Part 3

XII.

The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the house of Jacques Coeur is an object of interest scarcely less positive. This remarkable man had a very strange history, and he too was "broken," like the wretched soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been re- habilitated, however, by an age which does not fear the imputation of paradox, and a marble statue of him ornaments the street in front of his house. To interpret him according to this image - a womanish figure in a long robe and a turban, with big bare arms and a dramatic pose - would be to think of him as a kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his period, but his spirit was very modern; he was a Van- derbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century. He supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to pay the troops who, under the heroic Maid, drove the English from French soil. His house, which to-day is used as a Palais de Justice, appears to have been re- garded at the time it was built very much as the resi- dence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New York to-day. It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the town is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a lower level, and, if you approach it on that side, as I did, to come round to the front of it, you have to ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old, must have formed a portion of the city wall; at any rate, it offers to view two big towers, which Joanne says were formerly part of the defence of Bourges. From the lower level of which I speak - the square in front of the post-office - the palace of Jacques Coeur looks very big and strong and feudal; from the upper street, in front of it, it looks very handsome and deli- cate. To this street it presents two stories and a con- siderable length of facade; and it has, both within and without, a great deal of curious and beautiful detail. Above the portal, in the stonework, are two false win- dows, in which two figures, a man and a woman, ap- parently household servants, are represented, in sculp- ture, as looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several cen- turies at the window. They appear to be watching for the return of their master, who left his beautiful house one morning and never came back.

The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been written by M. Pierre Clement, in a volume crowned by the French Academy, is very wonderful and in- teresting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods grow jealous of human success. Merchant, million- naire, banker, ship-owner, royal favorite, and minister of finance, explorer of the East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty, imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been elucidated by M. Clement, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the fifteenth century. He has shown that the spoliation of the great merchant was a deliberately calculated act, and that the king sacrificed him without scruple or shame to the avidity of a sin- gularly villanous set of courtiers. The whole story is an extraordinary picture of high-handed rapacity, - the crudest possible assertion of the right of the stronger. The victim was stripped of his property, but escaped with his life, made his way out of France, and, betak- ing himself to Italy, offered his services to the Pope. It is proof of the consideration that he enjoyed in Europe, and of the variety of his accomplishments, that Calixtus III. should have appointed him to take command of a fleet which his Holiness was fitting out against the Turks. Jacques Coeur, however, was not destined to lead it to victory. He died shortly after the expedition had started, in the island of Chios, in 1456. The house of Bourges, his native place, testifies in some degree to his wealth and splendor, though it has in parts that want of space which is striking in many of the buildings of the Middle Ages. The court, indeed, is on a large scale, ornamented with turrets and arcades, with several beautiful windows, and with sculptures inserted in the walls, representing the various sources of the great fortune of the owner. M. Pierre Clement describes this part of the house as having been of an "incomparable richesse," - an estimate of its charms which seems slightly exaggerated to-day. There is, however, something delicate and familiar in the bas-reliefs of which I have spoken, little scenes of agriculture and industry, which show, that the pro- prietor was not ashamed of calling attention to his harvests and enterprises. To-day we should question the taste of such allusions, even in plastic form, in the house of a "merchant prince" (say in the Fifth Avenue). Why is it, therefore, that these quaint little panels at Bourges do not displease us? It is perhaps because things very ancient never, for some mysterious reason, appear vulgar. This fifteenth-century million- naire, with his palace, his egotistical sculptures, may have produced that impression on some critical spirits of his own day.

The portress who showed me into the building was a dear litte old woman, with the gentlest, sweetest, saddest face - a little white, aged face, with dark, pretty eyes - and the most considerate manner. She took me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of Bourges - an inland town if there ever was one, without even a river (to call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions - hav- ing found his end as admiral of a fleet; but this boat- shaped roof, which is extremely graceful and is re- peated in another apartment, would suggest that the imagination of Jacques Coeur was fond of riding the waves. Indeed, as he trafficked in Oriental products and owned many galleons, it is probable that he was personally as much at home in certain Mediterranean ports as in the capital of the pastoral Berry. If, when he looked at the ceilings of his mansion, he saw his boats upside down, this was only a suggestion of the shortest way of emptying them of their treasures. He is presented in person above one of the great stone chimney-pieces, in company with his wife, Macee de Leodepart, - I like to write such an extraordinary name. Carved in white stone, the two sit playing at chess at an open window, through which they appear to give their attention much more to the passers-by than to the game. They are also exhibited in other attitudes; though I do not recognize them in the composition on top of one of the fireplaces which represents the battle- ments of a castle, with the defenders (little figures be- tween the crenellations) hurling down missiles with a great deal of fury and expression. It would have been hard to believe that the man who surrounded himself with these friendly and humorous devices had been guilty of such wrong-doing as to call down the heavy hand of justice.

It is a curious fact, however, that Bourges contains legal associations of a purer kind than the prosecution of Jacques Coeur, which, in spite of the rehabilitations of history, can hardly be said yet to have terminated, inasmuch as the law-courts of the city are installed in his quondam residence. At a short distance from it stands the Hotel Cujas, one of the curiosities of Bourges and the habitation for many years of the great juris- consult who revived in the sixteenth century the study of the Roman law, and professed it during the close of his life in the university of the capital of Berry. The learned Cujas had, in spite of his sedentary pur- suits, led a very wandering life; he died at Bourges in the year 1590. Sedentary pursuits is perhaps not exactly what I should call them, having read in the "Biographie Universelle" (sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so grave a work) an amusing pic- ture of the short, fat, untidy scholar dragging himself a plat ventre across his room, from one pile of books to the other. The house in which these singular gym- nastics took place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of the most picturesque at Bourges. Dilapidated and discolored, it has a charm- ing Renaissance front. A high wall separates it from the street, and on this wall, which is divided by a large open gateway, are perched two overhanging turrets. The open gateway admits you to the court, beyond which the melancholy mansion erects itself, decorated also with turrets, with fine old windows, and with a beautiful tone of faded red brick and rusty stone. It is a charming encounter for a provincial by- street; one of those accidents in the hope of which the traveller with a propensity for sketching (whether on a little paper block or on the tablets of his brain) decides to turn a corner at a venture. A brawny gen- darme, in his shirt-sleeves, was polishing his boots in the court; an ancient, knotted vine, forlorn of its clusters, hung itself over a doorway, and dropped its shadow on the rough grain of the wall. The place was very sketchable. I am sorry to say, however, that it was almost the only "bit." Various other curious old houses are supposed to exist at Bourges, and I wandered vaguely about in search of them. But I had little success, and I ended by becoming sceptical. Bourges is a ville de province in the full force of the term, especially as applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide cobble- stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, with- out local color. The look of things is neither modern nor antique, - a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank walls, - walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses - that avert themselves from the street, as if in natural chagrin at there being so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy, everything has a charm, a color, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six weeks spent en province, however, I saw few places that had not more expression than Bourges.

I went back to the cathedral; that, after all, was a feature. Then I returned to my hotel, where it was time to dine, and sat down, as usual, with the commis- voyageurs, who cut their bread on their thumb and partook of every course; and after this repast I re- paired for a while to the cafe, which occupied a part of the basement of the inn and opened into its court. This cafe was a friendly, homely, sociable spot, where it seemed the habit of the master of the establishment to tutoyer his customers, and the practice of the cus- tomers to tutoyer the waiter. Under these circum- stances the waiter of course felt justified in sitting down at the same table with a gentleman who had come in and asked him for writing materials. He served this gentleman with a horrible little portfolio, covered with shiny black cloth and accompanied with two sheets of thin paper, three wafers, and one of those instruments of torture which pass in France for pens, - these being the utensils invariably evoked by such a request; and then, finding himself at leisure, he placed himself opposite and began to write a letter of his own. This trifling incident reminded me afresh that France is a democratic country. I think I re- ceived an admonition to the same effect from the free, familiar way in which the game of whist was going on just behind me. It was attended with a great deal of noisy pleasantry, flavored every now and then with a dash of irritation. There was a young man of whom I made a note; he was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very facetious, chatter- ing, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game went on and he lost, and had to pay the consomma- tion, he dropped his amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and went away in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more amusing than the contrast. The manner of the whole affair was such as, I apprehend, one would not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking cad; just as the bright little cafe where a robust mater- familias, doling out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror behind the comptoir, was a much more civilized spot than a British public- house, or a "commercial room," with pipes and whiskey, or even than an American saloon.

XIII.

It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey and not an excursion; for I had no intention of coming back. The question, in- deed, was to get away, - no easy matter in France, in the early days of October, when the whole jeunesse of the country is going back to school. It is accom- panied, apparently, with parents and grandparents, and it fills the trains with little pale-faced lyceens, who gaze out of the windows with a longing, lingering air, not unnatural on the part of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our American appreciation of the oppor- tunities of boyhood. The train stopped every five minutes; but, fortunately, the country was charming, - hilly and bosky, eminently good-humored, and dotted here and there with a smart little chateau. The old capital of the province of the Maine, which has given its name to a great American State, is a fairly interest- ing town, but I confess that I found in it less than I expected to admire. My expectations had doubtless been my own fault; there is no particular reason why Le Mans should fascinate. It stands upon a hill, indeed, - a much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges. This hill, however, is not steep in all direc- tions; from the railway, as I arrived, it was not even perceptible. Since I am making comparisons, I may remark that, on the other hand, the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges. It looks out upon a small market-place which has a certain amount of character and seems to be slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an ugly halle, or circular market- house, to keep it in position. At Le Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which, I lost no time in directing my steps. It suf- fered by juxta-position to the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, - a very crooked and untidy lane, of really mediaeval aspect, honored with the denomina- tion of the Grand' Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria, - an absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monu- ment in the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question - very sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it - is an elaborate little dusky facade, overhanging the street, ornamented with panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture. A fat old woman, standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to it, - a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming manner, - told me what the house was, and also in- dicated to me a rotten-looking brown wooden mansion, in the same street, nearer the cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique," and of a thousand facetious verses, enjoyed for some years, in the early part of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position - he was unable even to go down on his knees - prosecuted that other suit which made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon; though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":-

"Celui qui cy maintenant dort, Fit plus de pitie que d'envie, Et souffrit mille fois la mort, Avant que de perdre la vie. Passant, ne fais icy de bruit, Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eveille, Car voicy la premiere nuit, Que le Pauvre Scarron sommeille."

There is rather a quiet, satisfactory place in front of the cathedral, with some good "bits" in it; notably a turret at the angle of one of the towers, and a very fine, steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which it overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two or three little pointed towers, a big, black, precipitous roof, and a general air of having had a history. There are houses which are scenes, and there are houses which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic architecture of the United States is that it is not scenic, thank Heaven! and the good fortune of an old structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a per- son, as it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if it might have communicated a little of its personality to the front of the cathedral, which has none of its own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower. One sees from without, at a glance, the peculiarity of the church, - the disparity between the romanesque nave, which is small and of the twelfth century, and the immense and splendid transepts and choir, of a period a hundred years later. Outside, this end of the church rises far above the nave, which looks merely like a long porch leading to it, with a small and curious romanesque porch in its own south flank. The transepts, shallow but very lofty, display to the spectators in the place the reach of their two clere-story windows, which occupy, above, the whole expanse of the wall. The south transept terminates in a sort of tower, which is the only one of which the cathedral can boast. Within, the effect of the choir is superb; it is a church in it- self, with the nave simply for a point of view. As I stood there, I read in my Murray that it has the stamp of the date of the perfection of pointed Gothic, and I found nothing to object to the remark. It suffers little by confrontation with Bourges, and, taken in itself, seems to me quite as fine. A passage of double aisles surrounds it, with the arches that divide them sup- ported on very thick round columns, not clustered. There are twelve chapels in this passage, and a charm- ing little lady chapel, filled with gorgeous old glass. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble; its lightness and grace, its soaring sym- metry, carry the eye up to places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and unlike several English ones) Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a sort of gallery of pictures, blooming with vivid color. It is the south transept that contains the formless image - a clumsy stone woman lying on her back - which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.

The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large place de foire, ad- jacent to a fine old pubic promenade which is known as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a while in rectangular alleys, destitute of herbage, and received a deeper impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins, between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may admire it at a con- venient distance. I admired it till I thought I should remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown facade, and a portal fretted with early sculptures; but the details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have stood awhile in the choir of the cathedral, there is no sensation at Le Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced, I had looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests some- thing dark and square, a vision of old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact, accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in running the risk of disappointment. I took mine, such as it was, quietly enough, while I sat before dinner at the door of one of the cafes in the market-place with a bitter-et-curacao (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep me com- pany. I remember that in this situation there came over me an impression which both included and ex- cluded all possible disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the air was admirably soft. The good Manceaux, in little groups and pairs, were seated near me; my ear was soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was nothing in particular in the prospect to charm; it was an average French view. Yet I felt a charm, a kind of sympathy, a sense of the completeness of French life and of the lightness and brightness of the social air, together with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a positive interest. I know not why this transcendental mood should have descended upon me then and there; but that idle half-hour in front of the cafe, in the mild October afternoon, suffused with human sounds, is perhaps the most definite thing I brought away from Le Mans.

XIV.

I am shocked at finding, just after this noble de- claration of principles that in a little note-book which at that time I carried about with me, the celebrated city of Angers is denominated a "sell." I reproduce this vulgar term with the greatest hesitation, and only because it brings me more quickly to my point. This point is that Angers belongs to the disagreeable class of old towns that have been, as the English say, "done up." Not the oldness, but the newness, of the place is what strikes the sentimental tourist to-day, as he wanders with irritation along second-rate boulevards, looking vaguely about him for absent gables. "Black Angers," in short, is a victim of modern improvements, and quite unworthy of its admirable name, - a name which, like that of Le Mans, had always had, to my eyes, a highly picturesque value. It looks particularly well on the Shakspearean page (in "King John"), where we imagine it uttered (though such would not have been the utterance of the period) with a fine old in- sular accent. Angers figures with importance in early English history: it was the capital city of the Plantagenet race, home of that Geoffrey of Anjou who married, as second husband, the Empress Maud, daughter of Henry I. and competitor of Stephen, and became father of Henry II., first of the Plantagenet kings, born, as we have seen, at Le Mans. The facts create a natural presumption that Angers will look historic; I turned them over in my mind as I travelled in the train from Le Mans, through a country that was really pretty, and looked more like the usual English than like the usual French scenery, with its fields cut up by hedges and a considerable rotundity in its trees. On my way from the station to the hotel, however, it became plain that I should lack a good pretext for passing that night at the Cheval Blanc; I foresaw that I should have con- tented myself before th e end of the day. I remained at the White Horse only long enough to discover that it was an exceptionally good provincial inn, one of the best that I encountered during six weeks spent in these establishments.

"Stupidly and vulgarly rnodernized," - that is an- other phrase from my note-book, and note-books are not obliged to be reasonable. "There are some narrow and tortuous-streets, with a few curious old houses," - I continue to quote; "there is a castle, of which the ex- terior is most extraordinary, and there is a cathedral of moderate interest. It is fair to say that the Chateau d'Angers is by itself worth a pilgrimage; the only drawback is that you have seen it in a quarter of an hour. You cannot do more than look at it, and one good look does your business. It has no beauty, no grace, no detail, nothing that charms or detains you; it is simply very old and very big, - so big and so old that this simple impression is enough, and it takes its place in your recollections as a perfect specimen of a superannuated stronghold. It stands at one end of the town, surrounded by a huge, deep moat, which originally contained the waters of the Maine, now divided from it by a quay. The water-front of Angers is poor, - wanting in color and in movement; and there is always an effect of perversity in a town lying near a great river and, yet not upon it. The Loire is a few miles off; but Angers contents itself with a meagre affluent of that stream. The effect was naturally much better when the huge, dark mass of the castle, with its seventeen prodigious towers, rose out of the protecting flood. These towers are of tremendous girth and soli- dity; they are encircled with great bands, or hoops, of white stone, and are much enlarged at the base. Between them hang vast curtains of infinitely old-look- ing masonry, apparently a dense conglomeration of slate, the material of which the town was originally built (thanks to rich quarries in the neighborhood), and to which it owed its appellation of the Black. There are no windows, no apertures, and to-day no battlements nor roofs. These accessories were removed by Henry III., so that, in spite of its grimness and blackness, the place has not even the interest of look- ing like a prison; it being, as I supposed, the essence of a prison not to be open to the sky. The only features of the enormous structure are the black, sombre stretches and protrusions of wall, the effect of which, on so large a scale, is strange and striking. Begun by Philip Augustus, and terminated by St. Louis, the Chateau d'Angers has of course a great deal of history. The luckless Fouquet, the extravagant minister of finance of Louis XIV., whose fall from the heights of grandeur was so sudden and complete, was confined here in 1661, just after his arrest, which had taken place at Nantes. Here, also, Huguenots and Vendeans have suffered effective captivity.

I walked round the parapet which protects the outer edge of the moat (it is all up hill, and the moat deepens and deepens), till I came to the entrance which faces the town, and which is as bare and strong as the rest. The concierge took me into the court; but there was nothing to see. The place is used as a magazine of ammunition, and the yard con- tains a multitude of ugly buildings. The only thing to do is to walk round the bastions for the view; but at the moment of my visit the weather was thick, and the bastions began and ended with themselves. So I came out and took another look at the big, black ex- terior, buttressed with white-ribbed towers, and per- ceived that a desperate sketcher might extract a picture from it, especially if he were to bring in, as they say, the little black bronze statue of the good King Rene (a weak production of David d'Angers), which, standing within sight, ornaments the melancholy faubourg. He would do much better, however, with the very striking old timbered house (I suppose of the fifteenth century) which is called the Maison d'Adam, and is easily the first specimen at Angers of the domestic architecture of the past. This admirable house, in the centre of the town, gabled, elaborately timbered, and much restored, is a really imposing monument. The basement is occupied by a linen- draper, who flourishes under the auspicious sign of the Mere de Famille; and above his shop the tall front rises in five overhanging stories. As the house occupies the angle of a little place, this front is double, and the black beams and wooden supports, displayed over a large surface and carved and interlaced, have a high picturesqueness. The Maison d'Adam is quite in the grand style, and I am sorry to say I failed to learn what history attaches to its name. If I spoke just above of the cathedral as "moderate," I suppose I should beg its pardon; for this serious charge was probably prompted by the fact that it consists only of a nave, without side aisles. A little reflection now convinces me that such a form is a distinction; and, indeed, I find it mentioned, rather inconsistently, in my note-book, a little further on, as "extremely simple and grand." The nave is spoken of in the same volume as "big, serious, and Gothic," though the choir and transepts are noted as very shallow. But it is not denied that the air of the whole thing is original and striking; and it would therefore appear, after all, that the cathedral of Angers, built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is a sufficiently honorable church; the more that its high west front, adorned with a very primitive Gothic portal, supports two elegant tapering spires, between which, unfortunately, an ugly modern pavilion has been inserted.

I remember nothing else at Angers but the curious old Cafe Serin, where, after I had had my dinner at the inn, I went and waited for the train which, at nine o'clock in the evening, was to convey me, in a couple of hours, to Nantes, - an establishment remarkable for its great size and its air of tarnished splendor, its brown gilding and smoky frescos, as also for the fact that it was hidden away on the second floor of an un- assuming house in an unilluminated street. It hardly seemed a place where you would drop in; but when once you had found it, it presented itself, with the cathedral, the castle, and the Maison d'Adam, as one of the historical monuments of Angers.

XV.

If I spent two nights at Nantes, it was for reasons of convenience rather than of sentiment; though, in- deed, I spent them in a big circular room which had a stately, lofty, last-century look, - a look that con- soled me a little for the whole place being dirty. The high, old-fashioned, inn (it had a huge, windy porte- cochere, and you climbed a vast black stone staircase to get to your room) looked out on a dull square, sur- rounded with other tall houses, and occupied on one side by the theatre, a pompous building, decorated with columns and statues of the muses. Nantes be- longs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine," and its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it, I believe, much commercial movement. It is a spacious, rather regular city, looking, in the parts that I traversed, neither very fresh nor very venerable. It derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire, which are overhung with tall eighteenth-century houses (very numerous, too, in the other streets), - houses, with big entresols marked by arched windows, classic pediments, balcony- rails of fine old iron-work. These features exist in still better form at Bordeaux; but, putting Bordeaux aside, Nantes is quite architectural. The view up and down the quays has the cool, neutral tone of color that one finds so often in French water-side places, - the bright grayness which is the tone of French land- scape art. The whole city has rather a grand, or at least an eminently well-established air. During a day passed in it of course I had time to go to the Musee; the more so that I have a weakness for provincial museums, - a sentiment that depends but little on the quality of the collection. The pictures may be bad, but the place is often curious; and, indeed, from bad pictures, in certain moods of the mind, there is a degree of entertainment to be derived. If they are tolerably old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I confess I can do no- thing with works of art of which the badness is of receat origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odor, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the snuffy custodian in a black skull cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the lustreless gem of the museum, - these things have a mild historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate something. Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of a successful warrior; having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's marshal, Clarke (created Duc de Feltre). In addition to these there is the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school, culled from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State. Wherever the traveller goes, in France, he is reminded of this very honorable practice, - the purchase by the Government of a cer- tain number of "pictures of the year," which are pre- sently distributed in the provinces. Governments suc- ceed each other and bid for success by different devices; but the "patronage of art" is a plank, as we should say here, in every platform. The works of art are often ill-selected, - there is an official taste which you immediately recognize, - but the custom is essen- tially liberal, and a government which should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common. The only thing in this particular Musee that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman, by Ingres, - very flat and Chinese, but with an interest of line and a great deal of style.

There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of Angers, but has, without, much less of the impressiveness of great size, and, within, much more interest of detail. The court contains the remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic, a tall ele- gant building of the sixteenth century. The chateau is naturally not wanting in history. It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany, and was brought, with the rest of the province, by the Duchess Anne, the last representative of that race, as her dowry, to Charles VIII. I read in the excellent hand-book of M. Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of the kings of France, from Louis XI. downward; and also that it has served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other distinguished persons, from the horrible Merechal de Retz, who in the fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of hundred young children, sacrificed in abomin- able rites, to the ardent Duchess of Berry, mother of the Count of Chambord, who was confined there for a few hours in 1832, just after her arrest in a neigh- boring house. I looked at the house in question - you may see it from the platform in front of the chateau - and tried to figure to myself that embarrassing scene. The duchess, after having unsuccessfully raised the standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons), in the legitimist Bretagne, and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe, had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the austere M. Guizot, by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz. For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an inter- stice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the castle in- dicated also another historic spot, a house with little tourelles, on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have signed the Edict of Nantes. I am, however, not in a position to answer for this pedigree.

There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which command the Loire, of which, I sup- pose, one may be tolerably sure; that is, their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier and his infamous noyades. The most hideous episode of the Revolution was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied to- gether in couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire. The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the air noble, in France always reminds me of those dreadful years, - of the street-scenes of the Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongru- ous, for nothing could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads car- ried on pikes, of groups of heated citoyennes shaking their fists at closed coach-windows, I see in the back- ground the well-ordered features of the architecture of the period, - the clear gray stone, the high pilasters, the arching lines of the entresol, the classic pediment, the slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers, makes no im- pression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold. Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave. Some have a rich outside and nothing within; others a very blank face and a very glowing heart. There are a hundred possibilities of poverty and wealth, and they make the most unexpected combinations.

The great treasure of Nantes is the two noble se- pulchral monuments which occupy either transept, and one of which has (in its nobleness) the rare distinction of being a production of our own time. On the south side stands the tomb of Francis II., the last of the Dukes of Brittany, and of his second wife, Margaret of Foix, erected in 1507 by their daughter Anne, whom we have encountered already at the Chateau de Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make room for her, and where she herself died. Trans- ferred to the cathedral from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at Saint Gatien of Tours, is one of the most brilliant works of the French Renaissance. It has a splendid effect, and is in perfect preservation. A great table of black marble supports the reclining figures of the duke and duchess, who lie there peacefully and majestically, in their robes and crowns, with their heads each on a cushion, the pair of which are supported, from behind, by three, charming little kneeling angels; at the foot of the quiet couple are a lion and a greyhound, with heraldic devices. At each of the angles of the table is a large figure in white marble of a woman elaborately dressed, with a symbolic meaning, and these figures, with their contemporary faces and clothes, which give them the air of realistic portraits, are truthful and liv- ing, if not remarkably beautiful. Round the sides of the tomb are small images of the apostles. There is a kind of masculine completeness in the work, and a certain robustness of taste.

In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us noting to say in regard to the great final contrast, - the contrast between the immobility of death and the trappings and honors that survive. They expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the solemnity, of their conviction that the Marble image was a part of the personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the re- demption, of his memory. A modern tomb, in com- parison, is a sceptical affair; it insists too little on the honors. I say this in the face of the fact that one has only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in the presence of one of the purest and most touching of modern tombs. Catholic Brittany has erected in the opposite transept a monument to one of the most devoted of her sons, General de Lamoriciere, the de- fender of the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo. This noble work, from the hand of Paul Dubois, one of the most interesting of that new generation of sculp- tors who have revived in France an art of which our overdressed century had begun to despair, has every merit but the absence of a certain prime feeling. It is the echo of an earlier tune, - an echo with a beauti- ful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white marble, elaborately worked with arabesques and che- rubs, in a relief so low that it gives the work a cer- tain look of being softened and worn by time, lies the body of the Breton soldier, with, a crucifix clasped to his breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast, and they have a certain greatness: the one, a serene, robust young mother, beautiful in line and attitude; the other, a lean and vigilant young man, in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These figures con- tain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard called a splendid example but a bad model. The visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more or less a reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse for that. The interest of the work of Paul Dubois is its peculiar seriousness, a kind of moral good faith which is not the commonest feature of French art, and which, united as it is in this case with exceeding knowledge and a remarkable sense of form, produces an impression, of deep refinement. The whole monu- ment is a proof of exquisitely careful study; but I am not sure that this impression on the part of the spec- tator is altogether a happy one. It explains much of its great beauty, and it also explains, perhaps, a little of a certain weakness. That word, however, is scarcely in place; I only mean that M. Dubois has made a vi- sible effort, which has been most fruitful. Simplicity is not always strength, and our complicated modern genius contains treasures of intention. This fathomless modern element is an immense charm on the part of M. Paul Dubois. I am lost in admiration of the deep aesthetic experience, the enlightenment of taste, re- vealed by such work. After that, I only hope that Giuseppe Garibaldi may have a monument as fair.

XVI.

To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward, across the historic bocage of La Vendee, the home of royalist bush-fighting. The country, which is exceedingly pretty, bristles with copses, orchards, hedges, and with trees more spread- ing and sturdy than the traveller is apt to deem the feathery foliage of France. It is true that as I pro- ceeded it flattened out a good deal, so that for an hour there was a vast featureless plain, which offered me little entertainment beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay (from which, in reality, I was yet far distant). As we drew near La Rochelle, however, the prospect brightened con- siderably, and the railway kept its course beside a charming little canal, or canalized river, bordered with trees, and with small, neat, bright-colored, and yet old-fashioned cottages and villas, which stood back on the further side, behind small gardens, hedges, painted palings, patches of turf. The whole effect was Dutch and delightful; and in being delightful, though not in being Dutch, it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle, which from the moment I entered it I perceived to be a fascinating little town, a most original mixture of brightness and dulness. Part of its brightness comes from its being extra- ordinarily clean, - in which, after all, it is Dutch; a virtue not particularly noticeable at Bourges, Le Mans, and Angers. Whenever I go southward, if it be only twenty miles, I begin to look out for the south, pre- pared as I am to find the careless grace of those lati- tudes even in things of which it may, be said that they may be south of something, but are not southern. To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft a sensation as descending the Italian side, of the Alps; and to go from New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the ca- ractere meridional. Really, a great many things had a hint of it. For that matter, it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound - to wake up there, as it were - would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive shades of difference by which it ceases to be the north. These shades are exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye for them all. If he perceive them at New York and Philadelphia, - we imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston, - how could he fail to perceive them at La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are lined with arcades, - good, big, straddling arcades of stone, such as befit a land of hot summers, and which recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky portions of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide place d'armes, which looked for all the world like the piazza of some dead Italian town, empty, sunny, grass-grown, with a row of yellow houses overhanging it, an unfrequented cafe, with a striped awning, a tall, cold, florid, uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on one side, and on the other a shady walk, which forms part of an old rampart. I followed this walk for some time, under the stunted trees, beside the grass-covered bastions; it is very charming, wind- ing and wandering, always with trees. Beneath the rampart is a tidal river, and on the other side, for a long distance, the mossy walls of the immense garden of a seminary. Three hundred years ago, La Rochelle was the great French stronghold of Protestantism; but to-day it appears to be a'nursery of Papists.

The walk upon the rampart led me round to one of the gatesi of the town, where I found some small modern, fortifications and sundry red-legged soldiers, and, beyond the fortifications, another shady walk, - a mail, as the French say, as well as a champ de manoeuvre, - on which latter expanse the poor little red-legs were doing their exercise. It was all very quiet and very picturesque, rather in miniature; and at once very tidy and a little out of repair. This, however, was but a meagre back-view of La Rochelle, or poor side-view at best. There are other gates than the small fortified aperture just mentioned; one of them, an old gray arch beneath a fine clock-tower, I had passed through on my way from the station. This picturesque Tour de l'Horloge separates the town proper from the port; for beyond the old gray arch, the place presents its bright, expressive little face to the sea. I had a charming walk about the harbor, and along the stone piers and sea-walls that shut it in. This indeed, to take things in their order, was after I had had my breakfast (which I took on arriv- ing) and after I had been to the hotel de ville. The inn had a long narrow garden behind it, with some very tall trees; and passing through this garden to a dim and secluded salle a manger, buried in the heavy shade, I had, while I sat at my repast, a feeling of seclusion which amounted almost to a sense of in- carceration. I lost this sense, however, after I had paid my bill, and went out to look for traces of the famous siege, which is the principal title of La Rochelle to renown. I had come thither partly because I thought it would be interesting to stand for a few moments in so gallant a spot, and partly because, I confess, I had a curiosity to see what had been the starting-point of the Huguenot emigrants who founded the town of New Rochelle in the State of New York, a place in which I had passed certain memorable hours. It was strange to think, as I strolled through the peaceful little port, that these quiet waters, during the wars of religion, had swelled with a formidable naval power. The Rochelais had fleets and admirals, and their stout little Protestant bottoms carried de- fiance up and down.

To say that I found any traces of the siege would be to misrepresent the taste for vivid whitewash by which La Rochelle is distinguished to-day. The only trace is the dent in the marble top of the table on which, in the hotel de ville, Jean Guiton, the mayor of the city, brought down his dagger with an oath, when in 1628 the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary was the soul of the resistance; he held out from February to October, in the midst of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass. I limit my ambition, in these light pages, to speaking of those things of which I have personally received an impression; and I have no such impression of the defence of La Rochelle. The hotel de ville is a pretty little building, in the style of the Renaissance of Francis I.; but it has left much of its interest in the hands of the restorers. It has been "done up" without mercy; its natural place would be at Rochelle the New. A sort of battlemented curtain, flanked with turrets, divides it from the street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where you discover the face of the building. It has statues set into it, and is raised upon a very low and very deep arcade. The principal function of the deferential old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your attention to the indented table of Jean Guiton; but she shows you other objects of interest besides. The interior is absolutely new and extremely sump- tuous, abounding in tapestries, upholstery, morocco, velvet, satin. This is especially the case with a really beautiful grande salle, where, surrdunded with the most expensive upholstery, the mayor holds his official receptions. (So at least, said my worthy portress.) The mayors of La Rochelle appear to have changed a good deal since the days of the grim Guiton; but these evidences of municipal splendor are interesting for the light they throw on French manners. Imagine the mayor of an English or an American town of twenty thousand inhabitants holding magisterial soirees in the town-hall! The said grande salle, which is un- changed in form and its larger features, is, I believe, the room in which the Rochelais debated as to whether they should shut themselves up, and decided in the affirmative. The table and chair of Jean Guiton have been restored, Iike everything else, and are very elegant and coquettish pieces of furniture, - incongruous relics of a season of starvation and blood. I believe that Protestantism is somewhat shrunken to-day at La Rochelle, and has taken refuge mainly in. the haute societe and in a single place of worship. There was nothing particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as, after leaving the hotel de ville, I walked along the empty portions and cut out of the Tour de l'Horloge, which I have already mentioned. If I stopped and looked up at this venerable monument, it was not to ascertain the hour, for I foresaw that I should have more time at La Rochelle than I knew what to do with; but because its high, gray, weather-beaten face was an obvious subject for a sketch. The little port, which has two basins, and is ac- cessible only to vessels of light tonnage, had a certain gayety and as much local color as you please. Fisher folk of pictuesque type were strolling about, most of them Bretons; several of the men with handsome, simple faces, not at all brutal, and with a splendid brownness, - the golden-brown color, on cheek and beard, that you see on an old Venetian sail. It was a squally, showery day, with sudden drizzles of sun- shine; rows of rich-toned fishing-smacks were drawn up along the quays. The harbor is effective to the eye by reason of three battered old towers which, at different points, overhang it and look infinitely weather- washed and sea-silvered. The most striking of these, the Tour de la Lanterne, is a big gray mass, of the fifteenth century, flanked with turrets and crowned with a Gothic steeple. I found it was called by the people of the place the Tour des Quatre Sergents, though I know not what connection it has with the touching history of the four young sergeants of the garrison of La Rochelle, who were arrested in 1821 as conspirators against the Government of the Bour- bons, and executed, amid general indignation, in Paris in the following year. The quaint little walk, with its label of Rue sur les Murs, to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge, leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it. This walk has the top of the old town-wall, toward the sea, for a parapet on one side, and is bordered on the other with decent but irregular little tenements of fishermen, where brown old women, whose caps are as white as if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In this direction there is a very pretty stretch of shore, out of the town, through the fortifications (which are Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery, which edges the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big Etablissernent des Bains. It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Etablissement had the bank- rupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season; so I turned my back upon it, and gained, by a circuit in the course of which there were sundry water-side items to observe, the other side of the cheery little port, where there is a long breakwater and a still longer sea-wall, on which I walked awhile, to inhale the strong, salt breath of the Bay of Biscay. La Rochelle serves, in the months of July and August, as a station de bains for a modest provincial society; and, putting aside the question of inns, it must be charming on summer afternoons.

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 into the station, for I re- membered the impression received on another occa- sion; 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 her consider- able bill. 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 mo- ment 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 creviced brownness, and pass under a gateway sur- mounted by the arms of a mediaeval despot. Why I should find it a pleasure, in France, to imagine my- self 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 interminiable 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 ornee de statues," as the Guide-Joanne, usually so reticent, takes the trouble to announce, has an omnibus, and, I suppose, has 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 has always seemed to me the dirtiest of human things, - it has so many opportunities to betray itself.