I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early springtime, when
it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable violets peep from among
the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit down to dinner,
and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your knees, for the
nights are chill, and the salle-à-manger opens on the court. There is
less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the forest is more
itself. It is not bedotted with artists’ sunshades as with unknown
mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English picnics. The hunting
still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes since,
‘_à fond de train_, _monsieur_, _et avec douze pipuers_.’
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country, each
of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together and
mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of
leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little
ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green; and, dotted
among the pines, or standing by themselves in rocky clearings, the
delicate, snow-white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow-white
branches yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze
of twigs. And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright
sand-breaks between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and
brown heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later
year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow,
tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight
set in purple heather. The loveliness of the woods in March is not,
assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain of
salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting of bitter
ale; you acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And
the wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the while by
voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart
tinkling to a new tune—or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in
your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges you into
many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest. It is as if
the whole wood were full of friendly voice, calling you farther in, and
you turn from one side to another, like Buridan’s donkey, in a maze of
pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches, barred
with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty
oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; thence the tall
shaft climbs upwards, and the great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out
into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying and calling. On
the sward of the Bois d’Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread
arms, like fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and
the sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts of
young wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with
fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in the
thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with years and the
rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are sown
and carried away again by the light air—like thistledown. The loneliness
of these coverts is so excessive, that there are moments when pleasure
draws to the verge of fear. You listen and listen for some noise to
break the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the
strain; your sense of your own identity is troubled; your brain reels,
like that of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles;
and should you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything
of yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.
Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always unbroken.
You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes
briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with a long steady rush,
like the breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at band, the branches
move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart.
Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird
gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may
time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman’s axe.
From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by; and
from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet
and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of the
woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear
suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit
past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in
green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; and then, out of the
thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds
are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through
the clearings, and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you,
where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot,
and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a
vague excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few
people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying their
axes steadily, and old women and children gathering wood for the fire.
You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight: the old woman
laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a long branch
behind them in her wake. That is the worst of what there is to
encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure
was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat
grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here
be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much hesitation,
and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green pine-tops, in a
remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders. He drew near
warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an open. The
old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire. The
eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing out
notes on a key-bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the neighbourhood
picking violets. And the whole party as grave and silent as the woods
around them! My friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held
their peace; not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out
single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows. They took
no notice whatever of my friend’s presence, which was disquieting in
itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole party to mechanical
waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might have played the
bugle with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as this hypothesis
of his became more certain, the awful insolubility of why they should be
left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them up again when they
ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became
too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his
heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever
transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata; or it
may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is all
another chapter of Heine’s ‘Gods in Exile’; that the upright old man with
the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the young dragoon with
the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.