IN THE AISNE--_continued_
LAON
It would be hard to find in France, or out of France, on a pleasant
summer's day, a more charming drive than the highway which leads from
Chauny, with its great modern industries and its lively, bustling
people, to the little feudal town of Coucy-le-Château, perched upon its
lofty hill and dominated by one of the grandest, if not, indeed, the
grandest, of feudal fortress-homes.
I do not know that Gargantua would now find the people of Chauny as
entertaining as Rabelais tells us they were in his time. Then he 'amused
himself much with the boatmen, and above all with those of Chauny in
Picardy--wonderful chatterboxes, and great at bandying chaff on the
subject of green monkeys.' There is no lack of boatmen now at Chauny,
though the railway has taken away much of their living; but the glory of
the green monkeys, I fear, has departed. In the days of Gargantua, the
Chaunois were as famous as the Savoyards now are, for wandering over
France with trained monkeys and trained dogs. On October 1 in each year,
on the feast of St. Rémy, every one of these peripatetic citizens was
expected to appear in his native town, there to join in a procession
which marched from what is now known as the Port Royal to the Bailliage,
bearing to the lieutenant-general of the king a traditional present in
the form of a huge pasty, decorated with eggs and chestnuts, and
surmounted by a pastry tower.
To the confection of this pasty the famous mills of Chauny, reputed the
best in France, were bound to contribute five _setiers_ of wheat, and
the guild of the butchers a calf's head.
Before the procession marched a learned dog, trained to all manner of
tricks and devices, and upon either side of the dog the town trumpeters,
sounding their finest and loudest _fanfares_.
At the Bailliage the lieutenant-general received the procession, seated
in a great chair of state in the midst of the hall, with wide open
doors, that all the people crowding into the Place might see what went
on within. Before this high functionary the learned dog advanced, quite
alone, and performed all his best tricks. He then gave way to the bearer
of the pasty. This having been gravely accepted, after the manner of a
feudal homage, by the lieutenant-general, the bearer, passing it on to
the servants of the Bailliage, proceeded himself to imitate as exactly
and as skilfully as possible all the performances of his predecessor the
learned dog, amid the shouting and applause of the multitude.
This over, a great silence fell upon the whole assembly, and it then
became the duty of the performer, assuming an attitude of profound and
deferential obeisance, to salute the lieutenant-general after a fashion
more easily describable by Rabelais or by M. Armand Silvestre than by
me, and which seems to have been derived from some of the singular rites
attributed by Von Hammer to the Templars, as a part of the ceremonial
observed by them in their secret conclaves.
When all this had been duly gone through with, the 'jongleurs' of Chauny
received the Royal permission to resume their perambulations of the
realm for another year, and the day wound up with junketings and
jollifications all over the town.
The 'jongleurs' and the learned dogs and the green monkeys have passed
away, with the lieutenant-general of the king. But I found a certain
homely shrewdness and vivacity in the people with whom I talked as they
went in and out of the '_Pot d'Etain_,' the chief hostelry of the place,
and the fact that this chief hostelry still keeps its good old-time name
of the 'Tin Pot,' and has not changed itself into a 'Grand Hôtel de
Chauny,' seemed to me to argue a survival here of common sense and sound
local feeling. The host of the 'Tin Pot,' a solid, well-to-do personage,
learned in crops and horses, gave me a capital trap, shaded with an
awning such as is worn on the delightful little basket-waggons at Nice
and Monte-Carlo, and a wide-awake driver for my trip to Coucy and Anizy,
on the way to Laon. His daughter, a decidedly good-looking young lady,
not wholly unconscious of her natural advantages, who kept the guests of
the café in capital order, seemed to have no high opinion of the powers
that be in France. She took up an English sovereign which I laid down on
the counter when settling a bill, and looked at it with much interest.
'That weighs more than a napoleon,' she said; 'and who is the young
lady? She is pretty, and it is a good head.'
I explained that the lady was young because the coin was old, and that
the head was the head of the Queen of Great Britain, who had reigned
over that realm for more than fifty years.
'More than fifty years!' exclaimed the damsel; 'is it possible! And
still the same queen! Ah! they are well behaved the English; no wonder
they are rich. They are not such babies as we are!'
After passing through the well-built and neatly kept _cités ouvrières_
of the Chauny branch of the Company of St.-Gobain, and the little suburb
of Autreville, the highway to Coucy-le-Château, and to the once royal
city of Soissons, runs through such fine woodlands, alternating with
parks and highly-cultivated fields, that one seems to be traversing a
great private domain. The trees are as well-grown as any you see in
England; the hedges are luxuriant, the roadway is admirably made and
perfectly well kept. The Comte de Brigode has a handsome château here,
standing well in a large park; and there is a good deal of hunting and
shooting here in the season.
Near by, too, is the pleasant château of Lavanture, long the home of a
branch established here of the once famous Dauphinese family of De
Théis. It was brought here from the land of Bayard and of De Comines by
a stalwart soldier, one of the lansquenet officers of Francis I., but
its renown in Picardy is of a gentler and more humane type; and after
giving a long succession of kindly and learned men to the public service
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it finally died out
with Constance de Théis, Princesse de Salm, who was known under the
Directory and the Empire in Paris as the 'Muse of Reason,' and the
'Boileau of Women,' and with her nephew, the last Baron de Théis, one of
the most charming of men, and one of the most conscientious and accurate
of archæologists and collectors. The baron died in 1874. The 'objets
d'art et de haute curiosité,' brought together by him with infinite
pains and unerring taste into his château of Lavanture, were dispersed
under the hammer of the auctioneer, and Lavanture itself passed into the
possession of another race.
This whole region of the Laonnais and the Soissonnais is full of
historic souvenirs. It may be almost called the cradle of the French
monarchy. Its reasonably well authenticated annals go back to the Roman
domination. Its mediæval monasteries were among the richest; its
mediæval monks among the most learned and industrious and useful of
France, draining the marsh-lands, reclaiming the wastes, clearing the
forests. Its feudal barons were typical men of their order, alike in
their virtues and in their vices. The seigneurs of Lizy and of Mareilly,
of Esternay and of Roncy, of Mauny and Trucy, come and go through the
archives of the towns and communes here, now defying the kings of France
and trampling on the peasants, now standing by the peasants and still
defying the kings; quarrelling with and plundering the Church to-day,
doing penance to-morrow, and endowing chapels and convents. You
continually come amid the smiling farms and fertile acres upon some
shattered hold whose towers once rose above the hamlet and the church.
A region such as this in England would be rich, not in historic ruins
and historic recollections alone, but in ancient strongholds of feudal
power converted gradually, through the gradual progress of a strong and
steadfast race, into stately modern homes. It would have its Warwick
Castle and its Charlecote, its Guy's Cliff and its Stoneleigh, as well
as its Kenilworth.
But in the great houses and the châteaux, of which there is no lack in
the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, there is little now that is historic,
save their names and their sites. They are standing witnesses to the
essentially criminal and senseless character of the Revolution of 1789.
The _Jacqueries_ which Arthur Young found raging all over France during
that year of ill omen were not much less brutal and they were much more
inexcusable than the _Jacqueries_ of 1357 for which the Comte de Foix
and the Captal de Buch exacted the stern vengeance chronicled by
Froissart. They were the cause and not the consequence of that
emigration of the landed classes which contributed so much to the
downfall of law and order in France.
They were one of the justifying causes, not one of the excusable
consequences, of the armed coalitions of the Continent against
Revolutionary France. Pétion and the other scoundrels in Paris who
stirred them up were doubtless 'political' criminals, to adopt a
distinction without a difference much in favour in our times. But the
peasants who took an active part in these crimes were simply brigands
and assassins. They murdered men, they tortured women and children, they
pillaged houses, while the King of France and Navarre was assembling the
States-General to reform the abuses of the government. France was at
peace with all the world. It was the fashion at Versailles and in the
drawing-rooms of Paris to fall into spasms of sentimental emotion over
periwinkles and over peasants--to rave about the instinctive nobility of
human nature and the inherent Rights of Man. Never was any country in
the world in less danger of being trampled under foot by 'tyrants and
oppressors' than was France in 1789, when of a sudden, all over the
kingdom, the peasants, who were about to be liberated and crowned with
flowers, rose like wolves upon the landholders who were to liberate and
to crown them--burst by night into defenceless châteaux, dragged tender
women and young children out of their beds, and drove them out into the
world penniless and to starve, demolished all the valuables they could
not carry away, wrecked the buildings, burned the pictures, the works of
art, and the libraries.
The 'Terror' of 1793 at Paris was black and vile enough. But the Terror
of 1789 in the provinces was blacker and more vile. Arthur Young met on
the highway seigneurs flying from their homes half-naked, with their
families, in the vain hope of finding shelter in the nearest town. At
Montcuq, in what is now the Department of the Lot, the peasants broke
into the château of the Marquise de Fondani, and carried off all the
grain, all the beds, a hundred and twenty sheets, forty-two dozen
towels, fifty-four tablecloths, two hundred and forty chemises, eleven
silk dresses, twelve dresses of Indian muslin, thirty-two pairs of silk
stockings, five fine Aubusson tapestries. The plundered mistress of the
house was driven out, to live on the charity of her friends. Her aunt,
aged ninety-four years, was thrown upon a dunghill, where she died
gazing on the peasants whom she had cared for and treated with kindness
for years, as they divided among themselves her house-linen, her
furniture, her plate, her porcelains, the very doors and windows of her
home. All this was in the summer of 1789, long before a German trumpet
sounded to arms on the French frontier. And all this went on throughout
the glorious year 1789 all over France. At Mamers, on the Dive, in
Brittany, in July 1789, while the Gardes-Françaises were dishonouring
the uniform they wore and disgracing the name of France by joining in
the cowardly attack of a howling mob on the Bastille, and protecting the
ruffians who butchered the unfortunate De Launay, the estimable peasants
of that place seized two ladies, Madame de Barneval and Madame des
Malets, and beat their teeth to pieces with stones like so many Comanche
savages.
The people of the city of Le Mans at the same time beat to death M. de
Guilly, burned alive the aged Comte de Falconnière, broke into the
Château de Juigné, cut off the ears and the noses of all the persons
they found there, and drove them out with pitchforks, following and
striking them till they died. In Provence similar horrors were committed
at the same time, under the direct instigation of the local authorities,
called there the consuls.
In August, 1789, M. de Barras was cut in pieces before the eyes of his
wife. Madame de Listenay and her two daughters were tied naked to trees
and tormented. Madame de Monteau and all the inmates of her house were
tormented for eight hours and then drowned in the lake in her own
grounds. At Castelnau de Montmirail, near Cahors, the head of one of two
brothers, De Ballud, was cut off and the blood left to drip upon the
face of the surviving brother; the Comtesse de la Mire was seized in her
own house by the peasants and her arms cut to pieces; M. Guillin was
slain, roasted, and eaten before the eyes of his wife. At Bordeaux the
Abbés de Longovian and Dupuy were beheaded and their heads carried about
on pikes. M. de Bar was burned alive in his château. All these horrors,
and innumerable others not less revolting, were committed all over
France in cold blood, before the advance of the 'standard of the
tyrants' had set M. Rouget de l'Isle to composing the declamatory
rigmarole of the _Marseillaise_. Is it possible to regard a revolution
which began in this hideous, cowardly, and burglarious fashion with any
feelings other than those inspired by the Gordon riots of 1780 in
London? If the truth in regard to these things could have been known in
America in 1789, as it may now be learned from the unanswerable
testimony of authentic contemporary documents in France, there can be
little doubt that Washington would have treated anyone who begged him to
accept a key of the Bastille as he would have treated Dickens's Hugh or
Dennis tendering to him a key of Newgate prison, with the compliments
of Lord George Gordon.
From the private conversation and correspondence of the few Americans
then in Europe who really knew what was going on in France, the most
thoughtful and alert of our public men gathered enough of the truth to
regard the first French Republic with loathing and contempt. Their
general feeling on the subject is expressed in an entry in his diary
made during the month of October, 1789, long before 'the Terror,' by
Gouverneur Morris. 'Surely it is not the usual order of Divine
Providence to leave such abominations unpunished. Paris is, perhaps, as
wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine,
oppression, baseness, cruelty, and yet this is the city which has
stepped forward in the sacred cause of Liberty!'
This picture of Paris in 1789 is the more impressive that it was not
drawn by a Puritan or a Pharisee. Gouverneur Morris was eminently what
is called a 'man of the world,' His diary abounds in proofs that, to use
his own language, he was 'no enemy to the tender passion.' Indeed, while
the elections for the States-General were going on, he appears to have
been almost as much interested in finding out the fair author of an
anonymous billet-doux as in unravelling the politics of the day. He was
not so much scandalised by the immorality as appalled by the lawlessness
of the French capital. He foresaw the failure of the Revolution from the
outset. A week before the States-General met in April, 1789, he wrote to
General Washington: 'One fatal principle pervades all ranks. It is a
perfect indifference to the violation of all engagements.'
He noted at the same time the fears of Necker lest it should be 'found
impossible to trust the troops.'
Of the Tiers-Etat, when it had carried into effect the grotesque and
senseless dictum, of the Abbé Sieyès, that the Tiers-Etat, having
thitherto been nothing in France, ought thenceforth to be everything,
Morris expected only what came of it under its self-assumed title of a
'National Assembly.' 'It is impossible,' he wrote to Robert Morris in
America, 'to imagine a more disorderly body. They neither reason,
examine, nor discuss. They clap those whom they approve, and hiss those
whom they disapprove.... I told their President frankly that it was
impossible for such a mob to govern the country. They have unhinged
everything. It is anarchy beyond conception, _and they will be obliged
to take back their chains_.'
All this was long before 'the Terror,' I repeat. It was long before 'the
Terror' that the hotel of the Duc de Castries was stormed and pillaged
in Paris by a mob because the son of the Duc, having been grossly
insulted by a popular favourite, De Lameth, had called Lameth out,
allowed Lameth's seconds to choose swords as the weapons, and then
wounded Lameth. This monstrous performance the Assembly sanctioned.
'I think,' wrote Morris very quietly, 'it will lead to consequences not
now dreamt of.'
In this same year, 1789, long before 'the Terror,' Morris, noting in his
diary a conversation with General Dalrymple, a kinsman of the rather
celebrated Madame Elliot, observes, 'he tells me of certain horrors
committed in Arras, but to these things we are familiarised.'
It was this essentially criminal and anarchical character of the
Revolution of 1789 which brought on 'the Terror,' not 'the Terror' which
engendered the crime and the anarchy.
Why should 'horrors' have been committed at Arras in 1789? The
contemporary documents show that the people in and about Arras were much
better off in 1789 than they had ever before been. The renting value of
farms about Arras was nearly or quite thirty per cent. higher in 1750
than it had been in 1700, and it was nearly or quite 100 per cent.
higher in 1800 than in 1750. M. de Calonne cites a farm which had
brought only 1,800 livres in 1714 as bringing, in 1784, 3,800 livres.
Men paid these advanced prices not for the ownership of the land, which
before 1789 carried with it certain social distinctions and advantages,
but for the use, the productive and commercial use, of the land. The
horrors of which General Dalrymple spoke, at Arras as elsewhere
throughout France--here, in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, in
Provence, in Normandy, in Languedoc--were perpetrated not by a
downtrodden peasantry, rising to shake off oppression, nor yet in the
frenzy of a great popular rally to resist a foreign invader. They were
an outburst of crime stimulated, no doubt, as we are now enabled, by
fearless and conscientious investigators of the documentary history of
France, to see, by cabals of political conspirators at Paris, just as
the Gordon riots at London in 1780 were stimulated by anti-Catholic
fanatics. But in both cases the perpetrators were governed by the mere
lust of pillage and destruction. Châteaux were broken into, sacked, and
burned here in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, as Lord Mansfield's
house was broken into, sacked, and burned in London, because they were
full of valuables to be looted. As the drama went on, other passions
came into play--passions not less but more ignoble than the mere savage
lust of plunder and destruction. A branded rogue and libeller, Brissot,
hurried back from his exile beyond the Atlantic to compete with Camille
Desmoulins in that noble work of 'denouncing' his fellow-citizens, which
earned for Camille the ghastly title of '_procureur de la lanterne_.'
Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' sustained, inspired, and
animated that most mischievous group with all the concentrated fires of
envy, jealousy, and revenge, which had smouldered in her own heart from
the time when, as a girl of seventeen, she had passed a week 'in the
garrets' of the palace at Versailles with Madame Le Grand, one of the
tirewomen of the Dauphiness. The firmness with which Madame Roland met
her own fate on the scaffold has been sufficiently celebrated in poetry
and in prose. But it is wholesome also to remember the ferocity with
which, in the 'glorious' month of July, 1789, a fortnight after the
capture of the Bastille, she clamoured for the blood of Marie Antoinette
and Louis XVI. In 1771 Marie Phlipon, the engraver's daughter, a girl of
seventeen, educated, as her own Memoirs tell us, on 'Candide,' the
'Confessions of Rousseau,' and the 'Adventures of the Chevalier de
Faublas,' came away from Versailles so gangrened with envy of the
glittering personages among whom she had been condemned to play the part
of a humble spectator, that 'she knew not what to do with the hatred in
her heart.' In 1780 she took as her husband M. Roland, a small
Government official. He styled himself M. Roland de la Platière, from
the name of a small estate which belonged not to him but to his elder
brother, an excellent priest and canon of Villefranche (who, by the way,
was guillotined at Lyons in 1793), and in 1781 his young wife made him
take her to Paris, where they spent some time in vain efforts to secure
letters patent of nobility! The efforts failing, they went back to live
at Lyons, where M. Roland was an inspector of manufactories, and from
Lyons, in July, 1789, Madame Roland, now become at last a most
classical Republican, wrote to her friend M. Bosc (who afterwards
published her Memoirs), a letter denouncing the timidity of their
political friends. 'Your enthusiasm,' she exclaims, 'is only a fire of
straw! _If the National Assembly does not regularly bring to trial two
illustrious heads, or if some generous imitators of Decius do not strike
them down, you will all go to the devil._'
I soften and tone down the final phrase of this extraordinary outburst,
for though in the original it is but an indecorum as compared with that
famous passage in the 'Memoirs of Madame Roland' which M. de
Sainte-Beuve gracefully describes as 'an immortal act of indecency,' it
is yet an indecorum of a sort more tolerable in the French than in the
English tongue. If the style is the man, the style is also the woman. In
1771 Marie Phlipon 'knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.'
In 1789 Marie Roland, then on the eve of her appearance upon the public
stage of the Revolution, had found 'what to do with the hatred in her
heart.'
In this letter to Bosc we have the 'soul of the Gironde' _tout entière à
sa proie attachée_. She clung to her regicide purpose with the tenacity
of a tigress. Everything which furthered it she approved, everything
which retarded it she denounced. When the king and queen were brought
back captives from Varennes to Paris in June 1791 she wrote, in an
ecstasy of delight, to Bancal des Issarts, that 'thirty or forty
thousand National Guards surrounded our great brigands'; and her desire
was that 'the royal mannikin should be shut up, and his wife brought to
trial.' She was then inclined to favour the scheme of a regency, of
which her ally Pétion should be the chief. We know from his own
nauseating account of his conduct while journeying back from Varennes to
Paris with the unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Pétion's
dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious
coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the
authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Pétion's odious
revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity.
Under the spell of this scheme Madame Roland seems for a time to have
suspended her merciless pursuit of the sovereign whom she hated. She
even got so far as almost to regret the failure of the royal fugitives
to escape. Why? Because their escape 'would have made civil war
inevitable!' These are her own words in a letter written to Bancal des
Issarts, June 25, 1791: 'We can only be regenerated by blood!' This was
the horrible core of her Republican creed.
It made her the ally, the accomplice, the apologist by turns of all the
most sanguinary wretches who grasped at power in her distracted
country--of Marat, when in a spasm of unusual energy La Fayette sought
to suppress his abominable journal; of Robespierre, whose eventual
triumph was to seal her own fate and that of all her personal friends,
including the one man whom in all her life she seems to have
passionately loved; and of Danton, red with the blood of the helpless
prisoners butchered in these massacres of September 1792, of which her
husband, then a member of what called itself a 'Government' in France,
did not hesitate publicly, and under his official signature, to speak to
the people of Paris in these terms: 'I admired the 10th of August; I
shuddered at the consequences of the 2nd of September' (at the
consequences of the horrors that day perpetrated, as M. Edmond Biré very
aptly points out, not at all at the horrors themselves); 'I well
understood what must come of the long-deceived patience and of the
justice of the people. I did not inconsiderately blame a first terrible
movement, but I thought that it was well to prevent its being kept up,
and those who sought to perpetuate it were deceived by their
imagination!'
This monstrous language was used by Roland in a placard published on the
walls of Paris on September 13. The massacres had not then really
ceased, and the 'first terrible movement' seemed likely to be followed
by a second not less 'terrible,' which might make things dangerous, not
for the prisoners huddled under lock and key only, but for certain
members of the Legislative Assembly, the Girondists themselves!
Is it conceivable that now, after a hundred years, rational beings
should look back with any feelings but those of contempt and horror upon
these 'patriots' of 1789? Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' was
simply the soul of a conspiracy of ambitious criminals masquerading in
the guise of philanthropists and philosophers. There is something
biblical in the dramatic completeness of the chastisement which overtook
this unhappy woman. 'They that take the sword shall perish by the
sword.'
The murder of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compass, led
not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and
associates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and
laboured, was brought to pass, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then
made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to
it, three weeks afterwards, on November 8, 1793. In the ridiculous
revolutionary calendar of the epoch, this date stood as the 18th
Brumaire; Year II. It was celebrated six years afterwards on the 18th
Brumaire of the year VIII. of the Republic, by the advent to supreme
authority of the Corsican soldier who was to found a despotic empire
upon the results of that 'universal war' into which France had been
insanely driven by 'the soul of the Gironde.' A mere coincidence, of
course! It was a mere coincidence, too, that the Girondist,
Dufriche-Valazé, who, at the trial of Louis XVI., especially gratified
the personal malignity of Madame Roland by the insolence with which he
treated the royal captive, should have tried to save his own head when
he and his comrades at last were writhing in the iron grip of
Robespierre, by eagerly denouncing his friend and associate, Valady, as
the real author of a particularly virulent placard intended by the
Girondists to turn the fury of the Parisian mob against the Jacobins!
Seeing that he had disgraced himself to no purpose, the wretched
creature, who had contrived to conceal a dagger about his person, drew
it out when the merciless prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, rising in his
place, demanded, on October 29, 1793, that all the Girondists then on
trial, having been found guilty by the jury--though no plea had been
heard in their defence, and the judge had not summed up--should be
instantly condemned to suffer death and the confiscation of their
property under the Law of December 16, 1792--a law passed by the
Girondists themselves, and highly approved by 'the soul of the Gironde.'
Unobserved in the general excitement Valazé drove the dagger into his
heart, and crying out, 'I am a dead man!' fell bleeding to the floor.
When his companions had been removed by the guards, Fouquier-Tinville
rose again in his place, and requested that the tribunal would order the
corpse before them to be taken with the living criminals to the Place de
la Révolution, and there with them _guillotined_!
From this even the Convention shrank. But the dead body of Valazé was in
fact carried in a little cart through the streets of Paris, behind the
dismal cortège of the condemned, 'lying stretched upon the back, and the
face uncovered,' on October 31. After the execution was over it was
flung, with the remains of his companions, into a great pit.
This was the end, for Madame Roland and her worshippers, in four short
years, of the 'great reformation' of which, on May 17, 1790, she had
written to one of her friends that it could only be carried through by
'burning many more châteaux!'
For France, and the French people, the end of it, I fear, has not yet
come.
Rapine and confiscation have not been unknown, unfortunately, in the
history of any civilised State. But under what modern government,
excepting the government of the first French Republic, has sheer
pillage, mere downright robbery, been recognised as a legitimate
instrument of political propagandism, and, in fact, as a title to
property? While the Girondists predominated in France, Brissot,
self-styled de Warville, was their avowed leader; and Brissot, ten years
before the Revolution, in his 'Philosophic Researches into the Rights of
Property, and Robbery considered in the Light of Nature,' published at
Chartres in 1780, had laid it down as a great principle that 'exclusive
ownership is, in Nature, a real crime.' 'Our institutions,' said this
worthy man, 'punish theft, which is a virtuous action, commended by
Nature herself.' Clearly such 'institutions' needed a great reformation.
It came. France was 'regenerated by blood,' and the disciples of
Rousseau widened the area of human happiness, not by burning only, but
by 'looting' all the houses they could break into.
The châteaux having been duly pillaged and burned, and their owners
driven to fly for their lives, the government, controlled by the
'principles' of Brissot, made emigration a crime, seized the remaining
property of the 'emigrants,' and turned it over with a national title,
to other people!
A most interesting and valuable chapter in history is still to be
written on the relation of the French Revolution to property in France.
Such a history cannot be written by the unassisted light of the statutes
and the code. Family records, private correspondence, the reports and
despatches of the diplomatic agents of the successive French Governments
between 1789 and 1799, must all be laid under contribution, if we are to
get at the truth concerning the conditions under which a very large
proportion of the land of France passed during that period, from the
ownership of men who had much to lose by the changes of the Revolution,
into the ownership of men who had everything to gain from those changes.
The landed proprietors of France were driven into emigration, not that
France might be free--for France was much more free before the
emigration began in 1789 than she was in 1791--but that other people
might get possession of their estates. Without understanding this, it is
impossible to understand some of the most atrocious measures adopted,
chiefly while the Girondists were masters, first by the Legislative
Assembly, and then by the Convention, in regard to 'emigrants.'
This subject was evidently dealt with in the Assembly and the
Convention, as the American Colonel Swan discovered, in 1791, that the
tobacco question was dealt with--'by a knot of men who disposed of all
things as they liked, and who turned everything to account.'
On October 23, 1792, for example, a decree was adopted inflicting the
penalty of death on any emigrant who should return to France! A
fortnight later, on November 8, 1791, a similar decree made it a
capital offence for any 'emigrant' to enter a French colony!
The first of these decrees was levelled at emigrants whose estates had
been seized by the 'popular societies' all over France, and sold, or put
in the way of being sold. The second was aimed at the owners of estates
in such colonies as Hayti, then one of the richest and most flourishing,
as it is now one of the most wretched and uncivilised islands in the
world. A curious 'Minute Book' of the 'Friends of Liberty' at
Port-au-Prince, which was given to me in 1871 by an old French resident
of Santo Domingo, contains a list of the great proprietors of the
island, annotated and marked in a way which indicates that a systematic
plan of action against them was either then adopted, or about to be
adopted, by the agents of the 'Friends' at Paris. As the spoliation went
on, the decrees became more and more Draconian. In March and April 1793,
it was decreed that 'any person convicted of emigration, or any priest
within the category of priests ordered to be transported, who should be
found on French territory, should be put to death within twenty-four
hours!' As in many cases the question of the crime of emigration was to
be decided by persons actually enjoying the property of the alleged
emigrant, this short shrift was a most effectual 'warranty of title.'
On March 5, 1793, it was decreed that, 'any young girl _aged fourteen_
or more, who, having emigrated, should have come back and have then been
sent out of France by the authorities, and who should return to France a
second time, should be forthwith _put to death_.' This is perhaps the
most shamelessly felonious of all these felonious decrees, adopted, be
it remembered, while Madame Roland was still the 'soul of the Gironde,'
and still taking an active part in the preparation and promulgation of
all the acts of the State!
The object of this abominable decree was obvious.
In some cases the property of families in France was actually saved and
carried through the tempest of the Revolution by young girls, who
fearlessly faced all the horrors of the time, remained in their homes,
and, supported by a few faithful friends and servants, such as for the
credit of human nature and the confusion of Schopenhauer, are really
sometimes to be found doing their duty in such emergencies, successfully
maintained their right to the estates of their fathers. Near the
picturesque old capital of Le Puy in the Haute-Loire, Mademoiselle Irène
de Tencin, after her father was driven from his château, remained there
with her young brother and a few loyal servants--maintained her rights,
collected what money she could, bought _assignats_ for gold, and so
bought back the confiscated land and the furniture of her home. A tailor
of Le Puy wished to marry her, and the 'Republican' council threatened
her with death if she refused! 'Death on the spot!' she replied. Then
they actually locked her up in prison for a year! But she held out to
the end and carried her young brother safely through until the days of
law came back. The decree of March 5, 1793, condemning girls of fourteen
to death in certain cases, was intended to prevent 'emigrants' from
sending back any more daughters of this type to France, to represent the
rights of the family.
About this there can be no manner of doubt. Could a more signal proof
than this decree affords be given of the essentially predatory and
criminal direction which was given to the domestic policy of France by
the 'knot of men who disposed of all things as they liked, and who
turned everything to account'? They had their tentacles out all over
France. The 'Sociétés populaires,' of which I have seen it stated by
writers of authority that no fewer than 52,000 existed, and were at work
in 1792, served them everywhere, the local leaders of these 'societies'
of course sharing with them in the general booty according to their
several deserts.
The story of a single family in Provence, as told in an admirable
monograph by M. Forneron, illustrates perfectly the methods and the
results of this organisation of confiscation in the name of patriotism
and philanthropy.
When the States-General were summoned in 1789 the Marquis de Saporta, a
kinsman of the great house of Crillon, now represented by the Duchesse
d'Uzès, was the seigneur of Montsallier, a domain near the ancient and
picturesque little city of Apt between Avignon and Vaucluse. His own
estate was large, and he had greatly increased it in 1770, by marrying a
daughter of one of the richest planters in Hayti. Like many other men of
his rank at that time, he was an ardent admirer of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and a firm believer in the native nobility and general
perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his
generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine
he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the
believers in Madame de Staël's man of destiny, her father, the Genevese
banker, Necker. In November 1790 he was elected constitutional mayor of
Apt, and inducted into office 'with much applause' by a solemn service
in the parish church. In February 1791, a local patriot named Reboulin
surnamed the 'Roman,' and an armourer named Thiebault who had joined the
Marseilles club, and consequently were in correspondence with Paris,
organised a systematic attack upon the Marquis. 'This man,' they said
at Marseilles, 'is an enemy of the constitution by reason of his rank
and of his rage at what is going on. He is a _ci-devant_ noble, who
became mayor by intrigues and cabals.'
From that moment no peace was given to the Saporta family till, one by
one, they were driven out of France. The Marquis held out bravely as
long as he could, and was the last to leave. When his wife left he gave
her a passport signed by himself as mayor, in which he described her as
the 'citoyenne Laporte,' the object of this being that no evidence
should exist to show that Madame de Saporta had really 'emigrated.' In
default of such evidence there was some chance that her property rights
might be respected.
After the fall of the Directory the Saportas ventured to come back, and
in 1800 they finally recovered so much of their property as had not
before that time been sold 'by the State.' There was not much left. A
sister of the Marquis, the Marquise d'Eyragues, who had enjoyed a very
large income before the Revolution, wrote to her nephew in 1800 that she
esteemed herself very happy to recover a 'house to live in and two
thousand francs a year.'
Here in this beautiful region around Laon and Chauny and Coucy, the
story of those evil days is told almost as instructively by the
properties which then escaped ruin as by those which, like the estate of
the Saportas, were confiscated and broken up.
In the eighteenth century it was full of fine buildings--châteaux,
churches, monasteries, hospitals. Go where you please, you come upon the
sites of edifices, once local centres of civilisation, which were
pillaged, burned, and demolished, while the 'national agents' ruled the
provinces for the benefit of the speculators at Paris. Here stood the
stately Château de Molerepaire, of which nothing now remains but a
farmhouse; there, the ancient parish church of St. Paul at
Mons-en-Laonnois, one of the finest in the district, now utterly gone,
all its materials having been sold for the profit of certain 'national
agents' in 1794. Wissignicourt possessed in 1789 one of the most
beautiful churches in Northern France and two considerable châteaux. The
church of St.-Rémi was first robbed of all its ornaments, and finally,
in 1793, completely demolished.
The Château de la Cressonnière, built in the sixteenth century by Claude
de Massary, and inhabited by his descendants as resident landlords until
the Revolution, has entirely disappeared. Of the Château de
Wissignicourt, founded in the twelfth century by a baron of the great
Picard family of De Hangest, some portions still exist. But this little
commune, which occupies one of the most naturally charming sites in the
Laonnois, between Anizy and Laon, is indebted to the 'patriots' of
Chauny, who domineered over it during the Revolution, for the
annihilation of local features, which in these days of railway travel
and picturesque tourists would have materially enhanced the value of its
not very fertile territory. These buildings, these châteaux and
churches, were part of the accumulated capital of France, and certainly
not the least important part of the accumulated capital of the commune
of Wissignicourt. If they had been destroyed in the heat of conflict, as
so many such buildings were destroyed in this country during the wars of
religion, and in Germany, and even in Great Britain, the philosophers
might have some plausible pretext at least for citing their favourite
proverb that you 'cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs.'
And we might be invited to set off, against this loss of accumulated
capital, certain important gains in the way of more liberal
institutions and an enfranchised industry. But this is not the case.
The vandalism of the Revolution of 1789 was perpetrated in cold blood. I
speak, of course, now of the real authors of it all, at Paris, not of
the mere mobs in the provinces, hot with the sordid lust of plunder or
with personal spites and rancours--and it was perpetrated for the profit
of those who promoted it. The bronzes and brasses and lead and hammered
iron of the desecrated churches were turned into money, and the money
went into the pockets of the 'patriots.' Monuments that would now be
priceless were destroyed, for example, at St.-Denis, not in the least
that the metal might be cast into cannon--I am told the military records
show that the republican armies fought their battles, when finally they
got to fighting them, exclusively with the artillery of the
monarchy--but that the metal might be sold in the markets, and the
proceeds confiscated by the vendors. Certain rogues at Chauny and their
employers in Paris were doubtless the richer a hundred years ago for the
desecration of the Church of St.-Rémi and the pillage of La Cressonnière
and the Château de Wissignicourt. But Wissignicourt and its people are
the poorer to-day for these performances.
An instructive estimate might be made of the dead loss which the little
city of Bourg-en-Bresse would have sustained during the past century if
the sensible Savoyards of that place had not cunningly protected the
magnificent statue-tombs of Marguerite d'Autriche, Marguerite de Bourbon
and Philibert le Beau in their grand old church of Notre-Dame de Brou,
against the rapacity of the revolutionary 'operators,' by cramming the
whole church full of straw and hay.
Soissons, in reality one of the very oldest cities in France, the seat,
when Cæsar first assailed it, of a Gallic prince, whose authority
extended beyond the Channel into Britain, and the cradle long
afterwards of the first Frankish monarchy, might be taken, so far as
its general aspect goes, for a creation of the Second Empire, were it
not for its beautiful old cathedral, sadly damaged in 1793, but
very successfully restored, and for the graceful towers of
St.-Jean-des-Vignes. These latter were rescued with extreme difficulty
by the townspeople themselves from the felonious fury of the democratic
operators, who despoiled their city for ever of all the rest of that
superb castellated abbey. Of St.-Médard without the walls, which, were
it now standing, would be to the history of the French people what
Winchester Cathedral is to the history of the English, only the
subterranean chapels remain. The materials and the contents of the abbey
itself were turned into cash.
St.-Médard-lez-Soissons was only one of eighteen considerable
Benedictine abbeys which down to the Revolution existed within the
limits of the modern department of the Aisne of which Laon is the chief
town. Besides these, this region, the early reclamation and cultivation
of which, as I have already said, was chiefly due to the monastic
orders, possessed, before 1793, sixteen abbeys and monasteries of the
Premonstratensians. The mother abbey of this great order, founded by
Saint-Norbert in the twelfth century, commemorates in its name the great
agricultural work done by him and his disciples. Prémontré, 'the meadows
of the monastery,' was the chief seat of the Order which a hundred years
ago comprised more than eighteen hundred monasteries, the
chapters-general of which were held here. The vast and stately buildings
of Présmontré are still standing. They were constructed on a scale of
royal grandeur, worthy of the Order, under the Abbé de Muyn, towards the
end of the reign of Louis XIV., and they much resemble the buildings
erected at the same time at the Grande Chartreuse, near Grenoble. Like
these, they were seized upon in 1793 by the revolutionists. But in both
cases the buildings were saved, those of the Grande Chartreuse because
there was no temporal use to which they could be put, standing, as they
do, high up above the gorges of the Guier, in their glorious solitude
amid the pine-forests of Dauphiné; and these of Prémontré for exactly
the opposite reason, because they were available for purposes more
profitable than the sale of their materials was likely to be. They were
converted first into a saltpetre factory by the little knot of financial
operators who bought them for a song as 'national property.' Afterwards
an attempt was made to establish glassworks in them. Then they became an
orphan asylum, and now they are a great asylum for lunatics!
St.-Jean-des-Vignes at Soissons, already mentioned, was the only
monastery of the Joannists in France, and it was one of fifteen
Cistercian abbeys in this region. The remaining ruins of the church of
one of these Cistercian abbeys at Longpont, near Soissons, vindicate its
ancient fame as one of the jewels of French religious architecture. It
was built under St.-Louis, and consecrated in his presence. It shared,
in 1793, the fate of the almost equally beautiful church of St.-Leger at
Soissons, the apse, transepts, and cloisters of which, even in their
present condition, suffice to show what Soissons lost when it was looted
and desecrated. A worthy bishop of Soissons, M. de Garsignies, bought
what remained of St.-Leger in 1850, and established there a seminary.
Add to these edifices those of twelve commanderies of the Temple, ten
commanderies of St. John of Jerusalem, two Chartreuses, ten collegiate
churches, and more than a hundred and fifty priories, nunneries, and
other religious communities, and it will be seen what a grand field of
enterprise and speculation was thrown open in the Laonnais and the
Soissonnais to the disciples of Brissot de Warville and of Condorcet by
the seizure of the Church property alone.
Scarcely less numerous than the religious edifices in this region were
the châteaux. Of these comparatively few are now standing, either as
picturesque ruins or as residences. The bas-reliefs and tapestry of the
ancient buildings of La Ferté-Milon, the birthplace of Racine, are still
worthy of a visit. Of Nanteuil, a fine château of the time of Francis
I., a single tower remains. The magnificent manor-house of the Ducs de
Valois at Villers-Cotterets (a little beyond the limits of the region I
am now treating of) was made an historic monument by Napoleon III.; but
it is none the better for base uses against which it surely ought to
have been protected as the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas by the ghosts
of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis! The towers and the donjon of the Château
of Nesle on the Somme, whence sallied forth, in the time of Louis XV.,
the four much too famous sisters De Mailly, were not so maltreated in
1793 as to be quite uninhabitable when the first Napoleon passed a night
there, during his final struggle for empire; and there still is to be
seen the old Lombard-Roman church of St.-Leger, wherein was held a
council strong enough to coerce Philip Augustus into doing what Henry
VIII. refused, three centuries afterwards, to do, and to make him take
back his divorced queen Ingelburga of Denmark. Braisnes, planted upon a
peak, overlooks what is left of the exquisite twelfth-century church of
St.-Yved, ruthlessly battered and abused in 1793, and robbed of certain
matchless monuments in enamelled copper for the benefit of a syndicate
of patriotic rogues. The Châteaux de Gandelu, de Neuville, de
St.-Lambert are ruins. The lordly cradle of the great House of Guise;
the tower of Marchais in which, tradition tells us, the League was first
conceived by which the princes of Lorraine were backed in their struggle
for the throne of France; the keep of Beaurevoir, one of the prisons of
the Maid of Orléans--these may be seen. Of how many others, the names of
which ring out as from a chronicle of French history, nothing but the
names is left! Caulincourt, Coeuvres d'Estrées, de Bohain de
Luxembourg, d'Armentières, de Conflans, de Condé, de Comin, de Buzancy,
de Puységur.
Two of the most important châteaux in this region in 1789 were those of
Pinon and of Anizy. The first still exists, and stands substantially as
it then stood, and is now admittedly the finest in the Laonnais. The
second was wrecked and demolished. It is perhaps worth while to tell
what befell Anizy, and how Pinon escaped.
Both Anizy and Pinon are of very ancient origin.
Anizy seems to have been a fortress of the Emperor Valentinian in the
fourth century, and it was pillaged by the Vandals in the fifth. On
December 26, 496, Clovis, in recognition of the baptism he had received
on the preceding day at the hands of St.-Rémi in the cathedral church of
Reims, gave the lordships of Anizy, Coucy, and Leuilly to that prelate.
Two years afterwards St.-Rémi, who had made Laon a bishopric, gave Anizy
to his nephew St.-Génébaud, the first bishop of Laon, to be held and the
revenues thereof to be applied by the bishops of Laon for ever to the
benefit of the poor of that diocese. He coupled the gift with a solemn
curse and anathema upon all who should ever disturb or misapply the
donation. From that time to 1789 Anizy was a lordship of the bishops of
Laon, who in time were made dukes and peers of France.
The annals of Laon attest the loyalty through long ages of the bishops
of Laon to the injunctions laid upon them by St.-Rémi. The Normans came
to Anizy, for example, in 883, and pillaged and ruined the place. Four
years afterwards the bishop of Laon founded there a hospital, or
Hôtel-Dieu, for the poor and infirm of the diocese, and the king,
Charles le Gros, endowed it handsomely. In 904 Jeanne, sister of Raoul,
bishop of Laon, with the help of her brother, founded at Anizy a priory
of Sisters to receive and care for the young girls of the place. In 996,
Adalberon, bishop of Laon, founded a maladrerie, or lepers' hospital, at
Anizy, to be 'a refuge and place of healing for the poor of Anizy,
Wissignicourt, and Pinon.'
As time went on and the feudal system became more fully developed, the
bishops of Laon found it judicious to establish one of those high feudal
personages known as Vidames, and the relations of the Vidames of Laon
with their episcopal superior, on the one hand, and with the people of
such lordships as Anizy on the other, become very interesting.
They are made more interesting still by the entrance upon the scene of
the kings of France, contending for a real royal authority, of great
barons like the Sires de Coucy bent on getting a complete local
independence of any central government, and of the people of the
communes, who very early saw their own game as between the Church, the
barons, and the king, and played it here, as in so many other places,
with most respectable skill and success. There is a picturesque story of
Pope Benedict VIII., who held a council at Laon, going from Laon to view
the episcopal château at Anizy, with a _cortège_ of cardinals and
bishops, and on the way springing down nimbly from his horse to rescue
the bishop of Cambray, obviously a prelate of much weight, under whom a
little bridge gave way as they were crossing the river Lette. This was
in the year 1018. A century later, in 1110, Gandri, bishop of Laon,
summoned John Comte de Soissons, Robert II. Comte de Flandre, and
Enguerrand I. Sire de Coucy, the three loftiest and lordliest personages
then of this part of the world, to a conference at his château in Anizy,
there to fix and define where the authority of the Sire de Coucy ended
and that of the bishops of Laon began. In 1210 the burgh of Anizy became
a free commune and elected its first mayor. The next year its seigneur,
Robert de Châtillon, bishop-duke of Laon, at his own cost fortified the
place with walls and towers, and did this so well that three years
afterwards Enguerrand III. de Coucy, just then the most masterful person
in all this part of France, thought it wise to treat with the
bishop-duke as to their respective rights of ownership in the adjoining
forest of Roncelais. They agreed so perfectly that the formidable lord
of Coucy immediately afterwards did the bishop-duke and the people of
Anizy the notable service of leading a band of his retainers against a
company of brigands who were burning lonely farmhouses and carrying off
the crops.
Having got their mayor and their walls and their towers, the burghers of
Anizy took to quarrelling with the bishop-dukes of Laon, and so got
their communal rights suppressed by one of those prelates in 1230, only
to see them re-established again half a century later in 1278, by
another bishop-duke, Geoffroi de Beaumont, who made a compromise with
his troublesome vassals, reserving only to himself the right to nominate
the officers of justice. The king of France, Philippe le Hardi, be it
observed, took sides with the burghers in this affair, and they raised a
monument to him in 1293.
This, with almost everything else of any importance in Anizy, was
destroyed by the English of Edward III., in the next century, one of the
local seigneurs, the lord of Locq (where a château still represents the
extinct lordship) and the curé of the church of St.-Peter falling
valiantly in the defence of their people. The bishop-duke came over to
help them from Laon, and died in his château at Anizy the next year.
In 1352, another bishop-duke founded a free market at Anizy for three
days in each year, at the feast of St.-George, and in 1408 his successor
built a grain-hall there. In 1513 Louis XII. granted the burghers a free
market every Monday. This so incensed the then bishop-duke, Louis de
Bourbon-Vendôme, that he tried to suppress the annual market and take
back the grain-hall, in return for which attempts the worthy burghers
pillaged his château at Anizy and pulled it nearly to pieces.
Clearly the seigneurs did not have things all their own way in these
good old times! For after several years of contention Louis de
Bourbon-Vendôme came to terms with his burghers, and matters were put
upon so friendly a footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the
erection at Anizy of a new château, to be surrounded with an extensive
and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and
artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to
decorate the façade with statues--the new buildings were connected with
what remained of the earlier château by a grand gallery; pavilions
flanked the main edifice and adorned the grand cour d'honneur. King
Francis, during his stay at Folembray, frequently visited his cousin the
Bishop-duke in this château, one of the great chambers of which was long
known as the room of King Francis. When Louis de Bourbon-Vendôme died
in 1557, the château was not entirely finished, and a lawsuit followed
his death, between his personal heirs and the bishop-dukes for the
possession of the buildings. It lasted for nearly a century, and when
the prelates at last were declared to be the owners, in 1645, the
stately edifice had fallen into a sad state of dilapidation. The
Cardinal d'Estrées restored the façade in 1660, but one of his
successors actually unroofed it and sold the lead. In 1750, a
bishop-duke of quite another type, the Cardinal de Rochechouart, spent
great sums of money upon it, restored it, and decorated it throughout,
and made it one of the noblest residences in this part of France. At the
same time he put in order all the public buildings of Anizy, and had the
roads carefully paved throughout the borough. He was followed by a
prelate of a like mind, Louis de Sabran, the last bishop-duke of Laon,
who is still remembered in his episcopal city for his public spirit and
his benevolence, and who made the park of Anizy his special care.
Then came the Revolution.
In 1790, the local 'directory' of the district of Chauny laid violent
hands upon the château. It was in great part demolished, and what was
left of it defaced. It was robbed of its precious furniture, pictures,
and ornaments, its valuable chimney-pieces, its elaborate iron and brass
work. The old trees were cut down in the park, and the railings
destroyed. The fine old church of Ste.-Geneviève at the same time was
first turned into a hall of meeting for the electors, who distrusted
each other so profoundly that when their first meeting was held, May 3,
1790, the documents relating to the elections were locked up in a
confessional, lest they should be stolen, and then deliberately wrecked
and looted by the 'friends of Liberty,' or, in other words, by a squad
of ruffians from Chauny and the neighbourhood, who, after putting on
the sacerdotal vestments, marched about the church carrying the daïs,
beat the crosses and the carved stalls to pieces, smashed and defaced
the monuments and the altars, broke open the poor-box, and carried off
all that was worth stealing. The stone slabs from the graves were sold,
a saltpetre factory was established in the church, the presbytery was
made a town-hall, and the 'worship of Reason,' in the person of a young
woman of Chauny, was solemnly inaugurated at Anizy! The château and the
park were sold by the self-constituted dictators of Anizy to one M. Orry
de Sainte-Marie on August 7, 1792, for a nominal price. This M. Orry
seems to have been an 'operator.' For in June, 1793, he sold the château
to the 'ci-devant Vicomtesse de Courval,' the mother of the then owner
of the Château of Pinon, about which I shall presently have something to
say, and bought it back from her again in March 1795, leaving her the
right to enjoy it until her death, which took place in 1806. All this
curiously illustrates the perils and uncertainties of land-ownership in
such times! In 1808, Orry de Sainte-Marie, having by that time become a
justice of the peace at Anizy, and doubtless a fervent Imperialist, sold
the château to M. Collet, Director of the Mint at Paris. From him it
passed by sale, in 1824, to M. Senneville, and in 1841 to M. Lafont de
Launoy.
Let us turn now to Pinon, two kilomètres to the south of Anizy, long one
of the chief seats of the power of the famous Sires de Coucy, one of
whom seems to have been the real author of the arrogant motto since, in
one or another form, attributed to more than one great family in France:
Roi ne suis
Ne prince, ne comte aussy:
Je suis le Sire de Coucy.
The Château of Pinon was originally built by Enguerrand II. of Coucy in
the twelfth century. His grandfather Enguerrand I. had been invited by
the Archbishop of Reims to establish himself at Pinon, which was a part
of the splendid Christmas gift made by Clovis to the see of Reims, as I
have already stated, after his baptism at Reims; and Enguerrand II., who
appears to have been a typical baron, finding the place favourable for
the feudal industry of levying toll on trade and commerce, there erected
a great castle, one of the many legendary castles to be found all over
Europe which boasted a window for every day in the year. He thought fit,
however, to select for this castle a site which belonged to the Abbey of
St.-Crispin the Great at Soissons, and thus got himself into trouble
with the Church. Strong as he was, he found the Church too strong for
him. The Bishop of Soissons compelled him to agree to pay an annual and
perpetual rent to the Abbey, and made him also take the cross and go to
the Holy Land to expiate his sacrilege. There he fell in battle. The
grandson of this baron, Robert de Coucy, in 1213 granted the people of
Pinon 'a right of assize according to the use and custom of Laon,' and
the next year founded there a hospital. Twenty years afterwards Pinon
became a commune, and John de Coucy granted the inhabitants a free
market. The Château of Pinon passed in the 14th century to the elder
branch of the great house of de Coucy, and in 1400 it was sold, under
duress to Louis of France (Duc d'Orléans) by the last heiress of the
house Marie de Coucy, daughter of Enguerrand VII. by his first wife
Isabel, Princess Royal of England, and eldest daughter of Edward III. by
Philippa of Hainault.
A hundred years afterwards Louis XII. had taken possession of the
estates and the château, and made a gift of these to his daughter
Claude de France. In spite of this, however, the property passed into
the hands of the ancient family of De Lameth, and towards the end of the
seventeenth century the Château de Pinon witnessed one of the most
romantic and abominable murders recorded in the annals of French
gallantry.
As Pinon is still, after all the chances and changes of seven hundred
years, the finest inhabited château in the Soissonnais, and as, by a
curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair
compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat
gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather Italian than French.
Charles Marquis d'Albret, the last of that illustrious race, Prince de
Mortagne and Comte de Massant, was the nephew of the Maréchal d'Albret,
and he came therefore, on the mother's side, of the royal blood of Henry
of Navarre.
He loved, not wisely but too well, Henriette de Roucy, Comtesse de
Lameth, called 'la belle Picarde,' whose husband was seigneur of the
Château de Pinon. In August 1678, the Marquis d'Albret was at the
Château de Coucy with the army of Flanders, then commanded by the
Marshal-Duke of Schomberg, who afterwards fell fighting for King William
III. in Ireland at the battle of the Boyne.
The Comte de Lameth, who had in some way discovered the relations which
existed between his wife, 'la belle Picarde,' and the Marquis d'Albret,
shut the comtesse into a room at Pinon, and compelled her, by threats
and violence, to write a letter to the marquis giving him a rendezvous
at Pinon. On the day mentioned in her letter the Comte de Lameth ordered
six horses to be put to his coach, and (having previously put his wife
under watch and ward) drove off with an escort to Laon. News of this was
carried at once to Coucy. The Marquis set forth with a single attendant
on horseback to Chavignon, where at the hostelry of La Croix Blanche, he
was met, as from the letter of his lady-love he expected to be, by a
servant from the Château de Pinon.
Armed only with pistols in his holsters, he mounted after dark and rode
on from Chavignon to Pinon. There, as he entered the park-gates, just
after midnight, three men, one of them Jocquet, the valet de chambre of
the Comte de Lameth, sallied out upon him from under an archway, and,
feigning to take him for a robber, opened fire upon him. He killed one
of his assailants, and then himself fell.
About fifty years ago, the then proprietor of Pinon was building a lodge
for one of his keepers when the workmen came upon a gold ring in digging
for the foundation. It bore the engraved name of D'Albret, and the name
of the royal regiment which he commanded. He had doubtless been buried
where he fell in the park.
This proprietor was the father of the late Baron de Courval, formerly an
officer in the French army, who, during the Second Empire, married Miss
Ray of New York.
The De Courvals became possessors of Pinon through the murder of the
Marquis d'Albret. The way in which this came about curiously illustrates
the course of justice and injustice under the _ancien régime_. This
differed more in form than in fact from the course of justice and
injustice in our own time. Claude, Comte de Lameth, the jealous husband
of 'la belle Picarde,' was a great personage, not only Comte de Lameth
but Vicomte de Laon, d'Anizy, de Marchy, and de Croix, and seigneur of
Bayencourt, Pinon, Bouchavannes, Clacy, Laniscourt, Quincy, '_et autres
lieux_.' But the Marquis d'Albret was a greater personage still, and
the widow of the marquis, who refused to believe the story of his affair
with 'la belle Picarde,' was a _dame d'atours_ of the queen, Marie
Thérèse. So also was the cousin-german of the marquis, and these two
dames made such a clamour about the murder that the king, Louis XIV.,
and of course with the king the whole court, so waged war against the
Comte de Lameth that his whole family found it wise to seek safety in
flight, and fearing the confiscation of all his property, the Comte
(whose wife had previously gone into an Ursuline convent) sold the
estate and Château of Pinon, with other estates, to his friend Pierre
Dubois de Courval, president of the parliament of Paris.[8]
[8] The venom of this old history recurs in the Revolution,
poisoning the minds of three Lameths, concerning whom Mr. Carlyle
indulges in much quite unnecessary and grotesque emotion.
In 1730 Dubois de Courval pulled down the ancient Château de Pinon, and,
on the designs of Mansard, built the present stately and imposing
edifice. Le Nôtre laid out for him also the extensive park, and, when he
died, in 1764, he left Coucy-la-Ville and Fresnes to his elder son, and
to his younger, with the title of Vicomte de Courval, the château and
estates of Pinon.
It was the widow of this younger son, Aimé-Louis Dubois de Courval, who,
as I have already said, saved what could be saved of the Château of
Anizy in 1793 by buying it from the enterprising M. Orry de
Sainte-Marie.
Her husband, a man of worth and of note in the parliament of Paris, died
on the very eve of the great troubles, December 1, 1788. He was then in
his sixty-seventh year, and as he had done nothing but good at Pinon,
not only embellishing the château and the park, but giving much time and
money to improve the condition of the people, he would probably have
been sent to the guillotine at Paris by the local 'directory at Chauny'
had he lived long enough, and his property confiscated, like the
property of the bishops and dukes at Anizy. His oldest son was a lad of
fifteen when the storm burst in 1789. His mother took his interests
resolutely in hand. She came of two aristocratic stocks, the Millys and
the Clermonts-Tonnerre, but she got the better of the democrats. Like
old Madame Dupin at Chenonceaux, she carried herself and her property,
by woman's wit and woman's will, through the Revolution. In 1791 she
contrived to get her son, then only seventeen, elected commander of the
National Guard at Anizy. He ripened rapidly, under the stress of the
times, bought up the 'patriots' when it was necessary--and there is
abundant evidence to show that they were always in the market, even at
Paris and during the worst times of the Terror--was made a baron of the
empire by Napoleon, elected President of the Canton of Anizy in 1811, a
councillor-general of the Aisne in the same year, and deputy in 1814.
With the Restoration he became once more Vicomte de Courval and seigneur
of Pinon, having long before converted the park and gardens of the
château into the 'English style,' with fine watercourses and an
extensive lake, and died quietly at Paris in 1822. In 1794, at the age
of twenty, he married a daughter of the Marquis de Saint-Mars.
His son and successor, Ernest-Alexis Dubois de Courval, was taken
into high favour by Charles X., but was nevertheless made a
councillor-general of the Aisne under Louis Philippe. He married the
only daughter of Moreau, who was a child of nine years old when her
father fell fighting against France and Napoleon in 1813. In a curious
Gothic tower which he built at Pinon are still preserved some of the
standards captured from the enemies of France by Moreau, and these I am
assured are the only such standards, excepting those of the Invalides,
recovered through the efforts of the House of Peers, which existed in
France before the Crimean War. In this tower the Vicomte de Courval
formed a remarkable collection of mediæval arms and armour, antique
furniture, stained glass, medals and coins. This region is very rich not
only in Roman remains, but in druidical stones and other vestiges of the
races which dwelt here before Cæsar came. Marcus Aurelius, Trajan,
Hadrian, Alexander Severus, Probus, Gordian, Constantine and Constantius
are all represented on the coins found in and around the property of M.
de Courval; but one of his most interesting acquisitions was a silver
coin bearing the name of Clovis, with the title of 'imperator.' There is
a record at Anizy of a treasure of coins of Aurelius, found there so
long ago as in the middle of the twelfth century; and under the
bishop-dukes of Laon a collection of Roman coins and vases was gradually
formed at the mairie of Anizy, which 'disappeared' soon after the
'patriots' of Chauny undertook to 'liberate' that commune.
The American Vicomtesse de Courval, who now owns Pinon, and passes a
part of each year there, is the widow of a son of this Ernest de
Courval.
Looking backward dispassionately over this 'centennial record' of two
considerable estates in the Department of the Aisne, what advantages,
social, political, or economical, can be shown to have enured to the
people of the commune of Anizy and of Pinon from the revolutionary
processes to which those estates were subjected a hundred years ago? Not
a man in Anizy or in Pinon owns a rood of land now which he might not
just as easily have owned had the alienation of the Church property in
those communes been conducted through the gradual and systematic
processes of law and order. Instead of one remarkable and interesting
château, these communes would now possess two, each in the natural
course of things, a centre of local activity and civilisation. Instead
of one ancient church, much despoiled and damaged, Anizy would now
possess three such churches, each in its own way an object of interest
to architects and artists, and it would be possible for an honest
gendarme or a poor labourer on the highway to hear mass, if he liked, in
any one of them, without incurring the wrath of his superiors and the
loss of his daily bread.