In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 15

The last notes were but faint vibrations, coming from a lengthening distance.

"Ah!" and Monsieur Paul breathed a sigh. "They don't care about singing. They are doing it all the time they are so much in love. The fathers' lawsuit ended only last month. They've waited three years--happy Claire--happy Mathieu!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CONVERSATION OF PATRIOTS.

The world that found its way to the mayor's table at this early period of the summer season was largely composed of the cla.s.s that travels chiefly to amuse others. The commercial gentlemen in France, however, have the outward bearing of those who travel to amuse themselves. The selling of other people's goods--it is surely as good an excuse as any other for seeing the world! Such an occupation offers an orator, one gifted in conversational talents--talents it would be a pity to see buried in the domestic napkin--a fine arena for display.

The French commercial traveller is indeed a genus apart; he makes a fetish of his trade; he preaches his propaganda. The fat and the lean, the tall and the little, the well or meanly dressed representatives of the great French houses who sat down to dine, as our neighbors or _vis-a-vis_, night after night, were, on the whole, a great credit to their country. Their manners might have been mistaken for those of a higher rank; their gifts as talkers were of such an order as to make listening the better part of discretion.

Dining is always a serious act in France. At this inn the sauces of the _chef_, with their reputation behind them, and the proof of their real excellence before one, the dinner-hour was elevated to the importance of a ceremony. How the petty merchants and the commercial gentlemen ate, at first in silence, as if respecting the appeal imposed by a great hunger, and then warming into talk as the acid cider was pa.s.sed again and again! What crunching of the st.u.r.dy, dark-colored bread between the great knuckles! What huge helps of the famous sauces! What insatiable appet.i.tes! What nice appreciation of the right touch of the tricksy garlic! What nodding of heads, clinking of gla.s.ses, and warmth of friends.h.i.+p established over the wine-cups! At dessert everyone talked at once. On one occasion the subject of Gambetta's death was touched on; all the table, as one man, broke out into an effervescence of political babble.

"What a loss! What a death-blow to France was his death!" exclaimed a heavy young man in a pink cravat.

"If Gambetta had lived, Alsace and Lorraine would be ours now, without the firing of a gun!" added an elderly merchant at the foot of the table.

"Ah--h! without the firing of a gun they will come to us yet. I tell you, without the firing of a gun--unless we insist on a battle,"

explosively rejoined a fiery-hued little man sitting next to Monsieur Paul; "but you will see--we shall insist. There is between us and Germany an inextinguishable hate--and we must kill, kill, right and left!"

"_Allons--allons!_" protested the table, in chorus.

"Yes, yes, a general ma.s.sacre, that is what we want; that is what we must have. Men, women, and children--all must fall. I am a married man--but not a woman or a child shall escape--when the time comes,"

continued the fiery-eyed man, getting more and more ferocious as he warmed with the thought of his revenge.

"What a monster!" broke in Madame Le Mois, her deep base notes unruffled by the spectacle of her bloodthirsty neighbor's violence; "you--to bayonet a woman with a child in her arms!"

"I would--I would--"

"Then you would be more cruel than they were. They treated our women with respect."

There was a murmur of a.s.senting applause, at this sentiment of justice, from the table. But the fiery-eyed man was not to be put down.

"Oh, yes, they were generous enough in '71, but I should remember their insults of 1815!"

"_Ancienne histoire--ca_" said the mere, dismissing the subject, with a humorous wink at the table.

"As you see," was Monsieur Paul's comment on the conversation, as we were taking our after-dinner stroll in the garden--"as you see, that sort of person is the bad element in our country--the dangerous element--unreasoning, revengeful, and ignorant. It is such men as he who still uphold hatreds and keep the flame alive. It is better to have no talent at all for politics--to be harmless like me, for instance, whose worst vice is to buy up old laces and carvings."

"And roses--"

"Yes--that is another of my vices--to perpetuate the old varieties.

They call me along our coast the millionnaire--of roses! Will you have a 'Marie Louise,' mademoiselle?"

The garden was as complete in its old time aspect as the rest of the inn belongings. Only the older, rarer varieties of flowers and rose stalks had been chosen to bloom within the beautifully arranged inclosure. _Citronnelle_, purple irises, fringed asters, sage, lavender, _rose-peche_, bachelor's-b.u.t.ton, _the d'Horace_, and the wonderful electric fraxinelle, these and many other shrubs and plants of the older centuries were ma.s.sed here with the taste of one difficult to please in horticultural arrangements. Our after-dinner walks became an event in our day. At that hour the press of the day's work was over, and Madame Mere or Monsieur Paul were always ready to join us for a stroll.

"For myself, I do not like large gardens," Monsieur Paul remarked, during one of these after-dinner saunters. "The monks, in the old days, knew just the right size a garden should be--small and sheltered, with walls--like a strong arm about a pretty woman--to protect the shrubs and flowers. One should enter the garden, also, by a gate which must click as it closes--the click tickles the imagination--it is the sound henceforth connected with silence, with perfumes and seclusion. How far away we seem now, do we not?--from the bustle of the inn court-yard--and yet I could throw a stone into it."

The only saunterers besides ourselves were the flamingo, who, cautiously, timorously picked his way--as if he were conscious he was only a bunch of feathers hoisted on stilts; the white parrot, who was wabbling across the lawn to a favorite perch in the leaves of a tropical palm; and the peac.o.c.k, whose train had been spread with a due regard to effect across a bed of purple irises, with a view to annihilating the brilliancy of their rival hues.

The bit of sky framed by these four garden walls always seemed more delicate in tone than that which covered the open court-yard. The birds in the bushes had moments of melodious outbursts they did not, apparently, indulge in along the high-road. And what with the fading lights, the stars p.r.i.c.king their way among the palms, the scents of flowers, and the talk of a poet, it is little wonder that this twilight hour in the old garden was certain to be the most lyrical of the twenty-four.

CHAPTER XIX.

IN LA CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS.

"It is the winters, mesdames, that are hard to bear. They are long--they are dull. No one pa.s.ses along the high-road. It is then, when sometimes the snow is piled knee-deep in the court-yard, it is then I try to amuse myself a little. Last year I did the Jumieges sculptures; they fit in well, do they not?"

It was raining; and Monsieur Paul was paying us an evening call. A great fire was burning in the beautiful Francois I. fireplace of our sitting-room, the famous Chambre des Marmousets. We had not consented that any of the lights should be lit, although the lovely little Louis XIV. chandelier and the antique bra.s.s sconces were temptingly filled with fresh candles. The flames of the great logs would suffer no rival illuminations; if the trunks of full-grown trees could not suffice to light up an old room, with low-raftered ceilings, and a ma.s.s of bric-a-brac, what could a few thin waxen candles hope to do?

On many other occasions we had thought our marvellous sitting-room had had exceptional moments of beauty. To turn in from the sunlit, open court-yard; to pa.s.s beneath, the vine-hung gallery; to lift the great latch of the low Gothic door and to enter the rich and sumptuous interior, where the light came, as in cathedral aisles, only through the jewels of fourteenth-century gla.s.s; to close the door; to sit beneath the prismatic shower, ensconced in a nest of old tapestried cus.h.i.+ons, and to let the eye wander over the wealth of carvings, of ceramics, of Spanish and Normandy trousseaux chests, on the collection of antique chairs, Dutch porcelains, and priceless embroideries--all the riches of a museum in a living-room--such a moment in the Marmousets we had tested again and again with delectable results. At twilight, also, when the garden was submerged in dew, this old seigneurial chamber was a retreat fit for a sybarite or a modern aesthete. The stillness, the soft luxurious cus.h.i.+ons, the rich dusk thickening in the corners, the complete isolation of the old room from the noise and tumult of the inn life, its curious, its delightful unmodernness, made this Marmouset room an ideal setting for any mediaeval picture. Even a sentiment tinctured with modern cynicism would, I think, have borrowed a little antique fervor, if, like the photographic negative our nineteenth-century emotionalism somewhat too closely resembles, in its colorless indefiniteness, the sentiment were sufficiently exposed, in point of time and degree of sensitiveness, to the charm of these old surroundings.

On this particular evening, however, the pattering of the rain without on the cobbles and the great blaze of the fire within, made the old room seem more beautiful than we had yet seen it. Perhaps the capture of our host as a guest was the added treasure needed to complete our collection. Monsieur Paul himself was in a mood of prodigal liberality; he was, as he himself neatly termed the phrase, ripe for confession; not a secret should escape revelation; all the inn mysteries should yield up the fiction of their frauds; the full nakedness of fact should be given to us.

"You see, _cheres dames_, it is not so difficult to create the beautiful, if one has a little taste and great patience. My inn--it has become my hobby, my pride, my wife, my children. Some men marry their art, I espoused my inn. I found her poor, tattered, broken-down, in health, if you will; verily, as your Shakespeare says of some country wench: 'a poor thing but mine own.'" Monsieur Paul's possession of the English language was scarcely as complete as the storehouse of his memory. He would have been surprised, doubtless, to learn he had called poor Audrey, "a pure ting, b.u.t.taire my noon!"

"She was, however," he continued, securely, in his own richer Norman, "though a wench, a beautiful one. And I vowed to make her glorious.

'She shall be famous,' I vowed, and--and--better than most men I have kept my vow. All France now has heard of Guillaume le Conquerant!"

The pride Monsieur Paul took in his inn was indeed a fine thing to see.

The years of toil he had spent on its walls and in its embellishment had brought him the recompense much giving always brings; it had enriched him quite as much as the wealth of his taste and talent had bequeathed to the inn. Latterly, he said, he had travelled much, his collection of curios and antiquities having called him farther afield than many Frenchmen care to wander. His love of Delft had taken him to Holland; his pa.s.sion for Spanish leather to the country of Velasquez; he must have a Virgin, a genuine fifteenth-century Virgin, all his own; behold her there, in her stiff wooden skirts, a Neapolitan captive. The bra.s.s braziers yonder, at which the courtiers of the Henris had warmed their feet, stamping the night out in cold ante chambers, had been secured at Blois; and his collection of tapestries, of stained gla.s.s, of Normandy bra.s.ses, and Breton carvings had made his own coast as familiar as the Dives streets.

"The priests who sold me these, madame," he went on, as he picked up a priest's chasuble, now doing duty as a table covering "would sell their fathers and their mothers. It is all a question of price."

After a review of the curios came the history of the human collection of antiquities who had peopled the inn and this old room.

Many and various had been the visitors who had slept and dined here and gone forth on their travels along the high-road.

The inn had had a n.o.ble origin; it had been built by no less a personage than the great William himself. He had deemed the spot a fitting one in which to build his boats to start forth for his modest project of conquering England. He could watch their construction in the waters of Dives River--that flows still, out yonder, among the gra.s.ses of the sea-meadows. For some years the Norman dukes held to the inn, in memory of the success of that clever boat-building. Then for five centuries the inn became a manoir--the seigneurial residence of a certain Sieur de Semilly. It was his arms we saw yonder, joined to those of Savoy, in the door panel, one of the family having married into a branch of that great house.

Of the famous ones of the world who had travelled along this Caen post-road and stopped the night here, humanly tired, like any other humble wayfarer, was a hurried visit from that king who loved his trade--Louis XI. He and his suite crowded into the low rooms, grateful for a bed and a fire, after the weary pilgrimage to the heights of Mont St. Michel. Louis's piety, however, was not as lasting in its physically exhaustive effects, as were the fleshly excesses of a certain other king--one Henri IV., whose over-appreciation of the oysters served him here, caused a royal attack of colic, as you may read at your pleasure in the State Archives in Paris--since, quite rightly, the royal secretary must write the court physician every detail of so important an event. What with these kingly travellers and such modern uncrowned kings as Puvis de Chavannes, Dumas, George Sand, Daubigny, and Troyon, together with a goodly number of lesser great ones, the famous little inn has had no reason to feel itself slighted by the great of any century. Of all this motley company of notabilities there were two whose visits seemed to have been indefinitely prolonged.

There was nothing, in this present flowery, picturesque a.s.semblage of buildings, to suggest a certain wild drama enacted here centuries ago.

Nothing either in yonder tender sky, nor in the silvery foliage on a fair day, which should conjure up the image of William as he must have stood again and again beside the little river; nor of the fury of his impatience as the boats were building all too slowly for his hot hopes; nor of the strange and motley crew he had summoned there from all corners of Europe to cut the trees; to build and launch boats; to sail them, finally, across the strip of water to that England he was to meet at last, to grapple with, and overthrow, even as the English huscarles in their turn bore down on that gay Minstrel Taillefer, who rode so insolently forth to meet them, with a song in his throat, tossing his sword in English eyes, still chanting the song of Roland as he fell.

None of the inn features were in the least informed with this great, impressive picture of its past. Yet does William seem by far the most realizable of all the personages who have inhabited the old house.

There was another visitor whose presence Monsieur Paul declared was as entirely real as if she, also, had only just pa.s.sed within the court-yard.

"I know not why it is, but of all these great, _ces fameux_, Madame de Sevigne seems to me the nearest, in point of time. Her visit appears to have happened only yesterday. I never enter her room but I seem to see her moving about, talking, laughing, speaking in epigrams. She mentions the inn, you know, in her letters. She gives the details of her journey in full."

I, also, knew not why; but, later, after Monsieur Paul had left us, when he had shut himself out, along with the pattering raindrops, and had closed us in with the warmth and the flickering fire-light, there came, with astonis.h.i.+ng clearness, a vision of that lady's visit here.