How quick bright things come to confusion!  When we arise next
morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and
the face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops.
Yesterday's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally
enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea.  A sickly
shimmer lies upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is
washed out of the green and golden landscape of last night, as
though an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted
it together with a sponge.  We go out a-walking in the wet roads.
But the roads about Grez have a trick of their own.  They go on for
a while among clumps of willows and patches of vine, and then,
suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in some miry
hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came!  So we draw
about the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence,
or go to the billiard-room, for a match at corks and by one consent
a messenger is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-
morrow.

To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back
for exercise, and let their kidnap-sacks follow by the trap.  I
need hardly say they are neither of them French; for, of all
English phrases, the phrase 'for exercise' is the least
comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.  All goes well for a
while with the pedestrians.  The wet woods are full of scents in
the noontide.  At a certain cross, where there is a guardhouse,
they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter of their
good host at Barbizon.  And so there they are hospitably received
by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince
in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some
prints of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting.  As they
draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the
big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a
while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears
and the rain beginning to fall.  The ways grow wider and sandier;
here and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-
shore; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks,
and the race of sign-posts is no more.  One begins to look at the
other doubtfully.  'I am sure we should keep more to the right,'
says one; and the other is just as certain they should hold to the
left.  And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls
'sheer and strong and loud,' as out of a shower-bath.  In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors.  They cannot see out of
their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their
boots.  They leave the track and try across country with a
gambler's desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make
the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from
boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than
rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and
broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the
distance.  And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the
grumbling thunder.  There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer
discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that
it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-
corner than to suffer in the person.  At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest
pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale.  Thence, by the
Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the
clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.


THE WOODS IN SPRING


I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early
springtime, when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable
violets peep from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people
at most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep
a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-
manger opens on the court.  There is less to distract the
attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself.  It is not
bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor
bestrewn with the remains of English picnics.  The hunting still
goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
since, 'a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers.'

If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills
that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of
country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all
mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey,
and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue.  Then zones of pine
of a solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by
themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of
birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate,
and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs.  And then a
long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown
heather.  It is all rather cold and unhomely.  It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the
later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
of sunlight set in purple heather.  The loveliness of the woods in
March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type.  It is made
sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness.  It has a
sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as
men acquire a taste for olives.  And the wonderful clear, pure air
wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and
makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune--
or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in your boyhood
something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges
you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest.
it is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voice, calling you
farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's
donkey, in a maze of pleasure.

Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches,
barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
hand.  Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of
underwood; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great
forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden evening sky,
where the rooks are flying and calling.  On the sward of the Bois
d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like
fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and the
sound of the axe is rarely still.  But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts
of young wood.  The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn
with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark.  Rocks lie crouching in
the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with
years and the rigours of the changeful seasons.  Brown and yellow
butterflies are sown and carried away again by the light air--like
thistledown.  The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that
there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear.  You
listen and listen for some noise to break the silence, till you
grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your sense of
your own identity is troubled; your brain reels, like that of some
gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should
you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything of
yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.

Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always
unbroken.  You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the
tree-tops; sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes
with a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves.  And
sometimes, close at band, the branches move, a moan goes through
the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart.  Perhaps you may
hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry
continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time
your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe.
From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear,
not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of
voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places.
Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs;
scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a
man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a
bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar
of rifle-shots.  Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are
blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and
the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, where you sit
perched among the rocks and heather.  The boar is afoot, and all
over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague
excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.

Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are
few people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters
plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
wood for the fire.  You may meet such a party coming home in the
twilight:  the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the
little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake.  That is
the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what
once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise
you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique.  It was on a
very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a
frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be
nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked
boulders.  He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
under a tree in an open.  The old father knitted a sock, the mother
sat staring at the fire.  The eldest son, in the uniform of a
private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle.  Two or
three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets.  And the
whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them!  My
friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows.  They
took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks.  Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon.  And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.  Nothing has ever
transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata;
or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that
this is all another chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove,
and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or
Mars.


MORALITY


Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of
men.  Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices
have arisen to spread abroad its fame.  Half the famous writers of
modern France have had their word to say about Fontainebleau.
Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George Sand, de Senancour,
Flaubert, Murger, the brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each
of these has done something to the eternal praise and memory of
these woods.  Even at the very worst of times, even when the
picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the
forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty.  It was in
1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his Historical Description of
the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau.  And very droll it
is to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of
what was then permissible.  The monstrous rocks, etc., says the
Abbe 'sont admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient
aussitot avec Horace:  Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari
libet.'  The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you
see how he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak.
Horace, at any rate, was classical.  For the rest, however, the
Abbe likes places where many alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-
Etoile, are kept up 'by a special gardener,' and admires at the
Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and Waters,
the Sieur de la Falure, 'qui a fait faire ce magnifique endroit.'

But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes
a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that
quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so
wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.  Disappointed men,
sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind
have come here for consolation.  Hither perplexed folk have retired
out of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window on some night
of masquerade, and here found quiet and silence, and rest, the
mother of wisdom.  It is the great moral spa; this forest without a
fountain is itself the great fountain of Juventius.  It is the best
place in the world to bring an old sorrow that has been a long
while your friend and enemy; and if, like Beranger's your gaiety
has run away from home and left open the door for sorrow to come
in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find the
truant hid.  With every hour you change.  The air penetrates
through your clothes, and nestles to your living body.  You love
exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals.  You forget all
your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the
moment only.  For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral
feeling.  Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or
sorry; but you see them framed in the forest, like figures on a
painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any living and
kindly sense.  You forget the grim contrariety of interests.  You
forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in
unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that
gapes on either hand for the defeated.  Life is simple enough, it
seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out
of a last night's dream.

Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible.  You
become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections.
When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole
round world.  You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on
foot.  You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of
saddle-bags, into the enchanted East.  You may cross the Black
Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted
with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own
reflections in the Rhine or Danube.  You may pass the spinal cord
of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends
her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea.
You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns.  You may be
awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
the robin in the hedge.  For you the rain should allay the dust of
the beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked.
Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the
lane; inn after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by
river receive your body in the sultry noon.  Wherever you went warm
valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should compass you
about; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk
with you an hour upon your way.  You may see from afar off what it
will come to in the end--the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of
human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast.  And yet it
will seem well--and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best--to break all the network bound about your feet by birth
and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of
phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
dissolvent.

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover.  For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour.  Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes.  Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place.  If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-
change.  And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness
is for much in the effect produced.  You reckon up the miles that
lie between you and intrusion.  You may walk before you all day
long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble
out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers.  And there
is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion.
When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near
Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze
about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar:  'Caesar
mihi hoc donavit.'  It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved
at this occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves thus
touching hands with forgotten ages, and following an antiquity with
hound and horn.  And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle
curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this stag had carried
its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and winters
had shone and snowed on the imperial badge.  If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's
hounds and houses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these
groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and
elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of human
years?  Here, also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest glade,
sounds the gallop of the pale horse.  But he does not hunt this
cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small:  and if
you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest
thickets, you too might live on into later generations and astonish
men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die.  There is
nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires.  Here all the
impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more.  You may count
your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter,
or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun
wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens.  Here shall
you see no enemies but winter and rough weather.  And if a pang
comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger.  All
the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of
duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of
these woods, fall away from you like a garment.  And if perchance
you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together,
like an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a
factory chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as
for the staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns
old arms and harness from the furrow of the glebe.  Ay, sure
enough, there was a battle there in the old times; and, sure
enough, there is a world out yonder where men strive together with
a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.  So much you
apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination.  A faint far-off
rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as of some dead religion.



CHAPTER VI--A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE {5} A FRAGMENT 1879
Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of 'Travels
with a Donkey in the Cevennes.'



Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire,
the ancient Velay.  As the name betokens, the town is of monastic
origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a
church of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-
priest and several vicars.  It stands on the side of hill above the
river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road
where the wolves sometime pursue the diligence in winter.  The
road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end
to end in a single narrow street; there you may see the fountain
where women fill their pitchers; there also some old houses with
carved doors and pediment and ornamental work in iron.  For
Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter;
and there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely
penitent, who found means to ruin himself by high living in this
village on the hills.  He certainly has claims to be considered the
most remarkable spendthrift on record.  How he set about it, in a
place where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at
the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a
problem for the wise.  His son, ruined as the family was, went as
far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and
son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France.  Not
until the latter had got into the train was the work of Richelieu
complete.

It is a people of lace-makers.  The women sit in the streets by
groups of five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from
one group to another.  Now and then you will hear one woman
clattering off prayers for the edification of the others at their
work.  They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon about
the head, and sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap; and
so they give the street colour and brightness and a foreign air.  A
while ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district
with the lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn five
francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in
London.  Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever and
industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or
less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago.  The
tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and
left nobody the richer.  The women bravely squandered their gains,
kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to
sweethearting and a merry life.  From week's end to week's end it
was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the
wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to
ten at night.  Now these dancing days are over.  'Il n'y a plus de
jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon.  I hear of no great advance in
what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with
its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic
figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a
custom of the past.  Only on the occasion of the fair shall you
hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company
singing the measure while the others dance.  I am sorry at the
change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence
so much mountain merriment in France.  The lace-makers themselves
have not entirely forgiven our country-women; and I think they take
a special pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the
town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were
arrested and driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on
the wall.

From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and
pickpockets have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the
occasion.  Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to
buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of
which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town.  Sunday
wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of
drugget, and usually a complete suit to match.  I have never set
eyes on such degrading raiment.  Here it clings, there bulges; and
the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into
a mockery and laughing-stock.  Another piece of Sunday business
with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice.  It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going.  I have
seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before,
wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing;
and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to
seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have
waited still.  There was a canonical day for consultation; such was
the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to
conform.

Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
polite concessions rather than in speed.  Each will wait an hour or
two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe.  The Courrier (such is the
name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive
at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier
in good time for a six-o'clock dinner.  But the driver dares not
disoblige his customers.  He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay.  These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking
the advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous
business of stage-coaching than we are used to see it.

As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises
and falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only
to see new and father ranges behind these.  Many little rivers run
from all sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from
Monastier, bears the great name of Loire.  The mean level of the
country is a little more than three thousand feet above the sea,
which makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome.
There is little timber except pines, and the greater part of the
country lies in moorland pasture.  The country is wild and tumbled
rather than commanding; an upland rather than a mountain district;
and the most striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies
low beside the rivers.  There, indeed, you will find many corners
that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his
grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and
looks as young as on the seventh morning.  Such a place is the
course of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and
thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds
singing; a place for lovers to frequent.  The name of the river was
perhaps suggested by the sound of its passage over the stones; for
it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at
Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell
asleep.

On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble
as the best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the population
is, in its way, as Scottish as the country.  They have abrupt,
uncouth, Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were
trespassing, an 'Ou'st-ce que vous allez?' only translatable into
the Lowland 'Whaur ye gaun?'  They keep the Scottish Sabbath.
There is no labour done on that day but to drive in and out the
various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling
in the meadows.  The lace-makers have disappeared from the street.
Not to attend mass would involve social degradation; and you may
find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of Catholic
Monthly Visitor on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes.  I remember
one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the
baby, gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer.  One strapping
lass stood with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the
rest chiming in devoutly.  Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face
asleep among some straw, to represent the worldly element.

Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster's
daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy,
until she grew quite flushed.  I have heard the reverse process
going on between a Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments
in the two cases were identical.  Each apostle based her claim on
the superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the
business with a threat of hell-fire.  'Pas bong pretres ici,' said
the Presbyterian, 'bong pretres en Ecosse.'  And the postmaster's
daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with
the butt of it instead of the bayonet.  We are a hopeful race, it
seems, and easily persuaded for our good.  One cheerful
circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each side
relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart.  And
I call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
imagination.

Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy
orders.  And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate.
It is certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or
across the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a
fortune of at least 40,000 francs.  The lads go forth pricked with
the spirit of adventure and the desire to rise in life, and leave
their homespun elders grumbling and wondering over the event.
Once, at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these
disappointed parents:  a drake who had fathered a wild swan and
seen it take wing and disappear.  The wild swan in question was now
an apothecary in Brazil.  He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and
first landed in America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single
halfpenny in his pocket.  And now he was an apothecary!  Such a
wonderful thing is an adventurous life!  I thought he might as well
have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure:  one to drink, another
to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly
caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary
in Brazil.  As for his old father, he could conceive no reason for
the lad's behaviour.  'I had always bread for him,' he said; 'he
ran away to annoy me.  He loved to annoy me.  He had no gratitude.'
But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled
offspring, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he
said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it
gloriously in the air.  'This comes from America,' he cried, 'six
thousand leagues away!'  And the wine-shop audience looked upon it
with a certain thrill.

I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the
country.  Ou'st que vous allez? was changed for me into Quoi, vous
rentrez au Monastier and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it.
There was one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a
chair for me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to
gossip.  They were filled with curiosity about England, its
language, its religion, the dress of the women, and were never
weary of seeing the Queen's head on English postage-stamps, or
seeking for French words in English Journals.  The language, in
particular, filled them with surprise.

'Do they speak patois in England?'  I was once asked; and when I
told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' said they.

'No, no,' I said, 'not French.'

'Then,' they concluded, 'they speak patois.'

You must obviously either speak French or patios.  Talk of the
force of logic--here it was in all its weakness.  I gave up the
point, but proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I
was met with a new mortification.  Of all patios they declared that
mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound.  At
each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of
the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp
about the street in ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a
faint and slightly disagreeable bewilderment.  'Bread,' which
sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, was
the word that most delighted these good ladies of Monastier; it
seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and
they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for
winter evenings.  I have tried it since then with every sort of
accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.

They were of all ages:  children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude.  One and all were pleasant and
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity
when that was called for by the subject of our talk.  Life, since
the fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious
air.  The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a
provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one
of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me
many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my
arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in
her eye that were eminently Scottish.  But the rest used me with a
certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human.  Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible
gaiety of my native tongue.  Between the old lady and myself I
think there was a real attachment.  She was never weary of sitting
to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with
all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to
repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial.
It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the
last.  'No, no,' she would say, 'that is not it.  I am old, to be
sure, but I am better-looking than that.  We must try again.'  When
I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a
somewhat touching manner.  We should not meet again, she said; it
was a long farewell, and she was sorry.  But life is so full of
crooks, old lady, that who knows?  I have said good-bye to people
for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see
them yet again.

One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception.  In spite of their piety,
they could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person.  There
was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human
body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of
it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment.  My
landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided
patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the
language of a drunken bully.  And of all the swearers that I ever
heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
finished it and took my departure.  It is true she had a right to
be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse
for drink before the day was well begun.  But it was strange to
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a
river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the
clear and silent air of the morning.  In city slums, the thing
might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a
plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised
the ear.

The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my
principal companion.  He was generally intelligent, and could have
spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was
his specially to have a generous taste in eating.  This was what
was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I
found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and
special knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are
about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether
secondary question.

I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
grew to believe myself an expert in the business.  I thought I
could make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure
off the wayside with any living engineer in France.  Gondet was one
of the places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another.  There, at Laussonne, George Sand
spent a day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis de
Villemer; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence.  It appears that he spoke French imperfectly;
for this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever
he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in patois, she would
make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her
memory.  The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it
would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her
works.  The peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so
much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering
with this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady
and far from beautiful:  the most famous man-killer of the age
appealed so little to Velaisian swine-herds!

On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials
towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an
improving acquaintance with the foreman road-mender.  He was in
great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his
subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he
called 'the gallantry' of paying for my breakfast in a roadside
wine-shop.  On the whole, he was a man of great weather-wisdom,
some spirits, and a social temper.  But I am afraid he was
superstitious.  When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a
company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
Sabbath.  I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion,
that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party.
Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great
empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road.
The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking
of his whip.  He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was
impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill,
the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night.  At the time,
people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca.

I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.

The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of
thing than formerly.  'C'est difficile,' he added, 'a expliquer.'

When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some
road-metal with the gauge -

'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'

We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the
east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.

'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.

For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.

Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl,
one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently
making lace.  This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a
panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a
distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of
the honesty of our intentions.

The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled
from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair.  A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read
in these uncouth timidities.

The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail
of their own fireside.  No man ventures abroad without meat and a
bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even
thus equipped he takes the road with terror.  All day the family
sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally
without work or diversion.  The father may carve a rude piece of
furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets
in again, and along with it the labours of the field.  It is not
for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
habitations.  A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were
indispensable in such a life . . .



CHAPTER VII--RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM



Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it
should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire.  A
matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science
to-morrow.  From the mind of childhood there is more history and
more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes
in a library.  The child is conscious of an interest, not in
literature but in life.  A taste for the precise, the adroit, or
the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he
has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material--I had almost said this
practical--pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came
the first.  I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that
would seem to imply a prior stage 'The Lord is gone up with a
shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet'--memorial version, I
know not where to find the text--rings still in my ear from my
first childhood, and perhaps with something of my nurses accent.
There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these
loud words, but I believe the words themselves were what I
cherished.  I had about the same time, and under the same
influence--that of my dear nurse--a favourite author:  it is
possible the reader has not heard of him--the Rev. Robert Murray
M'Cheyne.  My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-

'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'

There is imagery here, and I set it on one side.  The other--it is
but a verse--not only contains no image, but is quite
unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
childhood:

'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -

I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
has continued to haunt me.

I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
eloquent beyond their value.  Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm,
'The Lord is my shepherd':  and from the places employed in its
illustration, which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a
house then occupied by my father, I am able, to date it before the
seventh year of my age, although it was probably earlier in fact.
The 'pastures green' were represented by a certain suburban
stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an
autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith:  the place is
long ago built up; no pastures now, no stubble-fields; only a maze
of little streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children.  Here,
in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow
something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant; and close by the
sheep in which I was incarnated--as if for greater security--
rustled the skirt, of my nurse.  'Death's dark vale' was a certain
archway in the Warriston Cemetery:  a formidable yet beloved spot,
for children love to be afraid,--in measure as they love all
experience of vitality.  Here I beheld myself some paces ahead
(seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny
passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd's staff,
such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod
like a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff
sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like
one whispering, towards my ear.  I was aware--I will never tell you
how--that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement.
The third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-

 'My table Thou hast furnished
 In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows':

and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series.  I saw
myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over
my shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from
an authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green
court of a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white
imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows.  The picture appears
arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock
analysed the dream of Alan Armadale.  The summer-house and court
were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the
imps conveyed from Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress; the bearded and
robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the
shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it
figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed
out to me as a jest by my father.  It was shown me for a jest,
remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.
Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an
intermediary too trivial--that divine refreshment of whose meaning
I had no guess; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn
with delight, even as, a little later, I should have written
flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word that might have
appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean
associations.  In this string of pictures I believe the gist of the
psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no more to say to me; and
the result was consolatory.  I would go to sleep dwelling with
restfulness upon these images; they passed before me, besides, to
an appropriate music; for I had already singled out from that rude
psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all, not
growing old, not disgraced by its association with long Sunday
tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion
thought:-

'In pastures green Thou leadest me,
The quiet waters by.'

The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words.  If these
pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great
vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful
plots that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and
circumstances that I might call up before me, with closed eyes,
when I was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of
the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.  Robinson
Crusoe; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic
soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and bloody for a
child, but very picturesque, called Paul Blake; these are the three
strongest impressions I remember:  The Swiss Family Robinson came
next, longo intervallo.  At these I played, conjured up their
scenes, and delighted to hear them rehearsed unto seventy times
seven.  I am not sure but what Paul Blake came after I could read.
It seems connected with a visit to the country, and an experience
unforgettable.  The day had been warm; H--- and I had played
together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road;
then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly
sweetness in the air.  Somehow my play-mate had vanished, or is out
of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent into the village on
an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone
through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.  How often since then has
it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time:
the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my
mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then that I
knew I loved reading.