On the last day of August he left Avallon, and with a short stay at Sémur reached his old quarters at the Hôtel de la Cloche, Dijon. He was already contemplating "Præterita," picking up the memories of early days, and planning a drive by the old road through Jura as his parents used to do it in the pre-railway period. He began by showing me where he bit his "Seven Lamps" plate in the wash-hand basin, and where Nurse Anne used to wake him of mornings. Meanwhile, for the book to be called "Our Fathers have told us," continuing "The Bible of Amiens," he would spend two days with the monks. Cîteaux, the home of the Cistercians, was the first day's trip, marred by the heat and dust, and by finding all vestiges of the monks replaced by an industrial school of the ugliest, which, nevertheless, he inspected with nicely restrained impatience. A moated grange on the wayside homeward caught his eye, and as he sketched it he tried to make me believe that this must at least be a bit of the monks' work, and the journey not in vain. But next day there were far more interesting experiences in a visit to St. Bernard's birthplace. He has described this fully in his lecture called "Mending the Sieve," in the volume of "Verona, &c.," and I need only recall the surprise of a bystander not wholly unsympathetic, when Ruskin knelt down on the spot of the great saint's nativity, and stayed long in prayer. He was little given to outward show of piety, and his talk, though enthusiastic, had been no preparation for this burst of intense feeling.
Later on the same day (Saturday, September 2) he left Dijon for the Jura drive. We passed Poligny, a usual resting-place in bygone journeys, by train, and stayed at Champagnole, where the old Hôtel de la Poste used to be one of his "homes." It had been splendid weather for the last few days, after a cold August in Central France; and the first Jura walk was across the hill to the gorge of the Ain. I had often been through the Jura, as a blind, benighted modern, but never before loitered from slab to slab of its fissured limestone summits, looking for the foreground loveliness of nestling flowers which contrast so delicately with the quaint, crannied rock; there is nothing which gives the same lyrical feeling except some of Nature's gardens in wild Icelandic lava-fields. How eager he was, and delighted with this open upland! You know there is only one place where he speaks of "liberty" as a good thing, and there it means the liberty of this Jura walk, enjoyed that afternoon.
By-and-by we came to a wood. He cast about a little for the way through the trees, then bade me notice that the flowers of spring were gone: "You ought to have seen the wood-anemones, and oxalis, and violets"; and then, picking his steps to find the exact spot by a twisted larch-tree, and gripping my arm to hold me back on the brink of the abyss, "That's where the hawk sailed off the crag, in one of my old books; do you remember?"
ON RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD, BETWEEN MOREZ AND LES ROUSSES
September 1882
There were thunder clouds over the plain-country that evening, and we made no stop to sketch. On our drive next day up to the flat, high country of St. Laurent, with its pine forests and scattered cottages, and down into Morez, the weather worsened. Thence the road climbs by the side of the valley to the highest back of Jura at Les Rousses; the road, he says, "walked most of the way, was mere enchantment." At a halt I sketched, when a break in the clouds gave sunbeams darting into the valley beneath, and wisps of white wreathed the steep forests. You see where he got that beautiful cadence to a fine passage, after comparing the Jura upland with a Yorkshire moor, and contrasting the becks of our fells with the enchanted silence of open Jura. "The raincloud clasps her cliffs, and floats along her fields; it passes, and in an hour the rocks are dry, and only beads of dew left in the Alchemilla leaves—but of rivulet or brook, no vestige, yesterday or to-day or to-morrow. Through unseen fissures and filmy crannies the waters of cliff and plain have alike vanished; only far down in the depth of the main valley glides the strong river, unconscious of change."
Up at Les Rousses he pointed out the fort, then in building or newly built, with scorn—as if the Swiss on the one side or the French on the other could be kept in their bounds by stone walls, when real war comes; and then crossing the frontier there was the elation of getting into Switzerland. "Why do you like it better than France?" he asked. I was just trying to say why, that it is a free country and some more innocent gush, when the Swiss Customs officers ran up, and insisted on overhauling us, for they don't often see travellers as in the old days at Les Rousses. I was mightily crestfallen and he not a little delighted at this exemplification of "liberty"; but he did not make the incident a horrid example in "Præterita."