[Illustration]
‘Twenty minutes--half an hour--three-quarters--what mademoiselle
pleases!’
This was what the waiter said when we asked him how long it would take
to drive to the Gare d’Orléans on the morning that we left Paris. We
selected half an hour, and by so doing as nearly as possible missed our
train--in fact, when we arrived at the Quai d’Austerlitz the station
clock was already at the hour of departure. It was consoling to be told
officially that it was five minutes fast, but five minutes does not go
far in the maddening routine of French stations, and we were wrecks,
mentally and physically, by the time we had wedged ourselves into the
crowded carriage, labelled ‘Bordeaux--Bastide,’ that was to be our
portion. French railway officials never weary of this little practical
joke of keeping the outside clock of the station five minutes fast. If
they did it always it would lose its piquancy, but they guard against
this by occasional deviations into truth, so that the nerve of the
public is effectively shattered, and the station officials never fail of
amusement.
Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time, especially when the
train goes through a country that, after a first hour or so of
picturesqueness, lacks absolutely any distinction of colour or outline.
Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side, without a fence,
without a boundary, except for the occasional rows of housemaids’ mops
and birch-rods that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of poplars
are inseparable from French travelling; they haunt the ridges of the
plains like the ghosts of worthier trees, with all the dejection
befitting those who know that they are only worth a few francs, and can
hope for no better transmigration than a kitchen table or a pig’s
trough. The country seemed silent and empty after the harvest; we saw
very few living things except flocks of sheep, and we meditated with an
ever-growing wonder on what might be the moral suasion that kept each of
these on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing from the more than
demoniacal perverseness of Irish sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to
us that the French must have hit on the supreme expedient of offering no
resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed at one blow the essential joy
of trespass.
The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us time to observe all
wayside objects: we could have counted the big _citrouilles_ that lay in
magnificent obesity, with their sunset-hued cheeks glowing like fire on
the colourless fields, suggestive of immeasurable pumpkin squash, and we
could see on the low bushes that we had at first taken for currant
trees, the black clusters that told we had at last come into the wine
country. It was not so pleasant to see in the waiting-room at Poitiers
the black clusters of men, each enveloped in his own halo of garlic or
bad tobacco smoke, that told us our chance of getting a cup of coffee
was not worth the attendant horror of elbowing our way through them to
the buffet. We had not got over the strangeness of knowing that at any
or every small hotel or railway station we could have a really good cup
of coffee, unflavoured by chicory, liquorice, blackbeetles, or whatever
may be the master ingredient in the muddy draught that is invariable at
such places in England, and we had looked forward to Poitiers with an
enthusiasm quite unconnected with the Black Prince, or any other
romantic memory of Mrs. Markham’s _History of England_.
By the time we reached Angoulême it was quite dark, and we had fallen
into the sodden stupefaction of travel. The carriage was nearly empty,
and the lamp cast a distorted light upon the puckered faces of the old
lady and gentleman who were our only fellow-travellers, as their heads
nodded and rolled in anxious, uneasy slumber. The small stations became
more frequent, and we were drearily aware of the same routine at each:
the half-dozen lights of a village across the fields, the nasal bellow
of an unintelligible name, the thump of a box or two on the platform,
and finally a sound that we took at first for the bleat of a tethered
kid, but which we discovered to be the note of a small trumpet or horn,
wound by the guard as the signal for departure. It was only towards the
end of the journey that this implement had replaced the ordinary
whistle, and for about eight or ten stations we laughed at it; after
that the lament of the kid added itself seriously to the general gloom.
The last hour or two before Bordeaux would have been much harder to bear
but for a display of sheet lightning, the like of which we had never
seen before. The sudden beautiful flicker played hide-and-seek like a
living creature among the curtains of cloud, flashing about all the
points of the compass between south and east, or sometimes thrusting to
and fro across an opening, like glimpses of the rapiers in a giants’
fencing bout. It was under this mocking, elfish light that we first
sighted Bordeaux and its river, and realised that the time had come for
us to strap up our rugs, and say ‘pardon’ in our best French accent to
the old gentleman on whose feet we trod as we did so, and to drag our
stiff bodies forth into the electric glare of the station. We had
reached such a stage of fatigue and demoralisation that we should rather
have stayed in the carriage all night, and gone on with the old lady to
a place she called ‘Erin,’ in a fine Hammersmith twang. We should not
have cared much whether it proved to be the land of our birth, or Irun,
on the Spanish frontier, which we now believe to have been her
destination.
We had a long quarter of an hour to wait before the _Douane_ could bring
itself to give up its dead, and there was another quarter of an hour of
driving through deserted and badly-lighted streets before we got to our
hotel. We crossed a bridge that must have been half a mile long, we
feigned to each other an interest in a half-seen gateway at the end of
it, and our hearts were all the time groping in a certain hold-all,
where lay a spirit-kettle, a teapot, and half a pound of English tea.
The offensively urbane and wide-awake head waiter, with his clean-shaven
face and foxy eyes, had some evident difficulty in repressing his scorn
when he heard that he was to _faire monter_ to our room a little milk
and hot water, but it mounted to our third floor for all that. It was a
blow to find a skin on the top of the milk that showed it had once been
boiled: we did not know then that French hotels considered milk in its
raw, uncooked state to be as baneful as if it were water.
Our room was large, and of a somewhat gloomy magnificence, with towering
bed canopies, and darkly-gleaming mahogany; and as our one
_bougie_--valued in the bill at a franc--contended with its
surroundings, we felt like a chapter out of almost any of Scott’s
novels--the chapter where the hero spends a night in some one’s private
and luxurious dungeon, and having obtained writing materials, has heard
the last retreating footsteps of an attendant who has unostentatiously
locked and double-locked the door. What we heard principally, while we
drank our surreptitious midnight cup of tea, was not the howling of the
storm or the hoarse baying of a bloodhound in the courtyard, but the
snoring of some one in the next room. It was hard to believe that the
artist was not doing it on purpose; each snore was so painstaking, so
measured, and had such a careful crescendo in its vibrating fortissimo.
He had certainly brought the accomplishment to a high degree of
perfection, and if he does not die of concussion of the brain in the
attempt, he ought, with a little more practice, to be able to empty any
hotel in a single night.
It was broad summer in Bordeaux, so we discovered next morning when we
escaped from the
[Illustration: OUR SURREPTITIOUS MIDNIGHT CUP OF TEA.]
half-light of the coffee-room and walked forth to see the town. We went
down to the quays and crawled along them in the shade, looking at the
immense river, and the long ‘winter woodland’ of masts of all countries,
stretching away seemingly to the Bay of Biscay: it did not matter that
the water was the colour of _café au lait_, churned to dirty froth by
innumerable screws and paddles, or that the hoarse screams of steam
whistles ascended through black smoke to the brilliant heavens; all was
new and delightful, and of a cheerfulness unknown to the British Isles.
It was here that we began to realise what the wine country could do when
it gave its mind to it. The great quays were packed close with barrels
as far as the eye could follow--barrels on whose ends were hieroglyphs
that told of aristocratic birth as plainly as the armorial bearings on a
carriage; the streets were full of long narrow carts like ladders on
wheels, laden also with barrels, one behind the other; and about every
five minutes, as it seemed to us, some big ship moved out from the
wharf, filled to the brim with claret, and slipped down the yellow
current to other climes. As we sat under the chestnut trees and watched
the tide of the traffic, we began to notice that there are more grey
horses in France than one would have imagined there could have been in
the world. The streets of Paris are mottled by them; the streets of
Bordeaux are mottled in the opposite way--that is to say, the dark
horses are like specks among the white, and in the Médoc the necessary
difficulty of providing black horses for funerals can probably be only
solved by blacklead.
We carried a map of Bordeaux in our hands, and stopped many times to
study it as we strolled along, causing thereby an ecstasy of interest
among the sailors and the women sitting at their stalls of strange
fruits and fungi. It was disappointing that French wit did not on these
occasions elaborate any jest more sparkling than ‘_Ah! Les Anglaises!_’
though the inhabitants seemed to find the humour of the situation
satiatingly expressed in this simple formula. Once, in Paris, a
butcher’s boy screamed ‘Angleesh spock-en’ after us, and convulsed the
whole street with the sally; but we thought that we could have produced
something better any day on Patrick’s Bridge, Cork. We perseveringly
ciphered out our route to the church of St. Michel, assisted a good
deal, it must be admitted, by the fact that its steeple is the tallest
thing in Bordeaux. We were getting very hot indeed as we toiled through
the Tour de Cailhau--so hot that, as a Galway woman once remarked, ‘it
would have been a pleasure to any one to lie down and die,’ and we
longed to sit down and rest on the kerbstone in the shade of the Tour
beside a man in a blue blouse who was sharpening a razor in his entirely
filthy palm.
This being out of the question, we struggled on towards St. Michel,
promising ourselves a bath of coolness and darkness under its lofty
roof, and more especially in its underground caverns, where inhabit the
celebrated mummies that have been preserved by the soil of the graveyard
from dissolution. We crossed the last and sunniest street, and passed
through a swing door into a large church, considerably hotter than
anything or anywhere outside, and with an atmosphere of an unknown and
stifling kind. We walked round it in silence, and, looking at each
other, as we fanned ourselves with guide-books, we felt that our last
chance of averting heat-apoplexy was to go underground at once and see
the mummies.
We found that the mummies lived in a place apart from the church, under
the _clocher_, as the beautiful spire is called, by which we had steered
our way, and we approached with feelings of unmitigated awe and
creepiness the doorway to which we had been directed by two little boys
who were playing cards in the shadow of a buttress. The door itself was
round another buttress, in a low and crumbling stone archway, and we
knocked timidly at it. It opened, and in a room of about the size and
shape of a bonnet-box we beheld, instead of mummies, a cheerful family
party at breakfast. We were about to retire, but the mother, wiping the
_vin ordinaire_ from her jovial mouth, assured us that she was ready to
show us the Cellar of the Mummies immediately. We squeezed past the rest
of the family, and saw that at their very feet a precipitous stone
staircase plunged into darkness.
Our guide picked up a candlestick of a pattern that we were destined to
see more of afterwards,--_i.e._ a long piece of wood with a tallow
_bougie_ erect at one end of it,--and after an anxious inquiry on our
parts as to whether there was any scent _là-bas_ in the cave had been
answered in the negative, we followed her into the abyss. It proved to
be a circular vault, made, like everything else in Bordeaux, of dusty
yellow stone, and, after a minute of despondency on the part of the
_bougie_, we saw, lining its walls, a dismal array of little brown
figures, propped on end behind a low wooden rail.
The guide advanced with alacrity to her task.
‘Behold, mesdames, the celebrated mummies of St. Michel’--
She paused, and flourished the candle in the awful faces of a group of
objects who were just preserved from being skeletons by a ragged
covering of dusty leather which had once been flesh.
[Illustration: ‘BEHOLD, MESDAMES, THE CELEBRATED MUMMIES OF ST.
MICHEL.’]
‘_Voiçi la famille empoisonnée!_ Observe the morsel still in the mouth
of the little one! Mosh-rhume! _Hein?_’ She made a light-hearted attempt
at the English word, but seeing we looked bewildered, passed easily back
into French. ‘Mushrooms, mesdames. All the family are found dead
together!’
We looked at them, but not too closely, and also at their
companions--the porter, the fat woman (now a shrivelled and dreadful
dwarf), the boy who had been buried alive,--at least, the guide
hopefully said that she was almost sure that he had been buried
alive,--and the General, evidently a special favourite, who had been
frequently wounded in the battle, so she told us, as an apology for the
fact that there was very little of him left. How she knew these gruesome
histories we did not inquire, and with the best intentions in the world
we could not altogether believe them. There was nothing human or
appealing in these grotesque survivals of three centuries ago; they
might have been little damaged terra-cotta figures, had it not been for
the dusty grins that showed unmistakable teeth, and some indefinable
sentiment of genuineness and absence of effort.
As we climbed up the stone stairs into the sun and heat, we felt that
the immortality thrust upon the mummies of St. Michel was a cruel one;
and nothing but the affectionate satisfaction of the able show-woman
with her show reconciles us to its memory.