Chartres, May 10th, 1862.
We were quite worn out with the ever increasing noise of Paris; or, perhaps, I should rather say, as the heat became greater, so our necessity for open windows by day and by night increased; and the masons opposite rose to their work with the early morning light. So we determined to go off to Britanny for our few remaining days, having a sort of happy mixture of the ideas of sea, heath, rocks, ferns, and Madame de Sevigne in our heads. The one and first destined point in our plans was to see the cathedral at Chartres.
We left Paris about three o'clock, and went past several stations, the names of which reminded us of Madame de Sevigne's time — Rambouillet, perhaps, the most of all. The station is some distance from the town of Chartres, which, like so many French provincial towns, consists of a Place, and a few appendent streets. The magnificent cathedral stands a little aloof; we left it on one side as we came in an omnibus up to our hotel, which looked on to the Place. But alas for my hopes of a quiet night! The space before the house is filled with booths — dancing-booths, acting-booths, wild-beast shows, music-booths, each and all making their own separate and distinct noises; the «touter» to one booth sitting in front of it and blowing a trumpet as hard as any angel in the old pictures; the hero of the theatrical booth walking backwards and forwards in front of his stage, and ranting away in King Cambyses' vein; the lions and tigers are raging with hunger, to judge from their roars; and the musicians are in the full burst of the overture to Guillaume Tell. Mary and Irene have gone out, in spite of it all, to have a. peep at the cathedral before it is too dark; and I have chosen our bed-rooms. If the lion only knew it, he could easily make a spring into our balcony; but I hope, as he is great, he will be stupid. I have rung the bell, and rung the bell, and gone cut in the corridor and called; and, at last, I shall have to go downstairs, to try and find some one to bring up the meal which I have promised the others they shall find ready on their return. I have been and found Madame, and laid my complaint before her. She says the servants are all gone out to see the shows in the Place, which is very wicked in them; but I suspect, from her breathless way of speaking, she has only just rushed in herself, to see that I am not running away with the house. I fancy I am the only person in it. She assures me, with true French volubility, that she will send up some coffee and bread directly, and will scold Jeanette well.
May 11th. - Mary and Irene returned from the cathedral last night before anything was ready, and were too full of the extraordinary architectural magnificence they had seen to care about my Martha-like troubles. But I had not seen the cathedral; and I was hungry if they were not. I went down again, and this time I found Madame in full tilt against an unfortunate woman, who looked as if she had been captured, vi et armis, out of the open-air gaiety and the pleasant company of friends in the Place. She brought us up our meal with sullen speed, giving me occasionally such scowls of anger that I almost grew afraid at the feeling I had provoked. Yet she refused to be soothed by our little expressions of admiration for the fair, and our questions as to what was to be seen. Her only attempt at an apology was a sort of grumbling soliloquy, to the effect that ladies who knew what was comme il faut would never have gone out so late in the evening of a jour de fete to walk about the town; and that, as Mary and Irene had done this improper thing, there was no knowing when, if ever, they would return. I wish she had let us try to comfort her, for I really was very sorry to have dragged a poor creature back from what was, perhaps, the great enjoyment of the year. After our coffee we went to bed; and I am not at all sure if we were not, for some hours, the only occupants of the hotel. But the lion did not take advantage of his opportunity, though we were obliged to leave the windows open for the heat. This morning we went to see the cathedral. It is so wonderfully beautiful that no words can describe it. I am thoroughly glad we came by Chartres.
May 12th. - Vitre. - We came on here yesterday afternoon. Irene, who is the most wide-awake person I know, sat upright in the railway- carriage, looking out of the window with eager, intelligent eyes, and noting all she saw. It was a fete day; and at all the little cabarets, with their wayside gardens, there were groups of peasants in their holiday dress, drinking what appeared to be cider, from its being in large stone bottles, and eating galette — a sort of fiat cake of puff-paste, dusted over with powdered sugar, with which we had become well acquainted in Paris. The eating and drinking seemed, however, to be rather an excuse for sitting round well- scoured tables in the open air, than an object in itself. I sank back in my seat in a lazy, unobservant frame of mind, when Irene called out, 'Oh, look! there is a peasant in the goat-skin dress one reads about; we must be in Britanny now; look, look!' I had to sit up again and be on the alert; all the time thinking how bad for the brain it was to be straining one's attention perpetually after the fast-flitting objects to be seen through a railway carriage window. This is a very good theory; but it did not quite hold water in practice. Irene was as bright as ever when we stopped at Vitre; I was tired and stupid. Perhaps the secret was, that I did unwillingly what she did with pleasure.
The station at Vitre is a little outside the town, and is smart and new and in apple-pie order, as a station on a line that has to make its character ought to he. The town, on the contrary, is ancient, picturesque, and deserted. There have been fortified walls all round it, but these are now broken down in many places, and small hovels have been built of the debris wherever this is the case, giving one the impression of a town stuffed too full, which has burst its confines and run over. Yet inside the walls there are many empty houses, and many grand fortified dwellings, with coats of arms emblazoned over the doorway, which are only half-occupied. All the little world of the town seemed to be at the railway-station, and everybody welcomed us with noise and advice. The inn down in our ten-years-old Murray no longer existed; so we were glad to be told of the 'Hotel Sevigne,' although we suspected it to be a mere trick of a name. Not at all. We are really veritably lodged in the very house she occupied, when she left Les Rochers to come and do the honours of Vitre to the Governor of Britanny — the Duc de Chaulnes. Our hotel is the 'Tour de Sevigne' of her letters. On being told this, I asked for the tower itself. It had been pulled down only a year or two before, in order to make the great rambling mansion more compact as an hotel. As it was, they had changed the main entrance from hack to front; and to arrive at it, we had to go over a great piece of vacant irregular ground, the inequalities of which were caused by the debris of the tower.
The place belongs to the Marquis de Nethumieres, a descendant of the de Sevignes, so our host said. At any rate, he lives at Les Rochers, and owns our hotel. It seems as though our landlord had not had capital enough to furnish the whole of this immense, far-stretching house, which is entered in the middle of the building with long corridors to the right and to the left, both upstairs and downstairs — corridors so wide and well-lighted by the numerous windows looking to the back (or town-side), that they are used as store-rooms and sculleries. Here there are great sacks of corn and unpacked boxes of possible groceries; there a girl sits and sings as she mends the house-linen by a window, apparently diligent enough, but perfectly aware, all the time, that the ostler in the yard below is trying to attract her attention; and there, again, a woman is standing, shoulders square, to an open window, 'topping and tailing' a basket of gooseberries, and shouting out her part of a conversation with some one unseen in the yard below. Yet the great corridor looks empty and strangely deserted. Somehow, I suppose that as soon as I heard the name of 'Tour de Sevigne,' I expected to see a fair, plump lady, in hanging sleeves and long light-brown ringlets, walking before me wherever I went, half-turning her pretty profile over her white shoulder to say something bright and playful; and, instead, we follow our rather spruce landlord into the bedrooms at the end of the corridor, and coolly order our dinner for this day of May, 1862.
The rooms in this house are not large, but so very lofty, that I suspect that the panelled partition walls are but later wooden divisions of large? rooms; and so, on tapping, we find to be the case. My window looks out on the country outside the town; Irene's is just on the opposite side, and she sees roofs of deeply furrowed tiles —
