The house of the fort has become a museum; swords, guns, ammunition, letters, keys, spades which were broken in throwing up the entrenchments, engravings of several periods, are there hung on the walls or arranged in showcases; even an old watch, which the journal of the fortress, likewise preserved, states, had been lost among the ruins. We linger there and I notice that our traveling companions speak less as time passes. But when we have made the round of the walls of Carillon and when we notice in the full light of ten o’clock in the morning all the country which the old fort commands, words come again; joy, also; the ground descends from there down to the lake, narrow at this point; the hills rise gradually and the blue of the distance defines itself in clear lines upon the pale azure of the horizon. Some one says: “Do you not notice how that resembles the plain of Pau, as seen from the terrace?” Indeed, if I efface from my memory the image of blue waters, which the waters of Lake Champlain disturbed by the melting snows do not at all resemble, and which do not reflect the sky, the two landscapes have a similarity. Even the atmosphere is transparent here, revealing the elevated conformation of the distance. Another of our companions, who soon notices the extended form of the lake and the color of the trees on the lower level, says, almost at the same moment, “I believe I see the Vosges with Retournemer and Longemer.” In other ways we recognize here French harmonies.
Some hours later, we are on a point of land quite far from the fort of Carillon, at the foot of a white stone lighthouse. The light overlooks a stretch of bad rock land, standing in the midst of low places and fields which stretch out behind it. What a desert this would be, and from the origin of the world, this spur on which break the short waves of Lake Champlain!
But to-day the people of the American towns, those who live in the Adirondacks, those from the other side of the water, miners, farmers, and various workers, or trout fishers, who have come to prepare for the coming season, have assembled at Crown Point Forts. Some horses, picketed, browse in the fields; others are hitched to the branches of a hawthorne—the remains, perhaps of an old plantation, set out by the hand of a jealous old French soldier. Some American carriages, a little seat on four very light wheels; some wagons, twenty automobiles, are scattered on the grass, while around the lighthouse, on all the levels of the rock, are seated upon benches or on the ground a mixed population, intimate, badly controlling the children who race around like young quail; listening, understanding—or pretending to understand—the speeches which glorify Champlain. The bronze medallion which represents France, the work of Rodin, brought by us, is already set in its niche in front. The wind blows; it causes to vibrate the ten cords stretched from the lantern of the lighthouse to the ground in a crown, and flaps the big canopy and all the flags which ornament it. And as my mind wanders when the speeches are in English, I listen to what the flags are saying:
“Do you see them, these people seated in the front row? They don’t belong here.”
“It’s plain that they don’t belong here. You’re not saying much of anything: Are they tanned by the open air? Have they the free and easy way of the American citizen?”
“I suppose that they are from Paris?”
“You have a very simple way of being sure of it, my dear. Did you ever hear such a noise! Listen! When they are from Paris, there is never any lack of talk!”
“—Precisely, the orator proclaims himself; he comes from Paris.”
“Not of great extent, this France?”
“Not very formidable?”