Paris.—It seems to me as if I were going back a month to recall my departure from Havre, my memory is so clouded with later incidents. I was awaked on the morning after I had written to you, by a servant, who brought me at the same time a cup of coffee, and at about an hour before daylight we were passing through the huge gates of the town on our way to Paris. The whole business of diligence-travelling amused me exceedingly. The construction of this vehicle has often been described; but its separate apartments (at four different prices), its enormous size, its comfort and clumsiness, and, more than all, the driving of its postillions, struck me as equally novel and diverting. This last mentioned performer on the whip and voice (the only two accomplishments he at all cultivates), rides one of the three wheel horses, and drives the four or seven which are in advance, as a grazier in our country drives a herd of cattle, and they travel very much in the same manner. There is leather enough in two of their clumsy harnesses, to say nothing of the postillion's boots, to load a common horse heavily. I never witnessed such a ludicrous absence of contrivance and tact as in the appointments and driving of horses in a diligence. It is so in everything in France, indeed. They do not possess the quality as a nation. The story of the Gascoigne, who saw a bridge for the first time, and admired the ingenious economy that placed it across the river, instead of lengthwise, is hardly an exaggeration.
At daylight I found myself in the coupé (a single seat for three in the front of the body of the carriage, with windows before and at the sides), with two whiskered and mustached companions, both very polite, and very unintelligible. I soon suspected, by the science with which my neighbor on the left hummed little snatches of popular operas, that he was a professed singer (a conjecture which proved true), and it was equally clear, from the complexion of the portfeuille on the lap of the other, that his vocation was a liberal one—a conjecture which proved true also, as he confessed himself a diplomat, when we became better acquainted. For the first hour or more my attention was divided between the dim but beautiful outline of the country by the slowly approaching light of the dawn, and my nervousness at the distressing want of skill in the postillion's driving. The increasing and singular beauty of the country, even under the disadvantage of rain and the late season, soon absorbed all my attention, however, and my involuntary and half-suppressed exclamations of pleasure, so unusual in an Englishman (for whom I found I was taken), warmed the diplomatist into conversation, and I passed the three ensuing hours very pleasantly. My companion was on his return from Lithuania, having been sent out by the French committee with arms and money for Poland. He was, of course, a most interesting fellow-traveller; and, allowing for the difficulty with which I understood the language, in the rapid articulation of an enthusiastic Frenchman, I rarely have been better pleased with a chance acquaintance. I found he had been in Greece during the revolution, and knew intimately my friend, Dr. Howe, the best claim he could have on my interest, and, I soon discovered, an answering recommendation of myself to him.
The province of Normandy is celebrated for its picturesque beauty, but I had no conception before of the cultivated picturesque of an old country. I have been a great scenery-hunter in America, and my eye was new, like its hills and forests. The massive, battlemented buildings of the small villages we passed through, the heavy gateways and winding avenues and antique structure of the distant and half-hidden châteaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, singular appearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a stone, the absence of all that we define by comfort and neatness, and the presence of all that we have seen in pictures and read of in books, but consider as the representations and descriptions of ages gone by—all seemed to me irresistibly like a dream. I could not rub my hand over my eyes, and realize myself. I could not believe that, within a month's voyage of my home, these spirit-stirring places had stood all my lifetime as they do, and have—for ages—every stone as it was laid in times of worm-eaten history—and looking to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and dames in the days of French chivalry. I looked at the constantly-occurring ruins of the old priories, and the magnificent and still-used churches, and my blood tingled in my veins, as I saw, in the stepping-stones at their doors, cavities that the sandals of monks, and the iron-shod feet of knights in armor a thousand years ago, had trodden and helped to wear, and the stone cross over the threshold, that hundreds of generations had gazed upon and passed under.
By a fortunate chance the postillion left the usual route at Balbec, and pursued what appeared to be a bye-road through the grain-fields and vineyards for twenty or twenty-five miles. I can only describe it as an uninterrupted green lane, winding almost the whole distance through the bosom of a valley that must be one of the very loveliest in the world. Imagine one of such extent, without a fence to break the broad swells of verdure, stretching up from the winding and unenclosed road on either side, to the apparent sky; the houses occurring at distances of miles, and every one with its thatched roof covered all over with bright green moss, and its walls of marl interlaid through all the crevices with clinging vines, the whole structure and its appurtenances faultlessly picturesque, and, when you have conceived a valley that might have contented Rasselas, scatter over it here and there groups of men, women, and children, the Norman peasantry in their dresses of all colors, as you see them in the prints—and if there is anything that can better please the eye, or make the imagination more willing to fold up its wings and rest, my travels have not crossed it. I have recorded a vow to walk through Normandy.
As we approached Rouen the road ascended gradually, and a sharp turn brought us suddenly to the brow of a steep hill, opposite another of the same height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the distance of a mile across. Between, lay Rouen. I hardly know how to describe, for American eyes, the peculiar beauty of this view; one of the most exquisite, I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill is common enough in our country, but of the hundreds that answer to this description, I can not name one that would afford a correct comparison. The nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so old a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially different from ours. If there were another Mount Holyoke, for instance, on the other side of the Connecticut, the situation of Northampton would be very similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural village, with its glimpses of white houses seen through rich and luxurious masses of foliage, the mountain sides above broken with rocks, and studded with the gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and the fields below waving with heavy crops, irregularly fenced and divided, the whole picture one of an overlavish and half-subdued Eden of fertility—instead of this I say—the broad meadows, with the winding Seine in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, the grass closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, the edges of the river set regularly with willows, the little bright islands circled with trees, and smooth as a lawn; and instead of green lanes lined with bushes, single streets running right through the unfenced verdure, from one hill to another, and built up with antique structures of stone—the whole looking, in the coup d'œil of distance, like some fantastic model of a town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and meadows of silk velvet.
You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in the guide-books. As my object is to record impressions, not statistics, I leave you to consult those laconic chronicles, or the books of a thousand travellers, for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was burnt here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. There is a statue erected to her memory, which I did not see, for it rained; and after the usual stop of two hours, as the barometer promised no change in the weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took my place in the night diligence and kept on.
I amused myself till dark, watching the streams that poured into the broad mouth of the postillion's boots from every part of his dress, and musing on the fate of the poor Maid of Orleans; and then, sinking down into the comfortable corner of the coupé, I slept almost without interruption till the next morning—the best comment in the world on the only comfortable thing I have yet seen in France, a diligence.
It is a pleasant thing in a foreign land to see the familiar face of the sun; and, as he rose over a distant hill on the left, I lifted the window of the coupé to let him in, as I would open the door to a long-missed friend. He soon reached a heavy cloud, however, and my hopes of bright weather, when we should enter the metropolis, departed. It began to rain again; and the postilion, after his blue cotton frock was soaked through, put on his greatcoat over it—an economy which is peculiarly French, and which I observed in every succeeding postilion on the route. The last twenty-five miles to Paris are uninteresting to the eye; and with my own pleasant thoughts, tinct as they were with the brightness of immediate anticipation, and an occasional laugh at the grotesque figures and equipages on the road, I made myself passably contented till I entered the suburb of St. Denis.
It is something to see the outside of a sepulchre for kings, and the old abbey of St. Denis needs no association to make a sight of it worth many a mile of weary travel. I could not stop within four miles of Paris, however, and I contented myself with running to get a second view of it in the rain while the postilion breathed his horses. The strongest association about it, old and magnificent as it is, is the fact that Napoleon repaired it after the revolution; and standing in probably the finest point for its front view, my heart leaped to my throat as I fancied that Napoleon, with his mighty thoughts, had stood in that very spot, possibly, and contemplated the glorious old pile before me as the place of his future repose.
After four miles more, over a broad straight avenue, paved in the centre and edged with trees, we arrived at the port of St. Denis. I was exceedingly struck with the grandeur of the gate as we passed under, and, referring to the guide-book, I find it was a triumphal arch erected to Louis XIV., and the one by which the kings of France invariably enter. This also was restored by Napoleon, with his infallible taste, without changing its design: and it is singular how everything that great man touched became his own—for, who remembers for whom it was raised while he is told who employed his great intellect in its repairs?