LES ROCHERS DE MAD. DE SÉVIGNÉ.

It is no longer possible to exclaim with Madame de Sévigné, “c’est une chose étrange, que les grands voyages!” Les grands voyages, on the contrary, have become the most common and every-day events of life! A “good traveller” has ceased to be “something at the latter end of a dinner,” as La Feu has it: and to talk of the “Pyrenean and the river Po,” would now incur for the prosing delinquent the character of a bore, and the penalty of being once heard and ever after avoided. Travelling, even to “Judah’s barren sands,” is no longer a distinction; and the Traveller’s Club has so completely become every body’s club, that it has been proposed, by way of something really exclusive, to start a crocchio ristretto of those who have never travelled at all. To talk of a visit to Paris is as cockney as to prate of the lakes of Cumberland or to cite their poets; to boast of having seen the Pope pontificate, is as pure a John-Gilpinism, as to chatter of Fonthill; and to have “swum in a gondola” is no more thought of, God save the mark! than a voyage in the Richmond steamer. The Pacific Ocean and the British Channel have become subjects equally common-place; and if another Peyrouse should disappear from the world, it is odds but he would be picked up in a month by some wandering dandy from Bond-street, or discovered on an uninhabited island by a roving detachment from the Yacht Club.

“How came you to alter your route last year? I thought to have met you at Thebes!”

“Oh! I changed my mind, on hearing that half Bloomsbury were there before me; and so cut off for the North Pole with Parry.”

“Did you meet any one there one knows?”

“No, that’s the charm of it. White bears excepted, one has the place to one’s self. Whom did you have, by the by, at Athens last year?”

“Scarcely a soul; at least, scarcely a soul ‘above buttons.’ There were a few third-rate English and first-rate Irish to be seen, sauntering about the Acropolis, and making goûtés in the Parthenon; but pas âme qui vive—that one ever heard of before. The A.’s pushed on for the Pyramids, the B.’s have been some time settled on the brow of Mount Caucasus, C. left us in the spring for the Crimea, and D. joined his eternal Pylades at Ispahan.”

“At Ispahan! what a fellow that D. is, with his eternal pretensions to taste! Go to Ispahan! when one is sick of it, and its Hajji Babas of Bond-street, and all that sort of thing. No one turns his horse’s head to the South now, unless indeed it were in search of the terra incognita. It is the merest pont aux ânes. One’s very tailor passes his vacances at Smyrna (where mine, by the by, picked up some charming cachemirs, to make cool coats for next winter); and you know the old story of Lady Lydia’s maid and Monsieur Forbin, and the silk parasol, in the ruins of Thebes. The North, Sir, the North is the only thing now, the Frozen sea, or Kamtschatka, via Moscow, that’s my carte de voyage for the next travelling season. Have you seen my Droshka?”

“No; but I have a Britska waiting for me at Petersburgh. I am going to join Lord Frederick J——, who has the prettiest thing on the Sea of Azoff, built by Potemkin. Will you be des nôtres?”

“With all my heart. Let us rendezvous at Novogorod, embark at Smolensko on the Dnieper, and so proceed by Kerson and the steppes.”

“Exactly; and that will bring us within two verstes of Lord F.’s villa.”

It is thus that the home-bred youths “prate of their whereabouts.” Not only il n’y a plus de Pyrénées, but the total annihilation of time and place seems to have realized the poet’s rant, and to have turned the nursery-dream of Peter Wilkins and his flying men to a “flat reality.” While British travellers are thus illustrating the “march of mind,” by marching off to all parts of the globe, and

there is a nation which keeps its ground with all that tenacity of a toad on a tile⁠[38]⁠—a nation which, compared by some to tigers, by others to monkeys, and by Voltaire to both, appears to have been the least understood of any nation on earth. For while the North in hordes come swarming, as of old, over the sunny regions of the South, and while the south seems to change sides, hands across, down the middle and up again, in a cosmopolitical country-dance with the natives of the frozen North, the French, who stand between both, are sure to be always found at home. For one French traveller, of either sex, to be met on the high roads of Europe, one thousand, at least, of any, or every other nation, may be seen scampering from the Tagus to the Neva, and from Thebes to the Giant’s Causeway. The French are, in fact, the most grave, sedentary, and immovable people of Europe. Even their women, so falsely accused of vivacity and activity, expend their energies in perpetual movement of mind and muscle. Under the old régime (when the women in France led the lives of the sultanas in the harem, one particular only excepted), all the institutions, both political and social, tended to encourage habits of indolence, in which, in free states, and under happier moral combinations, the sex can never indulge. The very forms and language of high society were borrowed from the inveterate habits of a slavish, idle, and sedentary existence. Did any affliction befal a lady of rank, she forthwith went to bed, to receive the condolence of friends dans la ruelle. If she went to drive, it was but to promener en voiture; and even in modern Paris, a promenade extends but to a seat in the gardens of the Tuileries, or a chair on the Boulevards.

I had a friend in Paris, some few years ago, who was the most charming and most indolent creature in the world. She was one of the best remains of the old régime of rank and fashion, who had survived the plebeian bustle and democratic activity of the Revolution. Though she had nearly reached her grand climacteric, she was, as she often assured me, still “as active, vivacious, and locomotive as she had been in the flower and bloom of her youth;” and, witty and indolent as Madame du Deffand herself, she was a finely preserved specimen of a genus, now rapidly disappearing, which philosophy might have contemplated with rapturous curiosity. Madame de —— was a perfect impersonation of a lady of fashion of the days of Marie Antoinette. Her ruelle was her empire; her chaise longue her throne. She took her chocolate, and received visits in bed, during the day; rose late, dined at the hour of the old French souper, between eight and nine, and sat up half the night, surrounded by her habitués, among whom were to be numbered all the bel esprit of Paris.

I was as much with her as my health and our very opposed habits would permit, for she was a perfect study; and I generally left her in the midst of her media noche, in all the vigour of spirits which are vulgarly supposed to belong to the early part of the day. As I made many sacrifices to these habits of indolence, I occasionally required them in turn; and I sometimes succeeded in digging her out of her hotel, where she had for years been niched, motionless as the priestesses of the temples of Pompeii, which modern virtù excavates from their domicile of centuries. I once routed her from her bed at mid-day; and had her dressed and driving at Longchamp, just as the beau monde were turning their horses’ heads homeward. I also once produced her, to the amazement of her friends, at the opera, before the ballet was half over; and I actually had her at a séance of the Institut before the expected discours of the long-winded Mons. Quatremère de Quincy had quite concluded.

My indolent and agreeable friend, notwithstanding this decided vis inertiæ, talked in raptures of the country (like all French women), and had a campagne three leagues from Paris, about which she raved, and from which her jardinière was duly replenished with March violets, April hyacinths, and immortels all the year. Daily projects were made, and as daily broken, for taking me to this “Délices;” and it was not till after a thousand “Nous remettrons cela à un autre jour,” that the day at last arrived, when, having myself made all the necessary preparations for a formidable journey of three leagues, assisted at the levée, hurried forward the toilette, and bribed over Félicie, her unfelicitous femme de chambre, to unusual expedition, I at last got Madame de —— under weigh, and absolutely transported her from her dormeuse au coin du feu, to her calèche. With horses and a coachman as lazy as herself, it was late in the evening when we arrived within view of the iron gates of the campagne; and before we had reached the end of the straight avenue of limes, it was so dark that we could scarcely discern the grim, grotesque stone statues of Arlequin and Colombine, which guarded the flight of marble steps, leading to the broad paved terrace on which the maison de campagne was perched.

Before we had reposed from the fatigues of the journey, and swallowed our goûté, it was what is vulgarly called pitch-dark; and as the motive for making this course was to see the gardens, the serres chaudes, and the luxuriant beds of hyacinths, then in all their “redolence of bloom,” I could not help expressing my disappointment, with a captiousness which afforded infinite amusement to Madame de ——, whose bursts of laughter were interrupted with “Et tout cela pour une fleur! pour un promenade! pour une fatigue manqué!”⁠[39] My ill-humour, however, was at once vanquished, on beholding the gardener enter the room with a lighted lantern, and equipped with a nightcap under his hat, to conduct us to the garden. We immediately followed our guide; and, accompanied by Félicie picking her short steps over the dewy gravel, and her mistress’s fat dog, Sylphide, waddling beside her, we actually saw the hyacinths, and noticed the fine growth of the precocious petits pois, by candle-light.

With such inertness and hatred of all movement, it may readily be imagined that a necessity, which soon afterwards occurred to Madame de ——, for visiting the remotest part of the remote province of Bretagne, was an event full of difficulty and annoyance. A considerable property, however, depended on her attendance on the Cour d’Assise of Rennes, and there was no alternative.

After procrastinating from day to day, and being half inclined to incur the risk of absence, and to leave her procès to take care of itself, she at length decided to go on my offering to accompany her. I was just then in a fit of ennui at finding all London in Paris, and was delighted by the hope of visiting a province that had the merit of being free from the incursions of his Britannic Majesty’s somewhat tiresome subjects. My proposition was accepted with a sort of incredulous joy; for a sacrifice of such magnitude was not to be understood: so leaving behind us tous nos enfans et tous nos maris, we started for Brittany, on a brilliant April morning, in a style that recalled the travelling of the days of Louis XIV. when the carrosse d’un Grand Seigneur was a moving house, and (from the number of persons to be stuffed into its portières, its sur le devant, and other holes and corners) a house of no inconsiderable dimensions.

Madame de —— travelled with her own four sleek horses, her own carriage, and as many of her habitual comforts and nécessaires as could be stuffed into its seats, pockets, wells, and imperials. Félicie and Sylphide occupied the back seats, as tenants in common with cushions, pillows, walking-canes, parasols, vitchouras, and the nécessaire de toilette. Madame de ——, wrapped up in her douillette and cachemir, with eau de chipre in one hand, and her bonbonnière in the other, was obliged to have frequent recourse to both, in order to support her through the fatigue of the day. The historical sites of Rambouillet and Maintenon, on the contrary, kept me fully awake, till we arrived at the old town of ——, one of Madame de Sévigné’s oft-cited stages, on her way to Les Rochers. Here we alighted before the porte-cochère of the Préfet (the uncle of Madame de ——, à la mode de Bretagne), whose salon presented in miniature all that is ridiculous, pompous, grovelling, and contemptible in the Court of the Tuileries. The Préfet represented noblement et avec dignité; and did the honours by his fair cousin, before his country subjects, as if she were a princess visiting the court of a brother prince; while Madame de ——, on her part, exhibited all the superiority, which Parisian ladies never fail to show off in their penitential pilgrimages to the provinces.

Amused for a time, but delighted to leave behind me the formality of the little court of the Prefecture, it was with no faint pleasure I saw my dilatory friend seated in her carriage at a reasonable hour on the following morning. Being one of those who, like Boileau’s abbot, had never seen the sun rise, the exertion soon overpowered her; and she fell into a profound sleep, in which she was joined by Sylphide and Félicie; while the novelty of all I beheld, kept me in that delightful excitement, in which alone we truly feel the value of existence.

The old feudal dukedom of Bretagne, intact from the common places of British travellers, untrodden by their restless steps, untraced by their busy pens—is still the Bretagne of Louis XIV. The natives continue to preserve their individuality, as in the days of their rude but heroic souverains. Genuine and unmixed descendants of the ancient Britons (who took refuge here when expelled from their own country), they remain to this day as unlike the inhabitants of the southern and central provinces of France, as if they still went in puris naturalibus, and painted their bodies blue. We had scarcely passed the Loire, when I observed an abrupt change in the physiognomy of the people. In the pure Armorican, or Bas-Breton of the aubergiste of the ancient town of Laval, I was struck by the rhythm and accent of my compatriots, the Celts,⁠[40] and almost fancied myself listening to some Mrs. O’Shaughnessy in Connaught, or to the reading of a page from the Scotch novels. As we proceeded into the department of Ille et Vilaine, the heart of the province, the scenery became gradually less and less French. The dense and distant forests, shading to the edge of the flat, extensive heaths, recalled all the romantic desolation of northern dreariness; relieved by patches of rank verdure and flowering orchards, much more picturesque than the vaunted “vine-covered hills” of France.

Bretagne, only united to the French crown in 1532, by the marriage of Francis the First with the grand-daughter of its last duke, was so long governed in the true spirit of feudality by its petty but warlike princes, that its political circumstances, combining with a remote and insulated position, excluded it from all participation in the progressive civilization of Europe. In the Revolution, it suffered much by the Vendean wars, which threw it back nearly to what it was under Louis XIV.; nor has the share which it had in the general reorganization of France, materially changed its original physiognomy, either physically or morally. Rude and remote, however, as it was, it still produced some of the finest and most distinguished characters which illustrate the history of France. The two rival and romantic Dukes, Charles de Blois, and John de Montfort;⁠[41] the heroic Jeanne la Boiteuse, Duchess of the province, in whose right Charles de Blois held the sovereignty; the clever Olivier de Clisson, constable of France; the gallant Tennegui du Chatel; and that flower of chivalry, Bertrand du Guesclin “le franc et loyal,” are characters which belong to the poetry of history, and almost redeem those bold, bad times, which produced such human monsters as Charles le Mauvais, and Pierre le Cruel. It is, perhaps, no false induction to assert, that much of their soldierly frankness and noble simplicity arose from an organization, nourished and preserved by the very localities of the rude clime and wild scenery in which they received their existence.

With the history of Bertrand du Guesclin in my hand, which had been lent me by my host of the Prefecture, (that history which Madame de Sévigné had recommended to Madame de Grignan,) and with my head full of de Montfort and de Blois, and les grandes compagnies, and the maladrins, and the Black Prince, and Jean Chandos, and the other prominent characters in the great melodrame enacted in Bretagne during the fourteenth century, I was abruptly recalled to the dull realities of the present moment, on the evening of the third day’s journey, by a shock, a concussion, that awoke my sleeping partners, and extorted exclamations from Madame de ——, screams from Félicie, and a loud, shrill, continuous howl from Sylphide. These, with the crashing of flacons, and the pious interjections of the coachman Baptiste, and the gros juron of Hypolite the laquais, “gave the world assurance” that we were “abîmés, plantés pour la nuit,”—in one word, that the carriage was not only overturned, but rendered wholly unserviceable, till it should have passed through the renovating hands of a country smith.

To proceed farther was impossible; we were, by a mile or two, less than half-way between Vitri (where we had dined, “à la tour de Sévigné,”) and Rennes, our proposed halt for the night. Baptiste was a Bas-Breton; and having assured us that he knew every step of the road, comme son bonnet de nuit, he had turned into a narrow cross road, which was to have shortened the distance by a league. It was this unlucky pretension that produced the accident, which now left us, at sunset, in a dreary by-road, with a broken-down vehicle, and no visible prospect of aid, nearer than Vitri. While Madame de —— was exhausting herself in inefficient complaint, while Félicie was scolding Baptiste from the window, and Sylphide was accompanying both with a basso continuo of howl, I alighted to reconnoitre our position, and discover what chance we had of assistance; and while Baptiste was showing me where the spring was broken, a person approached with a book in his hand, from the gate of a little orchard to the left. As he took off his hat and discovered his tonsured head, he observed, that there was a forge belonging to the château, the turrets of which were visible through the dark woods which cover the whole plain between Vitri and Rennes; that immediate assistance could be had, and the spring patched up, so as to bring us, with careful driving, to Rennes before midnight. The person who gave us this information was an elderly man, of interesting appearance, and in a clerical habit, with a certain air de prêtre, which left us no doubt as to his vocation.

“Et le château, Monsieur?” demanded Madame de ——; “what is its name? It probably belongs to some of my friends; for I am connected with nearly all the old noblesse of the province.”

“It is the Château des Rochers, Madame!”

“The Château des Rochers!” reiterated Madame de ——.

“The château of Madame de Sévigné!” I exclaimed, with almost breathless delight.

The stranger bowed assent. “Eh, mon dieu! qui est donc le châtelain? to what noble family has it descended? The Sévignés are extinct; and I believe Les Rochers were bequeathed to the Duchesse de Simiane by her illustrious grandmother.”

“Les Rochers have fallen into various hands within the last half-century, Madame. It was sold, with other national property, at the Revolution. The present proprietor is a rich gentleman of the province, Le Baron de ——. He is at present in Paris; but there will be no difficulty in showing you the château, which may amuse away the time till your carriage is set to rights.”

Madame de ——, who had not heard the name of the present proprietor of Les Rochers, whispered me, “Ah! ma belle, ce Monsieur le Baron d’aujourd’hui est sans doute un de la Bande Noire,”⁠[42] coldly declined the proposition, and as rest, to her, was always enjoyment, she patiently resigned herself to the agreeable infliction of remaining tranquilly in the carriage; while Félicie, who descended to give Sylphide an airing, immediately seated herself on a mossy bank by the road side; and Hypolite, mounting one of the coach-horses, rode off for the smith, the smoke of whose forge was visible at a short distance.

The idea of visiting Les Rochers, whence so many of the inimitable letters of the most charming writer in the world were written, appeared to me rather a pleasant dream, than a reality. I could scarcely credit my luck. So taking the stranger’s offered arm, I promised Madame de —— a speedy return, and proceeded to the shrine of “Notre Dame des Rochers,” with as much devotional enthusiasm as ever carried a jubilee pilgrim across the Pontine Marshes, from the Abruzzi to St. Peter’s. Having cut across the little orchard, we were still involved in a woody copse, which gave us only partial gleams of the white towers of the château. “Envoyez-moi de la vue, et je vous enverrai des arbres,”⁠[43] writes Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan: and the request is still applicable to the site, which is covered with trees, to the total exclusion of some charming views, which, with a little effort, might be happily commanded from the building. The château and its mass of antique towers stand upon an esplanade, after the manner of the feudal edifices of France. La cour du château, spacious and gloomy, is shut in by a ponderous iron gate, through which I gazed with a fluttering heart, while the old porter, summoned by the stranger, went for his keys to give us admission. Nothing could be more antique and picturesque than the architecture, tinged and partially lighted, as it was, by a brilliant sunset. The château is said to date its erection as far back as the fourteenth century; and its high antiquity was verified by a spiral flight of stairs, cut out of a tower in the corps de logis; which was flanked by two other towers,—the whole bordered by grim Gothic heads, and monstrous nondescript representations of animals, which incrusted the upper part of the building, from the springing of the roof to its summit. One little tower stood apart, built in the same grotesque style, except that its roof resembled an extinguisher.

“That,” said my cicerone, “is a modern building. It is the chapel mentioned in Madame de Sévigné’s letters, built by her for le bien bon, the amiable and witty Abbé de Coulanges.”

The porter now gave us admittance; and as we paused before the interesting edifice, which, with Turkish barbarity, had been recently white-washed, he exclaimed, “It is another thing now, pardie, to what it was before the Revolution, with its green and brown walls, and moss, and ivy, and birds’ nests, and what not!—Mais nous avons changés tout cela—nous avons reblanchi toutes ces vieilles masures, à la chaux; et encore donné trois couches bien épaisses en dehors et en dedans.”⁠[44]⁠

The old porter then waddled on before us, and the stranger observed, in a low voice, as if replying to the disgust my looks involuntarily expressed, “Monsieur le Concierge, it seems, has never read the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They have indeed changed this most interesting of all sites into a grotesque métairie;” and pointing to a lavoir and stables decorated with Corinthian columns, the curé added, “And yet this is not the worst!”

We were now in the hall of the château, and followed our cicerone through the apartments not closed against the intrusion of strangers; but all had been so recently and thoroughly changed to the modern style of decoration, that there was scarcely any object left to recal la bellissima madre, except her portrait by Mignard, which was placed over le poële in the dining-room. Dark, low, and narrow, this apartment could not have been the room in which Madame de Sévigné so often entertained the splendid governor of the province and his lady, the high-bred Palatine, with the jovial, gay, and witty visitors, the Coulanges, Pomenars, and others of rank and talents, whom the assembling of the States General at Rennes brought to the château. Nothing now remained as it had been even so recently as the year 1810.

“Every thing has been destroyed and effaced,” whispered the stranger: “and even the cabinet de lecture and the bedchambers of Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan (where the portrait of la belle et fière comtesse still hangs) have undergone a similar and equally barbarous alteration.”

As these classical and historical apartments were locked up, and as time pressed, and the sun was sinking, we hurried on to the gardens and grounds, so often described by Madame de Sévigné. But still change, barbarous, pitiless change prevailed. New walls, new terraces, new orangeries destroyed all those precious associations so intimately connected with the old. They had also recently cut down those allées, planted and watched with such maternal tenderness by Madame de Sévigné; and as their sites were pointed out to me, I could not avoid exclaiming, “Helas! qu’est devenu ce bosquet enchanté?”

“Que voulez-vous, Madame?” asked the old gardener, pettishly. “We have cut them down to make chicken-hatches for Madame.”

The stranger, to console me, exhibited the phenomenon of the echo, so often cited to Madame de Grignan, and which, as it could not be turned to any account for the hen-coops, still remains in all its original mystery.

“L’allée de ma fille still existed in 1810,” said my guide, as evident a Sevignite as myself; “but there now remains not one of those venerable witnesses, which so often shaded and sheltered in their promenades the tenderest of mothers and the most adored of daughters. Not one old and silent confidant exists of those piquantes causeries between the witty maman beauté, and that trésor de folie, her still wittier son,—of the strange but humorous confessions, followed by such mild reprimands, and such sarcastic pleasantries,—and of those aveux naïfs de l’aimable vaurien, who in one night at Lansequenet mangeait 500 gros chênes à sa mère, and who, brave as Condé, spirituel as St. Evremont, had entered the lists with Dacier, concerning Horace, had lived with Racine, laughed with Molière, jilted Ninon, se grisait par bon air, committed a thousand follies, confessed them all a thousand times to his belle maman, and, always forgiven, continued to repent old pleasures at Les Rochers, and to solicit new, on his return to Paris.”

I inquired in vain for those formal and venerable allées, ornamented with so many pretty devices, and consecrated by such recollections;—all had fallen victims to the axe of the terrible Baron Breton. Their names, however, still survived; and I had the melancholy pleasure of walking over the ground which was still known as “l’Allée Royale,” “l’Allée du Point du Jour,” “l’Allée de Tremaine,” and “l’Allée de l’Infinie.” At the farther extremity of the Allée Royale, a semi-circular seat of verdure, commanding a delicious view of the coteaux boisés of the immediate neighbourhood, invited us to a momentary halt. This was the charming spot, whence Madame de Sévigné wrote so many of her letters,—“la Place de Madame.” It was decorated with a fine old orange-tree, which had been removed from its vast green-house, in a wooden caisse, by the stranger himself, in the absence of the baron. While we gazed on the rich and lovely vista, the sunlight gradually faded from the summits of the loftiest trees, the shadows deepened, and the necessity of returning was acknowledged with regret, and obeyed with reluctance.

Having begged permission, therefore, to gather a little bouquet from the orange-tree which shaded “la Place de Madame,” I again accepted the arm of the courteous cicerone. As we proceeded towards the carriage, my thoughts were so completely transported to the days of the La Rochefoucaulds, the Coulanges, and the La Moussés, that, forgetting the lapse of a century, and of events that had doubled that interval, I inquired if any of the family of the amusing Mademoiselle du Plessis, the bas bleu of Vitri, and the subject of Madame de Sévigné’s humorous delineations, were still in the neighbourhood.⁠[45] He replied, that of the dramatis personæ of Les Rochers, of all those who had played such amusing and characteristic parts in the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, he knew but one name that had survived the lapse of time and the general bouleversement. It was that of Pilois.

“What!” I said, “the favourite and venerable gardener of Madame de Sévigné, who planted those very trees under whose shade we are walking?⁠[46] Do any of his descendants reside here?”

“His great grandson has the honour of addressing you,” he replied, bowing.

We were now within view of the carriage; and taking from my neck a little cross of Irish bogwood, I requested him to accept of it, as a small token of acknowledgment for the pleasure I had derived through his means, in being permitted to visit the shrine of the goddess “of my idolatry,” and to enjoy a conversation with the descendant of her faithful friend and domestic, to whose character his illustrious lady had communicated a classic and deathless interest. The good clergyman blushed, bowed, and accepted my offering, with as much courtesy, and a feeling apparently as deep, as if it had been of “one entire and perfect crysolite.” The spring was now patched up, and pronounced capable of carrying us to Rennes. We therefore bade a hasty adieu to our accidental acquaintance, and soon lost sight of the ancient and memorable towers of Le Château des Rochers.⁠[47]⁠