CHAPTER V

VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN

Out of Lunéville over the muddy Vesouze, through the Place Brûlée, and onto a pasty road, E. M. driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded love. As we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then turned his back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, for all the world like the tales of the famous dwarf Bébé, during years the delight of the Court of Stanislas.

Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest yellow or red, as the sun fell on them through rifts in dark clouds, and many women, old men, and children were working in wet beet-root fields, among little groupings of black crosses....

We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. Such a change! Before reaching it, instead of the skeleton outline of homes one now sees orderly rows of red roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary, pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. (Miss Polk), had got suddenly to a point where it began to show, though the finished houses will be too damp for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other things, must await the spring.

Everywhere in the streets the busy work of reconstruction is proceeding. Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont are coming and going, helping with masonry, bringing in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always lived there; not _en passant par la Lorraine_. It’s a very human document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as far as they are concerned, when they leave a village they only change their residence. For the women the thing is much more serious. _They_ get a change of regiment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail of the war. Things in Vitrimont were simply taking their inevitable course. Nothing is held back for long, with the generations pressing thick and fast. Black-aproned children with books on their backs, to whom E. M. gave little slabs of chocolate, were coming from the new school-house. Old men were hobbling about, and women bending over embroidery frames, in houses often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. In the old days Lorraine furnished beautiful damasks and gold galloons and laces to Paris and Versailles.

We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman was just taking from its frame a beautiful beaded bag such as one would buy very, very dear in the Rue de la Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the light falling on her pale, withered face, wearing a great black-bowed head-dress, a yellow cat in her lap. It was an _intérieur_ that would have done honor to any great museum.

We visited Mlle. Antoine, living in a reconstructed street named after a Polish prince. She escaped to Lunéville with her servant on the day of the entry of the Germans into the village, August 23, 1914, fleeing through the ancient forest, but returned to her Lares and Penates a few days afterward with German passes. She represents culture in the village, and is clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, but with two red spots on her cheeks—she is fighting off consumption by living out of doors with her chickens and live stock, in sabots and apron and shawl. A beautiful old desk was in her living-room, and there was a discussion as to whether it was Louis XVI or Directoire, but under any name one would have loved to possess it. The windows looked out onto the inevitable dung-heap, but beyond were bronzing forests, and, in between, fields the color of semi-precious stones.

[Illustration: MISS POLK’S WEDDING

The Comtesse de Buyer (Miss Polk) on the arm of Monsieur Mirman, Prefect of the Meurthe et Moselle, after her wedding at Vitrimont, September, 1917.]

Hearing the sound of music as we passed the church, we went in and found some young girls were practising a “_Credo_,” clustered about the little organ, and wearing brooches with a device of thistle and double Lorraine cross that Madame de Buyer had given them on her wedding-day. I looked again upon the lovely old fifteenth-century vaulting, fully restored, shifting my eye hurriedly from the hideous but seemingly imperishable dado with its design of painted folds of cloth. At the door the little holy water fonts, formed of shells held upon two heads of seraphim, gave me a thrill of joy—and sadness, too, that beauty is so perishable.

Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways were muddy beneath the leafless trees. Bead crosses and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums decorated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the dead. I stood by a breach in the wall near the grave of “_Charles Carron, musicien, souvenir d’un camarade, 31 août, 1914_,” looking out toward the forest of Vitrimont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; more jasper and amethyst and Chrysoprase and cornelian fields rolled gently in between it and me. There was the band of yellow like a Greek border to a garment in the western sky—only that and nothing more, yet some beauty and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and woodcock, gray pheasant and larks, were flying about, and some strongly marked black-and-white magpies were pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked myself again, “What is it that stamps Lorraine with such beauty?” General de Buyer told me that when Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, “_C’est trop vert_,” and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian Isles, it would seem too green. But I saw, returning there in autumn, that the soul of Lorraine, _l’élégante et douleureuse_, is like unto tarnished silver, with its grays, yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has suffered, hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places have been devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. And I knew that one must see it in autumn, beneath the wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with their hints of color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious earth—and, in between, the beat of the human heart.

It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving light of ages. Those secular beeches, that I had first seen in their tenderest green, had become a brilliant yellow, and were turned to the south. The great bronze oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as those of the human beings passing beneath them. In all these forests round about Vitrimont, Parroy, and Mondon the legendary lords of the country hunted; the roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman highways which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Trèves, from Toul to Metz, and again from Langres to Strasburg. The name Lunéville emerges out of the night of the tenth century in the person of Étienne, Bishop of Toul, successor of St.-Gérard, and Folmar I, Count of Lunéville, was married to Sparhilde, descended from Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost any one who respects himself in these parts talks quite casually of being descended from Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or René the Victorious, as a Boston man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar’s hunting-lodge was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes to get from Lunéville to Vitrimont. In time it was transformed into a château, and around it grew a village, which in turn became a fortified town, then the capital of Léopold and Stanislas.

I stood for a long time by that 1914 breach in the wall, and the grave of _Charles Carron, musicien_, looking out over the rolling fields in the late October afternoon, migrating birds passing against the amber sky, red vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and beeches; near me was a tangle of wild-plum bushes, stiffened blackberry-vines, and dried ramie. All except the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was in sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, russet, jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow rivers, slipping between bushes of osier and plum, and somewhere there is a slower, nigrescent canal scarcely a-move between willows and poplars. And those men who are out there where that dull thunder is!...

I thought how often in her history the men that hunted in her forests or tilled her fields had reddened them with their blood, or, buried in them, had increased the harvests, fighting now against one invader, now another, being continually thrown back from power to power like a ball, with nothing changeless save the changelessness of their changing destiny—and its unescapableness.

And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine prince, the Crusades began, and under a duke of Lorraine, Charles V, they ended. And of the holy glory of Jeanne d’Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, of the covenant of our own men.

I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely of the natural world.

As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of that band of lemon. The western sky became a vast ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat in it. The red roofs of Lunéville were transfigured, a crimson glow was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, outlined against a blue-white eastern sky. But only for a few minutes. The streets of Lunéville were already dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs.

We stopped for tea at the house of Madame —— on the outskirts of the town. It had been occupied by the Germans that first August, and in one of the _salons_ was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not replastered or papered. “They” had rolled up her rugs and given them to her, and she and her four young daughters had lived in the upper stories during the occupation, and seen war very close from their windows. The only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I think, was missing. In the cellars and in the garden, whose walls are still breached and broken, dead and wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had lain.

The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young aviators were there for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely linked, threaded the black streets to the Hôtel des Vosges. And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn.