Here is the primitive little romanesque church, whose gracious tower is now hoary with years, and golden with the kisses of the sun. One's glance rests long upon those stones, where, above the slender colonettes, among the waving grasses, wild flowers, ferns, and soft moss of the slag roof, the stone corner-heads of a thousand years ago watch silently over a tree-embowered, weed-entangled, dreamy garden of the dead. For these are the living memorials of a poet—the wide, green meadow of the valley, the undulating boughs, and gray and silver glimpses of the breeze-swung poplars, the red tiles of the ancient village, the stream willow-fringed, the creamy cattle browsing in upland pastures, the gracious contours of woodland hill, touched by Autumn's mellowing hand, the blue dome above, whose silver islands float on the wings of a warm, south wind.
His memories linger, too, in melodious songs, sung by poets not less than he, the lark in the blue, the thrush on the bough, the zephyrs among the leaves; the distant tap, tap, tap, of the woodpecker in the far-off forest, or of some follower of that stone-cutter of St. Point, with whom Lamartine, high up in the mountain quarry, talked of the ways of God with man. One day, perhaps, France will realize these truths; then she will cease to desecrate, with hideous monuments, the open spaces of her ancient villages, and the resting place of her illustrious dead.
Having been assured by a villager that visits to the Château were permitted, encouraged even, I effected an entrance to the grounds, through a gate in the wall on the north side of the church. The building appears to be a patchwork of many dates, marred by some wretched, modern imitations, and the hideous device, not infrequent hereabouts, of painting sham gothic windows on a plaster wall; but the general effect of the whole, matured by age, set in finely timbered grounds, is not unpleasing. I wish I could say the same for my welcome, which might be summed up in these words: "Come in, go through; damn you, get out!"
The cicerone who, by the way, was kind enough to inform me that no part of the building was of earlier date than the nineteenth century,[96] was so rude that I felt much more disposed to discuss with her, gently but firmly, the question of manners, than to look at the many relics she was able to show me.[97]
It is obvious that only three courses are open to the owner of an historic house. He can refuse admission to the public; he can grant admission unconditionally; or he can grant admission on payment, or on other reasonable conditions; but, upon whatever terms he admits you, he must make you welcome, so long as you, in your turn, conform to the exigencies of polite society. A thinly veiled attitude of hostility deprives the self-respecting visitor of all pleasure.
Be it added, however, lest I should discourage others from visiting the castle, that the account of my experience was received most apologetically by several villagers, who assured me that the present inhabitants were "gentils," and that my cold reception must have been due to the fact, of which I was, of course, unaware, that there was illness in the house.
My wrath having been appeased by lunch, and the attentions of a good-natured hostess, I proceeded boldly to climb to the head of the Valley of St. Point, and, after many kilometres of very hard work, was rewarded by a look back over the Valley, from below Tramaye. In the middle distance, shone, in the afternoon sun, bronze and white among the tapering poplars, the Village of St. Point, crowned by the ancient gray church; and, higher yet, the sombre trees of the garden, and the towers of Lamartine's château. Above Tramaye, itself a very eagle's aerie, one by one the lower valleys open out to view, until, at last, crossing the "col," you descend, for kilometre after kilometre, to Clermain in the Valley of the Grosne, one of the once-fortified advance-guard villages protecting the approach to Cluny from the South.
