Through a Fair Country
To Nemours all the way was pleasantness, and all the path was peace. There was nothing to note but the beauty and excellence of the road. Only once we came to pavé. Then, however, as it was at the bottom of a hill, it was like to be our ruin. Rosin, back-pedalling, and clever steering to the side-path saved us. A couple of tramps asked if we had not an extra seat to spare.
As for Nemours, we could go on for ever in its praise, we found it so pretty; but for its inhabitants, the less, I think, we say of them the better.—At three café restaurants—one we passed just as we went into the city, two were in its very heart—food was refused to us. There was no reason given for this refusal. The people were disagreeable that was all.—We lunched in true tramp fashion, on whatever we could pick up by the way. At one end of the town we ate pears, at the other cake. If our meal was scanty, we at least had all out of doors, instead of a close café, for dining-room.
We rode a little distance by the canal, and then went into the town to come quite unexpectedly upon its castle, which, with its grim grey walls and turrets, was the first real castle we had seen in all our journey. But old carts and lumber lay familiarly in its courtyard, as if to remind the chance visitor of its useless old age.—We liked it better from the other side of the river, where all belittling details were lost, and we saw the grey pile sternly outlined against the sky and softly reflected in the water.
Beyond Nemours the same fine road, like a park avenue, went with the poplared river until the latter ran off with a great curve across the broad green fields, to keep well out of sight until it turned back to meet us at Fontenoy. Here were two canoeists.—The sun shone on the water, but failed in soft shadows on the meadows beyond and on the road. Everything was still and at rest but the river and ourselves.
But, quiet as the country was, there was nothing to remind us it was Sunday. Peasants were at work. Old women here and there cut grass by the wayside, or carried it home in large bundles on their backs. In one place cantonniers were busy covering the road with broken stones. In another we passed travellers footing it over the white highway; one who walked barefoot, with his boots and his umbrella strapped to his back, was singing as he went.—Only once we heard church bells. In the little grey stone villages, at whose entrance poplars stood for sentinels, there were more people about than usual. And at Souppes, where we stopped for coffee, the café was full of men in blouses, playing cards and drinking beer.
In the course of the afternoon we left the department of the Seine-et-Loire for the Loiret, where the road, though not bad, was not quite so good, and where the kilometre-stones no longer marked the distance, but were newly whitened, looking for all the world, as J—— suggested, like tombstones of dead kilometres.—Then we came to the first vineyard on our route, in which the vines, heavy with purple clusters, clung to low poles, with none of the grace of the same vines crossing from mulberry to mulberry in Italy, or of the hops in England.—Up and down the road took us—now giving us a glimpse of an old farm-house on a hillside, and then of a far château half hidden in the trees, until we began to meet many carriages.—A few minutes after these signs of city life appeared, we were in Montargis.