menu_book Chapter 8

XVII. It is an injustice to Poitiers to approach her by night, as I did some three hours after leaving La Rochelle, for what Poitiers has of best, as they would say at Poitiers, is the appearance she presents to the arriving stranger who puts his head out of the window of the train.

I gazed into the gloom from such an aperture before we got to the station, for I remembered the impression received on another occasion, but I saw nothing save the universal night, spotted here and there with an ugly railway lamp. It was only as I departed the following day that I assured myself that Poitiers still makes something of the figure she ought on the summit of a considerable hill.

I have a kindness for any little group of towers, any cluster of roofs and chimneys, that lift themselves from an eminence over which a long road ascends in zigzags. Such a picture creates for the moment a presumption that you are in Italy, and even leads you to believe that if you mount the winding road you will come to an old-town wall, an expanse of crevice brownness, and pass under a gateway surmounted by the arms of a medieval despot.

Why I should find it a pleasure in France to imagine myself in Italy is more than I can say. The illusion has never lasted long enough to be analyzed. From the bottom of its perch Poitiers looks large and high, and indeed the evening I reached it, the interminable climb of the omnibus of the hotel I had selected, which I found

at the station, gave me the measure of its commanding position. This hotel, magnifique construction ornée de statues, as the guide Joanne, usually so reticent, takes the trouble to announce, has an omnibus, and I suppose his statues, though I didn't perceive them, but it has very little else save immemorial accumulations of dirt.

It is magnificent, if you will, but it is not even relatively proper, and a dirty inn to me the dirtiest of human things. It has so many opportunities to betray itself. Poitiers covers a large space, and is as crooked and straggling as you please, but these advantages are not accompanied with any very salient features or any great wealth of architecture.

Although there are few picturesque houses, however, there are two or three curious old churches. Notre-Dame-la-Grande in the marketplace, a small Romanesque structure of the 12th century, has a most interesting and venerable exterior. Composed like all the churches of Poitiers, of a light brown stone with a yellowish tinge,

it is covered with primitive but ingenious sculptures and is really an impressive monument. Within it has lately been daubed over with the most hideous decorative painting that was ever inflicted upon passive pillars and indifferent vaults. This battered yet coherent little edifice has the touching look that resides in everything supremely old.

It has arrived at the age at which such things cease to feel the years. The waves of time have worn its edges to a kind of patient dullness. There is something mild and smooth, like the stillness, the deftness of an octogenarian, in its rudeness of ornament, and it has become insensible to differences of a century or two. The cathedral interested me much less than Our Lady the Great, and I have not the spirit

to go into statistics about it. It is not statistical to say that the cathedral stands halfway down the hill of Poitiers, in a quiet and grass-grown place, with an approach of crooked lanes and blank garden walls, and that its most striking dimension is the width of its façade. This width is extraordinary, but it fails, somehow, to give nobleness to the edifice

which looks within, Murray makes the remark, like a large public hall. There are a nave and two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave, and there are some very fearful modern pictures, which you may see much better than you usually see those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glowing side chapels, there being no fine old glass to diffuse a kindly gloom.

The sacristan of the cathedral showed me something much better than all this bright bereness. He led me a short distance out of it to the small Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious object at Poitiers. It is an early Christian chapel, one of the earliest in France. Originally, it would seem, that is, in the sixth or seventh century, a baptistry, but

converted into a church while the Christian era was still comparatively young. The Temple de Saint-Jean is therefore a monument even more venerable than Notre Dame la Grande, and that numbness of age which are imputed in Notre Dame ought to reside in a still larger measure in its crude and colorless little walls. I call them crude, in spite of their having been baked through by the centuries, only

because although certain rude arches and carvings alled into them, and they are surmounted at either end with a small gable, they have, so far as I can remember, little fascination of surface. Notre Dame is still expressive, still pretends to be alive, but the temple has delivered its message and is completely at rest.

It retains a kind of atrium on the level of the street from which you descend to the original floor, now uncovered, but buried for years under a false bottom. The semicircular apse was, apparently at the time of its conversion, into a church, thrown out from the east wall. In the middle is the cavity of the old baptismal font.

The walls and vaults are covered with traces of extremely archaic frescoes, attributed, I believe, to the twelfth century. These vague, gaunt, staring fragments of figures are, to a certain extent, a reminder of some of the early Christian churches in Rome. They even faintly recall to me the great mosaics of Ravenna.

The temple de Saint-Jean has neither the antiquity nor the completeness of those extraordinary monuments, nearly the most impressive in Europe, but, as one may say, it is very well for Poitiers. Not far from it, in a lonely corner which was animated for the moment by the vociferations of several old women who were selling tapirs, presumably for the occasion of a particular devotion, is the graceful Romanesque church erected in the twelfth century to Saint-Rémy-de-Grande,

a lady who found means to be a saint even in the capacity of a Maravintian queen. It bears a general resemblance to Notre-Dame-la-Grande and, as I remember it, is corrugated in somewhat the same manner with porous-looking carvings. But I confess that what I chiefly recollect is the row of old women sitting in front of it, each with a tray of wax and tapirs in her lap, and upraiding me for my neglect of the opportunity

to offer such a tribute to the saint. I know not whether this privilege is occasional or constant. Within the church there was no appearance of a festival, and I see that the name-day of Saint-Rémy-de-Grande occurs in August, so that the importunate old women sit there always, perhaps, and deprive of its propriety the epithet I just applied to this provincial corner. In spite of the old women, however, I suspect that the place is lonely, and indeed it is perhaps the old women that have made

the desolation. The lion of Poitiers in the eyes of the natives is doubtless the Palais du Justis, in the shadow of which the statue-guarded hotel just mentioned, erects itself, and the gem of the courthouse, which has a prosy modern front with pillars and a high flight of steps, is the curious Salle des Pas Perdus, or Central Hall, out of which the different tribunals open. This is a feature of every French courthouse, and seems the result of a conviction that a Palace of Justice,

the French deal in much finer names than we, should be in some degree palatial. The great hall at Poitiers has a long pedigree, as its walls date back to the 12th century, and its open wooden roof, as well as the remarkable trio of chimney pieces at the right end of the room as you enter, to the 15th. The three tall fireplaces, side by side, with a delicate gallery running along the top of them, constitute the originality of this ancient chamber, and make one think of the groups

that must formally have gathered there, of all the wet boot soles, the trickling doublets, the stiffened fingers, the rheumatic shanks, that must have been presented to such an incomparable focus of heat. Today, I am afraid, these mighty hearts are forever cold, just as it probably administered with the aid of a modern calorifère, and the walls of the palace are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts the three fireplaces

are high gothic windows, the tracery of which masks in some sort the chimneys, and in each angle of this end of the room, to the right and left of the trio of chimneys, is all open work spiraled staircase, ascending to, I forget where, perhaps to the roof of the edifice. The whole side of the is very lordly, and seems to express an unstinted hospitality, to extend the friendliest of all invitations, to bid the whole world come and get warm. It was the invention of John, Duke of Berry,

and Count of Poitou, about 1395. I give this information on the authority of the Guy Joann, from which source I gather much other curious learning, for instance, that it was in this building, when it had surely a very different front, that Charles VII was proclaimed king in 1422, and that here, Jeanne d'Arc was subjected in 1429 to the inquisition of certain doctors and matrons. The most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de Brossac, a small public

garden at one end of the flat top of the hill. It has a happy look of the last century, having been arranged at that period, and a beautiful sweep of view over the surrounding country, and especially of the course of the little river Clins, which winds about a part of the base of the big mound of Poitiers. The limit of the steel little garden is formed on the side that turns away from the town by the rampart erected in the 14th century, and by its big semi-circular bastions.

This rampart of great length has a low parapet. You look over it at the charming little vegetable gardens with which the base of the hill appears exclusively to be garnished. The whole prospect is delightful, especially the details of the part just under the walls at the end of the walk. Here the river makes a shining twist, which a painter might have invented, and the side of the hill is terraced into several ledges, a sort of tangle of small blooming patches, and little pavilions with

peaked roofs and green shutters. It is idle to reproduce all this in words. It should be reproduced only in watercolors. The reader, however, will already have remarked at disparity in these ineffectual pages, which are pervaded by the attempt to sketch without a palette or brushes. He will doubtless also be struck with the grovelling vision, which, on such a spot as the ramparts of Poitiers, peoples itself with carrots and cabbages rather than with images of the Black Prince and

the captive king. I am not sure that in looking out from the Promenade de Blossac you command the old battlefield. It is enough that it was not far off, and that the great rout of Frenchmen poured into the walls of Poitiers, leaving on the ground a number of the fallen equal to the little army, of the invader. I did think of the battle. I wondered rather helplessly where it had taken place, and I came away, as the reader will see from the preceding sentence, without finding out. This

indifference, however, was the result rather of a general dread of military topography than of a want of admiration of this particular victory, which I have always supposed to be one of the most brilliant on record. Indeed, I should be almost ashamed, and very much at a loss, to say what light it was that this glorious day seemed to me to have left forever on the horizon, and why the very name of the place has always caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying

the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths, when a vague American permits himself an emotion, because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the Black Prince, as he lies forever at rest in the choir of Canterbury.

Nevertheless, the victory of Poitiers declines to lose itself in these considerations, the sense of it is a part of our heritage, the joy of it a part of our imagination, and it filters down through the centuries and migrations till it titillates the New Yorker, who forgets in his elation that he happens at that moment to be enjoying the hospitality of France. It was something done, I know not how justly, for England, and what was done in the 14th century

for England was done also for New York. If it was really for the sake of the Black Prince that I had stopped at Poitiers, for my pre-vision of Notre Dame la Grande and of the little temple of Saint John was of the dimmest, I ought to have stopped at Angoulême for the sake of David and Eve Sechart, of Lucienne de Rubanpre and of Madame de Bargeton, who, when she wore a toilette étudiée, sported a Jewish turban

ornamented with an eastern brooch, a scarf of gauze, a necklace of cameos, and a robe of painted muslin, whatever that may be, treating herself to these luxuries out of an income of 12,000 francs. The persons I have mentioned have not that vagueness of identity, which is the misfortune of historical characters. They are real, supremely real, thanks to their affiliation to the great Balzac, who had invented an artificial reality which was as much better than the vulgar article

as mock turtle soup is than the liquid it emulates. The first time I read Les Illusions Perdues, I should have refused to believe that I was capable of passing the old capital of Angio without alighting to visit the Humeau. But we never know what we are capable of till we are tested, as I reflected when I found myself looking back at Angoulême from the window of the train just after we had emerged from the long tunnel that passes under the town.

This tunnel perforates the hill on which, like Poitiers, Angoulême rears itself, and which gives it an elevation still greater than that of Poitiers. You may have a tolerable look at the cathedral without leaving the railway carriage, for it stands just above the tunnel and is exposed much more shortened to the spectator below. There is evidently a charming walk round the plateau of the town, commanding those pretty views of which Balzac gives an account.

But the train whirled me away, and these are my only impressions. The truth is that I had no need, just at that moment, of putting myself into communication with Balzac, for opposite to me in the compartment were a couple of figures almost as vivid as the actors in the Comédie Humaine. One of these was a very genial and dirty old priest, and the other was a reserved and concentrated young monk, the latter, by which I mean a monk of any kind,

being a rare sight today in France. This young man indeed was mitigatedly monastic. He had a big brown frock and cowl, but he had also a shirt and a pair of shoes. He had, instead of a hempen scourge round his waist, a stout leather thong, and he carried with him a very profane little valise. He also read from beginning to end the Figaro, which the old priest, who had done the same, presented to him, and he looked altogether as if, had he not been a monk, he would have made a

distinguished officer of engineers. When he was not reading the Figaro, he was conning his breviary, or answering with rapid precision and with a deferential but discouraging dryness. The frequent questions of his companion, who was of quite another type. This worthy had a bored, good-natured, unbuttoned, expansive look. He was talkative, restless, almost disreputably human. He was surrounded by a great deal of small luggage, and had scattered over the carriage

his books, his papers, the fragments of his lunch, and the contents of an extraordinary bag, which he kept beside him, a kind of secular reliquary, and which appeared to contain the odds and ends of a lifetime, as he took from it successively a pair of slippers, an old padlock, which evidently didn't belong to it, an opera glass, a collection of almanacs, and a large seashell, which he very carefully examined. I think that if he had not been afraid of the young monk,

who was so much more serious than he, he would have held the shell to his ear like a child. Indeed, he was a very childish and delightful old priest, and his companion evidently thought a most frivolous. But I liked him the better of the two. He was not a country curé, but an ecclesiastic of some rank, who had seen a good deal both of the church and of the world, and if I had not been afraid of his colleague, who read the Figaro as seriously as if it had been an encyclical,

I should have entered into conversation with him. All this while I was getting onto Bordeaux, where I permitted myself to spend three days. I am afraid I have next to nothing to show for them, and that there would be little profit in lingering on this episode, which is the less to be justified, as I had in former years examined Bordeaux attentively enough. It contains a very good hotel, a hotel not good enough, however, to keep you there for its own sake. For the rest, Bordeaux is a big,

rich, handsome, imposing commercial town, with long rows of fine old 18th century houses, which overlook the yellow Garonne. I have spoken of the keys of Nantes as fine, but those of Bordeaux have a wider sweep, and a still more architectural air. The appearance of such a port as this makes the Anglo-Saxon tourists blush for the sordid waterfronts of Liverpool and New York, which, with their larger activity, have so much more reason to be stately. Bordeaux gives a great

impression of prosperous industries, and suggests delightful ideas, images of prune boxes and bottled claret. As the focus of distribution of the best wine in the world, it is indeed a sacred city, dedicated to the worship of Bacchus in the most discreet form. The country all about it is covered with precious vineyards, sources of fortune to their owners, and of satisfaction to distant consumers. And as you look over to the hills beyond the Garonne, you see them in the autumn

sunshine, fretted with the rusty richness of this or that immortal clou. But the principal picture within the town is that of the vast curving quays, bordered with houses that looked like the hotels of farmers' general of the last century, and of the wide tawny river crowded with shipping and spanned by the largest of bridges. Some of the types on the waterside are of the sort that arrest a sketcher, figures of stalwart brown-faced basks, such as I had seen of old in great numbers at

Biarritz, with their loose circular caps, their white sandals, their air of walking for a wager. Never was a tougher, a harder race. They are not mariners nor watermen, but putting questions of temper aside, they are the best possible dock porters. And such a place has indeed much to say of the wealth, the capacity for production of France, the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all,

the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold. The whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence, an appearance which culminates in the great place which surrounds the grand théâtre, an establishment in the highest style, encircled with columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafés. One feels it to be a monument to the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If I had not forbidden myself to linger, I should venture to insist on

this, and at the risk of being considered fantastic, trace an analogy between good claret and the best qualities of the French mind. Pretend that there is a taste of sound bordeaux in all the happiest manifestations of that fine organ, and that correspondingly there is a touch of French reason, French completeness in a glass of pointe canne. The danger of such an excursion would lie mainly in its being so open to the reader to take the ground from under my feet by

saying that good claret doesn't exist. To this I should have no reply whatever. I should be unable to tell him where to find it. I certainly didn't find it at Bordeaux where I drank a most vulgar fluid, and it is of course notorious that a larger part of mankind is occupied and vainly looking for it. There was a great pretense of putting it forward at the exhibition which was going on at Bordeaux at the time of my visit, an exposition philomatique lodged in a collection

of big temporary buildings in the Allée d'Orléans and regarded by the Bordeaux lay for the moment as the most brilliant feature of their city. Here were pyramids of bottles, mountains of bottles, to say nothing of cases and cabinets of bottles. The contemplation of these glittering tiers was of course not very convincing, and indeed the whole arrangement struck me as a high impertinence. Good wine is not an optical pleasure, it is an inward emotion, and if there was a chamber of

degustation on the premises I failed to discover it. It was not in the search for it indeed that I spent half an hour in this bewildering bizarre. Like all expositions, it seemed to me to be full of ugly things, and gave one a portentous idea of the quantity of rubbish that man carries with him on his course through the ages. Such an amount of luggage for a journey after all so short. There were no individual objects. There was nothing but dozens and hundreds, all machine-made

and expressionless, in spite of the repeated grimace, the conscious smartness of the last new thing that was stamped on all of them. The fatal facility of the French article becomes at last as irritating as the refrain of a popular song. The poor Indien Galibie struck me as really more interesting. A group of stunted savages who formed one of the attractions of the place, and were confined in a pen in the open air with a rabble of people pushing and squeezing,

hanging over the barrier to look at them. They had no grimace, no pretension to be new, no desire to catch your eye. They looked at their visitors no more than they looked at each other, and seemed ancient, indifferent, terribly bored. Chapter 19. There was much entertainment in the journey through the wide smiling garden of Gascony. I speak of it as I took it in going from Bordeaux to Toulouse. It is the south, quite the south, and had for the present narrator its

full measure of the charm he is always determined to find in countries that may even by courtesy be said to appertain to the sun. It was, moreover, the happy and genial view of these mild latitudes, which heaven knows often have a dreariness of their own. A land teeming with corn and wine, and speaking everywhere, that is, everywhere the phylloxera had not laid it waste, of wealth and plenty. The road runs constantly near the Garonne, touching now and then its slow,

brown, rather sullen stream, a sullenness that encloses great dangers and disasters. The traces of the horrible floods of 1875 have disappeared, and the land smiles placidly enough while it waits for another immersion. Toulouse, at the period I speak of, was up to its middle, and in places above it, in water, and looked still as if it had been thoroughly soaked, as if it had faded and shriveled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course,

are more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charming Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here and there occupies the foreground beneath a screen of dense tall trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals, and speaking from the victorial standpoint, I hold the taste to be most legitimate, will delight in this admirable

specimen of the class, which has a very interesting history not to be narrated here. On the other side of the road, the left, all the way runs a long, low line of hills, or rather one continuous hill, or perpetual cliff with a straight top in the shape of a ledge of rock which might pass for a ruined wall. I am afraid the reader will lose patience with my habit of constantly referring to the landscape of Italy as if that were the measure of the beauty of every other. Yet I am still more

afraid that I cannot apologize for it and must leave it in its culpable nakedness. It is an idle habit, but the reader will long since have discovered that this was an idle journey and that I give my impressions as they came to me. It came to me then that in all this view there was something transalpine with the greatest smartness and freshness and much less elegance and languor. This impression was occasionally deepened by the appearance on the long eminence of which I speak

of a village, a church, or a chateau, which seemed to look down at the plain from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the bright-faced flat-roofed houses covered with tiles, the softness and sweetness of the light and air, recalled the prosier portions of the lumbered plain. Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression, but not enough to give a color to its dark, dirty, crooked streets, which are irregular without being eccentric and which,

if it were not for the superb church of Saint-Cernin, would be quite destitute of monuments. I have already alluded to the way in which the names of certain places impose themselves on the mind, and I must add that of Toulouse to the list of expressive appellations. It certainly evokes a vision, suggests something highly meridional, but the city, it must be confessed, is less pictorial than the word in spite of the Place du Capitole, in spite of the key of the Garonne,

in spite of the curious cloister of the old museum. What justifies the images that are latent in the word is not the aspect but the history of the town. The hotel to which the well-advised traveler will repair stands in the corner of the Place du Capitole, which is the heart and center of Toulouse, and which bears a vague and inexpensive resemblance to the Piazza Castello at Turin. The capital, with a wide modern face, occupies one side, and, like the palace at Turin, looks

across at a high arcade under which the hotels, the principal shops, and the lounging citizens are gathered. The shops are probably better than the Turinese, but the people are not so good. Stunted, shabby, rather vitiated-looking, they have none of the personal richness of the sturdy pied-montese, and I will take this occasion to remark that in the course of a journey of several weeks in the French provinces I rarely encountered a well-dressed male. Can it be possible the

republics are unfavorable to a certain attention to one's boots and one's beard? I risk this somewhat futile inquiry, because the proportion of neat coats and trousers seemed to be about the same in France and in my native land. It was notably lower than in England and in Italy, and even warranted the supposition that most good provincials have their chin shaven and their boots blacked but once a week. I hasten to add, lest my observation should appear to be of a sadly superficial

character, that the manners and conversation of these gentlemen bore, whenever I had occasion to appreciate them, no relation to the state of their chin and their boots. They were almost always marked by an extreme amenity. At Toulouse there was the strongest temptation to speak to people, simply for the entertainment of hearing them reply with that curious, that fascinating accent of the Languedoc, which appears to abound in final consonants and leads the Toulousans to say

bien-gue and maison-gue like Englishmen learning French. It is as if they talked with their teeth rather than with their tongue. I find in my notebook a phrase in regard to Toulouse, which is perhaps a little ill-natured, but which I will describe as it stands. The oddity is that the place should be both animated and dull, a big brown-skinned population clattering about in a flat tortuous town which produces nothing whatever that I can discover.

Except the church of Saint-Cernin and the fine old court of the Hôtel d'Azéza, Toulouse has no architecture, the houses are for the most part of brick of a greyish-red color and have no particular style. The brickwork of the place is in fact very poor, inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite wanting in the richness of tone which this homely material takes on in the damp climates of the North. And then my notebook goes on to narrate a little visit to the capital, which was

soon made as the building was in course of repair and half the rooms were closed. End of section 8.