Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces. Mansfield Milburg Francisco

constituted an advance over the system in vogue in earlier times.

      Times have changed in France since the days when the education of the masses was unthought of. Then the curé or a monkish brother would get a few children together at indeterminate periods and teach them the catechism, a paternoster or a credo, and that was about all. Writing, arithmetic – much less the teaching of grammar – were deemed entirely unnecessary to the growing youth. Then (and the writer has seen the same thing during his last dozen years of French travel) it was a common sight to see the sign “Ecrivain Publique” hanging over, or beside, many a doorway in a large town.

      The Renaissance overflow from Italy left a great impress on the art and literature of France, and all its bright array of independent principalities. The troubadours and minstrels of still earlier days had given way to the efforts and industry of royalty itself. François Premier, and, for aught we know, all his followers, penned verses, painted pictures, and patronized authors and artists, until the very soil itself breathed an art atmosphere.

      Marguerite de Valois (1492-1549), the sister of François Premier, was called the tenth muse even before she became Queen of Navarre, and when she produced her Boccoccio-like stories, afterwards known as the “Heptameron of the Queen of Navarre,” enthusiasm for letters among the noblesse knew no bounds.

      The spirit of romance which went out from the soft southland was tinged with a certain license and liberty which was wanting in the “Romaunt of the Rose” of Guillaume de Lorris, and like works, but it served to strike a passionate fire in the hearts of men which at least was bred of a noble sentiment.

      What the Renaissance actually did for a French national architecture is a matter of doubt. But for its coming, France might have achieved a national scheme of building as an outgrowth of the Greek, Roman, and Saracen structures which had already been planted between the Alps and the Pyrenees. The Gothic architecture of France comes nearer to being a national achievement than any other, but its application in its first form to a great extent was to ecclesiastical building. In domestic and civil architecture, and in walls and ramparts, there exists very good Gothic indeed in France, but of a heavier, less flowery style than that of its highest development in churchly edifices.

      The Romanesque, and even the pointed-arch architecture (which, be it remembered, need not necessarily be Gothic) of southern and mid-France, with the Moorish and Saracenic interpolations found in the Pyrenees, was the typical civic, military and domestic manner of building before the era of the imitation of the debased Lombardic which came in the days of Charles VIII and François Premier. This variety spread swiftly all over France – and down the Rhine, and into England for that matter – and crowded out the sloping roof, the dainty colonnette and ribbed vaulting in favour of a heavier, but still ornate, barrel-vaulted and pillared, low-set edifice with most of the faults of the earlier Romanesque, and none of its excellences.

      The parts that architects and architecture played in the development of France were tremendous. Voltaire first promulgated this view, and his aphorisms are many; “My fancy is to be an architect.” “Mansard was one of the greatest architects known to France.” “Architects were the ruin of Louis XIV.” “The Cathedral builders were sublime barbarians.” Montesquieu was more sentimental when he said: “Love is an architect who builds palaces on ruins if he pleases.”

      The greatest architectural expression of a people has ever been in its Christian monuments, but references to the cathedrals, churches and chapels of the Pyrenean states have for the most part been regretfully omitted from these pages, giving place to fortresses, châteaux, great bridges, towers, donjons, and such public monuments as have a special purport in keeping with the preconceived limits of a volume which deals largely with the romance of feudal times.

      Generally speaking, the architectural monuments of these parts are little known by the mass of travellers, except perhaps Henri Quatre’s ancestral château at Pau, the famous walls of Carcassonne, and perhaps Bayonne’s bridges or the Eglise St. Saturnin and the bizarre cathedral of St. Etienne at Toulouse. All of these are excellent of their kind; indeed perhaps they are superlative in their class; but when one mentions Perpignan’s Castillet, the Château de Puylaurens, the arcaded Gothic houses of Agde, Béziers’ fortress-cathedral, the fortress-church of St. Bertrand de Comminges or a score of other tributary monumental relics, something hitherto unthought of is generally disclosed.

      Almost the whole range of architectural display is seen here between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Gascony, and any rambling itinerary laid out between the two seas will discover as many structural and decorative novelties as will be found in any similar length of roadway in France.

      Leaving the purely ecclesiastical edifices – cathedrals and great churches – out of the question, the entire Midi of France, and the French slopes and valleys of the Pyrenees in particular, abounds in architectural curiosities which are marvels to the student and lover of art.

      There are châteaux, chastels and chastillons, one differing from another by subtle distinctions which only the expert can note. Then there are such feudal accessories as watch-towers, donjons and clochers, and great fortifying walls and gates and barbicans, and even entire fortified towns like Carcassonne and La Bastide. Surely the feudality, or rather its relics, cannot be better studied than here, – “where the people held the longest aloof from the Crown.”

      The watch-towers which flank many of the valleys of the Pyrenees are a great curiosity and quandary to archæologists and historians. Formerly they flashed the news of wars or invasions from one outpost to another, much as does wireless telegraphy of to-day. Of these watch-towers, or tours télégraphiques, as the modern French historians call them, that of Castel-Biel, near Luchon, is the most famous. It rises on the peak of a tiny mountain in the valley of the Pique and is a square structure of perhaps a dozen or fifteen feet on each side. Sixteen feet or so from the ground, on the northwest façade, is an opening leading to the first floor. This tower is typical of its class, and is the most accessible to the hurried traveller.

      The feudal history of France is most interesting to recall in this late day when every man is for himself. Not all was oppression by any means, and the peasant landowner – as distinct from the vilain and serf– was a real person, and not a supposition, even before the Revolution; though Thomas Carlyle on his furzy Scotch moor didn’t know it.

      Feudal France consisted of seventy thousand fiefs or rere-fiefs, of which three thousand gave their names to their seigneurs. All seigneurs who possessed three châtellenies and a walled hamlet (ville close) had the right of administering justice without reference to a higher court. There were something more than seven thousand of these villes closes, within which, or on the lands belonging to the seigneurs thereof, were one million eight hundred and seventy-two thousand monuments, – churches, monasteries, abbeys, châteaux, castles, and royal or episcopal palaces. It was thus that religious, civic and military architecture grew side by side and, when new styles and modifications came in, certain interpolations were forthwith incorporated in the more ancient fabrics, giving that mélange of picturesque walls and roofs which makes France the best of all lands in which to study the architecture of mediævalism. Among these mediæval relics were interspersed others more ancient, – Roman and Greek basilicas, temples, baths, arenas, amphitheatres and aqueducts in great profusion, whose remains to-day are considerably more than mere fragments.

      The hereditary aristocracy of France, the rulers and the noblesse of the smaller kingdoms, dukedoms and countships, were great builders, as befitted their state, and, being mostly great travellers and persons of wealth, they really surrounded themselves with many exotic forms of luxury which a more isolated or exclusive race would never have acquired. There is no possible doubt whatever but that it is the very mixture of styles and types that make the architecture of France so profoundly interesting even though one decries the fact that it is not national.

      One well recognized fact concerning France can hardly fail to be reiterated by any who write of the manners and customs and the arts of mediæval times, and that is that the figures of population of those days bear quite similar resemblances to those of to-day. Historians of a hundred years back, even, estimated the total population of France in the fifteenth century as being very nearly the same as at the Revolution, – perhaps thirty