CHAPTER VI

"CHASTILLON AU NOBLE DUC"

(The War Cry of the Bourguignons)

The importance of the ancient Chastillon on the banks of the Seine was entirely due to the prominence given to it by the Burgundian dukes of the first race who made it their preferred habitation.

The place was the ancient capital of the Bailliage de la Montague, the rampart and keep to the Burgundian frontier from the tenth to the fifteenth century.

The origin of the Chateau des Ducs is blanketed in the night of time. Savants, even, can not agree as to the date of its commencement. One says that it and its name were derived from Castico, a rich Sequanais; and another that it comes from Castell, an enclosed place; or from Castellio--a small fortress. Each seems plausible in the absence of anything more definite, though according to the castle's latest historian it owes its actual inception to the occupation of the Romans who did build a castrum here in their time.

During the pourparlers between Henri IV and the League, the inhabitants of the city demanded of Nicolas de Gellan, governor of the place, the giving up of the castle which had for years been the cause of so much misery and misfortune. The place had been the culminative point of the attacks of centuries of warriors, and the inhabitants believed that they had so suffered that it was time to cry quits.

When the surrender, or the turning over, of the castle took place, all the population, including women and children, marched en masse upon the structure, and wall by wall and stone by stone dismantled it, leaving it in the condition one sees it to-day. A castle of sorts still exists, but it is a mere wraith of its former self. There is this much to say for it, however, and that is that its stern, grim walls which still stand remain as silent witnesses to the fact that it was not despoiled from without but demolished from within. Peace came soon after, and the people in submitting to the new régime would not hear of the rebuilding of the chateau, and so for three hundred years its battered walls and blank windows have stood the stresses of rigorous winters and broiling summers, a

silent and conspicuous monument to the rights of the people.

The majestic tower of the chateau, for something more than the mere outline of the ground-plan still exists, is bound to two others by a very considerable expanse of wall of the donjon, and by the _courtines_ which formerly joined the bastions with the main structure.

The suggestion of the ample inner court is still there, and the foundations of still two other towers, as well as various ruined walls. A neighbouring edifice, the buildings formerly occupied by the Canons of Saint Vorles, is inexplicably intermingled with the ruins of the chateau in a way that makes it difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. The _chevet_ of the Eglise de Saint Vorles and its churchyard also intermingle with the confines of the chateau in an extraordinary manner. To say the least, the juxtaposition of things secular and ecclesiastic is the least bit incongruous.

Châtillon's Tour de Gissey, practically an accessory to the chateau, is a noble work whose well-preserved existence is due entirely to the solidity of its construction. Its lower ranges are of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but its upper gallery and its row of _meurtrières_ were due to the military engineers of Henri IV. who sought to make it the better serve the purpose of their royal master.

Within this tower are two fine apartments, of which the upper, known as the Salle des Gardes, was, before the Revolution, the sepulchre of certain wealthy neighbouring families.

Within the limits of the plot which surrounds the chateau, the church and the tower, is the tomb of Maréchal Marmont, Duc de Raguse.

The present edifice at Châtillon occupied by the Sous-Préfecture was built, as a plaque on the wall indicates, by Madame la Comtesse de Langeac in 1765. It is a fine example of the architecture of the period which, in spite of glaring inconsistencies to be noted once and again, is unquestionably most effective, and suggests that after all the chateau filled its purpose well as a great town house of a wealthy noble. The building plays a public part to-day, and if it serves its present purpose half as well as its former, no one should complain. Within this really superb and palatial structure is still to be seen the magnificent stairway of forged iron of the period of Louis XVI. Besides this are various apartments with finely sculptured wooden panels and rafters of the same epoch, all of which accessories were brought thither from the nearby Chateau de Courcelles-les-Ranges, demolished during the Revolution.

The Chateau de Marmont at Châtillon was formerly the princely residence of the Maréchal de Marmont, rebuilt from the fifteenth century chatelet occupied by the Sires de Rochefort, who were simply the appointed chatelains of the Duc de Bourgogne, to whom the property really belonged.

In various successive eras the edifice was transformed, or added to, until it took its present form, the gradual transformation leaving little or no trace of its original plan.

The Maréchal de Marmont, one of Châtillon's most illustrious sons, would have transformed his native city into a Burgundian Versailles, or at least a "Garden City." He did found a great agricultural enterprise, of which the chateau, its gardens and its park, formed the pivot. Too enterprising for his times, the Duc de Raguse saw himself ruined, and then came the German invasion of '71, when, in a combat with the Garibaldians, the chateau was burned.

Châtillon has perpetuated the name of its great man in the public _place_, and also by naming one of the principal streets for him, but has not yet erected a statue to him. This indeed may be a blessing in disguise. Statues in trousers are seldom dignified, and this noble duke lived too late for cloak and sword or suit armour.

The Chateau de Marmont, so called even to-day, was rebuilt after the fire and now serves a former Maire of the city as his private residence.

Châtillon-sur-Seine was--though all the world seems to have forgotten or ignored it--the seat of a convention in 1814 which proposed leaving France its original territorial limits of 1792, a proposition of the ambassadors which was utterly rejected by Napoleon.

Albeit that Châtillon lies on the banks of the Seine it is well within the confines of Burgundy. Roundabout is a most fascinating and little exploited region.

Thirty kilometres to the north is Bar-sur-Seine and to the northwest Brienne-le-Chateau, where the Corsican first learned the rudiments of the art of war.

"_La grand'ville de Bar-sur-Seine a fait trembler Troyes en Champaigne!_" Poor _grand'ville_! To-day it is withered and all but dried up and blown away. Poor grand'ville! It is the same of which Froissart recounts that it lost in one day the houses of nine hundred "_nobles et de riches bourgeois_" by fire. Without doubt these houses were of wooden frames and offered but little resistance to fire, as the period was 1359. Afterwards the town was rebuilt and became again populous and rich. Then began the decadence, until to-day it is the least populous "_chef-lieu_" of the department. Its population is, and ever has been, part Bourguignon and part Champagnois, the latter province being but a league to the northward, where, on the actual boundary, is found the curiously named little village of Bourguignons.

South from Châtillon, across the great forest of the same name, one of the great national forests of France so paternally cared for by the Minister for Agriculture, is the actual source of the Seine. Here is what the engineers call a "Chateau d'Faux," though there is little enough of the real chateau of romance about it. It is simply a head-house with an iron _grille_ and various culverts and canals and what not which lead the bubbling waters of the Seine to a wider bed lower down, there to continue their way, via Paris, to the sea.

A classic sculpture, typifying the Source of the Seine, has been erected commemorating the achievement of the engineers, but appropriate as the sentiment is it has not prevented the dishonouring hand of that abominable certain class of tourist of graving its names and dates thereon.

The Seine at this point is nothing very majestic. It is simply a "_humble filet que le nain vert, Oberon, franchirait d'un bond sans mouiller ses grelots_." All Frenchmen, and Parisians in particular, have a reverence for every kilometre of the swift-flowing waters of the Seine. This is perhaps difficult for the stranger, who may be familiar with greater if less historic streams at home, to appreciate until he has actually discussed the thing with some Frenchman. Then he learns that it is the Frenchman's Niagara, Mississippi and Yosemite and Pike's Peak all rolled into one so far as his worship goes.

Midway between Châtillon and the source is Duesme, a smug, unheard of little hamlet, the successor of a feudal bourg of great renown in its day. The sparse ruined walls still suggest the pride of place which it once held when capital of the powerful Burgundian Countship of Duesme. Its walls are still something more than mere outlines, but the manorial residence has become one of those "walled farms," so called, so frequently seen, and so unexpectedly, in the countryside of France. Here and there a gate-post, a wall or a gable, is as of old, and two great ornamental vases support the entrance to the alleyed row of trees which leads from the highroad to the dwelling, suggesting, if in a vague way, the old adage, "Other days, other ways."

The fall of this fine old feudal residence has been great, but the present occupant--if he has a thought or care for such things--must be content indeed with such a princely farm-house. It must be a fine thing to raise chickens and other barn-yard livestock amid such surroundings!