A DAY AT BAYEUX AND ST. LO.
Caen seated in its plain, wearing its crown of steeples--this was our
last glimpse of the beautiful city. Our way to Bayeux was strewn thick
with these Normandy jewels; with towns smaller than Caen; with Gothic
belfries; with ruined priories, and with castles, stately even when
tottering in decay. When the last castle was lost in a thicket, we
discovered that our iron horse was stopping in the very middle of a
field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city,
built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at
home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with grass and
daisies, was a very finished evidence of civilization at high pressure.
But a lane as the beginning of a cathedral town!
Evidently Bayeux has had a Ruskinian dread of steam-whistles, for this
ancient seat of bishops has succeeded in retaining the charms of its
old rustic approaches, whatever else it may have sacrificed on the
altar of modernness.
An harangue, at the door of the quaint old Normandy omnibus, by the
driver of the same, was proof that the lesson of good oratory,
administered by generations of bishops, had not been lost on the Bayeux
inhabitants. Two rebellious English tourists furnished the text for the
driver's sermon; they were showing, with all the naive pride of
pedestrians, their intention of footing the distance between the
station and the cathedral. This was an independence of spirit no Norman
could endure to see. What? these gentlemen proposed to walk, in the
sun, through clouds of dust, when here was a carriage, with ladies for
companions, at their command? The coach had come down the hill on
purpose to conduct _Messieurs les voyageurs;_ how did these gentlemen
suppose _a père de famille_ was to make his living if the fashion of
walking came in? And the rusty red vest was thumbed by the gnarled hand
of the father, who was also an orator; and a high-peaked hat swept the
ground before the hard-hearted gentlemen. All the tragedy of the
situation had come about from the fact that the tourists, also, had
gotten themselves up in costume. When two fine youths have risen early
in the day to put on checked stockings, leggings, russet walking-shoes,
and a plaited coat with a belt, such attire is one to be lived up to.
Once in knickerbockers and a man's getting into an omnibus is really
too ignominious! With such a road before two sets of such well-shaped
calves--a road all shaped and graded--this, indeed, would be flying in
the face of a veritable providence of bishop-builders intent on
maintaining pastoral effects.
The knickerbockers relentlessly strode onward; the driver had addressed
himself to hearts of stone. But he had not yet exhausted his quiver of
appeal. Englishmen walk, well! there's no accounting for the taste of
Britons who are also still half savages; but even a barbarian must eat.
Half-way up the hill, the rattle of the loose-jointed vehicle came to a
dead stop. With great gravity the guard descended from his seat; this
latter he lifted to take from the entrails of the old vehicle a handful
of hand-bills. He, the horse, the omnibus, and we, all waited for, what
do you suppose? To besprinkle the walking Englishmen as they came
within range with a shower of circulars announcing that at "_midi, chez
Nigaud, il y aura un dejeuner chaud_."
The driver turned to look in at the window--and to nod as he turned--he
felt so certain of our sympathy; had he not made sure of them at last?
A group of gossamer caps beneath a row of sad, gray-faced houses was
our Bayeux welcome. The faces beneath the caps watched our approach
with the same sobriety as did the old houses--they had the antique
Norman seriousness of aspect. The noise we made with the clatter and
rattle of our broken-down vehicle seemed an impertinence, in the face
of such severe countenances. We might have been entering a deserted
city, except for the presence of these motionless Normandy figures. The
cathedral met us at the threshold of the city: magnificent, majestic, a
huge gray mountain of stone, but severe in outline, as if the Norman
builders had carved on the vast surface of its facade an imprint of
their own grave earnestness.
We were somewhat early for the hot breakfast at Nigaud's. There was,
however, the appetizing smell of soup, with a flourishing pervasiveness
of onion in the pot, to sustain the vigor of an appetite whetted by a
start at dawn. The knickerbockers came in with the omelette. But one is
not a Briton on his travels for nothing; one does not leave one's own
island to be the dupe of French inn-keepers. The smell of the soup had
not departed with our empty plates, and the voice of the walkers was
not of the softest when they demanded their rights to be as odorous as
we. There is always a curiously agreeable sensation, to an American, in
seeing an Englishman angry; to get angry in public is one thing we do
badly; and in his cup of wrath our British brother is sublime--he is so
superbly unconscious--and so contemptuous--of the fact that the world
sometimes finds anger ridiculous.
At the other end of the long and narrow table two other travellers were
seated, a man and a woman. But food, to them, it was made manifestly
evident, was a matter of the most supreme indifference. They were at
that radiant moment of life when eating is altogether too gross a form
of indulgence. For these two were at the most interesting period of
French courtship--just _after_ the wedding ceremony, when, with the
priest's blessing, had come the consent of their world and of tradition
to their making the other's acquaintance. This provincial bride and her
husband of a day were beginning, as all rustic courting begins, by a
furtive holding of hands; this particular couple, in view of our
proximity and their own mutual embarrassment, had recourse to the
subterfuge of desperate lunges at the other's fingers, beneath the
table-cloth. The screen, as a screen, did not work. It deceived no
one--as the bride's pale-gray dress and her flowery bonnet also
deceived no one--save herself. This latter, in certain ranks of life,
is the bride's travelling costume, the world over. And the world over,
it is worn by the recently wedded with the profound conviction that in
donning it they have discovered the most complete of all disguises.
This bride and groom were obviously in the first rapture of mutual
discovery. The honey in their moon was not fresher than their views of
the other's tastes and predilections.
"Ah--ah--you like to travel quickly--to see everything, to take it all
in a gulp--so do I, and then to digest at one's leisure."
The bride was entirely of this mind. Only, she murmured, there were
other things one must not do too quickly--one must go slow in matters
of the heart--to make quite sure of all the stages.
But her husband was at her throat, that is, his eyes and lips were, as
he answered, so that all the table might partake of his emotion--"No,
no, the quicker the heart feels the quicker love comes. _Tiens, voyons,
mon amie, toi-même, tu m'as confié_"--and the rest was lost in the
bride's ear.
Apparently we were to have them, these brides, for the rest of our
journey, in all stages and of all ages! Thus far none others had
appeared as determined as were these two honey-mooners, that all the
world should share their bliss. They were cracking filberts with their
disengaged fingers, the other two being closely interlocked, in quite
scandalous openness, when we left them.
That was the only form of excitement that greeted us in the quiet
Bayeux streets. The very street urchins invited repose; the few we saw
were seated sedately on the threshold of their own door-steps, frequent
sallies abroad into this quiet city having doubtless convinced them of
the futility of all sorties. The old houses were their carved facades
as old ladies wear rich lace--they had reached the age when the vanity
of personal adornment had ceased to inflate. The great cathedral,
towering above the tranquil town, wore a more conscious air; its
significance was too great a contrast to the quiet city asleep at its
feet. In these long, slow centuries the towers had grown to have the
air of protectors.
The famous tapestries we went to see later, might easily enough have
been worked yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde
and her hand-maidens would find no more--not so much--to distract and
disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray
streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier
bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only
beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces,
Bayeux was already old. She was far more Norse then than Norman; she
was Scandinavian to the core; even her nobles spoke in harsh Norse
syllables; they were as little French as it was possible to be, and yet
govern a people.
Mathilde, when she toiled over her frame, like all great writers, was
doubtless quite unconscious she was producing a masterpiece. She was,
however, in point of fact, the very first among the great French
realists. No other French writer has written as graphically as she did
with her needle, of the life and customs of their day. That long scroll
of tapestry, for truth and a naive perfection of sincerity--where will
you find it equalled or even approached? It is a rude Homeric epic; and
I am not quite certain that it ought not to rank higher than even some
of the more famous epics of the world--since Mathilde had to create the
mould of art into which she poured her story. For who had thought
before her of making women's stitches write or paint a great historical
event, crowded with homely details which now are dubbed archaeological
veracities?
Bayeux and its tapestry; its grave company of antique houses; its
glorious cathedral dominating the whole--what a lovely old background
against which poses the eternal modernness of the young noon sun! The
history of Bayeux is commonly given in a paragraph. Our morning's walk
had proved to us it was the kind of town that does more to re-create
the historic past than all the pages of a Guizot or a Challamel.
The bells that were ringing out the hour of high-noon from the
cathedral towers at Bayeux were making the heights of St. Lo, two hours
later, as noisy as a village fair. The bells, for rivals, had the
clatter of women's tongues. I think I never, before or since, have
beheld so lively a company of washerwomen as were beating their clothes
in Vire River. The river bends prettily just below the St. Lo heights,
as if it had gone out of its way to courtesy to a hill. But even the
waters, in their haste to be polite, could not course beneath the great
bridge as swiftly as ran those women's tongues. There were a good
hundred of them at work beneath the washing-sheds. Now, these sheds,
anywhere in France, are really the open-air club room of the French
peasant woman; the whole dish of the village gossip is hung out to dry,
having previously been well soused and aired, along with the blouses
and the coarse chemises. The town of St. Lo had evidently furnished
these club members of the washing-stones with some fat dish of
gossip--the heads were as close as currants on a stem, as they bent in
groups over the bright waters. They had told it all to the stream; and
the stream rolled the volume of the talk along as it carried along also
the gay, sparkling reflections of the life and the toil that bent over
it--of the myriad reflections of those moving, bare-armed figures, of
the brilliant kerchiefs, of the wet blue and gray jerseys, and of the
long prismatic line of the damp, motley-hued clothes that were
fluttering in the wind.
The bells' clangor was an assurance that something was happening on top
of the hill. Just what happened was as altogether pleasing a spectacle,
after a long and arduous climb up a hillside, as it has often been my
good fortune to encounter.
The portals of the church of Notre Dame were wide open. Within, as we
looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to
see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was
a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit by
the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of
white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale as
the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the
scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others
swinging incense that thickened the dusk. Suddenly, like a vision, the
white veils passed out into the sunlight, and we saw that the faces
beneath the veils were young and comely. The faces were still
alternately lighted by the flare of the burning tapers and the glare of
the noon sun. The long procession ended at last in a straggling group
of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and
with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town,
in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from
the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys'
singing.
Whether it was a pardon, or a _fête_, or a first communion, we never
knew. But the town of St. Lo is ever gloriously lighted, for us, with a
nimbus of young heads, such as encircled the earlier madonnas.
After such a goodly spectacle, the rest of the town was a tame morsel.
We took a parting sniff of the incense still left in the eastern end of
the church's nave; there was a bit of good glass in a window to reward
us. Outside the church, on the west from the Petite Place, was a wide
outlook over the lovely vale of the Vire, with St. Lo itself twisting
and turning in graceful postures down the hillside.
On the same prospect two kings have looked, and before the kings a
saint. St. Lo or St. Laudus himself, who gave his name to the town,
must, in the sixth century, have gazed on virgin forests stretching
away from the hill far as the eye could reach. Charlemagne, three
hundred years later, in his turn, found the site a goodly one, one to
tempt men to worship the Creator of such beauty, for here he founded
the great Abbey of St. Croix, long since gone with the monks who
peopled it. Louis XI, that mystic wearing the warrior's helmet, set his
seal of approval on the hill, by sending the famous glass yonder in the
cathedral, when the hill and the St. Lo people beat the Bretons who had
come to capture both.
Like saint, and kings, and monks, and warriors, we in our turn crept
down the hill. For we also were done with the town.