If I spent two nights at Nantes,it was for reasons of convenience rather than of sentiment;though,indeed,I spent them in a big circular room which had a stately,lofty,lastcentury look,a look that consoled me a little for the whole place being dirty.The high,oldfashioned,inn (it had a huge,windy portecochere,and you climbed a vast black stone staircase to get to your room)looked out on a dull square,surrounded with other tall houses,and occupied on one side by the theatre,a pompous building,decorated with columns and statues of the muses.Nantes belongs to the class of towns which are always spoken of as "fine,"and its position near the mouth of the Loire gives it,I believe,much commercial movement.
It is a spacious,rather regular city,looking,in the parts that I traversed,neither very fresh nor very venerable.It derives its principal character from the handsome quays on the Loire,which are overhung with tall eighteenthcentury houses (very numerous,too,in the other streets),houses,with big entresolsmarked by arched windows,classic pediments,balconyrails of fine old ironwork.These features exist in still better form at Bordeaux;but,putting Bordeaux aside,Nantes is quite architectural.The view up and down the quays has the cool,neutral tone of color that one finds so often in French waterside places,the bright grayness which is the tone of French landscape art.The whole city has rather a grand,or at least an eminently wellestablished air.During a day passed in it of course I had time to go to the Musee;the more so that I have a weakness for provincial museums,a sentiment that depends but little on the quality of the collection.The pictures may be bad,but the place is often curious;and,indeed,from bad pictures,in certain moods of the mind,there is a degree of entertainment to be derived.If they are tolerably old they are often touching;but they must have a relative antiquity,for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of receat origin.The cool,still,empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved,the red brick tiles,the diffused light,the musty odor,the mementos around you of dead fashions,the snuffy custodian in a black skull cap,who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the lustreless gem of the museum,these things have a mild historical quality,and the sallow canvases after all illustrate something.
Many of those in the museum of Nantes illustrate the taste of a successful warrior;having been bequeathed to the city by Napoleon's marshal,Clarke (created Duc de Feltre).In addition to these there is the usual number of specimens of the contemporary French school,culled from the annual Salons and presented to the museum by the State.Wherever the traveller goes,in France,he is reminded of this very honorable practice,the purchase by the Government of a certain number of "pictures of the year,"which are presently distributed in the provinces.Governments succeed each other and bid for success by different devices;but the "patronage of art"is a plank,as we should say here,in every platform.The works of art are often illselected,there is an official taste which you immediately recognize,but the custom is essentially liberal,and a government which should neglect it would be felt to be painfully common.The only thing in this particular Musee that I remember is a fine portrait of a woman,by Ingres,very flat and Chinese,but with an interest of line and a great deal of style.
There is a castle at Nantes which resembles in some degree that of Angers,but has,without,much less of the impressiveness of great size,and,within,much more interest of detail.The court contains the remains of a very fine piece of late Gothic,a tall elegant building of the sixteenth century.The chateau is naturally not wanting in history.It was the residence of the old Dukes of Brittany,and was brought,with the rest of the province,by the Duchess Anne,the last representative of that race,as her dowry,to Charles VIII.I read in the excellent handbook of M.Joanne that it has been visited by almost every one of the kings of France,from Louis XI.downward;and also that it has served as a place of sojourn less voluntary on the part of various other distinguished persons,from the horrible Merechal de Retz,who in the fifteenth century was executed at Nantes for the murder of a couple of hundred young children,sacrificed in abominable rites,to the ardent Duchess of Berry,mother of the Count of Chambord,who was confined there for a few hours in 1832,just after her arrest in a neighboring house.I looked at the house in question you may see it from the platform in front of the chateau and tried to figure to myself that embarrassing scene.
The duchess,after having unsuccessfully raised the standard of revolt (for the exiled Bourbons),in the legitimist Bretagne,and being "wanted,"as the phrase is,by the police of Louis Philippe,had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes,where,at the end of five months of seclusion,she was betrayed,for gold,to the austere M.Guizot,by one of her servants,an Alsatian Jew named Deutz.For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an interstice behind a fireplace,and by the time she was drawn forth into the light she had been ominously scorched.The man who showed me the castle indicated also another historic spot,a house with little tourelles,on the Quai de la Fosse,in which Henry IV.
is said to have signed the Edict of Nantes.I am,however,not in a position to answer for this pedigree.