menu_book Chapter 5

Section 5 of A Little Tour of France by Henry James. This LibreVox recording is in the public domain. I hardly know what to say about the tone of Langer, which, though I have left it to the end of my sketch, formed the objective point of the first excursion I made from Tours. Langer is rather dark and grey.

It is perhaps the simplest and most severe of all the castles of the Loire. I don't know why I should have gone to see it before any other, unless it be because I remember the Duchess de Langer, who figures in several of Balzac's novels and found this association very potent. The Duchess de Langer is a somewhat transparent fiction, but the castle from which Balzac

borrowed the title of his heroine is an extremely solid fact. My doubt just above as to whether I should pronounce it exceptionally grey comes from my having seen it under a sky which made most things look dark. I have, however, a very kindly memory of that moist and melancholy afternoon, which was much more autumnal than many of the days that followed it.

Langer lies down the Loire near the river on the opposite side from Tours, and to go to it you will spend half an hour in the train. You pass on the way the Château de Luin, which with its round towers catching the afternoon light looks uncommonly well on a hill at a distance. You pass also the ruins of the Castle of Saint-Mar, the ancestral dwelling of the young

favourite of Louis XIII, the victim of Richelieu, the hero of Alfred de Vigny's novel, which is usually recommended to young ladies engaged in the study of French. Langer is very imposing and decidedly sombre. It marks the transition from the architecture of defence to that of elegance. It rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to which it gives

its name, and which it entirely dominates, so that, as you stand before it, in the crooked and empty street there is no resource for you but to stare up at its heavy, overhanging cornice and at the huge towers surmounted with extinguishes of slate. If you follow the street to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments of a French village.

Little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen, brown old crones, the tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps, worn by day, look dazzling, little alleys perforating the thickness of a row of cottages, and showing you behind as a glimpse the vividness of a green garden. In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formally have been occupied by some of

its appurtenances, and which indeed is still partly enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence, which, with the small houses of the village at its base, shuts in the castle from behind. The enclosure is not defiantly guarded, however, for a small rough path which you presently reach leads up to an open gate.

This gate admits you to a vague and rather limited parc, which covers the crest of the hill, and through which you may walk into the gardens of the castle. These gardens of small extent confront the dark walls with their brilliant parterre, and covering the gradual slope of the hill, form, as it were, the fourth side of the court. This is the stateliest view of the château, which looks to you sufficiently grim and grey,

as after asking leave of a neat young woman who sallies out to learn your errand, you sit there on a garden bench and take the measure of the three tall towers attached to this inner front, and forming severally the cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cornice, one of the features of l'enje, which is merely ornamental, as it is not macacolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as well.

The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on the ruins of feudalism. The main event in the history of the castle is the marriage of Anne of Brittany to her first husband Charles VIII, which took place in its great hall in 1491. Into this great hall we were introduced by the neat young woman, into this great hall and into Sunday other halls, winding staircases, galleries, chambers.

The Cizeroni of l'enje is in too great a hurry. The fact is pointed out in the excellent Guy Joann. This ill dissimulated vice, however, is to be observed in the country of the Loire in everyone who carries a key. It is true that at l'enje there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourists' weakness

of dawdling, for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds and ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all apartments should be through which the insatiable American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, causing to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some simpering

portrait. To return to Tours, my companion and I had counted on a train which, as is not uncommon in France, existed only in the Indicateurs des chemins de fer, and instead of waiting for another, we engaged a vehicle to take us home. A sorry carriole of attache it proved to be, with the accessories of a lumbering white

mare and a little wizened ancient peasant who would put on, in honor of the occasion, a new blouse of extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic woman who put it too with her own hands, women in Touraine and Abléssois appearing to have the best of it in the business of letting vehicles, as well as in many other industries.

There is in fact no branch of human activity in which one is not liable in France to find a woman engaged. Women indeed are not priests, but priests are, more or less, women. They are not in the army, it may be said, but then they are the army. They are very formidable.

In France one must count with the women. The drive back from Langer-du-Tour was long, slow, cold. We had an occasional spatter of rain, but the road passes most of the way close to the and there was something in our jog-truck through the darkening land beside the flowing river which it was very possible to enjoy.

Chapter 10. The consequence of my leaving to the last of my little mention of Lush is that space and opportunity fail me, and yet a brief and hurried account of that extraordinary spot would after all be in best agreement with my visit. We snatched a fearful joy, my companion and I, the afternoon we took the train for Lush.

The weather this time had been terribly against us. Again and again a day that promised fair became hopelessly foul after lunch. At last we determined that if we could not make this excursion in the sunshine we would make it with the aid of our umbrellas. We grasped them firmly and started for the station, where we were detained an unconscionable

time by the evolutions outside of certain trains laden with liberated and exhilarated conscripts who, their term of service ended, were about to be restored to civil life. The trains in Turen are provoking. They serve as little as possible for excursions. If they convey you one way at the right hour it is on the condition of bringing you back

at the wrong. They either allow you far too little time to examine the castle or the ruin, or they leave you planted in front of it by periods that outlast curiosity. They are perverse, capricious, exasperating. It was a question of our having but an hour or two at Lush, and we could ill afford to

sacrifice to accidents. One of the accidents, however, was that the rain stopped when we got there, leaving behind it a moist mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky which were in perfect agreement with the grey old city. Lush is certainly one of the greatest impressions of the traveller in central France, the largest

cluster of curious things that presents itself to his sight. It rises above the valley of the Andres, the charming stream set in meadows and sedges, which wanders through the province of Berry and through many of the novels of Madame George Champs, lifting from the summit of a hill which it covers to the base a confusion of terraces, ramparts, towers and spires.

Having but little time, as I say, we scaled the hill a main and wandered briskly through this labyrinth of antiquities. The rain had decidedly stopped, and say that we had our train on our minds, we saw Lush to the best advantage. We enjoyed that sensation with which the conscientious tourist is, or ought to be, well acquainted,

and for which at any rate he has a formula in his rough-and-ready language. We experienced, as they say, most odious of verbs, an agreeable disappointment. We were surprised and delighted. We had not suspected that Lush was so good. I hardly know what is best there.

The strange and impressive little collegial church, with its Romanesque atrium or narthex, its doorways covered with primitive sculpture of the richest kind, its treasure of a so-called altar embossed with fighting warriors, its three pyramidal domes so unexpected, so sinister, which I have not met elsewhere in church architecture, or the huge square keep of the eleventh century, the most cliff-like tower I remember whose immeasurable thickness I did not penetrate,

or the subterranean mysteries of two other less striking but not less historic dungeons, into which a terribly imperative little Ciceroni introduced us with the aid of downward ladders, ropes, torches, warnings, and extended hands, and many fearful anecdotes all in impervious darkness. These horrible prisons of Lush, at an incredible distance below the daylight, were a favored resort of Louis XI, and were, for the most part, I believe, constructed by him.

One of the towers of the castle is garnished with hooks or supports of the celebrated iron cage, in which he can find the cardinal Laballu, who survived so much longer than might have been expected this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure. All these things form part of the castle of Lush, whose enormous en-saint covers the whole of the top of the hill, and abounds in dismantled gateways, in crooked passages, in winding

lanes that lead to post and doors, in long facades that look upon terraces interdicted to the visitor, who proceeds with irritation that they command magnificent views. These views are the property of the sub-prefect of the department, who resides at the Château de Lush, and who has also the enjoyment of a garden, a garden compressed and curtailed, as those of old castles that perch on hilltops are apt to be, containing a horse-just nut-tree

of fabulous size, a tree of a circumference so vast and so perfect that the whole population of Lush might sit in concentric rows beneath its boughs. The gem of the place, however, is neither the big marronnier, nor the collegial church, nor the mighty dungeon, nor the hideous prisons of Louis XI. It is simply the tomb of Agnes Sorel, la belle des belles, so many years the mistress of

Charles VII. She was buried in 1450 in the collegial church. Whence, in the beginning of the present century, her remains, with the monument that marks them, were transferred to one of the towers of the castle. She has always, I know not with what justice, enjoyed a fairer fame than most ladies who

have occupied her position, and this fairness is expressed in the delicate statue that surmounts her tomb. It represents her lying there in lovely demureness, her hands folded with the best modesty, a little kneeling angel at either side of her head, and her feet hidden in the folds of her decent robe resting upon a pair of couchant lambs, innocent reminders of her name.

Agnes, however, was not lamb-like, inasmuch as according to her popular tradition at least, she exerted herself sharply in favor of the expulsion of the English from France. It is one of the suggestions of Loche that the young Charles VII, hard put to it as he was for a treasury and a capital, le roi de bourges as he was called at Paris, was yet a rather privileged mortal to stand up as he does before posterity between the noble

Joan and the gentille Agnes, deriving, however, much more honor from one of these companions than from the other. Just as delicate a relic of antiquity as this fascinating tomb is the exquisite oratory of Anne of Brittany, among the apartments of the castle the only chamber worthy of note. This small room, hardly larger than a closet and forming part of the addition made to the

edifice by Charles VII, is embroidered over with the curious and remarkably decorative device of the ermine and festooned cord. The objects in themselves are not especially graceful, but the constant repetition of the figure on the walls and ceiling produces an effect of richness in spite of the modern whitewash with which, if I remember rightly, they have been endued.

The little streets of Loche wander crookedly down the hill and full of charming pictorial bits, an old town gate passing under a medieval tower which is ornamented by Gothic windows and the empty niches of statues. A meager but delicate Hôtel de Ville of the Renaissance nestling close beside it. A curious chanceli of the middle of the 16th century with mythological figures and a Latin

inscription on the front, both of these latter buildings being rather unexpected features of the huddled and precipitous little town. Loche has a suburb on the other side of the Andre which we had contented ourselves with looking down at from the heights. While we wondered whether, even if it had not been getting late and our train were more

accommodating, we should care to take our way across the bridge and look up that bust and terracotta of Francis I, which is the principal ornament of the Château de Sanssac and the Faubourg en Beaulieu. I think we decided that we should not, that we were already quite well enough acquainted with the nasal profile of that monarch.

Chapter 11 I know not whether the exact limits of an excursion as distinguished from a journey have ever been fixed. At any rate it seemed none of my business at Tours to settle the question. Therefore, though the making of excursions had been the promise of my stay, I thought

it vain while I started for Bourges to determine to which category that little expedition might belong. It was not till the third day that I returned to Tours and the distance traversed for the most part after dark was even greater than I had supposed. That however was partly the fault of a tiresome wait at Vierceau where I had more than enough

time to dine very badly at the buffet, and to observe the proceedings of a family who had entered my railway carriage at Tours and had conversed unreservedly for my benefit all the way from that station, a family whom had entertained me to assign to the class of petite noblesse de province. Their noble origin was confirmed by the way they all made Megre in the refreshment room

– it happened to be a Friday – as if it had been possible to do anything else. They ate two or three omelets apiece and ever so many little cakes, while the positive talkative mother watched her children as the waiter handed about the roast fowl. I was destined to share the secrets of this family to the end, for when I had taken place in the empty train that was in waiting to convey us to Bourges, the same vigilant woman

pushed them all on top of me into my compartment, though the carriages on either side contained no travellers at all. It was better, I found, to have dined, even on omelets and little cakes, at the station at Vierceau rather than at the hotel at Bourges, which, when I reached it at nine o'clock at night, did not strike me as the prince of hotels.

The inns in the smaller provincial towns of France are all, as the term is, commercial, and the commis voyageur is in triumphant possession. I saw a great deal of him for several weeks after this, for he was apparently the only traveller in the southern provinces, and it was my daily fate to sit opposite to him at table d'hôte and in railway trains.

He may be known by two infallible signs – his hands are fat and he tucks his napkin into his shirt collar. In spite of these idiosyncrasies, he seemed to me a reserved and inoffensive person, with singularly little of the demonstrative good humour that he had been described as possessing. I saw no one who reminded me of Balzac's illustre godissard, and indeed in the course

of a month's journey through a large part of France I heard so little desultory conversation that I wondered whether a change had not come over the spirit of the people. They seemed to me as silent as Americans when Americans have not been introduced, and infinitely less addicted to exchanging remarks at railway trains and at table d'hôte than the colloquial and cursory English.

A fact perhaps not worth mentioning were it not at variance with that reputation which the French have long enjoyed of being a pre-eminently sociable nation. The common report of the character of a people is, however, an indefinable product, and it is apt to strike the traveller who observes for himself as very wide of the mark. The English, who have for ages been described, mainly by the French, as the dumb, stiff,

unapproachable race, present today a remarkable appearance of good humour and garrality, and are distinguished by their facility of intercourse. On the other hand, anyone who has seen half a dozen Frenchmen pass a whole day together in a railway carriage with out-breaking silence is forced to believe that the traditional reputation of these gentlemen is simply the survival of some primitive formula.

It was true doubtless before the Revolution, but there have been great changes since then. The question of which is the better taste, to talk to strangers or to hold your tongue, is a matter apart. I inclined believe that the French reserve is the result of a more definite conception of social behaviour.

I allude to it only because it is at variance with the national fame, and at the same time is compatible with a very easy view of life in certain other directions. On some of these latter points the boule d'or at Bourges was full of instruction, boasting, as it did, of a hall of reception in which amid old boots that had been brought to be cleaned, old linen that was being sorted for the wash, and lamps of evil odour that were

awaiting replenishment, a strange, familiar, promiscuous household life went forward. Small scullions in white caps and aprons slept upon greasy benches. The boots sat staring at you while you fumbled, helpless, in a row of pigeonholes for your candlestick or your key. And amid the coming and going of the commis voyageurs, a little seamstress bent over the

undergarments of the hostess, the latter being a heavy, stern, silent woman who looked at people very hard. It was not to be looked at in that manner that one had come all the way from Tours, so that within ten minutes after my arrival I sallied out into the darkness to get somehow and somewhere a happier impression.

However late in the evening I may arrive at a place, I cannot go to bed without an impression. The natural place in Bours to look for one seemed to be the cathedral, which moreover was the only thing that could account for my presence dans cette galère. I turned out of a small square in front of the hotel and walked up a narrow sloping street paved with big rough stones and guiltless of a footway.

It was a splendid starlit night, the stillness of a sleeping ville de province was over everything, I had the whole place to myself. I turned to my right at the top of the street where presently a short, vague lane brought me into sight of the cathedral. I approached it obliquely from behind, it loomed up in the darkness above me enormous

and sublime. It stands on the top of the large but not lofty eminence over which bourses scattered, a very good position as French cathedrals go, for they are not all so nobly situated as Châtre-la-Hon. On the side on which I approached it, the south, it is tolerably well exposed, though

the precinct is shabby. In front it is rather too much shut in. These defects, however, it makes up for on the north side and behind, where it presents itself in the most admirable manner to the garden of the Arche Véchée, which has been arranged as a public walk with the usual formal alleys of the Jardin français.

I must add that I appreciated these points only on the following day. As I stood there in the light of the stars, many of which had an autumnal sharpness, while others were shooting over the heavens, the huge, rugged vessel of the church overhung me in very much the same way as the black hull of a ship at sea would overhang a solitary swimmer.

It seemed colossal, stupendous, a dark leviathan. The next morning, which was lovely, I lost no time in going back to it, and found with satisfaction that the daylight did it no injury. The Cathedral of Bourges is indeed magnificently huge, and if it is a good deal wanting in lightness and grace, it is perhaps only the more imposing.

I read in the excellent handbook of Monsieur Joanne that it was projected dès 1172, but commenced only in the first years of the thirteenth century. The nave, the writer adds, was finished tant bien que mal faute de ressources. The façade is of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in its lower part, and of the fourteenth in its upper.

The allusion to the nave means the omission of the transepts. The west front consists of two vast but imperfect towers, one of which, the south, is immensely buttressed so that its outline slopes forward like that of a pyramid, being the taller of the two. If they had spires, these towers would be prodigious, as it is, given the rest of the

church, they are wanting in elevation. There are five deeply recessed portals, all in a row, each surmounted with a gable, the gable over the central door being exceptionally high. Above the porches, which give the measure of its width, the front rears itself, piles itself on a great scale, carried up by galleries, arches, windows, sculptures, and supported

by the extraordinarily thick buttresses of which I have spoken, and which, though they embellish it with deep shadows thrown sidewise, do not improve its style. The portals, especially the middle one, are extremely interesting. They are covered with curious early sculptures. The middle one, however, I must describe alone.

It has no less than six rows of figures. The others have four, some of which, notably the upper one, are still in their places. The arch at the top has three tiers of elaborate imagery. The upper of these is divided by the figure of Christ in judgment, of great size, stiff and terrible, with outstretched arms.

On either side of him arranged three or four angels, with the instruments of the Passion. Beneath him, in the second frieze, stands the Angel of Justice with his scales, and on either side of him is the vision of the Last Judgment. The good prepare, with infinite titillation and complacency, to ascend to the skies, while the bad are dragged, pushed, hurled, stuffed, crammed into pits and cauldrons of fire.

There is a charming detail in this section. Beside the angel on the right, where the wicked are the prey of demons, stands a little female figure, that of a child, who with hands meekly folded and head gently raised, waits for the stern angel to decide upon her fate. In this fate, however, a dreadful big devil also takes a keen interest.

He seems on the point of appropriating the tender creature. He has a face like a goat and an enormous hooked nose. But the angel gently lays a hand upon the shoulder of the little girl. The movement is full of dignity, as if to say, No, she belongs to the other side. The frieze below represents the general resurrection, with the good and wicked emerging from their

sepulchres. Nothing can be more quaint and charming than the difference shown in the way of responding to the final trump. The good get out of their tombs with a certain modest gaiety, an alacrity tempered by respect. One of them kneels to pray as soon as he has disinterred himself.

You may know the wicked, on the other hand, by their extreme shyness. They crawl out slowly and fearfully. They hang back and seem to say, Oh dear! These elaborate sculptures, full of ingenuous intention and of the reality of early faith, are in a remarkable state of preservation.

They bear no superficial signs of restoration and appear scarcely to have suffered from the centuries. They are delightfully expressive. The artist had the advantage of knowing exactly the effect he wished to produce. The interior of the cathedral has a great simplicity and majesty, and above all a tremendous

height. The nave is extraordinary in this respect. It dwarfs everything else I know. I should add, however, that I am in architecture always of the opinion of the last speaker. Any great building seems to me, while I look at it, the ultimate expression.

At any rate, during the hour I sat gazing along the high vista of Bours, the interior of the great vessel corresponded to my vision of the evening before. There is a tranquil largeness, a kind of infinitude, about such an edifice. It soothes and purifies the spirit. It illuminates the mind.

There are two aisles on either side in addition to the nave, five in all, and, as I have said, there are no transepts, an emission which lengthens the vista, so that from my place Near the door the central jeweled window in the depths of the perpendicular choir seemed a mile or two away. The second or outward of each pair of aisles is too low, and the first too high.

Without this inequality the nave would appear to take an even more prodigious flight. The double aisles pass all the way around the choir, the windows of which are inordinately rich in magnificent old glass. I have seen glass as fine in other churches, but I think I have never seen so much of it at once.

Beside the cathedral on the north is a curious structure of the 14th or 15th century, which looks like an enormous flying buttress with its support sustaining the north tower. It makes a massive arch high in the air and produces a romantic effect as people pass to the open gardens of the Archivéché, which extend to a considerable distance in the rear of the church.

The structure supporting the arch has the girth of a larges house and contains chambers with whose uses I am unacquainted, but to which the deep pulsations of the cathedral, the vibration of its mighty bells, and the roll of its organ tones must be transmitted even through the great arm of stone. The archepiscopal palace, not walled as in Tours, is visible as a stately habitation

of the last century, now in course of reparation in consequence of a fire. From this side and from the gardens of the palace the nave of the cathedral is visible in all its great length and height, with its extraordinary multitude of supports. The gardens aforesaid, accessible through tall iron gates, are the promenade, the trilleries of the town, and very pretty in themselves, are immensely set off by the overhanging church.

It was warm and sunny, the benches were empty. I sat there a long time in that pleasant state of mind which visits the traveller in foreign towns when he is not too hurried, while he wonders where he had better go next. The straight unbroken line of the roof of the cathedral was very noble, but I could see from this point how much finer the effect would have been if the towers, which had dropped

almost out of sight, might have been still carried higher. The archepiscopal gardens looked down at one end over a sort of esplanade or suburban avenue lying on a lower level on which they opened, and where several detachments of soldiers, bulges full of soldiers, had just been drawn up. The civil population was also collecting, and I saw that something was going to happen.

I learned that a private of the chasseurs was to be broken for stealing, and everyone was eager to behold the ceremony. Suddenly other detachments arrived on the ground, besides many of the military who had come as a matter of taste. One of them described to me the process of degradation from the ranks, and I felt for

a moment a hideous curiosity to see it, under the influence of which I lingered a little. But only a little. The hateful nature of the spectacle hurried me away at the same time that others were hurrying forward. As I turned my back upon it, I reflected that human beings are cruel brutes, though I could

not flatter myself that the ferocity of the thing was exclusively French. In another country the concourse would have been equally great, and the moral of it all seemed to be that military penalties are as terrible as military honors are gratifying.