LE MANS

Le mans is a name newly familiar. It was, if I am not mistaken, an American base during the war. I know, at any rate, that the presence of the American Army there is well remembered. Save for that episode, however, it is not one of the better-known towns of northern France to-day, though it, again, lies on one of the great lines of travel, and on one of the chief railways connecting Paris with the Atlantic—the railway to Brest. It is that which gave it the economic and (after a fashion) strategic position which it held during the Great War. But, normally, the communications of western Europe through the Atlantic leave Le Mans by the way. Goods and men come off the ships at Cherbourg or at Havre, and the lines thence to Paris leave Le Mans far to the west. Meanwhile, the normal roads of travel from the north to the south of Europe also neglect it. They converge on Paris from the ports of Normandy and of Picardy; they radiate out from Paris to Bordeaux and to Marseilles. Le Mans has enjoyed one advantage from this position: it has retained its spirit; and though it has largely forgotten its own history, one can—as one grasps the character of the old town, masked by the extension of modern building—recall the original plan and the castle rock which was the heart of Maine.

To face page 172.]

Normandy, with its intense history, was the Roman Province of the Second Lyonnaise. Brittany was the Celtic Province which, though it was and is half Roman-speaking, preserved and preserves a life entirely its own. Normandy ever attempted to master Brittany. The dukes of Normandy were for ever desiring to obtain an acknowledgment of their supremacy from the rulers of Brittany. The two provinces, which then were virtually kingdoms, touched in the Bay of Saint-Michel; but the wilder western land never submitted. It only played at submission to Rouen in order to avoid submission to Paris.

Wedged in between the two, just below the sea-coast and not having access to the sea; lozenge-shaped, not wholly of Anjou, not stretching to the Loire; formed, we know not how, by the petty local lordships of the darkness after Charlemagne, there rose up that countryside of Maine whose function it was to be a march land between the Breton and the Norman power. In all their history, until the final consolidation of the French monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages, Maine was the makeweight and the balance. William the Conqueror insisted upon ruling it, and took, by dint of great effort, its capital, Le Mans. Four hundred years later, as the Plantagenet line was failing, the cession of Maine was felt in England to be the peril of Normandy, and the man who had sacrificed Maine as the price of Henry VI.’s marriage paid for the sacrifice with his life. And even to-day, when all these things are forgotten, Maine and Le Mans play a neutral rôle. They are not Norman, and they are not Breton; and modern travel which knows Normandy and Brittany by heart misses Maine and its capital—to their good.

I have just called Le Mans a hill town. I suppose that most of my contemporaries who visit it will think I am using some special term of my own not corresponding to reality. The land rises slowly from the Huisne; that there was ever here a citadel, a defensible place, one might not guess, especially if one should come in from the railway station on the flat, or by the road from Angers, or from the south. But to understand what Le Mans means in history, do not, upon arriving there, go straight into the centre of the city, but rather cross the Sarthe westward, and thence, from the suburb on the right bank of the river, look up against the steep hill—it is almost a cliff—on which the castle (what is left of it) and the cathedral stand. Thence you will see what Le Mans meant to our fathers. It was by river that trade came to the place; it was by river that stores of war could be accumulated within it. Seen thus, standing above the river, it is a splendid steep. Even on the far side toward the east there was, in the first state of the countryside, before any levelling or building up, an approach upon a slope, defensible by a wall, and old Le Mans stood within a circle of walls which had that steep rock fall upon the water for its highest point, and looked down from that at the precipitous slopes. See how to-day the modern street cuts through the rock citadel by a tunnel; and see how the castle, now reduced to a governor’s residence of the later Middle Ages, its old strength quite forgotten, still masters the stream, and how the cathedral towers above the whole.

To face page 175.]

That building, the cathedral of Le Mans, is thought the most perfect of the later Gothic churches in France. From within, looking toward the choir, it is certainly that; and from without, looking at the great sheaf of flying buttresses, it is that no less. But there is another feature in the great pile which a wise man will note for himself if he will go and stand in the little square of the bishopric above the steps which lead to the old dominating rock that brought Le Mans into being; thence he will see in one view the half-barbaric western front, grotesque with the heavy and terrifying humour of the eleventh century or the early twelfth, before the architecture of the West had caught the flame; and in that same view he sees something older than any Christian church, the great druidical stone, built right into the walls; and in that same view he sees the superb south transept, the last achievement of the Gothic.

There is another thing in Le Mans, not commonly known, which always moves me profoundly; that is the tomb of Berengaria, the woman whom Richard the Lion-Heart loved, and for whom he broke with the house of France, repudiating the sister of the King. Why she comes to lie there, while he is at Fontevrault, I do not know; but there she lies, three weeks’ march northward from her father’s land, the queen and the mate of the greatest man of her time who had died so long before her by that blunt arrow under Chalus, days and days away. If I knew nothing in Le Mans except her tomb, I should think the place worth visiting for that alone.

_Part V_

_The Rhine March_