One other building in Dijon I will mention—the Palais de Justice, which has a beautiful Renaissance façade, with a high gable in the Flemish style, and a domed Corinthian porch. The threatening darkness of the stone, and the grim, lurid, purplish colours it takes in certain lights, harmonise well with our memories of deeds done in that Salle des Pas Perdus, and the torture chamber of the prisons within. This Palace was also the Parliament House of the Valois Dukes.
But we, who pass our days in London, soon weary of other cities, even though they be ancient and French; besides, we wanted to see something of the environs of Dijon; so a fine afternoon found us cycling along the five kilometres of flat yet attractive road that leads by the Canal de Bourgogne to Plombières, in the valley of the Ouche. There was music all the way; the breeze that whispered to the "paint-brush" poplars, and rustled in the reeds and grasses of the bank; the song of the grasshoppers, the "sound of waters shaken" where they curled foaming through the lock gates. We had beauty with us, too; all the mature beauty of a bright autumn day, as we glided beside the still water, between waving grasses and lichen-gilded trunks. On our left were golden vineyards, and, beneath them, rose-embowered cottages and jagged quarries where brawny quarrymen were dealing mighty, swinging strokes that echoed through the valley. To our right were the terraced hills of Talant, and ahead the tower of Plombières church, high above the village roofs. We passed white-hooded peasants—ample women with genuine, solid bodies, ambling homeward from the markets of Dijon, and black-bloused peasants, who, blessed with a patience that was never given to us, were "soaking an indefinite bait in an indifferent stream;" we passed blazing bonfires by the side of the road, whereon girls were heaping all the grasses they had cut during a busy day with the sickle. And when we got there, we found the mairie besieged by women in white dresses and men in black coats. There was a wedding; and couples were whirling in the Salle de Bal.
That Talant I spoke of, on the hill, is another spot to make for between tea and dinner; if only for the views it gives you down over the City of Dijon and the Valley of the Ouche. From the village green, shaded with ancient walnut trees, between which the children play with their dappled goats, there lie before you, across the willow-fringed silver streak that is the Canal de Bourgogne, the hills of the Côte d'Or, now shrouded in the purple mists of evening. Southward, looming through the red smoke-wreaths, that curl upwards from its factories, rise the towered palace, and the spires of the ducal city. Below, among the vines and fruit trees, beside the red gravel pit in the grey cemetery, the flames of the peasants' fires, flashing in lines, like the camp fires of a beleaguered town, are deepening with an opalesque veil of floating vapour the gathering mysteries of the night.
As we climbed the road that winds up the hill to Talant, whose old Castle, by the way, was the scene of a hundred memorable events, that I have no time to remember now, we saw on our right another wooded spur of the Côte d'Or, crowned with a big church and a little one. We knew it at once for Fontaine, the home of St. Bernard—a spot not to be missed. The next day found us there. Passing through the village, we came to a small, round pool at the foot of the steep, shaded with a ring of poplars and walnut trees. This must be the very pool in which St. Bernard plunged, when, in the hey-day of youth, he felt his blood glowing too warmly within him. I wonder that the peasants, or the priests, have not made holy water of it before this. We climbed the hill, and, sitting on a broken stone wall, caught glimpses, across the changing vines, of distant Dijon towers, while those improvident grasshoppers, who should have been harvesting against a coming winter, just sang and sang, as though they would out-sing the larks.
Then I wandered through the little Burgundian church, and the tangled wilderness of a churchyard, while my wife, sitting enthroned in lilac bushes, and eating blackberries of her own picking, watched the western sun gilding, height beyond height, the distant hills, and dreamed of Bernard, her chosen patron saint. How often must he, torn between chivalry and church, have wrestled with his spirit upon that very spot.
This great building near us, on the crest of the hill, is built on the site of Tescelin le Roux's castle; and contains, I believe, some remnants of it; but it has no longer any attraction for us. Restoration and modern additions[178] have stolen away its hoary age. We may be foolish in these matters; but we got more pleasure from a wooden bust of St. Bernard, that we bought for three francs from a white-winged sister, in the pilgrimage shop beside the basilica. We still look at it daily, and believe it—quite wrongly, no doubt—to be a perfect likeness of Tescelin's perfect son.
Before we part from Dijon, there is one other episode in its history to which I should like to refer.