A Little Tour of France Part 9

There was no rain; there was only, all the afternoon, a mild, moist wind and a sky magnificently black; which made a _repoussoir_ for the paler cliffs of the fountain. The road, by train, crosses a flat, expressionless country, towards the range of arid hills which lie to the east of Avignon, and which spring (says Murray) from the ma.s.s of the Mont-Ventoux. At Isle-sur-Sorgues, at the end of about an hour, the foreground becomes much more animated and the distance much more (or perhaps I should say much less) actual. I descended from the train and ascended to the top of an omnibus which was to convey me into the recesses of the hills. It had not been among my previsions that I should be indebted to a vehicle of that kind for an opportunity to commune with the spirit of Petrarch; and I had to borrow what consolation I could from the fact that at least I had the omnibus to myself. I was the only pa.s.senger; every one else was at Avignon watching the Rhone. I lost no time in perceiving that I could not have come to Vaucluse at a better moment. The Sorgues was almost as full as the Rhone, and of a colour much more romantic. Rushing along its narrowed channel under an avenue of fine _platanes_ (it is confined between solid little embankments of stone), with the good wives of the village, on the brink, washing their linen in its contemptuous flood, it gave promise of high entertainment farther on.

The drive to Vaucluse is of about three-quarters of an hour; and though the river, as I say, was promising, the big pale hills, as the road winds into them, did not look as if their slopes of stone and shrub were a nestling-place for superior scenery. It is a part of the merit of Vaucluse indeed that it is as much as possible a surprise. The place has a right to its name, for the valley appears impenetrable until you get fairly into it. One perverse twist follows another until the omnibus suddenly deposits you in front of the "cabinet" of Petrarch. After that you have only to walk along the left bank of the river. The cabinet of Petrarch is to-day a hideous little _cafe_, bedizened, like a signboard, with extracts from the ingenious "Rime." The poet and his lady are of course the stock-in-trade of the little village, which has had for several generations the privilege of attracting young couples engaged in their wedding-tour and other votaries of the tender pa.s.sion. The place has long been familiar, on festal Sundays, to the swains of Avignon and their attendant nymphs. The little fish of the Sorgues are much esteemed, and, eaten on the spot, they const.i.tute, for the children of the once Papal city, the cla.s.sic suburban dinner. Vaucluse has been turned to account, however, not only by sentiment, but by industry; the banks of the stream being disfigured by a pair of hideous mills for the manufacture of paper and of wool. In an enterprising and economical age the water-power of the Sorgues was too obvious a motive; and I must say that, as the torrent rushed past them, the wheels of the dirty little factories appeared to turn merrily enough. The footpath on the left bank, of which I just spoke, carries one fortunately quite out of sight of them, and out of sound as well, inasmuch as on the day of my visit the stream itself, which was in tremendous force, tended more and more, as one approached the fountain, to fill the valley with its own echoes.

Its colour was magnificent, and the whole spectacle more like a corner of Switzerland than a nook in Provence. The protrusions of the mountain shut it in, and you penetrate to the bottom of the recess which they form. The Sorgues rushes and rushes; it is almost like Niagara after the jump of the cataract. There are dreadful little booths beside the path, for the sale of photographs and _immortelles_--I don't know what one is to do with the immortelles--where you are offered a brush dipped in tar to write your name withal on the rocks. Thousands of vulgar persons, of both s.e.xes, and exclusively, it appeared, of the French nationality, had availed themselves of this implement, for every square inch of accessible stone was scored over with some human appellation. It is not only we in America, therefore, who besmirch our scenery; the practice

[Ill.u.s.tration: VAUCLUSE--RUINS OF CASTLE]

exists, in a more organised form (like everything else in France), in the country of good taste. You leave the little booths and stalls behind; but the bescribbled crag, bristling with human vanity, keeps you company even when you stand face to face with the fountain. This happens when you find yourself at the foot of the enormous straight cliff out of which the river gushes. It rears itself to an extraordinary height--a huge forehead of bare stone--looking as if it were the half of a tremendous mound split open by volcanic action. The little valley, seeing it there, at a bend, stops suddenly and receives in its arms the magical spring. I call it magical on account of the mysterious manner in which it comes into the world, with the huge shoulder of the mountain rising over it as if to protect the secret. From under the mountain it silently rises, without visible movement, filling a small natural basin with the stillest blue water. The contrast between the stillness of this basin and the agitation of the water directly after it has overflowed, const.i.tutes half the charm of Vaucluse. The violence of the stream when once it has been set loose on the rocks is as fascinating and indescribable as that of other cataracts; and the rocks in the bed of the Sorgues have been arranged by a master-hand. The setting of the phenomenon struck me as so simple and so fine--the vast sad cliff, covered with the afternoon light, still and solid for ever, while the liquid element rages and roars at its base--that I had no difficulty in understanding the celebrity of Vaucluse. I understood it, but I will not say that I understood Petrarch. He must have been very self-supporting, and Madonna Laura must indeed have been much to him.

The aridity of the hills that shut in the valley is complete, and the whole impression is best conveyed by that very expressive French epithet _morne_. There are the very fragmentary ruins of a castle (of one of the bishops of Cavaillon) on a high spur of the mountain, above the river; and there is another remnant of a feudal habitation on one of the more accessible ledges. Having half an hour to spare before my omnibus was to leave (I must beg the reader's pardon for this atrociously false note; call the vehicle a _diligence_, and for some undiscoverable reason the offence is minimised), I clambered up to this latter spot and sat among the rocks in the company of a few stunted olives. The Sorgues, beneath me, reaching the plain, flung itself crookedly across the meadows like an unrolled blue ribbon. I tried to think of the _amant de Laure_, for literature's sake; but I had no great success, and the most I could do was to say to myself that I must try again. Several months have elapsed since then, and I am ashamed to confess that the trial has not yet come off. The only very definite conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is indeed c.o.c.kneyfied, but that I should have been a fool, all the same, not to come.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter x.x.xvi

[Orange]

Mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hotel de Petrarque et de Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light.

This village, where at six o'clock every one appeared to have gone to bed, was fairly darkened by its high, dense plane-trees, under which the rushing river, on a level with its parapets, looked unnaturally, almost wickedly, blue. It was a glimpse which has left a picture in my mind: the little closed houses, the place empty and soundless in the autumn dusk but for the noise of waters, and in the middle, amid the blackness of the shade, the gleam of the swift, strange tide. At the station every one was talking of the inundation being in many places an accomplished fact, and, in particular, of the condition of the Durance at some point that I have forgotten. At Avignon, an hour later, I found the water in some of the streets. The sky cleared in the evening, the moon lighted up the submerged suburbs, and the population again collected in the high places to enjoy the spectacle. It exhibited a certain sameness, however, and by nine o'clock there was considerable animation in the Place Crillon, where there is nothing to be seen but the front of the theatre and of several cafes--in addition indeed to a statue of this celebrated brave, whose valour redeemed some of the numerous military disasters of the reign of Louis XV. The next morning the lower quarters of the town were in a pitiful state: the situation seemed to me odious. To express my disapproval of it I lost no time in taking the train to Orange, which, with its other attractions, had the merit of not being seated on the Rhone. It was destiny to move northward; but even if I had been at liberty to follow a less unnatural course I should not then have undertaken it, inasmuch as the railway between Avignon and Ma.r.s.eilles was credibly reported to be (in places) under water. This was the case with almost everything but the line itself on the way to Orange. The day proved splendid, and its brilliancy only lighted up the desolation.

Farmhouses and cottages were up to their middle in the yellow liquidity; haystacks looked like dull little islands; windows and doors gaped open, without faces; and interruption and flight were represented in the scene. It was brought home to me that the _populations rurales_ have many different ways of suffering, and my heart glowed with a grateful sense of c.o.c.kneyism. It was under the influence of this emotion that I alighted at Orange to visit a collection of eminently civil monuments.

The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so fine that I will let the word pa.s.s. One of them is a triumphal arch, supposedly of the period of Marcus Aurelius; the other is a fragment, magnificent in its ruin, of a Roman theatre. But for these fine Roman remains and for its name, Orange is a perfectly featureless little town, without the Rhone--which, as I have mentioned, is several miles distant--to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things that this obscure French borough--obscure, I mean, in our modern era, for the Gallo-Roman Arausio must have been, judging it by its arches and theatre, a place of some importance--should have given its name to the heirs-apparent of the throne of Holland and been borne by a king of England who had sovereign rights over it. During the Middle Ages it formed part of an independent princ.i.p.ality; but in 1531 it fell, by the marriage of one of its princesses, who had inherited it, into the family of Na.s.sau. I read in my indispensable Murray that it was made over to France by the treaty of Utrecht. The arch of triumph, which stands a little way out of the town, is rather a pretty than an imposing vestige of the Romans. If it had greater purity of style one might say of it that it belonged to the same family of monuments as the Maison Carree at Nimes. It has three pa.s.sages--the middle much higher than the others--and a very elevated attic. The vaults of the pa.s.sages are richly sculptured, and the whole structure is covered with friezes and military trophies. This sculpture is rather mixed; much of it is broken and defaced, and the rest seemed to me ugly, though its workmanship is praised. The arch is at once well preserved and much injured. Its general ma.s.s is there, and as Roman monuments go it is remarkably perfect; but it has suffered, in patches, from the extremity of restoration. It is not, on the whole, of absorbing interest. It has a charm, nevertheless, which comes partly from its soft, bright yellow colour, partly from a certain elegance of shape, of expression; and on that well-washed Sunday morning, with its brilliant tone, surrounded by its circle of thin poplars, with the green country lying beyond it and a low blue horizon showing through its empty portals, it made, very sufficiently, a picture that hangs itself to one of the lateral hooks of the memory. I can take down the modest composition and place it before me as I write. I see the shallow, shining puddles in the hard, fair French road; the pale blue sky, diluted by days of rain; the disgarnished autumnal fields; the mild sparkle of the low horizon; the solitary figure in sabots, with a bundle under its arm, advancing along the _chaussee_; and in the middle I see the little ochre-coloured trio of apertures, which, in spite of its antiquity, looks bright and gay, as everything must look in France of a fresh Sunday morning.

It is true that this was not exactly the appearance of the Roman theatre, which lies on the other side of the town; a fact that did not prevent me from making my way to it in less than five minutes, through a succession of little streets concerning which I have no observations to record. None of the Roman remains in the south of France are more impressive than this stupendous fragment. An enormous mound rises above the place, which was formerly occupied--I quote from Murray--first by a citadel of the Romans, then by a castle of the princes of Na.s.sau, razed by Louis XIV. Facing this hill a mighty wall erects itself, thirty-six metres high and composed of ma.s.sive blocks of dark brown stone simply laid one on the other; the whole naked, rugged

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORANGE--THE THEATRE.]

surface of which suggests a natural cliff (say of the Vaucluse order) rather than an effort of human or even of Roman labour. It is the biggest thing at Orange--it is bigger than all Orange put together--and its permanent ma.s.siveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it presents to the town--the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets perforated with holes to receive the staves of the _velarium_--bears the traces of more than one tier of ornamental arches; though how these flat arches were applied, or incrusted, upon the wall, I do not profess to explain. You pa.s.s through a diminutive postern--which seems in proportion about as high as the entrance of a rabbit-hutch--into the lodge of the custodian, who introduces you to the interior of the theatre. Here the ma.s.s of the hill affronts you, which the ingenious Romans treated simply as the material of their auditorium. They inserted their stone seats, in a semicircle, in the slope of the hill, and planted their colossal wall opposite to it. This wall, from the inside, is, if possible, even more imposing. It formed the back of the stage, the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It contains three doors, the middle one being the highest and having above it, far aloft, a deep niche apparently intended for an imperial statue.

A few of the benches remain on the hillside, which, however, is mainly a confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill, high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the back of the scene, the s.p.a.ce left between it and the chord of the semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers placed in a line like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the softness of melancholy, of the theatre at Aries; but it is more extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being enacted there--

"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."

At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--immense in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, _as you_ face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous alt.i.tude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to the theatre. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic, bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand breakfast at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a stable of the Roman days.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter x.x.xvii

[Macon]

I have been trying to remember whether I fasted all the way to Macon, which I reached at an advanced hour of the evening, and think I must have done so except for the purchase of a box of nougat at Montelimart (the place is famous for the manufacture of this confection, which, at the station, is hawked at the windows of the train) and for a bouillon, very much later, at Lyons. The journey beside the Rhone--past Valence, past Tournon, past Vienne--would have been charming, on that luminous Sunday, but for two disagreeable accidents. The express from Ma.r.s.eilles, which I took at Orange, was full to overflowing; and the only refuge I could find was an inside angle in a carriage laden with Germans who had command of the windows, which they occupied as strongly as they have been known to occupy other strategical positions. I scarcely know, however, why I linger on this particular discomfort, for it was but a single item in a considerable list of grievances--grievances dispersed through six weeks of constant railway-travel in France. I have not touched upon them at an earlier stage of this chronicle, but my reserve is not owing to any sweetness of a.s.sociation. This form of locomotion, in the country of the amenities, is attended with a dozen discomforts; almost all the conditions of the business are detestable. They force the sentimental tourist again and again to ask himself whether, in consideration of such mortal annoyances, the game is worth the candle.

Fortunately a railway journey is a good deal like a sea-voyage; its miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive. That is why I completed, to my great satisfaction, my little tour in France. Let this small effusion of ill-nature be my first and last tribute to the whole despotic _gare_: the deadly _salle d'attente_, the insufferable delays over one's luggage, the porterless platform, the overcrowded and illiberal train. How many a time did I permit myself the secret reflection that it is in perfidious Albion that they order this matter best! How many a time did the eager British mercenary, clad in velveteen and clinging to the door of the carriage as it glides into the station, revisit my invidious dreams! The paternal porter and the responsive hansom are among the best gifts of the English genius to the world. I hasten to add, faithful to my habit (so insufferable to some of my friends) of ever and again readjusting the balance after I have given it an honest tip, that the bouillon at Lyons, which I spoke of above, was, though by no means an idea bouillon, much better than any I could have obtained at an English railway-station. After I had imbibed it I sat in the train (which waited a long time at Lyons) and, by the light of one of the big lamps on the platform, read all sorts of disagreeable things in certain

[Ill.u.s.tration: LYONS.]

radical newspapers which I had bought at the bookstall. I gathered from these sheets that Lyons was in extreme commotion. The Rhone and the Saone, which form a girdle for the splendid town, were almost in the streets, as I could easily believe from what I had seen of the country after leaving Orange. The Rhone, all the way to Lyons, had been in all sorts of places where it had no business to be, and matters were naturally not improved by its confluence with the charming and copious stream which, at Macon, is said once to have given such a happy opportunity to the egotism of the capital. A visitor from Paris (the anecdote is very old), being asked on the quay of that city whether he didn't admire the Saone, replied good-naturedly that it was very pretty, but that in Paris they spelled it with the _ei_. This moment of general alarm at Lyons had been chosen by certain ingenious persons (I credit them perhaps with too sure a prevision of the rise of the rivers) for practising further upon the apprehensions of the public. A bombsh.e.l.l filled with dynamite had been thrown into a cafe, and various votaries of the comparatively innocuous _pet.i.t verre_ had been wounded (I am not sure whether any one had been killed) by the irruption. Of course there had been arrests and incarcerations, and the _Intransigeant_ and the _Rappel_ were filled with the echoes of the explosion. The tone of these organs is rarely edifying, and it had never been less so than on this occasion. I wondered as I looked through them whether I was losing all my radicalism; and then I wondered whether, after all, I had any to lose. Even in so long a wait as that tiresome delay at Lyons I failed to settle the question, any more than I made up my mind as to the probable future of the militant democracy, or the ultimate form of a civilisation which should have blown up everything else. A few days later the water went down at Lyons; but the democracy has not gone down.

I remember vividly the remainder of that evening which I spent at Macon--remember it with a chattering of the teeth. I know not what had got into the place; the temperature, for the last day of October, was eccentric and incredible. These epithets may also be applied to the hotel itself--an extraordinary structure, all facade, which exposes an uncovered rear to the gaze of nature. There is a demonstrative, voluble landlady, who is of course part of the facade; but everything behind her is a trap for the winds, with chambers, corridors, staircases all exhibited to the sky as if the outer wall of the house had been lifted off. It would have been delightful for Florida, but it didn't do for Burgundy even on the eve of November 1, so that I suffered absurdly from the rigour of a season that had not yet begun. There was something in the air; I felt it the next day, even on the sunny quay of the Saone, where in spite of a fine southerly exposure I extracted little warmth from the reflection that Alphonse de Lamartine had often trodden the flags. Macon struck me, somehow, as suffering from a chronic numbness, and there was nothing exceptionally cheerful in the remarkable extension of the river. It was no longer a river--it had become a lake; and from my window, in the painted face of the inn, I saw that the opposite bank had been moved back, as it were, indefinitely. Unfortunately the various objects with which it was furnished had not been moved as well, the consequence of which was an extraordinary confusion in the relations of things. There were always poplars to be seen, but the poplar had become an aquatic plant. Such phenomena, however, at Macon attract but little attention, as the Saone, at certain seasons of the year, is nothing if not expansive. The people are as used to it as they appeared to be to the bronze statue of Lamartine, which is the princ.i.p.al monument of the _place_, and which, representing the poet in a frogged overcoat and top-boots, improvising in a high wind, struck me as even less casual in its att.i.tude than monumental sculpture usually succeeds in being. It is true that in its present position I thought better of this work of art, which is from the hand of M. Falguiere, than when I had seen it through the fact.i.tious medium of the Salon of 1876. I walked up the hill where the older part of Macon lies, in search of the natal house of the _amant d'Elvire_, the Petrarch whose Vaucluse was the bosom of the public. The Guide-Joanne quotes from "Les Confidences" a description of the birthplace of the poet, whose treatment of the locality is indeed poetical. It tallies strangely little with the reality, either as regards position or other features; and it may be said to be not an aid, but a direct obstacle, to a discovery of the house. A very humble edifice, in a small back street, is designated by a munic.i.p.al tablet, set into its face, as the scene of Lamartine's advent into the world. He himself speaks of a vast and lofty structure, at the angle of a _place_, adorned with iron clamps, with a _porte haute et large_ and many other peculiarities. The house with the tablet has two meagre storeys above the bas.e.m.e.nt, and (at present, at least) an air of extreme shabbiness; the _place_, moreover, never can have been vast. Lamartine was accused of writing history incorrectly, and apparently he started wrong at first; it had never become clear to him where he was born. Or is the tablet wrong? If the house is small, the tablet is very big.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter x.x.xviii

[Bourg-en-Bresse]

The foregoing reflections occur, in a cruder form, as it were, in my note-book, where I find this remark appended to them: "Don't take leave of Lamartine on that contemptuous note; it will be easy to think of something more sympathetic!" Those friends of mine, mentioned a little while since, who accuse me of always tipping back the balance, could not desire a paragraph more characteristic; but I wish to give no further evidence of such infirmities, and will therefore hurry away from the subject--hurry away in the train which, very early on a crisp, bright morning, conveyed me, by way of an excursion, to the ancient city of Bourg-en-Bresse. Shining in early light, the Saone was spread, like a smooth white tablecloth, over a considerable part of the flat country that I traversed. There is no provision made in this image for the long, transparent screens of thin-twigged trees which rose at intervals out of the watery plain; but as, in all the conditions, there seemed to be no provision for them in fact, I will let my metaphor go for what it is worth. My journey was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I pa.s.sed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town _quelconque_, as M. Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands in the midst of the great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat county, sometime property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest capital. The blue ma.s.ses of the Jura give it a creditable horizon, but the only nearer feature it can point to is its famous sepulchral church.

This edifice lies at a fortunate distance from the town, which, though inoffensive, is of too common a stamp to consort with such a treasure.

All I ever knew of the church of Brou I had gathered, years ago, from Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem which bears its name. I remember thinking, in those years, that it was impossible verses could be more touching than these; and as I stood before the object of my pilgrimage, in the gay French light (though the place was so dull), I recalled the spot where I had first read them and where I had read them again and yet again, wondering whether it would ever be my fortune to visit the church of Brou. The spot in question was an armchair in a window which looked out on some cows in a field; and whenever I glanced at the cows it came over me--I scarcely know why--that I should probably never behold the structure reared by the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret. Some of our visions never come to pa.s.s; but we must be just--others do. "So sleep, for ever sleep, O princely pair!" I remembered that line of Matthew Arnold's, and the stanza about the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret coming to watch the builders on her palfrey white. Then there came to me something in regard to the moon shining on winter nights through the cold clere-storey. The tone of the place at that hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and bright, but with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even with the fact of the unexpected remoteness of the church from the Jura added to it, did not prevent me from feeling that I looked at a monument in the production of which--or at least in the effect of which on the tourist-mind of to-day--Matthew Arnold had been much concerned. By a pardonable licence he has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of the Jura than it stands at present. It is very true that, though the mountains in the sixteenth century can hardly have been in a different position, the plain which separates the church from them may have been bedecked with woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the beautiful building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in that particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there are reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of Brou should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of a vague little town.

[The Church of Brou]

The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret--Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and his wife Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has a high name in history, having been regent of the Netherlands in behalf of her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., of whose early education she had had the care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, to whom the province of Bresse belonged, and who died two years later. She had been betrothed, as a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and was kept for some time at the French court--that of

[Ill.u.s.tration: BROU--THE CHURCH.]

her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was eventually repudiated, in order that her _fiance_ might marry Anne of Brittany--an alliance so magnificently political that we almost condone the offence to a sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for husbands, however, inasmuch as before her marriage to Philibert she had been united to John of Castile, son of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon--an episode terminated by the death of the Spanish prince within a year. She was twenty-two years regent of the Netherlands and died, at fifty-one, in 1530. She might have been, had she chosen, the wife of Henry VII. of England. She was one of the signers of the League of Cambray against the Venetian Republic, and was a most politic, accomplished, and judicious princess.

She undertook to build the church of Brou as a mausoleum for her second husband and herself, in fulfilment of a vow made by Margaret of Bourbon, mother of Philibert, who died before she could redeem her pledge and who bequeathed the duty to her son. He died shortly afterwards, and his widow a.s.sumed the pious task. According to Murray, she entrusted the erection of the church to "Maistre Loys von Berghem," and the sculpture to "Maistre Conrad." The author of a superst.i.tious but carefully prepared little Notice which I bought at Bourg calls the architect and sculptor (at once) Jehan de Paris, author (_sic_) of the tomb of Francis II. of Brittany, to which we gave some attention at Nantes, and which the writer of my pamphlet ascribes only subordinately to Michel Colomb.

The church, which is not of great size, is in the last and most flamboyant phase of gothic and in admirable preservation; the west front, before which a quaint old sun-dial is laid out on the ground--a circle of numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into the earth--is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art, told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply the quality of the stone)--the great feature is the admirable choir, in the midst of which the three monuments have bloomed under the chisel like exotic plants in a conservatory. I saw the place to small advantage, for the stained gla.s.s of the windows, which are fine, was under repair, and much of it was masked with planks.

In the centre lies Philibert-le-Bel, a figure of white marble on a great slab of black, in his robes and his armour, with two boy-angels holding a tablet at his head, and two more at his feet. On either side of him is another cherub; one guarding his helmet, the other his stiff gauntlets.

The att.i.tudes of these charming children, whose faces are all bent upon him in pity, have the prettiest tenderness and respect. The table on which he lies is supported by elaborate columns adorned with niches containing little images and with every other imaginable elegance; and beneath it he is represented in that other form so common in the tombs of the Renaissance--a man naked and dying, with none of the state and splendour of the image above. One of these figures embodies the duke, the other simply the mortal; and there is something very strange and striking in the effect of the latter, seen dimly and with difficulty through the intervals of the rich supports of the upper slab. The monument of Margaret herself is on the left, all in white marble tormented into a mult.i.tude of exquisite patterns, the last extravagance of a gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return upon itself. Unlike her husband, who has only the high roof of the church above him, she lies under a canopy supported and covered by a wilderness of embroidery--flowers, devices, initials, arabesques, statuettes. Watched over by cherubs, she is also in her robes and ermine, with a greyhound sleeping at her feet (her husband, at his, has a waking lion); and the artist has not, it is to be presumed, represented her as more beautiful than she was. She looks indeed like the regent of a turbulent realm. Beneath her couch is stretched another figure--a less brilliant Margaret, wrapped in her shroud, with her long hair over her shoulders. Round the tomb is the battered iron railing placed there originally, with the mysterious motto of the d.u.c.h.ess worked into the top--_fortune infortune fort une_. The other two monuments are protected by barriers of the same pattern. That of Margaret of Bourbon, Philibert's mother, stands on the right of the choir; and I suppose its greatest distinction is that it should have been erected to a mother-in-law. It is but little less florid and sumptuous than the others; it has, however, no second rec.u.mbent figure. On the other hand, the statuettes that surround the base of the tomb are of even more exquisite workmanship: they represent weeping women, in long mantles and hoods, which latter hang forward over the small face of the figure, giving the artist a chance to carve the features within this hollow of drapery--an extraordinary play of skill. There is a high, white marble shrine of the Virgin, as extraordinary as all the rest (a series of compartments representing the various scenes of her life, with the a.s.sumption in the middle); and there is a magnificent series of stalls, which are simply the intricate embroidery of the tombs translated into polished oak. All these things are splendid, ingenious, elaborate, precious; it is goldsmith's work on a monumental scale, and the general effect is none the less beautiful and solemn because it is so rich. But the monuments of the church of Brou are not the n.o.blest that one may see; the great tombs of Verona are finer, and various other early Italian work. These things are not insincere, as Ruskin would say; but they are pretentious, and they are not positively _nafs_. I should mention that the walls of the choir are embroidered in places with Margaret's tantalising device, which--partly perhaps because it is tantalising--is so very decorative, as they say in London. I know not whether she was acquainted with this epithet, but she had antic.i.p.ated one of the fashions most characteristic of our age.

One asks one's self how all this decoration, this luxury of fair and chiselled marble, survived the French Revolution. An hour of liberty in the choir of Brou would have been a carnival for the image-breakers. The well-fed Bressois are surely a good-natured people. I call them well-fed both on general and on particular grounds. Their province has the most savoury aroma, and I found an opportunity to test its reputation. I walked back into the town from the church (there was really nothing to be seen by the way), and as the hour of the midday breakfast had struck, directed my steps to the inn. The table d'hote was going on, and a gracious, bustling, talkative landlady welcomed me. I had an excellent repast--the best repast possible--which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and b.u.t.ter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed. "La plus belle fille du monde," as the French proverb says, "ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a;"

and it might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it. But there was a bloom of punctuality, so to speak, about these eggs of Bourg, as if it had been the intention of the very hens themselves that they should be promptly served. "Nous sommes en Bresse, et le beurre n'est pas mauvais," the landlady said with a sort of dry coquetry, as she placed this article before me. It was the poetry of b.u.t.ter, and I ate a pound or two of it; after which I came away with a strange mixture of impressions of late gothic sculpture and thick _tartines_. I came away through the town, where, on a little green promenade, facing the hotel, is a bronze statue of Bichat the physiologist, who was a Bressois. I mention it not on account of its merit (though, as statues go, I don't remember that it is bad), but because I learned from it--my ignorance, doubtless, did me little honour--that Bichat had died at thirty years of age, and this revelation was almost agitating. To have done so much in so short a life was to be truly great. This reflection, which looks deplorably trite as I write it here, had the effect of eloquence as I uttered it for my own benefit on the bare little mall at Bourg.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter x.x.xix

[Beaune]

On my return to Macon I found myself fairly face to face with the fact that my tour was near its end. Dijon had been marked by fate as its farthest limit, and Dijon was close at hand. After that I was to drop the tourist and re-enter Paris as much as possible like a Parisian. Out of Paris the Parisian never loiters, and therefore it would be impossible for me to stop between Dijon and the capital. But I might be a tourist a few hours longer by stopping somewhere between Macon and Dijon. The question was where I should spend these hours. Where better, I asked myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me), than at Beaune? On my way to this town I pa.s.sed the stretch of the Cote d'Or, which, covered with a mellow autumn haze, with the sunshine shimmering through, looked indeed like a golden slope. One regards with a kind of awe the region in which the famous _crus_ of Burgundy (Vougeot, Chambertin, Nuits, Beaune) are, I was going to say, manufactured. Adieu, paniers; vendanges sont faites! The vintage was over; the shrunken russet fibres alone clung to their ugly stick. The horizon on the left of the road had a charm, however; there is something picturesque in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That delicate critic M. Emile Montegut, in a charming record of travel through this region published some years ago, praises Shakespeare for having talked (in "Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point.

I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque, but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping. It is a drowsy Burgundian town, very old and ripe, with crooked streets, vistas always oblique, and steep, moss covered roofs. The princ.i.p.al lion is the Hopital-Saint-Esprit, or the Hotel-Dieu simply, as they call it there, founded in 1443 by Nicholas Rollin, Chancellor of Burgundy. It is administered by the sisterhood of the Holy Ghost, and is one of the most venerable and stately of hospitals. The face it presents to the street is simple, but striking--a plain, windowless wall, surmounted by a vast slate roof, of almost mountainous steepness. Astride this roof sits a tall, slate-covered spire, from which, as I arrived, the prettiest chimes I ever heard (worse luck to them, as I will presently explain) were ringing. Over the door is a high, quaint canopy, without supports, with its vault painted blue and covered with gilded stars. (This, and indeed the whole building, have lately been restored, and its antiquity is quite of the spick-and-span order. But it is very delightful.) The treasure of the place is a precious picture--a Last Judgment, attributed equally to John van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden--given to the hospital in the fifteenth century by Nicholas Rollin aforesaid.