Part 14
The courier was not able to understand why I had not nerve enough to walk along a crumbling slope with a precipice only thirty feet high below me; but I had no difficulty in understanding it. It is constitutional with me to get nervous and incapable under the probability of getting myself dropped thirty feet on to a pile of rocks; it does not come from culture. Some people are made in one way, and some in another--and the above is my way. Some people who can skirt precipices without a tremor have a strong dread of the dentist’s chair, whereas I was born without any prejudices against the dentist’s chair; when in it I am interested, am not in a hurry, and do not greatly mind the pain. Taken by and large, my style of make has advantages over the other, I think. Few of us are obliged to circumnavigate precipices, but we all have to take a chance at the dental chair.
People who early learn the right way to choose a dentist have their reward. Professional superiority is not everything; it is only part. All dentists talk while they work. They have inherited this from their professional ancestors, the barbers. The dentist who talks well--other things being equal--is the one to choose. He tells anecdotes all the while and keeps his man so interested and entertained that he hardly notices the flight of time. For he not only tells anecdotes that are good in themselves, but he adds nice shadings to them with his instruments as he goes along, and now and then brings out effects which could not be produced with any other kind of tools at all. All the time that such a dentist as this is plowing down into a cavity with that spinning gouge which he works with a treadle, it is observable that he has found out where he has uncovered a nerve down in there, and that he only visits it at intervals, according to the needs of his anecdote, touching it lightly, very lightly and swiftly, now and then, to brighten up some happy conceit in his tale and call a delicate electric attention to it; and all the while he is working gradually and steadily up toward his climax with veiled and consummate art--then at last the spindle stops whirling and thundering in the cavity, and you know that the grand surprise is imminent, now--is hanging in the very air. You can hear your heart beat as the dentist bends over you with his grip on the spindle and his voice diminished to a murmur. The suspense grows bigger--bigger--bigger--your breath stops--then your heart. Then with lightning suddenness the “nub” is sprung and the spindle drives into the raw nerve! The most brilliant surprises of the stage are pale and artificial compared with this.
It is believed by people generally--or at least by many--that the exquisitely sharp sensation which results from plunging the steel point into the raw nerve is pain, but I think that this is doubtful. It is so vivid and sudden that one has no time to examine properly into its character. It is probably impossible, with our human limitations, to determine with certainty whether a sensation of so high and perfect an order as that is pain or whether it is pleasure. Its location brings it under the disadvantage of a common prejudice; and so men mistake it for pain when they might perceive that it is the opposite of that if it were anywhere but in a tooth. I may be in error, but I have experimented with it a great deal and I am satisfied in my own mind that it is not pain. It is true that it always feels like pain, but that proves nothing--ice against a naked back always passes for fire. I have every confidence that I can eventually prove to everyone’s satisfaction that a nerve-stab produces pleasure; and not only that, but the most exquisite pleasure, the most perfect felicity which we are capable of feeling. I would not ask more than to be remembered hereafter as the man who conferred this priceless benefaction upon his race.
11.30.--Approaching the Falls of the Rhône. Canal to the left, walled with compact and beautiful masonry. It is a cut-off. We could pass through it and avoid the Falls--are advised by the Admiral to do it, but all decline, preferring to have a dangerous adventure to talk about.
However....
The truth is, the current began to grow ominously swift--and presently pretty lumpy and perturbed; soon we seemed to be simply flying past the shores. Then all of a sudden three hundred yards of boiling and tossing river burst upon our sight through the veiling tempest of rain! I did not see how our flimsy ark could live through such a place. If we were wrecked, swimming could not save us; the packed multitude of tall humps of water meant a bristling chaos of big rocks underneath, and the first rock we hit would break our bones. If I had been fortified with ignorance I might have wanted to stay in the boat and see the fun; but I have had much professional familiarity with water, and I doubted if there was going to be any fun there. So I said I would get out and walk, and I did. I need not tell anybody at home; I could leave out the Falls of the Rhône; they are not on the map, anyhow. If an adventure worth recording resulted, the Admiral and the courier would have it, and that would answer. I could see it from the bank--nothing could be better; it seemed even providential.
I ran along the bank in the driving rain, and enjoyed the sight to the full. I never saw a finer show than the passage of that boat was, through the fierce turmoil of water. Alternately she rose high and plunged deep, throwing up sheets of foaming spray and shaking them off like a mane. Several times she seemed to fairly bury herself, and I thought she was gone for good, but always she sprang high aloft the next moment, a gallant and stirring spectacle to see. The Admiral’s steering was great. I had not seen the equal of it before.
The boat waited for me down at the Villebois bridge, and I presently caught up and went aboard. There was a stretch of a hundred yards of offensively rough water below the bridge, but it had no dangerous features about it. Still, I was obliged to claim that it had, and that these perils were much greater than the others.
Noon.--A mile of perpendicular precipices--very handsome. On the left, at the termination of this stately wall, a darling little old tree-grown ruin abreast a wooded islet with a large white mansion on it. Near that ruin nature has gotten up a clever counterfeit of one, tree-grown and all that, and, as its most telling feature, has furnished it a battered monolith that stands up out of the underbrush by itself and looks as if men had shaped it and put it there and time had gnawed it and worn it.
This is the prettiest piece of river we have found. All its aspects are dainty and gracious and alluring.
1 P.M.--Château de la Salette. This is the port of the Grotte de la Balme, “one of the seven wonders of Dauphiny.” It is across a plain in the face of a bluff a mile from the river. A grotto is out of the common order, and I should have liked to see this one, but the rains have made the mud very deep and it did not seem well to venture so long a trip through it.
2.15 P.M.--St.-Etienne. On a distant ridge inland a tall openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the Virgin standing on it.
Immense empty freight barges being towed upstream by teams of two and four big horses--not on the bank, but under it; not on the land, but always in the water--sometimes breast deep--and around the big flat bars.
We reached a not very promising-looking village about four o’clock, and concluded to land; munching fruit and filling the hood with pipe smoke had grown monotonous. We could not have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly. The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into the drenching rain and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak and cold and windy, and there was no fire. Winter overcoats were not sufficient; they had to be supplemented with rugs. The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such force that they knocked up the water like pebble splashes.
With the exception of a very occasional wooden-shod peasant, nobody was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean of our sex. But all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries. To them and the other animals life is serious; nothing interrupts their slavery. Three of them were washing clothes in the river under the window when we arrived, and they continued at it as long as there was light to work by. One was apparently thirty; another--the mother?--above fifty; the third--grandmother?--so old and worn and gray she could have passed for eighty. They had no waterproofs or rubbers, of course; over their heads and shoulders they wore gunny sacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of the volume reached ground, the rest soaked in on the way.
At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open donkey cart--husband, son, and grandson of those women? He stood up in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when they were not obeyed swiftly enough. Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soaked clothing into the cart and stowing them to the man’s satisfaction. The cart being full now, he descended, with his umbrella, entered the tavern, and the women went drooping homeward in the wake of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to sight. We would tar and feather that fellow in America, and ride him on a rail.
When we came down into the public room he had his bottle of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was chomping like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is in everybody’s hands on the Rhône borders, and was enlightening himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of women.
Wednesday.--After breakfast, got under way. Still storming as hard as ever. The whole land looks defeated and discouraged. And very lonely; here and there a woman in the fields. They merely accent the loneliness.
NOTE.--The record ends here. Luxurious enjoyment of the excursion rendered the traveler indifferent to his notes. The drift continued to Arles, whence Mark Twain returned to Geneva and Ouchy by rail. Ten years later he set down another picture of this happy journey--“The Lost Napoleon”--which follows.--A. B. P.
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Footnote 3:
Of Hartford, Connecticut.
Footnote 4:
_Note, 1904._ Hopkinson Smith, now a distinguished man in literature, art, and architecture. S. L. C.
THE LOST NAPOLEON
The lost Napoleon is a part of a mountain range. Several miles of it--say six. When you stand at the right viewpoint and look across the plain, there, miles away, stretched out on his back under the sky, you see the great Napoleon, sleeping, with his arm folded upon his breast. You recognize him at once and you catch your breath and a thrill goes through you from head to foot--a most natural thing to happen, for you have never been so superbly astonished in your life before, and you realize, if you live a century, it is not likely that you will ever encounter the like of that tremendous surprise again. You see, it is unique. You have seen mountain ridges before that looked like men lying down, but there was always some one to pilot you to the right viewpoint, and prepare you for the show, and then tell you which is the head and which the feet and which the stomach, and at last you get the idea and say, “Yes, now I see it, now I make it out--it is a man, and wonderful, too.” But all this has damaged the surprise and there is not much thrill; moreover, the man is only a third-rate celebrity or no celebrity at all--he is no Napoleon the Great. But I discovered this stupendous Napoleon myself and was caught wholly by surprise, hence the splendid emotion, the uplifting astonishment.
We have all seen mountains that looked like whales, elephants, recumbent lions--correctly figured, too, and a pleasure to look upon--but we did not discover them, somebody pointed them out to us, and in the same circumstances we have seen and enjoyed stately crags and summits known to the people thereabouts as “The Old Man’s Head,” “The Elephant’s Head,” “Anthony’s Nose,” “The Lady’s Head,” etc., and we have seen others that were named “Shakespeare’s Head,” and “Satan’s Head,” but still the fine element of surprise was in almost all cases wanting.
The Lost Napoleon is easily the most colossal and impressive statue in the world. It is several miles long; in form and proportions it is perfect. It represents Napoleon himself and not another; and there is something about the dignity and repose of the great figure that stirs the imagination and half persuades it that this is not an unsentient artifice of nature, but the master of the world sentient and dreaming--dreaming of battle, conquest, empire. I call it the Lost Napoleon because I cannot remember just where I was when I saw it. My hope, in writing this, is that I may move some wandering tourist or artist to go over my track and seek for it--seek for it, find it, locate it exactly, describe it, paint it, and so preserve it against loss again.
My track was down the Rhône; I made the excursion ten or eleven years ago in the pleasantest season of the year. I took a courier with me and went from Geneva a couple of hours by rail to the blue little Lake Bourget, and spent the night in a mediæval castle on an island in that little lake. In the early morning our boat came for us. It was a roomy open boat fifteen or twenty feet long, with a single pair of long oars, and with it came its former owner, a sturdy big boatman. The boat was mine now; I think I paid five dollars for it. I was to pay the boatman a trifling daily wage and his keep, and he was to take us all the way down the Rhône to Marseilles. It was warm weather and very sunny, but we built a canvas arch, like a wagon cover, over the aftermost third of the boat, with a curtain at its rear which could be rolled up to let the breeze blow through, and I occupied that tent and was always comfortable. The sailor sat amidships and manned the oars, and the courier had the front third of the boat to himself. We crossed the lake and went winding down a narrow canal bordered by peasant houses and vineyards, and after about a league of this navigation we came in sight of the Rhône, a troubled gray stream which went tearing past the mouth of the peaceful canal at a racing gait. We emerged into it and laid in the oars. We could go fast enough in that current without artificial aid. During the first days we slipped along down the curving bends at a speed of about five miles an hour, but it slackened later.
Our days were all about alike. About four in the afternoon we tied up at a village and I dined on the greensward in front of the inn by the water’s edge, on the choicest chickens, vegetables, fruit, butter, and bread, prepared in French perfection and served upon the whitest linen; and as a rule I had the friendly house cat and dog for guests and company and willing and able helpers. I slept in the inn; often in clean and satisfactory quarters, sometimes in the same room with the cows and the fleas. I breakfasted on the lawn in the morning with cat and dog again; then laid in a stock of grapes and other fruits gathered fresh from the garden and some bottles of red wine made on the premises, and at eight or nine we went floating down the river again. At noon we went ashore at a village, bought a freshly caught fish or two, had them broiled, got some bread and vegetables, and set sail again at once. We always lunched on board as we floated along. I spent my days reading books, making notes, smoking, and in other lazy and enchanting ways, and had the delightfulest ten-day voyage I have ever experienced.
It took us ten days to float to Arles. There the current gave out and I closed the excursion and returned to Geneva by rail. It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and we should have been obliged to row. That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it.
I think it was about the eighth day that I discovered Napoleon. My notes cover four or five days; there they stop; the charm of the trip had taken possession of me, and I had no energy left. It was getting toward four in the afternoon--time to tie up for the day. Down ahead on the right bank I saw a compact jumble of yellowy-browny cubes stacked together, some on top of the others, and no visible cracks in the mass, and knew it for a village--a village common to that region down there; a village jammed together without streets or alleys, substantially--where your progress is mainly _through_ the houses, not _by_ them, and where privacy is a thing practically unknown; a village which probably hadn’t had a house added to the jumble for five hundred years. We were anywhere from half a mile to a mile above the village when I gave the order to proceed to that place and tie up. Just then I glanced to my left toward the distant mountain range, and got that soul-stirring shock which I have said so much about. I pointed out the grand figure to the courier, and said:
“Name it. Who is it?”
“Napoleon!”
“Yes, it is Napoleon. Show it to the sailor and ask him to name it.”
The sailor said, “Napoleon.” We watched the figure all the time then until we reached the village. We walked up the river bank in the morning to see how far one might have to go before the shape would materially change, but I do not now remember the result. We watched it afterward as we floated away from the village, but I cannot remember at what point the shape began to be marred. However, the mountains being some miles away, I think that the figure would be recognizable as Napoleon along a stretch of as much as a mile above and a mile below the village, though I think that the likeness would be strongest at the point where I first saw it--that is, half a mile or more above the village.
We talked the grand apparition over at great length and with a strong interest. I said I believed that if its presence were known to the world such shoals of tourists would come flocking there to see it that all the spare ground would soon be covered with hotels; and I think so yet. I think it would soon be the most celebrated natural curiosity on the planet, that it would be more visited than Niagara or the Alps, and that all the other famous natural curiosities of the globe would fall to a rank away below it. I think so still.
There is a line of lumbering and thundering great freight steamers on the Rhône, and I think that if some man will board one of them at Arles and make a trip of some hours upstream--say from three to six--and keep an eye out to the right and watch that mountain range he will be certain to find the Lost Napoleon and have no difficulty in rediscovering the mighty statue when he comes to the right point. It will cost nothing to make the experiment, and I hope it will be done.
NOTE.--Mark Twain’s biographer rediscovered it in 1913. It is some miles below Valence, opposite the village of Beauchastel.
SOME NATIONAL STUPIDITIES (1891-1892)
The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.
Take the German stove, for instance--the huge white porcelain monument that towers toward the ceiling in the corner of the room, solemn, unsympathetic, and suggestive of death and the grave--where can you find it outside of the German countries? I am sure I have never seen it where German was not the language of the region. Yet it is by long odds the best stove and the most convenient and economical that has yet been invented.[5]