The Path to Rome | Page 9

sleep by his
oxen, and we to our straw in other barns. Next day we started before
dawn, and I never saw him again.
This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men love
is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings love
sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to be hard
on the rich.
I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I walked the long

evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its deeps
infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn
where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of
the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys could
eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the place
where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of lake.
Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into
the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the last
familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my
experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered instead
of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to reminiscence and
to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their shepherd, who gave me a
good-night. I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all
books are conceived (but none written); I was 'smoking the enchanted
cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it
is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of
that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a
man were altogether his own master and controlled by no necessity, not
even the necessity of expression, all his life would pass away in these
sublime imaginings.
This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine
is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that must
be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity resembles rather
a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it are nearly
mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the province
reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A little village,
which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies up on the right
between the steep and the water, and just where the hills end a flat that
was once marshy and is now half fields, half ponds, but broken with
luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its civilization. Along this flat
runs, bordered with rare poplars, the road which one can follow on and
on into the heart of the Vosges. I took from this silence and this vast
plain of still water the repose that introduces night. It was all consonant
with what the peasants were about: the return from labour, the bleating
folds, and the lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I
passed along the upper valley to the spring of the hills.
In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he

can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of
purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when the
night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of memory,
have discovered that their darkness has conquered.
The peasants sat outside their houses in the twilight accepting the cool
air; every one spoke to me as I marched through, and I answered them
all, nor was there in any of their salutations the omission of good
fellowship or of the name of God. Saving with one man, who was a
sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me in an accent that
was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I told him I had to go up
into the forest to take advantage of the night, since the days were so
warm for walking. As I left the last house of the village I was not
secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up the hill
into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night would pass.
With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars
were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below,
but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to distinguish
the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became little better
than a lane; at the