MARIENBAD--A HEALTH FACTORY

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THE SIMPLE BUT SUFFICIENT REGIMEN IMPOSED ON PATIENTS IN AN AUSTRIAN

RESORT--OBSERVATIONS ON DIGESTION.

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(Contributed to the New York _Sun_, 1891)

This place is the village of Marienbad, Bohemia. It seems no very great

distance from Annecy, in Haute-Savoie, to this place--you make it in

less than thirty hours by these continental express trains--but the

changes in the scenery are great; they are quite out of proportion to

the distance covered. From Annecy by Aix to Geneva, you have blue lakes,

with bold mountains springing from their borders, and far glimpses of

snowy wastes lifted against the horizon beyond, while all about you is a

garden cultivated to the last possibility of grace and beauty--a

cultivation which doesn’t stop with the handy lower levels, but is

carried right up the sheer steeps and propped there with ribs of

masonry, and made to stay there in spite of Newton’s law. Beyond

Geneva--beyond Lausanne, at any rate--you have for a while a country

which noticeably resembles New England, and seems out of place and like

an intruder--an intruder who is wearing his every-day clothes at a

fancy-dress ball. But presently on your right, huge green mountain

ramparts rise up, and after that for hours you are absorbed in watching

the rich shadow effects which they furnish, and are only dully aware

that New England is gone and that you are flying past quaint and

unspeakable old towns and towers. Next day you have the lake of Zurich,

and presently the Rhine is swinging by you. How clean it is! How clear

it is! How blue it is! How green it is! How swift and rollicking and

insolent are its gait and style! How vivid and splendid its

colors--beautiful wreck and chaos of all the soap bubbles in the

universe! A person born on the Rhine must worship it.

I saw the blue Rhine sweep along; I heard, or seemed to hear,

The German songs we used to sing in chorus sweet and clear.

Yes, that is where his heart would be, that is where his last thoughts

would be, the “soldier of the legion” who “lay dying in Algiers.”

And by and by you are in a German region, which you discover to be quite

different from the recent Swiss lands behind you. You have a sea before

you, that is to say; the green land goes rolling away, in ocean swells,

to the horizon. And there is another new feature. Here and there at wide

intervals you have islands, hills two hundred and three hundred feet

high, of a haystack form, that rise abruptly out of the green plain, and

are wooded solidly to the top. On the top there is just room for a

ruined castle, and there it is, every time; above the summit you see the

crumbling arches and broken towers projecting.

Beyond Stuttgart, next day, you find other changes still. By and by,

approaching and leaving Nuremberg and down by Newhaus, your landscape is

humped everywhere with scattered knobs of rock, unsociable crags of a

rude, towerlike look, and thatched with grass and vines and bushes. And

now and then you have gorges, too, of a modest pattern as to size, with

precipice walls curiously carved and honeycombed by--I don’t know

what--but water, no doubt.

The changes are not done yet, for the instant the country finds it is

out of Württemberg and into Bavaria it discards one more thickness of

soil to go with previous disrobings, and then nothing remains over the

bones but the shift. There may be a poorer soil somewhere, but it is not

likely.

A couple of hours from Bayreuth you cross into Bohemia, and before long

you reach this Marienbad, and recognize another sharp change, the change

from the long ago to to-day; that is to say from the very old to the

spick and span new; from an architecture totally without shapeliness or

ornament to an architecture attractively equipped with both; from

universal dismalness as to color to universal brightness and beauty as

to tint; from a town which seems made up of prisons to a town which is

made up of gracious and graceful mansions proper to the light of heart

and crimeless. It is like jumping out of Jerusalem into Chicago.

The more I think of these many changes, the more surprising the thing

seems. I have never made so picturesque a journey before, and there

cannot be another trip of like length in the world that can furnish so

much variety and of so charming and interesting a sort.

There are only two or three streets here in this snug pocket in the

hemlock hills, but they are handsome. When you stand at the foot of a

street and look up at the slant of it you see only block fronts of

graceful pattern, with happily broken lines and the pleasant accent of

bay projections and balconies in orderly disorder and harmonious

confusion, and always the color is fresh and cheery, various shades of

cream, with softly contrasting trimmings of white, and now and then a

touch of dim red. These blocks are all thick walled, solid, massive,

tall for this Europe; but it is the brightest and newest looking town on

the Continent, and as pretty as anybody could require. The steep hills

spring high aloft from their very back doors and are clothed densely to

their tops with hemlocks.

In Bavaria everybody is in uniform, and you wonder where the private

citizens are, but here in Bohemia the uniforms are very rare.

Occasionally one catches a glimpse of an Austrian officer, but it is

only occasionally. Uniforms are so scarce that we seem to be in a

republic. Almost the only striking figure is the Polish Jew. He is very

frequent. He is tall and of grave countenance and wears a coat that

reaches to his ankle bones, and he has a little wee curl or two in front

of each ear. He has a prosperous look, and seems to be as much respected

as anybody.

The crowds that drift along the promenade at music time twice a day are

fashionably dressed after the Parisian pattern, and they look a good

deal alike, but they speak a lot of languages which you have not

encountered before, and no ignorant person can spell their names, and

they can’t pronounce them themselves.

Marienbad--Mary’s Bath. The Mary is the Virgin. She is the patroness of

these curative springs. They try to cure everything--gout, rheumatism,

leanness, fatness, dyspepsia, and all the rest. The whole thing is the

property of a convent, and has been for six or seven hundred years.

However, there was never a boom here until a quarter of a century ago.

If a person has the gout, this is what they do with him: they have him

out at 5.30 in the morning, and give him an egg and let him look at a

cup of tea. At six he must be at his particular spring, with his tumbler

hanging at his belt--and he will have plenty of company there. At the

first note of the orchestra he must lift his tumbler and begin to sip

his dreadful water with the rest. He must sip slowly and be a long time

at it. Then he must tramp about the hills for an hour or so, and get all

the exercise and fresh air possible. Then he takes his tub or wallows in

his mud, if mud baths are his sort. By noon he has a fine appetite, and

the rules allow him to turn himself loose and satisfy it, so long as he

is careful and eats only such things as he doesn’t want. He puts in the

afternoon walking the hills and filling up with fresh air. At night he

is allowed to take three ounces of any kind of food he doesn’t like and

drink one glass of any kind of liquor that he has a prejudice against;

he may also smoke one pipe if he isn’t used to it. At half past nine

sharp he must be in bed and his candle out. Repeat the whole thing the

next day. I don’t see any advantage in this over having the gout.

In the case of most diseases that is about what one is required to

undergo, and if you have any pleasant habit that you value, they want

that. They want that the first thing. They make you drop everything that

gives an interest to life. Their idea is to reverse your whole system of

existence and make a regenerating revolution. If you are a Republican,

they make you talk free trade. If you are a Democrat they make you talk

protection; if you are a Prohibitionist, you have got to go to bed drunk

every night till you get well. They spare nothing, they spare nobody.

Reform, reform, that is the whole song. If a person is an orator, they

gag him; if he likes to read, they won’t let him; if he wants to sing,

they make him whistle. They say they can cure any ailment, and they do

seem to do it; but why should a patient come all the way here? Why

shouldn’t he do these things at home and save the money? No disease

would stay with a person who treated it like that.

I didn’t come here to take baths, I only came to look around. But first

one person, then another began to throw out hints, and pretty soon I was

a good deal concerned about myself. One of these goutees here said I had

a gouty look about the eye; next a person who has catarrh of the

intestines asked me if I didn’t notice a dim sort of stomach ache when I

sneezed. I hadn’t before, but I did seem to notice it then. A man that’s

here for heart disease said he wouldn’t come downstairs so fast if he

had my build and aspect. A person with an old-gold complexion said a man

died here in the mud bath last week that had a petrified liver--good

deal such a looking man as I am, and the same initials, and so on, and

so on.

Of course, there was nothing to be uneasy about, and I wasn’t what you

may call really uneasy; but I was not feeling very well--that is, not

brisk--and I went to bed. I suppose that that was not a good idea,

because then they had me. I started in at the supper end of the mill and

went through. I am said to be all right now, and free from disease, but

this does not surprise me. What I have been through in these two weeks

would free a person of pretty much everything in him that wasn’t nailed

there--any loose thing, any unattached fragment of bone, or meat or

morals, or disease, or propensities or accomplishments, or what not. And

I don’t say but that I feel well enough, I feel better than I would if I

was dead, I reckon. And, besides, they say I am going to build up now

and come right along and be all right. I am not saying anything, but I

wish I had enough of my diseases back to make me aware of myself, and

enough of my habits to make it worth while to live. To have nothing the

matter with you and no habits is pretty tame, pretty colorless. It is

just the way a saint feels, I reckon; it is at least the way he looks. I

never could stand a saint. That reminds me that you see very few priests

around here, and yet, as I have already said, this whole big enterprise

is owned and managed by a convent. The few priests one does see here are

dressed like human beings, and so there may be more of them than I

imagine. Fifteen priests dressed like these could not attract as much of

your attention as would one priest at Aix-les-Bains. You cannot pull

your eye loose from the French priest as long as he is in sight, his

dress is so fascinatingly ugly. I seem to be wandering from the subject,

but I am not. This is about the coldest place I ever saw, and the

wettest, too. This August seems like an English November to me. Rain?

Why, it seems to like to rain here. It seems to rain every time there is

a chance. You are strictly required to be out airing and exercising

whenever the sun is shining, so I hate to see the sun shining because I

hate air and exercise--duty air and duty exercise taken for medicine. It

seems ungenuine, out of season, degraded to sordid utilities, a subtle

spiritual something gone from it which one can’t describe in words,

but--don’t you understand? With that gone what is left but canned air,

canned exercise, and you don’t want it.

When the sun does shine for a few moments or a few hours these people

swarm out and flock through the streets and over the hills and through

the pine woods, and make the most of the chance, and I have flocked out,

too, on some of these occasions, but as a rule I stay in and try to get

warm.

And what is there for means, besides heavy clothing and rugs, and the

polished white tomb that stands lofty and heartless in the corner and

thinks it is a stove? Of all the creations of human insanity this thing

is the most forbidding. Whether it is heating the room or isn’t, the

impression is the same--cold indifference. You can’t tell which it is

doing without going and putting your hand on it. They burn little

handfuls of kindlings in it, no substantial wood, and no coal.

The fire burns out every fifteen minutes, and there is no way to tell

when this has happened. On these dismal days, with the rain steadily

falling, it is no better company than a corpse. A roaring hickory fire,

with the cordial flames leaping up the chimney--But I must not think of

such things, they make a person homesick. This is a most strange place

to come to get rid of disease.

That is what you think most of the time. But in the intervals, when the

sun shines and you are tramping the hills and are comparatively warm,

you get to be neutral, maybe even friendly. I went up to the

Aussichtthurm the other day. This is a tower which stands on the summit

of a steep hemlock mountain here; a tower which there isn’t the least

use for, because the view is as good at the base of it as it is at the

top of it. But Germanic people are just mad for views--they never get

enough of a view--if they owned Mount Blanc, they would build a tower on

top of it.

The roads up that mountain through that hemlock forest are hard packed

and smooth, and the grades are easy and comfortable. They are for

walkers, not for carriages. You move through steep silence and twilight,

and you seem to be in a million-columned temple; whether you look up the

hill or down it you catch glimpses of distant figures flitting without

sound, appearing and disappearing in the dim distances, among the stems

of the trees, and it is all very spectral, and solemn and impressive.

Now and then the gloom is accented and sized up to your comprehension in

a striking way; a ray of sunshine finds its way down through and

suddenly calls your attention, for where it falls, far up the hillslope

in the brown duskiness, it lays a stripe that has a glare like

lightning. The utter stillness of the forest depths, the soundless hush,

the total absence of stir or motion of any kind in leaf or branch, are

things which we have no experience of at home, and consequently no name

for in our language. At home there would be the plaint of insects and

the twittering of birds and vagrant breezes would quiver the foliage.

Here it is the stillness of death. This is what the Germans are forever

talking about, dreaming about, and despairingly trying to catch and

imprison in a poem, or a picture, or a song--they adored Waldeinsamkeit,

loneliness of the woods. But how catch it? It has not a body; it is a

spirit. We don’t talk about it in America, or dream of it, or sing about

it, because we haven’t it. Certainly there is something wonderfully

alluring about it, beguiling, dreamy, unworldly. Where the gloom is

softest and richest, and the peace and stillness deepest, far up on the

side of that hemlock mountain, a spot where Goethe used to sit and

dream, is marked by a granite obelisk, and on its side is carved this

famous poem, which is the master’s idea of Waldeinsamkeit:

Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch:

Die Vogel in schweigen in Walde.

Warte nur--Balde

Ruhest du auch.

It is raining again now. However, it was doing that before. I have been

over to the establishment and had a tub bath with two kinds of pine

juice in it. These fill the room with a pungent and most pleasant

perfume; they also turn the water to a color of ink and cover it with a

snowy suds, two or three inches deep. The bath is cool--about 75° or 80°

F., and there is a cooler shower bath after it. While waiting in the

reception room all by myself two men came in and began to talk.

Politics, literature, religion? No, their ailments. There is no other

subject here, apparently. Wherever two or three of these people are

gathered together, there you have it, every time. The first that can get

his mouth open contributes his disease and the condition of it, and the

others follow with theirs. The two men just referred to were

acquaintances, and they followed the custom. One of them was built like

a gasometer and is here to reduce his girth; the other was built like a

derrick and is here to fat up, as they express it, at this resort. They

were well satisfied with the progress they were making. The gasometer

had lost a quarter of a ton in ten days, and showed the record on his

belt with pride, and he walked briskly across the room, smiling in a

vast and luminous way, like a harvest moon, and said he couldn’t have

done that when he arrived here. He buttoned his coat around his equator

and showed how loose it was. It was pretty to see his happiness, it was

so childlike and honest. He set his feet together and leaned out over

his person and proved that he could see them. He said he hadn’t seen

them from that point before for fifteen years. He had a hand like a

boxing glove. And on one of his fingers he had just found a diamond ring

which he had missed eleven years ago.

The minute the derrick got a chance he broke in and began to tell how he

was piling on blubber right along--three-quarters of an ounce every four

days; and he was still piping away when I was sent for. I left the fat

man standing there panting and blowing, and swelling and collapsing like

a balloon, his next speech all ready and urgent for delivery.

The patients are always at that sort of thing, trying to talk one

another to death. The fat ones and the lean ones are nearly the worse at

it, but not quite; the dyspeptics are the worst. They are at it all day

and all night, and all along. They have more symptoms than all the

others put together and so there is more variety of experience, more

change of condition, more adventure, and consequently more play for the

imagination, more scope for lying, and in every way a bigger field to

talk. Go where you will, hide where you may, you cannot escape that word

liver; you overhear it constantly--in the street, in the shop, in the

theater, in the music grounds. Wherever you see two or a dozen people of

ordinary bulk talking together, you know they are talking about their

livers. When you first arrive here your new acquaintances seem sad and

hard to talk to, but pretty soon you get the lay of the land and the

hand of things, and after that you haven’t any more trouble. You look

into the dreary dull eye and softly say:

“Well, how’s your liver?”

You will see that dim eye flash up with a grateful flame, and you will

see that jaw begin to work, and you will recognize that nothing is

required of you from this out but to listen as long as you remain

conscious. After a few days you will begin to notice that out of these

people’s talk a gospel is framing itself and next you will find yourself

believing it. It is this--that a man is not what his rearing, his

schooling, his beliefs, his principles make him, he is what his liver

makes him; that with a healthy liver he will have the clear-seeing eye,

the honest heart, the sincere mind, the loving spirit, the loyal soul,

the truth and trust and faith that are based as Gibraltar is based, and

that with an unhealthy liver he must and will have the opposite of all

these, he will see nothing as it really is, he cannot trust anybody, or

believe in anything, his moral foundations are gone from under him. Now,

isn’t that interesting? I think it is.

One of the most curious things in these countries is the street manners

of the men and women. In meeting you they come straight on without

swerving a hair’s breadth from the direct line and wholly ignoring your

right to any part of the road. At the last moment you must yield up your

share of it and step aside, or there will be a collision. I noticed this

strange barbarism first in Geneva twelve years ago.

In Aix-les-Bains, where sidewalks are scarce and everybody walks in the

streets, there is plenty of room, but that is no matter; you are always

escaping collisions by mere quarter inches. A man or woman who is headed

in such a way as to cross your course presently without a collision will

actually alter his direction shade by shade and compel a collision

unless at the last instant you jump out of the way. Those folks are not

dressed as ladies and gentlemen. And they do not seem to be consciously

crowding you out of the road; they seem to be innocently and stupidly

unaware that they are doing it. But not so in Geneva. There this class,

especially the men, crowd out men, women, and girls of all rank and

raiment consciously and intentionally--crowd them off the sidewalk and

into the gutter.

There was nothing of this sort in Bayreuth. But here--well, here the

thing is astonishing. Collisions are unavoidable unless you do all the

yielding yourself. Another odd thing--here this savagery is confined to

the folk who wear the fine clothes; the others are courteous and

considerate. A big burly Comanche, with all the signs about him of

wealth and education, will tranquilly force young ladies to step off

into the gutter to avoid being run down by him. It is a mistake that

there is no bath that will cure people’s manners. But drowning would

help.

However, perhaps one can’t look for any real showy amount of delicacy of

feeling in a country where a person is brought up to contemplate without

a shudder the spectacle of women harnessed up with dogs and hauling

carts. The woman is on one side of the pole, the dog on the other, and

they bend to the work and tug and pant and strain--and the man tramps

leisurely alongside and smokes his pipe. Often the woman is old and

gray, and the man is her grandson. The Austrian national ornithological

device ought to be replaced by a grandmother harnessed to a slush cart

with a dog. This merely in the interest of fact. Heraldic fancy has been

a little too much overworked in these countries, anyway.

Lately one of those curious things happened here which justify the

felicitous extravagances of the stage and help us to accept them. A

despondent man, bankrupt, friendless, and desperate, dropped a dose of

strychnia into a bottle of whisky and went out in the dusk to find a

handy place for his purpose, which was suicide. In a lonely spot he was

stopped by a tramp, who said he would kill him if he didn’t give up his

money. Instead of jumping at the chance of getting himself killed and

thus saving himself the impropriety and annoyance of suicide, he forgot

all about his late project and attacked the tramp in a most sturdy and

valiant fashion. He made a good fight, but failed to win. The night

passed, the morning came, and he woke out of unconsciousness to find

that he had been clubbed half to death and left to perish at his

leisure. Then he reached for his bottle to add the finishing touch, but

it was gone. He pulled himself together and went limping away, and

presently came upon the tramp stretched out stone dead with the empty

bottle beside him. He had drunk the whisky and committed suicide

innocently. Now, while the man who had been cheated out of his suicide

stood there bemoaning his hard luck and wondering how he might manage to

raise money enough to buy some more whisky and poison, some people of

the neighborhood came by and he told them about his curious adventure.

They said that this tramp had been the scourge of the neighborhood and

the dread of the constabulary. The inquest passed off quietly and to

everybody’s satisfaction, and then the people, to testify their

gratitude to the hero of the occasion, put him on the police, on a

good-enough salary, and he is all right now and is not meditating

suicide any more. Here are all the elements of the naïvest Arabian tale;

a man who resists robbery when he hasn’t anything to be robbed of does

the very best to save his life when he has come out purposely to throw

it away; and finally is victorious in defeat, killing his adversary in

an effectual and poetic fashion after being already hors du combat

himself. Now if you let him rise in the service and marry the chief of

police’s daughter it has the requisite elements of the Oriental romance,

lacking not a detail so far as I can see.

DOWN THE RHÔNE

(1891)

In old times a summer sail down the Rhône was a favorite trip with

travelers. But that day is long gone by. The conveniences for the sail

disappeared many years ago--driven out of existence by the railway.

In August, 1891, I made this long-neglected voyage with a boatman and a

courier. The following account of it is part diary and part comment. The

main idea of the voyage was, not to see sights, but to rest up from

sight-seeing. There was little or nothing on the Rhône to examine or

study or write didactically about; consequently, to glide down the

stream in an open boat, moved by the current only, would afford many

days of lazy repose, with opportunity to smoke, read, doze, talk,

accumulate comfort, get fat, and all the while be out of reach of the

news and remote from the world and its concerns.

Our point of departure was to be the Castle of Châtillon on Lake

Bourget, not very far from Aix-les-Bains. I went down from Geneva by

rail on a Saturday afternoon, and reached the station nearest the castle

during the evening. I found the courier waiting for me. He had been down

in the lake region several days, hunting for a boat, engaging the

boatman, etc.

_From my log._--The luggage was given to the porters--a couple of

peasant girls of seventeen or eighteen years, and a couple of younger

ones--children, one might say, of twelve or thirteen. It consisted of

heavy satchels and holdalls, but they gathered it up and trudged away,

not seeming to mind the weight. The road was through woods and

uphill--dark and steep and long. I tried to take the heavy valise from

the smallest one, telling her I would carry it myself. She did not

understand, of course, and resisted. I tried, then, to take the bag by

gentle force. This alarmed her. The courier came and explained that she

was afraid she was going to lose the trifle of money she was earning.

The courier told her this was not the case, but she looked doubtful and

concluded to hang on to a sure thing.

“How much is it she’s going to get?”

“She will charge about half a franc.”

“Then pay her _now_, and she’ll give up the bag.”

But that scheme failed, too. The child hung to the bag and seemed

distressed. No explanation could be got out of her, but one of the other

girls said the child was afraid that if she gave it up, the fact would

be used against her with tourists as proof that she was not strong

enough to carry their luggage for them, and so she would lose chances to

get work.

By and by the winding road carried us by an open space where we could

see very well--see the ruins of a burned-out little hamlet of the

humblest sort--stone walls with empty window holes, narrow alleys

cluttered with wreckage and fallen thatch, etc. Our girls were eager to

have us stop and view this wonder, the result of the only conflagration

they had ever seen, the only large event that had ever accented their

monotonous lives. It had happened a couple of months before, and the

villagers had lost everything, even to their stockings of savings, and

were too poor to rebuild their houses. A young woman, an old one, and

all the horses had been burned to death; the young girls said they could

take us among the ruins and show us the very spot.

We finally came out on the top of the hill, and there stood the castle,

a rather picturesque old stack of masonry with a walled yard about it

and an odd old stumpy tower in a corner of the yard handsomely clothed

in vines. The castle is a private residence, whose owner leaves it in

charge of his housekeeper and some menservants, and lives in Lyons

except when he wants to fish or shoot.

The courier had engaged rooms, but the fact had probably been forgotten,

for we had trouble in rousing the garrison. It was getting late and they

were asleep. Eventually a man unlocked and unbarred the door and led us

up a winding stair of heavy and very plain stonework. My bed was higher

from the floor than necessary. This is apparently the rule in old French

houses of the interior. But there is a stepladder.

In the morning I looked out of my window and saw the tops of trees below

me, thick and beautiful foliage, and below the trees was the bright blue

water of the lake shining in the sun. The window seemed to be about two

hundred feet above the water. An airy and inspiring situation, indeed. A

pope was born in that room a couple of centuries ago. I forget his name.

In that old day they built for utility, this was evident.

Everything--floors, sashes, shutters, beams, joists--were cheap, coarse,

ornamentless, but everlastingly solid and substantial. On the wall hung

an indication of the politics of the present owner. This was a small

photograph with “Philippe Comte de Paris” written under it.

The castle was ancient, in its way, but over the door of one of its

rooms there was a picture set in a frame whose profound antiquity made

all its surroundings seem modern and fresh. This frame was of good firm

oak, as black as a coal, and had once been part of a lake-dweller’s

house. It was already a thing of antiquity when the Romans were planting

colonies in France before the time of Christ. The remains of a number of

lake villages have been dug out of the mud of Lake Bourget.

Breakfast was served in the open air on a precipice in a little arbor

sheltered by vines, with glimpses through the tree tops of the blue

water far below, and with also a wide prospect of mountain scenery. The

coffee was the best I ever drank in Europe.

Presently there was a bugle blast from somewhere about the

battlements--a fine Middle Age effect--and after a moment it was

answered from the further shore of the lake, and we saw a boat put out

from that shore. It was ours. We were soon on board and away.

It was a roomy, long flatboat, very light and easy to manage--easy to

manage because its sides tapered a little toward both ends, and both

ends curved up free from the water and made the steering prompt and

easy. The rear half was sheltered from sun and rain by a temporary (and

removable) canopy stretched over hoop-pole arches, after the fashion of

the old-time wagon covers of the emigrants to California. We at once

rolled the sides of the canopy high up, so that we might have the breeze

and a free view on every hand.

On the other side of the lake we entered a narrow canal, and here we had

our last glimpse of that picturesque Châtillon perched on its high

promontory. The sides of the canal were walled with vines heavily laden

with black grapes. The vine leaves were white with the stuff which is

squirted on them from a thing like a fire extinguisher to kill the

calamitous phylloxera. We saw only one living creature for the first

lonely mile--a man with his extinguisher strapped on his back and hard

at his deadly work. I asked our admiral, Joseph Rougier, of the village

of Chanaz, if it would be a good idea to offer to sell this Sabbath

breaker a few choice samples of foreign phylloxera, and he said yes, if

one wanted to play the star part in an inquest.

At last two women and a man strolling churchward in their Sunday best

gave us a courteous hail and walked briskly along abreast of us, plying

the courier and the sailor with eager questions about our curious and

unaccountable project, and by the time they had got their fill and

dropped astern to digest the matter and finish wondering over it, we

were serene again and busy discussing the scenery; for now there was

really some scenery to look at, of a mild but pleasant type--low

precipices, a country road shaded by large trees, a few cozy thatched

cabins scattered along, and now and then an irruption of joyous children

who flocked to inspect us and admire, followed by friendly dogs who

stood and barked at us, but wagged their tails to say no offense was

intended.

Soon the precipice grew bolder, and presently Chanaz came in sight and

the canal bore us along its front--along its street, for it had only

one. We stepped ashore. There was a roll of distant drums, and soon a

company or two of French infantry came marching by. All the citizens

were out, and every male took off his hat politely as the soldiers moved

past him, and this salute was always returned by the officers.

I wanted envelopes, wine, grapes, and postage stamps, and was directed

to a stone stairway and told to go up one flight. Up there I found a

small well-smoked kitchen paved with worn-out bricks, with pots and pans

hanging about the walls, and a bent and humped woman of seventy cooking

a very frugal dinner. The tiredest dog I have seen this year lay asleep

under the stove, in a roasting heat, an incredible heat, a heat that

would have pulled a remark of the Hebrew children; but the dog slept

along with perfect serenity and did not seem to know that there was

anything the matter with the weather. The old woman set off her coffee

pot. Next she removed her pork chop to the table; it seemed to me that

this was premature--the dog was better done.

We asked for the envelopes and things; she motioned us to the left with

her ladle. We passed through a door and found ourselves in the smallest

wholesale and retail commercial house in the world, I suppose. The place

was not more than nine feet square. The proprietor was polite and

cheerful enough for a place five or six times as large. He was weighing

out two ounces of parched coffee for a little girl, and when the

balances came level at last he took off a light bean and put on a

heavier one in the handsomest way and then tied up the purchase in a

piece of paper and handed it to the child with as nice a bow as one

would see anywhere. In that shop he had a couple of bushels of wooden

shoes--a dollar’s worth, altogether, perhaps--but he had no other

articles in such lavish profusion. Yet he had a pound or so or a

dipperful of any kind of thing a person might want. You couldn’t buy two

things of a kind there, but you could buy one of any and every kind. It

was a useful shop, and a sufficient one, no doubt, yet its contents

could not have cost more than ten dollars. Here was home on a small

scale, but everything comfortable, no haggard looks visible, no

financial distress apparent. I got all the things I came for except

double-postage stamps for foreign service; I had to take domestic stamps

instead. The merchant said he kept a double-stamp in stock a couple of

years, but there was no market for it, so he sent it back to Paris,

because it was eating up its insurance. A careful man and thrifty; and

of such is the commonwealth of France.

We got some hot fried fish in Chanaz and took them aboard and cleared

out. With grapes and claret and bread they made a satisfactory luncheon.

We paddled a hundred yards, turned a rock corner, and here was the

furious gray current of the Rhône just a-whistling by! We crept into it

from the narrow canal, and laid in the oars. The floating was begun. One

needs no oar-help in a current like that. The shore seemed to fairly

spin past. Where the current assaults the heavy stone barriers thrown

out from the shores to protect the banks, it makes a break like the

break of a steamboat, and you can hear the roar a couple of hundred

yards off.

The river where we entered it was about a hundred yards wide, and very

deep. The water was at medium stage. The Rhône is not a very long

river--six hundred miles--but it carries a bigger mass of water to the

sea than any other French stream.

For the first few miles we had lonely shores--hardly ever a house. On

the left bank we had high precipices and domed hills; right bank low and

wooded.

At one point in the face of a precipice we saw a great cross (carved out

of the living rock, the Admiral said) forty feet above the carriage

road, where a doctor has had his tomb scooped in the rock and lies in

there safe from his surviving patients--if any.

At 1.25 P.M. we passed the slumbrous village of Massigneux de Rive on

the right and the ditto village of Huissier on the left (in Savoie). We

had to take all names by sound from the Admiral; he said nobody could

spell them. There was a ferry at the former village. A wire is stretched

across the river high overhead; along this runs a wheel which has ropes

leading down and made fast to the ferryboat in such a way that the

boat’s head is held farther upstream than its stern. This angle enables

the current to drive the boat across, and no other motive force is

needed. This would be a good thing on minor rivers in America.

2.10 P.M.--It is delightfully cool, breezy, shady (under the canopy),

and still. Much smoking and lazy reflecting. There is no sound but the

rippling of the current and the moaning of far-off breaks, except that

now and then the Admiral dips a screechy oar to change the course half a

point. In the distance one catches the faint singing and laughter of

playing children or the softened note of a church bell or town clock.

But the reposeful stillness--that is the charm--and the smooth swift

gliding--and the fresh, clear, lively, gray-green water. There was such

a rush, and boom, and life, and confusion, and activity in Geneva

yesterday--how remote all that seems now, how wholly vanished away and

gone out of this world!

2.15.--Village of Yenne. Iron suspension bridge. On the heights back of

the town a chapel with a tower like a thimble, and a very tall white

Virgin standing on it.

2.25.--Precipices on both sides now. River narrow--sixty yards.

2.30.--Immense precipice on right bank, with groups of buildings (Pierre

Châtel) planted on the very edge of it. In its near neighborhood a

massive and picturesque fortification.

All this narrow gut from the bridge down to the next bridge--a mile or

two--is picturesque with its frowning high walls of rock.

In the face of the precipice above the second bridge sits a painted

house on a rock bench--a chapel, we think, but the Admiral says it is

for the storage of wine.

More fortifications at the corner where the river turns--no cannon, but

narrow slits for musketry commanding the river. Also narrow slits in the

solid (hollowed-out) precipice. Perhaps there is no need of cannon here

where you can throw a biscuit across from precipice to precipice.

2.45.--Below that second bridge. On top of the bluffs more

fortifications. Low banks on both sides here.

2.50.--Now both sets of fortifications show up, look huge and

formidable, and are finely grouped. Through the glass they seem deserted

and falling to ruin. Out of date, perhaps.

One will observe, by these paragraphs, that the Rhône is swift enough to

keep one’s view changing with a very pleasant alacrity.

At midafternoon we passed a steep and lofty bluff--right bank--which was

crowned with the moldering ruins of a castle overgrown with trees. A

relic of Roman times, the Admiral said. Name? No, he didn’t know any

name for it. Had it a history? Perhaps; he didn’t know. Wasn’t there

even a legend connected with it? He didn’t know of any.

Not even a legend. One’s first impulse was to be irritated; whereas one

should be merely thankful; for if there is one sort of invention in this

world that is flatter than another, it is the average folklore legend.

It could probably be proven that even the adventures of the saints in

the Roman calendar are not of a lower grade as works of the inventor’s

art.

The dreamy repose, the infinite peace of these tranquil shores, this

Sabbath stillness, this noiseless motion, this strange absence of the

sense of sin, and the stranger absence of the desire to commit it--this

was the perfectest day the year had brought! Now and then we slipped

past low shores with grassy banks. A solitary thatched cottage close to

the edge, one or two big trees with dense foliage sheltering the

cottage, and the family in their Sunday, clothes grouped in the deep

shade, chatting, smoking, knitting, the dogs asleep about their feet,

the kittens helping with the knitting, and all hands content and

praising God without knowing it. We always got a friendly word of

greeting and returned it. One of these families contained eighteen sons,

and all were present. The Admiral was acquainted with everybody along

the banks, and with all the domestic histories, notwithstanding he was

so ineffectual on old Roman matters.

4.20.--Bronze statue of the Virgin on a sterile hill slope.

4.45.--Ruined Roman tower on a bluff. Belongs to the no-name series.

5.--Some more Roman ruins in the distance.

At 6 o’clock we rounded to. We stepped ashore in a woodsy and lonely

place and walked a short mile through a country lane to the sizable and

rather modern-looking village of St.-Genix. Part of the way we followed

another pleasure party--six or eight little children riding aloft on a

mountain of fragrant hay. This is the earliest form of the human

pleasure excursion, and for utter joy and perfect contentment it stands

alone in a man’s threescore years and ten; all that come after it have

flaws, but this has none.

We put up at the Hôtel Labully, in the little square where the church

stands. Satisfactory dinner. Later I took a twilight tramp along the

high banks of a moist ditch called the Guires River. If it was my river

I wouldn’t leave it outdoors nights, in this careless way, where any dog

can come along and lap it up. It is a tributary of the Rhône when it is

in better health.

It became dark while we were on our way back, and then the bicyclers

gave us many a sudden chill. They never furnished us an early warning,

but delivered the paralyzing shock of their rubber-horn hoot right at

our shoulder blades and then flashed spectrally by on their soundless

wheels and floated into the depths of the darkness and vanished from

sight before a body could collect his remark and get it out. Sometimes

they get shot. This is right.

I went to my room, No. 16. The floor was bare, which is the rule down

the Rhône. Its planks were light colored, and had been smoothed by use

rather than art; they had conspicuous black knots in them. The usual

high and narrow bed was there, with the usual little marble-topped

commode by the head of it and the usual strip of foot carpet alongside,

where you climb in. The wall paper was dark--which is usual on the

Continent; even in the northern regions of Germany, where the daylight

in winter is of such poor quality that they don’t even tax it now.

When I woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and raining hard, so I

stayed in bed and had my breakfast and a ripe old Paris paper of last

week brought up. It was a good breakfast--one often gets that; and a

liberal one--one seldom gets that. There was a big bowl for the coffee

instead of a stingy cup which has to be refilled just as you are getting

interested in it; there was a quart of coffee in the pot instead of a

scant half pint; instead of the usual hollow curl of brittle butter

which evades you when you try to scoop it on to the knife and crumbles

when you try to carve it, there was a solid cream-colored lump as big as

a brick; there was abundance of hot milk, and there was also the usual

ostensible cream of Europe. There _must_ be cream in Europe somewhere,

but it is not in the cows; they have been examined.

The rain continued to pour until noon, then the sun burst out and we

were soon up and filing through the village. By the time we had tramped

our mile and pushed out into the stream, the watches marked 1.10 and the

day was brilliant and perfect.

Over on the right were ruins of two castles, one of them of some size.

We passed under a suspension bridge; alongside of it was an iron bridge

of a later pattern. Near by was a little steamer lying at the bank with

no signs of life about her--the first boat, except ferryboats,

encountered since we had entered the Rhône. A lonely river, truly.

We drifted past lofty highlands, but there was nothing inspiring about

them. In Switzerland the velvet heights are sprinkled with homes clear

to the clouds, but these hills were sterile, desolate, gray, melancholy,

and so thin was the skin on them that the rocky bones showed through in

places.

1.30.--We seem lost in the intricate channels of an archipelago of flat

islands covered with bushes.

1.50.--We whirl around a corner into open river again, and observe that

a vast bank of leaden clouds is piling itself up on the horizon; the

tint thrown upon the distant stretches of water is rich and fine.

The river is wide now--a hundred and fifty yards--and without islands.

Suddenly it has become nearly currentless and is like a lake. The

Admiral explains that from this point for nine miles it is called L’Eau

Morte--Dead Water.

The region is not entirely barren of life, it seems--solitary woman

paddling a punt across the wide still pool.

The boat moved, but that is about all one could say. It was indolent

progress; still, it was comfortable. There were flaming sunshine behind

and that rich thunder gloom ahead, and now and then the fitful fanning

of a pleasant breeze.

A woman paddled across--a rather young woman with a face like the “Mona

Lisa.” I had seen the “Mona Lisa” only a little while before, and stood

two hours in front of that painting, repeating to myself: “People come

from around the globe to stand here and worship. What is it they find in

it?” To me it was merely a serene and subdued face, and there an end.

There might be more in it, but I could not find it. The complexion was

bad; in fact, it was not even human; there are no people of that color.

I finally concluded that maybe others still saw in the picture faded and

vanished marvels which _had_ been there once and were now forever

vanished.

Then I remembered something told me once by Noel Flagg,[3] the artist.

There was a time, he said, when he wasn’t yet an artist but thought he

was. His pictures sold, and gave satisfaction, and that seemed a

good-enough verdict. One day he was daubing away in his studio and

feeling good and inspired, when Dr. Horace Bushnell, that noble old

Roman, straggled in there without an invitation and fastened that deep

eye of his on the canvas. The youth was proud enough of such a call, and

glad there was something on the easel that was worthy of it. After a

long look the great divine said:

“You have talent, boy.” (That sounded good.) “What you want is

teaching.”

Teaching--he, an accepted and competent artist! He didn’t like that.

After another long look:

“Do you know the higher mathematics?”

“I? No, sir.”

“You must acquire them.”

“As a proper part of an artist’s training?” This with veiled irony.

“As an _essential_ part of it. Do you know anatomy?”

“No, sir.”

“You must learn how to dissect a body. What are you studying,

now--principally?”

“Nothing, I believe.”

“And the time flying, the time flying! Where are your books? What do you

read?”

“There they are, on the shelves.”

“I see. Poetry and romance. They must wait. Get to your mathematics and

your anatomy right away. Another point: you must train your eye--you

must teach yourself to see.”

“Teach myself to see? I believe I was born with that ability.”

“But nobody is born with a _trained_ ability--nobody. A cow sees--she

sees all the outsides of things, no doubt, but it is only the trained

eye that sees deeper, sees the soul of them, the meaning of them, the

spiritual essence. Are you sure that you see more than the cow sees? You

must go to Paris. You will never learn to see here. There they’ll teach

you; there they’ll train you; there they’ll work you like a slave; there

they’ll bring out the talent that’s in you. Be off! Don’t twaddle here

any longer!”

Flagg thought it over and resolved that the advice was worth taking. He

and his brother cleared for Paris. They put in their first afternoon

there scoffing at the works of the old masters in the Louvre. They

laughed at themselves for crossing a wide ocean to learn what masterly

painting might be by staring at these odious things. As for the “Mona

Lisa,” they exhausted their treasure of wit in making fun of it.

Next day they put themselves into the hands of the Beaux Arts people,

and that was the end of play. They had to start at the very bottom of

their trade and learn it over again, detail by detail, and learn it

_right_, this time. They slaved away, night and day for three months,

and wore themselves to shadows. Then they had a day off, and drifted

into the Louvre. Neither said a word for some time; each disliked to

begin; but at last, in front of the “Mona Lisa,” after standing mute

awhile one of them said:

“Speak out. Say it.”

“Say it yourself.”

“Well, then, we _were_ cows before!”

“Yes--it’s the right name for it. That is what we were. It is

unbelievable, the change that has come over these pictures in three

months. It is the difference between a landscape in the twilight and the

same landscape in the daytime.” Then they fell into each other’s arms.

This all came back to me, now, as I saw this living “Mona Lisa” punting

across L’Eau Morte.

2.40 P.M.--Made for a village on the right bank with all speed--Port de

Groslee. Remains of Roman aqueduct on hilltop back of village.

Rain!--Deluges of it. Took refuge in an inn on the bank--Hôtel des

Voyageurs. The public room was full of voyageurs and tobacco smoke. The

voyageurs may have been river folk in the old times when the inn was

built, but this present crowd was made up of teamsters. They sat at bare

tables, under their feet was the bare floor, about them were the four

bare walls--a dreary place at any time, a heart-breaking place now in

the dark of the downpour. However, it was manifestly not dreary to the

teamsters. They were sipping red wine and smoking; they all talked at

once, and with great energy and spirit, and every now and then they gave

their thighs a sounding slap and burst into a general horse laugh. The

courier said that this was in response to rude wit and coarse anecdotes.

The brace of modest-looking girls who were waiting on the teamsters did

not seem troubled. The courier said that they were used to all kinds of

language and were not defiled by it; that they had probably seldom heard

a spade called anything but a spade, therefore the foulest words came

innocent to their ears.

This inn was built of stone--of course; everybody’s house on the

Continent, from palace to hovel, is built of that dismal material, and

as a rule it is as square as a box and odiously plain and destitute of

ornament; it is formal, forbidding, and breeds melancholy thoughts in

people used to friendlier and more perishable materials of construction.

The frame house and the log house molder and pass away, even in the

builder’s time, and this makes a proper bond of sympathy and fellowship

between the man and his home; but the stone house remains always the

same to the person born in it; in his old age it is still as hard, and

indifferent, and unaffected by time as it was in the long-vanished days

of his childhood. The other kind of house shows by many touching signs

that it has noted his griefs and misfortunes and has felt for them, but

the stone house doesn’t--it is not of his evanescent race, it has no

kinship with him, nor any interest in him.

A professional letter writer happened along presently, and one of the

young girls got him to write a letter for her. It seemed strange that

she could not write it herself. The courier said that the peasant women

of the Rhône do not care for education, but only for religion; that they

are all good Catholics, and that their main ambition in life is to see

the Rhône’s long procession of stone and bronze Virgins added to, until

the river shall be staked out with them from end to end; and that their

main pleasure in life is to contribute from their scant centimes to this

gracious and elevating work. He says it is a quite new caprice; that ten

years ago there was not a Virgin in this part of France at all, and

never had been. This may be true, and, of course, there is nothing

unreasonable about it, but I have already found out that the courier’s

statements are not always exact.

I had a hot fried fish and coffee in a garden shed roofed with a mat of

vines, but the rain came through in streams and I got drenched in spite

of our umbrellas, for one cannot manage table implements and umbrellas

all at the same time with anything like good success.

_Mem._--Last evening, for economy’s sake, proposed to be a Frenchman

because Americans and English are always overcharged. Courier said it

wouldn’t deceive unless I played myself for a deaf-and-dumb

Frenchman--which I did, and so the rooms were only a franc and a half

each. But the Admiral must have let it out that I was only deaf and dumb

in French, for prices were raised in the bill this morning.

4.10 P.M.--Left Port de Groslee.

4.50 P.M.--Château of the Count Cassiloa--or something like that--the

Admiral’s pronunciation is elusive. Courier guesses the spelling at

“Quintionat.” I don’t quite see the resemblance. This courier’s

confidence in himself is a valuable talent. He must be descended from

the idiot who taught our forefathers to spell tizzik with a _ph_ and a

_th_.

The river here is as still and smooth and nearly as dead as a lake. The

water is swirly, though, and consequently makes uneasy steering.

River seems to draw together and greatly narrow itself below the count’s

house. No doubt the current will smarten up there.

Three new quarries along here. Dear me! how little there is in the way

of sight-seeing, when a quarry is an event! Remarked upon with

contentment.

Swept through the narrow canallike place with a good current.

On the left-hand point below, bush-grown ruins of an ancient convent

(St. Alban’s), picturesquely situated on a low bluff. There is a higher

and handsomer bluff a trifle lower down. How did they overlook it? Those

people generally went for the best, not second best. Shapely hole in

latter bluff one hundred feet above the water--anchorite’s nest?

Interesting-looking hole, and would have cost but little time and

trouble to examine it, but it was not done. It is no matter; one can

find other holes.

At last, below bluffs, we find some greensward--not extensive, but a

pleasant novelty.

5.30.--Lovely sunset. Mottled clouds richly painted by sinking sun, and

fleecy shreds of clouds drifting along the fronts of neighboring blue

mountains. Harrow in a field. Apparently harrow, but was distant and

could not tell; could have been a horse.

5.35.--Very large gray broken-arched and unusually picturesque ruin

crowning a hilltop on right. Name unknown. This is a liberal mile above

village of Briord (my spelling--the Admiral’s pronunciation), on same

side. Passed the village swiftly, and left it behind. The villagers came

out and made fun of our strange tub. The dogs chased us and were more

noisy than necessary.

6 P.M.--Another suspension bridge--this is the sixth one. They have

ceased to interest. There was nothing exciting about them, from the

start. Presently landed on left bank and shored the boat for the night.

Hôtel du Rhône Moine. Isolated. Situated right on the bank. Sort of a

village--villagette, to be exact--a little back. Hôtel is two stories

high and not pretentious--family dwelling and cow stable all under one

roof.

I had been longing to have personal experience of peasant life--be “on

the inside” and see it for myself, instead of at second hand in books.

This was an opportunity and I was excited about it and glad. The kitchen

was not clean, but it was a sociable place, and the family were kind and

full of good will. There were three little children, a young girl,

father, mother, grandparents, some dogs, and a plurality of cats. There

was no discord; perfect harmony prevailed.

Our table was placed on the lawn on the river bank. One had no right to

expect any finer style here than he would find in the cheapest and

shabbiest little tavern in America, for the Hôtel du Rhône Moine was for

foot wanderers and laborers on the flatboats that convey stone and sand

and wood to Lyons, yet the style _was_ superior--very much so. The

tablecloth was white, and it and the table furniture were perfectly

clean. We had a fish of a pretty coarse grain, but it was fresh from the

river and hot from the pan; the bread was good, there was abundance of

excellent butter, the milk was rich and pure, the sugar was white, the

coffee was considerably better than that which is furnished by the

choice hotels of the capitals of the Continent. Thus far, peasant life

was a disappointment, it was so much better than anything we were used

to at home in some respects. Two of the dogs came out, presently, and

sat down by the table and rested their chins on it, and so remained. It

was not to beg, for they showed no interest in the supper; they were

merely there to be friendly, it was the only idea they had. A squadron

of cats came out by and by and sat down in the neighborhood and looked

me over languidly, then wandered away without passion, in fact with what

looked like studied indifference. Even the cats and the dogs are well

and sufficiently fed at the Hôtel du Rhône Moine--their dumb testimony

was as good as speech.

I went to bed early. It is inside the house, not outside, that one

really finds the peasant life. Our rooms were over the stable, and this

was not an advantage. The cows and horses were not very quiet, the smell

was extraordinary, the fleas were a disorderly lot, and these things

helped the coffee to keep one awake. The family went to bed at nine and

got up at two. The beds were very high; one could not climb into them

without the help of a chair; and as they were narrow and arched, there

was danger of rolling out in case one drifted into dreams of an

imprudent sort. These lofty bedsteads were not high from caprice, but

for a purpose--they contained chests of drawers, and the drawers were

full of clothing and other family property. On the table in my room were

some bright-colored, even gorgeous little waxen saints and a Virgin

under bell-glasses; also the treasures of the house--jewelry and a

silver watch. It was not costly jewelry, but it was jewelry, at any

rate, and without doubt the family valued it. I judged that this

household were accustomed to having honest guests and neighbors or they

would have removed these things from the room when I entered it, for I

do not look honester than others.

Not that I have always thought in this way about myself, for I haven’t.

I thought the reverse until the time I lost my overcoat, once, when I

was going down to New York to see the Water Color exhibition, and had a

sort of adventure in consequence. The house had been robbed in the

night, and when I came downstairs to rush for the early train there was

no overcoat. It was a raw day, and when I got to New York at noon I grew

colder and colder as I walked along down the Avenue. When I reached East

Thirty-fourth street I stopped on the corner and began to consider. It

seemed to me that it must have been just about there that Smith,[4] the

artist, took me one winter’s night, with others, five years before, and

caroused us with roasted oysters and Southern stories and hilarity in

his fourth story until three or four in the morning; and now if I could

only call to mind which of those houses over the way was his, I could

borrow an overcoat. All the time that I was thinking and standing there

and trying to recollect, I was dimly conscious of a figure near me, but

only dimly, very dimly; but now as I came out of my reverie and found

myself gazing, rapt but totally unconscious, at one of the houses over

there, that figure solidified itself and became at once the most

conspicuous thing in the landscape. It was a policeman. He was standing

not six feet away, and was gazing as intently at my face as I had been

gazing at the house. I was embarrassed--it is always embarrassing to

come to yourself and find a stranger staring at you. You blush, even

when you have not been doing any harm. So I blushed--a thing that does

not commend a person to a policeman; also I tried to smile a placating

smile, but it did not get any response, so then I tried to make it a

kind of friendly smile, which was a mistake, because that only hardens a

policeman, and I saw at once that this smile had hardened this one and

made my situation more difficult than ever; and so, naturally, my

judgment being greatly impaired by now, I spoke--which was an error,

because in these circumstances one cannot arrange without reflection a

remark which will not seem to have a kind of suspicious something about

it to a policeman, and that was what happened this time; for I had

fanned up that haggard smile again, which had been dying out when I

wasn’t noticing, and said:

“Could you tell me, please, if there’s a Mr. Smith lives over there

in----”

“_What_ Smith?”

That rude abruptness drove his other name out of my mind; and as I saw I

never should be able to think of it with the policeman standing there

cowing me with his eye, that way, it seemed to me best to get out a name

of some kind, so as to avert further suspicion, therefore I brought out

the first one which came into my mind, which was John--another error.

The policeman turned purple--apparently with a sense of injury and

insult--and said there were a million John Smiths in New York, and

_which_ one was this? Also what did I want with Smith? I could not

remember--the overcoat was gone out of my mind. So I told him he was a

pupil of mine and that I was giving him lessons in morals; moral

culture--a new system.

That was a lucky hit, anyway. I was merely despicable, now, to the

policeman, but harmless--I could see it in his eye. He looked me over a

moment then said:

“You give him lessons, do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you been giving him lessons?”

“Two years, next month.” I was getting my wind again, and confidence.

“Which house does he live in?”

“That one--the middle one in the block.”

“Then what did you ask _me_ for, a minute ago?”

I did not see my way out. He waited for an answer, but got tired before

I could think of one that would fit the case and said:

“How is it that you haven’t an overcoat on, such a day as this?”

“I--well, I never wear them. It doesn’t seem cold to me.”

He thought awhile, with his eye on me, then said, with a sort of sigh:

“Well, maybe you are all right--I don’t know--but you want to walk

pretty straight while you are on my beat; for, morals or no morals,

blamed if I take much stock in you. Move on, now.”

Then he turned away, swinging his club by its string. But his eye was

over his shoulder, my way; so I had to cross to that house, though I

didn’t want to, any more. I did not expect it to be Smith’s house, now

that I was so out of luck, but I thought I would ring and ask, and if it

proved to be some one else’s house, then I would explain that I had come

to examine the gas meter and thus get out the back way and be all right

again. The door was opened by a middle-aged matron with a gentle and

friendly face, and she had a sweet serenity about her that was a notable

contrast to my nervous flurry. I asked after Smith and if he lived

there, and to my surprise and gratitude she said that this was his home.

“Can I see him? Can I see him right away--immediately?”

No; he was gone downtown. My rising hopes fell to ruin.

“Then can I see Mrs. Smith?”

But alas and alas! she was gone downtown with him. In my distress I was

suddenly smitten by one of those ghastly hysterical inspirations, you

know, when you want to do an insane thing just to astonish and petrify

somebody; so I said, with a rather overdone pretense of playful ease and

assurance:

“Ah, this is a very handsome overcoat on the hat rack--be so good as to

lend it to me for a day or two!”

“With pleasure,” she said--and she had the coat on me before I knew what

had happened. It had been my idea to astonish and petrify her, but I was

the person astonished and petrified, myself. So astonished and so

petrified, in fact, that I was out of the house and gone, without a

thank-you or a question, before I came to my senses again. Then I

drifted slowly along, reflecting--reflecting pleasantly. I said to

myself, “She simply divined my character by my face--what a far clearer

intuition she had than that policeman.” The thought sent a glow of

self-satisfaction through me.

Then a hand was laid on my shoulder and I shrank together with a crash.

It was the policeman. He scanned me austerely and said:

“Where did you get that overcoat?”

Although I had not been doing any harm, I had all the sense of being

caught--caught in something disreputable. The officer’s accusing eye and

unbelieving aspect heightened this effect. I told what had befallen me

at the house in as straightforward a way as I could, but I was ashamed

of the tale, and looked it, without doubt, for I knew and felt how

improbable it must necessarily sound to anybody, particularly a

policeman. Manifestly he did not believe me. He made me tell it all over

again, then he questioned me:

“You don’t know the woman?”

“No, I don’t know her.”

“Haven’t the least idea who she is?”

“Not the least.”

“You didn’t tell her your name?”

“No.”

“She didn’t ask for it?”

“No.”

“You just asked her to lend you the overcoat, and she let you take it?”

“She put it on me herself.”

“And didn’t look frightened?”

“Frightened? Of course not.”

“Not even surprised?”

“Not in the slightest degree.”

He paused. Presently he said:

“My friend, I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t you see, yourself, it’s

a tale that won’t wash? Do _you_ believe it?”

“Yes. I know it’s true.”

“Weren’t you surprised?”

“Clear through to the marrow!”

He had been edging me along back to the house. He had a deep design; he

sprung it on me now. Said he:

“Stop where you are. I’ll mighty soon find out!”

He walked to the door and up the steps, keeping a furtive eye out toward

me and ready to jump for me if I ran. Then he pretended to pull the

bell, and instantly faced about to observe the effect on me. But there

wasn’t any; I walked toward him instead of running away. That unsettled

him. He came down the steps, evidently perplexed, and said:

“Well, I can’t make it out. It may be all right, but it’s too many for

me. I don’t like your looks and I won’t have such characters around. Go

along, now, and look sharp. If I catch you prowling around here again

I’ll run you _in_.”

I found Smith at the Water Color dinner that night, and asked him if it

were merely my face that had enabled me to borrow the overcoat from a

stranger, but he was surprised and said:

“No! What an idea--and what intolerable conceit! She is my housekeeper,

and remembered your drawling voice from overhearing it a moment that

night four or five years ago in my house; so she knew where to send the

police if you didn’t bring the coat back!”

After all those years I was sitting here, now, at midnight in the

peasant hotel, in my night clothes, and honoring womankind in my

thoughts; for here was another woman, with the noble and delicate

intuitions of her sex, trusting me, a total stranger, with all her

modest wealth. She entered the room, just then, and stood beaming upon

me a moment with her sweet matronly eyes--then took away the jewelry.

_Tuesday, September 22d._--Breakfast in open air. Extra canvas was now

to be added to the boat’s hood to keep the passengers and valises better

protected during rainstorms. I passed through the villagette and started

to walk over the wooded hill, the boat to find us on the river bank

somewhere below, by and by. I soon got lost among the high bushes and

turnip gardens. Plenty of paths, but none went to river. Reflection.

Decision--that the path most traveled was the one leading in the right

direction. It was a poor conclusion. I got lost again; this time worse

than before. But a peasant of above eighty (as she said, and certainly

she was very old and wrinkled and gray and bent) found me presently and

undertook to guide me safely. She was vigorous, physically, prompt and

decided of movement, and altogether soldierlike; and she had a hawk’s

eye and beak, and a gypsy’s complexion. She said that from her girlhood

up to not so very many years ago she had done a man’s work on a woman’s

pay on the big keel boats that carry stone down the river, and was as

good a man as the best, in the matter of handling stone. Said she had

seen the great Napoleon when she was a little child. Her face was so

wrinkled and dark and so eaglelike that she reminded me of old Indians

one sees out on the Great Plains--the outside signs of age, but in the

eye an indestructible spirit. She had a couple of laden baskets with her

which I had found heavy after three minutes’ carrying, when she was

finding the way for me, but they seemed nothing to her. She impressed

one rather as a man than as a woman; and so, when she spoke of her child

that was drowned, and her voice broke a little and her lip quivered, it

surprised me; I was not expecting it. “Grandchild?” No--it was her own

child. “Indeed? When?” So then it came out that it was sixty years ago.

It seemed strange that she should mind it so long. But that was the

woman of it, no doubt. She had a fragment of newspaper--religious--with

rude holy woodcuts in it and doubtful episodes in the lives of mediæval

saints and anchorites--and she could read these instructive matters in

fine print without glasses; also, her eyes were as good at long

distances. She led hither and thither among the paths and finally

brought me out overlooking the river. There was a steep sandy frontage

there, where there had recently been a small landslide, and the faint

new path ran straight across it for forty feet, like a slight snow track

along the slant of a very steep roof. I halted and declined. I had no

mind to try the crumbly path and creep and quake along it with the

boiling river--and maybe some rocks--under my elbow thirty feet below.

Such places turn my stomach. The old woman took note of me, understood,

and said what sounded like, “_Lass’ ma allez au premier_”--then she

tramped briskly and confidently across with her baskets, sending

miniature avalanches of sand and gravel down into the river with each

step. One of her feet plowed from under her, about midway, but she

snatched it back and marched on, not seeming to mind it. My pride urged

me to move along, and put me to shame. After a time the old woman came

back and coaxed me to try, and did at last get me started in her wake

and I got as far as midway all right; but then to hearten me still more

and show me how easy and safe it was, she began to prance and dance her

way along, with her knuckles in her hips, kicking a landslide loose with

every skip. The exhibition struck a cold panic through me and made my

brain swim. I leaned against the slope and said I would stay there until

the boat came and testified as to whether there were rocks under me or

not. For the third time in my life I was in that kind of a fix--in a

place where I could not go backward or forward, and mustn’t stay where I

was. The boat was a good while coming, but it seemed longer than that.

Where I was, the slope was like a roof; where the slope ended the wall

was perpendicular thence to the water, and one could not see over and

tell what the state of things might be down there. When the boat came

along, the courier said there was nothing down there but deep water--no

rocks. I did not mind the water; so my fears disappeared, now, and I

finished my march without discomfort. I gave the old woman some money,

which pleased her very much and she tried her grateful best to give us a

partridge, newly killed, which she rummaged out of one of her baskets,

and seemed disappointed when I would not take it. But I couldn’t; it

would have been a shabby act. Then she went her way with her heavy

baskets and I got aboard and afloat once more, feeling a great respect

for her and very friendly toward her. She waved a good-by every now and

then till her figure faded out in the plain, joining that interminable

procession of friends made and lost in an hour that drifts past a man’s

life from cradle to grave and returns on its course no more. The courier

said she was probably a poacher and stole the partridge.

The courier was not able to understand why I had not nerve enough to

walk along a crumbling slope with a precipice only thirty feet high

below me; but I had no difficulty in understanding it. It is

constitutional with me to get nervous and incapable under the

probability of getting myself dropped thirty feet on to a pile of rocks;

it does not come from culture. Some people are made in one way, and some

in another--and the above is my way. Some people who can skirt

precipices without a tremor have a strong dread of the dentist’s chair,

whereas I was born without any prejudices against the dentist’s chair;

when in it I am interested, am not in a hurry, and do not greatly mind

the pain. Taken by and large, my style of make has advantages over the

other, I think. Few of us are obliged to circumnavigate precipices, but

we all have to take a chance at the dental chair.

People who early learn the right way to choose a dentist have their

reward. Professional superiority is not everything; it is only part. All

dentists talk while they work. They have inherited this from their

professional ancestors, the barbers. The dentist who talks well--other

things being equal--is the one to choose. He tells anecdotes all the

while and keeps his man so interested and entertained that he hardly

notices the flight of time. For he not only tells anecdotes that are

good in themselves, but he adds nice shadings to them with his

instruments as he goes along, and now and then brings out effects which

could not be produced with any other kind of tools at all. All the time

that such a dentist as this is plowing down into a cavity with that

spinning gouge which he works with a treadle, it is observable that he

has found out where he has uncovered a nerve down in there, and that he

only visits it at intervals, according to the needs of his anecdote,

touching it lightly, very lightly and swiftly, now and then, to brighten

up some happy conceit in his tale and call a delicate electric attention

to it; and all the while he is working gradually and steadily up toward

his climax with veiled and consummate art--then at last the spindle

stops whirling and thundering in the cavity, and you know that the grand

surprise is imminent, now--is hanging in the very air. You can hear your

heart beat as the dentist bends over you with his grip on the spindle

and his voice diminished to a murmur. The suspense grows

bigger--bigger--bigger--your breath stops--then your heart. Then with

lightning suddenness the “nub” is sprung and the spindle drives into the

raw nerve! The most brilliant surprises of the stage are pale and

artificial compared with this.

It is believed by people generally--or at least by many--that the

exquisitely sharp sensation which results from plunging the steel point

into the raw nerve is pain, but I think that this is doubtful. It is so

vivid and sudden that one has no time to examine properly into its

character. It is probably impossible, with our human limitations, to

determine with certainty whether a sensation of so high and perfect an

order as that is pain or whether it is pleasure. Its location brings it

under the disadvantage of a common prejudice; and so men mistake it for

pain when they might perceive that it is the opposite of that if it were

anywhere but in a tooth. I may be in error, but I have experimented with

it a great deal and I am satisfied in my own mind that it is not pain.

It is true that it always feels like pain, but that proves nothing--ice

against a naked back always passes for fire. I have every confidence

that I can eventually prove to everyone’s satisfaction that a nerve-stab

produces pleasure; and not only that, but the most exquisite pleasure,

the most perfect felicity which we are capable of feeling. I would not

ask more than to be remembered hereafter as the man who conferred this

priceless benefaction upon his race.

11.30.--Approaching the Falls of the Rhône. Canal to the left, walled

with compact and beautiful masonry. It is a cut-off. We could pass

through it and avoid the Falls--are advised by the Admiral to do it, but

all decline, preferring to have a dangerous adventure to talk about.

However....

The truth is, the current began to grow ominously swift--and presently

pretty lumpy and perturbed; soon we seemed to be simply flying past the

shores. Then all of a sudden three hundred yards of boiling and tossing

river burst upon our sight through the veiling tempest of rain! I did

not see how our flimsy ark could live through such a place. If we were

wrecked, swimming could not save us; the packed multitude of tall humps

of water meant a bristling chaos of big rocks underneath, and the first

rock we hit would break our bones. If I had been fortified with

ignorance I might have wanted to stay in the boat and see the fun; but I

have had much professional familiarity with water, and I doubted if

there was going to be any fun there. So I said I would get out and walk,

and I did. I need not tell anybody at home; I could leave out the Falls

of the Rhône; they are not on the map, anyhow. If an adventure worth

recording resulted, the Admiral and the courier would have it, and that

would answer. I could see it from the bank--nothing could be better; it

seemed even providential.

I ran along the bank in the driving rain, and enjoyed the sight to the

full. I never saw a finer show than the passage of that boat was,

through the fierce turmoil of water. Alternately she rose high and

plunged deep, throwing up sheets of foaming spray and shaking them off

like a mane. Several times she seemed to fairly bury herself, and I

thought she was gone for good, but always she sprang high aloft the next

moment, a gallant and stirring spectacle to see. The Admiral’s steering

was great. I had not seen the equal of it before.

The boat waited for me down at the Villebois bridge, and I presently

caught up and went aboard. There was a stretch of a hundred yards of

offensively rough water below the bridge, but it had no dangerous

features about it. Still, I was obliged to claim that it had, and that

these perils were much greater than the others.

Noon.--A mile of perpendicular precipices--very handsome. On the left,

at the termination of this stately wall, a darling little old tree-grown

ruin abreast a wooded islet with a large white mansion on it. Near that

ruin nature has gotten up a clever counterfeit of one, tree-grown and

all that, and, as its most telling feature, has furnished it a battered

monolith that stands up out of the underbrush by itself and looks as if

men had shaped it and put it there and time had gnawed it and worn it.

This is the prettiest piece of river we have found. All its aspects are

dainty and gracious and alluring.

1 P.M.--Château de la Salette. This is the port of the Grotte de la

Balme, “one of the seven wonders of Dauphiny.” It is across a plain in

the face of a bluff a mile from the river. A grotto is out of the common

order, and I should have liked to see this one, but the rains have made

the mud very deep and it did not seem well to venture so long a trip

through it.

2.15 P.M.--St.-Etienne. On a distant ridge inland a tall openwork

structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing on

it.

Immense empty freight barges being towed upstream by teams of two and

four big horses--not on the bank, but under it; not on the land, but

always in the water--sometimes breast deep--and around the big flat

bars.

We reached a not very promising-looking village about four o’clock, and

concluded to land; munching fruit and filling the hood with pipe smoke

had grown monotonous. We could not have the hood furled, because the

floods of rain fell unceasingly. The tavern was on the river bank, as is

the custom. It was dull there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look

out of the window into the drenching rain and shiver; one could do that,

for it was bleak and cold and windy, and there was no fire. Winter

overcoats were not sufficient; they had to be supplemented with rugs.

The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that

they knocked up the water like pebble splashes.

With the exception of a very occasional wooden-shod peasant, nobody was

abroad in this bitter weather--I mean of our sex. But all weathers are

alike to the women in these continental countries. To them and the other

animals life is serious; nothing interrupts their slavery. Three of them

were washing clothes in the river under the window when we arrived, and

they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. One was

apparently thirty; another--the mother?--above fifty; the

third--grandmother?--so old and worn and gray she could have passed for

eighty. They had no waterproofs or rubbers, of course; over their heads

and shoulders they wore gunny sacks--simply conductors for rivers of

water; some of the volume reached ground, the rest soaked in on the way.

At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable,

smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey cart--husband,

son, and grandson of those women? He stood up in the cart, sheltering

himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone

of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough.

Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the

orders, lifting the immense baskets of soaked clothing into the cart and

stowing them to the man’s satisfaction. The cart being full now, he

descended, with his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went

drooping homeward in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with

the deluge and lost to sight. We would tar and feather that fellow in

America, and ride him on a rail.

When we came down into the public room he had his bottle of wine and

plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was chomping like a

horse. He had the little religious paper which is in everybody’s hands

on the Rhône borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of

French saints who used to flee to the desert in the Middle Ages to

escape the contamination of women.

Wednesday.--After breakfast, got under way. Still storming as hard as

ever. The whole land looks defeated and discouraged. And very lonely;

here and there a woman in the fields. They merely accent the loneliness.

NOTE.--The record ends here. Luxurious enjoyment of the excursion

rendered the traveler indifferent to his notes. The drift continued to

Arles, whence Mark Twain returned to Geneva and Ouchy by rail. Ten

years later he set down another picture of this happy journey--“The

Lost Napoleon”--which follows.--A. B. P.

-----

Footnote 3:

Of Hartford, Connecticut.

Footnote 4:

_Note, 1904._ Hopkinson Smith, now a distinguished man in literature,

art, and architecture. S. L. C.