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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