Neufchâteau

“ FRANÇOIS DE NEUFCHÂTEAU, NICOLAS LOUIS, Count (1750–1828) , French statesman and poet, was born at Saffais near Rozières in Lorraine on the 17th of April 1750, the son of a school-teacher. He studied at the Jesuit college of Neufchâteau in the Vosges, and at the age of fourteen published a volume of poetry which obtained the approbation of Rousseau and of Voltaire. Neufchâteau conferred on him its name, and he was elected member of some of the principal academies of France. In 1783 he was named procureur-général to the council of Santo Domingo. ”

“ Among the topics insisted upon by the Comte de Neufchateau as most clearly establishing the French origin of Gil Blas, an intimate acquaintance with the court of Louis XIV., and frequent allusions to the most remarkable characters in it, are very conspicuous. But to him who really endeavours to discover the country of an anonymous writer, such an argument, unless reduced to very minute details, and contracted into a very narrow compass, will not appear satisfactory. He will recollect that the extremes of society are very uniform, that courts resemble each other as well as prisons ”

“ Trips to the machine gun range laid out by one member of the Company in coöperation with a man from Battalion headquarters near Prez sous Lafauche, southwest of Neufchateau, were made by French motor truck. ”

“ An adaptation of “Pamela,” by François de Neufchâteau, afterwards Minister of the Interior, which contained not a little material calculated to awaken regret for the proscribed nobility, provided the Jacobins with the pretext they desired, and, on September 3, the whole of the players, with the exception of Molé, who had contrived to effect his escape, and Des Essarts, who was taking the waters at Baréges, were arrested and conveyed to the Madelonettes, in the Quartier Saint-Martin-des-Champs, and Sainte-Pélagie, in the Rue de la Clef ”

“ These bunks also made seats for the rest of the men when winter nights made the space around the stove a coveted commodity.
Upon invitation the 102d Regiment Band came to the mess hall the Sunday following the Company's arrival at Certilleux and raised the spirits of the men with a concert. Tuesday a march was made to Neufchateau where steel helmets and full machine gun equipment, as far as the guns and carts were concerned, were drawn from the French ordnance depot there. The equipment was hauled back to camp on a hike memorable for its strenuous character. ”

“ When the relief by units of the 4th Division was complete at noon, November 12th, the Company left behind it the bloody fields of the Argonne-Meuse battle and began its long hike to the south. The trip was made in easy stages. Passing down through the valley of the Meuse the route followed took the Battalion to the Ninth Training Area, southwest of Neufchateau, and November 23 billets were assigned in the village of Poulangy, fifteen kilometers north of Chaumont, in Haute Marne. ”

“ Yes, I learnt to spin and to sew; in sewing and spinning I fear no woman in Rouen. For dread of the Burgundians, I left my father’s house and went to the town of Neufchâteau, [10] in Lorraine, to the house of a woman named La Rousse, where I sojourned about fifteen days. When I was at home with my father, I employed myself with the ordinary cares of the house. I did not go to the fields with the sheep and the other 10animals. Every year I confessed myself to my own Curé, and, when he was prevented, to another Priest with his permission. ”

“ They were an hundred miles distant, but reach so high in the heavens, that they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white that arrange themselves on the horizon during summer. Their immensity staggers the imagination, and so far surpasses all conception, that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they indeed form a part of the earth.
From this point we descended to Neufchâtel, which is situated in a narrow plain, between the mountains and its immense lake, and presents no additional aspect of peculiar interest. ”

“ The town of Neufchâtel contains between 4 and 5,000 inhabitants; it is partly built on a hill, where stand the church and castle, and partly on a plain near the lake, on the borders of which are handsome public walks and further improvements are carrying on. The elegant appearance of many of the private houses proves the wealth of their owners. ”

“ From La Châtre, just south of Nohant, we turned due west along the valley of the Creuse, through a country possessing some local fame for picturesqueness, but which struck us, in its early spring nudity, as somewhat parched and chalky-looking, without sufficient woodland to drape its angles. It makes up, however, in architectural interest for what its landscape lacks, and not many miles beyond La Châtre the otherwise featureless little town of Neuvy-Saint-Sépulcre presents one feature of unusual prominence. ”

“ In point of scenery Newburg is as felicitously placed, perhaps, as any other spot in the world, having in its immediate neighborhood every element of natural loveliness,—and just below, the sublime and promising Pass of the Highlands. From the summit of the acclivity, the view over Matteawan and Fishkill is full of beauty,—the deep flow of the Hudson lying between, and the pretty villages just named sparkling with their white buildings and cheerful steeples beyond.
Newburg has a considerable trade with the back country, and steamboats are running constantly between its pier and New York. ”

“ The man’s dull face brightened as he perceived our hero, for Newman, for indefinable reasons, enjoyed the confidence of the liveried gentry. The footman led the way across a great central vestibule, with a pyramid of plants in tubs in the middle of glass doors all around, to what appeared to be the principal drawing-room of the château. ”

“ The Château Neuf, and one of the towers, called Le Pavilion de Gabrielle, which is still in good preservation, were erected by him, close to the Castle, for the residence of his favourite, La belle Gabrielle: [15] and the superb terrace was begun in his reign. From this spot the view is very interesting and extensive: nothing can surpass the admirable assemblage of hills, meadows, gardens, and vineyards, which charm the eye, and which as they are viewed from its different points on a clear summer's evening, appear at every turn, in new beauty, and endless variety. ”

“ If Bedlam could be suddenly removed like another Aladdin’s palace, and set down on the space now occupied by Newgate, scarcely one man out of a hundred, whose road to business every morning lies through Newgate-street, or the Old Bailey, would pass the building without bestowing a hasty glance on its small, grated windows, and a transient thought upon the condition of the unhappy beings immured in its dismal cells ”

“ Next to the spikes of Newgate, the visitor must always mark for lasting remembrance, the stones of Newgate doorsteps. They are not perhaps more than eighty years old, but they look more worn than the jambs of Temple bar—more decayed than the wheel windows of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey. They are ancient through use, and not through time. ”

“ The nobility have then returned from their summer homes. The czar is at his palace. The Nevsky Prospect is gay with equipages of every description, from the common sledge to the carriages of the aristocracy, while the Neva, frozen to the thickness of three or four feet, rivals the Nevsky, with its crowds of sledges and skates and lookers-on, its colored lights, its bazaars and booths filled with a laughing crowd till long after the coachmen and horses, who have stood for hours in the cold before the Winter Palace, where a ball was in progress, have gone home. ”

“ Newman rang at the gate, and was almost frightened at the tone with which a big rusty bell above his head replied to him. An old woman came out from the gatehouse and opened the creaking portal just wide enough for him to pass, on which he went in and across the dry bare court and the little cracked white slabs of the causeway on the moat. At the door of the house he waited for some moments, and this gave him a chance to observe that Fleurières was not "kept up" and to reflect that it was a melancholy place of residence. ”

“ The lake is not deep, but seldom freezes, although it is thirty-one toises more elevated than that of Geneva.
The principalities of Neufchâtel and Vallingen are about twelve leagues long, by eight at the broadest part; the soil is far from fertile, but the industry of the inhabitants renders it astonishingly productive. Any person having a certificate of his general good conduct may settle here, and enjoy every essential privilege of the native subjects. This is perhaps the only country in Europe exempt from taxes ”

“ The indescribable charm of the unworn day rested upon the rural landscape, where farmhouses, maize fields, orangeries, and orchards alternated with primeval woodlands and wide-stretching pastures. The houses were often old, the farming indifferent, the fences decayed; but with all faults it was the country—the blessed country—and the heart of Ernest Neuchamp, a born and bred land worshipper, went out to the dew-bespangled champaign. ”

“ But the rest is merely a shapeless heap of ruins: the interior is wholly under the plough; and the fragments of denudated walls preserve small remains of the coating of large square stones, which formerly embellished and protected them. Neufmarché, in the days of Norman sovereignty, was one of the strong holds of the duchy. The chroniclers [24] speak of the village as being defended by a [Page 45] fortress, in the reign of William the Conqueror. The church, too, with its semi-circular architecture, attests the antiquity of the station. ”

“ Behind the city of Neufchatel rises the mountain of Chaumont, so called from its bald head, for neither tree nor shrub grows on its summit. Straight through this mountain, from its northern to its southern side, there is a natural road, formed by a split in the mountain from top to bottom. In this transverse cut, which forms one of the most romantic and picturesque gorges leading into the heart of the Jura range, you get a profile view of the change in the inclination of the strata, and can easily distinguish the point of juncture between the two sets of deposits. ”

“ But without considering Newgate as no other than human nature with its mask off, which some very shameless writers have done, a thought which no price should purchase me to entertain, I think we may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid palaces of the great are often no other than Newgate with the mask on. ”

“ The intermediate space is divided into several paved yards, in which the prisoners take such air and exercise as can be had in such a place. These yards, with the exception of that in which prisoners under sentence of death are confined (of which we shall presently give a more detailed description) , run parallel with Newgate-street, and consequently from the Old Bailey, as it were, to Newgate-market. The women’s side is in the right wing of the prison nearest the Sessions-house. ”

“ In the neighbourhood of Neuchâtel there is a famous stream that will well repay us to follow its windings for some distance into the mountain home and source. The Areuse is a wild mountain torrent, that varies from a quiet, though never a clear, stream, to a rushing, foaming river. We suddenly plunge into the jaws of a defile so dark and gloomy that we almost imagine it to be the entrance to an enormous cavern. The little path we follow is fixed to the side of the weathered walls like windowsills to the wall of a house. The defile deepens and darkens at every step ”

“ And she gave him Madame de Cintré’s address.
He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a queer way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. ”

“ Did you ever see the little village of Newbury, in New England? I dare say you never did; for it was just one of those out-of-the-way places where nobody ever came unless they came on purpose: a green little hollow, wedged like a bird’s nest between half a dozen high hills, that kept off the wind and kept out foreigners; so that the little place was as straitly sui generis as if there were not another in the world. The inhabitants were all of that respectable old steadfast family who made it a point to be born, bred, married, die, and be buried, all in the self-same spot. ”

“ He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took the direction of the Rue d’Enfer. The day had the softness of early spring; but the weather was gray and humid. Newman found himself in a part of Paris which he little knew—a region of convents and prisons, of streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by a few wayfarers. At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the Carmelites—a dull, plain edifice, with a high-shouldered blank wall all round it. From without Newman could see its upper windows, its steep roof and its chimneys. ”

“ Neuchamp, who had risen early and made all his arrangements, fully prepared for the momentous plunge into real life. He had attired himself in an old tourist’s suit of rough serviceable tweed, and donned a pair of thick-soled lace-up boots fitted for climbing mountain sides, and the roughest pedestrian work that might occur. He had filled his knapsack with the requisites that a gentleman cannot dispense with, even in the lightest marching order, and had adopted a brown wide-awake hat, which he trusted would relieve him henceforward from any injurious sobriquet. ”

“ Newgate,” he continues, “considered as a prison is a structure of more cost and beauty than was necessary, because the sumptuousness of the outside but aggravates the misery of the wretches within; but as a gate to such a city as London, it might have received considerable additions both of design and execution, and abundantly answered the cost in the reputation of the building. The gate of a city, erected rather for ornament than use, ought to be in the style of the triumphal arches.... If Newgate be considered as a prison, it is indeed a very dismal one. ”