A NIGHT IN A CAEN ATTIC.
I have always found the act of going away contagious. Who really enjoys
being left behind, to mope in a corner of the world others have
abandoned? The gay company atop of the coach, as they were whirled
beneath the old archway, had left discontent behind; the music of the
horn, like that played by the Pied Piper, had the magic of making the
feet ache to follow after.
Monsieur Paul was so used to see his world go and come--to greeting it
with civility, and to assist at its departure with smiling indifference
that the announcement of our own intention to desert the inn within a
day or so, was received with unflattering impassivity. We had decided
to take a flight along the coast--the month and the weather were at
their best as aids to such adventure. We hoped to see the Fête Dieu at
Caen. Why not push on to Coutances, where the Fête was still celebrated
with a mediaeval splendor? From thence to the great Mont, the Mont St.
Michel, it was but the distance of a good steed's galloping--we could
cover the stretch of country between in a day's driving, and catch, who
knows?--perhaps the June pilgrims climbing the Mont.
"Ah, mesdames! there are duller things in the world to endure than a
glimpse of the Normandy coast and the scent of June roses!
_Idylliquement belle, la côte à ce moment-ci!_"
This was all the regret that seasoned Monsieur Paul's otherwise
gracious and most graceful of farewells. Why cannot we all attain to an
innkeeper's altitude, as a point of view from which to look out upon
the world? Why not emulate his calm, when people who have done with us
turn their backs and stalk away? Why not, like him, count the pennies
as not all the payment received when a pleasure has come which cannot
be footed up in the bill? The entire company of the inn household was
assembled to see us start. Not a white mouse but was on duty. The
cockatoos performed the most perilous of their trapeze accomplishments
as a last tribute; the doves cooed mournfully; the monkeys ran like
frenzied spirits along their gratings to see the very last of us.
Madame Le Mois considerately carried the bantam to the archway, that
the lost joy of strutting might be replaced by the pride of preferment
above its fellows.
"_Adieu_, mesdames."
"_Au revoir_--you will return--_tout le monde revient_--Guillaume le
Conquérant, like Caesar, conquers once to hold forever--remember--"
[Illustration: CHATEAU FONTAINE LE HENRI, NEAR CAEN]
From Monsieur Paul, in quieter, richer tones, came his true farewell,
the one we had looked for:
"The evenings in the Marmousets will seem lonely when it rains--you
must give us the hope of a quick return. Hope is the food of those who
remain behind, as we Normans say!"
The archway darkened the sod for an instant; the next we had passed out
into the broad highway. Jean, in his blouse, with Suzette beside him,
both jolting along in the lumbering _char-à-banc_, stared out at us
with a vacant-eyed curiosity. We were only two travellers like
themselves, along a dusty roadway, on our way to Caen; we were of no
particular importance in the landscape, we and our rickety little
phaeton. Yet only a moment before, in the inn court-yard, we had felt
ourselves to be the pivotal centre of a world wholly peopled with
friends! This is what comes to all men who live under the modern
curse--the double curse of restlessness and that itching for novelty,
which made the old Greek longing for the unknown deity--which is also
the only honest prayer of so many _fin de siècle_ souls!
Besides the dust, there were other things abroad on the high-road. What
a lot of June had got into the air! The meadows and the orchards were
exuding perfumes; the hedge-rows were so many yards of roses and wild
grape-vines in blossom. The sea-smells, aromatic, pungent, floated
inland to be married, in hot haste, to a perfect harem of clover and
locust scents. The charm of the coast was enriched by the homely,
familiar scenes of farm-house life. All the country between Dives and
Caen seemed one vast farm, beautifully tilled, with its meadow-lands
dipping seaward. For several miles, perhaps, the agricultural note
alone would be the dominant one, with the fields full of the old, the
eternal surprise--the dawn of young summer rising over them. Down the
sides of the low hills, the polychrome grain waved beneath the touch of
the breeze like a moving sea. Many and vast were the flat-lands; they
were wide vistas of color: there were fields that were scarlet with the
pomp of poppies, others tinged to the yellow of a Celestial by the
feathery mustard; and still others blue as a sapphire's heart from the
dye of millions of bluets. A dozen small rivers--or perhaps it was only
one--coiled and twisted like a cobra in sinuous action, in and out
among the pasture and sea meadows.
As we passed the low, bushy banks, we heard the babel of the
washerwomen's voices as they gossiped and beat their clothes on the
stones. A fisherman or two gave one a hint that idling was understood
here, as elsewhere, as being a fine art for those who possess the
talent of never being pressed for time. A peasant had brought his horse
to the bank; the river, to both peasant and Percheron, was evidently
considered as a personal possession--as are all rivers to those who
live near them. There was a naturalness in all the life abroad in the
fields that gave this Normandy highroad an incomparable charm. An
Arcadian calm, a certain patriarchal simplicity reigned beneath the
trees. Children trudged to the river bank with pails and pitchers to be
filled; women, with rakes and scythes in hand, crept down from the
upper fields to season their mid-day meal with the cooling whiff of the
river and sea air. Children tugged at their skirts. In two feet of
human life, with kerchief tied under chin, the small hands carrying a
huge bunch of cornflowers, how much of great gravity there may be! One
such rustic sketch of the future peasant was seriously carrying its
bouquet to another small edition seated in a grove of poppies; it might
have been a votive offering. Both the children seated themselves, a
very earnest conversation ensuing. On the hill-top, near by, the father
and mother were also conversing, as they bent over their scythes.
Another picture was wheeling itself along the river bank; it was a
farmer behind a huge load of green grass; atop of the grasses two
moon-faced children had laps and hands crowded with field flowers.
Behind them the mother walked, with a rake slung over her shoulder, her
short skirts and scant draperies giving to her step a noble freedom.
The brush of Vollon or of Breton would have seized upon her to embody
the type of one of their rustic beauties, that type whose mingled
fierceness and grace make their peasants the rude goddesses of the
plough.
Even a rustic river wearies at last of wandering, as an occupation.
Miles back we had left the sea; even the hills had stopped a full hour
ago, as if they had no taste for the rivalry of cathedral spires.
Behold the river now, coursing as sedately as the high-road, between
two interminable lines of poplars. Far as the eye could reach stretched
a wide, great plain. It was flat as an old woman's palm; it was also as
fertile as the city sitting in the midst of its luxuriance has been
rich in history.
"_Ce pays est très beau, et Caen la plus jolie ville, la plus avenante,
la plus gaie, la mieux située, les plus belles rues, les plus beaux
bâtiments, les plus belles églises_--"
There was no doubt, Charm added, as she repeated the lady's verdict, of
the opinion Madame de Sévigné had formed of the town. As we drove, some
two hundred years later, through the Caen streets, the charm we found
had been perpetuated, but alas! not all of the beauty. At first we were
entirely certain that Caen had retained its old loveliness; the
outskirts were tricked out with the bloom of gardens and with old
houses brave in their armor of vines. The meadows and the great trees
of the plain were partly to blame for this illusion; they yielded their
place grudgingly to the cobble-stoned streets and the height of dormer
windows.
To come back to the world, even to a provincial world, after having
lived for a time in a corner, is certain to evoke a pleasurable feeling
of elation. The streets of Caen were by no means the liveliest we had
driven into; nor did the inhabitants, as at Villerville, turn out _en
masse_ to welcome us. The streets, to be quite truthful, were as
sedately quiet as any thoroughfares could well be, and proudly call
themselves boulevards. The stony-faced gray houses presented a
singularly chill front, considering their nationality. But neither the
pallor of the streets nor their aspect of provincial calm had power to
dampen the sense of our having returned to the world of cities. A girl
issuing from a doorway with a netted veil drawn tightly over her rosy
cheeks, and the curve of a Parisian bodice, immediately invested Caen
with a metropolitan importance.
The most courteous of innkeepers was bending over our carriage-door. He
was desolated, but his inn was already full; it was crowded to
repletion with people; surely these ladies knew it was the week of the
races? Caen was as crowded as the inn; at night many made of the open
street their bed; his own court-yard was as filled with men as with
farm-wagons. It was altogether hopeless as a situation; as a welcome
into a strange city, I have experienced none more arctic. I had,
however, forgotten that I was travelling with a conqueror; that when
Charm smiled she did as she pleased with her world. The innkeeper was
only a man; and since Adam, when has any member of that sex been known
to say "No" to a pretty woman? This French Adam, when Charm parted her
lips, showing the snow of her teeth, found himself suddenly,
miraculously, endowed with a fragment of memory. _Tiens_, he had
forgotten! that very morning a corner of the attic--_un bout du
toit_--had been vacated. If these ladies did not mind mounting to a
_grenier_--an attic, comfortable, although still only an attic!
The one dormer window was on a level with the roof-tops. We had a whole
company of "belles voisines," a trick of neighborliness in windows the
quick French wit, years ago, was swift to name. These "neighbors" were
of every order and pattern. All the world and his mother-in-law were
gone to the races;--and yet every window was playing a different scene
in the comedy of this life in the sky. Who does not know and love a
French window, the higher up in the world of air the better? There are
certain to be plants, rows of them in pots, along the wide sill; one
can count on a bullfinch or a parrot, as one can on the bébés that
appear to be born on purpose to poke their fingers in the cages; there
is certain also to be another cage hanging above the flowers--one
filled with a fresh lettuce or a cabbage leaf. There is usually a snowy
curtain, fringed; just at the parting of the draperies an old woman is
always seated, with chin and nose-tip meeting, her bent figure rounding
over the square of her knitting-needles.
It was such a window as this that made us feel, before our bonnets were
laid aside, that Caen was glad to see us. The window directly opposite
was wide open. Instead of one there were half a dozen songsters aloft;
we were so near their cages that the cat-bird whistled, to call his
master and mistress to witness the intrusion of these strangers. The
master brought a hot iron along--he was a tailor and was just in the
act of pressing a seam. His wife was scraping carrots, and she tucked
her bowl between her knees as she came to stand and gaze across. A cry
rose up within the low room. Some one else wished to see the newcomers.
The tailor laid aside his iron to lift proudly, far out beyond the
cages, the fattest, rosiest offspring that ever was born in an attic.
The babe smote its hands for pure joy. We were better than a broken
doll--we were alive. The family as a family accepted us as one among
them. The man smiled, and so did his wife. Presently both nodded
graciously, as if, understanding the cause of our intrusion on their
aerial privacy, they wished to present us with the compliment of their
welcome. The manners among these garret-windows, we murmured, were
really uncommonly good.
"Bonjour, mesdames!" It was the third time the woman had passed, and we
were still at the window. Her husband left his seam to join her.
"Ces dames are not accustomed to such heights--_à ces hauteurs
peut-être?_"
The ladies in truth were not, unhappily, always so well lodged; from
this height at least one could hope to see a city.
"_Ah! ha! c'est gai par ici, n'est-ce pas?_ One has the sun all to
one's self, and air! Ah! for freshness one must climb to an attic in
these days, it appears."
It was impossible to be more contented on a height than was this family
of tailors; for when not cooking, or washing, or tossing the "bébé" to
the birds, the wife stitched and stitched all her husband cut, besides
taking a turn at the family socks. Part of this contentment came, no
doubt, from the variety of shows and amusements with which the family,
as a family, were perpetually supplied. For workers, there were really
too many social distractions abroad in the streets; it was almost
impossible for the two to meet all the demands on their time. Now it
was the jingle of a horse's bell-collar; the tailor, between two snips
at a collar, must see who was stopping at the hotel door. Later a horn
sounded; this was only the fish vender, the wife merely bent her head
over the flowers to be quite sure. Next a trumpet, clear and strong,
rang its notes up into the roof eaves; this was something _bébé_ must
see and hear--all three were bending at the first throbbing touch of
that music on the still air, to see whence it came. Thus you see, even
in the provinces, in a French street, something is quite certain to
happen; it all depends on the choice one makes in life of a window--of
being rightly placed--whether or not one finds life dull or amusing.
This tailor had the talent of knowing where to stand, at life's
corner--for him there was a ceaseless procession of excitements.
It may be that our neighbor's talent for seeing was catching. It is
certain that no city we had ever before looked out upon had seemed as
crowded with sights. The whole history of Caen was writ in stone
against the blue of the sky. Here, below us, sat the lovely old town,
seated in the grasses of her plain. Yonder was her canal, as an artery
to keep her pulse bounding in response to the sea; the ship-masts and
the drooping sails seemed strange companions for the great trees and
the old garden walls. Those other walls William built to cincture the
city, Froissart found three centuries later so amazingly "strong, full
of drapery and merchandise, rich citizens, noble dames, damsels, and
fine churches," for this girdle of the Conqueror's great bastions the
eye looks in vain. But William's vow still proclaims its fulfilment;
the spire of l'Abbaye aux Hommes, and the Romanesque towers of its
twin, l'Abbaye aux Dames, face each other, as did William and Mathilde
at the altar--that union that had to be expiated by the penance of
building these stones in the air.
Commend me to an attic window to put one in sympathetic relations with
cathedral spires! At this height we and they, for a part of their
flight upward, at least, were on a common level--and we all know what
confidences come about from the accident of propinquity. They seemed to
assure us as never before when sitting at their feet, the difficulties
they had overcome in climbing heavenward. Every stone that looked down
upon the city wore this look of triumph.
In the end it was this Caen in the air--it was this aerial city of
finials, of towers, of peaked spires, of carved chimneys, of tree-tops
over which the clouds rode; of a plain, melting--like a sea--into the
mists of the horizon; this high, bright region peopled with birds and
pigeons; of a sky tender, translucent, and as variable as human
emotions; of an air that was rapture to breathe, and of nights in which
the stars were so close they might almost be handled; it was this free,
hilly city of the roofs that is still the Caen I remember best.
There were other features of Caen that were good to see, I also
remember. Her street expression, on the whole, was very pleasing. It
was singularly calm and composed, even for a city in a plain. But the
quiet came, doubtless, from its population being away at the races. The
few townspeople who, for obvious reasons, were stay-at-homes, were
uncommonly civil; Caen had evidently preserved the tradition of good
manners. An army of cripples was in waiting to point the way to the
church doors; a regiment of beggars was within them, with nets cast
already for the catching of the small fry of our pennies. In the gay,
geranium-lit garden circling the side walls of St. Pierre there were
many legless soldiers; the old houses we went to see later on in the
high street seemed, by contrast, to have survived other wars, those of
the Directory and the Mountain, with a really scandalous degree of good
fortune. On our way to a still greater church than St. Pierre, to the
Abbaye aux Dames, that, like the queen who built her, sits on the
throne of a hill--on our way thither we passed innumerable other
ancient mansions. None of these were down in the guide books; they
were, therefore, invested with the deeper charm of personal discovery.
Once away from the little city of the shops, the real Caen came out to
greet us. It was now a gray, sad, walled town; behind the walls,
level-browed Francis I. windows looked gravely over the tufts of
verdure; here was an old gateway; there what might once have been a
portcullis, now only an arched wreath of vines; still beyond, a group
of severe-looking mansions with great iron bound windows presented the
front of miniature fortresses. And everywhere gardens and gardens.
Turn where you would, you would only turn to face verdure, foliage, and
masses of flowers. The high walls could neither keep back the odors nor
hide the luxuriance of these Caen gardens. These must have been the
streets that bewitched Madame de Sévigné. Through just such a maze of
foliage Charlotte Corday has also walked, again and again, with her
wonderful face aflame with her great purpose, before the purpose
ripened into the dagger thrust at Marat's bared breast--that avenging
Angel of Beauty stabbing the Beast in his bath. Auber, with his
Anacreontic ballads in his young head, would seem more fittingly framed
in this old Caen that runs up a hill-side. But women as beautiful as
Marie Stuart and the Corday can deal safely in the business of
assassination, the world will always continue to aureole their pictures
with a garland of roses.
The Abbaye on its hill was reached at last. All Caen lay below us; from
the hillside it flowed as a sea rolls away from a great ship's sides.
Down below, far below, as if buttressing the town that seemed rushing
away recklessly to the waste of the plains, stands the Abbaye's
twin-brother, the Aux Hommes. Plains, houses, roof-tops, spires, all
were swimming in a sea of golden light; nothing seemed quite real or
solid, so vast was the prospect and so ethereal was the medium through
which we saw it. Perhaps it was the great contrast between that
shimmering, unstable city below, that reeked and balanced itself like
some human creature whose dazzled vision had made its footing
insecure--it may be that it was this note of contrast which invested
this vast structure bestriding the hill, with such astonishing
grandeur. I have known few, if any, other churches produce so
instantaneous an effect of a beauty that was one with austerity. This
great Norman is more Puritan than French: it is Norman Gothic with a
Puritan severity.
The sound of a deep sonorous music took us quickly within. It was as
mysterious a music as ever haunted a church aisle. The vast and snowy
interior was as deserted as a Presbyterian church on a week-day. Yet
the sound of the rich, strong voices filled all the place. There was no
sound of tingling accompaniment: there was no organ pipe, even, to add
its sensuous note of color. There was only the sound of the voices, as
they swelled, and broke, and began afresh.
The singing went on.
It was a slow "plain chant." Into the great arches the sonorous
chanting beat upon the ear with a rhythmic perfection that, even
without the lovely flavor of its sweetness, would have made a beauty of
its own. In this still and holy place, with the company of the stately
Norman arches soaring aloft--beneath the sombre glory of the giant
aisle--the austere simplicity of this chant made the heart beat, one
knew not why, and the eyes moisten, one also knew not why.
We had followed the voices. They came, we found, from within the choir.
A pattering of steps proclaimed we were to go no farther.
"Not there, my ladies--step this way, one only enters the choir by
going into the hospital."
The voice was low and sweet; the smile, a spark of divinity set in a
woman's face; and the whole was clothed in a nun's garb.
We followed the fluttering robes; we passed out once more into the
sunlit parvis. We spoke to the smile and it answered: yes, the choir
was reserved for the Sisters--they must be able to approach it from the
convent and the hospital; it had always, since the time of Mathilde,
been reserved for the nuns; would we pass this way? The way took us
into an open vaulted passage, past a grating where sat a white-capped
Sister, past a group of girls and boys carrying wreaths and
garlands--they were making ready for the _Fête-Dieu_, our nun
explained--past, at the last, a series of corridors through which,
faintly at first, and then sweeter and fuller, there struck once more
upon our ears the sounds of the deep and resonant chanting.
The black gown stopped all at once. The nun was standing in front of a
green curtain. She lifted it. This was what we saw. The semicircle of a
wide apse. Behind, rows upon rows of round arches. Below the arches, in
the choir stalls, a long half-circle of stately figures. The figures
were draped from head to foot. When they bent their heads not an inch
of flesh was visible, except a few hands here and there that had
escaped the long, wide sleeves. All these figures were motionless; they
were as immobile as statues; occasionally, at the end of a "Gloria,"
all turned to face the high altar. At the end of the "Amen" a cloud of
black veils swept the ground. Then for several measures of the chant
the figures were again as marble. In each of the low, round arches, a
stately woman, tall and nobly planned, draped like a goddess turned
saint, stood and chanted to her Lord. Had the Norman builders carved
these women, ages ago, standing about Mathilde's tomb, those ancient
sculptures could not have embodied, in more ideal image, the type of
womanly renunciation and of a saint's fervor of exaltation.
We left them, with the rich chant still full upon their lips, with
heads bent low, calm as graven images. It was only the bloom on a
cheek, here and there, that made one certain of the youth entombed
within these nuns' garb.
"Happy, _mesdames? Oh, mais très heureuses, toutes_--there are no women
so happy as we. See how they come to us, from all the country around.
_En voilà une_--did you remark the pretty one, with the book, seated,
all in white? She is to be a full Sister in a month. She comes from a
noble family in the south. She was here one day, she saw the life of
the Sisters, of us all working here, among the poor soldiers--_elle a
vu ça, et pour tout de bon, s'est donnée à Dieu!_"
The smile of our nun was rapturous. She was proving its source. Once
more we saw the young countess who had given herself to her God. An
hour later, when we had reached the hospital wards, her novice's robes
were trailing the ground. She was on her knees in the very middle of
the great bare room. She was repeating the office of the hour, aloud,
with clasped hands and uplifted head. On her lovely young face there
was the glow of a divine ecstasy. All the white faces from the long
rows of the white beds were bending toward her; to one even in all
fulness of strength and health that girlish figure, praying beside the
great vase of the snowy daisies, with the glow that irradiated the
sweet, pure face, might easily enough have seemed an angel's.
As companions for our tour of the grounds we had two young Englishmen.
Both eyed the nuns in the distance of the corridors and the gardens
with the sharpened glances all men level at the women who have
renounced them. It is a mystery no man ever satisfactorily fathoms.
"Queer notion, this, a lot of women shutting themselves up," remarked
the younger of the two. "In England, now, they'd all go in for being
old maids, drinking tea and coddling cats, you know."
"I wonder which are the happier, your countrywomen or these Sisters,
who, in renouncing the world devote their lives to serving it. See,
over yonder" and I nodded to a scene beneath the wide avenue of the
limes. Two tall Augustines were supporting a crippled old man; they
were showing him some fresh garden-beds. Beyond was a gayer group. Some
of the lay sisters were tugging at a huge basket of clothes, fresh from
the laundry. Running across the grass, with flying draperies, two nuns,
laughing as they ran, each striving to outfoot the other, were
hastening to their rescue.
"They keep their bloom, running about like that; only healthy nuns I
ever saw."
"That's because they have something better than cats to coddle."
"Ah, ha! that's not bad. It's a slow suicide, all the same. But here we
are, at the top; it's a fine outlook, is it not?"
The young man panted as he reached the top of the Maze, one of the
chief glories of the old Abbaye grounds. He had a fair and sensitive
face; a weak product on the whole, he seemed, compared with the
nobly-built, vigorous-bodied nuns crowding the choir-stalls yonder.
Instead of that long, slow suicide, surely these women should be doing
their greater work of reproducing a race. Even an open-air cell seems
to me out of place in our century. It will be entirely out of fashion
in time, doubtless, as the mediaeval cell has gone along with the old
castle life, whose princely mode of doing things made a nunnery the
only respectable hiding-place for the undowered daughters.
As we crept down into Caen, it was to find it thick with the dust of
twilight. The streets were dense with other things besides the
thickened light. The Caen world was crowding homeward; all the
boulevards and side streets were alive with a moving throng of dusty,
noisy, weary holidaymakers. The town was abroad in the streets to hear
the news of the horses, and to learn the history of the betting.
Although we had gone to church instead of doing the races, many of
those who had peopled the gay race-track came back to us. The table
d'hôte, at our inn that night, was as noisy as a Parisian cafe. It was
scarcely as discreet, I should say. On our way to our attic that night,
the little corridors made us a really amazing number of confidences.
It was strange, but all the shoes appeared to have come in pairs of
twos. Never was there such a collection of boots in couples. Strange it
was, also, to see how many little secrets these rows of candid
shoe-leather disclosed. Here a pert, coquettish pair of ties were
having as little in common as possible with the stout, somewhat clumsy
walking-boots next them. In the two just beyond, at the next door, how
the delicate, slender buttoned kids leaned over, floppingly, to rest on
the coarse, yet strong, hobnailed clumpers!
Shabbier and shabbier grew the shoes, as we climbed upward. With each
pair of stairs we seemed to have left a rung in the ladder of fortune
behind. But even the very poorest in pocket had brought his little
extravagance with him to the races.
The only genuine family party had taken refuge, like ourselves, in the
attic.
At the very next door to our own, Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé proclaimed,
by the casting of their dusty shoes, that they also, like the rest of
the world, had come to Caen to see the horses run.