From a terrace back of the palace we looked out on a pretty lake where Eugénie's son used to sail a miniature, full-rigged ship, large enough, if one could judge from a picture we saw, to have held the little prince himself. There was still sunlight on the tree-tops, and these and the prince's pretty pavilion reflecting in the placid water made the place beautiful. But the little vessel was not there. I wished, as we watched, that it might come sailing by. I wished that the prince had never been exiled, and that he had not grown up and gone to his death in a South African jungle. I wished that he might be back to sail his ship again, and that Eugénie might be young and have her theater once more, and that Louis Napoleon's hunting-parties might still gather in the painted ball-room and fill the vacant palace with something besides mere curiosity and vain imaginings.
We had meant to go to Barbizon, home of the artist Millet, but we got lost in the forest next morning, and when we found ourselves, we were a good way in the direction of Melun and concluded to keep on, consoling ourselves with the thought that Barbizon is not Barbizon any more, and would probably be a disappointment, anyway. We kept on from Melun, also, after buying some luncheon things, and all day traversed that beautiful rolling district which lies east of Paris and below Rheims, arriving toward evening at Epernay, center of the champagne district. We had no need to linger there. We were anxious to get to Rheims.
We were still in the hills when we looked on the valley of the Vesle and saw a city outspread there, and in its center, mellowed and glorified by seven kindly centuries, the architectural and ecclesiastical pride of the world, the Cathedral of Rheims. Large as the city was, that great central ornament dwarfed and dominated its surroundings. Thus Joan of Arc had seen it when, at the head of her victorious army, she conducted the king to Rheims for his coronation. She approached the fulfilment of her mission, the completion of the great labor laid upon her by the voices of her saints. Mark Twain tells of Joan's approach to Rheims, of the tide of cheers that swept her ranks at the vision of the distant towers.
It was the sixteenth of July that Joan looked down upon Rheims, and now four hundred and eighty-five years later it was again July, with the same summer glory on the wood, the same green and scarlet in the poppied fields, the same fair valley, the same stately towers rising to the sky. But no one can ever feel what Joan felt, can ever put into words, ever so faintly, what that moment and that vision meant to the Domremy shepherd-girl.
Descending the plain, we entered the city, crossed a bridge, and made our way to the cathedral square. Then presently we were at the doorway where Joan and her king had entered—the portal which has been called the most beautiful this side of paradise. How little we dreamed that destruction and disfigurement lay only a few weeks ahead!
It is not required any more that one should write descriptively of the now vanished glories of the church of Rheims, it has been done so thoroughly and so numerously by those so highly qualified for the undertaking. Fergusson, who must have been an authority, for the guide-book quotes him, calls it, "perhaps the most beautiful structure produced in the Middle Ages."
The cathedral was already two hundred years old when Joan arrived in 1429. But it must have looked quite fresh and new, then, for nearly five centuries later it seemed to have suffered little. Some of the five hundred and thirty statues of its wonderful portal were weatherworn and scarred, to be sure, but the general effect of beauty and completeness was not disturbed.
Many kings had preceded Joan and her sovereign through the sacred entrance. Long before the cathedral was built, French sovereigns had come to Rheims for their coronation. Here Clovis had been baptized nearly a thousand years before.
It was a mighty assemblage that gathered for the crowning of Joan's king. France, overrun by an invader, had known no real king for years—had, indeed, well nigh surrendered her nationality. Now victory, in the person of a young girl from an obscure village, had crowned their arms and brought redemption to their throne. No wonder the vast church was packed, and that crowds were massed outside. From all directions had come pilgrims to the great event—persons of every rank, among them two shepherds, Joan's aged father and uncle, who had walked from Domremy, one hundred and twenty miles, to verify with their own eyes what their ears could not credit.