A Hilltop on the Marne, Mildred Aldrich [libby ebook reader txt] 📗

day. It seems busy enough to me. I am afraid it will to you, still so willing to fight, still so absorbed in the struggle, and still so over fond of your species seem futile. Who knows which of us is right ? or if our difference of opinion may not be a difference in our years? If all who love one another were of the same opinion, living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby. So cheer up. You are content. Allow me to be.


Ill


June 20, 1914.

I have just received your letter the last, you say, that you can send before you sail away again for "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave," where you still seem to feel that it is my duty to return to die. I vow I will not discuss that with you again. Poverty is an unpretty thing, and poverty plus old age simply horrid in the wonderful land which saw my birth, and to which I take off my sun bonnet in reverent admiration, in much the same spirit that the peasants still uncover before a shrine. But it is the land of the young, the energetic, and the ambitious, the ideal home of the very rich and the laboring classes. I am none of those hence here I stay. I turn my eyes to the west often with a queer sort of amazed pride. If I were a foreigner of any race but French I 'd work my passage out there in an emigrant ship. As it is, I did forty five years of hard labor there, and I consider that I earned the freedom to die where I please.

I can see in "my mind's eye" the glitter in yours as you wrote and underscored I'll wager you spend half your days in writing letters back to the land you have willfully deserted. As well have stayed among us and talked and you talk so much better than you write. "Tut! tut! That is nasty." Of course I do not deny that I shall miss the inspiration of your contradictions or do you call it repartee? I scorn your arguments, and I hereby swear that you shall not worry another remonstrance from me.

You ask me how it happens that I wandered in this direction, into a part of the country about which you do not remember to have ever heard me talk, when there were so many places that would have seemed to you to be more interesting. Well, this is more interesting than you think. You must not fancy that a place is not interesting because you can't find it in Hare, and because Henry James never talked about it. That was James's misfortune and not his fault.

The truth is I did look in many more familiar directions before fortunate accident led me here. I had an idea that I wanted to live on the heights of Montmorency, in the Jean Jacques Rousseau country. But it was terribly expensive too near to Enghien and its Casino and baccarat tables. Then I came near to taking a house near Viroflay, within walking distance of Versailles. But at the very mention of that all my French friends simply howled. "It was too near to Paris"; "it was the chosen route of the Apaches"; and so on and so forth. I did not so much care for the situation. It was too familiar, and it was not really country, it was only suburbs. But the house attracted me. It was old and quaint, and the garden was pretty, and it was high. Still it was too expensive. After that I found a house well within my means at Poigny, about an hour, by diligence, from Rambouillet. That did attract me. It was real country, but it had no view and the house was very small. Still I had got so tired of hunting that I was actually on the point of taking it when one of my friends accidentally found this place. If it had been made to order it could not have suited me better situation, age, price, all just to my taste. I put over a year and a half into the search. Did I keep it to myself well?

Besides, the country here had a certain novelty to me. I know the country on the other side of the Petit Morin, but all this is new to me except Meaux. At first the house did not look habitable to me. It was easily made so, however, and it has great possibilities, which will keep me busy for years.

Although you do not know this part of the country, it has, for me, every sort of attraction historical as well as picturesque. Its historical interest is rather for the student than the tourist, and I love it none the less for that.

If ever you relent and come to see me, I can take you for some lovely walks. I can, on a Sunday afternoon, in good weather, even take you to the theater what is more, to the theater to see the players of the Comedie Francaise. It is only half an hour's walk from my house to Pont aux Dames, where Coquelin set up his maison de retraite for aged actors, and where he died and is buried. In the old park, where the du Barry used to walk in the days when Louis XVI clapped her in prison on a warrant wrung from the dying old king, her royal lover, there is an open air theater, and there, on Sundays, the actors of the Theatre Francais play, within sight of the tomb of the founder of the retreat, under the very trees and they are stately and noble where the du Barry walked.

Of course I shall only take you there if you insist. I have outgrown the playhouse. I fancy that I am much more likely to sit out on the lawn and preach to you on how the theater has missed its mission than I am unless you insist to take you down to the hill to listen to Moliere or Racine.

If, however, that bores you, it would me, you can sit under the trees and close your eyes while I give you a Stoddard lecture without the slides. I shall tell you about the little walled town of Crecy, still surrounded by its moat, where the tiny little houses stand in gardens with their backs on the moat, each with its tiny footbridge, that pulls up, just to remind you that it was once a royal city, with drawbridge and portcullis, a city in which kings used to stay, and in which Jeanne d'Arc slept one night on her way back from crowning her king at Rheims: a city that once boasted ninety nine towers. Half a dozen of these towers still stand. Their thick walls are now pierced with windows, in which muslin curtains blow in the wind, to say that to day they are the humble homes of simple people, and to remind you of what warfare was in the days when such towers were a defense. Why, the very garden in which you will be sitting when I tell you this was once a part of the royal estate, and the last Lord of the Land was the Duke de Penthievre. I thought that fact rather amusing when I found it out, considering that the house I came so near to taking at Poigny was on the Rambouillet estate where his father, the Duke de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV's illegitimate sons, died, where the Duke de Penthievre was born, and where he buried his naughty son, the Duke de Lamballe.

Of course, while I am telling you things like this you will have to bring your imagination into play, as very few vestiges of the old days remain. I still get just as much fun out of Il y avait une fois, even when the "once on a time" can only be conjured up with closed eyes. Still, I can show you some dear little old chapels, and while I am telling you about it you will probably hear the far off, sad tolling of a bell, and I shall say to you "Ca sonne a Bouleurs." It will be the church bells at Bouleurs, a tiny, tree shaded hamlet, on another hilltop, from which, owing to its situation, the bells, which rarely ring save for a funeral, can be heard at a great distance, as they have rung over the valley for years. They sound so sad in the still air that the expression, Ca sonne a Bouleurs, has come to mean bad luck. In all the towns where the bell can be heard, a man who is having bad luck at cards, or has made a bad bargain, or has been tricked in any way, invariably remarks, "Ca sonne a Bouleurs."

I could show you something more modern in the way of historical association. For example, from the road at the south side of my hill I can show you the Chateau de la Haute Maison, with its mansard and Louis XVI pavilions, where Bismarck and Favre had their first unsuccessful meeting, when this hill was occupied by the Germans in 1870 during the siege of Paris. And fifteen minutes' walk from here is the pretty Chateau de Conde, which was then the home of Casimir Perier, and if you do not remember him as the President of the Republic who resigned rather than face the Dreyfus case, you may remember him as the father in law of Madame Simone, who unsuccessfully stormed the American theater, two years ago.

You ask me how isolated I am. Well, I am, and I am not. My house stands in the middle of my garden. That is a certain sort of isolation. There is a house on the opposite side of the road, much nearer than I wish it were. Luckily it is rarely occupied. Still, when it is, it is over occupied. At the foot of the hill perhaps five hundred yards away are the tiny hamlet of Joncheroy and the little village of Voisins. Just above me is the hamlet of Huiry half a dozen houses. You see that is not sad. So cheer up. So far as I know the commune has no criminal record, and I am not on the route of tramps. Remember, please, that, in those last winters in Paris, I did not prove immune to contagions. There is nothing for me to catch up here unless it be the gayety with which the air is saturated.

You ask me also how it happens that I am living again "near by Quincy?" As true as you live, I never thought of the coincidence. If you please, we pronounce it "Kansee." When I read your question I laughed. I remembered that Abelard, when he was first condemned, retired to the Hermitage of Quincy, but when I took down Larousse to look it up, what do you think I found? Simply this and nothing more: "Quincy: Ville des Etats Unis (Massachusetts), 28,000 habitants."

Isn't that droll? However, I know that there was a Sire de Quincy centuries ago, so I will look