Part 21

In this dining-room, a masked door opens into a dark chapel, so small that it will barely hold six persons. You can count four _Prie-Dieu_ there. On the right, a large door opens into a very modern drawing-room filled with pictures and a great number of small pieces of furniture: English tables, Parisian coffers,--nothing is lacking to produce that charming home-like feeling that is derived from luxurious trifles. Two portraits of Her Royal Highness are placed opposite one another; that by Lawrence in a dress of white satin, with a rose on her breast, exhibits the most charming little foot that can possibly be admired in a white satin slipper.

On walking through the dining-room, you enter, by a door on the left, a little salon, which seems relatively small after the preceding rooms, and perhaps overwhelmed by the sumptuous furniture that adorns it. It contains thirty splendid pictures; this is a kind of Uffizi or _Salon carré_, where scarcely one of the greatest names in painting is missing. Among these great masterpieces shines a Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, so beautiful that it would make cold chills run through the most elementary connoisseur and the most hide-bound and prosaic Philistine.

This Salon illumined by a soft and well distributed light, seems to me the select spot, the very heart of the building, and I left it with deep regret to go and visit the famous salon which contains those two porphyry columns whose value is so great that they are worth more than the entire palace. They are placed in front of a door, and thus produce as little effect as the lapis lazuli in the “Salon Serra” in Genoa, which you might well believe were painted and varnished, and which strongly resemble a metallic blue watered silk.

There is still another salon, but it is not remarkable in any way. In the four corners, four bracket pedestals support four busts: those of the Duc de Berry, of Charles X., and other members of the royal family.

The Vendramin-Calergi has gained an additional interest in recent years on account of the fact that Richard Wagner died in it on Feb. 13, 1883.--E. S.

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF THE OLD SERAGLIO, TURKEY.]

A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE

PIERRE LOTI

The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees; in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of day. The little Turkish _cafés_ begin to open, and two or three _minims_ are already being shaved in the open air under the trees.

It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with those warm little _bonbons_ that they sell here in the morning, and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast.

About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress.

These walls shut in a little corner of earth which is absolutely special and unique, and which is the extreme point of Oriental Europe,--a promontory that juts out towards neighbouring Asia, and which was, moreover, for many centuries, the residence of the Caliphs and a place of incomparable splendour. This, and the sacred suburb of Eyoub contain all that is most exquisite in Constantinople: this is the “Old Seraglio,”--a name that alone evokes a world of dreams.

They open for us a door in this wall, and, then, as soon as the barrier is passed, the delicious melancholy of interior things is revealed to us, and the dead Past takes us to itself and envelops us with its winding-sheet.

At first, there is silence and shadow. Empty, desolate courts, where the neglected grass pushes through the flag-stones and where still live ancient trees that were contemporaries of the magnificent sultans of former times: black cypresses as tall as towers, plane-trees which have acquired unwonted forms, all hollowed out by time, being supported only by immense shreds of bark and bent like old men.

Then come the galleries with colonnades in the ancient Turkish style, painted with strange frescoes, under which the great Solomon forced the ambassadors of the European kings to enter. And this place, happily never open to profane visitors, has not yet become a common promenade for tourists; behind the high walls, it preserves a little mysterious peace, it is all imprinted with the sadness of dead splendour.

Crossing these first courts, we have upon the right impenetrable gardens, where you see rising above the clumps of cypress old kiosks with closed windows,--the residences of imperial widows and aged princesses who wish to end their days here in this austere retreat in one of the most wonderful sites in the world.

It is all bathed in sunlight, all dazzling in tranquil light, the last portion of this walled-in spot to which we have now come,--the very last point of the Old Seraglio, and of Europe. It is a solitary esplanade, very elevated and very white, dominating the distant blue of the sea and of Asia. The clear morning sunlight inundates those depths of space out yonder, where the towns, the islets and the mountains are sketched out in light tints above the motionless sheet of Marmora.

Around us are old buildings also white, which contain all that is rarest and most precious in Turkey.

First the kiosk, forbidden to infidels, where the cloak of the Prophet is kept in a cover embroidered with jewels. Then the kiosk of Bagdad, the interior of which is entirely clothed in those old Persian faïences; which are priceless to-day: the branches of red flowers were made upon them with coral that they liquified by a process now lost and spread upon them like pigment.

Then the Imperial Treasury, very white also under its layers of whitewash and barred like a prison; and whose iron gates will be opened for me presently.

And finally, a palace, uninhabited, but well maintained, which we entered and sat down. Steps of white marble led us to the salons of the first floor, which were furnished about the middle of the last century in the European taste. They are of the Louis XV. style, to which an imperceptible mixture of Oriental singularity gives a special charm. The white and gold wainscots with old cherry or old lilac damask with white flowers show nothing but light tints mellowed by time. There are some large Sèvres and Chinese vases, and few other objects, but all of them are old and rare. Much space, air, and light, and a tranquil symmetry in the arrangement of everything--give a feeling of changelessness and neglect.

And there in a sort of sumptuous solitude, seated on these _fauteuils_ of a deliciously pale rose, before large open windows, we have from this last promontory of Europe, the splendid view that charmed the Sultans of the past. To our left, and very far below us, the Bosphorus spreads, furrowed with ships and caïques; the whiteness of the marble quays are reflected in it; the whiteness of the new imperial residences, Dolma Bagtche and Tcheragan, are mirrored inverted in long, pale lines; the row of palace and mosques is pictured magnificently upon its banks. Opposite is Asia, still bluish in the remaining drifts of the morning mist; it is Scutari, with its domes and minarets, with its immense cemetery and its forest of dark cypresses. To the right, the infinite expanse of Marmora;--distant steamboats are moving upon it, lost in all that diaphanous blue,--little grey silhouettes trailing delicate clouds of smoke.

How well it was chosen, this site, to dominate and watch from above that Turkey, seated superbly on two divisions of the world! And to-day, what peace and what melancholy splendour in this complete isolation from all the agitations of modern life, in this great silence of abandonment, under this clear and mournful sun!

When the guardian of the Treasury--an old man with a white beard--is ready to open the iron door with his enormous keys, twenty individuals come to form a hedge, ten to the right, ten to the left, on each side of the entrance.

We pass between this double row and enter the rather dark halls, into which they all follow us.

The cavern of Ali Baba could never have been filled with such wealth! For eight centuries they have been heaping up here the rarest jewels and the most astonishing marvels of art. As our eyes become rested from the outside sunlight, and get accustomed to the shadowy interior, the diamonds begin to sparkle everywhere. Things in profusion, without age or price, classified by species upon shelves. Arms of all periods, from Genghis Khan to Mahomet; weapons of silver and gold set with jewels. Then there are collections of golden coffers of all sizes and of all styles; some are covered with rubies, others with diamonds and others with sapphires; some of them are even cut out of a single emerald as big as an ostrich’s egg. Then there are services for coffee, for drinking, and ewers of antique and exquisite forms. And the stuffs fit for fays; the saddles; the harness, the housings of parade in brocades of gold and silver, embroidered and encrusted with flowers in precious stones; the large thrones made to sit upon cross-legged: all these in ruby and fine pearl together produce a rosy brilliancy; elsewhere, others covered with emeralds and brilliant in their green reflections, look as if bathed in sea-water.

In the last hall, there is waiting for us behind the windows a motionless and terrible company: twenty-eight _macabre_ dolls, of human size, standing up straight in a military row with their elbows touching each other. They all wear that high pear-shaped turban that has not been in use for a century, and which is only to be seen upon the catafalques of distinguished personages, in the twilight of mortuary kiosks, or carved upon the tombs--so that this kind of a turban is for me absolutely associated with the idea of death. Until the beginning of this century, whenever a sultan died, they brought here a doll clothed in the ceremonial robes of the dead sovereign, they placed marvellous arms in his belt, put on his turban, and his magnificent jewelled aigrette,--and it remained here forever covered with this eternally wasted wealth. The twenty-eight Sultans who succeeded each other from the capture of Constantinople until the end of the Seventeenth Century are standing here in their imperial robes in facsimile; slowly has the sombre and sumptuous assembly increased, new funeral dolls came one by one to range themselves in line with the old ones, who had awaited them for hundreds of years, sure of seeing them at last--and they are now touching each other’s elbows.

Their long robes are of the strangest brocades, with great mysterious designs whose tints are dimmed by time; priceless poignards with large handles made of a single precious stone, rust, notwithstanding the care, in the silken belts; it even seems that the enormous diamonds of the aigrettes have lost some of their fire, and shine with a yellowish and dulled light.

And this unheard of luxury, all powdered with dust, is sad to look upon. Fabulously magnificent, the dolls with the high coiffure, objects of so much human covetousness guarded there behind the double doors of iron, useless and dangerous, see the seasons, years, reigns, revolutions and centuries pass by with the same immobility and the same silence, with scarcely any daylight through the gratings of the old windows and in total darkness after the sun sets. Each one bears his name, written like a common name upon a faded ticket--illustrious names that were formerly terrible: Mourad the Conqueror, Soliman the Magnificent, Mohammed and Mahmoud. I believe that these dolls give me the most terrifying lesson of fragility and nothingness.

THE DUOMO, THE LEANING TOWER. THE BAPTISTERY AND THE CAMPO-SANTO OF PISA

H. A. TAINE

There are two Pisas: one in which people are bored and where they have lived in a provincial manner since the decadence; this is the greater part of the city, with the exception of a secluded corner: the other is this corner, a marble sepulchre, where the Duomo, the Baptistery, the Leaning Tower and the Campo-Santo repose silently like beautiful things that are dead. The true Pisa is here, and in these relics of an extinguished life, you find a world.

A renaissance before the renaissance, a second and almost antique budding of an antique civilization, a spring-time after six centuries of snow,--such are the ideas and words that crowd into the mind. Everything is of marble, white marble, whose immaculate whiteness shines in the azure. On all sides are large solid forms, the cupola, the full wall, the balanced stories, the firmly-planted round or square mass; but over these forms, revived from the antique, like delicate foliage that clothes an old tree-trunk, there is spread an individual invention and a new decoration of the small columns surmounted by arcades, and the originality and grace of this architecture thus renewed cannot be described.

[Illustration: DUOMO, LEANING TOWER, BAPTISTERY AND CAMPO SANTO, ITALY]

In 1083, to honour the Virgin who had given them the victory over the Saracens of Sardinia, the Pisans began to build their Duomo.

This is almost a Roman basilica, I should say a temple surmounted by another temple, or if you like better, a house having its gable for a façade, and this gable is cut off at the peak to support a still smaller house. Five stories of columns cover the entire façade with their superimposed porticoes. Two by two they are coupled together to support the little arcades; all these lovely columns of white marble under their black arcades make an aërial population that is most graceful and unexpected. In no place here do you perceive that sorrowful reverie of the Mediæval north; it is the holiday of a young nation that is awakening, and, in the joy of its newly acquired wealth, honours its gods. She has gathered from the distant shores to which her wars and trade led her, capitals, ornaments and entire columns and these fragments of antiquity fit into the work without any incongruity; for the work is instinctively cast into the ancient mould and is only developed with a grain of fantasy on the side of delicacy and charm. All the antique forms re-appear, but remodelled in the same spirit, by a new and original vivacity. The exterior columns of the Greek temple are reduced, multiplied and elevated into the air and are not only a support but have become an ornament. The Roman or Byzantine dome is elongated and its natural heaviness diminished beneath a crown of slender little columns with a mitre ornament which girds it in the centre with its delicate gallery. On the two sides of the great door two Corinthian columns are enveloped with the luxuriant leaves, buds and twining stems of the acanthus, and from the threshold we see the church with its rows of black, and white columns of nave and transept, with their multitude of slender and beautiful forms rising up like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sense of feeling; it is not excessive and confused as in the north, but, at the same time, it is not contented with merely the grave simplicity and the robust nudity of antique architecture. This spirit is the daughter of a pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more feminine than her mother.

She is not yet an adult, sure of her steps; she makes awkward mistakes. The lateral façades outside are monotonous. The cupola within is a reversed funnel, of a strange and disagreeable form. The union of the two arms of the cross is unpleasing, and a number of modernized chapels dispel the charm of the purity found in Sienna. At the second glance, however, all this is forgotten, and the effect of the whole is felt again. Four rows of Corinthian columns, surmounted by arcades, divide the church into five naves and form a forest. A second passage also as richly peopled with columns crosses the first one, and above the beautiful grove, rows of still smaller columns are carried along and intersect each other in order to uphold in the air the quadruple gallery, also prolonged and intersected. The ceiling is flat; the windows are little, and most of them without panes; they allow the walls to exhibit the grandeur and solidity of their mass, and down these long lines of straight and simple windows the untempered daylight makes these innumerable columns glow with the serenity of an ancient temple.

It is not, however, wholly an ancient temple, and there lies its peculiar charm: at the back of the choir the entire hollowed out apsis is occupied with a large Christ[11] in a golden robe, with the Virgin and another smaller saint. His face is gentle and sad: on this golden background in the dimness of the pale daylight he seems like a vision. Certainly, a number of pictures and constructions of the Middle Ages supply all the needs of ecstasy. Other fragments show the decadence and the deep barbarism from which they sprang. There remains one of those ancient bronze doors covered with formless and horrible bronze bas-reliefs.

Such is what the descendants of the sculptors preserved out of antiquity, such is what the human mind became in the chaos of the Tenth Century at the time of the Hungarian invasions, of Marozzia and Theodora: sad, mournful, anæmic, dislocated and mechanical figures, God the Father and six angels, three on one side and three on the other, all leaning at the same angle like a row of cards leaning against one another; the twelve apostles all in a row, six in front and six in the intervening spaces, like those round rings with holes for eyes and long lines for arms that children scribble in their exercise-books. On the other hand, the entrance doors, carved by John of Bologna,[12] are full of life: leaves of the rose, the grapevine, the medlar, the orange and the laurel with their berries, their fruits and their flowers, amongst which are birds and animals, twine about and make frames for animated figures and groups that are energetic and imposing. This wealth of truthful and vital forms is peculiar to the Sixteenth Century: it discovered nature and man at the same time. Five centuries lie between the work of these two doors.

There is nothing more to say about the Baptistery or the Leaning Tower; the same idea, the same taste and even the same style are seen in them. The one is a simple isolated dome; the other is a cylinder; each has its exterior decoration of columns. However, each has its own distinct and speaking physiognomy; but too much time would be occupied in either talking or writing about them and too many technical terms would be needed to distinguish the subtle differences. I will only mention the inclination of the Tower. It is supposed that when the Tower was half-finished, it leaned and that the architects kept on, and since they went on with it this inclination did not seem to have troubled them. At all events, there are other leaning towers in Italy,--at Bologna, for instance; voluntarily, or involuntarily, this fondness for oddity, this search for paradox and this yielding to fantasy, is one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages.

In the centre of the Baptistery is a superb eight-sided basin; each one of three sides is incrusted with a rich and complicated flower in full bloom, and each flower is different. There is a circle of large Corinthian columns around it, supporting round-arched arcades; most of them are ancient and are ornamented with antique bas-reliefs: Meleager with his barking dogs and the nude bodies of his companions is assisting at Christian mysteries. On the left, there is a pulpit similar to the one in Sienna, the first work of Nicholas of Pisa,[13] a simple marble coffer supported on marble columns and covered with carvings. The feeling of the strength and nudity of antiquity is exhibited here in a striking manner. The sculptor understood the postures and movements of the body. His figures, a little massive, are grand and simple; sometimes he reproduces the tunics and the folds of the Roman costume; one of his nude personages, a kind of Hercules carrying a lion on his shoulders, has that large chest and the strained muscles that the sculptors of the Sixteenth Century loved so much. What a difference to human civilization and what a hastening of it there would have been if these restorers of ancient beauty, these young Republics of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, these precocious creators of modern thought had been left to themselves like the ancient Greeks, if they had followed their natural bent, if mystical tradition had not intervened to limit and divert their effort, if secular genius had developed among them, as it formerly did in Greece, amongst free, rude and healthy institutions, and not, as it did, two centuries later, in the midst of the servitude and the corruptions of the decadence.

The last of these edifices, the Campo-Santo, is a cemetery, the earth of which, brought from Palestine, is holy. Four high walls of polished marble surround it with their white and highly ornamented panels. Within, a square gallery forms a promenade and opens upon a court through arcades trellised with ogival windows. It is filled with mortuary monuments, busts, inscriptions, and statues of every form and of every age. Nothing could be nobler or simpler. A framework of dark wood supports the vault, and the naked crest of the roof cuts the crystal of the sky. At the corners four cypresses rustle their leaves in the light breeze. The grass grows in the court with freshness and wild luxuriance. Here and there a climbing flower twines itself around a column, a little rosebush, or tiny shrub, glowing in a ray of sunlight. Not a sound,--this quarter is deserted; now and then you hear only the voice of a stroller which echoes as if beneath the vault of a church. It is the veritable cemetery of a free and Christian city; here before the tombs of the great, you can well reflect upon death and public affairs.

[Illustration: ROCHESTER CASTLE, ENGLAND.]

ROCHESTER CASTLE

ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN