1877
It was a very little tour, but the charm of the three or four old towns
and monuments that it embraced, the beauty of the brilliant October, the
pleasure of reminding one's self how much of the interest, strength and
dignity of France is to be found outside of that huge pretentious
caravansary called Paris (a reminder often needed), these things deserve
to be noted. I went down to Rheims to see the famous cathedral, and to
reach Rheims I travelled through the early morning hours along the
charming valley of the Marne. The Marne is a pretty little green river,
the vegetation upon whose banks, otherwise unadorned, had begun to blush
with the early frosts in a manner that suggested the autumnal tints of
American scenery. The trees and bushes were scarlet and orange; the
light was splendid and a trifle harsh; I could have fancied myself
immersed in an American "fall," if at intervals some gray old
large-towered church had not lifted a sculptured front above a
railway-station, to dispel the fond illusion. One of these church-fronts
(I saw it only from the train) is particularly impressive; the little
cathedral of Meaux, of which the great Bossuet was bishop, and along
whose frigid nave he set his eloquence rolling with an impetus which it
has not wholly lost to this day. It was entertaining, moreover, to enter
the country of champagne; for Rheims is in the ancient province whose
later fame is syllabled the world over in popping corks. A land of
vineyards is not usually accounted sketchable; but the country about
Epernay seemed to me to have a charm of its own. It stretched away in
soft undulations that were pricked all over with little stakes muffled
in leaves. The effect at a distance was that of vast surfaces, long,
subdued billows, of pincushion; and yet it was very pretty. The deep
blue sky was over the scene; the undulations were half in sun and half
in shade; and here and there, among their myriad bristles, were groups
of vintagers, who, though they are in reality, doubtless, a prosaic and
mercenary body of labourers, yet assumed, to a fancy that glanced at
them in the cursory manner permitted by the passage of the train, the
appearance of joyous and disinterested votaries of Bacchus. The blouses
of the men, the white caps of the women, were gleaming in the sunshine;
they moved about crookedly among the tiny vine-poles. I thought them
full of a charming suggestiveness. Of all the delightful gifts of France
to the world, this was one of the most agreeable--the keen, living
liquid in which the finest flower of sociability is usually dipped. It
came from these sunny places; this little maze of curling-sticks
supplied the world with half the world's gaiety. I call it little only
in relation to the immense number of bottles with gilded necks in which
this gaiety is annually stored up. The acreage of the champagne seemed
to me, in fact, large; the bristling slopes went rolling away to new
horizons in a manner that was positively reassuring. Making the
handsomest allowance for the wine manufactured from baser elements, it
was apparent that this big corner of a province represents a very large
number of bottles.
As you draw near to Rheims the vineyards become sparser, and finally
disappear, a fact not to be regretted, for there is something
incongruous in the juxtaposition of champagne and gothic architecture.
It may be said, too, that for the proper appreciation of a structure
like the cathedral of Rheims you have need of all your head. As, after
my arrival, I sat in my window at the inn, gazing up at the great
façade, I found something dizzying in the mere climbing and soaring of
one's astonished vision; and later, when I came to wander about in the
upper regions of the church, and to peep down through the rugged
lacework of the towers at the little streets and the small spots of
public places, I found myself musing upon the beauty of soberness. My
window at the Lion d'Or was like a proscenium-box at the play; to admire
the cathedral at my leisure I had only to perch myself in the casement
with a good opera-glass. I sat there for a long time watching the great
architectural drama. A drama I may call it, for no church-front that I
have seen is more animated, more richly figured. The density of the
sculptures, the immense scale of the images, detract, perhaps, at first,
in a certain sense, from the impressiveness of the cathedral of Rheims;
the absence of large surfaces, of ascending lines, deceives you as to
the elevation of the front, and the dimensions of some of the upper
statues bring them unduly near the eye. But little by little you
perceive that this great figured and storied screen has a mass
proportionate to its detail, and that it is the grandest part of a
structure which, as a whole, is one of the noblest works of man's hands.
Most people remember to have seen some print or some photograph of this
heavily-charged façade of Rheims, which is usually put forward as the
great example of the union of the purity and the possible richness of
gothic. I must first have seen some such print in my earliest years, for
I have always thought of Rheims as the typical gothic cathedral I had
vague associations with it; it seemed to me that I had already stood
there in the little overwhelmed _place_. One's literary associations
with Rheims are indeed very vivid and impressive; they begin with the
picture of the steel-clad Maid passing under the deeply-sculptured
portal, with a banner in her hand which she has no need to lower, and
while she stands amid the incense and the chants, the glitter of arms
and the glow of coloured lights, asking leave of the young king whom she
has crowned to turn away and tend her flocks. And after that there is
the sense of all the kings of France having travelled down to Rheims in
their splendour to be consecrated; the great groups on the front of the
church must have looked down on groups almost as stately--groups full of
colour and movement--assembled in the square. (The square of Rheims, it
must be confessed, is rather shabby. It is singular that the august
ceremony of the _sacre_ should not have left its mark upon the
disposition of the houses, should not have kept them at a respectful
distance. Louis XIV., smoothing his plumage before he entered the
church, can hardly have had space to swing the train of his
coronation-robe.) But when in driving into the town I reached the small
precinct, such as it is, and saw the cathedral lift its spireless towers
above the long rows of its carven saints, the huge wheel of its window,
the three great caverns of its portals, with the high acute pediments
above each arch, and the sides abutting outward like the beginning of a
pyramid; when I looked at all this I felt that I had carried it in my
mind from my earliest years, and that the stately vision had been
implanted there by some forgotten glimpse of an old-fashioned
water-colour sketch, in which the sky was washed in with expressive
splashes, the remoter parts of the church tinted with a fascinating
blueness, and the foundations represented as encumbered with little
gabled and cross-timbered houses, inhabited by women in red petticoats
and curious caps.
I shall not attempt any regular enumeration of the great details of the
façade of Rheims; I cannot profess even to have fully apprehended them.
They are a glorious company, and here and there, on its high-hung
pedestal, one of the figures detaches itself with peculiar
effectiveness. Over the central portal sits the Virgin Mary, meekly
submitting her head to the ponderous crown which her Son prepares to
place upon it; the attitude and movement of Christ are full of a kind of
splendid politeness. The three great doorways are in themselves a museum
of imagery, disposed in each case in five close tiers, the statues in
each of the tiers packed perpendicularly against their comrades. The
effect of these great hollowed and chiselled recesses is extremely
striking; they are a proper vestibule to the dusky richness of the
interior. The cathedral of Rheims, more fortunate than many of its
companions, appears not to have suffered from the iconoclasts of the
Revolution; I noticed no absent heads nor broken noses. It is very true
that these members may have had adventures to which they do not, as it
were, allude. But, like many of its companions, it is so pressed upon by
neighbouring houses that it is not easy to get a general view of the
sides and the rear. You may walk round it, and note your walk as a long
one; you may observe that the choir of the church travels back almost
into another quarter of the city; you may see the far-spreading mass lose
itself for a while in parasitic obstructions, and then emerge again with
all its buttresses flying; but you miss that wide margin of space and
light which should enable it to present itself as a consistent picture.
Pictures have their frames, and poems have their margins; a great work
of art, such as a gothic cathedral, should at least have elbow-room. You
may, however, stroll beneath the walls of Rheims, along a narrow, dark
street, and look up at the mighty structure and see its higher parts
foreshortened into all kinds of delusive proportions. There is a grand
entertainment in the view of the church which you obtain from the
farthermost point to which you may recede from it in the rear, keeping
it still within sight I have never seen a cathedral so magnificently
buttressed. The buttresses of Rheims are all double; they have a
tremendous spring, and are supported upon pedestals surmounted by
immense crocketed canopies containing statues of wide-winged angels. A
great balustrade of gothic arches connects these canopies one with
another, and along this balustrade are perched strange figures of
sitting beasts, unicorns and mermaids, griffins and monstrous owls.
Huge, terrible gargoyles hang far over into the street, and doubtless
some of them have a detail which I afterwards noticed at Laon. The
gargoyle represents a grotesque beast--a creature partaking at once of
the shape of a bird, a fish, and a quadruped. At Laon, on either side of
the main entrance, a long-bellied monster cranes forth into the air with
the head of a hippopotamus; and under its belly crouches a little man,
hardly less grotesque, making up a rueful grimace and playing some
ineffectual trick upon his terrible companion. One of these little
figures has plunged a sword, up to the hilt, into the belly of the
monster above him, so that when he draws it forth there will be a leak
in the great stone gutter; another has suspended himself to a rope that
is knotted round the neck of the gargoyle, and is trying in the same
manner to interrupt its functions by pulling the cord as tight as
possible. There was sure to be a spirit of life in an architectural
conception that could range from the combination of clustering towers
and opposing fronts to this infinitely minute play of humour.
There is no great play of humour in the interior of Rheims, but there is
a great deal of beauty and solemnity. This interior is a spectacle that
excites the sensibility, as our forefathers used to say; but it is not
an easy matter to describe. It is no description of it to say that it is
four hundred and sixty-six feet in length, and that the roof is one
hundred and twenty-four feet above the pavement; nor is there any very
vivid portraiture in the statement that if there is no coloured glass in
the lower windows, there is, _per contra_, a great deal of the most
gorgeous and most ancient in the upper ones. The long sweep of the nave,
from the threshold to the point where the coloured light-shafts of the
choir lose themselves in the gray distance, is a triumph of
perpendicular perspective. The white light in the lower part of Rheims
really contributes to the picturesqueness of the interior. It makes the
gloom above look richer still, and throws that part of the roof which
rests upon the gigantic piers of the transepts into mysterious
remoteness. I wandered about for a long time; I sat first in one place
and then in another; I attached myself to that most fascinating part of
every great church, the angle at which the nave and transept divide. It
was the better to observe this interesting point, I think, that I passed
into the side gate of the choir--the gate that stood ajar in the tall
gilded railing. I sat down on a stool near the threshold; I leaned back
against the side of one of the stalls; the church was empty, and I lost
myself in the large perfection of the place. I lost myself, but the
beadle found me; he stood before me, and with a silent, imperious
gesture, motioned me to depart. I risked an argumentative glance,
whereupon he signified his displeasure, repeated his gesture, and
pointed to an old gentleman with a red cape, who had come into the choir
softly, without my seeing him, and had seated himself in one of the
stalls. This old gentleman seemed plunged in pious thoughts; I was not,
after all, very near him, and he did not look as if I disturbed him. A
canon is at any time, I imagine, a more merciful man than a beadle. But
of course I obeyed the beadle, and eliminated myself from this
peculiarly sacred precinct. I found another chair, and I fell to
admiring the cathedral again. But this time I think it was with a
difference--a difference which may serve as an excuse for the triviality
of my anecdote. Sundry other old gentlemen in red capes emerged from the
sacristy and went into the choir; presently, when there were half a
dozen, they began to chant, and I perceived that the impending vespers
had been the reason of my expulsion. This was highly proper, and I
forgave the beadle; but I was not so happy as before, for my thoughts
had passed out of the architectural channel into--what shall I
say?--into the political. Here they found nothing so sweet to feed upon.
It was the 5th of October; ten days later the elections for the new
Chamber were to take place--the Chamber which was to replace the
Assembly dissolved on the 16th of May by Marshal MacMahon, on a charge
of "latent" radicalism. Stranger though one was, it was impossible not
to be much interested in the triumph of the republican cause; it was
impossible not to sympathise with this supreme effort of a brilliant and
generous people to learn the lesson of national self-control and
self-government. It was impossible by the same token, not to have noted
and detested the alacrity with which the Catholic party had rallied to
the reactionary cause, and the unction with which the clergy had
converted itself into the go-betweens of Bonapartism. The clergy was
giving daily evidence of its devotion to arbitrary rule and to every
iniquity that shelters itself behind the mask of "authority." These had
been frequent and irritating reflections; they lurked in the folds of
one's morning paper. They came back to me in the midst of that tranquil
grandeur of Rheims, as I listened to the droning of the old gentlemen in
the red capes. Some of the canons, it was painful to observe, had not
been punctual; they came hurrying gut of the sacristy after the service
had, begun. They looked like amiable and venerable men; their chanting
and droning, as it spread itself under the great arches, was not
disagreeable to listen to; I could certainly bear them no grudge. But
their presence there was distracting and vexatious; it had spoiled my
enjoyment of their church, in which I doubtless had no business. It had
set me thinking of the activity and vivacity of the great organisation
to which they belonged, and of all the odious things it would have done
before the 15th of October. To what base uses do we come at last! It was
this same organisation that had erected the magnificent structure around
and above me, and which had then seemed an image of generosity and
benignant power. Such an edifice might at times make one feel tenderly
sentimental toward the Catholic church--make one remember how many of
the great achievements of the past we owe to her. To lapse gently into
this state of mind seems indeed always, while one strolls about a great
cathedral, a proper recognition of its hospitality; but now I had lapsed
gently out of it, and it was one of the exasperating elements of the
situation that I felt, in a manner, called upon to decide how far such a
lapse was unbecoming. I found myself even extending the question a
little, and picturing to myself that conflict which must often occur at
such a moment as the present--which is actually going on, doubtless, in
many thousands of minds--between the actively; practically liberal
instinct and what one may call the historic, æsthetic sense, the sense
upon which old cathedrals lay a certain palpable obligation. How far
should a lover of old cathedrals let his hands be tied by the sanctity
of their traditions? How far should he let his imagination bribe him, as
it were, from action? This of course is a question for each man to
answer for himself; but as I sat listening to the drowsy old canons of
Rheims, I was visited, I scarcely know why, by a kind of revelation of
the anti-catholic passion, as it must bum to-day in the breasts of
certain radicals. I felt that such persons must be intent upon war to
the death; how that must seem the most sacred of all duties. Can
anything, in the line of action, for a votary of the radical creed, be
more sacred? I asked myself; and can any instruments be too trenchant? I
raised my eyes again to the dusky splendour of the upper aisles and
measured their enchanting perspective, and it was with a sense of doing
them full justice that I gave my fictive liberal my good wishes.
This little operation restored my equanimity, so that I climbed several
hundred steps and wandered lightly over the roof of the cathedral.
Climbing into cathedral-towers and gaping at the size of the statues
that look small from the street has always seemed to me a rather brutal
pastime; it is not the proper way to treat a beautiful building; it is
like holding one's nose so close to a picture that one sees only the
grain of the canvas. But when once I had emerged into the upper
wilderness of Rheims the discourse of a very urbane and appreciative old
bell-ringer, whom I found lurking behind some gigantic excrescence, gave
an aesthetic complexion to what would otherwise have been a rather
vulgar feat of gymnastics. It was very well to see what a great
cathedral is made of, and in these high places of the immensity of
Rheims I found the matter very impressively illustrated. I wandered for
half an hour over endless expanses of roof, along the edge of sculptured
abysses, through hugely-timbered attics and chambers that were in
themselves as high as churches. I stood knee-high to strange images, of
unsuspected proportions, and I followed the topmost staircase of one of
the towers, which curls upward like the groove of a corkscrew, and gives
you at the summit a hint of how a sailor feels at the masthead. The
ascent was worth making to learn the fulness of beauty of the church,
the solidity and perfection, the mightiness of arch and buttress, the
latent ingenuity of detail. At the angles of the balustrade which
ornaments the roof of the choir are perched a series of huge sitting
eagles, which from below, as you look up at them, produce a great
effect. They are immense, grim-looking birds, and the sculptor has given
to each of them a pair of very neatly carved human legs, terminating in
talons. Why did he give them human legs? Why did he indulge in this
ridiculous conceit? I am unable to say, but the conceit afforded me
pleasure. It seemed to tell of an imagination always at play, fond of
the unexpected and delighting in its labour.
Apart from its cathedral Rheims is not an interesting city. It has a
prosperous, modern, mercantile air. The streets look as if at one time
M. Haussmann, in person, may have taken a good deal of exercise in them;
they prove, however, that a French provincial town may be a wonderfully
fresh, clean, comfortable-looking place. Very different is the aspect of
the ancient city of Laon, to which you may, by the assistance of the
railway, transfer yourself from Rheims in a little more than an hour.
Laon is full of history, and the place, as you approach it, reminds you
of a quaint-woodcut in the text of an ancient folio. Out of the midst of
a smiling plain rises a goodly mountain, and on the top of the mountain
is perched the old feudal _commune_, from the centre of which springs,
with infinite majesty, the many-towered cathedral. At Laon you are in
the midst of old France; it is one of the most interesting chapters of
the past. Ever since reading in the pages of M. Thierry the story of the
fierce straggle for municipal independence waged by this ardent little
city against its feudal and ecclesiastical lords, I had had the
conviction that Laon was worthy of a visit. All the more so that her two
hundred years of civic fermentation had been vainly spent, and that in
the early part of the fourteenth century she had been disfranchised
without appeal. M. Thierry's readers will remember the really thrilling
interest of the story which he has selected as the most complete and
typical among those of which the records of the mediæval communities
are full; the complications and fluctuations of the action, its
brilliant episodes, its sombre, tragic _dénoûment_, I did not visit
Laon with the _Lettres sur l'Histoire de France_ in my pocket, nor had I
any other historic texts for reference; but a vague notion of the
vigorous manner in which for a couple of centuries the stubborn little
town had attested its individuality supplied my observations with an
harmonious background. Nothing can well be more picturesque than the
position of this interesting city. The tourist who has learned his trade
can tell a "good" place at a glance. The moment Laon became visible from
the window of the train I perceived that Laon was good. And then I had
the word for it of an extremely intelligent young officer of artillery,
who shared my railway-carriage in coming from Rheims, and who spoke with
an authority borrowed from three years of garrison-life on that windy
hill-top. He affirmed that the only recreation it afforded was a walk
round the ramparts which encircle the town; people went down the hill as
little as possible--it was such a dreadful bore to come up again. But he
declared, nevertheless, that, as an intelligent traveller, I should be
enchanted with the place; that the cathedral was magnificent, the view
of the surrounding country a perpetual entertainment, and the little
town full of originality. After I had spent a day there I thought of
this pleasant young officer and his familiar walk upon the city-wall; he
gave a point to my inevitable reflections upon the degree to which at
the present hour, in France, the front of the stage is occupied by the
army. Inevitable reflections, I say, because the net result of any
little tour that one may make just now is a vivid sense of red trousers
and cropped heads. Wherever you go you come upon a military quarter, you
stumble upon a group of young citizens in uniform. It is always a pretty
spectacle; they enliven the scene; they touch it here and there with an
effusion of colour. But this is not the whole of the matter, and when
you have admitted that it is pictorial to be always _sous les armes_,
you fall to wondering whether it is not very expensive. A million of
defenders take up a good deal of room, even for defenders. It must be
very uncomfortable to be always defending. How do the young men bear it;
how does France bear it; how long will she be able to keep it up? Every
young Frenchman, on reaching maturity, has to give up five years of his
life to this bristling Minotaur of military service. It is hard for a
nation of shameless civilians to understand how life is arranged among
people who come into the world with this heavy mortgage upon the
freshest years of their strength; it seems like drinking the wine of
life from a vessel with a great leak in the bottom. Is such a _régime_
inspiring, or is it demoralising? Is the effect of it to quicken the
sentiment of patriotism, the sense of the daggers to which one's country
is exposed and of what one owes to the common cause, or to take the edge
from all ambition that is not purely military, to force young men to say
that there is no use trying, that nothing is worth beginning, and that a
young fellow condemned to pay such a tax as that has a right to refund
himself in any way that is open to him? Reminded as one is at every step
of the immensity of the military burden of France, the most interesting
point seems to me not its economical but its moral bearing. Its effect
upon the finances of the country may be accurately computed; its effect
upon the character of the young generation is more of a mystery. As the
analytic tourist wanders of an autumn afternoon upon the planted rampart
of an ancient town and meets young soldiers strolling in couples or
leaning against the parapet and looking off at the quiet country, he is
apt to take the more genial view of the dreadful trade of arms. He is
disposed to say that it teaches its votaries something that is worth
knowing and yet is not learned in several other trades--the hardware,
say, or the dry-goods business. Five years is a good deal to ask of a
young life as a sacrifice; but the sacrifice is in some ways a gain.
Certainly, apart from the question of material defence, it may be said
that no European nation, at present, can afford, morally, not to pass
her young men, the hope of the country, through the military mill. It
does for them something indispensable; it toughens, hardens, solidifies
them; gives them an ideal of honour, of some other possibility in life
than making a fortune. A country in which the other trades I spoke of
have it all their own way appears, in comparison, less educated.
So I mused, as I strolled in the afternoon along the charming old
city-wall at Laon; and if my meditations seem pretentious or fallacious,
I must say in justice that I had been a good while coming to them. I had
done a great many things first. I had climbed up the long straight
staircase which has been dropped like a scaling-ladder from one of the
town-gates to the bottom of the hill. Laon still has her gates as she
still has her wall, and one of these, the old Porte d'Ardon, is a really
precious relic of mediæval architecture. I had repaired to the sign of
the _Hure_--a portrait of this inhospitable beast is swung from the
front of the inn--and bespoken a lodging; I had spent a long time in
the cathedral, in it and before it, beside it, behind it; I had walked
all over the town, from the citadel, at one end of the lofty plateau on
which it stands, to the artillery-barracks and the charming old church
of St. Martin at the other. The cathedral of Laon has not the elaborate
grandeur of that of Rheims; but it is a very noble and beautiful church.
Nothing can be finer than its position; it would set off any church to
stand on such a hill-crest. Laon has also a façade of many sculptures,
which, however, has suffered greater violence than that of Rheims, and
is now being carefully and delicately restored. Whole figures and
bas-reliefs have lately been replaced by exact imitations in that fresh
white French stone which looks at first like a superior sort of plaster.
They were far gone, and I suppose the restorer's hand was imperiously
called for. I do not know that it has been too freely used. But half the
charm of Laon is the magnificent colouring of brownish, weather-battered
gray which it owes to the great exposure of its position, and it will be
many a year before the chalky scars and patches will be wrought into
dusky harmony with the rest of the edifice. Fortunately, however, they
promise not to be very numerous; the principal restorations have taken
place inside. I know not what all this labour costs; but I was
interested in learning from the old bell-ringer at Rheims that the sum
voted by the Chamber for furbishing up his own church was two millions
of francs, to be expended during ten years. That is what it is to have
"national monuments" to keep up. One is apt to think of the fourteenth
century as a rather ill-appointed and comfortless period; but the fact
that at the present time the mere repair of one of its buildings costs
forty thousand dollars a year would indicate that the original builders
had a great deal of money to spend. The cathedral of Laon was intended
to be a wonderful cluster of towers, but only two of these
ornaments--the couple above the west front--have been carried to a great
altitude; the pedestals of the rest, however, detach themselves with
much vigour, and contribute to the complicated and somewhat fantastic
look which the church wears at a distance, and which makes its great
effectiveness. The finished towers are admirably light and graceful;
with the sky shining through their large interstices they suggest an
imitation of timber in masonry. They have one very quaint feature. From
their topmost portions, at each angle, certain carven heads of oxen peep
forward with a startling naturalness--a tribute to the patient, powerful
beasts who dragged the material of the building up the long zig-zags of
the mountain. We perhaps treat our dumb creatures better to-day than was
done five hundred years ago; but I doubt whether a modern architect, in
settling his accounts, would have "remembered," as they say, the oxen.
The whole precinct of the cathedral of Laon is picturesque. There is a
charming Palais de Justice beside it, separated from it by a pleasant,
homely garden, in which, as you walk about, you have an excellent view
of the towering back and sides of the great church. The Palais de
Justice, which is an ancient building, has a fine old gothic arcade, and
on the other side, directly upon the city-wall, a picturesque, irregular
rear, with a row of painted windows, through which, from the _salle
d'audience_, the judge on the bench and the prisoner in the dock may
enjoy a prospect, admonitory, inspiring, or depressing, as the case may
be, of the expanded country. This great sea-like plain that lies beneath
the town on all sides constitutes, for Laon, a striking resemblance to
those Italian cities--Siena, Volterra, Perugia--which the traveller
remembers so fondly as a dark silhouette lifted high against a glowing
sunset. There is something Italian, too, in the mingling of rock and
rampart in the old foundations of the town, and in the generous verdure
in which these are muffled. At one end of the hill-top the plateau
becomes a narrow ridge; the slope makes a deep indentation, which
contributes to the effect of a thoroughly Italian picture. A line of
crooked little red-roofed houses stands on the edge of this indentation,
with their feet in the tangled verdure that blooms in it; and above them
rises a large, florid, deserted-looking church, which you may be sure
has a little empty, grass-grown, out-of-the-way _place_ before it.
Almost opposite, on another spur of the hill, the gray walls of a
suppressed convent peep from among the trees. I might have been at
Perugia.
There came in the evening to the inn of the Hure a very worthy man who
had vehicles to hire. The Hure was decidedly a provincial hostelry, and
I compared it mentally with certain English establishments of a like
degree, of which I had lately had observation. In England I should have
had a waiter in an old evening-suit and a white cravat, who would have
treated me to cold meat and bread and cheese. There would have been a
musty little inn-parlour and probably a very good fire in the grate, and
the festally-attired waiter would have been my sole entertainer. At Laon
I was in perpetual intercourse with the landlord and his wife, and a
large body of easy-going, confidential domestics. Our intercourse was
carried on in an old darksome stone kitchen, with shining copper vessels
hanging all over the walls, in which I was free to wander about and take
down my key in one place and rummage out my candlestick in another,
while the domestics sat at table eating _pot-au-feu_. The landlord
cooked the dinner; he wore a white cap and apron; he brought in the
first dish at the table d'hôte. Of course there was a table d'hôte,
with several lamps and a long array of little dessert-dishes, for the
benefit of two commercial travellers, who tucked their napkins into
their necks, and the writer of these lines. Every country has its
manners. In England the benefits--whatever they are--represented by the
evening dress of the waiter would have been most apparent; in France one
was more sensible of the blessings of which the white cap and apron of
the host were a symbol. In England, certainly, one is treated more as a
gentleman. It is too often forgotten, however, that even a gentleman
partakes of nourishment. But I am forgetting my dispenser of vehicles,
concerning whom, however, and whose large red cheeks and crimson cravat,
I have left myself room to say no more than that they were witnesses of
a bargain that I should be driven early on the morrow morning, in an
"Américaine," to the Château de Coucy. The Américaine proved to be a
vehicle of which I should not have been eager to claim the credit for my
native land; but with the aid of a ragged but resolute little horse, and
a driver so susceptible as regards his beast's appearance that,
referring to the exclamation of dismay with which I had greeted it, he
turned to me at the end of each successive kilometre with a rancorous
"_Now_, do you say he can't go?"--with these accessories, I say, it
conveyed me more than twenty miles. It was entertaining to wind down the
hillside from Laon in the early morning of a splendid autumn day; to dip
into the glistening plain, all void of hedges and fences, and sprinkled
with light and dew; to jog along the straight white roads, between the
tall, thin poplars; to rattle through the half-waked villages and past
the orchards heavy with sour-looking crimson apples. The Château de
Coucy is a well-known monument; it is one of the most considerable ruins
in France, and it is in some respects the most extraordinary. As you
come from Laon a turn in the road suddenly, at last, reveals it to you.
It is still at a distance; you will not reach it for half an hour; but
its huge white donjon stands up like some gigantic lighthouse at sea.
Coucy is altogether on a grand scale, but this colossal, shining
cylinder is a wonder of bigness. As M. Viollet-le-Duc says, it seems to
have been built by giants for a race of giants. The very quaint little
town of Coucy-le-Château nestles at the foot of this strange,
half-substantial, half-spectral structure; it was, together with a
goodly part of the neighbouring country, the feudal appanage of those
terrible lords who erected the present indestructible edifice, and whose
"boastful motto" (I quote from Murray) was
"Roi je ne suis,
Prince ni comte aussi;
Je suis le Sire de Coucy."
Coucy is a sleepy little borough, still girdled with its ancient wall,
entered by its old gateways, and supported on the verdurous flanks of a
hill-top. I interviewed the host of the Golden Apple in his kitchen; I
breakfasted--_ma foi, fort bien_, as they would say in the indigenous
tongue--in his parlour; and then I visited the château, which is at
five minutes' walk. This very interesting ruin is the property of the
state, and the state is represented by a very civil and intelligent
woman, who divests the trade of custodian of almost all its grossness.
Any feudal ruin is a charming affair, and Coucy has much of the sweet
melancholy of its class. There are four great towers, connected by a
massive curtain and enclosing the tremendous donjon of which I just now
spoke. All this is very crumbling and silvery; the enclosure is a tangle
of wild verdure, and the pigeons perch upon the inaccessible battlements
exactly where the sketcher would wish them. But the place lacked, to my
sense, the peculiar softness and venerableness, the ivied mellowness, of
a great English ruin. At Coucy there is no ivy to speak of; the climate
has not caressed and embroidered the rugged masses of stone. This is
what I meant by speaking of the famous donjon as spectral; the term is
an odd one to apply to an edifice whose walls are thirty-four feet
thick. Its vast, pale surface has not a speck nor a stain, not a
clinging weed nor a creeping plant. It looks like a tower of ivory.
I took my way from Coucy to the ancient town of Soissons, where I found
another cathedral, from which, I think, I extracted all the
entertainment it could legitimately yield. There is little other to be
had at Soissons, in spite of the suggestiveness of its name, which is
redolent of history and local colour. The truth is, I suppose, that
Soissons looks so new, precisely because she is so old. She is in her
second youth; she has renewed herself. The old city was worn out; it
could no longer serve; it has been succeeded by another. The new one is
a quiet, rather aristocratic-looking little _ville de province_--a
collection of well-conditioned, sober-faced abodes of gentility, with
high-walled gardens behind them and very carefully closed
portes-cochère in front. Occasionally a porte-cochère opens; an
elderly lady in black emerges and paces discreetly away. An old
gentleman has come to the door with her. He is comfortably corpulent; he
wears gold spectacles and embroidered slippers. He looks up and down the
dull street, and sees nothing at all; then he retires, closing the
porte-cochère very softly and firmly. But he has stood there long
enough to give an observant stranger the impression of a cautious
provincial bourgeoisie that has a solid fortune well invested, and that
marries its daughters only _à bon escient_. This latter ceremony,
however, whenever it occurs, probably takes place in the cathedral, and
though resting on a prosaic foundation must borrow a certain grace from
that charming building. The cathedral of Soissons has a statueless front
and only a single tower; but it is full of a certain natural elegance.
V