A COTTAGE HOME
There is no sound in the forest but your own footsteps and the rustle of the dry leaves as your dress brushes them. You emerge from the pine-forest on to a bare piece of mountain land, grayish purple, with patches of black. Then you dive into a chestnut-grove, where the leaves are green and brown and gold, and the earth is a rich brown. And so down the path into the village wrapped in a blue haze. The women in their cottages are bending busily over copper pots and pans on great open fireplaces of blazing logs. Little coloured bowls have been laid out on long polished tables for the evening meal, and the bright pewter plates have been brought down from the dresser. Lulu has been sent out to bring home bread for supper. 'Va, ma petite Lulu,' says her mother, 'dépêche toi.' And the small fat bundle in the check pinafore toddles hastily down the stone steps on chubby legs.
On the stone settles outside almost every house in the village families are sitting—the mothers and withered old grandmothers knitting or peeling potatoes, and the children munching apples and hunches of bread-and-butter. An old woman is washing her fresh green lettuce at the pump. As we mount the hill leading to the hotel and look back, night is fast descending on the village. The mountains have taken on a deeper purple; blue smoke rises from every cottage; the gray sky is changing to a faint citron yellow; the few slim pine-trees on the hills stand out against it jet-black, like sentinels.
MEDIÆVAL HOUSES, VITRÉ
CHAPTER III
VITRÉ
For the etcher, the painter, the archæologist, and the sculptor, Vitré is an ideal town. To the archæologist it is an ever-open page from the Middle Ages, an almost complete relic of that period, taking one back with a strange force and realism three hundred years and more. Time has dealt tenderly with Vitré. The slanting, irregular houses, leaning one against the other, as if for mutual support, stand as by a miracle.
Wandering through Vitré, one seems to be visiting a wonderful and perfect museum, such as must needs please even the exacting, the blasé, and the indifferent. You are met at every turn by the works of the ancients in all their naïve purity and simplicity, many of the houses having been built in the first half of the seventeenth century.