I went away the next day. Where was I going? I did not know. I had flung a feather to the wind; it blew that day from the south, so my feather was carried northwards. I set out therefore, for the north, and should probably go to Havre. There seems to be an invincible attraction leading one back to places one has previously visited. It will be remembered that I was at Havre in 1828 and rewrote Christine, as far as the plot was concerned, in the coach between Paris and Rouen. Then, too, Rouen is such a beautiful town to see with its cathedral, its church of Saint-Ouen, its ancient houses with their wood-carvings, its town-hall and hôtel Bourgtheroude, that one longs to see it all again! I stopped a day there. Next day the boat left at six in the morning. At that time it still took fourteen hours to get from Paris to Rouen by diligence, and ten hours from Rouen to Havre by boat. Now, by express train it only takes three and a half! True, one departs and arrives—when one does arrive—but one does not really travel; you do not see Jumiéges, or la Meilleraie or Tancarville, or all that charming country by Villequier, where, one day, ten years after I was there, the daughter of our great poet met her death in the midst of a pleasure party. Poor Léopoldine! she would be at Jersey now, completing the devout colony which provided a family if not a country for our exiled Dante, dreaming of another inferno! Oh! if only I were that mysterious unknown whose elastic arm could extend from one side of the Guadalquiver to the other, to offer a light to Don Juan's cigar, how I would stretch out each morning and evening my arm from Brussels to Jersey to clasp the beloved hand which wrote the finest verse and the most vigorous prose of this century!
We no longer see Honfleur, with its fascinating bell-tower, built by the English; an erection which made some bishop or other, travelling to improve his mind, say, "I feel sure that was not made here!" In short, one goes to Havre and returns the same day, and one can even reach Aix-la-Chapelle the next morning. If you take away distance, you augment the duration of time. Nowadays we do not live so long, but we get through more.
When I reached Havre I went in search of a place where I could spend a month or six weeks; I wanted but a village, a corner, a hole, provided it was close to the sea, and I was recommended to go to Sainte-Adresse and Trouville. For a moment I wavered between the two districts, which were both equally unknown to me; but, upon pursuing my inquiries further, and having learnt that Trouville was even more isolated and hidden and solitary than Sainte-Adresse, I decided upon Trouville. Then I recollected, as one does in a dream, that my good friend Huet, the landscape painter, a painter of marshes and beaches, had told me of a charming village by the sea, where he had been nearly choked with a fish bone, and that the village was called Trouville. But he had forgotten to tell me how to get to it. I therefore had to make inquiries. There were infinitely more opportunities for getting from Havre to Rio-de-Janeiro, Sydney or the coast of Coromandel than there were to Trouville. Its latitude and longitude were, at that time, almost as little known as those of Robinson Crusoe's island. Sailors, going from Honfleur to Cherbourg, had pointed out Trouville in the distance, as a little settlement of fishermen, which, no doubt, traded with la Délivrande and Pont-l'Évêque, its nearest neighbours; but that was all they knew about it. As to the tongue those fisherfolk talked they were completely ignorant, the only relations they had hitherto had with them had been held from afar and by signs. I have always had a passion for discoveries and explorations; I thereupon decided, if not exactly to discover Trouville, at least to explore it, and to do for the river de la Touque what Levaillant, the beloved traveller of my childhood, had done for the Elephant River. That resolution taken, I jumped into the boat for Honfleur, where fresh directions as to the route I should follow would be given me. We arrived at Honfleur. During that two hours' crossing at flood-tide, everybody was seasick, except a beautiful consumptive English lady, with long streaming hair and cheeks like a peach and a rose, who battled against the scourge with large glasses of brandy! I have never seen a sadder sight than that lovely figure standing up, walking about the deck of the boat, whilst everybody else was either seated or lying down; she, doomed to death, with every appearance of good health, whilst all the other passengers, who looked at the point of death, regained their strength directly they touched the shore again, like many another Antæus before them. If there are spirits, they must walk and look and smile just as that beautiful English woman walked and looked and smiled. When we landed at Honfleur, just as the boat stopped, her mother and a young brother, as fair and as rosy as she seemed, rose up as though from a battlefield and rejoined her with dragging steps. She, on the contrary, whilst we were sorting out our boxes and portmanteaux, lightly cleared the drawbridge which was launched from the landing-stage to the side of the miniature steam-packet, and disappeared round a corner of the rue de Honfleur. I never saw her again and shall never see her again, probably, except in the valley of Jehoshaphat; but, whether I see her again, there or elsewhere—in this world, which seems to me almost impossible, or in the other, which seems to me almost improbable—I will guarantee that I shall recognise her at the first glance.
We were hardly at Honfleur before we were making inquiries as to the best means of being transported to Trouville. There were two ways of going, by land or by sea. By land they offered us a wretched wagon and two bad horses for twenty francs, and we should travel along a bad road, taking five hours to reach Trouville. Going by sea, with the outgoing tide, it would take two hours, in a pretty barque rowed by four vigorous oarsmen; a picturesque voyage along the coast, where I should see great quantities of birds, such as sea-mews, gulls and divers, on the right the infinite ocean, on the left immense cliffs. Then if the wind was good—and it could not fail to be favourable, sailors never doubt that!—it would only take two hours to cross. It was true that, if the wind was unfavourable, we should have to take to oars, and should not arrive till goodness knows when. Furthermore, they asked twelve francs instead of twenty. Happily my travelling companion—for I have forgotten to say that I had a travelling companion—was one of the most economical women I have ever met; although she had been very sick in crossing from Havre to Honfleur, this saving of eight francs appealed to her, and as I had gallantly left the choice of the two means of transport to her she decided on the boat. Two hours later we left Honfleur as soon as the tide began to turn.
[1] Young workman of the Parisian faubourgs.
[CHAPTER XII]
Appearance of Trouville—Mother Oseraie—How people are accommodated at Trouville when they are married—The price of painters and of the community of martyrs—Mother Oseraie's acquaintances—How she had saved the life of Huet, the landscape painter—My room and my neighbour's—A twenty-franc dinner for fifty sous—A walk by the sea-shore—Heroic resolution