Chapter VI: Part I

1893

I

“The prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost.” So runs an old French proverb, which is not always true. At least, in that bygone year of 1893 by the end of April the heat was as parched as at midsummer; roses and strawberries were hawked through the streets of Paris; the dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh for the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand years! ’Tis something to feel one’s self in a Gaulish forest--though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But, in the forests of the Oise, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors who may have shadowed Pharamond.

At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training-stables, and parched, oblong racecourse. Chantilly is a true French village, with its one endless winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. From almost any point of it you see, beyond the houses, a glint of waters and hear a rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy lightness about the place, about the fresh fine air, the loose sand of the soil, the thin green boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, the smooth-trunked beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into great forest trees. It was with an effort of the imagination that we realized the ancient stock of this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared.

II

In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of a hunter-prince, and everything about it was ordered for the chase. Those wide-open grassy glades, studded with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer; and in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does prepared their nurseries. Great, floundering, russet pheasants came flying by; at every step a hare or a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far at the further end of the forest there were deep, unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place, for the wild boar delights in them. As we walked or drove down the neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appeared impassable to the traveller, and we wondered at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman.

Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful venery, for, thick as grass, thick and sweet, the lily of the valley springs in all the brakes and shady places. The scent of the game will not lie across these miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair, and the deer, still deafened with the winter’s yelp of the hounds--the deer, who sets his back against the sturdiest oak, and butts at the pack with his antlers, who swims the lakes, and from his island refuge sells his life as hard as he can--the deer, accustomed to be always vanquished, beholds himself at last befriended by an ally more invincible than water or forest oak, by the sweet innumerable white lily, innocent as himself, that every May-time sends the huntsmen home.

The lily that saves the deer is the consolation of poor women. Every morning during the brief season of its blossom, they are up before the dawn. Holding their children by the hand, they are off to the innermost dells of its forest; and before our breakfast-time they are back at the railway stations at Chantilly or Creil, laden with bunches of lilies, which they sell to the dusty passengers bound by the morning mails for London or for Brussels. Sweet flowers with the dew upon them, fragrant posies, who would not give a five-penny-piece for so much beauty? “What would you buy with your roses that is worth your roses?” sings the Persian poet. These tired country-women of the Oise would know what to reply: new sabots for the good man, a white communion veil for the second girl, a shawl for the old grandam, and a galette for the children’s dinner! The lilies are a harvest to them, like any other--a sweet, voluntary, unplanted harvest that comes three months before the corn is yellow.

The lilies were all out when we drove through the woods at Chantilly. I had never seen such a sight, for we had not yet visited Compiègne, where they are still more profuse and, I think, of a larger growth. In the Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely, in timid clumps; and how proud of them we were! But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of coy flowers as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall jonquils of Orange, ye have a plenteous rival in the north! The whole way to Commelle the glades were sweet with lilies.

Every traveller between Calais and Paris has marked unwitting the beauty of Commelle. You remember the view that precedes or follows (according to your direction) the little station of Orry-Coye? The rails are laid on the summit of a hill; the train rushes through a delicate forest of birch. Suddenly we come upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in a wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the Thérain, placid and royal amid its mantling woods; while, on the other side, the hill breaks in a sort of precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets asleep amid the trees; a turreted white castle rises out of a sedgy island, and appears the very palace of the _Belle au Bois dormant_. These are the Pools of Commelle--pools or lakes? Pool is too small and lake too large for the good French word _étang_. They are considerable lakelets, some miles round, four in a row, connected each with each. They lie in a sheltered valley, almost a ravine, whose romantic character contrasts with the rest of the forest. Here the clipped and slender trees of Chantilly give place to an older and more stately vegetation. The gnarled roots of the beeches grip the sides of the hills with an amazing cordage, spreading as far over the sandy cliff as their boughs expand above. In the bottom of the combe, one after another, lie the four sister pools. The road winds by their side through meadows of cowslips, past the bulrushes where the swan sits on her nest, and past the clear spaces of open water, where her mate swims double on the wave. The brink is brilliant with kingcup on a film of ladysmock. At the end of the last pool the ground rises towards the forest. There are some ruins; an old grey mill rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the grace and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground, are exquisitely tranquil.

We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle--_le Château de la Reine Blanche_, as the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the Prince de Joinville. A tradition runs that, in 1227, the mother of St. Louis had a chateau here. Six hundred years later, the last of the Condés built the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. ’Tis the romantic Gothic of Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there is a homely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of an old tune--“Ma Normandie,” perhaps, or “Combien j’ai Douce Souvenance.” The mill-race rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers near the hall-door. It is very silent, very peaceful, very deserted. The Castle of St. Louis would not have seemed so old-world as this.

We must make a long road home by the _Table Ronde_, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to visit, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of steps leads steeply down the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which runs demurely, as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer than it looks, and as sometimes we see a meek-faced, slender little woman mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great oblong sheet of artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A stone’s-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, it dazzles in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here into a long low hill. There we found a score of white-bloused, bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour. Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of pictures.

Before we leave, we must stroll round by the castle, with its fine old gardens planted by Le Nôtre, its vast stables, imposing as a church, its sheets of water, out of which rises, elegantly turreted, the brand-new chateau of 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles of Touraine. For once there was an older castle here, built by Jean Bullant for Anne of Montmorency. The great constable left the splendid palace to his son, and in 1632 Chantilly, as it stood among the waters and the gardens of Le Nôtre, was a thing to wonder at and envy. Here Henri, Duke of Montmorency, kept his court and filled his galleries with famous pictures. He was a great patron of the arts. His wife, the _Silvie_ of the poets of her time, has left her name still, like a perfume, among the avenues and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life; but the duke was discontented in his castle; private wealth could not console him for public woes, and he joined in the revolt of Gaston d’Orléans. He was defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner, and beheaded at Toulouse, by order of Cardinal Richelieu. “On the scaffold,” says St. Simon, “he bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and another to my father.”

The duke was a near kinsman of the Prince of Condé. Until the last, _Silvie_ had believed that this cousin, powerful and in the king’s good graces, would intervene, and save her husband’s life. To her surprise, Condé held his peace. The axe fell--and _Silvie_ understood, when the king awarded the confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condé.

For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued to be the almost Royal pleasure-house, the Versailles of the Princes of Condé. Then the great Revolution rased the castle to the ground. It was not here, but some miles away--at St. Leu-Taverny--that the last Condé died, in 1830. Chantilly, which had come into the family by a violent death, left it also in a sombre and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condé was found one morning hanged to the handle of his casement-window. The castle of Chantilly passed to the Duc d’Aumale. In 1840 he began the labour of restoring it; but the Revolution of 1848 sent him into exile, and only in 1872 was Chantilly restored to its rightful proprietor. Then, like a phœnix, the new castle began to rise swiftly from its nest of ash and ruin. It is as like the castle of the Renaissance, from which it descends, as a young child is like its illustrious ancestor. ’Tis a princely and elegant palace, and we find no fault with it beyond its youth. It stands with a swanlike grace amid its waters; it holds, as in the days of Montmorency, a rare treasure of old pictures and priceless manuscripts; and so far as eye can reach from its terraces, the lands and forests are subject to its lord. Chantilly is, in truth, a great possession. The Duc d’Aumale, as we know, had no sons. He died in 1897, and, choosing the most gifted men of his country for his children, he bequeathed his palace and estate of Chantilly to the Institute of France.

III

If the day be cold or windy, drive through the forest of Hallatte to Creil, and thence take the train to Compiègne, for there blows a stiffish breeze across the plateau of the Oise. But if mild air and sun attend you, hire a light victoria, choose a good driver (you can get one to do the thing for five and twenty francs or so), and set out by Senlis and Verberie for Compiègne. ’Tis a matter of five and forty kilomètres; and to make the drive a success, you must stretch it a little further still, and go through the forest of Chantilly, round by St. Léonard, to Senlis.

Senlis is a charming little town, perched on a hill in true mediæval fashion, and grouped in a cluster round its fine cathedral and the ruins of the castle of St Louis (a real mediæval castle, this one, at least so much as is left of it). Halfway up the hill the antique bulwarks, turned into a raised and shady walk, wear their elms and limes and beeches like flowers amid a mural crown. From this green garland the streets rise ever steeper, darker, more irregular; yet not so narrow but that here and there we spy some white half-modern house, with pots of pinks in the windows, and a garden full of flowers, which looks the natural home for some provincial heroine in a novel of Balzac’s. I should like to end my days, I think, in just such a little town, to sit in my garden and receive my fair visitors under the green roof of the lime-tree walk. The notary, the sous-préfet (is there a sous-préfet?), the curé perhaps, and some of the country neighbours would come once a week to play écarté, tric-trac, and boston with each other, and chat with us in a polished little parlour, with squares of carpet in front of all the chairs. Once a week, on the afternoon consecrated by local fashion,

we should walk on the ramparts and meet our neighbours, talk of the crops and pull the Government to pieces (it stands a great deal of pulling!). We should shake our heads over the Conseil Municipal, but forgive the individual councillors, who are invariably amiable in private life. The terrible M. Dupont would give me a cutting of Malmaison pink for my garden, and _that_ breach would be healed.... Stop carriage! let us begin at once, that peaceful imaginary comedy of old age. But, ah, the little white house is already out of sight. We are in front of the shattered round towers of the thirteenth-century palace, all fringed with brown wallflowers against an azure sky. We climb higher still, for see--here is the high, sunny, little square where the tall cathedral stands.

Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival building, its great porches arched around with sculptured saints and prophets. There are two towers, one of them topped by a surprising steeple, a hundred feet in height, which is a landmark for all the country round. The deep porches rich in shadow, the slender lofty towers, compose an exterior altogether simple, noble, and religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like all Gothic churches, is best seen from without. Within, that bare unending height of pillar, that cold frigid solemnity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, is less touching than the grand yet homely massiveness of Romanesque, or even than the serene placidity of the classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his prayers in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built apparently for the worship of giraffes or pelicans? Oh for the little, low-roofed chapels of St. Mark’s, the unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant’ Ambrogio, or even the simple, pious beauty of such a Norman village church as St. Georges de Boscherville, near Rouen! Think of the quaint, sombre poetry of Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, of Saint Julien at Brioude, or Saint Trophime at Arles; or even remember the elegant and holy grace of the Parisian St. Etienne du Mont--these be churches in which to say one’s prayers. Whereas your Northern Gothic is a marvellous poem from without; but how frigid is the chill interior of those august and noble monuments! Duty divorced from charity is not more cold; and I can easier imagine a filial and happy spirit of worship in the humblest square-towered parish church.

As it happened, we did not see the interior of Senlis at its best. The spring cleaning was in full force; the straw chairs were heaped in an immense barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral--and really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like Socrates in his basket--an energetic char-man was brushing the cobwebs from the sculptured capitals with a huge besom made of the dried but leafy boughs of trees. He had been hauled up there in a sort of crate by some ingenious system of ropes and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that vast cleanly interior was not unpicturesque; it was like a caricature of any picture of Mr. Orchardson’s.

IV

Senlis was the capital of our friends the Sylvanectes. Hence stretched on either hand the vast forests which even to-day are still considerable in a score of relics--the woods of Chantilly, Lys, Coye, Ermenonville, Hallatte, Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, etc., but which in Gallo-Roman times were still one vast united breadth of forest. To-day, all round Senlis the lands are cleared, and the nearest woods, north or south, are some six miles away. We rumbled regretfully down the hill, out towards the windy plains of Valois, windiest plains that ever were; bleak champaigns where the sough and rushing of the wind sounds louder than at sea. The forests of this northern plain are beautiful. O woods of Chantilly! O birchen glades of Coye! O deep and solemn vales of Compiègne, spinnies of Hallatte, and wavy pine-knolls of Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a collar of green emeralds upon the breast of Mother Earth? But we must admit that, shorn of their trees, the plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample solemn roll, of the plains of Seine-et-Marne. ’Tis a lean, chill, flat, and as it were an angular sort of beauty; like some thin thirteenth-century saint, divinely graceful in her robes of verdure; more graceful beneath those plenteous folds than her better nourished sisters. But never choose her for your model of Venus Anadyomene. Leave her that imperial cloak of woods and forests.

We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture; by stretches of sad precocious corn, already in ear on its scanty span-high stems of green; by quarries and hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte; then forth again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till somehow suddenly we find ourselves on the steep brow of a down (they call it a mountain here, la Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen through the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver. Far away beyond the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths of forest, blue and ever bluer, make an azure background that reaches out to Compiègne.

We dash down the hill and clatter along the sleepy pebbly village street, past the inn full of blouses and billiards, till the trees press thicker and thicker among the lengthening shadows. The forest is full of the peculiar soft beauty that foreruns the summer dusk. These outskirts are fragrant with thorn-trees and acacia-trees. O white-flowering delicate mock-acacias, were I the king of France, I would multiply ye by all my high roads--for none is more beautiful to the eye and none is more majestic or more bountiful than you. Throughout that parched spring of 1893, when the hay stood withered a span high from the ground, your long green leaves served as fodder for our cattle, most succulent and sweet. And what shall I say of your blossom--delicious to every sense--an exquisite rain of white pearls, dropping fragrant perfumes on the tree, which, plucked and delicately fried in batter, make a _beignet_ worthy of Lucullus? I love your black and gnarled thorny trunk, so dark in its veil of lacy green and white; and it always seems to me that the nightingale sings sweeter than elsewhere from your high and twisted branches.

Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees, still in flower, grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground studded with silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness, very fair and sweet, their muslin skirt spread white under the gleam of the rising moon. The lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We pass--and as soon as we have passed, no doubt, they clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance to celebrate the spring.

But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far away, here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides between their branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror of the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your ancestry. You have never known with a shudder just how they sacrificed the victim on yonder smooth grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God! Think, on this very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls to-night, among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or reaped his harvest on this sacred soil: it is still consecrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs rustle immemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their mast-like columns to support the temple roof. And there is Something in the temple, Something vast and nameless. Something that sighs and laments and chills, super-human or anti-human, Something which has no place in any of our creeds. What is it, this obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood and tension of the spirit, that locks us in a holy awe amid the shades of the nocturnal forest? Who knows? Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the rites of our ancestors, Celts or Germans; a drop of the heart’s blood of the Druid or the Alruna-woman, still alive in us after two thousand years. They say that children fear the dark because they are still haunted by the dread of prowling beasts; our babies long obscurely for the blazing camp-fires which kept the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear survives in them and forbids them to sleep without that bright protection. Brr!... I wish we could see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Compiègne!

At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a human beacon. ’Tis a blacksmith’s forge, and then some straggling houses. Again a space of scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg. The streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more exhilarating. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Compiègne.

V

The market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the morning, and the gay wide square is full of booths and country-people, clustered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you know, we took her--worse luck to us!--at the gate of Compiègne. But it was at Rouen she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand ashamed throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the market-place this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we could not see the best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our hotel stands the fine Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted, Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for the chimes. It was finished in 1510, when Louis XII. was king. There he rides, on the large arcade on the first story, every inch a king; but the statue is modern.

Gay, bright, with charming environs, Compiègne is a pleasant county town; but it has not that look of age, of historic continuity, which are the charm of smaller places, such as Crépy and Senlis. No sign is left of the great palace of the Merovingian kings, no relic of that stalwart fortress whence are dated so many of the acts of Charles the Wise; that castle of Compiègne where, says Eustache Deschamps, “Tel froid y fait en yver que c’est raige,” built against the river bridge--

“Le Chastel que se lance
Dessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”

Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place, here and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Here and there, on the limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden, and we recognize a fragment

of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain roads in the forest were planned and laid out by Francis the First. Then there is the city gate, built by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still remain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and among them that “Hôtel des Rats” where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1591. There are one or two old churches, too much restored. And then, of course, there is the great uninteresting palace, the very twin of the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we remember for the sake of the two Napoleons.

The charm, the attraction, of Compiègne is elsewhere. The forest here is beautiful as Fontainebleau. True, here are none of the wild romantic deserts, the piled crags hoary with juniper, the narrow gorges, and sudden summer vistas of Fontainebleau. The trees themselves have a different character. We find few of those great gnarled and hollow giants whose twisted arms make such uncanny shadows towards sunset in the Bas-Bréau. Here the oaks shoot up to an inconceivable height erect and branchless until they meet at last in a roof of verdure just tinged with April rose and gold. If Fontainebleau reminds us of a comedy of Shakespeare’s, Compiègne has the noble and ordered beauty, the heroic sentiment of Racine. What solemn arches and avenues of beeches; what depths of forest widening into unexpected valleys, rippling in meadow-grass, where the hamlet clusters round its ruined abbey; what magical lakes and waters interchained, where the wooded hills shine bright in doubled beauty! Ah! Fontainebleau, after all, is a blind poet: the forest is ignorant of lake and river. But Compiègne has the Oise and the Aisne and the Automne. Compiègne has its lakes and tarns, and pools innumerable, its seven and twenty limpid brooks, its wells and ripples in every valley-bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual irrigation, teems with flowers. The seal of Solomon waves above the hosts of lily of the valley. The wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel the grass with their pale stars. Here and there on the sandier slopes a deep carpet of bluebells, or at the water’s edge a brilliant embroidery of kingcups, give point to the sweet monotony of white and green, which vibrates from the flowers in the grass to the flowering may-bushes, to the acacias only half in blossom, and thence more faintly to the lady birch and beech with gleaming trunks and delicate foliage. White and green appear again in the wide sheets of water amid the shimmering woods. So I shall always think of the wood of Compiègne as of some paradise, too perfect for violent hue and passionate colour--some Eden haunted only by the souls of virgins, sweet with all fresh pure scents, white with white flowers, and green with the delicate trembling green of April leaves.

VI

Where shall we go to-day? There are many lovely drives in the forest. Champlieu has its Roman camp, its antique theatre and temple; Morienval its abbey church with the three Norman towers, St. Nicolas its priory, St. Pierre its ruins, St. Jean its marvellous old trees, and Ste. Perrine its lakes where the deer come to die. Shall I confess that we know these beauties still by rumour only? For we went first of all by the foot of Mont St. Mard to the hamlet of the old mill, and round the lakes of La Rouillie to Pierrefonds. And on the morrow, when we set out for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we would cry to the driver, “Go back, and take us the same drive as yesterday.” And so three times we drove past the Vieux Moulin.

This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you visit Compiègne, go _last_ to Pierrefonds, round by the Vieux Moulin, or, however long you stay, you will never see the rest.

VII

Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin! We are soon deep in woods of oak and beech. We pass the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper height towers above us. See, how wonderful is this deep-green glen, where the oaks rise sheer a hundred feet and more from the sheet of lily of the valley at their feet! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the beautiful growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweetness and profusion of the flowers, the something delicate, lofty, and serious about this landscape, makes a rare impression amid the opulence of April. Our glade slopes downward from the base of Mont St. Mard; at its further extremity begins the valley of the Vieux Moulin.

It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just room in the valley for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its hay-meadows. They are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and here and there a taller meadow-orchid. Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight, but never out of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de Berne.

The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end--perhaps a hundred dark little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses--out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an “ascension” to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep to the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup gives place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters, in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on between the wood and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so almost theatric in the perfection of its _mise en scène_. And see, the castle is quite perfect, without a scar, without a ruin! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood, as it seemed? Have we driven back five hundred years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century?

VIII

Pierrefonds! It was here that a sad ne’er-do-weel (for whom I have a liking none the less) built himself this famous castle in 1391. It was the wonder of the age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of the Crown. It was dismantled in 1617; and all that remains of the fourteenth-century fortress is, with the foundations, one side of the keep and part of the outer wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the triumph of Viollet-le-Duc. Before the decoration was finished, before the last moats were dry, or the palisade laid out, the Second Empire fell; the munificent patron became an invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds was dubbed a national monument, kept from ruin, but no longer an occasion for expense. I own that I should like to have seen it before it was restored--to have seen the real, time-stained, historical document. Yet, after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of documents; and there is only one such magnificent historical novel as the Castle of Pierrefonds.

The decoration is often poor and gaudy; but architecturally Pierrefonds is a work of genius. To walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive, and as they were: a hundred phrases of mediæval novels or poems throng our memory. See, there is the great Justice Hall, built separate from the keep, above the Salle des Gardes; and there, connecting it with the outer defences, are the galleries or _loggie_, where the knights and ladies used to meet and watch the Palm Play in the court below. Here is the keep, a fortress within a fortress, with its postern on the open country. From its watch-towers, or its double row of battlements, we can study the whole system of mediæval defence. Ah, this would be the place to read some particularly exciting book of Froissart’s--“The Campaign in Brittany,” for instance, or one of those great Gascon sieges, full of histories of mining and counter-mining, of sudden sallies from the postern gate, of great engines built like towers, launching stones and Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by night against the castle wall. I am deep in mediæval strategy when a timid common-sensible voice interrupts--

“Mais comment cela se peut-il que le château soit si ancien, p’isque vous me dites qu’il fut construit sous le Second Empire?”

’Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local tradesman, bent on holiday, tramping the forest with his wife, their dinner in a basket, and bunches of _muguets_ dangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd little fellow. In his one phrase, he has summed up the sovereign objection to Pierrefonds--

“How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say, ’twas built under Napoleon III.?”

Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored!

IX

The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one; for, down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there stands the _Établissement des Bains_. Here tepid sulphur springs are captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to get well in this enchanting village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces,

and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne, proclaims the trump of Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely home safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms. ’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the Parisian--a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty of the woods against the fate of Asnières.

There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take the train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the lovely drive through the forest to Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois, whence the train will take him on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one would think that such a dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The road that slopes down from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the knolly forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cotterets; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst course open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the train direct to Paris.