In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau
is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western side of it with
what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to testify
that there is no square mile without some special character and charm.
Such quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the Bas-Bréau, and the
Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point
in common beyond the silence of the birds. The two last are really
conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a
thousand political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and
the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In the other the
trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon
another, the foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in
the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes spiring and casting
forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church architecture, canopies
this rugged chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white
causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road conceived for
pageantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days
of glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and
only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far away
and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and
you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon the
other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close
beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the
ingredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that, in all this part,
you come continually forth upon a hill-top, and behold the plain,
northward and westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long
the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night
succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and
fragrance. There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the glittering
streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.
In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as your
foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted
in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of
forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient
refuge of his race.
And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in the
most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with
conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has
countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you are never
surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the
centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing,
thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness; it is rather
a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit’s
cavern. In the midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with
the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and
peopled by historic names, stands smokeless among gardens.
Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug
who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family
Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope
ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a
Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly
stupid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small
change; for that he had a great avidity. In the course of time he proved
to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to
indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be
discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie
unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock. But
your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks, if
there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I may
suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me for
aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a
hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A
confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for
water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest
pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and
offers some of the repose of natural forests. And the solitary, although
he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with
his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands
of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon
by windows; others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that
meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter’s camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem but
an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the plain man
it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for
company.