to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where there is
always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters
and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is organised in the
dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful
jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a lamp or two,
while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, and sober men,
who are not given to such light pleasures, get up on the table or the
sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a
tumbler of wine. Or sometimes--suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the
court from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by
day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow
under every vine leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a
basket made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long
alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with
every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there
a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and sound
many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into
the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old
bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes
ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent
round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song
and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling a
good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called
together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one
of the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes
grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die finally out, and still
walks on in the strange coolness and silence and between the crisp
lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings
out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.
No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the
busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue
to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in
his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly
silent that it seems to him he might hear the church-bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in
outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his childhood
passed between the sun and flowers.
IDLE HOURS
The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be
understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees that
go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds
like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working on
the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the side of
a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms
below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as
I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt
fully without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's
light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the
unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you have
not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you
will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window--for there are
no blinds or shutters to keep him out--and the room, with its bare wood
floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort of
glory of reflected lights. You may doze a while longer by snatches, or
lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which
former occupants have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile;
local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape
splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the
salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool,
and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his
"motive." And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village,
carries with him a little following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong
only nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest
all day long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit
by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting.
They would like to be under the trees all day. But they cannot go alone.
They require a pretext. And so they take the passing artist as an excuse
to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to
bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall
as a greyhound and with a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will
trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing
white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is not to be
exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please, all they will do
is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, to you
they will remain faithful, and with you return; although if you meet
them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you
with a countenance of brass.
The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows
gives up an incense of song, and every valley wandered through by a
streamlet rings and reverberates from side to side with a profusion of
clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own
account only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as
one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitoes
drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of
the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in
the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where there is no
incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood, you are
conscious of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of
infinitesimal living things between the trees. Nor are insects the only
evil creatures that haunt the forest. For you may plump into a cave
among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see
a crooked viper slither across the road.
Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by
a friend: "I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make the
jolliest motive." And you reply: "Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke."
And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours
doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet
farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter,
encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.
You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the
trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through
the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees
a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light. But you
know it is going forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get
ready your own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in
words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the
open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it
were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key.
The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles,
some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers--looking, in their
soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone
seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and
rain--are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like
misbegotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so
peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man
might live fifty years in England and not see.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a
pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the
dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the
shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the
poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves
that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that
remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat
of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest
savour.
"You can get up now," says the painter; "I'm at the background."
And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood,
the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
farther into the open. A cool air comes along the highways, and the
scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown
thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not
like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had
known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer
evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon
the woodland winds. One side of the long avenues is still kindled with
the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees the
west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their
chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.
A PLEASURE-PARTY
As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go in
force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered a
large wagonette from Lejosne's. It has been waiting for near an hour,
while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other hurried over his toilette
and coffee; but now it is filled from end to end with merry folk in
summer attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and amid much applause from
round the inn-door off we rattle at a spanking trot. The way lies
through the forest, up hill and down dale, and by beech and pine wood,
in the cheerful morning sunshine. The English get down at all the
ascents and walk on ahead for exercise; the French are mightily
entertained at this, and keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we
carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some
one will be always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.
Before we get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from
Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with a case of
merchandise; and it is "Desprez, leave me some malachite green";
"Desprez, leave me so much canvas"; "Desprez, leave me this, or leave me
that"; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with grave face and
many salutations. The next interruption is more important. For some time
back we have had the sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a little past
Franchard, we find a mounted trooper holding a led horse, who brings
the wagonette to a stand. The artillery is practising in the
Quadrilateral, it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally
interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at
the glaring cross-roads, and get down to make fun with the notorious
Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and
ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And
meanwhile the Doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal
beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the
too facile sentry. His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified
and insinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged all
the world over, and speaks all languages from French to Patagonian. He
has not come home from perilous journeys to be thwarted by a corporal of
horse. And so we soon see the soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders
imitate a relenting heart. "_En voiture, Messieurs, Mesdames_," sings
the Doctor; and on we go again at a good round pace, for black care
follows hard after us, and discretion prevails not a little over valour
in some timorous spirits of the party. At any moment we may meet the
sergeant, who will send us back. At any moment we may encounter a flying
shell, which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez.
Grez--for that is our destination--has been highly recommended for its
beauty. "_Il y a de l'eau_," people have said, with an emphasis, as if
that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am rather led to
think it does. And Grez, when we get there, is indeed a place worthy of
some praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old
bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn garden
descends in terraces to the river; stableyard, kailyard, orchard, and a
space of lawn, fringed with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.
On the opposite bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set
thickly with willows and poplars. And between the two lies the river,
clear and deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants
cluster about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way
up upon the piers in green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar with
long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their
leaves. And the river wanders hither and thither among the islets, and
is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old building in the
lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box where the
good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one oily ripple
following another over the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a
splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed under the old kirk,
where the village women wash and wash all day among the fish and
water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there should be specially cool
and sweet.
We have come here for the river. And no sooner have we all bathed than
we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding under the
trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. Some one sings;
some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean over the gunwale to
see the image of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow of the boat,
with balanced oars and their own head protruded, glide smoothly over the
yellow floor of the stream. At last, the day declining--all silent and
happy, and up to the knees in the wet lilies--we punt slowly back again
to the landing-place beside the bridge. There is a wish for solitude on
all. One hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a
walk in the country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church. And it
is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes round
from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse
once more into a jolly fellowship.
Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some of
the others, loath to break up good company, will go with them a bit of
the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the
wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been. The coachman loses
the road. So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent
success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to applaud; and it seems
as if the festival were fairly at an end--
"Nous avons fait la noce,
Rentrons a nos foyers!"
And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and taken
our places in the court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch on the long
table out in the open air, where the guests dine in summer weather. The
candles flare in the night wind, and the faces round the punch are lit
up, with shifting emphasis, against a background of complete and solid
darkness. It is all picturesque enough; but the fact is, we are aweary.
We yawn; we are out of the vein; we have made the wedding, as the song
says, and now, for pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't. When here
comes striding into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and
splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable
Blank; and in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness
of our laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen,
picture-dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. We are as merry as
ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all the
good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of
sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in a
great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered with sleeping hounds,
and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood-fire in a mediaeval
chimney. And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn beside
the river.
How quick bright things come to confusion! When we arise next morning,
the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of
the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies
encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their voyage
towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the
dripping house roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green and
golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken a
water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out
a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about Grez have a trick of
their own. They go on for a while among clumps of willows and patches of
vine, and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in
some miry hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came! So we draw about
the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or go to
the billiard-room for a match at corks; and by one consent a messenger
is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-morrow.
To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for
exercise, and let their knapsacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say
they are neither of them French; for, of all English phrases, the phrase
"for exercise" is the least comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.
All goes well for a while with the pedestrians. The wet woods are full
of scents in the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a
guard-house, they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter
of their good host at Barbizon. And so there they are hospitably
received by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince in
the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some prints
of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the
Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the big guns, they take
a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a while somewhat vaguely,
with the sound of the cannon in their ears and the rain beginning to
fall. The ways grow wider and sandier; here and there there are real
sand hills, as though by the seashore; the fir-wood is open and grows in
clumps upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no more. One
begins to look at the other doubtfully. "I am sure we should keep more
to the right," says one; and the other is just as certain they should
hold to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain
falls "sheer and strong and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of their
eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their boots.
They leave the track and try across country with a gambler's
desperation, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation
worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from boulder to boulder, or
plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste
clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too
plainly of the cannon in the distance. And meantime the cannon grumble
out responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of
melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and
so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the
chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair
of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois
d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean
hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.
THE WOODS IN SPRING
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early spring-time,
when it is just beginning to re-awaken, and innumerable violets peep
from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit down
to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your
knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on the
court. There is less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the
forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists' sunshades as
with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English
picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be
brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told
by an agitated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten
minutes since, "_a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze piqueurs._"
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country,
each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together
and mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of
leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little
ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green; and, dotted
among the pines, or standing by themselves in rocky clearings, the
delicate, snow-white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow-white
branches yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze
of twigs. And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright
sandbreaks between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and
brown heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later
year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow,
tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight
set in purple heather. The loveliness of the woods in March is not,
assuredly, of this blowsy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain of
salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting of bitter
ale; you acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And
the wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the while by
voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart
tinkling to a new tune--or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in
your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges you
into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest. It is as
if the whole wood were full of friendly voices calling you farther in,
and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's donkey, in a maze
of pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches, barred
with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty
oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; thence the tall
shaft climbs upward, and the great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out
into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying and calling. On
the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread
arms, like fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and
the sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts of
young wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with
fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in the
thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with years and
the rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are
sown and carried away again by the light air--like thistledown. The
loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that there are moments when
pleasure draws to the verge of fear. You listen and listen for some
noise to break the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the
intensity of the strain; your sense of your own identity is troubled;
your brain reels, like that of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose
in Asiatic jungles; and should you see your own outspread feet, you see
them, not as anything of yours, but as a feature of the scene around
you.