II.

The street is full of downcast faces; lawyers, bankers, people tired with office work, or bored with having too much fortune and too little trouble. In the evening, they go to Frascati or watch the loungers who elbow each other among the shops {427}on the course. During the day they drink and bathe a little, ride and smoke a good deal. The bloated patients, stretched on arm-chairs, digest their food; the lean study the newspapers; the young men talk with the ladies about the weather; the ladies are busy in rounding their petticoats aright: the old, who are critics and philosophers, take snuff, or look at the mountains with glasses, to ascertain if the engravings are exact. It is not worth the trouble of having so much money, merely to have so little pleasure.

This _ennui_ proves that life resembles the opera; to be happy there, you must have money for your ticket, but, also, the sentiment of music. If the money is wanting, you remain outside in the rain among the boot-blacks; if you have no taste for music, you sleep sullenly in your superb box. I conclude that we must try to earn the four francs for the parterre, but above all to make ourselves acquainted with music.

The promenades are too neat and recall the Bois de Boulogne; here and there a tired broom leans against a tree its slanting silhouette. From the depths of a thicket the _sergents de ville_ cast on you their eagle glance, and the dung decorates the alleys with its poetic heaps.

An invalid always brings with him one or more {428}companions. Where is the being so disinherited by heaven as not to have a relation or friend who is bored? And where is the friend or relation so thankless as to refuse a service which is a pleasure party? The invalid drinks and bathes; the friend wears gaiters or rides, hence the species of tourists.

[Illustration: 454]

This species comprises several varieties, which are distinguished by the song, the plumage, and the gait. These are the principal:

FIRST.

The first has long legs, lean body, head bent {429}forward, large and powerful feet, vigorous hands, excellent at grasping and holding on. It is provided with canes, ferruled sticks, umbrellas, cloaks, india-rubber top-coats. It despises dress, shows itself but little in society, knows thoroughly guides and hotels. It strides over the ground in an admirable manner, rides with saddle, without saddle, in every way and all possible beasts. It walks for the sake of walking, and to have the right of repeating several fine, ready-made phrases.

I found, and picked up, at Eaux-Chaudes, the journal of one of these walking tourists. It is entitled: _My Impressions_.

“15th July.--Ascent of Vignemale. Set out at midnight, came back at ten o’clock in the evening. Appetite on the summit; excellent dinner, pate, fowls, trout, claret, kirsch. My horse stumbled eleven times. Feet galled. Rondo, good guide. Total: sixty-seven francs.

“20th July.--Ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. Fifteen hours. Sanio, fair guide; knows neither songs nor stories. Good sleep for an hour at the top. Two bottles broken, which rather spoiled the provisions. Thirty-eight francs.

“21st July.--Excursion to the Valley of Héas. Too many stones in the road. Twenty-one miles. Must exercise every day. To-morrow will walk twenty-four. {430}“24th July.--Excursion to the Valley of Aspe. Twenty-seven miles.

“1st August.--Lake of Oo. Good water, very cold; the bottles were well cooled.

“2d August.--Valley of the Arboust. Met three caravans; two of donkeys, one of horses. Thirty miles. Throat raw. Corns on the feet.

“3d August.--Ascent of the Maladetta. Three days. Sleep at the Rencluse de la Maladetta. My large double cloak with the fur collar keeps me from being frozen. In the morning I make the omelette myself. Punch with snow. Second night in the Vale of Malibierne. Passage of the Glacier. My right shoe gets torn. Arrival at the summit. View of three bottles left by the preceding tourists. For amusement, I read a number of the _Journal des Chasseurs_. On my return, I am entertained by the guides. Bagpipes in the evening at my door; great bouquet with a ribbon. Total: one hundred and sixty-eight francs.

“15th August.--Leave the Pyrenees. Three hundred and ninety-one leagues in a month, on foot as well as on horse and in carriage. Eleven ascents, eighteen excursions. I have used up two ferruled sticks, a top-coat, three pairs of trousers, five pairs of shoes. Good year.

“P.S.--Sublime country. My spirit bows beneath these great emotions.” {431}

[Illustration: 457]

{432}

{433}SECOND.

The second variety comprises thoughtful methodical people, generally wearing spectacles, endowed with a passionate confidence in the printed letter. You know them by the guide-book, which they always carry in their hand. This book is to them the law and the prophets. They eat trout at the place named in the book, make all the stops advised by the book, dispute with the innkeeper when he asks more than is marked in the book. You see them at the remarkable points with their eyes fixed on the book, filling themselves with the description, and informing themselves exactly of the sort of emotion which it is proper to feel. On the eve of an excursion, they study the book and learn in advance the order and connection of the sensations they ought to experience: first, surprise; a little further on a tender impression; three miles beyond, chilled with horror; finally a calm sensibility. They do and feel nothing but with documents in hand and on good authority. On reaching a hotel, their first care is to ask their neighbor at the table if there is any place of reunion; at what hour people meet there; how the different hours of the day are filled up; what walk is taken in the afternoon; what other in the evening. The next {434}day they follow all these directions conscientiously. They are clad in watering-place fashion; they change their dress as many times as the custom of the places deems proper; they make all the excursions they ought to make at the necessary hour, in the proper equipage. Have they any taste? It is impossible to say; the book and public opinion have thought and decided for them. They have the consolation of thinking that they have walked in the broad road and are imitators of the human kind. These are the _docile tourists._

THIRD.

[Illustration: 460]

The third variety walks in troops and makes its excursions by families. You see from afar a great {435}peaceable cavalcade; father, mother, two daughters, two tall cousins, one or two friends and sometimes donkeys for the little boys.

[Illustration: 461]

They beat the donkeys, which are restive; they advise the fiery youths to be prudent; a glance retains the young ladies about the green veil of the mother. The distinctive traits of this variety are the green veil, the bourgeois spirit, the love of siestas and meals on the grass; an unfailing sign is the taste for little social games. This variety is rare at Eaux-Bonnes, more common at Bagnères de Bigorre and at Bagnères de Luchon. It is remarkable for its prudence, its culinary instincts, its economical habits. The individuals making the excursion stop at a spot selected the day before; they unload pâtés and bottles.

If they have brought nothing, they go and knock at the nearest hut for milk; they are astonished at having to pay three sous a glass for it: they find that it strongly resembles goat’s milk, and they say to each other, after they have drunken, that the wooden spoon was not over-clean. They {436}look curiously at the dark stable, half underground, where the cows ruminate on beds of heather; after which, the great fat men seat themselves or lie down. The artist of the family draws out his album and copies a bridge, a mill, and other album views. The young girls run and laugh, and let themselves drop out of breath upon the grass; the young men run after them. This variety, indigenous in the great cities, in Paris above all, wishes to revive among the Pyrenees the pleasure parties of Meudon or Montmorency.

FOURTH.

[Illustration: 462]

Fourth kind: dining tourists. At Louvie, a family from Carcassonne, father, mother, son, daughter and servant, alighted from the interior. For the first time in their life they were undertaking a {437}pleasure trip. The father was one of those florid bourgeois, pot-bellied, important, dogmatic, well-clad in fine cloth, carefully preserved, who educate their cooks, arrange their house _en bonbonnière_, and establish themselves in their comfort, like an oyster in its shell. They entered stupefied into a dark dining-room, where the half-empty bottles strayed among the cooling dishes. The cloth was soiled, the napkins of a doubtful white. The father, indignant, asked for a cup of tea, and began walking up and down with a tragic air. The rest looked at each other mournfully and sat down. The dishes came helter-skelter, all of them failures. Our Carcassonne friends helped themselves, turned the meat over on their plates, looked at it, and did not eat. They ordered tea a second time; the tea did not appear; the travellers were called for the coach, and the landlord demanded twelve francs. Without saying a word, with a gesture of concentrated horror, the head of the family paid. Then, approaching his wife, he said to her: “It was your wish, madam!” A quarter of an hour later the storm burst forth: he poured his complaint into the bosom of the conductor. He declared that the company would fail if it changed horses at such a poisoner’s; he trusted that disease would soon carry off such dirty people. They told him that everybody in the country was so, and that they lived {438}happily for eighty years. He raised his eyes to heaven, repressed his grief, and directed his thoughts toward Carcassonne.

FIFTH.

Fifth variety; rare: learned tourists.

[Illustration: 464]

One day, at the foot of a damp rock, I saw a little lean man coming toward me, with a nose like an eagle’s beak; a hatchet face, green eyes, grizzling locks, nervous, jerky movements, and something quaint and earnest in his countenance. He had on huge gaiters, an old black, rain-beaten cap, trousers spattered to the knee with mud, a botanical case full of dents on his back, and in his {439}hand a small spade. Unfortunately I was looking at a plant with long, straight, green stalk, and white, delicate corolla, which grew near some hidden springs. He took me for a raw fellow-botanist. “Ah, here you are, gathering plants! What, by the stalk, clumsy? What will it do in your herbarium without roots? Where is your case? your weeder?”

“But, sir--”

“Common plant, frequent in the environs of Paris, _Parnassia palustris_: stem simple, erect, a foot in height, glabrous, radical leaves petiolate (sheathing caulis, sessile), cordiform, entirely glabrous; simple flower, white, terminal, the calix with lanceolate leaves, petals rounded, marked with hollow lines, nectaries ciliate and furnished with yellow globules at the extremity of the cilia resembling pistils; helleboraceous. Those nectaries are curious; good study, plant well chosen. Courage! you’ll get on.”

“But I am no botanist!”

“Very good, you are modest. However, since you are in the Pyrenees, you must study the flora of the country; you will not find another such opportunity. There are rare-plants here which you should absolutely carry away. I gathered near Oleth, the Menziesra Daboeci, an inestimable godsend. I will show you at the house the _Ramondia_ {440}_Pyrenaica,_ solanaceous with the aspect of the primrose. I scaled Mont Perdu to find the _Ranunculus parnassifolius_ mentioned by Ramond, and which grows at a height of 2,700 mètres. Hah! what is that! the _Aquilcgia Pyrenaica!_”

And my little man started off like an isard, clambered up a slope, carefully dug the soil about the flower, took it up, without cutting a single root, and returned with sparkling eyes, triumphant air, and holding it aloft like a banner.

“Plant peculiar to the Pyrenees. I have long wanted it; the specimen is excellent. Come, my young friend, a slight examination: you don’t know the species, but you recognize the family?”

“Alas! I don’t know a word of botany.”

He looked at me stupefied. “And why do you gather plants?”

“To see them, because they are pretty.”

He put his flower into his case, adjusted his cap, and went off without adding another word.

SIXTH.

Sixth variety; very numerous: _sedentary tourists._ They gaze on the mountains from their windows; their excursions consist in going from their room to the English garden, from the English garden to the promenade. They take a siesta upon the heath, {441}and read the journal stretched on a chair; after which they have seen the Pyrenees.

SEVENTH.

There was a grand ball yesterday. Paul presented there a young creole from Venezuela in America; the young man has as yet seen nothing; he has just left ship at Bordeaux, whence he comes here; a very fine fellow, however, of a fine, olive complexion; great hunter, and better fitted for frequenting mountains than drawing-rooms. He comes to France to form himself, as they say; Paul pretends that it is to be deformed.

We have taken our place in a corner; and the young man has asked Paul to define to him a ball.

“A great funereal and penitential ceremony.”

“Pshaw!”

“No doubt of it, and the custom goes back a long way.”

“Indeed?”

“Back to Henry III. who instituted assemblies of flagellants. The men of the court bared their backs, and met together to lash one another over the shoulders. Nowadays there is no longer any whipping, but the sadness is the same. All the men who are here come to expiate great sins or have just lost their relations.” {442}“That is the reason why they are dressed in black.”

“Precisely.”

“But the ladies are in magnificent dresses.”

“They mortify themselves only the better for that. Each one has hung around the loins a sort of haircloth, that horrible load of petticoats which hurts them and finally makes them ill. This is after the example of the saints, the better to work out salvation.”

“But all the men are smiling.”

“That is the finest thing about it; cramped as they are, shut up in their winding-sheet of black cloth. They impose restraint on themselves, and give proof of virtue. Go forward six steps, you will see.”

The young man advanced; not yet used to the movements of a drawing-room, he stepped on the feet of a dancer and smashed the hat of a melancholy gentleman. He returned, covered with confusion, to hide himself beside us.

“What did your two poor devils say to you?”

“I don’t at all understand. The first, after an involuntary wry face, looked at me amiably. The other put his hat under his other arm and bowed.”

“Humility, resignation, a wish to suffer in order to enhance their merits. Under Henry III. they thanked him who had strapped them the best. I {443}will make a musician talk; listen. Monsieur Steuben, what quadrille are you playing there?”

“_L’Enfer_, a fantastic quadrille. It is the legend of a young girl carried off alive in the clutches of the devil.”

“It is, indeed?”

“Very expressive. The finale expresses her cries of grief and the howling of the demons. The young girl makes the air, the demons the bass.

“And you play after that?”

“Some contra-dances on _di tanti palpiti._”

“Won’t you please give me the idea of that air.”

“It is at the return of Tancred. The point is to paint the most touching sadness.”

“Excellent choice. And no mazurkas, no waltzes?”

“Presently; here is a great book of Chopin, he is our favorite. What a master! What fever! what cries, sorrowful, uncertain, broken! All these mazurkas make one want to weep.

“That is why they are danced; you see, my dear child, only afflicted people could select such music. By the way, how do they dance in your country?”

“With us? we jump and stir about, we laugh out, shout, perhaps.”

“What comical folks! and why?”

“Because they are happy and want to stir their limbs.“{444}

“Here, four steps forward, as many back, a turn cramped by the conflict of neighboring dresses, two or three geometric inclinations. The cotton-spinners in the prison at Poissy make precisely the same motions.”

“But these people talk.”

“Go forward and listen; there is nothing inconsiderate about it, I assure you.”

He returns after a minute.

“What did the man say?”

“The gentleman came up briskly, smiled delicately, and, with a gesture as of a happy discoverer, he remarked that it was warm.”

[Illustration: 472]

“And the lady?”

“The lady’s eyes flashed. With an enchanting smile of approval, she answered that it was indeed.”

“Judge what constraint they must have imposed on themselves. The gentleman is thirty years old; for twelve years he has known his phrase; the lady is twenty-two, she has known hers for seven years. Each has made and heard the question and answer three or four thousand times, and yet they appear to be interested, surprised. What empire over self! What force {445}of nature! You see clearly that these French who are called light are stoics on occasion.”

“My eyes smart, my feet are swollen, I have been swallowing dust; it is one o’clock in the morning, the air smells bad, I should like to go. Will they remain much longer?”

“Until five o’clock in the morning.”

EIGHTH.

Two days after there was a concert. The creole said in coming out that he was very tired, and had understood nothing of all that buzzing, and begged Paul to explain to him what pleasure people found in such noise.

“For,” said he, “they have enjoyed it, since they paid six francs for admission, and applauded vehemently.”

“Music awakes all sorts of agreeable reveries.”

“Let us see.”

“Such an air suggests scenes of love; such another makes you imagine great landscapes, tragic events.”

“And if you don’t have these reveries, the music bores you?”

“Certainly; unless you are professor of harmony.” {446}“But the audience were not professors of harmony?”

“No indeed.”

“So that they have all had all those reveries you talk about, otherwise they would be bored; and, if they were bored, they would neither have paid nor applauded.”

[Illustration: 472]

“Well argued.”

“Explain then to me the reveries they have had; for example, that serenade mentioned in the programme, the serenade from Don Pasquale.”

“It paints a happy love, full of pleasure and unconcern. You see a handsome youth with laughing eyes and blooming cheek, in a garden in Italy; under a tranquil moon, by the whispering of the breeze, he awaits his mistress, thinks of her smile, {447}and little by little, in measured notes, joy and tenderness spring harmoniously from his heart.”

“What, they imagined all that! What happy country-folk are your people! What fulness of emotion and thought! What discreet countenances! I should never have suspected, to see them, that they were having so sweet a dream.”

“The second piece was an andante of Beethoven.”

“What about Beethoven?”

[Illustration: 473]

“A poor, great man, deaf, loving, misunderstood, and a philosopher, whose music is full of gigantic or sorrowful dreams.”

“What dreams?”

“‘Eternity is a great eyry, whence all the centuries, like young eaglets, have flown in turn to cross {448}the heavens and disappear. Ours is in its turn come to the brink of the nest; but they have clipped its wings, and it awaits death while gazing upon space, into which it cannot take flight.’”

“What is that you are reciting to me?”

“A sentence of de Musset, which translates your andante.”

“What! In three minutes they passed from the first idea to this. What men! What flexibility of spirit! I should never have believed in such readiness. Without tripping, as a matter of course, they entered this reverie on leaving a serenade? What hearts! What artists! You make me thoroughly ashamed of myself: I shall never again dare to say a word to them.”

“The third piece, a duo of Mozart’s, expresses quite German sentiments, an artless candor, melancholy, contemplative tenderness, the half-defined smile, the timidity of love.”

“So that their imagination, which was still in a perfect state of distraction, is in a moment so transformed as to represent the confidence, the innocence, the touching agitation of a young girl?”

“Certainly.”

“And there are seven or eight pieces in a concert?”

“At least. Moreover, these pieces being taken from three or four countries and two or three {449}centuries, the audience must suddenly assume the sentiments, opposite as they are and varied, of all these centuries and of all these countries.”

“And they were crowded on benches, under a glaring light.”

“And in the pauses, the men talked railroads, the ladies dresses.”

“I am getting confused. I, when I dream, want to be alone, at my ease, or at most with a friend. If music touches me, it is in a little dark room, when some one plays airs of one sort, that suit my state of mind. It is not necessary that any one should talk to me about positive things. Dreams do not come to me at will; they fly away in spite of me. I see clearly that I am on another continent, with an entirely different race. One learns in travelling.”

A suspicion seized him: “Perhaps they had come there for penance? When they came out, I saw them yawning, and dejected in countenance.”

“Don’t believe anything of it. It is because they restrain themselves. Otherwise, they would burst into tears and throw themselves on your neck.”

NINTH.

In the evening our creole, who had been thinking, said to Paul:

{450}“Since you are such musicians in France, your well-educated girls must all learn music?”

“Three hours of scales every day, for thirteen years, from seven to twenty; total, fourteen thousand hours.”

“They profit by it?”

“One out of eight; of the other seven, three become good hand-organs, four poor hand-or-gans.”

“I suppose for a compensation they are made to read?”

“Le Ragois, La Harpe, and other dictionaries, all sorts of little treatises of florid piety.”

“What then is your education?”

“A pretty case embalmed with incense, perfumed, securely padlocked, where the mind sleeps while the finders turn a bird-organ.”

“Well, that is encouraging for the husband. And what does _he_ do?”

“He receives the key of the case, opens it; a little devil in a white dress jumps at his nose, eager to dance and get out.”

“Very well, the husband serves as guide. Has he other cares?”

“Perhaps so.”

“For instance?”

“An apartment, third floor, costs two thousand francs, the dress of the wife fifteen hundred, the {451}education of a child, a thousand; the husband earns six thousand.”

“I understand; while dancing, they think of all sorts of melancholy things.”

“Of economizing, keeping up appearances, flattering, calculating.”

“What then is marriage with you?”

“An act of society between a minister of foreign relations and a minister of the interior.”

“And for preparation they have learned--”

“To roll off scales, to shine in trills, to shift their wrists. Prestidigitation instructs in housekeeping.”

“Decidedly, you Europeans have a fine logic. And the eighth girl, the one who does not become a hand-organ?”

“The piano forms her too. It answers for everything, everywhere. Beneficent machine!”

“How is that?”

“It exalts and refines. Mendelssohn surrounds them with ardent, delicate, morbid imaginings. Rossini fills their nerves with an expansive and voluptuous joy. The sharp, tormented desires, the broken, rebel cries of modern passions, rise from every strain of Meyerbeer. Mozart awakens in them a swarm of affections and dim longings. They live in a cloud of emotions and sensations.”

“The other arts would do as much.”

“Not a bit of it. Literature is a living psychology, {452}painting a living physiology. Music alone invents all, copies nothing, is a pure dream, gives free rein to dreams.”

“And probably they strike out into it.”

“With all the ardor of their ignorance, their sex, imagination, idleness, and their twenty years.”

“Well, of evenings they have the poetry of the family and the world for pasture.”

“In the evening, a night-capped gentleman, their husband, talks to them of his reports and his practice. The children in their cradle are spoiled or grumble. The cook brings her account. They bow to fifteen men in their _salon_, and compliment fifteen ladies on their dresses. In addition, once in awhile, the penitential and funereal ceremony you saw three days ago.”

“But then the piano seems chosen expressly.”

“To resign them at the outset to the meanness of a commonplace condition, the nothingness of the feminine condition, the wretchedness of the human condition. It is plain that all will be content, that none will become languishing or sharp. Dear and beneficent instrument! Salute it with respect, when you enter a room. It is the source of domestic concord, of feminine patience and conjugal bliss.”

“Saint Jacques, I swear that my wife shall not know music!”{453}

“You are making bachelor’s vows, my dear friend. Nowadays every girl who wears gloves has made her fingers run over that machine; otherwise she would think herself no better than a washerwoman.”

“I will marry my washerwoman.”

“The day after your wedding she will have a piano brought in.”

*****

Paul has sprained his foot and spent two days in his room, occupied in watching a poultry yard. He improved the occasion by writing the following little treatise for the use of the young creole, a sort of viaticum, with which he will nourish himself for the better understanding of the world. I thought the treatise melancholy and skeptical. Paul replies, that one should be so at first, in order not to be afterward, and that it is well to be a little skeptical if you wish not to be too skeptical. {454}

[Illustration: 480]

LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT.