An Inland Voyage | Page 8

British subject, yet he has never succeeded in
persuading a single official of his nationality. He flatters himself he is
indifferent honest; yet he is rarely taken for anything better than a spy,
and there is no absurd and disreputable means of livelihood but has
been attributed to him in some heat of official or popular distrust. . . .
For the life of me I cannot understand it. I too have been knolled to
church, and sat at good men's feasts; but I bear no mark of it. I am as
strange as a Jack Indian to their official spectacles. I might come from
any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do. My ancestors
have laboured in vain, and the glorious Constitution cannot protect me
in my walks abroad. It is a great thing, believe me, to present a good
normal type of the nation you belong to.
Nobody else was asked for his papers on the way to Maubeuge; but I

was; and although I clung to my rights, I had to choose at last between
accepting the humiliation and being left behind by the train. I was sorry
to give way; but I wanted to get to Maubeuge.
Maubeuge is a fortified town, with a very good inn, the Grand Cerf. It
seemed to be inhabited principally by soldiers and bagmen; at least,
these were all that we saw, except the hotel servants. We had to stay
there some time, for the canoes were in no hurry to follow us, and at
last stuck hopelessly in the custom-house until we went back to liberate
them. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. We had good meals,
which was a great matter; but that was all.
The Cigarette was nearly taken up upon a charge of drawing the
fortifications: a feat of which he was hopelessly incapable. And besides,
as I suppose each belligerent nation has a plan of the other's fortified
places already, these precautions are of the nature of shutting the stable
door after the steed is away. But I have no doubt they help to keep up a
good spirit at home. It is a great thing if you can persuade people that
they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel
bigger. Even the Freemasons, who have been shown up to satiety,
preserve a kind of pride; and not a grocer among them, however honest,
harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but
comes home from one of their coenacula with a portentous significance
for himself.
It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can live in
a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
whole life in which you have no part paralyses personal desire. You are
content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
colonel with his three medals goes by to the cafe at night; the troops
drum and trumpet and man the ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It
would task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place
where you have taken some root, you are provoked out of your
indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting
with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too
soon familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you
stand so far apart from the business, that you positively forget it would
be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you,
that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short
time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into a wood, with

all nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would
be much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull
country town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to
keep them from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life.
These externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a
dead language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than
an oath or a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married
couples going to church of a Sunday that we have clean forgotten what
they represent; and novelists are driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less,
when they wish to show us what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a
woman to live for each other.
One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than
his outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough
looking