"C'est ancien" said a hotel porter, with a wave of the hand. "C'est un monument historique," added a bystander. The porter smiled, as his hand closed mechanically over a franc.
We rode, that first afternoon, to Cezenat, on the slopes of the Jura. The aspect of the country round was harsher than that of central Burgundy, and the light fiercer; the landscape, as a whole, lacks the soft charm of the vine-clad Côte d'Or, without attaining to the romantic quivering whiteness of the vrai midi. It was very delightful to rest before the café opposite to the church of Revonnat, and watch the shapely, creamy cattle, following the swarthy maid to the water-trough beneath the virgin-crowned fountain. They drank steadily, until a long stick, rattling about their shiny muzzles, made them raise mildly-protesting heads. They walked home with unruffled dignity, a processional frieze of madonnas—their faces veiled, as befits holiness.
More, and then more, came tinkling by, driven by a diminutive boy. They disappeared down a winding lane, and were followed by four horses, harnessed tandem, wearing the three-horned attelage of the Midi, and stamping, swishing their tails, and tossing heads, till all the village was vocal with their music. After them waddled a fat woman, leaking seed, and followed by a hundred hungry fowls. Last of all, two piebald oxen, harnessed in front of a skinny pony, tugged wearily up the hill the household goods of a whole family piled upon a creaking cart.
With the exception of a few old houses and the world-famous Brou, there is very little architecture worth seeing in Bourg. Or, if there is, it did not detain us long. We made at once for Princess Margaret's Church, rather more than a kilometre distant from the lower part of the town, at the end of a long, straight, squalid road. There we found it—this jewel ill-set. The authorities, with the cynical apathy, or ignorance, that characterises French ecclesiasticism, have surrounded the building, on the west and north, with a gravelled open space, like the playground of a board-school, adorned with a tawdry crucifix, and a lavatory, the whole enclosed within an ignoble wall. Why the French public tolerate such outrages is a mystery!
I suppose that, in this case, darkness is just ignorance.[198] Yet before their very eyes are evidences that it was not always so. The pictures in their church show that the "parvis" was originally planted with shrubs, which would grow as readily to-day as they did then; failing a grassy lawn, and the money or men to keep it green and trim.
Enough of the setting—what of Princess Margaret's Church? Looking up at it, we are reminded, at once, of her Flemish sympathies. The high gables of this west front—of which the centre one is lightened by a rose and three triangular windows, symbols of eternity and the Trinity—recall the splendid architecture of Bruges and the Rhine country. Rich flamboyant carving is to be seen everywhere; yet the effect is more striking than successful. The façade is surrounded with elaborate embellishments, that, jostling with one another, break the harmony of line; the ornament is tortured, and conveys the impression that it is merely hung upon the Church; the figures in the tympanum below the flat-arched portal, are poor in execution; the tower is mean and insufficient. Yet we must not hasten to condemn. This fallen Gothic, though marred by the defects of its qualities, and, beyond question, fundamentally decrepit, has yet wintry graces all her own. Her death days were neither ignoble, nor frozen; rather they were instinct with a repentant animation, and warmed by a delicate flush, the hope and vision of coming spring.
Yes, despite the wanton waste of ornament, despite intemperance and lack of restraint, there is pathos, there is beauty, even, in these splendid agonies of a matchless art. That proud princess of ancient lineage, lying stricken in her darkened chamber, where yet lingered the shadows of a passing night, bent timidly, fearfully, her dreamy, dying eyes upon the before and after, upon what had been and was yet to be; until, gathering strength for a last effort, the frail, fair, white hand, drawing apart the silken folds of the curtain, caught, through the glowing casement, a glimpse of a golden dawn brightening a yet lovelier world, and smiled to see the pure radiance of a happier, more human belief touching with the tender light of a new-born hope the sterner mysticism of her earlier discarded faith. The discarded faith was mediævalism; that new-born hope we call the Renaissance.