WHILE the glacial downpours of this endless winter continue, I find pleasure in running over and completing the notes collected in the course of a stroll which I undertook on a warm and charming day last autumn. In weather as bad as this one can ramble only in memory, unless desirous of catching influenza.
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I went to Meaux and to Germigny-l'Evêque to discover, either at the episcopal residence or in Bossuet's country house, whatever may still recall the memory of the "Eagle."
To tell the truth, it was not the "Eagle" who interested me on that day, but the man himself. I had recently read the remarkable portrait which forms the close of the beautiful study of M. Rebelliau, those pages which are so vivid and in which is sketched with so much relief and truth the figure "of an everyday Bossuet, sweet and simple."1It seemed to me that nowhere could this Bossuet be better evoked than in the garden of the bishop's house at Meaux and in the park of Germigny. "In Germiniaco nostro," we read at the end of the Latin letters of "M. de Meaux."
I recalled, besides, with what surprise I had read theMémoiresof Abbé Le Dieu, those notes, sometimes puerile, but so touching in their familiar simplicity, which reveal to us a Bossuet very different from that of Bausset. This cardinal, although he composed his book from the manuscripts of Abbé Le Dieu, could not resign himself to the simplicity of the faithful secretary. He has doubtless collected everything; he has said everything; but he has thought it his duty to ascribe to his model a continuous majesty and an inexhaustible pride. He has drawn the Bossuet of Rigaud's portrait.
Shall we cite an example of the way in which Cardinal de Bausset transposes the descriptions of Abbé Le Dieu? Bossuet invited his priests to say the mass quickly: "It is necessary to go roundly, for fear of tiring the people." This is the phrase reported by Abbé Le Dieu. And this is how Cardinal de Bausset translates the expression to make it more suitable to the gravity of the author of theOraisons funèbres: "It is necessary to perform all the ceremonies with dignity," said Bossuet, "but with suitable speed. It is not necessary to tire the people." A simple shading; but a characteristic trait is effaced.
I commenced my pilgrimage by a visit to the cathedral of Meaux.
"He had taken possession of the bishopric of Meaux on Sunday, February 8, 1682, and, on Ash Wednesday in the following week, preaching in his cathedral to signalize the beginning of Lent, he declared that he would devote himself entirely to his flock and would consecrate all his talents to their instruction. He promised to preach on every occasion when he should pontificate; and that no business, however pressing, should ever prevent him from coming to celebrate the high, feasts with his people and to preach the word of God to them. He never failed in this, not even to exercise his office of Grand Almoner. He took leave of the princesses to whom he had been attached with much respect, and left to others the charge of administering Holy Communion to them on the high feasts." (Mémoiresof Abbé Le Dieu, Volume I, page 182.)
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The pulpit from which Bossuet preached so many sermons no longer exists. Its panels have been found and reassembled to form a new pulpit.
Otherwise, in this beautiful Gothic cathedral there is nothing to arouse the emotions or to speak to the imagination. Externally and internally, all has been "freshly restored." The soul of the past has departed from it.
There is soon to be placed under the roof of the church a commemorative monument which was recently exhibited in the Grand Palace, in the midst of an amusing crowd of statues. I was told that the authorities have not yet selected the place which this monument will occupy in the cathedral. How admirable! The monument has been conceived and executed for an undetermined position! This formidable pile of sculpture has been treated like a simple mantelpiece ornament.... But let us pass; this does not concern in the least the memory of Bossuet.
In the bishopry, the episcopal apartments are on the second floor. Bossuet did not live there very much. He voluntarily gave up the house to his nephews and his niece, Madame Bossuet. His family had undertaken the management of the household; he was a spendthrift and gave little attention to the cares of daily life, devoting all his time to his formidable labors. "I would lose more than half of my mental ability," he wrote to Marshal de Beliefonds, "if I restricted myself in my household expenses."
Madame Bossuet knew how to take advantage of this weakness of her uncle, inability to take care of his income. She had become mistress of the episcopal mansion; she led a worldly life there; she entertained; she gave suppers and concerts.
During Lent of 1704, Bossuet lay at death's door. The terrible agonies of illness had caused him to lose sleep. See what happened just outside of the room where he lay in agony: "This evening Madame Bossuet gave an entertainment to the Bishop of Troyes, Madame de La Briffe, the dowager, Madame Amelot, President Larcher, and other male and female company, to the number of eight. There was a magnificent repast for those who were fasting and those who were not, with all the noise which attends such assemblies, and yet this went on in the very antechamber of M. de Meaux and in his hearing, when he longed for sleep with the greatest inquietude." (Mémoires of Abbé le Dieu, Volume III, page 74.)
It is easy to understand that Bossuet did not find in such surroundings the peace and quiet necessary for his immense labors. He had to find a retreat where he could escape the sounds of feasting and conversation which filled the episcopal house.
Let us cross the garden which was once laid out by Le Nôtre. Beyond the flower beds, overlooking the ancient ramparts of the town of Meaux, an avenue of clipped yews offers a sure and austere asylum for meditation. This was, it is said, the bishop's promenade. At the very end, upon the platform of a former bastion, a little pavilion served as his study. Its old wainscot-ings have disappeared, but the original division of the pavilion into two rooms has remained; one contained his bed, the other his worktable.
Here Bossuet shut himself up every evening. In the middle of the night, after sleeping four or five hours, he waked up of his own accord, for he was master of his hours of sleep. He found his desk in readiness, his armchair in position, his books piled upon chairs, his portfolio of papers, his pens, his writing pad and his lighted lamp; and he commenced to think and to write. On winter nights he buried himself to his waist in a bearskin bag. After a vigil of three hours, he said his matins and returned to slumber.
While, in the silence of the night, M. de Meaux wrote against heretics and prayed for them, armed himself for the eternal combat and worked for the welfare of the souls which were in his charge, the salons of the episcopal house were made gay by lights and violins.
Bossuet remained faithfully in his diocese during the twenty-two years that he was bishop of Meaux.
But he always preferred to live in his country house at Germigny rather than in his episcopal palace.
Two leagues across a pleasant and slightly undulating country, the road crosses the Marne by a stone bridge. In the seventeenth century there was only a ferry. On the left bank appears the little village of Germigny with its few houses dotted pleasantly along the hillside. The landscape has the grace and freshness which is characteristic of the whole valley of the Marne: a horizon of tiny hills, humble and smiling, a fertile and regularly cultivated plain, an old mill lost among the willows, a line of great poplars, a sluggish, grassy rivulet, resigned to continual detours, and finally, spread over all these things, a somewhat humid light which imparts to them a delicate charm—a lovable spectacle of which the eye cannot tire, since its subtle seductiveness lies wholly in the changes of the height and the flight of the clouds.
From the twelfth century, the pleasure house of the Bishops of Meaux was at Germigny, on the banks of the Marne. Kings often stopped there when they came to hunt in the neighboring forests. Bossuet's predecessor, M. de Ligny, spent fifty thousand crowns in transforming the old house into a veritable château. The domain was sold at the time of the Revolution. But Msr. de Briey has bought back a part of it and has thus renewed the tradition of the former bishops of Meaux.
What remains of the old château? The park has been cut up. Of the gardens a lawn and a few alleys remain. The buildings have been ruined. A dovecote and an old turret are still standing, and the wreckers have respected the long terrace whose foot was formerly bathed by the Marne; it is today separated from the river by a highway. This is shaded by great trees, a charming place which seems to have been made especially for the meditative promenade of an orator or the relaxation of a theologian.
Bossuet loved Germigny. In his letters he often celebrated the charm of "his solitude." He even sung it in Latin in a hymn which he composed in honor of Saint Barthélémy, the patron of his parish. Every year he came to his country house to realize that dream of his youth which he had ingenuously expressed in a sermon: "What an agreeable diversion to contemplate how the works of nature advance to perfection by insensible increase! How much pleasure we can have in observing the success of the trees which we have grafted in a garden, the growth of the wheat, the flow of a river!" For he was sensitive to the spectacles of nature.
"Do you desire to see a sight worthy of your eyes? Chant with David: 'When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained.' Listen to the word of Jesus Christ who said to you: 'Consider the lily of the field and the flowers which pass in a day. Verily, verily, I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory and with that beautiful diadem with which his mother crowned his head, was not arrayed like one of these.' See these rich carpets with which the earth covers itself in the spring. How petty is everything in comparison with these great works of God! There we see simplicity joined with grandeur, abundance, profusion, inexhaustible riches, which were created by a word and which a word sustains...."
And, in this sameTraité de la concupiscencefrom which I have just extracted these lines, written with a grace almost worthy of Saint Francis, do you recall the admirable picture of a sunrise: "The sun advanced, and his approach was made known by a celestial whiteness which spread on all sides; the stars had disappeared and the moon had arisen as a crescent, of a silver hue so beautiful and so lively that the eyes were charmed by it.... In proportion as he approached, I saw her disappear; the feeble crescent diminished little by little; and when the sun was entirely visible, her pale and feeble light, fading away, lost itself in that of the great luminary in which it seemed to be absorbed..." Is not this the work of an attentive and passionate observer?
The numerous letters and decrees dated at Germigny show how much this retreat pleased Bossuet. His books followed him there. Labor seemed easier to him in this salubrious air and at this delicious spot. There he received, in noble and courteous fashion, the illustrious personages who came to visit him. The Great Condé, the Duc de Bourbon, the Prince de Conti, the Comte de Toulouse, the Duc de Maine, Cardinal Noailles, Marshal de Villars, Madame de Montespan, and her sister, the Abbess of Fontevrault, were the guests of Bossuet at Germigny. In 1690, the Dauphin, on his way to the army in Germany, had wished to make his first halt at Germigny, at the home of his ancient tutor.
The most celebrated preachers were invited by the Archbishop of Meaux to preach at his cathedral, and were afterward entertained in his country house. It was in this way that the Abbé de Fénelon often came to Germigny. At this period the bishop and the abbé esteemed and loved each other. "When you come," the Abbé de Fénelon wrote from Versailles to the Bishop of Meaux, "you will tell us of the marvels of spring at Germigny. Ours commences to be beautiful: if you do not wish to believe it, Monsignor, come to see it." (April 25, 1692.) And on another occasion, Fénelon sent to Bossuet verses upon his countryside which are, alas!—verses by Fénelon! Nine years later the springtimes of Germigny were forgotten. TheMaximes des Saintshad been condemned.Têlêmaquehad been published; Têlémaque which Bossuet read at this very Germigny, under the trees which had witnessed the former friendship now broken, Télémaque which he declared "unworthy not only of a bishop, but of a priest and of a Christian." And one day, he said to Abbé Le Dieu that Fénelon "had been a perfect hypocrite all his life...."
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Among the visitors at Germigny, we must not forget Malebranche, whose name was given to one of the avenues of the garden; Rigaud, who commenced in this country house the portrait of Bossuet which today may be found in the Louvre; Santeul, "the gray-haired child," who made Latin verses to describe and celebrate the chateau and the park of Germigny. How many verses Germigny has inspired!
This beautiful terrace which overlooks the Marne and where so many illustrious shades surround that of "M. de Meaux," is the very place to evoke the "sweet and simple" Bossuet! When we see that he has so many friends and know this taste for retreat and country life, the man loses at once a little of that solemnity and that inflexible arrogance which have come down in legend as characteristic of his personality.
We also seem to sustain a paradox, even after M. Brunetière, even after M. Rebelliau, in speaking today of the sweetness and the humanity of Bossuet. The entire eighteenth century labored to blacken and calumniate the victorious adversary of "sweet Fénelon." It is not in the course of a promenade upon the banks of the Marne that I pretend to study the quarrel of quietism. Nevertheless, however little we may wish to recall the vicissitudes of the dispute, we must admit that the excess of shiftiness of the crafty Perigordian sufficiently justified the excess of hardness of the impetuous Burgundian. But, in addition, we are not dealing here with Bossuet as a polemist. The profundity as well as the ingenuousness of his faith would excuse the vehemence of his arguments, if we could permit ourselves to be scandalized by so courteous a vehemence, we who, unbelieving or Christian, cannot discuss the most insignificant problems of politics without resorting to extremes of insult. Bossuet had neither hatred nor rancor. When he recovered from the emotion of the combat, he resumed his natural mood, which was all charity and sweetness.
He was nearer to the gospel than Fénelon ever was with his artistic vanity. He had in him something simple and awkward which brought him nearer to the people than to the great ones among whom he had lived. At court, he made more than one false move. In his diocese, he was loved for his goodness.
By regarding Bossuet as a persecutor, Jurieu and the philosophers in his train have obliged the historians to examine closely what the conduct of the Bishop of Meaux had been in regard to the Protestants of his diocese. Now it has appeared that, of all the prelates of France who were charged with assuring the execution of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, not one showed more humanity. Bossuet condemned violence and constraint, and there was only a single military execution in the diocese of Meaux. It would be childish to reproach a Catholic bishop of the seventeenth century for not having criticized the Revocation, of the Edict, especially since this bishop, the author ofPolitique tirée de l'Ecriture sainte, should have been, more than any other, impressed by the perils which the republican spirit of the French Protestants threatened to the monarchy. He preached to the Protestants as eloquently as he could, turned persecution aside from them, and gave alms to them. He received at Germigny a great number of ministers who had come to dispute with him; and it was in the little chapel of his chateau that Joseph Saurin and Jacques Bénigne Winslow abjured Protestantism beneath his hands.
All of this, I know, you can read in the biographies of Bossuet and, if you have not already done it, do not fail to read it in M. Rebelliau's book. But things have mysterious suggestiveness, and when we have seen the beautiful garden of the bishop's house at Meaux and the charming country about Germigny, we are more disposed to believe that the Bossuet of the modern historians is the true Bossuet. I have not verified their researches; but I have read Le Dieu and I have walked upon the terrace along the Marne; that is sufficient.
And I would be ungrateful if I failed to add that I had the most amiable and the best informed of guides in my promenade: the Abbé Formé, priest of Germigny, deserving of the parish of Bossuet, in all simplicity.
IHAD heard that, deep in the forest of Montmorency, near the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde, there might be found a little cemetery lost in the midst of the woods. I wondered who had chosen this romantic burial place. One of my friends, to whom I had imparted my curiosity, sent me a book by M. Auguste Rey, entitledLe Naturaliste Bosc, and assured me that I would there find enlightenment on the mystery which intrigued me. I read it, and the story told by M. Auguste Rey increased my desire to become acquainted with the cemetery of Sainte Radegonde.2
So, on an October afternoon, I wandered in the forest seeking tombs. The search was long and charming. As the forest of Montmorency is not provided with guideposts, it is impossible not to get lost in it. But the magnificence of the weather, the miraculous splendor of the golden and coppery foliage, the lightness of the luminous mists which float over the reddened forest, the perfume of the softened earth and of the moist leaves, make one quickly forget the humiliation of having lost his way.
Following one path after another, I ended by stumbling upon Sainte Radegonde. The place is well known to all walkers. Of the ancient priory, which was founded here in the thirteenth century by the monks of the Abbey of Saint Victor, there is left no more than a tumbledown building which serves today as a ranger's house. It is surrounded by a wall, so that it is no longer possible to approach the well which formerly attracted numerous pilgrims to Sainte Radegonde, for this saint cured, it is said, the itch and sterility.
Before the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde (the word hermitage was made fashionable in this country by Jean Jacques Rousseau) there opens a vast glade, whose slope descends to the brooklet called Ru du Nid-de-l'Aigle, which flows in the midst of a scrub of blackberries and hawthorns. At the end of the meadow, half hidden by copses, there rises a little bluff which elbows the stream aside. Here is the cemetery. A few very simple graves surround a little boulder on which is carved: "Bosc, Member of the Institute." Four great cedars overlook them with their superb shafts.
The site possesses an inexpressible beauty, at the hour when the forest loses the splendor with which it was but recently decked by the sun's rays, while a cold breeze shakes the half-naked branches, announcing the approaching frosts and sorrows of winter.
The scene is set. Now listen to the story, which I borrow almost entirely from the interesting study of M. Auguste Rey.
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Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, whose mortal remains repose in the cemetery of Sainte Radegonde, was born at Paris January 29, 1759. His family, originally from the Cevennes, belonged to the reformed religion. His father was one of the physicians of the king.
At Dijon, where he had been sent to college, he followed the courses of the naturalist Durande, became enthusiastic over the Linnæan system, and discovered his vocation. When, after returning to Paris, he was obliged by reverses of fortune to accept a very modest position in the post office, he continued the studies of his choice and took the public courses given by the professors and demonstrators of the King's Garden.
In 1780, it was proper to have a republican soul and a taste for botany. It was good form to attend the lectures of M. de Jussieu and to read Plutarch. Rousseau had made the love of flowers fashionable, for he had said: "While I collect plants I am not unfortunate." Madame de Genlis composed aMoral Herbal. Amateurs added a museum of natural history to their collection of paintings. One might then meet in the alleys of the King's Garden a great number of personages who were later to take part in the revolutionary assemblies. Bosc needed to make no effort to follow the fashion. Being a Huguenot, he was republican from birth. As to botany, he cherished it with a deep and ingenuous passion, and not as a pastime.
It was in the Botanic Garden, either at Jussieu's lectures or in André Thouin's home, that he sealed the great friendships of his life. He was, in fact, among the frequenters of the hospitable apartment where lived the four brothers Thouin, with their sisters, their wives and their daughters; this family of scientist gardeners received their friends in winter in the kitchen and in summer before the greenhouses. Celebrated men came to converse with and learn from these worthy men, who were the true masters of the King's Garden; and the "venerable" Malesherbes, seated upon a trough, often conversed with Madam Guillebert, the sister of André Thouin, for whom he had a particular esteem.3
Bosc at that time entered into friendship with three future members of the Convention, from whom he had acquired the taste of studying plants: Creuzé-Latouche, Garan de Coulon and Bancal des Issarts. The first two died Senators of the Empire. As to Bancal, we will soon run across him again.
It was in the same surroundings that he met Roland, an inspector of manufactures, and his young wife, then in all the flower of her robust beauty. The husband was forty-eight; the wife was twenty-six; Bosc was twenty; naturally he fell in love. Madame Roland gave him to understand that he had nothing to hope for from her; but she mockingly added that in eighteen years it would be allowable for him to make a like declaration to her daughter Eudora. Bosc resigned himself to the situation and consented to the friendship which was offered him; but he committed the folly, later, of taking seriously the raillery with which he had been dismissed.
For ten years Bosc continued a correspondence with Madame Roland which was full of confidence and freedom. These letters no longer exist, and it is a pity; for this republican botanist seems to have possessed sensitiveness, tenderness and judgment. We do possess, however, most of the letters which were written to him by Madame Roland.
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Without these letters and various others of the same period, we would never have had any other means of knowing Madame Roland than the image drawn by herself in her Memoirs, her intolerable Memoirs. We would always have seen her behind the tragic mask, heroic, unapproachable and full of vanity, and we would have remained almost unconscious of the frightful tragedy of her death if she had not left us these intimate and familiar effusions, in which are revealed the heart and the mind of a woman who was truly feminine. We are very little moved by the celebrated letter which she wrote one day to Bancal, Bosc's friend, to spurn his love, although she confessed to "tumultuous sentiments" which agitated her, and to tears which obscured her vision. I know that Michelet cries: "The cuirass of the warrior opens, and it is a woman that we see, the wounded bosom of Clorinda." But we must doubt, after all, the severity of the wound which leaves Clorinda cool enough to call to witness "the absolute irreproachability" of her life. There is something theatrical in such half-avowals. On the contrary, her letters to Bosc are simple in diction and ofttimes charming. They are spontaneous: "Seated in the ingle nook, but at eleven o'clock in the morning, after a peaceful night and the different cares of the day's work, my friend (that is, Roland) at his desk, my little girl knitting, and myself talking to one, watching over the work of the other, savoring the happiness of existing warmly in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to a friend, while the snow falls upon so many poor devils loaded down with misery and grief, I grieve over their fate; I turn back with pleasure to my own..." And elsewhere: "Now, know that Eudora reads well; begins to know no other plaything than the needle; amuses herself by drawing geometrical figures; does not know what shackles clothes of any kind may be; has no idea of the price one has to pay for rags for adornment; believes herself beautiful when she is told that she is a good girl and that she has a perfectly white dress, remarkable for its cleanness; that she finds the greatest prize in life to be a bonbon given with a kiss; that her naughty spells become rarer and shorter; that she walks through the darkness as in the daylight, fears nothing and has no idea that it is worth while to tell a lie about anything; add that she is five years and six weeks old; that I am not aware that she has false ideas on any subject, that is important at least; and agree that, if her stiffness has fatigued me, if her fancies have worried me, if her carelessness has made it more difficult for us to influence her, we have not entirely lost our pains..." And it would be possible to quote twenty other passages written with the same grace and the same simplicity....
As for the young friend to whom were addressed these nice letters, here is his portrait: "As for you, whom I see even at this distance talking quickly, going like lightning, with an air sometimes sensible and sometimes heedless, but never imposing when you try to be grave, because then you make grimaces derived from Lavater, and because activity alone suits your face; you whom we love well and who merit it from us, tell us if the present is supportable to you and the future gracious."
Let us return to Sainte-Radegonde. While botanizing through the woods which surround Paris, Bosc had discovered this retreat. The little house, last relic of a priory long since abandoned, was inhabited by an old peasant woman who gladly offered hospitality to strollers from Paris, when the Revolution broke out.
Bosc, by his temperament, his tastes and his friendships, was led to the new ideas. He was not satisfied with presiding over the Society of Natural History; he likewise joined the Society of Friends of the Constitution and, later, he became a member of the Jacobin Club. On September 25, 1791, we find him taking part in a festival given at Montmorency to celebrate the inauguration of a bust of Rousseau: before the dances and illuminations, he made a speech and offered periwinkles to the spirit of the philosopher.
Meanwhile, the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde, confiscated as ecclesiastical property, was about to be offered for sale, and Bosc was desolated at the thought that a new owner would perhaps forbid him access to the wood where he was accustomed to dream and work. He was poor and could not dream of buying the little property, valued at more than four thousand livres by the experts of the district of Gonesse. So he persuaded his friend Bancal to acquire Sainte Radegonde at the public auction, February 14, 1792. We do not know if he was a partner in the transaction. What seems certain is that Bancal never came to dwell in his hermitage.
A few days later Roland became Minister of the Interior and he named Bosc Administrator of Posts; it was a question of "disaristocratizing" this service. Bosc used his best talents toward it.... But, at the end of a year, the Gironde was overthrown, the Girondins were under warrants of arrest, and Bosc took refuge at Sainte Radegonde.
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He did not arrive there alone. Roland accompanied him; tracked by the revolutionists of the Commune, separated from his wife, who had been imprisoned in the Abbaye, he concealed himself for fifteen days with his friend before seeking a safer asylum at Rouen, in the home of the Demoiselles Malortie.
After having assured the escape of Roland, Bosc gets hold of his daughter Eudora, who was then twelve years old, and confides her to the wife of his friend Creuzé-Latouche; then he succeeds in entering the prison, where he reassures Madame Roland as to the fate of her child.
After being temporarily released, this lady is again arrested and shut up at Sainte Pélagie. Bosc continues to come and see her at the peril of his life. He brings her flowers, for which he goes to the Botanical Garden; but, one day, he understands the danger of thus going to visit the Thouins, and then it is the flowers of Sainte Radegonde that he brings to the prisoner in a basket. It is to him that Madame Roland confidesLes Notices Historiques—these are herMemoirs,—written in her prison. Finally, when her sentence has become inevitable, she begs from him poison, by which she may escape the insults of the judges and the populace: "Behold my firmness, weigh the reasons, calculate coldly, and appreciate how little is the worth of the canaille, greedy for spectacles." Bosc decides that for her own glory and for the sake of the Republic his friend must accept all: the outrages of the tribunal, the clamors of the crowd and the horror of the last agony. She submits. A few days later Bosc returns to Paris and hears of her execution.
Sainte Radegonde sheltered others who were proscribed.
One day when Bosc visited Creuzé-Latouche, he met there Laréveillière-Lépeaux. The latter, sought for at the same time as his two inseparable friends, Urbain Pilastre and Jean Baptiste Leclerc, had just learned of the flight of Pilastre and the arrest of Leclerc. He wished to return to his home, be arrested, and partake the fate of his friend. Creuzé dissuaded him from this act of despair....
Bosc knew Laréveillière from having formerly seen him at the home of André Thouin, for the future high priest of the Theophilanthropists had become quite expert in botany. He offered to share his hiding place with him. Laréveillière accepted. Both succeeded in leaving Paris without being noticed, and reached Sainte Radegonde.
For three weeks Laréveillière remained hidden in the forest of Emile. (At this time Montmorency was called Emile, in honor of Rousseau.) Neither he nor Bosc had a red cent. They had to live on bread, roots and snails. Besides, their hiding place was not safe; there was nothing unusual in the presence of Bosc in this solitude, but Laré-veillière might any day excite the curiosity of the patriots of Emile. The ugliness of his countenance and the deformity of his figure caused him to be noticed by every passer-by. Robespierre was then living in the hermitage of Jean Jacques; it has even been related that he met the fugitive face to face one day; at all events such an encounter was to be dreaded. The administrators of Seine-et-Oise sometimes took a fancy to hunt in the neighborhood of Sainte Radegonde.... The peril increased from day to day. A faithful friend, Pincepré de Buire, invited Laréveillère to take refuge at his home near Péronne. He left Sainte Radegonde.
"The good Mile. Letourneur," he has related, "gave me two or three handkerchiefs; Rozier, today a counselor at the royal court of Montpellier, then judge of the district of Montmorency, whose acquaintance we had made at Mile. Letourneur's, put one of his shirts in my pocket. Poor Bosc gave me the widow's mite—he put a stick of white crab in my hand and guided me through the forest to the highway. To use the English expression, on leaving him I tore myself from him' with extreme grief."4
Laréveillière arrived without difficulty at the village of Buire.
On the same day that he left Sainte Radegonde, another deputy of the Convention, Masuyer, came to take his place; he was accused because he had assisted at the escape of Pétion; but his greatest crime was that he had, in full Assembly, said to Pache, who insisted on proscriptions: "Haven't you got a little place for me on your list? There would be a hundred crowns in it for you!" Masuyer, disregarding Bosc's advice, wished to enter Paris. He was arrested near the Neuilly Bridge. Bosc, who had insisted on accompanying him, had just time to plunge into the Bois de Boulogne, escaped, and returned to his hermitage, where he awaited the end of the Terror.
When he returned to Paris, in the autumn of 1794, Bosc devoted his entire time to the labors imposed upon him by the last will of Madame Roland. He withdrew the manuscript of her Memoirs from the hiding place where he had left it, on top of the beam over the stable door of Sainte Radegonde, and published the first part of it in April, 1795. At the same time he endeavored to collect the remnants of the patrimony of Eudora, whose guardianship he had accepted.
Here begins the most melancholy episode of the life of this worthy man. He became smitten with his pupil. He allowed himself to be blinded by some marks of gratitude. "She is tenderly attached to me," he wrote to one of his friends, "and shows the happiest disposition; so I can no longer fail to meet her wishes and take her for my wife, despite the disproportion of our ages." Nevertheless, he still had scruples, and sent Eudora for several months to the Demoiselles Malortie, who had given asylum to Roland when a fugitive. It was well for him that he did, for his illusion was of short duration. Eudora did not love him....
Without employment, without means, his heart broken, he resolved to expatriate himself. He reached Bordeaux on foot, paid calls on the widows of his friends of the Gironde, and took passage on a ship departing for America. He left France in despair, without receiving a single word of farewell from Eudora. When he landed at Charleston, he learned of the marriage of his pupil to the son of a certain Champagneux, a friend of Madame Roland, to whom he had intrusted the guardianship of the young girl.
Laréveillière, who had become a Director, had him appointed vice-consul at Wilmington, and later consul at New York. But there were great difficulties between the United States and France; he could not obtain his exequatur. He tried to console himself by devotion to botany. But the wound which he had received still bled. "I do not know," he wrote to Madame Louvet, "when the wound of my heart will be sufficiently healed to allow me to revisit without too much bitterness the places and the individuals still dear to me, whose presence will bring back to me cruel memories. Although I am much more calm than when I left, although I am actually easily distracted by my scientific labors and even by manual occupations, I do not feel that I have courage to return to Paris. I still need to see persons to whom I am indifferent, in order to accustom myself to facing certain persons whom I have loved and whom I cannot forget, whatever injustice they may have done to me or to the Republic, without counting my Eudora...." And his memory takes him back to the dear retreat of Sainte Radegonde; he writes to Bancal: "Well! Then you no longer go to visit Sainte Radegonde? Do you then take no more interest in it? I conclude from that that you will undergo no further expense on account of it and that you will soon get rid of it. Nevertheless I had the project of planting there many trees from this country, since it is the soil most similar to that of South Carolina that I know in the neighborhood of Paris..."
Bosc did see Sainte Radegonde again. At the end of two years he returned to France and married one of his cousins. The Revolution was over and Eudora was forgotten.
From that time on, he gave himself up entirely to his work as a naturalist. He became Inspector of the nurseries of Versailles and also of those which were maintained by the Ministry of the Interior. In 1806 he was elected a member of the Institute. In 1825 he succeeded his friend André Thouin as Professor of Horticulture at the Botanical Garden, and after a long and cruel illness, which prevented him from lecturing, he died in 1828.
In 1801, when the first daughter born of his marriage had died in infancy, he had begged Bancal to transfer to him two perches of land in his domain of Sainte. Radegonde, in order that he might bury his child there. Such was the origin of the little cemetery where Bosc reposes in the midst of his children and his grandchildren.
I have not regretted making a pilgrimage and evoking, in the autumnal forest, the phantoms of these Revolutionists and these botanists.
How touching a figure is that of this Bosc, whose name recalls—it is Laréveillière-Lépeaux who speaks—"the most generous friendship, the most heroic courage, the purest patriotism, the most active humanity, the most austere probity, the most determined boldness, and at the same time the most extended knowledge in natural science and different branches of administration as well as in political, domestic and rural economy..." and also, let us add, the eternal blindness of the amorous Arnolphe!
THE spire of the ancient cathedral of Senlis overlooks an immense horizon. This belfry is the lightest, the most elegant, the most harmonious that Gothic art has given us. It rises with a flight so magnificent and so perfectly rhythmical that at the first glance one might think it a growth of nature; it seems to live with the same life as the heavens, the clouds and the birds. This masterly grace, this warm beauty, are, however, the work of time and of men. An architect endowed with genius thought out this miraculous plan, proportioned with this infallible precision the elevation of the different landings, distributed the openings and the surfaces, invented the pointed turrets and the frail columns which flank the edifice, taper off its structure, precipitate its flight and make it impossible to perceive the point at which the square tower is transformed into an octagonal spire, so that the highest pyramid seems to burst forth from a long corolla. Then the centuries have painted the stones with the pale gold of lichens, and have completed the masterpiece.
The whole of Senlis seems to have been built for the glory of its spire. Streets, gardens, squares, monuments, houses, all seem to be arranged by a mysterious artist, who persists in incessantly bringing back our glance to the dominating spire, the better to reveal to us all its graces and all its magnificence, at all times and under all lights.
We wander at random about the little episcopal city: it is charming, tortuous and taciturn, with its moss-covered pavements, its deserted alleys, its flowering orchards, its shadowed promenades, its ancient houses. We discover at every step houses of earlier days which the barbarism of the men of the present time has spared: here turrets, spiral staircases, doors surmounted by old escutcheons, long half-grotesque gargoyles, mullioned windows, evoke the refined elegance of the fifteenth century; yonder, a wall decorated with pilasters and medallions, or a noble brick and stone crow-stepped façade, witness the opulence of the citizenry at the time of the second Renaissance; there are admirable remains of hospitals of the thirteenth century; heavy Tuscan porches stand before beautiful hôtels of the eighteenth: and all this rich and varied architecture is an excellent commentary on the words of Jean de Jandun, the historian of Senlis: "To be at Senlis is to dwell in magnificent homes, whose vigorous walls are built, not of fragile plaster, but of the hardest and most selected stone, placed with an industrious skill, and whose cellars, surrounded by solid constructions of stone, so cool the wines during the summer season, thanks to the degree of their freshness, that the throat and the stomach of drinkers thereby experience a supreme delight."5
To the charm of the spectacle is added the charm of ancient names: the sinuous streets have retained their antique appellations. (How wise is Senlis to maintain these strange words, carved in the stone, at the corners of its streets, rather than to inscribe upon ignoble blue plates the names of all the celebrities dear to Larousse!) The beautiful houses of former days seem in some undiscoverable way to be more living when we discover them in the Street of the Red Mail, the Street of the Trellis, the Street of the White Pigeons, the Street of Tiphaine's Well, the Street of the Little Chaâlis, the Impasse du Courtillet, etc.... An amusing sign which represents three scholars arguing with an ape would no longer have any flavor if we had to seek for it in some Place Garibaldi; it is delicious when found at Unicom Crossways. On the old Town Hall, an inscription continues to indicate the position of the rabbit and broom market; and it is very fine that the name of Louis Blanc or of Gambetta has not been given to the Street of the Cheese Makers, were it only out of consideration for that excellent Jean de Jandun who, decidedly, well knew how to appreciate all the merits of Senlis, for he wrote in regard to the cheeses of his native town: "The sweetest milk, a butter without admixture, fat cheeses, served in abundance to mean and minor purses, banish that furious activity of the brain which fatigues almost without exception the majority of admirers of highly spiced meats, and thus furnish the well-regulated habitude of a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove." Façades, names and souvenirs are exquisite; and one says to one's self in sauntering about Senlis that, even without the assistance of the treatment recommended by Jean de Jandun, the silent and antique grace of the little town would be sufficient to inspire in old neurasthenics "the regulated habitude of a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove...."
The promenade is charming. But neither the picturesqueness of the streets, nor the beauty of the houses, nor the piquancy of the old names, nor even the words of Jean de Jandun are worth as much as the picture which here strike the glance at every turn: the spire, always the spire of Notre Dame. It appears suddenly between two gables. It projects above the old brownish tile roofs. Above the flower-covered walls of the gardens it is framed between clumps of lilac and horse-chestnut. It overlooks the houses, it dominates the parks. The poor tower of Saint Peter, with its disgraceful lantern, sometimes accompanies it at a distance, as if to make barbarians better appreciate the grandeur and the slenderness of Notre Dame's incomparable spire.
Senlis has preserved the ruins of its royal château. It is a place which abounds in memories, for a great number of the kings of France, from the Carlovingians to Henri IV, came here to visit for a season. Even its ruins are not without interest. They rest upon the Roman wall, which has remained intact at this spot, and we find there a fireplace of the thirteenth century, towers, casements.... But how completely indifferent all this archaeology leaves us when we behold the spire of the cathedral emerging from the greenery of the garden! The great trees conceal all the rest of the church. We see only, mounting into the full heaven, the golden pyramid, still finer and more aspiring in the midst of all these spring greeneries. A mysterious harmony exists between the youthful boldness, the robust lightness of the human work, and the triumphant freshness of the new vegetation. Besides, the monuments of Gothic art are as marvelously suited to intimacy with nature as to familiarity with life.
This familiarity, which has so often been destroyed by foolishly clearing away the surroundings of cathedrals, proves its value to us at Senlis on the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame. This is a rectangular space, where grass grows between the paving stones. The façade of the church is framed by two rows of noble chestnuts. Behind a venerable wall rise the turret and the gable of a fifteenth-century house. One might suppose it to be the deserted and well-kept courtyard of a Flemishbéguinage. In this ancient frame, in the midst of this solitude, the cathedral preserves all its youth. Here there is a perfect unison between the building and its surroundings. Not only are the trees, the walls, the houses, in harmony with the architecture, but this architecture itself remains alive, because its proportions have not been falsified. The dimensions of the square are exactly those which are needed in order that our eye may be able to discover in their beauty of propinquity the portal, the unfinished tower and the spire. All this is so perfect that its grace is eternal.
This cathedral of Senlis would be an incomparable edifice even if it did not possess its sublime spire.
The western portal is one of the most beautiful works of mediaeval sculpture. On the two sides of the porch, as on the northern door of Chartres, are arranged the kings and the prophets who foreshadowed the Saviour in the Old Testament. Vandals have mutilated these statues in olden times. In the nineteenth century other savages have restored them and have put in the place of the broken heads masterpieces of bad taste and silliness. Happily these malefactors have spared the rest of the sculptures; they have touched neither the ruins of the charming calendar, whose popular scenes unfold themselves above the kings and the prophets, nor the marvelous statuettes, still almost intact, which adorn the voussoirs of the portal, nor the bas-reliefs of the tympan where angels huddle about the dead Virgin, that some may carry to heaven her body and others her soul. As to theCoronation of the Virgin, which occupies the upper part of the tympan, it also has been respected alike by iconoclasts and by restorers. Of all the images of the Mother of God which the sculpture of the thirteenth century has left us, I know none more moving than this Virgin of Senlis. She is a peasant girl, a simple country maid, with heavy features, and resignation in her face; her unaccustomed hands can scarcely hold the scepter and the book; she is ready for all dolors and for all beatitudes, extenuated by miracles, harassed by maternity, still and alwaysancilla Domini, even in the midst of the glories of the coronation and of the splendors of Paradise.
The church of the twelfth century, to which this doorway belongs, was finished in the thirteenth, burned in the fourteenth, rebuilt in the fifteenth, and again ruined by fire at the beginning of the sixteenth. It is possible to discover in the cathedral of today the traces of these various reconstructions. But, however interesting it may be to follow, upon the stones of the monuments, the history of their vicissitudes, I will spare you this somewhat austere amusement. Continuous archaeology is tiresome.
I stop at the sixteenth century. It was at this period that the church took the form and the aspect which it has preserved to our time.