Chapter V: In the Valley of the Eure

The busy little villages which lie in the course of the Eure from Pont de l’Arche to Louviers are unheard of in the school geographies and conventional guide-books. They have little appealing interest for the general traveller. Arthur Young, a hundred or more years ago, knew them when he journeyed from Rouen to Louviers, and they have not greatly changed since that day.

By no means are they mere hamlets, though St. Pierre du Vauvray, St. Etienne du Vauvray, and one or two others are straggling enough in their way. With an important local railway junction at St. Pierre, however, there has grown up a traffic which has perhaps had less effect on the general topography round about than it has on the somnolence which once must have existed to a far greater degree than to-day.

At St. Cyr du Vaudreuil one sees sawmills and flour-mills grouped along the banks of the Eure, which here spreads itself into numerous branches with tree-grown islets, forming natural piers for the bridge which belongs to that great national highway from Rouen to Nantes, known as National Road No. 162.

From the first span of this long bridge, one sees, up or down stream, a succession of groupings of poplars and locusts growing up from the river bank, a tiny orchard or two, the long, wooded alley of larches which forms the entrance to the private park on the Ile l’Homme, the curiously spired church of Notre Dame du Vaudreuil, a sluice, and a weir. There are innumerable “motives,” as artists love to call them, for a day’s, a week’s, or a month’s work of brush or pencil.

The church of St. Cyr itself is a severe little building, with no decoration or ornament worthy of remark, though its interior is by no means bare or ugly. It has, furthermore, a charming roof of barrel-vaulted brickwork, which would be the pride of a more pretentious building. Its chief charm, however, is its modern but exceedingly picturesque spire which towers above the western portal. Its slated peak, its ornate iron arrow, and its corniced shaft, all group in delightful fashion among surroundings which, if not in any way luxurious, are exceedingly lively and interesting. Pigeons, and even crows and swallows apparently, fly in and out quite in the romantic fashion of sentimental poetry. The wonder is that they have not stopped the functions of the clock, which in this case, with its four dials facing each of the four quarters, is decidedly less offensive than usual, and forms a charming high light in a landscape of tender greens and grays.

The two artistic and architectural glories of Louviers are its magnificently florid church and the Hôtel du Grand Cerf. The Church of Notre Dame is a curiously hybrid structure in spite of the almost universal admiration bestowed upon its specific ornateness; for most people view it from only one side, that which has all the liveliness of the late Gothic era, or even later, for Renaissance details have crept in here and there, which will not allow it to rank with St. Maclou at Rouen, the peer of its class.

Renaissance details are seldom beautiful in conjunction with Gothic of any form, and when mixed with the latest variety which took distinguishable form are the more to be regretted, if one admires it in its purity, as it sometimes does exist, though very infrequently.

Some will not admit the beauty of Renaissance details at all. Certainly it is open to objection in a northern clime, regardless of how successfully the importation has been developed in architecture other than great churches. Here, however, in this singularly effective church at Louviers, it hangs like a parasite on buttress, lintel, and wall; not obtrusively, indeed, at a distance it is hardly distinguishable, but it is there, nevertheless, and taints the whole structure like the blight on a blossoming tree. Notre Dame de Louviers is a conglomerate structure, with the palm going to its severe, simple north tower and façade, in spite of the effectiveness of the more florid south front.

Not even in the Low Countries, or at Noyon in Picardy, where is that dignified and imposing early Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame, is there to be found a more impressive and elegant flanking west tower than here. Its graceful windows look bleak, boarded up or filled with stonework; but this was not for ornament, or they might as well have been left bare. It was probably for strength, temporary or permanent, in the expectation that some day an ornate spire would be added, which might rival even that of Texier’s at Chartres. Such was not to be, however. Nothing happened but a sudden desire to ornament the western porch and façade, in the sixteenth century; and so the edifice stands to-day, not a solitary example of such work; for one must not forget the cathedral at Evreux or that astonishing and freaklike Church of St. Gervais at Gisors near by, but one which is all the more sympathetic and agreeable because of the juxtaposition of the contrasting styles. The interior is interesting, but by no means to the same extent as the exterior, though the general effect is one of genial warmth and luxury.

The Eure, though not a great river, is a very beautiful one; and, in spite of being not well-known, is a very useful stream to the manufactories along its banks. It is tributary to the Seine, and properly belongs to the watershed of its larger parent. It flows nearly northward through Anet and Acquigny, and the little metropolis of Louviers, till its juncture with the Seine at Pont de l’Arche makes them one, so far as navigation is concerned, from Pont de l’Arche to Louviers.

One remarks the many tall chimneys of the cloth-factories of Louviers, of which Arthur Young wrote in the year 1787. With letters of introduction he had come to visit one of the leading manufacturers of a cloth then thought to be the superior of any woollen in the world. “Perfection goes no further than the Vigona cloths of M. Decretot,” said the genial traveller.

At Louviers the Eure divides into many branches and flows through the town in quite a Dutch-canal fashion. Louviers is both a new and an old town. The first in stone and brick housing the great cloth-factories on the water’s edge; while the second in stone and wood surrounds the magnificent Church of Notre Dame, and the old market-place where on Saturdays is to be seen a most extensive and picturesque display.

Louviers suffered greatly in the “Hundred Years’ War”; and the English invaded it in 1418, condemning to death 120 merchants chosen from the wealthy residents of the town. Even then it sheltered many cloth-manufacturing establishments whose products were in great repute and demand at all of the great fairs of the middle ages. In later days the prices of the manufactured goods have lowered; but the quality of the product of Louviers has always remained of the best. A trip up the valley of the Eure, from Pont de l’Arche to its rise near the southern boundary of Normandy and on up the valley of the Avre, will be wholly a new experience to many. It is not a magnificent stream, but it is a most industrious one, and turns numerous mill-wheels and waters a considerable section of the plain of Upper Normandy west of the Seine.

Damps, St. Cyr, Louviers, Acquigny, and Pacy are comparatively well-known, at least by users of the roadway, even if they do not stop over. The rich charms of many of the smaller places are, however, quite generally ignored.

Acquigny has in its church some remarkable wood-carvings and some valuable reliquaries. In the cemetery is a chapel, built over the tombs of St. Maure and St. Venerand, who were martyrized in the sixth century. There is also a château of the time of François I.

Next is Heudreville, with a diminutive church in part Romanesque; and at Croix St. Leufroy are the remains of the Abbey of Croix, founded in 788, and built into the fifteenth and sixteenth century parish church, in which are also the ancient baptismal fonts from the same edifice.

At Autheuil-Authouillet is a church with some good wood-carvings and ancient statues. It has, too, a fifteenth-century churchyard cross.

Chambray is of little enough note historically, except for an unimposing château of the time of Henri IV.; but its modern-looking, though undeniably and romantically environed, mill is one of those reminders of times, all but disappeared, before the advance of steam and electricity, which will appeal to artists and all lovers of travel.

If an artist could find accommodation in some wayside tavern, which is doubtful, as Pacy-sur-Eure, ten kilometres away, is the nearest centre of population--if a tiny place of two thousand souls can be so called--where such might be found, he would find view-points and colour-schemes enough to last him a fortnight, unless he worked with the rapidity of a Turner.

Just before reaching Pacy-sur-Eure one comes to Jouy-Cocherel,--and most likely passes it with a rush; for the roadway, though not a national road, is of that superlative excellence which often induces the traveller, if on a motor-car, to keep the pace until some untoward thing stops him.

The fifteenth-century church is all that it should be, but the near-lying hamlet of Cocherel claims the predominant historical interest. It was here in 1364 that the redoubtable Duguesclin vanquished the combined troops of the Kings of England and Navarre, and made prisoner the great captain, Jean de Grailly, after his rear-guard was cut to pieces by the French cavalry.

This feat of arms is commemorated by a monument erected near the banks of the Eure.

Menilles, almost up with Pacy, has an attractive church whose portal bears some most acceptable statuettes of the time of Louis XII. There is also a sixteenth-century château, most delightfully placed high above the roadway.

Pacy-sur-Eure is in itself hardly an attraction for the tourist; but it is his only chance for a square meal such as automobilists and cyclists demand, between Louviers and Evreux; and its hotel, the Lion d’Or, is writ down in the books of many as one of those enjoyable and unexpected _tables d’hôte_ which one so frequently comes across in the open country of France.

Pacy is the head of canal-boat and barge traffic on the Eure, and achieves something of importance from this enterprise; but otherwise, save for a most excellent automobile garage and a book-store which would delight the inhabitants of an English or American town of twenty times the size of Pacy, there is not much else of commerce to be noted.

The church dates from the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and was built upon a still more ancient foundation, so far lost in antiquity that its date is unknown.

In July, 1793, General de Puisaye, at the head of the Revolutionists, was defeated in a battle here by the troops of the National Convention.

Onward, toward the source of the Eure, one passes, by a gently rolling highroad, Hécourt, Breuilpont, and Lorey; unremarkable except for the natural beauties of their situation and the surrounding country. Where the roadway rises just beyond Pacy one gets a delightful view of the river valley known as the “Circuit of the Eure.” Here the not very ample stream winds in and out among the tall poplars in the same sinuous curves made famous by the memories of the celebrated vale of Cashmere, the broad river-bottom itself stretching out on either side a half-dozen miles, and leaving the silver stream a tiny thread running through the centre. It is a truly idyllic picture, and full of the sentiment which artists love.

Bueil is hardly more than a railway junction, where the line for Cherbourg and Brest divides; and at Garennes, an unassuming little village, the highroad crosses to the opposite river bank by a small bridge, from which one gets a delightful outlook up and down stream. Numerous water-mills are scattered here and there through the meadow-land, and there is an aspect of mechanical industry, which is astonishing to one whose conception of a factory is a great building of brick, with many windows and a towering chimney-stack as its chief and visible signs of usefulness. At Garennes one may see the trenches of the camp occupied by the Duc de Mayenne at the battle of the Ligeurs, at Ivry, in the last years of the sixteenth century.

Before one reaches Anet is Ivry-la-Bataille, a place name that conjures up much of history, though the great battle itself took place five kilometres away, in the neighbourhood of Epieds.

A column, first erected by Henri IV. and rebuilt by Napoleon I., marks the spot where the battle was fought on March 4, 1590. In the chronicles one reads specifically that it marks the exact location of the tent of the victor “_au panache blanc_.”

Ivry-la-Bataille has a thousand inhabitants, and a mere roadside tavern which rejoices in the grand name of Hôtel St. Martin. There are still remains of its ancient triple moat and fortifications, which date from the time of Louis the Fat and Philippe-Auguste, when the town was of vastly more importance than it has ever been since.

In 1418 the place was taken by Talbot, in 1424 by the Duke of Bedford, and in 1449 by Count Dunois, who demolished the fortifications.

Up to his time the name was Ivry-la-Chaussée, but since the great victory here of Henri IV. against the League, in 1590, it has been known as Ivry-la-Bataille.

Near the southern boundary of the ancient province of Normandy, in the valley of the Eure, is the Château of Anet, Delorme’s famous masterpiece, built for the winsome Diane de Poitiers, whose husband was once Seneschal of Normandy, in spite of the fact that her own name was evolved from the family estates in Poitou.

It was in 1552 that Delorme laid out the general plan of this magnificent Renaissance work, of which the wonderful portal and one wing yet remain. The rest was destroyed in the fury of the Revolution. Jean Goujon, the most famous of the Renaissance sculptors of France, lent his aid; and the arabesques and window decorations of Jean Cousin are, like the contributions of his contemporaries, incomparable.

This château was the pet and pride of the attractive and unfortunate Diane. It was also a favourite resting-place of Henri II., who often sojourned here. La Fontaine wrote, presumably on the strength of having been invited there:

“par l’ordre d’Apollon
Transportent dans Anet tout le sacre vallon;
Je le crois; puissions-nous chanter sous les ombrages
Des arbres dont ce lieu va border ces rivages.”

The susceptible Henri II. gave the new structure to the winsome Diane after her fascinations had been rejected by his father, François I. Diane must have had a sincere attachment for the family, or was able to convince the son that she had, to have acquired this magnificent establishment, now greatly remodelled, but still showing the outlines of the original château and many remains which are more than fragmentary. It is one of the best works of the architect, Philibert Delorme. The portal, which is magnificent, one wing of the present château, and the chapel are the relics left to-day of the original structure.

Art lovers will recall the celebrated statue known as “La Diane,” by Jean Goujon, one of the few authenticated works of this sixteenth-century genius of sculpture. This statue formerly occupied the centre of the Court of Honour of the Château d’Anet. It was all but destroyed when the rest of the château suffered at the Revolution; and, though in fragments, was sold to some one who placed it for safe-keeping in the _Musée des Petits-Augustins_ at Paris. In 1818 the group was inherited by the Duc d’Orléans, but Louis XVIII. acquired it for the Louvre by giving in exchange the statue of “Ajax Defying the Gods.”

The group, of course, had its inception in the mythological story of Diana; but since the court charmer herself was a huntress of repute, it was but natural for Goujon to have modelled the features upon that of Henri’s favourite. This has frequently been denied or ignored, though it seems plausible; and, when one notes the features and the coiffure, he finds them distinctly French, not Greek.

Diane, nude, is posed nonchalantly, her right arm around the neck of a superb deer whose antlers have six branches and who crouches on the ground beside her. In her left arm Diane bears a golden bow, and her hair is garlanded with pearls. The two dogs, Procion and Syrius, are playing beside her; and the whole grouping and execution is of a superb fidelity to nature, and must undoubtedly always remain as the most typical example of the best of French sculpture of the epoch of the Renaissance.

The daughter of Jean de Poitiers, Comte de St. Vallier, of the Valentinois counts, was born Sept. 3, 1499. Her biographers have in the main been flatterers, but it is generally admitted that she was a precocious child. At any rate, her education was considerable even for her time.

Diane married Louis de Brézé, whose paternal home was at Anet and who had previously espoused Catherine de Dreux, at the tender age of sixteen years. De Brézé, or De Dreux-Brézé as he had become by his former marriage, was then fifty-five years of age, so perhaps there is some cause for the winsome Diane’s lack of constancy. She had secured from François I. the release of her father, who had been imprisoned for complicity in the Bourbon affair,--a circumstance unknowingly, it has been said, brought about by Diane’s husband himself.

It was on a certain occasion at Amboise, when the nobles attached to the court were awaiting the pleasure of François as to whether or not he would hunt that morning, that we read one of the earliest references to Diane. The Comte de Saint-Vallier had just given the signal for departure when Marguerite d’Alençon addressed the father of Diane as follows:

“M. le Comte, tell me, when is the court to be graced by the presence of your incomparable daughter, Madame Diane, Grande Seneschale of Normandy?”

“Madame,” said Saint-Vallier, “her husband, M. de Brézé, is much occupied in his distant government. Diane is young, much younger than her husband. The court, madame, is dangerously full of temptations to the young....”

“We lose a bright jewel by her absence,” replied Marguerite.

Saint-Vallier had by no means any business to mix himself up in the Bourbon mêlée, and sorry enough he was for it ultimately.

Bourbon had fled to Spain, ultimately to take the field against his royal master, François, in Italy, and the Comte de Saint-Vallier was the principal aid in his flight and his chief accomplice. What his reward was to be no one knows.

“Saint-Vallier a conspirator, too!” said François, when told of the affair. “What! the captain of my archers? That strikes us hard. Well, I am sorry for Jean de Poitiers.”

“Are the proofs certain?...”

“Jean de Poitiers, my ci-devant captain of the guards, is the father of a charming lady. Madame Diane, the Seneschale of Normandy, is an angel, though her husband, De Brézé,--why, he is a monster. The old story, my lords,--Vulcan and Venus.”

In due time Diane appears at the court. “A lady, deeply veiled, who desires to speak with his Majesty alone,” she is announced.

“By St. Denis,” says the king, “who is she?”

“I think, Sire,” says the page, “it is the wife of the Grand Seneschal of Normandy.”

“Well, it does not surprise me,” says the king. “When her father got himself into this mess, I assumed she would intercede for him.”

“Diane entered,”--quoting from a contemporary account,--“her head covered with a deep veil.” She weeps, but her beauty shines radiantly through her tears. She is exquisitely fair and wonderfully fresh, with golden hair and dark eyebrows.

“Pardon, Sire,” she cries, “pardon my father. He is too old for punishment, and has hitherto been true to your Majesty.”

“At any rate, madame,” said François, “he is blessed with a most surpassing daughter. Mercy, Madame Diane, is a royal prerogative, but beauty is most potent. Will you, fair lady, exercise your prerogative and lend your presence to my court?... Then I declare your father pardoned, even though he had rent the crown from off my head.”

Diane thus left Normandy and became one of the shining lights of the beauty-loving court of François I., though, as history tells, she was not able to exercise her wiles to any great extent upon the monarch himself. Indeed he soon forsook her when she laid herself out to fascinate the feeble Henri, the king’s son,--a task which was not difficult or slow of consummation.

Her devotion to François was not returned, at least not ardently, though François is known to have visited the De Brézé home on three occasions, as royal ordinances were signed or dated from there in 1528, 1531, and 1543.

If Diane did not succeed to her liking with the father, she made a quick progress with the son, the Duc d’Orleans, who later was to become Henri II.; for he “broke a lance in her honour” at a tourney, thus constituting himself her chevalier, though at the time the youth owned to but fifteen years.

It was in 1536 that Diane de Poitiers almost literally captured Henri, who had become the husband of Catherine de Medici. Catherine could do nothing except ally herself with the Duchesse d’Etampes, who, even at the time of the lance-breaking, was a self-constituted rival of Diane. It was indeed the tragedy of Catherine’s position that it was considered beneath the dignity of tragedy. She, the wife of the future King of France, hardly acknowledged herself worthy of rivalry with this huntress, who was also able to woo with all the artifice of that terrible new Platonism. The Duchesse d’Etampes, with her “_Petite Bande_” and her alliance with the Guises and the Connétable Montmorency, was able to give battle to this upstart, but Catherine herself could only look on. There was a time, some ten years after her marriage, when François actually meditated her divorce from Henri. Catherine, now Dauphine, still remained without children, and, at a great family council, Diane de Poitiers persuaded the king that a separation of the husband and wife was the only wise course.

Catherine appealed to François I. She had, she said, heard of what had been proposed. It was for François to decide. Catherine wept during this appeal, and the king, who disliked tears, decided in her favour. Diane was defeated, and the Dauphine won one of her few triumphs against her insolent rival. Curiously enough, however, when, in 1543, a son was at last born to Catherine, it was Diane de Poitiers, robed in the black and white of her widowhood,--De Brézé having died at Anet, aged seventy-two years,--who received the little being into the world, and constituted herself the nurse of the mother. It was surely no wonder that Catherine, in spite of all her verbal gratitude, retained “_une plaie fort saignante au cœur_.”

A considerable advantage had already accrued to the fair Diane; for, when the Dauphin died in 1536, the Duc Henri d’Orleans, lover of Diane, became the heir presumptive to the crown.

Finally, in 1547, François I. died, and Diane first came into her real power. Catherine was neglected, and the vindictive Anne de Pisseleu, Duchesse d’Etampes, exiled to the Château of St. Bris. The historians speak of the death of François “as having released one long-suppressed individuality, that of the Dauphin.” The case of Catherine, however, was even harder than before. The sullen boy, her husband, had become a man under the tutelage of Diane, and silently Catherine had noted his mental growth.

She wrote to the Connétable Montmorency: “I know full well that I must not have the happiness of being near him, which makes me wish that you had my place and I yours so long as the war lasts; and that I could do him as much service as you have done.” Catherine served her husband well as a diplomatist in Paris, and Henri learned to respect her intelligence, though he never gave her a fraction of his heart. Always between him and her there was one woman, Diane de Poitiers, Grande Seneschale de Rouen, Duchesse de Valentinois. Diane was seventeen years older than Henri II., but the spell that she held over him had always been extraordinary.

The favours to come to Diane were meantime not long delayed. Her seigneury at Anet was contested, and Henri, by the right of kings, decided it in her favour. He gave her the magnificent château at Chenonceaux on the Loire, and the duchy of the Valentinois, to which he added “sums considerable,” say the chroniclers.

With this money Diane set about to construct the Château of Anet anew. Bearing in mind the memory of her former husband, Diane permitted only decorations in black and white, and Henri himself was led to adopt the same as his own colours. Henri came frequently to Anet, where one part of the château was reserved for him, and decorated, curiously enough, with the cipher and arms of himself and his queen Catherine.

These visits of her royal master were the cause of great expenditures on the part of Diane. In one year alone they rose above four hundred thousand francs. When one adds to this the expenditure of the construction and ornamentation of the château, one gets some idea of the disbursements of the public treasury on behalf of a royal favourite. Henri refused nothing to his mistress.

Diane by this time possessed ten estates in France, besides the duchy of Etampes and a hotel in Paris, which had also been the property of her ancient rival.

It was the curse of Catherine, whose own life was one long period of dissimulation, to see her husband’s mistress successful mainly by reason of sincerity. It was terrible for this woman, who, however decadent, stood for the culture and the traditions of the Italian Renaissance, to be set aside easily, contemptuously even, by one whose pose it was to stand for what was national in the French offshoot of the Renaissance.

Around Diane at Anet there circled a brilliant group of poets and architects and sculptors, who were all Frenchmen. Such men as these made Anet a resplendent citadel of the French Renaissance; and Diane, the typical Frenchwoman, was well equipped to play the part she had chosen. Her palace was indeed a kind of Thelema,--the home of nature and of intellect, of beauty and of ease. Rabelais would have wandered there content, nor would Diane have been too refined to laugh at his jokes with the true Gallic spirit. To her, as to her fellows, gaiety was more necessary than delicacy.

The later history of Diane all students and lovers of French history well know, but the Château of Anet stands to-day as a monument to her memory, more closely identified with her personality than even Chenonceaux on the Loire.

One may visit its apartments on Thursdays and Sundays in July of each year, through the courtesy of the present proprietor; and a personal acquaintance therewith is a thing to awaken a new interest in the life and times of Diane de Poitiers, one of the most famous of all the favourites of Kings of France.