token that he remembers--an etched plate, one of very few he has
executed, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the
weary soldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his
way from England to Paris.
February 1720.
Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger
than ever--something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in
his expression--speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the
thought of a summing-up of his life.
[41] I am reminded of the day when, already with that air of seemly
thought, le bel sérieux, he was found sketching, with so much truth
to the inmost mind in them, those picturesque mountebanks at the Fair
in the Grande Place; and I find, throughout his course of life,
something of the essential melancholy of the comedian. He, so
fastidious and cold, and who has never "ventured the representation
of passion," does but amuse the gay world; and is aware of that,
though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now, however,
he is finishing a very different picture--that too, full of humour--
an English family-group, with a little girl tiding a wooden horse:
the father, and the mother holding his tobacco-pipe, stand in the
centre.
March 1720.
To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of
the Academy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to
conduct their illustrious fellow-citizen, by torch-light, to supper
in their Guildhall, where all their beautiful old corporation plate
will be displayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them.
There is something in the payment of great honours to the living
which fills one with apprehension, especially when the recipient of
them looks so like a dying man. God have mercy on him!
[42]
April 1721.
We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a
messenger arrived post-haste with a letter on behalf of Antony
Watteau, desiring Jean-Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go
to bed that night; and my brother was on his way before daylight, his
heart full of a strange conflict of joy and apprehension.
May 1721.
A letter at last! from Jean-Baptiste, occupied with cares of all
sorts at the bedside of the sufferer. Antony fancying that the air
of the country might do him good, the Abbé Haranger, one of the
canons of the Church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was in
the habit of hearing Mass, has lent him a house at Nogent-sur-Marne.
There he receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once
liked best, the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him
nothing less than insupportable. Though he still dreams of change,
and would fain try his native air once more, he is at work constantly
upon his art; but solely by way of a teacher, instructing (with a
kind of remorseful diligence, it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will
be heir to his unfinished work, and take up many of his pictures
where he has left them. He seems now anxious [43] for one thing
only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple what remains of himself,
and the last secrets of his genius.
His property--9000 livres only--goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste
has found these last weeks immeasurably useful.
For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an
old friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in
which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever
so with me. And one lives also most reasonably so. With women, at
least, it is thus, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of
a pity which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so
strong, turning his face to the wall from the things which most
occupy men's lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest curé of Nogent he
has caricatured so often, who attends him.
July 1721.
Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned
unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footstep on the stairs. We turned
together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau
departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot
days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix
for the good curé of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he [44]
possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.
He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after
something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all.
NOTES
37. *Possibly written at this date, but almost certainly not printed
till many years later.--Note in Second Edition. Return.
II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS
[47] 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.
[48] Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of
successive ages, not without 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 brick-work 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 [49] 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 hôtel 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 [50] 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,
[51] have a common character--Joigny, Villeneuve, Saint 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 Étienne, 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 [52] 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-
à-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 [53] 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--[54] 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 [55] the cathedral of
Saint Étienne 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 [56] 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.
[57] 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 [58] 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
[59] 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 [60] 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.