AVALLON, _August 14, 1843_.
I expected to be in Lyons the 10th, and am not within sixty leagues of
that place. I shall not have any news from you until I reach Autun. If
you want to be kind you will write to me again at Lyons.
Vézelay pleases me more and more. The view from there is superb, and
besides it is sometimes a pleasure to be alone. As a usual thing I find
myself rather dreary company, but when I am depressed, with no good
reason for being so, and when this depression has in it no vestige of
anger, it is then that I enjoy complete solitude. This was my mood
during the last few days of my stay at Vézelay. I took long walks, or
lay down on the edge of a natural terrace, which a poet might well call
a precipice, and there I philosophised on the Ego, and on Providence, on
the hypothesis that there be a Providence. I thought of you also, which
was more agreeable than thinking of myself. But even the thought of you
was not the most cheerful, because no sooner did it come to me than it
occurred to my mind how happy I should be to see you here in this
obscure corner of the world. And then--and then, it all ended with this
other disheartening thought, that you were far, far away, that it was
not easy to see you, and not even certain that you would care to see me.
My presence at Vézelay greatly mystified the population. Whenever I
sketched, especially in a well-lighted room, large groups of people
would assemble around me, and every one had some conjecture as to my
occupation. This distinction proved a great bore, and I should like to
have had a janissary beside me to keep back the curious. Here I have
become once more one of the multitude. I came to visit an old uncle whom
I scarcely knew, and with whom I am obliged to stay two days. To
entertain me, he has taken me to see several mutilated heads found in
the excavations made nearby. I am not fond of relatives. You are
compelled to be on familiar terms with people you have never seen,
simply because they happen to be descended from the same grandfather
that you have. My uncle, however, is a most worthy man, not especially
provincial, and if we had two ideas in common I might even find him
agreeable.
The women here are as homely as the women in Paris; and they have,
moreover, ankles big as stumps. At Nevers the women had extremely pretty
eyes. They wear no national costumes. Besides our moral perfections, we
have the advantage of being the most stunted and the ugliest people of
Europe.
I send you an owl’s feather which I found in a gap of the Abbot’s Church
of the Madeleine at Vézelay. The former owner of the feather and I found
ourselves for a moment face to face, each one equally startled by our
unexpected encounter. The owl was less brave than I, and flew away. She
had a formidable beak, and eyes that were terrifying, besides two
feathers shaped like horns. I am sending this feather to you that you
may admire its softness, and also because I have read somewhere in a
book of magic that when one gives a woman an owl’s feather, and she
places it under her pillow, she dreams of him. Will you tell me your
dream? Good-bye.