Part 4

Strange how sharp and detailed will some of our very early memories remain in after life, when even important scenes of our later years are so easily forgotten! That old farm of Mesnil-le-Roy is still a clear picture, vignetted, so to speak, upon grey pages of oblivion.... I can yet see the orchard, strewn with myriad fallen apples—the byres, whereto at sundown returned the slow-pacing, dreamy, placid-eyed milch cows; the giant walnut-tree, with one of its main branches blasted by lightning—blasted on the stormy night, during which “thunder had fallen” freely ‹as the little boy heard the labourers say, awe-struck, in the morning; but during which he had slept under the brown-tiled roof without the slightest disturbance›.... I can see the _Four Banal_, that co-operative bread-oven, a relic of mediæval institutions, which was still common enough in those days; where you could have such an entrancing view of lambent blue flames lined with yellow when the door stood open to receive the unbaked loaves; and where the air smelt so divinely of hot wheaten crust when they were removed on completion....

It was, by the way, on that alluring spot—the boy used to find his way there regularly on the days when _on cuisait_—that he heard a certain remark, which to his child ears had no special meaning, but which remained on memory’s tablets to assume later an interesting significance. The country folk were very kind. The little English boy, left for the good of his health at the farm of _père Pelletier_, was known to everybody; was accepted and treated as one of the community. Rarely did he stroll, as might any roaming puppy dog, into an open door of the village without being supplied with a generous sup of milk, or a _tartine de raisiné_; or again, in season, with a _pomme cuite_. The roasted apple, be it said, browning and lusciously oozing caramel, was a standing affair in that old-world village. There was, however, on that day, a benighted wayfarer who obviously could not reconcile with these rustic surroundings the yellow-haired, barelegged little boy gravely gazing at the glowing oven.

“_D’ousqui sort, ce gosse-là?_” ‹for which barbarous lingo I take leave to give as an equivalent: Who’s the kid?› asked the man. And the answer came: “_Ça?—ca, mais le p’tit godem, donc_.” ‹That—why, that’s the little “goddam.”›

[Sidenote: THE LITTLE GODEM]

_Le petit godem!..._ Such was the name under which that young innocent was known at Mesnil-le-Roy, and, be it understood, in all cordiality and benevolence! Of a certainty not one of those excellent people had the remotest idea of the meaning of their “godem:” with them it was only the established equivalent for English.

The term is a noun, not an expletive, which has come down through five centuries—from the days, in fact, of the English occupation of France. Among the written records of those stirring times we come across many a passage in which a Duguesclin, a Maid of Orleans, or a Dunois is heard to mention hatefully “_les godems_,” or “_les godons d’Angleterre_.” Now, all that fertile country of the Vexin, the Ile-de-France and the Beauce, of which the fat farm land of my old _père Pelletier_ was so fair a sample, was obstinately fought for by the English for the best part of a century. Mantes-la-Jolie—now mainly famed for its river terraces, its sweet water grapes and its savoury _matelottes_ or eel stews—was once a fortified place of note, taken and retaken by French and English more than once; but finally captured ‹in 1418› by the noble Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Achilles of England, as the French themselves dubbed him, and firmly held by the “godems” for more than thirty years. To have heard that mispleasing word used dispassionately, merely as a substantive, is indeed a link with the past.

Strange paths of the musing thought, winding from Wisteria Sinensis to the days of our conquering English archer!

* * * * *

I spoke of these childhood memories as of oddly clear pictures emerging here and there out of grey mists of oblivion. Another now detaches itself in the same way from the clouds of the very distant past.

It belongs to the following summer. A perfume of Glycine still lingers about it, no doubt; for there again, upon the stone and through the curvetting iron-work balconies of the fair Louis XV house overlooking the park of St. Cloud, pale silvery green leafage, with here and there a cluster of faint blue, spreads in a well-regulated display—widely different, though, from the foaming profusion of the Mesnil. But the impression more specially associated with those happy St. Cloud days is the incense of the Sweet Briar.

[Sidenote: SWEET EGLANTINE]

What has happened—I pause and ask indignantly—to the Sweet-Briar of the world? Whither has the celestial, the entrancing scent of the true Eglantine vanished? Our twentieth century Briar is still—there is no gainsaying it—a delicious being, in its ephemeral exquisiteness of flower and its pleasant, if but slightly more lasting, leafy odour. But never, in subsequent life, have I captured again the sudden delight first brought to my childish nostrils by a puff of breeze that had passed over some hidden clump of sweet Eglantine. This first impression is connected with certain grassy alleys piercing deep the grand old-world park, or rather forest, of St. Cloud, which were my favourite playgrounds in the early sixties of the last century. ‹There is something distinctly suitable to the status of Grandpa, albeit merely “brevet” rank as in my case, in memorising thus about a past century!›

I can see the five-year-old arrested short upon the turf, in the midst of the hot pursuit of a blue butterfly, by his first whiff in life of Rosa Rubiginosa: so might a setter halt and stiffen, having got the wind of a grouse.—The source of the fitful stream of fragrance was hidden among clumps of forbidding brambles. Besides, there was no following the trail: it seemed ubiquitous. Like some Puck in his most tantalising mood, it would lead up and down, up and down—luring now to right, now to left, now straight ahead, anon seemed to whisk past from behind, until, in a kind of “dwam,” the child would give up the baffled purpose and pensively trot home by the nurse’s side.

For days the ambrosial fragrance dwelt in his little turned-up nose. It haunted the sensitive child-mind much as, later, in budding manhood, the remembrance of some enchanting face seen for an instant and then lost to sight. He had at last to confide his hopeless passion to his mother. It smelt ‹he explained› like the _Pomme Reinette_ of the dessert plates, but oh, so much, so much better! The reference to the well-known and excellent variety of apple left no doubt about the nature of the plant which had exhaled the elusive trails of perfume. “Reinette” became the accepted name of the woodland charmer and the hunt for Reinette bushes in the more devious paths of the wood a daily occupation.

* * * * *

With these expeditions is associated another first acquaintance that made a singularly strong impression.

There was, at the end of one of those heavenly grassed alleys, a group of brushwood greenery from which the unmistakable fragrance flowed deliciously across the path when the wind blew from a certain direction—I should say, now, from the west; for the path led to Garches, a place which, some eight years later, during the siege of Paris, became notorious as the scene of some very ferocious bayonet fighting. Undoubtedly there was a wealth of the desirable “Reinette” amid that underwood. But, to the mild surprise of nurse or mother, or whoever it might be who escorted the child upon his daily constitutional in the wood, nothing could induce him to draw that particular cover. He developed an ingenuity ‹or rather should it be called a disingenuousness› for pushing investigations or carrying on a game in paths that gave this spot a wide berth. Whenever possible, even, he found some specious argument for avoiding the Garches-ward alley altogether. No one, I believe, ever knew the reason.

[Sidenote: THE BLANCHING, LAUGHING ASPEN]

The fact is that, hard thereby, as if standing sentinel, rose a company of tall, slender Aspens—trees that, in a small boy’s estimation, did not behave as mere trees should. He had realised this, with a suddenness that first made his heart jump, and then rooted him on the spot, one day when, having caught up his scent, he was rushing with a whoop to the capture of his bush. The Aspens, up to that instant quite placid, palely green, grew all at once white with excitement and nodded their heads to each other; after which came the noise of their leaves; not the honest rustle of green trees, but derisive laughter; sounds, too, weirdly human, ringing as though in mockery of the discomfited invader.

Mark you, there is something decidedly uncanny in the deportment of the Aspen and its gracile, long-stalked trembling leaves, the white undersides of which any puff of wind exposes simultaneously to view—turning, on the instant, the whole of the green to foaming silver. There was no doubt about the matter then. These paling and odd rustling trees completely overawed Master Louis ‹Louis is Loki’s grandpa’s baptismal name, now sunk into disuse›, though, in his budding masculine pride, he kept the secret of his abhorrence very close within his own little bosom.

On one occasion, however, when he had had to make up his mind to walk past the blanching, murmuring group unless he were prepared ‹which he was not› to explain the nature of his objection, he asked, with a fair show of indifference, what manner of tree it was which “made that funny noise: he-he-he-he.” “One would say,” he added with elaborate airiness, “that they make a mock of one!”

When informed that “_Tremble_” was the name thereof, he became sunk in fresh unpleasant musings, and was fain to look back, fascinated, over his shoulder, each time the chuckling called after him.

The sound of the breeze, as it ruffles through the leaves of “Populus tremula,” is like nothing else in the woods. I have always retained my interest in the “Tremble” of my young days; and in the course of time it became one of delight instead of terror. I would give a good deal to have one of my own: one living not far from my bedroom window. It would be good to hear it laughing gently outside, when one first woke, and to know that it was powdering itself, so to speak, under the rays of the rising sun. But there are no Aspens in our part of the world. And, as for planting a council of these in the hope of silvery rustle and light effects, why, it is perhaps somewhat too late in the day! But I still seem to hear and see them with the ears and eyes of that dawning spring of life in the St. Cloud days.

VII

Poor little old town of St. Clodoald! In later years I spent an afternoon hunting up its distant remembrances. Alas, but it was like looking at some worn-out engraving, some faded dun picture once known in all its brilliancy.

Obliterated was the dainty white stone Palace; scene of the revelries and the bright-coloured elegancies of the Regent; favourite retreat of Marie Antoinette; theatre of the “_Dix-huit Brumaire_” drama; early home of _l’Aiglon_! The Château de St. Cloud, the summer residence of the last Napoleon, had been burned by the Prussians—even as they burned the bulk of the town—in 1870.[1]

Footnote 1:

_This was written long before anyone here dreamed of the near possibility of another German war._

Many a time, when, not so many years ago, we could read daily the shameless slander, the wilful calumnies, of the German press on the subject of the “barbarity” of our soldiers during the South African wars, has my mind flown back to the picture of charred and jagged ruins standing against the rise of the hill which once met my eyes when I looked for the quiet, happy prospect I had known.

[Sidenote: THE OLD PARK OF ST. CLOUD]

The town, when I last saw it, and its ancient church had been rebuilt; but the Palace was a dismal ruin; and the park seemed scald and deserted. Gone also, worst luck of all, the _Lanterne de Diogène_—the quaint tower at the river-side opening of the main alley, built in the pleasure-loving days of _Louis-le-Bien-Aimé_. ‹It was called a _mirador_: I believe a structure of that kind is now known as “gazebo”—deplorable word!› From the top of it a magnificent panorama of distant Paris could be descried.

The neighbourhood of _la Lanterne_ was the great trysting place of nurses and guardsmen, and the playing ground of children. On that day of back-dreaming exploration, I had been looking forward, with a kind of tenderness, to gazing once more on its bizarre shape. There is a well-known _ronde_, dating it would seem from the Middle Ages:

“_La Tour, prends garde— La Tour, prends garde— De te laisser abattre!_”

which is sung by the Gallic infant, in a game somewhat cognate to our: “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush!” It used to be danced under the shadow of this tower; and, in a child’s way, I had always instinctively associated the unnamed stronghold of the ballad with this peaceful erection.

Alas for the dear old _Tour_, it was destined to be laid low, after all, in spite of our eager warning! The terrace on which it was built was seized as the emplacement of a battery of heavy Krupps, for the bombardment of the obstinate capital yonder away. The _Lanterne de Diogène_, in its white stone and clear outline against the trees, offered too distinct a mark to the answering gunners to be tolerated. It had to be levelled. It was never rebuilt. I could find nothing appertaining to it but the grass bordered slabs of its foundations....

Lost, too, to me was the particular alley redolent of the memory of both _Reinette_ and _Tremble_; no doubt absorbed in some of the metalled motor roads that now traverse the park.

The _Grande Cascade_, however, which Lepautre, by order of Louis XIV, devised for the glorification of the Duke of Orleans’ future home, was still there. Its tiers of white stone steps over which the water, on _Grandes Eaux_ days, used to pour down, foaming yet disciplined, in symmetric balustered channels, between ranks of allegoric statues standing like guards and lacqueys upon a royal stairway—still descend, framed by huge umbrageous elms, from the middle height of the hill to the wide marble _bassin_ on the river level. How fully the great garden designers of the _Roy Soleil_ understood the life-giving virtue of moving waters in their grandiose if freezing conception of the formal landscape! Here, in the midst of the nature-made beauty of the old Park—where there had been forests, more or less wild, ever since Gaulish days—these architectural waters have a startling effect; incongruous no doubt, but the artificiality of the stone-work has been mellowed by two centuries and more of summer suns and winter frosts. And these monumental streams are beyond compare more beautiful than their prototypes of Versailles and the copies erected in other Continental residences in imitation of the _Grand Règne_ manner. This Lepautre was a man of fine power, in the style of his age. But he had also the servile fawning mind of that age. Soon after the triumph of the St. Cloud Park, he could find it in him to die in three days of jaundiced envy because some other design of his had been passed over by the King’s eye in favour of one by Mansard! Yea, to die of heart-burning, even as that greater man, Jean Racine, who, some years later, gave up the ghost in despair over a harsh remark passed by his royal master in a fit of temper; even as Vatel, the _maître d’hotel_, who fell upon his sword, and put an end to a life dishonoured by the failure of the fish at the celebrated Chantilly banquet!

Yes, the old cascade, at least, was still there, that once had filled the five-year-old’s imagination with a sense of the supreme in earthly grandeur. The _Jet Géant_, also; that spouting jet that reaches a height of ... but no, why cramp the stupendous into figures? Figures are finite things. The shaft of hissing water, in those days of confident wondering, reached the limit of the conceivable before it fell down again, in its thundering showers, through the iridescent bow, the _arc-en-ciel_, that could always be looked for when the sun shone on it at the sinking hour. But, alas, for the middle-aged visitor who sought for a taste again, however transient, of the noisy joyousness, the brilliance, the colour, locked up in memory’s casket!... The _cidevant_ royal park—now _Propriété Nationale_, and duly stamped, wherever room can be found for it, with the priggish and lying motto: _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_ was dull and drab and neglected: silent and morose. The _Grand Monarque’s_ extravagances in stone seemed positively shamefaced. The whole place—this artificial park within the ancient woods—had the melancholy of things outworn and disowned.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: FIRELIGHT PICTURES]

Yet here, in my armchair by the firelight, up on the side of our dear Surrey hill, I can still picture sharply to myself the summer life of St. Cloud as it was in the careless precarious days of the Second Empire.

The Empress Eugénie, then a young wife, and one of the most beautiful women of Europe, lived at the _Château_. And the Park, though thrown open to the people, was kept trim with jealous care. Roads generously sanded, lawns watered and mown with systematic care, parterres ever bright with flowers, all was marvellously different then from the present day shabbiness.

I seem to see again, even with almost a lifetime’s experience intervening, the vivid scene impressed on the observant and eager eyes of the child. The gay-hued crowds of ladies in all the then elegance of scuttle bonnets and crinolines; the bevies of children, of every class, but all joyous and noisy; the bands of marching youths, buzzing the popular airs of the year on the euphonious _Mirliton_; the siege of every “kiosk” where the wafers hot from the mould, or the cool lemonade, were dispensed; the swans, stately but voracious, being fed upon the great pond; the bright coloured beribboned _nourrices_ squatting with the nurslings on the circular benches within sound of the _musique militaire_, and the inevitable giant bearded _sapeur_ in flirtatious attendance; the quite too beautiful officers with tight waists, waxed moustaches and swaying gold epaulets—what not?

Before the great gates, solemnly walking to and fro, or standing picturesquely sentinel, there never wanted a party of veteran grenadiers in their towering brass-fronted bearskins and white cross-belts to produce the desired “Old Guard” effect. Or it might be heavy-moustached troopers, _Guides_, with sweeping plumes over the huge _colback_; with pelisses of fur and eagle-embroidered sabretaches, copying, on their side, the grim appearance of Napoleon’s ‹the real one’s› body guard.

The whole place, indeed, was pervaded with the “immense” uniforms of those pretorians: those long service professional soldiers for whose showy maintenance the Imperial Government stinted an otherwise dwindling national army—disastrous army, destined, despite its gallantry, to be so soon decimated, swept away, by the legions of _das Volk in Waffen_ wielded with the ruthless mastery of German generalship!

[Sidenote: FORGOTTEN BRILLIANCIES]

For such as have only known France since the strictly utilitarian days that followed the great _débâcle_; days when the notion that any kind of smartness is incompatible with “republican efficiency seems to have become an obsession” it is difficult to realize the gilded magnificence of the _Garde Impériale_. Still less, perhaps, in these anti-militarist times, the idolatry of the people for its _beaux militaires_. Of a truth, on a sunny day, they brightened the park walks almost as much as the Geraniums in the great stone urns, or the forbidden golden fruit in the orange tubs!

The authorities were sedulous, especially in such places as St. Cloud, to keep the pleasant side—the pride, the pomp and circumstance—of soldiering in evidence. The happy little town was awakened in the morning, was apprised of noon and again of sundown, by the incredibly joyous “sonneries” of the _Lanciers de l’Impératrice_, whose trumpeters specially gathered from far and wide, could sound all tuckets and points of war in an admirable harmony of high overtones blended with the noble, grave sounds of the ordinary calls.... Entrancing music to the little boy, in the glycine-clad house of the _rue du Château_, who would start awake, hearken, and then turn round and go to sleep again in great content. The drums of the _garde montante_, headed by the olympian _tambour-major_, sedulously tossing and twirling his cane, daily rattled the window panes as in great pomp it ascended the hill, palace-wards. It never failed to draw the same crowd to the same doorsteps. Estaffettes clattered hourly along the narrow paved streets, on their way to and from Paris; glittering, clinking, full of official importance, and with an eagerness no doubt wholly uncalled for by any existing necessity.

All that colour and bustle and pleasant make-believe of strength and “tradition,” was typical of all one has since learned to associate with that Empire on the high road to ruin. But it had its attractive side for those who had not found it out; and, seen through the prism of distance, a picturesqueness that modern France, so systematically democratized, is scarce like to know again.

VIII

The ways of our musings are as devious, as unexpected, as those of a general conversation: there is no presiding spirit to keep us to a standing topic! This topic, with us, should be “Our Sentimental Garden.” And our tattle should, really, be connected, even if but distantly; with plants or scenery; with country life and friends ‹or foes›; with emotions or reminiscences plausibly evoked by the flower side of life. Happily it is pleasant enough to be brought back to the right theme; as I am just now by a thought of the head-line.

[Sidenote: REDISCOVERED DELIGHTS]

To one who has taken somewhat late in the day to a life in the country, most of its interests seem to be a rediscovery of early, simple, and intimate delights; to be connected with impressions long forgotten.

There is an episode in the biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which, if I remember aright, bears upon this point. I have not got the _Confessions_ by me—it is, no doubt, in that cynical autobiography that the anecdote is recorded—nor, indeed, any other work of that exceedingly antipathetic writer. ‹This is the usual course: the books I require for reference when in the country happen oftener than not to be on my London bookshelves; and _mutatis mutandis, vice versa_!› The precise wording cannot in consequence be given here. But it is a small matter; the story is to this effect:

In his young and singularly impressionable days, Jean-Jacques was taking a country walk with one very near to his heart. At a certain spot of the garden, or the wood, in which he was tasting the subtle joys of _solitude à deux_, the lady suddenly exclaimed:

“See, yonder is a _pervenche_!”