“Comment?” she repeated peevishly. “I do not understand you.”
—The man still tinkered at his pots.
I chaffed them in my best Romany, but they took no further heed. I tried French. I said I was a Gipsy come from over the seas, with news of their brothers in America.——
“But we’re not Gipsies,” said they; “we live in Boulogne, and we’re busy.”
—I declare I never was so snubbed in my life!
’Twas but six quarters of an hour on foot to Neuchâtel, the carpenter told us.—The road in the late afternoon was full of fine carriages and shabby carts; and in sight of Neuchâtel we passed men and women going home from work. We asked one man if there was an inn in the town.——
“Il-y-a-douze,” he answered, with great effort, and hurried on, so that we had not time to tell him we too could speak English.
We wondered so small a town should be so rich in inns. But douze, it seemed, was the English way of saying deux. A woman standing in the first doorway assured us there were but two—one opposite the church, and another, the Pas de Cœur—we understood her to say, around the corner.—At the foot of the hill we found the first, with Boarding-House in large black letters on its newly whitewashed walls. As there never was any sentiment in a Boarding-House except in Dr. Holmes’ books, or any cheapness in a foreign hotel with an English sign, we looked for the other inn. But when we had wheeled up the street and down the street, until its want of heart became ours, we gave up the search and returned to the Boarding-House.
A FAT old landlady received us, after a glance at the tricycle had reassured her that to take us in did not mean to be taken in herself. She promised us dinner at six, and a room in the course of the evening. In the café, or outer kitchen, where she gave us chairs, an elderly Cinderella was blacking boots and peeling potatoes in the fireplace; a pretty girl was carrying tumblers and clean linen to a near room; another, with a big baby in her arms, gossiped with neighbours on the front steps. The landlady hurried back to the small kitchen, through the open door of which we could see her bustling about among the pots and pans.
Presently a little man, in white trousers and brown velveteen waistcoat, wandered in from the stable-yard to clink glasses with a friend at the bar, and drink without pause two mugs of beer and one glass of brandy. Then he gave us a dance and a song.
And then there came trooping into the room huntsmen with dogs and guns, and servants bearing long poles strung with rabbits, and three ladies in silks and gold chains and ribbons, and a small boy. The huntsmen were given cognac and absinthe; the ladies were led away through a narrow passage, but they returned in a minute, with pitchers which they themselves filled from a barrel near the kitchen-door.
These were people of quality, it was plain. They had come in a carriage, and a private dressing-room was found for them. But for us, who had arrived on a machine we worked ourselves, a basin was set in the fireplace, where we too made a toilet as best we could.—At seven the landlady, with upraised hands, rushed from the kitchen to say that——
“Mon Dieu! the mutton cutlets Monsieur and Madame ordered have gone like a dream. What is to be done?”
—What, indeed? And all the time we had supposed her preparations were for us.
A little later, when dinner still seemed a remote possibility, in searching for our bag which had been carried off, I came by chance upon a dining-room where the cloth was laid and the table was gay with lights and flowers. But when I hurried back with the good news to J—— he was less hopeful.——
“We had to wash in the fireplace,” said he.
—We were not long in doubt. The ladies and the huntsmen were ushered into the dining-room. The pretty girl in her neat apron carried in the soup, the fish, the cutlets. We could hear a pleasant clattering of plates and the sound of laughter. But still we sat in our humble corner.—Seldom have we felt class distinctions so bitterly. At last the landlady, very warm and red from the kitchen fire, with the baby in her arms, bade us follow her into a large dark room on the farther side of the café-kitchen. There she laid a modest omelette on a rough wooden table guiltless of cloth, and we ate it by the light of one candle. The huntsmen’s servants packed the rabbits and drank coffee on our left; on our right a little tailor stitched away at brown velveteens. Villagers strolled in and out, or played billiards; and a stray dog, unbidden, sat upright and begged at our side.—We cut but a poor figure in the Boarding-House of Neuchâtel.
We should have gone to bed at once, so tired were we after the pavé and the hills, but the sheets were not yet ironed. It was not until the kitchen clock struck ten that we were shown into a small closet where there was a bed, and promised a towel in the morning.—Before we went to sleep we heard, between the screams of the baby, the rain falling softly on the roof, to fill us with fears for the morrow’s ride.
THE next day began well. Without, the rain had stopped, and the morning was bright and clear. Within, unfavourable social distinctions had ceased, since we were the only guests. If we were slighted at dinner, we were overwhelmed with attention at breakfast. The interest of the household centred upon us. Nothing was talked of but our journey. Every one was eager to advise. We must go here, we must go there; we must keep by the sea, we must turn inland; and, above all, declared the little tailor, who still stitched away, we must not rest until we rode into Paris. Ah, what a city it was! He knew it well; but, my faith! a man must work to pay for life in the capital. He could see by the portfolio that Monsieur was an artist; no doubt he was on his way there to make great pictures.—We thought we could not please him better than to tell him in our country Paris was called the Paradise of good Americans. We were right. He made us a low bow, as if the compliment had been personal.
It was easy not to be bewildered by conflicting directions, since we were predetermined not to be influenced by them. The fairest promise of good roads, enchanting country, and picturesque towns could not have turned us a hair’s breadth from the route we had settled upon. The fact is, the question was one of sentiment, and at that stage of our enthusiasm where sentiment was concerned we were inflexible.—Mr. Sterne, on his way to Amiens and Paris, passed by Montreuil. To Montreuil, therefore, we must go.
A good strong breeze blew from the south. Out at sea it swept the white foam before it, and above, it lashed the clouds into fantastic shapes. It caught the skirts of the gleaners on their way to the yellow fields, and of the women going towards Neuchâtel, and held them back at every step. But we were saved the struggle while we rode eastward. Now we were on a level with the sea, looking at it across grassy plains and sandy stretches; and now it lay far below, and we saw it over the tree-tops on the hillside; again it was hidden by high dunes and dense pine-groves. Little villages lay in our way: Dannes, with pretty, shady road leading into it and out of it; another, for us nameless, with thatched white cottages, standing in a dreary waste, a broad inlet to one side. And at last a short ride between young green trees brought us to Etaples, a town of low white houses built close to the shore, and at the same time to the end of the day’s easy riding.
Our only memories of Etaples are unpleasant. We there bought a bottle of bad oil for a good price. When we left Neuchâtel the machine needed oiling; but the top of our oil-can had not been made to fit, and when we opened the tool-bag the can was in the oil instead of the oil in the can.—After using the poor stuff sold us by a shoemaker, the tricycle ran even more heavily. This was unfortunate, for after Etaples the road left the sea and started for the south. There was nothing to be done but to put our heads down and to work as if we were record-making.—I do
not think it wrong, merely because the wind blew in our faces almost every day of our sentimental journey, therefore to say the prevalent winds in France are from the south; but indeed all the trees thereabouts bend low towards the north, to confirm this assertion.
Thus we rode on between fields bare as the moors; through lovely park-like country; by little shady rivers, where ducks were swimming in the deep-green water; by tiny villages; by little churches, grey and old; by crosses, some split and decaying; through long avenues, with poplars on either side; by hills, the ploughman on the top strongly marked against the blue sky; and all the way the road was only a little worse than asphalt.
It was noon, and school-children were running home to dinner when we reached Montreuil. There were no less than three kilometres of pavé to be walked before we came into the town. We were further prepossessed against it because it has just enough character to stand upon a hill, instead of nestling in a hollow, as is the way with towns and villages in this part of the country. What with the wind and the pavé and the climb, we were so cast down that when by the city-gate, almost at the top of the hill, we saw a stone bearing the legend, “Two hundred kilometres to Paris,” we wondered if sentiment would carry us that far.
THERE is not a town in all France which, in my opinion, looks better in the map than Montreuil. I own it does not look so well in the guide-book, but when you come to see it, to be sure it looks most pitifully.
There is promise of picturesqueness in a group of tumbled-down gabled houses at its entrance, and in a fine church doorway at one end of the Place where we lunched. But gables and doorway have been spared, I think, but to mislead the visitor with false hopes. The streets are lined with modern houses monstrously alike. The Grande Place is large enough to deserve its name, but as we saw it, it was forlornly empty, silent, and dull. The gaiety of Montreuil has gone with the fiddling and drum-beating of La Fleur.
Despite its disadvantages, however, in the town where our Master compounded that little matter with the sons and daughters of poverty it was our duty to be sentimental. There was no question of travellers of our means and vehicle engaging a servant to fiddle and make splatter-dashes for us, even if another La Fleur could be produced. But if beggars sent in their claims, we could at least find in them the occasion of the first public act of our charity in France. Beggars, after a fashion, we did meet; for at once an old woman—a poor tattered soul—begged we would let her grandson Jules show us the way to a restaurant; and next a hatless man followed us around the Place to implore a visit to his hotel, where his wife could “spik Inglis”—a sound perhaps as worth money as the “My Lord Angolis” that won Mr. Sterne’s last sous. But our hearts were hardened against them, as his, too, might have been against those other miserables, had he not slept off the ill-humours of his journey to Montreuil.
I think it was at Montreuil it first occurred to us that sentiment does not depend upon man’s will alone.—And so we got on our tricycle with no more ease than usual, but less, as the wind came howling over the plain to meet us.
Note.—J—— was too lazy, and said the morning was too hot to do anything but work the tricycle.
THE road between Montreuil and Nampont was for us classic ground. Breathlessness, because of the wind, before we had got a league, brought our career—like La Fleur’s—to a sudden stop. We then had time to see that the deathbed of the famous donkey lay in fair country. Near by two windmills turned their long arms swiftly. A sportsman banged away in the fields, and, to bring good-luck, two crows flew overhead. When we went on, the wind began to moderate, and by the time we reached Nampont it was making but a little noiseless noise among the leaves.
We thought Nampont a pretty village, with its poplared canal flowing without turn or twist to the far horizon, and its long, wide street lined with low houses. The first we came to, that had a stone bench by the door and an adjoining court, we decided to be the post-house, in front of which the donkey’s master told his pathetic tale. We appealed to an old man just then passing. But he knew nothing of it, and there were so many other houses with stone seats and courts that we could not settle the matter to our satisfaction.—We were only certain of the pavé over which Mr. Sterne’s postillion set out in a full gallop that put him out of temper. Instead of galloping, we walked, first refreshing ourselves with groseille, a harmless syrup, in a brand-new café at the end of the village street, the one sign of modern enterprise in Nampont.
After this town, there was no sense of sentimental duty to oppress us, since a little beyond, it Mr. Sterne went to sleep, a sweet lenitive for evils, which Nature does not hold out to the cycler.
THE straight, poplared road to Abbeville still lay across a golden plain, with no interest save its beauty, here and there bounded by a row of trees, yellow haystacks standing out in bold relief against them; and here and there narrowed by dark woods, in front of which an old white-haired shepherd or little white-capped girl watched newly sheared sheep. Now and then the way led through small blue villages. There was Airon, where a large party of gleaners, old and young men, women, boys, and girls, sitting by the wayside, jumped up of one accord and walked with us up the hill. And then came Nouvion, where we saw a fine old rambling yellow farm-house, over whose disreputably tilted front-door peered two grotesque heads, and where we had coffee in the village inn, sitting on the one dry spot in the flooded floor, and just escaping the mops and buckets of two women who had raised the deluge.
The hills we still had. To read the “Emblems of the Frontispiece” in “Coryate’s Crudities,” one would imagine that from Montreuil to Abbeville was one long endless descent.
But I remember many steep up-grades to be climbed beside that of Airon.
Just about Nouvion the road was bad, because, so a friendly cantonnier said, there had been no rain for more than two months. He promised it would improve seven or eight kilometres farther on, and prepared us for a crowd in Abbeville, whither all the world had gone to take part in the funeral celebrations of Admiral Courbet, who by this hour of the afternoon was no doubt already buried.—A little later all the world seemed on its way home, and the road was full of carts, carriages, and pedestrians. It was no easy matter to steer between the groups on foot and the waggons driving sociably side by side. The crowd kept increasing, once in its midst a bicycler wheeling by to throw us a haughty stare. There were as many people on another straight poplar-lined road that crossed the Route Nationale. At this rate it was possible we should find no one left in the town, and the hotels, therefore, not more crowded than usual. So there was as much cheerful, unalloyed pleasure as Mr. Ruskin himself experienced—which he believes is not to be had from railway trains or cycles—in our getting into sight of Abbeville far below in the valley of the Somme, two square towers dominant over the clustered house-roofs.
On the outskirts of the city we saw the cemetery, a little to our right. The funeral procession, with flags, banners, and crosses borne aloft, was about to return from the grave. We felt so out of keeping with its solemnity that, rather than wait on the sidewalk as it passed, we hurried on at once.—But there was no going fast. In a minute we were jolting on the pavé again, and the street was more crowded than the road. All the world had but begun to go home. People walked on the pavement and in the street. Windows were filled with eager faces; benches and platforms in front of shops were still occupied. Houses were draped in black, flags hung here, there, and everywhere, and funeral arches were set up at short distances.
Our position was embarrassing. Try our best, we could not, unnoticed, make our way through the crowd. Every minute we had to call out to citizens or peasants in front to let us by. The people at the windows and on the benches, waiting idly to see the end of the day’s solemn show, at once caught sight of the tricycle. Do what we would, all eyes were turned towards it. And, to our horror, the funeral procession gained upon us. The chants of priests and acolytes were in our very ears. We jumped down and walked. But it was no use. In a few minutes we were on a line with the cross-bearer, leading the way for clergy and mourners through the streets. There was no escape. We could not turn back; we could not out-distance them. But, fortunately, before an archway at the entrance to a large Place the procession was disbanded. Without further ceremony, priests, stole and surplice under their arms, stray bishops in purple robes, naval and army officers, gentlemen in dress-coats and many medals, school-boys in uniform, peasants in caps, townspeople in ordinary clothes, walked home-or hotel-wards, we pushing the tricycle in their midst.
At the Hôtel de France we found confusion. Waiters tore in and out of the kitchen; maids flew up and down the court-yard. Frantic men and women surrounded, and together asked a hundred questions of a poor waiter in the centre of the court; an English family clamoured for a private dining-room.—During a momentary lull we stepped forward and told this waiter, who seemed a person of authority, we should like a room for the night.
There was not one to be had, he said. If we would wait two or three hours, it was just very possible some of these Messieurs might go back to Paris. If not, we must travel into another country; he knew we should fare no better in any hotel in Abbeville. Last night he had turned away fifty people.——
Where was the next country, asked I, for in his disappointment J—— had lost all his French.
It was only seven kilometres off. But, he added, we could dine in the hotel.
—Our choice lay between a certain good dinner at once and a mere possibility later in a far-off town. We were both tired and hungry.——
“It will be dark in half an hour,” said I.
“We can never work after eating heartily,” said J——, and, our objections thus disposed of, we decided for immediate dinner, and to risk the consequences.
—We wheeled the machine into the stable, conveniently adjoining the dining-room. We were
not very fresh after a day’s ride through the wind, over dry and dusty roads, and as we were to dine in company with dignitaries of State and Church, I said that first we should like to make our toilet. “Oh, certainly,” said the waiter, “Voilà!” and he pointed to a small spicket and a handkerchief of a towel at the dining-room door.—With no more elaborate preparation than these permitted, we went in and took our seats at table with bishops, officers, and statesmen in full dress.
It was as we expected. When we had eaten a dinner worthy of the company, we were unwilling to ride farther. We could and would not leave Abbeville that night.—J—— was silent over his sponge-cakes and wine, speaking only once, to consult me about the future tense of French verbs. Then he called the waiter.——
“Is there a room yet?” I asked.
“Not yet, Madame,” and he bowed his regrets.
“Well, then,” said J——, turning full upon him with the speech he had been ten minutes in composing, “nous partirons pas si nous dormirons sur la table!”
—Hitherto I had been his spokeswoman. The consequence of his sudden outburst in French was the waiter’s hearty assurance that the first room at his disposal was ours, but we must not look for it until nine or ten. It was then a little after seven.
This interval was spent in wandering about the town. The wind and the pavé together had again made me very tired. I remember as a restless dream our walk up and down the streets; into the great Place, a sombre black catafalque on one side, lights burning around it, tall houses back of it, the still taller Church of St. Wulfran rising above the high gables; and next into the church itself, where the columns and arches and altars, draped in black, and the people kneeling at prayer, or coming and going in the aisles, were but dimly seen by the light of a few candles. I remember speculating on the chance of shelter there, if at the eleventh hour the hotel failed us. And then we were shut out by the sacristan, to wander again through narrow, twisting streets; through brighter, livelier thoroughfares, the shops open, citizens and peasants laughing and talking; and so back to the Place, roofs and towers now but a black shadow on the dark blue of the evening sky; and at last to the hotel, where the good waiter met us with smiles.—A room at last! It was not very commodious, but it was the best he could do. There followed a melancholy quarter of an hour, during which we sat on a heap of blankets in a dark passage while the garçon laid the sheets.—The waiter was right; the room was not the most commodious. It was directly over the stable, and not larger than an old-fashioned closet. But it was better than church or dining-room; and though the garçon kept passing on the balcony without, and there was a ceaseless clatter in the court below, I was soon asleep.
IT is a pity that most tourists go straight from Calais to Amiens, satisfied to know Abbeville as a station by the way. The fault, I suppose, lies with “Murray” and “Baedeker,” who are almost as curt with it as with Montreuil, giving but a few words to its Church of St. Wulfran, and even fewer to its quaint old houses. But the truth is, Abbeville is better worth a visit than many towns they praise. And though Mr. Tristram Shandy objected to one of its inns as unpleasant to die in, I can recommend another as excellent to live in, which, after all, is of more importance to the ordinary tourist.
We remained in Abbeville the next day until noon. We went again to the church. We saw the house of Francis I. We found our way into alleys and courtyards, where grotesques were grinning and winking, as if they thought it an exquisite joke at last to be taken seriously by the few art and architectural critics, who now come to look at them.
AND now Mr. Ruskin writes:—“I not only object, but am quite prepared to spend all my best ‘bad language’ in reprobation of bi-tri-and-4-5-6 or 7-cycles, and every other contrivance and invention for superseding human feet on God’s ground. To walk, to run, to leap, and to dance are the virtues of the human body, and neither to stride on stilts, wriggle on wheels, or dangle on ropes, and nothing in the training of the human mind with the body will ever supersede the appointed God’s ways of slow walking and hard working.”
“Oh well, let us go on,” said J——.
BECAUSE of our sight-seeing we made a late start from Abbeville.—But then we determined to go no farther than Amiens that day. It was a good ten minutes’ walk over the pavé from the hotel to the end of the long Rue St. Gilles, where it is crossed by the railroad.—Here we were kept waiting another five minutes, in company with a carriage and two covered carts, while the woman in charge, who had shut the gate, put on her official hat and cape. Presently a faint whistle was heard.——
“Hold!” said one of the drivers, “I think he comes.”
—And so he did, and at last we were allowed to pass and go our way.—Another weary kilometre of pavé, and then we were on the highroad between the poplars.
But when we had got off the stones there was still the wind to fight. It blew in our faces with never-relaxing vigour, rushing through the trees and over the plain as if in haste to reach the sea. To make matters worse, the road was bad. The cavalry had ruined it, a stone-breaker said. We were soon riding on the side-walk.—The few white-capped, blue-skirted pedestrians we met went obligingly into the road to let us pass.——
“Pardon, ladies,” said we.
“Of nothing,” said they.
“The road is so bad,” we explained.
“You have reason. Au revoir,” cried they.
—The road ran straight along the edge of the upland. Below, a pretty river wound among reeds and willows, overtopped by tall trees shivering in the wind. But hard work gave us little chance for pleasure in the landscape, until at Pont Remy we stopped on the bridge to take breath.
We went back to the pedals with sad misgivings, like people who know that the worst is still to come. Just beyond, we left the Route Nationale for a by-road and unmitigated misery. Here we were led to believe there was no other road between Abbeville and Amiens. Amiens, “the very city where my poor lady is to come,” we could not miss. And yet Italian experience made us doubt the advisability of turning off the highroad.
The wind was now directly in our faces, and the road was deep with sand and loose with stones, and we had not gone a mile, a mile but scarcely one, when we lost our tempers outright and sent sentiment to the winds. First we climbed a long up-grade, passing old crumbling grey churches decorated with grotesques and gargoyles like those on St. Wulfran’s, in Abbeville, some perched upon hillocks, with cottages gathered about them, others adjoining lonely châteaux; and riding through forlornly poor villages full of houses tumbling to pieces and vicious dogs. Hills rose to our left; to our right, in the valley below, were wide marshes covered with a luxurious green growth, and beyond, the river, on the other side of which was a town with a tall church rising in its centre.
Once we got down to drink syrup and water at an inn where a commercial traveller catechised us about America.——
“And the commerce, it goes well there? Yes?”
—I suppose he took us for fellow-drummers; and I must admit the idea of our travelling for pleasure over such roads was the last likely to occur to him.
Then we went down hill for some distance, but we ran into ridges of sand and brought up
suddenly on a stone pile at the bottom. On the level the road became a shady avenue. But it grew worse as it increased in beauty. We wheeled first to one side, then to the other. We even tried the grass close to the trees. But soon we were down and walking, and pushing the wretched machine through the sand. And now riding was out of the question, it began to rain. When we came into Hangest——
“We’ll take the train,” said J——.
—But we had first to wait for two hours, during which we ate a lunch at the “Sign of the Duck,” and sat at the station watching the passing trains and the signals.—In his demoralisation J——asked at the office for tickets for la treizième classe, and then a man joined us and told us of the fine roads in his country, so that we wished we were there. Finally our train came.—J—— had some trouble with the machine. At the first baggage-car the conductor declared there was not room for it. The second was full and no mistake. He went back to the first, and while the conductor remonstrated, pushed it in with the help of a porter. He then had just time to jump into the nearest carriage, which happened to be the same in which I had already found a seat, and the train started. The carriage was full.——
“C’est complet, Monsieur,” screamed a little man, in a passion.
“Certainly, Monsieur” said J——, as he fastened the door with a click behind him.
“I tell you it’s full,” repeated the little man, in his rage dancing to the window and calling the conductor.
—It was too late. All he could do was to return to his seat and glower at J——, who calmly sat in the window.——
“We must not make the war,” said a good curé next to him, patting him gently on the shoulder.
—He restrained his anger with a comforting drink of brandy. Monsieur le Curé fell to saying his beads, covering his mouth with his wide-brimmed hat, while all the other passengers laughed and nudged each other. A man in the corner, carrying a genuine American carpet-bag, drank something from a gingerbeer bottle, and asked us in good American what we knew of the hotels in Paris.
At the next station J—— got out, and the man from the country of beautiful roads, who had been sitting in the adjoining compartment, met him at the door.——
“I render to you my place, Monsieur,” said he.
—And so in perfect peace we made all possible speed to Picquigny, and from Picquigny to Amiens; not, however, before we saw from the carriage windows that the road, now running alongside of the railway, was smooth and hard, that the sun shone, and that the wind blew but mildly.
At Amiens the conductor was waiting on the platform full of apologies. He had really thought there was no room for the velocipede. Monsieur must pardon him.
The French have a charming way of putting you in a good humour. We forgot the attack of the irascible traveller, as, let us hope, he forgave the enormity of J——’s crime.
WE should always remember Amiens, even were it not for the cathedral, because it was there we had the best dinner we ever ate in France.—In looking over my note-book I find I made at the time elaborate mention of the menu, and applied the adjective divine to a course of fresh mackerel served with an exquisite sauce.—As there may be readers who take interest, and perhaps pleasure, in dining well, I will here add that this excellent meal was eaten at the Hôtel de l’Univers. I can wish the visitor to Amiens no better luck than a dinner in this hotel prepared by the same artist.
It was a pity that, before leaving England—we had been so taken up with Mr. Sterne, whose sentiment was not to be distracted with cathedrals and old houses—we did not consult Mr. Ruskin, who probably thought of nothing else while he was in Amiens.—To the unsentimental traveller I would recommend the traveller’s edition of “Our Fathers have Told Us” (Part I. chap. iv.), rather than the “Sentimental Journey,” as a guide-book to the town.
We had two hours of daylight on the afternoon of our arrival, and we remained in the city until noon the next day, partly because there were many things to see, and partly on account of a heavy wind and rain storm in the morning. We were not much troubled by sentiment, though here Mr. Sterne’s overflowed into three chapters. But it was of a kind so impossible for us to simulate—not having left an Eliza in England, nor knowing a fair Countess in the town—we put all thought or hope of it aside, and went out to look about.
What pleased us most were the many canal-like branches of the Somme, old tumbled-down houses rising from the water, and little foot-bridges connecting them with opposite gardens. We liked, too, the wider and less modest main current of the river, where men or women in flat boats with pointed prows and square sterns, like inclined planes, were for ever poling themselves down stream beyond the embankment where the poplars begin.—But I remember we lingered longest on a bridge over a tiny canal from which there was a fine view of disreputably shabby back doors, women appearing and disappearing as they emptied their pails and pots, and of battered windows from which hung the family wardrobes. It was then, I believe, we pronounced Amiens the French Venice—an original idea which most likely occurs to every tourist fortunate enough to find his way to the banks of the Somme. Indeed I have since read that in the good old days, before a straight street had been dreamed of by city officials, the town was known as Little Venice.
Delightful as were the scenes by the river in the late afternoon, they were even more so in the early morning, when, from under a borrowed umbrella, we watched the open-air market. The embankment was carpeted with greens and full of noisy peasants. The prevailing tint, like that of the sky above, was a dull bluish grey, relieved here and there by a dash of white. Fastened to rings in the stone wall of the embankment, some thirty or forty of the boats with pointed prows lay on the water. Two, piled high with cabbages and carrots, the brightest bit of colour in the picture, were being poled towards the market-place. Others, laden with empty baskets, satisfied-looking women in the prow, a man at the stern, were on their homeward way. And above the river and the busy people and the background of houses the great cathedral loomed up, a “mass of wall, not blank, but strangely wrought by the hands of foolish men of long ago.”
We found a priest saying Mass in the chapel behind the choir, the eastern light shining on him at the altar. His congregation consisted of four poor women and one great lady in silk attire kneeling in the place of honour. In the nave and aisles were a handful of tourists and two sentimental travellers—i.e., ourselves, who scorned to be classed as tourists—uttering platitudes under their breath about the unspeakable feeling of space and height, as if the cathedral existed but to excite their wonder.
We went also to the old belfry, a fine substantial pile, allowed to stand, I suppose, because to remove it would be too herculean a task. Our attention was distracted from it to a pair of French twins staggering by, arm in arm, both wearing baggy brown velveteen trousers, striped shirts and open coats, and little round caps, which rested on each curly head at exactly the same angle. It was rather absurd to discover that they were no greater oddities to us than we were to them. Of one accord they stopped to stare solemnly at J——’s knee-breeches and long stockings. Indeed I might as well say here, as in any other place, that we were greater objects of curiosity off the machine than on it.—Always, as in Calais, the eminently quiet and respectable Cyclists’ Touring Club uniform seemed to strike every French man and woman as a problem impossible to solve but easy to ridicule.
THERE is nothing more pleasing to a traveller, or more terrible to travel-writers, than a large rich plain, unless it be a straight white poplar-lined road, good as asphalt. After Amiens, as after Abbeville and Neuchâtel, there was a poplared avenue over a breezy upland to carry us to the next town, that town little more but a new place to start from to the next plain and poplars, and so on. There were cantonniers still at work, sweeping the highway with great brooms.——
“You sweep them everyday?” asked J—— of one.
“Every day—yes,” he answered.
—And there was still a strong wind rushing down between the trees and blowing my skirts about my feet. Riding against it was such hard work that I walked many kilometres during the morning. But indeed there was scarce any walking with ease.