BY A FAIR RIVER AND OVER TERRIBLE MOUNTAINS.
THE milkman, followed by his goats, was piping through the town, and the clock over the geraniums in the court was just striking eight, as we disposed of our bill—not without numerous complaints, in which every one but some English tourists joined—and wheeled the tricycle out to the street.—Though the old motherly femme-de-chambre had come to see us ride, and stopped a friend to share this pleasure, and though there were many faces at the dining-room windows, the sight of the pavé, or French paving, kept us from mounting. We walked, J—— pushing the tricycle, to the Place, past the grey town-hall, into the Rue Royale. We had been told that where La Fleur’s hotel once stood a museum was being built. To sentimental travellers, perhaps, this destruction of old landmarks was as worthy of tears as a dead donkey.—But it is easier to weep in a private post-chaise than in the open streets.
We got through the town without trouble, but we could not ride even after we went round the city-gate which Hogarth did paint, and to which we gave but a passing glance. It was only beyond the long, commonplace, busy suburb of St. Pierre that the pavé ended and the good road began.
The morning was cool, the sky grey with heavy clouds, and the south wind we were soon to dread was blowing softly. It seemed a matter of course, since we were in France, that we should come out almost at once on a little river. It ran in a long line between reeds, towards a cluster of red-roofed cottages, and here and there fishermen sat, or stood, on the banks. When it forsook its straight course, the road and the street-car track from
Calais went winding with it,—grassy plains, where cows and horses wandered, stretching seaward on the right. In front we looked to a low range of blue hills, that gradually took more definite shape and colour as we rode. They were very near when we came to Guignes, a silent, modest little village, for all its royal associations and memories of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” On its outskirts old yellow houses rose right on the river’s edge; and when we passed, a girl in blue skirt stood in one doorway, sending a bright reflection into the grey water, and in another an old man peacefully smoked his pipe, taking it from his mouth to beg we would carry packets for him to Paris. Behind one cottage, in the garden among the apple-trees, was a large canal boat, like a French Rudder Grange. Beyond, high steep-roofed houses faced upon the street, and the stream was lined with many barges.—But just here we turned from river and street-car track to walk to the other end of the town, over pavé and up a steep hill, where we were told by a blushing young man, in foreign English, that we had but to follow the diligence then behind us if we would reach Marquise.
Though we thought this a rare jest at the time, we carried his advice out almost to the letter.—We had come to the terrible mountains for which we had been prepared in Calais. It is at this point, according to Mr. Ruskin, that France really begins, the level stretch we first crossed being virtually but part of Flanders. ’Tis a bad beginning, from a cycler’s ideal. For many miles I walked—and even J—— at times—along the white road, barren of the poplars one always expects in France, over the rolling treeless moors, where we were watched out of sight by gleaners, their white caps and dull blue skirts and sacks in pale relief against a grey blue-streaked sky; and by ploughmen, whose horses, happier than they, ate their dinners as they worked.—Always to the north of the moorland was the grey sea-line, and farther still the white cliffs of England.