associated in his mind with the memory of the trees of the park and
the waters of the pool.... In 1802, when he was Minister of the General
Police, he wished to come to visit his old college, he who, in the
time of the Terror, in the Nièvre and at Lyons, had added to the most
frightful massacres the most childish sacrilege. Events then passed
easily over the imagination of men, and even more quickly over
the imagination of a Fouché. An ex-Oratorist, Father Dotte-ville,
accompanied him to Juilly. The pupils received the visitors by singing
verses of their own composition:
Leaving, to revisit your friends,
The worries of the ministry,
Such leisures as are allowed you
In that solitary asylum;
Our forebears had the good fortune
To profit by your lessons....
This last allusion appeared a little too precise to Fouché, who turned
his back on the singers. But, after this moment of ill humor, his
Excellency showed himself very amiable. Fathers Lombois and Crenière,
his former associates, who still lived at Juilly, refused to speak to
him, however. But he did not despair of weakening their determination,
and it was he who in 1806 gave to the chapel of the college the
magnificent statue of Bérulle, of which I have spoken to you.
It was natural that Fouché, when he became an official under Bonaparte,
should show himself less vehemently irreligious than at the period when
he was the colleague of Collot d'Herbois. It was even necessary for
him to pretend devotion when Louis XVIII consented to give him a civil
position. But it is impossible to read without smiling the following
lines written to M. Charles Hamel, the historian of Juilly, by L.
Roberdeau, the former secretary of Fouché: "Here are the facts, whose
exactness I can guarantee to you. The curate of Ferrières always had a
place set for him at the chateau, when the Duke of Otranto was there. He
received from him annually a supplementary salary of six hundred francs
and was allowed to sign wood, bread and meat tickets ad libitum, as well
as to call for any other kind of aid or to distribute arms. The Duke
also gave a magnificent dais to the church. [This touch is exquisite,
when attributed to the former conventional who had methodically
plundered and wrecked all the churches of the Nièvre.] The doctor of
the château was required to take care of all the invalid poor of his
domains; he exacted that they should receive the same attention as
himself, etc." But this is the most admirable: "I do not know in what
sentiments the Duke of Otranto died; but I know that, when Louis XVIII
offered him an ambassadorship of the first rank, _he chose the humble
court of Dresden because the King of Saxony was known to be a sincerely
religious man._" I do not doubt that Fouché may have thus talked to his
credulous secretary. It is possible that he even said the same thing to
Louis XVIII. But the Kins: assuredly did not believe it, and was right.
I cannot decide to leave Fouché without quoting in this place some lines
from a magnificent portrait drawn by Charles Nodier. This passage is
almost unknown, being buried in the _Dictionnaire de la conversation_;
M. Charles Hamel has quoted it in his book: "There was not a feature in
his face, not a line in all its structure, on which work or care had
not left their imprint. His visage was pale, with a paleness which was
peculiar to himself. It was a cold but living tone, like that which time
gives to monuments. The power of his eyes, which were of a very clear
blue, but deprived of any light in their glance, soon prevailed over all
the impressions which his first aspect produced on one. Their curious,
exacting, profound, but immutably dull fixedness, had a quality which
was frightful.... I asked myself by what operation of the will he could
thus succeed in extinguishing his soul, in depriving the pupil of its
animated transparency, in withdrawing his glance into an invisible
sheath as a cat retracts its claws." This is wonderful!
*****
Father Fouché and Father Billaud were not the only masters of Juilly who
played a part in the Revolution. About the same time Father Gaillard
was regent of the sixth class, and Father Bailly was prefect of studies.
This Father Gaillard was a terrible man; he frightened his pupils by his
severity and his intractable piety. "Here is a man who, if justice had
been done, would have been burned, together with his writings," he
said before a portrait of Jean Jacques. In 1792 he left Juilly, having
exchanged his robe for the uniform of the National Guard; he went with
his company to Melun, where he married and became president of the
criminal court. Later he found means of paying a compliment to the First
Consul, and had the good luck again to come in contact with his former
associate Fouché. The latter elevated him to the Court of Cassation, and
made him one of his agents; Gaillard rendered great services to the Duke
of Otranto, at the court of Ghent.
Father Bailly also left the Oratory to take part in public affairs; but
he had more moderate opinions. As a deputy to the Convention from Meaux,
he voted against the death of the King; he was one of the Thermidorians,
took part in the Eighteenth Brumaire, and became a prefect of the
Empire....
If we believe with Taine that the Revolution was entirely an outcome
of Cartesianism and of the classic spirit, what a beautiful allegory is
this assembly of future Revolutionists in square caps, under the wide
branches of Malebranche's chestnut tree!
*****
The Oratory did not survive the Revolution, but Juilly outlived the
Oratory.
After 1789, the congregation was divided against itself. Some fathers
were willing to take the oath; others refused it. Some of the young
associates scorned the authority of the Superior General. The law of
August 18, 1792, dissolved the Oratory. But the Oratorists remained at
Juilly at the very height of the tumult. One day mobs from Meaux invaded
the buildings and pillaged the chapel; even after this, a few priests
and a score of pupils again assembled in the college. They left it only
during three months in 1793, when a military hospital was installed
in place of the school. After the Terror was over, the woman who
had acquired Juilly as a national property returned it to its former
masters. The college peopled itself anew.
Napoleon dreamed for a time of reestablishing the Oratory and of putting
it in charge of all secondary education; Jérôme was brought up
at Juilly. But this project was abandoned. But at least, when he
reorganized the University, Fontanes was inspired by the rules and the
programs of the colleges of the Oratory.
The last Oratorists retired in 1828. Juilly passed under the direction
of the Abbés de Scorbiac and de Salinis. Then comes another of the
glorious moments of its history. In 1830 and in 1831 Lamennais became
the guest of Juilly. Enveloped in his long black quilted coat, following
by choice the path at the water's edge--doubtless to rediscover there
memories of the pool of La Chesnaie, Lamennais carried back and forth,
under the trees of the old park, his passionate dreams. It was here
that he meditated his articles for L'Avenir, conceived the plan of the
"General Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty," composed the
ardent diatribes in which he claimed independence for the Church, the
right of teaching for Catholics, freedom to associate for the monks. It
was here that he charmed his friends by the sensitiveness of his heart
and frightened them by the boldness of his imagination. It was from
Juilly that he returned to Paris to appear with Lacordaire before the
Court of Assizes. It was from Juilly that he left for Rome....
Abbé Bautain and Abbé Carl, then Abbé Maricourt, directed Juilly
after MM. de Scorbiac and de Salinis, up to the time (1867) when the
reconstituted Oratory reentered in possession of the college founded by
Father de Condren.
In 1852 a few priests had been united by Father Pétetot, ex-curate of
Saint Roch, for the purpose of restoring the congregation dispersed at
the time of the Revolution. They had sought and found the traditions
of the former Oratory, and slowly "reconstituted in its entirety the
pacific and studious city built more than two centuries before by Father
de Bérulle." "They could then," said Cardinal Perraud, "place a living
model under their eyes in order, to imitate it." The Oratory was thus
reborn with the ancient rule which had formerly been its originally--a
simple association of lay priests submissive to bishops, it asked of its
members neither the vow of obedience nor the vow of poverty. [10] It
was natural that it should undertake the direction of Juilly, the most
ancient and the most glorious of its houses....
Here I end the rather desultory notes which I have made while visiting
Juilly and rummaging through its history. I wish to speak neither of
yesterday, nor of today..., nor of tomorrow. I have not attempted
to plead for the masters of Juilly, now threatened with again being
expelled from their house. I have not the ability to defend them, and
besides one cannot plead against a position already taken, or folly, or
wickedness.
Nor have I the candor to believe that the illustrious phantoms with
which are populated the shady avenues and the long galleries of Juilly,
Malebranche, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Lamennais, can move the vulgar
pedants to whom France now belongs. But if by chance I have evoked "the
long, mobile and flat face... the physiognomy like an agitated fizgig...
the little bloody eyes... the restless and convulsive attitudes" of
Joseph Fouché, I have allowed myself this historical amusement, without
thinking that the President of the Council may be able to take the same
pleasure in it. Father Fouché and the representative of the Mountain,
the bad Oratorist and the good Jacobin, must be congenial to him,
without doubt; but there is also the Duke of Otranto: M. Combes has not
yet got to that point.
Finally, if I have tried to show that the Oratory is attached by a close
bond to the past of France, that the mold in which, for two centuries
and a half, French intelligence was founded was fabricated at Juilly,
and that the very basis of our education remains Oratorist in spite
of everything, I have not for a single instant dreamed that these
considerations based on history could awake the least respect or the
least gratitude among the politicians, for these gentlemen are sincerely
convinced that France was born on the day when a majority of three
votes, captured, bought or stolen, made them ward bosses.
VII. THE CHÂTEAU DE MAISONS
|NOT long ago the Château of Asay-le-Rideau, a masterpiece of the French
art of the sixteenth century, was in peril. Today it is the turn of the
Chateau de Maisons, a masterpiece of the French art of the seventeenth
century. But this time it is not a question of a peril which is more
or less distant. The destruction of Maisons is a fact which is decided
upon. The property has just fallen into the hands of a real estate
speculator. He intends to cut up what remains of the park into house
lots. As to the chateau, the wreckers will first rip out the magnificent
mantelpieces and the incomparable sculptures which adorn the walls; they
will sell them; then they will tear down the building. The fragments
will serve to fill the moats, and on the ground thus made level they
will build suburban villas.
[Illustration: 0167]
The Department of Fine Arts looks on powerlessly at this act of
abominable vandalism, for the Chateau de Maisons is not listed as a
national monument. And not one of those amateurs who spend fortunes
every day to buy childish ornaments, restored pictures and ragged
tapestries, not a single one of these can be found who will preserve for
France one of the monuments which are the glory of French architecture.
Not one of those public administrations which incessantly build at
enormous expense hospitals, asylums, colleges, has thought that it might
be able, by utilizing this vast building, to render at the same stroke a
brilliant service to art and to history! It is said that the department
of Seine-et-Oise is looking for a site on which to build a hospital;
why did it not long ago decide to appropriate the Chateau de Maisons for
this purpose?
It is intolerable to think that one of the most beautiful residences of
old France, situated at the very gates of Paris, is going to be stupidly
demolished, at a time when the curators of our museums can find the
necessary money to purchase archaeological curiosities and foreign
trifles! [11] And you will see that, as soon as Maisons is stripped by
the house wreckers, it will be found very proper to purchase at
great expense for the Louvre a few of the statues and a part of the
bas-reliefs which vandals will have been permitted to tear from the
place where François Mansart had them placed!
The agony of Maisons will have lasted more than seventy years. It was
the banker Laffitte who, after 1830, commenced the work of destruction,
made way with the terraces and the cascades which were placed between
the château and the Seine, and demolished the great stables, a
magnificent building decorated with precious sculptures, which was the
marvel of Maisons. It was he who cut up the greater part of the park,
five hundred hectares, and cut down the centenarian trees of the domain
of the Longueils.
After Laffitte, what remained of Maisons passed to less barbarous hands.
Another proprietor tried to restore some beauty to the fragments of park
which had been preserved. Even today there remain pretty thickets,
a fine greensward, avenues lined with great antique busts, while the
château itself is almost intact.
Every Parisian knows, at least by having seen it from the window of a
railway train, this superb construction which tomorrow will be no more
than a pile of rubble and plaster. It ravishes us by the beauty of its
lines, by the happy choice of the site where it is placed, by the just
proportion of the architecture to the hillside on which it is seated.
The façade facing the court of honor is composed of two superposed
orders. In the pediments of the windows are sculptured eagles, and
women, terminated like sphinxes, as lions or dogs. To the right and
left, before the pavilions of the wings, rise two projections which
form terraces at the height of the first story. The whole monument has a
charming air of nervous elegance.
The vestibule (here was formerly the marvelous grille which today closes
the gallery of Apollo in the Louvre) rests on beautiful Doric columns.
The vault is decorated, on its four faces, with grand bas-reliefs
representing four divinities: never did sculptures show more docility,
more suppleness, in clothing architectural forms without overloading
them, without injuring the purity of their lines. And everywhere the
eagle of the Longueils unfolds its great wings of stone.
In the halls of this devastated château, there remains nothing but the
sculptured decoration. But what a masterpiece! Under the strong and
intelligent discipline of François Mansart, Gilles Guérin, Buyster, Van
Obstal and Sarazin surpassed themselves. The great mantelpiece where,
under a medallion of the great Condé, an antique triumph is marshaled,
the adorable playing children which Van Obstal carved above the cornice
of the grand stone staircase, the noble caryatides which sustain the
dome of the bedchamber, all the decoration of the guardroom where, about
1840, a poor painter called Bidault painted tiresome views of the Bay of
Naples, all the sculptures scattered through the different rooms of
the chateau, form one of the most perfect achievements, if not the most
perfect, which the seventeenth century has left us. The wreckers are
going to ruin it, they are going to annihilate it.
And they will annihilate also that admirable dining hall where the Count
of Artois set up, at the end of the eighteenth century, Houdon's Ceres,
Boizot's Vertumnus, Clodion's Erigone, and Foucou's Flora. Plaster casts
have replaced the originals on the ancient pedestals. But the hall has
retained its coffered ceiling, whose bas-reliefs equal, in grace, fancy
and richness of invention, the most delicate works of the Renaissance,
in surety and simplicity of execution, the purest works of Greek genius.
They will find wretches who will pull down these sacred stones with pick
and crowbar! And they will also find those who will tear from the little
oratory of Maisons its exquisite, its delicious marquetries!
When we wander through the deserted apartments of the old mansion, now
devoted to demolition, the heart contracts, and we ask with anger how
such vandalism is still possible in a period when everybody, even to the
least politician, talks of art and beauty!
The Château de Maisons was built by François Mansart, between 1642 and
1651, for René de Longueil.
The family of Longueil, originating in Normandy, where its feudal
possessions were near Dieppe, possessed the territory of Maisons from
the end of the fourteenth century. It has increased it by successive
acquisitions.
René de Longueil, Councilor in Parliament, had just been named president
of a court, when he commissioned Mansart to build him a new chateau
on his domain. He gave entire freedom to his architect in plan and
decoration. It is related that Mansart, after he had built the right
wing, leveled it with the ground to begin it over again on a new plan,
because he was not satisfied with his work. The expense was enormous:
it has been estimated at more than six millions. Maisons, when it was
finished, was considered one of the most beautiful châteaux of France.
How could Longueil afford this royal fancy? We are very ill-informed on
this point today. All that is known is that in 1650 the president
was named superintendent of finance; when, shortly afterward, he was
dismissed, he was responsible for this charming and significant remark:
"They are wrong; I have taken care of my own business; I was about to
look out for theirs."
Louis XIV sometimes visited Maisons. He came there unexpectedly with
the court, July 10, 1671, fleeing from Saint-Germain, where the Duke of
Anjou was dying. Bossuet brought the King the news of the death, and the
Queen's fool, Tricomini, transmitted it to Mlle, de Montpensier in these
terms: "You, great lords, you will all die like the least of men; here
is one who comes to say that your nephew is dead." This fool talked like
Bossuet. Mlle, de Montpensier adds that she went to pay her respects to
the King and that she wept bitterly with him. "He was deeply afflicted,
and with reason, for this child was very pretty." After the death of
René de Longueil, the chateau passed to his descendants, the last of
whom died in 1732. It then passed to the Marquis of Soye-court, who let
it fall into ruin; but in 1777 the Count of Artois bought it, restored
it, and embellished it magnificently.
We reach the upper stories of the château by a narrow and winding
staircase, ensconced in the thickness of the wall. Here is a maze of
corridors and tiny chambers. A larger apartment, however, exists in the
center of the building, below the lantern which crowns the roof. It is
ornamented with mythological paintings and Danae adorns the ceiling over
the bed in the alcove. This is the chamber of Voltaire.
[Illustration: 0175]
The great intimacy between Voltaire and the President de Maisons is well
known. The latter, great-grandson of the creator of the chateau, was a
studious young man of delicate tendencies. At the age of eighteen he
was President of Parliament. Re was said to be a good Latinist. His
education had been irreligious and he loved science. He had established
a chemical laboratory, where he manufactured the most perfect Prussian
blue which could be found in Europe, and a botanic garden of rare plants
where he cultivated coffee. He belonged to the Academy of Science, and
also possessed a collection of coins.
In 1723 Voltaire came to make his home with his friend. He found there
a good reception and a society ready to admire him. He knew, above all,
that the President was the nephew of Madame de Villars, and Voltaire was
then in all the heat of his passion for the Marshal's wife....
He arrived at Maisons in the month of November. He planned to finish his
tragedy of Marianne in this retreat. But he was immediately taken sick
with the smallpox and thought he would die. So he sent for the curate
of Maisons and confessed. The Danaë of the alcove possibly heard the
confession of Voltaire! Doctor Gervasi saved the dying man by making
him drink "two hundred pints of lemonade." As soon as he was cured,
to disembarrass his hosts and not abuse their goodness, Voltaire had
himself taken to Paris. Then occurred an episode which almost became
tragic. We must let Voltaire tell it:
"I was scarcely two hundred yards from the château when a part of the
ceiling of the chamber where I had lain fell in flames. The neighboring
chambers, the apartments which were below them, the precious furniture
with which they were adorned, all were consumed by the fire. The loss
amounted to a hundred thousand livres and, without the help of the
engines for which they sent to Paris, one of the most beautiful edifices
of the kingdom would have been destroyed. They hid this strange news
from me on my arrival; I knew it when I awoke; you cannot imagine how
great was my despair; you know the generous care which M. de Maisons
had taken of me; I had been treated like a brother in his house, and the
reward of so much goodness was the burning of his chateau. I could not
conceive how the fire had been able to catch so suddenly in my chamber,
where I had left only an almost extinguished brand. I learned that the
cause of this conflagration was a beam which passed exactly under the
fireplace.... The beam of which I speak had charred little by little
from the heat of the hearth....
"Madame and Monsieur de Maisons received the news more tranquilly than I
did; their generosity was as great as their loss and as my grief. M.
de Maisons crowned his bounty by giving me the news himself in letters
which make very evident that he excels in heart as in mind; he occupied
himself with the care of consoling me and it almost seemed as if it had
been my chateau which was burned."
And it is not only the shade of Voltaire which haunts the apartments
of Maisons! We may also be shown the chamber of Lafayette. In addition,
decorations in Empire style recall to us that in 1804 the château was
bought and inhabited by Lannes....
But what good is it to evoke these memories, since the admirable beauty
of the architecture and of the decorations has not sufficed to arrest
the enterprise of the housebreakers? [12]
VIII. THE VALLEY OF THE OISE
|WHEN the first automobiles made their appearance upon the highways,
some persons thought that, thanks to this new mode of locomotion, the
French were finally going to discover the thousand beauties of France.
They awoke from their dream when they heard the conversations of
automobilists. The latter, when they returned from their excursions,
told of the achievements of the engine, the misfortunes of the
tires, the treacheries of the road. They computed distances, counted
kilometers, passed judgment on macadam; but of the country traversed
they had seen, it was manifest, only the wide ribbon of the
road unrolling before their cars. If one talked to them of the
picturesqueness of a region through which they had passed, they replied:
"Too steep grades!"; and they cursed the rough cobbles when one praised
to them the pretty church in a village through which they had passed.
They were full of stories of autos, as hunters are of hunting yarns; but
every one knows that the beauty of the forest is the last thing a
hunter thinks of. The chauffeurs went into ecstasies at the memory of
a straight, smooth, deserted highway, drawn like an arrow for leagues
across an endless plain, far from the villages which are populated
by hens, children and straying dogs. The most romantic celebrated
the pleasure of speed, the intoxication of danger. In all of them one
guessed, though none would consent to avow it, the wild pride of hurling
themselves across the world, with a terrible uproar, in the midst of
universal fright, like petty scourges of God.
Some protested, and swore that it is easy to avoid the contagion of this
delirium, that they themselves had succeeded in using their machine as a
commodious vehicle and not as a simple instrument of sport. I only half
believed them. Some experiences had shown me that one feels
himself becoming an automobilist an hour after one is seated in an
automobile....