Part 11 (1/2)
LETTER XXII.
CHALONS, ON THE SAONE.--I have broken my route to stop at this pretty town, and take the steamboat which goes down the Saone to Lyons to-morrow morning. I have travelled two days and nights; but an excellent dinner and a quickened imagination indispose me for sleep, and, for want of better amus.e.m.e.nt in a strange city at night, I will pa.s.s away an hour in transcribing the hurried notes I have made at the stopping places.
I chose, by advice, the part of the diligence called the _banquette_--a covered seat over the front of the carriage, commanding all the view, and free from the dust of the lower apartments. The _conducteur_ had the opposite corner, and a very ordinary-looking man sat between us; the seat holding three very comfortably. A lady and two gentlemen occupied the _coupe_; a dragoon and his family, going to join his regiment, filled the _rotonde_; and in the interior was a motley collection, whom I scarce saw after starting; the occupants of the different parts of a diligence having no more a.s.sociation, even in a week's travel, than people living in adjoining houses in the city.
We rolled out of Paris by the _faubourg St. Antoine_, and at the end of the first post pa.s.sed the first object that interested me--a small brick pavilion, built by Henri Quatre for the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrees. It stands on a dull, level plain, not far from the banks of the river; and nothing but the fact that it was once occupied by the woman who most enslaved the heart of the most chivalrous and fickle of the French monarchs, would call your attention to it for a moment.
For the twenty or thirty miles which we travelled by daylight, I saw nothing particularly curious or beautiful. The guide-book is very diffuse upon the chateaux and villages on the road, but I saw nothing except very ordinary country-houses, and the same succession of small and dirty villages, steeped to the very chimneys in poverty. If ever I return to America, I shall make a journey to the west, for the pure refreshment of seeing industry and thrift. I am sick to the heart of pauperism and misery. Everything that is near the large towns in France is either splendid or disgusting. There is no medium in condition--nothing that looks like content--none of that cla.s.s we define in our country as the ”respectable.”
The moon was a little in the wane, but bright, and the night lovely.
As we got further into the interior, the towns began to look more picturesque and antique; and, with the softening touch of the moonlight, and the absence of beggars, the old low-browed buildings and half-ruined churches a.s.sumed the beauty they wear in description.
I slept on the road, but the echo of the wheels in entering a post-town woke me always; and I rarely have felt the picturesque more keenly than, at these sudden wakings from dreams, perhaps, of familiar things, finding myself opposite some shadowy relic of another age; as if it were by magical transportation, from the fireside to some place of which I had heard or read the history.
I awoke as we drove into _Sens_ at broad daylight. We were just pa.s.sing a glorious old pile of a cathedral, which I ran back to see while the diligence stopped to change horses. It is of pointed architecture, black with age, and crusted with moss. It was to this town that Thomas a Becket retired in disgrace at his difference with Henry the Second. There is a chapel in the cathedral, dedicated to his memory. The French certainly should have the credit of leaving things alone. This old pile stands as if the town in which it is built had been desolate for centuries: not a letter of the old sculptures chiselled out, not a bird unnested, not a filament of the gathering moss pulled away. All looks as if no human hand had been near it--almost as if no human eye had looked upon it. In America they would paint such an old church white or red, shove down the pillars, and put up pews, sell the pictures for fireboards, and cover the tesselated pavement with sand, or a home-made carpet.
As we pa.s.sed under a very ancient gate, crowning the old Roman ramparts of the town, a door opened, and a baker, in white cap and ap.r.o.n, thrust out his head to see us pa.s.s. His oven was blazing bright, and he had just taken out a batch of hot bread, which was smoking on the table; and what with the chill of the morning air and having fasted for some fourteen hours, I quite envied him his vocation. The diligence, however, pushed on most mercilessly till twelve o'clock, the French never dreaming of eating before their late _dejeuner_--a mid-day meal always. When we did get it, it was a dinner in every respect--meats of all kinds, wine, and dessert, certainly as solid and various as any of the American breakfasts, at which travellers laugh so universally.
Auxerre is a pretty town, on a swelling bank of the river Yonne; and I had admired it as one of the most improved-looking villages of France.
It was not till I had breakfasted there, and travelled a league or two towards Chalons, that I discovered by the guide book it was the ancient capital of Auxerrois, a famous town in the time of Julius Caesar, and had the honor of being ravaged ”at different times by Attila, the Saracens, the Normans, and the Calvinists, vestiges of whose devastations may still be seen.” If I had not eaten of a positively modern _pate foie gras_, and an _omelette souffle_, at a nice little hotel, with a mistress in a cap, and a coquettish French ap.r.o.n, I should forgive myself less easily for not having detected antiquity in the atmosphere. One imagines more readily than he realizes the charm of mere age without beauty.
We were now in the province of Burgundy, and, to say nothing of the historical recollections, the vineyards were all about us that delighted the palates of the world. One does not dine at the _Trois Freres_, in the Palais Royal, without contracting a tenderness for the very name of Burgundy. I regretted that I was not there in the season of the grape. The vines were just budding, and the _paysans_, men and women, were scattered over the vineyards, loosening the earth about the roots, and driving stakes to support the young shoots. At Saint Bris I found the country so lovely, that I left the diligence at the post-house, and walked on to mount a long succession of hills on foot.
The road sides were quite blue with the violets growing thickly among the gra.s.s, and the air was filled with perfume. I soon got out of sight of the heavy vehicle, and made use of my leisure to enter the vineyards and talk to the people at their work. I found one old man, with all his family about him; the little ones with long baskets on their backs, bringing manure, and one or two grown-up boys and girls raking up the earth with the unhandy hoe of the country, and setting it firmly around the roots with their wooden shoes. It was a pretty group, and I was very much amused with their simplicity. The old man asked my country, and set down his hoe in astonishment when I told him I was an American. He wondered I was not more burnt, living in such a hot country, and asked me what language we spoke. I could scarce get away from his civilities when I bade him ”Good day.” No politeness could have been more elegant than the manner and expression of this old peasant, and certainly nothing could have appeared sincerer or kinder. I kept on up the hill till I reached a very high point, pa.s.sing on my way a troop of Italians, going to Paris with their organs and shows--a set of as ragged specimens of the picturesque as I ever saw in a picture. A lovely scene lay before me when I turned to look back. The valley, on one side of which lies St. Bris, is as round as a bowl, with an edge of mountain-tops absolutely even all around the horizon. It slopes down from every side to the centre, as if it had been measured and hollowed by art; and there is not a fence to be seen from one side to the other, and scarcely a tree, but one green and almost unbroken carpet of verdure, swelling up in broad green slopes to the top, and realizing, with a slight difference, the similitude of Madame de Genlis, of the place of satiety, eternal green meadow and eternal blue sky. St. Bris is a little handful of stone buildings around an old church; just such a thing as a painter would throw into a picture--and the different-colored grain, and here and there a ploughed patch of rich yellow earth, and the road crossing the hollow from hill to hill like a white band; and then for the life of the scene, the group of Italians, the c.u.mbrous diligence, and the peasants in their broad straw hats, scattered over the fields--it was something quite beyond my usual experience of scenery and accident. I had rarely before found so much in one view to delight me.
After looking a while, I mounted again, and stood on the very top of the hill; and, to my surprise, there, on the other side lay just such another valley, with just such a village in its bosom, and the single improvement of a river--the Yonne stealing through it, with its riband-like stream; but all the rest of the valley almost exactly as I have described the other. I crossed a vineyard to get a view to the southeast, and _once more_ there lay a deep hollow valley before me, formed like the other two, with its little hamlet and its vineyards and mountains--as if there had been three lakes in the hills, with their edges touching like three bowls, and the terrace on which I stood was the platform between them. It is a most singular formation of country, really, and as beautiful as it is singular. Each of these valleys might be ten miles across; and if the dukes of Burgundy in feudal times rode ever to St. Bris, I can conceive that their dukedom never seemed larger to them than when crossing this triple apex of highland.
At Saulieu we left the usual route, and crossed over to Chagny.
Between these two places lay a spot, which, out of my own country, I should choose before all others for a retreat from the world. As it was off the route, the guide-book gave me not even the name, and I have discovered nothing but that the little hamlet is called _Rochepot_. It is a little nest of wild scenery, a mimic valley shut in by high overhanging crags, with the ruins of a battlemented and n.o.ble old castle, standing upon a rock in the centre, with the village of some hundred stone cottages at its very foot. You might stand on the towers of the ruins, and toss a biscuit into almost every chimney in the village. The strong round towers are still perfect, and the turrets and loop-holes and windows are still there; and rank green vines have overrun the whole ma.s.s everywhere; and nothing but the prodigious solidity with which it was built could have kept it so long from falling, for it is evidently one of the oldest castles in Burgundy. I never before saw anything, even in a picture, which realized perfectly my idea of feudal position. Here lived the lord of the domain, a hundred feet in the air in his rocky castle, right over the heads of his retainers, with the power to call in every soul that served him at a minute's warning, and with a single blast of his trumpet. I do not believe a stone has been displaced in the village for a hundred years. The whole thing was redolent of antiquity. We wound out of the place by a sharp narrow pa.s.s, and there, within a mile of this old and deserted fortress, lay the broad plains of Beaune and Chagny--one of the most fertile and luxurious parts of France. I was charmed altogether. How many things I have seen this side the water that I have made an involuntary vow in my heart to visit again, and at more leisure, before I die!
From Chagny it was but one post to Chalons, and here I am in a pretty, busy town, with broad beautiful quays, where I have promenaded till dark, observing this out-of-doors people; and now, having written a long letter for a sleepy man, I will get to bed, and redeem some portion of my two nights' wakefulness.
LETTER XXIII.
Pa.s.sAGE DOWN THE SAONE--AN ODD ACQUAINTANCE--LYONS--CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME DE FOURVIERES--VIEW FROM THE TOWER.
I looked out of my window the last thing before going to bed at Chalons, and the familiar constellation of _Ursa Major_ never shone brighter, and never made me a more agreeable promise than that of fair weather the following day for my pa.s.sage down the Saone. I was called at four, and it rained in torrents. The steamboat was smaller than the smallest I have seen in our country, and crowded to suffocation with children, women, and lap-dogs. I appropriated my own trunk, and spreading my umbrella, sat down upon it, to endure my disappointment with what philosophy I might. A dirty-looking fellow, who must have slept in his clothes for a month, came up, with a loaf of coa.r.s.e bread under his arm, and addressed me, to my sufficient astonishment, _in Latin_! He wanted to sit under my umbrella. I looked at him a second time, but he had touched my pa.s.sion. Latin is the only thing I have been driven to, in this world, that I ever really loved; and the clear, mellow, unctuous p.r.o.nunciation of my dirty companion equally astonished and pleased me. I made room for him on my trunk, and, though rusted somewhat since I philosophized over Lucretius, we got on very tolerably. He was a German student, travelling to Italy, and a fine specimen of the cla.s.s. A dirtier man I never saw, and hardly a finer or more intellectual face. He knew everything, and served me as a talking guide to the history of all the places on the river.
Instead of eating all at once, as we do on board the steamboats in America, the French boats have a _restaurant_, from which you order what you please, and at any hour. The cabin was set round with small tables, and the pa.s.sengers made little parties, and breakfasted and dined at their own time. It is much the better method. I descended to the cabin very hungry about twelve o'clock, and was looking about for a place, when a French gentleman politely rose, and observing that I was alone, (my German friend living on bread and water only,) requested me to join his party at breakfast. Two young ladies and a lad of fourteen sat at the table, and addressing them by their familiar names, my polite friend requested them to give me a place; and then told me that they were his daughters and son, and that he was travelling to Italy for the health of the younger girl, a pale, slender creature, apparently about eighteen. I was very well pleased with my position, and rarely have pa.s.sed an hour more agreeably.
French girls of the better cla.s.ses never talk, but the father was very communicative, and a Parisian, with the cross of the Legion of Honor, and we found abundance of matter for conversation. They have stopped at Lyons, where I write at present, and I shall probably join their party to Ma.r.s.eilles.
The clouds broke away after mid-day, and the banks of the river brightened wonderfully with the change. The Saone is about the size of the Mohawk, but not half so beautiful; at least for the greater part of its course. Indeed, you can hardly compare American with European rivers, for the charm is of another description, quite. With us it is nature only, here it is almost all art. Our rivers are lovely, because the outline of the sh.o.r.e is graceful, and particularly because the vegetation is luxuriant. The hills are green, the foliage deep and lavish, the rocks grown over with vines or moss, the mountains in the distance covered with pines and other forest-trees; everything is wild, and nothing looks bare or sterile. The rivers of France are crowned on every height with ruins, and in the bosom of every valley lies a cl.u.s.ter of picturesque stone cottages; but the fields are naked, and there are no trees; the mountains are barren and brown, and everything looks as if the dwellings had been deserted by the people, and nature had at the same time gone to decay. I can conceive nothing more melancholy than the views upon the Saone, seen, as I saw them, though vegetation is out everywhere, and the banks should be beautiful if ever. As we approached Lyons the river narrowed and grew bolder, and the last ten miles were enchanting. Naturally the sh.o.r.es at this part of the Saone are exceedingly like the highlands of the Hudson above West Point. Abrupt hills rise from the river's edge, and the windings are sharp and constant. But imagine the highlands of the Hudson crowned with antique chateaux, and covered to the very top with terraces and summer-houses and hanging-gardens, gravel walks and beds of flowers, instead of wild pines and precipices, and you may get a very correct idea of the Saone above Lyons. You emerge from one of the dark pa.s.ses of the river by a sudden turn, and there before you lies this large city, built on both banks, at the foot and on the sides of mountains. The bridges are fine, and the broad, crowded quays, all along the edges of the river, have a beautiful effect. We landed at the stone stairs, and I selected a hotel by chance, where I have found seven Americans of my acquaintance. We have been spending the evening at the rooms of a townsman of mine, very pleasantly.