In Lorraine Again
By D. W. BROGAN IT was almost six -years since I had last been in Nancy. although I had been since then in the rival capital of Lorraine, Metz. Lorraine still shows the scars of 1940 and of 1944. It shows older scars, too. The monument to Thiers in the square in front of the railway station at Nancy reminded me that he had been " the liberator of the national territory " as long ago as 1873. Some of the damage done in the last agonies of 1940 was still visible; so was some of the damage done by air raids in 1944. Here, from the beginning of time, had been a natural battle field. The train stopped briefly at Chalons-sur-Marne. There were the " Catalaunian fields " where Attila was repulsed in the last great Roman victory. To the -north is Verdun (one of the 'three bishoprics that were the nucleus of French Lorraine). Everywhere fortresses and battlefields. No wonder the province is, by comparison with its neighbours, poor in great human monu- ments; battlefields make poor museum pieces. But the changes since 1947 were notable. The Rhine-Marne canal that then lay empty was now full. Barges lay along the banks, one of them full of happy, slightly scrubby children, a delight to the eye of Sir Alan Herbert and an annoyance to rigorists of universal literacy. Roads and bridges had been restored too and the train, if not as startling as the rocket-like contraption that had hurled me to Nancy in 1947, was very fast and very luxurious. Possibly too luxurious, for it is an opinion held by some that too much of meagre French resources has been spent on restoration and improvement of transportation and not enough on habitation. There has been 'building but not enough. Less than a fifth of the houses destroyed in the war have been replaced and behind the elegant fagades of the Place Stanislas are relics, dark and dank, of an earlier age. " Really picturesque," said an enthusiastic young American, which was perhaps the proper spirit in which to approach the question. More inspiring to me, at any rate, was the new pharmacy building of the university and an air of well-being, at any rate .of better being (if there is such an expression) that was not so visible in 1947. There was, of course, decay as well. Would anybody like to buy a large, elegant, empty Carthusian monastery, or to own a real " Chacterhouse "?‘ The Bishop of Nancy has one on his hands with an alleged altar piece by Philippe de Champaigne thrown in. But grass grows in the monks' private gardens, cows, as one can see and feel, browse in the cloisters and the lively children of the concierge race along the corridors where the sons of St. Bruno paced in silent meditation. " Why not get the Carthusians to come back " I asked. " There are only enough now to provide members for four Charterhouses in all France," I was told. Even with the prospect of making mirabelle as a rival to the chartreuse of the Grand Chartreuse (a fluid on which I was delighted to learn Harriet Beecher Stowe once got tipsy), the monastery cannot be made a going concern.
But a few miles away was the great basilica of St. Nicholas, once a great pilgrimage place, now an immense church for a small town. It was being repaired; the roof was on; the great stones were being put into position. And there was the note that struck me in the past. St. Nicholas had suffered terribly before: in 1636 it was the Swedes; in 1944 the necessities of liberation. For the Swedes still supply the Lorraine standard of destruction, that is, in the old duchy of " Lorraine and Bar " whose ruler was the ally of the Holy Roman Emperor, while the Swedes were the allies of the duchy's covetous neighbour, the King of France, whose territories (mambo close at Toul, in Champagne, in the Vosges. So close, indeed, that it is a little difficult to say where Lorraine began and ended. I even heard the heresy advanced (by a Messin) that the greatest name in all the history of Lorraine, St. Joan, could be claimed by Champagne as well. Were we, I asked, to change " Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine Qu'Anglois brulerent a Rouan" to " la bonne Champenoise ?" No, a thousand times no. But it was the same learned sceptic who told me that " good King Stanislas," that one-time King of Poland whom an extra- ordinary fortune made the last Duke of Lorraine, did not spend more than a few days in Nancy in all his long reign, preferring his miniature Versailles at Luneville. But as Villon was right about St. Joan, tradition is right about King Stanislas, whose statue dominates the noble if slightly theatrical place that bears his name and whose pedestal credits him with a career of well-doing that would have made Albert the Good envious.
But there are other and older things in Nancy than the Place Stanislas. In the Musee Lorrain, that was the old palace of the dukes, M. France-Lanoir cleans (not restores) metal antiquities sent to him from all the musetffhs of France and the two Netherlands. X-rays, plexiglass cases, gases that main- tain pressures, dentist's drills that grind away accretions, a score of technical devices that I could not understand, bring back these buried treasures. There is a superb Gaulish helmet with its elegant spike from which there once floated the battle plume of Vercingetorix or some other Celtic war chief. There is magnificent and delicate inlaid silver and silver-gilt metal work turned up by the plough. And, most striking of all, there are the great Merovingian swords." They all were made, I was told, in one small region of the Rhineland. There, for hundreds of years the craftsmen worked; their wares went to Britain (becoming England), to Gaul (becoming France). These are from the smithy that made the swords of Siegfried, of Hengist and Horsa, of Clovis.
And there, examining the treasures being brought back to something like their old condition, was my friend the deputy, former captain in the Foreign Legion, veteran of Narvik and of Leclerc's march across Africa to join Montgomery and Koenig. He had had as adventurous a life as the men who had used these swords. We lunched and discussed the political situation. It seemed to be one series of knots that ordinary methods could not untie. I thought of the swords and of Alexander the Great's way with knots. I remembered that the deputy had written a book on Croriwell! I thought,, too, of the reconstruction of the cathedral of Toul that I had seen the day before going on under the eyes of bored American soldiers. And I turned to the excellent "grey wine."" of the country and the trout served with almonds. After all, over the main gate of Nancy is the old cross of Lorraine that was so potent a symbol in 1940, and St.' Joan was " la bonne Lorraine.'
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