We soon found the haunted pond that Barty was so fond of—but quite in the open, close to an enormous brick‑field, and only half full; and with all its trees cut down, including the tree on which they had hanged the gay young Viscount who had behaved so badly to Séraphine Doucet, and on which Séraphine Doucet afterwards hanged herself in remorse.
No more friendly charcoal‑burners, no more wolves or boars or cerfs—dix‑cors; and as for were‑wolves, the very memory of them had died out.
There seems no greater desecration to me than cutting down an old and well‑remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one of the manner in which French market‑women will pluck a goose before it's quite dead; you bristle with indignation to see it, but you mustn't interfere.
La Tremblaye itself had become a flourishing manufacturing town, and to our jaundiced and disillusioned eyes everybody and everything was as ugly as could be—and I can't say we made much of a bag in the way of souvenirs.
We were told that young Laferté was a barrister at Angers, prosperous and married. We deliberated whether we would hunt him up and talk of old times. Then we reflected how curiously cold and inhospitable Frenchmen can sometimes be to old English friends in circumstances like these—and how little they care to talk of old times and all that, unless it's the Englishman who plays the host.
Ask a quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be—what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your British welcome.
Then go and call on him when you find yourself in Paris—and you will soon learn to leave quite ordinary Frenchmen alone, on their own side of the Channel.
Happily, there are exceptions to this rule!
Thus the sweet Laferté remembrance, which had so often come back to me in my dreams, was forever spoiled by this unlucky trip.
It had turned that leaf from the tablets of my memory into a kind of palimpsest, so that I could no longer quite make out the old handwriting for the new, which would not be obliterated, and these were confused lines it was hard to read between—with all my skill!