Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden age"
and of its return--legends which will hardly be forgotten, however
prosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the aspiring,
never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since we are no
longer children, we might well question the advantage of the return to
us of a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, the
values of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on their surfaces,
unless we could regain also the childish consciousness, or rather
unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the
appropriate lightness of heart. The dream, however, has been left for
the most part in the usual vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours
people have been too busy to furnish it forth with details. What
follows is a quaint legend, with detail enough, of such a return of a
golden or poetically-gilded age (a denizen of old Greece itself
actually finding his way back again among men) as it happened in an
ancient town of medieval France.
Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of
successive ages, not with-out lively touches of the present, are
blended together harmoniously, with a beauty SPECIFIC--a beauty
cisalpine and northern, yet at the same time quite distinct from the
massive German picturesque of Ulm, or Freiburg, or Augsburg, and of
which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the
rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being
of the essence of its physiognomy--the town of Auxerre is perhaps the
most complete realisation to be found by the actual wanderer.
Certainly, for picturesque expression it is the most memorable of a
distinguished group of three in these parts,--Auxerre, Sens,
Troyes,--each gathered, as if with deliberate aim at such effect, about
the central mass of a huge grey cathedral.
Around Troyes the natural picturesque is to be sought only in the rich,
almost coarse, summer colouring of the Champagne country, of which the
very tiles, the plaster and brickwork of its tiny villages and great,
straggling, village-like farms have caught the warmth. The cathedral,
visible far and wide over the fields seemingly of loose wild-flowers,
itself a rich mixture of all the varieties of the Pointed style down to
the latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churches
for breadth of proportions internally, and is famous for its almost
unrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid, elaborate,
later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance in design
as well as in colour. In one of the richest of its windows, for
instance, certain lines of pearly white run hither and thither, with
delightful distant effect, upon ruby and dark blue. Approaching nearer
you find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of white
the long walking-staves in the hands of Abraham, Raphael, the Magi, and
the other saintly patrons of journeys. The appropriate provincial
character of the bourgeoisie of Champagne is still to be seen, it would
appear, among the citizens of Troyes. Its streets, for the most part in
timber and pargeting, present more than one unaltered specimen of the
ancient hotel or town-house, with forecourt and garden in the rear; and
its more devout citizens would seem even in their church-building to
have sought chiefly to please the eyes of those occupied with mundane
affairs and out of doors, for they have finished, with abundant outlay,
only the vast, useless portals of their parish churches, of surprising
height and lightness, in a kind of wildly elegant Gothic-on-stilts,
giving to the streets of Troyes a peculiar air of the grotesque, as if
in some quaint nightmare of the Middle Age.
At Sens, thirty miles away to the west, a place of far graver aspect,
the name of Jean Cousin denotes a more chastened temper, even in these
sumptuous decorations. Here all is cool and composed, with an almost
English austerity. The first growth of the Pointed style in
England--the hard "early English" of Canterbury--is indeed the creation
of William, a master reared in the architectural school of Sens; and
the severity of his taste might seem to have acted as a restraining
power on all the subsequent changes of manner in this place--changes in
themselves for the most part towards luxuriance. In harmony with the
atmosphere of its great church is the cleanly quiet of the town, kept
fresh by little channels of clear water circulating through its
streets, derivatives of the rapid Vanne which falls just below into the
Yonne. The Yonne, bending gracefully, link after link, through a
never-ending rustle of poplar trees, beneath lowly vine-clad hills,
with relics of delicate woodland here and there, sometimes close at
hand, sometimes leaving an interval of broad meadow, has all the
lightsome characteristics of French river-side scenery on a smaller
scale than usual, and might pass for the child's fancy of a river, like
the rivers of the old miniature-painters, blue, and full to a fair
green margin. One notices along its course a greater proportion than
elsewhere of still untouched old seignorial residences, larger or
smaller. The range of old gibbous towns along its banks, expanding
their gay quays upon the water-side, have a common character--Joigny,
Villeneuve, Julien-du-Sault--yet tempt us to tarry at each and examine
its relics, old glass and the like, of the Renaissance or the Middle
Age, for the acquisition of real though minor lessons on the various
arts which have left themselves a central monument at
Auxerre.--Auxerre! A slight ascent in the winding road! and you have
before you the prettiest town in France--the broad framework of
vineyard sloping upwards gently to the horizon, with distant white
cottages inviting one to walk: the quiet curve of river below, with all
the river-side details: the three great purple-tiled masses of Saint
Germain, Saint Pierre, and the cathedral of Saint Etienne, rising out
of the crowded houses with more than the usual abruptness and
irregularity of French building. Here, that rare artist, the
susceptible painter of architecture, if he understands the value alike
of line and mass of broad masses and delicate lines, has "a subject
made to his hand."
A veritable country of the vine, it presents nevertheless an expression
peaceful rather than radiant. Perfect type of that happy mean between
northern earnestness and the luxury of the south, for which we prize
midland France, its physiognomy is not quite happy--attractive in part
for its melancholy. Its most characteristic atmosphere is to be seen
when the tide of light and distant cloud is travelling quickly over it,
when rain is not far off, and every touch of art or of time on its old
building is defined in clear grey. A fine summer ripens its grapes into
a valuable wine; but in spite of that it seems always longing for a
larger and more continuous allowance of the sunshine which is so much
to its taste. You might fancy something querulous or plaintive in that
rustling movement of the vine-leaves, as blue-frocked Jacques Bonhomme
finishes his day's labour among them.
To beguile one such afternoon when the rain set in early and walking
was impossible, I found my way to the shop of an old dealer in
bric-a-brac. It was not a monotonous display, after the manner of the
Parisian dealer, of a stock-in-trade the like of which one has seen
many times over, but a discriminate collection of real curiosities. One
seemed to recognise a provincial school of taste in various relics of
the housekeeping of the last century, with many a gem of earlier times
from the old churches and religious houses of the neighbourhood. Among
them was a large and brilliant fragment of stained glass which might
have come from the cathedral itself. Of the very finest quality in
colour and design, it presented a figure not exactly conformable to any
recognised ecclesiastical type; and it was clearly part of a series. On
my eager inquiry for the remainder, the old man replied that no more of
it was known, but added that the priest of a neighbouring village was
the possessor of an entire set of tapestries, apparently intended for
suspension in church, and designed to portray the whole subject of
which the figure in the stained glass was a portion.
Next afternoon accordingly I repaired to the priest's house, in reality
a little Gothic building, part perhaps of an ancient manor-house, close
to the village church. In the front garden, flower-garden and potager
in one, the bees were busy among the autumn growths--many-coloured
asters, bignonias, scarlet-beans, and the old-fashioned parsonage
flowers. The courteous owner readily showed me his tapestries, some of
which hung on the walls of his parlour and staircase by way of a
background for the display of the other curiosities of which he was a
collector. Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt with
the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments--pipes,
cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the
building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale,
as was standing in the old priest's library, though almost soundless
now, whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if
transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A
sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate
bewilderments of the whole series--giddy dances, wild animals leaping,
above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like some mazy
arabesque, the various presentations of one oft-repeated figure,
translated here out of the clear-coloured glass into the sadder,
somewhat opaque and earthen hues of the silken threads. The figure was
that of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery creature,
sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in
skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always
with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable
streets of Auxerre. What is it? Certainly, notwithstanding its grace,
and wealth of graceful accessories, a suffering, tortured figure. With
all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner
of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of
those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of
an age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity and
assuredly of a larger capacity for melancholy. With this fancy in my
mind, by the help of certain notes, which lay in the priest's curious
library, upon the history of the works at the cathedral during the
period of its finishing, and in repeated examination of the old
tapestried designs, the story shaped itself at last.
Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the cathedral of Saint
Etienne was complete in its main outlines: what remained was the
building of the great tower, and all that various labour of final
decoration which it would take more than one generation to accomplish.
Certain circumstances, however, not wholly explained, led to a somewhat
rapid finishing, as it were out of hand, yet with a marvellous fulness
at once and grace. Of the result much has perished, or been transferred
elsewhere; a portion is still visible in sumptuous relics of stained
windows, and, above all, in the reliefs which adorn the western
portals, very delicately carved in a fine, firm stone from Tonnerre, of
which time has only browned the surface, and which, for early mastery
in art, may be compared with the contemporary work of Italy. They come
nearer than the art of that age was used to do to the expression of
life; with a feeling for reality, in no ignoble form, caught, it might
seem, from the ardent and full-veined existence then current in these
actual streets and houses. Just then Auxerre had its turn in that
political movement which broke out sympathetically, first in one, then
in another of the towns of France, turning their narrow, feudal
institutions into a free, communistic life--a movement of which those
great centres of popular devotion, the French cathedrals, are in many
instances the monument. Closely connected always with the assertion of
individual freedom, alike in mind and manners, at Auxerre this
political stir was associated also, as cause or effect, with the figure
and character of a particular personage, long remembered. He was the
very genius, it would appear, of that new, free, generous manner in
art, active and potent as a living creature.
As the most skilful of the band of carvers worked there one day, with a
labour he could never quite make equal to the vision within him, a
finely-sculptured Greek coffin of stone, which had been made to serve
for some later Roman funeral, was unearthed by the masons. Here, it
might seem, the thing was indeed done, and art achieved, as far as
regards those final graces, and harmonies of execution, which were
precisely what lay beyond the hand of the medieval workman, who for his
part had largely at command a seriousness of conception lacking in the
old Greek. Within the coffin lay an object of a fresh and brilliant
clearness among the ashes of the dead--a flask of lively green glass,
like a great emerald. It might have been "the wondrous vessel of the
Grail." Only, this object seemed to bring back no ineffable purity, but
rather the riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself. Coated
within, and, as some were persuaded, still redolent with the tawny
sediment of the Roman wine it had held so long ago, it was set aside
for use at the supper which was shortly to celebrate the completion of
the masons' work. Amid much talk of the great age of gold, and some
random expressions of hope that it might return again, fine old wine of
Auxerre was sipped in small glasses from the precious flask as supper
ended. And, whether or not the opening of the buried vessel had
anything to do with it, from that time a sort of golden age seemed
indeed to be reigning there for a while, and the triumphant completion
of the great church was contemporary with a series of remarkable wine
seasons. The vintage of those years was long remembered. Fine and
abundant wine was to be found stored up even in poor men's cottages;
while a new beauty, a gaiety, was abroad, as all the conjoint arts
branched out exuberantly in a reign of quiet, delighted labour, at the
prompting, as it seemed, of the singular being who came suddenly and
oddly to Auxerre to be the centre of so pleasant a period, though in
truth he made but a sad ending.
A peculiar usage long perpetuated itself at Auxerre. On Easter Day the
canons, in the very centre of the great church, played solemnly at
ball. Vespers being sung, instead of conducting the bishop to his
palace, they proceeded in order into the nave, the people standing in
two long rows to watch. Girding up their skirts a little way, the whole
body of clerics awaited their turn in silence, while the captain of the
singing-boys cast the ball into the air, as high as he might, along the
vaulted roof of the central aisle to be caught by any boy who could,
and tossed again with hand or foot till it passed on to the portly
chanters, the chaplains, the canons themselves, who finally played out
the game with all the decorum of an ecclesiastical ceremony. It was
just then, just as the canons took the ball to themselves so gravely,
that Denys--Denys l'Auxerrois, as he was afterwards called--appeared
for the first time. Leaping in among the timid children, he made the
thing really a game. The boys played like boys, the men almost like
madmen, and all with a delightful glee which became contagious, first
in the clerical body, and then among the spectators. The aged Dean of
the Chapter, Protonotary of his Holiness, held up his purple skirt a
little higher, and stepping from the ranks with an amazing levity, as
if suddenly relieved of his burden of eighty years, tossed the ball
with his foot to the venerable capitular Homilist, equal to the
occasion. And then, unable to stand inactive any longer, the laity
carried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too boisterous
amusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the ball could no
longer be traced along the dusky aisles.
Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one--one of those
little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are
still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of France-there
were some who connected his birth with the story of a beautiful country
girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been taken from her own
people, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the Count of Auxerre. She
had wished indeed to see the great lord, who had sought her privately,
in the glory of his own house; but, terrified by the strange splendours
of her new abode and manner of life, and the anger of the true wife,
she had fled suddenly from the place during the confusion of a violent
storm, and in her flight given birth prematurely to a child. The child,
a singularly fair one, was found alive, but the mother dead, by
lightning-stroke as it seemed, not far from her lord's chamber-door,
under the shelter of a ruined ivy-clad tower. Denys himself certainly
was a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side cottage, nestling actually
beneath the vineyards, he came to be an unrivalled gardener, and, grown
to manhood, brought his produce to market, keeping a stall in the great
cathedral square for the sale of melons and pomegranates, all manner of
seeds and flowers (omnia speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers,
sweetmeats hot from the frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans from
the little pottery in the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whose
house he lived. On that Easter Day he had entered the great church for
the first time, for the purpose of seeing the game.
And from the very first, the women who saw him at his business, or
watering his plants in the cool of the evening, idled for him. The men
who noticed the crowd of women at his stall, and how even fresh young
girls from the country, seeing him for the first time, always loitered
there, suspected--who could tell what kind of powers? hidden under the
white veil of that youthful form; and pausing to ponder the matter,
found themselves also fallen into the snare. The sight of him made old
people feel young again. Even the sage monk Hermes, devoted to study
and experiment, was unable to keep the fruit-seller out of his mind,
and would fain have discovered the secret of his charm, partly for the
friendly purpose of explaining to the lad himself his perhaps more than
natural gifts with a view to their profitable cultivation.
It was a period, as older men took note, of young men and their
influence. They took fire, no one could quite explain how, as if at his
presence, and asserted a wonderful amount of volition, of insolence,
yet as if with the consent of their elders, who would themselves
sometimes lose their balance, a little comically. That revolution in
the temper and manner of individuals concurred with the movement then
on foot at Auxerre, as in other French towns, for the liberation of the
commune from its old feudal superiors. Denys they called Frank, among
many other nicknames. Young lords prided themselves on saying that
labour should have its ease, and were almost prepared to take freedom,
plebeian freedom (of course duly decorated, at least with wild-flowers)
for a bride. For in truth Denys at his stall was turning the grave,
slow movement of politic heads into a wild social license, which for a
while made life like a stage-play. He first led those long processions,
through which by and by "the little people," the discontented, the
despairing, would utter their minds. One man engaged with another in
talk in the market-place; a new influence came forth at the contact;
another and then another adhered; at last a new spirit was abroad
everywhere. The hot nights were noisy with swarming troops of
dishevelled women and youths with red-stained limbs and faces, carrying
their lighted torches over the vine-clad hills, or rushing down the
streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by
the river. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere.
And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel
offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy--the morning
sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was
over--dew-drenched garments--the serf lying at his ease at last: the
artists, then so numerous at the place, caught what they could,
something, at least, of the richness, the flexibility of the visible
aspects of life, from all this. With them the life of seeming idleness,
to which Denys was conducting the youth of Auxerre so pleasantly,
counted but as the cultivation, for their due service to man, of
delightful natural things. And the powers of nature concurred. It
seemed there would be winter no more. The planet Mars drew nearer to
the earth than usual, hanging in the low sky like a fiery red lamp. A
massive but well-nigh lifeless vine on the wall of the cloister,
allowed to remain there only as a curiosity on account of its immense
age, in that great season, as it was long after called, clothed itself
with fruit once more. The culture of the grape greatly increased. The
sunlight fell for the first time on many a spot of deep woodland
cleared for vine-growing; though Denys, a lover of trees, was careful
to leave a stately specimen of forest growth here and there.
When his troubles came, one characteristic that had seemed most amiable
in his prosperity was turned against him--a fondness for oddly grown or
even misshapen, yet potentially happy, children; for odd animals also:
he sympathised with them all, was skilful in healing their maladies,
saved the hare in the chase, and sold his mantle to redeem a lamb from
the butcher. He taught the people not to be afraid of the strange, ugly
creatures which the light of the moving torches drew from their
hiding-places, nor think it a bad omen that approached. He tamed a
veritable wolf to keep him company like a dog. It was the first of many
ambiguous circumstances about him, from which, in the minds of an
increasing number of people, a deep suspicion and hatred began to
define itself. The rich bestiary, then compiling in the library of the
great church, became, through his assistance, nothing less than a
garden of Eden--the garden of Eden grown wild. The owl alone he
abhorred. A little later, almost as if in revenge, alone of all animals
it clung to him, haunting him persistently among the dusky stone
towers, when grown gentler than ever he dared not kill it. He moved
unhurt in the famous menagerie of the castle, of which the common
people were so much afraid, and let out the lions, themselves timid
prisoners enough, through the streets during the fair. The incident
suggested to the somewhat barren pen-men of the day a "morality"
adapted from the old pagan books--a stage-play in which the God of Wine
should return in triumph from the East. In the cathedral square the
pageant was presented, amid an intolerable noise of every kind of
pipe-music, with Denys in the chief part, upon a gaily-painted chariot,
in soft silken raiment, and, for headdress, a strange elephant-scalp
with gilded tusks.
And that unrivalled fairness and freshness of aspect:--how did he alone
preserve it untouched, through the wind and heat? In truth, it was not
by magic, as some said, but by a natural simplicity in his living. When
that dark season of his troubles arrived he was heard begging
querulously one wintry night, "Give me wine, meat; dark wine and brown
meat!"--come back to the rude door of his old home in the cliff-side.
Till that time the great vine-dresser himself drank only water; he had
lived on spring-water and fruit. A lover of fertility in all its forms,
in what did but suggest it, he was curious and penetrative concerning
the habits of water, and had the secret of the divining-rod. Long
before it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar, and would
climb with delight to the great scaffolding on the unfinished tower to
watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land, till it rattled on the
great tiled roof of the church below; and then, throwing off his
mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely, clinging firmly against the
tempestuous wind among the carved imageries of dark stone.
It was on his sudden return after a long journey (one of many
inexplicable disappearances), coming back changed somewhat, that he ate
flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his
delicate fingers in a kind of wild greed. He had fled to the south from
the first forbidding days of a hard winter which came at last. At the
great seaport of Marseilles he had trafficked with sailors from all
parts of the world, from Arabia and India, and bought their wares,
exposed now for sale, to the wonder of all, at the Easter fair--richer
wines and incense than had been known in Auxerre, seeds of marvellous
new flowers, creatures wild and tame, new pottery painted in raw gaudy
tints, the skins of animals, meats fried with unheard-of condiments.
His stall formed a strange, unwonted patch of colour, found suddenly
displayed in the hot morning.
The artists were more delighted than ever, and frequented his company
in the little manorial habitation, deserted long since by its owners
and haunted, so that the eyes of many looked evil upon it, where he had
taken up his abode, attracted, in the first instance, by its rich
though neglected garden, a tangle of every kind of creeping, vine-like
plant. Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials of his
trade, the vine-dresser as it were turned pedant and kept school for
the various artists, who learned here an art supplementary to their
own,--that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his existence, till they
found themselves grown into a kind of aristocracy, like veritable gens
fleur-de-lises, as they worked together for the decoration of the great
church and a hundred other places beside. And yet a darkness had grown
upon him. The kind creature had lost something of his gentleness.
Strange motiveless misdeeds had happened; and, at a loss for other
causes, not the envious only would fain have traced the blame to Denys.
He was making the younger world mad. Would he make himself Count of
Auxerre? The lady Ariane, deserted by her former lover, had looked
kindly upon him; was ready to make him son-in-law to the old count her
father, old and not long for this world. The wise monk Hermes bethought
him of certain old readings in which the Wine-god, whose part Denys had
played so well, had his contrast, his dark or antipathetic side; was
like a double creature, of two natures, difficult or impossible to
harmonise. And in truth the much-prized wine of Auxerre has itself but
a fugitive charm, being apt to sicken and turn gross long before the
bottle is empty, however carefully sealed; as it goes indeed, at its
best, by hard names, among those who grow it, such as Chainette and
Migraine.
A kind of degeneration, of coarseness--the coarseness of satiety, and
shapeless, battered-out appetite--with an almost savage taste for
carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of
certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their newborn babes.
A girl with child was found hanged by her own act in a dark cellar. Ah!
if Denys also had not felt himself mad! But when the guilt of a murder,
committed with a great vine-axe far out among the vineyards, was
attributed vaguely to him, he could but wonder whether it had been
indeed thus, and the shadow of a fancied crime abode with him. People
turned against their favourite, whose former charms must now be counted
only as the fascinations of witchcraft. It was as if the wine poured
out for them had soured in the cup. The golden age had indeed come back
for a while:--golden was it, or gilded only, after all? and they were
too sick, or at least too serious, to carry through their parts in it.
The monk Hermes was whimsically reminded of that after-thought in pagan
poetry, of a Wine-god who had been in hell. Denys certainly, with all
his flaxen fairness about him, was manifestly a sufferer. At first he
thought of departing secretly to some other place. Alas! his wits were
too far gone for certainty of success in the attempt. He feared to be
brought back a prisoner. Those fat years were over. It was a time of
scarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good things
they had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of needy
children, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up again
and again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the little
hungry creatures went prowling after scattered hedge-nuts or dried
vine-tendrils. Mysterious, dark rains prevailed throughout the summer.
The great offices of Saint John were fumbled through in a sudden
darkness of unseasonable storm, which greatly damaged the carved
ornaments of the church, the bishop reading his mid-day Mass by the
light of the little candle at his book. And then, one night, the night
which seemed literally to have swallowed up the shortest day in the
year, a plot was contrived by certain persons to take Denys as he went
and kill him privately for a sorcerer. He could hardly tell how he
escaped, and found himself safe in his earliest home, the cottage in
the cliff-side, with such a big fire as he delighted in burning upon
the hearth. They made a little feast as well as they could for the
beautiful hunted creature, with abundance of waxlights.
And at last the clergy bethought themselves of a remedy for this evil
time. The body of one of the patron saints had lain neglected somewhere
under the flagstones of the sanctuary. This must be piously exhumed,
and provided with a shrine worthy of it. The goldsmiths, the jewellers
and lapidaries, set diligently to work, and no long time after, the
shrine, like a little cathedral with portals and tower complete, stood
ready, its chiselled gold framing panels of rock crystal, on the great
altar. Many bishops arrived, with King Lewis the Saint himself
accompanied by his mother, to assist at the search for and disinterment
of the sacred relics. In their presence, the Bishop of Auxerre, with
vestments of deep red in honour of the relics, blessed the new shrine,
according to the office De benedictione capsarum pro reliquiis. The
pavement of the choir, removed amid a surging sea of lugubrious chants,
all persons fasting, discovered as if it had been a battlefield of
mouldering human remains. Their odour rose plainly above the plentiful
clouds of incense, such as was used in the king's private chapel. The
search for the Saint himself continued in vain all day and far into the
night. At last from a little narrow chest, into which the remains had
been almost crushed together, the bishop's red-gloved hands drew the
dwindled body, shrunken inconceivably, but still with every feature of
the face traceable in a sudden oblique ray of ghastly dawn.
That shocking sight, after a sharp fit as though a demon were going out
of him, as he rolled on the turf of the cloister to which he had fled
alone from the suffocating church, where the crowd still awaited the
Procession of the relics and the Mass De reliquiis quae continentur in
Ecclesiis, seemed indeed to have cured the madness of Denys, but
certainly did not restore his gaiety. He was left a subdued, silent,
melancholy creature. Turning now, with an odd revulsion of feeling, to
gloomy objects, he picked out a ghastly shred from the common bones on
the pavement to wear about his neck, and in a little while found his
way to the monks of Saint Germain, who gladly received him into their
workshop, though secretly, in fear of his foes.
The busy tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the
many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St.
Etienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful enough to
lighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend Denys. He took
his place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a novice also as to
whatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could but compound sweet
incense for the sanctuary. And yet, again by merely visible presence,
he made himself felt in all the varied exercise around him of those
arts which address themselves first of all to sight. Unconsciously he
defined a peculiar manner, alike of feeling and expression, to those
skilful hands at work day by day with the chisel, the pencil, or the
needle, in many an enduring form of exquisite fancy. In three
successive phases or fashions might be traced, especially in the carved
work, the humours he had determined. There was first wild gaiety,
exuberant in a wreathing of life-like imageries, from which nothing
really present in nature was excluded. That, as the soul of Denys
darkened, had passed into obscure regions of the satiric, the grotesque
and coarse. But from this time there was manifest, with no loss of
power or effect, a well-assured seriousness, somewhat jealous and
exclusive, not so much in the selection of the material on which the
arts were to work, as in the precise sort of expression that should be
induced upon it. It was as if the gay old pagan world had been BLESSED
in some way; with effects to be seen most clearly in the rich miniature
work of the manuscripts of the capitular library,--a marvellous Ovid
especially, upon the pages of which those old loves and sorrows seemed
to come to life again in medieval costume, as Denys, in cowl now and
with tonsured head, leaned over the painter, and led his work, by a
kind of visible sympathy, often unspoken, rather than by any formal
comment.
Above all, there was a desire abroad to attain the instruments of a
freer and more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto--a
music that might express the whole compass of souls now grown to
manhood. Auxerre, then as afterwards, was famous for its liturgical
music. It was Denys, at last, to whom the thought occurred of combining
in a fuller tide of music all the instruments then in use. Like the
Wine-god of old, he had been a lover and patron especially of the music
of the pipe, in all its varieties. Here, too, there had been evident
those three fashions or "modes":--first, the simple and pastoral, the
homely note of the pipe, like the piping of the wind itself from off
the distant fields; then, the wild, savage din, that had cost so much
to quiet people, and driven excitable people mad. Now he would compose
all this to sweeter purposes; and the building of the first organ
became like the book of his life: it expanded to the full compass of
his nature, in its sorrow and delight. In long, enjoyable days of wind
and sun by the river-side, the seemingly half-witted "brother" sought
and found the needful varieties of reed. The carpenters, under his
instruction, set up the great wooden passages for the thunder; while
the little pipes of pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voice
singing to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets. At times
this also, as people heard night after night those wandering sounds,
seemed like the work of a madman, though they awoke sometimes in wonder
at snatches of a new, an unmistakable new music. It was the triumph of
all the various modes of the power of the pipe, tamed, ruled, united.
Only, on the painted shutters of the organ-case Apollo with his lyre in
his hand, as lord of the strings, seemed to look askance on the music
of the reed, in all the jealousy with which he put Marsyas to death so
cruelly.
Meantime, the people, even his enemies, seemed to have forgotten him.
Enemies, in truth, they still were, ready to take his life should the
opportunity come; as he perceived when at last he ventured forth on a
day of public ceremony. The bishop was to pronounce a blessing upon the
foundations of a new bridge, designed to take the place of the ancient
Roman bridge which, repaired in a thousand places, had hitherto served
for the chief passage of the Yonne. It was as if the disturbing of that
time-worn masonry let out the dark spectres of departed times. Deep
down, at the core of the central pile, a painful object was
exposed--the skeleton of a child, placed there alive, it was rightly
surmised, in the superstitious belief that, by way of vicarious
substitution, its death would secure the safety of all who should pass
over. There were some who found themselves, with a little surprise,
looking round as if for a similar pledge of security in their new
undertaking. It was just then that Denys was seen plainly, standing, in
all essential features precisely as of old, upon one of the great
stones prepared for the foundation of the new building. For a moment he
felt the eyes of the people upon him full of that strange humour, and
with characteristic alertness, after a rapid gaze over the grey city in
its broad green framework of vineyards, best seen from this spot, flung
himself down into the water and disappeared from view where the stream
flowed most swiftly below a row of flour-mills. Some indeed fancied
they had seen him emerge again safely on the deck of one of the great
boats, loaded with grapes and wreathed triumphantly with flowers like a
floating garden, which were then bringing down the vintage from the
country; but generally the people believed their strange enemy now at
last departed for ever. Denys in truth was at work again in peace at
the cloister, upon his house of reeds and pipes. At times his fits came
upon him again; and when they came, for his cure he would dig eagerly,
turned sexton now, digging, by choice, graves for the dead in the
various churchyards of the town. There were those who had seen him thus
employed (that form seeming still to carry something of real sun-gold
upon it) peering into the darkness, while his tears fell sometimes
among the grim relics his mattock had disturbed.
In fact, from the day of the exhumation of the body of the Saint in the
great church, he had had a wonderful curiosity for such objects, and
one wintry day bethought him of removing the body of his mother from
the unconsecrated ground in which it lay, that he might bury it in the
cloister, near the spot where he was now used to work. At twilight he
came over the frozen snow. As he passed through the stony barriers of
the place the world around seemed curdled to the centre--all but
himself, fighting his way across it, turning now and then right-about
from the persistent wind, which dealt so roughly with his blond hair
and the purple mantle whirled about him. The bones, hastily gathered,
he placed, awefully but without ceremony, in a hollow space prepared
secretly within the grave of another.
Meantime the winds of his organ were ready to blow; and with difficulty
he obtained grace from the Chapter for a trial of its powers on a
notable public occasion, as follows. A singular guest was expected at
Auxerre. In recompense for some service rendered to the Chapter in
times gone by, the Sire de Chastellux had the hereditary dignity of a
canon of the church. On the day of his reception he presented himself
at the entrance of the choir in surplice and amice, worn over the
military habit. The old count of Chastellux was lately dead, and the
heir had announced his coming, according to custom, to claim his
ecclesiastical privilege. There had been long feud between the houses
of Chastellux and Auxerre; but on this happy occasion an offer of peace
came with a proposal for the hand of the Lady Ariane.
The goodly young man arrived, and, duly arrayed, was received into his
stall at vespers, the bishop assisting. It was then that the people
heard the music of the organ, rolling over them for the first time,
with various feelings of delight. But the performer on and author of
the instrument was forgotten in his work, and there was no
re-instatement of the former favourite. The religious ceremony was
followed by a civic festival, in which Auxerre welcomed its future
lord. The festival was to end at nightfall with a somewhat rude popular
pageant, in which the person of Winter would be hunted blindfold
through the streets. It was the sequel to that earlier stage-play of
the Return from the East in which Denys had been the central figure.
The old forgotten player saw his part before him, and, as if
mechanically, fell again into the chief place, monk's dress and all. It
might restore his popularity: who could tell? Hastily he donned the
ashen-grey mantle, the rough haircloth about the throat, and went
through the preliminary matter. And it happened that a point of the
haircloth scratched his lip deeply, with a long trickling of blood upon
the chin. It was as if the sight of blood transported the spectators
with a kind of mad rage, and suddenly revealed to them the truth. The
pretended hunting of the unholy creature became a real one, which
brought out, in rapid increase, men's evil passions. The soul of Denys
was already at rest, as his body, now borne along in front of the
crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. The
men stuck little shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his torn
raiment, into their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for the
purpose. The monk Hermes sought in vain next day for any remains of the
body of his friend. Only, at nightfall, the heart of Denys was brought
to him by a stranger, still entire. It must long since have mouldered
into dust under the stone, marked with a cross, where he buried it in a
dark corner of the cathedral aisle.
So the figure in the stained glass explained itself. To me, Denys
seemed to have been a real resident at Auxerre. On days of a certain
atmosphere, when the trace of the Middle Age comes out, like old marks
in the stones in rainy weather, I seemed actually to have seen the
tortured figure there--to have met Denys l'Auxerrois in the streets.