(LA COMMANDERIE DE BALLAN)
1903
I
An old irregular house, a long grey line in the hollow, founded by the
Templars some eight hundred years ago and finished yesterday. In 1189,
Henry II. of England lay there for a night, very sick, on his way to die
at Chinon. The house was then a Commanderie of the Knights-Templar: we
know how they perished! In all ages, I think, patriotism in France has
shown two sides--two faces, if you will; the one aristocratic, desiring
the advancement of the nation by means of an _élite_, a chosen few, to
whose perfection the common sort was to be sacrificed; the other,
essentially popular, full of dreams and visions, plotting a general
happiness and justice made absolute on earth. The Templars were of the
former party. Early in the fourteenth century, a democratic king made a
clean sweep of them, confiscated their wealth, and left our Commanderie
to bear an empty name. Doubtless, at the moment, King Philip was full of
virtuous schemes. A volume of documents, edited by Renan, shows the wise
uses to which the French Government intended to put this lucky potful of
treasure: there is a plan for popular education, elaborated by a
certain Pierre Du Bois, which we might read to-day, with colleges for
women, scholarships for lady doctors, an Order of Nursing Sisters to be
sent to the colonies--all strangely modern for 1306. High schools for
boys and girls, with special facilities for studying the natural and
moral sciences, were to be established in the existing Commanderies. But
nothing came of it, of course; and no one knows exactly what hole in
fourteenth-century finance was stopped by the nuggets of the unfortunate
Knights-Templar.
Our Commanderie remained a Commanderie. It was handed over to the
Knights of Malta. So much and no more do we know of its fate from the
time of Philip the Fair till the French Revolution. For five hundred
years a mist envelops it. The nineteenth century was to raise its
fortunes.
One of Napoloen’s marshals had a son--himself a prince and a
soldier--unhappily married to a lady of unattractive virtue. A nervous,
artistic, irascible man, he went about still seeking his ideal, _circuit
rudens, quærens quem devoret_. He found it, unfortunately for her, in
the maiden daughter of one of his old friends. Often have I heard of a
certain dinner-party given by the girl’s father--an old general--in
honour of the prince, and how the guests waited in the stiff yellow
Empire _salon_, where the clock on the chimney-piece struck, first the
half-hour, then the hour; and yet the prince never appeared; and still
the young hostess lingered in her pressing-room. At last the dreadful
truth burst upon the hungry and anxious company--they had eloped
together!
Save for this one great slip in conduct, the lady was a saint--a mute
inglorious George Eliot. She reclaimed her lover, whose courses up to
that time had been of the most devious, and showed him the sweetness of
a calm, domestic life. She even reconciled him with his virtuous spouse,
and if, as I fear, she broke her father’s heart, she lived to be
blessed by the family she had outraged. Society in France still bore
traces of the recent upheaval of the Revolution; the rule of morals was
relaxed, and passion was held a great excuse. The lady’s character and
her lover’s rank and fidelity combined to attenuate their fault: people
ended by thinking of her as a sort of morganatic wife. She would say
sometimes to her partner in shame: “My dear, you must not neglect the
good princess. Remember she has always the first claim on your
attention.” If, thus despatched to his duties, he stayed too long at
home, the prince’s lawful helpmeet would remark one day: “_Mon ami_, it
is a long time since you looked after your plantations at the
Commanderie.” There is a beautiful old romance by Marie de France called
_Eliduc, or, The Man with Two Wives_. With no less gracious a courtesy,
no less delicate a sense of a rival’s due and a lover’s duty, did these
two nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an impossible,
position.
The prince had bought our ancient manor-house to hide therein his
unespousèd saint. He rebuilt the tumbling walls, restored roof and
ceilings; it was he, no doubt, who drained the fishpond which used to
stand so close to the front door. He made the place a little paradise.
He was rich; he sent all over both worlds, old and new, for rare trees
to plant the hilly park which rises about the small grey priory, gently
swelling to a rim of oakwoods all around. The park is, as it were, a
brief and shallow valley from which the river has long disappeared,
leaving only a tiny, almost invisible streamlet which trickles through
the softest lawns, planted now with groups of silvery Atlas cedars; with
old hollow chestnuts, which--they, at least--must date back some two
hundred years, so far have they gone in the sere and yellow leaf; with
Californian cypresses, which flame all autumn until their fiery needles
rust and fall; with strange pines that grow in a pyramid; with deodoras
and monkey-trees from India; with copper beech and silvery maple. He
stocked the place with antelopes, guanacos, and llamas, quaint, shy
creatures, housed in folds under the spreading trees, that would come to
the palings and feed, tame and timid, from their lady’s hand. And here,
as quiet and lonely as Adam and Eve in their garden, lived these
unlawful lovers, eternally sequestered. He, indeed, had his excursions
and forthcomings, incidental to the existence of a man with two wives,
but she, poor soul, wrapt in a veil of tender shame, dared not show her
face beyond the unfenced boundaries of her woods, and did by stealth her
very deeds of mercy.
Some fifty years ago, both prince and lady died. The house and lands
then came by purchase into the hands of some friends of mine, who have
considerably extended the lands of their domain. The younger brother
married an exquisite young _sociétaire_ of the Comédie Française--a
young lady, pure as pearl, good as gold, of a sort rare, though not
impossible, upon the stage, in France. To this paradise of the
Commanderie he brought his young wife; but--alas for our terrestrial
Edens!--she died there before the year was out. When the widower
followed her, he left the house to his elder brother, a soldier of some
note, who turned his sword into a ploughshare, and devoted himself to
his vineyards and cornfields. His daughter is mistress of the
manor-house to-day.
As it stood when it came into her hands, the Commanderie was a fit
pavilion for a pair of lovers, but scarcely the hospitable home of a
numerous family. Much of it had to be rebuilt and much restored. A story
was added. One day, when the masons were taking down an ugly plaster
ceiling from a small room in the tower, there underneath they
[Illustration: THE COMMANDERIE AT BALLAN]
found, still solid, still fresh and clear, the ancient beams and
roof-trees of a distant century, painted with the coat-of-arms of the
Knights of Malta.