Gaston de Latour; an unfinished romance
Pater, Walter, 1839-1894
English
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GASTON DE LATOUR: AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE
WALTER PATER
1. A Clerk in Orders: 1-25
2. Our Lady's Church: 26-47
3. Modernity: 48-72
4. Peach-Blossom and Wine: 73-90
5. Suspended Judgment: 91-115
6. Shadows of Events: 116-131
7. The Lower Pantheism: 132-end
I. A CLERK IN ORDERS
The white walls of the Chateau of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts,
composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent
object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La
Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days
of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it
recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union,
less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the
improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous
monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object
which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it
was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of
the very ground-plan of the house itself--everywhere was the token of
their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway
through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely
together.
Why this irregularity of ground-plan?--the traveller would ask;
recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the
eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the
part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of
architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question,
true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making
the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large
measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death,
some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could
hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is
plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty
remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a
crenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some
ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained.
It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that had
allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at
this point in its growth.
And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite
motives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect
the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity
of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of
that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house--a
double manoir--two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far
back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been
the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked
with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of
Latour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonely
manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when
the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring
lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so
dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed
away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the
younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the
kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight,
the building of a second manor-house--the Chateau d'Amour, as it came
to be called--that the two families, in what should be as nearly as
possible one abode, might take their fortunes together.
Of somewhat finer construction than the rough walls of the older
manor, the Chateau d'Amour stood, amid the change of years, as a
visible record of all the accumulated sense of human existence among
its occupants. The old walls, the old apartments, of those two
associated houses still existed, with some obvious additions, beneath
the delicate, fantastic surfaces of the chateau [4] of the sixteenth
century. Its singularity of outline was the very symbol of the
religion of the family in the race of Latour, still full of loyalty
to the old home, as its numerous outgrowths took hold here and there
around. A race with some prominent characteristics ineradicable in
the grain, they went to raise the human level about them by a
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