He made marginal notes and then, putting on his glasses, drafted a scheme for the development of the deposits of San Lucido.
[VII]
THE P.L.M. railway bore Lewis rapidly and powerfully away from the life of Paris. After leaving the campanile of the Gare de Lyon behind during dinner, they followed the graceful river outlines of the Seine to Charenton (with its shallops). Then the intoxicating descent through the Burgundian vineyards; after which night lasted as far as Italy.
Lewis only knew Europe from having travelled through it on business, often imperfectly, always hurriedly, without ever opening either his eyes or his heart to it. He knew all about the time tables and itineraries, even though he liked throwing regular routes and through tickets to the winds. He sacrificed depth to length, and, like all his contemporaries, he was—he and his nerves—the victim of the spirit of speed. His business sense was really nothing but a taste for adventure. He worked as he would have played, heedless of rules, selfishly, without giving a thought to the needs of the nation or of the period.
"I don't care a damn," he wrote to Martial, "for the inner meaning of things."
Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this cosmoimpolitan," as Monsieur Vandémanque dubbed him, maintained that he felt far more bewildered beyond the fortifications of Paris than beyond the frontiers of France.
To leave one's country is the next best thing to coming back to it. After passing Modane he had felt the strange atmosphere that one breathes at the gates of France, just as though France were not the most entrancing place to remain in (or perhaps because of it), experiencing that pleasure one has when one's relations with someone or something are strained, but all the more precious for that, and which are so well described by the expression "out of tune." Other countries are only parts of a continent or of the world; France is a sealed vessel, a form of diet complete in itself, interesting to, but not interested by Europe. One can feel German villages tremble at the least sign of movement from a Russian army corps, and the whole of Spain heave at a shot fired at one of her governors in the garrisons of Morocco. London, with even more reason, throbs with a kind of terrestrial neuralgia on hearing of oil being struck in Mexico, or of a political murder in the Punjab. But Paris, self-centred Paris, always remains unmoved. International upheavals reach the Paris press agencies with an air of unreality; from there they find their way into the editorial offices and to the caricaturists, and thence to a laughing public which sings songs about them. The more intelligent people never open a paper. So that on leaving France one has more than at other times the impression of escaping at the right moment and taking a holiday from one's domestic happiness, and of avoiding the danger of living with a wife who is completely satisfying.
Europe itself only begins beyond the frontier. The gates, even on the French side, seem to assume a peculiar character, and in spite of the presence of the customs officials, to have something foreign about them. For an instant the dotted frontier line seems to rise like a drawbridge, and Mentone-Garavan appears in its blue setting with its customs officials smoking at the latticed window of their palm-leaf hut; check trousers are drying on the bougainvilliers, and a commemorative tablet shows that at this point France dates from 1861. A bubbling brook scurries through a gap in the rock pierced by those caves in which primeval man sleeps amongst flints and fossil teeth. At Modane, through which Lewis passed forty-eight hours earlier, the frontier consists of a cold corridor of wet stones suspended over a bronze-coloured torrent with ferns that brush the windows of the passing carriages. Two languages with but a single rail. Frasne-Vallorbe, where begins the land of icy water, black pine trees and cheerless plains, which runs like a sash across the whole of Europe. At Kehl, that bridge which is such a feat of German toil, like an Eiffel Tower flung hurriedly across the Rhine. Jeumont, Feignies, the outlets into Belgium, where during the night the customs' searchlights play amongst the slag heaps lining the pitiless canals like limelight following an actress off the stage. To say nothing of the openings into Spain: Portbou and its Vauban forts, like huge neglected roses, given over to traffic in barrels of sweets medicinal wines; Béhobie with the sound of Spanish klaxons ascending along the Pyrenean torrents. Hendaye and the international bridge where the Guardia Civil hands over extradited people to the French police. Lewis might have left France and won his freedom in almost any direction with his eyes shut.
[VIII]
"Ma présentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur aquatique, je la peux tenter, avec l'excuse du hasard."
(S. MALLARMÉ, Le Nénuphar blanc.)