Part 4 (2/2)

HAVRE.--This is one of those places which scribbling travellers hurry through with a crisp mention of their arrival and departure, but, as I have pa.s.sed a day here upon customhouse compulsion, and pa.s.sed it pleasantly too, and as I have an evening entirely to myself, and a good fire, why I will order another _pound_ of wood (they sell it like a drug here), and Monsieur and Mademoiselle Somebodies, ”violin players right from the hands of Paganini, only fifteen years of age, and miracles of music,” (so says the placard), may delight other lovers of precocious talent than I. Pen, ink, and paper for No. 2!

If I had not been warned against being astonished, short of Paris, I should have thought Havre quite an affair. I certainly have seen more that is novel and amusing since morning than I ever saw before in any seven days of my life. Not a face, not a building, not a dress, not a child even, not a stone in the street, nor shop, nor woman, nor beast of burden, looks in any comparable degree like its namesake the other side of the water.

It was very provoking to eat a salt supper and go to bed in that tiresome berth again last night, with a French hotel in full view, and no permission to send for a fresh biscuit even, or a cup of milk. It was nine o'clock when we reached the pier, and at that late hour there was, of course, no officer to be had for permission to land; and there paced the patrole, with his high black cap and red pompon, up and down the quay, within six feet of our tafferel, and a shot from his arquebuss would have been the consequence of any unlicensed communication with the sh.o.r.e. It was something, however, to sleep without rocking; and, after a fit of musing antic.i.p.ation, which kept me conscious of the sentinel's measured tread till midnight, the ”gentle G.o.ddess” sealed up my cares effectually, and I awoke at sunrise--in France!

It is a common thing enough to go abroad, and it may seem idle and common-place to be enthusiastic about it; but nothing is common or a trifle, to me, that can send the blood so warm to my heart, and the color to my temples as generously, as did my first conscious thought when I awoke this morning. _In France._ I would not have had it a dream for the price of an empire.

Early in the morning a woman came clattering into the cabin with wooden shoes, and a _patois_ of mingled French and English--a _blanchisseuse_--spattered to the knees with mud, but with a cap and 'kerchief that would have made the fortune of a New York milliner.

_Ciel!_ what politeness! and what white teeth and what a knowing row of papillotes, laid in precise parallel, on her clear brunette temples.

”_Quelle nouvelle!_” said the captain.

”_Poland est a bas!_” was the answer, with a look of heroic sorrow, that would have become a tragedy queen, mourning for the loss of a throne. The French manner, for once, did not appear exaggerated. It was news to sadden us all. Pity! pity! that the broad Christian world could look on and see this glorious people trampled to the dust in one of the most n.o.ble and desperate struggles for liberty that the earth ever saw! What an opportunity was here lost to France for setting a seal of double truth and splendor on her own newly-achieved triumph over despotism. The washerwoman broke the silence with ”_Any clothes to wash, Monsieur?_” and in the instant return of my thoughts to my own comparatively-pitiful interests, I found the philosophy for all I had condemned in kings--the humiliating and selfish individuality of human nature! And yet I believe with Dr. Channing on that dogma.

At ten o'clock I had performed the traveller's routine--had submitted my trunk and my pa.s.sport to the three authorities, and had got into (and out of) as many mounting pa.s.sions at what seemed to me the intolerable impertinencies of searching my linen, and inspecting my person for scars. I had paid the porter three times his due rather than endure his cataract of French expostulation; and with a bunch of keys, and a landlady attached to it, had ascended by a cold, wet, marble staircase, to a parlor and bedroom on the fifth floor: as pretty a place, when you get there, and as difficult to get to as if it were a palace in thin air. It is perfectly French! Fine, old, last-century chairs, covered with splendid yellow damask, two sofas of the same, the legs or arms of every one imperfect; a coa.r.s.e wood dressing-table, covered with fringed drapery and a sort of throne pincus.h.i.+on, with an immense gla.s.s leaning over it, gilded probably in the time of Henri Quatre; artificial flowers all around the room, and prints of Atala and _Napoleon mourant_ over the walls; windows opening to the floor on hinges, damask and muslin curtains inside, and boxes for flower-pots without; a bell-wire that pulls no bell, a bellows too asthmatic even to wheeze, tongs that refuse to meet, and a carpet as large as a table-cloth in the centre of the floor, may answer for an inventory of the ”parlor.” The bedchamber, about half as large as the boxes in Rattle-row, at Saratoga, opens by folding doors, and discloses a bed, that, for tricksy ornament as well as size, might look the bridal couch for a faery queen in a panorama; the same golden-sprig damask looped over it, tent-fas.h.i.+on, with splendid crimson cord, ta.s.sels, fringes, etc., and a pillow beneath that I shall be afraid to sleep on, it is so dainty a piece of needle-work.

There is a delusion about it, positively. One cannot help imagining, that all this splendor means something, and it would require a worse evil than any of these little deficiencies of _comfort_ to disturb the self-complacent, Captain-Jackson sort of feeling, with which one throws his cloak on one sofa and his hat on the other, and spreads himself out for a lounge before this mere apology of a French fire.

But, for eating and drinking! if they cook better in Paris, I shall have my pa.s.sport altered. The next _prefet_ that signs it shall subst.i.tute _gourmand_ for _proprietaire_. I will profess a palate, and live to eat. Making every allowance for an appet.i.te newly from sea, my experience hitherto in this department of science is transcended in the degree of a rushlight to Arcturus.

I strolled about Havre from breakfast till dinner, seven or eight hours, following curiosity at random, up one street and down another, with a prying avidity which I fear travel will wear fast away. I must compress my observations into a sentence or two, for my fire is out, and this old castle of a hotel lets in the wind ”shrewdly cold,” and, besides, the diligence calls for me in a few hours and one must sleep.

Among my impressions the most vivid are--that, of the twenty thousand inhabitants of Havre, by far the greater portion are women and soldiers--that the buildings all look toppling, and insecurely antique and unsightly--that the privates of the regular army are the most stupid, and those of the national guard the most intelligent-looking troops I ever saw--that the streets are filthy beyond endurance, and the shops clean beyond all praise--that the women do all the buying and selling, and cart-driving and sweeping, and even shoe-making, and other sedentary craftswork, and at the same time have (the meanest of them) an air of ambitious elegance and neatness, that sends your hand to your hat involuntarily when you speak to them--that the children speak French, and look like little old men and women, and the horses, (the famed Norman breed) are the best of draught animals, and the worst for speed in the world--and that, for extremes ridiculously near, dirt and neatness, politeness and knavery, chivalry and _pet.i.tesse_, of bearing and language, the people I have seen to-day _must_ be pre-eminently remarkable, or France, for a laughing philosopher, is a paradise indeed! And now for my pillow, till the diligence calls. Good night.

LETTER IV.

PARIS.--It seems to me as if I were going back a month to recall my departure from Havre, my memory is so clouded with later incidents. I was awaked on the morning after I had written to you, by a servant, who brought me at the same time a cup of coffee, and at about an hour before daylight we were pa.s.sing through the huge gates of the town on our way to Paris. The whole business of diligence-travelling amused me exceedingly. The construction of this vehicle has often been described; but its separate apartments (at four different prices), its enormous size, its comfort and clumsiness, and, more than all, the driving of its postillions, struck me as equally novel and diverting.

This last mentioned performer on the whip and voice (the only two accomplishments he at all cultivates), rides one of the three wheel horses, and drives the four or seven which are in advance, as a grazier in our country drives a herd of cattle, and they travel very much in the same manner. There is leather enough in two of their clumsy harnesses, to say nothing of the postillion's boots, to load a common horse heavily. I never witnessed such a ludicrous absence of contrivance and tact as in the appointments and driving of horses in a diligence. It is so in everything in France, indeed. They do not possess the quality as a nation. The story of the Gascoigne, who saw a bridge for the first time, and admired the ingenious economy that placed it across the river, instead of lengthwise, is hardly an exaggeration.

At daylight I found myself in the _coupe_ (a single seat for three in the front of the body of the carriage, with windows before and at the sides), with two whiskered and mustached companions, both very polite, and very unintelligible. I soon suspected, by the science with which my neighbor on the left hummed little s.n.a.t.c.hes of popular operas, that he was a professed singer (a conjecture which proved true), and it was equally clear, from the complexion of the portfeuille on the lap of the other, that his vocation was a liberal one--a conjecture which proved true also, as he confessed himself a _diplomat_, when we became better acquainted. For the first hour or more my attention was divided between the dim but beautiful outline of the country by the slowly approaching light of the dawn, and my nervousness at the distressing want of skill in the postillion's driving. The increasing and singular beauty of the country, even under the disadvantage of rain and the late season, soon absorbed all my attention, however, and my involuntary and half-suppressed exclamations of pleasure, so unusual in an Englishman (for whom I found I was taken), warmed the diplomatist into conversation, and I pa.s.sed the three ensuing hours very pleasantly. My companion was on his return from Lithuania, having been sent out by the French committee with arms and money for Poland.

He was, of course, a most interesting fellow-traveller; and, allowing for the difficulty with which I understood the language, in the rapid articulation of an enthusiastic Frenchman, I rarely have been better pleased with a chance acquaintance. I found he had been in Greece during the revolution, and knew intimately my friend, Dr. Howe, the best claim he could have on my interest, and, I soon discovered, an answering recommendation of myself to him.

The province of Normandy is celebrated for its picturesque beauty, but I had no conception before of the _cultivated_ picturesque of an old country. I have been a great scenery-hunter in America, and my eye was new, like its hills and forests. The ma.s.sive, battlemented buildings of the small villages we pa.s.sed through, the heavy gateways and winding avenues and antique structure of the distant and half-hidden chateaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, singular appearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a stone, the absence of all that we define by _comfort_ and _neatness_, and the presence of all that we have seen in pictures and read of in books, but consider as the representations and descriptions of ages gone by--all seemed to me irresistibly like a dream. I could not rub my hand over my eyes, and realize myself. I could not believe that, within a month's voyage of my home, these spirit-stirring places had stood all my lifetime as they do, and have--for ages--every stone as it was laid in times of worm-eaten history--and looking to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and dames in the days of French chivalry. I looked at the constantly-occurring ruins of the old priories, and the magnificent and still-used churches, and my blood tingled in my veins, as I saw, in the stepping-stones at their doors, cavities that the sandals of monks, and the iron-shod feet of knights in armor a thousand years ago, had trodden and helped to wear, and the stone cross over the threshold, that hundreds of generations had gazed upon and pa.s.sed under.

By a fortunate chance the postillion left the usual route at Balbec, and pursued what appeared to be a bye-road through the grain-fields and vineyards for twenty or twenty-five miles. I can only describe it as an uninterrupted green lane, winding almost the whole distance through the bosom of a valley that must be one of the very loveliest in the world. Imagine one of such extent, without a fence to break the broad swells of verdure, stretching up from the winding and unenclosed road on either side, to the apparent sky; the houses occurring at distances of miles, and every one with its thatched roof covered all over with bright green moss, and its walls of marl interlaid through all the crevices with clinging vines, the whole structure and its appurtenances faultlessly picturesque, and, when you have conceived a valley that might have contented Ra.s.selas, scatter over it here and there groups of men, women, and children, the Norman peasantry in their dresses of all colors, as you see them in the prints--and if there is anything that can better please the eye, or make the imagination more willing to fold up its wings and rest, my travels have not crossed it. I have recorded a vow to walk through Normandy.

As we approached Rouen the road ascended gradually, and a sharp turn brought us suddenly to the brow of a steep hill, opposite another of the same height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the distance of a mile across. Between, lay Rouen. I hardly know how to describe, for American eyes, the peculiar beauty of this view; one of the most exquisite, I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill is common enough in our country, but of the hundreds that answer to this description, I can not name one that would afford a correct comparison. The nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so old a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially different from ours. If there were another Mount Holyoke, for instance, on the other side of the Connecticut, the situation of Northampton would be very similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural village, with its glimpses of white houses seen through rich and luxurious ma.s.ses of foliage, the mountain sides above broken with rocks, and studded with the gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and the fields below waving with heavy crops, irregularly fenced and divided, the whole picture one of an overlavish and half-subdued Eden of fertility--instead of this I say--the broad meadows, with the winding Seine in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, the gra.s.s closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, the edges of the river set regularly with willows, the little bright islands circled with trees, and smooth as a lawn; and instead of green lanes lined with bushes, single streets running right through the unfenced verdure, from one hill to another, and built up with antique structures of stone--the whole looking, in the _coup d'oeil_ of distance, like some fantastic model of a town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and meadows of silk velvet.

You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in the guide-books.

As my object is to record impressions, not statistics, I leave you to consult those laconic chronicles, or the books of a thousand travellers, for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was burnt here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. There is a statue erected to her memory, which I did not see, for it rained; and after the usual stop of two hours, as the barometer promised no change in the weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took my place in the night diligence and kept on.

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