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THE SPELL OF
THE HEART OF FRANCE

THE SPELL SERIES

Each volume with one or more colored plates
and many illustrations from original drawings
or special photographs. Octavo, decorative
cover, gilt top, boxed. Per volume, $3.00

By Isabel Anderson

THE SPELL OF BELGIUM
THE SPELL OF JAPAN
THE SPELL OF THE HAWAIIAN
ISLANDS AND THE PHILIPPINES

By Caroline Atwater Mason
THE SPELL OF ITALY
THE SPELL OF SOUTHERN SHORES
THE SPELL OF FRANCE

By Archie Bell

THE SPELL OF CHINA
THE SPELL OF EGYPT
THE SPELL OF THE HOLY LAND

By Keith Clark

THE SPELL OF SPAIN
THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND

By W. D. McCrackan

THE SPELL OF TYROL .

THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES

By Edward Neville Vose

THE SPELL OF FLANDERS

By Burton E. Stevenson

THE SPELL OF HOLLAND

By Julia DeW. Addison

THE SPELL OF ENGLAND

By Nathan Haskell Dole

THE SPELL OF SWITZERLAND

By Andre Hallays (Translated by Frank
Roy Fraprie)
THE SPELL OF ALSACE
THE SPELL OF THE HEART OF
FRANCE

THE PAGE COMPANY
53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass.

The Aqueduct of Louis XIF, Maintenon.

From a water-color by Blanche McManus.
(See page 4.J

^ Spell of
Heart of France

THE TOWNS, VILLAGES AND
CHATEAUX ABOUT PARIS

Andre Hallays

JluthoT of " The %ell of Alsaw ' '

translated, with a foreword, by

Frank Ro], Fraprie. S.M., F.R.P.

ILLUSTRATED

First Impression, October, 1920

©CI,A601678

THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. S. A,

MCV 26 iS20

'n^ I

INTRODUCTION

Whoever has read ''The Spell of Alsace" by-
Andre Hallays will need no introduction to the
present book. While the work on Alsace was
undoubtedly read by many because of its timely
publication just at the close of the Great War,
when Alsace and all things French were uppermost
in the public mind, these readers found themselves
held and charmed as much by Monsieur Hallays'
wondrous talent for visualizing landscape and for
infusing the breath of Uf e into images of the past
as by the inherent interest of the subjects on
which he discoursed.

His books are not travel books in the hack-
neyed sense of the word. He does not. catalogue
the things which should be seen, or describe in
guidebook fashion those objects which are starred
by Baedeker. He does not care to take us to see
the things which "every traveler ought to see."
He specializes in the obscure and the little-known.
He finds that the beauty of out-of-the-way places
and objects far from the beaten track of tourist
traffic is as great as can be found in famous spots,
and far more gratifying because of the fact that

X Introduction

it can be observed in solitude and enjoyed in
moods undisturbed by the multitude.

His manner of depicting landscapes is not by
meticulous description, but by apparently casual
touches of color, brilliantly illuminating what
might to the ordinary observer seem monotonous
and colorless landscapes. The inspired flash of
description clings in the mind and gives an unfor-
getable impression of landscape or architectural
beauty. In Alsace he saw everywhere the red-
tiled roofs, the pink sandstone of the Vosges,
sharply contrasted against the green foliage of
lush summer or the golden light of the declining
sun. In the heart of France, as indeed also in
Alsace, he sees, especially, architectural delights
which are unknown to the guidebook and the
multitude.

In fact, it is with the eye of an architect that
Monsieur Hallays has traveled through the outer
suburbs of Paris, to write the essays which are
included in this book. Everywhere he is impressed
by the marvelous perfection of French architec-
tm-al styles at their best, as he has found them
in the regions which he traversed. He makes us
see new beauty in churches and chateaux which
we might pass with a casual glance had not his
illuminating vision and description marked that
which we might see and wonder at.

Introduction xi

The architectural settings, however, much as
they may appeal to his professional eye, are but
the beautiful frames in which to set a multitude of
charming portraits of French worthies, from the
most famous to the most obscure. He knows his
French literature, and more particularly the
memoirs and the letters which shed so vital a
light on men and motives. He has resurrected
more than one character from obscurity and for-
getfulness. His pathetic picture of Bosc, the
lover of nature, choosing his grave in the woods
which he loved so well, in defiance of the imme-
morial custom of his race, will seem perhaps more
unusual to the European mind than to the Ameri-
can, for the New England pioneer of necessity
made his own family graveyard in the most
accessible spot, and these little plots on farms and
in woods dot American soil. His portrait of the
mystic Martin of Gallardon is particularly timely
in this era of revival of interest in psychical
research.

Written, as these essays were, through a series
of years, his descriptions of Soissons and the
valley of the Oise tell us of since-devastated
regions as they were before the whirlwind and
havoc of war swept over heroic France. Doubt-
less the visitor today would find but a memory of
some of the architectural beauties here described.

xii Introduction

Their memories are imperishable, and not the
least of the merits of the book is that the guns of
the Hun cannot destroy the written records of
this beauty, though they may have blasted from
the earth the stones and mortar which composed

those sacred edifices.

Frank Roy Fraprie.
Boston, June 23, 1920.

CONTENTS

FAOB

Introduction

Maintenon . . . . .

II.

La Ferte-Milon . . . .

III.

Meaux and Germigny

IV.

Sainte Radegonde

Senlis

VI-

JUILLY :.

VIL

The Chateau de Maisons .

. 104

VIII.

The Valley of the Oise

. 114

IX.

Gallardon ....

. 135

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon

. 169

XI.

NOYON .....

. 186

XII.

SOISSONS ...... I.;

. 204

XIII.

BeTZ : ;.

. 218

XIV.

Chantilly. . . . ;.

. 250

XV.

The Chateau of Wideville

. 281

XVI.

The Abbey of Livry .

. 291

Notes

. 307

. 313

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Aqueduct op Louis XIV

Maintenon {in

Frontispiece

THE Duchess of

full color) (See page 4)
The Heart of France (map)
Chateau op Maintenon
Louis XIY .
Madame de Montespan .
Madame de Maintenon and

Burgundy
Jean Eacine

Chateau of La Ferte-Milon
Jacques Benigne Bossuet
Cathedral op Meaux
Fenelon and the Duke op Burgundy
Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc .
Madame Roland ....
Jean Marie Roland
Portal op the Cathedral op Senlis
The Pool at Juilly
The Abbey op Port-Royal
Jean de La Fontaine
The Fountain of Neptune, Versailles (in full

color)
Chateau de Maisons

14
18
22
28
30
38
44
46
50
66
72
82
86

92
104

xvi List of Illustrations

PAGE

Fkanqois Maeib Aeouet Voltaire . . . Ill

Church of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent . . . 122
Napoleon's Bedchamber, Chateau de Com-

PIEGNE . . ... . . 126

Church op Tracy-le-Val .... 131

Interior of the Church of Gallardon . . 135

Notre Dame de Chartres . . . . 141

Louis XVIII 154

The Valley op the Seine, from the Terrace

AT St. Germain (in full color) . . . 169

Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux . . . . 174

Henry IV 178

Cardinal-Dug de Rohan-Chabot . . . 182

Cathedral of Noyon ..... 190
Faqade of the Abbey op Saint-Jean-des-

ViGNES, SoissoNs (in full color) . . 212

Princess op Monaco ..... 222

Statue op Le Notre, at Chantilly . . 225

The Temple of Friendship, Betz . . . 240

The Salon op the Garden op Sylvie . . 250

Theophile de Viau ..... 256

The Great Conde ...... 265

Chateau op Chantilly ..... 266

Louis XV as Dauphin ..... 276

Portrait op Mademoiselle de Clermont, by

Nattier 278

Cardinal Richelieu . . . . . 284

ChIteau op "Wideville ..... 286

The Present Abbey of Livry .... 291

:wy*AHi lO T-

THE HEART OF FRANCE

The SPELL of the
HEART of FRANCE

MAINTENON

THERE is in V Education Sentimentale a
brief dialogue which reciirs to my memory
whenever I enter a historic home.
Frederic and Rosanette were visiting the cha-
teau of Fontainebleau. As they stood before the
portrait of Diane de Poitiers as Diana of the
Nether World, Frederic ''looked tenderly at
Rosanette and asked her if she would not like
to have been this woman."
" 'What woman?'
" 'Diane de Poitiers!'

"He repeated: 'Diane de Poitiers, the mistress
of Henry II.'

"She answered with a little, 'Ah!' That was
all.

"Her silence proved clearly that she knew noth-
ing and did not understand, so to relieve her
embarrassment he said to her,

2 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

" 'Perhaps you are tired?'

" 'No, no, on the contrary!'

"And, with her chin raised, casting the vaguest
of glances around her, Rosanette uttered this
remark :

" ^That brings hack memories/'

"There could be perceived on her countenance,
however, an effort, an intention of respect. . . ."

That brings back memories. Rosanette does not
know exactly what they are. But her formula
translates — and with what sincerity ! — the
charm of old chateaux and old gardens about
which floats the odor of past centuries. She
"yawns immoderately" while breathing this vague
perfume, because she is unfamiliar with literature.
Nevertheless, she instinctively feels and respects
the melancholy and distinguished reveries of
those who know the history of France. And
besides, if these latter in their turn desired to
express the pleasure which they feel in visiting
historic places, I would defy them to find any
other words than those which Rosanette herself
uses.

This pleasure is one of the most lively which
can be felt by a loiterer who loves the past, but
whose listless imagination requires, to set it in
motion, the vision of old architecture and the
suggestion of landscapes. It is also one of those

From a drawing by Blanche McManus

CHATEAU OF MAINTENON

Maintenon S

which can most easily be experienced. The soil
of France is so impregnated with history! Every-
where, "that brings back memories."

It is, therefore, to seek "memories" that I
visited Maintenon and its park on a clear and
limpid October afternoon. I had previously read
once more the correspondence of Madame de
Maintenon and run through a few letters of
Madame de Sevign^. My memory is somewhat
less untrained than that of Rosanette. But,
nevertheless, I am startled, on the day when I
wish to learn again, to perceive how many things
I have unlearned, if I ever knew them.

The chateau of Maintenon dates from the six-
teenth century. Since then it has been continued
and enlarged without rigorous following of the
original plan. It is built of stone and brick,
worked and chiseled like the jewels of the French
Renaissance. Its two unsymmetrical wings termi-
nate, the one in a great donjon of stone, the other
in a round tower ®f brick. Some parts have been
restored, others have preserved their aspect of
ancientness. . . . But here, as everywhere else,
time has performed its harmonizing work, and
what the centuries have not yet finished, the soft
October light succeeds in completing. Diversity
of styles, discordances between different parts of

4 The Spell of tha Heart of France

the construction, bizarre and broken lines traced
against the sky by the inequalities of the roofs, the
turrets, the towers and the donjon, neither dis-
concert nor shock us. All these things fuse into
a robust and elegant whole. The very contrasts,
born of chance, appear like the premeditated
fancy of an artist who conceived a work at once
imposing and graceful. The artist is the autumn
sun.

Before the chateau extends a great park which
also offers singular contrasts. Near the building
are stiff parterres in the French style. Beyond,
a long canal, straight and narrow, between two
grassy banks, is pure Le Notre. But, on both
sides of the canal, these stiff designs disappear
and are replaced by vast meadows, fat and humid,
sown with admirable clumps of trees; Le Notre
never passed here. Nature and the seventeenth
century are now reconciled, and the park of
Maintenon presents that seductiveness common
to so many old French parks which are ennobled
by their majestic remnants of the art of Versailles.

Its unusual beauty springs from the ruined
aqueduct which crosses its whole width. These
immense arcades, half crumbled to ruin, clothed
with ivy and Virginia creeper, give a solemn
melancholy to the spot. They are the remains of
the aqueduct which Louis XIV started to con-

Maintenon

struct, to bring to Versailles the waters of the
Eure, a gigantic enterprise which was one of the
most disastrous of his reign. The gangs employed
in this work were decimated by terrible epidemics
caused by the effluvia of the broken soil. It is
said that ten thousand men there met their
death and fifty million francs were wasted. War
in 1688 interrupted these works, ''which," says
Saint-Simon, "have not since been resumed;
there remain of them only shapeless monuments
which will make eternal the memory of this cruel
folly." And, in 1687, Racine, visiting at Main-
tenon, described to Boileau these arcades as
"built for eternity!" In the eighteenth century,
the architects who were commissioned to con-
struct the chateau of Crecy for Madame de
Pompadour came to seek materials in the ancient
domain of Madame de Maintenon. . . . These
different memories are an excellent theme for
meditation upon the banks of the grand canal,
in whose motjonless waters is reflected this pro-
digious romantic decoration.

Within the chateau, we are allowed to visit the
oratory, in which are collected some elegant wood
carvings of the sixteenth century; the king's
chamber, which contains some paintings of the
seventeenth century; a charming portrait of
Madame de Maintenon in her youth and another

6 The Spell of the Heart of France

of Madame de Thianges, the sister of Madame de
Montespan; and lastly, the apartment of
Madame de Maintenon.

What is called the apartment of Madame de
Maintenon consists of two narrow chambers,
containing fm-niture of the seventeenth century; I
know not if these are originals or copies. Two
portraits attract our attention, one of Madame
de Maintenon, the other of Charles X.

The portrait of Madame de Maintenon is a
copy of that by Mignard in the Louvre. "She
is dressed in the costume of the Third Order of
St. Francis; Mignard has embellished her; but it
lacks insipidity, flesh color, whiteness, the air of
youth; and without all these perfections it shows
us a face and an expression surpassing all that
one can describe; eyes full of animation, perfect
grace, no finery and, with all this, no portrait
surpasses his." (Letter from Madame de Cou-
langes to Madame de Sevigne, October 26, 1694.)
Madame de Coulanges does not consider as
finery the mantle of ermine, the royal mantle
thrown over the shoulders of the Franciscan
sister. Louis XIV had required this of the
painter, and it was one of the rare occasions on
which he almost officially admitted the mysteri-
ous marriage. This portrait, in truth, is one of
the best works of Mignard. But, even without

LOUIS XIV.

Maintenon 7

the witness of Madame de Coulanges, we would
not have doubted that the artist had embelHshed
his model. In 1694, Madame de Maintenon was
fifty-nine.

As to the portrait of Charles X, it is placed
here to call to memory the fact that in 1830 the
last of the Bourbons, flying from Rambouillet,
came hither, ''in the midst of the dismal column
which was scarcely hghted by the veiled moon"
(Chateaubriand), and that he found asylum
for a night in the chamber of Madame de
Maintenon.

^ :i: 4: H: 4: 4: 4:

It was on December 27, 1674, that Madame
Scarron became owner of the chateau, and the
domain of Maintenon, for the sum of two hun-
dred and fifty thousand hvres. Louis XIV gave
her this present in recognition of the care which
she had given for five years to the children of
Madame de Montespan. At this time the mission
of the governess, at first secret, had become a
sort of official charge. The illegitimate offspring
had been acknowledged in 1673. Madame Scarron
had then left the mysterious house in which she
dwelt ''at the very end of the Faubourg Saint-
Germain . . . quite near Vaugirard." She ap-
peared at court. But she had calculated the
danger of her position; she dreamt of putting

8 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

herself out of reach of changes of fortune and of
acquiring an "estabhshment."

The letters which she then addressed to her
spiritual director, Abbe Gobehn, were full of the
tale of her fears and her sorrows. She desired a
piece of property to which she could retire to
lead the life of solitude and devotion, to which
she then aspired. She finally obtained from
Madame de Montespan and the King the gift of
Maintenon, and, two months later, she wrote to
her friend, Madame de Coulanges, her first
impressions as a landed proprietor:

''I am more impatient to give you news of
Maintenon than you are to hear them. I have
been here two days which seemed only a moment;
my heart is fixed here. Do you not find it admir-
able that at my age I should attach myself to
these things like a child? The house is very
beautiful: a little too large for the way I propose
to run it. It has very beautiful surroundings,
woodlands where Madame de Sevigne might
dream of Madame de Grignan very comfortably.
I would like to live here; but the time for that
has not yet arrived."

It never came. Madame de Maintenon — the
King had given this name to Scarron's widow —
remained at court to carry out her great purpose:
the conversion of Louis XIV. Not that this

Maintenon 9

project was then clearly formed in her mind.
But, little by little, she saw her favor increase,
the King detach himself from Madame de Monte-
span, and all things work together to assm-e her
victory, which was to be that of God. So it was
necessary for her to abandon her project of living
in retirement, and to remain at Versailles upon the
field of battle. She had hours of weariness and
sadness; but, sustained by pride and devotion,
she always returned to this court life, which, as
La Bruyere expresses it, is a ''serious and melan-
choly game which requires application."

At first it was necessary that she should struggle
against the caprices, the angers and the jealousies
of Madame de Montespan; for a profound aversion
separated the two women. "It is a bitterness,"
says Madame de Sevign^, ''it is an antipathy,
they are as far apart as white is from black.
You ask what causes that? It is because the
friend (Madame de Maintenon) has a pride which
makes her revolt against the other's orders.
She does not like to obey. She will mind father,
but not mother." At one time, the preaching of
Bourdaloue and the imprecations of Bossuet had
determined the King to break with Madame de
Montespan (during Lent of 1675), and, before
departing for the campaign in Flanders, Louis
XIV had bidden farewell to the favorite in ^

10 The Spell of the Heart of France

glazed room, under the eyes of the whole court.
But when the King returned the work of the
bigots was in vain. Madame de Montespan
regained her ascendancy. ''What triumph at
Versailles! What redoubled pride! What a solid
establishment! What a Duchess of Valentinois!
What a relish, even because of distractions and
absence! What a retaking of possession!" (No
one has expressed like Madame de S^vign^ the
dramatic aspect of these spectacles of the court.)
After this dazzhng reentry into favor, every one
expected to see the position of Madame de
Maintenon become less favorable. But she had
patience and talent. Her moderation and good
sense charmed the King, who wearied of the
passionate outbursts of his mistress and who was
soon 10 be troubled by the frightful revelations
of the La Voisin affair. It is true that the Monte-
span was succeeded by a new favorite. Mile, de
Fontanges. But she was ''as beautiful as an
angel and as foohsh as a basket." She was httle
to be feared; her reign was soon over. And
Madame de Maintenon continued to make the
King acquainted with "a new country which
was unknown to him, which is the commerce of
friendship and conversation, without constraint
and without evasion." But how many efforts
and cares there still were before the day of defi-

MADAME DE MONTESPAN

Maintenon 11

nite triumph, that is, until the secret marriage!

In going through her correspondence, we j&nd
very few letters dated from Maintenon. During
the ten years which it took her to conquer and
fix the King's affection, she made only rare and
brief visits to her chateau. It is true that Louis
XIV had commissioned Le N6tre 'Ho adjust this
beautiful and ugly property." The domain had
been increased by new acquisitions. But her
position as governess, and later when she was lady
of the bed-chamber to the Dauphiness, the \^ishes of
Louis XIV kept Madame de 3.Iaintenon at court.

The only time when she remained several
months at Maintenon seems to have been in the
spring of 1779; Madame de Montespan, whom
the King was neglecting at the moment for Mile.
de Ludres, had come to beg shelter of the friend
of her friend, in order to be delivered under her
roof of her sixth child. Mile, de Blois. This
memory has a special value, if we wish to become
well acquainted with the characteristic morahty
of the seventeenth century. Observe, in fact,
that this child was adulterous on both sides; that
Madame de Montespan, abandoned, could only
hate Madame de Maintenon, more in favor than
ever; that, five years later, Madame de IMain-
tenon was to marry Louis XIV, and finally that,
in spite of this curious complaisance, Madame

n The Spell of the Heart of France

de Maintenon had none the less the most sure
and vigilant conscience in regard to everything
which touched on honor. ... It is most likely
that others will discover some day terrible indeli-
cacies in acts which we today think very innocent.
There is an evolution in casuistry.

From the epoch of the foundation of Saint Cyr,
Madame de Maintenon had less time than ever
for her property. She lived her life elsewhere,
divided between the King and the House of St.
Louis. When her niece married the Duke of
Ayen she gave her Maintenon, but reserved the
income for herself but it was to St. Cyr that she
retired and there she died.

Under the great trees of the park, where the
verdure is already touched with pale gold, in the
long avenue which is called the Alley of Racine,
because the poet is supposed to have planned
Athalie there (I do not know if tradition speaks
the truth), I recall that letter to Madame de
Coulanges which I transcribed a little way back.
"My heart is fixed here," said Madame de Main-
tenon. But, the more I think of it the less it
seems to me that her heart was ever capable of
becoming attached to the beauty of things. The
"very beautiful surroundings" of Maintenon
pleased her because this chateau was the proof

Maintenon ' 13

of the King's favor, because, after the miseries of
her childhood, after the years of trials and
anxieties, she finally felt that her ''estabhshment"
was a fact. But there is something like an accent
of irony in her way of vaunting the ''woodlands
where Madame de Sevigne might dream of Madame
de Grignan very comfortably," for there never
was a woman who dreamed less and scorned
dreaming more than this beautiful tutoress, pos-
sessed of good sense, sound reason and a poor
imagination.

She was very beautiful and remained so even
to an advanced age. She was about fifty when
the Ladies of Saint Cyr drew this marvelous
portrait of her: ''She had a voice of the most
agreeable quality, an affectionate tone, an opea
and smiling countenance, the most natural ges-
tures of the most beautiful hands, eyes of fire,
such affectionate and regular motions of a free
figure that she outshone the most beautiful
women of the court. . . . Her first glance was
nnposing and seemed to conceal severity. . . .
Her smile and her voice opened the cloud. . . ."
(This is better than all the Mignards.) Her
conversation was delightful: Madame de Sevign4
bears witness to it, and that at a time when her
testimony cannot be questioned, since nothing
could then cause her to foresee the prodigious

14 The Spell of the Heart of France

destiny of Madame Scarron. She had a sovereign
grace in her apparel, although the material of her
clothing was always of extreme simplicity; and
this amazed her confessor, the excellent and
respectful Abbe Gobehn, who said to her: ''When
you kneel before me I see a mass of drapery fall-
ing at my feet with you, which is so graceful that
I find it almost too much for me."

She knew that she was irresistibly beautiful,
and her confessor had assuredly taught her noth-
ing by telling her that her commonest robes fell
into folds about her with royal elegance. There
was no coquettishness in her.

No one today can have any doubt of her integ-
rity and her virtue. Bussy-Rabutin has certified
this and he was not accustomed to give such a
brevet without good reasons. But, to refute the
calumnies of Saint-Simon, nothing more is required
than to read the letters of Madame de Mainte-
non. They have a turn and an accent which
cannot deceive.

The whole rule of her conduct was double.
She was virtuous from devotion and from care
for her reputation. The second sentiment was
certainly much more important to her than the
first. She has herself confessed it: "I would like
to have done for God all that I have done in the
world to keep my reputation."

MADAME DE MAINTENON AND THE DUCHESS OF BURGUNDY

Maintenon 15

"I wanted to be somebody of importance," she
said. This explains everything: her ambition, her
prudence, her moderation and her scruples. She
cares Uttle for the advantages which her high
position could give her; she seeks neither titles,
nor honors, nor donations. She wishes for the
approbation of honest men; she desires ''good
glory, bonne gloire,'' as Fenelon has expressed it.
We find in her, mingled in proportions which it
is impossible to measure, a passion for honor
quite in the manner of Corneille, and a much less
noble apprehension of what people will say about
her. But if this is truly her character — and,
when we have read her letters, it is impossible to
retain a doubt on this point — she is incapable
of the weaknesses of which she has been accused.
"I have a desire to please and to be well thought
of, which puts me on my guard against all my
passions." That is truth itself, and good psy-
chology. But even more fine and more pene-
trating appears to me the remark once made
about Madame de Maintenon by a woman of
intellect: "This is what has passed through my
mind . . . and has made me beheve that all the
evil they have said about her is quite false: it is
that if she had had something to reproach her-
seK about in regard to her morals, if she had had
weakneesee of a certain kind, she would haye had

16 The Spell of the Heart of France

to fight less against vainglory. Humility would
have been as natural to her as it was foreign to
her, I mean in the bottom of her heart; for exter-
nally every appearance denied that secret pride of
which she complains to her spiritual director. It
was therefore necessary that this should have
been a secret esteem for herself. Now how could
she esteem herself, with the uprightness which was
part of her, if she had not known herself to be
estimable, she who in her conversations paints so
well those whose reputation has been tarnished by
evil conduct. ... I do not know if my thought is
good; but it has pleased me." Thus in the eight-
eenth century, Madame de Louvigny wrote to
La Beaumelle, the first historian of Madame de
Maintenon. The analysis is just and delicate.

One of the grievances of Saint-Simon against
Madame de Maintenon is the manner in which
she used her credit to displace certain prelates of
noble birth, preferring to them "the crass igno-
rance of the Sulpicians, their supreme platitude
. . . the filthy beards of Saint-Sulpice." Chance
has brought to my notice a copy of the letters of
Madame de Maintenon which belonged to Scherer
and which he annotated when reading it, I find
there this remark penciled upon a page: ''Neither
Jesuit, nor Jansenist, but Sulpician." It is impos-
sible to give a better definition of the devotion of

Maintenon 17

Madame de Maintenon. She had the reasonable
piety which is the mark of Saint Sulpice. From
her family and from her infancy she had preserved
a sort of remnant of Calvinism: she did not like
the mass and was pleased with psalm singing.
This was to estrange her from the Jesuits. On
the other hand, Jansenism had an air of inde-
pendence, almost of revolt, which must have dis-
pleased her intelligence, with its love of order.
She was wisely and irreproachably orthodox. Her
grave, tranquil, active piety reveals a conscience
without storms and an imagination without fever.

Thus she had great pride and little vanity,
great devotion and little fervor. She had much
common sense in everything. She loved her glory
passionately and her God seriously. She was
charitable, as was enjoined by the religion which
she practiced with a submissive heart. But we
know neither a movement of sensitiveness nor an
outburst of tenderness in her hfe. She had a
very lofty soul, a very clear intelligence, a very
rigid will. She was desperately dry.

Did this Sulpician, spiritual, cold and ambitious,
ever feel the charm of the great trees of her park?
I doubt it.

LA FERTS-MILON

RACINE was about twelve years old when
he left La Fert4-Milon, to go first to the
college of Beauvais and later to Port-Royal
des Champs. He passed his infancy there in the
house of his paternal grandmother, Marie des
Moulins, the wife of Jean Racine, controller of
the salt warehouse; he was thirteen months old
when his mother died and three years old at the
death of his father. Of these early years we know
nothing except that the grandmother loved the
orphan more than any of her own children, an
affection of which Racine retained the most
tender memory.

He later often returned to the town of his birth,
where his sister Marie had remained and had
married Antoine Riviere. The two families
remained united; Racine handled the interests of
his brother-in-law at Paris; the Rivieres sent
Racine skylarks and cheeses; and when Racine's
children were ill, they were sent to their aunt to
be cared for in the open air. And these were

JEAN RACINE

La Ferte-Milon 19

almost all the bonds between Racine and La
Ferte-Milon.

It is therefore probable that almost nothing at
La Fert^-Milon today will awaken reminiscences
of the poet. However, let us seek.

At the exit from the station a long street, a
sort of faubourg of low houses, with their naive
signs swinging in the wind, leads us to the bridge
across the Ourcq. On the opposite bank, the little
old town with its little old houses clambers up
the abrupt slope of a hill which is crowned by the
formidable ruin of the stronghold. Here and
there, at the water's edge are remnants of walls,
towers and terraced gardens, which, with the
meadows and the poplars of the valley, compose
a ravishing landscape.

Once across the bridge, behold Racine. It is a
statue by David d'Angers. It is backed by the
mayoralty and surrounded by a portico. Racine
wears a great wig, which is not surprising; but,
notwithstanding his great wig, he is half naked,
holding up with his hand a cloth which surrounds
his body and forms ''harmonious " folds. It is
Racine at the bath. Near him stands a cippus,
on which are inscribed the names of his dramatic
works, from Athalie to Les frdres ennemis, the
title of which latter is half concealed by the
inevitable laurels.

20 The Spell of the Heart of France

While I was contemplating this academic but
ridiculous image, a peasant, carrying a basket
on his arm, approached me and delivered the fol-
lowing discourse: ''This is Jean Racine, born in
1639, died in 1699. And you read upon this
marble the list of his dramatic works. He was
born at La Ferte-Milon and I have at home parch-
ments where one may see the names of the persons
of his family; I possess also his baptismal font.
I am, so to speak, the keeper of the archives of
La Ferte. . . . The Comedie frangaise will come
here April 23. . . . Racine had two boys and
five girls. . . . There was a swan in his coat of
arms; the swan is the symbol of purity. Fenelon,
Bishop of Cambrai, has been compared to a swan.
Fenelon, born in 1651 and dead in 1715, is the
author of Tdemaque and of the Maximes des
Saints. This last work embroiled him with
Jacques Benigne Bossuet, in Latin Jacobus
Benignus, Bishop of Meaux, who wrote Oraisons
funehres and the Discours sur Vhistoire universelle,
which he was unfortunately unable to finish. . . .
My name is Bourgeois Parent, and here is my
address. And you, what is your name? You
would not belong to the Comedie frangaise? ^^ All
this uttered in the voice of a scholar who has
learned his lesson by heart, with sly and crafty
winks. . . , I thank this bystander for his

La Ferte-Milon 21

erudition; I admit humbly that I do not belong
to the Comedie frangaise and I take leave, not
without difficulty, of this extraordinary ''Ra-
cinian," who truly has the genius of transition,
in the manner of Petit-Jean.

In what house was Racine born? The accepted
tradition is that his mother was brought to bed
at No. 3, Rue de la Pescherie (now Rue Saint-
Vaast); in this house hved the Sconin couple,
the father and mother of Madame Racine.
The old house has been demolished, and there
remains of it nothing more than a pretty medal-
lion of stone which represents the Judgment of
Paris. This is inserted above a door in the
garden of the new house. But, in the same
street, there stands another house (No. 14) which
belonged to the paternal grandparents of Jean
Racine; it is here, according to other conjectures,
that the author of Athalie was born. And these
two houses are not the only ones at La Ferte
which dispute the honor of having seen the birth
of Racine. ... I will not get mixed up in the
search for the truth. I have heard that the
people of Montauban recently had recourse to an
ingenious means of ending a quarrel of the same
kind. No one knew in which house Ingres had
been born; a furious controversy had arisen
between various proprietors of real estate. It was

22 The Spell of the Heart of France

ended by a referendum. Universal suffrage gave
its decision. Now the question is decided, irrevo-
cably.

There is another monument to the poet. Behind
the apse of the church, in a little square, on top
of a column, is perched an old bust more or less
roughly repaired; at its foot has been placed a
tawdry cast-iron hydrant. This is called the
Racine Fountain. Decidedly La Fert^ is a poor
place of pilgrimage: few relics, and the images of
the saint are not beautiful!

Fortunately, to recompense the pilgrim, there
are in the two churches precious stained glass
windows of the sixteenth century; those of Notre
Dame, despite grievous restorations, are brilliant
in coloring and free in design. The Saint Hubert
is a good picture of almost Germanic precision,
and, above the right-hand altar, the portraits of
the donors and their children are natural and
graceful. Above all, there is the admirable fagade
of the old castle of Louis of Orleans, an enormous
crenelated fortress, flanked with towers, whose
naked grandeur is set off by sculptures, marvel-
ous but mutilated, alas! There are statues of
armed champions framed in elegant foliage, and,
above the arch of the great door, the celebrated
Coronation of the Virgin, one of the masterpieces
of French sculpture; a cast of it can be studied

La Ferte-Milon 23

at the Trocadero, and there we can admire at
full leisure the truth of the attitudes and the
freedom of the draperies. But no one can imagine
the beauty of this composition, unless he has seen
it reheved against and shining from the ferocious
wall of the citadel, colored with the golden green
of mosses, while tufts of yellow wallflowers, grow-
ing among the dehcate carvings of the wide frame,
give an exquisite sumptuousness to the whole
decoration.

Returning to the terrace on the other side of
the castle, which dominates the houses, the towers
and the gardens of the village, I find myself before
the framework of a great tent which is being
erected for the approaching performance by the
ComMie frangaise, and find myself brought back
from the Middle Ages to Racine. These juxta-
positions no longer surprise us, since we are now
so accustomed to ramble through history and
Hterature as through a great second-hand store,
stopping at all the curiosities which amuse our
eclectic taste. I imagine, however, that a man
of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of
Racine, would have been stupified to think that
any one could enjoy the verses of Berenice and at
the same time be sensitive to the charm of the
old Gothic images, carved upon the wall of this
"barbarous" donjon. Time has done its work;

24 The Spell of the Heart of France

it has effaced the prejudices of centuries; it has
allowed us to perceive that the sculptor of the
Coronation of the Virgin and the poet who wrote
Berenice were, after all, sons of the same race
and servants of the same ideal. No, this is not a
vain dream; there is something Racinian in the
statues of La Ferte-Milon. They possess purity,
nobility and elegance. Has not this Virgin,
kneeling before the throne of the Lord, while
two angels ceremoniously hold up the train of
her royal mantle, has she not, I say, the attitude
and the touching grace of Racine's Esther at the
feet of Ahasuerus?

At the edge of this terrace, I have before me
the delightful landscape of the little hills of the
Ourcq valley, and, as I contemplate the soft and
beautiful undulations covered by the forest of
Retz, I am more and more struck by the harmony
of this charming spot.

I think of the pages which Taine placed at the
beginning of his essay on La Fontaine, in which
he discovers in the French landscape the very
qualities of the Gallic mind. You remember this
picture of the land of Champagne: '^The moun-
tains had become hills; the woods were no longer
more than groves. . . . Little brooks wound
among bunches of alders with gracious smiles. . . .
All is medium-sized here, tempered, inclined

La Ferte-Milon 25

rather toward delicacy than toward strength."
How exact all this is! There is a perfect concord-
ance between the genius of La Fontaine and the
aspect of the country of his birth. In the valley
of the Marne, if we follow one of those long high-
ways which stretch, straight and white, between
two ranks of trembling poplars, it seems unnat-
ural not to see the animals leave the fields and
come to talk to us upon the roadway.
These French landscapes have still another sort
of beauty, and, in the country of Racine, this
beauty is more striking than elsewhere; its design
has an incomparable grace and nobleness. The
hues of the different planes intermingle without
ever breaking one another. The undulations
unfold with a caressing, almost musical, slowness.
These hillocks which surround La Ferte-Milon
have, in truth, the sweetness of a verse of Berenice.
They have the flexibility of rhythm of a chorus
from Esther:

Just as a docile brook
Obeys the hand which turns aside its course,
And, allowing the aid of its waters to be divided,

Renders a whole field fertile;
Oh, God, Thou sovereign master of our wills.
The hearts of kings he thus within Thy hand.

We must repeat these verses upon the terrace
of La Ferte-Milon, at the foot of which the Ourcq
ramifies among the gardens and the meadows;
and we must follow upon the horizon the elegant

26 The Spell of the Heart of France

sinuosity of the low hills, to appreciate the mys-
terious and subtle harmony which was established
for life between the imagination of Racine and
the sweet countryside of his infancy.

I did not wish to leave the town of Racine
without following the Faubourg de Saint- Vaast
up to the wooded hillside where the Jansenists
who took refuge at La Ferte-Milon often came to
pray. In 1638, the recluses of Port-Royal had
been dispersed; Lancelot had taken refuge at
La Ferte-Milon, with the parents of one of his
pupils, Nicolas Vitart (the Vitarts were relatives
of the Racines); then M. Antoine Le Maitre and
M. de Sericourt had come to join him. They
long led a life of complete seclusion in the little
house of the Vitarts; but in the summer of 1639
they sometimes decided to go out after supper.
Then they went into the neighboring wood, "upon
the mountain," which overlooks the town, and
there they conversed of good things. They never
spoke to anybody; but when they returned at
nine o'clock, walking in single file and telling
their beads, the townsfolk, seated before their
doors, rose in respect and kept silence as they
passed. (It is still easy to imagine this admirable
scene in the little streets of La Ferte; the archi-
tecture has changed so little!) The good odor,
as Lancelot calls it, which was spread by the three

La Ferte-Milon 27

Jansenists, remained as a living influence in the
little town. And this sojourn of the hermits
brought Port-Royal near to the Racine family.
The sister of the poet's grandmother was already
cellaress at the abbey; his aunt will later take the
veil; his grandmother will end her life at Port-
Royal des Champs; and the young Jean Racine
(he entered the world only after the hermits had
departed) will have for masters Lancelot, Le
Maitre and Hamon. . . . Later he will make a
scandal at Port-Royal; he will rally his masters.
But, in spite of this, their lessons will remain
ineffaceable; and the author of the Cantiques
spirituelles will desire to be buried at the foot of
Hamon' s grave. On what did the destiny of the
poet depend? Perhaps Esther and Athalie would
never have been written if these three hermits,
fleeing from persecution, had not come one day
to ''Jansenize" La Fert6 and to converse about
good things upon the "Mountain," as they called
this pretty hillock of the Valois, with its soft and
shadowy slopes.

Ill

MEAUX AND GERMIGNY

WHILE the glacial downpours of this
endless winter continue, I find pleas-
ure in running over and completing
the notes collected in the course of a stroll which
I undertook on a warm and charming day last
autumn. In weather as bad as this one can
ramble only in memory, unless desirous of catch-
ing influenza.

***** ^

I went to Meaux and to Germigny-l'Ev^que
to discover, either at the episcopal residence or
in Bossuet's country house, whatever may still
recall the memory of the ''Eagle."

To tell the truth, it was not the ''Eagle" who
interested me on that day, but the man himself.
I had recently read the remarkable portrait which
forms the close of the beautiful study of M.
Rebelliau, those pages which are so vivid and in
which is sketched with so much relief and truth the
figure "of an everyday Bossuet, sweet and simple.^'
(Note 1.) It seemed to me that nowhere could

JACQUES BENIGNE BOSSUET

Meaux and Germigny 29

this Bossuet be better evoked than in the garden
of the bishop's house at Meaux and in the park
of Germigny. "In Germiniaco nostro," we read at
the end of the Latin letters of ''M. de Meaux."

I recalled, besides, with what surprise I had
read the Memoires of Abbe Le Dieu, those notes,
sometimes puerile, but so touching in their familiar
simplicity, which reveal to us a Bossuet very
different from that of Bausset. This cardinal,
although he composed his book from the manu-
scripts of Abb6 Le Dieu, could not resign himself
to the simplicity of the faithful secretary. He has
doubtless collected everything; he has said every-
thing; but he has thought it his duty to ascribe
to his model a continuous majesty and an inex-
haustible pride. He has drawn the Bossuet of
Rigaud's portrait.

Shall we cite an example of the way in which
Cardinal de Bausset transposes the descriptions
of Abbe Le Dieu? Bossuet invited his priests to
say the mass quickly: "It is necessary to go roundly,
for fear of tiring the people." This is the phrase
reported by Abbe Le Dieu. And this is how Cardi-
nal de Bausset translates the expression to make
it more suitable to the gravity of the author of
the Oraisons funebres: "li is necessary to perform
all the ceremonies with dignity," said Bossuet,
''but with suitable speed. It is not necessary to

80 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

tire the people." A simple shading; but a char-
acteristic trait is effaced.

I commenced my pilgrimage by a visit to the
cathedral of Meaux.

''He had taken possession of the bishopric of
Meaux on Simday, February 8, 1682, and, on Ash
Wednesday in the following week, preaching in
his cathedral to signaUze the beginning of Lent,
he declared that he would devote himself entirely
to his flock and would consecrate all his talents
to their instruction. He promised to preach on
every occasion when he should pontificate; and
that no business, however pressing, should ever
prevent him from coming to celebrate the high
feasts with his people and to preach the word of
God to them. He never failed in this, not even
to exercise his ojffice of Grand Almoner. He took
leave of the princesses to whom he had been
attached with much respect, and left to others
the charge of administering Holy Communion
to them on the high feasts." {Memoires of Abbe
Le Dieu, Volume I, page 182.)

The pulpit from which Bossuet preached so
many sermons no longer exists. Its panels have
been found and reassembled to form a new pulpit.

Otherwise, in this beautiful Gothic cathedral
there is nothing to arouse the ^notions or to

Meaux and Germigny SI

speak to the imagination. Externally and inter-
nally, all has been '^ freshly restored." The soul
of the past has departed from it.

There is soon to be placed under the roof of the
church a commemorative monument which was
recently exhibited in the Grand Palace, in the
midst of an amusing crowd of statues. I was
told that the authorities have not yet selected
the place which this monument will occupy in
the cathedral. How admirable! The monument
has been conceived and executed for an unde-
termined position! This formidable pile of sculp-
ture has been treated like a simple mantelpiece
ornament. . . . But let us pass; this does not
concern in the least the memory of Bossuet.

S|C 9t^ 7|C «fC !)» S|C •!•

In the bishopry, the episcopal apartments are
on the second floor. Bossuet did not live there
very much. He voluntarily gave up the house
to his nephews and his niece, Madame Bossuet.
His family had imdertaken the management of
the household; he was a spendthrift and gave httle
attention to the cares of daily life, devoting all
his time to his formidable labors. ''I would lose
more than half of my mental ability," he wrote
to Marshal de Belief onds, "if I restricted mysell
in my household expenses."

Madame Bossuet knew bow to take advantage

32 The Spell of the Heart of France

of this weakness of her uncle, inability to take
care of his income. She had become mistress of
the episcopal mansion; she led a worldly life there;
she entertained; she gave suppers and concerts.

During Lent of 1704, Bossuet lay at death's
door. The terrible agonies of illness had caused
him to lose sleep. See what happened just out-
side of the room where he lay in agony: ''This
evening Madame Bossuet gave an entertainment
to the Bishop of Troyes, Madame de La Briffe,
the dowager, Madame Amelot, President Larcher,
and other male and female company, to the num-
ber of eight. There was a magnificent repast for
those who were fasting and those who were not,
with all the noise which attends such assemblies,
and yet this went on in the very antechamber of
M. de Meaux and in his hearing, when he longed
for sleep with the greatest inquietude." {Memoir es
of Abb6 le Dieu, Volume III, page 74.)

It is easy to understand that Bossuet did not
find in such surroundings the peace and quiet
necessary for his immense labors. He had to
find a retreat where he could escape the sounds
of feasting and conversation which filled the
episcopal house.

Let us cross the garden which was once laid
out by Le Notre. Beyond the flower beds, over-
looking the ancient ramparts of the town of

Meaux and G-ermigny SS

Meaux, an avenue of clipped yews offers a sure
and austere asylum for meditation. This was, it
is said, the bishop's promenade. At the very end,
upon the platform of a former bastion, a little
pavilion served as his study. Its old wainscot-
ings have disappeared, but the original division
of the pavihon into two rooms has remained; one
contained his bed, the other his worktable.

Here Bossuet shut himself up every evening.
In the middle of the night, after sleeping four or
five hours, he waked up of his own accord, for he
was master of his hours of sleep. He found his
desk in readiness, his armchair in position, his
books piled upon chairs, his portfolio of papers,
his pens, his writing pad and his lighted lamp;
and he commenced to think and to write. On
winter nights he buried himself to his waist in a
bearskin bag. After a vigil of three hours, he
said his matins and returned to slumber.

While, in the silence of the night, M. de Meaux
wrote against heretics and prayed for them,
armed himself for the eternal combat and worked
for the welfare of the souls which were in his
charge, the salons of the episcopal house were
made gay by lights and violins.

Bossuet remained faithfully in his diocese during
the twenty-two years that he was bishop of Meaux.

34 The Spell of the Heart of France

But he always preferred to live in his country house
at Germigny rather than in his episcopal palace.

Two leagues across a pleasant and shghtly
undulating country, the road crosses the Marne
by a stone bridge. In the seventeenth century
there was only a ferry. On the left bank appears
the httle village of Germigny with its few houses
dotted pleasantly along the hillside. The land-
scape has the grace and freshness which is charac-
teristic of the whole valley of the Marne: a horizon
of tiny hills, humble and smiling, a fertile and
regularly cultivated plain, an old mill lost among
the willows, a line of great poplars, a sluggish,
grassy rivulet, resigned to continual detours, and
finally, spread over all these things, a somewhat
humid hght which imparts to them a delicate
charm — a lovable spectacle of which the eye
cannot tire, since its subtle seductiveness lies
wholly in the changes of the light and the flight
of the clouds.

From the tweKth century, the pleasure house
of the Bishops of Meaux was at Germigny, on
the banks of the Marne. Kings often stopped
there when they came to hunt in the neighboring
forests. Bossuet's predecessor, M. de Ligny,
spent fifty thousand crowns in transforming the
old house into a veritable chateau. The domain
was sold at the time of the Revolution. But

Meaux and Germigny 35

Mgr. de Briey has bought back a part of it and
has thus renewed the tradition of the former
bishops of Meaux.

What remains of the old chateau? The park
has been cut up. Of the gardens a lawn and a
few alleys remain. The buildings have been
ruined. A dovecote and an old turret are still
standing, and the wreckers have respected the
long terrace whose foot was formerly bathed by
the Marne; it is today separated from the river
by a highway. This is shaded by great trees, a
charming place which seems to have been made
especially for the meditative promenade of an
orator or the relaxation of a theologian.

Bossuet loved Germigny. In his letters he
often celebrated the charm of "his sohtude."
He even sung it in Latin in a hymn which he
composed in honor of Saint Barthelemy, the
patron of his parish. Every year he came to his
country house to reaUze that dream of his youth
which he had ingenuously expressed in a sermon:
''What an agreeable diversion to contemplate
how the works of nature advance to perfection
by insensible increase! How much pleasure we
can have in observing the success of the trees
which we have grafted in a garden, the growth of
the wheat, the flow of a river!" For he was
sensitive to the spectacles of nature.

36 The Spell of the Heart of France

''Do you desire to see a sight worthy of your
eyes? Chant with David: 'When I consider thy
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained.' Listen to
the word of Jesus Christ who said to you: 'Con-
sider the lily of the field and the flowers which
pass in a day. Verily, verily, I say unto you,
that Solomon in all his glory and with that beauti-
ful diadem with which his mother crowned his
head, was not arrayed like one of these.' See
these rich carpets with which the earth covers
itself in the spring. How petty is everything in
comparison with these great works of God! There
we see sunplicity joined with grandeur, abundance,
profusion, inexhaustible riches, which were created
by a word and which a word sustains. . . ."

And, in this same Traite de la concupiscence
from which I have just extracted these lines,
written with a grace almost worthy of Saint
Francis, do you recall the admirable picture of a
sunrise: "The sun advanced, and his approach was
made known by a celestial whiteness which spread
on all sides; the stars had disappeared and the
moon had arisen as a crescent, of a sUver hue so
beautiful and so hvely that the eyes were charmed
by it. . . . In proportion as he approached, I
saw her disappear; the feeble crescent diminished
little by little; and when the sun was entirely

Meaux and Grermigny 37

visible, her pale and feeble light, fading away,
lost itself in that of the great luminary in which
it seemed to be absorbed. . . ." Is not this the
work of an attentive and passionate observer?

The numerous letters and decrees dated at
Germigny show how much this retreat pleased
Bossuet. His books followed him there. Labor
seemed easier to him in this salubrious air and at
this delicious spot. There he received, in noble and
courteous fashion, the illustrious personages who
came to visit him. The Great Conde, the Due de
Bourbon, the Prince de Conti, the Comte de
Toulouse, the Due de Maine, Cardinal de Noailles,
Marshal de Villars, Madame de Montespan, and
her sister, the Abbess of Fontevrault, were the
guests of Bossuet at Germigny. In 1690, the
Dauphin, on his way to the army in Germany,
had wished to make his first halt at Germigny,
at the home of his ancient tutor.

The most celebrated preachers were invited by
the Archbishop of Meaux to preach at his cathe-
dral, and were afterward entertained in his coun-
try house. It was in this way that the Abb4
de Fenelon often came to Germigny. At this
period the bishop and the abbe esteemed and loved
each other. "When you come," the Abbe de
Fenelon wrote from Versailles to the Bishop of
Meaux, "you will teU us of the marvels of spring

38 The Spell of the Heart of France

at Germigny. Ours commences to be beautiful:
if you do not wish to believe it, Monsignor, come
to see it." (April 25, 1692.) And on another
occasion, Fenelon sent to Bossuet verses upon his
countryside which are, alas! — ^verses by Fene-
lon! Nine years later the springtimes of Ger-
migny were forgotten. The Maximes des Saints
had been condemned. T^Umaque had been pub-
lished; Td&maque which Bossuet read at this very
Germigny, under the trees which had witnessed the
former friendship now broken, T^Umaque which
he declared '' unworthy not only of a bishop, but
of a priest and of a Christian." And one day,
he said to Abb6 Le Dieu that Fenelon ''had been
a perfect hypocrite all his life. . . ."

Among the visitors at Germigny, we must not
forget Malebranche, whose name was given to
one of the avenues of the garden; Rigaud, who
commenced in this country house the portrait of
Bossuet which today may be found in the Louvre;
Santeul, ''the gray-haired child," who made Latin
verses to describe and celebrate the chateau and
the park of Germigny. How many verses Ger-
migny has inspired!

This beautifiil terrace which overlooks the
Marne and where so many illustrious shades
surround that of "M. de Meaux," is the very

FENELON AND THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

Meaux and Germigny 39

place to evoke the ''sweet and simple" Bossuet!
When we see that he has so many friends and
know this taste for retreat and comitry Hfe, the
man loses at once a little of that solemnity and
that inflexible arrogance which have come down
in legend as characteristic of his personahty.

We also seem to sustain a paradox, even after
M. Brunetiere, even after M. Rebelliau, in speak-
ing today of the sweetness and the humanity of
Bossuet. The entire eighteenth century labored to
blacken and calumniate the victorious adversary
of "sweet F^nelon." It is not in the course of a
promenade upon the banks of the Marne that I
pretend to study the quarrel of quietism. Never-
theless, however httle we may wish to recall the
vicissitudes of the dispute, we must admit that
the excess of shiftiness of the crafty Perigordian
sufficiently justified the excess of hardness of the
impetuous Burgundian. But, in addition, we are
not deahng here with Bossuet as a polemist.
The profundity as well as the ingenuousness of
his faith would excuse the vehemence of his argu-
ments, if we could permit ourselves to be scandal-
ized by so courteous a vehemence, we who, unbe-
lieving or Christian, cannot discuss the most
insignificant problems of pohtics without resorting
to extremes of insult. Bossuet had neither hatred
nor rancor. When he recovered from the emo-

40 The Spell of the Heart of France

tion of the combat, he resumed his natural mood,
which was all charity and sweetness.

He was nearer to the gospel than Fenelon ever
was with ■ his artistic vanity. He had in him
something simple and awkward which brought
him nearer to the people than to the great ones
among whom he had hved. At court, he made
more than one false move. In his diocese, he was
loved for his goodness.

By regarding Bossuet as a persecutor, Jurieu
and the philosophers in his train have obliged the
historians to examine closely what the conduct of
the Bishop of Meaux had been in regard to the
Protestants of his diocese. Now it has appeared
that, of all the prelates of France who were
charged with assuring the execution of the Revo-
cation of the Edict of Nantes, not one showed
more humanity. Bossuet condenmed violence
and constraint, and there was only a single mili-
tary execution in the diocese of Meaux. It would
be childish to reproach a Catholic bishop of the
seventeenth century for not having criticized the
Revocation, of the Edict, especially since this
bishop, the author of Politique tir^e de lEcriture
sainte, should have been, more than any other,
impressed by the perils which the republican
spirit of the French Protestants threatened to the
monarchy. He preached to the Protestants as

Meaux and Germigny 41

eloquently as he could, turned persecution aside
from them, and gave alms to them. He received
at Germigny a great number of ministers who
had come to dispute with him; and it was in the
little chapel of his chateau that Joseph Saurin
and Jacques Benigne Winslow abjured Protes-
tantism beneath his hands.

All of this, I know, you can read in the biogra-
phies of Bossuet and, if you have not already done
it, do not fail to read it in M. Rebelliau's book.
But things have mysterious suggestiveness, and
when we have seen the beautiful garden of the
bishop's house at Meaux and the charming coun-
try about Germigny, we are more disposed to
believe that the Bossuet of the modern historians
is the true Bossuet. I have not verified their
researches; but I have read Le Dieu and I have
walked upon the terrace along the Marne; that
is sufficient.

And I would be ungrateful if I failed to add that
I had the most amiable and the best informed of
guides in my promenade: the Abbe Forme, priest
of Germigny, deserving of the parish of Bossuet,
in all simplicity.

IV
SAINTE RADEGONDE

I HAD heard that, deep in the forest of Mont-
morency, near the hermitage of Saint®
Radegonde, there might be found a Uttle ceme-
tery lost in the midst of the woods. I wondered
who had chosen this romantic bm'ial place. One
of my friends, to whom I had imparted my
curiosity, sent me a book by M. Auguste Rey,
entitled Le Naturaliste Bosc, and assured me that
I would there find enhghtenment on the mystery
which intrigued me. I read it, and the story
told by M. Auguste Rey increased my desire to
become acquainted with the cemetery of Sainte
Radegonde. (Note 2.)

So, on an October afternoon, I wandered in the
forest seeking tombs. The search was long and
charming. As the forest of Montmorency is not
provided with guideposts, it is impossible not
to get lost in it. But the magnificence of the
weather, the miraculous splendor of the golden
and coppery foUage, the lightness of the luminous
mists which float over the reddened forest, the

Sainte Eadegonde 43

perfume of the softened earth and of the moist
leaves, make one quickly forget the humiliation
of having lost his way.

Following one path after another, I ended by
stumbhng upon Sainte Radegonde. The place
is well known to all walkers. Of the ancient priory,
which was founded here in the thirteenth century
by the monks of the Abbey of Saint Victor, there
is left no more than a tumbledown building which
serves today as a ranger's house. It is surrounded
by a wall, so that it is no longer possible to
approach the well which formerly attracted
numerous pilgrims to Sainte Radegonde, for
this saint cured, it is said, the itch and sterihty.

Before the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde
(the word hermitage was made fashionable in
this country by Jean Jacques Rousseau) there
opens a vast glade, whose slope descends to the
brooklet called Ru du Nid-de-l'Aigle, which flows
in the midst of a scrub of blackberries and haw-
thorns. At the end of the meadow, haK hidden
by copses, there rises a httle bluff which elbows
the stream aside. Here is the cemetery. A few
very simple graves surround a little boulder on
which is carved: ''Bosc, Member of the Institute."
Four great cedars overlook them with their superb
shafts.

The site possesses an inexpressible beauty, at

44 The Spell of the Heart of France

the hour when the forest loses the splendor with
which it was but recently decked by the sun's
rays, while a cold breeze shakes the hah-naked
branches, announcing the approaching frosts and
sorrows of winter.

The scene is set. Now Usten to the story, which
I borrow almost entirely from the interesting study
of M. Auguste Rey.

Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, whose mortal
remains repose in the cemetery of Sainte Rade-
gonde, was born at Paris January 29, 1759. His
family, originally from the Cevennes, belonged to
the reformed religion. His father was one of the
physicians of the king.

At Dijon, where he had been sent to coUege, he
followed the courses of the naturahst Durande,
became enthusiastic over the Linnsean system,
and discovered his vocation. When, after return-
ing to Paris, he was obliged by reverses of fortune
to accept a very modest position in the post office,
he continued the studies of his choice and took
the public courses given by the professors and
demonstrators of the King's Garden.

In 1780, it was proper to have a republican soul
and a taste for botany. It was good form to
attend the lectures of M. de Jussieu and to read
Plutarch. Rousseau had made the love of flowers

LOUIS AUGUSTIN GUILLAUME BOSC

Sainte Radegonde 45

fashionable, for he had said: "While I collect
plants I am not unfortunate." Madame de Genhs
composed a Moral Herbal. Amatem-s added a
museum of natural history to their collection of
paintings. One might then meet in the alleys of
the King's Garden a great number of personages
who were later to take part in the revolutionary
assembhes. Bosc needed to make no effort to
foUow the fashion. Being a Huguenot, he was
repubUcan from birth. As to botany, he cherished
it with a deep and ingenuous passion, and not as
a pastime.

It was in the Botanic Garden, either at Jussieu's
lectures or in Andre Thouin's home, that he
sealed the great friendships of his life. He was,
in fact, among the frequenters of the hospitable
apartment where lived the four brothers Thouin,
with their sisters, their wives and their daughters;
this family of scientist gardeners received their
friends in winter in the kitchen and in summer
before the greenhouses. Celebrated men came to
converse with and learn from these worthy men,
who were the true masters of the King's Garden;
and the "venerable" Malesherbes, seated upon a
trough, often conversed with Madam Guillebert,
the sister of Andre Thouin, for whom he had a
particular esteem. (Note 3.)

Bosc at that time entered into friendship with

46 The Spell of the Heart of France

three future members of the Convention, from
whom he had acquired the taste of studying plants:
Creuz6-Latouche, Garan de Coulon and Bancal
des Issarts. The first two died Senators of the
Empire. As to Bancal, we will soon run across
him again.

It was in the same surroundings that he met
Roland, an inspector of manufactures, and his
young wife, then in aU the flower of her robust
beauty. The husband was forty-eight; the wife
was twenty-six; Bosc was twenty; naturally he
fell in love. Madame E-oland gave him to under-
stand that he had nothing to hope for from her;
but she mockingly added that in eighteen years
it would be allowable for him to make a like dec-
laration to her daughter Eudora. Bosc resigned
himself to the situation and consented to the
friendship which was offered him; but he com-
mitted the folly, later, of taking seriously the
raillery with which he had been dismissed.

For ten years Bosc continued a correspondence
with Madame Roland which was full of confidence
and freedom. These letters no longer exist, and
it is a pity; for this republican botanist seems to
have possessed sensitiveness, tenderness and judg-
ment. We do possess, however, most of the letters
which were written to him by Madame Roland.

Without these letters and various others of the

MADAME ROLAND

Sainte Radegonde 47

same period, we would never have had any other
means of knowing Madame Roland than the
image drawn by herself in her Memoirs, her
intolerable Memoirs. We would always have seen
her behind the tragic mask, heroic, unapproach-
able and full of vanity, and we would have
remained almost unconscious of the frightful
tragedy of her death if she had not left us these
intimate and familiar effusions, in which are
revealed the heart and the mind of a woman who
was truly feminine. We are very little moved by
the celebrated letter which she wrote one day to
Bancal, Bosc's friend, to spurn his love, although
she confessed to "tumultuous sentiments" which
agitated her, and to tears which obscured her
vision. I know that Michelet cries: "The cuirass
of the warrior opens, and it is a woman that we
see, the wounded bosom of Clorinda." But we
must doubt, after all, the severity of the wound
which leaves Clorinda cool enough to call to
witness "the absolute irreproachability" of her
life. There is something theatrical in such half-
avowals. On the contrary, her letters to Bosc
are simple in diction and ofttimes charming.
They are spontaneous: "Seated in the ingle
nook, but at eleven o'clock in the morning,
after a peaceful night and the different cares
of the day's work, my friend (that is, Roland)

48 The Spell of the Heart of France

at his desk, my little girl knitting, and myself
talking to one, watching over the work of the
other, savoring the happiness of existing warmly
in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to
a friend, while the snow falls upon so many poor
devils loaded down with misery and grief, I
grieve over their fate; I tm-n back with pleasure to
my own. . . ." And elsewhere: ''Now, know that
Eudora reads well; begins to know no other play-
thing than the needle; amuses herself by drawing
geometrical figures; does not know what shackles
clothes of any kind may be; has no idea of the
price one has to pay for rags for adornment ; believes
herself beautiful when she is told that she is a
good girl and that she has a perfectly white dress,
remarkable for its cleanness; that she finds the
greatest prize in life to be a bonbon given with a
kiss; that her naughty spells become rarer and
shorter; that she walks through the darkness as in
the daylight, fears nothing and has no idea that it
is worth while to tell a lie about anything; add
that she is five years and six weeks old; that I am
not aware that she has false ideas on any subject,
that is important at least; and agree that, if her
stiffness has fatigued me, if her fancies have
worried me, if her carelessness has made it more
difficult for us to influence her, we have not
entirely lost our pains. . . ." And it would be

Sainte Radegonde 49

possible to quote twenty other passages written
with the same grace and the same simphcity. . . .
As for the young friend to whom were addressed
these nice letters, here is his portrait: "As for you,
whom I see even at this distance talking quickly,
going like Ughtning, with an air sometimes sensi-
ble and sometimes heedless, but never imposing
when you try to be grave, because then you make
grimaces derived from Lavater, and because
activity alone suits your face; you whom we love
well and who merit it from us, tell us if the present
is supportable to you and the future gracious."

Let us return to Sainte-Radegonde. While
botanizing through the woods which surround
Paris, Bosc had discovered this retreat. The little
house, last relic of a priory long since abandoned,
was inhabited by an old peasant woman who
gladly offered hospitality to strollers from Paris,
when the Revolution broke out.

Bosc, by his temperament, his tastes and his
friendships, was led to the new ideas. He was not
satisfied with presiding over the Society of Natural
History; he likewise joined the Society of Friends
of the Constitution and, later, he became a mem-
ber of the Jacobin Club. On September 25, 1791,
we find him taking part in a festival given at
Montmorency to celebrate the inauguration of a

50 The Spell of the Heart of France

bust of Rousseau : before the dances and illumina-
tions, he made a speech and offered periwinkles
to the spirit of the philosopher.

Meanwhile, the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde,
confiscated as ecclesiastical property, was about
to be offered for sale, and Bosc was desolated at
the thought that a new owner would perhaps
forbid him access to the wood where he was
accustomed to dream and work. He was poor and
could not dream of buying the httle property,
valued at more than four thousand livres by the
experts of the district of Gonesse. So he per-
suaded his friend Bancal to acquire Sainte, Rade-
gonde at the public auction, February 14, 1792.
We do not know if he was a partner in the trans-
action. What seems certain is that Bancal never
came to dwell in his hermitage.

A few days later Roland became Minister of the
Interior and he named Bosc Administrator of
Posts; it was a question of ''disaristocratizing"
this service. Bosc used his best talents toward
it. . . . But, at the end of a year, the Gironde was
overthrown, the Girondins were under warrants
of arrest, and Bosc took refuge at Sainte Rade-
gonde.

He did not arrive there alone. Roland accom-
panied him; tracked by the revolutionists of the
Conmiune, separated from his wife, who had been

JEAN MARIE ROLAND

Sainte Radegonde 51

imprisoned in the Abbaye, he concealed himself
for fifteen days with his friend before seeking a
safer asylum at Rouen, in the home of the
Demoiselles Malortie.

After having assured the escape of Roland,
Bosc gets hold of his daughter Eudora, who was
then twelve years old, and confides her to the wife
of his friend Creuz^-Latouche ; then he succeeds
in entering the prison, where he reassures Madame
Roland as to the fate of her child.

After being temporarily released, this lady
is again arrested and shut up at Sainte P^lagie.
Bosc continues to come and see her at the peril
of his Hfe. He brings her flowers, for which he
goes to the Botanical Garden; but, one day, he
understands the danger of thus going to visit
the Thouins, and then it is the flowers of Sainte
Radegonde that he brings to the prisoner in a
basket. It is to him that Madame Roland confides
Les Notices Historiques — these are her Memoirs, —
written in her prison. Finally, when her sentence
has become inevitable, she begs from him poison,
by which she may escape the insults of the judges
and the populace: "Behold my firmness, weigh
the reasons, calculate coldly, and appreciate how
little is the worth of the canaille, greedy for
spectacles." Bosc decides that for her own glory
and for the sake of the Republic his friend must

52 The Spell of the Heart of France

accept all: the outrages of the tribunal, the
clamors of the crowd and the horror of the last
agony. She submits. A few days later Bosc returns
to Paris and hears of her execution.

Sainte Radegonde sheltered others who were
proscribed.

One day when Bosc visited Creuz6-Latouche, he
met there Lareveilliere-Lepeaux. The latter,
sought for at the same time as his two inseparable
friends, Urbain Pilastre and Jean Baptiste Leclerc,
had just learned of the flight of Pilastre and the
arrest of Leclerc. He wished to return to his home,
be arrested, and partake the fate of his friend.
Creuze dissuaded him from this act of despair. . . •

Bosc knew Lareveilliere from having formerly
seen him at the home of Andre Thouin, for the
future high priest of the Theophilanthropists had
become quite expert in botany. He offered to
share his hiding place with him. Lareveilhere
accepted. Both succeeded in leaving Paris with-
out being noticed, and reached Sainte Radegonde.

For three weeks Lareveilliere remained hidden
in the forest of Emile. (At this time Montmorency
was called Emile, in honor of Rousseau.) Neither
he nor Bosc had a red cent. They had to live on
bread, roots and snails. Besides, their hiding
place was not safe; there was nothing unusual in

Sainte Radegonde 53

the presence of Bosc in this sohtude, but Lare-
veilliere might any day excite the curiosity of the
patriots of Emile. The ughness of his countenance
and the deformity of his figure caused him to be
noticed by every passer-by. Robespierre was then
living in the hermitage of Jean Jacques; it has
even been related that he met the fugitive face
to face one day; at all events such an encounter
was to be dreaded. The administrators of Seine-
et-Oise sometimes took a fancy to hunt in the
neighborhood of Sainte Radegonde. . . . The
peril increased from day to day. A faithful friend,
Pincepre de Buire, invited Lareveill^re to take
refuge at his home near Peronne. He left Sainte
Radegonde.

^'The good Mile. Letourneur," he has related,
"gave me two or three handkerchiefs; Rozier,
today a counselor at the royal court of Mont-
pellier, then judge of the district of Montmorency,
whose acquaintance we had made at Mile.
Letourneur's, put one of his shirts in my pocket.
Poor Bosc gave me the widow's mite — he put a
stick of white crab in my hand and guided me
through the forest to the highway. To use the
English expression, on leaving him '1 tore myself
from him' with extreme grief." (Note 4.)

Lareveilliere arrived without difficulty at the
village of Buire.

54 The Spell of the Heart of France

On the same day that he left Sainte Radegonde,
another deputy of the Convention, Masuyer, came
to take his place; he was accused because he had
assisted at the escape of Petion; but his greatest
crime was that he had, in full Assembly, said to
Pache, who insisted on proscriptions: "Haven't
you got a little place for me on your list? There
would be a hundred crowns in it for you !' ' Masuyer,
disregarding Bosc's advice, wished to enter Paris.
He was arrested near the Neuilly Bridge. Bosc,
who had insisted on accompanying him, had just
time to plunge into the Bois de Boulogne, escaped,
and returned to his hermitage, where he awaited
the end of the Terror.

4e 4: * ^ * 4: *

When he returned to Paris, in the autumn of
1794, Bosc devoted his entire time to the labors
imposed upon him by the last will of Madame
Roland. He withdrew the manuscript of her
Memoirs from the hiding place where he had left
it, on top of the beam over the stable door of
Sainte Radegonde, and published the first part
of it in April, 1795. At the same time he
endeavored to collect the remnants of the patri-
mony of Eudora, whose guardianship he had
accepted.

Here begins the most melancholy episode of
the life of this worthy man. He became smitten

Sainte Radegonde 55

with his pupil. He allowed himself to be bUnded
by some marks of gratitude. "She is tenderly-
attached to me," he wrote to one of his friends,
''and shows the happiest disposition; so I can no
longer fail to meet her wishes and take her for
my wife, despite the disproportion of our ages."
Nevertheless, he still had scruples, and sent
Eudora for several months to the Demoiselles
Malortie, who had given asylum to E-oland when
a fugitive. It was well for him that he did, for
his illusion was of short duration. Eudora did not
love him. . . .

Without employment, without means, his heart
broken, he resolved to expatriate himseK. He
reached Bordeaux on foot, paid calls on the widows
of his friends of the Gironde, and took passage
on a ship departing for America. He left France
in despair, without receiving a single word of
farewell from Eudora. When he landed at Charles-
ton, he learned of the marriage of his pupil to the
son of a certain Champagneux, a friend of Madame
Roland, to whom he had intrusted the guardian-
ship of the young girl.

Lareveilhere, who had become a Director, had
him appointed vice-consul at Wilmington, and
later consul at New York. But there were great
difficulties between the United States and France;
he could not obtain his exequatur. He tried to

56 The Spell of the Heart of France

console himself by devotion to botany. But the
wound which he had received still bled. ^'I do
not know," he wrote to Madame Louvet, "when
the wound of my heart will be sufficiently healed
to allow me to revisit without too much bitter-
ness the places and the individuals still dear to
me, whose presence will bring back to me cruel
memories. Although I am much more calm than
when I left, although I am actually easily dis-
tracted by my scientific labors and even by
manual occupations, I do not feel that I have
courage to return to Paris. I still need to see
persons to whom I am indifferent, in order to
accustom myself to facing certaui persons whom
I have loved and whom I cannot forget, whatever
injustice they may have done to me or to the
Repubhc, without counting my Eudora. . . ."
And his memory takes him back to the dear
retreat of Sainte Radegonde; he writes to Bancal:
"Well! Then you no longer go to visit Sainte
Radegonde? Do you then take no more interest in
it? I conclude from that that you will undergo no
further expense on account of it and that you will
soon get rid of it. Nevertheless I had the project
of planting there many trees from this country,
since it is the soil most similar to that of South
Carolina that I know in the neighborhood of
Paris. . . ."

Sainte Radegonde 57

Bosc did see Sainte Radegonde again. At the
end of two years he returned to France and married
one of his cousins. The Revolution was over and
Eudora was forgotten.

From that time on, he gave himself up entirely
to his work as a naturalist. He became Inspector
of the nurseries of Versailles and also of those
which were maintained by the Ministry of the
Interior. In 1806 he was elected a member of the
Institute. In 1825 he succeeded his friend Andre
Thouin as Professor of Horticulture at the
Botanical Garden, and after a long and cruel
illness, which prevented him from lecturing, he
died in 1828.

Sb *I( 4c ^ SilC !$• «)C

In 1801, when the first daughter born of his
marriage had died in infancy, he had begged
Bancal to transfer to him two perches of land in
his domain of Sainte. Radegonde, in order that he
might biu-y his child there. Such was the origin
of the little cemetery where Bosc reposes in the
midst of his children and his grandchildren.

I have not regretted making a pilgrimage and
evoking, in the autumnal forest, the phantoms of
these Revolutionists and these botanists.

How touching a figure is that of this Bosc,
whose name recalls — it is Lareveilliere-Lepeaux
who speaks— "the most generous friendship,

58 The Spell of the Heart of France

the most heroic courage, the purest patriotism,
the most active humanity, the most austere
probity, the most determined boldness, and at
the same time the most extended knowledge in
natural science and different branches of adminis-
tration as well as in pohtical, domestic and rural
economy. . ." and also, let us add, the eternal
blindness of the amorous Arnolphe!

SENLIS

THE spire of the ancient cathedral of Senlis
overlooks an immense horizon. This belfry-
is the hghtest, the most elegant, the most
harmonious that Gothic art has given us. It
rises with a flight so magnificent and so perfectly-
rhythmical that at the first glance one might
think it a growth of nature; it seems to live with
the same life as the heavens, the clouds and the
birds. This masterly- grace, this warm beauty,
are, however, the work of time and of men. An
architect endowed with genius thought out this
miraculous plan, proportioned with this infallible
precision the elevation of the different landings,
distributed the openings and the surfaces, invented
the pointed turrets and the frail colunons which
flank the edifice, taper off its structure, precipitate
its flight and make it impossible to perceive the
point at which the square tower is transformed
into an octagonal spire, so that the highest pyra-
mid seems to burst forth from a long corolla.
Then the centuries have painted the stones with

60 The Spell of the Heart of France

the pale gold of lichens, and have completed the
masterpiece.

The whole of Senlis seems to have been built
for the glory of its spire. Streets, gardens, squares,
monuments, houses, all seem to be arranged by a
mysterious artist, who persists in incessantly
bringing back our glance to the dominating spire,
the better to reveal to us all its graces and all its
magnificence, at all times and under all lights.

We wander at random about the httle episcopal
city: it is charming, tortuous and taciturn, with
its moss-covered pavements, its deserted alleys,
its flowering orchards, its shadowed promenades,
its ancient houses. We discover at every step
houses of earUer days which the barbarism of the
men of the present time has spared: here turrets,
spiral staircases, doors surmounted by old escut-
cheons, long half-grotesque gargoyles, mullioned
windows, evoke the refined elegance of the fifteenth
century; yonder, a wall decorated with pilasters
and medallions, or a noble brick and stone crow-
stepped fagade, witness the opulence of the citi-
zenry at the time of the second Renaissance;
there are admirable remains of hospitals of the
thirteenth century; heavy Tuscan porches stand
before beautiful h6tels of the eighteenth: and all
this rich and varied architecture is an excellent
commentary on the words of Jean de Jandun,

Senlis 61

the historian of Senlis: ''To be at Senhs is to dwell
in magnificent homes, whose vigorous walls are
built, not of fragile plaster, but of the hardest and
most selected stone, placed with an industrious
skill, and whose cellars, surrounded by solid con-
structions of stone, so cool the wines during the
summer season, thanks to the degree of their
freshness, that the throat and the stomach of
drinkers thereby experience a supreme delight."
(Note 5.)

To the charm of the spectacle is added the
charm of ancient names: the sinuous streets have
retained their antique appellations. (How wise
is Senlis to maintain these strange words, carved
in the stone, at the corners of its streets, rather
than to inscribe upon ignoble blue plates the
names of all the celebrities dear to Larousse!)
The beautiful houses of former days seem in some
undiscoverable way to be more living when we
discover them in the Street of the Red Mail, the
Street of the Trellis, the Street of the White
Pigeons, the Street of Tiphaine's Well, the Street
of the Little Chaalis, the Impasse du Courtillet,
etc. . . . An amusing sign which represents
three scholars arguing with an ape would no
longer have any flavor if we had to seek for it in
some Place Garibaldi; it is delicious when found
at Unicorn Crossways. On the old Town Hall, an

62 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

inscription continues to indicate the position of
the rabbit and broom market; and it is very fine
that the name of Louis Blanc or of Gambetta
has not been given to the Street of the Cheese
Makers, were it only out of consideration for that
excellent Jean de Jandun who, decidedly, well
knew how to appreciate all the merits of Senlis,
for he wrote in regard to the cheeses of his native
town: "The sweetest milk, a butter without admix-
ture, fat cheeses, served in abundance to mean
and minor purses, banish that furious activity of
the brain which fatigues almost without exception
the majority of admirers of highly spiced meats,
and thus furnish the well-regulated habitude of
a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove."
Fagades, names and souvenirs are exquisite;
and one says to one's self in sauntering about
Senlis that, even without the assistance of the
treatment recommended by Jean de Jandun, the
silent and antique grace of the little town would
be suflScient to inspire in old neurasthenics "the
regulated habitude of a tranquil life and a sim-
phcity of the dove. ..."

The promenade is charming. But neither the
picturesqueness of the streets, nor the beauty of
the houses, nor the piquancy of the old names,
nor even the words of Jean de Jandun are worth
as much as the picture which here strikes the

Senlls 68

glance at every turn: the spire, always the spke
of Notre Dame. It appears suddenly between
two gables. It projects above the old brownish
tile roofs. Above the flower-covered walls of the
gardens it is framed between clumps of lilac and
horse-chestnut. It overlooks the houses, it
dominates the parks. The poor tower of Saint
Peter, with its disgraceful lantern, sometimes
accompanies it at a distance, as if to make bar-
barians better appreciate the grandeur and the
slenderness of Notre Dame's incomparable spire.
Senlis has preserved the ruins of its royal
chateau. It is a place which abounds in mem-
ories, for a great number of the kings of France,
from the Carlovingians to Henri IV, came here to
visit for a season. Even its ruins are not without
interest. They rest upon the Roman wall, which
has remained intact at this spot, and we find there
a fireplace of the thirteenth century, towers, case-
ments. . . . But how completely indifferent aU
this archaeology leaves us when we behold the
spire of the cathedral emerging from the greenery
of the garden! The great trees conceal aU the
rest of the church. We see only, mounting into
the full heaven, the golden pyramid, stOl finer
and more aspiring in the midst of all these spring
greeneries. A mysterious harmony exists between
the youthful boldness, the robust lightness^ of

64 The Spell of the Heart of France

the human work, and the triumphant freshness of
the new vegetation. Besides, the monuments of
Gothic art are as marvelously suited to intimacy
with nature as to famiUarity with Ufe.

This famiharity, which has so often been de-
stroyed by foohshly clearing away the surround-
ings of cathedrals, proves its value to us at Senlis
on the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame. This is a
rectangular space, where grass grows between the
paving stones. The fagade of the church is
framed by two rows of noble chestnuts. Behind
a venerable wall rise the turret and the gable of a
fifteenth-century house. One might suppose it to
be the deserted and well-kept courtyard of a
Flemish heguinage. In this ancient frame, in the
midst of this solitude, the cathedral preserves all
its youth. Here there is a perfect unison between
the building and its surroundings. Not only are
the trees, the walls, the houses, in harmony with
the architecture, but this architecture itself
remains alive, because its proportions have not
been falsified. The dimensions of the square are
exactly those which are needed in order that our
eye may be able to discover in their beauty of
propinquity the portal, the unfinished tower and
the spire. All this is so perfect that its grace is
eternal.

Senlis 65

This cathedral of Senhs would be an incompar-
able edifice even if it did not possess its sublime
spire.

The western portal is one of the most beautiful
works of mediaeval sculpture. On the two sides of
the porch, as on the northern door of Chartres, are
arranged the kings and the prophets who fore-
shadowed the Saviour in the Old Testament.
Vandals have mutilated these statues in olden
times. In the nineteenth century other savages
have restored them and have put in the place of
the broken heads masterpieces of bad taste and
silliness. Happily these malefactors have spared
the rest of the sculptures; they have touched
neither the ruins of the charming calendar, whose
popular scenes unfold themselves above the kings
and the prophets, nor the marvelous statuettes,
still almost intact, which adorn the voussoirs of
the portal, nor the bas-rehef s of the tympan where
angels huddle about the dead Virgin, that some
may carry to heaven her body and others her
soul. As to the Coronation of the Virgin, which
occupies the upper part of the tympan, it also
has been respected alike by iconoclasts and by
restorers. Of all the images of the Mother of
God which the sculpture of the thirteenth cen-
tury has left us, I know none more moving than
this Virgin of Senlis. She is a peasant girl, a

ed The Spell of the Heart of France

simple country maid, with heavy featm-es, and
resignation in her face; her unaccustomed hands
can scarcely hold the scepter and the book; she
is ready for all dolors and for all beatitudes,
extenuated by miracles, harassed by maternity,
still and always ancilla Domini, even in the midst
of the glories of the coronation and of the splen-
dors of Paradise.

The church of the twelfth century, to which
this doorway belongs, was finished in the thir-
teenth, burned in the fourteenth, rebuilt in the
fifteenth, and again ruined by fire at the beginning
of the sixteenth. It is possible to discover in the
cathedral of today the traces of these various
reconstructions. But, however interesting it may
be to foUow, upon the stones of the monuments,
the history of their vicissitudes, I will spare you
this somewhat austere amusement. Continuous
archaeology is tiresome.

I stop at the sixteenth century. It was at this
period that the church took the form and the
aspect which it has preserved to our time.

In 1505, the Bishop Charles de Blanchefort,
together with the chapter, addressed the following
request to the King: ''May it please the King to
have pity and compassion on the poor chiu-ch of
Senlis. . . which, by fortune and inconvenience
of fire, in the month of June, 1504, was burned,

PORTAL OF THE CATHEDRAL OF SENLIS

Senlls 67

the bells melted, and the belfry which is great,
magnificent and one of the notable of the king-
dom, by means of the said fire in such wise dam-
aged that it is in danger of falling." Louis XII
showed himself favorable to the request. Nobles,
citizens and merchants contributed to the work.
The spire was made firm. The walls of the nave
were raised, the vaulting was reconstructed, the
transept was built, and there were constructed
at the north and south sides those two finely
chiseled portals which give to Notre Dame de
Senlis so much elegance and sumptuousness.
How, without dinnnishing the pure beauty of the
old cathedral, the architects of the Renaissance
should have been able to give it this luxurious
attire, this festal clothing; how, without damage
to the ancient edifice, they should have been
able to envelop it with all these laces and jewels
of stone, slender columns, balustrades, carved
copings, pierced lanterns, is a miracle of taste
and ingenuity. The French builders of the first
half of the sixteenth century often produced such
prodigies; but nowhere, I believe, has the success
been as complete as at Senlis.

In the interior, even though the nave is very
short and the choir very deep, the same impres-
sion of unity. Nevertheless, the balustrades in
Renaissance style, which garnish the upper gal-

68 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

leries, shock us for a moment. The discrepancy
in the styles is more visible inside the edifice.
Outside the light envelops all and softens the con-
trasts; the sun creates harmony.

The chapels are poorly decorated. The archi-
tects and clergy have there rivaled each other in
bad taste. They have broken open the apse to
add to it a chapel of the Virgin, which breaks all
the lines of the monument inside and out. Two
statues of the thirteenth century, one representing
Saint Louis and the other Saint Levain, have been
ridiculously colored, so that one would take them
today for products of the Rue Bonaparte. A
pretty Virgin of the fourteenth century would
have been better off without the new gilding
which has been inflicted on it. . . .

At the end of the church, I read on one of the
pillars the following inscription: ''Nicolas Jour-
dain, administrator of this parish, deceased
January 30, 1799. — ^This church owes to him its
restoration and its embellishment. The grateful
parishioners have erected this monument to him. —
Marie Frangoise Truyart, his spouse, equally bene-
factress of this church, deceased January 17,
1811. — Pray for their souls."

Who was M. Jourdain? What embelUshments
does the church of Senhs owe to him? I would
have liked to know. I looked for the sacristan,

Senlis 69

that he might tell me, and also that he might allow

me to enter the sacristy, where one may see the

Dance of Fools on a capital. But the sacristan

of Notre Dame de Senlis dwells very far from his

church, on the banks of the Nonette, in the place

called the Asses' Backs; he goes home before

eleven o'clock in the morning to get his lunch,

and is never seen again at the cathedral, according

to the bell-ringer, before four o'clock in the

afternoon. So I returned at four o'clock. The

sacristan was still eating breakfast at the Asses'

Backs. ... So I shall never know anything

about either M. Nicolas Jourdaia nor Marie

Frangoise Truyart, his wife.

* * * * * * *

On the other bank of the Nonette, turn about.
A little bridge over a httle river; some orchards,
still pink and white with thek last flowers; a street
which climbs through the town, whose roofs and
uneven gables are outlined softly against a sky of
pale blue; remnants of ramparts starred with
golden flowers; great clumps of verdure rising
everywhere among the rosy roofs, and finally the
great belfry dominating all, the Httle town, the
little valley, the fields which rise and fall to the
horizon. Behold, and if you are "one of us," you
will recognize the most perfect, the most elegant,
the finest, the best arranged of aU the landscapes

70 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

of the world. Here is France, the France of
Fouquet, the France of Corot.

And I must also, before leaving Senlis, announce
that this truly aristocratic town has not a single
statue in its squares.

JUILLY

THE Oratorist Fathers founded the college
of Juilly September 2, 1639. They stiU
directed it when these hnes were written.
The world knows what fate has since come to the
masters of this old institution.

Here we are deep in the soil and the history of
France. Juilly, an ancient monastery of the
Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, is seven
leagues from Paris, four leagues from Meaux, in
the Parisis, in the heart of the region where
France discovered that it had a conscience, a
destiny, a tongue and an art. The earth here is
so opulent, so fat and so heavy that six oxen
harnessed to a plow labor over the furrow. The
rich plateau lifts here and there in slow and
measured undulations or sinks in laughing and
umbrageous folds. The brooks are called the
Biberonne, the Ru du Rossignol (Nightingale
Brook); the villages, Thieux, Compans, Dam-
martin, Nantouillet. Joan of Arc prayed in the
church of Thieux. Saint Genevieve, to slake

7^ The Spell of the Heart of Prance

the thirst of one of her companions, called forth
the limpid spring about which the monastery
grew. All the virtues and all the legends of France
render the air more gentle and more salubrious
here.

The valley of Juilly has the modest and pene-
trating grace of the exquisite landscapes of the
Ile-de-France. At the bottom of the valley
stretch lawns and a pool with formal banks. On
one of the slopes, a beautiful park displays its
grand parallel avenues, which debouch on wide
horizons, a park made expressly for the promenade
of a metaphysician, a Cartesian park. On the
opposite slope, a farm, a dovecote, then the vast
buildings of the college, massive constructions of
the seventeenth century, whose austere and naked
fagades are not without grandeur.

On the edge of the pool rises a chestnut tree,
thrice centenarian. Tradition will have that it
sheltered the reveries of Malebranche. It is per-
haps in this place that the Oratorist read Des-
cartes, with such transports " that he was seized
with palpitations of the heart, which sometimes
obliged him to interrupt his reading," an extraordi-
nary emotion which inspired Fontenelle with
this delicious remark: " The invisible and useless
truth is not accustomed to find so much sensi-
tiveness among men, and the most ordinary

THE POOL AT JUILLY

Juilly 73

objects of their passions would hold themselves
happy to be the object of as much."

The chestnut tree of Malebranche has been
pruned. Under the weight of centuries, its
branches bent and broke. They have been cut,
and the venerable trunk now stretches toward the
sky only the wounded stumps. This spectacle
in this place makes one think of the destiny of a
philosophy. The decaying branches of the sys-
tem have been broken, the soil has been strewn
with the great branches under which men for-
merly enjoyed the repose of certainty. But, when
the pruner has finished his task, we still admire
the structure of the old tree and the fecundity of
the soil whence it grew.

The college, with its long corridors and its vast
staircases, preserves a monastic appearance, which
would be severe and harsh if the countryside, the
grass plots, the park and the pool did not display
their gayety about the old walls. When M.
Demolins and his imitators created their new
schools, they followed the example of England;
but, in a certain manner, they revived a French
tradition. Before any one thought of crowding
children into the university barracks of the nine-
teenth century, there were in France colleges
where life was lived in the open air, in the midst
of a beautiful park,

74 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

Within, the house is grave and without luxury.
The Oratorists were never rich. The house has
remained almost in the state in which it was in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
chapel only was rebuilt a few years ago, for the
ancient convent chapel of the thirteenth century
had fallen to ruins. The magnificent wainscot-
ings of oak in the strangers' refectory enframe
paintings of the time of Louis XV, representing
skating, fishing and hunting scenes; the staircase
which leads to the apartments of the Superior is
ornamented with a beautiful railing of iron and
brass; these are the only traces of ancient decora-
tion to be met with in the whole college.

But the ancient home is rich in memories.
Before entering, we have already half seen on the
bank of the pool the meditative shade of Male-
branche. Other ghosts rise on every side. The
Oratory of France lives again at Juilly.

Here, in the chapel, is the image of Cardinal
de BeruUe. This statue, an admirable work by
Jacques Sarazin, is the upper portion of a mauso-
leum which the Oratorist Fathers of Paris had
erected in their institution to the memory of their
founder. The cardinal, in full canonicals, kneels
on a prie-dieu, in the attitude of prayer, with an
open book before him. His head and the upper

Juilly 75

portion of his body turn toward the left in a cm-i-
ous way, but the face is a prodigy of hfe and
expression. The coarse featiu-es, strongly accen-
tuated, breathe good-will and kindness. He has
the magnificent ugliness of a saint.

The concordat of Francis I had caused the
moral ruin of the convents of France; the secular
clergy, among the troubles of the rehgious wars,
had fallen into the most miserable condition,
without piety, without knowledge, and without
manners, when, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Pierre de BeruUe, Madame Acarie and
Saint Vincent de Paul undertook the religious
restoration of France, which the adjuration of
Henri IV had just definitely restored to Cathol-
icism. B^rulle fomided the Oratory of France
on the model of the Oratory of Rome, instituted
by Saint Phihp N^ri.

On November 11, 1611, Saint Martin's Day,
in a house of the Fauboiu-g Saint Jacques, called
the House of Petit Bourbon (the Val-de-Grace
was later built on this same spot), BeruUe and
five other priests assembled to constitute a con-
gregation. The aim of this was to "increase the
perfection of the priestly calling." But its rule
and its spirit had nothing in common with the
rule and the spirit of the monastic orders. The
Oratorist does not pronounce special vows, and

76 The Spell of the Heart of France

remains under the jurisdiction of his bishop.

Bossuet, in his funeral oration on Father Bour-
going, splendidly sununarized the constitution of
the Oratory:

"The immense love of Pierre de BeruUe for the
Church inspired him with the design of forming a
company to which he desired to give no other
spirit than the very spirit of the Church nor any
other rules than its canons, nor any other superiors
than its bishops, nor any other bonds than its
charity, nor any other solemn vows than those of
baptism and of the priesthood.

"There, a holy Uberty makes a holy engage-
ment. One obeys without dependence, one
governs without commands; all authority is in
gentleness, and respect exists without the aid of
fear. The charity which banishes fear operates
this great miracle, and, with no other yoke than
itself, it knows how, not only to capture, but
even to annihilate personal will."

The Jesuits had returned to France seven years
before Pierre de BeruUe created the Oratory. He
was not the enemy of the Company of Jesus, since
he himself had labored to procm-e its return to
France. His work was none the less opposed to
that of Saint Ignatius. "In our body," said a
century later an Oratorist who was faithful to the
spirit of his congregation, "liberty consists . ♦ ,

Juilly 77

in wishing and in doing freely what one ought,
quasi liberi." This quasi Uteri is exactly the
opposite of the famous perinde ac cadaver. We
may understand sufficiently why, in the course
of time, the Jesuits showed Httle sympathy for
the Oratorists. The work of Pierre de Berulle
must have appeared to them a perilous compro-
mise between Cathohc orthodoxy and the detested
principles of the Reformation: what good is it to
renew, at every moment of one's life, one's adhe-
sion to a rule to which it is more simple and more
sure to enchain one's self once for all? Why
wish to give one's self at any cost the haughty joy
of feeling and exercising one's Uberty? And what
is this annihilation which allows the will to reas-
sert itseK incessantly, vivacious and active? The
Jesuits, therefore, were not surprised to see the
Oratory threatened by the Jansenist contagion.

We might be tempted to say, employing a
vocabulary which is too modern, that the spirit
of the Oratory was, from its inception, a hberal
spirit. Let us rather say : It was a Cartesian spirit.
Pierre de Berulle loved and admired Descartes
and urged him to pubhsh his writings. The
greatest of disciples of Descartes, Malebranche,
was an Oratorist. ... A Jesuit would not have
failed to call our attention also to the fact that
here is displayed the imprudence of Pierre de

78 The Spell of the Heart of France

BeruUe and of his successors; for from methodical
doubt came all the rationahsm of the eighteenth
century. . . .
Let us return to Juilly.

On the walls of the masters' refectory hangs a
long series of portraits: they are those of the
Generals Superior of the Oratory and of some
illustrious Oratorists. The most beautiful is that
of Malebranche: this long, meager face witnesses
the candid and simple soul of the metaphysician,
who saw ''all in God." Other paintings are less
attractive. But they are all precious for the
history of the Oratory and of Juilly. . . . Let us
stop before some of these images.

Father de Condren. ''God had rendered him,"
said Saint Chantal, "capable of instructing
angels." His features are impressed with infinite
gentleness; but the height of his forehead and
the veiled splendor of his glance reveal an uncon-
querable tenacity, and thanks to this contrast the
whole face assumes a strange delicacy.

Pierre de BeruUe died at the age of fifty-four,
overcome by fatigue; his labor had been immense;
he had created and guided his congregation,
founded seminaries, dehvered sermons, written
books, guided consciences, and he had been mixed
up in affairs of state. It was Father de Condren

Juilly 79

who succeeded him in the office of Superior Gen-
eral. He gave to the Oratory its permanent
constitution and founded Juilly.

With Father de Condren, the Oratory aban-
doned the path which its founder had traced for
it. It was less occupied in forming the clergy
and instituting seminaries than in giving instruc-
tion to lay youth. The original purpose of the
congregation was thereafter followed and achieved
by M. Olier and the priests of Saint Sulpice. The
wishes of Louis XIII were not averse to this
change, for which in any case Father de Condren
had no dislike; he had taste and talent for teaching.
The ancient abbey of Juilly was thus transformed
into a model college called the Royal Academy
(1638). The King authorized the institution to
add the arms of France to the arms of the Oratory.

Father de Condren himself prepared the new
regulations for study and discipline of the young
Academy. These regulations were a veritable
reform in French education, — a durable and pro-
found reform, for the programs of the University
in the nineteenth century were drawn up in
accordance with the principles of the Oratory.

At that period the Jesuits were masters of edu-
cation and instruction. They considered as the
foundation of all studies a grammatical knowledge
of the dead languages, and gave little attention

80 The Spell of the Heart of France

to history and the exact sciences. They had
instituted that classical education which is so
appropriate to the very genius of our nation that
its ruin would perhaps be the downfall of our
language, our taste and our literature. Never-
theless, their method in certain respects was
narrow and antiquated: they excluded the history
• and the language of France from a college training.
The work of the Oratorists was in a certain
measure to Frenchify and modernize the instruc-
tion of the Jesuits. They remained faithful to
classic antiquity. A year before his death. Father
de Condren said to Thomassin that he did not
desire to leave this world imtil he had once more
read the entire works of Cicero. However, the
Ratio Studiorum, at Juilly, introduced great novel-
ties in the college course. The masters were
required to address the youths in their mother
tongue and to put in their hands Latin grammars
written in French. From that time they began
by learning the rules of French orthography.
Latin became obligatory only from the fourth
class on. The Catechism was given in Latin only
in the second class. History lessons were always
given in French. In the study of Latin, without
abandoning the use of themes, translations were
preferred. Greek was taught in the same way,
but its knowledge was not pushed as far, A

Juilly 81

special chair of history was instituted. The his-
tory of France was given first place, and became
the object of a three-year course. The private
library of the pupils contained principally books
on ancient and modern history. There were also
geography lessons. Finally, in this Cartesian
house, mathematics and physics naturally received
great honor.

They also taught drawing, music, horseman-
ship, fencing and dancing. But comedies and
ballets, which the Jesuits allowed their pupils,
were replaced at Juilly by the sessions of a sort of
literary Academy where the most advanced
pupils imitated the French Academy.

Richelieu, who had so profound and just an
instinct for the interest of France in all directions,
could not be indifferent to the enterprise of Father
de Condren. He understood that the Oratorists
were associating themselves with his great work,
gave their methods "applause such as one could
scarcely believe," and, when he founded a college
in his natal town of Richelieu, laid out the regu-
lations and the program in imitation of those
which were in use at Juilly.

Sainte-Beuve has done honor to the little
schools of Port-Royal for this great revolution in
teaching: "It is indeed," he says, "to these gentle-
men of Port-Royal that the honor is due of having

82 The Spell of the Heart of France

put education in accord with the hterary progress
which the French Academy accomphshed about
the same time, and for having first introduced the
regularity and elegance of French into the current
of learned studies. To get rid of pedantry without
ruining solidity, might have been their motto. . . .
So, a great innovation! To teach children to read
in French, and to choose in French the words
which stood for the objects with which they were
already acquainted and of which they knew the
meaning: this was the point of departure of Port-
Royal. . . ." (Note 6.)

A historian of Juilly (M. Charles Hamel) has
observed that the lower schools were opened only
four years after the foundation of Juilly, and
that we must restore to Father de Condren the
glory of having been the first 'Ho get rid of
pedantry without ruining sohdity," and to cause
French to be spoken in the schools of France.
(Note 7.)

Father Bourgoing. This third superior was a
harsh and absolute master. He was also a rather
rough man of business and one who was not
embarrassed by an excess of power. He imposed
the authority of the rules in all possible ways.
His conduct had a tinge of superb vehemence
which contrasted strongly with the modesty and
gentleness of his predecessors. The Jansenist

Juilly 83

heresy was commencing to hover around the
Oratory. Father Bom-going drew back those
who were straying, with a rough and heavy crook.
He was, besides, as Cardinal Perraud says, in
UOratoire de France, ''the hving model of the
virtues which he desired that others should prac-
tice." (Note 8.) He inflicted terrible penances.
We behold him to his very last day ''shorten
his sleep in spite of his need; endure the rigors of
cold despite his advanced years ; continue his fasts
in spite of his labors; finally afflict his body by
all sorts of austerities without considering his
bodily infirmities." Thus Bossuet expressed him-
self in his funeral oration for Father B our going,
one of the least celebrated, but one of the most
magnificent, that he composed. We have only
to read it to know the men and the spirit of the
Oratory in the seventeenth century.

Father de Sainte-Marthe. This man seems to
have been a student, full of virtue, good sense and
good fellowship, but a man who found himself
very much at a loss in the midst of vexations.
And it was exactly at the period of his govern-
ment that the tempests were unloosed upon the
Oratory. Jansenism had entered the house.
Fathers Quesnel and Du Guet were expelled
from the community. But these punishments did
not satisfy the Archbishop of Paris, M. de Harlay,

84 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

who wished to govern the Oratory with a strong
hand. In the midst of these griefs and intrigues
the unfortunate Father de Sainte-Marthe exoner-
ated himself, proclaimed his submission, preached
concihation, sought to ward off the animosity of
the Archbishop and the King, defended his con-
gregation against the assaults of heresy, and went
away in exile from province to province, until the
day came when it was necessary for him to resign
his office. . . . The more we look at the portrait
of Father de Sainte-Marthe, the more we pity
this good priest, who was evidently bom to Uve
in fair weather.

Father de la Tour. One of the most pleasing
portraits in the refectory of Juilly, full of grace
and mahce. Saint-Simon has also drawn a por-
trait of Father de la Tour and the painter has
added nothing to the sketch of the writer. ''He
was tall of stature, well built, agreeable but im-
posing of countenance, well known for his phant
but fu-m mind, adroit but strong in his sermons,
in the way he led in gay and amusing conversa-
tion without departing from the character which
he bore, excelUng by a spirit of 'wisdom, conduct
and government, and held in the greatest con-
sideration."

*******

We have arrived at the threshold of the eight-

Juilly 85

eenth century. Before going farther, let us evoke
once more the remembrance of two illustrious
guests of whom the old house was proud.

They still show at Juilly the room of Bossuet.
It is lined with very simple panehng and has an
alcove. The furnishings are in the style of the First
Empire. It is here that Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux,
often slept in the course of his pastoral visits, for
Juilly was situated in his diocese. He preached
in the village chapel and presided at the exercises
of the Academy. On August 6, 1696, he wrote to
his nephew, Abb^ Bossuet: ''I came here to listen
to a thesis which was dedicated to me. There
are here a number of worthy people, and the
flower of the Oratory. ..."

The other ^' great man," whose memory has been
preserved at Juilly is Jean de La Fontaine.

He was scarcely twenty years old when a canon
of Soissons, named Hericart, lent him some reli-
gious books. The reading of these inflamed him
with great devotion and he believed that he was
called to the ecclesiastical state. He departed for
Paris and entered the institution at the Oratory
on April 27, 1641. This was his first distraction.

A few weeks later his masters sent him to Juilly,
under Father de Vemeuil, who was to prepare him
for ordination. La Fontaine read Marot and
looked out of the window. Now, as his room over-

86 The Spell of the Heart of France

looked the farmyard, he amused himself every
day by watching the hens pick up their living.
To get the sympathy of the ben-keeper, he let
down by a cord his cap full of bread crumbs.

Father Bourgoing, then superior of the congre-
gation, was not the man to sympathize with the
tastes and crotchets of Jean de La Fontaine; he
sent him back to Paris, to the seminary of Saint-
Magloire. Then one fine day, the young man
went away as he had come, leaving behind him
his brother, Claude de La Fontaine, who, taking
his example seriously, had also entered the Ora-
tory. His stay at Juilly does not seem to have
left a very deep trace in its memory. But he
had at least furnished the future students of the
college with a very fine subject for Latin verses.

It is well known that Canon Hericart, as he
had not been able to make a priest of his friend,
later decided to marry him to one of his relatives.
La Fontaine went to the marriage as he had gone
to the Oratory; he escaped from it in the same
way.

The fate of the Oratory of France was less
glorious in the eighteenth century than it had
been in the seventeenth: the theological quarrels
which broke out as a result of the Bull Unigenitus
divided and enfeebled the congregation. But the
renown of Juilly did not suffer from this, and the

Juilly 87

college founded by Father de Condren prospered.
The buildings of the old monastery were recon-
structed and enlarged. The methods of instruc-
tion remained the same. As to discipline, it is
said to have been quite paternal, and was exercised
by reprimands or affectionate chidings rather
than by punishments. At Juilly, however, as in
all colleges, the children continued to be whipped.
In 1762, the Jesuits were expelled from France
and their properties sold. This was apparently a
great advantage for the Oratory : the closing of the
colleges of the Company of Jesus made it the
master of education. But the thoughtful Ora-
torists did not fall into this illusion. ''It is the
destruction of our congregation," said Father de
la Valette at that time; he understood that this
brutal blow touched the Church itself, even if some
doubted this and others were unwilling to admit
it. Besides, the succession of the Jesuits was too
heavy a burden to be undertaken. The Oratory
was not sufficiently numerous suddenly to take
charge of so many houses; it found it necessary
to associate with itself a great number of "lay
brothers," whose vocation was doubtful; these
young "regents" were generally found to be
unprepared to undergo the constraints of a reli-
gious rule. This was being discovered when the
Revolution broke out.

88 The Spell of the Heart of France,

An old student of Juilly, Antoine Vincent
Arnault, a tragic poet, author of Marius d Min-
turne, Lucrece, Cincinnatus, etc., whom Napoleon
wished to have as collaborator in writing a tragedy
and who was the predecessor of Scribe in the
French Academy, left some interesting memoirs
entitled Souvenirs d'un sexagenaire. (Note 9.) He
was born in 1766 and entered Juilly in 1776. He
has told us of his college years, "the eight un-
happiest years of his life." Thanks to him, we
know the existence which was the rule at Juilly
from 1780 to 1784, and what professors had charge
of the instruction. The picture seems to me to
be worth redrawing, now that we know the archi-
tecture and the history of the school.

The superior of the house at that time was
Father Petit. "A skilled administrator, a pru-
dent director, a mentality without prejudice or
illusions, more of a philosopher than he perhaps
beheved himself to be, indulgent and malevolent
at once, he guided this great house with good
words, and maintained admirable order in it for
thirty years. . . . Rehgious, but not fanatical,
he did not forget that he was director of a board-
ing school and not of a seminary, and that the
children who were confided to him were to hve
in the world: so he was especially anxious that

Juilly 89

they should be turned into worthy men: this was
his own expression."

In truth, this '' admirable order" was sometimes
troubled. The collegians of 1780 played their
parts: they wrote little verses and little hbels
against their masters, became enthusiastic about
the American Revolution, and played at upris-
ings. The wisdom and moderation of Father
Petit did not always succeed in calming the revo-
lutionary effervescence of these youths. The
wind which commenced to blow across France
blew hard even in the high monastic corridors of
Juilly.

The middle classroom was the most turbulent
and the promptest to revolt against iniquity. One
day these ''middles" decided to hang their prefect
in effigy. The victim got angry, shut off recrea-
tion and ordered the children to return to the
schoolroom. Instantly the candles went out;
dictionaries, candlesticks, writing desks, became
so many projectiles which rained upon the pre-
fect's back; struck down by a copy of the Gradus,
the pedant fled. The class then built barricades
and lit a bonfire, into which they threw the ferule,
the mortarboard and the scholarship record
which the enemy had left upon the field of battle.
They refused to listen to overtures of peace, and
remained deaf to the warnings of the Superior,

90 The Spell of the Heart of France

although they were in the habit of respecting
them.

From the viewpoint of a man who later went
through several revolutions, Arnault here makes
this judicious remark: "Whoever may be the indi-
viduals of which it is composed, the mob always
obeys the same principles. The breath of a child
in a glass of water produces the same effects as
the blast of the hurricane upon the ocean."

It became necessary to turn the siege into a
blockade. On the next day, vanquished by
hunger, the scholars surrendered. They were
promised a general amnesty. But, once in pos-
session, the besiegers violated the treaty. ' ' Then,"
adds Arnault, "I understood what poUtics was;
I saw that it was not always in accord with the
morahty which we were so eloquently advised to
respect as the equal of reUgion." And this was
doubtless the reason why there were so many
prefects of the Empire among the former pupils
of Juilly!

Father Petit was not the only Oratorist of whom
Arnault handed down a good report. Father
Viel, the translator of TeUmaque into Latin verse,
showed so much justice and goodness in the col-
lege that the students always arranged to rebel
while he was traveUng, thus showing how much
they respected him. Father Dotteville, the

Juilly 01

translator of Sallust and of Tacitus, built at
Juilly a charming retreat where he cultivated
literature and flowers. Father Prioleau, who taught
philosophy, knew how to make aU work lovable,
even the study of Aristotle's Categories. Father
Mandar, who later became superior of the college,
was famous as a preacher — he was compared to
Massillon — and as a poet — he was compared to
Gresset. His lively muse, fertile in songs, rose
even to descriptive poetry. Father Mandar
wrote a poem called the Chartreuse; for he was
sensitive to the beauties of nature and Jean
Jacques had sought his company. . . . These
remained, even to the end of their life, faithful
to their vocation. Others failed in this, and owed
their great celebrity neither to translations nor
to the practice of oratorical virtues. Juilly was a
nursery of Revolutionists and of Conventionals.

One day — science was still honored in this
Cartesian college — it was decided to give the
pupils a scientific recreation. Under the direction
of their professor of physics, they built a fire
balloon of paper, upon which a prefect of studies
who indulged in fugitive verse wrote this quatrain
of his own composition:

^(We have grown too old for soap bubbles;
In changing balloons we change pleasures.
If this carried oiu" first homage to King Louis,
The winds would blow it to the goal of our desires.

92 The Spell of the Heart of France

We do not know if the fire balloon came down
in the park of Versailles. But we do know the
names of the physicist and the poet of Juilly.
The physicist was Father Fouche, and the poet
was Father Billaud (Billaud-Varennes). Arnault
remarks in this connection: ''Ten years after-
ward, they showed themselves less gracious toward
the monarch."

Father BiUaud, good Father Billaud, as he was
called at Juilly, was a young man of twenty-one
years. He was the son of a lawyer of La Rochelle
who had neither fortune nor clients. He had
scarcely left college when he abducted a young
girl and then became a member of a troupe of
comedians. He was a failure on the stage and
returned to La Rochelle. There he put on the
stage a satirical comedy: La Femme comme il
n'y en a plus, in which he defamed all the women
of his town. It was hissed off the boards and he
had to flee to Paris. As he was penniless, he
entered the Oratory; and, as the Oratory needed
regents for its colleges, they sent him to Juilly
as prefect of studies. His pupils loved his good
fellowship. But his superiors had very quickly
seen what was under the mask. ''Billaud — To
judge by the way in which he reads Latin, he
does not know it very well. Has he brains? I
have not had sufficient time to find out. But he

The Fountain of Neptune, Versailles.

From a water-color bv Blanche McManus.

Juilly 93

has a high opinion of himself, and I regard him
as only a worldly man, clothed in the habit of the
Oratory, coolly regular and honest, who has tried
hard not to compromise himself in the last few
months, for when he first came here his behavior
was not of the best. Though he may be judicious
in his conduct, I do not think that he is suited to
the Oratory, because of his age, of what he has
been, and of what he is." Such was the judgment
passed upon him by his superior, for the Superior
General of the congregation, in 1784. Shortly
afterward it was learned that Father Billaud had
offered a tragedy to the comedian Larive: he
was expelled. . . . We know what followed: his
entry of the bar at Paris, his marriage to the
natural daughter of a farmer-general, his friend-
ship with Marat and Ptobespierre, his complicity
in the massacres of September, his ferocities and
cowardices, his turnabout on the ninth of Ther-
midor, his banishment to Guiana, his escape, his
death in San Domingo. He ended his career as
a teacher of parrots.

Was good Father Billaud of Juilly a hypocrite?
Did he already dissimulate under the appearance
of cold regularity the wild passions of the .Jacobin
of '93? ... I prefer the explanation of Arnault
who, decidedly, does not lack judgment: "Father
Billaud, who later became so frightfully famous

94 The Spell of the Heart of France

under the name of Billaud-Varennes, also appeared
to be a very good man at that time, and perhaps
he was so; perhaps he would even have been so
all his life, if he had remained a private citizen, if
the events which provoked the development of his
atrocious policy and the application of his fright-
ful theories had never presented themselves. I
would prefer to beheve that morally, as physically,
we all carry in ourselves the germs of more than
one grave malady, from which we seem to be
exempt as long as we do not meet the circumstance
which is capable of provoking the explosion."

Father Fouche, professor of physics, was a year
older than Father Billaud. He also passed at
Juilly as a good fellow, and interested his pupils
by showing them spectacular physical experi-
ments. He, however, did not enter the Oratory
from necessity or caprice. He was brought up
by the Oratorists of Nantes, and had come to the
institution at Paris with the intention of devoting
himself to the teaching of science. He had no
bent for theology, but was fond of studying
Horace, Tacitus and Euclid's Commentaries.
He was soon to abandon Euclid; but he did not
forget the examples of perfect wickedness which
were presented to him by Tacitus, and he served
the Terror, the Directory and Napoleon with the
cold infamy of a freedman; as for Horace, he was

Juilly 95

never faithless to him, for he had a taste for
gardens and for friendship.

He was regent at Venddme, then at Juilly, then
at Arras, where he made the acquaintance of
Robespierre. He was prefect of studies at Nantes
when the Revolution threw him into pubUc Hfe.

He never forgot Juilly. Perhaps some of the
verses of Horace were associated in his mind with
the memory of the trees of the park and the waters
of the pool. ... In 1802, when he was Minister
of the General Police, he wished to come to visit
his old college, he who, in the time of the Terror,
in the Ni^vre and at Lyons, had added to the most
frightful massacres the most childish sacrilege.
Events then passed easily over the imagination
of men, and even more quickly over the imagina-
tion of a Fouche. An ex-Oratorist, Father Dotte-
ville, accompanied him to Juilly. The pupils
received the visitors by singing verses of their
own composition:

Leaving, to revisit your friends,
The worries of the ministry,
Such leisures as are allowed you
In that solitary asyluro;
Our forebears had the good fortune
To profit by your lessons ....

This last allusion appeared a Uttle too precise
to Fouche, who turned his back on the singers.
But, after this moment of ill humor, his Excellency
showed himseK very amiable. Fathers Lombois

96 The Spell of the Heart of France

and Creniere, his former associates, who still lived
at Juilly, refused to speak to him, however. But
he did not despair of weakening their determina-
tion, and it was he who in 1806 gave to the chapel
of the college the magnificent statue of Berulle,
of which I have spoken to you.

It was natural that Fouche, when he became an
official under Bonaparte, should show himseK less
vehemently irreligious than at the period when he
was the colleague of CoUot d'Herbois. It was
even necessary for him to pretend devotion when
Louis XVIII consented to give him a civil posi-
tion. But it is impossible to read without smiling
the following lines written to M. Charles Hamel,
the historian of Juilly, by L. Roberdeau, the
former secretary of Fouch6: "Here are the facts,
whose exactness I can guarantee to you. The
curate of Ferrieres always had a place set for him
at the chateau, when the Duke of Otranto was
there. He received from him annually a supple-
mentary salary of six hundred francs and was
allowed to sign wood, bread and meat tickets ad
libitum, as well as to call for any other kind of aid
or to distribute arms. The Duke also gave a
magnificent dais to the church. [This touch is
exquisite, when attributed to the former conven-
tional who had methodically plundered and
wrecked all the churches of the Nievre.J The

Juilly 97

doctor of the chateau was requked to take care
of all the invaUd poor of his domams; he exacted
that they should receive the same attention as
himseK, etc." But this is the most admirable: ''I
do not know in what sentiments the Duke of
Otranto died; but I know that, when Louis
XVIII offered him an ambassadorship of the
first rank, he chose the humble court of Dresden
because the King of Saxony was known to be a
sincerely religious man." I do not doubt that
Fouche may have thus talked to his credulous
secretary. It is possible that he even said the
same thing to Louis XVIII. But the Kins: assur-
edly did not believe it, and was right.

I cannot decide to leave Fouche without quot-
ing in this place some Hues from a magnificent
portrait drawn by Charles Nodier. This passage
is almost unknown, being buried in the Diction-
naire de la conversation; M. Charles Hamel has
quoted it in his book: "... There was not a
feature in his face, not a Une in all its structiu-e,
on which work or care had not left their imprint.
His visage was pale, with a paleness which was
peculiar to himseh. It was a cold but living tone,
like that which time gives to monuments. The
power of his eyes, which were of a very clear blue,
but deprived of any hght in their glance, soon
prevailed over all the impressions which his first

98 The Spell of the Heart of France

aspect produced on one. Their curious, exacting,
profound, but immutably dull fixedness, had a
quality which was frighirul. ... I asked myself
by what operation of the will he could thus
succeed in extinguishing his soul, in depriving the
pupil of its animated transparency, in with-
drawing his glance into an invisible sheath as a
cat retracts its claws." This is wonderful!

^"Fathef Fouchejand Father Billaud were not
the only masters of Juilly who played a part in
the Revolution. About the same time Father
Gaillard was regent of the sixth class, and Father
Bailly was prefect of studies. This Father Gaillard
was a terrible man; he frightened his pupils by
his severity and his intractable piety. ''Here is a
man who, if justice had been done, would have
been btirned, together with his writings," he said
before5a portrait of Jean Jacques. In 1792 he
left Juilly, having exchanged his robe for the
uniform of the National Guard; he went with his
company to Melun, where he married and became
president of the criminal court. Later he found
means of paying a compliment to the First Consul,
and had the good luck again to come in contact
with his former associate Fouche. The latter
elevated him to the Court of Cassation, and made
him one of his agents; Gaillard rendered great

Juilly 99

services to the Duke of Otranto, at the court of
Ghent.

Father Bailly also left the Oratory to take part
in pubUc affairs; but he had more moderate
opinions. As a deputy to the Convention from
Meaux, he voted against the death of the King;
he was one of the Thermidorians, took part in
the Eighteenth Brumaire, and became a prefect
of the Empire. . . .

If we believe with Taine that the Revolution
was entirely an outcome of Cartesianism and of
the classic spirit, what a beautiful allegory is this
assembly of future Revolutionists in square caps,
under the wide branches of Malebranche's chest-
nut tree!

*******

The Oratory did not survive the Revolution,
but Juilly outlived the Oratory.

After 1789, the congregation was divided against
itself. Some fathers were willing to take the
oath; others refused it. Some of the young asso-
ciates scorned the authority of the Superior
General. The law of August 18, 1792, dissolved
the Oratory. But the Oratorists remained at
Juilly at the very height of the tumult. One day
mobs from Meaux invaded the buildings and
pillaged the chapel; even after this, a few priests
and a score of pupils again assembled in the col-

100 The Spell of the Heart of France

lege. They left it only during three months in
1793, when a military hospital was installed in
place of the school. After the Terror was over,
the woman who had acquired Juilly as a national
property returned it to its former masters. The
college peopled itself anew.

Napoleon dreamed for a time of reestablishing
the Oratory and of putting it in charge of all
secondary education; Jerome was brought up at
Juilly. But this project was abandoned. But at
least, when he reorganized the University, Fon-
tanes was inspired by the rules and the pro-
grams of the colleges of the Oratory.

The last Oratorists retired in 1828. Juilly
passed under the direction of the Abbes de Scorbiac
and de Salinis. Then comes another of the glori-
ous moments of its history. In 1830 and in 1831
Lamennais became the guest of Juilly. Enveloped
in his long black quilted coat, following by choice
the path at the water's edge — doubtless to redis-
cover there memories of the pool of La Chesnaie,
Lamennais carried back and forth, under the
trees of the old park, his passionate dreams. It
was here that he meditated his articles for
UAvenir, conceived the plan of the ''General
Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty,"
composed the ardent diatribes in which he claimed
independence for the Church, the right of teaching

Juilly 101

for Catholics, freedom to associate for the monks.
It was here that he charmed his friends by the
sensitiveness of his heart and frightened them by
the boldness of his imagination. It was from
Juilly that he returned to Paris to appear with
Lacordaire before the Court of Assizes. It was
from Juilly that he left for Rome. . . .

Abb4 Bautain and Abbe Carl, then Abbe
Maricourt, directed Juilly after MM. de Scorbiac
and de Salinis, up to the time (1867) when the
reconstituted Oratory reentered in possession of
the college founded by Father de Condren.

In 1852 a few priests had been united by Father
P^tetot, ex-curate of Saint Roch, for the purpose
of restoring the congregation dispersed at the
time of the Revolution. They had sought and
found the traditions of the former Oratory, and
slowly "reconstituted in its entirety the pacific
and studious city built more than two centuries
before by Father de Berulle." ' ' They could then,"
said Cardinal Perraud, ''place a hving model
under their eyes in order to imitate it." The
Oratory was thus reborn with the ancient rule
which had formerly been its originally — a simple
association of lay priests submissive to bishops,
it asked of its members neither the vow of obedi-
ence nor the vow of poverty. (Note 10.) It
was natural that it should undertake the direction

102 The Spell of the Heart of France

of Juilly, the most ancient and the most glorious
of its houses. ...

Here I end the rather desultory notes which I
have made while visiting Juilly and rummaging
through its history. I wish to speak neither of
yesterday, nor of today . . . , nor of tomorrow.
I have not attempted to plead for the masters of
Juilly, now threatened with again being expelled
from their house. I have not the ability to defend
them, and besides one cannot plead against a
position already taken, or folly, or wickedness.

Nor have I the candor to believe that the illus-
trious phantoms with which are populated the
shady avenues and the long galleries of Juilly,
Malebranche, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Lamennais,
can move the vulgar pedants to whom France now
belongs. But if by chance I have evoked ''the
long, mobile and flat face . . . the physiognomy
like an agitated fizgig . . . the little bloody
eyes . . . the restless and convulsive attitudes"
of Joseph Fouche, I have allowed myself this
historical amusement, without thinking that the
President of the Council may be able to take the
same pleasure in it. Father Fouch^ and the repre-
sentative of the Mountain, the bad Oratorist and
the good Jacobin, must be congenial to him, with-
out doubt; but there is also the Duke of Otranto:
M. Combes has not yet got to that point.

Juilly 103

Finally, if I have tried to show that the Oratory
is attached by a close bond to the past of France,
that the mold in which, for two centuries and a
half, French intelligence was founded was fabri-
cated at Juilly, and that the very basis of our
education remains Oratorist in spite of every-
thing, I have not for a single instant dreamed that
these considerations based on history could awake
the least respect or the least gratitude among the
politicians, for these gentlemen are sincerely
convinced that France was born on the day when
a majority of three votes, captured, bought or
stolen, made them ward bosses.

VII

THE CHATEAU DE MAISONS

OT long ago the Chateau of Asay-le-Rideau,
a masterpiece of the French art of the
sixteenth century, was in peril. Today it
is the turn of the Chateau de Maisons, a master-
piece of the French art of the seventeenth cen-
tury. But this time it is not a question of
a peril which is more or less distant. The destruc-
tion of Maisons is a fact which is decided upon.
The property has just fallen into the hands of a
real estate speculator. He intends to cut up
what remains of the park into house lots. As
to the chateau, the wreckers will first rip out the
magnificent mantelpieces and the incomparable
sculptures which adorn the walls; they will sell
them; then they will tear down the building. The
fragments will serve to fill the moats, and on the
ground thus made level they will build suburban
villas.

The Department of Fine Arts looks on power-
lessly at this act of abominable vandalism, for
the Chateau de Maisons is not listed as a national

104

The Chateau de Maisons 105

monument. And not one of those amateurs who
spend fortunes every day to buy childish orna-
ments, restored pictures and ragged tapestries,
not a single one of these can be found who will
preserve for France one of the monuments which
are the glory of French architecture. Not one of
those public administrations which incessantly
build at enormous expense hospitals, asylums,
colleges, has thought that it might be able, by
utilizing this vast building, to render at the same
stroke a brilliant service to art and to history!
It is said that the department of Seine-et-Oise is
looking for a site on which to build a hospital;
why did it not long ago decide to appropriate the
Chateau de Maisons for this purpose?

It is intolerable to think that one of the most
beautiful residences of old France, situated at the
very gates of Paris, is going to be stupidly de-
molished, at a time when the curators of our
museums can find the necessary money to pur-
chase archaeological curiosities and foreign trifles!
(Note 11.) And you will see that, as soon as
Maisons is stripped by the house wreckers, it
will be found very proper to purchase at great
expense for the Louvre a few of the statues and
a part of the bas-reUefs which vandals will have
been permitted to tear from the place where
Frangois Mansart had them placed!

106 The Spell of the Heart of France

The agony of Maisons will have lasted more than
seventy years. It was the banker Laffitte who,
after 1830, commenced the work of destruction,
made way with the terraces and the cascades which
were placed between the chateau and the Seine,
and demolished the great stables, a magnificent
building decorated with precious sculptures, which
was the marvel of Maisons. It was he who cut
up the greater part of the park, five hundred
hectares, and cut down the centenarian trees of
the domain of the Longueils.

After Laffitte, what remained of Maisons passed
to less barbarous hands. Another proprietor
tried to restore some beauty to the fragments of
park which had been preserved. Even today there
remain pretty thickets, a fine greensward, avenues
lined with great antique busts, while the chateau
itself is almost intact.

Every Parisian knows, at least by having seen
it from the window of a railway train, this superb
construction which tomorrow will be no more than
a pile of rubble and plaster. It ravishes us by the
beauty of its fines, by the happy choice of the
site where it is placed, by the just proportion of the
architecture to the hillside on which it is seated.

The facade facing the court of honor is com-
posed of two superposed orders. In the pediments
of the windows are sculptured eagles, and women,

The Chateau de Maisons 107

terminated like sphinxes, as lions or dogs. To
the right and left, before the pavilions of the
wings, rise two projections which form terraces
at the height of the first story. The whole monu-
ment has a charming air of nervous elegance.

The vestibule (here was formerly the marvelous
grille which today closes the gallery of Apollo in
the Louvre) rests on beautiful Doric columns.
The vault is decorated, on its four faces, with grand
bas-reliefs representing four divinities: never did
sculptures show more docility, more suppleness,
in clothing architectural forms without overloading
them, without injuring the purity of their Unes.
And everywhere the eagle of the Longueils unfolds
its great wings of stone.

In the halls of this devastated cha,teau, there
remains nothing but the sculptured decoration.
But what a masterpiece! Under the strong and
intelUgent discipline of Frangois Mansart, Gilles
Gu^rin, Buyster, Van Obstal and Sarazin sur-
passed themselves. The great mantelpiece where,
under a medallion of the great Conde, an antique
triumph is marshaled, the adorable playing
children which Van Obstal carved above the
cornice of the grand stone staircase, the noble
caryatides which sustain the dome of the bed-
chamber, all the decoration of the guardroom
where, about 1840, a poor painter called Bidault

108 The Spell of the Heart of France

painted tiresome views of the Bay of Naples, all
the sculptures scattered through the different
rooms of the chateau, form one of the most
perfect achievements, if not the most perfect,
which the seventeenth century has left us. The
wreckers are going to ruin it, they are going to
annihilate it.

And they will annihilate also that admirable
dining hall where the Count of Artois set up, at
the end of the eighteenth century, Houdon's
Ceres, Boizot's Vertumnus, Clodion's Erigone, and
Foucou's Flora. Plaster casts have replaced the
originals on the ancient pedestals. But the hall
has retained its coffered ceiling, whose bas-rehefs
equal, in grace, fancy and richness of invention,
the most delicate works of the Renaissance, in
surety and simphcity of execution, the purest
works of Greek genius. They will find wretches
who will pull down these sacred stones with pick
and crowbar! And they will also find those who
will tear from the Uttle oratory of Maisons its
exquisite, its delicious marquetries!

When we wander through the deserted apart-
ments of the old mansion, now devoted to demoU-
tion, the heart contracts, and we ask with anger
how such vandalism is still possible in a period
when everybody, even to the least politician, talks
of art and beauty!

The Chateau de Maisons 109

The Chateau de Maisons was built by Frangois
Mansart, between 1642 and 1651, for Rene de
Longueil.

The family of Longueil, originating in Nor-
mandy, where its feudal possessions were near
Dieppe, possessed the territory of Maisons from
the end of the fourteenth century. It has increased
it by successive acquisitions.

Ren4 de Longueil, Councilor in Parliament, had
just been named president of a court, when he
commissioned Mansart to build him a new chateau
on his domain. He gave entire freedom to his
architect in plan and decoration. It is related that
Mansart, after he had built the right wing, leveled
it with the ground to begin it over again on a new
plan, because he was not satisfied with his work.
The expense was enormous: it has been estimated
at more than six millions. Maisons, when it was
finished, was considered one of the most beautiful
chateaux of France. How could Longueil afford
this royal fancy? We are very ill-informed on
this point today. All that is known is that in
1650 the president was named superintendent of
finance; when, shortly afterward, he was dismissed,
he was responsible for this charming and signifi-
cant remark: "They are wrong; I have taken
care of my own business; I was about to look out
for theirs,"

110 The Bpell of the Heart of France

Louis XIV sometimes visited Maisons. He
came there unexpectedly with the court, July
10, 1671, fleeing from Saint-Germain, where the
Duke of Anjou was dying. Bossuet brought the
King the news of the death, and the Queen's fool,
Tricomini, transmitted it to Mile, de Montpensier
in these terms: "You, great lords, you will all die
like the least of men; here is one who comes to
say that your nephew is dead." This fool talked
like Bossuet. Mile, de Montpensier adds that she
went to pay her respects to the King and that she
wept bitterly with him. "He was deeply afflicted,
and with reason, for this child was very pretty."

After the death of Ren6 de Longueil, the chateau
passed to his descendants, the last of whom died
in 1732. It then passed to the Marquis of Soye-
court, who let it fall into ruin; but in 1777 the
Count of Artois bought it, restored it, and embel-
hshed it magnificently.

We reach the upper stories of the ch§,teau by a
narrow and winding staircase, ensconced in the
thickness of the wall. Here is a maze of corridors
and tiny chambers. A larger apartment, however,
exists in the center of the building, below the
lantern which crowns the roof. It is ornamented
with mythological paintings and Danae adorns
the ceiling over the bed in the alcove. This is
the chamber of Voltaire.

FRANQOIS MARIE AROUET VOLTAIRE

The Chateau de Maisons 111

The great intimacy between Voltaire and the
President de Maisons is well known. The latter,
great-grandson of the creator of the chateau,
was a studious young man of delicate tendencies.
At the age of eighteen he was President of Parlia-
ment. He was said to be a good Latinist. His
education had been irrehgious and he loved science.
He had established a chemical laboratory, where
he manufactured the most perfect Prussian blue
which could be found in Em-ope, and a botanic
garden of rare plants where he cultivated coffee.
He belonged to the Academy of Science, and also
possessed a collection of coins.

In 1723 Voltaire came to make his home with
his friend. He found there a good reception and a
society ready to admire him. He knew, above all,
that the President was the nephew of Madame
de Villars, and Voltaire was then in all the heat
of his passion for the Marshal's wife. . . .

He arrived at Maisons in the month of Novem-
ber. He planned to finish liis tragedy of Marianne
in this retreat. But he was immediately taken sick
with the smallpox and thought he would die.
So he sent for the curate of Maisons and con-
fessed. The Danae of the alcove possibly heard the
confession of Voltaire! Doctor Gervasi saved the
dying man by making him drink "two hundred
pints of lemonade." As soon as he was cured, to

112 The Spell of the Heart of France

disembarrass his hosts and not abuse their good-
ness, Voltaire had himself taken to Paris. Then
occurred an episode which almost became tragic.
We must let Voltaire tell it:

''I was scarcely two hundred yards from the
chateau when a part of the ceiling of the chamber
where I had lain fell in flames. The neighboring
chambers, the apartments which were below them,
the precious furniture with which they were
adorned, all were consumed by the fire. The loss
amounted to a hundred thousand livres and,
without the help of the engines for which they
sent to Paris, one of the most beautiful ediJ&ces
of the kingdom would have been destroyed.
They hid this strange news from me on my arrival ;
I knew it when I awoke; you cannot imagine how
great was my despair; you know the generous
care which M. de Maisons had taken of me;
I had been treated like a brother in his house, and
the reward of so much goodness was the burning
of his chateau. I could not conceive how the fire
had been able to catch so suddenly in my chamber,
where I had left only an almost extinguished
brand. I learned that the cause of this conflagra-
tion was a beam which passed exactly under the
fireplace. . . . The beam of which I speak had
charred little by little from the heat of the
hearth. . . .

The Chateau de Maisons 113

"Madame and Monsieur de Maisons received
the news more tranquilly than I did; their gener-
osity was as great as their loss and as my grief.
M. de Maisons crowned his bounty by giving me
the news himself in letters which make very evi-
dent that he excels in heart as in mind; he occupied
himself with the care of consoling me and it almost
seemed as if it had been my chateau which was
burned."

And it is not only the shade of Voltaire which
haunts the apartments of Maisons! We may also
be shown the chamber of Lafayette. In addition,
decorations in Empire style recall to us that in
1804 the chateau was bought and inhabited by
Lannes. . . .

But what good is it to evoke these memories,
since the admirable beauty of the architecture
and of the decorations has not sufficed to arrest
the enterprise of the housebreakers? (Note 12.)

VIII
THE VALLEY OF THE OISE

'HEN the first automobiles made their
appearance upon the highways, some
persons thought that, thanks to this
new mode of locomotion, the French were finally
going to discover the thousand beauties of France.
They awoke from their dream when they heard
the conversations of automobihsts. The latter,
when they returned from their excursions, told
of the achievements of the engine, the misfortunes
of the tires, the treacheries of the road. They
computed distances, counted kilometers, passed
judgment on macadam; but of the country trav-
ersed they had seen, it was manifest, only the
wide ribbon of the road unrolling before their
cars. If one talked to them of the picturesque-
ness of a region through which they had passed,
they replied: "Too steep grades!"; and they
cursed the rough cobbles when one praised to them
the pretty church in a village through which they
had passed. They were full of stories of autos,
as hunters are of hunting yarns; but every one

114

The Valley of the Oise 115

knows that the beauty of the forest is the last
thing a hunter thinks of. The chauffeurs went
into ecstasies at the memory of a straight, smooth,
deserted highway, drawn Uke an arrow for leagues
across an endless plain, far from the villages which
are populated by hens, children and straying
dogs. The most romantic celebrated the pleasure
of speed, the intoxication of danger. In all of
them one guessed, though none would consent
to avow it, the wild pride of hurling themselves
across the world, with a terrible uproar, in the
midst of universal fright, hke petty scourges of
God.

Some protested, and swore that it is easy to
avoid the contagion of this dehrium, that they
themselves had succeeded in using their machiae
as a commodious vehicle and not as a simple
instrument of sport. I only half believed them.
Some experiences had shown me that one feels
himself becoming an automobihst an hour after
one is seated in an automobile. . . .

But recently one of my friends asserted: ''Your
experiences prove nothing. You chose your auto
badly, or perhaps your chauffeur, or even your
companions. Three conditions are indispensable
for traveling, or rather for loitering, in an automo-
bile: 1. A firm decision to see everything, which
depends on you alone; 2. A docile chauffeur; 3.

116 The Spell of the Heart of France

A comfortable auto of moderate speed. My
chauffeur and my machine fulfil the two latter
conditions. Arrange the itinerary yourself. We
will stop as often as you please. WiU an experi-
ence of three days consecrated to archaeology
seem conclusive to you?"

I proposed to my friend to pass in review all
the churches of the Oise Valley from Saint Leu
d'Esserent to Noyon. . . . There is not in this
part of France a single village whose church is not
worthy of a visit. It is the cradle of Gothic art.

My friend was right. You can loiter in an auto-
mobile; but it is necessary, to be successful, to
be a lover of loafing almost to a mania, and to
be a lover of sightseeing until it is a passion.

If you are not sustained by a tenacious and
obstinate curiosity, you immediately succumb to
the mania of automobihsm. Do not speak of the
attraction of rapidity; for, to get rid of this, there
is a sure and simple means, that of choosing a
machine of medium speed. But, whatever may be
the rapidity of the machine, you remain exposed
to a double obsession. There is at first the search
for a good road, the hatred of cobblestones, dirt
roads and badly kept pavements; doubtless an
automobile, well built and prudently driven, can
overcome the most difficult roads; but the fear
of jolts and the terror of breakdowns cause us to

The Valley of the Oise 117

see, always and everywhere, the good road, where
the machine reaches its maximum of speed.
Every detom* becomes odious if it compels the
abandonment of a smooth road for more dangerous
crossroads. The chauffeur is therefore desirous
of following blindly the line marked on his special
map. (Let us remark in passing that maps for
the use of automobilists are generally detestable.)
But the essential peculiarity of the state of mind
common to automobilists is a disgust with halts.
"Keep on, keep on!" a mysterious voice seems to
cry to us whenever there comes a desire to stop.
Nothing hurries us; we are loafing; we have long
hours ahead of us before we reach the end of the
day's rim; nevertheless the briefest stop seems to
be an unnecessary delay. We can no longer admit
the idea of immobility; we experience a sort of
ennui when trees, houses and men cease their
regular flight along both sides of the road. Then we
understand how it is that so many automobihsts
are happy in driving between moving pictures,
without looking at anything, and how they get
from it a pleasure which is both careless and
frenzied.

These are unfortunate circumstances for the
contemplation of landscapes and of monuments. It
is, however, possible to triumph over them. The
slavery of the good road can be escaped, But

118 The Spell of the Heart of France

do not count upon it without a veritable effort of
the will.

If one is master of himself as of his machine,
then traveling in an auto becomes delightful,
for one can modify, shorten, lengthen, the itiner-
ary of the excursion according to one's fancy.
We turn aside at a crossroad to climb a hill, from
which we hope to discover an agreeable outlook,
or perhaps to visit a church of whose spire, rising
in the midst of the woods, a ghmpse has been
caught. If we perceive that we have passed,
without noticing it, a monument or a picturesque
site, we turn back. Yes, we turn back. This
assertion will leave more than one chauffeur
incredulous. But everything is possible when one
really has the taste of travel, even to losing two
minutes by turning his machine around on a
straight road.

This way of traversing the highroads of France
has, I admit, its inconveniences, the most serious
of which is the necessity of incessantly watching
the map to guide the chauffeur at every fork.
The signboard always appears too late, when the
machine has already made the wrong turn.
The speed of the auto is such that it is not possible
to study the map and to enjoy the view at the
same time. It is necessary to choose. The wisest
plan is to make up your mind to miss the road

The Valley of the Oise 119

occasionally. The mistake is so quickly corrected!
I also recognize that travehng in an auto will
never replace the slow promenade, in which one
stopped at every turn of the route, amused by
people and by things. But it has the great advan-
tage of annihilating distance, of bringing sites and
monuments close to one another, of permitting
rapid comparisons without any effort of memory,
and of revealing the general characteristics of a
whole region. It suits synthetic minds. It repels
a httle those who have the passion of analysis.
In short it makes us acquainted with the forest,
but leaves us ignorant of the beauty of the
trees. . . .

* :if * * ^ if if

From Paris to Chantilly there is at first the
monotonous plateau which separates the valley
of the Mame from that of the Oise. In this
gently rolling plain the villages are numerous, and
everywhere, overlooking the housetops, rise the
pointed or saddle-roofed spires of old belfries.
There is not a hamlet of the Ile-de-France which
does not possess a precious and exquisite church.
It is here, on the soil of the royal domain, that
the soul of France was formed. It is here that
its national art was born.

We will stop, as the luck of the road wills.

Louvres formerly possessed two churches: one

120 The Spell of the Heart of France

of them has disappeared and of it there remains
only a fine Romanesque belfry; in the other, which
shows the somewhat absurd elegance of the fif-
teenth century, we see a frieze of vine leaves
running all around the wall. And behold, at the
very first stop, in this petty village, a charming
resume of the whole of French art; a robust
Romanesque tower, finished in the first period of
pointed Gothic and, beside the gray belfry, the
excessive and delightful luxury of flamboyant
Gothic. A league farther on, the church of Marly-
la-Ville offers a perfect example of the art of the
thirteenth century; with its little flying buttresses
and its low triforium, one might say that it was
the tiny model for a great cathedral. By the side of
the road, a poor half-ruined shed, with a broken
roof, a hollowed pavement and moldy walls, is the
church of Fosses; in its misery and its degradation,
the humble nave of the twelfth century still
preserves some remnants of its pure beauty. . . .
A glance at the pleasing Renaissance fagade of
the church of Luzarches. . . . The automobile
rolls along the edge of the forest. . . . Villas of
horsebreeders and jockeys. . . . Some Enghsh
cottages. . . . The immense greensward and the
very uneven cobbled street of Chantilly. ... A
few more woods, and we behold the wide valley
of the Oise.

The Valley of the Oise 121

On the opposite hill rises the church of Saint-
Leu-d'Esserent, on a large terrace, above the
houses and the gardens of the town. The apse
turned toward the Oise, the robust flying but-
tresses and the radiating chapels, two great square
towers which flank the choir, the tower of the
porch with its tapering steeple, the grand and
harmonious mass of the edifice, aU give to this
church the aspect of a proud and gracious citadel.

Saint-Leu-d'Esserent is one of the most moving
types of the architecture of the twelfth century,
of that architecture which is called transitional.
The fagade is still semi-Romanesque, but its
openings are already finer and more numerous.
Internally, the mixture of Romanesque and
pointed gives to the monument an extraordi-
narily varied aspect; the arches which separate
the nave from the low side aisles are broken;
the full semicircle reappears in the triforium,
and in the upper windows the arch is pointed
again. The vaulting is formed by the intersection
of pointed arches; but in the chapels of the apse
there are trilobes inscribed in circular arches.
And this diversity of styles is here the result
neither of gropings nor of fresh starts; it results
from a marvelously conceived plan in which the
builders knew how to mingle and harmonize the
beauties of tradition and the audacities of the

122 The Spell of the Heart of France

new art. The Romanesque architecture had no
period of decadence and, on the other hand, at
the period when Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was built,
the time of research and of trial whence emerged
the pointed architecture was already past. It
is the meeting of the two styles which renders so
magnificent certain churches of the twelfth cen-
tury, such as Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and Noyons.

The ambulatory of the choir was enriched in a
free and infinitely harmonious style; the columns
and the capitals, even as early as this, show an
admirable purity of style.

Saint-Leu-d'Esserent was an important priory
of the Cluniac order. Some arcades of the cloister
still adhere to the wall of the church. Other
remains of the monastery exist on private property.
We would have been pleased to visit them. The
proprietor answered us: "It is impossible; this is
the day I dry my washing." An inhabitant of
Saint-Leu-d'Esserent said to us a few moments
later, in a mysterious tone: ''The monks were
rich. There is buried treasure there. That man
is sifting all the soil on his land: he is looking for
gold. . . ." (Saint-Leu is sixty kilometers from
Paris.)

4: 4: « ii: :^ :{: *

For two days we are going to follow the valley
where the river slowly coils its long bends through

CHURCH OP SAINT-LEU-D ESSERENT

The Valley of the Oise 123

the wheat fields and the poplars. The low hiUs,
covered with forests, lie in the distance and never
come near enough to force the Oise to sudden
detours. This river is not Uke the Marne,
incessantly turned aside by the spur of a hill.
It flows indolently under a pale horizon, in a
vast landscape whose shades are infinitely delicate,
and whose lines are infinitely soft. It bears silent
barges through the fertile plains. Daughter of
the north, it reflects in its clear green waters
villages of brick. The smoke of workshops
mingles with the mist-banks of its sky. At night
the fights of the glass furnaces brighten its banks.
B}^ talking with the men who drive their horses
upon the towpath, it is easy to guess that the
Oise is born in Belgium.

Bell-towers dot the valley on both banks of the
river. That of Montataire rises above the trees
of a park at the top of a bluff. The church possesses
an exquisite portal surmounted by a frightfully
mutilated bas-relief of the Annunciation; but
how much grace the draperies still possess!

It is useless to stop at Creil, since a barbarous
municipality thought it advisable to pull down
the church of Saint Evremont, one of the most
beautiful specimens of the architecture of the
twelfth century.

The people of Nogent-les-Vierges are not bar-

124 The Spell of the Heart of France

barians: they have preserved their church. It
is not as pure in style as that of Saint Evremont.
But its belfry — terribly restored — is adorned
with original details. The rectangular choir,
which the thirteenth century added to the Roman-
esque nave, possesses a rare elegance, with its
slender pillars. What a diversity there is in the
creations of Gothic architecture! How inventions
in construction permitted infinite variation in the
plans of churches! It is only by thus traversing
the countrysides of France that one can admire
the abundant imagination of the builders of the
thirteenth century. There are many churches,
especially in the north, which, hke that of Nogent-
les-Vierges, possess a choir terminated by a flat
wall. But the type is diversified from edifice to
edifice. Open a manual of archaeology; take the
most recent and the most complete of all, that of
M. Enlart, and you will observe what diSiculty
the author has in classing and characterizing
such work, after the last years of the twelfth
century. At no other period was architecture so
profoundly individual an art. We may say that
every building was then original, not only in the
details, but especially in the plan.

I have written that the people of Nogent-les-
Vierges were not barbarians, but I am on the
point of taking it back, when I think of a sort of

The Valley of the Oise US

panoramic Calvary which they have installed in
their beautiful church. Let them look at this
picture which might seem beautiful to a Kanaka:
then let them look at the two beautiful bas-rehefs
of the fifteenth century which are placed at the
extremity of the nave, and let them blush!

A little farther on, the church of Villers-Saint-
Paul also possesses a Romanesque nave on low,
squat pillars, and a Gothic choir whose columns
expand into wide branches of stone. This choir
is square, like that of Nogent-les-Vierges. The
two villages are only a league apart; without
doubt only a few years separated the two buildings,
yet it will always be impossible for us to confoimd
these two churches in our memorj^!

Rieux also had its Romanesque nave and its
Gothic choir. The nave has been made into a
schoolhouse. As to the choir, it is being restored,
but the orientation of the altar is being changed
in the process, so that the width of the choir
becomes the length of the church. And they are
executing this lovely transformation without any
thought of the ancient plans, or any more respect
for the wishes of the dead who, buried under the
pavement of the sanctuary, will no longer occupy
the position with respect to the altar iu which
they had wished to rest forever.

On the left bank of the Oise, Pont-Sainte-

126 The Spell of the Heart of France

Maxence: a pointed-arched church of the Renais-
sance, heavy, massive. This type of architecture,
which has produced so many elegant works in
Normandy, has been less happy in the Isle of
France. Pontpoint : a Romanesque nave, a pointed
choir, at the end of which they have preserved
an old apse of the eleventh century, and these
patchings are delightful! We salute at the portal
of the church of Verberie an adorable statue of
the Virgin. We cross back to the right bank of the
Oise to admire the stone steeple of Venette,
pleasingly planted on the pedestal of a Romanesque
tower : we reach Compiegne.

Compiegne has a beautiful chateau which
everybody knows, and Compiegne is a charming
town which many sojourners do not know.
More than one traveler has gone through it without
ever having seen the chapel of the ancient H6tel-
Dieu, whose grand reredos of carved wood is one
of the most brilliant masterpieces of the French
sculpture of the seventeenth century.

Compiegne possesses a historical society, which
shows much zeal in causing the preservation of the
appearance and the monuments of the old town.
Let us praise in passing the efforts of these worthy
men: we must not lose a chance for exalting the
good and saying evil of the wicked. On one

From a drawing by Blanche McManus

NAPOLEON'S BEDCHAMBER, CHATEAU DE COMPIBGNB

The Valley of the Oise 127

occasion this historical society intervened to
prevent that, under pretext of straightening a
line, the remnants of an old bastion should be
destroyed because they injured, it was said, the
beautiful perspective of the subprefecture. It
also undertook the defense of the old tower called
the Tower of Joan of Arc, and succeeded in saving
this venerable moniunent. Alas, it did not succeed
in protecting the bridge of Compiegne against the
engineers who wrapped it up in an iron apron,
under pretext of facilitating traffic. . . . Yes,
the traffic of the bridge of Compiegne!

From belfry to belfry, we continue our route
toward Noyon.

At the junction of the Aisne, in a pleasing
landscape, the church of Choisy-au-Bac seems to
watch over the tombs of a little cemetery filled
with flowers. It is Romanesque, fairly well
restored, and charmingly picturesque.

At Longueil-sous-Thourotte, the poor old church
is about to disappear. By its side they have built
a grand new church, a copy of twelfth-century
architecture. Was it worth while to demolish
the modest and venerable edifice of earlier days?
Could it not be preserved beside the proud modern
construction, even if it were tottering and dilapi-
dated? It contained beautiful funeral slabs of the

128 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

Renaissance, which are going to be exiled, no
one knows where; it contained, above all, superb
stained glass of the thirteenth century. Two
windows have been placed in the new church;
but there remains a third, and there remain
also remarkable monochromatic frescoes. What
is going to be done with these precious remnants?
They have not been listed as national treasures.

. . . Tomorrow, perhaps, they will go to decorate
the dining room of a Chicago millionaire: what a
disgrace! And all the windows of the new church
are adorned with stained glass whose banal horror
makes the magnificence of these ancient windows
apparent to every eye!

The church of Thourotte — it is of the twelfth
century, but has lost much of its character —
contains a fine altar screen of gilded wood, repre-
senting the different scenes of the Passion. It
is said to be Flemish work; judging by the types
of certain personages, this might be doubted;
but the shutters which close upon the screen bear
paintings whose origin is not in the least doubtful.
Poor paintings, whose restoration was confided
by a too-zealous curate to a pitiable dauber!
Now, the Commission of Historic Monuments
has listed the beautiful sculptures and has put
them under glass: the effect of this is abominable,
but we Uve among barbarians and second-hand

The Valley of the Oise 129

dealers, and we are actually forced to put our
works of art under lock and key to defend them.
As for the painted shutters, they are hung up on
the wall: a few were spared by the dauber. In
the same church we may still see two beautiful
altars supported by torsos of the seventeenth
century. How many beautiful works of art still
remain in our Httle churches of France, in spite
of revolutions and dealers in antiques!

The Cistercian abbey of Ourscamp is now a
cotton spinning miU. Behind a magnificent iron
fence stretch vast buildings of the seventeenth
century. In the center rises a grand pavihon.
We pass through an open door between the high
columns which support the balcony of the upper
story, and suddenly discover that this immense
construction is a mere veneer to hide the old church
of the monastery. Of the nave there is no longer
anything remaining; but a httle farther on, in the
midst of the park, the choir still lifts its arches of
magnificently pure architecture. The roof has
fallen, but the columns and the walls stiU stand.
It is a picture like that of the church of Long-
pont, in the forest of Villers-Cotterets. (There is
also great similarity between the architecture of
Longpont and that of Ourscamp.) It seems that
the intimate beauty of Gothic art is better revealed
to us when we thus discover the ruin of one of its

130 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

masterpieces among the trunks and branches of
trees; we then can better feel the hving grace of its
columns and the freedom of its arches. . . . There
is so much truth in this admirable page from the
G^nie du christianisme: "The forests of the Gauls
have passed in their turn into the temples of our
fathers, and our forests of oak have thus main-
tained their sacred origin. These vaults carved
into foliage, these jambs which support the walls
and end suddenly hke broken trunks, the coolness
of the vaults, the darknesses of the sanctuary, the
obscure wings, the secret passages, the lowly
doorways, all retrace the labyrinths of the woods
in the Gothic church: everything makes us feel
in it religious horror, mysteries and divinity, etc.
..." The centuries have accomplished their
work, and, in the ruins of the edifice, which is
surrounded and invaded by the verdure of the
forest, we recognize still better what art learns from
nature. (Note 13.)

Of the old abbey, there still remains a superb
hall with Gothic vaults and a triple nave. It is
called the ''HaU of the Dead," because it is said
that the bodies of the monks were placed there
for two days before the funeral. So great a room
for this use? Was it not rather the chapter
room of the monastery?

I will say nothing of Noyon today. On another

CHURCH OP TRACY-LE-VAL

The Valley of the Oise 131

occasion we will return to this lovable and silent
town, which is adorned with one of the most
perfect religious edifices of our country.

Upon the return trip, in the forest and valleys
adjacent to the valley of the Oise, the obedient
auto stopped before many other exquisite
churches.

The belfry of Tracy-le-Val is one of the pearls
of French art. The tower rests upon a square sub-
basement; when it has reached the height of the
apse, two long, narrow windows open upon each
side, framed by little columns of adorably fine work-
manship, and monsters and grotesques grimace on
all sides under the arches and upon the capitals.
Above these strange details, the tower suddenly
becomes octagonal, but, to mask the abrupt
change in the architectural scheme, statues with
outstretched wings are placed at the four angles.
A conical tower of stone crowns this strange
belfry, twice admirable, by the richness of its
decoration and by the grace of its proportions.

Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, in the midst of the forest
of Compiegne, is a church of the twelfth century
which the restorers have rebuilt. Perhaps it will
still interest a few archaeologists by the origi-
nality of its plan: designed in the form of a Latin
cross, its crossarms have double bays, like the

132 The Spell of the Heart of France

nave; but this singularity of construction is the
only merit which the church retains today: it is
clean, new, frozen and dead,

Morienval, with its three towers, its triple nave,
and its ambulatory, is a beautiful church. In
the interminable controversies which have raged
over the date and the place of the origin of the
Gothic style, Morienval has been cited a hundred
times, and it has been much discussed because of
its ambulatory, which is vaulted with pointed
arches and which certain historians affirm to have
been built in the middle of the eleventh
century. ... I do not know. But what I know
well, is that, in future controversies, one will do
well to hold to the texts and to the drawings, and
not to attempt to reason from the monument
itself; for this exists no longer, or at least it is
restored, which amoimts to the same thing. Yes,
they have restored the ambulatory of Morienval,
and they have not half restored it, I can assure
you. For they have completely recarved certain
capitals. ... It is truly a singular spectacle to see
in the twentieth century so many stone carvers
occupied, some in producing Romanesque, others
Gothic, and still others classical architectin-e.
It is also diverting to think of the mistakes into
which future archaeologists will fall, led astray by
all these copies. But, in spite of all, as it is the

The Valley of the Oise 133

old monuments which pay for these debauches of
sculpture, as it is at the expense of their conser-
vation that this fury of restoration is exercised,
we would willingly renounce these ironical joys.
Oh, if the restorers would only consecrate each
year to the placing of tiles or slates the sums which
they squander in having capitals recarved!

Since the fancy of this archaeological excursion
has taken me into the valley of the Authonne,
a pretty name for a pretty brook, I desire to see
that chateau of Vez which its owner, M. Dru,
recently bequeathed to the nation. It is a magnifi-
cent fortress on the summit of a wooded hill.
The donjon and the encircling wall have been
skillfully restored. Of the main body of the build-
ing, of which only ruins remain, a part only was
rebuilt by M. Dru. . . . Will the nation accept
the legacy? I hope so, because it appears that
M. Dru left a sum sufficient to finish the work. This
sort of archaeological restitution seems to me very
unnecessary; it would be far better to leave such
things to theatrical scene builders. But it is not
necessary to discourage the worthy who diminish
the profits of the house wreckers by bequeathing
their castles to the public.

Irony of geographical names! At the foot of the
hill which sustains the donjon of Vez, we see, in
the midst of the fields, a Gothic church of the

134 The Spell of the Heart of France

flamboyant period, remnant of a Premonstraten-
sian monastery. It is now used as a farmstead.
I consult my map to know the name of the ham-
let: it is called Lieu-Restaure (Restored Place).

I took the road back to Paris through the great
plains of Valois, overlooked by the sublime spire
of the cathedral of Senhs.

INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF GALLARDON

GALLARDON

GALLARDON, a town of the region of
Chartres, is built upon the spur formed by
the valleys of the Ocre and the Voise, two
of those narrow and sinuous ravines, clothed with
trembling alders and poplars, which traverse the
immense plateau of La Beauce. The houses rise,
stage above stage, on the side of the hill ; then, at
the summit of the slope, commences the endless
plain, the ocean of harvests, dotted with the whirl-
ing iron arms of water-pumping windmills, where
th6 towers of the cathedral of Chartres are dimly
seen above the horizon. Gallardon was formerly a
strong defensive position, and the ruin of its old
donjon, "the shoulder of Gallardon," still sketches
curious outlines against the sky. Gallardon pos-
sesses a remarkable church, whose choir is a marvel
of elegance, and whose nave is covered with a
beautiful vault of painted wood. It also boasts of
a beautiful Renaissance house. . . . Finally, it is
noted for the richness of its fields and above aU for
the excellence of its beans.

135

136 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

But, today, neglecting the picturesque, archseo-

logical and horticultural merits of Gallardon, I

wish to tell the story of a singular personage who

was born in this tiny village of La Beauce, Thomas

Ignatius Martin, a visionary laborer, known under

the name of Martin of Gallardon. (Note 14.)
*******

In 1816, the White Terror reigned in La Beauce
as in other places. Gallardon had not escaped the
fever which torments the least village of France
on the morrow of every revolution. Conquered
and furious, the Liberals met in the hall of an inn
to exchange their regrets and their rancors; with
airs of bravado they evoked the memories of the
Revolution and the glories of the Empire. Oppo-
site them, and in opposition to them, the Royahst
Committee celebrated the victory of its party and
exploited it. It annoyed and threatened its
adversaries, bombarded the Chamber with peti-
tions, and the ministers with denunciations. It
was the appointed hour for all reprisals, all
enthusiasms and all creduHties.

Thomas Ignatius Martin was born at Gallardon
of a family of small farmers who had been known
there from time immemorial. He was thirty-three
years old and the father of four children. He was
a robust, simple, upright, easy-going and open-
hearted citizen. In the midst of aroused passions

Gallardon '' 137

he had never mixed in political affairs. On the
testimony of the mayor of Gallardon, ''the Revo-
lution always seemed to displease him, especially
on account of the disorders which it caused, in
which he never took part. He remained tranquil
in all these events, even on the 20th of March,
when Bonaparte returned; he seemed, however, to
be angry at the banishment of the King; but he
also took tranquilly the return of the King in the
month of July, rejoicing at it, but without osten-
tation." In short, he was a wise man. He ful-
filled his religious duties exactly, but without
fervor, went to mass, kept Lent, read nothing but
his prayer book and when, passing by his fields,
the curate asked of him: ''How goes the work?"
he replied: "Much obliged, M. Cure, it goes well."
He was never seen at the tavern.

Now, on February 15, 1816, about half-past
two in the afternoon, Thomas was in his fields
busy in spreading manure on his land, when he
suddenly saw an unknown man appear before him.
This man, who appeared to be about five feet
two inches high, was slim of figure, with a taper-
ing, delicate and very white face ; he was enveloped
to his feet in a long frock coat of blonde color,
was shod with boots tied with strings, and wore
a high silk hat. He said to Martin in a very
gentle voice:

138 The Spell of the Heart of France

''It is necessary that you should go to see the
King; that you should say to him that his life
is in danger, as well as that of the princes; that
evil men are stiU attempting to overturn the
government; that several writings or letters are
already in circulation in some provinces of his
States on this subject; that it is necessary that
he shall have an exact and general watch kept in
all his States, and especially in the capital; that
it is also necessary that he should exalt the day of
the Lord, that it may be kept holy; that this
holy day is misused by a great portion of his peo-
ple; that it is necessary that he shall cause public
works to stop on that day; that he shall cause
public prayers to be ordered for the conversion
of the people; that he shall exhort them to peni-
tence; that he shall abohsh and annihilate all the
disorders which are committed on all the days
which precede the holy forty days of Lent: that
if he does not do all these things, France will fall
into new evils. It is necessary that the King
should behave towards his people as a father to
his child who deserves to be punished; that he
shall punish a small number of the most culpable
among them to intimidate the others. If the King
does not do what is said, there will be made so
great a hole in his crown that this will bring him
entirely to ruin,"

G-allardon 139

To this discourse Martin replied very judi-
ciously: ''But you can certainly go away and find
others than me to undertake such a commission
as that." ''No/' replied the unknown, "it is
you who shall go." Martin replied still more
judiciously: "But since you know it so well, you
can indeed go yourself to find the King and say
all that to him; why do you address yourself to
a poor man like me, who does not know how to
explain himself?" The unknown showed himself
inflexible: "It is not I," said he, "who shall go,
it will be you; pay attention to what I say to you,
for you shall do all that I command you." Then
his feet appeared to lift from the earth, his head
to sink, his body to shrink, and the apparition
disappeared. A mysterious force prevented Mar-
tin from quitting his field and made him finish
his work much more rapidly than was usual.

When he returned to Gallardon, Martin went
to his priest to relate the adventure to him. The
curate, who was called M. Laperruque, advised
him to eat, drink and sleep well, without worrying
about this chimera. But, on the following day,
the unknown presented himseK on several occa-
sions before the more and more frightened peasant,
and repeated to him the order to go and find the
King.

Martin, on the advice of the curate, visited the

140 The Spell of the Heart of France

Bishop of Versailles, who questioned him and
sent him back to Gallardon. A new apparition:
the unknown declares that he will not tell his
name, that he is sent from heaven, and that if
Martin is chosen above all to speak to Louis
XVIII, ''it is to lower pride." From this day he
does not cease to lecture Martin: ''It is not neces-
sary to believe that it is by the will of men that
the usurper came last year, it is to punish
France. . . . France is in a state of delirium: it
shall be delivered to all sorts of evils. ..." At
the same time he warned him "that he would be
led before the King, that he would discover to
him the secret things of the period of his exile, but
that the knowledge of them would only be given
to him at the moment when he would be intro-
duced into the King's presence." Whether he
cultivates his fields, or whether he remains in the
barn to thresh his wheat, the unfortunate farmer
always finds himself in the presence of the haunting
apparition.

Meanwhile, the curate Laperruque corresponds
with the Bishop of Versailles, who corresponds
with the Minister of Police. The latter requests
the prefect of Eure-et-Loir to verify "if these
apparitions, said to be miraculous, were not
rather a flight of the imagination of Martin, a
veritable illusion of his exalted spirit; or if possibly

NOTRE DAME DE CHARTRES

Gallardon 141

the pretended apparition, or perhaps Martin him-
self, ought not to be severely questioned by the
pohce and then turned over to the courts."

Warned by the unknown that he is soon going
to appear ''before the first magistrate of his
arrondissement," Martin repairs to Chartres with
his curate, and goes to see the prefect; he relates
to him his visions, announces himseK as ready to
repeat the story of them to the Minister of Police
and to the King himself, and on March 7, at
five o'clock in the morning, departs from Chartres
by the diligence, in the company of M. Andr6,
lieutenant of gendarmes. They both arrive at
Paris at half-past five and take rooms at the
H6tel de Calais, Rue Montmartre.

On the next morning, the Ueutenant of gen-
darmes takes his man to the General Pohce Head-
quarters. In the courtyard, the unknown appears
again to Martin: ''You are going," says he, "to
be questioned in several ways; have neither fear
nor inquietude, but tell the things as they are."
It is nine o'clock; the minister, M. Decazes, has
not yet arisen. A secretary makes Martin undergo
a preliminary interrogatory. The latter allows
himself to be neither intimidated nor disconcerted.
Then he is introduced into the private room of the
minister, to whom he relates again the series of
apparitions, and describes the countenance and

142 The Spell of the Heart of France

the clothing of the unknown. ''Well/' the minis-
ter then says to him, ''you will see him no more,
for I am going to have you arrested and taken to
prison." This news leaves Martin very incredu-
lous. . . . And, having returned to the Hotel de
Calais, he again hears the unknown assure him
that the police have no power over him, and that
it is high time to warn the King.

The minister begins to be embarrassed. It is
evident that the words of the unknown are not
unhke — even to style — the discourses uttered
by M. de Marcellus, M. de Chateaubriand, the
ultras who meet every evening in the Rue Therese,
in the salon of M. Piet, in short, all the enemies of
M. Decazes. On the other hand, the simplicity
of Martin, his air of frankness, the concordance
of his stories, all preclude the idea of an imposture.
Could this peasant, then, be playing a part in
some political machination? But it is impossible
to discover who could be the instigators of the
mystification. M. Decazes, to get to the bottom
of the affair, then orders Pinel, physician in chief
of the Salpetriere, to repair to the Hotel de Calais
and examine the individual in question. After a
long conversation, Pinel decides that Martin is
afflicted with an "intermittent alienation"; then
he reflects and writes to the minister that the
wisest course is to take the subject to Charenton

Gallardon 143

for a few days, in order that it may be possible
to observe him and pronounce upon his case.

Meanwhile, the unknown continues to appear
to Martin and to announce to him the worst
catastrophes. Suddenly, on March 10, he decides
to reveal his name: ''I had told you that my name
would remain unknown; but, since incredulity is
so great, it is necessary that I discover my name
to you; I am the Archangel Raphael, an angel
very celebrated at the throne of God; I have
received the power to strike France with all sorts
of plagues." And he adds that peace will not
return to France before the year 1840. These
words terrify Martin.

- Three days later, the lieutenant of gendarmes
causes him to enter a hired carriage and, under
pretext of a drive, conducts him to Charenton.
Martin, however, displays no astonishment at
this: the supernatural voice has warned him of it.

Martin remained about three weeks at Charen-
ton, observed and studied very closely by Doctor
Royer-CoUard, chief physician of the hospital.
He set down his observations and his conclusions
in a long report, which he signed with Pinel.
It is from this document that I have just related
the first visions of Martin.

This report gives us a high idea of the prudence,

144 The Spell of the Heart of France

the method and the scruples of the physicians
who prepared it. As we read these clear and
judicious pages, we are obliged to recognize that
if the science of mental maladies has made httle
progress since 1816, the speciahsts resort to bold-
ness of diagnosis and obscurities of language
which Pinel and Royer-CoUard knew nothing of.
These two doctors knew that their work would
pass under the King's eyes, and they doubtless put
particular care into it. Nevertheless, not one of
our most famous alienists would consent today to
sign such an avowal of uncertainty, nor, above all,
to express his doubts and reserves in a fashion as
limpid and as intelhgible, without once dissimulat-
ing by a barbarous jargon the fragihty of his
knowledge.

The doctors begin by an exposition of the facts,
the apparitions of the archangel, the confidences
of Martin to his curate, his trip to Paris and his
arrival at Charenton. They report that after
having submitted him to a detailed examination,
they had found in him no sign of malady nor any
symptom of derangement of mind: he is sound of
body, reasons well, manifests neither overexcite-
ment nor violence; he accepts his internment with
resignation and asks only that he be permitted
to accomplish his mission, for he continues to
receive the visits and the admonitions of the

Grallardon 145

archangel. We shall see that he finally obtained
entry to the presence of the King. But let us see
first, according to expert medical testimony,
whether Martin was an impostor or an illuminate.

''If Martin is an impostor," say the doctors,
"he can have become so only in one of two ways:
either by imagining his r6le alone and executing it
without any outside assistance, or by obeying
the influence of other persons more enlightened
than himself and by receiving their counsel and
their instruction."

The physicians discard the first hypothesis;
what they themselves have observed of the charac-
ter of Martin and what they have learned through
information brought from Gallardon, prevents
their befieving in trickery. ''Martin was the last
man in the world whom one would suspect of
forming a project such as this and of cleverly bring-
ing together all the parties to it; he did not have
the religious and political acquaintances which
this requires, and he would never have been able
to compose by himself alone the discourses which
he assures us were addressed to him; but even
supposing, contrary to all probability, that he
might have been capable of conceiving such a
plan, his skill would have come to an end at the
first difficulty of execution. Let us imagine him
in this contingency face to face with the different

146 The Spell of the Heart of France

persons who have questioned him; let one oppose
his inexperience to their penetration, his ignorance
to the artifice of their questions, his timidity to
the impression of respect which the exercise of
authority always calls forth, and let one ask
one's seK if he would not have been disconcerted a
score of times and fallen into the traps which were
laid for him in all directions. Let us add that,
if he had only been an adroit rogue, he would have
infalhbly sought to turn this roguery to his own
profit by making it a means of fortune or of credit.
Now, he has not dreamed for a single instant of
taking advantage of the extraordinary things
which happened to him; he has not even been
willing to accept a small sum of money which was
offered him for his traveling expenses; he has
never worked to acquire partisans, and finally,
he has retin-ned to his village as simple and with
as little pretension as before. Has one ever seen
rogues so disinterested?"

Must we believe that Martin is not the sole
author of the imposture and that he was guided
by outside advice? The physicians combat
equally this hypothesis which would have made
policemen smile in the beginning. Here is their
reasoning, and it is very strong: ''To admit this
second hypothesis, it is necessary to admit also
that a certain number of men, attached to some

Gallardon 147

political or religious faction and knowing Martin
directly or indirectly, should have entered into
close relations with him at some time before Janu-
ary 15, and have continued these relations from
January 15 up to the time of Martin's removal to
Paris, and also in Paris itself, during the sojourn
which he made there, and even at Charenton dur-
ing the three weeks which he passed there. . . .
Without these precautions, Martin, abandoned
to himself and now obedient only to vague and
insufficient guidance, would not have been able
to escape the perils which surrounded him. . . .
Previous to January 15, Martin associated only
with his family or the people of his village; he has
never been known to have had any acquaintance
or association with persons of a higher class; con-
sequently he has not had them; for in a village
nothing remains secret; every one knows what
his neighbor is doing. From January 15 up to the
time of his removal to Paris, the most authentic
reports certify that he has seen only his curate,
the Bishop of Versailles and the prefect of Eure-
et-Loir, and we know exactly what passed between
them and Martin. In the journey from Gallardon
to Paris, and during the stay which he made in
that city, Martin was accompanied by an officer
of gendarmes who left him neither by day nor by
night, and who affirms that, with the exception

148 The Spell of the Heart of France

of M. Pinel, no one at all has had an interview
with him. As to Charenton, we certify that he
there met only three strangers: one was the
commandant and the two others [M. Sosth^ne de
La Rochefoucauld and the Abbe Dulondel, sent
by the Archbishop of Rheims, to whom the King
had entrusted the care and the solution of the
Martin affair], discreet persons, incapable of
becoming the instruments of trickery; that all
three have had communication with Martin only
in the presence of the director, and that they were
rigorously restricted to addressing a few questions
to him without making any kind of insinua-
tion. . . . Martin talked of his visions neither
to the patients, nor to the attendants, nor to the
gardeners. Besides, no letter, no advice, had
reached him from outside. . . ." Then Martin
is neither an impostor nor an accomplice in an
imposture. He thus actually experienced the sen-
sations which he reports.

Having established the sincerity of Martin,
the physicians asked themselves how his intellec-
tual condition should be characterized.

Martin is the puppet of hallucinations. There-
fore his affection approaches insanity in certain
characteristics. ''It is for this reason," adds
Royer-CoUard, "that M. Pinel and myself did
not hesitate at first sight to regard this affection

Gallardon 149

as a particular kind of insanity, and it is probable
that any other physician would have thought
as we do on this point. But if Martin's affection
approaches insanity in some particulars, it also dif-
fers from it in important and basic respects. . . ."
What were they? ''In the case of ordinary mental
patients, the hallucination of the senses is almost
always led up to and brought on by causes which
have acted strongly upon their imagination, or
disturbed more or less the exercise of their
intellectual faculties; it never manifests itself
without a special concentration of efforts of the
attention or the imagination upon a single idea
or upon a particular series of ideas, at least in the
period which immediately precedes the vision."
Now, in Martin's case, there is nothing hke this.
He has rehgious visions, although he had a mind
Httle inclined to the mystic and was even a rather
lukewarm Christian. His visions relate to politics,
yet he was a stranger to the passions of his fellow
citizens and did not read the newspapers. Among
ordinary insane, visions are always accompanied
by a certain ecstatic exaltation which gives the
seer the attitude of the inspired, of the prophet,
and never permit him to relate his visions with
calmness and tranquilUty. Now Martin remains
constantly the same. He confides his visions only
to his superiors, he appears more annoyed than

150 The Spell of the Heart of France

glorified by them, he relates them with simplicity;
he is not turned for one instant from his habitual
occupations. Singular coincidences justified cer-
tain of the prophecies of Martin: "If it is necessary
to make use of the testimony of the officer of
gendarmes who accompanied him, Martin an-
nounced to him in the morning the visit which
M. Pinel was to make in the afternoon, without
there being any way in which he could learn of
this. . . . We are equally assured that he had
actually written to his brother under date of
March 12, to warn him that the authorities were
going to have information collected in his neigh-
borhood, in regard to the persons with whom he
habitually associated there, while the letter by
which these inquiries were ordered was not written
until the sixteenth of the same month. ..."
Pinel and Royer-Collard willingly admit that there
exist "incontestable occurrences of previsions and
presentiments which were later realized by the
event." But what appears not less certain "is
that these occurrences are met with only in the
case of persons who enjoy all their faculties and
never among the mentally afflicted. This is a
side of our nature which remains inexplicable to
us even to this day and which will probably long
escape our researches." Finally, Martin is dis-
tinguished by his excellent health from other

Gallardon 151

hallucinate insane, who are always the victims of
physical troubles.

What can then be the nature of this condition,
so individual and so different from insanity asit
is usually observed?

I have had to abridge this long scientific dis-
cussion, but I will copy the conclusions of the
report verbatim:

"We here find ourselves arrested by important
considerations. On the one hand, it very often
happens that true insanity shows itself at first
only by indefinite symptoms and takes its real
form and its complete development only at a
period more or less remote from its first appear-
ance; on the other hand, the methods of classifi-
cation applied even to this day in medicine are
still very imperfect, and lack much of that degree
of precision which seems to belong especially to
the other physical sciences. . . . The external
and tangible properties of objects are the only
ones which receive the attention of the doctor:
it is by the examination of these that he regulates
his ministry, and intellectual facts are almost
always surrounded with so many obscurities that
it is extremely difficult to assert rigorously exact
analogies or differences.

"If these reflections are true, in general, they
are especially so with respect to the facts observed

152 The Spell of the Heart of France

in Martin's case, and the mere statement of these
facts furnishes a sufficient proof of this. We conse-
quently think that Martin's condition may change.
It would be rash to pronounce upon this condition
before the lapse of a year, and until then we think
it is proper that we should abstain from judging
him. We also think that this condition, as we
have observed it, cannot, taking into considera-
tion the present imperfection of our knowledge,
be characterized in a precise manner, and that
even if we suppose that it would always remain the
same, it would still be necessary to wait, in order
to determine its nature, until facts of the same
kind, observed and recorded with care, should
have been discovered in sufficient quantity to
spread new light upon this still obscure portion
of our knowledge."

Consequently, Pinel and Royer-CoUard declare
that they have found it necessary to refrain from
giving any treatment, they decide that the min-
ister has done "an act of justice and humanity"
in returning Martin to his family, and request
that, during a period of considerable duration, he
should be the subject of "enlightened observation."

When Louis XVIII decided to summon Martin
to the Tuileries, he had not yet read this report,
which was not drawn up until several days later.

Gallardon 153

But M. Decazes had communicated to him the
observations of the physicians, and the Arch-
bishop of Rheims in hke manner the impressions
of his emissary, Abbe Dulondel. To what senti-
ment did he respond in summoning Martin?
Probably to simple curiosity. ''Infected with his
century, it is to be feared that religion was for
the Very Christian king' only an elixir suitable
for the amalgamation of the drugs of which roy-
alty is composed." (This admirable formula is
by Chateaubriand.)

On April 2, Martin was conducted from Charen-
ton to poUce headquarters. The minister an-
nounced to him that he was about to be taken
to see the King, then went into a neighboring
room. Then Martin beheld the archangel, and
heard these words: ''You are going to speak to
the King and you will be alone with him; have no
fear in appearing before the King because of
what you have to say to him." A carriage was
ready. But the peasant preferred to go to the
Tuileries on foot, and the first gentleman in
waiting introduced him into the King's apartment.
* ******

Martin was in the presence of Louis XVIII;
he was finally going to be able to acquit himself
of his mission and to transmit to the King the
warnings of the archangel.

154 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

He himself reported this interview to Doctor
Royer-CoUard; then, after returning to Gallardon,
he made a more detailed statement to his cm^ate,
M. Laperruque; the latter wrote down the rela-
tion under the dictation of Martin, who certified
to its exactness, and the manuscript was sent to
the prefecture of Chartres. We are obhged to
confine ourselves to the statements of the laborer
of La Beauce, for the scene had no witness. To
the Duchess of Berry, who questioned him about
this personage, Louis XVIII merely repHed that
Martin was a very worthy man who had given him
good advice from which he hoped to he able to profit.

Martin finds the King seated at a table ''upon
which," he says, ''there were many papers and
pens." He bows,Aat in hand.

"Sire, I salute you."

"Good morning, Martin."

"You surely know, Sire, why I come."

"Yes, I know that you have something to tell
me and I have been told that it was something
which you could say only to me. Be seated."

Martin takes an armchair, sits down on the
other side of the table, facing the King, and begins
the conversation.

"How is your health, Sire?"

"I feel a little better than I have for some time;
and how are you getting along?"

„..-_.-.;..-..■ .^■j^^^^^'^cii^^^a^^'i^^imi^JiAi^s^

LOUIS XVIII

Gallardon 155

''I am very well, thank you."
"What is the reason for your coming here?"
And the seer commences to relate the admoni-
tions and the prophecies of the archangel, all that
had happened to him since January 15, the date
of the first apparition. He adds:

"It has also been said to me: One has betrayed
the King and will betray him again; a man has
escaped from prison; the King has been made
to believe that this occurred through subtleness,
skill and chance; but the thing is not so, it was
premeditated; those who should have attempted
to recapture him have neglected the matter; they
have used in their task much slowness and negh-
gence; they have caused him to be pursued when
it was no longer possible to recapture him. I
do not know who, they have not told me this."
"I know him well, it is Lavalette."
"It has been said to me that the King examines
aU his employees, and especially his ministers."
"Have they not named the persons to you?"
"No, it has been said to me that it was easy for
the King to know them; as for myself I do not
know them."

Martin pretends that, at this moment, Louis
XVIII lifted his eyes to heaven, saying: "Ah! it is
necessary!". . . and began to weep. Seeing
which, he himself wept with the King to the end

156 The Spell of the Heart of France

of the interview. But his emotion does not prevent
him from continuing.

"It has also been said to me that the King
should send into his provinces confidential officials
to examine the administrations, without their
being warned, without their even knowing that
any one has been sent ; and you will be feared and
respected by your subjects. It has been said to
me that I should say to you that the King should
remember his distress and his adversity in the
time of his exile. The King has wept for France;
there has been a time when the King no longer
had any hope of returning hither, seeing France
alHed with aU its neighbors."

"Yes, there was a time when I no longer had
any hope, seeing aU the States which no longer had
any support."

"God has not wished to destroy the King; he
has recalled him into his States at the moment
when he least expected it. At last the King has
returned to his legitimate possessions. What are
the acts of grace which have been returned for
such a benefit? To punish France once more,
the usurper has been drawn from his exile: it
was not by the will of men, nor by the effect of
chance that things were permitted thus. He
returned without forces, without arms, without
any defense being made against him. The legiti-

Gallardon 157

mate King was obliged to abandon his capital,
and although he believed that he could still hold
one city in his States, he was obliged to abandon
it."

"It is very true, I intended to remain at Lille."

''When the usurper returned. . . [let us omit
these historic matters]. The King again reentered
his States. Where are the acts of grace which have
been rendered to God for so glorious a miracle?"

And Louis XVIII still weeps. ... Then Mar-
tin recalls to him private facts regarding his exile.

''Keep the secret of them," returns the King;
"there will only he God, you and myself who will
ever know that. . . . Has it not been said to you
how it is necessary that I should conduct myself
in governing France?"

"No, he has made no mention to me of all
that which is in the writings; the minister has
the writings, as the things have been announced."

"Has he not said to you that I have already
sent forth decrees for all that you have spoken of
to me?"

"No, no one has mentioned it to me. ..."

". . . If, however, he returns, you will ask
him how it is necessary that I should conduct
myself in governing."

"It has been said to me that as soon as my
commission to the King had been accompHshed,

158 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

I would never see anything more and that I
would be undisturbed."

Louis XVIII, perhaps less troubled than the
worthy Martin beheves, continues to question
the seer and to make him detail the circumstances
under which certain of his previsions have been
reaHzed. (The medical report informs of these
curious coincidences.) Then, having listened to
this story — "It is the same angel," he says,
''who led the young Tobias to Rages and who
made him marry her." He takes the right hand
of Martin, that which the angel has pressed,
and adds: 'Tray for me."

"Surely, Sire, I and my family, as well as the
curate of Gallardon, have always prayed that the
affair should succeed."

"How old is the curate of Gallardon? Has he
been with you long?"

"He is almost sixty; he is a worthy man; he has
been with us about five or six years."

"I commend myself to you, to him and to all
your family."

"Surely, Sire, it is much to be desired that you
should remain; because if you should happen to
depart or if some misfortune should come to you,
we others would risk nothing also by going away,
because there are also evil people in our country;
they are not lacking."

Gallardon 159

After having renewed all the recommendations
which the archangel had charged him to transmit
to the King, Martin wishes Louis XVIII good
health and asks his permission to return 'Ho the
center of his family."

''I have given orders to send you back there."

"It has always been announced to me that no
harm and no evil would happen to me."

''Nor will anything happen to you; you will
return there tomorrow; the minister is going to
give you supper and a bedroom and papers to
take you back."

"But I would like it if I could return to
Charenton to bid them good-by and to get a
shirt which I left there."

"Did it not trouble you to remain at Charenton?
Did you get along well there?"

"No trouble at all; and surely if I did not get
along well there, I would not ask to go back."

"WeU, since you desire to go back there, the
minister will see that you are sent there at my
expense."

On the next day, having said farewell to the
physicians at Charenton, Martin was taken back
to Chartres, where the prefect of Eure-et-Loir
recommended him to observe the greatest dis-
cretion in regard to his adventure, then he returned
to Gallardon. The curiosity seekers who had been

160 The Spell of the Heart of France

worried by his absence questioned him: ''When
you have business," he rephed to them, "do you
not go and do it? Well, I have been to do mine."
And he went back to working in the fields.

M. Decazes and the King himseh would doubt-
less have preferred that the affair should remain
secret; but it was soon bruited about. Troubled
by the extraordinary events which had occurred
in France in the last two years, imaginations were
eager for the supernatural. On the other hand,
the most violent members of the Royahst party
did not find it inopportune that a miraculous voice
had come to recall to the sovereign his duties as
"very Christian king."

Copies of the medical report and manuscript
relations circulated among the pubhc. In the
month of August, 1816, an Enghsh journal told
the story of Martin. It was published in the
Journal general de France in January, 1817.
Finally pamphlets were printed. A "former
magistrate" of Dijon told the stories of the
visions which he considered miraculous; he accused
the physicians of having "spread clouds over the
truth of the revelations made to Martin," and
compared the "divine" mission of the peasant to
that of Joan of Arc. A priest. Abbe Wurtz,
answered: for him, all the visions of the man of

Gallardon 161

Gallardon were only fables and illusions; they
touched upon "the dignity of the most august
family of the imiverse"; this pretended archangel
was an enemy of the legitimate monarchy; upon
the high hat of the unknown, there was perhaps
a tricolored cockade under the white one!

Finally, there appeared a work which subse-
quently ran into twenty editions and spread the
name of Martin of Gallardon throughout the
whole of France: Relation Concerning the Events
Which Happened to a Laborer of La Beauce in the
Early Days of 1816. Its author was M. Silvy,
''former magistrate," a man of great knowledge
and of great piety; it was he who acquired the site
of the ruins of Port-Royal and who perpetuated
in the nineteenth century the spirit and the
traditions of Jansenism.

Written from the accounts of Martin himself
and the reports of the director and the doctors
of Charenton, this relation was accompanied by
religious considerations. M. Silvy did not doubt
that Thomas had been inspired by God through
the mediation of an archangel. He interpreted
in his own fashion the quite scientific prudence
which the doctors had evidenced in refusing to
give a definite opinion upon the case of the illumi-
nate. A whole life of disinterestedness and charity
proved the good faith of M. Silvy. But it is

162 The Spell of the Heart of France

sufficient, to eliminate the idea of a fraud, to
know the mortifications and the disillusions which
eventually overwhelmed this honest man, with-
out affecting his belief.

The police commenced to be stirred up. The
peasant had been sent back to his plow with a
recommendation to be silent; he was silent, but
many others talked in his stead. It was impossible
to act vigorously against him without becoming
ridiculous, for the authorities had been forced
to recognize his sincerity, and the report signed
by the alienists would not allow a personage
as inoffensive as he to be returned to Charen-
ton. Measures were therefore taken against his
historian, and the pohce prosecuted M. Silvy.
The latter, who was a good Royalist, did not
hesitate to declare that when the first edition of
his pamphlet was sold out he would bind himself
not to publish a second. This, for the moment,
was all that M. Decazes could wish. The prosecu-
tion was abandoned: the publicity of a trial was
useless.

The archangel Raphael had announced to Martin
that ''when his commission had been carried out
he would see nothing more." But, one day, the
visions recommenced, to the great astonishment
of all those who had beUeved in the first revela-
tions. They admitted their embarrassment, and

Gallardon 163

made the conjecture that, after having received
his inspirations from a messenger of light, Martin
might now be visited by a messenger of darkness.
Besides, the archangel did not appear again.
Martin merely heard voices which announced to
him the fall of the Bourbons and the dismember-
ment of France; he saw hands tracing mysterious
letters upon the walls; he predicted frightful
catastrophes. The peasant had become prophet.
His mental condition changed, in accordance with
the prediction of Doctor Boyer-CoUard. People
came to consult him from twenty leagues around.
His poor cracked head put him at the mercy of
all the plotters.

He got mixed up in his revelations. We have
seen that when he had been admitted to the
presence of Louis XVIII, he had told the latter
certain secrets of his exile and that the King had
begged him to preserve this confidence. He was
silent until the death of the King; but in 1825 he
believed that he was able to speak and made this
strange confidence to Due Mathieu de Mont-
morency; one day Louis XVIII, then Count of
Provence, had, while hunting, formed the design
of killing Louis XVI, had even taken aim at his
brother, and only chance had prevented the
murder. It was this criminal thought that he,
Martin, had recalled to the King. Certain

164 The Spell of the Heart of France

Royalists observed, not without foundation, that
the historical knowledge of Martin was not very
sound, and that it was not a question here of
secrets of the period of exile.

Martin did not trouble himself about these
inconsistencies, and continued to prophesy. In
1830 he announced the Revolution. On the Satur-
day which preceded the ordinances, he heard a
voice pronounce these words: ''The ax is raised,
blood is going to flow." When Charles X in
flight sent the Marquis de la Rochejacquelin to
him from Rambouillet to question him as to the
decision he must make, Martin repHed that aU
was over and that it was necessary to leave France.
On the next day, while hstening to the mass, he
saw three red tears, three black tears, and three
white tears, fall upon the chalice. The puzzle
was solved by three words: Death, Mourning, Joy.
The Joy seemed superfluous to the adherents of the
legitimate monarchy.

As to the famous "secret of the King," it was
not long before he gave a new version of it. What
he had revealed to Louis XVIII was the survival
of Louis XVII. He had fallen into the hands of
the partisans of Naundorff; he remained there
untn his death.

Shortly after the Revolution of 1830, there
appeared an anonymous pamphlet entitled: The

Gallardon 165

Past and the Future Explained by Extraordinary
Events. The author, who did not give his name,
was Abbe Perrault, secretary of the Grand
Almonry of France during the Restoration and
member of a '' Committee of Researches Respect-
ing Louis XVII." He made use of the revela-
tions of Martin to demonstrate the illegitimacy of
Louis XVIII and of Charles X, and Martin certi-
fied to all of this with his name and his signature.
(Note 15.)

His former friends, whom he seemed to deny
and whom he allowed to be defamed by the
anonymous author of the pamphlet, were greatly
grieved by this. I have before me a touching
letter which was written him at that time by
M. Silvy: ''May the Lord deign to give you eyes
enlightened by the heart, to lead you back into
the way of truth and sincerity. I cannot nor
should I conceal from you that in separating
yourself from it, as you seem to have done for
several years, you do an infinite wrong to the
special work with which you were charged by the
angel of the Lord in the early months of 1816.
You were then only a simple instrument in his
hands, chosen by him as a good villager whom
no one could suspect of belonging to any party,
and unhappily there are many of these which di-
vide the Church and the State. What a change

166 The Spell of the Heart of France

has happened in you! And what a difference
between Thomas Martin as he showed himself in
1816, and the same Thomas Martin in 1832! . . .
Such is the evil fruit (the fruit of death) of this
book (a lie) Du passe et de Vavenir, which confirms
and must confirm more than ever different persons
in unbeHef and in avoidance of the salutary advice
which was given to all France by the mission which
was confided to you (and which you have just
dishonored). I have learned by myself and I am
still certain from different testimonies that many
of those who at first had believed in your first
announcements no '' longer give to you the shadow
of faith. I could even name to you, if you desire
it, curates and honorable priests, vicars and even
seminarists whom your new visions and their
manifest falsity have totally disgusted with your
previous revelations of 1816. . . ." This letter
was not answered. The unfortunate Martin
belonged henceforward to those who exploited
his hallucinations.

When, in the month of May, 1833, the clock-
maker of Crossen, Due de Normandie, arrived
at Paris to make himself known to his faithful,
and when the sect commenced to be organized,
the King and the Prophet met. The circumstances
of this interview are not known precisely. Accord-
ing to certain authors, Martin was taken to Saint

Gallardon 167

Arnoult, a village near Dourdan, to the home of
the curate Appert, one of the most zealous and
most devoted partisans of Naundorff ; there, in the
presbytery, they presented him to a mysterious
personage whom he immediately hailed as the true
King of France, while the friends of Naundorff
wept at the spectacle of the miracle. But the
Viscount of Maricourt received from the mouth of
Doctor Antoine Martin, son of Thomas Martin, a
version according to which the scene may have
been less solemn and less touching. In September,
1833, on waking one morning, Martin said to his
son: "At this moment there resides at Paris,
with Madame de Rambaud, an unknown who
calls himself King Louis XVII. My angel requires
me to assure myself of his identity. Let us depart,
my son." They departed. "Are you King Louis
XVII?" Martin brusquely said to the stranger
who was called Naundorff, when he was in his
presence. "In that case, you have upon the
shoulder, a half-ring, an indelible sign of your
identity, marked there by the Queen your mother,
a sleeping lion upon your breast and a dove on your
thigh." Then Naundorff took the Martins,
father and son, into "a discreet place prescribed
by decency," and allowed them to see that these
signs were marked upon his body. (Note 16.)
From the day when Martin enrolled himseK in

168 The Spell of the Heart of France

Naundorff's party he leads a wandering Hfe, full
of tribulations. He stays but rarely in his own
village. He retires sometimes to Chartres, some-
times to Versailles; for the voices order him
incessantly to flee from his enemies and to hide
himself.

On April 12, 1834, he leaves Gallardon to make
a retreat at Chartres. When leaving, he tells
his wife that he well knows that something is
going to happen to him, but that he confides aU
to the will of God. He goes to see some honorable
persons who are accustomed to receive him. But,
when his novena is finished and he is about to
return home, he is taken with frightful pains and
dies before a doctor can be called. The honorable
persons send for the widow, require her to send
the body of the deceased to the home of a curate,
her relation, and the latter is requested to declare
that the death took place in his house. He refuses,
and the body is transported to Gallardon. The
strangeness of all these circumstances and the
appearance of the body cause suspicion of poison-
ing. Martin's family demand that the body shall
be exhumed and an autopsy made. The doctors
examine the body, but nothing more is heard of
the affair.

Thus ends very mysteriously the seer Thomas
Martin of Gallardon.

The Valley of the Seine, from the Terrace at
St. Germain.

From a water-color by Blanche McManus.

FROM MANTES TO LA ROCHE-GUYON

"HEN we leave Mantes aiid follow the val-
ley of the Seine, we leave behind us the
charming town so well named Mantes-
la-Jolie. At each turn of the road the sleeping
waters reflect a heaven of blue, and trembhng
verdure beneath: we dream of Corot. Through
the gaps in the curtain formed by the poplars of
the isles and the river banks, appears the white
and smiling town, rising above its river, sweetly
ordered below the towers of its fine and proud
cathedral; we dream of the dehcate, precise and
finished grace of those landscapes which form the
background of fifteenth-century miniatures.

Farther on, the aspect and the color of things
change completely. Chalky escarpments close
the horizon. Here commences the bluff, the
abrupt bluff, which henceforth will overlook the
bank of the Seine all the way to the channel, and
which uninterruptedly will form the bastion of
the Norman coast from Havre to Dieppe. The
locality has already a sort of maritime flavor. On

169

170 The Spell of the Heart of France

days of tempest, the clouds which flee from the
northwest and rush across the great valley seem
to be swept by the wuid of the open sea, the river
is covered with little short, foamy waves, the air
has a salty tang; and when Vetheuil, at the
entrance of a tiny ravine, presents its low houses,
its lanes tumbling toward the river bank, the high
terrace and the Norman tower of its church, we
might swear it was a fishing village. . . .

This church of Vetheuil, which is said to have
been commenced in the twelfth century, boasts of
a fine belfry pierced with high lancet windows,
which was built by Charles le Bel. It was recom-
menced and completed in the sixteenth century by
the Grappins, architects of Gisors. This family
enriched the Vexin with precious buildings. The
church of Vetheuil is the masterpiece of the most
celebrated artist of the dynasty, Jean Grappin the
elder. The Renaissance gave France few rehgious
edifices more seducing and more harmonious than
this. Nowhere were the new decoration and the
classic styles more ingeniously applied to the
transformation of an old church. The fagade of
Gisors, which is also by Jean Grappin, seems to be
less perfect in its art. Here the architectural
effect is fight and finely balanced. Niches, con-
soles, dais, balustrades, medallions, are charmingly
invented. We still see the elegance and sobriety

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 171

of the earliest Renaissance; and yet there already
appear, under the little porch, the H and the
crescent. The Grappins had remained faithful to
the traditions of taste and restraint, which were
beginning to be lost by their contemporaries.

Within, there are some pretty statues of earlier
days, a fine Flemish altar screen with scenes from
the Passion, and abominable colored statues of
the most modern hideousness.

We stop before a singular chapel, shut off by
a vilely daubed wooden grating: to look at the
rags and strange accessories which hang on the
walls, we might at first take it for the property
room of a theater. The paintings with which it is
afilicted represent sepulchral things, thigh bones,
tears and death's heads. The wall which faces the
altar is covered with the portraits of a large num-
ber of persons dressed in black, and covered with
a sort of bonnet with tumed-up edges. This is
the chapel of the Charity of Vetheuil, a lay brother-
hood, whose function is to assist the dying and
bury the dead. It doubtless dates from the Middle
Ages, like other brotherhoods of the same type,
which were formed in the Vexin, the remembrance
of which is not yet totally lost at Mantes, at La
Roche-Guyon, at Vetheuil, at Rosny. Like them
also, it was restored by a bull of Gregory XIII at
the end of the sixteenth century, as a result o^ the

172 The Spell of the Heart of France

frightful ravages of the plague at Milan. The
Charities of Rosny, of La Roche and of Mantes
have been dissolved. That of Vetheuil has sur-
vived. The costumes of the brothers, great robes
of black serge with a blue collar, are what we see
hung on the chapel wall; and here are also the
lanterns and the crosses which are carried before
the bier, the bell of the bell-ringer, and his dal-
matica sprinkled with skulls and bones, as well as
the insignia of the chief banner bearer. (Note 17.)
Each time that I have returned hither I have
feared to see this httle chapel abandoned and to
learn that this touching trumpery had been ban-
ished to an attic. Till now the people of Vetheuil
have preserved their Charity. But how much
longer will these vestiges of the rites and the cus-
toms of the past endure?

Below Vetheuil a torn and ravined promontory
presses close to the sudden bend of the river. No
trees; a handful of vines; tufts of stunted vegeta-
tion dotting the chalky slope. Nature has not
been alone in tormenting and tearing this strange
wall. Men have carved their habitations in this
soft stone; and a subterranean village has been
built in the hillside, like those villages which we
find in the tufa of the river banks of the Loire.
The men have deserted these troglodyte homes,

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 173

which are now no longer used save as cellars and
stables. But the spot has retained a singular
picturesqueness. A little church tower springs
from the rock and sometimes we may stiU see the
chimney of a cavern sending its smoke through
the vines or the thickets.

The village is called Haute-Isle. Formerly the
manor house, surrounded by walls, was the only
one which stood in the open. In the seventeenth
century it sheltered ''the illustrious M. Dongois,
chief registrar of parliament. " Now this illustrious
M. Dongois was the uncle of the not less illustrious
M. Nicolas Despreaux. And it was thus that
Haute-Isle (then written Hautile) had the honor
of being sung, if I dare say it, by Boileau himseK:

It is a tiny village, or rather a hamlet,

Built upon the slope of a long range of hills,

Whence the eye may wander far across the neighboring plaing._

The Seine, at the foot of the mountains which are washed by its

waves,
Beholds twenty islets rise from the bosom of its waters,
Which, dividing its flow in diverse manners,
Form twenty rivers from a single stream.
All its banks are covered with wildUng willows
And with walnut trees often scourged by the passer-by. . . .

These verses are a Httle rough, a tiny bit diffi-
cult. Lyric quality and picturesqueness were not
the busiaess of Boileau. Like all his contempo-
raries — omitting La Fontaine and Sevigne — he
neither knew how to describe a landscape nor to
translate its emotion. From this incapacity it
has been assumed that the men and the women of

174 The Spell of the Heart of France

the seventeenth century were indifferent to the
charm of natiire. . . . They were not pantheists,
assuredly; they had neither ecstasies nor trem-
blings before the ''dramas" of light and the ''sav-
age beauties" of the ocean or of the peaks. . . .
But they imderstood and felt the grace of a
beautiful valley. Since we have met the rural
Boileau upon ovir way, let us collect his souvenirs
of country residences.

Let us first remark that if his description of
Haute-Isle somewhat resembles a page of pen and
ink drawing, we nevertheless find indicated there
all of the particulars by which this landscape
enchants us: the contrast of the rough, wild slope
with the wide plain which stretches beyond the
Seine, the grace of the river and its islands, the
verdure of the willows and the walnuts. And
Boileau does not forget to show us — by a some-
what obscure periphrase — the urchin who, as he
passes along the road, brings down the nuts by
hurhng stones.

What does Boileau do when he is in the country?
He makes verses naturally, since his business is to
be a poet.

Here, in a valley which answers all my needs,

I buy at Uttle expense solid pleasures:

Sometimes, with book in hand, wandering ia the meadows,

I occupy my mind with useful thoughts;

Sometimes seeking the end of a line which I have constructed

I find in a nook of the woods the word which had escaped me. . . .

NICOL VS BOILEAU-DESPREAUX

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 175

Behold the solid pleasures of a constructor of
verses, the friend of useful reveries. Reporters
have recently questioned our men of letters as to
how they "employ their vacations.". . . They
have replied in prose by confidences quite like
those which Boileau addressed in verse to M.
Lamoignon, advocate general.

But at Hautile, Boileau sometimes stopped to
dream and rhyme; then, he ''jestingly allured the
too eager fish"; or, he ''made war on the inhabi-
tants of the air " ; and he tasted, on returning from
the chase, the pleasure of an "agreeable and
rustic" repast.

So, when he was about to leave the country, he
expressed the ordinary wish of every citizen and
of every poet obliged to return to Paris :

Oh, fortunate sojourn! Oh, fields beloved of heaven!
Why, strolling forever through your deUcious prairies,
Can I not fix my wandering course here
And, known by you alone, forget the world outside?

Charming verses, of which La Fontaine would
not have been ashamed.

And he said a sad adieu to this countryside,
whose peace seemed to him sweeter and more
salutary in proportion as the years made him feel
more deeply the value of calm and especially of
silence; he was then forty years old:

Already less fuU of fire, to animate my voice,
I have need of the silence and the shadow of the woods.
******* *

/ need repose, meadows and forests.

176 The Spell of the Heart of France

This is another very pretty hne, the Hne of a
quadragenarian, . .

* * * * •jt * *

"By the riverside of Se3nie is a marvelous mount
upon which formerly was built a castle, over
strong and over proud and called La Roche-
Guyon. It is still so high and fierce that scarcely
may one see to its summit. He who made it and
enclosed it, made, at the base of the mount and by
cutting the rock, a great cave in the semblance of
a house, which might have been made by nature."
(Note 18.)

The ''over proud" castle is still standing on the
summit of the hill, dismantled, breached, ruined,
but ever keeping its proud and fierce aspect. As
to the house created "by cutting the rock," it has,
so to speak, slowly moved away from the slope
from century to century. It was at first a sort of
den, hollowed beneath the donjon. Then its
galleries stretched out and were extended to the
edge of the escarpment; then the entrances to the
subterranean castle were closed by fagades of stone
and armed with towers; a fortress was thus built
against the rock, and at the same time its ram-
parts were thrown forward to the Seine. To the
gloomy feudal citadel succeeded a chateau of the
Renaissance, somewhat less terrible, and the
castellans of the eighteenth century changed it

Prom Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 177

in the taste of their time without being able to
deprive it of its warlike aspect.

This history of the construction is manifest
when we look upon this curious pile of different
buildings. Above, the ruin of the donjon; at the
foot of the slope and imited to it, a grand chateau
whose front fagade is framed by two towers of the
Middle Ages; and before this semi-feudal abode,
charming stables in the style of those of Chantilly.
A grandiose aggregation, utterly without harmony,
almost barbaric, but in which is reflected with
attractive clearness the whole past of France,
from the invasion of the Normans to the Revo-
lution.

Beautiful furnishings, lovely paintings, fine
carvings, adorn the apartments. The walls of the
salon are covered with matchless tapestries, which
portray the history of Esther. But it is the por-
traits which monopolize our attention here. Some
are mere copies. The others are attributed —
correctly — to Mignard, to de Troy, to Nattier.
They evoke the glorious or charming memories of
the castellans and the chatelaines, and, thanks
to them, the whole past of La Roche-Guy on is
born again. I do not know that there is in the
whole of France a chateau so rich in memories
and in history.

It belonged to the Guys de la Roche, and the

178 The Spell of the Heart of France

wife of one of them, the heroic Perrette de la
Riviere, there sustained a siege of five months
against the Enghsh. In the sixteenth century it
belonged to the Sillys, and you may be shown the
chamber where, on the morrow of the battle of
Ivry, King Henri found a good supper, a good
lodging and nothing more, for the virtuous
Marquise de Guercheville ordered that his coach
should be harnessed, so that he went away to the
house of one of his lady friends two leagues from
there — an admirable adventm-e on which a novel
might be written. Then La Roche passed to the
du Plessis-Liancourts : thus its name is mingled
with the history of Jansenism; then to the La
Rochef oucaulds : the author of the Maxims dwelt
here; then, after the Revolution, to the Rohans,
and in 1829 it returned to the La Rochefoucaulds.
These names alone are a paean of glory.

Among the portraits hung on the walls several
represent the Marquise d'Enville at various ages.
What pretty, fine features! It was this Marquise
who created the chateau as it still exists today, and
transformed the old citadel into a home of luxury.
Her father, Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld,
exiled by Louis XV to La Roche-Guy on, had taken
advantage of the leisure given him by the King's
disfavor to commence great works in his domain;
he had planted trees upon the naked hillside,

From Mantes to La RocKe-Guyon 179

thrown down the useless embattlements of the
fortress and constructed a new pavilion. The
Marquise d'Enville succeeded him in 1779 and
continued his work. Without thinking of expense,
she built, laid out gardens, ordered paintings,
tapestries and statues. She was a woman of taste
and spirit: she corresponded with Walpole and
Voltaire, was intimate with Turgot and Condorcet,
declared herself the pupil of the philosophers, and
made her salon the rendezvous of the economists.
But it was said that she practiced philosophy more
than she preached it; she had founded a free school
in her village and had engaged nuns to teach in it;
in years of bad harvests, she opened charitable
workrooms for the poor. She showed herseK
faithful and open-hearted in her friendships, for
she remained the friend of Mile, de L'Espinasse
without ceasing to be the friend of Madame du
Deffand. She was one of those aristocrats who
worked with candid generosity for the ruin of the
aristocracy: the Revolution neither surprised nor
frightened her. But, on September 4, 1792, a
band of revolutionists at Gisors murdered her son,
the Due de la Rochefoucauld, who had sat in the
Constituent Assembly among the Constitution-
alists. In the following year she was herself
denounced, arrested, thrown into prison and owed
her liberty, perhaps her life, only to a petition of

180 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

the citizens of the commune of La Roche-Guyon.

She died in 1797 at the age of eighty.

*******

A little way back we met Boileau, dreaming at
the foot of the bluff of Haute-Isle. A few steps
farther on, at La Roche-Guyon, we meet Hugo
and Lamartine; both stopped in this chateau
during the Restoration.

La Roche then belonged to the Due de Rohan-
Chabot.

A short while ago M. Charles Bailie pubhshed a
fat book upon this personage, who was somewhat
slender, somewhat droll, and even, I will ventiu-e
to say, a little ridiculous. But as this biography
gave its author an opportunity to study men and
manners of the period of the Restoration, and as this
study swarms with new and well-told anecdotes,
we gladly ignore the insignificance of the hero.
Here is a surmnary of the life of this cardinal-duke :

Auguste de Chabot, born February 29, 1788,
followed his father, the Prince of Leon, into exile,
and returned to Paris with him in 1800. He was
educated in a somewhat haphazard fashion by a
refractory Oratorist and later by a former college
regent. In 1807, when his grandfather, the Due de
Rohan, died, his father became Due de Rohan and
he himself Prince de Leon. When his father died
in 1816 he became Duke de Rohan.

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 181

In 1808 he married Mile, de Serent, who was
seventeen years old. Chateaubriand sometimes
said to him: ''Come, Chabot, so that I may cor-
rupt you"; but his morals remained irreproach-
able. He traveled in Italy; he saw Madame
Recamier and did not fall in love with her. Queen
Caroline distinguished him. ''She treated him,"
said Lamartine, "with a marked favor which
promised a royal friendship, if the future cardinal
had seen in the most beautiful of women anything
else than the delight of the eye." He had pretty
features, gave infinite care to his toilet, wrote
romantic poems and dabbled in water colors.

In 1809 he became a chamberlain of the
Emperor. In 1815 his wife was burned to death,
the laces of her gown having taken fire. In 1819
he entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice and was
ordained a priest in 1822. Madame de Broglie
thus described him, in the following year: "He
had a thin pale face, and, at the same time, a
coquettish care for his person which seemed to
join honest instincts with former worldly memories;
in his face there was a mingling of fanaticism and
foolishness. "

He went to La Roche-Guyon to preach and on
this occasion he chose five hundred volumes from
the magnificent library collected by the Marquise
d'Enville, piled them up in the castle courtyard

182 The Spell of the Heart of France

and burned them : they were rare volumes adorned
with precious bindings. Later he went to Rome,
where he expected to be made a cardinal. He
returned without the purple; but he had converted
Madame de Recamier's chambermaid.

In 1828 he was elevated to the archbishopric of
Auch and later to that of Besangon. He dissat-
isfied the seminarists by untimely reforms; he did
not take it amiss that ecclesiastics should wear
poHshed laced boots. He shocked the liberals by
his bigotry and the clergy by his luxury. He
restored his cathedral; but he spoiled the apse,
broke out the crossbars of the windows to replace
them by frightful stained glass, demolished the
altar, which was a beautiful work of art of the
eighteenth century, and cast out a beautiful stone
pulpit of the fifteenth century from which Saint
Francis de Sala had preached.

He was made cardinal in the month of July,
1830. The fall of the Bourbons forced him to flee
to Belgium, whence he passed into Switzerland.
After the death of Pius VIII, he took part in the
conclave which elected Gregory XVI and offici-
ated at the marriage of the Duchess de Berry to
Count Lucchesi-Pah. He returned to his diocese
in 1832, where he was received by a riot. He
nevertheless remained there and died in 1833 of
typhoid fever.

CARDINAL-DUC DE ROHAN-CHABOT

From Mantes to La Roche-Cuyon 183

The Patriote, a newspaper of Besangon, which
had opposed him, pubhshed the day after his
death a courteous article: ''We do not doubt that
he owed what influence he had to his virtue. He
prayed devoutly and the accent of his voice,
intoning the chants of the Church, breathed true
religion. No one can say what he would have
eJEfected among us, if his career had been longer
and if he had become reconciled to ovir Revolution."

. . . You think, without doubt, of Bouvard
and Pecuchet taking notes to write the life of the
Due d'Angoul^me. So do I.

Now let us return to La Roche-Guyon.

Montalembert, Marchangy, Berryer, Dupan-
loup, Hugo, Lamartine, were there the guests of
the Abbe-Duc de Rohan.

How Hugo made the acquaintance of the Due
de Rohan and visited him at La Roche-Guyon;
how, terrified by the princely formality which
reigned as well in the chapel of the chateau as in
the dining room, he fled after two days; finally
how the Due de Rohan gave Lamennais to Hugo
as a confessor, may be read in Volume II of Victor
Hugo raconte par un temoin de sa vie. We must
not neglect to consult also the severe but exact
work of M. Bire.

Lamartine wrote one of his most admirable
Meditations at La Roche-Guyon:

184 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

Here comes to die the world's last echoing sound;
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port:
Here, the soul steeps itself in peace the most profound,
And this peace is not death.

In the note which he left as a sequel to this
poem, Lamartine relates that, in 1819, the Due
de Rohan was introduced to him by Due Mathieu
de Montmorency. "We became close friends
without his ever making me feel, and without my
ever allowing myself to forget, by that natural
tact which is the etiquette of nature, the distance
which he indeed wished to bridge, but which
nevertheless existed between two names which
poesy alone could bring together for an instant."
This is exquisite, with an affectation of respect
which borders on impertinence.

The Meditation is entitled Holy Week at La
Roche-Guyon. Not a line of this grand lyric piece
reveals that it was conceived in this place rather
than in any other. Lamartine has thus attempted
to justify his title: "The principal ornament of the
chateau," he writes, "was a chapel hollowed in the
rock, a true catacomb, affecting, in the cavernous
circimivolutions of the mountain, the form of the
naves, the choirs, the pillars, the rood-lofts, of a
cathedral. He induced me to go to pass Holy
Week there with him. He took me there himself.
. . . The religious service, pious voluptuousness
of the Due de Rohan, was celebrated every day in

From Mantes to La Roche-Guyon 185

this subterranean church, with a pomp, a luxury,
and holy enchantments, which intoxicate youthful
imaginations. ..."

The picture is dehghtful. Unfortunately it
entirely emerged from the ''youthful imagina-
tion" of Lamartine. The subterranean church
still exists at La Roche-Guyon, just as in the time
of the Due de Rohan. But the triple chapel, cut
in the hill, and sufficiently hghted from outside,
has nowise the appearance of a catacomb. There
are no ''cavernous circumvolutions, " naves, choirs,
pillars, rood-lofts. The cathedral is composed of
three httle vaulted rooms. . . .

And I now think of the honest BoUeau. He
would not have mystified us or himseh in this
manner! It is true that you and I would give the
whole epistle to Lamoignon for this single line:

Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port.

NOYON

THE light softens and dims, even in these days
of the dog star, and, under this heaven of
palest azure, the puissant harmony of ver-
dure and red bricks announces the neighborhood
of Flanders. Only the stone towers of the cathe-
dral dominate with their gray mass the ruddy
buildings and the leafage of the gardens.

Noyon possessed immense convents which were
razed during the Revolution. Scattered remnants
still mark the sites of these monasteries; here an
apse transformed into a storehouse, there the f agade
of a chapel. The monks have departed; but the
town has retained a monastic aspect; and it is a
place where one might make a retreat. In the
silence of the melancholy streets, the pavements
seem to ring more sonorously, and the passer
listens with surprise to the echo of his steps
between the silent houses. . . .

Upon the market place, the delicate and florid
f agade of the old Hotel de Ville of the Renaissance
calls up the images of communal life, peculiar to

186

Noyon 187

the little cities of the north; we look for the belfry
tower, we expect to hear the chimes; but the dis-
putatious conunune of the Middle Ages is now a
wise, sad and pensive little town. In the staircase,
sculptures in high rehef portray the heavy gayeties
of northern cUmes; but Noyon is now a wise, sad
and decent little town.

On the same square stands a curious fountain
provided by the liberality of an eighteenth-century
prelate. Statues of the cardinal virtues decorate
its pedestal from which rises an obeUsk, surrounded
by emblems and allegories; we see there a Cupid
caressing a lamb, quivers, arrows, a hound, —
symbols of innocent love and of fidelity. An in-
scription placed upon the monument recalls to
the people of Noyon that among them Chilperic II
was buried, Charlemagne consecrated and Hugh
Capet elected king. I do not know whether this
inscription is as old as the fountain: it has a
certain grandeur in its conciseness; let us praise
the towns which thus array themselves in their
past glories, and recall the part which they have
played in the destinies of France. . . .

With its houses of brick and its gardens sur-
rounded by high walls, its silence and its memories,
Noyon would merit the tenderness of its people,
even if Noyon did not possess its admirable
cathedral. . . .

188 The Spell of the Heart of France

What a charming picture is made by the apse,
with its radiating chapels! Torch holders orna-
ment the flying buttresses, which were restored in
the eighteenth century: they drive to despair the
pure archaeologists and fill with Joy men without
taste who, insensitive to unity of style, love to
hear monuments tell their history, their whole
history. To this harmonious apse is joined the
treasury, and then a fine structure with wooden
panels of the sixteenth century, the library of the
canons: its street floor was formerly arcaded and
sheltered a market; alas! it has been walled up,
. , . Behind, the buildings of the chapter house,
hovels, turi^ets, an arcade thrown across the street,
a high crenellated wall, surround the cloister and
the flanks of the cathedral; and the picturesque-
ness of these disordered lines is delightful.

On the other side of the apse appears a lamen-
table breach. Here formerly stood the chapel of
the bishopry; it was attached to the crossing of the
church and thus the little portal of the transept
was exquisitely framed. This thirteenth-century
chapel was long since abandoned; it had lost its
ancient roof; but these ancient walls should have
been respected. To free the cathedral, they have
been leveled to the ground. . . . Not quite, how-
ever, for the owner of a cellar excavated beneath
this chapel resisted the efforts of the architect:

Noyon 189

today the remnants of the Uttle edifice still remain.
And they have not even the appearance of a ruin,
but the piteous aspect of a demolition. Thus has
been destroyed a truly beautiful grouping, and
the cathedral, quite contrary to good sense, has
been isolated from the ancient bishopry to permit
the people of Noyon to walk all around their
church. At least, this is the only benefit they have
received from it.

Before the east front of the church Ues a little
square surroimded by the tranquil and substantial
homes of the canons. Upon the piers of each door,
great vases swell their paunches and project their
stone flames : this is the leit motiv of the eighteenth
century. The canons for whom these beautiful
homes were constructed had only to cross the
parvis to enter the cathedral. This rises before
their houses with its massive towers, which are
not crowned by spires, but in which the mixture
of the plain arch with the pointed marks the orig-
inaliV of the building. The vast porch, with three
doorways whose sculptures were sacked by the Rev-
olutionists and then by the administrators of the
Restoration, preserves an inimitable majesty. . . .

The exterior of this church charmed us especially
by its picturesqueness ; within, it gives us an
impression of perfect beauty.

190 The Spell of the Heart of France

It ravishes us at first by the balance of its differ-
ent parts, by the justness of its proportions. Its
plan is a masterpiece. In almost all our cathedrals
we admire the choir, then we admire the nave; if
we wish to take in the whole edifice at a single
glance, we are still astonished by its grandeur and
majesty, but our eye no longer experiences the
same dehght nor our mind the same satisfaction.
If we take up a position at the entrance of Notre
Dame de Noyon, in that species of vestibule which
opens on the first bay of the nave and which here
rises to the height of the vaulting, we have before
us an absolutely harmonious work. The glance
can travel as far as the apse without being arrested
by any discordance. There is, I believe, no Gothic
church where the dimensions of the nave cor-
respond in so happy a fashion to the dimensions
of the choir. The unity of the monument is
incomparable. The choir seems to be the com-
pletion, the expansion of the long Gothic structure.
The nave seems to make its way to this circle of
light, without haste, with a tranquil and bold
rhythm which is produced by the regular alter-
nation of its naked columns and its pilasters
flanked by tiny pillars. . . .

This forms the beauty, so to speak, the intel-
lectual beauty, of the cathedral of Noyon. But its
most original character, by which it enchants our

From a drawing by Blanche McManus

CATHEDRAL OF NOYON

Noyon 191

imagination and impresses itself in our memory,
is the marvelous combination of the pointed and
the circular arch. (Note 19.) It is charming
among all those charming churches which rose in
the twelfth century in the valleys of the Oise and
the Seine, and in which architects endowed with
genius knew how to bring together the round arcs
of the declining Romanesque and the pointed arches
of the Gothic at its dawning. In no other place did
the art of these constructors display itseK in so
refined and subtle a manner; nowhere else can we
find so complete a success; in no other region has
the marriage of tradition and moderation given
birth to a more exquisite work.

Consider the elevations of the nave: the arches
which separate the nave from the side aisles break
in ogives; the tribunes are pierced with pointed
apertures divided by little columns and sur-
mounted by trefoil windows; the light penetrates
this triforium through Romanesque windows;
above these tribunes runs a little gallery whose
arches are circular, and higher still the twin
windows of the clerestory are framed with semi-
circular arches. In the transepts, whose two arms
end in apses, there are other combinations, but
the two varieties of arches are always fraternally
associated; the Gothic and the Romanesque al-
ternate from the ground to the vaulting. In the

192 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

choir, finally, the arcades, round-arched in the two
first bays, are pointed at the back of the apse and
the lines of the clerestory reproduce the same
arrangement; the tribunes are cut in points and
the arches of the gallery are divided in trefoil. To
this diversity of lines we must add the diversity
of decoration. Two styles are here juxtaposed:
here are the monsters, the grotesques and the
foUage of Romanesque art, and there the more
sober and truthful sculpture of Gothic art.

But — here is the miracle — all these contrasts
appear only when we closely analyze the elements
of the edifice. They never make discords; they
never enfeeble the impression of grace, ease and
perfection which we experienced when we entered
Notre Dame de Noyon.

There has been much discussion about the date
of the construction of this church.

This question was not in the least embarrassing
to Jacques Le Vasseur, the dean of the chapter,
who published in 1633 a volume of 1400 pages,
entitled Annales de Veglise cathedrale de Noyon.
For him, the choir where he went every day to sing
the psalms had been built by Saint M^dard in the
sixth century; Charlemagne had constructed the
nave; then, after the year 1000, ''our choir was
refreshed, our nave completed, our belfries added,

Noyon 193

for the accomplishment of the work." Neverthe-
less he added: ''At least the experts judge that
these works and manufactures are of these times.
..." The excellent Le Vasseur was not, in any
case, the man to contradict them in their judg-
ments, for he consecrated a chapter of his book to
demonstrating that the foundation of Noyon by
Noah was ''probable"; and it is easy to guess the
reasons which he extracted from philology.

The "experts" of the nineteenth century looked
a Httle closer. When they had learned to dis-
tinguish Romanesque art from Gothic art, they
quickly succeeded in classifying the cathedral of
Noyon among the monuments of the transition.
In a vital and eloquent study which he published
in 1845, in which in describing the cathedral of
Noyon he studied the origins and celebrated the
beauties of Gothic art, Vitet maintained that this
cathedral was "conceived and entirely outlined
from 1150 to 1170 and that it was entirely carved,
finished off and completed only toward the end of
the century or perhaps even a little later." These
dates are not quite exact: M. Eugene Lefevre^
PontaUs has demonstrated this by the archives and
by the archaeological examination of the monu-
ment itself; he has proved that the choir was fin-
ished in 1157, the nave in 1220, that the vaultings
fell in a fire at the close of the thirteenth century

194 The Spell of the Heart of France

and that the church was then repahed. . . . And
I refer you to his excellent Histoire de la cathedrale
de Noyon. (Note 20.)

The two arms of the transept are rounded m the
form of an apse. This plan is frequently met with
in Romanesque cathedrals, and especially in those
of the lower Rhine. We find it also in the cathedral
of Tournai, and it was doubtless from the latter
that the architects of Noyon borrowed the idea of
their transept, for imtil the middle of the twelfth
century the two dioceses were united under the
same pastoral staff. Besides, if I were an archaeol-
ogist, I would study attentively the plans of these
two churches: perhaps this comparison would
explain some of the peculiarities of Noyon. Noth-
ing can be more graceful than these two circular
arms, where the variety of the arches gives an
additional charm to the curved lines. . . . But
here behold the malice of the restorers.

The north arm has not been restored. Several
of its windows were bricked up in the eighteenth
century; the ground-floor windows have been
replaced by niches decorated with statues, and at
the end of the apse a httle door has been opened to
communicate with the sacristy. The men who
thus treated a venerable monument of the Middle
Ages were vandals, I admit. But there is, just the

Noyon 195

same, a very pleasing and very delicate reminis-
cence of the Renaissance in the decoration which
they plastered over the twelfth-century walls.
They diminished the Ught in this part of their
chm-ch; but is not this better than the crude day-
light which enters through the clear panes? In
short, they altered the character of the ancient
edifice, but they left it accent and life.

Turn toward the opposite arm. It also had been
modified in the course of centuries, but it has
recently been restored to its original condition.
A door gave communication with the bishop's
garden; it has been suppressed. Several openings
had been blocked up, but have been reopened. In
short, it has been restored; and it is just for the
purpose of better restoring it that they have, as I
have described, demolished the little chapel of the
bishopry. All this was accomphshed with the
rarest skill and the most exact science. This apse
now presents the aspect of a perfect scheme of
architecture. It is light, it is clean, it is finished.
But where is the accent? Where is the life? The
most vandal of the vandals are not always those
we would suspect.

4: :): ^ 4: ^ ^ 4:

Under the crossing of the transept stands the
chief altar of white marble. Its table is a vast
rounded console, supported by the uplifted hands

196 The Spell of the Heart of France

of six angels of gilded bronze and surmounted by
a little circular temple. The steps of the altar, the
friezes and the capitals of the little temple are
ornamented with chiseled copper. It is a very-
beautiful work of art of the style of Louis XVI. It
was put in place in 1779.

Until the eighteenth century, the cathedral had
retained its old altar of the thirteenth century:
placed, according to the ancient custom, at the
very end of the apse, without candles, without
crucifix, without tabernacle, it was a simple table
surrounded by curtains which were opened only at
the elevation of the host; the altar cloths varied
according to the office of the day; the altar screen
was adorned with precious shrines.

Now, in 1753, an architect and inspector of
buildings of the King, who resided at Compiegne,
Louis Godot, proposed to the chapter of Noyon
the designing of an altar "d la romaine." His
project pleased the chapter, which accepted it,
despite the violent opposition of Claude Bonne-
dame and several other canons, who were displeased
with the proposed destruction of the Gothic altar.

Godot, who proposed also to replace the ancient
choir stalls, to demolish the rood-loft and to sur-
round the choir with gratings, prepared a sketch.
The chapter appropriated the sum necessary for
the work. But Bonnedame and his friends were

Noyon 197

not through; they addressed a request to the heu-
tenant-general of the baihwick, invoking the
fathers of the church, the hturgy and respect for
ancient things. The intendant of the province-
ship came to Noyon to pacify the chapter. But
Bonnedame became more and more intractable.
The King remitted the affair to the council of state.
The opposing parties again brought forward their
liturgical arguments, and added that the sum asked
for the decoration of the choir would be better
employed if used to reconstruct the vaultings
which threatened to collapse. Experts were
appointed to examine the condition of the vault-
ings and declared it to be excellent. Bonnedame
did not wish to confess himseK vanquished and
reasserted his grievances. Godot replied and set
up the authority of Michelangelo: it should be
quite permissible to place the altar in the transept
at Noyon, since it was thus done at Saint Peter's
in Rome! The council of state finally ratified the
first decision of the chapter and completed the
discomfiture of Bonnedame and his partisans.

M. Lefevre-Pontalis, from whom I borrow this
anecdote, cites with honor the names of the canons
who, under the leadership of Bonnedame, showed
themselves in these circumstances ''the defenders
of good archaeological traditions." Let us there-
fore praise the canons Du Heron, Cuquigny,

198 The Spell of the Heart of France

Bertault, du Tombelle, Antoine de Caisnes,
Pelleton, Mauroy and Reneufve, who showed a
meritorious zeal for the protection of an altar of
the thirteenth century. Such sentiments are not
common among churchmen, even in 1905; they
were still more rare in 1754. Yes — for the love of
principle — let us celebrate this pious pigheadedness.
Only . . . only, when I look at the altar ''d
la romaine" conceived by Godot, I ask myself,
with all sorts of remorse and scruples, whether
Bonnedame or his adversaries were right. This
Roman altar is a pure marvel of elegance. The
angels of gilded bronze which support the table,
and which are attributed to Gouthieze, are delight-
ful statuettes; the copper garlands and emblems
which decorate the marble are of the finest work-
manship; the little temple elevated above the
tabernacle is dehcate in taste, despite its Trianon-
esque appearance . . . And what an unexpected
harmony between this charming bibelot and the
old cathedral of the twelfth century! Yes, this
altar is in its right place, in spite of the liturgy, in
spite of the proprieties, in spite of the respectable
prejudices of Bonnedame. An exquisite harmony
exists between the curve of the steps, the table and
the tabernacle, and the rounded forms of the choir
and of the transept. What foolishness is this unity
of style!

Hoyoii 190

Then Bonnedame was wrong? I do not know,
but, today, we must honor his memory and recom-
mend his example; for, if some one today decided
to plan to remove the Romanesque altar of the
cathedral of Noyon, it would be to substitute for
it a Neo-Gothic altar, which would be abominable,
encumbering and out of place: on this point there
is no doubt.

Godot's altar just escaped being treated by the
Revolutionists as the Gothic altar had been by
the canons. A mason wished to break down this
monument of superstition. But a representative
of the people interfered and made this brute
understand that what he thought were angels were
goddesses of love, that the bunches of grapes and
the ears of wheat were not the emblems of the
Eucharist, but those of the cult of Ceres and of
Bacchus. The altar was spared and became that
of the Goddess of Reason. Persons who today
still share the opinion of Bonnedame, will perhaps
find that the representative of the people did but
reestablish the truth. Let us reprove such a
manner of thought. ...

Of the cloister of the cathedral, there stiU
remains only a single gallery. The rest, very-
dilapidated, was torn down by the workmen of the
fabric of Notre Dame de Noyon in 1811.

200 The Spell of the Heart of France

On this gallery opens the great chapter hall, an
admhable Gothic nave where the restorers have
done their work. In the cloister itself, their zeal
was more moderate and more discreet. They
repaired the broken roofs, boimd with iron the
falling columns, respected the breaches and the
breaks.

As the great walls on which the destroyed
triforium rested still stand, the aspect of the place
has not changed, its intimate beauty has not been
violated. One may stUl enjoy there the eternal
silence, shadow, freshness and coolness. . . . One
hears there only the droning of the flies, while, in
the midst of the area, a grand weeping willow
shades an old well with rusty iron fittings.

Under the cloister fragments of carving have
been laid, and in this pile of stones we discover
with melancholy a few admirable fragments. Some
beautiful tombstones have been set up along the
walls. ...

The afternoon is torrid. It is pleasant to linger
under these arches and deliver oneself to the
pleasures of epigraphy. Let us decipher the epi-
taphs.

Here is that of a Bishop of Noyon, M. Jean
Frangois de La Cropte de Bourzac, who died
January 23, 1766. Three distichs commemorate
the humility of the defunct, his piety, his devotion

Noyon 201

to the King. Below these Latin verses, which are
elegantly banal, we discover a name which excites
our curiosity: Gresset. It was, in fact, the author
of Vert-Vert whom the canons retained to compose
the epitaph of their bishop. It is doubtful whether
our Bonnedame, the enemy of Roman altars,
would have aided the poet in glorifying the vir-
tues of M. Jean Frangois de La Cropte de Bourzac :
for it was in fact under the rule of this bishop that
an abandoned architect undertook the new decora-
tion of the choir of the cathedral of Noyon.

Upon a great tombstone is represented the Last
Judgment. t^We see there the Great Judge, the
angel who sounds the trumpet and declaims:
Surgite, mortui, venite, the defunct who rises from
his tomb, hangs his shroud on the arm of the cross
and says to the Lord: Domine, jube ad me venire,
other open sepulchers and scattered bones. Below
these images we read these lines, which lack
neither force nor savor (Note 21) :

The body of Gilles Coquevil,
Were he rich or poor, noble or vile,
Before being laid to rot here,
Is without food and drink
Awaiting the Judgment
And the decree of the last day
Where we must all. . .
Render account of past evils.
May God give his soul promptly
Pardon, and so to all trespassers.

In the same church, beside the door of the
cloister, a singular face surmounts an interminable

202 The Spell of the Heart of France

epitaph. It is the face of an old mandarin, uni-
formly bald and symmetrically wrinkled. We
see the man to the middle of his body, his arms
folded and his thumbs down. His mien, his pose,
the expression of his face, have something inde-
scribably Chinese. On his breast appears a
mysterious object, in the shape of an ostrich egg,
on which is engraved a column with these words:
Ito fidens. ... It is necessary to read the epitaph
to find the key to the riddle. This mandarin is
Jacques Le Vasseur, canon and historian of the
church of Noyon, whose name I have already
mentioned in connection with the origins of the
cathedral. The epitaph commences with a ter-
rible pun upon the Latin name of Le Vasseur,
Vasserius. A golden vase, it is there said, vas
aureits, is hidden in this tomb, but it should not
tempt the cupidity of any one, for it contains only
virtues. It is this symboHc vase that is carved
upon the stone. The' column is that which guided
the confident canon towards his eternal home:
fidens ito . . . And we learn also — in a delightful
Latin which I translate clumsily, — that 'Hhis man
of good hved, in every place, niggardly for himself,
generous for others; that is why, dying, he left Ht-
tle except mingled rare and precious books, prefer-
able— by the declarations of the wise — to the
treasures of the Orient as much as to the magnifi-

Noyon 203

cent and tinkling adornments of the North. ..."
All these puerilities do not lack charm, especially
when they keep us in the cool shadow of a
cathedral, at the hottest and most blinding hour of
the day. . . .

:^ H: 4: H: ^ t): ^

The day declines. It is the moment when all
the beauty of the cathedral is revealed. Now the
contrasts of lights and shades become more mov-
ing. A soft green clarity fills the choir, and lends
to its architecture a more subtle and airy grace;
it filters through the high openings of the nave,
illuminates the pointed arches of the vaulting,
accentuates the ramifications of the arches; the
whole structure appears lighter and more tri-
umphal.

We return toward the great open doors, and,
after the magnificence of the church, savor the deU-
cate and peaceful intimacy of the town. In the
triple bay of the portal is framed the little square
of the parvis where, ranged Uke canons in the
choir, the houses of the chapter seem to slumber
in the twihght, and ... at the end of a narrow
street, roofs, gables and dark clumps of verdure
outline themselves against a rosy sky. . . .

SOISSONS

SAINT-JEAN-DES-VIGNES

SOISSONS is a white, peaceable and smiling
city whose tower and pointed spires rise
from the bank of a lazy river, in the midst
of a circle of green hills: town and countryside
call to mind the httle pictures which the illumina-
tors of our old manuscripts painted with loving
care. Here is France, pure France: nothing of
that Flemish air assumed by the httle towns of
the valley of the Oise, with their brick houses,
such as exquisite Noyon, like a great heguinage.
Precious monuments relate the whole history of
the French monarchy, from the Merovingian
crypts of the abbey of Saint Medard to the
beautiful hotel built on the eve of the Revolution
for the intendants of the provinces. In the midst
of the narrow streets and the httle gardens, a
magnificent cathedral extends the two arms of its
great transept; on the north a flat wall and an
immense expanse of glass; on the south, that
marvelous apse where the pointed and the
rounded arch mingle in so delicate a fashion.

204

Soissons 205

One cannot omit a malediction in passing on
the architect who, to the dishonor of the interior
of this monument, marked off each stone with
black joints, checkering it in such an exasperating
manner that all the lines of the architecture are
lost.

A promenade through the streets of this lovable
town is charming. Today, I would like to enter-
tain you with the most celebrated of the monu-
ments of Soissons, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-
Vignes.

Of this monastery, which was one of the most
beautiful and richest in France, there remains only
the fagade of the church, the remains of a cloister
of the fourteenth century, traces of a cloister of
the Renaissance, a few buildings of the seven-
teenth century, and a magnificent Gothic hall,
the refectory of the convent.

How the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes was
reduced to a state of ruin is an interesting chapter
of the history of vandalism, which I will briefly
relate to you. Then we will see what steps would
be necessary to save the refectory building.

Founded in the eleventh century, the abbey of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes followed the rule of Saint
Augustine. Its monks were Joannist canons.
Their duty consisted in celebrating mass within

206 The Spell of the Heart of France

the monastery and in acting as curates in the
forty parishes which belonged to the community
in the dioceses of Soissons and of Meaux. Ninety
canons remained encloistered ; fifty priests served
the parishes. Because of their hohness and their
knowledge, the Joannists had acquired such
renown during the Middle Ages that Cardinal
Jean de Dormans confided to the monks of Saint-
Jean-des-Vignes the direction of the college of
Dormans-Beauvais founded by him at Paris.

The gifts of kings, nobles and citizens gave the
canons means wherewith to undertake the con-
struction of a great church. About 1335 they
laid the foundations of the nave and the towers.
At the end of the fourteenth century the walls of
the nave were finished, and the towers had risen
to the level of the great rose window. The plunder-
ings of the Abb^ R,emy d'Orbais, and later the
wars of the Armagnacs and the Burgundians,
interrupted the work, and it was not until about
the end of the fifteenth century that the vaultings
and the tiles were put in place. The two towers
were not finished until later, the smaller in the
last years of the fifteenth century, the greater
in 1520. The construction of the church had
occupied more than two hundred years. (Note 22.)

In 1567, two years after the death of the last
canon regular of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, the Prot-

Soissons 207

estants devastated the abbey: the hbrary and the
treasury were plundered, the stained glass and
the statues were broken, the carvings were burned
and the fountains demohshed. The commenda-
tory monks took Httle pains to repair the damages.

At the beginning of the Revolution, there were
no more than thirty monks in the monastery.
They were expelled, and the nave of the church
was used as a mihtary bakeshop.

There is a widely believed legend that the
church was demolished during the Revolution.
This is absolutely false. At this time, as the roofs
were not well looked after, a bay of the vaulting fell ;
but, under the Consulate, the monument was still
solid and a few repairs would have sufficed to
preserve it. It was torn down by a bishop of
Soissons, Mgr. Leblanc de Beaulieu.

It is a painful story. I have before me the'
administrative documents of this abominable
destruction, documents which were brought to
my attention by M. Max Sainsaulieu, the architect
of the historic monuments of Soissons. These
documents are instructive.

On August 1, 1804, the churchwardens of the
cathedral and parish church of Soissons address
themselves to the mayor of the city and disclose
to him that their church is in great need of repairs
and that these indispensable works wiU cost

208 The Spell of the Heart of France

23,786 francs. '^The desire," they write, 'Ho
lighten as much as possible this charge upon our
town, has suggested to us a means which would
totally free us from it, at least for several years.
This means consists in obtaining from the govern-
ment the right to dispose of the former church of
the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, in order to
employ the products of its demohtion for the
conservation and repair of the cathedral. It will
not be difficult for you. Monsieur le Maire, to
convince the government by a description of the
present condition of this church, and by a relation
of the accidents which almost happened two years
ago and again recently, by the falling of various
parts of it, that the total demohtion of this struc-
ture will produce no real disadvantage to the
national treasury and will contribute advanta-
geously to pubhc safety. ..."

Behind the churchwardens, it is really the
bishop who demands the demohtion of the
church. As a matter of fact, on April 25, 1805, by
a decree given at the Stapinigi Palace, the Emperor
orders that the prefect of the department of the
Aisne, at the instance of the Bishop of Soissons,
shall put at his disposal the church of Saint-Jean-
des-Vignes, ''in order that the materials coming
from the church may be used in the repair of the
cathedral": the inhabitants of Soissons must

Soissons 209

merely, in. exchange for this concession, consoH-
date the walls of the other parts of the abbey which
have been granted to the Administration of
Powder and Saltpeter.

Mgr. Leblanc de Beauheu receives his decree.
Meanwhile the inhabitants of Soissons are
alarmed at this project of demohtion, protest
against the plan of the prelate and take their
grievances to the prefect. It is often assumed
that before the advent of romanticism no one in
France cared for the monuments of the Middle
Ages. Now, as early as 1805, the news that the
church of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes is about to be
destroyed excites the indignation of the people
of Soissons. The archaeologists make ready for
battle. The prefect writes to the bishop (June
26, 1805): "Monsieur, I am receiving a great
number of complaints against the approaching
demohtion of the church of Saint-Jean: the
inhabitants of Soissons appear to be extremely
attached to this edifice, which they regard as a
precious monument of the arts. I have the honor
to forward to you a copy of a historical summary
which has been forwarded to me. As it belongs to
you. Monsieur, to decide the fate of this church,
which is at your disposal, I can only confide
in what your good sense and your enlightened
love for the arts will suggest to you."

^10 The Spell of the Heart of France

His "enlightened love for the arts" does not
in the least inspire the bishop with a desire to
save the church; but the complaints of his jflock
embarrass him, and he explains to the prefect that
he himself cannot proceed in a regular manner,
that it is unsuitable that a bishop should have
''personal connection with the demolition of a
church." And, for four years, matters remain at
this stage.

Finally, in 1807, disdaining the protests and
triiunphing over his own scruples, the bishop
awards the glass and the ironwork to a certain
Archin. In 1809 he empowers his notary to treat
in his name with the contractors for demolition.
All that he accords to the inhabitants of Soissons
is the preservation of the fagade.

The bargain is concluded between "Antoine
Isidore Petit de Reimpre, imperial notary, domi-
ciled at Soissons, in the name and endowed with
the powers of Mgr. Jean Claude Leblanc-Beaulieu,
Bishop of Soissons and Laon, baron of the Empire
and member of the Legion of Honor, of the first
part; and Leonard Wallot, building contractor,
and Pierre-Joseph Delacroix pere, carpenter. . . ."
By the terms of the agreement, the two towers and
the portals must remain intact, and the contrac-
tors are even obliged to do certain work of con-
solidation. But nothing will remain of the nave

Soissons 211

and the choir of the church: "All the parts to be
demohshed shall be demolished down to and
including the foundations. The rubbish caused
by the demolition shall at first be thrown into
the vaults of the church; consequently the ceilings
of the aforesaid vaults shall be demolished, the
ground shall be perfectly leveled and the surplus
of the rubbish shall be transported into the fields."
This is not aU. The bishop reserves for his own
share a hundred and sixty cubic meters of ashlar!
The price of the sale was fixed at three thousand
francs.

For six hundred dollars, they leveled to the
ground a marvelous Gothic edifice, the largest
church of the diocese except the cathedral; the
choir was composed, as a matter of fact, of two
bays, the transept likewise of two bays, and the
nave of five; it was sixty meters long and twenty-
six high. It is an excellent custom to carve upon
the monuments the names of those who have
built and repaired them. It would not be ill if
upon the ruins of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes an inscrip-
tion should recall the absurd demohtion and the
name of its author, Mgr. Leblanc de BeauUeu.

In 1821 the demolition was not yet complete,
for Wallot found some difficulty in selling his
ashlar. It is said that several houses of Soissons
were built with the stone of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.

212 The Spell of the Heart of France

The Department of War, which had been
granted the buildings of the abbey, continued the
work of the ecclesiastical housebreakers. It tore
down a small Renaissance cloister. Had it not
been for the intervention of the Archaeological
Society of Soissons, it would have destroyed the
two galleries of the great cloister which still
stand. Finally, in 1870, the German shells did
great damage and set a fire which calcined the
lower part of the portal.

* * * * * * *

Today, a part of the ruins has been placed in
charge of the Administration of Fine Arts. It
is possible to visit the towers, the organ platform
and the great cloister.

It is a lamentable spectacle, that of this mag-
nificent fagade, now isolated like a useless stage
setting: through the three bays of the portal we
perceive the ground which was carefully leveled, in
accordance with the orders of Mgr. Leblanc de
Beaulieu; the great rose window is an empty
hole against the sky. Nevertheless, how precious
this fragment of a church still is! What master-
pieces of grace and boldness are these two towers,
unlike, but both so perfect, with their galleries,
their arcades, their pinnacles, their bell towers
and their stone spires. And what admirable carv-
ings! There are, under the elegant canopies

Facade of the Abbey of Saint-J ean-des-Viynes,
Soissons.

Soissons 213

attached to each story of the towers, the images — -
alas! too often mutilated by the Huguenots or by
the Revolutionists — of the Apostles and the
Evangelists; there is the crucified Christ upon
the window bars of the great tower window;
there are, above all, on the two sides of the rose
window, the touching and expressive statues of
Our Lady of Sorrow and of Saint John the Evan-
gelist.

Two of the galleries of the cloister have disap-
peared. The other two present arcades of a
charming design. Ornaments of rare delicacy
frame the inner door. Heads of monsters decorate
the gargoyles. About the capitals and upon the
bases of the corbels are twined allegorical flowers
of perfect execution: here the vines which recall
the name of the abbey itself, there the ivy and
the wormwood to which Saint John the Baptist,
patron saint of the monastery, communicated the
virtue of counteracting witchcraft; elsewhere the
oak, the apple, the strawberry, the wild geranium,
all the plants which in the Middle Ages were
reputed to cure ills of the throat, for, until the
last century, it needed but a pilgrimage to Saint-
Jean-des-Vignes to be freed from quinsy. (Note
23.)

And this is all that one is allowed to see of the
abbey of Saint- Jean-des-Vignes. Whoever is curi-

214 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

ous to become acquainted with the last remnants
of the Renaissance cloister (a few arches and four
very beautiful stone medallions) and to enter the
ancient refectory of the abbey, will run against
the veto of military authority.

It is probable that the Adminstration of Fine
Arts will without difficulty obtain permission
that the public may have access to the courtyard
where the little cloister stands. But it will doubt-
less be more difficult to recapture from the War
Department the refectory building, where it has
been installed for a century.

This refectory is a vaulted hall, forty meters
long and divided into two naves by fine columns.
Whoever wishes to obtain an idea of the beauty
of this admirable structure may think of the
refectory of Royaumont, today much disfigured, or
even the refectory of the priory of Saint Martin
in the Fields, now the Library of Arts and Trades,
and whose character has been altered by useless
daubs of paint. These two latter edifices belong to
the thirteenth century. The refectory of Saint-
Jean-des-Vignes seems to date from the fourteenth.
Here may be found, as in all the halls of the same
kind, the readers' stall hollowed in the thickness
of the wall, and reached by several stone steps.

A food storehouse has been installed in this
refectory. To utifize the space, it has been divided

Soissons 215

into two stories by a floor which passes below
the capitals of the columns. Here are piled boxes
of canned goods, biscuits, bags of grain. In
conformity with the military regulations, all
the walls are covered, for a meter above the floor,
with a thick layer of coal tar, so that the capitals,
just above the second story floor, have disap-
peared under this covering. The rest of the walls
is simply covered with whitewash. At some
unknown time the whitewash was removed from
certain spots to uncover two pictures which appear
to be contemporary with the building. One is
stiU visible and represents the Resurrection. The
other has almost completely disappeared. For-
merly wooden shutters protected them from the
curiosity of the soldiers employed in the store-
house. They are now exposed to every insult.
Perhaps other paintings exist xmder the white-
wash.

Under this great hall is a vaulted subterranean
room, whose bays correspond to the bays of the
refectory. It is likewise used for army provisions.

This is the condition to which, in 1905, one
of the most precious monuments of Gothic archi-
tecture which exists in France is abandoned.
And the vandals are not satisfied with secularizing
the buildings, with tarring the capitals and with
dooming the paintings to certain destruction.

216 The Spell of the Heart of France

By overloading the edifice they endanger its
safety.

The War Department is not responsible for all
this vandalism. It has been assigned a Gothic
hall in which to store its provisions. It has used
it as well as it knew how; it has apphed to it the
rules which are common to all military buildings;
it is not the guardian of monuments of the past.

This guardianship belongs to the Bureau of
Historic Monuments; its responsibility is to take
notice of and to save the refectory of Saint-
Jean-des-Vignes.

It is not possible to conceal the difficulties of
the attempt. The Minister of War will consent
to abandon this edifice only if he is furnished
another provision storehouse in Soissons itseh.
So a new building must be put up. Who will
pay for it? The city of Soissons, interested in the
preservation of a "precious monument of the
arts," as the prefect of 1805 said, doubtless will
not refuse to contribute to the expense. But the
state must come to its aid.

When, tomorrow, at some public sale, there
shall be put up at auction some primitive of more
or less certain authenticity, a hundred thousand
francs wiU be spent to hang it in a room of the
Louvre, and there will be glorification over the
acquisition. Would it not be wiser and safer to

Soissons 217

preserve the paintings of the fourteenth century
which decorate the refectory of Saint-Jean-des-
Vignes, whose authenticity, I beheve, no one
will ever dare to contest? With the same stroke,
a magnificent bit of architecture will be saved.
Who knows if we may not even see other medi-
aeval paintings appear from under the whitewash?
... In short, we shall have saved a precious
work of Gothic art for France. And future cen-
turies will draw a parallel between the house-
wrecking bishop who destroyed the church of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes and the pious undersecre-
tary of state who protected the refectory of the
Joannist canons. (Note 24.)

XIII
BETZ

At the bottom of a valley,
There is a charming chateau
"Whose adored mistress
Is its most beautiful ornament;
The charms of her countenance
And the virtues of her heart
Embelhsh nature
And spread happiness.

*****

At the sound of her voice a limpid stream

Will take a happier course;

The most smiling verdure

Will enchant all eyes;

A scattered and dusky grove

Planted by her beautiful hands,

WiU cover with its shade

Candor and beauty.

THIS song, which was set to the tune, Que
ne suis-je la fougere, was written by Louis
Joseph de Bourbon-Conde. The "adored
mistress" was Marie Catherine de Brignole, Prin-
cess of Monaco. The ''charming chateau" was
that of Betz, celebrated at that period because of
the beauty of its gardens laid out in the EngUsh
fashion.

The chateau has disappeared; but the design
of the park is not effaced; not all of the structures

218

Betz 219

with which it was adorned by the caprice of the
Princess of Monaco have perished. After a long
period of neglect, the domain is today in safe
hands: the remnants of the gardens of Betz
are now safeguarded. Groves, ruins and temples
here still evoke a memory of the imagination
at once sUly, incoherent and deUghtful, which
satisfied men and especially women on the eve
of the French Revolution.

Marie Christine de Brignole had married at
eighteen a ro\i6 of forty, the former lover of her
mother. The Parliament of Paris had divorced
her from this brutal and jealous husband, and
she had become the unconcealed mistress of
Conde. Their relations were public. The Princess
Hved at Paris in a hotel in the Rue Saint Domi-
nique, beside the Palais Bourbon. She reigned
at Chantilly.

Conde was tender but faithless. He deceived
his lady love, was desolated to see her unhappy,
accused God of having given her too sensitive a
heart and began over again. Still other cares
troubled the Princess of Monaco: however great
may then have been the toleration of the world and
the ease of morals, the children of the Prince could
not resign themselves to dissimulate the disdain
which they felt for La Madame. The Princess

^20 The Spell of the Heart of France

of Bourbon amused herself one day by composing
a tableau in which she put on the stage her father-
in-law and the Princess; these two, who played
the two principal parts, perceived the wicked
allusions of the author only when they perceived
the embarrassment of the spectators; but a
family scene occiu-red as soon as the curtain
dropped. Then the pubHc decided that the favorite
was responsible for the quarrel which soon sepa-
rated the Duke and the Duchess of Bourbon. . . .
(Note 25.)

La Madame had the wisdom to perceive that
the moment had come to make a strategic retreat,
and to seek a shelter against hostilities which,
in the end, might have become perilous. It was
necessary for her to find a property which was at
the right distance from Chantilly and from Paris,
*' neither too far nor too near," where she might
be forgotten by the world, but where Conde
could come to see her without difficulty. She
chose Betz, near Crepy-en-Valois.

The lords of Levignen had early built a strong-
hold above the valley of Betz. Later another
home had been constructed on an island formed
by the Grivette, a tributary of the Ourcq. It
was in this chateau, already rebuilt in the seven-
teenth century, that Madame de Monaco
estabHshed herself. A donjon, the two great

Betz 221

round towers which flanked the wings of the
principal block, the waters which bathed the feet
of the walls, gave the house an almost feudal
aspect. But the iaterior was decorated in the
taste of the day, wainscoted with delicate panels,
oramented with charming furniture, paintings
and precious objects of art. The buildings and the
adornment of the park cost more than four
milhons.

The Princess of Monaco passed at Betz the
happiest years of her life. She guided the labors
of her architects, her sculptors and her gardeners.
She played at farming. Her sons, from whom
her husband had formerly separated her, came to
make long visits with her. Conde, wiser with age,
redoubled his tenderness. When he was obliged
to travel, either to Dijon to preside over the
States or to the camp of Saint Omer to direct the
maneuvers of the royal army, he wrote to her
at length, and the refrain of his letters was:
"Would that I were at Betz!" As soon as his
service at court or with the army permitted it,
he hastened to the Princess : he brought rare books
and pictures to enrich the chateau; he interested
himself in the works undertaken for his friend.
He advised the workmen and gave his opinion
upon the plans. . . .

Madame de Monaco renewed her youth in this

222 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

"rural retreat," and the years passed without
lessening the grace of her countenance, without
thickening her slender waist, without slowing her
hght step. It is not an inhabitant of Betz who
drew for us this portrait, it is Goethe, at Mayence,
in 1792: ". . .The Princess of Monaco, declared
favorite of the Prince of Conde, and the orna-
ment of ChantiUy in its palmy days, appeared
lively and charming. One could imagine nothing
more gracious than this slender blondine, young,
gay, and frivolous; not a man could have resisted
her saUies. I observed her with entire freedom of
mind and I was much surprised to meet the lively
and joyous Philine, whom I had not expected to
find there. . . ." Philine was then fifty-three
years old.

^ ^ 4fC 5j» ^ •!• SI*

The great occupation of the Princess at Betz
was to create a park in modem taste. She found
in this her cares and her glory. The Due d'Har-
coiU"t, former preceptor of the first son of Louis
XVI, who had already distinguished himself by
designing his park at La Colline near Caen,
undertook to design the avenues, to form the
vistas, to plan the buildings: in a certain sense
he drew up the scenario of the garden. Hubert
Robert made the plans of the temples and the
ruins. The architect Le Gendre supervised the

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Betz 228

buildings. The site was adapted for the estabhsh-
ment of an Enghsh garden: on the two banks of
the Grivette rose httle wooded hills, and, thanks
to the undulations of the landscape, sometimes
gentle, sometimes brusque, it was there possible
to mingle the ''pictiu'esque," the ''poetic" and
the "romantic." The thickets were pierced by
sinuous paths; pines and perfumed exotics varied
the verdure of the hornbeams and the beeches;
the course of the river, which spread out into a
marshy meadow, was confined within sodded
banks. The forest was thinned to allow the eye
to perceive the surrounding fields, and there were
scattered in the valley and through the woods

Temples and tombs and rocks and caverns,
The lesson of history and that of romance.

Models were not lacking. Without speaking
of the parks created in England by Kent and his
disciples, there existed the admirable examples
of Ermenonville, belonging to M. de Girardin,
Limours, to the Countess de Brionne, Bel-CEil,
to the Prince de Ligne, Maupertuis, to M. de
Montesquiou, the Little Trianon and Bagatelle,
Le MouUn-Joli of the engraver Watelet. . . .
And at the same moment when Madame de
Monaco was undertaking the construction of
her garden, the financier Jean Joseph de La Bord^
was completing, upon the advice of Robert and

224 The Spell of the Heart of France

de Vernet, the construction of the admirable
park of Mer6viUe. The chatelaine of Betz con-
formed to the rules of the type.

Possibly some day some one will write the
history of these Enghsh gardens of the eighteenth
century: no study would be more suitable to
acquaint us with the contradictory sentiments and
the confused thoughts which agitated society in
the years which preceded 1789. The lectures of
M. Jules Lemaitre and the penetrating book of
M. Lasserre upon Romanticism have recently
drawn attention to the disorders caused in the
French body politic by the poison of Rousseau.
To illustrate such remarks, nothing would be
better than the plans and the structm-es of the
parks composed in France from 1770 to 1789.
We would there behold a mingling of pedantry
and sentimentality, the most refined taste united
to the most silly feeling, adorable reminiscences
of classical antiquity mingled with the first
abortions of romantic bric-a-brac. We would
especially distinguish there the laborious artifices
and the childish conventions in which the pre-
tended lovers of nature became entangled. And
I do not insist upon the prodigious disaccord
between ideas and manners: for this I will send
you to the charming discourse which the Count
de Larborde puts at the beginning of his Descrip-

STATUE OF LE NOTRE, AT CHANTILLY

Betz ^25

tion des nouveaux jar dins (1808), where he shows
the fooUsh and joyous guests of the fashionable
parks, laughing in "the valley of tombs," quarrel-
ing upon "the bench of friendship" and bringing
to the country the tastes and the habits of the
city: "while praising the pure air of the fields, they
rose at two o'clock in the afternoon, they gambled
until four o'clock in the morning, and while they
grew tender over the simplicity of country man-
ners, the women plastered themselves with rouge
and beauty spots, and wore panniers. ..."

To tell the truth, the men of this period retained
too much dehcacy of mind not to feel the ridicu-
lousness of the inventions in which they found
their delight. But fashion was master. The
theorists of "modern gardens" endeavored to
make headway against the excesses of the irregular
type. In his agreeable poem, Les Jardins, which
contains so many ingenious hnes, the worthy
Abb6 Delille lavished the most judicious counsels
on his contemporaries and endeavored to hold
the balance equal between Kent and Le Notre.

In his Essai sur les jardins, the modest Watelet,
the creator of Le Moulin-Joli, recalled to good
taste the constructors of park buildings, and
pronounced it ill that one should build a mauso-
leum to the memory of a favorite hound (an
allusion to a grotto in the gardens of Stowe

226 The Spell of the Heart of France

which Lord Granville Temple had consecrated
to the memory of Signor Fido, an Italian grey-
hound); unluckily, he judged that a perfect,
simple and '^ natural" structure for a park would
be the true monastery of Heloise, and he imagined
the inscription which it would have been necessary
to carve ''upon a mjrrtle" — if the climate per-
mitted it — in order to move young lady
visitors. . . . Morel, the landscape architect
of Ermenonville, did not hke fictitious construc-
tions which assemble in a single locality all
centuries and all nations. But, on the other hand,
Carmontelle, the designer of the fantastic con-
structions of Mousseaux, found that Morel's
conceptions were deplorable: and neither of them
was wrong. Horace Walpole, in his Essay on
Gardens, praised the English gardens, but made
fun of the abuse of buildings, of which hermitages
seemed to him particularly inappropriate: ''It
is ridiculous," said he, "to go to a corner of a
garden to be melancholy," and he deplored that
the hypothesis of irregularity should have brought
people to a love for the crooked. Baron de
Tschoudy, author of the article Bosquet, in the
supplement to the Encyclopedie, wrote in regard
to tombs, inevitable accessories of all English
gardens: "A somber object may not be displeasing
in a landscape by Salvator; it is too far from the

Betz %n

truth to sadden us; but what is its excuse? Do
we go walking to be melancholy? Indeed, I
would like much better to raise the tendrils of
the ivy from the base of an overturned column,
to read a touching inscription! How my heart
would expand at the sight of a humble cabin,
filled by happy people of my own kind, who
would gayly spade their little enclosure and whose
flocks would gambol about it! With what ecstasy
would I listen to their songs in the silence of a
beautiful evening! For is there anything more
sweet than songs caused by happiness which one
has given?"

But all this did not discourage the proprietors
of English parks from building hermitages, tombs,
Gothic chapels, Tartar kiosks and Chinese
bridges. ... In rambling through the gardens
of Betz we will meet these structures and many
others.

*
The design of the alleys at Betz has remained
almost the same as it was in the eighteenth century.
But, as the park has in the meantime belonged to
owners who were little interested in preserving
its former appearance, some of the woods have
been cut, and places which were formerly bare
are today grown up to copses. Rows of poplars
which were assuredly not foreseen by the land-

228 The Spell of the Heart of France

scape gardeners of the Princess of Monaco grow
on the banks of the Grivette. Many views have
thus been modified and many vistas no longer
exist. In addition, some of the old buildings
have been destroyed, while only remnants remain
of others. Fortunately, to guide us in our ramble
and permit us to reconstruct the places as they
were in the time of the Princess of Monaco, we
possess a very complete description of the gardens.
It was drawn up in verse by Cerutti and published
January 1, 1792, under this title: Les jar dins de
Betz, poeme accompagne de notes instructives sur
les travaux champHres, sur les arts, les lois, les revo-
lutions, la noblesse, le clerge, etc. . . ; fait en 1785
par M. Cerutti et publie en 1792 par M. . . ,
editeur du "Breviaire philosophique du feu roi
de Prusse^ This work, although in verse, and
deplorable verse, contains a sufficiently exact
list of the buildings of Betz, and the copious
commentary in prose which accompanies the
''poem" is sufficiently amusing. . . . But it will
perhaps not be useless, before accepting Cerutti
as a guide, to briefly recall his life and his writings.
There exists a peremptory and dehghtful letter
of the Marquise de Crequi about him: ''The
administrator Cerutti has just finished his rhet-
oric: he promised well, twenty years ago. He
has not made a step forward during this time.

Betz 229

We see, as a matter of fact, beginnings which will
become only miscarriages. In short, his verses
have appeared prosaic to me and his prose pro-
fusely ornamented poverty. Do not be astonished
at his ecstasy in regard to the centm-y: he owes
all to it." Here is the very man: the medal is
sharply coined.

Bom in Piedmont, Cerutti had entered the
Company of Jesus. He taught at first with success
in a college at Lyons. In other times, he would
have remained the good college regent which
he was at the beginning of his life and, as he
possessed a certain brilliancy, he would have
composed Latin verses in the manner of Father
Rapin. Perhaps he would even have succeeded
in the pulpit, for he had a fine bearing, an amiable
countenance, a pleasing voice, measured gestures
and brilliancy of mind. But he was gifted at the
same time with exalted sensibility, and the
century in which he hved seemed to promise
everything to sensible men capable of exhaUng
all their sensibility in prose and verse. C6rutti
declaimed and rhymed during the whole of his
life.

While he was still professor at Lyons he had
sent an essay on the duel to the Feast of Flora
and another essay to the Academy of Dijon
on this subject: ''Why have modern republics

230 The Spell of the Heart of France

acquired less splendor than the ancient republics?"
Some people ascribed the dissertation of the
Jesuit to Rousseau: it was the dawn of his glory.
Then, to defend his company, Cerutti composed
an Apologie de VInstitut des JSsuites. This work
brought him the favor of the Dauphin: he came
to court. The poor man became smitten with
a beautiful lady who was cruel to him and he
fell into the deepest melancholy. He emerged
from it only to compose verses on charlatanism
or chess, and to give his opinion on public affairs
in short pamphlets. He was very friendly to new
ideas : but, at need, he put his muse to the service
of his noble protectresses. One of his works
acquired a certain reputation: it was an intermi-
nable apologue. The Eagle and the Owl, "a. fable
written for a young prince whom one dared to
blame for his love for science and letters." Grimm,
though he was very indulgent to Cerutti, made a
remark in regard to this fable which is not lacking
in subtlety or truth: ''There is no sovereign
philosopher, there is no celebrated man of letters,
who has not received a tribute of distinguished
homage from M. Cerutti. Let us congratulate
philosophy on seeing the apologist of the Jesuits
become today the panegyrist of the wise men of
the century, praise the progress of illumination
and counsel the kings to take as confessors only

Betz 231

their conscience, good works, or some philosophic
poet. All this is perhaps not so far from a Jesuit
as one might imagine, ..." When the Revolu-
tion broke out, despite his poor health and the
deafness with which he was afflicted, Cerutti,
who, in accordance with the strong expression
of the Marquise de Crequi, owed everything to
the century, wished to pay his debt to it. He
multiplied his pamphlets and booklets, collabo-
rated in the discourses of Mirabeau, and it was
he who pronounced the funeral oration of the
orator in the church of Saint Eustache. He was
elected a member of the Legislative Assembly,
edited a little newspaper. La Feuille villageoise,
whose purpose was to spread the spirit of the
Revolution in the country districts, and died in
1792. If he had lived a few months longer, the
guillotine would doubtless have interrupted the
ingenuous dream of this unfrocked Jesuit, maker
of alexandrines.

What led Cerutti to describe the gardens of
Betz? I despaned of discovering what circum-
stances might have placed him in the household
of the Princess of Monaco, imtil I noticed,
scattered through his poem, some verses which
had been engraved in the Temple of Friendship
at Betz. So Cerutti had been charged with
composing the mottoes and the inscriptions

232 The Spell of the Heart of France

indispensable to every English garden. Such a
task was well suited to his poetic talent : it seemed
to agree less well with his philosophical convictions.
But the philosopher required the poet, in accom-
plishing his task, to tell the truth to the clergy
as well as to the nobility. Thus Cerutti's con-
science was appeased. Madame de Monaco,
doubtless, was less satisfied. This perhaps explains
why the poem was not published until 1792;
the nation had then confiscated the chateau and
the beautiful gardens, and the princess was
living a life of exile at Mayence, where, for her
glory, a better poet than Cerutti sketched her
charming portrait in five lines.

Let us follow the sinuous ways which lead across
the park to the different ''scenes" invented for
the amusement of the Princess of Monaco. The
author of the poem, Les jardins de Betz, Cerutti,
will revive for us the buildings which are gone.
He is a prosy guide, somewhat of a ninny. But
his heavy diatribes on priests, nobles and kings
make the description of these childish fancies
almost tragic. Behind the canvas so pleasingly
covered by Hubert Robert, we might almost
beheve we could hear the heavy tramp of the
stage hands preparing for the change of scene.

The chateau which was inhabited by the

Betz 233

Princess of Monaco stood on an island in the
Grivette, quite near the village of Betz. Its
towers were reflected in the river, on which
floated white swans. Baskets of flowers orna-
mented the banks. Farther up, the Grivette
formed another isle, embelUshed with exotic
shrubs and an oriental kiosk. A Chinese bridge
joined it to the park, and little junks were moored
to the margin. Pekin gave this kiosk and Nankin
these hght boats.

Nothing more remains of the chateau, which
was sold during the Revolution and was totally
demolished in 1817. There also remains nothing
more of these Chinese fancies, by which the land-
scape artists of the eighteenth century endeavored
to recall the true origin of irregular gardens. The
rotted planks of the Chinese bridge fell into the
little river long ago.

In vain also would we seek some trace of the
''Druid Temple." To erect this curious construc-
tion, this "little bosky oratory," there had been
chosen for cutting young oaks of equal thickness
and perfectly straight; they had been cut off
at the same height and planted in a circle on an
isolated mound; then this circular pahsade was
crowned by a wooden cupola, whence were sus-
pended pine cones and tufts of sacred mistletoe.
On beholding this spectacle Cerutti burst forth:

234 The Spell of the Heart of France

Who would believe it? This place so pure and peaceful
"Was the cruel nest of superstition!
There formerly, frightening the shadows every evening,
The Druid, surrounded by a hundred funereal torches,
Strangled a mortal at the foot of Theutates.

It is probable that the vision of human sacrifices
obsessed neither the Princess of Monaco nor her
friends, when they came to rest themselves in
this sort of belvedere. But Cerutti is a philosopher ;
and from the Druids his indignation spreads to
all theocracies — Hebrew, Scandinavian, Roman.
The priests of Theutates force him to think of
the fagot fires of the Inquisition, of the crimes of
monasticism and of the massacre of Saint Bar-
tholomew. ... So much so that he can no longer
restrain himself and passes to other structures:

Cursing the incense bearer, I leave the fatal hill.

Not far from the Druid Temple rose the ruin
of a "Feudal Tower." It still stands. Time has
somewhat enlarged the breaches provided by
Hubert Robert when he drew the plan. But the
ivy has grown for more than a century and it
has given an almost venerable aspect to this fac-
titious ruin. Everything here is imagined to show
the ravage of centuries: the battlements have
crumbled; the interior is empty, and we still see
the traces of the floors which separated the va-
rious stories; the stone fireplaces still remain
attached to the walls. Over the lintel of a door,
we may read in Gothic characters an inscription

Betz 235

in the purest "old French" of the eighteenth
century. Below the tower there are dungeons.
We love to imagine the blonde princess for whom
this romantic ruin had been erected, coming to
sit at the foot of her tower, and, in order to put
her thoughts in harmony with the melancholy
of this legendary site, reading, in a nice Httle
book published by Sieur Cazin, bookseller of
Rheims, some chivalrous romance by M. de
Mayer, for example Genevieve de Cornouailles et le
Damoisel sans nom. Even for us, this imitation
is not without charm; its picturesqueness is
agreeable; then we surprise here the first awaken-
ing of the romantic imagination, the birth of the
modern taste for the Middle Ages, and we regret
a little the time when people amused themselves
by fabricating entirely new ruins, without think-
ing of restoring and completing the true ruins,
those which are the work of time. ... As to
C^rutti, the spectacle of this false donjon cannot
distract him from his folly:

Oh, castles of the oppressors! Oh, insulting palaces!
Walls of tyranny, asyluMi of rapine,
May you henceforth exist only in ruins!
Instead of those barons who vexed the universe,
We see on the remains of your deserted donjons
Cruel wolves wander, together with hungry foxes:
Under different names, they are of the same race.

And he immediately adds a note of which I
reproduce only these few lines; ''I am very far

236 The Spell of the Heart of France

from confounding modern castles with ancient
ones, and the castellans of today with those of
former times. The modern chateaux are not soiled
with the blood of their vassals, but how many-
are still bathed in their tears! . . . The castel-
lans of today are, however, distinguished for the
most part by a reputation for humanity, philoso-
phy, pohteness. But let us plumb these shining
exteriors. In these so human mortals, you will find
. . . tyrants inflexible to their inferiors. Their
philosophy is still less sohd than their human-
ity. ... As to this politeness so vaunted by
them, it is in the final analysis nothing but the
art of graduating and seasoning scorn, so that
one does not perceive it and even enjoys it. . . .
They seem to except you, to distinguish you from
the common herd; but try to emerge from it,
and they will thrust you back." The whole bit
would be worth quoting. It is beautiful, this
outpouriQg of venom on account of a garden
pavilion!

In the midst of a thicket, in a place which was
formerly open, a little pyramid stands on a high
base. The inscription which it formerly bore in
golden letters :

L'iNDEPENDANCE AmERICAINE

has disappeared. Reflections of C^rutti upon
''the impetuous car of revolutions": events have

Betz 237

combined to give them a certain opportuneness
here.

The minghng of centuries and the diversity of
allusions were one of the laws of the composition
of an EngUsh garden. This is why, a little farther
on, we penetrate to the "Valley of Tombs."
A Latin inscription invites visitors to meditation
and silence. An avenue of cypress, of larches,
of pines, of junipers, "of all the family of melan-
choly trees," led to the tombs and disposed the
soul to meditation. Sepulchers "without worldly
pomp and without curious artistry," bore naive
epitaphs. Here were the tombs of Thybaud de
Betz, dead on a Crusade, and of Adele de Crepy,
who, having followed her knight to the Holy
Land, brought back his mortal remains and "fell
dead of grief, at the last stroke of the chisel which
finished ornamenting this monument." The epi-
taphs were engraved in Gothic characters; for
"this Gothic form is something more romantic
than the Greek and the Roman." It is needless
to remark that these tombs were simple monu-
ments intended for the ornamentation of the
garden and that no lord of Betz was ever buried
in this place. Some of the "melancholy trees"
planted by the Princess of Monaco still remain
among the thickets which have since grown in
the "Valley of Tombs," which valley was an

238 The Spell of the Heart of France

''elevated esplanade": a pleasing incongruity of
the friends of nature! As to the tombs, there
remain only a few mutilated renmants of the stat-
ues of the two recumbent figures.

After the inevitable tombs, come the inevitable
chapel and the inevitable hermitage. But the
hermitage of Betz possessed this much originaUty,
that it was inhabited by an actual hermit.

The hermitage (today there remains of it no
more than the lower part) was composed of two
little rooms, one above the other. The upper one
was a sort of a grotto used as an oratory.

This monastic cave is a charming spot.
There we see shining in a Uttle space,
Transparent nacre and vermihon coral.
A ray of sun which penetrates the grot
Illumines it and seems a ray of grace.

C^rutti immediately delivers to us the ''secrets"
of this illumination. The walls of the grotto were
pierced by Httle crevices, closed by bits of white,
yellow, purple, violet, orange, green, blue and
red glass. When the sun passed through these
ghttering bits, its rays, tinged with all the colors,
produced a magical light within the grotto.
"One would beheve that the hermit is an enchanter
who brings down the sun, or an astronomer who
decomposes light." C^rutti adds judiciously:

Betz 239

''This curious phenomenon is, however, only
child's play."

Any other than Cerutti would perhaps have a
word of pity for the poor man condemned to live
in a home thus curiously lighted. But he does
not love the ''pale cenobites"; he approaches
them only to scandalize them by his frank
speech. . . .

At the foot of the crucifix, the hermit in his corner
Celebrates his good fortune. . . in which I do not believe.

The hermit beheved in it. He even beheved in
it so well that he Uved in his hermitage through
the whole time of the Revolution and died there
in 1811, aged seventy-nine years, — having ob-
served to the day of his death the rules set for
him by the Princess of Monaco. In accordance
with these rules, he was required to lead an edifying
life, to appear at mass in the habit of his estate,
to preserve seclusion and silence, to have no con-
nection with the inhabitants of the neighboring
villages, to cultivate flowers and give his surround-
ings a pleasant appearance, finally to exhibit
the hermitage, the grotto and the chapel to
curious visitors and to watch that no one touched
anything. He received a hundred francs a year,
the use of a httle field and a little vegetable
garden, every Saturday a pound of tallow candles,
and in winter the right to collect dead branches

240 The Spell of the Heart of France

to warm himself. He was furnished in addition
the necessary tools for kitchen and culture, two
small fire pumps, a little furniture, a house for
his chickens and the habit of a hermit. The
tailor of Betz — his bill has been discovered —
asked ninety-nine francs, five sous for dressing a
hermit. Finally two cash boxes were placed,
one in the chapel and the other in the hermitage,
to receive the offerings of generous souls who
wished to better the condition of the recluse.

^ :): ^ ^ $ ^ H:

By passing from ruins to tombs and from
tombs to hermitages, we have reached the end of
the park. Let us retrace our steps along the
banks of the Grivette. Under the trees which
shade its banks, the little river forms a little
cascade, and the picture composed by the land-
scape architect has here lost nothing of its pristine
grace. Cerutti thus describes it:

A vast mass of rocks arrests it in its course
But, soon surmounting this frightful mass,
The flood precipitates itself in a burning cascade.
Then, resuming its march and its pompous detours,
Etc. . . .

Poor little Grivette!

Upon the right bank of the stream stands a
ravishing edifice. It is the Temple of Friendship,
the most beautiful and, fortunately, the best
preserved of the structures of Betz, which alone,

Betz 241

the chateau having been destroyed and the park
disfigured, is sufficient to immortaUze here the
memory of Madame de Monaco. Among the
great trees which make an admirable frame for
it, it presents the four columns and the triangular
gable of its Neo-Greek fagade. It is the most
charming and the most elegant of the Hubert
Roberts — a marvelous setting for an opera by
Gluck. As we ascend the grassy slope, we savor
more vividly the exquisite proportions of the archi-
tecture, the sovereign grace of the colonnade,
the nobility of the gable, and also the strange
beauty of the pines which enframe the master-
piece. (These trees with red trunks and twisted
shapes made an important part of the decoration
of all English gardens. Introduced into Europe
for the first time in the gardens of Lord Weymouth,
in Kent, they are called by the landscapists of
the times Weymouth pines, or more briefly.
Lord pines.)

Formerly, a wood of oaks extended on both
sides of the temple; it was cut in the nineteenth
century; the hillside is now partly denuded; this
is very unfortunate, for the picture conceived by
Hubert Robert has thus been altered. Neverthe-
less, the essential feature of the landscape is
intact, for the Weymouth pines still shelter the
access to the peristyle.

24^ The Spell of the Heart of France

Under the colonnade, between two statues,
opens a door of two leaves on which are sculptured
fine garlands of flowers. Within the temple,
along the naked wall, Ionic columns alternate
with truncated shafts which once supported the
busts of the heroes of friendship, and nothing is
more original than the oblique flutings of these
pedestals. Coffers of singular beauty decorate
the ceihng, in the midst of which an opening allows
Hght to enter. About the edifice runs a cornice,
the design of which is at once rich and delicate.
A charming marble bas-rehef decorates the top
of the doorway. The rear wall curves back between
two columns to form a little apse, raised by two
steps: its curve is so pleasing, its dimensions are
so just, the arch of the demi-cupola which shelters
it is designed with so much grace, that we experi-
ence, in contemplating these pure, supple and
harmonious fines, that ravishment of eye and
soul which only the spectacle of perfect architec-
ture can produce. Before the steps is placed a
round stone altar. In the fittle apse, we might
have admired until recently a plaster reproduction
of Love and Friendship, the celebrated group which
Pigalle carved for Madame de Pompadour, the
marble of which — much damaged — belongs to
the Louvre. M. Rocheblave, who saw the statue
in the place where the Princess of Monaco had

Betz 243

placed it, and who has written very interestingly
about it (Note 26), affirms, and we can believe it,
that this cast of the original, made and hghtly
retouched by the sculptor Dejoux, was a unique
work, infinitely precious. It has been removed
from Betz ; but it will soon be replaced by another
cast of the same group. The divinity will recom-
pute its temple.

On the pedestal of the statue appeared this
quatrain :

Wise friendship! love seeks your presence;

Smitten with your sweetness, smitten with your constancy,

It comes to implore you to embellish its bonds

With aU the virtues which consecrate thine.

And on the wall of the apse this was engraved :

Pure and fertile source of happiness.

Tender friendship! my heart rests with thee;

The world where thou art not is a desert for me;

Art thou in a desert? thou takest the place of this world.

This last motto is by Cerutti.

The cast of Love and Friendship is not the only
object which has disappeared from the temple of
Betz. There was also there a ''circular bed,"
where meditation invited

Romantic Love and ambitious Hope

to be seated.

This "circular bed" was also a poetic invention.
A document, discovered by M. de Segur in the
archives of Beauvais, shows us that Cerutti was

244 The Spell of the Heart of France

commissioned to ''furnish" the Temple of Friend-
ship. As his archaeological knowledge was insuffi-
cient, he addressed himself to the author of the
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis. We possess the
reply of Abbe Barthelemy. The latter seems quite
embarrassed: he states that the ancients prayed
standing, on their knees or seated on the ground,
and that there were no seats in the temples; he
thinks that one might take as a model either the
curule chair of the Senators, or the throne on
which the gods were represented as seated, or
even a bench, a sofa. . . . ''Besides," he ended,
"I believe, hke M. Cerutti, that as friendship is a
goddess of all times, we may furnish her as we will."
Quatrains, sensibilities and puerilities, all these
do not prevent the temple of Betz from being one.
of the most perfect works of the Greco-Roman
Renaissance of the last years of the eighteenth
century. (Note 27.) In the gardens of the Little
Trianon, Mique produced nothing more exquisite
than this work of Le Roy. And how adorable they
are, these httle monuments, supreme witnesses of
classic tradition, suddenly revivified by the dis-
coveries of the antiquaries, by the Voyages of
the Count de Caylus, by the first excavations
at Herculaneum and Pompeii! With what surety
of taste, with what subtlety of imagination, have
the fines and the forms of ancient art been

Betz 245

accommodated to the adornment of the northern
landscape! It is the last flower of our architecture.
It is necessary to hearken to and meditate upon
the instruction, the eternal instruction given us
by this temple so gracefully placed before the
verdant meadows of a valley of the Ile-de-France.
The caprice of a sentimental princess dedicated
it to friendship. Let us dedicate it in our grateful
thought to the strong and charming god whose
decrees were respected and whose power was
venerated for three centuries by poets and artists
without an ingratitude, without a blasphemy.
This sanctuary was doubtless the homage of a
disappearing piety: already those who built it
celebrated in the neighboring groves the rites of
a new cult; there they deified disorder, ruin and
melancholy; there they abandoned themselves to
childish and dangerous superstitions; . already
romanticism and exoticism mastered hearts and
imaginations. The more reason for admiring and
cherishing the last altars where men sacrificed to
reason, order and beauty. Besides, behold: a
century has elapsed; the false ruins are ruined;
the false tombs are no more than rubbish; the
Chinese kiosks have disappeared; yet, upon the
hillside, the four Ionic columns still show the
immortal grace of their spreading bases and their
fine volutes.

246 The Spell of the Heart of France

Another stage, and the last, to the " Baths of the
Princess." This rustic retreat had been constructed
in the midst of the woods. The woods have been
cut and now there remains no more than a single
clump of trees in the midst of a meadow, over-
shadowing the basin of a spring. Here were
formerly placed renanants of sculpture in the
antique fashion.

Marbles broken and dispersed without arrangement.

l(e :)t ^ :it :fc :{e :{e

The Graces sometimes came to rest themselves there.

»H >i( )|t ^ ^ ^ 3{c

Seated near these benches, we easily forget ourselves;
Voluptuousness follows the shadow and melancholy. . . .

Melancholy was not the only visitor to this
charming retreat. Let us rather hsten to the
Prince de Ligne describing the "baths" of an
English garden. His prose will console us for the
verses of Cerutti: ''Women love to be deceived,
perhaps that they may sometimes avenge them-
selves for it. Occupy yourselves with them in
your gardens. Manage, stroll with, amuse this
charming sex; let the walks be well beaten, that
they may not dampen their pretty feet, and let
irregular, narrow, shaded paths, odoriferous of
roses, jasmines, orange blossoms, violets and
honeysuckles, coax these ladies to the bath or to
repose, where they find their fancy work, their
knitting, their filet and especially their black

Bet2f M7

writing desk where sand or something else is

always lacking, but which contains the secrets

unknown to lovers and husbands, and which,

placed upon their knees, is useful to them in

writing hes with a crow's plume."

With this pleasing picture, let us leave the

gardens of Betz.

*******

I continued to read the Coup d'odl sur les
Jardins of the Prince de Ligne, whence are
extracted the pretty things which I have just
quoted, and I wish to reproduce the ending of
this work, which is the whole philosophy of the
English garden.

"Happy, finally, if I have been able to succeed
(the Prince de Ligne did not content himseK with
writing about gardens; he had transformed a part
of the park of Bel-Oeil in the new fashion), if,
in embellishing nature, or rather in approaching
her, let us rather say in making her felt, I could
give taste for her! From our gardens, as I have
announced, she would lead us elsewhere; our
minds would no longer have recourse to other
powers than her; our purer hearts would be the
most precious temples that could be dedicated to
her. Our souls would be warmed by her merit,
truth would retiun to dwell among us. Justice
would quit the heavens, and, a hundred times more

248 The Spell of the Heart of France

happy than in Olympus, the gods would pray
men to receive them among themselves."

In the midst of their philosophical and rural
amusements, while they ''embellished" the woods
of Betz and purified their hearts by tasting nature,
the Princess of Monaco and the Prince of Conde
doubtless spoke similar words.

Nevertheless the omniscient gods remain in
Olympus: they knew Cerutti and foresaw the
morrow.

It is just this which gives a singular melancholy
to the gardens which were laid out in France on
the eve of the Revolution, a true melancholy, a
profound melancholy, no longer the Hght and
voluptuous melancholy with which the romantic
"friends of nature" pleased themselves. It was
scarcely five years after the Princess of Monaco
had finished designing and ornamenting her
gardens when it was necessary for her to abandon
everything to follow Conde and partake with
him the perils, the sufferings and the mortifications
of emigration, to face the privations of the hfe
of the camp and the humiliations of defeat, to
flee, always to flee across Europe before the
victorious Revolution, and to learn at each stage
of the bloody death of a relative or a friend.
Such memories kill the smile awakened by the
childishness of the structures scattered through

Betz 249

the gardens of Betz ; they communicate a touching
grace to the allegories of the Temple of Friend-
ship ; they envelop the entire park with a touching
sadness. (Note 28.)

XIV
CHANTILLY

I — THE HOUSE OF SYLVIE

THE most charming part of the gardens of
Chantilly hes behind the Chateau d'Enghien
and is called the Park of Sylvie, ia memory
of Marie FeHce Orsini, the wife of Henri II de
Montmorency, the "Sylvie" of Theophile. On
the site of the httle house where the Duchess had
received and sheltered the proscribed poet, the great
Cond^ built a pavihon, and pierced the neigh-
boring woods with ''superb alleys"; his son, Henri
Jules, added to it the amusement of a labyrinth.

The park and the house of Sylvie have been
reconstructed in our day at the order of the Due
d'Aumale. Overarching avenues lead to the
pavilion, which we perceive through a curtaia of
verdure as soon as we pass the gate of honor of the
chateau. Behind the httle structure, an elegant
trellis encloses regular parterres, and the picture
thus composed almost reproduced the picture of
the house of Sylvie as it is shown to us by an
engraving of Perelle.

The Due d'Aumale has enlarged the pavihon

250

Chantilly 251

of the seventeenth century by a lovely round
hall, decorated by beautiful carved wainscotings,
removed from one of the hunting lodges of the
forest of Dreux. The other rooms are ornamented
with Chinese sUks and lacquers, with Beauvais and
Gobelins tapestries, with precious furniture and
various hunting pictiu'es. We see there also two
modem paintings by Ohvier Merson, one repre-
senting Theophile and Sylvie, the other Mile, de
Clermont and M. de Melun; they recall two famous
chapters of the chronicles of Chantilly. The first
belongs to history, for nothing is more certain than
the misadventure of the unfortunate Theophile.
The second is known to us only from a novel of
Madame de GenMs in which, for lack of documents,
it is difficult to decide which parts are due to the
imagination of the author; we might even inquire
if this moving and tragic anecdote is anything
more than simple romantic fiction.

Of these two stories, let us call up first the most
distant, that which gave to the charming wood of
Chantilly the adornment of a delightful name and

of some elegant verses.

*******

In 1623, when Theophile composed his odes on
the Maison de Sylvie, Chantilly belonged to Henri
II de Montmorency, grandson of the grand con-
stable Anne de Montmorency, and to his wife

252 The Spell of the Heart of France

Marie Felice Orsini. Their tragic destiny is well
known, how the Duke, involved by Gaston
d'Orleans in a foolish prank, lost his head in 1632
and how the Duchess went to hide her tears and
her mourning with the Visitandines de Moulins.
But at this time they hved happy and powerful in
the most beautiful of the residences of France
and everything smiled on their youth; he was
twenty-nine years old; she was twenty-four.
Louis XIII continued toward Henri II the great
friendship which Henri IV had always witnessed
toward his "crony," Henri I de Montmorency.
Like his father he often came to Chantilly.

The chateau, built by Pierre Chambiges for the
constable Anne de Montmorency, on the founda-
tions of the old feudal fortress, decorated by the
greatest artists of the Renaissance, was still being
embellished day by day : the original gardens, laid
out to the west of the chateau and consisting of a
few flower beds, had been enlarged. In this mag-
nificent house the Duke held a most brilliant court :
he was, says Tallemant, "brave, rich, gallant,
liberal, danced well, sat well on horseback and
always had men of brains in his employ, who made
verses for him, who conversed with him about a
milUon things, and who told him what decisions
it was necessary to make on the matters which
happened in those times."

Chantilly 253

Among these "men of brains/' who ate the
bread of the Due de Montmorency, the most
celebrated was the poet Theophile de Viau, a
native of Clairac sur le Lot, a Huguenot and a
"cadet of Gascony. "

Under Henri IV, men of his reUgion and of his
country were well received at court: it was under
"the B6arnais" that Paris commenced to dislike
them. The young man from the region of Agen
had therefore left his little paternal manor and
settled in the capital to seek his fortune when he
was twenty years old, in 1610. The assassination
of the King must have shaken his hopes for a
moment. But Theophile was soon assured of the
protection of the Due de Montmorency; he found
means to retain it in the midst of the frightful
catastrophes of his existence. In any case, this
sort of domesticity did not weigh too heavily on
his shoulders, for he said to his master:

Now, I am very happy in your obedience.
In my captivity I have much Ucense,
And any other than you would end by tiring
Of giving so much freedom to a serf so hbertine.

The fame of the poet Theophile has suffered
much from two lines by Boileau:

... To prefer Theophile to Malherbe or to Racan
And the fake money of Tasso to the pure gold of Virgil.

So, when the Romanticists began to revive
the classics and to discover far-distant ancestors

254 The Spell of the Heart of France

in old French literature, they thought of Theo-
phile: Boileau himself pointed him out to them.
In Les Grotesques, Gautier rehabiUtated him and
called him a "truly great poet," esteeming that
one cannot make bad verses when one bears the
glorious Christian name of Th^ophile. To com-
pletely demonstrate this to us, he quoted several
pieces by his namesake which he abridged and
even tastefully corrected — a stratagem which
revolted the scrupulous Sainte-Beuve. To tell
the truth, now that we are free from romantic
prejudices, it is difficult for us not to think that
on this occasion, as on many others, Boileau was
right. Among the poets of the time of Louis XIII,
Th^ophile is perhaps the one whom we now read
with the least pleasure. We find in him neither
the beauty, the force and the style of Malherbe,
nor that so lively sentiment for nature which
gives so much value to various bits by Racan,
nor the vigorous local color of Saint Amant. He
shows a facile and sometimes brilliant imagina-
tion; but he lacks taste and restraint in a con-
tinuous and desolating fashion. La Bruyere has
finely expressed this in comparing Theophile
with Malherbe: ''The other (Theophile), without
choice, without exactness, with a free and unequal
pen, overloads his descriptions too much, empha-
sizes the details ; he makes a dissection ; sometimes

Chantilly ^55

he paints, he exaggerates, he overpasses the truth
of nature; he makes a romance of it."

Theophile, who had a brilhant mind, rendered
justice to Malherbe; but he decorated with the
name of originahty his distaste for labor, his scorn
of rules:

Let him who will imitate the marvels of others.

Malherbe has done very well, but he did it for himself.
*******

I love his fame and not his lesson.
* * * *

I know some who make verses only in the modern fashion,

Who seek Phoebus at mid-day with a lantern,

Who scratch their French so much that they tear it all to tatters,

Blaming everything which is easy only to their own taste.
*******

Rules displease me, I vxrite confusedly;

A good mind never does anything except easily.

I wish to make verses which shall not be constrained,

To send forth my mind beyond petty designs,

To seek out secret places where nothing displeases me,

To meditate at leisure, to dream quite at my ease,

To waste a whole hour in admiring myself in the water.

To hear, as if in a dream, the flowing of a brook.

To write within a wood, to interrupt myself, to be silent by myself,

To compose a quatrain without thinking of doing it.

Here are eight Unes which make us think of La
Fontaine, in accent and in sentiment. But we
would be embarrassed if we had to find twenty
others as well turned in all the works of Theophile.
What emphatic odes! What fastidious elegies!
What feeble sonnets! Without the divine gift,
this kind of nonchalance leads the poet either to
platitudes or to disorder. Theophile is not lyrical.
Here and there, by fits and starts, a few striking

^56 The Spell of the Heart of France

images appear, but the strophes come forth with-
out grace, with terrible monotony. His love poems
are frozen: gallantry mingled with sensuality
takes the place of passion with him, and while it
sometimes inspires a few lines which are happy by
reason of gentleness or voluptuousness, most often
they are poor nonsense. His best odes, like Matin
or Solitude, whence we may select a few delicately
shaded lines, repel us as a whole because of his
fashion of painting too minutely, too dryly, too
exactly. ...

So, what caused the great fame of Theophile in
the seventeenth century and later gave him the
indulgence of the Romanticists, was much less his
poetic talent than the renown of his adventures.
As Gautier took care to inform us, this poor devil
was born ''under a mad star"; he knew exile and
prison, he just escaped being burned ahve for
atheism and hbertinage.

In a page of charming prose (Th^ophile's prose
is better than his verse) the poet has told us his
taste and his philosophy: "One must have a
passion not only for men of virtue, for beautiful
women, but also for all sorts of beautiful things.
I love a fine day, clear fountains, the sight of
mountains, the spread of a wide plain, beautiful
forests; the ocean, its calms, its swells, its rocky
shores; I love also all which more particularly

THEOPHILE DE VIAU

Chantilly 257

touches the senses: music, flowers, fine clothes,
hunting, blooded horses, sweet smells, good cheer;
but my desires cling to all these only as a pleasure
and not as a labor; when one or another of these
diversions entirely occupies a soul, it passes from
affection to madness and brutality; the strongest
passion which I can have never holds me so
strongly that I cannot quit it in a day. If I love,
it is as much as I am loved, and, as neither nature
nor fortune has given me much power to please,
this passion with me has never continued very
long either its pleasure or its pain. I cling more
closely to study and to good cheer than to aU the
rest. Books have sometimes tired me, but they
have never worn me out, and wine has often
rejoiced me, but never intoxicated. ..." [Once
more the memory of La Fontaine crosses our minds
and we recall The Hymn of Passion at the end of
Psyche.] Theophile is thus a perfect Epicurean
by birth and by principle, an Epicurean in the
diversity and the brevity of his enjoyments, an
Epicurean in the prudent and wise administration
of his pleasures.

Did he carry further than he admits the practice
of doctrine, and freedom of manners? Did he use
the free and obscene speech which has been
ascribed to him? Had he still other passions of
which he says nothing in this public confession?

258 The Spell of the Heart of France

It is only necessary to read Tallemant to be
instructed as to the way of living common to
libertines at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, and to judge that, even if Theophile
practiced all the vices which his enemies have
ascribed to him, fate was nevertheless very cruel
in inflicting on him a punishment which so many
others might then have merited.

The poet's misfortune was to unloose against
himseK the ire of some Jesuits who — for reasons
which have remained obscure — sought for his
destruction with frenzied zeal. Imprudence in
writing and speaking had already compromised
him: when exiled for the first time, he had had to
seek a refuge in Gascony, in Languedoc, even to
take refuge in England for several months. But
he had been recalled and, following an august
example, and thinking that Paris was well worth
a mass, he had abjured Calvinism: he could
thenceforth believe himself in safety. Then biirst
the storm. A collection of licentious and sacri-
legious poetry appeared at Paris in 1622 under the
title of Parnasse Satyrique; certain pieces were
attributed to Theophile, who endeavored, but in
vain, to disavow the publication. A year after,
he was accused before Parliament and con-
demned, in contumacy, to be burned aUve. On
the eve of his sentence, Father Garasse had pub-

Chantilly 259

lished a formidable quarto entitled La Doctrine
curieuse des heaux esprits de ce temps, in which were
heaped up calumnies, insults and invectives
against Th^ophile and his disciples, whom the
Jesuit called "the school of young calves." While
he was being executed in effigy upon the Place de
Gr^ve, and while the Jesuits aroused the court and
the magistrates against him, Theophile prudently
escaped to Chantilly and from there set out for the
frontier of the kingdom. But he was arrested near
Saint-Quentin, brought back to Paris, thrown into
the prison of Ravaillac. He remained there two
years waiting for a new trial. The Jesuits were
in charge of the proceedings and the investigation.
The poet was again foimd guilty. But this time
the sentence was less rigorous: it was banishment.
He died two years later, at the age of thirty-six.

During these trials, the Duke and Duchess
de Montmorency had not ceased to interest
themselves in their protege. More than once the
Duke had intervened in his favor, but without
success. After the first sentence he gave him
asylum at Chantilly in a "cool haU" built in the
woods at the end of the pool. It was the memories
of this retreat that the poet later evoked in his
prison, to make them the subject of the ten little
odes which he entitled, La Maison de Sylvie.

260 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

I doubt that the odes of the Maison de Sylvie
are superior to the other works of Theophile.
However, if any one asked me: "What must I
read by Theophile?" I would reply to him:
"La Maison de Sylvie, on condition that you read
it at ChantiUy beside the pool." The great poets
have sometimes added a special grace or nobihty
to the landscapes which they have described.
But it is also true that ancient verses, whose
attractiveness seems lost today, reassume an
indescribable savor in the very places which have
formerly inspired them. The poet sometimes
makes us better feel the beauty of nature; but by
a mysterious sorcery, nature can retimi a breath
of life to dead poems.

To leave, before dying,

The living features of a painting

Which can never perish

Except by the loss of nature,

I pass golden pencils

Over the most revered spots

Where virtue takes refuge,

Whose door was open to me

To put my head in shelter.

When they burned my effigy.

Poor rhymer, they are indeed effaced, the hues
of your "golden pencils"! You promised yourseh
immortahty, you promised it to Sylvie:

Thus, under modest vows

My verses promise Sylvie

That charming fame which posterity

CaUs a second life;

Chantilly mi

But you added with more reason:

What if my writings, scorned,
Cannot be authorized
As witnesses of her glory,
These streams, these woods.
Will assume souls and voices,
To preserve its memory.

Such has been fate : it is the soul and the voices
of the waters, the woods and the rocks which
preserve today the memory of the beautiful
Itahan princess and her poor devil of a poet!

It is not for the pm-e beauty of the verses
(which, however, do not lack grace), it is for the
elegance of the picture which they evoke from
far away, from very far away, that we love today
to read once more these Hnes:

One evening when the salty waves

Lent their soft bed

To the four red coursers

Which are yoked by the sun,

I bent my eyes upon the edge

Of a bed where the Naiad sleeps.

And, watching Sylvie fish,

I saw the fishes fight

To see which would soonest lose its life

In honor of her fishhooks.

Warning against noise with one hand

And throwing her hne with the other.

She causes that, at the onset of night.

The day should decHne more sweetly.

The Sim feared to light her

And feared to go away;

The stars did not dare to appear.

The waves did not dare to ripple.

The zephyr did not dare to pass.

The very grass restrained its growing.

(This is the scene which M. Oliver Merson
desired to represent upon one of the walls of

^62 The Spell of the Heart of France

Sylvie's pavilion; I do not dare to affirm that he
rendered all its charm.)

Despite a very obscure and very pretentious
mythological machinery, we may still enjoy the
Tritons transformed into a troop of white deer by
a single glance of Sylvie, and gamboling timidly
among the thickets of the wood:

Their hearts, deprived of blood by fear.

Can only with timidity

Behold the sky or trample on the earth. '

(Here is one of those pictures which abound in
Th^ophile and disconcert the reader, even when
the coolness of the charming grove disposes him
to every indulgence.)

We will also discover an Albanesque grace in a
combat of Loves and Nereids in the waters of the
pool:

Now together, now scattered,

They shine in this dark veil

And beneath the waves which they have pierced

Allow their shadow to disappear;

Sometimes in a clear night,

Which shines with the fire of their eyes.

Without any shadow of clouds,

Diana quits her swain

And goes down below to swim

With her naked stars.

But the plays of the Naiads are not the only
visions which present themselves to the memory
of the prisoner in the inky dungeon where the
hatred of Father Garasse has condemned him

Chantilly 26S

to rhyme his idyls. He remembers that one day
Thyrsis, whom he loves with a "chaste and faith-
ful friendship," came to visit him at Chantilly
and to tell him a frightful and interminable
nightmare in which were announced all his future
misfortunes. This episode might appear super-
fluous if it did not give Theophile the opportunity
to estabhsh in eleven hnes the innocence of his
manners, an opportune apology after the defama-
tions of the Jesuit. . . . Soon, casting aside these
unpleasant images, he returns to the marvels of
the "enchanted park"; he sings the perfume of
the flowers, the glances of his mistress, the coolness
of the waters, the graces of the spring, the fecun-
dity of nature and the concert of birds which
salutes Sylvie in the woods. . . . And the ode
terminates by an abrupt flattery addressed to the
King. But he has not yet exhausted the whole
chaplet of lovable remembrances; he diverts
himself by imagining the song of the nightingales,
and in the darkness of his prison, it is always
Chantilly that he sees. How sad that a better
poet might not have treated this charming
thought!

Forth from my dark tower

My soul sends out its rays which pierce

To this park which the eyes of day

Traverse with so much difficulty.

My senses have the whole picture of it:

I feel the flowers at the edge of the water.

^64 The Spell of the Heart of France

I sense the coolness which endews them.
The princess comes to sit there.
I see, as she goes there in the evening,
How the day flees and respects her.

The last ode is a promenade about the pool, and,
while lacking in poetic beauty, it contains some top-
ographical indications which it would be amusing
to verify with the aid of the plans and the docu-
ments of the archives. There is a question there
of a "lodge today deserted" where Alcandre once
came to enjoy solitude. Alcandre is Henri IV,
and we thus know the place of the "King's
Garden," a retreat where Henri IV loved to pass
his time, when he came to Chantilly. Then
Theophile leaves on the left a thick wood favorable
for lovers' meetings, a "quarter for the Faun
and for the Satyr," and stops at a chapel, probably
the little chapel of Saint Paul, which still exists
today; he remains there a long time and prays the
Lord, with the fervor of a poor poet persecuted
by the Jesuits and accused of atheism; but words,
aheady sufficiently undisciplined when he wishes
to employ them to sing the sport of the nymphs,
refuse to obey him when he seizes the harp of
David: his prayer is a miracle of platitude. . . .

And if, following my advice, you shall one day
read La Maison de Sylvie under the trees of
Chantilly, perhaps, despite its poverty of style
and monotony of rhymes, you may still find some

THE GREAT CONDE

Chantilly ^65

pleasure there, in spite of the disdain of Boileau,
in spite of the enthusiasms of Gautier.

II MADEMOISELLE DE CLERMONT

We are in 1724. A century has elapsed since
the day when the proscribed poet found asylum in
a little house built at the extremity of the pool,
and now there remains hardly a remnant of the
Chantilly of the Montmorencies. Le Notre and
Mansart have been here. Immense regular gar-
dens, traversed by canals, decorated with statues
and fountains, have replaced the modest garden
plots of the Renaissance. The swelling woods
which neighbored the chateau are transformed to
a majestically clipped park. Of the ancient build-
ings, the great Conde has allowed only the little
chateau to remain, and he has arranged the apart-
ments of even this in a new fashion. For the old
manor house which the architects of the sixteenth
century had transformed into a luxurious, elegant
and picturesque residence, he has substituted a
veritable palace, with grand though monotonous
f agades, flanked with sufficiently disgraceful pepper
boxes. He has built the orangery and the theater,
and created a mass of cascades, basins and foun-
tains which rival Versailles. Henri Jules has con-
tinued the work of his father, built a house for his
gentlemen in place of the farm of Bucan, estab-

266 The Spell of the Heart of France

lished a magnificent menagerie at Vineuil, designed
the labyrinth of Sylvie's grove and dispersed
throughout the park a multitude of marbles copied
from the antique. Now the master of Chantilly is
the Due de Bourbon, Monsieur le Due, Prime
Minister of the King; he also is a great lover of
gardens and the buildings; he transforms the
chapel, he demolishes and reconstructs the three
faces of the interior court of the chateau, and he
confides to Jean Aubert the task of finishing the
construction of the Great Stables, commenced by
Mansart. (Note 29.)

Chantilly is then, after Versailles and Marly,
the most beautiful of the residences of France.
It is also the theater of the most sumptuous
festivals. M. le Due there spends royally an
immense fortune, which is still growing from
operations in the funds. His mistress, Agnes de
Pleneuf , Marquise de Prie, holds a veritable court
there.

The King comes to pass two months at Chantilly
and, every day, he is offered "the diversion of
stag hunting or wild boar hunting." The evenings
are reserved for the opera, for the comedy and
for the dance. The gazettes of Paris describe with
a thousand details the hecatombs of wild boars,
the lansquenet parties and the suppers at which
shine the three sisters of M. le Due, Miles, de

From a drawing by Blanche McManus

CHATEAU OF CHANTILLY

Chantilly 267

Charolais, de Clermont and de Sens. The peddlers
offer in the streets the list of expert beauties
whom chance, added by Madame de Prie, has
put in the path of the young King, and for whom
the young King has not lusted.

On August 30, 1724, one of the friends of the
Due de Bourbon, the Due de Melun, is killed in
one of the hunts given in honor of the King. Here
is the story from the gazettes: '^ Towards seven
o'clock in the evening, half a league from the
chateau, the Due de Melun, riding at a gallop
in one of the forest ways, was wounded by the
stag which was being tracked and which was
almost at bay. The blow which he gave in passing
was so hard that horse and horseman were thrown.
The Due de Melun was aided at first by the Due
de Bourbon and the Comte de Clermont. Sieur
Flandin du Montblanc, surgeon to the King,
gave him first aid and had him carried to the
chateau where he died today, the 31st, at five
o'clock in the morning, in the thirtieth year of his
age, after having received all the sacraments and
made his will."

This tragic event moves the guests of the
chateau, for the Due de Melun is related to all
the great families of the kingdom. The King sheds
a few tears and talks of leaving the same evening.
But he is made to understand that so sudden a

268 The Spell of the Heart of France

departure will be interpreted in a fashion not very
complimentary to the Prime Minister. He con-
sents to remain two days longer at Chantilly and
retm-ns to Versailles.

Madame de Genhs is the author of a historical
novel entitled Mademoiselle de Clermont. In it
she relates that this princess had secretly married
the Due de Melun eight days before the accident
which led to his death. Of the history of the
amours of Mile, de Clermont and M. de Melun,
she had composed a touching and dramatic Uttle
story.

At the bottom of the first page of this work she
puts the following note: "The substance of this
history, and almost all the details which it con-
tains, are true; the author received them from a
person (the late Marquise de Puisieulx-Sillery)
who was as noteworthy for the sincerity of her
character as for the superiority of her mind, and
whom Mile, de Clermont honored for twenty
years, up to the day of her death, with her most
intimate friendship. It was at ChantiUy itseK
and in the fatal alley, which still bears the name
of Melun, that this story was told for the first
time to the author, who then wrote down its
principal features and afterward forgot this little
manuscript for thirty years. It was neither

Chantilly 269

finished, nor written for the pubhc^ but no historic
detail has been excised."

Is not this merely one of those subterfuges
which romancers use to persuade us that they
have "invented nothing" and to give us the illu-
sion that it ''really happened"? Or did Madame de
Genhs really receive the confidences of a well-
informed old lady?

First, we must note that if the author wished
to mystify her readers, she succeeded on this
occasion. When the Due d'Aumale had Mile,
de Clermont and M. de Melun painted as a
pendant to Theophile and Sylvie, he accepted
the truth of the story told by Madame de Genlis.
It may possibly be said that the Due d'Aumale
could not refuse such a species of posthumous
homage to the tutor of Louis Philippe. But all
the historians who have written of Chantilly
have in turn told the story of the adventure of
Mile, de Clermont, without even discussing its
probability. . . . And now let us read the novel
of Madame de Genlis.

It is a short and very agreeable task. The
contemporaries of Madame de Genlis united in
considering Mademoiselle de Clermont as her
masterpiece and as a masterpiece. On the first
point, I am ready to believe them; I cannot
compare Mademoiselle de Clermont with the

^70 The Spell of the Heart of France

innumerable romances, tales and novels of the
same author: I do not know them. As a child,
I read Les Veillees du Chateau, and I cannot say
today if it is necessary to set them above the
similar works of Bouilly and of Berquin. As to
the Souvenirs de Felicie, it has always seemed to
me a sufficiently diverting book, full of doubtful
anecdotes and of untruthful portraits, but in
which the author shows her true self, with all
her vanities of a woman and all her ridiculous
traits as a wiiter. Is Mademoiselle de Clermont
a masterpiece? Perhaps it was, but it is no longer.
It remains a deUghtf ul book. It has great merits :
marvelous rapidity, perfect skill and ease in the
knitting together of the different episodes, a
facile, supple and natural way of telling. If we
confine ourselves to the composition of the work,
it is a model: neither Merimee nor Maupassant
has written anything more concise or more
pohshed. Without doubt, the style of Madame
de Genlis seems terribly out of date today; her
simple, Hmpid, perfectly correct language entirely
lacks accent; her somewhat vague expressions
have today a trace of age and colorlessness; in
the tragic passages she exasperates us a little by
the abuse of points of suspense; finally we are
sometimes tired out by the lazy sensibility of the
writer, the simplicity of the maxims which she

Chantilly 271

inserts in her narration, her childish efforts to
give a moral appearance to the most passionate
of adventiu-es; we discover too often the author of
Les Veillees du Chateau in a story which we would
have preferred to have told by the author of La
Chartreuse de Parme. But the pleasure of a well-
written story is so vivid that even in spite of the
affectations, the artifices and the childishness,
we still feel the emotion of the drama.

The two principals of the story are Mademoiselle
de Clermont, sister of the Due de Bourbon, and
the Due de Melun.

"Mile, de Clermont received from nature and
from fortune all the gifts and all the goods which
can be envied: royal birth, perfect beauty, a fine
and delicate mind, a sensitive soul and that
sweetness, that equality of character which are so
precious and so rare, especially in persons of her
rank. Simple, natural, chary of words, she always
expressed herself delightfully and wisely; there was
as much reason as charm in her conversation.
The sound of her voice penetrated to the bottom
of the heart, and an air of sentiment, spread over
her whole person, gave interest to her least impor-
tant actions; such was Mile, de Clermont at the
age of twenty." She appears at Chantilly and,
immediately, the beauty of the place, which
offers '^all that a sensitive soul can love in the

272 The Spell of the Heart of France

way of rural and solitary delights," the splendor
of "the most ingenious and the most sumptuous
feasts," the pleasure of her first homage and her
first praise, intoxicate her youthful heart.

Portrait of M. de Melun: "His character, his
virtues, entitle him to personal consideration,
independently of his fortune and of his birth.
Although his figure was noble and his features
mild and intellectual, his outer man showed no
briUiancy; he was cold and distracted in society;
though gifted with a superior mind, he was not
at all what is called an amiable man, because he
felt no desire to please, not from disdain or pride,
but from an indifference which he had constantly
preserved up to this period. . . . Finally the
Due de Melun, though endowed with the most
noble politeness, had no gallantry; his very sensi-
tiveness and extreme delicacy had preserved him
till then from any engagement formed iu caprice;
aged scarcely thirty years, he was still only too
capable of experiencing a grand passion, but,
because of his character and his morals, he was
safe from all the seductions of coquetry."

One of the favorite diversions of Mile, de Cler-
mont was to read romances aloud before a few
friends, and on these occasions, they never failed
to praise her reading and her sensitiveness.
"The women wept, the men listened with the

Chantilly 273

appearance of admiration and sentiment; they
talked quite low among themselves; it was easy
to guess what they said; sometimes they were
overheard (vanity has so fine an ear!), and the
hearer gathered the words ravishing, enchanting. ''

We will soon see if this story is true. But let
us emphasize in passing the improbabihty of this
little picture. Is it credible that people wept so
abundantly at Chantilly in 1724?

A single man, always present at these lectures,
preserves an obstinate silence: it is M. de Melun.
The attitude of this motionless and silent auditor
pricks the curiosity of Mile, de Clermont. She
questions. The Duke lets her understand that the
reading of romances seems futile and frivolous to
him. On the morrow she inflicts on her auditors
the reading of a book of history. And the intrigue
is begun.

Mile, de Clermont seeks the company of the Mar-
quise de G. . . , a tiresome and loquacious person,
but the cousin of M. de Melun: her presence takes
the curse off the promenades and conversations
in the gardens of Chantilly. Dm-ing one of these
promenades, a petition is presented to the princess.
She promises to hand it to her brother. But, in
the hurry of dressing for the ball, she forgets her
promise. M. de Melun, without saying anything
about it, picks up the petition which was forgotten

274 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

upon a table, and obtains from M. le Due the
favor which was asked, pretending that he is
fuMUing the wishes of Mile, de Clermont. Con-
fusion of the forgetful young girl, who makes a
vow not to appear at a ball for a year. ... I
will not say that this sentimental catastrophe is
the most happy episode of the novel of Madame
de Genlis.

More delicate, more truthful, more touching —
with an agreeable dash of romance — is the story
of the incidents which lead up to the inevitable
declaration. Mile, de Clermont is the first to
avow her passion. Her birth and rank forbid
M. de Melun to seek the hand of a princess of the
blood royal. He goes away, he returns. Oaths
are exchanged, and it is finally Mile, de Clermont
who proposes a secret marriage.

The two lovers appoint a meeting in a cottage.
M. de Melun throws himself at the feet of Mile,
de Clermont and abandons himself to all the
transports of passion. Suddenly he rises and in a
stifled voice begs her for the last time to abandon
him.

"No, no," returns Mile, de Clermont, "I will
not flee from him whom I can love without shame,
without reserve and without remorse, if he dares,
as well as myself, to brave the most odious prej-
udices." At these words the Duke regarded

Chantilly 275

Mile, de Clermont with surprise and shock.
"I am twenty-two years old/' she continued;
''the authors of my being no longer exist; the age
and the rank of my brother give him only a
fictitious authority over me, for nature has made
me his equal."

"Great God!" cried the Duke, "what are you
trying to make me think?"

"What! would I then be doing such an extraor-
dinary thing? Did not Mile, de Montpensier
marry the Due de Lauzun?"

"What do you say? Oh, heavens!"

"Did not the proudest of our kings at first
approve this union? Later a court intrigue made
him revoke his permission; but he had given it.
Your birth is not inferior to that of the Due de
Lauzun. Mile, de Montpensier was blamed by
nobody, and she would not have failed to appear
interesting in all eyes, because she was young and
especially because she was loved."

"Who? Me? By such an excess I would abuse
your sentiments and yom* inexperience!"

"There is no longer time for us to flee. . . .
There is no longer time for us to deceive ourselves
by discussing impossible sacrifices. ... As we
cannot break the tie which binds us, we must
render it legitimate and sanctify it."

The next night, at two o'clock in the morning.

276 The Spell of the Heart of France

clothed in a simple white muslin dress, she leaves
the chateau. As she crosses the courtyard, her
skirt catches on one of the ornaments of the
pedestal of Conde's statue. She turns around in
terror and believes that she must relate to her
great ancestor the reasons for her attire. This
nocturnal discourse is not one of the most
ingenious inventions of Madame de Genlis.

In the same hut where the supreme explanation
had occurred a chaplain secretly unites the new
Lauzun to the new Montpensier.

Eight days later the King arrives at Chantilly.
Festivals and hunts. M. de Melun is thrown off
his horse and wounded by a stag: we have seen
the true story of the accident.

Mile, de Clermont is a few steps from the place

where her husband is wounded ; her carriage serves

to transport the wounded man to the chateau.

Passion is stronger than convention: she confesses

all to M. le Due. He, to avoid a scandal, feigns a

trifle of indulgence and persuades the unfortunate

lady to conceal her grief until the King's departure.

She is buoyed up by false news, is told that the

wound is not mortal and is not informed of the

death of M. de Melun until Louis XV has left

Chantilly. \

* * * * * * *

History or romance?

From the pastelle by Rosalba Carriera

LOUIS XV AS DAUPHIN

Chantilly 277

Let us first remark that, whether history or
romance, there is nothing to locaUze this story
at the House of Sylvie. Madame de Genlis simply
says to us that she thought it out in Sylvie's
wood, that is all. In the great gallery of the
Musee Conde, a painting by Nattier shows us
the delicate countenance and the ardent eyes of
Mile, de Clermont. The princess is there repre-
sented in the guise of a nymph; her elbow rests
on an overturned urn whence flows a limpid
stream; a Love smiles at her feet; near her a
servant holds a ewer bound with gold and from
it fills a cup. In the background a pretty garden
pavihon is outlined against a winter sky. This
pavilion is that of the "Mineral Springs," and
thus explains the allegories of the portrait. This
little structure disappeared more than a century
ago : it was situated in a part of the gardens which
formerly extended over the hill of La Nonette,
between the little stream and the main street of
Chantilly : this land was separated from the domain
during the Revolution and is now occupied by
private owners. Possibly, at some time, some one
has taken the pavilion in Nattier's picture for the
House of Sylvie and perhaps this confusion explains
why the souvenir of Mile, de Clermont and
M. de Melun has been placed beside the souvenir
of Th6ophile and the Duchess of Montmorency.

278 The Spell of the Heart of France

But do we find here only an error of topography?
Did Mile, de Clermont secretly marry the Due de
Melun?

What might make us doubt the truth of the
anecdote is primarily the character of the author
who related it to us. Madame de Genhs made a
travesty of everything: the past, the present and
even the future. She put romanticism and romance
into her own existence as well as that of others;
whether it is a question of events of which she
was witness or of those which she relates from
hearsay, it is never prudent to accept her word
without confirmation.

Let us apply the test. Neither in the memoirs
nor in the letters of the first half of the eighteenth
century have I discovered an allusion to the
intrigue of one of the sisters of M. le Due with the
gentleman whom a stag mortally wounded in the
forest of Chantilly on August 30, 1724. I have
questioned the man who today best knows the
history of Chantilly, M. Gustav Macon: he told
me that he has never met a mention of the adven-
ture of Mile, de Clermont before 1802, the date
at which Madame de Genlis published her novel.

We do not know much about the pretty naiad
painted by Nattier. We know the charm of her
features and we know that Montesquieu wrote
for her the Temple de Guide, "with no other aim

ti^' ^^

PORTRAIT OF MADEMOISELLE DE CLERMONT, BY NATTIER

Chantilly 279

than to make a poetic picture of voluptuousness."
But an anecdote told by Duclos will show us
a person somewhat different from the heroine
of Madame de Genhs. When the marriage of
Louis XV with Marie Leczinska was decided
upon, the Due d'Antin was sent to Strasbourg as
an envoy to the PoUsh princess. He pronounced
in these circumstances a discourse in which, with
singular lack of tact, he found it necessary to
make an allusion to the project which M. le
Due had recently conceived of marrying the
King to the youngest of his sisters, Mile, de Sens:
the King, he said, having to choose between the
Graces and Virtues, had taken the latter. Mile,
de Clermont, superintendent of the future house-
hold of the Queen, heard this remark: "Appar-
ently," she said, "d'Antin takes us, my sisters and
myself, for prostitutes." This is not the tone
of the romance of Madame de GenUs.

Madame de Tracy relates that one day she
read Mademoiselle de Clermont and wept for a
solid hour. Madame de Coigny then said to her:
"But all that is not true." Madame de Tracy
answered: "What has that to do with it, if it seems
truef And Madame de Tracy was right. . . .
Today it seems a little less true, and I do not
promise my female readers, if they take the fancy
of reading Mademoiselle de Clermont, that they

280 The Spell of the Heart of Prance

will weep for an hour. It is even possible that in
certain places they might have more desire to
laugh than to weep. Nevertheless, it is a pleasant
bit to read under the trees of Chantilly, this tiny
romance printed by Didot, and which Desenne
illustrated with fine and childish Httle designs,
where we see gentlemen in wigs and ladies in
curls in surroundings of Empire style; a lovable
and opportune anachronism, for it has marvel-
ously translated the character of this sentimental
novel, which never had any history back of it.

THE CHATEAU OF WIDEVILLE.

IN a little valley, between Versailles and Maule,
at the end of an immense green carpet where
a few old garden statues still stand, the chateau
of Wideville deploys its beautiful fagade of red
brick framed in white stone. The harmonious
lines of the uneven roofs show up against the
backgroimd of the wooded hillside. Around the
building, wide moats filled with running water
form a square, and at each angle of the platform
projects a square bastion topped by a watch tower.
This parade-armor harmonizes well with the
robust elegance of the construction. On beholding
the admirable mixture here produced by the
reminiscences of the feudal manor, the graces of
the Renaissance and the majesty of classic archi-
tecture, we immediately think of that magical
line of Victor Hugo:

It was a grand chateau of the day of Louis Treize.

To tell the truth, we know no other architectural
work in France which expresses with more deli-
cacy and seduction the noble and chivalrous

sesi

^82 The Spell of the Heart of France

charm of the period when order and discipline had
not effaced all traces of fancy. And as, by rare
good fortune, Wideville still belongs to descend-
ants of him who built it, and as its possessors
have preserved it and repaired it with jealous
care and perfect taste, it is a hving image of
French art of the time of Louis XIII which we
have before our eyes.

At the commencement of the seventeenth
century, the manor of Wideville was a square
fortress, flanked with towers and rising upon a
mound; it was doubtless restored at the time of
the Renaissance, for magnificent mantels of this
period were moved into the new chateau which
Claude de Bulhon built in 1632 at the bottom of the
valley, after he had bought the estate of Wideville
from Rene de Longueil, Marquis de Maisons.

This little Claude de Bullion was a very great
personage, though the tininess of his stature pro-
voked all kinds of jeers. He was the son of a
Burgundian magistrate, and his mother was one
of the twenty children of Charles de Lamoignon.
Tallemant des Reaux has related that a certain
Countess de Sault had contributed to the advance-
ment of the little Claude, and had succeeded in
getting him nominated as President of the
Inquests. ''Ah! Madame!" she said one day to
Marie de M6dicis, "if you only knew Monsieur

'The Chateau of Wideville 283

de Bullion as well as I do!" "Gawd preserve
me from it, Madame la Comtesse!" replied the
Italian. Henri IV had charged him with various
embassies. Louis XIII made him guardian of the
seals of his orders, and then superintendent of
the finances. Whatever may have been the origin
of the good luck of BuUion, he showed himself
worthy of his position by his talent and probity.
When he became superintendent of the finances,
he had the prudence to make an inventory of his
property, in order to be able to defend himself
against any future accusation of peculation. It
became necessary for him to provide for the finan-
cial demands of Richelieu, which were terrible.
So he laid new taxes and became very unpopular,
but it did not displease him to oppose the multi-
tude. In 1636, when the Spanish army had
invaded the kingdom, Richelieu did not dare to
face the discontent of the people, exasperated by
defeat. '^ And I," said Bullion to him, "whom they
hate more than your Eminence, I will go through
the whole city on horseback, followed by two
lackeys only, and no one will say a word to me."
He did it as he had promised, and the next day
the Cardinal, emboldened, repaired in a carriage
with doors open from his palace to the Porte
Saint Antoine.
The King and his minister backed up BuUion.

284 The Spell of the Heart of France

He groaned incessantly about the state of the
finances and forecast bankruptcy. His complaints
did not trouble Richelieu: ''As to the humors of
M. de Bullion," wrote the Cardinal, ''we must
overlook them without worrying about them,
when they are bad."

He was extremely rich, for he was a good man-
ager and received each year from the King a
present of one hundred thousand livres in addition
to his salary. His manner of life never exceeded
his income. Later, in the time of the great prodi-
gality of the superintendent Nicolas Fouquet,
people recalled the economy of M. de Bullion
and the modest appearance of his hotel in the
Rue Platriere. As for his morals, they were
scandalous, also on the authority of TaUemant.
The superintendent often repaired to the Faubourg
Saint Victor, to the home of his friend Doctor de
Brosse, who had there founded a botanical garden,
and there he indulged in gross debauchery at his
ease. But we possess a very curious letter from
Richelieu to Madame de Bullion, where we read:
"I would like to be able to witness more usefully
than I have the affection with which I shall
always be at your service. Aside from the fact
that the consideration of your merit would cause
this, the frequent solicitations which M. de Bullion
makes to me in regard to what can concern your

The Chateau of Wideville 285

contentment, renders me not a little agreeable
to this. I have seen the day when I beUeved that
he was one of those husbands who love their
wives only because of the money they have
brought; but now I perceive that he loves his
skin better than his shirt, the interest of his
wife more than those of another, and that he is,
as concerns marriage, like those who do not think
that they have done a good work unless they do
it in secret. ..." Harmonize the testimony of
Tallemant with that of Richelieu.

The story of Bullion's death is rather tragic.
On December 21, 1640, in the new chateau of
Saint Germain, as the King, who was already very
ill, seemed to sleep before the fire, stretched out
in his great Roman chaii", some courtiers who were
talking in a window embrasure asked one another
in a low voice who would succeed Cardinal de
Richelieu, whose life was known to be in danger.
The King heard their words and turned around:
"Gentlemen," he said, "you forget M. de Bullion."
On the next day the words of Louis XIII were
reported to the minister, who became furious at
the thought that his place was being thus disposed
of. He harshly criticized Bullion, who had come
to see him as ordinarily, for having forgotten a
detail of administration, and wished to make him
sign an acknowledgment of i':. As the superin-

286 The Spell of the Heart of France

tendent refused, he seized the tongs from the

fireplace 'Ho give them to him on the head."

BuUion signed, but was stricken with apoplexy as

the result. He was bled twice in the arm. The

Cardinal came to see him, and found him without

speech or knowledge. '' Having seen which," —

it is Guy Patiu who relates it, — ''dissolved in

tears, the Cardinal Prince returned. The sick

man died from congestion of the brain."

Such was the man who built the Chateau de

Wideville. The neighborhood of Saint Germain,

and the nearness of the forests where the King

usually hunted, doubtless decided him to choose

for his residence this melancholy and solitary

valley surrounded by woods.

*******

We do not know what architect drew the plan
and superintended the construction of Wideville.
We do not know to whom to attribute this build-
ing, so well seated upon the fortified platform,
these fagades so pleasingly designed, cut by a
central projection and flanked by two paviHons,
these roofs where dormers of charming style
alternate with projecting bull's-eyes, these rounded
platforms which unite the mansion to the court
of honor and to the gardens, and that delightful
coloring which is given to the whole construction
by the happy union of stone and brick.

from a sketch by Guillaumot (187S)

CHATEAU OF WIDEVILLE

The Chateau of Wideville 287

Two great artists collaborated in the decoration
of Wideville, the sculptor Sarazin and the painter
Vouet, for whom Bullion seems to have felt
especial esteem, for he commissioned the pair of
them with the ornamentation of his Parisian hotel
also. Sarazin executed the four statues in niches
which beautify the fagade towards the gardens;
he also carved the two hounds which guard the
door of the house on the same side.

Behind the chateau are gardens in the French
style. The flower-beds have been restored in the
antique taste. In Bulhon's time a wide avenue
started from the platform, bordered with mytho-
logical statues, works of Buyster, but nothing
remains of it today. The grotto, situated at the
end of this alley, still exists, and this grotto is the
marvel of Wideville. Of all the edifices of this
species with which fashion ornamented so many
French gardens in imitation of Italy, this is, I
believe, the best preserved. It is a pavihon whose
fagade presents four columns of the Tuscan order,
cut by rustic drums and charged with carved
mosses. The three bays between these columns
are closed by hammered iron gratings, masterpieces
of the locksmith's art. Male and female figures,
representing rivers, lying on a bed of roses, enframe
the arched pediment which surmounts the grotto.
The interior is lined with shells. The nymphseum

288 The Spell of the Heart of France

has lost its statues, but we still see the vase from
which water flowed through three hons' heads.
Stucco figures of satyrs frame the great cartouches
of the ceiling, where Vouet executed admirable
mythological paintings. These are now very much
damaged, but what time has spared of them shows
a marvelous decorator, a worthy disciple of the
great Venetians.

Near the chateau, a pleasant little house which
is called the '^Hermitage," and which was slightly
modified in the eighteenth century, contains some
delicate wood carvings. Farther away stands the
chapel, a simple oratory with an arched ceiling.
There, before the altar, a stone sarcophagus bears
the words Respect and Obedience; this is the
sepulcher of the Duchesse de La Valli^re, niece
of the Carmelite Louis de la Mis6ricorde. Of
all the phantoms which people Wideville, there
is none more charming than that of JuHe de
Crussol, Duchesse de La Valli^re. The whole
eighteenth century celebrated her grace, her
charity, her sharp and brilliant wit, her beauty
which defied years. Voltaire versified for her his
finest compliments. During the whole Revolution
she remained in her chateau, and her presence
preserved Wideville from the fate which then
overtook so many old seigniorial domains. The
thought of being buried under the earth had

The Chateau of Wideville 289

always horrified her; so her remains were placed
in this sarcophagus standing above ground.

Like the exterior and the gardens, the apart-
ments of the chateau have preserved their aspect
of earlier years. Some changes which dated from
the eighteenth century have been removed in
order that the house might be as it was in the
time of Claude de Bullion.

Three Renaissance chimney pieces adorn the
great rooms of Wideville. They are constructed
of white stone and of different colored marbles,
ornamented with marvelous carvings, which repre-
sent foliage, sirens and female heads, and they
were found in the earUer manor which Bulhon
demolished. Perhaps it was by the advice of
Sarazin that he had them moved to the new
home.

Except the guardroom, whose ceiling is a
masterpiece of architectural ingenuity, all the
rooms of the chateau have ceiUngs with painted
beams. The enameled brick pavements are intact.
Everywhere are tapestries, one of which with
dehciously faded tones represents the siege of La
Rochelle, precious paintings, family portraits.
In the "King's Chamber" almost nothing has
been changed since January 23, 1634; it was on
this day that Louis XIII paid M. de BuUion the

290 The Spell of the Heart of France

compliment of sleeping at Wideville. And every-
where there occurs to our memory the line of
Victor Hugo :

It was a grand chateau of the time of Louis Treize.

XVI

THE ABBEY OF LIVRY

jHE ancient abbey of Livry, situated between
the village of Livry-en-1 ' Aulnoye and that
of Chchy-sous-Bois, three leagues from
Paris, is about to be sold by pubhc auction.
This property belonged to the Congregation of
the Fathers of the Assumption, who had their
houses of novices here. As in a short time it will
probably be turned over to speculators, who will
cut it into lots for suburban houses, it is necessary
before its destruction to evoke some of the sou-
venirs which have rendered this place illustrious.
Other than precious and charming memories,
there is nothing which can interest us at Livry;
and these relate only to literary history. The
rehgious chronicles of the abbey of Notre Dame
de Livry, founded at the end of the twelfth century
as a monastery of canons regular, offers no episode
worthy of attention. There is nothing here for
the archaeologist save a pile of old stones, rem-
nants of capitals and of funeral slabs, which
were discovered a few years ago. Of the architec-

291

292 The Spell of the Heart of France

ture of the ancient monastery, there remains only
a dwelUng house of the seventeenth century.
The rest of the buildings were destroyed after
the Revolution and have since been replaced by
characterless structures. Finally, though the
park presents almost its former beautiful design,
its trees were replanted in the nineteenth century.
But Livry was the "pretty abbey" dear to
Madame de S^vigne. It is here that she wrote
her most charming pages, passed her sweetest
hours, felt the most vividly the seduction of the
country. So Livry is sacred soil for every lover
of French letters.

H: 4: lie 9!( $ 4t 4:

In 1624 the King gave the abbey of Livry to
Christophe de Coulanges as commendator. He was
then only eighteen years old. -

In both a spiritual and a worldly sense the abbey
was in a pitiable condition: its church was crum-
bling, its houses were scarcely inhabitable, and
great disorder reigned among the few ecclesiastics
who remained in the cloister. The young abbot
was pious and economical. The abbey was
reformed with his consent, the church restored,
and a part of the cloister rebuilt. He put up this
grand building of noble and simple aspect, which
still stands; he made of it an agreeable country
house, surrounded by orange trees, flower beds,

The Abbey of Livry 293

bits of water, and easily accessible, for a fine
avenue joined it to the highway from Paris to
Meaux. He furnished apartments there, received
his family and his friends, and led a hfe without
display, but without privations. Besides, if the
rule was then strictly observed in the monastery,
the monks were not very numerous: in 1662, there
were only eight professed friars there. (Note 30.)
In 1636, the Abb^ de Coulanges was invested
with the guardianship of a little orphan, his
niece, Marie de Chantal: the child was ten years
old; the tutor twenty-nine. For fifty years he
watched over the person and the property of his
ward with an entirely paternal solicitude, gave
her very wise masters, Uke Manage and Chapelain,
occupied himself with her establishment and,
when she became a widow, wisely administered
her fortune. But everything was said by Madame
de Sevign^ herself, when the "very good" died:
"There is nothing good that he did not do for
me, either in giving me his own property entirely,
or in preserving and reestablishing that of my
children. He drew me from the abyss in which
I was at the death of M. de Sevign6, he won law-
suits, he restored all my properties to good condi-
tion, he paid our debts, he made the estate which
my son inhabits the most handsome and agreeable
in the world, he married off my children; in a word

294 The Spell of the Heart of France

I owe peace and repose in life to his continuous
cares. . . ." And she adds this reflection so
tenderly true and so sadly human: "The loss that
we feel when the old die is often considerable
when we have great reasons for loving them and
when we have always seen them." (September
2, 1687.)

Madame de Sevign6 had passed her youth at
Livry near this worthy man. After the death of
her husband she stayed there from choice. She
lived happily there with her daughter, and the
latter even returned there several times after
her marriage. These memories rendered Livry
still more dear to Madame de S6vign6, who, on an
April day, after having heard the nightingales
and contemplated the budding greenery of the
park, wrote to Madame de Grignan: *'It is very
difficult for me to revisit this place, this garden,
these alleys, this little bridge, this avenue, this
meadow, this mill, this little view, this forest,
without thinking of my very dear child." (April
22, 1672.) In the summer, when they put her
httle daughter in her care, she took her to Livry:
'^Presently I am going to Livry; I will take with
me my httle child and her nurse and all the httle
household. . . . (May 27, 1672.) She loved to
receive her son at Livry. She went to Livry to
care for her maladies and to follow her treatments.

The Abbey of Livry 295

She also went there to pay her devotions in Holy-
Week: "I have made of this house a little
Trappe. ... I have found pleasure in the sadness
which I have had here: a great solitude, a great
silence, a sad office, Tenebrse intoned with devotion
(I had never been at Livry in Holy Week), a
canonical fast and a beauty in these gardens with
which you would be charmed, all these have
pleased me." (March 24, 1671.) It was her
favorite place for writing, and she said that her
mind and her body were there in peace. And,
truly, almost all the letters which she wrote from
Livry breathed joy and health.

So what despair, when, at the death of the
Abb6 de Coulanges, she beheves that she will
no longer be able to return to Livry and that she
must say farewell to that agreeable solitude
which she loves so much! "After having wept
for the Abbe," she cries, ''I weep for the abbey."
(November 13, 1687.) Happily the successor
of the Abb^ de Coulanges is Seguier de la Verriere,
former bishop of Nimes. He is a very holy prelate,
and allows Madame de Sevign6 hberty to go to
Livry, as in the days of the ''very good^ But
Seguier dies. New anxieties. Fmally the abbey
is given to Denis Sanguin, bishop of Senhs, an
uncle of Louis Sanguin, Lord of Livry, friend of
the Coulanges and of Madam_e de S^vign^. Then

^96 The Spell of the Heart of France

she writes to her daughter: '^It is true that these
Sanguins, this Villeneuve, the idea of the old
Pavin, these old acquaintances, are so confused
with our garden and our forest, that it seems to
me it is the same thing, and that not only have
we lent it to them, but that it is still ours by the
assurance of again finding there our old furniture
and the same people whom we saw there so often.
Finally, my child, we were worthy of this pretty
solitude by the taste which we had and which
we still have for it."

^ >{: * * >!: 4: 4:

Since we have opened the letters of Madame
de Sevign^, let us continue to mark the pages in
which she has spoken of Livry, and let us seek
the reason for the taste for this ''pretty solitude"
which she showed to the end.

She knew how to enjoy the days of sadness in
this "solitude," for example when she had just
been separated from her daughter, or when she
had received some unpleasant news from Grignan.
On these days she tasted the silence of the forest
and of the meadow: ''Here is a true place for the
humor in which I am: there are hours and alleys
whose holy horror is interrupted only by the love
affairs of our stags, and I enjoy this solitude."
(October 4, 1679.) And, a few days later: "I
wish to boast of being all afternoon in this meadow

The Abbey of Livry 297

talking to our cows and our sheep. I have good
books and especially the little letters and Montaigne.
What more is needed when I have not you?"
(October 25, 1679.) But she was not the woman
to content herself with the holy horror of the
woods and to converse forever with the beasts
of her meadow. She had a httle of the turn of
imagination of the good La Fontaine. But,
affectionate and sociable, she also wished friends
about her and loved conversation. At Livry she
very often met her uncle, her cousins, the de
Coulanges, her friend Corbinelh, the Abbe de
Grignan and many others. She was neighborly
with the famihes and guests of de Pomponne, de
Clichy and de Chelles. Chariots brought from
Paris loquacious visitors, rich in news. Walks on
foot in the near-by forest were improvised.

Nowhere — not even at Les Rochers, where
she drew so many pleasant landscapes — did
Madame de Sevigne better express the pleasure
given her by the spectacles of nature. She has
expressed with inimitable art the particular charm
of each season in a few words, and we might, by
collecting certain passages of the letters written
at Livry, compose, as it were, the picturesque
calendar of Madame de Sevigne. Let us try it.

February: ''We have passed here the three days
of carnival, the sun which shone Saturday made

298 The Spell of the Heart of France

us decide on it. . . . We have tempered the
brilUancy of approaching Lent with the dead
leaves of this forest ; we have had the most beauti-
ful weather in the world, the gardens are clean,
the view beautiful, and a noise of birds which
already commences to announce spring has seemed
to us much more pleasant than the horrid cries
of Paris. . . ." (February 2, 1680.)

April: "I departed quite early from Paris: I
went to dine at Pomponne; there I found our
honhomme (Arnaud d'AndiUy). . . . Finally,
after six hours of very agreeable, though very
serious conversation, I left him and came here,
where I found all the triumph of the month of May.
The nightingale, the cuckoo, the warbler

Have opened the spring in our forests.

I walked there all evening quite alone." (April
29, 1671.)

May: "The beauty of Livry is above everything
that you have seen; the trees are more beautiful
and more green; everything is full of those lovely
honeysuckles. This odor has not yet sickened
me; though you greatly scorn our little bushes,
compared with your groves of oranges." (May 30,
1672.)

July: "Ah, my very dear one, how I would wish
for you such nights as we have here! What sweet
and gracious air! What coolness! What tranquillity!

The Abbey of Livry 299

What silence! I would like to be able to send it
to you and let your north wiud be confounded by
it." (July 3, 1677.)

August: "You well remember that beautiful
evenings and full moonlight gave me a sovereign
pleasure. " (August 14, 1676.)

November: ''I have come here to finish the
fine weather and bid adieu to the leaves; they
are all still on the trees; they have only changed
color; instead of being green, they are the color of
dawn and of so many kinds of dawn that they
compose a rich and magnificent cloth of gold which
we wish to find more beautiful than green, even if it
were only as a change.'^ (November 3, 1677.) —
*'I leave this place with regret, my daughter:
the country is still beautiful; this avenue and all
that was stripped by the caterpillars and which
has taken the Uberty of growing out again with
your permission, is greener than in the spring of
the most beautiful years; the little and the great
palisades are adorned with those beautiful shades
of autumn by which the painters know so well how
to profit; the great elms are somewhat stripped,
but we do not regret these punctured leaves;
the country as a whole is still all smiling. . . ."

These samples, chosen from a hundred others,
show how dehcate was the sentiment of nature
in Madame de Sevigne. We find in her letters

BOO The Spell of the Heart of France

all the themes with which modem poets since
Lamartine have experimented: the first songs of
birds announcing the spring, the "triumph of
May," the serenity of summer nights, the beauty
of moonlight, the charm of Indian summer, the
sumptuous sadness of autumn. We may say that
these are the commonplaces of universal poetry.
But as it was long since conceded that, except for
La Fontaine, no one iq the seventeenth century was
sensible of the charm of landscapes, it is well to
note these impressions of Madame de Sevign6.
I know the reply: Madame de S6vign6 is herself a
second exception. Is this quite certain? Observe
that Madame de S^vigne does not witness in the
least that she considers it original to take a
Virgilian pleasure in the song of the nightingale
or even in the full moon. Her correspondents
whose letters we possess, do not show any more
surprise at these effusions. There is no doubt that
they themselves are moved by the same emotion
before the same pictures. They do not say so.
Therefore, the rule is to communicate one's
intimate thoughts and sentiments only with all
sorts of reserves and precautions; one's "impres-
sions" are not written down. La Fontaine scorns
this rule, hke all others. Madame de Sevign6 does
not submit to it any more than he does, because
she writes only for a little group of friends, and

The Abbey of Livry 301

because she abandons herself to her expansive
nature in everything. But, even if not the object
of literature, the love of the country was neither
less Hvely nor less widespread in the seventeenth
century than at any other period.

Madame de S6vign6, then, is pleased at Livry
because she is sensitive to the varied shadings of
landscapes and to the changes of nature. But
she has a singular preference for this bit of soil,
so much so that she does not seem to feel the
dampness there — which is unusual for a
rheumatic — and that one day she will regret
all of it, even to the rain: ''How charming these
rainy days are! We will never forget this little
place." Perhaps the landscape of Livry, this
modest and gracious landscape of the Parisis
which she describes so charmingly — "this garden,
these alleys, this little bridge, this avenue, this
meadow, this mill, this little view, this forest" —
is what accords best with her imagination. Exalted
in her maternal tenderness, passionate in her
friendships, Madame de S6vign6 offers the con-
trast of ardent sensitiveness and controlled taste.
Her judicious spirit shudders at excess and
disorder. The humble and fine elegance of this
countryside in the surroundings of Paris must
have enchanted her. She loves her estate of Les
Rochers greatly, but more as a proprietor proud

302 The Spell of the Heart of France

of the improvements with which she has enriched
her domain. For Livry she has a tenderness of
the heart.

The comparison between Livry and Grignan
recurs incessantly in her letters, as we have seen.
Without doubt she is thinking principally of the
health of her daughter when she curses the north
wind of Provence and "this sharp and frosty air
which pierces the most robust." But, at the same
time, how clearly we see that to the harsh and
rocky sites of the Midi she prefers northern nature,
more gentle, more smihng, and to ''this devil of
a Rhone, so proud, so haughty, so turbulent," the
''beautiful Seine" whose gracious banks are
"ornamented with houses, trees, little willows, Uttle
canals, which we cause to issue from this great
river!" On another occasion she writes: "How
excessive you are in Provence! All is extreme, your
torridities, your calms, your north winds, your
rains out of season, your thunders in autumn:
there is nothing gentle nor temperate. Your
rivers are out of their banks, your fields drowned
and furrowed. Your Durance has almost always
the devil in its bosom; your Isle of Brouteron very
often submerged." (November 1, 1679.)

In the last years of her hfe, she ended by
pardoning Provence for its north wind and its
sharp air; one winter, she will even decide that

The Abbey of Livry 303

the mountains covered with snow are charming,
and she will wish that a painter might reproduce
these frightful beauties. And it will be not only
the joy of living near her daughter which will
cause her thus to abjure her tastes of aforetime,
but also the softness of the sun and of the light.
There are no old people who can resist this sorcery.
In the last letters written to Grignan there is no
longer a mention of Livry.

We would like to, find today in the house and the
garden of the old abbey some trace of the sojourn
of Madame de Sevign6; but everything has been
upset since the end of the eighteenth century.

Here is the dwelling house constructed by the
Abb6 de Coulanges, in which Madame de S6vign4
dwelt. Where was the apartment of the Marquise?
In a letter of August 12, 1676, she says: ''We have
made a casement opening on the garden in the
little cabinet, which takes away all the damp and
unhealthy air which was there, and which gives
us extreme pleasure; it does not make the room
warm, for only the rising sun visits it for an hour
or two. ..." The indication is precise. We are
oriented, and we recognize very nearly the position
of the little cabinet. But was this on the first or
second floor? It is impossible to discover any
indication. And we walk about soberly in the

304 The Spell of the Heart of France

apartments, deserted since the departure of the
Assumptionists : some abandoned books, collec-
tions of sermons, rest on a sheK of the hbrary;
old priests' hats lie on the floor; a beret hes on a
corner of a table, a great map of Paris in the
eighteenth century hangs askew upon a waU;
the breeze blows through the windows whose
panes are broken. . . .

The gardens have long since given place to
meadows and thickets. An old orange house with
broken glass is hah in ruins. The basins have
disappeared. Here is, however, the canal where
M. du Plessis, tutor of the children of M. de
Pomponne, tried to down himself. The little
bridge, near which Madame de Sevign6 went to
wait for her visitors or her mail, no longer exists,
but the abutments mark its position, and, there
also, an iron gate which assuredly dates from the
time of the Abb4 de Coulanges still hangs between
two stone pillars. And this poor remnant of the
ancient architecture is sufficient to render more
hvely the little picture which Madame de S^vigne
has drawn in one of her letters : "1 pace about the
little bridge; I emerge from the 'Humor of my
Daughter^ and look through the 'Humor of my
Mother^ to see if La Beauce (one of her lackeys)
does not come ; and then I walk up again and return
to put my nose into the end of the path which

The Abbey of Livry 305

leads to the Uttle bridge; and by dint of taking

this walk, I see this dear letter come, and I receive

it and read it with all the sentiments which you

may imagine." (August 4, 1677.) And naturally,

nothing exists of the two alleys which had been

given those singular names, "under which" —

the remark is by Father Mesnard, the best of the

biographers of Madame de Sevign6 — ''one cannot

fail to imagine the so different tastes of the mother

and of the daughter, their so opposite characters,

their occasional poutings, and their promenades

separated after some quarrel, and which make us

always think, the one of a beautiful smihng alley,

full of light and verdure, the other of some path

more cramped, more sad and more dry." In

the park, if we no longer promenade under the

very trees that sheltered the reveries of Madame

de Sevign^, the alleys at least have remained

rectilinear and still present the perspectives which

were ingeniously arranged by the gardener of the

Abb^ de Coulanges. Finally, the ''little view"

which charmed Madame de Sevigne has not

X3hanged. There is always, beyond the meadows

and the park, the same horizon harmoniously

bounded by a swell of land covered with woods —

a gracious site, ennobled by so many beautiful

memories that, if we were not entirely barbarous,

we would have to save it from the woodcutters

306 The Spell of the Heart of France

and the builders . Ah! if there could only be found
some friend of Madame de Sevigne to prevent
them from touching the ''pretty solitude!"

THE END

NOTES

Note 1. Page 28. Bossuet by Rebelliau, in the series
"Grands ficrivains frangais."

Note 2. Page 42. Le Naturaliste Bosc. Un Girondin
herborisant, by Auguste Rey. — Versailles, published by
Bernard.

Note 3. Page 45. MSmoires de Lareveilliere-Lipeaux.

Note 4. Page 53. Memoires de Lariveilliere-Lipeaux,
Vol. I, page 167.

Note 5. Page 61. I owe this quotation to the excellent
work of Canon Miiller: Senlis et ses environs. Why can we
not have a book written with such knowledge and skill about
every city of France!

Note 6. Page 82. Sainte-Beuve. Port-Royal, Vol. Ill,
pages 510-512.

Note 7. Page 82. The historian of Juilly is M. Charles
Hamel. His book (Paris, Gervais, 1888) is a moving and
very vivid picture of the college during its three centuries of
existence.

Note 8. Page 83. L'Oratoire de France, by Cardinal
Perraud.

Note 9. Page 88. Published in four volumes by Dufey,
Paris, 1833.

Note 10. Page 101. In regard to the history of the
Oratory in the nineteenth century we may profitably read
the work in which Father Chauvin has preserved the life and
work of Father Gratry.

Note 11. Page 105. The Louvre has just bought an
Egyptian stele for a hundred and three thousand francs, and
the Chateau de Maisons going to be demolished.

307

308 Notes

Note 12. Page 113. We may remark that the Chateau
de Maisons was later purchased by the State while M. Henri
Marcel was Director of Fine Arts.

Note 13. Page 130. It must be understood that this
impression does not correspond to archaeological facts.

Note 14. Page 136. The most important document about
Thomas of Gallardon is the medical report, addressed to the
Ministry of Police, by Doctors Pinel and Royer-CoUard, in
1816. I owe to the courtesy of M. Gazier the opportunity
of seeing a copy of this report. At the same time, this learned
professor of the Sorbonne has been kind enough to place at
my disposal a mass of pamphlets and manuscripts, some of
which are unpublished, in regard to the seer of Gallardon:
I have made use of these various documents in preparing this
little essay. — In 1892, Captain Marin published an interesting
book: Thomas Martin de Gallardon (published by Carre of
Paris), in which he studied numerous articles which appeared
during the Restoration, and reproduced the report of the
doctors from a copy in the possession of M. Anatole France.
We may add that the latter wrote a charming article in review
of Captain Marin's book {Temps, March 13, 1892).

Note 15. Page 165. The most extraordinary thing was
that ingenious Legitimists later found a way to give credence
to the prophecies of Martin of Gallardon without ceasing to
be faithful to the Count de Chambord. In 1871, thirty-seven
years after Martin's death, an anonymous author (the ques-
tion of Louis XVII has been handled by a number of anony-
mous writers) relates a conversation which M. Hersent, a
Lazarist, had with the visionary in 1830. The latter then
announced that the crown of France would return to its true
heir.

"But," said the curious Lazarist, "how will he ascend to
the throne?"

"Monsieur, he will ascend to the throne over corpses!"

"Who will lead him to us?"

Notes 309

"The troops of the north."

"How long will he reign?"

"Not very long; he will leave the crown to a prince of his
race."

"And when will all this happen?"

"When France shall have been sufficiently punished for
the death of his father."

Now see the conclusion of the anonymous writer of 1871:
"Henri V has indeed said lately, in a letter which has been
universally judged to be of very great importance: '/ am the
heir'; but he has not said: '/ am the immediate heir.' If Louis
XVII exists, his proposition is true; he is the heir, after the
immediate heir, since, according to Martin, this true heir,
who must come in an extraordinary manner, led by troops
from the north, who have already frightfully punished France,
is to reign only a very short time, and leave the crown to a
prince of his race, who can only be Henri V." (Grave ques-
tion.— Louis XVII est-il bien mort? — Roanne, 1871.) Cred-
ulous persons are full of subtlety.

Note 16. Page 167. Figaro, August 8, 1904.

Note 17. Page 172. In regard to these charities consult
the work of Emile Rousse: La Roche-Guyon: Chdtelains,
Chateau et Bourg (Hachette et Cie., 1892). This book, — much
more vivid and captivating than this kind of local monographs
generally are, — contains a very accurate and very complete
history of La Roche-Guyon. I have used it extensively.
Note 18. Page 176. Chronique de Saint-Denis.
Note 19. Page 191. Instead of og-we it would be better to
write here arc en tiers-point, so as not to annoy the archaeolo-
gists. But all my readers are not archaeologists and would
not be interested in the fine distinctions among pointed arches.
Note 20. Page 194. This history is a reprint from the
Memoires du ComitS archSologique de Noyon (Vol. XVII);
it is adorned with numerous illustrations which show different
aspects of the cathedral. — The members of a recent Congress

310 Notes

of the French Society of Archaeology' met at Noyon. The
Guide published for members of the Congress contains short
and precise notes upon the different monuments which were
■\isited. That which relates to the Cathedral of Noyon was
written by the Director of the Society, j\I. Eugene Lefevre-
Pontalis.

Note 21. Page 201. The stone is broken at the end of the
seventh line.

Note 22. Page 206. I have taken these dates and some
other facts from an article by ]M. Fernand Blanchard, Secre-
tary of the Archaeological, Historical and Scientific Societ}^ of
Soissons (1905). This pamphlet contains a ver}^ clear sum-
mary of the history of the monument and an excellent descrip-
tion of the ruins.

Note 23. Page 213. These ingenious remarks on the
flora of Saint- Jean-des-Vignes were made by M. Fernand
Blanchard {loc. cit).

Note 24. Page 217. Nothing has been done since 1905
in the way of freeing from military authority the refectory of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.

Note 25. Page 220. The history of Madame de Monaco
has been pleasingly told by Marquis Pierre de Segur, in a
study which forms the second part of the book entitled
La Derniere des Conde. I have borrowed from this work
mam^ details regarding Betz which the Marquis de Segur has
extracted from the archives of Beauvais.

Note 26. Page 243. Musees et Monuments de France,
1906, No. 10.

Note 27. Page 244. The architect of the Temple of
Friendship was called Le Roy; this is the name which is
signed to the memorandum of the sums paid to the sculptor
Dejoux for the casting of the group by Pigalle, — a memo-
randum which has been published b}' 'M. Rocheblave.

Note 28. Page 249. Since these lines were written the
Archaeological Committee of Senlis has pubhshed a work on

Notes 311

the gardens of Betz by M. Gustav Macon. The gifted curator
of the Musee Conde reproduces in this a ven'^ complete
description of the gardens of the Princess of Monaco which
must have been drawn up in the last half of 1792 or the first
half of 1793. Its author is unknown. According to M. Macon,
he was perhaps one of the writers who collaborated at that
time in the preparation of Le Voyage piUoresque de la France;
we might also think of IMerigot, who had just described the
gardens of Chantilly so attractively. To this unpubhshed
description M. Macon has added a series of notes in which he
has collected all the information which he has found in the
works of other historians or which he has himself discovered in
regard to the artists who collaborated in the adornment of
the domain of Betz. In short, he has exhausted the subject.

Note 29. Page 266. The transformations of Chantilly
have been studied and described by M, G. Macon (Revue de
I' art ancien et modenie, April, 1S9S).

Note 30. Page 293. I have profitably consulted Livry
et son abbaye, by Abbe A. E. Genty (189S).

INDEX

Acarie, Madame, 75.
Aisne River, 127.
Amelot, Madame, 32.
Andilly, Arnaud d', 298.
Andr^, M., 141, 143, 147.
Angers, David d', 19.
AngouUme, Due d', 183.
Anjou, Duke of, 110.
Antin, Due d', 279.
Appert, 167.
Archin, 210.
Arnault, Antoine Vincent,

90, 93.
Artois, Count of, 108, 110.
Asay-le-Rideau, Chateau

104,
Aubert, Jean, 266.
Auch, 182.

Aumale, Due d', 250, 269.
Authonne River, 133.
Ayen, Duke of, 12.

Bailie, M. Charles, 180.
Bailly, Father, 99.
Bancal des Jssarts, 46, 47,

56.
BarthSlemy, Abbe, 244.
Bausset, Cardinal de, 29.

of,

50,

Bautain, AbbS, 101.

Beaulieu, Leblanc de, 207 — 212.

Beauvais, 18, 243.

Belief onds, Marshal de, 31.

Bel-Oeil, 223, 247.

Berquin, 270.

Berry, Duchess of, 154, 182.

Berry er, 183.

Bertault, 198.

BSrulle, Pierre de, 74-78, 96.

Besangon, 182, 183.

Betz, 218-249.

Bidault, 107.

Billaud-Varennes,Jean Nicolas,

92-94, 98.
5ir^, M., 183.
Blanchefort, Charles de, 66.
£fois, Mile, de, 11.
Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 5,
; 173-175, 180, 185, 254, 265.
Boizot, 108.

Bonaparte, Jtrome, 100.
Bonnedame, Claude, 196-199,

201.
Bosc, Louis Augustin Guillaume,

xi, 42-58.
Bossuet, Abbe, 85.
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 9,

20, 28-41, 76, 83, 85, 102,

110.
Bossuet, Madame, 31-32.
Bouilly, 270.

313

314

Index

Bourbon, Due de, 37, 266-267,

271, 276, 278, 279.
Bourbon, Duchess of, 220.
Bourbon, Princess of, 219-220.
Bourbon-CondS, Louis Joseph

de, 218-222, 248.
Bourdaloue, 9.

Bourgoing, Father, 82-83, 86.
Bourzac, De, 200-201.
Bouvard, 183.
Briey, Mgr. de, 35.
Brignole, Marie Catherine de

(see Monaco, Princess of).
Brionne, Countess de, 223.
Broglie, Madame de, 181.
Brosse, Doctor de, 284.
Brunetiere, ilf ., 39.
Buire, Pincepre, 53.
Bullion, Claude de, 282-289.
Bullion, Madame de, 284-285.
Bussy-Rabutin, 14.
Buyster, 107, 287.

Caen, 222.

Caisnes, Antoine de, 198.

Carl, Abbs, 101.

Carmontelle, 226.

Caroline, Qu£en, 181.

Cazin, Sieur, 235.

Cerutti, 228-240, 243-244, 246,

248.
Chabot, Auguste de (see Rohan-

Chabot, Due de) .
Chambiges Pierre, 252.
Champagneux, Madame (see

Roland^ Eudora) .

Chantal, Marie de (see Sevigne,

Madame de).
Chantilly, 119, 120, 177, 219-

221, 250-280.
Chapelain, 293.
Charenton, 142-144, 147-148,

153, 159, 161, 162.
Charlemagne, 187, 192.
Charles X, 6, 7, 164-166.
Charolais, Mile, de, 267.
Chartres,135,141,154, 159,168.
Chateaubriand, Frangois Au-
guste, Viscount de, 7, 142,

153, 181.
Chelles, De, 297.
Chilperic II, 187.
Choisy-au-Bac, 127
Clermont, Comte de, 267.
Clermont, Mile, de, 251, 267,

268-280.
Clichy, De, 297.
Clichy-sous-Bois, 291.
Clodion, 108.
Coigny, Madame de, 279.
Combes, M., 102.
Compans, 71.
Compiegne, 126-127, 196.
Compiegne, Forest of, 131.
Condi, The Great, 37, 107, 250,

265.
Condi, Henri Jules de, 250,

265-266.
Condi, Louis Joseph de Bourbon

(see Bourbon-Condi, Louis

Joseph de) .
Condorcet, 179.
Condren, Father de, 78-82, 87,

101.

Index

315

Conti, Prince de, 37.

Coquevil, Gilles, 201.

Corhinelli, 297.

Corneille, Pierre, 15.

Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille,

70, 169.
Coulanges, Christophe de, 292-

296, 303, 304, 305.
Coulanges, Madame de, 6-8, 12.
Coulon, Gar an de, 46.
Crecy, Chateau of, 5.
Creil, 123.
Creniere, Father, 96.
Cr6py-en-Valois, 220.
Crequi, Marquise de, 228, 231.
CreuzS-Latouche, 46, 51, 62.
Crussol, Julie de (see La

Vallihre, Duchesae da).
Cuquigny, 197.

Dammartin, 71.

Decazes, M. tilie, 141-142, 153,

160, 162.
Dejoux, 243.

Delacroix, Pierre-Joseph, 210.
Delille, AbbS, 225.
DemoUns,M., 73.
Descartes, RenS, 72, 77.
Desenne, 280.
Despreaux, Nicolas (see

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas) .
Dijon, 44, 221,
Dongois, M.,173.
Dormans, Jean de, 206.
Dotteville, Father, 90, 95.
Dourdan, 167.

Dreux, Forest of, 251.

Dru, M., 133.

Duclos, 279.

Du Deffand, Madame, 179.

Du Guet, Father, 83.

Du Heron, 197.

Dulondel, Abbe, 148, 153.

Du Montblanc, Flandin, 267.

Dupanloup, 183.

DuPlessis-Liancourt (family),

178.
Durande, 44.
Du Tombelle, 198.

Enlart, M., 124.

Enville, Marquise d', 178, 17?^-

180, 181.
Ermenouville, 223, 226.
Eure-et-Loir, Prefect of, 140,

147, 159.
Euro River, 6.

Finelon, Bishop ofCambrai, 15,

20, 37-38, 40.
Fontanes, 100.
Fontanges, Mile, de, 10.
Fontenelle, 72.
Fontevrault, Abbess of, 37.
Fosses, 120.
FouchS, Father Joseph, 92, 94-

98, 102.
Foucou, 108.

Fouquet, Nicolas, 70, 284.
Francis 1,75.

S16

Index

Gaillard, Father, 98.
GaUardon, 135-137, 139, 145,

147, 154, 159, 168.
GaUardon, Martin of (see Mar-
tin of GaUardon).
Garasse, Father, 258-259, 262.
Gautier, 254, 256, 265.
Genlis, Madame de, 45, 251,

268-280.
Germigny- 1' Evique, 28-29,

34-41.
Gervasi, Doctor, 111.

Girardin, M. de, 223.

Gisors, 170, 179.

Gobelin, AbbS, 8, 14, 16.

Godot, Louis, 196-199.

Goethe, 222.

Gouthieze, 198.

Grappin, Jean, 170-171.

Gregory XIII, 171.

Gregory XVI, 182.

Gresset, 201.

Grignan, Abbi de, 297.

Grignan, Madame de, 8, 13, 294,
296.

Grivette River, 220, 223, 228,
233, 240.

GuercheviUe, Marquise de, 178.

GuSrin, GiUes, 107.

GuiUebert, Madame, 45.

Hamel, Charles, 82, 96, 97.
Hamon, 27.
Harcourt, Due d', 222.

Harlay, M. de, 83.
Haute-Isle, 173-175, 180.
Hautile (see Haute-Isle).
Henry II, 1.
Henry IV, 63, 178, 252, 253,

263, 264.
Herbois, Collot d', 96.
Hericourt, Canon, 85-86.
Houdon, 108.
Hugh Capet, 187.
Hugo, Victor, 180, 183, 281,

290.

Ile-de-France, 119, 126.
Ingres, 21.

Issarts, Bancal des (see Bancal
des Issarts).

Jandun, Jean de, 60, 62.
Jourdain, Nicolas, 68-69.
Juilly, 71-103.
Jurieu, 40.
Jussieu, M. de, 44, 45.

Kent, William, 223, 225.

La Beaumelle, 16.
La Borde, Jean Joseph de, 223.
La Briffe, Madame de, 32.
La Bruyere, 9, 254.

Index

317

La Colline, 222.

Lacordaire, 101.

Lafayette, 113.

La Fert^-Milon, 18-27.

Laffitte, 106.

La Fontaine, Claude de, 86.

La Fontaine, Jean de, 24-25,

85-86, 102, 173, 175, 255,

257, 297, 300.
Lamartine, Alphonse, 180, 181,

183-185, 300.
Lamennais, 100-102, 183.
Lamoignon, Charles de, 282.
Lancelot, 26-27.
Lannes, 113.
Laperruque, M., 137, 139-141,

144, 147, 154, 158.
Larborde, Count de, 224.
Larcher, President, 32.
LarSveilliere-L6peaux, 52-54,

55, 57.
Larive, 93.

La Riviere, Perrette de, 178.
La Roche (see La Roche-

Guyon) .
La Roche, Guys de, 177.
La Rochefoucauld, Alexander

de, 178.
La Rocheofucauld, Sosthine de,

148.
La Roche-Guyon, 171, 172,

176-185.
La Rochelle, 92.
Larousse, 61.
Lasserre, M., 224.
La Tour, Father de, 84.
Lauzun, Due de, 275.
Lavalette, Count de, 155.

La Valette, Father de, 87.

La Valliere, Duchesse de, 288-

289.
Lavater, 49.

La Verriere, Siguier de, 295.
Leczinska, Marie, 279.
Le Dieu, Abbe, 29-30, 32, 38.
Lefevre-Pontalis, Eugene 193-

194, 197.
Le Gendre, 222,
Le MaUre, Antoine, 26-27.
Lemaltre, Jules, 224.
Le Moulin-Joli, 223, 225.
Le Notre, AndrS, 4, 11, 32, 225,

265.
Leclerc, Jean Baptiste, 52.
Le Roy, 244.

L'Espinasse, Mile, de, 179.
Les Rochers, 297, 301.
Letourneur, Mile., 53.
Le Vasseur, Jacques, 192-193,

202.
Levignen, Lords of, 220.
Lieu-Restaur^, 133-134.
Ligne, Prince de, 223, 246-247.
Ligny, M. de, 34.
Limours, 223.
Livry, Abbey of, 291-306.
Livry-en-l'Aulnoye, 291.
Loire River, 172.
Lombois, Father, 95.
Longpont, 129.

Longueil,Ren6 de, 109-110, 282.
Longueil-sous-Thourotte, 127-

128.
Louis XII, 66-67.
Louis XIII, 79, 252, 254, 282,

283, 285, 286, 289.

318

Index

Louis XIV, 4, 6-13, 110.
Louis XV, 74, 178, 266-268,

276.
Louis XVI, 99, 163, 196, 222.
Louis XVII, 164-165, 167.
Louis XVIII, 96, 97, 137-142,

144-145, 148, 152-160, 163-

166.
Louvet, Madame, 56.
Louvigny, Madame de, 16.
Louvres, 119-120.
Lucchesi- Pali, Count, 182.
Ludres, Mile, de, 11.
Luzarches, 120.

Macon, Gustav, 278.
Maine, Due de, 37.
Maintenon, Ch&teau of, 3-17.
Maintenon, Madame de, 3, 5-

17.
Maisons, CMteau de, 104^113.
Maisons, Marquis de (see Lotv-

gueil, RenS de) .
Maisons, President de, 111-113.
Malebranche, Nicolas, 38, 72-

74, 77, 99, 102.
Malesherbes, 45.
Malherbe, Frangois de, 253, 254,

255.
Malortie, Demoiselles, 51, 55.
Mandar, Father, 91.
Mansart, Francois, 105, 107,

109, 265, 266.
Mantes (Mantes-la-Jolie), 169,

171, 172.
Marat, 93.

Marcellus, M. de, 142.
Marchangy, 183.
Maricourt, AbbS, 101.
Maricourt, Viscount of, 167.
Marley-la-ViUe, 120.
Marne River, 25, 34r-35, 38,

39, 119, 123.
Marot, Clement, 85.
Martin, Dr. Antoine, 167.
Martin of Gallardon, xi, 136-

168.
Martin, Thomas Ignatius (see

Martin of Gallardon).
Massillon, 91.
Masuyer, 54.
Maule, 282.
Maupassant, De, 270.
Maupertuis, 223.
Mauroy, 198.
Mayer, M. de, 235.
Meaux, 28-33, 41, 71, 99, 206,

293.
Meaux, M. de (see Bossuet,

Jacqu^ Binigne).
MSdicis, Marie de, 282-283.
Melun, Due de, 251, 267-280.
Menage, 293.
M^r^ville, 224.
Merimee, 270.
Merson, Olivier, 251, 261.
Mesnard, Father, 305,
Michelet, 47.

Mignard, Nicolas, 6, 13, 177.
Mique, 244.
Mirabeau, 231.
Monaco, Princess of, 218-223,

228, 231-235, 237, 239, 241,

242, 248.

Index

319

Montaigne, 297.
Montalemhert, 183.
Montataire, 123.
Montespan, Madame de, 6-11,

37.
Montesquieu, 278.
Montesquiou, M. de, 223.
Montmorency, 49.
Montmorency, Anne de, 251,

252.
Montmorency, Duchess of (see

Orsini, Marie Felice).
Montmorency, Forest of, 42-

44, 52-54.
Montmorency, Henri I de, 252.
Montmorency, Henri II de, 250-

253, 259.
Montmorency, Mathieu de, 163,

184.
Montpensier, Mile, de, 110, 275.
Morel, 226.
Morienval, 132.
Moulins, Marie des, 18.
Montauban, 21.
Mousseaux, 226.

Nantouillet, 71.

Napoleon Bonaparte, 88, 94, 96,

100, 137, 208.
Nattier, Jean Marc, 177, 277,

278.
Naundorff, 164, 167-168.
Noailles, Cardinal de, 37.
Nodier, Charles, 97.
Nogent-les-Vierges, 123-125.
Nonette River, 69.

Noyon, 116, 122, 127, 130, 186-
203, 204.

Ocre River, 135.

Oise River, xi, 116, 119, 120-

131, 191, 204.
Olier, M., 79.
Orleans, Gaston d', 252.
Orleans, Louis of, 22,
Orsini, Marie FSlice {"Sylvie"),

250, 251, 252, 259, 269, 277.
Otranto, Duke of, 96-97, 99,

102.
Ourcq River, 19, 24, 25, 220.
Ourscamp, 129.

Pache, 54.

Parent, Bourgeois, 20.

Patin, Guy, 286.

Pavin, 296.

Pecuchet, 183.

Pelleton, 198.

Perelle, 250.

Peronne, 53.

Perraud, Cardinal, 83, 101.

Perrault, Abbe, 165.

Petetot, Father, 101.

Petion, 54.

Petit, Father, 88-90.

Piet, M., 142.

Pigalle, 242.

Pilastre, Urbain, 52.

Pinel, Dr., 142, 144-152.

Pius VIII, 182.

320

Index

Pleneuf, Agnes de (see Prie,

Marquise de).
Plessis, M. du, 304.
Poitiers, Diane de, 1.
Pompadour, Madame de, 5,

242.
Pomponne, M. de, 297, 298,

304.
Pontpoint, 126.
Pont-Sainte-Maxence, 125-126.
Port-Royal des Champs, 18,

26-27, 81-82, 161,
Prie, Marquise de, 266, 267.
Prioleau, Father, 91.
Puisieulx-Sillery, Marquise de,

268.

Quesnel, Father, 83.

Racan, M. de, 253, 254.
Racine, Jean (1), 18.
Racine, Jean (2), 5, 12, 18-27.
Rambaud, Madame de, 167.
Rambouillet, 7, 164.
Rapin, Father, 229.
RSaux, Tallemant des, 282.
Rebelliau, M., 28-29, 39, 41.
RScamier, Madame de, 181, 182.
Reneufve, 198.
Retz, Forest of, 24.
Rey, M. Auguste, 42, 44.
Rheim^, Archbishop of, 148, 153.
Richelieu, Cardinal, 81, 283-
286.

Rieux, 125.

Rigaud, Hyacinthe, 29, 38.

Riviere, Antoine, 18.

Riviere, Marie (Racine), 18.

Roberdeau, L., 96.

Robert, Hubert, 222, 223, 232,

234, 241.
Robespierre, 53, 93, 95.
Rocheblave, M., 242.
Rochejacquelin, Marquis de la,

164.
Rohan-Chabot, Due de, 180-185.
Rohan (family), 178, 180.
Roland, Eudora, 46, 48, 51, 54-

55, 57.
Roland, M., 46, 47, 50-51.
Roland, Madame, 46-52, 54, 55.
Rosny, 171, 172.
Rouen, 51.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 43, 44,

50, 52, 53, 91, 98, 224, 230.
Royaumont, 214.
Royer-Collard, Antoine Athan-

ase, 143-152, 154, 163.
Rozier, 53.

Saint Amant, 254.
Saint Arnoult, 167.
Saint Cyr, 12, 13.
Sainte-Beuve, 81, 254.
Sainte-Marthe, Father de, 83-

84.
Sainte P^lagie, 51.
Sainte Radegonde, 42-44, 49-

54, 56-67.
Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, 131-132.

Index

321

Saint-Leu-d' Esserent, 116,
121-122.

Saint Medard, 192.

Saint- Simon, 5, 14, 16, 84.

Saint Sulpice, 181.

Saint Victor, Abbey of, 43.

Saint Vincent de Paul, 75.

Salinis, Abbe de, 100, 101.

Samsaulieu, Max, 207.

Sangin, Denis, 295, 296.

Sangin, Louis, 295.

Santeul, 38.

Sarazin, Jacques, 74, 107, 287,
289.

Sault, Countess de, 282-283.

Saurin, Joseph, 41.

Scarron, Madame (see Main-
tenon, Madame de).

Scherer, 16.

Sconins, The, 21.

Scorbiac, AbbS de, 100, 101.

Scribe, 88.

SSgur, M. de, 243.

Seine River, 169, 172, 176, 191.

SenUs, 59-70, 134.

Sens, Mile, de, 267, 279.

SSrent, Mile, de, 181.

Sericourt, M. de, 26-27.

Sevignk, M. de, 293-294.

SSvignS, Madame de, 3, 6, 8-10,
13, 173, 292-306.

Sillys, The, 178.

Silvy, M., 161-162, 165.

Soissons, xi, 204-217.

Soyecourt, Marquis of, 110.

Taine, 24, 99.

Tallemant, 252, 258, 284.
Temple, Lord Granville, 226.
Theophile, 250, 251, 253-265,

269, 277.
Thianges, Madame de, 6.
Thieux, 71.
Thomassin, 80.

Thouin, AndrS, 45, 51, 52, 57.
Thourotte, 128-129.
Thyrsis, 263.
Toulouse, Comte de, 37.
Tournai, 194.
Tracy, Madame de, 279.
Tracy-le-Val, 131.
Tricomini, 110.
Troy, De, 177.
Troyes, Bishop of, 32.
Truyart, Marie Francoise, 68-

69.
Tschoudy, Baron de, 226-227.
Turgot, 179.

Valentinois, Duchess of (see
Montespan, Madame de).

Van Obstal, 107.

Venette, 126.

Verberie, 126.

Vernet, De, 224.

Versailles, 4, 5, 9, 10, 37, 57,
92, 168, 281.

Versailles, Bishop of, 140, 147.

Vetheuil, 170-172.

Vexin, The, 171.

Vez, Chateau of, 133.

Viau, TMophile de (see TM-

32^

Index

Viel, Father, 90.
Villars, Madame de, 111.
Villars, Marshal de, 37.
Villeneuve, 296.
Villers-Cotterets, Forest

129.
Villers-Saint-Paul, 125.
Vineuil, 266.
Vitart, Nicolas, 26.
Vitet, 193.
Voise River, 135.

of,

Voltaire, Franqois MarieAroult,

110-113, 179, 288.
Vouet, 287, 288.

Wallet, Leonard, 210, 211.
Walpole, Horace, 179, 226.
Watelet, 223, 225.
Wideville, Chateau of, 281-290.
Winslow, Jacques BSnigne, 41.
Wurts, Abbe, 160.

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