It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a pleasant place,—a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending, little Hôtel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine view. While I was at Vire, the fête day of the Emperor was celebrated—with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the préfet's invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town, and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were dismally paraded about, and the firemen practised with their muskets, very awkwardly, at a mark which was so placed among the trees that they could hardly see it.
Why has not the government the sense to let these people alone? After all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which does not exist.
If Louis Napoleon is in any peril, it is not from the republican or constitutional party, but from his own lavish expenditure, which begins to irritate the people. They are careless of their rights as freemen, but they are fond, and growing daily fonder, of money; and they do not like to be heavily taxed, and to hear at the same time that the Emperor is wasting on his personal expenses and those of his relatives and courtiers some six millions of dollars a year. Regard for economy is the only profession which distinguishes the addresses of the so-called opposition candidates from those of their competitors. I asked a good many people what they thought of the Mexican expedition. Not one of them objected to its injustice, but they all objected to its cost, "Cela mangera beaucoup d'argent," was the invariable reply. And in this point of view the government has committed what it would think much worse than any crime,—a very damaging blunder.
It does not appear that the Orleans family have any hold on the mind of the French people. When I mentioned their name, it seemed to produce no emotion, one way or the other. But if the marshals and grandees, who have hold of the wires of administration at the point where they are centralized, chose to make Napoleon III abdicate, (as they made Napoleon I. abdicate at Fontainebleau,) and to set up a king of the House of Orleans in his place, they could probably do it; and they might choose to do it, if, by such blunders as the Mexican expedition, he seemed to be placing their personal interests in jeopardy.
Stopping to breakfast at Condé, on the way from Vire to Falaise, I fell in with the only Frenchman, with a single exception, who showed any interest in the affairs of America. Generally speaking, I was told, and found by experience, that profound apathy prevailed upon the subject. This gentleman, on learning that I had recently been in America, entered eagerly into conversation on the subject. But his inquiries were only about the prospects of cotton; and all I could tell him on that point was, that, if the growth of cotton was profitable, the Yankee would certainly make it grow.
The castle of Falaise is the reputed birthplace of the Conqueror. They even pretend to show you the room in which he was born. The existing castle, however, is of considerably later date. It is even doubtful, according to the best antiquaries, whether there were any stone castles at the date of his birth, or only earthworks with palisades. There is, however, one genuine monument of that time. You look down from the castle on the tanneries in the glen below, and see the women washing their clothes in the stream, as in the days when Robert the Devil wooed the tanner's daughter. Robert, however, must have had diabolically good eyes to choose a mistress at such a distance.
Annexed to the castle is Talbot's Tower,—a beautiful piece of feudal architecture, and a monument of a later episode in that long train of miserable wars between England and France, of which the Conqueror's cruel rapacity may be regarded as the spring; for the English conquests were an inverted copy and counterpart of his. But the Conqueror's crimes, like those of Napoleon I., were on the grandiose scale, and therefore they impose, like those of Napoleon, on the slavishness of mankind; while the petty bandit, though endowed perhaps with the same powers of destruction and only lacking the ampler sphere, is buried under the gallows. The equestrian statue of William in the public place at Falaise prances, it has been remarked, close to the spot where rest the ashes of Walter and Biona, Count and Countess of Pontoise, poisoned, if contemporary accounts are true, by the same ambition which launched havoc and misery on a whole nation. They and the Conqueror were rival claimants to the sovereignty of Maine. They supped with the Conqueror one evening at Falaise, and next morning William was the sole claimant. The Norman, like the Corsican, was an assassin as well as a conqueror.
I must leave it to architects to describe the architectural glories of Caen. But I had no idea that the Norman style, in England grand only from its massiveness, could soar to such a height of beauty as it has attained in the Church of St. Stephen and the Abbaye aux Dames. I afterwards did homage again to its powers when standing before the august ruin of Jumièges. There is something peculiarly delightful in the freshness of early art, whether Greek or mediæval, and whether in architecture or in poetry,—when you see the mind first beginning to feel its power over the material, and to make it the vehicle of thought. There is something, too, in all human works, which makes the early hope more charming than the fulfilment.
St. Stephen is the church of the Conqueror, as the Abbaye aux Dames is that of his Queen. There he lies buried. Every one knows the story of Ascelin demanding the price of the ground in which William was going to be buried, and which the tyrant had taken from him by force; and how, at last, the corpse of the Conqueror was thrust, amidst a scene of horror and loathing, into its grave. But Rex Invictissimus is the inscription on his tomb.
The spire of St. Pierre is very graceful; the body of the church, in the latest and most debased style of Gothic architecture, stands signally contrasted with St. Stephen,—St. Stephen the simple vigor of the prime, St. Pierre the florid weakness of the decay.