It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just room in the valley for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its hay-meadows. They are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and here and there a taller meadow-orchid. Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight, but never out of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de Berne.
The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end—perhaps a hundred dark little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses—out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an “ascension” to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep to the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup gives place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters, in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on between the wood and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so almost theatric in the perfection of its mise en scène. And see, the castle is quite perfect, without a scar, without a ruin! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood, as it seemed? Have we driven back five hundred years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century?
VIII
Pierrefonds! It was here that a sad ne’er-do-weel (for whom I have a liking none the less) built himself this famous castle in 1391. It was the wonder of the age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of the Crown. It was dismantled in 1617; and all that remains of the fourteenth-century fortress is, with the foundations, one side of the keep and part of the outer wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the triumph of Viollet-le-Duc. Before the decoration was finished, before the last moats were dry, or the palisade laid out, the Second Empire fell; the munificent patron became an invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds was dubbed a national monument, kept from ruin, but no longer an occasion for expense. I own that I should like to have seen it before it was restored—to have seen the real, time-stained, historical document. Yet, after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of documents; and there is only one such magnificent historical novel as the Castle of Pierrefonds.
The decoration is often poor and gaudy; but architecturally Pierrefonds is a work of genius. To walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive, and as they were: a hundred phrases of mediæval novels or poems throng our memory. See, there is the great Justice Hall, built separate from the keep, above the Salle des Gardes; and there, connecting it with the outer defences, are the galleries or loggie, where the knights and ladies used to meet and watch the Palm Play in the court below. Here is the keep, a fortress within a fortress, with its postern on the open country. From its watch-towers, or its double row of battlements, we can study the whole system of mediæval defence. Ah, this would be the place to read some particularly exciting book of Froissart’s—“The Campaign in Brittany,” for instance, or one of those great Gascon sieges, full of histories of mining and counter-mining, of sudden sallies from the postern gate, of great engines built like towers, launching stones and Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by night against the castle wall. I am deep in mediæval strategy when a timid common-sensible voice interrupts—
“Mais comment cela se peut-il que le château soit si ancien, p’isque vous me dites qu’il fut construit sous le Second Empire?”
’Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local tradesman, bent on holiday, tramping the forest with his wife, their dinner in a basket, and bunches of muguets dangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd little fellow. In his one phrase, he has summed up the sovereign objection to Pierrefonds—
“How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say, ’twas built under Napoleon III.?”
Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored!