We wish to take our stop at some not too large town of the interior, and which shall it be,--Chalons-sur-Saone, with its bridge, and quays, and meadows; or Dijon, lying in the vineyards of Burgundy; or Chateauroux, in the great sheep plains of Central France; or Limoges, still more unknown, prettily situated among the green hills of Limousin, and the chief town of the department _Haute Vienne_?

Let it be just by the Boule d'Or, in the town last named, that I quit my seat in the diligence. The little old place is not upon any of the great routes, so that the servants of the inn have not become too republican for civility, and a blithe waiting-maid is at hand to take our luggage.

A plain door-way in the heavy stone inn, and still plainer and steeper stair-way, conduct to a clean, large chamber upon the first floor.

Below in the little salon some three or four are at supper. Join them you may, if you please, with a chop nicely done, and a palatable _vin du pays_.

It is too dark to see the town. You are tired with eight-and-forty hours of constant diligence-riding,--if you have come from Lyons, as I did,--and the bed is excellent.

The window overlooks the chief street of the place; it is wide and paved with round stones, and dirty, and there are no sidewalks, though a town of thirty thousand inhabitants. Nearly opposite is a cafe, with small green settees ranged about the door, with some tall flowering shrubs in green boxes; and even at eight in the morning two or three are loitering upon their chairs and sipping coffee. Next door is the office of the diligence for Paris. Farther up the street are haberdashery shops and show-rooms of the famous Limoges crockery. Soldiers are pa.s.sing by twos, and cavalrymen in undress go sauntering by on fine coal-black horses; and the guide-book tells me that from this region come the horses for all the cavalry of France....

There are curious old churches, and a simple-minded, gray-haired verger, to open the side chapels and to help you spell the names on tombs. Not half so tedious will the old man prove as the automaton cathedral-showers of England, and he spices his talk with a little wit.

There are shops, not unlike those of a middle-sized town in our country; still, little air of trade, and none at all of progress. Decay seems to be stamped on nearly all the country towns of France, unless so large as to make cities, and so have a life of their own, or so small as to serve only as market-towns for the peasantry....

Wandering out of the edge of the town of Limoges, you come upon hedges and green fields, for Limousin is the Arcadia of France. Queer old houses adorn some of the narrow streets, and women in strange head-dresses look out of the balconies that lean half-way over. But Sunday is their holiday time, when all are in their gayest, and when the green walks encircling the town, laid upon that old line of ramparts which the Black Prince stormed, are thronged with the population.

The bill at the _Boule d'Or_ is not an extravagant one; for as strangers are not common, the trick of extortion is unknown. The waiting-maid drops a courtesy, and gives a smiling _bon jour_, not surely unmindful of the little fee she gets; but she never disputes its amount, and seems grateful for the least. There is no "boots" or waiter to dog you over to the diligence; nay, if you are not too old, or ugly, the little girl herself insists upon taking your portmanteau, and trips across with it, and puts it in the hands of the conductor, and waits your going earnestly, and waves her hand at you, and gives you another "_bon voyage_" that makes your ears tingle till the houses of Limoges and its high towers have vanished, and you are a mile away, down the pleasant banks of the river Vienne.

Shall we set a foot down for a moment in the queer, interesting, busy old Norman town of Rouen, where everybody goes who goes to Paris, but where few stop for a look at what in many respects is most curious to see in all France? The broad, active quays, and the elegant modern buildings upon them, and the bridges, and the river with its barges and steamers, are, it is true, worth the seeing, and exposed to the eye of every pa.s.ser, and give one the idea of a new and enterprising city. But back from this is another city--the old city--infinitely more worthy of attention.

Out of its midst rises the corkscrew iron tower of the Cathedral, under which sleeps Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy; and if one have the courage to mount to the dizzy summit of that corkscrew winding tower of iron, he will see such a labyrinth of ways, shut in by such confusion of gables, and such steep, sharp roofs, glittering with so many colored tiles, as that he will seem to dream a dream of the olden time.

And if he have an agricultural eye, it will wander delightedly over the broad, rich plains that there border the Seine, rich in all manner of corn-land and in orchards. And if he have an historic eye, it will single out an old castle or two that show themselves upon the neighboring hills; and the ruins, and the Seine, and the valley, and the town will group together in his imagination, and he will bear away the picture in his mind to his Western home in the wilderness; and it shall serve him as an ill.u.s.tration--a living ill.u.s.tration--to the old chronicles of wars, whether of Monstrelet, or Turner, or Anquetil, or Michelet, down through all the time of his thinking life. So, when he readeth of Norman plain blasted with battle, and knightly helmets glittering in the crash of war, he shall have a scene,--a scene lying clear as mid-day under the eye of steady memory,--in the which he may plant his visions of Joan of Arc, or of stout Henry V., or of drivelling Charles VI., or of _Jean sans peur_; for these--all of them, he knows--have trodden the valley of Rouen.

Whoever may have seen English Worcester or Gloucester will have a foretaste of what comes under the eye at Rouen; but to one fresh from the new, straight thoroughfares of America nothing surely can seem stranger than the dark, crowded ways of the capital of Normandy.

How narrow, how dirty, how cool! for even in summer the sun cannot come down in them--for the projecting balconies and the tallness of the houses; and between the fountains in the occasional open places and the incessant washings it is never dry. There is no pavement for the foot-goer but the sharp, round stones sticking up from side to side, and sloping down to the sluice-way in the middle. Donkeys with loads of cabbages, that nearly fill up the way, women with baskets on their heads, and staring strangers, and _gendarmerie_ in their c.o.c.ked hats, marching two by two, and soldiers, and school-boys (not common in France), and anxious-faced merchants (still rarer out of the North), all troop together under gables, that would seem to totter were they not of huge oak beams, whose blackened heads peep out from the brick walls like faces of an age gone by.

What quaint carving! what heavy old tiles, when you catch a glimpse of the peaked roofs! what windings and twists! There are well-filled and sometimes elegant shops below, with story on story reeling above them.

Away through an opening, that is only a streak of light at the end, appears the ugly brown statue of the Maid of Orleans. There she was burned, poor girl!--and the valet, if you have the little English boy of the Hotel de Rouen, will tell you how, and when, and why they burned her; and he will ring the bell at the gate of a strange, old house close by, and beckon you into the court, where you will see around the walls the bas-reliefs of the Cloth of Gold. St. Owens too, which, after Strasburg Cathedral, is the n.o.blest Gothic church in France, is in some corner of the never-ending curious streets. And on a fete day, what store of costume on its pavement! What big, white muslin caps,--flaring to left and right! What show of red petticoats, and steeple-crowned hats, and clumping sabots, and short-waisted boys, and little, brown men of Brittany!...

Many--many dull diligence--days lie between Rouen and the sunny southern town of Nismes; yet with the wishing we were there at once.

Where was born Guizot,--where are Protestant people,--where are almost quiet Sundays,--where there is a Roman Coliseum, dropped in the centre of the town,--there are we. On a December day, when I was there, it was as warm and summer-like,--the sunny side of that old ruin,--and the green things peeped out from the wall as fresh and blossoming, as if Merrie May had commenced her time of flowers. And the birds were chattering out of all the corridors, and the brown stone looked as mellow as a russet apple in the glow of that rich southern atmosphere.

The trees along the Boulevard--running here through the town--wore a spring-like air (there must have been olives or evergreen oaks among them), and though I cannot say if the peach-trees were in bloom, yet I know I picked a bright red rose in the garden by the fountain,--the great Roman fountain which supplies the whole town with water,--and it lies pressed for a witness in my journal yet. And there were a hundred other roses in bloom all around,--and a little girl was pa.s.sing through the garden at the time, with one in her hair, and was playing with another in her hand. And the old soldier who limps, and lives in the little cottage at the gate of the garden, as patrol, was sunning himself on the bench by the door; and a canary-bird that hung over it was singing as blithely in his cage as the sparrows had been singing in the ruin.

And what was there in that charming garden spot of Nismes, with its wide walks and shade of trees, and fresh with the sound of running water and the music of birds? There was an old temple of Diana, and fountain of the Nymphs. Both were embowered in trees at the foot of the hill which lords it over the town.

The fountain rises almost a river, and alone supplies a city of forty thousand inhabitants. The guide-books will tell one that it is some fifty or sixty feet in depth, and surrounded with walls of masonry,--now green with moss and clinging herbs; and from this, its source, it pa.s.ses in a gushing flood over the marble floors of old Roman baths, as smooth and exact now as the day on which they were laid. The old soldier will conduct you down and open the door-way, so that you may tread upon the smooth marble where trod the little feet of the unknown Roman girls.

For none know when the baths were built, or when this temple of Diana was founded. Not even of the great arena, remarkable in many respects as the Roman Coliseum, is there the slightest cla.s.sic record. Nothing but its own gigantic masonry tells of its origin.

Upon the top of the hill, from whose foot flows the fountain, is still another ruin,--a high, c.u.mbrous tower. And as I wandered under it, full of cla.s.sic fervor, and looked up,--with ancient Rome in my eye, and the gold aegis, and the banner of triumph,--behold, an old woman with a red handkerchief tied round her head was spreading a blue petticoat over the edge of the tower to dry.

But from the ground beneath was a rich view over the town and valley.

The hill and the garden at its base were cloaked with the deep black green of pines and firs; beyond was the town, just veiled in the light smoke of the morning fires; here peeped through a steeple, there a heavy old tower, and looming with its hundred arches and circ.u.mference of broken rocks--bigger than them all--was the amphitheatre of the Latin people, whose language and monuments alone remain. Beside the city--through an atmosphere clear as a morning on the valley of the Connecticut--were the stiff velvety tops of the olive-orchards and the long brown lines of vineyards;--away the meadows swept, with here and there over the level reach an old gray town, with tall presiding castle, or a glittering strip of the bright branches of the Rhone.

But not only is there pleasant December sun and sunny landscape in and about the Provencal town of Nismes, there are also pleasant streets and walks; there is a beautiful Roman temple,--_La Maison Carree_,--than which there is scarce a more perfect one through all Italy, among the neat white houses of the city. Within it are abundance of curiosities, for such as are curious about dates and inscriptions that cannot be made out; and there are Roman portals still left in the vestiges of the Roman walls....

There is the Grand Theatre for such as wish a stall for a month; and there is the grander theatre of the old Roman Arene. True, the manager is dead, and the actors are but bats and lizards, with now and then a grum old owl for prompter. But what scenes the arched openings blackened by the fires of barbarians, and the stunted trees growing where Roman ladies sat, paint to the eye of fancy! What an orchestra the birds make at twilight, and the recollections make always!

It was better than Norma, it was richer than Robert le Diable, to sit down on one of the fragments in front of where was the great entrance and look through the iron grating, and follow the perspective of corridors opening into the central arena, where the moonlight shone on a still December night,--glimmering over the ranges of the seats and upon the shaking leaves. And there was a rustle, a gentle sighing of the night wind among the crevices, that one could easily believe was the echo of a distant chorus behind the scenes:--and so it was,--a chorus of Great Dead Ones,--mournful and slow,--listened to by no flesh ear, but by the delicate ear of Memory.

There are rides about Nismes. There is Avignon with its brown ramparts and its gigantic Papal towers bundling up from the banks of the Rhone, only a half-day's ride away; and half a day more will put one down at the fountain of Vaucluse; where, if it be summer-time,--and it is summer-time there three-quarters of the year,--you may sit down under the shade of a fig-tree, or a fir, and read--undisturbed save by the dashing of the water under the cliff--the fourteenth Canzonet of Petrarch....

Coming back at nightfall, [the traveller] will have a mind to hunt through the narrow, dim-lighted streets of Avignon in search of the tomb of Laura, and he will find it embowered with laurels and shut up by a thorn hedge and wicket; and to get within this, he will ring the bell of the heavy, sombre-looking mansion close by, when a shuffling old man with keys will come out and do the honors of the tomb. He will take a franc,--not absolutely disdainfully, but with a world of _sang-froid_, since it is not for himself (he says) but for the poor children within the mansion, which is a foundling hospital. He puts the money in his red waistcoat-pocket, suiting to the action a sigh, "_Mes pauvres enfans!_"

Perhaps you will add in the overflowing of your heart, "Poor children!"

As you go out of the garden, a box at the gate, which had escaped your notice, solicits offerings in behalf of the inst.i.tution from strangers visiting the tomb. The box has a lock and key; the old man does not keep the key. You have a sudden suspicion of his red waistcoat-pocket, and sigh as you go out, _Les pauvres enfans!_

_Pont du Gard_ is the finest existing remain of a Roman aqueduct, and spans a quite deep stream, good for either fishing or bathing. Profusion of wild flowers grow about and over it, and fig-trees and brambles make a thicket together on the slope that goes down to the water.

One may walk over the top of the ruin--two yards wide, without parapet or rail--and look over into the depth three hundred feet below. The nerves must be strong to endure it, then the enjoyment is full. Less than half a day's ride will bring one from the Pont du Gard to the Hotel du Luxembourg of Nismes.

Montpellier is in Provence, the city of summer-like winters, and upon the river is Arles, with its Arena, larger even than that of Nismes, but far less perfect; and its pretty women--famous all over France--wear a mischievous look about them, and the tie of their red turbans, as if coquetry were one of their charms.

It is a strange, mixed-up town, that of Arles,--ruins and dirt and narrowness and grandeur, an old church in whose yard they dig up Roman coffins, and a rolling bridge of boats. Not anywhere in France are there dirtier and more crooked streets, not anywhere such motley array of shops amid the filth, red turbans and meat, bread and blocks, old coins and silks. Within the museum itself are collected more odd sc.r.a.ps of antiquity than can be found elsewhere together; there are lead pipes and stone fountains, old inscriptions and iron spikes, and the n.o.blest monument of all is a female head that has no nose; but the manager very ingeniously supplies with his hand the missing feature.

Opposite the doors of this museum stands an obelisk of granite, which was fished out of the Rhone, and boasts a high antiquity, and upon its top is a brilliant sun with staring eyes. To complete the extraordinary grouping, upon another side of the same square is a church with the strangest bas-relief over its central door-way that surely madcap fancy ever devised. It is a representation of the Last Judgment; on the right, the angels are leading away the blessed in pairs, and on the left a grinning devil with horns, and with a stout rope pa.s.sed over his shoulder and clinched in his teeth, is tugging away at legions of condemned souls.

There is rare Gothic sculpture within some old cloisters adjoining, and a marble bas-relief within the church, with a Virgin and Child in glory, was--I say it on the authority of an ingenious _valet de place_--of undoubtedly Roman origin.

Ancient sarcophagi may be seen here and there in the streets, serving as reservoirs at the fountains; and many a peasant of the adjoining country makes the coffin of a Roman n.o.ble his water-trough.

There belongs another antiquity to Provence besides that of Roman date,--it is that of the gay, chivalrous times of William IX., Count of Poitou, and all the gallant Troubadours who came after him. Then helmets glittered over the Provencal plains, and ladies wove silken pennants in princely halls. Then the tournament drew its throngs, and knights contended not only with their lances for martial fame but with their songs for the ears of love. Even monarchs--Barbarossa and Coeur de Lion--vied with Troubadours, and the seat of the Provencal court was the great centre of Southern chivalry. Arles had its court of love, more splendid than now, and its _arret d'amour_ was more binding than the charms of the brightest eyes that shine in Provence to-day.

Little remains of the luxurious tastes of the old livers at Arles. The cafe, dirty and dim, a.s.sembles the chivalry of the city, and a stranger Western knight, in place of baronial hall, is entertained at the Hotel du Forum, where, with excess of cheatery, they give him for St. Peray a weak, carbonated Moselle.

Let no one judge of the flat sand surface of Provence by the rich descriptions of the Mysteries of Udolfo, nor let the lover of ballad poetry reckon upon the peasant _patois_ as having the sweet flow of Raymond or Bertrand de Born.

A FRENCH FARMER'S PARADISE.

M. BETHAM-EDWARDS.

[So many woful stories are told us of the penury and strife for bare existence of the agriculturists of Europe that it is pleasant to read of happier scenes and more plentiful larders.

M. Betham-Edwards, than whom few are better able to speak of the conditions of life in rural France, has drawn for us, in her "Holidays in Eastern France," a cheerful picture of such a scene, which we take pleasure in reproducing. We are here taken out of the beaten track of ordinary travel into "fresh scenes and pastures new."]

How delicious to escape from the fever, heat, and turmoil of Paris during the Exhibition to the green banks and sheltered ways of the gently undulating Marne! With what delight we wake up in the morning to the noise--if noise it can be called--of the mower's scythe, the rustle of acacia-leaves, and the notes of the stock-dove, looking back as upon a nightmare to the horn of the tramway conductor and the perpetual grind of the stonemason's saw! Yes, to quit Paris at a time of tropic heat, and nestle down in some country resort, is, indeed, like exchanging Dante's lower circle for Paradise. The heat has followed us here; but with a screen of luxuriant foliage ever between us and the burning blue sky, and with a breeze rippling the leaves always, no one need complain.

With the c.o.c.ks and the hens, and the birds and the bees, we are all up and stirring betimes; there are dozens of cool nooks and corners, if we like to spend the morning out of doors, and do not feel enterprising enough to set out on an exploring expedition by diligence or rail. After the mid-day meal every one takes a siesta, as a matter of course, waking up between four and five o'clock for a ramble. Wherever we go we find lovely prospects. Quiet little rivers and ca.n.a.ls, winding in between lofty lines of poplars, undulating pastures, and amber cornfields; picturesque villages, crowned by a church spire here and there; wide sweeps of highly cultivated land, interspersed with rich woods, vineyards, orchards, and gardens; all these make up the scenery familiarized to us by some of the most characteristic of French painters.

Just such tranquil rural pictures have been portrayed over and over again by Millet, Corot, Daubigny; and in this very simplicity often lies their charm. No costume or grandiose outline is here, as in Brittany; no picturesque poverty, no poetic archaisms; all is rustic and pastoral, but with the rusticity and pastoralness of every day.

We are in the midst of one of the wealthiest and best cultivated regions of France, moreover, and, when we penetrate beneath the surface, we find that in manner and customs, as well as dress and outward appearance, the peasant and agricultural population generally differ no little from their remote country-people, the Bretons. In this famous cheese-making country, the "Fromage de Brie" being the specialty of these rich dairy-farms, there is no superst.i.tion, hardly a trace of poverty, and little that can be called poetic. The people are wealthy, laborious, and progressive. The farmers' wives, however hard they may work at home, wear the smartest of Parisian bonnets and gowns when paying visits. I was going to say, when at church, but n.o.body does go there!