Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume IV Part 1

Seeing Europe with Famous Authors.

Volume 4.

by Various.

CATHEDRALS AND CHATEAUX

(_Continued_)

BAYEUX AND ITS FAMOUS TAPESTRIES[A]

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical Tour in France and Germany."]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN

The diligence brought me here from Caen in about two hours and a half. The country, during the whole route, is open, well cultivated, occasionally gently undulating, but generally denuded of trees. Many pretty little churches, with delicate spires, peeped out to the right and left during the journey; but the first view of the cathedral of Bayeux put all the others out of my recollection.

There is, in fact, no proper approach to this interesting edifice. The western end is suffocated with houses. Here stands the post-office; and with the most unsuspecting frankness, on the part of the owner, I had permission to examine, with my own hands, within doors, every letter--under the expectation that there were some for myself. Nor was I disappointed.

But you must come with me to the cathedral, and of course we must enter together at the western front. There are five porticoes; the central one being rather large, and the two, on either side, comparatively small. Formerly, these were covered with sculptured figures and ornaments, but the Calvinists in the sixteenth, and the Revolutionists in the eighteenth century, have contrived to render their present aspect mutilated and repulsive in the extreme. On entering, I was struck with the two large transverse Norman arches which bestride the area, or square, for the bases of the two towers.

It is the boldest and finest piece of masonry in the whole building.

The interior disappointed me. It is plain, solid, and divested of ornament.

Hard by the cathedral stood formerly a magnificent episcopal palace.

Upon this palace the old writers dearly loved to expatiate. There is now, however, nothing but a good large comfortable family mansion; sufficient for the purposes of such hospitality and entertainment as the episcopal revenues will afford.

It is high time that you should be introduced in proper form to the famous Bayeux tapestry. Know then, in as few words as possible, that this celebrated piece of tapestry represents chiefly the Invasion of England by William the Conqueror, and the subsequent death of Harold at the battle of Hastings. It measures about 214 English feet in length, by about nineteen inches in width; and is supposed to have been worked under the particular superintendence and direction of Matilda, the wife of the Conqueror. It was formerly exclusively kept and exhibited in the cathedral; but it is now justly retained in the Town Hall, and treasured as the most precious relic among the archives of the city.

There is indeed every reason to consider it as one of the most valuable historical monuments which France possesses. It has also given rise to a great deal of archeological discussion. Montfaucon, Ducarel, and De La Rue, have come forward successively--but more especially the first and last; and Montfaucon in particular has favored the world with copper-plate representations of the whole.

Montfaucon's plates are generally much too small; and the more enlarged ones are too ornamental.

It is right, first of all, that you should have an idea how this piece of tapestry is preserved, or rolled up. You see it here, therefore, precisely as it appears after the person who shows it, takes off the cloth with which it is usually covered. The first portion of the needle-work, representing the emba.s.sy of Harold from Edward the Confessor to William Duke of Normandy, is comparatively much defaced--that is to say, the st.i.tches are worn away, and little more than the ground, or fine close linen cloth remains. It is not far from the beginning--and where the color is fresh, and the st.i.tches are, comparatively, preserved--that you observe the portrait of Harold.

You are to understand that the st.i.tches, if they may be so called, are threads laid side by side--and bound down at intervals by cross st.i.tches, or fastenings--upon rather a fine linen cloth; and that the parts intended to represent flesh are left untouched by the needle.

I obtained a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is worked. The colors are generally a faded or bluish green, crimson, and pink. About the last five feet of this extraordinary roll are in a yet more decayed and imperfect state than the first portion. But the designer of the subject, whoever he was, had an eye throughout to Roman art--as it appeared in its later stages. The folds of the draperies, and the proportions of the figures, are executed with this feeling.

I must observe that, both at top and at bottom of the princ.i.p.al subject, there is a running allegorical ornament, of which I will not incur the presumption to suppose myself a successful interpreter.

The constellations, and the symbols of agriculture and of a rural occupation form the chief subjects of this running ornament. All the inscriptions are executed in capital letters of about an inch in length; and upon the whole, whether this extraordinary and invaluable relic be of the latter end of the eleventh, or the beginning or middle of the twelfth century seems to me a matter of rather a secondary consideration. That it is at once unique and important, must be considered as a position to be neither doubted nor denied.

I have learned even here, of what importance this tapestry roll was considered in the time of Bonaparte's threatened invasion of our country: and that, after displaying it at Paris for two or three months, to awaken the curiosity and excite the love of conquest among the citizens, it was conveyed to one or two sea-port towns, and exhibited upon the stage as a most important material in dramatic effect.

THE CHATEAU OF HENRI IV. AT PAU[A]

[Footnote A: From "A Tour Through the Pyrenees." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1873.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-pa.s.sengers on the points of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement. At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris....

Here are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the motionless oxen as they pa.s.s, you must not look at them; they would carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas.... It was eight o'clock in the morning; not a visitor at the castle, no one in the courts nor on the terrace; I should not have been too much astonished at meeting the Bearnais, "that l.u.s.ty gallant, that very devil," who was sharp enough to get for himself the name of "the good king."

His chateau is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley that any graces and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of pointed roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two ma.s.sive brick towers close the line with their esplanades and battlements. It is connected with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream.

Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north side deranges the symmetry. The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of incongruous masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixt to the wall, a row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age; dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions garlanded with elaborate reliefs. This masquerade of styles troubles the mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about its neighbor.

On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-sh.e.l.l, which was the cradle of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d'Albret, a complete set of furniture in the taste of the Renaissance, striking and somber, painfully labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism.

Jeanne d'Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might, according to her promise, be confined in this castle. "A princess," says D'Aubigne, "having nothing of the woman about her but the s.e.x, a soul entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart unconquerable by adversity."

She sang an old Bearnaise song when she brought him into the world.

They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurancon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown. The child was born in the chamber which opens into the lower tower of Mazeres, on the southwest corner.

His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old, led him through the Catholic army to La Roch.e.l.le, and gave him to her followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and what men! Their descendants were just now pa.s.sing in the streets, going to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Ma.s.sillon.

Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the soul, had its enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon's fire and a soldier's ardor, with abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the ladies.

This is no spectacle of great ma.s.ses of well-disciplined men, coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nerac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pa.s.s, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville. They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune....

The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests. You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of the blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to come to the happy country of the Bearnais to find such melancholy impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man; their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume.

We gazed on the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshaled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart a vague unrest is felt; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery. Suddenly the clock strikes, and one is forced to go and prepare himself to eat his soup between two commercial travelers.

To-day the sun s.h.i.+nes. On my way to the Place Nationale, I remarked a poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coach-house; they have fastened upon it a carrier's sign. The arcades, in small gray stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw, and made the somber corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets with outweigh those one has come to seek.

From the esplanade which is opposite, the whole valley and the mountains beyond may be seen; this first sight of a southern sun, as it breaks from the rainy mists, is admirable; a sheet of white light stretches from one horizon to another without meeting a single cloud.

The heart expands in this immense s.p.a.ce; the very air is festal; the dazzled eyes close beneath the brightness which deluges them and which runs over, radiated from the burning dome of heaven. The current of the river sparkles like a girdle of jewels; the chains of hills, yesterday veiled and damp, extend at their own sweet will beneath the warming, penetrating rays, and mount range upon range to spread out their green robe to the sun.

In the distance, the blue Pyrenees look like a bank of clouds; the air that bathes them shapes them into aerial forms, vapory phantoms, the farthest of which vanish in the canescent horizon--dim contours, that might be taken for a fugitive sketch from the lightest of pencils. In the midst of the serrate chain the peak Midi d' Ossau lifts its abrupt cone; at this distance, forms are softened, colors are blended, the Pyrenees are only the graceful bordering of a smiling landscape and of the magnificent sky. There is nothing imposing about them nor severe; the beauty here is serene, and the pleasure pure.

The statue of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune, his proud bearing. His air is neither that of a great nor a good man, nor of a man of intellect; his face is discontented, and one would say that he was bored with Pau. I am not sure that he was wrong: and yet the city pa.s.ses for agreeable, the climate is very mild, and invalids who fear the cold pa.s.s the winter in it.

CHATEAUX IN THE VALLEY OF THE LOIRE[A]

[Footnote A: From "Outre-Mer." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

In the beautiful month of October I made a foot excursion along the banks of the Loire, from Orleans to Tours. This luxuriant region is justly called the garden of France. From Orleans to Blois, the whole valley of the Loire is one continued vineyard. The bright green foliage of the vine spreads, like the undulations of the sea, over the landscape, with here and there a silver flash of the river, a sequestered hamlet, or the towers of an old chateau, to enliven and variegate the scene.

The vintage had already commenced. The peasantry were busy in the fields--the song that cheered their labor was on the breeze, and the heavy wagon tottered by, laden with the cl.u.s.ters of the vine.