We were called at five o'clock in the morning. Even the little birds of
Lyons were drowsy at that untoward and melancholy hour. As I slowly
roused myself I heard their sleepy twitterings out in the trees on the
Cours du Midi--and my sympathies were with them. There are natures which
are quickened and strengthened by the early day. Mine is not such. I
know of nothing which so numbs what I am pleased to term my faculties as
to be _particeps criminis_ in the rising of the sun.
But life was several shades less cheerless by the time that we left the
Hotel Univers--which I ever shall remember gratefully because it
ministered so well, even in the very midst of the driving bustle of the
Lyons Exposition, to our somewhat exacting needs--and went down to the
river side. Already the mists of morning had risen, and in their place
was the radiant sunshine of the Midi: that penetrating, tingling
sunshine which sets the blood to dancing and thence gets into the brain
and breeds extravagant fancies there which straightway are uttered as
substantial truths--as M. Daudet so often has told us; and also, when
writing about this his own dearly-loved birth-land, so often has
demonstrated in his own text.
Yet had we come to the boat while still in the lowering mood begotten of
our intemperate palterings with the dawn we must have yielded quickly
to the infectious cheerfulness which obtained on board the _Gladiateur_.
Even a Grey Penitent would have been moved, coming unawares into that
gay company, to throw off his _cagoule_ and to dance a saraband. From
end to end the big _Gladiateur_ was bright with bunting--flags set in
clusters on the great paddle-boxes, on the bow, on the stern--and the
company thronging on board was living up to the brightness of the
sunshine and the flags.
For they were going home, home to their dear South, those poet exiles:
and their joy was so strong within them that it almost touched the edge
of tears. I could understand their feeling because of a talk that I had
had three days before, in Paris, with Baptiste Bonnet: up in his little
apartment under the mansard, with an outlook over the flowers in the
window-garden across roof-tops to Notre Dame. Bonnet could not come upon
this expedition--and what love and longing there was in his voice while
he talked to us about the radiant land which to him was forbidden but
which we so soon were to see! To know that we were going, while he
remained behind, made us feel like a brace of Jacobs; and when Madame
Bonnet made delicious tea for us--"because the English like tea," as she
explained with a clear kindliness that in no wise was lessened by her
misty ethnology--we felt that so to prey upon their hospitality in the
very moment that we were making off with their birthright was of the
blackest of crimes. But because of what our dear Bonnet had said, and of
the way in which he had said it, I understood the deep feeling that
underlay the exuberant gayety of our boat-mates--and it seemed to me
that there was a very tender note of pathos in their joy.
They were of all sorts and conditions, our boat-mates: a few famous
throughout the world, as the player Mounet-Sully, the painter Benjamin
Constant, the prose poet Paul Arene; many famous throughout France; and
even in the rank and file few who had not raised themselves above the
multitude in one or another of the domains of art. And all of them were
bound together in a democratic brotherhood, which yet--because the
absolute essential to membership in it was genius--was an artistic
aristocracy. With their spiritual honours had come to many of them
honours temporal; indeed, so plentiful were the purple ribbons of the
Palms and the red rosette of the Legion--with here and there even a
Legion button--as to suggest that the entire company had been caught out
without umbrellas while a brisk shower of decorations passed their way.
A less general, and a far more picturesque, decoration was the enamelled
cigale worn by the Cigaliers: at once the emblem of their Society, of
the Felibrien movement, and of the glowing South where that gayest of
insects is born and sings his life out in the summer days.
Most of the poets came to the boat breakfastless, and their first move
on board was toward the little cabin on deck wherein coffee was served.
The headwaiter at the improvised breakfast table--as I inferred not less
from his look and manner than from his ostentatiously professed
ignorance of his native tongue--was an English duke in reduced
circumstances; and his assistants, I fancy, were retired French
senators. Indeed, those dignified functionaries had about them an air of
high comedy so irresistible, and so many of the ladies whom they served
were personages of the Odeon or the Comedie Francaise, that only the
smell of the coffee saved the scene from lapsing into the unrealism of
the realistic stage.
Seven o'clock came, but the _Gladiateur_ remained passive. At the
gang-plank were assembled the responsible heads of the expedition--who
were anything but passive. They all were talking at once, and all were
engaged in making gestures expressive of an important member of the
party who had been especially charged to be on hand in ample time; who
had outraged every moral principle by failing to keep his appointment;
whose whereabouts could not be even remotely surmised; whose absence was
the equivalent of ruin and despair--a far less complex series of
concepts, I may add, than a southern Frenchman is capable of expressing
with his head and his body and his hands.
It was the pianist.
A grave Majoral, reaching down to the kernel of the matter, solved the
difficulty with the question: "Have we the piano?"
"We have."
"Enough!" cried the Majoral. "Let us go."
In a moment the gang-plank was drawn aboard; the lines were cast off;
the great paddle-wheels began to turn; the swift current laid hold upon
us--and the _Gladiateur_, slipping away from the bank, headed for the
channel-arch of the Pont-du-Midi. The bridge was thronged with our
friends of Lyons come down to say good-bye to us. Above the parapet
their heads cut sharp against the morning glitter of the sun-bright sky.
All together they cheered us as we, also cheering, shot beneath them:
and then the bridge, half hidden in the cloud of smoke from our huge
funnel, was behind us--and our voyage was begun.