IN LA CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS.
"It is the winters, mesdames, that are hard to bear. They are
long--they are dull. No one passes along the high-road. It is then,
when sometimes the snow is piled knee-deep in the court-yard, it is
then I try to amuse myself a little. Last year I did the Jumièges
sculptures; they fit in well, do they not?"
It was raining; and Monsieur Paul was paying us an evening call. A
great fire was burning in the beautiful Francois I. fireplace of our
sitting-room, the famous Chambre des Marmousets. We had not consented
that any of the lights should be lit, although the lovely little Louis
XIV. chandelier and the antique brass sconces were temptingly filled
with fresh candles. The flames of the great logs would suffer no rival
illuminations; if the trunks of full-grown trees could not suffice to
light up an old room, with low-raftered ceilings, and a mass of
bric-à-brac, what could a few thin waxen candles hope to do?
On many other occasions we had thought our marvellous sitting-room had
had exceptional moments of beauty. To turn in from the sunlit, open
court-yard; to pass beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great
latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous
interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through
the jewels of fourteenth-century glass; to close the door; to sit
beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried
cushions, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of
ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection
of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless embroideries--all
the riches of a museum in a living-room--such a moment in the
Marmousets we had tested again and again with delectable results. At
twilight, also, when the garden was submerged in dew, this old
seigneurial chamber was a retreat fit for a sybarite or a modern
aesthete. The stillness, the soft luxurious cushions, the rich dusk
thickening in the corners, the complete isolation of the old room from
the noise and tumult of the inn life, its curious, its delightful
unmodernness, made this Marmouset room an ideal setting for any
mediaeval picture. Even a sentiment tinctured with modern cynicism
would, I think, have borrowed a little antique fervor, if, like the
photographic negative our nineteenth-century emotionalism somewhat too
closely resembles, in its colorless indefiniteness, the sentiment were
sufficiently exposed, in point of time and degree of sensitiveness, to
the charm of these old surroundings.
On this particular evening, however, the pattering of the rain without
on the cobbles and the great blaze of the fire within, made the old
room seem more beautiful than we had yet seen it. Perhaps the capture
of our host as a guest was the added treasure needed to complete our
collection. Monsieur Paul himself was in a mood of prodigal liberality;
he was, as he himself neatly termed the phrase, ripe for confession;
not a secret should escape revelation; all the inn mysteries should
yield up the fiction of their frauds; the full nakedness of fact should
be given to us.
"You see, _chères dames_, it is not so difficult to create the
beautiful, if one has a little taste and great patience. My inn--it has
become my hobby, my pride, my wife, my children. Some men marry their
art, I espoused my inn. I found her poor, tattered, broken-down, in
health, if you will; verily, as your Shakespeare says of some country
wench: 'a poor thing but mine own.'" Monsieur Paul's possession of the
English language was scarcely as complete as the storehouse of his
memory. He would have been surprised, doubtless, to learn he had called
poor Audrey, "a pure ting, buttaire my noon!"
"She was, however," he continued, securely, in his own richer Norman,
"though a wench, a beautiful one. And I vowed to make her glorious.
'She shall be famous,' I vowed, and--and--better than most men I have
kept my vow. All France now has heard of Guillaume le Conquérant!"
The pride Monsieur Paul took in his inn was indeed a fine thing to see.
The years of toil he had spent on its walls and in its embellishment
had brought him the recompense much giving always brings; it had
enriched him quite as much as the wealth of his taste and talent had
bequeathed to the inn. Latterly, he said, he had travelled much, his
collection of curios and antiquities having called him farther afield
than many Frenchmen care to wander. His love of Delft had taken him to
Holland; his passion for Spanish leather to the country of Velasquez;
he must have a Virgin, a genuine fifteenth-century Virgin, all his own;
behold her there, in her stiff wooden skirts, a Neapolitan captive. The
brass braziers yonder, at which the courtiers of the Henris had warmed
their feet, stamping the night out in cold ante chambers, had been
secured at Blois; and his collection of tapestries, of stained glass,
of Normandy brasses, and Breton carvings had made his own coast as
familiar as the Dives streets.
"The priests who sold me these, madame," he went on, as he picked up a
priest's chasuble, now doing duty as a table covering "would sell their
fathers and their mothers. It is all a question of price."
After a review of the curios came the history of the human collection
of antiquities who had peopled the inn and this old room.
Many and various had been the visitors who had slept and dined here and
gone forth on their travels along the high-road.
The inn had had a noble origin; it had been built by no less a
personage than the great William himself. He had deemed the spot a
fitting one in which to build his boats to start forth for his modest
project of conquering England. He could watch their construction in the
waters of Dives River--that flows still, out yonder, among the grasses
of the sea-meadows. For some years the Norman dukes held to the inn, in
memory of the success of that clever boat-building. Then for five
centuries the inn became a manoir--the seigneurial residence of a
certain Sieur de Sémilly. It was his arms we saw yonder, joined to
those of Savoy, in the door panel, one of the family having married
into a branch of that great house.
Of the famous ones of the world who had travelled along this Caen
post-road and stopped the night here, humanly tired, like any other
humble wayfarer, was a hurried visit from that king who loved his
trade--Louis XI. He and his suite crowded into the low rooms, grateful
for a bed and a fire, after the weary pilgrimage to the heights of Mont
St. Michel. Louis's piety, however, was not as lasting in its
physically exhaustive effects, as were the fleshly excesses of a
certain other king--one Henri IV., whose over-appreciation of the
oysters served him here, caused a royal attack of colic, as you may
read at your pleasure in the State Archives in Paris--since, quite
rightly, the royal secretary must write the court physician every
detail of so important an event. What with these kingly travellers and
such modern uncrowned kings as Puvis de Chavannes, Dumas, George Sand,
Daubigny, and Troyon, together with a goodly number of lesser great
ones, the famous little inn has had no reason to feel itself slighted
by the great of any century. Of all this motley company of notabilities
there were two whose visits seemed to have been indefinitely prolonged.
There was nothing, in this present flowery, picturesque assemblage of
buildings, to suggest a certain wild drama enacted here centuries ago.
Nothing either in yonder tender sky, nor in the silvery foliage on a
fair day, which should conjure up the image of William as he must have
stood again and again beside the little river; nor of the fury of his
impatience as the boats were building all too slowly for his hot hopes;
nor of the strange and motley crew he had summoned there from all
corners of Europe to cut the trees; to build and launch boats; to sail
them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet
at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles
in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so
insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his
sword in English eyes, still chanting the song of Roland as he fell.
None of the inn features were in the least informed with this great,
impressive picture of its past. Yet does William seem by far the most
realizable of all the personages who have inhabited the old house.
There was another visitor whose presence Monsieur Paul declared was as
entirely real as if she, also, had only just passed within the
court-yard.
"I know not why it is, but of all these great, _ces fameux_, Madame de
Sévigné seems to me the nearest, in point of time. Her visit appears to
have happened only yesterday. I never enter her room but I seem to see
her moving about, talking, laughing, speaking in epigrams. She mentions
the inn, you know, in her letters. She gives the details of her journey
in full."
I, also, knew not why; but, later, after Monsieur Paul had left us,
when he had shut himself out, along with the pattering raindrops, and
had closed us in with the warmth and the flickering fire-light, there
came, with astonishing clearness, a vision of that lady's visit here.
She and her company of friends might have been stopping, that very
instant, without, in the open court. I, also, seemed to hear the very
tones of their voices; their talk was as audible as the wind rustling
in the vines. In the growing stillness the vision grew and grew, till
this was what I saw and heard:
[Illustration: CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS--DIVES]
TWO BANQUETS AT DIVES.