Gaston de Latour by Walter Horatio Pater
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GASTON DE LATOUR: AN UNFINISHED ROMANCE WALTER PATER
1. A Clerk in Orders: 1-25
2. Our Lady's Church: 26-47
3. Modernity: 48-72
4. Peach-Blossom and Wine: 73-90
5. Suspended Judgment: 91-115
6. Shadows of Events: 116-131
7. The Lower Pantheism: 132-end
I. A CLERK IN ORDERS
The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts, composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union, less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of the very ground-plan of the house itself--everywhere was the token of their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway through the world [2] which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely together.
Why this irregularity of ground-plan?--the traveller would ask; recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question, true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making the most, of the sympa