A jar of water in the figure's right hands emptied itself on his head.A jar of water in the figure's right hands emptied itself on his head.
A jar of water in the figure's right hands emptied itself on his head.
Wet and cross, the visitor would pursue his way, taking care not to go near another statue standing alone in a wide grassy space, with a ring dangling from its finger. The children or pages waiting on the lady of the house would, however, think that the flat lawn would be a splendid place in which to play at 'tilting at the ring,' and here was a ring just set up for the purpose. Hastily fetching their toy weapons, they would choose a starting-place and, holding their lances well back, run swiftly towards the statue, hoping to thrust the lance-point through the ring, as by-and-by they would have to do at the sports at a royal wedding or a coronation. But the moment the ring was touched a huge wet sponge would swing round from the back of the figure and hit the champion a sharp blow on the back of the head, to the great delight and surprise of his companions.
It was not a game that could be played twice on the same person, as Palissy well knew; but in those days great lords with trains of attendants frequently stopped at each other's houses on the way to their own lands, so that a constant supply of fresh pages might be looked for, all eager to play at tilting at the ring.
It was in 1565 that Palissy was sent for to Paris by the queen, to help her to decorate and lay out the gardens of the palace of the Tuileries, which she was now planning, close to the Louvre.
The very name of the place must have sounded home-like in the ears of Palissy, for Tuileries means nothing more than 'tile-fields,' and for a long while this part of Paris had been the workshop of brick-makers and potters outside the walls of the old city. But in the reign of Catherine's father-in-law, Francis I.,they were forced to move further away, as the king had taken a fancy to the site, and had bought it for his mother. Gardens were made where the furnaces had stood; but these were by no means fine enough to please Catherine, and she called in her favourite architect, Philibert Delorme, to erect a palace in their place, and bade Palissy, now called 'Bernard of the Tuileries' by his friends, to invent her a new pleasure-ground stretching away to the west.
We may be sure that Palissy did not lose this happy chance of carrying into practice the 'delectable garden' of his dreams. He had his workshops and kilns on the spot, and a band of skilled potters who baked the figures of men and animals which he himself fashioned out of clay. Two of his sons, Nicholas and Mathurin, seem to have inherited some of his talent, and were his partners, as we learn from a royal account book of the year 1570, and it must have been pleasant to him to have their company. The queen herself often walked down from the Louvre close by to see how he was getting on, and to give her opinion as to the grouping of some statues or the arrangement of a grotto; and here too came his friends when in Paris, Montmorency, Condé, Jarnac and others, and Delorme, Bullant, Filon, and all the great architects of the day. The château of Ecouen, belonging to Montmorency, situated about twelve miles from Paris, had been decorated by Palissy before he entered the service of the queen-mother, and had gained him great fame and many commissions.
At Ecouen the long galleries and the floor of the chapel were paved with tiles containing pictures of subjects taken out of the Bible. In the garden was the first 'grotto' the potter ever made, and very proud he was of it, and still more so of the invention by which, at a signal from the host, one of the attendants would touch a spring, and streams of water poured over the guests. It is difficult to imagine the grave constable,occupied as he was with religious wars, or anxiously watching affairs of state, playing such rude and silly tricks on the gentlemen and ladies he was entertaining, and it is pleasanter to think of them all listening to the songs of birds which, we are told, were imitated to the life by means of water passing through pipes and reeds. Altogether, Ecouen was thought a marvel of beauty and fancy, and everybody who considered they had any claims to good taste made a point of riding out to visit it.
Safe under royal protection and happy in his work, Palissy did not trouble himself about the fighting that still raged in the name of religion. When he was tired of the hot atmosphere of the kiln, he would wander along the banks of the river, or into the woods and hills about Paris, and watch the birds and the insects fluttering among the trees. Then, with his mind full of what he had beheld, he would return to his workshop, and, calling for clay, would never rise from his chair until he had made an exact copy of the little scene which had caught his fancy. First he would form his oval-shaped dish, and in the centre of it would lie some twisted snakes, with sprays of leaves and flowers scattered round them, while over the cups of the flowers bees and butterflies hovered gaily. Or, again, he would fashion a wavy sea, bordered by shells of all sorts, fishes, frogs, leaves, and butterflies, and in the middle a great sea-serpent wriggling gracefully across the dish.
Everything was true to nature and beautifully executed, and in those days it never seemed to strike anyone that dishes were meant to hold food and not to be treated as pictures.
Palissy had been working for eight years in Paris when the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place. No one sought to harm the potter, Huguenot though hewas, and he lived on peacefully, respected by all, for some time longer.
In 1574 Charles IX., the well-intentioned, half-mad young king, died, and his brother Henry, a man in every way much worse than himself, came to the throne. Like the rest of his family, however, he was fond of art, and protected the potter, and a few months later we find Palissy, quite unharmed, giving lectures on natural history to some of the most famous scientific men in Paris. If he wanted to prove a point he had a quantity of drawings or materials at hand to show them. He spoke well, and the fame of his lectures spread. The little room was soon filled to overflowing with lawyers, scholars, and, above all, physicians, the celebrated monsieur Ambroise Paré, doctor to the queen-mother, and a Huguenot like himself, at their head.
During nine years Palissy continued to deliver these lectures every Lent, working steadily most of the day among his furnaces at the Tuileries. He was now seventy-five, and had escaped so many dangers that he might well think himself safe to the end, which could not be far off. But in 1585 Henry III. thought himself obliged to take more active measures against the Huguenots. Palissy had never concealed—as he had never obtruded—his faith, and, most likely at the instigation of someone who envied him, he was at once sent to the prison of the Bastille, and sentence of death passed upon him.
Yet once again the potter's gift for making friends, perhaps the most valuable of all his talents in that fierce age, stood him in good stead. This time it was actually one of the persecuting Guises, the duc de Mayenne, who saved him, and prevented the decree from being carried out.
For four years Palissy remained a prisoner. Mayenne desired to set him free, but did not dare to do so, soleft him where he was till better times came. But Palissy had a surer friend than Mayenne, who came to his rescue. In spite of his strong frame, years passed in a prison of those days, where hunger, cold, and dirt would break any man down, proved too much even for Bernard Palissy, now more than eighty years of age. Little by little he grew weaker, watched and tended, as far as might be, by those who, like himself, had suffered for conscience' sake. Then one evening he went to sleep, and woke in the Delectable Garden.
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Endcover illustration (the characters from this book)