Through the long afternoon we went winding upward among those unpeopled hills, meeting almost nothing in the way of human life, passing through but one village, Grenolhac, too small even to be set down in the road book. In fact, the first place mentioned beyond Alais was Villefort, with a small population and one inn, a hostelry indicated in the book merely by a little wineglass, and not by one of the tiny houses which, in their varied sizes, picture the recommended hotels and the relative importance thereof. There was no mention of rooms in connection with the Café Marius Balme; the outlook for accommodation overnight was not very cheerful.
It was chilly, too, for evening was closing in and we were well up in the air. The prospect of camping by the roadside, or even of sitting up in a café until morning, did not attract a person of my years, though Narcissa and the Joy declared that to build a camp fire and roll up in the steamer rugs would be "lovely." As there were only three rugs, I could see that somebody was going to be overlooked in the arrangement; besides, a night in the mountains in May, let it begin ever so gayly, is pretty sure to develop doubtful features before morning. I have done some camping in my time, and I have never been able to get together enough steamer rugs to produce a really satisfactory warmth at, say, three or four o'clock in the morning, when the frost is embroidering the bushes and the stars have a glitter that drills into your very marrow. Langogne, the first town marked with a hotel, was at least thirty-five miles farther along, and I could tell by the crinkly look of the road as it appeared on our map that it was no night excursion. Presently we descended into a sort of gorge, and there was Villefort, an isolated, ancient little hamlet forgotten among the Cévennes hilltops. We came to an open space and there, sure enough, was the Café Balme, and by the side of it, happy vision, another little building with the sign "Hôtel Balme."
It was balm indeed. To my faithful inquiry, "Vous avez des chambres?" Yes, they had chambers—they were across the open square, over the garage—that is to say, the stable—if the monsieur and his party would accept them.
"Oui, certainement!"
They were not luxurious—they were just bare boxes, but they were clean, with comfortable beds, and, dear me! how inviting on this particularly chilly evening, when one has put in most of the day climbing narrow, circuitous mountain roads—one-sided—that is to say, one side a wall, the other falling off into unknown space.
They were very quiet rooms, for we had the place to ourselves. The car would sleep just under us, and we had a feeling of being nomads, the kind that put up in barns and empty buildings. A better place could hardly have made us happier, and a better dinner than we had could not be produced anywhere. There was soup—French soup; hot fried trout, taken that day from the mountain streams; then there was omelet of the freshest eggs, served so hot that one must wait for it to cool; also a dish of veal of the same temperature and of such tenderness that you could cut it with a fork; and there was steak which we scarcely touched, and a salad, and fruit and cakes and camembert cheese, with unlimited wine throughout. How could they give a dinner like that, and a good bed, and coffee and rolls with jam next morning, all for four francs—that is, eighty cents, each? I will tell you: they did their own cooking, and were lost so far in the mountains that they had not yet heard of the "high cost of living." And if I have not mentioned it before, I wish to say here that all the red road-book hotels are good, however small or humble they appear. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that all French hotels are good—at least that they have good food and beds. With the French, to have good beds and good food is a religion.
You notice I do not mention the coffee. That is because it is not real coffee. It is— I don't quite know what it is. In the large hotels it merely looks like coffee. In these small inns it looks like a dark, ominous soup and tastes like that as much as anything. Also, it is not served in cups, but bowls, porridge bowls, with spoons to match, and the natives break chunks of bread in it and thus entirely carry out the soup idea. This is the French conception of coffee in the remoter districts, but the bread and jam or honey that go with it are generally good and plentiful, and I suppose the fearful drink itself must be wholesome. One hears a good deal in America of delicious French coffee, but the only place to get it is in America, in New Orleans, say, or New York. I have never found any really good coffee even in Paris.
I think not many travelers visit the Cévennes. The road across the mountains from Nîmes toward Paris seemed totally untraversed, at least so far as tourists are concerned. No English is spoken anywhere—not a word. This was France—not the France that is Paris, which is not France at all any more than New York City is America, but the France which is a blending of race and environment—of soil and sky and human struggle into a unified whole that is not much concerned with the world at large, and from generation to generation does not greatly change.
One may suppose, for instance, that the market at Villefort, which we saw next morning, was very much what it was a hundred years ago—that the same sturdy women in black dresses and curious hats had carried the same little bleating kids, one under each arm—that trout and strawberries and cheese and cherries and all the products of that mountain district were offered there, around the old stone fountain, in the same baskets under the shadow of the same walls, with so little difference in the general aspect that a photograph, if one could have been taken then, might be placed beside the ones we made and show no difference in the fashion of things at all.
We bought some of the strawberries, great delicious dewy ones, and Narcissa and the Joy wanted to buy one or even a dozen of the poor little kids, offering to hold them in their laps constantly. But I knew that presently I should be holding one or more of those kids in my own lap and I was afraid I could not do that and drive with safety. I said that some day when we had time we would build a wooden cage on wheels to put behind the car and gradually collect a menagerie, but that I was afraid we didn't have time just now. We must be getting on.