All this he understood; I ordered such a meal as men give to beloved friends returned from wars. I ordered a wine I had known long ago in the valley of the Saône in the old time of peace before ever the Greek came to the land. While they cooked it I went to their cool and splendid cathedral to follow a late Mass. Then I came home and ate their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose.
All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done; after he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened Bramimonde.
So I slept deeply all day long; and, outside, the glare made a silence upon the closed shutters, save that little insects darted in the outer air.
When I woke it was evening. So well had they used me that I paid what they asked, and, not knowing what money remained over, I left their town by the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the road.
My way lay under the flank of that mountain whereby the Luccans cannot see Pisa, or the Pisans cannot see Lucca--it is all one to me, I shall not live in either town, God willing; and if they are so eager to squint at one another, in Heaven's name, cannot they be at the pains to walk round the end of the hill? It is this laziness which is the ruin of many; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to cross the plain of Arno in one night, and reach by morning the mouth
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and gate of that valley of the Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief city of the world, and the Popes' residence--as, indeed, it plainly is to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual, geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical.
For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio--the hot, droughty, and baking Garfagnana--lead down pointing straight to Rome; and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up directly towards Rome? I say, nowhere in the world is such a coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever.