Part 22

Thus the first public deeds of the providential mission of Joan of Arc are connected with Chinon. At this moment, Charles VII. had by his side another woman of generous heart and strong spirit: this was the queen, Marie of Anjou. Her influence was greater than historians have recognized; it was much more salutary and efficacious than that of Agnes Sorel. When the latter appeared at Chinon for the first time before the eyes of Charles VII., it was already six months since Joan of Arc had gone to the stake at Rouen. Is not that enough for us to say that France had already been saved and that the advice and remonstrances of Agnes Sorel came too late?

However that may be, the presence of Agnes Sorel at the court of Chinon was insupportable to the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI. He even made it a pretext for a conspiracy against his father. These designs of an unnatural son did not succeed, but they poisoned the King’s last years.

In 1461, Charles VII. died at Mehun sur Yèvre, and Louis XI. succeeded to the throne. Louis XI. took up his abode by preference at the Castle of Plessis-lez-Tours: he often came to Chinon. It was in the environs of that town, at the Castle of Forges, that he felt the first attack of the malady that carried him off. Philippe de Commines, Seigneur d’Argenton, governor of the Castle of Chinon, informs us how this accident, which was nothing less than an attack of apoplexy, came upon him.

In the very year of the death of Louis XI. a famous personage in buffoon literature was born at Chinon. François Rabelais is the most cynical of writers, and if, as some people assert, he tried to hide his philosophy beneath the masque of folly, it must be acknowledged that he succeeded.

After the reign of Louis XI., the Castle of Chinon was very little frequented by the court. Catherine de’Medici was there in 1560, and the Duke of Anjou, afterwards Henri III. appeared there at the head of his army, marching against the Reformers, who were to be so rudely chastised in the plains of Montoncour.

In 1629, the Princess de Conti, who possessed Chinon by virtue of an exchange of property with Henry of Lorraine, Duke of Chevreuse, sold the castle with all its dependencies to Cardinal Richelieu. The sale gave the signal, so to speak, for the demolition of the royal castle of the Plantagenets and French monarchs. When the Revolution, that piled up so many ruins arrived, it found nothing more to do here.

The remains of the old manor are still gigantic. Those high walls, dismantled curtains, crenellated masonry, and discrowned turrets harbour glorious memories; but it is not always easy to distinguish what belongs to each century, or clearly to discern the work of the Romans or the Visigoths, of Thibault the Trickster, Henry II., Philip Augustus, Charles VII., or Louis XI. The greater part of these ruins, however, is characteristic of the Fifteenth Century. Scarcely anything remains intact except the belfry tower, now called the _Tour de l’Horloge_, twenty to twenty-five meters in height. These picturesque ruins belong to the town of Chinon, having been left to it by the house of Richelieu.

THE SUMMER PALACE

MAURICE PALÉOLOGUE

THE last time that I saw the Imperial Palace of Pekin was on a morning in the last of April. The air was fresh and limpid, and the vault of heaven seemed to have lifted itself to a prodigious height. It was not that somewhat misty atmosphere of spring in France, which seems impregnated with damp and vegetable odours, and which bathes the unstable outlines of objects; neither was it that tenuous light of those mornings in the East that overspreads the distances, envelops objects, and defines their planes. It was a very dry air, for five months had passed since a drop of rain had fallen, with an almost brutal clearness which seemed to bring the horizon nearer and which harshly exhibited the forms of the buildings and the lines of the landscape.

I went out very early, and the windings of my course took me to the Imperial City, one of the three cities that compose the capital of the Middle Kingdom. The streets differed in appearance from those of the quarters I had just traversed, the shops became rarer, the roadways wider, and the temples and palaces closer together. But at this early hour there was still greater animation here, and a crowd of horsemen, pedestrians, and carriages made passage difficult.

I was about to turn in order to return to the French Legation, when a cart, peculiarly constructed upon two wheels placed almost at the back, and escorted by two horsemen, made my horse stand aside; it was a Tartar carriage from the court stables: a black mule harnessed with yellow leather and led by a groom, also in yellow livery, drew it along with great strides.

In front, visible between the open curtains, a young woman was seated with her legs crossed beneath her. She was clothed in a large mantle of salmon-pink silk bordered with blue and gold lace and ornamented down the front and on the sleeves with clusters of flowers embroidered with very delicate brilliancy and delicious harmony of colour. This vestment almost entirely covered her gown of a pale and dead green that fell in folds about her.

Her hair, gathered up on the top of her head, was divided in two thick folds, crossed here and there by long pins of gold, surmounted by butterflies of silver filagree, and artificial flowers of the strangest forms and hues. Also, as is customary among ladies of quality, her face was entirely painted with ceruse; but the cheeks and the dimple of the chin and the lips were coated with a thick layer of carmine, while a line of antimony immoderately lengthened her eyes out towards the temples, and two black _mouches_ stuck near the cheek-bone, gave a peculiar appearance, a sort of air of morbid coquetry, to this depressing face in which life seemed to have been extinguished.

She held herself in a paralyzed immobility, with a hebetated fixity of gaze and a doubtful glimmer of intelligence, oscillating like a waxen puppet or an idol in a procession, at each jolt of the carriage. She was, doubtless, judging from the livery of the driver and the escorting horsemen, a young Tartar lady of the court, one of the Empress’s maids of honour, or one of the imperial princesses shut up in the Palace.

I set out to follow her at a distance. Her chariot ascended the inclined plane of a bridge, the flooring of which was of marble; the balustrade, also of marble, supported some sculptured dragons.

Beneath the arches, the waters of a lake glittered. The light of the sun, still near the horizon, barely touched the liquid surface but spread its brilliancy everywhere else. In certain spots, lotus flowers blossomed and made the lake look like a meadow floating upon the clear and sleeping waters. It was the “Golden Lake,” a dependency of the Imperial Palace, whose high walls and golden roofs could be seen in the background.

Light buildings, such as kiosks and temples, reached to the shore. The vast number of these roofs assumed rosy hues and the slightest details of their complicated architecture stood out clearly, looking in the liquid air that enveloped them, elegant, graceful and fresh amid the apricot trees and blossoming mimosas that covered the banks.

North China was, in fact, just emerging from her long winter’s mourning, and the impression given by that spring-tide picture of earth’s new awakening was exquisite.

The Tartar chariot continued to advance with the rapid steps of its mule: it was now passing at the foot of an artificial hill, planted with green trees, at the summit of which rose a Buddhist obelisk that stood out almost harshly against the blue of the sky.

But along the shore of the lake, the tints had already become deeper, and the lines less sharp. The kiosks, the pavilions, and the temples that rose upon the banks exhibited the original type of Chinese buildings, a canvas tent with turned up corners. The extreme profusion of ornamental details did not succeed in hiding the poverty of the original conception: dragons, chimeras, phœnixes, and tortoises, an entire fabulous and fantastic zoology of sculptured wood or terra cotta, surcharged the ridge-poles; figurines and painted flowers of clay weighed down the cornices, the larmiers, and the pediments; gaudy colors made a motley mixture upon the capitals of the columns and the architraves; but beneath this bristling and unrestrained decoration, you always found the absolute and invariable type that China has uniformly adopted at every epoch of her history and throughout her entire empire.

However, I had by this time arrived at the fortified enclosure of the palace. High above me a rampart reared itself, thirty feet high and surrounded by a wide moat. At regular intervals, towers with turned-up roofs jutted out over this line of stone which extended so far that it seemed to shut in an entire city. A few trees had crossed the sloping wall, and the shadows of their branches spread over the dark and stagnant waters of the moat.

A large gateway, surmounted by an enormous square tower, gave access to the interior of the palace, and three gigantic black letters engraved upon a golden panel at the summit of the tower seemed a mysterious inscription placed at the threshold of an unknown world.

And at the moment when the Tartar carriage became engulfed under the arch and was lost in the Imperial enclosure, I experienced still more powerfully the impression that I had received three years before in Morocco in front of the palace of the Sultan Moulay-Hassan. There also, in the old city of Islam shining in the sunlight, I had felt myself transported into the midst of a new world, but I saw the barriers broken down, I was able to pass through the great pointed doorways of Dar-el-Mechouar, and the Court of the Scherifs was opened before me, as a scene of fairy-land or dreamland unfolds in a dazzling brilliancy of light and colour.

Here, on the contrary, everything remained closed and impenetrable.

However, the topography of the palace was not entirely unknown to me; I had already studied the plan made by the Jesuit missionaries who visited it in the Eighteenth Century, and, indeed, from the heights of the ramparts of the Tartar village, I had been able to recognize the general arrangement and distinguish the regular succession of its rectangular courtyards and gardens containing forty-eight enormous palaces and about the same number of pavilions, kiosks, arches and gateways.

Only the tops of the principal buildings rose above the surrounding wall and into the clumps of verdure. Very far away, in the south, near the “Gate of Eternal Purity,” I perceived the temple of the ancestors of the dynasty of Ta-Thsing now reigning, where the Emperor comes at stated dates to accomplish the sacred rites of the official cult.

Then nearer, three buildings, taller than the rest, stood in a row, and the sculptured dragons on the ridge-poles and the glazed tiles on the roofs were resplendent in the sunlight: these were the three palaces of the “Sovereign Concord, Medium Concord, and Protective Concord,” where the Sovereign attends to the affairs of state and traces with his vermilion-steeped pencil the characters that express his decisions and that are laws venerated as the figured and material form of the Imperial will. There, every morning at two o’clock, the Emperor presides at the Grand Council of the Middle Kingdom; five ministers only have access to it. There, no matter what their age or fatigue, they must remain standing the whole time, or bow their foreheads to the ground when, from his throne, a stage of gilded wood raised six feet above the floor, the Son of Heaven addresses them. During the minority of the sovereigns, as is the case with the present Emperor, the Empress Regent is present also in the council, but she is not considered as there, and a screen of yellow silk hides her from all eyes.

Then I saw a confused mass of houses of imperial princes, Manchus, chamberlains, daughters of Emperors married to Mongol princes and immured in the palace until their death, wives of the second degree and concubines of the deceased sovereigns, ladies of honour, mistresses of ceremonies, and eunuchs, an entire population, a wisely arranged hierarchy amounting to more than eight thousand persons. Towards the east, in the dazzling sunlight, appeared also the barracks of the three banners of the guard, the treasury, the shops of porcelain, silver, and silk, ornaments, garments, tea, religious objects destined for the Son of Heaven, and manufactories where things are prepared for his exclusive use; the armoury, the stables, the Imperial library where the oldest annals of the world are kept, the “Pavilion of the Literary Flowers,” whither the Emperor repairs in the second moon of the year to interpret the sacred books; and the temple of the Tchouan-sin-tien where the sacrifices to the memory of Confucius and the great philosophers are performed.

Finally, very near me, behind the gardens that ran along the length of the wall of the enclosure, I caught a glimpse of the “Palace of the Superior Terrestrial Element,” which recalled the memory of that unfortunate Empress Aluteh, who died in 1875 at the age of eighteen. She was the daughter of a Manchu prince. When very young, barely fifteen years, a decree proclaiming her for the Emperor tossed her brusquely into the Court of Pekin from her province in Tartary, and shut her up in the palace which she was to leave only with her life. On November 16, 1872, at midnight, she entered in bridal toilette through the “Gate of Celestial Purity”: she wore a robe of red silk embroidered with dragon and phœnix, a large scarlet veil enveloped her from head to foot. Three years later she went out dead through the “Flowered Gate of the East”: she had killed herself on learning of the death of her husband, the Emperor Tong-Tche: an unusual luxury was lavished upon her funeral procession, and embroideries of pale blue silk upon white satin embossed with gold covered her coffin.

However, the hour was advancing; the meeting of the Council was over; the couriers of state were departing for the provinces; the great mandarins came out of the palace, and after making interminable bows, got into their chariots, and I returned to the French Legation.

BERKELEY CASTLE

ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN

For sylvan beauty and pastoral loveliness there is no fairer countryside in all England than the broad domains of which the old feudal stronghold of the Berkeleys is the centre. A mile to the westward, the Severn’s broad flood sweeps slowly to the Bristol Channel, only twenty miles away. Five miles or so to the eastward, the last spurs of the Cotswold Hills sink to the level of the plain. There is Stinchcomb Hill with its flat bare top dotted with the white tents of its summer camp. Beautiful Dursley lies in a neighbouring hollow. Nibley Knoll, where begin the beeches of Westridge Woods, amid which are the earthworks of a Roman or Saxon fort, can be easily distinguished by the column by Teulon that rises about one hundred feet to commemorate the part William Tyndale took in the Reformation. The little valleys running into these hills (locally called _bottoms_) hear the call of spring long before the uplands, and along the margins of their streams the snowdrops wake to nod graciously at their reflected beauty; and then, before the Westridge Woods are clothed in green, among the shielding trunks the primrose spreads a cloth of gold above the last year’s leaves.

This whole district is thronged with historic memories; many a Norman cross and church lies within a circuit of twelve miles’ radius. Tortworth Court is close at hand. A few miles down across the river, stands mighty Chepstow with the Wye washing her ruined walls; but Berkeley is still intact and inhabited after seven centuries’ assault by Time and civil strife. This is what renders Berkeley so remarkable among English castles: it retains its ancient shell, and it has always been owned and inhabited by a lineal descendant of the original owner and builder.

The “Faire Vale of Berkeley” was always famous for its beauty and fertility. William of Malmesbury describes it as “rich in corn, productive in fruits ... enticing even the lazy to industry by the prospect of a hundredfold return.... Neither has any county in England more numerous or richer vineyards ... the wine is but little inferior to that of France in sweetness.” The vineyards have long disappeared, and the only vines now seen are those that beautify the walls and frame the latticed casements of the cottages.

In Domesday Book, Berkeley appears as a royal demesne and borough: one of the trees mentioned as a boundary of the hundred is still pointed out in the Deer Park, and known as King William’s Oak. The Conqueror gave the manor to Roger de Berkeley who erected the Keep about 1093. At first this was only a military hold to keep the neighbourhood in check, but buildings were gradually added till the castle assumed its present form and the lord took up his residence here under Cœur de Lion, a century later.

Situated on a little rise, its strong battlements and towers look across the tops of the beautiful trees that now shade its useless moat, and the visitor enjoys a lovely view in every direction. Situated midway between Gloucester and Bristol, the baron, predatory doubtless as was the custom of the age, was in a fine position to levy toll on merchant caravans that must pass through the vale. The form of the castle is that of an irregular circle. The drawbridge leads to a portcullised gateway in massive walls between two hexagonal towers. The donjon is a square tower with turrets at the angles, built on higher ground than the other constructions to dominate the rest of the castle. It was erected in 1342. It is called Thorpe’s tower after the family who held lands in tenure from the lord in return for acting as its warders. The strong keep also still stands and shows the warder’s walk fifty-eight feet in length, in perfect preservation. The dimensions of the great hall are forty-eight by thirty-three feet. Its great chimney is adorned with mediæval armour and antlers. The ancient kitchen and other offices still exist, and so does the chapel with its Decorated style of architecture. The sacrarium is of special interest since it is divided into two floors, each with a separate entrance and fireplace, the lower for the use of the retainers and the upper, or Oriel, for the family and guests. The living-rooms contain many pictures by famous masters, and some historic furniture. Among the latter, are some ebony chairs and a table that Drake brought home from the Spanish Main.

Rich as the castle is in antiquarian remains, however, the interest of these walls is multiplied a hundredfold by their historical associations. When we take our stand on the summit of the Donjon and look around and below us, what memories are evoked! When we recall the history of the family, we cannot but marvel that the ancient line is still in possession; for a turbulent race were the Berkeleys, and often arrayed against the Crown. Roger de Berkeley joined Stephen against the granddaughter of his father’s benefactor, and therefore Henry Fitz-Empress confiscated his fief, and conferred it upon Robert Fitz-Harding, Governor of Bristol, of royal Danish descent, at the same time making him a baron. The latter’s son, however, married Roger’s heiress, and thus the Berkeleys were restored in their son Maurice. Robert, the son of the latter, joined the barons against John, who seized the castle, and was there in the last year of his reign. However, Robert’s brother Thomas managed to get it restored, in 1233, by Henry III. Maurice, the son of Thomas, was in rebellion with Simon de Montfort twenty-five years later, and, as a result, Berkeley was again confiscated. His son Thomas served Edward I., the “Hammer of the Scots,” so well in the North that he got back his ancestral honours and domains and was summoned to Parliament as Baron Berkeley in 1295. This lord and his son and grandson were rich and powerful, and all the beautiful “Edwardian” stone-work is of this period. Much of the older work was cleared away for the new buildings of the loveliest style of English Gothic. But what a deed of violence was perpetrated in the narrow chamber in the adjoining building below us! We have reached the dark memory that above all else enshrouds Berkeley. The effeminate king who lost Bannockburn and handed over the reins of government to the unworthy Gaveston and De Spencers, decimating the English baronage at their behests, and revelling in Oriental vice and ferocity, finally succumbed to his wife and her paramour at Kenilworth early in 1327. The Lord of Berkeley now was Thomas, the grandson of the favourite of Edward I. To him and to two knights named John Maltravers and Thomas de Gournay was entrusted the custody of the dethroned Edward II. The two latter removed their captive secretly and treated him with every indignity: they crowned him with a crown of hay and shaved him with ditch-water along the way. A circumstantial account tells how he said therefore he would supply his own hot water with tears! On Palm Sunday, Baron Thomas received him kindly and treated him with consideration, whereupon he received a reprimand from Queen Isabel, bidding him “use no familiarity with Edward, the late king;” and so, fearing for himself, he “departed with heavy cheere, perceiving what violence was intended.” Lovely as was the view from his window, the long summer from April to September brought no joy to the prisoner. The _Berkeley MS._ says that “this poor, foolish king did nothing but lament for his wife, singing love-songs in a low voice and grieving that she would neither see him nor permit his son or any of his relatives to come near him. The Queen was afraid that the Church would compel her to live with him again, and therefore urged his death.” At first, his keepers tried to ruin his health by piling putrid carcases in the pit below his chamber; then they kept him half-starved and half-clad. Yet the Queen reproved them for excessive clemency! Marlowe quotes the historian in noble verse when Edward complains:

“In mire and puddle I have stood This ten days’ space; and, lest that I should sleep, One plays continually upon a drum. They give me bread and water, being a king, So that, for want of sleep and sustenance, My mind’s distempered and my body’s numbed.... O, would my blood dropped out from every vein, As doth this water from my tattered robes. Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus, When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont!”