——
CHAPTER XV.
Il me semble que considerant la foiblesse de nostre vie, et à combien d’escueils ordinaires et naturels elle est exposée, on n’en devroit pas faire si grande part à la naissance, à l’oisiveté te à l’apprentissageage.
Montaigne, ch. 57.
In a second visit to Europe after the death of De Mornay, I sought out the hamlet where his father lived. It was Chateaux-Prix sur L’Emmat. The place is very French, being in the neighborhood of a dismantled fortification. But the green slopes are still kept trim for promenades. Long, long rows of Lombardy poplars, very different from the spindling things we have, stretch a mile along the water. The low, red houses, with red tiles, huddle together about the red church, like a brood crowding around the hen. In the evenings, the brown peasants in blouses, and the brown mothers and maids in broad straw plats, cluster under vines at the doors, with long loaves of bread and flasks of country wine. Clumps of Grenoble walnut-trees—we call them English—half conceal with their full foliage the immense rood of timber which predominates over a village spring. Near this, as the sun sinks, are heard the sound of the tabor and pipe, and the clatter of sabots, as the boys and girls run to the merry-making. Donkeys are loose among the road-side thistles, and the long twilight is not over before all are in bed.
But the De Mornays had flitted out of France, and I found them—almost the only remaining Huguenots in Louvain, which once was so famous a Protestant town.[[1]] The portrait of Gaston du Plessis, Albert’s grand-uncle, hanging at Doctor De Mornay’s, might—with another dress—have passed for a likeness of my friend; but it was in feather and coat-armor. Madame Guers, a young widow, heard with tears my remembrances of her cousin. It was she who carried me to see the Hôtel de Ville, built some time in the fifteenth century, and told me gay romances of the Dukes of Brabant. She had never heard of Froissart! I cannot remember whether it was here or at Liège that I wondered at the Holy Family of Quentin Matsys. The Louvain beer is famous, and I advise tourists to acquaint themselves with the Brabant John Barleycorn at the Maison des Brasseurs, or Brewer’s Hall, or at the convent of Parc, with its fish-ponds, not far distant.
Being still out of my head about teaching, I was dinned with talk concerning the Methode Jacotot, which is as little remembered there as Manual Labor Schools with us. And, surely, a comical method it was! For Jacotot presumed to teach every thing out of one book, by an everlasting repetition. Hundreds of schools were set up on this plan.
Rambling old man that I am! It is time my chapters came to an end. Alice is horrified at my reading out of Homer a passage in the twentieth book of the Odyssey, and says she shall dream of it. I defy Pfeffers to find any thing more ghastly in German story. It is where the guests are suddenly struck mad. They burst forth into sardonic laughter. Blood issues from their mouths, and tears pour from their eyes. Meanwhile Theoclymenus, gifted with sudden clairvoyance, beholds the sun perishing from the heavens, the porch filled with spectres, and the walls sweating gore. Why has it not been quoted by our Northern spiritualists?
Before I end my dictations and resolve to bid Alice close her portfolio, let me give one or two discoveries concerning old age, which my readers will better understand when they have had the “three warnings.”