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GASTON DE LATOUR: AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE
WALTER PATER

1. A Clerk in Orders: 1-25

2. Our Lady's Church: 26-47

3. Modernity: 48-72

4. Peach-Blossom and Wine: 73-90

5. Suspended Judgment: 91-115

6. Shadows of Events: 116-131

7. The Lower Pantheism: 132-end



I. A CLERK IN ORDERS

The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts,
composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent
object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La
Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days
of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it
recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union,
less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the
improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous
monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object
which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it
was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of
the very ground-plan of the house itself--everywhere was the token of
their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway
through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely
together.

Why this irregularity of ground-plan?--the traveller would ask;
recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the
eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the
part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of
architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question,
true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making
the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large
measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death,
some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could
hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is
plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty
remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a
crenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some
ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained.
It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that had
allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at
this point in its growth.

And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite
motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect
the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity
of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of
that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house--a
double manoir--two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far
back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been
the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked
with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of
Latour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonely
manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when
the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring
lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so
dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed
away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the
younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the
kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight,
the building of a second manor-house--the Château d'Amour, as it came
to be called--that the two families, in what should be as nearly as
possible one abode, might take their fortunes together.

Of somewhat finer construction than the rough walls of the older
manor, the Château d'Amour stood, amid the change of years, as a
visible record of all the accumulated sense of human existence among
its occupants. The old walls, the old apartments, of those two
associated houses still existed, with some obvious additions, beneath
the delicate, fantastic surfaces of the château [4] of the sixteenth
century. Its singularity of outline was the very symbol of the
religion of the family in the race of Latour, still full of loyalty
to the old home, as its numerous outgrowths took hold here and there
around. A race with some prominent characteristics ineradicable in
the grain, they went to raise the human level about them by a
transfer of blood, far from involving any social decadence in
themselves. A peculiar local variety of character, of manners, in
that district of La Beauce, surprised the more observant visitor who
might find his way into farmhouse or humble presbytery of its
scattered townships. And as for those who kept up the central
tradition of their house, they were true to the soil, coming back,
under whatever obstacles, from court, from cloister, from distant
crusade, to the visible spot where the memory of their kindred was
liveliest and most exact--a memory, touched so solemnly with a
conscience of the intimacies of life, its significant events, its
contacts and partings, that to themselves it was like a second sacred
history.

It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of
Deux-manoirs--one of the later days of August. The event, which
would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all
that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it
was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years,
and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant
thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his
fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church
of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial
patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode,
the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents
and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope
of their old age--the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters,
certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the
family councils.

They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old
chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day.
Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its
breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a
daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that
had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost
angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy
spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one
entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral
stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great
blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes.
An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars,
lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and
mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion
through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of
all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a
later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above
the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window;
the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of
hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate
tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold,
down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants
of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched
by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted
glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old
church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries,
the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor--much-prized family
possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great
ecclesiastical function like this--the lights burning, flowers
everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the
peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy
chance of an episcopal blessing.

And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal
adornments, which now so rarely saw the light, forming the central
group, expectant around the young seigneur they had conducted hither,
seemed of one piece with [7] those mystic figures, the old, armour-
clad monumental effigies, the carved and painted imageries which ran
round the outer circuit of the choir--a version of the biblical
history, for the reading of those who loitered on their way from
chapel to chapel. There was Joseph's dream, with the tall sheaves of
the elder brethren bowing to Joseph's sheaf, like these aged heads
around the youthful aspirant of to-day. There was Jacob going on his
mysterious way, met by, conversing with, wrestling with, the Angels
of God--rescuing the promise of his race from the "profane" Esau.
There was the mother of Samuel, and, in long white ephod, the much-
desired, early-consecrated child, who had inherited her religious
capacity; and David, with something of his extraordinary genius for
divine things written on his countenance; onward, to the sacred
persons of the Annunciation, with the golden lily in the silver cup,
only lately set in its place. With dress, expression, nay! the very
incidents themselves innocently adapted to the actual habits and
associations of the age which had produced them, these figures of the
old Jewish history seemed about to take their places, for the
imparting of a divine sanction, among the living actors of the day.
One and all spoke of ready concurrence with religious motions, a
ready apprehension of, and concurrence with, the provisions of a
certain divine scheme for the improvement of one's opportunities in
the world.

[8] Would that dark-haired, fair-skinned lad concur, in his turn, and
be always true to his present purpose--Gaston de Latour, standing
thus, almost the only youthful thing, amid the witness of these
imposing, meditative, masks and faces? Could his guardians have read
below the white propriety of the youth, duly arrayed for dedication,
with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded
over his left shoulder, he might sorely have disturbed their placid
but somewhat narrow ruminations, with the germs of what was strange
to or beyond them. Certain of those shrewd old ecclesiastics had in
fact detected that the devout lad, so visibly impressed, was not
altogether after their kind; that, together with many characteristics
obviously inherited, he possessed--had caught perhaps from some
ancestor unrepresented here--some other potencies of nature, which
might not always combine so accordantly as to-day with the mental
requisites of an occasion such as this. One of them, indeed, touched
notwithstanding by his manifest piety just then, shortly afterwards
recommended him a little prayer "for peace" from the Vespers of the
Roman Breviary--for the harmony of his heart with itself; advice
which, except for a very short period, he ever afterwards followed,
saying it every evening of his life.

Yet it was the lad's own election which had led him to this first
step in a career that might take him out of the world and end the
race of [9] Latour altogether. Approaching their fourscore years,
and realising almost suddenly the situation of the young Gaston, left
there alone, out of what had been a large, much-promising, resonant
household, they wished otherwise, but did not try to change his
early-pronounced preference for the ecclesiastical calling. When he
determined to seek the clericature, his proposal made a demand on all
their old-fashioned religious sentiment. But the fund was a deep
one, and their acquiescence in the result entire. He might indeed
use his privilege of "orders" only as the stepping-stone to material
advancement in a church which seemed to have gone over wholly to the
world, and of which at that time one half the benefices were
practically in the hands of laymen. But, actually, the event came to
be a dedication on their part, not unlike those old biblical ones--an
offering in old age of the single precious thing left them; the
grandchild, whose hair would presently fall under the very shears
which, a hundred years before, had turned an earlier, brilliant,
Gaston de Latour into a monk.

Charles Guillard, Bishop of Chartres, a courtly, vivacious prelate,
whose quick eyes seemed to note at a glance the whole assembly, one
and all, while his lips moved silently, arrived at last, and the rite
began with the singing of the Office for the Ninth Hour. It was like
a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way--Mirabilia
testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly [10] fresh, the
soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the
sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation
of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had
still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert
in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis
quae periit--the physical world; with its lusty ministers, at work,
or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned to the
August sun--the world so importunately visible, intruding a little
way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of heat across the
old over-written pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries
within. Seen from the incense-laden sanctuary, where the bishop was
assuming one by one the pontifical ornaments, La Beauce, like a many-
coloured carpet spread under the great dome, with the white double
house-front quivering afar through the heat, though it looked as if
you might touch with the hand its distant spaces, was for a moment
the unreal thing. Gaston alone, with all his mystic preoccupations,
by the privilege of youth, seemed to belong to both, and link the
visionary company about him to the external scene.

The rite with which the Roman Church "makes a clerk," aims certainly
at no low measure of difference from the coarser world around him, in
its supposed scholar: and in this case the [11] aspirant (the precise
claims of the situation being well considered) had no misgiving.
Discreetly, and with full attention, he answers Adsum! when his name
is called, and advances manfully; though he kneels meekly enough, and
remains, with his head bowed forward, at the knees of the seated
bishop who recites the appointed prayers, between the anthems and
responses of his Schola, or attendant singers--Might he be saved from
mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward
guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who
had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine
love. "The Lord is my inheritance" whispers Gaston distinctly, as
the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five
places, "after the fashion of Christ's crown," the shears in the
episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious
spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice
ripples down over him. "This is the generation of them that seek
Him," the choir sings: "The Lord Himself is the portion of my
inheritance and my cup." It was the Church's eloquent way of bidding
unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to
seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.

The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf
flung across the land, as [12] the party returned home in the late
August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at
the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool
space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers
being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells
startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted
churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they
approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the
coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral
occupants started back out of the daylight--"Why depart, dear
ghosts?" was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more
in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood.
There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in
one of the two old houses. That other, the Château d'Amour, remained
for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders,
though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery
of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or
that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate
brothers, onwards--above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de
Latour had died of joy.

With minds full of their recent business it was difficult to go back
to common occupations; as darkness came on, the impressions of the
day did but return again more vividly and concentrate [13] themselves
upon the inward sense. Observance, loyal concurrence in some high
purpose for him, passive waiting on the hand one might miss in the
darkness, with the gift or gifts therein of which he had the
presentiment, and upon the due acceptance of which the true fortune
of life would turn; these were the hereditary traits alert in Gaston,
as he lay awake in the absolute, moon-lit, stillness, his outward ear
attentive for the wandering footsteps which, through that wide,
lightly-accentuated country, often came and went about the house,
with weird suggestions of a dim passage to and fro, and of an
infinite distance. He would rise, as the footsteps halted perhaps
below his window, to answer the questions of the travellers,
pilgrims, or labourers who had missed their way from farm to farm, or
halting soldier seeking guidance; terrible or terror-stricken
companies sometimes, rudely or piteously importunate to be let in--
for it was the period of the Religious Wars, flaming up here and
there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years.

Once, in the beginning of these troubles (he was then a child,
leaning from the window, as a sound of rickety, small wheels
approached) the enquiry came in broken French, "Voulez-vous donner
direction?" from a German, one of the mercenaries of the Duc de
Guise, hired for service in a civil strife of France, drawing wearily
a crippled companion, so far from home. [14] The memory of it,
awakening a thousand strange fancies, had remained by him, as a
witness to the power of fortuitous circumstance over the imagination.

One night there had come a noise of horns, and presently King Charles
himself was standing in the courtyard, belated, and far enough now
from troublesome company, as he hunted the rich-fleshed game of La
Beauce through the endless corn. He entered, with a relish for the
pleasant cleanliness of the place, expressed in a shrill strain of
half-religious oaths, like flashes of hell-fire to Gaston's suddenly-
awakened sense. It was the invincible nature of the royal lad to
speak, and feel, on these mad, alto notes, and not unbecoming in a
good catholic; for Huguenots never swore, and these were subtly
theological oaths. Well! the grandparents repressed as best they
could their apprehensions as to what other hunters, what other
disconcerting incident, might follow; for catholic France very
generally believed that the Huguenot leaders had a scheme for
possessing themselves of the person of the young king, known to be
mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest
apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the
blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also
with the eagerness of a madman--steeped in blood. He lay there for a
few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston
rising from [15] his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards,
on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the
night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly
enjoying this "gipsy" incident, with the supper after that unexpected
fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very
pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly
satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious
movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy
plaything of other people's humours, escaped for a moment out of a
world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed
gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly,
profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the
notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of
his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane--lines simpler-
hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.

The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration
of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was
that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode
away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by
the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the
treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet
progress--the tranquil and tolerant years of the [16] Renaissance--
the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely
confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial
aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic
personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic
beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent
egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the
extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de
Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old
manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the
softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once
more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign
mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people
who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration
among newer things so little warlike.

A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A
perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and
furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of
contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de
L'Hôpital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single
actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself
the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only
by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17]
and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival
claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the
so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it,
but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some
chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the
spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true
catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant
Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound
regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth
year, "when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from
France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have
not been able to replace." Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded
from one end of France to the other.

It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including
Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might
make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and
pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife--of
merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do
with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on
his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two
young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers
are quarrelling about [18] the division, lately effected there, of
their dead father's morsel of land. "I shall hate you till death!"
cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists
part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and
Huguenot.

The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history
during the reigns of Catherine's sons might indeed lead one to fancy
that little human kindness could have remained in France,--a
fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have
been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human
life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself:--all
war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human
nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of
tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like
all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of
Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests' ears, of
that dark and fugitive Montgomeri, the slayer, as some would have it
the assassin, of a king, now active, and almost ubiquitous, on the
Huguenot side. Still, at Deux-manoirs, this warfare, seething up
from time to time so wildly in this or that district of France, was
for the most part only sensible in incidents we might think
picturesque, were they told with that intention; delightful enough,
certainly, to the curiosity of a boy, in whose [19] mind nevertheless
they deepened a native impressibility to the sorrow and hazard that
are constant and necessary in human life, especially for the poor.
The troubles of "that poor people of France"--burden of all its
righteous rulers, from Saint Lewis downwards--these, at all events,
would not be lessened by the struggle of Guise and Condé and Bourbon
and Valois, of the Valois with each other, of those four brilliant
young princes of the name of Henry. The weak would but suffer
somewhat more than was usual, in the interest of the strong. If you
were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance
flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke
rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the
peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women
and all, with fork and scythe,--still, those peasants used their
scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and
slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their
noonday rest. In effect, since peace is always in some measure
dependent on one's own seeking, disturbing forces do but fray their
way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet
realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every
phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres,
salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of
perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough
[20] for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of
either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his
child's garden-bed, that was only because in a fine June the corn had
grown tall so quickly, through which he was presently led to it, with
all its garish sweets undisturbed: and it was with the ancient
growths of mind--customs, beliefs, mental preferences--as with the
natural world.

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