Страница 25 из 65
Except for an incongruous factory chimney further away on the bank of the Sèvre, the countryside of Tiffauges remained in perfect harmony with the immense château, erect among its ruins. Within the close, still to be traced by the ruins of the towers, was a whole plain, now converted into a miserable truck garden. Cabbages, in long bluish lines, impoverished carrots, consumptive navews, spread over this enormous circle where iron mail had clanked in the tournament and where processionals had slowly devolved, in the smoke of incense, to the chanting of psalms.
A thatched hut had been built in a corner. The peasant inhabitants, returned to a state of savagery, no longer understood the meaning of words, and could be roused out of their apathy only by the display of a silver coin. Seizing the coin, they would hand over the keys.
For hours one could browse around at ease among the ruins, and smoke and daydream. Unfortunately, certain parts were inaccessible. The donjon was still shut off, on the Tiffauges side, by a vast moat, at the bottom of which mighty trees were growing. One would have had to pass over the tops of the trees, growing to the very verge of the wall, to gain a porch on the other side, for there was now no drawbridge.
But quite accessible was another part which overhung the Sèvre. There the wings of the castle, overgrown with ivy and white-crested viburnum, were intact. Spongy, dry as pumice stone, silvered with lichen and gilded with moss, the towers rose entire, though from their crenelated collarettes whole blocks were blown away on windy nights.
Within, room succeeded glacial room, cut into the granite, surmounted with vaulted roofs, and as close as the hold of a ship. Then by spiral stairways one descended into similar chambers, joined by cellar passageways into the walls of which were dug deep niches and lairs of unknown utility.
Beneath, those corridors, so narrow that two persons could not walk along them abreast, descended at a gentle slope, and bifurcated so that there was a labyrinth of lanes, leading to veritable cells, on the walls of which the nitre scintillated in the light of the lantern like steel mica or twinkling grains of sugar. In the cells above, in the dungeons beneath, one stumbled over rifts of hard earth, in the centre or in a corner of which yawned now the mouth of an unsealed oubliette, now a well.
Finally, at the summit of one of the towers, that at the left as one entered, there was a roofed gallery ru
Briefly, the exterior of the castle revealed a fortified place built to stand long sieges, and the dismantled interior made one think of a prison in which flesh, mildewed by the moisture, must rot in a few months. Out in the open air again, one felt a sensation of well-being, of relief, which one lost on traversing the ruins of the isolated chapel and penetrating, by a cellar door, to the crypt below.
This chapel, low, squat, its vaulted roof upheld by massive columns on whose capitals lozenges and bishop's croziers were carved, dated from the eleventh century. The altar stone survived intact. Brackish daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn, came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an oubliette or by a well shaft.
In the evening after di
"All this," said Durtal to himself, "is the skeleton of a dead keep. To reanimate it we must revisualize the opulent flesh which once covered these bones of sandstone. Documents give us every detail. This carcass was magnificently clad, and if we are to see Gilles in his own environment, we must remember all the sumptuosity of fifteenth century furnishing.
"We must reclothe these walls with wainscots of Irish wood or with high warp tapestries of gold and thread of Arras, so much sought after in that epoch. Then this hard, black soil must be repaved with green and yellow bricks or black and white flagstones. The vault must be starred with gold and sown with crossbows on a field azur, and the Marshal's cross, sable on shield or, must be set shining there."
Of themselves the furnishings returned, each to its own place. Here and there were high-backed signorial chairs, thrones, and stools. Against the walls were sideboards on whose carved panels were bas-reliefs representing the A
So one must reconstruct the decorations of the other rooms, in which nothing was standing but the walls and the high, basket-fu
"Remain the costumes to be restored," said Durtal to himself, and he imagined Gilles and his friends, not in their damaskeened field harness, but in their indoor costumes, their robes of peace. He visualized them in harmony with the luxury of their surroundings. They wore glittering vestments, pleated jackets, bellying out in a little flounced skirt at the waist. The legs were encased in dark skin-tight hose. On their heads were the artichoke chaperon hats like that of Charles VII in his portrait in the Louvre. The torso was enveloped in silver-threaded damask, which was crusted with jewelleries and bordered with marten.