III.
Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their travels, and their style flows as easily as their life.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the provincial folk. They drink the health of the absent, enjoy the muscatel as much as possible, and trifle in prose and verse. They are the epicureans of their time, easy poets who are troubled about nothing, not even about glory; graze all that they touch, and write only for their own amusement.
“Encausse,” say they, “is far from all commerce, and a man can have no other diversion in it than that of watching the return of his health. A small stream that, a score of paces away from the village, winds among willows and the greenest fields imaginable, was our only consolation. We used to go every morning to take our water in this pretty spot, and after dinner to walk there. One day when we were on the brink, seated on the grass, there came suddenly from the midst of the reeds that were nearest a man who had apparently been listening to us; it was an old man, all white, pale and lean, whose beard and locks hung below his girdle, such (an one) as Melchisedec is painted; or rather the figure is that of a certain old Greek bishop, who, with many a salaam, tells everybody’s fortune; for he wore a top-piece like a cauldron-lid, but of exceeding size, which answered him for a hat. And this hat, whose broad brim went drooping upon his shoulders, was made of branches of willow, and covered nearly all his body. His coat of greenish hue was woven of rushes, the whole covered with great bits of a thick and bluish crystal.
“At sight of this apparition, fear caused us to make the sign of the cross twice over, and go three paces backward. But curiosity prevailed over fear, and we resolved, although with some little palpitation of heart, to await the extraordinary old man, whose approach was thoroughly courteous, and who spoke to us very civilly as follows:
“Gentlemen, I am not surprised that with my unexpected appearance you should be a little startled in mind, but when you shall have learned in what rank the fates have set my birth to you unknown, and the motive of my coming, you will calm your minds.
"I am the god of this stream, who, with an ever inexhaustible urn, tilted at the foot of that hill, take the task in this meadow of pouring unceasingly the water, which makes it so green and flowery. For eight days now, morning and evening, you come regularly to see me without thinking to pay me a visit. It is not that I do not deserve that you should pay me this respect; for, in short, I have this advantage, that a channel so pure and clear is the place of my appanage. In Gascony such a portion is very neat for a cadet.”
The two travellers were talking of the tides of the Garonne, and of the reasons for them given by Gassendi and Descartes. This very obliging god relates to them how Neptune thereby punishes an ancient rebellion of the rivers. “Then the honest river-god takes himself off, and when he has gone a score of paces the good soul is melted entirely into water.”
Nowadays this mythology seems unmeaning, and the thought flat. Look at the environs, the surroundings save it. Carelessness, intoxication, are on one side. It is born between two glasses of good wine thoroughly relished, in the midst of an unpremeditated letter. Are people so very nice at table? It is a refrain they are humming; flat or not, is of no consequence. The main thing is good humor and the inclination to laugh. I picture to myself the honest fellows, well-dressed, portly, their eyes still shining from the long dinner of yesterday, with rubies on their cheeks, perfectly ready to sit down to dine at the first inn and to bedevil the maid. La Fontaine did so, especially when he travelled. They made stops, forgot themselves, the broad jokes flew.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
They didn’t cross France as nowadays, after the fashion of a cannon-ball or an attorney; they allowed five days for going to Poitiers, and in the evening, on going to bed, they fed the body. It was the last age of the good corporeal life, that heavy bourgoisie which had its flower and its portrait in Flemish art. It was already disappearing; aristocratic propriety and lordly salutes were taking possession of literature; Boileau gave us serious verse, thoroughly useful and solid, like pairs of tongs. Nowadays when the middle-class man is a philosopher, ambitious, a man of business, it is far worse. Let us not speak ill of those who are happy; happiness is a sort of poetry; it is in vain that we boast ourselves, that poetry we have not.