Читать книгу The Royal Road to Romance - Richard Halliburton - Страница 7

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In Paris the greatest catastrophe of my story came to pass. Irvine, the wit, the optimist, unexpectedly and unwillingly was forced to hurry off to Italy, leaving me to carry on disconsolately alone. Piety and I escorted him to the station, bade him through tears as cheerful a farewell as possible, and glumly watched the train take him away. We three had committed so many delightful crimes together since our ascent of the Trocadéro that our trio had become solidly united, and its disruption gave Piety as much cause for lamentation as myself.

Left alone, I resolved to seek consolation in the French châteaux. But first I must write a Rhineland and a Matterhorn story for the market, and in some more immediate way revive my sadly drooping capital. A week of seclusion in the American Library accomplished the writing. Then, in two weeks, having rented a “studio” and a phonograph, I revived the capital by teaching dancing lessons, with two of the pension scandalmongers as my star pupils. Without their patronage I should never have bicycled away from Paris, one morning early in November, with nearly as many francs in my pocket as on the day I landed in Hamburg.

Passing through Versailles and Chartres, I reached the Loire at Orleans, and clung to its banks as it rippled westward through Touraine.

For ten days I loitered in this land of poets and châteaux, tarrying with each castle as long or briefly as my fancy chose. An hour at Chambord, an afternoon at Loches, a day at Blois, two at Amboise. Chenonceaux, the loveliest and most graceful of all, captivated me completely. “Only give me Chenonceaux, and take all the rest,” Catherine de Medici once exclaimed. The bloodthirsty politics of this notorious lady are open to censure, but her taste in châteaux was superb.

For me no tour of Touraine would have been complete without a visit to Chinon, since here Richard Coeur de Lion, the foremost of my boyhood heroes, breathed his last. On learning at this place that Richard’s body had been carried to Fontevrault, a famous abbey some dozen miles away, and buried there, I immediately lost interest in Chinon, and scorning the approach of a stormy night sped away toward the abbey to be a pilgrim to my hero’s tomb. Before I had gone a mile black clouds began to gather overhead. The wind came in wild gusts. A shepherd drove his sheep furiously to cover. An old hag in an apple-cart shrieked speed at her toy donkey and beat him into frantic haste. Man and beast scurried hither and thither to escape the impending torrents. With a crash of lightning the rain dashed to earth amid obliterating darkness. But wrapped in my coat I whirled on through the storm, stopped beneath the shelter of Château Montroreau’s towering walls, past which the road led, and leaning against the great stones extracted my map and flash-light to find Fontevrault. Two miles back from the river it lay, two miles into the very teeth of the November gale. For any shrine less than Richard’s I would not have stirred a foot, yet in this case, raging elements seemed to be a proper setting for the approach to such a dauntless spirit. The abbey was reached; an ecclesiastic responded to my furious knocking. Perhaps at last, even at this late and tempestuous hour, I was to stand beside the mortal remains of my boyhood idol.

“It is impossible for me to grant you permission to enter,” the official informed me in positive tones. “We admit only visitors who have passes from the préfet. This is a prison as well as an abbey, and at present the chapel where the English kings are buried quarters convicts.”

Convicts! Oh, Richard, what desecration!

Distressed more by this sacrilege than by the rebuff, I rode dejectedly back to the river and beside it into Saumur. The storm had suddenly ceased; the clouds had drifted away; a new moon and old stars came out to reflect their image in the swollen Loire.

In Paris my bicycle expedition plans had been very vague. Once the châteaux were behind I had no idea what the next step would be. Having by now run into the ocean at St. Nazaire it was necessary to make up my mind on this subject—a very simple thing for me to do with Spain so alluring and so near. True I had little more than fifty dollars left, but what of that? Where was poverty a more popular institution than in Spain! Out came my disintegrating map of Europe. Upon the Iberian peninsula my eyes came to rest. Barcelona! Alhambra! Toledo! Gibraltar! That’s where I’d go—and to make it doubly beautiful and joyous and romantic I’d climb the Pyrenees on the way. But I must make haste. Already snow was piling deep in the mountain passes.

So I put my bicycle aboard a Bordeaux night express baggage-coach, and getting through the gate with a part-way third-class ticket, rode undisturbed first-class to the fourth city of France.

Any interest in this beautiful metropolis was cut short by a cold wave, which, descending over all the country, rudely jerked my attention back to the Pyrenees. The November crossing of these mountains, as yet unpenetrated by rail, would be a difficult and dangerous undertaking, and I fully understood that the later the expedition was postponed the less agreeable it would be. I had investigated the various passes into Spain, and had chosen the route from Ax because this gave me the opportunity to visit Carcassonne and Andorra, one a citadel, one a country, of such extraordinarily romantic interest that I considered them royal and indispensable stations along the road through southern France.

With Carcassonne as my first goal I overhauled my bicycle and sped out of the port city with a frosty wind behind me. The first day, driven furiously forward by wind and impatience, I covered one hundred and twenty-eight miles along the banks of the Garonne to Montauban, which is more miles than I ever care to bicycle again in one day. The next afternoon Toulouse was reached, and that night, in a flood of moonlight—Carcassonne.

“Il ne faut pas mourir sans avoir vu Carcassonne,” has been written of this astonishing city, no less than of Naples,—and with almost as much justification. Late on that glittering November evening, armed with a flash-light, I left the modern ville basse on foot, crossed the seven-hundred-year-old bridge over the river that separates the fortress from the modern town, looked up at the sharp escarpment, and behold, before my eyes, nine centuries disappeared. I became an anachronism, a twentieth-century American living in sixth-century France. In one sweep the Middle Ages were revealed. A magical moonlit city of walls and towers and battlements, defiant and impregnable, rose before me. Perhaps it was hallucination. Perhaps I had been picturing crusades and twelfth-century battles till I was “seeing things.” Perhaps if I watched, the besiegers would storm up the hill with flashing armor and be met by a rain of arrows from the walls. No, it was not this; it was reality—it was Carcassonne, a fortress begun by the Visigoths and completed by St. Louis, so skilfully and formidably built it had defied the sieges of man and nature, emerging unscathed. As I was astonished by the battlements I saw before me, so by the very same battlements was Clovis in 508, were the Moors in 715, was the famous Crusader commander, Simon de Montfort in 1209, so by the same battlements were most of the great figures of the Middle Ages.

Not a person was to be seen; not a light showed, nor a dog barked as I climbed the path and walked beneath the massively fortified gate, through the double line of enormous walls, into a strange world. Incredibly ancient houses, dark and ghostly, reeled grotesquely along the crazy streets. My footsteps echoed. There was no other sound. Where were the swordsmen and cross-bowmen that should have been guarding the gate? Where were the knights in armor that should be posted about the château walls, and the ladies and banners and retinues that should be animating this corpse of a fortress? Inclines led me to the rim of the crenelated walls, and on up into a tower, where my flash-light revealed the loopholes and machicolations through which arrows and stones were showered upon the attackers. Round the walls I went, marveling at the ingenuity and shrewdness of the engineers who erected them. So impregnable was this Cité after the final touches given it by St. Louis, that it was never taken by storm.

Persistently I tried to find my way into the massive château, with ten circular defense towers, but approach was blocked. The striking Gothic chapel, so graceful and delicate amid all these grim fortifications, was likewise barred. With fifty-two towers, a mile and a half of walls, and with dungeons, tunnels, ramparts, barbicans, to examine, I did not miss the château. In this treasury of romance the night passed quickly. While I stood in a tower and looked from the battlements over the housetops, dawn broke. The dead city slowly was aroused. A man appeared in the streets, and then another and another. I knew the hours of enchantment were gone. The ghosts of Crusaders and Saracens and Visigoths, which must have been abroad that night, had marched down the shafts of the ancient wells into the subterranean caverns, to watch over the fabulous treasures which any true native of the citadel will tell you lie buried there.

With the night departed Yesterday. The real, the unromantic present lived again. I switched off my flash-light. Its gleam had faded.