The road passing from the bridge beneath the crag on which the fortress stands, though quitting the Rhone here, continues very beautiful as far as Bellay, bold in the distance and wooded near,—but the hills are frequent and fatiguing, and the last the worst, as the town is perched on a pinnacle. The miserable inn is on the Place, and the window of our bedroom looked on the closed office of the notary Peytel. You may remember that the 31st of October twelvemonth, driving home in his cabriolet from Bourg, to obtain sole command of her fortune, he murdered his young wife, having first shot the servant, (a man of irreproachable character,) as on him was to lie the weight of the crime. The story Peytel told was at first believed, but his forgetfulness had left his servant’s still loaded pistols on his person, and his guilt came strangely to light. His fellow notaries, not liking the stain of an execution on their brotherhood, drew up a petition in his favour. It appears that notwithstanding his double murder, he excited sympathy, and himself believed in the possibility of pardon; and bearing out the assertion “that all the world is a stage and the men merely players,” to obtain a last dramatic effect he embraced the gaoler’s wife ere he went to execution, and bade her mark that his countenance had undergone no change. The servant, while lighting my fire, said his sister had gone to Paris to petition the king, but had done so in vain, because it was said that Peytel was not a brave homme, as this was not his première fois. So that, according to Fanchette’s code of morality, a man may be a brave homme who commits murder only a première fois. Bad dinner and bad beds.
The hostler asked D—— if I did not belong to a peculiar race called Amazons, always attired thus.
Pont d’Ain, 12th November.
Rose early to leave Bellay ditto, and were detained by seeing the rain pouring down on the melancholy Place, and the red umbrellas of people who crossed it in sabots, and the dripping diligence just arrived, wrinkling the widened gutter where half a dozen ducks were dipping their heads in the water and seemed triumphing in their superior powers of enjoyment. As the inn was not tempting, we left it as soon as the shower in some degree subsided, and a short distance and gentle ascent brought us to the identical bridge, the scene of the murder. It crosses a sluggish stream which creeps on either side of it and of the road over low and marshy meadows. The spot has a melancholy aspect, partly perhaps from its associations and the weather on which we saw it. A few fine oaks grow here and there, near one of which the man was murdered, and within hearing are several cottages, one so close that its inhabitants might almost, had the moon been bright (for it was eleven o’clock), have seen what was passing. The marsh, to which she fled in her terror, was on the right hand as we approached the bridge, and having pursued and shot her there, he feared she was not quite dead, and ere he feigned to seek assistance, laid her, face downwards, in the water, and preserving his coolness when he returned, placed her corpse in the cabriolet and drove beside his victim into Bellay.
Our road entered a desolate glen, where the deposits formed by the heavy rains have made small lakes or rather large pools under the bare hills. This melancholy valley is succeeded by one of surpassing beauty, for there are crags still grey and shattered but peeping above wooded hills on which stand the proud ruins of convent and castle, or with vineyards growing up their sides, the clear water of the rapid stream at their foot flashing as it turns watermills, and in the hollow where it flows so busily, oak and chestnut, and walnut, and ash-trees, forming groves rich and varied, interspersed with clumps of dark box and portions of fallen rock bright with the delicate greens of the mosses which cover them.
We passed St. Rambert, beautifully placed on the river’s edge, with its ancient fortress above and the ruin of another stronghold like itself on an eminence which rises from the flat surface of the valley. Two leagues before arriving at Pont d’Ain, we bade a final adieu to this lovely country, and issued on the plains of France. As it was growing dusk, we less regretted the change, and Fanny, finding a strip of turf by the road-side, shook her small head and cantered on merrily. There is a fine bridge at Pont d’Ain, and the inn is good, though dear.
13th November.
A lovely morning; Bourg is prettily placed, for the plain has undulations and patches of copse wood, and you look back to the mountains of Savoy. Left the cathedral of Brou on the right hand just before entering the town, a large building of not perhaps the purest Gothic, but picturesque notwithstanding, and within of remarkable beauty. Early in the year 1120, there stood on this spot a monastery, whither Ulric, Lord of Bresse, returned from the Holy Land to end his days. The Duchess of Savoy, wife of Philip the Second, made a vow to build here a splendid church and convent should her husband escape the consequences of a dangerous fall. Commenced by the latter, they were left unfinished, for he died in 1497. His son Philibert succeeded him; he had espoused Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and of Mary of Burgundy. Twice affianced, to Charles the Eighth of France, and John, heir to the Spanish throne, she married Philibert, surnamed the Handsome in 1501, and in 1504 was left a widow and childless. She had Bresse for dowry, and the government of Burgundy from her father, so that seeing herself rich and uncontrolled, she undertook to accomplish her mother-in-law’s vow, and raised the cathedral as it now stands between the years 1511 and 1530. The tombs of the old duchess, its first founder, and that of Philip, are there, as are those of Philibert the Handsome and Margaret herself. On her monument is inscribed the singular motto—
Fortune, Infortune, fors une.
Unluckily for our progress it was fair time at Bourg, and the crowd of peasants in their short boddices and flat hats, which, surmounted by a black lace turret and ornamented by black lace streamers, are placed at the top of their ugly heads, literally stopped the way. One pretty girl (the only one) looked well under it. The boddice and short sleeves are ornamented with fringe, black lace, and rags innumerable, and the arms are bare, saving in those who, exhibiting great luxury, have worsted gloves confined above the elbow by elastic garters. Passing towards the centre of the fair, where the thickest crowd stood gaping round the tent which contained Franconi’s troop, a fat man came rushing forth from a café, and with one hand on my rein and the other on my arm, inquired whether I would take any thing, and whether the horses had been fed, so affectionately, that I had great trouble in getting rid of him.