intersected by broad staring paths, cut across by others into smaller squares, compels you either to be for ever throwing off at right angles to your course, or to turn out of the enclosure. When the proclamation for the opening of the season has been tamboured through the streets—with the doctors rests the announcement of the day—immediately orders are issued for clean shaving the grass-plats, lopping off redundant branches, to recall the growth of trees to sound orthopedic principles, and to reduce that wilderness of impertinent forms, wherewith nature has disfigured her own productions, into the figures of pure geometry! Hither, into this out-of-doors drawing-room, at the fashionable hour of four P.M., are poured out, from the embouchures of all the hotels, all the inhabitants of them; all the tailor's gentlemen of the Boulevard des Italiens, and all the modisterie of the Tuileries.
Our Amusements.
Pair by pair, as you see them costumés in the fashions of the month; pinioned arm to arm, but looking different ways; leaning upon polished reeds as light and as expensive as themselves—behold the chivalry of the land! The hand of Barde is discernible in their paletots. The spirit of Staub hovers over those flowery waistcoats; who but Sahoski shall claim the curious felicity of those heels? and Hippolyte has come bodily from Paris on purpose to do their hair. "Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire," says Boileau, and here, in supply exactly equal to the demand, come forth, rustling and bustling to see them, bevies of long-tongued belles, who ever, as they walk and meet their acquaintance, are announcing themselves in swift alternation "charmées," with a blank face, and "toutes desolées," with the best good-will! Here you learn to value a red riband at its "juste prix," which is just what it will fetch per ell; specimens of it in button-holes being as frequent as poppies amidst the corn. Pretending to hide themselves from remark, which they intend but to provoke, here public characters do private theatricals a little à l'écart. Actors gesticulate as they rehearse their parts under the trees. Poets
"Rave and recite, and madden as they stand;"
and honourable members read aloud from the Débats that has just arrived, the speech which they spoke yesterday "en Deputés." Our promenade here lacks but a few more Saxon faces amidst the crowd, and a greater latitude of extravagance in some of its costumes, to complete the illusion, and to make you imagine that this public garden, flanked as it is on one side by a street of hotels, and on the opposite by the bank of the Allier, is the Tuilleries with its Sunday population sifted.
Twenty-five francs secures you admission to the "Cercle" or club-house, a large expensive building, which, like most buildings raised to answer a variety of ends, leaves the main one of architectural propriety wholly out of account. But when it is considered how many interests and caprices the architect had to consult, it may be fairly questioned, whether, so hampered, Vitruvius could have done it better; for the ground floor was to be cut up into corridors and bathing cells; while the ladies requested a ball and anteroom; and the gentlemen two "billiards" and a reading-room, with detached snuggeries for smoking—all on the first floor.
Public places, excepting the above-mentioned "Cercle," exist not at Vichy, and as nobody thinks of paying visits save only to the doctor and the springs, "on s'ennui très considerablement à Vichy." If it be true, that, in some of the lighter annoyances of life, fellowship is decidedly preferable to solitude, ennui comes not within the number—every attempt to divide it with one's neighbours only makes it worse; as Charles Lamb has described the concert of silence at a Quakers' meeting, the intensity increases with the number, and every new accession raises the public stock of distress, which again redounds with a surplus to each individual, "chacun en a son part, et tous l'ont tout entier."[4] What a chorus of yawns is there; and mutual yawns, you know, are the dialogue of ennui. No wonder; for the physicians don't permit their patients to read any books but novels. They seek to array the "Understanding" against him who wrote so well concerning its laws; Bacon, as intellectual food, they consider difficult of digestion; and even for their own La Place there is no place at Vichy! Every unlucky headache contracted here, is placed to the account of thinking in the bath. If Dr P—— suspects any of his patients of thinking, he asks them, like Mrs Malaprop, "what business they have to think?" "Vous êtes venu ici pour prendre les eaux, et pour vous desennuyer, non pas pour penser! Que le Diable emporte la Pensée!" And so he does accordingly!
How we got through the twenty-four hours of each day, is still a problem to us; after making due deductions for the time consumed in eating, drinking, and sleeping. Occasionally we tried to "beat time" by versifying our own and our neighbours' "experiences" of Vichy. But soon finding the "quicquid agunt homines" of those who in fact did nothing, was beyond our powers of description, gave up, as abortive, the attempt to maintain our "suspended animation" on means so artificial and precarious. When little is to be told, few words will suffice. If the word fisherman be derived from fishing, and not from fish, we had a great many such fishermen at Vichy; who, though they could neither scour a worm, nor splice the rod that their clumsiness had broken, nor dub a fly, nor land a fish of a pound weight, if any such had had the mind to try them, were vain enough to beset the banks of the Allier at a very early hour in the morning. As they all fished with "flying lines," in order to escape the fine imposed on those that are shotted, and seemed to prefer standing in their own light—a rare fault in Frenchmen—with their backs to the sun; the reader will readily understand, if he be an angler, what sport they might expect. Against them and their lines, we quote a few lines of our own spinning:—
Now full of hopes, they loose the lengthing twine,
Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line!
Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind—
Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind?
Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak,
That now assemble, now disperse, in freak;
They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout,
Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about;
See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace,
Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting dace!
Baffled at last, they quit the ungrateful shore,
Curse what they fail to catch—and fish no more!
Yet fish there be, though these unsporting wights
Affect to doubt what Rondolitier[5] writes;
Who tells, "how, moved by soft Cremona's string,
Along these banks he saw the Allice spring;
Whilst active hands, t' anticipate their fall,
Spread wide their nets, and draw an ample haul."