Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3
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SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS, VOLUME III
FRANCE AND THE NETHERLANDS
Selected and Edited, with Introductions, etc., by
FRANCIS W. HALSEY
Editor of "Great Epochs in American History"
Associate Editor of "The World's Famous Orations"
and of "The Best of the World's Classics," etc.
IN TEN VOLUMES
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration: Paris: The Seine and Bridges]
Vol. III
Part One
Introduction to Volumes III and IV
France and the Netherlands
The tourist bound for France lands either at Cherbourg, Havre, or
Boulogne. At Cherbourg, he sees waters in which the "Kearsarge" sank the
"Alabama"; at Havre a shelter in which, long before Caesar came to Gaul,
ships, with home ports on the Seine, sought safety from the sea; and at
Boulogne may recall the invading expedition to England, planned by
Napoleon, but which never sailed.
From the Roman occupation, many Roman remains have survived in England,
but these are far inferior in numbers and in state of preservation to the
Roman remains found in France. Marseilles was not only an important Roman
seaport, but its earliest foundations date perhaps from Phoenician times,
and certainly do from the age when Greeks were building temples at Paestum
and Girgenti. Rome got her first foothold in Marseilles as a consequence
of the Punic wars; and in 125 B.C. acquired a province (Provincia Romana)
reaching from the Alps to the Rhone, and southward to the sea, with Aix as
its first capital and Arles its second. Caesar in 58 B.C. found on the
Seine a tribe of men called Parisii, whose chief village, Lutetia, stood
where now rises Notre Dame.
Lutetia afterward became a residence of Roman emperors. Constantius
Chlorus spent some time there, guarding the empire from Germans and
Britons, while Julian the Apostate built there for himself a palace and
extensive baths, of which remains still exist in Paris. In that palace
afterward lived Pepin le Bref ("mayor of the palace"), son of Charles
Martell, and father of the great Charles. Romans built there an
amphitheater seating ten thousand people, of which remains are still
visible.
Lyons was a great Roman city. Augustus first called it into vigorous life,
his wish being to make it "a second Rome." From Lyons a system of roads
ran out to all parts of Gaul. Claudius was born there; Caligula made it
the political and intellectual capital of Provincia; its people, under an
edict of Caracalla, were made citizens of Rome. At Nimes was born the
Emperor Antoninus. In Gaul, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Domitian
were made emperors. At Arles and Nimes are Roman amphitheaters still
regularly put to use for combats between men and wild beasts--but the wild
beasts, instead of lions and tigers, are bulls. At Orange is a Roman
theater of colossal proportions, in which a company from the Theatre
Francais annually presents classical dramas. The magnificent fortress city
of Carcassonne has foundation walls that were laid by Romans. Notre Dame
of Paris occupies the site of a temple to Jupiter.
As with modern England, so with modern France; its people are a mixture of
many races. To the southwest, in a remote age, came Iberians from Spain,
to Provence, Ligurians from Italy; to the northeast, Germanic tribes; to
the northwest, Scandinavians; to the central parts, from the Seine to the
Garonne, in the sixth century B.C., Gauls, who soon became the dominant
race, and so have remained until this day, masterful and fundamental. When
Caesar came, there had grown up in Gaul a martial nobility, leaders of a
warlike people, with chieftains whose names are familiar in the mouths and
ears of all schoolboys--Aricvistus and Vercingetorix. When Vercingetorix
was overthrown at Alesia, Gaul became definitely Roman. For five hundred
years it remained loyal to Rome. Within its borders, was established the
Pax Romana, and in 250 A.D., under St. Denis, Christianity. When the
disintegration of the empire set in five centuries afterward, Gaul was
among the first provinces to suffer. With the coming of the Visigoths and
Huns from the Black Sea, the Pranks and Bnrgundians from beyond the Rhine,
the Roman fall was near, but great battles were first fought in Gaul,
battles which rivaled those of Caesar five centuries before. Greatest of
all these was the one with Attila, at Chalons, in 451, where thousands
perished.
When the Roman dominion ended, Rome's one great province in Gaul became
seventeen small principalities, and power drifted fast into the hands of a
warlike aristocracy. Then a strong man rose in Clovis, who, in 508, made
Lutetia his capital, his successors enriching and adorning it. From these
beginnings, has been evolved, in twelve hundred years, the great modern
state--through Charlemagne and his empire-building, Louis XI. and his work
of consolidating feudal principalities into one strong state, through a
Hundred Years' War, fierce wars of religion, a long line of Bourbon kings,
with their chateaux-building in Touraine and Versailles, the Revolution of
1789, the Napoleonic era, the Republic. An historical land surely is this,
and a beautiful land, with her snow-capped mountains of the southeast, her
broad vineyards, unrivaled cathedrals, her Roman remains, ancient olive
groves, her art, her literature, her people.
Belgium and Holland were included in the territory known to Rome as Gaul.
Here dwelt a people called the Belgii, and another called the Nervii--that
tribal nation whom Caesar "overcame" on a summer's day, and the same
evening, "in his tent," "put on" the mantle that was pierced afterward by
daggers in the Senate House. From these lands came the skilled Batavian
cavalry, which followed Caesar in pursuit of Pompey and forced Pompey's
flight at Pharsalia. From here afterward came other Batavians, who served
as the Imperial Guard of Rome from Caasar's time to Vespasian's. In race,
as in geographical position, the Netherlands have belonged in part to
France, in part to Germany, the interior long remaining Gallic, the
frontier Teutonic. From Caesar's time down to the fifth century, the land
was Roman. Afterward, in several periods, it was in part, or in whole,
included in the domain of France--in Charlemagne's time and after; under
Louis XI., who sought, somewhat unsuccessfully, its complete submission;
under Louis XIV., who virtually conquered it; under the French Revolution,
and during Napoleon's ascendency. On Belgium soil Marlborough fought and
won Ramillies, and Wellington Waterloo.
Belgium and Holland were for long great centers of European commerce--at
Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam--rivals of English ports,
Holland an ancient adversary of England and her valiant enemy in great
wars. A still fiercer struggle came with Spain. Perhaps an even greater
conflict than these two has been her never-ending war with the sea.
Holland has been called a land enclosed in a fortress reared against the
sea. For generations her people have warred with angry waves; but, as
Motley has said, they gained an education for a struggle "with the still
more savage despotism of man." Let me not forget here Holland's great
school of art--comparable only to that of Spain, or even to that of Italy.
F. W. H.
Contents of Volume III
France and the Netherlands--Part One
INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. III AND IV--By the
Editor.
I--Paris
The City Beautiful--By Anne Warwick
Notre-Dame--By Victor Hugo
The Louvre--By Grant Allen
The Madeline and Champs Elysees--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Hotel des Invalides and Napoleon's Tomb--By Augustus J. C. Hare
The Palais de Justice and Sainte Chapelle--By Grant Allen
The Hotel de Ville and the Conciergerie--By Augustus J. C. Hare
Pere la Chaise--By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Musee de Cluny--By Grant Allen
The Place de la Bastille--By Augustus J. C. Hare
The Pantheon and St. Etienne du Mont--By Grant Allen
St. Roch--By Augustus J. C. Hare
II--The Environs of Paris
Versailles--By William Makepeace Thackeray
Versailles in 1739--By Thomas Gray
Fontainebleau--By Augustus J. C. Hare
St. Denis--By Grant Allen
Marly-Le-Roi--By Augustus J. C. Hare
The Village of Auteuil--By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Two Trianons--By Augustus J. C. Hare
Malmaison--By Augustus J. C. Hare
St. Germain--By Leitch Ritchie
St. Cloud--By Augustus J. C. Hare
III--Old Provence
The Papal Palace at Avignon--By Charles Dickens
The Building of the Great Palace--By Thomas Okey
The Walls of Avignon--By Thomas Okey
Villeneuve and the Broken Bridge--By Thomas Okey
Orange--By Henry James
Vaucluse--By Bayard Taylor
The Pont du Guard,--Aigues-Mortes--Nimes--By Henry James
Arles and Les Baux--By Henry James
IV--Cathedrals and Chateaux
Amiens--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Rouen--By Thomas Frognall Dibdin
Chartres--By Epiphanius Wilson
Rheims--By Epiphanius Wilson
(_Cathedrals and Chateaux continued in Vol. IV_)
List of Illustrations
Volume III
Frontispiece
Paris: The Seine and Bridges
Notre Dame, Paris
Portion of the Louvre, Paris
Church of the Madeleine, Paris
Napoleon's Sarcophagus, Paris
The Burial Place of Napoleon, Paris
Column and Place Vendome, Paris
Column of July, Paris
The Pantheon, Paris
The House of the Chamber of Deputies, Paris
The Bourse, Paris
Interior of the Grand Opera House, Paris
Front of the Grand Opera House, Paris
The Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Arch Erected by Napoleon Near the Louvre, Paris
The Church of St. Vincent de Paul, Paris
The Church of St. Sulpice, Paris
The Picture Gallery of Versailles
The Bed-Room of Louis XIV., Versailles
The Grand Trianon at Versailles
The Little Trianon at Versailles
The Bed-Room of Catherine de Medici at Chaumont
Marie Antoinette's Dairy at Versailles
Tours
Saint Denis
Havre
The Bridge at St. Cloud
[Illustration: Notre Dame, Paris]
[Illustration: Church of the Madeleine]
[Illustration: Portion of the Louvre]
[Illustration: Paris: Column and Place Vendome]
[Illustration: Burial Place of Napoleon]
[Illustration: Napoleon's Sarcophagus]
[Illustration: Paris: Column of July in the Place de la Bastille]
[Illustration: Pantheon, Paris]
[Illustration: House of the Chamber of Deputies]
[Illustration: Bourse, Paris]
I
PARIS
The City Beautiful
By Anne Warwick
[Footnote: From "The Meccas of the World." By permission of the publisher,
John Lane. Copyright, 1913.]
The most prejudiced will not deny that Paris is beautiful; or that there
is about her streets and broad, tree-lined avenues a graciousness at once
dignified and gay. Stand, as the ordinary tourist does on his first day,
in the flowering square before the Louvre; in the foreground are the
fountains and bright tulip-bordered paths of the Tuileries--here a glint
of gold, there a soft flash of marble statuary, shining through the trees;
in the center the round lake where the children sail their boats. Beyond
spreads the wide sweep of the Place de la Concorde, with its obelisk of
terrible significance, its larger fountains throwing brilliant jets of
spray; and then the trailing, upward vista of the Champs Elysees to the
great triumphal arch; yes, even to the most indifferent, Paris is
beautiful.
To the subtler of appreciation, she is more than beautiful; she is
impressive. For behind the studied elegance of architecture, the elaborate
simplicity of garden, the carefully lavish use of sculpture and delicate
spray, is visible the imagination of a race of passionate creators--the
imagination, throughout, of the great artist. One meets it at every turn
and corner, down dim passageways, up steep hills, across bridges, along
sinuous quays; the masterhand and its "infinite capacity for taking
pains." And so marvelously do its manifestations of many periods through
many ages combine to enhance one another that one is convinced that the
genius of Paris has been perennial; that St. Genevieve, her godmother,
bestowed it as an immortal gift when the city was born.
From earliest days every man seems to have caught the spirit of the man
who came before, and to have perpetuated it; by adding his own distinctive
yet always harmonious contribution to the gradual development of the
whole. One built a stately avenue; another erected a church at the end; a
third added a garden on the other side of the church, and terraces leading
up to it; a fourth and fifth cut streets that should give from the
remaining two sides into other flowery squares with their fine edifices.
And so from every viewpoint, and from every part of the entire city,
to-day we have an unbroken series of vistas--each one different and more
charming than the last.
History has lent its hand to the process, too; and romance--it is not an
insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors of
Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant
Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left their
monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined tower, but
there they are, eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit that lives
forever staunch in the heart of the fervent French people.
It comes over one overwhelmingly sometimes, in the midst of the careless
gaiety of the modern city, the old, ever-burning spirit of rebellion and
savage strife that underlies it all, and that can spring to the surface
now on certain memorable days, with a vehemence that is terrifying. Look
across the Pont Alexandre, at the serene gold dome of the Invalides,
surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are in the fires and awful
slaughter of Napoleon's wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut
down for the lust of one man's ambition; and when that is spent, and the
wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly
asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left--and the great
Emperor has done his duty!
Or you are walking through the Cite, past the court of the Palais de
Justice. You glance in, carelessly--memory rushes upon you--and the court
flows with blood, "so that men waded through it, up to the knees!" In the
tiny stone-walled room yonder, Marie Antoinette sits disdainfully composed
before her keepers; tho her face is white with the sounds she hears, as
her friends and followers are led out to swell that hideous river of
blood.
A pretty, artificial city, Paris; good for shopping, and naughty
amusements, now and then. History? Oh yes, of course; but all that's so
dry and uninspiring, and besides it happened so long ago.
Did it? In your stroll along the Rue Royale, among the jewellers' and
milliners' shops and Maxim's, glance up at the Madeleine, down at the
obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago, this
was the brief distance between life and death for those who one minute
were dancing in the "Temple of Victory," the next were laying their heads
upon the block of the guillotine.
Notre-Dame
By Victor Hugo
[Footnote: From Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris." Translated by A.L. Alger. By
permission of Dana, Estes & Co. Copyright, 1888.]
The church of Notre-Dame at Paris is doubtless still a sublime and
majestic building. But, much beauty as it may retain in its old age, it is
not easy to repress a sigh, to restrain our anger, when we mark the
countless defacements and mutilations to which men and time have subjected
that venerable monument, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its
first stone, or Philip Augustus, who laid its last....
Upon the face of this aged queen of French cathedrals, beside every
wrinkle we find a scar. "Tempus edax, homo edacior;" which I would fain
translate thus: "Time is blind, but man is stupid." Had we leisure to
study with the reader, one by one, the various marks of destruction graven
upon the ancient church, the work of Time would be the lesser, the worse
that of Men, especially of "men of art," since there are persons who have
styled themselves architects during the last two centuries.
And first of all, to cite but a few glaring instances, there are assuredly
few finer pages in the history of architecture than that facade where the
three receding portals with their pointed arches, the carved and
denticulated plinth with its twenty-eight royal niches, the huge central
rose-window flanked by its two lateral windows as is the priest by his
deacon and subdeacon, the lofty airy gallery of trifoliated arcades
supporting a heavy platform upon its slender columns, and lastly the two
dark and massive towers with their pent-house roofs of slate, harmonious
parts of a magnificent whole, one above the other, five gigantic stages,
unfold themselves to the eye, clearly and as a whole, with their countless
details of sculpture, statuary, and carving, powerfully contributing to
the calm grandeur of the whole; as it were, a vast symphony in stone; the
colossal work of one man and one nation, one and yet complex, like the
Iliad and the old Romance epics, to which it is akin; the tremendous sum
of the joint contributions of all the force of an entire epoch, in which
every stone reveals, in a hundred forms, the fancy of the workman
disciplined by the genius of the artist--a sort of human creation, in
brief, powerful and prolific as the Divine creation, whose double
characteristics, variety and eternity, it seems to have acquired.
And what we say of the facades, we must also say of the whole church; and
what we say of the cathedral church of Paris must be said of all the
Christian churches of the Middle Ages. Everything is harmonious which
springs from spontaneous, logical, and well-proportioned art. To measure a
toe, is to measure the giant.
Let us return to the facade of Notre-Dame as we see it at the present day,
when we make a pious pilgrimage to admire the solemn and mighty cathedral,
which, as its chroniclers declare, inspires terror. This facade now lacks
three important things: first, the eleven steps which formerly raised it
above the level of the ground; next, the lower series of statues which
filled the niches over the doors; and lastly, the upper row of the twenty-
eight most ancient kings of France, which adorned the gallery of the first
story, from Childebert down to Philip Augustus, each holding in his hand
"the imperial globe."
The stairs were destroyed by Time, which, with slow and irresistible
progress, raised the level of the city's soil; but while this flood-tide
of the pavements of Paris swallowed one by one the eleven steps which
added to the majestic height of the edifice, Time has perhaps given to the
church more than it took away, for it is Time which has painted the front
with that sober hue of centuries which makes the antiquity of churches
their greatest beauty.
But who pulled down the two rows of statues? Who left those empty niches?
Who carved that new and bastard pointed arch in the very center of the
middle door? Who dared to insert that clumsy, tasteless, wooden door,
carved in the style of Louis XV., side by side with the arabesques of
Biscornette? Who but men, architects, the artists of our day?
And if we step into the interior of the edifice, who overthrew that
colossal figure of Saint Christopher, proverbial among statues by the same
right as the great hall of the palace among halls, as the spire of
Strasburg among steeples? And those myriad statues which peopled every
space between the columns of the choir and the nave, kneeling, standing,
on horseback, men, women, children, kings, bishops, men-at-arms--of stone,
of marble, of gold, of silver, of copper, nay even of wax--who brutally
swept them away? It was not the hand of Time.
And who replaced the old Gothic altar, with its splendid burden of shrines
and reliquaries, by that heavy marble sarcophagus adorned with clouds and
cherubs, looking like a poor copy of the Val-de-Grace or the Hotel des
Invalides? Who was stupid enough to fasten that clumsy stone anachronism
into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV.,
fulfilling the vow of Louis XIII.?
And who set cold white panes in place of that stained glass of gorgeous
hue, which led the wondering gaze of our fathers to roam uncertain 'twixt
the rose-window of the great door and the ogives of the chancel? And what
would a precentor of the sixteenth century say if he could see the fine
coat of yellow wash with which our Vandal archbishops have smeared their
cathedral? He would remember that this was the color with which the
executioner formerly painted those buildings judged "infamous;" he would
recall the hotel of the Petit-Bourbon, bedaubed with yellow in memory of
the Constable's treason; "a yellow of so fine a temper," says Sauval, "and
so well laid on, that more than a hundred years have failed to wash out
its color." He would fancy that the sacred spot had become accursed, and
would turn and flee.
And if we climb higher in the cathedral, without pausing to note a
thousand barbarous acts of every kind, what has become of that delightful
little steeple which rested upon the point of intersection of the
transept, and which, no less fragile and no less daring than its neighbor,
the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, (also destroyed), rose yet nearer heaven
than the towers, slender, sharp, sonorous, and daintily wrought?
An architect of good taste (1787) amputated it, and thought it quite
enough to cover the wound with that large leaden plaster which looks like
the lid of a stewpan. Thus was the marvelous art of the Middle Ages
treated in almost every land, but particularly in France. We find three
sorts of injury upon its ruins, these three marring it to different
depths; first, Time, which has made insensible breaches here and there,
mildewed and rusted the surface everywhere; then, political and religious
revolutions, which, blind and fierce by nature, fell furiously upon it,
rent its rich array of sculpture and carving, shivered its rose-windows,
shattered its necklaces of arabesques and quaint figures, tore down its
statues--sometimes because of their crown; lastly, changing fashion, even
more grotesque and absurd, from the anarchic and splendid deviations of
the Renaissance down to the necessary decline of architecture.
Fashion did more than revolutions. Fashion cut into the living flesh,
attacked the very skeleton and framework of art; it chopped and hewed,
dismembered, slew the edifice, in its form as well as in its symbolism, in
its logic no less than in its beauty. But fashion restored, a thing which
neither time nor revolution ever pretended to do. Fashion, on the plea of
"good taste," impudently adapted to the wounds of Gothic architecture the
paltry gewgaws of a day,--marble ribbons, metallic plumes, a veritable
leprosy of egg-shaped moldings, of volutes, wreaths, draperies, spirals,
fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, lusty cupids, and bloated cherubs,
which began to ravage the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de
Medici, and destroyed it, two centuries later, tortured and distorted, in
the Dubarry's boudoir.
There are thus, to sum up the points to which we have alluded, three sorts
of scars now disfiguring Gothic architecture; wrinkles and warts upon the
epidermis--these are the work of time; wounds, brutal injuries, bruises,
and fractures--these are the work of revolution, from Luther to Mirabeau;
mutilations, amputations, dislocations of the frame, "restorations,"--
these are the Greek, Roman barbaric work of professors according to
Vitruvius and Vignole. Academies have murdered the magnificent art which
the Vandals produced. To centuries, to revolutions which at least laid
waste with impartiality and grandeur, are conjoined the host of scholastic
architects, licensed and sworn, degrading all they touch with the
discernment and selection of bad taste, substituting the tinsel of Louis
XV. for Gothic lace-work, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is
the donkey's kick at the dying lion. It is the old oak, decaying at the
crown, pierced, bitten and devoured by caterpillars.
How different from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre Dame at
Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus; "so loudly boasted by the
ancient pagans," which immortalized Herostratus, held the cathedral of the
Gauls to be "more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure!"
Notre Dame at Paris is not, however, what can be called a complete,
definite monument, belonging to a class. It is neither a Roman nor a
Gothic church. The edifice is not a typical one. It has not, like the
abbey at Tournus, the sober massive breadth, the round expansive arch, the
icy bareness, the majestic simplicity of those buildings based on the
semicircular arch. It is not, like the cathedral at Bourges, the
magnificent, airy, multiform, bushy, sturdy, efflorescent product of the
pointed arch.
It is impossible to class it with that antique order of dark, mysterious,
low-studded churches, apparently crusht by the semicircular arch--almost
Egyptian, save for the ceiling; all hieroglyphic, all sacerdotal, all
symbolic, more loaded in their ornamentation with lozenges and zigzags
than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with animals than with
men; less the work of the architect than of the bishop; the first
transformation of the art, bearing the deep impress of theocratic and
military discipline, taking root in the Lower Empire, and ceasing with
William the Conqueror. It is impossible to place our cathedral in that
other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in stained glass and
sculpture; of pointed forms and daring attitudes; belonging to the
commoners and plain, citizens, as political symbols; free, capricious,
lawless, as works of art; the second transformation of architecture, no
longer hieroglyphic, unchangeable, sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive,
and popular, beginning with the close of the Crusades and ending with
Louis XI. Notre Dame at Paris is not of purely Roman race like the former,
nor of purely Arab breed like the latter.
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