At St. Martin I waited the return of my vision. I climbed, and tried chamois-hunting with no success so far as game was concerned, though I saw the beautiful creatures in their homes, and now rejoice that I did not kill any, though I fear I wounded one mortally, where we could not retrieve him. One of my excursions was to the summit of the Aiguille de Varens, by a path, in one place cut in the face of a precipice, only wide enough for one's feet, with sheer cliff above and below, and nothing to hold by. I have a good head, but to follow my guide on that path was something which only mauvaise honte brought me to. I was ashamed to hesitate where he walked along so cheerily. We arranged to spend the night at a chalet where a milkmaid with the figure of the Venus of Milo tended a remnant of the herd, most of which had already descended to the valleys below. As the sun was setting I walked out to the brow of the aiguille, which from below seemed a point, but was in reality only the perpendicular face of a mass of mountain which in the other direction sloped away towards Switzerland for miles. The view of Mont Blanc, directly opposite, then bare of clouds from the base to the summit, with the red sunset light falling full on the great fields of snow, of which I had never realized the extent from any other point, was by far the most imposing view of the great mountain I have ever found. I stood at an elevation of about 7000 feet, halfway to the summit of Mont Blanc, with the whole broad expanse of glacier and snowfield glowing in the rosy twilight; and, while I watched the sun set, at my feet lay the valley of the Arve, with the town of Sallanches and its attendant villages in the blue distance of gathering night, thousands of feet below me. As I looked, enchanted, the chimes of the convent below rang out a Gregorian air, which came up to my heights like a solemn monition from the world of dreams, for nothing could be distinguished of its source. We started a chamois, and saw him race across the broad field of snow like the wind, while I could only follow, laboring knee-deep in the snow, like a tortoise after a hare. We slept that night buried in the hay. I am glad to say that the hunt in the morning was without other result than a delightful walk, for my guide was a better climber than huntsman.
A few days later, I made, with another guide, an excursion to the Col des Fours, on the other side of the valley. The guide was an old professional hunter, and knew the habits of the chamois well. We climbed up leisurely in the afternoon, and slept in the hay of a deserted chalet; for from there the cattle had already been all driven down. While the guide prepared the supper, I walked out to the edge of the cliffs to get the view. The landscape had become a sea of mist,—a river, rather; for the whole valley was filled with a moving, billowy flood of fog flowing from Mont Blanc, and enveloping mountain and valley alike in a veil of changing vapor, melting, forming, and flowing beneath my feet, hiding every object in the landscape below the cliffs I stood on. It made me dizzy, for I seemed to be in the clouds. And while I waited there came a transfiguration of the scene,—the mist began to grow rosy, and deeper and deeper, till it was almost like a sea of blood. No source of light was visible from my point of view, but, of course, the phenomenon, though seemingly mysterious, was evident. The sun, in setting, illuminated the fields of snow at the summit of the mountain beyond, which reverberated its flaming light into the vapor below, penetrating it down to my feet, but the mountain itself was, from my elevation, invisible. It passed like all glories, and quicker than most.
The next morning we went to take our posts for a chamois drive. A friend of the guide, whom he had picked up to profit by my coming, took one side of the valley, and I the other, while a boy with an umbrella went down the valley to drive the chamois up to us. Having posted me, the stupid guide crossed the line of the drive between me and the meadow where the chamois would come to feed, and took his post, hiding nearer the peaks where they had passed the night. Soon after sunrise they made their appearance on a field of snow which sloped down into the Val,—nine, young and old. I shall never see anything prettier than the play of those young chamois on the snow. They butted and chased each other over the snow, frolicked like kittens, standing on their hind legs and pushing each other, until, probably, they grew hungry, and then came down to the grass to feed. This was the moment for the driver to come in, and he came up the valley waving his arms and umbrella and shouting. The chamois came in my direction till they crossed the track of the old hunter, scenting which they halted, sniffed the air, and then broke in panic, the majority running back past the driver and within a few yards of him, so that if he had had a gun he could easily have killed one, and went down the valley out of sight; three came up the valley, taking the flank of the almost perpendicular rocks, within shot of me, but at full gallop, and I fired at the middle one of the group. They passed behind a mass of rock as I fired, and two came out on the other side. If I hit one I could not know, for the place was inaccessible, but I hope that I missed. I have often thought of the possibility that I might have hit the poor beast, and sent him mortally wounded amongst the rocks to die, and I never recur to the incident without pain. It becomes incomprehensible to me, as my own life wanes, how I could ever have found pleasure in taking the lives of other creatures filling their stations in the world better than I ever did. The late educated soul pays the penalty of earlier ignorance, but there is no atonement to the victims.
I stayed at St. Martin while the plebiscite and annexation to France took place. It was a hollow affair, the voting being a mockery, but the Sardinian government had never made itself seriously felt in Savoy, for either good or ill; the people were a quiet and law-abiding race, and while I was in the country I never heard of a crime or a prosecution. The regiments of Savoyard troops went into the French army with ill will, and there was a bloody fight between them and the French soldiers at Lyons when the former went into the barracks there.
I was at St. Martin when the Emperor and Empress made their tour through the new possession. The state carriages had to be left at Sallanches when the sovereigns went up to the great ball offered them at Chamounix, and, when they returned, the little mountain carriages which brought them down halted under the windows of the auberge of St. Martin, in which I lived, to wait for the state carriages to come across the river. They had to wait about half an hour, and as they walked up and down in the road under my window, beside which stood my loaded rifle, I thought how easily I could change the course of European politics, for I could have hit any button on the Emperor's clothes, and I hated him enough to have killed him cheerfully, as an enemy of mankind; but regicide has always seemed to me a great mistake, as it would have been in that case, for it would only have placed the young Prince Imperial on the throne, under the regency of the Empress. I was then a radical republican, with all the sympathies of a Parisian Red, for I had not learned that it is less the form of the government than the character of the governed which makes the difference between governments. I did not spare the life of the Emperor from any apprehension of consequences to me, for I had none. I knew the paths up the mountain at the back of the hotel, and before the confusion should have been overcome, and a pursuit organized, I could have been beyond danger, on my way to the Swiss frontier, for the pine woods came to the back door of the hotel; and beyond that, I never had the habit of thinking of the consequences of what I proposed to do. When I returned to Paris, after the autumn had passed, I told the story to an artist friend, an ultraradical, how I stood at my window with a loaded rifle by my side, and the Emperor twenty feet below, and he shouted with fury, "And you didn't kill him?" Time and fate have punished him more fitly than I should have done, and wise men leave these things to time and fate.
CHAPTER XVIII
PARIS AGAIN THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA
I remained in Paris all that winter, and took a studio with an American friend,—Mr. Yewell,—but I could do no work; the headache never left me, and, though I could draw a little, my vision failed when it was strained, and I seemed to have lost my color sense. I was desperate, and, when Garibaldi set out on the Marsala expedition, I was just on the point of sailing to join him when I received a letter from the father of my fiancée, telling me that her perplexities and distress of mind over our marriage had so increased that they feared for her reason if she were not set at rest. I took the next steamer, and ended the vacillation by insisting on being married at once. Nothing but a morbid self-depreciation had prevented her from coming to a decision in the matter long before, and there was no other solution than to assume command and impose my will. We were married two days after my landing, and returned to Paris a few days after. When the spring opened we went down into Normandy, and there, returning to the study of nature and living in quiet and freedom from anxiety, I slowly and partially recovered my vision, and began to regain in a measure the power of drawing. The landscape of the quiet French country suited me perfectly, and I made two or three good studies, but without getting into a really efficient condition for painting, which I only did a year or two later at Rome.
Our winter in Paris had been greatly brightened by the acquaintance of the Brownings, the father and sister of the poet. We lived in the same section of Paris, near the Hotel des Invalides, and much of our time was passed with them. "Old Mr. Browning" we have always called him, though the qualification of "old," by which we distinguished him from his son Robert, seemed a misnomer, for he had the perpetual juvenility of a blessed child. If to live in the world as if not of it indicates a saintly nature, then Robert Browning the elder was a saint: a serene, untroubled soul, conscious of no moral or theological problem to disturb his serenity, and as gentle as a gentle woman,—a man in whom, it seemed to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank acceptance of life as he found it come to him. He had, many years before we knew him, inherited an estate in Jamaica, but on learning that to work it to profit he must become a slave owner he renounced the heritage. And, knowing him as we knew him, it is easy to see that he would renounce it cheerfully and without any hesitation. A man of a rougher and more energetic type might have tried the experiment, or questioned the judgment, at least have regretted his own integrity, but Browning could have done neither. The way was clear, and the decision must have been as quick as that of a child to reject a thing it abhorred. His unworldliness had not a flaw. So beautiful a life can never have become distinguished in the struggles and antagonisms which make the career of the man of the world, or even the man of letters, as letters are now written; for he was a man, and the only one I ever knew, of whom one would say that he applied in the divine sense the maxim of Christ, "Resist not evil,"—he simply, and by the necessity of his own nature, ignored it.
He had a curious facility in drawing heads of quaint and always varied character, which character he could not foresee when he began the drawing. They were always in profile, and he began at one extremity and ran his pencil round to the other, always bringing out an individuality, but without any intention as to what that should be; and he named it, when it was done, according to the type it offered, generally in character, with a trace of caricature, and, for the most part, subjects from the courts of law,—a judge or a puzzled juror, a disappointed or a triumphant client, etc., etc. He would draw a dozen or twenty in an evening, all different and all unforeseen, as much to him as to us, and he was as much amused as we were when it turned out more than usually funny. His chief amusement was hunting through the bookstalls along the quays, and I have, amongst my old books, an early life of Raphael, which he gave me, with his name on the fly leaf.