Motor-Flight Through France

I. Paris to Poitiers

PART II I PARIS TO POITIERS SPRING again, and the long white road unrolling itself southward from Paris. How could one resist the call? We answered it on the blandest of late March mornings, all April in the air, and the Seine fringing itself with a mist of yellowish willows as we rose over it, climbing the hill to Ville d'Avray. Spring comes soberly, inaudibly as it were, in these temperate European lands, where the grass holds its green all winter, and the foliage of ivy, laurel, holly, and countless other evergreen shrubs, links the lifeless to the living months. But the mere act of climbing that southern road above the Seine meadows seemed as definite as the turning of a leaf-the passing from a black- [78 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE and-white page to one illuminated. And every day now would tum a brighter page for us. Goethe has a charming verse, descriptive, it is supposed, of his first meeting with Christiane Vulpius: "Aimlessly I strayed through the wood, having it in my mind to seek nothing." Such, precisely, was our state of mind on that first day's run. We were simply pushing south toward the Berry, through a more or less familiar country, and the real journey was to begin for us on the morrow, with the run from Chateauroux to Poitiers. But we reckoned without our France! It is easy enough, glancing down the long page of the Guide Continental, to slip by such names as Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres and Valenc;ay, in one's dash for the objective point; but there is no slipping by them in the motor, they lurk there in one's path, throwing out great loops of persuasion, arresting one's flight, complicating one's impressions, oppressing, bewildering one with the renewed, half-forgotten sense of the hoarded richness of France. Versailles first, unfolding the pillared expanse of its north fac;ade to vast empty perspectives of radiating avenues; then Rambouillet, low in a [74 ] -I« II: c w :I: I-« o w :I: lI &. o W (j) IL« z o z w IZ '" ~ ... o ~ ~ I- a : .... I- '" i= n. ~ '" a: .... i= <5 n. PARIS TO POITIERS towers of Laon or the domes of Perigueux-but in the homogeneous interest of the old buildings within the city: the way they carry on its packed romantic history like the consecutive pages of a richly illuminated chronicle. The illustration of that history begins with the strange little "tempie " of Saint John, a baptistery of the fourth century, and accounted the earliest Christian building in France-though this applies only to the lower story (now virtually the crypt), the upper having been added some three hundred years later, when baptism by aspersion had replaced the primitive plunge. Unhappily the ancient temple has suffered the lot of the toohighly treasured relic, and fenced about, restored, and converted into a dry little museum, has lost all that colour and pathos of extreme age that make the charm of humbler monuments. This charm, in addition to many others, still clings to the expressive west front of Notre Dame la Grande, the incomparable little Romanesque church holding the centre of the marketplace . Built of a dark grey stone which has taken on-and been suffered to retain-a bloom of golden lichen like the trace of ancient weather- [89 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE worn gilding, it breaks, at the spring of its portalarches , into a profusion of serried, overlapping sculpture, which rises tier by tier to the splendid Christ Triumphant of the crowning gable, yet never once crowds out and smothers the structural composition, as Gothic ornament, in its most exuberant phase, was wont to do. Through all its profusion of statuary and ornamental carving, the front of Notre Dame preserves that subordination to classical composition that marks the Romanesque of southern France; but between the arches, in the great spandrils of the doorways, up to the typically Poitevin scales of the beautiful arcaded angle turrets, what richness of detail, what splendid play of fancy! After such completeness of beauty as this little church presents-for its nave and transept tower are no less admirable than the more striking front --even such other monuments as Poitiers has to offer must suffer slightly by comparison. Saint Hilaire Ie Grand, that notable eleventh-century church, with its triple aisles and its nave roofed by cupolas, and the lower-lying temple of Sainte Radegonde, which dates from the Merovingian queen from whom it takes its name, have both [90 ] PARIS TO POITIERS suffered such repeated alterations that neither carries the imagination back with as direct a flight as the slightly less ancient Notre Dame; and the cathedral itself, which one somehow comes to last in an enumeration of the Poitiers churches, is a singularly charmless building. Built in the "twelfth century, by Queen Eleanor of Guyenne, at the interesting moment of transition from" the round to the pointed arch, and completed later by a wide-sprawling Gothic front, it gropes after and fails of its effect both without and within. Yet it has one memorable possession in its thirteenth-century choir-stalls, almost alone of that date in France--tall severe seats, their backs formed by pointed arches with delicate low.-relief carvings between the spandrils. There is, in especial, one small bat, with outspread web-like wings, so exquisitely fitted into its allotted space, and with such delicacy of observation shown in the modelling of its little halfhuman face, that it remains in memory as having the permanence of something classical, outside of dates and styles. Having lingered over these things, and taken in by the wayan impression of the confused [91 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE and rambling ducal palace, with its magnificent grande salle completed and adorned by Jean de Berry, we began to think remorsefully of the wonders we had missed on our run from Le Blanc to Poitiers. We could not retrace the whole distance; but at least we could return to the curious little town of Chauvigny, of which we had caught a tantalising glimpse above a moonlit curve of the Vienne. We found it, by day, no less suggestive, and full of unsuspected riches. Of its two large Romanesque churches, the one in the lower town, beside the river, is notable, without, for an extremely beautiful arcaded apse, and contains within a striking fresco of the fifteenth century, in which Christ is represented followed by a throng of the faithful-kings, bishops, monks and clerks-who help to carry the cross. The other, and larger, church, planted on the summit of the abrupt escarpment which lifts the haute ville above the Vienne, has a strange body-guard composed of no fewer than five feudal castles, huddled so close together on the narrow top of the cliff that their outer walls almost touch. The lack, in that open country, of easily fortified points doubtless drove [92 ] PARIS TO POITIERS the bishops of Poitiers (who were also barons of Chauvigny) into this strange defensive alliance with four of their noble neighbours ; and one wonders how the five-sided menage kept the peace, when local disturbances made it needful to take to the rock. The gashed walls and ivy-draped dungeons of the rival ruins make an extraordinarily romantic setting for the curious church of Saint Pierre, staunchly seated on an extreme ledge of the cliff, and gathering under its flank the handful of town within the fortified circuit. There is nothing in architecture so suggestive of extreme age, yet of a kind of hale durability, as these thick-set Romanesque churches, with their prudent vaulting , their solid central towers, the close firm grouping of their apsidal chapels. The Renaissance brought the classic style into such permanent relationship to modern life that eleventhcentury architecture seems remoter than Greece and Rome; yet its buildings have none of the perilous frailty of the later Gothic, and one associates the idea of romance and ruin rather with the pointed arch than with the round. Saint Pierre is a Singularly good example of [93 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE this stout old school, which saw the last waves of barbarian invasion break at its feet, and seems likely to see the ebb and flow of so many other tides before its stubborn walls go under. It is in their sculptures, especially, that these churches reach back to a dim and fearful world of which few clues remain to us: the mysterious baleful creatures peopling their archivolts and capitals seem to have come out of some fierce vision of Cenobite temptation, when the hermits of the desert fought with the painted devils of the tombs. The apsidal capitals of Saint Pierre are a very menagerie of such strange demons----evil beasts grinning and mocking among the stocky saints and angels who set forth, unconcerned by such hideous propinquity, the story of the birth of Christ. The animals are much more skilfully modelled than the angels, and at Chauvigny one slender monster, with greyhound flanks, subhuman face, and long curved tail ending in a grasping human hand, haunts the memory as an embodiment of subtle malevolence. [94 ] ...