Here Renard stopped to finish his glass, draining-the last drop of the yellow liquid. Then he went on: "To travel! To start when an impulse seizes one! To go—anywhere! Why not! It was for this, after all, that all of us have come our three thousand miles." Perhaps it was the restless tossing of the shipping out yonder in the basins that awoke an answering impatience within, in response to Renard's outburst. Where did they go, those ships, and, up beyond this mouth of the Seine, how looked the shores, and what life lived itself out beneath the rustling poplars? Is it the mission of all flowing water to create an unrest in men's minds?
Meanwhile, though the talk was not done, the dinner was long since eaten. We rose to take a glimpse of Honfleur and its famous old basin. The quays and the floating docks, in front of which we had been dining, are a part of the nineteenth century; the great ships ride in to them from the sea. But here, in this inner quadrangular dock, beside which we were soon standing, traced by Duquesne when Louis the Great discovered the maritime importance of Honfleur, we found still reminders of the old life. Here were the same old houses that, in the seventeenth century, upright and brave in their brand new carvings, saw the high-decked, picturesquely painted Spanish and Portuguese ships ride in to dip their flag to the French fleur-de-lis. There are but few of the old streets left to crowd about the shipping life that still floats here, as in those bygone days of Honfleur pride;—when Havre was but a yellow strip of sand; when the Honfleur merchants would have laughed to scorn any prophet's cry of warning that one day that sand-bar opposite, despised, disregarded, boasting only a chapel and a tavern, would grow and grow, and would steal year by year and inch by inch bustling Honfleur's traffic, till none was left.
In the old adventurous days, along with the Spanish ships came others, French trading and fishing vessels, with the salty crustations of long voyages on their hulls and masts. The wharves were alive then with fish-wives, whom Evelyn will tell you wore "useful habits made of goats' skin." The captains' daughters were in quaint Normandy costumes; and the high-peaked coifs and the stiff woollen skirts, as well as the goat-skin coats, trembled as the women darted hither and thither among the sailors—whose high cries filled the air as they picked out mother and wife. Then were bronzed beards buried in the deeply-wrinkled old mères' faces, and young, strong arms clasped about maidens' waists. The whole town rang with gayety and with the mad joy of reunion. On the morrow, coiling its way up the steep hillsides, wound the long lines of the grateful company, one composed chiefly of the crews of these vessels happily come to port. The procession would mount up to the little church of Notre Dame de Grâce perched on the hill overlooking the harbor. Some even—so deep was their joy at deliverance from shipwreck and so fervent their piety—crawled up, bare-footed, with bared head, wives and children following, weeping for joy, as the rude ex-votos were laid by the sailors' trembling hands at the feet of the Virgin Lady.
As reminders of this old life, what is left? Within the stone quadrangle we found clustered a motley fleet of wrecks and fishing-vessels; the nets, flung out to dry in the night air, hung like shrouds from the mastheads; here and there a figure bestrode a deck, a rough shape, that seemed endowed with a double gift of life, so still and noiseless was the town. Around the silent dock, grouped in mysterious medley and confusion, were tottering roof lines, projecting eaves, narrow windows, all crazily tortured and out of shape. Here and there, beneath the broad beams of support, a little interior, dimly lighted, showed a knot of sailors gathered, drinking or lounging. Up high beneath a chimney perilously overlooking a rude facade, a quaint shape emerged, one as decrepit and forlorn of life and hope as the decaying houses it overlooked. Silence, poverty, wretchedness, the dregs of life, to this has Honfleur fallen. These old houses, in their slow decay, hiding in their dark bosom the gaunt secrets of this poverty and human misery, seemed to be dancing a dance of drunken indifference. Some day the dance will end in a fall, and then the Honfleur of the past will not even boast of a ghost, as reminder of its days of splendor.
An artist quicker than anyone else, I think, can be trusted to take one out of history and into the picturesque. Renard refused to see anything but beauty in the decay about us; for him the houses were at just the right drooping angle; the roof lines were delightful in their irregularity; and the fluttering tremor of the nets, along the rigging, was the very poetry of motion.
"We'll finish the evening on the pier," he exclaimed, suddenly; "the moon will soon be up—we can sit it out there and see it begin to color things."
The pier was more popular than the quaint old dock. It was crowded with promenaders, who, doubtless, were taking a bite of the sea-air. Through the dusk the tripping figures of gentlemen in white flannels and jaunty caps brushed the provincial Honfleur swells. Some gentle English voices told us some of the villa residents had come down to the pier, moved by the beauty of the night. Groups of sailors, with tanned faces and punctured ears hooped with gold rings, sat on the broad stone parapets, talking unintelligible Breton patois. The pier ran far out, almost to the Havre cliffs, it seemed to us, as we walked along in the dusk of the young night. The sky was slowly losing its soft flame. A tender, mellow half light was stealing over the waters, making the town a rich mass of shade. Over the top of the low hills the moon shot out, a large, globular mass of beaten gold. At first it was only a part and portion of the universal lighting, of the still flushed sky, of the red and crimson harbor lights, of the dim twinkling of lamps and candles in the rude interiors along the shore. But slowly, triumphantly, the great lamp swung up; it rose higher and higher into the soft summer sky, and as it mounted, sky and earth began to pale and fade. Soon there was only a silver world to look out upon—a wealth of quivering silver over the breast of the waters, and a deeper, richer gray on cliffs and roof tops. Out of this silver world came the sound of waters, lapping in soft cadence against the pier; the rise and fall of sails, stirring in the night wind; the tread of human footsteps moving in slow, measured beat, in unison with the rhythm of the waters. Just when the stars were scattering their gold on the bosom of the sea-river, a voice rang out, a rich, full baritone. Quite near, two sailors were seated, with their arms about each other's shoulders. They also were looking at the moonlight, and one of them was singing to it:
"Te souviens-tu, Marie, De notre enfance aux champs?
"Te souviens-tu? Le temps que je regrette C'est le temps qui n'est plus."
[Illustration: THE INN AT DIVES—GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT]