The previous night in the cars I had found myself the only woman among some half dozen French military officers, who paid me the most polite attention. They were charmed that I made no objection to their cigarettes, talked with me on various topics, criticised McClellan as a general, and were enthusiastic on the subject of our country generally. About midnight they prepared a grand repast from their traveling-bags, to which they gave me a cordial invitation. I begged to contribute my mesquin supply of grapes and brioches, and the supper was a considerable event. Their canteens were filled with red wines, and one cup served the whole company. They drank my health and that of the President of the United States. Afterward we had vocal music, two of the officers being good singers. They sang Beranger's songs and the charming serenade from Lalla Rookh. I finally expressed a desire to hear the Marseillaise. This seemed to take them by surprise, but one of the singers, declaring that he had "rien à refuser à madame" boldly struck up,
Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé;
but his companions checked him before he had finished the first stanza. The law forbade, they said, the production of the Marseillaise in society. We were a society: the guard would hear us and might report it.
"Vous voyez, madame," said the singer, "n'il n'est pas défendu d'être voleur, mais c'est défendu d'être attrapé" (It is not against the law to be a thief, but to be caught.)
My traveling—companions reached their destination early in the morning, and, very gallantly expressing regrets that they were not going over the Alps, so as to bear mer company, bade me farewell.
From the rear of the St. Michel hotel, called the Lion d'Or, I watched the preparations for crossing Mont Cenis. Three diligences were being crazily loaded with our baggage. The men who loaded them seemed imitating the Alpine structure. They piled trunk on trunk to the height of thirty feet, I verily believe; and if some one should nudge my elbow and say "fifty," I should write it down so without manifesting the least surprise.
When the preparations were finished the setting sun was shining clearly on the white summits above, and we commenced slowly winding up the noble zigzag road. Rude mountain children kept up with our diligences, asked for sous and wished us bon voyage in the name of the Virgin.
The grandeur, but especially the extent and number, of the Alpine peaks impressed me with a vague, undefinable sense, which was not, I think, the anticipated sensation; and indeed if I had been in a poetic mood, it would have been quickly dissipated by the mock raptures of a young Englishman with a poodly moustache and an eye-glass. He called our attention to every chasm, gorge and waterfall, as if we had been wholly incapable of seeing or appreciating anything without his aid. As for me, I did not feel like disputing his susceptibility. I was suffering an uneasy apprehension of an avalanche—not of snow, but of trunks and boxes from the topheavy diligences ahead of us. However, we reached the top of Mont Cenis safely by means of thirteen mules to each coach, attached tandem, and we stopped at the queer relay-house there some thirty minutes. Here some women in the garb of nuns served me some soup with grated cheese, a compound which suggested a dishcloth in flavor, yet it was very good. I will not attempt to reconcile the two statements. After the soup I went out to see the Alps. The ecstatic Briton was still eating and drinking, and I could enjoy the scene unmolested. I crossed a little bridge near the inn. The night was cold and bright. Hundreds of snowy peaks above, below and in every direction, some of their hoary heads lost in the clouds, were glistening in the light of a clear September moon, and the stillness was only broken by a wild stream tumbling down the precipices which I looked up to as I crossed the bridge. It was indeed an impressive scene—cold, desolate, awful. I walked so near the freezing cataract that the icicles touched my face, and thinking that Dante, when he wrote his description of hell, might have been inspired by this very scene, I wrapped my cloak closer about me and went back to the inn.
The diligences were ready, and we commenced a descent which I cannot even now think of without a shudder. To each of those heavily-laden stages were attached two horses only, and we bounded down the mountain-side like a huge loosened boulder. Imagine the sensation as you looked out of the windows and saw yourself whirling over yawning chasms and along the brinks of dizzy precipices, fully convinced that the driver was drunk and the horses goaded to madness by Alpine demons! I have been on the ocean in a storm sufficiently severe to make Jew and Christian pray amicably together; I have been set on fire by a fluid lamp, and have been dragged under the water by a drowning friend, but I think I never had such an alarming sense of coming destruction as in that diligence. I think of those sure-footed horses even now with gratitude.