with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along
the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of
his later life was already gathering. The dead!--he was coming to be
on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of
"the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work
being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not
invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled
drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood
open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in
silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never
to be finished.
Gaston, as he turned from that stolen reading of the opening verse in
jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, to the writer, let out his soul
perhaps; for the poet's face struck fire too, and seeming to detect
on a sudden the legible document of something by no means
conventional below the young man's well-controlled manner and
expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual
furtherance, and in particular for the addition of "manly power" to a
"grace" of mind, obviously there already in due sufficiency. Would
he presently carry a letter with recommendation of himself to
Monsieur Michel de Montaigne? Linked they were, in the common
friendship of the late Etienne de la Boetie yonder! Monsieur Michel
could tell him much of the great ones--of the Greek and Latin masters
of style. Let his study be in them! With what justice, by the way,
had those Latin poets dealt with winter, and wintry charms, in their
bland Italy! And just then, at the striking of a rickety great bell
of the Middle Age, in the hands of a cowled brother came the
emblazoned grace-cup, with which the Prior de Ronsard had enriched
his "house," and the guests withdrew.
[70] "Yesterday's snow" was nowhere, a surprising sunlight
everywhere; through which, after gratefully bidding adieu to the
great poet, almost on their knees for a blessing, our adventurers
returned home. Gaston, intently pondering as he lingered behind the
others, was aware that this new poetry, which seemed to have
transformed his whole nature into half-sensuous imagination, was the
product not of one or more individual writers, but (it might be in
the way of a response to their challenge) a general direction of
men's minds, a delightful "fashion" of the time. He almost
anticipated our modern idea, or platitude, of the Zeit-geist. A
social instinct was involved in the matter, and loyalty to an
intellectual movement. As its leader had himself been the first to
suggest, the actual authorship belonged not so much to a star as to a
constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he had pointed out in the sky,
or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by
a common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in
the instinct of others. Here, truly, was a doctrine to propagate, a
secret open to every one who would learn, towards a new management of
life,--nay! a new religion, or at least a new worship, maintaining
and visibly setting forth a single overpowering apprehension.
The worship of physical beauty a religion, the proper faculty of
which would be the bodily eye! Looked at in this way, some of the
well- [71] marked characteristics of the poetry of the Pleiad assumed
a hieratic, almost an ecclesiastical air. That rigid correctness;
that gracious unction, as of the medieval Latin psalmody; that
aspiring fervour; that jealousy of the profane "vulgar"; the sense,
flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its
utmost triumph, could never be really popular:--why were these so
welcome to him but from the continuity of early mental habit? He
might renew the over-grown tonsure, and wait, devoutly, rapturously,
in this goodly sanctuary of earth and sky about him, for the
manifestation, at the moment of his own worthiness, of flawless
humanity, in some undreamed-of depth and perfection of the loveliness
of bodily form.
And therewith came the consciousness, no longer of mere bad-
neighbourship between what was old and new in his life, but of
incompatibility between two rival claimants upon him, of two ideals.
Might that new religion be a religion not altogether of goodness, a
profane religion, in spite of its poetic fervours? There were
"flowers of evil," among the rest. It came in part, avowedly, as a
kind of consecration of evil, and seemed to give it the beauty of
holiness. Rather, good and evil were distinctions inapplicable in
proportion as these new interests made themselves felt. For a
moment, amid casuistical questions as to one's indefeasible right to
liberty of heart, he saw himself, somewhat [72] wearily, very far
gone from the choice, the consecration, of his boyhood. If he could
but be rid of that altogether! Or if that would but speak with
irresistible decision and effect! Was there perhaps somewhere, in
some penetrative mind in this age of novelties, some scheme of truth,
some science about men and things, which might harmonise for him his
earlier and later preference, "the sacred and the profane loves," or,
failing that, establish, to his pacification, the exclusive supremacy
of the latter?
IV. PEACH-BLOSSOM AND WINE
[73] Those searchings of mind brought from time to time cruel starts
from sleep, a sudden shudder at any wide outlook over life and its
issues, draughts of mental east-wind across the hot mornings, into
which the voices of his companions called him, to lose again in long
rambles every thought save that of his own firm, abounding youth.
These rambles were but the last, sweet, wastefully-spent remnants of
a happy season. The letter for Monsieur Michel de Montaigne was to
hand, with preparations for the distant journey which must presently
break up their comradeship. Nevertheless, its actual termination
overtook them at the last as if by surprise: on a sudden that
careless interval of time was over.
The carelessness of "the three" at all events had been entire.
Secure, on the low, warm, level surface of things, they talked, they,
rode, they ate and drank, with no misgivings, mental or moral, no too
curious questions as to the essential nature of their so palpable
well-being, [74] or the rival standards thereof, of origins and
issues. And yet, with all their gaiety, as its last triumphant note
in truth, they were ready to trifle with death, welcoming, by way of
a foil to the easy character of their days, a certain luxurious sense
of danger--the night-alarm, the arquebuse peeping from some quiet
farm-building across their way, the rumoured presence in their
neighbourhood of this or that great military leader--delightful
premonitions of the adventurous life soon to be their own in Paris.
What surmises they had of any vaguer sort of danger, took effect, in
that age of wizardry, as a quaintly practical superstition, the
expectation of cadaverous "churchyard things" and the like, intruding
themselves where they should not be, to be dissipated in turn by
counter-devices of the dark craft which had evoked them. Gaston,
then, as in after years, though he saw no ghosts, could not bear to
trifle with such matters: to his companions it was a delight, as they
supped, to note the indication of nameless terrors, if it were only
in the starts and crackings of the timbers of the old place. To the
turbid spirits of that generation the midnight heaven itself was by
no means a restful companion; and many were the hours wasted by those
young astrophiles in puzzling out the threats, or the enigmatic
promises, of a starry sky.
The fact that armed persons were still abroad, thieves or assassins,
lurking under many disguises, [75] might explain what happened on the
last evening of their time together, when they sat late at the open
windows as the night increased, serene but covered summer night,
aromatic, velvet-footed. What coolness it had was pleasant after the
wine; and they strolled out, fantastically muffled in certain old
heraldic dresses of parade, caught up in the hall as they passed
through, Gaston alone remaining to attend on his grandfather. In
about an hour's time they returned, not a little disconcerted, to
tell a story of which Gaston was reminded (seeing them again in
thought as if only half real, amid the bloomy night, with blood upon
their boyish flowers) as they crossed his path afterwards at three
intervals. Listening for the night-hawk, pushing aside the hedge-row
to catch the evening breath of the honeysuckle, they had sauntered
on, scarcely looking in advance, along the causeway. Soft sounds
came out of the distance, but footsteps on the hard road they had not
heard, when three others fronted them face to face--Jasmin, Amadée,
and Camille--their very selves, visible in the light of the lantern
carried by Camille: they might have felt the breath upon their
cheeks: real, close, definite, cap for cap, plume for plume, flower
for flower, a light like their own flashed up counter-wise, but with
blood, all three of them, fresh upon the bosom, or in the mouth. It
was well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even
devils, [76] as wise men know, taking flight at its white glitter
through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with
mimic counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before
them.
Curdled at heart for an hour by that strange encounter, they went on
their way next morning no different. There was something in the mere
belief that peace was come at last. For a moment Huguenots were, or
pretended to be, satisfied with a large concession of liberty; to be
almost light of soul. The French, who can always pause in the very
midst of civil bloodshed to eulogise the reign of universal kindness,
were determined to treat a mere armistice as nothing less than
realised Utopia. To bear offensive weapons became a crime; and the
sense of security at home was attested by vague schemes of glory to
be won abroad, under the leadership of "The Admiral," the great
Huguenot Coligni, anxious to atone for his share in the unhappiness
of France by helping her to foreign conquests. Philip of Spain had
been watching for the moment when Charles and Catherine should call
the Duke of Alva into France to continue his devout work there.
Instead, the poetic mind of Charles was dazzled for a moment by the
dream of wrestling the misused Netherlands from Spanish rule
altogether.
Under such genial conditions, then, Gaston set out towards those
south-west regions he had [77] always yearned to, as popular
imagination just now set thither also, in a vision of French ships
going forth from the mouths of the Loire and the Gironde, from
Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of
Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that
of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and
allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its
advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La
Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of
his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and
wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of
the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a
region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the
mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white
Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy
seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so
many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human
habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along
some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little
prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive
architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely
native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one
was not but might become--the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined,
to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With
their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal
chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision
for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were
the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque
age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed
souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy
apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their
very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light
here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did
not merely accept the sun, but flashed it back gratefully from the
white, gracious, carven houses, that were like a natural part of it.
As he passed below, fancy would sometimes credit the outlook from
their lofty gables with felicities of combination beyond possibility.
What prospects of mountain and sea-shore from those aerial window-
seats!
And still, as in some sumptuous tapestry, the architecture, the
landscape, were but a setting for the human figures: these palatial
abodes, never out of sight, high on the river bank, challenged
continual speculation as to their inhabitants--how they moved, read
poetry and romance, or wrote the memoirs which were like romance,
passed through all the hourly changes of their all- [79]
accomplished, intimate life. The Loire was the river pre-eminently
of the monarchy, of the court; and the fleeting human interests, fact
or fancy, which gave its utmost value to the liveliness of the
natural scene, found a centre in the movements of Catherine and her
sons, still roving, after the eccentric habit inherited from Francis
the First, from one "house of pleasure" to another, in the pursuit at
once of amusement and of that political intrigue which was the
serious business of their lives. Like some fantastic company of
strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, the
royal family, with all its own small rivalries, would be housed for
the night under the same roof with some of its greater enemies--Henri
de Guise, Condé, "The Admiral," all alike taken by surprise--but
courteously, and therefore ineffectively. And Gaston, come thus by
chance so close to them, had the sense not so much of nearness to the
springs of great events, as of the likeness of the whole matter to a
stage-play with its ingeniously contrived encounters, or the
assortments of a game of chance.
And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation
of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and
whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in
a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined,
varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination
by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly
along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel
freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it
was visible--sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon
line. The features of the landscape changed again, and the gardens,
the rich orchards, gave way to bare, grassy undulations: only, the
open sandy spaces presented their own native flora, for the fine
silex seemed to have crept into the tall, wiry stalks of the ixias,
like grasses the seeds of which had expanded, by solar magic, into
veritable flowers, crimson, green, or yellow patched with black.
It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea's arms, amid the low
murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a
little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient
manor, deserted as the sea encroached--long ago, for the fig-trees in
the riven walls were tough and old. Next morning he must turn his
back betimes, with the freshness of the outlook still undimmed, all
colours turning to white on the shell-beach, the wrecks, the children
at play on it, the boat with its gay streamers dancing in the foam.
Bright as the scene of his journey had been, it had had from time to
time its grisly touches; a forbidden fortress with its steel-clad
inmates thrust itself upon the way; the village church had been
ruined too recently to count as picturesque; and at last, at the
meeting-point of [81] five long causeways across a wide expanse of
marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant, La Rochelle
itself scowled through the heavy air, the dark ramparts still rising
higher around its dark townsfolk:--La Rochelle, the "Bastion of the
Gospel" according to John Calvin, the conceded capital of the
Huguenots. They were there, and would not leave it, even to share
the festivities of the marriage of King Charles to his little
Austrian Elizabeth about this time--the armed chiefs of
Protestantism, dreaming of a "dictator" after the Roman manner, who
should set up a religious republic. Serried closely together on
land, they had a strange mixed following on the sea. Lair of
heretics, or shelter of martyrs, La Rochelle was ready to protect the
outlaw. The corsair, of course, would be a Protestant, actually
armed perhaps by sour old Jeanne of Navarre--the ship he fell across,
of course, Spanish. A real Spanish ship of war, gay, magnificent,
was gliding even then, stealthily, through the distant haze; and
nearer lay what there was of a French navy. Did the enigmatic
"Admiral," the coming dictator, Coligni, really wish to turn it to
foreign adventure, in rivalry of Spain, as the proper patriotic
outcome of this period, or breathing-space, of peace and national
unity?
Undoubtedly they were still there, even in this halcyon weather,
those causes of disquiet, like the volcanic forces beneath the
massive [82] chestnut-woods, spread so calmly through the breathless
air, on the ledges and levels of the red heights of the Limousin,
under which Gaston now passed on his way southwards. On his right
hand a broad, lightly diversified expanse of vineyard, of towns and
towers innumerable, rolled its burden of fat things down the slope of
the Gironde towards the more perfect level beyond. In the heady
afternoon an indescribable softness laid hold on him, from the
objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And
was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron,
the chalybeate influence, was to come?--those coquettish, well-kept,
vine-wreathed towers, smiling over a little irregular old village,
itself half-hidden in gadding vine, pointed out by the gardeners (all
labourers here were gardeners) as the end of his long, pleasant
journey, as the abode of Monsieur Michel de Montaigne, the singular
but not unpopular gentleman living there among his books, of whom
Gaston hears so much over-night at the inn where he rests, before
delivering the great poet's letter, entering his room at last in a
flutter of curiosity.
In those earlier days of the Renaissance, a whole generation had been
exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself. An older
ideal moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature
actually in possession, still haunted humanity, at the very moment
when it was [83] called, through a full knowledge of the past, to
enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own
capacities.--Might one enjoy? Might one eat of all the trees?--Some
had already eaten, and needed, retrospectively, a theoretic
justification, a sanction of their actual liberties, in some new
reading of human nature itself and its relation to the world around
it.--Explain to us the propriety, on the full view of things, of this
bold course we have taken, or know we shall take!
Ex post facto, at all events, that justification was furnished by the
Essays of Montaigne. The spirit of the essays doubtless had been
felt already in many a mind, as, by a universal law of reaction, the
intellect does supply the due theoretic equivalent to an inevitable
course of conduct. But it was Montaigne certainly who turned that
emancipating ethic into current coin. To Pascal, looking back upon
the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the
impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who
represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama,
hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings,
that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and
impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.
Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a
life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been
accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated
modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston
presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season,
that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he
took, Montaigne--the acclivity--of Saint Michael, just thirty-six
years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the
neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return
thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his
days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of
the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life,
a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and
unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with
seeming indolence at home.
It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his
house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been
rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war
shelters: and openness--that all was wide open, searched through by
light and warmth and air from the soil--was the impression it made on
Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court,
to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the
great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still
lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a
certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a
preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and
savoured of his native earth.
Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively,
as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life,
towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely
interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest,
truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service
as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays
were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he
cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with
itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed,
outward stimulus--physical motion, some text shot from a book, the
queries and objections of a living voice.--"My thoughts sleep, if I
sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but
thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked
them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions,
many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting
their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual
publication at last to none of the usual literary motives--desire for
fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell--but to the sociable desire for
a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for
companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance";
speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."--"If there
be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who
can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but
whistle, and I will run!"