a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the
light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost
little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been
aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of
any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time
in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The
effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in
Rome itself, on evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon broken
shafts and slabs of antique pavement. As we sat in the theater, looking
at the two lone columns that survive--part of the decoration of the
back of the stage--and at the fragments of ruin around them, we might
have been in the Roman forum.
The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less complete than
that at Nîmes; it has suffered even more the assaults of time and of
the children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats are
almost wholly wanting; but the external walls, minus the topmost tier
of arches, are massively, ruggedly complete; and the vaulted corridors
seem as solid as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly
vast, and as monumental, for a place of light amusement--what is called
in America a "variety-show"--as it entered only into the Roman mind to
make such establishments. The podium is much higher than at Nîmes, and
many of the great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put
into their places. The proconsular box has been more or less
reconstructed, and the great converging passages of approach to it are
still majestically distinct; so that, as I sat there in the moon-charm
stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it
was not impossible to listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick
voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hundred years ago.
The theater has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with
a different music. The Roman theater at Arles seemed to me one of the
most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular
fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton--the arena may be called a
skeleton; for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the
row of columns which formed the scene--the permanent
back-scene--remain; two marble pillars--I just mentioned them--are
upright, with a fragment of their entablature. Before them is the
vacant space which was filled by the stage, with the line of the
proscenium distinct, marked by a deep groove, imprest upon slabs of
stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen had been intended
to fit into it. The semicircle formed by the seats--half a cup--rises
opposite; some of the rows are distinctly marked. The floor, from the
bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is
formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored
marble--red, yellow, and green--which, tho terribly battered and
cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.
Everything shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep of its
enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the
auditorium, and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The
way in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the
architects of our epoch, as also the immense size of the place is a
proof of extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors.
It was after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena
that we came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The
principal entrance was locked, but we effected an easy escalade, scaled
a low parapet, and descended into the place behind the scenes.
It was as light as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim
columns, as we sat on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of
silent actors. What I called touching, just now was the thought that
here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been
supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo
of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring
beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the
ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day
it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pass, by no
means, in great numbers, from one part of the town to the other;
treading the old marble floor, and brushing, if need be, the empty
benches. This familiarity does not kill the place again; it makes it,
on the contrary, live a little--makes the present and the past touch
each other.
If I called Les Baux a city, it was not that I was stretching a point
in favor of the small spot which to-day contains but a few dozen
inhabitants. The history of the place is as extraodinary as its
situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state; but
an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself
sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties,
with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords
of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a
time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places
nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage.
The chronicle of this old Provençal house has been written, in a style
somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the
little book--a modest pamphlet--at the establishment of the good
sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest part of Les
Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom
I heard piping their lessons, while I waited in the cold parlor for one
of the ladies to come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more
perfect than the manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet
her small religious house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the
world. It was spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had
lately been papered and painted; in this respect, at the medieval
Pompeii, they were rather a discord. They were, at any rate, the
newest, freshest thing at Les Baux.
I remember going round to the church, after I had left the good
sisters, and to a little quiet terrace, which stands in front of it,
ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall,
breast-high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air
and all about the neighboring country. I remember saying to myself that
this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist
of taste keeps in his mind as a picture. The church was small and brown
and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this however, is no
general description of Les Baux.
I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple
reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved
in lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and
castle, have become fragmentary, not through the sudden destruction,
but through the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an
extinguished, but a deserted city; more deserted far than even
Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in
the grass-grown element.
It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its greatness, when
its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and Neophantis,
kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia, and emperors of
Constantinople--even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules
Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the
fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained
at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who,
however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject
towns, most of them, tho a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were
seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand
admirals of the kingdom of Naples, and its ladies were sought in
marriage by half the first princes in Europe.
A considerable part of the little narrative of M. Canonge is taken up
with the great alliances of the House of Baux, whose fortunes,
matrimonial and other, he traces from the eleventh century down to the
sixteenth. The empty shells of a considerable number of old houses,
many of which must have been superb, the lines of certain steep little
streets, the foundations of a castle, and ever so many splendid views,
are all that remains to-day of these great titles.
To such a list I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people,
who emerged from the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze
at the two foreigners who had driven over from Arles, and whose horses
were being baited at the modest inn. The resources of this
establishment we did not venture otherwise to test, in spite of the
seductive fact that the sign over the door was in the Provençal tongue.
This little group included the baker, a rather melancholy young man, in
high boots and a cloak, with whom and his companions we had a good deal
of conversation.
The Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race,
with a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this
one, the traveler, who is waiting for his horses to be put in or his
dinner to be prepared, observes in the charming people who lend
themselves to conversation in the hilltowns of Tuscany. The spot where
our entertainers at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most
inhabited portion of the town; as I say, there were at least a dozen
human figures within sight. Presently we wandered away from them,
scaled the higher places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the
castle, and looked down from the cliff overhanging that portion of the
road which I have mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind.
I was unable to trace the configuration of the castle as plainly as the
writers who have described it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to
say that I did not even perceive the three great figures of stone (the
three Marys, as they are called; the two Marys of Scripture, with
Martha), which constitute one of the curiosities of the place, and of
which M. Jules Canonge speaks with almost hyperbolical admiration. A
brisk shower, lasting some ten minutes, led us to take refuge in a
cavity, of mysterious origin, where the melancholy baker presently
discovered us, having had the bonne pensée of coming up for us with an
umbrella which certainly belonged, in former ages, to one of the
Stéphanettes or Berangères commemorated by M. Canonge. His oven, I am
afraid, was cold so long as our visit lasted.
When the rain was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered
space before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things.
They took the form of narrow, precipitous streets, bordered by empty
houses, with gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had
glimpses of sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and
vault. Some of the houses are still inhabited; but most of them are
open to the air and weather. Some of them have completely collapsed;
others present to the street a front which enables one to judge of the
physiognomy of Les Baux in the days of its importance. This importance
had pretty well passed away in the early part of the sixteenth century,
when the place ceased to be an independent principality, It became--by
request of one of its lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his
time--part of the appanage of the kings of France, by whom it was
placed under the protection of Arles, which had formerly occupied with
regard to it a different position. I know not whether the Arlesians
neglected their trust; but the extinction of the sturdy little
stronghold is too complete not to have begun long ago. Its memories are
buried under its ponderous stones.
As ve drove away from it in the gloaming, my friend and I agreed that
the two or three hours we had spent there were among the happiest
impressions of a pair of tourists very curious in the picturesque. We
almost forgot that we were bound to regret that the shortened day left
us no time to drive five miles further, above a pass in the little
mountains--it had beckoned to us in the morning, when we came in sight
of it, almost irresistibly--to see the Roman arch and mausoleum of
Saint Remy. To compass this larger excursion (including the visit to
Les Baux) you must start from Arles very early in the morning; but I
can imagine no more delightful day.
IV
Cathedrals and Chateaux
Amiens
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
[Footnote: From "French and Italian Note Books." By special arrangement
with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Copyright, 1871, 1883, 1889.]
The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything
English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the
entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway
affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a
statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We
met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and
knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children,
clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes.
It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the
shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to
dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should
have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As
it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to
enjoy the Cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of
English cathedrals.
It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a
high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of
England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their
height. The impression the latter give is of magnitude and mass; this
French Cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, tho
but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still
keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first
placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep,
elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at
the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an
idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no
screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals.
We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of
worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those
of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in
the recess of every arch of the side-aisles, beneath each lofty window,
there was a chapel dedicated to some saint, and adorned with great
marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad,
in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely
tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one
sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I
suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the
true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or
placed under glass.
In every chapel, moreover, there was a confessional--a little oaken
structure, about as big as a sentry-box, with a closed part for the
priest to sit in, and an open one for the penitent to kneel at, and
speak through the open-work of the priest's closet. Monuments, mural
and others, to long-departed worthies, and images of the Savior, the
Virgin, and saints, were numerous everywhere about the church; and in
the chancel there was a great deal of quaint and curious sculpture,
fencing in the Holy of Holies, where the high altar stands. There is
not much painted glass; one or two very rich and beautiful
rose-windows, however, that looked antique; and the great eastern
window, which, I think, is modern. The pavement has, probably, never
been renewed, as one piece of work, since the structure was erected,
and is foot-worn by the successive generations, tho still in excellent
repair. I saw one of the small, square stones in it, bearing the date
of 1597, and no doubt there are a thousand older ones.
Rouen
By Thomas Frognall Dibdin
[Footnote: From "A Bibliographical Tour in France and Germany."]
The approach to Rouen is indeed magnificent. I speak of the immediate
approach, after you reach the top of a considerable rise, and are stopt
by the barriers. You then look down a straight, broad, and strongly
paved road, lined with a double row of trees on each side. As the
foliage was not thickly set, we could discern, through the delicately
clothed branches, the tapering spire of the cathedral, and the more
picturesque tower of the Abbaye St. Ouen--with hanging gardens, and
white houses, to the left--covering a richly cultivated ridge of hills,
which sink, as it were, into the Boulevards, and which is called the
Faubourg Cauchoise. To the right, through the trees, you see the River
Seine (here of no despicable depth or breadth), covered with boats and
vessels in motion, the voice of commerce, and the stir of industry,
cheering and animating you as you approach the town. I was told that
almost every vessel which I saw (some of them of two hundred, and even
of three hundred tons burden) was filled with brandy and wine....
First for the cathedral, for what traveler of taste does not doff his
bonnet to the mother-church of the town through which he happens to be
traveling, or in which he takes a temporary abode? The west front,
always the forte of the architects's skill, strikes you as you go down,
or come up, the principal street--La Rue des Carmes--which seems to
bisect the town into equal parts. A small open space, which, however,
has been miserably encroached upon by petty shops, called the Flower
Gardens, is before this western front; so that it has some little
breathing room in which to expand its beauties to the wondering eyes of
the beholder. In my poor judgment, this western front has very few
elevations comparable with it--including even those of Lincoln and
York. The ornaments, especially upon the three porches, between the two
towers, are numerous, rich, and for the greater part entire, in spite
of the Calvinists, the French Revolution, and time.
As you enter the cathedral, at the center door, by descending two
steps, you are struck with the length and loftiness of the nave, and
with the lightness of the gallery which runs along the upper part of
it. Perhaps the nave is too narrow for its length. The lantern of the
central large tower is beautifully light and striking. It is supported
by four massive clustered pillars, about forty feet in circumference;
but by casting your eye downward, you are shocked at the tasteless
division of the choir from the nave by what is called a Grecian screen;
and the interior of the transepts has undergone a like preposterous
restoration.
The rose windows of the transepts, and that at the west end of the
nave, merit your attention and commendation. I could not avoid
noticing, to the right, upon entrance, perhaps the oldest side chapel
in the cathedral, of a date less ancient than that of the northern
tower, and perhaps of the end of the twelfth century. It contains by
much the finest specimens of stained glass--of the early part of the
sixteenth century. There is also some beautiful stained glass on each
side of the chapel of the Virgin, behind the choir; but altho very
ancient, it is the less interesting, as not being composed of groups,
or of historical subjects. Yet, in this as in almost all the churches
which I have seen, frightful devastations have been made among the
stained glass windows by the fury of the Revolutionists....
On gazing at this splendid monument of ancient piety and
liberality--and with one's mind deeply intent upon the characters of
the deceased--let us fancy we hear the sound of the great bell from the
southwest tower--called the Amboise Tower--erected, both the bell and
the tower, by the uncle and minister of Amboise. Know, my dear friend,
that there was once a bell (and the largest in Europe, save one), which
used to send forth its sound for three successive centuries from the
said tower. This bell was broken about thirty years ago, and destroyed
in the ravages of the immediately succeeding years. The southwest tower
remains, and the upper part of the central tower, with the whole of the
lofty wooden spire--the fruits of the liberality of the excellent men
of whom such honorable mention has been made. Considering that this
spire is very lofty, and composed of wood, it is surprising that it has
not been destroyed by tempest or by lightning.
Leaving the cathedral, you pass a beautifully sculptured fountain, of
the early time of Francis I., which stands at the corner of the street,
to the right; and which, from its central situation, is visited the
livelong day for the sake of its limpid waters. Push on a little
further, then, turning to the right, you get into a sort of square, and
observe the abbey--or rather the west front of it--full in face of you.
You gaze, and are first struck with its matchless window: call it rose,
or marigold, as you please.
I think, for delicacy and richness of ornament, this window is
perfectly unrivaled. There is a play of line in the mullions, which,
considering their size and strength, may be pronounced quite a
masterpiece of art. You approach, regretting the neglected state of the
lateral towers, and enter through the large and completely opened
center doors, the nave of the abbey. It was toward sunset when we made
our first entrance. The evening was beautiful; and the variegated tints
of sunbeam, admitted through the stained glass of the window, just
noticed, were perfectly enchanting. The window itself, as you look
upward, or rather as you fix your eye upon the center of it, from the
remote end of the abbey, or the Lady's Chapel, was a perfect blaze of
dazzling light; and nave, choir, and side aisles seemed magically
illumined. We declared instinctively that the Abbey of St. Ouen could
hardly have a rival--certainly not a superior.
Let me, however, put in a word for the organ. It is immense, and
perhaps larger than that belonging to the cathedral. The tin pipes
(like those of the organ in the cathedral) are of their natural color.
I paced the pavement beneath, and think that this organ can not be
short of forty English feet in length. Indeed, in all the churches
which I have yet seen, the organs strike me as being of magnificent
dimensions.
You should be informed, however, that the extreme length of the
interior, from the further end of the chapel of the Virgin, to its
opposite western extremity, is about four hundred and fifty English
feet; while the height, from the pavement to the roof of the nave, or
the choir, is one hundred and eight English feet. The transepts are
about one hundred and forty feet in length. The central tower, upon the
whole, is not only the grandest tower in Rouen, but there is nothing
for its size in our own country that can compare with it. It rises
upward of one hundred feet above the roof of the church; and is
supported below, or rather within, by four magnificent cluster-pillared
bases, each about thirty-two feet in circumference. Its area, at
bottom, can hardly be less than thirty-six feet square. The choir is
flanked by flying buttresses, which have a double tier of small arches,
altogether "marvelous and curious to behold."
I could not resist stealing quietly round to the porch of the south
transept, and witnessing, in that porch, one of the most chaste, light,
and lovely specimens of Gothic architecture which can be contemplated.
Indeed, I hardly know anything like it. The leaves of the poplar and
ash were beginning to mantle the exterior; and, seen through their
green and gay lattice work, the traceries of the porch seemed to assume
a more interesting aspect. They are now mending the upper part of the
façade with new stone of peculiar excellence--but it does not harmonize
with the old work. They merit our thanks, however, for the preservation
of what remains of this precious pile. I should remark to you that the
eastern and northeastern sides of the abbey of St. Ouen are surrounded
with promenades and trees: so that, occasionally, either when walking
or sitting upon the benches, within these gardens, you catch one of the
finest views imaginable of the abbey.
Chartres
By Epiphanius Wilson
[Footnote: From "The Cathedrals of France." By permission of the
author. Copyright, 1900.]