by walls, was the only one which stood in the open. In the seventeenth
century it sheltered "the illustrious M. Dongois, chief registrar of
parliament." Now this illustrious M. Dongois was the uncle of the not
less illustrious M. Nicolas Despréaux. And it was thus that Haute-Isle
(then written Hautile) had the honor of being sung, if I dare say it, by
Boileau himself:
It is a tiny village, or rather a hamlet,
Built upon the slope of a long range of hills,
Whence the eye may wander far across the neighboring plains.^
The Seine, at the foot of the mountains which are washed by its
waves,
Beholds twenty islets rise from the bosom of its waters,
Which, dividing its flow in diverse manners,
Form twenty rivers from a single stream.
All its banks are covered with wildling willows
And with walnut trees often scourged by the passer-by....
These verses are a little rough, a tiny bit difficult. Lyric quality
and picturesqueness were not the business of Boileau. Like all his
contemporaries--omitting La Fontaine and Sévigné--he neither knew how to
describe a landscape nor to translate its emotion. From this incapacity
it has been assumed that the men and the women of the seventeenth
century were indifferent to the charm of nature.... They were not
pantheists, assuredly; they had neither ecstasies nor tremblings before
the "dramas" of light and the "savage beauties" of the ocean or of the
peaks.... But they understood and felt the grace of a beautiful valley.
Since we have met the rural Boileau upon our way, let us collect his
souvenirs of country residences.
Let us first remark that if his description of Haute-Isle somewhat
resembles a page of pen and ink drawing, we nevertheless find indicated
there all of the particulars by which this landscape enchants us: the
contrast of the rough, wild slope with the wide plain which stretches
beyond the Seine, the grace of the river and its islands, the verdure of
the willows and the walnuts. And Boileau does not forget to show us--by
a somewhat obscure periphrase--the urchin who, as he passes along the
road, brings down the nuts by hurling stones.
[Illustration: 0257]
What does Boileau do when he is in the country? He makes verses
naturally, since his business is to be a poet.
Here, in a valley which answers all my needs,
I buy at little expense solid pleasures:
Sometimes, with book in hand, wandering in the meadows,
_I occupy my mind with useful thoughts;_
Sometimes seeking the end of a line which I have constructed
I find in a nook of the woods the word which had escaped me....
Behold the solid pleasures of a constructor of verses, the friend of
useful reveries. Reporters have recently questioned our men of letters
as to how they "employ their vacations."... They have replied in prose
by confidences quite like those which Boileau addressed in verse to M.
Lamoignon, advocate general.
But at Hautile, Boileau sometimes stopped to dream and rhyme; then,
he "jestingly allured the too eager fish"; or, he "made war on the
inhabitants of the air"; and he tasted, on returning from the chase, the
pleasure of an "agreeable and rustic" repast.
So, when he was about to leave the country, he expressed the ordinary
wish of every citizen and of every poet obliged to return to Paris:
Oh, fortunate sojourn! Oh, fields beloved of heaven!
Why, strolling forever through your delicious prairies,
Can I not fix my wandering course here
And, known by you alone, forget the world outside?
Charming verses, of which La Fontaine would not have been ashamed.
And he said a sad adieu to this countryside, whose peace seemed to him
sweeter and more salutary in proportion as the years made him feel more
deeply the value of calm and especially of silence; he was then forty
years old:
Already less full of fire, to animate my voice,
I have need of the silence and the shadow of the woods.
*****
I need repose, meadows and forests.
This is another very pretty line, the line of a quadragenarian...
*****
"By the riverside of Seyne is a marvelous mount upon which formerly was
built a castle, over strong and over proud and called La Roche-Guyon. It
is still so high and fierce that scarcely may one see to its summit.
He who made it and enclosed it, made, at the base of the mount and by
cutting the rock, a great cave in the semblance of a house, which might
have been made by nature." [18]
The "over proud" castle is still standing on the summit of the hill,
dismantled, breached, ruined, but ever keeping its proud and fierce
aspect. As to the house created "by cutting the rock," it has, so to
speak, slowly moved away from the slope from century to century. It was
at first a sort of den, hollowed beneath the donjon. Then its galleries
stretched out and were extended to the edge of the escarpment; then the
entrances to the subterranean castle were closed by façades of stone and
armed with towers; a fortress was thus built against the rock, and at
the same time its ramparts were thrown forward to the Seine. To the
gloomy feudal citadel succeeded a chateau of the Renaissance, somewhat
less terrible, and the castellans of the eighteenth century changed
it in the taste of their time without being able to deprive it of its
warlike aspect.
This history of the construction is manifest when we look upon this
curious pile of different buildings. Above, the ruin of the donjon;
at the foot of the slope and united to it, a grand chateau whose front
façade is framed by two towers of the Middle Ages; and before this
semi-feudal abode, charming stables in the style of those of Chantilly.
A grandiose aggregation, utterly without harmony, almost barbaric,
but in which is reflected with attractive clearness the whole past of
France, from the invasion of the Normans to the Revolution.
Beautiful furnishings, lovely paintings, fine carvings, adorn
the apartments. The walls of the salon are covered with matchless
tapestries, which portray the history of Esther. But it is the portraits
which monopolize our attention here. Some are mere copies. The others
are attributed--correctly--to Mignard, to de Troy, to Nattier. They
evoke the glorious or charming memories of the castellans and the
chatelaines, and, thanks to them, the whole past of La Roche-Guyon is
born again. I do not know that there is in the whole of France a chateau
so rich in memories and in history.
[Illustration: 0263]
It belonged to the Guys de la Roche, and the wife of one of them, the
heroic Perrette de la Riviere, there sustained a siege of five months
against the English. In the sixteenth century it belonged to the Sillys,
and you may be shown the chamber where, on the morrow of the battle of
Ivry, King Henri found a good supper, a good lodging and nothing more,
for the virtuous Marquise de Guercheville ordered that his coach should
be harnessed, so that he went away to the house of one of his lady
friends two leagues from there--an admirable adventure on which a novel
might be written. Then La Roche passed to the du Plessis-Liancourts:
thus its name is mingled with the history of Jansenism; then to the La
Rochefoucaulds: the author of the Maxims dwelt here; then, after
the Revolution, to the Rohans, and in 1829 it returned to the La
Rochefoucaulds. These names alone are a pæan of glory.
Among the portraits hung on the walls several represent the Marquise
d'Enville at various ages. What pretty, fine features! It was this
Marquise who created the château as it still exists today, and
transformed the old citadel into a home of luxury. Her father, Alexandre
de la Rochefoucauld, exiled by Louis XV to La Roche-Guyon, had taken
advantage of the leisure given him by the King's disfavor to commence
great works in his domain; he had planted trees upon the naked hillside,
thrown down the useless embattlements of the fortress and constructed a
new pavilion. The Marquise d'Enville succeeded him in 1779 and continued
his work. Without thinking of expense, she built, laid out gardens,
ordered paintings, tapestries and statues. She was a woman of taste and
spirit: she corresponded with Walpole and Voltaire, was intimate with
Turgot and Condorcet, declared herself the pupil of the philosophers,
and made her salon the rendezvous of the economists. But it was said
that she practiced philosophy more than she preached it; she had founded
a free school in her village and had engaged nuns to teach in it; in
years of bad harvests, she opened charitable workrooms for the poor.
She showed herself faithful and open-hearted in her friendships, for she
remained the friend of Mlle. de L'Espinasse without ceasing to be the
friend of Madame du Deffand. She was one of those aristocrats who worked
with candid generosity for the ruin of the aristocracy: the Revolution
neither surprised nor frightened her. But, on September 4, 1792, a
band of revolutionists at Gisors murdered her son, the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld, who had sat in the Constituent Assembly among the
Constitutionalists. In the following year she was herself denounced,
arrested, thrown into prison and owed her liberty, perhaps her life,
only to a petition of the citizens of the commune of La Roche-Guyon. She
died in 1797 at the age of eighty.
*****
A little way back we met Boileau, dreaming at the foot of the bluff of
Haute-Isle. A few steps farther on, at La Roche-Guyon, we meet Hugo and
Lamartine; both stopped in this château during the Restoration.
La Roche then belonged to the Duc de Rohan-Chabot.
A short while ago M. Charles Bailie published a fat book upon this
personage, who was somewhat slender, somewhat droll, and even, I will
venture to say, a little ridiculous. But as this biography gave its
author an opportunity to study men and manners of the period of the
Restoration, and as this study swarms with new and well-told anecdotes,
we gladly ignore the insignificance of the hero. Here is a summary of
the life of this cardinal-duke: Auguste de Chabot, born February 29,
1788, followed his father, the Prince of Leon, into exile, and returned
to Paris with him in 1800. He was educated in a somewhat haphazard
fashion by a refractory Oratorist and later by a former college regent.
In 1807, when his grandfather, the Duc de Rohan, died, his father became
Duc de Rohan and he himself Prince de Leon. When his father died in 1816
he became Duke de Rohan.
In 1808 he married Mlle. de Séreit, who was seventeen years old.
Chateaubriand sometimes said to him: "Come, Chabot, so that I may
corrupt you"; but his morals remained irreproachable. He traveled in
Italy; he saw Madame Recamier and did not fall in love with her. Queen
Caroline distinguished him. "She treated him," said Lamartine, "with a
marked favor which promised a royal friendship, if the future cardinal
had seen in the most beautiful of women anything else than the delight
of the eye." He had pretty features, gave infinite care to his toilet,
wrote romantic poems and dabbled in water colors.
[Illustration: 0269]
In 1809 he became a chamberlain of the Emperor. In 1815 his wife was
burned to death, the laces of her gown having taken fire. In 1819 he
entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice and was ordained a priest in 1822.
Madame de Broglie thus described him, in the following year: "He had a
thin pale face, and, at the same time, a coquettish care for his person
which seemed to join honest instincts with former worldly memories; in
his face there was a mingling of fanaticism and foolishness."
He went to La Roche-Guyon to preach and on this occasion he chose five
hundred volumes from the magnificent library collected by the Marquise
d'Enville, piled them up in the castle courtyard and burned them: they
were rare volumes adorned with precious bindings. Later he went to Rome,
where he expected to be made a cardinal. He returned without the purple;
but he had converted Madame de Récamier's chambermaid.
In 1828 he was elevated to the archbishopric of Auch and later to that
of Besançon. He dissatisfied the seminarists by untimely reforms; he did
not take it amiss that ecclesiastics should wear polished laced boots.
He shocked the liberals by his bigotry and the clergy by his luxury. He
restored his cathedral; but he spoiled the apse, broke out the crossbars
of the windows to replace them by frightful stained glass, demolished
the altar, which was a beautiful work of art of the eighteenth century,
and cast out a beautiful stone pulpit of the fifteenth century from
which Saint Francis de Sala had preached.
He was made cardinal in the month of July, 1830. The fall of the
Bourbons forced him to flee to Belgium, whence he passed into
Switzerland. After the death of Pius VIII, he took part in the conclave
which elected Gregory XVI and officiated at the marriage of the Duchess
de Berry to Count Lucchesi-Pali. He returned to his diocese in 1832,
where he was received by a riot. He nevertheless remained there and died
in 1833 of typhoid fever.
The _Patriote_, a newspaper of Besançon, which had opposed him,
published the day after his death a courteous article: "We do not doubt
that he owed what influence he had to his virtue. He prayed devoutly
and the accent of his voice, intoning the chants of the Church, breathed
true religion. No one can say what he would have effected among us,
if his career had been longer and if he had become reconciled to our
Revolution."
... You think, without doubt, of Bouvard and Pécuchet taking notes to
write the life of the Duc d'Angoulême. So do I.
Now let us return to La Roche-Guyon.
Montalembert, Marchangy, Berryer, Dupan-loup, Hugo, Lamartine, were
there the guests of the Abbé-Duc de Rohan.
How Hugo made the acquaintance of the Due de Rohan and visited him at La
Roche-Guyon; how, terrified by the princely formality which reigned as
well in the chapel of the château as in the dining room, he fled after
two days; finally how the Duc de Rohan gave Lamennais to Hugo as a
confessor, may be read in Volume II of _Victor Hugo raconté par un
témoin de sa vie_. We must not neglect to consult also the severe but
exact work of M. Biré.
Lamartine wrote one of his most admirable _Meditations_ at La
Roche-Guyon:
Here comes to die the world's last echoing sound;
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port:
Here, the soul steeps itself in peace the most profound,
And this peace is not death.
In the note which he left as a sequel to this poem, Lamartine relates
that, in 1819, the Due de Rohan was introduced to him by Duc Mathieu de
Montmorency. "We became close friends without his ever making me feel,
and without my ever allowing myself to forget, by that natural tact
which is the etiquette of nature, the distance which he indeed wished
to bridge, but which nevertheless existed between two names which poesy
alone could bring together for an instant." This is exquisite, with an
affectation of respect which borders on impertinence.
The Meditation is entitled Holy Week at La Roche-Guyon. Not a line
of this grand lyric piece reveals that it was conceived in this place
rather than in any other. Lamartine has thus attempted to justify his
title: "The principal ornament of the château," he writes, "was a chapel
hollowed in the rock, a true catacomb, affecting, in the cavernous
circumvolutions of the mountain, the form of the naves, the choirs, the
pillars, the rood-lofts, of a cathedral. He induced me to go to pass
Holy Week there with him. He took me there himself.... The religious
service, _pious voluptuousness_ of the Duc de Rohan, was celebrated
every day in this subterranean church, with a pomp, a luxury, and holy
enchantments, which intoxicate youthful imaginations...."
The picture is delightful. Unfortunately it entirely emerged from the
"youthful imagination" of Lamartine. The subterranean church still
exists at La Roche-Guyon, just as in the time of the Duc de Rohan.
But the triple chapel, cut in the hill, and sufficiently lighted
from outside, has nowise the appearance of a catacomb. There are no
"cavernous circumvolutions," naves, choirs, pillars, rood-lofts. The
cathedral is composed of three little vaulted rooms....
And I now think of the honest Boileau. He would not have mystified us or
himself in this manner! It is true that you and I would give the whole
epistle to Lamoignon for this single line:
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port.
XI. NOYON
|THE light softens and dims, even in these days of the dog star, and,
under this heaven of palest azure, the puissant harmony of verdure and
red bricks announces the neighborhood of Flanders. Only the stone towers
of the cathedral dominate with their gray mass the ruddy buildings and
the leafage of the gardens.
Noyon possessed immense convents which were razed during the Revolution.
Scattered remnants still mark the sites of these monasteries; here an
apse transformed into a storehouse, there the façade of a chapel. The
monks have departed; but the town has retained a monastic aspect; and
it is a place where one might make a retreat. In the silence of the
melancholy streets, the pavements seem to ring more sonorously, and the
passer listens with surprise to the echo of his steps between the silent
houses....
Upon the market place, the delicate and florid façade of the old Hôtel
de Ville of the Renaissance calls up the images of communal life,
peculiar to the little cities of the north; we look for the belfry
tower, we expect to hear the chimes; but the disputatious commune of
the Middle Ages is now a wise, sad and pensive little town. In the
staircase, sculptures in high relief portray the heavy gayeties of
northern climes; but Noyon is now a wise, sad and decent little town.
On the same square stands a curious fountain provided by the liberality
of an eighteenth-century prelate. Statues of the cardinal virtues
decorate its pedestal from which rises an obelisk, surrounded by emblems
and allegories; we see there a Cupid caressing a lamb, quivers, arrows,
a hound,--symbols of innocent love and of fidelity. An inscription
placed upon the monument recalls to the people of Noyon that among them
Chilpéric II was buried, Charlemagne consecrated and Hugh Capet elected
king. I do not know whether this inscription is as old as the fountain:
it has a certain grandeur in its conciseness; let us praise the towns
which thus array themselves in their past glories, and recall the part
which they have played in the destinies of France....
With its houses of brick and its gardens surrounded by high walls,
its silence and its memories, Noyon would merit the tenderness of its
people, even if Noyon did not possess its admirable cathedral....
What a charming picture is made by the apse, with its radiating chapels!
Torch holders ornament the flying buttresses, which were restored in the
eighteenth century: they drive to despair the pure archaeologists and
fill with joy men without taste who, insensitive to unity of style,
love to hear monuments tell their history, their whole history. To this
harmonious apse is joined the treasury, and then a fine structure with
wooden panels of the sixteenth century, the library of the canons: its
street floor was formerly arcaded and sheltered a market; alas! it has
been walled up,... Behind, the buildings of the chapter house, hovels,
turrets, an arcade thrown across the street, a high crenellated
wall, surround the cloister and the flanks of the cathedral; and the
picturesqueness of these disordered lines is delightful.
On the other side of the apse appears a lamentable breach. Here formerly
stood the chapel of the bishopry; it was attached to the crossing of
the church and thus the little portal of the transept was exquisitely
framed. This thirteenth-century chapel was long since abandoned; it
had lost its ancient roof; but these ancient walls should have been
respected. To free the cathedral, they have been leveled to the
ground.... Not quite, however, for the owner of a cellar excavated
beneath this chapel resisted the efforts of the architect.
Today the remnants of the little edifice still remain. And they have not
even the appearance of a ruin, but the piteous aspect of a demolition.
Thus has been destroyed a truly beautiful grouping, and the cathedral,
quite contrary to good sense, has been isolated from the ancient
bishopry to permit the people of Noyon to walk all around their church.
At least, this is the only benefit they have received from it.
Before the east front of the church lies a little square surrounded by
the tranquil and substantial homes of the canons. Upon the piers of each
door, great vases swell their paunches and project their stone flames:
this is the leit motiv of the eighteenth century. The canons for whom
these beautiful homes were constructed had only to cross the parvis to
enter the cathedral. This rises before their houses with its massive
towers, which are not crowned by spires, but in which the mixture of the
plain arch with the pointed marks the originality of the building. The
vast porch, with three doorways whose sculptures were sacked by the
Revolutionists and then by the administrators of the Restoration,
preserves an inimitable majesty....
*****
The exterior of this church charmed us especially by its
picturesqueness; within, it gives us an impression of perfect beauty.
It ravishes us at first by the balance of its different parts, by the
justness of its proportions. Its plan is a masterpiece. In almost all
our cathedrals we admire the choir, then we admire the nave; if we wish
to take in the whole edifice at a single glance, we are still astonished
by its grandeur and majesty, but our eye no longer experiences the same
delight nor our mind the same satisfaction. If we take up a position at
the entrance of Notre Dame de Noyon, in that species of vestibule which
opens on the first bay of the nave and which here rises to the height
of the vaulting, we have before us an absolutely harmonious work. The
glance can travel as far as the apse without being arrested by any
discordance. There is, I believe, no Gothic church where the dimensions
of the nave correspond in so happy a fashion to the dimensions of the
choir. The unity of the monument is incomparable. The choir seems to
be the completion, the expansion of the long Gothic structure. The nave
seems to make its way to this circle of light, without haste, with a
tranquil and bold rhythm which is produced by the regular alternation of
its naked columns and its pilasters flanked by tiny pillars....
[Illustration: 0279]
This forms the beauty, so to speak, the intellectual beauty, of the
cathedral of Noyon. But its most original character, by which it
enchants our imagination and impresses itself in our memory, is the
marvelous combination of the pointed and the circular arch. [19] It is
charming among all those charming churches which rose in the twelfth
century in the valleys of the Oise and the Seine, and in which
architects endowed with genius knew how to bring together the round arcs
of the declining Romanesque and the pointed arches of the Gothic at its
dawning. In no other place did the art of these constructors display
itself in so refined and subtle a manner; nowhere else can we find so
complete a success; in no other region has the marriage of tradition and
moderation given birth to a more exquisite work.
Consider the elevations of the nave: the arches which separate the nave
from the side aisles break in ogives; the tribunes are pierced with
pointed apertures divided by little columns and surmounted by trefoil
windows; the light penetrates this triforium through Romanesque windows;
above these tribunes runs a little gallery whose arches are circular,
and higher still the twin windows of the clerestory are framed with
semicircular arches. In the transepts, whose two arms end in apses,
there are other combinations, but the two varieties of arches are always
fraternally associated; the Gothic and the Romanesque alternate from the
ground to the vaulting. In the choir, finally, the arcades, round-arched
in the two first bays, are pointed at the back of the apse and the lines
of the clerestory reproduce the same arrangement; the tribunes are cut
in points and the arches of the gallery are divided in trefoil. To this
diversity of lines we must add the diversity of decoration. Two styles
are here juxtaposed: here are the monsters, the grotesques and the
foliage of Romanesque art, and there the more sober and truthful
sculpture of Gothic art.