A Roundabout Journey

Chapter I. Out Of The Fog Into The Sun

We left Paris on the morning of November 8, 1881, in a dense fog. The difference between the fog of Paris and the fog of London is that one is yeUow and the other is black ; both are raw ancl piercing, and when I am in Paris I am not prepared to say that I prefer the latter. The Paris sky is gray, like its houses. I do not know why it is that all the large capitals of the civilized world have such unpleasant climates, — London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, — New York, even with its extremes, is better than either. We did not escape from the fog until we had run through the forest of Fontainebleau, when the sun came out in all its splendor, ancl we were whirled along through a cloudless day, and over a smiling land, every inch of which is cultivated. The effect is that of a prairie, so extensive is the view ; but there are low hills, now ancl then, and water-courses, with mdes on miles of sentinel poplars, and now and then, on an elevation, a ruined tower marking some old feudal domination.

The fields, without fences, are cultivated in long narrow strips, in colors of green, brown, and gray. Gautier says the country looks Hke the cloth patterns pasted on cards whicli his tailor sends him. Gray houses dot the landscape every where ; gray villages with curious old spires and tow ers are frequent ; the long strips of gray roads are dazzling white in the sunshine. Gray is the prevailing color, for France seems to be all limestone and chalk, and houses, fields, and people take this color of decadence. At this season there are no vivid greens to make a contrast. The foliage, however, has warmth, the forests showing rich brown and the mulberries golden yellow. We travel express, none but first-class carriages be ing on the train. The fare also is first class. The distance from Paris to Avignon is about four hundred and sixty miles, and the fare is over ninety-one francs — over eighteen doUars.

This includes only a little baggage, so that there is a large extra charge for that. However, there are some compensations. We travel fast and we reach places at the time named on the schedule. This surprises Americans, who are accustomed to regard time tables on long routes as arranged for the amusement of directors and not for the information of the public. We made the distance, four hundred and sixty miles, from Paris to Avignon, in twelve hours and forty minutes, ancl arrived on time. This includes stops of a half hour for breakfast at OUT OF THE FOG INTO THE SUN. 3 twelve, and a half hour for dinner at six. There are, besides, five other stops of five minutes each, so that the running time is actually only a Httle over eleven hours, or (if I have figured correctly) over forty-one mUes an hour.

Another good thing about the journey was the ab sence of "hot boxes." The only thing that could bear that name was the hot-water cans that were given us for foot-warmers. Now, a real American is not com fortable without a " hot box " occasionaUy in the course of a long journey. It seems to him that something has n't happened. The cars also were exceedingly easy. This was due to comfortable seats ancl good springs partly, but mainly to the excellence of the road-bed and the per fection of the steel raUs. We ghded along on our very rapid course without a jar. Ancl another discov ery we soon made was that the road was so perfectly ballasted with stone that we had no dust. We were neither jerked about nor banged up ancl down. This splendid steel highway from Paris to Marseilles is run over as smoothly as if one were in a gondola, a dustless journey, on time.

And we were little visited by conductors, ticket-men, or other inquisitive persons, and not once by boys who desired to improve our minds and destroy our stomachs by their merchandise. Having once put us into a car for Avignon and been satisfied that we had paid, the officials let us alone. We might have got out any where, and forfeited our tickets and left our baggage. Not tiU we reached Dijon at night did a ticket-taker open the door. But then four simple words that he said — "Billets si vous plait " — so deluged the apart ment with garlic that we had to open all the windows. If he had added another solid word, I think we should have been compelled to jump out of the car. Such a mighty power is the breath of a single man in this great nation. I am sorry to say that the climate of Paris extends far south.

The isothermal line takes a dip almost clown to the Mediterranean. By the middle of the afternoon we were in a cold, dense fog again, as thick as we have on the banks of Newfoundland, and it was not until we were weU away from Lyons and the sun had ceased to draw the moisture from the ground that we saw the stars. But by nine o' clock wediad changed our climate totally, and when we saw in the moonlight the towers of the ancient Palace of the Popes at Avignon, we knew that the sort of winter to which we are accustomed was left behind us, and we had not to look forward with apprehension to Thanksgiving day. The ancient hotel received us in its ancient court yard, where the big sycamore-tree grows and the galleries run round, and where there are benches for loiterers to sit in the sun. The next morning was cloudless, delicious.

The soldiers ancl the children were sunning themselves in the Place de la Ville, at the head of the Rue de la Re'publique, where stands the statue of CriUon, friend of Henry of Navarre, and OUT OF THE FOG INTO THE SUN. the pretty theatre with the figures of Racine and Cor nedle seated in front. We were come to a land where statues can sit out doors with comfort in winter. I returned to the hotel with my hands full of the open air roses of Provence, which are blooming everywhere. It is only truth to say, however, that the " mistral," an odious, cold, cutting northeast wind, blows here in the winter and gives Avignon a bad name. It is not so very far from the spurs of the Alps, and one of the finest sights from the Dome of Rocks, above the old palace, is Mt. Yentoux, eighteen miles away and 6,421 feet high, a lovely purple mountain, said by Petrarch, who ascended it, to be covered with eternal snow.

The snow may be eternal or internal, but we could not see it. Avignon, crumbling, old, crooked in its ways and indecent in some of its smells, is, after aU, a most romantic, delightful old town, interesting in its archi tectures, its superb old palaces, its historical associations of the Popes and the Two Lovers, and has, altogether, a most fascinating atmosphere for the trav eler. But it is afflicted, as aU France is, with soldiers, barracks full of them, streets fuU of them. They sleep in the Palace of the Popes ; you see one of their unintelligent heads at every little window of the for tress-palace, ancl squads of conscripts, the rawest of raw recruits, are always in sight. Ancl they seem poor material for soldiers, short in stature, iU-made, inferior in every way, light weights in head as well as in body.

This is the general character of the conscripts and troops we have seen everywhere south on our journey, and it is very poor stuff to oppose to the stalwart, in teUigent German soldiers — if they are to be opposed to them.

Chapter II. The Fountain Of Vaucluse

The lover has almost as good a chance of immortal ity as the warrior. A romantic attachment to a charming woman, especiaUy if it is hopeless or ought to be hopeless, put into literature, does very nearly as weU for a man's reputation as if he murdered a great many of his feUows. Not quite ; for killing is stiU the most popular thing a man can do in this world. Witness, the prominent industry of France at this moment is the training of the most awkward of conscripts into the most unsoldierly-Hke-looking soldiers, for the purpose of kiUing Germans and other outside barbarians. The quaint old walled city of Avignon, however, owes more to Petrarch than it does to any or aU of the Popes who once made it the centre of the shows and pUgrimages of the Christian world ; more even than to that fighting Pope Benoit XIII., who was n't a very good Holy Father, as holy fathers go in this world, al though he stood a siege in his palace-fortress in Avig non that lasted a year longer than the siege of Troy.

AU Avignon is saturated with the story of Petrarch and Laura, and it is a pity that the name of the handsomest street in the city and the only straight one, NOTES OF A ROUNDaIBOUT JOURNEY. which was Rue Petrarque, has, in the access of Re publicanism — for Avignon is fiercely Republican — been changed into Rue de la Re"publique. I know very well that it is the fashion now not to believe very much in Petrarch's love-affair, and to say that the sweet but cold Laura de Sade, dying at the age of forty, a faithful wife ancl the mother of eleven chUdren, was only a literary flame of the sentimental Italian. But I like, while I am here, to believe the old romance in aU its detaUs. And if the poeticaUy amorous poet mingled his taste for letters and his love of renown with a convenient and idealized passion for a beautiful woman, ancl made every event of his de spairing love the theme of a sonnet, I like to believe that the name of Laura, which was always on his lips or at the end of his pen, was something more than a name.

It was, says the simple narrative, on the Monday of Holy Week, at six o'clock in the morning, that Petrarch saw at Avignon, in the church of the nuns of Sainte Claire, a young woman whose robe of green was sown with violets. Her beauty struck him : it was Laura. Daughter of Audibert des Noves, chevalier, she had recently married Hugues de Sade, of an old patrician house of Avignon. Her features — so Petrarch de scribes her — were fine and regular, her eyes were brill iant, her glance was tender, her physiognomy sweet, her behavior modest, her gait noble, her voice vibrant with feeling ; her waist was slender, her eyebrows were black, her hair was blonde ; her complexion was of dazzling whiteness, animated with the most lively colors ; in short, she had a charm more seducing than beauty. To see this lovely person was to love her.

To be absent from her was a torture. It was necessary to Petrarch to be near her always. He sought her every where. She had the air of inviting him. If he ap proached her, she fled ; but she fled slowly ; she fled to be pursued. Petrarch was timid. Laura was a woman of sense, and yet, like all women, au fond, a coquette. It was a coquetry which nature inspired, which modesty confessed. Laura was flattered by his devotion, not insensible to the renown which his son nets brought her; distinguished strangers from afar wished to see the divinity who inspired the famous poet. They could not always recognize in her the rav ing beauty whom Petrarch saw. Did Laura love him? The love of Petrarch flat tered her pride. But she had the air of ignoring the passion of the young poet ; she treated him with kindness ; but a sweet severity came to the aid of her virtue.

She attracted him and repeUed him. He seemed always to pursue an enticing shadow which always just evaded his grasp, and yet invited him with a sweet smile into some heavenly place. In the despair of a lover whose love was in the air, in disgust of a sycophantic court whose favor was only got by fawning, in hatred of a city whose morals were decayed, ancl in order to have uninterrupted leisure for the cultivation of the muse, Petrarch sought a retreat in the soHtude of Vaucluse. Even there the image of Laura pursued him ; he heard her voice in the garden at evening, and in the murmuring stream that ran be fore his door his thought swiftly traveled to Avignon, where she lived. He wrote there many sonnets upon her. Upon her beautiful eyes he composed three poems full of grace, delicacy, esprit.

Drawn back to Avig non by his passion for her, or drawn from Vaucluse by missions political or poetic, Petrarch returned to it again and again. But it was never more than a retreat of convenience, a summer residence. What is this Vaucluse, whose fountain is such a per ennial spring of poetic longing ? Vaucluse is to-day a little town of some five or six hundred inhabitants, in the foot-hills of the French Alps, about eighteen miles east of Avignon. I went there by the railway to Ca vaiUon, which was the home, you may remember, of Pierre de Provence, whose romantic love for La BeUe Maguelonne is the theme of one of the most charming stories of the twelfth century. The road was through a level gray limestone region, planted everywhere with the vine and the olive. Here and there are little hills, and on one of these, to the north, is the Chateau Neuf du Pape, whence comes a very good red wine of that name, which even the temperance traveler in this land of the grape ancl the madder may drink if he gets an absolution from the Pope.

Before us, however, aU the way, rose one of the loveliest of mountains — the last southern effort of the Alps to sustain their majesty — a barren height, lifted up in a purple light under this blue sky of Provence ; a mountain which has a special fame from the fact that Petrarch once ascended it, and describes it as in perpetual snow. Things are not now so perpetual as they were in mediæval times, or this season has been unfavorable for snow. We could see none. It is the Mt. Ventoux. It has an air of repose in lonely grandeur, and gets the full benefit of its alti tude, for this plain descends with only a gentle slope to the Mediterranean. The day was lovely — it was the 12th of November — like our choicest ancl most inspiring October days. Olive orchards gave a silver shimmer to the air, and flowers bloomed in the open without fear of frosts.

At every Httle station upon low trellises were trained rose vines, and sweet-scented red roses, the red rose that used to be a shy confession of love in June in New England, made brUHant banks of color. We left the train at LTsle du Sorgue, a sleepy, gray, and dusty little village on the river Sorgue, and took an omnibus for Vaucluse, three or four miles distant. The stone houses are gray, the roads are gray, the landscape is grizzly. The road, however, is broad, and hard, ancl smooth. As we go on, by vineyards and olive orchards, with a Virgin ancl Child at odd angles and corners by the portals in the waUs, the country becomes rougher and less arable. We are approaching the mountains, or rather the gray limestone cliffs which are their outposts. The road descends to the narrow valley of the Sorgue, ancl follows its tortuous course into the very bosom of the mountain.

Soon we pass under the arches of a fine modern viaduct, and find ourselves in a ravine, with the rapid little river and high cliffs on both sides. There is a house with a garden now and. then, but there is no room for many houses. We pursue this way until we come to a veritable cui de sac. In this cui de sac is Vaucluse. It is a sorry little town, rather Italian than French in its appearance, with its few houses on the edge of the stream, and perched on the hiU-sides. In one place the rock has been tunneled, and the tunnel leads to other stone houses jammed under the ledges. There is a little square with a high commemorative column (erected in 1804), and a big sycamore-tree. This is where the omnibus stops, and the horses are unhitched, and where old women, not so pretty as old women might be, offer to seU you dried grasses colored, and sprigs of lavender, and photographs of the fountain and the town.

There is, of course, a cas 6 on this square, the Petrarque et Laure, and a bridge across the stream leads to a modern paper-miU. Taking the right bank of the river we ascend by a stony path, always attended by the woman with the lavender and the photographs and babies, until we reach the end of the horse-shoe inclosure. In the last few hundred yards the river has disappeared. We mount by the side of a dry cascade. The bed of the stream is strewn with big moss-covered bowlders, and over these the torrent pours when the fountain, in the spring, is high enough to overflow. Its outlet now is under this stony bed. These bowlders in the dry stream (for it is here dry the greater part of the year) are thickly painted with the names of distin guished Frenchmen. I know they are distinguished or they would not be here.

Every square foot of the vast cliffs about us, as far as moderate ladders can reach, also bears in white paint the same noble names. The Frenchman always paints or carves his name on every object that is available whenever he ventures into the savage and unknown world outside of Paris. His appreciation of himself is of the same sort as the modesty of the ancient Pharaohs. Mounting above this dry cascade, we were faced and hemmed in by a perpendicular limestone precipice eleven hundred feet in height. Before us in the cliff is a cavern, perhaps a hundred feet long by thirty deep. At a descent into it of thirty or forty feet from the brink where we stood was a pool of water, perhaps thirty feet across, and probably, at this time, about thirty feet deep. But it is impossible to say how deep it is, for the water is absolutely peUucid.

I have never seen any mountain stream clearer. And yet its color is a sort of blue black. Petrarch describes it as " a mirror of blue-black water, so pure, so stiU, that where it laps the jiebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and water ends." I found this HteraUy true, for stooping on the shingly edge to dip the water in my hand I only perceived by the touch where the water began. This is the sole source of the river Sorgue, which issuing from this ravine parts itself into many canals ; it refreshes the prairies of Vaucluse, it waters Lille and the beautiful plain of Contat, and at last throws itself into the Rhone near Avignon. " O Vaucluse ! " exclaims the poet in his absence, " who will transport me to thy fresh banks ! O fountain marvelous ! would that I were seated near thy source !

" Returning to the square, we crossed the bridge to the rock-hewn street behind the mill and passed through a rock tunnel in search of the site of Pe trarch's house. On the height above us, perched upon the rugged rocks, are the ruins of the castle of Cardi nal Cabasole. The Cardinal was Petrarch's friend, the seignior of this district, and part of the time Pe trarch's companion here. At the foot of the precipice, under this castle in the air, was Petrarch's modest house. This site is tolerably well defined. The house has long ago gone, but another, which is said to be ex actly like his, stands in its place. It is a two-story stone house, jammed under the precipice of which it seems to be a ragged part, with smaU windows, and looks very much like a poor stable and hen-house. In front of it is a little garden fenced in.

This was a part of the larger garden of Petrarch, which extended to the river. In Petrarch's day this may have been a charming retreat. In the stream he drew his nets for fish. Melodious birds chanted in his ear, and farther off he heard in the meadows the lowing of herds and the bleating of sheep. The birds sang on one side ; on the other, the waves murmured. Figs, grapes, al monds he had — these were his delicacies. His habit was that of a shepherd. At mid-day he was in a vaulted grotto impenetrable to the rays of the sun. At evening he wandered in the meadows, where he had a second garden. It is a little difficult to imagine all this now, in the midst of these surroundings so grim and common place. But the stream is there, and the everlasting gray cliffs are there ; and the ruins of his friend's castle stiU look down upon this marvelous gorge in the mountain.

I plucked some pink roses of Provence ancl a leaf of magnolia from this dusty and blooming little garden, as romantic aids to imagination and faith. In this solitude I can believe that the image of Laura pursued Petrarch as it had followed him in the forest of Ardennes. He believed that he saw her. He saw her start from the trunk of a tree, from the basin of the fountain, from she crevice of a rock, even from the edge of a cloud. " Three times," says he, " in the midst of the horrors of the night, all the doors fast shut, I have seen her appear at the foot of the bed, with an air assumed, with a countenance haughty. It was her very self." She rebuked her slave ; she reclaimed him. What did Laura wish ? " Perhaps," says the naif chronicler, " to be the first and perhaps the only woman who was ever loved with an angelic love."

On the front of the cafe of Petrarque et Laure, in the little square, is an inscription saying that on the site of this building Petrarch had his study, and that on this very spot he composed his one hundred and twenty-ninth sonnet, beginning (written here in French and in Italian) : — " O sweet country ! O pure river ! Which bathes the beautiful visage And the dear eyes of my Laura ! "

Chapter III. Avignon To

NfMES. Put a man in red trousers and blue jacket and make his red legs move in unison with a lot of other red legs, and the man is perhaps relieved a Httle of his original insignificance. We have been witnessing the manufacture of soldiers, out of poor material, all the way across France. We have seen the forlorn squads of conscripts on tlieir way to the stations ; we have seen the first attempts on the drill ground to make four of them stand in a right Hne ; we have seen their awkward efforts to make the musket anything but a murderous instrument for themselves, and we have finaUy seen them march off in columns — this thousand red-legged machine of war — with slanting bayonets and the intent to kill. I did not intend to say anything more about the soldiers. But as I opened my window to the south to let in the sweet morning air, I heard the toot-toot of the everlasting trumpet-call, and while I sit down to begin this page a red-legged regiment is crossing the esplanade.

I wish I could say anything good of them. Individually they are insignificant ; but tlieir red legs do go very weU together. At any rate they are the prominent fact in all these towns and cities. The air is full of soldiering. The trumpet-call is the first thing one hears in the morning and the last in the evening, and all day the tan-ta-ra tan-ta-ra is liable to break out and a squad of uniforms appear round the corner. In the streets everywhere are soldiers and officers, the most familiar figures ; but nothing seems able to give any of them the soldierly bearing that the Germans have. I don't know, however, that it is any of my business, if the republic chooses to use up its energies in this way. But I wish they would put some good -sized men into the army, just for ajipearances. There are Frenchmen of fair proportions ; you see occasionally a large man on the street, ancl they make a brave show — especially the commercial travelers — at the tables d'hote.

A row of Frenchmen at the table of a first class hotel is likely to be a row of exceedingly good heads ancl highly intelligent faces, and men of more than ordinary size. To be sure, their table manners are apt to be barbarous, but then one would not go to a hotel in America to learn manners. It seems to me on the whole, taking the conscripts and the crowds in the streets, that the French in the south are under sized. Perhaps it is a significant and decisive fact that the bedsteads at the hotels are all a trifle short for a man of good honest proportions to stretch himself at ease. We have plenty of men in Hartford to whom these bedsteads would be the mere mockery of repose. They have in this region a new use for men. They make " chambermaids " of them. Nearly all our chambermaids since we left Paris have been of the awkward sex.

It seems to outrage the nature of things to see one of these unhandy creatures making up a bed, and trying to give that touch to it which is instinctive in a woman. The fact that men are employed to do this domestic service in hotels speaks volumes. But what is in the volumes I don't know. From Avignon to Nimes is a very pleasant ride of some twenty-five or thirty mUes by rail of a sunny morning. The view is very extended, though the land is not flat ; there are charming slopes ancl great sweeps of well-tiUed land. The prominent feature — every where in this region, indeed — is the vast olive or chards. Together with the grape vines they cover the land. In coming only this short distance we have changed, however, the milieu. There are not so many roses and other flowers in the open air as at Avignon.

That old town, although it has, as I said, a bad name for the mistral, is nevertheless very good to the flowers all the year round, and is a bower of roses. In the gar den above the Palace of the Popes they were setting out new beds of mignonette, as if they expected it to bloom through the winter. The cemetery was odorous with sweet flowers. About the sarcophagus where lie, in a nook sheltered by hedges of pines, John Stuart MU1 ancl his weU-beloved wife, are banks of roses, red and pink and yellow, rejoicing in the sun and robbing the grave of half its lonesomeness. We left behind, too, at Avignon, the strawberries. Strawberries, they say, they have there every month in the year. To be sure they are the small, seedy, Swiss variety, of which it takes a great many to make a mouthful. But a strawberry is a strawberry in Ht erature as well as on the table, and to come in of a winter morning from a walk in the abounding sun with a hand fuU of roses, and see on the breakfast table even the humblest strawberry, is more pleasing than a stalled ox ancl snow in New England.

This Nimes is a large city — 63,000 inhabitants the guide-book says — and it has the reputation of being one of the most cheerful and pleasant cities in southern France. It is open and sunny, and wide-spaced, but somehow, after one has seen the Roman ruins and the public garden, where there are also lovely Roman remains, there is not much to interest the traveler. It is too modern and lacks altogether the picturesque ness of Avignon, with its crooked, iU-savored streets and its decayed grandeur. The HStel Luxembourg, where we stay, has a lovely sunny front south and west on the esplanade, a great esplanade of gravel in the middle of which is a lovely fountain with statues by Pradier, and about which are the public buildings and the vast and imposing Roman Amphitheatre. It is a good place also from our bal cony to see the sunset and to hear day and night the toot-toot of the trumpeting soldiers, and the tooting horns of the omnibus and street-car conductors.

If there is any one thing the French like more than an other it is noise. This old hotel has a sort of imposing appearance interiorly, with its large court and open staircase and gaUeries. It is a curious place, however. We were met on entering by two old women, in mob caps, black fronts, and short black dresses, who regarded us with the curiosity of magpies — nice, friendly old magpies — tottering about and solicitous to know our wants and to turn the last penny on them. It seems to be quite in the way here for old ladies to keep hotels. The Europa at Avignon was kept for sixty years by two Hvely, comfortable old ladies — they were not always so old — who had just departed this Hfe the year we were at Avignon before (in 1875). In the little waiting room hangs a portrait of their gracious old mother, who, I suppose, kept the same house ages before.