Scanned and proofed by Alfred J. Drake (www.ajdrake.com)
1. A Clerk in Orders: 1-25
2. Our Lady's Church: 26-47
3. Modernity: 48-72
4. Peach-Blossom and Wine: 73-90
5. Suspended Judgment: 91-115
6. Shadows of Events: 116-131
7. The Lower Pantheism: 132-end
The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts,composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominentobject which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of LaBeauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those daysof the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, itrecorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union,less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by theimprovement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuousmonuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every objectwhich had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home itwas visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities ofthe very ground-plan of the house itself—everywhere was the token oftheir anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathwaythrough the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closelytogether.
Why this irregularity of ground-plan?—the traveller would ask;recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on theeye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on thepart of the builders of the place in an age indulgent ofarchitectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question,true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, makingthe most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in largemeasure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death,some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed couldhardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it isplain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scantyremnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, acrenellated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to someordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained.It might seem to have been a kind of reverence rather that hadallowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely atthis point in its growth.
And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into reconditemotives and half-accomplished purposes in such matters, could detectthe circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarityof ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings ofthat date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house—adouble manoir—two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Farback in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had beenthe one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlockedwith alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family ofLatour, and another, had added field to field. In the single lonelymanor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came whenthe marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouringlands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night sodislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowedaway in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to theyounger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, thekindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight,the building of a second manor-house—the Château d'Amour, as it cameto be called—th