At the end of the church, I read on one of the pillars the following inscription: "Nicolas Jourdain, administrator of this parish, deceased January 30, 1799.—This church owes to him its restoration and its embellishment. The grateful parishioners have erected this monument to him.—Marie Françoise Truyart, his spouse, equally benefactress of this church, deceased January 17, 1811.—Pray for their souls."
Who was M. Jourdain? What embellishments does the church of Senlis owe to him? I would have liked to know. X looked for the sacristan, that he might tell me, and also that he might allow me to enter the sacristy, where one may see the Dance of Fools on a capital. But the sacristan of Notre Dame de Senlis dwells very far from his church, on the banks of the Nonette, in the place called the Asses' Backs; he goes home before eleven o'clock in the morning to get his lunch, and is never seen again at the cathedral, according to the bell-ringer, before four o'clock in the afternoon. So I returned at four o'clock. The sacristan was still eating breakfast at the Asses' Backs.... So I shall never know anything about either M. Nicolas Jourdain nor Marie Françoise Truyart, his wife.
* * * *
On the other bank of the Nonette, turn about. A little bridge over a little river; some orchards, still pink and white with their last flowers; a street which climbs through the town, whose roofs and uneven gables are outlined softly against a sky of pale blue; remnants of ramparts starred with golden flowers; great clumps of verdure rising everywhere among the rosy roofs, and finally the great belfry dominating all, the little town, the little valley, the fields which rise and fall to the horizon. Behold, and if you are "one of us," you will recognize the most perfect, the most elegant, the finest, the best arranged of all the landscapes of the world. Here is France, the France of Fouquet, the France of Corot.
And I must also, before leaving Senlis, announce that this truly aristocratic town has not a single statue in its squares.
VI. JUILLY
THE Oratorist Fathers founded the college of Juilly September 2, 1639. They still directed it when these lines were written. The world knows what fate has since come to the masters of this old institution.
Here we are deep in the soil and the history of France. Juilly, an ancient monastery of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, is seven leagues from Paris, four leagues from Meaux, in the Parisis, in the heart of the region where France discovered that it had a conscience, a destiny, a tongue and an art. The earth here is so opulent, so fat and so heavy that six oxen harnessed to a plow labor over the furrow. The rich plateau lifts here and there in slow and measured undulations or sinks in laughing and umbrageous folds. The brooks are called the Biberonne, the Ru du Rossignol (Nightingale Brook); the villages, Thieux, Compans, Dam-martin, Nantouillet. Joan of Arc prayed in the church of Thieux. Saint Geneviève, to slake the thirst of one of her companions, called forth the limpid spring about which the monastery grew. All the virtues and all the legends of France render the air more gentle and more salubrious here.