charms which surrounded the place, one may well judge by a contemplation of it to-day.
Here in the chateau, or manor, or whatever manner of rank it actually takes in one’s mind, you may see the room occupied by Madame de Sévigné on the occasion of her “pleasant visit.” It is a “Chambre aux Fleurs” in truth, and that, too, is the name by which the apartment is officially known.
Above the mantel, garlanded with flowers carved in wood, one reads the following attributed to the fascinating Marquise herself. The circumstance is authenticated in spite of the fantastic orthography. As a letter writer, at any rate, she made no such faults.
“Nos plaisirs ne sont capparence
Et souvent se cache nos pleurs
Sous l’éclat de ces belles fleurs
Qui ne sont que vaine éperance.”
The Chateau de Bourbilly, where Madame de Sévigné was really bound at the time she lingered on “chez son cher seigneur,” is a near neighbour of Époisses. It was the retreat of Madame de Chantal, the ancestress of Madame de Sévigné, the founder of the Order of the Visitation who has since become a saint of the church calendar – Sainte Jeanne-de-Chantal.
This fine seventeenth century chateau, with its pointed towers and its mansard, belonged successively to the families Marigny, de Mello, de Thil, de Savace, de la Tremouille and Rabutin-Chantel, of which the sanctified Jeanne and Madame de Sévigné were the most illustrious members.
Madame de Sévigné, the amiable letter writer, sojourned here often on her voyages up and down France. She herself lived in the
Chateau des Rochers in Brittany and her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan, in Provence, and they did not a little visiting between the two. Bourbilly was a convenient and delightful halfway house.
Madame de Sévigné can not be said to have made Bourbilly her residence for long at any time. For a fact she was as frequently a guest at the neighbouring Chateau de Guitant, a feudal dwelling still inhabited by the de Guitants, or at Époisses, as she was at Bourbilly.
In the chapel, which is of the sixteenth century, is the tomb of the Baron de Bussy-Rabutin and some reliques of Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal. The latter has served to make of Bourbilly a pilgrim shrine which, on the 21st August, draws a throng from all parts for the annual fête.
There was a popular impression long current among French writers that Madame de Sévigné was born in the Chateau de Bourbilly. A line or two of that indefatigable penman, Bussy, tended to make this ready of belief when he wrote of his cousin as “Une demoiselle de Bourgogne egarée en Bretagne.” She herself claimed to have been “transplanted,” but it was a transplantation by marriage; she was most certainly not born at Bourbilly, at any rate, for history, better informed than an unconvincing scribbler, states that she was born in Paris, like Molière and Voltaire, who also have finally been claimed by the capital as her own.
At all events, at Bourbilly Madame de Sévigné was true enough on the land of the “vieux chateau de ses pères, ses belles prairies, sa petite rivière, ses magnifiques bois.” It was her property in fact, or came to be, and she might have lived there had she chosen. She would not dispose of it when importuned to do so, and replied simply, but coldly (one reads this in the “Letters”), “I will not sell the property for the reason that I wish to hand it down to my daughter.” From this one would think that she had a great affection for it, but at times it was a “vieux chateau” and at others it was a “horrible maison.” Capricious woman! The letters of Madame de Sévigné written from here were not numerous, as she only “stopped over” on her various journeyings. When one recognizes the tastes and habits of the Marquise, it is not to be wondered at that her visits to Bourbilly were neither prolonged nor multiplied.
Turning one’s itinerary south from Semur one comes shortly to Cussy-la-Colonne, where “la Colonne” is recognized by the archæologists as one of the most celebrated and most ancient monuments of Burgundy.
One learns from the inscription in Franco-Latin that the ancient monument (antiquissimum hoc monumentum) much damaged by the flapping wings of time, was rebuilt, as nearly as possible in its original form, by a prefect of the Department of the Côte d’Or (Collis Aurei Praefectus), M. Charles Arbaud, in the reign (sous l’empire) of Charles X (imperante Carolo X… Anno Salutis MDCCCXXV.) An astonishing mélange this of the tongue of Cicero and modern administrative patois.
The Colonne de Cussy, is rather a pagan memorial of a victory of the Romans in the reign of Diocletian, or, from another surmise, a funeral monument to a Roman general dead on the eve of victory. In either case, there it stands fragmentary and wind and weather worn like the pillars of Hercules or Pompey.
One simply notes Cussy and its “colonne” en passant on the road to Saulieu and Arnay-le-Duc, where the Ducs de Bourgogne had one of their most favoured country houses, or manors.
We only stopped at Saulieu by chance anyway; we stopped for the night in fact because it was getting too late to push on farther, and we were glad indeed that we did.
Saulieu is a most ancient town and owes its name to a neighbouring wood. Here was first erected a pagan temple to the sun; fragments of it have recently been found; and here one may still see the tracings of the old Roman way crossing what was afterwards, – to the powerful colony at Autun, – the Duchy of Burgundy.
As a fortified place Saulieu was most potent, but in 1519 a pest destroyed almost its total population. Disaster after disaster fell upon it and the place never again achieved the prominence of its neighbouring contemporaries.
It was here at Saulieu in Revolutionary times that the good people, as if in remembrance of the disasters which had befallen them under monarchial days, hailed with joy the arrival of the men of the Marseilles Battalion as they were marching on Paris “to help capture Capet’s castle.” Before the church of Saint Saturnin the Patriots’ Club had lighted a big bonfire, and the “Men of the Midi” were received with open arms and a warm welcome.
“How good they were to us at Saulieu,” said one of the number, recounting his adventures upon his arrival at Paris; “they gave us all the wine we could swallow and all the good things we could eat, – we had enough bœuf-à-la-daub to rise over our ears…”
To-day the good folk of Saulieu treat the stranger in not unsimilar fashion, and though the town lacks noble monuments it makes up for the deficiency in its good cheer. Saulieu in this respect quite lives up to its reputation of old. This little capital of the Morvan-Bourguignon has ever owned to one or more distinguished Vatel’s. Madame de Sévigné, in 1677, stopped here at a friend’s country house, and, as she wrote, “le fermier donne à tous un grand diner.” This was probably the Manoir de Guitant between Bourbilly and Saulieu. They were long at table, for it was a diner des adieux given by her friend Guitant to his visitors. She wrote further: “With the dinner one drank a great deal, and afterwards a great deal more; all went off with the greatest possible éclat. Voila l’affaire!”
Evidently such a manner of parting did not produce sadness!
A donjon tower with a duck-pond before it, opposite the Hotel de la Poste is all the mediævalism that one sees within the town at Saulieu to-day. It is all that one’s imagination can conjure up of the ideal donjon of mediævalism and interesting withal, though its history is most brief, indeed may be said to exist not at all in recorded form, for the chief references to Saulieu’s historic past date back to the pagan temple and the founding of the Abbey of Saint Andoche in the eighth century.
Still heading south one comes in a dozen kilometres to a chateau of the fourteenth century, and the restorations of
