A LITTLE JOURNEY ALONG THE COAST.
CAEN, BAYEUX, ST. LO, COUTANCES.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A NIGHT IN A CAEN ATTIC.
I have always found the act of going away contagious. Who really enjoys being left behind, to mope in a corner of the world others have abandoned? The gay company atop of the coach, as they were whirled beneath the old archway, had left discontent behind; the music of the horn, like that played by the Pied Piper, had the magic of making the feet ache to follow after.
Monsieur Paul was so used to see his world go and come—to greeting it with civility, and to assist at its departure with smiling indifference that the announcement of our own intention to desert the inn within a day or so, was received with unflattering impassivity. We had decided to take a flight along the coast—the month and the weather were at their best as aids to such adventure. We hoped to see the Fête Dieu at Caen. Why not push on to Coutances, where the Fête was still celebrated with a mediaeval splendor? From thence to the great Mont, the Mont St. Michel, it was but the distance of a good steed's galloping—we could cover the stretch of country between in a day's driving, and catch, who knows?—perhaps the June pilgrims climbing the Mont.
"Ah, mesdames! there are duller things in the world to endure than a glimpse of the Normandy coast and the scent of June roses! Idylliquement belle, la côte à ce moment-ci!"
This was all the regret that seasoned Monsieur Paul's otherwise gracious and most graceful of farewells. Why cannot we all attain to an innkeeper's altitude, as a point of view from which to look out upon the world? Why not emulate his calm, when people who have done with us turn their backs and stalk away? Why not, like him, count the pennies as not all the payment received when a pleasure has come which cannot be footed up in the bill? The entire company of the inn household was assembled to see us start. Not a white mouse but was on duty. The cockatoos performed the most perilous of their trapeze accomplishments as a last tribute; the doves cooed mournfully; the monkeys ran like frenzied spirits along their gratings to see the very last of us. Madame Le Mois considerately carried the bantam to the archway, that the lost joy of strutting might be replaced by the pride of preferment above its fellows.
"Adieu, mesdames."
"Au revoir—you will return—tout le monde revient—Guillaume le Conquérant, like Caesar, conquers once to hold forever—remember—"
[Illustration: CHATEAU FONTAINE LE HENRI, NEAR CAEN]
From Monsieur Paul, in quieter, richer tones, came his true farewell, the one we had looked for:
"The evenings in the Marmousets will seem lonely when it rains—you must give us the hope of a quick return. Hope is the food of those who remain behind, as we Normans say!"
The archway darkened the sod for an instant; the next we had passed out into the broad highway. Jean, in his blouse, with Suzette beside him, both jolting along in the lumbering char-à-banc, stared out at us with a vacant-eyed curiosity. We were only two travellers like themselves, along a dusty roadway, on our way to Caen; we were of no particular importance in the landscape, we and our rickety little phaeton. Yet only a moment before, in the inn court-yard, we had felt ourselves to be the pivotal centre of a world wholly peopled with friends! This is what comes to all men who live under the modern curse—the double curse of restlessness and that itching for novelty, which made the old Greek longing for the unknown deity—which is also the only honest prayer of so many fin de siècle souls!
Besides the dust, there were other things abroad on the high-road. What a lot of June had got into the air! The meadows and the orchards were exuding perfumes; the hedge-rows were so many yards of roses and wild grape-vines in blossom. The sea-smells, aromatic, pungent, floated inland to be married, in hot haste, to a perfect harem of clover and locust scents. The charm of the coast was enriched by the homely, familiar scenes of farm-house life. All the country between Dives and Caen seemed one vast farm, beautifully tilled, with its meadow-lands dipping seaward. For several miles, perhaps, the agricultural note alone would be the dominant one, with the fields full of the old, the eternal surprise—the dawn of young summer rising over them. Down the sides of the low hills, the polychrome grain waved beneath the touch of the breeze like a moving sea. Many and vast were the flat-lands; they were wide vistas of color: there were fields that were scarlet with the pomp of poppies, others tinged to the yellow of a Celestial by the feathery mustard; and still others blue as a sapphire's heart from the dye of millions of bluets. A dozen small rivers—or perhaps it was only one—coiled and twisted like a cobra in sinuous action, in and out among the pasture and sea meadows.
As we passed the low, bushy banks, we heard the babel of the washerwomen's voices as they gossiped and beat their clothes on the stones. A fisherman or two gave one a hint that idling was understood here, as elsewhere, as being a fine art for those who possess the talent of never being pressed for time. A peasant had brought his horse to the bank; the river, to both peasant and Percheron, was evidently considered as a personal possession—as are all rivers to those who live near them. There was a naturalness in all the life abroad in the fields that gave this Normandy highroad an incomparable charm. An Arcadian calm, a certain patriarchal simplicity reigned beneath the trees. Children trudged to the river bank with pails and pitchers to be filled; women, with rakes and scythes in hand, crept down from the upper fields to season their mid-day meal with the cooling whiff of the river and sea air. Children tugged at their skirts. In two feet of human life, with kerchief tied under chin, the small hands carrying a huge bunch of cornflowers, how much of great gravity there may be! One such rustic sketch of the future peasant was seriously carrying its bouquet to another small edition seated in a grove of poppies; it might have been a votive offering. Both the children seated themselves, a very earnest conversation ensuing. On the hill-top, near by, the father and mother were also conversing, as they bent over their scythes. Another picture was wheeling itself along the river bank; it was a farmer behind a huge load of green grass; atop of the grasses two moon-faced children had laps and hands crowded with field flowers. Behind them the mother walked, with a rake slung over her shoulder, her short skirts and scant draperies giving to her step a noble freedom. The brush of Vollon or of Breton would have seized upon her to embody the type of one of their rustic beauties, that type whose mingled fierceness and grace make their peasants the rude goddesses of the plough.
Even a rustic river wearies at last of wandering, as an occupation. Miles back we had left the sea; even the hills had stopped a full hour ago, as if they had no taste for the rivalry of cathedral spires. Behold the river now, coursing as sedately as the high-road, between two interminable lines of poplars. Far as the eye could reach stretched a wide, great plain. It was flat as an old woman's palm; it was also as fertile as the city sitting in the midst of its luxuriance has been rich in history.
"Ce pays est très beau, et Caen la plus jolie ville, la plus avenante, la plus gaie, la mieux située, les plus belles rues, les plus beaux bâtiments, les plus belles églises—"
There was no doubt, Charm added, as she repeated the lady's verdict, of the opinion Madame de Sévigné had formed of the town. As we drove, some two hundred years later, through the Caen streets, the charm we found had been perpetuated, but alas! not all of the beauty. At first we were entirely certain that Caen had retained its old loveliness; the outskirts were tricked out with the bloom of gardens and with old houses brave in their armor of vines. The meadows and the great trees of the plain were partly to blame for this illusion; they yielded their place grudgingly to the cobble-stoned streets and the height of dormer windows.
To come back to the world, even to a provincial world, after having lived for a time in a corner, is certain to evoke a pleasurable feeling of elation. The streets of Caen were by no means the liveliest we had driven into; nor did the inhabitants, as at Villerville, turn out en masse to welcome us. The streets, to be quite truthful, were as sedately quiet as any thoroughfares could well be, and proudly call themselves boulevards. The stony-faced gray houses presented a singularly chill front, considering their nationality. But neither the pallor of the streets nor their aspect of provincial calm had power to dampen the sense of our having returned to the world of cities. A girl issuing from a doorway with a netted veil drawn tightly over her rosy cheeks, and the curve of a Parisian bodice, immediately invested Caen with a metropolitan importance.
The most courteous of innkeepers was bending over our carriage-door. He was desolated, but his inn was already full; it was crowded to repletion with people; surely these ladies knew it was the week of the races? Caen was as crowded as the inn; at night many made of the open street their bed; his own court-yard was as filled with men as with farm-wagons. It was altogether hopeless as a situation; as a welcome into a strange city, I have experienced none more arctic. I had, however, forgotten that I was travelling with a conqueror; that when Charm smiled she did as she pleased with her world. The innkeeper was only a man; and since Adam, when has any member of that sex been known to say "No" to a pretty woman? This French Adam, when Charm parted her lips, showing the snow of her teeth, found himself suddenly, miraculously, endowed with a fragment of memory. Tiens, he had forgotten! that very morning a corner of the attic—un bout du toit—had been vacated. If these ladies did not mind mounting to a grenier—an attic, comfortable, although still only an attic!
The one dormer window was on a level with the roof-tops. We had a whole company of "belles voisines," a trick of neighborliness in windows the quick French wit, years ago, was swift to name. These "neighbors" were of every order and pattern. All the world and his mother-in-law were gone to the races;—and yet every window was playing a different scene in the comedy of this life in the sky. Who does not know and love a French window, the higher up in the world of air the better? There are certain to be plants, rows of them in pots, along the wide sill; one can count on a bullfinch or a parrot, as one can on the bébés that appear to be born on purpose to poke their fingers in the cages; there is certain also to be another cage hanging above the flowers—one filled with a fresh lettuce or a cabbage leaf. There is usually a snowy curtain, fringed; just at the parting of the draperies an old woman is always seated, with chin and nose-tip meeting, her bent figure rounding over the square of her knitting-needles.
It was such a window as this that made us feel, before our bonnets were laid aside, that Caen was glad to see us. The window directly opposite was wide open. Instead of one there were half a dozen songsters aloft; we were so near their cages that the cat-bird whistled, to call his master and mistress to witness the intrusion of these strangers. The master brought a hot iron along—he was a tailor and was just in the act of pressing a seam. His wife was scraping carrots, and she tucked her bowl between her knees as she came to stand and gaze across. A cry rose up within the low room. Some one else wished to see the newcomers. The tailor laid aside his iron to lift proudly, far out beyond the cages, the fattest, rosiest offspring that ever was born in an attic. The babe smote its hands for pure joy. We were better than a broken doll—we were alive. The family as a family accepted us as one among them. The man smiled, and so did his wife. Presently both nodded graciously, as if, understanding the cause of our intrusion on their aerial privacy, they wished to present us with the compliment of their welcome. The manners among these garret-windows, we murmured, were really uncommonly good.
"Bonjour, mesdames!" It was the third time the woman had passed, and we were still at the window. Her husband left his seam to join her.
"Ces dames are not accustomed to such heights—à ces hauteurs peut-être?"
The ladies in truth were not, unhappily, always so well lodged; from this height at least one could hope to see a city.
"Ah! ha! c'est gai par ici, n'est-ce pas? One has the sun all to one's self, and air! Ah! for freshness one must climb to an attic in these days, it appears."
It was impossible to be more contented on a height than was this family of tailors; for when not cooking, or washing, or tossing the "bébé" to the birds, the wife stitched and stitched all her husband cut, besides taking a turn at the family socks. Part of this contentment came, no doubt, from the variety of shows and amusements with which the family, as a family, were perpetually supplied. For workers, there were really too many social distractions abroad in the streets; it was almost impossible for the two to meet all the demands on their time. Now it was the jingle of a horse's bell-collar; the tailor, between two snips at a collar, must see who was stopping at the hotel door. Later a horn sounded; this was only the fish vender, the wife merely bent her head over the flowers to be quite sure. Next a trumpet, clear and strong, rang its notes up into the roof eaves; this was something bébé must see and hear—all three were bending at the first throbbing touch of that music on the still air, to see whence it came. Thus you see, even in the provinces, in a French street, something is quite certain to happen; it all depends on the choice one makes in life of a window—of being rightly placed—whether or not one finds life dull or amusing. This tailor had the talent of knowing where to stand, at life's corner—for him there was a ceaseless procession of excitements.
It may be that our neighbor's talent for seeing was catching. It is certain that no city we had ever before looked out upon had seemed as crowded with sights. The whole history of Caen was writ in stone against the blue of the sky. Here, below us, sat the lovely old town, seated in the grasses of her plain. Yonder was her canal, as an artery to keep her pulse bounding in response to the sea; the ship-masts and the drooping sails seemed strange companions for the great trees and the old garden walls. Those other walls William built to cincture the city, Froissart found three centuries later so amazingly "strong, full of drapery and merchandise, rich citizens, noble dames, damsels, and fine churches," for this girdle of the Conqueror's great bastions the eye looks in vain. But William's vow still proclaims its fulfilment; the spire of l'Abbaye aux Hommes, and the Romanesque towers of its twin, l'Abbaye aux Dames, face each other, as did William and Mathilde at the altar—that union that had to be expiated by the penance of building these stones in the air.
Commend me to an attic window to put one in sympathetic relations with cathedral spires! At this height we and they, for a part of their flight upward, at least, were on a common level—and we all know what confidences come about from the accident of propinquity. They seemed to assure us as never before when sitting at their feet, the difficulties they had overcome in climbing heavenward. Every stone that looked down upon the city wore this look of triumph.
In the end it was this Caen in the air—it was this aerial city of finials, of towers, of peaked spires, of carved chimneys, of tree-tops over which the clouds rode; of a plain, melting—like a sea—into the mists of the horizon; this high, bright region peopled with birds and pigeons; of a sky tender, translucent, and as variable as human emotions; of an air that was rapture to breathe, and of nights in which the stars were so close they might almost be handled; it was this free, hilly city of the roofs that is still the Caen I remember best.
There were other features of Caen that were good to see, I also remember. Her street expression, on the whole, was very pleasing. It was singularly calm and composed, even for a city in a plain. But the quiet came, doubtless, from its population being away at the races. The few townspeople who, for obvious reasons, were stay-at-homes, were uncommonly civil; Caen had evidently preserved the tradition of good manners. An army of cripples was in waiting to point the way to the church doors; a regiment of beggars was within them, with nets cast already for the catching of the small fry of our pennies. In the gay, geranium-lit garden circling the side walls of St. Pierre there were many legless soldiers; the old houses we went to see later on in the high street seemed, by contrast, to have survived other wars, those of the Directory and the Mountain, with a really scandalous degree of good fortune. On our way to a still greater church than St. Pierre, to the Abbaye aux Dames, that, like the queen who built her, sits on the throne of a hill—on our way thither we passed innumerable other ancient mansions. None of these were down in the guide books; they were, therefore, invested with the deeper charm of personal discovery. Once away from the little city of the shops, the real Caen came out to greet us. It was now a gray, sad, walled town; behind the walls, level-browed Francis I. windows looked gravely over the tufts of verdure; here was an old gateway; there what might once have been a portcullis, now only an arched wreath of vines; still beyond, a group of severe-looking mansions with great iron bound windows presented the front of miniature fortresses. And everywhere gardens and gardens.
Turn where you would, you would only turn to face verdure, foliage, and masses of flowers. The high walls could neither keep back the odors nor hide the luxuriance of these Caen gardens. These must have been the streets that bewitched Madame de Sévigné. Through just such a maze of foliage Charlotte Corday has also walked, again and again, with her wonderful face aflame with her great purpose, before the purpose ripened into the dagger thrust at Marat's bared breast—that avenging Angel of Beauty stabbing the Beast in his bath. Auber, with his Anacreontic ballads in his young head, would seem more fittingly framed in this old Caen that runs up a hill-side. But women as beautiful as Marie Stuart and the Corday can deal safely in the business of assassination, the world will always continue to aureole their pictures with a garland of roses.
The Abbaye on its hill was reached at last. All Caen lay below us; from the hillside it flowed as a sea rolls away from a great ship's sides. Down below, far below, as if buttressing the town that seemed rushing away recklessly to the waste of the plains, stands the Abbaye's twin-brother, the Aux Hommes. Plains, houses, roof-tops, spires, all were swimming in a sea of golden light; nothing seemed quite real or solid, so vast was the prospect and so ethereal was the medium through which we saw it. Perhaps it was the great contrast between that shimmering, unstable city below, that reeked and balanced itself like some human creature whose dazzled vision had made its footing insecure—it may be that it was this note of contrast which invested this vast structure bestriding the hill, with such astonishing grandeur. I have known few, if any, other churches produce so instantaneous an effect of a beauty that was one with austerity. This great Norman is more Puritan than French: it is Norman Gothic with a Puritan severity.
The sound of a deep sonorous music took us quickly within. It was as mysterious a music as ever haunted a church aisle. The vast and snowy interior was as deserted as a Presbyterian church on a week-day. Yet the sound of the rich, strong voices filled all the place. There was no sound of tingling accompaniment: there was no organ pipe, even, to add its sensuous note of color. There was only the sound of the voices, as they swelled, and broke, and began afresh.
The singing went on.
It was a slow "plain chant." Into the great arches the sonorous chanting beat upon the ear with a rhythmic perfection that, even without the lovely flavor of its sweetness, would have made a beauty of its own. In this still and holy place, with the company of the stately Norman arches soaring aloft—beneath the sombre glory of the giant aisle—the austere simplicity of this chant made the heart beat, one knew not why, and the eyes moisten, one also knew not why.
We had followed the voices. They came, we found, from within the choir.
A pattering of steps proclaimed we were to go no farther.
"Not there, my ladies—step this way, one only enters the choir by going into the hospital."
The voice was low and sweet; the smile, a spark of divinity set in a woman's face; and the whole was clothed in a nun's garb.
We followed the fluttering robes; we passed out once more into the sunlit parvis. We spoke to the smile and it answered: yes, the choir was reserved for the Sisters—they must be able to approach it from the convent and the hospital; it had always, since the time of Mathilde, been reserved for the nuns; would we pass this way? The way took us into an open vaulted passage, past a grating where sat a white-capped Sister, past a group of girls and boys carrying wreaths and garlands—they were making ready for the Fête-Dieu, our nun explained—past, at the last, a series of corridors through which, faintly at first, and then sweeter and fuller, there struck once more upon our ears the sounds of the deep and resonant chanting.
The black gown stopped all at once. The nun was standing in front of a green curtain. She lifted it. This was what we saw. The semicircle of a wide apse. Behind, rows upon rows of round arches. Below the arches, in the choir stalls, a long half-circle of stately figures. The figures were draped from head to foot. When they bent their heads not an inch of flesh was visible, except a few hands here and there that had escaped the long, wide sleeves. All these figures were motionless; they were as immobile as statues; occasionally, at the end of a "Gloria," all turned to face the high altar. At the end of the "Amen" a cloud of black veils swept the ground. Then for several measures of the chant the figures were again as marble. In each of the low, round arches, a stately woman, tall and nobly planned, draped like a goddess turned saint, stood and chanted to her Lord. Had the Norman builders carved these women, ages ago, standing about Mathilde's tomb, those ancient sculptures could not have embodied, in more ideal image, the type of womanly renunciation and of a saint's fervor of exaltation.
We left them, with the rich chant still full upon their lips, with heads bent low, calm as graven images. It was only the bloom on a cheek, here and there, that made one certain of the youth entombed within these nuns' garb.
"Happy, mesdames? Oh, mais très heureuses, toutes—there are no women so happy as we. See how they come to us, from all the country around. En voilà une—did you remark the pretty one, with the book, seated, all in white? She is to be a full Sister in a month. She comes from a noble family in the south. She was here one day, she saw the life of the Sisters, of us all working here, among the poor soldiers—elle a vu ça, et pour tout de bon, s'est donnée à Dieu!"
The smile of our nun was rapturous. She was proving its source. Once more we saw the young countess who had given herself to her God. An hour later, when we had reached the hospital wards, her novice's robes were trailing the ground. She was on her knees in the very middle of the great bare room. She was repeating the office of the hour, aloud, with clasped hands and uplifted head. On her lovely young face there was the glow of a divine ecstasy. All the white faces from the long rows of the white beds were bending toward her; to one even in all fulness of strength and health that girlish figure, praying beside the great vase of the snowy daisies, with the glow that irradiated the sweet, pure face, might easily enough have seemed an angel's.
As companions for our tour of the grounds we had two young Englishmen. Both eyed the nuns in the distance of the corridors and the gardens with the sharpened glances all men level at the women who have renounced them. It is a mystery no man ever satisfactorily fathoms.
"Queer notion, this, a lot of women shutting themselves up," remarked the younger of the two. "In England, now, they'd all go in for being old maids, drinking tea and coddling cats, you know."
"I wonder which are the happier, your countrywomen or these Sisters, who, in renouncing the world devote their lives to serving it. See, over yonder" and I nodded to a scene beneath the wide avenue of the limes. Two tall Augustines were supporting a crippled old man; they were showing him some fresh garden-beds. Beyond was a gayer group. Some of the lay sisters were tugging at a huge basket of clothes, fresh from the laundry. Running across the grass, with flying draperies, two nuns, laughing as they ran, each striving to outfoot the other, were hastening to their rescue.
"They keep their bloom, running about like that; only healthy nuns I ever saw."
"That's because they have something better than cats to coddle."
"Ah, ha! that's not bad. It's a slow suicide, all the same. But here we are, at the top; it's a fine outlook, is it not?"
The young man panted as he reached the top of the Maze, one of the chief glories of the old Abbaye grounds. He had a fair and sensitive face; a weak product on the whole, he seemed, compared with the nobly-built, vigorous-bodied nuns crowding the choir-stalls yonder. Instead of that long, slow suicide, surely these women should be doing their greater work of reproducing a race. Even an open-air cell seems to me out of place in our century. It will be entirely out of fashion in time, doubtless, as the mediaeval cell has gone along with the old castle life, whose princely mode of doing things made a nunnery the only respectable hiding-place for the undowered daughters.
As we crept down into Caen, it was to find it thick with the dust of twilight. The streets were dense with other things besides the thickened light. The Caen world was crowding homeward; all the boulevards and side streets were alive with a moving throng of dusty, noisy, weary holidaymakers. The town was abroad in the streets to hear the news of the horses, and to learn the history of the betting.
Although we had gone to church instead of doing the races, many of those who had peopled the gay race-track came back to us. The table d'hôte, at our inn that night, was as noisy as a Parisian cafe. It was scarcely as discreet, I should say. On our way to our attic that night, the little corridors made us a really amazing number of confidences.
It was strange, but all the shoes appeared to have come in pairs of twos. Never was there such a collection of boots in couples. Strange it was, also, to see how many little secrets these rows of candid shoe-leather disclosed. Here a pert, coquettish pair of ties were having as little in common as possible with the stout, somewhat clumsy walking-boots next them. In the two just beyond, at the next door, how the delicate, slender buttoned kids leaned over, floppingly, to rest on the coarse, yet strong, hobnailed clumpers!
Shabbier and shabbier grew the shoes, as we climbed upward. With each pair of stairs we seemed to have left a rung in the ladder of fortune behind. But even the very poorest in pocket had brought his little extravagance with him to the races.
The only genuine family party had taken refuge, like ourselves, in the attic.
At the very next door to our own, Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé proclaimed, by the casting of their dusty shoes, that they also, like the rest of the world, had come to Caen to see the horses run.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A DAY AT BAYEUX AND ST. LO.
Caen seated in its plain, wearing its crown of steeples—this was our last glimpse of the beautiful city. Our way to Bayeux was strewn thick with these Normandy jewels; with towns smaller than Caen; with Gothic belfries; with ruined priories, and with castles, stately even when tottering in decay. When the last castle was lost in a thicket, we discovered that our iron horse was stopping in the very middle of a field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city, built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with grass and daisies, was a very finished evidence of civilization at high pressure.
But a lane as the beginning of a cathedral town!
Evidently Bayeux has had a Ruskinian dread of steam-whistles, for this ancient seat of bishops has succeeded in retaining the charms of its old rustic approaches, whatever else it may have sacrificed on the altar of modernness.
An harangue, at the door of the quaint old Normandy omnibus, by the driver of the same, was proof that the lesson of good oratory, administered by generations of bishops, had not been lost on the Bayeux inhabitants. Two rebellious English tourists furnished the text for the driver's sermon; they were showing, with all the naive pride of pedestrians, their intention of footing the distance between the station and the cathedral. This was an independence of spirit no Norman could endure to see. What? these gentlemen proposed to walk, in the sun, through clouds of dust, when here was a carriage, with ladies for companions, at their command? The coach had come down the hill on purpose to conduct Messieurs les voyageurs; how did these gentlemen suppose a père de famille was to make his living if the fashion of walking came in? And the rusty red vest was thumbed by the gnarled hand of the father, who was also an orator; and a high-peaked hat swept the ground before the hard-hearted gentlemen. All the tragedy of the situation had come about from the fact that the tourists, also, had gotten themselves up in costume. When two fine youths have risen early in the day to put on checked stockings, leggings, russet walking-shoes, and a plaited coat with a belt, such attire is one to be lived up to. Once in knickerbockers and a man's getting into an omnibus is really too ignominious! With such a road before two sets of such well-shaped calves—a road all shaped and graded—this, indeed, would be flying in the face of a veritable providence of bishop-builders intent on maintaining pastoral effects.
The knickerbockers relentlessly strode onward; the driver had addressed himself to hearts of stone. But he had not yet exhausted his quiver of appeal. Englishmen walk, well! there's no accounting for the taste of Britons who are also still half savages; but even a barbarian must eat. Half-way up the hill, the rattle of the loose-jointed vehicle came to a dead stop. With great gravity the guard descended from his seat; this latter he lifted to take from the entrails of the old vehicle a handful of hand-bills. He, the horse, the omnibus, and we, all waited for, what do you suppose? To besprinkle the walking Englishmen as they came within range with a shower of circulars announcing that at "midi, chez Nigaud, il y aura un dejeuner chaud."
The driver turned to look in at the window—and to nod as he turned—he felt so certain of our sympathy; had he not made sure of them at last?
A group of gossamer caps beneath a row of sad, gray-faced houses was our Bayeux welcome. The faces beneath the caps watched our approach with the same sobriety as did the old houses—they had the antique Norman seriousness of aspect. The noise we made with the clatter and rattle of our broken-down vehicle seemed an impertinence, in the face of such severe countenances. We might have been entering a deserted city, except for the presence of these motionless Normandy figures. The cathedral met us at the threshold of the city: magnificent, majestic, a huge gray mountain of stone, but severe in outline, as if the Norman builders had carved on the vast surface of its facade an imprint of their own grave earnestness.
We were somewhat early for the hot breakfast at Nigaud's. There was, however, the appetizing smell of soup, with a flourishing pervasiveness of onion in the pot, to sustain the vigor of an appetite whetted by a start at dawn. The knickerbockers came in with the omelette. But one is not a Briton on his travels for nothing; one does not leave one's own island to be the dupe of French inn-keepers. The smell of the soup had not departed with our empty plates, and the voice of the walkers was not of the softest when they demanded their rights to be as odorous as we. There is always a curiously agreeable sensation, to an American, in seeing an Englishman angry; to get angry in public is one thing we do badly; and in his cup of wrath our British brother is sublime—he is so superbly unconscious—and so contemptuous—of the fact that the world sometimes finds anger ridiculous.
At the other end of the long and narrow table two other travellers were seated, a man and a woman. But food, to them, it was made manifestly evident, was a matter of the most supreme indifference. They were at that radiant moment of life when eating is altogether too gross a form of indulgence. For these two were at the most interesting period of French courtship—just after the wedding ceremony, when, with the priest's blessing, had come the consent of their world and of tradition to their making the other's acquaintance. This provincial bride and her husband of a day were beginning, as all rustic courting begins, by a furtive holding of hands; this particular couple, in view of our proximity and their own mutual embarrassment, had recourse to the subterfuge of desperate lunges at the other's fingers, beneath the table-cloth. The screen, as a screen, did not work. It deceived no one—as the bride's pale-gray dress and her flowery bonnet also deceived no one—save herself. This latter, in certain ranks of life, is the bride's travelling costume, the world over. And the world over, it is worn by the recently wedded with the profound conviction that in donning it they have discovered the most complete of all disguises.
This bride and groom were obviously in the first rapture of mutual discovery. The honey in their moon was not fresher than their views of the other's tastes and predilections.
"Ah—ah—you like to travel quickly—to see everything, to take it all in a gulp—so do I, and then to digest at one's leisure."
The bride was entirely of this mind. Only, she murmured, there were other things one must not do too quickly—one must go slow in matters of the heart—to make quite sure of all the stages.
But her husband was at her throat, that is, his eyes and lips were, as he answered, so that all the table might partake of his emotion—"No, no, the quicker the heart feels the quicker love comes. Tiens, voyons, mon amie, toi-même, tu m'as confié"—and the rest was lost in the bride's ear.
Apparently we were to have them, these brides, for the rest of our journey, in all stages and of all ages! Thus far none others had appeared as determined as were these two honey-mooners, that all the world should share their bliss. They were cracking filberts with their disengaged fingers, the other two being closely interlocked, in quite scandalous openness, when we left them.
That was the only form of excitement that greeted us in the quiet Bayeux streets. The very street urchins invited repose; the few we saw were seated sedately on the threshold of their own door-steps, frequent sallies abroad into this quiet city having doubtless convinced them of the futility of all sorties. The old houses were their carved facades as old ladies wear rich lace—they had reached the age when the vanity of personal adornment had ceased to inflate. The great cathedral, towering above the tranquil town, wore a more conscious air; its significance was too great a contrast to the quiet city asleep at its feet. In these long, slow centuries the towers had grown to have the air of protectors.
The famous tapestries we went to see later, might easily enough have been worked yesterday, in any one of the old mediaeval houses; Mathilde and her hand-maidens would find no more—not so much—to distract and disturb them now in this still and tranquil town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. She was far more Norse then than Norman; she was Scandinavian to the core; even her nobles spoke in harsh Norse syllables; they were as little French as it was possible to be, and yet govern a people.
Mathilde, when she toiled over her frame, like all great writers, was doubtless quite unconscious she was producing a masterpiece. She was, however, in point of fact, the very first among the great French realists. No other French writer has written as graphically as she did with her needle, of the life and customs of their day. That long scroll of tapestry, for truth and a naive perfection of sincerity—where will you find it equalled or even approached? It is a rude Homeric epic; and I am not quite certain that it ought not to rank higher than even some of the more famous epics of the world—since Mathilde had to create the mould of art into which she poured her story. For who had thought before her of making women's stitches write or paint a great historical event, crowded with homely details which now are dubbed archaeological veracities?
Bayeux and its tapestry; its grave company of antique houses; its glorious cathedral dominating the whole—what a lovely old background against which poses the eternal modernness of the young noon sun! The history of Bayeux is commonly given in a paragraph. Our morning's walk had proved to us it was the kind of town that does more to re-create the historic past than all the pages of a Guizot or a Challamel.
The bells that were ringing out the hour of high-noon from the cathedral towers at Bayeux were making the heights of St. Lo, two hours later, as noisy as a village fair. The bells, for rivals, had the clatter of women's tongues. I think I never, before or since, have beheld so lively a company of washerwomen as were beating their clothes in Vire River. The river bends prettily just below the St. Lo heights, as if it had gone out of its way to courtesy to a hill. But even the waters, in their haste to be polite, could not course beneath the great bridge as swiftly as ran those women's tongues. There were a good hundred of them at work beneath the washing-sheds. Now, these sheds, anywhere in France, are really the open-air club room of the French peasant woman; the whole dish of the village gossip is hung out to dry, having previously been well soused and aired, along with the blouses and the coarse chemises. The town of St. Lo had evidently furnished these club members of the washing-stones with some fat dish of gossip—the heads were as close as currants on a stem, as they bent in groups over the bright waters. They had told it all to the stream; and the stream rolled the volume of the talk along as it carried along also the gay, sparkling reflections of the life and the toil that bent over it—of the myriad reflections of those moving, bare-armed figures, of the brilliant kerchiefs, of the wet blue and gray jerseys, and of the long prismatic line of the damp, motley-hued clothes that were fluttering in the wind.
The bells' clangor was an assurance that something was happening on top of the hill. Just what happened was as altogether pleasing a spectacle, after a long and arduous climb up a hillside, as it has often been my good fortune to encounter.
The portals of the church of Notre Dame were wide open. Within, as we looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit by the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale as the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others swinging incense that thickened the dusk. Suddenly, like a vision, the white veils passed out into the sunlight, and we saw that the faces beneath the veils were young and comely. The faces were still alternately lighted by the flare of the burning tapers and the glare of the noon sun. The long procession ended at last in a straggling group of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town, in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys' singing.
Whether it was a pardon, or a fête, or a first communion, we never knew. But the town of St. Lo is ever gloriously lighted, for us, with a nimbus of young heads, such as encircled the earlier madonnas.
After such a goodly spectacle, the rest of the town was a tame morsel. We took a parting sniff of the incense still left in the eastern end of the church's nave; there was a bit of good glass in a window to reward us. Outside the church, on the west from the Petite Place, was a wide outlook over the lovely vale of the Vire, with St. Lo itself twisting and turning in graceful postures down the hillside.
On the same prospect two kings have looked, and before the kings a saint. St. Lo or St. Laudus himself, who gave his name to the town, must, in the sixth century, have gazed on virgin forests stretching away from the hill far as the eye could reach. Charlemagne, three hundred years later, in his turn, found the site a goodly one, one to tempt men to worship the Creator of such beauty, for here he founded the great Abbey of St. Croix, long since gone with the monks who peopled it. Louis XI, that mystic wearing the warrior's helmet, set his seal of approval on the hill, by sending the famous glass yonder in the cathedral, when the hill and the St. Lo people beat the Bretons who had come to capture both.
Like saint, and kings, and monks, and warriors, we in our turn crept down the hill. For we also were done with the town.
CHAPTER XXV.
A DINNER AT COUTANCES.
The way from St. Lo to Coutances is a pleasant way. There is no map of the country that will give you even a hint of its true character, any more than from a photograph you can hope to gain an insight into the moral qualities of a pretty woman.
Here, at last, was the ideal Normandy landscape. It was a country with a savage look—a savage that had been trained to follow the plough. Even in its color it had retained the true barbarians' instinct for a good primary. Here were no melting-yellow mustard-fields, nor flame-lit poppied meadows, nor blue-bells lifting their baby-blue eyes out of the grain. All the land was green. Fields, meadows, forests, plains—all were green, green, green. The features of the landscape had changed with this change in coloring. The slim, fragile grace of slim trees and fragile cliffs had been replaced by trees of heroic proportions, and by outlines nobly rounded and full—like the breasts of a mother. The whole country had an astonishing look of vigor—of the vigor which comes with rude strength; and it had that charm which goes with all untamed beauty—the power to sting one into a sense of agitated enjoyment.
Even the farm-houses had been suddenly transformed into fortresses. Each one of the groups of the farm enclosures had its outer walls, its miniature turrets, and here and there its rounded bastions. Each farm, apparently, in the olden days had been a citadel unto itself. The Breton had been a very troublesome neighbor for many a long century; every ploughman, until a few hundred years ago, was quite likely to turn soldier at a second's notice—every true Norman must look to his own sword to defend his hearth-stone. Such is the story those stone turrets that cap the farm walls tell you—each one of these turrets was an open lid through which the farmer could keep his eye on Brittany.
Meanwhile, along the roads as we rushed swiftly by, a quieter life was passing. The farm wagons were jogging peacefully along on a high-road as smooth as a fine lady's palm—and as white. The horses were harnessed one before the other, in interminable length of line. Sometimes six, sometimes eight, even so many as ten, marched with great gravity, and with that majestic dignity only possible to full-blooded Percherons, one after the other. They each wore a saddle-cloth of blue sheepskin. On their mottled haunches this bit of color made their polished coats to gleam like unto a lizards' skin.
Meanwhile, also, we were nearing Coutances. The farm-houses were fortresses no longer; the thatched roofs were one once more with the green of the high roads; for even in the old days there was a great walled city set up on a hill, to which refuge all the people about for miles could turn for protection.
A city that is set on a hill! That for me is commonly recommendation enough. Such a city, so set, promises at the very least the dual distinction of looking up as well as looking down; it is the nearer heaven, and just so much the farther removed from earth.
Coutances, for a city with its head in the air, was surprisingly friendly. It went out of its way to make us at home. At the very station, down below in the plain, it had sent the most loquacious of coach-drivers to put us in immediate touch with its present interests. All the city, as the coarse blue blouse, flourishing its whip, took pains to explain, was abroad in the fields; the forests, tiens, down yonder through the trees, we could see for ourselves how the young people were making the woods as crowded as a ball-room. The city, as a city, was stripping the land and the trees bare—it would be as bald as a new-born babe by the morrow. But then, of a certainty, we also had come for the fête—or, and here a puzzled look of doubt beclouded the provincial's eyes—might we, perchance, instead, have come for the trial? Mais non, pas çà, these ladies had never come for that, since they did not even know the court was sitting, now, this very instant, at Coutances. And—sapristi! but there was a trial going on—one to make the blood curdle; he himself had not slept, the rustic coachman added, as he shivered beneath his blouse, all the night before—the blood had run so cold in his veins.
The horse and the road were all the while going up the hill. The road was easily one that might have been the path of warriors; the walls, still lofty on the side nearest the town, bristled with a turret or a bastion to remind us Coutances had not been set on a hill for mere purposes of beauty. The ramparts of the old fortifications had been turned into a broad promenade. Even as we jolted past, beneath the great breadth of the trees' verdure we could see how gloriously the prospect widened—the country below reaching out to the horizon like the waters of a sea that end only in indefiniteness.
The city itself seemed to grow out of the walls and the trees. Here and there a few scattered houses grouped themselves as if meaning to start a street; but a maze of foliage made a straight line impossible. Finally a large group of buildings, with severe stone faces, took a more serious plunge away from the vines; they had shaken themselves free and were soon soberly ranging themselves into the parallel lines of narrow city streets.
It was a pleasant surprise to find that, for once, a Norman blouse had told the truth; for here were the people of Coutances coming up from the fields to prove it. In all these narrow streets a great multitude of people were passing us; some were laden with vines, others with young forest trees, and still others with rude garlands of flowers. The peasant women's faces, as the bent figures staggered beneath a young fir-tree, were purple, but their smiles were as gay as the wild flowers with which the stones were thickly strewn. Their words also were as rough:
"Diantre—mais c'e lourd!"
"E-ben, e toi, tu n' bougeons point, toi!"
And the nearest fir-tree carrier to our carriage wheels cracked a swift blow over the head of a vine-bearer, who being but an infant of two, could not make time with the swift foot of its mother.
The smell of the flowers was everywhere. Fir-trees perfumed the air. Every doorstep was a garden. The courtyards were alive with the squat figures of capped maidens, wreathing and twisting greens and garlands. And in the streets there was such a noise as was never before heard in a city on a hill-top.
For Coutances was to hold its great fête on the morrow.
It was a relief to turn in from the noise and hubbub to the bright courtyard of our inn. The brightness thereof, and of the entire establishment, indeed, appeared to find its central source in the brilliant eyes of our hostess. Never was an inn-keeper gifted with a vision at once so omniscient and so effulgent. Those eyes were everywhere; on us, on our bags, our bonnets, our boots; they divined our wants, and answered beforehand our unuttered longings. We had come far? the eyes asked, burning a hole through our gossamer evasions; from Paris, perhaps—a glance at our bonnets proclaimed the eyes knew all; we were here for the fête, to see the bishop on the morrow; that was well; we were going on to the Mont; and the eyes scented the shortness of our stay by a swift glance at our luggage.
"Numéro quatre, au troisième!"
There was no appeal possible. The eyes had penetrated the disguise of our courtesy; we were but travellers of a night; the top story was built for such as we.
But such a top story, and such a chamber therein! A great, wide, low room; beams deep and black, with here and there a brass bit hanging; waxed floors, polished to mirrory perfection; a great bed clad in snowy draperies, with a snow-white duvet of gigantic proportions. The walls were gray with lovely bunches of faded rosebuds flung abroad on the soft surface; and to give a quaint and antique note to the whole, over the chimney was a bit of worn tapestry with formidable dungeon, a Norman keep in the background, and well up in front, a stalwart young master of the hounds, with dogs in leash, of the heavy Norman type of bulging muscle and high cheekbones.
Altogether, there were worse fates in the world than to be travellers of a night, with the destiny of such a room as part of the fate.
When we descended the steep, narrow spiral of steps to the dining-room, it was to find the eyes of our hostess brighter than ever. The noise in the streets had subsided. It was long after dusk, and Coutances was evidently a good provincial. But in the gay little dining-room there was an astonishing bustle and excitement.
The fête and the court had brought a crowd of diners to the inn-table; when we were all seated we made quite a company at the long, narrow board. The candles and lamps lit up any number of Vandyke pointed beards, of bald heads, of loosely-tied cravats, and a few matronly bosoms straining at the buttons of silk holiday gowns. For the Fête-Dieu had brought visitors besides ourselves from all the country round; and then "a first communion is like a marriage, all the relatives must come, as doubtless we knew," was a baldhead's friendly beginning of his soup and his talk, as we took our seats beside him.
With the appearance of the potage conversation, like a battle between foes eager for contest, had immediately engaged itself. The setting of the table and the air of companionship pervading the establishment were aiders and abettors to immediate intercourse. Nothing could be prettier than the Caen bowls with their bunches of purple phlox and spiked blossoms. Even a metropolitan table might have taken a lesson from the perfection of the lighting of the long board. In order that her guests should feel the more entirely at home, our brilliant-eyed hostess came in with the soup; she took her place behind it at the head of the table.
It was evident the merchants from Cherbourg who had come as witnesses to the trial, had had many a conversational bout before now with madame's ready wit. So had two of the town lawyers. Even the commercial gentlemen, for once, were experiencing a brief moment of armed suspense, before they flung themselves into the arena of talk. At first, or it would never have been in the provinces, this talk at the long table, everyone broke into speech at once. There was a flood of words; one's sense of hearing was stunned by the noise. Gradually, as the cider and the thin red wine were passed, our neighbors gave digestion a chance; the din became less thick with words; each listened when the other talked. But, as the volume of speech lessened, the interest thickened. It finally became concentrated, this interest, into true French fervor when the question of the trial was touched on.
"They say D'Alençon is very clever. He pleads for Filon, the culprit, to-night, does he not?"
"Yes, poor Filon—it will go hard with him. His crime is a black one."
"I should think it was—implicating le petit!"
"Dame! the judge doesn't seem to be of your mind."
"Ah—h!" cried a florid Vandyke-bearded man, the dynamite bomb of the table, exploding with a roar of rage. "Ah—h, cré nom de Dieu!—Messieurs les presidents are all like that; they are always on the side of the innocent—"
"Till they prove them guilty."
"Guilty! guilty!" the bomb exploded in earnest now. "How many times in the annals of crime is a man guilty—really guilty? They should search for the cause—and punish that. That is true justice. The instigator, the instigator—he is the true culprit. Inheritances—voilà les vrais coupables. But when are such things investigated? It is ever the innocent who are punished. I know something of that—I do."
"Allons—allons!" cried the table, laughing at the beard's vehemence. "When were you ever under sentence?"
"When I was doing my duty," the beard hurled back with both arms in the air; "when I was doing my three years—I and my comrade; we were convicted—punished—for an act of insubordination we never committed. Without a trial, without a chance of defending ourselves, we were put on two crumbs of bread and a glass of water for two months. And we were innocent—as innocent as babes, I tell you."
The table was as still as death. The beard had proved himself worthy of this compliment; his voice was the voice of drama, and his gestures such as every Frenchman delights in beholding and executing. Every ear was his, now.
"I have no rancor. I am, by nature, what God made me, a peaceable man, but"—here the voice made a wild crescendo—"if I ever meet my colonel—gare à lui! I told him so. I waited two years, two long years, till I was released; then I walked up to him" (the beard rose here, putting his hand to his forehead), "I saluted" (the hand made the salute), "and I said to him, 'Mon colonel, you convicted me, on false evidence, of a crime I never committed. You punished me. It is two years since then. But I have never forgotten. Pray to God we may never meet in civil life, for then yours would end!"
"Allons, allons! A man after all must do his duty. A colonel—he can't go into details!" remonstrated the hostess, with her knife in the air.
"I would stick him, I tell you, as I would a pig—or a Prussian! I live but for that!"
"Monstre!" cried the table in chorus, with a laugh, as it took its wine. And each turned to his neighbor to prove the beard in the wrong.
"Of what crime is the defendant guilty—he who is to be tried to-night?" Charm asked of a silent man, with sweet serious eyes and a rough gray beard, seated next her. Of all the beards at the table, this one alone had been content with listening.
"Of fraud—mademoiselle—of fraud and forgery." The man had a voice as sweet as a church bell, and as deep. Every word he said rang out slowly, sonorously. The attention of the table was fixed in an instant. "It is the case of a Monsieur Filon, of Cherbourg. He is a cider merchant. He has cheated the state, making false entries, etc. But his worst crime is that he has used as his accomplice un tout petit jeune homme—a lad of barely fifteen—"
"It is that that will make it go hard for him with the jury—"
"Hard!" cried the ex-soldier, getting red at once with the passion of his protest—"hard—it ought to condemn him, to guillotine him. What are juries for if they don't kill such rascals as he?"
"Doucement, doucement, monsieur," interrupted the bell-note of the merchant. "One doesn't condemn people without hearing both sides. There may be extenuating circumstances!"
"Yes—there are. He is a merchant. All merchants are thieves. He does as all others do—only he was found out."
A protesting murmur now rose from the table, above which rang once more, in clear vibrations, the deep notes of the merchant.
"Ah—h, mais—tous voleurs—non, not all are thieves. Commerce conducted on such principles as that could not exist. Credit is not founded on fraud, but on trust."
"Très bien, très bien," assented the table. Some knives were thumped to emphasize the assent.
"As for stealing"—the rich voice continued, with calm judicial slowness—"I can understand a man's cheating the state once, perhaps—yielding to an impulse of cupidity. But to do as ce Monsieur Filon has done—he must be a consummate master of his art—for his processes are organized robbery."
"Ah—h, but robbery against the state isn't the same thing as robbing an individual," cried the explosive, driven into a corner.
"It is quite the same—morally, only worse. For a man who robs the state robs everyone—including himself."
"That's true—perfectly true—and very well put." All the heads about the table nodded admiringly; their hostess had expressed the views of them all. The company was looking now at the gray beard with glistening eyes; he had proved himself master of the argument, and all were desirous of proving their homage. Not one of the nice ethical points touched on had been missed; even the women had been eagerly listening, following, criticising. Here was a little company of people gathered together from rustic France, meeting, perhaps, for the first time at this board. And the conversation had, from the very beginning, been such as one commonly expects to hear only among the upper ranks of metropolitan circles. Who would have looked to see a company of Norman provincials talking morality, and handling ethics with the skill of rhetoricians?
Most of our fellow-diners, meanwhile, were taking their coffee in the street. Little tables were ranged close to the house-wall. There was just room for a bench beside the table, and then the sidewalk ended.
"Shall you be going to the trial to-night?" courteously asked the merchant who had proven himself a master in debate, of Charm. He had lifted his hat before he sat down, bowing to her as if he had been in a ball-room.
"It will be fine to-night—it is the opening of the defence," he added, as he placed carefully two lumps of sugar in his cup.
"It's always finer at night—what with the lights and the people," interpolated the landlady, from her perch on the door-sill. "If ces dames wish to go, I can show them the way to the galleries. Only," she added, with a warning tone, her growing excitement obvious at the sense of the coming pleasure, "it is like the theatre. The earlier we get there the better the seat. I go to get my hat." And the door swallowed her up.
"She is right—it is like a theatre," soliloquized the merchant—"and so is life. Poor Filon!"
We should have been very content to remain where we were. The night had fallen; the streets, as they lost themselves in dim turnings, in mysterious alleyways, and arches that seemed grotesquely high in the vague blur of things, were filled for us with the charm of a new and lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone; that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between the slit made by the street a deep, vast chasm opened; it was the night filling the great width of sky, and the mists that shrouded the hill, rising out of the sleeping earth. There was only one single line of light; a long deep glow was banding the horizon; it was a bit of flame the dusk held up, like a fading torch, to show where the sun had reigned.
In and out of this dusk the townspeople came and went. Away from the mellow lights, streaming past the open inn doors, the shapes were only a part of the blur; they were vague, phantasmal masses, clad in coarse draperies. As they passed into the circle of light, the faces showed features we had grown to know—the high cheekbones, the ruddy tones, the deep-set, serious eyes, and firm mouths, with lips close together. The air on this hill-top must be of excellent quality; the life up here could scarcely be so hard as in the field villages. For the women looked less worn, and less hideously old, and in the men's eyes there was not so hard and miserly a glittering.
Almost all, young or old, were bearing strange burdens. Some of the men were carrying huge floral crosses; the women were laden with every conceivable variety of object—with candlesticks, vases, urns, linen sheets, rugs, with chairs even.
"They are helping to dress the reposoirs, they must all be in readiness for the morning," answered our friend, still beside us, when we asked the cause of this astonishing spectacle.
Everywhere garlands and firs, leaves, flowers, and wreaths; people moving rapidly; the carriers of the crosses stopping to chat for an instant with groups working at some mysterious scaffolding—all shapes in darkness. Everywhere, also, there was the sweet, aromatic scent of the greens and the pines abroad in the still, clear air of the summer night.
This was the perfume and these the dim pictures that were our company along the narrow Coutances streets.