Part 6

We drove to the Place Martroi to see the large equestrian statue of Joan by Foyatier, with reliefs by Vital Dubray. It is very imposing, and the reliefs, showing the great moments in Joan's career, are really fine. We did not care to hunt for other memorials. It was enough to drive about the city, trying to pick out a house here and there that looked as if it might have been standing five hundred years, but if there were any of that age--any that had looked upon the wild joy of Joan's entrance and upon her triumphal departure, they were very few indeed.

It is a grand, straight road from Orleans to Fontainebleau, and it passes through Pithiviers, which did not look especially interesting, though we discovered, when it was too late, that it is noted for its almond-cakes and lark-pies. I wanted to go back, then, but the majority decided against me, and in the late afternoon we entered the majestic royal forest, and by and by came to the palace and the little town and to a pretty hotel on a side street, that was really a village inn for comfort and welcome. There was still plenty of daylight, mellow, waning daylight, and the palace was not far away. We would not wait for it until morning.

I think we most enjoyed seeing palaces about the closing-hour. There are seldom any other visitors then, and the fading afternoon sunlight in the vacant rooms softens their garish emptiness and seems, somehow, to bring nearer the rich pageant of life and love and death that flowed through them so long, and then one day came to an end, and now it is not passing any more. It was really closing-time when we arrived at the palace, but the custodian was lenient, and for an hour we wandered through gorgeous galleries, and salons, and suites of private apartments, where kings and queens lived gladly, loved madly, died sadly for about three hundred years. Francis I built Fontainebleau, on the site of a mediæval castle. He was a hunter, and the forests of Fontainebleau were always famous hunting-grounds. Louis XIII, who was born in Fontainebleau, built the grand entrance staircase, from which, a hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte bade good-by to his generals before starting for Elba. Other kings have added to the place and embellished it; the last being Napoleon III, who built for Eugénie the bijou theater across the court.

It may have been our mood, it may have been the tranquil evening light, it may have been reality that Fontainebleau was more friendly, more alive, more a place for living men and women to inhabit than any other palace we have seen. It was hard to imagine Versailles as having ever been a home for anybody. At Fontainebleau I felt that we were intruding--that Marie Antoinette, Marie Louise, or Eugénie might enter at any moment and find us there.

The apartments of the first Napoleon and Marie Louise tell something, too, but the story seems less intimate. Yet the table is there on which Napoleon signed his abdication, while an escort waited to take him to Elba, and in his study is his writing-table; and there is a bust by Canova; but that is marble, and does not encourage the thought of life.

For size and magnificence the library is the most impressive room in Fontainebleau. It is very lofty, very splendid, and it is two hundred and sixty-four feet long. Napoleon III gave great hunting-banquets there. Since then it has always been empty, except for visitors.

The light was getting dim by the time we reached the pretty theater which Louis Napoleon built for Eugénie. It is a very choice place, and we were allowed to go on the stage and behind the scenes and up in the galleries, and there was something in the dusky vacancy of that little play-house, built to amuse the last empress of France, that affected us almost more than any of the rest of the palace, though it was built not so long ago and its owner is still alive. It is not used, the custodian told us--has never been used since Eugénie went away. I believe nothing at Fontainebleau gave more delight to Narcissa and the Joy than this dainty theater.

From a terrace back of the palace we looked out on a pretty lake where Eugénie's son used to sail a miniature, full-rigged ship, large enough, if one could judge from a picture we saw, to have held the little prince himself. There was still sunlight on the tree-tops, and these and the prince's pretty pavilion reflecting in the placid water made the place beautiful. But the little vessel was not there. I wished, as we watched, that it might come sailing by. I wished that the prince had never been exiled, and that he had not grown up and gone to his death in a South African jungle. I wished that he might be back to sail his ship again, and that Eugénie might be young and have her theater once more, and that Louis Napoleon's hunting-parties might still gather in the painted ball-room and fill the vacant palace with something besides mere curiosity and vain imaginings.

We had meant to go to Barbizon, home of the artist Millet, but we got lost in the forest next morning, and when we found ourselves, we were a good way in the direction of Melun and concluded to keep on, consoling ourselves with the thought that Barbizon is not Barbizon any more, and would probably be a disappointment, anyway. We kept on from Melun, also, after buying some luncheon things, and all day traversed that beautiful rolling district which lies east of Paris and below Rheims, arriving toward evening at Epernay, center of the champagne district. We had no need to linger there. We were anxious to get to Rheims.

We were still in the hills when we looked on the valley of the Vesle and saw a city outspread there, and in its center, mellowed and glorified by seven kindly centuries, the architectural and ecclesiastical pride of the world, the Cathedral of Rheims. Large as the city was, that great central ornament dwarfed and dominated its surroundings. Thus Joan of Arc had seen it when, at the head of her victorious army, she conducted the king to Rheims for his coronation. She approached the fulfilment of her mission, the completion of the great labor laid upon her by the voices of her saints. Mark Twain tells of Joan's approach to Rheims, of the tide of cheers that swept her ranks at the vision of the distant towers.

It was the sixteenth of July that Joan looked down upon Rheims, and now four hundred and eighty-five years later it was again July, with the same summer glory on the wood, the same green and scarlet in the poppied fields, the same fair valley, the same stately towers rising to the sky. But no one can ever feel what Joan felt, can ever put into words, ever so faintly, what that moment and that vision meant to the Domremy shepherd-girl.

Descending the plain, we entered the city, crossed a bridge, and made our way to the cathedral square. Then presently we were at the doorway where Joan and her king had entered--the portal which has been called the most beautiful this side of paradise. How little we dreamed that destruction and disfigurement lay only a few weeks ahead!

It is not required any more that one should write descriptively of the now vanished glories of the church of Rheims, it has been done so thoroughly and so numerously by those so highly qualified for the undertaking. Fergusson, who must have been an authority, for the guide-book quotes him, calls it, "perhaps the most beautiful structure produced in the Middle Ages."

The cathedral was already two hundred years old when Joan arrived in 1429. But it must have looked quite fresh and new, then, for nearly five centuries later it seemed to have suffered little. Some of the five hundred and thirty statues of its wonderful portal were weatherworn and scarred, to be sure, but the general effect of beauty and completeness was not disturbed.

Many kings had preceded Joan and her sovereign through the sacred entrance. Long before the cathedral was built, French sovereigns had come to Rheims for their coronation. Here Clovis had been baptized nearly a thousand years before.

It was a mighty assemblage that gathered for the crowning of Joan's king. France, overrun by an invader, had known no real king for years--had, indeed, well nigh surrendered her nationality. Now victory, in the person of a young girl from an obscure village, had crowned their arms and brought redemption to their throne. No wonder the vast church was packed, and that crowds were massed outside. From all directions had come pilgrims to the great event--persons of every rank, among them two shepherds, Joan's aged father and uncle, who had walked from Domremy, one hundred and twenty miles, to verify with their own eyes what their ears could not credit.

We are told that the abbot, attended by the archbishop, his canons, and a deputation of nobles, entered the crowded church, followed by the five mounted knights who rode down the great central aisle, clear to the choir, and then at a signal backed their prancing steeds all the distance to the great doors.

Very likely the cathedral at Rheims had never known such a throng until that day, nor heard such a mighty shout as went up when Joan and the king, side by side and followed by a splendid train, appeared at the great side entrance and moved slowly to the altar.

I think there must have fallen a deep hush then--a petrified stillness that lasted through the long ceremonial, while every eye feasted itself upon the young girl standing there at the king's side, holding her victorious standard above him--the banner that "had borne the burden and had earned the victory," as she would one day testify at her trial. I am sure that vast throng would keep silence, scarcely breathing, until the final word was spoken and the dauphin had accepted the crown and placed it upon his head. But then we may hear, borne faintly down the centuries, the roar of renewed shouting that told to those waiting without that the great ceremony was ended, that Charles VII of France had been annointed king. As in a picture we seemed to see the shepherd-girl on her knees saying to the crowned king: "My work which was given me to do is finished: give me your peace, and let me go back to my mother, who is poor and old, and has need of me."

But the king raises her up and praises her and confers upon her nobility and titles, and asks her to name a reward for her service, and we hear her ask that Domremy, "poor and hard-pressed by reason of the war," may have its taxes remitted.

Nothing for herself--no more than that; and in the presence of all the great assemblage Charles VII decreed that by grace of Joan of Arc, Domremy should be free from taxes forever.

There within those walls it was all reality five hundred years ago. One did not study the interior to discover special art values or to distinguish in what manner it differed from others we had seen. For us the light from its great rose-window and upper arches was glorified because once it fell upon Joan of Arc in that supreme moment when she saw her labor finished and asked only that she might return to Domremy and her flocks. The statues in the niches were sacred because they looked upon that scene, the altar paving was sanctified because it felt the pressure of her feet.

Back of the altar stood a statue of Joan unlike any we had seen elsewhere, and to us more beautiful. It was not Joan with her banner aloft, her eyes upward. It was Joan with her eyes lowered, looking at no outward thing, her face passive--the saddest face and the saddest eyes in the world--Joan the sacrifice of her people and her king.

It may have been two miles out of Rheims that we met the flood. There had been one heavy shower as we entered the city, but presently the sun broke out, bright and hot, too bright and too hot for permanence. Now suddenly all was black again, there was a roar of thunder, and then such an opening of the water-gates of the sky as would have disturbed Noah. I turned the car over to the side of the road, but the tall, high-trimmed trees afforded no protection. Our top was a shelter, but not a complete one--the wind drove the water in, and in a moment our umbrellas were sticking out in every direction and we had huddled together like chickens. The world was blotted out. I had the feeling at moments that we were being swept down some great submarine current.

I don't know how long the inundation lasted. It may have been five minutes or thirty. Then suddenly it stopped--it was over--the sun was out.

There was then no mud in France,--not in the highroads,--and a moment or two later we had revived, our engine was going, and we were gliding between fair fields--fresh, shining fields where scarlet poppy-patches were as pools of blood. How peaceful it all was then, for there is no lovelier land than the Marne district from Rheims to Châlons and to Vitry-le-Francois. Yet it has been often a war district--a battle-ground; it has been fought over time and again since the ancient allies defeated Attila and his Huns there, checking the purpose of the "Scourge of God," as he called himself. It could never be a battle-ground again, we thought--the great nations were too advanced for war. Ah me! within two months from that day men were lying dead across that very road, shells were tearing at the lovely fields, and another stain had mingled with the trampled poppies.

Châlons-sur-Marne, like Rheims and Epernay, is a champagne center and seemed prosperous. There are some churches there, but they did not seem of great importance.

It was in July when we were on the Marne. In an earlier chapter I have told how, only three weeks later, when we had reached Vevey, Switzerland, the "great upheaval" came, and with what disturbing consequences. We did not leave Europe with the early rush. For a time we hesitated about leaving at all. But then uncertainties increased. With Italy planning war, the possibility of not being able to leave when we were ready was not comforting. So in October at last we got a military pass to take the car out of Switzerland, and on one of the last days of the month set off up the Rhone Valley, down which Cæsar's armies once had marched, and drove to Brigue, and the next day crossed the Simplon Pass--up and up more than six thousand feet, where the snow was flying, and where there are no villages any more, but only a hospice, and here and there a wayside shelter. Then through a wild, savage-looking land--down and down, into Italy, arriving in the rain at Domodossola, glad, oh so glad, for safe shelter and food and beds!

I will not tell here of our month's wanderings in Italy. But one day our reliable car was loaded on a vessel for home, and a little later we were aboard the same ship, breasting such storms as made it seem impossible that only a little while before we had been in a sunny land, gliding smoothly over a solid surface that did not heave, and toss, and roar, day and night, without end; then by and by a day came when we were gliding once more over smooth, solid ground--this time in our own land, far from the quaint villages, the bright rivers, the ancient castles, the sunny slopes, and perfect roads of France.

Yet America is not without its glories. And though it has fewer quaint villages and no ancient castles, it has at least as fair scenery, as fertile lands, and its roads are growing better and more numerous every day. Our wayside inns will improve, too, I am sure of it, until America, like France, may become another paradise. Narcissa and the Joy were patriotic enough to be gladdened at the sight of New England shores and hillsides, and, as Narcissa says:

"Well, if we didn't see America first, we'll probably have plenty of time to see it now."

LETTER-BOXES IN FOREIGN LANDS

BY A. R. ROY

The first letter-box ever used was established in Paris in 1560. It is true that a kind of letter-box was in use in Italy before that time; it was not used, however, by the postal service, but as a place for denunciations directed to the police.

The first letter-box in Germany was established in 1766, in Berlin. At first the boxes were simple; both for depositing letters and for removing them the cover was lifted. During the last century a great many different styles of boxes have been introduced, but the so-called Swedish system is now in universal use.

In Germany the letter-boxes are highly ornamental, and in many cases made especially to be in harmony with the architecture of the building to which they are fastened. They are painted blue, and show the coat of arms of the empire and that of the postal department, a post-horn with tassels. The mail is removed by fastening a bag to the bottom of the box; the bag is slipped in and opens and closes automatically. The postman does not handle or even see the letters, and cannot get at them.

In London large letter-boxes are placed on the sidewalk, at nearly every street corner. They have different compartments for city and country mail, and this, as well as the height of the apertures, makes them rather inconvenient for any but grown people. While they are painted a brilliant red and therefore very conspicuous, they are by no means an embellishment to the city. The letters are taken out by opening a large door and literally shoveling the mail-matter into a bag.

The letter-box in the general post-office in England is a magnificent construction. The sign-board is made of brass, on which the directions are engraved in ink. Large slits provide for the country and colonial mails, and there is also a different compartment for newspapers and parcels.

The modern French letter-box has the shape of a pillar, profusely ornamented with the conventional lily. The whole box or stand is fashioned after a plant, and the top resembles a bud. The body is surrounded by floral wreaths or festoons, and the base is formed by large leaves. The boxes are placed against buildings and have a very pretty effect.

In Brussels the government keeps pace with the needs of the people, and has attached postal boxes to the rear ends of cars in the city. This aids and hastens the delivery of letters and telegrams, as most of these cars pass the post-offices, where the boxes are emptied. This street-car letter-box, in fact, virtually takes the place of the "pneumatic tube" postal system, for which London and Berlin have become famous.

The Russian post-box is an old-fashioned, awkward-looking box. It looks something like a peasant hut. The roof is lifted up, and the letters are taken out from the top. The postman handles the letters as freely as the sorters themselves. In times past the governmental power in Russia was so strict that it is believed the post-office officials frequently opened letters suspected of being connected with plots against the State, and read them.

The Italian post-boxes are prettily constructed and grouped together in threes and fours. One box is used for the city, another for the country, and by the side is a big automatic machine for stamps. A "penny in the slot" supplies the various kinds of stamps required.

The Amsterdam letter-pillar is of very artistic construction, which is both pleasing to the eye and practical. The royal arms are conspicuously and prettily embossed on the face of the box, and below them are two rosettes of conventional style. There are two letter-slits, one for the country and one for the city. The top is crowned with ornamental bowers. Right above the pillar is a board on which the times of delivery and collection are clearly written.

The Rumanian letter-boxes are all numbered in large letters so as to help the public to keep track of where they post their mail, and also the postman in his collection. It is a simple square box which is placed generally on the walls of large buildings in the main streets.

Throughout the Orient, where the national influences are many and various, each country has its own post-office. For instance, the British have their own, and the French and the Germans theirs. The stamps used by each of these post-offices are, of course, their own, there not being a universal system for all countries.

Right on the city gate in Tangier we find, in this town of an old civilization, the convenience of most modern time--a letter-box. Before the natives were used to them they were considered as wonderful machines into which a missive once being put was mysteriously conveyed to its destination, and they were generally feared. To-day the smallest boy uses them. The style of course varies with the power that puts it up.

Here we can notice with what expression of wonderment the native posts a letter. He is only certain the letter will go, but how, he does not know.

The German post-box is painted blue, and has only German directions written on it. The directions giving time of delivery and collection are written in many languages.

The final photograph shows a letter-box on a Moorish gateway in Tangier, Morocco. And here this convenience of modern days looks strange in its surroundings of Arabic fresco and characters. No attempt has been made to harmonize with the Moorish architecture. The letters are collected from an opening on the other side of the wall.

LOST RHEIMS

BY LOUISE EUGÉNIE PRICKITT

"Rheims, which has been on fire for a week, is now nothing but a great pile of smoking ruins," I read in the paper of the man who sat next to me in the subway. With a sick heart I read on: "There are no traces of streets and thoroughfares, which have disappeared from view under the accumulation of debris. Ancient buildings in the Place Royal and the market-place and the Musicians' House, which dates from the sixteenth century, have been reduced to dust and ashes." With a doubly sad heart I read it, for to me it is more than an old French city that lies in ruins, since with it goes the picturesque and historic background of my early youth. It is the tragic passing of my city of dreams, for there I dreamed away eight happy years of girlhood.

It is an enviable thing to live in an ancient city like Rheims till its history becomes a part of the texture of one's mind, till the background of that history, hangs like a series of distinct pictures in one's thought, not to be effaced by anything that shall come afterward. The streets of Rheims as they then stood are photographed clearly on the retina of my mind's eye, and, dominating all, as it did at my first sight of it, is the majestic shape of the cathedral. I enter again, in imagination, those beautiful portals, and feel myself a tiny figure, and young in the midst of hoary antiquity. The organ music surges through the building, the choir-boys' voices soar above it. I see again the slanting fall of colored light across the wide gray floors, the soft blue smoke of the rising incense, the towering pillars, the vaulted roof, the dim vistas ending in the splendor of painted windows. Years and years of patient labor it took to rear this marvel. It represented the ideality of an age; it was, in fact, that ideality incarnate, left standing for all posterity to see and take inspiration from.

It was at sunset one December day that I first entered Rheims. It was to be my home for the next eight years, for my father had been appointed by the American Government to be consul there. How eagerly, I remember, we looked out of the train window as we approached the city. Long before the town itself became distinct to our eyes, we could plainly see the cathedral, a superb silhouette, imposing and not to be forgotten. It was like one's first view of the ocean or the mountains or the desert.