Each relief showed a group in which some living figure is dragged to death by a triumphant skeleton, and chief among them were our first parents Adam and Eve, the origins of death for every generation after.
"Mors qui venis de mors de pomePrimes en feme et puis en homeTu bats le siècle comme toile."
On other pillars were an emperor, a king, a high constable, a duke, a courtier, a pope, a cardinal, a bishop, and an abbot. They seem to cry, like Villon, with a phrase that is especially appropriate to a Rouen cemetery:
"Haro, haro, le grand et le mineur,Et qu'est cecy—mourray, sans coup ferir?"
Without the power to struggle, they are haled from their high places to the levelling tomb.
Reproductions of the first Todtentanz of Hans Holbein the younger are now within the reach of everyone, and they have made these terrible imaginations of the early sixteenth century the common property of all who care to look at them. Designed just before 1526, when the horrors of the Peasants' War and of innumerable outbreaks of pestilence and famine had left fresh traces in the minds of everyone, they were not published until 1538 at Lyons by Melchoir and Gaspar Trechsel. After the sixth edition of 1562 no further addition to the plates is known. They were cut with a knife upon wood, and not with the ordinary graver, in 1527, or a little earlier, by Hans of Luxemburg, sometimes called Franck, whose full signature is on Holbein's Alphabet in the British Museum, which contains several sets of the impressions, believed to be engraver's proofs from the original blocks, such as exist also in Berlin, at Basle, in Paris, and at Carlsruhe. They have been frequently copied, but the best modern imitations in wood engraving are those made in 1833 for Douce's "Holbein's Dance of Death," which come nearest to the incomparable skill of Hans of Luxemburg, and have been reproduced again, only in this last year, by George Bell of London.
The oldest representation of this idea is probably to be found at Minden in Westphalia, and bears the date of 1383. But it was known also at Dresden, at Lubeck, in Lucerne, in the château of Blois, in Auvergne, and elsewhere in France. In all these places Death is shown dancing with men of every age and condition, and carrying them off with him to the grave. There is no doubt that the scene had its origin not merely in the imagination of the sixteenthcentury, but reached further back to the hideous "Danse Macabre" of the fourteenth century, when the Black Death was slaying high and low so fast that men were seized with a panic of hysterical convulsion and leaped frenziedly about the streets and churches, even in the cemeteries themselves. The numberless carvings on the cathedrals, representing the Devil and his myrmidons struggling for mastery with a living soul, provided an easy and instant suggestion. But by degrees the religious quality of the mania lessened and grew weaker. At last the purely material horror of extinction overcame everything else. It was no longer the Devil who seized a maddened ring of men and women and danced them screaming into hell. Now it was Death himself who clutched every man by the sleeve and hurried him into the over-crowded ever-hungry sepulchre. If this was one thought of the rich who thought at all, it was also the only consolation of the poor, and therefore no more appropriate carvings for the poor man's cemetery of St. Maclou could be imagined by the workman of the sixteenth century.
But if the poor had their Danse Macabre, the great ones of the city spared nothing to impress on their survivors that the magnificence of their lives should follow them even to the tomb. In the Chapelle de la Vierge of Rouen Cathedral are two of the most famous funereal monuments of the sixteenth century, and in one of these you will notice a very remarkable example of the way in which the sculptors of the rich understood their task. Their orders, no doubt, were to give of their best to celebrate the dead man's greatness; their designs were evidently as unfettered by suggestion as by expense; and they had their inevitable revenge. Beneath the magnificent figure of the knight in armour lies the corpse, naked in death and as poor as the beggar in the street. In the Louvre you may see a monument by Germain Pilon that is even more suggestive of this feeling on thepart of the artist. It is the tomb of Madame de Birague, Valentina Balbiani.[64]Under a sumptuous dress, covered with sculpture so delicate that the marble looks like lace, a thin and shrunken form can be distinguished. The wasted hand holds a tiny book whose pages it has no strength to turn. Her little dog tries vainly to awake her from a slumber that is eternal. A corpse that is almost a skeleton lies beneath. This is not the sincere expression of the sorrow Villon knew; for we can easily imagine the unhappy Valentina's fate from our knowledge of her husband, one of the hell-hounds of Catherine de Médicis, who was foremost in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. This is not the old longing of the lover for his mistress:—
Mort, j'appelle de ta rigueur,Qui m'as ma maistresse ravie,Et n'est pas encore assouvieSi tu ne me tiens en langueur.Onc puis n'euz force ne vigneur;Mais que te nuysoit-elle en vieMort?Deux estions, et n'avions qu'ung cueur;S'il est mort, force est que devie,Voire, ou que je vive sans vie,Comme les images, par cueur,Mort!
It is the changed note of Ronsard's passionate regret that every lovely feature must be marred by Death:—
"Pour qui gardes-tu tes yeuxEt ton sein délicieuxTa joue et ta bouche belleEn veux-tu baiser PlatonLà-bas après que CharonT'aura mise en sa nacelle?"
The work of Germain Pilon at the Louvre, and of the sculptor of the dead de Brézé in Rouen Cathedral, whether that were Pilon himself, or Jean Cousin, or Goujon, has none of the gentle regret that reverences what it has once loved in life. There is in it all the fierce desire for personified destruction, all the hideous mockery of the rich man levelled with the poorest in a common corruption, which inspired the "Danse Macabre"; but the sculptor's thought is expressed with the subtle handicraft of a supersensitive age, with a fury of achievement and a triumph over technical difficulties that is the very essence of the best French Renaissance. In the same spirit Ronsard continues his relentless comparison of the dead woman with the living mistress:—
"Ton teste n'aura plus de peauNy ton visaige tant beauN'aura veines ny arteresTu n'auras plus que des dentsTelles qu'on les voit dedansLes testes des cimetères."
This complicated mental attitude had evidently not been reached when Rouland Leroux carved the great mausoleum for Cardinal d'Amboise, which is on the south side of this chapel, or if it had been attained by some men, neither Leroux himself nor Pierre Désaubeaulx his fellow-workman had been touched by it. The very inscription proclaims the exact reverse of that grisly triumph which is celebrated so clearly on the opposite tomb; for the virtues of Georges d'Amboise are said to be superior to death:—
"Pastor eram cleri populi pater aurea seseLilia subdebant quercus et ipsa mihiMortuus en jaceo morte extinguuntur honoresAt virtus mortis nescia morte viret."
TOMB OF THE TWO CARDINALS D'AMBOISE
TOMB OF THE TWO CARDINALS D'AMBOISE IN THE CHAPELLEDE LA SAINTE VIERGE IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL
An optimism that may have been foreign to his age is appropriate to this sturdy and ambitious ecclesiastic,who did not forget to do so much material good for his town of Rouen, with waterworks, and even drainage, and fair new buildings spaciously designed; all this in spite of wider interests which did not stop at the tiara itself, of which all men said the great cardinal was worthy. Of the two statues that are now within the arched recess, the one on the right represents him, and it must have been an excellent likeness. It has been called a peasant face; and it is certainly no courtier who kneels there before the carving of his patron saint slaying the dragon. The square head, the deep brows, the heavy jaw and firm mouth, are not beautiful, but they are impressive, and they show a character as far removed from the peasant as it was from the voluptuary, as near akin to the administrator of Normandy as to the Cardinal of the Holy Church. I have little doubt that this was the handiwork of the Rouland Leroux who must have often seen him in the Cathedral, and who helped to build the great Palais de Justice, which was given to Rouen at his request.
In the statue on the left hand, it is more possible that Jean Goujon (to whom so many things are ascribed without foundation) may have had a hand. For this was put up in 1541, at least sixteen years after the first one, in memory of the second Georges d'Amboise, the nephew of the greater cardinal, and the last archbishop freely elected by the Chapterhouse. Of the multitude of carvings that are in the alabaster and marble round these statues, it is scarcely possible to give any description that will be intelligible, and if their value in history does not tempt you to visit them yourself, I can only point you to the drawing that Miss James has done to make these pages more intelligible. The niches on each side of the dragon contain six statuettes; a bishop, a Virgin and child, St. John the Baptist, St. Romain, a saint, and an archbishop blessing. Above them curves a large arch, with three pierced pendentives and a frieze delicately carved with birds and angels. Above this rises the highest division of the monument, on the same plane as the sarcophagus below; seven small niches of the prophets and sibyls divide the six larger panels, in which the Apostles are shown in pairs. Beyond these again is a crown of pinnacles in open-work, alternating with statuettes in smaller niches. The lowest portion, the sarcophagus itself, is divided by seven pilasters, each adorned with the figure of a monk, with six compartments holding the statuettes of Faith, Charity, Prudence, Strength, Temperance, and Justice. All this amazing complication of delicate handiwork was done for the sum of 6952 livres, 16 sols, 4 deniers, which represents about 60,000 francs, or £2400 to-day.
TOMB OF LOUIS DE BRÉZÉ IN ROUEN CATHEDRALOn the opposite side of this chapel is the great tomb of Louis de Brézé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy, of which I have already spoken. As an architectural composition it is, to my mind, infinitely finer than the other, though there is not only a lack of the obvious sincerity that inspired Leroux, but there is also the too evident appearance of that triumph of Death which has been described in this chapter. Nor can I help fancying that it represents too the somewhat sinister triumph of a widow's cunning. For as I have drawn elsewhere the life and the ambitions of Georges d'Amboise as the owner of Chaumont on the Loire, so I have become acquainted with that typical figure of the sixteenth century, Diane de Poitiers, at the home she took from Bohier at Chenonceaux; and therefore her kneeling figure in the widow's weeds of a conventional sorrow suggests nothing better to me than the fashionable grief of the mistress of Henri II., the ostentation in mourning of the most rapacious and unfeeling woman of her time.
Though the magnificent workmanship of the dead man at whose head she kneels reminds me more of Germain Pilon's methods, I can well believe that Jean Goujon may have been responsible for the general design of the whole monument during the year we know he spent at Rouen in 1540, when he was twenty years of age. Men seem to have matured more quickly in those days than is possible in the slower generations that we know. But even if the graceful caryatides and every other carving is his work, I must still ascribe the strong treatment of the massive knight in armour on his war horse to the same artist who conceived the dead figure lying in its shroud beneath; and whether that artistwere Pilon or Jean Cousin, it is most improbable that it should have been Goujon, for whom the work would have been just as much too early for his own age, as that of Pilon would have been too late for the suggested date of the entire monument. That the contrast of the dead and living Seneschal was more than a mere court fashion of the time, I have, of course, only advanced my own opinion; but even if it were not so, in this case and in that of the Balbiani monument and many others, the fact that so gruesome a custom should have prevailed at all is even more significant than if it were the result of the imagination of some few of the greatest sculptors.
A MONK PRAYING, FROM THE TOMB OF CARDINAL D'AMBOISE IN ROUEN CATHEDRALIn sketching the more sombre features of this extraordinary century, it is impossible to omit any reference to those religious troubles which may have been already suggested to you by the kneeling monks upon the tomb of Georges d'Amboise. They were as terrible in Rouen as in almost every other town in France; the violent deaths and tortures they made so common in the city cannot be omitted in any estimate of the horrors of the time; and if I do not dilate upon them as their importance in history might seem to demand, it is because they are chiefly responsible for the destruction or debasement of most of those great architectural monuments which it is my chief business to describe. They were also responsible for the next two sieges in the story of the town, and in the first of thesethere is a tale that I must tell you, if only to show that if these men had the realisation of death ever present before their eyes, they were also very hard to kill, and did not yield to the Arch-Enemy so easily as many of their descendants in an age which tries its hardest to forget him.
Encouraged by the news of the horrible massacre of Vassy, the Huguenots under the Prince of Condé seized Rouen on the night of April 15, 1562, pillaged the churches, and stopped the services of the Catholic religion. A few months afterwards the royal army marched to the rescue under the Constable Anne de Montmorency, François de Guise, and the father of Henri Quatre, Antoine de Navarre, who was shot in the shoulder when directing the attack from the trenches, and died at Andelys a month afterwards. While the Protestants were defending the walls, a certain François de Civille was ordered with his company to hold the ramparts near the Porte St. Hilaire, not far from the Fourches de Bihorel. While at his post he was wounded by a shot from an arquebus, which passed through his cheek and shattered the right jaw-bone, at eleven in the morning on the 15th October. The bullet came out behind his collar-bone and tore his ruff to pieces. He fell down the glacis, and a foraging party stripped him and buried him hurriedly in a ditch near by, and there he was left till six that evening. His lacquey, Nicolas de la Barre, searching the ramparts for his master after the assault had been repulsed, saw a human hand sticking up out of the mud; his companion, Captain Jean de Cléré, kicked the fingers as he walked, and a peculiar ring de Civille was known to wear flashed in the light. The body was at once dug up and carried to the house of the Sieur de Coqueraumont, in the Rue des Capucins.
There for five days and five nights the servant watched by his master, "who lay in a lethargy," andwas just beginning to show feeble signs of life when the enemy took the town by assault. On the twenty-eighth, some Catholic soldiers broke into his place of refuge, and finding a pestilent heretic lying ill, they threw him out of a window. Being lucky enough to fall upon one of the many dunghills which were beneath the windows of Rouen at that time, de Civille lay there in his shirt and nightcap for three days and nights without food or drink, and no one discovered him. At last, when the town was a little quieter, a cousin fetched him away to the Château de Croisset, and by July in the next year he had almost completely recovered his health. Though all this happened when he was only twenty-six, he lived to write an account of his adventures when he was seventy-four for the pleasure and instruction of posterity; and he only expired for the last time at the ripe age of eighty, from an inflammation of the lungs caught by making love to a young woman underneath her window during a hard frost.
The second siege in this century was occasioned by the troubles of the League. In 1589 public anxiety had increased to such a pitch that the royalist Court of Justice was removed to Caen, while the "Ligueurs" held Rouen for the Duc de Mayenne. In July 1590 bands of armed men a hundred strong went shouting through the streets, and would have disarmed the town-guard on the Vieux Marché had they not been stopped by Valdory, the district captain of the Burgess militia, who has left a detailed account of the disturbances of that unhappy time in Rouen. From his book it may be learnt that the "Vieux Palais" of the English kings was still within the city walls by the river to the south-west, that the fort had not long been rebuilt near the Abbey of St. Catherine, that the Faubourgs were again destroyed as they were in 1417 to leave no shelter for the enemy, and that the investing troops tried to cut off the streamof Robec, so as not merely to deprive that quarter of its water supply, but to stop the public mills. In November 1591 Henry of Navarre used some ships to help him in his attack on Rouen, but the townsfolk, who refused to acknowledge a Protestant as their king, seem to have paid little attention to the naval demonstration, and finally chased his vessels out of the harbour and got possession of most of their cargoes of sheep, oxen, wine and other booty. The defence was brilliantly conducted throughout, and Valdory relates that when three hundred musketeers were requested for a forlorn hope, no less than two thousand men thronged to the officers' houses demanding weapons to join in the sally. "Rouvel" was very busy all the time in the town belfry, and rang furiously by night or day whenever the scouts gave notice that the enemy were likely to attack. Directly his notes were heard, every citizen rushed to his appointed place upon the ramparts, and waited without confusion for the enemy. They were good shots with an arquebus, too, for a captain was reported to Valdory as having killed one of the enemy's sentinels "at a distance of three hundred paces at least;" and an equally successful shot is recorded at five hundred paces.
They were even vain-glorious; for Monsieur de Villars, says the same authority, desirous of a little diversion outside the walls, rode out with several gentlemen, and tilted at the ring beyond the ramparts under a hot fire, until he had had his fill of amusement. When the enemy could get to close quarters with the common folk they found them no easier to handle; for as some of Henry of Navarre's soldiers were foraging in a garden for herbs, the gardeners rushed out and "killed them with large stones." The town never opened its gates until Henry of Navarre repudiated his religion and became the King of France. Rouen, as well as Paris, was evidently "well worth a mass."
SIR CHRISTOPHER LYTCOT, HIGH SHERIFF OF BERKSHIRE, KNIGHTED BY HENRI IV. AT THE SIEGE OF ROUEN IN 1591. FROM THE BRASS UPON HIS TOMB IN WEST HANNEY CHURCH, NEAR WANTAGE, BERKSHIREOne of the most interesting things about this fighting is the presence of a numerous body of Englishmen who had joined Biron and Henry of Navarre, under the Earl of Essex. Their Queen had offered a special prize for the first man who should make a successful shot at the defenders of the town; but they do not seem to have distinguished themselves particularly, and at last a hundred of them (chiefly squires) were killed. A hardy specimen of the race, however, is mentioned by Valdory, who evidently kept his eyes open for good work, whether of friend or foe. This Englishman, after receiving four wounds from a cutlass on the head, "pretended to be dead, allowed himself to be stripped by our soldiers, and dragged naked to the ramparts." While he lay there, desirous to make quite sure of their man, the Rouen sentinels (who must have been mariners from Dieppe) dropped a small cannon ball on his stomach, "but he did not seem to feel it," and continued obstinately to remain alive. However, when the Sieur de Canonville took him prisoner and bound up his wounds, with the object, apparently, of getting a ransom from his friends, he seems to have determined that no foreigner should make money out of him, and died.
In the Church of West Hanney, near Wantage, in Berkshire, is the tomb of one of these Englishmen who fought for Henry of Navarre before the walls of Rouen, and it will be an appropriateending to this chapter of the dead if I close it with his epitaph:—
"Beneath this stone lyeth enterred the corps of Sir Christopher Lytcot, Knight, twice high sheriff of the county of Berk (Husband of two wives both in the sayd countye the former Jane Essex widdowe of Thomas Essex of Beckett House Eq. the later Catherine Young widdowe of Willm Younge of Bastledon Eq) Knighted in the campe before Roane the xvi of Novemb 1591 by the hands of the French Kinge Henry the Fourth of yt name and King of Navarre. Who after his travailes in Germany Italy and Fraunce and the execution of justice unto the glory of God and the good of his country ended his pilgrimage at Bastledon ye xxv of April 1599."
"Beneath this stone lyeth enterred the corps of Sir Christopher Lytcot, Knight, twice high sheriff of the county of Berk (Husband of two wives both in the sayd countye the former Jane Essex widdowe of Thomas Essex of Beckett House Eq. the later Catherine Young widdowe of Willm Younge of Bastledon Eq) Knighted in the campe before Roane the xvi of Novemb 1591 by the hands of the French Kinge Henry the Fourth of yt name and King of Navarre. Who after his travailes in Germany Italy and Fraunce and the execution of justice unto the glory of God and the good of his country ended his pilgrimage at Bastledon ye xxv of April 1599."
DES TODES WAPPENSCHILD
DES TODES WAPPENSCHILD
VIEW OF ROUEN
VIEW OF ROUEN, DRAWN BY JACQUES LELIEUR IN 1525
"Les gens de Rouen sont honnêtes,Grans entrepreneurs d'edificesDe theatres et artificesEs entrees des grans seigneurs,Roy prelatz et aultres greigneurs."
THOUGH Henri Quatre could not get through the gates of Rouen while the town remained faithful to the League, and considered him a heretic, the sturdy citizens were ready enough to accept a king of their own religion, and when the "Vert Galant" made his first solemn entry into the place in 1596, they welcomed him as heartily as any of his predecessors. You will remember that there were Englishmen with him when he was trying to get into Rouen a few years before, and it was to Rouen again that the Earl of Shrewsbury and a brilliant suite brought the Queen of England's greeting to her cousin of France, and sent him the famous Order of the Garter. The Ambassador was most appropriately lodged in a very famous house in Rouen, which itself formed a remarkably complete memorial of the friendship between the same two thrones earlier in the century. The Maison Bourgtheroulde, at the corner of the Place de la Pucelle and the Rue du Panneret, contains indeed one of the best pictorial records that exists in Europe, not only of the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but also of the decorations that were displayed there.
The house is a good example of the transition between "Gothic" domestic architecture and that of the Renaissance. Built about the same time as thePalais de Justice and the Bureau de Finances, it formed a part of that brilliant series of beautiful dwellings in which the early years of the sixteenth century at Rouen were so fruitful. Its exterior façade upon the Place de la Pucelle is so terribly changed and mutilated now, that unless you will refer to Lelieur's drawing, reproduced withChapter IX., no view of its present condition can suggest to you the original design. Of that high roof with lofty crested windows, of the side-turret at the angle of the street, of the beautifully carved door, not a trace remains. The principal entrance built on the old Marché aux Veaux was placed between two heavy pillars, which had statues on them, and even before the traveller had passed inside, these suggested to him the motive which underlies the whole decoration of the house; for these are the two pillars which were on each side of the English King's pavilion at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Whereof the one, in the words of the English chronicler, was "intrayled with anticke works, the old god of wine called Bacchus birlyng the wine, which by the conduits in the erthe ran to all people plenteously with red, white, and claret wine, over whose head was written in letters of Romayn in gold, 'Faicte bonne chere qui vouldra.'" The other pillar was "of ancient Romayne work, borne with four lions of gold ... and on the summit of the said piller stood an image of the blynde God, Cupid, with his bowe and arrowes of love, by hys seeming, to stryke the yonge people to love." But these have gone, and so little is left of the beauty of the façade that it really will require some courage to believe what I have just said, and go through the wooden door in search of better fortune.
GALLERY OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE
THE GALLERY OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE, SHOWING THE CARVINGS OF THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, AND ABOVE THEM THE CARVINGS OF PETRARCH'S "TRIUMPH"
It was the town house of the family of Le Roux,[65]a name which already has artistic associations for any lover of the architecture of Rouen, though I have found no trace of relationship between the architect of the Cathedral façade, the Bureau de Finances, and the Palais de Justice, and the lawyers who built and decorated this "hôtel." Indeed I cannot imagine it would be likely that a man of so much originality and power both in architecture and in sculpture would have lent himself to the methods of decoration employed here, which, as you will see, are more appropriate to the accurately historical than to the freely artistic frame of mind. The man who made the fortune of the family was the second Guillaume Le Roux, husband of Jeanne Jubert de Vely, and one of the fifteen lay councillors called to the Perpetual Échiquier created by Louis XII. in 1499. He bought the estates of Tilly, Lucy, Sainte Beuve, and Bourgtheroulde, and built the "corps de logis" in the interior courtyard exactly opposite the entrance. He also began the wings on the north and west, but left the great southern gallery to be completed by his son Guillaume, "Abbé d'Aumale et du Val Richer," who held several benefices under the great Cardinal d'Amboise, and derived his chief claim to importance from having been employed by François I. in the negotiation of the celebrated Concordat which that king announced with so much solemnity on his entry into Rouen in 1517.
These two last facts may largely account for the decoration of the new wing the Abbé built in Rouen, and the carvings he added to the older walls; for they are mainly suggested by one of the most magnificent occurrences in the ostentatious reign of a king whose visit to the town had no doubt enhanced the importance of the Abbé in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. At any rate he was not likely to let them forget that the François whom he had helped in the matter of theConcordat was also the hero of the "Champ du Drap d'Or." Though the house may have been begun as early as 1486, when the second Guillaume Le Roux was married, it was not finished for some time afterwards, and we may put 1531 as the latest date, because the Phœnix of Eleanor of Austria shows beside the Salamander of her husband. Abbé Guillaume died in 1532, before which year the carvings must have been completed, and they evidently cannot have been begun before 1520, the date of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which was their chief inspiration, so that the carvings certainly have the value of almost contemporaneous workmanship, and most probably the authority, either directly or indirectly, of an eye-witness. It may be as well to remember that to that gorgeous ceremony there was no possibility of any mere loafer, or any wandering unauthorised artist being admitted, because it is on record that everyone without a special permit was cleared out of the country in a circle of some four leagues; and it is not too much to imagine that even if one who had had a hand in the important negotiations of the Concordat four years before were not in the King's suite, he was at least in a position to see and profit by the work of the artists who accompanied François,[66]to record his splendours and to make the best use of all their opportunities.
Since 1820 the Maison Bourgtheroulde has practically been a unique example of the style of decoration for which it is famous. Before that year "La Grande Maison" existed at Grand-Andely, not far off, with much the same kind of ornament upon its Renaissance walls; but that has now vanished utterly, with the exception of some of the large statues which were bought at three francs the square foot by anEnglishman,[67]and taken across the Channel to decorate a country-house. It will therefore be well worth while to consider in some detail what the Bourgtheroulde carvings are, and how they originated; for even if they do not appeal to us so much as the original and thoroughly local work of other Rouen sculptors, they have a value of their own that may be considered entirely apart from any æsthetic criticism of the sources of the carver's workmanship.
MEETING OF HENRY VIII. AND FRANÇOIS I.
THE MEETING OF HENRY VIII. AND FRANÇOIS I. ON THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD, FROM THE CARVINGS OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE
To begin, then, at the beginning, the entrance-door on the inside of the court is decorated with medallion portraits, surrounded by garlands, of François I. (whose long nose betrays him) and the stout, square face of Henry VIII. Both are bearded. The note of historical suggestion is struck at once. It continues still more unmistakably on the series of panels immediately beneath the window-sills of the wing on the left hand as you enter. On these is represented that useless pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, by which François (who posed as the protector of art and the Renaissance in France, though he did singularly little for either) tried to obscure the defeathe had just sustained by the election of his solemn rival Charles V. as Emperor. The interview lasted from the 7th to the 24th of June 1520, and there the chronicler describes how the two Kings "se virent et parlementerent ensemble après midi environ les vespres, en la terre dudit Roy d'Angleterre, en une petite vallée nommée le valdoré entre ladite ville d'Ardres et le château de Guynes."
The third or central panel (which is the best carved and almost the best preserved) contains the actual meeting of the Kings. At the first (beginning from the left) is shown the Château of Guynes; from the windows and galleries men and women are looking out, and on the ground before the gate are the small saluting-cannon of the period, almost invisible from the decay of the stone. A few of the last of the English suite are just issuing from the gates, some a-foot and some on horseback; both men and horses wear great feathered plumes, and the men on foot have a circular headdress of feathers like an aureole. In the second panel, two horsemen bearing maces ride in front of an ecclesiastic who carries a processional cross. Behind it is the great Cardinal Wolsey, in violet-coloured velvet, riding on a mule, with pages. Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was with him; and the Order of the Garter, whose motto could be read upon a horseman's knee some sixty years ago, was worn by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. It has disappeared now, and so much has gone with it, owing to the atmosphere of Rouen, which has more in common with Oxford than its architectural surroundings, that the careful plaster-casts preserved in Paris (and photographed by the late M. Paul Robert in his "Trocadéro" Series, iv. 29) will soon be the best memorial of sculptures, as valuable to England as they are to France, and equally neglected by both. In 1821 M. Delaquérièreissued a careful description of them (published by Firmin Didot, Paris), and to a second edition (published in 1841) he added a detailed drawing of the whole gallery by Polyclès Langlois, and five larger drawings of each of the panels originally done, in 1823, for Nodier's well-known "Voyages Pittoresques." It is the central panel from these that I reproduce here, and Miss James's drawing will show you the relative position of the procession and of the frieze of the Triumph above it on the left wing of the house. In 1841, plaster-casts could be bought from M. Rossi in Rouen. But these exist no longer, and, by comparing the drawing made in 1823 with the carvings themselves, you will be able to appreciate how rapidly the stone decays. It will still be possible, however (in 1899 at least), to discover on the mouldering surface of the wall at least a trace of nearly everything that was originally there; and your appreciation of the faithfulness of the sculptor to recorded fact will be still further increased if you can compare his work with the picture in Hampton Court, with the English contemporary versions from which I have occasionally quoted, and with such French accounts as that of du Bellay or Fleurange.
The third and central panel is the culmination of the splendours of the whole. Each monarch, with his hat in his right hand, bows low in salutation. You will notice that François wears his beard, but Henry is clean shaved like the majority of those present. This is another detail that is corroborated elsewhere, for the story is well known how François swore he would not shave till he had seen the English King; how Henry made a similar oath out of politeness, and broke it in impatience; how the French ambassadors eagerly enquired whether this clean chin was to be construed as "an unfriendly act," and were told that Henry's affection resided not in his beard, but in his heart. The English King, says the chronicler, on that great occasion "showed himself some deal forward in beauty and personage, the most goodliest Prince that ever reigned over the realm of England: his Grace was apparelled in a garment of cloth of silver of damask, ribbed with cloth of gold, so thick as might be; the garment was large, and pleated very thick. The horse which his Grace rode on was trapped in a marvellous vesture of a new-devised fashion; the trapper was of fine bullion, curiously wrought, pounced and set with antique work of Romayne figures." This carving shows that his harness was embroidered in alternate squares of leopards and roses. Close to him is the Marquis of Dorset, who bore the sword of State, with the Earls of Essex and Northumberland and others, besides the pikemen and guards, and the 400 mounted archers, who were peculiar to the English retinue.
François wears embroidered cloth of gold, and bears a cape of heavier gold thread, sewn with gems. His chest and sleeves are covered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and pearls. His horse has the fleurs de lys embroidered on saddle and harness. Before him march the Swiss guard under Fleurange, who has left an account of the whole matter; close by are Mountjoy and the other heralds, with the High Admiral and the great nobles. On the back of the last rider is carved the royal badge, that salamander which was seen miraculously to appear in effigy among the clouds while the Cardinal was celebrating High Mass. The English chronicler describes the scene carved upon this panel as follows:—"Then blew the trumpets, sackbutts, clarions, and all other minstrelsy on both sides, and the King descended down towards the bottom of the valleyof Ardres in sight of the nations, and on horseback met and embraced the two Kings each other; then the two Kings alighted, and after embraced with benign and courteous manner each other, with sweet and goodly words of greeting; and after few words these two noble Kings went together into the tent of cloth of gold that was there set on the ground for such purpose, thus arm-in-arm went the French King Francis the First of France, and Henry the Eighth King of England and France, together passing with communication."
On the fourth panel, behind four mace-bearers, rides an ecclesiastic bearing what was once a double cross: the dove that flew above his head has entirely disappeared. Then comes Cardinal de Boissey, the Papal Legate, and among the other Cardinals (who may be recognised by their hatstrings falling on their chests) are those of Bourbon, Albret, and Lorraine. Much of this has been destroyed, but there is enough left to realise what Du Bellay says about the ruinous extravagance of the dresses:—"Many of the Frenchmen," he writes, "carried the price of woodland, watermill, and pasture on their backs." Yet the taste of the Englishmen, who had not spent so much, was acknowledged to have produced as splendid an effect as the gorgeous outlay of the French; as Fleurange particularly records of the English pavilion made of wood, and drapery and glass, "elle était trop plus belle que celle des Français, et de peu de coûtance." In one point, however, the ladies of Paris asserted a superiority they have retained almost ever since; the Englishwomen confessed themselves beaten; but when they followed the fashion of their fair rivals, it was not much better; for, says the truthful historian, "what they lost in modesty they did not make up in grace."
Most unfortunately, on the fifth and last panel, though the stair-rail has preserved some of its details better than any of the rest, the superiority of these French ladiescannot be sufficiently studied, though several of their heads may be seen watching the procession from the windows and balconies of Ardres. The plumed hats and horses of the escort are particularly clear here, and they are more numerous than in the famous "Triumph of Maximilian" or in the "Entry of Charles V. into Bologna." The figure of the courtier just mounting his horse is the one I like best of all except the dignified personage who bears the cross before the French ecclesiastics.
If the English ambassador in 1596 was easily able to recognise the subject of these carvings, no less quickly would the Cardinal de Florence, the Papal Legate who came to Rouen in the same year, and was also lodged in this house, remember the originals from which were taken the carvings on the frieze above the windows on this wall. For though later generations have misunderstood them, just as they imagined the lower carvings to be the Council of Trent, it is quite clear from some words first discovered on the stone in 1875, that the frieze was inspired by the "Triumphs" of Petrarch. These words are as follows; and I have added their proper continuation and beginning in italics:—
"Amor vincit mundumPudicitia vincit amoremMors vincit pudicitiamFama vincit mortemTempus vincitfamamDivinitas seu Eternitas omnia vincit."
M. Palustre has pointed out that an edition of these "Triumphs" was published in Venice in 1545 by Giolito, with woodcuts; and though this is rather too late for the carvings (unless, as was the case with Holbein's "Todtentanz," we may imagine the cuts were known long before the book) it is a matter of common knowledge that the subject was a favourite one not only for such illustrations but especially for tapestry; asAgrippa d'Aubigné records of contemporary tapestries at Lyons: "Elles représentent quatre triomphes, chacun de trois partis...." And it was also by just such chariots, cars, and elephants, or other animals, that virtues and vices were represented in the great processions of the kings and queens at Rouen and elsewhere, processions which of course were often taken as the subject for tapestries commemorating their magnificence. In Petrarch's verses you may read:—
"Quattro destrier via più che neve bianchiSopr' un carro di foco un garzon crudoCon arco in mano, e con saette a' fianchi....... Vidi un vittorioso e sommo ducePur com' un di color, che 'n CampidoglioTrionphal carro a gran gloria conduce...."
On the third of these upper panels (just above the meeting of the two kings), is a great car drawn by oxen, whose wheels are crushing prostrate bodies in the road beneath them. The fourth carving shows a stage drawn by two elephants. The fleshless head of Death is in the front, with a serpent coiling round his leg, and on the car is the figure of a woman blowing a trumpet, with a banner. This is evidently the fourth line of the verse just quoted, "Fama vincit mortem." On the fifth car, drawn by four beasts, is a great daïs, and personages beneath it. Before it walks a figure with a turban, beside it another figure crowned with branches and carrying a tree. Emblems of the growth of nature dispersed in the design may perhaps suggest the passage of the seasons and the lapse of time, for "Tempus vincit famam." The last line, "Divinitas omnia vincit," is very well illustrated, over the door. Drawn by a lion, an eagle, an ox and an angel, to symbolise the four evangelists, a great car supports the three Persons of the Trinity beneath a daïs; and under the wheels are crushed various uncouth figuresrepresenting heresies. Cardinals, popes, and bishops accompany the procession.
Though I have only mentioned, so far, two of those great royal entries into Rouen, for which the citizens were especially famous, the details given inChapter XI.will alone suggest that the scenes taken from Petrarch's verses would be very appropriate to a house in this particular town. The still more gorgeous festivities arranged for Henri II. and Catherine de Médicis, which I shall mention later on in this chapter, are even more like the triumphal cars and set pageants here represented, which have lasted on in England in the somewhat debased form of our own Lord Mayor's show, and were perhaps themselves the symbolical descendants of the Triumphs of the ancient Romans.
This gallery of the Cloth of Gold and the Triumphs, is decorated in every other part with beautifully designed arabesques, and is joined to the main façade by an exquisite turret, which rises at the corner near the short flight of steps, and breaks up the straight line of the walls in a way that the early Renaissance builders were extremely fond of doing, before the transition period had advanced so far as to make them forget the principles of the rising line of "Gothic" and adhere solely to the horizontal line of the Italian. But this turret is even more remarkable for the carvings it bears than for the delicate taste which dictated its position in the whole design. Upon the two sides visible to the spectator from the courtyard it is covered with representations of the pastoral scenes that might be seen any summer in the sixteenth century on the hills near Rouen. To see them all upon these walls you will need a good field-glass, but they deserve the closest inspection that is possible.
Standing by the door of the gallery, the first relief above the window in the turret shows a scene by the banks of Seine, in which men are swimming about andplaying various tricks on each other in the water. On shore some labourers are cutting grass with long scythes which have only one handle rather low down in their long straight stem, and women are piling up what has been cut for hay. In the distance the same scene is continued, a man stops to drink out of his flask, a hawk is swooping down upon a heron, and trees and towered houses fill up the further space. Above it, and beneath the next window higher up the tower, the country grows more mountainous, and sheep are pasturing among the fields. In front a gallant shepherd ties his mistress's garter, while she reproves his rustic forwardness. Behind them a somewhat similar declaration of affection is going on. A third shepherd quenches his thirst from a round flask. A traveller on horseback, with a bundle tied behind him, rides up the winding road, near which stands a rude shepherd's hut on wheels, which is still used in many an upland pasture to this day. On the other side of the road is a windmill. Scattered houses rise above the hills, and among the clouds is seen a flight of birds. Beneath is written the appropriate legend, "Berger à Bergere prōptemēt se ingere." Beneath the small window at the top of the tower on the same side, the game called "Mainchaude" is in full progress. A shepherdess blindfolds with her hand the shepherd whose head is resting in her lap, and his comrades stand ready to take advantage of his helpless position. Various modest sheep pretend they are not looking, another man calls to his friend in the distance, and a fifth is pensively playing a hautbois in the usual miraculous countryside with artistically disposed tufts of clouds above it. The motto reads:—
"Passe temps legers nous valent argentSilz ne sont dargent ils sont de bergers."
CARVING FROM THE TURRET OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE
NOVS SOMES DES FINS: ASPIRĀS A FINSCARVING FROM THE TURRET OF THE MAISON BOURGTHEROULDE
Turning to the other side of the tower, the carvingbeneath the highest window represents a jovial picnic under the same idyllic conditions. Out of a big bowl placed on a tree-stump, a shepherdess helps her lover with a spoon, another man makes his dog beg for a morsel of the food; music is provided behind by a self-sacrificing person with the bagpipes, and a fourth shepherd stands in the distance with some sheep, like a martyr to his duty. The window beneath this is decorated with a sheep-shearing scene, which I have reproduced from the outline drawing by E.H. Langlois, published by Delaquérière in his "Description Historique des Maisons de Rouen" (Paris: Firmin Didot. 1821). The presiding shepherdess carries on her work with the usual embarrassing distractions. By her side a musician plays his hautbois to a dancing dog. Just behind them a spirited chase after a marauding wolf is in full cry; more houses, clouds, and birds complete the picture. The motto is "Nous somes des fins: aspirans a fins." The last scene represents men fishing, some with nets out of a boat, others on land with various uncouth patterns of fishing-rod; everyone appears to be making a fine catch, but the extraordinary occurrence on the bank will entirely divert your attention from the fish; for a knight, who had evidently ridden down to see the sport, has been snatched out of his saddle by a burly flying griffin, and his servant looks frantically after his disappearing body in the clouds. Untroubled by these strange events, a young woman walks calmly towards the castle, a little further on, carrying a basket of eggs and butter on her head, and above her some new kind of osprey flies away with a protesting pike. [Seepage 361.]
As carvings, these charmingly naïve representations of country life break absolutely every rule that is supposed to govern the art of sculpture. Their relief is very slight indeed, they have no definite limits, for they wander vaguely round the windows, with trees and runningwater and clouds and birds and houses all on the same plane, and all with equal "values." I have not the slightest doubt that just as the Field of the Cloth of Gold was copied from a historical tapestry of the event, just as the Triumphs of Petrarch were copied from tapestries that might well have decorated the town of Ardres on the occasion of the royal meeting, so these window decorations, which betray their origin even more than the carvings on the other wing, were taken direct from tapestries which may have been at Ardres in June 1520, and certainly might have been seen in any great château of the period. Their very position on these walls is very like what tapestries were so frequently used for in the lavish mural decoration of the time. Every house hung out its best embroideries and tapestries and gaily coloured cloths; and the way in which these windows break into the background of each design represents the very probable result of draping a long piece of tapestry round the window of a house. The Château of Blois is known to have contained just such "bergeries" in the rooms of Anne of Brittany; at another château in Touraine, the Chaumont of Georges d'Amboise (the friend of the builder of this house in Rouen), may be still seen needlework, in pink and old rose, of country scenes, in the rooms used by Catherine de Médicis. Finally, in the inventory of the tapestries of Philip the Bold of Burgundy, drawn up soon after his death, you may read such entries as the following:—