Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What
went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of
its own. I found a board, commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
francs ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.' Some
of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh;
while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to
the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.
The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not
ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much
interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to
them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
counselled me warmly to summon him at law--'because I might have died.'
The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
uncreamed milk.
'You will do yourself an evil,' she said. 'Permit me to boil it for
you.'
After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest daughter
let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my convenience. Here I
wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an omelette before I left. The
table was thick with dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except
in winter weather. I had a clear look up the vent, through brown
agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a
handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched by the
blaze.
The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. 'You will have
to change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two parts, and then
you might have double the weight.'
I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.
'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her greatly
on the march. Look.'
Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started,
and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some
misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I
own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil
was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few
necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
should have to carry Modestine. AEsop was the man to know the world! I
assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so
rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc;
and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the
world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse;
cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.
A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the
road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my
much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go
anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to
move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down
off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite
underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life,
and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that
must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out
of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to
occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who
can annoy himself about the future?
I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks
alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was black
or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which
pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall
white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty
quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through this
sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size,
which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais. The
weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but
the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly
splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.
Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and
river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old
castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But the
inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with
clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four
yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its
array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a
kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or
noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a
handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun.
Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one of these,
lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance
all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time
to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great
wood.