Il me semble que considerant la foiblesse de nostre vie, et à
combien d’escueils ordinaires et naturels elle est exposée, on
n’en devroit pas faire si grande part à la naissance, à
l’oisiveté te à l’apprentissageage.
Montaigne, ch. 57.
In a second visit to Europe after the death of De Mornay, I sought out
the hamlet where his father lived. It was _Chateaux-Prix sur L’Emmat_.
The place is very French, being in the neighborhood of a dismantled
fortification. But the green slopes are still kept trim for promenades.
Long, long rows of Lombardy poplars, very different from the spindling
things we have, stretch a mile along the water. The low, red houses,
with red tiles, huddle together about the red church, like a brood
crowding around the hen. In the evenings, the brown peasants in blouses,
and the brown mothers and maids in broad straw plats, cluster under
vines at the doors, with long loaves of bread and flasks of country
wine. Clumps of Grenoble walnut-trees—we call them _English_—half
conceal with their full foliage the immense rood of timber which
predominates over a village spring. Near this, as the sun sinks, are
heard the sound of the tabor and pipe, and the clatter of _sabots_, as
the boys and girls run to the merry-making. Donkeys are loose among the
road-side thistles, and the long twilight is not over before all are in
bed.
But the De Mornays had flitted out of France, and I found them—almost
the only remaining Huguenots in Louvain, which once was so famous a
Protestant town.[1] The portrait of Gaston du Plessis, Albert’s
grand-uncle, hanging at Doctor De Mornay’s, might—with another
dress—have passed for a likeness of my friend; but it was in feather
and coat-armor. Madame Guers, a young widow, heard with tears my
remembrances of her cousin. It was she who carried me to see the _Hôtel
de Ville_, built some time in the fifteenth century, and told me gay
romances of the Dukes of Brabant. She had never heard of Froissart! I
cannot remember whether it was here or at Liège that I wondered at the
Holy Family of Quentin Matsys. The Louvain beer is famous, and I advise
tourists to acquaint themselves with the Brabant John Barleycorn at the
_Maison des Brasseurs_, or Brewer’s Hall, or at the convent of Parc,
with its fish-ponds, not far distant.
Being still out of my head about teaching, I was dinned with talk
concerning the _Methode Jacotot_, which is as little remembered there as
Manual Labor Schools with us. And, surely, a comical method it was! For
Jacotot presumed to teach every thing out of one book, by an everlasting
repetition. Hundreds of schools were set up on this plan.
Rambling old man that I am! It is time my chapters came to an end. Alice
is horrified at my reading out of Homer a passage in the twentieth book
of the Odyssey, and says she shall dream of it. I defy Pfeffers to find
any thing more ghastly in German story. It is where the guests are
suddenly struck mad. They burst forth into sardonic laughter. Blood
issues from their mouths, and tears pour from their eyes. Meanwhile
Theoclymenus, gifted with sudden clairvoyance, beholds the sun perishing
from the heavens, the porch filled with spectres, and the walls sweating
gore. Why has it not been quoted by our Northern spiritualists?
* * * * *
Before I end my dictations and resolve to bid Alice close her portfolio,
let me give one or two discoveries concerning old age, which my readers
will better understand when they have had the “three warnings.”
Old folks do not acquire wisdom in a natural way; that is, as they
acquire short breath, puckered lips, gray hairs, crowsfeet, weak knees
and shuffling feet. Habit is habit. Idle youth—idle age. I love books
as much and as fondly as when I was in my father’s garret. But my
glasses are too young for me, and McAlister is five hundred miles away,
and folios are hard to manage, and my grand-daughter is in peril of
laryngitis by reading so loud to me, and my eyes close in the middle of
periods, and my pipe goes out ten times a-day.
When I was young I thought life pleasant, but I also thought that after
three-score I should be ready to yield it without a sigh. I do not know
how it is, but my love of life has a tenacity as tough as my corded
fingers. Every preparation for “that vast ocean I must sail so soon” is
induced _ab extra_. The instinctive tendency is to live a little longer.
In old age I fancy myself not very much attended to. This I suppress;
but for the life of me I cannot help observing that in all companies my
chair becomes insular. The young men prefer learning of the young women.
The young women attend to me sweetly—but as it were by afterthought,
from sense of duty.
As an old man, I perceive that young creatures are too gay. The loud
laugh reaches me, but I have lost the _bon mot_ which caused it. The
books they are in raptures about are not in my collection. Was I ever
thus? And did those grave looks of my seniors proceed from something
like this in their heedless offspring? Heigh-ho! It is time for me to
look for hat and stick, as a _conviva satur_.
The teeth which Gardette furnished me are the admiration of all
companies; and I speak with only a perceptible click produced by the
play of the gold and porcelain. Yet what I say is evidently less
relished than when I used to be in blue broad-cloth and hair-powder, and
with six unstarched cravats about my neck. My Latin quotations are
unintelligible, for I retain the old continental sound of the vowels,
and cannot break my organs into the Anglicism of _payter_, _frayter_,
and _nigh-sigh_, for _pater_, _frater_, and _nisi_. I can’t learn to
change the Spanish _Quijote_ into Quixotte, with a double T; or to talk
“of paying over _over_ ten dollars,” when I mean “paying over more than
ten dollars.” Alice has never found her favorite “reliable” in any
English author before the days of Sir Robert Peel; or any classic writer
who ever uttered the phrase “_on_ to-morrow.” I am old-fashioned enough
to present to each other visitors who meet at a morning call, and to
show them to the door; nor can I wear my hat in the house, bald as I am.
_Quere._ Whether Methusalem had these disabilities in proportion to his
longinquity?
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[1] I may be in error, but so my Commissionaire Jean d’Ypres told me.