VII
Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin! We are soon deep in woods of oak and beech. We pass the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper height towers above us. See, how wonderful is this deep-green glen, where the oaks rise sheer a hundred feet and more from the sheet of lily of the valley at their feet! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the beautiful growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweetness and profusion of the flowers, the something delicate, lofty, and serious about this landscape, makes a rare impression amid the opulence of April. Our glade slopes downward from the base of Mont St. Mard; at its further extremity begins the valley of the Vieux Moulin.
It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just room in the valley for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its hay-meadows. They are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and here and there a taller meadow-orchid. Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight, but never out of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de Berne.
The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end—perhaps a hundred dark little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses—out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an “ascension” to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep to the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup gives place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters, in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on between the wood and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so almost theatric in the perfection of its mise en scène. And see, the castle is quite perfect, without a scar, without a ruin! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood, as it seemed? Have we driven back five hundred years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century?