In and Out of Three Normandy Inns by Anna Bowman Dodd (page 2)

conscience; that dark curtain of hair, looped madonna-wise over each ear, framed a face as unruffled as her conscience.

She was entirely at peace with her world, and with heaven as well, that was certain. Whatever her sins, the confessional had purged her. Like others, doubtless, she had found a husband and the provinces excellent remedies for a damaged reputation. She lived now in the very odor of sanctity; the cure had a pipe in her kitchen, with something more sustaining, on certain bright afternoons. Although she was daily announcing to us her approaching dissolution–“I die, mesdames–I die of ennui”–it seemed to me there were still signs, at times, of a vigorous resuscitation. The cure’s visits were wont to produce a deeper red in the deep bloom of her cheek; the mayor and his wife, who drank their Sunday coffee in the arbor, brought, as did Beatrix’s advent to Dante, _vita nuova_ to this homesick Parisian.

There were other pleasures in her small world, also, which made life endurable. Bargaining, when one teems with talent, may be as exciting as any other form of conquest. Madame’s days were chiefly passed in imitation of the occupation so dear to an earlier, hardier race, that race kings have knighted for their powers in dealing mightily with their weaker neighbors. Madame, it is true, was only a woman, and Villerville was somewhat slimly populated. But in imitation of her remote feudal lords, she also fell upon the passing stranger, demanding tribute. When the stranger did not pass, she kept her arm in practice, so to speak, by extracting the last _sou_ in a transaction from a neighbor, or by indulging in a drama in which the comedy of insult was matched by the tragedy of contempt.

One of these mortal combats it was my privilege to witness. The war arose on our announcement to Mere Mouchard, the lady of the inn by the sea, of our decision to move next door. To us Mere Mouchard presented the unruffled plumage of a dove; her voice also was as the voice of the same, mellowed by sucking. Ten minutes later the town was assembled to lend its assistance at the encounter between our two landladies. Each stood on their respective doorsteps with arms akimbo and head thrust forward, as geese protrude head and tongue in moments of combat. And it was thus, the mere hissed, that her boarders were stolen from her–under her very nose–while her back was turned, with no more thought of honesty or shame than a—-. The word was never uttered. The mere’s insult was drowned in a storm of voices? for there came a loud protest from the group of neighbors. Madame Fouchet, meanwhile, was sustaining her own role with great dignity. Her attitude of self-control could only have been learned in a school where insult was an habitual weapon. She smiled, an infuriating, exasperating, successful smile. She showed a set of defiant white teeth, and to her proud white throat she gave a boastful curve. Was it her fault if _ces dames_ knew what comfort and cleanliness were? if they preferred “_des chambres garnies avec gout, vraiment artistiques_”–to rooms fit only for peasants? _Ces dames_ had just come from Paris; doubtless, they were not yet accustomed to provincial customs–_aux moeurs provinciales_. Then there were exchanged certain melodious acerbities, which proved that these ladies had entered the lists on previous occasions, and that each was well practised in the other’s methods of warfare. Opportunely, Renard appeared on the scene; his announcement that we proposed still to continue taking our repasts with the mere, was as oil on the sea of trouble. A reconciliation was immediately effected, and the street as immediately lost all interest in the play, the audience melting away as speedily as did the wrath of the disputants.

“_Le bon Dieu soit loue_,” cried Madame Fouchet, puffing, as she mounted the stairs a few moments later–“God be praised”–she hadn’t come here to the provinces to learn her rights–to be taught her alphabet. Mere Mouchard, forsooth, who wanted a week’s board as indemnity for her loss of us! A week’s board–for lodgings scorned by peasants!

“Ah, these Normans! what a people, what a people! They would peel the skin off your back! They would sell their children! They would cheat the devil himself!”

“You, madame, I presume, are from Paris.” Madame smiled as she answered, a thin fine smile, richly seasoned with scorn. “Ah, mesdames! All the world can’t boast of Paris as a birthplace, unfortunately. I also, I am a Norman, _mais je ne m’en fiche pas!_ Most of my life, however, I’ve lived in Paris, thank God!” She lifted her head as she spoke, and swept her hands about her waist to adjust the broad belt, an action pregnant with suggestions. For it was thus conveyed to us, delicately, that such a figure as hers was not bred on rustic diet; also, that the Parisian glaze had not failed of its effect on the coarser provincial clay.

Meanwhile, below in the garden, her husband was meekly tying up his rose-trees.

Neither of the landladies’ husbands had figured in the street-battle. It had been a purely Amazonian encounter, bloodless but bitter. Both the husbands of these two belligerent landladies appeared singularly well trained. Mouchard, indeed, occupied a comparatively humble sphere in his wife’s _menage_. He was perpetually to be seen in the court-yard, at the back of the house, washing dogs, or dishes, in a costume in which the greatest economy of cloth compatible with decency had been triumphantly solved. His wife ran the house, and he ran the errands, an arrangement which, apparently, worked greatly to the satisfaction of both. But Mouchard was not the first or the second French husband who, on the threshold of his connubial experience, had doubtless had his role in life appointed to him, filling the same with patient acquiescence to the very last of the lines.

There is something very touching in the subjection of French husbands. In point of meekness they may well serve, I think, as models to their kind. It is a meekness, however, which does not hint of humiliation; for, after all, what humiliation can there be in being thoroughly understood? The Frenchwoman, by virtue of centuries of activity, in the world and in the field, has become an expert in the art of knowing her man; she has not worked by his side, under the burn of the noon sun, or in the cimmerian darkness of the shop-rear, counting the pennies, for nothing. In exchanging her illusions for the bald front of fact, man himself has had to pay the penalty of this mixed gain. She tests him by purely professional standards, as man tests man, or as he has tested her, when in the ante-matrimonial days he weighed her _dot_ in the scale of his need. The Frenchwoman and Shakespeare are entirely of one mind; they perceive the great truth of unity in the scheme of things:

“Woman’s test is man’s taste.”

This is the first among the great truths in the feminine grammar of assent. French masculine taste, as its criterion, has established the excellent doctrine of utilitarianism. With quick apprehension the Frenchwoman has mastered this fact; she has cleverly taken a lesson from ophidian habits–she can change her skin, quickly shedding the sentimentalist, when it comes to serious action, to don the duller raiment of utility. She has accepted her world, in other words, as she finds it, with a philosopher’s shrug. But the philosopher is lined with the logician; for this system of life has accomplished the miracle of making its women logical; they have grasped the subtleties of inductive reasoning. Marriage, for example, they know is entered into solely on the principle of mutual benefit; it is therefore a partnership, _bon_; now, in partnerships sentiments and the emotions are out of place, they only serve to dim the eye; those commodities, therefore, are best conveyed to other markets than the matrimonial one; for in purely commercial transactions one has need of perfect clearness of vision, if only to keep one well practised in that simple game called looking out for one’s own interest. In Frenchwomen, the ratiocinationist is extraordinarily developed; her logic penetrates to the core of things.

Hence it is that Mouchard washes dishes.

Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere’s comedy, who expressed such surprise at finding that he had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it, was no more amazed than would Mere Mouchard have been had you announced to her that she was a logician; or that her husband’s daily occupations in the bright little court-yard were the result of a system. Yet both facts were true.

In that process we now know as the survival of the fittest, the mere’s capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse’s incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and the _dot_ system, relegated to the ignominy of passing his days washing dishes–dishes which she cooked and served–dishes, it should be added, which she was entirely conscious were cooked by the hand of genius, and which she garnished with a sauce and served with a smile, such as only issue from French kitchens.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE QUARTIER LATIN ON THE BEACH.

The beach, one morning, we found suddenly peopled with artists. It was a little city of tents. Beneath striped awnings and white umbrellas a multitude of flat-capped heads sat immovably still on their three-legged stools, or darted hither and thither. Paris was evidently beginning to empty its studios; the Normandy beaches now furnished the better model.

One morning we were in luck. A certain blonde beard had counted early in the day on having the beach to himself. He had posed his model in the open daylight, that he might paint her in the sun. He had placed her, seated on an edge of seawall; for a background there was the curve of the yellow sands and the flat breadth of the sea, with the droop of the sky meeting the sea miles away. The girl was a slim, fair shape, with long, thin legs and delicately moulded arms; she was dressed in the fillet and chiton of Greece. During her long poses she was as immovable as an antique marble; her natural grace and prettiness were transfigured into positive beauty by the flowing lines and the pink draperies of her Attic costume. Seated thus, she was a breathing embodiment of the best Greek period. When the rests came, her jump from the wall landed her square on her feet and at the latter end of the nineteenth century. Once free, she bounded from her perch on the high sea-wall. In an instant she had tucked her tinted draperies within the slender girdle; her sandalled feet must be untrammelled, she was about to take her run on the beach. Soon she was pelting, irreverently, her painter with a shower of loose pebbles. Next she had challenged him to a race; when she reached the goal, her thin, bare arms were uplifted as she clapped and shouted for glee; the Quartier Latin in her blood was having its moment of high revelry in the morning sun.

This little grisette, running about free and unshackled in her loose draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity–gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the Attic charm and grace, it has captured, also, something of its sublime indifference; in the very teeth of the dull modern world, France has laughed opinion to scorn.

At noon the tents were all deserted. It was at this hour that the inn garden was full. The gayety and laughter overflowed the walls. Everyone talked at once; the orders were like a rattle of artillery–painting for hours in the open air gives a fine edge to appetite, and patience is never the true twin of hunger. Everything but the _potage_ was certain to be on time.

Colinette, released from her Greek draperies, with her Parisian bodice had recovered the _blague_ of the studios.

“_Sacre nom de–on reste donc claquemure ainsi toute la matinee!_ And all for an _omelette_–a puny, good-for-nothing _omelette_. And you–you’ve lost your tongue, it seems?” And a shrill voice pierced the air as Colinette gave her painter the hint of her prodding elbow. With the appearance of the _omelette_ the reign of good humor would return. Everything then went as merrily as that marriage-bell which, apparently, is the only one absent in Bohemia’s gay chimes.

These arbors had obviously been built out of pure charity: they appeared to have been constructed on the principle that since man, painting man, is often forced to live alone, from economic necessity, it is therefore only the commonest charity to provide him with the proper surroundings for eating _a deux._ The little tables beneath the kiosks were strictly _tete-a-tete_ tables; even the chairs, like the visitors, appeared to come only in couples.

The Frenchman has been reproached with the sin of ingratitude; has been convicted, indeed, as possessed of more of that pride that comes late–the day after the gift of bounty has been given–than some other of his fellow-mortals. Yet here were a company of Frenchmen–and Frenchwomen–proving in no ordinary fashion their equipment in this rare virtue. It was early in May; up yonder, where the Seine flows beneath the Parisian bridges, the pulse of the gay Paris world was beating in time to the spring in the air. Yet these artists had deserted the asphalt of the boulevards for the cobbles of a village street, the delights of the _cafe chantant_ had been exchanged for the miracle of the moon rising over the sea, and for the song of the thrush in the bush.

The Frenchman, more easily and with simpler art than any of his modern brethren, can change the prose of our dull, practical life into poetry; he can turn lyrical at a moment’s notice. He possesses the power of transmuting the commonplace into the idyllic, by merely clapping on his cap and turning his back on the haunts of men. He has retained a singular–an almost ideal sensitiveness, of mental cuticle–such acuteness of sensation, that a journey to a field will oftentimes yield him all the flavor of a long voyage, and a sudden introduction to a forest, the rapture that commonly comes only with some unwonted aspect of nature. Perhaps it is because of this natural poet indwelling in a Frenchman, that makes him content to remain so much at home. Surely the extraordinary is the costly necessity for barren minds; the richly- endowed can see the beauty that lies the other side of their own door- step.

CHAPTER IX.

A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD.

There were two paths in the village that were well worn. One was that which led the village up into the fields. The other was the one that led the tillers of the soil down into the village, to the door step of the justice of the peace.

A good Norman is no Norman who has not a lawsuit on hand.

Anything will serve as a pretext for a quarrel No sum of money is so small as not to warrant a breaking of the closest blood ties, if thereby one’s rights may be secured. Those beautiful stripes of rye, barley, corn, and wheat up yonder in the fields, that melt into one another like sea-tones–down here on the benches before the _juge de paix_–what quarrels, what hatreds, what evil passions these few acres of land have brought their owners, facing each other here like so many demons, ready to spring at the others’ throats! Brothers on these benches forget they are brothers, and sisters that they have suckled the same mother. Two more yards of the soil that should have been Fillette’s instead of Jeanne’s, and the grave will enclose both before the clenched fist of either is relaxed, and the last _sous_ in the stocking will be spent before the war between their respective lawyers will end.

Many and many were the tales told us of the domestic tragedies, born of wills mal-administered, of the passions of hate, ambition, and despair kept at a white heat because half the village owned, up in the fields, what the other half coveted. Many, also, and fierce were the heated faces we looked in upon at the justice’s door, in the very throes of the great moment of facing justice, and their adversary.

Our own way, by preference, took us up into the fields. Here, in the broad open, the farms lay scattered like fortifications over a plain. Doubtless, in the earlier warlike days they had served as such.

Once out of the narrow Villerville streets, and the pastoral was in full swing.

The sea along this coast was not in the least insistant; it allowed the shore to play its full gamut of power. There were no tortured shapes of trees or plants, or barren wastes, to attest the fierce ways of the sea with the land. Reminders of the sea and of the life that is lived in ships were conspicuous features everywhere, in the pastoral scenes that began as soon as the town ended. Women carrying sails and nets toiled through the green aisles of the roads and lanes. Fishing-tackle hung in company with tattered jerseys outside of huts hidden in grasses and honeysuckle. The shepherdesses, as they followed the sheep inland into the heart of the pasture land, were busy netting the coarse cages that trap the finny tribe. Long-limbed, vigorous-faced, these shepherdesses were Biblical figures. In their coarse homespun, with only a skirt and a shirt, with their bare legs, half-open bosoms, and the fine poise of their blond heads, theirs was a beauty that commanded the homage accorded to a rude virginity.

In some of the fields, in one of our many walks, the grass was being cut. In these fields the groups of men and women were thickest. The long scythes were swung mightily by both; the voices, a gay treble of human speech, rose above the metallic swish of the sharp blades cutting into the succulent grasses.

The fat pasture lands rose and sank in undulations as rounded as the nascent breasts of a young Greek maiden. A medley of color played its charming variations over fields, over acres of poppies, over plains of red clover, over the backs of spotted cattle, mixing, mingling, blending a thousand twists and turns into one exquisite, harmonious whole. There was no discordant note, not one harsh contrast; even the hay-ricks seemed to have been modelled rather than pitched into shape; their sloping sides and finely pointed apexes giving them the dignity of structural intent.

Why should not a peasant, in blouse and sabots, with a grinning idiot face, have put the picture out? But he did not. He was walking, or rather waddling, toward us, between two green walls that rose to be arched by elms that hid the blue of the sky. This lane was the kind of lane one sees only in Devonshire and in Normandy. There are lanes and lanes, as, to quote our friend the cobbler, there are cures and cures. But only in these above-named countries can one count on walking straight into the heart of an emerald, if one turns from the high-road into a lane. The trees, in these Devonshire and Normandy by-paths, have ways of their own of vaulting into space; the hedges are thicker, sweeter, more vocal with insect and song notes than elsewhere; the roadway itself is softer to the foot, and narrower–only two are expected to walk therein.

It was through such a lane as this that the coarse, animal shape of a peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted; the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant’s blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous deformity of the smile idiocy wears. Again I ask, why did he not disfigure this fair scene, and put out something of the beauty of the day? Is it because the French peasant seems now to be an inseparable adjunct of the Frenchman’s landscape? That even deformity has been so handled by the realists as to make us see beauty in ugliness? Or is it that, as moderns, we are all bitten by the rabies of the picturesque; that all things serve and are acceptable so long as we have our necessary note of contrast? Certain it is that it appears to be the peasant’s blouse that perpetuates the Salon, and perhaps–who knows?–when over-emigration makes our own American farmer too poor to wear a boiled shirt when he ploughs, we also may develop a school of landscape, with figures.

Meanwhile the walk and the talk had made Charm thirsty. “Why should we not go,” she asked, “across the next field, into that farm house yonder, and beg for a glass of milk?”

The farm-house might have been waiting for us, it was so still. Even the grasses along its sloping roof nodded, as if in welcome. The house, as we approached it, together with its out-buildings, assumed a more imposing aspect than it had from the road. Its long, low facade, broken here and there by a miniature window or a narrow doorway, appeared to stretch out into interminable length beneath the towering beeches and the snarl of the peach-tree boughs.

The stillness was ominous–it was so profound.

The only human in sight was a man in a distant field; he was raking the ploughed ground. He was too far away to hear the sound of our voices.

“Perhaps the entire establishment is in the fields,” said Charm, as we neared the house.

Just then a succession of blows fell on our ear.

“Someone is beating a mattress within, we shall have our glass after all.”

We knocked. But no one answered our knock.

The beating continued; the sound of the blows fell as regularly as if machine-impelled. Then a cry rose up; it was the cry of a young, strong voice, and it was followed by a low wail of anguish.

The door stood half-open, and this is what we saw: A man–tall, strong, powerful, with a face purple with passion–bending over the crouching form of a girl, whose slender body was quivering, shrinking, and writhing as the man’s hand, armed with a short stick, fell, smiting her defenceless back and limbs.

Her wail went on as each blow fell.

In a corner, crouched in a heap, sitting on her heels, was a woman. She was clapping her hands. Her eyes were starting from her head; she clapped as the blows came, and above the girl’s wail her strong, exultant voice arose–calling out:

“_Tue-la! Tue-la!_”

It was the voice of a triumphant fury.

The backs of all these people were turned upon us; they had not seen, much less heard, our entrance.

Someone else had seen us, however. A man with a rake over his shoulder rushed in through the open door; it was the peasant we had seen in the field. He seized Charm by the arm, and then my own hand was grasped as in a grip of iron. Before we had time for resistance he had pushed us out before him into the entry, behind the outer door. This latter he slammed. He put his broad back against it; then he dropped his rake and began to mop his face, violently, with a filthy handkerchief he plucked from beneath his blouse.

“_Que chance! Nom de Dieu, que chance! Je v’avions vue_, I saw you just in time–just in time–“

“But, I must go in–I wish to go back!” But Charm might as well have attempted to move a pillar of stone.

The peasant’s coarse, good-humored face broke into a broad laugh.

“Pardon, mam’selle–_j’n bougeons pas. Not’ maitre e encolere; e’ son jour–faut pas l’irriter–aujou’hui.”_

Meantime, during the noise of our forced exit and the ensuing dialogue, the scene within had evidently changed in character, for the blows had ceased. Steps could be heard crossing and recrossing the wooden floor. A creaking sound succeeded to the beating–it was the creaking and groaning of a wooden staircase bending beneath the weight of a human figure. In an upper chamber there came the sound of a quiet, subdued sobbing now. They were the sobs of the girl. She at least had been released.

A face, cruel, pinched, hardened, with flaming agate eyes and an insolent smile, stood looking out at us through the dulled, dusty window-pane. It was the fury.

Meanwhile the peasant was still defending his post. A moment later the tall frame of the farmer suddenly filled the open doorway. The peasant well-nigh fell into his master’s arms. The farmer’s face was still terrible to look upon, but the purple stain of passion was now turned to red. There was a mocking insolence in his tone as he addressed us, that matched with the woman’s unconcealed glee.

“Will you not come in, mesdames? Will you not rest a while after your long walk?” On the man’s hard face there was still the shadow of a sinister cruelty as he waved his hand toward the room within.

The peasant’s good-humored, loutish smile, and his stupid, cow-like eyes, by contrast, were the eyes and smile of a benevolent deity.

The smile told us we were right, as we slunk away toward the open road. The head kept nodding approval as we vanished presently beneath the shade of the protecting trees.

The fields, as we swept rapidly past them, were as bathed in peace as when we had left them; there was even a more voluptuous content abroad: for the twilight was wrapping about the landscape its poppied dusk of gloom and shadow. Above, the birds were swirling in sweeping circles, raining down the ecstasy of their night-song; still above, far beyond them, across a zenith pure, transparent, ineffably pink, illumined wisps of clouds were trailing their scarf-like shapes. It was a scene of beatific peace. Across the fields came the sound of a distant bell. It was the _Angelus_. The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend their heads in prayer.

And in our ears, louder than the vibrations of the hamlet bell, louder than the bird-notes and the tumult of the voluptuous insect whirr, there rang the thud, thud of cruel blows falling on quivering human flesh.

The curtain that hid the life of the peasant-farmer had indeed been lifted.

CHAPTER X.

ERNESTINE.

“Ah, mesdames, what will you have? The French peasant is like that. When he is in a rage nothing stops him–he beats anything, everything; whatever his hand encounters must suffer when he is angry; his wife, his child, his servant, his horse, they are all alike to him when he sees red.”

Monsieur Fouchet was tying up his rose-trees; we were watching him from our seat on the green bench. Here in the garden, beneath the blue vault, the roses were drooping from very heaviness of glory; they gave forth a scent that made the head swim. It was a healthy, virile intoxication, however, the salt in the air steadying one’s nerves.

Nature, not being mortal and cursed with a conscience, had risen that morning in a mood for carousal; at this hour of noon she had reached the point of ecstatic stupor. No state of trance was ever so exquisite. The air was swooning, but how delicate its gasps, as if it fell away into calm! How adorably blue the sky in its debauch of sun-lit ether! The sea, too, although it reeled slightly, unsteadily rising only to fall away, what a radiance of color it maintained! Here in the garden the drowsy air would lift a flower petal, as some dreamer sunk in hasheesh slumber might touch a loved hand, only to let it slip away in nerveless impotence. Never had the charm of this Normandy sea-coast been as compelling; never had the divine softness of this air, this harmonious marriage of earth-scents and sea-smells seemed as perfect; never before had the delicacy of the foliage and color-gradations of the sky as triumphantly proved that nowhere else, save in France, can nature be at once sensuous and poetic.

We looked for something other than pure enjoyment from this golden moment; we hoped its beauty would help us to soften our landlord. This was the moment we had chosen to excite his sympathies, also to gain counsel from him concerning the tragedy we had witnessed the day before. He listened to our tale with evident interest, but there was a disappointing coolness in his eye. As the narrative proceeded, the brutality of the situation failed to sting him to even a mild form of indignation. He went on tying his rose-trees, his ardor expending itself in choice snippings of the stray stalks and rebellious tendrils.

“This Guichon,” he said, after a brief moment, in the tone that goes with the pursuance of an occupation that has become a passion. “This Guichon–I know him. He is a hard man, but no harder than many others, and he has had his losses, which don’t always soften a man. ‘_Qui terre a guerre a_,’ Moliere says, and Guichon has had many lawsuits, losing them all. He has been twice married; that was his daughter by his first wife he was touching up like that. He married only the other day Madame Tier, a rich woman, a neighbor, their lands join. It was a great match for him, and she, the wife, and his daughter don’t hit it off, it appears. There was some talk of a marriage for the girl lately; a good match presented itself, but the girl will have none of it; perhaps that accounts for the beating.”

A rose, overblown with its fulness of splendor, dropped in a shower at Fouchet’s feet just then.

“_Tiens, elle est finie, celle-la_” he cried, with an accent of regret, and he stooped over the fallen petals as if they had been the remains of a friend. Then he sighed as he swept the mass into his broad palm.

“Come, let us leave him to the funeral of his roses; he hasn’t the sensibilities of an insect;” and Charm grasped my arm to lead me over the turf, across the gravel paths, toward the tea-house.

This tottering structure had become one of our favorite retreats; in the poetic _mise-en-scene_ of the garden it played the part of Ruin. It was absurdly, ridiculously out of repair; its gaping beams and the sunken, dejected floor could only be due to intentional neglect. Fouchet evidently had grasped the secrets of the laws of contrast; the deflected angle of the tumbling roof made the clean-cut garden beds doubly true. Nature had had compassion on the aged little building, however; the clustering, fragrant vines, in their hatred of nudity, had invested the prose of a wreck with the poetry of drapery. The tip-tilted settee beneath the odorous roof became, in time, our chosen seat; from that perch we could overlook the garden-walls, the beach, the curve of the shore, the grasses and hollyhocks in our neighbor’s garden, the latter startlingly distinct against the great arch of the sky.

It was here Renard found us an hour later. To him, likewise, did Charm narrate our extraordinary experience of yesterday, with much adjunct of fiery comment, embellishment of gesture, and imitative pose.

“Ye gods, what a scene to paint! You were in luck–in luck; why wasn’t I there?” was Renard’s tribute to human pity.

“Oh, you are all alike, all–nothing moves you–you haven’t common human sympathies–you haven’t the rudiments of a heart! You are terrible–all of you–terrible!” A moment after she had left us, as if the narrowness of the little house stifled her. With long, swinging steps she passed out, to air her indignation, apparently, beneath the wall of the espaliers.

“Splendid creature, isn’t she?” commented Renard, following the long lines of the girl’s fluttering muslin gown, as he plucked at his mustache. “She should always wear white and gold–what is that stuff?–and be lit up like that with a kind of goddess-like anger. She is wrong, however,” he went on, a moment later; “those of us who live here aren’t really barbarians, only we get used to things. It’s the peasants themselves that force us; they wouldn’t stand interference. A peasant is a kind of king on his own domain; he does anything he likes, short of murder, and he doesn’t always stop at that.”

“But surely the Government–at least their Church, ought to teach them–“

“Oh, their Church! they laugh at their cures–till they come to die. He’s a heathen, that’s what the French peasant is–there’s lots of the middle ages abroad up there in the country. Along here, in the coast villages, the nineteenth century has crept in a bit, humanizing them, but the _fonds_ is always the same; they’re by nature avaricious, sordid, cruel; they’ll do anything for money; there isn’t anything sacred for them except their pocket.”

A few days later, in our friend the cobbler we found a more sympathetic listener. “Dame! I also used to beat my wife,” he said, contemplatively, as he scratched his herculean head, “but that was when I was a Christian, when I went to confession; for the confessional was made for that, _c’est pour laver le linge sale des consciences, ca_” (interjecting his epigram). “But now–now that I am a free-thinker, I have ceased all that; I don’t beat her,” pointing to his old wife, “and neither do I drink or swear.”

“It’s true, he’s good–he is, now,” the old wife nodded, with her slit of a smile; “but,” she added, quickly, as if even in her husband’s religious past there had been some days of glory, “he was always just–even then–when he beat me.”

“_C’est tres femme, ca–hein, mademoiselle?_” And the cobbler cocked his head in critical pose, with a philosopher’s smile.

The result of the interview, however, although not entirely satisfactory, was illuminating, besides this light which had been thrown on the cobbler’s reformation. For the cobbler was a cousin, distant in point of kinship, but still a cousin, of the brutal farmer and father. He knew all the points of the situation, the chief of which was, as Fouchet had hinted, that the girl had refused to wed the _bon parti_, who was a connection of the step-mother. As for the step-mother’s murderous outcry, “Kill her! kill her!” the cobbler refused to take a dramatic view of this outburst.

“In such moments, you understand, one loses one’s head; brutality always intoxicates; she was a little drunk, you see.”

When we proposed our modest little scheme, that of sending for the girl and taking her, for a time at least, into our service, merely as a change of scene, the cobbler had found nothing but admiration for the project. “It will be perfect, mesdames. They, the parents, will ask nothing better. To have the girl out at service, away, and yet not disgracing them by taking a place with any other farmer; yes, they will like that, for they are rich, you see, and wealth always respects itself. Ah, yes, it’s perfect; I’ll arrange all that–all the details.”

Two days later the result of the arrangement stood before us. She was standing with her arms crossed, her fingers clasping her elbows–with her very best peasant manner. She was neatly, and, for a peasant, almost fashionably attired in her holiday dress–a short, black skirt, white stockings, a flowery kerchief crossed over her broad bosom, and on her pretty hair a richly tinted blue _foulard_. She was very well dressed for a peasant, and, from the point of view of two travellers, of about as much use as a plough.

“It’s a beautiful scheme, and it’s as dramatic as the fifth act of a play; but what shall we do with her?”

“Oh.” replied Charm, carelessly, “there isn’t anything in particular for her to do. I mean to buy her a lot of clothes, like those she has on, and she can walk about in the garden or in the fields.”

“Ah, I see; she’s to be a kind of a perambulating figure-piece.”

“Yes, that’s about it. I dare say she will be very useful at sunset, in a dim street; so few peasants wear anything approaching to costume nowadays.”

Ernestine herself, however, as we soon discovered, had an entirely different conception of her vocation. She was a vigorous, active young woman, with the sap of twenty summers in her lusty young veins. Her energies soon found vent in a continuous round of domestic excitements. There were windows and floors that cried aloud to Heaven to be scrubbed; there were holes in the sheets to make mam’zelle’s lying between them _une honte, une vraie honte_. As for Madame Fouchet’s little weekly bill, _Dieu de Dieu_, it was filled with such extortions as to make the very angels weep. Madame and Ernestine did valiant battle over those bills thereafter. Ernestine was possessed of the courage of a true martyr; she could suffer and submit to the scourge, in the matter of personal persecution, for the religion of her own convictions; but in the service of her rescuer, she could fight with the fierceness of a common soldier.

“When Norman meets Norman–” Charm began one day, the sound of voices, in a high treble of anger, coming in to us through the windows.

But Ernestine was knocking at the door, with a note in her hand.

“An answer is asked, mesdames,” she said, in a voice of honey, as she dropped her low courtesy.

This was the missive:

ALONG AN OLD POST-ROAD.

TO HONFLEUR AND TROUVILLE.

CHAPTER XI.

TO AN OLD MANOR.

“Will _ces dames_ join me in a marauding expedition? Like the poet Villon, I am about to turn marauder, house breaker, thief. I shall hope to end the excursion by one act, at least, of highway robbery. I shall lose courage without the enlivening presence of _ces dames._ We will start when the day is at its best, we will return when the moon smiles. In case of finding none to rob, the coach of the desperadoes will be garrisoned with provisions; Henri will accompany us as counsellor, purveyor, and bearer of arms and costumes. The carriage for _ces dames_ will stop the way at the hour of eleven.

“I have the honor to sign myself their humble servant and co-conspirator.

“John Renard.”

“This, in plain English,” was Charm’s laconic translation of this note, “means that he wishes us to be ready at eleven for the excursion to P—-, to spend the day, you may remember, at that old manor. He wants to paint in a background, he said yesterday, while we stroll about and look at the old place. What shall I wear?”

In an hour we were on the road.

A jaunty yellow cart, laden with a girl on the front seat; with a man, tawny of mustache, broad of shoulder, and dark of eye, with face shining to match the spring in the air and that fair face beside him; laden also with another lady on the back seat, beside whom, upright and stiff, with folded arms, sat Henri, costumer, valet, cook, and groom. It was in the latter capacity that Henri was now posing. The role of groom was uppermost in his orderly mind, although at intervals, when his foot chanced to touch a huge luncheon-basket with which the cart was also laden, there were betraying signs of anxiety; it was then that the chef crept back to life. This spring in the air was all very well, but how would it affect the sauces? This great question was written on Henri’s brow in a network of anxious wrinkles.

“Henri,” I remarked, as we were wheeling down the roadway, “I am quite certain you have put up enough luncheon for a regiment.”

“Madame has said it, for a regiment; Monsieur Renard, when he works, eats with the hunger of a wolf.”

“Henri, did you get in all the rags?” This came from Renard on the front seat, as he plied his steed with the whip.

“The costume of Monsieur le Marquis, and also of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, are beneath my feet in the valise, Monsieur Renard. I have the sword between my legs,” replied Henri, the costumer coming to the surface long enough to readjust the sword.

“Capital fellow, Henri, never forgets anything,” said Renard, in English.

“Couldn’t we offer a libation or something, on such a morning–“

“On such a morning,” interrupted the painter, “one should be seated next to a charming young lady who has the genius to wear Nile green and white; even a painter with an Honorable Mention behind him and fame still ahead, in spite of the Mention, is satisfied. You know a Greek deity was nothing to a painter, modern, and of the French school, in point of fastidiousness.”

“Nonsense! it’s the American woman who is fastidious, when it comes to clothes.”

Meanwhile, there was one of the party who was looking at the road; that also was arrayed in Nile green and white; the tall trees also held umbrellas above us, but these coverings were woven of leaves and sky. This bit of roadway appeared to have slipped down from the upper country, and to have carried much of the upper country with it. It was highway posing as pure rustic. It had brought all its pastoral paraphernalia along. Nothing had been forgotten: neither the hawthorn and the osier hedges, nor the tree-trunks, suddenly grown modest at sight of the sea, burying their nudity in nests of vines, nor the trick which elms and beeches have, of growing arches in the sky. Timbered farm-houses were here, also thatched huts, to make the next villa-gate gain in stateliness; apple orchards were dotted about with such a knowing air of wearing the long line of the Atlantic girdled about their gnarled trunks, that one could not believe pure accident had carried them to the edge of the sea. There were several miles of this driving along beneath these green aisles. Through the screen of the hedges and the crowded tree-trunks, picture succeeded picture; bits of the sea were caught between slits of cliff; farmhouses, huts, and villas lay smothered in blossoms; above were heights whereon poplars seemed to shiver in the sun, as they wrapped about them their shroud- like foliage; meadows slipped away from the heights, plunging seaward, as if wearying for the ocean; and through the whole this line of green roadway threaded its path with sinuous grace, serpentining, coiling, braiding in land and sea in one harmonious, inextricable blending of incomparable beauty. One could quite comprehend, after even a short acquaintance with this road, that two gentlemen of Paris, as difficult to please as Daubigny and Isabey, should have seen points of excellence in it.

There are all sorts of ways of being a painter. Perhaps as good as any, if one cares at all about a trifling matter like beauty, is to know a good thing when one sees it. That poet of the brush, Daubigny, not only was gifted with this very unusual talent in a painter, but a good thing could actually be entrusted in his hands after its discovery. And herein, it appears to me, lies all the difference between good and bad painting; not only is an artist–any artist–to be judged by what he sees, but also by what he does with a fact after he’s acquired it–whether he turns it into poetry or prose.

I might incautiously have sprung these views on the artist on the front seat, had he not wisely forestalled my outburst by one of his own.

“By the way,” he broke in; “by the way, I’m not doing my duty as cicerone. There’s a church near here–we’re coming to it in a moment–famous–eleventh or twelfth century, Romanesque style–yes–that’s right, although I’m somewhat shaky when it comes to architecture–and an old manoir, museum now, with lots of old furniture in it–in the manoir, I mean.”

“There’s the church now. Oh, let us stop!”

In point of fact there were two churches before us. There was one of ivy: nave, roof, aisles, walls, and conic-shaped top, as perfectly defined in green as if the beautiful mantle had been cut and fitted to the hidden stone structure. Every few moments the mantle would be lifted by the light breeze, as might a priest’s vestment; it would move and waver, as if the building were a human frame, changing its posture to ease its long standing. Between this church of stone and this church of vines there were signs of the fight that had gone on for ages between them. The stones were obviously fighting decay, fighting ruin, fighting annihilation; the vines were also struggling, but both time and the sun were on their side. The stone edifice was now, it is true, as Renard told us, protected by the Government–it was classed as a “monument historique”–but the church of greens was protected by the god of nature, and seemed to laugh aloud, as if with conscious gleeful strength. This gay, triumphant laugh was reflected, as if to emphasize its mockery of man’s work, in the tranquil waters of a little pond, lily-leaved, garlanded in bushes, that lay hidden beyond the roadway. Through the interstices of the vines one solitary window from the tower, like a sombre eye, looked down into the pond; it saw there, reflected as in a mirror, the old, the eternal picture of a dead ruin clasped by the arms of living beauty.

This Criqueboeuf church presents the ideal picturesque accessories. It stands at the corner of two meeting roadways. It is set in an ideal pastoral frame–a frame of sleeping fields, of waving tree-tops, of an enchanting, indescribable snarl of bushes, vines, and wild flowers. In the adjoining fields, beneath the tree-boughs, ran the long, low line of the ancient manoir–now turned into a museum.

We glanced for a few brief moments at the collection of antiquities assembled beneath the old roof–at the Henry II. chairs, at the Pompadour-wreathed cabinets, at the long rows of panels on which are presented the whole history of France–the latter an amazing record of the industry of a certain Dr. Le Goupils.

“Criqueboeuf doesn’t exactly hide its light under a bushel, you know, although it doesn’t crown a hill. No end of people know it; it sits for its portrait, I should say at least twice a week regularly, on an average, during the season. English water-colorists go mad over it–they cross over on purpose to `do’ it, and they do it extremely badly, as a rule.”

This was Renard’s last comment of a biographical and critical nature, concerning the “historical monument,” as we reseated ourselves to pursue our way to P—-.

“Why don’t you show them how it can be done?”

“Would,” coolly returned Renard, “if it were worth while, but it isn’t in my line. Henri, did you bring any ice?”

Henri, I had noticed, when we had reseated ourselves in the cart, had greeted us with an air of silent sadness; he clearly had not approved of ruins that interfered with the business of the day.

“_Oui, monsieur_, I did bring some ice, but as monsieur can imagine to himself–a two hours’ sun–“

“Nonsense, this sun wouldn’t melt a pat of butter; the ice is all right, and so is the wine.”

Then he continued in English: “Now, ladies, as I should begin if I were a politician, or an auctioneer; now, ladies, the time for confession has arrived; I can no longer conceal from you my burglarious scheme. In the next turn that we shall make to the right, the park of the P—- manoir will disclose itself. But, between us and that Park, there is a gate. That gate is locked. Now, gates, from the time of the Garden of Eden, I take it, have been an invention of–of–the other fellow, to keep people out. I know a way–but it’s not the way you can follow. Henri and I will break down a few bars, we’ll cross a few fields over yonder, and will present ourselves, with all the virtues written on our faces, to you in the Park. Meanwhile you must enter, as queens should–through the great gates. Behold, there is a cure yonder, a great friend of mine. You will step along the roadway; you will ring a door-bell; the cure will appear; you will ask him if it be true that the manoir of P—- is to rent, you have heard that he has the keys; he will present you the keys; you will open the big gate and find me.”

“But–but, Mr. Renard, I really don’t see how that scheme will work.”

“Work! It will work to a charm. You will see. Henri, just help the ladies, will you?”

Henri, with decisive gravity, was helping the ladies to alight; in another instant he had regained his seat, and he and Renard were flying down the roadway, out of sight.

“Really–it’s the coolest proceeding,” Charm began. Then we looked through the bars of the park gate. The park was as green and as still as a convent garden; a pink brick mansion, with closed window-blinds, was standing, surrounded by a terrace on one side, and by glittering parterres on the other.

“Where did he say the old cure was?” asked Charm, quite briskly, all at once. Everything had turned out precisely as Renard had predicted. Doubtless he had also counted on the efficacy of the old fable of the Peri at the Gate–one look had been sufficient to turn us into arrant conspirators; to gain an entrance into that tranquil paradise any ruse would serve.

“Here’s a church–he said nothing about a church, did he?”

Across the avenue, above the branches of a row of tall trees, rose the ivied facade of a rude hamlet church; a flight of steep weedy steps led up to its Norman doorway. The door was wide open; through the arched aperture came the sounds of footfalls, of a heavy, vigorous tread; Charm ran lightly up a few of the lower steps, to peer into the open door.

“It’s the cure dusting the altar–shall I go in?”

“No, we had best ring–this must be his house.”

The clatter of the cure’s sabots was the response that answered to the bell we pulled, a bell attached to a diminutive brick house lying at the foot of the churchyard. The tinkling of the cracked-voiced bell had hardly ceased when the door opened.

But the cure had already taken his first glance at us over the garden hedges.

CHAPTER XII.

A NORMAN CURE.

“Mesdames!”

The priest’s massive frame filled the narrow door; the tones of his mellow voice seemed also suddenly to fill the air, drowning all other sounds. The grace of his manner, a grace that invested the simple act of his uncovering and the holding of his _calotte_ in hand, with an air of homage, made also our own errand the more difficult.

I had already begun to murmur the nature of our errand: we were passing, we had seen the manoir opposite, we had heard it was to rent, also that he, Monsieur le Cure, had the keys.

Yes, the keys were here. Then the velvet in Monsieur le Cure’s eyes turned to bronze, as they looked out at us from beneath the fine dome of brow.

“I have the keys of the garden only, mesdames,” he replied, with perfect but somewhat distant courtesy; “the gardener, down the road yonder, has the keys of the house. Do you really wish to rent the house?”

He had seen through our ruse with quick Norman penetration. He had not, from the first, been in the least deceived.

It became the more difficult to smooth the situation into shape. “We had thought perhaps to rent a villa, we were in one now at Villerville. If Monsieur le cure would let us look at the garden. Monsieur Renard, whom perhaps he remembered–

“M. Renard! Oh ho! Oh ho! I see it all now,” and a deep, mellow laugh smote the air. The keenness in the fine eyes melted into mirth, a mirth that laid the fine head back on the broad shoulders, that the laugh that shook the powerful frame might have the fuller play.

“Ah, _mes enfants_, I see it all now–it is that scoundrel of a boy. I’ll warrant he’s there, over yonder, already. He was here yesterday, he was here the day before, and he is afraid, he is ashamed to ask again for the keys. But come, _mes enfants_, come, let us go in search of him.” And the little door was closed with a slam. Down the broad roadway the next instant fluttered the old cure’s soutane. We followed, but could scarcely keep pace with the brisk, vigorous strides. The sabots ploughed into the dust. The cane stamped along in company with the sabots, all three in a fury of impatience. The cure’s step and his manner might have been those of a boy, burning with haste to discover a playmate in hiding. All the keenness and shrewdness on the fine, ruddy face had melted into sweetness; an exuberance of mirth seemed to be the sap that fed his rich nature. It was easy to see he had passed the meridian of his existence in a realm of high spirits; an irrepressible fountain within, the fountain of an unquenchable good-humor, bathed the whole man with the hues of health. Ripe red lips curved generously over superb teeth; the cheeks were glowing, as were the eyes, the crimson below them deepening to splendor the velvet in the iris. The one severe line in the face, the thin, straight nose, ended in wide nostrils in the quivering, mobile nostrils of the humorist. The swell of the gourmand’s paunch beneath the soutane was proof that the cure was a true Norman he had not passed a lifetime in these fertile gardens forgetful of the fact that the fine art of good living is the one indulgence the Church has left to its celibate sons.

Meanwhile, our guide was peering with quick, excited gaze, through the thick foliage of the park; his fine black eyes were sweeping the parterre and terrace.

“Ah-h!” his rich voice cried out, mockingly; and he stopped, suddenly, to plant his cane in the ground with mock fierceness.

“_Tiens_, Monsieur le Cure!” cried Renard, from behind a tree, in a beautiful voice. It was a voice that matched with his well-acted surprise, when he appeared, confronting us, on the other side of the tree-trunk.

The cure opened his arms.

“_Ah, mon enfant, viens, viens!_ how good it is to see thee once again!”

They were in each other’s arms. The cure was pressing his lips to Renard’s cheek, in hearty French fashion. The priest, however, administered his reproof before he released him. Renard’s broad shoulders received a series of pats, which turned to blows, dealt by the cure’s herculean hand.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were here, yesterday, _Hein_? Answer me that. How goes the picture? Is it set up yet? You see, mesdames,” turning with a reddened cheek and gleaming eyes, “it is thus I punish him–for he has no heart, no sensibilities–he only understands severities! And he defrauded me yesterday, he cheated me. I didn’t even know of his being here till he had gone. And the picture, where is it?”

It was on an easel, sunning itself beneath the park trees. The old priest clattered along the gravelly walk, to take a look at it.

“_Tiens_–it grows–the figures begin to move–they are almost alive. There should be a trifle more shadow under the chin, what do you think?”

Henri raised his chin. Henri had undergone the process of transformation in our absence. He was now M. le Marquis de Pompadour–under the heart-shaped arch of the great trees, he was standing, resplendent in laces, in glistening satins, leaning on a rusty, dull-jewelled sword. Renard had mounted his palette; he was dipping already into the mounds of color that dotted the palette-board, with his long brushes. On the canvas, in colors laid on by the touch of genius, this archway beneath which we were standing reared itself aloft; the park trees were as tall and noble, transfixed in their image of immutable calm, on that strip of linen, as they towered now above us; even the yellow cloud of the laburnum blossoms made the sunshine of the shaded grass, as it did here, where else no spot of sun might enter, so dense was the night of shade. The life of another day and time lived, however, beneath that shade; Charm and the cure, as they drooped over the canvas, confronted a graceful, attenuated courtier, sickening in a languor of adoration, and a sprightly coquette, whose porcelain beauty was as finished as the feathery edges of her lacy sleeves.

“_Tres bien tres bien_” said the cure, nodding his head in critical commendation. “It will be a little masterpiece. And now,” waving his hand toward us, “what do you propose to do with these ladies while you are painting?”

“Oh, they can wander about,” Renard replied, abstractedly. He had already reseated himself and had begun to ply his brushes; he now saw only Henri and the hilt of the sword he was painting in.

“I knew it, I could have told you–a painter hasn’t the manners of a peasant when he’s painting,” cried the priest, lifting cane and hands high in air, in mock horror. “But all the better, all the better, I shall have you all to myself. Come, come with me. You can see the house later. I’ll send for the gardener. It’s too fine a day to be indoors. What a day, _hein_? Le bon Dieu_ sends us such days now and then, to make us ache for paradise. This way, this way–we’ll go through the little door–my little door; it was made for me, you know, when the manoir was last inhabited. I and the children were too impatient–we suffered from that malady–all of us–we never could wait for the great gates yonder to be opened. So Monsieur de H—- built us this one.” The little door opened directly on the road, and on the cure’s house. There was a tangle of underbrush barring the way; but the cure pushed the briars apart with his strong hands, beating them down with his cane.

When the door opened, we passed directly beyond the roadway, to the steep steps leading to the church. The cure, before mounting the steps, swept the road, upward and downward, with his keen glance. It was the instinctive action of the provincial, scenting the chance of novelty. Some distant object, in the meeting of two distant roadways, arrested the darting eyes; this time, at least, he was to be rewarded for his prudence in looking about him. The object slowly resolved itself into two crutches between which hung the limp figure of a one-legged man.

“_Bonjour, Monsieur le cure_.” The crutches came to a standstill; the cripple’s hand went up to doff a ragged worsted cap.

“Good-day, good-day, my friend; how goes it? Not quite so stiff, _hein_–in such a bath of sunlight as this? Good-day, good-day.”

The crutches and their burden passed on, kicking a little cloud of dust about the lean figure.

“_Un peu casse, le bonhomme_” he said, as he nodded to the cripple in a tone of reflection, as if the breakage that bad befallen his humble friend were a fresh incident in his experience. “Yes, he’s a little broken, the poor old man; but then,” he added, quickly renewing his tone of unquenchable high spirits–“one doesn’t die of it. No, one doesn’t die, fortunately. Why, we’re all more or less cracked, or broken up here.”

He shook another laugh out, as he preceded us up the stone steps. Then he turned to stop for a moment to point his cane toward the small house with whose chimneys we were now on a level. “There, mesdames, there is the proof that more breaking doesn’t signify in this matter of life and death, _Tenez_, madame–” and with a charming gesture he laid his richly-veined, strong old hand on my arm–a hand that ended in beautiful fingers, each with its rim of moon-shaped dirt; “_tenez_–figure to yourself, madame, that I myself have been here twenty years, and I came for two! I bought out the _bonhomme_ who lived over yonder.

“I bought him and his furniture out. I said to myself, ‘I’ll buy it for eight hundred, and I’ll sell it for four hundred, in a year.'” Here he laid his finger on his nose–lengthwise, the Norman in him supplanting the priest in his remembrance of a good bargain. “And now it is twenty years since then. Everything creaks and cracks over there: all of us creak and crack. You should hear my chairs, _elles se cassent les reins_–they break their thighs continually. Ah! there goes another, I cry out, as I sit down in one in winter and hear them groan. Poor old things, they are of the Empire, no wonder they groan. You should see us, when our brethren come to take a cup of soup with me. Such a collection of antiquities as we are! I catch them, my brothers, looking about, slyly peering into the secrets of my little menage. ‘From his ancestors, doubtless, these old chairs and tables, say these good freres, under their breath. And then I wink slyly at the chairs, and they never let on.”

Again the mellow laugh broke forth. He stopped again to puff and blow a little, from his toil up the steep steps. Then all at once, as the rough music of his clicking sabots and the playful taps of his cane ceased, the laugh on his mobile lips melted into seriousness. He lifted his cane, pointing to the cemetery just above us, and to the gravestones looking down over the hillsides between a network of roses.

“We are old, madame–we are old, but, alas! we never die! It is difficult to people, that cemetery. There are only sixty of us in the parish, and we die–we die hard. For example, here is my old servant”–and he covered a grave with a sweep of his cane–for we were leisurely sauntering through the little cemetery now. The grave to which he pointed was a garden; heliotrope, myosotis, hare-bells and mignonette had made of the mound a bed of perfume–“see how quietly she lies–and yet what a restless soul the flowers cover! She, too, died hard. It took her years to make up her mind; finally _le bon Dieu_ had to decide it for her, when she was eighty-four. She complained to the last–she was poor, she was in my way, she was blind. ‘_Eh bien, tu n’as pas besoin de me faire les beaux yeux, toi_’–I used to say to her. Ah, the good soul that she was!” and the dark eye glistened with moisture. A moment later the cure was blowing vigorously the note of his grief, in trumpet-tones, through the organ that only a Frenchman can render an effective adjunct to moments of emotion.

“You see, _mes enfants_, I am like that–I weep over my friends–when they are gone! But see,” he added quickly, recovering himself–“see, over yonder there is my predecessor’s grave. He lies well, _hein?_– comfortable, too–looking his old church in the face and the sun on his old bones all the blessed day. Soon, in a few years, he will have company. I, too, am to lie there, I and a friend.” The humorous smile was again curving his lips, and the laughter-loving nostrils were beginning to quiver. “When my friend and I lie there, we shall be a little crowded, perhaps. I said to him, when he proposed it, proposed to lie there with us, ‘but we shall be crunching each other’s bones!’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘only falling into each other’s arms!’ So it was settled. He comes over from Havre, every now and then, to talk our tombstones over; we drink a glass of wine together, and take a pipe and talk about our future–in eternity! Ah, how gay we are! It is so good to be friends with God!”

The voice deepened into seriousness. He went on in a quieter key:

“But why am I always preaching and talking about death and eternity to two such ladies–two such children? Ah–I know, I am really old–I only deceive myself into pretending I’m young. You will do the same, both of you, some day. But come and see my good works. You know everyone has his little corner of conceit–I have mine. I like to do good, and then to boast of it. You shall see–you shall see.”

He was hurrying us along the narrow paths now, past the little company of grave-stones, graves that were bearing their barbaric burdens of mortuary wreaths, of beaded crosses, and the motley assemblage, common to all French graveyards, of hideous shrines encasing tin saints and madonnas in plaster.

Above the sunken graves and the tin effigies of the martyrs behind the church, arose a fair and glittering marble tomb. It was strangely out of keeping with the meagre and paltry surroundings of the peasant grave-stones. As we approached the tomb it grew in imposingness. It was a circular mortuary chapel, with carved pediment and iron-wrought gateway.

“It’s fine, _hein_, and beautiful, _hein?_ It is the Duke’s!” The cure, it was easy to see, considered the chapel in the light of a personal possession. He stood before it, bare-headed, with a new earnestness on his mobile face. “It is the Duke’s. Yes, the Duke’s. I saved his soul, blessed be God! and he–he rebuilds my cellars for me: See”–and he pointed to the fine new base of stone, freshly cemented, on which the church rested–“see, I save his soul, and he preserves my buildings for me. It’s a fair deal, isn’t it? How does it come about, that he is converted? Ah, you see, although I am a man without science, without knowledge, devoid of pretensions and learning, the good God sometimes makes use of such humble instruments to work His will. It came about in the usual way. The Duke came here carrying his religion lightly, as one may say, not thinking of his soul. I–I dine with him. We talk, we argue; he does, that is–I only preach from my Bible. And behold! one day he is converted. He is devout. And from gratitude, he repairs my crumbling old stones. And now see how solid, how strong is my church cellar!”

Again the fountain of his irrepressible merriment bubbled forth. For all the gayety, however, the severe line deepened as one grew to know the face better; the line in profile running from the nose into the firm upper lip and into the still more resolute chin, matched the impress of authority marked on the noble brow. It was the face of one who might have infinite charity and indulgence for a sin, and yet would make no compromise with it.

We had resumed our walk. It led us at last into the interior of the little church. The gloom and silence within, after the dazzling brilliancy of the noon-day sun and the noisy insect hum, invested the narrow nave and dim altar with an added charm. The old priest knelt for the briefest instant in reverence to the altar. When he turned there was surprise as well as a gentle reproach in the changeable eyes.

“And you, mesdames! How is this? You are not Catholics? And I was so sure of it! Quite sure of it, you were so sympathetic, so full of reverence. And you, my child”–turning to Charm–“you speak our tongue so well, with the very accent of a good Catholic. What! you are Protestant? La! La! What do I hear?” He shook his cane over the backs of the straw-bottomed chairs; the sweet, mellow accents of his voice melted into loving protest–a protest in which the fervor was not quenched in spite of the merry key in which it was pitched.

“Protestants? Pouffe! pouffe! What is that? What is it to be a Protestant? Heretics, heretics, that is what you are. So you are _deux affreuses heretiques_? Ah, la! la! Horrible! horrible! I must cure you of all that. I must cure you!” He dropped his cane in the enthusiasm of his attack; it fell with a clanging sound on the stone pavement. He let it lie. He had assumed, unconsciously, the orator’s, the preacher’s attitude. He crowded past the chairs, throwing back his head as he advanced, striking into argumentative gesture:

“_Tenez_, listen, there is so little difference, after all. As I was saying to M. le comte de Chermont the other day, no later than Thursday–he has married an English wife, you know–can’t understand that either, how they can marry English wives. However, that’s none of my business–we have nothing to do with marrying, we priests, except as a sacrament for others. I said to M. le comte, who, you know, shows tendencies toward anglicism–astonishing the influence of women–I said: ‘But, my dear M. le comte, why change? You will only exchange certainty for uncertainty, facts for doubts, truth for lies.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the comte replied, ‘but there are so many new truths introduced now into our blessed religion–the infallibility of the pope–the–‘ ‘_Ah, mon cher comte–ne m’en parlez pas_. If that is all that stands in your way–_faites comme le bon Dieu! Lui–il ferme les yeux et tend les bras._ That is all we ask–we his servants–to have you close your eyes and open your arms.'”

The good cure was out of breath; he was panting. After a moment, in a deeper tone, he went on:

“You, too, my children, that is what I say to you–you need only to open your arms and to close your eyes. God is waiting for you.”

For a long instant there was a great stillness–a silence during which the narrow spaces of the dim aisles were vibrating with the echoes of the rich voice.

The rustle of a light skirt sweeping the stone flooring broke the moment’s silence. Charm was crossing the aisles. She paused before a little wooden box, nailed to the wall. There came suddenly on the ear the sound of coin rattling down into the empty box; she had emptied into it the contents of her purse.

“For your poor, monsieur le cure,” she smiled up, a little tremulously, into the burning, glowing eyes. The priest bent over the fair head, laying his hand, as if in benediction, upon it.

“My poor need it sadly, my child, and I thank you for them. God will bless you.”

It was a touching little scene, and I preferred, for one, to look out just then at Henri’s figure advancing toward us, up the stone steps.

When the priest spoke again, it was in a husky tone, the gold in his voice dusted with moisture; but the bantering spirits in him had reappeared.

“What a pity, that you must burn! For you must, dreadful heretics that you are! And this dear child, she seems to belong to us–I can never sit by, now, in Paradise, happy and secure, and see her burn!” The laugh that followed was a mingled caress and a blessing. Henri came in for a part of the indulgence of the good cure’s smile as he came up the steps.

“Ah, Henri, you have come for these ladies?”

“_Oui_, monsieur le cure, luncheon is served.”

Our friend followed us to the topmost step, and to the very edge of the step. He stood there, talking down to us, as we continued to press him to return with us.

“No, my children–no–no, I can’t join you; don’t urge me; I can’t, I must not. I must say my prayers instead; besides the children come soon, for their catechism. No, don’t beg me, I don’t need to be importuned; I know what that dear Renard’s wine is. _Au revoir et a bientot_–and remember,” and here he lifted his arms–cane and all, high in the air–“all you need do is to close your eyes and to open your arms. God himself is doing the same.”

High up he stood, with uplifted hands, the smile irradiating a face that glowed with a saint’s simplicity. Behind the black lines of his robe, the sunlight lay streaming in noon glory; it aureoled him as never saint was aureoled by mortal brush. A moment only he lingered there, to raise his cap in parting salute. Then he turned, the trail of his gown sweeping the gravel paths, and presently the low church door swallowed him up. Through the door, as we crossed the road, there came out to us the click of sabots striking the rude flagging; and a moment after, the murmuring echo of a deep, rich voice, saying the office of the hour.

CHAPTER XIII.

HONFLEUR–NEW AND OLD.

The stillness of the park trees, as we passed beneath them, was like the silence that comes after a blessing. The sun, flooding the landscape with a deluge of light, lost something of its effulgence, by contrast with the fulness of the priest’s rich nature. This fair world of beauty that lay the other side of the terrace wall, beneath which our luncheon was spread, was fair and lovely still–but how unimportant the landscape seemed compared to the varied scenery of the cure’s soul-lit character! Of all kinds of nature, human nature is assuredly the best; it is at least the most perdurably interesting. When we tire of it, when we weary of our fellow-man and turn the blase cheek on the fresh pillow of mother-earth, how quickly is the pillow deserted once the mental frame is rested or renewed! The history of all human relations has the same ending–we all of us only fall out of love with man to fall as swiftly in again.

The remainder of the afternoon passed with the rapidity common to all phases of enchantment.

How could one eat seriously, with vulgar, gluttonous hunger, of a feast spread on the parapet of a terrace-wall? The white foam of napkins, the mosaic of the _patties_, the white breasts of chicken, the salads in their bath of dew–these spoke the language of a lost cause. For there was an open-air concert going on in full swing, and the performance was one that made the act of eating seem as gross as the munching of apples at an oratorio–the music being, indeed, of a highly refined order of perfection. One’s ears needed to be highly attuned to hear the pricking of the locusts in the leaves; even the breeze kept uncommonly still, that the brushing of the humming-birds’ and bees’ wings against the flower-petals might be the more distinctly heard.

I never knew which one of the party it was that decided we were to see the day out and the night in; that we were to dine at the Cheval Blanc, on the Honfleur quays, instead of sedately breaking bread at the Mere Mouchard’s. Even our steed needed very little urging to see the advantages of such a scheme. Henri alone wore a grim air of disapproval. His aspect was an epitome of rigid protest. As he took his seat in the cart, he held the sword between his legs with the air of one burning with a pent-up anguish of protest. His eye gloomed on the day; his head was held aloft, reared on a column of bristling vertebra, and on his brow was written the sign of mutiny.

“Henri–you think we should go back; you think going on to Honfleur a mistake?”

“Madame has said it”–Henri was a fatalist–in his speech, at least, he lived up to his creed. “Honfleur is far–Monsieur Renard has not the good digestion when he is tired–he suffers. _Il passe des nuits d’angoisse. Il souffre des fatigues de l’estomac. Il se fatigue aujourd’hui!_” This, with an air of stern conviction, was accompanied by a glance at his master in which compassion was not the most obvious note to be read. He went on, remorselessly:

“And, as madame knows, the work but begins for me when we are at home. There are the costumes to be dusted and put away, the paintbrushes to clean, the dishes and lunch-basket to be attended to. As madame says, monsieur is sometimes lacking in consideration. _Mais, que voulez-vous? le genie, c’est fait comme ca._”

Madame had not expressed the feeblest echo of a criticism on the composition of the genius in front; but the short dialogue had helped, perceptibly, to lift the weight of Henri’s gloom; he was beginning to accept the fate of the day with a philosopher’s phlegm. Already he had readjusted a little difficulty between his feet and the lunch basket, making his religious care of the latter compatible with the open sin of improved personal comfort.

Meanwhile the two on the front seat were a thousand miles away. Neither we, nor the day, nor the beauty of the drive had power to woo their glances from coming back to the focal point of interest they had found in each other. They were beginning to talk, not about each other but of themselves–the danger-signal of all tete-a-tete adventures.

When two young people have got into the personal-pronoun stage of human intercourse, there is but one thing left for the unfortunate third in the party to do. Yes, now that I think of it, there are two roles to be played. The usual conception of the part is to turn marplot–to spoil and ruin the others’ dialogue–to put an end to it, if possible, by legitimate or illegitimate means; a very successful way, I have observed, of prolonging, as a rule, such a duet indefinitely. The more enlightened actor in any such little human comedy, if he be gifted with insight, will collapse into the wings, and let the two young idiots have the whole stage to themselves. As like as not they’ll weary of the play, and of themselves, if left alone. No harm will come of all the sentimental strutting and the romantic attitudinizing, other than viewing the scene, later, in perspective, as a rather amusing bit of emotional farce.

Besides being in the very height of the spring fashion, in the matter of the sentiments, these two were also busily treading, at just this particular moment, the most alluring of all the paths leading to what may be termed the outlying territorial domain of the emotions; they were wandering through the land called Mutual Discovery. Now, this, I have always held, is among the most delectable of all the roads of life; for it may lead one–anywhere or nowhere.

Therefore it was from a purely generous impulse that I continued to look at the view. The surroundings were, in truth, in conspiracy with the sentimentalists on the front seat; the extreme beauty of the road would have made any but sentimental egotists oblivious to all else. The road was a continuation of the one we had followed in the morning’s drive. Again, all the greenness of field and grass was braided, inextricably, into the blue of river and ocean. Above, as before, in that earlier morning drive, towered the giant aisles of the beaches and elms. Through those aisles the radiant Normandy landscape flowed again, as music from rich organ-piped throats flows through cathedral arches. Out yonder, on the Seine’s wide mouth, the boats were balancing themselves, as if they also were half divided between a doubt and a longing; a freshening spurt of breeze filled their flapping sails, and away they sped, skipping through the waters with all the gayety which comes with the vigor of fresh resolutions. The light that fell over the land and waters was dazzling, and yet of an astonishing limpidity; only a sun about to drop and end his reign could be at once so brilliant and so tender–the diffused light had the sparkle of gold made soft by usage. Wherever the eye roved, it was fed as on a banquet of light and color. Nothing could be more exquisite, for depth of green swimming in a bath of shadow, than the meadows curled beneath the cliffs; nothing more tempting, to the painter’s brush, than the arabesque of blossoms netted across the sky; and would you have the living eye of nature, bristling with animation, alive with winged sails, and steeped in the very soul of yellow sunshine, look out over the great sheet of the waters, and steep the senses in such a breadth of aqueous splendor as one sees only in one or two of the rare shows of earth.

Then, all at once, all too soon, the great picture seemed to shrink; the quivering pulsation of light and color gave way to staid, commonplace gardens. Instead of hawthorn hedges there was the stench of river smells–we were driving over cobble-paved streets and beneath rows of crooked, crumbling houses. A group of noisy street urchins greeted us in derision. And then we had no doubt whatsoever that we were already in Honfleur town.

“Honfleur is an evil-smelling place,” I remarked.

“Oh, well, after all, the smells of antiquity are a part of the show; we should refuse to believe in ancientness, all of us, I fancy, if mustiness wasn’t served along with it.”

“How can any town have such a stench with all this river and water and verdure to sweeten it?” I asked, with a woman’s belief in the morality of environment–a belief much cherished by wives and mothers, I have noticed.

“Wait till you see the inhabitants–they’ll enlighten you–the hags and the nautical gentlemen along the basins and quays. They’ve discovered the secret that if cleanliness is next to godliness, dirt and the devil are likewise near neighbors. Awful set–those Honfleur sailors The Havre and Seine people call them Chinamen, they are so unlike the rest of France and Frenchmen.”

“Why are they so unlike?” asked Charm.

“They’re so low down, so hideously wicked; they’re like the old houses, a rotten, worm-eaten set–you’ll see.”

Charm stopped him then, with a gesture. She stopped the horse also; she brought the whole establishment to a standstill; and then she nodded her head briskly forward. We were in the midst of the Honfleur streets–streets that were running away from a wide open space, in all possible directions. In the centre of the square rose a curious, an altogether astonishing structure. It was a tower, a belfry doubtless, a house, a shop, and a warehouse, all in one; such a picturesque medley, in fact, as only modern irreverence, in its lawless disregard of original purpose and design, can produce. The low-timbered sub-base of the structure was pierced by a lovely doorway with sculptured lintel, and also with two impertinent modern windows, flaunting muslin curtains, and coquettishly attired with rows of flowering carnations. Beneath these windows was a shop. Above the whole rose, in beautiful symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and famous Belfry of St. Catherine,

As we were about to turn away to descend the high street, a Norman maiden, with close-capped face, leaned over the carnations to look down upon us.

“That’s the daughter of the bell-ringer, doubtless. Economical idea that,” Renard remarked, taking his cap off to the smiling eyes.

“Economical?”

“Yes, can’t you see? Bell-ringer sends pretty daughter to window, just before vespers or service, and she rings in the worshippers; no need to make the bells ring.”

“What nonsense!”–but we laughed as flatteringly as if his speech had been a genuine coin of wit.

A turn down the street, and the famous Honfleur of the wharves and floating docks lay before us. About us, all at once, was the roar and hubbub of an extraordinary bustle and excitement; all the life of the town, apparently, was centred upon the quays. The latter were swarming with a tattered, ragged, bare-footed, bare-legged assemblage of old women, of gamins, and sailors. The collection, as a collection, was one gifted with the talent of making itself heard. Everyone appeared to be shrieking, or yelling, or crying aloud, if only to keep the others in voice. Sailors lying on the flat parapets shouted hoarsely to their fellows in the rigging of the ships that lay tossing in the docks; fishermen’s families tossed their farewells above the hubbub to the captain-fathers launching their fishing-smacks; one shrieking infant was being passed, gayly, from the poop of a distant deck, across the closely lying shipping, to the quay’s steps, to be hushed by the generous opening of a peasant mother’s bodice. One could hear the straining of cordage, the creak of masts, the flap of the sails, all the noises peculiar to shipping riding at anchor. The shriek of steam-whistles broke out, ever and anon, above all the din and uproar. Along the quay steps and the wharves there were constantly forming and re-forming groups of wretched, tattered human beings; of men with bloated faces and a dull, sodden look, strikingly in contrast with the vivacity common among French people. Even the children and women had a depraved, shameless appearance, as if vice had robbed them of the last vestige of hope and ambition. Along the parapet a half-dozen drunkards sprawled, asleep or dozing. At the legs of one a child was pulling, crying:

“_Viens–mere t’battra, elle est soule aussi._”

The sailors out yonder, busy in the rigging, and the men on the decks of the smart brigs and steamships, whistled and shouted and sang, as indifferent to this picture of human misery and degradation as if they had no kinship with it.

As a frame to the picture, Honfleur town lay beneath the crown of its hills; on the tops and sides of the latter, villa after villa shot through the trees, a curve of roof-line, with rows of daintily draped windows. At the right, close to the wharves, below the wooded heights, there loomed out a quaint and curious gateway flanked by two watchtowers, grim reminders of the Honfleur of the great days. And above and about the whole, encompassing villa-crowded hills and closely packed streets, and the forest of masts trembling against the sky, there lay a heaven of spring and summer.

Renard had driven briskly up to a low, rambling facade parallel with the quays. It was the “Cheval Blanc.” A crowd assembled on the instant, as if appearing according to command.

“_Allons–n’encombrez pas ces dames!_” cried a very smart individual, in striking contrast to the down at-heel air of the hotel–a personage who took high-handed possession of us and our traps. “Will _ces dames_ desire a salon–there is _un vrai petit bijou_ empty just now,” murmured a voice in a purring soprano, through the iron opening of the cashier’s desk.

Another voice was crying out to us, as we wound our way upward in pursuit of the jewel of a salon. “And the widow, _La Veuve_, shall she be dry or sweet?”

When we entered the low dining-room, a little later, we found that the artist as well as the epicure has been in active conspiracy to make the dinner complete; the choice of the table proclaimed one accomplished in massing effects. The table was parallel with the low window, and through the latter was such a picture as one travels hundreds of miles to look upon, only to miss seeing it, as a rule. There was a great breadth of sky through the windows; against the sky rose the mastheads; and some red and brown sails curtained the space, bringing into relief the gray line of the sad-faced old houses fringing the shoreline.

“Couldn’t have chosen better if we’d tried, could we? It’s just the right hour, and just the right kind of light. Those basins are unendurable–sinks of iniquitous ugliness, unless the tide’s in and there’s a sunset going on. Just look now! Who cares whether Honfleur has been done to death by the tourist horde or not? and been painted until one’s art-stomach turns? I presume I ought to beg your pardon, but I can’t stand the abomination of modern repetitions; the hand-organ business in art, I call it. But at this hour, at this time of the year, before this rattle-trap of an inn is as packed with Baedeker attachments as a Siberian prison is with Nihilists–to run out here and look at these quays and basins, and old Honfleur lying here, beneath her green cliffs–well, short of Cairo, I don’t know any better bit of color. Look out there, now! See those sails, dripping with color, and that fellow up there, letting the sail down–there, splash it goes into the water, I knew it would; now tell me where will you get better blues or yellows or browns, with just the right purples in the shore line, than you’ll get here?”

Renard was fairly started; he had the bit of the born monologist between his teeth; he stopped barely long enough to hear even an echoing assent. We were quite content; we continued to sip our champagne and to feast our eyes. Meanwhile Renard talked on.

“Guide-books–what’s the use of guide-books? What do they teach you, anyway? Open any one of the cursed clap-trap things. Yes, yes, I know I oughtn’t to use vigorous language.”

“Do,” bleated Charm, smiling sweetly up at him. “Do, it makes you seem manly.”

Even Renard had to take time to laugh.

“Thank you! I’m not above making use of any aids to create that illusion. Well, as I was saying, what guide-book ever really helped anyone to _see?_–that’s what one travels for, I take it. Here, for instance, Murray or Baedeker would give you this sort of thing: ‘Honfleur, an ancient town, with pier, beaches, three floating docks, and a good deal of trade in timber, cod, etc.; exports large quantities of eggs to England.’ Good heavens! it makes one boil! Do sane, reasonable mortals travel three thousand miles to read ancient history done up in modern binding, served up a la Murray, a la Baedeker?”

“Oh, you do them injustice, I think–the guides do go in for a little more of the picturesque than that–“

“And how–how do they do it? This is the sort of thing they’ll give you: ‘Church of St. Catherine is large and remarkable, entirely of timber and plaster, the largest of its kind in France.’ Ah! ha! that’s the picturesque with a vengeance. No, no, my friends, throw the guide-books into the river, pitch them overboard through the port holes, along with the flowers, and letters _to be read three days out_, and the nasty novels people send you to make the crossing pleasant. And when you travel, really travel, mind, never make a plan–just go–go anywhere, whenever the impulse seizes you–and you may hope to get there, in the right way, possibly.”

Here Renard stopped to finish his glass, draining-the last drop of the yellow liquid. Then he went on: “To travel! To start when an impulse seizes one! To go–anywhere! Why not! It was for this, after all, that all of us have come our three thousand miles.” Perhaps it was the restless tossing of the shipping out yonder in the basins that awoke an answering impatience within, in response to Renard’s outburst. Where did they go, those ships, and, up beyond this mouth of the Seine, how looked the shores, and what life lived itself out beneath the rustling poplars? Is it the mission of all flowing water to create an unrest in men’s minds?

Meanwhile, though the talk was not done, the dinner was long since eaten. We rose to take a glimpse of Honfleur and its famous old basin. The quays and the floating docks, in front of which we had been dining, are a part of the nineteenth century; the great ships ride in to them from the sea. But here, in this inner quadrangular dock, beside which we were soon standing, traced by Duquesne when Louis the Great discovered the maritime importance of Honfleur, we found still reminders of the old life. Here were the same old houses that, in the seventeenth century, upright and brave in their brand new carvings, saw the high-decked, picturesquely painted Spanish and Portuguese ships ride in to dip their flag to the French fleur-de-lis. There are but few of the old streets left to crowd about the shipping life that still floats here, as in those bygone days of Honfleur pride;–when Havre was but a yellow strip of sand; when the Honfleur merchants would have laughed to scorn any prophet’s cry of warning that one day that sand-bar opposite, despised, disregarded, boasting only a chapel and a tavern, would grow and grow, and would steal year by year and inch by inch bustling Honfleur’s traffic, till none was left.

In the old adventurous days, along with the Spanish ships came others, French trading and fishing vessels, with the salty crustations of long voyages on their hulls and masts. The wharves were alive then with fish-wives, whom Evelyn will tell you wore “useful habits made of goats’ skin.” The captains’ daughters were in quaint Normandy costumes; and the high-peaked coifs and the stiff woollen skirts, as well as the goat-skin coats, trembled as the women darted hither and thither among the sailors–whose high cries filled the air as they picked out mother and wife. Then were bronzed beards buried in the deeply-wrinkled old meres’ faces, and young, strong arms clasped about maidens’ waists. The whole town rang with gayety and with the mad joy of reunion. On the morrow, coiling its way up the steep hillsides, wound the long lines of the grateful company, one composed chiefly of the crews of these vessels happily come to port. The procession would mount up to the little church of Notre Dame de Grace perched on the hill overlooking the harbor. Some even–so deep was their joy at deliverance from shipwreck and so fervent their piety–crawled up, bare-footed, with bared head, wives and children following, weeping for joy, as the rude _ex-votos_ were laid by the sailors’ trembling hands at the feet of the Virgin Lady.

As reminders of this old life, what is left? Within the stone quadrangle we found clustered a motley fleet of wrecks and fishing-vessels; the nets, flung out to dry in the night air, hung like shrouds from the mastheads; here and there a figure bestrode a deck, a rough shape, that seemed endowed with a double gift of life, so still and noiseless was the town. Around the silent dock, grouped in mysterious medley and confusion, were tottering roof lines, projecting eaves, narrow windows, all crazily tortured and out of shape. Here and there, beneath the broad beams of support, a little interior, dimly lighted, showed a knot of sailors gathered, drinking or lounging. Up high beneath a chimney perilously overlooking a rude facade, a quaint shape emerged, one as decrepit and forlorn of life and hope as the decaying houses it overlooked. Silence, poverty, wretchedness, the dregs of life, to this has Honfleur fallen. These old houses, in their slow decay, hiding in their dark bosom the gaunt secrets of this poverty and human misery, seemed to be dancing a dance of drunken indifference. Some day the dance will end in a fall, and then the Honfleur of the past will not even boast of a ghost, as reminder of its days of splendor.

An artist quicker than anyone else, I think, can be trusted to take one out of history and into the picturesque. Renard refused to see anything but beauty in the decay about us; for him the houses were at just the right drooping angle; the roof lines were delightful in their irregularity; and the fluttering tremor of the nets, along the rigging, was the very poetry of motion.

“We’ll finish the evening on the pier,” he exclaimed, suddenly; “the moon will soon be up–we can sit it out there and see it begin to color things.”

The pier was more popular than the quaint old dock. It was crowded with promenaders, who, doubtless, were taking a bite of the sea-air. Through the dusk the tripping figures of gentlemen in white flannels and jaunty caps brushed the provincial Honfleur swells. Some gentle English voices told us some of the villa residents had come down to the pier, moved by the beauty of the night. Groups of sailors, with tanned faces and punctured ears hooped with gold rings, sat on the broad stone parapets, talking unintelligible Breton _patois_. The pier ran far out, almost to the Havre cliffs, it seemed to us, as we walked along in the dusk of the young night. The sky was slowly losing its soft flame. A tender, mellow half light was stealing over the waters, making the town a rich mass of shade. Over the top of the low hills the moon shot out, a large, globular mass of beaten gold. At first it was only a part and portion of the universal lighting, of the still flushed sky, of the red and crimson harbor lights, of the dim twinkling of lamps and candles in the rude interiors along the shore. But slowly, triumphantly, the great lamp swung up; it rose higher and higher into the soft summer sky, and as it mounted, sky and earth began to pale and fade. Soon there was only a silver world to look out upon–a wealth of quivering silver over the breast of the waters, and a deeper, richer gray on cliffs and roof tops. Out of this silver world came the sound of waters, lapping in soft cadence against the pier; the rise and fall of sails, stirring in the night wind; the tread of human footsteps moving in slow, measured beat, in unison with the rhythm of the waters. Just when the stars were scattering their gold on the bosom of the sea-river, a voice rang out, a rich, full baritone. Quite near, two sailors were seated, with their arms about each other’s shoulders. They also were looking at the moonlight, and one of them was singing to it:

_”Te souviens-tu, Marie,
De notre enfance aux champs?

“Te souviens-tu?
Le temps que je regrette
C’est le temps qui n’est plus._”

[Illustration: THE INN AT DIVES–GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT]

DIVES: AN INN ON A HIGH-ROAD.

CHAPTER XIV.

A COAST DRIVE.

On our return to Villerville we found that the charm of the place, for us, was a broken one. We had seen the world; the effect of that experience was to produce the common result–there was a fine deposit of discontent in the cup of our pleasure.

Madame Fouchet had made use of our absence to settle our destiny; she had rented her villa. This was one of the bitter dregs. Another was to find that the life of the village seemed to pass us by; it gave us to understand, with unflattering frankness, that for strangers who made no bargains for the season, it had little or no civility to squander. For the Villerville beach, the inn, and the villas were crowded. Mere Mouchard was tossing omelettes from morning till night; even Augustine was far too hurried to pay her usual visit to the creamery. A detachment of Parisian costumes and beribboned nursery maids was crowding out the fish-wives and old hags from their stations on the low door-steps and the grasses on the cliffs.

Even Fouchet was no longer a familiar figure in the foreground of his garden; his roses were blooming now for the present owners of his villa. He and madame had betaken themselves to a box of a hut on the very outskirts of the village–a miserable little hovel with two rooms and a bit of pasture land being the substitute, as a dwelling, for the gay villa and its garden along the sea-cliffs. Pity, however, would have been entirely wasted on the Fouchet household and their change of habitation. Tucked in, cramped, and uncomfortable beneath the low eaves of their cabin ceilings, they could now wear away the summer in blissful contentment: Were they not living on nothing–on less than nothing, in this dark pocket of a _chaumiere_, while their fine house yonder was paying for itself handsomely, week after week? The heart beats high, in a Norman breast, when the pocket bulges; gold–that is better than bread to feel in one’s hand.

The whole village wore this triumphant expression–now that the season was beginning. Paris had come down to them, at last, to be shorn of its strength; angling for pennies in a Parisian pocket was better, far, than casting nets into the sea. There was also more contentment in such fishing–for true Norman wit.

Only once did the village change its look of triumph to one of polite regret; for though it was Norman, it was also French. It remembered, on the morning of our departure, that the civility of the farewell costs nothing, and like bread prodigally scattered on the waters, may perchance bring back a tenfold recompense.

Even the morning arose with a flattering pallor. It was a gray day. The low houses were like so many rows of pale faces; the caps of the fishwives, as they nodded a farewell, seemed to put the village in half mourning.

“You will have a perfect day for your drive–there’s nothing better than these grays in the French landscape,” Renard was saying, at our carriage wheels; “they bring out every tone. And the sea is wonderful. Pity you’re going. Grand day for the mussel-bed. However, I shall see you, I shall see you. Remember me to Monsieur Paul; tell him to save me a bottle of his famous old wine. Good-by, good-by.”

There was a shower of rose-leaves flung out upon us; a great sweep of the now familiar beret; a sonorous “Hui!” from our driver, with an accompaniment of vigorous whip-snapping, and we were off.

The grayness of the closely-packed houses was soon exchanged for the farms lying beneath the elms. With the widening of the distance between our carriage-wheels and Villerville, there was soon a great expanse of mouse-colored sky and the breath of a silver sea. The fields and foliage were softly brilliant; when the light wind stirred the grain, the poppies and bluets were as vivid as flowers seen in dreams.

It is easy to understand, I think, why French painters are so enamoured of their gray skies–such a background makes even the commonplace wear an air of importance. All the tones of the landscape were astonishingly serious; the features of the coast and the inland country were as significant as if they were meditating an outbreak into speech. It was the kind of day that bred reflection; one could put anything one liked into the picture with a certainty of its fitting the frame. We were putting a certain amount of regret into it; for though Villerville has seen us depart with civilized indifference or the stolidity of the barbarian–for they are one, we found our own attainments in the science of unfeelingness deficient: to look down upon the village from the next hill top was like facing a lost joy.

Once on the highroad, however, the life along the shore gave us little time for the futility of regret. Regret, at best, is a barren thing: like the mule, it is incapable of perpetuating its own mistakes; it appears to apologize, indeed, for its stupidity by making its exit as speedily as possible. With the next turn of the road we were in fitting condition to greet the wildest form of adventure.

Pedlars’ carts and the lumbering Normandy farm wagons were, at first, our chief companions along the roadway. Here and there a head would peep forth from a villa window, or a hand be stretched out into the air to see if any rain was falling from the moist sky. The farms were quieter than usual; there was an air of patient waiting in the courtyards, among the blouses and standing cattle, as though both man and beast were there in attendance on the day and the weather, till the latter could come to the point of a final decision in regard to the rain.

Finally, as we were nearing Trouville, the big drops fell. The grain-fields were soon bent double beneath the spasmodic shower. The poppies were drenched, so were the cobble paved courtyards; only the geese and the regiment of the ducks came abroad to revel in the downpour. The villas were hermetically sealed now–their summer finery was not made for a wetting. The landscape had no such reserves; it gave itself up to the light summer shower as if it knew that its raiment, like Rachel’s, when dampened the better to take her plastic outlines, only gained in tone and loveliness the closer it fitted the recumbent figure of mother earth.

Our coachman could never have been mistaken for any other than a good Norman. He was endowed with the gift of oratory peculiar to the country; and his profanity was enriched with all the flavor of the provincial’s elation in the committing of sin. From the earliest moment of our starting, the stream of his talk had been unending. His vocabulary was such as to have excited the envy and despair of a French realist, impassioned in the pursuit of “the word.”

“_Hui!–b-r-r-r!_”–This was the most common of his salutations to his horse. It was the Norman coachman’s familiar apostrophe, impossible of imitation; it was also one no Norman horse who respects himself moves an inch without first hearing. Chat Noir was a horse of purest Norman ancestry; his Percheron blood was as untainted as his intelligence was unclouded by having no mixtures of tongues with which to deal. His owner’s “_Hui!_” lifted him with arrowy lightness to the top of a hill. The deeper “_Bougre_” steadied his nerve for a good mile of unbroken trotting. Any toil is pleasant in the gray of a cool morning, with a friend holding the reins who is a gifted monologist; even imprecations, rightly administered, are only lively punctuations to really talented speech.

“Come, my beauty, take in thy breath–courage! The hill is before thee! Curse thy withered legs, and is it thus thou stumbleth? On–up with thee and that mountain of flesh thou carriest about with thee.” And the mountain of flesh would be lifted–it was carried as lightly by the finely-feathered legs and the broad haunches as if the firm avoirdupois were so much gossamer tissue. On and on the neat, strong hoofs rang their metallic click, clack along the smooth macadam. They had carried us past the farm-houses, the cliffs, the meadows, and the Norman roofed manoirs buried in their apple-orchards. These same hoofs were now carefully, dexterously picking their way down the steep hill that leads directly into the city of the Trouville villas.

Presently, the hoofs came to a sudden halt, from sheer amazement. What was this order, this command the quick Percheron hearing had overheard? Not to go any farther into this summer city–not to go down to its sand-beach–not to wander through the labyrinth of its gay little streets?–Verily, it is the fate of a good horse, how often! to carry fools, and the destiny of intelligence to serve those deficient in mind and sense.

The criticism on our choice of direction was announced by the hoofs turning resignedly, with the patient assent of the fatigue that is bred of disgust, into one of the upper Trouville by-streets. Our coachman contented himself with a commiserating shrug and a prolonged flow of explanation. Perhaps _ces dames_, being strangers, did not know that Trouville was now beginning its real season–its season of baths? The Casino, in truth, was only opened a week since; but we could hear the band even now playing above the noise of the waves. And behold, the villas were filling; each day some _grande dame_ came down to take possession of her house by the sea.

How could we hope to make a Frenchman comprehend an instinctive impulse to turn our backs on the Trouville world? What, pray, had we just now to do with fashion–with the purring accents of boudoirs, with all the life we had run away from? Surely the romance–the charm of our present experiences would be put to flight once we exchanged salutations with the _beau monde_–with that world that is so sceptical of any pleasure save that which blooms in its own hot-houses, and so disdainful of all forms of life save those that are modelled on fashion’s types. We had fled from cities to escape all this; were we, forsooth, to be pushed into the motley crowd of commonplace pleasure-seekers because of the scorn of a human creature, and the mute criticism of a beast that was hired to do the bidding of his betters? The world of fashion was one to be looked out upon as a part of the general _mise-en-scene_–as a bit of the universal decoration of this vast amphitheatre of the Normandy beaches.

Chat noir had little reverence for philosophic reflections; he turned a sharp corner just then; he stopped short, directly in front of the broad windows of a confectioner’s shop. This time he did not appeal in vain to the strangers with a barbarian’s contempt for the great world. The brisk drive and the salt in the air were stimulants to appetite to be respected; it is not every day the palate has so fine an edge.

“_Du the, mesdames–a l’Anglaise?_” a neatly-corsetted shape, in black, to set off a pair of dazzling pink cheeks, shone out behind rows of apricot tarts. There was also a cap that conveyed to one, through the medium of pink bows, the capacities of coquetry that lay in the depths of the rich brown eyes beneath them. The attractive shape emerged at once from behind the counter, to set chairs about the little table. We were bidden to be seated with an air of smiling grace, one that invested the act with the emphasis of genuine hospitality. Soon a great clatter arose in the rear of the shop; opinions and counter-opinions were being volubly exchanged in shrill French, as to whether the water should or should not come to a boil; also as to whether the leaves of oolong or of green should be chosen for our beverage. The cap fluttered in several times to ask, with exquisite politeness–a politeness which could not wholly veil the hidden anxiety–our own tastes and preferences. When the cap returned to the battling forces behind the screen, armed with the authority of our confessed prejudices, a new war of tongues arose. The fate of nations, trembling on the turn of a battle, might have been settled before that pot of water, so watched and guarded over, was brought to a boil. When, finally, the little tea service was brought in, every detail was perfect in taste and appointment, except the tea; the action that had held out valiantly,