It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le Mans it was a journey and not an excursion;for Ihad no intention of coming back.The question,indeed,was to get away,no easy matter in France,in the early days of October,when the whole jeunesseof the country is going back to school.It is accompanied,apparently,with parents and grandparents,and it fills the trains with little palefaced lyceens,who gaze out of the windows with a longing,lingering air,not unnatural on the part of small members of a race in which life is intense,who are about to be restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our American appreciation of the opportunities of boyhood.The train stopped every five minutes;but,fortunately,the country was charming,hilly and bosky,eminently goodhumored,and dotted here and there with a smart little chateau.The old capital of the province of the Maine,which has given its name to a great American State,is a fairly interesting town,but I confess that I found in it less than Iexpected to admire.My expectations had doubtless been my own fault;there is no particular reason why Le Mans should fascinate.It stands upon a hill,indeed,a much better hill than the gentle swell of Bourges.This hill,however,is not steep in all directions;from the railway,as I arrived,it was not even perceptible.Since I am making comparisons,I may remark that,on the other hand,the Boule d'Or at Le Mans is an appreciably better inn than the Boule d'Or at Bourges.It looks out upon a small marketplace which has a certain amount of character and seems to be slipping down the slope on which it lies,though it has in the middle an ugly halle,or circular markethouse,to keep it in position.At Le Mans,as at Bourges,my first business was with the cathedral,to which,I lost no time in directing my steps.It suffered by juxtaposition to the great church I had seen a few days before;yet it has some noble features.It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town,which falls straight away on two sides of it,and makes a striking mass,bristling behind,as you see it from below,with rather small but singularly numerous flying buttresses.On my way to it I happened to walk through the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses,a very crooked and untidy lane,of really mediaeval aspect,honored with the denomination of the Grand'Rue.Here is the house of Queen Berengaria,an absurd name,as the building is of a date some three hundred years later than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion,who has a sepulchral monument in the south aisle of the cathedral.The structure in question very sketchable,if the sketcher could get far enough away from it is an elaborate little dusky facade,overhanging the street,ornamented with panels of stone,which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.A fat old woman,standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to it,a most gracious old woman,with a bristling moustache and a charming manner,told me what the house was,and also indicated to me a rottenlooking brown wooden mansion,in the same street,nearer the cathedral,as the Maison Scarron.The author of the "Roman Comique,"and of a thousand facetious verses,enjoyed for some years,in the early part of his life,a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans,which gave him a right to reside in one of the canonical houses.He was rather an odd canon,but his history is a combination of oddities.He wooed the comic muse from the armchair of a cripple,and in the same position he was unable even to go down on his knees prosecuted that other suit which made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV.
was to be the second.There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon;though,after all,there was doubtless as much as there need have been in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an epitaph as this,which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,Fit plus de pitie que d'envie,Et souffrit mille fois la mort,Avant que de perdre la vie.
