edifice, the largest church of the diocese except the cathedral; the
choir was composed, as a matter of fact, of two bays, the transept
likewise of two bays, and the nave of five; it was sixty meters long and
twenty-six high. It is an excellent custom to carve upon the monuments
the names of those who have built and repaired them. It would not be ill
if upon the ruins of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes an inscription should recall
the absurd demolition and the name of its author, Mgr. Leblanc de
Beaulieu.
In 1821 the demolition was not yet complete, for Wallot found some
difficulty in selling his ashlar. It is said that several houses of
Soissons were built with the stone of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.
[Illustration: 0305]
The Department of War, which had been granted the buildings of the
abbey, continued the work of the ecclesiastical housebreakers. It tore
down a small Renaissance cloister. Had it not been for the intervention
of the Archaeological Society of Soissons, it would have destroyed the
two galleries of the great cloister which still stand. Finally, in 1870,
the German shells did great damage and set a fire which calcined the
lower part of the portal.
* * * * *
Today, a part of the ruins has been placed in charge of the
Administration of Fine Arts. It is possible to visit the towers, the
organ platform and the great cloister.
It is a lamentable spectacle, that of this magnificent façade, now
isolated like a useless stage setting: through the three bays of the
portal we perceive the ground which was carefully leveled, in accordance
with the orders of Mgr. Leblanc de Beaulieu; the great rose window is an
empty hole against the sky. Nevertheless, how precious this fragment of
a church still is! What masterpieces of grace and boldness are these
two towers, unlike, but both so perfect, with their galleries, their
arcades, their pinnacles, their bell towers and their stone spires. And
what admirable carvings! There are, under the elegant canopies attached
to each story of the towers, the images--alas! too often mutilated
by the Huguenots or by the Revolutionists--of the Apostles and the
Evangelists; there is the crucified Christ upon the window bars of the
great tower window; there are, above all, on the two sides of the rose
window, the touching and expressive statues of Our Lady of Sorrow and of
Saint John the Evangelist.
Two of the galleries of the cloister have disappeared. The other two
present arcades of a charming design. Ornaments of rare delicacy frame
the inner door. Heads of monsters decorate the gargoyles. About the
capitals and upon the bases of the corbels are twined allegorical
flowers of perfect execution: here the vines which recall the name of
the abbey itself, there the ivy and the wormwood to which Saint John
the Baptist, patron saint of the monastery, communicated the virtue of
counteracting witchcraft; elsewhere the oak, the apple, the strawberry,
the wild geranium, all the plants which in the Middle Ages were reputed
to cure ills of the throat, for, until the last century, it needed but a
pilgrimage to Saint-Jean-des-Vignes to be freed from quinsy. [23]
And this is all that one is allowed to see of the abbey of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes. Whoever is curious to become acquainted with the
last remnants of the Renaissance cloister (a few arches and four very
beautiful stone medallions) and to enter the ancient refectory of the
abbey, will run against the veto of military authority.
It is probable that the Administration of Fine Arts will without
difficulty obtain permission that the public may have access to the
courtyard where the little cloister stands. But it will doubtless
be more difficult to recapture from the War Department the refectory
building, where it has been installed for a century.
This refectory is a vaulted hall, forty meters long and divided into two
naves by fine columns. Whoever wishes to obtain an idea of the beauty of
this admirable structure may think of the refectory of Royaumont, today
much disfigured, or even the refectory of the priory of Saint Martin in
the Fields, now the Library of Arts and Trades, and whose character has
been altered by useless daubs of paint. These two latter edifices belong
to the thirteenth century. The refectory of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes seems
to date from the fourteenth. Here may be found, as in all the halls of
the same kind, the readers' stall hollowed in the thickness of the wall,
and reached by several stone steps.
A food storehouse has been installed in this refectory. To utilize the
space, it has been divided into two stories by a floor which passes
below the capitals of the columns. Here are piled boxes of canned goods,
biscuits, bags of grain. In conformity with the military regulations,
all the walls are covered, for a meter above the floor, with a thick
layer of coal tar, so that the capitals, just above the second story
floor, have disappeared under this covering. The rest of the walls is
simply covered with whitewash. At some unknown time the whitewash was
removed from certain spots to uncover two pictures which appear to be
contemporary with the building. One is still visible and represents
the Resurrection. The other has almost completely disappeared. Formerly
wooden shutters protected them from the curiosity of the soldiers
employed in the storehouse. They are now exposed to every insult.
Perhaps other paintings exist under the whitewash.
Under this great hall is a vaulted subterranean room, whose bays
correspond to the bays of the refectory. It is likewise used for army
provisions.
This is the condition to which, in 1905, one of the most precious
monuments of Gothic architecture which exists in France is abandoned.
And the vandals are not satisfied with secularizing the buildings,
with tarring the capitals and with dooming the paintings to certain
destruction.
By overloading the edifice they endanger its safety.
The War Department is not responsible for all this vandalism. It has
been assigned a Gothic hall in which to store its provisions. It has
used it as well as it knew how; it has applied to it the rules which are
common to all military buildings; it is not the guardian of monuments of
the past.
This guardianship belongs to the Bureau of Historic Monuments; its
responsibility is to take notice of and to save the refectory of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.
It is not possible to conceal the difficulties of the attempt. The
Minister of War will consent to abandon this edifice only if he is
furnished another provision storehouse in Soissons itself. So a new
building must be put up. Who will pay for it? The city of Soissons,
interested in the preservation of a "precious monument of the arts," as
the prefect of 1805 said, doubtless will not refuse to contribute to the
expense. But the state must come to its aid.
When, tomorrow, at some public sale, there shall be put up at auction
some primitive of more or less certain authenticity, a hundred thousand
francs will be spent to hang it in a room of the Louvre, and there will
be glorification over the acquisition. Would it not be wiser and safer
to preserve the paintings of the fourteenth century which decorate the
refectory of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, whose authenticity, I believe, no
one will ever dare to contest? With the same stroke, a magnificent bit
of architecture will be saved. Who knows if we may not even see other
mediaeval paintings appear from under the whitewash?... In short, we
shall have saved a precious work of Gothic art for France. And future
centuries will draw a parallel between the house-wrecking bishop
who destroyed the church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes and the pious
undersecretary of state who protected the refectory of the Joannist
canons. [24]
XIII. BETZ
At the bottom of a valley,
There is a charming château
Whose adored mistress
Is its most beautiful ornament;
The charms of her countenance
And the virtues of her heart
Embellish nature
And spread happiness.
*****
At the sound of her voice a limpid stream
Will take a happier course;
The most smiling verdure
Will enchant all eyes;
A scattered and dusky grove
Planted by her beautiful hands,
Will cover with its shade
Candor and beauty.
|THIS song, which was set to the tune, _Que ne suis-je la fougère_,
was written by Louis Joseph de Bourbon-Condé. The "adored mistress" was
Marie Catherine de Brignole, Princess of Monaco. The "charming château"
was that of Betz, celebrated at that period because of the beauty of its
gardens laid out in the English fashion.
The château has disappeared; but the design of the park is not effaced;
not all of the structures with which it was adorned by the caprice of
the Princess of Monaco have perished. After a long period of neglect,
the domain is today in safe hands: the remnants of the gardens of Betz
are now safeguarded. Groves, ruins and temples here still evoke a memory
of the imagination at once silly, incoherent and delightful, which
satisfied men and especially women on the eve of the French Revolution.
Marie Christine de Brignole had married at eighteen a roué of forty,
the former lover of her mother. The Parliament of Paris had divorced her
from this brutal and jealous husband, and she had become the unconcealed
mistress of Condé. Their relations were public. The Princess lived at
Paris in a hotel in the Rue Saint Dominique, beside the Palais Bourbon.
She reigned at Chantilly.
Condé was tender but faithless. He deceived his lady love, was desolated
to see her unhappy, accused God of having given her too sensitive a
heart and began over again. Still other cares troubled the Princess of
Monaco: however great may then have been the toleration of the world
and the ease of morals, the children of the Prince could not resign
themselves to dissimulate the disdain which they felt for La Madame.
The Princess of Bourbon amused herself one day by composing a tableau
in which she put on the stage her father-in-law and the Princess; these
two, who played the two principal parts, perceived the wicked allusions
of the author only when they perceived the embarrassment of the
spectators; but a family scene occurred as soon as the curtain dropped.
Then the public decided that the favorite was responsible for the
quarrel which soon separated the Duke and the Duchess of Bourbon....
[25]
La Madame had the wisdom to perceive that the moment had come to make a
strategic retreat, and to seek a shelter against hostilities which, in
the end, might have become perilous. It was necessary for her to find a
property which was at the right distance from Chantilly and from Paris,
"neither too far nor too near," where she might be forgotten by the
world, but where Condé could come to see her without difficulty. She
chose Betz, near Crepy-en-Valois.
The lords of Levignen had early built a stronghold above the valley of
Betz. Later another home had been constructed on an island formed by
the Grivette, a tributary of the Ourcq. It was in this château, already
rebuilt in the seventeenth century, that Madame de Monaco established
herself. A donjon, the two great round towers which flanked the wings of
the principal block, the waters which bathed the feet of the walls, gave
the house an almost feudal aspect. But the interior was decorated in
the taste of the day, wainscoted with delicate panels, oramented with
charming furniture, paintings and precious objects of art. The buildings
and the adornment of the park cost more than four millions.
The Princess of Monaco passed at Betz the happiest years of her
life. She guided the labors of her architects, her sculptors and her
gardeners. She played at farming. Her sons, from whom her husband had
formerly separated her, came to make long visits with her. Condé, wiser
with age, redoubled his tenderness. When he was obliged to travel,
either to Dijon to preside over the States or to the camp of Saint Omer
to direct the maneuvers of the royal army, he wrote to her at length,
and the refrain of his letters was: "Would that I were at Betz!" As soon
as his service at court or with the army permitted it, he hastened to
the Princess: he brought rare books and pictures to enrich the château;
he interested himself in the works undertaken for his friend. He advised
the workmen and gave his opinion upon the plans....
[Illustration: 0318]
Madame de Monaco renewed her youth in this "rural retreat," and the
years passed without lessening the grace of her countenance, without
thickening her slender waist, without slowing her light step. It is not
an inhabitant of Betz who drew for us this portrait, it is Goethe, at
Mayence, in 1792: "The Princess of Monaco, declared favorite of the
Prince of Condé, and the ornament of Chantilly in its palmy days,
appeared lively and charming. One could imagine nothing more gracious
than this slender blondine, young, gay, and frivolous; not a man could
have resisted her sallies. I observed her with entire freedom of mind
and I was much surprised to meet the lively and joyous Philine, whom I
had not expected to find there...." Philine was then fifty-three years
old.
*****
The great occupation of the Princess at Betz was to create a park
in modern taste. She found in this her cares and her glory. The Due
d'Har-court, former preceptor of the first son of Louis XVI, who had
already distinguished himself by designing his park at La Colline near
Caen, undertook to design the avenues, to form the vistas, to plan the
buildings: in a certain sense he drew up the scenario of the garden.
Hubert Robert made the plans of the temples and the ouins. The architect
Le Gendre supervised the buildings. The site was adapted for the
establishment of an English garden: on the two banks of the Grivette
rose little wooded hills, and, thanks to the undulations of the
landscape, sometimes gentle, sometimes brusque, it was there possible to
mingle the "picturesque," the "poetic" and the "romantic." The thickets
were pierced by sinuous paths; pines and perfumed exotics varied the
verdure of the hornbeams and the beeches; the course of the river, which
spread out into a marshy meadow, was confined within sodded banks. The
forest was thinned to allow the eye to perceive the surrounding fields,
and there were scattered in the valley and through the woods
Temples and tombs and rocks and caverns,
The lesson of history and that of romance.
Models were not lacking. Without speaking of the parks created in
England by Kent and his disciples, there existed the admirable examples
of Ermenonville, belonging to M. de Girardin, Limours, to the Countess
de Brionne, Bel-Eil, to the Prince de Ligne, Maupertuis, to M. de
Montesquiou, the Little Trianon and Bagatelle, Le Moulin-Joli of the
engraver Watelet.... And at the same moment when Madame de Monaco was
undertaking the construction of her garden, the financier Jean Joseph
de La Bordé was completing, upon the advice of Robert and de Vernet, the
construction of the admirable park of Méréville. The chatelaine of Betz
conformed to the rules of the type.
[Illustration: 0321]
Possibly some day some one will write the history of these English
gardens of the eighteenth century: no study would be more suitable to
acquaint us with the contradictory sentiments and the confused thoughts
which agitated society in the years which preceded 1789. The lectures
of M. Jules Lemaître and the penetrating book of M. Lasserre upon
Romanticism have recently drawn attention to the disorders caused in
the French body politic by the poison of Rousseau. To illustrate such
remarks, nothing would be better than the plans and the structures of
the parks composed in France from 1770 to 1789. We would there behold a
mingling of pedantry and sentimentality, the most refined taste united
to the most silly feeling, adorable reminiscences of classical antiquity
mingled with the first abortions of romantic bric-a-brac. We would
especially distinguish there the laborious artifices and the childish
conventions in which the pretended lovers of nature became entangled.
And I do not insist upon the prodigious disaccord between ideas and
manners: for this I will send you to the charming discourse which the
Count de Larborde puts at the beginning of his Description des nouveaux
jardins (1808), where he shows the foolish and joyous guests of the
fashionable parks, laughing in "the valley of tombs," quarreling upon
"the bench of friendship" and bringing to the country the tastes and
the habits of the city: "while praising the pure air of the fields, they
rose at two o'clock in the afternoon, they gambled until four o'clock in
the morning, and while they grew tender over the simplicity of country
manners, the women plastered themselves with rouge and beauty spots, and
wore panniers...."
To tell the truth, the men of this period retained too much delicacy
of mind not to feel the ridiculousness of the inventions in which they
found their delight. But fashion was master. The theorists of "modern
gardens" endeavored to make headway against the excesses of the
irregular type. In his agreeable poem, Les Jardins, which contains
so many ingenious lines, the worthy Abbé Delille lavished the most
judicious counsels on his contemporaries and endeavored to hold the
balance equal between Kent and Le Nôtre.
In his Essai sur les jardins, the modest Watelet, the creator of Le
Moulin-Joli, recalled to good taste the constructors of park buildings,
and pronounced it ill that one should build a mausoleum to the memory of
a favorite hound (an allusion to a grotto in the gardens of Stowe which
Lord Granville Temple had consecrated to the memory of Signor Fido,
an Italian greyhound); unluckily, he judged that a perfect, simple and
"natural" structure for a park would be the true monastery of Héloïse,
and he imagined the inscription which it would have been necessary to
carve "upon a myrtle"--if the climate 'permitted it--in order to move
young lady visitors.... Morel, the landscape architect of Ermenonville,
did not like fictitious constructions which assemble in a single
locality, all centuries and all nations. But, on the other hand,
Carmontelle, the designer of the fantastic constructions of Mousseaux,
found that Morel's conceptions were deplorable: and neither of them
was wrong. Horace Walpole, in his Essay on Gardens, praised the English
gardens, but made fun of the abuse of buildings, of which hermitages
seemed to him particularly inappropriate: "It is ridiculous," said he,
"to go to a corner of a garden to be melancholy," and he deplored that
the hypothesis of irregularity should have brought people to a love for
the crooked. Baron de Tschoudy, author of the article Bosquet, in the
supplement to the Encyclopédie, wrote in regard to tombs, inevitable
accessories of all English gardens: "A somber object may not be
displeasing in a landscape by Salvator; it is too far from the truth to
sadden us; but what is its excuse? Do we go walking to be melancholy?
Indeed, I would like much better to raise the tendrils of the ivy from
the base of an overturned column, to read a touching inscription! How
my heart would expand at the sight of a humble cabin, filled by happy
people of my own kind, who would gayly spade their little enclosure and
whose flocks would gambol about it! With what ecstasy would I listen to
their songs in the silence of a beautiful evening! For is there anything
more sweet than songs caused by happiness which one has given?"
But all this did not discourage the proprietors of English parks from
building hermitages, tombs, Gothic chapels, Tartar kiosks and Chinese
bridges.... In rambling through the gardens of Betz we will meet these
structures and many others.
The design of the alleys at Betz has remained almost the same as it was
in the eighteenth century. But, as the park has in the meantime
belonged to owners who were little interested in preserving its former
appearance, some of the woods have been cut, and places which were
formerly bare are today grown up to copses. Rows of poplars which were
assuredly not foreseen by the landscape gardeners of the Princess of
Monaco grow on the banks of the Grivette. Many views have thus been
modified and many vistas no longer exist. In addition, some of the old
buildings have been destroyed, while only remnants remain of others.
Fortunately, to guide us in our ramble and permit us to reconstruct the
places as they were in the time of the Princess of Monaco, we possess
a very complete description of the gardens. It was drawn up in verse by
Cérutti and published January 1, 1792, under this title: _Les jardins de
Betz, poème accompagné de notes instructives sur les travaux champêtres,
sur les arts, les lois, les révolutions, la noblesse, le clergé, etc...;
fait en 1785 par M. Cérutti et publié en 1792 par M..., éditeur du
"Bréviaire philosophique du feu roi de Prusse_." This work, although in
verse, and deplorable verse, contains a sufficiently exact list of the
buildings of Betz, and the copious commentary in prose which accompanies
the "poem" is sufficiently amusing.... But it will perhaps not be
useless, before accepting Cérutti as a guide, to briefly recall his life
and his writings.
There exists a peremptory and delightful letter of the Marquise de
Créqui about him: "The administrator Cérutti has just finished his
rhetoric: he promised well, twenty years ago. He has not made a step
forward during this time. We see, as a matter of fact, beginnings which
will become only miscarriages. In short, his verses have appeared
prosaic to me and his prose profusely ornamented poverty. Do not be
astonished at his ecstasy in regard to the century: he owes all to it."
Here is the very man: the medal is sharply coined.
Born in Piedmont, Cérutti had entered the Company of Jesus. He taught at
first with success in a college at Lyons. In other times, he would have
remained the good college regent which he was at the beginning of his
life and, as he possessed a certain brilliancy, he would have composed
Latin verses in the manner of Father Rapin. Perhaps he would even
have succeeded in the pulpit, for he had a fine bearing, an amiable
countenance, a pleasing voice, measured gestures and brilliancy of mind.
But he was gifted at the same time with exalted sensibility, and the
century in which he lived seemed to promise everything to sensible men
capable of exhaling all their sensibility in prose and verse. Cérutti
declaimed and rhymed during the whole of his life.