CHAPTER II

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS

_October 11th, 7.30._

Awakened at five o’clock to the sound of cavalry passing under my windows. I have three, and got the full benefit of the hoofs. I looked out into a bluish, late-night sky; endless shadowy lines of men that I knew were blue-clad were defiling, and there was a faint booming of cannon. Everything that the pitchy blackness of the streets of Lunéville prevents the inhabitants from doing between 5 and 8 P.M. they do between 5 and 8 A.M. The hour was set back on the 7th, which is why we have suddenly so much morning and these chopped-off afternoons. It makes the streets of the old town “hum” in the early hours. No Taubes; the sky too threatening. Again _chic atmosphère de guerre_.

My big room is charming. The doors have panelings of the great epoch of Lunéville, but on the walls is a fresh papering of a pinkish _toile de Jouy_ design, in such good taste, an abyss between it and the _Jugend-Stil_ of the “Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre”; over each door is a lunette containing a faded old painting.

The pink-curtained windows have deep embrasures; a fresh, thick, pale-gray carpet quite covers the floor; on the mantelpiece is a bronze clock, a large Europa sitting on a small bull. I suspect _it_ is 1830. In one corner a commodious Louis XV _armoire_. On one of its doors is carved a peasant’s house and a hunter aiming at a deer half-hidden in some trees. On the other is a fishing scene and a bridge, and in the distance a château. The panels are inclosed in charming Pompadour scrolls, and there is an elaborate wrought-iron lock of the same period. It seemed to epitomize the life of Lorraine, as well as “the reign of the arts and talents.” Discovered last night that the electric light is in the right place, so that a lady can dress for dinner or read in bed with equal facility. There is all the hot water one could wish, an open fireplace, but it was with a sigh that I said, as I heard the cannon, “_Rien ne manque_.” The maid, who had been in England, put our things out last night with a dainty touch, the ribbons on top; my pink satin négligé was placed with art across the chair by my bed. In E. M.’s room, equally comfortable, her pale-blue one was also tastefully displayed. Somehow, all the physical comfort is so insistently in contrast with what is being gone through with a few kilometers away, and though my soul can be supremely content without any of it, I looked for the moment with a new appreciation on this flicker of comfort behind that dreadful front.

Again we groped through the Place Léopold after dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s, feeling our way slowly under completely remote stars, Jupiter so gorgeous that for a moment my heart was afraid. Then I became sensible of ghostly and lovely companions, the amiable secrets of whose amiable lives have been revealed to me in many a tome since I crossed that square in those linden-scented nights of June. Did linden scent, on which a long chapter could be written, have anything to do with their morals, I wonder? However that may be, I thought of Duke Léopold going from the château through the park to the house in the rue de Lorraine to see the Princesse de Craon, who bore twenty children here in Lunéville, preserving her beauty and her husband’s love, and that of Duke Léopold as well, evidently having the secret of squaring the circle without breaking it (unknown in the twentieth century, when everything “goes bang” if it is but breathed upon). Then of the wild and witty Chevalier de Boufflers, painting and making verses, loving and forgetting, whose mother, beloved of “_Stanislas, Roi de Pologne et Duc de Lorraine et de Bar_,” was the bright particular star of Stanislas’s Court, as his grandmother had been of Léopold’s. And how often _La divine Emilie_ and Voltaire passed through the Place Léopold in their coach to be put up at the Palace and contribute to the gaiety of nations. They and many others filled the square, and I was thinking of discreet sedan-chairs coming from rendezvous rather than of the uncompromised and uncompromising lamp-post that finally got me, minus the light.

Now I quite dislike getting up from this literally downy couch, with its dainty pink-lined, lace-trimmed, white-muslin covered eiderdown and its heaps of soft pillows, to investigate further their _amours_, and in general the _arts et talents_ of the eighteenth century, but so I willed it, and so it must be done. For some reason nervous energy is at a low ebb. There are moments when I throw my life out of the window, when nothing seems impossible and most things quite easy, but to-day the gray world outside, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, I would consider well lost for converse with a beloved friend by my fireside.

_October 12th._

Nothing to be found in Lunéville on an October night except your soul, and if you don’t keep it fairly bright, you won’t find even that. Oh, woe is me! about six o’clock mine was suddenly too dark and sad for words, so I betook me to the downy couch of the morning, with a batch of letters and various books given me by M. Guérin at lunch, some old, some new, concerning _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_. The Hôtel des Vosges is ahead of any Ritz that was ever built, and, what’s more, in it your soul’s your own, even if it is a poor and dark and trembling thing.

My “_Symphonie Pastorale_” letter to —— returned to me. Have just reread it and pinned it into the Journal. It’s all part of the same.

AIX-LES-BAINS, _vendredi, 27 août, 1917_.

... The orchestra, pale, emasculated, having the minimum of strings—the musicians of France are dead or in the trenches—seemed without accent during the first part of the program. “_La Chasse du Jeune Henri_” of Méhul, “_Les Eolides_” of César Franck, something of Grétry, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, _enfin_, one of the usual war-time programs. But then followed the “_Symphonie Pastorale_” and the master’s voice suddenly swelled the thin sounds, triumphant in the beauty of his order and splendor.

A.—(_Sensations agréables en arrivant à la Campagne. Allégro ma non troppo._) I felt myself invaded by a familiar but long-untasted delight as my ear received the gorgeous consonances, and the lovely theme of the violins drew me to an interior place. My fancy was set a-wandering in a world of green glades, and broad meadows covered with asphodel and belladonna and fringed by dark plantings of pines, such as the master had wandered in, and “upon my eyes there lay a tear the dream had loosened from my brain.” In deep serenity I found myself thinking on appearances of “things wise and fair,” feeling myself in some way included in a company of paradisaical beings.

Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation succeeded the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful scene, like to the lunar landscape of the battle-field of Verdun, and I knew that my dwelling-place was a world of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the invading horror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling of suffocation clutched my throat, and a something burning wrapped my soul. Delight was dead.

B.—(_Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto._) The master spoke again, in a voice of purling water over smooth stones and through soft grasses; the music of the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the beauty of the exterior world tried to communicate itself to me. But my eyes fell on a white-haired man seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a start and groan, and was doubtless thinking on combat and empty places and “heroes struggling with heroes and above them the wrathful gods.”

And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and nameless sacrifices and children at evening and silent firesides, and broken loves and other visible and invisible things.

C.—(_Joyeuse réunion de Paysans. Allégro._) Expressing the master’s deep belief in the goodness of humanity, its deathless adorations, its inextinguishable hopes.

But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here in Savoy, and husbands and fathers and sons will cross their thresholds no more. “The ancients have ceased from the gates, the young men from the choir of the singers.”

I sat by the stream among the peasants and remembered suddenly two combatants, an Austrian and a Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that first winter of the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the ground, and when he was brought in they were black and swollen, and as I saw him he was but a trunk of a man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with something wild and burning in his look, and restless hands, had fallen with his feet in a stream, and he, too, would walk no more; and so one thinks of brooks and sweet, moving waters these days.

(_Orage—Tempête. Allégro._) The sudden D flat, the world in noise and horror and protesting hate, and hard, bright-eyed men meeting from East and West, the sons of the world falling for the sins of the world; and there is no way out, for all words save that of peace may be spoken. And I thought on the loneliness of the mind, and knew it for as great or greater than that of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these are of such abundance that there are always contacts. But the loneliness of the mind is a world where there is scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices call, and sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to _you_ to-night.

I listened again. (_Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance après l’orage. Allegretto._) And I suddenly realized how unsubstantial, for all their thickness, are the towers wherein each dwells isolated from some near happiness, shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving touch might be his own. And I found that the completed harmonies of the lovely finale, “_Herr, wir danken Dir_,” were seeking my mortal ear, and my soul was being regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from untimely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life who go up to battle, and from all the company of those who “have wrapped about themselves the blue-black cloud of death,” and I saw again visions, felicities, progressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with lovely, veiled, outcast, undesired Peace, accompanied me through the warm Savoyan night. But they left me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed _concierge_ saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols of my real world) took me up-stairs. Now I am alone with thoughts of him who gave to melody its eternal fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would that you had listened with me!... You who will not, Peace!...

M. Guérin’s book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, _en permission_, with a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel ——, and several other men. Mr. G., whose family have been part owners of the Lunéville porcelain-factories for one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and afterward, over our coffee by his library fire, we talked politics and literature and music. I had just been reading Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_, not at all in favor just now, which I had picked up on her centenary.

“_Une exaltée_,” said one of the officers.

“That is not enough to say of one who always had the courage of her convictions,” I answered, and recalled the conversation between her and Benjamin Constant when under the Consulate he threw himself into the opposition.

“_Voilà_,” he said, “_votre salon rempli de personnes qui vous plaisent; si je parle demain, il sera désert; pensez-y_.”[14]

And she answered, “_Il faut suivre sa conviction_.”

“She certainly followed out her convictions; but what did Madame de Staël know of the Germans?” pursued the colonel. “She saw them in the quite factitious setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by the play of mind. Those _beaux esprits_ presented the character and the future of their race, through rose-colored clouds of Romanticism, to one of the most charming and gifted women another race had ever produced, _et puis elle rentre et elle écrit de l’Allemagne! Cela serait comique si ce n’était pas si triste._”

“Don’t you think both sides played up,” I asked, “at those Weimar suppers? She was under the charm of philosophers and musicians, and they under the charm of her wit and appreciation. I keep thinking how they all enjoyed it—and how those black eyes flashed under the heavy red-and-gold turban.”

“Without doubt it was more than agreeable. I only complain that she was in a position to mislead succeeding generations, and did so. She seems to have had no _flair_, and because she got the personal enthusiasm, the hot striking of mind against mind, that was at once her gift and her delight, she glorifies a nation that later makes furious attempts to destroy hers.”

I then remarked, but a bit warily: “Talking of centenaries, I have just had in my hands the discourse of Wagner on the centenary of Beethoven. It has fire.”

“We won’t talk of Wagner, the mere memory of a phrase scorches one’s ear. Beethoven, yes, for all time, but we French can’t listen to Wagner now. He’s like a hot iron on seared flesh—or a rake in a wound. We want nothing more to do with the Lohengrins and the Tannhäusers and the Siegfrieds. I only wish they had been annihilated with their Walhalla.”

“These beings, however, were potential in the German race. Madame de Staël got their projections, together with the metaphysics of Goethe and his contemporaries, and carried away with her the memory of a blue-eyed people lost in metaphysical dreams, passionately loving poetry and music.”

“Yes, and presented them to us as an example of all the social virtues. Look at history,” said another officer, with a gesture toward the east.

One _can_ talk of other things besides the booming of cannon, even in Lunéville—but not with complete pleasure.

Then E. M. and I departed to take a _tournée_ about the country. But the Ford reposing in the Guérins’ garage was completely unresponsive; it might have been dead. It appears it hates cold weather. A dozen officers are billeted in the Guérins’ house; two of their orderlies and the butler tried to crank it. The only signs of life were in the handle, which from time to time flew round with extraordinary rapidity. We called out to one not-over-cautious soldier, “Be careful; you will break your arm.”

He only answered:

“If that happens I shall have two or three months of tranquillity.” And that’s how _he_ felt anent the breaking of his arm!

At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by the meadows of the silent crosses, skirting the hill of Léomont, with its great scars of 1914 shell-holes, beneath which is a little village with the strange name of Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it was once “Antelucus” (before the sacred grove), and afterward was a dependence of the priory of Léomont built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. Then we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road leading to Crévic. Great stretches of Lorraine, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, were flung out before us under rain-clouds and sunbursts—lovely stretches, with fields of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of red-stemmed osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root in which women and old men and little children were working, piling high red-white mounds or separating the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles.

Crévic is shot to bits. Of the château of General Lyautey[15] but a few crumbling walls remain. Though the piles of stones and mortar are covered with the green of three summers’ growth, still the cannon are booming to the east and north. The perfectly banal church is intact. People were walking about the streets and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes, and there seemed many very little children. We passed out over an old bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great curtain of rain hung to the west near Dombasle, the smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught and held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and there were other great stretches of unspeakable beauty, soft, rolling, and radiant—crying out about the generations that have bent over them.

The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely destroyed church of pure Gothic that workmen are at last roofing over; but three winters have already passed over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go out through the village in the direction of Dombasle, and suddenly against some gorgeous masses of clouds we see an _avion de chasse_, “type Nieuport,” as E. M., who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial, tells me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch pinning two gray velvety curtains together, where a ray of blinding light falls. Then it makes a series of marvelous _vrilles_, and I say to her, “How can men who do that love finite woman?” A great observation balloon, _saucisse_, hung in the sky, and another broad shaft of light lay on the far hills behind which lie intrenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets.

At this moment a _panne_. The only thing in sight is a long line of war-supply wagons drawn by tired horses, and women and old men and children bending over their eternal piles of beet-root. But E. M. said, “Sooner than change that tire, I’ll bury the Ford by the road.” So we bumped and crawled along till we met a line of _camions_. The first was driven by a handsome, tall, very small-handed, extremely polite Frenchman, who knew Fords, having been four months with Piatt Andrew at the Field Service Ambulance in the rue Raynouard, and who agreed to change it for us.

A hail-storm, like a pelting of diamonds, as sudden bursts of light caught it, came up in the middle of the operation, which was finally completed with expressions of mutual satisfaction. The shining storm was withdrawn like a curtain, showing the sun on the great stretches, and Dombasle with the smoke of its hundred chimneys was a thing of inexpressible beauty, while behind it were the great towers of St.-Nicolas du Port, for which we decided to make a dash. We got into it, through Dombasle, as a perfect rainbow rose from the Meurthe and disappeared into the horizon, where the gray-clad men with the pointed helmets are intrenched.

“For luck,” said E. M.

But I asked, “Whose luck?” the rainbow evidently being neutral.

We had some difficulty in finding anything but the towers of the church. There is no square in front; tiny streets encircle it on all sides. But we at last got into the narrow street in front of the cathedral, which is called “_Des Trois Pucelles_,” in memory of the three young girls to whom St.-Nicolas gave a _dot_. I was not alone in remembering that he is the patron saint of those contemplating matrimony.

The church is of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and among the largest of the Gothic churches of Lorraine. Swelling-breasted pigeons with gorgeous pink and red and green and purple upon their throats were nestled against the beautiful carvings of the gray portals, and much soft cooing was going on. Above the central door, in the _trumeau_, is a statue of the saint said to have been done by the brother of Ligier Richier, and I thought of the lovely Gothic fireplace by Ligier Richier himself taken from St.-Mihiel, and now at Ochre Court in Newport.

Noble interior, though the pillars have had the beautiful sharpness of their chiseling blunted by much painting and whitewashing. There are remains of early frescoes on some of the croisillons, and near a door I found a tiny, ancient painting representing scenes in the life of St.-Nicolas, inclosed in glass in a modern varnished wooden frame. Somewhere in the pavement of the church is a certain potent slab, and she who steps upon it is married within the year. Its exact position is not known, but I told E. M. to take an exhaustive walk about and commend herself to heaven and the saint.

When we came out into the ancient streets the western sky was aflame and there were translucent pale greens ahead of us. We turned again toward the open road and Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century. Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, followed by the great bishops and the builder-monks, who constructed the immense abbeys and the churches of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilderness had become what I saw it that afternoon. From the chimneys of its munition-factories, against the amber sky, there poured and twisted a wonder of gray and white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darkening, soot-blackened streets were overflowing with human energies spilling themselves into the greedy war-machine. There are vast monotonous workingmen’s quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being trampled in the wine-press....

It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of the _maire_, Mr. Keller, the celebrated house where the Prince de Beauvau was born, where the beautiful Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, where the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in 1801, and where, in 1914, the _maire_ lodged the generals of the German army. Madame was still at her hospital, so we left our cards and came back to the hotel.

Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this pleasant room to motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is the program. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s blowing, but I bethink me of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, and those other saints, St.-Eucarius and St.-Loup, starting out in all kinds of weather, and of the _œuvre_ that we are to visit, founded last summer for children gathered in 1917 from villages where there had been bad gas attacks. The history of Lorraine piles high about me—the cannon boom. What a day to lie with your life’s blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields.... The motor horn sounds.