BEAUNE AND THE COTE D'OR
Ever since we left Beaune, my wife has been endeavouring, at frequent
intervals, to extract from me an unconditional promise that, one day,
we will go to live there. "It would be lovely," she says, "to live
close to the Hôtel Dieu, and to watch the vines, for a whole summer,
ripening on the Côte d'Or." So it would.
Certainly, if we are to live in France, we might do worse than choose
this little rampart-girdled town, that, though on the main line of
the P.L.M., has retained so much of its mediæval charm, and still has
houses to show you of every century from the thirteenth onwards.
Beaune has a _cachet_, and surprises all its own. Go where you may,
you will find them, or they will find you. Stand in the little Rue de
l'Enfer, not happily named, and look up towards the church. Along a
white wall, that the sun has fretted with a lace-work of leafy shadow,
runs a frieze of ivy, below a rich cornice of blossoming lilac. Within
that garden are glimpses of ancient mottled walls, seen through green
branches, whose wavy lines lead up to the tower, crowned by the lovely
dome and lantern of Notre Dame.
Or stand beneath the exquisite, gothic porch of that same church, and
look through its soft, brown shadowy arches to the white walls and
flowery gardens of the old houses beside it; or across the place, to
where the warm, purple shadows lie upon the rosy oriel and tourelle of
the Maison du Colombier.
[Illustration: · BEAUNE ·]
There are good things, too, in the centre of the town--the Flemish
belfry in the Place Monge; ancient houses in the Rue de Lorraine; and
especially a glimpse of a fifteenth century, pink-washed corner shop,
topped by the graceful lantern of the Hospice de la Charité.
Here we are back at Notre Dame, one of the finest churches in Burgundy,
but so hemmed in by other buildings that it is not seen to advantage,
except from the west side, at a point in the street beyond the
Colombier. There only do you get the whole building and the proportions
of the tower in good perspective. The view from the east end, however,
is presentable. The apsidal chapels, the ambulatory and lofty choir,
leading the eye upward, stage by stage, to the glorious dome tiled in
red, green, and yellow, give a quite Burgundian effect of satisfying
solidity, and of colouring that, though, on the whole, rather cold, is
harmonious in certain lights.
As usual, the heavy flying buttresses, that fail to fly, are an
architectural defect.
The gem of the exterior is the early thirteenth-century, triple,
open-aisled porch, of two bays, with gloriously carved panelled doors
of the fifteenth century. For grace and harmony of proportion this
porch is one of the best in France. It recalls that most successful of
all façades, Peterborough Cathedral.
The interior has all the features of twelfth-century Burgundian
romanesque--an almost barrel-vaulted nave, and aisle, with slightly
stilted horseshoe arches, and quadripartite vaulting, groined, without
ribs. Some of the cushion capitals are plain, some carved, and the
vaulting shafts throughout, except in the transept, take the ordinary
Burgundian form of fluted pilasters.
Each bay of the triforium is divided, as usual, into three round-headed
arches--of which two are blind and the centre one pierced--with fluted,
or zig-zagged pilasters between them. In the chapel of St. Léger are
two quite interesting fifteenth century frescoes of the raising of
Lazarus, and the stoning of Stephen--both, probably, by a painter of
the Flemish school. The former picture, though mutilated and faded, is
still quite realistic; too much so, in a sense; for the bystanders are
so interested in the miracle that they have elbowed the Christ quite
to one side of the picture. Martha is prominent, in the conventional
attitude, with her handkerchief to her nose. "Jam Foetet."
[Illustration: PORCH OF EGLISE NOTRE DAME--BEAUNE
_Facing page 232_]
But Notre Dame, though good, is not the best of Beaune. The church must
yield to the Hôtel Dieu. History, or, at any rate, my history, does
not relate how Nicholas Rolin, the Chancellor of Philippe le Bon, came
to erect at a little fifth-rate town, such as is Beaune, a hospital
unrivalled in all France; yet such is the fact. I do not even know why
he built one at all, unless old Louis XI.'s mot be true--that he had
"made enough poor to necessitate building a hospital to keep them in."
But, there it is, an eighth wonder of the world; beautiful, from the
crest on the gable to the knocker on the door.
This Hôtel Dieu, seen on a grey day or a blue one, is absolutely
harmonious and satisfying. Whether you follow the length of soft,
yellow, brown wall, the blue-grey expanse of the high-pitched roof, the
delicate flêche, or the starry, gabled hood over the entrance, your eye
feasts upon a poem in form and colour; you feel at once the intense
delight of looking upon a work of art that could not have been better
done. But you will stay longest before the porch, the most daring and
most completely successful that exists.
The entrance is beneath a flattened arch, through a panelled door
with a beautiful forged-iron knocker and alms-box; all protected by a
glorious three-gabled hood, crocketed and pinnacled, and built into the
main wall, from which it projects without visible support. The pendants
have angels, bearing shields, with the arms of Nicholas Rolin and his
wife. The hood is slated in grey, as is the roof, and the blue vault
beneath is starred with golden stars, symbolizing the little heaven
within. Upon the blue tympanum is written in gold letters, "Hostel
Dieu, 1443." All these blues and golds harmonise perfectly with the
great crested roof, whether in its more sombre, grey mood, or when the
richer purples come leaping from it at the call of the sun, to play
about the sides of the dormers, or among the shadows of the flagged
pinnacles above.
The exterior remains almost unchanged from the time of Nicholas Rolin,
when the poor of Beaune first gathered round the stone benches, and
beneath the verandah,[180] to receive their dole of five hundred kilos
of bread that are still distributed once a year to the needy of the
district.
Following a white-winged sister, we passed into the courtyard, to find
ourselves in a great, galleried building, of the late Flemish type,
with a many-coloured linoleum roof, elaborate pinnacled gables, and, in
one corner, a well in the forged ironwork which the Flamands of that
time worked with unrivalled skill.
There was only one jarring note--the garish brown colour of the
woodwork, laid on, the guide told me, five years ago. It is a thousand
pities; for had the oak been merely oiled, or painted a dark brown,
or matched with one of the tints in the roof, many visitors would be
spared a shock, and I doubt not that the convalescence of certain
patients would be considerably accelerated. Yet, in spite of garish
paint, we can echo Viollet-le-Duc's sentiment, that it is worth while
to be ill at Beaune.
This abode of peace takes you straight back to the fifteenth century,
with its beauties all intact, and only its horrors mitigated. Nothing
here has changed--from the costumes of the white angels who flit
noiselessly through the kitchens and wards, to the tapestry covers laid
upon the curtained, oak beds, with the oak chairs beside them. Even the
pewter vessels are identical with those in use at the founding of the
hospital.
The chapel, too, opening from one of the wards, is a good place to pray
in. Through the glorious windows--copies of the original, resplendent
with figures and devices--the warm colour streams down upon the
altar, where of old was set up Roger Van der Weyden's magnificent
Last Judgment; now in the musée above. On great days the volets were
drawn back, and the picture exposed; magnificent red tapestries were
laid upon the beds, and all was ordered for the best in this little
kingdom-of-heaven upon earth.
Here Guigonne de Salins, the great Chancellor's wife, is laid; and
her arms (the castle) and his (the key) with his device, "Seule
[Illustration: 6-pointed star]" (Only Star), are scattered broadcast.
No less ubiquitous is her motto, The Bird on the Bough, signifying how
lonely she was to be after her lord's death. Guigonne, no doubt, was
sincere enough; but one cannot help remembering that the sentiments
expressed in these devices were not always lived up to. Did not Rolin's
own master, Philippe le Bon, for example, choose the words "Aultre
n'Auray" as a chaste allusion to his conjugal devotion? yet we have
Olivier de la Marche assuring us that his gracious master had "de
bâtards et de bâtardes une moult belle compagnie."
[Illustration: · COURT YARD OF THE HOSPITAL ·
· BEAUNE ·]
But I am digressing. We must follow to the musée our
guide, whose manner could not be more gentle, were we patients and not
visitors,--reminded on the way, by the sight of polished floors and
shining pots, that the cleanliness of this building moved a certain
worthy Canon Papillon, in the 17th century, to remark, "Ineptiarum
stultus est labor," which, freely rendered, means: "They are fools who
waste soap."
The best thing in the musée--in fact, the only thing that one really
goes there to see--is the Last Judgment of Roger Van der Weyden, which,
in spite of the 19th century restoration, remains a splendid example of
Flemish art, still very Gothic in treatment, and full of the sadness
of decline. The work is executed with all the microscopic accuracy
of detail characteristic of the school. There is fine realism, and
individual treatment; but no breakaway from tradition: all the figures
are consciously attitudinizing, and one feels that the painter is
making a last desperate effort to enforce belief in an outworn dogma.
The welter of human beings, bursting out from their graves, dragging
one another, and being dragged, by hair and limbs, pell-mell down into
hell; this biting of fingers, and pulling of ears till they bleed,
does not convince. Such a subject was well suited to the primitives of
the Romanesque and early Gothic periods, but seems hopelessly archaic
for a painter born within hail of the Renaissance. Nevertheless,
though, in spite of its horrors, and its unhappy colouring, the
picture, as you linger before it, grows on you, it is with a sigh of
relief that you turn to its more successful part, the portraits of the
donors, magnificent in their energy and expression. Here you have an
opportunity to judge concerning the probability of Louis XI.'s alleged
slander upon Nicholas Rolin. Did he, or did he not, grind the faces
of the poor? My wife says unhesitatingly, "He did"; and, looking at
the significant scarlet angel above his head--suggestive of a red
aura--I decline to contradict a lady. His is, indeed, a disinheriting
countenance. But Guigonne, his seule étoile, is of a different stamp.
Piety exudes from her. As the guide somewhat bluntly put it, "She was
as good as she was ugly"--a speech which no lady, living or dead, would
ever forgive.
[Illustration: End of chapter XVI; Star Ornament]
FOOTNOTES:
[180] This verandah or hood has disappeared. It is shown on a model
of the hospital to be seen in the musée.
[Illustration: Heading chapter XVII; Saint Martin and Saint Margaret]