e wom 5 aeUniversity of Virginia Library DC28 .R7 1925 HONebel " nen RR ae a PRIOR Sd Sa vs Ds Pa Sah So eae es Pate Ra as RT Ae ag ee Fe spades Lae yeas ¥ Sas Shh WUE Ooi ee C3 Suis Beir BR ws Ete eten ae Meee pee: eo Eee Reda ee Ree PL eRe G ee ~ aie a pf 2 G Ee iy ie zeeLIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA GIFT OF ISAAC T. WALKE 0 ee a. res Perens caiibenedmndtn tent taaleet ee bt Pa ee eee ean ee ene te ee p H H t ; ul 1 + 4 7 f eee er ee eer esSe ee ee ee en ) L a ee re Saitama intact aie hie bee Lid tt ramen tan cai ee ee eeFRANCE FROM SEA TO SEAee re ee — a ed ; * 5 | ‘ } ' i : : ee ewer see meet imeus iiGine ee ee ee a ee! tee ee ee ete ee eeF 1 i bi / a ui ! eda ent ee Fe te! edt o Looking northwest from the Arc Triomphe along the magnificent Avenue de la Grandee Armée, typical of the Parisian boulevards. syne yee es a Dee eee &eistishktieute ie cee ge Pa ae i taeeeenlieeel ee a dit Patvich din onic p be cig beds beep fash ap hae Gd FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA By ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS F. RB. G, 8. Author of “Vistas in Sictly,” ete. NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1925rn tlt pte a ee ee ee ; ; i | ) : ; ; UL : i H ee a ee “ser CoryricHt, 1913, py McBrine, Nast & Co. Revisep EpiIrion CopyricHT, 1925, By Rogsert M. McBriwe @& Co,CHAPTER II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. xX. aK eT: XIT. XIII. INTRODUCTIONS. IMPRESSIONS . GoLpEN SANDS OF PICARDY ABBEVILLE AND NEARBY SToNE BIBLES CONTENTS “Tie SoMME” AND RECONSTRUC- TION CHAMPAGNE AND CHURCHES Tur “EnFANTs-PERDUS’ — ALsAcre-LoORRAINE CHATEAU-LHIERY AND BrYoND Tur GOLDEN SIDE Amone THE DoMEs Tur City or Many Brivces GRENOBLE, THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE AND CHAMBERY Gornc TO GRASSE . . a PAGE ] 1 15 28 39 49 62 74 84 97 110 121 132 147CONTENTS CHAPTER XV. Oxp PROVENCE . ‘ XIX. Turovcu LANGUEDOC XX. Tuer PrrENEES CouNTRY XXIV. In Oxp Brittany XXYV. THre Norman Country AOXVIS Rouen = : XXVIT. Nor Far From Paris. XXVIII. Historic Paris BrsLioGRAPHY . ; INDEX XIV. GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA. XVI. “A Dream or Farr WoMEN” XVII. Txr Home or SEVEN Pores XVIII. Tuer Livine AND THE DEAD . XXIX. THe SIREN oF THE SEINE XXJI. Prricuevx, LimocEsANnpD PoIriers XXII. Tur Piaycrounp oF THE Kincs XXIII. In Bourcets anp ANGERS. PAGE 157 168 178 190 201 210 221 239 253 269 2719 300 316 332 353 367 379ILLUSTRATIONS Looking northwest from the top of the Are de Triomphe Frontispiece FACING PAGE The Street of 108 Steps at Boulogne-sur-Mer . A charming vista on the River Somme, showing Amiens Cathedral in the distance Reims: The Martyr-City and Cathedral under bombardment in 1917 Verdun: The projected Ossuaire for the Un- identified Dead and the famous “Bayonet Trench” . Grenoble The perfume factory workers in Grasse The Cote d’Azur, or Blue Shore . The monastery-castle of St. Honorat . The Amphitheatre of Arles The Palace of the Popes at Avignon . The ancient Roman baths at Nimes At Aigues-Mortes rises one of the most wonder- ful pieces of military architecture in the world Carcassonne 14 15 46ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE @heereatpeakoft the Meije. << : . «. 207 Périgueux: the Cathedral of St. Front . . 222 The Chateau de Chenonceaux . : . 223 Azay-le-Rideau on the River Indre . . . 238 Tours-Blois: The Cathedral of Tours and the glorious open-air staircase at Blois . . 239 A wedding dance at Vannes 2°70 A section of the famous Bayeux Tapestry. . 271 The vast chateau of Versailles . , . 286 Versailles Ibe Notre’sucarden 9. (. «457 287 The famous stair at Fontainebleau . : « 9 o0Z ‘The palace of Fontainebleau. . . . . 808 ‘The Town Hall of Compiéene . .. «=. « dah That Preux Chateau, Pierrefonds : : oe Lhe ChirchvotiSt. Denis) 229. ; 350 The Panthéon, and the Church of the Invalides 351 A typical French mansion of the days when houses were adorned instead of numbered and the wineshop of the Infant Jesus in the Rue du Fauborg St. Honoré, Paris . . 366 The Trocadero Museum of Sculpture and the Ile de Cité with Notre Dame Cathedral, . 367INTRODUCTION OW the French have stirred up the world from time to time, be it with admiration or with horror! And how they have led the world, now here, now there, but ever with bound- less enthusiasm, is an interesting study to us Ameri- cans of the United States, for we are also an enthust!- astic folk, though perhaps we flatter ourselves that we are so in a saner way. The French are nothing if not individual, and the spirit within them, that stirs them, and stirs all the world to love or to hate them—whence did it come? Primitive men there were in France, dwellers in caves, and builders of megalithic monuments; but the three bases of the French nation are Celts, Ro- mans and Franks. To be sure, in the south there were Iberians, Ligurians, Phenicians and Greeks, all before the Romans came in; and afterward, Visigoths and Saracens; in the north, Celts from Britain and the later Northmen; in the east, Burgundians. But it is more reasonable to suppose that the thing that makes for the strong distinctiveness of the French character, the génie nationale, derives from one of the three fundamental races, or from a combination of them. When the authenticated story of France began, the country was inhabited by various strong tribes iINTRODUCTION of Celts, whose blood made the solid foundation upon which the nation was erected. In 154 3B.c. a pros- perous Greek colony at Massilia, now Marseilles, hard pressed by its barbarous neighbors, invited the victorious Romans to their aid, and they, of course, came into Gaul to stay. To the Romans originally everything north of the Tiber was Gaul; but later the name narrowed down to what is now France. The Romans gave the semi-savages they conquered peace and its arts, a cultured speech, a marvelous code of legal procedure, and the land a place in world-his- tory. In that wild and stormy fifth century, when the world seemed moving about as it had never moved be- fore, various Germanic tribes pressed into Gaul, and took what they would of the unhappy land worn out by Roman excesses. By the year 413 one tribe, the Burgundians, had established themselves in a large eastern district with a very flexible boundary. A little later another tribe, the Visigoths, settled in the south. Then, in 443, came the Franks, to whom the country owes not only some of its blood and laws and institutions, but its very name. By 481 the first Frankish dynasty, the Merovingian, was definitely established. What a record of intrigue and bloodshed they have left us, with the vanity, venge- fulness and ambition of women often as the moving spring. Weakened by their excesses, they were thrust from the throne by their own mayors of the palace —who founded the Carlovingian line that gave Charlemagne to the world—all German, and consid- ering France as merely part of a great and holy empire. The Carlovingians lasted even a shorter iiINTRODUCTION period than their predecessors, and toward the end of their régime we have the instructive spectacle of the King of the Franks perched on the hilltop of Laon, on the eastern extremity of the Ie de France, in daily fear that the powerful Duke of Normandy, or the Count of Paris—who was also the Duc de France—would pounce upon his mighty hill fortress, and wrest from him even the nominal sovereignty he possessed. Indeed, it was the pusillanimity of the Carlovingians during the early raids of the North- men, when they left the defense of the capital to the courageous Counts of Paris, that eventu- ally cost them the throne, and gave the latter their chance, bringing them into power as the House of Capet. For eight hundred years this line gave the ever-growing kingdom an uninterrupted suc- cession of rulers who made their land great and independent. How those Capetians worked, with an eye single to the one object—the building up of their king- dom! And what a variety of work there was— always according to the type of king—now strategy, now force, now gaining, now losing a little, but al- ways with eye and mind fixed, struggling steadily ahead undaunted. Their task was herculean. Be- fore their accession the feudal system had developed throughout the land to such an extent that the king himself was often only a strong lord among his stronger vassals. Then, too, strange as it now appears, the kings of England, in the thirteenth century—through inheritance and marriage—held greater possessions in France than the French kings iiiINTRODUCTION themselves—a mighty enemy on the very hearthstone. And after both these obstacles had been surmounted the country still remained to be knitted together into a real and living nation. What a variety of kings that line produced! Now a Philippe Auguste, well named, for he was a Cesar in his plans and their working out; now a saint— for St. Louis was a real saint; now a Charles the Wise; now a Charles the Well-Served, who betrayed those who served him well; now a.human hyena and genius in Louis XI; now a Grand Monarque; and those others who, through their folly and wickedness, let go all their ancestors had gathered together. Even before the coming of the Franks there was a power in the land that grew on into a formidable force, keeping step from the beginning, and fre- quently testing its strength with the kings, quite as often as not besting them—the Church. Often its pretensions were unrighteous; again, it was honey- combed with deceit and corruption, and reproaches were heaped upon it for temporal aggrandizement that comported ill with the doctrine it preached. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that the Church, and it alone, preserved for us during the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman civilization whatever was worth while in the world. Tirelessly it preserved the torch of learning ablaze, disseminated at least something of truth, and, above all, kept before the world a spirit of reverence and worship for something higher and finer than the mere things of life. And all this time what of the great, silent, earth- ivINTRODUCTION born masses? What were they doing? Sometimes bearing their burdens cheerfully enough, but as often as not struggling, writhing like a sleeping giant, gathering strength; or perhaps still more like the sullen molten mass that writhes and struggles in the bowels of the earth until ready to belch forth irresistibly and sweep the earth bare in its loose fury. In their writhing how often they turned upon their brethren and joyously slew them, seeming not to care whose blood was shed so it was shed. Surely in no other civilized land were ever such gory ex- cesses. Then, when the cataclysm could no longer be denied—the Terror! No matter what we may think of the horrors of that dreadful period, the fact remains that it marked a tremendous stride in the progress of humanity. Because of it, it was admitted, however reluctantly, that the people as a mass have rights. In token of those rights France made her national motto and the key-note of her modern exist- ence, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality; and even if the dream those words inspired could not be entirely realized, through human fallibility, there has been a steady advance toward embodying them in the constitution of all modern society. As for France herself, to-day, after many experi- ments with republics as well as with emperors and kings, the stability of her national life seems as- sured. Once more opportunity for greatness and leadership seems to be knocking at her door. What will she do?A eR ET Teg Ree Tee = eee a ; i ; H 1 i i Se ee ™ i ee ee ensINTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION RITING in the quiet detachment of an V \ ancient stone manorhouse upon a windy hilltop in Pennsylvania, no thought that France stood upon the threshold of a trial more bit- ter than all she had ever endured, entered my mind in penning the last paragraph of the Introduction to the first edition of this book. No human being could have thought of such a thing. Nothing any- one, soldier or layman, could or did imagine about a war with Germany as a possibility, came within the farthest outer penumbra of what actually happened. And no man who, like myself, served for even a part of that hideous time as a correspondent, and wit- nessed some of the horrors loosed upon the fairest fields of Europe, can hope to write of it without prejudice and deep emotion. The cost to France was 8,400,000 men mobilized, 1,364,000 killed, 740,000 permanently mutilated, and 3,000,000 wounded; all of its two hundred coal mines and its thirty-four iron-mines wrecked; 1,030 miles of main and 1,490 miles of local railroads utterly destroyed ; 893,792 buildings out of the 1,190,066 in the devastated regions either totally destroyed or so severely damaged they could not be used; and more than eight million acres of land devastated and put out of cultivation.Sih ce ee et he ee INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION Yet in the main, France was impoverished for a time rather than mutilated. The “Field of Honor” covered less than a third of the entire country, and in those parts over which no cannon boomed, the things that have been true for ages are still true, the beauty and interest that have existed for centuries still exist, as moving, as joyous, as typically French as they have always been. The “opportunity for greatness and leadership” which in 1913 implied the arts of peace rather than the stern practicalities of war, implies them now more than ever. And, with the reconstitution of a badly shattered world fairly under way, the question asked in that last paragraph can be answered to the ever- lasting glory and honor of a France which once again displayed, individually and nationally, the imperish- able characteristics which have made her what she is. A. 5S. R. The Lake Court, West Palm Beach, Fla. February 15, 1925.FRANCE FROM SHEA TO SEAanninatieiiinendenaiaeiateminitet ata ae eee 1 : i 5 ; taeda Riidieae et ee eee Eat ce neni ene ede ee Pe ee ee ee ee ee eeFrance from Sea to Sea IMPRESSIONS / 40 many places one must go in the spring to see the country at its best; not so La Belle France. Surely no other name of affection for a land was ever better deserved than this. From the golden sands of Picardy to the blue shore of the Mediterranean, every province is lovely, and every one has its own special form of loveliness, its definite characteristics : golden sands, apple orchards and bil- lowing fields of grain; black rocks, gray weather, the Miséréré of the sea for the music of life—and death; brilliant rivers that wind in sinuous coils, and dark, sullen streams that force their way to the sea with savage impetuosity; placid canals and milky highroads bordered by slender trees; endless vine- yards, where bursting grapes drink deep of the golden sun; the sky-piercing fence of the Alps, sawteeth full of snow, and bristling with pine and fir; vast, solemn gorges, suggestive of the Cajion of the Colo- rado; barren deserts of gray or tan, and wide marshes with blue lagoons; air full of shimmering heat waves, of myriad colors and the subtle perfume [1]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA of rose and olive and oleander, linden and jasmine and whispering palm. Blue the sky and blue the shore—but why go on forever? Pity those misguided souls who either rush by all this to frivol away their time in Paris, among the cafés and shops and hotels, with a lot of other stuffy spenders, or who wait to see the country until their jaded senses refuse to absorb the beauty and charm of Nature. These are they who know naught of the joys of loitering across sylvan scenes in stertorous little trains of matchboxes on wheels, that have to stop every few kilométres to let the sniffling little engine get its breath—there is opportunity for pic- tures; who miss entirely the delights of the people, of that friendly welcome into the little compartment where a peasant cheerily lifts a chicken out of the way to let you sit down, or pushes aside a huge bas- ket of vegetables to let you pass; who never experi- ence the delights of quiet, unpretentious little hotels, blissfully ignorant of Paris ways and Paris prices, where the proprietor, also the chef de cuisine, comes, smiling and bowing, out of his immaculate kitchen, wiping his soft, pink hands on his immaculate apron, to wish you bon voyage with a heart-warming hand- shake. Some of these hostelries are more than three hun- dread years old. The stairs play about like the streams of a fountain, dividing, twisting, shooting off at crazy angles, like wind-blown water. It takes a strong bump of location to find the path to your own chamber. One inn is entered through a fragrant kitchen, another through a littered dining-room or [2]IMPRESSIONS a public bar. Once we found a narrow, circular stair, without any kind of rail, winding up from the kitchen; and in the floor, before the first step, was a villainous trapdoor. Was it oubliette, or only wine cellar? We never knew, but only the guidebook’s recommendation took us across that wicked-looking door. There are so many excellent ways of reaching France that a list is quite unnecessary. Enter France as you will, you need have no fear of the French customs. Only don’t carry matches. A friend of mine once paid a hundred francs—a franc apiece— for carelessly having a box in his trunk, and for- getting it was there, in plain sight. To carry either perfume or tobacco is equally foolish; one does not take coals to Newcastle, and the government-owned tobacco shops now sell the best grades of foreign mixtures; while as for perfumes—go to Grasse! Before you go anywhere, always be sure to consult the local Syndicat d’Initiative. It is exactly what it claims to be—a syndicate to give you initiative. Frenchmen of position and intelligence all over the country have formed a central association, with in- numerable branches, often in the most out-of-the-way places, for the express purpose of helping you to understand France and to see it conveniently, cheaply and in comfort. Ask for the little free guide in each place; learn all about the special trips and excursions the Syndicat arranges; have its valuable assistance in everything. In a word, use it, and you help it accomplish its purpose—all without cost to yourself. [3]ee a ee a ee ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Never were there more or easier means of trans- portation than in France. ‘The whole country is lit- erally gridironed with railroads; perhaps I should say cobwebbed with them, for their crossings and ramifications in every direction are as numerous as the spinnings of an industrious spider. Scarcely a town of any importance but is served by at least one line, sometimes more; and when you hunt up some little out-of-the-way spot you have unbounded ad- miration for the geniuses who construct those Chinese puzzles they call time-tables. Imagine every railway line, with every station on it, in the Atlantic coast States, for example, in a single fat little time-table, and you have some notion of the comprehensiveness of the French publications. They are for sale new every month at the station newsstands—the railways never give anything away but themselves. While the cost of travel per mile on these railways —not all of them are State lines, as in Italy—is high, and there is no such money-saving device as the Sicilian tessere, there are so many kinds of tickets that the leanest pocket can be suited and the most exacting demands as to itinerary satisfied. Baggage is costly, for the French rules allow only sixty-six pounds free for checking; but you may carry with you into the compartment all you can manage, to the discomfiture of others equally loaded down. Conditions have changed so since the war, it is advisable to avoid possible disappointments by secur- ing railroad tickets and detailed information from reliable tourist agents, especially when traversing the former war-zone. The principal agencies have [4]IMPRESSIONS arranged tours to meet every sort of requirement. Rightly chosen, these will be found both considerably less expensive than going alone, and in general satisfactory. Of course the romantic—and so the appropriate— way to enter France is by air, a way unimaginable before the war hastened aeroplane development. Today the great aérogare of France is at Le Bourget, about twelve kilometres to the northeast of the Place de la Concorde, on the Chantilly-Senlis road, with comfortable motors to bring the passengers—and their baggage—into the capital. More than eighty machines of the most luxurious types maintain a regular service between Paris, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw; and via air-connections, north as far as Helsingfors, east to Nijni Novgorod, south to Fez and Rabat, and west to Manchester. The airport has sixteen huge hang- ars, two monster garages, a handsome restaurant, customs offices, and a wonderful cement platform for “taking off” and alighting. Safe as travel is by land, the figures claim it is even safer by air. Cer- tainly there is nothing prosaic about it yet. These great machines carry not only passengers but ex- press packages ranging all the way from parts for automobiles, boots, gowns, and gold for the banks, to live chickens—the normally feathered variety and blooded animals. On the little local trains the office of conductor has been so far reduced to simplicity you rarely, if ever, know he is aboard. Tickets are punched before you step out upon the platform to take the train, [5]— —— ——~ ag nee in FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA and collected at the exit from the station where you leave the line. Between times, if so minded, you alight, check your baggage in the economical con- signe—two cents a day for any piece—tell the good- natured gatekeeper that you wish to see the town a little while before going on, if he doesn’t mind, show your ticket, and off you go. The courtesy and willingness of the employés is very distinguished, as a rule. The “flowing roads” are the delight of automo- bilist, bicyclist and footfarer alike, magnificent tree- bordered highways, the well-kept children of a gen- erous and paternal government, whose foresight and ample pocket have made them what they are, the standard by which all other roads are judged—and generally found wanting. On every route little can- tonniers’ huts contain the tools with which the labor- ers repair the damage done by fast automobiles, and the brooms with which they keep the way clean. It is an enlightening sight to see one of these rough- looking fellows, broom in hand, miles away from the nearest town, calmly sweeping a fifty-two-foot high- way already immaculate. Notwithstanding the number and size of the French rivers, there is little opportunity for travel by boat. But when such a chance does come, by all means take it. And then there are the canals, three thousand miles of them, with their huge iron boats brilliantly painted and spotlessly clean, tempting you to idle away the halcyon days gliding noiselessly and slow over their burnished mirror, between long rows of noble trees, an enormous natural picket fence. [6]IMPRESSIONS What a trip one could make from the Mediterranean to Toulouse by the Canal du Midi, with its hundred locks, its rise of 425 feet to its culminating point, and its fall of two hundred to the Garonne, or rather to the Canal Lateral, which goes on toward the Atlantic. The two things that have impressed me most about the Frenchman out of doors are his bicycle riding and his fishing. Every stream and canal is lined with men and boys, frequently with women and girls, too, line in hand. Considering the mercu- rial French temperament, I wondered how they stayed in one place so long, until I watched their method. Then I wondered how they ever caught anything. The line is never still a minute, but up and down, back and forth, goes the pole, in a ceaseless flicking of the water. This must be the safety-valve for their temperament. Another thing that astonished me is the size of the fish that satisfies them. Many a fish have I seen caught, in many a different stream, but never one more than three or four inches in length! As everybody fishes, so everybody rides a bicycle. But while the fishermen are amusing, the riders are both annoying and dangerous. They seem to drop down from the clear sky and spring up from the solid earth, without the formality of either bell or horn, and are really more trying to watch for than the automobiles. Not one in sight, you start across the street—and jump for your life before you get there! Let one knock you and himself down, and instead of apology you are much more likely to re- [7]Ca ee ee eee ee a rg a age FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ceive anathema—for not looking where the rider was going. The advent of the small, cheap automobile—Mon- sieur Citroen is the Gallic Ford—which is being turned out in rapidly increasing quantities, has added fresh jeopardy to life on the flowing road. In some localities, especially on Sundays and other jours des fétes, the flivver frangais seems to justify the bitter- ness of the American who in his wrath called it a curse. Its seeming omnipresence, however, is really not nearly so bad as it appears to jangled nerves. France is still too much occupied in striving to re- build her shattered industrial life and get back her economic balance to listen, as a nation, to the lure of the purring motor, and a great deal of the motoring, aside from the Army and other official traffic, will be found on examination to be the pleasuring of for- cigners, both resident and tourist. For the intendant motorist one peculiarity of the French law should be noted most carefully, since it bears out the ancient adage that though figures may never lie, lars will figure. This simple regulation provides that the French Government has the right to purchase on demand any foreign motor brought into France by its owner, at the exact figure he names as its value for the collection of customs duties! So a fine car worth four or five thousand dollars, solemnly declared by its owner to be worth only one, would be very likely to attract the atten- tion of the officials. It is a neat way of picking up good machines at low cost. The roads in general, at least so far as the main [8]IMPRESSIONS highways or routes nationales are concerned, were in very good condition by the summer of 1924. Many of the less important routes départmentales, OY, as we should put it, county roads, were also excellent, and in some cases magnificent stretches of concrete, arrow-straight and generous in every way as only French roads can be, have been constructed with the avowed purpose of stimulating motor traffic. On the other hand, the Cartes Tarides, which are among the finest motor-maps in the world, disclose the condition of many highways and byways as bad, especially in the former war zone and about Paris. The poor quality and high price of gasoline (essence, not pétrole), the occasional overcharge by innkeepers when they find one is motoring, and the obvious language difficulties in case of breakdowns, are un- deniable drawbacks. But taken by and large, the motor frees the visitor from the dirt, the arbitrary schedules and the grimness of the railroads. In place of the rail approach to a town through ac- cumulated architectural débris and backwash which lacks even picturesqueness, the motor whisks us at our own convenience by hitherto unperceived routes into fresh and stimulating perspectives which put the town forward in a light that hides under no bushel of glaring tracks or ghastly, barnlike, dingy stations which mask the personality beyond. And besides this, there inevitably string along the route those picture-book hill-towns and crumbling cha- teaux, those lovely, peaceful pastorals dreaming be- side willow-bordered streams, which invite a stop, if only for a moment’s enthusiasm. For the amateur [9]aa oe FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA a photographer, too, the motor opens the whole mar- velous pictorial treasure trove of France as no rail- way could ever do. For the motorist who intends shipping his car abroad from this country, the details of crating, in- ternational driving licenses, customs formalities, and the like should be investigated most carefully in per- son before starting. The Touring Club de France, one of the largest and most influential sporting or- ganizations in the world, accepts temporary member- ships. These at times prove of great value and con- venience, especially if one can forget the customary brusquerie of American manners and veil his impa- tience with a veneer of Gallic courtesy, which will go far toward smoothing out difficulties. The American driver has no difficulty with the rules of the road, since the French custom is the same as ours. Speed limits and motorcycle officers have not yet invaded this joyous land, but woe betide the stupid or care- less motorist who runs anyone down or makes mis- chief of any sort. The Latin law presumes an of- fender guilty until he establishes his innocence—and cows, carts, chickens and even people will persist in attempting suicide. Everybody remembers Mark Twain’s genial fool- ing, no doubt: “France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks, it is a fine country.” It is. And, as a matter of fact, it has every sort of climate under the sun, but most of the varieties are in the south, with its snow- capped mountains and semi-tropical shores. In the north the climate and temperature are very equable, [ 10 ]IMPRESSIONS soft and moist. It must be acknowledged that this moistness quite often takes the form of decided pre- cipitation—rain. And the evenness of temperature makes an overcoat in August not so out of place as it sounds. ‘These conditions, however, account for the riot of verdure and the greenness of the country. The greens are a revelation, and give one a wholly new sense of values in landscapes. Cultivation 1s a vital factor in these So-apparent values, whether in farming or the market gardening in which the French excel. A large family not only can live well, but save money, on one hectare, about two and a half acres, in the vicinity of almost any of the large cities. The most notable thing is one of these gardens is the glass cloche or bell, about eighteen inches high, and perhaps a foot in diameter, used as a sort of individual forcing frame. The queer-looking objects give one the uncanny sensation of watching some process of black art worked by the earth trolls in their ugly, grayish retorts. The women do their full share of the farming and gardening, but don’t expect to find them all in picturesque array. Of costumes there are compara- tively few left; the quaint and ancient dress of the Bretonnes is an exception, and on workdays this is sober enough. But on féte days! All the riches of rainbow and sunset seem to have been lavished on the women; and the men, if not butterflies, are at least moths of some pretension. I have also seen some handsome costumes in Dauphiné and Savoie, while the dress of the women of Arles, though fairly ascetic in its severity, is often considered the most [11]ee eg matey Se er — FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA charming of all, But there are myriad caps—the distinguishing mark of the French peasant woman— ranging from tiny bits of cambric no bigger than the palm of one’s hand to great, full-sailed, embroid- ered affairs with enormous bows and long, flying streamers. Read them aright, and you know at once the wearer’s town and province. And of one thing you may always be sure: the cap, of what- ever location, is invariably as fresh and inviting as though it had just come from the iron of an expert laundress. In France, the public fountain plays no such im- portant part in the life of the people as in Spain and Italy; instead, the café is the center of news. amusement and gossip for all classes, ages and sexes. There you may sit listening to the gossip for hours, as one at a show, while the harlequin, Life, performs all about and before you. What you hear and see depends upon the grade of café you patronize; but always it is full of color, full of spirit, essentially and typically French. Now a mother, busy with her fledglings, shocks you by giving her three-year-old sips of her apéritif, while the older children drink their beer like veterans; or some one behind you tells a piquant story, and everybody laughs; again, a statesman sits down next to a dirty salesman, and each has his pale green poison; newsboys, toy ped- dlers, matchgirls and beggars thread in and out among the tables, and the buzz of friendly conversa- tion is rudely punctuated by their cries and the staccato of the hurrying waiters, whose prodigies of liquid prestidigitation make you shudder for your [12]ie ap 98M A ere IMPRESSIONS safety. The street procession is endless: goats fol- lowing clouted pipers with shrill, miniature calliopes ; ladies hobbled in fashionable attire, gay hussars, ele- phantine dragons in glittering helmets and horsetail plumes, leather-legged artillerymen, pretty girls with bandboxes they could hide in, magnificent tandems of huge Percherons hauling great carts; placid, cream-colored oxen plodding on with loads of wine or stone, and right across their path a vegetable cart, pulled by a panting dog, a stolid woman, or by both. Cheap as ox-power is in France, dog-power is cheaper yet, and woman-power cheapest of all. Not only are the cafés on the street, but often at even the simplest little hotel or restaurant you dine on the sidewalk, behind a low hedge of box trees in tubs, with the pleasant street life spicing the meal agreeably. The people of each province are quite as charac- teristic as its physical features, and by rights every one should have its individual biographer and vol- ume. True, the old boundaries are gone, and France is divided into some eighty départements, which have no significance beyond convenience in governing them. But we still love to think of Old Provence, Old Tou- raine, Old Brittany, Old Normandy, and so on; and the salient fact remains that whether a man be of Reims or of Caen, of Aix or of Poitiers, and no mat- ter how patriotic he may be, he is even yet under his mask of Frenchness a Champenois or a Norman, a Provencal or a Poitevin, proud of the ancient prov- ince whose child he is. Even more engaging than the folk of to-day are the historic figures of other centuries, whose names [13]eee EN gE a ts teat FRANCE FROM SEA TO ‘SEA are on every tongue, who give rich suggestion to La Belle France. She is the very heart and center of gracious legend and fable, of moving song and music. ‘Troubadour ballads lilt from crag to crag among the mountain castles of Provence; ghosts of dead lords and ladies haunt the chateaux of Touraine, whose blood-stained walls harbor many a wild and eerie tale; Abélard and Bluebeard, Ste. Genévidve and Joan of Arc, historic figures all, but enmeshed in a mass of fable, stir the imagination to-day as they did of old; kings and commoners, saints and sinners, fiends and fairies, weave about all France a language of mystery and the supernatural so rich, so varied and inexhaustible that no Frenchman even has fathomed its depths. There is something for every one in France—sci- entist, holiday-maker, student, whatever or whoever he may be. Megalithic monuments mark the graves of a vanished people; great arenas, crumbling arches, aqueducts and walls breathe the spirit of Imperial Rome; architecture, the natural outgrowth of Nature and man’s needs, dots every province with princely palaces and princely temples to the faith; cities and villages almost impossibly lovely relieve the charm of the landscape with sculptured abruptness and effi- cacy. Throughout this country, so fertile in sugges- tion, so boundlessly rich in history that wakes the coolest blood to riot, the thoughtful traveler stands in speechless admiration, or murmurs, as did the Latin of eld: “Siste, viator, circwmspice.” [14]II “TmHE GOLDEN SANDS OF PICABDY” Y all means the happiest way I know to enter France is by that picturesque old fortress- seaport, Boulogne-sur-Mer, with its sur- roundings an English playground, stretching back from the “golden sands” and emerald sea up the chalk cliffs of ancient Picardy. If, on the other hand, you enter France through Cherbourg and Nor- mandy, practically all your fellow passengers, and other continual arrivals, are in a tremendous hurry for a sight of the grands boulevards of Paris, and the unrest of their haste poisons your enjoyment. But at Boulogne you find so many genial idlers, all happily busy playing, or doing nothing, that it 1m- mediately knocks the insidious little speed devil off your shoulder, and helps you to loiter gracefully yourself. Indeed, a whole summer could be spent in and about Boulogne without a single dull or wasted day, so full of beauty and interest are the city and its lovely environs. Either from the sea or from the cliffs above, the town and its harbor are most strik- ing; seen from the steamer, Boulogne is the most at- [15]rs gg ge FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA y tractive port in northern France. The cliffs that rise mistily in the distance at first sight slowly brighten into distinct shapes as you approach the enormous harbor works, with their basins for commerce and docking, their breakwaters and lighthouses. To the left rises the great white shape of the Casino; nearby, fashionable hostelries, with pretentious names and elaborate arrangements for comfort; and a trim little waterside park, whose flowers make a pleasing con- trast with the green of the sea and the gold of the sands. Beyond, and inward, stretches the town, on the east bank of the river Liane; on the west bank more town, with the great railroad stations and freight yards, hotels, warehouses, all the usual and familiar sights of a waterfront. Ambitious trolley- cars bustle hither and yon, so many ants full of industry and endeavor. Up the hills climbs the older city, until the square and massive Boulogne of old times is seen, or rather imagined, nestling secure within the thirteenth century walls no vandal has yet torn down in the name of Progress. Above them rise the dome of the Cathedral, the belfry, the roofs of the chateau; and, away off to one side, Napoleon’s crowning piece of egotism, the towering column to mark his “invasion” of England. But it is the port and the waterfront that claim our attention first: a tangle of masts and rigging along the quays; steamers coming and going, paint- ing the soft gray of the northern sky a sooty black; pilot-boats, with ochered sails and huge, painted numbers, breezing in or out; a great liner like our own idling at anchor in the farther bay; on the [ 16 |“GOLDEN SANDS TOF PLCARDY”’ shore, swart fishermen and quaintly bonneted fisher- women working about the boats; the pleasant aroma of tar and pitch and fresh fish, of the vivifying ozone of the sea. English and Italian and even Spanish mingle in your ears with the harsh Picard patois and with French. But during the war the language here was almost exclusively English. Boulogne was the main port of entry for British troops and supplies, and the activity which today seems so strenuous was magnified beyond belief. The port is a hive, buzzing and cosmopolitan, fourth in importance among French seaports, and preeminent as a focus of pas- sengers and commercial intercourse with the white cliffs of Albion. During 1917-18 German airmen bombed Boulogne heavily, but no permanent damage resulted, and the city’s activities remained unchecked. Today it is as gay and busy as ever. Just back of the quays is the fishmarket, and in the early morning, when the fishing boats land their scaly cargoes, it is well worth a visit for any one who does not mind the absence of violets and the presence of dripping floors and baskets. Public auctioneers quickly dispose of the fish in wholesale lots. Then some of these large lots are divided up among the retailers, many of them women, who sell by the piece or the pound. The market is bedlam while the large lots are being sold. Auctioneers “bark,” buyers shout back, rushing factors plunge to and fro with huge, dripping baskets. You must keep your wits about you, lest you meet disaster at hasty hands which forget that perhaps your clothes are not improved by being fishy. [17]me gg ggg a gp a ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA The Boulonnais fishermen form a community wholly apart from the rest of the people. They live in their own quarter, La Beurriére, dress—in part, at least—in their ancient costumes, talk mostly the Picard patois, flavored with special words, and have their own distinct customs and habits. Some of the streets leading up through their quarter remind one of Lord Byron’s famous anathema on Malta: “Adieu, ye curséd streets of stairs, How every one who mounts ye swears!” But as in Malta, foreigners need not walk up; they can drive comfortably around behind. French thrift and French industry have no finer exponents than these fisherfolk. There are no idlers here. The grandmothers do their part, as well as the strong and hearty, mending nets beside the doors. There is neither bitterness nor tragedy in their with- ered old faces, no trace of the heritage of all that follow the fortunes of the “‘toilers of the sea.” There is humor, kindliness, placid old age. Bravely they have weathered all their storms, and come so close to port that they have ceased to feel the mortal pang that wounds younger hearts. Some of the girls of the people are very pretty, and the quaint Boulonnaise cap adds a coquettish halo to the comely faces. But study the faces a little, and you can read in every line the tragedy of the sea, despite the smiling eyes and curving lips. It speaks well for the character of the sturdy Picard fisherfolk that instead of being dour and sad, they live with spirit, and enjoy a smile while they may. [18]“GOLDEN SANDS OF PICARDY”’ High on the cliff above the jetties stands a memo- rial chapel of lost fishermen, with a great crucifix beside the door in its walled yard. The men’s last reverential glance as they go out rises to this image in which they have such simple, childlike faith; their first greeting to the shore on their safe return salutes it. The grim gray walls burn warm with the love and devotion of the whole fishing population. The chapel interior is covered with sad little memorial tablets. ‘Lost at sea,” father and sons; grandsire and stripling as well as hearty manhood. Often a whole family gone at one blow in the black cold and storm. And the trembling women come here to pray and to weep and to remember— “For men must work and women must weep, And the sooner it’s over the sooner to sleep, And goodbye to the bar and its moaning.” Directly below is the other side of life, the lavishly splendid Casino, which includes the usual brilliant gaming-rooms, grand salon, theater seating over a thousand, gorgeous plate-glass restaurant in the Moorish style, great concert hall, and every con- venience and luxury. On the water side a beautiful semi-circular esplanade commands an entrancing prospect of the town and harbor, while on clear nights the lights of the dreaded South Foreland Shoals, across the Channel, wink on the horizon. Extensive gardens not only surround the Casino, but run along the Boulevard Ste. Beuve, making this whole section a huge floral promenade. And the sands themselves—the sands all along the coast of Picardy, [ 19 ]a a er ee a French writer bishop and a monk, “undoubtedly,’ declares, “for moral reasons.’’ The sculptors here at Reims who worked on the Cathedral attained a mastery of style that recalls the noblest works of antiquity, with the addition of an individuality the ancient works lacked. Indeed, “the last half of the century reached a climax which has been likened, not without justice, to the Golden Age of Pericles; in fact, the whole Middle Ages can offer nothing, in point of classical purity and eleva- tion, to compare with the finest among these works.”* The nave, now flooded with light because of the destruction of the marvelous rose-window and the removal of some of the other stained glass, is bold and free and airy. Both aisles were formerly hung with priceless tapestries. About the capitals of the massive octagonal pillars are wreaths of foliage, among which the caprice of the sculptor mixed human and chimerical figures. The nave and the north transept are in use at present, and when the choir, buried by the collapse of part of the vaulting, *Luebke: History of Art. [ oO |CHAMPAGNE AND CHURCHES and the weakened south transept are repaired, the whole structure will be opened again. Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s, splendid gift of a restoration fund is shortly to be put to use in bringing back all that human hands can of the original glory. One day, as we came into the Cathedral, the fif- teenth century organ was thundering softly high above in the majestic cafion of the roof. Before the choir stood a great catafalque, its candles flick- ering like fireflies against the somber funeral pall draped over the altar. The little knot of black-robed mourners, the very size and grandeur of the empty edifice, seemed somehow a personification of grief, a materialization of human sorrow that not even the strong, comforting voices of the priests in the choir, chanting Gregorian music, could allay. How differ- ent from the brilliant coronation scenes the Cathedral has witnessed so many times! In all those ceremonies a precious vessel, called the Sainte Ampoule, was used. According to tradi- tion, this ampulla, filled with inexhaustible holy oil, was brought from heaven by a dove for the corona- tion of Clovis. The Revolution shattered the miracu- lous receptacle, but somehow some one managed to preserve a fragment from which the oil had not entirely vanished. This was carefully enclosed in a new jeweled reliquary, and Charles X was anointed from it at his coronation in 1825. Freeman summed up its importance very well by pointing out that its use seemed a sort of patent of royalty, since the divine right of no king anointed from it was ever disputed, or even challenged. P70 I= et ge egg —_— a Ane TO egy: a ee ee ee ee eee eee eae aa TN eho il - — = gt ge ag FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA The treasury is unusually rich and complete for a French cathedral, when we remember the frantic pulaging of revolutionary days, the wanton destruc- tion by the blood-maddened people of precious relics of no intrinsic value, and even of immovable furni- ture and decorations. Though very few of the tapes- tries and other treasures of art have as yet been put back into their accustomed places, most of them es- caped harm. The Cathedral, accordingly, has con- siderable extremely valuable jewelry and goldsmith’s work of an unusual character, among other notable pieces the so-called Chalice of St. Rémi, solid gold twelfth century work, richly encrusted with jewels and enamels. No matter where one looked at the great structure, inside or out, there was more than enough of beauty. A whole vivid little world of it ran in and about the three lofty galleries above the walls close under the edge of the now destroyed oak and lead roof: finials, crockets, cariatides, medallions, delicate httle spires and turrets and dormers. Everywhere lean old gar- goyles of amazing fierceness and expression thrust their eager necks far out to carry away the rain from the walls—weird, half-imaginative, half-real monsters overflowing with individualism and spirit. And while the destruction was thundering on, what of the grotesque chimeras that used to sit upon the topmost balustrade of the apse, peering out over the city? They always seemed to me, as I studied them day after day, a sort of elfin watchdogs, guar- dians of the sacred fane who smiled from their lofty perches so long as one behaved, but who would rend [72]CHAMPAGNE AND CHURCHES one in pieces did he so much as lay a finger upon their precious charge. My fancy was all wrong! They not only never rent any of the restorers, but they did not exercise a single spell against the deep- mouthed guns thundering at them from distant Bri- mont and Nogent l’Abbesse. Perhaps I regarded them too seriously. Perhaps, after all, they were only watching for the bringing in of the grapes, for wine has always been very close to the Gallic heart, and they were as Gallic as anything in all the length and breadth of France.eae eee es ree a ae A tee I ee Og ae ae aa al il Seg ee ee ~~ VII THE “ENFANTS-PERDUS’ —ALSACE-LORRAINE T was not until 1917 that I came to some under- standing of the sentimental attachment in which Alsace and Lorraine, those lovely “lost chil- dren” of La Belle France, were held by their mother- country from that calamitous day at Frankfort— May 10, 1871—when Bismarck took them bodily, as part of Germany’s spoil of war. Bismarck himself did not understand what he was doing for the Ger- many of the future when he secured the vast timber and potash resources of Alsace, the enormous riches of Lorraine in coal and iron. He, more than any other individual, made possible the supreme effort of Germany in the World War by providing her, within her own borders, all the coal for fuel, the iron for munitions, the potash for industrial and agri- cultural purposes she could use. Aside from this tremendous sentimental and eco- nomic importance to France, Alsace and Lorraine brought back into the Republican fold a region of marvelous, if at times somewhat sombre beauty, [ 74 ]THE “ENFANTS-PERDUS’—ALSACE-LORRAINE though Lorraine, even including Metz, has few lures for the traveler who has already seen the beauties of her southern sister. From Paris it is a day’s ride by whichever way one goes to the Vosges Mountains. On the longest and most southerly route, the train runs through one of the most beautiful and fruitful regions of central France, striking first southward to Mélun, then eastward to Troyes, the home of “Troy” meas- ures of weight, and one of the most fascinating of all French cities to the student of architecture and archaeology. The city is under-run and traversed by the Seine, but the principal waterway is the im- portant Canal de la Haute-Seine, which divides the western, or commercial, section from the older city, which was originally settled, like Paris itself, on an island. Chaumont, farther east, is interesting only as the headquarters of the American army under General John J. Pershing. To the southeast, Langres hides coyly within its great ramparts. Without a guidebook one would hardly suspect these mighty walls to be largely of modern construction ; but the authorities declare they date, with the excep- tion of the remarkable fifteenth and seventeenth cen- tury towers, from the middle of the last century. Vésoul gives a glimpse of a huge statue of the Virgin atop the hill of La Motte directly above the town. Some thirty miles farther on the train begins to ascend the gentle lower slopes of the Vosges, and finally reaches Belfort, known as the “Heroic” from its defense in 1870, commemorated by the Lion, 72 [75]ane ey Tenens gg FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA feet long and 36 feet high, carved upon the bald rock just below the citadel of the fortress, by Bartholdi the Alsatian sculptor, a native of Colmar. If one would have the fullest appreciation of the misty beauty and charm of the Vosges, there can be no better starting point than Belfort. Safe and commodious motor-coaches of the “Route d’Alsace” cover all the regained territory not served by rail lines, and give the visitor an excellent idea of the region. The Route Joffre, which since the war has been added officially to the national roadway system, was planned with characteristic French foresight, not only as a highway for war purposes, but as a scenic route to encourage motor travel afterwards. Hewn and carved laboriously from sticky red clay and shale, it climbs in zigzags at times so sharp one wonders the guns ever mounted it. Every grade bears its plainly lettered signpost—“‘18 Pour Cent,” “20 Pour Cent,” and in one place the distinctly startling “28 Pour Cent.” Skimming over its im- proved surface today, with the time to enjoy to the full the marvelous views on every hand, affords a distinctly different sensation from the one experi- enced by those who traversed it as quickly as possible while the war was in progress. Though none of the peaks of the Vosges are lofty, they are many of them abrupt and the scenery is stimulating to a high degree. From Belfort north- ward the highway up to Massemiinster stretches away like a broad white ribbon between fields bril- hantly green or golden in summer. At Giromagny, some tricksy elf seems to have taken French houses [761THE “ENFANTS-PERDUS”—ALSACE-LORRAINE — and given them a fantastically humorous twist. The dull gleam of their red tiles and the clambering vines that spray facades and sides with brilliant flowers are Gallic enough. But there is a greater vivacity, a greater abandon to the joie de vivre as the blossoms frolic all over little outbuildings and massive low stone walls, splash up over a bridge here and scramble down a little bluff yonder. Everything is small, every- thing has a strong earthy personality, and the snubbed gables of the houses themselves suggest the curious people who inhabit them. Im the front yards of many of the houses spreading old trees give distinctly the effect of monstrous umbrellas before the doors. From Giromagny the road twists and winds and fairly leaps through the exquisite valley of the Rose Montoise and then, still upward, along the more picturesque and larger valley of the Sewen to the village of that name, as delightful and homey an Alsatian town as could be imagined, sprawled across the banks of its clear emerald torrent. Sunny-headed children with light blue eyes and thick tongues speak a weird patois difficult to understand, and the bril- liant Alsatian costume adds greatly to the attrac- tiveness of the women and girls. In the tight black velvet, black-laced bodice over a snowy waist, with scarlet short skirt, white stockings and a huge black bow in the hair, they make a picture that lights up their surroundings vividly. Towns with all but unpronounceable names nestle snugly in dense forests, invisible until one is fairly upon them, and then reveal themselves as lovely as [77]Ne gg: ~~ ee Ol gg alana adenechate ee ne a ee been ——— ee oe a ge Ved —_ ee ee eee ae ge ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA any painter’s conception: Dolleren—green and calm as a philosopher’s dream—Weegschied, Kirschberg, Niederbruch! And then happy Massemiinster, or, as the French now call it, Massevaux. It is a typical Alsatian town, with a somewhat Spanish effect of a big, earth-floored central square in the midst of which rise a monument and a fountain. The shops thrust out their signs over the scrupulously clean streets at right-angles to the walls, and woe betide the unlucky visitor who happens to be taller than he should! Many of these signboards silhouette red bears and golden rising suns and snowy horses against the tender blue of the Alsatian sky. In the shops one finds an amazing jumble, typical of the country store everywhere, but with this dif- ference from the stores in France, that almost every- where here American goods seem to be favored, and wherever possible the people are buying American machines and tools and oddments of all kinds— Americans occupy a very warm spot in Alsatian hearts. Alsatian thrift has, of course, a part in this. Leading up to Hartmannswillerkopf and to the higher Mulkenrein—which commands a view of the trenches on mountain and plain—the Route Joffre branches away from the main roads and becomes 2 hair-raising adventure in itself, sheer cliffs on one side, sheer precipices on the other, until it stops— or did during the War—on the shaggy flanks of the Stauffen. From the rondpoint, or halting-place for motors, one had to go afoot through the forest to reach the Mulkenrein’s crest. Directly below, across [78]arvels, ts m mice It ye are with ~ a ~ ~ _ picture loveliest in the Grenobleee ee Se a ee ee ee ea ee ad aes eo! Ree SSF v cess Se see Ce. ve ¢ = ev ee ST: tS ves. « € aps of rose-le isse amid great he c *¢ rk — _ — ” — v =o me ~ — - . ictory The perfume fi rTHE “ENFANTS-PERDUS”—ALSACE-LORRAINE the narrow valley, rises “Hartmann,” as the French often abbreviate the mountain’s name. The fight- ing here was ferocious—equal on a small scale to the struggle about Verdun. The summit of the hill, criss-crossed by trenches and tumbled about by the shellfire of both Armies, is monumented by the one bare pine stump which is all that remains of its once dense forests. It flings its mute arm to heaven in despair and memory, while at its feet lie the shattered limbs and trunks of the forest that surrounded it before “Furious Frank and fiery Hun” came to death-grips there. Comparatively little of Alsace, however, was devastated by fighting. The Germans naturally did not wish to smash up what they con- sidered theirs, and the French were equally reluctant to destroy what they knew was to become theirs again. BE YO: ND HE somewhat sentimental attitude Americans have maintained for many years toward France has, since the conclusion of the World War, crystallized into something much more definite and solid. ‘The two main reasons are the seventy-five thousand American soldiers who died on French soil, and the epochal change in our foreign relations. In a travel book there is neither the space nor the opportunity for a detailed account of what we did: that is pure history. Nor are we concerned with the effects of our parting with the past upon either the United States or France. But because of what has happened every live American visitor is awake to the fresh romance breathed by war upon a part of France whose rich beauty and varied com- pulsions stir him to depths of emotion and a keen, attentive participation in many engaging features previously, perhaps, passed unnoticed. The field of the American military operations, a beautiful, partly wooded, rolling plain, is not only historic ground and the scene of innumerable battles in the distant past, but it is also rubricked with ex- quisite little chateaux and charming towns full of [ 84 ]CHATEAU-THIERR Yi AND “BEY OND atmosphere: here a lonely fragment of some feudal castle; there a typical, stone-walled, aloof old farm with its steaming midden close to the house-door ; yonder a slender, graceful spire etched above the trees and suggesting quaint old stone reredos and time-blackened pulpit or stalls. Almost twelve hundred years ago, when Paris was little more than a fortress with a huddle of houses clinging about its skirts, Charles-the-Hammer built a mighty castle for the Frankish King Thierry IV on a brusque hill dominating the river Marne, some sixty miles east of the capital. Chateau-Thierry, as it was called, was a storm-centre from its birth. After King Thierry’s time it was held by the power- ful Counts of Champagne, and went through siege after siege in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Napoleon himself adding a page to its bloody history when in 1814 he crushed the Russo-German armies under von Bliicher in its vicin- ity. Of the original castle not much was left within the old outer walls, now the border of a pleasant little park, when in July of 1918 the American troops in the second Battle of the Marne, under Marshal Foch’s high-command, threw the enemy back and saved Paris from danger. The Americans were un- tried. Yet they passed triumphantly through the ruthless street fighting with the coolness and courage of veterans. Their marksmanship was astonishing. Their manoeuvring indicated the high intelligence and initiative no one but ourselves believed they could display. The present bridge across the Marne, connecting [ 85 ]—=5 aa gal a re = I na As eee Aten s pete mines matt Tp mati lg came iit Seer gg gales a ec tg ee = PRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA the railroad station suburb and the city proper, was a graceful American gift, replacing the old one blown up in the fighting of 1914. There is little of interest in the architecture of the place, and the scars of bombardment and destruction are healing fast. About seven miles away, however, just outside the little town of Bourésches, is the still inspiring and battle-mutilated remainder of the famous Belleau Wood, renamed by the French the “Marine Brigade Woods” in honor of the Fourth American, or Ma- rine, Brigade, which did such gallant service there. Merely to look at those tree stumps and the broken, rocky ground, is to see again the ferocity of the those justly feared combat in which the Marines “Devil Dogs” the Germans respected so highly— peeled off their coats, rolled up their khaki sleeves and finished their victory with the bayonet. In the Meuse-Argonne battleground name after name of the old towns has a familiar ring to Ameri- can ears which heard them so often during 1918 and after—Buzancy; Montfaucon; Grandpré of the thirteenth century church with its splendid black marble tomb seriously damaged when “les Yanks” battered their way up through this northern en- trance of the Argonne, cut by the river Aire. The Argonne is a high, wooded tableland more than forty miles long and eight or ten wide, its eastern edge a line of ragged bluffs above the lower plain of the Barre and the gorge of the Aire. Five main roads traverse the plateau, which is cut up by innumerable little valleys and ravines. Part of it is heavily wooded and matted with underbrush, which [ 86 |CHATEAU-THIERRY AND BEYOND made the fighting unusually difficult and desperate in character. It is a country of charming old towns and abrupt little hills, dotted with the crumbling ruins of feudal castles—nothing of importance, but much that overflows with beauty and atmosphere. On the western edge of the Forest is the pictur- esque old fortress town of Ste. Menehould, regarded in ancient times as the capital of the Argonne region. During the war it was hammered severely, but to-day makes an excellent headquarters for a visit to the battlefield. The original town, still known as “the Chateau,” crowns a height overlooking the Aisne. In the lower may still be seen the old Post Office where Louis XVI, “Citizen Capet,” and luckless Queen Marie Antoinette, were apprehended by chance —Louis’ curiosity—on their flight in 1791, and re- and the thirsty guillotine. turned to Paris On the slopes of the loftiest hill in this region, the village of Clermont affords a remarkable view of both the Verdun and Argonne fields. Clermont was almost completely battered out of existence during the fighting, but the sixteenth century church—if one can turn, in the presence of such a view, from the thought of war to architecture—of St. Didier, still keeps its two Renaissance portals, which happily escaped the shells. Another feature intact among the ruins is the “Entombment” in the Pilgrims’ Chapel of Ste. Anne, the figures of which are a full life-size. It was in late September of 1918 that American troops began the terrific battle of the Meuse-Ar- gonne, by far the greatest action in which we had [ 87 ]Re, eg i ti ow ce ee a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA | ever engaged. Already, in the Cotes de Meuse and the Woévre, they had attacked both sides of the men- acing St. Mihiel Salient—with French troops at the point—smashed it in two days, and liberated more than two hundred square miles of captured territory. Except for St. Mihiel (St. Michael) itself, none of the towns within the huge triangle are of importance, but the former’s fame is secure as the birthplace of Ligier-Richier the sculptor and his descendants, who formed the St. Mihiel School of sculpture. Though the town was damaged in the fighting, the church of St. Etienne, a florid Gothic structure dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, preserves Ligier-Richier’s magnificent ‘Entombment,” with thirteen remarkable statues, and a handsome Renais- sance reredos. During the war the Germans, in dire need of bronze for the bands of their shells, removed the statue of the sculptor from the square bearing his name. When the great offensive began, with characteristic American dash a group of hills commanding the left bank of the Meuse—the first objective—was gained in less than two days. Then the real fighting began, desperate struggling through the woods, over little hills, down into gullies and up again, where every hollow concealed a quick death or at least a desperate hazard. Into this difficult terrain General Pershing —twenty-two years ago in the Philippines I knew and respected a Captain John J. Pershing as an ex- cellent fighter, a strict disciplinarian and a man of all-around ability, but had no thought of his future renown—threw his citizen Army. It was a daring, [8&8]CHATEA U-THIERRY AND BEYOND typically American idea, a typical American force such as has been our weapon in all of our wars: the men many of them virgin to fire, neither trained to- gether as an army nor accustomed to fighting to- gether as a unit; many of the officers entirely un- tried. The line was stiffened where weakest, and com- manded, by veteran professional soldiers. ‘The men, hating the bloody task and savagely determined to get through with it as thoroughly and quickly as only men of intelligence and spirit could, proved everything America expected of them, and often had to be restrained rather than urged ahead. The world knows the result, but it will never ap- preciate the hideousness of that titanic struggle where heroism was commonplace, where the smallest successes cost agonizing effort, and where captured ground was measured in blood. Armistice Day found our lines clear east of the Meuse, the enemy in retreat before them, and only the cessation of hostilities to prevent the investment of Metz itself, with the promise of an even greater victory. All this territory is historic ground, already sanctified by blood. To the northwest, Sedan made up for the débacle of forty-eight years previous, when the Ger- mans surrounded and forced the surrender of not only 87,000 Frenchmen, but of their Field Marshal, MacMahon, and of the Emperor Napoleon III him- self. Montmédy, farther southeast along the Ameri- can lines, saw our grimy gunners regretfully firing the last shots of the war when the whistle blew at eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11, 1918. When the final lists were compiled, it was found [ 80]ee I ay =——— ~ i eee ete FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ore eee ee —_oe oye ae re eye batiRt Ral ipree er sege Se SENT pe ee 2 ~ _— tit —— “i ne ee i citi star celal pe : Ne eg ee that our total casualties numbered 119,000, or roughly, one man killed, wounded or missing out of every six engaged. That alone indicates the ferocity of the struggle and the spirit with which the Ameri- cans carried themselves. The twenty thousand pris- oners and eight hundred guns captured made a glorious item to add to the untarnished record of the American arms. Bar-le-Duc, once capital of the feudal Duchy of Bar, the town of preserves and wine, poises like a jewel in a green-gold setting above the murmuring current of the Ornain, with steep and shaggy hills flanking it on both sides and made spiky here and there by the short poles of spreading vineyards. The river cuts through the newer industrial section, while iwo canals belt it on the southwest at the lower edge of the old town, and along its northeastern boundary. Beyond the former, the Ville Haute is reached by flights of steep steps and streets that seem to mount almost straight up. The church of St. Pierre con- tains one of the most astounding monuments in France, the tomb of René de Chalon, Prince of Orange, executed by Ligier-Richier. The monument is too ghastly for description, but it 1s well worth seeing, the sculptor having literally fulfilled the last wish of the Prince—that his body be shown in a state of decomposition. All around Bar-le-Duc are small towns and vil- lages of interest, several with splendid old castles. The thirteenth-seventeenth century church at Ligny- en-Barrois contains a remarkable figure of the Ma- [ 90 ]CHATEA U-THIE RRY AND BEWON D donna painted on silk, while Grand—the Gallic suc- cessor of Roman Granum—possesses an interesting Roman mosaic pavement, and not far off is a wood in which Roman sculptures are numerous and ancient stone coffins protrude from the ground. The chief feature of interest today, however, is neither castle nor antiquities, but a road—the blood-soaked “Sacra Via”. This long route of agony runs to Verdun by way of Souilly, where Generals Pétain and Nivelle conducted their magnificent defense in 1916, and two years later Gen. Pershing directed the Meuse-Ar- gonne offensive. Standing upon it, years after the last gun spoke, if you have a spark of imagination, you can picture the two streams which flowed unceasingly over the forty-two miles of its battered surface: the fresh troops going up into action, the supplies and am- munition and all the impedimenta of modern war moving toward the ghastly red front; the ambu- lances with their groaning, or silent, loads, the walk- ing-wounded, the shattered guns and limbers, the flotsam and jetsam of combat drifting painfully back. And here and there, weaving in and out among this crawling mass, the staff cars and dispatch-riders furiously speeding to and fro, with repair gangs toil- ing grimly in the exposed stretches to make passable the great pits torn out by exploding shells. During the spring of 1916, when the Crown Prince’s offen- sive was at its most furious pitch, more than two thousand trucks alone passed over the road during each twenty-four hours. Verdun itself, at the northeastern end of the Sacred for]7” i ll ee a en ne re ——— ———— a ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA aa Way, was the goal the Germans failed to win after the expenditure of more than four hundred thousand killed and twice as many wounded. The old town, with its historic citadel and bastioned fortifications, lying across the canalised river Meuse, was roughly handled but not destroyed. The Cathedral of Notre Dame lost its roof, but in the main stood intact, while the Citadel, though the especial target of the Germans because its lone tower was used as a wireless station, was so solid and massive in construction that both military conferences and public ceremonies were held in its deep vaults and behind its thick walls with perfect safety. Up on the hill, in the old town, some of the war ruins are still visible, but below, along the river and on the level ground, almost everything is rebuilt much in the manner of an American subdivision development, except that the work has been done more solidly, with brick, stone and concrete, as though Verdun were still—which it is not—a vital border fortress, and thus possessed of a highly im- portant reason for being. The sightseer, however, will find great interest in a tour of the battlefield to the north and east of the city, where the grandeur of utter desolation is beyond description, and the forests testify to their previous existence only by blackened stumps. Leaving the city by the former main approach to the front, the Faubourg Payé, the first evidence of war is the mili- tary cemetery in which seven of the eight selected Unknown Soldiers are buried, one from each sector of the long battle-line, the eighth lying beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. One fort after another [92CHA TEA U-THILE RR yA ND Eh YiON D offers its glorious testimony for the defense: Vaux, Souville—nearest the city, where the attack was halted—and Douaumont, most famous of all, the focus of the main attack, unbelievably shattered and contorted. Not far away will rise the enormous concrete and stone dyke of the Ossuaire de Douaumont, to be de- voted entirely to the unknown dead who fell in the fifty-two sectors of this terrible field. Flung out in a long, low line, it will be a symbol of the living dyke the heroic defenders of Verdun interposed between France and the enemy. The soaring central shaft will burn every night with the funeral taper the dead could not have upon the “field of honor.” Marshal Pétain said with deep emotion when he saw the plans and model: ‘‘It is as simple and sober as the soldier- soul; vast and noble as the grandeur of sacrifice; im- perishable as the memory of these heroes of Verdun.” The interior is to be as simple and heroic as the exterior. Down the vast arched gallery will be gath- ered the coffins, each alveole holding two. As the French put it, they are to be reunited in death two- by-two to signify ‘“‘that comradeship which has always reigned among our soldiers even to the death during the war, and which was so important a factor of both the Army morale and of its victory.” The largest stones of the pillars are offered to families, parishes, societies, military groups and others upon subscriptions of five hundred francs, and each stone so paid for will be engraved with the names of the givers’ dead. All the smaller stones are offered at two hundred francs each for the same purpose. In [93 ]ee ey aren ee LO ae — get gag FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA this way it is hoped to swell the general fund being collected for the erection of the building, which will be the “crown of the great military cemetery.” It is also planned to have three chapels within, Catho- lic, Protestant and Jewish, with chaplains attached, to provide services and comfort for those of every faith. The problem of affording a temporary resting- place for the remains of the unknown heroes was met by the construction of a barrack-like wooden build- ing. As we enter it, we come first into a small room in whose walls are a series of half a dozen or so stereoscopic lenses. To look through these is to see the fullest measure of horror war provides: they show the trenches and forts of Verdun while the bat- tle was going on, and before the dead and wounded had been removed. Here a dozen or more men lie piled on top of one another in hideous contortions ; yonder a leg thrusts from the sidewall of the trench at a wild angle; headless bodies are plainly visible in clear perspective; a beseeching hand reaches up out of the mud, vainly grasping at life. Beginning at No. 1 lens, the views grow more horrible as the series progresses. Beyond this chamber is the main hall, where the coffins thus far gathered are heaped upon one another, with an altar at the farther end. The great tragedy of Verdun lay in the impossibility of identifying most of the killed. So terrible was the conflict that of the four hundred thousand who fell, only one-fourth could be recognized. ‘They are buried elsewhere. Of the others, not a single entire skeleton has been recovered. [ 94]CHA TE AU-THIERRY AND BEY OND Close beside the main road, in the Ravin de la Dame, is the Tranchée des Baionettes, where 170 French soldiers, rifles on their shoulders, bayonets fixed, were buried alive in their trench. The explo- sion gave them not only sepulture but immortal fame. Nothing could be done by their comrades, in the heat of a Satanic combat, to dig them out. So they suf- focated. To this day they stand firmly there, their rifle-muzzles and bayonets protruding above the piti- less earth which inhumed them years ago. But an American gift has reared above them a solid concrete shelter or roof, close to the ground, to keep off the corrosion of rain and storm, and one has to stoop low to see that rigid, ragged line of steel which better than anything else gives visible expression to the war cry of Verdun—Ils ne passeront pas!” “They shall not pass!” More than half way back to Paris, between Sézanne and La Fére-Champenoise, is another immortal spot where “they” did not pass, and where Ferdinand Foch by a single stroke emerged from among his fellow-commanders into the realm of greatness. My first intimate impression of the war was gained there in September of 1917, on the third anniversary of the initial Battle of the Marne. Dignitaries and cor- respondents—myself among them—and the country folk from miles around gathered upon an eminence crowned by the shell-split and battered little Chateau de Mondemont whose terrace overlooks the vast clay- pits of the Marshes of St. Gond. I stood within a few feet of General Foch, who had the President of the Republic and the Cabinet on one side, Marshal Joffre fos]pene. _ onde ~ i we —— == yo Ot —— FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA on the other, and saw the battle unroll at my feet. The General, a pleasant, grey-haired, mild-mannered little man anything but military-looking—curiously enough, all the greater French leaders I have seen, from “Papa” Joffre down, seemed to me to be un- usually simple, kindly and human, without a particle of the grim, martial ostentation we think of as the sign of the soldier—had not yet arrived at his full fame or his Marshal’s seven stars. Map in hand, he explained with a quiet vividness I have never heard excelled, the part his troops played in the titanic fight whose objective was Paris. Into his keen blue eyes as he talked crept a flame which belied the almost expressionless tones in which he described the Marshes at our feet, and told how he had crowded the Kronprinz’s own showy Regiment, the Death’s Head Hussars, among other thousands, to their engulfing fate in the sticky swamp. Behind us, in the main salon of the Chateau, had been the headquarters whence the General had directed at least a part of the operations. Whether or not the little mansion has been restored and is again a home, does not matter. It is the vivid panorama which counts as the setting of an historical event of world-import- ance: the magnificent sweep of the fine, partly wooded hills, the thick, lush green of the wide-spreading swamps, the vistas of beauty to be met at every turn. I see them all each time I glance at the black pennon with the white Death’s Head and Squadron number, I got from a friend of the poilu who captured the trophy that memorable day in 1914. [ 96 |IX THE GOLDEN SDE () N to the south of Champagne is that other vinous district, Burgundy, where the wine is as heavy and rich and red as the cham- pagne is light and golden and sparkling. It was here that both of the great monastic houses that influenced the growth of the Romanesque so pro- foundly, flourished—Cluny and Citeaux. And during the twelfth century the Burgundian school of archi- tecture was far in advance of all others, not only in the size and magnificence of its buildings, but in progress in design, the sculptors turning from the conventional and stereotyped patterns of classic art to Nature for their models. The Burgundians, having invaded Gaul some fifty years earlier than the Franks, were already Christians when the latter came down to Amiens, and furnished Clovis with a Christian princess—Clotilde—to be his queen and guiding star. One good turn deserves another, and the savage Frank repaid his queen’s province by promptly reducing it to the position of a subject kingdom. ‘The only difficulty was that Burgundy [97 Ja FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA refused to stay put. Now a province, again a king- dom by itself, it was always puissant and active, always a thorn in the Frankish side; and in that tempestuous period when the feudal system was in its death throes, we find the ambitious Dukes of Burgundy ready to sacrifice not only the French crown, but the very French nation itself, to gain their personal ends. Though they had no national feeling, these dukes did care mightily for their duchy, which they were trying to develop into a kingdom. It was always a land of prosperity and plenty; it is to-day, to such an extent that the département cut right out of the heart of Old Burgundy is called the Cote d’Or, the Golden Side, rich in grain and wine. The city of Dijon is picturesquely situated at the foot of the hills of the Golden Side, in a splendidly watered plain, on two rivers and a canal which might well, in time of stress, help out the eight great forts surrounding it in defending the citizens. It became the capital of the duchy early in the eleventh century, but was not prominent until the latter part of the fourteenth, under its ambitious Dukes Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. And what is this “City of Glori- ous Dukes” most famous for now? Mustard and gingerbread! The mustard is not even grown there, but only mixed. As to the gingerbread—every one to his taste! There is the usual contrast of wide, new streets and old, narrow ones jammed with quaint and unusual houses of another era and other requirements. Many [ 98 ]THE GOLDEN SIDE of them are quite short; the others extraordinarily crooked, with a superabundance of names. It is highly disconcerting to find half a dozen names for one street ; even more so to find it wabbling in almost as many directions, twisting and turning like the trail of some hunted animal. Perhaps, indeed, that is what many of these old streets are. In the center of the city is the Palais des htats— House of Parliament—built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries around the scanty remains of the ducal palace—a tower or two, the kitchen, and a few other rooms. The building, or rather buildings, are now used as the Hodtel de Ville, Post Office and Museum, which contains one of the finest provincial collections in the country. The gems of the collec- tion are the tombs, carefully restored since the Revo- lution, of two of the great dukes, Philip the Bold and his son, John the Fearless, which stand in the Salle des Gardes. The older one, dating from 1414, is the finer of the two; both are built of black marble and alabaster, relieved by colors and gilding. In the niches of the fine Gothic arcades about them are statuettes of mourning ecclesiastics, exquisitely sculp- tured and disposed. From the Palais des tats the Place d’Armes spreads away in a huge, walled semicircle that gives one the sense of being in the bastion of some gigantic fort, though the walls all around are pierced by the doors and windows of the shops that abut upon it, and by two streets which run through it near the palace. The illusion is heightened by the roofs of the other houses behind, showing above the wall, and [99 Jee _ FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA two other streets driven through in narrow archways. I have never seen anything else like it. Dijon is rich in old houses dating from the Renais- sance, with charming facades, wooden fronts for arti- sans and stone for rich bourgeois. The work, how- ever, is heavy and elaborate, for the Burgundians, in all periods, have been noted for their love of super- abundant decoration for exteriors. The most com- plete of the facades of the French Renaissance is that of the church of St. Michel. The present Cathedral of St. Bénigne dates from the latter part of the thirteenth century. It is a weird-looking structure, gray and forbidding of walls, kaleidoscopic of roofs, the covering ranging from stone and slate to bright, multi-colored tiles. In style, St. Bénigne is Gothic, but its plan is very like that of the later Romano-Byzantine churches. Here we find the narthex, or vestibule, an ante-church sometimes provided for the catechumens—believers not yet baptized. The most remarkable church, however, is Notre Dame, which M. Viollet-le-Duc called “‘the master- piece of the Burgundian school of the thirteenth cen- tury.” Nothing you may have read quite prepares you for the extraordinary ecclesiastical zoo that stares down at you from the facade. Immense gar- goyles that are more than gargoyles, chimeras and other unholy dream-beasts glare and grin, and lean far out with craning necks, in rows of seventeen, from rich and splendid friezes on each of the two arcaded stories above the fine triple porch. Every one of these monsters is different, and every one so [ 100 |THE GOLDEN SIDE overflowing with life and expression that you forget everything else in Dijon to stand, staring and won- dering, below them. Apparently the architects ex- pended their energies fully upon this fagade, for the interior presents little of interest beyond its tech- nical excellences. But you forget that, and turn again for one last, cheering, regretful glance at these swarming eccleciastical hobgoblins as you go away. They and the mustard make up your happiest memo- ries of the Burgundian capital. South from Dijon we pass through the heart of the Cote d’Or, where we find the historic names we recognize on every side are those familiar to us only on wine cards. It is as though the whole long list had developed from bottles into towns, and sprung into life here. Within the past thirty years or so the phylloxera has necessitated the practical replanting of all the Burgundian vineyards. As in Spain, American vines were chosen, many of them from California. So it is the soil and the climate, not the vine, that makes the wine. The center of this fertile wine district 1s Beaune. It is particularly satisfying in any country to go exploring the obscure, unimportant little cities of which you know almost nothing but the names. In the more important places, if you choose, you can usually take a book, written in your own language, and easily follow up every scrap of historic, scenic or architectural interest that amounts to anything. But in the byways, where you have to puzzle it all out bit by bit as you go along with the aid of the natives you meet, most often in the humblest walks [ 101 ]ee Ciena is Tl ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA of life, you have almost the joy of the true discoverer. The medieval aspect of Beaune—houses with quaint turrets and stair-towers, images and curious balconies—lends the old town a peculiar charm. Long ago, with the exception of a few scattered frag- ments, its walls gave way to pleasant, tree-lined boulevards. 'The moat, however, has not been filled up, and mighty-muscled laundresses use it as a wash- tub, with very picturesque effect. You wonder if they are not the ones who battered down the walls. The old church of Notre Dame has a remarkable fourteenth century porch, or vast exterior narthex, like another smaller but unwalled church, surmounted by a handsome gallery, the finest of its type, and very like that of St. Germain |’Auxerrois in Paris. Beaune’s greatest hostage to fame, however, is no church, but the ancient Hostel Dieu, or Hospital of St. Esprit, which Dom Nicolas Rolin, the Chancellor of Burgundy, founded in 1443. The street exterior, of grayish-brown masonry, with small, square, barred windows, a high-pitched slate roof, and a series of elegant and graceful pinnacles and little flag-vanes of gilded lead, suggests an ancient chateau. Over the door, a small, high-pitched canopy, blue-ceiled and gold-starred, with fine leaden finials and penden- tives, testifies perfectly to the ideal of beauty as well as usefulness that moved men in the fifteenth cen- tury; and the iron knocker—the original one—is a little Gothic frame, up which a lizard, the knocker proper, is pursuing a fly. The simple exterior gives no hint of the beauty of the interior courtyard,:in Flemish-Gothic, with [ 102 |THE GOLDEN SIDE elaborate wooden pignons and covered galleries. In one corner of the court is a deep well with a beauti- ful old Flemish iron frame, from which dangles the ancient iron bucket. It is more like a king’s lodge than a charity hospital. M. Nicolas, as Philip the Good’s chancellor, had large ideas regarding money, and his aim was that each patient should enjoy, while in the Hostel, everything an income of a thousand divres each could provide. In the old days only the daughters of noble or wealthy families were sisters here; but that is not the case with the devoted band of nuns who give their lives to the service of the poor to-day. They have, however, retained their fifteenth century cos- tumes—white in summer and blue in winter. They fit across the court, and up and down the galleries, silent, grave, story-book princesses full of good works and practical tenderness. Their quaint, full skirts and coifs strike a pleasant note of harmony against the satisfying background of this splendid old court, where the mere presence of the modern visitors and doctors and workmen is a harsh anachronism. One carpenter especially roused my ire by clambering astride a pignon he was repairing, to roll a cigar- ette. Zounds—tobacco in the fifteenth century! The main ward is a vast vaulted hall, the beds separated by curtains—to keep out the drafts, a nurse said. But they can be drawn back to let the patients hear some good father read the mass, or preach consolingly from the mellow old pulpit under the magnificent stained-glass window at the lower end of the room. [ 103 |— - ee ll _ po Oe eee ee ne - ee 7 —— ning iin — _— OT glee tata a elt nein ea —_ ag cc ar i Ce a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Everything in the great kitchen is as spotless as on a man-of-war, and most appetizing odors waft out from the range, some twenty feet long. The roast- ing is still done in the cavernous chimney-place, on steel spits heavy enough to support a whole sheep or half a beef. The spits are turned by Tourne- broche, a captivating little spit-boy. He turns and turns and turns, without ever a headache or a glance, beyond watching his roasts, for Tourne-broche is a clockwork boy, wound up with a key. The sister who showed me about said that Messer Nicolas would never tolerate real spit-boys, and that the little man- nekin dates from the very foundation of the institu- tion. “You may think of the hospice as you like,” one writer says, “as asylum or hospital or business propo- sition.” That is not fair. The two elements of religion and charitable healing are its main features, and both require money to accomplish anything. After all the centuries of its useful existence the Hostel’s chief source of income is the sale of its vintages, and why should not this be done in a busi- nesslike way? ‘The Hostel is one of the largest own- ers of vines in Burgundy, and this sale of its wines in November is of considerably more than local im- portance, its influence extending even to England. The actual bidding, I was told, is done in the council hall, but the quotation board is posted in the court, so that the vast crowd can note the prices, which fix the market values of all the principal Burgundies for the succeeding year. From Beaune a jerky little steam tram runs out [ 104 ]THE GOLDEN SIDE through the hilly heart of the wine section, where the vineyards stretch away in vast fields as big as corn fields here, acres upon acres of soft and tender green, striped with the thin brown lines of the four- foot poles to which the vines are tied. Even the house yards are full of them; not a flower, a blade of grass or a weed is to be seen. Again you see the high stone walls, massive and frowning, great clos to be entered only through the padlocked iron gate in the wall, or thick, thorny hedges, suffi- cient to keep everything that walks or creeps at a safe distance from the precious crops within. I walked two very dusty miles of road between Pommard and Beaune to see how the vines are taken care of in July. In one place a two-hundred-pound Maud Muller, when she saw me about to photograph the vineyard, asked me to wait until she could go home and dress. Her employer, a very friendly agri- culturist and vine expert, told me his troubles with the government, which, he said, bestowed its decora- tion of the Order of Agricultural Merit on know- nothings who wrote for the papers, and let good men who did the actual work go undecorated. When I jokingly suggested that he buy the decoration, he sighed and answered: “I might, but it costs a lot to bribe the right people.” West of Beaune is the Morvan, a country of roll- ing plains and lofty hills, where the people, like their own granite rocks—Morvan means Black Rock— have kept apart from the rest of the world for centuries. To this day the marriage of a Morvan- deau with any one of a different section is a rarity, [ 105 |a ee wana i Ng ty wis — ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA and consequently the original physique, physiognomy and curious moral code of the district have been preserved almost intact. One of my objects in going through the Morvan was to see some of the typical Morvandeaux, said to have round, hairless faces, and queer, flat noses. Somehow or other, the only round, hairless face I could find that that of a tiny girl, Baby Jeanne, though I tramped ChAteau-Chinon, the geographical center of the district, from end to end, visited the church twice, and went far out along the country roads. The supposition is that these people are descended from some of Attila’s Huns, who re- mained in this district after their leader’s defeat. As a matter of fact, the men I saw were all very hairy, and rather American-looking. ‘The women were even better proportioned than their husbands. So well known in the last century was the robustness of these Morvan women that kings and emperors sent here for wet-nurses. Napoleon’s little son, the King of Rome, was nursed by a young Morvan foster- mother. As Chateau-Chinon is the geographical center of the Morvan, so Autun, the Augustodunum of Cesar, is its commercial focus, a city of some fifteen thou- sand, with quite a trade in cereals and other agri- cultural products. To-day, Autun is little more than the shrunken mummy of the city the Romans built here in the plain to take the place of Bibracte, the capital of the strong Celtic tribe of the Aedui, which occupied the crest of Mt. Beuvray, eleven miles dis- tant. The former greatness of the Roman metropolis [ 106 |THE GOLDEN SIDE is amply attested by many remains of architectural importance, among them two fine, half-ruined gate- ways, the Portes St. André and d’Arroux. On the latter appear the pilasters whose flutings exercised such a considerable influence upon later architecture. We find it clearly manifested in the fine triforium of the Cathedral of St. Lazare. The capitals of the fluted pilasters are just as unmistakably Byzantine. Indeed, the whole Cathedral is a curious but elegant mélange of Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic and Re- naissance, though the main part was only fifty-eight years in building. To visit Autun without going to Bibracte is to miss the sense of its true relation to the prehistoric past. It was there that representatives from all over Gaul convened a great assembly to find means for making one last desperate struggle against Rome, sinking their tribal jealousies, and choosing Vercin- getorix, chief of the Arverni, as their leader in this forlorn hope. Legend and fable cluster about Mt. Beuvray as thickly as the mists and rain that made its ascent impossible for me. Nevers has not the same historic prominence as Autun and others of its neighbors, but is worth a visit, if only that its main thoroughfare, leading up from the railroad station, pleasantly reminds you of a New England village street—sunshine streaming down through the orderly rows of fine old trees to dapple the pavement of very rough stones, cut like bricks; houses set back from the narrow sidewalk a little; flowers here and there; shades down, or shut- ters drawn in the windows. The town takes a firm I 107 ]ee ey ee ee Tal ggg tien —_— et i ~ te ee a ae tte! neti Re Netgear -" , a lett eee lr wl gir Patt fe asa ce a . ate * ae a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA hold of you at once, and the people are pleasant- spoken and witty. What matter if the feudal castle has put on a new face and turned into a “Palais de Justice”? It still presents its grim, original back to you, and to the town that snuggles up behind in its shelter; and the broad, open square in front rolls away to an exquisite series of terraces, below which the lovely valley of the Loire curves away on either hand into infinity. The scene is unforgetable: the lazy, shim- mering serpent coquetting among myriad sandbanks ; the railroad bridge of gold crossing it, a veritable Roman aqueduct for immortality and beauty; a thou- sand tints of foliage and flower gleaming on the terraces and the wooded slopes on the distant bank. The most unusual building in town is the Cathedral of St. Cyr, one of the two double-apsed cathedrals in France. Tradition explains prettily why it is dedi- cated to St. Cyrus, and why the saint is sculptured as a naked child riding a pig. King Charles, it seems, had a dream in which a naked little boy ap- peared to him while he was out hunting, and promised that if his majesty would clothe him he would save him from a terrible wild boar. The king promised, and the child, none other than the saint himself, mounted the ferocious animal’s back, and, guiding him by the tusks, drove him straight upon the king’s lance. And the Bishop of Nevers guilelessly explained that when the little saint asked for “clothes” he meant the rebuilding of the church. From an architectural standpoint, the eleventh century church of St. Etienne is more worth while, a [ 108 ]THE GOLDEN SIDE splendid example of the Romanesque style of Au- vergne, which worked its way up into the Nivernais. However, the most fascinating object in town is the ancient Porte du Croux, a great, square tower, with all the loopholes and traces of medieval defense so picturesque and so useless now. Dripping with delicate vines, and scarred with the wounds of time, it suggests in every graceful but sturdy line the fourteenth century, of which it is so beautiful a rep- resentative. The street leading through it winds out- ward between stout walls to a noble barbican, or outer defense; and to see Nevers at its best, go through them both, and a little beyond, of a June afternoon, just before sunset. There, in the slowly fading glory of the scented afternoon, lies the town, its roofs and pinnacles, chateau and Cathedral, gate- ways and spires, all a blaze of liquid gold, conjuring the ghosts of another day to people anew each storied house and tower,a a ee ae od “ = Se a ee ae ~— a ee a Ce et a ee te eee ee Tee a ~~, —— lt i aegis Xx AMONG THE DOMES S the train rolls over the viaduct, westward, the view of Nevers, proudly cresting its hill in the background, is very fine; and onward toward Bourges, purple delphinium, golden butter- cups and yellow mustard, flaming scarlet poppies and brilliant white daisies spangle the fields with color, the most colorful landscape in France. Great white cattle graze, unstartled by the iron horse, in nearby pastures; and trees of a dozen species checker the landscape with their lofty hedges: tilleuls (lindens), maples, spindling poplars, lofty acacias, thick-bodied horse-chestnuts; gray, stuccoed houses, with soft, warm, reddish-brown roofs, peep out from among the trees, often with pleasant vines spraying over doors and windows. But it is better to see Bourges in connection with Touraine, and to go on southward through Auvergne from Nevers. Here all the world seems going to be “cured” at the baths of Riom, Vichy, Royat. The trains are full of would-be sick folk, who dearly love to tell just where and how they imagine themselves afflicted. An unusually stout young Frenchwoman [ 110 |SS Per ee ee) ad ae panorama of unrivalled splendor and charm. DADA me & ~ancing ce, . 4¢ c q q 4 4 4 4 ¢ ¢ 4 ¢ an entr Gabo # ‘ ‘The Cote d’Azur, or Blue Shore, isee at etal eet See eh ee ee en — ema : , i i - a Ee a an ea a Tee — ‘ao pany ee esGRENOBLE across the lush fields the spotted kine plodded home- ward at the hest of a barefoot boy, who whistled with shrill cheeriness as he switched at the flowers. The westering sun splashed dull wall and gleaming field with gold; long shadows barred the road with purple; the houses lay still and peaceful in their emerald frames, with here and there a man smoking contentedly in a doorway, while from the chimney a blue spiral of smoke eddied up, as gaunt and unreal as the slim poplars by the hedge. Now there are deep cuts and enclosing scarps, stone-protected, or, in heu of masonry, guarded from washouts by wick- ets of brush woven through stakes. Then for some time the country suggests Switzerland—the confor- mation of mountain and foothill, the color of the landscape, the tiny streams dripping down the moun- tainside—but the cottages not at all. And then Grand Lemps, with mud walls along the track en- closing the village, and houses of either mud or rubble, giving a very Spanish effect. Again farm scenes, men and women haying, goats nibbling off the top of a hedge, vines on low trellises. The mountains increase in grandeur, with a won- derful play of sunset on the snow in the distance, while the nearer peaks are blue-hazed, like a Puvis de Chavannes vision. One must see mountains and landscapes under exactly these conditions to appreci- ate his color effects; and then it is to marvel at his ability to overlay colors, or at least to give that im- pression—a sunset blue over a sort of old rose pink. Our Lady of Vouise, a huge copper figure, silhouetted against the brilliant sky at Voiron, made us suddenly [ 133 ]3 - Te — eee Te - Ng Nae FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA aware of the mountain on whose top she stands. Almost at her feet we dropped three carloads of picture-book laborers we had brought up the line, and they filled the platform with corduroy and color and chatter. If so far we have passed through a picture-book country, now we enter fairyland. Not even Granada itself can compare with the marvels about Grenoble, coming in of a summer evening. Surely it is the loveliest picture France affords—the ancient town, whose walls bristle with bastions and towrelles; the thick gray stream of the Isére plunging madly past; the endless series of superimposed snow mountains. Think not of hotel or dinner. Take an open carriage and get right over to the river. At first, the moun- tains swim in a glorious heliotrope haze, and the town is ghostly and cold and gray in the midst of their slendour. ‘The sun drops behind a sheltering peak; the heliotrope sky flames, quivers, fades; the very air turns green, a curious, eery green; the dis- tant mountains emerge icy black, the nearer and lower ones change into huge, translucent lumps of jade, and the river to ink; vast, dull-green shadows creep slowly down to grip the city with chill fingers that choke out of it the last waning spark of day. The marvel is over? Not quite. Somewhere, faintly, a silvery bell begins to sing, wee lights gem the edges of the flood and twinkle out along bridge and avenue; it is night in Grenoble. Still in a dream, you turn away, wishing for the tongue of a poet to phrase the glory you have seen as all its majesty and weirdness deserve. Not even the smells and lights [ 134 ]GRENOBLE and champings of the hotel dining-room can quite rob you of the ecstacy you have inspired from the miracle. Eventually you have to come down to earth again. Yet even then Grenoble does nothing to shat- ter your hopes. Genius itself must have chosen the site, and not all “‘man’s vile arts”’ could spoil it. Grenoble is a city of nearly seventy thousand pop- ulation, and formerly the capital of Dauphiné. When that province was added to the crown possessions, in 1349, the heir to the throne of France took his title of Dauphin from it, while the lands of the province became his princely appanage. Where the Dauphin’s palace used to stand is the handsome fifteenth century Palace of Justice, facing the Place St. André, with the old chapel, now the church of St. André, diagonally opposite. It is a disgrace to Grenoble that the church should be dis- figured outside by haying big posters advertising various nostrums plastered over its wall to one side of the door, and small shops tucked up on the other. The effect is very bizarre. Before the door we found a crowd of idlers, mostly lower-class women and girls, waiting for a wedding party which the in the adja- cent Hotel de Ville for the civil ceremony. With great dignity, during the interim, the verger came out, gorgeous in black and purple robes, with a scarlet-tufted black biretta, holding a stray cat by the scruff of its neck, stalked down the street, peering into shops until he came to an empty one, threw her in, slammed the door, and stalked solemnly back. The wedding party had literally to fight its way through the elbowing, crowding mob, which followed [ 135 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA into the church. The only seats left were at the very door, where we could see nothing of the cere- mony for the backs of the people who stood on the chairs in front. The interior of St. André seems to have suffered as much in modern times as the exterior. Surely no thirteenth century chapel ever had such tawdry tinsel and glass, such dreadful paintings. The most interesting thing in the church is the monument to the memory of the Chevalier Bayard, the knight without fear and without re- proach, who was born at Le-Cheylas-la-Buissiére, twenty miles away. The Hotel de Ville, with its handsome towers, occu- pies part of the former mansion of the Duc de Lesdiguiéres, one of the Calvinist governors under whom the religious wars raged fiercely at Grenoble. The duke’s ambition was to be Grand Constable of France, and he did not hesitate to change faiths and fight his former friends when he thought it would benefit him. His garden is now the Jardin de Ville, beautiful if rather precise, and a popular as well as a fashionable promenade. The city is full of flowering squares, and as if that were not enough, one morning gardeners climbed to the top of the little white trolley station in the Place, right under our windows, and filled it with potted plants, brilliant geraniums and the like, changing a very commonplace necessity into a thing of beauty. The most spacious park of all skirts the walls, and is named, picturesquely, the Promenade of the Green Island. Right across the river the rugged town swalls zigzag up the craggy hill to the Bastille at the [ 126 ] SGI TR I EeGRENOBLE top, for Grenoble is a first-class military post, pro- tected by a belt of up-to-date fortresses. At the foot of the hill is the old Porte St. Laurent, and, just within, the eleventh century church of the same name, whose crypt was originally a sixth cen- tury cruciform chapel. Almost opposite, in a spot- less little two-room apartment giving upon the street, lives a very dainty old lady who makes gloves. The Grenoble district employs no less than 29,000 glove- makers, and the importance of the industry may be judged from the fact that every year almost seven million dollars’ worth of gloves come from this sec- tion alone. All day long, in good weather, Madame David sits outside her door, with a little saw-toothed vise between her knees gripping the kid, which she sews with machine-like perfection and speed. Some- times she makes as many as a dozen pairs a day. Married in St. Laurent, across the street, she has lived forty-five years in the one house, “always happy,” as she put it, with a smile. When I asked her if I might photograph her, she replied very gently: ‘““Non—I cannot pay for it.” Assured that it was only for a “‘p’tit sowvenir,” she looked stern. “Are you a merchant? I do not wish my picture upon the postal-cards.” When she finally understood, her fine, clear skin flushed like a child’s at her innocent mistake, and she thanked me very prettily. And a duchess might have written every word of her note of thanks for the pictures I sent her. Bonheur a chére Madame David! [137 ]gee ge ein ‘i nt S eaeemtnal ne senor 7 a AO ——— eee he ee ee ee i _— ae ra ee Ne = FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA As you come back along the river, its swift current impresses you, not as water, but as very liquid clay, and you do not wonder that the piers of the bridges turn knife-like edges to meet the torrent and are square and solid behind. As you walk along the bank, the lowermost bridge seems suddenly to have sprouted full-sized trees in an orderly line from end to end. You stop to consider this phenomenon, then hurry forward to observe it closely; and as your viewpoint changes, the trees move back to their rightful position along the river bank, which curves just below the bridge in such a way as to present a perfect illusion when seen from upstream. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is a heavy Roman- esque building of little distinction; but, as has been said already, it is the site, and not the sights, of Grenoble that make the city a joy to the traveler. In every direction you may take long and short excursions among the beautiful environs, by tram, on foot, along the different railroad lines, or by automobile. Perhaps the most interesting is to the Grande Chartreuse. This trip can be made by changing from the railroad to a steam tram and then to an omnibus; but the ideal way is by one of the P. L. M. automobiles, that run all summer from Grenoble to Aix-les-Bains, by way of the Chartreuse and Chambéry. The machines are big trucks, with comfortable, four-seated bodies, that hold eighteen people besides the chauffeur. The cautious driving is a surprise to Americans. At times the machine makes twenty miles an hour, but the average for the whole trip, going and coming, can hardly be [ 138]GRENOBLE more than about twelve at the outside. In fact, this slowness becomes so pronounced occasionally that the machine jerks itself along rather than runs, which results in giving the passengers a tremendous “vibra- tion cure.” The route over the higher part of the hills, espe- cially the Col du Porte, is of use only during June, July and August. The one means of communication the foresters and peasants have with the outside world during the winter is on muleback, and seldom then, avalanches on the Col making even such travel very risky. So each little hamlet is practically self- contained and self-supporting in the fullest sense. A little pink time-table and guide issued by the local Syndicat d’Initiative says: “Dauphiné! Savoie! These magic names evoke in the eye of the tourist avidity of emotions, a succession of uninterrupted marvels: sombre, boiling gorges, abrupt rocks, toothed peaks whose savage horror contrasts strangely with the sweet luminosity of the pasture lands that cover with a carpet of velvet the flanks of the loftier mountains.” It is all true, and much more. But a detailed description of that scenery, as we saw it from the huge car, that slowed down or stopped entirely now and then, to let me make a picture, would be wearisome. The Chartreuse, where the unctuous liqueur was made until a few years ago, stands in the midst of a circus of mountains covered with pine forests, at the foot of the escarpments of the Grand Som, and some four kilometers from the entrance to the valley called the Désert, once the property of the [ 139 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA monks. The monastery was founded by St. Bruno in the eleventh century, but what we see to-day is a tremendous walled enclosure filled with ugly seven- teenth century Renaissance buildings which belong to the State. They are exhibited at fixed hours to the curious by a functionary with a very lackadaisical manner, who announces the various names and func- tions of the different rooms and halls with no more expression or feeling than a slot machine, and appar- ently with not the slightest interest even in tips. The convent itself is now in rather badly kept condition: dust all over everything, and the names of tourists scribbled in it, on tables and walls; the floors thick with dirt. From the great chapter hall the portraits of the former generals of the order have been taken to Tarragona, in Spain, whither the monks removed on being exiled from France a few years ago, and only the names and titles above their places, with the painted escutcheon of each, remain on the plaster. Every single thing of the slightest value has been stripped away, and the effect is that of looking over the bones of a desic- cated skeleton. On toward Aix-les-Bains it is a comparatively short run to St. Pierre d‘Entremont. Here the Féte du Bon Dieu was in progress, the houses neatly trimmed with branches, and over the middle of the main street an arch of green, from the center of which hung a cotton Dove of the Holy Spirit, with red sealing-wax feet and white fluted-paper wings and tail, bearing a pink paper rose in its beak. A Frenchman in our car sprang up in his seat as we ran [ 140 |GRENOBLE under it, and, with a shout of “Voila le Bon Dieu!— Behold the Good God!” tore it off. It was so quickly done that the villagers had only time to gasp as we shot by, but we could hear an angry tumult be- hind us. No better example could be desired of the savagery of the automobilist, who relies on his speed and power to commit indecencies of this sort; but I doubt that any one but a Frenchman would have thought of quite such a sacrilege as this. At the culminating point of the route, with woods about you, and nothing especial to see, you turn a sharp corner, and there is the snow-topped fence of the world. It smites you. Words are too paltry to contain a tithe of that infinite splendor whose peak is Mt. Blanc itself. Now the road begins to go down, winding through a dense forest, and then, through a tunnel, we see a lovely blue pastoral, framed in gray by the vault. As we came through, Lake Bourget was half veiled by a driving rain- storm, while above it floated a tremendous black cloud, ready to burst and let down oceans. Mean- time the sun was shining brightly all around us, and the cloud cast a huge purple shadow over field and foothill. We could not see the Chateau of Cha- tillon on the near hill, projecting into the lake, be- cause of the haze; nor any of the other ancient castles around its banks, nor yet Aix-les-Bains, for the same reason. But the color scheme was marvel- ous: every mountain blue, each a different shade or tint; the fields ranging up their sides all different greens, some clean-shaven and smooth as skin, others rippling with waving young grain that yielded to [ 141 ]a a ee a aden is $7 Ope e spe ete PR Arete eens, FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA the stormy breeze blowing in from the lake, some tinted with the yellow of mustard or buttercups, and everywhere the redeeming touch of scarlet pop- pies. Chambéry, right below, seemed a “play-toy”’ of low spires and chimneys, of dull red tiles and slate-roofed houses and forts and barracks. The road down into the town is a series of sweeping curves, and from the tunnel into the nearly level stretches there is a horseshoe where we travel five or six miles at least to make a scant one of ap- proach. Chambéry is full of “atmosphere’”’—houses over- hanging the river; the river vanishing under the town gardens; little balconies full of potted plants with red blooms, and of chairs and tables, as if arranged for taking tea; boulevards lined with low ‘sycamores that meet twenty feet overhead; a freakish elephant fountain; red, white and blue striped poles for flags at the street crossings; splendid arcades on the rue de Boigne, equal to those of the rue de Rivoli in Paris. But the real atmosphere of the town comes. out best in the unique way the central part is built. You can go almost its whole length and breadth without ever using the streets, except to cross them, for the houses are built mainly around hollow squares, with queer, black little passages underneath, leading from one block right through to another, making one think of the innumerable labyrinths of a rabbit warren. They spell intrigue, robbery, midnight assassination, all the picturesque life of medieval times, when the commons had to be able to make instantaneous disappearances, and [ 142 | I et = i iE RIS a I1S * 1round which there « c ith de: ible atmosphere. * ribs < — } ° 4 all 7 il — ao © = = — es oS 4 _ : he » o mR in indesc Arles, é * itre of € c Amphithe Thea ee oengs teers rn ey ae eee ee en ee ee eee ene es ee ed most extraordinary mixture of fortress, < D — — — ~ ~ an — of — - <_ ilace of the Popes at € r« ‘The _— = os oO > = a © ¢) © oa — ~ ss = oS prisonGRENOBLE only the nobility and gentry, in their steel clothes, dared walk openly in the streets. From winding stone stair or sable doorway you look out into the lofty courts, whose iron-barred windows, rising four or five stories above, are so prison-like it takes all the magic of the pot of geraniums that some one is nursing high in air to make you feel that here could be home for any one. In old times, Chambéry was the capital of the Duchy of Savoie, just as it is the capital now of the French département that bears the Savoyard name. Its chief feature is, of course, the ancient chateau, a tremendous affair, about a thousand feet long, on a little hillock at the end of the rue de Boigne. It was originally built in the thirteenth century, as the castle of the powerful and independ- ent Ducs de Savoie, and many a brilliant and stirring scene have its grim old walls witnessed. But the dukes were destined for higher things than ruling a mere duchy, and when they became kings of Sar- dinia—en route to the throne of Italy—their castle gradually slipped down the easy descent, until to-day it is a police station. Few indeed are the chateaux that give a better idea of those ancient feudal lords than this, though a large part of the structure has been restored. Its scarps and walls, titanically thick and high; its massive, lonely tower; the wonderful ramp by which you venture into the interior court- yard; the exquisite Portail at the lower side; the beautiful apse of the chapel, a good-sized church in itself—all spell military power, boundless resources, and a soaring imagination that are wonderfully im- [143 |. ae eee ee ee — - ~ Se he nae tee eet dee EE = rr ie FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA pressive. Not even the ugly commonplace that has built up all around the noble old structure has much power to take from its effect and charm. It is rather dusty and gusty in Chambéry in sum- mer, but the quaint little Café P. Barlet has pro- vided against that by a glass enclosure outside, where you can sit, and have your apéritif or your tea com- fortably, and still see all that goes on or goes by. It will not be more than two or three minutes after you sit down before things begin to happen. It may be only a miniature covered “schooner,” full of birds for sale, drawn by a medium-sized donkey and two big yellow dogs in front, and pushed from behind by a third panting, trotting, yellow mongrel, who surges forward into his collar-harness with tongue hanging far out. Or it may be an enormous peasant woman, in a handsome costume of black and royal purple, sauntering by with her family, husband and son together not equaling her for bulk. Per- haps a big touring car, full of prosperous bourgeois, stops at the door for a gasoline apéritif. The women have good clothes and big diamonds, but, oh, such feet! Their shoes look like the old ones you give a tramp, who puts them on because he needs them, in spite of the fact that they are down at the heel and much too large and too long. At night, one-half of Chambéry seems to spend its time at the big moving picture park, and the other half at the one café-chantant the town boasts, the barnlike Brasserie Moderne. Here a good part of the audience is composed of officers and men from [ 144 ]GRENOBLE the garrison, “Dragons” and Alpine Chasseurs-a- Piéd, picturesque fellows all. The good folk of Chambéry are very proud of their Chasseurs, and boast that any one of the artillerymen attached to this type of regiment can carry, or at least hold for a moment, the mountain gun it takes two mules to carry up the dizzy trails. Fortunately, they did not exhibit their Samsonian qualities while I was in the café, and the scene was one of discretion, as the French would say, though the performance of the singers and dancers was as méchant as their appearance and their voices were attractive. By all means go back to Grenoble by automobile, as you came. ‘The return trip inevitably clarifies and strengthens the delightful impressions received on the way up, impressions that not even a visit to Aix-les-Bains, with its tepid sulphur baths, its gam- bling casino, and its magnificent location, can spoil. Coming back, we noticed not only the familiar cruci- fixes for human beings by the roadside, but tiny little crosses made of cleanly whittled twigs, standing about two feet high, in fields of mustard, grain and small vegetables—crosses for the birds of heaven to worship at. At least, that is what the chauffeur said, crossing himself and lifting his cap, as he no- ticed one. Another Frenchman, smiling at his naiveté, remarked gravely that perhaps that was the reason they were there; but, anyway, it was good to have one’s crops dedicated to religion, and the birds might worship if they chose. The grave old crow I noticed sitting on one, nevertheless, did not [145 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA , look worshipful; he was tilting the little symbol of faith far to one side, so that it looked rakish rather than religious. As we rolled along we passed several small cattle fairs in the mountain villages, and in one place, as the chauffeur said, “one market of women, one of cattle.’ The only women we noticed being sold in the market, however, were those who were buying at the carts,XITI GOING Ly GRASSE NE of the great new motor roads of France, a splendid wide concrete avenue that flows like oil, runs down from Grenoble to the Mediterranean, and one may glide over its smooth surface and experience something of the now almost forgotten romance of travel in the entrancing vistas it provides. Connecting at the lower end with the main Riviera highway, it affords such a sight-seeing opportunity as few other roads in the world can pro- vide. But for everyone who takes the train every win- dow frames a picture, with a peak as a background. About twenty miles from Grenoble we suddenly swing out on a viaduct that sweeps up the mountain- side in two spiraling curves that fairly take away the breath. The view is inspiring! I lost my head over it completely, making picture after picture, to the interest of a Frenchman and his wife, who very pleasantly gave me window rights on both sides of the compartment, and so missed part of the scene themselves. It is over all too quickly, with a rush [ 147 ]Be ae ee ee ee ee a ~ nr e . —— ee STP eee —— ~ ee ee —— ee Se — ~ ee > —~ -_— - FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA through a cindery tunnel, and then again we see it, and go still higher. Below, the plain and the foot- hills unroll like a flag thrown to the winds, and the panorama, in the sunshine of mid-June, is beyond words of praise or description. After changing cars at Veynes we soon pass two remarkable mountain formations. In the first, a rock crest runs up in a curve just over the tip, exactly like the brazen crests on ancient helmets. To one side this ridge looks a splendid piece of fortifica- tion, that might flame at any moment with gunfire. The second is a series of low foothills approaching a mountain shaped and formed like a walled city, with regularly built defenses and bastions all along. All through the mountainous regions of southern France there are these peculiar formations. Now the scenery changes rapidly tains rising from orchards of almonds and olives, clear indication of the sunny south. And then you barren, rugged moun- cry out in surprise at the sight of a village of feudal days, topped by an old fort on the crest of its hill, with the vale and river winding away toward Provence in blue waves, upon which the setting sun casts a romantic splendor wholly at variance with the facts. Traveling by day, to miss none of the scenery, we saw most of our stopping-places for the first time in a ruddy glamour of the sunset. As a matter of plain statement, Sisteron is an unwholesome place, full of vermin, stenches, filthy streets, houses without ventilation or sanitation, dirty people, talking a patois which is a mess of French, Provencal and argot. Yet the people are very good [ 148]GOING TO GRASSE to look at, the children lovely and well-mannered, and the whole situation so unusual and attractive that one is apt to forget everything but the beauty of Nature in both still and animated life. You avoid all the drawbacks by stopping near the station, at a Touring Club hotel, with a terrace full of potted daisies, little marble-topped tables and a tinkling fountain. A long, dusty, sycamore avenue leads to the town, where the twelfth century church of Notre Dame and the ruined towers of the ancient ramparts are mightily attractive. We were standing before the miniature “Palace of Justice,” when a gentleman, clearly of the haute volée, came out of a small, very ordinary house directly opposite. In answer to my questions, he said he knew very little of the place, as he was a stranger himself; but he did direct us to the best viewpoint. I concluded he must be the judge, as afterward proved to be the case. Following his advice, we climbed up through a winding lane to the crest of the hill and the fort, a wonderful struc- ture, partly designed by Vauban, so situated as to utilize the natural rock wherever possible for parts of its walls and scarps. Ruined outworks, testifying mutely to its original strength, make a melancholy belt about its lower side. But we did not go in. The French authorities are inclined to view cameras with jaundiced eyes, and I had no desire to prove the hospitality of a border fortress inhabited only by a handful of artillerymen, who posted no sentries, and gave small evidence of contact with the world. A little to one side, however, on a slightly higher [ 149 ]CAT — ee an FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA spur of the hill, we found a stirring panorama: the silver lines of the railroad metals along which we had come paralleled by the blue mountain stream that cuts into the bigger, muddier river just above the town; the almost flat plain through which they run; the mountains fencing it in on every side and throwing out low lines of foothills that venture only a little way into the open. Two great defiles, or passes, through one of which the railroad van- ishes, form a natural entrance into central France, and the forts which mount the commanding hills all through this district are designed to prevent invasion from the Italian frontier, not far distant. After dinner we sat out on the terrace, listening to the bird-songs and the tinkle of the water, and watching the egg in the fountain turning somer- saults. By-and-by the judge came along and sat down for his coffee, and a drummer for a liqueur house argued vigorously with Madame that his gen- tian cordial was infinitely superior to any other liqueur tonique. When we retired at last, in the moonlight, the gentle murmur of flowing water was still in our ears, and the perfume of the garden, wafted in on the crisp mountain air, fresh in our nostrils. The town, though filthy, makes an effort to be as clean as possible. Its street-cleaning department consists of a horse and cart, a girl of ten, with fuzzy, faded yellow hair, a foreman who does little, and a vigorous woman of forty, who does most of the work. Broom and shovel in hand, she gathers into big heaps the little piles of refuse the girl [ 150 ]GOING TO GRASSE collects, shovels them into the cart, and then climbs in on top to stamp the load down. Along the main street in the early morning there is plenty to see: sturdy old farmer-women, with pitchforks over their shoulders and wide-brimmed, floppy straw hats, on their way out to the fields; young girls roasting and grinding coffee on the sidewalk; women dam- ming the rushing gutters to get enough water for a vigorous broom-scrubbing of whole shop-fronts ; women and girls carrying water from the fountains, or doing laundry work there. One fat laundress at a little square fountain basin was very up-to-date —she washed sitting in a chair, with an umbrella over her to keep off the sun, which was really hot. Everywhere through southern France you find the gipsy. In the square facing the “Cathedral” two of these vagabond families were encamped. The most surprising thing about them was that the men were doing the culinary work, while the women and girls were lounging and reading the papers. There is a compulsory education law in France, but how do the authorities hold the gipsies anywhere long enough to teach them anything? One man washed dishes, and then some lettuce, which he shook in a dirty jute bag to dry for dinner. Another peeled vegetables for a stew, and put them to simmer in a black kettle over an open wood fire. All the gipsies looked fairly clean and comfortable, at least as much so as the townsfolk. Some of the young girls were as pretty as they were wild-looking. On the way back to the hotel we saw two playing like fawns, leaping over a mountain rivulet and running about. [ 151]tee Sen OI gg OT gg gg, of ES nee Nee ha em aan ee ot Pat ade ae muah ee erat el ee ee are Pe ee en ane area ee ti emg parr PeNERT —— — ———— - ig FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA The elder, about twelve, was the picture of a grand- opera gipsy—black eyes, thick black hair, tawny skin with high color. She wore a vivid red kerchief over her hair and a dress full of startling color contrasts. All about the hills are charming walks, and the stony height across the river, which gives a splendid view of town and fortress, is a veritable paradise of every imaginable kind, size and color of wild flower, the air saturated with their rich fragrance. On from Sisteron the scenery is striking and varied. Near Annot, the rock formations are especially novel. Big, isolated boulders perch insecurely in all sorts of impossible places on the hillsides. In a number of places walls have been built, making a house of the niche or cavern under the rock. Once more we left the train in the late afternoon, at the little town of Entrevaux. It is condensed picturesqueness itself, crowding together on a rocky head of land deeply moated on three sides by a tor- rential mountain stream. Black, steep, narrow alleys, too tiny to be called real streets, wander fractiously up and down among the lofty houses, paved with flat, round stones, set on edge, and calculated to give corns to anybody but wearers of wooden sabots. Around it all the walls run up the forbidding hill- side to a wonderfully situated citadel, once a strong fort, now a military prison. The statement that no cabs are allowed to enter the town is rather ridiculous. There are no cabs, in the first place; no demand for them, in the second ; and in the third, they could not get around in the [152 |GOING TO GRASSE town if they were there. Entering through the double gate over the drawbridge, we followed a twisty little street to the main Place, where the only hotel occupies an ancient building. It is the sort of hostelry one learns to expect in such a place, but clean and fairly comfortable. A winding stair, with distracting branches, leads from the basement on up to the bedroom floors; the dining-room, about half-way between the entrance hall and the first bedroom floor, on a little offshoot. A rather elab- orate dinner was served by the pleasant proprietress and her young daughter, though the only guests besides ourselves were three cheery young Jesuit fathers and a disgruntled artillery colonel. Next morning we found the village farrier shoeing horses, mules and donkeys right before the hotel door. If ever there was anything that spoke of medieval days, it was this. I could imagine knights and roistering blades, looking for trouble in the good old novelistic fashion, leaping down from their steeds at the door, and going inside for refreshment while the swart peasant smith took a turn at their horses’ feet. The facade of the hotel itself suggests poi- gnards and swords and hose, though I cannot tell why, since it is merely old and grimy, and featureless save for a big vine climbing over it. But the atmos- phere is there, nevertheless. The steeds to-day are usd to carry in produce from the fields and gardens outside—there are none whatever in town, since space is precious on the bare rock—and you have to flatten yourself in a doorway to let the panniered beasts go by. Here and there a horse toils at the end of a [153]tn tne FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA long rope, hoisting bales of hay or fodder into the upper stories of dwellings, the people preferring to live in what we consider the least desirable part of the house, black, damp, cellar-lke rooms at or below the street-level. The people, while they lack the attractiveness of their town, are very pleasant and gracious—perhaps the tourist-in-a-hurry has never been in Entrevaux to spoil them—and most of the children are both pretty and charmingly shy. ‘T'wo little witches, Illaudie and Héléne, stole our hearts as they washed their well-darned little stockings at a fountain basin in the dappled shadow of a great chestnut; and we longed for the power of a Sorolla to bewitch them, in turn, into forever smiling figures upon a sun- splashed canvas. They followed us around, livening dark alleys and black doorways; they brought up their little friends to pose for us, and even the bonne maman of one—though she had so hideous a mustache I could scarcely believe her willing. Un- fortunately, she is only one of many thousands of such women in provincial France, many not only mustached but bearded. As there are no manufactures in the town, prac- tically the entire able-bodied population emigrates every morning to the fields and gardens and vine- yards outside. Some of the gardens are unbeliev- ably narrow, mere strips of terrace a few feet wide, hanging above the rushing stream. Leaving Entrevaux behind, the train soon passes through some of the glorious mountain gorges that give this whole southern region an unforgetable char- [154]GOING TO GRASSE acter. One town, Touét-de-Beuil, is distinctly origi- nal, the houses on the rocky hillside climbing in some places to what appears from the train eleven full stories. Of course, this is mere illusion. It is simply that two or more rows are visible, one above and be- hind the other. Later, the valley narrows to a mere defile, with the road and railroad on a narrow shelf. Farther on, town after town comes into view, each on its hilltop, making an effect better imagined or seen than described, especially at the spot where from the low valley you look up to the eternal peaks and see no less than five, each with its man-made coronet. The train goes on to Nice, but we left it at the junction station of Colomars for the narrow-gauge line to Grasse. This Sud Railroad runs through beautiful, if sometimes terrifying, landscapes, over long viaducts, through tunnels, and among flower plantations all the way. For a little the train, more like matchboxes than ever, parallels the boiling Var, darts across it on a rattling, double-decked bridge, a ruined Tem- and plunges into exquisite scenery plars’ castle on a hill, a black etching against the flaming sky of approaching sunset; the town of St. Jeannet-la-Gaude, nestling under the Gibraltar- like crag of Baou; a deep little gorge, merely the earnest of what is coming in the twilight. Vence and Tourettes, beautiful towns both, drop behind, and our speed accelerates until the match- boxes hop about alarmingly on the rails. These narrow-gauge lines are all very well on straight met- als, at slow speed, and on a level, but when they go [155]Se -- - —a = gna te eg FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA careering around the sides of mountains, with sheer drops of several hundred feet on one side and jagged walls towering sheer above on the other, or nothing at all on either side but the narrow edge of a viaduct spanning a ravine so deep and crooked the trestle has to curvet to get across, it makes your head swim and turns your stomach. That is what you feel going over the Gorge du Loup, and any blasé person craving a new sensation has only to try it, about dusk, to gratify his wish. Gorge of the Wolf indeed it is; a bottomless gorge, apparently, from the car window, full of unearthly lupine rock shapes and of ghostly waterfalls, at which the affrighted little engine shrieks madly and runs away. You can hear the wheel-flanges smack against the rails as the speed and the curves throw you from side to side. The safety of the road and the speed is best proven by the fact that there has never been an accident on it; but any one with imagination can conjure up some very lively horrors at twilight, notwithstanding. The last gorge is the worst. All we could see of it was a yawring black void, with here and there a faint light far below us, distant and twinkling as a tiny star.XIV GRASSE AND THE BRIVIERA a thousand feet above sea-level, delightfully set on a hillside, where its houses and fac- tories, chimneys and spires, sweep in a great amphi- theater about the cathedral, and mount the slope — lies about twelve miles inland, and tier upon tier. Somehow we expected to find the city all a bower, full of perfume, with splendid villas and magnificent hotels right in the heart of things. In reality, the fine estates, flower-gardens and hotels which attract such a tremendous patronage from every country under the sun in winter, are all out- side the town proper. As for the perfume, it is there —in spots. Aside from them, Grasse smells very much like any other old town in France. Belted about with high walls that rise to the level of the third-story windows, it is a damp labyrinth of crooked, narrow, vilely paved ramps that fre- quently end in tricky stairs or split into twins, one going on at its old level, the other descending or rising, and perhaps ending in a passageway running through the heart of some prominent building. Here [157]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA and there a fountain, overhung by sycamores or a single big willow, makes a bright spot in the street, and gathers the color and gaiety of the mercurial people about it, while everywhere, now almost swal- lowed up by tawdry conventionality, now surquidant and alone, rise fragments of the splendid past, bits of sober doorways, stately arches, a battered palace facade, or a melodramatic square donjon tower, all eloquent of Italy. The most important building is the church of Notre Dame De Podio, the ancient Cathedral, with a tall, simple, square campanile, both essentially Italian in type. These Italian influences in archi- tecture are undoubtedly the result of the commer- cial relations and political treaties between the old Republics of Grasse, Pisa and Genoa. Unfortunately, the French town became embroiled in the bitter fac- tional quarrels of her allies, and her own people split into hostile parties themselves, with the result that the Count of Provence, Raymond Béranger, was able, in 1226, to take possession of her. The people may have been valiant fighters in those ancient days, but they do not look the part now—slight of stature, and insignificant of feature, with especially small noses. Indeed, over in the little neighboring town of Le Bar this latter peculiarity is so pronounced that it seemed to us a positive disfigurement. Grasse is renowned the world over for its per- fumes. In the vicinity of the town, on hill and in valley, more than twelve thousand acres are devoted to the cultivation of roses, tuberoses, jasmine, violets, pinks, orange-blossoms, and innumerable other flow- [ 158 ]GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA ers, whose petals yield the precious essence. The region seems to have been sprinkled in the old days with convents and monasteries, and it is in them that many of the larger distilleries are housed. ‘This does not seem quite so bad as stables or wine-shops in dismantled religious edifices; yet as we stand in the door of some beautiful old chapel, and look in at the sweating crowd of workers, it seems a dese- cration, even though they are piling up great heaps of rose-leaves and the air is surcharged with a fra- grance no incense could ever give. Visitors are welcome in the factories, and a woman cicerone guides you through from the room where the flowers are pulled to pieces and the petals heaped in great baskets, to the packing-room, where the finished bottles of perfume are prepared for shipment to every civilized land. The stripped petals are thrown into huge vats of boiling fat, and after vari- ous interesting processes—all carefully explained, if you wish to hear about them—the essence is con- densed, and the precipitated fat turned into fine scented soaps, so that the only waste in the whole proceeding is the petals themselves, from which every semblance of shape and odor has been expressed. This hot process is employed for all the flowers except Jjas- mine and tuberoses. Their perfume is first extracted by cold grease, on glass plates, after which the process is the same. A French authority declares that every season 642,400 tons of different flowers are destroyed at Grasse for the manufacture of the costly essence. No less than twelve and a half tons of petals are [ 159 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA required for the manufacture of a single liter of rose essence, which sells for anywhere from four hundred to five hundred dollars there at the factory. Little did Catherine de’ Medici dream of this when she sent her famous doctor, the Sieur Tombarelli, to Grasse to found a laboratory for perfume distilla- tion in the sixteenth century. From Grasse it is only a dozen miles or so through a perfumed Eden to Cannes, on the Cote d’Azur, the Blue Shore, as the French half of the Riviera is called. It is hard to believe that only about eighty years ago Cannes, now the millionaire’s paradise, was nothing but a little fishing village, huddling about the ancient church and castle, on a rocky eminence thrusting out into the middle of the bay. At that time the English statesman, Lord Brougham, fleeing from the fog and damp of an English winter to the sunshine and flowers of southern Italy, could not go on to his destination because of a quarantine, and stopped at Cannes. He found in its climate and location exactly what he desired. His villa built, other Englishmen came, talked of this Blue Shore, and the Riviera was launched upon a swelling tide of prosperity. The most interesting feature of old Cannes is the Chevalier’s Tower, part of the eleventh century fortress-residence of the mainland representative, or Chevalier, of the Abbot of the nearby Iles de Lérins who was feudal as well as religious lord of all this territory. The tower is square and massive, built of great cut stones with rough faces. It is typical of the south, as the round tower is of the north, and [ 160 ]GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA is found everywhere—as an isolated defense, a part of the walls of protected cities, and in forts. ‘The stormy times in which it and many similar towers throughout this region were built show clearly in the entrance—a square door in the second story, reached only by a ladder, that could be instantly drawn in on the approach of an enemy. The step or ledge where its top rested is still there, making a narrow sill. There is a stairway now for visitors. For all the light admitted by the narrow loopholes is very meager, and the climb toilsome, it 1s well worth while to make the ascent for the magnificent, brilliant panorama from the top. On either hand stretches away a flashing crescent of blue water, pearly sand and white-walled, red- roofed houses. Away on the west the Estérel Moun- tains creep out seaward in a rich blue fringe of thorny peaks. To the east, the curving shore dim- ples and coquettes with the sea in an apparently endless series of glistening bays and hilly little capes. Right at our feet is the old town, and off shore the islands of St. Honorat and Ste. Marguerite make a mass of blue and green on the horizon. It is as lovely as anything ever imagined, the broad water- front boulevard lined with truly magnificent hotels and gardens, villas of the rich and noble, palms, flow- ers, statuary, fountains, everything man could desire. After seeing the villas of the fashionables it is easy to understand why the hotel dweller does not get into society. They are palaces—their gardens are marvels! Though the Riviera was a part of Old Provence, [ 161 |Seema —_—_— as FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA neither name, by any stretch of imagination, ever suggests the other; and yet, in a measure, each has the same suggestion: Provence, good wine, fair women, and the splintering crash of spears; the Riviera, good wine, fair women, and the seductive clink of gold. Of course, everybody who is anybody goes to the Riviera during the few weeks that Fashion has decreed as the season; and all such envied ones declare positively that this flashing coast is quite impossibly hot in summer, and nobody who is any- body would think of it then—ca suffit! As for us, we have tried it in the height of the season, and during the summer, and declare unequivocally for the latter. Is there any satisfaction in being one jot among a million tittles, crowded for room, robbed on every hand, and half-frozen except when you have taken off your foolish summery clothes and gone to bed? Anyway, what’s the use of going “‘where every pros- pect pleases” when the view is sure to be blocked by the Prince and Princess of Tarara; where, when you do snatch a chance to level the camera, some one jostles you; or where, no matter how modest your appearance, some Count Noaccount tries to scrape acquaintance—because tous les Américains sont riches? On the other hand, this picture: A park bench all to yourself and your paraphernalia; over you a whispering palm, making exquisite shadow-lace on the sand, whence impish little heat ripples dance up- ward; before you one of the loveliest panoramas ever created, stretching for miles on every hand; a knot of colorful fishermen off to one side, working [ 162 ]GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA at their nets; a native child skipping gaily along the beach; a dozen lusty women at the mouth of a rivulet, ruining perfectly good linen; and a lone sail in the offing, wheeling about like a great white moth in the blue. The few hotels that are open are all yours, and you can have any sort of boat almost for the asking. And above everything, now on a bare shelf upon the rugged mountainside, now sweeping up or down in great, birdlike curves and loops, runs that most fascinating of a highroads, the Grande Corniche— literally the cornice above the highly decorated Ri- viera, where the motors of all the fashionable world fly to and fro. Seen by night from the calm waters hundreds of feet below, the Corniche is easily traced by the glaring headlights of the cars which flit like so many skyey fireflies in the upper distance, darting off now and again at angles we know mean roads up or down the sides of the steep hills, but which seem from below to be arbitrary flights through the night on wings. Nothing but a catalogue, and a lengthy one, could name the resorts, famous and otherwise, all the way along this captivating shore: resorts for all condi- tions of men and pockets, each with some peculiar charm and loveliness of its own. Nice is more of a city than any of the rest, and while it has all the “attractions” that mar the other places, it also has more comforts for those in moderate circumstances, while I have been told the villa colony is at least ap- proachable. And Monte Carlo—where in all the wide creation is there such another miniature paradise as [ 163 ]Se a a etnecammnic in man 7 — Cl gg OT r 4 ieee Ce ee eee eee et ee eee Te ee a ee oer Pars oes ‘ es ee . oe ee ee ee pares eT Ie FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA this Mediterranean hill, where the green tables inside keep the outside gardens green, and the whole world lays its tribute under the wheels of Juggernaut? The flower-scented air is sick with the vitiation of mingled blood and gold—you cannot escape its baleful per- vasiveness. ‘Three days were all I could stand of that atmosphere. Along the whole shining length of the Riviera I know of nothing more delightful than the sail across from Cannes to the lovely Iles de Lérins, said to have been named for the Greek pirate Lero. In the season a little steamer runs from Croisette Point; but in season or out take a little sailing lugger, and your own time, and go as you please. St. Honorat, for all it is a tiny island, possesses by far the most important medieval buildings to be found anywhere on the Riviera. They contain some of the features at least of every period and style of both civic and religious Provencal art. In the fifth century, St. Honorat founded a monastery here, which for a very considerable period was the chief source and focus of all the learning and culture in southern Gaul. Missionaries went out from its sheltering haven to carry the light of Christianity and civiliza- tion into all the world, not the least famous of them that Patrick who gave faith and fame alike to the Emerald Isle. As the monastery grew in riches, the murderous raids of the Mediterranean corsairs became more fre- quent, until finally the monks built them a strong castle, rising out of the water on the southern side of the island. But even that did not always save [ 164 |GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA them; once, indeed, the pirates held the castle for a whole year, and were driven out only by the con- certed action of all the nobility of Provence. Its object, of course, was first of all to provide a safe retreat, and its appearance outside is consequently military: moated, battlemented, loopholed and port- cullised; inside, religious and monastic from top to bottom, with cells, refectory, domestic offices, chapel, and an exquisitely double-arched cloister which be- lies the stern visage on the other side of walls mel- lowed by time to a rich golden hue that harmonizes brilliantly with the dark green of the pines and the blue of the southern sea and sky. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the abbey was suppressed. Nearly a century later it was reconstituted, and occupied by Cistercians, who still have an orphanage on the island. A highly perfumed monk showed me through the new building. The contrast between a monkish refectory in use, with the bottles and other things on tables cov- ered with shiny brown oilcloth, and the deserted ones usually seen, is very striking, and wakes a sensation in you of being part of the past. The old cloister, in its simple Cistercian style, with its round-headed little windows instead of the usual large arcades giving upon the garden, and its tunnel vaulting strengthened by transverse ribs, is also in strong contrast with the new structure. Of the seven ancient chapels which once dotted the island only two remain. That of St. Trinité, at the eastern end of the island, is a peculiar domed edifice with three [ 165 |as ee — ae ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA apses, and without doubt one of the very oldest buildings in Provence. One of the principal charms of the place is that you can visit the castle and roam about the entire island at will, unmolested by any guide. In a field we saw the brothers a-haying, their black robes tucked up, their heads half hidden by huge straw hats, looking hke so many old farmer-women. Every- where aromatic pines have made a springy carpet of their needles for your feet. In rows and groups and columns they stand, an unforgetable and charm- ing population. They lean over the water to caress its shining mirror, and their slim, graceful bodies stripe the horizon like the bars of a cage, through which you look across to the Ile Ste. Marguerite. There is nothing to attract one on Ste. Marguerite now, unless he cares to visit the fortress-prison where the famous Man in the Iron Mask was so long con- fined. Richelieu built the fortress, which was later used as a state prison, and now is guarded only by a caretaker, who shows you around. Originally, tradition says, there was but a single island there, inhabited on one side by St. Honorat and his monks, on the other by Ste. Marguerite, his sister, and her nuns. Being very fond of her austere brother, Ste. Marguerite used to visit him at the monastery every month. But the good abbot, fearing that even so pure a thing as sisterly affection might deflect his thoughts from higher and holier things, and imperil his immortal welfare, finally com- manded her to come no more. In his cloister he spent the night in prayer, and behold, at dawn the sea had [ 166 |GRASSE AND THE RIVIERA made two islands of the one! Then St. Honorat sent his sister word that he would cross the gulf to see her each year when the cherry-trees blossomed. She, too, then spent a fervent night at prayer, the pretty legend runs, and when the ruddy morning dawned, lo! the cherry-trees were all in blossom, and ever after that, while the good saints lived, the trees blossomed every month, and St. Honorat, seeing that Heaven willed him not to forget his sister, kept his pledge, and saw her as before.ae , —— i — Soe wer XV OLD PROVENCE ORE than twenty-five centuries ago swarthy Pheenician merchants dotted the halcyon coasts of Provence with little posts for trading with Ligurian inhabitants. Then came the colonizing Greeks, whose civilization molded its life until the Roman conquest. Under its new mas- ters, Provence became rich and favored—The Provy- ince, Provincia, Provence—filled with the monuments of their success, elaborate architecture of the high tide of the Empire’s greatness. And after this the deluge! But Provence, far removed from the source of these new, uncouth influences, preserved at least relics of its Latin civilization during the Dark Ages, and with the dawn immediately showed life in music, art and literature. From this feeble beginning there gradually devel- oped all that wonderful and romantic life of the period of chivalry, with its Courts of Love, its trou- badours, its devotion as much to making verses and singing them as to the sterner virtues necessitated by the roughness of the greater world beyond the [ 168 ]OLD PROVENCE Provencal borders. Luxury and perfume were in the native air of Provence: the sunny, enervating climate predisposed men to voluptuousness rather than valor, and as the resisting power of the province waned by degrees her national pulse beat slower and slower, until finally, her promise unfulfilled, she slept upon the broad bosom of La Mére France. Westward along the ragged coast from Cannes unrolls a resplendent series of clean-cut panoramas of red, white, green, blue. Here and there, as at Théoule, the railway runs along the very edge of red cliffs that slope abruptly down to the sea, which sweeps into the distance, where the Lérins float the castle of St. Honorat, clear as a drop of golden honey, in the sapphire background. So vivid, so lovely are these views that no one who has not seen them can gather from the written word a true idea of the color, beauty and placidity of the picture. Fréjus, the Forum Julii of the Romans, is a big, rambling, prosperous town, whose Latin remains are rich and important, and whose medieval structures are scarcely less engaging. Forcqualqueiret-Garéoult —imagine anybody giving two towns on opposite sides of a railroad names like that and expecting the trains to stop!—boasts chateaux, old and crum- bling; so does Tourves, where a Virgin, on a spire of rock right alongside the track, looks down upon her town with an expression of melancholy. Here you see a church with the typical Provencal bell-tower above its spire, a bird-cage of iron rods and wires; there a villa whose bulging facade is glaring with faience plaque monstrosities, stuck on without rea- [ 169 ]ge ee Ne FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA son, or regard for architectural propriety, and add- ing a gleam of savage color to the scene. In fact, it is the strongly contrasting colors both in nature and in “art,” all along this line, that give the scenery its greatest charm and distinction. St. Maximin—and again late afternoon. Picture a railway station on a lonely swale of green, sur- rounded by oceans of powdery white dust that puffs up in an impalpable mist at every step of the horse that pulls the rheumatic old omnibus away toward the curve in the road where the town, squatting in its dusty basin among the low hills, begins to appear, a straggling collection of sunbaked houses around a church whose spire is both too slender and too short. The dust is stifling and hot; the afternoon sun pours down with an almost tropic fierceness; grass and weeds by the winding roadside are white instead of green, and when at last we step from the omnibus, at the hotel, we are white, too—more like millers than travelers. Our room quickly selected, we threw open the shut- ters, and were astonished to see our coachman, evi- dently a “lightning-change artist,” arrayed in a chef’s full regalia, sitting across the street, talking to a woman shopkeeper. As he stayed outside until dinner was served, some two hours later, he must have cooked it before he went to meet the train. But for all that the dinner was better than we had in many a would-be Parisian hostelry elsewhere in the provinces, where we never saw the chef. Rambling leisurely through the streets in the [ 170 ]OLD PROVENCE — gloaming you stumble over an impossible number of children and pets: tame goats, puppies, kids, mag- pies that exclaim “Oh!” and flap heavily off a few feet when you come too close. The people are coming in from their toil in the fields, on foot, in donkey carts, riding big plow-horses, whose chains clank against their fat sides. Now you see a wiry farmer and his buxom spouse crammed into a child’s-size cart, pulled by a little ass no bigger than a dog; now two simply mountainous old women on the skele- ton of a hay wagon, clucking to their little horse; again, a female huckster crouching in her market wagon, drawn by panting Fido, who makes heavy weather of it, but trots along briskly. A woman appears in a door with a milk-can full of water— woe betide you if you get in her splashsome way! The town is settling down for the night, washing its dusty face and getting its dinner. Two hours later the sudden cry of a wakeful magpie in a garden is loud and startling. You can hear a pin drop in St. Maximin by nine o’clock. Here we come upon one of the strangest of all the religious legends of France, a story that accounts with great circumstance for the introduction of the new religion so speedily to supplant paganism. After the final scene on Calvary the little band of relatives and disciples scattered before the determined perse- cutions of the malignant Jews, and several—Lazarus, Martha, Mary Magdalen, Mary Jacobi, sister of the Virgin, Mary Salomé, the mother of James, Tro- phime, Maximin, and others—miraculously escaped to southern France, where they are severally com- [171]a of — nang nett ne ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Cm memorated in shrines and churches, often of great beauty. The big church here is the most perfect specimen of the Gothic in Provence, strikingly out of conso- nance with its surroundings. It might, indeed, have been transported bodily from the Ie de France. Its lofty, simple, pointed vaulting and arches are light and airy, and the effect must have been very beau- tiful when the long, slim windows, which reduce the masonry to its smallest limits, were filled with stained glass. The contrast with the usually dark and gloomy southern churches must also have been great. Yet it may have been glaring, too, in the brilliant light of the south. We can only guess at it, for the stained glass is mostly gone, and the aisle win- dows are closed by added side chapels. The wood sculptures throughout the interior are excellent, the choir stalls carved with scenes from the lives and martyrdoms of old-time Dominican monks. If these wooden pictures are historically accurate, the Dominican brethren must have had an amusing time dying. One, for example, is shown half hanged, recumbent, with a pleasant-faced soldier hacking out a large section of him with a dull sword. It is highly instructive—swords ought to be sharper! The chief treasure of the church, however, is not carving, but the highly venerated object which pur- ports to be the skull of St. Mary Magdalen. Above the eye-sockets are two dark spots, which the sacris- tan declared are the finger-prints of the Christ, who touched her on His way to Calvary. The legend says that the Magdalen lived as a hermit for a long [ 172OLD PROVENCE Aetemnee time, and died in the cave at Ste. Baume, nine and a half miles away. One of the many excellent pic- tures in the church at St. Maximin shows her re- nouncing the world by throwing her pearl collar to the floor of the dripping cave, which is covered with unset gems. It is a very pleasant little pilgrimage to the hermitage-shrine of Ste. Baume, if you can spare the time, and the beauty and wildness of the location repay you for the exertion. Eight miles further on, toward Aix, the little town of Pourriéres marks one of the bloodiest fields the world has ever seen in any age, the Campi Putridi, literally, “Stinking Fields,’? where Marius the Ro- man, with a skill matched only by his ruthless fe- rocity, practically wiped out of existence the vast barbarian horde which had swarmed down, with women and children and chattels, from the bleak shores of the Baltic to the sunny lands of southern Europe. More than 100,000 fell, and 300,000 more Marius sold into slavery all along the southern shore they had risked so much to reach. Then, as so many of the Israelitish captains of Biblical history had been commanded to do before him, the Roman reared a huge pyre on the scene of his triumph, and the bodies, and all the plunder he could not carry away, roared up to the heavens on wings of fire, whose traces were easily uncovered centuries after Rome herself had ceased to be an empire. With the shadow of the Campi Putridi still hang- ing over us, we come to Aix, the charming, sleepy, modern-medieval city that grew up from the ruins of Aque Sextiz, the first Roman settlement in Gaul. [173]at aaa i FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ~ ae | The barbarians who smote the Roman city did their work thoroughly. Only a bit of wall here, a pillar there, and a few fragments in the museum, tell the story of the early days. But memory in Aix is not of the beginning; it is of the end, for here dwelt good King René, here were the Courts of Love, the troubadours, the good wine and fair women, and song and laughter, that gave Provence its fame— and its fate. All the sunny charm and glamour of Old Provence opens before you in the leafy, square-trimmed tunnel of trees up the Cours Mirabeau, that parts the mod- ern Aix from the old. It is a long, narrow, dirt- floored promenade between the sycamores, with a cob- bled road, and a scanty sidewalk on either hand, and a series of fountains, mossy and dripping and green, up the center. And at its head, looking down as though to greet you in the favorite city of his smiling kingdom, stands the effigy of René himself, Count of Provence, Duc d’Anjou, de Bar and de Lorraine, King of the Two Sicilies and of Jerusalem. The tide of life flows lazily by in the brilliant sunshine at right and left, the fountains plash, and the breeze that elsewhere makes the dusty streets unbearable here whispers a suggestive requiem for the all but forgotten past. After rambling through a labyrinthine tangle of streets and barren squares in the older part of town you find him again, gazing out from one of the panels of a fine tryptich in the Cathedral. A young king on the Cours Mirabeau—how he would have wept over such a name and its associations !—he is [ 174 |PGT Viney ns mee “HT ee — Ry > = Pr tae elo 3 % ns ene 3 = ra (Pr ae "sigiiike ides ar Cc s and cupids, stucco balustr in urn ire rich und brid ‘ € in baths at Nimes . c Rom ancient The re ges, ¢ cmilitary the world. a en a ee ee in architecture Se ~ i — / A _ —_ ~ hme — —_ en _ po ~ =~ ~ _ _ — a ~ Y = bam ~ po = ee ~ - A —_ ond - ~ ~ UR _ Ww o— : ~ sy a nd * ~ ) — Cn } és A YY os oad oL id alee ieee en ee ee ee ee Sd tek a a et Pha Pemniaien | meet Hee ee eee isOLD PROVENCE old and gray in the great church, yet still the poet- king, still the well-beloved of his people. René him- self painted it, they of Aix would have us believe. But no—artist and poet and musician though he may have been, René did not paint himself and his second queen, Jeanne de Laval, in these panels of the Burning Bush. The artist, whose identity is dis- puted, was evidently a Fleming, since the work is a fine specimen of the Flemish style. The Cathedral is a curious composite. The ancient church of St. Sauveur, believed to have been built on a part of the cellar of a temple to Apollo, dating from 1103, now forms the southern aisle of the fif- teenth century Cathedral. Still more unusual is the tiny octagonal baptistery, said to date from the sixth century. Its eight antique granite columns, from the old Temple of Apollo, support a dome whose modern stucco finish spoils the character of the whole structure. I believe that there are only two other baptisteries like this in the whole of France. The beautiful Romanesque cloister of St. Sauveur is distinguished by the boundless resource and variety of its white marble sculpture, columns that range from plain cylinders to fretted octagons, from straight to bent and twisted and even knotted shafts, surmounted by elaborately carved capitals. The dull, faded red of the brick pavement makes a pleasing background for their pallid beauty. The central doors of the western facade, with their prophets and sibyls, are richly carved early sixteenth century work. They are jealously guarded from the equally [175 ]ap = a a a — “= — - Id —O ~—— a i aaa gametes uel wet — P , eek nian tl oe bk el be aah tT bee ieee ane ee eet cee ToL ort. Cee ace — ee = q FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA destructive hands of time and vandal by stout oaken false doors, that swing open only to the silver key you drop into the willing verger’s palm. Westward, from Aix to Rognac, you pass under a prodigy of modern architecture, the towering, three-storied aqueduct of Roquefavour, that carries the water of the Durance fifty-seven miles to Mar- seilles. It runs among the little hills, a gleaming ribbon, a thing of beaten gold, arch rising above arch, striding easily across the green little vale through which the engine shieks. At Rognac we changed to the main line for Arles. We had been on slow, small trains, going away from Paris, so long that when a big, fast train came in, marked “Paris,” we did not recognize it as ours. Calmly we leaned back and watched passengers alight and embark, the guards bang the doors shut, the exchange of those touching little courtesies between trainmen and station employés which are a part of every train departure. Suddenly we looked at one another and asked, “‘Aren’t we going toward Paris?” And then what a scramble! Not a porter, not a railroad employé of any stripe was visible, and the luggage was heavy.and plentiful. But the lone French lady in the compartment we stormed gallantly dragged in bags and cameras, quite as excited as we, and infinitely more expressive, and finished by | hauling us in afterward. Everything was neatly ar- ranged in the baggage racks, we had our breaths, made our apologies decently,and rested a while before the train started leisurely on its northward journey. The long Etang de Berre, a big salt lake, runs [176]OLD PROVENCE for miles beside the track, blue and ruffled, its farther shore black and misty in the distance. The region is wild and hilly, covered with olive plantations that alternate with scrubby patches of gorse and heather. On the right rises a mountain covered with peculiar formations so like a huge castle that, with a little imagination, you can see sentries patrolling its walls, and gray pinnacles and bastions that have all the seeming of ruined outworks and watch-towers. And then that wonderful, shining, absolutely barren desert of the Crau, a slightly rolling plain covered still with the stones Jupiter showered down upon the sons of Neptune to save his favorite, Hercules. ‘Trees and a little vegetation there are beside and near the track; but beyond, only a vast yellow prairie of stones. The very sheep that turn over the larger rocks for a scanty nibble of the whitish grass un- derneath, seem big stones themselves, and the meager fringe of trees in the distance is sere and gaunt. The lake turns green near shore, blue farther out, and streaked everywhere with black ripples, the fiery horses of the North Wind, that toss their little white manes pettishly. Comes then a low, marshy point, jeweled with shining pools, and the lake vanishes behind. Then a few miles more, and, through a mar- velously fertile and marshy district, with a rush and a roar the train draws into the City of Lovely Women.eee ee eee a a a er ee eee XVI “, DREAM OF FAIR WOMEWN” es EHOLD a marvel under the sun.” No mat- ter what it is in Arles that draws you thither, the glory of supreme Roman arch- itecture, the reminiscences of Greek days, or the su- perficial interests of modern travel; no matter whether one or all of these things most interest you while there, no sooner are you away than the city be- comes the soft, blurry background of a dream, through which move the sweet and stately, the fair and captivating daughters of Arles. So I wrote in 1913. But alas for progress! One of the great railway companies has established shops in the vicinity of the city and imported workmen and their families from other regions in considerable num- bers. With so many strange new faces appearing among the familiar ones, the local beauty is less con- spicuous and arresting. In time the intermarriage of newcomers and old inhabitants will undeniably make a difference in type, and the Arles of fifty years hence will perhaps be actually as unlike its old self as it now seems on a casual inspection. [ 178 ]‘A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN’”’ From the importance of the position of Arles, at the head of the Rhone delta, and in the older days upon vast navigable lagoons that communicated with the sea, all the different peoples of this southern lit- toral must have had a part in the city’s early life. Of them all, Rome alone has left us imperishable his- tory and monuments. No tangible evidence remains of the earlier Greek days, though we find Hellenic in- fluence pervasive in architecture; and nowhere in the world—not even in Greece itself, according to one au- thority—are there more perfect examples of the old Greek type, physically, than in the women of Arles. There are only two hotels in town, both of them in the Place du Forum, which has remained in the center of the city from Roman times. It has been written that, no matter which hotel you choose, you will wish you had gone to the other. I can youch for only half of the statement. Starting out from the Place, the thing that most impresses you at first is not the Arlésiennes, but the curious bits of architecture thrusting out at every corner: old houses, whose walls bear only a carved window-lintel, a corner second-story Virgin, a part of some old Roman carving, a bit of Renaissance superficial frieze or decoration. Then, near the crossing of the rues de la Bastille and des Arénes, you see the Amphi- theater. The effect is stunning. And with the Arlési- ennes sitting on their doorsteps on either side the picture is complete in the narrow street, scarce eight feet wide, but very clean, with whitewashed houses and raised doorsteps undercut for a gutter passage. This Amphitheater of Arles, the largest in France, [179 ]cei lt oh Ati te a — FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA is in the familiar elliptical form and two stories high, sixty arches in each, built of great blocks of stone so accurately fitted together that no cement is necessary; and even to-day, after centuries of neglect and decay, many of its elaborate moldings and other carved decorations are to be seen. ‘The imperial entrance, at the southern end of the ellipse, which measures about five hundred feet in length by some three hundred and fifty in width, is open, and you go in to the noise of a wild beast—the custodian’s barking terrier, who welcomes anything to break the monotony of the blood-stained silence. But neither dog nor man follows: you stand alone where twenty-six thousand spectators at once used to enjoy the hideous spectacles of the arena at the expense of the Emperor in the palmy days of Roman Gaul. During the Middle Ages the Amphitheater was transformed into a fortress, and four towers built upon it; three of them still remain. After its use had passed as a strong defense it became a noisome labyrinth where the human dregs of Arles festered in disease and crime. Many a reminder of those days and people you find as you walk among the silent arcades—here a soot-blackened ceiling, there parts of a shattered stair, yonder rude attempts to fresco the wall. An indescribable atmosphere clings about it all, and I felt, even more than in the Coliseum itself, a something I could neither define nor analyze, yet which sprang from this great house of death, consecrated by blood and tears, and standing yet a monument to Roman pride and degradation. [ 180 ]‘A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN” A pleasanter side of Roman life is indicated by the twin columns, the bits of Corinthian molding and the shattered marble ornaments of the great theater, where the higher culture of the Greeks is writ so large. The seats have recently been restored, so that we have an excellent idea of the magnitude of the building, which seated no less than sixteen thou- sand persons. Apparently ten thousand less cared for the play than for the real tragedies of the arena. Among the ruins in 1651 was discovered an exquisite work of Greek art, the Vénus d’Arles, now in the Louvre. Many other impressive relics have been gathered into the Lapidary Museum in the ancient church of Ste. Anne. he collection is, I believe, unique in France; certainly I have never seen another in which the percentage of fine specimens to trash is so large, “the Grecian descent and culture of the country,” as Mr. McGibbon remarks, “being distinctly observ- able in these monuments.” Among the treasures are several inspiring figures, full of the joy of life and sport: Greek dancers, of swaying, yielding lines, brimming over with plastic grace despite cruel mu- tilations ; a bust of the Empress Livia, Junoesque and frigid; and an altar to the Bona Dea, the Good Goddess of dim eastern lineage. Upon the face of this great Earth-Mother man might not gaze and live, so on the marble block is carved a delicate oaken wreath, within which the semblance of an ear iS embayed at either side. Thus, if man might not see his dread divinity, he might, at least, be sure his petitions would reach her ready ear. f 1&1 |} } | . ‘| 1 teat ae - } } FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Among the sarcophagi which form the principal part of the collection, are splendid pagan and Chris- tian tombs, a progressive series, as it were, clearly indicating the transitional styles from the Greek to the fully developed Roman, and from that on into Christian times. Most of them came from Alyscamps, as the Arlésiens call the old Roman cemetery of the Elysii Campi, the Elysian Fields. When the pagan gods had passed, St. Trophime, Bishop of Arles, consecrated the spot for Christian sepulture, and himself was laid to rest there. Ariosto and Dante sang its fame to all the world, princes of Church and State chose it for their long sleep, and at one time no less than nineteen churches and mortuary chapels stood about its verdant close. Bodies were even sent down the Rhone in barrels, with money for decent burial, and it is said that the kindly river always swung the grisly cargo in beside the plot where all would lie. But when, in the middle of the twelfth century, St. Trophime’s body was taken from it to repose in his Cathedral, the prestige of Alys- camps departed, and it rapidly fell into disuse and decay. Its classic monuments and sarcophagi were ruthlessly plundered. Many were sent broadcast throughout France, and even to Rome, as models of classic art, and the few that remained a benighted generation turned into watering-troughs for cattle and bridges over ditches in the fields. The latter have been rescued from their oblivion, fortunately, and ranged in a solemn row at either side of the long avenue of tall, slender trees, through which the pitying wind whispers, and the sunlight filters [ 182 ]‘‘A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN’’ to dapple tomb and roadway alike with gold and gray. Out near the Rhone, almost entirely shut in by mean modern buildings, are the scanty remains of what is said to have been the palace Constantine built in the fourth century, when Arles was approach- ing the zenith of her glory. The city of the lagoons was a favorite with the Emperor, who made it a splendid seat of government, worthy its reputation of being a smaller Rome; and the people of Arles under the imperial rule lived as became the citizens of a capital, among scenes of beauty, richness and profligate enjoyment such as Gaul had never before witnessed. The Romanesque Cathedral, dedicated to St. Tro- phime, is dignified by one of the fairest, most ma- jestic porches southern French architecture has ever produced—a massive twelfth century archway, which enthrones a Christ, surrounded by the emblems of the four evangelists; a lintel where the Twelve sit in benign meditation, and friezes of the redeemed and the damned on either hand. Its effect is enhanced by the almost plain front wall of the church, and by the steps that raise it from actual contact with the busy market square. The snow-white, simple and very impressive nave, with its pointed barrel vault- ing, is an excellent example—typical of the revulsion against earlier and richer forms—of the rigidly aus- tere Cistercian style found in the second period of Provencal architecture. But the most beautiful part of the structure is the twelfth century cloisters ad- joining, rich beyond anything save a catalogue in [ 183 ]Se ee a oe be dehe e tet tie iea taek a —— sane Siti enemas ee ae ~~ ee ee ra A rt et — FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA eee their Provencal floridity of details. Sunny, pleasant cloisters they are, where every prospect pleases—but the sexton. That worthy pirate ought to be immo- lated upon a pyre of the signs he has posted all about the sacred close: ‘‘Remember the Concierge”! Remember him? Can any one who has been herded about those lovely precincts, cornered at last, made to pay, and then thrust out into an unsympathetic world, fail to remember him? And yet all thought of him is wiped away clean of a Sunday morning, when you stand in the dazzling sunshine beside the obelisk in the middle of the Place de la République, the cathedral shimmering in the heat-waves before you, the azure sky overhead and all about the pretty Arlésiennes of the cameo profiles coming from mass. And yet—is “pretty” exactly the word? No. Often they are not pretty at all, as we use the word. What are they? you ask. Cer- tainly not Frenchwomen. Is it the fetching coif and fichu that give them their air? Are they Greek? Are they Roman? Are they Saracen? Surely all three, and more. Wealth and station in life have nothing to do with their superb appearance. One ancient Arlésienne I remember, clearly a woman of the people, seventy, stalwart, hawk-eyed, visaged like a Cesar, and walking with a staff. She lived in a house facing the Amphitheater, and the first time I saw her she was proceeding majestically down the street, greeting her neighbors with dignity—and I simply did not have the effrontery to take her pic- ture. Another day I came back, and deliberately stalked her. Though by neither look nor word did [ 184 ]“A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN’”’ she acknowledge my presence, she knew why I had returned. Yet, in spite of plenty of opportunity, I could not trespass upon her grand air. The picture is still untaken. Another, a woman of thirty-five, perhaps, stood upon the stoop of a house in a tiny side street—a Saracen beauty, dark and slender, with black eyes that belied her calm dignity. I approached with elaborate carelessness. Not by the flicker of an eyelid did she deign to notice me, and I fatuously thought she was deliberately posing—the daughters of Provence have always been charged with being coquettes. Follow the after-church parade down to the Lice, where the rich sunlight spatters through the leaves upon an endless procession. Colors there are, of course, but the most beautiful costume is the long black gown, gathered and full and sweeping, the soft, sheer, white fichu crossed modestly upon the breast; the hair parted, and brought down softly over the ears, then gathered up in a crowning knot, covered with white—a bit of lace, perhaps, or a tiny piece of flimsy cambric—and bound around by a broad band of black ribbon or velvet, with one free end behind. It must be admitted, however, that now- adays there are too many in the Sunday parade who affect the Parisian styles with their banalities— Frenchwomen they must be. One day in the hotel dining-room an old Proven- cal, who looked half Don Quixote and half Frédéric Mistral, was talking poetry, art and letters with his companions. A big Englishman came in, and glared [ 185 |a — a) = es - Sve — Seta ees — a abies Se a - ne a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA about for a seat fiercely, but quite without animosity. For some reason he stepped back into the hall, and the Provencal, who had frowned, and stopped talk- ing, at his entrance, threw up both hands over his head wildly and barked: “Woof! Woof! Woof! These English! Huge animals they are! Woof! I can no longer talk of poetry in the presence of so huge a creature!” ‘The Englishman, coming back just then, evidently heard, and striding over near him said in excellent French that all could hear: “Waiter, give me a good seat, but don’t put me too near that old Burgundy snail. I might eat him by mistake !”’ Dear old jouglar, with his little rages and his fierce, yard-long mustaches! He is only a soft blur in the distance now. Blurred, too, are the Roman ruins, the fine Cathedral, the gray river—mere deli- cate bits of light and shade in the background of the dream of Arles, through which always stately, always appealing, weave the clear figures of those fair women, neither Greek, nor Saracen, nor Roman, nay, nor even Provengale, but wholly Arlésiennes and stirring. Desert! and then the sea. A formless, straggling town about a fortified church some goldsmith might have carved from a block of old gold, a few bare streets, a handful of untidy people and shambling white houses, some peasants playing bowles on the salt-meadow square between town and sea, gaudy fishing-boats on the gentle beach, and a great black cross for the fishermen upon the dunes—this is f 186 |]““A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN’? Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and who cannot be reverent in the little town had best not come. From Arles, the route to The Saints—as the na- tives say—lies through the wild and desolate Camar- gue, the Rhone delta. It is a vast flat, three hundred square miles in area, only a few feet above the sea, and the occasional farm or ranch serves only to emphasize its general emptiness. The train rattled over the atrocious roadbed with doors and windows wide open, to give smoke and cinders from the loco- motive good circulation. Our companions, simple folk of the Comargue, shouted back and forth among themselves, and tiring of this, drew both engineer and fireman into their conversation. Those worthies, turning their backs upon their tasks, leaned over the after-rail and chatted pleasantly while the engine bumped along unwatched and uncontrolled. So we hung out of the windows and kept watch ourselves. When the three Marys and their companion saints landed in safety after their miraculous voyage the younger members of the party scattered, to fulfill their vow of consecration as missionaries: but Mary Jacobi and Mary Salomé, already advanced in years, stayed by the sea, teaching, preaching, and healing the folk of the Camargue, while their faithful black maid Sarah scoured the district for food for them all. Eventually she became the patroness of the gip- sies, and they come by scores and hundreds every year, a swarthy, sweating, disorderly crew, to ven- erate the relics of the black saint they consider peculiarly their own, and to pray for her aid and the aid of her mistress in healing. Through the [ 187 | nealFRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA thin, nervous lips of the little curate, who held me, like some Ancient Mariner, with the glint of his fanatic eye, I saw it all. Was he watching me for signs of doubt or wavering interest? Whatever the reason, he was apparently satisfied, and gave the whole graphic story of the annual May madness. Immediately the religious ceremonies are over, the gipsies hitch up their crazy, shabby wagons, and trail out once more into the Camargue. But the townspeople and the visitors turn to the social func- tions of horse-racing and bull-baiting. Our little curate seemed to see nothing incongruous in this, but cheerily explained the bull-fight—not a fight at all, really, but a game, in which a man tries to snatch a cockade from between a bull’s horns—and often the “bull” is a cow! The church and the vicarage actually form part of the arena, the rest being made up of a collapsible five-bar fence, the massive rails of which lie around in piles when not in use. The loungers about the little place were very ready to supplement the curate’s story of the bulls, but they shied off when the Saintes Maries were mentioned. Have they, like so many other Frenchmen, lost their ancient faith, or did they fear a disbelieving listener? The church itself, a remarkable twelfth century structure, built on the site of an earlier one de- stroyed by Saracen pirates, is typical of the fortified religious edifices to be found throughout southern France. Its exposed position on the shore, where these murderous raiders were always a danger, ac- counts for its high and massive walls, surmounted all around by battlements, and protected at the east- [ 188 ]‘‘A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN’”’ ern end by what in a secular building would be the keep or donjon. Here it is a three-storied chapel tower. In the lower story, or crypt, are the relics of Sarah; the second forms the choir of the church; and above is the reliquary-chapel of the Maries. It all took on a special color and significance in our eyes after the curate’s turgid narrative, and in lieu of the bare stone walls, the tawdry fixtures, and the pathetic ex-votos, we could see only the eager throng, the smoking candles, hear the shouts of Vive les Saintes! and the full throated singing that so eloquently bespeaks the blind faith which in itself has wrought many miracles. As we came away, the picture still vivid before us, the sunlight picked out the figures of a line of women washing clothes in an irrigating ditch, all greatly interested in the camera. Coquettishly the younger ones posed, while their elders smiled and went stolidly on with their work. Emboldened by their chic, I asked the nearest one her name. With perfect gravity she replied: “I am Sainte Marie of Arles, monsieur.” Her neighbor giggled self- consciously: ‘And I, Sainte Marie of the Saintes Maries.” The engine shrieked, and I fled before the Mag- dalen had time to declare herself. —. | a R=- _— er ee gee ee — eal a ee a - ee ee — = Tera ——— XVII THE HOME OF THE ShVYEN POPE'S RACTICALLY all that was left of the Roman Avenio or Avignon, after Barbarian, Saracen and Frenchman finished with it, were small articles that have been gathered into a museum. So interest to-day centers around the time, from 1308 to 1377, when Avignon was the residence of the Popes—seven of them Frenchmen, and legitimately elected, two anti-popes. Their palace, a most extraordinary mixture of fortress, prison and convent, deserves its reputation as one of the show places of France. It climbs up the side of a great rock which falls sheer on the south and east, cut off completely from the town, that sweeps around it in a great ellipse which the Rh6éne completes on the north. On the west, the palace walls rise in another precipice, pierced by a narrow gate. ‘There is no attempt at evenness in the height of the walls. The different buildings that make up the palace were simply set where they were wanted, without regard to the level of the ground, and this gives an irregularity and a charm that is very pleasing. [ 190 ]THE HOME OR THE SEVEN POPES The most impressive feature of the exterior is the machicolation of the parapet, carried on tall Gothic arches, like the vaulting arches of a church. The walls themselves rise perhaps a hundred feet high by some seventeen feet think, and the six towers that still stand—there used to be seven altogether—are fifty feet higher. On the west, the principal entrance was originally guarded by outworks, portcullises, folding gates, and several baillies or courts. For the successors of St. Peter, as spiritual world-kings, the Popes here were certainly well protected. You enter their ancient domicile through the Court of Honor to-day, and find it far from inspiring. Ma- sons, sculptors, carpenters, guides and tourists min- gle on ground cumbered now with all the impedimenta of restoration. The chip, chip, chip of the stone- cutter’s chisel fills the air; powdery gray dust carpets the enclosure; and for the courtly speech of the days when the palace was in its prime, you hear American slang, English monosyllables, and Provencal and French. From revolutionary times until some years ago, the spiritual power was replaced by arms—the seat of the Popes was a barrack. In the small section open to inspection the mark of the beast is writ large upon frescoed wall and ceiling, in windows stripped of their stained glass, in all the traces a conscript soldiery leaves behind. Whitewash half an inch thick is being carefully removed from the walls of council hall and bedchamber, and paintings full of spirit and beauty are peeping out. In the Pope’s bed- room, for instance, instead of the conventional relig- [ rox |ee eee i ee eee te in _ ss : _— at a ee _ ee ee cena ek pertain a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ious compositions, the artist left a charming little fishing scene, with a jester on the bank ridiculing the fishermen and brandishing a landing-net for the minnow about to be caught. Apparently fishing in the France of those early days was as popular, and as amusing, as it is to-day. We see the low, vaulted hall where the College of Cardinals met to elect one of their own number to the keys of heaven and hell when the old Pope died; the vast kitchen, with its lofty ceiling, and chimney in which a whole ox might easily roast; staircases and rooms and corridors seemingly innumerable. He who is fortunate sees it all under the cheery guidance of ancient G. Vassel, jouglar, félibre of the old Provencal school, and the friend of Mistral. Tall, smiling, white-bearded, the venerable poet-guide winks at you when his quick ear catches some foolish or ignorant sally by a visitor, and jokes with you genially in the kitchen—“Ah, those Popes! How they loved good chicken and mutton, roasted to a turn! And their wines. They drank enough, enough!” And he launches, chuckling infectiously, into an enthusiastic description and catalogue of the papal cellars. Perhaps, too, if you please him, when you go away he will give you a picture of himself upon a postcard, ask for your fountain-pen, and scribble a couplet beneath his likeness, per remem- brango. He is typically of the South, of Provence, a sunny, care-free child of Nature, who has “crown enough, but not grown up”; always ready to sing, in the weak, musical dialect of his region, as he did [ 192 |THE HOME OF THE SEVEN POPES when King George, then Prince of Wales, visited the palace under his care— Couro revendrés mai dins la Céuta Papalo, Bello Autesso Reiauto, reveire lis ami? Vous faran soun salut li galoio cigab, E cantaran per vous soun refrin favours. The literary life of Provence centers here in the city of the Popes to-day. It is the meeting-place of the Félibres, or Lovers of Beauty. Here they gathered, to attempt the resurrection of their charm- ing speech as a written language of literature, not many years ago. Of old, Provencal was the speech of the troubadours, whose amorous songs were the natural expression of the idealism which, from its birth as an outgrowth of the crusades and the ado- ration of the Virgin, rapidly developed into a prime feature of civilization. Out of the glamour that sur- rounded the deified Mary gradually came the worship of all women, and as a consequence knights and nobles, commoners and kings, sang the one song. As many as could took their lutes and wandered about seeking what lady they might charm, some- times with fatal, oftener with ludicrous results. Kings themselves played at being troubadours—wit- ness the adventures of the Lion Heart—and it was only with the Albigensian crusades and the Inquisi- tion’s ban that Provencal died as a polite speech. Its revival some years since by the poets Rou- manille, Mistral, and their followers, met with instant approval throughout the province, and the move- ment can be traced entirely to an old woman’s tears. The poet Jotisé Roumanille one day recited some of [ 193 ] ae n A; Dery —_ ee ee tee eee es , C abd ee es min te tiveedet) Liil~ tw eteteli: tier —_ calc ie, em—_——— gee soma pene eet a a es ~ ea ee ee ee SO gg a ee tia . a ee a ge FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA al —— his French verses to his aged mother, who had heard that he was “making paper talk.” The old lady shook her head in sorrowful ignorance. “I do not under- stand,” she said. So Roumanille, suddenly fired with the idea of writing in the only speech she knew, touched her heart with some new verses in Provencal, and she wept and kissed him. Could a poet wish a fairer omen of success, or a movement start more auspiciously ? The church of Notre Dame des Déms, a heavy unattractive Romanesque structure, stands still higher than the palace on the Rocher, and is an important example of Provencal architecture. The distinguishing features of its porch are so very clas- sic that for a long time it was thought to have belonged to an edifice of the Roman days. But there is now no doubt that its fluted Corinthian columns at either side, its triangular pediment, its cornices with the familiar egg-and-leaf ornamenta- tion, were only copied carefully from Roman mod- cls, as was so often the case at the beginning of the revival after the Dark Ages. The interior has been restored out of all sem- blance of the original, but the lantern supporting the dome at the eastern end is raised in a remarkable manner on a series of overlapping arches well worth notice. The only monument of any consequence in the church is the elaborate fourteenth century Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII, now stripped bare of its beautiful statuettes, six of which ornament the pulpit of the Gothic church of St. Pierre in the town behind the palace. [ 104 |THES HOME OF DHE SEVEN POPES The whole crown of the Rocher, or Rock, is cov- ered with the fine gardens called the Promenade du Rocher des Déms, reaching to its very edge, a preci- pice full three hundred feet above the swirling Rhone. The gardens are full of flower-beds and statues, school-children and nurses with babies, old folks sun- ning themselves, and travelers come for the view or to rest. And here, too, we see many of the priests of whom all Avignon seemed full—beautiful, sweet, noble-faced men, all old, all ripe with holiness and the genuine piety and sympathy that come only to him who help his fellow-man. Visitors undoubt- edly they were, the flower of priesthood from the ends of the earth, and they made us wonder if the memories of the papal capital draw only such of the clergy on vacations as are altogether lovely and lovable and good. Below the parapet, down on the river’s edge, the people look like ants, and the vehicles seem toys. Across the Rhone tower the massive walls and battle- ments of Fort St. André; nearer, the strong tower of Philippe le Bel, which guarded the farther end of the long bridge of St. Bénézet, built in the latter part of the twelfth century. Three of the project- ing, boat-shaped piers and four arches of this bridge still stand, and on one of them is the picturesque chapel of St. Nicholas. According to legend, the bridge was built through the instrumentality of a little shepherd lad, Bénézet, called from his flocks in the distant mountains by a mysterious voice, which led him straight to Avignon. The mob jeered at his mission and pretensions, but the good Bishop, [ 195 |—_— . — tS Lg Se —~ ~~ Se es — asain FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA almost convinced by his calm enthusiasm, tested his celestial authority by asking that he carry a huge block of stone, heavy enough to weary thirty men, to the spot where the bridge was to be built. Simply the child took the great stone in his little arms, as if he were carrying one of his own lambs, followed by the crowd, which turned its jeering into wild acclaim. And so, without delay, the bridge was built; and Bénézet, though he died before he was twenty, became, in the course of time, a saint. Another bridge now leads over to Villeneuve-lés- Avignon, which through the centuries has declined from the prosperous suburb of papal days, and the later frontier fortress, to a mere straggling, sleepy country town. From the Place de Hotel de Ville, tramcars weave throughout Avignon, and omnibus lines still more ubiquitous take you anywhere you will. Wonderful vehicles these; long, creaking, rickety affairs, like small, open trolley-cars, with frightful seats and canvas tops—and pretty girl conductors! I am not quite sure but that it was the conductors that made us feel Villeneuve must be worth seeing. Before we started I played hide-and- seek with an especially pretty one, under the trees in the Place, where her ’bus slowly filled up. Dodging gravely about, she never admitted my presence, but by quick steppings into the shadows, and by swift leaps into the ’bus, in pretended assistance of old women and children, the fair conductor—and she was fair—managed to escape and leave me with only a picture of an elbow flying around the corner of the tailboard. [ 196 ]THE: HOME OF THE SEVEN “POPES It is a long drive over that interminable bridge, which crosses a good-sized island, covered with scrub and small trees and what seemed to be well-cared- for meadow. ‘The passengers doze or read news- papers, the glare of the southern afternoon falls warmly through the lowered curtains of the exposed side of the car, and the white dust turns to lather on the sweating horses’ flanks. At the end of the bridge the ’bus swings off to the right, along the river bank, and the breeze comes fresh from King Philip’s tower, a golden honeycomb against the ceru- lean sky and gray rock, where the end of little Bénézet’s bridge used to touch the shore. The road ascends, in a long curve, past the silent tower, then sinuously descends to Villeneuve, shapeless, vaguely romantic, and sunbaked. The ’bus stops beside the ancient southern Gothic church, with its massive for- tified tower, but you walk on up through narrow, ill-paved streets, past low houses whose doors open flush with the gutter and let out sleepy dogs who blink curiously at your heels. And then, at the crest of the hill where the town ends, you see the object of your journey, the grim Fortress St. André, visible proof of the jealous fear with which the kings of France watched the ever-growing power of the Popes across the river. St. André is medievalism crystallized, with its one narrow entrance, a mere arrow-slit between two tow- ers once toothed with a portcullis. The decrepit caretaker dozes all day long in his chair outside the titanic towers, round and northern, where one natu- rally expects them to be square and southern, while [ 197 |ma —_ —— ae eet , = ~ mn ene OT a gg ge ee rn ene ne ees ig eg ni din FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA artists paint impressionistic daubs of his heroic domicile. The fortress covers the whole top of the hill; it might be a little walled city, so large is it. Indeed, there are houses within these grim, yellow walls; many of them mere stone hovels, crumbling into dust. Grass almost hides the cobbles of the streets; the fighting-platforms inside the parapet sprout weeds and wild flowers; and the air of the entire ruin is ineffably sad. In countless little evil holes in the black damp and chill of the towers, holes you are told are dungeons, where the kings, notably Louis XIV, used to place forgotten men, the sadness takes visible form in the crude carvings upon floor and wall. Human moles, working with nothing sharper than their spoons, the prisoners toiled to make here a crucifix, there a St. George and dragon, a rude sketch of a Gothic church; and in one place the pregnant couplet: “N’ entreprenez rien sans envisager le fin. P. P. P. P.”—‘‘Undertake nothing whose end you have not seen. Have patience, poor prisoners.” But come outside and shake off the sadness in the liquid gold of a perfect afternoon. Sit for a while under the olive-trees, gazing over at the city, fair as a dream picture, built all of gold and gems. From an emerald setting it rises beyond the golden stream. The cloudless southern sky pours upon it all the glory of the Provencal sunshine; and as you contem- plate it dreamily the city dwindles smaller and smaller, and the palace on the Rock waxes until its huge bulk dwarfs all else, becomes Avignon itself, domineering and extensive. [ 198 ]THE HOME OFF THE SEVEN? POPE'S Though Avignon has no Roman remains to show, you will find them not far away, at the quiet, charm- ing little town of Orange, in the magnificent trium- phal arch and the great theater, which give us an instructive picture of the days of the Empire; and also at St. Rémy, in Cesar’s arch to commemorate his triumph over Vercingetorix, and in the towering pile to Marius, whose memory would have been safe without it. Who could forget the Campi Putridi? And at St. Rémy, besides monuments, you find beauty and spirit—women who rival the fair daughters of Arles. Avignon is fragrant with memories of Petrarch and Laura, and they should be followed on out into the smiling country, through L’Ile-sur-Sorgue, full of the purring music of water-wheels, and on to Vaucluse, where the Closed Vale of the Romans ends in a towering cliff. Petrarch’s garden was here by the stream that gushes forth from the stone, and here he first saw Laura the lovely, for whom he sighed all his life. His love gave us imperishable sonnets: they give us the picture of a weakling, instead of a man able to override all obstacles in his path and win the one woman, whatever the cost or consequences. At Tarascon, hapless King René made him a fairy castle on the bank, above the gleaming Rhone. Alas! it is a prison now, and none enter save those who do not return to any hotel in time for luncheon. But from the guard-walls outside you may look across to the heights on the other bank, where the romance of Aucassin and Nicolette has made the ruined castle [ 199 |—_——e - eighth i ee — FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA of Beaucaire forever famous. No one who has loved has any excuse for not knowing Aucassin, who, un- like the timid Petrarch, swore that he preferred hell with his sweet Nicolette and all the goodly lords and ladies of his father’s train, to heaven with the aged monks and priests and poor, who knew naught of honest worldly joys. But neither René nor Aucassin drew us to Tarascon. We went to hunt a tarasque, and to call upon Mister Tartarin. Long and hard we hunted through the uninteresting little town, and at last ran our monster to earth in a stable—a black canvas brute, with a bristly wig on his nodding head, and great goggle eyes, and too many sharp teeth. Red and white and green stripes bar him like a tiger, and he has the shape of a mouse—ten feet long. It is not hard to understand why the bold man-eater kept Tarascon in terror of its life until gentle Ste. Marthe, coming up from Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la- Mer, hunted and put a quietus on him forever with the sign of the cross. We failed to see Mister Tartarin. Though I made diligent inquiries, no one seemed to know him, and it was not until a few minutes before our train left that a gentleman told me the mighty hunter’s villa was about a mile outside of town. ‘Then, alas! it was too late.XVIII a ee ee VE Ne Ge AGNeD a E. DLE, AD S you step from the railroad station upon the broad, clean Avenue Feuchéres, Nimes turns brightly toward you a _ sun-kissed southern visage of ancient splendor and present pros- perity: wide streets full of trees; formal gardens with sweet-smelling shrubs; promenades of the most lavish sort; bits of Roman architecture as precious and beautiful as rare scarabei; wooded heights spangled with flowers and bristling with odoriferous firs. ‘The city is so perfumed, with a subtle, elusive, fragrant freshness, you open your nostrils to it in sheer eagerness of life. You breathe in the essence of the German poet’s line, “Weisst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehn?” Very different it is from the heavy, cloying sweetness of tuberose and jasmine, and perfumes in the making, as at Grasse. What a race of Titans they must have been, those Romans, who built in defiance of time and man alike! The Amphitheater here is not so large as that at Arles, but its exterior is in better condition, and presents a very imposing appearance. Here, for [ 201 |— ee ~~ AT a aes —_——— —s ae a ge ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ee once, the Roman genius went wrong in designing the great corridor whose square-headed arches support the second story. Cracked like glass and crumbling like putty under the tremendous weight imposed upon them, the massive stone lintels of the arches have had to be reinforced by iron bars thrust through and up and down, until the great fabric looks as though sewed roughly together with these stout metal bastings. The arrangement of the seats is interest- ing: the lowest series for dignitaries, the next for the knights, the third for plain citizens, and the upper rows for the slaves, quarrelsome creatures, whose seats had to be marked off by a deep groove chiseled in the stone on either hand. The podium, or barrier between the lowest seats and the arena, is so low that it has given rise to a good deal of speculation about the sort of fights given. Surely no wild-animal combats could have been safe unless a metal netting was stretched above the podium. It seems more likely that most of the sports must have been naval battles, gladiatorial contests, chariot races, and other amusements not likely to injure the onlookers. Those stirring scenes of old are commemorated to-day by presentations of spectacular dramas, the annual branding of the lively little bulls of the nearby Camargue, and by bull-fights, which for sheer brutality might well make the ghosts of the emperors rattle their bones in envy. Were the Romans, who built this house that they might sit in it and watch Life and Death play tag, prophets? Could they, nearly a score of centuries ago, have [ 202 ]THE LIVING AND THE DEAD foreseen the sordid, flashing pageantry of the pres- ent-day courses aux taureaux? Scarcely ; yet over the imperial entrance two great bulls’ heads, gazing out over the city with mild eyes, bespeak the character of the arena to-day. Why were they put there—to flatter Divus Augustus, born in a house that had bulls sculptured upon it? None knows, yet they link the present with the past as graphically as though the ancients had known what the moderns would be. Nimes is rich indeed in these monuments of an- tiquity; more so, perhaps, than any other spot in France. Of them all, the most distinguished and lovely, indeed the most beautiful and perfect speci- men of Roman architecture north of Italy, is the Maison Carrée. Yes, the French language, which we are told is so exquisitely refined in its denomina- tion of anything and everything, can find nothing better to call this little gem of a temple, dedicated to the “Princess of Youth,” than the Maison Carrée, the Square House! More a splendid chapel than a temple, the little edifice is an oblong, measuring about forty by eighty feet, of the pseudo-peripteral type, with ten slim Corinthian columns enclosing the deep porch, and twenty others engaged in the side and rear walls. The gabled roof surmounts an en- tablature and a pediment so profusely decorated that the effect is, if anything, too rich; yet the details of style, to be sure indelibly stamped with Greek genius, are remarkably pure. It is hard not to wax over enthusiastic about it, especially when you see or think of the vast ugliness of the modern theater right across the Place. Compared with this gloomy coun- [ 203 ] alc— er ee ee -_ err teers fet pect — - ee ag ga I la nana iinge Oe ‘ nn gc ae FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA terfeit of Greek dignity, the “Square House” fairly scintillates. In Roman days, rows of columns ex- tended to right and left from the temple—this was evidently the end of the Forum—enclosing shops and public places of business or resort. On the fagade is a series of holes for the bolts with which the original inscription, in bronze letters, was held fast. Many ingenious attempts have been made to decipher the inscription by reading the holes, but the authori- ties differ so widely that you may puzzle out a new one for yourself and be quite as nearly right, per- haps, as the savants. The reading most generally approved is that which dedicates the structure to the Princes Cassius and Lucius, the two fortunate boys adopted by Emperor Augustus as his heirs. The history of the temple is quite as full of ro- mance as the building itself is of beauty: we find it a temple, a church, a stable—then the flutings of the central columns of the porch were shaven away to give entrance to carts and other vehicles—an Augustinian mausoleum. When the Revolution waved its red flag at all religious institutions, the dread tribunal of blood met in it. Its picturesque career closed with its adoption by the State as a monument historique, and a museum for relics of the past. On either side of the door is a great amphora, one of the pair bearing an inscription informing the curi- ous that this particular vase was found in 1823, on the estate of M. Lauret, at Saussine, and that it was just this sort of a “tub” that Diogenes lived in, in the happy days of old. Two of the Roman city’s gateways still remain, [ 204 ]THE LIVINGFAND THE DEAD one of them the Gate of Augustus, built in 16 B.c., as a double main arch for vehicles, flanked by a little postern on either hand for pedestrians. A tiny tower at each side contains the stairs leading to the gallery at the top of the arch, and served as a lookout and signal station. ‘To-day, fenced in an angle between the blank walls of modern tenements, the noble gateway makes a curious impression of detachment and aloofness from both its ancient and present surroundings. One of the loveliest walks in any French city to-day is in Nimes, along the Quai de la Fontaine, with its little canal, to Fountain Park. Ten or fif- teen feet below the level of the Quai runs the clear green stream, mirroring back long, quivering, silky vistas of the proud old trees that line the banks above, arching their necks and whispering to the scented breeze that the heavy, inartistic houses flank- ing them are modern excrescences, not without some dignity, but certainly creatures of no character. Crossing streets make the effect of the stream that of a series of very long and deep but narrow tanks or basins, full of glorious reflections. The elaborate Garden of the Fountain is laid out in the Louis XV style, with broad lawns, prim borders of glossy oranges full of green and gold, and bright- eyed flower-beds. Nurses idle on the shaded benches while their small charges disport themselves on the clean gravel paths or the inviting lawns. And at the back edge of the park, close to the steep Mont Cavalier, a splendid spring gushes forth, to fill the ancient Roman baths, rich in urns and cupids, stucco [ 205 ]Site gy ee SO a a ee = = ‘ ORD atigit iii Re = FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA balustrades and quaint bridges, and all that florid eighteenth century taste could suggest to add to the already lovely scene. By all means accept the serv- ices of one of the old custodians always hovering about, and let him tell in his own droll way the story of the baths of eld and of King Louis XV’s gay court ladies and their amusements here. You will learn history as it was never told in any schoolbook on either side of the water, but it will be none the less fascinating for all its novelty. To one side is a tiny ruined Temple of Diana, built by the Romans on the site of a temple of the Celts to their fountain god Nemausus. Behind the baths, balsamy alleys wind up the slope among the trees, where everything is as natural and in- formal as the gardens below are precise. Rising alone from the trees on the crest is the Tour de Magne—Splendid Tower—a huge, hollow monument about a hundred feet high. It is the oldest building in Nimes, erected by the citizens to the glory of Augustus. The view from the top is worth the climb—the whole city spread on the uneven plain, with broad avenues shooting straight out lke the spokes of a wheel, the plain itself a moving sea of color, and away on the horizon faint fringes of moun- tain peaks. The Nimois seem to have been content to rest upon the glory of their Roman remains, for here is no such Christian architecture as at Arles. A few miles away, across the valley of the Gardon, strides one of the Romans’ grandest works, a mighty aqueduct, a hundred and sixty feet high, as perfect pictorially as it is scientifically. It gives you a com- [ 206 ]tte Saas Greams'. = . your of ty Ch Lily ro Gs f ione the ast a ~ - ‘ed, turreted, b € jumps spi suddenly issonne LrCeLCes ‘ « men “AVS ilw € icier ‘ ¢ Its ol noe in 13.000 feet. € e a \ ‘ . ! kd } Hi Fi 14 . 5 : * | 5 4 A ‘ p j ‘ i 5 v o ses more th . Ce ee le 01 ee ~ I ‘ * the Me ede tein ater te < OL ‘reat peal ‘The g ee ee. “(ri steee en ne eS a,THE LIVInG AND? THE DEAD plete sense of the undeviating force and skill of the engineers who could produce at one stroke something so beautiful by making it so supremely perfect as a thing for use: hewn stones, uncemented, but cling- ing together, arch upon arch, three tiers high, the topmost row hollowed out for the passage of the water. The City of Dead-Waters—what a name! Southward from Nimes, among the dead waters of the sickly lagoons that gave it its name of Aigues- Mortes, rises one of the most wonderful pieces of military architecture in the world. The town was founded by St. Louis at a time when he was fired with holy zeal; and thence he set out upon his un- fortunate crusades of 1248 and 1270. But why should a king make a city because he wished to sail away? and why should he choose so mean a spot if he must build? Because at that time almost the whole of the southern coast was controlled by the powerful Counts of Provence and Béziers, and one who was only King of France had to take what he could get. So flat is the country as Aigues-Mortes is ap- proached that there is no thrill to it until, leaving the station, you walk in the blinding light of the salty, sandy plain, among the staggering white houses and little vineyards, to the town. A stone bridge humps its back to leap across the Beaucaire Canal, and from its arch you look down upon the slow- flowing waters to and past the spot whence St. Louis embarked upon his crusades. The walls, built by his [ 207 |= : : ed Dalene Se ee kane eee eed ig a ae — Teenie i - LO ae Ne FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA son, Philip III, rise from twenty-five to more than thirty feet in height, and make the town a rectan- gular fortress, some six hundred yards one way by a hundred and fifty the other. They are guarded by no less than twenty towers, some of them square, some round, and ten great gates, named after their various uses or from events that transpired in or about them. Of them all, the Tower of Constance is the most effective, because it stands clear away from the walls, simply a smooth, round shell of masonry, pierced by unusually long arrow-slits, and crowned at one side with a slender little shaft, upon which is still the iron cage within which, in St. Louis’ time, a beacon- fire used to guide ships entering or leaving the port. The priceless little French-English guidebook I afterward acquired, in its English half declares that the city was built “as a stronghold in the periods of scufling with the Saracens pirats landing from Spain or the Mediterranean border.” According to many writers, past and present, the miasma of fever stalks in by door and window as soon as the sun is down. Very likely—but people still are born and married and happy in the little city by the étangs; and so far as I could see they looked very like any other people, neither sicklier nor healthier. From the flatness of the surrounding country, Aigues-Mortes could never have had the glorious effect of Carcassonne, and the filling up of the moat has robbed the grim walls of what majesty they once had in the days when they rose, alive and strong, from the dead waters. But looked down upon from [ 208 ]THE LIVING AND TITHE DEAD the Tower of Constance, or from any one of the cor- ner turrets of the walls themselves, only the presence of men in coats of mail, and surtouts with white crosses, is indeed to make the picture true to the thir- teenth century. The ancient houses are, some of them, still there; others of the same type have been built ; the streets and squares all show the military- minded architect; and the long walk about the haughty battlements is a revelation of the very dif- ficulties the crusading Saint himself had to face in the Holy Land, where he died. As I stood upon the fighting platform, a sudden shower of missiles came whistling past in a touch of realism I had not anticipated. Sheltering quickly behind the battlements, I peered cautiously out and down. Not a knight was visible, not a man-at-arms. There were no ballistae or other engines of war. But a lusty shout surged up—‘Un sou, Monsteur—un sou!”? And when I tossed a few coppers down, the boisterous young ragamuffins who had for a moment made the Moyen Age alive again, screeched very modernly and scampered away with their easily won loot, — tenia ee a ~~——e TE re een te er ee ee ee al ee ent ee ee cae iii ae TE ecm, en ~~ ve ae ee Sr eta eee esp aaa aioe Pe a Te XTX THROUGH LANGUEDOC ESTWARD from Nimes we have an unin- terrupted series of exquisite vistas from the time we cross the blue waters of the Etang d’Ingril and come to Cette—the Mediter- ranean on one side, another blue lagoon on the other, great, snowy piles of salt dotting the shore like the tents of an invading army. The harbor, and the end of the Canal du Midi, connecting Mediterranean and Atlantic, flutter with the flags of the world. Comes a long, shining beach between sea and lake, and then Agde, its somber, frowning cathedral havy- ing all the seeming of a feudal castle. A few miles more, and the locomotive drags us into Béziers, rumbling over the echoing railway via- duct, past the ancient, unequally arched bridge that humps its back as it leaps across the river Orb. It is a town full of color, from the brown, fortified pile of St. Nazaire’s Cathedral, reared on strong- arched terraces at the edge of the almost perpen- dicular rocks, up which climb sure-footed houses, to the bright gardens and umbrageous promenade, [ 210 ]THROUGH LANGUEDOC named for Paul Riquet, who was born in Béziers. At his own expense, this far-sighted and public- spirited citizen built the three-million-dollar Canal du Midi to link Atlantic and Mediterranean, and benefit not merely his native city, but the whole Midi region of France. Do not miss reading Martin’s* graphic descrip- tion of the massacre of the Protestants of Béziers, July 22, 1209, during the Albigensian wars. It is very easy French. A line or two will give you an idea: “In a few moments the city was inundated by thousands of furious enemies. Then there fol- lowed the greatest massacre the world has ever seen; they spared neither age nor youth, not even the suckling babe. Before the massacre began the con- querors had asked the Abbé of Citeaux how they should distinguish between the faithful and the here- tic. ‘Kill them all! replied Arnaud Amauri. ‘Kall them all! God will know His own!’ Arnaud Amauri avowed that twenty thousand (had been killed) in the account he rendered to the Pope of his victory. Such was the début of the champions of the faith.” At Narbonne is another fortified cathedral and bishop’s palace—but Carcassonne waits just down the line. As you come puffing along through lovely rolling country, Carcassonne suddenly jumps at you around the corner of a low green hill, with the sun gleaming torridly upon its slate roofs and shining on the cool stretch of greensward between its inner and outer walls. It looks as much the fairy city of your dreams as a fact can ever resemble a fancy. * Histoire de France, par Henri Martin, vol. IV: P. 32. [ 211 ] nla ae aeee = ee ae ee ce FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA For twenty years I had dreamed of this mystical city of the south, this spired, turreted, bastioned fortress, whose every aspect, in pictures and descrip- tion alike, fired my imagination with everything chivalry and medievalism suggest. And now, with the goal of years under my foot, it so transpired that to sit down in Carcassonne as I wished and study it at leisure for weeks, to come to know its people and the very stones of its frowning walls, was impossible. A few days at most for the realiza- tion of old desire? No! The train stopped half an hour; so would I; and the plan of years could wait for decent fulfilment. I hope I shall not be like Nadaud’s old peasant, who, at sixty, started to realize his lifelong dream of the castle walls “as grand as those of Babylon.” “But (Heaven forgive him) half way on, The old man died upon the road; He never gazed on Carcassonne.” Even before the advent of the Romans, Toulouse was a city of importance, and it continued to be so under succeeding nations. In the latter part of the eighth century, indeed, its hereditary counts be- came so powerful that they almost succeeded in making themselves independent of their titular soy- ereign, the King of France. Under the rule of these counts, Languedoc enjoyed great prosperity and a remarkable degree of freedom in life and lan- guage. This very enlightenment drew down upon them the wrath of the Church, and a new “crusade” was gaily entered upon by the Catholic North to exterminate these rebellious southern heretics. Be- [ 212 |THROUGH LANGUEDOC sides having the charm of novelty, the Albigensian war promised plenty of loot close at hand, and under the leadership of Count Simon de Montfort, a dia- bolical butcher in the disguise of humanity, the “crusaders” turned the fair land of Languedoc into desolation, and called it Peace. Toulouse to-day is the epitome of what a very large commercial community, unhindered by restric- tions of space, can do in making its domicile at- tractive and easy to get about in. It covers an enormous area on both sides of the Garonne, full of broad, fine streets—the rue Alsace-Lorraine would do credit to Paris, of which it is typical—avenues lined with trees, big and little parks, open squares, ugly houses of the modern French school, and 2 few ancient civic and religious edifices of both im- portance and interest. The people are of an ordinary commercial type, the women plump, the girls very pretty and well dressed, and all highly perfumed. The Capitole, or Hétel de Ville, stands in the cen- ter of the city, a huge, hideous, pretentious affair, of little architectural merit, facing the barren vast- ness of the Place de Capitole, where the market is held. There is, however, an immediate antidote to this dreary commonplace in the lovely little park laid out right behind. It isn’t very much bigger than the palm of your hand, but is crowded with trees, and flower-beds full of color, and is the pictur- esque setting for a delightful fifteenth century square donjon keep, restored, to be sure, by the omnipresent Viollet-le-Duc, but so striking and beautiful, with its dull-red brick walls and slate roofs, that glisten [213 ] = | eee eremaiiterlnamatinea oe a ee aie oeee ee —— = ee —= ee ne ——— art ii all sce eT gate —— —— } ) f a Sen FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA as though they had been newly treated with stove polish, that you think of the illustrations of the fairy tales you read long before you were old enough to visit Toulouse. Down the dark and narrow Street-of-the-Bull we come to the dull-red church of the Saint-Bull, a curious fourteenth century edifice, with triangular arches in its fagade, and a belfry not only typically Tolosan, but which exercised a powerful influence in molding the style of belfries on churches throughout the province. ‘The church stands, according to leg- end, on the spot where the bull to which the Romans tied St. Sernin, after he had refused to sacrifice the beast to Jupiter, stopped in his wild career. That incident is commemorated inside by a series of strik- ing modern frescoes that look hke mosaics and give the story with a wealth of color and detail. At the end of the same street, in a vast open square, the saint is better memorialized by the magnificent church bearing his name, St. Sernin, at once the pride of Toulouse and one of the most splendid Romanesque churches anywhere in the world. It is built, as was fitting, of the “material of the dis- trict,” plain red brick, as are most other great Tolo- san churches of any age; for the city, lying in a dusty plain, had no convenient quarries, and so, tak- ing the clay near at hand, wrought with it in perfect and beautiful works, fully as enduring as those fash- ioned of the less harshly toned stone or marble of other cities. It is very seldom that one sees an effect so entirely pleasing and unlabored as that produced by the group [214 ]THROUGH LANGUEDOC of the five round-topped chapels of the eastern end, which fairly flow upward toward the spire over the crossing. Five seems to be the significant number of St. Sernin—five aisles inside, five chapels at their ends, five stories to the spire, gradually decreasing in dimensions as they mount. The two little chapels attached to the east side of each transept, so far from spoiling the symmetry of the design, rather increase it, and the whole group is curiously Oriental in appearance. The opposite, or western, end, a huge, rough, unfinished pile, with lofty buttresses and a twin portal and rose window, serves merely to bring into stronger relief the rest of the edifice. Before the door on the south side of the nave rises a beauti- ful and elaborate Renaissance arch. Wholly at variance with the style of church as this arch is, it was so skilfully conceived as to do no violence to the harmonious whole. Inside, St. Sernin is a true Latin cross, unusually large for a Romanesque church—880 feet long by 104 feet wide, with the transepts 210 feet from end to end. The columns are crowned by capitals won- derfully varied and rich, foliage and figures ming- ling in harmonious and lifelike profusion. Behind the chancel, on the walls, strange carven reliefs, some pagan, some Christian, form a curious fringe of gray. The feature that most interests the greater number of visitors is not here, however, but on a seat among the choir-stalls. Turn up a miséréré, and look closely, in the flicker of the taper the verger holds toward the ancient oak. Out of the shadows slowly emerges the form of a—pig, leaning from a [ 215 ]1 nem ta Eg pa RE oe FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA pulpit! And lest none but the elect see the point of the satire, he is labeled plainly: Calvin el porc. One of the pleasantest memories you take away from St. Sernin is that of its bells. Every hour they play through the tuneful “Ave Maria de Lourdes”; and every fifteen minutes parts of the same air drift out over the city in a silvery, soothing recurrence from their melodious throats. Of all the cathedrals of France, ancient or mod- ern, I did not find one equal to St. Etienne de Tou- louse for bizarrerie. It is really two short, wide churches telescoped into one another, but not quite on the same axis. Flat-roofed behind, half-gabled in front, with a fortress-like tower shooting up beside the fagade, the Cathedral makes you rub your eyes and wonder if you are awake. ‘The fine rose window was left in its place during the fifteenth century re- construction, but a new door was cut, neither in the middle nor clear to the side, but just enough out of center to give a queer twist to the whole. Inside, you see the same effect. At the end of a short, wide nave, an immensely thick, tall pillar, to the right of which is a narrow aisle, and to the left the really handsome choir, which projects on that side like a transept. It has to be seen to be appreciated. It seems that a new choir was commenced, on a different axis, with the intention of tearing down the old nave and building a new one on the new axis. But it was never done, and, in all probability, never will be now. It would be a shame to destroy such a unique monument as this! Toulouse has its share of other churches, one [ 216 ]THROUGH LANGUEDOC of which, the ruined conventual church of the Jaco- bins, has a fine octagonal tower of red brick. The church itself has been used as a military barrack. Happier far the fate of that old Augustinian con- vent behind whose high walls is the Fine Arts Mu- seum, a provincial collection really worth a careful inspection. When we first tried to enter, one gloomy morning, we found an old peasant woman sitting on the steps, unmindful of the mist that was fast turn- ing to rain. “Pardon, Madame,” I said, “‘is the Musée open to-day?” “Sir? she answered dejectedly, “I do not know. I am not of Toulouse, thank God!” And with a glance at the lowering sky, she huddled together again, the picture of dumb woe, marooned in an unfriendly city. The two cloisters of the former convent, of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, are the acme of cloistral perfection. And the gargoyles—Mon Dieu! Taken from their old lofty perches, they stand erect, a long, grinning row, down the middle of one of the cloister arcades, gaping, laughing, sneering, snarling at you! All you can do is to goggle back in sheer amazement if you are an American, or say fervently, “Mon Dieu!” if you are French. Toulouse has plenty of fine mansions of the days when a man’s house was his pride as well as his castle. But its greatest charms are the swirling Garonne, with its bridges, its wing dam and pictur- esque old mills—one of them dates clear back to the ninth century—and the three splendid canals, which focus in one grand basin called the Embouchure. [217 ]> meme ———— —— ~ nets areas = — ee i eee — Se PP Tg OO inn egg tn aE agg ast Rt ne Nest apne ial ee ne AOR pete eile a me RE NS “hres gate —— ee - ani —_ FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Lines of trees bar their placid waters with long, quiv- ering reflections; canal-boats surge heavily along at two miles an hour, towed by splendid horses, who do their work like machines; fishermen, women and boys line bank and bridges with a patience that is farcical, or pitiful; and trolley-cars empty crowds of gay amusement-seekers under the trees at the great stone basin where the boats tie up. It is here that the Canal du Midi starts on its long journey to the Mediterranean. After it was built, in the seventeenth century, it was found that the upper part of the Garonne was very unsatisfactory as a means of regu- lar transportation, so in the nineteenth century the Canal Lateral was constructed to carry the traffic a hundred and twenty miles nearer the Atlantic, where it joins the river near St. Pierre-d’Aurillac. Albi—and the Cathedral. It stirs you like the Pyramids with its awful simplicity and tremendous mass; it crushes you, dominates you. Is it merely a fortified church? Is it a sanctified fortress? What is 1t? And out of the dim, vague past that produced it comes the answer: I am the mighty rock to cast a shadow in a weary land, and the strong fortress that cannot fall. I am the Church. “The circumstances which compelled the fortifica- tion of practically all the churches of the Midi,” says a French publication dealing with the Cathedral, “explain the character of Ste. Cécile and its origin.” Then it goes on to declare that, though the Albigen- sian heresy had almost vanished, the bishop was so zealous in his prosecution of heretics that there were [ 218 ]THROUGH LANGUEDOC determined reprisals against him, which led him to make his church a material symbol of power; and for three hundred years the faithful, the bishop and the clergy were often glad to put themselves under the protection of the mighty walls of the Cathedral. Flanked by the archiepiscopal palace-fortress, it rises on the crest of an abrupt hill overlooking the river Tarn. A huge hall, about 446 feet long by 120 feet wide, it terminates at the western end in a square tower like a donjon keep, that rises 152 feet above the walls, which themselves soar up 157 feet. Bald as the figures are, they give a faint idea of the sky-piercing character of the edifice. Then consider that every corner is a round military tower, thicken- ing into a massive glacis at the base; that the but- tresses are also towers mighty in defense; that not a window, loophole, or arrow-slit, even, comes any- where near the ground, and you haye some notion of the noble conception. All the old outworks which once fenced off its approaches have vanished, and so have the machicolations of the gigantic main tower, yet the effect is still overwhelming. Against the south side of this red brick fortress has been thrown all the delicate witchery and magic of the Gothic, in a gleaming, white stone entrance vestibule of four arches. But why—what business has a bit of lacework on the cuirass of a knight, however beau- tiful it may be in itself? Within, the promise of the vast walls is fulfilled, and more. Before you, on either hand, the tremen- dous single nave stretches away, unbroken by pillar or column. It is, as Gautier said of Toledo Cathe- [ 219 |_ ERENT Serge TR ig ais - ‘aii po Le = ee —_ - Oe eee Ts aaa FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA dral, “a mountain scooped out, a valley turned topsy- turvy.” Ninety feet or more above the floor, the painted ceiling is a veritable Bible in color; the open gallery that runs all around the nave affords an excellent vantage ground for studying this open book. But the chef d’wuvre is the flamboyant marble screen of lacework, canopied figures and pinnacles, that encloses the choir completely, and gives the effect of a small and elegant church within a vast one. Lace in stone it is, some of it so sheer it seems impossible that cold steel could have wrung it, chip by chip, from the inflexible heart of the block. So amazed was Richelieu, when first he saw the screen, that he demanded a ladder and a knife, and climbing up to one of the fairylike spires, scraped it carefully, to assure himself that the chiseling was actually stone, and not plaster. There are in Albi other things well worth while. But Albi is, always will be, The Church, the great, unconquerable fortress-sanctuary upon a hill that cannot be hid.XxX THE PYRENEES COUN DEY RANCEH is fortunate in her south wall. From the grey and silver surges of the Bay of Biscay to the pellucid ultramarine of the Mediterranean, its enclosing barrier of ruggedness and beauty effectively corks the great Spanish bottle to the south. This range of the Pyrenees possesses everything the lover of natural beauty and the seeker after health can desire: tremendous mountains and little hills; deep, slit-like gorges whose bottoms are boiling torrents of foam; waterfalls not to be matched south of Scandinavia; dense black forests covering some mountains, while other Titans are as bare and naked as when they and the Alps were torn out of the protesting bowels of Mother Earth at about the same time. ‘There are meadows here, spangled with brilliant color; dells where wildflowers make a ver- itable exposition of delicacy and perfume. Little sapphire lakes hide among the crags high in air. Wild goats and foxes, trout and other game fish, snow-partridge and heathcock live in this hunter’s and fisherman’s paradise. Everywhere the foothills [ 221 ]eee > patina + PPR es feet APR retete 4 see, — a FRANCE ERIOM SEA TO SHA a gush forth healing springs whose blessings are as great as their odors are evil. And behind and above everything else, overtopping the puny world of men and beasts, rise the gods of the snow and perpetual cold, those white and solitary peaks whose grim fur- rows hide their treacherous glaciers and immanent avalanches. The Pyrenees may be roughly divided into three sections. In the western one live the Basques, a people neither French nor Spanish but wholly indi- vidual, as interesting and picturesque as they are unique, and as little understood as to origin, as any race in history. They are a fine, clean-minded, clean- bodied folk, athletic and wholesome. Their natural gravity is tinctured with humanness, yet in many ways they are as clannish and unapproachable as the Bretons, and on the whole proud of the fact that “the Basques, like good women, have no history.” Their language, which they call Euskara, meaning Clear Speech, is unique, allied to no other known tongue, and so difficult to acquire there is a saying that the devil tried for seven years to learn it, mast- ered three words, and went back to his brimstone in disgust. The Basques have a number of stories to account for their origin and language, but like best the tale which makes them the direct descendants of Adam, and their language the original speech of the Garden of Eden. One could hardly ask a more charming point @apput for seeing them and their country than Bayonne, the principal city and capital of the former Basque province of Labourd. Like ancient Gaul [ 222 ]Onry « ind massive m € ~ — ~ — a — — — ~ = ee ~ ~ _ — vo) — —_ ~ aux J > Chenonce de ateau { Ch ‘The f an old mill. itions oO f ‘ found aFe ee ee = $a.reng) -feqePerenenneens a begete Se r= Ee ee a ee ee es TT o ete SN — ei a gg ena ee aa SR et tat Se ec Na eee C ymin 2 Cathedr J into Périgueux, you see the spire and domes of the al of St. Front gleaming above the river as impressive aS some mosque,THE PYRENEES COUNTRY: —, itself, Bayonne lies in tres partes, Grand Bayonne to the west, Petit Bayonne to the east of the river Nive, where it flows into the larger Adour, and to the north, across that stream, the vivid Quarter of the Holy Spirit, a weird jumble of docks, steamers, fish- ing-boats, railroad station, abattoir and, high on the hill, Vauban’s beautiful and still virgin fortress, bear- ing the proud inscription Nunquam Polluta. The whole scene is full of attraction: shops decorated with pendentives of yellow oilskins and sea-boots, great strings of garlic showing pearly white against the crimson peppers beside them, and goatskins bulg- ing with wine, all in strong relief against the red, yellow and pink walls of the houses. It is all very cheery and lively, the Basques and Spaniards con- spicuous among their Gallic fellow-townsmen, the former wearing the slouchy, artistic-looking tam or béret, the girls and women of the latter frequently disporting a vivid flower in their black hair. Though the city proper has its excellent points, including grassy western ramparts and the Chateau built over a part of the Roman walls, its interest is mainly historic. The only building of any moment is the thirteenth century Cathedral. As a whole, though it is unfinished and the building is still going on slowly—ain 1847 a citizen bequeathed the Chapter an annuity for carrying on the work and making restorations—it is a handsome and harmonious edi- fice with a magnificent southern portal and an inter- esting interior. It would be hard indeed to find a more delightful location for a watering place than the line of low [ 223 ]ee he i = Si a i ma A i a a i a stg Sos “oN sn lida ia FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA cliffs above the fine beach where all the world bathes and the town of Biarritz straggles amiably along above the sea in cheerful nondescript. Like its greater neighbor, Bayonne, it was at its prosperous and smelly best during early times, when its whaling and cod-fleets gave it considerable importance. With the failure of the fisheries, it dropped down immedi- ately to inconsequence, from which the Carlist Wars in Spain woke it after the lapse of a long and dreary period. Many Spanish nobles, finding Spain alto- gether too hot to be either comfortable or safe, fled to Biarritz, among them that Countess of Montijo whose young and beautiful daughter was destined, as the Empress Eugénie, to return to the town, and to live in the palatial villa Napoleon III built for her in 1854. The approval of royalty was all that was necessary to metamorphose the dormant village into a resort for the fashionables of every nation. Outside the town the roads run past many a stately and formal villa set in its own little park, whose high stone walls gush delicate vines. Fancy iron gates allow fleeting vistas of the prim entrance-walks under flowering trellises, between still primmer flower-beds of gorgeous color. Beyond are the inevitable golf links and racecourse, while the broad reaches of meadowland rolling into the distance are brilliant in summer with crimson spurge-laurel and the burning blue of a wild flower whose name I do not konw. It is, however, the magnificent situation of the town and its exceptional climate which have main- tained its popularity, especially in the season, when the delightful beach is crowded with bathers. On [ 224 ]THE PYRENEES COUNTRY the north, a mighty lighthouse punctuates Cap Mar- tin, whence the cliffs and beach curve gently away like an oval shell to the little promontory of Ata- laye, where a ruined castle lifts its shattered walls, and a wild, savage tangle of rocks and islets fences it off from the combing surges of the Bay of Biscay. Southward the beach runs on again, the rolling coun- try behind bright with wild flowers, golden samphire often growing all the way down to the water’s edge. On this southern side of the Atalaye there are no rocks to stop the waves, and they come thundering in upon the sand in a majestic and ceaseless proces- sional. This is the section of the beach where the Basques flock by the thousand on the second Sunday of Sep- tember—I was never there at that particular time— to bathe by themselves. ‘There is more in this once- a-year water-spree, perhaps, than at first sight ap- pears. In any event, at the little town of Cambo- lés-Bains, somewhat farther south, they come from all the country around each St. John’s Eve ( June 23) for a remarkable exhibition of rapid and Gargantuan drinking? Just as the clocks begin to strike mid- night, everyone begins to drink the waters as fast and as copiously as he can, so as to get every drop possible before the striking stops. This is an in- fallible means of keeping healthy until the next year! Not far south of Biarritz is the charming town of St. Jean-de-Luz which, like all the others, has ac- quired some modern adjuncts. But on the mansion of Messire Jehan de Casabilha in the Rue St. Jacques, a carved inscription in archaic French gives the key- [ 225 ]ms _ Og FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA most noted of the establishments is the Thermes des Oecufs, often called simply “The Eggs”—they per- sistently omit the qualifying bad! The pavilion con- tains a running-water swimming-pool a trifle under seventy feet long by some twenty-seven wide. As this particular spring is used in the treatment of skin-diseases—! Personally, were I convinced that this water was necessary to my health, I should pre- fer to drink it from a bottle, and take hand-baths of it, in the warmth and sunny cheer of Pau. Another valley resort is the simple little mountain hamlet of Luz. It is dominated by the ruined cha- teau of Ste. Marie and the Knights Templars’ twelfth century church, crenellated of wall, embat- tled of gateway, black as a dungeon inside, with curlously “barbaric” decorations and ecclesiastical furniture. It is the best example in France of the architecture of that famous religious-military order. The valley road is thrilling hereabouts with its varied glimpses of the river, which comes crashing down the impressive gorge a bottle-green torrent which bursts into huge masses of foam as it tears wickedly at its restraining rocks. Waterfalls thread the hills everywhere; high on shelves on the mountains perch the towns of Vizos and Esquiéze, with the snowy peaks behind everything. About thirteen miles to the south rises the most marvelous and awe-inspiring of all Pyrenean spec- tacles, the Cirque, or amphitheatre, of Gavarnie, whose Surrounding peaks rise from nine to ten thou- sand feet. The Cirque itself, whose floor is more than a mile above sea level, is two miles wide between [ 232 ]THE PYRENEES COUNTRY the mountains which sweep it around like the pro- jections of a royal crown. In their ridges and fur- rows are silent glaciers and vast fields of snow which have lain there in frozen majesty since the distant geological era that gave birth to these Titans, form- ing marvelous waterfalls, two of which, at least, are never dry. One, the Cascade de Gavarnie, I believe is, with the exception of a Norwegian fall, the highest in Europe, with a sheer single plunge from top to bottom, when the water is plentiful, of almost fourteen hundred feet. When summer has depleted the melting snows, the Cascade takes two jumps, of more than nine hundred and more than four hundred feet, descending in a whirl of spray that looks almost like a tremendous jet of down- ward steam. Another trip which should not be missed is the ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre from Baréges. As the Pyrenees go, this peak is not high, ranking only fortieth with its altitude of 9,400 feet; but because it stands practically alone on the northern slope, the view it commands is incomparable. From the platform at the western side of the very summit, we gaze along the icy billows of the range, in clear weather as far as the distant Bay of Biscay, and northward over the plain of Guyenne until mere physical distance swallows up all outlines. The sharp contrast between the fertile, temperate, living world below and the barren silences and deadly frost above make an ineradicable impression. The old town of Lourdes nestles at the foot of an abrupt hill whose picture-book ancient castle towers [ 233 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA commandingly above a sharp angle in the Gave de Pau. The walls and keep of sterner days are still there, silent and unyielding as the nearby mountains themselves. The town below, which has developed in the past half century or so from a mere country place into a city with important hotels and imposing shops, owes its growth to a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous. She declared that the Virgin had appeared to her in a tiny cave in the hill, com- manding that a church be built in her honor on the spot. Pilgrims soon began flocking to Lourdes, and the spring which issues from the grotto quickly be- came famous as a source of miraculous healing. To-day the place is visited by countless thousands, some of whom beyond question derive benefit from their visit. But the utterly sordid atmosphere of the city, with its repellant commercializing of the most sacred thing in the world—the faith and hope of men, women and children who need all that faith can give them—makes one turn from the spectacle heavy-hearted. Tarbes, so far to the north that it lies in a luxuriant plain practically clear of the Pyrenees, is a dull place excepting when the mountain folk and Spaniards flock in to the fairs to sell their wares and sturdy mountain horses, filling the great square of the Forail with color and noise. The beautiful Jardin Massey, planned like an English park, was laid out by a former superintendent of the Versailles Gardens. It is the city’s brightest spot. There is little else, unless one cares to inspect the great mili- [ 234]THE PYRENEES COUNTRY tary stud farm and cavalry remount station of the French Army. Since the war, however, Tarbes has assumed an importance to Americans it lacked before. A bronze tablet on a modest house displays the baton of a Field Marshal, thirteen stars, and the arms respec- tively of Tarbes and of Alsace-Lorraine. The in- scription reads: “In this house on October 2, 1851, was born Ferdinand Foch, who became Generalissimo of the Armies of Liberty and Marshal of France in 1918. This commemorative Placque was placed here August 15, 1921, by an official Delegation of the American Legion, representing the Veterans of the United States of America who, as guests of the Re- public of France, made this pilgrimage to Tarbes.” Besides Marshal Foch two other natives of Tarbes achieved world fame: Théophile Gautier, and that arch-scoundrel of the Revolution, Barrére, the fiend who demanded—and got—Marie Antoinette’s head. One of the most breath-taking spectacles in the Pyrenees is the tiny town of St. Bertrand de Com- inges, crammed together on top of a lofty, truncated, isolated hill in the valley of the Garonne, and given personality such as no other town I know quite matches, by its glorious Cathedral. From miles away we see it towering there alone in the air, dominating the entire region. Before we recognize it as a church it strikes deep chords of response in us by its gran- deur of proportion and bulk, its ancient, arrogant mien. It might be the still mighty hold of the Lord of all the mountains—as we presently discover it is. [ 235 ]a ———- — - — or art wee Papcnmett ee gO ~ ee —e ee — aes ene oe FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA More than eight hundred years ago it was begun, but the main portions date from the closing years of the thirteenth century, when Bishop Bertrand de Goth—not that earlier St. Bertrand for whom it was named—labored upon it before ascending the Papal throne in Rome. In an architectural as well as a Scenic sense it is one of the most splendid and im- portant religious edifices in the south of France, 2 massive block of a building whose western facade— Roman inscriptions have been let into it in several places—is flanked by a tremendous square tower now culminating in a spire. The carving of the columns about the lofty portal is exceedingly curious. The most interesting single bit is a very old head, clearly representing Jupiter, and in all probability a sur- vival, like the inscriptions, of the Roman city which existed here before the sixth century. The interior is equally stately and well-propor- tioned, The choir screen and rood loft occupy more than half of the fine Gothic nave, and give the ex- ceedingly Spanish effect of a smaller and more deli- cate edifice within the large one. Their carved wood- work, finished about 1536, ranks among the gems of the early Renaissance, and the choir stalls are, if anything, still more elaborate and beautiful. In fact, wherever we turn in this amazing edifice the wonder of its richness, taste and nobility grows—so fine, so lofty a conception so loftily executed, so far out of the world on this little hilltop, remote from everything of importance in even the past that reared it, and to-day more an historical monument than a living church. [ 236 ]LHE PYRENEES COUNTRY Bagnéres de Luchon is perhaps the greatest of all the Pyrenean watering places, delightfully located at the mouth of the valley of the same name, and having more of real comfort, distractions and op- portunities for outside excursions than any other similar resort in the entire range. The new town, built up to accommodate the tourist influx, is mag- nificently laid out and planted, one avenue in par- ticular, the superb Allées d’Etigny, with its four fine rows of venerable limes, making a wonderful promen- ade. The atmosphere is one of luxury throughout, the very guides—most of them are entirely unneces- sary, by the way—having adopted a wholly imagin- ary “Pyrenean costume” to keep pace with the artis- tic toilettes of the fashionables who patronize them. The springs for which Luchon is noted were known as long ago as Roman times, when, as Balniariae Lixonienses, the town contributed to the health of the Empire. The archaeologist will fi id something to interest him here in the votive tablets of those days, proffered to the local god of healing whose Gal- licized name the city of to-day bears proudly. The springs range from hot to cold, and from plain salt to very sulphurous, so that they are available in in- numerable ailments. The Bath Establishment or Pavilion has a fine peristyle of twenty-eight beauti- ful monolithic columns of the snowy St. Béat marble, which has been quarried in the Pyrenees for centuries. Every morning, in the wide Promenade des Quin- conces——planted in squares, with the fifth tree in the centre, thus giving the avenue its name—before the Pavilion a band gives concerts, and the visitors [ 237 ]—— i = —s = “ 2 Nenana ™ POT a gg en I ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA stroll leisurely to and fro, sipping the waters and exchanging greetings and gossip. It gives one the sense of being present at a sort of enormous outdoor afternoon tea at the wrong time of day! And then to the east, along that swinging Route des Pyrénées, are more and yet more healing springs and rushing gaves, nobly coronetted hills, sky-pierc- ing peaks and picturesque valleys, feudal castles whose ruins house the ghosts of a romantic and stir- ring past, quaint highland villages and world-re- nowned watering places—Ax, whose name is said to derive from the Latin Aqua (Water), with its sixty- one springs; Font Romeu, grown from a hermitage and place of pilgrimage into a year-round resort noted for its winter sports. How different the last few links of the jeweled chain, in the warm and brilliant sunshine of the Medi- terranean, pungent with the perfumes of the almost tropical vegetation and flower, completing the full circle of Pyrenean charm with its entrancing atmos- phere, its languor and repose, its broadly Spanish exoticism !architecture ic ance domest alss on the river Indre. French Ren ing - unple of « _ ~~ ~ SD ~_ ~~ A YS oa Mh v - — ~ ~ in 1u is the perfect ex ae c « iv-le-Ride ‘ ae 4a cee ag af nage asi om Sa ee at Ta il gin a I ie AB a AT i i a a a a ae Ee eee ee eee Shee ey ee ee ee ce ba aa a atin an eT, Ee, et atari) Sime he ee ein ne = nh > or Ky | Sat NRG gg ; sf | r L = f ¥ ate a ‘a ~ ' “ee |! < ee "| = =~ 1 he _— 4 _ Witt ; a wv 4 oa Ser we ire a = atheg ts t - rOUJON, = | lange. ittributed to Jean ( ‘ » € « oures ¢ * , with f IS iircase at Blo . The Cathedral of Tours is an architectural me The glorious open-air st Le fil lois: ) , lours-]! r . RightX XI PERG Ur UX, LIMOGES AND POTTER s AHUZAC, Donnazac, Vindrac, Najac, Capde- nac, Figeac—why does every other station between Albi and Périgueux end in that harsh palatal ac? At first amusing, then monot- onous, as town after town terminates, like its fel- lows, in the un-Gallic consonant, it becomes, at last, positively irritating. But though the nomenclature may annoy, the scenery does not. It is a long and vivid panorama through the valleys of the Vere, the Aveyron, the Lot and the Dordogne. Viaducts stretch their lean bodies across gorge and glen. Tunnels bore smokily through iron hills—half the scenery is dripping black walls and clouds of cinders. But often you emerge into a sunny vale, full of soft- colored fields, of bold little hills rising from the plain as abruptly as beehives in a farmyard, capped. with wonderful old castles, flushed a ruddy gold in the afternoon sunshine. Najac is such, and when the Revolution separated the chatelain of its chateau from his breath by Dr. Guillotine’s most approved and painless method, his castle was knocked down to some patriot, who pulled a good bit of it to pieces for building material. Let us hope he got out of [ 239 ]selina “ a a ee a i tN i gO REE i gs en NE og A a OO ——— eee eS . tenn, eke ee ee = ae a — a nN anda Sade een ea FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA it more than the two dollars and twenty-one cents he paid for the splendid old pile! But Najac and its woes are quickly forgotten as you roll along over bad tracks through as lovely a forest-gorge as can be imagined, nine bridges and as many tunnels, now on one side of the Aveyron, now on the other, serving to hold the attention of the most supercilious traveler in spite of himself. But the greatest spectacle does not appear until, coming down into the valley of the Dordogne, the tracks are overhung by sheer, beetling crags that soar upward six hundred feet. The Circus of Mont- valent slowly unfolds to you in all the grandeur of a huge, rocky theater of fantastic contour. Again the picture changes, and the valley becomes luxuri- antly fertile, the grass and foliage and crops of the richest, silkiest green, with the bald top of a hill crowned by the imposing twin towers of Turenne, all that remain of the famous Marshal Turenne’s chateau. Coming into Périgueux, you seem suddenly to have entered the East, the spire and beehive domes of the Cathedral of St. Front gleaming above the river as white and impressive as some moSque. How this came to be makes an interesting story. Along in the tenth and eleventh centuries a brisk trade was car- ried on between the Levant and the west of France and Britain. The corsairs about the Straits of Gibraltar were so active that the merchandise was discharged at Marseilles or Narbonne, and carried overland to La Rochelle or Nantes, whence it was reshipped northward. This trade was mostly in the [ 240 ]PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS hands of Venetian merchants, who, having their head- quarters in Périgueux, built them a church in the form of a Greek cross with five domes, inspired by their home Cathedral of San Marco in the city by the Adriatic, with this difference, that the domes are polygonal and the arches slightly pointed, as in the Provengal style, instead of being spherical, as in the East. At the western end is a huge square tower, crowned by a domed lantern whose roof, mounted upon a beautiful colonnade, is in the fish-scale style. A yard short of two hundred feet in height, it is the only tower in France in the Byzantine style. But alas! the ancient structure, which better than any other in France showed what the pure Byzantine could produce, was almost lost in the nineteenth cen- tury reconstruction. The result is offensively new and glaring to him who loves the soft tones of weath- ered stone. It leaves the beholder cold—unless his wrath for the “restorer” warms him to the mutilated cathedral. The interior is impressive only by reason of its grand dimensions throughout, the mathematical re- currence of the soaring domes, and the general effect of mass given by them and by the great pillars at the crossing. Apart from the newness, the effect of this noble simplicity is ruined by the “eccleciastical furniture,” as the French call it: atrocious gilt chan- deliers in crude castle-and-turret design, glaring chromos on the white limestone walls, and tinsel of the tawdriest sort. The Cathedral, which was only an abbey church [ 241 ]SE ation Ce ee I a gf ae ee —— SS ee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA until the latter part of the seventeenth century, lies on high ground in the newer town, overlooking the river Isle; but down in the old city is the original cathedral, the queer little church of St. Etienne, one of the earliest in the province to be roofed with domes. Behind the high altar is a most unusual reredos, thirty feet high by thirty-six wide—an Assumption carved out of tough but pliant oak with such skill that the figures seem sympathetic and nat- ural, despite the generally baroque character of the work. My camera was carefully poised on the backs of two chairs, when a priest entered hastily and allowed the door to slam behind him with a crash that shook the whole church. He hesitated a moment, then strode over to my chairs. I expected the phrase I had come to dislike so cordially: ““Defense-of-to-pho- tograph here!” But he only said graciously: “I’m very sorry I slammed that door. I hope it didn’t spoil your picture... .” He was very young, or he would not have apolo- gized. It seems part of religion in France to an- nounce one’s entrance into the sanctuary with a hol- low boom, be the entrant priest or layman. Nearby we find the ruins of a Roman amphithea- ter, but no such imposing fabric as at Arles or Nimes. The few ragged arches of crumbling ma- sonry are almost hidden by a luxuriant screen of clinging vines and bright flowers that spring from the carefully tended little park which fills the site of the former arena. A block or two away, in a fine garden, above the railroad tracks, is the ghost of [ 242 ]PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS —— what in its prime was the delightful Chateau Bar- riére, built on part of the old Roman walls, and burned by the Protestants toward the close of the sixteenth century. Perhaps in its heyday Chateau Barriére took an active part in the gay southern life of which we hear so much. You find here memorial tablets to a “troubadour of Périgueux, and to another sweet singer. Across the tracks a little way farther along the brick Tower of Vésone, round and massive and rough, has furnished the archeologists with many a discussion, some claiming it to be pure Roman, others equally certain that it antedated the Roman and was sacred to the pagan gods of Vesuna, a sort of central pantheon, to which every street in the old Gaulish city led. As long ago as 1770 a French traveler wrote of Limoges: “The subtilty of its air may contribute to render its inhabitants grand eaters.” Perhaps this Limogeois fondness for good cheer accounts for our entertainment in a hotel such as we found nowhere else in France, at even double the price. The head waiter understood what ordering a@ la carte meant, the food and cooking were perfection, and we dined on a vine-covered veranda bordered by flowers, with the beautiful Place Jourdain, the finest park square in the city, before us. Porcelain made Limoges famous, and the china upon your dining-table probably came from one of the factories you may visit freely. Its manufacture is interesting to. watch in its multifarious processes and dry to read about. But the less understood en- [ 243 ]————— 7 = ed a aoe See Th enh oe eee OO gg or FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA amel work is interesting in every way. For Limoges paints with fire in liquid glass, and its four or five ateliers turn out veritable gems of color and com- position. The process is almost primitive in its simplicity. Its success depends wholly upon the artistic feeling and ability and the good craftsmanship of the maitre who builds up each of these pictures upon metal, for enamel-making is an art rather than a mere commercial industry. The prices alone testify to that. Copper is the basis of all the enamels. Smoothly covered with a transparent coat of silica, it is ready for the next step. The artist sketches his design upon this coating—a house in the woods, a pastoral, a portrait, anything. Then bits or strips of gold, silver or platinum foil are glued upon every spot where the ruddy copper background is not wanted, and again the piece is transparently coated with silica. The enamels themselves are different-colored sili- cas that look in the rough like bits of broken glass of many hues. The artist grinds them to powder, mixes them with plain cold water, and then stipples them on very slowly and carefully with the tip of a knife-blade, to make sure that each color covers its part of the design, to burst all their bubbles, and to secure a perfectly even thickness throughout. One color is usually fired at a time, at a temperature of something like 1,800 degrees Centigrade, though two wholly different shades can be baked at once without running into one another. Many of the complicated [ 244 |PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS enamels are fired as many as fifty or sixty times, the simple ones often thirty; and as three or four pieces out of every dozen made are spoiled before the process is complete, the successes have to pay for the failures. The art is very old; we find it in a flourishing condition, with Limoges as its center, as far back as the twelfth century. During the sixteenth, enam- eling reached the height of its technical excellence and popularity, and some of the works of that period are treasured still in the Cathedral of St. Etienne. Precious and beautiful they are, splendid in compo- sition and coloring, full of value as contemporary likenesses. And yet, though the colors of old are perhaps a little softer, the master seems not to have solved the problem that confronts every artist, the opacity of color, while the enamels of the present are transparently clear, and even the deepest shadows have a luminosity and depth the older ones lack. The Cathedral is pure Gothic in style, and very beautiful. Though its building lasted from the latter part of the thirteenth century on through to mod- ern times, the architects of the different periods had the good sense to carry on the work in perfect har- mony with what had gone before. The most striking thing to be seen inside is the superb sixteenth century rood screen, which has been moved from its original position to the west end of the nave. Its elegant sculptured decorations include a strange subject for a Christian church—the Labors of Hercules. The great tower or belfry, which stands awkwardly in [ 245 ]gg at CO FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA front of the facade, and a little to one side, is a relic of an earlier Romanesque church. Limoges is a very busy place, and right outside the cathedral we found two old women, one carding wool and the other making mattresses with it. The wool was beautifully clean and soft, the old women immaculate, and they had a clean canvas on the ground under their work. “How much for mat- tresses to-day?” I asked. The old wool-carder looked up cheerily. “‘Deua- cinquante, Monsieur, les meilleurs—Two francs and a half, sir, the very best”—she said. “Fifty cents! And how many do you make a day, madame?” This time the mattress-maker stopped thrusting a twelve-inch needle through the ticking—she was sew- ing the tufts on—and regarded me with distinct dis- approval. “I‘wo—perhaps three, when we are not disturbed,” was her tart observation. The busiest place I found was the Street-of-the- Butchers, literally a long lane of blood and smells. One whiff is enough to send almost any one flying in distress and disgust; but I was determined to see it through. The narrow gutters are full of entrails, blood, bits of pelt and wool. Meat all about hangs in the air to spoil. The most disagreeable features are small animals skinned whole, and showing up like villainous anatomical charts in realistic colors. The stench is pretty bad, but the people all seem strong and hearty, even when bloody up to their eyes, as many of them are. They are very much alive, sharp [ 246 ]PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS and shrewd, talking well, and not encouraging any familiarity in the way of jokes on their street or their amiable customs. I inquired of several if their an- cient guild still endures, and was told it is still composed of the “best people in the city,” and is the most important of the numerous labor societies. The church of St. Michel is remarkable for its equality of dimensions in aisles and nave, and the number and size of its beautiful stained-glass win- dows, which give the effect of walls built of colored glass instead of stone. Indeed, the architect did reduce the walls to the level of frames for the win- dows, rather than of solid masses pierced for illumi- nation. ‘The spectacle in the afternoon, when the sunlight falls through the richly colored glass in floods of glory, that splash cold stone floor and wall and pillar with jewels, when entering worshipers swing a great bar of white sunshine across the church every time they open the wide door, when the burning candles about the high altar and in the sconces before shrines gem the dim interior with flecks of gold, is unforgetable. Not even the mere- tricious showiness of ex-votos and poor modern images can spoil the satisfying effect of warmth and breadth and glorious color. Although Poitou, one of the most colorful prov- inces in France, lies along the main line of the railway from Paris to Bordeaux, it is terra incognita to the great majority of travelers. But why rail at the travelers, when the natives themselves know noth- [ 247 ] = a ahe — a lind aod Sn ae tN ~ rs DD ge FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ing of things in their immediate vicinity? Asking the head waiter in our hotel in Poitiers to tell us how to find the Pierre Leyée, we were overwhelmed when he answered sheepishly: “TI can’t tell you, sir. I have never been across the river! The history of Poitou is no less rich in contrast and color than the province itself, for great lords and gallant ruled it, by no means the least important the “fendless Williams,” some of whom were colorful enough to satisfy any one. Indeed, Count William IX was the first troubadour, and a “grand trompeur des dames—a great deceiver of ladies.” His grand- daughter Eleanor was the first of the troubadours’ queens of chivalry; and she it was who, divorced from the King of France, carried her domains with her, to the sorrow of France, when, in 1152, she married Henry II of England. The name of the capital city, Poitiers, has been made famous by three battles, none of which was really there—the first, when Clovis crushed the Visigoths ; the second, when Charles Mar- tel drove out the Saracens, who, it is said, had previously been invited in by one of the Counts of Poitou; and the third, when Edward the Black Prince defeated John the Good in a bloody repetition of Crécy. Two rivers, the Clain and the Boivre, have hewn a great moat about the foot of the hill on which Poitiers stands, leaving it attached to the mainland only by a narrow little isthmus. All about this pear- shaped promontory circle other hills of equal height, and the site is one of great distinction. The tramway from the railway station coils upward to the Place [ 248 ]PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS “ —_—_—— d’Armes, the center of the town, from which queer, crooked streets lead every which way, all slipping over the edges downhill, so no matter which way you turn, you have to climb laboriously back. It is emphatically a city of churches—curious, beautiful, freakish and dull; every style, from that of the fourth century on. Indeed, the most ancient Christian monument in France is the little temple of St. Jean, a baptistery of Christian-Roman times. It is, fortunately, in an excellent state of preserva- tion, possibly because of the very ordinary Roman- esque additions that have been made to it. Standing some ten feet below the level of the present sidewalks, it is curiously dwarfed in aspect, looking more like a great stone box, with half a beehive attached to either side, than anything else. The roof is built of courses of stone, which give the effect of a series of huge inverted saucers of graduated sizes piled one upon another. This ancient fane is used to-day as a museum of antiquities, principally very early Christian tombs, mortuary tablets, fragments of old capitals, and decorative sculpture. It was built dur- ing the rule of Poiters’ great bishop, St. Hilary, and down near the neck of the pear the remarkable and indescribable Romanesque church of St. Hilaire, with a naive, six aisles and six cupolas, commemorates him in suitable fashion. They were days of both terror and romance, those primitive centuries. Often both mingled in some such moving tale as that of the Lady Radegonde, the young Thuringian princess taken prisoner by Clo- thaire I, son of Clovis, and forced to become his [ 249 ]shoe nner ne ad ee eee eT eT eee Te Trane ee ee re et eee ee eneeee a ea an SN a ngs eae man me narra Siamese — Se = _ peer Te ge = SS ax. nen eS ee a ie ang A Sapna meee Se FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA ee unhappy child bride. Unable to endure her vicious and cruel husband—among other things, he murdered her little brother—she soon ran away from the pal- ace at Soissons. Fortunately for Radegonde, the Church protected her, and, coming to Poitiers, she founded a quiet nunnery above the river, and spent her days in holiness and charity. Her church as it stands to-day makes a striking impression with its great flat buttresses, its many-sided apse and chapels, its massive western tower, and its tall, exceedingly slender fléche. The interior, wide and aisleless, is clearly Angevin—very simple, but effective. The crypt, dark and musty as a tomb chamber should be —in imagination—is illuminated by the flicker of the candles of perpetual remembrance burning before the fine marble figure representing the saint, for which Anne of Austria was the royal model. One receives a wholly new impression down there of what the Church meant to high and low alike, in those troubled days, when to have was to hold, without counting the cost, unless the Church thrust its mighty arm between owner and chattel or liege and vassal. No Hindu temple looks stranger than the aston- ishing and overvalued church of Notre Dame la Grande—enough to make the city’s reputation by itself. It rises from a dusty square crowded with the tents and benches of peasant market-folk, its conical tourelles and tower roofed in the fish-scale pattern, its western facade an amazing medley in which bizarre, sculptured grotesques, animals and chimeras, throw the dignified figures of the Christ, the apostles, and others into strange relief. The [ 250 ]PERIGUEUX, LIMOGES AND POITIERS columns about the door are even wilder, made of writhing, twisting serpents and apelike forms that have a horrid fascination. It is not art, yet some- how I found it hard not to study every repulsive part by itself. Long afterward I found justification for my unconscious attitude in the naif confession of a great German critic, who declared that it takes considerable will-power to see beyond these details to the architecture itself. The exterior of the Cathedral of St. Pierre, neither beautiful nor ugly nor even yet commonplace, hardly prepares you for the imposing dimensions and plan of the interior. The device of narrowing and lower- ing the nave and aisles as they run from doors to apse, in order to convey the impression of greater size and give a finer perspective, is so well done that it is in perfect harmony with the rest of the interior. No one but the student will notice it, except after study, and even then it takes nothing from the general effect. One afternoon a little girl in mourning dress came in with two mere babies, both in the same griey- ous color. No black smocks these, but the weeds of grief. The number of children throughout France who proclaim the loss of a parent in this cruel fash- ion is astonishing; and the worst of it is that their little minds are so filled with the panoply of Death that they take a flaunting pleasure in cneir funereal garb. Leading the children to font and altar, the little mother helped them through their devotions with what seemed to the uninitiate profane celerity. Then, almost knocking the littlest and most obstrep- [ 251 ]ae ee ee ee a arent ayn ete eg — on Zi aN Se aE ia ROR a a Fie ta nS a FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA erous baby down to compel her obedience, she liter- ally dragged them back to the font again and made them cross themselves. They seemed not to mind it in the least, but grinned at us cheerily as they were thrust at the holy water and immediately shooed from the edifice, as predatory chickens are driven from a flower-bed. It was very pathetic, and p’tite mere showed clearly how deep the ritual had sunk into her poor little groping child-soul. The chil- dren of Poitou seem more devoted to their faith than any others we saw in France. We found them in every church in the city, little suppliants who looked pitifully small and helpless, and in need of the help they came so religiously to seek. Churches seem to be the only things of artistic value that Poitiers keeps out in the open. An aston- ishing number of beautiful scraps is hidden away, however, behind or among the most dreary common- places, one of them the guardroom of the fourteenth century palace of the Counts, a vast hall fifty-six feet wide and one hundred and sixty long, with a triple Gothic chimneypiece at one end so large half a regiment could toast its shins about the fires. In front is a Greek temple Palace of Justice, a favorite form of architecture for such buildings. What rela- tion is there in the modern mind between a Greek temple and the punishment of crime? Nearby, as I photographed a very fat man driving a great black dog who was hauling a cart full of vegetables, the peasant called out cheerily: “Did you take me, too? I don’t mind. It’s only the dog that cares.” [ 252 ]XXIT Doon PTA YY GROW ND OLR HE. KEN GS ROM the thirteenth century, when that con- structive monarch, Philippe-Auguste, finally gathered the province of Touraine in from the English, it became the favorite playground of the French kings. And what could be more delight- ful for a royal pleasaunce than this broad, smiling district, full of wide sunny spaces, with a great, fustrous river winding through as it gathers in its gleaming tributaries? Here king and noble alike reared his proud, defensible residence, a medieval castle-fortress, more often than not crowning a height from which he could command the sunny plain. As time went on, however, the castle developed into an edifice more for residence and pleasure than for defense, more often than not nestling in the lowlands beside one of the shimmering streams. Tours was the capital and converging point of this district, and though the kings are gone, Tours and its surroundings are a playground yet. The dust of countless automobiles flies in the streets by day and night; its hotels are among the largest and best in France; it is a popular starting point for [ 253 ]ae at hn ae ea tee eee = _—— es Tg gy ne? a er a ee wee eee FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA excursions in every direction, and the first thing that strikes the stranger is the large number of English and Americans who seem perfectly at home in street and hotel, café and store. The city les on the left bank of the Loire, on a flat tongue of land between it and the little river Cher, just above their junction; but the Loire is a very uncertain quantity, its uncertainty preventing navigation such as one expects to find on a great waterway. In its pleasant moods it is given over to amusements: children wade fearlessly in its tepid current ; men and women alike fish—by the year, ap- parently—from banks and bridges and boats; and canoes and small craft play up and down the shal- lows. It also takes by no means an insignificant part, with its regattas and swimming races, in the merrymaking of the July 14th celebration, the anni- versary of the fall of the Bastille. We were in Tours on the great occasion, and found it the same sort of festival that our own Independence Day will be when we succeed in expurgating it of murder and holocaust—if we ever do. The crowds were full of soldiers: black dragoons with their horse-tail plumes and helmets, armored blue cuirassiers, leather-legged red-and-blue artillery- men, lavender hussars, and even magenta Zouaves and white Turcos, all behaving themselves like gen- tlemen. These brilliant bits of military color give a character to crowds in foreign cities that is wholly lacking here. There is always color in the crowds in Tours. On the busy rue Nationale one day we met the queerest [ 254]LHE PLAYGROUND OF LHEsEINGS combination vehicle imaginable, a hand-organ. baby carriage, the very height of utility. Mother ground out the music while baby howled an obbligato, and two older tots pirouetted, smirked, and gathered in ithe pennies. These were no such dancers, however, as the gipsy children of Granada. Neither do these dancers live in caves, though a lttle way outside Tours is an odd cave-town in the chalky cliffs. It almost makes you jump to see a glazed window star- ing at you from the blank, apparently solid rock; or a queer, slender chimney, with smoke curling from it, sticking up lke some freakish pinnacle of the hill. A Tours stationer told me he rented one of these cave-dwellings for the summer. He said it had a number of rooms, and was sanitary in every ways idonttknow.#cne « But there are many fine old houses in Tours, among them one said to be that of Tristan the Hermit, Louis XI’s hangman. It was probably built much later than Tristan’s time, and its decoration of a twisted cord upon the facade may be the only reason for its somewhat unenviable notoriety. But it is an attractive mansion, whoever its owner may have been long ago, and it has a tall stair-tower in its court- yard. A subterranean passage is said to have con- nected the real house of Tristan with the chateau at Plessis-lés-Tours—now a heap of ruins—Louis’ fa- vorite residence, where he died. Whether true or not, the story fits in perfectly with all we know of the somber monarch, who liked to have his grim persuader handy. The Cathedral, dedicated to St. Gatien, who [ 255 ]FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA brought Christianity to the city and became the first bishop of the diocese, was commenced early in the twelfth century, but its construction dragged along until Renaissance cupolas were added in the sixteenth. Yet it really looks better than that sounds, with its fanciful extravagance of flamboyant orna- ment charmingly executed. Other churches there are, both new and old, and fragments of abbeys; memories of St. Clotilde, the vigorous but godly wife of Clovis, who ended her days here in a convent; of the soldier-saint, Martin, who was truly a soldier of the cross; of Gregory of Tours, the famous historian. But why spend time on Saints and churches, with all Touraine about us? Here, certainly, I would advise an automobile, though there is danger always of hastening away from some historic spot too soon because of the ease in doing so. Nevertheless, the automobile is best, because you can have a dozen points of view from your car to one from a train. One of the love- liest views I ever had, in Touraine or elsewhere, was a glimpse of fields and farmhouses by a little river, seen through trees on which great birds’ nests of mistletoe were outlined against the sky. I never should have noticed it from a train. In the eleventh century the fierce counts of the neighboring province of Anjou were constantly struggling for the possession of the fair land of Touraine, and not a town but has its legend of Black Fulk of Anjou. At Loches we find him perched high above the Indre—a branch of the Loire—swooping out, like the falcon he was, right and left against [ 256 ]THE PLAYGROUND OF THE KINGS his enemies, and with but one thought in his mind— the expansion of Anjou. In his day, the castle was a stronghold, pure and simple; but in the fifteenth century Charles VII built a pleasant hunting lodge inside it. The town of Loches, grouped about the castle hill, with its donjon, its church, its chateau, and its fortifications, presents a most picturesque ensemble. The moat has long since been filled up, but the walls, about a mile and a quarter around, are still mostly standing, and there are few more impressive entrances anywhere in Europe than the ugly, massive, frowning gateway, with the narrow, vertical slots in the curtain wall, through which the drawbridge chains used to work. The church of St. Ours is a most remarkable Ro- manesque structure, with a roof of four pyramids, one in front, one almost over the apse, and two forming the roof of the nave. The entrance is through a porch or narthex full of grotesque sculp- tures, beyond which stretches the cool, dim vista of the nave, with its weird upside-down-cornucopias ceil- ing. Everything invites detailed inspection. But the girl who takes you around demands that you listen to her parrot’ speech—English, committed to memory, and recited without the slightest sense of its meaning, and with the horrible enunciation of a mute who has been taught to talk. She will not even answer questions in French intelligently, and, if you ask too many, begins her performance all over again. Her family seems to have a monopoly of the grounds, and, no matter which way you turn, one of them jumps at you, loaded to the muzzle. [257 ]— i a a a i atm ek rere ee 2", — Or — ee i FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA To the left of the church is the Chateau Royal, strong and simple, its plain walls relieved by fine moldings and carved corbels under the roof. The building is now the Sub-Prefecture of Police, and little of it is shown. In one tower is the tomb of Agnes Sorel, originally in the church. She left a large sum of money to the monks; but they, alleging scruples as to her life, asked Louis XI to let them remove the body. The king agreed, if they would also give up her money. They kept the tomb! Later it was placed in the chateau. Above the entrance to another stair-tower is a bas-relief, now badly weath- ered, but still quite clear, showing Charles and Agnes in a bower in the woods. A nobler figure haunts the chateau, Anne of Brit- tany, queen successively to Charles VIII and Louis XII, who found inspiration and solace in a tiny oratory high above the ground, and so small it is a mere cell. At one end beside the door is the altar, decorated with her device of ermines’ tails and the knotted cordon of the Franciscans. But Anne is not the dominant figure here. Louis XI seems almost incarnate in the donjon, a huge square keep with massive buttresses, tower- ing up 130 feet into the air, now roofless and floorless in each of its four stories, redolent of cruelty and blood. ‘The keep in which he perpetrated his most diabolical cruelties is the smaller one he built along- side, especially for the reception of former favorites ; and in a corridor you may read, if your eyes are good, and the custodian lights a match, the ironical invitation scrawled by some hapless prisoner: ““Entrés [ 258 |THE PLAYGROUND OF THE KINGS messieurs chez le roy nostre mestre—Enter, gentle- men, to the king, our master.” The cells are horrors: up in the air and down under the ground, some lighted by slits in the walls, many not lighted at all. In several of these dens the cruel monarch placed nis own peculiar instruments of torture, cages four feet square inside. One of his most noted prisoners was the Cardinal de la Balue, a rare old scoundrel, not unlike himself. In a sloping passageway giving upon his cell, Louis used to squat and mumble pray- ers to the leaden images of the Virgin stuck in the greasy band of his shabby old hat, gloating all the while over his victim, who could neither stand up nor lie down. Now and then the king would stop his patter of prayers to order the handy Tristan: “Further agitate his Eminence, my Tristan!” And the cage would swing to and fro. No such sinister memories come to mind at Chinon, though counts and kings were there a-plenty—it was the Plantagenet Henry II’s favorite continental residence. In this great triple fortress-castle that towers above the placid Vienne a royal crown of ruined grandeur, all other history pales before that of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid. It was in 1429 that the lazy, weak Charles VII, sneeringly called the “King of Bourges,” while enjoying himself in the great white riverside fortress with a gay court, finally agreed to receive Joan. Among the scornful train in brilliant attire who thronged the great hall—now so desolate that the very birds do not roost in 1t— the figure of Joan must have been a striking appa- rition—“with none of the glory of his court in [ 259 ]i as oer NY J - on a " a ek Sinliciale A ee A a a a ad TS i a neal rng ne nen ee, — a ete Meee ae eT ee eet a 3 = = - ~ et i ee vie el al deh Per eee ee Oe " aliases - FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA her attire, but with all the glory of God in her face,” as Mr. Shoemaker has it. Of the three chateaux that made up Chinon, the Chateau St. Georges has been entirely razed. All that remains of the Grand Logis, or royal apart- ments in the Chateau du Milieu, are bare walls with here and there an elegant chimneypiece hanging to them. Across a moat that looks a hundred feet wide and is spanned by a bridge as enduring as time, you come to the third part, the Chateau of Courdray, with the tower in which the Maid resided during her stay at Chinon. In the grass beside it are still visible the foundations of the Chapel of St. Martin, Where she spent much of her time in prayer. As we stand on one of the towers, looking out at the glory of river and plain under the sunset, we wonder how many times Jeanne stood there, and what were her dreams in those sunset hours, when the castle lay a golden house among the purple lilacs of the spring. Had she any omen of success—and death? Had the subtle poison of the royal atmos- phere that afterward was her undoing already be- gun to work in her veins? Or was she rather not still the perfect, innocent child, waiting only the royal word to speed to the relief of the beleaguered city of Orléans? If Orléans was as deadly dull and monotonous in those days as it is now, we cannot wonder that Jeanne had hard work in persuading pleasure-loving Charles that it was worthy of rescue. The only redeeming features we could find there were the beautiful sixteenth century Hétel de Ville and the tiny little park back of it. [ 260 ]THE PLAYGROUND OF THE KING'S The blood-stained castle of Amboise, with its lofty walls and ramparts defended by three massive tow- ers, stands magnificently high above river and town. Its effectiveness is greatly enhanced by the lofty ground it stands on, and by the masonry of its outer walls being carried all the way up from low ground. Some sort of castle occupied this plateau from Gaul- ish times, and we come upon the trail of Black Fulk of Anjou here, and the specter of cruel Louis XI also. But of all its checkered story the great scene is the last, a grim, melodramatic vengeance before the assembled court—the dour Duc de Guise; Catherine de’? Medici, holding to the scene by her iron will her weak son, Francis II, and his trembling bride, Mary Stuart. When the hideous butchery was done, the chateau was decorated with Huguenot heads, the river ran red, and the forest was stumbling-full of bodies. The frivolous court fled the loathsome sights and smells—the day of Amboise was over; the kings never came back. Though the beautiful river fagade, built by Charles VIII, after his useless and foolish campaign, shows Italian influence, it is usually Francis I who receives the credit for having habituated the Italian arts in France. Among the masters of the Renaissance who put their genius in Gallic harness at his call was Leonardo da Vinci, who died at Amboise. In the terraced garden there is a small bust of the master. I was photographing it, when a Frenchman and his wife, apparently of some position, came up with a guide. Evidently Madame did not understand that worthy’s mouthings, and turned to her husband. [ 261]i oe m com ihichiiei ad mune Ee ele — Se ee ~ PEPE et erg ele: —— oe eS ee PRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA “Henri, who was this man, da Vinci?” Henri was fully equal to the occasion: “Oh, just some fellow that died here.’’ The entrance to the chateau is by a long ramp that leads up past the old fortified wall and a little gem of the Gothic, the chapel of St. Hubert, built by Charles VIII, and elaborately decorated with carv- ings within and without. In the tympanum above the door is a good modern carving showing Charles on the left and his Queen, Anne of Brittany, on the right of the Virgin and Child enthroned. Poor Anne! She has fared ill at the hands of some biog- raphers, who seem to have small appreciation for a virtuous woman in France. But a kinder historian, Mr. Theodore A. Cook, says of her and her ladies : “Like another Vesta, or another Diana, she held all her nymphs in strict discipline, and yet remained full of sweetness and courtesy.” The town of Amboise, as a whole, is one of the most medieval-looking, mysterious old places along the Loire, full of dark, winding alleys, and houses whose barred windows and heavily protected doors are elo- quent of stormy times. After the slaughter at Amboise the tragedy moved on to Blois, where the Duc de Guise met his just deserts at the orders of the cowardly Henry III, brother of Francis II. Treacherously stabbed in a dark passageway, Guise staggered into the king’s private chamber, where he fell dying at the foot of the royal bed, calling for the king, who meantime was in hiding behind a curtain in a passageway: Next day the duke’s cardinal-brother was killed like [ 262 |THE PLAYGROUND OF DHE KINGS a trapped rat in a prison cell below. A few days later, wicked old Catherine de’ Medici died, raving, in her rooms nearby, and within the year Henry himself was murdered. Then the royalty of France gave up the chateau forever. The northwest wing of Blois, erected by Francis I, is wonderful as you approach it, a huge mass rising on a mighty, fortress-like base, whose walls are a castle in themselves. The high Gothic roof is still maintained, but everywhere the Gothic ornamental details have been displaced by the Renaissance. Double Spanish arcades, which give light and shadow exactly where needed, add an attractive feature sel- dom seen in France. Across the facade is a wonder- ful row of gargoyles, and to stand in the corner turret and look along at these unchanging monsters racing forward, as it were, is to set the clock back four hundred years, and to feel, somehow, part of the Middle Ages yourself. On the court side of this wing is the gem of the whole chateau, the éscatier & jour, that stands boldly forth from the pillared wall without destroying its symmetry, and which in itself is perfect and radiant. ‘The carving is as delicate as goldsmith’s work, even in the mere grotesques. It was probably done by Italian artists, but the large figures in the niches are ascribed to Jean Goujon, as everything of un- known origin at this period generally is. The fagade of the earlier wing, built by Louis XII, presents a very striking appearance, with red and white brick and a great, flamboyant portal. Of the later work of Gaston d’Orléans the less said the [ 263 ]Se iedlan int Sate et Sree = ~~ et = ay ort OT tg PRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA better. He planned a total reconstruction of the chateau, with the aid of Mansart, but, as a French mentor quaintly puts it, “fortunately, he died before being able to realize his schemes.” On entering the chateau, unless you bribe the guide, he drags you into a museum on the ground floor that is a weariness. The rooms were the private apartments of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, and the most noticeable things about them are their smallness and simplicity and their amazing chimney- pieces. Throughout the chateau the color-schemes, of course all restorations, are fairly barbaric, the colors rich beyond description, but piled on one an- other without regard for either harmony or contrast. Down a little sloping side street, near the Cathe- dral, stands the house of the old sonneur, or bell- ringer. Quaint, wasp-waisted figures of men who seem to be either steeple-jacks or acrobats, crawl up the pilasters of the upper stories, and on the central pilaster of the third story three of them are tangled together in a most realistic aerial snarl. Blois is rich in old houses, queer, twisting, mysterious streets, and an atmosphere ample in suggestion. There is something immensely gratifying about it all, a sense of being in a measure a proper part of the old times yourself. This sense came to me in no other city in northern France. The chateau of Chambord stands in the middle of a vast park, surrounded by a wall twenty-one miles in circumference, the whole in a flat, uninteresting country. It was built for Francis I by Pierre Nep- [ 264 ]THE PLAYGROUND GE THE SEING'S veu, but it seems certain that the King had a hand in the conception of the work, which was to make him, according to his own notion, one of the greatest builders of the universe. To be sure, the stupendous chateau, 512 by 385 feet, with its four great towers in the fagade, probably looked very different when rising out of the waters of its moat. It must be taken for what it is, an attempt to unite the fortified castle of the Middle Ages and the pleasure palace of the sixteenth century—an absurd proposition. The roofs are a perfect forest of little pinnacles, carven chimneys, turrets and sculptured ornament, with dormer windows everywhere, and above all, the big double lantern of the main stair-tower. ‘This gimerackery justifies Chateaubriand’s description: “The brilliant butterfly of the Renaissance striving to burst through its still visible chrysalis of Gothic traditions, the laced and ruffled head of the cavalier appearing above the strong joints of his armor, the beauty that was sought for, and so nearly won, showing clearer than the failure which at first oppresses us.” Which, being interpreted, means that it really is not so bad as it looks. Neither count nor king began the building of the beautiful chateau of Chenonceaux, but plain Thomas de Bohier, Receiver-General of Finances for Nor- mandy, and his wife Catherine. Unfortunately for the Bohiers, neither of them lived to enjoy their work, and later Chenonceaux became a royal chateau, unique in that the taint of murder never darkened it. It is built on the piles and massive masonry foun- dations of an old mill, and makes no pretense at being [ 265 |aera ie fet Peatlee cert - ——- ee a a ae = = an aeiit a eee ar ~ ——— oe re ea ae ee ee UN Ae enema mee = i mo elt ae ge cag gE iin aE pts = a de : ss . ae * wv FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA a fortified dwelling. One tower, evidently preserved for ornamental purposes, is all that is left of the days when a fortified castle occupied what is now an open court. In the kingly days the chateau was the favorite residence of Catherine de Medici, who built the long gallery over the river Cher, a most unhappy addition architecturally, though it possibly adds to the picturesqueness of the building. It is a great and lofty pile with graceful lines, miniature turrets where the towers would have been two centuries earlier, and gables and pinnacles and dormers at unusual and unexpected angles that give it both character and charm; and its location on the little river Cher is one of the most exquisite natural settings in the world for a palatial mansion. Wherever you stray about the grounds, something beautiful appears, like the magnificent old well with its elaborate, wrought-iron superstructure, which the corrosion of time has merely softened in outline; or a splendid old tree, wonderfully duplicated in Nature’s watery mirror of the moat. Chenonceaux is a private residence again now, but as it is seldom occupied, chateau and gardens are more a brilliant show-place than anything else. And now we come to one of the purest creations of the early French Renaissance, the chateau of Azay-le-Rideau. About this palace in miniature softly flow the clear waters of the little Indre, span- gled with great yellow and white lilies, and moisten- ing the roots of countless brilliant flowers beside the walls. Here the old idea of a fortress-dwelling is entirely discarded, and only such of its forms as make [ 266 |THE PLAY GROUND” OF “THE KINGS for beauty have been kept—the high-pitched roof, the turrets and the buttressed windows, all banded about with sculptured frames, like delicate embroid- ery. What difference does it make if the style was borrowed? ‘The French changed and improved upon their model, revitalizing it and making it distinctly a national system of which they can well be proud. The dim and silent rooms are partly filled now with such art objects from the State Museums in Paris as belong properly in old chateaux, among them some fine tapestries. I particularly wanted a pic- ture of a seventeenth century Gobelin, representing the appearance of the Cross to the Emperor Constan- tine. Came a knocking at the door. “You go down- stairs and see who it is wants to come in,” I told the caretaker. ‘Don’t come back for five minutes.” The very absence of history only adds to the charm of the place: pleasant walks that wind hither and yon, the splash of falling water, the songs of birds, the perfume of the flowers, The only thing that hin- ders our enjoyment of Azay-le-Rideau is the thought that it is a museum when it ought to be a home— with all its radiant daintiness, its joyous freedom, its delicate sense of rhythm and proportion. But these are only a handful. Chateaux are scat- tered in every direction throughout this smiling val- ley. They spell the growth and development of the nobility, just as the Romanesque churches spell that of the Church, and the Gothic cathedrals that of the people. And when the aristocracy was checked in wealth, growth and aspirations by the Revolution, the great chateaux ceased to be homes, and became [ 267 ]— one tle cee Se eel aot RS ett Nap at at pega TT oO ne Bo, A i ag ma Ne te FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA museums. ‘he French people cut off their religious growth more or less permanently in the Terror, and the stalemate lasted until the World War. That terrific sacrifice seemed for a time to be bringing France back into a more religious conviction and practice, and for a moment she experienced much the same sort of uplift and aspiration toward spiritu- ality that the beginning of the Gothic movement witnessed. But disillusion and cynicism crept in on the heels of governmental indifference and incapacity, partisans played politics with a lust rarely equalled in history, and the apathy that has succeeded athe- istic philosophy and socialistic cant is an effective damper on popular religious expression. New great churches as an evidence of the people’s interest are as impossible to-day as new great chateaux of the noble or feudal type.XXIII IN BOURGE'S AND] AN GE RS we think, as we look out over the courtly old gray city, which must appear to-day very much as it did in Charles VII’s time, with its great and beautiful cathedral towering over it, 2 beneficent white guardian. Perhaps the sluggard Charles thought so, too, as he idled here in the seat : : ING OF BOURGES: Not such a bad title, of his southern government and in Touraine. Better than a struggle for Paris, anyway, where the wolfish people of his kingdom were starving, fighting, dying ; the city itself in the hands of the English and their Burgundian allies. Strange that such a man as Charles should command such service as to gain him the title of the “‘Well-Served.” One who served him well was the merchant prince of Bourges, Jacques Coeur, whom Charles betrayed and robbed as cheerfully as he deserted Jeanne d’Arc. The Rothschild of the fifteenth century, Coeur pos- sessed the most colossal fortune ever amassed by a private Frenchman up to that time. His house at Bourges was exceptionally magnificent, and remains [ 269 ]ag sme ET Ni in Sell Sl pata ngage Or ee I ia ena lt a a NT FRANCE FROM SEA TO SEA Sa enema to this day one of the finest monuments of the Mid- dle Ages. The rear view is the most commanding, the two big Roman towers melting into the octagonal towers and main walls of the structure as naturally as if the architect had designed them, instead of taking them ready to hand and making the house fit them. ‘The round-cornered chimneys, with ele- gant fretted tops, the little turrets and finials, the gargoyles, the odd windows, all leave an ineradicable impression of taste and boundless expenditure. In front, the house is long, low, and far-flung, covered with stucco where it is not of cut stone; and in places, as around the doorway, elaborately carved. Above the entrance, from two false windows, carven servants lean out, watching for their returning mas- ter. The great oaken door, dark with age, has a delicate iron handle, in the form of a canopied choir- stall; and everywhere the boltheads are hearts— coeur means heart in French. In the place before the house is a queer, womanish-looking statue of Jacques himself, in a sort of Turkish costume, prob- ably because after his disgrace and exile he led the navy of Pope Calixtus III against the Turk. The courtyard rivals the exterior of the house for richness and beauty, especially in its gracefully carved octagonal stair-towers, and the quaint figures and medallions carved upon pillar and wall. Jacques’ coat-of-arms—hearts and scallop-shells—is every- where, and the character of the man himself is empha- sized by his punning motto: “To brave hearts noth- ing is impossible.” Especially effective is the entrance to the chapel stair from the court, with three sets of [ 270 ]room, unds with the bride and g ices, . € and ~ Sin a we _— ~ WY + \) oe ~ ~ A ~ _ mt _ i it Vannes. 1 c nce « A wedding d d: * . ind everybody ¢ €de Se ee ee ee ee AseOr rane tl eed qute space Sethe Se ee * i Si oo sine emia Sa = a ht i cae ‘S: oO 2 representing the Battle of Hastin death of King Harald. try 42) _ ~ or = foul As md = —_ ss ~~ — w. = am ~ ~ ee bad ss) Ce _ _— ——~ — — * ~ — * a — _— — — — ae _ ~ a of the A. section