It was not to be looked at in that manner that one had come all the way from Tours; so that within ten minutes after my arrival I sallied out into the darkness to form somehow and somewhere a happier relation.
However late in the evening I may arrive at a place, I never go to bed without my impression. The natural place at Bourges to look for it seemed to be the cathedral; which, moreover, was the only thing that could account for my presence _dans cette galere_. I turned out of a small square in front of the hotel and walked up a narrow, sloping street paved with big, rough stones and guiltless of a footway. It was a splendid starlight night; the stillness of a sleeping _ville de province_ was over everything; I had the whole place to myself. I turned to my right, at the top of the street, where presently a short, vague lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely, from behind; it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous and sublime.
It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which Bourges is scattered--a very good position as French cathedrals go, for they are not all so n.o.bly situated as Chartres and Laon. On the side on which I approached it (the south) it is tolerably well exposed, though the precinct is shabby; in front, it is rather too much shut in. These defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the Archeveche, which has been arranged as a public walk, with the usual formal alleys of the _jardin francais_. I must add that I appreciated these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea would overhang a solitary swimmer. It seemed colossal, stupendous, a dark leviathan.
The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it, and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more imposing. I read in the excellent handbook of M. Joanne that it was projected "_des_ 1172," but commenced only in the first years of the thirteenth century. "The nave," the writer adds, "was finished _tant bien que mal, faute de ressources_; the facade is of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its upper." The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts.
The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers; one of which (the south) is immensely b.u.t.tressed, so that its outline slopes forward like that of a pyramid. This is the taller of the two. If they had spires these towers would be prodigious; as it is, given the rest of the church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the measure of its width, the front rears itself,
piles itself, on a great scale, carried up by galleries, arches, windows, sculptures, and supported by the extraordinarily thick b.u.t.tresses of which I have spoken and which, though they embellish it with deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not improve its style. The portals, especially the middle one, are extremely interesting; they are covered with curious early sculptures. The middle one, however, I must describe alone. It has no less than six rows of figures--the others have four--some of which, notably the upper one, are still in their places.
The arch at the top has three tiers of elaborate imagery. The upper of these is divided by the figure of Christ in judgment, of great size, stiff and terrible, with outstretched arms. On either side of him are ranged three or four angels, with the instruments of the Pa.s.sion.
Beneath him in the second frieze stands the angel of justice with the scales; and on either side of him is the vision of the last judgment.
The good prepare, with infinite t.i.tillation and complacency, to ascend to the skies; while the bad are dragged, pushed, hurled, stuffed, crammed, into pits and caldrons of fire. There is a charming detail in this section. Beside the angel, on the right, where the wicked are the prey of demons, stands a little female figure, that of a child, who, with hands meekly folded and head gently raised, waits for the stern angel to decide upon her fate. In this fate, however, a dreadful big devil also takes a keen interest: he seems on the point of appropriating the tender creature; he has a face like a goat and an enormous hooked nose. But the angel gently lays a hand upon the shoulder of the little girl--the movement is full of dignity--as if to say: "No; she belongs to the other side." The frieze below represents the general resurrection, with the good and the wicked emerging from their sepulchres. Nothing can be more quaint and charming than the difference shown in their way of responding to the final trump. The good get out of their tombs with a certain modest gaiety, an alacrity tempered by respect; one of them kneels to pray as soon as he has disinterred himself. You may know the wicked, on the other hand, by their extreme shyness; they crawl out slowly and fearfully; they hang back, and seem to say "Oh, dear!" These elaborate sculptures, full of ingenuous intention and of the reality of early faith, are in a remarkable state of preservation; they bear no superficial signs of restoration and appear scarcely to have suffered from the centuries. They are delightfully expressive; the artist had the advantage of knowing exactly the effect be wished to produce.
The interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty and, above all, a tremendous height. The nave is extraordinary in this respect; it dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I am in architecture always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great building seems to me while I look at it the ultimate expression. At any rate, during the hour that I sat gazing along the high vista of Bourges the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude, about such an edifice; it soothes and purifies the spirit, it illuminates the mind. There are two aisles, on either side, in addition to the nave--five in all--and, as I have said, there are no transepts; an omission which lengthens the vista, so that from my place near the door the central jewelled window in the depths of the perpendicular choir seemed a mile or two away. The second or outward of each pair of aisles is too low and the first too high; without this inequality the nave would appear to take an even more prodigious flight. The double aisles pa.s.s all the way round the choir, the windows of which are inordinately rich in magnificent old gla.s.s. I have seen gla.s.s as fine in other churches, but I think I have never seen so much of it at once.
Beside the cathedral, on the north, is a curious structure of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, which looks like an enormous flying b.u.t.tress, with its support, sustaining the north tower. It makes a ma.s.sive arch, high in the air, and produces a romantic effect as people pa.s.s under it to the open gardens of the Archeveche, which extend to a considerable distance in the rear of the church. The structure supporting the arch has the girth of a largeish house, and contains chambers with whose uses I am unacquainted, but to which the deep pulsations of the cathedral, the vibration of its mighty bells and the roll of its organ-tones must be transmitted even through the great arm of stone.
The archiepiscopal palace, not walled in as at Tours, is visible as a stately habitation of the last century, at the time of my visit under repair after a fire. From this side and from the gardens of the palace the nave of the cathedral is visible in all its great length and height, with its extraordinary mult.i.tude of supports. The gardens aforesaid, accessible through tall iron gates, are the promenade--the Tuileries--of the town, and, very pretty in themselves, are immensely set off by the overhanging church. It was warm and sunny; the benches were empty; I sat there a long time in that pleasant state of mind which visits the traveller in foreign towns, when he is not too hurried, while he wonders where he had better go next. The straight, unbroken line of the roof of the cathedral was very n.o.ble; but I could see from this point how much finer the effect would have been if the towers, which had dropped almost out of sight, might have been carried still higher. The archiepiscopal gardens look down at one end over a sort of esplanade or suburban avenue lying on a lower level on which they open, and where several detachments of soldiers (Bourges is full of soldiers) had just been drawn up. The civil population was also collecting, and I saw that something was going to happen. I learned that a private of the Cha.s.seurs was to be "broken" for stealing, and every one was eager to behold the ceremony. Sundry other detachments arrived on the ground, besides many of the military who had come as a matter of taste. One of them described to me the process of degradation from the ranks, and I felt for a moment a hideous curiosity to see it, under the influence of which I lingered a little. But only a little; the hateful nature of the spectacle hurried me away at the same that others were hurrying forward. As I turned my back upon it I reflected that human beings are cruel brutes, though I could not flatter myself that the ferocity of the thing was exclusively French. In another country the concourse would have been equally great, and the moral of it all seemed to be that military penalties are as terrible as military honours are gratifying.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Chapter xii
[Bourges: Jacques Coeur]
The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques Coeur awaits you in posture scarcely less leonine. This remarkable man had a very strange history, and he too was "broken" like the wretched soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been rehabilitated, however, by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret him according to this image--a womanish figure in a long robe and a turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose--would be to think of him as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his spirit was very modern; he was a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century. He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to pay the troops who, under the heroic Maid,
[Ill.u.s.tration: Bourges--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
drove the English from French soil. His house, which to-day is used as a Palais de Justice, appears to have been regarded at the time it was built very much as the residence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate it offers to view two big towers which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak--the square in front of the post-office--the palace of Jacques Coeur looks very big and strong and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very handsome and delicate. To this street it presents two tiers and a considerable length of facade; and it has both within and without a great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master, who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.
The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been written by M. Pierre Clement in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and interesting, but I have no s.p.a.ce to go into it here. There is no more curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling from one day to the other, or of the antique superst.i.tion that the G.o.ds grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker, ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the globe and his own, great capitalist who had antic.i.p.ated the brilliant operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty, imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been elucidated by M. Clement, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a singularly villanous set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of high-handed rapacity--the crudest possible a.s.sertion of the right of the stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his life, made his way out of France and, betaking himself to Italy, offered his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques Coeur, however, was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after the expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house at Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and splendour, though it has in parts that want of s.p.a.ce which is striking in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court indeed is on a large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful windows and with sculptures inserted in the walls, representing the various sources of the great fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clement describes this part of the house as having been of an "incomparable richesse"--an estimate of its charms which seems slightly exaggerated to-day. There is, however, something delicate and familiar in the bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little scenes of agriculture and industry which show that the proprietor was not ashamed of calling attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day we should question the taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in the house of a "merchant prince" however self-made. Why should it be, accordingly, that these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease us? It is perhaps because things very ancient never, for some mysterious reason, appear vulgar. This fifteenth-century millionaire, with his palace, his "swagger" sculptures, may have produced that impression on some critical spirits of his own day.
The portress who showed me into the building was a dear little old woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face--a little white, aged face, with dark, pretty eyes--and the most considerate manner. She took me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of Bourges--an inland town if ever there was one, without even a river (to call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions--having found his end as admiral of a fleet; but this boat-shaped roof, which is extremely graceful and is repeated in another apartment, would suggest that the imagination of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as he trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is probable that he was personally as much at home in certain Mediterranean ports as in the capital of the pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at the ceilings of his mansion, he saw his boats upside down, this was only a suggestion of the shortest way of emptying them of their treasures. He is presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in company with his wife, Macee de Leodepart--I like to write such an extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention much more to the pa.s.sers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in other att.i.tudes; though I do not recognise them in the composition on top of one of the fireplaces which represents the battlements of a castle, with the defenders (little figures between the crenellations) hurling down missiles with a great deal of fury and expression. It would have been hard to believe that the man who surrounded himself with these friendly and humorous devices had been guilty of such wrong-doing as to call down the heavy hand of justice.
It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal a.s.sociations of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques Coeur, which, in spite of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hotel Cujas, one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of the great jurisconsult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of the Roman law and professed it during the close of his life in the university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of his sedentary pursuits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits are perhaps not exactly
[Ill.u.s.tration: BOURGES--THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR]
what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle"
(sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so grave a work) an amusing picture of the short, fat, untidy scholar dragging himself _a plat ventre_, across his room, from one pile of books to the other. The house in which these singular gymnastics took place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discoloured, it has a charming Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street, and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court, beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with turrets, with fine old windows and with a beautiful tone of faded red brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial by-street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A brawny gendarme in his shirtsleeves was polishing his boots in the court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its cl.u.s.ters, hung itself over a doorway and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall.
The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a _ville de province_ in the full force of the term, especially as applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor antique--a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank walls--walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses--that avert themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six weeks spent _en province_, however, I saw few places that had not more expression than Bourges.
I went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual, with the _commis-voyageurs_, who cut their bread on their thumb and partook of every course; and after this repast I repaired for a while to the cafe, which occupied a part of the bas.e.m.e.nt of the inn and opened into its court. This cafe was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to _tutoyer_ his customers and the practice of the customers to _tutoyer_ the waiter.
Under these circ.u.mstances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little portfolio covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets of
[Ill.u.s.tration: BOURGES: THE CATHEDRAL (WEST FRONT)]
thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which pa.s.s in France for pens--these being the utensils invariably evoked by such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I received an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavoured every now and then with a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he was such a beautiful specimen of his cla.s.s. Sometimes he was very facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game went on and he lost and had to pay the _consommation_, he dropped his amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn"t play any more, and went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend, one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking cad; just as the bright little cafe where a robust materfamilias, doling out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror behind the _comptoir_, was a much more civilised spot than a British public-house or a "commercial room," with pipes and whisky, or even than an American saloon.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Chapter xiii
[Le Mans]
It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The question indeed was to get away, no easy matter in France in the early days of October, when the whole _jeunesse_ of the country is returning to school. It is accompanied, apparently, with parents and grandparents, and it fills the trains with little pale-faced _lyceens_, who gaze out of the windows with a longing, lingering air not unnatural on the part of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood. The train stopped every five minutes; but fortunately the country was charming--hilly and bosky, eminently good-humoured, and dotted here and there with a smart little chateau. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interesting town, but I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed--a much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however, is not steep in all directions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that, on the other hand, the Boule d"Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better inn than the Boule d"Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an ugly _halle_, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some n.o.ble features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking ma.s.s, bristling behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly numerous flying b.u.t.tresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very crooked and untidy lane, of really mediaeval aspect, honoured with the denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria--an absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument in the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question--very sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it--is an elaborate little dusky facade, overhanging the street, ornamented with panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.
A fat old woman standing in the door of a small grocer"s shop next to it--a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming manner--told me what the house was, and also indicated to me a rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same street, nearer the cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique" and of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some years, in the early part of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position--he was unable even to go down on his knees--prosecuted that other suit which made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon; though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":
"Celui qui cy maintenant dort, Fit plus de pitie que d"envie, Et souffrit mille fois la mort, Avant que de perdre la vie.
Pa.s.sant, ne fais icy de bruit, Et garde bien qu"il ne s"eveille.
Car voicy la premiere nuit, Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille."
There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front of the cathedral, with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the towers and a very fine steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little pointed towers, a big black, precipitous roof, and a general air of having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank goodness, and the characteristic of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a person, as it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral, which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church--the disparity between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century, and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave, which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow but very lofty, display to the spectators in the _place_ the reach of their two clere-storey windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the choir is superb; it is a church in itself, with the nave simply for a point of view. As I stood there I read in my Murray that it has the stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with Bourges and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A pa.s.sage of double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them supported on very thick round columns, not cl.u.s.tered. There are twelve chapels in this pa.s.sage, and a charming little lady-chapel filled with gorgeous old gla.s.s. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very n.o.ble; its lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid gla.s.s. The beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that contains the formless image--a clumsy stone woman lying on her back--which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.
The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large _place de foire_, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a while in rectangular alleys dest.i.tute of herbage and received a deeper impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins, between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown facade and a portal fretted with early sculptures; but the
[Ill.u.s.tration: LE MANS--THE CATHEDRAL]
details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has a st.u.r.dy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact, accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to a.s.sure one"s self in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be a.s.sured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat before dinner at the door of one of the cafes in the market-place with a _bitter-et-curacao_ (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me company. I remember that in this situation there came over me an impression which both included and excluded all possible disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air, together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of the cafe, in the mild October afternoon suffused with human sounds, is perhaps the most abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Chapter xiv
[Angers]
I am shocked at finding, just after this n.o.ble declaration of principles, that in a little note-book which at that time I carried about with me the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell." I reproduce this vulgar word with the greatest hesitation, and only because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers belongs to the disagreeable cla.s.s of old towns that have been, as the English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern improvements and quite unworthy of its admirable name--a name which, like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque value. It looks particularly well on the Shakespearean page (in "King John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the utterance of the period) with a fine grinding insular accent. Angers figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and compet.i.tor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. These facts create a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country that was really pretty and looked more like the usual English than like the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for pa.s.sing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have contented myself before the end of the day. I remained at the White Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally good provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks spent in these establishments.
"Stupidly and vulgarly modernised"--that is another flower from my note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are some narrow and tortuous streets, with a few curious old houses," I continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the exterior is most extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest." It is fair to say that the Chateau d"Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage; the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you; it is simply very old and very big--so big and so old that this simple impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front of Angers is poor--wanting in colour and in movement; and there is always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally much better when the vast dark bulk of the castle, with its seventeen prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of tremendous girth and solidity; they are encircled with great bands, or hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them hang high curtains of infinitely old-looking masonry, apparently a dense conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally built (thanks to rich quarries in the neighbourhood), and to which it owed its appellation of the Black. There are no windows, no apertures, and to-day no battlements nor roofs. These accessories were removed by Henry III., so that, in spite of its grimness and blackness, the place has not even the interest of looking like a prison; it being, as I suppose, the essence of a prison not to be open to the sky. The only features of the enormous structure are the blank, sombre stretches and protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on so large a scale, is strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus and terminated by St.
Louis, the Chateau d"Angers has of course a great deal of history. The luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of Louis XIV., whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and complete, was confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had taken place at Nantes. Here also Huguenots and Vendeans suffered effective captivity.
I walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it is all up-hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard contains a mult.i.tude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So I came out and took another look at the big, black exterior, b.u.t.tressed with white-ribbed towers, and perceived that a desperate sketcher might extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they say, the little black bronze statue of the good King Rene (a weak production of
[Ill.u.s.tration: ANGERS--OLD TIMBERED HOUSES]
David d"Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the Maison d"Adam and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really imposing monument. The bas.e.m.e.nt is occupied by a linen-draper, who flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mere de Famille; and above his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging storeys. As the house occupies the angle of a little _place_, this front is double, and the black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d"Adam is quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as "moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave, without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a form is a distinction; and indeed I find it mentioned, rather inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big, serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is a sufficiently honourable church; the more that its high west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern pavilion has been inserted.