This all came back to me, now, as I saw this living “Mona Lisa” punting across L’Eau Morte.
2.40 P.M.--Made for a village on the right bank with all speed--Port de Groslee. Remains of Roman aqueduct on hilltop back of village. Rain!--Deluges of it. Took refuge in an inn on the bank--Hôtel des Voyageurs. The public room was full of voyageurs and tobacco smoke. The voyageurs may have been river folk in the old times when the inn was built, but this present crowd was made up of teamsters. They sat at bare tables, under their feet was the bare floor, about them were the four bare walls--a dreary place at any time, a heart-breaking place now in the dark of the downpour. However, it was manifestly not dreary to the teamsters. They were sipping red wine and smoking; they all talked at once, and with great energy and spirit, and every now and then they gave their thighs a sounding slap and burst into a general horse laugh. The courier said that this was in response to rude wit and coarse anecdotes. The brace of modest-looking girls who were waiting on the teamsters did not seem troubled. The courier said that they were used to all kinds of language and were not defiled by it; that they had probably seldom heard a spade called anything but a spade, therefore the foulest words came innocent to their ears.
This inn was built of stone--of course; everybody’s house on the Continent, from palace to hovel, is built of that dismal material, and as a rule it is as square as a box and odiously plain and destitute of ornament; it is formal, forbidding, and breeds melancholy thoughts in people used to friendlier and more perishable materials of construction. The frame house and the log house molder and pass away, even in the builder’s time, and this makes a proper bond of sympathy and fellowship between the man and his home; but the stone house remains always the same to the person born in it; in his old age it is still as hard, and indifferent, and unaffected by time as it was in the long-vanished days of his childhood. The other kind of house shows by many touching signs that it has noted his griefs and misfortunes and has felt for them, but the stone house doesn’t--it is not of his evanescent race, it has no kinship with him, nor any interest in him.
A professional letter writer happened along presently, and one of the young girls got him to write a letter for her. It seemed strange that she could not write it herself. The courier said that the peasant women of the Rhône do not care for education, but only for religion; that they are all good Catholics, and that their main ambition in life is to see the Rhône’s long procession of stone and bronze Virgins added to, until the river shall be staked out with them from end to end; and that their main pleasure in life is to contribute from their scant centimes to this gracious and elevating work. He says it is a quite new caprice; that ten years ago there was not a Virgin in this part of France at all, and never had been. This may be true, and, of course, there is nothing unreasonable about it, but I have already found out that the courier’s statements are not always exact.
I had a hot fried fish and coffee in a garden shed roofed with a mat of vines, but the rain came through in streams and I got drenched in spite of our umbrellas, for one cannot manage table implements and umbrellas all at the same time with anything like good success.
Mem.--Last evening, for economy’s sake, proposed to be a Frenchman because Americans and English are always overcharged. Courier said it wouldn’t deceive unless I played myself for a deaf-and-dumb Frenchman--which I did, and so the rooms were only a franc and a half each. But the Admiral must have let it out that I was only deaf and dumb in French, for prices were raised in the bill this morning.
4.10 P.M.--Left Port de Groslee.
4.50 P.M.--Château of the Count Cassiloa--or something like that--the Admiral’s pronunciation is elusive. Courier guesses the spelling at “Quintionat.” I don’t quite see the resemblance. This courier’s confidence in himself is a valuable talent. He must be descended from the idiot who taught our forefathers to spell tizzik with a ph and a th.
The river here is as still and smooth and nearly as dead as a lake. The water is swirly, though, and consequently makes uneasy steering.
River seems to draw together and greatly narrow itself below the count’s house. No doubt the current will smarten up there.