Europe and elsewhere

In old times a summer sail down the Rhône was a favorite trip with travelers. But that day is long gone by. The conveniences for the sail disappeared many years ago--driven out of existence by the railway.

In August, 1891, I made this long-neglected voyage with a boatman and a courier. The following account of it is part diary and part comment. The main idea of the voyage was, not to see sights, but to rest up from sight-seeing. There was little or nothing on the Rhône to examine or study or write didactically about; consequently, to glide down the stream in an open boat, moved by the current only, would afford many days of lazy repose, with opportunity to smoke, read, doze, talk, accumulate comfort, get fat, and all the while be out of reach of the news and remote from the world and its concerns.

Our point of departure was to be the Castle of Châtillon on Lake Bourget, not very far from Aix-les-Bains. I went down from Geneva by rail on a Saturday afternoon, and reached the station nearest the castle during the evening. I found the courier waiting for me. He had been down in the lake region several days, hunting for a boat, engaging the boatman, etc.

From my log.--The luggage was given to the porters--a couple of peasant girls of seventeen or eighteen years, and a couple of younger ones--children, one might say, of twelve or thirteen. It consisted of heavy satchels and holdalls, but they gathered it up and trudged away, not seeming to mind the weight. The road was through woods and uphill--dark and steep and long. I tried to take the heavy valise from the smallest one, telling her I would carry it myself. She did not understand, of course, and resisted. I tried, then, to take the bag by gentle force. This alarmed her. The courier came and explained that she was afraid she was going to lose the trifle of money she was earning.

The courier told her this was not the case, but she looked doubtful and concluded to hang on to a sure thing.

“How much is it she’s going to get?”

“She will charge about half a franc.”

“Then pay her now, and she’ll give up the bag.”

But that scheme failed, too. The child hung to the bag and seemed distressed. No explanation could be got out of her, but one of the other girls said the child was afraid that if she gave it up, the fact would be used against her with tourists as proof that she was not strong enough to carry their luggage for them, and so she would lose chances to get work.

By and by the winding road carried us by an open space where we could see very well--see the ruins of a burned-out little hamlet of the humblest sort--stone walls with empty window holes, narrow alleys cluttered with wreckage and fallen thatch, etc. Our girls were eager to have us stop and view this wonder, the result of the only conflagration they had ever seen, the only large event that had ever accented their monotonous lives. It had happened a couple of months before, and the villagers had lost everything, even to their stockings of savings, and were too poor to rebuild their houses. A young woman, an old one, and all the horses had been burned to death; the young girls said they could take us among the ruins and show us the very spot.

We finally came out on the top of the hill, and there stood the castle, a rather picturesque old stack of masonry with a walled yard about it and an odd old stumpy tower in a corner of the yard handsomely clothed in vines. The castle is a private residence, whose owner leaves it in charge of his housekeeper and some menservants, and lives in Lyons except when he wants to fish or shoot.

The courier had engaged rooms, but the fact had probably been forgotten, for we had trouble in rousing the garrison. It was getting late and they were asleep. Eventually a man unlocked and unbarred the door and led us up a winding stair of heavy and very plain stonework. My bed was higher from the floor than necessary. This is apparently the rule in old French houses of the interior. But there is a stepladder.

In the morning I looked out of my window and saw the tops of trees below me, thick and beautiful foliage, and below the trees was the bright blue water of the lake shining in the sun. The window seemed to be about two hundred feet above the water. An airy and inspiring situation, indeed. A pope was born in that room a couple of centuries ago. I forget his name.

In that old day they built for utility, this was evident. Everything--floors, sashes, shutters, beams, joists--were cheap, coarse, ornamentless, but everlastingly solid and substantial. On the wall hung an indication of the politics of the present owner. This was a small photograph with “Philippe Comte de Paris” written under it.

The castle was ancient, in its way, but over the door of one of its rooms there was a picture set in a frame whose profound antiquity made all its surroundings seem modern and fresh. This frame was of good firm oak, as black as a coal, and had once been part of a lake-dweller’s house. It was already a thing of antiquity when the Romans were planting colonies in France before the time of Christ. The remains of a number of lake villages have been dug out of the mud of Lake Bourget.

Breakfast was served in the open air on a precipice in a little arbor sheltered by vines, with glimpses through the tree tops of the blue water far below, and with also a wide prospect of mountain scenery. The coffee was the best I ever drank in Europe.

Presently there was a bugle blast from somewhere about the battlements--a fine Middle Age effect--and after a moment it was answered from the further shore of the lake, and we saw a boat put out from that shore. It was ours. We were soon on board and away.

It was a roomy, long flatboat, very light and easy to manage--easy to manage because its sides tapered a little toward both ends, and both ends curved up free from the water and made the steering prompt and easy. The rear half was sheltered from sun and rain by a temporary (and removable) canopy stretched over hoop-pole arches, after the fashion of the old-time wagon covers of the emigrants to California. We at once rolled the sides of the canopy high up, so that we might have the breeze and a free view on every hand.

On the other side of the lake we entered a narrow canal, and here we had our last glimpse of that picturesque Châtillon perched on its high promontory. The sides of the canal were walled with vines heavily laden with black grapes. The vine leaves were white with the stuff which is squirted on them from a thing like a fire extinguisher to kill the calamitous phylloxera. We saw only one living creature for the first lonely mile--a man with his extinguisher strapped on his back and hard at his deadly work. I asked our admiral, Joseph Rougier, of the village of Chanaz, if it would be a good idea to offer to sell this Sabbath breaker a few choice samples of foreign phylloxera, and he said yes, if one wanted to play the star part in an inquest.

At last two women and a man strolling churchward in their Sunday best gave us a courteous hail and walked briskly along abreast of us, plying the courier and the sailor with eager questions about our curious and unaccountable project, and by the time they had got their fill and dropped astern to digest the matter and finish wondering over it, we were serene again and busy discussing the scenery; for now there was really some scenery to look at, of a mild but pleasant type--low precipices, a country road shaded by large trees, a few cozy thatched cabins scattered along, and now and then an irruption of joyous children who flocked to inspect us and admire, followed by friendly dogs who stood and barked at us, but wagged their tails to say no offense was intended.

Soon the precipice grew bolder, and presently Chanaz came in sight and the canal bore us along its front--along its street, for it had only one. We stepped ashore. There was a roll of distant drums, and soon a company or two of French infantry came marching by. All the citizens were out, and every male took off his hat politely as the soldiers moved past him, and this salute was always returned by the officers.

I wanted envelopes, wine, grapes, and postage stamps, and was directed to a stone stairway and told to go up one flight. Up there I found a small well-smoked kitchen paved with worn-out bricks, with pots and pans hanging about the walls, and a bent and humped woman of seventy cooking a very frugal dinner. The tiredest dog I have seen this year lay asleep under the stove, in a roasting heat, an incredible heat, a heat that would have pulled a remark of the Hebrew children; but the dog slept along with perfect serenity and did not seem to know that there was anything the matter with the weather. The old woman set off her coffee pot. Next she removed her pork chop to the table; it seemed to me that this was premature--the dog was better done.

We asked for the envelopes and things; she motioned us to the left with her ladle. We passed through a door and found ourselves in the smallest wholesale and retail commercial house in the world, I suppose. The place was not more than nine feet square. The proprietor was polite and cheerful enough for a place five or six times as large. He was weighing out two ounces of parched coffee for a little girl, and when the balances came level at last he took off a light bean and put on a heavier one in the handsomest way and then tied up the purchase in a piece of paper and handed it to the child with as nice a bow as one would see anywhere. In that shop he had a couple of bushels of wooden shoes--a dollar’s worth, altogether, perhaps--but he had no other articles in such lavish profusion. Yet he had a pound or so or a dipperful of any kind of thing a person might want. You couldn’t buy two things of a kind there, but you could buy one of any and every kind. It was a useful shop, and a sufficient one, no doubt, yet its contents could not have cost more than ten dollars. Here was home on a small scale, but everything comfortable, no haggard looks visible, no financial distress apparent. I got all the things I came for except double-postage stamps for foreign service; I had to take domestic stamps instead. The merchant said he kept a double-stamp in stock a couple of years, but there was no market for it, so he sent it back to Paris, because it was eating up its insurance. A careful man and thrifty; and of such is the commonwealth of France.

We got some hot fried fish in Chanaz and took them aboard and cleared out. With grapes and claret and bread they made a satisfactory luncheon. We paddled a hundred yards, turned a rock corner, and here was the furious gray current of the Rhône just a-whistling by! We crept into it from the narrow canal, and laid in the oars. The floating was begun. One needs no oar-help in a current like that. The shore seemed to fairly spin past. Where the current assaults the heavy stone barriers thrown out from the shores to protect the banks, it makes a break like the break of a steamboat, and you can hear the roar a couple of hundred yards off.

The river where we entered it was about a hundred yards wide, and very deep. The water was at medium stage. The Rhône is not a very long river--six hundred miles--but it carries a bigger mass of water to the sea than any other French stream.

For the first few miles we had lonely shores--hardly ever a house. On the left bank we had high precipices and domed hills; right bank low and wooded.

At one point in the face of a precipice we saw a great cross (carved out of the living rock, the Admiral said) forty feet above the carriage road, where a doctor has had his tomb scooped in the rock and lies in there safe from his surviving patients--if any.

At 1.25 P.M. we passed the slumbrous village of Massigneux de Rive on the right and the ditto village of Huissier on the left (in Savoie). We had to take all names by sound from the Admiral; he said nobody could spell them. There was a ferry at the former village. A wire is stretched across the river high overhead; along this runs a wheel which has ropes leading down and made fast to the ferryboat in such a way that the boat’s head is held farther upstream than its stern. This angle enables the current to drive the boat across, and no other motive force is needed. This would be a good thing on minor rivers in America.

2.10 P.M.--It is delightfully cool, breezy, shady (under the canopy), and still. Much smoking and lazy reflecting. There is no sound but the rippling of the current and the moaning of far-off breaks, except that now and then the Admiral dips a screechy oar to change the course half a point. In the distance one catches the faint singing and laughter of playing children or the softened note of a church bell or town clock. But the reposeful stillness--that is the charm--and the smooth swift gliding--and the fresh, clear, lively, gray-green water. There was such a rush, and boom, and life, and confusion, and activity in Geneva yesterday--how remote all that seems now, how wholly vanished away and gone out of this world!

2.15.--Village of Yenne. Iron suspension bridge. On the heights back of the town a chapel with a tower like a thimble, and a very tall white Virgin standing on it.

2.25.--Precipices on both sides now. River narrow--sixty yards.

2.30.--Immense precipice on right bank, with groups of buildings (Pierre Châtel) planted on the very edge of it. In its near neighborhood a massive and picturesque fortification.

All this narrow gut from the bridge down to the next bridge--a mile or two--is picturesque with its frowning high walls of rock.

In the face of the precipice above the second bridge sits a painted house on a rock bench--a chapel, we think, but the Admiral says it is for the storage of wine.

More fortifications at the corner where the river turns--no cannon, but narrow slits for musketry commanding the river. Also narrow slits in the solid (hollowed-out) precipice. Perhaps there is no need of cannon here where you can throw a biscuit across from precipice to precipice.

2.45.--Below that second bridge. On top of the bluffs more fortifications. Low banks on both sides here.

2.50.--Now both sets of fortifications show up, look huge and formidable, and are finely grouped. Through the glass they seem deserted and falling to ruin. Out of date, perhaps.

One will observe, by these paragraphs, that the Rhône is swift enough to keep one’s view changing with a very pleasant alacrity.

At midafternoon we passed a steep and lofty bluff--right bank--which was crowned with the moldering ruins of a castle overgrown with trees. A relic of Roman times, the Admiral said. Name? No, he didn’t know any name for it. Had it a history? Perhaps; he didn’t know. Wasn’t there even a legend connected with it? He didn’t know of any.

Not even a legend. One’s first impulse was to be irritated; whereas one should be merely thankful; for if there is one sort of invention in this world that is flatter than another, it is the average folklore legend. It could probably be proven that even the adventures of the saints in the Roman calendar are not of a lower grade as works of the inventor’s art.

The dreamy repose, the infinite peace of these tranquil shores, this Sabbath stillness, this noiseless motion, this strange absence of the sense of sin, and the stranger absence of the desire to commit it--this was the perfectest day the year had brought! Now and then we slipped past low shores with grassy banks. A solitary thatched cottage close to the edge, one or two big trees with dense foliage sheltering the cottage, and the family in their Sunday, clothes grouped in the deep shade, chatting, smoking, knitting, the dogs asleep about their feet, the kittens helping with the knitting, and all hands content and praising God without knowing it. We always got a friendly word of greeting and returned it. One of these families contained eighteen sons, and all were present. The Admiral was acquainted with everybody along the banks, and with all the domestic histories, notwithstanding he was so ineffectual on old Roman matters.

4.20.--Bronze statue of the Virgin on a sterile hill slope.

4.45.--Ruined Roman tower on a bluff. Belongs to the no-name series.

5.--Some more Roman ruins in the distance.

At 6 o’clock we rounded to. We stepped ashore in a woodsy and lonely place and walked a short mile through a country lane to the sizable and rather modern-looking village of St.-Genix. Part of the way we followed another pleasure party--six or eight little children riding aloft on a mountain of fragrant hay. This is the earliest form of the human pleasure excursion, and for utter joy and perfect contentment it stands alone in a man’s threescore years and ten; all that come after it have flaws, but this has none.

We put up at the Hôtel Labully, in the little square where the church stands. Satisfactory dinner. Later I took a twilight tramp along the high banks of a moist ditch called the Guires River. If it was my river I wouldn’t leave it outdoors nights, in this careless way, where any dog can come along and lap it up. It is a tributary of the Rhône when it is in better health.

It became dark while we were on our way back, and then the bicyclers gave us many a sudden chill. They never furnished us an early warning, but delivered the paralyzing shock of their rubber-horn hoot right at our shoulder blades and then flashed spectrally by on their soundless wheels and floated into the depths of the darkness and vanished from sight before a body could collect his remark and get it out. Sometimes they get shot. This is right.

I went to my room, No. 16. The floor was bare, which is the rule down the Rhône. Its planks were light colored, and had been smoothed by use rather than art; they had conspicuous black knots in them. The usual high and narrow bed was there, with the usual little marble-topped commode by the head of it and the usual strip of foot carpet alongside, where you climb in. The wall paper was dark--which is usual on the Continent; even in the northern regions of Germany, where the daylight in winter is of such poor quality that they don’t even tax it now.

When I woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and raining hard, so I stayed in bed and had my breakfast and a ripe old Paris paper of last week brought up. It was a good breakfast--one often gets that; and a liberal one--one seldom gets that. There was a big bowl for the coffee instead of a stingy cup which has to be refilled just as you are getting interested in it; there was a quart of coffee in the pot instead of a scant half pint; instead of the usual hollow curl of brittle butter which evades you when you try to scoop it on to the knife and crumbles when you try to carve it, there was a solid cream-colored lump as big as a brick; there was abundance of hot milk, and there was also the usual ostensible cream of Europe. There must be cream in Europe somewhere, but it is not in the cows; they have been examined.

The rain continued to pour until noon, then the sun burst out and we were soon up and filing through the village. By the time we had tramped our mile and pushed out into the stream, the watches marked 1.10 and the day was brilliant and perfect.

Over on the right were ruins of two castles, one of them of some size.

We passed under a suspension bridge; alongside of it was an iron bridge of a later pattern. Near by was a little steamer lying at the bank with no signs of life about her--the first boat, except ferryboats, encountered since we had entered the Rhône. A lonely river, truly.

We drifted past lofty highlands, but there was nothing inspiring about them. In Switzerland the velvet heights are sprinkled with homes clear to the clouds, but these hills were sterile, desolate, gray, melancholy, and so thin was the skin on them that the rocky bones showed through in places.

1.30.--We seem lost in the intricate channels of an archipelago of flat islands covered with bushes.

1.50.--We whirl around a corner into open river again, and observe that a vast bank of leaden clouds is piling itself up on the horizon; the tint thrown upon the distant stretches of water is rich and fine.

The river is wide now--a hundred and fifty yards--and without islands. Suddenly it has become nearly currentless and is like a lake. The Admiral explains that from this point for nine miles it is called L’Eau Morte--Dead Water.

The region is not entirely barren of life, it seems--solitary woman paddling a punt across the wide still pool.

The boat moved, but that is about all one could say. It was indolent progress; still, it was comfortable. There were flaming sunshine behind and that rich thunder gloom ahead, and now and then the fitful fanning of a pleasant breeze.

A woman paddled across--a rather young woman with a face like the “Mona Lisa.” I had seen the “Mona Lisa” only a little while before, and stood two hours in front of that painting, repeating to myself: “People come from around the globe to stand here and worship. What is it they find in it?” To me it was merely a serene and subdued face, and there an end. There might be more in it, but I could not find it. The complexion was bad; in fact, it was not even human; there are no people of that color. I finally concluded that maybe others still saw in the picture faded and vanished marvels which had been there once and were now forever vanished.

Then I remembered something told me once by Noel Flagg,^[3] the artist. There was a time, he said, when he wasn’t yet an artist but thought he was. His pictures sold, and gave satisfaction, and that seemed a good-enough verdict. One day he was daubing away in his studio and feeling good and inspired, when Dr. Horace Bushnell, that noble old Roman, straggled in there without an invitation and fastened that deep eye of his on the canvas. The youth was proud enough of such a call, and glad there was something on the easel that was worthy of it. After a long look the great divine said:

“You have talent, boy.” (That sounded good.) “What you want is teaching.”

Teaching--he, an accepted and competent artist! He didn’t like that. After another long look:

“Do you know the higher mathematics?”

“I? No, sir.”

“You must acquire them.”

“As a proper part of an artist’s training?” This with veiled irony.

“As an essential part of it. Do you know anatomy?”

“No, sir.”

“You must learn how to dissect a body. What are you studying, now--principally?”

“Nothing, I believe.”

“And the time flying, the time flying! Where are your books? What do you read?”

“There they are, on the shelves.”

“I see. Poetry and romance. They must wait. Get to your mathematics and your anatomy right away. Another point: you must train your eye--you must teach yourself to see.”

“Teach myself to see? I believe I was born with that ability.”

“But nobody is born with a trained ability--nobody. A cow sees--she sees all the outsides of things, no doubt, but it is only the trained eye that sees deeper, sees the soul of them, the meaning of them, the spiritual essence. Are you sure that you see more than the cow sees? You must go to Paris. You will never learn to see here. There they’ll teach you; there they’ll train you; there they’ll work you like a slave; there they’ll bring out the talent that’s in you. Be off! Don’t twaddle here any longer!”

Flagg thought it over and resolved that the advice was worth taking. He and his brother cleared for Paris. They put in their first afternoon there scoffing at the works of the old masters in the Louvre. They laughed at themselves for crossing a wide ocean to learn what masterly painting might be by staring at these odious things. As for the “Mona Lisa,” they exhausted their treasure of wit in making fun of it.

Next day they put themselves into the hands of the Beaux Arts people, and that was the end of play. They had to start at the very bottom of their trade and learn it over again, detail by detail, and learn it right, this time. They slaved away, night and day for three months, and wore themselves to shadows. Then they had a day off, and drifted into the Louvre. Neither said a word for some time; each disliked to begin; but at last, in front of the “Mona Lisa,” after standing mute awhile one of them said:

“Speak out. Say it.”

“Say it yourself.”

“Well, then, we were cows before!”

“Yes--it’s the right name for it. That is what we were. It is unbelievable, the change that has come over these pictures in three months. It is the difference between a landscape in the twilight and the same landscape in the daytime.” Then they fell into each other’s arms.

This all came back to me, now, as I saw this living “Mona Lisa” punting across L’Eau Morte.

2.40 P.M.--Made for a village on the right bank with all speed--Port de Groslee. Remains of Roman aqueduct on hilltop back of village. Rain!--Deluges of it. Took refuge in an inn on the bank--Hôtel des Voyageurs. The public room was full of voyageurs and tobacco smoke. The voyageurs may have been river folk in the old times when the inn was built, but this present crowd was made up of teamsters. They sat at bare tables, under their feet was the bare floor, about them were the four bare walls--a dreary place at any time, a heart-breaking place now in the dark of the downpour. However, it was manifestly not dreary to the teamsters. They were sipping red wine and smoking; they all talked at once, and with great energy and spirit, and every now and then they gave their thighs a sounding slap and burst into a general horse laugh. The courier said that this was in response to rude wit and coarse anecdotes. The brace of modest-looking girls who were waiting on the teamsters did not seem troubled. The courier said that they were used to all kinds of language and were not defiled by it; that they had probably seldom heard a spade called anything but a spade, therefore the foulest words came innocent to their ears.

This inn was built of stone--of course; everybody’s house on the Continent, from palace to hovel, is built of that dismal material, and as a rule it is as square as a box and odiously plain and destitute of ornament; it is formal, forbidding, and breeds melancholy thoughts in people used to friendlier and more perishable materials of construction. The frame house and the log house molder and pass away, even in the builder’s time, and this makes a proper bond of sympathy and fellowship between the man and his home; but the stone house remains always the same to the person born in it; in his old age it is still as hard, and indifferent, and unaffected by time as it was in the long-vanished days of his childhood. The other kind of house shows by many touching signs that it has noted his griefs and misfortunes and has felt for them, but the stone house doesn’t--it is not of his evanescent race, it has no kinship with him, nor any interest in him.

A professional letter writer happened along presently, and one of the young girls got him to write a letter for her. It seemed strange that she could not write it herself. The courier said that the peasant women of the Rhône do not care for education, but only for religion; that they are all good Catholics, and that their main ambition in life is to see the Rhône’s long procession of stone and bronze Virgins added to, until the river shall be staked out with them from end to end; and that their main pleasure in life is to contribute from their scant centimes to this gracious and elevating work. He says it is a quite new caprice; that ten years ago there was not a Virgin in this part of France at all, and never had been. This may be true, and, of course, there is nothing unreasonable about it, but I have already found out that the courier’s statements are not always exact.

I had a hot fried fish and coffee in a garden shed roofed with a mat of vines, but the rain came through in streams and I got drenched in spite of our umbrellas, for one cannot manage table implements and umbrellas all at the same time with anything like good success.

Mem.--Last evening, for economy’s sake, proposed to be a Frenchman because Americans and English are always overcharged. Courier said it wouldn’t deceive unless I played myself for a deaf-and-dumb Frenchman--which I did, and so the rooms were only a franc and a half each. But the Admiral must have let it out that I was only deaf and dumb in French, for prices were raised in the bill this morning.

4.10 P.M.--Left Port de Groslee.

4.50 P.M.--Château of the Count Cassiloa--or something like that--the Admiral’s pronunciation is elusive. Courier guesses the spelling at “Quintionat.” I don’t quite see the resemblance. This courier’s confidence in himself is a valuable talent. He must be descended from the idiot who taught our forefathers to spell tizzik with a ph and a th.

The river here is as still and smooth and nearly as dead as a lake. The water is swirly, though, and consequently makes uneasy steering.

River seems to draw together and greatly narrow itself below the count’s house. No doubt the current will smarten up there.

Three new quarries along here. Dear me! how little there is in the way of sight-seeing, when a quarry is an event! Remarked upon with contentment.

Swept through the narrow canallike place with a good current.

On the left-hand point below, bush-grown ruins of an ancient convent (St. Alban’s), picturesquely situated on a low bluff. There is a higher and handsomer bluff a trifle lower down. How did they overlook it? Those people generally went for the best, not second best. Shapely hole in latter bluff one hundred feet above the water--anchorite’s nest? Interesting-looking hole, and would have cost but little time and trouble to examine it, but it was not done. It is no matter; one can find other holes.

At last, below bluffs, we find some greensward--not extensive, but a pleasant novelty.

5.30.--Lovely sunset. Mottled clouds richly painted by sinking sun, and fleecy shreds of clouds drifting along the fronts of neighboring blue mountains. Harrow in a field. Apparently harrow, but was distant and could not tell; could have been a horse.

5.35.--Very large gray broken-arched and unusually picturesque ruin crowning a hilltop on right. Name unknown. This is a liberal mile above village of Briord (my spelling--the Admiral’s pronunciation), on same side. Passed the village swiftly, and left it behind. The villagers came out and made fun of our strange tub. The dogs chased us and were more noisy than necessary.

6 P.M.--Another suspension bridge--this is the sixth one. They have ceased to interest. There was nothing exciting about them, from the start. Presently landed on left bank and shored the boat for the night. Hôtel du Rhône Moine. Isolated. Situated right on the bank. Sort of a village--villagette, to be exact--a little back. Hôtel is two stories high and not pretentious--family dwelling and cow stable all under one roof.

I had been longing to have personal experience of peasant life--be “on the inside” and see it for myself, instead of at second hand in books. This was an opportunity and I was excited about it and glad. The kitchen was not clean, but it was a sociable place, and the family were kind and full of good will. There were three little children, a young girl, father, mother, grandparents, some dogs, and a plurality of cats. There was no discord; perfect harmony prevailed.

Our table was placed on the lawn on the river bank. One had no right to expect any finer style here than he would find in the cheapest and shabbiest little tavern in America, for the Hôtel du Rhône Moine was for foot wanderers and laborers on the flatboats that convey stone and sand and wood to Lyons, yet the style was superior--very much so. The tablecloth was white, and it and the table furniture were perfectly clean. We had a fish of a pretty coarse grain, but it was fresh from the river and hot from the pan; the bread was good, there was abundance of excellent butter, the milk was rich and pure, the sugar was white, the coffee was considerably better than that which is furnished by the choice hotels of the capitals of the Continent. Thus far, peasant life was a disappointment, it was so much better than anything we were used to at home in some respects. Two of the dogs came out, presently, and sat down by the table and rested their chins on it, and so remained. It was not to beg, for they showed no interest in the supper; they were merely there to be friendly, it was the only idea they had. A squadron of cats came out by and by and sat down in the neighborhood and looked me over languidly, then wandered away without passion, in fact with what looked like studied indifference. Even the cats and the dogs are well and sufficiently fed at the Hôtel du Rhône Moine--their dumb testimony was as good as speech.

I went to bed early. It is inside the house, not outside, that one really finds the peasant life. Our rooms were over the stable, and this was not an advantage. The cows and horses were not very quiet, the smell was extraordinary, the fleas were a disorderly lot, and these things helped the coffee to keep one awake. The family went to bed at nine and got up at two. The beds were very high; one could not climb into them without the help of a chair; and as they were narrow and arched, there was danger of rolling out in case one drifted into dreams of an imprudent sort. These lofty bedsteads were not high from caprice, but for a purpose--they contained chests of drawers, and the drawers were full of clothing and other family property. On the table in my room were some bright-colored, even gorgeous little waxen saints and a Virgin under bell-glasses; also the treasures of the house--jewelry and a silver watch. It was not costly jewelry, but it was jewelry, at any rate, and without doubt the family valued it. I judged that this household were accustomed to having honest guests and neighbors or they would have removed these things from the room when I entered it, for I do not look honester than others.

Not that I have always thought in this way about myself, for I haven’t. I thought the reverse until the time I lost my overcoat, once, when I was going down to New York to see the Water Color exhibition, and had a sort of adventure in consequence. The house had been robbed in the night, and when I came downstairs to rush for the early train there was no overcoat. It was a raw day, and when I got to New York at noon I grew colder and colder as I walked along down the Avenue. When I reached East Thirty-fourth street I stopped on the corner and began to consider. It seemed to me that it must have been just about there that Smith,^[4] the artist, took me one winter’s night, with others, five years before, and caroused us with roasted oysters and Southern stories and hilarity in his fourth story until three or four in the morning; and now if I could only call to mind which of those houses over the way was his, I could borrow an overcoat. All the time that I was thinking and standing there and trying to recollect, I was dimly conscious of a figure near me, but only dimly, very dimly; but now as I came out of my reverie and found myself gazing, rapt but totally unconscious, at one of the houses over there, that figure solidified itself and became at once the most conspicuous thing in the landscape. It was a policeman. He was standing not six feet away, and was gazing as intently at my face as I had been gazing at the house. I was embarrassed--it is always embarrassing to come to yourself and find a stranger staring at you. You blush, even when you have not been doing any harm. So I blushed--a thing that does not commend a person to a policeman; also I tried to smile a placating smile, but it did not get any response, so then I tried to make it a kind of friendly smile, which was a mistake, because that only hardens a policeman, and I saw at once that this smile had hardened this one and made my situation more difficult than ever; and so, naturally, my judgment being greatly impaired by now, I spoke--which was an error, because in these circumstances one cannot arrange without reflection a remark which will not seem to have a kind of suspicious something about it to a policeman, and that was what happened this time; for I had fanned up that haggard smile again, which had been dying out when I wasn’t noticing, and said:

“Could you tell me, please, if there’s a Mr. Smith lives over there in----”

“What Smith?”

That rude abruptness drove his other name out of my mind; and as I saw I never should be able to think of it with the policeman standing there cowing me with his eye, that way, it seemed to me best to get out a name of some kind, so as to avert further suspicion, therefore I brought out the first one which came into my mind, which was John--another error. The policeman turned purple--apparently with a sense of injury and insult--and said there were a million John Smiths in New York, and which one was this? Also what did I want with Smith? I could not remember--the overcoat was gone out of my mind. So I told him he was a pupil of mine and that I was giving him lessons in morals; moral culture--a new system.

That was a lucky hit, anyway. I was merely despicable, now, to the policeman, but harmless--I could see it in his eye. He looked me over a moment then said:

“You give him lessons, do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you been giving him lessons?”

“Two years, next month.” I was getting my wind again, and confidence.

“Which house does he live in?”

“That one--the middle one in the block.”

“Then what did you ask me for, a minute ago?”

I did not see my way out. He waited for an answer, but got tired before I could think of one that would fit the case and said:

“How is it that you haven’t an overcoat on, such a day as this?”

“I--well, I never wear them. It doesn’t seem cold to me.”

He thought awhile, with his eye on me, then said, with a sort of sigh:

“Well, maybe you are all right--I don’t know--but you want to walk pretty straight while you are on my beat; for, morals or no morals, blamed if I take much stock in you. Move on, now.”

Then he turned away, swinging his club by its string. But his eye was over his shoulder, my way; so I had to cross to that house, though I didn’t want to, any more. I did not expect it to be Smith’s house, now that I was so out of luck, but I thought I would ring and ask, and if it proved to be some one else’s house, then I would explain that I had come to examine the gas meter and thus get out the back way and be all right again. The door was opened by a middle-aged matron with a gentle and friendly face, and she had a sweet serenity about her that was a notable contrast to my nervous flurry. I asked after Smith and if he lived there, and to my surprise and gratitude she said that this was his home.

“Can I see him? Can I see him right away--immediately?”

No; he was gone downtown. My rising hopes fell to ruin.

“Then can I see Mrs. Smith?”

But alas and alas! she was gone downtown with him. In my distress I was suddenly smitten by one of those ghastly hysterical inspirations, you know, when you want to do an insane thing just to astonish and petrify somebody; so I said, with a rather overdone pretense of playful ease and assurance:

“Ah, this is a very handsome overcoat on the hat rack--be so good as to lend it to me for a day or two!”

“With pleasure,” she said--and she had the coat on me before I knew what had happened. It had been my idea to astonish and petrify her, but I was the person astonished and petrified, myself. So astonished and so petrified, in fact, that I was out of the house and gone, without a thank-you or a question, before I came to my senses again. Then I drifted slowly along, reflecting--reflecting pleasantly. I said to myself, “She simply divined my character by my face--what a far clearer intuition she had than that policeman.” The thought sent a glow of self-satisfaction through me.

Then a hand was laid on my shoulder and I shrank together with a crash. It was the policeman. He scanned me austerely and said:

“Where did you get that overcoat?”

Although I had not been doing any harm, I had all the sense of being caught--caught in something disreputable. The officer’s accusing eye and unbelieving aspect heightened this effect. I told what had befallen me at the house in as straightforward a way as I could, but I was ashamed of the tale, and looked it, without doubt, for I knew and felt how improbable it must necessarily sound to anybody, particularly a policeman. Manifestly he did not believe me. He made me tell it all over again, then he questioned me:

“You don’t know the woman?”

“No, I don’t know her.”

“Haven’t the least idea who she is?”

“Not the least.”

“You didn’t tell her your name?”

“No.”

“She didn’t ask for it?”

“No.”

“You just asked her to lend you the overcoat, and she let you take it?”

“She put it on me herself.”

“And didn’t look frightened?”

“Frightened? Of course not.”

“Not even surprised?”

“Not in the slightest degree.”

He paused. Presently he said:

“My friend, I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t you see, yourself, it’s a tale that won’t wash? Do you believe it?”

“Yes. I know it’s true.”

“Weren’t you surprised?”

“Clear through to the marrow!”

He had been edging me along back to the house. He had a deep design; he sprung it on me now. Said he:

“Stop where you are. I’ll mighty soon find out!”

He walked to the door and up the steps, keeping a furtive eye out toward me and ready to jump for me if I ran. Then he pretended to pull the bell, and instantly faced about to observe the effect on me. But there wasn’t any; I walked toward him instead of running away. That unsettled him. He came down the steps, evidently perplexed, and said:

“Well, I can’t make it out. It may be all right, but it’s too many for me. I don’t like your looks and I won’t have such characters around. Go along, now, and look sharp. If I catch you prowling around here again I’ll run you in.”

I found Smith at the Water Color dinner that night, and asked him if it were merely my face that had enabled me to borrow the overcoat from a stranger, but he was surprised and said:

“No! What an idea--and what intolerable conceit! She is my housekeeper, and remembered your drawling voice from overhearing it a moment that night four or five years ago in my house; so she knew where to send the police if you didn’t bring the coat back!”

After all those years I was sitting here, now, at midnight in the peasant hotel, in my night clothes, and honoring womankind in my thoughts; for here was another woman, with the noble and delicate intuitions of her sex, trusting me, a total stranger, with all her modest wealth. She entered the room, just then, and stood beaming upon me a moment with her sweet matronly eyes--then took away the jewelry.

Tuesday, September 22d.--Breakfast in open air. Extra canvas was now to be added to the boat’s hood to keep the passengers and valises better protected during rainstorms. I passed through the villagette and started to walk over the wooded hill, the boat to find us on the river bank somewhere below, by and by. I soon got lost among the high bushes and turnip gardens. Plenty of paths, but none went to river. Reflection. Decision--that the path most traveled was the one leading in the right direction. It was a poor conclusion. I got lost again; this time worse than before. But a peasant of above eighty (as she said, and certainly she was very old and wrinkled and gray and bent) found me presently and undertook to guide me safely. She was vigorous, physically, prompt and decided of movement, and altogether soldierlike; and she had a hawk’s eye and beak, and a gypsy’s complexion. She said that from her girlhood up to not so very many years ago she had done a man’s work on a woman’s pay on the big keel boats that carry stone down the river, and was as good a man as the best, in the matter of handling stone. Said she had seen the great Napoleon when she was a little child. Her face was so wrinkled and dark and so eaglelike that she reminded me of old Indians one sees out on the Great Plains--the outside signs of age, but in the eye an indestructible spirit. She had a couple of laden baskets with her which I had found heavy after three minutes’ carrying, when she was finding the way for me, but they seemed nothing to her. She impressed one rather as a man than as a woman; and so, when she spoke of her child that was drowned, and her voice broke a little and her lip quivered, it surprised me; I was not expecting it. “Grandchild?” No--it was her own child. “Indeed? When?” So then it came out that it was sixty years ago. It seemed strange that she should mind it so long. But that was the woman of it, no doubt. She had a fragment of newspaper--religious--with rude holy woodcuts in it and doubtful episodes in the lives of mediæval saints and anchorites--and she could read these instructive matters in fine print without glasses; also, her eyes were as good at long distances. She led hither and thither among the paths and finally brought me out overlooking the river. There was a steep sandy frontage there, where there had recently been a small landslide, and the faint new path ran straight across it for forty feet, like a slight snow track along the slant of a very steep roof. I halted and declined. I had no mind to try the crumbly path and creep and quake along it with the boiling river--and maybe some rocks--under my elbow thirty feet below. Such places turn my stomach. The old woman took note of me, understood, and said what sounded like, “Lass’ ma allez au premier”--then she tramped briskly and confidently across with her baskets, sending miniature avalanches of sand and gravel down into the river with each step. One of her feet plowed from under her, about midway, but she snatched it back and marched on, not seeming to mind it. My pride urged me to move along, and put me to shame. After a time the old woman came back and coaxed me to try, and did at last get me started in her wake and I got as far as midway all right; but then to hearten me still more and show me how easy and safe it was, she began to prance and dance her way along, with her knuckles in her hips, kicking a landslide loose with every skip. The exhibition struck a cold panic through me and made my brain swim. I leaned against the slope and said I would stay there until the boat came and testified as to whether there were rocks under me or not. For the third time in my life I was in that kind of a fix--in a place where I could not go backward or forward, and mustn’t stay where I was. The boat was a good while coming, but it seemed longer than that. Where I was, the slope was like a roof; where the slope ended the wall was perpendicular thence to the water, and one could not see over and tell what the state of things might be down there. When the boat came along, the courier said there was nothing down there but deep water--no rocks. I did not mind the water; so my fears disappeared, now, and I finished my march without discomfort. I gave the old woman some money, which pleased her very much and she tried her grateful best to give us a partridge, newly killed, which she rummaged out of one of her baskets, and seemed disappointed when I would not take it. But I couldn’t; it would have been a shabby act. Then she went her way with her heavy baskets and I got aboard and afloat once more, feeling a great respect for her and very friendly toward her. She waved a good-by every now and then till her figure faded out in the plain, joining that interminable procession of friends made and lost in an hour that drifts past a man’s life from cradle to grave and returns on its course no more. The courier said she was probably a poacher and stole the partridge.

The courier was not able to understand why I had not nerve enough to walk along a crumbling slope with a precipice only thirty feet high below me; but I had no difficulty in understanding it. It is constitutional with me to get nervous and incapable under the probability of getting myself dropped thirty feet on to a pile of rocks; it does not come from culture. Some people are made in one way, and some in another--and the above is my way. Some people who can skirt precipices without a tremor have a strong dread of the dentist’s chair, whereas I was born without any prejudices against the dentist’s chair; when in it I am interested, am not in a hurry, and do not greatly mind the pain. Taken by and large, my style of make has advantages over the other, I think. Few of us are obliged to circumnavigate precipices, but we all have to take a chance at the dental chair.

People who early learn the right way to choose a dentist have their reward. Professional superiority is not everything; it is only part. All dentists talk while they work. They have inherited this from their professional ancestors, the barbers. The dentist who talks well--other things being equal--is the one to choose. He tells anecdotes all the while and keeps his man so interested and entertained that he hardly notices the flight of time. For he not only tells anecdotes that are good in themselves, but he adds nice shadings to them with his instruments as he goes along, and now and then brings out effects which could not be produced with any other kind of tools at all. All the time that such a dentist as this is plowing down into a cavity with that spinning gouge which he works with a treadle, it is observable that he has found out where he has uncovered a nerve down in there, and that he only visits it at intervals, according to the needs of his anecdote, touching it lightly, very lightly and swiftly, now and then, to brighten up some happy conceit in his tale and call a delicate electric attention to it; and all the while he is working gradually and steadily up toward his climax with veiled and consummate art--then at last the spindle stops whirling and thundering in the cavity, and you know that the grand surprise is imminent, now--is hanging in the very air. You can hear your heart beat as the dentist bends over you with his grip on the spindle and his voice diminished to a murmur. The suspense grows bigger--bigger--bigger--your breath stops--then your heart. Then with lightning suddenness the “nub” is sprung and the spindle drives into the raw nerve! The most brilliant surprises of the stage are pale and artificial compared with this.

It is believed by people generally--or at least by many--that the exquisitely sharp sensation which results from plunging the steel point into the raw nerve is pain, but I think that this is doubtful. It is so vivid and sudden that one has no time to examine properly into its character. It is probably impossible, with our human limitations, to determine with certainty whether a sensation of so high and perfect an order as that is pain or whether it is pleasure. Its location brings it under the disadvantage of a common prejudice; and so men mistake it for pain when they might perceive that it is the opposite of that if it were anywhere but in a tooth. I may be in error, but I have experimented with it a great deal and I am satisfied in my own mind that it is not pain. It is true that it always feels like pain, but that proves nothing--ice against a naked back always passes for fire. I have every confidence that I can eventually prove to everyone’s satisfaction that a nerve-stab produces pleasure; and not only that, but the most exquisite pleasure, the most perfect felicity which we are capable of feeling. I would not ask more than to be remembered hereafter as the man who conferred this priceless benefaction upon his race.

11.30.--Approaching the Falls of the Rhône. Canal to the left, walled with compact and beautiful masonry. It is a cut-off. We could pass through it and avoid the Falls--are advised by the Admiral to do it, but all decline, preferring to have a dangerous adventure to talk about.

However....

The truth is, the current began to grow ominously swift--and presently pretty lumpy and perturbed; soon we seemed to be simply flying past the shores. Then all of a sudden three hundred yards of boiling and tossing river burst upon our sight through the veiling tempest of rain! I did not see how our flimsy ark could live through such a place. If we were wrecked, swimming could not save us; the packed multitude of tall humps of water meant a bristling chaos of big rocks underneath, and the first rock we hit would break our bones. If I had been fortified with ignorance I might have wanted to stay in the boat and see the fun; but I have had much professional familiarity with water, and I doubted if there was going to be any fun there. So I said I would get out and walk, and I did. I need not tell anybody at home; I could leave out the Falls of the Rhône; they are not on the map, anyhow. If an adventure worth recording resulted, the Admiral and the courier would have it, and that would answer. I could see it from the bank--nothing could be better; it seemed even providential.

I ran along the bank in the driving rain, and enjoyed the sight to the full. I never saw a finer show than the passage of that boat was, through the fierce turmoil of water. Alternately she rose high and plunged deep, throwing up sheets of foaming spray and shaking them off like a mane. Several times she seemed to fairly bury herself, and I thought she was gone for good, but always she sprang high aloft the next moment, a gallant and stirring spectacle to see. The Admiral’s steering was great. I had not seen the equal of it before.

The boat waited for me down at the Villebois bridge, and I presently caught up and went aboard. There was a stretch of a hundred yards of offensively rough water below the bridge, but it had no dangerous features about it. Still, I was obliged to claim that it had, and that these perils were much greater than the others.

Noon.--A mile of perpendicular precipices--very handsome. On the left, at the termination of this stately wall, a darling little old tree-grown ruin abreast a wooded islet with a large white mansion on it. Near that ruin nature has gotten up a clever counterfeit of one, tree-grown and all that, and, as its most telling feature, has furnished it a battered monolith that stands up out of the underbrush by itself and looks as if men had shaped it and put it there and time had gnawed it and worn it.

This is the prettiest piece of river we have found. All its aspects are dainty and gracious and alluring.

1 P.M.--Château de la Salette. This is the port of the Grotte de la Balme, “one of the seven wonders of Dauphiny.” It is across a plain in the face of a bluff a mile from the river. A grotto is out of the common order, and I should have liked to see this one, but the rains have made the mud very deep and it did not seem well to venture so long a trip through it.

2.15 P.M.--St.-Etienne. On a distant ridge inland a tall openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing on it.

Immense empty freight barges being towed upstream by teams of two and four big horses--not on the bank, but under it; not on the land, but always in the water--sometimes breast deep--and around the big flat bars.

We reached a not very promising-looking village about four o’clock, and concluded to land; munching fruit and filling the hood with pipe smoke had grown monotonous. We could not have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly. The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into the drenching rain and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and there was no fire. Winter overcoats were not sufficient; they had to be supplemented with rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that they knocked up the water like pebble splashes.

With the exception of a very occasional wooden-shod peasant, nobody was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean of our sex. But all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries. To them and the other animals life is serious; nothing interrupts their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river under the window when we arrived, and they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty; another--the mother?--above fifty; the third--grandmother?--so old and worn and gray she could have passed for eighty. They had no waterproofs or rubbers, of course; over their heads and shoulders they wore gunny sacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of the volume reached ground, the rest soaked in on the way.

At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey cart--husband, son, and grandson of those women? He stood up in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough. Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soaked clothing into the cart and stowing them to the man’s satisfaction. The cart being full now, he descended, with his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to sight. We would tar and feather that fellow in America, and ride him on a rail.

When we came down into the public room he had his bottle of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was chomping like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is in everybody’s hands on the Rhône borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of women.

Wednesday.--After breakfast, got under way. Still storming as hard as ever. The whole land looks defeated and discouraged. And very lonely; here and there a woman in the fields. They merely accent the loneliness.