In The Heart Of The Vosges And Other Sketches Part 7

"Throughout the last thirty years I have lent sums, large considering my means, to friends, comrades and entire strangers. Never, never, never has a single centime been repaid by a single one of these borrowers. I now vow to myself, never under any circ.u.mstances whatever to lend money again!"

Poor song-writers, nevertheless, he posthumously befriended. By his will with the bulk of his property was founded "La pet.i.te Caisse des chansonniers," a benefit society for less happy Nadauds to come. By aid of these funds, lyrists and ballad-writers unable to find publishers would be held on their onward path. Full of honours, Nadaud died in 1893, monuments being erected to his memory, streets named after him, and undiminished popularity keeping his name alive.

And the honour denied to Beranger, to Victor Hugo, to Balzac, the coveted sword and braided coat of the Forty were Nadaud's also. With the witty Piron he could not ironically antic.i.p.ate his own epitaph thus--

"Here lies Nadaud who was nothing, not even an Academician!"

Before taking leave of Carca.s.sonne, poetic and picturesque, the most inveterate anti-sightseer should peep into its museum. For this little _chef-lieu_ of the Aude, with a population under thirty thousand, possesses what, indeed, hardly a French townling lacks, namely, a picture-gallery. If not remarkable from an artistic point of view, the collection serves to demonstrate the persistent, self-denying and constant devotion to culture in France. Times may be peaceful or stormy, seasons may prove disastrous, the withered, thin and blasted ears of corn may devour the seven ears full and golden, the ship of State may be caught in a tornado and lurch alarmingly--all the same "the man in the street," "the rascal many," to quote Spenser, will have a museum in which, with wife and hopefuls, to spend their Sunday afternoons. The local museum is no less of a necessity to Jacques Bonhomme than his daily _pot-au-feu_, that dish of soup which, according to Michelet, engenders the national amiability.

The splendid public library--the determinative is used in the sense of comparison--numbers just upon a volume per head, and the art school, school of music, and other inst.i.tutions tell the same story. Culture throughout the country seems indigenous, to spread of itself, and, above all things, to reach all cla.s.ses. Culture on French soil is gratuitous, ever free as air! We must never overlook that primary fact.

One or two more noticeable facts about Carca.s.sonne. Here was born that eccentric revolutionary and poetic genius, Fabre d'Eglantine, of whom I have written elsewhere.

[Footnote: See Literary Rambles in France, 1906]

Yet another historic note. From St. Vincent's tower during the Convention, 1792-5, were taken those measurements, the outcome of which was the metric system. Two mathematicians, by name Delambre and Mechain, were charged with the necessary calculations, the _metre_, or a ten-millionth part of the distance between the poles and the equator (32,808 English feet), being made the unit of length. Uniformity of weight followed, and became law in 1799.

But to touch upon historic Carca.s.sonne is to glance upon an almost interminable perspective. The chronicle of this charming little city on the bright blue Aude has been penned and re-penned in blood and tears. In 1560 Carca.s.sonne suffered a preliminary Saint Bartholomew, a general ma.s.sacre of Protestants announcing the evil days to follow; days that after five hundred years have left their trace, moral as well as material.

VIII

TOULOUSE

A zigzaggery, indeed, was this journey from Nimes to my Pyrenean valley.

That metropolis of art and most heroic town, Montauban, I could not on any account miss. Toulouse necessarily had to be taken on the way to Ingres-ville, as I feel inclined to call the great painter's birthplace and apotheosis. But why write of Toulouse? The magnificent city, its public gardens, churches, superbly housed museums and art galleries, its promenades, drives and panoramas are all particularized by Murray, Joanne and Baedeker. Here, however, as elsewhere, are one or two features which do not come within the province of a guide-book.

The only city throughout France that welcomed the Inquisition was among the first to open a _Lycee pour jeunes filles._ In accordance with the acts of 1880-82 public day schools for girls were opened throughout France; that of Toulouse being fairly representative, I will describe my visit.

The school was now closed for the long vacation, but a junior mistress in temporary charge gave us friendliest welcome, and showed us over the building and annexes. She evidently took immense and quite natural pride in the little world within world of which she formed a part. Her only regret was that we could not see the scholars at work. Here may be noted the wide field thrown open to educated women by the above-named acts, from under-mistresses to _Madame la directrice_, the position being one of dignity and provision for life, pensions being the reward of long service.

The course of study is prepared by the rector of the Toulousain Academy, and the rules of management by the munic.i.p.al council, thus the programme of instruction bears the signature of the former, whilst the prospectus, dealing with fees, practical details, is signed by the mayor in the name of the latter.

We find a decree pa.s.sed by the town council in 1887 to the effect that in the case of two sisters a fourth of the sum-total of fees should be remitted, of three, a half, of four, three-quarters, and of five, the entire amount. Even the outfit of the boarders must be approved by the same authority. A neat costume is obligatory, and the number and material of undergarments is specified with the utmost minuteness.

Besides a sufficient quant.i.ty of suitable clothes, each student must bring three pairs of boots, thirty pocket-handkerchiefs, a bonnet-box, umbrella, parasol, and so forth.

Such regulations may at first sight look trivial and unnecessary, but there is much to be said on the other side. From the beginning of the term to the end, the matron, whose province is quite apart from that of the head-mistress, is never worried about the pupils' dress, no shoes in need of repair, no garments to be mended, no letters to be written begging Mme. A. to send her daughter a warm petticoat, Mme. B. to forward a hair-brush, and so on. Again, the uniform obligatory on boarders prevents those petty jealousies and rivalries provoked by fine clothes in girls' schools. Alike the child of the millionaire and of the small official wear the same simple dress.

Children are admitted to the lower school between the ages of five and twelve, the cla.s.ses being in the hands of certificated mistresses. The upper school, at which pupils are received from twelve years and upwards, and are expected to remain five years, offers a complete course of study, lady teachers being aided by professors of the Faculte des Lettres and of the Lycee for youths. Students who have remained throughout the entire period, and have satisfactorily pa.s.sed final examinations, receive a certificate ent.i.tling them to admission into the great training college of Sevres or to offer themselves as teachers in schools and families.

The curriculum is certainly modest compared with that obligatory on candidates for London University, Girton College, or our senior local examination; but it is an enormous improvement on the old conventual system, and several points are worthy of imitation. Thus a girl quitting the Lycee would have attained, first and foremost, a thorough knowledge of her own language and its literature; she would also possess a fair notion of French common law, of domestic economy, including needlework of the more useful kind, the cutting out and making up of clothes, and the like. Gymnastics are practised daily. In the matter of religion the munic.i.p.ality of Toulouse shows absolute impartiality. No sectarian teaching enters into the programme, but Catholics and Protestants and Jews in residence can receive instruction from their respective ministers.

The Lycee competes formidably with the convents as regards fees.

Twenty-eight pounds yearly cover the expense of board, education, and medical attendance at the upper school; twenty-four at the lower; day boarders pay from twelve to fifteen pounds a year; books, the use of the school omnibus, and laundress being extras. Three hundred scholars in all attended during the scholastic year ending July 1891.

Day-pupils not using the school omnibus must be accompanied to and from the school, and here an interesting point is to be touched upon. In so far as was practicable, the Lycee for girls has been modelled on the plan of the time-honoured establishments for boys. As yet a uniform curriculum to begin with was out of the question; the programme is already too ambitious in the eyes of many, whilst ardent advocates of the higher education of women in France regret that the vices as well as the virtues of the existing system have been retained. Educationists and advanced thinkers generally would fain see a less strait-laced routine, a less stringent supervision, more freedom for play of character. The Lycee student, boy or girl, youth or maiden, is as strictly guarded as a criminal; not for a moment are these citizens of the future trusted to themselves.

In the vast dormitory of the high school here we see thirty neat compartments with part.i.tions between, containing bed and toilet requisites, and at the extreme end of the room, commanding a view of the rest, is the bed of the under-mistress in charge, _surveillante_ as she is called. Sleeping or waking, the students are watched. This ma.s.sing together of numbers and perpetual supervision no longer find universal favour.

But I am here writing of fifteen years ago. Doubtless were I to repeat my visit I should find progressive changes too numerous for detail.

Happy little middle-cla.s.s Parisians now run to and from their Lycees unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, _la promeneuse_ or walking chaperon.

Works on social France, as is the case with almanacs, encyclopaedias and the rest, require yearly revision. Manners and customs change no less quickly than headgear and skirts.

Charles Lamb would have lived ecstatically at the Languedocian capital.

It is a metropolis of beggardom, a mendicant's Mecca, a citadel of Jules Richepin's cherished _Gueux_. Here, indeed, Elia need not have lamented over the decay of beggars, "the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation--your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses--is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear _Mendicity_. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast hasting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution."

No, here is what the best beloved of English humorists calls "the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism," here his vision would have feasted on "Rags, the Beggars' robes and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public." "He is never out of fashion," adds Lamb, "or limpeth outwardly behind it. He is not required to wear court mourning.

He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances."

Here, too, would the unmatchable writer have gazed upon more than one "grand fragment, as good as an Elgin marble." And alas! many deformities more terrible still, and which, perhaps, would have damped even Lamb's ardour. For in the Toulouse of 1894, as in the London of sixty years before, its mendicants "were so many of its sights, its Lions." The city literally swarmed with beggars. At every turn we came upon some living torso, distorted limb and hideous sore. Begging seemed to be the accepted livelihood of cripples, blind folk and the infirm. Let us hope that by this time something better has been devised for them all. Was it here that Richepin partly studied the mendicant fraternity, giving us in poetry his astounding appreciation, psychological and linguistic? And perhaps the bard of the beggars, like the English humorist, would wish his _pauvres Gueux_ to be left unmolested.

The sights of Toulouse would occupy a conscientious traveller many days.

The least leisurely should find time to visit the tiny square called _place du Salin_. Here took place the innumerable _autos-da-fe_ of the Toulousain Inquisition, and here, so late as 1618, the celebrated physician and scientist Vanini was atrociously done to death by that truly infernal tribunal, and for what? For simply differing from the obscurantism of his age, and having opinions of his own.

The atrocious sentence pa.s.sed on Vanini was in part remitted, evidently public opinion already making itself felt. His tongue was cut out, but strangulation preceded the burning alive. Here one cannot help noting the illogical, the puerile--if such words are applicable to devilish wickedness--aspect of such Inquisitorial sentences. If these hounders-down of common-sense and the reasoning faculty really believed, as they affected to believe, that men who possessed and exercised both qualities were thereby doomed to eternal torments, why set up the horrible and costly paraphernalia of the Inquisition? After all, no matter how ingeniously inventive might be their persecutors, they could only be made to endure terminable and comparatively insignificant torments, not a millionth millionth fraction of eternity!

Refreshing it is to turn to the Toulouse of minstrelsy. The proud seat of the troubadours, the Academy of the Gay Science and of the poetic tourneys revived in our own day! Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the _Feux Floraux_ of the olden time and the society of _Lou Felibrige_ with its revival of Provencal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly esteemed by a great Englishman.

In Mill's _Correspondence_ (1910) we find a beautiful letter, and written in fine stately French, from the philosopher to the poet, dated Avignon, October 1869.

Mill had sent Mistral the French translation of his essay, "The Subjection of Women," and in answer to the other's thanks and flattering a.s.surance of his own conversion, he wrote: "Parmi toutes les adhesions qui ont ete donnees a la these de mon pet.i.t livre, je ne sais s'il y en a aucune qui m'ont fait plus de plaisir que la votre."

The letter as a whole is most interesting, and ends with a characterization, a strikingly beautiful pa.s.sage in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Hard were it to match this appreciation among orthodox writers.

So transparent is the atmosphere here that the Pyrenees appear within an hour's ride: they are in reality sixty miles off! Lovely are the clearly outlined forms, flecked with light and shadow, the snowy patches being perfectly distinct.

IX

MONTAUBAN, OR INGRES-VILLE

An hour by rail from Toulouse lies the ancient city of Montauban, as far as I know unnoticed by English tourists since Arthur Young's time. This superbly placed _chef-lieu_ of the Tarn and Garonne is alike an artistic shrine and a palladium of religious liberty. Here was born that strongly individualized and much contested genius, Dominique Ingres, and here Protestantism withstood the League, De Luyne's besieging army and the dragonnades of Louis XIV.

The city of Ingres may be thought of by itself; there is plenty of food for reflection here without recalling the prude whose virtue caused more mischief than the vices of all the Montespans and Dubarrys put together.

Let us forget the Maintenon terror at Montauban, the breaking up of families, the sending to the galleys of good men and women, the torturings, the roastings alive, and turn to the delightful and soothing souvenirs of genius! Every French town that has given birth to shining talent is straightway turned into a Walhalla. This ancient town, so strikingly placed, breathes of Ingres, attracts the traveller by the magic of the painter's name, has become an art pilgrimage. The n.o.ble monument erected by the townsfolk to their great citizen and the picture-gallery he bequeathed his native city well repay a much longer journey than that from Toulouse. We see here to what high levels public spirit and local munificence can rise in France. We see also how close, after all, are the ties that knit Frenchman and Frenchman, how the glory of one is made the pride of all. The bronze statue of the painter, with the vast and costly bas-relief imitating his "Apotheosis of Homer" in the Louvre, stand in the public walk, the beauty of which aroused even Arthur Young's enthusiasm. "The promenade," he wrote in June 1787, "is finely situated. Built on the highest part of the rampart, and commanding that n.o.ble vale, or rather plain, one of the richest in Europe, which extends on one side to the sea and in front to the Pyrenees, whose towering ma.s.ses heaped one upon another in a stupendous manner, and covered with snow, offer a variety of lights and shades from indented forms and the immensity of their projections. This prospect, which contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of cultivation; an animated but confused ma.s.s of infinitely varied parts, melting gradually into the distant obscure, from which emerges the amazing frame of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads above the clouds."

The Ingres Museum contains, I should say, more works from the hand of a single master than were ever before collected under the same roof.

Upwards of a thousand sketches, many of great power and beauty, are here, besides several portraits and one masterpiece, the Christ in the Temple, brilliant as a canvas of Holman Hunt, although the work of an octogenarian. The painter's easel, palette, and brushes, his violin, the golden laurel-wreath presented to him by his native town, and other relics are reverently gazed at on Sundays by artisans, soldiers and peasant-folk. The local museum in France is something more than a little centre of culture, a place in which to breathe beauty and delight. It is a school of the moral sense, of the n.o.bler pa.s.sions, and also a temple of fame. Therein the young are taught to revere excellence, and here the ambitious are stimulated by worthy achievement.

Ingres-ville recalls an existence stormy as the history of Montauban itself. This stronghold of reform throughout her vicissitudes did not show a bolder, more determined front to the foe than did her great citizen his own enemies and detractors. Dominique Ingres and his life-story favour those physicists who discern in native soil and surroundings the formative influences of apt.i.tudes and character. The man and his birthplace matched each other. Indomitableness characterized both, and to understand both we must know something of their respective histories. To Montauban Henri Martin's great history does ample justice, to her ill.u.s.trious son contemporary writers have recently paid worthy tributes.

[Footnote: See _Les Grands Artistes--Ingres_, par J. Mommeja, Paris, Laurens; _Le Roman d'amour de M. Ingres_, par H. Lapauze, Paris, Lafitte, 1911.]

"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times," wrote Savage Landor, "he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding." In the case of Ingres, opposition and contumely were followed by perhaps excessive laudation whilst he lived, after his death ensuing a long period of reaction. Time has now set the seal upon his fame. The great Montalbanais has been finally received into the national Walhalla.