France and the Republic Part 18

This, with almost everything else of any importance in Anizy, was destroyed by the English of Edward III., in the next century, one of the local seigneurs, the lord of Locq (where a chateau still represents the extinct lords.h.i.+p) and the cure of the church of St.-Peter falling valiantly in the defence of their people. The bishop-duke came over to help them from Laon, and died in his chateau at Anizy the next year.

In 1352, another bishop-duke founded a free market at Anizy for three days in each year, at the feast of St.-George, and in 1408 his successor built a grain-hall there. In 1513 Louis XII. granted the burghers a free market every Monday. This so incensed the then bishop-duke, Louis de Bourbon-Vendome, that he tried to suppress the annual market and take back the grain-hall, in return for which attempts the worthy burghers pillaged his chateau at Anizy and pulled it nearly to pieces.

Clearly the seigneurs did not have things all their own way in these good old times! For after several years of contention Louis de Bourbon-Vendome came to terms with his burghers, and matters were put upon so friendly a footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the erection at Anizy of a new chateau, to be surrounded with an extensive and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to decorate the facade with statues--the new buildings were connected with what remained of the earlier chateau by a grand gallery; pavilions flanked the main edifice and adorned the grand cour d'honneur. King Francis, during his stay at Folembray, frequently visited his cousin the Bishop-duke in this chateau, one of the great chambers of which was long known as the room of King Francis. When Louis de Bourbon-Vendome died in 1557, the chateau was not entirely finished, and a lawsuit followed his death, between his personal heirs and the bishop-dukes for the possession of the buildings. It lasted for nearly a century, and when the prelates at last were declared to be the owners, in 1645, the stately edifice had fallen into a sad state of dilapidation. The Cardinal d'Estrees restored the facade in 1660, but one of his successors actually unroofed it and sold the lead. In 1750, a bishop-duke of quite another type, the Cardinal de Rochechouart, spent great sums of money upon it, restored it, and decorated it throughout, and made it one of the n.o.blest residences in this part of France. At the same time he put in order all the public buildings of Anizy, and had the roads carefully paved throughout the borough. He was followed by a prelate of a like mind, Louis de Sabran, the last bishop-duke of Laon, who is still remembered in his episcopal city for his public spirit and his benevolence, and who made the park of Anizy his special care.

Then came the Revolution.

In 1790, the local 'directory' of the district of Chauny laid violent hands upon the chateau. It was in great part demolished, and what was left of it defaced. It was robbed of its precious furniture, pictures, and ornaments, its valuable chimney-pieces, its elaborate iron and bra.s.s work. The old trees were cut down in the park, and the railings destroyed. The fine old church of Ste.-Genevieve at the same time was first turned into a hall of meeting for the electors, who distrusted each other so profoundly that when their first meeting was held, May 3, 1790, the doc.u.ments relating to the elections were locked up in a confessional, lest they should be stolen, and then deliberately wrecked and looted by the 'friends of Liberty,' or, in other words, by a squad of ruffians from Chauny and the neighbourhood, who, after putting on the sacerdotal vestments, marched about the church carrying the das, beat the crosses and the carved stalls to pieces, smashed and defaced the monuments and the altars, broke open the poor-box, and carried off all that was worth stealing. The stone slabs from the graves were sold, a saltpetre factory was established in the church, the presbytery was made a town-hall, and the 'wors.h.i.+p of Reason,' in the person of a young woman of Chauny, was solemnly inaugurated at Anizy! The chateau and the park were sold by the self-const.i.tuted dictators of Anizy to one M. Orry de Sainte-Marie on August 7, 1792, for a nominal price. This M. Orry seems to have been an 'operator.' For in June, 1793, he sold the chateau to the 'ci-devant Vicomtesse de Courval,' the mother of the then owner of the Chateau of Pinon, about which I shall presently have something to say, and bought it back from her again in March 1795, leaving her the right to enjoy it until her death, which took place in 1806. All this curiously ill.u.s.trates the perils and uncertainties of land-owners.h.i.+p in such times! In 1808, Orry de Sainte-Marie, having by that time become a justice of the peace at Anizy, and doubtless a fervent Imperialist, sold the chateau to M. Collet, Director of the Mint at Paris. From him it pa.s.sed by sale, in 1824, to M. Senneville, and in 1841 to M. Lafont de Launoy.

Let us turn now to Pinon, two kilometres to the south of Anizy, long one of the chief seats of the power of the famous Sires de Coucy, one of whom seems to have been the real author of the arrogant motto since, in one or another form, attributed to more than one great family in France:

Roi ne suis Ne prince, ne comte aussy: Je suis le Sire de Coucy.

The Chateau of Pinon was originally built by Enguerrand II. of Coucy in the twelfth century. His grandfather Enguerrand I. had been invited by the Archbishop of Reims to establish himself at Pinon, which was a part of the splendid Christmas gift made by Clovis to the see of Reims, as I have already stated, after his baptism at Reims; and Enguerrand II., who appears to have been a typical baron, finding the place favourable for the feudal industry of levying toll on trade and commerce, there erected a great castle, one of the many legendary castles to be found all over Europe which boasted a window for every day in the year. He thought fit, however, to select for this castle a site which belonged to the Abbey of St.-Crispin the Great at Soissons, and thus got himself into trouble with the Church. Strong as he was, he found the Church too strong for him. The Bishop of Soissons compelled him to agree to pay an annual and perpetual rent to the Abbey, and made him also take the cross and go to the Holy Land to expiate his sacrilege. There he fell in battle. The grandson of this baron, Robert de Coucy, in 1213 granted the people of Pinon 'a right of a.s.size according to the use and custom of Laon,' and the next year founded there a hospital. Twenty years afterwards Pinon became a commune, and John de Coucy granted the inhabitants a free market. The Chateau of Pinon pa.s.sed in the 14th century to the elder branch of the great house of de Coucy, and in 1400 it was sold, under duress to Louis of France (Duc d'Orleans) by the last heiress of the house Marie de Coucy, daughter of Enguerrand VII. by his first wife Isabel, Princess Royal of England, and eldest daughter of Edward III. by Philippa of Hainault.

A hundred years afterwards Louis XII. had taken possession of the estates and the chateau, and made a gift of these to his daughter Claude de France. In spite of this, however, the property pa.s.sed into the hands of the ancient family of De Lameth, and towards the end of the seventeenth century the Chateau de Pinon witnessed one of the most romantic and abominable murders recorded in the annals of French gallantry.

As Pinon is still, after all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather Italian than French.

Charles Marquis d'Albret, the last of that ill.u.s.trious race, Prince de Mortagne and Comte de Ma.s.sant, was the nephew of the Marechal d'Albret, and he came therefore, on the mother's side, of the royal blood of Henry of Navarre.

He loved, not wisely but too well, Henriette de Roucy, Comtesse de Lameth, called 'la belle Picarde,' whose husband was seigneur of the Chateau de Pinon. In August 1678, the Marquis d'Albret was at the Chateau de Coucy with the army of Flanders, then commanded by the Marshal-Duke of Schomberg, who afterwards fell fighting for King William III. in Ireland at the battle of the Boyne.

The Comte de Lameth, who had in some way discovered the relations which existed between his wife, 'la belle Picarde,' and the Marquis d'Albret, shut the comtesse into a room at Pinon, and compelled her, by threats and violence, to write a letter to the marquis giving him a rendezvous at Pinon. On the day mentioned in her letter the Comte de Lameth ordered six horses to be put to his coach, and (having previously put his wife under watch and ward) drove off with an escort to Laon. News of this was carried at once to Coucy. The Marquis set forth with a single attendant on horseback to Chavignon, where at the hostelry of La Croix Blanche, he was met, as from the letter of his lady-love he expected to be, by a servant from the Chateau de Pinon.

Armed only with pistols in his holsters, he mounted after dark and rode on from Chavignon to Pinon. There, as he entered the park-gates, just after midnight, three men, one of them Jocquet, the valet de chambre of the Comte de Lameth, sallied out upon him from under an archway, and, feigning to take him for a robber, opened fire upon him. He killed one of his a.s.sailants, and then himself fell.

About fifty years ago, the then proprietor of Pinon was building a lodge for one of his keepers when the workmen came upon a gold ring in digging for the foundation. It bore the engraved name of D'Albret, and the name of the royal regiment which he commanded. He had doubtless been buried where he fell in the park.

This proprietor was the father of the late Baron de Courval, formerly an officer in the French army, who, during the Second Empire, married Miss Ray of New York.

The De Courvals became possessors of Pinon through the murder of the Marquis d'Albret. The way in which this came about curiously ill.u.s.trates the course of justice and injustice under the _ancien regime_. This differed more in form than in fact from the course of justice and injustice in our own time. Claude, Comte de Lameth, the jealous husband of 'la belle Picarde,' was a great personage, not only Comte de Lameth but Vicomte de Laon, d'Anizy, de Marchy, and de Croix, and seigneur of Bayencourt, Pinon, Bouchavannes, Clacy, Laniscourt, Quincy, '_et autres lieux_.' But the Marquis d'Albret was a greater personage still, and the widow of the marquis, who refused to believe the story of his affair with 'la belle Picarde,' was a _dame d'atours_ of the queen, Marie Therese. So also was the cousin-german of the marquis, and these two dames made such a clamour about the murder that the king, Louis XIV., and of course with the king the whole court, so waged war against the Comte de Lameth that his whole family found it wise to seek safety in flight, and fearing the confiscation of all his property, the Comte (whose wife had previously gone into an Ursuline convent) sold the estate and Chateau of Pinon, with other estates, to his friend Pierre Dubois de Courval, president of the parliament of Paris.[8]

[8] The venom of this old history recurs in the Revolution, poisoning the minds of three Lameths, concerning whom Mr. Carlyle indulges in much quite unnecessary and grotesque emotion.

In 1730 Dubois de Courval pulled down the ancient Chateau de Pinon, and, on the designs of Mansard, built the present stately and imposing edifice. Le Notre laid out for him also the extensive park, and, when he died, in 1764, he left Coucy-la-Ville and Fresnes to his elder son, and to his younger, with the t.i.tle of Vicomte de Courval, the chateau and estates of Pinon.

It was the widow of this younger son, Aime-Louis Dubois de Courval, who, as I have already said, saved what could be saved of the Chateau of Anizy in 1793 by buying it from the enterprising M. Orry de Sainte-Marie.

Her husband, a man of worth and of note in the parliament of Paris, died on the very eve of the great troubles, December 1, 1788. He was then in his sixty-seventh year, and as he had done nothing but good at Pinon, not only embellis.h.i.+ng the chateau and the park, but giving much time and money to improve the condition of the people, he would probably have been sent to the guillotine at Paris by the local 'directory at Chauny'

had he lived long enough, and his property confiscated, like the property of the bishops and dukes at Anizy. His oldest son was a lad of fifteen when the storm burst in 1789. His mother took his interests resolutely in hand. She came of two aristocratic stocks, the Millys and the Clermonts-Tonnerre, but she got the better of the democrats. Like old Madame Dupin at Chenonceaux, she carried herself and her property, by woman's wit and woman's will, through the Revolution. In 1791 she contrived to get her son, then only seventeen, elected commander of the National Guard at Anizy. He ripened rapidly, under the stress of the times, bought up the 'patriots' when it was necessary--and there is abundant evidence to show that they were always in the market, even at Paris and during the worst times of the Terror--was made a baron of the empire by Napoleon, elected President of the Canton of Anizy in 1811, a councillor-general of the Aisne in the same year, and deputy in 1814.

With the Restoration he became once more Vicomte de Courval and seigneur of Pinon, having long before converted the park and gardens of the chateau into the 'English style,' with fine watercourses and an extensive lake, and died quietly at Paris in 1822. In 1794, at the age of twenty, he married a daughter of the Marquis de Saint-Mars.

His son and successor, Ernest-Alexis Dubois de Courval, was taken into high favour by Charles X., but was nevertheless made a councillor-general of the Aisne under Louis Philippe. He married the only daughter of Moreau, who was a child of nine years old when her father fell fighting against France and Napoleon in 1813. In a curious Gothic tower which he built at Pinon are still preserved some of the standards captured from the enemies of France by Moreau, and these I am a.s.sured are the only such standards, excepting those of the Invalides, recovered through the efforts of the House of Peers, which existed in France before the Crimean War. In this tower the Vicomte de Courval formed a remarkable collection of mediaeval arms and armour, antique furniture, stained gla.s.s, medals and coins. This region is very rich not only in Roman remains, but in druidical stones and other vestiges of the races which dwelt here before Caesar came. Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Hadrian, Alexander Severus, Probus, Gordian, Constantine and Constantius are all represented on the coins found in and around the property of M.

de Courval; but one of his most interesting acquisitions was a silver coin bearing the name of Clovis, with the t.i.tle of 'imperator.' There is a record at Anizy of a treasure of coins of Aurelius, found there so long ago as in the middle of the twelfth century; and under the bishop-dukes of Laon a collection of Roman coins and vases was gradually formed at the mairie of Anizy, which 'disappeared' soon after the 'patriots' of Chauny undertook to 'liberate' that commune.

The American Vicomtesse de Courval, who now owns Pinon, and pa.s.ses a part of each year there, is the widow of a son of this Ernest de Courval.

Looking backward dispa.s.sionately over this 'centennial record' of two considerable estates in the Department of the Aisne, what advantages, social, political, or economical, can be shown to have enured to the people of the commune of Anizy and of Pinon from the revolutionary processes to which those estates were subjected a hundred years ago? Not a man in Anizy or in Pinon owns a rood of land now which he might not just as easily have owned had the alienation of the Church property in those communes been conducted through the gradual and systematic processes of law and order. Instead of one remarkable and interesting chateau, these communes would now possess two, each in the natural course of things, a centre of local activity and civilisation. Instead of one ancient church, much despoiled and damaged, Anizy would now possess three such churches, each in its own way an object of interest to architects and artists, and it would be possible for an honest gendarme or a poor labourer on the highway to hear ma.s.s, if he liked, in any one of them, without incurring the wrath of his superiors and the loss of his daily bread.

CHAPTER X

IN THE AISNE--_continued_

LAON

The lofty hill on which the Sires de Coucy planted their chief fortress rises above the fields and forests of the Soissonnais as the Mont St.-Michel rises above the waves and the sands of the Norman coast.

The narrow streets and quaint old houses of the little town of Coucy-le-Chateau are huddled around the outworks of the colossal castle, almost as closely as are the climbing streets and the terraced houses of St.-Michel around the martial monastery; and each of these two places is, in its own kind, unique.

I had been strongly recommended to pa.s.s the night when I visited the chateau, not in the little city itself, though it boasts a 'Hotel des Ruines,' but at a little wayside inn, rather indeed a restaurant and a baiting-place for travellers by the highway than an inn, which stands at the foot of the hill of Coucy. I took the advice, and had no cause to repent it. The walk up the hill, of some two miles, to the tower and the castle was simply delightful on a fine afternoon in June. Opposite my little inn is a small and rather dilapidated chateau of the eighteenth century, which originally must have been a very pleasant residence; and in the extensive meadows about it were grazing a number of fine cattle, the property of M. de Vaublanche. 'He is the only man hereabouts who takes any trouble with his beasts,' said my cheery, athletic young host, and leading the way for me into the meadows, he pointed out the princes of the herd, all of them really fine animals of the best French breeds, with as much pride as if he had been the owner. 'It gives more pleasure to see these--does it not, sir?--than to look at yonder dead chimney,' he said, pointing to some extensive sugarworks, all closed and deserted, on the other side of the road. The sugar crisis has been very sharp here, as in other parts of France, and many smokeless chimneys are to be seen here as in other departments.

An embattled gateway of the thirteenth century welcomes the traveller now with its open arch as he approaches the town of Coucy, and the best views of the chateau are to be got from the road as you climb up the long ascent.

In the quaint little town the house is still carefully preserved, and the chamber itself religiously kept in order, in which, on June 7, 1594, Gabrielle d'Estrees gave birth to a son destined afterwards to make his mark in the military annals of France as Cesar, Duc de Vendome. An inscription on a tablet in the wall thus commemorates his advent into the world: 'In this chamber was born, and in the chamber above was baptized, the legitimised son of France, de Vendome, a prince of very good hopes, the child of the most Christian, most magnanimous, most invincible, and most clement King of France and of Navarre, Henry IV., and of Gabrielle d'Estrees, d.u.c.h.esse de Beaufort.'

Not far from this house is the ancient belfry of Coucy, wherein swings a bell of dolorous prestige, the tradition of Coucy averring that, whenever a citizen of Coucy is about to die, this bell tolls of itself, and is heard by him alone.

Doubtless the communal schoolmaster will ere long drive this tradition out of the mind of the rising generation in Coucy. If so I trust, though I hardly expect, that he will drive out with it another and more mischievous tradition, born within the precincts of the ancient castle.

Not once, but a dozen times, this year in different parts of France, I have seen allusions made, in political journals, to the monstrous right which the seigneurs of old possessed and exercised of hanging small boys for snaring and killing rabbits within their parks and woods. The old game laws of France, like the old game laws, and indeed like many other old laws, of England and of other countries, were not over-mild. Was not a woman first strangled and then burned in England for 'coining' in the year 1789, while the States-General were performing at Paris their fantastic overture to the ghastly drama of the Terror? Yet England in 1789 knew a great deal more of personal liberty than France knows now in 1889. The tradition of the seignorial right of hanging boys for killing rabbits originated, it is probable, with Enguerrand IV., Sire de Coucy, of whom it is told that, exasperated by three young lads, scholars of the monastic school of Saint-Nicolas-aux-Bois, whom he found shooting at rabbits and hares in his woods with bows and arrows, he had the lads seized and hanged. So far from doing this within his seignorial rights, however, was the Sire de Coucy, that the monks proceeded against him vigorously, and Saint-Louis had him arrested for it, and was with much difficulty restrained by the barons of the realm from hanging him in his turn. He was only pardoned on very severe conditions, one of which was that he should do penance for a number of years in his own castle of Coucy, where, the chroniclers tell us, he died 'in shame and repentance.' His successor, Enguerrand V., took the matter so much to heart that he led the life of an anchorite at Coucy, and had himself buried in the Abbey of Premontre near the doorway; like Alonzo de Ojeda the Conquistador, the slab upon whose grave I saw some years ago at the entrance of the ruined church of San Francisco in Santo Domingo, with an inscription reciting that he was there laid to rest, by his own request, as a great sinner, upon whose ashes all who pa.s.sed should tread.

Tortuous little streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green s.p.a.ce which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest avenues in France. But the tallest trees are dwarfed by the gigantic donjon tower. This rises to a height still of at least 180 feet. It is 150 feet in circ.u.mference at the base, and slopes very gradually to the summit. The hall on the ground floor measures more than forty feet in diameter, the walls being of enormous thickness. Over one of the doorways is a defaced bas-relief representing a lion attacked and slain by Enguerrand I. de Coucy. The chimney-place in the ground floor hall would make a very respectable modern house, and there is a well within the hall said to be of unknown depth. The donjon consists of three storeys above the ground floor, the main hall on the first floor being particularly remarkable for its height. The vaulted ceiling of this hall must have been very fine, and throughout it is apparent that the builders of the Chateau de Coucy had the comfort of the inmates and a certain stately elegance of effect much more in mind than was common with the builders of castles in the thirteenth century. The walls at the summit are more than nine feet thick, and they were doubtless surmounted originally with a great circular gallery of wood covered in with a roof. The Sires de Coucy, like other crusaders, doubtless brought back all manner of rich carpets and stuffs from the East, and with these and the wonderful carved chests and ma.s.sive woodwork of the time the Chateau de Coucy may well have been a much more agreeable place of abode than, from our modern acquaintance with their winding stone stairways and denuded walls, we are apt to imagine these great feudal fortresses to have been.

The views from the summit now are simply superb. The vast forests over which Enguerrand, the builder, gazed, seeking out the sites on which he planted so many strongholds--(it is known that besides Coucy he erected at least eight other castles, from Folembray to Saint-Lambert)--have been replaced in great part by fertile fields and smiling towns. But the land is still richly wooded. Far down, in a little wilderness beneath us, the guardian pointed out to me an odd edifice looking like a combination of a modern Gothic church with a seaside villa. This, he told me, was the residence of a distinguished artist of Paris, who pa.s.ses a part of every year in this region, making studies of forest scenery. Beyond this, in a large park, is a chateau of the Marquis de la Chataigneraie, once a part of the domain of Coucy.

The enceinte of the chateau is of enormous extent. The solidity of the walls and the towers resisted so successfully the mines and pickaxes of Richelieu that the great outlines of the immense building are still easily definable, with fine traces of the architecture of the great chapel. That St.-Louis and Henry IV. visited Coucy we know, and the guardian was good enough to give me very minute and particular information as to the chambers which they occupied.

He was a curious fellow, this guardian, an Alsatian immigrant, he informed me. The people here, he thought, were not so much pleased as they ought to be that the Government had given him the place, which brings him in 400 francs a year, with the lodge I have mentioned for a residence, and the right to all the crops of any kind he can raise on the land attached to the chateau. He was then cutting the gra.s.s, which grew very well within the precincts of the chateau. But he took great pains to impress upon me that he was doing this, not so much for the sake of the hay he expected to make as for the accommodation of visitors like myself, 'to make the ground pleasanter to walk upon.'

This was an attention which no right-minded person could fail to recognise with a _pour-boire_, particularly as the worthy guardian complained of the extremely poor quality of the wine grown about Coucy.

I told him I had always heard that King Francis I. insisted on having his wine sent to him from this place. 'Ah!' he replied, 'in those days what did they know about good wine?'

The rooks in countless numbers were flying and cawing all over the beautiful old place. 'I have tried to kill these birds,' said the guardian wearily. 'They destroy my peas. But the cartridges cost too much, and I have had to give it up.' He had been in his place four months. I might think it very pleasant seeing it in June. But if I could see it in February, with the wind howling 'through the tall trees and around the huge tower!'

On my return to my neat little hostelry my host came out to meet me. 'He had just heard that four councillors-general, on their way home from a meeting, would like to dine at his house. Would I object to their dining with me--there was no other good room?' Naturally I was only too glad to share the room and the dinner with them. A very good dinner it was too.

'Men learn to cook, but are born to roast.' My host's cook was born to roast both fat chickens and a capital leg of mutton. One of the councillors-general, when they drove up, went out into the kitchen to examine and report upon the outlook. He came back presently rubbing his hands together with glee. 'Admirable!' he exclaimed; 'it will be a Belshazzar's feast--a superb leg of mutton, truly superb!'

'The first green peas of the season here!' said our host, coming in with them. 'You will see if they are good. They come late here, the green peas, but you see what they are when they do come.'

The four councillors-general were all Republicans. One of them, a country banker, as I learned, was a trifle sarcastic about the prospects of the party. 'They are too soft,' he said, 'at Paris. They lack wrist.

They do not hit hard enough. What we want is a man; where are we to find him?' Another, a tall grey-bearded man, an attorney, agreed with the banker as to the 'softness' of the authorities. 'I am a Republican of yesterday,' he said. 'I remember, under the Empire, how, when I spoke at Chauny, I spoke with a gendarme at the table behind me, and a couple of spies in the hall. That is what we should have now in these meetings where they abuse the Republic.' I observed that while this councillor, by the way, always spoke of 'the Republic,' the banker as invariably spoke of 'the Republican party.' They both agreed, however, and their companions agreed with them, that the real want was the 'want of a man.'

'The President is doing well though,' said the grey-bearded 'Republican of yesterday.' 'He is beginning to stand out against the horizon, is he not?' The others were not so sure of this, and then there arose a most lively and singularly outspoken exchange of views as to the different leaders of the Republican party. It would be hardly fair for me to cite these; but one remark made by the banker, in regard to a very conspicuous political personage, amused me. 'Yes,' he said in reply to one of his companions: 'yes; ---- is skilful--very skilful--but he has no foresight. Would you trust him with your pocket-book? No!' 'Oh certainly not!'