Part 21 (2/2)
The royal heralds, dazzled by the splendour of the garment, gathered it up, and one of them hastened with it after Jean Party, calling out to him that he had forgotten it.
'In my country,' said the haughty burgher turning towards the herald, 'it is not the custom for people to take their cus.h.i.+ons away with them!'
One of the predecessors of this proud citizen, Jean Bernier, gave a banquet in 1333 to all the allies of the Comte de Flanders, which is celebrated by the chroniclers as the grandest ever seen in Flanders.
There were sixty-nine guests, including the kings of Bohemia and of Navarre, and six tables 'so sumptuous with gold and silver plate, that the like had never been seen.'
In 1473 a chapter was held at Valenciennes of the Golden Fleece. In 1540 the city entertained Charles V., the Dauphin, and the Duc d'Orleans. In 1549 a society called 'the princ.i.p.ality of pleasure' gave a festival to 562 guests in the woolstaplers' hall. Each guest was equipped with two flagons of silver, one for wine and the other for beer, and 1,700 pieces of silver and gold plate furnished forth the table, of which the chronicler observes, to the undying glory of the city, that 'all these vessels of silver and gold belonged to dwellers at Valenciennes; and also that _not one piece was lost_!'
The glory pa.s.sed away from Valenciennes with the religious wars. The place became a headquarters of Protestantism, and the Most Catholic King sent his armies to deal with it. The Spaniards took Valenciennes and long held it. In 1656, under Conde, they beat off the French under Turenne, and it was only in 1677 that Louis XIV. finally captured it, and turned it over to Vauban to be fortified.
As the town stands much lower than the surrounding country, Vauban planned his works with an eye to flooding the region, if necessary, by the waters of the Scheldt. Valenciennes stands at 25.98 metres above the sea-level. But Anzin, the chief suburb, is at 39 metres, and the hills beyond at 80 metres above the sea-level.
When the Spaniards got the upper hand fairly in French Flanders, thousands of the workers in wool emigrated to England, carrying their industry with them. Many of these emigrants naturally went into the cloth-making West of England, and to this day I am told by genealogists Flemish names, translated or curiously transmogrified, are to be found in Somerset and Devons.h.i.+re, which attest the extent and value to England of the exodus. What its real proportions were it is hard now to estimate. The chroniclers talk of a hundred thousand people going out from Flanders to England between the defeat of the Armada in 1588 and the repulse of the French from before Valenciennes in 1656. But the numbers are obviously conjectural.
What is certain is, that during this period Valenciennes was the centre of a most interesting spiral movement (to use the phrase of Goethe) in the history of modern Europe. Coming down later to the contest between France, under Louis XIV., and the allies, led by Marlborough and Prince Eugene, we find Valenciennes again playing a leading part. And during the last blind, desperate effort of France to shake off the domination of the scoundrels who had fastened themselves upon her vitals at Paris after the collapse of the monarchy, Valenciennes became the theatre of the tolerably well-conceived, but intolerably ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris in 1792, and in both cases he came to grief through his overweening self-confidence and consequent lack of the most ordinary prudence and forecast.
A morning may be spent with both profit and pleasure in the galleries of the Hotel de Ville at Valenciennes. The building is of the early seventeenth century, and was remodelled and partially reconstructed under the Second Empire. It is s.p.a.cious and not without a certain dignity, but, like the streets and squares, it is ill kept.
The galleries which occupy the whole of the second floor are extensive, well-lighted, and with a more careful and systematic arrangement of the pictures would be of considerable value to students of art. Valenciennes certainly had painters of merit before the sixteenth century. One of these, celebrated by Froissart, Maitre Andre, was both a sculptor and a painter. In 1364 he became 'imagier' of Charles V. of France. The statues of that king, of Jeanne de Bourbon his queen, and of King John and King Philip, still extant at St.-Denis, are his work. Two exquisite ma.n.u.scripts illuminated by him still exist; one in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, the other at Brussels.
Simon Marmion, who died at Valenciennes on Christmas-day, 1489, was the court painter of that high and puissant prince, Philippe, Duc de Bourgogne, and ranked among the chiefs of the Flemish School. Pictures of his exist at Bruges, Nuremberg, and Paris. The Valenciennes museum has an _ex-voto_ on wood, the history of which is curious. It was found broken into two pieces, and hidden away behind a confessional in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. How it came there no one knows. It may have been flung there during the pillage of the church, or put there to save it. At all events, having been carefully (not too carefully) restored and cleaned, it now presents two interesting pictures, one of St. John, holding in his right hand a book on which the Paschal Lamb reposes, with an ecclesiastic kneeling before him in a red robe, covered with a transparent alb, a palm resting on his right arm. The other represents a dead body on a rug, half-covered with a shroud. Above, on a scroll, are the lines
Da requiem cunctis, Deus, hic et ubique sepultis, Ut sint in requie, propter tua vulnera quinque.
In 1782 the provost of Valenciennes, the baron Pujol de Lagrave, who served as provost till 1789, and again after the capture of the city by the Duke of York, established here a school of art not unworthy the birthplace of Watteau and of Pater. Both of these painters are represented in the collection, the former by a characteristic little 'Conversation under the Trees in a Park' and by an interesting portrait of the sculptor Pater, the father of the painter. The two families of Watteau and of Pater lived on terms of such friendly intimacy at Valenciennes that the father of Pater sent his son up to Paris, to study his art under Watteau.
Watteau received his young compatriot so coldly, and made things so unpleasant for him, that he soon went back discouraged, to resume his career at home. There he encountered the hostility of the local corporation of St. Luke, that guild of painters refusing to allow him to practise his art without regularly pa.s.sing through his apprentices.h.i.+p, and taking his 'master's degree.' Pater resisted, and the case went before the magistracy of Valenciennes, before the Provincial Council of Hainault, and finally before the Parliament of Flanders. It was contested for several years, and finally resulted in an arrangement, under which Pater bound himself never to paint in Valenciennes, 'under any pretext whatsoever.' He might go to Paris and paint as much as he liked, but in Valenciennes painting was the privilege of the corporation of St. Luke. This has a pre-Adamite sound in modern ears. But even now no man may lawfully kill or cure the sick in London or Paris or New York without a diploma, despite the 'epoch-making' principles of 1879. And the new French Chamber of 1889 apparently intends to forbid all foreign physicians to attend upon patients in France! In Valenciennes, as a matter of fact, a liberal School of Art was established in 1782, by which time both Watteau and Pater had done their life's work and taken their places among the masters in a world-wide corporation of St. Luke.
Two charming groups by Pater represent this painter in the Museum of his native city, together with a portrait of his sister, bequeathed by M.
Bertin, the last representative of the Pater family in Valenciennes.
A grand and well-known triptych by Rubens, representing the preaching, the martyrdom, and the entombment of St. Stephen, in three compartments, upon the extension of which, when closed, appears a bold and striking picture of the Annunciation, is one of the chief treasures of the Museum. It belonged to the n.o.ble monastery of St.-Amand, which was wrecked and pillaged during the Revolution, and, with the valuable library of the monastery, very rich in missals and ma.n.u.scripts, was confiscated by the patriots of Valenciennes.
Another Rubens, of less importance, originally belonged to the church of Notre-Dame de la Chaussee, which was pulled down, as well as pillaged, at the same time. It seems to have been rescued from the spoilers by the good people of the neighbourhood, and was honestly bought for the Museum in 1866, not magnificently 'presented' to it by official 'receivers,'
not much better than the original thieves.
Francois Pourbus of Bruges is represented here by two admirable full-length portraits of Philippe Emanuel de Croy, Comte de Solre, and of his sister, Marie de Croy, and by a full-length portrait of Dorothee de Croy, d.u.c.h.esse d'Arschot, in a stately wedding-dress, painted, in the full maturity of his powers, at Paris, in 1617. This is the wedding-dress described, according to M. Foucart, an accomplished amateur of Valenciennes, one of the Conservators of the Museum, by Reiffenberg in his valuable book: '_Une existence de Grand Seigneur au XVI^e Siecle_,' and the Valenciennes Museum is particularly rich in pictures of interest from this, which may be called the doc.u.mentary, point of view.
Among these must be reckoned a curious painting of the mother and the wife of Henri III., with sundry dames of high degree, and women of the people violently squabbling together over a pair of trunk-hose, the property of the king, who lies prostrate in one corner of the canvas, struck down by the clenched fist of a man in the robes of a member of the Parliament of Paris.
From this and from another painting on parchment which sets forth, as an inscription recites, 'the cruel martyrdom of the most reverend Cardinal de Guise by the inhuman tyrant Henri de Valois,' it may be clearly gathered that the people of French Flanders had very positive opinions, and were not slow to express them, long before the Abbe Sieyes const.i.tuted himself the Isaac Newton of political science.
There is a goodly show, too, of historical portraits of interest, one of the Admiral de Coligny, which was exhibited at Paris in 1878, another of Fenelon, which came here from the pillage of the Chapterhouse of Cambray, another of Prince Maurice of Na.s.sau, another of Hortense Mancini. A good full-length portrait of Bardo Bardi Magalotti, colonel of the 'Royal Italian' regiment under Louis XIV., is set in a very remarkable frame of superbly carved oak, part of the woodwork of the demolished church of St.-Gery. Of historical interest, too, is a large Van der Meulen, representing the defeat of Turenne before Valenciennes in 1656, by the Spanish army under Conde. From a bird's-eye view of Valenciennes in the background of this large canvas, we may see how much the city has lost by the gradual destruction of its finest architectural features.
Within the last few years the Museum of Valenciennes has been endowed, through the munificence chiefly of a Wallachian n.o.bleman, Prince George Stirbey, well known in Paris, with a unique collection of the works of Carpeaux, the sculptor of the famous groups which adorn the facade of the grand Opera House at Paris.
Carpeaux was born at Valenciennes, and the fine statue of Watteau which stands now in the city was both suggested and executed by him. So long ago as 1860, when he began to recognise his own place in contemporary art, he expressed his wish to have his memory perpetuated in his native place by as complete a collection of his works as could be made; and in his will, drawn up in 1874, he left to Valenciennes all his models in plaster, and all the drawings for his works, together with all the sketch-books he had filled during his artistic life, and which were then in the keeping of his relations at Auteuil.
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