ORLÉANS: GENERAL VIEW OF THE TOWN
But now we were approaching a town with a name—a name so encrusted and overgrown with associations that it was undeniably disappointing, as we reached its outskirts, to find Châteauroux—aside from its fine old château on the Indre—so exactly like other dull French towns, so provokingly unconscious of being one of the capital cities of literature. And it seems, in fact, literally as well as figuratively unaware of its distinction. Fame throws its circles so wide that it makes not a ripple near home; and even the alert landlady of the Hôtel Sainte Catherine wrinkled her brows perplexedly at our question: “Is one permitted to visit the house of George Sand?”
“Le château de George Sand? (A pause of reflection.) C’est l’écrivain, n’est-ce pas? (Another pause.) C’est à Nohant, le château? Mais, Madame, je ne saurais vous le dire.”
Yet here was the northern gate of the Sand country—it was here that, for years, the leaders of the most sedentary profession of a sedentary race—the hommes de lettres of France—descended from the Paris express, and took a diligence on their pilgrimage to the oracle. When one considers the fatigue of the long day’s railway journey, and the French dread of déplacements, the continual stream of greatness that Paris poured out upon Nohant gives the measure of what Nohant had to offer in return.
As we sat at breakfast in the inn dining-room we irreverently pictured some of these great personages—Liszt, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Dumas fils, Flaubert—illustrious figures in the queer dishabille of travel, unwinding strange cache-nez, solicitous for embroidered carpet-bags, seated in that very room over their coffee and omelette, or climbing to the coupé of the diligence outside. And then we set out on the same road.
Straight as an arrow, after the unvarying fashion of the French government highway, it runs southeast through vast wheatfields, past barns and farmhouses grouped as in the vanished “drawing-books” of infancy—now touching, now deserting the Indre banks, as the capricious river throws its poplar-edged loops across the plain. But presently we began to mount insensibly; till at length a sharp turn, and an abrupt fall of the land, brought us out on a ridge above the plain of the Berry, with the river reappearing below, and far, far south a blue haze of mountains.
The road, after that, descends again by gentle curves, acquainting one gradually with the charming details of the foreground—pale-green copses, fields hedged with hawthorn, long lines of poplars in the plain—while, all the way, the distant horizon grows richer, bluer and more mysterious. It is a wide lonely country, with infrequent villages—mere hamlets—dotting the fields; one sees how the convivial Dudevant, coming from the livelier Gascony, might have found it, for purposes of pot-house sociability, a little thinly settled. At one of these small lonely villages—Vicq—just where the view spreads widest, the road loses it again by a gradual descent of a mile or so; and at the foot of the hill, among hawthorn and lilac hedges, through the boughs of budding trees, a high slate roof shows to the left—the roof of a plain-faced fawn-coloured house, the typical gentilhommière of the French country-side.
No other house is in sight: only, from behind the trees, peep two or three humble tiled cottages, dependencies of the larger pile. There is nothing to tell us the name of the house—nothing to signalise it, to take it out of the common. It stands there large, placid, familiarly related to the high-road and the farm, like one side of the extraordinary woman it sheltered; and perhaps that fact helps to suggest its name, to render almost superfluous our breathless question to the pretty goose-girl knitting under the hedge.
“Mais oui, Madame—c’est Nohant.”
The goose-girl—pink as a hawthorn bud, a “kerchief” tied about her curls—might really, in the classic phrase of sentimental travel, have “stepped out” of one of the novels written yonder, under the high roof to which she pointed: she had the honest savour of the terroir, yet with that superadded grace that the author of the novels has been criticised for bestowing on her peasants. She formed, at any rate, a charming link between our imagination and the famous house; and we presently found that the miracle which had preserved her in all her 1830 grace had been extended to the whole privileged spot, which seemed, under a clear glass bell of oblivion, to have been kept intact, unchanged, like some wonderful “exhibit” illustrative of the extraordinary history lived within it.