A LITTLE TOWN IN PICARDY

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2966, 2 January 1917, Page 9

A LITTLE TOWN IN PICARDY

SOME BURIED MEMORIES (By a French Officer at, the. Front.) The fighting on the Sommo front has thrown the glare of a new and lurid Jight upon tlio name of Chaulnes, long buried in the oblivion of silent years. Onco this little town of Picardy. tho ancient cradle of the Dukes of Chaulnes, to whom it gave its nanio, enjoyed a period of considerable glory in the splendid shadow of their castle, erected by a brother of the favourite of Louis XIII. The town would appear, indeed, to have existed for tho aolo purpose of affording a suitable setting, or, rather, approach, to this great mansion, much as the Propylae Colonnade might be said to do for the Acropolis. From that portion of the front, on which I am now fighting, wore it not for the incessant roar of our inexhaustible artillery I should be able to hear tho voice of the French guns, engaged in their pious work of redemption by destruction. My ears are deafened by the din around me, but my heart senses every shelU/as it bursts over tho dear little town, and upon its castlo. the scene, for me, of many a happy hour in tlie days before the war. .Memories of tho Revolution. But this by no moans the first catastrophe that has overwhelmed this ancient stronghold, whoso venerable stones are mellowed by the suns of three centuries. The Revolution destroyed a portion of the buildings, and spoilt to some extent the beauty of its park, by filling in most of the ornamental water and tearing up the pipes by means of which the flashing fountains and thundering cascades were ted with streams from distant springs. And later, tho war of 1870 brought it beneath the sway of tho greedy Prussians, worthy precursors of those Boohes who haveheld it of late on the long leaso that is happily now expiring. After all this, what will remain there of all those treasures that dead and gone seigneurs were at such pains to amass —the trees, mighty raonarchs of the park, the leafy bowers, centuries old? And that garden, forsaken now and uncared for, whose geometrical, box-bordered parterres recall in thoir prim beauty those of Lo Notre at Versailles! Louis XIV Walked there when he billeted at tho castle on his way to the Flanders front—they had a Flanders front in the seventeenth century, too! The Duke, his host, was renowned for his magnificence. He shod his horses with silver, and gave reckless orders ■ that no man should seek to recover a cast shoe. German Pillagers. Of the priceless furniture and works of art collected and added to by each succeeding Duke, I cunnot say how much the .Revolution may have snared. But enough remained, at any rate, in 1870, for the Prussians to send home, ill tho absence of tho rightful owners, over sixty cases of stuff. Super-pil-lagers, as usual, they seem to havo embellished their thefts with a grim and heavy irony, the worthy blossom oi : their vaunted Kultur. And so when

tho war was over; tho officers who had thus made free with the Castle, sent to its mistress a letter, published in some over-Rhine "Zeitung," thanking her for the lavish hospitality -which they had been forced to "take" iii her home, and expressing their regrets that j sho had not horseif remained to act ; the part of hostess as gracefully as the portrait on the walls of her boudoir assured them sho would have done. They plundered genteelly, if one may say so. And many, pretty trifles escaped their eager rapacity. In so vast and well-stocked a domain thcro must still have remained a plentiful harvest for the plunderers of to-day. I think of the fate of, amongst other things, certain paintings—and of a ravishing bit' of Louis XV which I myfielf discovered there, not very long before the war. I had taken refuge with my thoughts one day in a room that was never used, owing, I suppose, to an 1830 coldness and stiffness of arrangement. My eyes—fleeing the horror of a sheepskin rug of long and curly tresses and spinach-green hue —were riveted all at onco by a vision of four slender tulipwood legs, with chiselled copper' feot, delicate as those, of a. gazelle. They were scarcely visible amid tho fringes of a. multicoloured tablecloth which, after tho fashion dear to our grandmothers, concealed in. its hoavy folds this suggestion of a very pretty piece of furniture.

And such it certainly proved, of ea perfect a style, moreover, and adorned with such remarkable copporwork that I knew it must be from the hands of some great master cabinetmaker of the eighteenth century. A minute, inspection revealed a crowned It—the branded mark of royal furniture. A Deceptive Letter. To what quarter of Germany have tho present invaders dispatched- this rare treasure which once, cro it came to Picardy, adorned the apartment of a Queen of Franco? Perhaps it is in Borlin, sont there with tho rest-of tho booty from the Castlo of' Chaulnea by tho O.C. of the Bodies! That such has been- its fate is indicated by tho following incident—once. more documentary! " A year or so ago a letter bearing tho stamp of a noutral •country, and addressed simply to "The Owner of tin Gastlo of Ohaulnes, France,"" -was delivered by the civil authorities to tho Paris residence of my friend from Picardy. It was dated from Berlin, and tho gist of it, in brief, was this: Such-and-such a number of cases . have been sent to me from Chaulnes by the officer commanding our troops stationed in the Oas.tir and its environs. Being a groat amateur of art, and anxious to save from an impending bombardment the treasures that still remained there, ho caused them to be collected and carefully packed and sent here to me. 1 am keeping them for you. Owing to the present difficulty of communication between our respective countries, 1 think it best to wait until the end of the war before returning them to you, but meanwhilo I enclose a list of the contents of the cases. . . . Let each judge for himself of the genuineness of these artless I will only remark, for the sake of justice, that the list in question contained merely articles of no artistic value, aud made no mention of the real "treasures" 1 Which surely makes it pretty obvious whether the letter was an act of true probity or merely si cunning ruse to obtain credit for n tiotitious and deceptive honesty. In the Gehenna of tho Front, whore tho pitiless machine-gun reigns supreme, Chaulnes, in company with so many other martyred towns aud castles, crumbles into an immortal dust for the greater glory of co doux pays de France.---"Daily News."