THE GREAT HOUSE OF DURTAL

I know not why it is, but there are many places which, through the mechanical accidents of our time, become overknown, and others which one might call underknown. Too many people know Assisi; not nearly enough people know Loretto. Too many people know Rabat and Fez, even to-day. Too many people know Montserrat, and not enough know the Chimneys of Riglos, which are among the wonders of the world.

Durtal, the Great House of Durtal, is one of the lesser known things. Perhaps I ought to be glad of that, for I can easily imagine it ruined by crowds. But, at any rate, if it has pride in itself, or if its ghostly owners could feel human pride in whatever place they now may be, it seems unfair that such a thing should not be as famous to-day as it most assuredly is splendid.

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The Great House of Durtal is a lesser example of the spirit which, when it had all the wealth of the kingship behind it, set up those neighbouring castles of the Loire which are certainly among the much too well-known things. Durtal had no such wealth behind it; it was the great house of a big private gentleman. But Lord, what an effect he got for his money! You will look in vain, I think, for any other private house in Europe, in the countrysides, at least—for I do not know whether one should call the Barberini House a palace or not—which gives you such an impression of nobility, of magnificence; in the old sense of the term magnificence: ‘A great doing—a making of something worthy.’

The builder played every trick—and legitimately—to give this effect of magnificence. When first the place had been set up as a stronghold, in the Dark Ages when all such strongholds were founded, a knoll above the quiet river had been castellated. It was the castle of Durtal; but when greater wealth and less power came to the descendants of that house, the falling ground was fronted with a projecting three sides of Renaissance work which makes to-day the Great House of Durtal, three piled up stories high above the low-lying ground to the south; but on the north, at the top of the steep hill the ground on a level with its second storey. The builder spread out the stone basement of that cliff of a façade at an angle, after the fashion of the Egyptians, to give a look of support and strength to the weight above; and in the eastern corner he married the high Renaissance roof to the last battlements of the Middle Ages, just as the builders of the Medicean Louvre in Paris joined the Middle Ages to sixteenth-century Italy.

One would have thought that Durtal would have been famous if through Rabelais alone, for all the glorious episode of Picrochole turns upon Durtal; he was Lord of Durtal, if you remember, when he was struck with that sudden burst of imperialism of his and determined to conquer the whole world ‘without fear of being turned upon his flank by the Muscovites.’

But Rabelais has brought no fame to this, and for a hundred who see the master in bronze upon the public place of Chinon, scarcely one, I suppose, has ever seen Durtal.

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Perhaps the choice of travellers is wise, for Durtal is dead, in spite of all its beauty and strength. These things were intended for human habitations and for lordships. They went with personal powers and personal prides. They have now no functions to fulfil, because the builders of them have departed and their descendants inhabit them no more. You may go through the halls of that old place and find no ornament; the promise of the great façade is not fulfilled within; one wing at the back which closed the courtyard has disappeared; and as for using the place, it has been turned into a hospital. Durtal is no longer Durtal, because it is no longer alive. But it is worth seeing, all the same, and if a man wants a series in which the history of all our vivid developments between the Crusades and the Reformation may stand before him, let him visit Durtal after Angers—an hour in the local train and less in a motor. He will see at Angers—and he will be wise to approach from the river—a castle of stark bastions, wholly devoid of any grace at all, a great quadrilateral of half-round towers, not very high, gigantically thick and strong, with hardly a slit for light or for arrows round the wall, built, too early for battlements, of a dark and forbidding stone which you can hardly distinguish from the rock out of which it springs and into which it is dovetailed. Angers, though it is the Plantagenet castle in which first were heard the songs of the Arthurian cycle, within the gaunt naked walls of which arose the beginnings of the Middle Ages, is built wholly for use, and for one use—the use of war; and of war when war meant the rumbling of mangonel engines attempting to batter down walls almost as strong as the walls of nature. Angers is sheerly for defence, the stronghold of a man who was a king. Then came the great four hundred years of development, and at the end of them, Durtal, no longer a castle in the old sense at all, not built for defence nor suggesting it, yet still suggesting strength and, above all, power of tradition.

I sometimes wonder, when I see the way in which the rich build nowadays, failing nearly always to reach the effect they desire, that they do not merely copy. Why has not some one of our modern rich set to work to reproduce Durtal? He would certainly have a house better than anything they have built in Europe for two hundred years. But I suppose when he had done it some other revolution like that which has taken the soul out of Durtal would nullify his efforts, and that the palace which he had raised for the satisfaction of his vanity or of his legitimate pride in blood would be debased to false uses in its turn.

At any rate, there is Durtal, as good a thing in death as I know. Perhaps some rich man with a kind heart will buy it back from the governors of the hospital, destroy in it the devices of the religious who tend the sick, turn its chapel into a dancing hall, re-erect the fallen north wing, complete the courtyard again, and fill Durtal once more with a false life. And if that happens I know not whether I shall be glad or sorry.