The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-01-03
TROYES.
A Neglected French Tawn and Its History
The house of champagne.

the tamest scenery in the world on their way
to some of the grandest, pause only for the
half-hour of its buffet at the capital of Cham
pagne. The dullness Of the great northern
plain of France is little hard to bear with
the glories of the Alps in full prospect, but
the Alps will wait patiently for day or two,
and for travellers of the gentler order, to
whom hurry and night-expresses are an
abomination, we can hardly suggest town
which will better repay the expenditure of
little time and trouble than the good town of
Troyes. To Englishmen indeed it has q
| donble historical interest-frst, as the capi-
| tai of house which once promised to set
sovereigns of its blood on the throne
of England; and again as the
| scene of the treaty which followed
| Agincourt, and whose result, had not the
course of events torn it to shreds, must have
been to render England mere dependency
of France. But simply as town it is full of
interest It's cathedral fairly holds its own
even in the neighborhood of Beauvais and
Rheims In the Church of st. Urban it
possesses building in which the decorative
art of the thirteenth century has reached its
highest point of perfection. Busy and
thriving, too, as the place is its streets retain
much of that older picturesqueness which
everywhere through France is vanishing be-
fore Prefet and Marie. In an electoral ad-
dress which he has lately issued, the Maire of
zens not to show, by their rejection of him,
a wish to undo all that thirty years of civic
administration have done. We fear that not
even the rejection of so important func-
tionary would restore to Troyes all that those
thirty years have swept away-the Church of
| the Jacobins, or the ancient Butchery, or the
palace of the Counts or the lordly circuit of its
| walls. But losses like these have taken
| less from the interest of Troyes than they
would have taken from that of most towns.
| It's charm lies not so much in feudal or eccle-
| siastical remains as in the tall pargeted
houses, the steep gables with the deeply-re-
cessed arch in their front, the large court
yards with the galleries round them, the
rusted pulleys or the projecting dormers
which reveal the real life of the Nuremburg of
| France. The character of the town is indi-
Gated by its very site. II lies in gentle dip
of the monotonous level, the lower city hud-
died round its cathedral on an almost imper-
| ceptible slope to the east, the upper grouped
| round the Hotel de Vile on the higher rise to
| the west. The two are still as distinct as
ever, and the canal which runs in the hollow
between them serves, as the comitial palace
which it swept away did of old, to sever the
| town of the merchant from the town of the
bishop and the count.
OF the last of these, as it is the older part
of the whole, we will speak first. 1t is
little amusing to recall the steep hillside of
Lincoln in these flats of Champagne, but the
| way in which the castle and cathedral of our
English city are set side by side may enable
the reader to understand the arrangements of
the lower town of Troyes. Over its southern
half towers the mass of the Minister of St.
Peter, with the Bishops borough sloping
gently by the narrow, tangled streets of the
| old Butchery to the island and Nails which
mask the head waters of Seine. To the north
| of it is the site of the military fortres, which
| Onotra have cd tn q
To the cathedral itself guide books, and even
Mr.. Fergussons notice in his ''History of
Architecture" give scant justice. No doubt
much of the detail has been tampered
with by modern restoration, and though
the charge of insufficient height which
the last writer brings is unfair enough,
the nave, in spite of the double aisle
on either side, is perhaps q little
tame and Ineffective. But, within and with
out in the perfect proportions of each bay,
and in the noble grouping of its other
chapels, the choir is hardly to be surpassed.
The episcopal history of the town, however,
is uneventful, nor does the list of its prelates
present any name of remarkable eninence.
They were, in fact, overshadowed by the
Counts 1t is strange, as one stands on the
grassy site of their donjon, or beside the
canal which has obliterated their palace, to
think how utterly all trace of the
House of Champagne has vanished from
its capital None of the great houses OF
France were destined to SO strange q fate.
Inheritors by marriage of the Carolingian
blood, by geographical position alike depen-
dent and independent of France and of the
Empire, Welding gradually together the belt
of provinces from Chartres and Touraine by
Blois to Troyes which held as in prison
house the infant realm of Hugh Capet, the
descendants of Thibaut the Trickster
seemed, through the ninth and tenth
centuries to hold the fortunes of France in
their hands The earlier kings were but
| their puppets, the earlier Counts of Anjou
were their feudatories; it was they wholed the
hosts of France against the hated Normans.
Thrice q crown seemed within their grasp,
and yet, of all the feudal princes of the North,
they were the one house to which fate refused
a throne The most daring and powerful of
their line fell in seizing the realm of Aries.
The Norman dukes, SO long the object of their
hate, succeeded not only in battling their de-
signs on the throne of France, but in them
selves becoming lords of England. Their feu-
datories of Anjou, after plundering them of
their fairest province, baffied their attempt
to found royal line in Stephen, and
set an Angevin count on the throne
of William and of Alfred. The truth is
that the Counts, brilliant, ambitious as
they were, wanted the patience, the force,
the restless energy, which in their different
ways lifted their three rivals to greatness.
At home, however, their rule seems to have
been very mild and benefcent. Like the
neighboring rulers Of Flanders, their policy
bent itself especially to the encouragement
of industry, and now that the statelier me-
a 4 kl.-s- l.. al 10