Part 13

Do not hesitate to postpone your visit if the sitting of the Corps Législatif should not take place on Monday.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

CONVERSATIONS.

I passed the 3rd and 4th of April in the Corps Législatif listening to the debate on the demand by the Government of permission to prosecute M. de Montalembert, a member of the Corps Législatif, for the publication of a letter to M. Dupin, which it treated as libellous. As it was supposed that M. de Montalembert's speech would be suppressed, I wrote as much of it as I could carry in my recollection; the only other vehicle--notes--not being allowed to be taken. On the evening of the 5th of April I left Paris for St. Cyr.

St. Cyr, Thursday, April 6, 1854.--I drove with Tocqueville to Chenonceaux, a château of the sixteenth century, about sixteen miles from Tours, on the Cher. I say on the Cher, for such is literally its position. It is a habitable bridge, stretching across the water.

The two first arches, which spring from the right bank of the river, and the piers which form their abutments, are about one hundred feet wide, and support a considerable house. The others support merely a gallery, called by our guide the ballroom of Catherine de Médicis, ending in a small theatre. The view from the windows of the river flowing through wooded meadows is beautiful and peculiar. Every window looks on the river; many rooms, as is the case with the gallery, look both up and down it. It must be a charming summer residence. The rooms still retain the furniture which was put into them by Diane de Poictiers and Catherine de Médicis; very curious and very uncomfortable; high narrow chairs, short sofas, many-footed tables, and diminutive mirrors. The sculptured pilasters, scrolls, bas-reliefs and tracery of the outside are not of fine workmanship, but are graceful and picturesque. The associations are interesting, beginning with Francis I. and ending with Rousseau, who spent there the autumn of 1746, as the guest of Madame Dupin, and wrote a comedy for its little theatre. The present proprietor, the Marquis de Villeneuve, is Madame Dupin's grandson.

In the evening we read my report of the debate on Montalembert.

'It is difficult,' said Tocqueville, 'to wish that so great a speech had been suppressed. But I am inclined to think that Montalembert's wiser course was to remain silent. What good will his speech do? It will not be published. Yours is probably the only report of it. So far as the public hears anything of it, the versions coming through an unfavourable medium will be misrepresentations. In a letter which I received from Paris this morning it is called virulent. It was of great importance that the minority against granting the consent should be large, and I have no doubt that this speech diminished it by twenty or thirty. It must have wounded many, frightened many, and afforded a pretext to many. Perhaps, however, it was not in human nature for such a speaker as Montalembert to resist the last opportunity of uttering bold truths in a French Assembly.'

Friday, April 7.--We drove to-day along the Loire to Langrais, about twelve miles below Tours.

Here is a castle of the thirteenth century, consisting of two centre and two corner towers, and a curtain between them, terminating in a rocky promontory. Nothing can be more perfect than the masonry, or more elegant than the few ornaments. The outside is covered with marks of bullets, which appear to have rattled against it with little effect.

On our return we visited the castles of Cinq Mars and Luynes. Langrais, Cinq Mars, and Luynes were all the property of Effiat, Marquis of Cinq Mars, who with De Thou conspired against Richelieu in the latter part of Louis XIII.'s reign, and was beheaded. The towers of Cinq Mars were, in the words of his sentence, 'rasées à la hauteur de l'infamie,' and remain now cut down to half their original height. Luynes stands finely, crowning a knoll overlooking the Loire. It is square, with twelve towers, two on each side and four in the corners, and a vast ditch, and must have been strong. Nearly a mile from it are the remains of a Roman aqueduct, of which about thirty piers and six perfect arches remain. It is of stone, except the arches, which have a mixture of brick. The peasants, by digging under the foundations, are rapidly destroying it. An old man told us that he had seen six or seven piers tumble. A little nearer to Tours is the Pile de Cinq Mars, a solid, nearly square tower of Roman brickwork more than ninety feet high, and about twelve feet by fourteen feet thick. On one side there appear to have been inscriptions or bas-reliefs. Ampère believes it to have been a Roman tomb; but the antiquaries are divided and perplexed. Being absolutely solid, it could not have been built for any use.

I am struck during my walks and drives by the appearance of prosperity. The country about Tours is dotted with country-houses, quite as numerous as in any part of England. In St. Cyr alone there must be between twenty and thirty, and the houses of the peasants are far better than the best cottages of English labourers. Everyone seems to have attached to it a considerable piece of land, from ten acres to two, cultivated in vines, vegetables and fruit. These and green crops are nearly the only produce; there is very little grain. All the persons whom I met appeared to be healthy and well-clad. The soil and climate are good, and the proximity to Tours insures a market; but physical advantages are not enough to insure prosperity. The neighbourhood of Cork enjoys a good climate, soil, and market, but the inhabitants are not prosperous.

After some discussion Tocqueville agreed with me in attributing the comfort of the Tourainese to the slowness with which population increases. In the commune of Tocqueville the births are only three to a marriage, but both Monsieur and Madame de Tocqueville think that the number of children here is still less. I scarcely meet any.

Marriages are late, and very seldom take place until a house and a bit of ground and some capital have been inherited or accumulated. Touraine is the best specimen of the petite culture that I have seen. The want of wood makes it objectionable as a summer residence.

We are now suffering from heat. After eight in the morning it is too hot to walk along the naked glaring roads, yet this is only the first week in April.

Saturday, April 8.--The sun has been so scorching during our two last drives that we have given ourselves a holiday to-day, and only dawdled about Tours.

We went first to the cathedral, which I never see without increased pleasure. Though nearly four hundred years passed from its commencement in the twelfth century to its completion in the fifteenth, the whole interior is as harmonious as if it had been finished by the artist who began it. I know nothing in Gothic architecture superior to the grandeur, richness, and yet lightness of the choir and eastern apse. Thence we went to St. Julien's, a fine old church of the thirteenth century, desecrated in the Revolution, but now under restoration.

Thence to the Hôtel Gouin, a specimen of the purely domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, covered with elegant tracery and scroll-work in white marble. We ended with Plessis-les-Tours, Louis XI.'s castle, which stands on a flat, somewhat marshy, tongue of land stretching between the Loire and the Cher. All that remains is a small portion of one of the inner courts, probably a guard-room, and a cellar pointed out to us as the prison in which Louis XI kept Cardinal de la Balue for several years. The cellar itself is not bad for a prison of those days, but he is said to have passed his first year or two in a grated vault under the staircase, in which he could neither stand up nor lie at full length.

'It is remarkable,' said Tocqueville, 'that the glorious reigns in French history, such as those of Louis Onze, Louis Quatorze, and Napoleon ended in the utmost misery and exhaustion, while the periods at which we are accustomed to look as those of disturbance and insecurity were those of comparative prosperity and progress. It seems as if tyranny were worse than civil war.'

'And yet,' I said, 'the amount of revenue which these despots managed to squeeze out of France was never large. The taxation under Napoleon was much less than under Louis Philippe.'

'Yes,' said Tocqueville, 'but it was the want of power to tax avowedly that led them into indirect modes of raising money, which were far more mischievous; just as our servants put us to more expense by their jobs than they would do if they simply robbed us to twice the amount of their indirect gains.

'Louis XIV. destroyed all the municipal franchises of France, and paved the way for this centralized tyranny, not from any dislike of municipal elections, but merely in order to be able himself to sell the places which the citizens had been accustomed to grant.'

Sunday, April 9.--Another sultry day. I waited till the sun was low, and then sauntered by the side of the river with Tocqueville.

'The worst faults of this Government,' said Tocqueville, 'are those which do not alarm the public.

'It is depriving us of the local franchises and local self-government which we have extorted from the central power in a struggle of forty years. The Restoration and the Government of July were as absolute centralizers as Napoleon himself. The local power which they were forced to surrender they made over to the narrow pays légal, the privileged ten-pounders, who were then attempting to govern France. The Republic gave the name of Conseils-généraux to the people, and thus dethroned the notaires who had governed those assemblies when they represented only the bourgeoisie. The Republic made the maires elective. The Republic placed education in the hands of local authorities. Under its influence, the communes, the cantons, and the departments were becoming real administrative bodies. They are now mere geographical divisions. The préfet appoints the maires. The préfet appoints in every canton a commissaire de police--seldom a respectable man, as the office is not honourable. The gardes champêtres, who are our local police, are put under his control. The recteur, who was a sort of local Minister of Education in every department, is suppressed. His powers are transferred to the préfet. The préfet appoints, promotes, and dismisses all the masters of the écoles primaires. He has the power to convert the commune into a mere unorganised aggregation of individuals, by dismissing every communal functionary, and placing its concerns in the hands of his own nominees. There are many hundreds of communes that have been thus treated, and whose masters now are uneducated peasants. The préfet can dissolve the Conseil-général of his department and, although he cannot directly name its successors, he does so virtually.

'No candidate for an elective office can succeed unless he is supported by the Government. The préfet can destroy the prosperity of every commune that displeases him. He can dismiss its functionaries, close its schools, obstruct its improvements, and withhold the assistance in money which the Government habitually gives to forward the public purposes of a commune.

'The Courts of Law, both criminal and civil, are the tools of the Executive. The Government appoints the judges, the préfet provides the jury, and la haute police acts without either.

'All power of combination, even of mutual communication, except from mouth to mouth, is gone. The newspapers are suppressed or intimidated, the printers are the slaves of the préfet, as they lose their privilege if they offend; the secrecy of the post is habitually and avowedly violated; there are spies to watch and report conversation.