Rousseau was one of the few distinguished men of letters in France who cared for country life, and he must be allowed to share with Bernardin de St. Pierre the credit of having introduced not only sentiment but landscape into the French novel. He could not have lived permanently in Paris, though he was a resident in the capital when he declared that if the officers of the crown insisted on his paying exorbitant taxes, he would go on to the boulevards, sit[{286}] under a tree, and die of hunger. Even at that time he took constant rambles in the Bois de Vincennes, through which he had to pass to visit his friend Diderot, confined in the château.
Apart from the fine foliage and the exhilarating air which serve to attract visitors to Vincennes, the place is celebrated for its fortress, which neither centuries nor revolutions have swept away. The dungeon, which is now the only remnant of the citadel commenced by Philippe de Valois, and completed by Charles the Wise on the ruins of the castle to which Philippe Augustus used to resort in view of the pleasures of the chase, was formerly encircled by eight towers, grouped around its walls like vassals around their lord. These, however, have been demolished by revolutions and by time.
To-day the redoubtable citadel in which so many kings have sojourned is a military establishment, which includes an artillery arsenal, barracks, hospitals, a cannon foundry, a factory of arms, a château, a church, and a great number of store-rooms. Its precincts are immense. Other fortresses are hidden in the immediate vicinity, and guard the approaches. Artillerymen incessantly go and come between the fortress and the village and the village and the practice-ground.
Penetrating the sombre vault which leads from the door of entrance to the interior court, the visitor finds before him the ancient royal residence, whose façade preserves something of the majesty of antiquity. To the left stands the chapel built by Charles V. in imitation of the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, and which he dedicated to the Trinity and the Virgin, the fencing-room, and the tower of the reservoir; to the right the formidable dungeon rears its head towards heaven.
In the space enclosed by these various constructions are stacked up, in faultless order, parallelograms of cannons and pyramids of bullets. Long rows of howitzers, their mouths directed skywards, are to be seen side by side with masses of enormous bombs. In the large neighbouring buildings are halls which contain, suspended from the walls, hooked up round the pillars, and symmetrically arranged in corners, a prodigious stock of guns, bayonets, and sabres. Everything shines and glitters: there is not a particle of dust anywhere. An army could here find sufficient weapons to invade a country. The church is close at hand. It recalls a peaceful and merciful divinity in a place consecrated to war. Prayers are uttered at a spot where men are incessantly trying to find how to kill the greatest number of their fellows in the shortest possible space of time.
The Gothic church, with its fine exterior masonry, is void of all ornamentation within. It gives one the impression of having been sacked at some stage in its history. In a lateral chapel there is a monument raised to the memory of the Duc d’Enghien.
What the Parisians, however, come particularly to see, what they love, what they visit with the greatest eagerness, is the dungeon. This old monument in stone is to them an object of worship. They envelop it with a fond curiosity, and, despite the horror they feel at the terrible scenes it has witnessed during so many centuries, they will not see it disappear without regret. In their imagination it is a legendary, monument, and, in all probability, if the Bastille had not been torn up from the soil by the Great Revolution, that prison-fortress would now have been preserved with the utmost care for the gratification of public curiosity.
No one finding himself at Vincennes after a country stroll fails to ascend to the summit of the dungeon. The visitor pants a little, perhaps, on reaching the platform which crowns it, but he is recompensed for his fatigue by the immense panorama which opens around him. There below, in that transparent vapour which the sun’s rays never more than half penetrate, those myriads of roofs, those monstrous domes, those belfries, that stubble of chimneys whence clouds of smoke are escaping, that distant and ceaseless din which reminds one of the waves breaking on some shore, proclaim the gayest city in the world. At the foot of the edifice the forest stretches away, and behind the screen of trees lies a limitless country, in which cultivated fields extend to the horizon. Everywhere orchards, hamlets, villages meet the eye. The Seine is not far off, and at no great distance, like a band of silver, the Marne meanders capriciously through an immense plain studded with clumps of trees.
On one side a view is obtained of Montreuil, famed for its peaches; on the other, by the river bank, a congregation of villas and cottages in picturesque disorder shows the site of Port-Creuil, where Frederic Soulié sought literary repose. At a little distance lies Saint-Maur, where verdure-loving Parisian business-men like to spend Sunday with their families. Some of them, indeed, reside there permanently; and year by year bricks and mortar may be seen to[{287}] encroach further and further upon the surrounding country. Hard by is Saint-Mandé, where Armand Carrel died of the wound received in his duel with Emile de Girardin. His tomb is in the cemetery, where stands a statue in his honour.
If the gaze is now turned sharply towards Paris, it encounters, beyond Alfort and its schools, Charenton, celebrated for that mansion of which Sébastien Leblanc conceived the first idea in 1741, and, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, the château of Conflans, so long the residence of the Archbishop of Paris. In that immense space which lies beneath the eye there is scarcely a stone or a tree which does not recall some memory. All those roads, all those footpaths, have been trodden by men who were destined to leave a deep mark on the history of France. There is not a corner in this sylvan expanse where some civil or religious combat has not taken place. The Normans, the English, even the Cossacks have made incursions here. There is, according to the expression of one French writer, not a tuft of grass which has not been stained with human blood. Through the villages in sight princes and kings have passed. Torch-lit cortèges, conducting prisoners to the dungeon and to death, have alternated with triumphal processions, escorting sovereigns to their capital to the flourish of trumpets. On that hill yonder Charles VII. raised a castle—the Castle of Beauty—which preserves the memory of Agnes Sorel. In another part of the wood, near Créteil, a little house was once the residence of Odette, who consoled Charles VI. Saint-Mandé once possessed a little park in which Louis XIV., before he was the Louis XIV. of Versailles and of Madame de Maintenon, felt the beat of his own heart; for it was there that he met the fascinating de la Vallière. Under the shade of those old oaks many other beautiful phantoms may by the imaginative mind be seen gracefully gliding: Gabrielle d’Estrées, for instance, Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Longueville, and Madame de Pompadour.