Gaston de Latour; an unfinished romance

by Walter Pater

Under such genial conditions, then, Gaston set out towards those south-west regions he had [77] always yearned to, as popular imagination just now set thither also, in a vision of French ships going forth from the mouths of the Loire and the Gironde, from Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one was not but might become—the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined, to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did not merely accept the sun, but flashed it back gratefully from the white, gracious, carven houses, that were like a natural part of it. As he passed below, fancy would sometimes credit the outlook from their lofty gables with felicities of combination beyond possibility. What prospects of mountain and sea-shore from those aerial window- seats!

And still, as in some sumptuous tapestry, the architecture, the landscape, were but a setting for the human figures: these palatial abodes, never out of sight, high on the river bank, challenged continual speculation as to their inhabitants—how they moved, read poetry and romance, or wrote the memoirs which were like romance, passed through all the hourly changes of their all- [79] accomplished, intimate life. The Loire was the river pre-eminently of the monarchy, of the court; and the fleeting human interests, fact or fancy, which gave its utmost value to the liveliness of the natural scene, found a centre in the movements of Catherine and her sons, still roving, after the eccentric habit inherited from Francis the First, from one "house of pleasure" to another, in the pursuit at once of amusement and of that political intrigue which was the serious business of their lives. Like some fantastic company of strolling players amid the hushed excitement of a little town, the royal family, with all its own small rivalries, would be housed for the night under the same roof with some of its greater enemies—Henri de Guise, Condé, "The Admiral," all alike taken by surprise—but courteously, and therefore ineffectively. And Gaston, come thus by chance so close to them, had the sense not so much of nearness to the springs of great events, as of the likeness of the whole matter to a stage-play with its ingeniously contrived encounters, or the assortments of a game of chance.

And in a while the dominant course of the river itself, the animation of its steady, downward flow, even amid the sand-shoals and whispering islets of the dry season, bore his thoughts beyond it, in a sudden irresistible appetite for the sea; and he determined, varying slightly from the prescribed route, to reach his destination by way [80] of the coast. From Nantes he descended imperceptibly along tall hedge-rows of acacia, till on a sudden, with a novel freshness in the air, through a low archway of laden fruit-trees it was visible—sand, sea, and sky, in three quiet spaces, line upon line. The features of the landscape changed again, and the gardens, the rich orchards, gave way to bare, grassy undulations: only, the open sandy spaces presented their own native flora, for the fine silex seemed to have crept into the tall, wiry stalks of the ixias, like grasses the seeds of which had expanded, by solar magic, into veritable flowers, crimson, green, or yellow patched with black.

It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea's arms, amid the low murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient manor, deserted as the sea encroached—long ago, for the fig-trees in the riven walls were tough and old. Next morning he must turn his back betimes, with the freshness of the outlook still undimmed, all colours turning to white on the shell-beach, the wrecks, the children at play on it, the boat with its gay streamers dancing in the foam. Bright as the scene of his journey had been, it had had from time to time its grisly touches; a forbidden fortress with its steel-clad inmates thrust itself upon the way; the village church had been ruined too recently to count as picturesque; and at last, at the meeting-point of [81] five long causeways across a wide expanse of marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant, La Rochelle itself scowled through the heavy air, the dark ramparts still rising higher around its dark townsfolk:—La Rochelle, the "Bastion of the Gospel" according to John Calvin, the conceded capital of the Huguenots. They were there, and would not leave it, even to share the festivities of the marriage of King Charles to his little Austrian Elizabeth about this time—the armed chiefs of Protestantism, dreaming of a "dictator" after the Roman manner, who should set up a religious republic. Serried closely together on land, they had a strange mixed following on the sea. Lair of heretics, or shelter of martyrs, La Rochelle was ready to protect the outlaw. The corsair, of course, would be a Protestant, actually armed perhaps by sour old Jeanne of Navarre—the ship he fell across, of course, Spanish. A real Spanish ship of war, gay, magnificent, was gliding even then, stealthily, through the distant haze; and nearer lay what there was of a French navy. Did the enigmatic "Admiral," the coming dictator, Coligni, really wish to turn it to foreign adventure, in rivalry of Spain, as the proper patriotic outcome of this period, or breathing-space, of peace and national unity?

Undoubtedly they were still there, even in this halcyon weather, those causes of disquiet, like the volcanic forces beneath the massive [82] chestnut-woods, spread so calmly through the breathless air, on the ledges and levels of the red heights of the Limousin, under which Gaston now passed on his way southwards. On his right hand a broad, lightly diversified expanse of vineyard, of towns and towers innumerable, rolled its burden of fat things down the slope of the Gironde towards the more perfect level beyond. In the heady afternoon an indescribable softness laid hold on him, from the objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron, the chalybeate influence, was to come?—those coquettish, well-kept, vine-wreathed towers, smiling over a little irregular old village, itself half-hidden in gadding vine, pointed out by the gardeners (all labourers here were gardeners) as the end of his long, pleasant journey, as the abode of Monsieur Michel de Montaigne, the singular but not unpopular gentleman living there among his books, of whom Gaston hears so much over-night at the inn where he rests, before delivering the great poet's letter, entering his room at last in a flutter of curiosity.

In those earlier days of the Renaissance, a whole generation had been exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself. An older ideal moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature actually in possession, still haunted humanity, at the very moment when it was [83] called, through a full knowledge of the past, to enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own capacities.—Might one enjoy? Might one eat of all the trees?—Some had already eaten, and needed, retrospectively, a theoretic justification, a sanction of their actual liberties, in some new reading of human nature itself and its relation to the world around it.—Explain to us the propriety, on the full view of things, of this bold course we have taken, or know we shall take!

Ex post facto, at all events, that justification was furnished by the Essays of Montaigne. The spirit of the essays doubtless had been felt already in many a mind, as, by a universal law of reaction, the intellect does supply the due theoretic equivalent to an inevitable course of conduct. But it was Montaigne certainly who turned that emancipating ethic into current coin. To Pascal, looking back upon the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama, hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings, that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.

Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season, that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he took, Montaigne—the acclivity—of Saint Michael, just thirty-six years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life, a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with seeming indolence at home.

It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war shelters: and openness—that all was wide open, searched through by light and warmth and air from the soil—was the impression it made on Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court, to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and savoured of his native earth.

Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively, as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life, towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest, truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed, outward stimulus—physical motion, some text shot from a book, the queries and objections of a living voice.—"My thoughts sleep, if I sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions, many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual publication at last to none of the usual literary motives—desire for fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell—but to the sociable desire for a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance"; speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."—"If there be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but whistle, and I will run!"