Chapter VI: Part I (5)

I went to the distribution of prizes at the school of the Christian Brothers. I had greatly admired the schools of the brotherhood in Ireland, and felt an interest in their system, notwithstanding their main object, like that of the famous Jesuit teachers of the sixteenth century, was rather to proselytize than to educate. The ceremony was thoroughly French, each boy being crowned with a tinsel wreath, and kissed by one of the company when he was presented with his prize. Everything, however, was arranged with the greatest taste and skill; and the recitations and dialogues, by which the endless distribution of prizes was relieved, were very cleverly and gracefully performed. Some of them were comic. The one which made us laugh most was a dialogue between a barber and a young gentleman who had come into his shop to be shaved. The barber pausing with the razor in his hand, the young gentleman asked him, angrily, why he did not begin. "I am waiting," replied the barber, "for your beard to grow." Specimens of writing were handed round, which were good; drawings, which, strange to say, were detestable. I praised the recitations and dialogues to the gentleman who sat next me. "Ah! oui," was his reply, "tout cela vient de Paris." So complete is the centralization of French intellect, even in such little matters as these! While I was in France, some leading politicians were attempting to set on foot a movement in favor of political decentralization. They must begin deeper, if they would hope to succeed.

In Ireland, the Christian Brothers maintain the most purely spiritual character, and the most complete independence of the state. But here, alas! a different tendency peeped out. The alliance of a Jesuit Church with the Empire, and the subserviency of education to their common objects, were typified by the presence of the _sous-prefet_ and the _maire_ in their gold-laced coats of office, who arrived escorted by a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. The harangue of the reverend head of the establishment was highly political, and amply merited by its recommendations of the duty of obedience to authority the eulogy of the _sous-prefet_ on "the good direction" which the brotherhood were giving to the studies of youth. There is no garrison at Avranches. But all the soldiers in the place seemed to have been collected to give a military character to the scene. Other incentives of military aspiration were not wanting; and the boy who delivered the allocution told us, amidst loud applause, that he and his companions were being brought up to be, "not only good Christians, but, in case of need, good soldiers."

In France under the Empire a military character is studiously given to every act of public, and almost of social life. There you see everywhere the pomp of war in the midst of peace, as in America you saw everywhere peace in the midst of civil war. The images of war and conquest are constantly kept before the eyes of a people naturally full of military vanity, and now, by the decay alike of religious and political faith, almost entirely bereft of all other aspirations. There is at the same time a vast standing army, which is not occupied, as the army of the Roman Empire was, in defending the frontiers, nor, as the Austrian army is, in holding down disaffected provinces, and which is full of the memory of the Napoleonic conquests, and longs again to overrun and pillage Europe in the name of "glory." There is no restraining influence either of morality or of religion to keep the war spirit in check. The French priesthood are as ready as any priests of Jupiter or Baal to bless national aggression, if by so doing they can gain political power. In what can all this end? In what but a European war? The children in the schools of the Christian Brothers are no doubt faithfully taught the precepts of a religion of peace; but there is a teaching of a different kind before their eyes, which, it is to be feared, they more easily imbibe and less easily forget.

It was amusing, on this and other occasions, to see the state which surrounds the subordinate officials of the Empire. I had found the head of the American Republic and all its armaments without any insignia of dignity, without a guard or attendants, in a common office room. And here was a _sous-prefet_ parading the streets in solemn state, in a gilded coat, and with a line of bayonets glittering on either hand.

From Avranches it is a pleasant walk (by the country road) to the village of Ducie, where there is good fishing, a nice little village inn, and a deserted chateau in the Louis Quatorze style, and of sumptuous dimensions, which, if it was ever completely finished, is now in a state of great dilapidation. No doubt it shared the fate of its fellows, when the Revolution proclaimed "peace to the cottage, war to the castle." The peasantry almost everywhere rose, like galley-slaves whose chains had been suddenly struck off, and gutted the chateaux, the strongholds of feudal extortion and injustice. How violent and sweeping have been the revolutions of this people compared with those of the stronger and more self-controlled race! In England, the Tudor mansions, and not unfrequently even the feudal castles, are still tenanted by the heirs, or by those who have peacefully purchased from the heirs, of their ancient lords; and the insensible gradations by which the feudal guard-room has softened down into the modern drawing-room, and the feudal moat into the flower-garden, are emblematic of the continuous and comparatively tranquil progress of English history. In France, how different! Scarcely eighty years have passed since the Chateau de Montgomeri was proud and gay; since the village idlers gathered here to see its lord, and his little provincial court, assemble along those mouldering balustrades, and ride through the now deserted gates. But to the grandchildren of those villagers the chateau is a strange, mysterious relic of the times before the flood. A group of peasants tried in vain, when I asked them, to recollect the name of its former proprietors. One of them said that it had been inhabited by a great lord, who shod his horses with shoes of gold,--much the sort of tale that an Irish peasant tells you about the primeval monuments of his country. The mansions of France before the Revolution belong as completely to the past as the tombs of the Pharaohs. The old aristocracy and the old dynasty are no longer hated or regretted. Their names excite no emotion whatever in the French peasant's heart. They are wiped out of the memory of the nation, and their place knows them no more. In the midst of their shows and their pleasures and their shallow philosophies, they could not read the handwriting on the wall, and therefore they are blotted out of existence. They went on marrying and giving in marriage; this chateau, perhaps, was still being enlarged and embellished, when the flood came upon them and destroyed them all. The science of politics is the science of regulating progress and avoiding revolutions.

The hostess of the Lion d'Or is about to transfer her establishment to an inn of greater pretensions, to which, aware that the old chateau is an object of interest to visitors, she means to give the name of the Hotel de Montgomeri. On the wall of her _cafe_ is a coarse medallion bust taken from a room in the chateau. She did not know whom it represented; and I dare say it was only my fancy that made me think I recognized a rude effigy of the once adored features of Marie Antoinette.

The plates at the Lion d'Or were adorned with humorous devices. On one was a satire on the hypocritical rapacity of perfidious Albion. Two English soldiers were standing with their swords hidden behind their backs, and trying to coax back to them some Indians who were running away in the distance. "Come to us, dear little Indians; you know we are your best friends!" Suppose "Arabs" or "Mexicans" had been substituted for "Indians." To a Frenchman, our conquests in India are rapine; his own conquests in Algeria or Mexico are the extension of civilization by the "holy bayonets" (I forget whether the phrase is Michelet's or Quinet's) of the chosen people. Justice gives the same name (no matter which) to both.

At Ducie a handsome new church had just been built,--mainly, I was told, by the munificence of two maiden ladies. The congregation at vespers was large and apparently devout; and here the number of the men was in fair proportion to that of the women. In the churches of the cities, though the power of the clergy has everywhere increased of late, you see scarcely one man to a hundred women.

On the road, a shower drove me for refuge into the house of a peasant, who received me with the usual kindliness of the French peasantry, and, when the shower was over, walked two or three miles with me on my way. The condition of these present proprietors is a subject of great interest to English economists, especially as we are evidently on the eve of a great controversy--perhaps a great struggle--respecting the law of succession to landed property in our own country. Not that any English economist would go so far as to advocate the French system of compulsory subdivision, which owes its existence in great measure to the policy of the first Napoleon,--who took care, with the instinct of a true despot, to secure the solitary power of the throne against the growth of an independent class of wealthy proprietors. All that English economists contemplate is the abolition of primogeniture and entail. I must not found any conclusion on observations so partial and cursory as those which I was able to make; but I suspect that the French peasant is better off than the English laborer. He is not better housed, clothed, or fed; perhaps not so well housed, clothed, or fed. He eats black bread, which the English peasant would reject, and clumps about in wooden shoes, which the English laborer would regard with horror; but this, according to statements which I have heard, and am inclined to trust, arises, generally speaking, not so much from indigence as from self-denying frugality, pushed to an extreme. The French peasant is the possessor of property, and has a passion, almost a mania, for acquisition. He saves money and subscribes to government loans, which are judiciously brought out in very small shares, so as to draw forth his little hoard, and thus bind him as a creditor to the interest of the Empire. The cottage of the peasant which I entered on my way to Ducie was very mean and comfortless, and the food which his hospitality offered me was of the coarsest kind. But he had a valuable mare and foal; his yard was full of poultry; and his orchard showed, for a bad season, a fair crop of apples. There are some large estates, the result frequently of great fortunes made in trade. Not far from the place where the high-born lords of the Chateau de Montgomeri once reigned, a chocolate-merchant had bought broad lands, and built himself a princely mansion. I should have thought that the great proprietors would have crushed the small; but I was assured that the two systems went on very well side by side. But this is a matter for exact inquiry, not for casual remark. The population in France is stationary, or nearly so, while that of England increases rapidly; and this is an important element in the question, and itself raises questions of a difficult, perhaps of a disagreeable kind.

The cares of proprietorship must necessarily interfere with the lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as Americans are commonly believed to be. It would be a happy thing if the Irish peasant's lightness of heart, pleasant as it often is, could be interfered with in the same way. There is a certain gayety which springs from mere recklessness, and is sister to despair.

They are hard economical problems that we have to solve in this Old World, and terribly complicated by social and political entanglements; and there is no boundless West, with bread for all who want it, to assist us in the solution.

From Avranches you visit Mont St. Michel,--not without difficulty, for you have to drive along over sands which are never dry, and over which the tide--its advance can be seen even from the distant height of Avranches--rushes in with the speed of a race-horse. But you are well repaid. Mont St. Michel is one of the most astonishing and beautiful monuments of the Catholic and feudal age. Its fortifications, and the halls, church, and cloisters of the chivalrous and monastic fraternities of which it was the seat, rise like an efflorescence from the solitary cone of granite, surrounded at low tide by the vast flat of sand, at high tide by the sea. Gothic architecture, to which we are apt to attach the notion of a sort of infantine unconsciousness, here seems consciously to revel and disport itself in its power, and to exult in investing the sea-girt rock with the playful elegance of a Cellini vase. It is a real _jeu d'esprit_ of mediaeval art. The cloisters are a model of airy grace, enhanced by contrast with the massiveness of the fortress and the wildness of the scene. A strange life the monks must have led in their narrow boundaries. But they had the visits of the knights to relieve their dulness; and probably they were rude natures, not liable to the unhappiness which such seclusion would produce in men of cultivated sensibilities and active minds. Both monks and knights are gone long ago. But there are still six priests on the rock. I asked what they did. "Ils prient le bon Dieu."

In feudal times this sea-girt fortress was almost impregnable. Two ancient cannon lying at its gate show that the conqueror of Agincourt thundered against it in vain. Its weak point was want of water: it had none but the rain-water collected in a great cistern. In these days it could not hold out an hour against a single gun-boat.

It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a pleasant place,--a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending, little Hotel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine view. While I was at Vire, the _fete_ day of the Emperor was celebrated--with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the _prefet's_ invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town, and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were dismally paraded about, and the firemen practised with their muskets, very awkwardly, at a mark which was so placed among the trees that they could hardly see it.

Why has not the government the sense to let these people alone? After all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which does not exist.

If Louis Napoleon is in any peril, it is not from the republican or constitutional party, but from his own lavish expenditure, which begins to irritate the people. They are careless of their rights as freemen, but they are fond, and growing daily fonder, of money; and they do not like to be heavily taxed, and to hear at the same time that the Emperor is wasting on his personal expenses and those of his relatives and courtiers some six millions of dollars a year. Regard for economy is the only profession which distinguishes the addresses of the so-called opposition candidates from those of their competitors. I asked a good many people what they thought of the Mexican expedition. Not one of them objected to its injustice, but they all objected to its cost, "Cela mangera beaucoup d'argent," was the invariable reply. And in this point of view the government has committed what it would think much worse than any crime,--a very damaging blunder.

It does not appear that the Orleans family have any hold on the mind of the French people. When I mentioned their name, it seemed to produce no emotion, one way or the other. But if the marshals and grandees, who have hold of the wires of administration at the point where they are centralized, chose to make Napoleon III abdicate, (as they made Napoleon I. abdicate at Fontainebleau,) and to set up a king of the House of Orleans in his place, they could probably do it; and they might choose to do it, if, by such blunders as the Mexican expedition, he seemed to be placing their personal interests in jeopardy.

Stopping to breakfast at Conde, on the way from Vire to Falaise, I fell in with the only Frenchman, with a single exception, who showed any interest in the affairs of America. Generally speaking, I was told, and found by experience, that profound apathy prevailed upon the subject. This gentleman, on learning that I had recently been in America, entered eagerly into conversation on the subject. But his inquiries were only about the prospects of cotton; and all I could tell him on that point was, that, if the growth of cotton was profitable, the Yankee would certainly make it grow.

The castle of Falaise is the reputed birthplace of the Conqueror. They even pretend to show you the room in which he was born. The existing castle, however, is of considerably later date. It is even doubtful, according to the best antiquaries, whether there were any stone castles at the date of his birth, or only earthworks with palisades. There is, however, one genuine monument of that time. You look down from the castle on the tanneries in the glen below, and see the women washing their clothes in the stream, as in the days when Robert the Devil wooed the tanner's daughter. Robert, however, must have had diabolically good eyes to choose a mistress at such a distance.

Annexed to the castle is Talbot's Tower,--a beautiful piece of feudal architecture, and a monument of a later episode in that long train of miserable wars between England and France, of which the Conqueror's cruel rapacity may be regarded as the spring; for the English conquests were an inverted copy and counterpart of his. But the Conqueror's crimes, like those of Napoleon I., were on the grandiose scale, and therefore they impose, like those of Napoleon, on the slavishness of mankind; while the petty bandit, though endowed perhaps with the same powers of destruction and only lacking the ampler sphere, is buried under the gallows. The equestrian statue of William in the public place at Falaise prances, it has been remarked, close to the spot where rest the ashes of Walter and Biona, Count and Countess of Pontoise, poisoned, if contemporary accounts are true, by the same ambition which launched havoc and misery on a whole nation. They and the Conqueror were rival claimants to the sovereignty of Maine. They supped with the Conqueror one evening at Falaise, and next morning William was the sole claimant. The Norman, like the Corsican, was an assassin as well as a conqueror.

I must leave it to architects to describe the architectural glories of Caen. But I had no idea that the Norman style, in England grand only from its massiveness, could soar to such a height of beauty as it has attained in the Church of St. Stephen and the Abbaye aux Dames. I afterwards did homage again to its powers when standing before the august ruin of Jumieges. There is something peculiarly delightful in the freshness of early art, whether Greek or mediaeval, and whether in architecture or in poetry,--when you see the mind first beginning to feel its power over the material, and to make it the vehicle of thought. There is something, too, in all human works, which makes the early hope more charming than the fulfilment.

St. Stephen is the church of the Conqueror, as the Abbaye aux Dames is that of his Queen. There he lies buried. Every one knows the story of Ascelin demanding the price of the ground in which William was going to be buried, and which the tyrant had taken from him by force; and how, at last, the corpse of the Conqueror was thrust, amidst a scene of horror and loathing, into its grave. But _Rex Invictissimus_ is the inscription on his tomb.

The spire of St. Pierre is very graceful; the body of the church, in the latest and most debased style of Gothic architecture, stands signally contrasted with St. Stephen,--St. Stephen the simple vigor of the prime, St. Pierre the florid weakness of the decay.

Caen is a large city, and, of course, full of soldiers, who are as completely the dominant caste in France now, as the old _noblesse_ were before the Revolution. To this the French have come after their long train of sanguinary revolutions,--after all their visions of a perfect social state,--after all their promises of a new era of happiness to mankind. "A light and cruel people," Coleridge calls them. And how lightly they turned from regenerating to pillaging and oppressing the world! They have great intellectual gifts, and still greater social graces; but, in the political sphere, they have no real regard for freedom, and will gladly lay their liberties at the feet of any master who will enable them to domineer over other nations. Napoleon I. is more than their hero: he is their God. Many of them, the soldiery especially, have no other object of worship. I saw in a shop-window a print of Napoleon I., Napoleon II., and the Prince Imperial, all in military uniform and surrounded by the emblems of war. It was entitled, "The Past, the Present, and the Future of France." Military ambition has been the Past of France, is her Present, and seems too likely to be her Future. In some directions, she has promoted civilization; but, politically speaking, she has done, and probably will long continue to do, more harm than good to mankind.

I may say with truth, that, having seen America, and brought away an assured faith in human liberty and progress, I looked with far more serenity than I should otherwise have done on the Zouaves, swaggering, in the insolence of triumphant force, over the neglected ashes of Turgot and Mirabeau. I felt as though, strong as the yoke of these janizaries and their master looked, I had the death-warrant of imperialism in my pocket. There is a Power which made the world for other ends than these, and which will not suffer its ends to give way even to those of the Bonapartes. But to all appearances there will be a terrible struggle in Europe,--a struggle to which the old "wars of the mercenaries" were a trifling affair,--before the nations can be redeemed from subjection to these armed hordes and the masters whom they obey.

From Caen I visited Bayeux,--a sleepy, ecclesiastical town with a glorious cathedral, which, however, shows by a huge crack in the tower that even such edifices know decay. Gems of the Norman style are scattered all round Caen and Bayeux; and one of the finest is the little church of St. Loup, in the environs of Bayeux.

I found that the old French office-book had been completely banished from the French churches by the Jesuit and Ultramontane party, and the Roman (though much inferior, Roman Catholics tell me, as a composition) everywhere thrust into its place. The people in some places recalcitrated violently; but the Jesuits and Ultramontanes triumphed. The old Gallican spirit of independence is extinct in the French Church, and its extinction is not greatly to be deplored; for it tended not to a real independence, but to the substitution of a royal for an ecclesiastical Pope. Louis XIV. was quite as great a spiritual tyrant as any Hildebrand or Innocent, and his tyranny was, if anything, more degrading to the soul. In fact, the Ultramontane French Church, resting for support on Rome, may be regarded by the friends of liberty, with a qualified complacency, as a check, though a miserable one, on the absolute dominion of physical force embodied in the Emperor.

The Bayeux tapestry, representing the expedition of William the Conqueror, is curious and valuable as an historical monument, though it cannot be proved to be contemporary. As a work of art it is singularly spiritless, and devoid of merit of any kind. One of the fancy figures on the border reveals the indelicacy of the ladies (a queen, perhaps, and her handmaidens) who wrought it in a way which would be startling to any one who had taken the manners and morals of the age of chivalry on trust.

The heat drove me from Caen before I had "done" all the antiquities and curiosities prescribed by the guidebook. Migrating to Lisieux, I found myself in such pleasant quarters that I was tempted to settle there for some days. The town is almost an unbroken assemblage of the quaintest and most picturesque old houses. There are whole streets without any taint of modern architecture to disturb the perfect image of the past. Two magnificent churches, one of them formerly a cathedral, rise over the whole; and there is a very pretty public garden, with its terraces, pastures, and green alleys. A public garden is the invariable appendage of a city in France, as it ought to be everywhere. We do not do half enough in England for the innocent amusement of the people.

At Lisieux we had a public _fete_. It is evidently a part of the business of the _sous-prefets_ to get up these things as antidotes to political aspiration. _Panem et circenses_ is the policy of the French, as it was of the Roman Caesars. For two or three days beforehand, the people were engaged in planting little fir-trees in the street before their doors, and decorating them and the houses, with little tricolor flags. Larger flags (of which this little quiet town produced a truly formidable number) were hung out from all the houses. As the weather was very dry, the population was at work keeping the fir-trees alive with squirts. The _fete_ consisted of a horse and cattle show, in which the Norman horses made a very good display; the inevitable military review, which, Lisieux being as happily free from soldiery as Vire, was here, too, performed by the firemen; the band of a regiment of the line, which had been announced as a magnificent addition to the festivities, by a special proclamation of the _sous-prefet_; balloons not of the common shape, but in the shape of dogs, pigs, and grotesque human figures, a gentleman and lady waltzing, etc., which must have rather puzzled any scientific observer whose telescope was at that moment directed to the sky; and, to crown all, fireworks (the noise of which, a French gentleman remarked to me, the people loved, as reminding them of musketry) and an illumination. The illumination--all the little trees before the houses, as well as the houses themselves and the green arches thrown across the streets, being covered with lamps--was an extremely pretty sight. The outline of the old houses, and the windings and declivities of the old streets, wonderfully favored the effect. But the French are peerless in these things. The childish delight of the people was pleasant to see. Why cannot they be satisfied with their _fetes_, and with the undisputed empire of cookery and dress, instead of making themselves a scourge to the world, and keeping all Europe in disquietude and under arms?

The Emperor is trying to inoculate his subjects with a taste for English sports, but with rather doubtful success. He tries to make them play at cricket, but they do not much like the swift bowling. There was a caricature in the Charivari of a Frenchman standing up to his wicket with an implement which the artist intended for a bat, but which was more like a pavior's rammer, in his hand. A friend was asking him whether he had a wife, children, any tie to life. "None." "Then you may begin." In a window at Lisieux there was a print of a fox-hunt, with the master of the hounds dismounting to despatch the fox with a gun! At Vire there was a print of a horse-race, with the horses in a cantering attitude, and a large dog running and barking by their side. I have seen something equally funny of the same kind in America, but I need not say what or where. I never witnessed a French horse-race, but I am told that they enjoy it _moult tristement_, as they say we English enjoy all our amusements.

Close to Lisieux is the fashionable watering-place of Trouville, a place without any charms that I could see, puffed into celebrity by Alexander Dumas. The Duke de Morny invested in building there a good deal of the money which he made by the _coup d'etat_. Life at a French watering-place seems to be as close an imitation of life at Paris as French ingenuity can produce under the adverse circumstances of the case. Nothing but the religion of fashion can compel these people periodically to leave the capital for the sea. The mode of bathing is rather singular. I found that the Americans did not, as is commonly believed in England, put trousers on the legs of their pianos, but I believe you are more particular than we are; and therefore, perhaps, you would be still more surprised than we are at seeing a gentleman wrapped in a sheet stalk before the eyes of all the promenaders over the sands to the sea, and there throw off the sheet, and at his leisure get into the water. At the risk of exposing my English prudishness, I ventured to remark to a French acquaintance that the fashion was _un peu libre_. I found, rather to my astonishment, that he thought so too.

At Val Richer, near Lisieux, is the pleasant country-house of M. Guizot. There, surrounded by his children and his grandchildren, a pretty patriarchal picture, the veteran statesman and historian reposes after the prodigious labors and tragic vicissitudes of his life. I say he reposes; but his pen is as active as ever, only that he has turned from politics and history to the more enduring and consoling topic of religion. He has just given us a volume on Christianity; he is about to give us one on the state of religion in France. It will be deeply interesting. In the revival of religion lies the only hope of regeneration for the French nation. And whence is that revival to come? From the official priesthood, and the jesuitical influences depicted in _Le Maudit_? Or from the Protestant Church of France, itself full of dissensions and turmoils, in which M. Guizot himself has been recently involved? Or from the school of Natural Theologians represented by Jules Simon? We shall see, when M. Guizot's work appears. It is from his religious character as well as from his attachment to constitutional liberty, I imagine, that M. Guizot has, unlike the mass of his countrymen, watched the American struggle with ardent interest, and cordially rejoiced in the triumph of the Union and of freedom.

There are of course very different opinions as to this eminent man's career; and there are parts of his conduct of which no Liberal can approve. But I have always thought that a tranquil and happy old age is a proof, as well as a reward, of a good life; and if this be the case, M. Guizot's life, though not free from faults, must on the whole have been good.

His resistance to reform is commonly regarded as having led to the fall of the constitutional monarchy. I should attribute that catastrophe much more to the prevalence of the military spirit, which the peaceful policy of Louis Philippe disappointed, and to which even the conquest of Algeria failed (as its authors deserved) to give a sufficient vent. The reign of Louis Philippe was essentially an attempt to found a civil in place of a military government in France, which was foiled by the passions excited by the presence of a large standing army and the recent memory of the Napoleonic wars. The translation of the body of Napoleon from St. Helena to Paris was the greatest mistake committed by the king and his advisers. It was the self-humiliation of the government of peace before the Genius of War.

At Lisieux, as at Caen, and afterwards at Rouen, I saw on the Sunday a great church full of women, with scarcely a score of men. And what wonder? Close to where I sat was the altar of Our Lady of La Salette, offering to the adoration of the people the most coarse and revolting of impostures. And in the course of the service, an image of the Virgin, from which the taste of a Greek Pagan would have recoiled, was borne round the aisles in procession, manifestly the favorite object of worship in a church nominally devoted to the worship of God. An educated man in France, even one of the best character and naturally religious, would almost as soon think of entering a temple of Jupiter as a church. Religion in Roman Catholic countries being thus left, so far as the educated classes are concerned, to the priests and women, its recent developments have been inspired exclusively by priestly ambition and female imagination. The infallibility of the Pope and the worship of the Virgin have made, and are still making, tremendous strides. The Romanizing party in the Episcopal Church of England are left panting behind, in their vain efforts to keep up with the superstitions of Rome.

From Lisieux my road lay by Pont-Audemer in its beautiful valley to Caudebec on the Seine; then along the Seine,--here most pleasant,--by the towers of Jumieges, the masterpiece, even in its ruins, of the grand Norman style, and the great Norman Church of St. George de Boscherville, to Rouen.

Everybody knows Rouen and its sights,--the Cathedral, the Church of St. Ouen, the magnificent view of the city from St. Catherine's Hill,--magnificent still, though much marred by the tall chimneys and their smoke. St. Ouen is undoubtedly the perfection of Gothic art. Unlike most of the cathedrals, it is built all in the same style and on one plan, complete in every part, admirable in all its proportions, and faultless in its details. But there is something disappointing in perfection. The less perfect cathedrals suggest more to the imagination than is realized in St. Ouen.

In the Museum is a portion of the heart of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The Crusader king loved the Normans, and bequeathed his heart to them. He did not bequeath it to Imperial France. With all his faults, he was an illustrious soldier of Christendom; and he deserves to rest, not within the pale of this sensualist and atheist Empire, but in some land where the spirit of religious enterprise is not yet dead.

In the outskirts is St. Gervais, the church of the monastery to which William the Conqueror was carried, out of the noise and the feverish air of the great city, to die, and which witnessed the strange struggle, in his last moments, between his rapacious passions and his late-awakened remorse. So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general anarchy. Government was still only personal: law had not yet been enthroned in the minds of men. Even the personal attendants of the Conqueror abandoned his corpse,--a singular illustration of the theory, cherished by lovers of the past, that the relations of master and servant were more affectionate, and of a higher kind, in the days of chivalry than they are in ours.

Among the workingmen of Rouen, there probably lurks a good deal of republicanism, akin to that which exists among the workingmen of Paris. Unfortunately it is of a kind which, though capable of spasmodic attempts to revolutionize society by force, is little capable of sustained constitutional effect, and which alarms and arrays against it, not only despots, but moderate friends of liberty and progress. The outward appearances, however, at Rouen are all in favor of the Zouave and the Priest; and of the dominion of these two powers in France, if they can abstain from quarrelling with each other, it is difficult to foresee the end.

I have spoken bitterly of the French Empire. It has not only crushed the liberties of France, but it is the keystone and the focus of the system of military despotism in Europe. Bismarck, O'Donnell, and all the rest who rule by sabre-sway, are its pupils. It is intensely propagandist,--feeling, like slavery, that it cannot endure the contagious neighborhood of freedom. It has to a terrible extent corrupted even English politics, and inspired our oligarchical party with ideas of violence quite foreign to the temper of English Tories in former days. It is killing not only all moral aspirations, but almost all moral culture in France, and leaving nothing but the passion for military glory, the thirst of money, and the love of pleasure. It is reducing all education to a centralized machine, the wires of which are moved by a bureau at Paris; and we shall see the effects of this on French intellect in the next generation, "Ils ont tue la jeunesse," were the bitter words of an eminent and chivalrous Frenchman to the author of this article. Commerce is no doubt flourishing, and money is being made by the commercial classes, at present, under the Empire; but the highest industry is intimately connected with the moral and intellectual energies of a nation; and if these perish, it will in time perish too.

I have no means of knowing whether the morality of the court and the upper classes at Paris is what it is commonly reported to be; though, assuredly, if the performances of Therese are truly described to us, strange things must go on in the highest circles. Historical experience would be at fault, if a military despotism, with a political religion, did not produce moral effects in Paris somewhat analogous to those which it produced in Rome. The fashionable literature of the Empire, which can scarcely fail to reflect pretty accurately the moral state of the fashionable world, is not merely loose in principle, (as literature might possibly be in a period of transition between a narrower and an ampler moral code,) but utterly vile and loathsome; it seeks the materials of sensation novels from the charnel-house as well as from the brothel.

At Dieppe, my last point, I visited that very picturesque as well as memorable ruin, the Chateau d'Arques. It is a monument of the great victory gained near it by the Huguenots under Henri IV. over the League. This and the other Huguenot victories, alas! proved bootless; and it is melancholy to visit the fields where they were won. By a series of calamities, the party was in the end erased from history; and scarcely a trace of its existence remains in the religious or political condition of Roman Catholic and Imperial France. It has left some noble names, and the memory of some noble deeds, which no doubt work upon national character to a certain extent; but this is all.

There was nothing in the fashionable watering-place of Dieppe to tempt my stay; and I turned from the Chateau d'Arques to embark for the land where, in spite of our political reaction and the efforts of the priest-party in our Church, the principles for which the field of Arques was fought and won have still a home.

AUNT JUDY.

A soft white bosom, kissed by lips and fondled by fingers pure as itself!

Back through the tender twilight of my one dim dream of a sinless childhood I catch that accusing glimpse of my mother--and myself. And as I stand here on this shapeless cairn of remorses, which, after forty years, I have piled upon my butchered and buried promise, that child turns from "the cup of his life and couch of his rest," to look upon me wondering, pitying.

My mother died when I was scarce five years old; and save the blurred beauty of that reproachful phantom,--caught and lost, caught and lost, by the unfaithful eyes of a graceless spirit,--she is as though she never had been. But in her place she left me a vicarious mother,--old, foolish, doting, black,--the youngest, loveliest, wisest, fairest lady I have ever known,--young with the youth of the immortal heart, lovely with the loveliness of the gleaning Ruth, wise with the wisdom of the most blessed among mothers when she "pondered all those things in her heart," and fair with the fairness of her who goeth her way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feedeth her kids beside the shepherds' tents,--black, but comely.

"Aunt Judy,"--Judith was her company name,--as the oldest of my uncles and aunts, and other boys' grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the rest of us children, delighted to call her,--was pure negro; not grafted, scandalous mulatto, nor muddled, niggerish "gingerbread," but downright, unmixed, old-fashioned blackamoor. Her father and mother were genuine importations from the coast of Africa, snatched from some cannibal's calaboose,--where else they might have been butchered to make a Dahomeyan holiday,--and set up in a country gentleman's kitchen in Maryland, where they and their Christian progeny helped to make many a happy Christmas.

Of this antique Ethiopian couple I remember nothing,--they died long before I was born,--nor have I gathered any notable _ana_ concerning them. Only of the father, I learned from my darling old nurse that he was one hundred and four years old when the Almighty Emancipator set him free; and from my father, and the brothers and sisters of my mother, that he possessed in a remarkable degree those simple, childlike virtues, characteristic of the original domesticated African, which his daughters Judith and Rachel so richly inherited.

Aunt Judy was one of many slaves set free by my grandfather's will, partly in reward of faithful service, partly from an impulse of conscientiousness; for our fine old Maryland gentleman was that social and political phenomenon, a slaveholder with a practical scruple. Not that he doubted the moral wholesomeness of the "institution," which, in his theory, was patriarchal and protective, and in his practice eminently beneficent;--if he were living this day, I doubt not he would be found among its most earnest and confident champions;--but he did not believe in holding human beings in bondage "on principle," as it were, and for the mere sake of bondage. The patriarchal element was, he thought, an essential in the moral right of the system, and _that_ no longer necessary, the system became wrong. Therefore, so soon as it became clear to him that he (so peculiarly had God blessed him) could protect, advise, relieve his servants as effectually, they being free, as if their persons and their poor little goods, their labor and almost their lives, were at his disposal, he set them at liberty without asking the advice, or caring for the opinion, of any man; and by the same instrument which gave them the right to work, think, live, and die for themselves, he imposed upon his children a solemn responsibility for their well-being, in the future as in the past,--the honorable care of seeing to it that their wants were judiciously provided for, their training virtuous, their instruction useful, their employers just, their families united, and their homes happy. Those who were already of age went forth free at once; the minors received their "papers" on their twenty-first birthday. And thus it was that, when I was born, Aunt Judy was as much freer than her "boy" is now, as simple, natural wants are freer than impatient, artificial appetites.

But that was the beginning and the end of Aunt Judy's freedom. For all the change it wrought in her feelings and her ways toward us, or in ours toward her, she might as well have remained the slave and the baby she was born; the old relations, so natural and gentle, of affection and faithful service on her side, of affection and grateful care on ours, no mere legal forms could alter: no papers could disturb their peacefulness, no privileges impair their confidence. Indeed, that same freedom--or at least her personal interest in it--was matter of magnificent contempt to both nurse and child; she understood it too well to pet it, I understood it too little to be jealous of it. It was only by asking her that you could discover that Aunt Judy was free; it was only by being asked that she could recollect it. For her, freedom meant the right to "go where she pleased"; but her love knew no _where_ but my father's roof and her darling's crib, nor anything so wrong as that right. For us, her freedom meant our freedom, the right to send her away when we chose; but our love knew no such _when_ in all the shameful possibilities of time, nor anything in all the cruel conspiracies of ingratitude so wrong as that right. Could we entreat her to leave us, or to return from following after us, when each of our hearts had spoken and said, "The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me"? So she and I have gone on together ever since, and shall go on, until we come to the Bethlehem of love at rest. What though she had been there before we started, and were there now? To the saints and their eternal spaceless spirits there are nor days, nor miles, nor starting-points, nor resting-places, nor journey's ends.

From my earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not read her precious Bible without spectacles, as I could, and why my back was not bent too, and how if I lived I would grow so. From such instructions I derived a blurred, bewildering notion that from me to her, suffering an Aunt-Judy change, was a long, slow, wearisome process of puckering and dimming and stiffening. But when she told me how she had carried my mother in her arms, as she had carried me, and had made the proud discovery of her first tooth, as, piously exploring among my tender gums with her little finger, she had found mine, I stared at the Pacific of her possible nursings, in a wild surmise, silent upon a peak of wonder. "Well, then, Auntie," I asked, "do you think you're much more than a thousand?"

She was not noticeably little as a woman, but wonderfully little as a bundle, to contain so many great virtues,--rather below the medium stature, slender, and bent with age, rather than with burdens; for she had had no heartless master to lay heavy packs upon her. Her face, far from unpleasing in its lines, was lovely in its blended expression of intelligence, modesty, the sweetest guilelessness, an almost heroic truthfulness, devoted fidelity, a dove-like tranquillity of mind, and that abiding, reposeful trust in God which is equal to all trials, and can never be taken by surprise. Her voice was soft and soothing, her motions singularly free from clumsiness or fretfulness, her manners so beautifully blended of unaffected humility, patience, and self-respect as to command, in cheerful reciprocity, the deference they tendered; in which respect she was a severe ordeal to the sham gentlemen and ladies who had the honor to be presented to her,--the slightest trace of snobbery betraying itself at once to the sensitive test-paper of Aunt Judy's true politeness. Her ways were ways of pleasantness, and all her paths were peace. Faith, hope, and charity were met in her dusky, shrunken bosom,--more at home there, perhaps, than in a finer dwelling.

A sneering philosophy was never yet challenged to contemplate a piety more complete than that which made this venerable "nigger" a lady on earth, and a saint in heaven; but on her knees she found it, and on her knees she held it fast,--watching, praying, trembling.

"When she sat, her head was, prayer-like, bending;
When she rose, it rose not any more.
Faster seemed her true heart grave-ward tending
Than her tired feet, weak and travel-sore."

She was, indeed, a living prayer, a lying-down and rising-up, a going-out and coming-in prayer,--a loving, longing, working, waiting prayer,--a black and wrinkled, bent and tottering incense and aspiration. With her to labor was literally to worship; she washed dishes with confession, ironed shirts with supplication, and dusted furniture with thanksgiving,--morning, evening, noon, and night, praising God. From resting-place to resting-place, over tedious stretches of task, she prayed her way,

"And ever, at each period,
She stopped and sang, 'Praise God!'"

like Browning's Theocrite. And, as if answering Blaise, the listening monk, when he said,

"Well done!
I doubt not thou art heard, my son:
As well as if thy voice to-day
Were praising God the Pope's great way,"

her longing was,

"Would God that I
Might praise him _some_ great way and die."

Many a time have I, bursting boisterously into my little bedroom in quest of top or ball, checked myself, with a feeling more akin to superstition than to reverence, on finding Aunt Judy on her knees beside the pretty cot she had just made up so snugly and tenderly for me, pouring her ever-brimming heart out in clear, refreshing springs of prayer. Led by these still waters, she rested there from the heat and burden of life, as the camel by wells in the desert. On such occasions I always knew that my dear old nurse had just finished making a bed or sweeping a room, and had sunk down to rest in a prayer, as a fagged drudge on a stool. If you ever gloried--and what gentleman has not?--in Gregg's brave old hymn, beginning

"Jesus, and shall it ever be,
A mortal man ashamed of thee?"

you would ask for no more intrepid illustration of its loyal spirit than the figure of Aunt Judy on her knees at the foot of my father's bed, where he often found her in the act,--turning her face for an instant, but without offering to rise, from her Divine Master to the mild fellow-servant in whom she affectionately recognized an earthly master, and asking, with a manner far less embarrassed than his own, "Was you lookin' for your gloves, sir? They's on de bureau,--and your umbrell's behind de door";--and then placidly turning back again to that Master whom most of us white slaves of the Devil think we have honored enough when we have printed His title with a capital M.

"My Master, shall I speak? O that to Thee
My Servant were a little so
As flesh may be!
That these two words might creep and grow
To some degree of spiciness to Thee!"