Читать книгу Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy - M. F. Mansfield - Страница 3

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“La plus belle Comté, c’est Flandre; La plus belle duché, c’est Bourgogne, Le plus beau royaume, c’est France.”

THIS statement is of undeniable merit, as some of us, who so love la belle France—even though we be strangers—well know.

The Burgundy of Charlemagne’s time was a much vaster extent of territory than that of the period when the province came to play its own kingly part. From the borders of Neustria to Lombardia and Provence it extended from the northwest to the southeast, and from Austrasia and Alamannia in the northeast to Aquitania and Septimania in the southwest. In other words, it embraced practically the entire watershed of the Rhône and even included the upper reaches of the Yonne and Seine and a very large portion of the Loire; in short, all of the great central plain lying between the Alps and the Cevennes.

The old Burgundian province was closely allied topographically, climatically and by ties of family, with many of its neighbouring political divisions. Almost to the Ile de France this extended on the north; to the east, the Franche Comté was but a dismemberment; whilst the Nivernais and the Bourbonnais to the west, through the lands and influence of their seigneurs, encroached more or less on Burgundy or vice versa if one chooses to think of it in that way. To the southeast Dombes, Bresse and Bugey, all closely allied with one another, bridged the leagues which separated Burgundy from Savoy, and, still farther on, Dauphiny.

The influence of the Burgundian spirit was, however, over all. The neighbouring states, the nobility and the people alike, envied and emulated, as far as they were able, the luxurious life of the Burgundian seigneurs later. If at one time or another they were actually enemies, they sooner, in many instances at least, allied themselves as friends or partisans, and the manner of life of the Burgundians of the middle ages became their own.

Not in the royal domain of France itself, not in luxurious Touraine, was there more love of splendour and the gorgeous trappings of the ceremonial of the middle ages than in Burgundy. It has ever been a land of prosperity and plenty, to which, in these late days, must be added peace, for there is no region in all France of to-day where there is more contentment and comfort than in the wealthy and opulent Departments of the Côte d’Or and the Saône and Loire which, since the Revolution, have been carved out of the very heart of old Burgundy.

The French themselves are not commonly thought to be great travellers, but they love “le voyage” nevertheless, and they are as justifiably proud of their antiquities and their historical monuments as any other race on earth. That they love their patrie, and all that pertains to it, with a devotion seemingly inexplicable to a people who go in only for “spreadeaglism,” goes without saying.

“Qu’il est doux de courir le monde! Ah! qu’il est doux de voyager!”

sang the author of the libretto of “Diamants de la Couronne,” and he certainly expressed the sentiment well.

The Parisians themselves know and love Burgundy perhaps more than any other of the old mediæval provinces; that is, they seemingly love it for itself; such minor contempt as they have for a Provençal, a Norman or a Breton does not exist with regard to a Bourguignon.

Said Michelet: “Burgundy is a country where all are possessed of a pompous and solemn eloquence.” This is a tribute to its men. And he continued: “It is a country of good livers and joyous seasons”—and this is an encomium of its bounty.

The men of the modern world who own to Burgundy as their patrie are almost too numerous to catalogue, but all will recall the names of Buffon, Guyton de Morveau, Monge and Carnot, Rude, Rameau, Sambin, Greuze and Prud’hon.

In the arts, too, Burgundy has played its own special part, and if the chateau-builder did not here run riot as luxuriously as in Touraine, he at least builded well and left innumerable examples behind which will please the lover of historic shrines no less than the more florid Renaissance of the Loire.

In the eighteenth century, the heart of Burgundy was traversed by the celebrated “coches d’eau” which, as a means of transportation for travellers, was considerably more of an approach to the ideal than the railway of to-day. These “coches d’eau” covered the distance from Chalon to Lyon via the Saône. One reads in the “Almanach de Lyon et des Provinces de Lyonnois, Forêz et Beaujolais, pour l’année bissextile 1760,” that two of these “coches” each week left Lyon, on Mondays and Thursdays, making the journey to Chalon without interruption via Trévoux, Mâcon and Tournus. From Lyon to Chalon took the better part of two and a half days’ time, but the descent was accomplished in less than two days. From Chalon, by “guimbarde,” it was an affair of eight days to Paris via Arnay-le-Duc, Saulieu, Vermanton, Auxerre, Joigny and Sens. By diligence all the way, the journey from the capital to Lyon was made in five days in summer and six in winter. Says Mercier in his “Tableau de Paris”: “When Sunday came on, the journey mass was said at three o’clock in the morning at some tavern en route.”

The ways and means of travel in Burgundy have considerably changed in the last two hundred years, but the old-time flavour of the road still hangs over all, and the traveller down through Burgundy to-day, especially if he goes by road, may experience not a little of the charm which has all but disappeared from modern France and its interminably straight, level, tree-lined highways. Often enough one may stop at some old posting inn famous in history and, as he wheels his way along, will see the same historic monuments, magnificent churches and chateaux as did that prolific letter writer, Madame de Sévigné.

Apropos of these mediæval and Renaissance chateaux scattered up and down France, the Sieur Colin, in 1654, produced a work entitled “Le Fidèle Conducteur pour les Voyages en France” in which he said that every hillside throughout the kingdom was dotted with a “belle maison” or a “palais.” He, too, like some of us of a later day, believed France the land of chateaux par excellence.

Evelyn, the diarist (1641–1647), thought much the same thing and so recorded his opinion.

The Duchesse de Longueville, (1646–1647), on her journey from Paris called the first chateau passed on the way a “palais des fées,” which it doubtless was in aspect, and Mlle. de Montpensier, in a lodging with which she was forced to put up at Saint Fargeau, named it “plus beau d’un chateau,”—a true enough estimate of many a maison bourgeois of the time. At Pouges-les-Eaux, in the Nivernais, just on the borders of Burgundy, whilst she was still travelling south, Mlle. de Montpensier put up at the chateau of a family friend and partook of an excellent dinner. This really speaks much for the appointments of the house in which she stopped, though one is forced to imagine the other attributes. She seemingly had arrived late, for she wrote: “I was indeed greatly surprised and pleased with my welcome; one could hardly have expected such attentions at so unseemly an hour.”

La Fontaine was a most conscientious traveller and said some grand things of the Renaissance chateaux-builders of which literary history has neglected to make mention.

Lippomano, the Venetian Ambassador of the sixteenth century, professed to have met with a population uncivil and wanting in probity, but he exalted, nevertheless, to the highest the admirable chateaux of princes and seigneurs which he saw on the way through Burgundy. Zinzerling, a young German traveller, in the year 1616, remarked much the same thing, but regretted that a certain class of sight-seers was even then wont to scribble names in public places. We of to-day who love old monuments have, then, no more reason to complain than had this observant traveller of three hundred years ago.

Madame Laroche was an indefatigable traveller of a later day (1787), and her comments on the “belles maisons de campagne” in these parts (she was not a guest in royal chateaux, it seems) throw many interesting side lights on the people, the manners and the customs of her time.

Bertin in his “Voyage de Bourgogne” recounts a noble welcome which he received at the chateau of a Burgundian seigneur—“Salvos of musketry, with the seigneur and the ladies of his household awaiting on the perron.” This would have made an ideal stage grouping.

Arthur Young, the English agriculturist, travelling in France just previous to the Revolution, had all manner of comment for the French dwelling of whatever rank, but his observations in general were more with reference to the chaumières of peasants than with the chateaux of seigneurs.

Time was when France was more thickly bestrewn with great monasteries and abbeys than now. They were in many ways the rivals of the palatial country houses of the seigneurs, and their princely abbés and priors and prelates frequently wielded a local power no less militant than that of their secular neighbours.

Great churches, abbeys, monasteries, fortresses, chateaux, donjons and barbican gates are hardly less frequently seen in France to-day than they were of old, although in many instances a ruin only exists to tell the tale of former splendour.

This is as true of Burgundy as it is of other parts of France; indeed, it is, perhaps, a more apt reference here than it would be with regard to Normandy or Picardy, where many a mediæval civic or religious shrine has been made into a warehouse or a beet-sugar factory. The closest comparison of this nature that one can make with respect to these parts is that some Cistercian monastery has become a “wine-chateau” like the Clos Vougeot or Beaune’s Hospice or Hotel Dieu, which, in truth, at certain periods, is nothing more nor less than a great wholesale wine-shop.

Mediæval French towns, as well in Burgundy as elsewhere, were invariably built up on one of three plans. The first was an outgrowth of the remains and débris of a more ancient Gaulish or Roman civilization, and purely civic and secular. The second class of community came as a natural ally of some great abbey, seigneurial chateau, really a fortress or an episcopal foundation which demanded freedom from molestation as its undeniable right. It was in such latter places that the bishops and abbés held forth with a magnificence and splendour of surroundings scarcely less imposing than that of royalty itself, though their domains were naturally more restricted in area and the powers that the prelates wielded were often no less powerful than their militant neighbours. The third class of mediæval settlements were the villes-neuves, or the villes-franches, a class of communities usually exempt from the exactions of seigneurs and churchmen alike, a class of towns readily recognized by their nomenclature.

By the sixteenth century the soil of France was covered with a myriad of residential chateaux which were the admiration and envy of the lords of all nations. There had sprung up beside the old feudal fortresses a splendid galaxy of luxurious dwellings having more the air of domesticity than of warfare, which was the chief characteristics of their predecessors. It was then that the word chateau came to supplant that of chastel in the old-time chronicles.

Richelieu and the Fronde destroyed many a mediæval fane whose ruins were afterwards rebuilt by some later seigneur into a Renaissance palace of great splendour. The Italian builder lent his aid and his imported profusion of detail until there grew up all over France a distinct variety of dwelling which quite outdistanced anything that had gone before. This was true in respect to its general plan as well as with regard to the luxury of its decorative embellishments. Fortresses were razed or remodelled, and the chateau—the French chateau as we know it to-day, distinct from the chastel—then first came into being.

Any review of the castle, chateau and palace architecture of France, and of the historic incident and the personages connected therewith, is bound to divide itself into a geographical or climatic category. To begin with the manner of building of the southland was only transplanted in northern soil experimentally, and it did not always take root so vigorously that it was able to live.

The Renaissance glories of Touraine and the valley of the Loire, though the outcome of various Italian pilgrimages, were of a more florid and whimsical fashioning than anything in Italy itself, either at the period of their inception or even later, and so they are to be considered as something distinctly French—indeed, it was their very influence which was to radiate all over the chateau-building world of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

By contrast, the square and round donjon towers of the fortress-chateaux—like Arques, Falais and Coucy—were more or less an indigenous growth taking their plan from nothing alien. Midi and the centre of France, Provence, the Pyrenees and the valleys of the Rhône and Saône, gave birth, or development, to still another variety of mediæval architecture both military and domestic, whilst the Rhine provinces developed the species along still other constructional lines.

There was, to be sure, a certain reminiscence, or repetition of common details among all extensive works of mediæval building, but they existed only by sufferance and were seldom incorporated as constructive elements beyond the fact that towers were square or round, and that the most elaborately planned chateaux were built around an inner courtyard, or were surrounded by a fosse, or moat.

In Burgundy and the Bourbonnais, and to some extent in the Nivernais, there grew up a distinct method of castle-building which was only allied with the many other varieties scattered over France in the sense that the fabrics were intended to serve the same purposes as their contemporaries elsewhere. The solid square shafts flanking a barbican gate—the same general effect observable of all fortified towns—the profuse use of heavy Renaissance sculpture in town houses, the interpolated Flemish-Gothic (seen so admirably at Beaune and Dijon), and above all, the Burgundian school of sculptured figures and figurines were details which flowered hereabouts as they did nowhere else.

So far as the actual numbers of the edifices go it is evident that throughout Burgundy ecclesiastical architecture developed at the expense of the more luxuriously endowed civic and domestic varieties of Touraine, which, we can not deny, must ever be considered the real “chateaux country.” In Touraine the splendour of ecclesiastical building took a second place to that of the domestic dwelling, or country or town house.

For the most part, the Romanesque domestic edifice has disappeared throughout Burgundy. Only at Cluny are there any very considerable remains of the domestic architecture of the Romans, and even here there is nothing very substantial, no tangible reminder of the palace of emperor or consul, only some fragments of more or less extensive edifices which were built by the art which the Romans brought with them from beyond the Alps when they overran Gaul. If one knows how to read the signs, there may still be seen at Cluny fragments of old Roman walls of stone, brick, and even of wood, and the fact that they have already stood for ten or a dozen centuries speaks much for the excellence of their building. It was undoubtedly something just a bit better than the modern way of doing things.

Of all the domestic edifices of Burgundy dating from the thirteenth century or earlier, that enclosing the “cuisines” (the only name by which this curious architectural detail is known) of the old palace of the dukes at Dijon is credited by all authorities as being quite the most remarkable, indeed, the most typical, of its environment. After this comes the Salle Synodale at Sens. These two, showing the civic and domestic details of the purely Burgundian manner of building, represent their epoch at its very best.

In Dauphiny and Savoy, and to a certain extent the indeterminate ground of Bresse, Dombes and Bugey which linked Burgundy therewith, military and civic architecture in the middle ages took on slightly different forms. Nevertheless, the style was more nearly allied to that obtaining in mid-France than to that of the Midi, or to anything specifically Italian in motive, although Savoy was for ages connected by liens of blood with the holder of the Italian crown.

It was only in 1792 that Savoy became a French Département, with the rather unsatisfactory nomenclature of Mont Blanc. It is true, however, that by holding to the name of Mont Blanc the new department would at least have impressed itself upon the travelling public, as well as the fact that the peak is really French. As it is, it is commonly thought to be Swiss, though for a fact it is leagues from the Swiss frontier.

Before a score of years had passed Savoy again became subject to an Italian prince. Less than half a century later “La Savoie” became a pearl in the French diadem for all time, forming the Départements of Haute Savoie and Savoie of to-day.

The rectangular fortress-like chateau—indeed more a fortress than a chateau—was more often found in the plains than in the mountains. It is for this reason that the chateaux of the Alpine valleys and hillsides of Savoy and Dauphiny differ from those of the Rhône or the Saône. The Rhine castle of our imaginations may well stand for one type; the other is best represented by the great parallelogram of Aigues-Mortes, or better yet by the walls and towers of the Cité at Carcassonne.

Feudal chateaux up to the thirteenth century were almost always constructed upon an eminence; it was only with the beginning of this epoch that the seigneurs dared to build a country house without the protection of natural bulwarks.

The two types are represented in this book, those of the plain and those of the mountain, though it is to be remembered that it is the specific castle-like edifice, and not the purely residential chateau that often exists in the mountainous regions to the exclusion of the other variety. After that comes the ornate country house, in many cases lacking utterly the defences which were the invariable attribute of the castle. Miolans and Montmelian in Savoy stand for examples of the first mentioned class; Chastellux, Ancy-le-Franc and Tanlay in Burgundy for the second.

Examples of the hôtels privées, the town houses of the seigneurs who for the most part spent their time in their maisons de campagne of the large towns and provincial cities are not to be neglected, nor have they been by the author and artist who have made this book. As examples may be cited the Maison des Dauphins at Tour-de-Pin, that elaborate edifice at Paray-le-Monail, various examples at Dijon and the svelt, though unpretending, Palais des Granvelle at Besançon in the Franche Comté.

To sum up the chateau architecture, and, to be comprehensive, all mediæval and Renaissance architecture in France, we may say that it stands as something distinctly national, something that has absorbed much of the best of other lands but which has been fused with the ingenious daring of the Gaul into a style which later went abroad to all nations of the globe as something distinctly French. It matters little whether proof of this be sought in Touraine, Burgundy or Poitou, for while each may possess their eccentricities of style, and excellencies as varied as their climates, all are to-day distinctly French, and must be so considered from their inception.

Among these master works which go to give glory and renown to French architecture are not only the formidable castles and luxurious chateaux of kings and princes but also the great civic palaces and military works of contemporary epochs, for these, in many instances, combined the functions of a royal dwelling with their other condition.