Yes I but I knew how to keep silence. I shall
never refurnish my house. That were indeed useless.
The same thing would happen again. I had no desire
even to re-enter the house, and I did not re-enter
it; I never visited it again. I went to Paris,
to the hotel, and I consulted doctors in regard to
the condition of my nerves, which had disquieted me
a good deal ever since that fatal night.
They advised me to travel, and I followed their council.
I began by making an excursion into Italy. The
sunshine did me much good. During six months
I wandered about from Genoa to Venice, from Venice
to Florence, from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Naples.
Then I traveled over Sicily, a country celebrated
for its scenery and its monuments, relics left by
the Greeks and the Normans. I passed over into
Africa, I traversed at my ease that immense desert,
yellow and tranquil, in which the camels, the gazelles,
and the Arab vagabonds, roam about, where, in the
rare and transparent atmosphere, there hovers no vague
hauntings, where there is never any night, but always
day.
I returned to France by Marseilles, and in spite of
all the Provencal gaiety, the diminished clearness
of the sky made me sad. I experienced, in returning
to the continent, the peculiar sensation, of an illness
which I believed had been cured, and a dull pain which
predicted that the seeds of the disease had not been
eradicated.
I then returned to Paris. At the end of a month,
I was very dejected. It was in the autumn, and
I wished to make, before the approach of winter, an
excursion through Normandy, a country with which I
was unacquainted.
I began my journey, in the best of spirits, at Rouen,
and for eight days I wandered about passive, ravished
and enthusiastic, in that ancient city, in that astonishing
museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments.
But, one afternoon, about four o’clock, as I
was sauntering slowly through a seemingly unattractive
street, by which there ran a stream as black as the
ink called “Eau de Robec,” my attention,
fixed for the moment on the quaint, antique appearance
of some of the houses, was suddenly turned away by
the view of a series of second-hand furniture shops,
which succeeded one another, door after door.
Ah! they had carefully chosen their locality, these
sordid traffickers in antiquaries, in that quaint
little street, overlooking that sinister stream of
water, under those tile and slate-pointed roofs in
which still grinned the vanes of byegone days.
At the end of these grim storehouses you saw piled
up sculptured chests, Rouen, Sevre, and Moustier’s
pottery, painted statues, others of oak, Christs,
Virgins, Saints, church ornaments, chasubles, capes,
even sacred vases, and an old gilded wooden tabernacle,
where a god had hidden himself away. Oh!
What singular caverns are in those lofty houses, crowded
with objects of every description, where the existence
of things seems to be ended, things which have survived
their original possessors, their century, their times,
their fashions, in order to be bought as curiosities
by new generations.
