Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Page A

the landscape's inhabitants. What she celebrates about France on the human side is its civic order and elegance, the amenity of manners, the vivacity, good temper, and intelligent enjoyment of life. These terms are always comparative. Today the motorist will find the approaches to French towns no more “romantic or stately” by road than they are by rail; and just as there is a commercial clutter of Mr. Bricolage and his confrères disfiguring the outskirts, so there is more of an overlay to the perceptible character of the people. We can no longer see back as clearly as she could.
    Wharton and James agreed about much, but not everything, of what they visited together. Each had an aesthetic in which Italy was the touchstone; they liked their old buildings old, and were suspicious of restoration. She is more wholehearted in admiring the Graeco-Roman remains of Provence. He had judged the Pont du Gard finally “a little stupid” (an adjective also applied to the Tour Magne at Nîmes, and to the round towers of Chambord), and was lordly in his diminishment of Roman architecture: “The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great.” She thought Avignon engagingly Italianate; he had loathed it, finding the Palais des Papes “as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as it is dirty.” For once he would happily applaud the arrival of the restorers, “for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is at present.” But their most instructive disagreement came at Bourg-en-Bresse, whose principal attraction was and is the church at Brou.
    James's account begins with a sentimental evocation of Matthew Arnold's then-celebrated poem about Brou. He twits and pardons Arnold for his geographical inexactitude, sketches the flamboyant piety that lay behind the construction of the church, dabbles with his guidebook, describes the famous tombs, gives them little butter-dabs of approval—admirable, admirable, charming, exquisite, splendid, ingenious, elaborate, precious—before concluding that, though fine, the monuments are not quite so fine as their rivals in Verona. He makes a slightly arch mother-in-law joke, marvels that the whole edifice wasn't destroyed in the Revolution, and segues effortlessly into a rhapsodic description—more fun for us, and, one senses, for him too—of the simple yet epicurean lunch of boiled eggs, bread, and local butter that he subsequently consumed in Bourg.
    Wharton's account makes no reference to James's text of 1882, any more than it does to his living presence beside her in the Panhard twenty-five years later. It must have been intimidating to address an unchanged subject already discussed by an accompanying Master. No doubt she had read A Little Tour; though when last, we do not know. How could there not be, at some level, an element of competitiveness in her description? She too begins with a jocund treatment of Arnold's poem, wondering if he could ever have seen the church at Brou, so inaccurately does he locate it. As for the edifice itself: for a start, it disobeys Wharton's precept that old buildings should look old—this one is “scrubbed, scraped and soaped as if its renovation were a feat daily performed by the ‘seven maids with seven mops’ on whose purifying powers the walrus so ingeniously speculated.” Externally, it is “a celluloid toy.” Internally, it reminds her of the Albert Memorial, all pious expense and little taste. It is “pastrycook's art.” Alongside this informal mockery resides her precise architectural sense. Where James murmurs suavely that Margaret of Austria's shrine is “the last extravagance of a Gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return upon itself,” Wharton makes the same point in a more vernacular style (“the last boiling-over of the heterogeneous Gothic pot”), emphasizes her extra knowledge (“One sees the