CALAIS.
CALAIS can never again be to English travellers on the Continent what it was to Sterne, to Wordsworth, to Thackeray—the pleasant threshold of a holiday abroad. It was with something of boyish gusto of enjoyment that Thackeray claimed that "there is no town more French than Calais." Subjectively the claim was just, for Calais was the first French town in those days where an Englishman on his grand tour began his adventures of mind or body. " That charming old ' Hotel Dessein,'"he exclaims, "with its court, its gardens, its lordly kitchen, its princely waiter—a gentleman of the old school, who has welcomed the finest company in Europe." The finest company, kings and queens, princes and ambas- sadors, cardinals and bishops, aviators, actors, all the most famous people of our day still pass through Calais, but they do not halt there. The Gare Maritime stands isolated on a spit of sand between the harbour and the sea, and the eager traveller of our day barely gets a distant glimpse of the steeples and towers of the old town as the train whirls him away to Germany, Italy, Spain, the Riviera. Dessein's is gone, and its site is occupied by a hideous red. brick barrack of a municipal college. By its side stands the eyeless façade of the little theatre (dismantled only last year) where so many Englishmen first heard the thrilling three taps of the mace which still announces the rising curtain on the French stage. Rignolle's, almost as famous a hostelry in its day and as expensive, is now the Caserue des Douanes, and a third hotel, looking out on the "petit paradis," the basin excavated by the English during their 350 years of dominion, has fallen on even more evil days, and is a dilapidated tene- ment dwelling swarming with prolific working people.
Worse change still for lovers of antiquity, the old walls are gone, and with them the gates, one of which has been immortalized by Hogarth. In their place are broad boulevards and great docks full of English and Norwegian steamers, and to the south the pretty Jardin Richelieu, which separates the old English town from the new manufacturing quarter of St. Pierre. There can be few manufacturing towns more salubrious, for if it has little architectural beauty or pretension, its streets are broad and airy, and are swept by the clean, vivifying sea breeze. The walls are gone and the old monasteries, which provided Sterne with one of his characteristic pieces of sentiment. Who can forget that charming Franciscan monk to whose silent appeal the sentimental traveller buttoned up his pocket, only to make a repentant exchange of snuffboxes, when the appearance of a charming French lady and the prospect of a flirtation had changed his mood. " One of those heads," says Sterne, the con- noisseur and latitudinarian, "which Guido has often painted, mild, pale, penetrating. . . . It would have suited a Brahmin " (he had beard of Brahmins from the pretty wives of yellow nabobs), "and had I met it on the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it." By a quaint turn of Fate's wheel, Sterne himself has more reverence in modern France than the reverend fathers for whose virtues ho had probably a perfectly genuine respect. He had so steeped himself in French style and French wit that there is no English author more easily rendered into French, and he is almost more of a French than an English classic. Perhaps this was partly the secret of Thackeray's unwilling admiration of his art, for Thackeray, too, loved French travel and French friends, and owed not a little of his own ease in the use of the pen to studies in French letters. One only of the ancient gates remains, and is locally attributed to English builders— the gate of the now formidable citadel, surmounted by a bas-relief of Neptune with his trident. The citizens of Calais are not accurate antiquaries, however, for M. F. Lennel, the learned author of a great History of Calais now being pub- lished (vol. i., Calais. J. Peumery, 1909), tells us that the gate in question dates from 1663, whereas, as we all know, Francis, Duke of Guise, captured the town from the English more than a hundred years before. An even worse blunder is the bast in front of the Musee in the great Place d'Armcs, now the market-place, popularly supposed to be the portrait of the rescuer of Calais from British dominion, but in reality that of his son Henry of Lorraine, to whom the town owes no gratitude.
Calais is much altered, and not altogether for the better, but it has still a delightfully French aspect, paradoxically heightened by some few surviving traces of English rule. The great warehouse of the English merchants of the Staple has been let out in tenement dwellings, but its courtyard is still entered by a fine Tudor gateway, which a few trifling repairs would convert into a worthy entrance to an Oxford quadrangle. The Musee possesses the Tudor tower of the old Justice of the Staple of the English time, the wooden belfry of which has a pretty carillon. Close to this, in the Rue de la Citadelle, are ancient gabled houses with jutting upper storeys which would not be out of place in Norwich or Cambridge, and were probably built by Englishmen. But the most important survival of English role is the curious Perpendicular Church of Our Lady, perhaps the only church of that style in which the Roman worship is still performed. It has little of the elegance and lightness which mark the latest development of English Gothic. Its grim central tower has something of the aspect of a mediaeval keep, and the transepts are buttressed at the corners with loopholed turrets which tell eloquently that the English citizens of Calais went armed even at their devotions, and held their post across the Channel by a pre- carious tenure. Of the subsequent French periodic a gorgeous Renaissance reredos, splendid with painting and rococo alabaster pillars and allegorical statues in the taste of the eighteenth century.. The great west window, with its fine Perpendicular tracery, is blocked by an organ whose music is well worth hearing on Sundays and feast days. The streets of the old town are not much changed since Thackeray's time, and have all the pleasant picturesqueness that almost any old French town presents to English eyes. North of the ancient English " petit paradis " a new boulevard goes right through the great Risban—the fort built by the English to guard the harbour mouth—to the plage and casino. The beach runs, all hard smooth sand, westwards to Sangatte, known to most of us by the exploits of aviators and as the point where the projected tunnel to Dover begins. Calais might well become a famous watering-place but for the numerous forts which lurk behind the sand dunes which line the beach and prevent the growth of the town towards the sea. Calais has become a great place of arms and the headquarters of one of the most novel developments of French naval enterprise. Here are the Pluviose ' and her three submersible sisters. Only last year the Pluvitae ' was sunk by a cross-Channel steamer with her gallant crew of 27, and here she is afloat again, manned by other 27 volunteers, cheerful and friendly young fellows with whom it is a pleasure for an Englishman to converse in these days of the entente cordials. Near their rendezvous is Le Minsk, the fish- market, where the traveller may test the accuracy of Words- worth's ungallant sonnet on Calais fish-wives. It is a matter of taste perhaps. Wordsworth probably did not know that in the University Library at Cambridge is a volume of historical MSS. containing a letter from Richard II. to the captain of Calais warning him not to allow his men-at-arms to be too attentive to the local damsels. If the older ladies at the fish-stalls have a somewhat terrific aspect, and possess a readiness of speech which would not do injustice to Billingsgate, their younger companions are fresh and comely enough. M. Lennel ruefully admits that the narrow alleys of Le Courgain, the fishermen's quarter, are as mal- odorous, if as picturesque, as the streets of Naples, but the people are much out of doors, and the air of Calais is brisk and invigorating.
Just now the fisher-folk turn out every evening on the quay to watch " les Parisiens " returning from their work in the harbour under a strong escort of gendarmes. " Les Parisiens " are " blacklegs " imported by the harbour authori- ties to take the place of local strikers. In Calais, as else- where, there is industrial civil war, and military patrols warn the inquisitive traveller, good-naturedly enough, away from the great warehouses lest he should perchance be a saboteur in disguise. But most of the citizens of Calais seem to take life easily enough, perhaps because the commercial and mili- tary importance of their town has brought them a modest prosperity. If Calais has lost something of the charm and interest which it had for Sterne and Wordsworth, Thackeray and Dickens, it is still a place in which an Englishman may spend a pleasant day or two. The big hotel at the landing stage keeps an excellent kitchen for its many temporary guests, and in the town the Grand RW1 and the Hotel du Sauvage do their best to recall the vanished splendours and comforts of Dessein's and Rignolle's. An electric tramway runs from the Place d'Armes to Guinea, the scene of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry splendid anticipation of the glories of modern durbara. St. Omer and Dunkirk, both interesting places to Englishmen, are only an hour's journey by rail. Calais itself is only some three hours' travel from London, and is in many ways more interesting than the plages which tempt week-end visitors. For some of us at least a visit to Calais is worth making if only as an excuse for rereading the opening pages of the Sentimental Tourney and Thackeray's Roundabout Paper on "Dessein's."
Previous page
