from boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that
are now no more than rivulets, and across waste clearings
where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell
all too plainly of the cannon in the distance.
And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the
grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of
melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it
is at once so grey and so lurid, that it is far more
agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-corner
than to suffer in the person. At last they chance
on the right path, and make Franchard in the early
evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers that ever
welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois d’Hyver,
the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the
clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.
THE WOODS IN SPRING
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp
early springtime, when it is just beginning to reawaken,
and innumerable violets peep from among the fallen
leaves; when two or three people at most sit down
to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep
a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and
the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There
is less to distract the attention, for one thing,
and the forest is more itself. It is not bedotted
with artists’ sunshades as with unknown mushrooms,
nor bestrewn with the remains of English picnics.
The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your
heart may be brought into your mouth as you hear far-away
horns; or you may be told by an agitated peasant that
the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
since, ‘a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze
pipuers.’
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system
of low hills that permeates the forest, you will see
many different tracts of country, each of its own
cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together
and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint
yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little ruddier
in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green;
and, dotted among the pines, or standing by themselves
in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks
of birches, spreading out into snow-white branches
yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a
purple haze of twigs. And then a long, bare
ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken
and brown heather. It is all rather cold and
unhomely. It has not the perfect beauty, nor
the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later year,
when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and
there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heather.
The loveliness of the woods in March is not, assuredly,
of this blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp
with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness.
It has a sting like the sting of bitter ale; you
acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for
