France and the Republic Part 17

It was this essentially criminal and anarchical character of the Revolution of 1789 which brought on 'the Terror,' not 'the Terror' which engendered the crime and the anarchy.

Why should 'horrors' have been committed at Arras in 1789? The contemporary doc.u.ments show that the people in and about Arras were much better off in 1789 than they had ever before been. The renting value of farms about Arras was nearly or quite thirty per cent. higher in 1750 than it had been in 1700, and it was nearly or quite 100 per cent.

higher in 1800 than in 1750. M. de Calonne cites a farm which had brought only 1,800 livres in 1714 as bringing, in 1784, 3,800 livres.

Men paid these advanced prices not for the owners.h.i.+p of the land, which before 1789 carried with it certain social distinctions and advantages, but for the use, the productive and commercial use, of the land. The horrors of which General Dalrymple spoke, at Arras as elsewhere throughout France--here, in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, in Provence, in Normandy, in Languedoc--were perpetrated not by a downtrodden peasantry, rising to shake off oppression, nor yet in the frenzy of a great popular rally to resist a foreign invader. They were an outburst of crime stimulated, no doubt, as we are now enabled, by fearless and conscientious investigators of the doc.u.mentary history of France, to see, by cabals of political conspirators at Paris, just as the Gordon riots at London in 1780 were stimulated by anti-Catholic fanatics. But in both cases the perpetrators were governed by the mere l.u.s.t of pillage and destruction. Chateaux were broken into, sacked, and burned here in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais, as Lord Mansfield's house was broken into, sacked, and burned in London, because they were full of valuables to be looted. As the drama went on, other pa.s.sions came into play--pa.s.sions not less but more ign.o.ble than the mere savage l.u.s.t of plunder and destruction. A branded rogue and libeller, Brissot, hurried back from his exile beyond the Atlantic to compete with Camille Desmoulins in that n.o.ble work of 'denouncing' his fellow-citizens, which earned for Camille the ghastly t.i.tle of '_procureur de la lanterne_.'

Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' sustained, inspired, and animated that most mischievous group with all the concentrated fires of envy, jealousy, and revenge, which had smouldered in her own heart from the time when, as a girl of seventeen, she had pa.s.sed a week 'in the garrets' of the palace at Versailles with Madame Le Grand, one of the tirewomen of the Dauphiness. The firmness with which Madame Roland met her own fate on the scaffold has been sufficiently celebrated in poetry and in prose. But it is wholesome also to remember the ferocity with which, in the 'glorious' month of July, 1789, a fortnight after the capture of the Bastille, she clamoured for the blood of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In 1771 Marie Phlipon, the engraver's daughter, a girl of seventeen, educated, as her own Memoirs tell us, on 'Candide,' the 'Confessions of Rousseau,' and the 'Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas,' came away from Versailles so gangrened with envy of the glittering personages among whom she had been condemned to play the part of a humble spectator, that 'she knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.' In 1780 she took as her husband M. Roland, a small Government official. He styled himself M. Roland de la Platiere, from the name of a small estate which belonged not to him but to his elder brother, an excellent priest and canon of Villefranche (who, by the way, was guillotined at Lyons in 1793), and in 1781 his young wife made him take her to Paris, where they spent some time in vain efforts to secure letters patent of n.o.bility! The efforts failing, they went back to live at Lyons, where M. Roland was an inspector of manufactories, and from Lyons, in July, 1789, Madame Roland, now become at last a most cla.s.sical Republican, wrote to her friend M. Bosc (who afterwards published her Memoirs), a letter denouncing the timidity of their political friends. 'Your enthusiasm,' she exclaims, 'is only a fire of straw! _If the National a.s.sembly does not regularly bring to trial two ill.u.s.trious heads, or if some generous imitators of Decius do not strike them down, you will all go to the devil._'

I soften and tone down the final phrase of this extraordinary outburst, for though in the original it is but an indecorum as compared with that famous pa.s.sage in the 'Memoirs of Madame Roland' which M. de Sainte-Beuve gracefully describes as 'an immortal act of indecency,' it is yet an indecorum of a sort more tolerable in the French than in the English tongue. If the style is the man, the style is also the woman. In 1771 Marie Phlipon 'knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.'

In 1789 Marie Roland, then on the eve of her appearance upon the public stage of the Revolution, had found 'what to do with the hatred in her heart.'

In this letter to Bosc we have the 'soul of the Gironde' _tout entiere a sa proie attachee_. She clung to her regicide purpose with the tenacity of a tigress. Everything which furthered it she approved, everything which r.e.t.a.r.ded it she denounced. When the king and queen were brought back captives from Varennes to Paris in June 1791 she wrote, in an ecstasy of delight, to Bancal des Issarts, that 'thirty or forty thousand National Guards surrounded our great brigands'; and her desire was that 'the royal mannikin should be shut up, and his wife brought to trial.' She was then inclined to favour the scheme of a regency, of which her ally Petion should be the chief. We know from his own nauseating account of his conduct while journeying back from Varennes to Paris with the unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Petion's dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious coincidence a pa.s.sage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity.

Under the spell of this scheme Madame Roland seems for a time to have suspended her merciless pursuit of the sovereign whom she hated. She even got so far as almost to regret the failure of the royal fugitives to escape. Why? Because their escape 'would have made civil war inevitable!' These are her own words in a letter written to Bancal des Issarts, June 25, 1791: 'We can only be regenerated by blood!' This was the horrible core of her Republican creed.

It made her the ally, the accomplice, the apologist by turns of all the most sanguinary wretches who grasped at power in her distracted country--of Marat, when in a spasm of unusual energy La Fayette sought to suppress his abominable journal; of Robespierre, whose eventual triumph was to seal her own fate and that of all her personal friends, including the one man whom in all her life she seems to have pa.s.sionately loved; and of Danton, red with the blood of the helpless prisoners butchered in these ma.s.sacres of September 1792, of which her husband, then a member of what called itself a 'Government' in France, did not hesitate publicly, and under his official signature, to speak to the people of Paris in these terms: 'I admired the 10th of August; I shuddered at the consequences of the 2nd of September' (at the consequences of the horrors that day perpetrated, as M. Edmond Bire very aptly points out, not at all at the horrors themselves); 'I well understood what must come of the long-deceived patience and of the justice of the people. I did not inconsiderately blame a first terrible movement, but I thought that it was well to prevent its being kept up, and those who sought to perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination!'

This monstrous language was used by Roland in a placard published on the walls of Paris on September 13. The ma.s.sacres had not then really ceased, and the 'first terrible movement' seemed likely to be followed by a second not less 'terrible,' which might make things dangerous, not for the prisoners huddled under lock and key only, but for certain members of the Legislative a.s.sembly, the Girondists themselves!

Is it conceivable that now, after a hundred years, rational beings should look back with any feelings but those of contempt and horror upon these 'patriots' of 1789? Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' was simply the soul of a conspiracy of ambitious criminals masquerading in the guise of philanthropists and philosophers. There is something biblical in the dramatic completeness of the chastis.e.m.e.nt which overtook this unhappy woman. 'They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.'

The murder of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compa.s.s, led not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and a.s.sociates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and laboured, was brought to pa.s.s, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to it, three weeks afterwards, on November 8, 1793. In the ridiculous revolutionary calendar of the epoch, this date stood as the 18th Brumaire; Year II. It was celebrated six years afterwards on the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. of the Republic, by the advent to supreme authority of the Corsican soldier who was to found a despotic empire upon the results of that 'universal war' into which France had been insanely driven by 'the soul of the Gironde.' A mere coincidence, of course! It was a mere coincidence, too, that the Girondist, Dufriche-Valaze, who, at the trial of Louis XVI., especially gratified the personal malignity of Madame Roland by the insolence with which he treated the royal captive, should have tried to save his own head when he and his comrades at last were writhing in the iron grip of Robespierre, by eagerly denouncing his friend and a.s.sociate, Valady, as the real author of a particularly virulent placard intended by the Girondists to turn the fury of the Parisian mob against the Jacobins!

Seeing that he had disgraced himself to no purpose, the wretched creature, who had contrived to conceal a dagger about his person, drew it out when the merciless prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, rising in his place, demanded, on October 29, 1793, that all the Girondists then on trial, having been found guilty by the jury--though no plea had been heard in their defence, and the judge had not summed up--should be instantly condemned to suffer death and the confiscation of their property under the Law of December 16, 1792--a law pa.s.sed by the Girondists themselves, and highly approved by 'the soul of the Gironde.'

Un.o.bserved in the general excitement Valaze drove the dagger into his heart, and crying out, 'I am a dead man!' fell bleeding to the floor.

When his companions had been removed by the guards, Fouquier-Tinville rose again in his place, and requested that the tribunal would order the corpse before them to be taken with the living criminals to the Place de la Revolution, and there with them _guillotined_!

From this even the Convention shrank. But the dead body of Valaze was in fact carried in a little cart through the streets of Paris, behind the dismal cortege of the condemned, 'lying stretched upon the back, and the face uncovered,' on October 31. After the execution was over it was flung, with the remains of his companions, into a great pit.

This was the end, for Madame Roland and her wors.h.i.+ppers, in four short years, of the 'great reformation' of which, on May 17, 1790, she had written to one of her friends that it could only be carried through by 'burning many more chateaux!'

For France, and the French people, the end of it, I fear, has not yet come.

Rapine and confiscation have not been unknown, unfortunately, in the history of any civilised State. But under what modern government, excepting the government of the first French Republic, has sheer pillage, mere downright robbery, been recognised as a legitimate instrument of political propagandism, and, in fact, as a t.i.tle to property? While the Girondists predominated in France, Brissot, self-styled de Warville, was their avowed leader; and Brissot, ten years before the Revolution, in his 'Philosophic Researches into the Rights of Property, and Robbery considered in the Light of Nature,' published at Chartres in 1780, had laid it down as a great principle that 'exclusive owners.h.i.+p is, in Nature, a real crime.' 'Our inst.i.tutions,' said this worthy man, 'punish theft, which is a virtuous action, commended by Nature herself.' Clearly such 'inst.i.tutions' needed a great reformation.

It came. France was 'regenerated by blood,' and the disciples of Rousseau widened the area of human happiness, not by burning only, but by 'looting' all the houses they could break into.

The chateaux having been duly pillaged and burned, and their owners driven to fly for their lives, the government, controlled by the 'principles' of Brissot, made emigration a crime, seized the remaining property of the 'emigrants,' and turned it over with a national t.i.tle, to other people!

A most interesting and valuable chapter in history is still to be written on the relation of the French Revolution to property in France.

Such a history cannot be written by the una.s.sisted light of the statutes and the code. Family records, private correspondence, the reports and despatches of the diplomatic agents of the successive French Governments between 1789 and 1799, must all be laid under contribution, if we are to get at the truth concerning the conditions under which a very large proportion of the land of France pa.s.sed during that period, from the owners.h.i.+p of men who had much to lose by the changes of the Revolution, into the owners.h.i.+p of men who had everything to gain from those changes.

The landed proprietors of France were driven into emigration, not that France might be free--for France was much more free before the emigration began in 1789 than she was in 1791--but that other people might get possession of their estates. Without understanding this, it is impossible to understand some of the most atrocious measures adopted, chiefly while the Girondists were masters, first by the Legislative a.s.sembly, and then by the Convention, in regard to 'emigrants.'

This subject was evidently dealt with in the a.s.sembly and the Convention, as the American Colonel Swan discovered, in 1791, that the tobacco question was dealt with--'by a knot of men who disposed of all things as they liked, and who turned everything to account.'

On October 23, 1792, for example, a decree was adopted inflicting the penalty of death on any emigrant who should return to France! A fortnight later, on November 8, 1791, a similar decree made it a capital offence for any 'emigrant' to enter a French colony!

The first of these decrees was levelled at emigrants whose estates had been seized by the 'popular societies' all over France, and sold, or put in the way of being sold. The second was aimed at the owners of estates in such colonies as Hayti, then one of the richest and most flouris.h.i.+ng, as it is now one of the most wretched and uncivilised islands in the world. A curious 'Minute Book' of the 'Friends of Liberty' at Port-au-Prince, which was given to me in 1871 by an old French resident of Santo Domingo, contains a list of the great proprietors of the island, annotated and marked in a way which indicates that a systematic plan of action against them was either then adopted, or about to be adopted, by the agents of the 'Friends' at Paris. As the spoliation went on, the decrees became more and more Draconian. In March and April 1793, it was decreed that 'any person convicted of emigration, or any priest within the category of priests ordered to be transported, who should be found on French territory, should be put to death within twenty-four hours!' As in many cases the question of the crime of emigration was to be decided by persons actually enjoying the property of the alleged emigrant, this short shrift was a most effectual 'warranty of t.i.tle.'

On March 5, 1793, it was decreed that, 'any young girl _aged fourteen_ or more, who, having emigrated, should have come back and have then been sent out of France by the authorities, and who should return to France a second time, should be forthwith _put to death_.' This is perhaps the most shamelessly felonious of all these felonious decrees, adopted, be it remembered, while Madame Roland was still the 'soul of the Gironde,'

and still taking an active part in the preparation and promulgation of all the acts of the State!

The object of this abominable decree was obvious.

In some cases the property of families in France was actually saved and carried through the tempest of the Revolution by young girls, who fearlessly faced all the horrors of the time, remained in their homes, and, supported by a few faithful friends and servants, such as for the credit of human nature and the confusion of Schopenhauer, are really sometimes to be found doing their duty in such emergencies, successfully maintained their right to the estates of their fathers. Near the picturesque old capital of Le Puy in the Haute-Loire, Mademoiselle Irene de Tencin, after her father was driven from his chateau, remained there with her young brother and a few loyal servants--maintained her rights, collected what money she could, bought _a.s.signats_ for gold, and so bought back the confiscated land and the furniture of her home. A tailor of Le Puy wished to marry her, and the 'Republican' council threatened her with death if she refused! 'Death on the spot!' she replied. Then they actually locked her up in prison for a year! But she held out to the end and carried her young brother safely through until the days of law came back. The decree of March 5, 1793, condemning girls of fourteen to death in certain cases, was intended to prevent 'emigrants' from sending back any more daughters of this type to France, to represent the rights of the family.

About this there can be no manner of doubt. Could a more signal proof than this decree affords be given of the essentially predatory and criminal direction which was given to the domestic policy of France by the 'knot of men who disposed of all things as they liked, and who turned everything to account'? They had their tentacles out all over France. The 'Societes populaires,' of which I have seen it stated by writers of authority that no fewer than 52,000 existed, and were at work in 1792, served them everywhere, the local leaders of these 'societies'

of course sharing with them in the general booty according to their several deserts.

The story of a single family in Provence, as told in an admirable monograph by M. Forneron, ill.u.s.trates perfectly the methods and the results of this organisation of confiscation in the name of patriotism and philanthropy.

When the States-General were summoned in 1789 the Marquis de Saporta, a kinsman of the great house of Crillon, now represented by the d.u.c.h.esse d'Uzes, was the seigneur of Montsallier, a domain near the ancient and picturesque little city of Apt between Avignon and Vaucluse. His own estate was large, and he had greatly increased it in 1770, by marrying a daughter of one of the richest planters in Hayti. Like many other men of his rank at that time, he was an ardent admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a firm believer in the native n.o.bility and general perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the believers in Madame de Stael's man of destiny, her father, the Genevese banker, Necker. In November 1790 he was elected const.i.tutional mayor of Apt, and inducted into office 'with much applause' by a solemn service in the parish church. In February 1791, a local patriot named Reboulin surnamed the 'Roman,' and an armourer named Thiebault who had joined the Ma.r.s.eilles club, and consequently were in correspondence with Paris, organised a systematic attack upon the Marquis. 'This man,' they said at Ma.r.s.eilles, 'is an enemy of the const.i.tution by reason of his rank and of his rage at what is going on. He is a _ci-devant_ n.o.ble, who became mayor by intrigues and cabals.'

From that moment no peace was given to the Saporta family till, one by one, they were driven out of France. The Marquis held out bravely as long as he could, and was the last to leave. When his wife left he gave her a pa.s.sport signed by himself as mayor, in which he described her as the 'citoyenne Laporte,' the object of this being that no evidence should exist to show that Madame de Saporta had really 'emigrated.' In default of such evidence there was some chance that her property rights might be respected.

After the fall of the Directory the Saportas ventured to come back, and in 1800 they finally recovered so much of their property as had not before that time been sold 'by the State.' There was not much left. A sister of the Marquis, the Marquise d'Eyragues, who had enjoyed a very large income before the Revolution, wrote to her nephew in 1800 that she esteemed herself very happy to recover a 'house to live in and two thousand francs a year.'

Here in this beautiful region around Laon and Chauny and Coucy, the story of those evil days is told almost as instructively by the properties which then escaped ruin as by those which, like the estate of the Saportas, were confiscated and broken up.

In the eighteenth century it was full of fine buildings--chateaux, churches, monasteries, hospitals. Go where you please, you come upon the sites of edifices, once local centres of civilisation, which were pillaged, burned, and demolished, while the 'national agents' ruled the provinces for the benefit of the speculators at Paris. Here stood the stately Chateau de Molerepaire, of which nothing now remains but a farmhouse; there, the ancient parish church of St. Paul at Mons-en-Laonnois, one of the finest in the district, now utterly gone, all its materials having been sold for the profit of certain 'national agents' in 1794. Wissignicourt possessed in 1789 one of the most beautiful churches in Northern France and two considerable chateaux. The church of St.-Remi was first robbed of all its ornaments, and finally, in 1793, completely demolished.

The Chateau de la Cressonniere, built in the sixteenth century by Claude de Ma.s.sary, and inhabited by his descendants as resident landlords until the Revolution, has entirely disappeared. Of the Chateau de Wissignicourt, founded in the twelfth century by a baron of the great Picard family of De Hangest, some portions still exist. But this little commune, which occupies one of the most naturally charming sites in the Laonnois, between Anizy and Laon, is indebted to the 'patriots' of Chauny, who domineered over it during the Revolution, for the annihilation of local features, which in these days of railway travel and picturesque tourists would have materially enhanced the value of its not very fertile territory. These buildings, these chateaux and churches, were part of the acc.u.mulated capital of France, and certainly not the least important part of the acc.u.mulated capital of the commune of Wissignicourt. If they had been destroyed in the heat of conflict, as so many such buildings were destroyed in this country during the wars of religion, and in Germany, and even in Great Britain, the philosophers might have some plausible pretext at least for citing their favourite proverb that you 'cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs.'

And we might be invited to set off, against this loss of acc.u.mulated capital, certain important gains in the way of more liberal inst.i.tutions and an enfranchised industry. But this is not the case.

The vandalism of the Revolution of 1789 was perpetrated in cold blood. I speak, of course, now of the real authors of it all, at Paris, not of the mere mobs in the provinces, hot with the sordid l.u.s.t of plunder or with personal spites and rancours--and it was perpetrated for the profit of those who promoted it. The bronzes and bra.s.ses and lead and hammered iron of the desecrated churches were turned into money, and the money went into the pockets of the 'patriots.' Monuments that would now be priceless were destroyed, for example, at St.-Denis, not in the least that the metal might be cast into cannon--I am told the military records show that the republican armies fought their battles, when finally they got to fighting them, exclusively with the artillery of the monarchy--but that the metal might be sold in the markets, and the proceeds confiscated by the vendors. Certain rogues at Chauny and their employers in Paris were doubtless the richer a hundred years ago for the desecration of the Church of St.-Remi and the pillage of La Cressonniere and the Chateau de Wissignicourt. But Wissignicourt and its people are the poorer to-day for these performances.

An instructive estimate might be made of the dead loss which the little city of Bourg-en-Bresse would have sustained during the past century if the sensible Savoyards of that place had not cunningly protected the magnificent statue-tombs of Marguerite d'Autriche, Marguerite de Bourbon and Philibert le Beau in their grand old church of Notre-Dame de Brou, against the rapacity of the revolutionary 'operators,' by cramming the whole church full of straw and hay.

Soissons, in reality one of the very oldest cities in France, the seat, when Caesar first a.s.sailed it, of a Gallic prince, whose authority extended beyond the Channel into Britain, and the cradle long afterwards of the first Frankish monarchy, might be taken, so far as its general aspect goes, for a creation of the Second Empire, were it not for its beautiful old cathedral, sadly damaged in 1793, but very successfully restored, and for the graceful towers of St.-Jean-des-Vignes. These latter were rescued with extreme difficulty by the townspeople themselves from the felonious fury of the democratic operators, who despoiled their city for ever of all the rest of that superb castellated abbey. Of St.-Medard without the walls, which, were it now standing, would be to the history of the French people what Winchester Cathedral is to the history of the English, only the subterranean chapels remain. The materials and the contents of the abbey itself were turned into cash.

St.-Medard-lez-Soissons was only one of eighteen considerable Benedictine abbeys which down to the Revolution existed within the limits of the modern department of the Aisne of which Laon is the chief town. Besides these, this region, the early reclamation and cultivation of which, as I have already said, was chiefly due to the monastic orders, possessed, before 1793, sixteen abbeys and monasteries of the Premonstratensians. The mother abbey of this great order, founded by Saint-Norbert in the twelfth century, commemorates in its name the great agricultural work done by him and his disciples. Premontre, 'the meadows of the monastery,' was the chief seat of the Order which a hundred years ago comprised more than eighteen hundred monasteries, the chapters-general of which were held here. The vast and stately buildings of Presmontre are still standing. They were constructed on a scale of royal grandeur, worthy of the Order, under the Abbe de Muyn, towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV., and they much resemble the buildings erected at the same time at the Grande Chartreuse, near Gren.o.ble. Like these, they were seized upon in 1793 by the revolutionists. But in both cases the buildings were saved, those of the Grande Chartreuse because there was no temporal use to which they could be put, standing, as they do, high up above the gorges of the Guier, in their glorious solitude amid the pine-forests of Dauphine; and these of Premontre for exactly the opposite reason, because they were available for purposes more profitable than the sale of their materials was likely to be. They were converted first into a saltpetre factory by the little knot of financial operators who bought them for a song as 'national property.' Afterwards an attempt was made to establish gla.s.sworks in them. Then they became an orphan asylum, and now they are a great asylum for lunatics!

St.-Jean-des-Vignes at Soissons, already mentioned, was the only monastery of the Joannists in France, and it was one of fifteen Cistercian abbeys in this region. The remaining ruins of the church of one of these Cistercian abbeys at Longpont, near Soissons, vindicate its ancient fame as one of the jewels of French religious architecture. It was built under St.-Louis, and consecrated in his presence. It shared, in 1793, the fate of the almost equally beautiful church of St.-Leger at Soissons, the apse, transepts, and cloisters of which, even in their present condition, suffice to show what Soissons lost when it was looted and desecrated. A worthy bishop of Soissons, M. de Garsignies, bought what remained of St.-Leger in 1850, and established there a seminary.

Add to these edifices those of twelve commanderies of the Temple, ten commanderies of St. John of Jerusalem, two Chartreuses, ten collegiate churches, and more than a hundred and fifty priories, nunneries, and other religious communities, and it will be seen what a grand field of enterprise and speculation was thrown open in the Laonnais and the Soissonnais to the disciples of Brissot de Warville and of Condorcet by the seizure of the Church property alone.

Scarcely less numerous than the religious edifices in this region were the chateaux. Of these comparatively few are now standing, either as picturesque ruins or as residences. The bas-reliefs and tapestry of the ancient buildings of La Ferte-Milon, the birthplace of Racine, are still worthy of a visit. Of Nanteuil, a fine chateau of the time of Francis I., a single tower remains. The magnificent manor-house of the Ducs de Valois at Villers-Cotterets (a little beyond the limits of the region I am now treating of) was made an historic monument by Napoleon III.; but it is none the better for base uses against which it surely ought to have been protected as the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas by the ghosts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis! The towers and the donjon of the Chateau of Nesle on the Somme, whence sallied forth, in the time of Louis XV., the four much too famous sisters De Mailly, were not so maltreated in 1793 as to be quite uninhabitable when the first Napoleon pa.s.sed a night there, during his final struggle for empire; and there still is to be seen the old Lombard-Roman church of St.-Leger, wherein was held a council strong enough to coerce Philip Augustus into doing what Henry VIII. refused, three centuries afterwards, to do, and to make him take back his divorced queen Ingelburga of Denmark. Braisnes, planted upon a peak, overlooks what is left of the exquisite twelfth-century church of St.-Yved, ruthlessly battered and abused in 1793, and robbed of certain matchless monuments in enamelled copper for the benefit of a syndicate of patriotic rogues. The Chateaux de Gandelu, de Neuville, de St.-Lambert are ruins. The lordly cradle of the great House of Guise; the tower of Marchais in which, tradition tells us, the League was first conceived by which the princes of Lorraine were backed in their struggle for the throne of France; the keep of Beaurevoir, one of the prisons of the Maid of Orleans--these may be seen. Of how many others, the names of which ring out as from a chronicle of French history, nothing but the names is left! Caulincourt, Coeuvres d'Estrees, de Bohain de Luxembourg, d'Armentieres, de Conflans, de Conde, de Comin, de Buzancy, de Puysegur.

Two of the most important chateaux in this region in 1789 were those of Pinon and of Anizy. The first still exists, and stands substantially as it then stood, and is now admittedly the finest in the Laonnais. The second was wrecked and demolished. It is perhaps worth while to tell what befell Anizy, and how Pinon escaped.

Both Anizy and Pinon are of very ancient origin.

Anizy seems to have been a fortress of the Emperor Valentinian in the fourth century, and it was pillaged by the Vandals in the fifth. On December 26, 496, Clovis, in recognition of the baptism he had received on the preceding day at the hands of St.-Remi in the cathedral church of Reims, gave the lords.h.i.+ps of Anizy, Coucy, and Leuilly to that prelate.

Two years afterwards St.-Remi, who had made Laon a bishopric, gave Anizy to his nephew St.-Genebaud, the first bishop of Laon, to be held and the revenues thereof to be applied by the bishops of Laon for ever to the benefit of the poor of that diocese. He coupled the gift with a solemn curse and anathema upon all who should ever disturb or misapply the donation. From that time to 1789 Anizy was a lords.h.i.+p of the bishops of Laon, who in time were made dukes and peers of France.

The annals of Laon attest the loyalty through long ages of the bishops of Laon to the injunctions laid upon them by St.-Remi. The Normans came to Anizy, for example, in 883, and pillaged and ruined the place. Four years afterwards the bishop of Laon founded there a hospital, or Hotel-Dieu, for the poor and infirm of the diocese, and the king, Charles le Gros, endowed it handsomely. In 904 Jeanne, sister of Raoul, bishop of Laon, with the help of her brother, founded at Anizy a priory of Sisters to receive and care for the young girls of the place. In 996, Adalberon, bishop of Laon, founded a maladrerie, or lepers' hospital, at Anizy, to be 'a refuge and place of healing for the poor of Anizy, Wissignicourt, and Pinon.'

As time went on and the feudal system became more fully developed, the bishops of Laon found it judicious to establish one of those high feudal personages known as Vidames, and the relations of the Vidames of Laon with their episcopal superior, on the one hand, and with the people of such lords.h.i.+ps as Anizy on the other, become very interesting.

They are made more interesting still by the entrance upon the scene of the kings of France, contending for a real royal authority, of great barons like the Sires de Coucy bent on getting a complete local independence of any central government, and of the people of the communes, who very early saw their own game as between the Church, the barons, and the king, and played it here, as in so many other places, with most respectable skill and success. There is a picturesque story of Pope Benedict VIII., who held a council at Laon, going from Laon to view the episcopal chateau at Anizy, with a _cortege_ of cardinals and bishops, and on the way springing down nimbly from his horse to rescue the bishop of Cambray, obviously a prelate of much weight, under whom a little bridge gave way as they were crossing the river Lette. This was in the year 1018. A century later, in 1110, Gandri, bishop of Laon, summoned John Comte de Soissons, Robert II. Comte de Flandre, and Enguerrand I. Sire de Coucy, the three loftiest and lordliest personages then of this part of the world, to a conference at his chateau in Anizy, there to fix and define where the authority of the Sire de Coucy ended and that of the bishops of Laon began. In 1210 the burgh of Anizy became a free commune and elected its first mayor. The next year its seigneur, Robert de Chatillon, bishop-duke of Laon, at his own cost fortified the place with walls and towers, and did this so well that three years afterwards Enguerrand III. de Coucy, just then the most masterful person in all this part of France, thought it wise to treat with the bishop-duke as to their respective rights of owners.h.i.+p in the adjoining forest of Roncelais. They agreed so perfectly that the formidable lord of Coucy immediately afterwards did the bishop-duke and the people of Anizy the notable service of leading a band of his retainers against a company of brigands who were burning lonely farmhouses and carrying off the crops.

Having got their mayor and their walls and their towers, the burghers of Anizy took to quarrelling with the bishop-dukes of Laon, and so got their communal rights suppressed by one of those prelates in 1230, only to see them re-established again half a century later in 1278, by another bishop-duke, Geoffroi de Beaumont, who made a compromise with his troublesome va.s.sals, reserving only to himself the right to nominate the officers of justice. The king of France, Philippe le Hardi, be it observed, took sides with the burghers in this affair, and they raised a monument to him in 1293.