To the confection of this pasty the famous mills of Chauny, reputed the best in France, were bound to contribute five setiers of wheat, and the guild of the butchers a calf's head.
Before the procession marched a learned dog, trained to all manner of tricks and devices, and upon either side of the dog the town trumpeters, sounding their finest and loudest fanfares.
At the Bailliage the lieutenant-general received the procession, seated in a great chair of state in the midst of the hall, with wide open doors, that all the people crowding into the Place might see what went on within. Before this high functionary the learned dog advanced, quite alone, and performed all his best tricks. He then gave way to the bearer of the pasty. This having been gravely accepted, after the manner of a feudal homage, by the lieutenant-general, the bearer, passing it on to the servants of the Bailliage, proceeded himself to imitate as exactly and as skilfully as possible all the performances of his predecessor the learned dog, amid the shouting and applause of the multitude.
This over, a great silence fell upon the whole assembly, and it then became the duty of the performer, assuming an attitude of profound and deferential obeisance, to salute the lieutenant-general after a fashion more easily describable by Rabelais or by M. Armand Silvestre than by me, and which seems to have been derived from some of the singular rites attributed by Von Hammer to the Templars, as a part of the ceremonial observed by them in their secret conclaves.
When all this had been duly gone through with, the 'jongleurs' of Chauny received the Royal permission to resume their perambulations of the realm for another year, and the day wound up with junketings and jollifications all over the town.
The 'jongleurs' and the learned dogs and the green monkeys have passed away, with the lieutenant-general of the king. But I found a certain homely shrewdness and vivacity in the people with whom I talked as they went in and out of the 'Pot d'Etain,' the chief hostelry of the place, and the fact that this chief hostelry still keeps its good old-time name of the 'Tin Pot,' and has not changed itself into a 'Grand Hôtel de Chauny,' seemed to me to argue a survival here of common sense and sound local feeling. The host of the 'Tin Pot,' a solid, well-to-do personage, learned in crops and horses, gave me a capital trap, shaded with an awning such as is worn on the delightful little basket-waggons at Nice and Monte-Carlo, and a wide-awake driver for my trip to Coucy and Anizy, on the way to Laon. His daughter, a decidedly good-looking young lady, not wholly unconscious of her natural advantages, who kept the guests of the café in capital order, seemed to have no high opinion of the powers that be in France. She took up an English sovereign which I laid down on the counter when settling a bill, and looked at it with much interest. 'That weighs more than a napoleon,' she said; 'and who is the young lady? She is pretty, and it is a good head.'
I explained that the lady was young because the coin was old, and that the head was the head of the Queen of Great Britain, who had reigned over that realm for more than fifty years.
'More than fifty years!' exclaimed the damsel; 'is it possible! And still the same queen! Ah! they are well behaved the English; no wonder they are rich. They are not such babies as we are!'
After passing through the well-built and neatly kept cités ouvrières of the Chauny branch of the Company of St.-Gobain, and the little suburb of Autreville, the highway to Coucy-le-Château, and to the once royal city of Soissons, runs through such fine woodlands, alternating with parks and highly-cultivated fields, that one seems to be traversing a great private domain. The trees are as well-grown as any you see in England; the hedges are luxuriant, the roadway is admirably made and perfectly well kept. The Comte de Brigode has a handsome château here, standing well in a large park; and there is a good deal of hunting and shooting here in the season.
Near by, too, is the pleasant château of Lavanture, long the home of a branch established here of the once famous Dauphinese family of De Théis. It was brought here from the land of Bayard and of De Comines by a stalwart soldier, one of the lansquenet officers of Francis I., but its renown in Picardy is of a gentler and more humane type; and after giving a long succession of kindly and learned men to the public service through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it finally died out with Constance de Théis, Princesse de Salm, who was known under the Directory and the Empire in Paris as the 'Muse of Reason,' and the 'Boileau of Women,' and with her nephew, the last Baron de Théis, one of the most charming of men, and one of the most conscientious and accurate of archæologists and collectors. The baron died in 1874. The 'objets d'art et de haute curiosité,' brought together by him with infinite pains and unerring taste into his château of Lavanture, were dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, and Lavanture itself passed into the possession of another race.