The little chapel has disappeared, I believe, since the castle and the whole country were restored to the Catholic worship. Besides, this treatment arose from humanity: Saint-Pont, at Macon, “afforded the ladies, as they went out from the banquets that he gave, the pleasure of seeing a certain number of prisoners leap off from the bridge.” Such were these men, extreme in everything, in fanaticism, in pleasure, in violence; never did the fountain of desires flow fuller and deeper; never did more vigorous passions unfold themselves with more of sap and greenness. Walking through these silent halls, disturbed from time to time by fair invalids or pale young consumptives who walk there, I fancied that enervation of the inner nature came from the enervation of the bodies. We spend our time within doors, taken up with discussions, reflections and reading; the gentleness of manners removes dangers from us, and industrial progress fatigues. They lived in the open air, ever following the chase and in war. “Queen Catherine was very fond of riding, up to the age of sixty and more, and of making great and active journeys, even after she had often fallen, to the great injury of her body, for she was several times so far hurt as to break her leg and wound her head.” The rude exercises hardened their nerves; their warmer blood, stirred by incessant peril, urged upon the brain impetuous caprices; they made history, while we write it.
III.
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The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests. You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to come to the happy country of the Béarnais to find such melancholy impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man; their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume. We gazed on the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshalled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart one feels a vague unrest; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery. Suddenly the clock strikes, and one has to go and prepare to take his soup between two commercial travellers.
