. A summer voyage on the river Saône. With a hundred and forty-eight illustrations. bey on the highest ground, and therewas a picturesque fortified bridge across the Saone. If only theChalon of those days could have been preserved till the present,if only it could have been gently and tenderly repaired, and notdestroyed by vandalism and revolution ! By an effort of archi-tectural science a city of that quality may almost be recon-structed. Viollet-le-Duc could have made a hard architecturaldrawing of some town built with equal richness of fifteenth- P 2 212 The SaSne. century invention, and th
. A summer voyage on the river Saône. With a hundred and forty-eight illustrations. bey on the highest ground, and therewas a picturesque fortified bridge across the Saone. If only theChalon of those days could have been preserved till the present,if only it could have been gently and tenderly repaired, and notdestroyed by vandalism and revolution ! By an effort of archi-tectural science a city of that quality may almost be recon-structed. Viollet-le-Duc could have made a hard architecturaldrawing of some town built with equal richness of fifteenth- P 2 212 The SaSne. century invention, and then told us that Chalon was, if not that,at any rate similar to that. But the difference between all suchresuscitations and the reality is that the sun does not shine uponthem ; the cloud-shadows do not fall upon them ; they do nottake their place in the life of the land and the river. The realChalon of those days reflected her hundred towers in the gentlesummer Saone, and in the winter the angry floods washed againsther walls and made her seem like a great stronghold in the Clialoii, the Bridge, 1600. Our desire would be to live near such a city long enough tosee her under a thousand aspects, clear in the splendour ofhottest noon, with her gilded vanes bright against the blue, darkin the solemnity of the twilight, mysterious under the moon. In the sixteenth century Chalon was fortified anew by royalcommand, to the intense dissatisfaction of the inhabitants, butthe conditions of warfare had changed, and the art of fortifica-tion with them. After that, the beauty of the mediaeval town A Summer Voyage. 213 appears to have been gradually more and more completely effacedtill we come to the prosaic modern way of building. Nor has theRenaissance left any beautiful work as a compensation. Thereare old towns in France, such as Blois, for example, where theRenaissance artists have made it difficult to regret the destruc-tive change of fashion that made room for them, but it i
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