left home and travelled on foot over the south of France, gaining fresh
knowledge at every step, as those do who keep their wits about them. He
had no money, so he paid his way by the help of his pencil, as he was
later to do in the little town of Saintes, taking portraits of the
village innkeeper or his wife, or drawing plans for the new rooms the
good man meant to build now that business was so thriving, and measuring
the field at the back of the house, that he thought of laying out as a
garden of fruits and herbs. And as the young man went he visited the
cathedrals in the towns as well as the forges and the manufactories, and
never rested till he found out why this city made cloth, and that one
silk, and a third wonderful patterns of wrought iron.
We do not know exactly how long Palissy remained on his travels, but as
there was no need for him to hurry and so much for him to see he
probably was away for some years. On his return he seems to have settled
down in the little town of Saintes, on the river Charente, where he
supported himself by doing what we should call surveying work, measuring
the lands of the whole department, and reporting on the kind of soil of
which they were made, so that the government might know how to tax them.
* * * * *
In the year 1538 Palissy married, and a year later came the event which
influenced more than any other the course of his future life. A French
gentleman named Pons, who had spent a long while at the Italian court of
Ferrara, returned to France, bringing with him many beautiful things,
among others an 'earthenware cup, wonderfully shaped and enamelled.'
Pons happened to meet Palissy, and finding that the same subjects
interested them both, he showed him the cup. The young man could
scarcely contain himself at the sight. For some time he had been turning
over in his mind the possibility of discovering enamel, or glaze, to put
on the earthen pots, and now here, in perfection, was the very thing he
was looking for.
During the next two or three years, when he was busy surveying the lands
about Saintes, in order to support his wife and little children, his
thoughts were perpetually occupied with the enamelled cup, and how to
make one like it. If he could only see a few more, perhaps something
might give him a clue; but how was he to do that? Then one day in the
winter of 1542 a pirate boat from La Rochelle, on the coast, sailed into
port with a great Spanish ship in tow, filled with earthenware cups from
Venice, and plates and goblets from the Spanish city of Valencia, famous
for its marvellously beautiful glaze. The news of the capture soon
reached Palissy, and we may be sure he had made a study of the best of
the pots before they were bought by the king, Francis I., and given away
to the ladies of the French court. But the Venetian and Spanish
treasures still kept their secret, and Palissy was forced to work on in
the dark, buying cheap earthen pots and breaking them, and pounding the
pieces in a mortar, so as to discover, if he could, the substances of
which they were made.
* * * * *
All this took a long time, and Palissy gave up his surveying in order to
devote his whole days to this labour of love. The reward, however, was
very slow in coming, and if he had not contrived to save a little money
while he was still a bachelor his wife and children would have starved.
Week after week went by, and Palissy was to be seen in his little
workshop, making experiments with pieces of common pots, over which he
spread the different mixtures he had made. These pieces, he tells us,
'he baked in his furnace, hoping that some of these mixtures might, when
hot, produce a colour'; white was, however, what he desired above all,
as he had heard that if once you had been able to procure a fine white,
it was comparatively easy to get the rest. Remembering how as a boy he
had used certain chemical substances in staining the glass, he put these
into some of his mixtures, and hopefully awaited the result.
But, alas! he 'had never seen earth baked,' and had no idea how hot the
fire of his furnace should be, or in what way to regulate it. Sometimes
the substance was baked too much, and sometimes too little; and every
day he was building fresh furnaces in place of the old ones which had
cracked, collecting fresh materials, making fresh failures, and
altogether wasting a great deal of time and money.
* * * * *
Thus passed several years, and it is a marvel how the family contrived
to live at all, and madame Palissy had reason for the reproaches and
hard words which she heaped on her husband. The amount of wood alone
necessary to feed the furnaces was enormous, and when Palissy could no
longer afford to buy it, he cut down all the trees and bushes in his
garden, and when they were exhausted burned all the tables and chairs in
the house and tore up the floors. Fancy poor madame Palissy's feelings
one morning when this sight met her eyes. His friends laughed at him and
told tales of his folly in the neighbouring town, which hurt his
feelings; but nothing turned him from his purpose, and except for the
few hours a week when he worked at something which _would_ bring in
money enough to keep his family alive, every moment, as well as every
thought, was given up to the discovery which was so slow in being made.
[Illustration: Fancy poor madame Palissy's feelings.]
Again he bought some cheap pots, which he broke in pieces, and covered
three or four hundred fragments with his mixtures. These he carried,
with the help of a man, to a kiln belonging to some potters in the
forest, and asked leave to bake them. The potters willingly gave him
permission, and the pieces were laid carefully in the furnace. After
four hours Palissy ventured to examine them, and found one of the
fragments perfectly baked, and covered with a splendid white glaze. 'My
joy was such,' he writes, 'that I felt myself another man'; but he
rejoiced too soon, for success was still far distant. The mixture which
produced the white glaze was probably due to Palissy having added
unconsciously a little more of some special substance, because when he
tried to make a fresh mixture to spread over the rest of the pieces he
failed to obtain the same result. Still, though the disappointment was
great, he did not quite cease to 'feel another man.' He had done what he
had wanted once, and some day he would do it again and always.
* * * * *
It seems strange that Palissy did not go to Limoges, which was not very
far off, and learn the trade of enamelling at the old-established
manufactory there. It would have saved him from years of toil and
heartsickness, and his family from years of poverty. But no! he wished
to discover the secret _for himself_, and this he had no right to do at
the expense of other people.
However, we must take the man as he was, and as we read the story of his
incessant toils we wonder that any human being should have lived to tell
the tale. He was too poor to get help; perhaps he did not want it; but
'he worked for more than a month night and day,' grinding into powder
the substances such as he had used at the moment of his success. But
heat the furnace as he might, it would not bake, and again he was
beaten. He had found the secret of the enamel, but not how to make it
form part of the pots.
Each time victory appeared certain some fresh misfortune occurred, the
most vexatious of all being one which seems due to Palissy's own
carelessness. The mortar used by the potter in building his kiln was
full of small pebbles, and when the oven became very hot these pebbles
split, and mixed with the glaze. Then the enamel was spread over the
earthen pots (which at last were properly baked), and the surface of
each vessel, instead of being absolutely smooth, became as sharp as a
razor and tore the hand of any unlucky person who touched it.
To guard against such accidents Palissy invented some sort of
cases--'lanterns' he calls them--in which to put his pots while in the
kiln, and these he found extremely useful. He now plucked up heart and
began to model lizards and serpents, tortoises and lobsters, leaves and
flowers, but it was a long while before he could turn them out as he
wished. 'The green of the lizards,' he tells us, 'got burned before the
colour of the serpents was properly fixed,' and the lobsters, serpents
and other creatures were baked before it suited the potter, who would
have liked them all to take the same time. But at length his patience
and courage triumphed over all difficulties. By-and-by he learned how to
manage his furnace and how to mix his materials; the victory had taken
him sixteen years to win, but at last he, and not the fire, was master;
henceforth he could make what he liked, and ask what price he chose.
And there we will leave Palissy the artist and turn to the life of
Palissy the Huguenot.
* * * * *
For some years past the reformed religion had spread rapidly in this
corner of France, and Palissy, always anxious to understand everything
that came in his way, began first to inquire into the new doctrines, and
then to adopt them. One of the converts, Philibert Hamelin, a native of
Tours, was seized by the magistrates and condemned to death, and
Palissy, who was his special friend, careless of any risk to himself,
did all that was possible to obtain his pardon; when that proved
hopeless, the potter arranged a plan of escape for the prisoner, but
Hamelin declined to fly, and was hanged at Bordeaux in 1557.
The new religion had changed life outwardly as well as inwardly at
Saintes, as Palissy himself tells us. 'Games, dances, songs, banquets,
smart clothes, were all things of the past. Ladies were forbidden by
Calvin, whose word was law, even to wear ribbons; the wine shops were
empty, for the young men passed their spare hours in the fields; girls
sat singing hymns on the banks of the streams, and boys abandoned their
games, and were as grave as their fathers.' The new faith spread rapidly
in this district, but the converts did not all behave in the peaceable
manner described by Palissy. As the party grew stronger it also grew
more violent, and it was plain to him and to everyone else that civil
war must shortly follow. Cruelty on one side was answered by cruelty on
the other, and Palissy had thrown in his lot with the Huguenots, and by
his writings as well as his words urged them to take arms against the
Catholics. Perhaps the artist in him may have grieved to hear of the
destruction in the beautiful churches of the carved images of the saints
that were broken by axes and hammers; of the pictures that were burned,
or the old illuminated manuscripts that were torn in pieces; but
outwardly he gave his approval, and when things went against the
Huguenots, even Palissy's powerful friends who admired his works could
no longer shut their eyes. He was warned to change his ways, and as he
did not the duke of Montpensier, then governor of the rebellious
provinces, thought he would keep Palissy from greater mischief by
putting him into prison. From Saintes he was sent to Bordeaux, where the
magistrates, irritated at his having given the use of a tower which they
had granted him for a studio as a meeting-place for Huguenots, ordered
him into stricter confinement, while they debated whether the studio
should be destroyed. But the constable of France, Anne de Montmorency,
hearing of this proposal, hastened to the queen dowager, Catherine de
Médicis, who came to the rescue by appointing him potter to the royal
household. In this manner Palissy and his studio both escaped, and soon
afterwards the Treaty of Amboise (1563) gave peace to both parties.
After this the happiest period of Palissy's life began. He was free, he
was on the way to grow rich, and he had leisure to write down the
thoughts and plans that had come to him long ago as a boy in his
wanderings, or lately, in his lonely hours in prison. His children could
be well provided for, and he need have no more anxiety about them. As to
his wife, she appears to have been already dead when fortune at last
visited him, and, indeed, she played but a small part in his life.
Now his first book was composed, and in it we can read about the gardens
that Palissy hoped to lay out if his rich friends, Montmorency, or
Montpensier, or Condé, or even the queen herself, would help him to
carry out his designs.
The garden of Palissy's thoughts was to be very large, and certainly
would cost a great deal of money. It was to be situated under a hill, so
that the flowers and fruits might be protected from the winds, and many
streams were to flow through it. Broad alleys would cross the garden,
ending in arbours, some made of trees, trained or cut into different
shapes, and filled with statues; others of different coloured stones,
with lizards and vipers climbing upon the walls, while on the floor
texts would be picked out in pebbles. Plants and flowers would hang from
the roofs of the grottos, and beside them the rivulets would broaden
into basins where real frogs and fish would gaze with surprise at their
stone companions on the brink. Here and there the stream would be dammed
up into a lake covered with tiny islands, and filled with forget-me-nots
and water-lilies and pretty yellow irises, and at the next turn of the
path the visitor would be delighted by a beautiful statue half hidden by
a grove of trees. Catching sight of an inscription in the left hand of
the figure, he would not resist stepping aside to read it, and as he was
stooping to see what was written a jar of water in the figure's right
hand would empty itself on his head.
[Illustration: A jar of water in the figure's right hands emptied itself
on his head.]
Wet and cross, the visitor would pursue his way, taking care not to go
near another statue standing alone in a wide grassy space, with a ring
dangling from its finger. The children or pages waiting on the lady of
the house would, however, think that the flat lawn would be a splendid
place in which to play at 'tilting at the ring,' and here was a ring
just set up for the purpose. Hastily fetching their toy weapons, they
would choose a starting-place and, holding their lances well back, run
swiftly towards the statue, hoping to thrust the lance-point through the
ring, as by-and-by they would have to do at the sports at a royal
wedding or a coronation. But the moment the ring was touched a huge wet
sponge would swing round from the back of the figure and hit the
champion a sharp blow on the back of the head, to the great delight and
surprise of his companions.
It was not a game that could be played twice on the same person, as
Palissy well knew; but in those days great lords with trains of
attendants frequently stopped at each other's houses on the way to their
own lands, so that a constant supply of fresh pages might be looked for,
all eager to play at tilting at the ring.
* * * * *
It was in 1565 that Palissy was sent for to Paris by the queen, to help
her to decorate and lay out the gardens of the palace of the Tuileries,
which she was now planning, close to the Louvre.
The very name of the place must have sounded home-like in the ears of
Palissy, for Tuileries means nothing more than 'tile-fields,' and for a
long while this part of Paris had been the workshop of brick-makers and
potters outside the walls of the old city. But in the reign of
Catherine's father-in-law, Francis I., they were forced to move
further away, as the king had taken a fancy to the site, and had bought
it for his mother. Gardens were made where the furnaces had stood; but
these were by no means fine enough to please Catherine, and she called
in her favourite architect, Philibert Delorme, to erect a palace in
their place, and bade Palissy, now called 'Bernard of the Tuileries' by
his friends, to invent her a new pleasure-ground stretching away to the
west.
We may be sure that Palissy did not lose this happy chance of carrying
into practice the 'delectable garden' of his dreams. He had his
workshops and kilns on the spot, and a band of skilled potters who baked
the figures of men and animals which he himself fashioned out of clay.
Two of his sons, Nicholas and Mathurin, seem to have inherited some of
his talent, and were his partners, as we learn from a royal account book
of the year 1570, and it must have been pleasant to him to have their
company. The queen herself often walked down from the Louvre close by to
see how he was getting on, and to give her opinion as to the grouping of
some statues or the arrangement of a grotto; and here too came his
friends when in Paris, Montmorency, Condé, Jarnac and others, and
Delorme, Bullant, Filon, and all the great architects of the day. The
château of Ecouen, belonging to Montmorency, situated about twelve miles
from Paris, had been decorated by Palissy before he entered the service
of the queen-mother, and had gained him great fame and many commissions.
At Ecouen the long galleries and the floor of the chapel were paved with
tiles containing pictures of subjects taken out of the Bible. In the
garden was the first 'grotto' the potter ever made, and very proud he
was of it, and still more so of the invention by which, at a signal from
the host, one of the attendants would touch a spring, and streams of
water poured over the guests. It is difficult to imagine the grave
constable, occupied as he was with religious wars, or anxiously
watching affairs of state, playing such rude and silly tricks on the
gentlemen and ladies he was entertaining, and it is pleasanter to think
of them all listening to the songs of birds which, we are told, were
imitated to the life by means of water passing through pipes and reeds.
Altogether, Ecouen was thought a marvel of beauty and fancy, and
everybody who considered they had any claims to good taste made a point
of riding out to visit it.
* * * * *
Safe under royal protection and happy in his work, Palissy did not
trouble himself about the fighting that still raged in the name of
religion. When he was tired of the hot atmosphere of the kiln, he would
wander along the banks of the river, or into the woods and hills about
Paris, and watch the birds and the insects fluttering among the trees.
Then, with his mind full of what he had beheld, he would return to his
workshop, and, calling for clay, would never rise from his chair until
he had made an exact copy of the little scene which had caught his
fancy. First he would form his oval-shaped dish, and in the centre of it
would lie some twisted snakes, with sprays of leaves and flowers
scattered round them, while over the cups of the flowers bees and
butterflies hovered gaily. Or, again, he would fashion a wavy sea,
bordered by shells of all sorts, fishes, frogs, leaves, and butterflies,
and in the middle a great sea-serpent wriggling gracefully across the
dish.
Everything was true to nature and beautifully executed, and in those
days it never seemed to strike anyone that dishes were meant to hold
food and not to be treated as pictures.
* * * * *
Palissy had been working for eight years in Paris when the massacre of
St. Bartholomew took place. No one sought to harm the potter, Huguenot
though he was, and he lived on peacefully, respected by all, for some
time longer.
In 1574 Charles IX., the well-intentioned, half-mad young king, died,
and his brother Henry, a man in every way much worse than himself, came
to the throne. Like the rest of his family, however, he was fond of art,
and protected the potter, and a few months later we find Palissy, quite
unharmed, giving lectures on natural history to some of the most famous
scientific men in Paris. If he wanted to prove a point he had a quantity
of drawings or materials at hand to show them. He spoke well, and the
fame of his lectures spread. The little room was soon filled to
overflowing with lawyers, scholars, and, above all, physicians, the
celebrated monsieur Ambroise Paré, doctor to the queen-mother, and a
Huguenot like himself, at their head.
* * * * *
During nine years Palissy continued to deliver these lectures every
Lent, working steadily most of the day among his furnaces at the
Tuileries. He was now seventy-five, and had escaped so many dangers that
he might well think himself safe to the end, which could not be far off.
But in 1585 Henry III. thought himself obliged to take more active
measures against the Huguenots. Palissy had never concealed--as he had
never obtruded--his faith, and, most likely at the instigation of
someone who envied him, he was at once sent to the prison of the
Bastille, and sentence of death passed upon him.
Yet once again the potter's gift for making friends, perhaps the most
valuable of all his talents in that fierce age, stood him in good stead.
This time it was actually one of the persecuting Guises, the duc de
Mayenne, who saved him, and prevented the decree from being carried out.
For four years Palissy remained a prisoner. Mayenne desired to set him
free, but did not dare to do so, so left him where he was till better
times came. But Palissy had a surer friend than Mayenne, who came to his
rescue. In spite of his strong frame, years passed in a prison of those
days, where hunger, cold, and dirt would break any man down, proved too
much even for Bernard Palissy, now more than eighty years of age. Little
by little he grew weaker, watched and tended, as far as might be, by
those who, like himself, had suffered for conscience' sake. Then one
evening he went to sleep, and woke in the Delectable Garden.
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Red Book of Heroes, by Leonora Blanche Lang