THE GLACIÈRE OF THE GRÂCE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANÇON.
The grand and lovely scenery of the Val de Travers has at length been
opened up for the ordinary tourist world, by the railway which connects
Pontarlier with Neufchâtel. The beauties of the valley are an
unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets
the traveller passing north from the former town; but the country soon
assumes a pleasanter aspect, and nothing can be more charming than the
soft green slopes, dotted with the richest pines, which form the
approach to the station of Boujeailles. It is impossible for the most
careless traveller to avoid observing the ill effects produced upon the
trees on the south side of the forest of Chaux, by the crowded and
neglected state in which they have been left, and the wet state of the
soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and
then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their
heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in
other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the
appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number
of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a
cedar-like air to the scene of ruin.
Up to this point, an elderly Frenchman in the carriage had been
extremely offensive, from the evil odour of his Macintosh coat; but in
answer to a remark upon the improvement which the railway would effect,
by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on
that subject, and gave it so pleasantly, and had evidently so good a
knowledge of the topography of Franche Comté, that his coat speedily
lost its smell, and we became excellent friends.
It is a tantalising thing to be whirled on a hot and dusty day through
districts famous for their wines, the dust and heat standing out in
more painful colours by contrast with the recollection of cooling
draughts which other occasions have owed to such vineyards; though,
after all, the true method of facing heat with success is to drink no
wine. At any rate, the vineyards of Arbois must always be interesting,
and if the stories of the Templars' orgies be true, we may be sure
that the chapelry which they possessed in that town would be a
favourable place of residence with the order; possibly Rule XVI. might
there be somewhat relaxed. 'The good wine of Arbois,' _la meilleure
cave de Bourgougne_, a judicious old writer says, had free entry into
all the towns of the Comté; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial,
Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the
empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the
troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they
did not wish to attack _ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui
frappe partout_;[26] and the king was forced to come himself, with his
constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which
undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater
extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the
municipality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the
country. He praised the wine very highly, on which one of the body had
the ill taste to assure him that they had a better wine than that.
'You keep it, perhaps,' was the royal rebuke, 'for a better occasion.'
Henry had a great opinion of this wine; and the Duc de Sully states,
in his Memoirs, that when the Duc de Mayenne retired from the league
against the king, and came to Monceaux to tender his allegiance, Henry
punished him for past offences by walking so fast about the grounds of
the château, that the poor duke, what with his sciatica, and what with
his fat, at last told him with an expressive gesture that a minute
more of it would kill him. The king thereupon let him go, and promised
him some _vin d'Arbois_ to set him right again.[27]
The present appearance of the town, as seen from the high level followed
by the railway, scarcely recalls the time when Arbois was known as _le
jardin de noblesse_, and Barbarossa dated thence his charters, or Jean
Sans-peur held there the States of Burgundy. Gollut[28] tells a story of
a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of
France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an
elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always
surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the
Châtelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the
occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her
mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that '_par
pitié elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres
debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine_.'
There is a Val d'Amour near Arbois, but the more beautiful valley of
that name lies between Dôle and Besançon, and, as we passed its
neighbourhood, my friend with the Macintosh informed me that as it was
clear from my questions that I was drawing up a history of the Franche
Comté, he must beg me to insert a legend respecting the origin of this
name, Val d'Amour, which, he believed, had never appeared in print. I
disclaimed the history, but accepted the legend, and here it is:--The
Seigneur of Chissey was to marry the heiress of a neighbouring
seigneurie, and, it is needless to add, she was very lovely, and he was
handsome and brave. A lake separated the two châteaux, and the young man
not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it
fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved
sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering
her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her
efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters
to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near
the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percée, or, as men now
spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the
valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness
and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the
Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for
Noble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the
treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dôle
in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey
indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the
female prebends of Château-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters,
filled a considerable place in the history of the Comté from the
Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]
and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were
possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the
Val d'Amour.
As we drew nearer to Besançon, each turn of the small streams, and each
low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Cæsar's
'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a
battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to
retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for
the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of
grass-land between their foot and the stream.
The Frenchman knew his Cæsar, but he put that general in the fourth
century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily
detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the
indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the
nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of
small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besançon, and was
greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him
Cæsar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the
amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this
denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besançon, some even
thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre
and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The
Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the
Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It
seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine.
It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself
visited the glacière which was the object of my search, and was able to
give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on
the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave
five leagues from Besançon. As so often happened in other cases, he
advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to
the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and
galleries near the Doubs, below Besançon. Seeing, however, that I was
bent on visiting the glacière, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for
the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near
not to receive guests on that day; while Saturday, he thought, was
almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on
days of abstinence. Saturday, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.
The first sight of Besançon explains at once why Cæsar was so anxious
to forestall Ariovistus by occupying Vesontio, although the hill on
which the citadel stands is not so striking as the similar hill at
Salins, and the engines of modern warfare would promptly print their
telegrams on every stone and man in the place, from the neighbouring
heights. The French Government has wisely taken warning from the
bombardment by the Allies, and has covered the heights which command it
on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of
the place. Historically, Besançon is a place of great interest. It
witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with
Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the
troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the
two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops,
and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against
the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town,
while the fight was still going on.[31] The Bisuntians claim to
themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio
was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabinus, who asserted that he was the
grandson of a son of Julius Cæsar, and proclaimed himself emperor in
the time of Vespasian. The Sequani proceeded against him of their own
accord, and conquered him in the interest of the reigning emperor; and
he and his wife Peponilla lived hid in a tomb for nine years. Here two
sons were born to them; and when they were all discovered and carried to
Rome, Peponilla prettily told the emperor that she had brought up two
sons in the tomb, in order that there might be other voices to intercede
for her husband's life besides her own. They were, however, put to
death.[32]
To judge from the style of the hotels, Besançon is not visited by many
English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who
care for such things with a full average of vaulted passages, and feudal
gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of
evil smell. There are gates of all shapes and times--Louis-Quatorze
towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban's own eye;
while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut
through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by
the course of the river Doubs. This excavation, called appropriately the
_Porte Taillée_, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty
nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius
Cæsar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction
of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring
out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besançon, and was the work
probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries assign the
aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no
better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of
triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible
subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to
the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian,
however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of
Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which
Besançon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption
of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation
of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous
chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town
where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and
Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.
The Hôtel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French
ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is
true that on one occasion, at least, _haricots verts à l'Anglaise_ meant
a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of
artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of
the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for
many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round
his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation.
The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail
coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any
order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois
from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of
these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis
between the last savouries and the _plat doux_; for the usual practice
with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for
the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge,
and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful
mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as
nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by
taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with
the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, and red trousers
gathered in plaits to match, boldly despised the sophistication of
spoons, and ate their vanilla cream like men, by the help of bread and
fingers. The manners and broken French of the stranger formed an open
and agreeable subject of conversation, and the table was much quieter
than a Frenchman's _table d'hôte_ is sometimes known to be: on one
occasion, however, all decorum was scattered to the winds, and the
guests rushed out into the court-yard with disordered bibs and tuckers,
on the announcement by the head waiter of a '_chien à l'Anglaise_, not
so high as a mustard-pot,' which one of the company promptly bought for
twenty-four francs, commencing its education on the spot by a lesson in
cigar-smoking.
It frequently happens in France that _café noir_ is a much more ready
and abundant tap than water, and so it was here; notwithstanding which,
the bedroom apparatus was most comfortable and complete. The chambermaid
was a boy, and under his auspices a sheet of postage-stamps and a lead
pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that
possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he
brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously
discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust therein,
deferring the discovery and his consequent surprise till he reached my
room. It was curious that the stamps, which had before been in an open
sheet, were now folded neatly together, and curled into the shape of a
waistcoat-pocket. He was inexorable about the pencil.
No certain information could be obtained in the hotel respecting the
glacière; so an owner of carriages was summoned, and consulted as to the
best means of getting there. He naturally recommended that one of his
own carriages should be taken as far as the Abbey of Grâce-Dieu, and
that we should start at five o'clock the next morning, with a driver who
knew the way to the glacière from the point at which the carriage must
be left.[34] Five o'clock seemed very early for a drive of fifteen
miles; but the man asserted that instead of five leagues it was a good
seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glacière may be called
a historical glacière, being the only one which has attracted general
attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besançon arose very
many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists.
The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map
with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessary for a crow
line are constructed, the world must be content to call it seven and a
half at least. The man bargained for two days' pay for the carriage, on
the plea that the horse would be so tired the next day that he would not
be able to do any work, and as that day was Sunday, the great day for
excursions, it would be a dead loss. It so happened that the charge for
two days, fifteen francs, was exactly what I paid elsewhere for one day,
so there was no difficulty about the price.
We started, accordingly, at five o'clock. The day was delightfully
fine, and in spite of the driver's peculiarity of speech, caused by a
short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched
between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question
and answer respecting the country through which we passed. Of course,
the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap,
ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or
other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous
one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs
away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn
at Mühlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse
arrangement than even this, both reins passing through one small leather
loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one
occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing
to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to
steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on
the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English
cargo behind.
There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besançon, and the
old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the
corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the
remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are
in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in
winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters
vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he
could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of
the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of
rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp
air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed
through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where
some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies.
Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a
little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account
for the strange appearance of _pommes de terre au naturel_.
Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before
breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven
o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilomètres from
Besançon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray. The
breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of butter and other
things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the
milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a
soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon.
A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose
appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly
delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from
the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of
that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced
an age. I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her
garrulity to a more stimulating source.
When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of
our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in
general, _à propos_ to the Convent of Grâce-Dieu, the Chartreuse at
which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse.
The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in
consequence enormously rich. Among the products of their industry, a
liqueur known as _Chartreuse_ seemed to fill a high place in his esteem,
for he considered it to be better--and he said it as if that
comparative led into an eighth heaven--better even than absinthe. I had
an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes
below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its
great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious
sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions,
however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very
trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately
been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been
systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the
manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with
the real gains. I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each
batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is
performed with so much solemnity at Grâce-Dieu as at Grenoble; and,
indeed, it rests only on the assertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian
that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[35]
Having communicated such information as he possessed, the man seemed to
think he had a right to learn something in return, and administered
various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in
England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he
had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that
English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary
grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The
roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with
mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad
and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by
young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of
being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a
sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the
intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and
turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.
At length we passed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and
much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting,
consists _le sport_ in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this
point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so
far found to be associated with glacières; but now the country became
slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up
on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the
weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller
type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky
part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand
pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were
all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and
orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther
south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought
us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grâce-Dieu, striking
from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the
valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been
so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besançon at
five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a
shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glacière,
half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the
valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so
close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill,
belonging to the Brothers, and for the escape-channel of the stream
which works the mill. This building is quite new, and might almost be
taken for a fortification against inroads by the head of the valley,
especially as the words _Posuerunt me custodem_ appear on the face,
applying, however, to an image of the Virgin, which presides over the
establishment. The monks have expended their superfluous time and
energies upon the erection of crosses of all sizes on every projecting
peak and point of rock, one cross more sombre than the rest marking the
scene of a recent death. As I had no means of determining the elevation
of this district above the sea,[36] I made enquiries as to the climate
in winter; and one of the Brothers told me, that it was an unusual thing
with them to have a fall of snow amounting to two joints of a remarkably
dirty finger.
At the mill, the path turns up the steep wooded hill on the right, and
leads through young plantations to a small cottage near the glacière,
where the plantations give place to a well-grown beech wood. Here my
conductor startled me by announcing that there was 20 centimes to pay
to the farmer of the cave for entrance; an announcement which seemed to
take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the
disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no
doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of _pour-boire_ he
could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so
serious an effect, and it was difficult to make him understand that the
fact and not the amount of payment was the trouble. When I illustrated
this by saying that I would gladly give a franc to be allowed to enter
the glacière free, he seemed to think that if I would entrust him with
the franc, he might possibly arrange that little matter for me.
The immediate approach to the glacière is very impressive. The surface
of the ground slopes slightly upwards, and the entrance, from north to
south, is by a broad inclined plane, of gentle fall at first, which
rapidly becomes steep enough to require zigzags. The walls of rock on
either side are very sheer, and increase of course in height as the
plane of entrance falls. The whole length of the slope is about 420
feet, and down a considerable part of this some grasses and flowers are
to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice;
though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June,
1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some
of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of
this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had
been made by the farmer. In one place, within 24 feet of its upper
commencement, it was from 2-1/2 to 3 feet thick; but the prominence of
that part seemed to mark it out as of more than the average thickness.
Even where to all appearance there was nothing but mud and earth, an
unexpected fall or two showed that all was ice below. Whether the driver
had previously experienced the treacherousness of this slope of ice,
or whatever his motive might be, he left me to enter and explore alone.
The roof of the entrance is at first a mere shell, formed by the thin
crust of rock on which the surface-earth and trees rest high overhead;
but this rapidly becomes thicker, as shown in the section of the cave,
and thus a sort of outer cave is formed, the real portal of the glacière
being reached about 60 feet above the bottom of the slope. This outer
cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the
several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered
and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and
all, up to the shell-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircles of
various graduated sizes, showing their concavity; while at the bottom of
the whole is seen a patch of darkness, with two masses of ice in its
centre, looming out like grey ghosts at midnight. This darkness is of
course the inner cave, the entrance to which, though it seems so small
from above, is 78 feet broad.
The glacière itself may be said to commence as soon as this entrance,
or perpendicular portal, is passed, and thus includes 60 feet of the
long slope of ice, from the foot of which to the farther end of the
cave is 145 feet, the greatest breadth of the cave being 148 feet.
Immediately below the portal I found a piece of the trunk of a large
column of ice, 7 feet long and 12 feet in girth, its fractured ends
giving the idea of the interior of a quickly-grown tree, in
consequence of the concentric arrangement of convergent prisms
described in the account of the Glacière of S. Georges. The wife of
the farmer told me afterwards that there had been two glorious
columns at this portal, which the recent rains had swept away.
Excepting a short space at the foot of the slope, and another towards
the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some
parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been
removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot
deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true
floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so
arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a
fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on
the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts,
and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with
seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the
chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the
girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a
smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the
cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large space with small
limestone stalactites, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on
a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted
drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly
grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down
this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a
narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in
the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up
there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains
of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular
area between 60 and 70 feet in circumference.
[Illustration: VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIÈRE OF GRÂCE-DIEU, NEAR
BESANÇON.]
The three large masses of ice which rendered this glacière in some
respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line
from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the
floor where the ice was thickest. The central mass was extremely
solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular
pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very
striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the
ice-floor with which it blended. The mass which lay to the east of
this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had
found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had
accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper
branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure
in the roof. The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had
vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side
where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice
showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could
suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet.
The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree,
branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty,
each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid
bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of
suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side
by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the
column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white
and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in
former glacières, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not
unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of
the glittering element. But the westernmost mass was the grandest and
most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping
willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty,
resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued attitude of
grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out
here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass. The girth was
76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was
looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so
that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long
slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to
pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid
blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme
edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by
tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest
head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not
to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the
loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone
seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile
wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the
conventional manner. When at last it was safely lodged, the height
proved to be 27 feet. I had hoped to find it much more than this, from
the grandeur of the effect of the whole mass, and I took the trouble
to measure the knotted string again with a tape, to make sure that
there was no mistake. The column formed upon the fir-tree was 3 or 4
feet lower.
I have since found many notices of this glacière in the Memoirs of the
French Academy and elsewhere, extracts from which will be found in a
later chapter. These accounts are spread over a period of 200 years,
extending from 1590 to 1790, and almost all make mention of the columns
or groups of columns I have described; but, without exception, the
heights given or suggested in the various accounts are much less than
those which I obtained as the result of careful measurement. The latest
description of a visit to the glacière states a fact which probably will
be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier
times.[37] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had
procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from
which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing
stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high,
and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in
the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot
thick. So that it is not improbable that the largest of the three masses
of the present day owes its height, and its peculiar form, to a series
of stakes fixed from time to time in the various heads formed under the
fissures in the roof, though nothing but the most solid ice can now be
seen. It would be very interesting to try this experiment in one of the
caves where, without any artificial help, such immense masses of ice are
formed; and by this means columns might, in the course of a year or two,
be raised to the very roof. Further details on this subject will be
given hereafter.
There was no perceptible draught of air in any part of the cave, and the
candles burned steadily through the whole time of my visit, which
occupied more than two hours. The centre was sufficiently lighted by the
day; but in the western corner, and behind the largest column,
artificial light was necessary. The ice itself did not generally show
signs of thawing, but the whole cave was in a state of wetness, which
made the process of measuring and investigating anything but pleasant.
I had placed two thermometers at different points on my first
entrance--one on a drawing-board on a large stone in the middle of the
pond of water which has been mentioned, and the other on a bundle of
pencils at the entrance of the end chapel, in a part of the cave where
the ice-floor ceased for a while, and left the stones and rock bare. The
former gave 33°, the latter, till I was on the point of leaving, 31
1/2°, when it fell suddenly to 31°. It was impossible, however, to stay
any longer for the sake of watching the thermometer fall lower and lower
below the freezing point; indeed, the results of sundry incautious
fathomings of the various pools of water, and incessant contact of hands
and feet with the ice, had already become so unpleasant, that I was
obliged to desert my trusty hundred feet of string, and leave it lying
on the ice, from want of finger-power to roll it up. The thermometers
were both Casella's, but that which registered 31° was the more lively
of the two, the other being mercurial, with a much thicker stem: the
difference in sensitiveness was so great, that when they were equally
exposed to the sun in driving home, the one ran up to 93° before the
other had reached 85°.
In leaving the glacière, I found a little pathway turning off along the
face of the rock on the left hand, a short way up the slope of entrance,
and looking as if it might lead to the opening in the dark wall on the
western side of the cave. After a time, however, it came to a corner
which it seemed an unnecessary risk to attempt to pass alone; and my
prudence was rewarded by the discovery that, after all, the supposed
cave could not be thus reached. It is said that this other cave was the
place to which the inhabitants fled for refuge when their district was
invaded, probably by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar with his 10,000 Swedes,
and that a ladder 40 feet long is necessary for getting at it.
The driver had long ago absconded when I returned to the upper regions;
but the wife of the farmer of the grotto was there, and communicated
all that she knew of the statistics of the ice annually removed. She
said that in 1863 two chars were loaded every day for two months, each
char taking about 600 kilos, the wholesale price in Besançon being 5
francs the hundred kilos. Since the quintal contains 50 kilos, it will
be seen that this account does not agree with the statement of Renaud as
to the amount of ice each char could take. No doubt, a char at S.
Georges may mean one thing, and a char in the village of Chaux another;
but the difference between 12 quintaux and 50 or 60 is too great to be
thus explained, and probably Madame Briot made some mistake. Her
husband, Louis Briot, works alone in the cave, and has twelve men and a
donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from
the glacière, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besançon. He uses
gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a
pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus
procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom
layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great
time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband say that the
columns were higher then than at any other time of the year: she also
confirmed my views as to the disastrous effects of heavy rain. As with
every other glacière of which I could obtain any account, excepting the
Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, she complained that the ice had
not been so beautiful and so abundant this year as last, although the
winter had been exceptionally severe.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: Jean Bontemps, Conseiller au bailliage d'Arbois.]
[Footnote 27: 'Allez vous en reposer, rafraischir et boire un coup au
chasteau, car vous en avez bon besoin; j'ay du vin d'Arbois en mes
offices, dont je vous envoyeray deux bouteilles, car je scay bien que
vous ne le hayés pas.'--_Petitot_. iii. 9.]
[Footnote 28: Mém. de la Comté de Bourgougne, Dôle, 1592, p. 486.]
[Footnote 29: One of the Seigneurs de Chissey, Michaud de Changey, who
died in high office in 1480, was known by preeminence as _le Brave_.]
[Footnote 30: Dr. Buckland visited these caves in 1826, to look for
bones, of which he found a great number. Gollut (in 1592) spelled the
name _Aucelle_, and derived it from _Auricella_, believing that the
Romans worked a gold mine there. It is certain that both the Doubs and
the Loue supplied very fine gold, and the Seigneurs of Longwy had a
chain made of the gold of those rivers, which weighed 160 crowns.]
[Footnote 31: Dion Cass. lib. lxiii.]
[Footnote 32: Ib. lib. lxvi.]
[Footnote 33: Known locally as the _Porte Noire_, like the great _Porta
Nigra_ at Treves, and other Roman gates in Gaul.]
[Footnote 34: I should be inclined, from what I saw of the country, to
go to the station of Baume-les-Dames on any future visit, and walk
thence to the glacière, perhaps three leagues from the station.]
[Footnote 35: He was in error. The Paris correspondent of the 'Times'
gave, some months since (see the impression of Jan. 20, 1865), an
account of an interesting trial respecting the manufacture of the
liqueur peculiar to the Abbey of Grâce-Dieu. From this account it
appears that the liqueur was formerly called the Liqueur of the
Grâce-Dieu, but is now known as Trappistine. It is limpid and oily;
possesses a fine aroma, a peculiar softness, a mild but brisk flavour,
and so on. It was invented by an ecclesiastic who was once the Brother
Marie-Joseph, and prior of the convent, but is now M. Stremler, having
been released by the Pope from his vows of obedience and poverty, in
order that he might teach Christianity to the infidels of the New World.
The Brothers took the question of the renunciation of poverty into their
own hands, by declining to give up the money which Brother Marie-Joseph
had originally brought into the society; so M. Stremler, being now
moneyless, commenced the secular manufacture of the seductive
Trappistine, in opposition to the regular manufacture within the walls
of the Abbey, abstaining, however, from the use of the religious label
which is the Brothers' trade-mark. The unfortunate inventor was fined
and condemned in costs for his piracy.]
[Footnote 36: See p. 310.]
[Footnote 37: _Journal des Mines_, Prairial, an iv., pp. 65, &c.]
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