Part 12

Just to show how strange, mysterious, and romantic life is, I will relate to you in a faithful narrative a few of my experiences the other day--it was a common Saturday. Some people may say that my experiences were after all quite ordinary experiences. After _all_, they were not. I was staying in a little house, unfamiliar to me, and beyond a radius of a few hundred yards I knew nothing of my surroundings, for I had arrived by train, and slept in the train. I felt that if I wandered far from that little house I should step into the unknown and the surprising. Even _in_ the house I had to speak a foreign tongue; the bells rang in French. During the morning I walked about alone, not daring to go beyond the influence of the little house; I might have been a fly wandering within the small circle of lamplight on a tablecloth; all about me lay vast undiscovered spaces. Then after lunch a curious machine came by itself up to the door of the little house. I daresay you have seen these machines. You sit over something mysterious, with something still more mysterious in front of you. A singular liquid is poured into a tank; one drop explodes at a spark, and the explosion pushes the machine infinitesimally forward, another drop explodes and pushes the machine infinitesimally forward, and so on, and so on, and quicker and quicker, till you can outstrip trains. Such is the explanation given to me. I have a difficulty in believing it, but it seems to find general acceptance. However, the machine came up to the door of the little house, and took us off, four of us, all by itself; and after twisting about several lanes for a couple of minutes it ran us into a forest. I had somehow known all the time that that little house was on the edge of a great forest.

*****

Without being informed, I knew that it was a great forest, because against the first trees there was a large board which said “General Instructions for reading the signposts in the forest,” and then a lot of details. No forest that was not a great forest, a mazy forest, and a dangerous forest to get lost in, would have had a notice board like that. As a matter of fact the forest was fifty miles in circumference. We plunged into it, further and further, exploding our way at the rate of twenty or thirty miles an hour, along a superb road which had a beginning and no end. Sometimes we saw a solitary horseman caracoling by the roadside; sometimes we passed a team of horses slowly dragging a dead tree; sometimes we heard the sound of the woodman’s saw in the distance. Once or twice we detected a cloud of dust on the horizon of the road, and it came nearer and nearer, and proved to be a machine like ours, speeding on some mysterious errand in the forest. And as we progressed we looked at each other, and noticed that we were getting whiter and whiter--not merely our faces, but even our clothes. And for an extraordinary time we saw nothing but the road running away from under our wheels, and on either side trees, trees, trees--the beech, the oak, the hornbeam, the birch, the pine--interminable and impenetrable millions of them, prodigious in size, and holding strange glooms in the net of their leafless branches. And at intervals we passed cross-roads, disclosing glimpses, come and gone in a second, of other immense avenues of the same trees. And then, quite startlingly, quite without notice, we were out of the forest; it was just as if we were in a train and had come out of a tunnel.

And we had fallen into the midst of a very little village, sleeping on the edge of the forest, and watched over by a very large cathedral. Most of the cathedral had ceased to exist, including one side of the dizzy tower, but enough was left to instil awe. A butcher came with great keys (why a butcher, if the world is so commonplace as people make out?), and we entered the cathedral; and though outside the sun was hot, the interior of the vast fane was ice-cold, chilling the bones. And the cathedral was full of realistic statues of the Virgin, such as could only have been allowed to survive in an ice-cold cathedral on the edge of a magic forest. And then we climbed a dark corkscrew staircase for about an hour, and came out (as startlingly as we had come out of the forest) on the brink of a precipice two hundred feet deep. There was no rail. One little step, and that night our ghosts would have begun to haunt the remoter glades of the forest. The butcher laughed, and leaned over; perhaps he could do this with impunity because he was dressed in blue; I don’t know.

*****

Soon afterwards the curious untiring machine had swept us into the forest again. And now the forest became more and more sinister, and beautiful with a dreadful beauty. Great processions of mighty and tremendous rocks straggled over hillocks, and made chasms and promontories, and lairs for tigers--tigers that burn bright in the night. But the road was always smooth, and it seemed nonchalant towards all these wonders. And presently it took us safely out of the forest once again. And this time we were in a town, a town that by some mistake of chronology had got into the wrong century; the mistake was a very gross one indeed. For this town had a fort with dungeons and things, and a moat all round it, and the quaintest streets and bridges and roofs and river and craft. And processions in charge of nuns were walking to and fro in the grass grown streets. And not only were the houses and shops quaint in the highest degree, but the shopkeepers also were all quaint. A greyheaded tailor dressed in black stood at the door of his shop, and his figure offered such a quaint spectacle that one of my friends and myself exclaimed at the same instant: “How Balzacian!” And we began to talk about Balzac’s great novel “Ursule Mirouët.” It was as if that novel had come into actuality, and we were in the middle of it. Everything was Balzacian; those who have read Balzac’s provincial stories will realise what that means. Yet we were able to buy modern cakes at a confectioner’s. And we ordered tea, and sat at a table on the pavement in front of an antique inn. And close by us the landlady sat on a chair, and sewed, and watched us. I ventured into the great Balzacian kitchen of the inn, all rafters and copper pans, and found a pretty girl boiling water for our tea in one pan and milk for our tea in another pan. I told her it was wrong to boil the milk, but I could see she did not believe me. We were on the edge of the forest.

*****

And then the machine had carried us back into the forest. And this time we could see that it meant business. For it had chosen a road mightier than the others, and a road more determined to penetrate the very heart of the forest. We travelled many miles with scarcely a curve, until there were more trees behind us than a thousand men, could count in a thousand years. And then--you know what happened next. At least you ought to be able to guess. We came to a castle. In the centre of all forests there is an enchanted castle, and there was an enchanted castle in the centre of this forest. And as the forest was vast, so was the castle vast. And as the forest was beautiful, so was the castle beautiful. It was a sleeping castle; the night of history had overtaken it. We entered its portals by a magnificent double staircase, and there was one watchman there, like a lizard, under the great doorway. He showed us the wonders of the castle, conducting us through an endless series of noble and splendid interiors, furnished to the last detail of luxury, but silent, unpeopled, and forlorn. Only the clocks were alive. “There are sixty-eight clocks in the castle.” (And ever since I have thought of those sixty-eight clocks ticking away there, with ten miles of trees on every side of them.) And the interiors grew still more imposing. And at length we arrived at an immense apartment whose gorgeous and yet restrained magnificence drew from us audible murmurs of admiration. Prominent among the furniture was a great bed, hung with green and gold, and a glittering cradle; at the head of the cradle was poised a gold angel bearing a crown. Said the sleepy watchman: “Bed-chamber of Napoleon, with cradle of the King of Rome.” This was the secret of the forest.

II--SECOND JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST

We glided swiftly into the forest as into a tunnel. But after a while could be seen a silvered lane of stars overhead, a ceiling to the invisible double wall of trees. There were these stars, the rush of tonic wind in our faces, and the glare of the low-hung lanterns on the road that raced to meet us. The car swerved twice in its flight, the second time violently. We understood that there had been danger. As the engine stopped, a great cross loomed up above us, intercepting certain rays; it stood in the middle of the road, which, dividing, enveloped its base, as the current of a river strokes an island. The doctor leaned over from the driving-seat and peered behind. In avoiding the cross he had mistaken for part of the macadam an expanse of dust which rain and wind had caked; and on this treachery the wheels had skidded. “Ça aurait pu être une sale histoire!” he said briefly and drily. In the pause we pictured ourselves flung against the cross, dead or dying. I noticed that other roads joined ours at the cross, and that a large grassy space, circular, separated us from the trees. As soon as we had recovered a little from the disconcerting glimpse of the next world, the doctor got down and restarted the engine, and our road began to race forward to us again, under the narrow ceiling of stars. After monotonous miles, during which I pondered upon eternity, nature, the meaning of life, the precariousness of my earthly situation, and the incipient hole in my boot-sole--all the common night-thoughts--we passed by a high obelisk (the primitive phallic symbol succeeding to the other), and turning to the right, followed an obscure gas-lit street of walls relieved by sculptured porticoes. Then came the vast and sombre courtyard of a vague palace, screened from us by a grille; we overtook a tram-car, a long, glazed box of electric light; and then we were suddenly in a bright and living town. We descended upon the terrace of a calm _café_, in front of which were ranged twin red-blossomed trees in green tubs, and a waiter in a large white apron and a tiny black jacket.

*****

The lights of the town lit the earth to an elevation of about fifteen feet; above that was the primeval and mysterious darkness, hiding even the housetops. Within the planes of radiance people moved to and fro, appearing and disappearing on their secret errands; and glittering tramcars continually threaded the Square, attended by blue sparks. A monumental bull occupied a pedestal in the centre of the Square; parts of its body were lustrous, others intensely black, according to the incidence of the lights. My friends said it was the bull of Rosa Bonheur, the Amazon. Pointing to a dark void beyond the flanks of the bull, they said, too, that the palace was there, and spoke of the Council-Chamber of Napoleon, the cradle of the King of Rome, the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. I had to summon my faith in order to realise that I was in Fontainebleau, which hitherto had been to me chiefly a romantic name. In the deep and half-fearful pleasure of realisation---“This also has happened to me!”--I was aware of the thrill which has shaken me on many similar occasions, each however unique: as when I first stepped on a foreign shore; when I first saw the Alps, the Pyrenees; when I first strolled on the grand boulevards; when I first staked a coin at Monte Carlo; when I walked over the French frontier and read on a thing like a mile-post the sacred name “Italia”; and, most marvellous, when I stood alone in the Sahara and saw the vermilions and ochres of the Aurès Mountains. This thrill, ever returning, is the reward of a perfect ingenuousness.

*****

I was shown a map, and as I studied it, the strangeness of the town’s situation seduced me more than the thought of its history. For the town, with its lights, cars, cafés, shops, halls, palaces, theatres, hotels, and sponging-houses, was lost in the midst of the great forest. Impossible to enter it, or to leave it, without winding through those dark woods! On the map I could trace all the roads, a dozen like ours, converging on the town. I had a vision of them, palely stretching through the interminable and sinister labyrinth of unquiet trees, and gradually reaching the humanity of the town. And I had a vision of the recesses of the forest, where the deer wandered or couched. All around, on the rim of the forest, were significant names: the Moret and the Grez and the Franchard of Stevenson; Barbizon; the Nemours of Balzac; Larchant. Nor did I forget the forest scene of George Moore’s “Mildred Lawson.”

After we had sat half an hour in front of glasses, we rushed back through the forest to the house on its confines whence we had come. The fascination of the town did not cease to draw me until, years later, I yielded and went definitely to live in it.

III--THE CASTLE GARDENS

On the night of the Feast of Saint Louis the gardens of the palace are not locked as on other nights. The gardens are within the park, and the park is within the forest. I walked on that hot, clear night amid the parterres of flowers; and across shining water, over the regular tops of clipped trees, I saw the long façades and the courts of the palace: pale walls of stone surmounted by steep slated roofs, and high red chimneys cut out against the glittering sky. An architecture whose character is set by the exaggerated slope of its immense roofs, which dwarf the walls they should only protect! All the interest of the style is in these eventful roofs, chequered continually by the facings of upright dormers, pierced by little ovals, and continually interrupted by the perpendicularity of huge chimneys. The palace seems to live chiefly in its roof, and to be top-heavy.

It is a forest of brick chimneys growing out of stone. Millions upon millions of red bricks had been raised and piled in elegant forms solely that the smoke of fires below might escape above the roof ridge: fires which in theory heated rooms, but which had never heated aught but their own chimneys: inefficient and beautiful chimneys of picturesque, ineffectual hearths! Tin pipes and cowls, such as sprout thickly on the roofs of Paris and London, would have been cheaper and better. (It is always thus to practical matters that my mind runs.) In these monstrous and innumerable chimneys one saw eccentricity causing an absurd expense of means for a trifling end: sure mask of a debased style!

*****

With malicious sadness I reflected that in most of those chimneys smoke would never ascend again. I thought of the hundreds of rooms, designed before architects understood the art of planning, crowded with gilt and mahogany furniture, smothered in hangings, tapestries, and carpets, sparkling with crystal whose cold gaiety is reflected in the polish of oak floors! And not a room but conjures up the splendour of the monarchs and the misery of the people of France! Not an object that is associated with the real welfare of the folk, the makers of the country! A museum now--the palace, the gardens, and the fountained vistas of lake and canal--or shall I not say a mausoleum?--whose title to fame, in the esteem of the open-mouthed, is that here Napoleon, the supreme scourge of families and costly spreader of ruin,-wrote an illegible abdication. The document of abdication, which is, after all, only a facsimile, and the greedy carp in the lake--these two phenomena divide the eyes of the open-mouthed.

And not all the starers that come from the quarters of the world are more than sufficient to dot very sparsely the interminable polished floors and the great spaces of the gardens. The fantastic monument is preserved ostensibly as one of the glories of France! (_Gloire_, thou art French! Fontainebleau, Pasteur, the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo, the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean Railway--each has been termed a _gloire_ of France!) But the true reason of the monument’s preservation is that it is too big to destroy. The later age has not the force nor the courage to raze it and parcel it and sell it, and give to the poor. It is a defiance to the later age of the age departed. Like a gigantic idol, it is kept gilded and tidy at terrific expense by a cult which tempers fear with disdain.

IV--AN ITINERARY

I have lived for years in the forest of Fontainebleau, the largest forest in France, and one of the classic forests--I suppose--of the world. Not in a charcoal-burner’s hut, nor in a cave, but in a town; for the united towns of Avon and Fontainebleau happen to be in the forest itself, and you cannot either enter or quit them without passing through the forest; thus it happens that, while inhabiting the recesses of a forest you can enjoy all the graces and conveniences of an imperial city (Fontainebleau is nothing if not Napoleonic), even to _cafés chantants_, cinematograph theatres, and expensive fruiterers. I tramp daily, and often twice daily, in this forest, seldom reaching its edge, unless I do my tramping on a bicycle, and it is probably this familiarity with its fastnesses and this unfamiliarity with its periphery as a continuous whole that has given me what I believe to be a new idea for a tramping excursion: namely, a circuit of the forest of Fontainebleau. It is an enterprise which might take two days or two months. I may never accomplish it myself, but it ought to be accomplished by somebody, and I can guarantee its exceeding diversity and interest. The forest is surrounded by a ring of towns, townships, and villages of the most varied character. I think I know every one of them, having arrived somehow at each of them by following radii from the centre. I propose to put down some un-Baedekerish but practical notes on each place, for the use and benefit of the tramp er who has the wisdom to pursue my suggestion.

*****

One must begin with Moret. Moret is the show-place on the edge of the forest, and perhaps the oldest. I assisted some years ago at the celebration of its thousandth anniversary. It is only forty-three miles from Paris, on the main line of the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean railway, an important junction; two hundred and fifty trains a day pass through the station. And yet it is one of the deadest places I ever had tea in. It lies low, on the banks of the Loing, about a mile above the confluence of the Seine and the Loing. It is dirty, not very healthy, and exceedingly picturesque. Its bridge, church, gates and donjon have been painted and sketched by millions of artists, professional and amateur. It appears several times in each year’s Salon. This is its curse--the same curse as that of Bruges: it is overrun by amateur artists. I am an amateur artist myself; in summer I am not to be seen abroad without a sketching-stool, a portfolio, and a water-bottle in my hip pocket. But I hate, loathe and despise other amateur artists. Nothing would induce me to make one of the group of earnest dabbers and scratchers by the bridge at Moret. When I attack Nature, I must be alone, or, if another artist is to be there, he must be a certified professional. I have nothing else to say against Moret. There are several hotels, all mediocre.

A more amusing and bracing place than Moret is its suburb St. Mammès, the port at the afore-mentioned confluence, magnificently situated, and always brightened by the traffic of barges, tugs, and other craft. There is an hotel and a _pension_. The Seine is a great and noble stream here, and absolutely unused by pleasure-craft. I do not know why. I once made a canoe and navigated the Amazonian flood, but the contrivance was too frail. Tugs would come rushing down, causing waves twelve inches high at least, and I was afraid, especially as I had had the temerity to put a sail to the canoe.

*****

The tramper should cross the Seine here, and go through Champagne, a horrible town erected by the Creusot Steel Company--called, quite seriously, a “garden city.” He then crosses the river again to Thomery--the grape town. The finest table grapes in France are grown at Thomery. Vines flourish in public on both sides of most streets, and public opinion is so powerful (on this one point) that the fruit is never stolen. Thomery’s lesser neighbour, By, is equally vinous. These large villages offer very interesting studies in the results of specialisation. Hotels and _pensions_ exist.

From Thomery, going in a general direction north by west, it is necessary to penetrate a little into the forest, as the Seine is its boundary here, and there is no practical towing-path on the forest side of the river. You come down to the river at Yalvins Bridge, and, following the left bank, you arrive at the little village of Les Plâtreries, which consists of about six houses and an hotel where the food is excellent and whose garden rises steeply straight into the forest. A mile farther on is the large village of Samois, also on the Seine. Lower Samois is too pretty---as pretty as a Christmas card. It is much frequented in summer; its hotel accommodation is inferior and expensive, and its reputation for strictly conventional propriety is scarcely excessive. ‘However, a picturesque spot! Climb the very abrupt stony high street, and you come to Upper Samois, which is less sophisticated.

From Samois (unless you choose to ferry across to Féricy and reach Melun by Fontaine-le-Port) you must cut through an arm of the forest to Bois-le-Roi. You are now getting toward the northern and less interesting extremity of the forest. Bois-le-Roi looks a perfect dream of a place from the station. But it is no such thing. It is residential. It is even respectably residential. All trains except the big expresses stop at Bois-le-Roi, which fact is a proof that the residents exert secret influences upon the railway directors, and that therefore they are the kind of resident whose notion of architecture is merely distressing. You can stay at Bois-le-Roi and live therein comfortably, but there is no reason why you should.

The next place is Melun, which lies just to the north of the forest. It is the county town. It is noted for its brewery. It is well situated on a curve of the Seine, and it is more provincial (in the stodgy sense) and more ineffably tedious even than Moret. It possesses neither monuments nor charm. Yet the distant view of it--say from the height above Fontaine-le-Port, is ravishing at morn.

From Melun you face about and strike due south, again cutting through a bit of the forest, to Chailly-en-Bière. (All the villages about here are “_en bière_”) Chailly is just a nice plain average forest-edge village, and that is why I like it. I doubt if you could sleep there with advantage. But if you travel with your own tea, you might have excellent tea there.