The chapels are poorly decorated. The architects and clergy have there rivaled each other in bad taste. They have broken open the apse to add to it a chapel of the Virgin, which breaks all the lines of the monument inside and out. Two statues of the thirteenth century, one representing Saint Louis and the other Saint Levain, have been ridiculously colored, so that one would take them today for products of the Rue Bonaparte. A pretty Virgin of the fourteenth century would have been better off without the new gilding which has been inflicted on it..... At the end of the church, I read on one of the pillars the following inscription: "Nicolas Jourdain, administrator of this parish, deceased January 30, 1799.--This church owes to him its restoration and its embellishment. The grateful parishioners have erected this monument to him.--Marie Françoise Truyart, his spouse, equally benefactress of this church, deceased January 17, 1811.--Pray for their souls." Who was M. Jourdain? What embellishments does the church of Senlis owe to him? I would have liked to know. X looked for the sacristan, that he might tell me, and also that he might allow me to enter the sacristy, where one may see the Dance of Fools on a capital. But the sacristan of Notre Dame de Senlis dwells very far from his church, on the banks of the Nonette, in the place called the Asses' Backs; he goes home before eleven o'clock in the morning to get his lunch, and is never seen again at the cathedral, according to the bell-ringer, before four o'clock in the afternoon. So I returned at four o'clock. The sacristan was still eating breakfast at the Asses' Backs.... So I shall never know anything about either M. Nicolas Jourdain nor Marie Françoise Truyart, his wife. * * * * On the other bank of the Nonette, turn about. A little bridge over a little river; some orchards, still pink and white with their last flowers; a street which climbs through the town, whose roofs and uneven gables are outlined softly against a sky of pale blue; remnants of ramparts starred with golden flowers; great clumps of verdure rising everywhere among the rosy roofs, and finally the great belfry dominating all, the little town, the little valley, the fields which rise and fall to the horizon. Behold, and if you are "one of us," you will recognize the most perfect, the most elegant, the finest, the best arranged of all the landscapes of the world. Here is France, the France of Fouquet, the France of Corot. And I must also, before leaving Senlis, announce that this truly aristocratic town has not a single statue in its squares. $VI. JUILLY |THE Oratorist Fathers founded the college of Juilly September 2, 1639. They still directed it when these lines were written. The world knows what fate has since come to the masters of this old institution.