Lui fait offrir le roi Louis.”
It was at the Castle of Angers, in a kind of little manor-house flanked by four turrets, that René first saw the light on the 16th of January, 1409. The Maugine was his nurse in the citadel, the Maugine, Tiphaine, to whom in after years he erected a tomb, the touching inscription upon which is from his hand. Married at the age of twelve to Isabelle de Lorraine, René d’Anjou, fighting everywhere for twenty-five years, made only rare appearances at the Castle of Angers; but soon comes the death of Isabelle and upon it quickly follows the second marriage of the prince with Jeanne de Laval, upon which he establishes his residence at Angers. Farewell war, diplomacy, treaties and conquests! René yields himself up to the charm of his young wife. To her the poet consecrates his loving stanzas of Regnault and Jeanneton, a kind of autobiography of the husband and wife. The Shepherd and the Shepherdess, a delicate pastorale composed in honour of Jeanne de Laval, will be put into its final form under the skies of Provence, at Tarascon; but it is in the Angevin country that the poet finds all his ideas as he strolls at the side of the beautiful Jeanne. The writers of the time show us René going out of the Castle without escort, accompanied solely by his royal spouse, and taking the chemin de la Baumette. After passing through the field-gate, the illustrious personages got into a fisherman’s boat below the Basse-Chaîne, and descended the Maine to that solitary hermitage, where Rabelais will presently come to study at the Cordeliers.
It is also from this Castle that René d’Anjou issues to cross his “beautiful city” on foot to his dear hermitage, where he loved to consort “with the citizens of Angers, the artists and the men of learning of his Court.”
René disappeared; Louis XI. reigned. A century elapsed. Henri III. yielded to the request of the common people of the city who wished for the destruction of the Castle. The citadel suffered. Letters patent from the King authorized the governor of Anjou to “raze to the ground the stones of all the walls, towers, lodgings, buildings and fortifications of the Castle.” Already the workmen are called. Who will direct this barbarous piece of work? Donadieu, Sieur de Puycharic, claims this honour. Puycharic is the governor of the Castle. They grant his wish. But a man of heart, a soldier, can he conscientiously annihilate the ramparts of a city? This military post of which he is the keeper has its past of glorious traditions. It is worthy of respect. Its services, it seems to him, ought to be taken into consideration. This is what Puycharic thought aside, and for ten years—you have read of this—for ten years—with clever ingenuity, Puycharic kept his army of destroyers busy without destroying anything. He yielded to the necessities of the hour by demolishing the outside buildings of the Castle which he had inherited from his predecessors; a garden pavilion, built by Louisa of Savoy, disappeared; the field-gate, whose defence was difficult, was altered; two useless towers lost their turrets, and in proportion as the waggons full of stones left the Castle, the common people exulted, proud of their success. From time to time, it is true, public opinion complained of the slowness of the workmen at the town’s expense. “Isolated during the troubles,” M. Port has said of him, “in the heart of the Angevin league, the valiant captain was not merely satisfied to guard the place but bravely attacked the foe in the field, one day the Lion d’Angers, another Brissac, Rochefort, Beaupreau, and Chemillé, fighting for about ten years in every kind of warlike adventure, fought against and fighting, holding the country in hand and preparing the place for the King.” His headquarters were at the Castle. It was here that he rallied his men and came to heal his wounds between encounters. Peace being restored, Puycharic, being appointed senechal of Anjou, dismissed his workmen, who were greatly astonished and perhaps greatly pleased at having repaired, embellished and fortified the Castle that they thought they were pulling down.
Puycharic died in 1605. His funeral was magnificent. He rests in the chapel of the Jacobins; and his brothers, the bishops of Saint-Papoul and d’Auxerre erected to his memory a monument surmounted by his statue.
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE
G. W. STEEVENS
Southward out of Madras you still run through the new India, the old India of the nursery. Now it is vivid with long grass, now tufted with cotton, then dark-green with stooping palm-heads or black with firs; anon brown with fallow, blue with lakes and lagoons, black with cloud-shadowing pools starred with white water-lilies. Presently red hills break out of the woods, then sink again to sweeping pastures dotted only with water-hoists and naked herdsmen.
Then in the placid landscape you are almost startled by the sight of monuments of religion. A tall quadrangular pyramid, its courses lined with rude statues, a couple of half-shaped human figures, ten times human size, a ring of colossal hobby-horses sitting on their haunches like a tea-party in Wonderland—they burst grotesquely out of meadow and thicket, standing all alone with the soil and the trees. No worshippers, no sign of human life near them, no hint of their origin or purpose—till you almost wonder whether they are artificial at all, and not petrified monsters from the beginning of the world.
THE PAGODA OF TANJORE, INDIA.