LIMOGES, AND ITS PORCELAIN.
The traveller who, leaving Paris by express at 10 A.M., reaches the Orleans dépôt at Limoges at six in the evening, will see spacious boulevards, imposing buildings and a general air of stateliness and pretension, recalling the metropolis he left behind him in the morning. His omnibus will whisk him through streets crowded with promenaders, a picturesque panorama of well-dressed people, with a generous sprinkling of the light-blue jackets of the chasseurs, the gleaming helmets of the dragoons, the red kepis of the infantry, the broad-brimmed hats and sable mantles of the priesthood and the red-and-orange head-kerchiefs of the working-women. If it be late in the season and the days are short, he will see at every turn cafés ablaze with light, and the wide sidewalks before them lined with tables at which, cool as it may be, crowds of loungers are seated sipping bier, absinthe or eau sucrée. But, looking up the dingy side-streets, here and there he may detect, by the lines of flickering, straggling gas-lights, glimpses of another Limoges—glimpses of steep streets ending in stairways; of narrow and darkened passages where the opposite buildings nod to each other from across the street until they all but touch; of courts where curious little enshrined images of the Madonna and the saints look down from niches in the corners, and where heads are peeping out from every window to catch a whiff of evening air; and of sombre alleys, each lighted by a single lamp suspended midway, under the uncertain rays of which swarms of children and dogs are vying to awaken the loudest echoes.
A great conflagration devastated Limoges in 1865, but it proved to that city what our political economists would have us believe the national debt has been to the United States—a blessing in disguise. Incident to the rebuilding of the burnt quarter a spirit of general renovation seems to have crept over the minds of the city fathers, and from that time to the present the work of tearing down old buildings and widening or straightening narrow or crooked streets has been pushed forward to such a degree that were some Limousin Rip Van Winkle, after a twenty years' slumber in the adjacent mountains, to happen in suddenly upon the haunts of his childhood, he would open his eyes as wide as did his Knickerbocker namesake. But there are some things that no amount of outlay or engineering can accomplish; and though many costly improvements have been made in modernizing Limoges and bringing it up to a realizing sense of its dignity as the great porcelain-manufacturing city of Europe, there are yet within its walls some streets so crooked that nothing short of total demolition will ever straighten them, and others so steep and rocky that enough nitro-glycerine to shake down a hundred neighboring houses would have to be employed to level them. So it has come to be acknowledged that, with all the goodwill in the world for putting on modern airs, there are tumble-down, straggling, rickety relics of the past in Limoges which no amount of municipal resolutions or appropriations—nothing, in fact, but an earthquake—can ever remove. Every lover of the antique and quaint will fervently pray that no such disaster may ever come to efface the curious reminders of a time gone by.
For they are the pages upon which successive centuries have left their imprints. Here, for instance, is a street called the Rue du Consulat. By a happy coincidence, the United States consular office fronts upon it, but let not the patriotic American flatter himself that the street thence derives its name. Here lived one of the Roman proconsuls, and here stood the building in which the governors of the city, formerly known as "consuls," held their sessions. In this simple fact we discover a suggestion of the impress left by the domination of the Romans. But on their heels, in turn, came the Visigoths; then Clovis, who made Limoges one of his first conquests; and then the Saracens, who barely set foot on the soil ere Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers compelled them to leave. Some fragmentary bands, however, remained in the province, and one of them founded the neighboring city of Eymontiers, where buildings of Arabic architecture are still standing.
The Moors, surging northward from Spain, have left their impress in these fertile valleys that border the Vienne—an impress everywhere visible in the olive complexions and the costumes of the people, and audible in their language. The ethnologist is astonished at discovering so far to the North all the characteristics of a Spanish population. On fair-days, when the peasantry from a wide circuit are gathered on the Champ de Foires, one hears spoken a dialect incomprehensible to ordinary Frenchmen. It is a patois, a rolling, mellifluous brogue, much resembling the Gascon or the tongue spoken in the Basque provinces among the Pyrenees. Nor are the country-people the sole monopolists of this singular accent: the talk of most of the town-people is more or less tinctured with it. It is to the pure French what a good sweet Irish brogue is to the pure English. It is "Gascon"—and, after all, that is the only word that describes it—and you hear it spoken at every corner in Limoges, just as you meet everywhere swarthy faces, lustrous black eyes, raven hair and a marked dominance of the Southern type.
Limoges has had many masters. Charlemagne made a present of it to his son, Louis le Débonnaire. On another occasion, though the place is nearly two hundred miles inland, the Norman pirates came marching in and sacked it utterly. Louis the Stammerer, Carloman and Eudes were each in turn here crowned king of Aquitaine, and the last in 876 established the line of viscounts of Limoges, the last of whom, Henry of Navarre, reunited the domain to the crown of France. These viscounts inhabited from the thirteenth century the castle of Chalusset, about ten miles distant from the city. Its ruins are still interesting, and are a favorite resort for pleasure-parties. But still more frequently visited are the ruins of the castle of Chalus or Chabrol, where Richard Cœur de Lion fell in 1199. A railway-ride of an hour to Bussière-Galand, and another hour by stage, bring the visitor there. The very spot on which Richard fell is pointed out, and even at this late day it is proposed to erect there a monument bearing this inscription:
ANNO DOMINI 1199,
HIC