“With a senseless or sublime contempt for whatever binds or hampers, the Tziganes ask nothing from the earth but life, and preserve their individuality from constant intercourse with nature, as well as by absolute indifference to all those not belonging to their race, with whom they commune only as far as requisite for obtaining the common necessities of life.
“Like the Jews they have natural taste and ability for fraud; but, unlike them, it is without systematic hatred or malice. Hatred and revenge are with them only personal and accidental feelings, never premeditated ones. Harmless when their immediate wants are satisfied, they are incapable of preconceived intention of injuring, only wishing to preserve a freedom akin to that of the wild horse of the plains, and not comprehending how any one can prefer a roof, be it ever so fine, to the shelter of the forest canopy.
“Authority, rules, laws, principles, duties, and obligations are alike incomprehensible ideas to this singular race—partly from indolence of spirit, partly from indifference to the evils engendered by their irregular mode of life.
“Such only as it is, the Tzigane loves his life, and would exchange it for no other. He loves his life when slumbering in a copse of young birch-trees: he fancies himself surrounded by a group of slender maidens, their long floating hair bestrewed with shining sapphire stones, their graceful figures swayed by the breeze into voluptuous and coquettish gestures, as though each were trembling and thrilling under the kiss of an invisible lover. The Tzigane loves his life when for hours together his eyes idly follow the geometrical figures described in the sky overhead by the strategical evolutions of a flight of rooks; when he gauges his cunning against that of the wary bustard, or overcomes the silvery trout in a trial of lightning-like agility. He loves his life when, shaking the wild crab-apple-tree, he causes a hail-storm of ruddy fruit to come pouring down upon him; when he picks the unripe berries from off a thorny branch, leaving the sandy earth flecked with drops of gory red, like a deserted battle-field; when bending over a murmuring woodland spring, whose grateful coolness refreshes his parched throat as its gurgling music delights his ear; when he hears the woodpecker tapping a hollow stem, or can distinguish the faint sound of a distant mill-wheel. He loves his life when, gazing on the gray-green waters of some lonely mountain lake, its surface spellbound in the dawning presentiment of approaching frost, he lets his vagrant fancy float hither and thither unchecked; when reclining high up on the branch of some lofty forest-tree, hammock-like he is rocked to and fro, while each leaf around him seems quivering with ecstasy at the song of the nightingale. He loves his life when, out of the myriads of ever-twinkling stars in the illimitable space overhead, he chooses out one to be his own particular sweetheart; when he falls in love, to-day with a gorgeous lilac-bush of overwhelming perfume, to-morrow with a slender hawthorn or graceful eglantine, to be as quickly forgotten at sight of a brilliant peacock-feather, with which, as with a victorious war-trophy, he adorns his cap; when he sits by the smouldering camp-fire under ancient oaks or massive beeches; when, lying awake at night, he hears the call of the stag and the lowing of the respondent doe; when he has no other society but the forest animals, with whom he forms friendships and enmities—caressing or tormenting them, depriving them of liberty or setting them free, revelling in the treasures of Nature like a wanton child despoiling his parent’s riches, but well knowing their wealth to be inexhaustible.
“What he calls life is to inhale the breath of Nature with every pore of his body; to surfeit his eye with all her forms and colors; with his ear greedily to absorb all her chords and harmonics. Life for him is to multiply the possession of all these things by the kaleidoscopic and phantasmagorial effects of alcohol, then to sing and play, shout, laugh, and dance, till utter exhaustion.
“Having neither Bible nor Gospels to go by, the Tziganes do not see the necessity of fatiguing their brain by the contemplation of abstract ideas; and obeying their instincts only, their intelligence naturally grows rusty. Conscious of their harmlessness they bask in the rays of the sun, content in the satisfaction of a few primitive and elementary passions—the sans-gêne of their soul fettered by no conventional virtues.
“What strength of indolence! what utter want of all social instinct must these people possess in order to live as they have done for centuries, like that strange plant, native of the sandy desert, so aptly termed the wind’s bride, which, by nature devoid of root, and blown from side to side by every breeze, yet bears flower and fruit wherever it goes, continuing to put out shoots under the most unlikely conditions!
“And whenever the Tziganes have endeavored to bring themselves to a settled mode of life and to adopt domestic habits, have they not invariably sooner or later returned to their hard couch on the cold ground, to their miserable rags, to their rough comrades, and the brown beauty of their women?—to the sombre shades of the virgin forests, to the murmur of unknown fountains, to their glowing camp-fires and their improvised concerts under a starlit sky?—to their intoxicating dances in the lighting of a forest glade, to the merry knavery of their thievish pranks—in a word, to the hundred excitements they cannot do without?
“Nature, when once indulged in to the extent of becoming a necessity, becomes tyrannical like any other passion; and the charms of such an existence can neither be explained nor coldly analyzed—only he who has tasted of them can value their power aright. He must needs have slumbered often beneath the canopy of the starry heavens; have been oft awakened by the darts of the rising sun shooting like fiery arrows between his eyelids; have felt, without horror, the glossy serpent coil itself caressingly round a naked limb; must have spent full many a long summer day reclining immovable on the sward, overlapped by billowy waves of flowery grasses which have never felt the mower’s scythe; he must often have listened to the rich orchestral effects and tempestuous melodies which the hurricane loves to draw from vibrating pine-stems, or slender quaking reeds; he must be able to recognize each tree by its perfume, be initiated into all the varied languages of the feathered tribes, of merry finches, and of chattering grasshoppers; full often must he have ridden at close of day over the barren wold, when the rays of the setting sun cast a golden glamour over the atmosphere, and all around is plunged in a bath of living fire; he must have watched the red-hot moon rise out of the sable night over lonely plains whence all life seems to have fled away; he must, in short, have lived like the Tzigane in order to comprehend that it is impossible to exist without the balmy perfumes exhaled by the forests; that one cannot find rest within stone-built prisons; that a breast accustomed to draw full draughts of the purest ozone feels weighed down and crushed beneath a sheltering roof; that the eye which has daily looked on the rising sun breaking out through pearly clouds must weep, forsooth, when met on all sides by dull, opaque walls; that the ear hungers when deprived of the loud modulations, of the exquisite harmonies, of which the mountain breeze alone has the secret.