‘Antoine, let us be stirring now; the moon will be up soon. Gros Jean, throw that sack on your shoulder and move forward. And now, monsieur, I must wish you a good-night; and as in this changeful life we can never answer for the future, let me commend myself to your recollection hereafter, if, as may be, we should not meet again. Adieu, adieu,’ said he, waving his hand.
‘Adieu,’ said I, with a great effort to seem at ease; ‘a pleasant journey, and every success to your honest endeavours.’
‘You are a fine fellow,’ said he, stopping and turning about suddenly—‘a superb fellow; and I can’t part from you without a gage d’amitié between us’; and with the word he took my handsome travelling-cap from my head and placed it on his own, while he crowned me with a villainous straw thing that nothing save my bondage prevented me from hurling at his feet.
He now hurried forward after the others, and in a few minutes I was in perfect solitude.
‘Well,’ thought I (it was my first thought), ‘it might all have been worse; the wretches might have murdered me, for such reckless devils as practise their trade care little for human life. Murder, too, would only meet the same punishment as smuggling, or nearly so—a year more or a year less at the galleys; and, after all, the night is fine, and if I mistake not he said something about the moon.’ I wondered where was the pretty countess—travelling away, probably, as hard as extra post could bring her. Ah, she little thought of my miserable plight now! Then came a little interval of softness; and then a little turn of indignation at my treatment—that I, an Englishman, should be so barbarously molested; a native of the land where freedom was the great birthright of every one! I called to mind all the fine things Burke used to say about liberty, and if I had not begun to feel so cold I’d have tried to sing ‘Rule, Britannia,’ just to keep up my spirits; and then I fell asleep, if sleep it could be called—that frightful nightmare of famished wolves howling about me, tearing and mangling revenue-officers; and grisly bears running backward and forward with smuggled tobacco on their backs. The forest seemed peopled by every species of horrible shapes—half men, half beast—but all with straw hats on their heads and leather gaiters on their legs.
However, the night passed over, and the day began to break; the purple tint, pale and streaky, that announces the rising sun, was replacing the cold grey of the darker hours. What a different thing it is, to be sure, to get out of your bed deliberately, and rubbing your eyes for two or three minutes with your fingers, as you stand at the half-closed curtain, and then through the mist of your sleep look out upon the east, and think you see the sun rising, and totter back to the comfortable nest again, the whole incident not breaking your sleep, but merely being interwoven with your dreams, a thing to dwell on among other pleasant fancies, and to be boasted of the whole day afterwards—what a different thing it is, I say, from the sensations of him who has been up all night in the mail; shaken, bruised, and cramped; sat on by the fat man, and kicked by the lean one—still worse of him who spends his night dos à dos to an oak in a forest, cold, chill, and comfortless; no property in his limbs beneath the knees, where all sensation terminates, and his hands as benumbed as the heart of a poor-law guardian!
If I have never, in all my after-life, seen the sun rise from the Rigi, from Snowdon, or the Pic du Midi, or any other place which seems especially made for this sole purpose, I owe it to the experience of this night, and am grateful therefore. Not that I have the most remote notion of throwing disrespect on the glorious luminary, far from it—I cut one of my oldest friends for speaking lightly of the equator; but I hold it that the sun looks best, as every one else does, when he’s up and dressed for the day. It’s a piece of prying, impertinent curiosity to peep at him when he ‘s rising and at his toilette; he has not rubbed the clouds out of his eyes, or you dared not look at him—and you feel it too. The very way you steal out to catch a glimpse shows the sneaking, contemptible sense you have of your own act. Peeping Tom was a gentleman compared to your early riser.
The whole of which digression simply seems to say that I by no means enjoyed the rosy-fingered morning’s blushes the more for having spent the preceding night in the open air. I need not worry myself, still less my reader, by recapitulating the various frames of mind which succeeded each other every hour of my captivity. At one time my escape with life served to console me for all I endured; at another, my bondage excited my whole wrath. I vowed vengeance on my persecutors too, and meditated various schemes for their punishment—my anger rising as their absence was prolonged, till I thought I could calculate my indignation by an algebraical formula, and make it exactly equal to the ‘squares of the distance’ of my persecutors. Then I thought of the delight I should experience in regaining my freedom, and actually made a bold effort to see something ludicrous in the entire adventure: but no—it would not do; I could not summon up a laugh.
At last—it might have been towards noon—I heard a merry voice chanting a song, and a quick step coming up the allée of the wood. Never did my heart beat with such delight! The very mode of progression had something joyous in it; it seemed a hop and a step and a spring, suiting each motion to the tune of the air—when suddenly the singer, with a long bound, stood before me. It would, indeed, have been a puzzling question which of us more surprised the other; however, as I can render no accurate account of his sensations on seeing me, I must content myself with recording mine on beholding him, and the best way to do so is to describe him. He was a man, or a boy—Heaven knows which—of something under the middle size, dressed in rags of every colour and shape; his old white hat was crushed and bent into some faint resemblance of a chapeau, and decorated with a cockade of dirty ribbons and a cock’s feather; a little white jacket, such as men-cooks wear in the kitchen, and a pair of flaming crimson-plush shorts, cut above the knee, and displaying his naked legs, with sabots, formed his costume. A wooden sword was attached to an old belt round his waist—an ornament of which he seemed vastly proud, and which from time to time he regarded with no small satisfaction.
‘Holloa!’ cried he, starting back, as he stood some six paces off, and gazed at me with most unequivocal astonishment; then recovering his self-possession long before I could summon mine, he said, ‘Bonjour, bonjour, camarade! a fine day for the vintage.’