It is somewhat disconcerting and even annoying to be told, however,—when about to stroll down a tree-alleyed path,—that “the marchioness never went there.” Of course it’s pure conjecture on the part of this twentieth-century guide, since the noble marchioness has been dead some two hundred years or more, but, as aforesaid, the interruption fascinates one with its coolness.
At the right of the château are the gardens traced by the famous Lenôtre. In the “Letters” one reads frequent references to these great gardens with their vast and ancient forests of tall timber.
CHAPTER XI.
RENNES AND BEYOND
RENNES was once a great provincial capital, as great politically, perhaps, as Rouen, but it has not a tithe of the fascination or wealth of attraction of the Norman metropolis, and never had. Its Cathedral of St. Pierre is a cold, unfeeling thing, and its eighteenth-century town hall, its great military barracks, and its palace of a university are in no way great or lovable architectural monuments. As an offset against the mediocrity, is the somewhat bare exterior of the court-house, built in 1618 for the Breton Parliament, and furnished now, as then, in most luxurious fashion.
The Salle des Pas-Perdus is a vast apartment, most delightfully planned and decorated, and of the Grand Parliamentary Chamber the same may be said. Above the floor of this chamber are still to be seen the tribunes where the dames of other days, of the days of Madame de Sévigné, assisted at the sessions.
The town hall contains a library of eighty thousand volumes, of which one hundred or more are first editions, and six hundred manuscripts.
The museums of the university palace are exceedingly rich in treasure, and are in every way worthy of a great provincial capital.
For the rest, Rennes is a most ordinary, uninteresting town, though it does possess two mediæval monuments of remark: the Porte Mordelaise, a historic souvenir of the military architecture of the middle ages, and Church of Our Lady, the ancient chapel and cloister of an eleventh-century monastery founded by the Bishop St. Mélaine.
There are many fine old Renaissance houses scattered here and there about the town, but the general aspect is modern, and mediocre at that. Rennes would have been called by century-ago travellers “a well-built town,” and such it certainly is, as becomes the ancient capital of the duchy of Brittany.
In later days it is mostly known to the general reader as the scene of the famous Dreyfus trial, and its only liveliness comes from the officers of the tenth army corps, who, of a summer’s night, frequent the coffee-rooms opposite the court-house or the theatre, or promenade in the Thabor and the flower-garden, the old gardens of the Benedictine convent.