To our pampered countrymen, long nurtured in that peculiar species of luxury called comfort, the roads of France even now must seem but rude and barbarous constructions, when compared with the smooth, joltless causeways over which they are borne in their own land; but in the time of Louis the Thirteenth, when all works of the kind were carried on by the Seigneur through whose estates they passed, few but the principal roads between one great town and another were even passable for a carriage. Those, however, which traversing the wood of Mantes, served as means of access to the royal residence of St. Germain, were of a superior kind, and would have been absolutely good, had the nature of the soil afforded a steady foundation: but this was not always to be found in the forest, and the engineer had shown no small ingenuity in taking advantage of all the most solid parts of the land, and in avoiding those places where the marshy or sandy quality of the ground offered no secure basis. By these circumstances, however, he was obliged to deviate sadly from those principles of direct progression, so dear to all Frenchmen; and the road from St. Germain to Mantes, as well as that which branched off from it to join the high-road to Chartres, instead of being one interminable, monotonous, straight line, with a long row of trees, like a file of grenadiers, on each side, went winding in and out with a thousand turnings amongst the old oaks of the forest, that seemed to stand forward, and stretch their broad branches across it, as if willing to shelter it from the obtrusive rays of the sun. Sometimes, climbing the side of a hill, it would suddenly display a wide view over the leafy ocean below, till the eye caught the towers and spires of distant cities breaking the far grey line of the horizon. Sometimes, descending into the depths of the forest, it would almost seem to lose itself amongst the wild groves and savannas, being itself the only trace of man’s laborious hand amidst the wilderness around.
In the heart of the wood, at that point where the two roads (which I have mentioned) divaricated from each other, stood the hut of a Woodman, and the abreuvoir where many a gay lord of the Court would stop when his hunting was over, and give his horse time to drink. There, too, many a traveller would pause to ask his way through the forest; so that Philip, the woodman, and his young family, were known to almost all whom business or pleasure brought through the wood of Mantes; and although during the course of this true history, princes and heroes may become the subjects of discourse, it is with Philip that we must commence our tale.
It was at that season of the year, when the first leaves of summer begin to leave the branches from which they sprang, like the bright and tender hopes of early years, that fade and fall before the autumn of life has fully commenced. The sun had abated but little of his force, and the days scarcely seemed to have contracted their span.
The time of day, too, was like the period of the year, “falling gently into the sear,” so that it was only a scarce perceptible shadow, stealing over the landscape, which told that the great power of light was quitting that quarter of the globe, to bestow the equal blessing of his smile on other nations and on distant climes. That shadow had been the signal for Philip the woodman to return towards his home, and he issued forth from one of the forest paths, near his dwelling, singing as he came the old hunting-song of Le bon roi Dagobert.[A]
“King Dagobert in days of yore
Put on his hose wrong side before.
Says St. Eloi, the king’s old squire,
‘I would not offend, most gracious Sire,
But may your slave be soundly switch’d,
If your Majesty is not oddly breech’d,’
For you’ve got the wrong side before.’
Says the King, ‘I do not care a groat;
One’s breeches are scarcely worth a thought;
A beggar’s a king when he’s at his ease,
So turn them about which way you please,
And be quick, you s——”
[A] This song of Le bon roi Dagobert is in the original very long, and contains a great deal of witty ribaldry, unfit to be inserted here. The above is a somewhat free translation of the first verse, which stands thus in the French:
“Le bon roy Dagobert
Mettoit ses culottes à renvers.
Le bon St. Eloi
Lui dit, Oh mon Roy!
Que votre Majesté
Est bien mal culotté.
Eh bien, dit ce bon Roy,
Je consens qu’on les mête à l’endroit.”
Now St. Hubert, in all probability, is the only person who correctly knows how it happened, that the very unmeaning and inapplicable ditty of Le bon roi Dagobert, should have been appropriated exclusively to the noble exercise of hunting, to which it has no reference whatever; but so it has been, and even to the present day where is the chasseur who cannot, as he returns from the chace, blow the notes, or sing the words of Le bon roi Dagobert?
Philip, as woodman, had heard it echoed and re-echoed through the forest from his very infancy; and now, without even knowing that he did so, he sang it as a matter of habit, although his mind was occupied upon another subject: as men are always naturally inclined to employ their corporeal faculties on some indifferent object, when their mental ones are intensely engaged in things of deeper interest.