CHAPTER III
AVALLON, VEZELAY AND CHASTELLUX
AVALLON owes its origin to the construction of a chateau-fort. It was built by Robert-le-Pieux, the son of Hugues Capet, in the tenth century. Little by little the fortress has crumbled and very nearly disappeared. All that remains are the foundation walls on what is locally called the Rocher d’Avallon, virtually the pedestal upon which sits the present city.
Avallon, like neighbouring Semur and Vezelay, sits snugly and proudly behind its rampart of nature’s ravines and gorges, a series of military defences ready-made which on more than one occasion in mediæval times served their purpose well.
It was in the old Chateau d’Avallon that Jacques d’Epailly, called “Forte Épice,” was giving a great ball when Philippe-le-Bon beseiged the city. Jacques treated the inhabitants with the utmost disrespect, even the ladies, and secretly quitted the ball just before the city troops surrendered. History says that the weak-hearted gallant sold out to the enemy and saved himself by the back door, and in spite of no documentary evidence to this effect the long arm of coincidence points to the dastardly act in an almost unmistakable manner.
Near Avallon are still to be seen extensive Roman remains. A Roman camp, the Camp des Alleux, celebrated in Gaulish and Roman history, was here, and the old Roman road between Lyons and Boulogne in Belgica Secundus passed near by.
It is not so much with reference to Avallon itself, quaint and picturesque as the city is, that one’s interest lies hereabouts. More particularly it is in the neighbouring chateaux of Chastellux and Montréal.
The Seigneur de Chastellux was one of the most powerful vassals of the Duc de Bourgogne. By hereditary custom the eldest of each new generation presented himself before the Bishop of Auxerre clad in a surplice covering his military accoutrements, and wearing a falcon at his wrist. In this garb he swore to support Church and State, and for this devotion was vested in the title of Chanoin d’Auxerre, a title which supposedly served him in good stead in case of military disaster. It was thus that the Maréchal de Chastellux, a famous warrior, was, as late as 1792, also a canon of the cathedral at Auxerre. It was, too, in this grotesque costume that the Chanoin-Comte d’Chastellux welcomed Louis XIV on a certain visit to Auxerre. At Auxerre, in the cathedral, one sees a monument commemorative of the Sires de Chastellux. It was erected by César de Chastellux under the Restoration, to replace the tomb torn down by the Chapter in the fifteenth century. This desecration, by churchmen themselves, one must remember, took place in spite of the fact that a Chastellux was even then a dignitary of the church.
Chastellux, beyond its magnificent chateau, is an indefinable, unconvincing little bourg, but from the very moment one sets foot within its quaintly named Hotel de Maréchal de Chastellux he, or she, is permeated with the very spirit of romance and mediævalism. The bridge which crosses the Cure in the middle of the village owns to the ripe old age of three hundred and fifty years, and is still rendering efficient service. This is something mature for a bridge, even in France, where many are doing their daily work as they have for centuries. Will the modern “suspension” affairs do as well? That’s what nobody knows! The hotel, or auberge rather, can not be less aged than the bridge, though the manner in which it is conducted is not at all antiquated.
A rocky, jagged pedestal, of a height of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet, holds aloft the fine mass of the Chateau de Chastellux. For eight centuries this fine old pile was in the making and, though manifestly non-contemporary as to its details, it holds itself together in a remarkably consistent manner and presents an ensemble and silhouette far more satisfactory to view than many a more popular historic monument of its class. Its great round towers, their coiffes and the pignons and gables of the roof, give it all a cachet which is so striking that one forgives, or ignores the fact that it is after all a work of various epochs.
Visitors here are welcome. One may stroll the corridors and apartments, the vast halls and the courtyard as fancy wills, except that one is always discreetly ciceroned by a guardian who may be a man, a woman, or even a small child. There is none of the espionage system about the surveillance, however, and one can but feel welcome. Blazons in stone and wood and tapestries are everywhere. They are the best, or the worst, of their kind; one really doesn’t stop to think which; the effect is undeniably what one would wish, and surely no carping critic has any right to exercise his functions here. There is not the least cause to complain if the furnishings are of non-contemporary periods like the exterior adornments, because the certain stamp of sincerity and genuineness over all defies undue criticism.
The Chateau de Chastellux dates, primarily, from the thirteenth century, with many fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century restorations or additions which are readily enough to be recognized. From its inception, the chateau has belonged to the family of Beauvoir-de-Chastellux, the cadet branch of Anseric-de-Montréal.
Practically triangular in form, as best served its original functions of a defensive habitation, this most theatrical of all Burgundian chateaux is flanked by four great attached towers. The Tour de l’Horloge is a massive rectangular pile of the fifteenth century; the Tour d’Amboise is a round tower dating from 1592; the Tour de l’Hermitage and the Tour des Archives, each of them, also round, are of the sixteenth century. In the disposition and massiveness of these towers alone the Chateau de Chastellux is unique. Another isolated tower, even more stupendous in its proportions, is known as the Tour Saint Jean, and is a donjon of the ideally acceptable variety, dating from some period anterior to the chateau proper.
Moat-surrounded, the chateau is only to be entered by crossing an ornamental waterway. One arrives at the actual entrance by the usual all-eyed roadway ending at the perron of the chateau where a simple bell-pull silently announces the ways and means of gaining entrance. The domestic appears at once and without questioning your right proceeds to do the honours as if it were for yourself alone that the place were kept open.
The chief and most splendid apartment is the Salle des Gardes, to a great extent restored, but typical of the best of fifteenth century workmanship and appointments. Its chimney-piece, as splendid in general effect as any to be seen in the Loire chateaux, is but a re-made affair, but follows the best traditions and encloses moreover fragments of fifteenth century sculptures which are authentically of that period. The cornice of this majestic apartment bears the Chastellux arms and those of their allied families, interwoven with the oft repeated inscription, Monréal à Sire de Chastellux. In this same Salle des Gardes are hung a pair of ancient Gobelins, and set into the floor is a dainty morsel of an antique mosaic found nearby.
The modern billiard-room, also shown to the inquisitive, contains portraits of the Chancelier d’Aguesseau and his wife, and its fittings – aside from the green baize tables and their accessories – are well carried out after the style of Louis XIII. Good taste, or bad, one makes no comment, save to suggest that the billiard tables look out of place.
In what the present dweller calls the Salon Rouge are portraits and souvenirs of a military ancestor Comte César de Chastellux, who, judging from his dress and cast of countenance, must have been a warrior bold of the conventional type.
After the Salle des Gardes the Grand Salon is the most effective apartment. Its wall and ceiling decorations are the same that were completed in 1696, and incorporated therein are fourteen portraits of the Sires and Comtes who one day lived and loved within these castle walls. These portraits are reproductions of others which were destroyed by the unchained devils of the French Revolution who made way with so much valuable documentary evidence from which one might build up French mediæval history anew. The village church contains several tombal monuments of the Chastellux.
The Chateau de Montréal, or Mont-Royal, so closely allied with the fortunes of the Chastellux, between Avallon and Chastellux, is built high on a mamelon overlooking the Seruin, and is one of the most ancient and curious places in Burgundy. The little town, of but five hundred inhabitants, is built up mostly of the material which came from one of the most ancient of the feudal chateaux of mid-France. This chateau was originally a primitive fortress, once the residence of Queen Brunhaut, the wife of the Roi d’Austrasie in 566. It was from this hill-top residence that the name Montréal has been evolved.
The sparse population of the place were benefited by special privileges from the earliest times and the cité movenageuse itself was endowed with many admirable examples of administrative and domestic architecture.
Of the Renaissance chateaux of the later seigneurs, here and there many portions remain built into other edifices, but there is no single example left which, as a whole, takes definite shape as a noble historical monument. There are a dozen old Renaissance house-fronts, with here and there a supporting tower or wall which is unquestionably of mediæval times and might tell thrilling stories could stones but speak.
In Renaissance annals Montréal was celebrated by the exploit of the Dame de Ragny (1590), who recaptured the place after it had been taken possession of by the Ligeurs during the absence of her husband, the governor.
At the entrance of the old bourg is a great gateway which originally led to the seigneurial enclosure. It is called the Port d’en Bas and has arches dating from the thirteenth century. Montréal and its Mediæval chateau was the cradle of the Anseric-de-Montréal family, who were dispossessed in 1255 to the profit of the Ducs de Bourgogne. It was to the cadet branch of this same family Chastellux once belonged.
To the west lies Vezelay, one of the most remarkable conglomerate piles of ancient masonry to be seen in France to-day. It was a most luxurious abode in mediæval times, and its great church, with its ornate portal and façade, ranks as one of the most celebrated in Europe.
Vezelay is on no well-worn tourist track; it is indeed chiefly unknown except to those who know well their ecclesiastical history. It was within this famous church that Saint Bernard awakened the fervour of the Crusade in the breast of Louis-le-Jeune. The abbey church saw, too, Philippe-Auguste and Richard Cœur-de-Lion start for their Crusades, and even Saint Louis came here before setting out from Aigues Mortes for the land of the Turk. This illustrious church quite crushes anything else in Vezelay by its splendour, but nevertheless the history of its other monuments has been great, and the part played by the miniscule city itself has been no less important in more mundane matters. Its mediæval trading-fairs were famous throughout the provinces of all France, and even afar.
In the middle ages Vezelay had a population of ten thousand souls; to-day a bare eight hundred call it their home town.
The seigneurial chateau at Vezelay is hardly in keeping to-day with its former proud estate. One mounts from the lower town by a winding street lined on either side by admirably conserved Renaissance houses of an unpretentious class. The chateau, where lodged Louis-le-Jeune, has embedded in its façade two great shot launched from Huguenot cannon during the siege of 1559. Another seigneurial “hôtel privée” has over its portal this inscription:
“Comme Colombe humble et simple seray
Et à mon nom mes mœurs conformeray.”
Here in opulent Basse-Bourgogne, where the vassals of a seigneur were often as powerful as he, their dwellings were frequently quite as splendid as the official residence of the overlord. It is this genuinely unspoiled mediæval aspect of seemingly nearly all the houses of this curious old town of Vezelay which give the place its charm.
The Porte Neuve is a great dependent tower which formerly was attached to the residence of the governor – the chateau-fort in fact – and it still stands militant as of old, supported on either side by two enormous round towers and surmounted by a machicoulis and a serrated cornice which tells much of its efficiency as a mediæval defence. To the right are still very extensive remains of the fourteenth and fifteenth century ramparts.
Near Vezelay is the Chateau de Bazoche, which possesses a profound interest for the student of military architecture in France by reason of its having been the birthplace of Maréchal Vauban, who became so celebrated as a fortress-builder that he, as much as anybody, may be considered the real welder of modern France. Vauban’s body is buried in the local churchyard, but his heart had the distinction of being torn from his body and given a glorious (?) burial along with countless other fragments of military heroes in the Hotel des Invalides at Paris.
Bazoches is not a name that is on the tip of the tongue of every mentor and guide to French history, though the appearance of its chateau is such that one wonders that it is not more often cited by the guide-books which are supposed to point out the quaint and curious to vagabond travellers. There are many such who had rather worship at a shrine such as this than to spend their time loitering about the big hotels of the flash resorts with which the Europe of the average tourist is becoming overcrowded. Makers of guide-books and the managers of tourist agencies do not seem to know this.
Bazoches is a townlet of five hundred inhabitants, and not one of them cares whether you come or go. They do not even marvel that the chateau is the only thing in the place that ever brings a stranger there, – they ignore the fact that you are there, so by this reckoning one puts Bazoches, the town and the chateau, down as something quite unspoiled. Half the population lives in fine old Gothic and Renaissance houses which, to many of us, used to living under another species of rooftree, would seem a palace.
What the Chateau de Bazoches lacks in great renown it makes up for in imposing effect. Each angle meets in a svelt round tower of the typical picture-book and stage-carpenter fashion. Each tower is coiffed with a peaked candle-snuffer cap and a row of machicoulis which gives the whole edifice a warlike look which is unmistakable. The finest detail of all is “La Grande Tour” supporting one end of the principle mass of the chateau, and half built into the hillside which backs it up on the rear. Vauban bought an old feudal castle in 1663 and added to it after his own effective manner, thus making the chateau, as one sees it to-day, the powerful bulwark that it is.
The chateau belongs to-day to the Vibrave family, who keep open house for the visitor who would see within and without. The principle apartment is entirely furnished with the same belongings which served Vauban for his personal use.
Another neighbouring chateau, bearing also the name Chateau de Vauban, was also the property of the Maréchal. It dates from the sixteenth century, and though in no way historic, has many architectural details worthy of observation and remark.
CHAPTER IV
SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS, ÉPOISSES AND BOURBILLY
DUE east from Avallon some thirty odd kilometres is Semur-en-Auxois. It is well described as a feudal city without and a banal one within. Its mediæval walls and gates lead one to expect the same old-world atmosphere over all, but, aside from its churches and an occasional architectural display of a Renaissance house-front, its cast of countenance, when seen from its decidedly bourgeois point of view, is, if not modern, at least matter-of-fact and unsympathetic.
In spite of this its historical recollections are many and varied, and there are fragments galore of its once proud architectural glories which bespeak their prime importance, and also that the vandal hand of so-called progress and improvement has fallen heavily on all sides.
The site of Semur to a great extent gives it that far-away mediæval look; that, at least, could not be taken away from it. It possesses, moreover, one of the most astonishing silhouettes of any hill-top town in France. Like Constantine in North Africa it is walled and battlemented by a series of natural defences in the form of ravines or gorges so profound that certainly no ordinary invading force could have entered the city.
Semur was formerly the capital of the Auxois, and for some time held the same rank in the Burgundian Duchy.
The city from within suggests little of mediævalism. Prosperity and contentment do not make for a picturesque and romantic environment of the life of the twentieth century. It was different in the olden time. Semur, by and large, is of the age of mediævalism, however, though one has to delve below the surface to discover this after having passed the great walls and portals of its natural and artificial ramparts.
Semur’s bourg, donjon and chateau, as the respective quarters of the town are known, tell the story of its past, but they tell it only by suggestion. The ancient fortifications, as entire works, have disappeared, and the chateau has become a barracks or a hospital. Only the chateau donjon and immediate dependencies, a group of towering walls, rise grim and silent as of old above the great arch of the bridge flung so daringly across the Armançon at the bottom of the gorge.
The last proprietor of Semur’s chateau was the Marquis du Chatelet, the husband of the even more celebrated Madame du Chatelet, who held so great a place in the life of Voltaire. The philosopher, it seems, resided here for a time, and his room is still kept sacred and shown to visitors upon application.
Semur as much as anything is a reminder of the past rather than a living representation of what has gone before. Within the city walls were enacted many momentous events of state while still it was the Burgundian capital. Again during the troublous times of the “Ligue,” Henri IV transferred to its old chateau the Parliament which had previously held its sittings at Dijon.
Semur’s monuments deserved a better fate than has befallen them, for they were magnificent and epoch-making, if not always from an artistic point of view, at least from an historic one.
We made Semur our headquarters for a little journey to Époisses, Bourbilly and Montbard, where formerly lived and died the naturalist Buffon, in the celebrated Chateau de Montbard.
Époisses lies but a few kilometres west of Semur. Its chateau is a magnificently artistic and historic shrine if there ever was such. In 1677 Madame de Sévigné wrote that she “here descended from her carriage: chez son Seigneur d’Époisses.” Here she found herself so comfortably off that she forgot to go on to Bourbilly, where she was expected and daily awaited. It was ten days later that she finally moved on; so one has but the best of opinions regarding the good cheer which was offered her. At the time it must have been an ideal country house, this mansion of the Seigneur d’Époisses, as indeed it is to-day. The lady wrote further: “Here there is the greatest liberty; one reads or walks or talks or works as he, or she, pleases.” This is what everyone desires and so seldom gets when on a visit. As for the other natural and artificial charms which surrounded the place, one may well judge by a contemplation of it to-day.
Here in the chateau, or manor, or whatever manner of rank it actually takes in one’s mind, you may see the room occupied by Madame de Sévigné on the occasion of her “pleasant visit.” It is a “Chambre aux Fleurs” in truth, and that, too, is the name by which the apartment is officially known.
Above the mantel, garlanded with flowers carved in wood, one reads the following attributed to the fascinating Marquise herself. The circumstance is authenticated in spite of the fantastic orthography. As a letter writer, at any rate, she made no such faults.
“Nos plaisirs ne sont capparence
Et souvent se cache nos pleurs
Sous l’éclat de ces belles fleurs
Qui ne sont que vaine éperance.”
The Chateau de Bourbilly, where Madame de Sévigné was really bound at the time she lingered on “chez son cher seigneur,” is a near neighbour of Époisses. It was the retreat of Madame de Chantal, the ancestress of Madame de Sévigné, the founder of the Order of the Visitation who has since become a saint of the church calendar – Sainte Jeanne-de-Chantal.
This fine seventeenth century chateau, with its pointed towers and its mansard, belonged successively to the families Marigny, de Mello, de Thil, de Savace, de la Tremouille and Rabutin-Chantel, of which the sanctified Jeanne and Madame de Sévigné were the most illustrious members.
Madame de Sévigné, the amiable letter writer, sojourned here often on her voyages up and down France. She herself lived in the
Chateau des Rochers in Brittany and her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan, in Provence, and they did not a little visiting between the two. Bourbilly was a convenient and delightful halfway house.
Madame de Sévigné can not be said to have made Bourbilly her residence for long at any time. For a fact she was as frequently a guest at the neighbouring Chateau de Guitant, a feudal dwelling still inhabited by the de Guitants, or at Époisses, as she was at Bourbilly.
In the chapel, which is of the sixteenth century, is the tomb of the Baron de Bussy-Rabutin and some reliques of Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal. The latter has served to make of Bourbilly a pilgrim shrine which, on the 21st August, draws a throng from all parts for the annual fête.
There was a popular impression long current among French writers that Madame de Sévigné was born in the Chateau de Bourbilly. A line or two of that indefatigable penman, Bussy, tended to make this ready of belief when he wrote of his cousin as “Une demoiselle de Bourgogne egarée en Bretagne.” She herself claimed to have been “transplanted,” but it was a transplantation by marriage; she was most certainly not born at Bourbilly, at any rate, for history, better informed than an unconvincing scribbler, states that she was born in Paris, like Molière and Voltaire, who also have finally been claimed by the capital as her own.
At all events, at Bourbilly Madame de Sévigné was true enough on the land of the “vieux chateau de ses pères, ses belles prairies, sa petite rivière, ses magnifiques bois.” It was her property in fact, or came to be, and she might have lived there had she chosen. She would not dispose of it when importuned to do so, and replied simply, but coldly (one reads this in the “Letters”), “I will not sell the property for the reason that I wish to hand it down to my daughter.” From this one would think that she had a great affection for it, but at times it was a “vieux chateau” and at others it was a “horrible maison.” Capricious woman! The letters of Madame de Sévigné written from here were not numerous, as she only “stopped over” on her various journeyings. When one recognizes the tastes and habits of the Marquise, it is not to be wondered at that her visits to Bourbilly were neither prolonged nor multiplied.
Turning one’s itinerary south from Semur one comes shortly to Cussy-la-Colonne, where “la Colonne” is recognized by the archæologists as one of the most celebrated and most ancient monuments of Burgundy.
One learns from the inscription in Franco-Latin that the ancient monument (antiquissimum hoc monumentum) much damaged by the flapping wings of time, was rebuilt, as nearly as possible in its original form, by a prefect of the Department of the Côte d’Or (Collis Aurei Praefectus), M. Charles Arbaud, in the reign (sous l’empire) of Charles X (imperante Carolo X… Anno Salutis MDCCCXXV.) An astonishing mélange this of the tongue of Cicero and modern administrative patois.
The Colonne de Cussy, is rather a pagan memorial of a victory of the Romans in the reign of Diocletian, or, from another surmise, a funeral monument to a Roman general dead on the eve of victory. In either case, there it stands fragmentary and wind and weather worn like the pillars of Hercules or Pompey.
One simply notes Cussy and its “colonne” en passant on the road to Saulieu and Arnay-le-Duc, where the Ducs de Bourgogne had one of their most favoured country houses, or manors.
We only stopped at Saulieu by chance anyway; we stopped for the night in fact because it was getting too late to push on farther, and we were glad indeed that we did.
Saulieu is a most ancient town and owes its name to a neighbouring wood. Here was first erected a pagan temple to the sun; fragments of it have recently been found; and here one may still see the tracings of the old Roman way crossing what was afterwards, – to the powerful colony at Autun, – the Duchy of Burgundy.
As a fortified place Saulieu was most potent, but in 1519 a pest destroyed almost its total population. Disaster after disaster fell upon it and the place never again achieved the prominence of its neighbouring contemporaries.
It was here at Saulieu in Revolutionary times that the good people, as if in remembrance of the disasters which had befallen them under monarchial days, hailed with joy the arrival of the men of the Marseilles Battalion as they were marching on Paris “to help capture Capet’s castle.” Before the church of Saint Saturnin the Patriots’ Club had lighted a big bonfire, and the “Men of the Midi” were received with open arms and a warm welcome.
“How good they were to us at Saulieu,” said one of the number, recounting his adventures upon his arrival at Paris; “they gave us all the wine we could swallow and all the good things we could eat, – we had enough bœuf-à-la-daub to rise over our ears…”
To-day the good folk of Saulieu treat the stranger in not unsimilar fashion, and though the town lacks noble monuments it makes up for the deficiency in its good cheer. Saulieu in this respect quite lives up to its reputation of old. This little capital of the Morvan-Bourguignon has ever owned to one or more distinguished Vatel’s. Madame de Sévigné, in 1677, stopped here at a friend’s country house, and, as she wrote, “le fermier donne à tous un grand diner.” This was probably the Manoir de Guitant between Bourbilly and Saulieu. They were long at table, for it was a diner des adieux given by her friend Guitant to his visitors. She wrote further: “With the dinner one drank a great deal, and afterwards a great deal more; all went off with the greatest possible éclat. Voila l’affaire!”
Evidently such a manner of parting did not produce sadness!
A donjon tower with a duck-pond before it, opposite the Hotel de la Poste is all the mediævalism that one sees within the town at Saulieu to-day. It is all that one’s imagination can conjure up of the ideal donjon of mediævalism and interesting withal, though its history is most brief, indeed may be said to exist not at all in recorded form, for the chief references to Saulieu’s historic past date back to the pagan temple and the founding of the Abbey of Saint Andoche in the eighth century.
Still heading south one comes in a dozen kilometres to a chateau of the fourteenth century, and the restorations of Henri IV at Thoisy-la-Berchere. Later restorations, by the Marquis de Montbossier, who occupies it to-day, have made of it one of the most attractive of the minor chateaux of France. One may visit it under certain conditions, whether the family is in residence or not, and will carry away memories of many splendid chimney pieces and wall tapestries. For the rest the furnishings are modern, which is saying that they are banal. This of course need not always be so, but when the Renaissance is mixed with the art nouveau and the latest fantasies of Dufayal it lacks appeal. This is as bad as “Empire” and “Mission,” which seem to have set the pace for “club furniture” during the past decade.
Arnay-le-Duc still to the south was the site of a ducal Burgundian manor which almost reached the distinction of a palace. Here the country loving dukes spent not a little of their leisure time when away from their capital.
Arnay-le-Duc, more than any other town of its class in France, retains its almost undefiled feudal aspect to-day when viewed from beyond the walls. Formerly it was the seat of a bailliage and has conserved the débris of the feudal official residence. This is supported in addition by many fine examples of Renaissance-Burgundian architectural treasures which give the town at once the stamp of genuineness which it will take many years of progress to wholly eradicate.
None of these fine structures, least of all the ducal manor, is perfectly conserved, but the remains are sufficiently ample and well cared for to merit the classification of still being reckoned habitable and of importance. The old manor of the dukes has now descended to more humble uses, but has lost little of the aristocratic bearing which it once owned.
It was near this fortified bourgade of other days – fortified that the dukes might rest in peace when they repaired thither – that the infant Henri IV, at the age of sixteen, received his baptism of fire and first gained his stripes under the direction of Maréchal de Cossé-Brissac.