Cambridge Pieces | Page 7

his time in looking at Napoleon's hats and coats and shoes
in the Louvre; to eschew all the picture rooms save the one with the
Murillos, and the great gallery, and to dine at the Diners de Paris. If he
asks leave to wash his hands before dining there, he will observe a little
astonishment among the waiters at the barbarian cleanliness of the
English, and be shown into a little room, where a diminutive bowl will
be proffered to him, of which more anon; let him first (as we did) wash
or rather sprinkle his face as best he can, and then we will tell him after
dinner what we generally do with the bowls in question. I forget how
many things they gave us, but I am sure many more than would be
pleasant to read, nor do I remember any circumstance connected with
the dinner, save that on occasion of one of the courses, the waiter
perceiving a little perplexity on my part as to how I should manage an
artichoke served a la francaise, feelingly removed my knife and fork
from my hand and cut it up himself into six mouthfuls, returning me the
whole with a sigh of gratitude for the escape of the artichoke from a
barbarous and unnatural end; and then after dinner they brought us little
tumblers of warm lavender scent and water to wash our mouths out,
and the little bowls to spit into; but enough of eating, we must have
some more coffee at a cafe on the Boulevards, watch the carriages and
the people and the dresses and the sunshine and all the pomps and
vanities which the Boulevards have not yet renounced; return to the inn,

fetch our knapsacks, and be off to the Chemin de Fer de Lyon by
forty-five minutes past seven; our train leaves at five minutes past eight,
and we are booked to Grenoble. All night long the train speeds towards
the south. We leave Sens with its grey cathedral solemnly towering in
the moonlight a mile on the left. (How few remember, that to the
architect William of Sens we owe Canterbury Cathedral.)
Fontainebleau is on the right, station after station wakes up our dozing
senses, while ever in our ears are ringing as through the dim light we
gaze on the surrounding country, "the pastures of Switzerland and the
poplar valleys of France."
It is still dark--as dark, that is, as the midsummer night will allow it to
be, when we are aware that we have entered on a tunnel; a long tunnel,
very long--I fancy there must be high hills above it; for I remember that
some few years ago when I was travelling up from Marseilles to Paris
in midwinter, all the way from Avignon (between which place and
Chalon the railway was not completed), there had been a dense frozen
fog; on neither hand could anything beyond the road be descried, while
every bush and tree was coated with a thick and steadily increasing
fringe of silver hoar-frost, for the night and day, and half-day that it
took us to reach this tunnel, all was the same--bitter cold dense fog and
ever silently increasing hoar- frost: but on emerging from it, the whole
scene was completely changed; the air was clear, the sun shining
brightly, no hoar-frost and only a few patches of fast melting snow,
everything in fact betokening a thaw of some days' duration. Another
thing I know about this tunnel which makes me regard it with
veneration as a boundary line in countries, namely, that on every high
ground after this tunnel on clear days Mont Blanc may be seen. True, it
is only very rarely seen, but I have known those who have seen it; and
accordingly touch my companion on the side, and say, "We are within
sight of the Alps"; a few miles farther on and we are at Dijon. It is still
very early morning, I think about three o'clock, but we feel as if we
were already at the Alps, and keep looking anxiously out for them,
though we well know that it is a moral impossibility that we should see
them for some hours at the least. Indian corn comes in after Dijon; the
oleanders begin to come out of their tubs; the peach trees, apricots, and
nectarines unnail themselves from the walls, and stand alone in the

open fields. The vineyards are still scrubby, but the practised eye
readily detects with each hour some slight token that we are nearer the
sun than we were, or, at any rate, farther from the North Pole. We don't
stay long at Dijon nor at Chalon, at Lyons we have an hour to wait;
breakfast off a basin of cafe au lait and a