第88章

On my return to Macon I found myself fairly face to face with the fact that my little tour was near its end.Dijon had been marked by fate as its farthest limit,and Dijon was close at hand.After that I was to drop the tourist,and reenter Paris as much as possible like a Parisian.Out of Paris the Parisian never loiters,and therefore it would be impossible for me to stop between Dijon and the capital.But I might be a tourist a few hours longer by stopping somewhere between Macon and Dijon.The question was where I should spend these hours.Where better,I asked myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me)than at Beaune?On my way to this town I passed the stretch of the Cote d'Or,which,covered with a mellow autumn haze,with the sunshine shimmering through,looked indeed like a golden slope.One regards with a kind of awe the region in which the famous crus of Burgundy (Yougeot,Chambertin,Nuits,Beaune)are,I was going to say,manufactured.Adieu,paniers;vendanges sont faites!The vintage was over;the shrunken russet fibres alone clung to their ugly stick.The horizon on the left of the road had a charm,however,there is something picturesque in the big,comfortable shoulders of the Cote.That delicate critic,M.Emile Montegut,in a charming record of travel through this region,published some years ago,praises Shakspeare for having talked (in "Lear")of "waterish Burgundy."Vinous Burgundy would surely be more to the point.I stopped at Beaune in pursuit of the picturesque,but I might almost have seen the little I discovered without stopping.It is a drowsy little Burgundian town,very old and ripe,with crooked streets,vistas always oblique,and steep,mosscovered roofs.The principal lion is the HopitalSaintEsprit,or the HotelDieu,simply,as they call it there,founded in 1443by Nicholas Rollin,Chancellor of Burgundy.It is administered by the sisterhood of the Holy Ghost,and is one of the most venerable and stately of hospitals.

The face it presents to the street is simple,but striking,a plain,windowless wall,surmounted by a vast slate roof,of almost mountainous steepness.Astride this roof sits a tall,slatecovered spire,from which,as I arrived,the prettiest chimes I ever heard (worse luck to them,as I will presently explain)were ringing.Over the door is a high,quaint canopy,without supports,with its vault painted blue and covered with gilded stars.(This,and indeed the whole building,have lately been restored,and its antiquity is quite of the spickandspan order.But it is very delightful.)The treasure of the place is a precious picture,a Last Judgment,attributed equally to John van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden,given to the hospital in the fifteenth century by Nicholas Rollin aforesaid.