VIII
We drew away into calmer latitudes after leaving that whirlwind of a town. For the time being, our duties as public poets were ended; and there was a sense of restful comfort in knowing that for the moment we were rid of our fame and celebrity, and were free—as the lightest hearted of simple travellers—to enjoy the beauties of the river as it carried us, always at a full gallop, downward toward the sea.
In that tranquil spirit we came, presently, to the leaning Tour-Maudite: and found farther restfulness, after our own varied and too-energetic doings, in looking upon a quiet ruin that had remained soberly in the same place, and under the same sedative curse, for more than three hundred years. It is an architectural curiosity, this Curséd Tower—almost as far out from the perpendicular as is its better-known rival of Pisa; but more impressive in its unnatural crookedness because it stands upon an isolated crag which drops below it sheer to the river in a vast precipice. Anciently, before it went wrong and its curse came upon it, the tower was the keep of the Benedictine nunnery of Soyons. Most ungallantly, in the year 1569, the Huguenots captured the Abbey by assault; and thereupon the Abbess, Louise d'Amauze (poor frightened soul!) hurriedly embraced the Reformed religion—in dread lest, without that concession to the prejudices of the conquerors, still worse might come. Several of her nuns followed her hastily heterodox example; but the mass of them stood stoutly by their faith, and ended by making off with it intact to Valence. I admit that an appearance of improbability is cast upon this tradition by the unhindered departure from the Abbey of the stiff-necked nuns: who thus manifested an open scorn equally of the victorious Huguenots and of the Reformed faith. But, on the other hand, there are the ruins of the Abbey to prove conclusively that it truly was conquered; and there, slanting with a conspicuously unholy slant high up above the ruins, bearing steadfast witness to the wrath of heaven against that heretical Abbess and her heretical followers, is the Curséd Tower!
While the Abbess of Soyons, being still untried by the stress of battle, went sinless upon her still orthodox way, there lived just across the river on the Manor of l'Étoile a sinner of a gayer sort—Diane de Poitiers. The Castle of the Star dates from the fifteenth century; when Louis XI. dwelt there as Governor of Dauphiny and was given lessons in how to be a king. Diane the beautiful—"the most beautiful," as Francis I. gallantly called her—transformed the fortress into a bower, and gave to it (or accepted for it) the appropriately airy name of the Château de Papillon. There she lived long after her butterfly days were over; and in a way—although the Castle of the Butterfly is a silk-factory now—she lives there still: just as another light lady beautiful, Queen Jeanne of Naples, lives on in Provence. To this day her legend is vital in the country-side; and the old people still talk about her as though she were alive among them; and call her always not by her formal title of the Duchesse de Valentinois, but by her love title of "la belle dame de l'Étoile." Of this joyous person's family there is found a ghastly memento at the little town of Lène—a dozen miles down the river, beyond the great iron-works of Le Pouzin. It is the Tour de la Lépreuse: wherein a leper lady of the house of Poitiers was shut up for many years in awful solitude—until at last God in his goodness permitted her to die. I suppose that this story would have pointed something of a moral—instead of presenting only another case of a good moral gone wrong—had Diane herself been that prisoner of loathsome death in life.
But aboard the Gladiateur our disposition was to take the world easily and as we found it—since we found it so well disposed toward us—and not to bother our heads a bit about how moral lessons came off. With cities effervescing in our honour, with Mayors attendant upon us hat in hand, with brazen-helmeted firemen playing champagne upon us to stimulate our poetic fires, with boîtes and bands exploding in our praise—and all under that soul-expanding sun of the Midi—'tis no wonder that we wore our own bays jauntily and nodded to each other as though to say: "Ah, you see now what it is to be a poet in these latter days!" And we were graciously pleased to accept as a part of the tribute that all the world just then was rendering to us the panorama of mountains and towns and castles that continuously opened before us for the delectation of our souls.
Off to the right, hidden behind the factory-smoke of La Voulte, was the sometime home of Bernard de Ventadour, a troubadour whom the world still loves to honour—quite one of ourselves; off to the left, commanding the valley of the Drôme, were Livron and Loriol, tough little Huguenot nuts cracked all to pieces (as their fallen ramparts showed) in the religious wars; and a little lower down we came to Cruas: a famous fortified Abbey, surmounted by a superb donjon and set in the midst of a triple-walled town, whereof the Byzantine-Romanesque church is one of the marvels of Southern France. Cruas was founded more than a thousand years ago, in the time of Charlemagne, by the pious Hermengarde, wife of Count Eribert de Vivarais; being a thank-offering to heaven erected on the very spot where that estimable woman and her husband were set upon in the forest by a she-wolf of monstrous size. But the fortified Abbey was a later growth; and was not completed, probably, until the sixteenth century. It was toward the end of that century, certainly, that the Huguenots attacked it—and were beaten off finally by Abbot Étienne Déodel and his monks, who clapped on armour over their habits and did some very sprightly fighting on its walls.
Below Cruas, around the bend in the river, Rochemaure the Black came into sight: a withered stronghold topping an isolated rock of black basalt six hundred feet above the stream. It is a grewsome place: the ruin of a black nightmare of a basalt-built castle, having below and around it a little black nightmare of a basalt-built town—whereof the desperately steep and crooked streets are paved with black basalt, and are so narrowed by over-hanging houses as to show above them only the merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff—town and cliff and the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place, seemingly; but in cheerful contrast with its lowering neighbour up the stream.
And then, passing beyond a maze of islands—amidst which the river wandered so tortuously that our pilot had behind him a strong tiller-crew in order to carry us through safely—we came to the noble town of Viviers. From afar we saw its tall bell-tower, its beautiful cathedral, its episcopal palace; and as we drew nearer the whole environment of ancient houses and fortifications spread out around those governing points in a great amphitheatre. But what held us most was the gay dash of tri-colour on its bridge, and the crowd there evidently waiting for our coming to manifest toward us their good will. They cheered us and waved their hats and handkerchiefs at us, those poet-lovers, as we neared them; and as we passed beneath the bridge a huge wreath of laurel was swung downward to our deck, and a shower of laurel branches fluttered down upon us through the sunlit air. In all the fourteen centuries since Viviers was founded I am confident that nothing more gracious than this tribute to passing Poetry is recorded in the history of the town.
Naturally, being capable of such an act of nicely discriminating courtesy, Viviers has sound traditions of learning and of gentle blood. In its day it was a great episcopal city: whose bishops maintained an army, struck money, counted princes among their vassals, in set terms defied the power of the King of France—and recognized not the existence of any temporal sovereign until the Third Conrad of Germany enlarged their knowledge of political geography by taking their city by storm. Yet while finely lording it over outsiders, the bishops were brought curiously to their bearings within their own walls. Each of them, in turn, on his way to his installation, found closed against him, as he descended from his mule before it, the door of the cathedral; and the door was not opened until he had sworn there publicly that he would maintain inviolate as he found them the rights and privileges of the chapter and of the town. Moreover, once in each year the men and women of rank of Viviers asserted their right to a part enjoyment of the ecclesiastical benefices by putting on copes and mitres and occupying with the canons the cathedral stalls.
The line of one hundred and thirty bishops who in succession reigned here ended—a century back, in the time of the Revolution—in a veritable lurid flame; yet with, I think, a touch of agonized human nature too. The church historian can see only the diabolical side of the situation; and in a horror-struck way tells how that last Bishop, "being overcome by the devil, abjured the episcopacy; with his own hands destroyed the insignia of his sacred office; and thereafter gave himself up to a blasphemous attack upon the holy religion of which he had been for a long while one of the most worthy ministers."