What play has ever shown this more clearly than Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird"? Though the children go from glory to glory of lustrous imagination, though they can go back to the land of Old Memories, to the land of the Future, yet they cannot stay there. Though they see and rejoice to the full in the "Blue Bird," the spirit of Happiness, yet that one soft stroking of its feathers is all that is possible before it flies away. For every Ideal is winged: every Conception of Happiness but a passing vision. We have but to attempt to grasp them to find their elusiveness is a fact from which we cannot get away.
For me, the France about which I have written in the following pages is a country which calls to me from the world of my ideals, from the world of my imagination. From across the seas that call stirs me and thrills me indescribably. It is not the France of the Parisian; it is not the France of the automobilist; it is not the France of the Cook's tourist. It is the France upon whose shores one steps at once into the land of many ideals.
I should like here to thank three friends, Messieurs Henri Guillier, Goulon, and E. G. Sieveking, who have most kindly given me permission to print their photographs of the part of France through which I travelled, and more than all, the greatest friend of all, who alone made the journey possible.
I. Giberne Sieveking.
Autumn Impressions
of the Gironde
[CHAPTER I]
"Mails first!" shouted the captain from the upper deck, as the steamer from Newhaven brought up alongside the landing stage at Dieppe, and the eager flow of the tide of passengers, anxious to forget on dry land how roughly the "cradle of the deep" had lately rocked them, was stayed.
I looked round on the woe-begone faces of those who had answered the call of the sea, and whose reply had been so long and so wearisome to themselves. Why is it that a smile is always ready in waiting at the very idea of sea-sickness? There is nothing humorous in its presentment; nothing in its discomfort to the sufferers; but yet to the bystander it invariably presents the idea of something comic, and, to the man whose inside turns a somersault at the first lurch of the wave against the side of the steamer, mal-de-mer seems both a belittling, as well as a very uncomfortable, part to play!
At Dieppe the train practically starts in the street; and while it waited for its full complement of passengers, two or three countrywomen came and knocked with their knuckles against the sides of the carriages, and held up five ruddy-cheeked pears for sale. (One uses the term "ruddy-cheeked" for apples, so why not for pears, which shew as much cheek as the former, only of a different shape?)