CASTLE AVANTON, VIENNE.
[Page 112.
In our hotel, every evening, regularly at table d'hôte, appeared a genuine old specimen of the haute-noblesse. He was all one had ever dreamed of as an old marquis of an extinct régime! A sour, disappointed expression, (which he fed by drinking quantities of lemon-juice,) dominated his face, though through this could be seen an air of faded dignity which set him apart from the common herd who sat to right and left of him. Somehow or other, he conveyed to that noisy salle-à-manger the subtle atmosphere of some old castle in other days. One saw the splendid old panelled room in which he might have sat among the family portraits of many generations around him. Surrounding him many signs and tokens of ancient nobility, and that great army of unseen retainers that fenced him about wherever he went-his traditions. It was true he had to sit cheek by jowl with the commis voyageur, the bourgeois, the Cook's tourist, and seemed to be of them, but in reality he lived in another atmosphere. And as all the world knows, nothing separates one man from another so completely, so finally, as a certain essence of spiritual atmosphere.
Along the line from Poitiers to Rouen were trees of flaming tawny and russet tints. The effect of the snow which had fallen over the fields the previous night, was that of beaten white of egg having settled itself flat, and having been forked over in a regular pattern. The cabbages looked pinched and shrunken with the curl all out of their plumage. The whole landscape was backed by a deep lilac flush over the rising woodlands on the horizon. There is something in the straight, unswerving upward growth of the poplar which relieves the plains from their otherwise dead level monotony. This is the secret of all life. It must have contrast. It is not like to like which saves in the crucial moment of crisis, it is rather the power of the sudden, startling contrast.
After passing Orléans we came upon trees only partly despoiled of their leaves, which looked gorgeous in their new livery of white and gold, for the snow had fallen only upon the bare boughs. As the afternoon grew darker, the cold white glare of the fields shone more and more vividly, broken only by the whirl of the succeeding furrows, and the little copses of violet brown brushwood as the train raced along. Then, later, came a long sombre belt of pines, the light shewing dimly between the trunks. Anon, a chalk cutting, now a winking flare from the lights of some passing wayside station.
As we neared Rouen, we could see the Seine flowing close below the line of rail. It was moonlight, and the trees which lined its banks shone reflected clear and delicately outlined in the swirling water below. Every now and then a ripple caught the dazzling, steely glitter, and blazed up, as if the facets of a diamond had flashed them back, as the waves rose and fell. To the right, in the middle distance, long lines of undulating hills lay gloomy and sombre. Then—the train slowed into the vast city of innumerable traditions, and mediæval romance—Rouen.