Part 8
Coimbra is famous as the seat of learning for all Portugal—for many centuries, and still, the only university town in the realm. The huge square bulk of the university buildings on the crest of the hill overlooking the town typify the absolute domination of the place by the academical tradition. The hotel on the Alameda, like other hostelries of its sort, has no lack of commercial customers, but even they, assertive as they are, are swamped by the university professors, staff and graduates, who flock to its tables for their meals; whilst in the streets bookshops jostle each other all filled with text-books, and the unmistakable students are everywhere. And yet, with all this academical presence, there is none of that staid atmosphere of aloof erudition which is especially noticeable at Cambridge, and, to a lesser degree, at Oxford. It is true that the youngsters at Coimbra affect a garb at which the present-day undergraduate at Cambridge would scoff, if he did not proceed to more violent means to reduce its primness. A very clerical-looking black frock-coat, buttoned to the chin, is _de rigueur_, covered by a long black cloak reaching to the wearer’s heels, although, to tell the truth, this cloak, like a Cambridge third-year man’s gown, is oftener festooned over one shoulder or trailed along upon the arm than worn decorously as intended.
These Coimbra youths wear no head covering, and affect a gravity of demeanour whilst in the streets that gives them all the appearance of budding priests. But the absence of a collegiate system brings both staff and students into more direct contact with the town than is the case with our older universities, and the peculiar learned atmosphere of the High at Oxford or King’s Parade at Cambridge does not exist. It is a stiff climb up the hill to the university, and the cathedrals. The former is built round three sides of a large court, with a tower in one corner and an observatory in the open face, the enormous palace of the rector occupying one entire side of the square. Seven good light classrooms and a fine hall, senate-house, and examination rooms, give ample accommodation; and the view of the city from the end of the corridor containing the lecture-rooms is exceedingly fine. The library is a gorgeous gilt and over-decorated room in the florid taste of the eighteenth century, the worst possible style for a place of quiet study; and almost the only attractive feature in the exterior of the university is the fine Manueline doorway to the chapel in the great quadrangle. Here twisted cables, rich mouldings, floreated crockets and pinnacles, armillary spheres and crosses, the usual notes of the style, mark the work as being of the period when Portugal was ebullient with feverish energy and ambition.
Hard by is the bishop’s palace, now almost a ruin, but with some lovely bits of Manueline, and a delightful sixteenth-century courtyard like a scene upon the stage. The old cathedral (Sé Velha) upon the same hill, is perhaps the most perfect and unspoilt specimen of pure Romanesque of the twelfth century in the Peninsula. The deeply recessed west door, with round arch, quadruple ball mouldings, finely decorated Byzantine Romanesque pillars, and a large, recessed window in the same style above, occupy a square projecting battlemented tower flanked on each side by other square towers at the corners. On the south side the early renascence door reaching to the battlemented roof of the aisle is practically in ruins; but the pure, solid Romanesque of the rest of the building stands sturdy as ever after eight centuries. Small and grave, the nave and aisles, with the beautiful round-headed, recessed clerestory windows and capricious Romanesque Byzantine capitals, remain unmarred, though gilt and alabaster altars and chapels clamour for notice, and splendid sarcophagi of bishops and nobles on all sides contrast with the stern lines of the original building. Two features of the more recent periods deserve attention, the truly superb high-altar of Flemish workmanship of the first years of the sixteenth century, and the circular chapel of the Soares family, dated 1566. I could not tear myself away from the contemplation of the exterior of this old Sé on the hill over Coimbra, and at night when the darkness of the ancient city was hardly disturbed by flickering lamps, I lingered in the square around the battlemented walls and sturdy towers, reconstructing the scenes that had been enacted here, and calling up in imagination from their eternal sleep those great ones who rested so quietly within.
The new cathedral (Sé Nova) is a plain and ugly pseudo-classical building, in the so-called Jesuit style, standing on the summit of the hill, and only merits notice on account of its treasures. These form a veritable museum of early ecclesiastical art, from the twelfth century onward. I have rarely seen a finer specimen of goldsmith’s work than the custode of George d’Almeida, of pure Portuguese Gothic, in a similar style, but more imposing than the chalice already described at the Misericordia at Oporto.
Looking across the beautiful river Mondego from the acacia-shaded alameda where stands the hotel, the high wooded ridge straight opposite is crowned by the vast white convent of Santa Clara, once the glory of Coimbra and the cloister of queens, now partly destroyed and partly desecrated and turned into a factory. The heat was oppressive on the morning after my arrival at Coimbra, but a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Isabel the Queen, and to the shrine of love near to it, could not be foregone. Crossing the bridge I first wended my way to a beautiful villa almost on the banks of the river, in whose grounds there stands the Gothic ruin of a palace, and adjoining it gushing from a rock shaded by dark cedars a copious spring leaps joyously along a stone channel of some twenty feet long into a stone tank covered with water lilies. It is a lovely tranquil spot, where no sound reaches but the rustling of leaves and the gurgling of crystal water, and yet here, tradition says, was enacted in the long ago one of those tragedies that inspire poets, painters, and dramatists for all time. It was in 1355, and Ines de Castro, the lovely mistress of the Prince Dom Pedro, had so infatuated him that he refused to marry another at his father’s bidding. The King, Alfonso IV., incensed at the recalcitrancy of his heir, caused Ines to be done to death here beside the “Fountain of Love” by three courtiers. The son, Dom Pedro, rose in rebellion, and saw his father no more; but when two years afterwards the king died and Pedro succeeded him, he worked his ghastly revenge upon those who had persecuted his beloved. Ines had been buried at Santa Clara, the convent near, to which this estate belonged, and now her body was disinterred, dressed in royal robes, crowned with a diadem and adorned with jewels, and placed, a crumbling corpse, thus arrayed upon a throne in the monastery-Church of Alcobaça, whilst all the courtiers upon their knees kissed the dead hand of her whom they had insulted and contemned in life. Upon a stone by the side of the fountain this verse of Camões is inscribed:—
“As filhas do Mondego morte escura, Longo tempo chorando morarão: E por memoria eterna em fonte pura As lagrimas choradas transformarão, O nome e reputação que inda dura Dos amores de Ignes que ali pasarão Vede que fresca fonte rega as flores Que lagrimas são agua, e o nome amores.”
“The fountain of love in the garden of tears” is the spot called to this day, and a crumbling little Gothic convent founded by the lover king between this and the river bears the name of “the convent of tears.”
Above us gleams the long white building of Santa Clara, and zigzagging up the steep hill lies the path, shrines at each turn of the way inviting to devotion and to rest. The sun beats fiercely on the steep white road, but the view from the summit upon the esplanade that faces the convent church repays the trouble of the climb. Opposite, across the river, the city is piled up upon its grand amphitheatre of hills, the huge, square bulk of the university and the Sé Nova topping it all; whilst beyond the rolling hills covered with olives provide a dark-green background, which throws into higher relief the blue, white, and pink houses grouped in the limpid air, under a cloudless sky, flooded with sunlight.
Of all the rich foundation of the royal convent of Santa Clara all that now remains devoted to religious uses is the white church, and the adjoining sanctuary of the saintly queen, tended by ladies dedicated to charitable work, but not cloistered. The church is mainly of the seventeenth century, in the usual “Jesuit” style, and is crowded with gilt and carved woodwork; a large stately, unencumbered interior, containing several sarcophagi of members of the royal house, and the rich treasure in the sacristy must on no account be missed. A turret stair at the west end leads into a small loft overlooking the church, and richly, but sombrely decorated. Here stands a little altar, and on lifting a trap in the centre of it, and peering down through a grating a most impressive scene is presented to the view. A large, solemn choir-chamber, with carved stalls in rows, extending lengthwise along it, and the ample central space occupied by a magnificent canopy, under which, lit by a tiny red lamp burning eternally before it, lies a great coffin of rich repoussé silver, in which there rests the body of the sainted queen, the patron of Coimbra, the heroic Aragonese princess, who in 1323, rode between the armies of her husband, King Diniz, and their rebellious son, and stayed their unnatural strife at her own great peril.
[Illustration: SANTA CLARA, COIMBRA.]
One other royal shade at least haunts the royal convent of Santa Clara. Here, retired from the turmoil of ambitions and wrongs, of which through her youth she had been the victim, passed the long years of her devout renunciation that injured Princess Joan, “the Beltraneja,” daughter of Henry IV. of Castile, whom the great Isabel the Catholic ousted from her inheritance. Here in Coimbra, too, the tragedy of Maria de Telles, subject of poems and plays innumerable, was enacted in real life. King Ferdinand the Handsome, about 1371, though betrothed to a Castilian princess, fell in love with a lady called Leonor de Telles, and so endangered the recently concluded alliance. His people rose in revolt, and the lady’s family, especially her sister Maria, resented the adulterous connection. Leonor, secure in her mastery over the king, wreaked a terrible revenge upon those who opposed her; poison, the dagger, and the dungeon doing her fell work, until all Portugal was in fear at her feet, and the king became her wedded husband. The virtuous sister, Maria de Telles, happily married to the king’s half-brother, João, and safe in her palace at Coimbra, was difficult to attack. But the wicked Leonor was equal to the occasion, and, like a female Iago, instilled into the ears of the prince suspicions of his wife’s fidelity, and with forged evidence prompted him to revenge. The enraged husband murdered his protesting and innocent wife in cold blood at Coimbra (but not at the house now shown as the scene of the tragedy), and as soon as the foul deed was done Queen Leonor, who had been waiting in an adjoining room, entered, and, in the presence of the murdered Maria, mocked at the husband’s pain, and showed him that her sister was innocent. The prince in his rage attempted to murder the treacherous queen, but was seized, and subsequently escaped into exile, whilst Leonor lived to perpetrate other misdeeds.
I paced the acacia-shaded alameda as the sun sank below the hills, thinking of these sad memories of the times long past; of the noble self-sacrifice of the sainted queen, of the long agony of the Beltraneja, and of the blood-stained soul of Leonor. The air was cool and fresh, and the glowing sunset faded from crimson to dead rose in the west; but across the shimmering river the after-glow, like a luminous opal dawn, threw up the black silhouette of the wooded ridge, and the vast bulk of Santa Clara on the crest stood sharp and clear as if cut out of black velvet and laid upon pearly satin. And just over the great convent church a star of dazzling brilliancy—the brightest star, it seemed to me, I have ever beheld—blazed out alone in the pellucid sky, and tipped with diamond the cross above the silent silver shrine with its dim red lamp burning through the centuries. Thus sweet self-sacrifice conquers over time and death. The mouldering bones are naught, darkness enshrouds even the huge building in which they lie; yet far aloft the cross still stands distinct above all, gemmed with its glittering star, as the eternal memory of good deeds done still illumines the blackness of the world.
The next morning I took the train for Chão de Maçãs, a little roadside station, where a carriage had been ordered to meet me, and carry me two leagues over the mountains to Thomar. There was some stay at Pombal, where it was a feast day, and the peasant costumes were seen at their best—good upstanding people these, gaily clad, sober, and orderly, coming to the railway stations in good time and unhurried, but not hours before the train starts, as the peasants do in Spain. In the market, under the shadow of the great mediæval castle ruins on the hill, they do their buying and selling, live-stock for the most part to-day, without vociferation, but with an earnest quietness which is as far as possible from depression. Here at Pombal, and at Albergaria near, the men wear brown undyed homespun jackets, and trousers girt with red sashes. The bag cap is almost universal, and mutton-chop whiskers are the rule, but what will attract a foreign visitor most in their dress are the curious triple-caped ulsters, made of layers of grass, seen in many places in Portugal in wet weather, but especially in this neighbourhood. These garments, bulky as they look, are not heavy, and are an excellent protection against heavy rain.
The women here have very full, short, gathered skirts, and though none of them wear shoes or stockings hardly any are without heavy ancient jewelry of gold filigree apparently of considerable value. The bodices of the dresses are mostly red or yellow, and a broad horizontal stripe of bright colour often enlivens the skirt also, their brilliant head-kerchiefs being usually topped by a broad-brimmed velveteen hat, for the pork-pie hat of the north has been left behind now.
We had mounted into the country of pines and heather when we stopped at the little station of Chão de Maçãs, dumped down, as it seemed, in the wilderness with just a row of one-storey whitewashed cottages opposite. But where was the carriage? None had been heard of there, and I found myself several miles from anywhere, and with no means of conveyance. Sympathetic interest was not wanting. A muleteer loudly deplored that he was engaged to carry a load of goods to Ourem, and could not take me to Thomar. Clearly something must be done, however; so the little meeting of grave consultants adjourned from the station platform to the door of the humble general shop and tavern opposite to continue the important discussion. It happened that the whole village was just then deeply absorbed in witnessing an itinerant barber cutting a man’s hair in an open stable whilst the onlookers criticised and suggested improvements and variations in the process; but when the news spread that a strange gentleman was stranded at Chão de Maçãs with no conveyance to take him to Thomar, the critics of the barber’s art adjourned _en masse_ to the tavern, and respectfully joined in the discussion as to my fate. They were quite unanimous in agreeing that the Senhor Mathias Araujo, the hotelkeeper at Thomar, could not have received the letter or he would certainly have sent the carriage, of that there could be no doubt whatever. But oh! that _correio_, the post, was always at fault; and then many anecdotes were given at great length of hairbreadth escapes and heavy losses incurred by the sins and omissions of the Portuguese post-office. All this was no doubt interesting, but not helpful to me in my quandary, and I gently led the talk again to the chance of my getting a conveyance. The outlook was not hopeful, but the sympathetic muleteer somewhat doubtfully suggested to the innkeeper that some one near had a pair of mules. A significant look passed round, but the hint was not lost upon me, and by dint of much diplomacy a _rapaz_ was sent off for the mules. He returned by-and-by with an excellent-looking pair of animals, and an ancient shandrydan was pulled out of a stable. I wondered what had caused the hesitation, but my wonder did not last long. No sooner were the mules hitched to the bar than they began to kick furiously. Kicking chains were of little use; the lout who drove the team used his whip with heart and arm, the pieced and spliced rope and chain harness was strained almost to breaking, and the ancient “machine” threatened every moment to disintegrate into splinters.
[Illustration: A COUNTRY RAILWAY STATION.]
And so the team kicked their hardest all the seven miles to Thomar, and performed the distance, as it seemed to me, in one continued gymnastic exercise, more on their fore-legs than on their full complement of limbs. But kicking mules were powerless to mar the delight of the drive. The road was a perfect one, over hills covered with pines and dales ablaze with purple heather. The cool mountain breeze, laden with the scent of wild thyme, brought with it a new sense of delight which made breathing a conscious enjoyment, and the jaded elderly person in the shivering shandrydan felt impelled to shout aloud in mere exhilaration of living in such an atmosphere. Only a three weeks before I had seen Deeside at its best, but Deeside heather was dull, and the Deeside pine-clad hills in their wreaths of clouds were depressing, in comparison with this sparkling sweep of sandy moor and mountain.
Turning the shoulder of the highest ridge we came in sight of the vast and beautiful valley below us with Thomar in its midst upon its river bank nestling in greenery, with its steep, abrupt hill and castle standing sentinel over it. It was Sunday, and, although broad daylight when I drove into Thomar, a flight of rockets rushed into the air from the town-hall, and the braying of a brass band told me that the town was _en fête_. It was, I learnt, the ceremony of prize-giving and treating the school children by the town council, and all the little ones, clean, chubby, and well-clad they looked, were trooping, shouting, and cheering, as children do the world over. I found a warm welcome at the Hotel União, and was soon convinced that the Chão de Maçãs meeting was right in their assurance that the failure to send the carriage was from no fault of the host, a gentleman of cultured manners and tastes, quite unlike the ordinary type of Portuguese innkeeper. He was distressed to have received no letter to advise him of my coming, as he ought to have done two days before, but an hour or two afterwards he rushed into my room, excited and triumphant. He had forced them to open the post-office, Sunday though it was, and had rescued my letter from a heap which some careless postman had neglected to deliver! Thenceforward Senhor Jose Mathias Araujo, a pattern of Portuguese hotelkeepers, was indefatigable in making me, a mere passing stranger though I was, of whose name he had only heard vaguely, feel at home and comfortable at Thomar.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE TOWN HALL AND THE CONVENT, THOMAR.]
The place is one which to my latest days I shall never forget. A clean little rectangular town with straight streets of singularly modern aspect, on the banks of an exquisitely beautiful stream fringed by trees and gardens. The shops for the most part are but doorways open upon the street, for they have not adopted the modern fashion of windows for the display of goods. And life in general seems to pass drowsily, for with the exception of a small factory in some ancient conventual buildings on the farther bank of the stream, there is not much doing in the place.
But the object of my coming to this sweet, dull, little town pervades it everywhere. At the end of the three straight streets running from the river to the square market-place, with its ancient church and town-hall, there looms upon a steep hill, right up over the roofs as it seems, the most splendid and interesting mediæval castle-monastery in this land of hill-top strongholds—the ancient fortress headquarters of the crusading knights of the Order of Christ, successors in Portugal of the Templars. Thomar was the metropolis and fief of the Order, and on all sides the emblem of their peculiar cross is evident. Impressed upon my mind for ever is the view as I first gazed upon it from the main street (of course, incongruously called now after Serpa Pinto) on the sparkling autumn day. Clear and sharp high up on the hill against the indigo sky stood a ruined bell tower through whose gaping window the light shone, with tall, pointed cypresses by its side, and flanked by a mighty stretch of warm, grey battlements, above which rose the bulk of a great square keep.
A zigzag path leads from behind the sixteenth-century town-hall in the praça up the rocky sides of the precipitous hill. Gnarled olive trees, dwarf oaks, and aloes grew in the crevices and amidst the ruins of outer walls upon the face of the declivity; and the outer donjon, still standing unwrecked across the path, shows the tremendous strength even of these exterior defences. Above these loomed the Titanic walls, their battlemented sides and turrets, all stained a golden yellow with the lichen that covered them. The inner donjon, which adjoins the picturesque ruined bell tower, gives entrance to a charming grassy garden with tall cypresses, orange trees, and gay flowers, growing in what was once the wide courtyard of the castle; and the huge square main keep standing in the midst, all dismantled as it is, rears its flame-tinged battlements as proudly as when the soldiers of the Cross held this isolated stronghold against the hordes of Islam. The walls are everywhere pierced with loopholes in the shape of a cross surmounting a globe, and the cruciform device of the Order is graven upon stones on all sides.
[Illustration: SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.]