Part 7 (2/2)

Happy little middle-cla.s.s Parisians now run to and from their Lycees unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, _la promeneuse_ or walking chaperon.

Works on social France, as is the case with almanacs, encyclopaedias and the rest, require yearly revision. Manners and customs change no less quickly than headgear and skirts.

Charles Lamb would have lived ecstatically at the Languedocian capital.

It is a metropolis of beggardom, a mendicant's Mecca, a citadel of Jules Richepin's cherished _Gueux_. Here, indeed, Elia need not have lamented over the decay of beggars, ”the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation--your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses--is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear _Mendicity_. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast hasting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution.”

No, here is what the best beloved of English humorists calls ”the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism,” here his vision would have feasted on ”Rags, the Beggars' robes and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.” ”He is never out of fas.h.i.+on,” adds Lamb, ”or limpeth outwardly behind it. He is not required to wear court mourning.

He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances.”

Here, too, would the unmatchable writer have gazed upon more than one ”grand fragment, as good as an Elgin marble.” And alas! many deformities more terrible still, and which, perhaps, would have damped even Lamb's ardour. For in the Toulouse of 1894, as in the London of sixty years before, its mendicants ”were so many of its sights, its Lions.” The city literally swarmed with beggars. At every turn we came upon some living torso, distorted limb and hideous sore. Begging seemed to be the accepted livelihood of cripples, blind folk and the infirm. Let us hope that by this time something better has been devised for them all. Was it here that Richepin partly studied the mendicant fraternity, giving us in poetry his astounding appreciation, psychological and linguistic? And perhaps the bard of the beggars, like the English humorist, would wish his _pauvres Gueux_ to be left unmolested.

The sights of Toulouse would occupy a conscientious traveller many days.

The least leisurely should find time to visit the tiny square called _place du Salin_. Here took place the innumerable _autos-da-fe_ of the Toulousain Inquisition, and here, so late as 1618, the celebrated physician and scientist Vanini was atrociously done to death by that truly infernal tribunal, and for what? For simply differing from the obscurantism of his age, and having opinions of his own.

The atrocious sentence pa.s.sed on Vanini was in part remitted, evidently public opinion already making itself felt. His tongue was cut out, but strangulation preceded the burning alive. Here one cannot help noting the illogical, the puerile--if such words are applicable to devilish wickedness--aspect of such Inquisitorial sentences. If these hounders-down of common-sense and the reasoning faculty really believed, as they affected to believe, that men who possessed and exercised both qualities were thereby doomed to eternal torments, why set up the horrible and costly paraphernalia of the Inquisition? After all, no matter how ingeniously inventive might be their persecutors, they could only be made to endure terminable and comparatively insignificant torments, not a millionth millionth fraction of eternity!

Refres.h.i.+ng it is to turn to the Toulouse of minstrelsy. The proud seat of the troubadours, the Academy of the Gay Science and of the poetic tourneys revived in our own day! Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the _Feux Floraux_ of the olden time and the society of _Lou Felibrige_ with its revival of Provencal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly esteemed by a great Englishman.

In Mill's _Correspondence_ (1910) we find a beautiful letter, and written in fine stately French, from the philosopher to the poet, dated Avignon, October 1869.

Mill had sent Mistral the French translation of his essay, ”The Subjection of Women,” and in answer to the other's thanks and flattering a.s.surance of his own conversion, he wrote: ”Parmi toutes les adhesions qui ont ete donnees a la these de mon pet.i.t livre, je ne sais s'il y en a aucune qui m'ont fait plus de plaisir que la votre.”

The letter as a whole is most interesting, and ends with a characterization, a strikingly beautiful pa.s.sage in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Hard were it to match this appreciation among orthodox writers.

So transparent is the atmosphere here that the Pyrenees appear within an hour's ride: they are in reality sixty miles off! Lovely are the clearly outlined forms, flecked with light and shadow, the snowy patches being perfectly distinct.

IX

MONTAUBAN, OR INGRES-VILLE

An hour by rail from Toulouse lies the ancient city of Montauban, as far as I know unnoticed by English tourists since Arthur Young's time. This superbly placed _chef-lieu_ of the Tarn and Garonne is alike an artistic shrine and a palladium of religious liberty. Here was born that strongly individualized and much contested genius, Dominique Ingres, and here Protestantism withstood the League, De Luyne's besieging army and the dragonnades of Louis XIV.

The city of Ingres may be thought of by itself; there is plenty of food for reflection here without recalling the prude whose virtue caused more mischief than the vices of all the Montespans and Dubarrys put together.

Let us forget the Maintenon terror at Montauban, the breaking up of families, the sending to the galleys of good men and women, the torturings, the roastings alive, and turn to the delightful and soothing souvenirs of genius! Every French town that has given birth to s.h.i.+ning talent is straightway turned into a Walhalla. This ancient town, so strikingly placed, breathes of Ingres, attracts the traveller by the magic of the painter's name, has become an art pilgrimage. The n.o.ble monument erected by the townsfolk to their great citizen and the picture-gallery he bequeathed his native city well repay a much longer journey than that from Toulouse. We see here to what high levels public spirit and local munificence can rise in France. We see also how close, after all, are the ties that knit Frenchman and Frenchman, how the glory of one is made the pride of all. The bronze statue of the painter, with the vast and costly bas-relief imitating his ”Apotheosis of Homer” in the Louvre, stand in the public walk, the beauty of which aroused even Arthur Young's enthusiasm. ”The promenade,” he wrote in June 1787, ”is finely situated. Built on the highest part of the rampart, and commanding that n.o.ble vale, or rather plain, one of the richest in Europe, which extends on one side to the sea and in front to the Pyrenees, whose towering ma.s.ses heaped one upon another in a stupendous manner, and covered with snow, offer a variety of lights and shades from indented forms and the immensity of their projections. This prospect, which contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of cultivation; an animated but confused ma.s.s of infinitely varied parts, melting gradually into the distant obscure, from which emerges the amazing frame of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads above the clouds.”

The Ingres Museum contains, I should say, more works from the hand of a single master than were ever before collected under the same roof.

Upwards of a thousand sketches, many of great power and beauty, are here, besides several portraits and one masterpiece, the Christ in the Temple, brilliant as a canvas of Holman Hunt, although the work of an octogenarian. The painter's easel, palette, and brushes, his violin, the golden laurel-wreath presented to him by his native town, and other relics are reverently gazed at on Sundays by artisans, soldiers and peasant-folk. The local museum in France is something more than a little centre of culture, a place in which to breathe beauty and delight. It is a school of the moral sense, of the n.o.bler pa.s.sions, and also a temple of fame. Therein the young are taught to revere excellence, and here the ambitious are stimulated by worthy achievement.

Ingres-ville recalls an existence stormy as the history of Montauban itself. This stronghold of reform throughout her vicissitudes did not show a bolder, more determined front to the foe than did her great citizen his own enemies and detractors. Dominique Ingres and his life-story favour those physicists who discern in native soil and surroundings the formative influences of apt.i.tudes and character. The man and his birthplace matched each other. Indomitableness characterized both, and to understand both we must know something of their respective histories. To Montauban Henri Martin's great history does ample justice, to her ill.u.s.trious son contemporary writers have recently paid worthy tributes.

[Footnote: See _Les Grands Artistes--Ingres_, par J. Mommeja, Paris, Laurens; _Le Roman d'amour de M. Ingres_, par H. Lapauze, Paris, Lafitte, 1911.]

”When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times,” wrote Savage Landor, ”he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding.” In the case of Ingres, opposition and contumely were followed by perhaps excessive laudation whilst he lived, after his death ensuing a long period of reaction. Time has now set the seal upon his fame. The great Montalbanais has been finally received into the national Walhalla.

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