第43章

This whole side of the salle is very lordly,and seems to express an unstinted hospitality,to extend the friendliest of all invitations,to bid the whole world come and get warm.It was the invention of John,Duke of Berry and Count of Poitou,about 1395.Igive this information on the authority of the GuideJoanne,from which source I gather much other curious learning;for instance,that it was in this building,when it had surely a very different front,that Charles VII.was proclaimed king,in 1422;and that here Jeanne Darc was subjected,in 1429,to the inquisition of certain doctors and matrons.

The most charming thing at Poitiers is simply the Promenade de Blossac,a small public garden at one end of the flat top of the hill.It has a happy look of the last century (having been arranged at that period),and a beautiful sweep of view over the surrounding country,and especially of the course of the little river Clain,which winds about a part of the base of the big mound of Poitiers.The limit of this dear little garden is formed,on the side that turns away from the town,by the rampart erected in the fourteenth century,and by its big semicircular bastions.This rampart,of great length,has a low parapet;you look over it at the charming little vegetablegardens with which the base of the hill appears exclusively to be garnished.The whole prospect is delightful,especially the details of the part just under the walls,at the end of the walk.Here the river makes a shining twist,which a painter might have invented,and the side of the hill is terraced into several ledges,a sort of tangle of small blooming patches and little pavillions with peaked roofs and green shutters.It is idle to attempt to reproduce all this in words;it should be reproduced only in watercolors.The reader,however,will already have remarked that disparity in these ineffectual pages,which are pervaded by the attempt to sketch without a palette or brushes.He will doubtless,also,be struck with the grovelling vision which,on such a spot as the ramparts of Poitiers,peoples itself with carrots and cabbages rather than with images of the Black Prince and the captive king.

I am not sure that in looking out from the Promenade de Blossac you command the old battlefield;it is enough that it was not far off,and that the great rout of Frenchmen poured into the walls of Poitiers,leaving on the ground a number of the fallen equal to the little army (eight thousand)of the invader.I did think of the battle.I wondered,rather helplessly,where it had taken place;and I came away (as the reader will see from the preceding sentence)without finding out.This indifference,however,was a result rather of a general dread of military topography than of a want of admiration of this particular victory,which I have always supposed to be one of the most brilliant on record.Indeed,I should be almost ashamed,and very much at a loss,to say what light it was that this glorious day seemed to me to have left forever on the horizon,and why the very name of the place had always caused my blood gently to tingle.

It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five centuries ago,on French soil,one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another.Edward was a Frenchman as well as John,and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight.French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the Black Prince,as he lies forever at rest in the choir of Canterbury:a la mort ne pensaije mye.Nevertheless,the victory of Poitiers declines to lose itself in these considerations;the sense of it is a part of our heritage,the joy of it a part of our imagination,and it filters down through centuries and migrations till it titillates a New Yorker who forgets in his elation that he happens at that moment to be enjoying the hospitality of France.It was something done,I know not how justly,for England;and what was done in the fourteenth century for England was done also for New York.