Part 20
On the 7th of September, 1661, as night was falling, a company of musketeers crossed the drawbridge of the Castle of Angers. Scarcely had they entered the fortress when these musketeers expelled the garrison. This was the King’s order. A sub-lieutenant commanded these men: it was d’Artagnan. A prisoner had been confided to him: this was Nicholas Fouquet. The superintendent’s servant, La Vallée, and his physician, Pecquet, taking pity upon Fouquet, who was the prey of a quartan fever, obtained leave to share his captivity. The Castle then had shut within it three prisoners, who were subjected to the most rigorous treatment. We know by the official account of Fouquet’s detention that the bed in which he had to sleep on the 7th of September “was not of the cleanest.” Now for the rest, d’Artagnan, and his two officers, Saint Mars and Saint Leger, maintained an extreme reserve towards their guests. There is no news from outside. Pecquet, before leaving Nantes, had, it is true, fortuitously met Gourville. It was from him that Pecquet got the news of the arrest of Pellisson and the exile of Madame Fouquet. Sorrowful presage! The accused one began first of all to prepare his defence. He wrote several memoirs, but at the end of a few days, writing was prohibited. The president of Chalain, suspected of having wished to bribe a musketeer was also apprehended to be conducted to the Bastille. Louis XIV., Colbert, Le Tellier, and Séguier kept their eyes fixed on Angers. Fouquet lived there until the first of December, having no other pastime between his two attacks of fever than to contemplate with a melancholy look “_la fillette du Roi_.” This was the name by which they designated an iron cage, in which, according to legend, a queen of Sicily had been shut up by her husband “for having built the church of Saint-Maurice at Angers too magnificently.” This legend was not calculated to reassure the Superintendent. He knew that he was accused precisely of having used the money of the Treasury to build Vaux-le-Vicomte, the magnificence of which had offended the King. If, through misfortune, the thought of keeping him under such good guard, between these bars, had entered the heads of his enemies, of what advantage was the little bit of liberty that he still enjoyed? Moreover, he was not unaware of the refinements of cruelty that had been practiced for the past two centuries upon the prisoners of State. The “_fillette du Roi_,” made at the order of Louis XI., had not been empty at any period. Had not Cardinal Balue, bishop of Angers, known this instrument of torture at the _Château d’Onzain_, near Blois? Fouquet might well be afraid, for there entered perhaps far more passion than justice in his disgrace. They did not go so far, however, as to put him in a cage. The vigilance and the loyalty of d’Artagnan, and the thickness of the walls of the Castle seemed to Fouquet’s enemies, a sufficient safeguard against all danger of his escape. What is then the Castle of Angers?
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF ANGERS, FRANCE.]
Péan de la Tuilerie--the _d’Argenville angevin_--comes to tell us. “The Castle is at one of the extremities of the city, on a rock, and surrounded with deep moats, cut in the rock, which is an escarpment on the bank of a river that flows at its base, and from which they lift, by means of a very convenient machine, all the munitions which are necessary. It is of a triangular form, all built of slate and flanked by eighteen round towers and a crescent, which is the gate of the faubourg.”
Péan de la Tuilerie wrote in 1778. His description is still very nearly exact. To speak the truth, this military post forms less of a triangle than a pentagon, but the appearance of the Castle remains what it was in the last century. The girdle of moats has been, however, a little changed. The Maine rolls no longer beneath its towers. It is not, as you will readily believe, that the course of the river has been turned. To change the position of the fortress would have been difficult. They considered it simpler to fill up the canal. Some factories, some counting-houses, and some private dwellings occupy the place of the moat, and the traveller seeks vainly at the present moment for that “very convenient machine,” of which Péan speaks. Moreover, it would be useless. The Castle has no more need of munitions. English, Bretons and Normans have left it. Their attacks are ended. Angers ignores to-day those savage incursions and perpetual threats, which for several centuries, troubling its repose, kept its independence in check. Then the Castle had to sustain repeated sieges. The silence that envelops it has grown out of the clank of arms and the cries of the combatants, who many times made this stone colossus tremble to its very foundations. Ah! the noble rampart of the city! Its great days and its glorious past, haunt my memory.
Who chose its site? Count Eudes, under the royal approbation of Charles the Bald. The Plantagenets seem to have embellished and fortified the north turret of the building, but it is to Louis IX. that the primitive castle is indebted to its transformation into a military post. Its imposing towers, firmly planted on their bases of schist, are the work of Louis IX. Its large canals hollowed out of the slate date from the last years of the Fifteenth Century. They give character to the citadel. You judge it most impregnable in measuring the depth of its moats with your eye; but how many times had the enemy been repulsed by the rain of projectiles thrown from the Castle?
In 1444, the English approached the city. They ravaged the country mercilessly, and pillaged and ruined according to their good pleasure. The army encamped near the fortress, intending to open the siege on the following day. On the following day the English troops took their departure. What could have been the cause of their retreat? One of the English chiefs was hit in the forehead by a shot and instantly killed. This occasioned such confusion that the assailants fled. An artilleryman thus saved the city.
The Fifteenth Century was, moreover, the great epoch for the Castle of Angers. Louis XI., profound politician and crafty of action, meditated upon uniting the Duchy of Anjou to the crown of France. This was shown on two occasions. The second time, the Prince being at war with Bretagne had levied previously upon the city of Angers for subsidies for his troops. He came again. Behnard Guillaume Cerizay, his secretary, and three chamberlains entered Angers. They convoked and consulted with the notables. At this time _plébiscites_ were unknown. People did not have the character to defend their rights and their interests. They were minors. But if the Angevin populace could have spoken, it would not have spoken better than its representatives. The notables chose for France. “The assembly,” wrote M. Port, “through the voice of the Chancellor of Anjou, pledged its faith to the King. On the following day, Louis XI. had come to the Castle offering a favourable reply to all requests, granting to the most zealous petitions leave to have a house in the city.” The Castle in which this act of submission to the King of France took place, was formerly the property of the Duc d’Anjou, who was at the same time Count of Provence and King of Sicily, René, son of Yolande, poet, amateur, bibliophile, collector, and patron of poets, sculptors, goldsmiths, tapestry-workers and illuminators who filled his court,
“_René le prince populaire, Doux artiste aux yeux éblouis Des peintres que, pour lui plaire Lui fait offrir le roi Louis._”
It was at the Castle of Angers, in a kind of little manor-house flanked by four turrets, that René first saw the light on the 16th of January, 1409. The Maugine was his nurse in the citadel, the Maugine, Tiphaine, to whom in after years he erected a tomb, the touching inscription upon which is from his hand. Married at the age of twelve to Isabelle de Lorraine, René d’Anjou, fighting everywhere for twenty-five years, made only rare appearances at the Castle of Angers; but soon comes the death of Isabelle and upon it quickly follows the second marriage of the prince with Jeanne de Laval, upon which he establishes his residence at Angers. Farewell war, diplomacy, treaties and conquests! René yields himself up to the charm of his young wife. To her the poet consecrates his loving stanzas of _Regnault and Jeanneton_, a kind of autobiography of the husband and wife. _The Shepherd and the Shepherdess_, a delicate pastorale composed in honour of Jeanne de Laval, will be put into its final form under the skies of Provence, at Tarascon; but it is in the Angevin country that the poet finds all his ideas as he strolls at the side of the beautiful Jeanne. The writers of the time show us René going out of the Castle without escort, accompanied solely by his royal spouse, and taking the _chemin de la Baumette_. After passing through the field-gate, the illustrious personages got into a fisherman’s boat below the _Basse-Chaîne_, and descended the Maine to that solitary hermitage, where Rabelais will presently come to study at the Cordeliers.
It is also from this Castle that René d’Anjou issues to cross his “beautiful city” on foot to his dear hermitage, where he loved to consort “with the citizens of Angers, the artists and the men of learning of his Court.”
René disappeared; Louis XI. reigned. A century elapsed. Henri III. yielded to the request of the common people of the city who wished for the destruction of the Castle. The citadel suffered. Letters patent from the King authorized the governor of Anjou to “raze to the ground the stones of all the walls, towers, lodgings, buildings and fortifications of the Castle.” Already the workmen are called. Who will direct this barbarous piece of work? Donadieu, Sieur de Puycharic, claims this honour. Puycharic is the governor of the Castle. They grant his wish. But a man of heart, a soldier, can he conscientiously annihilate the ramparts of a city? This military post of which he is the keeper has its past of glorious traditions. It is worthy of respect. Its services, it seems to him, ought to be taken into consideration. This is what Puycharic thought aside, and for ten years--you have read of this--for ten years--with clever ingenuity, Puycharic kept his army of destroyers busy without destroying anything. He yielded to the necessities of the hour by demolishing the outside buildings of the Castle which he had inherited from his predecessors; a garden pavilion, built by Louisa of Savoy, disappeared; the field-gate, whose defence was difficult, was altered; two useless towers lost their turrets, and in proportion as the waggons full of stones left the Castle, the common people exulted, proud of their success. From time to time, it is true, public opinion complained of the slowness of the workmen at the town’s expense. “Isolated during the troubles,” M. Port has said of him, “in the heart of the Angevin league, the valiant captain was not merely satisfied to guard the place but bravely attacked the foe in the field, one day the Lion d’Angers, another Brissac, Rochefort, Beaupreau, and Chemillé, fighting for about ten years in every kind of warlike adventure, fought against and fighting, holding the country in hand and preparing the place for the King.” His headquarters were at the Castle. It was here that he rallied his men and came to heal his wounds between encounters. Peace being restored, Puycharic, being appointed senechal of Anjou, dismissed his workmen, who were greatly astonished and perhaps greatly pleased at having repaired, embellished and fortified the Castle that they thought they were pulling down.
Puycharic died in 1605. His funeral was magnificent. He rests in the chapel of the Jacobins; and his brothers, the bishops of Saint-Papoul and d’Auxerre erected to his memory a monument surmounted by his statue.
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE
G. W. STEEVENS
Southward out of Madras you still run through the new India, the old India of the nursery. Now it is vivid with long grass, now tufted with cotton, then dark-green with stooping palm-heads or black with firs; anon brown with fallow, blue with lakes and lagoons, black with cloud-shadowing pools starred with white water-lilies. Presently red hills break out of the woods, then sink again to sweeping pastures dotted only with water-hoists and naked herdsmen.
Then in the placid landscape you are almost startled by the sight of monuments of religion. A tall quadrangular pyramid, its courses lined with rude statues, a couple of half-shaped human figures, ten times human size, a ring of colossal hobby-horses sitting on their haunches like a tea-party in Wonderland--they burst grotesquely out of meadow and thicket, standing all alone with the soil and the trees. No worshippers, no sign of human life near them, no hint of their origin or purpose--till you almost wonder whether they are artificial at all, and not petrified monsters from the beginning of the world.
[Illustration: THE PAGODA OF TANJORE, INDIA.]
These are the outposts of the great pagodas of Southern India--those sublime monstrosities which scarce any European ever sees, which most have never heard of, but which afford perhaps the strongest testimony in all India at once to the vitality and the incomprehensibility of Hinduism. The religion that inspired such toilsome devotion must be one of the greatest forces in history; yet the Western mind can detect neither any touch of art in the monuments themselves nor any strain of beauty in the creed. Both command your respect by their size: that which is so vast, so enduring, can hardly, you tell yourself, be contemptible. And still you can see nothing in the temples but misshapen piles of uncouthness, nothing in the religion but unearthly superstitions, half meaningless and half foul.
The nearest approach to a symmetrical building is the great pagoda of Tanjore. Long before you near the gate you see its tall pyramidal tower, shooting free above crooked streets and slanting roofs. Presently you see the lower similar towers, so far from the first that you would never call them part of the same building. In reality they are the outer and inner gateways--_gopura_ is their proper name--built in diminishing courses, garnished with carving and statuary. From a distance the massive solemnity of their outlines, the stone lace of their decorations, strike you with an overwhelming assertion of rich majesty. But you are in India, and you wait for the inevitable incongruity.
It comes at the very gate. The entrance is not under the stately gopura, but under a screen and scaffolding of lath and plaster daubed with yellow and green grotesqueness--men with lotus-eyes looking out of their temples, horses with heads like snakes, and kings as tall as elephants. There is to be a great festival in a day or two, explains the suave Brahman; therefore the gopuras are boarded up with pictures beside which the tapestries of our pavement-artists are truth and beauty. You walk through scaffold-poles into a great square round the great tower, and with reverence they show you that colossal monolith, the great bull of Tanjore. I wish I could show you a picture of him, for words are unequal to him. In size he stands, or rather sits, thirty-eight hands two. His material is black granite, but it is kept so piously anointed with grease that he looks as if he were made of toffee. In attitude he suggests a roast hare, and he wears a half-smug, half-coquettish expression, as if he hoped that nobody would kiss him.
From this wonder you pass to the shrines of the chief gods. The unbeliever may not enter, but you stand at the door while a man goes along the darkness with a flambeau. The light falls on silk and tinsel, and by faith you can divine a seated image at the end. Next you are at the foot of the great tower, and the ridiculous has become the sublime again. Every story is lined with serene-faced gods and goddesses, dwindling rank above rank, a ladder of deities that seems to climb half-way up to heaven. Then the Brahman shows you a stone bull seated on the ground, like a younger brother of the great one. “It is in existence,” he says, throwing out his words in groups, dispassionately, as though somebody else were speaking and it were nothing at all to do with him--“it is in existence--to show the dimensions--of four other bulls--which are in existence--up there.” You lay your head back between your shoulder-blades, and up there, at the very top, among gods so small that you wonder whether they are gods or only panels or pillars, are four more little brothers of the hare-shaped toffee-textured monster below.
Reduplication is the keynote of Hindu art. The same bulls everywhere, the same gods everywhere, and all round the cloistered outer wall scores on scores of granite, fat-dripping, flower-crowned emblems, so crudely shapeless that you forget their gross significance--but all absolutely alike. Next the Brahman leads you aside to piles and piles of what look like overgrown, gaudily painted children’s toys. This is an exact facsimile of the Tower, reduced and imitated in wood. It is all in pieces, but at the festival the parts are fitted together and carried on a car. Every god sculptured on the pyramid is represented in a section of this model, waiting to be fitted into his place. Only what is richly mellow in tinted stone is garishly tawdry in king’s yellow and red lead--and again you tumble from the sublime to the infantile.
Next, a little shrine that is a net of the most delicate carving--stone as light and fantastic as wood; pillar and panel, moulding and cornice, lattice and imagery, all tapering gracefully till they become miniatures at the summit. It is a gem of exquisite taste and patient labour. And the very next minute you are again among flaming red and yellow dragon-tigers and duck-peacocks, and the one is just as holy and just as beautiful to its worshippers as the other. From which objects of veneration the Brahman passes lightly to the domestic life of the frescoed rajahs of Tanjore. “This gentleman--marry seventeen wives--all one day--doubtless in anxiety of getting son.” It is quite true. The Rajah, having but three wives and no child, resolved to marry six more young ladies, and collected seventeen to choose them from. But the fathers and brothers of the rejected eleven were affronted; and rather than have any unpleasantness on his wedding-day, his Majesty tactfully married the whole seventeen, nine in the morning and eight in the afternoon. “And here,” pursued the Brahman automatically, showing a tank, “he will let in water--and here he will play--with all his females--and all that.”
That is all, except to write your name in the visitor’s book. As I went in to sign, I noticed a band of musicians standing at the door and thought no more of it. But as my pen touched the paper, suddenly reedy pipes and discordant fiddles and heady tom-toms began to play “God Save the Queen.” A huge chaplet of muslin and tinsel, like a magnified Christmas-tree stocking, was cast about my neck; betel and attar-of-rose were brought up in silver vessels, and flowers and fruits on silver trays. The pagoda keeps its character to the end: the compliment was sublime--and I ridiculous.
Yet the temple of Tanjore is the most simple and orderly of all its kind. Visit the great pagoda of Madura and you will come out mazed with Hinduism. All its mysteries and incongruities, its lofty metaphysics and its unabashed lewdness, seem to brood over the dark chambers and crannying passages. The place is enormous. Over the four chief gateways rise huge pyramid-towers, coloured like harlequins, red tigers jostling the multiplied arms and legs of blue and yellow gods and goddesses so thick that the gopuras seem built of them. In the pure sunlight you almost blush for their crudity, just as you would blush if the theatre roof were lifted off during a matinée. But inside the place is nearly all half-lighted, dim, and cryptic. You go through a labyrinth, that seems endless, of dark chambers and aisles. Now you are in thick blackness, now in twilight, now the sun falls on fretwork over pillared galleries and damp-smelling walls. But as the light falls on the pillar you start, for it is carved into the shape of an elephant-headed Ganesh, or a conventionally high-stepping Shiva. On you go, from maze to maze, till there is no more recollection of direction or guess at size: you are lost in an underground world of gods that are half devils; you hardly distinguish the silent-footed, gleaming-eyed attendants from the stone figures. Some of the fantastic images are smeared with red-lead to simulate blood: all drip with fat. A heavy smell of grease and stagnant tank-water loads your lungs.
You feel that you are bewitched--lost and helpless among unclean things. When you come out into the sun and the cleaner dirt of the town, you draw long breaths. If you could understand the Hindu religion, you tell yourself, you would understand the Hindu mind. But that, being of the West, you never, never will.
THE VENDRAMIN-CALERGI
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
Following a vagabond method, let us regain the Grand Canal and give some details upon the Vendramin Palace, now occupied by the Duchesse de Berry. It is of a rich and noble architecture, probably by Pietro Lombardo; in the entablature and above the windows, little cherubs uphold storied shields adorned with exquisite taste, and contribute much elegance to this façade. A garden of somewhat restricted space contributes some green trees alongside this palace, which would not be distinguished from the others if the large white and blue posts with ropes did not indicate, by means of the fleur-de-lis painted upon them, a princely and semi-royal dwelling.
After having obtained permission to visit this palace, _valets_ in green livery welcome you very politely at the base of the staircase, the steps of which are laved by the waters, fasten your boat to the posts, and take you into a vestibule, where you wait until all the formalities of admission are complied with.
This vestibule is just as long as the palace; it opens upon a kind of court similar to the courts of our hotels.
Two hitched gondolas and a few earthen pots containing small firs and other poor plants that are dying of thirst are all that adorn the bareness of this vast waiting-room that is found in every Venetian palace,--an antechamber that is also a landing-place.
[Illustration: THE VENDRAMIN, CALERGI, ITALY.]
In the centre of this vestibule, a little to the left, a wide stairway between two walls is seen where the same decoration of miserable plants appear. A narrow carpet covers the steps leading to an immense hall resembling a vestibule, without furniture and without adornment. From this, you enter the dining-room, the walls of which are hung with family portraits.
This is a long square room. It is very well lighted by two enormous French windows.
An oval table stands in the centre and a screen shields the entrance. Upon the wall to the right you notice the portrait of the Duchesse de Bourgogne in a blue velvet dress; also of the Comte d’Artois and Madame la Princesse de Lamballe and several others. Upon the left wall opposite, is the full length portrait of Louis XV., and on either side of him, his daughters.