Proposing to return to this theme, and to see more of the broad church before I decide upon its position, I take leave of it and of its domain together. Farewell, England! farewell, London! For three months to come thou wilt contain the regalia of all wits, of all capabilities. Fain would we have lingered beside the hospitable tables, and around the ancient monuments, considering also the steadfast and slowly-developing institutions. But the chief veteran is in haste for Greece, and on the very Sunday on which we should have heard Martineau in the forenoon, and Dean Stanley in the afternoon, with delightful social recreation in the evening, we break loose from our moorings, reach Folkstone, and embark for its French antithesis, Boulogne sur mer.
THE CHANNEL.
If the devil is not so black as he is painted, it must be because he has an occasional day of good humor. Some such wondrous interval is hinted at by people who profess to have seen the Channel sea smooth and calm. We remember it piled with mountains of anguish—one's poor head swimming, one's heart sinking, while an organ more important than either in this connection underwent a sort of turning inside out which seemed to wrench the very strings of life. But on this broken Sabbath our wonderful luck still pursues us. It is in favor of the neophytes that this new dispensation has been granted. The monsters of the deep respect their innocence, and cannot visit on them the vulgar offences of their progenitors. They bind the waves with a garland of roses and lilies, whose freshness proves a spell of peace. We, the elders, embark, expecting the usual speedy prostration; but, placing ourselves against the mast, we determine, like Ulysses, to maintain the integrity of our position. And it so happens that we do. While a few sensitive mortals about us execute the irregular symphony of despair, we rest in a calm and upright silence. Never was the Channel so quiet! We were not uproarious, certainly, but contemplative. A wretch tucked us up with a tarpaulin, for which he afterwards demanded a trifle. If civility is sold for its weight in silver anywhere, it is on English soil and in English dependencies. We, the veterans, took our quiet ferriage in mute amazement; the neophytes took it as a thing of course.
Arrived, we rush to the buffet of the railroad station, where every one speaks French-English. Here a very limited dinner costs us five francs a head. We accept the imposition with melancholy thoughtfulness. Then comes the whistle of the locomotive. "En voiture, messieurs!" And away, with a shriek, and a groan, and a rattle,—to borrow Mr. Dickens's refrain, now that he has done with it,—en route for Paris.
PARIS AND THENCE.
In Paris the fate of Greece still pursues us. Two days the rigid veteran will grant; no more—the rest promised when the Eastern business shall have been settled. But those two days suffice to undo our immortal souls so far as shop windows can do this. The shining sins and vanities of the world are so insidiously set forth in this Jesuits' college of Satan, that you catch the contagion of folly and extravagance as you pace the streets, or saunter through the brilliant arcades. Your purveyor makes a Sybarite of you, through the inevitable instrumentality of breakfast and dinner. Your clothier, from boots to bonnet, seduces you into putting the agreeable before the useful. For if you purchase the latter, you will be moved to buy by the former, and use becomes an after-thought to your itching desire and disturbed conscience. Paris is a sweating furnace in which human beings would turn life everlasting into gold, provided it were a negotiable value. You, who escape its allurements solvent, with a franc or two in your pocket, and your resources for a year to come not mortgaged, should after your own manner cause Te Deum to be sung or celebrated. Strongly impressed at the time, moved towards every acquisitive villany, not excluding shop-lifting nor the picking of pockets, I now regard with a sort of indignation those silken snares, those diamond, jet, and crystal allurements, which so nearly brought my self-restraint, and with it my self-respect, to ruin. Everything in Paris said to me, "Shine, dye your hair, rouge your cheeks, beggar your purse with real diamonds, or your pride with false ones. But shine, and, if necessary, beg or steal." Nothing said, "Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, like a roaring lion," etc., etc. What a deliverer was therefore the stern Crete-bound veteran, who cut the Gordian knot of enchantment with, "Pack and begone." And having ended that inevitable protest against his barbarity with which women requite the offices of true friendship, I now turn my wrath against false, fair Paris, and cry, "Avoid thee, scelestissima! Away from me, nequissima! I will none of thee; not a franc, not an obolus. Avoid thee! Nolo ornari!"
Touching our journey from Paris to Marseilles, I will only give the scarce-needed advice that those who have this route to make should inflict upon themselves a little extra fatigue, and stop only at Lyons, if at all, rather than risk the damp rooms and musty accommodations of the smaller places which lie upon the route, offering to the traveller few objects of interest, or none. For it often happens in travelling that a choice only of inconveniences is presented to us, and in our opinion a prolonged day's journey in a luxurious car is far less grievous to be borne than a succession of stoppages, unpackings, and plungings into unknown inns and unaired beds. To this opinion, however, our Greece-bound veteran suffers not himself to be converted, and, accordingly, we, leaving Paris on the Wednesday at ten A. M., do not reach Marseilles until four o'clock of the Friday afternoon following.
The features of our first day's journey are those of a country whose landed possessions are subdivided into the smallest portions cultivable. Plains and hill-sides are alike covered with the stripes which denote the limits of property. Fruit trees in blossom abound every where, but the villages, built of rough stone and lime, are distant from each other. As we go southward, the vine becomes more apparent, and before we reach Lyons we see much of that contested gift of God. The trains that pass us are often loaded with barrels whose precious contents cannot be bought pure for any money, on the other side of the Atlantic, or even of the Straits of Dover. To this the procession of the jolly god has come at last. He leers at us through the two red eyes of the locomotive; its stout cylinder represents his embonpoint. Instead of frantic Bacchantes, the rattling cars dance after him, and "Ohe evohe!" degenerates into the shrill whew, whew of the engine. At the buffets and hotels en route his mysteries are celebrated. These must be sought in the labyrinthine state of mind of those who have drunken frequently and freely. They utter words unintelligible to the sober and uninspired, sentences of prophetic madness which the prose of modern physiology condenses into those two words—gout and delirium tremens. Yet these two dire diseases are rare among the temperate French. They export the producing medium au profit de l'étranger.
We stop the first night at Macon, and sleep in an imposing, chilly room, without carpets, under down coverlets. The second day's journey brings us to Lyons an hour before noon. We engage a fiacre, drive around the town, whose growth and improvement in the interval of sixteen years do not fail to strike us. Fine public squares adorn it, themselves embellished with bronze statues, among which we observe an equestrian figure of the first and only Napoleon. The shops are as tormenting as those of Paris, the Café Casati, where we dine, as elegant. Re-embarking at four P. M., we reach Valence in about four hours.
The worst of it is, that, arriving at these quaint little places after dark, you see none of their features, and taste only of their discomforts. At Valence our inn was so dreary, that, having bestowed the neophytes in sound slumber, the veteran and I sallied forth in quest of any pastime whatever, without being at all fastidious as to its source and character. Passing along the quiet streets, we observe what would seem to be a theatre, on the other side of the way. Entering, we find a youthful guardian, who tells us that there is up stairs a "confèrence de philosophie." We enter, and find a very respectable assemblage, listening attentively to an indistinct orator, who rhapsodizes upon the poets of modern France, with quotations and personal anecdotes. What he says has little originality, but is delivered with good taste and feeling. He speaks without notes; for, indeed, such a causerie spins itself, like a sailor's yarn, though out of finer materials.