Part 6

I adore neglected gardens, and this one reminded me of the great abandoned vineyards of the Italian villas; but it possessed, what these villas lack, a charming medley of vegetables and plants of a thousand different species--all the herbs of the St. John, and each herb tall and vigorous. The forest of cherry-trees, bending under their burden of scarlet fruit, gave also the idea of inexhaustible abundance.

It was not the sweet austerity (soave austero) of Italy; it was a soft and overflowing profusion, under a warm, mild, and moist sky.

Nothing appeared in sight, though a large town was close at hand, and a little river, the Erdre, wound under the hill, and from thence dragged itself towards the Loire. But this vegetable prodigality, this virgin forest of fruit trees, completely shut in the view. For a prospect, one must mount into a species of turret, whence the landscape began to reveal itself in a certain grandeur, with its woods and its meadows, its distant monuments, its towers. Even from this observatory the view was still limited, the city only appearing imperfectly, and not allowing you to catch sight of its mighty river, its island, its stir of commerce and navigation. A few paces from its great harbour, of whose existence there was no sign, one might believe oneself in a desert, in the landes of Brittany, or the clearings of La Vendée.

Two things were of a lofty character, and detached themselves from this sombre orchard. Penetrating the ancient hedges and chestnut-alleys, you found yourself in a nook of barren argillaceous soil, where, among thyme-laurels and other strong, rude trees, rose an enormous cedar, a veritable leafy cathedral, of such stature that a cypress already grown very tall was choked by it, and lost. This cedar, bare and stripped below, was living and vigorous where it received the light; its immense arms, at thirty feet from the ground, clothed themselves with strange and pointed leaves; then the canopy thickened; the trunk attained an elevation of eighty feet. You saw, about three leagues distant, the fields opposite the banks of the Sèvre and the woods of La Vendée. Our home, low and sheltered on the side of this giant, was not less distinguished by it throughout an immense circuit, and perhaps owed to it its name, the High Forest.

At the other end of the enclosure, from a deep sheet of water, rose a small ascent, crowned with a garland of pines. These fine trees, incessantly beaten by the sea-breezes, and shaken by the adverse winds which follow the currents of the great river and its two tributaries, groaned in the struggle, and day and night filled the profound silence of the place with a melancholy harmony. At times, you might have thought yourself by the sea; they so imitated the noise of the waves, of the ebbing and flowing tide.

By degrees, as the season became a little drier, this sojourn exhibited itself to me in its real character; serious, indeed, but more varied than one would have supposed at the first glance, and beautiful with a touching beauty which went home to the soul. Austere, as became the gate of Brittany, it had all the luxuriant verdure of the Vendean coast.

I could have thought, when I saw the pomegranates blooming in the open air, robust and loaded with flowers, that I was in the south. The magnolia, no dwarf, as we see it elsewhere, but splendid and magnificent, and full-grown, like a great tree, perfumed all my garden with its huge white blossoms, which contain in their thick chalices an abundance of I know not what kind of oil, an oil sweet and penetrating, whose odour follows you everywhere; you are enveloped in it.

We found ourselves this time in possession of a true garden, a large establishment, a thousand domestic occupations with which we had previously dispensed. A wild Breton girl rendered help only in the coarser tasks. Save one weekly journey to the town, we were very lonely, but in an extremely busy solitude; rising very early in the morning, at the first awakening of the birds, and even before the day. It is true that we retired to rest at a good hour, and almost at the same time as the birds.

This profusion of fruits, vegetables, and plants of every kind, enabled us to keep numerous domestic animals: only the difficulty was, that nourishing them, knowing each of them, and well-known by them, we could not make up our minds to eat them. We planted, and here we met with quite a distinct kind of inconvenience--our plantations were nearly always devoured beforehand.

This earth, fertile in vegetables, was equally or more prolific of destructive animals; enormous capacious snails, devouring insects. In the morning we collected a great tubful of snails. The next day you would never have thought so. There still seemed to be the full complement.

Our hens did their best. But how much more effective would have been the skilful and prudent stork, the admirable scavenger of Holland and all marshy districts, which some Western lands ought at all costs to adopt. Everybody knows the affectionate respect in which this excellent bird is held by the Dutch. In their markets you may see him standing peacefully on one foot, dreaming in the midst of the crowd, and feeling as safe as in the heart of the deepest deserts. It is a fantastic but well-assured fact, that the Dutch peasant who has had the misfortune to wound his stork and to break his leg, provides him with one of wood.

To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an infinite charm for a less absorbed mind. This beautiful spot, this great liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a rare harmony, such as one but seldom meets with in life. Its sweetness contrasted strongly with the thoughts of the present, with the gloomy past which then occupied my pen. I was writing of '93. Its heroic primeval history enveloped, possessed, shall I say consumed, me. All the elements of happiness which surrounded me, which I sacrificed to work, adjourning them for a time that, according to all appearances, might never be mine, I regretted daily, and incessantly cast back upon them a look of sorrow. It was a daily battle of affection and nature, against the sombre thoughts of the human world.

That battle for me will be always a powerful souvenir. The scene has remained sacred in my thought. Elsewhere it no longer exists. The house is destroyed--another built on its site. And it is for this reason that I have dallied here a little. My cedar, however, has survived; a notable thing, for architects now-a-days hate trees.

When, however, I drew near the end of my task, some glimpses of light enlivened the wild darkness. My sorrows were less keen, when I felt sure that I should thenceforth enjoy this memorial of a cruel but fertile experience. Once more I began to hear the voices of solitude, and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but slowly and with unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some time dead, and have returned from the other world.

In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable History, I had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, with a heart less tender than ardent. At a later period, when residing in the suburb of Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. I watched with interest my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so sensible every evening of the joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly grateful. How much more at Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever powerful and prolific, seeing the herbage shoot upward hour after hour, and all animal life multiplying around me, ought I not, I too, to expand and revive with this new sentiment!

If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and broken the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book which we frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France," by Toussenel, a charming and felicitous transition from the thought of country to that of nature.

So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch, his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the Gallic sense, the French esprit, the very soul of our fatherland.

The formulæ of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too spirituel animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius, gay, good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from illuminating the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened with the joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in the first day of spring.

Add a thing of great beauty, which does not spring from youth. The author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in his early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered in character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits of slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for those pathetic lives which he unveils--for these souls, these beings recognized by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more hunt without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier of compassion. And what barrier? His own work, the book in which he gives them life.

I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of which nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our swallows tracked for us, we followed; we proceeded southward. We fixed our transitory nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from Genoa.

An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, in the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of an equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense with fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard and the invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however? These oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage with the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. Animated life was very rare. There were few or no small birds; no sea birds. The fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those translucent waters. My glance pierced them to a great depth, and saw nothing but solitude, and the white and black rocks which form the bed of that gulf of marble.

The littoral, exceedingly narrow, is nothing but a small cornice, an extremely confined border, a mere eyebrow (sourcil) of the mountains, as the Latins would have said. To ascend the ladder and overlook the gulf is, even for the most robust, a violent gymnastic effort. My sole promenade was a little quay, or rather a rugged circular road, which wound, with a breadth of about three feet, between ancient garden walls, rocks, and precipices.

Deep was the silence, sparkling the sea, but all lonesome and monotonous, except for the passage of a few distant barks. Work was prohibited to me; for the first time for thirty years, I was separated from my pen, and had escaped from that paper and ink existence in which I had previously lived. This pause, which I thought so barren, in reality proved to me very fertile. I watched, I observed. Unknown voices awoke within me.

At some distance from Genoa, and the excellent friends whom we knew there, our only society was the small people of the lizards, which run over the rocks, played, and slumbered in the sun. Charming, innocent animals, which every noon, when we dined, and the quay was absolutely deserted, amused me with their vivacious and graceful evolutions. At the outset my presence had appeared to disquiet them; but a week had not passed before all, even the youngest, knew me, and knew they had nothing to fear from the peaceful dreamer.

Such the animal, and such the man. The abstemious life of my lizards, for which a fly was an ample banquet, differed in nothing from that of the povera gente of the coast. Many lived wholly on herbs. But herbs were not abundant in the barren and gaunt mountain. The destitution of the country exceeded all belief. I was not grieved at daring it, at finding myself sympathizing with the woes of Italy, my glorious nurse, who has nourished France, and me more than any Frenchman.

A nurse? That was she ever, so far as was possible in her poverty of resources, in the poverty of nature to which my health reduced me. Incapable of food, I still received from her the only nourishment which I could support, the vivifying air and the light--the sun, which frequently permitted us, in one of the severest winters of the century, to keep the windows open in January.

In the lazy, lizard-like life which I lived upon that shore, I wholly occupied myself with the surrounding country, with the apparent antiquity of the Apennines and the mountains which girdle the Mediterranean. Is there then no remedy? Or rather, in their leafless declivities shall we not discover the fountains which may renew their life? Such was the idea which absorbed me. I no longer thought of my illness; I troubled myself no more about recovering. I had made what is truly great progress for an invalid: I had forgotten myself. My business henceforward was to resuscitate that mighty patient, the Apennines. And as by degrees I became aware that the case was not hopeless--that the waters were hidden, not lost--that by their discovery we might restore vegetable life, and eventually animal life,--I felt myself much stronger, refreshed, renewed. For each spring that revealed itself, I grew less athirst; I felt its waters rise within my soul.

Ever fertile is Italy. She proved so to me through her very barrenness and poverty. The ruggedness of the bald Apennines, the lean Ligurian coast, did but the more awaken, by contrast, the recollection of that genial nature which cherishes the luxuriant richness of our western France. I missed the animal life; I felt its absence. From the mute foliage of sombre orange-gardens I demanded the woodland birds. For the first time I perceived the seriousness of human existence when it is no longer surrounded by the grand society of innocent beings whose movements, voices, and sports are, so to speak, the smile of creation.