"Je crains que monsieur ne le fatigue un peu!"
So I had to bid him good-bye; and after I had squeezed and kissed his
hand, he made me a most courtly bow, as though I had been a
complete stranger.
I rushed away, tossing up my arms like a madman in my pity and sorrow
for my dear old friend, and my general regret and disenchantment. I
made for the Bois de Boulogne, there to find, instead of the old
rabbit-and-roebuck-haunted thickets and ferneries and impenetrable
growth, a huge artificial lake, with row-boats and skiffs, and a rockery
that would have held its own in Rosherville gardens. And on the way
thither, near the iron gates in the fortifications, whom should I meet
but one of my friends the couriers, on his way from St. Cloud to the
Tuileries! There he rode with his arms jogging up and down, and his low
glazed hat, and his immense jack-boots, just the same as ever, never
rising in his stirrups, as his horse trotted to the jingle of the sweet
little chime round its neck.
[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
another régime.
Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
Napoleonic profusion.
No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
my fond ambition for twelve long years.
It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
seemed almost within my reach; I willed and willed and willed with all
my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold and
silver fish; and there, with an aching heart, I left them.
Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
worth living for many of us if a want so desperate and yet so natural
can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we
had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake. The
touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the tender
grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever, at out beck and
call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the senses.
Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones again
in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in _this_,
just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see them with
the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the old
obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth going mad
to become such a self-conjurer as that.
Thus musing sadly, I reached St. Cloud, and _that_, at least, and the
Boulogne that led me to it, had not been very perceptibly altered, and
looked as though I had only left them a week ago. The sweet aspect from
the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old
enchantment. There, at least, the glory had not departed.
I hastened through the gilded gates and up the broad walk to the grand
cascade. There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium,
still sat or reclined or gesticulated, the old, unalterable gods; there
squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze,
still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian
eyes. Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were
not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical
patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous,
whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their
insensibility of their eternal stability--their stony scorn of time and
wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of
man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more--when one
could reach them--and cling to them for a little while, after all the
dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day.
Indeed, they woke in me a healthy craving for all but forgotten earthly
joys--even for wretched meat and drink--so I went and ordered a
sumptuous repast at the Tête Noire--a brand-new Tête Noire, alas! quite
white, all in stone and stucco, and without a history!
It was a beautiful sunset. Waiting for my dinner, I gazed out of the
first-floor window, and found balm for my disappointed and regretful
spirit in all that democratic joyousness of French Sunday life. I had
seen it over and over again just like that in the old days; _this_, at
least, was like coming back home to something I had known and loved.
The cafés on the little "Place" between the bridge and the park were
full to overflowing. People chatting over their _consommations_ sat
right out, almost into the middle of the square, so thickly packed that
there was scarcely room for the busy, lively, white-aproned waiters to
move between them. The air was full of the scent of trodden grass and
macaroons and French tobacco, blown from the park; of gay French
laughter and the music of _mirlitons_; of a light dusty haze, shot with
purple and gold by the setting sun. The river, alive with boats and
canoes, repeated the glory of the sky, and the well-remembered,
thickly-wooded hills rose before me, culminating in the Lanterne
de Diogène.