Lippincotts Magazine, August 1873 | Page 3

seemed to have taken root on my
back, was heavier than it used to be. Had its rotundity developed, like
its master's? I stopped and gathered a flower, meaning to analyze it at
my next resting-place. I opened my box: then indeed I perceived the
secret of its weightiness. It revealed three small rolls of oatmeal toasted,
a little roast chicken, a bit of ham, some mustard in a cleaned-out
inkstand! This now was the treachery of Josephine. Josephine, who
never had the least sympathy for my botanical researches, and who had
small comprehension of the nobler hungers and thirsts of the scientific
soul, had taken it on her to convert my box into a portable meat-safe!
Bless the old meddler, how I thanked her for her treason! The aspect of
the chicken, in its blistered and varnished brown skin, reminded me
that I was clamorously hungry. Shade of Apicius! is it lawful for
civilized mortals to be so hungry as I was at eight or nine in the
morning?
At last I saw the end of that dusty, featureless street which stretches
from the barrier to the extremity of Romainville. I saw spreading before
me a broad plain, a kind of desert, where, by carefully keeping my eyes
straight ahead, I could avoid the sight of all houses, walls, human
constructions whatever.
My favorite traveler, the celebrated Le Vaillant, to whom I am indebted

for so many facts and data toward my great theory of Comparative
Geography, says that in first reaching the solitudes of Caffraria he felt
himself elated with an unknown joy. No traced road was before him to
dictate his pathway--no city shaded him with its towers: his fortune
depended on his own unaided instincts.
I felt the same delight, the same liberty. Something like the heavy strap
of a slave seemed to break behind me as I found myself quite clear of
the metropolis. Mad schemes of unanticipated journeys danced through
my head; I might amble on to Villemonble, Montfermeil, Raincy, or
even to the Forest of Bondy, so dear to the experimental botanist. Had I
not two days before me ere my compact with Hohenfels at Marly? And
in two days you can go from Paris to Florence. Meantime, from the
effects of famine, my ribs were sinking down upon the pelvic basin of
my frame.
The walk, the open air, the sight of the fowl, whose beak now burned
into my bosom's core, had sharpened my appetite beyond bearing. Yet
how could I eat without some drop of cider or soft white wine to drink?
Besides, slave of convention that I have grown, I no longer understand
the business of eating without its concomitants--a shelter and
something to sit on.
The plain became wearisome. There are two things the American-born,
however long a resident abroad, never forgives the lack of in Europe.
The first I miss when I am in Paris: it is the perpetual street-mending of
an American town. Here the boulevards, smeared with asphaltum or
bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without life: you
travel on scum. But in the dear old American streets the epidermis is
vital: what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles as they stand
together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth! How they are
perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the ponderous
drays are forced to dance on one wheel in a paroxysm of agony and
critical equipoise! But the perpetual state of street-mending, that is the
crowning interest. What would I not sometimes give to exchange the
Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long brooms desolately in the mud,
for the paviors' hammers of America, which play upon the pebbles like
a carillon of muffled bells? As for the other lack, it is the want of
wooden bridges. Far away in my native meadows gleams the silver
Charles: the tramp of horses' hoofs comes to my ear from the timbers of

the bridge. _Here_, with a pelt and a scramble your bridge is crossed:
nothing addresses the heart from its stony causeway. But the low,
arched tubes of wood that span the streams of my native land are so
many bass-viols, sending out mellow thunders with every passing
wagon to blend with the rustling stream and the sighing woods. Shall I
never hear them again?
A reminiscence more than ten years old came to give precision to my
ramblings in the past. Beyond the rustic pathway I was now following I
could perceive the hills of Trou-Vassou. Hereabouts, if memory served
me, I might find a welcome, almost a home, and the clasp of cordial if
humble hands. Here I might find folks who would laugh when I arrived,
and would be glad to share their luncheon with me But--ten years gone
by!
[Illustration: THE TWO CHICKENS.]