Chapter 3 SAINTE RADEGONDE

I HAD heard that, deep in the forest of Montmorency, near the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde, there might be found a little cemetery lost in the midst of the woods. I wondered who had chosen this romantic burial place. One of my friends, to whom I had imparted my curiosity, sent me a book by M. Auguste Rey, entitled Le Naturaliste Bosc, and assured me that I would there find enlightenment on the mystery which intrigued me. I read it, and the story told by M. Auguste Rey increased my desire to become acquainted with the cemetery of Sainte Radegonde. 2

So, on an October afternoon, I wandered in the forest seeking tombs. The search was long and charming. As the forest of Montmorency is not provided with guideposts, it is impossible not to get lost in it. But the magnificence of the weather, the miraculous splendor of the golden and coppery foliage, the lightness of the luminous mists which float over the reddened forest, the perfume of the softened earth and of the moist leaves, make one quickly forget the humiliation of having lost his way.

Following one path after another, I ended by stumbling upon Sainte Radegonde. The place is well known to all walkers. Of the ancient priory, which was founded here in the thirteenth century by the monks of the Abbey of Saint Victor, there is left no more than a tumbledown building which serves today as a ranger's house. It is surrounded by a wall, so that it is no longer possible to approach the well which formerly attracted numerous pilgrims to Sainte Radegonde, for this saint cured, it is said, the itch and sterility.

Before the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde (the word hermitage was made fashionable in this country by Jean Jacques Rousseau) there opens a vast glade, whose slope descends to the brooklet called Ru du Nid-de-l'Aigle, which flows in the midst of a scrub of blackberries and hawthorns. At the end of the meadow, half hidden by copses, there rises a little bluff which elbows the stream aside. Here is the cemetery. A few very simple graves surround a little boulder on which is carved: "Bosc, Member of the Institute." Four great cedars overlook them with their superb shafts.

The site possesses an inexpressible beauty, at the hour when the forest loses the splendor with which it was but recently decked by the sun's rays, while a cold breeze shakes the half-naked branches, announcing the approaching frosts and sorrows of winter.

The scene is set. Now listen to the story, which I borrow almost entirely from the interesting study of M. Auguste Rey.

Original

Louis Augustin Guillaume Bosc, whose mortal remains repose in the cemetery of Sainte Radegonde, was born at Paris January 29, 1759. His family, originally from the Cevennes, belonged to the reformed religion. His father was one of the physicians of the king.

At Dijon, where he had been sent to college, he followed the courses of the naturalist Durande, became enthusiastic over the Linn?an system, and discovered his vocation. When, after returning to Paris, he was obliged by reverses of fortune to accept a very modest position in the post office, he continued the studies of his choice and took the public courses given by the professors and demonstrators of the King's Garden.

In 1780, it was proper to have a republican soul and a taste for botany. It was good form to attend the lectures of M. de Jussieu and to read Plutarch. Rousseau had made the love of flowers fashionable, for he had said: "While I collect plants I am not unfortunate." Madame de Genlis composed a Moral Herbal. Amateurs added a museum of natural history to their collection of paintings. One might then meet in the alleys of the King's Garden a great number of personages who were later to take part in the revolutionary assemblies. Bosc needed to make no effort to follow the fashion. Being a Huguenot, he was republican from birth. As to botany, he cherished it with a deep and ingenuous passion, and not as a pastime.

It was in the Botanic Garden, either at Jussieu's lectures or in André Thouin's home, that he sealed the great friendships of his life. He was, in fact, among the frequenters of the hospitable apartment where lived the four brothers Thouin, with their sisters, their wives and their daughters; this family of scientist gardeners received their friends in winter in the kitchen and in summer before the greenhouses. Celebrated men came to converse with and learn from these worthy men, who were the true masters of the King's Garden; and the "venerable" Malesherbes, seated upon a trough, often conversed with Madam Guillebert, the sister of André Thouin, for whom he had a particular esteem. 3

Bosc at that time entered into friendship with three future members of the Convention, from whom he had acquired the taste of studying plants: Creuzé-Latouche, Garan de Coulon and Bancal des Issarts. The first two died Senators of the Empire. As to Bancal, we will soon run across him again.

It was in the same surroundings that he met Roland, an inspector of manufactures, and his young wife, then in all the flower of her robust beauty. The husband was forty-eight; the wife was twenty-six; Bosc was twenty; naturally he fell in love. Madame Roland gave him to understand that he had nothing to hope for from her; but she mockingly added that in eighteen years it would be allowable for him to make a like declaration to her daughter Eudora. Bosc resigned himself to the situation and consented to the friendship which was offered him; but he committed the folly, later, of taking seriously the raillery with which he had been dismissed.

For ten years Bosc continued a correspondence with Madame Roland which was full of confidence and freedom. These letters no longer exist, and it is a pity; for this republican botanist seems to have possessed sensitiveness, tenderness and judgment. We do possess, however, most of the letters which were written to him by Madame Roland.

Original

Without these letters and various others of the same period, we would never have had any other means of knowing Madame Roland than the image drawn by herself in her Memoirs, her intolerable Memoirs. We would always have seen her behind the tragic mask, heroic, unapproachable and full of vanity, and we would have remained almost unconscious of the frightful tragedy of her death if she had not left us these intimate and familiar effusions, in which are revealed the heart and the mind of a woman who was truly feminine. We are very little moved by the celebrated letter which she wrote one day to Bancal, Bosc's friend, to spurn his love, although she confessed to "tumultuous sentiments" which agitated her, and to tears which obscured her vision. I know that Michelet cries: "The cuirass of the warrior opens, and it is a woman that we see, the wounded bosom of Clorinda." But we must doubt, after all, the severity of the wound which leaves Clorinda cool enough to call to witness "the absolute irreproachability" of her life. There is something theatrical in such half-avowals. On the contrary, her letters to Bosc are simple in diction and ofttimes charming. They are spontaneous: "Seated in the ingle nook, but at eleven o'clock in the morning, after a peaceful night and the different cares of the day's work, my friend (that is, Roland) at his desk, my little girl knitting, and myself talking to one, watching over the work of the other, savoring the happiness of existing warmly in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to a friend, while the snow falls upon so many poor devils loaded down with misery and grief, I grieve over their fate; I turn back with pleasure to my own..." And elsewhere: "Now, know that Eudora reads well; begins to know no other plaything than the needle; amuses herself by drawing geometrical figures; does not know what shackles clothes of any kind may be; has no idea of the price one has to pay for rags for adornment; believes herself beautiful when she is told that she is a good girl and that she has a perfectly white dress, remarkable for its cleanness; that she finds the greatest prize in life to be a bonbon given with a kiss; that her naughty spells become rarer and shorter; that she walks through the darkness as in the daylight, fears nothing and has no idea that it is worth while to tell a lie about anything; add that she is five years and six weeks old; that I am not aware that she has false ideas on any subject, that is important at least; and agree that, if her stiffness has fatigued me, if her fancies have worried me, if her carelessness has made it more difficult for us to influence her, we have not entirely lost our pains..." And it would be possible to quote twenty other passages written with the same grace and the same simplicity....

As for the young friend to whom were addressed these nice letters, here is his portrait: "As for you, whom I see even at this distance talking quickly, going like lightning, with an air sometimes sensible and sometimes heedless, but never imposing when you try to be grave, because then you make grimaces derived from Lavater, and because activity alone suits your face; you whom we love well and who merit it from us, tell us if the present is supportable to you and the future gracious."

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Let us return to Sainte-Radegonde. While botanizing through the woods which surround Paris, Bosc had discovered this retreat. The little house, last relic of a priory long since abandoned, was inhabited by an old peasant woman who gladly offered hospitality to strollers from Paris, when the Revolution broke out.

Bosc, by his temperament, his tastes and his friendships, was led to the new ideas. He was not satisfied with presiding over the Society of Natural History; he likewise joined the Society of Friends of the Constitution and, later, he became a member of the Jacobin Club. On September 25, 1791, we find him taking part in a festival given at Montmorency to celebrate the inauguration of a bust of Rousseau: before the dances and illuminations, he made a speech and offered periwinkles to the spirit of the philosopher.

Meanwhile, the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde, confiscated as ecclesiastical property, was about to be offered for sale, and Bosc was desolated at the thought that a new owner would perhaps forbid him access to the wood where he was accustomed to dream and work. He was poor and could not dream of buying the little property, valued at more than four thousand livres by the experts of the district of Gonesse. So he persuaded his friend Bancal to acquire Sainte Radegonde at the public auction, February 14, 1792. We do not know if he was a partner in the transaction. What seems certain is that Bancal never came to dwell in his hermitage.

A few days later Roland became Minister of the Interior and he named Bosc Administrator of Posts; it was a question of "disaristocratizing" this service. Bosc used his best talents toward it.... But, at the end of a year, the Gironde was overthrown, the Girondins were under warrants of arrest, and Bosc took refuge at Sainte Radegonde.

Original

He did not arrive there alone. Roland accompanied him; tracked by the revolutionists of the Commune, separated from his wife, who had been imprisoned in the Abbaye, he concealed himself for fifteen days with his friend before seeking a safer asylum at Rouen, in the home of the Demoiselles Malortie.

After having assured the escape of Roland, Bosc gets hold of his daughter Eudora, who was then twelve years old, and confides her to the wife of his friend Creuzé-Latouche; then he succeeds in entering the prison, where he reassures Madame Roland as to the fate of her child.

After being temporarily released, this lady is again arrested and shut up at Sainte Pélagie. Bosc continues to come and see her at the peril of his life. He brings her flowers, for which he goes to the Botanical Garden; but, one day, he understands the danger of thus going to visit the Thouins, and then it is the flowers of Sainte Radegonde that he brings to the prisoner in a basket. It is to him that Madame Roland confides Les Notices Historiques-these are her Memoirs,-written in her prison. Finally, when her sentence has become inevitable, she begs from him poison, by which she may escape the insults of the judges and the populace: "Behold my firmness, weigh the reasons, calculate coldly, and appreciate how little is the worth of the canaille, greedy for spectacles." Bosc decides that for her own glory and for the sake of the Republic his friend must accept all: the outrages of the tribunal, the clamors of the crowd and the horror of the last agony. She submits. A few days later Bosc returns to Paris and hears of her execution.

Sainte Radegonde sheltered others who were proscribed.

One day when Bosc visited Creuzé-Latouche, he met there Laréveillière-Lépeaux. The latter, sought for at the same time as his two inseparable friends, Urbain Pilastre and Jean Baptiste Leclerc, had just learned of the flight of Pilastre and the arrest of Leclerc. He wished to return to his home, be arrested, and partake the fate of his friend. Creuzé dissuaded him from this act of despair....

Bosc knew Laréveillière from having formerly seen him at the home of André Thouin, for the future high priest of the Theophilanthropists had become quite expert in botany. He offered to share his hiding place with him. Laréveillière accepted. Both succeeded in leaving Paris without being noticed, and reached Sainte Radegonde.

For three weeks Laréveillière remained hidden in the forest of Emile. (At this time Montmorency was called Emile, in honor of Rousseau.) Neither he nor Bosc had a red cent. They had to live on bread, roots and snails. Besides, their hiding place was not safe; there was nothing unusual in the presence of Bosc in this solitude, but Laré-veillière might any day excite the curiosity of the patriots of Emile. The ugliness of his countenance and the deformity of his figure caused him to be noticed by every passer-by. Robespierre was then living in the hermitage of Jean Jacques; it has even been related that he met the fugitive face to face one day; at all events such an encounter was to be dreaded. The administrators of Seine-et-Oise sometimes took a fancy to hunt in the neighborhood of Sainte Radegonde.... The peril increased from day to day. A faithful friend, Pincepré de Buire, invited Laréveillère to take refuge at his home near Péronne. He left Sainte Radegonde.

"The good Mile. Letourneur," he has related, "gave me two or three handkerchiefs; Rozier, today a counselor at the royal court of Montpellier, then judge of the district of Montmorency, whose acquaintance we had made at Mile. Letourneur's, put one of his shirts in my pocket. Poor Bosc gave me the widow's mite-he put a stick of white crab in my hand and guided me through the forest to the highway. To use the English expression, on leaving him I tore myself from him' with extreme grief." 4

Laréveillière arrived without difficulty at the village of Buire.

On the same day that he left Sainte Radegonde, another deputy of the Convention, Masuyer, came to take his place; he was accused because he had assisted at the escape of Pétion; but his greatest crime was that he had, in full Assembly, said to Pache, who insisted on proscriptions: "Haven't you got a little place for me on your list? There would be a hundred crowns in it for you!" Masuyer, disregarding Bosc's advice, wished to enter Paris. He was arrested near the Neuilly Bridge. Bosc, who had insisted on accompanying him, had just time to plunge into the Bois de Boulogne, escaped, and returned to his hermitage, where he awaited the end of the Terror.

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When he returned to Paris, in the autumn of 1794, Bosc devoted his entire time to the labors imposed upon him by the last will of Madame Roland. He withdrew the manuscript of her Memoirs from the hiding place where he had left it, on top of the beam over the stable door of Sainte Radegonde, and published the first part of it in April, 1795. At the same time he endeavored to collect the remnants of the patrimony of Eudora, whose guardianship he had accepted.

Here begins the most melancholy episode of the life of this worthy man. He became smitten with his pupil. He allowed himself to be blinded by some marks of gratitude. "She is tenderly attached to me," he wrote to one of his friends, "and shows the happiest disposition; so I can no longer fail to meet her wishes and take her for my wife, despite the disproportion of our ages." Nevertheless, he still had scruples, and sent Eudora for several months to the Demoiselles Malortie, who had given asylum to Roland when a fugitive. It was well for him that he did, for his illusion was of short duration. Eudora did not love him....

Without employment, without means, his heart broken, he resolved to expatriate himself. He reached Bordeaux on foot, paid calls on the widows of his friends of the Gironde, and took passage on a ship departing for America. He left France in despair, without receiving a single word of farewell from Eudora. When he landed at Charleston, he learned of the marriage of his pupil to the son of a certain Champagneux, a friend of Madame Roland, to whom he had intrusted the guardianship of the young girl.

Laréveillière, who had become a Director, had him appointed vice-consul at Wilmington, and later consul at New York. But there were great difficulties between the United States and France; he could not obtain his exequatur. He tried to console himself by devotion to botany. But the wound which he had received still bled. "I do not know," he wrote to Madame Louvet, "when the wound of my heart will be sufficiently healed to allow me to revisit without too much bitterness the places and the individuals still dear to me, whose presence will bring back to me cruel memories. Although I am much more calm than when I left, although I am actually easily distracted by my scientific labors and even by manual occupations, I do not feel that I have courage to return to Paris. I still need to see persons to whom I am indifferent, in order to accustom myself to facing certain persons whom I have loved and whom I cannot forget, whatever injustice they may have done to me or to the Republic, without counting my Eudora...." And his memory takes him back to the dear retreat of Sainte Radegonde; he writes to Bancal: "Well! Then you no longer go to visit Sainte Radegonde? Do you then take no more interest in it? I conclude from that that you will undergo no further expense on account of it and that you will soon get rid of it. Nevertheless I had the project of planting there many trees from this country, since it is the soil most similar to that of South Carolina that I know in the neighborhood of Paris..."

Bosc did see Sainte Radegonde again. At the end of two years he returned to France and married one of his cousins. The Revolution was over and Eudora was forgotten.

From that time on, he gave himself up entirely to his work as a naturalist. He became Inspector of the nurseries of Versailles and also of those which were maintained by the Ministry of the Interior. In 1806 he was elected a member of the Institute. In 1825 he succeeded his friend André Thouin as Professor of Horticulture at the Botanical Garden, and after a long and cruel illness, which prevented him from lecturing, he died in 1828.

In 1801, when the first daughter born of his marriage had died in infancy, he had begged Bancal to transfer to him two perches of land in his domain of Sainte. Radegonde, in order that he might bury his child there. Such was the origin of the little cemetery where Bosc reposes in the midst of his children and his grandchildren.

I have not regretted making a pilgrimage and evoking, in the autumnal forest, the phantoms of these Revolutionists and these botanists.

How touching a figure is that of this Bosc, whose name recalls-it is Laréveillière-Lépeaux who speaks-"the most generous friendship, the most heroic courage, the purest patriotism, the most active humanity, the most austere probity, the most determined boldness, and at the same time the most extended knowledge in natural science and different branches of administration as well as in political, domestic and rural economy..." and also, let us add, the eternal blindness of the amorous Arnolphe!

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