A Little Tour of France Part 4

I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Cafe Serin, where, after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of hours, to Nantes--an establishment remarkable for its great size and its air of tarnished splendour, its brown gilding and smoky frescoes, as also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an una.s.suming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of the historical monuments of Angers.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter xv

[Nantes]

If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience rather than of sentiment; though indeed I spent them in a big circular room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look--a look that consoled me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fas.h.i.+oned inn (it had a huge windy _porte-cochere_, and you climbed a vast black stone staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, surrounded with other tall houses and occupied on one side by the theatre, a pompous building decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes belongs to the cla.s.s of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much commercial movement. It is a s.p.a.cious, rather regular city, looking, in the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It derives its princ.i.p.al character from the handsome quays on the Loire, which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous too in the other streets)--houses with big _entresols_ marked by arched windows, cla.s.sic pediments, balcony-rails of fine old iron-work. These features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has the cool, neutral tone of colour that one finds so often in French water-side places--the bright greyness which is the tone of French landscape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an eminently well-established, air. During a day pa.s.sed in it of course I had time to go to the Musee; the more so that I have a weakness for provincial museums--a sentiment that depends but little on the quality of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often curious; and indeed from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind, there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fas.h.i.+ons, the snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the l.u.s.treless gem of the museum--these things have a mild historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all ill.u.s.trate something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes ill.u.s.trate the taste of a successful warrior, having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's marshal Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State.

Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very honourable practice--the purchase by the Government of a certain number of "pictures of the year," which are presently distributed in the provinces. Governments succeed each other and bid for success by different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should say here, in every platform. The works of art are often ill-selected--there is an official taste which you immediately recognise--but the custom is essentially liberal, and a Government which should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing in this particular Musee that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman by Ingres--very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a great deal of style.

There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size, and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic--a tall elegant building of the sixteenth century. The chateau is naturally not wanting in history.

It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought, with the rest of the province, by the d.u.c.h.ess Anne, the last representative of that race, as her dowry, to Charles VIII. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of the kings of France, from Louis XI. downward; and also that it has served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other distinguished persons, from the horrible Marechal de Retz, who in the fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of hundred young children, sacrificed in abominable rites, to the ardent d.u.c.h.ess of Berry, mother of the Count of Chambord, who was confined there for a few hours in 1832, just after her arrest in a neighbouring house. I looked at the house in question--you may see it from the platform in front of the chateau--and tried to figure to myself that embarra.s.sing scene. The d.u.c.h.ess, after having unsuccessfully raised the standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons) in the legitimist Bretagne, and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe, had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.

For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the castle indicated also another historic spot, a house with little _tourelles_ on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not in a position to answer for this pedigree.

There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the horrors of the Terror of 1793, the b.l.o.o.d.y reign of the monster Carrier and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.

The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air n.o.ble_, in France always reminds me of those dreadful years--of the street-scenes of the Revolution. Superficially, the a.s.sociation is incongruous, for nothing could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the architecture of the period--the clear grey stone, the high pilasters, the arching lines of the _entresol_, the cla.s.sic pediment, the slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers, makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best to recover its reputation as soon as you have pa.s.sed the threshold.

Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.

Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.

The great treasure of Nantes is the two n.o.ble sepulchral monuments which occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its n.o.bleness) the rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany, and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Chateau de Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make room for her, and where she herself died. Transferred to the cathedral from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of the most brilliant works of the French Renaissance. It has a splendid effect and is in perfect preservation. A great table of black marble supports the reclining figures of the duke and d.u.c.h.ess, who lie there peacefully and majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads each on a cus.h.i.+on, the pair of which are supported from behind by three charming little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a lion and a greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of the table is a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately dressed, with a symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their contemporary faces and clothes, which give them the air of realistic portraits, are truthful and living, if not remarkably beautiful. Round the sides of the tomb are small images of the apostles. There is a kind of masculine completeness in the work, and a certain robustness of taste.

In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to say in regard to the great final contrast--the contrast between the immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption, of his memory. A modern tomb, in comparison, is a sceptical affair; it insists too little on the honours. I say this in the face of the fact that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs.

Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoriciere, the defender of the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This n.o.ble work, from the hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation of sculptors who have revived in France an art of which our over-dressed century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune--an echo with a beautiful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble elaborately worked with arabesques and cherubs, in a relief so low that it gives the work a certain look of being softened and worn by time, lies the body of the Breton soldier with a crucifix clasped to his breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene, robust young mother, beautiful in line and att.i.tude; the other a lean and vigilant young man, in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These figures contain abundant a.s.surance that M. Paul Dubois has been attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a splendid example and a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'Medici at Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The interest of the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind of moral good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art, and which, united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a remarkable sense of form, produces an impression of deep refinement. The whole monument is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that this impression on the part of the spectator is the happiest possible.

It explains much of the great beauty, and it also explains perhaps a little of the slight pedantry. That word, however, is scarcely in place; I only mean that M. Dubois has made a visible effort, which has visibly triumphed. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in admiration of the deep aesthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste, revealed by such work. After that I only hope that, Giuseppe Garibaldi may have somewhere or other some commemoration as distinguished.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter xvi

[La Roch.e.l.le]

To go from Nantes to La Roch.e.l.le you travel straight southward across the historic _bocage_ of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting.

The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses, orchards, hedges, and with trees more spreading and st.u.r.dy than the traveller is apt to find the feathery foliage of France. It is true that as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay (from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La Roch.e.l.le, however, the prospect brightened considerably, and the railway kept its course beside a charming little ca.n.a.l, or ca.n.a.lised river, bordered with trees and with small, neat, bright-coloured and yet old-fas.h.i.+oned cottages and villas, which stood back, on the farther side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf.

The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful, though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Roch.e.l.le, which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating little town, a quite original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean--in which, after all, it _is_ Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to find the careless grace of those lat.i.tudes even in things of which it may be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern.

To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft a sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and to go from New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter myself, on reaching La Roch.e.l.le, that I was already in the Midi, and to perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the _caractere meridional_. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For that matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound--to wake up there, as it were--would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive shades of difference by which it ceases to be the north. These shades are exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye for them all.

If he perceives them at New York and Philadelphia--we imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston--how could he fail to perceive them at La Roch.e.l.le? The streets of this dear little city are lined with arcades--good, big, straddling arcades of stone, such as befit a land of hot summers and which recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky porticos of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide _place d'armes_ which looked for all the world like the piazza of some dead Italian town, empty, sunny, gra.s.s-grown, with a row of yellow houses overhanging it, an unfrequented cafe with a striped awning, a tall, cold, florid, uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on one side, and on the other a shady walk which forms part of an old rampart. I followed this walk for some time, under the stunted trees, beside the gra.s.s-covered bastions; it is very charming, winding and wandering, always with trees. Beneath the rampart is a tidal river, and on the other side, for a long distance, the mossy walls of the immense garden of a seminary. Three hundred years ago La Roch.e.l.le was the great French stronghold of Protestantism, but to-day it appears to be a nursery of Papists.

The walk upon the rampart led me round to one of the gates of the town, where I found some small modern fortifications and sundry red-legged soldiers, and, beyond the fortifications, another shady walk--a _mail_, as the French say, as well as a _champ de manoeuvre_--on which latter expanse the poor little red-legs were doing their exercise. It was all very quiet and very picturesque, rather in miniature; and at once very tidy and a little out of repair. This, however, was but a meagre back-view of La Roch.e.l.le, or poor side-view at best. There are other gates than the small fortified aperture just mentioned; one of them, an old grey arch beneath a fine clock-tower, I had pa.s.sed through on my way from the station. This substantial Tour de l'Horloge separates the town proper from the port; for beyond the old grey arch the place presents its bright, expressive little face to the sea. I had a charming walk about the harbour and along the stone piers and sea-walls that shut it in. This indeed, to take things in their order, was after I had had my breakfast (which I took on arriving) and after I had been to the _hotel de ville_. The inn had a long narrow garden behind it, with some very tall trees; and pa.s.sing through this garden to a dim and secluded _salle a manger_, buried in the heavy shade, I had, while I sat at my repast, a feeling of seclusion which amounted almost to a sense of incarceration.

I lost this sense, however, after I had paid my bill, and went out to look for traces of the famous siege, which is the princ.i.p.al t.i.tle of La Roch.e.l.le to renown. I had come thither partly because I thought it would be interesting to stand for a few moments in so gallant a spot, and partly because, I confess, I had a curiosity to see what had been the starting-point of the Huguenot emigrants who founded the town of New Roch.e.l.le in the State of New York, a place in which I had pa.s.sed sundry memorable hours. It was strange to think, as I strolled through the peaceful little port, that these quiet waters, during the wars of religion, had swelled with a formidable naval power. The Rochelais had fleets and admirals, and their stout little Protestant bottoms carried defiance up and down.

To say that I found any traces of the siege would be to misrepresent the taste for vivid whitewash by which La Roch.e.l.le is distinguished to-day.

The only trace is the dent in the marble top of the table on which, in the _hotel de ville_, Jean Guiton, the mayor of the city, brought down his dagger with an oath when in 1628 the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary was the soul of the resistance; he held out from February

[Ill.u.s.tration: LA ROCh.e.l.lE]

to October in the midst of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pa.s.s. I limit my ambition in these light pages to speaking of those things of which I have personally received an impression, and I have no such impression of the defence of La Roch.e.l.le. The _hotel de ville_ is a pretty little building, in the style of the Renaissance of Francis I.; but it has left much of its interest in the hands of the restorers. It has been "done up" without mercy; its natural place would be at Roch.e.l.le the New. A sort of battlemented curtain, flanked with turrets, divides it from the street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where you discover the face of the building. It has statues set into it and is raised upon a very low and very deep arcade. The princ.i.p.al function of the deferential old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your attention to the indented table of Jean Guiton; but she shows you other objects of interest besides. The interior is absolutely new and extremely sumptuous, abounding in tapestries, upholstery, morocco, velvet, satin.

This is especially the case with a really beautiful _grande salle_, where, surrounded with the most expensive upholstery, the mayor holds his official receptions. (So at least said my worthy portress.) The mayors of La Roch.e.l.le appear to have changed a good deal since the days of the grim Guiton; but these evidences of munic.i.p.al splendour are interesting for the light they throw on French manners. Imagine the mayor of an English or an American town of twenty thousand inhabitants holding magisterial soirees in the town hall! The said _grande salle_, which is unchanged in form and in its larger features, is, I believe, the room in which the Rochelais debated as to whether they should shut themselves up, and decided in the affirmative. The table and chair of Jean Guiton have been restored, like everything else, and are very elegant and coquettish pieces of furniture--incongruous relics of a season of starvation and blood. I believe that Protestantism is somewhat shrunken to-day at La Roch.e.l.le, and has taken refuge mainly in the _haute societe_ and in a single place of wors.h.i.+p. There was nothing particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as, after leaving the _hotel de ville_, I walked along the empty porticos and out of the Tour de l'Horloge, which I have already mentioned. If I stopped and looked up at this venerable monument, it was not to ascertain the hour, for I foresaw that I should have more time at La Roch.e.l.le than I knew what to do with; but because its high, grey, weather-beaten face was an obvious subject for a sketch.

The little port, which has two basins and is accessible only to vessels of light tonnage, had a certain gaiety and as much local colour as you please. Fisher-folk of picturesque type were strolling about, most of them Bretons; several of the men with handsome, simple faces, not at all brutal, and with a splendid brownness--the golden-brown colour on cheek and beard that you see on an old Venetian sail. It was a squally, showery day, with sudden drizzles of suns.h.i.+ne; rows of rich-toned fis.h.i.+ng-smacks were drawn up along the quays. The harbour is effective to the eye by reason of three battered old towers which at different points overhang it and look infinitely weather-washed and sea-silvered.

The most striking of these, the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big grey ma.s.s

[Ill.u.s.tration]

of the fifteenth century, flanked with turrets and crowned with a Gothic steeple. I found it was called by the people of the place the Tour des Quatre Sergents, though I know not what connection it has with the touching history of the four young sergeants of the garrison of La Roch.e.l.le who were arrested in 1821 as conspirators against the Government of the Bourbons, and executed, amid general indignation, in Paris in the following year. The quaint little walk, with its label of Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge, leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and pa.s.ses under it. This walk has the top of the old town-wall, towards the sea, for a parapet on one side, and is bordered on the other with decent but irregular little tenements of fishermen, where brown old women, whose caps are as white as if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In this direction there is a very pretty stretch of sh.o.r.e, out of the town, through the fortifications (which are Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery which edges the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big etabliss.e.m.e.nt des Bains.

It was too late in the year to bathe, and the etabliss.e.m.e.nt had the bankrupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season; so I turned my back upon it and gained, by a circuit in the course of which there were sundry water-side items to observe, the other side of the cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater and a still longer sea-wall, on which I walked a while, to inhale the strong, salt breath of the Bay of Biscay. La Roch.e.l.le serves, in the months of July and August, as a _station de bains_ for a modest provincial society; and, putting aside the question of inns, it must be charming on summer afternoons.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter xvii

[Poitiers]

It is an injustice to Poitiers to approach her by night, as I did some three hours after leaving La Roch.e.l.le; for what Poitiers has of best, as they would say at Poitiers, is the appearance she presents to the arriving stranger who puts his head out of the window of the train. I gazed into the gloom from such an aperture before we got into the station, for I remembered the impression received on another occasion; but I saw nothing save the universal night, spotted here and there with an ugly railway lamp. It was only as I departed, the following day, that I a.s.sured myself that Poitiers still makes something of the figure she ought on the summit of her considerable hill. I have a kindness for any little group of towers, any cl.u.s.ter of roofs and chimneys, that lift themselves from an eminence over which a long road ascends in zigzags; such a picture creates for the moment a presumption that you are in Italy, and even leads you to believe that if you mount the winding road you will come to an old town-wall, an expanse of creviced brownness, and pa.s.s under a gateway surmounted by the arms of a mediaeval despot. Why I should find it a pleasure in France to imagine myself in Italy, is more than I can say; the illusion has never lasted long enough to be a.n.a.lysed. From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high; and indeed, the evening I reached it, the interminable climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had selected, which I found at the station, gave me the measure of its commanding position. This hotel, "magnifique construction ornee de statues," as the Guide-Joanne, usually so reticent, takes the trouble to announce, has an omnibus, and, I suppose, has statues, though I didn't perceive them; but it has very little else save immemorial acc.u.mulations of dirt. It is magnificent, if you will, but it is not even relatively proper; and a dirty inn has always seemed to me the dirtiest of human things--it has so many opportunities to betray itself.

Poitiers covers a large s.p.a.ce, and is as crooked and straggling as you please; but these advantages are not accompanied with any very salient features or any great wealth of architecture. Although there are few picturesque houses, however, there are two or three curious old churches. Notre Dame la Grande, in the market-place, a small romanesque structure of the twelfth century, has a most interesting and venerable exterior. Composed, like all the churches of Poitiers, of a light brown stone with a yellowish tinge, it is covered with primitive but ingenious sculptures, and is really an impressive monument. Within, it has lately been daubed over with the most hideous decorative painting that was ever inflicted upon pa.s.sive pillars and indifferent vaults. This battered yet coherent little edifice has the touching look that resides in everything supremely old; it has arrived at the age at which such things cease to feel the years; the waves of time have worn its edges to a kind of patient dulness; there is something mild and smooth, like the stillness, the deafness, of an octogenarian, even in its rudeness of ornament, and it has become insensible to differences of a century or two. The cathedral interested me much less than Our Lady the Great, and I have not the spirit to go into statistics about it. It is not statistical to say that the cathedral stands half-way down the hill of Poitiers, in a quiet and gra.s.s-grown _place_, with an approach of crooked lanes and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking dimension is the width of its facade. This width is extraordinary, but it fails, somehow, to give n.o.bleness to the edifice, which looks within (Murray makes the remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave and two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave; and there are some very fearful modern pictures, which you may see much better than you usually see those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glowing side-chapels, there being no fine old gla.s.s to diffuse a kindly gloom.

The sacristan of the cathedral showed me something much better than all this bright bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the small Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious object at Poitiers. It is an early Christian chapel, one of the earliest in France; originally, it would seem--that is, in the sixth or seventh century--a baptistery, but converted into a church while the Christian era was still comparatively young. The Temple de Saint-Jean is therefore a monument even more venerable than Notre Dame la Grande, and that numbness of age which I imputed to Notre Dame ought to reside in still larger measure in its crude and colourless little walls. I call them crude, in spite of their having been baked through by the centuries, only because, although certain rude arches and carvings are let into them and they are surmounted at either end with a small gable, they have (so far as I can remember) little fascination of surface. Notre Dame is still expressive, still pretends to be alive; but the temple has delivered its message and is completely at rest. It retains a kind of atrium, on the level of the street, from which you descend to the original floor, now uncovered, but buried for years under a false bottom. A semicircular apse was, apparently at the time of its conversion into a church, thrown out from the east wall. In the middle is the cavity of the old baptismal font.

The walls and vaults are covered with traces of extremely archaic frescoes, attributed, I believe, to the twelfth century. These vague, gaunt, staring fragments of figures are, to a certain extent, a reminder of some of the early Christian churches in Rome; they even faintly recalled to me the great mosaics of Ravenna. The Temple de Saint-Jean has neither the antiquity nor the completeness of those extraordinary monuments, nearly the most impressive in Europe; but, as one may say, it is very well for Poitiers.

Not far from it, in a lonely corner which was animated for the moment by the vociferations of several old women who were selling tapers, presumably for the occasion of a particular devotion, is the graceful romanesque church erected in the twelfth century to Saint Radegonde--a lady who found means to be a saint even in the capacity of a Merovingian queen. It bears a general resemblance to Notre Dame la Grande, and, as I remember it, is corrugated in somewhat the same manner with porous-looking carvings; but I confess that what I chiefly recollect is the row of old women sitting in front of it, each with a tray of waxen tapers in her lap, and upbraiding me for my neglect of the opportunity to offer such a tribute to the saint. I know not whether this privilege is occasional or constant; within the church there was no appearance of a festival, and I see that the name-day of Saint Radegonde occurs in August, so that the importunate old women sit there always perhaps and deprive of its propriety the epithet I just applied to this provincial corner. In spite of the old women, however, I suspect that the place is lonely; and indeed it is perhaps the old women who have made the desolation.

The lion of Poitiers in the eyes of the natives is doubtless the Palais de Justice, in the shadow of which the statue-guarded hotel, just mentioned, erects itself; and the gem of the court-house, which has a prosy modern front, with pillars and a high flight of steps, is the curious _salle des pas perdus_, or central hall, out of which the different tribunals open. This is a feature of every French court-house, and seems the result of a conviction that a palace of justice--the French deal in much finer names than we--should be in some degree palatial. The great hall at Poitiers has a long pedigree, as its walls date back to the twelfth century and its open wooden roof, as well as the remarkable trio of chimney-pieces at the right end of the room as you enter, to the fifteenth. The three tall fireplaces, side by side, with a delicate gallery running along the top of them, const.i.tute the originality of this ancient chamber, and make one think of the groups that must formerly have gathered there--of all the wet boot-soles, the trickling doublets, the stiffened fingers, the rheumatic shanks, that must have been presented to such an incomparable focus of heat. To-day, I am afraid, these mighty hearths are for ever cold; justice is probably administered with the aid of a modern _calorifere_, and the walls of the palace are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts the three fireplaces are high Gothic windows, the tracery of which masks, in some sort, the chimneys; and in each angle of this and of the room to the right and left of the trio of chimneys is an open-work spiral staircase, ascending to--I forget where; perhaps to the roof of the edifice. The whole side of the _salle_ is very lordly, and seems to express an unstinted hospitality, to extend the friendliest of all invitations, to bid the whole world come and get warm. It was the invention of John, Duke of Berry and Count of Poitou, about 1395. I give this information on the authority of the Guide-Joanne, from which source I gather much other curious learning; as, for instance, that it was in this building, when it had surely a very different front, that Charles VII. was proclaimed king in 1422; and that here Jeanne Darc was subjected, in 1429, to the inquisition of sundry doctors and matrons.

The most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de Blossac--a small public garden at one end of the flat top of the hill.

It has a happy look of the last century (having been arranged at that period), and a beautiful sweep of view over the surrounding country, and especially of the course of the little river Clain, which winds about a part of the base of the big mound of Poitiers. The limit of this dear little garden is formed, on the side that turns away from the town, by the rampart erected in the fourteenth century and by its big semicircular bastions. This rampart, of great length, has a low parapet; you look over it at the charming little vegetable-gardens with which the base of the hill appears exclusively to be garnished. The whole prospect is delightful, especially the details of the part just under the walls, at the end of the walk. Here the river makes a s.h.i.+ning twist which a painter might have invented, and the side of the hill is terraced into several hedges--a sort of tangle of small blooming patches and little pavilions with peaked roofs and green shutters. It is idle to attempt to reproduce all this in words; it should be reproduced only in water-colours. The reader, however, will already have remarked that disparity in these ineffectual pages, which are pervaded by the attempt to sketch without a palette or brushes. He will doubtless also be struck with the grovelling vision which, on such a spot as the ramparts of Poitiers, peoples itself with carrots and cabbages rather than with images of the Black Prince and the captive king. I am not sure that in looking out from the Promenade de Blossac you command the old battle-field; it is enough that it was not far off, and that the great rout of Frenchmen poured into the walls of Poitiers, leaving on the ground a number of the fallen equal to the little army (eight thousand) of the invader. I did think of the battle. I wondered, rather helplessly, where it had taken place; and I came away (as the reader will see from the preceding sentence) without finding out. This indifference, however, was a result rather of a general dread of military topography than of a want of admiration of this particular victory, which I have always supposed to be one of the most brilliant on record. Indeed, I should be almost ashamed, and very much at a loss, to say what light it was that this glorious day seemed to me to have left for ever on the horizon, and why the very name of the place had always caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the Black Prince as he lies for ever at rest in the choir of Canterbury: _a la mort ne pensai-je mye_. Nevertheless, the victory of Poitiers declines to lose itself in these considerations; the sense of it is a part of our heritage, the joy of it a part of our imagination, and it filters down through centuries and migrations till it t.i.tillates a New Yorker who forgets in his elation that he happens at that moment to be enjoying the hospitality of France. It was something done, I know not how justly, for England; and what was done in the fourteenth century for England was done also for New York.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter xviii

[Angouleme]

If it was really for the sake of the Black Prince that I had stopped at Poitiers (for my prevision of Notre Dame la Grande and of the little temple of St. John was of the dimmest), I ought to have stopped at Angouleme for the sake of David and Eve Sechard, of Lucien de Rubempre and of Madame de Bargeton, who when she wore a _toilette etudiee_ sported a Jewish turban ornamented with an Eastern brooch, a scarf of gauze, a necklace of cameos, and a robe of "painted muslin," whatever that may be; treating herself to these luxuries out of an income of twelve thousand francs. The persons I have mentioned have not that vagueness of ident.i.ty which is the misfortune of historical characters; they are real, supremely real, thanks to their affiliation to the great Balzac, who had invented an artificial reality which was as much better than the vulgar article as mock-turtle soup is than the liquid it emulates. The first time I read "Les Illusions Perdues" I should have refused to believe that I was capable of pa.s.sing the old capital of Anjou without alighting to visit the Houmeau. But we never know what we are capable of till we are tested, as I reflected when I found myself looking back at Angouleme from the window of the train just after we had emerged from the long tunnel that pa.s.ses under the town. This tunnel perforates the hill on which, like Poitiers, Angouleme rears itself, and which gives it an elevation still greater than that of Poitiers. You may have a tolerable look at the cathedral without leaving the railway carriage, for it stands just above the tunnel and is exposed, much foreshortened, to the spectator below. There is evidently a charming walk round the plateau of the town commanding those pretty views of which Balzac gives an account. But the train whirled me away, and these are my only impressions. The truth is that I had no need, just at that moment, of putting myself into communication with Balzac, for opposite to me in the compartment were a couple of figures almost as vivid as the actors in the "Comedie Humaine." One of these was a very genial and dirty old priest, and the other was a reserved and concentrated young monk--the latter (by which I mean a monk of any kind) being a rare sight to-day in France. This young man indeed was mitigatedly monastic. He had a big brown frock and cowl, but he had also a s.h.i.+rt and a pair of shoes; he had, instead of a hempen scourge round his waist, a stout leather thong, and he carried with him a very profane little valise. He also read, from beginning to end, the _Figaro_ which the old priest, who had done the same, presented to him; and he looked altogether as if, had he not been a monk, he would have made a distinguished officer of engineers.