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In and out of Three Normandy Inns

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Title: In and out of Three Normandy Inns

Author: Anna Bowman Dodd


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7961]
                Most recently updated: August 24, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7961

Credits: Produced by John Roberts, Anne Soulard, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN AND OUT OF THREE NORMANDY INNS ***




Produced by John Roberts, Anne Soulard, Charles Franks,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.











IN AND OUT OF THREE NORMANDY INNS

BY

ANNA BOWMAN DODD







[Illustration: GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT-DIVES]


TO EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.

_My Dear Mr. Stedman:

To this little company of Norman men and women, you will, I know,
extend a kindly greeting, if only because of their nationality. To your
courtesy, possibly, you will add the leaven of interest, when you
perceive--as you must--that their qualities are all their own, their
defects being due solely to my own imperfect presentment.

With sincere esteem_,

ANNA BOWMAN DODD.

_New York_.




CONTENTS.


VILLERVILLE.

I.      A LANDING ON THE COAST OF FRANCE II.     A SPRING DRIVE III.
FROM AN INN WINDOW IV.     OUT ON A MUSSEL-BED V.      THE VILLAGE VI.
A PAGAN COBBLER VII.    SOME NORMAN LANDLADIES VIII.   THE QUARTIER
LATIN ON THE BEACH IX.     A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD X.      ERNESTINE

ALONG AN OLD POST-ROAD.

XI.     TO AN OLD MANOIR XII.    A NORMAN CURE XIII.   HONFLEUR--NEW
AND OLD

DIVES.

XIV.    A COAST DRIVE XV.     GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT XVI.    THE GREEN
BENCH XVII.   THE WORLD THAT CAME TO DIVES XVIII.  THE CONVERSATION OF
PATRIOTS XIX.    IN LA CHAMBRE DES MARMOUSETS

TWO BANQUETS AT DIVES.

XX.     A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REVIVAL XXI.    THE AFTER-DINNER TALK OF
THREE GREAT LADIES XXII.   A NINETEENTH CENTURY BREAKFAST

A LITTLE JOURNEY ALONG THE COAST.

XXIII.  A NIGHT IN A CAEN ATTIC XXIV.   A DAY AT BAYEUX AND ST. LO XXV.
A DINNER AT COUTANCES XXVI.   A SCENE IN A NORMAN COURT XXVII.  THE
FETE-DIEU--A JUNE CHRISTMAS XXVIII. BY LAND TO MONT ST. MICHEL

MONT ST. MICHEL.

XXIX.   BY SEA TO THE POULARD INN XXX.    THE PILGRIMS AND THE
SHRINE--AN HISTORICAL OMELETTE





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT--DIVES A VILLAGE STREET--VILLERVILLE ON THE
BEACH--VILLERVILLE A SALE OF MUSSELS--VILLERVILLE A VILLERVILLE
FISH-WIFE A DEPARTURE--VILLERVILLE THE INN AT
DIVES--GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT CHAMBRE DE LA PUCELLE--DIVES CHAMBRE DES
MARMOUSETS--DIVES MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ CHAMBRE DE LA PUCELLE--DIVES
CHATEAU FONTAINE LE HENRI, NEAR CAEN AN EXCITING MOMENT--A COUTANCES
INTERIOR A STREET IN COUTANCES--EGLISE SAINT-PIERRE MONT SAINT MICHEL
MONT SAINT MICHEL SNAIL-GATHERERS




VILLERVILLE.

AN INN BY THE SEA.




CHAPTER I.

A LANDING ON THE COAST OF FRANCE.


Narrow streets with sinuous curves; dwarfed houses with minute shops
protruding on inch-wide sidewalks; a tiny casino perched like a
bird-cage on a tiny scaffolding; bath-houses dumped on the beach;
fishing-smacks drawn up along the shore like so many Greek galleys;
and, fringing the cliffs--the encroachment of the nineteenth century--a
row of fantastic sea-side villas.

This was Villerville.

Over an arch of roses; across a broad line of olives, hawthorns,
laburnums, and syringas, straight out to sea--

This was the view from our windows.

Our inn was bounded by the sea on one side, and on the other by a
narrow village street. The distance between good and evil has been
known to be quite as short as that which lay between these two
thoroughfares. It was only a matter of a strip of land, an edge of
cliff, and a shed of a house bearing the proud title of Hôtel-sur-Mer.

Two nights before, our arrival had made quite a stir in the village
streets. The inn had given us a characteristic French welcome; its eye
had measured us before it had extended its hand. Before reaching the
inn and the village, however, we had already tasted of the flavor of a
genuine Norman welcome. Our experience in adventure had begun on the
Havre quays.

Our expedition could hardly be looked upon as perilous; yet it was one
that, from the first, evidently appealed to the French imagination;
half Havre was hanging over the stone wharves to see us start.

"_Dame_, only English women are up to that!"--for all the world is
English, in French eyes, when an adventurous folly is to be committed.

This was one view of our temerity; it was the comment of age and
experience of the world, of the cap with the short pipe in her mouth,
over which curved, downward, a bulbous, fiery-hued nose that met the
pipe.

"_C'est beau, tout de même_, when one is young--and rich." This was a
generous partisan, a girl with a miniature copy of her own round
face--a copy that was tied up in a shawl, very snug; it was a bundle
that could not possibly be in any one's way, even on a somewhat
prolonged tour of observation of Havre's shipping interests.

"And the blonde one--what do you think of her, _hein_?"

This was the blouse's query. The tassel of the cotton night-cap nodded,
interrogatively, toward the object on which the twinkling ex-mariner's
eye had fixed itself--on Charm's slender figure, and on the yellow
half-moon of hair framing her face. There was but one verdict
concerning the blonde beauty; she was a creature made to be stared at.
The staring was suspended only when the bargaining went on; for Havre,
clearly, was a sailor and merchant first; its knowledge of a woman's
good points was rated merely as its second-best talent.

Meanwhile, our bargaining for the sailboat was being conducted on the
principles peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the
aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to
stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze
for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before
now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to
ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in
a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm
with jerseys and red caps. Each beret was the owner of a boat; and each
jersey had a voice louder than his brother's. Presently the battle of
tongues was drowning all other sounds.

In point of fact, there were no other sounds to drown. All other
business along the quays was being temporarily suspended; the most
thrilling event of the day was centring in us and our treaty. Until
this bargain was closed, other matters could wait. For a Frenchman has
the true instinct of the dramatist; business he rightly considers as
only an _entr'acte_ in life; the serious thing is the _scene de
theatre_, wherever it takes place. Therefore it was that the black,
shaky-looking houses, leaning over the quays, were now populous with
frowsy heads and cotton nightcaps. The captains from the adjacent
sloops and tug-boats formed an outer circle about the closer ring made
by the competitors for our favors, while the loungers along the
parapets, and the owners of top seats on the shining quay steps, may be
said to have been in possession of orchestra stalls from the first
rising of the curtain.

A baker's boy and two fish-wives, trundling their carts, stopped to
witness the last act of the play. Even the dogs beneath the carts, as
they sank, panting, to the ground, followed, with red-rimmed eyes, the
closing scenes of the little drama.

"_Allons_, let us end this," cried a piratical-looking captain, in a
loud, masterful voice. And he named a price lower than the others had
bid. He would take us across--yes, us and our luggage, and land
us--yes, at Villerville, for that.

The baker's boy gave a long, slow whistle, with relish.

"_Dame!_" he ejaculated, between his teeth, as he turned away.

The rival captains at first had drawn back; they had looked at their
comrade darkly, beneath their berets, as they might at a deserter with
whom they meant to deal--later on. But at his last words they smiled a
smile of grim humor. Beneath the beards a whisper grew; whatever its
import, it had the power to move all the hard mouths to laughter. As
they also turned away, their shrugging shoulders and the scorn in their
light laughter seemed to hand us over to our fate.

In the teeth of this smile, our captain had swung his boat round and we
were stepping into her.

"_Au revoir--au revoir et à bientôt!_"

The group that was left to hang over the parapets and to wave us its
farewell, was a thin one. Only the professional loungers took part in
this last act of courtesy. There was a cluster of caps, dazzlingly
white against the blue of the sky; a collection of highly decorated
noses and of old hands ribboned with wrinkles, to nod and bob and wave
down the cracked-voiced "_bonjours_." But the audience that had
gathered to witness the closing of the bargain had melted away with the
moment of its conclusion. Long ere this moment of our embarkation the
wide stone street facing the water had become suddenly deserted. The
curious-eyed heads and the cotton nightcaps had been swallowed up in
the hollows of the dark, little windows. The baker's boy had long since
mounted his broad basket, as if it were an ornamental head-dress, and
whistling, had turned a sharp corner, swallowed up, he also, by the
sudden gloom that lay between the narrow streets. The sloop-owners had
linked arms with the defeated captains, and were walking off toward
their respective boats, whistling a gay little air.

  "_Colinette au bois s'en alla
  En sautillant par-ci, par-là;
  Trala deridera, trala, derid-er-a-a._"

One jersey-clad figure was singing lustily as he dropped with a spring
into his boat. He began to coil the loose ropes at once, as if the
disappointments in life were only a necessary interruption, to be
accepted philosophically, to this, the serious business of his days.

We were soon afloat, far out from the land of either shores. Between
the two, sea and river meet; is the river really trying to lose itself
in the sea, or is it hopelessly attempting to swallow the sea? The
green line that divides them will never give you the answer: it changes
hour by hour, day by day; now it is like a knife-cut, deep and
straight; and now like a ribbon that wavers and flutters, tying
together the blue of the great ocean and the silver of the Seine. Close
to the lips of the mighty mouth lie the two shores. In that fresh May
sunshine Havre glittered and bristled, was aglow with a thousand tints
and tones; but we sailed and sailed away from her, and behold, already
she had melted into her cliffs. Opposite, nearing with every dip of the
dun-colored sail into the blue seas, was the Calvados coast; in its
turn it glistened, and in its young spring verdure it had the lustre of
a rough-hewn emerald.

"_Que voulez-vous, mesdames?_ Who could have told that the wind would
play us such a trick?"

The voice was the voice of our captain. With much affluence of gesture
he was explaining--his treachery! Our nearness to the coast had made
the confession necessary. To the blandness of his smile, as he
proceeded in his unabashed recital, succeeded a pained expression. We
were not accepting the situation with the true phlegm of philosophers;
he felt that he had just cause for protest. What possible difference
could it make to us whether we were landed at Trouville or at
Villerville? But to him--to be accused of betraying two ladies--to
allow the whole of the Havre quays to behold in him a man disgraced,
dishonored!

His was a tragic figure as he stood up, erect on the poop, to clap
hands to a blue-clad breast, and to toss a black mane of hair in the
golden air.

"_Dame! Toujours été galant homme, moi!_ I am known on both shores as
the most gallant of men. But the most gallant of men cannot control the
caprice of the wind!" To which was added much abuse of the muddy
bottoms, the strength of the undertow, and other marine disadvantages
peculiar to Villerville.

It was a tragic figure, with gestures and voice to match. But it was
evident that the Captain had taken his own measure mistakenly. In him
the French stage had lost a comedian of the first magnitude. Much,
therefore, we felt, was to be condoned in one who doubtless felt so
great a talent itching for expression. When next he smiled, we had
revived to a keener appreciation of baffled genius ever on the scent
for the capture of that fickle goddess, opportunity.

The captain's smile was oiling a further word of explanation. "See,
mesdames, they come! they will soon land you on the beach!"

He was pointing to a boat smaller than our own, that now ran alongside.
There had been frequent signallings between the two boats, a running up
and down of a small yellow flag which we had thought amazingly becoming
to the marine landscape, until we learned the true relation of the flag
to the treachery aboard our own craft.

"You see, mesdames," smoothly continued our talented traitor, "you see
how the waves run up on the beach. We could never, with this great
sail, run in there. We should capsize. But behold, these are bathers,
accustomed to the water--they will carry you--but as if you were
feathers!" And he pointed to the four outstretched, firmly-muscled
arms, as if to warrant their powers of endurance. The two men had left
their boat; it was dancing on the water, at anchor. They were standing
immovable as pillars of stone, close to the gunwales of our craft. They
were holding out their arms to us.

Charm suddenly stood upright. She held out her hands like a child, to
the least impressionable boatman. In an instant she was clasping his
bronze throat.

"All my life I've prayed for adventure. And at last it has come!" This
she cried, as she was carried high above the waves.

"That's right, have no fear," answered her carrier as he plunged
onward, ploughing his way through the waters to the beach.

Beneath my own feet there was a sudden swish and a swirl of restless,
tumbling waters. The motion, as my carrier buried his bared legs in the
waves, was such as accompanies impossible flights described in dreams,
through some unknown medium. The surging waters seemed struggling to
submerge us both; the two thin, tanned legs of the fisherman about
whose neck I was clinging, appeared ridiculously inadequate to cleave a
successful path through a sea of such strength as was running shoreward.

"Madame does not appear to be used to this kind of travelling," puffed
out my carrier, his conversational instinct, apparently, not in the
least dampened by his strenuous plunging through the spirited sea. "It
happens every day--all the aristocrats land this way, when they come
over by the little boats. It distracts and amuses them, they say. It
helps to kill the ennui."

"I should think it might, my feet are soaking; sometimes wet feet--"

"Ah, that's a pity, you must get a better hold," sympathetically
interrupted my fisherman, as he proceeded to hoist me higher up on his
shoulder. I, or a sack of corn, or a basket of fish, they were all one
to this strong back and to these toughened sinews. When he had adjusted
his present load at a secure height, above the dashing of the spray, he
went on talking. "Yes, when the rich suffer a little it is not such a
bad thing, it makes a pleasant change--_cela leur distrait_. For
instance, there is the Princess de L----, there's her villa, close by,
with green blinds. She makes little excuses to go over to Havre, just
for this--to be carried in the arms like an infant. You should hear
her, she shouts and claps her hands! All the beach assembles to see her
land. When she is wet she cries for joy. It is so difficult to amuse
one's self, it appears, in the great world."

"But, _tiens_, here we are, I feel the dry sands." I was dropped as
lightly on them as if it had been indeed a bunch of feathers my
fisherman had been carrying.

And meanwhile, out yonder, across the billows, with airy gesture
dramatically executed, our treacherous captain was waving us a
theatrical salute. The infant mate was grinning like a gargoyle. They
were both delightfully unconscious, apparently, of any event having
transpired, during the afternoon's pleasuring, which could possibly
tinge the moment of parting with the hues of regret.

"_Pour les bagages, mesdames_--"

Two dripping, outstretched hands, two berets doffed, two picturesque
giants bowing low, with a Frenchman's grace--this, on the Trouville
sands, was the last act of this little comedy of our landing on the
coast of France.




CHAPTER II.

A SPRING DRIVE.


The Trouville beach was as empty as a desert. No other footfall, save
our own, echoed along the broad board walks; this Boulevard des
Italiens of the Normandy coast, under the sun of May was a shining
pavement that boasted only a company of jelly-fishes as loungers.

Down below was a village, a white cluster of little wooden houses; this
was the village of the bath houses. The hotels might have been
monasteries deserted and abandoned, in obedience to a nod from Rome or
from the home government. Not even a fisherman's net was spread
a-drying, to stay the appetite with a sense of past favors done by the
sea to mortals more fortunate than we. The whole face of nature was as
indifferent as a rich relation grown callous to the voice of entreaty.
There was no more hope of man apparently, than of nature, being moved
by our necessity; for man, to be moved, must primarily exist, and he
was as conspicuously absent on this occasion as Genesis proves him to
have been on the fourth day of creation.

Meanwhile we sat still, and took counsel together. The chief of the
council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The
masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating
itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved
itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent
of demeanor--swaggering along as if conscious of there being a
full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was
accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness announced habits of
leisure and a sense of the refined pleasures of life; for an artistic
rendering of an aria from "La Fille de Madame Angot" was cutting the
air with clear, high notes.

The whistle and the brown legs suddenly came to a dead stop. The round
blue eyes had caught sight of us:

"_Ouid-a-a!_" was this young Norman's salutation. There was very little
trouser left, and what there was of it was all pocket, apparently. Into
the pockets the boy's hands were stuffed, along with his amazement; for
his face, round and full though it was, could not hold the full measure
of his surprise.

"We came over by boat--from Havre," we murmured meekly; then, "Is there
a cake-shop near?" irrelevantly concluded Charm with an unmistakable
ring of distress in her tone. There was no need of any further
explanation. These two hearty young appetites understood each other;
for hunger is a universal language, and cake a countersign common among
the youth of all nations.

"Until you came, you see, we couldn't leave the luggage," she went on.

The blue eyes swept the line of our boxes as if the lad had taken his
afternoon stroll with no other purpose than to guard them. "There are
eight, and two umbrellas. _Soyez tranquille, je vous attendrai._"

It was the voice and accent of a man of the world, four feet high--a
pocket edition, so to speak, in shabby binding. The brown legs hung,
the next instant, over the tallest of the trunks. The skilful whistling
was resumed at once; our appearance and the boy's present occupation
were mere interludes, we were made to understand; his real business,
that afternoon, was to do justice to the Lecoq's entire opera, and to
keep his eye on the sea.

Only once did he break down; he left a high _C_ hanging perilously in
mid-air, to shout out "I like madeleines, I do!" We assured him he
should have a dozen.

"_Bien!_" and we saw him settling himself to await our return in
patience.

Up in the town the streets, as we entered them, were as empty as was
the beach. Trouville might have been a buried city of antiquity. Yet,
in spite of the desolation, it was French and foreign; it welcomed us
with an unmistakably friendly, companionable air. Why is it that one is
made to feel the companionable element, by instantaneous process, as it
were, in a Frenchman and in his towns? And by what magic also does a
French village or city, even at its least animated period, convey to
one the fact of its nationality? We made but ten steps progress through
these silent streets, fronting the beach, and yet, such was the subtle
enigma of charm with which these dumb villas and mute shops were
invested, that we walked along as if under the spell of fascination.
Perhaps the charm is a matter of sex, after all: towns are feminine, in
the wise French idiom, that idiom so delicate in discerning qualities
of sex in inanimate objects, as the Greeks before them were clever in
discovering sex distinctions in the moral qualities. Trouville was so
true a woman, that the coquette in her was alive and breathing even in
this her moment of suspended animation. The closed blinds and iron
shutters appeared to be winking at us, slyly, as if warning us not to
believe in this nightmare of desolation; she was only sleeping, she
wished us to understand; the touch of the first Parisian would wake her
into life. The features of her fashionable face, meanwhile, were
arranged with perfect composure; even in slumber she had preserved her
woman's instinct of orderly grace; not a sign was awry, not a
window-blind gave hint of rheumatic hinges, or of shattered vertebrae;
all the machinery was in order; the faintest pressure on the electrical
button, the button that connects this lady of the sea with the Paris
Bourse and the Boulevards, and how gayly, how agilely would this
Trouville of the villas and the beaches spring into life!

The listless glances of the few tailors and cobblers who, with
suspended thread, now looked after us, seemed dazed--as if they could
not believe in the reality of two early tourists. A woman's head, here
and there, leaned over to us from a high window; even these feminine
eyes, however, appeared to be glued with the long winter's lethargy of
dull sleep; they betrayed no edge of surprise or curiosity. The sun
alone, shining with spendthrift glory, flooding the narrow streets and
low houses with a late afternoon stream of color, was the sole
inhabitant who did not blink at us, bovinely, with dulled vision.

Half an hour later we were speeding along the roadway. Half an
hour--and Trouville might have been a thousand miles away. Inland, the
eye plunged over nests of clover, across the tops of the apple and
peach trees, frosted now with blossoms, to some farm interiors. The
familiar Normandy features could be quickly spelled out, one by one.

It was the milking-hour.

The fields were crowded with cattle and women; some of the cows were
standing immovable, and still others were slowly defiling, in
processional dignity, toward their homes. Broad-hipped, lean-busted
figures, in coarse gowns and worsted kerchiefs, toiled through the
fields, carrying full milk-jugs; brass _amphorae_ these latter might
have been, from their classical elegance of shape. Ploughmen appeared
and disappeared, they and their teams rising and sinking with the
varying heights and depressions of the more distant undulations. In the
nearer cottages the voices of children would occasionally fill the air
with a loud clamor of speech; then our steed's bell-collar would
jingle, and for the children's cries, a bird-throat, high above, from
the heights of a tall pine would pour forth, as if in uncontrollable
ecstasy, its rapture into the stillness of this radiant Normandy
garden. The song appeared to be heard by other ears than ours. We were
certain the dull-brained sheep were greatly affected by the strains of
that generous-organed songster--they were so very still under the pink
apple boughs. The cows are always good listeners; and now, relieved of
their milk, they lifted eyes swimming with appreciative content above
the grasses of their pasture. Two old peasants heard the very last of
the crisp trills, before the concert ended; they were leaning forth
from the narrow window-ledges of a straw-roofed cottage; the music gave
to their blinking old eyes the same dreamy look we had read in the
ruminating cattle orbs. For an aeronaut on his way to bed, I should
have felt, had I been in that blackbird's plumed corselet, that I had
had a gratifyingly full house.

Meanwhile, toward the west, a vast marine picture, like a panorama on
wheels, was accompanying us all the way. Sometimes at our feet, beneath
the seamy fissures of a hillside, or far removed by sweep of meadow,
lay the fluctuant mass we call the sea. It was all a glassy yellow
surface now; into the liquid mirror the polychrome sails sent down long
lines of color. The sun had sunk beyond the Havre hills, but the flame
of his mantle still swept the sky. And into this twilight there crept
up from the earth a subtle, delicious scent and smell--the smell and
perfume of spring--of the ardent, vigorous, unspent Normandy spring.

[Illustration: A VILLAGE STREET--VILLERVILLE]

Suddenly a belfry grew out of the grain-fields.

"_Nous voici_--here's Villerville!" cried lustily into the twilight our
coachman's thick peasant voice. With the butt-end of his whip he
pointed toward the hill that the belfry crowned. Below the little
hamlet church lay the village. A high, steep street plunged recklessly
downward toward the cliff; we as recklessly were following it. The
snapping of our driver's whip had brought every inhabitant of the
street upon the narrow sidewalks. A few old women and babies hung forth
from the windows, but the houses were so low, that even this portion of
the population, hampered somewhat by distance and comparative
isolation, had been enabled to join in the chorus of voices that filled
the street. Our progress down the steep, crowded street was marked by a
pomp and circumstance which commonly attend only a royal entrance into
a town; all of the inhabitants, to the last man and infant, apparently,
were assembled to assist at the ceremonial of our entry.

A chorus of comments arose from the shadowy groups filling the low
doorways and the window casements.

"_Tiens_--it begins to arrive--the season!"

"Two ladies--alone--like that!"

"_Dame! Anglaises, Américaines_--they go round the world thus, _à
deux_!"

"And why not, if they are young and can pay?"

"Bah! old or poor, it's all one--they're never still, those English!" A
chorus of croaking laughter rattled down the street along with the
rolling of our carriage-wheels.

Above, the great arch of sky had shrunk, all at once, into a narrow
scallop; with the fields and meadows the glow of twilight had been left
behind. We seemed to be pressing our way against a great curtain, the
curtain made by the rich dusk that filled the narrow thoroughfare.
Through the darkness the sinuous street and rickety houses wavered in
outline, as the bent shapes of the aged totter across dimly-lit
interiors. A fisherman's bare legs, lit by some dimly illumined
interior; a line of nets in the little yards; here and there a white
kerchief or cotton cap, dazzling in whiteness, thrown out against the
black facades, were spots of light here and there. There was a glimpse
of the village at its supper--in low-raftered interiors a group of
blouses and women in fishermen's rig were gathered about narrow tables,
the coarse-featured faces and the seamed foreheads lit up by the feeble
flame of candles that ended in long, thin lines of smoke.

"_Ohé--Mère Mouchard!--des voyageurs!_" cried forth our coachman into
the darkness. He had drawn up before a low, brightly-lit interior. In
response to the call a figure appeared on the threshold of the open
door. The figure stood there for a long instant, rubbing its hands, as
it peered out into the dusk of the night to take a good look at us. The
brown head was cocked on one side thoughtfully; it was an attitude that
expressed, with astonishingly clear emphasis, an unmistakable
professional conception of hospitality. It was the air and manner, in a
word, of one who had long since trimmed the measurement of its
graciousness to the price paid for the article.

"_Ces dames_ wished rooms, they desired lodgings and board--_ces dames_
were alone?" The voice finally asked, with reticent dignity. "From
Havre--from Trouville, _par p'tit bateau!_" called out lustily our
driver, as if to furnish us, _gratis_, with a passport to the
landlady's not too effusive cordiality.

What secret spell of magic may have lain hidden in our friendly
coachman's announcement we never knew. But the "p'tit bateau" worked
magically. The figure of Mère Mouchard materialized at once into such
zeal, such effusion, such a zest of welcome, that we, our bags, and our
coachman were on the instant toiling up a pair of spiral wooden stairs.
There was quite a little crowd to fill the all-too-narrow landing at
the top of the steep steps, a crowd that ended in a long line of
waiters and serving-maids, each grasping a remnant of luggage. Our
hostess, meanwhile, was fumbling at a door-lock--an obstinate door that
refused to be wrenched open.

"Augustine--run--I've taken the wrong key. _Cours, mon enfant_, it is
no farther away than the kitchen."

The long line pressed itself against the low walls. Augustine, a
blond-haired, neatly-garmented shape, sped down the rickety stairs with
the step of youth and a dancer; for only the nimble ankles of one
accomplished in waltzing could have tripped as dexterously downward as
did Augustine.

"How she lags! what an idiot of a child!" fumed Mère Mouchard as she
peered down into the round blackness about which the curving staircase
closed like an embrace. "One must have patience, it appears, with
people made like that. _Ah, tiens,_ here she comes. How could you keep
_ces dames_ waiting like this? It is shameful, shameful!" cried the
woman, as she half shook the panting girl, in anger. "If _ces dames_
will enter,"--her voice changing at once to a caressing falsetto, as
the door flew open, opened by Augustine's trembling fingers--"they will
find their rooms in readiness."

The rooms were as bare as a soldier's barrack, but they were spotlessly
clean. There was the pale flicker of a sickly candle to illumine the
shadowy recesses of the curtained beds and the dark little
dressing-rooms.

A few moments later we wound our way downward, spirally, to find
ourselves seated at a round table in a cosy, compact dining-room.
Directly opposite, across the corridor, was the kitchen, from which
issued a delightful combination of vinous, aromatic odors. The light of
a strong, bright lamp made it as brilliant as a ball-room; it was a
ball-room which for decoration had rows of shining brass and copper
kettles--each as burnished as a jewel--a mass of sunny porcelain, and
for carpet the satin of a wooden floor. There was much bustling to and
fro. Shapes were constantly passing and repassing across the lighted
interior. The Mère's broad-hipped figure was an omniscient presence: it
hovered at one instant over a steaming saucepan, and the next was
lifting a full milk-jug or opening a wine-bottle. Above the clatter of
the dishes and the stirring of spoons arose the thick Normandy voices,
deep alto tones, speaking in strange jargon of speech--a world of
patois removed from our duller comprehension. It was made somewhat too
plain in this country, we reflected, that a man's stomach is of far
more importance than the rest of his body. The kitchen yonder was by
far the most comfortable, the warmest, and altogether the prettiest
room in the whole house.

Augustine crossed the narrow entry just then with a smoking pot of
soup. She was followed, later, by Mère Mouchard, who bore a sole au vin
blanc, a bottle of white Burgundy, and a super-naturally ethereal
soufflé. And an hour after, even the curtainless, carpetless bed
chambers above were powerless to affect the luxurious character of our
dreams.




CHAPTER III.

FROM AN INN WINDOW.


One travels a long distance, sometimes, to make the astonishing
discovery that pleasure comes with the doing of very simple things. We
had come from over the seas to find the act of leaning on a window
casement as exciting as it was satisfying. It is true that from our two
inn windows there was a delightful variety of nature and of human
nature to look out upon. From the windows overlooking the garden there
was only the horizon to bound infinity. The Atlantic, beginning with
the beach at our feet, stopped at nothing till it met the sky. The sea,
literally, was at our door; it and the Seine were next-door neighbors.
Each hour of the day these neighbors presented a different face, were
arrayed in totally different raiment, were grave or gay, glowing with
color or shrouded in mists, according to the mood and temper of the
sun, the winds, and the tides.

[Illustration: ON THE BEACH--VILLERVILLE]

The width of the sky overhanging this space was immense; not a scrap,
apparently, was left over to cover, decently, the rest of the earth's
surface--of that one was quite certain in looking at this vast inverted
cup overflowing with ether. What there was of land was a very sketchy
performance. Opposite ran the red line of the Havre headlands.

Following the river, inland, there was a pretence of shore, just
sufficiently outlined, like a youth's beard, to give substance to one's
belief in its future growth and development. Beneath these windows the
water, hemmed in by this edge of shore, panted, like a child at play;
its sighs, liquid, lisping, were irresistible; one found oneself
listening for the sound of them as if they had issued from a human
throat. The humming of the bees in the garden, the cry of a fisherman
calling across the water, the shout of the children below on the beach,
or, at twilight, the chorusing birds, carolling at full concert pitch;
this, at most, was all the sound and fury the sea beach yielded.

The windows opening on the village street let in a noise as tumultuous
as the sea was silent. The hubbub of a perpetual babble, all the louder
for being compressed within narrow space, was always to be heard; it
ceased only when the village slept. There was an incessant clicking
accompaniment to this noisy street life; a music played from early dawn
to dusk over the pavement's rough cobbles--the click clack, click clack
of the countless wooden sabots.

Part of this clamor in the streets was due to the fact that the
village, as a village, appeared to be doing a tremendous business with
the sea.

Men and women were perpetually going to and coming from the beach.
Fishermen, sailors, women bearing nets, oars, masts, and sails,
children bending beneath the weight of baskets filled with kicking
fish; wheelbarrows stocked high with sea-food and warm clothing; all
this commerce with the sea made the life in these streets a more
animated performance than is commonly seen in French villages.

In time, the provincial mania began to work in our veins.

To watch our neighbors, to keep an eye on this life--this became, after
a few days, the chief occupation of our waking hours.

The windows of our rooms fronting on the street were peculiarly well
adapted for this unmannerly occupation. By merely opening the blinds,
we could keep an eye on the entire village. Not a cat could cross the
street without undergoing inspection. Augustine, for example, who, once
having turned her back on the inn windows, believed herself entirely
cut off from observation, was perilously exposed to our mercy. We knew
all the secrets of her thieving habits; we could count, to a second,
the time she stole from the Mere, her employer, to squander in smiles
and dimples at the corner creamery. There a tall Norman rained
admiration upon her through wide blue eyes, as he patted, caressingly,
the pots of blond butter, just the color of her hair, before laying
them, later, tenderly in her open palm. Soon, as our acquaintance with
our neighbors deepened into something like intimacy, we came to know
their habits of mind as we did their facial peculiarities; certain of
their actions made an event in our day. It became a serious matter of
conjecture as to whether Madame de Tours, the social swell of the town,
would or would not offer up her prayer to Deity, accompanied by
Friponne, her black poodle. If Friponne issued forth from the narrow
door, in company with her austere mistress, the shining black silk
gown, we knew, would not decorate the angular frame of this
aristocratic provincial; a sober beige was best fitted to resist the
dashes made by Friponne's sharply-trimmed nails. It was for this, to
don a silk gown in full sight of her neighbors; to set up as companion
a dog of the highest fashion, the very purest of _caniches_, that
twenty years of patient nursing a paralytic husband--who died all too
slowly--had been counted as nothing!

Once we were summoned to our outlook by the vigorous beating of a drum.
Madame Mouchard and Augustine were already at their own post of
observation--the open inn door. The rest of the village was in full
attendance, for it was not every day in the week that the "tambour,"
the town-crier, had business enough to render his appearance, in his
official capacity, necessary; as a mere townsman he was to be seen any
hour of the day, as drunk as a lord, at the sign of "L'Ami Fidèle." His
voice, as it rolled out the words of his cry, was as _staccato_ in
pitch as any organ can be whose practice is largely confined to
unceasing calls for potations. To the listening crowd, the thick voice
was shouting:

"_Madame Tricot--à la messe--dimanche--a--perdu une broche--or et
perles--avec cheveux--Madame Merle a perdu--sur la plage--un panier
avec--un chat noir--_"

We ourselves, to our astonishment, were drummed the very next morning.
Augustine had made the discovery of a missing shoulder-cape; she had
taken it upon herself to call in the drummer. So great was the
attendance of villagers, even the abstractors of the lost garment must,
we were certain, be among the crowd assembled to hear our names shouted
out on the still air. We were greatly affected by the publicity of the
occasion; but the village heard the announcement, both of our names and
of our loss, with the phlegm of indifference. "Vingt francs pour avoir
tambouriné mademoiselle!" This was an item which a week later, in
madame's little bill, was not confronted with indifference.

"It gives one the feeling of having had relations with a wandering
circus," remarked the young philosopher at my side.

"But it is really a great convenience, that system," she continued;
"I'm always mislaying things--and through the drummer there's a whole
village as aid to find a lost article. I shall, doubtless, always have
that, now, in my bills!" And Charm, with an air of serene confidence in
the village, adjusted her restored shoulder-cape.

Down below, in our neighbor's garden--the one adjoining our own and
facing the sea--a new and old world of fashion in capes and other
garments were a-flutter in the breeze, morning after morning. Who and
what was this neighbor, that he should have so curious and eccentric a
taste in clothes? No woman was to be seen in the garden-paths; a man,
in a butler's apron and a silk skullcap, came and went, his arms piled
high with gowns and scarves, and all manner of strange odds and ends.
Each morning some new assortment of garments met our wondering eyes.
Sometimes it was a collection of Empire embroidered costumes that were
hung out on the line; faded fleur-de-lis, sprigs of dainty lilies and
roses, gold-embossed Empire coats, strewn thick with seed-pearls on
satins softened by time into melting shades. When next we looked the
court of Napoleon had vanished, and the Bourbon period was, literally,
in full swing. A frou-frou of laces, coats with deep skirts, and
beribboned trousers would be fluttering airily in the soft May air.
Once, in fine contrast to these courtly splendors, was a wondrous
assortment of flannel petticoats. They were of every hue--red, yellow,
brown, pink, patched, darned, wide-skirted, plaited, ruffled--they
appeared to represent the taste and requirement of every climate and
country, if one could judge by the thickness of some and the gossamer
tissues of others; but even the smartest were obviously, unmistakably,
effrontedly, flannel petticoats.

It was a mystery that greatly intrigued us. One morning the mystery was
solved. A whiff of tobacco from an upper window came along with a puff
of wind. It was a heated whiff, in spite of the cooling breeze. It was
from a pipe, a short, black pipe, owned by some one in the Mansard
window next door. There was the round disk of a dark-blue beret
drooping over the pipe. "Good--" I said to myself--"I shall see now--at
last--this maniac with a taste for darned petticoats!"

The pipe smoked peacefully, steadily on. The beret was motionless.
Between the pipe and the cap was a man's profile; it was too much in
shadow to be clearly defined.

The next instant the man's face was in full sunlight. The face turned
toward me--with the quick instinct of knowing itself watched--and then--

"Pas--possible!"

"You--here!"

"Been here a year--but you, when did you arrive? What luck! What luck!"

It was John Renard, the artist; after the first salutations question
followed question.

"Are you alone?--"

"No."

"Is she--young?"

"Yes."

"Pretty?"

"Judge for yourself--that is she--in the garden yonder."

The beret dipped itself perilously out into the sky--to take a full
view.

"Hem--I'll come in at once."

It was as a trio that the conversation was continued later, in the
garden. But Renard was still chief questioner.

"Have you been out on the mussel-beds?"

"Not yet."

"We'll go this afternoon--Have you been to Honfleur? Not yet?--We'll go
to-morrow. The tide will be in to-day about four--I'll call for
you--wear heavy boots and old clothes. It's jolly dirty. Where do you
breakfast?"

The breakfast was eaten, as a trio, at our inn, an hour later. It was
so warm a day, it was served under one of the arbors. Augustine was
feeding and caressing the doves as we entered the inn garden. At sight
of Renard she dropped a quiet courtesy, smiles and roses struggling for
a supremacy on her round peasant face. She let the doves loose at once,
saying: "Allez, allez," as if they quite understood that with Monsieur
Renard's advent their hour of success was at an end.

Why does a man's presence always seem to communicate such surprising
animation to a woman--to any woman? Why does his appearance, for
instance, suddenly, miraculously stiffen the sauces, lure from the
cellar bottles incrusted with the gray of thick cobwebs, give an added
drop of the lemon to the mayonnaise, and make an omelette to swim in a
sea of butter? All these added touches to our commonly admirable
breakfast were conspicuous that day--it was a breakfast for a prince
and a gourmet.

"The Mère can cook--when she gives her mind to it," was Renard's meagre
masculine comment, as the last morsel of the golden omelette
disappeared behind his mustache.

It was a gay little breakfast, with the circling above of the birds and
the doves. There are duller forms of pleasure than to eat a repast in
the company of an artist. I know not why it is, but it has always
seemed to me that the man who lives only to copy life appears to get
far more out of it than those who make a point of seeing nothing in it
save themselves.

Renard, meanwhile, was taking pains to assure us that in less than a
month the Villerville beaches would be crowded; only the artists of the
brushes were here now; the artists of high life would scarcely be found
deserting the Avenue des Acacias before June.

"French people are always coming to the seashore, you know--or trying
to come. It's a part of their emotional religion to worship the sea.
'La mer! la mer!' they cry, with eyes all whites; then they go into
little swoons of rapture--I can see them now, attitudinizing in salons
and at tables-d'hôte!" To which comment we could find no more original
rejoinder than our laughter.

It was a day when laughter was good; it put one in closer relations
with the universal smiling. There are certain days when nature seems to
laugh aloud; in this hour of noon the entire universe, all we could see
of it, was on a broad grin. Everything moved, or danced, or sang; the
leaves were each alive, trembling, quivering, shaking; the insect hum
was like a Wagnerian chorus, deafening to the ear; there was a brisk,
light breeze stirring--a breeze that moved the higher branches of the
trees as if it had been an arm; that rippled the grass; that tossed the
wavelets of the sea into such foam that they seemed over-running with
laughter; and such was still its unspent energy that it sent the Seine
with a bound up through its shores, its waters clanging like a sheet of
mail armor worn by some lusty warrior. We were walking in the narrow
lane that edged the cliff; it was a lane that was guarded with a
sentinel row of osiers, syringas, and laburnums. This was the guard of
the cliffs. On the other side was the high garden wall, over which we
caught dissolving views of dormer-windows, of gabled roofs, vine-clad
walls, and a maze of peach and pear blossoms. This was not precisely
the kind of lane through which one hurried. One needed neither to be
sixteen nor even in love to find it a delectable path, very agreeable
to the eye, very suggestive to the imaginative faculty, exceedingly
satisfactory to the most fastidious of all the senses, to that
aristocrat of all the five, the sense of smell. Like all entirely
perfect experiences in life, the lane ended almost as soon as it began;
it ended in a steep pair of steps that dropped, precipitously, on the
pebbles of the beach.

For some reason best known to the day and the view, we all, with one
accord, proceeded to seat ourselves on the topmost step of this
stairway. We were waiting for the tide to fall, to go out to the
mussel-bed. Meanwhile the prospect to be seen from this improvised seat
was one made to be looked at. There is a certain innate compelling
quality in all great beauty. When nature or woman presents a really
grandiose appearance, they are singularly reposeful, if you notice;
they have the calm which comes with a consciousness of splendor. It is
only prettiness which is tormented with the itching for display; and
therefore this prospect, which rolled itself out beneath our feet,
curling in a half-moon of beach, broadening into meadows that dropped
to the river edge, lifting its beauty upward till the hills met the
sky. and the river was lost in the clasp of the shore--this aspect of
nature, in this moment of beauty, was as untroubled as if Chateaubriand
had not found her a lover, and had flattered man by persuading him that,

"La voix de l'univers, c'est mon intelligence."




CHAPTER IV.

OUT ON A MUSSEL-BED.


That same afternoon we were out on the mussel bed.

The tide was at its lowest. Before us, for an acre or more, there lay a
wide, wet, stretch of brown mud. Near the beach was a strip of yellow
sand; here and there it had contracted into narrow ridges, elsewhere it
had expanded into scroll-like patterns. The bed of mud and slime ran
out from this yellow sand strip--a surface diversified by puddles of
muddy water, by pools, clear, ribbed with wavelets, and by little heaps
of stones covered with lichens. The surface of the bed, whether pools
or puddles, or rock-heaps, or sea-weeds massed, was covered by
thousands and thousands of black, lozenge-shaped bivalves. These
bivalves were the mussels. Over this bed of shells and slime there
moved and toiled a whole villageful of old women. Where the sea met the
edges of the mud-flat the throng of women was thickest. The line of the
ever-receding shore was marked by the shapes of countless bent figures.
The heads of these stooping women were on a level with their feet, not
one stood upright. All that the eye could seize for outline was the
dome made by the bent hips, and the backs that closed against the knees
as a blade is clasped into a knife handle. The oblong masses that were
lifted now and then, from the level of the sabots, resolved themselves
into the outlines of women's heads and women's faces. These heads were
tied up in cotton kerchiefs or in cotton nightcaps; these being white,
together with the long, thick, aprons also white, were in startling
contrast to the blue of the sky and to the changing sea-tones.

Between these women and the incoming tide, twice daily, was fought a
persistent, unrelenting duel. It was a duel, on the part of the
fish-wives, against time, against the fate of the tides, against the
blind forces of nature. For this combat the women were armed to the
teeth, clad as they were in their skeleton muscular leanness; helmeted
with their heads of iron; visored in the bronze of their skin and in
wrinkles that laughed at the wind. In these sinewy, toughened bodies
there was a grim strength that appeared to know neither ache nor
fatigue nor satiety.

High, clear, strong, came their voices. The tones were the tones that
come from deep chests, and with a prolonged, sustained capacity for
enduring the toil of men. But the high-pitched laughter proved them
women, as did their loud and unceasing gossip. The battle of the voices
rose above the swash of the waves, above, also, another sound, as
incessant as the women's chatter and the swish of the water as it
hissed along the mud-flat's edges.

[Illustration: A SALE OF MUSSELS--VILLERVILLE]

This was the swift, sharp, saw-like cutting among the stones and the
slime, the scrape, scrape of the hundred of knives into the moist
earth. This ceaseless scraping, lunging, digging, made a new world of
sound--strange, sinister, uncanny. It was neither of the sea nor yet of
the land--it was a noise that seemed inseparable from this tongue of
mud, that also appeared to be neither of the heavens above nor of the
earth, from the bowels out of which it had sprung.

The mussels cling to their slime with extraordinary tenacity; only an
expert, who knows the exact point of attachment between the hard shell
and its soil, can remove a mussel with dexterity. These women, as they
dipped their knives into the thick mud, swept the diminutive black
bivalve with a trenchant movement, as a Moor might cleave a human head
with one turn of his moon-shaped sword. Into the bronzed, wrinkled old
hands the mussels then were slipped as if they had been so many dainty
sweets.

New and pungent smells were abroad on this strip of slime. Sea smells,
strong and salty; smells of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet
of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the
smells also of rotten and decaying fish--all these were inextricably
blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for
freshness, and yet was warm with the softness of a June sun.

Meanwhile the voices of the women were nearing. Some of the bent heads
were lifted as we approached. Here and there a coif, or cotton cap,
nodded, and the slit of a smile would gape between the nose and the
meeting chin. A high good humor appeared to reign among the groups; a
carnival of merriment laughed itself out in coarse, cracked laughter;
loud was the play of the jests, hoarse and guttural the gibes that were
abroad on the still air, from old mouths that uttered strong, deep
notes.

"Why should they all be old?" we queried. We were near enough to see
the women face to face now, since we were far out along the outer edges
of the bed; we were so near the sea that the tide was beginning to wash
us back, along with the fringe of the diggers.

"They're not--they only look old," replied Renard, stopping a moment to
sketch in a group directly in front. "This life makes old women of them
in no time. How old, for instance, should you think that girl was, over
there?"

The girl whom he designated was the only figure of youth we had seen on
the bed. She was working alone and remote from the others. She wore no
coif. Her masses of red, wavy hair shaded a face already deeply seamed
with lines of premature age. A moment later she passed close to us. She
was bent almost double beneath a huge, reeking basket, heaped with its
pile of wet mussels. She was carrying it to a distant pool. Once beside
the pool, with swift, dexterous movement the heavy basket was slipped
from the bent back, the load of mussels falling in a shower into the
miniature lake. The next instant she was stamping on the heap, to
plunge them with her sabot still further into the pool. She was washing
her load. Soon she shouldered the basket again, filling it with the
cleansed mussels. A moment later she joined the long, toiling line of
women that were perpetually forming and reforming on their way to the
carts. These latter were drawn up near the beach, their contents
guarded by boys and old men, who received the loads the women had dug,
dragging the whole, later, up the hill.

"She has the Venus de Milo lines, that girl," Renard continued,
critically, with his eyes on her, as she now repassed us. The figure
was drawn up at its full height. It had in truth a noble dignity of
outline. There was a Spartan vigor and severity in the lean, uncorseted
shape, with the bust thrown out against the sky--the bust of a young
warrior rather than a woman. There was a hardy, masculine freedom in
the pliable motion of her straight back, a ripple with muscles that
played easily beneath the close bodice, in her arms, and her finely
turned ankles and legs, that were bared below the knee. The very
simplicity of her costume helped to mark the Greek severity of her
figure. She wore a short skirt of some coarse hempen stuff, covered
with a thick apron made of sail-cloth, her feet thrust into black
sabots, while the upper part of her body was covered with an unbleached
chemise, widely open at the throat.

She had the Phidian breadth and the modern charm--that charm which
troubles and disturbs, haunting the mind with vague, unsatisfied
suggestions of something finer than is seen, something nobler than the
gross physical envelope reveals.

"I must have her--for my Salon picture," calmly remarked Renard, after
a long moment of scrutiny, his eyes following the lean, stately figure
in its grave walk across the weeds and slime. "Yes, I must have her."

"Won't she be hard to get? How can she be made to sit, a stiffened
image of clay, after this life of freedom, this athletic struggle out
here--with these winds and tides?"

One of us, at least, was stirred at Renard's calm assumption--the
assumption so common to artists, who, when they see a good thing at
once count on its possessorship, as if the whole world, indeed, were
eternally sitting, agape with impatience, awaiting the advent of some
painter to sketch in its portrait.

"Oh, it'll be easy enough. She makes two francs a day with her six
basketfuls. I'll offer her three, and she'll drop like a shot."

"I'll make it a red picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a
little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish
violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground,
with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that
hair all over Europe." And he began sketching her in at once.

"_Bonjour, mère_, how goes it?" He nodded as he sketched at a wrinkled,
bent figure, who was smiling out at him from beneath her load of
mussels.

"_Pas mal--e' vous, M'sieur Renard?_"

"All right--and the mortgage, how goes that?"

"Pas si mal--it'll be paid off next year."

"Who is she? One of your models?"

"Yes, last year's: she was my belle--the belle of the mussel-bed for
me, a year ago. Now there's a lesson in patience for you. She's
sixty-five, if she's a minute; she's been working here, on this
mussel-bed, for five years, to pay the mortgage off her farm; when that
is done, her daughter Augustine can marry; Augustine's _dot_ is the
farm."

"Augustine--at our inn?"

"The very same."

"And the blonde--the handsome man at the creamery, he is the future--?"

"I'm sorry to hear such things of Augustine," smiled Renard, as he
worked; "she must be indulging in an entr'acte. No, the gentleman of
Augustine's--well, perhaps not of her affections, but of her mother's
choice, is a peasant who works the farm; the creamery is only an
incidental diversion. Again, I'm sorry to hear such sad things of
Augustine--"

"Horrors!"

"Exactly. That's the way it's done--over here. Will you join me--over
there?" Renard blushed a little. "I mean I wish to follow that
girl--she's going to dig out yonder. Will you come?"

Meanwhile the light was changing, and so was the tide. The women were
coming inward, washed up to the shore along with the grasses and
seaweeds. A band of diggers suddenly started, with full basket loads,
toward a fishing boat that had dropped anchor close in to the shore; it
was a Honfleur craft, come to buy mussels for the Paris market. The
women trudged through the water, up to their waists; they clustered
about the boats like so many laden beasts. But their shrill bargaining
proved them women.

Meanwhile that gentle hissing along the level stretch of brown mud was
the tide. It was pushing the women upward, as if it had been a
hand--the hand of a relentless fate--instead of a little, liquid kiss.

The sun, as it dipped, made a glory of splendor out of this commonplace
bank. It soaked the mud in gold; it was in a royal mood, throwing its
largess with reckless abundance to this poor of earth--to the slime and
the mud. The long, yellow, lichen leaves massed on the rocks were dyed
as if lying in a yellow bath. The sands were richly colored; the ridges
were brown in the shadows and burnished at the tops. In the distance
the sea weeds were black, sable furs, covering the velvet robes of
earth. The sea out beyond was as rosy as a babe, and the sails were
dazzlingly white as they floated past, between the sky and the distant
purple line of the horizon.

Meanwhile the tide is coming in.

The procession of the women toward the carts grows in numbers. The
thick sabots plunge into the mud, the water squirts out of the wooden
shoes as the strong heels press into them. The straw, the universal
stocking of these women-diggers, is reeking with dirt. Volumes of slush
are splashed on the bared skinny ankles, on the wet skirts, wet to the
waists, and on the coarse sail-cloth aprons tied beneath the hanging
bosoms. The women are all drenched now in a bath of filth. The baskets
are reeking with filth also, they rain showers of dirt along the bent
backs. A long line of the bent figures has formed on their way to the
carts. There is, however, a thick fringe of diggers left who still
dispute their rights with the sea.

But the tide is pushing them inward, upward. And all the while the
light is getting more and more golden, shimmery, radiant. Under this
light, beneath this golden mantel of color, these creatures appear
still more terrible. As they bend over, their faces tirelessly held
downward on a level with their hands, they seem but gnomes; surely they
are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk.
For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this
earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous
growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the
hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not
so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only
bits of the more distant weeds woven into tissues to hide mercifully
the lean, sinewy backs.

The tide is almost in.

In the shallows the sunset is fading. Here and there are brilliant
little pools, each pool a mirror, and each mirror reflects a different
picture. Here is a second sky--faintly blue, with a trailing saffron
scarf of cloud; there, the inverted silhouettes of two fish-wives are
conical shapes, their coifs and wet skirts startlingly distinct in
tones; beyond, sails a fantastic fleet, with polychrome sails, each
spar, masthead, and wrinkled sail as sharply outlined as if chiselled
in relief. Presently these miniature pictures fade as the light fades.
Blacker grows the mud, and there is less and less of it; the
silhouetted shapes of the diggers are seen no more; they are following
the carts up the steep cliffs; even the sky loses its color and fades
also. And the little pools that have been a burning orange, then a
darkening violet, gay with pictured worlds, in turn pale to gray, and
die into the universal blackness.

The tide is in.

It is flowing, rich and full, crested with foam beneath the osier
hedges. We hear it break with a sudden dash and splutter against the
cliff parapets. And the mud-bank is no more.

Half an hour later, from our chamber windows we looked forth through
the dusk across at the mussel bed. The great mud-bank, all that black
acreage of slime and sea-weed, the eager, struggling band of toiling
fish wives, all was gone; it was all as if it had not been--would never
be again. The water hissed along the beach; it broke in rhythmic,
sonorous measure against the parapet. Surely there had never been any
beds, or any mussels, or any toiling fish-wives; or if there had, it
was all a world that the sea had washed up, and then as quietly, as
heedlessly, as pitilessly had obliterated.

It was the very epitome of life itself.




CHAPTER V.

THE VILLAGE.


Our visit to the mussel-bed, as we soon found, had been our formal
introduction to the village. Henceforth every door step held a friend;
not a coif or a blouse passed without a greeting. The village, as a
village, lived in the open street. Villerville had the true French
genius for society; the very houses were neighborly, crowding close
upon the narrow sidewalk. Conversation, to be carried on from a
dormer-window or from opposite sides of the street, had evidently been
the first architectural consideration in the mind of the builders;
doors and windows must be as open and accessible as the lives of the
inhabitants. The houses themselves appeared to be regarded in the light
of pockets, into which the old women and fishermen plunged to drag
forth a net or a knife; also as convenient, if rude, little caverns
into which the village crawled at night, to take its heavy slumber.

The door-step was the drawing-room, and the open street was the club of
this Villerville world.

The door-way, the yard, or the bit of garden tucked in between two high
walls--it was here, under the tent of sky rather than beneath the
stuffy roofs, that the village lived, talked, quarrelled, bargained,
worked, and more or less openly made love.

To the door-step everything was brought that was portable. There was
nothing, from the small boy to the brass kettle, that could not be more
satisfactorily polished off, in full view of one's world, than by one's
self, in seclusion and solitude. Justice, at least, appeared to gain by
this passion for open-air ministration, if one were to judge by the
frequency with which the Villerville boy was laid across the parental
knee. We were repeatedly called upon to coincide, at the very instant
of flagellation, with the verdict pronounced against the youthful
offender.

"_S'il est assez méchant, lui?_ Ah, mesdames, what do you think of one
who goes forth dry, with clean sabots, that I, myself, have washed, and
behold him returned, _après un tout p'tit quart d'heure_, stinking with
filth? Bah! it's he that will catch it when his father comes home!" And
meanwhile the mother's hand descends, lest justice should cool ere
night.

[Illustration: A VILLERVILLE FISH-WIFE]

There were other groups that crowded the doorsteps; there were young
mothers that sat there, with their babes clasped to the full breasts,
in whose eyes was to be read the satisfied passion of recent
motherhood; there were gay clusters of young Norman maidens, whose
glances, brilliant and restless, were pregnant with all the meaning of
unspent youth. The figures of the fishermen, toiling up the street with
bared legs and hairy breast, bending beneath their baskets alive with
fish, stopped to have a word or two, seasoned with a laugh, with these
latter groups. There were also knots of patient old men, wrecks that
the sea had tossed back to earth, to rot and die there, that came out
of the black little houses to rest their bones in the sun. And
everywhere there were groups of old women, or of women still young, to
whom the look of age had come long before its due time.

The village seemed peopled with women, sexless creatures for the most
part, whom toil and the life on the mussel-bed or in the field had
dried and hardened into mummy shapes. Only these, the old and the
useless, were left at home to rear the younger generation and to train
them to take up the same heavy burden of life. The coifs of these old
hags made dazzling spots of brightness against the gray of the walls
and the stuccoed houses; clustered together, the high caps that nodded
in unison to the chatter were in startling contrast to the bronzed
faces bending over the fish-nets, and to the blue-veined, leathery
hands that flew in and out of the coarse meshes with the fluent ease of
long practice.

With one of these old women we became friends. We had made her
acquaintance at a poetic moment, under romantic circumstances. We were
all three watching a sunset, under a pink sky; we were sitting far out
on the grasses of the cliff. Her house was in the midst of the grasses,
some little distance from the village, attached to it only as a ragged
fringe might edge a garment. It was a thatched hut; yet there were
circumstances in the life of the owner which had transformed the
interior into a luxurious apartment. The owner of the hut was herself
hanging on the edge of life; she was a toothless, bent, and withered
old remnant; but her vigor and vivacity were those of a witch. Her
hands and eyes were ceaselessly active; she was forever busy, fingering
a fish-net, or polishing her Normandy brasses, or stirring some dark
liquid in an iron pot over the dim fire.

At our first meeting, conversation had immediately engaged itself; it
had ended, as all right talk should, in friendship. On this morning of
our visit, many a gay one having preceded it, we found our friend
arrayed as if for an outing. She had mounted her best coif, and tied
across her shrivelled old breast was a vivid purple silk kerchief.

"_Tiens, mes enfants, soyez les bienvenues_," was her gay greeting,
seasoned with a high cackling laugh, as she waved us to two rickety
chairs. "No, I'm not going out, not yet; there is plenty of time,
plenty of time. It is you who are good, _si aimables_, to come out here
to see me. And tired, too, _hein_, with the long walk? _Tiens_, I had
nearly forgotten; there's a bottle of wine open below--you must take a
glass."

She never forgot. The bottle of wine had always just been opened; the
cork was always also miraculously rebellious for a cork that had been
previously pulled. Although our ancient friend was a peasant, her
cellar was the cellar of a gourmet. Wonderful old wines were hers!
Port, Bordeaux, white wines, of vintages to make the heart warm; each
was produced in turn, a different vintage and wine on each one of our
visits, but no champagne. This was no wine for women--for the right
women. Champagne was a bad, fast wine, for fast, disreputable people.
"_C'est un vrai poison, qui vous infecte_," she had declared again and
again, and when she saw her daughter drinking it, it made her shudder;
she confessed to having a moment of doubt; had Paris, indeed, really
brought her child no harm? Then the old mere would shrug her bent
shoulders and rub her hands, and for a moment she would be lost in
thought. Presently the cracked old laugh would peal forth again, and,
as she threw back her head, she would shake it as if to dispel some
dark vision.

To-day she had dropped, almost as soon as we entered, into a narrow
trap-door, descending a flight of stone steps. We could hear a clicking
of bottles and a rustling of straw; and then, behold, a veritable fairy
issuing from the bowels of the earth, with flushes of red suffusing the
ribbed, bewrinkled face, as the old figure straightens its crookedness
to carry the dusty bottle securely, steadily, lest the cloudy settling
at the bottom should be disturbed. What a merry little feast then
began! We had learned where the glasses were kept; we had been busily
scouring them while our hostess was below. Then wine and glasses, along
with three chairs, were quickly placed on the pine table at the door of
the old house. Here, on the grass of the cliffs, we sat, sipping our
wine, enjoying the sea that lay at our feet, and above, the sunlit sky.
To our friend both sky and sea were familiar companions; but the fichu
was a new friend.

"Yes, it is very beautiful, as you say," she said, in answer to our
admiring comments. "It came from Paris, from my daughter. She sent it
to me; she is always making me gifts; she is one who remembers her old
mother! Figure to yourselves that last year, in midwinter, she sent me
no less than three gowns, all wool! What can I do with them? _C'est
pour me flatter, c'est sa manière de me dire qu'il faut vivre pour
longtemps! Ah, la chère folle!_ But she spoils me, the darling!"

This daughter had become the most mysterious of all our Villerville
discoveries. Our old friend was a peasant, the child of peasant
farmers. She would always remain a peasant; and yet her daughter was a
Parisian, and lived in a _bonbonnière_. She was also married; but that
only served to thicken the web of mystery enshrouding her. How could a
daughter of a peasant, brought up as a peasant, who had lived here, a
tiller of the fields till her nineteenth year, suddenly be transformed
into a woman of the Parisian world, gain the position of a banker's
wife, and be dancing, as the old mere kept telling us, at balls at the
Elysée? Her mother never answered this riddle for us; and, more amazing
still, neither could the village. The village would shrug its
shoulders, when we questioned it, with discretion, concerning this
enigma. "Ah, dame! It was she--the old mere--who had had chances in
life, to marry her daughter like that! Victorine was pretty--yes, there
was no gainsaying she was pretty--but not so beautiful as all that, to
entrap a banker, _un homme sérieux, qui vit de ses rentes!_ and who was
generous, too, for the old mere needn't work now, since she was always
receiving money." Gifts were perpetually pouring into the low
rooms--wines, and Parisian delicacies, and thick garments.

The tie between the two, between the mother and daughter, appeared to
be as strong and their relations as complete, as if one were not clad
in homespun and the other in Worth gowns. There was no shame, that was
easily seen, on either side; each apparently was full of pride in the
other; their living apart was entirely due to the old mère's preference
for a life on the cliffs, alone in the midst of all her old peasant
belongings.

"_C'est plus chez-soi, ici!_ Victorine feels that, too. She loves the
smell of the old wood, and of the peat burning there in the fireplace.
When she comes down to see me, I must shut fast all the doors and
windows; she wants the whole of the smell, _pour faire le vrai
bouquet_, as she says. If she had had children--ah!--I don't say but
what I might have consented; but as it is, I love my old fire, and my
view out there, and the village, best!"

At this point in the conversation, the old eyes, bright as they were,
turned dim and cloudy; the inward eye was doubtless seeing something
other than the view; it was resting on a youthful figure, clad in
Parisian draperies, and on a face rising above the draperies, that bent
lovingly over the deep-throated fireplace, basking in its warmth, and
revelling in its homely perfume. We were silent also, as the picture of
that transfigured daughter of the house flitted across our own mental
vision.

"The village?" suddenly broke in the old mère. "_Dieu de Dieu!_ that
reminds me. I must go, my children, I must go. Loisette is waiting; _la
pauvre enfant_--perhaps suffering too--how do I know? And here am I,
playing, like a lazy clout! Did you know she had had un _nini_ this
morning? The little angel came at dawn. That's a good sign! And what
news for Auguste! He was out last night--fishing; she was at her
washing when he left her. _Tiens_, there they are, looking for him!
They've brought the spy-glass."

The old mère shaded her eyes, as she looked out into the dazzling
sunlight. We followed her finger, that pointed to a projection on the
cliffs. Among the grasses, grouped on top of the highest rock, was a
family party. An old fish-wife was standing far out against the sky;
she also was shading her eyes. A child's round head, crowded into a
white knit cap, was etched against the wide blue; and, kneeling,
holding in both hands a seaman's long glass, was a girl, sweeping the
horizon with swift, skilful stretches of arm and hand. The sun
descended in a shower of light on the old grandam's seamy face, on the
red, bulging cheeks of the chubby child, and on the bent figure of the
girl, whose knees were firmly implanted in the deep, tall grasses.
Beyond the group there was nothing but sea and sky.

"Yes," the mere went on, garrulously, as she recorked the bottle of old
port, carrying table and glasses within doors. "Yes, they're looking
for him. It ought to be time, now; he's due about now. There's a man
for you--good--_bon comme le bon Dieu_. Sober, saving too--good
father--in love with Loisette as on the wedding night--_ah, mes
enfants!_--there are few like him, or this village would be a paradise!"

She shut the door of the little cabin. And then she gave us a broad
wink. The wink was entirely by way of explanation; it was to enlighten
us as to why a certain rare bottle of port--a fresh one--was being
secreted beneath her fichu. It was a wink that conveyed to us a really
valuable number of facts; chief among them being the very obvious fact
that the French Government was an idiot, and a tyrant into the bargain,
since it imposed stupid laws no one meant to carry out; least of all a
good Norman. What? pay two _sous octroi_ on a bottle of one's own wine,
that one had had in one's cellar for half a lifetime? To cheat the town
out of those twopence becomes, of course, the true Norman's chief
pleasure in life. What is his reputation worth, as a shrewd, sharp man
of business, if a little thing like cheating stops him? It is even
better fun than bargaining, to cheat thus one's own town, since nothing
is to be risked, and one is so certain of success.

The mere nodded to us gayly, in farewell, as we all three re-entered
the town. She disappeared all at once into a narrow door way, her arms
still clasping her old port, that lay in the folds of her shawl. On her
shrewd kindly old face came a light that touched it all at once with a
glow of divinity; the mother in her had sprung into life with sharp,
sweet suddenness; she had caught the wail of the new-born babe through
the open door.

The village itself seemed to have caught something of the same glow. It
was not only the splendor of the noon sun that made the faces of the
worn fish-wives and the younger women softer and kindlier than common;
the groups, as we passed them, were all talking of but one thing--of
this babe that had come in the night, of Auguste's absence, and of
Loisette's sharp pains and her cries, that had filled the street, so
that none could sleep.




CHAPTER VI.

A PAGAN COBBLER.


At dusk that evening the same subject, with variations, was the
universal topic of the conversational groups. Still Auguste had not
come; half the village was out watching for him on the cliffs. The
other half was crowding the streets and the doorsteps.

Twilight is the classic time, in all French towns and villages, for the
_al fresco_ lounge. The cool breath of the dusk is fresh, then, and
restful; after the heat and sweat of the long noon the air, as it
touches brow and lip, has the charm of a caress. So the door ways and
streets were always crowded at this hour, groups moved, separated,
formed and re formed, and lingered to exchange their budget of gossip,
to call out their "_Bonne nuit_," the girls to clasp hands, looking
longingly over their shoulders at the younger fishermen and farmers;
the latter to nod, carelessly, gayly back at them; and then--as men
will--to fling an arm about a comrade's shoulder as they, in their
turn, called out into the dusk,

"_Allons, mon brave; de l'absinthe, toi?_" as the cabaret swallowed
them up.

Great and mighty were the cries and the oaths that issued from the
cabaret's open doors and windows. The Villerville fisherman loved
Bacchus only, second to Neptune; when he was not out casting his net
into the Channel he was drinking up his spoils. It was during the
sobering process only that affairs of a purely domestic nature engaged
his attention. Some of the streets were permeated with noxious odors,
with the poison of absinthe and the fumes of cheap brandy. Noisy,
reeling groups came out of the tavern doors, to shout and sing, or to
fight their way homeward. One such figure was filling a narrow alley,
swaying from right to left, with a jeering crowd at his heels.

"_Est-il assez ridicule, lui?_ with his cap over his nose, and his
knees knocking at everyone's door? _Bah! ça pue! _" the group of lads
following him went on, shouting about the poor sot, as they pelted him
with their rain of pebbles and paper bullets.

"Ah--h, he will beat her, in his turn, poor soul; she always gets it
when he's full, as full as that--"

The voice was so close to our ears that we started. The words appeared
addressed to us; they were, in a way, since they were intended for the
street, as a street, and for the benefit of the groups that filled it.
The voice was gruff yet mellow; despite its gruffness it had the ring
of a latent kindliness in its deep tones. The man who owned it was
seated on a level with our elbows, at a cobbler's bench. We stopped to
let the crowd push on beyond us. The man had only lifted his head from
his work, but involuntarily one stopped to salute the power in it.

"_Bonsoir, mesdames_"--the head gravely bowed as the great frame of the
body below the head rose from the low seat. The room within seemed to
contain nothing else save this giant figure, now that it had risen and
was moving toward us. The half-door was courteously opened.

"Will not _ces dames_ give themselves the trouble of entering? The
streets are not gay at this hour."

We went in. A dog and a woman came forth from a smaller inner room to
greet us; of the two the dog was obviously the personage next in point
of intelligence and importance to the master. The woman had a
snuffed-out air, as of one whose life had died out of her years ago.
She blinked at us meekly as she dropped a timid courtesy; at a low word
of command she turned a pitifully patient back on us all. There were
years of obedience to orders written on its submissive curves; and she
bent it once more over her kettles; both she and the kettles were on
the bare floor. It was the poorest of all the Villerville interiors we
had as yet seen; the house was also, perhaps, the oldest in the
village. It and the old church had been opposite neighbors for several
centuries. The shop and the living-room were all in one; the low window
was a counter by day and a shutter by night. Within, the walls were
bare as were the floors. Three chairs with sunken leather covers, and a
bed with a mattress also sunken--a hollow in a pine frame, was the
equipment in furniture. The poverty was brutal; it was the naked,
unabashed poverty of the middle ages, with no hint of shame or effort
of concealment. The colossus whom the low roof covered was as
unconscious of the barrenness of his surroundings as were his own
walls. This hovel was his home; he had made us welcome with the manners
of a king.

Meanwhile the dog was sniffing at our skirts. After a tour of
observation and inspection he wagged his tail, gave a short bark, and
seated himself by Charm. The giant's eyes twinkled.

"You see, mesdames, it is a dog with a mind--he knows in an instant who
are the right sort. And eloquence, also--he is one who can make
speeches with his tail. A dog's tongue is in his tail, and this one
wags his like an orator!"

Some one else, as well as the dog, possessed the oratorical gift. The
cobbler's voice was the true speaker's voice--rich, vibrating,
sonorous, with a deep note of melody in it. Pose and gestures matched
with the voice; they were flexible and picturesquely suggestive.

"If you care for oratory--" Charm smiled out upon the huge but mobile
face--"you are well placed. The village lies before you. You can always
see the play going on, and hear the speeches--of the passers-by."

The large mouth smiled back. But at Charm's first sentence the keen
Norman eyes had fixed their twinkling glitter on the girl's face. They
seemed to be reading to the very bottom of her thought and being. The
scrutiny was not relaxed as he answered.

"Yes, yes, it is very amusing. One sees a little of everything here.
_Le monde qui passe_--it makes life more diverting; it helps to kill
the time. I look out from my perch, like a bird--a very old one, and
caged"--and he shook forth a great laugh from beneath the wide leather
apron.

The woman, hearing the laugh, came out into the room.

"_E'ben--et toi_--what do you want?"

The giant stopped laughing long enough to turn tyrant. The woman, at
the first of his growl, smiled feebly, going back with unresisting
meekness to her knees, to her pots, and her kettles. The dog growled in
imitation of his master; obviously the soul of the dog was in the wrong
body.

Meanwhile the master of the dog and the woman had forgotten both now;
he was continuing, in a masterful way, to enlighten us about the
peculiarities of his native village. The talk had now reached the
subject of the church.

"Oh, yes, it is fine, very, and old; it and this old house are the
oldest of all the inhabitants of this village. The church came first,
though, it was built by the English, when they came over, thinking to
conquer us with their Hundred Years' War. Little they knew France and
Frenchmen. The church was thoroughly French, although the English did
build it; on the ground many times, but up again, only waiting the hand
of the builder and the restorer."

Again the slim-waisted shape of the old wife ventured forth into the
room.

"Yes, as he says"--in a voice that was but an echo--"the church has
been down many times."

"_Tais-toi--c'est moi qui parle_," grumbled anew her husband, giving
the withered face a terrific scowl.

"_Ohé, oui, c'est toi_," the echo bleated. The thin hands meekly folded
themselves across her apron. She stood quite still, as if awaiting more
punishment.

"It is our good curé who wishes to pull it down once more," her
terrible husband went on, not heeding her quiet presence. "Do you know
our curé? Ah, ha, he's a fine one. It's he that rules us now--he's our
king--our emperor. Ugh, he's a bad one, he is."

"Ah, yes, he's a bad one, he is," his wife echoed, from the side wall.

"Well, and who asked you to talk?" cried her husband, with a face as
black as when the curé's name had first been mentioned. The echo shrank
into the wall. "As I was telling these ladies"--he resumed here his
boot work, clamping the last between his great knees--"as I was saying,
we have not been fortunate in cures, we of our parish. There are curés
and curés, as there are fagots and fagots--and ours is a bad lot. We've
had nothing but trouble since he came to rule over us. We get poorer
day by day, and he richer. There he is now, feeding his hens and his
doves--look, over there--with the ladies of his household gathered
about him--his mother, his aunt, and his niece--a perfect harem. Oh, he
keeps them all fat and sleek, like himself! Bah!"

The grunt of disgust the cobbler gave filled the room like a
thunder-clap. He was peering over his last, across the open counter, at
a little house adjoining the church green, with a great hatred in his
face. From one of the windows of the house there was leaning forth a
group of three heads; there was the tonsured head of a priest, round,
pink-tinted, and the figures of two women, one youthful, with a long,
sad-featured face, and the other ruddy and vigorous in outline. They
were watching the priest as he scattered corn to the hens and geese in
the garden below the window.

The cobbler was still eying them fiercely, as he continued to give vent
to his disgust.

"_Méchant homme--lui_," he here whipped his thread, venomously, through
the leather he was sewing. "Figure to yourselves, mesdames, that
besides being wicked, our curé is a very shrewd man; it is not for the
pure good of the parish he works, not he."

"Not he," the echo repeated, coming forth again from the wall. This
time the whisper passed unnoticed; her master's hatred of the curé was
greater than his passion for showing his own power.

"Religion--religion is a very good way of making money, better than
most, if one knows how to work the machine. The soul, it is a fine
instrument on which to play, if one is skilful. Our curé has a grand
touch on this instrument. You should see the good man take up a
collection, it is better than a comedy."

Here the cobbler turned actor; he rose, scattering his utensils right
and left; he assumed a grand air and a mincing, softly tread, the tread
of a priest. His flexible voice imitated admirably the rounded,
unctuous, autocratic tone peculiar to the graduates of St. Sulpice.

"You should hear him, when the collection does not suit him: '_Mes
frères et mes soeurs_, I see that _le bon Dieu_ isn't in your minds and
your hearts to-day; you are not listening to his voice; the Saviour is
then speaking in vain?' Then he prays--" the cobbler folded his hands
with a great parade of reference, lifting his eyes as he rolled his
lids heavenward hypocritically--"yes, he prays--and then he passes the
plate himself! He holds it before your very nose, there is no pushing
it aside; he would hold it there till you dropped--till Doomsday. Ah,
he's a hard crust, he is! There's a tyrant for you--_la monarchie
absolue_--that's what he believes in. He must have this, he must have
that. Now it is a new altar-cloth, or a fresh Virgin of the modern
make, from Paris, with a robe of real lace; the old one was black and
faded, too black to pray to. Now it is a _huissier_, forsooth, that we
must have, we, a parish of a few hundred souls, who know our seats in
the church as well as we know our own noses. One would think a 'suisse'
would have done; but we are swells now--_avec ce gaillard-là_, only the
tiptop is good enough. So, if you grace our poor old church with your
presence you will be shown to your bench by a very splendid gentleman
in black, in knee-breeches, with silver chains, with a three-cornered
hat, who strikes with his stick three times as he seats you. Bah!
ridiculous!"

"Ridiculous!" the woman repeated, softly.

"They had the curé once, though. One day in church he announced a
subscription to be taken up for restorations, from fifty centimes
to--to anything; he will take all you give him, avaricious that he is!
He believes in the greasing of the palm, he does. Well, think you the
subscription was for restorations, _mesdames_? It was for
demolition--that's what it was for--to make the church level with the
ground. To do this would cost a little matter of twenty thousand
francs, which would pass through his hands, you understand. Well, that
staggered the parish. Our mayor--a man _pas trop fin_, was terribly
upset. He went about saying the curé claimed the church as his; he
could do as he liked with it, he said, and he proposed to make it a
fine modern one. All the village was weeping. The church was the oldest
friend of the village, except for such as I, whom these things have
turned pagan. Well, one of our good citizens reminds the mayor that the
church, under the new laws, belongs to the commune. The mayor tells
this timidly to the curé. And the curé retorts, 'Ah, _bien_, at least
one-half belongs to me.' And the good citizen answers--he has gone with
the mayor to prop him up--'Which half will you take? The cemetery,
doubtless, since your charge is over the souls of the parish.' Ah! ah!
he pricked him well then! he pricked him well!"

The low room rang with the great shout of the cobbler's laughter. The
dog barked furiously in concert. Our own laughter was drowned in the
thunder of our host's loud guffaws. The poor old wife shook herself
with a laugh so much too vigorous for her frail frame, one feared its
after-effects.

The after-effects were a surprise. After the first of her husband's
spasms of glee the old woman spoke out, but in trembling tones no
longer.

"Ah, the cemetery, it is I who forgot to go there this week."

Her husband stopped, the laugh dying on his lip as he turned to her.

"_Ah, ma bonne_, how came that? You forgot?" His own tones trembled at
the last word.

"Yes, you had the cramps again, you remember, and there was no money
left for the bouquet."

"Yes, I remember," and the great chest heaved a deep sigh.

"You have children--you have lost someone?"

"_Hélas!_ no living children, mademoiselle. No, no--one daughter we
had, but she died twenty years ago. She lies over there--where we can
see her. She would have been thirty-eight years now--the fourteenth of
this very month!"

"Yes, this very month."

Then the old woman, for the first time, left her refuge along the wall;
she crept softly, quietly near to her husband to put her withered hand
in his. His large palm closed over it. Both of the old faces turned
toward the cemetery; and in the old eyes a film gathered, as they
looked toward all that was left of the hope that was buried away from
them.

We left them thus, hand in hand, with many promises to renew the
acquaintance.

The village was no longer abroad in the streets. During our talk in the
shop the night had fallen; it had cast its shadow, as trees cast
theirs, in a long, slow slant. Lights were trembling in the dim
interiors; the shrill cries of the children were stilled; only a
muffled murmur came through the open doors and windows. The villagers
were pattering across the rough floors, talking, as their sabots
clattered heavily over the wooden surface, as they washed the dishes,
as they covered their fires, shoving back the tables and chairs. As we
walked along, through the nearer windows came the sound of steps on the
creaking old stairs, then a rustling of straw and the heavy fall of
weary bodies, as the villagers flung themselves on the old oaken beds,
that groaned as they received their burden. Presently all was still.
Only our steps resounded through the streets. The stars filled the sky;
and beneath them the waves broke along the beach. In the closely packed
little streets the heavy breathing of the sleeping village broke also
in short, quick gasps.

Only we and the night were awake.




CHAPTER VII.

SOME NORMAN LANDLADIES.


Quite a number of changes came about with our annexation of an artist
and his garden. Chief among these changes was the surprising discovery
of finding ourselves, at the end of a week, in possession of a villa.

"It's next door," Renard remarked, in the casual way peculiar to
artists. "You are to have the whole house to yourselves, all but the
top floor; the people who own it keep that to live in. There's a garden
of the right sort, with espaliers, also rose trees, and a tea house;
quite the right sort of thing altogether."

The unforeseen, in its way, is excellent and admirable. _De l'imprévu,_
surely this is the dash of seasoning--the caviare we all crave in
life's somewhat too monotonous repasts. But as men have been known to
admire the still life in wifely character, and then repented their
choice, marrying peace only to court dissension, so we, incontinently
deserting our humble inn chambers to take possession of a grander
state, in the end found the capital of experience drained to pay for
our little infidelity.

[Illustration: A DEPARTURE--VILLERVILLE]

The owners of the villa Belle Etoile, our friend announced, he had
found greatly depressed; of this, their passing mood, he had taken such
advantage as only comes to the knowing. "They speak of themselves
drearily as 'deux pauvres malheureux' with this villa still on their
hands, and here they are almost 'touching June,' as they put it. They
also gave me to understand that only the finest flowers of the
aristocracy had had the honor of dwelling in this villa. They have been
able, I should say, more or less successfully to deflower this 'fine
fleur' of some of their gold. But they are very meek just now--they
were willing to listen to reason."

The "two poor unhappies" were looking surprisingly contented an hour
later, when we went in to inspect our possessions. They received us
with such suave courtesy, that I was quite certain Renard's skill in
transactions had not played its full gamut of capacity.

Civility is the Frenchman's mask; he wears it as he does his skin--as a
matter of habit. But courtesy is his costume de bal; he can only afford
to don his bravest attire of smiles and graciousness when his pocket is
in holiday mood. Madame Fouchet we found in full ball-room toilet; she
was wreathed in smiles. Would _ces dames_ give themselves the trouble
of entering? would they see the house or the garden first? would they
permit their trunks to be sent for? Monsieur Fouchet, meanwhile, was
making a brave second to his wife's bustling welcome; he was rubbing
his hands vigorously, a somewhat suspicious action in a Frenchman, I
have had occasion to notice, after the completion of a bargain. Nature
had cast this mild-eyed individual for the part of accompanyist in the
comedy we call life; a _rôle_ he sometimes varied as now, with the
office of _claqueur_, when an uncommonly clever proof of madame's
talent for business drew from him this noiseless tribute of applause.
His weak, fat contralto called after us, as we followed madame's quick
steps up the waxed stairway; he would be in readiness, he said, to show
us the garden, "once the chambers were visited."

"It wasn't a real stroke, mesdames, it was only a warning!" was the
explanation conveyed to us in loud tones, with no reserve of whispered
delicacy, when we expressed regret at monsieur's detention below
stairs; a partially paralyzed leg, dragged painfully after the latter's
flabby figure, being the obvious cause of this detention.

The stairway had the line of beauty, describing a pretty curve before
its glassy steps led us to a narrow entry; it had also the brevity
which is said to be the very soul, _l'anima viva_, of all true wit; but
it was quite long and straight enough to serve Madame Fouchet as a
stage for a prolonged monologue, enlivened with much affluence of
gesture. Fouchet's seizure, his illness, his convalescence, and present
physical condition--a condition which appeared to be bristling with the
tragedy of danger, "un vrai drame d'anxiété"--was graphically conveyed
to us. The horrors of the long winter also, so sad for a Parisian--"si
triste pour la Parisienne, ces hivers de province"--together with the
miseries of her own home life, between this paralytic of a husband
below stairs, and above, her mother, an old lady of eighty, nailed to
her sofa with gout. "You may thus figure to yourselves, mesdames, what
a melancholy season is the winter! And now, with this villa still on
our hands, and the season already announcing itself, ruin stares us in
the face, mesdames--ruin!"

It was a moving picture. Yet we remained strangely unaffected by this
tale of woe. Madame Fouchet herself, the woman, not the actress, was to
blame, I think, for our unfeelingness. Somehow, to connect woe, ruin,
sadness, melancholy, or distress, in a word, of any kind with our
landlady's opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat.
She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be
likened, in point of prosperity, to a Dutch landscape. Like certain of
the mediaeval saints presented by the earlier delineators of the
martyrs as burning above a slow fire, while wearing smiles of purely
animal content, as if in full enjoyment of the temperature, this lady's
sufferings were doubtless an invisible discipline, the hair shirt which
her hardened cuticle felt only to be a pleasurable itching.

"_Voilà, mesdames!_" It was with a magnificent gesture that madame
opened doors and windows. The drama of her life was forgotten for the
moment in the conscious pride of presenting us with such a picture as
her gay little house offered.

Inside and out, summer and the sun were blooming and shining with
spendthrift luxuriance. The salon opened directly on the garden; it
would have been difficult to determine just where one began and the
domain of the other ended, with the pinks and geraniums that nodded in
response to the peach and pear blossoms in the garden. A bit of faded
Aubusson and a print representing Madame Geoffrin's salon in full
session, with a poet of the period transporting the half-moon grouped
listeners about him to the point of tears, were evidences of the
refined tastes of our landlady in the arts; only a sentimentalist would
have hung that picture in her salon. Other decorations further proved
her as belonging to both worlds. The chintzes gay with garlands of
roses, with which walls, beds, and chairs were covered, revealed the
mundane element, the woman of decorative tastes, possessed of a hidden
passion for effective backgrounds. Two or three wooden crucifixes, a
_prie-dieu_, and a couple of saints in plaster, went far to prove that
this excellent _bourgeoise_ had thriftily made her peace with Heaven.
It was a curious mixture of the sacred and the profane.

Down below, beneath the windows overlooking the sea, lay the garden.
All the houses fronting the cliff had similar little gardens, giving,
as the French idiom so prettily puts it, upon the sea. But compared to
these others, ours was as a rose of Sharon blooming in the midst of
little deserts. Renard had been entirely right about this particular
bit of earth attached to our villa. It was a gem of a garden. It was a
French garden, and therefore, entirely as a matter of course, it had
walls. It was as cut off from the rest of the world as if it had been a
prison or a fortification.

The Frenchman, above all others, appears to have the true sentiment of
seclusion, when the society of trees and flowers is to be enjoyed. Next
to woman, nature is his fetish. True to his national taste in dress, he
prefers that both should be costumed _à la Parisienne_; but as poet and
lover, it is his instinct to build a wall about his idol, that he may
enjoy his moments of expansion unseen and unmolested. This square of
earth, for instance, was not much larger than the space covered by the
chamber roof above us; and yet, with the high walls towering over the
rose-stalks, it was as secluded as a monk's cloister. We found it,
indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a
retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those
mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they
paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down
shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the soul of a
Maecenas; he knew how to arrange a feast--of roses. The garden was a
bit of greensward, not much larger than a pocket handkerchief; but the
grass had the right emerald hue, and one's feet sank into the rich turf
as into the velvet of an oriental rug. Small as was the enclosure,
between the espaliers and the flower-beds serpentined minute paths of
glistening pebbles. Nothing which belonged to a garden had been
forgotten, not even a pine from the tropics, and a bench under the pine
that was just large enough for two. This latter was an ideal little
spot in which to bring a friend or a book. One could sit there and
gorge one's self with sweets; a dance was perpetually going on--the
gold-and-purple butterflies fluttering gayly from morning till night;
and the bees freighted the air with their buzzing. If one tired of
perfumes and dancing, there was always music to be enjoyed, from a full
orchestra. The sea, just the other side of the wall of osiers, was
always in voice, whether sighing or shouting. The larks and blackbirds
had a predilection for this nest of color, announcing their preference
loudly in a combat of trills. And once or twice, we were quite certain,
a nightingale with Patti notes had been trying its liquid scales in the
dark.

It was in this garden that our acquaintance with our landlord deepened
into something like friendship. Monsieur Fouchet was always to be found
there, tying up the rose-trees, or mending the paths, or shearing the
bit of turf.

_"Mon jardin, c'est un peu moi, vous savez_--it is my pride and my
consolation." At the latter word, Fouchet was certain to sigh.

Then we fell to wondering just what grief had befallen this amiable
person which required Horatian consolation. Horace had need of
rose-leaves to embalm his disappointments, for had he not cooled his
passions by plunging into the bath of literature? Besides, Horace was
bitten by the modern rabies: he was as restless as an American. When at
Rome was he not always sighing for his Sabine farm, and when at the
farm always regretting Rome? But this harmless, innocent-eyed,
benevolent-browed old man, with his passive brains tied up in a
foulard, o' morning's, and his _bourgeois_ feet adorned with carpet
slippers, what grief in the past had bitten his poor soul and left its
mark still sore?

"It isn't monsieur--it is madame who has made the past dark," was
Renard's comment, when we discussed our landlord's probable
acquaintance with regret--or remorse.

Whatever secret of the past may have hovered over the Fouchet
household, the evil bird had not made its nest in madame's breast, that
was clear; her smooth, white brow was the sign of a rose-leaf
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 Mère Mouchard, the lady of the inn by the
sea, of our decision to move next door. To us Mère 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
mère'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 goût, 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 loué_," 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. Mère 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 _ménage_. 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 Molière'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 Mère 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 mère'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.

"_Sacré nom de--on reste donc claquemuré ainsi toute la matinée!_ 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 _à deux._ The little tables beneath the
kiosks were strictly _tête-à-tête_ 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 _café 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 encoléré; 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_,' Molière 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-là_" 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-scène_ 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 curés--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, çà_"
(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 très femme, çà--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 curé yonder, a
great friend of mine. You will step along the roadway; you will ring a
door-bell; the curé 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 curé 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 curé dusting the altar--shall I go in?"

"No, we had best ring--this must be his house."

The clatter of the curé'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 curé 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 Curé, had the keys.

Yes, the keys were here. Then the velvet in Monsieur le Curé'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 curé 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 curé'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 curé'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 curé 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 Curé!" 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 curé 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 curé 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 curé'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 curé, 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.

"_Très bien très bien_" said the curé, 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 curé's house. There
was a tangle of underbrush barring the way; but the curé 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 curé, 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 curé_." 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 cassé, 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 ménage. 'From his
ancestors, doubtless, these old chairs and tables, say these good
frères, 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 curé 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 curé,
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 hérétiques_? 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 curé 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 curé," 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 curé's smile as he came up the
steps.

"Ah, Henri, you have come for these ladies?"

"_Oui_, monsieur le curé, 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
bientôt_--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 curé'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 blasé 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 Mère
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 génie, c'est fait comme ça._"

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 tête-à-tête 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--mère t'battra, elle est soûle 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
mères' 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 Grâce 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 _chaumière_, 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; a

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