UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE
MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE[459]
Maintenon, September 1836.
I resume my pen at the Château de Maintenon, through whose gardens I stroll by the autumnal light: peregrinæ gentis amænum hospitium.
When passing in front of the coasts of Greece, I used to ask myself what had become of the four acres of the garden of Alcinous, shaded with pomegranate-trees, apple-trees, fig-trees and adorned with two fountains? Goodman Laertes' vegetable-garden in Ithaca no longer had its two and twenty pear-trees when I was sailing before that island, and they were not able to tell me if Zante was still the home of the hyacinth. The pleasure-ground of Academus, in Athens, offered a few stumps of olive-trees to my view, as did the Garden of Gethsemane at Jerusalem. I have not wandered in the gardens of Babylon, but Plutarch teaches us that they still existed in the time of Alexander. Carthage presented to me the aspect of a park strewn with the vestiges of Dido's palaces. At Granada, looking through the doorways of the Alhambra, I could not take my eyes from the groves in which the romance of Spain had placed the loves of the Zegris. From the top of David's house at Jerusalem, the King-Prophet saw Bethsabee bathing in Urias' gardens; I saw none pass there save a daughter of Eve, a poor Abigail, who will never inspire me with the magnificent Penitential Psalms.
During the Conclave of 1828, I strolled in the Gardens of the Vatican. An eagle, plucked of its feathers and imprisoned in a den, presented the emblem of Pagan Rome overthrown; an emaciated rabbit was delivered as a prey to the bird of the Capitol, which had devoured the world. Monks have shown me, at Tusculum and Tibur, the waste fruit-groves of Cicero and Horace. I have shot wild-duck in Pliny's Laurentinum; the waves came to die at the foot of the wall of the dining-room, where, through three windows, one descried as it were three seas: quasi tria maria.
In Rome herself, as I lay among the wild anemones of Bel Respiro, between the pine-trees that formed a vault above my head, the Sabine Range opened to the view in the distance; Albano enchanted my eyes with its azure mountain, whose lofty denticulations were fringed with gold by the last rays of the sun: a sight that became more admirable still when I came to think that Virgil had contemplated it, as I was doing, and that I was seeing it again, from the midst of the ruins of the city of the Cæsars, across the vine-branch of the Tomb of the Scipios[460].
If, from these Gardens of the Hesperides of poetry and history, I descend to the gardens of our days, how many have I seen born and die? Without speaking of the woods of Sceaux, Marly, Choisy, now razed to the level of the corn-fields, without speaking of the thickets of Versailles, which they purpose to restore to their festal condition! I too have planted gardens; my little water-furrow, which served as a passage for the winter rains, was in my eyes equal to the ponds of the Prædium rusticum.
Seen from the side of the park, the Château de Maintenon, surrounded by moats filled from the waters of the Eure, presents on the left a square tower of bluish stone, on the right a round tower of red brick. The square tower is connected, by a block of buildings, with the surbased archway which opens from the outer yard to the inner yard of the castle. Above this, archway rises a mass of turrets from which starts a building which is attached transversely to another block coming from the round tower. These three lines of buildings contain a space closed on three sides and open only on the park.
The seven or eight towers of different thickness, height and shape are capped with priests' bonnets, which mix with a church-window, placed outside, towards the village.
The façade of the castle on the village side is of the Renascence period. The fancifulness of this style of architecture gives the Château de Maintenon a special character, as who should say of a town of olden time or a fortified abbey, with its spires and steeples, grouped at hap-hazard.