The Meditation is entitled Holy Week at La Roche-Guyon. Not a line of this grand lyric piece reveals that it was conceived in this place rather than in any other. Lamartine has thus attempted to justify his title: "The principal ornament of the château," he writes, "was a chapel hollowed in the rock, a true catacomb, affecting, in the cavernous circumvolutions of the mountain, the form of the naves, the choirs, the pillars, the rood-lofts, of a cathedral. He induced me to go to pass Holy Week there with him. He took me there himself.... The religious service, pious voluptuousness of the Duc de Rohan, was celebrated every day in this subterranean church, with a pomp, a luxury, and holy enchantments, which intoxicate youthful imaginations...."
The picture is delightful. Unfortunately it entirely emerged from the "youthful imagination" of Lamartine. The subterranean church still exists at La Roche-Guyon, just as in the time of the Duc de Rohan. But the triple chapel, cut in the hill, and sufficiently lighted from outside, has nowise the appearance of a catacomb. There are no "cavernous circumvolutions," naves, choirs, pillars, rood-lofts. The cathedral is composed of three little vaulted rooms....
And I now think of the honest Boileau. He would not have mystified us or himself in this manner! It is true that you and I would give the whole epistle to Lamoignon for this single line:
Sailors whose star has set, ashore! here is the port.
XI. NOYON
THE light softens and dims, even in these days of the dog star, and, under this heaven of palest azure, the puissant harmony of verdure and red bricks announces the neighborhood of Flanders. Only the stone towers of the cathedral dominate with their gray mass the ruddy buildings and the leafage of the gardens.
Noyon possessed immense convents which were razed during the Revolution. Scattered remnants still mark the sites of these monasteries; here an apse transformed into a storehouse, there the façade of a chapel. The monks have departed; but the town has retained a monastic aspect; and it is a place where one might make a retreat. In the silence of the melancholy streets, the pavements seem to ring more sonorously, and the passer listens with surprise to the echo of his steps between the silent houses....