Part 7 (1/2)
There were always poplars to be seen, but the poplar had become an aquatic plant. Such phenomena, however, at Macon attract but little attention, as the Saone, at certain seasons of the year, is nothing if not expansive. The people are as used to it as they ap- peared to be to the bronze statue of Lamartine, which is the princ.i.p.al monument of the _place_, and which, re- presenting the poet in a frogged overcoat and top- boots, improvising in a high wind, struck me as even less casual in its att.i.tude than monumental sculpture usually succeeds in being. It is true that in its pre- sent position I thought better of this work of art, which is from the hand of M. Falquiere, than when I had seen it through the fact.i.tious medium of the Salon of 1876. I walked up the hill where the older part of Macon lies, in search of the natal house of the _amant d'Elvire_, the Petrarch whose Vaucluse was the bosom of the public. The Guide-Joanne quotes from ”Les Confidences” a description of the birthplace of the poet, whose treatment of the locality is indeed poetical.
It tallies strangely little with the reality, either as re- gards position or other features; and it may be said to be, not an aid, but a direct obstacle, to a discovery of the house. A very humble edifice, in a small back street, is designated by a munic.i.p.al tablet, set into its face, as the scene of Lamartine's advent into the world.
He himself speaks of a vast and lofty structure, at the angle of a _place_, adorned with iron clamps, with a _porte haute et large_ and many other peculiarities. The house with the tablet has two meagre stories above the bas.e.m.e.nt, and (at present, at least) an air of ex- treme shabbiness; the _place_, moreover, never can have been vast. Lamartine was accused of writing history incorrectly, and apparently he started wrong at first: it had never become clear to him where he was born.
Or is the tablet wrong? If the house is small, the tablet is very big.
x.x.xVIII.
The foregoing reflections occur, in a cruder form, as it were, in my note-book, where I find this remark appended to them: ”Don't take leave of Lamartine on that contemptuous note; it will be easy to think of something more sympathetic!” Those friends of mine, mentioned a little while since, who accuse me of always tipping back the balance, could not desire a paragraph more characteristic; but I wish to give no further evi- dence of such infirmities, and will therefore hurry away from the subject, - hurry away in the train which, very early on a crisp, bright morning, conveyed. me, by way of an excursion, to the ancient city of Bourg-en-Bresse.
s.h.i.+ning in early light, the Saone was spread, like a smooth, white tablecloth, over a considerable part of the flat country that I traversed. There is no provision made in this image for the long, transparent screens of thin-twigged trees which rose at intervals out of the watery plain; but as, under the circ.u.mstances, there seemed to be no provision for them in fact, I will let my metaphor go for what it is worth. My journey was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I pa.s.sed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town _quelconque_, as M. Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands in the midst of the great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat county, sometime property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest capital. The blue ma.s.ses of the Jura give it a creditable horizon, but the only nearer feature it can point to is its famous sepulchral church. This edifice lies at a fortunate distance from the town, which, though inoffensive, is of too common a stamp to consort with such a treasure. All I ever knew of the church of Brou I had gathered, years ago, from Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem, which bears its name. I remember thinking, in those years, that it was impossible verses could be more touching than these; and as I stood before the object of my pilgrimage, in the gay French light (though the place was so dull), I recalled the spot where I had first read them, and where I read them again and yet again, wondering whether it would ever be my fortune to visit the church of Brou. The spot in question was an armchair in a window which looked out on some cows in a field; and whenever I glanced at the cows it came over me - I scarcely know why - that I should probably never behold the structure reared by the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret. Some of our visions never come to pa.s.s; but we must be just, - others do. ”So sleep, forever sleep, O princely pair!” I remembered that line of Matthew Arnold's, and the stanza about the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret coming to watch the builders on her palfry white. Then there came to me something in regard to the moon s.h.i.+ning on winter nights through the cold clere-story. The tone of the place at that hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and bright, but with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even with the fact of the unexpected remoteness of the church from the Jura added to it, did not prevent me from feeling that I looked at a monument in the pro- duction of which - or at least in the effect of which on the tourist mind of to-day - Matthew Arnold had been much concerned. By a pardonable license he has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of the Jura than it stands at present. It is very true that, though the mountains in the sixteenth century can hardly have been in a different position, the plain which separates the church from them may have been bedecked with woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the beautiful building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in that particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there are reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of Brou should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of a vague little town.
The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret, - Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and his wife Mary of Bur- gundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has a high name in history, having been regent of the Netherlands in behalf of her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., of whose early education she had had the care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, to whom the province of Bresse be- longed, and who died two years later. She had been betrothed, is a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and was kept for some time at the French court, - that of her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was eventually repudiated, in order that her _fiance_ might marry Anne of Brittany, - an alliance so magnificently political that we almost condone the offence to a sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for hus- bands, however, inasmuch as before her marriage to Philibert she had been united to John of Castile, son of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon, - an episode ter- minated, by the death of the Spanish prince, within a year. She was twenty-two years regent of the Nether- lands, and died at fifty-one, in 1530. She might have been, had she chosen, the wife, of Henry VII. of Eng- land. She was one of the signers of the League of Cambray, against the Venetian republic, and was a most politic, accomplished, and judicious princess.
She undertook to build the church of Brou as a mau- soleum, for her second husband and herself, in fulfil- ment of a vow made by Margaret of Bourbon, mother of Philibert, who died before she could redeem her pledge, and who bequeathed the duty to her son. He died shortly afterwards, and his widow a.s.sumed the pious task. According to Murray, she intrusted the erection of the church to ”Maistre Loys von Berghem,”
and the sculpture to ”Maistre Conrad.” The author of a superst.i.tious but carefully prepared little Notice, which I bought at Bourg, calls the architect and sculptor (at once) Jehan de Paris, author (sic) of the tomb of Francis II. of Brittany, to which we gave some attention at Nantes, and which the writer of my pamphlet ascribes only subordinately to Michel Colomb.
The church, which is not of great size, is in the last and most flamboyant phase of Gothic, and in admirable preservation; the west front, before which a quaint old sun-dial is laid out on the ground, - a circle of num- bers marked in stone, like those on a clock face, let into the earth, - is covered with delicate ornament.
The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant, in a blouse, who looked more as if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art, told me that it has never been touched, and that its freshness is simply the quality of the stone), - the great feature is the ad- mirable choir, in the midst of which the three monu- ments have bloomed under the chisel, like exotic plants in a conservatory. I saw the place to small advantage, for the stained gla.s.s of the windows, which are fine, was under repair, and much of it was masked with planks.
In the centre lies Philibert-le-Bel, a figure of white marble on a great slab of black, in his robes and his armor, with two boy-angels holding a tablet at his head, and two more at his feet. On either side of him is another cherub: one guarding his helmet, the other his stiff gauntlets. The att.i.tudes of these charm- ing children, whose faces are all bent upon him in pity, have the prettiest tenderness and respect. The table on which he lies is supported by elaborate columns, adorned with niches containing little images, and with every other imaginable elegance; and be- neath it he is represented in that other form, so com- mon in the tombs of the Renaissance, - a man naked and dying, with none of the state and splendor of the image above. One of these figures embodies the duke the other simply the mortal; and there is something very strange and striking in the effect of the latter, seen dimly and with difficulty through the intervals of the rich supports of the upper slab. The monu- ment of Margaret herself is on the left, all in white merble, tormented into a mult.i.tude of exquisite pat- terns, the last extravagance of a Gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return upon itself. Unlike her husband, who has only the high roof of the church above him, she lies under a canopy supported and covered by a wilderness of embroidery, - flowers, devices, initials, arabesques, statuettes.
Watched over by cherubs, she is also in her robes and ermine, with a greyhound sleeping at her feet (her husband, at his, has a waking lion); and the artist has not, it is to be presumed, represented her as more beautiful than she was. She looks, indeed, like the regent of a turbulent realm. Beneath her couch is stretched another figure, - a less brilliant Margaret, wrapped in her shroud, with her long hair over her shoulders. Round the tomb is the battered iron railing placed there originally, with the myste- rious motto of the d.u.c.h.ess worked into the top, - _fortune infortune fort une_. The other two monuments are protected by barriers of the same pattern. That of Margaret of Bourbon, Philibert's mother, stands on the right of the choir; and I suppose its greatest dis- tinction is that it should have been erected to a mother-in-law. It is but little less florid and sump- tuous than the others; it has, however, no second re- c.u.mbent figure. On the other hand, the statuettes that surround the base of the tomb are of even more exquisite workmans.h.i.+p: they represent weeping wo- men, in long mantles and hoods, which latter hang forward over the small face of the figure, giving the artist a chance to carve the features within this hollow of drapery, - an extraordinary play of skill. There is a high, white marble shrine of the Virgin, as extra- ordinary as all the rest (a series of compartments, re- presenting the various scenes of her life, with the a.s.sumption in the middle); and there is a magnifi- cent series of stalls, which are simply the intricate embroidery of the tombs translated into polished oak.
All these things are splendid, ingenious, elaborate, precious; it is goldsmith's work on a monumental scale, and the general effect is none the less beautiful and solemn because it is so rich. But the monuments of the church of Brou are not the n.o.blest that one may see; the great tombs of Verona are finer, and various other early Italian work. These things are not insincere, as Ruskin would say; but they are pre- tentious, and they are not positively _naifs_. I should mention that the walls of the choir are embroidered in places with Margaret's tantalizing device, which - partly, perhaps, because it is tantalizing - is so very decorative, as they say in London. I know not whether she was acquainted with this epithet; but she had antic.i.p.ated one of the fas.h.i.+ons most characteristic of our age.