22. 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 amusement
in a strange city at night, I will pass 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 coupé;
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 association, even in a week's travel, than people
living in an adjoining house in the city.
We rolled out of Paris by the faubourg St. Antoine,
and at the end of the first post passed 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 class
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 assumed 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 passing 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 passed under a very ancient gate, crowning
the old Roman ramparts of the town, a door opened,
and a baker, in white cap and apron, thrust out his
head to see us pass. 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
toward Chalons, that I discovered by the guide-book
it was the ancient capital of Auxerrois, a famous
town in the time of Julius Cæsar, 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 paté foie gras, and an
omelette soufflé, at a nice little hotel, with a mistress in
a cap, and a coquettish French apron, 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 grass, 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 expressions 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,
passing 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 cumbrous 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 noble 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 mass
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 saw before 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 pass, 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
