VII
The kings of France always thought so. Their castles lie all round. Lovely Amboise, on the Loire, still belongs to the family of Bourbon-Orleans; but the Republic holds what time has left of Loches, so lordly throned above the Indre, with Blois, and the remains of Plessis. Beautiful Chenonceaux, built across the Cher, has lately been sold to a millionnaire from Cuba. Other foreigners last year settled at Azay-le-Rideau, the fairest, to my thinking, of all the so-called castles of the Loire; for there the Indre seems to eddy round the deserted palace of the Sleeping Beauty. The huge feudal pile which dominates the Loire at Langeais belongs to a Protestant banker from the Havre. Villandry, Moncontour, have been purchased by wealthy families whose coat-of-arms was unknown a hundred years ago. Luynes alone still belongs to the ancient ducal house which bears its name.
All of these castles, and a hundred smaller ones, down to our small Commanderie, or the toy-castle of La Carte, near Ballan, have a grace and a dignity of their own, untouched by their change of fortunes. Fallen from their antique state, they appear to own the power of ennobling their possessors. And as the sea-shell models to its form the wandering fish that dwells in it by choice, so these old houses, representing an ideal annihilated by frequent revolutions, have silently refashioned the sort of aristocracy for which they were created. Their ancient walls can find no great change between the present and the past. To make the resemblance all the closer, there has arisen during the last few years in France, especially since the Dreyfus trial, a semblance of civil strife, and, as it were, a shadow of those wars of religion with which these old stones are so familiar. And if as yet no Huguenot gentlemen dangle anew from the iron balconies of Amboise, it is perhaps from no want of a will to string them there on the part of their orthodox neighbours.
Life in any of these chateaux, on either side of the abyss, is much the same; indeed, much the same life has been led in rural France by the upper classes since the very days of the Roman Empire. The letters of Ausonius, written in the fourth century; or the Victorial of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish knight who visited a castle in Normandy some thousand years later; each alike present a picture which varies in no essential point from that which we behold in any important country house to-day.
The letters of Ausonius introduce us to the brilliant villas that adorned in Gallo-Roman times the banks of the Garonne—villas that were rather palazzi, as they say in Italy to-day, with their picture-galleries, libraries, bath-rooms, and loggias adorned with statues. Round them extended noble gardens, like the gardens of Versailles or St. Cloud, with artificial lakes and canals, clipped yews in figures, rows of marble busts, and some little sunproof grove of ilex, where Pan for ever plays a flute grown green with moss. Just as in our days, the farm adjoined the villa, with its rick-yards and sheepfolds, its barns, stables, and winepress. But if the outer form of things was little different, still more striking is the social resemblance. Then, as now, the men of the household rose early for a morning’s hunting before the mid-day meal; visitors called after lunch, partook of a light refreshment, strolled with their hosts about the park and gardens. After their departure, then, as now, guests and hosts alike retired to write their letters. Not every day of old came and went the post, and the missives it brought and took were more studied and wittier than our hasty messages to-day. Then, as now, the upper class in France was passionately fond of music; and that, too, was a resource—the instruments indeed were a little different, being “lyres as big as carts,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, and hydraulic organs. But the pleasure and the habit were the same. On most afternoons, some of the guests of a large party were busy with music, or perhaps with the preparations for private theatricals, which then, as now, were a frequent entertainment in a country house: Paulus, of Saintes, brought with him to Lucaniacus a farce of his own composition for the delectation of Ausonius and his guests. While these were occupied in music or reciting, others were driving, or playing at tennis (Paulinus, of Pella, sent to Rome for his tennis-balls), and others, again, were planning some mighty race of cars. To-day they are motor-cars,—and there is all the difference.
After dinner, reading and conversation were the order of the day. Then, as now, the women were well to the fore. The wife of Ausonius wrote poetry, his daughter attended a course of university lectures, his aunt was a lady doctor. Depend upon it, in any age these clever French women could always hold their own! While some of the hosts of Lucaniacus sat talking round the lamp, others looked through the last new books; more often, some one read aloud to a circle of ladies busy with their needlework: just as to-night! In a quiet corner, dice and trictrac claimed their devotees. Ausonius does not speak of bridge or boston.
Life in the upper class has little changed in Gallia! We find, indeed, a greater difference if we compare our modern round of days and works with the picture offered in the Victorial. In 1406 (as we shall see in a later chapter), the chateau of Sérifontaine was no less hospitable than Lucaniacus, “and as well mounted,” says the chronicler, “as any mansion in Paris;” the pleasures of hunting and shooting, the extreme love and exquisite practice of music, the light and almost constant art of conversation were alike in the one as in the other. There is the same delightful courtesy, the same universal amiability of temper. But in the mediæval picture there is, perhaps (with a wilding grace and fantasy, which are not now in fashion), a lack of that sober, solid culture, that fund of judgment and good sense so oddly mixed with triviality, which in the days of Ausonius, as in our own, seem to me distinctive of society in France.
In all the comfortable bourgeois houses that I visit, as in the manor of Touraine, life runs as easy, as regular, as if on wheels of clockwork. This same ease and elasticity struck the excellent Don Pedro Niño, of whom more anon. “Could it last for ever,” said he, “such as it is, a man would not desire another Paradise.” Every one seems pleased and happy, and I have long since come to the conclusion that the real art, the real wealth of France, are just this universal amiability of temper. Nothing happens, yet every one seems busy and amused. The young people shoot and play tennis of mornings (they still play tennis in France), or ride their bicycles (an evident progress on Lucaniacus!), or mount their horses; the elders write letters, read the papers, stroll in the grounds, eat grapes from the trellis for a morning “cure;” the ladies smile and sit about arrayed in wonderful morning gowns, embroidering strips of mysterious and beautiful needlework. A great capacity for sitting about and smiling, an ability to embroider anything, from a shoe-bag to a set of curtains, is part of the equipment of every well-bred Frenchwoman. Lunch reunites the scattered elements and is rich in animated conversation: gossip, news, discussion, gibes, laughing protests, enthusiastic envolées, learned disquisitions, sparkling or ironic repartee, valuable information; for conversation in all its branches is the national game in France, played on all occasions by both sexes (especially together), and they are as clever here, and as easily first, as we in the cricket-field. After lunch the time runs, with scarce a variation, as it ran at Lucaniacus, or at Sérifontaine, save that in the last few years the general adoption of the motor-car has vastly increased the circle of possible visits and excursions. The letters to write, the game of tennis, the stroll in the grounds, the hour of music, remain unchanged. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are far superior at the piano to English-women or Italians; every little circle possesses its musician of considerable merit, and in almost every country house we may be sure of finding at least one lady, reading her music as lightly as her novel, and possessing a vast repertory of symphonies and sonatas which she plays with a just and fine understanding. How many an enchanted hour will she while away with Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, César Franck, greatest of modern masters, or, perhaps, the idol of the hour, Claude Debussy!
Even as the dice-tables and trictrac stood ready of old for the guests of Lucaniacus, so in every French country house to-day there is an orgy of innocent card-playing—such mysteries of Chinese bézique, boston, bridge (played any time these dozen years or more in France), or immense and complicated patiences which take five packs of cards. Meanwhile, I sit in a corner, very quiet, lost in a volume of Balzac, and a sweet agèd voice calls to me: “Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous préparez, mon enfant!” Ah, sweet agèd voice that I shall never hear again, your echo rings still for me in all the rooms of the Commanderie!