A Versailles Christmas-tide by Mary Stuart Boyd

A pleasant little book. I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg without any of its illustrations, to save memory on my Kindle, but that may have been a mistake; judging by the space allotted them, half the point of the memoir seems to have been the  pictures. They were drawn by the author's husband A. S. Boyd, whose art appeared in Punch and who himself appeared in the Who's Who of 1900.

Even bereft so, it's a pleasant little book. The Boyds, an English couple, receive word that their teenaged son, away at school in Versailles, has come down with scarlet fever. They set out at once -- "it was full noon when the news came, and nightfall saw us dashing through the murk of a wild mid-December night towards Dover pier" -- and after about a day and a half, a boat, a train to Paris, a drive across the city, and another train bring them "jolting in a fiacre over the stony streets of Versailles."

The following nine chapters gently tell the story of the parents' observations and small adventures while they winter unexpectedly in this eerily forgotten corner of France. Only twelve miles from Paris, "Versailles is not ancient; it is old, completely old. Since the fall of the Second Empire it has stood still. Most of the clocks have run down, as though they realised the futility of trying to keep pace with the rest of the world." The Boy recovers, as we know he will (this is not a writer to stun us with a tragedy at the end). Since he is being nursed by the Soeur of the Red Cross hospital in town, who only seems to allow parental visits at mealtimes, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd simply wait, and knock about Versailles for the better part of a month. They watch the goings-on among their fellow hotel guests, or at the vegetable market, where they buy and decorate a Christmas tree as a surprise for the invalid. Because it is Christmas, they watch the goings-on at the local Notre Dame, where silent worshipers contemplate a crèche, or attend to private spiritual needs.

Here a pretty girl returned thanks for evident blessings received; there an old spinster, the narrowness of whose means forbade her expending a couple of sous on the hire of a chair, knelt on the chilly flags and murmured words of gratitude for benefits whereof her appearance bore no outward indication.

Most interesting for the modern reader are the Boyds' leisurely tours of the palace of Versailles in the days before it was -- I should think -- a full-on, cleaned-up tourist destination, as crowded and lockstep with routines and défendus as it probably ever was when the Sun King's court adored him there. Early on in her book, Mrs. Boyd quickly sketches memories of a previous, rubberneck visit -- "a palace of fatiguing magnificence" -- but now in the off season while she is living in the town, she goes there again and really explores. Now she is given a private tour of the hidden staircase, "dark, narrow, and hoary with the dust of years," by which Marie Antoinette fled the invading crowds in October, 1789, and she claims to have asked to see it only after surmising, all on her own, that it must exist. ("... I was puzzling over the transparent fact that either of the apparent exits would have led her directly into the hands of the enemy, when the idea of a secret staircase suggested itself.") She visits the hameau, the queen's little fake dairy farm, and records it still abandoned and unkempt because its previous owners had been dragged away. Her writing is very pretty, and deserves quoting at length.

About the pillars supporting the verandah-roof of the chief cottage and that of the wide balcony above, roses and vines twined lovingly. And though it was the first day of January the rose foliage was yet green and bunches of shrivelled grapes clung to the vines. It was lovely then; yet a day or two later, when a heavy snowfall had cast a white mantle over the village, and the litle lake was frozen hard, the scene seemed still more beautiful in its ghostly purity.

At first sight there was no sign of decay about the long-deserted hamlet. The windows were closed, but had it been ealy morning, one could easily have imagined that the pseudo villagers were alseep behind the shuttered casements, and that soon the Queen, in some charming déshabillé, woudl come out to breathe the sweet morning air and to inhale the perfume of the climbing roses on the balcony overloking the lake, where gold-fish darted to and fro among the water-lilies ....

The sunset glamour had faded and the premature dusk of mid-winter was falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, shuddering, we hastened away.

I'm sure I don't know why, but perhaps some psychiatrist could explain why middle class, middle aged women, perhaps particularly Anglo women, stand ever fascinated by Marie Antoinette. Do French or for that matter Austrian women swoon over her quite as much? Do we recognize her as one of our own, though shrouded in far more than the glamor of mere foreignness? Stefan Zweig subtitled his biography of her "Portrait of an Average Woman," in keeping with his thesis that her fate and the fate of those around her might have been less tragic had she possessed any outsize abilities. Perhaps we like her because we see her as wife, mother, interested in friends, parties, rehabbing the house, elevated as a teenager to the highest and richest and most delightful sphere -- first Dauphine, then Queen of France! -- above all, innocent. Mrs. Boyd's book on visiting her ill son would have been far shorter had she not included two whole chapters on this woman and a great many of her compeers ("to me the Palace of Versailles is peopled by the ghosts of many women"). But her fascination with the queen fascinates also because, as a practical matter, from this witness in 1900 we enjoy the ghoulish little thrill of seeing the hameau as it can never be again. For her it was a crumbling but living thing. With her we can look at the rotting thatch and murmur inwardly, "just a little more than a hundred years ago ... not even repaired." I doubt it's quite so authentically, "oppressively" ghostly today.

 

Image from chateauversailles.fr, the official website of the Château de Versailles.

Yes, the Boy recovers. Like the boy in the (oppressive) children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, his things all have to be burned once he is well -- which is why his parents, in all their hurry, took care to bring him only old outgrown toys from his playroom at home anyway. It was 1900. No antibiotics. Apparently time, luck, emotional succor, and a boiled milk diet saw him through. At the end of it he is able to say, in the speech patterns only a Victorian thirteen-year-old could muster, " 'Do you know, I've rather enjoyed it!' " And so have we.

Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia by W. Somerset Maugham

What does it mean to travel? And isn't it fun reading a book on a Kindle?

Yes, it is fun, if I may answer the second question first. A travel book published by Somerset Maugham in 1905 is the sort of thing you might chance upon in an old library or a used book sale, or you might know about it if you are a student of Maugham. Still, the chances of such serendipity are slim, if you go about your book hunting in the usual way. Maugham's memory has faded and he has become known for only one or two things, Of Human Bondage primarily. The way to find Land of the Blessed Virgin now is to be given a Kindle as a surprise for your birthday, spend four nights figuring it out, and then use it to go to Project Gutenberg and start downloading free, obscure, out-of-copyright books. If you happen to browse through their collection by author's last name, choosing M at random, you will soon find Maugham -- and Mansfield, Katharine -- and there at your fingertips is the output of his career. And hers. The tide at full flood, as it were, proof of an author's stature when your great-grandmother was reading good books. There is Land of the Blessed Virgin, and there also Mansfield's travel book, In a German Pension.

A great deal of lovely prose is hidden away in the pages of these books and thousands of downloadable others like them, books which may never have been earth-shatteringly great, but which were well crafted by talented people still steeped in an educational system we don't remember; books which served as sophisticated and pleasurable diversions for a public that didn't have much else to do with leisure time except read. And read. And read some more. (And so get a taste of that education. Quick, when were the Moors in Andalusia?) When Somerset Maugham went to Spain in his twenties, he was capable afterwards of writing:

And presently I turned round to look at Seville in the distance, bathed in brilliant light, glowing as though its walls were built of yellow flame. The Giralda arose in its wonderful grace like an arrow; so slim, so comely, it reminded one of an Arab youth, with long, thin limbs. With the setting sun, gradually the city turned rosy-red and seemed to lose all substantiality, till it became a many-shaped mist that was dissolved in the tenderness of the sky.

Now, isn't that rather nice? Why not know it?

Apart from its lovely prose, Blessed Virgin is illuminating as a sort of workaday record of the way a young English gentleman saw Spain a hundred years ago. Incidentally, the title doesn't bespeak any coherent theme, although you might expect it would when you see that the reproduced frontispiece is a Baroque painting of the Virgin Mary. "Sketches and impressions," yes -- that's the bespoke theme. This workaday record of travel records things that I suppose shouldn't surprise us. We shouldn't be too awed, for example, by his going about on his own on horseback -- that was probably the equivalent of our renting a car for our needs today. The two circumstances which seem to have made his trip Adventure travel with a capital A were, first, that his time was open-ended. He was living in Spain, and when he moved on, he sailed for Africa, not home. Second, each day was often a solitary, native-style struggle to find food, shelter, and warm dry clothing, somewhere in the countryside. This was not the vacation we would expect when we travel. He saw interesting and famed sights, but he also simply wandered, because he wanted to go from this town to that on a particular road, or he wanted to approach this village from the north and not the south. He saw the Alhambra because you almost have to, but he also saw a prison and hospital because he wanted to. To be fair, he was also not a mere "Cook's" tourist but the young English literary gentleman no doubt thinking of material for future books.

His memoir, with all its word painting, returns us again and again to our first question, returns us more often and inescapably imperiously than our author likely intended: what does it mean to travel? What does the stranger ever really see or understand? (Mansfield's book is written from a far different perspective. She was staying in a German pension for her health, and confined her writing to a progression of mostly snarky, pompous sketches on the awful people -- "Herr Rat", and the like -- she was staying with. I bailed after the story of the Child Who Was Tired, all about an abused little servant girl who finally smothered the yowling, middle-class baby in her charge.) Only a hundred years ago, Maugham saw a Spain parts of which which come straight out of those medieval nightmare paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Diseased and limbless beggars still asked alms outside the churches. Horses were still killed during bullfights, as Hemingway witnessed later. And Maugham took care to observe peasants plowing, and townspeople going to see tacky, screechy theatrical shows, because that was Spain. If travel means you are supposed to go outside your comfort zone and see something of the way other human beings live on your very own planet, then he certainly did so. Yet, the "seeing" of whole book is also hampered by his indulging throughout that ultimate cliche, and I'm sure, throughout, he knew it: the romance of the warm, leisured, poor but happy (and incidentally, exotically ex-Muslim) south versus the cold, grey, moneyed and soulless (boring Christian) north. At one point, the young gentleman traveler thinks he has seen enough to write this:

A farmhouse such as this seems to me always a type of the Spanish impenetrability. I have been over many of them, and know the manner of their rooms and their furniture, the round of duties there performed and how the day is portioned out; but the real life of the inhabitants escapes me. My knowledge is merely external. I am conscious that it is the same of the Andalusians generally, and am dismayed because I know practically nothing more after a good many years than I learnt in the first few months of my acquaintance with them. ...They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger.

From the layout of a farmhouse, he thinks he can judge the Spaniard's "Eastern reserve"? Are they not people much like any other people? But who knows, given precisely the way he traveled and his native brains, perhaps he's right. Then why go? What have you learned, about the world, about yourself -- or is the point of travel to have mere fun? Towards the end of his chronicle, he'll try his hand at answering our questions. Travel can be done well or badly, of that he is sure. To travel well, to not be a vulgar Cook's tourist who only admires a view and then eats lunch, "the comeliness of your life or the beauty of your emotion" must transform what you see. "When the old red brick and the green trees say to you hidden things, and the vega and the mountains are stretched before you with a new significance ... so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself."

Excuses for having gone at all, apparently. But can't an exquisite soul also see significance at home? Leaving Spain, the thought occurs to him. "And then from Cadiz," he writes,

I saw the shores of Spain sink into the sea; I saw my last of Andalusia. Who, when he leaves a place that he has loved, can help wondering when he will see it again? ... The traveller makes up his mind to return quickly, but all manner of things happen, and one accident or another prevents him; time passes till the desire is lost, and when at last he comes back, himself has altered or changes have occurred in the old places and all seems different. ... and perhaps, notwithstanding all his passionate desires, he will indeed never return.

Of course the intention of this book is not to induce people to go to Spain: railway journeys are long and tedious, the trains crawl, and the hotels are bad ... It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it.

The man who stays home and preserves his illusions has the best of it. Or perhaps, the woman who just goes to one place, and that for a practical reason, has the better of it even though she writes a poorer book. Of our two travellers I preferred Maugham, but I must admit, if humor in the recollection of a journey is a sign of anything -- of having traveled "well," perhaps -- then here Mansfield outshines him. While admiring the singing shepherds and the orange trees he apparently never overheard stuffy, front parlor gems like this:

" 'Do you know,' said a voice, 'there is a man who LIVES in the Luft Bad next door? He buries himself up to the armpits in mud and refuses to believe in the Trinity.' "