Chapter 2

It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately effected there, of their dead father's morsel of land. "I shall hate you till death!" cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and Huguenot.

The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history during the reigns of Catherine's sons might indeed lead one to fancy that little human kindness could have remained in France,--a fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself:--all war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests' ears, of that dark and fugitive Montgomeri, the slayer, as some would have it the assassin, of a king, now active, and almost ubiquitous, on the Huguenot side. Still, at Deux-manoirs, this warfare, seething up from time to time so wildly in this or that district of France, was for the most part only sensible in incidents we might think picturesque, were they told with that intention; delightful enough, certainly, to the curiosity of a boy, in whose [19] mind nevertheless they deepened a native impressibility to the sorrow and hazard that are constant and necessary in human life, especially for the poor. The troubles of "that poor people of France"--burden of all its righteous rulers, from Saint Lewis downwards--these, at all events, would not be lessened by the struggle of Guise and Condé and Bourbon and Valois, of the Valois with each other, of those four brilliant young princes of the name of Henry. The weak would but suffer somewhat more than was usual, in the interest of the strong. If you were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women and all, with fork and scythe,--still, those peasants used their scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their noonday rest. In effect, since peace is always in some measure dependent on one's own seeking, disturbing forces do but fray their way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres, salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough [20] for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his child's garden-bed, that was only because in a fine June the corn had grown tall so quickly, through which he was presently led to it, with all its garish sweets undisturbed: and it was with the ancient growths of mind--customs, beliefs, mental preferences--as with the natural world.

It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Château d'Amour, indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman's apartment, with an effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston's own century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last. Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind, seemed [21] almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.

Hither, as to an oratory, a religious place, the finer spirits of her kin had always found their way, to leave behind them there the more intimate relics of themselves. To Gaston its influence imparted early a taste for delicate things as being indispensable in all his pleasures to come; and, from the very first, with the appetite for some great distinguishing passion, the peculiar genius of his age seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home, and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours--the couches, the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south- west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had been also a dainty love, leaving [22] its impress everywhere in this magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long since, the fragrance which the lad's movement stirred around him. And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles, who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.

A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity-- somewhere, somewhere, in the world!--waiting for him in the distance, or perchance already on its way, to explain, by its own plenary beauty and power, why wine and roses and the languorous summer afternoons were so delightful. So far indeed, the imaginative heat, that might one day enter into dangerous rivalry with simple old- fashioned faith, was blent harmoniously with it. They [23] were hardly distinguishable elements of an amiable character, susceptible generally to the poetic side of things--two neighbourly apprehensions of a single ideal.

The great passions, the fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as the true realisation of life, have not always softened men's natures: they have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance, into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its intricate omnipresence in life. In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world. For once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age. So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old, almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.

[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well- nigh healed now--those once so poignant griefs--the scars remaining only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly, in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the triumphant antiphons:--"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler!"--thinking intently of the little tombs which had recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth de Latour, Cornélius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours. Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava. Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant latent sensibilities.

The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles, as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north to south:--perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a scene which had for him something of the character of the sea--its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough, but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.

II. OUR LADY'S CHURCH

"I had almost said even as they."

[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child, everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim, spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well- born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half- clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry, contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a moment into imperious, angry fire.

It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning. The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral-- the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half- lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.

Notre-Dame de Chartres! It was a world to explore, as if one explored the entire Middle Age; it was also one unending, elaborate, religious function--a life, or a continuous drama, to take one's part in. Dependent on its structural completeness, on its wealth of well- preserved ornament, on its unity in variety, perhaps on some undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all these, the church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of impressing. In comparison, the other famous churches of France, at Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:--the catholic church must pay, even with the molten gold of her sanctuaries, the price of her defence in the civil war. At present, it was such a treasure-house of medieval jewellery as we have to make a very systematic effort even to imagine. The still extant register of its furniture and sacred apparel leaves the soul of the ecclesiologist athirst.

And it had another very remarkable difference from almost all Gothic churches: there were no graves there. Its emptiness in this respect is due to no revolutionary or Huguenot desecration. Once indeed, about this very time, a popular military leader had been interred with honour, within the precinct of the high altar itself. But not long afterwards, said the reverend canons, resenting on the part of their immaculate patroness this intrusion, the corpse itself, ill at ease, had protested, lifting up its hands above [30] the surface of the pavement, as if to beg interment elsewhere; and Gaston could remember assisting, awakened suddenly one night, at the removal of the remains to a more ordinary place of sepulture.

And yet that lavish display of jewellers' work on the altars, in the chapels, the sacristies, of Our Lady's Church, was but a framing for little else than dead people's bones. To Gaston, a piteous soul, with a touch also of that grim humour which, as we know, holds of pity, relic-worship came naturally. At Deux-manoirs too there had been relics, including certain broken children's toys and some rude childish drawings, taken forth now and then with almost religious veneration, with trembling hands and renewal of old grief, to his wondering awe at the greatness of men's sorrows. Yes! the pavement under one's feet had once been, might become again for him, molten lava. The look, the manner, of those who exposed these things, had been a revelation. The abundant relics of the church of Chartres were for the most part perished remnants of the poor human body itself; but, appertaining to persons long ago and of a far-off, immeasurable kind of sanctity, stimulated a more indifferent sort of curiosity, and seemed to bring the distant, the impossible, as with tangible evidence of fact, close to one's side. It was in one's hand--the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin, bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness--for a dim place like this--such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness. Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps, in its processes of vision.

As complex, yet not less perfectly united under a single leading motive,--its sister volume, was the ritual order of Notre-Dame de Chartres, a year-long dramatic action, in which every one had, and knew, his part--the drama or "mystery" of Redemption, to the necessities of which the great church had shaped itself. All those various "offices" which, in Pontifical, Missal and Breviary, devout imagination had elaborated from age to age with such a range of spiritual colour and light and shade, with so much poetic tact in quotation, such a depth of insight into [32] the Christian soul, had joined themselves harmoniously together, one office ending only where another began, in the perpetual worship of this mother of churches, which had also its own picturesque peculiarities of "use," proud of its maternal privilege therein. And the music rose--warmed, expanded, or fell silent altogether--as the order of the year, the colours, the whole expression of things changed, gathering around the full mystic effulgence of the pontiff in his own person, while the sacred theme deepened at the great ecclesiastical seasons, when the aisles overflowed with a vast multitude, and like a court, combed, starched, rustling around him, Gaston and his fellows "served" Monseigneur--they, zealous, ubiquitous, more prominent than ever, though for the most part profoundly irreverent, and, notwithstanding that, one and all, with what disdain of the untonsured laity!

Well! what was of the past there--the actual stones of the temple and that sacred liturgical order--entered readily enough into Gaston's mental kingdom, filling places prepared by the anticipations of his tranquil, dream-struck youth. It was the present, the uncalculated present, which now disturbed the complacent habit of his thoughts, proposing itself, importunately, in the living forms of his immediate companions, in the great clerical body of which he was become a part, in the people of Chartres itself (none the less animated because provincial) as [33] a thing, alien at a thousand points from his preconceptions of life, to be judged by him, to be rejected or located within. How vivid, how delightful, they were!--the other forty-nine of the fifty lads who had come hither, after the old- fashioned way, to serve in the household of Monseigneur by way of an "institution" in learning and good manners, as to which a grave national assembly, more than three centuries before the States- General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse their privileges."

And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces, saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness, kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices, distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time, shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth. To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:--that, surely, were the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:--instinctively, they felt and underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of spirit, its tides and changes of influence.