We drew away into calmer latitudes after leaving that whirlwind of a
town. For the time being, our duties as public poets were ended; and
there was a sense of restful comfort in knowing that for the moment we
were rid of our fame and celebrity, and were free--as the lightest
hearted of simple travellers--to enjoy the beauties of the river as it
carried us, always at a full gallop, downward toward the sea.
In that tranquil spirit we came, presently, to the leaning Tour-Maudite:
and found farther restfulness, after our own varied and too-energetic
doings, in looking upon a quiet ruin that had remained soberly in the
same place, and under the same sedative curse, for more than three
hundred years. It is an architectural curiosity, this Cursed
Tower--almost as far out from the perpendicular as is its better-known
rival of Pisa; but more impressive in its unnatural crookedness because
it stands upon an isolated crag which drops below it sheer to the river
in a vast precipice. Anciently, before it went wrong and its curse came
upon it, the tower was the keep of the Benedictine nunnery of Soyons.
Most ungallantly, in the year 1569, the Huguenots captured the Abbey by
assault; and thereupon the Abbess, Louise d'Amauze (poor frightened
soul!) hurriedly embraced the Reformed religion--in dread lest, without
that concession to the prejudices of the conquerors, still worse might
come. Several of her nuns followed her hastily heterodox example; but
the mass of them stood stoutly by their faith, and ended by making off
with it intact to Valence. I admit that an appearance of improbability
is cast upon this tradition by the unhindered departure from the Abbey
of the stiff-necked nuns: who thus manifested an open scorn equally of
the victorious Huguenots and of the Reformed faith. But, on the other
hand, there are the ruins of the Abbey to prove conclusively that it
truly was conquered; and there, slanting with a conspicuously unholy
slant high up above the ruins, bearing steadfast witness to the wrath of
heaven against that heretical Abbess and her heretical followers, is the
Cursed Tower!
While the Abbess of Soyons, being still untried by the stress of battle,
went sinless upon her still orthodox way, there lived just across the
river on the Manor of l'Etoile a sinner of a gayer sort--Diane de
Poitiers. The Castle of the Star dates from the fifteenth century; when
Louis XI. dwelt there as Governor of Dauphiny and was given lessons in
how to be a king. Diane the beautiful--"the most beautiful," as Francis
I. gallantly called her--transformed the fortress into a bower, and gave
to it (or accepted for it) the appropriately airy name of the Chateau de
Papillon. There she lived long after her butterfly days were over; and
in a way--although the Castle of the Butterfly is a silk-factory
now--she lives there still: just as another light lady beautiful, Queen
Jeanne of Naples, lives on in Provence. To this day her legend is vital
in the country-side; and the old people still talk about her as though
she were alive among them; and call her always not by her formal title
of the Duchesse de Valentinois, but by her love title of "la belle dame
de l'Etoile." Of this joyous person's family there is found a ghastly
memento at the little town of Lene--a dozen miles down the river, beyond
the great iron-works of Le Pouzin. It is the Tour de la Lepreuse:
wherein a leper lady of the house of Poitiers was shut up for many years
in awful solitude--until at last God in his goodness permitted her to
die. I suppose that this story would have pointed something of a
moral--instead of presenting only another case of a good moral gone
wrong--had Diane herself been that prisoner of loathsome death in life.
But aboard the _Gladiateur_ our disposition was to take the world easily
and as we found it--since we found it so well disposed toward us--and
not to bother our heads a bit about how moral lessons came off. With
cities effervescing in our honour, with Mayors attendant upon us hat in
hand, with brazen-helmeted firemen playing champagne upon us to
stimulate our poetic fires, with _boites_ and bands exploding in our
praise--and all under that soul-expanding sun of the Midi--'tis no
wonder that we wore our own bays jauntily and nodded to each other as
though to say: "Ah, you see now what it is to be a poet in these latter
days!" And we were graciously pleased to accept as a part of the tribute
that all the world just then was rendering to us the panorama of
mountains and towns and castles that continuously opened before us for
the delectation of our souls.
Off to the right, hidden behind the factory-smoke of La Voulte, was the
sometime home of Bernard de Ventadour, a troubadour whom the world still
loves to honour--quite one of ourselves; off to the left, commanding the
valley of the Drome, were Livron and Loriol, tough little Huguenot nuts
cracked all to pieces (as their fallen ramparts showed) in the religious
wars; and a little lower down we came to Cruas: a famous fortified
Abbey, surmounted by a superb donjon and set in the midst of a
triple-walled town, whereof the Byzantine-Romanesque church is one of
the marvels of Southern France. Cruas was founded more than a thousand
years ago, in the time of Charlemagne, by the pious Hermengarde, wife of
Count Eribert de Vivarais; being a thank-offering to heaven erected on
the very spot where that estimable woman and her husband were set upon
in the forest by a she-wolf of monstrous size. But the fortified Abbey
was a later growth; and was not completed, probably, until the sixteenth
century. It was toward the end of that century, certainly, that the
Huguenots attacked it--and were beaten off finally by Abbot Etienne
Deodel and his monks, who clapped on armour over their habits and did
some very sprightly fighting on its walls.
Below Cruas, around the bend in the river, Rochemaure the Black came
into sight: a withered stronghold topping an isolated rock of black
basalt six hundred feet above the stream. It is a grewsome place: the
ruin of a black nightmare of a basalt-built castle, having below and
around it a little black nightmare of a basalt-built town--whereof the
desperately steep and crooked streets are paved with black basalt, and
are so narrowed by over-hanging houses as to show above them only the
merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go
to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly
disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little
place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff--town and cliff and
the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white
cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which
a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place,
seemingly; but in cheerful contrast with its lowering neighbour up the
stream.
And then, passing beyond a maze of islands--amidst which the river
wandered so tortuously that our pilot had behind him a strong
tiller-crew in order to carry us through safely--we came to the noble
town of Viviers. From afar we saw its tall bell-tower, its beautiful
cathedral, its episcopal palace; and as we drew nearer the whole
environment of ancient houses and fortifications spread out around those
governing points in a great amphitheatre. But what held us most was the
gay dash of tri-colour on its bridge, and the crowd there evidently
waiting for our coming to manifest toward us their good will. They
cheered us and waved their hats and handkerchiefs at us, those
poet-lovers, as we neared them; and as we passed beneath the bridge a
huge wreath of laurel was swung downward to our deck, and a shower of
laurel branches fluttered down upon us through the sunlit air. In all
the fourteen centuries since Viviers was founded I am confident that
nothing more gracious than this tribute to passing Poetry is recorded
in the history of the town.
Naturally, being capable of such an act of nicely discriminating
courtesy, Viviers has sound traditions of learning and of gentle blood.
In its day it was a great episcopal city: whose bishops maintained an
army, struck money, counted princes among their vassals, in set terms
defied the power of the King of France--and recognized not the existence
of any temporal sovereign until the Third Conrad of Germany enlarged
their knowledge of political geography by taking their city by storm.
Yet while finely lording it over outsiders, the bishops were brought
curiously to their bearings within their own walls. Each of them, in
turn, on his way to his installation, found closed against him, as he
descended from his mule before it, the door of the cathedral; and the
door was not opened until he had sworn there publicly that he would
maintain inviolate as he found them the rights and privileges of the
chapter and of the town. Moreover, once in each year the men and women
of rank of Viviers asserted their right to a part enjoyment of the
ecclesiastical benefices by putting on copes and mitres and occupying
with the canons the cathedral stalls.
The line of one hundred and thirty bishops who in succession reigned
here ended--a century back, in the time of the Revolution--in a
veritable lurid flame; yet with, I think, a touch of agonized human
nature too. The church historian can see only the diabolical side of the
situation; and in a horror-struck way tells how that last Bishop, "being
overcome by the devil, abjured the episcopacy; with his own hands
destroyed the insignia of his sacred office; and thereafter gave himself
up to a blasphemous attack upon the holy religion of which he had been
for a long while one of the most worthy ministers."
It certainly is true that the devil had things largely his own way about
that time here in France; but it does not necessarily follow that in
this particular matter the devil directly had a hand. To my mind a
simpler and more natural explanation presents itself: That the
iconoclastic Bishop was a weak brother who had suffered himself to be
forced into a calling for which he had no vocation, and into an
apparent championship of a faith with which his inmost convictions were
at war; that for years and years the struggle between the inward man and
the outward Bishop had gone on unceasingly and hopelessly, until--as
well enough might happen to one strong enough to resent yet not strong
enough to overcome restraint--the galling irksomeness of such a double
life had brought madness near; and that madness did actually come when
the chains of a life and of a faith alike intolerable suddenly were
fused in the fierce heat of the Revolution and fell away.