Part 18

Our soldier, who had resigned the care of us to the armourer, met us again at the door, and led us round the remainder of the ramparts, dismissing us finally at the gate by which we entered. All the time we were in the castle, there had been a great discordance of drums and fifes, caused by the musicians who were practicing just under the walls; likewise the sergeants were drilling their squads of men, and putting them through strange gymnastic motions. Most, if not all, of the garrison belongs to a Highland regiment, and those whom we saw on duty in full costume looked very martial and gallant. Emerging from the Castle, we took the broad and pleasant footpath, which circles it about midway on the grassy steep which descends from the rocky precipice on which the walls are built. This is a very beautiful walk, and affords a most striking view of the Castle, right above our heads, the height of its wall forming one line with the precipice. The grassy hillside is almost as precipitous as the dark grey rock that rises out of it, to form the foundations of the Castle; but wild rosebushes, both of a white and red variety, are abundant here, and all in bloom; nor are these the only flowers. There is also shrubbery in some spots, tossing up green waves against the precipice; and broad sheets of ivy here and there mantle the head-long rock, which also has a growth of weeds in its crevices. The Castle walls above, however, are quite bare of any such growth. Thus, looking up at the old storied fortress, and looking down over the wide, historic plain, we wandered half-way round the Castle, and then, retracing our steps, entered the town close by an old hospital.

THE PALACE OF THE BOSPHORUS

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

When in your caïque upon the Bosphorus you have passed the Tower of Leander,[6] you see opposite Scutari an immense, unfinished palace that bathes its white feet in the blue and rapid waters. There is a superstition in the East, supported by the architects, that no one dies while the house he is having built is uncompleted; therefore the Sultans always take care to have some palace on hand.

As a rare instance among the Turks, who consecrate solid and precious materials to the house of God and erect for the transitory habitation of man only wooden kiosks hardly more enduring than himself, this palace is all of marble and built for eternity. It is composed of one great body and two wings. To say to what order of architecture it belongs would be difficult; it is not Greek, nor Roman, nor Gothic, nor Renaissance, nor Saracen, nor Arab, nor Turkish; it approaches that style which the Spaniards call _plateresco_, and which makes the façade of a building resemble a great piece of goldsmith’s work owing to the complicated wealth of its ornaments and the maddening mass of the details.

[Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE BOSPHORUS, TURKEY.]

Windows with open-work balconies, small enwreathed columns, ribbed trefoils, festooned frames, and intervening spaces crowded with sculpture and arabesques, recall the Lombard style and make you think of the ancient palaces of Venice; only there is the same difference between the Palace Dario or Casa d’oro and the Sultan’s Palace as between the Grand Canal and the Bosphorus.

This enormous building of Marmora marble, of a bluish white that seems a little cold owing to the sharp glitter from its newness, produces a very majestic effect between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea; it will produce a better one when the warm sun of Asia shall have gilded it with its rays which are received direct and at first-hand. Vignola, doubtless, would not know what to make of this hybrid façade where the styles of all periods and all countries form a composite order which he did not foresee. But one cannot deny that this multitude of flowers, foliage, and rose-work, carved like jewels of precious material possesses a tufted and complicated appearance, gorgeous and delightful to the eye. It is a palace that might have been made by an ornament-worker who was not an architect, and who spared neither the work of his hands, nor time, nor money. Such as it is, I prefer it to those horrid, classic reproductions, so beastly, so flat, so cold and so tiresome, such as are built by pedants and those who like to be conventional, and I greatly prefer these gay, ornamental masses of foliage interlacing with fantastic elegance, to a triangular pediment or a horizontal attic, resting on six or eight lean columns.

This naïve ignorance displayed upon so gigantic a scale has its charm; it is probable that the bold builders of our cathedrals knew little more, and their works are not the less admirable for that.

Along the whole length of the palace, there runs a platform, bordered on the side of the Bosphorus with monumental pillars linked together by grilles of beautiful and charming wrought-iron, where the iron curves in a thousand flowered arabesques, resembling the flourishes of a bold pen sweeping the paper. These gilded grilles form an extremely rich balustrade.

The two wings, built at a different period, are very much too low for the body of the principal dwelling, with which they have, moreover, no harmony of style or form. Imagine a double row of Odéons or Chambers of Deputies in miniature, following each other in wearisome alternation and presenting to the eye a line of slender little columns that seem to be of wood, although they are of marble.

In passing and repassing before this palace, the desire to visit it had come to me many times. In Italy nothing would have been simpler; but to bring your caïque to an imperial landing-place in Turkey, would be a grave performance that might bring serious consequences. Happily, through the agency of a friend, I was put into communication with the architect, M. Balyan, a young Armenian of great intelligence, and who spoke French.

M. Balyan had the kindness to take me in his boat of three pairs of oars, and made me enter first an old kiosk, a remnant of the former palace, where we were served with pipes, coffee, and sherbet flavoured with rose; then he conducted me himself through the apartments with a kindness and charming politeness for which I thank him here, hoping that one day his eye will fall upon these lines.

The interior has not been entirely finished yet, but, nevertheless, you can get an idea of the future splendour of the whole. The religious ideas of the Turks debar from their ornamentation a host of happy motives and restrict considerably the fancy of the artist, who must carefully abstain from mingling with his arabesques the representation of any living objects:--thus, there are no statues, no bas-reliefs, no masks, no chimæras, no griffins, no dolphins, no birds, no sphinxes, no serpents, no butterflies, no little figures half-woman and half-flower, no heraldic monsters, and none of those strange creatures that compose the fabulous zoölogy of ornamentation, and of which Raphael has made such marvellous use in the galleries of the Vatican.

The Arabian style, with its interruptions, distortions and its broken lines, its lace of stucco cut out with a punch, its ceilings of stalactites, its bee-hive niches, its marble perforated like the lid of a perfume-box, its mottos in florid Cufic, and its colourings of green, white and red, discretely enhanced with gold, would have afforded natural resources for the decoration of an oriental palace; but the Sultan, with the same caprice that makes us build Alhambras in Paris, wished to have a palace in the modern taste. One is astonished at first at his caprice, but, upon reflection, nothing is more natural. Having so few motives at his disposition, M. Balyan has needed a rare fertility of imagination in order to decorate in different ways more than three hundred halls or chambers.

The general arrangement is very simple: the rooms follow each other in succession, or open upon a large corridor; the harem, among others, is so arranged. The apartment of each woman opens by a single door into a vast passage, like the cells of nuns in a cloister. At each end, a guard of eunuchs, or _bostangis_, can be posted. From the threshold, I threw a glance over this retreat of secret pleasure, which resembles a convent or a boarding-school much more than one would imagine. Here are extinguished, without having shone upon the outside world, the stars of beauty unknown, but the eye of the master has rested upon them, for one minute perhaps, and that is enough.

The apartment of the Sultana-Validé, composed of lofty rooms looking upon the Bosphorus, is remarkable for its ceilings painted in fresco with an incomparable elegance and freshness. I do not know who are the workmen that made these marvels, but Diaz would not find upon his palette finer, more vaporous, more tender and, at the same time, richer tones. Sometimes they are skies of turquoise sown with light clouds floating in incredible depths, sometimes immense lace veils of marvellous figures, then a great shell of mother-of-pearl irised with all the hues of the prism, or still again of imaginary flowers hanging their corollas and leaves upon golden trellises; other chambers are similarly ornamented; sometimes a casket whose jewels are scattered about in playful disorder, necklaces whose pearls have broken from their strings and roll about like raindrops, a rillet of diamonds, sapphires and rubies forming the _motif_ of the decoration; golden boxes painted upon the cornices allow the bluish smoke of perfumes to escape and compose a ceiling with their transparent haze. Here Phingari through a rift in the cloud shows his silver crescent, so dear to the Mussulman; there modest Aurora colours a morning sky with rose, like the cheeks of virgin; farther away a large piece of brocade streaked with light glittering like cloth of gold, and held up by a clasp of carbuncles, reveals a corner of blue. Arabesques with infinite interlacings, sculptured compartments, golden rose-work, and bouquets of imaginary or real flowers, blue lilies of Iran, or roses of Schiraz, come to vary these themes, the chief of which I have cited, without attempting to enter into impossible details, and which the imagination of the reader must supplement.

The Sultan’s apartments are in the style of Louis XIV. Orientalized, where one feels an intentional imitation of the splendours of Versailles, the doors, the windows, and their frames are of cedar, mahogany, massive violet-ebony, exquisitely carved, and fastening by rich bolts gilded in ormoulu. From the windows you have the most marvellous view in the world: a panorama without a rival, and such as never sovereign had before in front of his palace. The coast of Asia, where upon an immense curtain of black cypress Scutari stands out, with its picturesque landing-place crowded with vessels, its pink houses, its white mosques among which are distinguished Buyuck-Djami and Sultan-Selim; and the Bosphorus with its rapid and transparent waters furrowed with the perpetual going and coming of the sailing-vessels, steam-boats, feluccas, prames, boats from Ismid and Trebizond, with antique shapes, peculiar sails, canoes, and caïques, above which fly the familiar swarms of sea-mews and gulls. If you lean out a little, you can discern upon the two shores a succession of summer homes and kiosks, painted in flesh colours that form a double key of palaces for this marvellous marine river. Add to this the thousand accidents of lights, the effects of sun and moon, and you will have a spectacle which imagination could not surpass.

One of the peculiarities of the palace is a large hall roofed with a dome of red glass. When the sun shines through this dome of rubies, everything assumes strange hues; the air seems to be in flames, and you seem to breathe fire; the columns seem like torch-lights, the marble pavement reddens into a floor of lava; a pink fire devours the walls; you fancy yourself in the reception-hall of a palace of salamanders built of metal in fusion; your eyes glitter like red spangles and your clothes become vestments of purple. An operatic hell, lighted with Bengal fire, can alone give an idea of this peculiar effect, of a questionable taste, perhaps, but very striking, nevertheless.

A little marvel which would not mar the most fairy-like architecture of the Thousand and One Nights, is the Sultan’s hall of baths. It is in the Moorish style, of veined Egyptian alabaster, and seems to have been cut out of one block of precious stone, with its columns, its splayed capitals, its heart-shaped arcades, and its ceiling constellated with crystal eyes that shine like diamonds. To what luxury might the body abandon itself upon these flags, transparent as agates, surrendering its flexible limbs to the skilful manipulations of the _tellacks_ in the midst of a cloud of perfumed vapour and under a shower of rose-water and balsam!

Tired of these marvels and fatigued with admiration, I thanked M. Balyan, who made me come out through the court of honour, the gate of which is a kind of triumphal arch of white marble of a very rich and florid ornamentation, and which forms on the land side an entrance quite worthy of this sumptuous palace. Then, as I was dying of hunger, I went into a fruiterer’s shop and was served with two _brochettes_ of _kabobs_, wrapped in a thick pancake, which I moistened with a glass of sherbet,--a very sober and entirely local repast.

PLESSIS-LES-TOURS

J. J. BOURRASSÉE

The castle of Plessis stands to the west of the city of Tours in a vast plain watered by the Loire and Cher. To reach it, you follow a road bordered with old mulberry-trees, the remains or heirs of those planted by Henri IV. in 1607, and renewed in 1690 by Louvois. Impressed by the terrible memories of Louis XI., turn not your head towards those trees to look for those hanged by Messire Tristan L’Hermite. Neither be afraid of finding beneath your feet those man-traps that were planted in the vicinity of the Castle to catch the curious and the rustics who ventured upon the lands of His Majesty. To-day the country is safe and there is nothing to be feared from the Castle, even if it is not attractive; but, in the Fifteenth Century, a safe-conduct and an experienced guide were necessary for crossing this dangerous region.

Plessis did not play any part in our national history until the reign of Louis XI. Until then, it was only an obscure lordship with a little castle on one of those rocky hillocks that still exist in the vale. This spot pleasing him much more than the castles of Amboise, Loches, or Chinon, the King bought it from his chamberlain, Hardouin de Maillé, in 1463, for the sum of 5,500 gold crowns, and abolished its old name of Montils. Here he built a castle in the Fifteenth-Century taste, simple and even severe, for brick largely figured in it, and with a glass gallery on the interior façade: a dwelling more worthy of a rich citizen than a King of France. Here, after his accession, Louis XI. spent the greater part of his life.

Towards the end of the year 1464, the King gathered together the prelates and principal lords of the realm at Plessis with the pretext of seeking their advice as to the means of remedying the discontent that was beginning to break out. In this assembly, Charles, Duke of Orleans, thought it his duty to hazard a few remonstrances; but Louis XI. replied to the duke in such harsh and offensive language that the unfortunate prince died of chagrin at Amboise a few days later. This attitude of the King drew the nobles into the League of Public Welfare, and the Duke of Berri placed himself at the head of the discontented. In order to try to calm them, the King was obliged to call together the States-General at Tours in 1468.

[Illustration: PLESSIS-LES-TOURS, FRANCE.]

The opposition of the nobles drove Louis XI. towards the middle classes, not that he had the least democratic tendencies, but because he felt more at ease among these small people, whose situation rendered them supple and easy. He always liked to have them about him, and raised them to the highest dignities, in hatred and defiance of the high nobility, because they were broken into the practice of affairs by commerce, and possessed the art, always prized by governments, of managing the finances skilfully and creating resources at critical moments. His selections were not always happy: witness La Balue, whom from a simple clerk he raised to the rank of bishop and even cardinal, and who betrayed him to the profit of the Duke of Burgundy. Louis XI., carrying a certain refinement of cruelty even into his most legitimate vengeance, had the cardinal confined in an iron cage. It is said that this odious invention was due to La Balue himself, and that he was the first on whom it was tried. After languishing for some time in one of the cells at Plessis, the cardinal was transferred to Loches and then to Montbazon: he did not recover his liberty till 1480, after a long and hard captivity.

Notwithstanding the success of his policy, Louis XI. had a sad and morose old age. Separated from his wife and son, more suspicious of everybody than ever, he shut himself up closely at Plessis and there redoubled his minute precautions. But two terrible guests whom the “guard that keeps watch at the barriers of the Louvre” can never stop, disease and death, soon came to seek him. When he felt the first pangs of the disease that was to carry him off, he multiplied his vows, acts of devotion and pilgrimages. Then he sent and fetched all the way from Calabria a poor hermit named Francisco Paolo, with the hope that the holy man’s prayers would obtain his recovery. As soon as the King was informed of his arrival, he ordered the Dauphin to go to meet him with the chief lords of the court and to receive him with all the respect due to so saintly a personage; he himself did not think he could do the saint too much honour and lodged him with his companions in the castle; but dwelling in the court ill suited the pious hermit and so they gave him a lodging in the Plessis courtyard. So many precautions and so many prayers failed to bend Heaven; even the holy ampulla was powerless. Louis XI. died at the Castle of Plessis, August 30th, 1483, aged sixty, after reigning twenty-two years. His body was first taken from Plessis to the church of St. Martin of Tours, where it lay in state for eight days; then it was taken to Notre Dame de Cléry, the spot which he himself had chosen for his burial. St. Francis had not been able to perform the miracle of curing the King; but he had prepared him for his approaching death, and it must be acknowledged that with a man like Louis XI. this was no small prodigy.

On the death of Louis XI. the court was installed at Plessis for some time. The Dauphin Charles, born at the Castle of Amboise in 1470, had reached his legal majority; but intelligence was very slightly developed in this puny and deformed child. His sister, Anne de Beaujeu, “fine and subtle, if any one ever was,” says Brantôme, “and the very image of her father in everything,” unhesitatingly took the regency, and, to resist the malcontents who wanted to deprive her of it, she convoked the States-General at Tours for January 1st, 1484. This celebrated assembly gave firm and vigilant attention to all the affairs of the realm and obtained quite a sensible reduction of taxes.

Amid the shock of intrigues and diverse ambitions, the lady of Beaujeu conducted herself with so much address and prudence, that the States confirmed the last wishes of Louis XI. in her favour.

The little King, as he was called, was not long in shaking off his sister’s yoke, and began his reign with an act of magnanimity by himself going in despite of his council and breaking the chains of the Duke of Orleans. Since the battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, that prince had been confined in the great tower of Bourges. One evening with a small suite the young King set out, or rather fled, from the Castle of Plessis under the pretext of a hunting-party, and went to free his prisoner. The Regent thought that Charles VIII. was going to return at the head of her enemies to proscribe her in turn. Happily she was mistaken. The reconciliation took place at Plessis, and from that day Louis of Orleans became the most faithful subject of his King.

The Castle of Plessis was a fortunate place for the Duke of Orleans. After the death of Charles VIII., he was proclaimed King under the title of Louis XII. and visited Touraine several times and stayed at the castle where his reconciliation with Anne de Beaujeu had been effected. There he convoked the States General in 1506, and the opening of this assembly took place in the great hall of Plessis on the fourteenth of May. The purpose of this assembly was to free the King’s word and by the intervention of the nation to break the treaty, impolitic as well as onerous to France, that had been signed at Lyons in 1503 and by which Louis XII. had promised to give his daughter Claude, then only seven years of age, in marriage to Charles of Luxembourg, who afterwards became the Emperor Charles V. and to whom she was to take as a dowry the duchies of Milan and Brittany and the county of Blois. It was a veritable dismemberment of France and the ruin of that wise policy which by the two marriages of the Duchess Anne with Charles VIII. and Louis XII. had secured Brittany to France. The States rose in force against the treaty and demanded the marriage of François of Valois, then twelve years old, with Claude of France. These wishes were favourably received, and Cardinal Georges d’Amboise proceeded to the ceremony of betrothal on the twentieth of May, in the great hall of Plessis.