Impressions

IMPRESSIONS
BYPIERRBLOTI

i

INTRODUCTION

BYHENRY-JAMES

CHARLOTTE S. M.

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

.

IMPRESSIONS BY PIERRE LOTI

IMPRESSIONS
^PIERRE LOTI

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY JAMES

ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO.
WESTMINSTER <*fe MDCCCXCVIII.

BIRMINGHAM:
PRINTED AT THE GUILD PRESS 45 GREAT CHARLES STREEET.

Pierre Loti.

MAY as well admit at the outset that
in speaking of Pierre Loti I give way
to an inclination of the irresistible sort,
express indeed a lively obligation. I am
conscious of owing him that amount
and that kind of pleasure as to which
hesitation resides only in the difficulty
of statement. He has been for me,
from the hour of my making his ac
quaintance, one of the joys of the time, and the fact
moreover of his being of the time has often, to my eyes,
made it seem to suffer less from the presence of writers
less delightful yet more acclaimed. It is a part of the joy
I speak of that, having once for all, at the beginning,
caused the critical sense thoroughly to vibrate, he has ever
since then let it alone, brought about in my mind a state
of acceptance, a state of gratitude, in which I have been
content not to discriminate. Critically, on first knowing
him, I surrendered — for it has always seemed to me that
the inner chamber of taste opens only to that key ; but,
the surrender being complete — the chamber never again

2 PIERRE

closed — I feel that, like King Amasis with the ring, I have
thrown the key into the deep. He is extremely unequal
and extremely imperfect. He is familiar with both ends
of the scale of taste. I am not sure even that on the
whole his talent has gained with experience as much as
was to have been expected, that his earlier years have not
been those in which he was most to endear himself.
But these things have made little difference to a reader so
committed to an affection.

It has been a very simple case. At night all cats are
grey, and I have liked him so much in general that there
has always been a perch, a margin left when the special
case has for the moment cut away a little of the ground.
The love of letters renders us no greater service — certainly
opens to us no greater satisfaction — than in putting us
from time to time under some such charm. There need
never be a fear, I think, of its doing so too often. When
the charm, in such a manner, fixes itself, what has hap
pened is that the effect, the operative gift, has become
to us simply a value, and that an experience more or less
bitter has taught us never, in literature, to sacrifice any
value we may have been fortunate enough to light upon.
Such discoveries are too happy, such values too great.
They do for us what nothing else does. There are other
charms and other surrenders, but those have their action
in another air. What the mind feels in any form of
magic is a particular extension of the contact with life,
and no two forms give us exactly the same. Every artist
who really touches us becomes in this way an individual
instrument, the fiddler, the improviser of an original
tune. The inspiration may sometimes fail, the notes

PIERRE LOTI. 3

sound weak or false ; but to break, on that account, the
fiddle across one's knee is surely — given, as we look about
the much-mixed field, the other " values " — a strange
aesthetic economy.

I.

I read and relish him whenever he appears, but his
earlier things are those to which I most return. It took
some time, in those years, quite to make him out — he
was so strange a mixture for readers of our tradition. He
was a " sailor-man " and yet a poet, a poet and yet a sailor-
man. To a marked division of these functions we had
always been accustomed, looking as little for sensibility in
the seaman as perhaps for seamanship in the man of emo
tion. So far as we were at all conscious of the uses of
sensibility it was not to the British or the American tar
that we were in the habit of applying for it. Tobias
Smollett, Captain Marryat, Tom Cringle, Fenimore
Cooper had taught us another way, and in general our
enjoyment of what we artlessly term adventure had not
been associated, either as a fact or as an idea, with the
privilege of a range of feeling. There was from the
first in Loti the experience of the navigator, and yet
there was the faculty, the necessity of expression. The
experience had doubtless not been prodigious, but it had
been at least of a sort that among writers of our race has
mostly, for some reason, seemed positively to preclude ex
pression. He introduced confusion, as I have elsewhere
had occasion to say, into our assumption, so consecrated
by time, that adventures are mainly for those who lack
the fiddle-bow and the fiddle-bow all for those condemned

4 PIERRE LOTL

to chamber-music. This was his period of most beautiful
production — the period of Mon Frere Tves, Pecheur
d'lslande, Fleurs d'Ennui, Aziyade, Le Roman d'un Spahi^
Le Manage de Loti; which are not here enumerated in
their order of appearance. They presented themselves as
the literary recreations — flowers of reminiscence and im
agination, not always flowers of lassitude — of a young
officer in the navy, a native of Rochefort and of old
Huguenot race, whose private name has so completely
lost itself in his public that I shall mention him but this
once as M. Julien Viaud. They made their full mark
only on the publication of Mon Frere Tves, but from that
moment Loti was placed.

I hasten to add that from that moment also the sea-
rover has been less visible in him than the man of expres
sion ; without detriment, however, to the immense good
fortune of his having betimes, in irresponsible youth,
possessed himself of the mystery of the sea. The sense of
it and the love of it, with the admirable passion they
make, are the background of most of his work, and of all
French writers of the day he is the one from whom Paris,
with its screen of many folds, least shuts off the rest of the
globe. He mentions Paris not even to curse it, and the
rest of the globe — but mainly the watery wastes — has
been his hunting-ground. It is largely in fact as if he
had been kept afloat by the very reasons that conduce to
the frequent disembarkment of the Englishman in quest
of impressions. He had in these years, as a Frenchman,
fewer places to land. When he did land, however, the
impressions came thick and are mainly presented in the
intensely personal form. They are autobiographic with-

PIERRE LOT/. 5

out reserve, for reserve, in spite of his extraordinary
faculty of selection and compression, his special genius for
summarising, is not his strong point. Whenever Loti
landed, in short, he made love, and whenever he made
love he appears to have told of it. That would be our
main stick to beat him with if his principal use for us had
been to inspire us — as I believe it has inspired some
readers — with the desire to beat. The limits of that
desire on my own part I have sufficiently hinted at, and
I feel that I should have had no use of him at all had I
not at an early stage arrived at some sort of adequate view
of his necessity for " telling." It is the telling, above all,
I judge, that is the lion in the path of those whom he
displeases. I have never supposed, at any rate, that we
can enjoy the special gift of others altogether on terms
made by ourselves ; it seems to me that when such a gift
is real we should take it in any way we can get it — take
it and be thankful. Of course — by the most blessed of all
laws — we are always free not to take, not even to read,
and I dare say that for many persons the non-perusal of
reminiscences such as these constitutes a positive pleasure.
There are writers, there are voyagers who tell nothing,
and for the best of reasons. Loti's singular power to tell
is exactly his value, and to attempt to make a law for it
might easily be, for readers and critics, a rash adventure.
His striking of the notes we delight in may be, for all we
know, conditioned on his striking of others we don't.
And then — and then : what can one say after all but
that we leave him his liberty ? Not that we would leave
it to everyone. There iare sympathies, in short, and im
punities; so that I have been careful to make with the

6 PIERRE LOTI.

erotics both of Le Manage de Loti and of Madame Chry-
santheme such terms as would not spoil for me the rest of
the message. This rest, in Loti, has always one mean
ing. It is the part not about his love-making.

We are most of all free from care, accordingly, in those
of his volumes in which the story he has to tell is the story
of someone else — the delightful brother Yves, the magni
ficent Yann of Brittany, Ramuntcho the bold young
Basque, or even the doleful little hero of Matelot. It is
difficult not to regret that these stories of someone else,
all with so special a beauty, are not the most numerous in
the list ; I would gladly have given for another Pecheur
d'Islande, indeed for another Ramuntcho or another Matelot,
a dozen things of the complexion of LExilee, of fantome
d 'Orient, of Le Roman d"un Enfant. In L'Exilee he " tells"
with a vengeance and quite too much ; too much, I mean,
of what he feels for the troubled, misplaced, accomplished
Queen of whose splendid hospitality and confidence the
volume is a record : too much also, doubtless, of what he
knows of the personal appearance and habits and private
affairs — oh, of a delicacy ! — of her principal lady-in-wait
ing. These are Loti's mystifying moments, other speci
mens of which confront us in the singular publicity given
by Le Livre de la Pitie et de la Mort to the last illness, the
last hours, the laying out and interment of one of the
nearest and most loved of his female relatives. Stranger
than strange as well, in the pages in question, are the
simplicity and solemnity of his expatiation on the favourite
cats and other inmates, the domestic arrangements and in
timate trifles of the home of his youth. It is odd that a
mere matter of shading — for in such things it is only that

PIERRE LOTI. 7

— should make so much difference ; but these are the
errors as to which it may be said not so much that the
hand would be stayed in the commission of them by the
presence of a sense of humour as that this presence would
in general have rendered them insupposable. They pro
ceed after all largely, from one of the most marked fea
tures of the French literary mind of the day — that intense
professionalism which is in its turn the result of conscious
and cultivated art. To work as hard as the countrymen
of Loti for the most part work their language — work their
perceptions, their emotions and sensibilities, their sense of
form, of style, of the shade, the effect, their analysis alike
of subject and of tone — to do all this is to thrust the torch
assuredly into every corner of experience and to drop
every grain of observation into the literary mill.

Nothing, in consequence, is more striking than the
failure of any sense — as we ourselves understand it — of a
division between the public and the private : the writer
becomes primarily a writer and ceases in the same propor
tion to be anything else. His soul, his life and its pulsa
tions are mere wheels and springs in the machinery of
expression, and the man, as a man, can treat himself to no
distinctive experience, reserve no garden-plot for wasteful
human use. There are precious kinds of silence that he
ceases to be able to afford, luxuries of simple choice, happy
failures of logic, for ever banished from his budget. Full
of suggestion on this head, for instance, is the manner in
which the brothers Goncourt live, in their extraordinary
Journal, up to the last penny of that part of their income
which might have been supposed to be most peculiarly
personal ; paying it out, on the spot, without, as one may

8 PIERRE LOTL

say, so much as passing it through their moral bank. The
French writer, on the other hand — I speak most, of
course, of the creators, as we perhaps a trifle fatuously call
them — can afford an expenditure of expression, particu
larly in prose, that causes his English-speaking brother to
appear by contrast to carry on a very small business. The
literary establishment of the latter is indeed in compari
son but meagrely mounted. Such is far from the case
with Loti's, which offers perhaps, through the peculiar
profusion of the personal note, as striking an example as
can be named of the rattling spiritual train de maison to
which I allude. I am lost in admiration of such an eco
nomy ; wonderstruck, as I reflect, as I measure it, at his
employment of his means. Three fourths of his work are
the most charming egotism ; the portion that is finest, the
four or five more or less constructed and conducted tales,
is the minor portion. And yet the egotism lives and
blooms too, scatters the rarest fragrance and throws out
pages like great strange flowers. It all comes from the
fact that he uses all his impressions. There are many
impressions he never has, but he gives us for all they are
worth those with which he is favoured — never misses
them on the wing nor shirks the catching; and of the
lightest, loosest yet cunningest interweaving of these his
curious prose mainly consists. It consists of the happiest
conceivable utterance of feelings about aspects. What he
may well have assured himself at the start was of his pro
bably being one of the persons in the world to whom
aspects had most to say. Wonderful and beautiful is the
language in which they speak to him, and that language,
as he has reported it, has made his literary fortune. Know-

PIERRE LOTL 9

ledge of the finer, or at any rate the unpersonal sort, re
flection of the deeper, the power to compose, in the larger
sense, or truly to invent, have had the smallest hand in the
business. At the same time he has been subject to the law
that nothing in art, however capricious, can be done with
out love, and he has continually loved two things — one
of them the great watery globe and the other the nature
of man.

These two things are what, in an exquisite way, both
Pecheur (Tlslande and Mon Frere Tves consist of; the first
the simplest, deepest little story of love and death, the
other the largest, tenderest, brightest picture of friendship
and life. The persons concerned are all sailor-folk, and
the setting of the drama — so far as not the great void of
the sea-spaces, against which his figures magnificently
stand up — is the landscape and colouring, the village
scenery of Brittany, for which no one has had so fine and
sincere a touch. With however much appreciation any
lover of Loti may once have spoken of these books, there
can never fail to be a freshness in coming back to them ;
they belong so to the class of the happiest literary things.
And yet, essentially, one must speak of them mainly for
old acquaintance — without the power of really naming
their charm. The beauty of the author at his best is
something too unnameable, something that seems a kind
of secret between himself and his reader. That indeed
perhaps is what we feel for all the authors who give us
the finer joy : we feel it to be quite enough if they know
what we like them for. When others don't know, that,
somehow, at moments, practically adds to the reason.
None of the famous " love-stories " of the world are, at

io PIERRE LOTL

any rate, more charged than this history of Yann and
Gaud with the particular exquisite, the mixture of beauty
and misery, that we require of the type — which, to com
mend itself to the right corner of our memory, must
always have its final terror and tragedy. Made up of two
main forces, human passion, human hope and effort, pain
and defeat, and the wonderfully vivified presence of nature
in ambush and waiting only to devour, the whole thing
hangs together and drives home its effect with an admir
able artistic economy. Loti's manner is so all his own —
the manner of intimate confidence in his reader, of talk,
of anecdote, of sequences neglected and lost, a part of the
work obligingly done for him — that quite equally at his
best and at his middling he offers the constant interest of
a thorough concealment of his means. I can imagine at
once no more unqualified success and no model more to
be deprecated. The only thing possible was to be Loti ;
let us pray to be protected from any attempt to emulate
him by any shorter cut. He offers himself expressly
enough as the least literary of writers, and one grants him
that without a protest so long as he remains one of the
most literary of pleasures. He is of course only what is
vulgarly called " deep," and at the very bottom of his
depth — like the purse in the consciousness of the pick
pocket looking innocently the other way — lies the finest
little knowledge of exactly how to do it. A small gold
thread, perfectly palpable to himself, guides him through
his gaps and breaks, the sweet wild garden of his conspi
cuous want of plan. This serves him extraordinarily in
Mon Frere Tves, in which there is so much delightful
clearness and so little concatenation. There are times

PIERRE LOTL n

indeed when we feel him to hold his happy instinct on
terms scarcely fair ; it does so for him whatever he wants
and yet gives, on our part, a positive air of pedantry to all
technical inquiries.

What touches deepest in his tales — and indeed in his
every page — is, as should be mentioned without delay,
the general pity of almost everything. It need hardly be
said that he is not of the complexion of the moralist, and
the light leading him through the tribulations of his
people is as little as possible any reference to what they
" had better " have done. We can never at all imagine
them to have done anything different, so little can it
come up for them to follow anything but their immediate
social instincts. When they pay for that only in sorrow
or shame, this becomes precisely for ourselves the spring
of an added interest. Loti's philosophy is the philosophy
of imagination — of likes and dislikes, of indulgence for
weakness and compassion for accident, of kindly tolerance
for unguarded or unbalanced good faith. His people have
come into the world mainly to feel, and he, upon their
heels, mainly to feel /or them. So, with all this, he feels
even more than they. That is his most individual note
— that he has carried his sensibility, so unquenched and
on the whole so little vulgarised, so much about the great
globe. The subjects of it in his two earlier novels and
in Matelot and Ramuntcho are the simplest of simple folk,
the poorest of the poor. They are all young and fresh
and strong, all beautiful and natural, kind and stricken ;
they earn their living in labour and sorrow, and their joys
are the scant breathing-times in the hard battle of life.
The humility of their condition is perhaps what most of

12 PIERRE LOTI.

all — given the admirable tenderness of his treatment of
them — makes us think of Loti as the last of the raffines.
It gives the measure of his admirable sense of sociability,
gives the natural note to the delicacy of his human tone,
to all his heart-softenings and his cultivation of pathos.
The strange little tale of Mate/of is nothing in the world
but heart-softening ; I call it strange for the simple reason
of its being a priori so unexpected a stroke on the part of
a member of his profession. It depicts the career of a
small sensitive sailor-boy who feels everything really too
much and in regard to whom we are ourselves, doubtless,
in this way — though it is almost brutal to say so — drawn
on to participations that are excessive. He dies, of course,
in sight of home, of a fever contracted in torrid eastern
seas, and the whole affair is but a merciless performance
on the finest fiddlestring. Yet the good Lotist, as I may
say, can only swallow Matelot whole : I should even guage
his goodness by his capacity to do so. But if the thing is
irresistible it is also calculated, transparent ; it unscrews
the stopper of tears with a positively audible creak.
What then is the reason that its tone is exquisite and its
pathos practically profound ? I am glad to suppose the
answer to such a question to lie beyond my analysis. The
reason is where the best reason always is, in the very air
of the picture — of which a particular breath, for instance,
is in the eloquence, the rare delicacy of presentation, of
the episode of the young man's innocent friendship,
blighted by fate, with the mild Madeleine of Quebec, the
charm of such a passage — Loti at his melancholy happiest
—as that in which the author strikes the last note of this
adventure. " So it had come to their loving each other

PIERRE LOTI. 13

with a tenderness that was equally pure for each. She,
ignorant of the things of love and reading her Bible every
night ; she, destined to keep her useless freshness and
youth for a few more springtimes not less pale and then
to grow old and fade in the narrowing round of these
same streets and these same walls. He, already spoiled
with kisses and with other arms, having the world for his
changing abode and called to start off perhaps to-morrow,
never again to come back — only to leave his body in dis
tant seas."

Fully characteristic of Loti is this mention of his sailor-
boy as " spoiled " — spoiled by contacts after all supposedly
familiar to sailor-boys. That is but a touch of his usual
pessimism, and practically our comment on it as we
read consists in not believing it : being spoiled is a process
his delightful people are in general so little the worse
for. The reason of which, I take it, just brings us close
to the general explanation of the author's largest magic,
the beauty of his dealings with sun and wind and space.
These are the elements with which, whether spoiled or
not, his characters mainly live and which he renders for
them with a breadth that never fails. They remain some
how, throughout, globe-creatures, with the great arch of
the sky for two-thirds of their consciousness, becoming no
uglier by anything that may happen to them than birds
become by the traps and missies of man. If they were
mewed and stewed in close rooms, in dark towns, it might
be a different matter. None of them circulate with more
ease and grace than Ramuntcho, the hero of his latest tale,
expert, in his character of bright young Basque, at Pyre-
neean tennis, Pyreneean smuggling and climbing, Pyre-

I4 PIERRE LOTL

neean love-making, too, not least. If here and there, from
book to book, the charm had suffered a chill, in Ramuntcho
it all comes back — the thing is wholly admirable. And
yet what is it ? — what that would commend it to readers
who like their mouthful of " story " big ? Perfect is the
bravery of the author's indifference to these and possibly
the thing that I most like him for. It is impossible not
to admire a man whose general assurance and his faith in
his particular star permit him to set sail with so small a
provision of plot. The beauty of such an outfit as Loti's
is in its positively never leaving him without a subject.
Cast ashore on strands the most desert, he is sufficiently
nourished by the delicacy of his senses. They play in and
out of Ramuntcho with the effect of the chequering of the
sun in a wood, and our enjoyment of the tale — one can
speak at least of one's own — is simply our recognition of
the intensity of all the presences. We look into the eyes
of the people, we sit with them in the boat, and spring
with them on the turf, and racket with them at the game,
and sweat with them in the great hot sun, smelling the
woods and tasting the wine and hearing the cries — enjoy
ing at every turn the colour and the rustle and the light.
We live with their simplicity and we generally love their
ways. Above all we love their loves, and there is no one
like Loti for making us fond of his lovers. So moments
and pictures stand out for us, all with the freshness of odours,
contacts, the tone of white walls and brown interiors
caught, in glimpses, as we take our ascent through chest
nut-woods. It is all experience and memory, and yet all
glamour and grace.

PIERRE LOTI. 15

III.

In the volumes, the most numerous, that are simply the
record of impressions, of change of place, we come back
perpetually to that tremor of the fiddlestring. No other
word renders so well the fine vibration in Loti of what he
sees and what he makes us see. This fineness is his charm
ing quality and arrived at without affectation or contortion.
The spasm of the descriptive alternates in the case of too
many other travellers with mere visual apathy, and our
choice is on the whole mainly between those who are
without observation and those who are without expression.
But to Loti things come with the sun and the wind and
the chance of the spot and the moment ; his perception is
a sensitive plate on which aspects are forever at play. He
is the companion, beyond all others, of my own selection,
for the simple reason that none other shows me so easily
such far and strange things. He has readers, of a cer
tainty, whom he more than consoles for the humdrum
nature of their fate ; as positively, with this affection for
him, it is better to have had no adventures of one's own.
It is simpler — and I say so quite without irony — not to
have travelled, not to have trodden with heavier feet the
ground over which we follow him. It is of the scenes I
shall never visit that I like to read descriptions, and no
thing, for that matter, would induce me to interfere with
any impression happily received from him. The descrip
tion in fact for the most part only mystifies and irritates
when memory is really in possession. I prefer his memory
to my own, and am ready to think it no hard rule of life
to have had, in my chair, to take so much of the more

1 6 PIERRE LOTL

wonderful world from a little lemon-covered book. We
can only, at the best, be transported, and the author of
Propos d'Exil, of Au Maroc, of Japoneries d1 Automne deli
vers us infallibly, by a process of his own, at the right
door in the wall. He has not been an explorer and is not
of that race, but his perception so penetrates that he has
only to ta£e me round the corner to give me the sense of
exploring^. I have been assured that Madame Chrysantheme
is as preposterous, as benighted a picture of Japan as if a
stranger, disembarking at Liverpool, had confined his
acquaintance with England to a few weeks spent in dis^
reputable female society in a vulgar suburb of that cityJ
But the moral of this truth, if a truth it be, would really
seem all to the writer's advantage : I should delight in any
observer in whom the gift of observation, the sense of
appearances, might be such as to make Birkenhead, say,
give him, and by his delightful intervention give me^ a
picture so charming and so living. Whether Loti tells
us or no what we want is a question that we certainly
never put ; what we want becomes for the time just what
ever he has to tell us. To turn him over again as I write
these lines is, none the less, scarcely to know where, for
examples, to pick and choose. We always meet side by
side, to begin with, specimens of his innocence and speci
mens of his craft. This collection of Figures et Choses qui
Passaient, opens with a succession of pages embodying,
on the occasion of the death of the baby of his servant,
the sort of emotion that we others flatter ourselves we
keep — when we have it to keep — veiled and hushed ; but
it goes on to the admirable Trois yournees de Guerre^ an
impression of the French attack on the Anam forts in the

PIERRE LOT!. 17

summer of 1883, which gives the reader exactly the sense
of blinking, wondering, perspiring participation in the
presence of endless queerness — the sense of seeing, hearing,
touching, smelling the whole hot, grotesque little horror.
No one approaches Loti for reconstituting such an episode
as this — and in the most off-hand, jotted, anecdotic way —
as a presented personal impression. Such notes are doubt
less journalism, but journalism exquisite. " In the midst
of the morning light, which was fresh and blue, these
flames " (a village was on fire) " were of an extraordinary
red ; they cast no light, but were as dark as blood. You
saw them twisted and mixing, saw everything instantly
consumed ; the smoke-clouds, intensely black, diffused a
sharp musty stench. On the roofs of the pagodas, in the
midst of their devilries, among the darts of all the forked
tails and outspread claws, the rush of the fire-tongues
seemed at first natural enough. But all the little plaster
monsters had begun to crackle and burst, scattering to
right and left the blue porcelain of their scales and the
crystal balls of their wicked eyes, then had crumbled, with
the beams, into the gaping holes of the temples."

Loti's East is, throughout, of all Easts the most beguil
ing, though, for the most part — unless perhaps in the case
of Au Maroc, where he appears to have been peculiarly
initiated — it seldom ceases to be the usual, accessible East,
the East of Cook, of tickets and time-tables, of the English
and American swarm. The swarm, at any rate, never
taints Loti's air, and we remain, in his caravan, as discon
nected from everything else as it need occur to us to
desire. If he has been only where they all have been, he
has at least brought back what they all have not, what

1 8 PIERRE LOT/.

indeed, for my imagination, n otheodhsa ronnee — the fine,
strange flower of the thing, the element that continues to
haunt us, the sweetest, saddest secret it whispers to the
mind. When the innumerable others — further pushers,
doubtless, and sharper penetrators — shall offer us notes of
this quality, then, only then, shall we grant that they have
been as far. It would of course never be easy to find in
any caravan a pilgrim with so absolute an esteem for his
own emotions. Loti belongs to the precious few who are
not afraid of being ridiculous; a condition not in itself
perhaps constituting positive wealth, but speedily raised to
that value when the naught in question is on the right
side of certain other figures. His attitude is that whatever,
on the spot and in the connection, he may happen to feel
is suggestive, interesting and human, so that his duty
with regard to it can only be essentially to utter it. The
duty of not being ridiculous is one to which too many
travellers of our own race assign the high position that he
attributes to right expression, to right expression alone.
It has led him, this gallant point of honour, to say, at
Jerusalem — in the volume with that title — too many
things about himself, even to appear indeed to have made
the wondrous pilgrimage too much in search of a present
able figure which is not quite the one we might have
guessed. Yet here too his sympathetic "self" still in
cludes a more sensible vision of a hundred other and very
different things than many a record — of the type that
leaxes us unstirred — accompanied with more precautions.
Jerusalem, on the other hand, I admit, is a trifle spoiled
for the rigid Lotist by being, in all the list, the book that
gives out most wandering airs, most echoes already heard,

PIERRE LOT: i. 19

of " literature." That the author has not been from be
ginning to end intensely literary let me not for a moment
do his prodigious legerdemain the wrong to suggest, for
his particular shade of the natural was surely never arrived
at without much choosing and comparing. His lightness
is the lightness of knowledge and his ease the ease of
practice. But he covers his tracks, as I have hinted, con
summately ; it is the perfect pointing of the watch with
out, discoverably, the mechanism. In 'Jerusalem we seem
a little to hear the tick.

But I have been reading again Au Maroc^ in which,
figuratively as well as literally, there is not the least
rumble of wheels. The author here wanders over his
subject with a step as independent of the usual literary
macadam as the march of his caravan, in the roadless land,
found itself perforce of any other ; and nothing is more
delightful than to keep him company through such a
mixture of wondrous matter and incalculable talk. Such
a volume as this expresses him at his best, for the special
adventure gives most chance to his admirable curiosity,
his undiscourageable passion for putting on as many as
possible of the queer forms of consciousness encountered
in other races and under other skies, of living — though
not perhaps for so very long — into conditions exotic and
uncomfortable, the inner sense of the strangeness of which
he more beguilingly than ever communicates. The inner
sense seems to me always to begin where the finest fair of
most travellers stops, and this exquisite Au Maroc is all
made up of it. His evocation of the almost unutterable
Fez, his description of the days spent there apart from the
other members of the mission in which he was included,

20 PIERRE LOTL

his picture, perhaps even more, of his further push to the
gruesome, melancholy Mekinez — the warm vividness of
these things takes on for the fond reader the intensity of
some private romance. Loti, in short, becomes thus — to
put it only at that, and where his wandering sensibility is
concerned — the rarest of tale-tellers. He drinks, in this
character, so deep of impressions that places where he has
passed are left dry : there are none, I repeat, we pay him
the questionable compliment of wishing to visit after him.
We; are content to go nowhere — which is a much greater
tribute. When I say we are content I mean perhaps we
are determined, for he leaves us, in a way all his own,
with a fear of finding strange things themselves not so
true as he is true to their surprising essence. Droll, in a
manner, yet without injury to their charm, are the pages
of his attempt — condemned, one must recognise, to a suc
cess mainly superficial — to live a little the life of any
corner that happens to strike him as extraordinary and in
particular to dress in its draperies ; droll perhaps above
all his frank delight in these last aids to illusion and very
expressive, at all events, of the joy of masquerading as an
Oriental that appears to have been from the first his
harmless revenge on his having been born a mere Hugue
not. This he was not the man to think sufficient. We
forgive any millinery that still leaves the standpoint of
the painter as free as, for instance, in such a passage as
this : " Toward two in the afternoon a halt in some place
or other, from which this image remains with me: the
perpetual boundless plain, flowered over as never a garden,
and alone there, a little way off, our old exhausted Caid
down on his knees at prayer. We are in a zone of white

PIERRE LO7L zi

daisies mixed with pink poppies. The old man, close to
his end, has an earthen face, a beard as blanched as lichen,
a dress of the same freshness of colour as the poppies and
daisies around, the kaftan of pink cloth showing through
the long white mufflers. His white horse, with its high
red saddle, browses beside him and plunges its head into
the grass. He himself, half sunk among the flowers, the
white and pink flowers that are circled, beneath the deep
blue of the summer sky, by the infinite desert of the
immense flowery level — he himself, prostrate on the earth
in which he will soon be laid, begs for the mercy of Allah
with the fervour of prayer given by the feeling of annihi
lation at hand." That is pure, essential Loti — poetry in
observation, felicity in sadness.

Henry James.

The Passing of a Child.

[HAT I am going to write is only for
those who have actually stood by some
newly-made little grave, covered still
perhaps with fresh flowers, and found
themselves overwhelmed by the remem
brance of a child's eyes that were closed
there for ever under the awful earth.

This death of little children — this
baffling enigma how it cheats our under
standing ! Why are they taken, instead of us, who have
done our day's work, and who would willingly accept to go ?
Or rather why did they come, since they were to depart
so soon, only to have undergone the iniquitous agony of
death ? Before their white tombs our reason and our
hearts struggle in conflict, rebellious and distressed in
darkness and doubt.

n The delightful little being whose memory I would en
deavour to prolong by speaking of him, was the only son
of Sylvestre, an old servant of ours, who had become after
ten years of service, almost one of the family. ]

THE PASSING OF A CHILD. 23

He had only seen two summers of our earth. His silky
hair, yellow as that of a doll, parted in funny little curls,
difficult enough to dress. His complexion was like Ben
gal roses, his features like a child angel's ; whilst a little
mouth that was always open above a chin slightly reced
ing, gave him an adorable air of naivete. Moreover he
was the happiest of babies, absorbed in the new joy of ex
istence, of breathing, of moving, full of life and healthful-
ness, and round and muscular as a cupid.

But his peculiar charm was in his eyes, great blue eyes,
frank and truthful and ever wide with astonishment before
all the things of this world.

In Paris, at the hotel, on this grey December morning
after my long journey from the north, where I had been
without news for several days, I casually open one of the
letters in a pile brought me from the poste-restante and
read : " Yesterday evening at eight o'clock little Roger
died in dreadful agony. We are all deeply distressed.
Poor Sylvestre is pitiful to see."

At first I turn and walk up and down as one agitated
by physical suffering. Then I continue reading, to learn
more : croup, it seems, caused his death, taking him in a
few hours from amidst the distraught watchers.

I walk up and down again, observing unconsciously the
details of every object about me, the hideousness of the
room, and kick aside everything in my way, until I can
grasp the inexorable reality of what I have just read; and
then suddenly a mist rises, I can see nothing, and the tears
come.

The idea that little Roger might die had never entered
my thoughts. Nor did I realize that he had taken so

24 ?HE PASSING

large a place in my heart — that little child ! I could not
believe that I cared so much for him. Besides, can we
tell why we are drawn towards some special little being
who is nothing to us, rather than to one who may be more
closely tied : it is something, perhaps, that steals from
their child eyes, something that rises from the little soul,
so new and pure, to penetrate ours that is oppressed and
gloomy.

In this same pile of letters is a telegram which has been
with the others for the last few days, at the poste restante:
" I am in dreadful trouble. Our little Roger is dead —
Sylvestre."

I look at the dates. All this happened two days ago !
They will bury him, then, to-night and it is too late. I
cannot possibly arrive in time. There is no human way
to see his dear little face again, even pale and rigid.

" Roger Couec," that was the title he gave himself
when he was asked " What is your name " (his own
abbreviation of his father's name, a Breton one of rough
consonants). When he pronounced this Couec, he was
so delightfully comical that we invariably made him repeat
it — to think to-day of this little word, to hear it echoing
in my mind, sickens me.

Here, in Paris, I ought to stay some time, I had
a thousand things to do, so many appointments, friends
counting on me for dinner, pressing questions to be settled,
none of which seems of any importance now ; but I am
determined to go. I shall not even trouble to warn them.
I shall go home, home. All the same he won't be there,
poor little fellow ! He will never be there again, our
Roger Couec.

OF A CHILD. 25

But there is no train I can possibly take till this even
ing. During the whole desolate day I shall have to wait
— wait in this room, or wander about the streets, alone,
and miserable, among those who are necessarily indifferent
— my being in revolt, exasperated and helpless against the
stupid cruelty of Death, who closes the eyes of the young,
and mows down children to lay them in his charnel house.

" I am in dreadful trouble. Our little Roger is dead."
As the weary hours go by, I keep thinking of his little
life, a little life of only two summers, and as each moment
passes, there deepens in me the sense that it is over for
ever.

Oh ! his little voice — I can hear it now, as it would
echo through the courtyard of our house when I passed
his parents' rooms. He always followed me : " Messieu,
Messieu !" (to him Monsieur was my name) and then his
little footsteps would patter merrily behind. All that is
at an end — shut up in the past !

As I look back, I see him in a certain pink merino
frock — his every-day costume at this time of the year —
and a white tie, " the Valliere? embroidered at each end
with a Chinese flower. He generally wore it the wrong
way round, the bow at the back, underneath his little
yellow curls. Good God, it breaks my heart, and the
tears blind me again when I think of that crooked little
tie, all in a muddle at the back of his pink frock.

He had an indomitable spirit, this little Roger, and yet
he never flew into violent passions, as most children do.
If we annoyed him by stopping him from splashing in
water, or by taking away from him anything he might
break, he would cry desperately, but only from unhappi-

26 'THE PASSING

ness : " Is it possible people can be so unjust," he would
seem to say, " Is it possible that such awful things can
happen to me !" Then we had to give in to him at once,
for in these moods he was irresistible. And now one
would give days of one's life never to have caused him
any little annoyance.

Sometimes, when he thought he had anything very
important to do, and was stopped on the way, he would
look up with extraordinary seriousness, and silently push
aside one's hand to proceed to his business, frowning
severely. Cats sometimes affect this droll gravity when
they are anxious to be about their affairs, too occupied to
take any heed of the most persistent calling.

He had such eyes, this little Roger, eyes hardly of the
earth, that habitually laughed with a little confident joy,
yet, at furtive moments, would suddenly look over serious.
And although everything in him suggested life — the in
consequent happiness of being, of laughter, he had, when
one thinks of it, eyes that seemed to question, to implore,
to trouble about some unknown to-morrow.

And it is these he chooses, the inexorable, imbecile
mower, to throw into his cemetery holes !

On the morrow, the 6th of December, after travelling
all night, I arrive at my home in the early morning of a
dismal winter day.

I find poor Sylvestre in my room lighting the fire. He
says childishly, with a great sob from his breast, " I have
lost my little Roger." And here, in the cold room, day
light just creeping through the windows, and a forgotten
lamp still alight on the table, he tells me about the end
of this little child for whom I weep even as much as he.

OF A CHILD. 27

So violent, so unexpected is this aggressiveness of death!
He was stifled in full life, struggling, wringing his little
hands in his suffering. . . " Until the last moment,"
says Sylvestre, " he held out his arms for me to take him,
he clung to me, and tried to raise himself up ; he did not
want to die."

Whilst listening to these awful details I suddenly think
of a scene that took place last summer. One evening they
came and told me that little Roger was ill. I went at
once to his parents' house, and there I found him on his
mother's knees, trembling, his cheeks wet with tears. He
closed his little hand over my ringer and looked up im
ploringly. " Would you believe," he seemed to say,
" what has happened to me — the fear I had of stifling — if
you knew !" There was nothing seriously the matter, a
little choking that often happens to babies. But already
in his look stirred the consciousness of his own weakness
and the anxiety, the agony of feeling so little, so powerless
before the menacing darkness he dared not face alone.
Remembering that terrible expression I can only imagine
too well the look he must have given of supplication and
growing terror when he threw out his arms to his father
" not wanting to die."

He had such absolute confidence in our protection that
it seemed as if we had betrayed the little fellow in allow
ing this cursed Mower to carry him away. His expression
at certain moments, recurring now to my mind so livingly,
causes me more emotion than human words can say. And
I think that the humbleness of his birth adds I know not
what of greater misery to the pain I feel at having lost him.
I should certainly have wept less had he been a little prince

28 THE PASSING

" Oh ! he was not forgotten," continues Sylvestre.
" Every one in the neighbourhood came, and he had so
many flowers, so many wreaths ! Besides the whole house
is in deep mourning for him ; we shall never hear his
laughter there again, nor the sound of his baby footsteps,
nor the dear shrill little voice."

We are silent at breakfast this morning, and Sylvestre,
who has resumed his duties for the first time since the
child's death, waits on us, his eyes smarting with tears.

All this last summer Roger used to come and assist at
our meals when we had them here in the breakfast room.
We would hear him trotting along the court-yard between
the flower-stands, anxious to be in time, and then he would
appear at the door smiling and radiant, hesitating for a
moment to ask permission with his eyes before coming in,
as if already in his little mind he understood that he had
not quite the right. " Yes, come in ; come in Roger
Couec." Then he would march in, pretending he was a
soldier. Left, right, left, right ; and during the whole
breakfast he would tumble in and out between his father's
legs, considerably upsetting the service.

At dessert he would push himself closer to my little
boy (three years his senior, and devoted to him as to his
best doll) and become suddenly bold, pouting his lips for
the cherry or strawberry he knew he would get.

After breakfast I went to the back of the house, to the
yard leading to the servants' premises. Into this sunny
quarter, one reached by a few steps, I used to go often on
the pretext of visiting the greenhouse, but really to see
something of Roger Couec, who was generally roaming
about there in a little pink frock and a Chinese silk tie.

OF A CHILD. 29

As soon as he saw me he would hasten up that I might
take him with me ; and even on those days when I did
not want him, he was irresistible, his little voice calling,
his determination to follow me, stumbling as he did on the
steps, too high for his little legs, that separated the two
courts, and going on all fours at last in a most business
like way in order to get along more quickly. Little being
come to life under my roof, just as the swallows do in the
spring, and as the roses bud on the old walls ; for him
these courts overshadowed by green branches represented
the world ! How inscrutable to us his little notions of
life, his little thoughts — buried now in the great abyss !

It is the first evening since my return.

I have just placed the portrait of little Roger above my
writing table in a pink and gold frame — pink like his
little frock. It is one he gave me himself. Somebody
had put it in his hands and told him to take it to " Mes-
sieu," and he came with a timid air, and something of a
twinkle, to make me a present of his portrait ; he knew
well enough it was his own portrait. How he clutched
it with his tiny hands !

Now Sylvestre brings me his little tie, all washed and
ironed, la Valliere^ that I asked him to give me." I bought
it in China when I was a sailor," he explained. I hang
the little cravat on the frame of the picture knotted with
a sprig of white flowers. The portrait will preserve for
some years yet the little angel-face that proved so ephe
meral, and that was taken from us so soon. We shall still
have something to remind us of that inexpressible child
look.

Another day gone.

3o THE PASSING

One dull morning in crossing the back yard, I saw the
little pink dress that they had washed, and that was hang
ing on a cord to dry, the little sleeves dangling : it will
become a thing put away, carefully folded, and in future
years no one will remember what child used to wear it.
Then I went into Sylvestre's, and I saw, arranged on some
shelves, those little toys I knew so well : his wooden horse,
the big goat he was so fond of, and his gun for playing at
soldiers.

There, too, was the album of coloured prints, pictures of
birds he was never tired of looking at. Whilst he turned
the leaves he would point them out one after another and
pronounce their names with a shout. An ostrich seemed
to amuse him the most, one can hardly tell why ; he
would stamp with joy the moment the picture came, and
announce " strich " with an air of triumph.

Every little insignificant thing that recalls him now
only brings pain.

Towards noon of this same day a brilliant sun breaks
through the morning's mist and the heavens are clear. I
walk with Sylvestre, who is in deep mourning, across the
cemetery. It seems here like April weather.

We find the place where he is laid, our little Roger, no
tomb made yet, only the signs of a recent burial. But the
newly-turned-up earth, the greasy earth, the awful earth
is hidden under a bed of flowers : all the wreaths that fol
lowed the light bier, hardly faded yet.

So, it is under there that the little face is hidden for
ever.

Another day, and it is the first Sunday since he is no
longer here : one of those beautiful winter days, perhaps

OF A CHILD. 31

the most melancholy of the year, bright with deceptive
sunshine, almost like April, but that draw in early to chill
dark evenings.

On such afternoons they would dress Roger Couec in
his best frock, his white fur tippet and large hat. His
parents would take him out for a walk among the other
little children all dressed in their Sunday clothes, proudly
conscious that he was invariably the rosiest and prettiest
child among the little Sunday decked crowd.

To-day Sylvestre and his wife have gone alone to the
cemetery : there, in the wan sunshine, they are busying
themselves in arranging the white wreaths that are still
fresh on the little grave, on the horrible mould. And
now the day draws in miserably cold. It is time to go in,
the time they would bring the little fellow home, his
cheeks crimson from the wind. This evening they return
alone, the first Sunday the father and mother are without
their little Roger. They have left him over there, frigid
and discoloured under the earth. When they return to
the empty room they will no longer hear the shrill little
voice and the echoing laugh. The little Sunday frock
and hat, put away in the cupboard, will become only
relics that time will soon render old-fashioned.

And at last they will accustom themselves to not seeing
their little Roger, just as I shall get out of the habit of
listening for his footsteps in the yard, or looking up for
his sudden appearance at the breakfast-room door.

The day when he fell back in his cradle, inert after
having suffered so much, after having desperately implored
our help with outstretched arms, he was surely enough on
that day mown down for ever, and cast back into the

32 THE PASSING OF A CHILD.

abyss. . . . The strange union of atoms that formed for a
brief moment his little smile and the expression of his eyes,
disintegrated and at an end. In our memory, which after
all will disintegrate too, his image will soon fade ; even
in this minute corner of the world where his life of two
short years was spent, one will soon forget that he passed;
things will go on the same, existence here as elsewhere
will continue its way. And in the course of innumerable
destinies, in the infinite circles of the ages, his disappear
ance will be as neglected and forgotten as the death of a
swallow, or the fading of a white rose on our walls. And
yet how can I express my sense of bitter revolt, my infi
nite pity, at the thought of the vain supplication of that
last look so full of terror at the approach of his end. How
can I speak of the pain I feel, with the added agony of
thinking that the dead child will not even know of it ! . . .

Easter Holidays.

N those days every month seemed end
less, and the years an eternity. Summer
time and holidays would last delightfully
enough, but the late autumn and winter,
poisoned by tasks and punishments, by
the cold and rain, dragged along with
lamentable slowness.

The year of which I am going to
speak, here was, I think, the twelfth I
had seen on this earth of ours. I spent it, alas ! under the
rod of " the Great Black Ape," professor of literature at the
college I had entered with no particular distinction ; and
it has left an impression on me that, even to this day, remains
painful, however lightly I turn my thoughts to it.

I can remember, as though it were yesterday, the profound
melancholy of that October day, the last of the holidays,
and the eve of the dreaded return to school. I had come
back that very morning from spending a free delightful
summer in the South and the sunshine with some cousins,
and my head was still full of all that I had seen and done
there : the gathering of the grapes among the reddening
vines, the climbing up through the oak woods to the

34 EASTER HOLIDAYS.

quaint old manors perched aloft on the heights, the un
premeditated rambles with a troop of little followers of
whom I was the undisputed leader. . . What a change
to come home only to see the summer die, and to take up
on the morrow the miserable routine of things.

Surely enough, on that day, a chill swept through the
air under a suddenly clouded heaven, bringing with it all
the sadness of autumn which I resented in my childhood
with inexplicable intensity. Moreover there was " the
Great Black Ape " (Monsieur Cracheux) whom I must
face in a few hours. I knew him by sight, having often
seen him as I passed the dreary college gates with my
nurse. For a year now I had scented him out and dreaded
him, and my peculiar disgust for his person aggravated
my sense of terror at the inevitable " going in." This
last day I spent first in filling my little museum with the
different precious specimens that I had brought back from
my walks in the South : wondrous butterflies caught in
the hay, and astonishing fossils discovered in the natural
grottoes and valleys. And then alone in my room I sat
down at my desk — where on the morrow alas ! I should
have to begin to work — and undertook a task which kept
me busy till dusk : the making of a calendar after my own
fashion, from which I could tear off a page every evening.
Ten little packets to be prepared of thirty leaflets each,
for ten school months, the dates and the days marked,
Thursdays and Sundays written with special elaboration
on pink paper.

Whilst I was arranging this, out from the foggy street
rose the plaintive cries of the wandering chimney sweeps,
who came always in Autumn time, like the knell of the

EASTER HOLIDAYS. 35

summer days : " Chimneys to sweep !" The lugubrious chant
filled my heart with untold agonies. Still my task went
on ; I had come to the month of April and to Easter. On
pink paper of course that great day, and beautifully writ
ten with a garland of flowers encircling it. On pink
paper, too, the following days, ten days of vacation — a
delightful truce to the hostilities of " the Great Ape."

When it was finished, I opened my cupboard of toys to
nail up my ten months in a row on the edge of the shelf,
beginning with this dire October.

In nailing the month of April I looked at the pink
bundle that marked the Easter holidays, and thought with
despair, will it ever come ? And in an imaginary future
I saw myself tearing down those leaves at the end of each
day that would grow milder and longer till the Spring
would be in the air.

Then came the month of May. When I get there, I
said to myself, at the hour to tear, it will be quite light
and the sky golden from a setting sun, and I shall hear
in the street the young women and sailors dancing, and
singing roundels of May, under the garlands hung above
them on the windows.

Then June and the flowers, and the fruit, and the sun
shine — then July — the coming at last of the long holidays
and the intoxicating departure for a visit to our cousins
in the South.

How immeasurably distant those future times appeared
to be!

II.

The yoke of the Great Black Ape was truly terrible —

36 EASTER HOLIDATS.

beyond my worst forebodings. What a sad and weary
winter it was, my hands always stained with ink, my task
never finished, and naturally a conscience that was never
at rest. Even on Thursdays and Sundays this old man,
who had no bowels of compassion, overwhelmed us. To
amuse my little fellow-sufferers I painted on my copy
books, which we secretly passed round, huge black apes
in various attitudes — poring over classic works, or scratch
ing themselves.

In these days the race of the Great Black Ape is dying
out, though a few still remain in the heart of the prov
inces, and I should like to rouse those unhappy little fel
lows, who are slow at their work, and at the bottom of
the class, to revolt against the trash that is forced upon
them to the ruin of their bodies and minds alike.

For all this, Easter did approach, and soon the last leaf
lets that covered the longed-for little batch of pink would
be thrown to the winds.

But Easter was very early that year and Spring a sorry
laggard.

A terrible fear that the days on the pink paper would
be days of rain and wintry weather took hold of me.

Palm Sunday went by with hardly a gleam of sunshine.
Then Good Friday, a sad grey day, the guns at the naval
station booming every half-hour to remind the world of
the death of Christ.

And Saturday came, gloomy too, but bringing with it
the end of the Great Ape's rule — and liberty !

The last class was just at an end — only one more quarter
of an hour ! I could hardly keep my seat !

Careful to the last, I wrote a hasty good-bye to Andre

EASTER HOLIDAYS. 37

between the leaves of my blotter. He was the eldest and
most grown-up of us all, and that year had shown some
liking for me, perhaps because I was the youngest, and
something still of a baby. (We only saw one another in
class as he was a boarder and I a day-scholar, and then
the Great Ape had had the meanness to put us at oppo
site ends of the room, under the pretext that we talked
too much, which obliged us to write to one another the
whole time in an Egyptian code on paper stamped with a
monkey in Chinese ink, the seal of our slavery.)

There was only a quarter of an hour before the general
sigh of relief; my feet tingled to be up, and my legs itched
to make for the window.

" Now boys," suddenly said the Great Ape, " take down
the holiday task that you must bring me on Wednesday
week when the class will re-assemble."

A holiday task ! We were betrayed ! What a pitiless
brute he was !

We all looked at one another, some in consternation,
others furious and indignant.

It was a Latin composition ! And I who could not even
write French, and fell short in all the Great Ape's subjects!

I wrote it down, brimming over with rage the while,
badly and untidily on purpose.

Moreover his subject was absurd. " In a great scented
garden through which the Spring breeze softly blew, a
rash child, heedless of his tutor's warning, amused himself
by teazing the bees who were sucking honey from the
freshly-opened flowers." (From time to time there were
dots to mark the places we were to fill in at our own dis
cretion.) " At last this disobedient child succeeded in

38 EASTER HOLIDATS.

trapping one of these interesting workers in the cup of a
campanula with his finger and thumb. And the infuriated
insect," dictated the old man, " and the infuriated insect,
began to struggle (notice the infinitive of movement), and
to sting the fingers of his cowardly persecutor. This,
boys, is the moral. A full stop, that's all."

On my way home I kept repeating to myself the phrase
" the infuriated insect," which, I don't know why, parti
cularly exasperated me. And to the title of the Black
Ape I added, as I ground my teeth with rage, " Dirty old
sparrow !"

Everything in this world of ours is a matter of custom
and convention, and this " dirty sparrow " in our school
slang expressed a completely overwhelming insult.

On Easter Sunday the church bells pealed out. From
early morning the streets were filled with moving crowds
of people in their best clothes. Following the old custom,
the good folk had decked themselves out in light clothes
and straw hats. But the heavens were still clouded and
the sun sulking.

It was sad to see them all in their Spring garments
hurrying along with frozen looks, and their heads bent
against the bitter north wind.

Surely Spring should not disappoint children who
have awaited it with such confidence and fervour during
the three interminable months of winter.

From the morrow it was arranged that I should work
at my holiday task for an hour a day, with the idea that
in two or three days it would be finished, my hands
washed of it and my heart free.

Patiently enough I kept to my room the whole ap-

EASTER HOLIDAYS. 39

pointed time, my elbows on the desk and my fingers
covered with ink, but nothing would come : " And the
infuriated insect began to struggle." Inspiration failed me,
my thoughts would wonder ; I was dreaming of the Spring
that would not appear, and longing to run outside, for all
the rain and wind.

And my heart sickened as I realized that the days,
those precious days written on the pink paper, were slip
ping inevitably by — cheerlessly, miserably.

III.

The holidays were flying — each day the same cold rain,
each day the same dark skies. There were only four
more. On Friday my little friend, Jeanne, came with her
mother to invite me to spend the day with her in a garden
which belonged to them outside the town. What an un
expected joy ! And the weather was actually clearing
after the torrent of rain, clouded at moments only, then
bright with sunshine.

After the week's confinement to the house, because of
the wet, it seemed wonderful to find the Spring at last. I
had even doubted its existence, but it was there all the
same, blooming in profusion; the pink hyacinths, anemones
so red, anemones so purple, and tufts of the common
gilly-flower, glorious golden yellow, striped with brown.
How brilliant they were, nodding their heads under the
uncertain skys, where great clouds swept past still laden
with winter greyness. And a sense of mysterious delight
stole over me in the presence of all these flowers, in spite
of the gusts of wind and the threatening rain.

On my homeward way I grew sad — the day was over

40 EASTER HOLIDATS.

and the unfinished Latin task hung over my head for the
morrow — the abominable infuriated insect. I whispered
a suggestion to my little friend that she should come and
fetch me again before the term began, which she promised
to do.

IV.

Oh, miserable me ! This evening the last of the pink
papers must be torn off.

There I was, after breakfast, pouring over the Latin com
position, hardly further advanced than on the Easter
Monday, when I heard that little Jeanne was waiting for
me downstairs to take me to her garden in the suburbs.
But my father came up, looked with consternation at my
copy-book and refused to let me go. "He must finish
his composition first," said he, " and then he can join her."
Heavens ! and it was the last day.

The thought of missing this one chance of spending
the afternoon with Jeanne in the great garden, filled me
with absolute despair.

I set to my subject with rage. I introduced breezes
and butterflies, crimson roses and flowers of punic red ;
then I came to the phrase which was almost at the end,
"And the infuriated insect. . ." Began to struggle ', in my
big Latin dictionary was translated : Jactare corpus (to
throw the body from side to side). As the expression
seemed to me rather strong for a bee I added to corpus the
ingenious epithet tenue, (tiny,) and to keep the insidious
infinitive of movement I wrote : tenue corpus jactare fur ens.

There ! it was finished ! Now quick for my nurse to
take me to the garden, for to my great humiliation I was

EASTER HOLIDAYS. 41

not considered old enough to go out alone. In great
haste I washed my hands, inky up to the elbow, and
dressed ready to start for the garden where Jeanne would
be waiting for me among the golden gilly-flowers and the
red anemones. Quick, quick, quick, for it was late and
the sun was setting — the sun of my last day !

Alas ! as we went through the town gates, there in the
avenue of young elms that led to the suburbs I saw Jeanne
— Jeanne coming back with her mother.

" So this is the time you come," she said with a little
tone of irony. " We are just going home."

Then in the chill of the day that was drawing to its
close, I knew that for a whole year I could not be with
the Spring in this great garden with its grey walls, and its
tender early flowers, so vivid and brilliant under the chang
ing sky. A devastating sense of regret took possession of
me, one of those strange and inexplicable fits of melan
choly with which my whole childhood was tinged,
especially at those hours of the evening when the shadows
were lengthening.

V.

Next morning we sat with mournful faces on rows of
benches, whilst the Great Ape read aloud our Easter pro
ductions.

My turn came to be read aloud by him. And who
would have thought it ; I had evidently succeeded in
doing well. Even when he came to the phrase, Tenue
corpus jactare furens, he exclaimed in a shrill grotesque
little voice, " Oh, that's excellent !"

Well that was too much ! To have done something
that pleased the Old Ape !

42 EASTER HOLIDAYS.

Covered with confusion, I sought the eyes of my friend
Andre, full of anxiety to learn what he would think of
me. He made a grimace from the distance, lowering his
head and protruding his lips to make me feel ashamed.

He seemed to mock me, but his smile was kind and
affectionate withal ; I saw he did not think too badly of
me for having done anything so good, and I felt a little
consoled.

A Reflective Moment.

HERE are moments, rare as they are
peculiar, when the true character of a
country suddenly frees itself from the
uniform commonplace of an every-
fday world, and a soul seems to rise
from the very soil, to steal from the
'trees, and from out a thousand things :
the bygone spirit of the race that
slept numbed by the great universal
medley, for a moment waking.

To-day, the 22nd of November, at the extreme point
where France ends, as I sit alone on my terrace that
actually overlooks Spain, the spirit of the Basque Country
appears to me for the first time. Our European countries,
alas ! grow more and more like one another. Thus I had
lived for a year in this Euscalerria without having dis
covered anything very peculiar, and without having be
come in any way aware that I was growing attached to it.
But doubtless a gradual working within me has taken
place, a slow penetrating of the Basque effluvium that
has insensibly prepared me to understand her and to love
her.

To-day is the feast of the Perpetual Adoration, and the

44 A REFLECTIVE MOMENT.

churches, Spanish as well as French, are fuller than ever
of burning tapers and simple souls that pray. It is glori
ously fine ; on the Bidassoa, on the Pyrenees, over the sea,
reigns the same infinite calm. The still air is warm as in
May, yet with the indefinable melancholy of late Autumn
— sign in itself of the waning year. The sea in the dis
tance glitters as a band of blue mother-of-pearl. There
are southern, almost African tints on the mountains
which are clearly outlined against the sky, though vapor
ous, and bathed in all that is diaphanous and golden.
The Bidassoa, at my feet, sluggish and smooth, reflects,
with the accuracy of a mirror, Fontarabia opposite — its
church, its strong castle scorched by a hundred summers,
the arid mountains beyond with their smallest ruts and
faintest shadows, even their tiniest cottages scattered
about white on the great red foundations, all delightfully
inverted. High up in the air or down in the depths of
the deceptive mirror the most distant summits are equally
pure. The immobility of everything, the luminous bril
liancy of the tints give these Spanish hills something of
the sadness of Morocco ; to-day, especially, one feels that
Africa is quite close — as though the clearness of the
atmosphere, that lessened visible distance, had also had the
power to bring it nearer us.

And this great calm silence over everything — this un
changing stillness of the air, these motionless lights and
great shadows, give me at first the impression of a pause
in the dizzy movement of centuries, of a reflectiveness, an
immense waiting, or rather a look of melancholy thrown
back on a past anterior to suns and human beings, races
and religions

A REFLECTIVE MOMENT. 45

And, in the great spaces for sound ring the old bells of
the churches, calling men the better, in the strange
hushes, to their dead worships, Fontarabia, Hendaye, the
convents of Monks ring, ring, send out their summons
with the same note of age, the same old voices as in cen
turies gone.

On the Bidassoa, boats pass slowly from shore to shore,
forming long lines of sleepy ripples that blur the inverted
picture of Fontarabia and the brown mountains. The
sailors on board, rugged-faced, wearing the traditional
black cap, and beardless according to the Basque custom,
talk together in a tongue that is thousands of years old, or
sing, in a nasal falsetto, their old ancestral airs.

And on the surrounding paths, all flowering again in
this marvellous Autumn time, between the hedges, hedges
covered as in Spring with wild roses, privet and honey
suckle, are women and young girls on their way from
onechurch to another, dressed mostly in black, a thick
black mantilla falling over their foreheads, the costume
habitually worn by those who go to pray, either for them
selves or for the dead laid under the earth in the cemetries.

Then suddenly as I stand before this scene — listening
still to the clanking of the old bells, or the snatches of
song that resound from the distance, I become aware of
all that this country has preserved of peculiar and dis
tinctive, down to its very depths. I feel for the first time
stealing up everywhere an atmosphere of separateness, as
it were, from the rest of the world, of mystery — a living
essence of what the place is — destructible alas ! but still
impregnating all things, exhaling from all things — surely
the dying soul of the Basque country.

46 A REFLECTIVE MOMENT.

And yet in the distance comes a hideous thing, noisy,
black, tearing past with idiotic speed, shaking the
ground, and disturbing the delightful calm by whistles
and rattling iron : the train — the railway, a mightier
leveller than time, distributing the base fabrics of industry,
propagating modern ideas, disgorging daily here as else
where the common-place, and stupid.

At Loyola.

O WARDS evening, as the sun is
setting, the express from Saint Sebas
tian to Madrid puts us down at a
town called Zumarraga, where my
Basque companion and myself are
obliged to wait an hour for the
carriage that is to take us on to
Ignace.

The mildness of a Southern Aut
umn is in the air, but everywhere dead leaves are falling.
This waiting on an October evening about an isolated
little town surrounded by high mountains, and where the
people only speak an incomprehensible language is inevi
tably depressing. We stroll about aimlessly. In a win
dow in one of the dark narrow streets a solitary parrot
talks to itself.

" I am sure he speaks Basque too," I say to my com
panion.

" Most likely," he answers, and listens. " Yes, he actu
ally does, he continues with a laugh. " I can hear him
saying Jacquo ederra (Pretty Jacquo)."

For the tenth time we find ourselves in front of the
Church which stands in a great square surrounded by old

48 AT LOTOLA.

ruined houses with projecting roofs, and carved balconies,
and emblazoned walls. It forms one side of the Square,
and is built of a reddish brown stone, weather-worn and
cracked in places ; and beyond (of the same red stone) rise
the mountains into evening light. In the centre of the
Square is a fountain to which young peasants come for
water. There is also a new monument of white marble
gleaming in relief against the shadowy surroundings : a
statue of an old man with the brow of a visionary, holding
in his hands a guitar, yarraguire, a wandering musician,
composer of patriotic hymns, seditious enough, and love
songs. An inscription in that ancient language that can
never really be understood by strangers, informs the world
that the Basques have honoured the last of their bards.
These Euscarrien people, still distinctive, still entirely
themselves, have in truth neither been successfully assimi
lated on the one side by France nor on the other by Spain.

In the distance the shrill notes of a flute break on the
air, accompanied by a tambourine at intervals, peculiarly
Arabian in its abrupt time. They draw near, and a wed
ding party appears — a very humble little wedding party,
moving along quickly, all but running to the sound of the
music.

Once within the Square, the little procession stops to
dance, all among the fallen leaves that scurry about their
feet, blown by the wind. They number but fifteen, and
just now we are their sole spectators. The bride, who is
young and pretty, alone is fashionably dressed, with leg of
mutton sleeves and a skirt of 1 830, the last caprice of 1 892.
The tambourine and the flute play a rapid wild air, one of
those Basque tunes in five time that upset all our notions

AT LOYOLA. 49

of rhythm ; and they start together a most complicated
dance interrupted by leaps and cries — an ancient dance, the
tradition of which will soon be lost.

Some girls come along with pitchers on their heads to
draw water from the fountain ; and then the bridegroom,
who looks about eighteen, goes towards them and asks
them to dance. Children run up, and a few idlers stroll
into the Square, so that quite a little assembly is formed
to make the wedding of the poor folk less cheerless in this
great forlorn place at the approach of night. In the
streets, too, the peasants stop their cumbrous waggons
drawn by oxen, that roll noisily along on round discs of
wood like the wheels of an ancient chariot.

At five o'clock our carriage is brought to us there, ready
at last : a kind of cabriolet with a hood of oil-cloth, and
drawn by two horses harnessed in tandem, with a consi
derable number of bells on their necks.

We are almost at once in the country ; it grows quite
dark, the air as warm as that of a summer night. An
hour and a half on the road, at a great pace, across valleys
and through gorges, skirting torrents we cannot see, but
hear roaring at our feet in spite of bells that jingle all the
time, whilst a soft wind from the south scatters dead leaves
up to our faces.

We stop at last before the porch of an enormous fonda.
We have reached our destination. On the other side of
the road is the Convent of Saint Ignatius, a black mass
rising from out of the darkness, quite solitary ; the Fonda
and the Convent, there is nothing else at Loyola !

The Fonda is an old building with staircases one might
find in a palace, their balustrades of wrought iron. As

50 AT LOTOLA.

soon as you enter you scent the acid odour of the food,
common to all Spanish inns. The good folk within nei
ther understand French nor Spanish, simply the language
of the country — Basque. At table there is only an old
priest and ourselves ; but a short time ago, it seems, when
the new General of the Jesuits was called, the great rooms
were full of travellers from all parts, even from the furthest
end of Poland and Russia.

The Fonda is almost a holy place ; the walls are hung
with sacred pictures, and along the staircases are writings
forbidding those who go up and down to swear or to
blaspheme.

II.

As I wake at Loyola, long rays of light filtering through
the shutters meet my eyes. The large room in which I
have slept is white-washed and bare — almost empty, with
pictures of saints and holy water vases hung on the walls.
All through the night I heard the convent bells tolling,
and the roar of a torrent not far distant. This morning it
is the voice of one of the Fonda servants that wakes me,
singing a Basque air in five time on the staircase, an air
by that Yparraguire whose statue I saw yesterday in the
great forlorn Square at Zumarraga.

I open my windows to let in the streaming sun. It is
the glorious morning of a Southern October. If it were
not for the red and gold of the trees, for the dead leaves
scattered on the grass, one would say this was an August
day. The site is unique and admirably chosen : a small
unbroken plain, the only one to be found for miles round
in this wild corner of the Basque country, a plain as fertile

AT LOYOLA. 51

as a garden, watered by a fresh torrent, and mysteriously
shut in, almost roofed in by high rugged mountains that
separate it from the rest of the world. The running water
makes a murmuring noise in the silence around, and a
pastoral calm hovers over the whole of the exquisite
region.

Yet in front of me rises the Convent of Saint Ignatius,
nest of the Jesuits, throned as sovereign master, immense
and superb in this isolated spot : a dark mass of grey
masonry, imposing and magnificent, in the midst of this
deserted country that has remained so rustic and primitive.
The chapel is in the centre of the great fa9ade which
forms, as it were, two strange wings : its dome rises in
the grand proportions of a basilica ; its peristyle stands out
in a sumptuous semicircle of marble, the portico and pil
lars of black marble emblazoned with white ; the steps
that lead up to it are immense, adorned with lions and
statues. And in front nothing but beds of chrysanthe
mums, peaceful alleys between old-fashioned trellised
borders, and oddly enough no enclosing walls or rails —
open to the wide country, to the fields and paths where
the peasants may go to and fro.

( Gloomy thoughts associate themselves with this nest of
Jesuitism and of the Inquisition : looking at this convent
of Loyola, whose very name savours of oppression, one
cannot help thinking of the cruel and implacable things
that were formerly decreed in lowered voices behind these
walls, and then executed close by or far away, always
pitilessly and in the dark) This huge and opulent edifice,
with its heavy architecture, its dominating air, hidden in
these mountains, has all the physiognomy that expresses

52 AT LOTOLA.

the great Jesuitical idea. Yet the confidence implied in
the surroundings, these gardens open to everyone, these
flowers unprotected even by a hedge, give an unexpected
air of hospitality. The rule of this order is certainly the
most astonishing deformation of Christianity that has ever
issued from the human brain, and just as there is a persis
tent gentleness, in spite of all things, a sweetness surround
ing the name of Jesus, so this word Jesuit, which is derived
from it, remains always disturbing and cold and hard.

In the midst actually of the trellised pathways labourers
go to and fro. Waggons, on wheels of massive wood, in
the Roman fashion, that make a peculiar groaning sound
as they roll — a sound one hears on every road in the Basque
country — are filled to overflowing with red and golden
cider apples that leave a train of scent on the mild air,
and are led by peasants who sing old world songs as they
pass the high windows, with no attempt at constraint.
In fact a profound security surrounds the great Jesuifiere,
an air impregnated with only peace and abundance.

We leave the Fonda to go out into the sunshine and
walk in the grounds of the gloomy convent. One of the
doors before us suddenly opens, evidently the door of the
school, for about thirty little boys scamper out, jumping
and shouting, whilst an old fellow, in the black gown of
the order, hastens to close the shutters on the first floor
above their heads, that they may safely play the traditional
Basque game of ball against the walls, without risk of
breaking the windows. They play for a little while, their
childish merriment echoing delightfully among the sombre
walls. Then they gradually disperse about the country,
and all is silence again — the great silence of the fields — no

AT LOYOLA. 53

one passes now. As the approach of noon, the sun pours
down with greater and greater force upon the beds of
chrysanthemums and the stately staircase of marble.

As I go up to the Chapel by these steps, admiring the
sumptuous porticoes, the incomparable site, and the won
derful blue sky, I experience a strange sense of instinctive
repulsion — something of an old Hugenot rancour against this
Society of Jesus. Not that I give credence to all the accusa
tions of wrong doing and evil certain hot-heads have hurled
against it — and, besides, what do its crimes signify ? A
human institution should only be judged by the amount
of enthusiasm it has aroused in the hearts of men, by the
amount of consolation or soothing illusion it has been able
to give to the world. But this Society of Jesus, which only
knows how to annihilate all whom it allures to its em
brace, that is based on a savage impersonality, awful, too,
in its almost boundless power and mysterious proceedings,
disquiets and confuses me.

The great doors of the Chapel, profusely sculptured from
top to bottom, and decorated with brass ornaments, are so
well polished and varnished, that, in spite of their age, they
are as bright as though they were new. In no other
church are doors kept with such care. They at once give
an impression of wealth, of persistence and durability. No
one is there. We try gently to push one of the sculptured
doors, which gives and opens, there seems to be nothing
to keep them closed. And then the splendour breaks upon
us.

An immense round church. In the centre a circular
colonnade, massive and strong, of marble that is almost
black, relieved by very fine threads of gold, supports

54 AT LOYOLA.

a dome of a lighter colour, all of grey and pink marble.
This dome is decorated with a series of gigantic slabs
of marble, grey and gold, ranged in a circle. Each
of these slabs rests on a regal drapery, also of marble,
that appears to fall in folds, their outside edges of the
palest rose coloured marble, the inside, the lining as it
were, of a brighter shade, the whole having the lustre of
porcelain. And over each of the black columns that
support the pink roof, a white statue stands in relief
against the folds of the beautiful drapery ; quite a company
of these personages up there, all of a snowy whiteness
arranged circular-wise in attitudes of thought and prayer.
At the further end of the church, facing the entrance, is
the marvellous sanctuary, the high Altar made entirely of
brown agate inlaid with rare stones of different colours,
among which white predominates. About these great
columns of twisted agate, prodigious mosaics entwine like
spirals of riband, the whole so exquisitely polished that it
gleams like the inside of a sea shell. In the centre stands
a life-sized statue of St. Ignatius in chiselled and embossed
silver. About the central rotunda, in the aisles of brown
and grey marble, the different secondary altars are orna
mented with statues, nearly all of which are remarkable,
and whose gilded draperies have that peculiar sheen that
gold takes on marble. Nowhere is there any excess of
decoration, actually a severe soberness in all the magnifi
cence ; everywhere the natural tints and gleam of marble ;
gold used only on the robes of the saints with extreme
discretion, in fine threads and light embroideries, bright
rich glittering gold.

The whole place is maintained with a freshness that is

AT: LOYOLA. 55

almost new, nevertheless one divines the age of things
beneath. Every detail here is bright, and without trace
of dust, even to the resounding flag-stones under our feet.
There is not another church in the world that is so per
fectly kept, and this excessive care is in itself a measure of
the Society's wealth.

Still nobody about. We entered without anyone notic
ing us, by a door that is always open. The sudden appa
rition of such a place on emerging from the surrounding
hills, the quiet of the morning, this silence amidst a splen
dour that seems hardly religious, makes one dream of
enchanted palaces that, at the touch of a magic wand,
might vanish.

Altogether, from a human point of view, I find this
magnificence of convents and churches that have swallowed
the fortunes of thousands of different people, and which
are so impersonal, affording to their creators even, no
more joy than to the casual traveller who hundreds of
years afterwards happens to pass by, strange and inexpli
cable.

After the Chapel, we desire to see the interior of the
convent, and return therefore to the walks of chrysanthe
mums. We ask some peasants what we should do, where
to knock, which door to go in by.

" Oh !" they say, " by which ever you like ; all the
doors are right, for one is allowed to go everywhere."

And they push the first door we come upon which opens
wide before us. Rather hesitatingly, and again without
meeting anyone, we go up to the second floor, and sud
denly find ourselves in a room like a small Asiatic pagoda,
or a fairy's chamber. Extraordinarily low in the ceiling,

56 AT LOYOLA.

it has enormous beams that one can touch with one's hand,
each one of which is a garland of acanthus leaves pro
fusely gilded. These beams, that are repeated throughout
the whole length of the room, all equally magnificent in
their extravagant excess of decoration, form together a
kind of tunnel of golden foliage. The room is divided
by a gilded grill beyond which two sacred lamps, with
globes like pink flowers, burn before the golden reliquaries.
All is bright with that inimitable soft tone of the heavy
gilding habitually used in former times, and a delicious odour
of incense fills the air. However, a tiny grill opens in a
door, and a pair of eyes look at us ; then the door opens,
and a young man between eighteen and twenty years of
age, with a cheery face, wearing the black gown of the
Jesuit and carrying a feather brush under his arm, and a
broom in his hand, smilingly beckons us to go in. He is
in a sumptuous old room hung with red brocade, and scat
tered with gilded furniture and tables of marble marque-
trie, busy dusting some reliquaries. He asks us if we
are French. My companion, who thinks he recognises
in him a man of his own race, answers in the Basque
language.

" Why, yes," responds the brother, " you are French,
but French Euscualdunac !" (French Basques).

His words seem to suggest : "therefore you are scarcely
French ! Say rather that we are compatriots !" and he becomes
more genial than ever. He explains to us that this is the
room of Ignatius Loyola, and that it is confided to his
care. These bones now encrusted with precious stones,
and these stuffs that fill the reliquaries, are the remains of
the person and the garments of the great saint.

AT LOYOLA. 57

If we wish to visit the Convent, he tells us, with the
same expressive confidence that seems here to be in the
very air, we have only to go down to the ground floor,
turn to the right then to the left and knock at the second
door, there we shall find some fathers who will be de
lighted to show us round. So we go and knock at the
prescribed door. A brother porter, after looking at us,
smiling, too, like the Basque brother upstairs, shows us into
a large airy parlour. Of course, he says, we shall be shown
round wherever we wish to go. A French father shall
even be chosen for our guide, if we will have the goodness
to sit down and wait a moment. It would be impossible
to wish for a more hospitable house, or for more agreeable
hosts.

Soon the father, who is to take us round, arrives with
outstretched hand. His expression is kind and frank; he
looks me straight in the face ; nothing of what is called
the Jesuitical air in his manner. He is cordial, affable
and gay. The Convent, we wander through, is immense,
a very labryinth in which, he tells us, young novices often
lose their way. With its white walls and in its bareness,
it resembles any other convent. The interminable corri
dors have little cells on each side that look out into the
quiet country ; over the door of each of these is written
the name of the father who inhabits it. There are many
French names, some English and some Russian : the
Society of Jesus extends its unseen hand everywhere.

But the wonder of the place is the old feudal castle of
St. Ignatius, which chance led us to enter first. It is one
of those little vulture's nests of the Spanish Middle Ages,
with archaic walls made of stone and of red brick curi-

58 AT LOYOLA,

ously intermingled. It is enclosed, set as a precious stone
in the great formidable convent sprung from it. So reli
giously is it respected, that in the rooms adjoining it,
whatever their decoration may be, the wall that forms
part of the castle is left bare in the rough stone. Its
extreme age makes the buildings that surround it, in
themselves old enough, appear almost new, and its small-
ness seems the more astonishing in the midst of the gigan
tic proportions of the monastery, resembling indeed a toy
castle built in former days for children. Sacred lamps
and perfumes burn throughout, day and night. The
Jesuits, who have succeeded each other these four centuries,
have made it a sacred duty to decorate it from top to
bottom. There are altars and gildings even in its little
stables. The room with the roof of golden foliage like a
pagoda, which we saw on arriving, is the ancient recep
tion room of the castle, no doubt quite modest in former
days, now, out of respect, the old beams are covered in all
this wealth, as a relic might be put in a golden shrine.

Loyola is situated between two little old Basque towns
near one another, Aspei'tia and Ascoi'tia, typical old places,
doubtless unchanged since their construction — sombre
houses with diminutive shops and small industries. Both
have churches, blest, like that of Loyola, by the terrestial
visits of St. Ignatius, and rich in decoration to an extent
unusual even in Spain. At Aspei'tia, behind the high
altar, from the pavement to the roof, there is a mass of
golden foliage deeply carved in wood that must have cost
infinite patience to accomplish.

The chief industry of both these towns, bathed now in
a fierce Autumn sun, appears to be the manufacture of

LOYOLA. 59

alpargates (boots with cloth tops) and of avarcac (Basque
boots made of sheepskin that fasten in the old-fashioned
way with a lacing up the calf of the leg) .

At Ascoi'tia especially, the streets are lined with boot
makers, working in feverish haste, as if an unshod world
were anxiously waiting for the completion of their alpar
gates. These good people sew and tap in a kind of frenzy,
and the string soles pile up about them in little mountains.

The same carriage, that brought us here in the dark
yesterday, takes us back to Zumarraga to-day in the hot
sunshine. We pass a great many heavy waggons drawn
by oxen, and full of scented apples, lumbering slowly along
on their massive wheels. Our horses, covered with bells,
galop over beds of dead leaves, through wondrous little
valleys, by the side of cool torrents we only heard on our
nocturnal journey.

The Mayor of the Sea.

I HE great solemn room in the Town
Hall of Fontarabia, dilapidated and
empty, bears witness, as does the
whole town here, to a bygone magni
ficence. At the further end of the
hall, under a sort of dai's of old bro
cade, there is a portrait of the Queen
Regent, and along the walls, benches
and arm-chairs are ranged.

We are three or four waiting. The shutters are closed
because of the fiies, leaving us almost in darkness. " In a
minute," says the Alcalde (the mayor of the town) "when
the vespers are over, they will come."

We hear the sound of a Basque flute, plaintive and
strange as Arab music, rising from the silence without.
It is stiflingly hot, and, in spite of the darkness in the
room, one is conscious that the great July sun is flaming in
the heavens, burning down on this mass of old wood and
stones which make up Fontarabia.

We go out on to the old balcony of forged iron to see
if they are coming. Below us is the " Calle Major," a

THE MAYOR OF THE SEA. 61

narrow street impenetrable by the sun, enclosed between
houses dating back to the middle ages. It is on a steep
incline ending down below in a ruined gate, and appar
ently closed at the top — walled in by the dark mass of the
church. A veritable scene from old Spain — a little bit
that has remained extraordinarily intact — roofs with sculp
tured beams projecting to afford shade, magnificent em
blazonries in relief on the walls of reddish stone ; balconies
of forged iron, one above the other, decorated with pots of
flowers, and brightened everywhere by geraniums and
carnations. Spanish heads appear at the windows, and
look towards the church, waiting for the procession that
is coming. Curiosity begins to animate the dead street.
The bells suddenly ring, the very vibrations reach us, and
fill the calm hot air : vespers are over.

The people come out of the dark old houses, they lean
over the balconies and fill up the door-ways. Service
being over, five or six priests, suave and kind in appear
ance, join us in the hall and greet us.

At last the drum is heard in the distance. They are
coming.

At the top of the street, from the turning which seems
to end it, a procession emerges. One by one the men
appear in front of the old church wall that forms the
great background of this picture. First the musicians, in
red caps, playing a quick lively march. Behind them a
woman who seems to be the principal person in the pro
cession, a woman draped in pure white, tall and perfectly
proportioned, with the movements of a goddess. She
advances rapidly, almost dancing in time to the music,
a large coffer on her head, which she holds with upraised

62 THE MAYOR

arms, like the rounded handles of a Greek vase. After
her comes a boy carrying a great red banner embroidered
with a blue escutcheon. Then a group of bronzed faces
wearing the traditional Basque cap : the fishermen — all
the brotherhood of Fontarabia — come from the seamen's
quarter for the annual solemnity of the election of their
new Alcalde.

The Mayor of the Sea, chief of the brotherhood, is
elected every year by a limited suffrage, and ever since
the middle ages, this duty has been performed under the
hot July sun, with an unaltered ceremonial.

They have marched down the " Calle Mayor " to music,
and now have come up into the Town Hall where every
one solemnly takes his place : the Alcalde of the town in
the centre, under the dais ; on each side of him the two
marine officers, the one French, the other Spanish, who
are in command on the Bidassoa ; then the two Alcaldes
of the sea, the old and the new, and lastly the peasants
and fishermen. The red banner, at least four hundred
years old, has been raised ; its archaic embroideries repre
sent a scene of whale fishing and aureoled saints walking
on troubled waters. They have attached it to the iron
balcony, that it may float above the street during the
ceremony.

The coffer brought by the beautiful dark girl is opened
before the Alcaldes. It contains the treasure of the
brotherhood which has to be verified : a large parchment
covered with Gothic writing conferring special blessings
from Pope Clement VIII ; a silver crucifix, a silver reli
quary, a silver chalice, a silver pit and rods for the masters
in whalebone with silver knobs (for the brotherhood, who

OF THE SEA. 63

only fish now for tunny and sardines, was founded long
ago when whales were still taken in the Bay of Biscay).

These venerable objects that have been passed down
from hand to hand for so many centuries, are still intact.

They read aloud the accounts of the community in that
ancient tongue of unknown origin which strangers never
succeed in wholly comprehending : So much for the
general working, so much for relief, so much for the
masses for the dead, and for safe voyages. Every fisher
man round the room listens attentively : sailors descended
from countless generations of sea adventurers who lived
on the dangerous waters of the Bay of Biscay. Hardened
faces, sunburnt and tanned — carefully shaved as monks.
Rapacious in their way, given to poaching and defying
the laws by throwing nets in French waters, even on our
very shores, yet brave folk withal and bold seamen !

The verification over, there is evidently to be sport
without. Already shouts arise from the crowded street :
they are bringing the bull !

He arrives, a reluctant enough creature, fastened to a
piece of wood that is drawn by a pair of oxen yoked to
gether, the rope long enough to allow the unhappy animal
to belabour the beasts before him with his horns. This
unwieldly equipage is difficult to drive, and advances
amidst many jerks and stops and kickings.

From under the porch of the Town Hall comes the
sound of brass instruments, alternating with the Basque
orchestra : little flutes and tambourines play the old airs
in five time, an odd rhythm of unknown antiquity, so
strange to our ears.

Meanwhile the bull, with its swathed horns, has been

64 THE MATOR

detached from the team and tied to a stone pillar by a
long cord that allows him to sweep the whole street.
Maddened and stupified, it rushes headlong at the passers-
by who call it, and dodge dexteriously aside. Then
come mad stampedes, banging of doors, galloping on the
slippery pavement, cries of fright, stumbles, dangerous
escapes and shouts of laughter.

When the sport is over the fishermen form into proces
sion again to return to their quarter by the sea, where a
gala is prepared in the house of the new Mayor.

At the head, the band, tambourines and flute. Then
the tall beautiful girl who carries the sacred coffer, and
who falls at once into the rhythmic walk, swaying with
the music. Next the great banner, the mayors, the
officers and the priests. Lastly the fishermen and the
crowd that accompany them in ever increasing numbers.

They file along the gloomy narrow street of high
houses in joyous haste, descending, after the turning by
the church, towards the sea — away suddenly from the
stuffiness of Fontarabia, along the side of a fence that slopes
precipitously down to the depths of the Bay of Biscay;
the Pyrenees, the coast of France and the infinite blue
ocean, lying in a glory of light at their feet.

Down there, on the shore, rests the modest little house
of the new mayor of the sea, surrounded, in the Basque
way, by plane trees pruned to form a roof. The doors are
open. On the arrival of the little train the sacred banner
is planted by the entrance, and the precious coffer put
away in the recess of an alcove behind the bed.

A table, simply arranged for the feast, and decorated
with large bouquets, stands in a small low room, the

OF THE SEA. 65

rafters low and as oppressive as those on a ship. The
whitewashed walls are hung with pictures of Christ, of
the Virgin, and the saints who protect seamen.

They crowd in and sit down, mayors, officers, priests
and the more notable fishermen, as many as it will hold.
The place is hot as an oven, in spite of occasional wafts of
sea-air. Fish and shell-fish, with every kind of sauce, are
served by smiling girls and women. Between each course
cigarettes are exchanged and lighted — and fishing matters
and smuggling are talked over in Spanish, and more
especially in Basque.

The room is on the ground floor, close to the people walk
ing about outside. Through the open window, in the fore
ground, the red banner is visible, now waving high, now
almost sweeping the sand. Then the beach where a fan
dango is being danced to music, and between the dancers,
who turn and sway, their arms raised high, is a glimpse
of the deep blue sea covered to-day with hundreds of black
sleeping atoms — the boats of the fishermen keeping holi
day. The people outside come in turn, and look and smile
through the window. Even passing strangers from Biarritz
and Saint Sebastian, cyclists in knickerbockers, and elegant
women in large feathered hats. These latter examine the
banner — the beautiful work, and the strange personages
embroidered on it.

And as far from them as these embroideries they find
so amusing — as far, thank Heaven, from their notions
and their modern emptinesses, are the crude bronzed fish
ermen, who eat at this table between pictures of Christ,
in the whole simpleness of bygone times, with the same
hopes, the same dreams, the same joys.

The Grotto of Isturitz.

LL grottoes are more or less alike,
their galleries, their stalactites
and their domes are of one archi
tecture. The same mysterious
Genii, who invent the forms of the
slow crystalizations, who preside at
the metamorphoses of inorganic
matter, have superintended with
an eternal patience the moulding

of their white arabesques. However, this grotto at Isturitz
deserves to be seen, though doubtless there are others in
existence more wonderful.

It is situated in the heart of the old Basque country,
which we approach by shady roads through ravines and
woods, half way up a wild mountain side.

At first we have to climb up tiny tracks, between rocks
and streamlets, on a carpeted way of sweet-smelling mint
and wild flowers. As we get higher and higher we see
that the country all round us is of the same character :

THE GROTTO OF ISTURITZ. 67

pastural, shady and peaceful, with great woods, and here
and there little churches nestling among the trees.

The entrance to the grotto is a hole closed by a wall of
masonry and a door of some kind.

Our guide, an Isturitz peasant, thrusts in a large key
and opens it up for us, and we enter at once into the dark
ness and damp and cold, into the silence so full of fright-
ning echoes; — and the strange mystery of subterranean
regions steals on us.

We go down into the depths by a steep slope. The
roof rises higher and higher over our heads, till the flames
of our candles are entirely lost, as in the deep shadows of
a cathedral.

We come into the great nave. In the centre, in spite
of the appalling darkness in which our lights flicker,
something gigantic can be vaguely distinguished, rising
up in an almost human attitude, white as milk, suggesting
an alabaster colossus that would endeavour to touch the
vaulted roof with its head.

Our guide throws down, at the feet of this creature, a
handful of straw which he had brought with him to set
ablaze for the final spectacle later on.

He wishes first to lead us into the several side galleries
where all those things and beings that haunt bad dreams
are petrified. Stalactites in infinite variety are grouped
together in families, the forms in each more or less resem
bling one another, as if the Genii of the Grotto had taken
to classifying them.

One gallery is consecrated more especially to light
fringes, so delicate sometimes that a touch would break
them ; they hang down everywhere like frozen rain, fall-

68 THE GROTTO

ing from the roof in innumerable garlands : fringes of all
widths, very long, or quite short, that separate or inter
mingle with a surprising variety of caprice.

Elsewhere they are like the long white fingers of a
corpse, sometimes open, sometimes bent like a claw ; they
might be a collection of arms and hands, gigantic, some
of them, that have been arranged, hung up, stuck in pro
fusion on the cold partitions ; but never a sharp point,
never an angle anywhere ; all of the same cream-like ap
pearance that excludes any idea of hardness : one expects
it to give to the slightest pressure, and is surprised, on
touching it, to find it as rigid as marble.

Here and there a monster equally white, of alarming
outline, rises or crouches unexpectedly in the middle of
the path, or tapers in a shadowy corner. And when one
realizes that the smallest of these motionless creatures has
required at least two thousand years of work at the hands
of the genii decorateurs we gain a conception of patience,
of possible duration rather crushing to our human transi-
toriness.

Elsewhere is the region of great animal forms, soft and
rounded, a confusion of elephants' trunks and ears, piles of
larvae, of human embryos, with huge eyeless heads, all
the waste of still-born creatures. And everywhere those
isolated beings, separated from the confused mass of germs,
seated about anywhere with swinging limbs, and hanging
ears.

When we come back to the first nave our guide lights
his straw fire, and the oppressive darkness vanishes, recedes

OF ISTURITZ. 69

with the aisles into the long corridors which we have just
left. In the glow of this red flame, the high vault of the
cathedral is revealed, exquisitely festooned and fringed ;
pillars stand out curiously worked from top to bottom.

The colossal white spectre, dimly seen on our arrival,
looks exactly like a woman draped in veils. The shadow
of it rises and falls and dances on the partitions of this
weird place.

One stands confounded before the meaning of these
things, before the enigma of these forms, before the reason
of such strange magnificence built up in the silence and
darkness, without object, by chance, in the course of
hundreds and thousands of years through the imperceptible
dripping of the stones.

On coming out of the grotto, one experiences a sense of
delight at being once again in the pure warm air, amongst
the verdure of the oaks, with the wide wooded horizon, in
the light and the open ; instead of the sepulchral atmos
phere of the underground, the sweet healthy scent of the
mint and wild carnations ; instead of the continuous drip
ping of dead waters in the silence below, the gay sound
of the torrents — living waters, and in the distance, the
tinkling bells of cattle returning to the fields.

For a moment, even to breathe in the fresh air is intoxi
cating, and the spreading country on all sides, so quiet
and green, seems an Eden.

Midnight Mass.

T is Christmas night, but the air at
this extreme point of Southern France
is as soft as it might be in April. A
crescent moon, that must soon sink be
hind the dark mass of mountains in the
west, is still in the sky among tiny
clouds that resemble flakes of white
eiderdown.

From the French shore, where I live,
I have just heard n o'clock struck by the old bell of
Fontarabia on the Spanish shore. And here comes the
boat I ordered to take me at this nocturnal hour to the
other side of the Bidassoa, the divisional line of the fron
tier ; it glides along by the light of a lantern to the foot
of my garden that is laid out in terraces above the dark
water.

Therefore let us away to Spain. The wide sluggish
river is luminous in the moonlight; — this Christmas even
ing, as mild as a night in April.

MIDNIGHT MASS. 71

For several years past, I have crossed these waters on
the same night and at the same hour ; sometimes in the
mild weather, sometimes in frosty weather, or in storms;
sometimes alone, sometimes with friends of whom I have
since lost sight, or who are dead. And it was always to
go to the same midnight mass, in the same convent of the
Capuchin monks, which is situated in a rather lonely spot
by the banks of the Bidassoa, on the road that leads from
Fontarabia to Irun. There is a certain melancholy in
revisiting every year the same things, in the same places,
on the same dates and at the same hour.

After a short crossing, of perhaps a quarter of an hour,
smooth as the gliding of shadows, we land on the Spanish
shore, and being recognised by the carabineers on guard,
I can walk freely towards the monks' chapel by a road
that follows the bank of the river at the foot of the moun
tains.

The bright crescent moon is actually deserting me,
leaving me to the care of the stars in a more shadowy
world. All along the road there are high Basque houses,
old and dilapidated, their white-washed walls perceptibly
white even in the dark ; and here and there phantom
trees with great leafless branches. Parts of the road more
closed in than the rest, are overshadowed by rocks, and
enveloped in deeper gloom. Everything slumbers in
peace and silence.

Twenty minutes' walk, or half-an-hour perhaps, going
leisurely along in the quiet night that surely borrows a
soothing atmosphere from the sweet mystery of Christ-

72 MIDNIGHT MASS.

mastide. Two or three bands of singers pass me, whose
approach can be heard from some distance in the midst of
such silence ; boys from Fontarabia, who walk about with
lanterns, singing ancient songs in which the Magi of Beth
lehem figure ; some accompanying themselves on a guitar,
others on a tambourine, all a little tipsy. They say a
cheerful good-night to me as they pass, and the sound of
their voices, and of the jerky ancient music is lost in the
distance.

Here at last are the great walls of the convent, pale
grey and unreal in appearance under the midnight stars ;
I go up a high flight of steps, and already there filters
to me, from within, the odour of incense, out into the
pure air.

The door of the chapel is open, throwing a ray of yel
low light into the blue of the night. It seems that this
evening anyone may enter without interference. And yet
formerly, on Christmas Days, this door was barred ; it was
necessary to pass through the sacristy after having shown
a patte blanche to a suspicious monk, and only little groups
of the brazen-faced, or of the elect, succeeded in gaining
admittance. But in our time everything is simplified,
everything is made commonplace ; sanctuaries have no
more barriers, and are open to all comers.

The chapel is full already, and on entering, dense clouds
of incense make it almost impossible to see, an unexpected
darkness, different enough to that outside. The Capucins,
motionless before the altar, and the women uniformly
veiled in black, motionless in the nave, are vaguely dis-

MIDNIGHT MASS. 73

cernible. Through the murmurings of the litanies
chanted in low voices from the choir, a strange impression
arrests one at the sight of this mass of women, whose
heads, draped in black, are bent towards the ground. They
have all put on the mantilla of mourning generally worn
in the Basque country during religious services in sign of
human frailty. Everything here is meant to remind one of
death. It seems to hover gloomily over these several hun
dred bowed heads. Each pavement stone in the church is
a funeral slab, and one is conscious that the ground one
walks on is full of bones. A cadaverous odour, that the
incense cannot dissimilate, rises from this crowd of peasants
and poor folk, among whom the old are in the majority,
and here and there a hollow cough resounds loudly under
the vaulted roofx As a fact it is only the terrifying
thought of death that has brought all these beings here
to-night to pray in common ; against death that all
these bells are ringing, the noise of them breaking sud
denly on the silence. And against death too, that this
great white Virgin has been erected, it alone lit up by the
flickering tapers in the sombre chapel — Oh ! so smiling
and white this great Virgin wreathed in pale roses : surely
a deceiving visictfi of infinite sweetness, radiant among the
clouds of incensej,

The incense grows thicker and thicker in the nave, and
the statues of the saints become confused with the motion
less monks, whose beards and locks are as archaic as those
of the images of wood and of stone.

However, the muttered litanies are only a sort of pre
liminary incantation ; a preparation for something else
that is to happen, and for which the crowd is waiting.

74 MIDNIGHT MASS.

Above the faithful, who are kneeling or sitting, a vast
mysterious gallery barred like a harem, projects from the
front wall over a third of the church ; one feels that it
is full of invisible assistants. At times the sound of a
drum escapes, or the clashing noise of brass, as if they
were preparing for some wonderful music.

The moment has come, Mass is about to begin. Many
more tapers are lighted. A dozen monks, whose gowns
and cowls are of white silk, enter the cloudy choir in ritu
alistic order, preceded by deacons who carry lanterns on
ipng shafts, ancient and half barbaric.
(^ And then suddenly from the secret gallery high up,
there bursts forth a strange, strident music, that almost
makes one shudder after the soothing monotony of the
litanies : Christ is born, the supposed conqueror of death,
has appeared on earth, and his advent is hailed with a
sudden and mad joy ! j Two or three hautboy 'j, which have
the biting tones of Bedouin bagpipes, lead a choir of reck
lessly joyous men's voices, accompanied by thirty Basque
drums, and by a legion of castenets. The whole thing,
though discordant and unexpected in a church, succeeded
nevertheless in producing by its very strangeness a sort of
religious fervour. They are old Christmas hymns belong
ing to Guipuzcoa, as quick and lively as habaneras, or as
seguidllles. And the monks in the gallery, who are making
all this noise of savage revelry, accompany their music with
a sort of ritual step. One hears the movements of beating
time, and sees their dancing shadows on the walls.

The long and complicated Mass continues with a be
wildering noise of hautboy 'jy and of human notes in a nasal
falsetto. Above the black veiled heads, above the poor

MIDNIGHT MASS. 75

and aged, into the smoke of the incense that grows still
thicker, the old world hymns succeed one another in a
growing exaltation, accompanied all the while by the
little thunder of the rattling tambourines, and by the dry
light noise of the castenets sounding between deft fingers.
Then, when all is over, there is a hurried movement among
the peasants and the poor towards the choir, where a doll
has just arrived in the arms of a monk, who offers it to the
faithful to kiss, a poor lifeless doll that has been carefully
wrapped in a child's swaddling clothes, and that repre
sents the new-born Saviour.

And now they all disperse into the night that has grown
colder and of a deeper blue.

I return alone to the boat that is to take me to the
French shore,, as one just awakend from a dream of the
olden times.\ I come away rather saddened : another
Christmas has passed over my head, another year has
stretched into the abyss without having brought me the
solution of anything, nor the hope of anything]

And, as I go back alone, I feel that I am a thousand
times more disinherited than the least of those humble
people, those old men or those poor folk, who, praying as
their ancestors prayed, have just kissed the simple, ridi
culous, and adorably ineffable doll in its linen.

The Passing of the Procession.

[VERY year, for centuries past, on the
Wednesday morning preceding Pente
cost, some twenty or thirty Basque
villages on the Spanish slope of the
Pyrenees have been emptied of their
parishoners. The good folk, laden
with crosses like that borne by Christ,
make a pilgrimage up to the Convent
of Roncevalles ; and, in order to see
the procession, it is necessary to sleep the night before at
Burguette, the last village it passes through before arriving
at the venerable monastry.

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a peaceful and charming town
that the railway, alas ! will soon spoil, is the place I start
from on this Tuesday, the ist of June, under a very cloudy
sky, to drive to Burguette by shady roads through an
immense forest of beeches.

About an hour after leaving Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port we
get into Spain, and stop at Val-Carlos, the village where
we have to alight for the frontier formalities.

THE PASSING OF THE PROCESSION. 77

And then, as Burguette is on the other side of the
Pyrenees (not far from the top, and at a very high altitude)
we ascend again for another four hours, penetrating into
the heart of the forest which grows more and more wild
and green. A coming storm growls ominously around us
among the clouds, and the bell of Val-Carlos begins to
ring out in a cracked, mournful tone. Its vibrations follow
us for a long time, and then are lost below in the infinite
silence of the trees.

On the banks of the road-side there is a monotonous
wealth of pink flowers: pink silenes, pink amourettes, pink
foxgloves; besides columbines, great campanulas and won
derful saxifrages. And everywhere falling waters, in tiny
streams, or noisy cascades, among the ferns.

The hail- storm bursts suddenly upon us, sharp and cut-
ing like the lash of a whip. We stop by an almost ver
tical side of the mountain carpeted with these same flowers
in magnificent profusion. The hail pelts us with myriads
of glass pearls. The long stalks of the foxgloves, cut and
broken, scatter their flowers on the moss, so many of them,
fluttering like pink ribands amongst the green leaves and
grass.

It is over quickly enough — the shower passes, and the
horses move on again, dragging us up the never-ending
zig-zags in the forest of beeches. And all the trees of this
forest are alike, apparently of the same shape and age,
having reached complete development without hindrance,
as a primaeval forest grows.

The storm continues to grumble in the distance, and
above our heads stretches a dark and unbroken cloud
which we gradually approach. The forest rises on all

78 THE PASSING OF

sides to vanish in this cloud ; high up, the trees and the
rocks that touch this filmy veil seem confused in a motion
less smoke, their heads entirely drowned in the grey mass.
We seem to be climbing the sides of a great closed gulf;
heavy rocks overhang us on all sides ; it is so dark that it
might be a premature twilight, and would be gloomy in
deed were it not for the glory of the verdure and the
wondrous pink flowers.

Soon we get quite close to the misty roof which looks
as if it could actually be touched. At a turning of the
deserted road we meet a procession, a humble village pro
cession wet through by the shower of hail — a hundred
mountaineers following a silver cross and three priests in
muslin surplices. They are returning towards Val-Carlos,
singing litanies, infinitely melancholy heard here amidst
the impassive sovereignity of the trees and dark sky.

Then again no one, nothing but the great stillness, and
the silence of those gigantic walls of verdure, the mystery
of the forest that stretches up to join the nebulous vault
that ever nears our heads like a sort of Dantesque roof.
We are passing through a gloomy obscurity all green and
grey.

And, after about four hours of this monotonous climb
ing, we get at last into the cloud which proves a freezing
mist ; we can distinguish nothing but the nearest branches
— the great, white branches of the beech trees. The
evening is approaching, and everything around us grows
more shadowy.

When we are at the highest point of this zig-zag road,
which now begins to descend before us, the rain comes
down in torrents, whilst daylight fades ; still, through the

THE PROCESSION. 79

downfall, we can see the high convent walls of Roncevalles
where we shall return to-morrow morning with the pro
cession. Half a mile further on, as the twilight deepens,
we reach Burguette. In the pelting rain and the splashing
mud I alight at the only inn in the village, which appears
to be two or three centuries old.

There I expected to spend a solitary and quiet night.
But no, on the eve of the pilgrimage it is the custom
apparently to make merry. After supper a guitar appears,
the handle decorated with tufts of wool, like the head of
a mule, then a second, then a third, a whole orchestra in
fact, including a tambourine spangled over with brass.

And the warm Spanish music begins, first lightly and
hesitatingly, as the cider and wine goes the round to raise
the good folks' spirits. Gradually fandangoes^ jotas, haba
neras are re-enforced and accelerated, always with more
noise and at a greater pace. Carabineers arrive, smugglers
and shepherds. There are no women, excepting the two
servants of the house, who hardly know which way to
turn. But the men dance among themselves with shouts
of childish delight.

Now the guitarists sing, as their hands move wildly over
the strings ; with head thrown back, eyes closed as if with
intoxication, and mouth wide open displaying wolf-like
teeth, they repeat the airs indefinitely, with a kind of fury,
on notes almost too high. From midnight until two
o'clock, whilst the storm is raging outside, everybody
dances, even the innkeeper, even his wife, and the old
men and women whom the noise has awakened in the cor
ners. The ancient inn vibrates from top to bottom: one
feels the old wood-work and the blackened ceiling shake,

8o THE PASSING OF

whilst the walls seem to be animated, impregnated with
the dancing vibrations of the guitars.

Wednesday, June 2nd.

Far and near, the clattering of footsteps and the tinkling
of numberless little bells that hang on the necks of the
sheep and goats, is the music that breaks on the morning
in this out of the way village, as day dawns among the
cloudy peaks.

The old inn awakes, silent now, after having vibrated all
night to the exaltation of song and the frenzy of guitars.

It is seven o'clock when I come down from my room
and stand on the threshold of the door to wait for the pro
cession to pass. It is no longer raining. A little sun
pierces the wandering clouds in which the village has
been wrapt. The street through which the procession of
crosses will defile, is fairly regular and long, and runs be
tween small old houses that are all alike, with high dark
roofs made of planks of beech, the wood of the neighbour
ing forests. The mud in the road is indented with end
less little marks made by the cloven feet of flocks which
have been driven out on to the high pasture lands, or into
the fields. From time to time peasants and peasant
women pass by, on mules also with bells, their harness
gleaming with brass, and saddles finished with red pen
dants. All are going in the direction of Roncevalles for
the pilgrimage of the day.

The open space near the Church would be an excellent
place to see the procession come up from the village
below, to see it appearing from out of that white mist
resting like a cloud in the hollow of the Pyrenees.

THE PROCESSION. 81

The Church is heavy and defaced ; centuries of storms
have beaten upon its rustic granite front, and the open
space before it is riddled like that of the streets by the
footprints of sheep and goats.

Suddenly, high up in the belfry windows where two
bells of equal size are visible, some men appear, who set
to ringing hastily, using the tongues of the bells as mallets.
Ding, ding, ding, they strike the bronze with frantic
rapidity, just as they played the guitar last night. The
air is filled at once with a wild crashing noise, the signal
for the procession they have already perceived and that
will soon be visible to us.

Then it comes, emerging from the mist. At first it
looks like a procession of wooden beams painfully carried
by men in mourning. Then, as it draws nearer and the
great blocks of wood become more distinctly outlined, they
are seen to have the shape of instruments of torture :
crosses, like that of Calvary, which penitents are bearing
on their backs, supporting the cross bars with outstretched
arms as though they were suffering crucifixion. One
begins to hear an intermittent moaning that rises in
rhythmic lamentation from this moving mass of men.
There are five hundred perhaps, all in black, with black
cowls drawn over the face, and walking bare-footed in the
mud, two abreast, with hurried steps, unlike the slow pace
usually adopted in processions. Ora pro nobis ! Ora pro
nobis ! they cry in a lugubrious tone, as they pass with
strange haste, their head bowed under the cross. At cer
tain intervals are the mayors of the villages, hat in hand
and draped in ceremonial capes. Next comes a group of
deacons in muslin surplices, carrying on long poles the gilt

82 THE PASSING OF

crosses belonging to the twenty or thirty neighbouring
parishes, mostly of ancient workmanship, some almost
barbarous. Then, bringing up the rear, troops of women
in black mantillas advance, singing litanies to the Virgin
in mournful voices. They have no cowls on their faces ;
their mantillas veil but withered ugliness, looks of sordid
suffering : a population sapped of youth by the bleak
climate of such regions — pale girls of the heights where
the conditions of life become overwhelming. On the
Church square, and scattered about the street of Burguette,
are the inevitable tourists, attracted as though by some
frontier feast, to this remote village, alas ! no longer suffi
ciently protected by the mountains, no longer far enough
away from Biarritz or from Bayonne. It is needless to say
that these intruders are armed with opera-glasses, various
appurtenances, kodacs, bicycles, even flutes. And in
front of all these humble inhabitants of the mountains,
passing on their way in childlike faith to kneel before Our
Lady of Roncevalles, in gruesome rags pitiful to see — in
front of them, these people find matter for laughter, for
remarks that are the quintessence of inanity.

Still, on towards Roncevalles the procession continues
to ascend, uttering their lugubrious groans; and in its wake
I find myself once again in the country.

The country here is extraordinarily green, being con
stantly in a state of moisture from its proximity to or
contact with the clouds ; rather melancholy, at the same
time suggesting a little paradise that the hand of man has
scarcely touched ; and something indescribable in the air
makes one conscious of the height one has attained.

The road passes through clumps of great beeches, their

THE PROCESSION. 83

branches covered with white lichen, through fields of
daisies where white goats feed in flocks. But further on
all around is the forest of endless beeches, peaceful and
monotonous, silent, fresh and green. The peaks in the
neighbourhood of this plateau of Burguette, that appeared
to tower so high when seen from the plains below, look
like little hills quite close at hand, wooded always by the
same strong species. And the clouds that are at home
here, wander round us like smoke, like fleecy eiderdown,
floating or resting over the green splendour of the trees.

The procession which I continue to follow, moves on
still at the same quick pace, noiselessly because the feet of
these mountaineers are bare or else shod in espadrilles.
Nothing is heard but lamentations persistently repeated in
a measured rhythm. Before me is the black mass of
women ; then the group with the silver crosses on which
a ray of sunlight falls at this moment, lighting up the
the nebulous green of the background ; lastly in the van
guard beyond, the crowd of crucified penitents with out
stretched arms, who will be hidden soon in the thick
grey mist before them with its mother-of-pearl reflections.
The ancient Roncevalles, towards which they are all
wending, is invisible in the clouds, a great pale mist that
was passing had stopped to envelope it.

We are in truth quite close to this Roncevalles we can
not see, for there is a sudden clash of bells which signal our
approach in rapid strokes, as the bells of Burguette did this
morning. The Convent looms out in a moment, magnified
by the indistinctness of its outlines blurred by the en
shrouding clouds. It appears colossal and fierce with its
fortress dungeon and its confusion of heavy walls.

84 THE PASSING OF THE PROCESSION.

The procession plunges into the shade of an old granite
porch to cross a deserted cloister with ruined arches, whose
crevices are filled with ferns and moss. The mist still en
velopes the human silhouettes, and produces a chill sepul
chral dampness, giving everything a look of unreality,
that takes the imagination back into the twilight of the
past.

At last we penetrate, like a flood, into the obscurity of
the Church clouded in incense. At the further end, tapers
burn before the old tabernacles of burnished gold. The
wan lights make the gilded columns, the gilded altar piece
— the remains of ancient splendour — gleam in the midst of
the dilapidation and gloom. But in the nave there is not
light enough to see one's way, and at first there is some
confusion as the procession crowds in : sweating bodies
push and elbow one another ; the crosses come into colli
sion, one hears the clashing of wood and the heavy bangs
on the flag-stones.

By degrees, however, the crowd gropes its way, and
one's eyes get accustomed to the darkness. The whole of
the centre aisle is occupied by a dense mass of women
veiled in black, and on either side, symmetrically arranged,
are the five hundred crucified, with arms extended, tired
and out of breath. This is the end of their painful march
under the weight of their heavy burdens. Now the monks
are going to say mass for them.

Mon Dieu ! without those drifting clouds it might all
have seemed vulgar and trivial.

The Sword Dance.

NDER the glare of a midday sun the
tennis was drawing to an end. The
six champions were sweating from the
heat in the centre of a huge grey
court, cemented and levelled so that
the balls should bound true ; in the
restrained movement of their arms, in
the still vigorous play of their mus
cles, and in their agile leaps one de-
vined a fatigue, and some haste to get the game over.

Moreover, I had lost all interest in the match, the sides
were quite unequal, and there could be no doubt as to the
ultimate result. I ceased to watch the players, and my
eyes fell on an inscription in white chalk, written on the
dazzling wall that was rounded at its base where the balls
struck with a hard sound. I read it mechanically, Viva
Euskual Herria said the inscription in large awkwardly
traced letters (Long live the Basque country !) Doubtless
the work of some passing enthusiast, or of a child. It took
hold of me, assuming a sudden importance in my mind :

86 THE SWORD DANCE.

these unfamiliar words so strangely sonorous, this cry of
revolt against the general process of levelling summed up
for me all that yet remained of what was Basque in this
Saint-Jean-de-Luz, which day by day was fading from her.

When one has lived some time in this dying Euskual-
Herria one sees so many games of tennis, and plays so
many oneself, that they lose their power of producing an
impression of local colour on the imagination. More
over to-day — a great gala day, in a town that is fast
becoming a kind of watering place — the tiers that surround
the court were filled by a cosmopolitan crowd of most
distressingly commonplace appearance.

Then there arrived a troup of odd-looking peasants, all
dressed alike. The Basques who were present received
them with murmurs of welcome: "You ! you ! you !" The
visitors smiled and answered according to the custom :
"You! you! you!" in high bird-like voices, such as certain
tribes of Red Indians assume when they dance.

They wore black trousers, black caps, black blouses
kilted in a thousand pleats and worn short, ending indeed
above the loins ; their faces were clean shaven, and had
that simple expression peculiar to old world people. They
were " Souletins," delegated dancers, who had come to
take part in the festivities from the ancient district of
Soule, whose traditions are still immutable. Their music
accompanied them : a tambourine, and a kind of great
flute shaped like a quiver, a veritable pipe of Pan.

In their presence the game was finished. And as soon
as the drawling voice of the crier had proclaimed the last
point in Basque, before the crowd had time to rise, the
organisers of the festivities invited the Souletins to dance.

THE SWORD DANCE. 87

Then the old man, who had been playing the pastoral
flute, advanced into the middle of the court, whilst the
dancers, who numbered about thirty, formed a large circle
around him holding hands. At the sound of a tiny trill,
strangely mysterious, and as if coming from far off, that
proceeded from the huge archaic flute, the men began to
move slowly in measured time. Here and there stupid
laughter was heard to escape from under elegant hats ;
but the greater number of the people, even of the more
common tourists were impressed and interested. A hush
fell upon the crowd present at this almost silent dance,
in which the light slippers of the Souletins glided noise
lessly over the surface of the court.

The spirit of past ages had surely come to life once
again at the sound of the flute, communicating to the sen
sitive, unexpected thrills, and to coarser natures a feeling
of respect in spite of themselves.

With the regularity of automatons, the Souletins
executed to a mournful measure the quickest and most
complicated steps. Occasionally a nervous leap would
raise them from the ground altogether, their pleated
blouses, so quaintly short, spreading wide under their arms
like the skirts of a ballet girl — so light were they, one
could not hear them fall to the ground again, and not
withstanding the great speed with which their feet moved,
their faces remained impassive and solemn. Still the old
flutist stood in the centre of the circle, playing his shrill
music as though he led them by some sorcery. The mid
day sun stunted the shadows of these dancers in black
garments, almost to nothing, as they whirled in a circle
on the grey asphalt.

88 THE SWORD DANCE.

The Angelus began to ring — for thank^God the Angelas
still rings out from the venerable belfries in this country
— as the crowd dispersed after the performance, pouring
into the streets of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

A dance was announced to take place at four o'clock
(the ancient sword dance to be performed by young
mountaineers of Guipuzcoa) ; meanwhile the time had to
be passed by lunching at some hotel, among tourists of all
classes, and then by wandering about the gay streets of the
town, where here and there the Basque music of tam
bourines and fifes could be heard.

In Saint-Jean-de-Luz there are still some delightful
corners, some quite secluded streets where the original
character of the place is yet preserved : jutting out roofs ;
whitewashed fa9ades intersected by green or red beams ;
great trees overhanging garden walls; glimpses of the blue
sea, or of the purple Pyrenees ; peace and silence between
white walk on a pavement of pebbles gathered from the
sea shored Nevertheless, dreadful modern buildings are
rising up daily — not a corner of the shore, not a lovely
hill-side that is not dishonoured now by some great costly
erection conceived by bloated barbarians, by snobs gone
mad. It would be so simple not to disfigure the country,
to build Basque houses, as a few artists have had the good
taste to do ! Alas, alas, who will save us from this moder\a
trumpery, from over luxury, from uniformity — and idiotsj!

.......

I sat down to wait under some trees of a square in front
of a cafe that had been established in a house of the seven
teenth century, the ex-abode of royalty, and watched

THE SWORD DANCE. 89

bicyclist after bicyclist pass by ; women with befeathered
hats, women of all nationalities, of all ranks, but who
copied one another in their dress, devoid of style or
meaning, with a complete disdain of any difference of
type. It is one of the achievements of this century that,
at any watering place, it is quite impossible to tell at first
sight whether you are at Ostend, at Trouville, or at Saint
Sebastian.

I entirely lost that note of strangeness the dancers had
given me in the morning. An effort was even necessary
to remind myself that, in those distant mountains, there
still exists the remnants of a people who guards, with the
secret of its origin, the faith and traditions and language
of its ancestors. However, two guitarists approached me,
a blind old man and a young girl, who had come from
Spain to beg for pence during the festivities. And the
moment I heard their music, a soft music almost drowned
by the noise of the wind from the sea, and the confused
murmur from the town, a veil began to fall — to fall on all
the modern trivialities. They struck up an old " Mal-
guenia." One of the guitars played the air; it was like
a song of Arabia, a moan spreading over desert plains.
The other accompanied in little short and trembling notes
that imitated the croaking of grasshoppers in deserts of
scorching sand. It seemed to speak of sorrows born by
souls in other ages, in Andalusia, at the heavy hour of
noon, when the Moors were in possession. . . In the
indefinable nature of this music, in the mystery of its
rhythm, the peculiar genius of the race will be preserved
for centuries still to come, in spite of the universal fusion
of men and things.

90 <THE SWORD DANCE.

At last, on the stroke of four, the young mountaineers
of Guipuzcoa, who had come to dance, appeared in the
court of the convent where the crowd had been assembled
for some time on several hundred chairs.

One held an immense silk standard, the others naked
swords. Unconcerned, and solemn in appearance as their
brothers of Soule this morning, they mounted the plat
form that had been prepared for them.

They wore red caps, were all in their shirt sleeves, and
tieless, in the Basque fashion ; their trousers were white
under an open waistcoat, with the traditional leather orna
ments on their calves: straps of leather studded with small
bells that would jingle in a moment with a barbaric sound
as they danced.

The decorated platform certainly looked rather like a
theatre at a fair, in spite of a simplicity almost naif in its
directness. To appreciate them fully it was necessary to
put aside any such comparison, and to forget equally the
modern crowd and a thousand ridiculous little details — in
fact the general surroundings.

Moreover, they themselves appeared quite unconscious
of their audience. It seems that on the previous day they
had replied to the director of a neighbouring Casino, who
wished to engage them for the evening, " No, we are
Basques who dance in the open air before Basques, the
dances of our country, that the traditions of them may be
prolonged. We are not folk who take money to show
ourselves off."

They were tall, supple, strong men, quite as much at
their ease before this crowd of bathers as in their own vil
lage, when it is a question of dancing among themselves,

THE SWORD DANCE. 91

on Sundays, in the open places before the churches. At
first they knelt down together with heads bent low towards
the earth in a magnificent salute to their standard ; the
bearer himself, kneeling in the centre of the motionless
group, began slowly to brandish the pole, with supple
movements in such a way as to cause the folds of silk to
fly like great agitated wings above their heads. Then
they all rose, grandly tall, and the dance commenced to
the sound of a warlike march played on fife and tam
bourine. The step was singularly complicated, varied
from time to time by tremendous bounds that shook the
little bells about them, and rattled the leather straps
against their calves. There was a brandishing of rapiers
in time to music, quick thrusts and parrying — a simulta
neous meeting of all the swords with the clash of steel. It
recalled some scene in antiquity — one of those warlike
dances in which the young men of Greece delighted.

Many other dances followed on this same platform, all
very ancient, some dating back incalculable ages, so remote
is the origin of these people. They performed the ancient
pastoral of Abraham, played by " young boys from the
community of Barcus — in which angels and demons figure
by the side of the patriarch, nay even Chodorlahomor,
King of Sodom."

Later, when it had grown dark, they began again in
the public Square, this time without a platform, in the
very midst of the crowd. The sword dance appeared
peculiarly noble and barbaric in the glimmer of lanterns
under a moonlit sky. And then at the end a general fan-

92 THE SWORD DANCE.

dango took place — everyone, girls and boys in a mad whirl
of intoxicating pleasure.

For a whole week the traditional Basque festivities suc
ceeded one another at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, all the old dances,
the diverse games of tennis ; improvisations by inspired
shepherds, competitions in those strange cries of hilarity
called Irrintzina which make one shudder; songs and
sacred hymns in churches. And the performers of these
bear names whose consonants echo down to us from
primitive times, names such as Agestaran, Lizarraga,
Imbil, Olai'z, and Heguiaphal. . .

It all takes place amidst surroundings that become more
and more incongruous, before assemblies in which Beotiens
predominate, and is so out of vogue, so little characteristic
of the country now, alas ! that at moments it seems almost
lamentable in the midst of the foolishly smiling crowd.

Yet how touching, how worthy of sympathy and res
pect are these efforts at preservation, these religious revi
vals of past customs which those festivities represent !

Cathedral Impressions.

.URGOS, when the light wanes, at the
close of an April Sunday, in the splen
dour of Southern Spring, and in all the
golden red of the sunset.

The air is still and very soft, and as
the daylight fades, a joyless evening spreads
gradually over the old world city, isola
ted here in the country, decrepid and
dying on the banks of a meagre river
that has no communication with the life-bringing sea.
In the waning light it seems as if the oppression of this
superb name Burgos, evoking splendours of greater days,
weighs upon her Sunday streets, where the Spain of to
day, so insignificant beside the Spain of former times,
perambulates in its fine modern clothes.

The Cathedral, the very celebrated cathedral, at once
comes into sight : above the houses appear points that rise
high into the golden air, points and arrows miraculously
carved, so frail in their exquisite tracery, like paper lace-
work, almost, that the wind must blow away— and for

94 CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS.

centuries they have been there, immovable. At this hour
they flame red, caught by the sinking sun that in a moment
will colour them alone, leaving the little street in dark
ness, whence gradually the Sunday crowd will disappear
into the obscure dwellings.

The very heart of the town is the cathedral's throne. I
am conducted there through a labyrinth of old houses as
quickly as possible, as I am leaving at nightfall. Here it is.
Great walls pierced by Gothic ogives, flights of steps,
sumptuous porticoes where a world of statues, sculptured
in red stone, are ranged in rows, placed one above the
other. Then, majestic gates — and suddenly a twilight, a
sepulchral chill on one's shoulders, a sweet smell of incense
in a subteranean darkness : I have gained the inside, pene
trating a world of incredible magnificence, of solitude
gloomily enchanted. In front of me are dark receding
distances, traversed here and there by rainbow beams that
fall from some great window, whilst flagstones resound
under my feet in the silence, echoing as in a cave.

It is the cathedral, the legendary cathedral, the marvel
of olden times; more surprising than Milan, Strasburg or
Toledo. In its Sunday evening abandonment, the great
organs silent and the censers extinguished, it inspires
something of dread.

At first, the impression one gets, is that of entering a
petrified forest, of walking under huge trees. The columns,
the enormous trunks rise up entwined by what might be
ivy or moss, in fact, fine and wonderful sculpture. Above,
wherever these pillars spread out their branch-like arches,
masses of foliage cluster, a veritable leafage of stone, close
and thick, like a roof of high forest trees overhead, testi-

CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS. 95

fying to the patient work of a whole generation of men.
All carved in living stone, all infinitely durable in spite of
such rare delicacy, and already transmitted to us from afar
through the past centuries. Between enormous pillars, in
all directions, are giant gates in bronze and iron, thirty feet
high, prodigiously wrought, separating the great nave from
a multitude of secondary chapels still more inconceivably
magnificent, where the delicate leaves, the fairy-like
bowers, which there too rise to the vaulted roof, are no
longer of stone but of glittering gold.

A man, who is the guardian of all this wealth, opens
these heavy barriers of bronze or of iron, one after another,
with wrought keys that are as long as daggers ; the
banging of the gates, as they close behind us, resound
lingeringly under the vaulted roof.

It is too late, he says, to see everything; night is coming
on. He hastens me forward.

At first we were alone in this vast place, then four or
five mountain peasants arrive in old clothes, with a shrink
ing look, uncouth and miserable, who ask permission to
follow, and join themselves to us in a group. They peer
quite closely at the sumptuous things in the growing
dusk, touching the gold with their fingers, and moistening
the marbles with their breath.

We go into the choir which is full of inestimable
treasures. It is shut ofF in a kind of great bronze cage,
concealed by long draperies of brocade falling the whole
height of the nave ; candlesticks of embossed silver, that
measure five or six feet, are arranged before the high altar

96 CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS.

glistening with gold. Afterwards, into all the secondary
chapels, whose gates in opening, awake louder and more
lingering echoes in the growing darkness, their golden
traceries, imitating acanthus leaves and dainty chicory
plants, seen close at hand, are peopled by hundreds of
figures and animals. Then, hurrying on again, we are
shown the tombs of the saintly founders ; the man, who
conducts us, briskly raises the cloth of red and gold velvet
that covers their images of alabaster or of marble, their
white reclining statues. We pass through a labyrinth of
cloisters full of souvenirs and relics ; the doors are fastened
by strange locks representing human faces, the key fitting
into mouths that grin. And at last back to the immense
nave again, nearly dark now, re-entering unexpectedly by a
small door.

There is no sense of religious peace in the place; on the
contrary, only a feeling of magnificence that is implacable
and overpowering ; no, not even calm, in spite of the
dusk and the silence ; not even the restful unity to be
found in certain Japanese sanctuaries of the Holy Moun
tain, which, together with this one, are the most splendid
temples to the Gods still unmolested by time. In this
extravagant excess of wealth one is conscious of something
wrong, of something intensely human and almost sensual.
A prodigious past is evoked : the Spain of the great
period, abounding in power and in gold ; but the peace,
the sweet peace of so many other Christian Churches is
wholly absent here.

I have experienced, before now, that to see things for
the first time by stealth, in the evening, in the fever of a
hurried visit, is the way to receive a complete, definite

CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS. 97

and just impression of them. It happened once, sometime
ago now, that having paid my first visit to the Acropolis at
Athens in the middle of the night, in the course of a few
minutes, at the price of many difficulties, and at the risk
of missing my ship, I remember that I caught a vivid
glimpse of its ancient splendour, in a way that I have
never since experienced. Thus with Burgos, I feel I
would rather not come again to weaken and dwarf my im
pressions of the whole, merely for the sake of seeing some
incomparable details I might undoubtedly discover.

We are going out.

Two small lights burn like Tom Thumb tapers in the
far distance of the nave, and near them a dark kneeling
form becomes visible. Let us see what it is ; let us ap
proach very quietly over the resounding flagstones, in order
not to disturb this praying phantom. Two wax tapers,
such modest tapers, are burning before a picture of the
Virgin, which hangs in a neglected corner, in an unim
portant niche behind one of the great pillars, yet is sump
tuous enough in its frame of old gold.

A woman dressed in black, with a mantilla of mourning
on her head, is prostrate before it. She holds a miserable
baby at her breast, a child but a few months old, in whose
shrivelled little face there is already the stamp of death.
She prays ardently for him as the wax of the tapers gradu
ally diminishes, the penny tapers she has placed before the
humblest picture she could find, this sorrowing creature.
The contrast between the prodigious wealth all round and
the rags of the supplicant is overwhelming and cruel : be-

98 CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS.

tween the persistent durability of those many thousand
saints draped in gold and the frailty of this little being
with no to-morrow, brought to them all wrapt up in rags,
and timidly presented before them that they may take pity
on him, destined surely to return soon to mother earth.

She is already decrepid, this woman whose attitude sug
gests such boundless distress, a grandmother perhaps, dis
puting with death for the child of a dead daughter, or
perhaps a mother, who, at an advanced age, has conceived
a child that is not likely to live.

With infinite tenderness she holds and covers up the
poor little human thing that owes its failure, its miserable
state to some unknown chance ; she draws a black hand
kerchief over the piteous face that seems to express already
some future suffering, and wraps a shawl about the thin
body no bigger than a doll's, to protect it from the sepul
chral damp that is falling on it from the vaulted roof.
Still she kneels, and her lips move in obstinate and vain
repetitions. Now she looks at me with eyes full of deso
lation, divining a pity no doubt in mine, seeming to ask
doesn't he look ill, my poor little one.

I turn away to elude her dumb question that tears at
my heart, and pretend to be interested in other things.
But the next moment, seeing that I remain there, she
raises her head towards me again, after a quick glance at
the splendour around. Evidently she is not quite con
vinced, and her eyes ask still more anxiously this time :
Do you really think that they will listen to me, these
magnificent divinities ?

God ! I do not know if they will listen. In her place
I would rather carry my child to one of those country

CATHEDRAL IMPRESSIONS. 99

chapels where the Virgin of simple folk reigns. The
Madonnas and Saints who inhabit this place are, more
than anything else, I think, creatures of ceremony, hard
ened by secular pomp. No, I cannot imagine that they
would occupy themselves with a poor old woman in tears,
and with her little deformed child who is dying.

The Passing of the Sultan.

am

HE window through which I
looking is in one of the Kiosks of the
Yeldiz Palace, the habitual resi
dence of His Majesty the Sultan.

And the window forms the frame
to a great scene that is very peculiar,
very unique, and that furnishes at
the very first glimpse a precise indi
cation of the time and place.

First, there is a Mosque, miraculously white in the-dust
and blazing June sun at mid-day, under a sky pale with
heat, quite a new and elegant Mosque, though built in the
pure old style, a Mosque suggesting the refinements of a
modern Islam, in this, not unlike our new Gothic churches
in which-archaic researches are allied to perfected methods;
almost too pretty with its high portico crowned by Arabian
trefoils, the fine carving of its windosw, the grace of its
minarets covered with ornaments like reversed stalactites,
and surmounted by a glittering crescent of gold.

In the immediate neighbourhood all is equally new, the

THE PASSING OF THE SULTAN. 101

ground sanded and naked, the trees young, the grass mown,
and baskets of flowers arranged with all the care usual in
princely residences.

Behind the white Mosque all in lace-work, that occu
pies the centre of the picture, and is the principal sub
ject, appear indistinctly the great marvels of former times.
In the distance — which, as the perspective indicates, we are
looking down upon from a height — stretches theBosphorus,
the silhouette of Asiatic Scutari ; then, that incomparable
thing, the point of the old Seraglio jutting out into the
water of Marmora, with minarets, cupolas and the cypresses
of Stamboul : all lightly sketched in grey blues, devoured
by the sunshine and the glare of the scintilating sea just
visible under a veil of luminous dust, and occupying little
space in the background, behind the lovely Mosque, like
the diminutive houses and palaces that nestle near the arms
and against the shoulders of the central figure in certain
pictures by old masters. It is so wonderful this point of
Stamboul with Saint Sophia and the old Seraglio, that
the very indication of its presence evokes in this modern
scene, recollections of the glorious past.

The interlacing roads, and alleys, and avenues that sur
round the Imperial Mosque, are full of soldiers on the
march, approaching one another to the sound of military
music, and gradually concentrating round the white per
forated walls of the sanctuary, where evidently some solem
nity is to take place. On all sides they are seen crossing
one another, and zigzagging as in some endless fairy defile
on the stage. Cavalry flags, black banners embroidered in
silver, the red ensigns of the lancers, pass and repass before
one another in a cloud of rising dust; the brass instruments

fHE PASSING OF

of the bands sparkle in the sun, as well as the high Cha-
peaus-chinois (military musical instruments) decorated with
horses' tails ; bells ring and flourishes resound, whilst the
air is filled with the peculiarly solemn tone of Turkish
trumpets. Still the soldiers continue to arrive, massing
themselves in a pre-arranged order, with a perfect preci
sion, and halting suddenly at their post. The nearest,
those who take their stand in serried ranks directly below
us, against the walls of the Kiosk, are Arnautes from the
north of the Empire, and Zouaves of Tripoli in green
turbans — splendid men, both in bearing and demeanour,
individually and in mass.

Now they are all there, not a movement among them,
every man wrapt in thought, for the holy hour of noon is
approaching, and soon the ceremony will take place in the
Mosque, for which they have all been assembled, the
" Selamlike," the great Friday prayer, at which the Sultan
will be present in person.

In the room here, there is no feeling of devout silence ;
diplomatists talk with the wives of ambassadors, or discuss
political questions together. Nor is there any in the
adjoining room, which is crowded with people, women
especially : tourists of different European nationalities to
whom, by request of the embassies, the Grand Master of
Ceremonies has given permission to come and see the
procession of the Selamlike. An aide-de-camp, the most
obliging Mehmed-Bey, in long flowing Circassian sleeves,
does the honours and shows the fair sight-seers to suit
able seats. Will his Majesty, who is to pass here under
these very windows, be on horseback or in a carriage ? A
question that greatly absorbs the spectators, and that is

THE SULTAN. 103

impossible to answer. Generally, for this short transit of
two or three hundred yards between the Palace and the
Mosque, the Sultan finds it simpler to get into a carriage
while his chargers are led behind, in this case regrettable,
for his Majesty looks very fine on horseback, and besides,
answers better to our idea of a Khalif than when passing
in a landau like any western king.

The time draws near ; the marble steps of the Mosque
have just been hastily covered with the precious red carpet,
on which the Sultan is to place his feet, and on each side of
the door, strange Asiatic groups have ranged themselves ;
long robes, green and yellow and orange, stand out against
the snowy whiteness of the walls ; dark heads of solemn
aspect surmounted by large turbans: — priests deputed from
Mecca, from Bagdad, from far distant countries over which
the Khalif extends his religious empire, bringing with
them a charming touch of the fierce barbarity of ancient
times.

Along the sanded avenue, lined by the troops and kept
clear by a double row of soldiers, dignitaries of all sorts
begin to arrive on their way to the prayer, more especially
officers, generals, and marshalls, all the heads of the Turk
ish Army : — but they are scarcely noticed in the general
impatience to see the Sultan pass.

In an elegant closed carriage, the princesses of the
Imperial family sweep by, a cloud of muslin concealing
their dress and faces.

The sun blazes : in the white rooms, on the white
Mosque, in the distances blurred by scintillating reflections
and dust, everywhere a glare of light, whilst the presence
of these thousands of armed men massed together in silence,

104 THE PASSING OF

all but holding their breath, seems to augment the oppres
sive heat.

One by one the great personages invited to the prayer
continue to arrive on foot; the Imperial princes, the elders
with their aides-de-camp, the children in military cos
tume accompanied by their tutors. Irresistibly charming
is a beautiful boy in naval costume covered with crosses,
who walks superbly, and turns his delightful intelligent
face to the people as he passes. In the tourists' room,
where he is not known, women's heads, in flowery hats
like May gardens, lean from the window to look at him,
and ask : " Who is it ?" It is the little Prince Burhan-
Eddine, his Majesty's youngest son.

Mid-day approaches. Everyone looks towards the
Palace. Watches are consulted — travellers' watches that
never agree, being regulated to all the different European
times. Through the troops, who rouse themselves and
stand erect, there runs a perceptible movement that
announces the approach of the sovereign. Amidst the
clashing of brass instruments the bands play the Imperial
Anthem. And up in the aerial gallery of the white min
aret, under the golden crescent, the mezzin has just appeared,
very small against the sky in the blazing sun. The mez
zin who is to chant the holy prayer.

Twelve o'clock ! Suddenly the music ceases, halts in
the middle of a phrase, an unexpected silence falls as
though under the oppression of something rather awful.
The troops stiffen themselves to a panting immobility.
Then the three cries, Allah ! Allah ! Allah ! rising simul
taneously from the powerful chests of five thousand soldiers,
rend the hot motionless air.

THE SULTAN. 105

And in the silence that falls again, after the great out
burst, the sovereign passes.

He is in a carriage, with Osman Pacha the illustrious
hero of Plevna in front of him, and passes quickly, as every
head bends.

And from aloft, under the blazing sky, the chant of the
mezzin falls, the oriental call, the secular call : this mar
vellous voice, chosen from among all voices, dominates the
noise below, covers the military commands and the vague
murmuring of so many thousand men. It is fresh, flexible
and infinite, something strange, too, in its melancholy
hautboy tones. The quick plaintive fugues rise and fall
above the human heads, throwing the mystic feeling of
Islam, even over the unbelieving strangers assembled there
for this unusual sight.

The Khalif, who has descended from his landau, mounts
the marble stairs on the red carpet. The oriental dresses
and sombre turbans, that were grouped upon the steps,
prostrate themselves to the ground. The last notes of the
heavenly voice grown plaintive, die on the air — and it is
over. The Khalif has passed. Everyone begins to breathe
and speak freely again after the religious hush, and con
versations are resumed among the cosmopolitan groups in
the Kiosk, whilst the beautiful white chargers harnessed
in gold are led away.

The moment has been short, but nevertheless, one has
felt again with a thrill amid splendid scenic effects, the
sweeping past of one of those special beings called Em
perors or Kings, in whom great nations are personified.

The Passing of the Queen.

CTUALLY I live in France, but
on a kind of projecting balcony
that overlooks Spain. As the
windows and terraces of my little
home are almost washed by the
Bidassoa, I can see and hear all
that passes on the opposite shore,
which is not in France.

To-day, a lovely day in the

height of summer-time, there is suddenly an unexpected
commotion among the bells over there : the Church of
Fontarabia, the Church of Irun, the monasteries, all peal
and peal as for some great festival. Then a large national
flag, red with a band of yellow, rises quickly above the
Castle of Jeanne-la-Folle, brilliant against the brown,
sombre mountains, and the French boats put off hurriedly
for Fontarabia, taking people from here evidently to see
some sight,

" What is it ?" I ask a boatman from my window.
" It's the Queen — the Queen of Spain. We are going
to see her pass !"

THE PASSING OF THE %VEEN. 107

Of course, I knew that every summer Her Majesty the
Queen Regent came from St. Sebastian to make a pil
grimage of several hours to old Fontarabia. Well, sup
posing I go too, and mix in the crowd of peasants and
fishermen to see the Queen pass. I hasten down and take
my place in a gay boat-load, in which a troop of young
girls and boys exchange merriments in the most ancient
and mysterious language in the world, with that full, light
roll of the r peculiar to Basque words.

Ten minutes on the Bidassoa that sweeps sluggishly
along under the brilliant southern sunlight, and we land
on the Spanish shore, on the deserted quai of Fontarabia.

The young girls say that it is already late : the Queen
will soon leave the Church and go away ; one must run.

By a familiar short cut we climb nimbly up between
houses built in the darkest middle ages, sinister and dead
under the burning sun, and we are soon in the wonderful
old street des Chevaliers^ close to the Church with its walls
like a fortress, magnificently emblazoned.

But we are late indeed — hardly in time to doff our caps
and open our sun-dazed eyes, before the Queen passes, very
quickly, in an open carriage drawn by mules at a galop
over the noisy paving stones. She has hardly appeared,
hardly been recognised, than she is driving rapidly away,
with the infant King at her side, who turns for a moment
to look at the Church with his deep young eyes. She is
quite simply dressed, this queen, according to the modern
custom that requires sovereigns to look as much as
possible like their subjects, yet so queenly in appearance,
in spite of her attempt at simplicity that in this particular
case, there could be no confusion.

io8 THE PASSING OF THE QUEEN.

I smile at the disappointment of my companions who

had hurried over from our France where there are no more

, kings, in the hope no doubt of admiring a golden dress.

(Really this strange levelling which sweeps everything

away — customs, traditions, dress, pomp and ceremonies —

strikes the imagination most forcibly here among the

Spanish surroundings of a past still intact, among the

grand old houses with their armorial bearings, and with

the sound everywhere of those very ancient bells pealing

in honour of the Queen.)

At the far end of me narrow old street, the Royal
carriage is already nearly out of sight, and the country
folk and the fishermen, grouped round the Church, are
slow to put on their caps, slow to raise their voices, as
if affected by some religious emotion. And yet they are
all Carlists by ancient enough tradition ; but one feels that
even to them the sovereign and mother who has just
passed, so unaffected and quiet in her simple dress, com
mands a sympathy and respect by the mere charm of her
presence.

The Moth.

NE cloudy evening, in my own par
ticular study, that resembles some cor
ner of the east, a gleam of light slips
through between the half-drawn cur
tains, forming a long line in the sur
rounding obscurity.

From the folds of my red velvet
wall hangings, gold embroideries
of archaic design, some tiny crea
ture makes its escape, as if drawn towards the dying
gleam of light, and once there, flutters impatiently about ;
a tiny grey moth hardly visible — a wisp of straw with
wings, that has doubtless just been hatched in this pale
renewing of the year.

\ A season ago, whilst I was sailing the Chinese seas, it
had surely been a horrible little worm, silently devouring
the fibre of the precious velvet, in the undisturbed security
of my deserted room.

And to-day an entirely new life intoxicated this atom,
the small place seemed huge to him, and this semi-dark
ness, light. This was its hour of youth, of exuberance, its

no THE MOTH.

hour of love, and the goal and crown of its whole inferior
larval existence.

Quicker and quicker in the delirium of life it flapped
its wings of silken dust to describe those fantastic little
curves.

In passing, I knocked it down with a thoughtless flip.
There on the ground, on the purple of an oriental carpet,
I saw its little battered body again, shaken with the flut-
terings of death, and out of pity, that it should not suffer
further, that it might return to its nothingness, I placed
my foot on its microscopic agony.

And then I paused to think a minute. What did this
remind me of? Something of the same kind, a similar
sort of agitation, a similar intoxicated flutter, had produced
in me a brief melancholy of the same nature, but more
acute.

Where had I seen it then ?

Yes, surely at Constantinople, one evening in April, on
the wooden bridge that joins Stamboul to Pera ! It was
the end of such a Spring day as this, when I was making
my way in the mist across a bridge. All the beggars that
haunt this spot were at their posts ; along the whole length
of the balustrade, their familiar figures were grouped, the
blind, the lame, and idiots covered with sores. Among
the rest was a miserable child, four or five years old per
haps, with shrivelled hands and sore eyes, who sat day by
day motionless upon some rags at the edge of the pave
ment, apathetic and slow as any caterpillar. Behind him
crouched his mother, an old woman showing the red
stumps of her two legs amputated at the knee.

People passed by, the busy and the idle, on horseback,

THE MOTH. in

and in carriages, men in red fezes, veiled beauties of the
harem, and, behind these crowds, Stamboul raised its domes
magnificently into the evening sky.

In a voice that was almost sweet, the woman without
legs called her little one to her, saying in Turkish : "Come
and put on your coat, Mahmoud ! Come quickly, for the
wind is turning cold."

He rose meekly and went. His coat was a little old
sordid Arabian cloak of a greyish colour with undecided
stripes, and of the oriental shape with a hood. His
mother handed him this rag, and he put out his tiny arms
ending in the deformed hands.

But, in a moment, before the second sleeve was on, he
escaped in a sudden fit of mischief, and began to run
wildly about, describing circles before the passers by, and
amusing himself by fluttering the sleeves of his Arabian
cloak like wings in the rising wind.

A little of that eternal youth so evanescent, a little of
the playful childishness of budding life that is common to
man and beasts, had chanced to wake in him. Among
his ancestors there must have been, as among everyone
else's, beings who were healthy, who knew the joy of
physical pleasure, the simple joy of being and of moving :
something then of those who had gone before lived again
furtively in his frail atrophied flesh.

I watched him in astonishment, having always known
him inactive : an infinite sadness possessed me at the sight
of his poor little ephemeral attempt at gaiety, his playful
sport, the fluttering of his grey cloak in the cold wind
and waning light.

His crippled mother became anxious, fearing the horses

ii2 THE MOTH.

and carriages : she called him, and grew angry, trying to
drag herself towards him to catch him. But still he
whirled in amongst the indifferent groups as they passed,
whirled distractedly, like the grey moths of the evening.

He came back however and crouched down at his post
of misery, resuming the dejected attitude, and did not
move again. It had ended, suddenly, as it had begun.

Something more cruel even than the flip given to the
moth had just crushed this already thoughtless little
creature : the uncertainty of its shelter and supper that
night ; the consciousness of being so miserable, so different
from others, of having dead hands, and of being a pariah.
His head was bent now, and he looked down on the
ground with a cunning evil expression, winking his eyes
the while.

The association in my mind between him and the moth
is even more intimate than I have been able to express.

Profanation.

HE grave-digger is in the garden,
and has come to inform the Com
mander that the holes are made ! "

This sinister sentence is addressed
to me by a young sailor with a fresh
bright voice, speaking with a Gas
con accent.

A Spring morning, a wondrous
morning in May, beams on the
Basque country. And there is so much fresh life every
where, so much joy in the air, so much rising sap in the
green plants, that death seems a dark improbable dream.
Yet, at the gate of my garden so full of roses, there stands
the old man just announced — the grave-digger with earth-
soiled hands.

It concerns those poor young Breton sailors, youths of
twenty, drowned four years ago in the breakers of the
Bidassoa, who are to be exhumed to-day. The ceme-
tary where they rested has become too small, too full of
the dead — they must be roused and moved. The crew of

n4 PROFANATION.

their ship, of which I am now in command, has just bought
for them a freehold piece of ground where they are all to
be laid together. And, as their relations are far away, the
care devolves on me of superintending this change of rest
ing-place.

The holes are made. It is time I should go. Fol
lowing the old remover of the dead, I take the path
bordered with daisies and veronicas and wild germander,
that leads to the enclosure of perfect peace.

From the top of a hill bordering the Bidassoa, the ceme
tery overlooks great luminous depths of sea, expanses of
water and mountains together, in all conceivable blues,
from the very pale to deep intense indigos. The air,
which is peculiarly soft to breathe, is full of the scent of
hawthorn and lilies. The cemetery is all in bloom, like a
private garden where everything grows in profusion ;
white lilies and old-fashioned flowers raise their long stalks
here and there above the tombs ; pinks are massed in
borders, or spread out in carpets ; Easter daisies as bou
quets in formal rows ; and, above all, quantities of Bengal
roses in luxuriant flower, masses of pink, outlined deli
cately against the distant blue. Surely southern May has
thrown an exquisite raiment about this spot, and the
weather to-day is exceptional, even here in the south,
clearest of the clear, and mild without being oppressive,
almost still, with an occasional waft of breeze that passes
impregnated with life. In vain has one experienced the
illusions of these spring days, one allows oneself to be taken
in by them again and again, as one ever will do until old
age. One gives oneself up to an intoxication of living, of
wellbeing, that seems as if it could never come to an end,

PROFANATION. 115

any more than this festival of light and youth that per
meates the world this morning, immense, gleaming and
soft.

The earth has been dug out, till the rotten planks of
of the coffins are laid bare ; at this they have stopped,
in accordance with my orders ; they wait for me before
raising the awful lids.

Well, let us begin with Tvon Gaeto, 22 years of age, top
man, whose name is written in white letters on a meagre
little cross of black wood overturned among the pinks and
the daisies.

The old grave-digger descends till he disappears between
the walls of the freshly-opened grave ; another man, his
mate, remains above on the brink, waiting attentively.

One stroke of the mattock, and the planks yield and
crumble, and amidst a rich soil darker than the rest, hide
ous remains are brought to light. The grave-digger pulls
at something long and blackish : a leg that breaks at the
knee and remains in his hand :

" Here," says he to the man above, " they are too far
gone ; we must take them bit by bit ; run home quickly
and fetch the basket!"

And bending over his work, he scratches about with
his nails, picking up the toes one by one, and placing
them in a little heap, as if for a game of knuckle-bones.

" I should not have thought they would have been so
far gone," he continues, " though they do go more quickly
on this side of the cemetery."

Indeed nothing remains but the bones that hardly hold
together.

The May sun pours down into this grave as brightly as

ii6 PROFANATION.

on the neighbouring flowers, pours down upon these long
buried bones that one would imagine were of a shadowy
world, made to move only in the darkness of night, and
that one is surprised to find visible in the daylight, so in
ertly still. The horror one waited for is less of a fact — they
differ so little, these bones, from the earth around, whence
the roses draw their life.

The osier basket is brought, and the remains are heaped
into it. The digger proceeds methodically, working by
degrees towards the head of the dead man. Having found
the legs, and carefully counted all the toes, he now dis
covers the larger bones of the trunk entwined by numer
ous white filaments of some vigorous root.

Still higher up, more horrible than all the rest, is the
chest : between the reddish circles that are actually the
ribs, is a mass of rottenness, an accumulation of worms.
Then, in spite of the smiling sun, in spite of the deluding
flowers, a shudder of revolt and of horror passes over us,
and even the old man straightens and hesitates.

He makes up his mind at last, however, joins his hands
and cleans out the thorax as with a spoon. He is right
after all — it is nothing but inoffensive matter, nourishing
to those roots, even now almost mould, and that will
pass into the branches of the rose trees when next they
spring up.

Again, and this time more definitely, the horror of it
leaves us ; the revolt, the disgust, gives place to a certain
grave resignation, and I feel that I too, if needs be, could
dare touch such remains as these, at some rural work of cul
tivation or in the performance of a pious duty. Coming
thus, in broad daylight, upon the mystery of subterranean

PROFANATION. 117

transformations, to see that a corpse is nothing but this, that
at the end of three or four years it is so little human, so akin
to the soil and to the stones, has after all something of a
tranquilizing effect. It helps one to understand the last
wish of certain thinkers, of Alphonse Karr amongst others,
to be buried between thin planks — hardly solid, that they
might the sooner return to the earth.

Meanwhile they have rilled up the basket ; some frag
ments of the sailor's shirt, still recognisable, and his tie,
almost intact, have been thrown into it.

Now the man thrusts in a piece of the coffin, and I ask
him :

" Why this bit of wood ? "

" Oh ! " he answers, " for what's stuck to it. Look,
it's part of him — his worms," and he turns the plank over
to show me a mass of larvae clinging to it underneath.

The sun rises brilliantly in the blue heavens. The hour
of noon advances in a calm splendour. From the soil
rises a scent of mint, of burnt grass, that will overpower
the perfume of all the flowers, of the roses and pinks and
gilly-flowers, until the cool of evening. The air seems
full of joy ; life scatters its thousand forces, and the spring
smiles everywhere. Far below, the glistening surface of
the sea has covered itself with innumerable little white
sails : the whole flotilla of the Fontarabian fishermen sail
ing gaily out into the open sea in a light breeze. Perched
on the walls of the enclosure are little children peering
down to see what we are doing, and close to us, two young
girls, with Basque handkerchiefs on their heads, quietly
watch the piled-up basket.

The old grave-digger continues to search with his fingers.

1 1 8 PR OFANATION.

" Oh ! " he exclaims, " look, they are quite right in
saying that the corpse always falls to the same side, the
head to the left — here is the head ; look which way it is
turned ! Oh ! his teeth, how white they are — like milk ! "

He picks up the head, raising it dripping and red from
the grave into the glare of the sunlight.

"Just look at these teeth, how fine they are. By our
Lady, so young too — children like that, and such beautiful
children as they were !"

Then turning to the two handsome girls who do not
seem in the least impressed, having been watching from
mere curiosity, he says :

" I know of more than one girl in the country who
wept on the day of their death, I can tell you ! At their
burial — I can remember it as though it were yesterday —
I bet there were more than three hundred people — Ah !
the hair now ; see, here is the hair !

And on the heap of remains he puts some light bits
that look like pale tow,

Meanwhile the basket at the edge of the grave is brim
ming over, and a mass of black rottenness slips off and
falls upon the old grave-digger, on to his neck and down
the inside of his shirt.

" Oh ! " he murmurs, a little disconcerted, and shakes
himself, " I should have preferred him to fall on me, when
he was alive. However, it will not kill I am thinking ! "

The painful task goes on. Three of the bodies have
been dispatched by bits ; we are at the fourth, Jean Ker-
gos, steersman. Near his leg, at the height where his
trouser-pocket might have been, the old man finds a little
black thing which he puts down at my feet : a leather

PROFANATION. 119

purse, with a metal clasp. The poor fellow, not washed
ashore till days after the wreck, was no doubt placed in
the coffin as he was.

I have the purse opened. It contains some pieces of
silver, some Spanish pence, and some sailor's buttons with
needles to sew them on. The lad was careful evidently,
one who liked to keep his sailor's clothes in good order.
Well, give him back his purse and sewing materials ; let
them be in the basket with the rest, with his bones and
the remains of his flesh. Let us only keep the pieces of
silver — he has perhaps some old poverty-stricken mother
to whom this last legacy might furnish bread.

When the basket has been rilled for the last time, and
they carry it away along the green paths over which wild
roses trail, I leave the empty graves, and follow. The birds
about are singing, and bees hum in the still warm air,
fresh withal. I have never seen a more charming day,
nor more enchanting weather, nor the spring more full of
sweet deluding promises^ And the sense of unexpected
peace deepens in me, peace from the physical fear of death,
from the horror of cemeteries — a resignation to this
prompt decay in the earth where the friendly roots pene
trate and transform everythingj

We come to the single grave that has been prepared to
receive them together. Down, into a large case of white
wood where the mixed remains of the others are already
accumulated, they throw the contents of this fourth basket.
Then all that sense of peacefulness goes. The contempla
tion is awful of all this mass of red bones, of rags of sailor's
clothes, of black rottenness and of worms, which was
once four young men, four fine sailors. Some reddish balls

1 20 PR OFANATION.

— the skulls — stand out in the nameless heap, the head of
one between the shin bones of the other in hideous pro
miscuity, in ridiculous and pitiable disorder.

With some feeling of anxiety I ask myself if we have
not, in our pious endeavours, committed the most odious
of profanations. Oh ! if we could only leave the bodies in
peace, there where they are laid — not open tombs — not
lay hands on the naked bones !

/The Orientals encumber their towns with cemeteries,
rather than violate a sepulchre ; they divert a road rather
than disturb the humblest of the dead. But we — we are
far away from such delicate respect ! ]

For those at Sea.

ERHAPS in former days I may have
turned a small current of sympathy and
of charity towards the heroic race of
sailors consecrated, from father to son,
to the Iceland fishing. Tears have
been shed over the Yanns and over the
iSylvestres, over the Gauds and the old
grandmother Moans ; who are in-
' numerable among these fisher folk.
At a time when the sea had made more orphans and
widows than usual, my unknown friends generously re
sponded to my appeal, and I had the immense joy of dis
tributing large alms at Paimpol.

And yet they are the happier, these Icelanders who die
like Yaun and like the crew of the Leopoldine in the
fulness of health and vigor, carried away suddenly by the
waves in the midst of a storm.

It is for the still more disinherited that I hold out my
hand to-day ; for those who are taken ill at sea during the
fishing season, on those distant frozen waters ; for those
who succumb there in awful agony, eternally tossed about

122 FOR THOSE AT SEA.

and wet on board uninhabitable boats, where everyone is
hopelessly ignorant of what should be done to cure them.
These brave fellows have not even the elementary succour
that the poorest highway wanderer is sure of finding in
the workhouses of France. The mortality through ill
nesses that are not tended is enormous every year, and it
is shocking to think that nothing has been done to lessen
it, though it were so easy !

A work has been started with this object. A society
has been formed to equip hospital boats to go to the Ice
landic seas, and in which invalids will be received — re
ceived and nearly always saved, for in general the slightest
care and the most ordinary remedies are sufficient to re
establish these robust constitutions.

But money is still wanted by this new society. It
should be given now, given to prevent the miserable death
of those distant sufferers : young and valiant fathers ot
families, or sons of widowed women or elder brothers, the
support of forsaken nests, or the longed-for of poor affi
anced brides in white caps.

Carmencita.

• WENTY years alas ! have passed
since then.

I was quite a young midshipman:
I looked like a child attached to the
•staff of the admiral who was in com
mand of the South Sea station.

I really do not remember who had
introduced me to this beloved Car
mencita. She lived at Valparaiso,

far from the quays and the ships, in a lovely quarter they
call the Almendral, her house, with iron-barred windows
according to the South American custom, situated in the
midst of a garden. She must have been about thirty-five
or thirty-six years old, the age when beauty wanes amongst
the Spanish women on this coast. To my youthful eyes
she seemed already a person of middle age, and indeed she
made no secret of her years, in spite of the elegant toilettes
that were sent her direct from Paris. " I am such an old
maid," she would say.

We were soon bound together by an intimate friendship

1 24 GARMENCITA.

in the purest sense of the word. I consecrated my even
ings to her, every hour I was spared from duty on board;
and every day, in a sweet maternal fashion, she made me
conjugate my Spanish verbs. Her fine face, a little yellow
and a little — -just a little — like parchment, was dominated
by wondrous eyes, so long that they seemed never to end,
with eyelashes that curled, and corners that, when she
smiled, turned up like those of a Chinese. I thought to
myself how pretty she must have been. Habitually silent,
she would speak in monosyllables, doing the rest with
quick flashes of facial expression — a pout or a glance, yet
she was witty enough at times, and something of the tease,
though quite without malice.

She was very clever at palmistry. I would let her hold
my hand for any length of time, in my eagerness to know
the future, having always some new question to put to her.

At her house, especially in the evening, as soon as it
grew dark, I would feel a sensation of distant exile, in spite
of the European hangings and furniture. Perhaps because
of that silent isolated quarter in which she lived, and the
thought of the long tramp that must be made through the
empty streets before reaching those animated quays ; and
of those two kilometres to be rowed in a boat, often on a
rough sea, in order to reach my ship before midnight, for
midshipmen on the Chilian coast had not the right to sleep
ashore nor even to outstay the hour of Cinderella. Her
garden, too, was foreign, yet there were shrubs with small
leaves and small flowers which grew there as well as in
temperate countries that have a winter, but they were all
new to me, and unknown : plants of the southern hemi
sphere subject to the cold of a winter the inverse of ours.

CARMENCITA. 125

One of her great means of charming was music. She
had wonderful fingers, and would play Listz in a wild
delightful manner, mingled with a certain exotic strange
ness. I would often ask her to play habaneras and sequi-
dlllos and all kinds of Spanish and Chilian dances. And
once, when she was playing one with a rhythm that seemed
new to me, I asked her what it was. " That ?" she said,
"A Sema Coueque. The dance of the country ; you really
didn't know it ?"

Later on, I was often to see this Sema Goueque, amongst
the pretty Cholas (half-castes of Spanish and Indian blend).
But just then I did not know it. " Oh !" she continued,
" very well we will dance it for you." She sent at once
for Juanita, Mercedes, and Pilar (fifteen to eighteen years
of age) her three nieces who lived at the end of the gar
den with their mother. When the dancers were in their
places, each with a raised arm holding a handkerchief in
her hand, she suddenly got up from the piano where she
was going to play this Sema Coueque'. " Oh," she exclaimed,
" you had better sing like the Cholas^ and I will do the
tambourine."

The girls sang as they swayed, and she with a changed
look — her eyes seemed almost Indian — beat on the reso
nant wood with her little dry hands, that surely had be
come sticks, marking the jerky pang! pang! pang! of the
Sema Coueque.

That the evening might be complete, they even served
mathe, a traditional South American infusion that one
drinks through a reed tube.

I did not take long to learn. And it became a habit
to end our evenings, when Pilar, Mercedes and Juanita

ia6 CARMENCITA.

always came in, with a " Suppose we dance Sema Coueque"
Once, on the eve of leaving Chili and of starting for Poly
nesia, I wanted her to dance herself:

" Oh !" she said, " such an old maid as I ! Really, Pilar,
can I possibly do what he asks ?"

" Monsieur," answered Pilar, " no one in Valparaiso
dances like Aunt Carmencita."

With a grace that was supple and light, she began to
dance. At first her slender figure swayed from the hips
which scarcely moved, shaken only by a slight rhythmic
motion. Then suddenly she started off, as if lifted up by
the strange cadence, and whirled round. Then for the
first time it seemed to me that she was young.

We saw each other again, ten months later on my
return from Oceania. A short and melancholy stay before
my departure for France — the long farewell. I found her
aged — especially after the young Tahitians whom I had
just left. In my absence her hair had become mixed with
silver threads, and one of her pretty teeth had been filled
with gold.

In the garden the austral plants were losing their leaves:
we were in April — the beginning of Autumn there.

We parted, promising to write to one another.

Then, in time, the letters grew scarce, and somehow at
last ceased. Twenty-three years is such an eternity !

My thoughts of the South Seas, of Valparaiso, of the
Almendral became more and more rare. She is old now,
I would say to myself, my poor Carmencita, bent perhaps
and grey haired.

And now, last night I dreamt of her, I saw the house
again at the Almendral, the old drawing-room in the grey

CARMENCITA. 127

twilight, Carmencita in an arm-chair, grown white and
decripid. I said, "Suppose we dance a Sema Coueque!"
With a sad gesture she showed me the old lady cloaks and
shawls in which she was wrapped up to the chin.

Then in my dream the hour suddenly struck when I
had to go back on board my frigate which was leaving.
It was already late. I had a long way to go through the
dark town, through the poor quarter where many Cholas,
mocking and laughing, were dancing the Sema Coueque ;
their bare arms, holding out the handkerchief, met at every
moment to bar my way and retard my progress. At last
the vision melted out into the silent night of nothingness,
as I reached the borders of a sombre sea where no one
danced any more.

This morning, when I awoke to real life again, I found
the memory of Carmencita very vivid, as invariably hap
pens when one has dreamt of anybody. It made me espe
cially melancholy to think of her faded beauty, and of her
figure that had now lost its grace. And it was for the first
time, after twenty-three years, like the rousing of some
tender emotion that lurks unconsciously at the root of all
friendship with women when they are beautiful or have
scarcely ceased to be so.

The Opposite Wall.

fIGHT at the end of a court, the three
lived together in a modest abode, the
mother and daughter and a maternal
relation (an aunt), already advanced in
years, whom they had just received
into their home.

The daughter was still quite young,
still in the ephemeral freshness of her
eighteen years — when they were ob
liged, through reverse of fortune, to shut themselves up in
the most retired corner of their ancestral home. The rest
of the beloved abode, all the bright side that looked on to
the street, must needs be let to desecrating strangers, who
changed the aspect of the old place and destroyed its asso
ciations.

An executive sale had despoiled them of the more luxu
rious furniture of the old days ; they arranged their new
little drawing-room with rather incongruous things: relics
of their ancestors, odds and ends collected from the lofts
and store-rooms of the house. But they had loved it at
once, this humble room, which now for years to come

THE OPPOSITE WALL. 129

was to unite all three around the same fire and the same
lamp in the winter evenings : a comfortable room with
a homely and cosy look, somewhat enclosed it is true, yet
without giving any impression of gloominess, for the win
dows, simply draped in muslin curtains, looked out on to a
sunny court, where low walls were decked with honey
suckle and roses.

Happy in this modest room, they were already begin
ning to forget the comfort and the luxury of former times,
when one day a communication was made to them which
caused the deepest consternation. The new owner was to
build two stories on to his abode ; a wall was to rise up
there before their windows, taking away the air and hiding
the sun.

And no way alas ! of averting this evil that struck home
more acutely than all the foregoing reverses of fortune.

To buy up the neighbour's house (an easy matter in the
days of their past prosperity) was not to be thought of
now ! There was nothing to be done, in their poverty,
but to bow the head.

So the wall began to spring up, layer by layer ; they
watched it rise with anguish, and a mournful silence
reigned in the little sitting-room that grew more gloomy
day by day, in proportion as the dark thing rose up. And
to think that it, growing ever higher, would soon replace
the depths of blue sky, or the golden clouds against which
the low wall stood out in relief with its covering of
branches !

In a month the masons had finished their work: a

130 THE OPPOSITE WALL.

smooth surface of hewn stone painted a greyish-white,
very much like a November sky, perpetually opaque,
monotonous and dead ; and in the summers that followed,
the rose trees and the shrubs of the court became etiolated
in its shadow.

The hot June and July sun still penetrated the sitting-
room, though more tardily in the morning, disappearing
quickly in the evening ; the dusks of late autumn fell an
hour earlier, followed at once by a pervading grey gloom.

And time passed : the months and seasons went by. As
the light waned in the nondescript hours of the evening
when one by one the three women put down their em
broidery or their sewing before lighting the lamp, the
young girl — who would soon have ceased to be young
— always raised her eyes towards that wall, which stood
there instead of the sky of former days ; and with a kind
of childish melancholy, that came upon her constantly like
the mania of a prisoner, she would amuse herself by look
ing, from a certain place, at the branches of the rose trees
and the tops of the shrubs against the grey background of
painted stones, and by trying to imagine that this back
ground was a sky, a sky rather lower and nearer than the
real one, as the kind that weighs down upon the distorted
visions of a dream at night.

They had the hope of inheriting some money, and often
spoke of it, round the lighted lamp at their work-table, as
of a fairy tale, so far away did it seem.

THE OPPOSITE WALL. 131

But when they should have it — this American succes
sion — at no matter what price, they would buy the neigh
bour's house in order to pull down all the new part, to
re-establish things as they were in the old times, and to
give back to their court, to their dear roses the sun of
former days. To throw down this wall had become their
one terrestrial desire, the one thought continually in their
minds.

And the old aunt would say :

" My dear children, God grant that I may live long
enough to see that happy day !"

It was long in coming, this inheritance of theirs.

The rain in time had made black stripes on the smooth
surface, sad to see, forming a kind of V, or the blurred
outline of a bird hovering. And the young girl gazed on
it for a long time every day, every day.

Once, in a very hot Spring when, in spite of the sha
dow of the wall, the roses had bloomed earlier and more
profusely than usual, a young man appeared at this end of
the court and for several evenings sat at the table with these
three ladies of meagre fortunes. He was passing through
the town, and had brought introductions from mutual
friends, not without a thought of marriage. He was good
looking, with a proud face bronzed by the great sea breezes.

But he thought the inheritance too chimerical. She
was not rich enough, this young girl, whose cheeks were
moreover, beginning to grow pale for want of light.

1 32 THE OPPOSITE WALL.

He departed to return no more, he, who had repre
sented, for a time, sun and strength and life. And she, who
had already considered herself his betrothed, felt at his
departure a sudden inward sense of death.

And the monotonous years continued their course like
impassable rivers ; five went by, ten, fifteen and even
twenty. The portionless girl lost her freshness little by
little — this freshness that was so useless and despised ; the
mother's hair turned white ; the old aunt became infirm,
with shaking head, an octogenarian in a faded armchair,
eternally seated in the same place, near the darkened win
dow, her venerable profile outlined against the foliage of
the court, below that background of smooth wall, where
unwonted marks in the shape of a bird, traced by the
slowly dripping rain, were becoming more accentuated.

In the presence of the wall, of the inexorable wall, they
all three grew old. And the rose trees and shrubs grew
old too, with the less sinister age of plants that seem to
grow young again each Spring.

" Oh ! my children, my poor children," the aunt still
continued to murmur in her cracked voice that no longer
finished the sentences, " if only I live long enough ."

And her bony hand pointed with a menacing gesture to
the oppressive stone thing.

She had been dead for ten months. They had wept
for her as for the dearest of grandmothers. Her absence
from the little sitting-room had left an unspeakable void

THE OPPOSITE WALL. 133

in the lives of these recluses, and then, the inheritance
came, came when they were no longer thinking of it, with
a shock at last.

The old maid — she had reached forty now — felt quite
young in the joy of possessing a fortune once more.

They would get rid of the tenants, of course, they would
reinstate themselves ; but from preference they would
generally occupy the little sitting-room of their humbler
days : in the first place it was now full of associations, and
then, it would regain its sunny cheerfulness as soon as
they had taken down the imprisoning wall that was now
nothing but a useless eyesore, easy enough to destroy with
a battery of golden sovereigns.

At last it took place, this pulling down of the wall.
For twenty mournful years they had desired its destruction.
Now, on an April day, with the first warm breezes and the
first long evenings, the thing was accomplished, quite
easily amidst the noise of falling stones and clouds of dust
and the singing of the workmen.

And towards the end of the second day, when all was
finished, when the labourers had gone, and silence reigned
again, they found themselves once more seated at their
table, mother and daughter, astonished at seeing so clearly
and having no need of the lamp to begin their evening
meal. As in a strange return to former days, they saw the
rose trees in their court once more against the sky. But
instead of the joy they had expected, they felt at first an
indefinable uneasiness : there was too much light, all at
once, in their little room, a sort of resplendent sadness,

OPPOSITE

and the sense of an unaccustomed void outside, of an im
mense change. No words came to them in the presence
of the accomplishment of their dream; each was absorbed;
a growing melancholy took hold of them, they remained
there without speaking, without touching the repast that
was served. Little by little, as their two hearts contracted
more, it grew into a veritable distress, like one of those
dark and hopeless regrets caused by death.

When at length the mother perceived that her daugh
ter's eyes were rilling with tears, and devined the unex
pressed thoughts that were surely the same as her own,
she said :

" It could be rebuilt. It seems to me that they could
try, could they not, to make it just the same ?"

" I was thinking of that too," answered the daughter.
" But no, you see ; it could never be the same!"

Heavens ! could it possibly be ? Had she indeed, she
herself decreed the annihilation of that familiar background,
the background before which, one spring, she had seen the
handsome face of a certain young man, and for so many
winters the venerated profile of the old aunt now dead.

And all at once, as she remembered the vague design in
the form of a shadowy bird, traced there by drops of rain,
and which she would never, never, never see again, her
heart was still more piteously torn ; she wept the bitterest
tears of her life over the irreparable destruction of that
wall.

An Old Missionary of Annam,

VER there, in the benighted yellow
country of the Far East, during the
war, our ship, a cumbrous ironclad,
was stationed for weeks at her block
ading post, in one of the bays along
the shore.

With the neighbouring land —
mountains of a miraculous green, or
rice-fields smooth like plains of velvet
—we rarely communicated. The inhabitants of the vil
lages and of the woods, kept aloof, suspicious or hostile.
An overwhelming heat fell upon us from a heavy sky that
was generally grey, veiled by a perpetual curtain of lead.
One morning, during my watch, the steersman on the
look out came and said to me : " There's a sampan, Cap
tain, coming from the end of the bay, and which looks as
though it were making for us."
" Oh ! and what is there in it ? "

Being uncertain, he looked through the glasses again,
before answering :

136 AN OLD MISSIONART

" There's a sort of ... bonze, Captain, a Chinaman,
I don't quite know what, who is seated all alone in the
stern."

Slowly and silently, the sampan approached over the
smooth water oily and hot. A young girl of yellow
complexion, dressed in black, stood rowing our ambiguous
visitor, who certainly wore the costume, the headdress
and the round eyeglasses of a priest of Annam, but who
had a beard and a strange face not in the least Asiatic.

He came on board and addressed me in French, speak
ing in a timid and glum way.

" I am a missionary," he said, " I come from Lorraine,
but I have lived for more than thirty years here, in a vil
lage about six hours inland, where they have all become
Christian. I wished to speak to the Commandant to ask
him for help. The rebels have threatened us, and are
already close upon us. It is certain that all my parish
ioners will be massacred if we do not get help at once ! "

Alas ! the Commandant was obliged to refuse the help
requested. All our men and guns had been sent else
where ; at that moment we had only just the necessary
number of sailors left to manage the ship ; really we could
do nothing for those poor " parishioners," and must leave
them to their fate.

The oppressive hour of noon approached, with its daily
torpor that suspends all life. The little boat and the
young girl had gone back to shore, and had just dis
appeared among the unhealthy verdure of the coast.

The missionary had remained, and was naturally a little
taciturn, though uncomplaining. The poor man was
hardly brilliant during the breakfast he shared with

OF ANN AM. 137

us. He had become so Annamite that all conversation
seemed impossible with him. After coffee, when the
cigarettes appeared, he grew a little more animated,
and asked for some French tobacco to fill his pipe ;
for twenty years, he said, such a pleasure had been
denied him. After which, excusing himself on the plea
of the long journey he had made, he fell asleep on the
cushions.

We should probably have to keep this unexpected
guest, whom the heavens had sent us, for several months,
till a reconciliation could be effected. I confess it was
without any enthusiasm that one of us went at last to
speak to him on the part of the Commandant.

"A room has been prepared for you, Father. It is un
necessary to say that you will be one of us until the day
when we can deposit you in a safe place."

He appeared not to understand.

" But — I was only waiting for night to ask you for a
little boat to take me back over there, to the end of the
bay. You can surely put me ashore before night, at
least ? " he continued anxiously.

" Ashore ! And what will you do ashore ? "

" I will return to my village," he said with a simplicity
that was quite sublime. " Oh ! I cannot sleep here, you
understand. Supposing the attack were to be to-night ! "

With each word he seemed to grow bigger, this soul
who had appeared so ordinary at first sight ; we began to
surround him with interested curiosity.

" Yet, you will be the last they will spare, Father ? "

" Oh ! yes, that is quite probable," he answered, calm
and splendid as an old martyr.

138 AN OLD MISSIONART OP ANN AM.

Ten of his parishoners awaited him on the shore, at
sunset ; together they would return at night to the threat-

red village, and then, God's will be done !
And when he was pressed to stay — for it would be
going to his death, to some atrocious Chinese death, if he
returned there after this refusal of help — he grew gently
indignant, obstinate, immovable, but with no grand
phrases, and with no anger.i

I " It was I who converted them, and you wish me to
abandon them when they are persecuted fpr their faith ?
But they are my children, you understand !| . . ."

Not a little moved, the officer on watch 'ordered one of
our boats to row him back, and we all went up to shake
hands when he left. Still unperturbed, quietly, grown once
more insignificant and silent, he entrusted us with a letter
to an old relative in Lorraine, took a small provision of
French tobacco, and started on his way.

As the day drew in, we stood for a long time silently
watching the outline of this apostle gliding over the hot,
oily sea into the distance, where he was going quite
simply to an obscure martyrdom.

We set sail the following week for I forget where, and
from that time forth, we were buffeted by events without
intermission. We never heard anything more of him,
and I think, for my part, I should never have thought of
him again, if Monseigneur Morel, the director of Catholic
Missions, had not begged me one day to write a little
Missionary Story.

Three Days War in Annam

i.

On Board.

August 1 7th, 1883.

HE whole Squadron is assembled in
the Bay of Tourane. An attack on
the forts and on the town is to be
made to-morrow.

No communication with land.
The day is spent in preparation.
The thermometer shows 33^5 in the
wind and in the shade. High
mountains surround the bay, recal
ling the Alps minus their snow. In the distance, on a
sandy promontory, one can see the town of Tourane : a
collection of low huts made of wood and of reeds.

On board we are busy equipping the companies that
are to disembark, giving to each man his ration, ammu
nition knapsack, gun-strap, etc., even making them try on
their shoes. The sailors are as merry as great children at

140 THREE DATS WAR

the thought of going on shore to-morrow, and the prepar
ations are carried on in absolute hilarity.

Yet, sunstrokes and fevers have already made many
ravages amongst them ; brave fellows, who quite lately
were brisk and strong, walk about with bowed head and
drawn yellow faces.

In the afternoon a small boat arrives from shore, with
some mandarins dressed in black, one of them shaded by
an immense white parasol. They go on board the flag
ship to confer, and then return as they came,

At five o'clock, a meeting and consultation of the cap
tains on board the Bayard. Storm and rain in torrents.

The sailors pass the evening in singing, more gaily than
usual. One even hears the shrill sound of the binlon (a
kind of bagpipe) that some Bretons have brought with
them.

Saturday, August i8th.

At nine o'clock in the morning, in superb weather, the
Squadron, Bayard^ Atalante^ Annamlte^ Chateau-Renaud,
Diac, Lynx, Vipere^ steams out in file from the Bay of
Tourane through a legion of fishermen's junks, that have
sails like the wings of butterflies, and makes its way to
wards Hue, the capital of Annam.

At twenty minutes past two, the Squadron arrives at
the mouth of the river Hue. In the foreground, a sandy
coast sparkling in the sun, green plumed cocoa-trees and
houses with arched Chinese roofs, and a solitary great
fort visible, guarding the entrance to the river, where the
sea breaks.

IN ANN AM. 141

The Squadron approaches with precaution, taking
soundings, and anchors as near as possible, hoisting the
French flags, and bringing the guns to bear in order to
commence the bombardment,

The fort replies bravely, hoisting the yellow flag of
Annam. It looks like a modern fort, well constructed
and protected by casemates, though there are no cannons
to be seen. Some persons appear at the embrasures, and
seem to lounge about and look calmly at us ; no doubt
their resistance will not be serious, we expect to see them
fly at the first gun-shot.

Above the brilliant line of the sands, the mountains
form a blurred back ground, rising high into the heavens,
sombre against the great luminous blue.

5.30 in the evening.

The first shell thrown by the Bayard gives the signal
to fire. It falls right on to the Annamite fort, raising a
red cloud of sand and of gravel. From every ship in the
Squadron a regular systematic bombardment begins, each
one aiming at the precise spot pointed out to her yester
day. Several minutes elapse, and nothing stirs on shore ;
apparently the Annamites have fled.

Then suddenly little rapid lights flash from the em
brasures of the fort, accompanied by white smoke ; it is
the reply : they are firing on us.

There are after all a great many cannons, little batteries,
that we did not see, arranged all along the coast in the
sand, and that keep up a constant firing.

But they are round balls that do not carry sufficiently
far to reach us. They fall half-way, making eddies in

142 THREE DATS WAR

the water. Only our advice boats, which have approached
nearer, could receive a chance hit or two — the ironclads
are too far off and watch them coming without fear ; we
can see them hit the water, rebound like a child's ball,
and then disappear.

Soon great red flames begin to rise behind the fort of
Thouane-An ; it is a fire caused by our shells, some vil
lages that are burning over there ; the fire gains ground
quickly, and rises high into the air with a thick smoke.

The bombardment continues. In spite of the rolling
that spoils our aim, shells pour down upon the Annam-
ites, capsizing everything ; but still they hold out and
precipitate their fire. Assuredly they are brave.

Seven o'clock in the evening.

It is almost dark ; the glare of the burning village
alone guides us in our aim. Thick clouds have gathered
on the mountains of Annam ; they form a huge black
background over which the lightning wanders ; down be
low, on the level of the sea, ever the rapid little flashes of
the cannons firing on us. A great yellow moon, which
rises amidst a confusion of clouds, sheds hardly any light;
one can no longer see anything at all. The Admiral gives
the signal to cease firing, and all is silent.

But the Annamites have responded up to the last, with
an unexpected force of resistance, and the flags of King
Tu-Duc still fly on the shore.

To-morrow morning, Sunday, at daybreak, we are to
attempt a landing by main force ; they have prepared the
bridges and rafts of bamboo, all the necessary apparatus.
The sailors are still carried away by a careless excitement ;

IN ANN AM. 143

but the more thoughtful are somewhat preoccupied by
the thought of this sudden attack by so few men, amidst
the breakers, on a coast protected by cannon and soldiers.
Seen close at hand, it appears less easy than it did yester
day, when talked over at Tourane.

Sunday, August I9th.

Hammocks up ! at four o'clock in the morning. The
companies who are to disembark quickly seize their arms,
their ammunition and their rations. Field-pieces and
quick firers are lowered into the boats.

Half-past five.

Counter-orders from the Admiral, the landing is defer
red. Some whalers belonging to the Squadron have been
to shore in the night to examine the breakers, which are
too dangerous to-day. Before sunrise the men are dis
armed, the landing apparatus stowed away, and, as though
nothing had happened, the great traditional Sunday wash
ing begins on all the ships.

At daybreak, the air is so clear that the minutest details
of everything on land can be distinguished, even far into
the distance.

Telescopes search the country up the river Hue : great
trees, green palms, and, from distance to distance, Anna-
mite flags, indicating forts and batteries. Nothing can be
seen of the town, where, it is said, the head of poor
Commandant Riviere is still exposed in the public place,
at the end of a pole.

Now there is a movement among the troops on the
sandy shore. People come out of the fort of Thouane-An

144 THREE DATS WAR

which we bombarded yesterday ; they are clothed in
black and wear great white Chinese hats, like mushrooms,
on their heads : their weapons glisten in the sun : they
are soldiers belonging to the regular army of King Tu-Duc.
They begin to cross the river on a ferry in order to con
centrate themselves opposite in a fort on the south bank.
The Bayard throws out shells ; the result is a panic, a fall
ing into the water ; they are seen running like madmen
on the sand. But the movement still goes on, and the
Annamite forts begin to answer us.

This morning, to our surprise, their projectiles reach
us, and whistle through the air with a noise similar to our
own. They have evidently been shot from rifled barrels.
They had none of these yesterday, and must have put
them up during the night.

A shot goes through the mast of the Vipere^ another in
dents the iron sheeting of the Bayard, and strikes a sailor
on the chest. Then, at a signal from the Admiral, the
general bombardment begins again.

There is no rolling to-day ; the perfectly aimed guns of
the Squadron bear full on the Annamite batteries, which
must be smashed. Each one of our shots raises a whirl
wind of sand and of stones. Their fire does not hold out
ten minutes. At the end of half-an-hour we cease ours,
as the land no longer replies.

It is eleven o'clock. This will be a day of rest for the
sailors, who have need of it ; on board, the well-known
whistle is given : " Men to hammocks, games allowed ! "
The batteries of the Squadron, dirtied by the powder, the
smoke, and the muddy water of the mops, have not their
usual aspect, their pleasant Sunday cleanliness ; but to-day

IN ANN AM. 145

they are swept by a goodly sea-breeze, not too hot and
very refreshing. Instead of taking their sacks, the sailors,
tired out by several days of excessive work and of long
watches, lie flat down on the boards and fall asleep. The
ships become as silent as great dormitories.

At eight o'clock in the evening, council of war on board
the Bayard. The breakers have greatly subsided : the
Annamite forts, twice bombarded, can no longer be in a
condition to offer a long resistance ; the disembarkation is
decided on for to-morrow morning, and the sailors retire
quickly to their hammocks in order to have a short time
for sleep before the call of " hammocks up," which is to
be sounded at four o'clock.

The officers of the landing corps are designated in ad
vance, according to certain fixed rules, relating to their
seniority and their duties on board ; those who have to
remain behind for the management of the ships, and the
service of the batteries, are accordingly prepared for the
deprivation, and accept it without a murmur.

For the sailors there is more liberty of choice ; many
topmen, who were not originally selected, have succeeded
to-day in substituting themselves for others less keen, and
are to go in their stead. It is a question, to-morrow morn
ing, of taking possession of the whole left bank of the
river Hue, which is the most seriously fortified portion of
the coast.

Independently of the little batteries erected here and
there on the sand, there is the great circular fort to the
south, which guards the entrance to the river with forty
embrasures for cannon ; then, the battery of the Rice
Magazine, and lastly, continuing in a north-westerly

146 THREE DATS WAR

direction, the fort furthest to the north. All more or less
injured by our shells, but no doubt repaired during the
night, and still capable of opening fire.

A splendid night. The ships of the Squadron sweep
the coast with great jets of electric light which must
somewhat frighten the Annamites. Meanwhile the French
whaling boats sound the entrance to the river and explore
the breakers on the shore.

Monday, August 2oth. Four o'clock, a.m.

"All hammocks up!" — Night is over. The landing
corps breakfasts hastily, arms itself, takes its ammunition
and two days' rations. A few hand-shakes, a few words
of advice exchanged between those who are going and
those remaining behind : then the boats are manned. All
the guns of the Squadron are pointed to the shore, ready
to open fire.

5.30 a.m.

At daybreak, the French flags are hoisted at the top of
every mast ; the uproar of bombardment begins again.
The land makes no response. The sand-hills form a white
line all along the horizon ; and high above, the violet
outline of the Annam mountains cuts into the brightening
sky.

5.50 a.m.

The whole flotilla of little boats gets under weigh.
The weather is very clear, absolutely calm. The sun
rises amongst little golden clouds. Day has broken sud
denly, as is the way in tropical countries. Every detail of
the mountains stands out accentuated in pink and blue.

IN ANN AM. 147

Above the sand-hills one can see the green cocoanut trees,
the batteries, the villages, the pagodas, the houses with
their -carved roofs. In all this nothing stirs, and our
shells seem to fall on a deserted country.

6. 20 a.m.

The companies, disembarked from the Bayard and the
Atalante^ reach the shore, and get wet through as they
begin to land amidst the breakers. There is a moment of
anxiety : from the ships of the Squadron, rows of Anna-
mite heads are plainly visible appearing above the sand
hills, though they cannot be seen by the sailors who are
landing ; these men are awaiting them there behind the
trenches. The Lynx, which is nearest to shore, greets
them with a volley of fire which appears to cut down
about twenty ; the rest conceal themselves.

The landing is effected close to the North fort, opposite
a village. Suddenly, from behind the sand-hills, there
comes a shower of flaming shells with a few projectiles
and pieces of iron. No one is wounded. The shells are
practically harmless, and fall softly on to the sand like
little meteors. The sailors make a rush for the sand-hills,
meet the Annamites in the trenches, fire upon them, then
charge them with bayonets. Instantly, the whole yellow
troop is in flight. A thousand men, perhaps, fly before a
handful of sailors. The Atalante company make a rush
on the North fort. Some Annamites come hurriedly out,
advance, fire without killing anyone, then draw back and
take to flight.

6.40 a.m.

The Atalante company is in the North fort. The
Annamite flag is lowered and the first French flag hoisted

148 THREE DATS WAR

in its place by Lieutenant Poidloiie, in command of the
company. The sailors pursue the Annamites towards the
north-west.

7.0 a.m.

The Artillery and the first group of Marine Infantry
have landed. The boats return for the second transport.
Another Annamite battery, established in the sand, opens
fire on the Vipere which replies. The shells have set
fire to the north village, that begins to blaze.

7.30 a.m.

The Annamite battery of the Rice Magazine opens
fire. The shells have caused another fire, a magnificent
one, this : village, pagoda, everything, burning with im
mense red flames and whirlwinds of smoke.

7.40 a.m.

The second detachment of Marine Infantry has landed;
all the Artillery is disembarked and mounted on the crest
of the sand-hills. The French troops mass themselves on
the shore, facing south, and prepare to march against the
great forts.

7.50 a.m.

A shell from the Squadron has set fire to the circular
fort to the south. All the French troops are massed ; the
Artillery opens fire on the forts. Towards the north,
every house is burning.

8.0 a.m.

The French troops divide and advance towards the
south.

8.35 a.m.

The first French detachments arrive, in small numbers,
at the Rice Magazine, and keep up a continuous firing.

IN ANN AM. 149

8.40 a.m.

They retreat a few steps and take shelter : the circular
fort is firing on them. The Squadron accelerates the
bombardment.

8.45 a.m.

The landing corps signals from shore to the Admiral's
ship (by means of flags hoisted on a pole) :

" Please, cease firing on the forts." The Admiral's ship
answers by signalling to the Squadron : " Cease fire ! "

8.50 a.m.

For a moment the hearts of those who watch from
on board stand still : the Annamites make a general sortie
from the Rice Magazine, and pour a rapid fire upon the
first French detachment which retreats and throws itself
down on the sand.

8,55 a.m.

They breathe again on board. All the French are on
their feet. Evidently no one is hurt for they all run ;
they run towards the Annamites without giving them
time to reload their guns. Moreover, reinforcements of
sailors and of soldiers of the Marine Artillery come up
from behind. The Annamites take to their heels, fly to
wards the south, and take refuge in a cluster of houses
over which their flag is flying. The French pursue them.

9.0 a.m.

From the Squadron, it is difficult to see what is happen
ing amongst the houses and the trees. Sharp fusilad-
ing is heard, and the flag of Annam falls. The French
continue to run forward towards the circular fort to the

150 THREE DATS WAR

south. The sun is rising high in the heavens, and the
heat becomes terrible.

9.5 a.m.

One can hear the French Artillery, which has reached
Thouane-An (the last village to the south) firing quite
close to the circular fort. The village of Thouane-An is
set alight by the first shot, and flares like a huge bonfire
of straw.

9.10 a.m.

Simultaneously from two sides, the French have en
tered the great circular fort which the Squadron's shells
have already filled with dead. The remaining Annamites
who had taken refuge there, make their escape, climbing
over the walls, like madmen : some take to the water,
others try to cross the river in boats, or by the ford, in
order to take refuge on the south bank. Those who are
in the water try naively to protect themselves with mats,
osier shields, or pieces of iron sheeting. The sailors, out
of pity, cease firing, and allow them to escape ; there will
be corpses enough in the fort to clear away this evening

Cefore they can get to rest.
The great yellow flag of Annam, that has been flying
)r two days, is lowered, and the French flag hoisted in
its place. All is at an end; the entire north bank is taken,
swept over and burnt. In a word, a glorious morning's
work, admirably carried out.

On the Annamites' side, about six hundred dead strew
the roads and the villages.

On our side, scarcely a dozen wounded, not one killed,
not one even seriously hurt.]

IN ANN AM. 151

9.15 a.m.

On board the Bayard, the flagship, the sailors are made
to man the rigging and shout : " Hurrah ! " — Every ship
of the squadron follows suit.

And then a general calm reigns. All retire to rest, at
any rate till the evening.

The troops on land signal for wine and for water which
are sent, and then they install themselves in the shade.

One was admirably placed on board for following from
above, as on a map, the movements of the attack. Now,
with telescopes, all the details could be distinguised, every
thing that passed, the very costumes, and attitudes of the
men.

A topman walks solemnly along the shore under a
great mandarin parasol.

A sailor, who is carrying a barrel, comes across an
Annamite feigning death on the sands, and shakes a finger
at him, as one does to a street urchin. The Annamite
humbly chin-chins to him, and kisses his feet, begging
for mercy.

The sailor has a kind heart and allows himself to be
softened.

But, look here, you'll have to carry my barrel.

He puts the thing on the man's shoulders and makes
him follow like a groom.

There is not a breath of air. The oppression of noon
falls on everything. The motionless sea reflects the heat
like a mirror. The line of sand-hills in the sun is of a
dazzling white ; two or three Annamite bodies lie on the
sand ; some sheep and pigs, frightened by the burning
villages, run over them ; a poor dog, who has evidently

152 7HREE DATS WAR IN ANNAM.

no master, rushes wildly to the right and to the left, as
though he had lost his head. Behind the sands, the
mountains of Annam fade away in a kind of hot haze,
and the blue of the heavens appears tarnished by the heat.

Nothing can be heard. But the villages are still burn
ing with long, red flames ; their smoke rises straight up
to an astonishing height, so still is the air ; in the midst
of all the dazzling blue, they look like gigantic black
columns.

Another slight cannonade towards three o'clock in the
evening. The Squadron has changed its moorings and
has taken up a position opposite the mouth of the river.
The Annamite forts on the south bank of the river fire on
Vipere and the Lynx which are moored quite close to the
bar, to be in readiness to cross it to-morrow morning.
The Squadron answers, and the firing ceases.

The night is absolutely calm. All along the coast can
be seen the glare of the Annamite villages, which burn in
the moonlight until morning.

Around these fires, many curious things must take
place. But they are far off, and from on board nothing
more can be seen.

II.

On Land : In the Camp of the Sailors of The
Atalante. Night of August 2Oth.

7 p.m.

Night already ! Near a small fire that is burning on
the ground, two officers of the Squadron are seated in
gilded armchairs of Asiatic form; — it is in the enclosure of
a fort, on the sand, amidst a wreck of broken pots, of rags
and fragments of all kinds.

Behind them is a tent that has been hurredly made with
the first things that came to hand : old sails, bits of yellow
flag or draperies of embroidered silk ; the whole supported
by lances, broken oars, sticks of bamboo, or standard poles
speckled with gold.

Sailors come and go in the darkness, marauding for
supper ; their footsteps make no noise on the sand, and
they do not talk at all; affected by the general silence that
seems to lie heavily on everything as the night falls.

These sumptuous details — the tent and the lances, the
gildings, in the midst of the havoc — assume in the night
a false air of grandeur. Vaguely it all makes one think
of events long past, the pillages and invasions of Ancient
Asia.

And the two officers, who are seated in their chairs of
state confide to one another this feeling that has come

154 THREE DATS

upon them, laughing at themselves as they talk of it,
making fun of the whole idea, as men do who are used to
incongruous situations, with the modern spirit that jokes
at everything. At heart, really, they have a feeling,
which they rather enjoy, of watching in some camp of
Attila's or of Tchengiz. And the comparison is a fair one,
for though the epoch is different, and the names too, the
events in themselves are similar.

Still it is impossible to carry on the conversation cheer
fully. Without knowing why they relapse into silence.
Their thoughts wander over the whole region, now in
darkness, that surrounds the low walls of the fort and is
strewn with the long-haired dead. Truly a peculiar look
is given to the bodies of the soldiers by those masses of
wiry hair.

In this silence and calm a thousand details come back
to one, a clearer conception of things is gained, and one is
beset suddenly by the horror of what had to be done.

Slowly, hour by hour, one goes through the whole suc
cession of that hard day's events.

First, the risky landing at dawn amongst the breakers
on the shore : the sailors, waist deep in water, shaken by
the waves, stumbling, wetting their ammunition and their
weapons. A bad beginning. Then the safe arrival of all
on the sands in spite of the shot and the shower of bombs
fired from above by invisible persons, hidden behind the
sandhills. Quickly they had begun to mount and run,
keeping dead silence. And then, suddenly, in a line of
trenches wonderfully laid, and apparently surrounding the
whole peninsula, they had come upon the watching enemy,
crouching like Saturnine rats in their sandholes : yellow

IN ANN AM. 155

men of extreme ugliness, lean, ragged, miserable, scantily
armed with lances and old rusty guns, and white lamp
shades on their heads. They had not looked like danger
ous enemies ; one dislodged them with the butt end of
the rifles or with bayonets.

Some had fled towards the north, dropping their provi
sions, their little baskets of rice, their portion of betel.
. . . And all this that had happened very, very quickly
— in a few seconds — floated through the mind now with
a lengthiness and precision of detail that was strange.

Then the superior officer in command of the landing
corps had given the order to the Atalante company to
climb to the end of the sandhill and take possession of the
fort on the right, over which floated the yellow flag of
Annam.

They climbed the hill at a run, somewhat in disorder ;
the sailors once started, went at it like children. Then
suddenly they had stopped, retreating a few steps. A new
trench filled with human heads ! All those faces had
risen up together, under a row of Chinese hats like lamp
shades ; their little eyes with turned-up corners looked
out with a false, ferocious expression, dilating with in
tense life, and paroxysms of rage and terror.

It was these they had seen from the Squadron, and had
watched anxiously through telescopes.

They were not in the least like the poor wretches of
the lower trench; they were fine, vigorous, thick-set men,
square military heads, the true Hun's head, with long hair
and small pointed Mongolian beards.

Correctly equipped, carrying their provision of bullets
in small baskets slung over the arm, like housewives going

156 fHREE DATS WAR

to market, they remained there, barring the road, wait
ing without moving or speaking : they were the regulars
of Annam, and they must have been brave to have held
out since yesterday under the terrible fire of the shells.

Badly armed, it is true; but it was impossible to judge of
that on first sight ; lances ornamented with tufts of red
cloth, large and terrible cutlasses set in hafts, and rifles on
which bayonets were fixed.

A moment's hesitation and fear amongst these great
excited children — our sailors — caused no doubt by surprise
at the sight of those yellow heads, of those strange physi
ognomies they had never seen, met there face to face,
emerging from their sandy hole.

It is a serious thing when such fright takes hold of one.
The men of Annam had straightened themselves still more,
as though ready to leave their holes. The moment be
came supreme. There were scarcely thirty who had
reached the top in the presence of all these yellow men ;
the rest were only half way up, too far off to support
them.

And, as it happened, in spite of their manly appearance
and their square figures, these sailors of the leading section
were very young, nearly all children of about twenty
years, Breton fishermen who had left their village last
Spring, and who had never seen an affair of the kind.
They had been told about traps, of the holes furnished
with points that the Chinese conceal for your steps ; they
had even been given knotted cords, and shown the trick
of these snares and how to escape from them. And they
remembered those things, and the head of Commandmant
Riviere stuck on the end of a spike, and the death of the

IN ANN AM. 157

tortured prisoners. Yes, they were really somewhat
afraid.

The ship's lieutenant in command of this company from
the Atalante had shouted " forward !" and had quickly
said all he could to encourage them. He had a plucky
second mate with him, Jean Louis Balcon, who had fought
in China and who, on his side, had done his utmost to
encourage the left wing by a quick, quaint seaman's har
angue. And the heads that watched from behind the
trench opened their little slanting eyes, hesitating still,
and wondering whether the moment had yet come to rush
upon these Frenchmen,

All this, which takes so long to tell, had not lasted two
minutes. But, from the Squadron, they had seen that
movement of hesitation too, and had watched it with
great anxiety.

At last, the sailors had been suddenly carried away,
whether by some more inspiriting word, or by a sense of
rage or of duty, I cannot tell. They threw themselves
headlong, with a shout, upon the men of Annam.

These latter had expected an attack of cold steel, hav
ing seen the glitter of the French bayonets. But no,
the muskets were loaded up, it was the fierce repeating
fire, the quick, devastating volley on volley of the kropa-
tschek that beat upon them like hail. They fell to the
ground, making the sand fly, and found voice then to cry out
in shrill tones ; they became mad with fear, and no longer
knew how to use their lances, stupified by the rapidity of
our firing. No, they had never imagined anything like
it : rifles more frightful and working more mysteri
ously than the cannons of yesterday ! Then they were

158 THREE DATS WAR

seized by that nameless terror of the incomprehensible,
the fatality of things, against which one feels that there is
nothing to be done, and the panic of defeat spread like
fire in a train of powder.

They fled shrieking, knocking each other over in their
narrow trench.

And the sailors, that little handful of men, fully excited
now by the smoke, by the sun, by the sight of blood, ran
in pursuit of them, up the sandhill.

In a few seconds they were at the top, before the fort.
Some soldiers, with heads like Huns, guarding it behind
the slope, had come out suddenly, like devils out of a box,
and had fired in their faces. By one of those extraordi
nary chances that favoured us that morning, they wounded
no one, and immediately fled in disorder, seized, too, by

(he contagion of fear.
Then the ship's lieutenant in command, still aided by
the second mate, Jean Louis Balcon, had torn down the
yellow flag of Annam, the black Mandarin flag, and
hoisted in their place the flag of France. This fort was
the culminating point of the peninsula ; the little French
flag was immediately seen from all around ; from the
shore and from the Squadron ; the sailors, who were just
then very excited, greeted it with shouts of joy. It was
the first to float on this land of Tu-Duc ; it was nothing,
and yet it was a great deal — a sign of hope, visible there
to the whole little troup of Frenchmen, and, for the others,
the presage of defeat)

From the top of this fort to which all the men of
the Atalante had rushed, one saw in the distance the
whole of the landing corps, the detachment from the

IN ANN AM. 159

Bayard, the artillery, the infantry of the marines, the
indigenous matas massing themselves on the sandhills to
begin their great uniform movement towards the forts on
the south. This could all be seen with a glance of
the eyes ; but it was more especially necessary to watch
those who had escaped from the trenches ; they were
hurrying down the other slope of the sand towards the
interior and the great lagoon, but might at any given
moment join forces again and return to the attack.

They had taken refuge on the left in a village which
was there, at the foot of the fort. A village smiling in
the sunshine with little white houses, speckled in the
Chinese fashion; beautiful exotic trees and gardens full of
flowers, and ancient pagodas whose walls were covered
with many-coloured crockery and whose roofs bristled
with monsters.

Oh ! the unhappy refugees ! A moment later, this
village was in flames. A shell from the Squadron had
fallen into the middle of it, right on to some straw-
thatched cottages. Walls of painted planks, thin laths of
bamboo, open-work partitions of Indian reed, the whole
caught fire almost simultaneously, the flames going so
quickly from house to house, one had not time to see
them pass.

In the fresh blue light of the morning these flames
looked extraordinarily red ; they gave no light, they were
dull like blood. One watched them writhe and mix and
hasten to consume everything ; the smoke, intensely black,
diffusing a strong musty stench. On the roofs of the
pagodas, among the devils, among all the outspread claws,
all the forked tails, all the darts, it seemed at first natural

160 THREE DATS WAR

enough to see the leaping tongues of fire. But these little
plaster monsters had begun to crackle and burst, throwing
to right and left their scales of blue porcelain, and the
crystal balls of their wicked eyes, then had sunk with the
rafters, into the gaping holes of the temples.

It became difficult to hold the sailors back; they wanted
to go down into the village, search under the trees, and
put an end to these men of Tu-Duc. An unnecessary dan
ger, for evidently the poor refugees would be forced to
leave it and fly elsewhere, half singed and completely
muted.

T During this time, towards the south, the combined
movement of the other French troops had been acceler
ated ; there, as here, the enemy was in flight, and, one
after another, the yellow flags of Annam fell The great
battery at the Rice Magazine was taken, the villages be
hind were burning with red flames and black smoke.
One was astonished to see all these fires, to see how
quickly and well everything was going, how the whole
country was in flames. One had no more conscience for
anything, and every feeling was absorbed in that astound
ing: fever for destruction.

r ^3

( After all, in the Far East, to destroy is the first rule of
warfare. Besides if you come with a little handful of men
to impose your law on a great country, the enterprise is
so adventurous, that it is necessary to excite terror, lest
you yourself should succumb. J

Now, into the midst of these sailors from the Atalante^
who had remained on the top of the sandhills, having
nothing more to do, an Annamite fort sent three well-
directed bullets, which by a rare chance ; traversed the

IN ANN AM. 161

different groups without touching any one, the sailors
hardly noticed them, so occupied were they in watch
ing the rout at their feet on the hot sands, which was
hastening to an end almost of itself.

In fact, they had not long to wait before the exodus of
Tu-Duc's soldiers, escaping from the burning village, took
place. Suddenly they were seen to emerge and collect on
the outskirts of the houses, hesitating still, tucking their
things well up in order to run the better, covering their
heads for fear of bullets, with bits of planks, with mats,
and osier shells — childish precautions, such as one would
take against a shower. And then they started off at
full speed. You could see some who were absolutely mad,
running blindly like wounded creatures ; they ran, this
race of terror, in zigzags and cross-wise, tucking their
things up to their hips in a comical way, their loosened
chignons, and long hair making them look like women.
Others jumped into the lagoon, covering their heads with
fragments of osier and of straw, and tried to swim to the
junks.

And in the smouldering village one saw burnt bodies
in little heaps on the 'ground. Some were still moving :
an arm, a leg stiffened itself out straight as it shrivelled,
or one heard horrible cries.

Hardly nine o'clock in the morning, and all appeared
to be over ; the detachment from the Bayard and the in
fantry had just taken the circular fort over there to the
South, containing more than a hundred cannon ; its great
yellow flag, the last, was on the ground, and on this side
as well, the panic-stricken soldiers had leapt into the waters
of the lagoons. In less than three hours the French

1 62 THREE DATS WAR

manoeuvres had been carried out with surprising precision
and success^ the defeat of the King of Annam was accom
plished.]

The noise of the artillery, the dry sound of the great
cannons had everywhere ceased; the ships of the Squadron
were no longer fireing, but floated tranquilly on the blue
water.

And then a crowd of men in white had swarmed up
the masts ; all the sailors on board had climbed into the
rigging, facing towards land, and, waving their hats,
shouted all together, " Hurrah." That was the end.

As noon approached the Atalante men had by degrees
set in order the little fort that they were to occupy until
the following day, by order of the Commander-in-Chief.
They were overcome by heat, by nervous excitement and
thirst. The red sandhills reflected the heat unbearably
under the sun which was at its zenith ; the dazzling light
fell perpendicularly, and the shadows, thrown by the men
standing, stopped short at their feet.

And this great country of Annam, that one could see on
the other side of the lagoon, seemed an Eden with its high
blue mountains, its cool wooded valleys. One thought of
that immense town of Hue, which was behind the screens
of verdure, scarcely defended now, and full of mysterious
treasures. Of course we should go there to-morrow, and
that would be the real affair.

The dinner hour had come, and all settled down as com
fortably as it was possible to a meagre campaign repast of
ship's rations. Fortunately, close at hand there was a
portable cabin belonging to a military mandarin who had
fled the day before: a vast cabin made of bamboo and

IN ANN AM. 163

reeds in fine and elegant trellis-work, extremely light.
It was brought up, with its cane benches, and its arm
chairs, and we sat down in it, well sheltered from the
burning sun.

Sad surprise : the wine ran short, in spite of express
orders from the Admiral and from the Captain of the
Atalante. It was incomprehensible. . . However, one
put a little more water in the canteens and dined very
merrily all the same.

The men had picked up lances, chaplets of sapeques
(Chinese money), and all sorts of garments. They had
wound round their hips beautiful strips of different coloured
materials. (Sailors always have a great liking for sashes).
They put on the airs of conquerors and strutted under
magnificent parasols, or played carelessly with fans as they
warded off the flies.

With this shelter from the sun and the rest, their
youthful heads grew cool again ; the excitement over,
they naively wondered how they could have been fighting
and taking life so short a time ago.

One of them, hearing the groan of a wounded man out
side, got up and made him drink the remainder of the wine
and water from his own canteen.

The fire in the village had slowly burnt itself out; just
a few little red flames were to be seen here and there
amongst the black ruins. Three or four houses only, had
not been burnt. Two pagodas were also left standing ;
another, nearest the fort, in burning out, had emitted a
sweet perfume of balm and of incense.

The sailors now all left their shelter of bamboos, and
though rather tired and blinded by the light, they wan-

1 64 THREE DATS WAR

dered about under the dangerous mid-day sun, looking for
the wounded, to give them drink and rice ; to place them
more comfortably on the sand, or to lay them with their
heads higher. They sought Chinese hats to put on their
heads, and mats to give them a little protection from the
heat. And the yellow men, who invent refined tortures
for their prisoners, looked at them with dilated eyes full of
wonder and gratitude. They signalled their thanks with
poor trembling hands, and above all they dared to relieve
themselves by groaning aloud, by giving vent to the
mournful " Han ! Han ! . . ." they had

restrained since the morning, that they might appear to
be dead.

Some of the corpses were already very dreadful. And
great horseflies were devouring them.

Peace had settled everywhere.

Over there, towards the great south fort where the final
round had been played this morning by the detachment
from the Bayard, nothing was to heard either.

It was the headquarters of the Captain in command of
the Expedition, and the fact that the firing had ceased
there was proof enough that the day of action was offici
ally at an end.

Some human heads now appeared in the lagoon from
under the old capsized junks, looking to see if it were true
that the fighting was really over before they ventured out —
poor scared creatures, the last of the refugees who had
hidden, suffocating in the water since the morning.

The heat was oppressive. Distant villages continued to
burn in the silence. Nothing happened, but from time to
time some death of an Annamite, some isolated episode to

IN ANN AM. 165

break the stillness of the evening, and the monotony of the
sun scorching down on the sands and on the dead.

A young Annamite soldier whose chest was pierced by
a deep hole, was the first who dared to drag himself to the
camp of the Atalante. Having heard how the others had
been treated, he had come to beg for a little rice.

Then he had stretched himself almost at the feet of the
lieutenant in command, guessing he would find protection,
and unwilling to move.

With great care and precaution they had taken him
away all the same, and had laid him elsewhere, on account
of the repulsiveness of his wound : with every breath, air
came out of the hole, causing a horrible liquid to bubble
at the opening.

There was no ambulance, no " Cross of Geneva " in
Annam. This was all that could be done for them : a
little rice, a little cold water, a little shade — and at last
leave them to die, turning away that one might not see.

5 o'clock.

A wounded man had got up suddenly, speaking very
loud in a prophetic tone, as though he were saying things
to the French that ought to be heard. Then they had
sent the interpreter to him.

It was a terrible curse against the military mandarins
who had taken to flight after having pushed them to
battle, against the spirits of the pagodas who had not been
able to protect them. He had further said that the spirits
of the French were superior to those of Annam, and ended
by asking for a little wine and sugar.

The glass emptied, his jaw had fallen with a sound like

1 66 THREE DATS WAR IN ANN AM.

a box opening, and he was dead, his hands still moving as
though to make a last tchin-tchin.

One was hungry in spite of all, and it was neccessary to
think of dining, before the night which comes so suddenly
in these countries.

Then the boys of Saigon had been sent for, who set
to work at once to ferret in the village like wicked little
thieving foxes. In a twinkling, they had found rice,
plates, sauce-pans, drawn fresh water, caught and plucked
some chickens. . . Everything that one asked for
seemed to come like magic from their hands. Won
derful little servants indeed, they had even brought, for
the two in charge of the fort, some beautiful blue ham
mocks of silken thread, as well as these great gilt armchairs
in which those officers had sat down, like sovereigns in
the declining light, beginning to review in their calmer
state of mind the whole series of the day's events.

III.

And now that night has really come these scenes fade
into a half-dream. One realizes that this will be a long
night and wearisome to pass ; one has no inclination to
sleep.

That town of Hue, which is there, quite close at hand,
only two hours' march away, though nothing reveals its
presence, shut in by its high walls, begins in like manner to
take fantastic shapes in the imagination. Shall we go there
to-morrow? It seems probable. And no doubt we shall
take possession of it as we did of Thouane-An, though
there are forts along the road and bars in the river.

A town unique among towns ; only one European ever
penetrated it, a Missionary Bishop, sent for by the king
when Hai-Phong was ceded. He gave some astonishing
accounts :

Its gates are closed to all, even to the people of Annam,
who only pass into its outer precincts under certain special
circumstances — finding it still more difficult to leave than
to enter.

It forms a perfect square, so extensive that it takes a
man more than a day to walk round it, and is almost
empty. Strangers, workmen, merchants, all who live
there are lodged in the suburbs, outside its interminable
walls. Inside it is nothing but the huge dwelling-place
of a king who is invisible or perhaps dead.

1 68 THREE DATS WAR

Nothing but palaces, seraglios, parks and pagodas; and,
no doubt, piled-up riches, that have lain untouched for cen
turies ; no one but courtiers and mandarins — shadowy
rople who govern and oppress this old kingdom of dust.
Five concentric walled enclosures, containing, in pro
portion as you approach the centre, personages who are
more and more important and more and more mysterious,

In the centre at last is the king, who has never been
seen, enclosed as though in the depths of one of those
series of Chinese boxes that fit one into another indefi
nitely. It sometimes happens, they say, that a guard of
the palace, seized with an overwheming curiosity, will
risk his life to catch a glimpse, through a door or an
open window of this old kingly visage fatal as that of
Medusa; for V he succeeds and is discovered his head is
at once cut ofFJ

This town/ it appears, is protected by a charm.
" When Europeans enter it,'* says an ancient proverb, " the
heavens will fall."

It is well worth the risk of an attack, and the thought
of the morrow pre-occupies the imagination.

8 o'clock in the evening.

It is time to make the first nocturnal patrol in the vil
lage ; the detachments of artillery and infantry encamped
there are under the authority of the fort.

The start is made with fully loaded arms. The patrol
lantern, carried by a sailor, which lights the way is an ex
quisite little Chinese lamp of ancient workmanship, taken
from a pagoda.

The patrol descends, often slipping on the sand. There

IN ANN AM. 169

is a smell of burning ; here is the village : red brasiers
give out smoke of a horrible odour ; grunting pigs poke
their snouts amongst the rubbish and the dead ; scared
hens and guinea-fowl flutter in search of a roosting place.
In spite of oneself one avoids the dark corners, one walks
in the open for fear of the dead bodies.

Again that horrible " Han ! Han ! " that one had
begun to forget — the sound of a hollow voice at the last
gasp ; and hands stretched out in supplication, endeav
ouring to do tchin-tchin. There are many on the ground
who call out ; one must stop to give them drink, and the
canteens of the honest patrollers are soon emptied.

A great building has been left standing in which
shadows appear to be moving round a fire : inside, gilded
walls, a gilded roof, the vastness of a church and the mag
nificence of a seraglio. It was one of the King's pagodas.
It is full of soldiers of the marine infantry who talk and
smoke as they come and go ; they burn up arm chairs of
rare beauty, covered with a fine coating of lacquer and of

fild, in order to cook their soup.
The night is dark and oppressive. More burnt houses
and dead bodies. Formless heaps ; half-scorched heads
trying to raise themselves ; hands that move. The little
Chinese lamp throws light on all this in passing . .

And then another pagoda, a smaller one, apparently
very old ; an antique curiosity with a confusion of devils
on the roof, and of grinning china monsters at the en-
tfanc^/.

\ Buddhas of jasper, broken gods and goddesses in gilded
wood lie about near the door, legs in the air, and
headless ; many have, no doubt, been taken away, and

170 THREE DATS WAR

these appear to be the remains after a hasty selection)
There is a fire at the further end, burning badly enough;
its light dances on the ancient gildings, on the mother-of-
pearl inscriptions, and on the china figures; it is the kitchen
of four soldiers who are occupied in boiling a pig. Several
editions of the mystic group of the Heron and the Tor
toise are lying on the ground ; and one of these great
herons is even burning under the saucepan amongst other
remains of sculpture, lying across the fire, with its stiff
red lacquered paws, and its gilded back.

The four men who are there laugh loudly, exchange
suburban jokes with a bad Parisian accent ; one would
guess that they were keepers of the barrier gates whom
.^chance has collected round this supper.
\ A little further on some others have picked up a tiny
little girl, a baby four or five years old, slightly wounded
on the leg. They have dressed the wound and have laid
her down as comfortably as possible, and are watching
her with the utmost solicitude. She is sleeping with
perfect trust in the midst of them; her eyes sloping
towards the temples give her the look of a little Toodie
cat, very sweet and winsome)

They had first laid her down quite naked, so that she
should be more at her ease in the great heat ; but they
have just decided, in consultation, that they must cover
her stomach lest she should get the colic from the damp
ness of the night; and one amongst them gives his sash.

Poor little forsaken thing, what can they do with her ?
They will not be allowed to take her with them ; what
is to become of her, all alone, when they have gone ?

Now we must go back to the fort ; to sit in the great

IN ANN AM. iji

gilded arm-chairs or lie down in the blue hammocks
which the boys have slung, — the chairs, most probably,
to keep a better look out.

The night grows darker and darker. One feels that
one is on an elevated plain because of the stretches of
darkness everywhere, with the distant fires of the camps
and burning houses.

The sailors have behaved very well. Many have
already gone to lie down quietly in the house of the
military mandarin. Others are sitting up, silently and
thoughtfully, heart-broken at having had to charge with
the bayonet, at seeing blood on their linen clothes, and
waiting impatiently for the morning to go and wash it out
" in soft water."

Some want to have supper already, from mere childish
ness, having scarcely recovered from their ample dinner ;
they have made another raid in the direction of a certain
pool of water where all the chickens and ducks, that
escaped the fire, have collected for a last conventicle of
their feathered kind. They have put a dozen to boil, with
a young pig, in an enormous saucepan on a bamboo fire.

An explosion and everything is scattered ! The sauce
pan jumps into the air, flies into pieces; the sauce falls in
rain. In order to discover the cause of the explosion,
they examine the remaining bamboos, which had been
taken, shortly before, from the mandarin's house ; they
are powder cases, full to the brim. It makes them laugh;
then they go and lie down for the night.

The silence increases, and the sound of the breakers on
the shore begins to be heard.

From time to time, " bang, bang, bang, bang," as the

172 THREE DATS WAR

boys of Saigon say : a scared sentinel, half asleep, who
thinks he hears footsteps, has fired hasty shots on some
phantom of his dream.

Or else a sepulchral groan rises from below the walls ;
always the " Han ! Han ! . . ." prolonged to a heart
rending moan ; some Annamite dying. One stops one's
ears in order not to hear.

There must be a great swell out at sea this evening, for
the noise of the breakers grows louder. Already this
morning the boats had difficulty in reaching the shore;
to-night it would be quite impossible, and, in case of a
surprise, or a defeat, there would be no means of getting
back to the ships.

One listens with something of melancholy to the dull
grumbling of the waves that now cut off all communica
tion with the squadron and the European world, remem
bering how small a number of men hold the place by
force of terror. And it seems strange in thinking of it
that one should have come in this impudent way to
encamp in the middle of an immense country, surround
ing oneself with the dead by way of inspiring fear.

8-30 p.m.

A flash of light, a great noise that makes one start up :
a cannon-shot from the village below. "Turn out ! " one
shouts : " Stand to arms ! "

It is only the scouts who thought they had seen the
outlines of some great junks appear in the middle of the
lagoon, on the glossy surface of the water.

After all, perhaps they are coming to negotiate.

They are no longer seen. All is silent again.

IN ANN AM. 173

9 o'clock.

At the same point several junks appear one after the
other, suddenly illuminated by a bright fire with long
tongues of flame that burns in front of one of them.

Once again turn out and stand to arms ! These junks
come from the mainland, from the direction of Hue.

Then they stop : there is the white flag of truce above
the fire, lit there no doubt to make it plainly visible. It is
necessary to go down to the shore with the interpreter to
receive this embassy, and give the order to the sentinels
to allow them to land.

They approach slowly, these junks, as though hesitating
with fear : they arrive, with their effect of Venetian
gondolas, carrying high their central dome and their
arched points. They move noiselessly, propelled by a
single oar from behind, with that little fluttering motion
peculiar to this method of progression. A voice that
sounds very French, asks :

" Will you receive the envoys from the court of Hue,
who come to sue for peace ? "

We answer :

" Yes."

And they come ashore. Improvised torches, pieces ot
flaring wood, throw light on the landing of these strange
people. First the guards of the court of Annam, clothed
in sombre blue, with large collars bordered with white.

They certainly seem rather numerous for a simple em
bassy, but it is probably a matter of etiquette, and besides
they are unarmed.

Then great sumptuous litters of gold are seen to emerge,
ending in grotesque faces ; and parasols of gold open in

174 THREE DATS WAR IN ANN AM.

the darkness, and baldachins, and hammocks ... It
seems an unpacking of fairyland.

All these things are arranged methodically on the sand.
The guards raise the golden litters to their shoulders, hang
the blue hammocks on them and then cover them with
baldachins and with curtains — in all, four complete sedans
— into which mount with an air of mystery, some person
ages whom one cannot see. Four bearers of parasols rush
forward as though to protect them from imaginary rays,
and at last the procession advances. With a silent retinue
it moves towards the man who in their eyes represents war,
invasion, terror: the ship's lieutenant in command of the
fort.

He stands waiting, about a hundred paces off, near a
fire that has been stirred up to give more light. He is
in campaining attire, dusty and torn, and soiled with earth
and smoke, and feels not a little amused at so ceremonious
an embassy.

Two paces from him the first parasol is lowered, the
first sedan stops, and the curtains are drawn aside. . . .

IV.

One expected to see some great Asiatic personage des
cend. But no, it is a European head, very pale, that
raises itself up from the hammock fringed with blue; the
voice, which is absolutely French, has that gentle and
rather unctuous drawl peculiar to Church functionaries ;
the man is clothed in a violet cassock ; the pastoral ring
glistens on his finger, and he first holds out his hand, to
receive a kiss which is not bestowed.

" Sir, I am the Missionary Bishop of Hue. I accom
pany the envoys. Will you receive the King's minister ? "

At the same time, the arm of one of the invisible per
sonages partly draws aside the curtains of the second sedan
and presents a letter on which the address is written in
French and in a very flowing handwriting (the Bishop's,
no doubt) :

"To the Civil Commissioner General, or, in his absence,
to the Rear-Admiral, Commander-in-Chief."

Assurance is given to his Eminence that he will be
treated with the utmost regard, he and those whom he
accompanies. But he is warned, at the same time, that
the laws of warfare, as also of simple prudence, make it
necessary to conduct him to the fort under an armed
escort ; there he will be courteously guarded till the
return of the junior officer who is going to headquarters
(the South fort) to bring back superior orders.

Then, at a given sign, a band of sailors surrounds the

1 76 THREE DATS WAR

entire embassy, and the procession, resuming its march in
the light of the torches, begins in dead silence to climb
the steep slope of the sands.

These torches, from time to time, light up dead bodies
that lie across the road, half buried in the sand, their hands
in the air, or a dying man who utters his horrible groan
as loud as he can, stretching out his arms towards the
soldiers of the court. But these pass on without daring
to turn round, trembling and stupefied by fear.

They halt at the top, in the little camp of the Atalante.

Then all the golden parasols are lowered and the bearers
bend down. The curtains of the sedans shake as though
they were about to be drawn ; the invisible personages are
going to appear ; and the sailors, curious to see their faces,
form a circle about, stirring up the bamboos, that they
may see better.

First the bishop, who puts his feet painfully to the
ground, assuming an attitude of languor. Next his vicar
alights. And at last the two Annamite personages, the
Prime Minister and the Secretary of State.

These two are trembling perceptibly, and press close
to the Bishop.

They are attired with extreme simplicity, in Chinese
tunics, uniformly black, fastened with loops and buttons
of pink jasper ; they wear thin, pointed little beards, —
like Attila ; and their hair, long as a woman's, is care
lessly put up in an old-fashioned chignon at the nape of
the neck. They are both very distinguished in their
whole appearance ; with refined faces, small patrician
hands and marvellous nails pointed like claws.

The Prime Minister leans on the shoulder of a strange

IN ANN AM. 177

courtier, of ambiguous sex, who had rushed forward to
help him descend : clothed in black like his master,
his hair parted in the middle into two very long braids,
he has a slight and elegant figure, and an effeminate and
pretty face. One would say at first it was a young girl
in man's clothes. But apparently it is a boy.

Then one thinks of those " Asiatic children " whom
the refined classes of the Lower Roman Empire used to
have brought them at great cost, and whom they attached to
their persons as things of fashion and luxury .\ Doubtless
the unprogressive Far East, so old before our era began,
has not changed since the Roman epochy

The boys of Saigon who are themselves " Asiatic chil
dren," would be very useful now in improvising — raising
out of the ground a presentable supper for the envoys,
who seem overcome by their emotions and the journey.
But they are no longer here. They were sent out of the
sailors' camp at nightfall, by order, and have gone away
to sleep no one knows where. A little wine and water,
and some tea and rice, is all that we can offer to the
Prime Minister and to the bishop.

Now the two priests, the two French officers and the
two Annamite grandees, with the " Asiatic child " at
their feet, are quietly seated, like friends, on the military
mandarin's light benches.

The conversation begins, rather slowly with some em
barrassment. The Bishop acts as interpreter, and his
drawling voice denotes excessive fatigue. He tells of the
consternation that reigns in Hue, the stupor, the con
tagious fear caused by our enormous cannon, our far-
carrying musketry, and our rapid firing.

178 THREE DATS

And then he adds, in a lower tone, that his role as
Bishop is naturally quite official. In coming this evening,
he had merely ceded to the solicitations of the Court of
Annam ; the terror was such that, without him the envoys
would not have dared to present themselves in the French
Camp.

The silent retinue of the embassy has established itself
in the middle of the fort enclosure ; courtiers and simple
guards sitting pell-mell on the sand, leaning against one
another, overwhelmed, as though with the approach of
their last hour. And the magnificant sedans lying on the
ground, the gilding of the great parasols, give the Asiatic
note to these mute groups.

The night is less dark; the heavy clouds, which at sun
set had hung like a velarium, begin to break, leaving clear
spaces full of stars.

The sailors, who had all wakened up to see the sedans
and the procession arrive, are now seated around on the
low walls of the fort ; they smoke and talk in undertones.
Over their heads can be seen the dark stretches of the
heaven, grown so tranquil with the coming of night. In the
distance, towards the west, there are still the red braziers,
all that remains of the villages. To the east, the Chinese
sea — a great unbroken plain that looks like bluish marble;
begins to glisten here and there, reflecting the spaces of
stars above.

Once again the " Han ! . . . Han ! . . ." rises
up from the shore in a horribly prolonged moan. Yet
another dying ! In spite of oneself one is silent while the
groan lasts, and the men of Annam shudder.

And then on the edge of the horizon one sees the great red

IN ANN AM. 179

disc of the moon, spreading her luminous trail over the
immensity of the waters. In a minute it will be quite light.

Little by little, among the group of envoys, the conversa
tion becomes more animated, more cordial. The Minister
offers his long Annamite cigarettes, rolled into thin wafers,
which he has brought ready made in a little coffer ; he
appears to gain confidence when he sees that they are
Accepted.

The language of the country seems to be a succession
)f uncertain, nasal consonants, cut up into somewhat halt
ing monosyllables, amongst which, at short intervals,
something like the miaoo of a cat recurs. Yet it all appears
to have a signification, for the Bishop translates a host of
very graceful \things that the poor vanquished ones feel
obliged to sayl

Towards 10.30, the Captain of the frigate L arrives

from the South fort, announcing the receipt of the letter
of truce and bringing the superior orders: the Ambassador
and the Bishop are to repair at once to Headquarters,
bringing their secretaries with them if they choose ; as to
the men of their retinue, they are to remain in the Ata-
lanta fort, under the supervision of the lieutenant in com
mand, who is requested to make them lie down surrounded
by his sailors.

Quickly the beautiful litters are raised, the hammocks
and curtains arranged ; the four personages take their
leave, and their sedans move off to the quick and measured
step of the bearers. The moon, which is still low, throws
a warm light upon them ; we watch them disappear in
the distance over the pink sands, still with their golden
parasols and their look of beings from out of fairyland.

i8o THREE DATS WAR

In the encampment there is a general movement and
preparation for settling down to sleep.
(^ But the yellow men are frightened now that the Bishop
and their chief have gone. Before lying down amongst
the sailors, they want to cement their friendship with
them, to assert it by a thousand amicable proofs. They
go through long forms of politeness, Annamite bows
of every description, ceremonious chin-chins with joined
hands, shakings of the hand that are endless. And
the sailors, greatly impressed by these beautiful man
ners, return the salutations and the handshakes, whilst
stifling their desire to laugh ; they are very much aston-
isned to meet yith such obsequious courtiers, and to feel
their lone nails.y

X

Before midnight, every one is more or less housed,
lying down, and asleep — the sentinels excepted.

The two officers, still in the mandarin chairs, are not
asleep yet either.

In vain the moon sheds forth her beautiful, clear light,
clouds disperse and the heavens become pure and splendid
again, nothing can lessen the gloom of this night of vigil.
The smoke of the burning villages can be distinguished as
plainly as in daylight ; on the shining sands, the bodies of
the dead form black patches — in the shape of a cross when
the arms are extended. \ And the continued noise of the
breakers produces that feeling of isolation, of being, cut
off from the rest of the world, in this land of AnnamJ

Then, suddenly the horrible "Han ! . . . Han ! . . ."
is heard again, and this time it seems to come from some
where close at hand, from the ground, almost from under
the chairs, and at the same instant real arms stretch out

IN ANN AM. 181

towards us, and try to embrace our knees . . . It is
the wounded man of last night, the poor fellow with the
pierced chest, who has come back again, who has dragged
himself along and presented himself here, God knows
how !

We dare not have him removed this time ; we give
him a covering, some wine to drink, and everything he
wants ; but it is provoking that he should insist on coming
back; since nothing can be done to save him, he had better
die at once.

I The air is heavy, and the wind hot; there is a sweet,
enervating scent of tropical plants and sandhill flowers
with a scent of other things as well, a mixture, at the
same time fetid and musky, which is peculiar to the vil
lages, and the people, and everything of this country.
The sailors say : " It smells Chinese/' and it cannot be
better expressed. That is it exactly : *tlt smells Chinese,"
which is characteristic and indefinable/1

. . . Suddenly a first whifF of cemetery air mixes itself
with these other strange odours . . . The corpses are
beginning to grow obnoxious ! Indeed, they

should have been removed before nightfall ; it ought to
have been thought of at sunset, when the first black
birds were seen to collect. But one counted on making
the prisoners do this business in the morning, one had no
idea that decomposition would set in so quickly.

... A second whifF arises, sickening, horrible . . .
it will certainly grow rapidly worse before morning,
and become intolerable. What is to be done ?
Wake the sailors, who are already so tired ? . , . One
hesitates between the horror of going to move the dead

1 82 THREE DATS WAR IN ANN AM.

bodies at night, and the dreadful discomfort that their
vicinity causes. A lassitude nails you to the spot; till a
kind of troubled sleep comes at last, full of dreams,
haunted by the contortions, the grimaces, and the dreadful
writhings of the dead. . . .

V.
The day of August 2ist.

At six o'clock the sun is there, flooding the land simul
taneously with brilliant light and extreme heat as it rises.
Then the visions of the night evaporate, and things re
sume their true proportions.

The tent where one has slept is rilled with sunbeams.
The gilded poles and the pagoda lances that sustain the
hangings, glitter ; but the hangings are soiled and sordid.

Outside, the whole camp is waking. The Annamites,
in stretching, sigh as they remember their defeat and the
terrors of yesterday. They shake their blue gowns — that
are spoilt — twist up their long hair and re-arrange their
chignons like women. Several fires are already lighted
on the sand. The sailors must needs set again to cooking
their chickens at the first sign of daybreak.

Down below, the land of Annam looks very beauti
ful, and rather strange at this early hour. The violet
peaks of the high mountains stand out clearly in the sky ;
they seem to be more jagged than is natural, as in a landj
scape that might have been painted by the Chinese.
The wooded plains are of that fresh and brilliant tint,
which is peculiar to the Tropics. And the mirador of
Hue — that of the Royal Palace — can be seen, dominating
the green distances . . .

1 84 THREE DATS WAR

The wounded man with the pierced chest has died in
the night ; he is stretched out stiffly, open-mouthed in the
sun. All round the fort, of course, there are still the
dead bodies in the same positions as last night. And, as
though there were not enough, the sea has even washed
up those that were thrown into it yesterday ; they are
all along the shore, washed by the white spray of the
waves, still with their hands in the air — and all swollen,
looking like great big-bellied baboons. It will certainly
be necessary to dig vast holes to bury so many bodies.

Will there be a march on Hue to-day — will its great,
mysterious walls be scaled ? — Doubtless not ; that embassy
which came last night will have signed anything rather
than see us enter the town and palaces, — the old pro
verb of Annam will be right once again.

Close round the camp there is nothing but the hot
sparkling sand, contrasting with the green border of the
interior ; and then the ruins and remains of all that the fire
destroyed yesterday. Two pagodas still standing, show
with an evil look their horns and claws and whole array of
earthenware devils. And the cocoa-nut trees in the vil
lage that were so fresh, have turned black ; they are
planted in the midst of all this waste like scorched old
feather-brooms.

Towards seven o'clock the distant noise of a fusilade.
It is the French troops encamped in the Circular Fort
who have just crossed the river Hue in the Squadron's
small boats, and are advancing on the sands of the south
bank. Through the telescope one can follow the distant
movements of these rows of little black pigmies who are
seamen and soldiers ; one can see them take possession,

IN ANN AM. 185

without striking a blow, of two or three forts that the
enemy abandoned in yesterday's great panic — and the
tricolor is hoisted everywhere.

That must be the end of it all, and doubtless there will
be no more righting.

An oppressive day, long, monotonous, excessively hot
and painful to get through.

The dead are being buried. There are more than one
had realized. The Annamite official report reckons
twelve hundred, and that is about the number. They
are thrown altogether into great holes. The prisoners
perform this duty, guarded by the Serjeants of the native
troops of Saigon with pointed bayonets.

The seamen, who are very thirsty to-day, draw water
from the cisterns ; but it is muddy water, and what is
more, it is musky like everything in this country. The
prisoners explain that it has been brought from the main
land in bottles of goat skin from which it gets the
smell, and that nevertheless it has a very good flavour.

Still, for fear of poison, the sailors decide to filter it.
And now the great Chinese hats — which have already
made splendid funnels for pouring the wine into the
canteens — are again in requisition. (The sand is strewn
with them, with these great conical hats in the forms of
lamp shades, dropped there during the rout.) They put
some pounded charcoal in the bottom, and then fill them
up with water, and soon, from the point, a little clear
stream runs out which is not bad to drink.

3 o'clock in the afternoon.
The embassy once more comes to camp, on its return

1 86 THREE DATS WAR

from headquarters. It passes on without stopping, picks
up its escort, descends with gymnastic strides towards the
lagoon, and embarks in the junks. And throughout this
rapid march, the great Asiatic parasols, speckled with
gold, turn, rise or fall, following the rays of the sun,
manipulated with rare precision by their bearers.

This time the sedans remain closed. The Bishop
alone pushed aside his curtains to wave his hand and
announce that the Treaty of peace had been accepted with
its hardest clauses : they are hastening as much as possible
to take it this same evening for the signature of the King
of Annam. . . .

So the old proverb is true, and the great walls of Hue
will keep their mystery.

The wind is decidedly in a peaceful quarter. At sun
set, two mandarins arrive at the fort, trembling a little,
but eager and obsequeous, with an air of profoundest
humility, making fine chin-chins, shaking hands with
everyone, an operation in which the folds of their pagoda
sleeves and the length of their nails come rather in the way.

Their robes are of ultramarine silk gauze, brocaded with
a large rose pattern. The fronts of a paler blue, like those
waistcoats worn by fashionable women in France.

They have come to bring us a supply of cattle, of pigs
and bananas, and fresh water, all kinds of good things
tbat will be very welcome.

C They also bring sensational news : it would seem that
the King in person, the invisible, the unknowable, went
up yesterday into his great mirador that one can see over
there, to watch the bombardment and the Squadron. It
is true that rigorous threats of death had been spread in

IN ANN AM. 187

the town against whoever should dare to raise his eyes
towards this tower; and all the houses, all the windows
had been closed in terror. But from the great suburbs
inhabited by Europeans and merchants, he could have
been seen through glasses, and this fact is really a sign of
the timts, a thing without precedent in the history of
Annam.J

9 o'clock in the evening.

The order arrives from headquarters to re-embark the
marines to-morrow in the early morning.

It is over, this little dream of conquest. The forts will
be left in charge of the Marine Infantry and of the Vipere.

The seamen, greatly disappointed, wander about the
burnt village, to pick up amongst the rubbish a thousand
little souvenirs that they wish to take away with them ;
with the help of lanterns they make an extraordinary
choice from amongst the remains, lamenting greatly that
they had not been warned earlier, that they had not been
able to select it all by daylight. They only go to sleep
very late, when they have prepared their little bundles
and sung several songs.

VI.
August the 22nd.

Towards eight o'clock on a glorious morning the
heavily-laden boats that are bringing the sailors with
their arms and baggage back over the glittering sea,
reach the ships of the Squadron.

The others, the less fortunate, those who had re
mained on board, wait near the bulwarks to see the
return: the men come on board with the air of conquerors,
displaying their beautiful sashes, wearing Chinese hats,
carrying lances, yellow flags or black ones at the end of
gilded poles ; they are deeply sunburnt, one and all, and
dying of thirst. . . .

And then, some have picked up tea-pots in old China
ware, flowery plates, buddhas, or mystic herons, birds
of the pagodas perched on tortoises.

And others, the practical and greedy, have brought
back fowls in cages, to be cooked on board — even little
live pigs slung in shoulder belts across the back, fastened
by their paws and shrieking horribly.

There is much rejoicing over this great and rapid suc
cess ; the news of the doubtful days in the north — on the
banks of the Red river — has not reached us yet, and we
imagine that peace will at once be signed, followed by
our departure, and return to France. At supper different

THREE DATS WAR IN ANN AM. 189

dishes, not provided by the rule, circulate at the tables of
the crew, with wines that come from the officers' quarters.
And on the stroke of nine a procession is even organized
and marches past, the men stooping low as they go under the
hammocks. Then those who are already asleep, wake up
with a start, and lean over, scared to see what is passing
under them : — great pointed hats, a procession of Chinamen !
. . . some in mandarin dresses of official cut, in black
silk, too tight often and split at the shoulders ; others
quite naked, simply carrying a lance, a mystic heron, or a
buddha to give a proper effect.

Not a single death to regret, no one missing at the roll
call, not an empty place ; — thus it all ends in gaiety and
fun.

And to-morrow the Squadron is to separate in order to
fulfil the several duties of re-victualling and of blockade.

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

LD-LTRL

JUN 21965

AM

7-4 4-9tf**-f

AUG 3 1978

orm L9-Series 444

PM
V

Nsr^nGr-Ultf
APR 1 2 1982

MAY 0419»e

, REC'DLD-t/RC

JLM. 0 6 1989

^679

DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRAI

AA 00069842'