The wonderful
"Hotel Bourgtheroulde," dating from the time of Francis the First,
and bearing on its sculptured walls the story of the Field of the
Cloth of Gold, in company with the strangely-contrasting
"Allegories", from Petrarch's "Triumphs", is enough in itself to
keep the mind engrossed with fanciful musings for an hour. How did
Petrarch and the Field of the Cloth of Gold come together in the
brain of the sculptor who long ago worked at these ancient bas-
reliefs? One wonders, but the wonder is in vain,--there is no
explanation;--and the "Bourgtheroulde" remains a pleasing and
fantastic architectural mystery. Close by, through the quaint old
streets of the Epicerie and "Gross Horloge", walked no doubt in
their young days the brothers Corneille, before they evolved from
their meditative souls the sombre and heavy genius of French
tragedy,--and not very far away, up one of those little shadowy
winding streets and out at the corner, stands the restored house of
Diane de Poitiers, so sentient and alive in its very look that one
almost expects to see at the quaint windows the beautiful wicked
face of the woman who swayed the humours of a king by her smile or
her frown.
Cardinal Bonpre, walking past the stately fourteenth-century Gothic
pile of the Palais de Justice, thought half-vaguely of some of these
things,--but they affected him less than they might have done had
his mind not been full of the grand music he had just heard in the
Cathedral, and of the darkness that had slowly gathered there, as
though in solemn commingling with the darkness which had at the same
time settled over his soul.
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