I learned,however,to my dismay,from a sympathizing but inexorable concierge,that what remained to me of the time I had to spend at Beaune,between trains,I had rashly wasted half an hour of it in breakfasting at the station,was the one hour of the day (that of the dinner of the nuns;the picture is in their refectory)during which the treasure could not be shown.The purpose of the musical chimes to which I had so artlessly listened was to usher in this fruitless interval.The regulation was absolute,and my disappointment relative,as I have been happy to reflect since I "looked up"the picture.Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign it without hesitation to Roger van der Weyden,and give a weak little drawing of it in their "Flemish Painters."I learn from them also what I was ignorant of that Nicholas Ronin,Chancellor of Burgundy and founder of the establishment at Beaune,was the original of the worthy kneeling before the Virgin,in the magnificent John van Eyck of the Salon Carre.All I could see was the court of the hospital and two or three rooms.The court,with its tall roofs,its pointed gables and spires,its wooden galleries,its ancient well,with an elaborate superstructure of wrought iron,is one of those places into which a sketcher ought to be let loose.It looked Flemish or English rather than French,and a splendid tidiness pervaded it.The porter took me into two rooms on the groundfloor,into which the sketcher should also be allowed to penetrate;for they made irresistible pictures.One of them,of great proportions,painted in elaborate "subjects,"like a ballroom of the seventeenth century,was filled with the beds of patients,all draped in curtains of dark red cloth,the traditional uniform of these,eleemosynary couches.Among them the sisters moved about,in their robes of white flannel,with big white linen hoods.The other room was a strange,immense apartment,lately restored with much splendor.It was of great length and height,had a painted and gilded barrelroof,and one end of it the one I was introduced to appeared to serve as a chapel,as two whiterobed sisters were on their knees before an altar.This was divided by red curtains from the larger part;but the porter lifted one of the curtains,and showed me that the rest of it,a long,imposing vista,served as a ward,lined with little reddraped beds."C'est l'heure de la lecture,"remarked my guide;and a group of convalescents all the patients I saw were women were gathered in the centre around a nun,the points of whose white hood nodded a little above them,and whose gentle voice came to us faintly,with a little echo,down the high perspective.I know not what the good sister was reading,a dull book,I am afraid,but there was so much color,and such a fine,rich air of tradition about the whole place,that it seemed to me I would have risked listening to her.I turned away,however,with that sense of defeat which is always irritating to the appreciative tourist,and pottered about Beaune rather vaguely for the rest of my hour:looked at the statue of Gaspard Monge,the mathematician,in the little place (there is no place in France too little to contain an effigy to a glorious son);at the fine old porch completely despoiled at the Revolution of the principal church;and even at the meagre treasures of a courageous but melancholy little museum,which has been arranged part of it being the gift of a local collector in a small hotel de ville.
I carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly autumnal,something rusty yet kindly,like the taste of a sweet russet pear.
