the most miserable condition, without piety, without
knowledge, and without manners, when, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Pierre de Bérulle, Madame Acarie and Saint Vincent de Paul
undertook the religious restoration of France, which the adjuration of
Henri IV had just definitely restored to Catholicism. Bérulle founded
the Oratory of France on the model of the Oratory of Rome, instituted by
Saint Philip Néri.
On November 11, 1611, Saint Martin's Day, in a house of the Faubourg
Saint Jacques, called the House of Petit Bourbon (the Val-de-Grâce was
later built on this same spot), Bérulle and five other priests assembled
to constitute a congregation. The aim of this was to "increase the
perfection of the priestly calling." But its rule and its spirit had
nothing in common with the rule and the spirit of the monastic orders.
The Oratorist does not pronounce special vows, and remains under the
jurisdiction of his bishop.
Bossuet, in his funeral oration on Father Bour-going, splendidly
summarized the constitution of the Oratory:
"The immense love of Pierre de Bérulle for the Church inspired him with
the design of forming a company to which he desired to give no other
spirit than the very spirit of the Church nor any other rules than its
canons, nor any other superiors than its bishops, nor any other bonds
than its charity, nor any other solemn vows than those of baptism and of
the priesthood.
"There, a holy liberty makes a holy engagement. One obeys without
dependence, one governs without commands; all authority is in
gentleness, and respect exists without the aid of fear. The charity
which banishes fear operates this great miracle, and, with no other yoke
than itself, it knows how, not only to capture, but even to annihilate
personal will."