by four turrets, that René first saw the light on the 16th of January,
1409. The Maugine was his nurse in the citadel, the Maugine, Tiphaine,
to whom in after years he erected a tomb, the touching inscription
upon which is from his hand. Married at the age of twelve to Isabelle
de Lorraine, René d’Anjou, fighting everywhere for twenty-five years,
made only rare appearances at the Castle of Angers; but soon comes
the death of Isabelle and upon it quickly follows the second marriage
of the prince with Jeanne de Laval, upon which he establishes his
residence at Angers. Farewell war, diplomacy, treaties and conquests!
René yields himself up to the charm of his young wife. To her the poet
consecrates his loving stanzas of _Regnault and Jeanneton_, a
kind of autobiography of the husband and wife. _The Shepherd and the
Shepherdess_, a delicate pastorale composed in honour of Jeanne de
Laval, will be put into its final form under the skies of Provence, at
Tarascon; but it is in the Angevin country that the poet finds all his
ideas as he strolls at the side of the beautiful Jeanne. The writers
of the time show us René going out of the Castle without escort,
accompanied solely by his royal spouse, and taking the _chemin de la
Baumette_. After passing through the field-gate, the illustrious
personages got into a fisherman’s boat below the _Basse-Chaîne_,
and descended the Maine to that solitary hermitage, where Rabelais will
presently come to study at the Cordeliers.
It is also from this Castle that René d’Anjou issues to cross his
“beautiful city” on foot to his dear hermitage, where he loved to
consort “with the citizens of Angers, the artists and the men of
learning of his Court.”
René disappeared; Louis XI. reigned. A century elapsed. Henri III.
yielded to the request of the common people of the city who wished
for the destruction of the Castle. The citadel suffered. Letters
patent from the King authorized the governor of Anjou to “raze to
the ground the stones of all the walls, towers, lodgings, buildings
and fortifications of the Castle.” Already the workmen are called.
Who will direct this barbarous piece of work? Donadieu, Sieur de
Puycharic, claims this honour. Puycharic is the governor of the
Castle. They grant his wish. But a man of heart, a soldier, can he
conscientiously annihilate the ramparts of a city? This military post
of which he is the keeper has its past of glorious traditions. It is
worthy of respect. Its services, it seems to him, ought to be taken
into consideration. This is what Puycharic thought aside, and for ten
years--you have read of this--for ten years--with clever ingenuity,
Puycharic kept his army of destroyers busy without destroying anything.
He yielded to the necessities of the hour by demolishing the outside
buildings of the Castle which he had inherited from his predecessors; a
garden pavilion, built by Louisa of Savoy, disappeared; the field-gate,
whose defence was difficult, was altered; two useless towers lost
their turrets, and in proportion as the waggons full of stones left
the Castle, the common people exulted, proud of their success. From
time to time, it is true, public opinion complained of the slowness
of the workmen at the town’s expense. “Isolated during the troubles,”
M. Port has said of him, “in the heart of the Angevin league, the
valiant captain was not merely satisfied to guard the place but bravely
attacked the foe in the field, one day the Lion d’Angers, another
Brissac, Rochefort, Beaupreau, and Chemillé, fighting for about ten
years in every kind of warlike adventure, fought against and fighting,
holding the country in hand and preparing the place for the King.” His
headquarters were at the Castle. It was here that he rallied his men
and came to heal his wounds between encounters. Peace being restored,
Puycharic, being appointed senechal of Anjou, dismissed his workmen,
who were greatly astonished and perhaps greatly pleased at having
repaired, embellished and fortified the Castle that they thought they
were pulling down.
Puycharic died in 1605. His funeral was magnificent. He rests in the
chapel of the Jacobins; and his brothers, the bishops of Saint-Papoul
and d’Auxerre erected to his memory a monument surmounted by his
statue.
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE
G. W. STEEVENS
Southward out of Madras you still run through the new India, the old
India of the nursery. Now it is vivid with long grass, now tufted
with cotton, then dark-green with stooping palm-heads or black with
firs; anon brown with fallow, blue with lakes and lagoons, black with
cloud-shadowing pools starred with white water-lilies. Presently red
hills break out of the woods, then sink again to sweeping pastures
dotted only with water-hoists and naked herdsmen.
Then in the placid landscape you are almost startled by the sight
of monuments of religion. A tall quadrangular pyramid, its courses
lined with rude statues, a couple of half-shaped human figures, ten
times human size, a ring of colossal hobby-horses sitting on their
haunches like a tea-party in Wonderland--they burst grotesquely out of
meadow and thicket, standing all alone with the soil and the trees. No
worshippers, no sign of human life near them, no hint of their origin
or purpose--till you almost wonder whether they are artificial at all,
and not petrified monsters from the beginning of the world.
[Illustration: THE PAGODA OF TANJORE, INDIA.]
These are the outposts of the great pagodas of Southern India--those
sublime monstrosities which scarce any European ever sees,
which most have never heard of, but which afford perhaps the
strongest testimony in all India at once to the vitality and the
incomprehensibility of Hinduism. The religion that inspired such
toilsome devotion must be one of the greatest forces in history; yet
the Western mind can detect neither any touch of art in the monuments
themselves nor any strain of beauty in the creed. Both command your
respect by their size: that which is so vast, so enduring, can hardly,
you tell yourself, be contemptible. And still you can see nothing in
the temples but misshapen piles of uncouthness, nothing in the religion
but unearthly superstitions, half meaningless and half foul.
The nearest approach to a symmetrical building is the great pagoda
of Tanjore. Long before you near the gate you see its tall pyramidal
tower, shooting free above crooked streets and slanting roofs.
Presently you see the lower similar towers, so far from the first
that you would never call them part of the same building. In reality
they are the outer and inner gateways--_gopura_ is their proper
name--built in diminishing courses, garnished with carving and
statuary. From a distance the massive solemnity of their outlines,
the stone lace of their decorations, strike you with an overwhelming
assertion of rich majesty. But you are in India, and you wait for the
inevitable incongruity.
It comes at the very gate. The entrance is not under the stately
gopura, but under a screen and scaffolding of lath and plaster daubed
with yellow and green grotesqueness--men with lotus-eyes looking out
of their temples, horses with heads like snakes, and kings as tall as
elephants. There is to be a great festival in a day or two, explains
the suave Brahman; therefore the gopuras are boarded up with pictures
beside which the tapestries of our pavement-artists are truth and
beauty. You walk through scaffold-poles into a great square round the
great tower, and with reverence they show you that colossal monolith,
the great bull of Tanjore. I wish I could show you a picture of him,
for words are unequal to him. In size he stands, or rather sits,
thirty-eight hands two. His material is black granite, but it is kept
so piously anointed with grease that he looks as if he were made of
toffee. In attitude he suggests a roast hare, and he wears a half-smug,
half-coquettish expression, as if he hoped that nobody would kiss him.
From this wonder you pass to the shrines of the chief gods. The
unbeliever may not enter, but you stand at the door while a man goes
along the darkness with a flambeau. The light falls on silk and tinsel,
and by faith you can divine a seated image at the end. Next you are at
the foot of the great tower, and the ridiculous has become the sublime
again. Every story is lined with serene-faced gods and goddesses,
dwindling rank above rank, a ladder of deities that seems to climb
half-way up to heaven. Then the Brahman shows you a stone bull seated
on the ground, like a younger brother of the great one. “It is in
existence,” he says, throwing out his words in groups, dispassionately,
as though somebody else were speaking and it were nothing at all to
do with him--“it is in existence--to show the dimensions--of four
other bulls--which are in existence--up there.” You lay your head
back between your shoulder-blades, and up there, at the very top,
among gods so small that you wonder whether they are gods or only
panels or pillars, are four more little brothers of the hare-shaped
toffee-textured monster below.
Reduplication is the keynote of Hindu art. The same bulls everywhere,
the same gods everywhere, and all round the cloistered outer wall
scores on scores of granite, fat-dripping, flower-crowned emblems, so
crudely shapeless that you forget their gross significance--but all
absolutely alike. Next the Brahman leads you aside to piles and piles
of what look like overgrown, gaudily painted children’s toys. This is
an exact facsimile of the Tower, reduced and imitated in wood. It is
all in pieces, but at the festival the parts are fitted together and
carried on a car. Every god sculptured on the pyramid is represented in
a section of this model, waiting to be fitted into his place. Only what
is richly mellow in tinted stone is garishly tawdry in king’s yellow
and red lead--and again you tumble from the sublime to the infantile.
Next, a little shrine that is a net of the most delicate carving--stone
as light and fantastic as wood; pillar and panel, moulding and
cornice, lattice and imagery, all tapering gracefully till they become
miniatures at the summit. It is a gem of exquisite taste and patient
labour. And the very next minute you are again among flaming red and
yellow dragon-tigers and duck-peacocks, and the one is just as holy and
just as beautiful to its worshippers as the other. From which objects
of veneration the Brahman passes lightly to the domestic life of the
frescoed rajahs of Tanjore. “This gentleman--marry seventeen wives--all
one day--doubtless in anxiety of getting son.” It is quite true. The
Rajah, having but three wives and no child, resolved to marry six
more young ladies, and collected seventeen to choose them from. But
the fathers and brothers of the rejected eleven were affronted; and
rather than have any unpleasantness on his wedding-day, his Majesty
tactfully married the whole seventeen, nine in the morning and eight in
the afternoon. “And here,” pursued the Brahman automatically, showing
a tank, “he will let in water--and here he will play--with all his
females--and all that.”
That is all, except to write your name in the visitor’s book. As I
went in to sign, I noticed a band of musicians standing at the door
and thought no more of it. But as my pen touched the paper, suddenly
reedy pipes and discordant fiddles and heady tom-toms began to play
“God Save the Queen.” A huge chaplet of muslin and tinsel, like a
magnified Christmas-tree stocking, was cast about my neck; betel and
attar-of-rose were brought up in silver vessels, and flowers and
fruits on silver trays. The pagoda keeps its character to the end: the
compliment was sublime--and I ridiculous.
Yet the temple of Tanjore is the most simple and orderly of all its
kind. Visit the great pagoda of Madura and you will come out mazed with
Hinduism. All its mysteries and incongruities, its lofty metaphysics
and its unabashed lewdness, seem to brood over the dark chambers
and crannying passages. The place is enormous. Over the four chief
gateways rise huge pyramid-towers, coloured like harlequins, red tigers
jostling the multiplied arms and legs of blue and yellow gods and
goddesses so thick that the gopuras seem built of them. In the pure
sunlight you almost blush for their crudity, just as you would blush
if the theatre roof were lifted off during a matinée. But inside the
place is nearly all half-lighted, dim, and cryptic. You go through a
labyrinth, that seems endless, of dark chambers and aisles. Now you
are in thick blackness, now in twilight, now the sun falls on fretwork
over pillared galleries and damp-smelling walls. But as the light
falls on the pillar you start, for it is carved into the shape of an
elephant-headed Ganesh, or a conventionally high-stepping Shiva. On you
go, from maze to maze, till there is no more recollection of direction
or guess at size: you are lost in an underground world of gods that are
half devils; you hardly distinguish the silent-footed, gleaming-eyed
attendants from the stone figures. Some of the fantastic images are
smeared with red-lead to simulate blood: all drip with fat. A heavy
smell of grease and stagnant tank-water loads your lungs.
You feel that you are bewitched--lost and helpless among unclean
things. When you come out into the sun and the cleaner dirt of the
town, you draw long breaths. If you could understand the Hindu
religion, you tell yourself, you would understand the Hindu mind. But
that, being of the West, you never, never will.
THE VENDRAMIN-CALERGI
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Following a vagabond method, let us regain the Grand Canal and give
some details upon the Vendramin Palace, now occupied by the Duchesse
de Berry. It is of a rich and noble architecture, probably by Pietro
Lombardo; in the entablature and above the windows, little cherubs
uphold storied shields adorned with exquisite taste, and contribute
much elegance to this façade. A garden of somewhat restricted space
contributes some green trees alongside this palace, which would not be
distinguished from the others if the large white and blue posts with
ropes did not indicate, by means of the fleur-de-lis painted upon them,
a princely and semi-royal dwelling.
After having obtained permission to visit this palace, _valets_ in
green livery welcome you very politely at the base of the staircase,
the steps of which are laved by the waters, fasten your boat to the
posts, and take you into a vestibule, where you wait until all the
formalities of admission are complied with.
This vestibule is just as long as the palace; it opens upon a kind of
court similar to the courts of our hotels.
Two hitched gondolas and a few earthen pots containing small firs and
other poor plants that are dying of thirst are all that adorn the
bareness of this vast waiting-room that is found in every Venetian
palace,--an antechamber that is also a landing-place.
[Illustration: THE VENDRAMIN, CALERGI, ITALY.]
In the centre of this vestibule, a little to the left, a wide stairway
between two walls is seen where the same decoration of miserable plants
appear. A narrow carpet covers the steps leading to an immense hall
resembling a vestibule, without furniture and without adornment. From
this, you enter the dining-room, the walls of which are hung with
family portraits.
This is a long square room. It is very well lighted by two enormous
French windows.
An oval table stands in the centre and a screen shields the entrance.
Upon the wall to the right you notice the portrait of the Duchesse
de Bourgogne in a blue velvet dress; also of the Comte d’Artois and
Madame la Princesse de Lamballe and several others. Upon the left wall
opposite, is the full length portrait of Louis XV., and on either side
of him, his daughters.
In this dining-room, a masked door opens into a dark chapel, so
small that it will barely hold six persons. You can count four
_Prie-Dieu_ there. On the right, a large door opens into a very
modern drawing-room filled with pictures and a great number of small
pieces of furniture: English tables, Parisian coffers,--nothing is
lacking to produce that charming home-like feeling that is derived
from luxurious trifles. Two portraits of Her Royal Highness are placed
opposite one another; that by Lawrence in a dress of white satin, with
a rose on her breast, exhibits the most charming little foot that can
possibly be admired in a white satin slipper.
On walking through the dining-room, you enter, by a door on the left, a
little salon, which seems relatively small after the preceding rooms,
and perhaps overwhelmed by the sumptuous furniture that adorns it. It
contains thirty splendid pictures; this is a kind of Uffizi or _Salon
carré_, where scarcely one of the greatest names in painting is
missing. Among these great masterpieces shines a Virgin by Andrea del
Sarto, so beautiful that it would make cold chills run through the most
elementary connoisseur and the most hide-bound and prosaic Philistine.
This Salon illumined by a soft and well distributed light, seems to me
the select spot, the very heart of the building, and I left it with
deep regret to go and visit the famous salon which contains those two
porphyry columns whose value is so great that they are worth more than
the entire palace. They are placed in front of a door, and thus produce
as little effect as the lapis lazuli in the “Salon Serra” in Genoa,
which you might well believe were painted and varnished, and which
strongly resemble a metallic blue watered silk.
There is still another salon, but it is not remarkable in any way. In
the four corners, four bracket pedestals support four busts: those of
the Duc de Berry, of Charles X., and other members of the royal family.
The Vendramin-Calergi has gained an additional interest in
recent years on account of the fact that Richard Wagner died in
it on Feb. 13, 1883.--E. S.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF THE OLD SERAGLIO, TURKEY.]
A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE
PIERRE LOTI
The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees;
in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of
day. The little Turkish _cafés_ begin to open, and two or three
_minims_ are already being shaved in the open air under the trees.
It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before
returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with
those warm little _bonbons_ that they sell here in the morning,
and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast.
About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me
back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and
in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between
the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding
enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress.
These walls shut in a little corner of earth which is absolutely
special and unique, and which is the extreme point of Oriental
Europe,--a promontory that juts out towards neighbouring Asia, and
which was, moreover, for many centuries, the residence of the Caliphs
and a place of incomparable splendour. This, and the sacred suburb of
Eyoub contain all that is most exquisite in Constantinople: this is the
“Old Seraglio,”--a name that alone evokes a world of dreams.
They open for us a door in this wall, and, then, as soon as the barrier
is passed, the delicious melancholy of interior things is revealed
to us, and the dead Past takes us to itself and envelops us with its
winding-sheet.
At first, there is silence and shadow. Empty, desolate courts, where
the neglected grass pushes through the flag-stones and where still live
ancient trees that were contemporaries of the magnificent sultans of
former times: black cypresses as tall as towers, plane-trees which have
acquired unwonted forms, all hollowed out by time, being supported only
by immense shreds of bark and bent like old men.
Then come the galleries with colonnades in the ancient Turkish style,
painted with strange frescoes, under which the great Solomon forced the
ambassadors of the European kings to enter. And this place, happily
never open to profane visitors, has not yet become a common promenade
for tourists; behind the high walls, it preserves a little mysterious
peace, it is all imprinted with the sadness of dead splendour.
Crossing these first courts, we have upon the right impenetrable
gardens, where you see rising above the clumps of cypress old kiosks
with closed windows,--the residences of imperial widows and aged
princesses who wish to end their days here in this austere retreat in
one of the most wonderful sites in the world.
It is all bathed in sunlight, all dazzling in tranquil light, the
last portion of this walled-in spot to which we have now come,--the
very last point of the Old Seraglio, and of Europe. It is a solitary
esplanade, very elevated and very white, dominating the distant blue of
the sea and of Asia. The clear morning sunlight inundates those depths
of space out yonder, where the towns, the islets and the mountains are
sketched out in light tints above the motionless sheet of Marmora.
Around us are old buildings also white, which contain all that is
rarest and most precious in Turkey.
First the kiosk, forbidden to infidels, where the cloak of the Prophet
is kept in a cover embroidered with jewels. Then the kiosk of Bagdad,
the interior of which is entirely clothed in those old Persian
faïences; which are priceless to-day: the branches of red flowers were
made upon them with coral that they liquified by a process now lost and
spread upon them like pigment.
Then the Imperial Treasury, very white also under its layers of
whitewash and barred like a prison; and whose iron gates will be opened
for me presently.
And finally, a palace, uninhabited, but well maintained, which we
entered and sat down. Steps of white marble led us to the salons of
the first floor, which were furnished about the middle of the last
century in the European taste. They are of the Louis XV. style, to
which an imperceptible mixture of Oriental singularity gives a special
charm. The white and gold wainscots with old cherry or old lilac damask
with white flowers show nothing but light tints mellowed by time.
There are some large Sèvres and Chinese vases, and few other objects,
but all of them are old and rare. Much space, air, and light, and a
tranquil symmetry in the arrangement of everything--give a feeling of
changelessness and neglect.
And there in a sort of sumptuous solitude, seated on these
_fauteuils_ of a deliciously pale rose, before large open
windows, we have from this last promontory of Europe, the splendid
view that charmed the Sultans of the past. To our left, and very far
below us, the Bosphorus spreads, furrowed with ships and caïques; the
whiteness of the marble quays are reflected in it; the whiteness of
the new imperial residences, Dolma Bagtche and Tcheragan, are mirrored
inverted in long, pale lines; the row of palace and mosques is pictured
magnificently upon its banks. Opposite is Asia, still bluish in the
remaining drifts of the morning mist; it is Scutari, with its domes and
minarets, with its immense cemetery and its forest of dark cypresses.
To the right, the infinite expanse of Marmora;--distant steamboats
are moving upon it, lost in all that diaphanous blue,--little grey
silhouettes trailing delicate clouds of smoke.
How well it was chosen, this site, to dominate and watch from above
that Turkey, seated superbly on two divisions of the world! And to-day,
what peace and what melancholy splendour in this complete isolation
from all the agitations of modern life, in this great silence of
abandonment, under this clear and mournful sun!
When the guardian of the Treasury--an old man with a white beard--is
ready to open the iron door with his enormous keys, twenty individuals
come to form a hedge, ten to the right, ten to the left, on each side
of the entrance.
We pass between this double row and enter the rather dark halls, into
which they all follow us.