[BOOK V]
[CHAPTER I]
The second period of my youth—Forest-keepers and sailors—Choron, Moinat, Mildet, Berthelin—La Maison-Neuve.
As I have now entered upon the second period of my youth, and put off the boy's toga to don that of adolescence, I must make my readers acquainted with the individuals who peopled the second circle of my life, as they have already become acquainted with those who peopled the first.
There exists in localities bordering great woods a peculiar people who, in the midst of the general population, keep their own stamp and character, and contribute a quota of poetry (which is the soul of the world) to swell the mass.
These are the forest-rangers.
I have lived much among keepers and much among sailors, and I have always been struck by the great similarity between these two races of men; both, as a rule, are unemotional, religious, and dreamers. The sailor or the forest-keeper will often stay side by side with his greatest friend (the one while forty or fifty knots are being sailed on the ocean; the other walking eight or ten leagues through big woods) without exchanging a single word, apparently without hearing or noticing anything; but, in reality, not a sound echoes in the air that the ear does not catch; not a movement stirs the surface of the water or the depth of the leaves that has been overlooked; and, as they both have the same ideas, similar instincts and similar feelings, as this silence has really been one long dumb conversation, it is not surprising that, when occasion demands, it is only necessary to utter a word, make a significant gesture or exchange a glance, and they will have managed to express more ideas by that glance, that gesture, that word, than others could in a long dissertation. But when they talk at night, round a woodland bivouac, or over their own fires, always well supplied with fuel and firewood, these reserved and silent dreamers can hold forth at great length, and picturesquely enough: the keepers about their hunting, the sailors about their storms!
The poetry of vast oceans and wide forests, which has descended upon them from the crests of the waves and the tree-tops, makes their language unadorned and yet imaginative. Their words are expressive and simple.