Book: Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old
manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which
paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Château d'Amour,
indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough
feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in
particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman's apartment, with an
effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston's own
century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of
the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of
Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had
watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of
her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till
against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last.
Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston
tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind,
seemed [21] almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.

Hither, as to an oratory, a religious place, the finer spirits of her
kin had always found their way, to leave behind them there the more
intimate relics of themselves. To Gaston its influence imparted
early a taste for delicate things as being indispensable in all his
pleasures to come; and, from the very first, with the appetite for
some great distinguishing passion, the peculiar genius of his age
seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had
been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life
its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home,
and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on
what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed
place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell
what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of
which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his
first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in
the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have
disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of
unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours--the couches,
the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south-
west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had
been also a dainty love, leaving [22] its impress everywhere in this
magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where
they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long
since, the fragrance which the lad's movement stirred around him.
And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles,
who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the
house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from
his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be
visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.

A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and
give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be
conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this
religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking
in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by
the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which
had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity--
somewhere, somewhere, in the world!--waiting for him in the distance,
or perchance already on its way, to explain, by its own plenary
beauty and power, why wine and roses and the languorous summer
afternoons were so delightful. So far indeed, the imaginative heat,
that might one day enter into dangerous rivalry with simple old-
fashioned faith, was blent harmoniously with it. They [23] were
hardly distinguishable elements of an amiable character, susceptible
generally to the poetic side of things--two neighbourly apprehensions
of a single ideal.

The great passions, the fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as
the true realisation of life, have not always softened men's natures:
they have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits
of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more
equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance,
into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to
the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de
Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its intricate
omnipresence in life. In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, the
handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit
observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of
human tears falling always through the shadows of the world. For
once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to
its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little
demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age.
So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went
forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the
sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old,
almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.

[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had
lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well-
nigh healed now--those once so poignant griefs--the scars remaining
only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their
surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly,
in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the
triumphant antiphons:--"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare
of the fowler!"--thinking intently of the little tombs which had
recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth
de Latour, Cornélius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours.
Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava.
Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must
be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own
susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through
the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as
if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant
latent sensibilities.

The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious
faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions
with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles,
as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as
we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a
thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast
level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north
to south:--perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for
the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the
imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no
shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all
accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of
every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it
as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable
soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it
for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset
him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a
scene which had for him something of the character of the sea--its
changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life
that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the
guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough,
but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it
was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue
dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of
absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.



II. OUR LADY'S CHURCH

"I had almost said even as they."

[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child,
everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing
light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people
of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of
sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the
Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to
visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous
virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying
this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim,
spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the
autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour
within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely
to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he
beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well-
born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half-
clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our
ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier
vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle
from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater
far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by
anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the
component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry,
contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of
those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been
adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed
of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through
repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of
stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied
to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking
perhaps for a few minutes' cool shelter from the summer noonday; and
the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a
moment into imperious, angry fire.

It was not in summer, however, that Gaston first set foot there; he
saw the beautiful city for the first time as if sheathed austerely in
repellent armour. In his most genial subsequent impressions of the
place there was always a lingering [28] trace of that famous frost
through which he made his way, wary of petrifying contact against
things without, to the great western portal, on Candlemas morning.
The sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed
suffering now chiefly from the cold. It was almost like a funeral--
the penitential violet, the wandering taper-light, of this half-
lenten feast of Purification. His new companions, at the head and in
the rear of the long procession, forced every one, even the Lord
Bishop himself, to move apace, bustling along, cross-bearer and
acolyte, in their odd little copes, out of the bitter air, which made
the jolly life Gaston now entered on, around the great fire of their
hall in the episcopal palace, seem all the more winsome.

Notre-Dame de Chartres! It was a world to explore, as if one
explored the entire Middle Age; it was also one unending, elaborate,
religious function--a life, or a continuous drama, to take one's part
in. Dependent on its structural completeness, on its wealth of well-
preserved ornament, on its unity in variety, perhaps on some
undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all
these, the church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of
impressing. In comparison, the other famous churches of France, at
Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and
to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on
a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished
there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which
the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the
natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing
roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious
maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the
shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very
primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere
sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:--the catholic
church must pay, even with the molten gold of her sanctuaries, the
price of her defence in the civil war. At present, it was such a
treasure-house of medieval jewellery as we have to make a very
systematic effort even to imagine. The still extant register of its
furniture and sacred apparel leaves the soul of the ecclesiologist
athirst.

And it had another very remarkable difference from almost all Gothic
churches: there were no graves there. Its emptiness in this respect
is due to no revolutionary or Huguenot desecration. Once indeed,
about this very time, a popular military leader had been interred
with honour, within the precinct of the high altar itself. But not
long afterwards, said the reverend canons, resenting on the part of
their immaculate patroness this intrusion, the corpse itself, ill at
ease, had protested, lifting up its hands above [30] the surface of
the pavement, as if to beg interment elsewhere; and Gaston could
remember assisting, awakened suddenly one night, at the removal of
the remains to a more ordinary place of sepulture.

And yet that lavish display of jewellers' work on the altars, in the
chapels, the sacristies, of Our Lady's Church, was but a framing for
little else than dead people's bones. To Gaston, a piteous soul,
with a touch also of that grim humour which, as we know, holds of
pity, relic-worship came naturally. At Deux-manoirs too there had
been relics, including certain broken children's toys and some rude
childish drawings, taken forth now and then with almost religious
veneration, with trembling hands and renewal of old grief, to his
wondering awe at the greatness of men's sorrows. Yes! the pavement
under one's feet had once been, might become again for him, molten
lava. The look, the manner, of those who exposed these things, had
been a revelation. The abundant relics of the church of Chartres
were for the most part perished remnants of the poor human body
itself; but, appertaining to persons long ago and of a far-off,
immeasurable kind of sanctity, stimulated a more indifferent sort of
curiosity, and seemed to bring the distant, the impossible, as with
tangible evidence of fact, close to one's side. It was in one's
hand--the finger of an Evangelist! The crowned head of Saint Lubin,
bishop of Chartres [31] long centuries since, but still able to
preserve its wheat-stacks from fire; bones of the "Maries," with some
of the earth from their grave; these, and the like of these, was what
the curious eye discerned in the recesses of those variously
contrived reliquaries, great and small, glittering so profusely about
the dusky church, itself ministering, by its very shadows, to a
certain appetite in the soul of Gaston for dimness--for a dim place
like this--such as he had often prefigured to himself, albeit with
some suspicion of what might seem a preference for darkness.
Physical twilight we most of us love, in its season. To him, that
perpetual twilight came in close identity with its moral or
intellectual counterpart, as the welcome requisite for that part of
the soul which loves twilight, and is, in truth, never quite at rest
out of it, through some congenital uneasiness or distress, perhaps,
in its processes of vision.

As complex, yet not less perfectly united under a single leading
motive,--its sister volume, was the ritual order of Notre-Dame de
Chartres, a year-long dramatic action, in which every one had, and
knew, his part--the drama or "mystery" of Redemption, to the
necessities of which the great church had shaped itself. All those
various "offices" which, in Pontifical, Missal and Breviary, devout
imagination had elaborated from age to age with such a range of
spiritual colour and light and shade, with so much poetic tact in
quotation, such a depth of insight into [32] the Christian soul, had
joined themselves harmoniously together, one office ending only where
another began, in the perpetual worship of this mother of churches,
which had also its own picturesque peculiarities of "use," proud of
its maternal privilege therein. And the music rose--warmed,
expanded, or fell silent altogether--as the order of the year, the
colours, the whole expression of things changed, gathering around the
full mystic effulgence of the pontiff in his own person, while the
sacred theme deepened at the great ecclesiastical seasons, when the
aisles overflowed with a vast multitude, and like a court, combed,
starched, rustling around him, Gaston and his fellows "served"
Monseigneur--they, zealous, ubiquitous, more prominent than ever,
though for the most part profoundly irreverent, and, notwithstanding
that, one and all, with what disdain of the untonsured laity!

Well! what was of the past there--the actual stones of the temple and
that sacred liturgical order--entered readily enough into Gaston's
mental kingdom, filling places prepared by the anticipations of his
tranquil, dream-struck youth. It was the present, the uncalculated
present, which now disturbed the complacent habit of his thoughts,
proposing itself, importunately, in the living forms of his immediate
companions, in the great clerical body of which he was become a part,
in the people of Chartres itself (none the less animated because
provincial) as [33] a thing, alien at a thousand points from his
preconceptions of life, to be judged by him, to be rejected or
located within. How vivid, how delightful, they were!--the other
forty-nine of the fifty lads who had come hither, after the old-
fashioned way, to serve in the household of Monseigneur by way of an
"institution" in learning and good manners, as to which a grave
national assembly, more than three centuries before the States-
General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat
behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the
future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and
moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse
their privileges."

And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat
upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces,
saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a
moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness,
kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his
very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from
their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices,
distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and
vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a
generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the
most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits
of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all
their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour
wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time,
shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth.
To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those
dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:--that, surely, were
the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the
touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul
of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their
leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:--instinctively, they felt and
underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of
spirit, its tides and changes of influence.

On the other hand also, to Gaston, dreamily observant, it was quaint,
likeable, the way they had of reproducing, unsuspectingly, the
humours of animal nature. Does not the anthropologist tell us of a
heraldry, with a large assortment of heraldic beasts, to be found
among savage or half-savage peoples, as the "survival" of a period
when men were nearer than they are or seem to be now, to the
irrational world? Throughout the sprightly movement of the lads'
daily life it was as if their "tribal" pets or monsters were with or
within them. Tall Exmes, lithe and cruel like a tiger--it was
pleasant to stroke him. The tiger was there, the parrot, the hare,
the goat of course, and certainly much apishness. [35] And, one and
all, they were like the creatures, in their vagrant, short, memories,
alert perpetually on the topmost crest of the day and hour,
transferred so heartlessly, so entirely, from yesterday to to-day.
Yet out of them, sure of some response, human heart did break:--in
and around Camille Pontdormi, for instance, brilliant and ambitious,
yet so sensitive about his threadbare home, concerning which however
he had made the whole company, one by one, his confidants--so loyal
to the people there, bursting into wild tears over the letter which
brought the news of his younger brother's death, visibly fretting
over it long afterwards. Still, for the most part, in their perfect
health, nothing seemed to reach them but their own boyish ordinances,
their own arbitrary "form." It was an absolute indifference; most
striking when they lifted their well-trained voices to sing in choir,
vacant as the sparrows, while the eloquent, far-reaching, aspiring
words floated melodiously from them, sometimes, with truly medieval
license, singing to the sacred music those songs from the streets (no
one cared to detect) which were really in their hearts. A world of
vanity and appetite, yet after all of honesty with itself! Like
grown people, they were but playing a game, and meant to observe its
rules. Say, rather, a world of honesty, and of courage! They, at
least, were not preoccupied all day long, and, if they woke in the
night, with the fear of death.

[36] It was part of their precocious worldliness to recognise, to
feel a little afraid of their new companion's intellectual power.
Those obviously meditative souls, which seem "not to sleep o'
nights," seldom fail to put others on their guard. Who can tell what
they may be judging, planning in silence, so near to one? Looking
back long afterwards across the dark period that had intervened,
Gaston could trace their ways through the world. Not many of them
had survived to his own middle life. Reappearing, from point to
point, they connected themselves with the great crimes, the great
tragedies of the time, as so many bright-coloured threads in that
sombre tapestry of human passion. To recall in the obtuse, grieved,
marred faces of uninteresting men or women, the disappointments, the
sorrows, the tragic mistakes of the children they were long ago; that
is a good trick for taking our own sympathy by surprise, which Gaston
practised when he saw the last, or almost the last, of some of them,
and felt a great pity, a great indulgence.

Here and now, at all events, carrying their cheerful tumult through
all those quiet ecclesiastical places--the bishop's garden, the great
sacristy, neat and clean in its brown, pensive lights, they seemed of
a piece with the bright, simple, inanimate things, the toys, of
nature. They made one lively picture with the fruit and wine they
loved, the birds they captured, the buckets of clear water drawn for
pastime from [37] the great well, and Jean Sémur's painted conjuring
book stolen from the old sorceress, his grandmother, out of which he
told their fortunes; with the musical instruments of others; with
their carefully hidden dice and playing-cards, worn or soiled by the
fingers of the older gamesters who had discarded them. Like their
elders, they read eagerly, in racy, new translations, old Greek and
Latin books, with a delightful shudder at the wanton paganism. It
was a new element of confusion in the presentment of that miniature
world. The classical enthusiasm laid hold on Gaston too, but essayed
in vain to thrust out of him the medieval character of his
experience, or put on quite a new face, insinuating itself rather
under cover of the Middle Age, still in occupation all around him.
Venus, Mars, Aeneas, haunted, in contemporary shape, like ghosts of
folk one had known, the places with which he was familiar. Latin
might still seem the fittest language for oratory, sixteen hundred
years after Cicero was dead; those old Roman pontiffs, draped
grandly, sat in the stalls of the choir; Propertius made love to
Cynthia in the raiment of the foppish Amadée; they played Terence,
and it was but a play within a play. Above all, in natural,
heartfelt kinship with their own violent though refined and cunning
time, they loved every incident of soldiering; while the changes of
the year, the lights, the shadows, the flickering fires of winter,
with [38] which Gaston had first associated his companions, so full
of artificial enjoyment for the well-to-do, added themselves
pleasantly, by way of shifting background, to the spectacular effect.

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