Read Ebook: Our sentimental journey through France and Italy A new edition with Appendix by Pennell Elizabeth Robins Pennell Joseph

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Ebook has 319 lines and 52471 words, and 7 pages

Sometimes I rode, for each tiny village nestled in a valley of its own, giving us a hill to coast as well as to climb. There were occasional windmills in the distance; and close to the road large farm-houses and barns, with high sloping red roofs and huge troughs in front, where we knew cattle would come in the twilight and horses would be watered in the morning. And when Calais, with smoking chimneys, was far behind and below, we came to black crosses by the wayside and better manners among the people. The peasants now wished us good day.

But, indeed, for hours afterwards we saw as little as if we had been in a railroad train. We were conscious only of the great hills to be climbed, and of our incessant trouble with the luggage-carrier. The new strap did not mend matters. Every few minutes the carrier with the bag took an ugly swing to one side.--We never began to enjoy a coast, we never got fairly started on an up-grade, that it did not force us to stop and push it straight. And then the lamp in its turn loosened, and every few kilometres had to be hammered into place.

"We're riding!" cried I, aghast.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "I see; you ride by turns."

"We ride together," said I; "and we've come from England, and we're going to Paris and Lyons, into Savoy, and over the Mont Cenis pass."

--And with that I turned my back and left them, open-mouthed, in the middle of the road.

"What?" asked the woman, without looking up from the tin-pan she was mending.

--The man still tinkered at his pots.

"But we're not Gipsies," said they; "we live in Boulogne, and we're busy."

--I declare I never was so snubbed in my life!

THE BOARDING-HOUSE OF NEUCH?TEL.

Presently a little man, in white trousers and brown velveteen waistcoat, wandered in from the stable-yard to clink glasses with a friend at the bar, and drink without pause two mugs of beer and one glass of brandy. Then he gave us a dance and a song.

And then there came trooping into the room huntsmen with dogs and guns, and servants bearing long poles strung with rabbits, and three ladies in silks and gold chains and ribbons, and a small boy. The huntsmen were given cognac and absinthe; the ladies were led away through a narrow passage, but they returned in a minute, with pitchers which they themselves filled from a barrel near the kitchen-door.

--What, indeed? And all the time we had supposed her preparations were for us.

"We had to wash in the fireplace," said he.

THE SOUTH WIND.

It was easy not to be bewildered by conflicting directions, since we were predetermined not to be influenced by them. The fairest promise of good roads, enchanting country, and picturesque towns could not have turned us a hair's breadth from the route we had settled upon. The fact is, the question was one of sentiment, and at that stage of our enthusiasm where sentiment was concerned we were inflexible.--Mr. Sterne, on his way to Amiens and Paris, passed by Montreuil. To Montreuil, therefore, we must go.

A good strong breeze blew from the south. Out at sea it swept the white foam before it, and above, it lashed the clouds into fantastic shapes. It caught the skirts of the gleaners on their way to the yellow fields, and of the women going towards Neuch?tel, and held them back at every step. But we were saved the struggle while we rode eastward. Now we were on a level with the sea, looking at it across grassy plains and sandy stretches; and now it lay far below, and we saw it over the tree-tops on the hillside; again it was hidden by high dunes and dense pine-groves. Little villages lay in our way: Dannes, with pretty, shady road leading into it and out of it; another, for us nameless, with thatched white cottages, standing in a dreary waste, a broad inlet to one side. And at last a short ride between young green trees brought us to Etaples, a town of low white houses built close to the shore, and at the same time to the end of the day's easy riding.

Our only memories of Etaples are unpleasant. We there bought a bottle of bad oil for a good price. When we left Neuch?tel the machine needed oiling; but the top of our oil-can had not been made to fit, and when we opened the tool-bag the can was in the oil instead of the oil in the can.--After using the poor stuff sold us by a shoemaker, the tricycle ran even more heavily. This was unfortunate, for after Etaples the road left the sea and started for the south. There was nothing to be done but to put our heads down and to work as if we were record-making.--I do

not think it wrong, merely because the wind blew in our faces almost every day of our sentimental journey, therefore to say the prevalent winds in France are from the south; but indeed all the trees thereabouts bend low towards the north, to confirm this assertion.

Thus we rode on between fields bare as the moors; through lovely park-like country; by little shady rivers, where ducks were swimming in the deep-green water; by tiny villages; by little churches, grey and old; by crosses, some split and decaying; through long avenues, with poplars on either side; by hills, the ploughman on the top strongly marked against the blue sky; and all the way the road was only a little worse than asphalt.

MONTREUIL.

There is not a town in all France which, in my opinion, looks better in the map than Montreuil. I own it does not look so well in the guide-book, but when you come to see it, to be sure it looks most pitifully.

I think it was at Montreuil it first occurred to us that sentiment does not depend upon man's will alone.--And so we got on our tricycle with no more ease than usual, but less, as the wind came howling over the plain to meet us.

NAMPONT.

The road between Montreuil and Nampont was for us classic ground. Breathlessness, because of the wind, before we had got a league, brought our career--like La Fleur's--to a sudden stop. We then had time to see that the deathbed of the famous donkey lay in fair country. Near by two windmills turned their long arms swiftly. A sportsman banged away in the fields, and, to bring good-luck, two crows flew overhead. When we went on, the wind began to moderate, and by the time we reached Nampont it was making but a little noiseless noise among the leaves.

After this town, there was no sense of sentimental duty to oppress us, since a little beyond, it Mr. Sterne went to sleep, a sweet lenitive for evils, which Nature does not hold out to the cycler.

A CITY IN MOURNING.

The straight, poplared road to Abbeville still lay across a golden plain, with no interest save its beauty, here and there bounded by a row of trees, yellow haystacks standing out in bold relief against them; and here and there narrowed by dark woods, in front of which an old white-haired shepherd or little white-capped girl watched newly sheared sheep. Now and then the way led through small blue villages. There was Airon, where a large party of gleaners, old and young men, women, boys, and girls, sitting by the wayside, jumped up of one accord and walked with us up the hill. And then came Nouvion, where we saw a fine old rambling yellow farm-house, over whose disreputably tilted front-door peered two grotesque heads, and where we had coffee in the village inn, sitting on the one dry spot in the flooded floor, and just escaping the mops and buckets of two women who had raised the deluge.

The hills we still had. To read the "Emblems of the Frontispiece" in "Coryate's Crudities," one would imagine that from Montreuil to Abbeville was one long endless descent.

"Here, not up Holdbourne, but down a steepe hill, Hee's carried 'twixt Montrell and Abbeville."

But I remember many steep up-grades to be climbed beside that of Airon.

At the H?tel de France we found confusion. Waiters tore in and out of the kitchen; maids flew up and down the court-yard. Frantic men and women surrounded, and together asked a hundred questions of a poor waiter in the centre of the court; an English family clamoured for a private dining-room.--During a momentary lull we stepped forward and told this waiter, who seemed a person of authority, we should like a room for the night.

It was only seven kilometres off. But, he added, we could dine in the hotel.

--We wheeled the machine into the stable, conveniently adjoining the dining-room. We were

"Is there a room yet?" I asked.

--Hitherto I had been his spokeswoman. The consequence of his sudden outburst in French was the waiter's hearty assurance that the first room at his disposal was ours, but we must not look for it until nine or ten. It was then a little after seven.

FAITHFUL ABBEVILLE.

It is a pity that most tourists go straight from Calais to Amiens, satisfied to know Abbeville as a station by the way. The fault, I suppose, lies with "Murray" and "Baedeker," who are almost as curt with it as with Montreuil, giving but a few words to its Church of St. Wulfran, and even fewer to its quaint old houses. But the truth is, Abbeville is better worth a visit than many towns they praise. And though Mr. Tristram Shandy objected to one of its inns as unpleasant to die in, I can recommend another as excellent to live in, which, after all, is of more importance to the ordinary tourist.

CRUSHED AGAIN.

And now Mr. Ruskin writes:--"I not only object, but am quite prepared to spend all my best 'bad language' in reprobation of bi-tri-and-4-5-6 or 7-cycles, and every other contrivance and invention for superseding human feet on God's ground. To walk, to run, to leap, and to dance are the virtues of the human body, and neither to stride on stilts, wriggle on wheels, or dangle on ropes, and nothing in the training of the human mind with the body will ever supersede the appointed God's ways of slow walking and hard working."

A BY-ROAD.

"Hold!" said one of the drivers, "I think he comes."

"Pardon, ladies," said we.

"Of nothing," said they.

"The road is so bad," we explained.

--The road ran straight along the edge of the upland. Below, a pretty river wound among reeds and willows, overtopped by tall trees shivering in the wind. But hard work gave us little chance for pleasure in the landscape, until at Pont Remy we stopped on the bridge to take breath.

The wind was now directly in our faces, and the road was deep with sand and loose with stones, and we had not gone a mile, a mile but scarcely one, when we lost our tempers outright and sent sentiment to the winds. First we climbed a long up-grade, passing old crumbling grey churches decorated with grotesques and gargoyles like those on St. Wulfran's, in Abbeville, some perched upon hillocks, with cottages gathered about them, others adjoining lonely ch?teaux; and riding through forlornly poor villages full of houses tumbling to pieces and vicious dogs. Hills rose to our left; to our right, in the valley below, were wide marshes covered with a luxurious green growth, and beyond, the river, on the other side of which was a town with a tall church rising in its centre.

"And the commerce, it goes well there? Yes?"

--I suppose he took us for fellow-drummers; and I must admit the idea of our travelling for pleasure over such roads was the last likely to occur to him.

Then we went down hill for some distance, but we ran into ridges of sand and brought up

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