Part 16 (1/2)

The 'religious wars' wrecked the Hotel-Dieu in the sixteenth century; but in 1620 a devout woman, Marie Dubuisson, took the work of reconstruction in hand, and the citizens followed it up; so that, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was well in order once more, and it continued to be administered for the benefit of the poor of Chauny till the 'patriots' confiscated it in 1793.

Under the Empire, in 1811, the re-established hospital was combined with an orphan asylum, and both were put under the charge of the Sisters of Charity, one of whom, Sister Renee Canet, had the good sense to found here a little manufactory of hosiery and caps, which holds its own, I am told, despite the not very benevolent combinations against it of the local hosiers. The old buildings of the Hotel-Dieu, however, no longer exist, and the chief public hospital of Chauny is installed in a large edifice put up under the Second Empire in 1865, and known as the 'Hospice-Sainte-Eugenie,' in honour of the Empress. It says something for the common sense of the local authorities that they have not insisted on changing the name of the inst.i.tution.

During the orgies of 1793 the paintpot was busy with all the streets and places of Chauny. The Rue de Premontre, so called because some property there belonging to the famous abbey of the Praemonstratensians, became the _cul-de-sac_ or 'bag-bottom of Fraternity;' the Rue des Moinets took the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; while the Rue Ganton, the licensed abode of the social evil of Chauny, received, with exquisite tact and propriety, the name of the Roman hero Scaevola! The monastery of the Holy Cross, founded by Mary of Cleves, d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, about the end of the fifteenth century, was confiscated, and made the headquarters of the Republican Commission, the street on which it stood receiving the name of the 'Bag-bottom of Vigilance,' from the banner which was borne upon public occasions through the streets by this commission, on which was depicted 'the Eye of Vigilance, a symbol of that exercised by it over the enemies of the Republic and the people.'

Another street in Chauny, the Rue des Bons Enfans, preserves the memory of the early foundation in the little city of public schools for the children of the poor--'les bons enfans escholiers.'

Where now stands the communal school of Chauny stood, I am told, a public college, founded here in the earliest years of the fourteenth century. The buildings of this college were restored under the Regency and Louis XV. They were confiscated, and the establishment swept away by the worthy Revolutionists of 1793, at the same time that they gave a public ball in the Church of Notre-Dame in honour of the Tree of Liberty, which the young girls of the place were expected to attend 'in dresses of white, symbolic of their innocence, and adorned only with their virtues!'

Besides this public college, Chauny, before the beneficent epoch of the Revolution, possessed a public school in each parish of the town. The schoolmaster, besides his regular scholars, who paid for their education, was expected to receive and educate eight poor children nominated by the mayor and sworn magistrates. For this he received, under Louis XIV., in 1706, forty setiers of wheat and fifty livres in money. It is interesting, also, to learn that the princ.i.p.al of the public college, when he happened to be a layman, received a salary, under Louis XIV., of 400 livres in addition to his dwelling-house. When he was a priest he received only 300 livres, but he might also receive 172 livres more as chaplain of the Hotel-Dieu. The well-to-do citizens who sent their children to the college paid for each child forty sols a year.

When law and order had been re-established by Napoleon in France, two citizens of Chauny, Carra and Dumoulin, in December 1802, got permission to re-open the college, which the Revolution had closed. It has never recovered its former importance however, and Chauny now possesses only a communal school, I am told, and two religious or free schools, besides the establishments maintained by the Company of St.-Gobain. One educational foundation of the _ancien regime_, however, still survives, in the bursaries of the Abbe Bouzier.

Antoine Bouzier d'Estouilly, priest, abbot of Notre-Dame-les-Ardres, doctor in science, doctor of the Sorbonne, canon and ecolatre of the collegiale of St.-Quentin, was a n.o.ble as well as a priest. He founded, on October 10, 1713, a fund for endowing two poor boys with the funds necessary to enable them, in his own words, 'to serve the Church as ecclesiastics, or the public in civil functions.' This phraseology is worth noting by people who are tempted to believe the nonsense current in our day to the effect that 'almost everything we know as modern civilisation in connection with inst.i.tutions of a philanthropic sort has taken shape within the last hundred years, and is due to the influence of the Revolution of 1789 in France.'

Nothing can be wider of the truth than this. On the contrary, the progress of modern civilisation in connection with such inst.i.tutions was distinctly checked and thwarted for a time in France by the shock of this Revolution, and in other countries by the horror and indignation which the follies and crimes of the French Revolutionists excited.

The foundation of the Abbe Bouzier was expressly intended by him to benefit 'the poorest' of those who should compete for its advantages, regard being had to their natural ability and apt.i.tudes for study. Each beneficiary was to enjoy his scholars.h.i.+p for eight consecutive years, dating from his entrance into the third cla.s.s. If he had got beyond the third cla.s.s when he secured his nomination the difference was to run against him. For example, a scholar ready to enter the cla.s.s of rhetoric who received a nomination was to hold his scholars.h.i.+p for six years only; if he was ready to enter upon the study of theology, law or medicine, for three years only; after the expiration of which another must be appointed to enjoy it. Provisions were also made to secure the good conduct of the beneficiaries. How this excellent foundation escaped the cupidity of the Revolutionists is not clear.

From June, 1793, to March, 1795, the _Societe Populaire_ of Chauny, organised by emissaries from Paris, ruled the town absolutely. The official authorities of the city and of the district went in abject terror of them; for a denunciation sent to the headquarters in Paris by this society was like a report sent thither from an army in the field by one of the legislative spies who accompanied the generals of the Republic, and swaggered about in the camps wearing the mountebank costumes which may be studied with amus.e.m.e.nt and advantage in the museum of the Revolution established this year in the Pavillon de Flore at Paris. The members of this _Societe Populaire_ openly pillaged the churches and convents, made domiciliary visits, sold certificates of 'civism,' and dictated the most extraordinary measures of confiscation and outrage. Their loudest leader was a certain Pierre Gogois, who used to wind up their meeting by singing songs of his own composition, addressed to the 'crowned brigands who were trying to re-establish the abominable monarchy with the help of their anthropophagous hordes!'

These worthies abolished the school kept by the 'Daughters of the Cross,' confiscated their property, and set up their own headquarters in the convent.

In some way the Bouzier fund escaped their clutches, and it has been so well managed that in 1871 the income was found large enough to warrant the managers in establis.h.i.+ng three scholars.h.i.+ps instead of two.

The good example of the Abbe has been followed in our own times by a Christian lady, Madame Lacroix of Sinceny. In memory of her son, a Councillor-General of the Aisne, who was universally esteemed throughout the department, and who died at the early age of thirty-five, this lady founded, a few years ago in perpetuity, eight prizes, to be annually competed for by the pupils of all the communal schools of the canton of Chauny, and by the pupils of the schools established here by the Company of St.-Gobain, as well as four full scholars.h.i.+ps at the School of Arts and Industries in Chalons-sur-Marne.

The prizes are to be competed for in applied geometry, in linear and ornamental drawing, as well as in all the obligatory studies of the schools concerned. The compet.i.tors for the four Chalons scholars.h.i.+ps must be the sons of workmen, domestic servants, labourers, or persons employed in agriculture or in manufactures within the canton of Chauny, whose incomes or earnings do not amount to 2,000 francs a year.

In 1874 the Munic.i.p.al Council of Chauny founded six purses of 450 francs a year, each to be competed for by candidates wis.h.i.+ng to fit themselves to compete for the Lacroix scholars.h.i.+ps, the successful candidates being left at liberty to enter any one of the free schools in Chauny. As Madame Lacroix has made the curates of the churches of Notre-Dame and St.-Martin _ex-officio_ members of the council of her fund, it is to be presumed that the Government at Paris will find some way of striking these clergymen out of the list, as it has already struck all ministers of religion out of the local committees of supervision in educational matters throughout France, for a French Republic is nothing if not logical.

My likening of Chauny to a French Rotterdam or Amsterdam may be excused when I say that in the middle of the last century the Mayor of Chauny a.s.sured the Intendant of Soissons that the munic.i.p.ality had to keep up no fewer than twenty-seven bridges. What with the Oise and its affluents, and the many watercourses created about the place, either to drain the marsh lands or to facilitate navigation, Chauny really is an aquatic little capital like Annecy in Savoy. Naturally its citizens set a certain value on their fis.h.i.+ng rights, and it may edify those who obstinately insist on regarding the feudal ages as ages of brute force, to know that so early as in 1175 the citizens of Chauny, by the lieutenant of the bailliage, Messire Regnault Doucet, a.s.serted and successfully maintained before the royal representatives their right to fish in all the waters round about their town in all lawful ways against the pretensions of no less a personage than the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans. In 1540 this right was confirmed to them anew, and it was then shown that at an inquest held in 1475 the witnesses had testified that from time whereof the memory of man ran not to the contrary no citizen of Chauny had ever been molested in the exercise of his right to fish in the waters of Chauny either on behalf of the Duc d'Orleans or on behalf of the King. The local archives, which are singularly rich and well-preserved, are full of instances like this, which show that the general current of life in this corner of France, long before the Revolution, was determined neither by the caprices of the great, nor by the pa.s.sions of the mob, but by systematic considerations of law and of tradition, until for the confusion of France, and more or less of the civilised world, the natural evolution and development of law and order were suddenly and insanely interrupted through the inconceivable weakness of a most amiable and useless king, by the 'wild a.s.ses' of Mirabeau, acting in 1789 under the pressure of what so friendly an eyewitness of their conduct as Gouverneur Morris calls the 'abominable'

populace of Paris.

So complete was the civilisation of this region long before the Revolution of 1789, that the mayor, the magistrates, and the citizens of Chauny, early in the seventeenth century, succeeded in breaking down and ruining an Italian gentleman, Cesare de Rusticis, who, thanks to Concini, had secured a royal patent for ca.n.a.lising the Oise from La Fere to Chauny. They got a notable advocate, M. Louis Vrevin, to draw up a protest against the enterprise in the most florid and elaborate fas.h.i.+on of the _Plaideurs_ of Racine, and by dint of bombarding the King's Council with the names of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Xerxes, Sesostris, Cleopatra, Cicero, Tertullian, and others, got, in 1625, what we in America now call an 'injunction,' putting a stop to the works begun by this foreigner, who 'had come into France to fix the eye of curiosity upon the river Oyse and to disturb it.' And a century later I find an operation carried out here for converting a not very satisfactory private investment into cash at the expense of the State which really would not discredit the most ingenious American 'railway king' of our own times. This also concerned a ca.n.a.l, the ca.n.a.l which unites the Oise with the Somme. This waterway became the property in 1728 of a celebrated millionaire of that time, Antoine de Crozat, and after his death fell, in the division of his estates, to the share of his granddaughter, the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul. It was not very profitable, and it represented a capital which ought to have yielded 2,200,000 livres a year. So a certain M. Laurent, who had built for the Duc de Choiseul his magnificent Chateau de Chanteloup, near Amboise (pulled down fifty years ago by Chaptal, the first great producer of beetroot sugar in France), undertook to get the ca.n.a.l turned into money. The plate-gla.s.s works of St.-Gobain were then under the direction of M. Deslandes, the clever nominee of Mme. Geoffrin. M. Laurent tried to persuade M. Deslandes to employ Picard coal (which could be brought by the ca.n.a.l) instead of wood in the furnaces at St.-Gobain. M. Deslandes made the experiment, but soon gave it up, as the coal smoke injured the plate-gla.s.s. He consented, however, to take four boatloads of the Picard coal and use it in the forges connected with the works. This was enough for M. Laurent, who went to Paris with an invoice of the four boatloads of coal, laid it before the Council with an elaborate paper setting forth the value to the ca.n.a.l of a traffic necessary to carry on the manufacture of the famous plate gla.s.s at St.-Gobain, and got the Council finally to purchase the d.u.c.h.esse's ca.n.a.l on his own terms. I really do not see what M. Laurent had to learn either from the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau or even from the American Declaration of Independence! If he had lived now he would have been a sharp compet.i.tor with a countryman of mine, of whom I am told in Chauny that he came here only a few years ago, inspected the chemical works, looked into the composition of certain heaps of rubbish thrown aside even by the sagacious managers of these works, and setting up near one of the ca.n.a.ls a genuine wooden American shed, so applied to what he found in this rubbish certain processes for the vulcanisation of indiarubber as to produce at very low cost certain articles for which a great and increasing demand exists, and thus founded a considerable industry here. He has since turned his establishment over, I am told, to a company at a great profit to himself, and gone back 'to the Rocky Mountains.' I am sorry for this, for I should have been glad to 'interview' him!

CHAPTER IX

IN THE AISNE--_continued_

LAON

It would be hard to find in France, or out of France, on a pleasant summer's day, a more charming drive than the highway which leads from Chauny, with its great modern industries and its lively, bustling people, to the little feudal town of Coucy-le-Chateau, perched upon its lofty hill and dominated by one of the grandest, if not, indeed, the grandest, of feudal fortress-homes.

I do not know that Gargantua would now find the people of Chauny as entertaining as Rabelais tells us they were in his time. Then he 'amused himself much with the boatmen, and above all with those of Chauny in Picardy--wonderful chatterboxes, and great at bandying chaff on the subject of green monkeys.' There is no lack of boatmen now at Chauny, though the railway has taken away much of their living; but the glory of the green monkeys, I fear, has departed. In the days of Gargantua, the Chaunois were as famous as the Savoyards now are, for wandering over France with trained monkeys and trained dogs. On October 1 in each year, on the feast of St. Remy, every one of these peripatetic citizens was expected to appear in his native town, there to join in a procession which marched from what is now known as the Port Royal to the Bailliage, bearing to the lieutenant-general of the king a traditional present in the form of a huge pasty, decorated with eggs and chestnuts, and surmounted by a pastry tower.

To the confection of this pasty the famous mills of Chauny, reputed the best in France, were bound to contribute five _setiers_ of wheat, and the guild of the butchers a calf's head.

Before the procession marched a learned dog, trained to all manner of tricks and devices, and upon either side of the dog the town trumpeters, sounding their finest and loudest _fanfares_.