Messire Miramon of Ranee, Lord Seneschal of Gontaron, held Duardenois.
Likewise there were the fiefs of Dom Meunier, Count of Montors, Dom Manuel’s brother-in-law. Meunier was not of this fellowship: he held also Giens. Here his wife ruled over Lower Duardenois.
Othmar Black-Tooth, whom some called Othmar the Lawless, long held Valneres and Ogde, until Manuel routed him: thereafter these villages, with the most of Bovion, stayed masterless.
Helmas the Deep-Minded, after a magic was put upon him in the year of grace 1255, held, in his fashion, the high place at Brunbelois: but the rest of Acaire, once Lorcha had been taken and Sclaug burned, was no man’s land. Also upon Upper Morven lived disaffected persons in defiance of all law and piety.
—Poictesme en Chanson et Legende. G. J. Bulg. Strasburg, 1785. [Pp. 87–88.]
A NOTE UPON POICTESME
Now that I come to preface this illustrated edition of The Silver Stallion, I find myself in the position, not altogether unexampled to human experience, of noting that affairs in this inexplicable world of ours, sometimes fall out a bit quaintly. For I regard these soul-contenting pictures which Mr. Pape has just completed, at his home in Tunbridge Wells, to adorn the pages of this the lateliest written, and the last, of all the stories of Poictesme. I recall the yet earlier illustrations—in Jurgen, and in Figures of Earth, and in The High Place, and in The Cream of the Jest,—which have been coming, now for nine years, from Mr. Pape’s studio, on St. John’s Road in Tunbridge Wells, to represent Poictesme as a land of such never-failing loveliness and drollery as I have found but too often to be humiliatingly absent from the accompanying text. And I recall, too, how my own less scintillant province, the Poictesme of the text, came out of this same Tunbridge Wells as long ago as 1905.
§2
Nobody need believe in the coincidence. I do not quite believe in it myself. None the less, I well remember how when I was writing Gallantry the characters perforce all went to Tunbridge Wells and spent the earlier half of my book there, and thus landed me—who then had not ever visited this watering place,—in endless difficulties. Maps and histories are all very welclass="underline" but they do not comfortably suffice in dealing with a town which you have never seen, and which still endures to confute you. . . . Meanwhile to every side problems arose. Upon which of the hills would Lady Allonby have lodged in 1750? just where would Captain Audaine have fought his duels? what was, in 1750, the dubious quarter of the town to which a profligate nobleman would abduct Jan heiress? into what suburbs would Vanringham most naturally have eloped with his Marchioness? and at what inn would the great Duke of Ormskirk have sought accommodations when he came down from London to dispose of the Jacobite conspiracy? Such were but five of the hundred or so niggling problems which fretted my imaginary stay in Tunbridge Wells; which made mere maps and histories inadequate; and which caused me to resolve for the remainder of the book, and indeed for the remainder of my auctorial career, to deal with a geography less prodigally adorned with doubts and pitfalls.
Never again, when any possible option is at hand, I said, will I lay the scene of any story in a real place. . . .
§3
So when Ormskirk had finished with his English imbroglios, and when he quitted the Wells, to our shared relief, and when he went into France to visit incognito his betrothed wife, then Mr. Bulmer’s first meeting with Mademoiselle de Puysange occurred in a byway of Louis Quinze’s kingdom thitherto unknown to cartographers. For it was at this time, in the final months of 1905, that Poictesme was born—of an illicit union between Poictiers and Angoulesme,—and that a rejuvenescent John Bulmer discovered this province. It was then that the chateau of Bellegarde was erected, and the Forest of Acaire was planted, to suit the needs of John Bulmer’s story. Upon the horizon the Taunenfels arose, to afford Achille Cazaio an appropriate residence; the Duardenez river flowed coyly just into sight; and somewhere in the background, too, as I gathered from the conversation of the people whom John Bulmer met in Poictesme, were Manneville and Des Roches and Beauseant.
This much alone of Poictesme then came into being, this tiniest snippet of the land then sprouted, as it were, out of my trouble with Tunbridge Wells; and this much of the province served me at this period, quite adequately, throughout the episode called In the Second April.
And Poictesme availed me yet again as I went on with Gallantry, and wrote, in 1906, the episode of The Scapegoats, which a bit more definitely established the existence of the town of Manneville. . . . But by this time I was caught. No author lately escaped from all that trouble in Tunbridge Wells could resist the attractions of a land so courteous in providing out of hand for its historian’s least need in the way of inns and cities and forests, and not even boggling over the instant erection of a mountain range wherever it would come in most serviceably. So the town in which Nelchen Thorn had just been murdered by Monsieur de Gatinais was immediately visited by Prince Edward Longshanks and Ellinor of Castile,—which couple conducted a tenson in this same Manneville, as is duly recorded in Chivalry; and already two of my books dealt with Poictesme.
§4
There Poictesme rested until 1910, when Domnei was started. And then, with this obliging province standing ready, with this whole realm at hand wherein no blunders in any point of fact or in any geographical detail were humanly possible, then quite inevitably the story of Domnei began in Poictesme; and yet further civic additions were made, in Montors and Fomor. A little later Felix Kennaston explored this so convenient nook of old-world France, during the composition of The Cream of the Jest in 1914; and it was he who first heard of Naimes and Bovion and Perdigon and Lisuarte, and who came as a pioneer to the castle of Storisende.
But far more important, to me at least, was this Felix Kennaston’s discovery that Poictesme was “a land wherein human nature kept its first dignity and strength, and wherein human passions were never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action.” For that discovery—again, to me at least,—touched upon what I have since found to be the special feature of Poictesme: it is a land wherein almost anything is rather more than likely to happen save one thing only; it is not permissible in Poictesme for anybody to cease, for one moment, from remaining a human being or ever to deviate from human sanity. ... I mean, in other words, very much what Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once observed:
“The problem of these fairy tales is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.”
So, then, did Poictesme continue to sprout out of the trouble which Tunbridge Wells had caused me. . . .
Thereafter I followed Jurgen’s adventuring, throughout the greater part of 1918: and the lay of Poictesme was now sufficiently known for a map to be made of it, although Figures of Earth and The High Place and Straws and Prayer-Books and The Silver Stallion were yet to add here and there to the land’s physical features, until finally, in 1925, in the pages of this same Silver Stallion, the very last settlement was effected, at St. Didol. Meanwhile the history of Poictesme, between the years 1234 and 1750, had been revealed to me: and the land, so far as I can judge, had become real.