Ever since we left Beaune, my wife has been endeavouring, at frequent intervals, to extract from me an unconditional promise that, one day, we will go to live there. "It would be lovely," she says, "to live close to the HÔtel Dieu, and to watch the vines, for a whole summer, ripening on the CÔte d'Or." So it would.

Certainly, if we are to live in France, we might do worse than choose this little rampart-girdled town, that, though on the main line of the P.L.M., has retained so much of its mediÆval charm, and still has houses to show you of every century from the thirteenth onwards.

Beaune has a cachet, and surprises all its own. Go where you may, you will find them, or they will find you. Stand in the little Rue de l'Enfer, not happily named, and look up towards the church. Along a white wall, that the sun has fretted with a lace-work of leafy shadow, runs a frieze of ivy, below a rich cornice of blossoming lilac. Within that garden are glimpses of ancient mottled walls, seen through green branches, whose wavy lines lead up to the tower, crowned by the lovely dome and lantern of Notre Dame.

Or stand beneath the exquisite, gothic porch of that same church, and look through its soft, brown shadowy arches to the white walls and flowery gardens of the old houses beside it; or across the place, to where the warm, purple shadows lie upon the rosy oriel and tourelle of the Maison du Colombier.

There are good things, too, in the centre of the town—the Flemish belfry in the Place Monge; ancient houses in the Rue de Lorraine; and especially a glimpse of a fifteenth century, pink-washed corner shop, topped by the graceful lantern of the Hospice de la CharitÉ.

Here we are back at Notre Dame, one of the finest churches in Burgundy, but so hemmed in by other buildings that it is not seen to advantage, except from the west side, at a point in the street beyond the Colombier. There only do you get the whole building and the proportions of the tower in good perspective. The view from the east end, however, is presentable. The apsidal chapels, the ambulatory and lofty choir, leading the eye upward, stage by stage, to the glorious dome tiled in red, green, and yellow, give a quite Burgundian effect of satisfying solidity, and of colouring that, though, on the whole, rather cold, is harmonious in certain lights.

As usual, the heavy flying buttresses, that fail to fly, are an architectural defect.

The gem of the exterior is the early thirteenth-century, triple, open-aisled porch, of two bays, with gloriously carved panelled doors of the fifteenth century. For grace and harmony of proportion this porch is one of the best in France. It recalls that most successful of all faÇades, Peterborough Cathedral.

The interior has all the features of twelfth-century Burgundian romanesque—an almost barrel-vaulted nave, and aisle, with slightly stilted horseshoe arches, and quadripartite vaulting, groined, without ribs. Some of the cushion capitals are plain, some carved, and the vaulting shafts throughout, except in the transept, take the ordinary Burgundian form of fluted pilasters.

Each bay of the triforium is divided, as usual, into three round-headed arches—of which two are blind and the centre one pierced—with fluted, or zig-zagged pilasters between them. In the chapel of St. LÉger are two quite interesting fifteenth century frescoes of the raising of Lazarus, and the stoning of Stephen—both, probably, by a painter of the Flemish school. The former picture, though mutilated and faded, is still quite realistic; too much so, in a sense; for the bystanders are so interested in the miracle that they have elbowed the Christ quite to one side of the picture. Martha is prominent, in the conventional attitude, with her handkerchief to her nose. "Jam Foetet."

But Notre Dame, though good, is not the best of Beaune. The church must yield to the HÔtel Dieu. History, or, at any rate, my history, does not relate how Nicholas Rolin, the Chancellor of Philippe le Bon, came to erect at a little fifth-rate town, such as is Beaune, a hospital unrivalled in all France; yet such is the fact. I do not even know why he built one at all, unless old Louis XI.'s mot be true—that he had "made enough poor to necessitate building a hospital to keep them in." But, there it is, an eighth wonder of the world; beautiful, from the crest on the gable to the knocker on the door.

This HÔtel Dieu, seen on a grey day or a blue one, is absolutely harmonious and satisfying. Whether you follow the length of soft, yellow, brown wall, the blue-grey expanse of the high-pitched roof, the delicate flÊche, or the starry, gabled hood over the entrance, your eye feasts upon a poem in form and colour; you feel at once the intense delight of looking upon a work of art that could not have been better done. But you will stay longest before the porch, the most daring and most completely successful that exists.

The entrance is beneath a flattened arch, through a panelled door with a beautiful forged-iron knocker and alms-box; all protected by a glorious three-gabled hood, crocketed and pinnacled, and built into the main wall, from which it projects without visible support. The pendants have angels, bearing shields, with the arms of Nicholas Rolin and his wife. The hood is slated in grey, as is the roof, and the blue vault beneath is starred with golden stars, symbolizing the little heaven within. Upon the blue tympanum is written in gold letters, "Hostel Dieu, 1443." All these blues and golds harmonise perfectly with the great crested roof, whether in its more sombre, grey mood, or when the richer purples come leaping from it at the call of the sun, to play about the sides of the dormers, or among the shadows of the flagged pinnacles above.

The exterior remains almost unchanged from the time of Nicholas Rolin, when the poor of Beaune first gathered round the stone benches, and beneath the verandah,[180] to receive their dole of five hundred kilos of bread that are still distributed once a year to the needy of the district.

Following a white-winged sister, we passed into the courtyard, to find ourselves in a great, galleried building, of the late Flemish type, with a many-coloured linoleum roof, elaborate pinnacled gables, and, in one corner, a well in the forged ironwork which the Flamands of that time worked with unrivalled skill.

There was only one jarring note—the garish brown colour of the woodwork, laid on, the guide told me, five years ago. It is a thousand pities; for had the oak been merely oiled, or painted a dark brown, or matched with one of the tints in the roof, many visitors would be spared a shock, and I doubt not that the convalescence of certain patients would be considerably accelerated. Yet, in spite of garish paint, we can echo Viollet-le-Duc's sentiment, that it is worth while to be ill at Beaune.

This abode of peace takes you straight back to the fifteenth century, with its beauties all intact, and only its horrors mitigated. Nothing here has changed—from the costumes of the white angels who flit noiselessly through the kitchens and wards, to the tapestry covers laid upon the curtained, oak beds, with the oak chairs beside them. Even the pewter vessels are identical with those in use at the founding of the hospital.

The chapel, too, opening from one of the wards, is a good place to pray in. Through the glorious windows—copies of the original, resplendent with figures and devices—the warm colour streams down upon the altar, where of old was set up Roger Van der Weyden's magnificent Last Judgment; now in the musÉe above. On great days the volets were drawn back, and the picture exposed; magnificent red tapestries were laid upon the beds, and all was ordered for the best in this little kingdom-of-heaven upon earth.

Here Guigonne de Salins, the great Chancellor's wife, is laid; and her arms (the castle) and his (the key) with his device, "Seule six-pointed star" (Only Star), are scattered broadcast. No less ubiquitous is her motto, The Bird on the Bough, signifying how lonely she was to be after her lord's death. Guigonne, no doubt, was sincere enough; but one cannot help remembering that the sentiments expressed in these devices were not always lived up to. Did not Rolin's own master, Philippe le Bon, for example, choose the words "Aultre n'Auray" as a chaste allusion to his conjugal devotion? yet we have Olivier de la Marche assuring us that his gracious master had "de bÂtards et de bÂtardes une moult belle compagnie."

But I am digressing. We must follow to the musÉe our guide, whose manner could not be more gentle, were we patients and not visitors,—reminded on the way, by the sight of polished floors and shining pots, that the cleanliness of this building moved a certain worthy Canon Papillon, in the 17th century, to remark, "Ineptiarum stultus est labor," which, freely rendered, means: "They are fools who waste soap."

The best thing in the musÉe—in fact, the only thing that one really goes there to see—is the Last Judgment of Roger Van der Weyden, which, in spite of the 19th century restoration, remains a splendid example of Flemish art, still very Gothic in treatment, and full of the sadness of decline. The work is executed with all the microscopic accuracy of detail characteristic of the school. There is fine realism, and individual treatment; but no breakaway from tradition: all the figures are consciously attitudinizing, and one feels that the painter is making a last desperate effort to enforce belief in an outworn dogma. The welter of human beings, bursting out from their graves, dragging one another, and being dragged, by hair and limbs, pell-mell down into hell; this biting of fingers, and pulling of ears till they bleed, does not convince. Such a subject was well suited to the primitives of the Romanesque and early Gothic periods, but seems hopelessly archaic for a painter born within hail of the Renaissance. Nevertheless, though, in spite of its horrors, and its unhappy colouring, the picture, as you linger before it, grows on you, it is with a sigh of relief that you turn to its more successful part, the portraits of the donors, magnificent in their energy and expression. Here you have an opportunity to judge concerning the probability of Louis XI.'s alleged slander upon Nicholas Rolin. Did he, or did he not, grind the faces of the poor? My wife says unhesitatingly, "He did"; and, looking at the significant scarlet angel above his head—suggestive of a red aura—I decline to contradict a lady. His is, indeed, a disinheriting countenance. But Guigonne, his seule Étoile, is of a different stamp. Piety exudes from her. As the guide somewhat bluntly put it, "She was as good as she was ugly"—a speech which no lady, living or dead, would ever forgive.