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Chapter III
INTO THE JURAS
It was still drizzling next morning, so we were in no hurry to leave. We plodded about the gray streets, picking up some things for the lunch basket, and Narcissa and the Joy got a chance to try their nice new French on real French people and were gratified to find that it worked just the same as it did on Swiss people. Then the sky cleared and I backed the car out of the big stable where it had spent the night, and we packed on our bags and paid our bill – twenty-seven francs for all, or about one dollar and thirty-five cents each for dinner, lodging, and breakfast – tips, one franc each to waitress, chambermaid, and garageman. If they were dissatisfied they did not look it, and presently we were once more on the road, all the cylinders working and bankruptcy not yet in sight. It was glorious and fresh along the lake-front – also appetizing. We stopped by and by for a little mid-morning luncheon, and a passing motorist, who probably could not believe we would stop merely to eat at that hour, drew up to ask if anything was wrong with our car and if he could help. They are kindly people, these French and Swiss. Stop your car by the roadside and begin to hammer something, or to take off a tire, and you will have offers of assistance from four out of every five cars that pass.
There is another little patch of Switzerland again at the end of the lake, and presently you run into Geneva, and trouble. Geneva is certainly a curious place. The map of it looks as easy as nothing and you go gliding into it full of confidence, and presently find yourself in a perfect mess of streets that are not on the map at all, while all the streets that are on the map certainly have changed their names, for you cannot find them where they should be, and no one has ever heard of them. Besides, the wind is generally blowing – the bise– which does not simplify matters. Narcissa inquired and I inquired, and then the Joy, who, privately, I think, speaks the best French of any of us, also inquired; but the combined result was just a big coalyard which a very good-looking street led us straight into, making it necessary to back out and apologize and feel ashamed. Then we heard somebody calling us, and, looking around, saw the man in gray who had last directed us, and who also felt ashamed, it seemed – of us, or himself, or something – and had run after us to get us out of the mess. So he directed us again and we started, but the labyrinth closed in once more – the dust and narrow streets and blind alleys – and once again we heard a voice, and there was the man in gray – he must have run a half a mile this time – waving and calling and pointing the path out of the maze. It seemed that they were fixing all the good streets and we must get through by circuitous bad ones to the side of the city toward France. I asked him why they didn't leave the good streets alone and fix the bad ones, but he only smiled and explained some more, and once more we went astray, and yet once more his voice came calling down the wind and he came up breathlessly, and this time followed with us, refusing even standing room on the running-board, until he got us out of the city proper and well headed for France. We had grown fond of that man and grieved to see him go. We had known him hardly ten minutes, I think, but friendships are not to be measured by time.
On a pretty hill where a little stream of water trickled we ate our first real luncheon – that is to say, we used our new stove. We cooked eggs and made coffee, and when there came a sprinkle we stood under our umbrellas or sat in the car and felt that this was really a kind of gypsying, and worth while.
There was a waving meadow just above the bank and I went up there to look about a little. No house was in sight, but this meadow was a part of some man's farm. It was familiar in every corner to him – he had known it always. Perhaps he had played in it as a child – his children had played in it after him – it was inseparable from the life and happiness of a home. Yet to us it was merely the field above our luncheon place – a locality hardly noticed or thought of – barely to be remembered at all.
Crossing another lonely but fertile land, we entered the hills. We skirted mountainsides – sometimes in sun, sometimes in shower – descended a steep road, and passed under a great arched battlement that was part of a frowning fortress guarding the frontier of France. Not far beyond, at the foot of a long decline, lay a beautiful city, just where the mountains notched to form a passage for the Rhone. It was Bellegarde, and as we drew nearer some of the illusions of beauty disappeared. French cities generally show best from a distance. Their streets are not very clean and they are seldom in repair. The French have the best roads and the poorest streets in the world.
We drew up in front of the custom house, and exhibited our French triptyque. It was all right, and after it was indorsed I thought we were through. This was not true. A long, excited individual appeared from somewhere and began nervously to inspect our baggage. Suddenly he came upon a small empty cigar box which I had put in, thinking it might be useful. Cigars are forbidden, and at sight of the empty box our wild-eyed attenuation had a fit. He turned the box upside down and shook it; he turned it sidewise and looked into it; shook it again and knocked on it as if bound to make the cigars appear. He seemed to decide that I had hidden the cigars, for he made a raid on things in general. He looked into the gasoline tank, he went through the pockets of the catch-all and scattered our guidebooks and maps; then he had up the cushion of the back seat and went into the compartment where this time was our assortment of hats. You never saw millinery fly as it did in that man's hands, with the head of the family and Narcissa and the Joy grabbing at their flowers and feathers, and saying things in English that would have hurt that man if he could have understood them. As for him, he was repeating, steadily, "Pas dérange" – "Pas dérange," when all the time he was deranging ruthlessly and even permanently. He got through at last, smiled, bowed, and retired – pleased, evidently, with the thoroughness of his investigation. But for some reason he entirely overlooked our bags strapped on the footboard. We did not remind him.
The Pert of the Rhone is at Bellegarde. The pert is a place where in dry weather the Rhone disappears entirely from sight for the space of seventy yards, to come boiling up again from some unknown mystery. Articles have been thrown in on one side – even live animals, it is said – but they have never reappeared on the other. What becomes of them is a matter of speculation. Perhaps some fearful underground maelstrom holds them. There was no pert when we were there – there had been too much rain. The Rhone went tearing through a gorge where we judged the pert should be located in less watery seasons.
During the rest of the afternoon we had rather a damp time – showery and sloppy, for many of the roads of these Jura foothills were in the process of repair, and the rain had stopped the repairs halfway. It was getting toward dusk when we came to Nantua – a lost and forgotten town among the Jura cliffs. We stopped in front of the showier hotel there, everything looked so rain-beaten and discouraging, but the woman who ran it was even showier than her hotel and insisted on our taking a parlor suite at some fabulous price. So we drove away and drew up rather sadly at the Hôtel du Lac, which on that dull evening was far from fascinating. Yet the rooms they showed us were good, and the dinner – a surprise of fresh trout just caught, served sizzling hot, fine baked potatoes and steak, with good red wine aplenty – was such as to make us forswear forevermore the showy hotels for the humbler inns of France.
But I am moving too fast. Before dinner we walked for a little in the gray evening and came to an old church – one of the oldest in France, it is said, built in the ninth century and called St. Michels. It is over a thousand years old and looks it. It has not been much rebuilt, I think, for invasion and revolution appear seldom to have surmounted the natural ramparts of Nantua, and only the stormbeat and the corrosion of the centuries have written the story of decay. Very likely it is as little changed as any church of its time. The hand of restoration has troubled it little. We slipped in through the gathering dusk, and tiptoed about, for there were a few lights flickering near the altar and the outlines of bowed heads. Presently a priest was silhouetted against the altar lights as he crossed and passed out by a side door. He was one of a long line that stretched back through more than half of the Christian era and most of the history of France. When the first priest passed in front of that altar France was still under the Carlovingian dynasty – under Charles the Fat, perhaps; and William of Normandy would not conquer England for two hundred years. Then nearly four hundred years more would creep by – dim mediæval years – before Joan of Arc should unfurl her banner of victory and martyrdom. You see how far back into the mists we are stepping here. And all those evenings the altar lights have been lit and the ministration of priests has not failed.
There is a fine picture by Eugene Delacroix in the old church, and we came back next morning to look at it. It is a St. Sebastian, and not the conventional, ridiculous St. Sebastian of some of the old masters – a mere human pincushion – but a beautiful youth, prostrate and dying, pierced by two arrows, one of which a pitying male figure is drawing from his shoulder. It must be a priceless picture. How can they afford to keep it here?
The weather seemed to have cleared, and the roads, though wet, were neither soft nor slippery. French roads, in fact, are seldom either – and the fresh going along the lake-front was delightful enough. But we were in the real Juras now, and one does not go through that range on a water grade. We were presently among the hills, the road ahead of us rising to the sky. Then it began to rain again, but the road was a good firm one and the car never pulled better.
It was magnificent climbing. On the steepest grades and elbow turns we dropped back to second, but never to low, and there was no lagging. On the high levels we stopped to let the engine cool and to add water from the wayside hollows. We were in the clouds soon, and sometimes it was raining, sometimes not. It seemed for the most part an uninhabited land – no houses and few fields – the ground covered with a short bushy growth, grass and flowers. A good deal of it was rocky and barren.
On the very highest point of the Jura range, where we had stopped to cool the motor, a woman came along, leading three little children. She came up and said a few words in what sounded like an attempt at English. We tried our French on her, but it did not seem to get inside. I said she must speak some mountain patois, for we had used those same words lower down with good results. But then she began her English again – it was surely English this time, and, listening closely, we got the fringes and tag ends of a curious story. She was Italian, and had been in New York City. There, it seemed, she had married a Frenchman from the Juras, who, in time, when his homeland had called him, had brought her back to the hills. There he had died, leaving her with six children. She had a little hut up the side lane, where they were trying to scratch a living from the stony soil. Yes, she had chickens, and could let us have some eggs. She also brought a pail with water for the radiator.
A little farther along we cooked the eggs and laid out all our nice lunch things on natural stone tables and looked far down the Jura slope on an ancient village and an old castle, the beginning of the world across the range.
It was not raining now, and the air was soft and pleasant and the spot as clean and sweet as could be. Presently the water was boiling and the coffee made – instantaneous coffee, the George Washington kind. And nothing could be fresher than those eggs, nothing unless it was the butter – unsalted butter, which with jam and rolls is about the best thing in the world to finish on.
We descended the Jura grades on the engine brake – that is, I let in the clutch, cut off the gasoline supply and descended on first or second speed, according to the grade. That saves the wheel brake and does no damage to the motor. I suppose everybody knows the trick, but I did not learn it right away, and there may be others who know as little. It was a long way to the lower levels, and some of the grades were steep. Then they became gradual, and we coasted – then the way flattened and we were looking across a level valley, threaded by perfectly ordered roads to a distant town whose roofs and spires gleamed in the sunlight of the May afternoon. It was Bourg, and one of the spires belonged to the church of Brou.
Chapter IV
A POEM IN ARCHITECTURE
The church of Brou is like no other church in the world. In the first place, instead of dragging through centuries of building and never quite reaching completion, it was begun and finished in the space of twenty-five years – from 1511 to 1536 – and it was supervised and paid for by a single person, Margaret of Austria, who built it in fulfillment of a vow made by her mother-in-law, Margaret of Bourbon. The last Margaret died before she could undertake her project, and her son, Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, called "The Handsome," followed before he could carry out her wishes. So his duchess, the other Margaret, undertook the work, and here on this plain, between the Juras and the Saône, she wrought a marvel in exquisite church building which still remains a marvel, almost untouched by any blight, after four hundred turbulent years. Matthew Arnold wrote a poem on the church of Brou which may convey the wonder of its beauty. I shall read it some day, and if it is as beautiful as the church I shall commit it, and on days when things seem rather ugly and harsh and rasping I will find some quiet corner and shut my eyes and say the lines and picture a sunlit May afternoon and the church of Brou. Then, perhaps, I shall not remember any more the petty things of the moment but only the architectural shrine which one woman reared in honor of another, her mother-in-law.
It is not a great cathedral, but it is by no means a little church. Its lofty nave is bare of furnishings, which perhaps lends to its impression of bigness. But then you pass through the carved doors of a magnificent juba screen, and the bareness disappears. The oaken choir seats are carved with the richness of embroidery, and beyond them are the tombs – those of the two Margarets, and of Philibert – husband and son.
I suppose the world can show no more exquisitely wrought tombs than these. Perhaps their very richness defeats their art value, but I would rather have them so, for it reveals, somehow, the thoroughness and sincerity of Margaret's intent – her determination to fulfill to the final letter every imagined possibility in that other's vow.
The mother's tomb is a sort of bower – a marble alcove of great splendor, within and without. Philibert's tomb, which stands in the center of the church, between the other two, is a bier, supported by female figures and fluted columns and interwoven decorations, exquisitely chiseled. Six cupids and a crouching lion guard the royal figure above; and the whole, in spite of its richness, is of great dignity. The tomb of the Duchess Margaret herself is a lofty canopy of marble incrustations, the elaborateness of which no words can tell. It is the superlative of Gothic decoration at a period when Gothic extravagance was supreme.
Like her husband Margaret sleeps in double effigy, the sovereign in state above, the figure of mortality, compassed by the marble supports, below. The mortality of the queen is draped, but in the case of Philibert, the naked figure, rather dim through the interspaces, has a curiously lifelike, even startling effect.
If the Duchess Margaret made her own tomb more elaborate, it is at least not more beautiful than the others, while an altar to the Virgin is still more elaborate – more beautiful, its grouped marble figures in such high relief that angels and cherubs float in the air, apparently unsupported. Here, as elsewhere, is a wealth of ornamentation; and everywhere woven into its intricacies one may find the initials P and M – Philibert and Margaret – and the latter's motto, "Fortune, infortune, fort une." It has been called a mysterious motto, and different meanings have been twisted out of it. But my French is new and fresh and takes things quite obviously. "Fortune and misfortune strengthens or fortifies one" strikes me as a natural rendering. That last verb fortifier may seem to be abbreviated without warrant, but Margaret was a queen and could have done that for the sake of euphony and word-play.
The unscarred condition and the purity of these precious marbles is almost as astonishing as their beauty, when one considers the centuries of invasion and revolution, with a vandalism that respected nothing sacred, least of all symbols of royalty. By careful search we could discover a broken detail here and there, but the general effect was completeness, and the white marble – or was it ivory tinted? – seen under the light of the illumined stained windows seemed to present the shapes and shades of things that, as they had never been new, neither would they ever be old.
Chapter V
VIENNE IN THE RAIN
It is about forty miles from Bourg to Lyons, a country of fair fields, often dyed deeply red at this season with crimson clover, a country rich and beautiful, the road a straight line, wide and smooth, the trees on either side vividly green with spring. But Lyons is not beautiful – it is just a jangling, jarring city of cobbled crowded streets and mainly uninteresting houses and thronging humanity, especially soldiers. It is a place to remain unloved, unhonored, and unremembered.
The weather now put aside other things and really got down to the business of raining. It was fair enough when we left Lyons, but as we reached the top of a hill that overlooked the world I saw down the fields a spectral light and far deepening dusk which looked ominous. By the time we got our top up there was a steady downpour. We did not visit any wayside villages, though some of them looked interesting enough. French villages are none too clean at any time and rain does not seem to help them. Attractive old castles on neighboring hilltops received hardly a glance; even one overhanging our very road barely caused us to check up. How old it looked in its wet desolation, the storm eating into its crumbling walls!
We pulled up at last at Vienne, at the end of the bridge facing the cathedral. History has been written about Vienne, and there are monuments of the past which it is not good form to overlook. The head of the family said she was not very particular about form and that she was particular about being wet and discomforted on a chill spring day. France was full of monuments of the past, she said, and she had not started out to make her collection complete. She would study the cathedral from the car, and would the rest of us please remember to bring some fresh rolls for luncheon. So the rest of us went to the church of St. Maurice, which begins to date with the twelfth century and looks even older. Surrounded by comparatively modern buildings and soaked with rain it appeared, one of the most venerable relics I had ever seen. I do not think we found the inside very interesting. It was dead and dusky, and the seventh-century sarcophagus of St. Leoninus was, in the French phrase, not gay. On the whole there seemed a good deal of mutilation and not much taste.
We paddled through streets, asking directions to the Roman temple. Vienne was an important town under the Romans, the capital of one of the provinces of Gaul. Of course the Romans would leave landmarks – the kind that would last. When we found the temple of Augustus and Livia at last, it did not look so much older than the church, though it is more than as old again. It was so positively Roman and so out of place among its modern French surroundings that it looked exactly like something that had been brought there and set up for exhibition. It took a heavy strain of imagination to see it as an integral part of the vanished Roman capital.
All about the temple lay fragments of that ancient city – exhibition pieces, like the temple. One felt that they should not be left out in the rain.
We hunted farther and found an Arch of Triumph, which the Romans generally built in conquered territory. It was hard to tell where the arch began and where it ended, such a variety of other things had grown up around and against it. Still, there was at least a section standing, Roman, and of noble proportions. It will still be Roman, and an arch, when those later incrustations have crumbled away. Roman work is not trivial stuff.
We might have lingered a little in the winding streets and made further discoveries, but the Joy had already sighted a place where the most attractive rolls and French cakes filled the window. The orders, she said, were very strict about the luncheon things. We must get them at once or we should not be able to locate the place again.
Curious things can happen in a brief absence. We returned to the car to find one of the back tires perfectly flat, the head of the family sitting serenely unconscious of her misfortune. We had picked up one of those flat-headed boot nails that Europeans love so well, and the tire had slowly and softly settled. There are cleaner, pleasanter things than taking off a tire and putting it on again in the rain, but I utilized a deep doorway on the corner for the dry work, and Narcissa held the umbrella while I pulled and pushed and grunted and pumped, during the more strenuous moments. Down the river a way we drew up in a grassy place under some trees and sat in the car and ate the gâteaux and other things, and under the green shelter I made coffee and eggs, the little cooker sitting cozily on the running-board. Then all the afternoon along the hard, wet, shining road that follows the Rhone to Valence, where we spent two days, watching the steady beat from the hotel windows, reading, resting, and eating a good deal of the time; doing not much sight-seeing, for we had touched Valence on our northward trip eight months before.
