I
AN old irregular house, a long grey line in the hollow, founded by the Templars some eight hundred years ago and finished yesterday. In 1189, Henry II. of England lay there for a night, very sick, on his way to die at Chinon. The house was then a Commanderie of the Knights-Templar: we know how they perished! In all ages, I think, patriotism in France has shown two sides—two faces, if you will; the one aristocratic, desiring the advancement of the nation by means of an élite, a chosen few, to whose perfection the common sort was to be sacrificed; the other, essentially popular, full of dreams and visions, plotting a general happiness and justice made absolute on earth. The Templars were of the former party. Early in the fourteenth century, a democratic king made a clean sweep of them, confiscated their wealth, and left our Commanderie to bear an empty name. Doubtless, at the moment, King Philip was full of virtuous schemes. A volume of documents, edited by Renan, shows the wise uses to which the French Government intended to put this lucky potful of treasure: there is a plan for popular education, elaborated by a certain Pierre Du Bois, which we might read to-day, with colleges for women, scholarships for lady doctors, an Order of Nursing Sisters to be sent to the colonies—all strangely modern for 1306. High schools for boys and girls, with special facilities for studying the natural and moral sciences, were to be established in the existing Commanderies. But nothing came of it, of course; and no one knows exactly what hole in fourteenth-century finance was stopped by the nuggets of the unfortunate Knights-Templar.
Our Commanderie remained a Commanderie. It was handed over to the Knights of Malta. So much and no more do we know of its fate from the time of Philip the Fair till the French Revolution. For five hundred years a mist envelops it. The nineteenth century was to raise its fortunes.
One of Napoloen’s marshals had a son—himself a prince and a soldier—unhappily married to a lady of unattractive virtue. A nervous, artistic, irascible man, he went about still seeking his ideal, circuit rudens, quærens quem devoret. He found it, unfortunately for her, in the maiden daughter of one of his old friends. Often have I heard of a certain dinner-party given by the girl’s father—an old general—in honour of the prince, and how the guests waited in the stiff yellow Empire salon, where the clock on the chimney-piece struck, first the half-hour, then the hour; and yet the prince never appeared; and still the young hostess lingered in her pressing-room. At last the dreadful truth burst upon the hungry and anxious company—they had eloped together!
Save for this one great slip in conduct, the lady was a saint—a mute inglorious George Eliot. She reclaimed her lover, whose courses up to that time had been of the most devious, and showed him the sweetness of a calm, domestic life. She even reconciled him with his virtuous spouse, and if, as I fear, she broke her father’s heart, she lived to be blessed by the family she had outraged. Society in France still bore traces of the recent upheaval of the Revolution; the rule of morals was relaxed, and passion was held a great excuse. The lady’s character and her lover’s rank and fidelity combined to attenuate their fault: people ended by thinking of her as a sort of morganatic wife. She would say sometimes to her partner in shame: “My dear, you must not neglect the good princess. Remember she has always the first claim on your attention.” If, thus despatched to his duties, he stayed too long at home, the prince’s lawful helpmeet would remark one day: “Mon ami, it is a long time since you looked after your plantations at the Commanderie.” There is a beautiful old romance by Marie de France called Eliduc, or, The Man with Two Wives. With no less gracious a courtesy, no less delicate a sense of a rival’s due and a lover’s duty, did these two nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an impossible, position.
The prince had bought our ancient manor-house to hide therein his unespousèd saint. He rebuilt the tumbling walls, restored roof and ceilings; it was he, no doubt, who drained the fishpond which used to stand so close to the front door. He made the place a little paradise. He was rich; he sent all over both worlds, old and new, for rare trees to plant the hilly park which rises about the small grey priory, gently swelling to a rim of oakwoods all around. The park is, as it were, a brief and shallow valley from which the river has long disappeared, leaving only a tiny, almost invisible streamlet which trickles through the softest lawns, planted now with groups of silvery Atlas cedars; with old hollow chestnuts, which—they, at least—must date back some two hundred years, so far have they gone in the sere and yellow leaf; with Californian cypresses, which flame all autumn until their fiery needles rust and fall; with strange pines that grow in a pyramid; with deodoras and monkey-trees from India; with copper beech and silvery maple. He stocked the place with antelopes, guanacos, and llamas, quaint, shy creatures, housed in folds under the spreading trees, that would come to the palings and feed, tame and timid, from their lady’s hand. And here, as quiet and lonely as Adam and Eve in their garden, lived these unlawful lovers, eternally sequestered. He, indeed, had his excursions and forthcomings, incidental to the existence of a man with two wives, but she, poor soul, wrapt in a veil of tender shame, dared not show her face beyond the unfenced boundaries of her woods, and did by stealth her very deeds of mercy.
Some fifty years ago, both prince and lady died. The house and lands then came by purchase into the hands of some friends of mine, who have considerably extended the lands of their domain. The younger brother married an exquisite young sociétaire of the Comédie Française—a young lady, pure as pearl, good as gold, of a sort rare, though not impossible, upon the stage, in France. To this paradise of the Commanderie he brought his young wife; but—alas for our terrestrial Edens!—she died there before the year was out. When the widower followed her, he left the house to his elder brother, a soldier of some note, who turned his sword into a ploughshare, and devoted himself to his vineyards and cornfields. His daughter is mistress of the manor-house to-day.
As it stood when it came into her hands, the Commanderie was a fit pavilion for a pair of lovers, but scarcely the hospitable home of a numerous family. Much of it had to be rebuilt and much restored. A story was added. One day, when the masons were taking down an ugly plaster ceiling from a small room in the tower, there underneath they
found, still solid, still fresh and clear, the ancient beams and roof-trees of a distant century, painted with the coat-of-arms of the Knights of Malta.