77- SENLIS SENLIS BY CICELY HAMILTON AUTHOR OF 'DIANA OF DOBSON'S,' ETC. LONDON : 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND COPYRIGHT 1917 ILLUSTRATIONS THE LICORNE BURNED OUT .... Frontispiece THE STATION AS THE GERMANS LEFT IT Facing page 6 A TYPICAL VIEW . . . . . . 12 OUTSIDE THE STATION ,,14 A CORNER OF THE RUE DE LA RPUBLIQUE 28 RUE DE LA RE>UBLIQUE 34 WHERE THE MAYOR OF SENLIS DIED . . ,, 40 THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE EAST . . 58 THE LAW COURTS ,,85 ROMAN WALL AND TOWER OF THE FOURTH CENTURY 106 THE RUE DE MEAUX SEEN FROM THE RAM- PARTS 122 SENLIS CHAPTER I I NEVER saw Senlis before the coming of the German ; he had ravaged and left it a full three months when I first tramped into the mutilated city on a dripping day in December in the year the War began. Six miles we had trudged on the broad highway that leads from Creil, lying deep in its hollow, by uplands and woodlands to Senlis ; six drizzling, straight- forward, most lonely miles, with forest and field to the right and left and with hardly a soul on the road. We met five wayfarers between town and town ; and of these (oddly enough, since we were in the French sphere of influence) not a single man was a native. One was a Belgian soldier and the other four hailed from Britain. Normally, of course, though the time was winter, the road would have been less deserted ; but it ran through the rear of the Zone of the Armies, and War I B SENLIS Zone restrictions applied. War Zone restrictions save on those thoroughfares where men and supplies went backwards and forwards to the front meant a limit to traffic, awheel and afoot, unfrequented roads and a general suggestion of sleepiness. Behind the fighting in the trenches lay a backwater, a belt of calm where authority discouraged the visitor and bade the inhabitant sit still. So much I had learned from some weeks in France when I set my face towards Senlis. It was at the point where the road leaves the windy, unhedged upland for the shelter of the Forest of Halatte that we met the first travellers we had struck since Creil and saw the first batch of our countrymen. Pulling up the rise towards us came a lorry, protesting loudly as it pulled ; its three occupants were all in uniform and two of the three wore khaki. That was in December 1914, before Belgium had taken to arraying her soldiers in dust- colour ; so we haiied khaki (unseen for a month) with an Anglo-Saxon shout. Khaki did not reply immediately ; it had at the moment other business on hand, more enthralling than the greeting of strangers. Before the lorry came level with us its brakes went on and it halted ; SENLIS whereupon a lean brown figure leaped down from its seat and hurried to the rear with a rifle raised unmistakably for business purposes. Our hearts beat fast with astonishment, perhaps anxiety ; the trenches, we had good reason to believe, were twenty long miles and more away yet the lorry had come to a sudden stop and khaki was out with a rifle. Gun and man vanished in a twinkling through a gate giving access to the forest ; and as we drew level with the waiting car a shot cracked out close at hand. We thrilled and half -pictured an ambush of lurking Germans an idea difficult to reconcile with the inertia and cheerfully expectant faces of our countryman seated at the driving-wheel and the stout blue Belgian beside him. " A pheasant/' the driver enlightened perhaps disappointed us. " My friend, he's a very good shot. He'll do us for supper ... if he's got him." He hadn't ; the pheasant was wily or swift and the very good shot had expended the taxpayers' ammunition in vain. He returned philosophically to confess failure and pass the time o* day with his countrywomen ; whereafter the lorry with the name of an Oxford Street shop yet distinguishable on its dirty side rolled off in the direction of Creil SENLIS and the north, while we plodded on our muddy way to Senlis. We met khaki once again before we reached it ; this time on an ambulance, bound southwards to Paris, whose driver and owner halted to speak to us " because I saw you were English." War-time, like its own code of morals, has its own code of manners which permits, amongst other deviations from the normal, of introductions offhand and self- made ; we were ready enough both to talk and be talked to, and carried away from our brief acquaint- anceship the knowledge that we should lunch and lunch well at the first hotel we came to. We were hungry enough by this time, and weary of the drizzle that stayed not so right glad of the Hotel des Arenes and the dfyeuner that timed with our coming. Let me at once confess it, though I pass evermore for a Vandal : on my first visit to Senlis I troubled not to see the arena and sought not for the famous Roman wall. And on the whole, Vandal or not, I think I did wisely and well since one clear impres- sion to carry away is worth many half-blurred memories. Sight-seeing without motive for interest is purposeless staring, no more ; and at the moment (it was in those first bewildering months of the War) SENLIS I was not interested in the sports or defences of the Romans, in the doings or dwellings of the Gauls. What interested me was not the capital of the Silvanectes but Senlis, French Senlis, as its citizens had made, as the Germans had battered and left it. So I passed quite close to the Roman arena on the broad highroad from Creil ; I took my lunch very heartily in its ancient and immediate neighbour- hoodand I left it, without a pang of conscience for another and a later visit. . . . Thereby, as I say, I did wisely and well for I got an impression unblurred. It was an impression in its essence dramatic ; far more dramatic, so it seems to me, than would have been obtained from the sight of a town com- pletely ravaged by the storm and brutality of war. There are towns and villages, not a few, over which battle and murder have swept to extinction, leaving in one scarce a stone in place, in the next but a misery of ruin. Senlis, on the other hand, was a study in violent contrast ; the works of peace and the works of war stood cheek by jowl within its limits. A living town, an uninjured town save for the one dead quarter. You walked one moment through orderly streets, provincially and pleasantly 6 SENLIS French ; respectable, not too bustling, as became a Cathedral city ; with here a wall and there a spire that had mellowed or crumbled through the cen- turies. You turned a corner : and side by side with prosperous order and ancient peace, with well-set shop-front and decorated spire lay a stretch of black desolation of burned -out house after burned -out house, of ruin staring at ruin. So distinct and sudden was the cleavage between order and black desolation that it would have been possible nay, easy for a man to walk about the town and out of it without guessing that he had passed within a few short yards of streets for the most part in ashes. The contrast, the sudden dramatic division, is due to the manner and nature of the havoc which the German wrought on the city. It was havoc deliberate and by fire, destruction at close quarters by the method of house to house. A bombardment from a distance may ruin more or less at haphazard ; annihilate erratically and again erratically spare. Senlis was bombarded as the enemy neared it and the French fell back through the town ; but the damage done was comparatively slight and fades into insignificance beside the wreckage wrought by fire. Houses in the Rue de la Re*publique and the SENLIS streets adjacent were burned out systematically by men who went steadily from door to door and worked on a definite plan. Senlis, says one who saw it, " flamed methodically " ; and thus you have a part of the town which is practically unscathed, and a part that is bare gaunt walls and heaps of rubble. ... So, rumour has it, should Paris have burned had she fallen to the German sword ; district by district and quarter by quarter, till France cried out for mercy and saved the remnant on terms. The local guide-book is not usually a dramatic production ; as a rule it is vapid or bombastic, or both, with a distinct tendency to induce diminution of interest in the objects depicted or described. I like my facts with a thrill to them ; hence my habit is to leave the local guide-book untouched in the stationer's window. It is a habit that has dis- advantages at times, and I cannot be too grateful to the less prejudiced companion who on my first visit to Senlis defied me and purchased a guide. Having bought it, we proceeded to con it in the street and in the rain ; and the first sentence conned in face of the heaped-up ruin of the Licorne and the Rue de la Re*publique brought with it an immediate accentuation of the sense of contrast and drama. 8 SENLIS " La jolie petite ville de Senlis," it told us in its pre-war accents, " a toujours et6 le sejour prefere des gens amis du calme et du bien-etre." " The favourite abode of the lover of quiet and comfort " then all the worse for the men of Senlis in the year 1914. The pre-war chronicler is emphatic on the point, and returns to it frequently in his pages. He quotes a fourteenth-century colleague, who describes the vociferous frogs in the river Nonette as the only disturbing element in the pleasant quiet of the city ; he excuses its comparatively uneventful history during the turbulent Middle Ages and the welter of the Wars of Religion by the fact that the citizens of Senlis were addicted to peace and to tolerance. When needful they stood a siege, and stood it well, but they were not of the temperament that thrusts itself into a quarrel ; on the contrary, they refrained as far as honest men might from participation in the fury of civil strife. Such scraps as one knows of their doings bear out their chronicler's theory. When Paris went blood- mad on Saint Bartholomew, she did not madden alone. There was many an echo to the bell of St. Germain TAuxerrois, and all over France the contagion of massacre spread. It is on record that SENLIS Senlis, near as she was to the centre of contagion, stood aloof from the horror and dipped not her hands in blood ; true to her tradition of compromise and prudence, she decided that it was impossible to cherish within her borders those who had been denounced as enemies of King and Faith ; but, having so decided, she bade them depart in peace. They went, thankful to have kept their lives- leaving Senlis thankful that she had not been forced to take them. Her citizens showed the same stubborn caution when the next great upheaval came at the end of the eighteenth century ; the capital, for all its nearness, neither cowed nor inflamed them into bloodshed, and revolutionary butchery in Senlis was dealt out only to monuments. True a repre- sentative of the people, one Andre" Dumont, was sent down from Paris to " purify " existing condi- tions ; but contrary to precedent the Senlis purifica- tion was performed without assistance from the guillotine. The principal result from the conven- tionnel's visit would appear to have been a resolution of the assembled citizens duly summoned by sound of bell to the effect that they did not recog- nize any form of religion. This conclusion was io SENLIS embodied in an address to the Representative of the People, and some damage to the local churches followed ; but though the resolution was said to be unanimous, the page recording it was shortly afterwards torn out of the city register. The men of Senlis, it would seem, had the defects of their good qualities ; they objected to martyrdom for themselves as well as for those who differed from them. By luck or by tact, then, they came through the Terror more easily than many, more easily than their nearness to Paris would seem to warrant ; and even the alien armies, which three times in the course of the nineteenth century made their conquer- ing way towards the capital, would seem on the whole to have respected the dwelling-place of the " lovers of quiet and comfort." In the " terrible year " of 1870 it was treated as an open town ; and in 1814 and 1815, when Germans, Russians and English marched through to make their entry into Paris, there were hardships, extortions, some pillaging on a minor scale insolence perhaps, but no savagery. Here and there an unhappy citizen had his home entered and ransacked ; and there was the serious and recurring difficulty of satisfying the invaders' SENLIS ii stomachs. " We had to find food for a detachment of Cossacks," a contemporary historian laments and goes on to record with bitterness the arrival of " Prussians, Wurtemburgers and Highlanders, who finished up all that was left." " On the 2nd (of July 1815) we watched the departure of the thousands of foreign troops who had camped in the neighbour- hood and just as we thought we had got rid of them there arrived others, Prussians, English and Dutch." A hard case no doubt, but no harder than that of many another town through which an invader has marched not hard enough for other than a local historian to chronicle or to leave any lasting effect. It took the last German invasion the invasion of 1914 to rouse the citizens from their calm of generations and turn their pleasant comfort into terror. Perhaps nay, probably that terror was all the more pitiable because of the immunity enjoyed by their fathers, their long tradition of temperate well-being and consistent aloofness from strife. Wars had rolled by them, and revolutions burned while the frogs croaked in the Nonette. Thus when the villas blazed on the road to Pontarme", their owners must have stared at the waving flames, incredulous as well as anguished. 12 SENLIS It is said and believed in Senlis that the invaders' original intention was that the town should perish utterly that, shed and spire and from end to end, it should be seared and scored by flame that it should fall as a fiery example, a warning to Paris and France. It is said that an order to this effect was actually given by the German " general " commanding at Senlis, from his quarters at the Grand Cerf Hotel ; but that the entreaties of the cure of Senlis so far touched his heart and conscience that he promised to approach his superior officer with a request for the lessening of the penalty ; and mean- while contented himself with firing the quarter adjoining the old Route de Flandre the Rue de la Republique, the Licorne and the Faubourg St. Martin. So the tale goes nor does there seem any reason to doubt it. It is borne out by the sentence of a council of war a sentence read by a German officer to a group of the town's hostages : It is ordered that every town or village where our troops are attacked by civilians shall be reduced to ashes. The inhabitants will be held responsible and led to immediate execution. Senlis attacked us and must take the consequences of its action. The sentence the original intention bears the SENLIS 13 war-mark of German thoroughness ; the stamp of that firm and considered ferocity of which only a system is capable. Man in the mass and as member of an organization will take on himself a responsi- bility for evil which he dare not shoulder alone for if blame should come, or failure, he can fall back on orders or on votes. For lack of the sense of indi- vidual responsibility the conscience of the system the nation, the society is always inferior to the conscience of the decent individual ; thus the measure by which German ruthlessness has excelled the ruthlessness of other nations is the measure of Germany's superiority in organization of human material, of her power of converting her nationals into irresponsible machines. (Than which there is no surer method of transforming seraph into fiend.) If the German commander at Senlis weakened before the prayers and arguments of a priest, it was because the machine had not moulded him through and through ; because there remained to him, in defiance of national teaching, some remnant of personal responsibility. His word it was that would light the flames, his order annihilate the city. Faced with the fact he hesitated and town and cathedral yet stand. 14 SENLIS (There are stories at Senlis, as elsewhere, that stand to the credit of the individual German one in particular of men who extinguished the flames lit by order that endangered the house of a bedridden woman. The real sin of the Teuton is not funda- mental cruelty, but that unfitness for or shrinking from personal responsibility which makes of him so good a machine. Nor is the temptation to sink the individual conscience in the conscience of the crowd one that confronts the German alone though, so far, he most thoroughly has yielded to it ; on the contrary, the civilization of the system, or organiza- tion, is a problem for all democracies.) One wonders why Senlis particularly was singled out for destruction more than Laon or Compigne or Amiens or half a dozen others that the victor had firmly in his grip. The same pretext the mingling of civilians in the fighting that took place in the streets could have been brought against Laon or Compiegne as easily as it was brought against Senlis ; and denial would always have been useless. There are towns that for aesthetic and other reasons one would get in a rage with and desire to wipe off the earth ; aggressive towns, towns hideous, towns dreary, filthy or bombastic. But SENLIS 15 Senlis has none of these evil qualities ; it is modest and apparently amiable. Amiable or not, they set to work to burn it ; systematically and starting from the neighbourhood of the railway station ; and thence down the road that leads to Paris through the forest of Pontarme. They burned it dutifully, in obedience to order, but not, it would seem in some cases at least without finding a pleasure in obedience. " Our conductor pointed out the flames with admiration " so writes one who was forced to look on the blazing streets in the company of a German escort. " He signed to us to enter an inn which the flames had spared and asked for matches I need hardly say he asked in vain. He rummaged about among the casks and bottles as he did not drink and had orders to burn, I am sure he was looking for paraffin ." The same eye-witness (Monsieur de Maricourt in his book Le Drame de Senlis) speaks of the " horrible beauty " of the sight which his captor invited him to admire. (" To right, to left is a flood of light from houses blazing and crumbling. Through the windows I saw furniture aflare and chimneys falling.") I have sat at a window on a hillside to the west- ward, whence its owner, on that day in September, 16 SENLIS watched the burning of the city and the throbbing sky overhead the red banner of the barbarian streaming in insult over France. And as it streamed (so she told me) she heard the thunder of bridge after bridge as its ruins crashed into the Oise that the German progress might be stayed while the French fell back to the Marne. I come of a race, the English, that finds it hard to produce and cultivate the sentiment of national hatred ; that replied to a fervid Hymn of Hate by nothing more forcible than an occasional Chant of Dislike. But, sitting by that window and looking towards Senlis, I asked myself whether the sight of a banner of wanton, vainglorious flame whether the echo of a thunder that betokened my countrymen's retreat would not have wakened even in me a most parching desire for revenge. And a Frenchman what must a Frenchman have felt when a German led him round Senlis and " pointed out the flames with admiration " ! CHAPTER II IF the agony of Senlis was sharp it was also short ; the town was occupied only on the 2nd of September on the eve of the battle of the Marne (on the day, as no German of the army would forget, of another battle, a famous battle at Sedan). The contrast between the untouched order of one part of the city and the utter ruin of another has its parallel in the yet more dramatic contrast between the swift overwhelming advance of the invader and his unexpected retreat. Senlis marked almost the flood of Teuton invasion ; the men who entered it von Kluck's men were drunk with their victories and speeding triumphantly to others. Even the legendary glories of the campaign of 1870 had paled before their achievements ; it had taken Moltke far more than a month to break the back of French resistance and reach the gates of Paris. They had struck hard, they had struck gloriously the prize was within their grasp : the Emperor's dinner was ordered in Paris, and 17 C i8 SENLIS Chantilly, but five miles away from Senlis, had been selected for the Emperor's stay while the terms of peace were dictated. . . . And a few days later the Emperor's soldiers were hurrying back from the Marne. What they felt as they retreated who shall say (except that some vein of amazed incredulity must have mingled with their angry disappointment) ; but I know very well what one of them felt just before the counter-blow was struck. Heaven knows what his name was and whether he lived or died ; but as his regiment passed through Senlis he scribbled a line to the folk at home that was never sent or signed. It was found, when the place was rid of him, in a ditch outside the town ; where mayhap the wind had blown it, where mayhap he had dropped it as he started up when the order came to move. It was written on blue-lined paper ruled on one side in chessboard squares and designed for the making of notes or a swift sketch-map ; scrawled in pencil by a man who believed that before many days were over he should salute his War-Lord in Paris. DEAR PARENTS AND SISTER (so it ran) I have your card of the I7th of August and was so glad to get my SENLIS 19 first news from home but your letter has not yet turned up. We came through Belgium where we had a lot to endure from the treachery of the inhabitants but our righteous cause is carrying us on from victory to victory, and three enemies have now learned that they cannot stand against us, the Belgians, the French and the English. . . . After this manner felt the soldiers of William II. as they marched out of Senlis with ruin still burning behind them ; glorying and extolling the most righteous cause which carried them from victory to victory, and convinced in their hearts of the foolish unrighteousness of those who had dared to withstand them with arms in their hands. Those of them who noted as they left the town that the road they took was the road not to Paris but more eastward to Meaux and Nanteuil, consoled themselves no doubt for the temporary swerve by talk and plan of a great encircling movement of a ring of German flesh and steel that should close on the capital and crush it into surrender. Their War-Lord held it, and with it France, in the very hollow of his hand. So they believed so they must have believed at that moment ; and not only they, but all the world that held its breath and waited for a blow at the heart of France. It is no wonder 20 SENLIS that they sang both loud and lustily as they marched through the smouldering city. It is on record that in March of the year 1594 Henry of Navarre made his entry into Paris to be king undisputed of France at last by way of the road from Senlis. Five years he had wrestled with the League and the League had held Paris against him ; to win his capital he had schemed, fought battles and abjured the faith he was bred in. He lay at the loyal little city of Senlis till the very eve of his triumph ; and as he went through her gates with his face to that other and mightier city which had for so long defied him, he cried out, exulting, to those who rode with him : " C'est a ce coup ! il n'y a que Dieu qui peut m'empecher que je n'entre dans Paris." "It is only God who can stay me from enter- ing Paris.'* So three hundred years later must the victor have cried, if not with his lips with his heart ; while the heart of the vanquished must have echoed him back : " It is only God who can stay you." . . . And ten days later less than ten days the miracle of miracles had happened and Kluck was backing to the Aisne. On the 2nd of September the invaders had entered Senlis ; on the gth the SENLIS 21 Marne was all but won and two hundred Zouaves came out from Paris to disperse and make prisoners the German stragglers who had lingered in the town to pillage. Foch Maunoury Gallieni with his army in taxi-cabs by some one, by some means, the tide had been stayed and turned. It may be that some among the advancing elated German host had heard and remembered that in 1815 their War- Lord's grandfather that other William of the Ever-Glorious Memory had halted and slept for a night in Senlis before taking his way into Paris ; being then but Prince William of Prussia, a young man eighteen years of age with an elder brother between him and the Prussian succession, and with fifty-five years yet to run before blood and iron made of him an Emperor and he was hailed the ruler of a new Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. A contemporary chronicler notes (it would seem without much interest) that the two sons of the King of Prussia had rested a night in Senlis at the house of one Monsieur Leblond. If the men of the city had been among the prophets, son number two of the King of Prussia would hardly have slept there in quiet. 22 SENLIS One may remember here that, within a few days of the passing of Prince William, Franois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, halted likewise in the city ; in the train of the royal returning fugitive, King Louis, eighteenth of the name, with whom he had fled from Paris and lived through the " Hundred Days " at Ghent. It is not for his remarks on the town chiefly reflections on the hospitality of a canon and his servant who " received us like dogs " that his visit is worthy of note ; the connection between Senlis and the author of the MSmoires d'Outre-Tombe is so slight that it would hardly be worth recalling but for certain convictions and prophecies which, if ironically in- clined, one may remember with interest in the streets which the German has branded. " Napoleon/' he dreamed and set down with confidence in his Memoirs, " has closed the era of the past. War can never again engross the interests of humanity he made it on too grand a scale, a scale that can never be equalled. He shut behind him once for all the gates of the temple of Janus and heaped against them so great a pile of dead that never again shall they reopen." So Rene" de Chateaubriand, prophet of peace, SENLIS 23 believing, no doubt, what he wrote. The war that was to end war had been fought in his day as in ours . . . the difference between the two being chiefly that in his day the war that was to end war slew men by the hundred thousand where in our day it slays by the million. CHAPTER III SENLIS had its warning of approaching invasion in the same way as many another town in the northern departments of France : by the passing southward of trains thronged with fugitives, the crowding on the roads of fugitives the trains could not carry, and, lastly, by the nearing thunder of guns and the sight of soldiers in retreat. Wisely or not, the swiftness of the enemy's advance was not revealed to the country at large in those terrible first weeks of war ; was there not always the desperate hope that the tide might yet be turned ? Thus the invader was at Compiegne while Paris in general believed him still in more northerly departments. There is a true story of a French officer who slept peacefully in a village not so very many miles from Senlis, having seen no reason as yet to doubt the tales of " holding " farther north ; and whose first warning of the German advance came when he was aroused from his easy slumbers 24 SENLIS 25 by the whir and rattle of car and gun as the army of Paris moved out to take its part in the Marne. On the last day of August there were British troops at Senlis. 1 On the 2nd of September, fighting their retreat, came the French, who " advised us to leave at once because the Germans would not spare us." The sweeping irresistible German front came down on Senlis in a curve from the north and east in a line extending roughly from the banks of the Oise to Nanteuil. On the last day of August the guns had grumbled loudly to the northward ; on the ist of September their growling was still more articulate. By mid-day on the 2nd the town had had warning enough and the greater number 1 Such inhabitants as I have talked to remember them for two reasons : because the then unfamiliar khaki was by some mistaken, at a first meeting, for the uniform of Kaiser William ; and because its wearers were always so cheery " si gais 1 " It is odd how the " gaiety " of the Englishman is becoming a legend in a country where formerly his gloom was proverbial. " Us sont si gais," they tell you wherever our troops have passed and they cannot all be mistaken. I myself am inclined to attribute the fact to that peculiar quality in our people defect or virtue as you will which makes them instinctively pull against the current of any disturbing emotion, be it individual or communal. Thus we take our pleasures sadly and our national tragedies with a grin. In neither case is the attitude assumed ; as I have said above, it is instinctive, the result of a racial habit of compromise and ingrained hatred of extremes. 26 SENLIS of its inhabitants had joined the throng that was flying helplessly south-westward the leaderless, ever-growing herd of civilians that the enemy was driving ahead of him like foam on an incoming wave. There was no more question of railway travelling on the morning of the 2nd of September, and those who had stayed their flight till then went by cart, by bicycle, on foot. As they fled shops closed, doors were locked, and normal life came to a standstill; and when the thunder of guns drew nearer yet the townsmen such as had dared to remain crept down to their cellars to shelter from the coming bombardment. (I have tried by enquiry as occasion offered and in various places to ascertain the reasons which induced those who might have fled to stay and face out occupation by the enemy's troops. Those public officials retained by their duty apart, there is the class of the unimaginative unable to realize that the routine in which they have lived for years could be actually and violently broken ; there is the class stayed by accidental reasons say by illness of their own or some member of household or family. Also there are those who fear above all things the destruction of property in their absence ; who have SENLIS 27 perhaps seen the houses of fugitive neighbours broken into by hungry fugitives from other districts and ransacked for food or for clothing. You can add to these classes such as, though not officials, are held at their post by some sense of responsibility for others by doubt of what may befall the less imaginative and more property-loving when left to the mercy of an enemy. In all these minds is a motive that dominates fear.) It was something after mid-day between one and two on the 2nd of September when the anticipation of bombardment became a reality and the first shell burst (and killed its man) in front of the Hotel de Ville. All the morning the firing had neared and loudened, and now the French rearguard beat its retreat through the streets and lanes of the city not daring to resist longer lest the German advance should outflank them. (There were some who, with orders or without them, did delay and in time resist of whose doings and their consequences later.) Montepilloy on one main road, Chamant on another had fallen into German hands ; and it was from Chamant to the northward, two miles away, that the guns were trained upon Senlis and aimed at her cathedral spire. 28 SENLIS The damage done by the bombardment, as I have said above, was not great. Here and there a house was struck and the cathedral bears its scars ; but though fifty shells are said to have fallen within its precincts, though gargoyles fell, and its glory, the spire, was a target they are scars one might pass without notice, paler patches on the time-worn stone. The inhabitants huddled in their cellars while the firing lasted ; but by luck or bad shooting they huddled practically uninjured. Nor did the bombardment last long by one statement half an hour ; it ceased as the French troops drew out of the town, and left it without reply. By a little after three in the afternoon the Germans were entering the city ; and the officer commanding (name unknown, but they rank him as General in Senlis) made his way to the Mairie, where the Mayor, Monsieur Odent, was awaiting him. Monsieur Eugene Odent was of Senlis, through and through, and his fathers were mayors before him (the name of one of them is still remembered in the town for his steady heroism in the days of the cholera scourge). He had been working in his office at the Mairie till the summons came and had, so they say, a presentiment that his life would be SENLIS 29 taken. The day before the entry of the Germans he had scribbled on a card to a colleague : " J'ai enfin mis ma femme en sfirete* et je suis maintenant tout a Senlis." When warned of the approach of the conquerors he left his office and met them on the steps of the Maine ; he had forbidden the calling together of his colleagues on the communal council it is said that he gave as his reason : " Do not let us have more than one victim." The German commander put questions to him which he answered to the best of his ability ; neither he nor Senlis had anything to gain by a falsehood. He was no soldier, nor is it likely that he was in the confidence of the retreating commanders ; he had spent the day as in duty bound at the Maine ; further, he had seen the French troops retiring through the streets as they made for the woods of Pontarm6. He had counselled quiet and submission to such citizens as had not fled ; he did not know the probability is so great as to be practically a certainty that in the outskirts of the town the French forces had left small detachments (by some accounts merely stragglers who had lingered too long in the faubourg ; by others, fresh troops hurried up to the town to cover their comrades' 30 SENLIS retreat). ... As I said, it seems certain he knew nothing of resistance or ambush ; and that when he informed the German commander that the town was quiet and clear of French troops, he spoke from such knowledge as he possessed, told only what he believed. Having told it, he was ordered to accompany the victor to his quarters at the Grand Cerf Hotel. After that but a few moments after began the tragedy of Senlis. The Germans on entering had spread through the town and for the most part had taken possession undisputed, breaking open houses whence owners had fled, and crowding into wineshops to drink thirstily after their labours. It was only when they flowed into the southern outskirts that they realized that Senlis was not yet entirely at their mercy. Unmistakably the men who fired on them from the gardens and buildings of the Rue de la Republique were soldiers fighting by order to cover retreat or fighting merely to escape. There are opposing stories how should there not be ? as to how the street fighting began ; but townsmen are stubborn in denying the conten- tion that civilians took part in the conflict. The Germans, they tell you, were determined to make SENLIS 31 an example and the pretext was ready before they set foot in the town. In one sense, indeed, civilians did take part a part most unwilling and perilous, most shameful to those who compelled them. In Senlis, as in Belgium, they were placed in the forefront of the battle ; they marched there unarmed, unprotected, as a rampart for the troops of their enemies. Men seized here and there as they showed in the streets were thrust to the fore of the German columns and, marching ahead of them, fell by their country- men's rifles. And not men alone ; amongst the wounded was a child so young that she was carried in her mother's arms. (There are doings so evil one finds it hard to credit them. I have been told this tale : I suppose it true ; and yet I can hardly believe it.) The child formed one of a wretched little party of six three men, two women, and herself who were driven at the head of the German troops down the road out of Senlis to the forest of Pontarme; still held by the French rearguard, which had dug itself in on its borders. The strata- gem, in part at least, would seem to have been successful ; it is a regrettable fact that the French army is not educated up to German standards 32 SENLIS and lacks that capacity for destroying its kin with equanimity which (as the Kaiser once reminded his recruits with emphasis) is one of the needful characteristics of the efficient defender of the Fatherland. Hence an account of the incident given by a French soldier present speaks of fire momentarily slackening as the cries of their wretched countrymen reached the ears of the French officers. Another account conveys the same impression ; the victims escaped, it says, by hurrying forward in a lull of the French fire and so gaining shelter in the forest. It was not to the relenting of their captors but to the horror and pity of their flesh and blood that they owed the mercy of their lives. Out of the six but one the child was wounded by a French bullet ; she was carried by her mother into the hospital in the Rue de la Republique, round which the fight raged fiercely. Out of the remaining four the four who escaped into the forest one was wounded, but not by the fire of his own countrymen ; he was hit in the back by a German bullet as he made for the French lines. . . . One of the victims has set down his experiences in writing ; telling how an officer, " in excellent French/' announced to him and his companions : SENLIS 33 " Nous ne vous fusillerons pas, mais ce sont les Fran$ais, vos compatriotes, qui se chargeront de ce soin." And going on to tell that, " having arrived at the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, which makes a right-angle with the Paris road, the Germans found themselves exposed to the fire of our troops. They hugged the walls of the houses, but forced us to walk in the middle of the road. We were ex- posed to the fire of machine guns." We amongst whom was a child ! Of four lads forced to precede the Germans as they advanced to attack down the Rue de la Re- publique but two of them lived to tell the tale and they lived badly wounded. Two died as their captors had meant them to die struck down by the bullets of Frenchmen. A third was wounded by the same tragic means ; and as, shot in the knee, he lay in the street by the side of his two dead comrades, a German officer came up to him and demanded to see his hurt. As the young man raised himself to show his injury the German shot him in the shoulder, and, having shot him, walked away. When the town grew quieter the lad dragged himself out of it dragged himself as far as Chantilly and lived to tell what he had suffered. ... As for D 34 SENLIS his fellow, the fourth living shield, he, too, had a narrow escape with his life from the hands of the same gallant soldier. As he crouched against the wall at the side of the road in a pitiful attempt at shelter, the Kaiser's officer put a good German bullet into him. He owed his life to the fact that he uttered no sound, and the German believed he had killed him. . . . The above is no hearsay accusation ; the names of the young men who suffered and died are known. Those who died were Jules Levasseur, whose age was twenty-two, and Georges Lemayrie, aged nineteen. Modern warfare is so monstrous, all-engrossing and complex, that there is a sense, and a very real sense, in which hardly a civilian stands outside it ; where the strife is to the death with an equal opponent the non-combatant ceases to exist. No modern nation could fight for its life with its men in uniform only ; it must mobilize, nominally or not, every class of its population for a struggle too great and too deadly for the combatant to carry on alone. The " unfit " who step into the shoes of the fit, the old men who fill the gaps left by their sons, the women who press into fields and workshops all these keep the fighting line going, and without them the fighting line must fail ; and hence, under modern g s * W -5 o >, II SENLIS 35 conditions of war, an increasing difficulty in drawing the line that protects the civilian from open attack by the soldier. A munition factory staffed by women, a laboratory where some weakling discovers a chemical compound, may be deadlier instruments of death and destruction than thousands of horses and men. Further, where each party to the strife enlists the services of his entire population puts forth, in a word, his utmost the question of national exhaustion looms far larger than it did in the day of the professional soldier and the army running to thousands. Consciously or unconsciously, while the armies are at grips, the civilians of one nation are outstripping, exhausting the other or are being outstripped and exhausted in the struggle for resources and replenishment. The work and re- sources of a civilian population have always been an indirect factor in every military situation ; but to-day they are a factor direct and declared, to-day the exempt and the woman are openly mobilized and enlisted. One sees that this direct intervention of the civilian in warfare must entail a certain loss of his immunity from direct attack and punishment, and that a leader hard pressed or unscrupulous may deem himself entitled to interpret the fundamental 36 SENLIS maxim enjoining him to cut his enemy's communica- tions in a fashion undreamed of by those who framed rules for a conflict confined to the soldier. Such, one imagines, is the line of argument by which the German nation has justified to itself the savagery and wanton destruction which marked the footsteps of its armies. As a theory it has its points, and the world will have to consider it ; but we judge a man not by his theories but by the manner in which he applies them. The German leaders decided at the outset that their war was a war on non-combatants; and that opportunities must be taken (and made) to inform non-combatants of the fact That, it may be, was justifiable and proved their foresight. What was neither justifiable nor far-sighted was the method of their war on civilians by terrorism pure and simple, by savage infliction of the penalty of death for resistance or alleged resist- ance which their own methods invited. We must suppose that they weighed and considered the risk of rousing the devil of extreme hatred in the hearts of those they terrorized, and came to the conclusion that, in view of their military preponderance, the danger was practically negligible they could afford to slay and spare not. SENLIS 37 In this conclusion they erred. In the first place because their military superiority over the allied nations was not so great as they had hoped ; in the second, because they had forgotten the repugnance -the instinctive repugnance and loathing of humanity for certain unnatural sins. One of these sins unforgivable they committed in the city of Senlis when they drove French citizens against the guns of their countrymen. It is a sin that has been cursed since Moses commanded, " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk." " Nous ne vous fusillerons pas, mais ce sont les Fran$ais, vos compatriotes, qui se chargeront de ce soin." It was because of the horror inspired by such sins that they counted in a military sense. They stirred the loathing even of the unimaginative ; they disposed once for all of the pacifist argument, ' What if the Germans did come ; we should not be any worse off." They made it impossible to suffer the victory of a nation that countenanced such sins. The story of Senlis helped to harden the heart of France and for that reason alone is worth remembering. CHAPTER IV BETWEEN two and three kilometres from Senlis, on the road that runs north to Compiegne, stands the village of Chamant, where once dwelt Lucien Bonaparte, next brother of the great Napoleon. (The only brother out of five who never wore a royal crown.) The department of Oise, it would seem, had attractions for the Bonaparte breed ; there are Murats, descendants of Caroline, at Chambly, and while Lucien settled at Chamant, near Senlis, his eldest brother Joseph King of Naples, King of Spain for a time was his neighbour a few miles off, at Mortefontaine. 1 As the former residence of the Corsican's brother, Chamant, one supposes, before the war had a certain mild local celebrity ; for the rest it is an ordinary 1 So far as I know, the only Napoleonic tradition connected with Senlis itself is a story that the Emperor, when travelling to Paris from Compiegne with his bride, Marie Louise, was brought to a halt in the streets of Senlis which he had intended to pass without stay so that young girls of the city might present the new Empress with flowers. 38 SENLIS 39 French village, straggling and disjointed, white- walled and watched over by a grey French church. If you see it for the first time (as I did) on a dreary day in March, you are inclined to consider it a very ordinary French village, to resent its most plentiful provision of mud and to wonder why a Bonaparte (or any one else) should choose it as a place of residence. It shows little sign of the fact that the opposing forces fought through it in September of the year 1914 ; it was not worth burning, may be, and the conquerors were content to install them- selves in the chateau and make free with its owner's good wine-cellars. 1 It was at Chamant, from the shelter of the chateau, that the enemy guns were trained upon Senlis and its spire a mark upstanding and graceful, most attractive to a German gunner. And it was in a field outside Chamant, not at Senlis itself, that the conquerors wrought " justice " on the mayor and not on the mayor only. Six wretched " hostages/' seized at random, died with him for the crime of being Frenchmen. 1 They played their usual filthy pranks in the interiors which had the misfortune to shelter them ; wasted, befouled, smashed, and threatened the villagers with violence. But so far as I know they destroyed no buildings and took no civilian lives. 40 SENLIS From the Compiegne road, in a field to the right, you can see in winter when the ground is bare the cross that marks the spot where the six men died; in summer the upstanding corn must hide it but any one will point out the way. The mayor, as I have said above, was led first to the Grand Cerf Hotel in the Rue de la Republique, where the Germans as soon as they entered the town had ordered a dinner for thirty ; and where since they did not burn it like its neighbours you may order your own to-day. There he remained as a captive ; with, one concludes, his presentiment of death growing stronger. The officer in command must have given him more than a hint of his fate when in the mayor's presence he accused the citizens of Senlis of firing on the German troops. Monsieur Odent protested ... he might as well have held his peace. It would seem that the neighbourhood of Chamant was chosen for his place of execution chiefly because the German general preferred its chateau as a place of residence to quarters in Senlis itself ; perhaps, like a wise man, he valued his good night's rest, and realized the difficulty of obtaining it in the neighbourhood of crumbling houses and streets SENLIS 41 aroar with flames. Be that as it may, he removed from the Grand Cerf to Chamant ; and to Chamant Monsieur Odent was brought, under military escort as a prisoner. (On the way his cane was snatched from him and used to strike him on the head.) He was taken to a reaped cornfield in the neighbourhood of the German bivouac (the field where a cross stands to-day), and there, in the company of a little drove of fellow-citizens captive like himself, like himself in the anguish of uncertainty he watched the night come down on Senlis and the red glare beat it back. There does not appear to have been any pretence of trial, and, all things considered, the conquerors showed a certain practical good sense and even honesty by declining to waste their time with forms of justice, or put themselves to the trouble of listening to useless defence. We must remember that these people were convinced of their own virtue as Robespierre was when he sent his tumbrils to the headsman. They believed most firmly that " German " stands for " good," and that what they willed was right because they willed it ; and it is characteristic of those who are sure of their own righteousness to go straight and cruelly to their 42 SENLIS end. The common precautions of law and justice are not for the infallible, the certainly righteous. Wars of religion have ever been the bitterest because of that certainty of righteousness in the heart of the combatant ; and the German mentality in 1914 was obviously tinged by the religious idea the German war was a crusade and a persecution. It is only those who are conscious of fallibility who will voluntarily protect others against the conse- quences of their own mistakes. It was without form of trial, therefore, at eleven at night, that his sentence was announced to the mayor; its bearers giving him a few minutes to take leave of his fellow -prisoners, and send his farewells to those he had put in safety. " We were placed," tells one of his fellow-prisoners, " we were placed all six in a row before several German officers, of whose rank I am ignorant. These officers ordered us to lie down on our faces and stretch out our arms." (Why ? unless to enjoy the brute sense of power, to gloat over Frenchmen lying flat on their faces, humiliated?) "Afterwards they told us to get up and stand in line again ; when we had done so, one of them asked Monsieur Odent if he were not the Mayor of Senlis. He was then made to approach SENLIS 43 a group of officers, who spoke to him in French I could not catch what they said. After only a few seconds Monsieur Odent came to us, shook our hands, and said they were going to shoot him. He went back for a moment to the officers, said a few words to them, came to me again and handed me some bank notes and fifty francs, asking me to give them to his family. Then he said, ' Good-bye, my dear Benoit, we shan't see each other again ; I am going to be shot now.' "... Thereupon, " advan- cing very courageously towards the officers," he was led away, and " a little time afterwards we heard two rifle-shots, followed by the report of a revolver, which we judged to be the coup de grace." Where he died the earth was shovelled over him very thinly; and ten days later, on the I2th of September, when the neighbourhood was cleared, once for all, of his slayers, the body was removed to Senlis and there buried with reverence and honour. Froissart has handed down to us the words of a good soldier, Sir Walter Manny, when his king was bent on the death of six burghers of Calais. " Gentle sir," he protested, " restrain your anger. You have a name for nobility and gentlehood ; do nothing by 44 SENLIS which that renown shall be abated. If you have not pity on these men the blame of your cruelty will be on every tongue.". . . If the knight spoke truth the fourteenth-century soldier of England had a higher standard of soldierly honour than the field-grey German of to-day ; for one does not gather that the blame of their leader's cruelty was on every tongue in the army of Kaiser William. The Middle Ages did their share of slaughter, sack and rape ; but they did not, so far as we know, excuse their savagery on the plea that some unarmed or half-armed burgher had threatened a body of men- at-arms equipped for the taking of life. . . . And even when the burghers of fallen Calais walked with ropes round their necks to the victor, the slaying of unarmed captives in cold blood was regarded as a stain on the fame and honour of a soldier. There is a record in the history of Senlis itself that proves it ; a tale of the slaying of unarmed men that has left a name to the town the name of the Boulevard des Otages. Five hundred years ago, in the year 1418, Serilis stood one of its sieges ; involved (one imagines against its will) in the complicated feuds of the Armagnacs and Bur- gundians, it sided with the latter and was invested SENLIS 45 by Armagnac the Constable. From February to April the town held out, and no man came to deliver it ; then, losing hope and at the end of their re- sources, the defenders parleyed and struck a bargain with their enemies. They would yield, they pro- mised, on the 1 8th of April, should succour not appear by that date ; and, as security for the due execution of the bond, they delivered into the hands of the Constable certain of their prominent citizens Henri de Marie, their Chancellor, and others whose names I know not. Day followed day till the 1 8th dawned and with it the banners of Burgundy ! . . . Beholding them, the Armagnacs were instant in their clamour for immediate opening of the gates ; beholding them, the men of the beleaguered fortress refused to open till the evening. The banners of Burgundy came swiftly on and the city was snatched from the very jaws of its devourers the Armagnacs cheated of their prey in the moment of certain victory. They retreated sullenly and Senlis was left untaken ; but it held its freedom at the price of its hostages' lives. Before the baulked troops of the Constable withdrew they slaughtered the cap- tives in full view of their townsmen on the ramparts, and hurled the severed heads into the city. . . . 46 SENLIS Even in those days the deed was a deed of horror ; even five hundred years ago shame was cried on the slayer of captives ! Eugene Odent, the Mayor of Senlis, did not die alone ; in the same field, on the same night, the earth was shovelled lightly on the shallow graves of six of his fellow-citizens. (Others were held captive in uncertainty all night, and then, with the morning, released, one knows not why it was a case of the one being taken and the other left.) The victims were men who had been seized at random as they walked or stood in the streets, told they were pris- oners, and carried from Senlis to Chamant. They were not chosen for their worldly importance, as the Armagnacs chose their hostages, since the list of trades they followed when alive shows a carter, a stone-mason and a leather-worker. Three of them were over sixty, and one was a boy of seventeen. They were less fortunate than their mayor in that no friend was with them at their ending to carry their last little sacred wishes and messages. . . . They are believed to have died about ten at night ; and, the execution being without French witnesses, it was only known who they were when the shallow SENLIS 47 graves were uncovered. (Many, no doubt, had been missing from their homes during the German reign of terror of whom it was impossible to say, at first, whether they were fled, killed or captive.) All six were identified, by feature or by clothing, and reburied with their mayor at Senlis. The execution of the mayor and his six fellow- hostages at Chamant was the result of a deliberate and formal order on the part of the officer command- ing the invaders in the district ; but in Senlis itself there were other executions of an even more rough- and-ready type, carried out on their own initiative and at their own convenience by certain of the German rank and file. The one or two stories which I have heard or read of these unceremonious murders have much the same characteristics ; the procedure seems to have been that a party of soldiers, entering the house, demanded drink and obtained it it was hardly likely that any Senlisien would have the rashness to refuse. Then, when the visitors had comfortably satisfied their thirst, they proceeded to emulate their officers in their manner of dealing with the host. In one case, that of the keeper of a small wine-shop, by an accusation of 48 SENLIS firing on them from behind his house which the helpless man vainly denied. His judges (probably half -drunken), unmoved by his pleading, removed him to the nearest convenient wall and shot him there and then. CHAPTER V I SUPPOSE that only those who have been through it can realize to the full the blight and the deadness that falls on a town during such an experience as that which came to Senlis ; when the normal regula- tions and customs that govern the community are suddenly replaced by an alien and hostile authority. For the time being the city French Senlis as it used to be had practically ceased to exist. In its stead was a " foreign possession," administered, not in the interest of the native-born but in the interest of the foreign possessor; the centre of gravity of the place was altered, and the manners, needs and habits of the stable population sub- ordinated entirely and at a moment's notice to the manners, needs and habits of an influx of soldier aliens. Such a change, even if not made brutally, would be bound to stagger, to produce confusion and deadlock. Add to this necessary confusion and deadlock the effects of terrorism, actual and 49 E 50 SENLIS potential ; the flight of inhabitants as the rumour of terrorism spread and the cowed self-effacement of those who stayed on as they learned by actual and bitter experience the meaning of a foreign occupation! (It is estimated that the French population of Senlis fell suddenly from about seven thousand to eighteen hundred ; in appearance, however, it fell to far less than that, so general was the disposition to shun the contact with the invader involved by the open street.) Activity and initiative ceased ; the life of the civilian in alien territory was a process of waiting, agonized or stupefied, for what would happen next ; what form of misfortune or deliverance. One can gauge the intensity of suffering by the intensity of relief that succeeds it ; and there is sheer passion of thankfulness in the outburst of a citizen of Senlis when the curse was lifted, the shadow of oppression removed : La vie renait, 1'air est respirable. Qu'ils sont gentils, nos soldats ! " Life is born again, we can breathe.". . . After the night of red ruin which left us dazed and blinded ; after the passing and passing of German hosts while our hearts died within us at their numbers ! After SENLIS 51 the pillaging, the bloodshed, the contempt, the feel of the jackboot on our neck . . . and, above all, after the uncertainty, the blank and helpless uncertainty. Life is born again, we can breathe and our soldiers, our soldiers . . . who have saved us ! (It does not need much imagination to under- stand why no people forgets the hero who has delivered it from the heel and sword of the oppressor. Others, whose names are forgotten, gave it learning and prosperity but the saviour gave it life !) Senlis died only for a week; an infinitesimal point of time compared to the months and years during which Belgium and districts of northern France lay stunned at the feet of the invader without separate life of their own ; but long enough for those who endured it to taste the bitterness of its death. . . . Let one who has tasted describe it. ' The town is almost deserted. . . . Soldiers are pillaging. At the corner of the Rue Sainte Genevieve they are breaking our poor French rifles. ... In the Rue de 1'Apport au Pain more soldiers pillaging a jeweller's shop which will soon be as bare as my hand. They work through it calmly and methodically, unashamed, without haste or roughness. All the same, for a word they would 52 SENLIS have a revolver at your head. ... I went into the chemist's his manager was taken off yesterday by the enemy, and no one knows what has become of him." And again : " I am always being told, by wives or relations, of men carried off by the Germans who have not reappeared. . . . The orders are to leave all doors open and neighbours unfasten the houses which refugees have left closed. . . . We ring vainly at the doors of empty houses. We seek vainly for a horse. All vehicles have been seized. German cyclists are making the round of the streets. ... I think of going to Villemetrie (a neighbouring village) ; this is imprudent as the day is drawing on and we are forbidden by the enemy's order to be out after sunset. ..." And later when the iron had entered into the soul : " There is the prospect of living for months, cut off from the world and perhaps starving, and at times I feel myself weakening. . . . While one of the greatest dramas in all history is being played out to its end, we are like rats in a trap, knowing nothing." l A city of empty houses ; of helplessness before 1 Quoted almost at random from M. de Maricourt's Le Drame de Senlis which let those who wish for a vivid impression read further. SENLIS 53 insult, and rage that had to be swallowed ; of streets where the stranger was master and the citizen cowered in hiding. A city of impotent loneliness and impotent longings . . . where homeless animals prowled and starved till in mercy they were hunted and destroyed. Where you heard no news ; where such hope as you might have dared to snatch from the mutter of guns to the southward was beaten out of you, beaten out of you, by the endless tramp- ling of alien troops on the march. And then, at the end of a week of it ... the Zouaves ! At six in the morning on the ninth day of September. For three days, from the 2nd to the 5th, the alien troops passed ceaselessly ; after that the two armies were at grips on the Marne and the fate of France in the balance. By the Qth the balance was swaying against the invader so, at six in the morning the dead city wakened to life, and those who peered cautiously from their windows as the shouting roused them saw red baggy trousers and red caps. Zouaves from St. Denis : one account says four hundred of them, one says two what matter their numbers so they stayed ? Many or few, they were strong enough to clear the town 54 SENLIS of such small detachments of the enemy as remained within its borders it was the turn of the French to take prisoners. . . . Again, I suppose, one must have lived through the experience to realize just what it means, after days of subjection, of death in life, to walk out erect and unafraid ; to see in the place of the field-grey incendiary a jaunty and confident Zouave, the embodiment of France to the rescue. How all hands must have sought his ! (Qu'ils sont gen tils, nos soldats !) How all eyes must have followed him, afraid to lose sight of the deliverer ! No doubt there were many who had fled from Senlis who did not return at all ; whose homes had been gutted or whose sources of livelihood had been destroyed either by fire or wholesale pillage. And those who came back did not come (as they went) in a crowd ; but gradually, as roads and railways were opened to traffic, and cautiously, as the dash on Paris became more improbable and the Front grew hard across France. As they came back, gradually and cautiously, there were tearful, wretched little scenes when families, returned from exile, found home bereft of everything that had made it worthy of the name, or hunted in blackened SENLIS 55 ruins for small treasures the flames might have spared. And while they wept and hunted, and the town authorities tidied the wreckage off the streets, the curious, so soon as the road was cleared, were motoring down from Paris and enterprising photographers hurrying out postcards of ruins. 1 1 With inscriptions in French and English whereof the English has a most individual charm. Witness postcards of " Senlis, German Incendiary Incendiary House, Cordelier's Street," and " The Heroic Tobacco-man " whoever he may be ! When a modern community has been beaten to the ground, advertisement it would seem is the first of its arts to lift up a head from the dust. CHAPTER VI THE Cathedral of Notre Dame at Senlis is one of a series of churches erected on the same spot. Its beginning was a chapel dedicated to the Virgin and begun as early as the third century by St. Rieul, the apostle of the district; then followed a more ambitious building, which, as the town flourished and became the residence of kings, attained the dignity of a cathedral a cathedral that chroniclers speak of for its sumptuous decoration and its treasure of gold and silver. This too aged and passed ; and the immediate predecessor of the present church was one erected towards the end of the tenth century. Its life for a church was a short one ; by the middle of the twelfth century it was crumbling into ruin, and the bishop of Senlis, one Thibaut, undertook the task of rebuilding it on a grander scale than before. The king's patronage was asked and obtained for the work; and when the question of payment became pressing Louis VII. 56 SENLIS 57 granted his royal letters of recommendation and protection to a mission sent out by the diocese to beg money and gifts from the faithful. According to custom the mission bore with it the especial treasures of Senlis relics of undoubted authenticity and sanctity whose pilgrimage was to stimulate the devotion of good Christians and inspire them to the loosening of purse-strings, so that architects and masons might be paid. In spite of this stimulus to generous almsgiving on the part of the neighbouring faithful, the building advanced but slowly ; and even with assistance from the king's purse it was not until the year 1191 that it was solemnly dedicated to the service and glory of God in the presence of an archbishop and five bishops. The ceremony by no means betokened the cathedral's completion ; money was still urgently needed, and once again the relic- bearing mission set out on its laudable journeying this time countenanced and blessed by the Arch- bishop of Rheims, who earnestly commended the pilgrims and their aims to the hearts and good offices of all clergy under his rule. Thanks to these and other measures such as the granting of indulgences to those who contributed 58 SENLIS to the pious work the cathedral was completed and grew rich ; was famous, like its predecessor, for the splendour of its treasure and ornament. In the thirteenth century its glory, the spire, first lifted its head towards heaven (of its designer is known only this that he was an artist in stone) and the fourteenth added the chapter-house and library. The church was rich not only in ornament but in relics ; whereof the chief was a spine from the Crown of Thorns secured for it by one of its bishops. Like many another Gothic cathedral, Senlis would hardly be recognizable by its original architect should his spirit revisit the ways of the city where he pondered and dreamed his dreams. With the passing of years the taste of the artist must neces- sarily suffer a change ; the worker in stone of the twelfth century had not and could not have the same ideals and methods of expression as his fellow- craftsman of the thirteenth century or fourteenth much less his successor of the sixteenth, seven- teenth or eighteenth. Comparatively few of the great churches of Europe approached anything like completion in the space of a man's working life ; the task was inevitably handed on from one generation of master-builder to another, and each SENLIS 59 generation brought to the work not only its changed individuals but their changing ideals and outlook. Further, when the raising of churches was a merit in itself, a forward step on the thorny path to redemption, there must have been some- times a desire on the part of those faithful well endowed with the goods of this world to erect varia- tions in the way of additions, rebuilding or ornament which were more necessary to the donor's salvation than to the architect's original plan. Add to these sources of variation not only, as years went on, the inevitable need of restoration but that curious blindness to the beauty of the Gothic which for a time affected Europe that blindness which made Gibbon select St. Sulpice as the finest church in Paris. Gibbon's century, the eighteenth, tried its hand on Senlis cathedral as on many another relic of the ages. French cathedral chapters of the period seem to have had strong views on the necessity of adapting the barbaric buildings under their charge to the requirements of a civilized taste; at Senlis, as at Rheims and elsewhere, the canons " improved " with much vigour. The thirteenth - century porch they tidied away altogether ; and finding it impossible, in spite of their earnest 60 SENLIS endeavours, to remove from the inside of choir and nave all traces of time and of a fire from which the building had once suffered, they decided to have the interior neatly and thoroughly whitewashed. For the purpose they called in an Italian, one Dominique Borrani, who probably performed the task to the entire satisfaction of his employers, since he had already (by the same lavish use of the brush) adapted the cathedral of Chartres, the abbey of St. Denis, and other important ecclesiastical monuments to the taste of a cultivated age. So thickly did his workmen plaster on their compound that in some cases they actually buried the carvings on the capitals beneath a coating of whitewash. The energetic chapter did not stop short at a mere coat of paint ; with a zeal worthy of a better cause it involved itself in heavy expenditure so heavy that the bill was a long time paying by a desperate effort to conceal, as far as the nature of the structure would admit, all relics of a barbarism that came down from earlier ages. Elaborate marble balustrades, florid choir stalls and ornate iron gateways entered into their scheme of decoration and improvement a scheme which a later generation has considerately swept away. SENLIS 61 I have alluded above to a fire which left permanent traces on the building. It not only left traces but went near to destroy it ; and through its ravages and the restoration they necessitated was responsible for much of the sixteenth-century work, such as the transepts with their portals and the large windows of the choir and nave. It was a catastrophe that transformed a church built according to the severer design of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into a building largely flamboyant. This was the great conflagration of June 1504, when the molten lead poured down from the roof and " ran in the streets like water." It is said to have been caused by lightning; but, whatever the cause, the cathedral blazed and almost to the point of destruction ; and when, after two days' raging, the flames died down, architects and masons were hard put to it to save the building from crumbling into ruin entire. The citizens gave generously to the work of pre- servation and repair ; experts were called in hastily, not only from Senlis but from Beauvais and Com- pigne, and immediate steps were taken to support the threatened tower and spire. The disaster was looked on apparently as some- thing like a national misfortune ; for both Louis XII. 62 SENLIS and his successor, Francis I., gave a grant in aid of the rebuilding in memory whereof the F and salamander of Francis still show above the north transept door. As a further token of the town's sense of gratitude, the statues both of Louis and of Francis, together with that of Anne of Brittany (wife of one king and mother-in-law of the other), were placed in niches above the southern portal. These statues exist no longer ; they were battered away by the king-breaking red revolutionist. If he dealt more mercifully with the salamander above the other door, it was probably because he had never heard of its significance as the favourite device of a defunct tyrant and considered it simply as a curly and fabulous worm. Low in the streets be it spoken but even leaving out of account the misdeeds of eighteenth-century canons, the cathedral of Senlis has suffered less at the hands of the invader than at the hands of the native-born vandal. This, it may be, is not to be accounted as a virtue to the invader or a proof of his feeling for the arts ; rather is it a proof of a certain deficiency in marksmanship, since by all accounts he had many a shot at the spire and has left his signature there as well as on other parts SENLIS 63 of the cathedral. On the whole, however, his signature was graven less deeply than that of the man of '93 ; who, after the public renunciation by the city of Senlis of all forms of religious superstition, proceeded with characteristic energy to purge the cathedral of its atmosphere of out-of-date piety. He began by selling off such movables choir stalls, chairs and the like as the public could convert to domestic and practical uses ; and went on to express his contempt for the past by inflicting considerable and hearty damage upon less portable adjuncts of the edifice. Francis I., Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany were not alone in their misfortune ; if you stand in the neighbourhood of the great west portal you may note at a first glance something of the handiwork of the sans-culotte, and at the second glance even more. Of the groups in relief sculptured over the doorway one, representing the death of the Virgin, is so battered that its figures are in some places almost annihilated. Fortunately its com- panion panel, the beautiful resurrection of the Mother of God, with its eager angels, uplifting and adoring, has escaped the hand of the destroyer and the larger (but far less interesting) coronation of the Virgin above is damaged only in places ; but 64 SENLIS on the other hand many of the rows of smaller figures representations of patriarchs, prophets, kings of Judah and ancestors of the Virgin are minus the necessary head, and the eight larger figures ranged on either side of the door were likewise decapitated by the hammer of the zealous patriot. This latter statement may seem at first sight to jar with the fact that the eight large figures in question have heads on their shoulders to this day ; but a nearer inspection will explain the apparent discrepancy. Fifty years after their decapitation a sculptor, one Robinet to whom must at least be given the credit for good intention set to work to repair the sacrilegious damage which the zealous patriot had wrought; and the eight prophets and patriarchs were once more provided with heads. Unluckily the sculptor's conscientious style was hardly in accordance with that of the predecessor who fashioned the limbs and attitudes of the afore- said prophets and patriarchs ; and there is ground for thinking that, under his chisel, some at least of the statues have suffered a change of identity that David has become Jeremiah, Jeremiah been transformed into Daniel. It was the zealous patriot likewise who swept SENLIS 65 away the treasures which the cathedral chapter had amassed in the course of six centuries ; the tapestries, the sixteenth -century rood-screen, the jewelled shrines and the lamps that burned before them ; and this pillage was the more grievous because the relics and treasures of such neighbouring churches as had been already diverted from religious purposes had been brought to Senlis for refuge. Not content with depriving the building of its riches, enthusiastically destructive citizens tore up its very paving-stones ; and the whilom House of God, thus mutilated, was used as a place of meeting for the local revolutionary club. Where the priest had chanted, the demagogue vituperated, and the canticle was ousted by the carmagnole. In addition to its uses as a Jacobin club-house, the building was found convenient and suitable for balls and public entertainments until such time as it was taken over by the military authorities as a storehouse for army forage. Two years later in 1795 the Terror had long been over, the reaction against it had set in ; with, as one of its results, a national admission that the Christian had a right to own and worship in the temples of his faith. Under the Directory the 66 SENLIS Catholic population of Senlis entered once more into possession of its cathedral, and began the urgent labour of clearance, cleaning and repair. Much of the ancient treasure of the church was gone and beyond recall the glory of its windows and the jewelled beauty of its shrines ; but only time and labour were called for, in order to clear the floor of the lumber with which it was scattered, and accom- plish the structural repairs rendered needful by the neglect and brute ill-usage of the red-revolutionary epoch. . . . One lost treasure came back after years in a fashion unexpected and curious ; the almost contemporary statue of Louis the Saint, which stands in the side-chapel dedicated to his name. During the reign of the sans-culotte the figure, being royal, was carried away from its pedestal to be discovered fifty years later buried in a neighbouring cemetery. Having been dis- covered, St. Louis was returned to his chapel, where he stands with his sceptre in one hand and the Crown of Thorns in the other. Looking at the statue which is large of head and chubby of face you would not guess at its adventures ; for if its out- lines are those of seven centuries gone, its paint is the paint of yesteryear orthodox ecclesiastical SENLIS 67 blue as to mantle, and gilt as to fleur de lys and sceptre. The fury of revolutionary destruction over, the cathedral, for more than a hundred years, suffered only from the zeal of the restorer or well-intentioned improver ; whose most noticeable addition to the structure is the lady chapel behind the high altar. The five chapels of the apse were formerly of equal size ; thus the increased dimensions of the lady chapel and the manner in which it juts out from the main building are a variant from the original plan. No doubt the architect of the chapel was pleased with his idea and its effect ; but a later generation might have been more grateful to him had the original plan been adhered to. Injudicious tinkering was the worst harm that befell the cathedral of Notre Dame between the waning of the Terror and the coming of the German invasion. The account of the German coming to its doors has a touch of ironic savagery. As the result of the deliberate bombardment from Chamant excused by the presence of fabled defenders in the tower gargoyles and statues not a few had come crashing from roof to pavement ; and when, at the sound of an uproar of blows, the cure* issued from his presby- 68 SENLIS tery, it was to find a party of German soldiers attack- ing the door beneath the spire with the fallen figure of a carven angel employed as battering-ram. (Perhaps the figure that has left a gap above the rose-window ; not the fellow of the lonely gargoyle which could hardly have been taken for an angel, but the missing fourth in the row of statues above it.) With the priest in their midst they mounted to the summit of the tower and satisfied them- selves that the fabled defenders were fabled, and the mitrailleuse dealing death from the roof of the building a figment of their own imagination ; satisfied themselves in short that the cathedral precincts contained no excuse for "reprisals" Chouse- incendiarism and massacre of hostages. That excuse they had perforce to seek elsewhere nor were they long in finding it. As I have told before, they threatened destruc- tion to the city ; threatened to burn it street by street and to scorch its cathedral (for the second time) by fire. Had that threat been held to and translated into action, the second burning of the church of Notre Dame would have been more thorough than the first ; for no man would have raised a hand to save it no man would have dared ; SENLIS 69 the flames would have been fed and fanned. It escaped because a man was less brutal than his orders ; perhaps because, in his inmost heart, he shrank from setting a torch to the House of God. . . . Such roughly and briefly is the history of the cathedral of Notre Dame at Senlis in the first centuries of its existence a church greatly honoured by kings. Like their forerunners of the Carlo vingian dynasty, the earlier monarchs of the line of Capet favoured Senlis as a place of residence ; the old chateau in its strength and prime was a predecessor of Versailles. Many of the Philippes and Louis must have knelt in worship in the cathedral ; more than one, as we know, paid his royal toll for its raising or its restoration. But of all the kings of the dynasty of Capet it is Henry of Navarre whose name and fame are most closely connected with Senlis. " Mon heur," he said, and the words are graven on its walls, 1 " mon heur a prins son com- mencement en la ville de Senlis dont il s'est seme* et augmente* par tout notre royaume." It was a city always most loyal to him, through trials most faithful to his cause ; a city that had stood a hard siege against the League, and from whence he set 1 On the face of the Hotel de Ville above the bust of the King. 70 SENLIS forth after years of struggle to possess his reluctant capital. When he set forth (it was on the twenty- first day of March in the year 1594) he left behind him in the Hotel de St. Perain at Senlis his mistress, Madame Gabrielle d'Estre*es, to await with im- patience the news he had promised to send her, the news that he was sovereign in Paris as well as sove- reign of France. Thus on the following day, at ten o'clock in the morning, when a courier stormed into Senlis to set bells a-ringing and guns a-roaring on the battlements, Madame d'Estrees sallied forth from her lodging into streets that were shouting down the guns. Amidst the tumult and cheering of the crowd she made her glad way to the cathedral ; there to hear the Te Deum, to bow the knee and render her thanks to High Heaven for its mercies vouchsafed to her lover. There is always a fragrance about the memory of a beauty that has long been dust, and so crookedly are we made the fragrance is the sweeter where the beauty that is dust was also frail. Thus the King's fine mistress passing through crowds to the echo of guns and rocking bells sunning herself in her lover's triumph as he sunned himself in her eyes is a picture vivid and splendid yet when the weighty doings of kings and SENLIS 71 ministers have died to a formula of history. . . . And, after all, it is pleasanter to think of Gabrielle worshipping joyously in Notre Dame than of in- vaders beating at its belfry doors with the head of a broken angel. Of the two memories it is the first I would rather take away with me. CHAPTER VII THE supreme achievement of Notre Dame of Senlis is the spire on its southern tower a masterpiece of the thirteenth century which, but for bad marks- manship, might be only a memory to-day. Seen from afar it will hold you by its grace ; drawn nearer you marvel alike at its grace, its detail and its boldness. There are certain columns in the choir of Beauvais which, above all shaped and uplifted stone, seem the wonder of the world for lightness ; fluted columns which surely can have no fellow in their mingling of suppleness and strength ; which could sway, if they would, as a reed sways, and yet carry their burden as a crown. To these, I say, I can hardly imagine a fellow ; but after them, when I think of lightness in stone, I think of the spire of Senlis. I am not alone in that impression of unusual lightness. " When," says one who knows the 72 SENLIS 73 spire, 1 " the visitor arrives at the head of the long and narrow staircase and sees suddenly above his head this immense and hollowed-out pyramid . . . which seems to tremble as the wind whistles through its long apertures, he is amazed at the daring of the architect . . . and asks himself how, in spite of fire, thunder and hurricane, in spite of the frost and the rain of seven centuries, the spire yet contrives to stand firm." Being afflicted with a head that turns at only the idea of looking downward, I have never corroborated the above description by a personal ascent of the tower ; I quote in part for the benefit of those not so hampered, in part as an explanation of the curious grace of the spire. It is those long apertures, like dormer windows, through which the wind whistles from every point of the compass, 2 that give the impression of lightness more than ordinary. Those same gabled apertures have had more than one imitator ; the builder of the spire was too great an artist for his inspiration to die with him and he left his mark far and wide. 1 M. Marcel Aubert, whose Senlis, one of the series of " Petites Monographies des Grands Edifices de la France," can well be consulted for a detailed description of the cathedral. 1 They are eight in number in the upper story. 74 SENLIS There are certain effects to use a cant term which give unreasonable pleasure ; by which I mean a pleasure impossible to analyse. I do not know why the movement of shallow water as ripple of tide on a windless day or the chatter of brook over pebbles should produce such curious delight in the ear of the listener ; and in the same way I have never been able to understand the dis- proportionate joy I take in the building whose tiles are laid on in the form of scales. The joy is there : I have pulled up my bicycle many a time for the pleasure of staring at a Kentish cottage where the overlapping tiles were like scales but have no idea why I stand and take pleasure so long. I know only that, apart from its form, there is a potent attrac- tion about the scaled building which the French mediaeval architect must also have felt when he raised the towers of Coutances, of Chartres and of Senlis. It was the centre of the cathedral that suffered most from the fire of the year 1504, the transepts and portions adjoining ; therefore it is at the two extremities, the apse and the west front, that you can best trace from the outside the earlier and severer plan. The lower portion of the apse with four of its SENLIS 75 five chapels is the work of the twelfth century ; the rounded little roofs of the chapels, like the halves of so many beehives, curving out from the main building. The small round-arched windows above them the windows of the choir-gallery are also of the same period ; but immediately over them the twelfth-century wall comes to an end and with a clear line of demarcation. The open balus- trade and buttresses above it, the windows and roof of the choir, belong to the early sixteenth century, and are part of the work of restoration rendered necessary by the havoc of the flames. Though the towers came safely through the ordeal by fire, the roof and the rest of the upper part was not so fortunate ; and, as a result of the rebuilding necessitated by the conflagration, one may say roughly that (with the exception of the section formed by the transepts) the lower stages of the cathedral are early Gothic, the higher the work of the sixteenth -century restorers. As stated in the previous chapter, the section formed by the tran- septs was entirely rebuilt at this period. One of the consequences of this remodelling is a build- ing much wider and considerably lighter than was planned by the original architect. The long 76 SENLIS windows above the choir had no place in the church he designed ; on the contrary, the windows through- out were small and the general effect must have been a sombre mystery akin to the atmosphere of that other Notre Dame of Paris. It was in a twilight gemmed with candles that the mediaeval clergy of Senlis played the Mystery of the Three Maries as Easter Day came round ; and the dove that was loosed in the choir at Whitsuntide, as a symbol of the Holy Ghost, must have fluttered up to be lost from sight in the shadow of the vaulted roof. Where the added width of the building comes in is not only in such palpable afterthoughts as the library and the chapel to the south of the choir but in the main body of the church, in the transepts and the line of the outer wall that extends from the transepts in the direction of the west front. This later doubling of the side aisles reaches to the base of the towers and can be traced clearly both inside the building and without. Notre Dame of Senlis, as its first architect saw it, was extremely simple in plan. He saw it as a three- aisled church, ending at the west in a couple of towers, at the east in the customary apse. The apse was formed by five small chapels of equal size, and the SENLIS 77 straight lines of nave and choir were broken only by a rudimentary form of transept. Had it been continued as he planned it, the building would not have been cruciform. This original severity of design was departed from even before the catastrophe of the great fire ; as early as the thirteenth century the first transept had given way to one more im- posing, and a hundred years later the chapel of St. Simon had been placed to the south of the choir and so modified the outline of the building and shortened the effect of the nave. Some of the finest of the earlier vaulting is to be found in the gallery above and behind the choir ; which is lit from outside by the round -arched windows above the chapels of the apse. Before the long windows of the choir came into existence and when the walls of the nave were pierced by openings correspondingly small, there must have been a perpetual half-light between the low arches and the sturdy columns of the gallery. The letting in of light upon ancient mystery that came with the six- teenth century was typical of a generation in whose blood was beating the spirit of the Renaissance which was largely the joy of enquiry. The south transept does not only bear a strong 78 SENLIS resemblance to that of its near neighbour, the one- time church of St. Pierre ; it has, in frontage and general design, a family likeness to contemporary portions of other notable French churches, particu- larly the cathedrals of Sens, of Troyes, and of Beauvais. The term family likeness is used with set intention ; for the group of buildings which so strongly resemble each other were erected by men of the same blood, Chambige, father and son. Martin Chambige, the architect of the north and south portals of the cathedral of Beauvais, was one of those summoned to the help of Notre Dame when the disaster of 1504 was threatening the building with ruin ; while thirty years later his son and pupil, Pierre, completed the restoration of the south transept. In addition to Beauvais the father worked at Sens and at Troyes; while, if the west front of St. Pierre of Senlis is not the creation of the younger Chambige, it is that of an artist who followed very closely in his footsteps. For the greater dignity of Pierre's south entry, the ground in front of it was cleared of the buildings which had hitherto huddled around the cathedral and obstructed the view of the portal. SENLIS 79 Those who are interested in details of architecture and the ideas that inspired their creators might do worse than spend a few minutes with the carven calendar at the western front of Notre Dame ; they can, having studied, compare it with similar almanacs in stone which they have seen already or may chance to see in the future. For the graven calendar is not confined to Notre Dame at Senlis ; it was an institution with the workers on French cathedrals, and Rheims, Amiens, Paris and Chartres are among the great churches which set forth in cunning sculpture the cycle of the months of the year. The origin of the custom was probably pre-Christian ; the flooring of early Romanesque churches was frequently decorated with the signs of the Zodiac, and it was only after the rise of Gothic art that the Zodiac gave place to a symbolism more realistic and familiar scenes of daily life took the place of the classic symbols. At Amiens the two forms of calendar go hand in hand, or rather one below the other ; the mower with his scythe illustrating the crab, the sower explaining the archer. What is chiefly interesting in these calendars is the local inspiration of their detail which makes for variety and realism. In subject they vary but 8o SENLIS little, since their record was always the record of the husbandman's year ; but their execution was the result of the sculptor's acquaintance with his immediate surroundings, unhampered by rigid tradition. Tradition might demand that certain saints should be represented in certain attitudes ; but it left the artist to do as he liked with his January and February peasants, his pictures of seedtime and harvest. So long as he suggested the passing of the year, he could pose and arrange them as he would. At Senlis the calendar stands under the feet of six of those eight unfortunate saints who lost their heads at the hammer of the red revolutionist a month, or panel, apiece to each foot of the six. (As there are not enough months to go round the whole eight, the two outside figures are provided with a pair of chimeras each.) Further, one may note that at Senlis the calendar begins with January ; the general, though not the invariable practice, since at Amiens it starts with December. The year did not open in mediaeval France on a generally accepted date, for it was not till the reign of Charles IX. that New Year's Day was standardised by royal decree ; in some districts (as at Amiens) the year SENLIS 81 began with Christmas, at others with Lady Day or Easter. The usual custom, however, was the ist of January, and to this custom most of the calendars conform ; and wherever placed as regards the new year, January stands for feasting and rest from toil. Sometimes, as at Senlis, by means of a single figure with jug and bowl, sometimes, as at Amiens, by several figures gathered at a table but, whether in company or whether alone, January is warm and well-fed. In February the husbandman is still kept from the fields by the weather and here you may see him, hunched hands round knees, in front of the fire on his hearth. With March the winter is left behind, and he is out and afield with his spade ; while in the next panel, April, he is cutting and trimming his trees. (At Rheims, in the wine country, the corresponding peasant is shown at the trimming of his vines.) May is the flush and full beauty of spring, when the heart of man turns to enjoyment of which the representation at Senlis Cathedral is that of a horseman going hawking. One may note that this is the only month which is not suggested by a scene from the husbandman's life ; the horse- man is clearly of higher than labouring degree. Follows June with the labourer again, the labourer 82 SENLIS as mower, and on the southern side of the doorway July shows him reaping his corn. There are varia- tions of attitude and gesture in the different cathedral calendars, but July is always the harvest and usually the act of reaping; there is an exception at Notre Dame of Paris, where the ripened corn does not come into the picture, which is that of a round -hatted, upright harvester in the act of sharpening his scythe. In August the peasant, bare to the waist, is threshing the grain he has reaped ; September shows the gathering of another harvest, the harvest of the laden vine ; and October which is sometimes the end of the grape-storing and sometimes the sower in his furrow is at Senlis a panel believed to represent the stocking of the winter's provisions. In November the goodman of Senlis is killing his pig at Paris, as at Rheims, he defers its slaughter till December and on the last panel he prepares for his winter junketings by the baking of Christmas cakes. The series gives you the yearly round of the typical son of Adam in his sowing and reaping, in his toil and bodily ease ; and asserts on the doors of the House of God the right to take pleasure in good living. From the frank insistence on eating and drinking in all SENLIS 83 these cathedral calendars one gathers that, whatever the case with the monk, the ascetic ideal had but few attractions for the mind of the mediaeval peasant. CHAPTER VIII ONE foresees (I am writing this within sound of guns and with the German heel still on France) one foresees that when once war is over and the zone of the armies a vanished restriction of yesterday, those who will hasten to visit the mutilated towns of Belgium and northern France will belong in the main to two classes : the one bent on seeing with their own eyes how much has been destroyed, and the other desirous to know and to prize what brute fury has allowed to survive. According to their tastes these two classes will select their differing itinerary, and those whose minds are stirred only by thought of that immediate past through which they themselves have lived will be able to satisfy their tastes to the full and not only to satisfy, to glut them. So much so that, at times, even they may turn in relief from tokens of the strife of yester- day to monuments of ages long dead; and may pass, by way of reaction, from gazing on shapeless 84 THE LAW COURTS. SENLIS 85 ruins to an interest in stone that is shaped. And for such Senlis, where so much is untouched by the flame that swept over it, will surely have its attractions. If it has not if the seeker after destruction is out for destruction only he may leave the town when he has seen what it has to give him ; when he has pottered down the Licorne and the Rue de la Re*publique, talked here and there with a native who " stayed," bought post cards of the ruins at their earliest and worst, and peered up at the shell- scars that mark the face of the cathedral. Having done his round he can pack his traps, pay his bill, and be off say, to Soissons. . . . Such a one, I take it, will have skipped the greater part of the preceding chapter, and will skip the whole of this ; which is written not for him but for those who, either by way of reaction or from natural liking, prefer now and again to turn out of the track of the war-god. The city of Senlis is peculiarly rich in churches that are not churches buildings once dedicated to the service of Heaven, now employed in a mundane capacity. There is a church that is now a market and a church that is now a museum ; one, on the 86 SENLIS outskirts, was transformed into a farm, and another has been a theatre. It goes without saying that the Great Revolution had a part in their transfor- mation ; as it secularized the cathedral, so it secular- ized the minor churches of Senlis in some cases permanently and effectually. Of these is St. Frambourg, in the street of that name, leading out of the Place Notre Dame ; by turns a stable, a carpenter's workshop and Temple of the Goddess of Reason. It is practically a con- temporary of the older part of the cathedral, which its history curiously resembles ; having been begun, like the cathedral, in the latter part of the twelfth century, on the site of an earlier church. The patronage of Louis, seventh of the name, was extended to the builders of St. Frambourg as to the builders of Notre Dame ; he held, it is said, in peculiar veneration the holy recluse whose name is perpetuated in the city, not only by the church erected in his honour but by a chapel in the cathe- dral itself. (I confess that St. Frambourg was unknown to me till I heard his name in Senlis ; nor have I since been able to learn more of him than this ; that he dwelt in life as a hermit in the forests of the Loire, and that some centuries after his death SENLIS 87 his body was translated to Senlis. I know not for what cause the city was selected for this honour ; but the distinction once gained it knew how to value it ; the relics of St. Frambourg were worshipped at his church till the Goddess of Reason superseded him.) The money necessary for the building of St. Frambourg was raised by much the same methods as those employed by the rival builders of the cathedral ; the relics of the saint were brought forth in a solemn procession, and exposed for public veneration ; the cardinal legate, in the presence of the king, promised easier admission through the gate of St. Peter to those who took part in the work. But even in the Ages which are known as the Ages of Faith, men knew how to value their shekels and draw tight their purse-strings ; and just as in the case of the cathedral contributions from the faith- ful came in slowly. It was some years after the relics of St. Frambourg had been carried in solemn procession before even a beginning was made of the edifice erected in his honour and it took another half-century and more for the church to near its completion. After that, for some centuries, its existence was less chequered than its neighbour's. 88 SENLIS It was spared the ordeal by fire that altered the plan of the cathedral, and remains very much what its architect intended it to be a building of that curiously austere beauty which is the effect of the one -aisled nave. True, the belfry tower that once stood in the north has crumbled away into ruin and the three lancet windows in the west front are surely a deviation from the original design else why the circle around them, intended for nothing but the outline of a rose window ? But on the whole, and in spite of its conversion to secular uses, St. Frambourg is a church of the men who planned it, untampered with by later generations. Untampered with, that is to say, as to its main and structural outlines : the Revolution swept it bare of all the accessories of a church of shrine and relic, of pulpit and carven stall. Dumont, the delegate from the National Con- vention who, as I have mentioned in a former chapter, succeeded in (temporarily) abolishing Christianity in Senlis, was a stickler for due and formal observance of the patriot's religion of Reason ; if, therefore, as seems probable, he himself in- augurated the cult of the goddess in St. Frambourg, his converts would have no cause to complain of SENLIS 89 the lack of elaborate ritual. At Abbeville, which Dumont had likewise converted, he instituted symbolic dances in honour of Reason the Divine ; nor did his dislike of the priesthood, whom he described as " black-clothed harlequins displaying their marionettes," prevent him from indulging his own pronounced tastes in the matter of theatrical worship. In St. Frambourg as in Notre Dame of Paris, as in a hundred other churches Christ on the Cross gave way to " a woman young and beautiful " Reason or Liberty " preceded by a troop of girl-citizens, dressed in white, and crowned with garlands of roses." And, conscious no doubt of her beauty and temporary importance, the local goddess, clad in " a white drapery and sky-blue mantle, her hair flowing and a cap of Liberty on her head," received the homage, more or less fervent, of a congregation of patriots. That homage may have been fervent, but it was not lasting ; the worship of Reason died almost before it was born. The remnant of statesmanship left in France took fright at its speedy excesses ; for the ritual of the new religion showed a tendency to degenerate into orgy, and it was not without cause that one " young and beautiful " Goddess 90 SENLIS of Liberty appeared with the motto, " Do not turn me into licence " inscribed on a band round her forehead. It did not take long to discover that symbolic dances and the spoiling of shrines were arguments keen-edged and dangerous in the mouth of the anti- revolutionist and that the rumour thereof was worth many recruits to the royal, rebel standard in La Vended ; hence the swift and out- spoken repudiation of the new cult of Reason by Robespierre, Danton and their followers. Reason worship that strange emanation from a society emotionally insane flourished for fewer weeks than Christianity had lasted centuries. Senlis was no more whole-hearted in the brand- new faith than the rest of Republican France ; its goddesses vanished (it would seem without protest on the part of their whilom devotees), and their temple lapsed from its dignity and high estate. Having lapsed, it partook once more of the fate of its neighbour, Notre Dame ; being converted, like the cathedral, into a storehouse for army forage. Here the resemblance and parallel between the two histories ceases ; for while the cathedral, the fever of revolution once spent, went back to the service to which it had been builded and dedicated, the SENLIS 91 whilom church of St. Frambourg has never again been put to the uses of the Catholic religion. To-day it is only the shell and appearance of a church which in its daily purpose is a workshop where the carpenter plies his trade. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were churches clustered thick in Senlis ; the in- habitants were indeed a God-fearing folk if the buildings were filled every Sunday. Some of them exist still as buildings and some have vanished altogether ; of the latter is St. Maurice, church of the priory of that name. It was a near neighbour of the cathedral, and, though nothing exists of the church itself, some remaining fragments of the priory yet stand, at the end of the Impasse Beaume. Gone, too, is St. Rieul, called after the apostle of the district, which rose in the northern quarter of the town, near the gate of the same name. These twain, says my authority curtly, " disappeared during the Revolution." St. Pierre of the bulbous tower and ornate fagade did not, like St. Rieul and St. Maurice, disappear from the face of the earth ; on the contrary, it stands to the east of the cathedral, still solid in its jumble of styles. But though its outward seeming is the 92 SENLIS seeming of a church, inside it is swept of the habit and panoply of religion, and after many vicissitudes it has settled down into a market. Its southern tower with the dome atop the dome like unto a large acorn has a fellow at Beaumont-sur-Oise ; it is a late and ungraceful addition to the building, dating from the early sixteen hundreds. If not entirely admirable, the tower is at least striking by virtue of its bulbous dome which (I suppose because of its grotesque quality) impresses itself upon eye and memory as the outstanding feature of St. Pierre. When you think of the church it comes first to your mind, before much that is worthier to live there, such as the flamboyant west front. In St. Pierre the bargainer and buyer have taken the place of the priest ; in St. Aignan he was superseded by the actor whose profession the priest once abhorred to the extent of refusing the blessing of Christian burial to those who had died without renouncing it. To find the church that so fell from grace make your way along the Rue de Beauvais ; where, walking towards the Porte de Creil, you shall see on your left, as the street bends, a gargoyle projecting round the curve. By which you may know you are close on the church of St. SENLIS 93 Aignan which before the War was the town theatre, and may be so again when you come to it. When I last saw it the theatre had been closed for the space of two years and a half save, I was told, for a performance arranged for the benefit of their fellows in hospital, by soldiers quartered in the district. Perhaps when it is plying its latter-day trade it looks less dishevelled and forlorn, and you may not notice so oddly the white-curtained windows let into the wall beneath the gargoyles. The church has stood some part of it at least for eight hundred years or so ; it was an edifice rich in its many treasures till the Terror swept them out. The destinies of the secularized churches of Senlis were varied ; no two of them shared a fate. To the east of the city, near the river Nonette, are the remains of St. fitienne now a barn. It is a church that has twice been built and twice been ruined it was destroyed for the first time in the wars of the Three Henries, and once more desecrated in the days of '93. After its destruction in the Leaguers' siege it rose again from its ashes and, in the first year of the seventeenth century, was dedicated anew to the service and worship of God ; and this second church it was that, nearly two 94 SENLIS hundred years later, was sold as national property and transformed to the uses of a farm building. Sold also as national property were the convent and church of the Carmelites at the foot of the old Rue de Paris ; the convent yellow-washed, with dormer windows is to-day a barrack, and the church a storehouse attached. Somewhat more in keeping is the fate of the figlise de la Charite*, which stands in the Rue de Meaux ; early eighteenth century, solid and dignified, it now holds the town museum. CHAPTER IX THERE is a trite remark about the smallness of the world which falls most often from the lips of those who discover that a new acquaintance has some link with their personal surroundings in the shape of a mutual friend. One can attain to the sensation it expresses of curious surprise at the joining up of seemingly unconnected destinies one can attain to it more easily than in any other way by the simple process of diving into the records of local history ; for there is hardly a community, however isolated, which has not, in the course of its forgotten past, contributed its quota of influence to the making of the world outside. As an illustration, take Senlis ; which, as a Frenchman assured me once, is the type of the French provincial city ; in form and tradition most truly of the soil, unmoulded by the hand of the foreigner. It is an inland town and habited by a 95 96 SENLIS race that is not given, like the Anglo-Saxon, to wandering for the sake of wandering or risking the known for the unknown ; it has followed the normal course of French development ; was semi - inde- pendent under its rulers till the power of the crown absorbed it ; was a peaceable city, made no great mark, and is known to-day rather for what it has suffered than for anything its sons have achieved. Yet, if you go back for a thousand years you may hit on the name of a forgotten Count Bernard, the lord and ruler of Senlis ; who, forgotten as he is, was a descendant of Charlemagne and a man of importance in his day. What is more, the doings of Count Bernard, his feuds and his policy, mattered much long after he was dead mattered much, though she knows it not, to England; mattered much, though she knows it not, to France. Since, but for Count Bernard and his warrings with his overlord, it is possible and more than possible that there might have been no Norman Conquest. Bernard II. of Senlis after the usual fashion of semi-independent counts in the tenth as in following centuries was not on the best or most peaceable terms with his King ; on the contrary, a chronicler SENLIS 97 has put it on record that " il le guerroya pendant toute sa vie." His King was Louis IV., surnamed d'Outremer ; and the bone of contention between them was the difficulty, usual enough in those days, of denning the limit and extent of the royal authority, the limit and extent of the authority of vassals of the crown ; Bernard and his sovereign, in short, lived through an early phase of the struggle that was only to end seven hundred years later when Richelieu had made it possible for a French sovereign to declare that he himself was the state. The time being not yet ripe for the advent of a Grand Monarch, Louis d'Outremer wrestled as best he could with the power of his turbulent vassals ; and incident- ally took such chances as presented themselves for reducing the independence of the great fiefs of the Crown. Among these fiefs the foremost in strength and turbulence was the pirate dukedom of Normandy ; whose ruler, William Longsword, being slain in his wars, left his son and successor a child. The child, named Richard and later Richard Sans Peur, had troublesome blood in his veins ; was own grandson to Rollo, the Northman and sea-raider, who had sailed up the Seine, bringing fire and sword in his 98 SENLIS wake ; and who had finally been bribed to desist and settle down with a dukedom carved out of France. Nominally a vassal and subject of the Crown, Rollo, when called on to do homage for his fief, declined to kneel to any man in person, and deputed a follower as proxy. The proxy shared the new duke's ideas on the reverence due to an overlord ; thus, instead of kneeling when he took the oath of fealty, he seized his hapless king by the foot and toppled him backwards to the laughter and applause of his fellows. Such being the Norman outlook and attitude of mind, small wonder that, Longsword being dead, King Louis hastened to take possession of the person of the new young duke ; in part, perhaps, in the hope of training him in ways more tractable than his fathers' ; in part as a hostage for the good behaviour of the formidable legions of Normandy and perhaps with some purpose more evil at the back of his kingly mind. Whatever his aims he held fast to the boy at Laon where he kept his court ; till his plans, good or evil, were frustrated by an ingenious Norman who smuggled young Richard out of the royal precincts concealed in a truss of hay. The ingenious follower, having effected the escape, lost no time in placing his small SENLIS 99 liege lord in safety in the hands of Count Bernard of Senlis ; who, ready as always for the chance of a blow at his overlord, accepted the charge, joined forces with the Normans and put King Louis to rout. His defeat made an end of any hope of undermining the virtual independence of the dukes of Normandy ; and, thanks in great measure to Bernard of Senlis, the duchy remained for genera- tions a thorn in the side of the Kings of France, and a breeder of endless wars. In time it passed on, with its power uncurtailed, to that successor of Richard the Fearless who was Robert, surnamed the Devil ; who in his turn passed it on to his son by Arlette, the tanner's daughter of Falaise a William, born out of wedlock, who is known to fame as the Conqueror. ... If the chronicler speaks truly, the interference in the quarrel of Count Bernard II. of Senlis may have meant much to France, to England and the western world at large ; its history might have been written somewhat differently had he been less insistent for the rights of his order against the power of the King, had he backed his sovereign against the Normans, not the Norman against his sovereign. You may reflect when you walk on the ramparts of Senlis that the ioo SENLIS forgotten lord of an Isle of France townlet helped to make you what you are. If Senlis was one of the least (though not the least) interesting of the cities of Roman Gaul, it was held in no small estimation when the Frank suc- ceeded to the Roman. There was no supreme capital in the days of Merovingian royalty ; Paris was one among many, not the heart and centre of France. The descendants of Clovis divided their favours, moving court from one place to another, not, as perhaps might be surmised, either from a sense of fairness or an idea of policy, but as a con- venient method of securing a sufficiency of victuals. They lived, it must be remembered, in days of undeveloped transport and dependence on local supplies ; they could not, like the Romans they had ousted, draw corn from the granaries of an empire. Thus their capitals (if such they can be called) may be best described as farm-cities ; Senlis and its fellows were great camps or settlements, well stored with provisions with a view to the visits of the court. That is to say, with a view to the feeding of a company of healthy barbarians. Upon these camps, or settlements the court of barbarians SENLIS 101 descended, remaining steadily and comfortably till the local store of victuals was exhausted ; after this came a move to another neighbourhood, while that which was left, eaten out by their stay, pro- ceeded to replenish its supplies. The valley of the Oise and the district round held several of these farm-capitals Senlis, Noyon, Compigne. The country was wooded and fertile, as it is to-day good country for hunting and feeding. There is an odd, flabby picturesqueness about the later Merovingian nonentities who drowsed their days in Senlis and the settlements adjacent ; as the ultimate absurdity of the constitutional proposition that a king should reign and not govern. Long-haired, indistinguishable Chilperics and Childe- berts who crawl and slumber through history, drawn in state by such sturdy white oxen as you may see in their country to-day. Symbols of authority which other men exerted ; rois faineants, do-nothing kings who died young because no one had need of them. A long succession of child- rulers had had its inevitable effect in a barbaric country which had need of strength in its leaders ; the boy -kings' deputies clung to their power and encouraged the boy-kings in foolishness and helpless 102 SENLIS sloth. In the end they were left with no shred of power to usurp their nominal functions being exercised by mayors of the palace ; they ate well and drank well and idled the years to their graves. So that it mattered not a rap to any but themselves that Childebert was buried and Dagobert alive, or that Thierry had followed on Dagobert. One after another the long-haired incapables were extinguished and slept with their fathers while stronger men ruled in their names ; until the day came when the pretence had worn itself out and Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, considered himself able to dispense with even the shadow of their kingship. Whereupon he took Chilperic the Stupid and shaved off the hair of his head. That shaving robbed Chilperic, the Stupid and Last, of his only claim to leadership of the flowing locks which, among the Franks, were a traditional sign of the ruler. Bereft of them he died how long after I know not in the monastery of St. Omer in Artois ; and that was the end of the procession of foolish, heavy-eyed, half-alive royalty, which had lumbered in and out of Senlis, which had gorged and drunk deep within her borders. It was in the year 751 that Pepin d'Heristal SENLIS 103 followed on Chilperic, descendant of Clovis, and made himself king in the Prankish dominions of which he had long been the ruler. His dynasty, if it never fell so low as that of the first Prankish line, was doomed with time to decay ; after the glories of the reign of Charlemagne the race degener- ated, the empire fell asunder ; and the later Carlo- vingians, like the later Merovingians, saw their functions passing to others for lack of the strength to hold them. They made longer resistance than the sons of Clovis ; but more than their weakness was against them, and their house was destined to pass, like his and Senlis was concerned in its passing. In the year 987 died the young king Louis. According to one account, of injuries received through a fall from his horse whereby he died after days of pain and fever ; according to another (and later) story, from poison given by his wife. His father, Lothair, was but recently dead, and Louis had reigned only a year ; he left no son, and the nearest to the throne was a Charles, his father's brother. But if Charles, the Carlovingian, was nearest in blood, Hugh Capet, duke of France, had the claim of the stronger man ; and there sided 104 SENLIS with him a powerful ally, the archbishop Adalbero of Rheims. At a council of churchmen and nobles held at Senlis, shortly after the death of the king, the prelate, an enemy of the Carlovingian house, denounced Charles for his vices and declared him unworthy of the crown ; further, he went on to assert that the royal dignity in the French dominions was not hereditary but elective. Probably the churchman was right and Charles unworthy, for he found no supporters in the gathering at Senlis, which followed the archbishop solidly ; with the result that, in the midsummer of 987, Hugh Capet, first of a long line of kings, was unanimously chosen to be ruler and sovereign of France. The change once made, the elective principle does not seem to have been heard of again and Capet's sons succeeded his sons to the days of the First Republic ; but Adalbero's proposal had served its turn and extin- guished the dynasty of Charlemagne. The choosing of Senlis as the meeting-place of the council which was to settle the fate of the Carlovingian line and nominate a new ruler of France is an indication of the town's importance at the end of the tenth century. It was not, per- haps, what it had been in the past, the rival and SENLIS 105 equal of Paris ; which, with its sturdy defence against the Norman a hundred years before, had taken a decisive step towards leadership of the cities of France. But it was still a city of no mean repute, where kings sojourned and took counsel ; whence they rode out to take their good pleasure in hunting through the forest of Chantilly or Halatte. The castle, half -ruinous nowadays, has seen and sheltered many sovereigns of France, from the do-nothing kings to the Bourbons ; under one guise or another and changing with the changing ages. Once or twice I have heard it called " le chateau de Henri IV." ; but long before the Bearnais had become the local tutelary genius his ancestors had held their state therein, and the generosity of the early Capetian kings towards the ecclesiastical foundations of the city is explained by the fact that they, too, were citizens of Senlis. Henry of Navarre was the last, and not the only monarch of his race to lodge at the old chateau ; after his time it was allowed to fall into decay, and such princely visitors as came to the town were entertained as guests of the bishop. . . . You may get your most attractive view of the cathedral spire from the garden within the castle walls ; you see it slender io6 SENLIS and upstanding, with a clipped tree in foreground, which seems striving to emulate its outline. The walls themselves are a patchwork record of the centuries when Senlis was of greatest account in the world ; they rose on the site of a Roman castrum, and the work of the Roman (as often) has outlasted much later building. (You can trace a part of it on entering to the right of the double-arched gate- way.) The ruined chapel was raised for King Louis the Sixth when the twelfth century was young, and through all the centuries, down to the sixteenth, the building was altered and remoulded. Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers affixed their symbols to its walls ; you could no more deter them from this fashion of writing their names than you can deter the cockney with a handy pocket-knife from carving his initials on a tree. Of the Bearnais' personal connection with Senlis there is one more tale to be told ; it was from thence that he fled to raise the banner of open revolt against his cousin and namesake, Henri III. Well might he regard Senlis as bound up with his rising fortunes ; since twice in his life he left it at a crisis in his fate, and twice won through to success. In the year 1576 he was some twenty-three years of age, and SENLIS 107 for nigh on four of them, since his marriage to Margaret of France, had been captive in all but name ; a tight-held guest of his cousins, the Valois, who had spared his life at the Saint Bartholomew but spared it with full intention to keep him within reach of their claws. Watched and distrusted, he dangled round the French court, humiliated by the knowledge of his impotence, by a forced conversion to Catholicism ; "a king/' as the courtiers jested, " a king with more nose than crown." The yoke of the Valois must have galled him, but he bore it with a smiling face ; was foremost in folly, and worse than folly, and took his part readily in the ecclesiastical ceremonies which were a public advertisement of his enforced change of religion ; succeeding by these means in persuading his gaolers that he was content with his lot, and had laid ambition aside. " Navarre," wrote an English agent in Paris, " was never so merry nor so much made of " and this not long before his flight. So well did he play his undignified part that his royal custodians, grown less strict and suspicious, allowed him more freedom of movement ; of which added liberty he took advantage to plan eventual escape. The day fixed for his flight was the 20th io8 SENLIS of February 1576, when Huguenot forces would be gathered in readiness for a stroke, and when certain discontented cities of the west were to open their gates at his summons ; and so stood matters on the fourth day of February, when the crownless king set out to hunt in the forest that lay around Senlis. As he came back from hunting at nightfall he was met by a party of horsemen who had galloped to seek him from Paris one of them Agrippa d'Aubigne, great fighter and writer of memoirs. " Sire," said Agrippa, " we have been betrayed. The king knows all, and the road back to Paris is death as well as dishonour." Whereat Henry of Navarre, without more ado, turned his horse's head and made one of the galloping fugitives. They rode, for the most part, through forests, the length of the long winter's night, crossed the Seine at Poissy, and, by luck or good cunning, evaded those sent out in search of them. In the end they came safely to Alen9on where the rebel needed not to hide. It is told that Henry, once the die was cast, sighed out a regret for the Mass as well as for his wife ; but his first public act was to stand as sponsor to a new-born child of Alenon, according to Re- formed rites. It is told, further, that when he SENLIS 109 entered the Huguenot meeting-house the omens were strongly propitious in the shape of the twenty-first psalm. " The King shall rejoice in Thy strength, O Lord, exceeding glad shall he be of Thy salvation. Thou hast given him his heart's desire." . . . Omen or not, he had fled well from Senlis, and begun the enterprise of winning a crown more lustrous than that of Navarre. His " good town " of Senlis was lucky to him ; in his flight to Alenc.cn, in his entry into Paris, in the siege she stood from the League. She might well have been its booty without striking a blow, for the bishop, Guillaume Rose, was a Leaguer hot and strong, and intrigued for the delivery of the city and the triumph of Aumale and Mayenne. D'Humerolles, the seneschal, like a true Senlisien, was all for compromise and peace ; but his hand was forced by the League's enemies, headed by one Thore*-Montmorency who outwitted the bishop, admitted his friends, and prepared to stand the consequences. The town having thus declared its policy, Aumale came down on it in force ; invested it closely, bombarded it hotly, and was on the point of taking it when La Noue and Longueville advanced to its help, and obliged him to raise the siege. This no SENLIS was in 1589, the year of the assassination of the last of the Valois kings, and the nominal accession of Henry of Navarre to his throne ; it took five years more of intrigue and combat till Senlis gave thanks in her Notre Dame for the Bearnais' entry into Paris. CHAPTER X ON the roll of history, other than local, you will not find the names of many of the sons of Senlis ; she is not of those cities which have enriched their innkeepers by producing a world-wide celebrity, and you can visit her without the necessity of inspecting the local " birthplace/' No giant has wrapped her round with his fame and swamped her provincial individuality ; which is the collective individuality bequeathed by generations of sturdy and peaceable men. Henry of Navarre is her nearest approach to a really obtrusive figure ; but you would not go first to Senlis to seek for traces of his doings he neither began nor ended his life within her walls, and she shares the reflection of his glory with many other districts of France. He was good friend to her and she good friend to him, and that is the extent of the connection. Myself, the lack of local celebrities does not lessen my pleasure in the town. The cult of the birthplace in SENLIS in a city of less than, say, a million inhabitants is apt to be rather overpowering and openly com- mercial ; and for this reason I think it desirable that the genius should, if possible, be born and die in London, Paris or New York where the great man is one among many and you have to hunt for his vestiges. In smaller places his personality has a tendency to be aggressive ; you are not, as a visitor, allowed to like them for themselves, and the district is stamped and labelled as the " country " of the genius who has taken the trouble to be born there or made a good income by describing it. (Some one, whose name I have forgotten, but with whose objections I have every sympathy, once complained that he could not look on the Lake mountains without thinking of Wordsworth's nose.) Senlis is nobody's country but her own, and you take her for what she is. Another great name beside Henry's has a slight connection with her history. Joan of Arc fought at Montepilloy to the right of the road to Crepy ; but Montepilloy is some miles away and though it is possible that the Maid entered Senlis, I have found no authority for saying so. As becomes the town's tradition, her sons have won no great SENLIS 113 fame in the tented field ; there was a seneschal of Senlis who died at Agincourt his name is on the roll of the slain but, so far as I can hear, there is no outstanding soldier-figure of the Napoleonic or any other period. The nearest approach to the type (though far from embracing a military career, he died of dislike for the military) would appear to be a choleric citizen of homicidal tendencies, who flourished at the outset of the revolutionary epoch when he came to an explosive end. This was one Billon, a clockmaker, who lived in the Rue du Chatel, and who, in December 1789, created a disastrous sensation in the town by destroying himself and over a score of his neighbours. Having a personal grudge against certain soldiers, he planted himself at an upper window of his dwelling and fired on some passing troops ; then, before his arrest could be effected, blew up the house and himself. In addition he killed about two dozen others and wounded another forty-one. As the amount of gunpowder needful for the shattering of a house and the killing of two dozen persons is not usually stored upon premises adapted to clock- making, one can only conclude that preparation was made and the act of the suicide deliberate. . . . I H4 SENLIS Of a less undesirable, if equally uncommon type of citizen are a certain Pierre Milhelet and his wife, who lived in the sixteenth century, and produced a family which must have been the wonder of the neighbourhood. The record does not state the exact number of their sons and daughters, but it must have been something unusual ; for an elderly lady, a member of the tribe, declared in the year 1576 that she had seen born in her lifetime no less than six hundred and forty-one of the descendants of the said Pierre and his wife, Marie Delabare. Different generations have different points of view. The achievement of the prolific couple would have made Malthus shiver and the Victorian economist grow pale ; to-day it will awaken the respectful enthusiasm of those who deplore the decline in the size of the family. One at least of the temporary dwellers in Senlis deserves more than a word of mention; Santerre, the brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who is chiefly remembered for his order to the drums to drown the voice of the son of St. Louis as he spoke to the crowd from his scaffold. For a time the ex- brewer was a prominent figure on the stage of the great Revolution, as a pompous, much-bedizened SENLIS 115 commandant of the Paris National Guard ; he rose still higher, to the rank of general, but his mili- tary talents were more suited to the marshalling of mobs or municipal troops than the conduct of armies in the field. He was a street soldier, not a soldier of the open country, and in La Vendee he made a poor job of it sustained a defeat at the hands of the Royalists, and was swiftly removed from command. Nevertheless, though no heaven-born soldier, he was a person of ideas and suggestions; such as that, worth recording in these days, for remedying the shortage of certain kinds of victuals, particularly the shortage of bread. " First " (I am quoting Carlyle), " that all classes of men should live two days of the week on potatoes ; then, second, that every man should hang his dog/ 1 Carlyle seems contemptuous of Santerre's proposals, since he proceeds forthwith to remark that "cheer- fuller form of inventive-stupidity that Commandant Santerre's dwells in no human soul/' He might have been less contemptuous had he lived in the days of the commandant-brewer or lived in the twentieth century ; living midway between us he was spared our common experience, knew naught of the legal meatless day and demands for the SENLIS killing off of lapdogs in the interest of the human population. Given potatoes, the idea of sub- stituting them for bread seems rational enough to us ; but it may be that, in Santerre's day, as in the twentieth century, potatoes were not always given. The glory of Commandant Santerre had departed when he came to dwell in Senlis. Gone were the days when he peacocked in strange uniforms, stood guard over humbled and captive royalty, and headed the sections of St. Antoine. He had lived to see. the sections of St. Antoine disarmed and his own eminent services no longer in official request. He had once declared that when his fellow-citizens had no further use for him he would " return and brew beer " ; but when he carried out his promise his business interests had suffered from the former brewer's excessive attention to the engrossing profession of politics. Cincinnatus, returning to his plough, found his plough more difficult to guide. Thus at the time of his coming to Senlis his fortunes were not at their highest ; when the whilom cus- todian of princes and general in La Vendee estab- lished himself in the city, it was in the hope of renewing his worldly prosperity by means of a SENLIS 117 wallpaper factory. Through lack of success his interest in the wallpaper business was not of very long duration, and when it came to an end there was nothing to keep him in the town. Perhaps Senlis, which had never been extremist, fought shy of one who had strutted on such bloody scenes, and Santerre's commercial failure was in part due to his former revolutionary record. If so, the prejudice was largely unjust ; that he was not persona grata with the Robespierre faction is proved by the fact that he suffered imprisonment under the Terror after his luckless campaign in La Vendee partly on account of its lucklessness, partly, it is said, by reason of his criticisms of administrative blunders in the army. He was only released by the upheaval of Thermidor from a durance of several months. Further, he had never been identified with the worst excesses of the Mountain ; on the contrary, he had protested with vigour against the massacres in the prisons, had advised St. Antoine to surrender its arms, and had treated royalty, while under his charge, with consideration and decency. There is ground for suspicion even of the popular story of his order to the drummers to beat lest the king should be heard from the scaffold ; n8 SENLIS another version has it that he silenced the drums, which were then ordered to strike up by a military officer present. Be that as it may, the man, though flamboyant and noisy, was essentially kind-hearted, and his open-handedness in the day of prosperity had something to do with the inroads made on his once considerable wealth. He died, paralytic, in the year 1809 ; one hopes kindly souls in his day of eclipse remembered the spendthrift good-nature which had helped to bring it about. The ramparts of Senlis mark the outline of the mediaeval city the larger city that had grown with time from the nucleus of the little Roman fortress. The southern and eastern lengths of the wall stand yet ; a part of the shield that enabled the town to hold out in its two great ordeals by battle, the siege that gave its name to the Boulevard or Rempart des Otages and the other of the Wars of Religion. Though the walls were enlarged in the days of King Louis XL who complained of the slowness with which the alteration was made then, as now and always, the town crept out beyond their borders. Round every fortified mediaeval city grew up the faubourg or suburb whence, when SENLIS 119 an enemy threatened, the inhabitants fled to take refuge in the city proper ; at Senlis there was a Faubourg St. Martin at least as early as the eleventh century for there is mention of the founding there by King Robert the Pious of one of the numerous hospitals for lepers which were scattered about the neighbourhood. (So general was the scourge at that date that there were no fewer than six such leproseries or maladreries within a radius of ten miles from Senlis.) The existence of a suburb, such as that of St. Martin, whose walls might give cover or command defences, was a danger in time of war ; hence, when Aumale and his Leaguers threatened a siege, it was the Senlisiens themselves who laid much of it low including the church of St. Martin. Nowadays the ramparts, pathed and planted, are good to walk on and look from ; best of all turning eastward from the corner above the arched Porte de Meaux. The Nonet te, a ribbon of a streamlet, flows along near the base of the wall ; it looks small enough to step across comfortably, and one doubts if the water defences of Senlis were much of a trial to its enemies. The walk is not long, for Senlis is not large ; and in a minute or two you 120 SENLIS will be abreast of the solid grey angle of the Abbey of St. Vincent, jutting oddly across the path. A sturdily handsome building, handsomely placed, with the country unrolled beneath its windows ; dating, as to cloisters, from the time of the Grand Monarch, as to church from the fine days of Gothic. Having passed St. Vincent you can, if you will, continue by the walls till they strike the Rue de la Republique ; or turn to the right by a cobbled by-way at the bottom of walls most needlessly high and so back into the Rue de Meaux. The Rue de la Republique, the new road to Paris, breaks the walk along the ramparts ; but you can take it up again on the farther side of the Rue Vieille de Paris whence starts that Rempart des Otages whose name commemorates a crime. (Per- haps in a thousand or two years hence the antiquary will ponder which crime ; arguing for and against the allusions to a mayor of Senlis, shot by Armagnacs, or hostages delivered as a pledge of surrender and beheaded by invaders from Berlin.) Following the Rempart des Otages and the Rempart de Montauban, you reach, on the outskirts of the town, the cross- roads where signboards point to Creil and Chantilly, SENLIS 121 and also, on your left hand, the path that leads to the playground of Gallo-Roman Senlis. My map, when I sought the arena, indicated an imposing Avenue Felix as the correct and only route ; but my map, I conclude, was drawn with an eye to the future; since, after a puzzled search of a minute or two, I was directed by a small boy who guessed at my trouble to turn down a neighbouring grass-walk. This led me straight and soon to the arena, and seems the only way to reach it. It is a pleasant little walk which I hope will remain as it is which probably will remain as it is for some time to come, since, for the next few years at least, there will be far more urgent matters on hand than the laying out of Avenue Felix. At the end of the path is a pleasant little arena, its tiers overgrown with turf ; a smooth green floor with tidy green circles above it whither Gallo-Roman Senlis issued forth from its fortress to take its customary recreation. It dates, say the learned, from some year in the third century. With the passing of Roman civilization it was left to disappear underground ; for centuries the soil covered it entirely, and its very existence was forgotten. It owes its preservation, no doubt, to 122 SENLIS this concealment and consequent oblivion ; had it remained above ground and in sight, its stones would have formed good material for the raising or repairing of ramparts. It was a phrase that gave one of the clues that led to its finding. A word or tradition is often more enduring than a monument carven in stone and an old well in the neighbourhood was called the Fontaine des Arenes. That title, coupled with the existence of a rounded dip in the slope near by, first set the antiquary thinking and later set him to work ; in the early eighteen-sixties excavations were made and the little arena, unseen for more than a thousand years, was laid bare to the sun and wind. Since then the process of concealment has begun again, the turf has worked steadily to cover up the unburied bones ; so that nowadays the tiers are once more smooth and the arena only a sunken ring where you may lie and sun yourself seeing nothing but a round of green. The place is liker to a fairy ring than to a theatre of bloody games ; yet from one of the little stone chambers which have been excavated under the turf, the gladiators issued in days when Senlis was Roman ; and the very smallness of the space in which they THE RUE DE MEAUX SEEN FROM THE RAMPARTS. SENLIS 123 strove must have added to the interest (as we should say, the horror) of the sport. Here was no distance to veil their features, as the Coliseum must have veiled them ; here was no height to dwarf their humanity, as the Coliseum must have dwarfed it. The spectator, close on them, must have seen the very sweat-drops on the face of a man hard pressed and blood spilled before him was visible blood, not a stain spreading wider on the sand. Hence the pleasure, one guesses, was more intimate and savage than that of the onlooker in an arena of greater proportions. If you are wise and have time unclaimed you will dawdle long on the ramparts now bordered with tall trees in a line. More especially will you stand by the wall above the Porte de Meaux where the road beneath you drops suddenly to the archway, and whence you can look downwards at the curve of an old French street or upwards at the spire of Notre Dame. And, looking up or looking down, you may rejoice in your heart that what the Germans burned was the newer quarter of the town ; buildings, on the whole, whose like (if wished for) can be ordered and planned again not the arrowy spire that tops the roofs or the houses of the Rue de Meaux. Was 124 SENLIS the order to burn that particular quarter given blindly ? Was it given because its villas looked particularly prosperous, or because the French rearguard had turned there and fought in its pre- cincts ? Or because the officer who gave it, blooded soldier though he was, had some reverence for the work of dead men's hands, some shame in making war on the past ? Whatever the reason the fact remains, and with it the charm of Senlis ; which is a charm not only of tall spires but of high-walled lanes, solid walls, huddled brown-tiled houses and curved streets. The original fortress, the Gallo- Roman, was compressed in the irregular circle of a wall surmounted by turrets whereof you may still find portions in the older ways of the town. It was one of the smallest of the fortress-cities of Gaul round which a man might walk in the space of a few minutes, since its circumference measured but little over nine hundred yards. This original circle has left its trace on the form and growth of the city, whose streets still follow the curve of the rounded wall. The modern exits from Senlis are straight as is the modern French fashion but the old ways curled and wound. One street, under several different names, forms a ring that marks SENLIS 125 an enlarged outline of the vanished Roman enceinte ; and two others, the Rue de la Treille and the Rue de la Chancellerie, have bent themselves into a loop. Such cities of Belgium and northern France as still exist in their ancient guise when the War is a nightmare of the past will, by the very fact of their existence, be ten- and twentyfold more prized and wondered at than they were in the years that are gone. They will be ten- and twentyfold more prized and wondered at for the reason that gave added value to the unburned Sibylline books ; their fellows have been mutilated or perished from the face of the earth. They have been crushed on the anvil of battle ; if and when they arise from their ruins it will be under forms new and strange. When I last saw Senlis the invader was retreating from the Somme and up the valley of the Oise ; and day by day news was coming through concerning the country he had yielded, of villages retaken that were not villages, and towns left as rubble and ruin. I remember that the chateau of Coucy was mined and destroyed that week ; Peronne was entered that week and found a desert. Wherever the German had passed there was waste and desolation, savage desolation even of the good green earth. 126 SENLIS Looking from the rampart at the cathedral towers yet standing, at the comely crowd of brown-tiled roofs about them, one measured the greatness of the loss to the world of beauty like unto the beauty of the ancient city of Senlis. What, you wonder, will arise on the place of the older dignity of the ruined towns, of the older proportion and sturdiness ? Will it not be rows of small jerry-built houses, run up all across France run up perforce in haste, for shelter, and accustoming the eye of a new generation to angles without grace, to monotony and shoddy pretentiousness ? Rows of houses, groups of villages, whole towns built to standardized and centralized pattern, without local character or one touch of local individuality. Featureless little villages, set down on the soil, not rooted in it ; featureless little cities that have not grown, measured out by the block and the yard ; with sham-Gothic sheds for churches, and barns built of corrugated iron in the place of good grey stone. I find I have said nothing of the Hotel de Ville nor mentioned the bishop's palace. I find I have said nothing of the old Hotel Dieu ; of the Hotel des Deux Pots at the gateway of the chateau ; or SENLIS 127 of the street in Senlis that delights me most, the narrow Rue des Cordeliers between the old road to Paris and the new. What matter to be ex- haustive is often to be dull, and it has not been my aim to follow in the footsteps of Herr Baedeker : also Senlis is rich enough in interest to spare a detail here and there. Besides, to the good tourist, there is always a pleasure in discovery even the dis- covery of a street or a carven doorpost. It may be that, by the time these lines are in print, the town will have patiently smoothed over and repaired, in part at least, the damage wrought by the invader ; the process of healing was already at work when last I walked its streets. There had not, so far as I could see, been very much actual rebuilding perhaps labour was still too scarce or money was lacking but the blackened rubble of my first visit was for the most part tidied away, the ruins were orderly ruins. If the process con- tinues apace, the seeker after desolation may per- haps be disappointed when he makes his round of Senlis ; but even he may get his thrill in remember- ing how narrowly and nearly the city escaped from destruction. And even he will confess it is well that Senlis has lived and not died. 128 SENLIS For if it had died there would have passed in the flames something more than a cluster of houses, a grouping of industries and homes. There would have passed much beauty ; and with it the indi- viduality, distinct yet typical, of a city that existed in the days before France was France. THE END Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh. 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