To say that I found any traces of the siege would be to misrepresent the taste for vivid whitewash by which La Rochelle is distinguished today.The only trace is the dent in the marble top of the table on which,in the hotel de ville,Jean Guiton,the mayor of the city,brought down his dagger with an oath,when in 1628the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed about it on sea and land.This terrible functionary was the soul of the resistance;he held out from February to October,in the midst of pestilence and famine.The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history;it has been related a hundred times,and I may only glance at it and pass.
I limit my ambition,in these light pages,to speaking of those things of which I have personally received an impression;and I have no such impression of the defence of La Rochelle.The hotel de ville is a pretty little building,in the style of the Renaissance of Francis I.;but it has left much of its interest in the hands of the restorers.It has been "done up"without mercy;its natural place would be at Rochelle the New.A sort of battlemented curtain,flanked with turrets,divides it from the street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always felicitous),which admits you to an inner court,where you discover the face of the building.It has statues set into it,and is raised upon a very low and very deep arcade.The principal function of the deferential old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your attention to the indented table of Jean Guiton;but she shows you other objects of interest besides.
The interior is absolutely new and extremely sumptuous,abounding in tapestries,upholstery,morocco,velvet,satin.This is especially the case with a really beautiful grande salle,where,surrdunded with the most expensive upholstery,the mayor holds his official receptions.(So at least,said my worthy portress.)The mayors of La Rochelle appear to have changed a good deal since the days of the grim Guiton;but these evidences of municipal splendor are interesting for the light they throw on French manners.Imagine the mayor of an English or an American town of twenty thousand inhabitants holding magisterial soirees in the townhall!The said grande salle,which is unchanged in form and its larger features,is,I believe,the room in which the Rochelais debated as to whether they should shut themselves up,and decided in the affirmative.The table and chair of Jean Guiton have been restored,Iike everything else,and are very elegant and coquettish pieces of furniture,incongruous relics of a season of starvation and blood.I believe that Protestantism is somewhat shrunken today at La Rochelle,and has taken refuge mainly in.the haute societe and in a single place of worship.There was nothing particular to remind me of its supposed austerity as,after leaving the hotel de ville,I walked along the empty portions and cut out of the Tour de l'Horloge,which I have already mentioned.If I stopped and looked up at this venerable monument,it was not to ascertain the hour,for I foresaw that I should have more time at La Rochelle than I knew what to do with;but because its high,gray,weatherbeaten face was an obvious subject for a sketch.
The little port,which has two basins,and is accessible only to vessels of light tonnage,had a certain gayety and as much local color as you please.Fisher folk of pictuesque type were strolling about,most of them Bretons;several of the men with handsome,simple faces,not at all brutal,and with a splendid brownness,the goldenbrown color,on cheek and beard,that you see on an old Venetian sail.It was a squally,showery day,with sudden drizzles of sunshine;rows of richtoned fishingsmacks were drawn up along the quays.The harbor is effective to the eye by reason of three battered old towers which,at different points,overhang it and look infinitely weatherwashed and seasilvered.The most striking of these,the Tour de la Lanterne,is a big gray mass,of the fifteenth century,flanked with turrets and crowned with a Gothic steeple.I found it was called by the people of the place the Tour des Quatre Sergents,though I know not what connection it has with the touching history of the four young sergeants of the garrison of La Rochelle,who were arrested in 1821as conspirators against the Government of the Bourbons,and executed,amid general indignation,in Paris in the following year.The quaint little walk,with its label of Rue sur les Murs,to which one ascends from beside the Grosse Horloge,leads to this curious Tour de la Lanterne and passes under it.This walk has the top of the old townwall,toward the sea,for a parapet on one side,and is bordered on the other with decent but irregular little tenements of fishermen,where brown old women,whose caps are as white as if they were painted,seem chiefly in possession.In this direction there is a very pretty stretch of shore,out of the town,through the fortifications (which are Vauban's,by the way);through,also,a diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery,which edges the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big Etablissernent des Bains.It was too late in the year to bathe,and the Etablissement had the bankrupt aspect which belongs to such places out of the season;so I turned my back upon it,and gained,by a circuit in the course of which there were sundry waterside items to observe,the other side of the cheery little port,where there is a long breakwater and a still longer seawall,on which I walked awhile,to inhale the strong,salt breath of the Bay of Biscay.
La Rochelle serves,in the months of July and August,as a station de bains for a modest provincial society;and,putting aside the question of inns,it must be charming on summer afternoons.
