Washerwomen, Grasse
CHAPTER XI
GRASSE
GRASSE, once a great resort, during the winter, for visitors, has ceased to be that, unless it be out of curiosity. They run up by train from Cannes for a couple of hours and return by the next. The only foreign residents there for the winter season are such as have bought villas which they cannot dispose of. But Grasse possesses advantages not shared by Cannes. It is far better protected against cold winds, as it lies under the great limestone wall that supports the bare terrace before the Alps. But, built as it is on a steep slope, it is not a place where any one with a weak heart can live, unless content to live at his window. There is scarce a bit of level street in the place. The shops are naught and entertainments indifferent But then—it is an admirable centre for a stay of a few weeks, for one who desires to explore the magnificent scenery of the Loup, the curious country in the great loop made by the River Var, S. Vallier, and the upper waters of the Siagne; Vence also and S. Jeannet under its marvellous crag, full of crevasses and caves.
Grasse must always have been a place where men settled, from the earliest days, as there is a foux, a great outburst of purest water from the rock. The cave from which it rushes is now closed up, and the water is led to the place where the women wash clothes, and by pipes is conveyed about the town. There is, however, no evidence that the town was one in Greek or Roman times, and it first appears in history in 1154; but then it was a place of some consequence, and shortly after that it contracted alliances on an equal footing with the Pisans and the Genoese. Throughout the Middle Ages it throve on its manufactures of soap, its leather, its gloves, its refined oil and scents. It was a free and independent town, governing itself like the Italian communities, as a Republic, with its annually elected consuls; and when it submitted in 1227 to Raymond Berenger, Count of Provence, it made its own terms with him. Grasse attained to great prosperity under the celebrated seneschal Romeo de Villeneuve, a remarkable man, whose story may here be told.
Douce, the heiress of the Counts of Provence, married Raymond Berenger I., Count of Barcelona, who died in 1131. From him in direct line descended Raymond Berenger IV., whose most trusty servant was Romeo de Villeneuve. This man arrived at the court of the Count as a pilgrim, staff in hand and cockleshell in hat, coming from a visit to S. James of Compostello. Something attractive about the man drew the attention of the Count, and he made of him his chief minister, High Constable of Provence, and treasurer. His strict integrity, his great prudence, and his justice, endeared him to the people as they did to his master. Through his instrumentality, Eleanor, the daughter of the Count, was married to Henry III. of England, and the niece of the Count to Richard, Duke of Cornwall. Nice had revolted against the Count, and Romeo reduced it to submission, and was appointed Governor of the town. Raymond Berenger had succeeded to his Countyship when the barons of Provence had asserted their independence and were warring against each other and harassing the towns. Romeo clipped their wings, and did all in his power to favour commerce and give prosperity to the towns. Without curtailing the splendour of his master's court, he took care that there should be no extravagance there; and he gathered about it the ablest men of the time, poets and the learned.
This was the period when mortal war was being waged between Pope Gregory IX. and the Emperor Frederick II. The Emperor had been cursed and excommunicated, a holy war proclaimed against him. Gregory issued a summons to all the prelates of Europe for a General Council to be held in the Lateran palace, at Easter, in which he would pour out all his grievances against Frederick, and unite the whole church in pronouncing Anathema Maranatha against him. But the Emperor himself had appealed to a General Council against the Pope; one sitting in Rome, presided over by Gregory, was not the tribunal to which he would submit. The Count of Provence commissioned Romeo to go to Rome with a fleet conveying bishops and cardinals to attend the Council. But Frederick had prepared a powerful fleet in Sicily and Apulia, under the command of his son, Enzio. Pisa joined him with all her galleys. The Genoese and Provençal fleet met that of the Emperor off the island of Meloria; the heavily laden Genoese and Provengal vessels were worsted after a sharp conflict; three galleys were sunk, twenty-two were taken. Some of the prelates went down in the sunken galleys; among the prisoners were three cardinals, four archbishops, and six bishops.
Cardinal Otho was in the fleet, returning to Rome with English plunder. He had been collecting enormous sums by exactions on the clergy and free-will offerings for the replenishing of the Papal treasury, and the prosecution of the holy war against Frederick. All this now fell into the hands of the Imperialists. Romeo was not taken prisoner; he fought with determined courage, and even captured one of the hostile vessels, and brought it back to Marseilles.
Raymond Berenger died in 1245; by his will he had confided the regency to Romeo, along with the guardianship of his daughters.
Romeo assembled the Provençal nobles and the representatives of the chief towns, and made them swear allegiance to Beatrix, the daughter of his old master, who had been constituted heiress of Provence.
Romeo succeeded in getting her married to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. This was done with wise purpose, but events proved—events over which Romeo had no control—that it was a disastrous mistake.
In his determination to root out the Hohenstauffen from Italy, Pope Clement IV. offered the crown of Naples and Sicily to this Charles. This was, as Mr. Addington Symons well says, "the most pernicious of all the evils inflicted by the papal power on Italy and on Provence." Then followed the French tyranny, under which Boniface VIII. expired at Anagni; Benedict XI was poisoned at the instigation of Philip le Bel, and the Papal see was transferred to Avignon.
Provence was henceforth involved in the bloody wars of Italy; its wealth, its manhood, were drained away, its Count passed to Naples to keep there his Court as a King, to the neglect of good government at home.
Romeo underwent the fate of all honest and strong men. He had made himself enemies, who accused him to the prince of having enriched himself at the expense of the province.
Romeo produced his accounts before the prince, showing that he had not betrayed his trust to the value of a denier; and then, resuming his pilgrim's habit, resumed also his wanderings. Finally he retired to the castle of Vence, where he died. His will was dated December i8th, 1250. Dante places him in Paradise:—
"Within the pearl, that now encloseth us
Shines Romeo's light, whose goodly deeds and fair
Met ill receptance. But the Provençals,
That were his foes, have little cause for mirth.
Ill shapes that man his course, who makes his wrong
Of other's worth. Four daughters were there born
To Raymond Berenger; and every one
Became a queen; and this for him did Romeo,
Though of mean state, and from a foreign land,
Yet envious tongues incited him to ask
A reckoning of that just one, who return'd
Twelve-fold to him for ten. Aged and poor
He parted thence; and if the world did know
The heart he had, begging his life by morsels,
'Twould deem the praise it yields him, scantly dealt."
(Par. vi. 131-44).
character. His young wife, moreover, the sister of three queens, excited him to aspire after a crown; and he saw in the county of Provence only a stepping-stone towards a throne. He hoped to acquire that of Constantinople, and he supposed that he was on his way thereto when he listened to the summons of the Pope to dispossess Manfred of the Sicilies. This disastrous resolve decided the fate of Provence, and was the prime cause of its ruin. If in the Count of Anjou there had been a glimmer of political sense, he would have seen how precarious a matter it was to accept a sovereignty as a feudatory of the Holy See, and to become the sport of circumstances ever shifting. He would have perceived how fatal it would be to his fortunes to oscillate between two centres; to exhaust the sources of his real strength in Provence to maintain himself in Naples. The nobility of Provence shared in his infatuation and eagerly joined in the undertaking. At the accession of Charles under the wise government of Raymond Berenger, and the judicious husbanding of its resources by Romeo de Villeneuve, Provence was at its acme of prosperity. Charles brought it to ruin. After the execution of Conradin, he rode roughshod over the people of Naples and Sicily. To his exactions there was no end. The great fiefs were seized and granted to Provençal or Angevin favourites; the foreign soldiers lived at free quarters, and treated the people with the utmost barbarity. There ensued an iron reign of force without justice, without law, without humanity, without mercy.
Conradin, from the scaffold, had cast his glove among the crowd, and called on Peter of Aragon, husband of Constance, daughter of the noble Manfred, to avenge him, and assume his inheritance. In Sicily, where the exactions, the tyranny of the French were most intolerable, a secret correspondence was kept up with Peter of Aragon, and he was entreated to deliver the island from its French masters. But before he was ready, an outbreak of the populace precipitated matters. On Easter Tuesday the inhabitants of Palermo had gone forth in pilgrimage to a church outside the town to vespers. French soldiers, mingling with the people, began to assault the young women. The Sicilians, the fathers, brothers, lovers, remonstrated, and bade the French keep away from the festival. The French gathered together and laid their hands on their swords. At this juncture a beautiful girl, with her betrothed, approached the church. A Frenchman, named Drouet, in wantonness of insult, went up to her and thrust his hand into her bosom. The girl fainted in her bridegroom's arms. A cry was raised of "Death to the Frenchmen!" and a youth started forward and stabbed Drouet to the heart.
This was the signal for a general insurrection. The cry spread to the city: every house was searched, and every person whose dress, speech, appearance, proclaimed him a Frenchman was massacred without mercy. Neither old age, nor sex, nor infancy, was spared. And in those Sicilian vespers, over two thousand of the Provençal and Angevin nobles and their wives perished under the knives of the justly incensed Sicilians.
When Charles heard of the massacre he burst into paroxysms of wrath. He is described as next having sat silent, gnawing the top of his sceptre, and then breaking forth into the most horrible vows of revenge.
Nor was the Pope behindhand in threats. It was to the Pope that Naples and Sicily owed the incubus of Charles and his Provençals. Clement IV. indeed was dead; Martin IV. now sat in his chair; but though there was a change in the person of the Chief Pontiff, there was no change of mind and policy.
The Palermitans sent an embassy to the Pope to deprecate his wrath, addressing him : "O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!" But even this adulation could not abate his rage. He proclaimed a crusade against the Sicilians. Heaven was promised to those who should draw the sword against them. Anathema was proclaimed against all who took their side.
But Peter of Aragon was indifferent to this ecclesiastical bluster, and the Sicilians were desperate. In spite of the blessings and promises of the Pope, Charles encountered only disaster. His fleet was destroyed, his son, Charles of Salerno, was captured; his treasury was exhausted, and the principal nobility of Anjou and Provence had been decimated in the Sicilian vespers. He sank into despondency and died, 1285.
Eventually, at the intercession of King Edward I. of England, the young prince, Charles the Lame, was released. He swore to pay 20,000 marks, and surrender his two sons as hostages till the sum was paid, and allow the claim to the Two Sicilies to drop. But no sooner was he freed than Pope Nicolas IV. annulled the treaty, released Charles of his oaths, and crowned him with his own hands. Charles did not surrender his sons, nor pay his ransom.
"This decree of Nicolas," says Dean Milman, "was the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom: it struck at the root of all chivalrous honour, at the faith of all treaties."
But Charles was fain to content himself with his counties of Provence and Anjou, and not allow himself to be drawn or impelled into wars by the Pope. In Provence he found wounds to staunch, ruins to repair.
It is highly to his credit that he frankly accepted this difficult and not very brilliant part. He avoided war, paid his father's debts, re-established his finances, and acquired in return the nickname of Charles the Miserly. After a reign of twenty-four years he died in 1309.
Grasse had been in the diocese of Antibes, but in 1243 Pope Innocent IV. transferred the seat of the bishop from Antibes to Grasse, on account of the unhealthiness of the former, and its liability to be plundered by the Moorish corsairs.
The bishops of Grasse were not in general men of great mark. Perhaps the least insignificant of them was Godeau.
Antoine Godeau, born at Dreux in 1605, lived in Paris with a kinsman named Couart; and as he thought he had the poetic afflatus he composed verses and read them to his kinsman. Couart took the lyrics to some literary friends, and they were appreciated. Godeau went on writing, and a little coterie was formed for listening to his compositions; and this was the nucleus out of which grew the Academic Francaise. Couart introduced Godeau to Mile, de Rambouillet, and he became her devoted admirer, and a frequenter of her social gatherings. The lady says, in one of her letters to Voiture: "There is here a man smaller than yourself by a cubit, and, I protest, a thousand times more gallant." Godeau, who entered holy orders and became an abbé, through his devotion to Mile, de Rambouillet, obtained the nickname of "Julie's Dwarf." Voiture was jealous of him, begrudged the favour of the lady who dispensed the literary reputations of the day, and he addressed a rondeau to Godeau:—
"Quittez l'amour, ce n'est votre métier,
Faites des vers, traduisez le psautier;
Votre fagon d'écrire est fort jolie;
Mais gardez-vous de faire folle,
Ou je saurais, ma foi, vous châtier
Comme un galant."
Godeau lived at a time when dancers about the saloons of the toasts and blue stockings of Paris were rewarded with spoils from the Church; and Godeau, when aged only thirty, was offered and accepted the united dioceses of Grasse and Vence. He was consecrated, and went to Grasse. Thence he wrote to Julie:—
"Dans ce desert ou je suis retourné',
Mon coeur languit, a souffrir destiné,
Et mon esprit plein de mélancolie
Ne pense plus qu'a la belle Julie.
****
J'aimerai mieux être aux fers condamné
Dans le dur froid de l'âpre Corilie.
O Rambouillet! O nymphe si jolie,
Souffrirez vous que je sois confiné"
Dans ce désert?"
Carros
poorest of all the sees in France.
Godeau was a voluminous writer, theological, historical, and poetic; and excelled in none of these lines. In fact, all his works have been consigned to the literary dust heap. His appointment to Grasse had followed on his presentation of a paraphrase of the Benedicite to Richelieu. The Cardinal said, "Sir, you have given me Benedicite. I in return render you Grasse (Grâce)."
The Cathedral of Grasse is of singularly uncouth Gothic, of the twelfth century, with huge drums of pillars, and the crudest of vaulting without any moulding being afforded to the ribs. Grasse possessed formerly a very curious feature, shared with Vence, of having the choir for bishop and chapter in the west gallery, over the porch. As this was so exceptional, and as the early apse would not admit of seats for the chapter, a late bishop built out a hideous structure behind the high altar to accommodate himself and the clergy. But at Vence the arrangement remains intact. That church of Vence is of very early architecture, I am afraid of stating how early. It consists of a nave with double aisles on each side, and the double aisles are carried round at the west end. Each of the aisles on both sides of the nave is stone-floored and vaulted underneath, forming a gallery. At the west end, both aisles are so floored, and here, above the narthex or porch, is the choir, with most beautifully carved stalls, bishop's throne at the extreme west end; and in the middle of this odd little upstairs choir is the lectern with its vellum MS. book of antiphons left as last used. The date of the stalls is 1455-1460, and the lectern is but little later.
According to tradition the church was built in the sixth century, on the site of a Pagan temple, and an image of an idol was buried under the foundations of each of the pillars. What is certain is that into two of the piers are inserted figures in alabaster from a Roman monument, and that numerous votive tablets and inscriptions are walled into the church. The beautiful woodwork of the western choir escaped being blown to splinters by a happy accident in 1596.
On Sunday, the Feast of S. Michael, the bishop occupied his throne at mass. When he stood up for the Gospel, his foot broke through the floor of his stall. He drew his foot out, and after the conclusion of the Creed proceeded to the pulpit to preach. Whilst he was away a choir boy looked into the hole made by the bishop's foot, thrust in an arm and drew out his hand full of a black powder, which he showed to an officer standing by, who at once recognised that this was gunpowder. A search was made, and it was found that enough gunpowder had been rammed in under the throne to blow bishop and chapter up, and wreck the church. A fuse had been inserted through a hole bored in the woodwork, and it was supposed that the purpose was to light this when the bishop returned from the pulpit. A messenger was at once sent to him, but he refused to desist from his sermon, calmly proceeding with it to the conclusion, although the congregation, who had received wind of the attempt, had begun to clear out of the church. He returned to his throne and remained there to the end of the service. It was never ascertained by whom the plot was arranged, whether by Huguenots, or whether it was due to private malice.
A corner house looking out on the Cours at Grasse, between the rue du Cours and the Passage Mirabeau, is the old town residence of the family of Cabris. The noblesse of the neighbourhood had their town residence at Grasse, and there spent the winter in such gaieties as could be got up between them.
In this house, No. 2 and 4 of the street, lived Louise, Marchioness de Grasse-Cabris, the youngest and most beautiful of the sisters of the famous Mirabeau. She had been married when quite young to the Marquis, who was a prey to ungovernable fits of temper, and was considerably her senior. But there was an excuse for his violence in the dissipated conduct of his wife.
The Mirabeaus were an old Provençal family which had migrated from Florence through some of the civic broils in the twelfth century. The patronymic was Arrigheti, which got by degrees Frenchified into Riquetti. The estate and title of Mirabeau were only acquired in 1568, by Jean Riquetti, who was first consul of Marseilles.
The Mirabeaus were a race of men singularly energetic, independent, and audacious. They boasted that they were all hewn out of one block, without joints. They were proud, rude, with original and strongly marked features, free-and-easy morals, and violent tempers. Jean Antoine de Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau, brigadier of infantry, was wounded in defending a bridge in the battle of Cassans. He fell, and all the hostile army passed over him. His old sergeant, seeing him down, put an iron pot over his master's head, and fled. This pot saved Mirabeau's life, but his right arm was broken, and he was so damaged that he was obliged to wear a silver collar to keep his head upright. He was presented by the Duke de Vendôme, under whom he had fought, to Louis XIV., who received him with some commonplace remark; to which the old crippled soldier replied rudely, "If in quitting the Colours he had come to Court payer quelque catin he would have received more honour and less words.", Vendôme was so scared at his audacity, that he said, "Henceforth, Riquetti, I will present you to the enemy, and never again to the king."
The son of this man was Victor de Riquetti, who called himself "l'Ami des Hommes," a fantastic hodgepodge of contradictions. He was a philanthropist and a despot, a feudalist, but also a reformer, a professed friend of mankind, but a tyrant in his own family. He hated superstition, but scoffed at "la canaille philosophique." Separated from his wife, he was engaged in lawsuits with her for years, which published to all Provence the scandals of the domestic hearth of the House of Mirabeau. The eldest son of this man was Gabriel Honoré, the great orator, and the youngest daughter was Louise, Marchioness de Grasse-Cabris. The feudal castle of the Cabris is on the way to Draguignan. Cabris occupies a conical hill in a dreary limestone district, where the soil is so sparse that even the olive cannot flourish there—it exists, that is all. The place is supplied with water from cisterns that receive the rain from the roofs. Honoré was disfigured by smallpox at the age of three, and he retained thenceforth an extraordinary hideousness of aspect which struck his contemporaries, but which does not seem in the slightest to have impeded his success with women. His father declared that physically and morally he was a monster. The romance of his life begins when he was aged seventeen, when, owing to a love intrigue, and to debts, his father obtained a lettre de cachet and had him imprisoned in the isle of Ré. From that time ensued a pitiless struggle, a veritable duel, between the imperious father and the ungovernable son. In 1772 Honoré married Emilie de Marignane at Aix; she was a wealthy heiress, but he speedily dissipated her fortune. His father obtained an order that he should be interned at Manosque. But he broke bounds and came to Grasse to visit his sister. Two days later an indecent pasquinade appeared placarded over the walls of Grasse, containing aspersions on the characters of the principal ladies of rank who spent the winter there.
It was at once bruited abroad that Mirabeau and his sister, Mme. de Cabris, had concocted the lampoon between them. Mirabeau was incensed. He was too much of a gentleman thus to defame ladies; and he hunted out M. de Villeneuve-Mouans as the author of this report. He went after him one day, when this old gentleman was walking on the road bare-headed, with an umbrella spread, horsewhipped him, and broke the umbrella over his shoulders.
The consequence was that a lettre de cachet was taken out against Louise; but on investigation it turned out that it was the Marquis de Grasse-Cabris, the husband of Louise, who was the author of the scurrilous lampoon, and that Honoré had known nothing about it.
When the Revolution broke out, the Marquis fled. The Castle of Cabris was sacked by the mob, and Louise and her husband lived for ten years in great poverty as emigrés.
When, finally, she returned to Provence it was to ruined Mirabeau. The castle had been wrecked, but she contrived to have a cottage built out of the ruins for herself and for her husband, who had sunk into dotage.
The brother of the great orator and of Louise de Cabris was André Boniface, Deputy to the Estates-General for the nobility of Limoges. His excesses at table, and his corpulence, procured for him the nickname of Mirabeau Tonneau. Gabriel Honoré reprimanded him for ascending the tribune when he was drunk. "Why," he replied, "you have monopolised all the vices of the family, and have left but this one to me." "In any other family but ours," he said, "I would pass as a disgrace. In mine, I am its most respectable member." He emigrated to Germany. An epigram was composed on him:—
"L’horreur de l'eau, l'amour du vin
Le retiendront au bord du Rhin."
Grasse, as already said, is an admirable centre for excursions, and no excursion is finer than that up the Gorge of the Loup. It is not often that commercial enterprise adds to picturesqueness of scene; but this it has at the entrance to the Gorge. There the railway makes a bold sweep over a really beautiful viaduct, this itself an addition to the scene. But further, in order to supply electric force to Nice for its trams and lighting, a canal has been bored in the precipice on the right bank of the Loup, at a great elevation, to bring the water from an upper fall, so as, by means of a turbine, to accumulate the required power; and the falls of this stream at the opening of the ravine are of great beauty.
It is hard to decide which is most beautiful, the view of the mouth of the ravine, with the waterfall foaming down the cliff beside it, as seen from the hill-side as the 
Cascade, Gorge Of Loup
Fall In The Gorge Of The Loup
There are views one sees that never leave one, that fix themselves in the mind indelibly; and the view of the mouth of the Loup Gorge is certainly one such scene.
The ravines of the Tarn are visited by increasing numbers of tourists every year, and I know them well; but I do not think them superior to those of the Loup, the Cians, and the Var. Visitors to the Riviera are for the most part content to hug the coast and cling to the great centres of civilization, where there are shops, casinos, and theatres, and do not branch off afield. Only the day before writing this page, I heard a gentleman who had spent several winters on the Côte d'Azur remark that "After a while one gets very sick of the Riviera." I promptly inquired whether he had penetrated any of the ravines sawn in the limestone; whether he had visited the mountain villages, such as Thouet de Bëuil; whether he had explored the Estérel. No—he knew nothing of them. In fact, through a dozen winters he had seen naught save the vulgar side of Provence.
It does not suffice to look at the mouth of the Gorge of the Loup. The ravine must be ascended, and that not by the new track, cut to accommodate the lazy, high up in the cliff, but by the footpath at the bottom. This will lead in the first place to an exquisite subject for the artist. On the farther bank is planted a little chapel with a cell once tenanted by a hermit. In mid torrent is a pile of rocks, and a light bridge of rudest construction traverses the river; above the piles of stone in the centre, against the purple gloom of the gorge, rises a crucifix, bathed in golden sunlight. Below, where it can root itself, is flowering laurestinus.
Farther up, after a succession of magnificent scenes, one drops upon a little house, where trout can be eaten, lying behind a waterfall; and to assist the visitor in reaching it, the proprietor runs out with a big umbrella to protect him from the torrent dissolved into rain. Further up the ravine come other and finer leaps of water, the main stream of the Loup, in maddest gambol of youth; and over all flash out gleams of the eternal snows.
Le Bar has a painting in the church, representing a Dance Macabre; it is, like all other such dances, of the fifteenth century. It represents Death armed with his bow among a party of dancers. Some are dying, and their souls are leaving their bodies. The picture is accompanied by a long Provençal inscription.
High above the entrance to the Gorge of the Loup stands the village of Gourdon, on the limestone terrace. The only spring water the place was supplied with came from a fountain in a cave in the face of a sheer precipice, reached by a thread of path, a foot to eighteen inches wide, along the cliff, and this, moreover, interrupted by a rift, usually crossed by a plank. But not infrequently this plank fell, or was carried away. Then those in quest of water leaped the gap, went on to the cave, filled their pitchers, and returned the same way, springing over the interval, where a false step would entail certain death.
At Mouans Sartoux, between Grasse and Cannes, stood the castle of a grim Huguenot Seigneur. The church was under the patronage of the Chapter of Grasse. The Sieur Reinaud invited two Calvinist ministers to his castle. In 1572, when the curé of Mouans had summoned a friar to help him for Christmas Day, and to preach, as he himself was a poor speaker,—just after midnight the Sieur sent armed men into the parsonage to threaten to kill the friar if he preached next day. On Christmas morning, accordingly, the frightened man abstained, and the congregation had to go without instruction on the lessons of the day. Then the Sieur broke into the church when the parishioners were communicating, along with his men-at-arms and his ministers, and made one of these latter ascend the pulpit and harangue the congregation, pour contumely on the Catholic Church, and denounce all respect for holy seasons. The fellow further told the people that their fathers and mothers were burning in hell-fire for not having revolted from the Church. Next, the Sieur renewed his threats that, should "the Cagot of a friar" venture to address the parishioners in the afternoon, he would do him to death. At vespers he again invaded the church, and set up one of his preachers to speak to the people. He did the same on the two following days. The Consuls of Mouans appealed to the Chapter of Grasse for protection, but they were incapable of affording them effectual aid.
The son of this Sieur, Pompée de Grasse, was more zealous even than his father, and did not confine himself to threats. He placed sword-edge and firebrand at the disposal of the Huguenot cause. He was a terror to the whole countryside. At last, one night, when he was at Bormes, in the Maures, a party of Catholics, disguised in long cloaks, managed to get into his castle, and killed him and his brother, and set fire to the place, His widow, Susanne de Villeneuve, and her two daughters, were allowed to escape by boat to Hyères.
We are vastly mistaken if we regard the parties in the Wars of Religion as all Lamb on one side, and all Wolf on the other. As a matter of fact, except in the Cevennes, the Reform was favoured only by the lesser nobility, not out of religious conviction, but out of a spirit of turbulence bred by the long disorders of the English occupation of Aquitaine, and the riots of the Free Companies. They resented the firm hand imposed on them by the Crown, and they hoped to get pickings out of Church estates.
The people generally were not touched by the negatives of Calvinism. After that Henry IV. joined the Church, most of the nobility and country gentry followed his example—again, not from conviction, but because they saw that the game of resistance was up.
At present, in the department of Var there are 1,500 Protestants out of a population of 310,000. In Alpes Maritimes they number 1,000 out of nearly 294,000, and most of these sectaries are foreign importations. If there had been deep-rooted convictions, these would not have been dissipated so certainly. In the Cevennes, Calvinism holds on notwithstanding persecution in the past, and in Ireland is a reverse instance.
But to return to Susanne de Villeneuve.
In 1592 the Duke of Savoy was at Grasse, and resolved on chastising this Susanne as a capital influence among the Razats. Actually two women at this period fomented the fury and bloodshed of internecine strife. The Baron de Vins, head of the Leaguers, had been killed in 1589 outside Grasse. The Countess Christine de Sault, his sister-in-law, had been the headpiece, as he the arm, of the party, and it was she who, in desperate resolve to save the Catholic cause, invited Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to give his help against the king. What she was on one side, that was Susanne de Villeneuve on the other—implacable, fanatical, remorseless in hate, and with an iron will.
The Duke of Savoy besieged Susanne in her castle of Mouans, and she defended herself gallantly; but, forced to surrender through lack of food, she imposed as condition that the castle should be spared. The duke broke his word, and levelled it. She was furious, reproached him, and demanded 40,000 crowns indemnity, or she would brand him as a liar and perjurer. He promised the money, but departed without paying. She hasted after him, caught him up in the plain of Cagnes, and poured forth afresh a torrent of abuse. He spurred his horse, so as to escape it; she flung herself in the way, held the bridle, and used her woman's tongue with such effect that Charles Emmanuel was glad to disburse the money on the spot so as to effect his escape.
The castle has disappeared to its foundations. The church stands intact, unrestored.
I have spoken of the Hotel of the Cabris family in the Cours. No. 1 is the ancient mansion of the family of Théas-Thorenc, and was built by Count François, who was engaged in the wars of Louis XV., and whose praises have been sung by Goethe. He was at the taking of Frankfort, when his commander-in-chief, the Prince of Soubise, acquired the celebrity of the epigram:—
"Soubise dit, la lanterne à la main:
’J'ai beau chercher! où diable est mon armée?
Elle était là pourtant, hier matin?'"
He died there August I5th, 1793.
Another Grasse worthy is Fragonard, the painter, a mercer's son, born at Grasse in 1732. He was put as clerk to a notary in early youth, but wearied mortally of the office, and in 1748 was given to the painter Bucher to be trained as an artist.
He was in full swing of favour and success in Paris when the Revolution broke out.
"Soon events became tragic, and then began the dusk of that bright and gentle life which had to him hitherto been one long smile. Frago had no thought of flying from the storm, and republicanism always remained idealised in his mind. But sadness oppressed his heart, and his friends shared it with him. These old pensioners of the king, enriched by the
aristocracy, could not see without regret the demolition of the ancien régime, and the ruin of their protectors, emigrated, imprisoned, hunted down. Without hating either royalty or Jacobinism, the little group of artists of plebeian birth and bourgeois manners suffered in silence the great revolution in which all their past went down, as the shadows of old age deepened on them. Their art was out of fashion. Their piquant scenes, their dainty subjects, were no longer possible in the midst of political and social convulsions, and a few years sufficed to convert the respect of yesterday into the contempt of to-day. Eighty years must pass before taste and justice could bring men back to love the charming French school of 1770, to understand its importance in the history of the national genius, so as to induce the digging of its relics forth from under the cinders of the Revolution, the empire, and the bourgeois royalty."[1]
A curiously small life must have been that of these little towns under the ancien régime, when the time of warfare was over. It was made up of petty quarrels, of scandals and gossip. Even in the cathedral, the bishop and the dean and the chapter were at loggerheads over the merest trifles—whether two or three coups of the censer should be given to the bishop, whether a bow to him should extend to the hams of the canons. Perhaps the funniest quarrel was about the patronage of the diocese. The bishop issued a pastoral, in which he announced that he had constituted S. Honoratus the patron of the clergy of Grasse, and did not say "with the assent of the chapter." Whereupon the incensed chapter cut the name of Honoratus out of their calendar, and refused to celebrate his festival. Some of the bishops were engaged in incessant strife. When one died, to him might be applied the epigram written on Clement XI.:—
" A vermibus terrae consumendus in tumulo, A vermibus ecclesiae jam consumptus in throno."
"The happy little town of Grasse," says Lenthéric, "seems to be the very home of flowers and perfumes. Its forests Of olives furnish the finest and sweetest oil of Provence; its groves of oranges and lemons yield at the same time flowers in abundance and fruit in maturity. About it are roses, jessamine, mint, heliotrope, Parma violets, mignonette, cultivated over wide tracts, as are also everywhere the common pot-herbs. The transformation of these natural products into perfumery has become the predominant industry of the district; and the neighbourhood of the Alps allows of the addition to this domestic flora of a thousand wild flowers and herbs—thyme, lavender, rosemary—all to be gathered close at hand."
- ↑ Les Grands Artistes, Fragonard, par C. Mauclair, Paris (n.d.)