Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches Part 11

"That you will be so, sir, in two months, if you remain here, there cannot be a doubt."

"Then, good heavens! where can I go? What am I to do without carriages, without opera nightingales, and, above all things, without a head cook?"

The night succeeding the consultation, the banker felt as if twenty cork-screws had been driven into his calves, and he made, ere dawn, a vow that he would leave the capital. This determination taken, the next point to be decided was in what direction to go,--for it was not a journey of pleasure he was about to take, but one of health; and for once his riches were of no further use to him than to provide the means of transit. His physicians, fas.h.i.+onable men, strange to say, were sincere, and did not order him to Nice or Lucca, hot-baths, or mineral waters, or even to the orange-groves of Hyeres, to which, when a rich man cannot recover, they send him, in order that he may die comfortably under Nature's warm blanket, the sun, inhaling with his last inspirations the delicious scent of her flowers. To Spain, where, said the invalid, they talk so loud and drink water, he would not go; nor to Germany, the land of meerschaums and sour crout. Which direction therefore was he to take? to which point of the compa.s.s was he to turn the vessel's prow?

Several times did the unhappy banker pa.s.s his geography in review, but his knowledge of this science was indeed finite, and the Landes, Picardy, and such like spots, alone presented themselves to his imagination. In this predicament the light of friends.h.i.+p suddenly threw a ray over his thinking faculties; he remembered my father, the companion of his boyhood, with whom he had been brought up,--his great friend, without doubt, but of whom he had not thought for the last ten years.

"By all the blue devils that dance in my brain!" said the unhappy _millionnaire_, starting up on his bed of pain, as if he had a spring in his back, and throwing at the nose of his astonished apothecary, who was watching him, the draught presented to him,--"by the wig of my respected grandfather,--by the beard of aesculapius, I have found the real friend who will pour over my head the oil of health."

"My good sir," said his attendant, "pray calm yourself, and take this pill" ...

"Yes, that dear friend, he will set me all to rights--he will bring to my heavy eyelids those peaceful slumbers which now, alas! I never enjoy."

"But, Sir," repeated the apothecary, "pray be so good as to lay down and swallow this."

"Back, felon of h.e.l.l! horse-leech, son of a poultice! go, doctor of the devil, and join your friend in black below."

"But _Monsieur le Banquier_"----

"Off I say, off!--sinister raven, cease your croaking! Silence--take the abominable drugs yourself--poison yourself, you wretch. Give me my trousers, and let me dress myself. Hey, Bilboquet!--bring my hot water, razors, and shaving soap. Hurrah! Phoebus, light the sun and put out the stars; arise day! Into the saddle, postillions,--here, bring some cigars. Hurrah! the wind is up; now, my stout boatmen, down to your oars." "Halloo! halloo!" shouted his attendant, "help! help!" and he got at both bells and rang away with might and main; but before any one came the banker was out of bed, struck his attendant a blow in the eye, which made him see one hundred and forty-six suns, and laid him upon the floor, after which he commenced waltzing _en chemise_ in his delirium, all round the room with a chair, dragging after him the unfortunate hero of the pestle and mortar, and roaring at the top of his voice these lines of Racine:

Peut-etre on t'a conte la fameuse disgrace De l'altiere Vasthi dont j'occupe la place, Lorsque le Roi, centre elle enflamme de depit,--

followed by--

Quel profane en ces lieux ose porter ses pas?

Hola, gardes!--

At this moment a reinforcement most luckily arrived; but as in this access of fever he defended himself against all comers like a bear, and boxed away like an Englishman, they had no little difficulty in securing him; at length, in spite of his violence, he was replaced in his bed, like a sword into its sheath. There, however, he would not lay quiet; first he tore the satin curtains, then he hugged his richly-worked pillow to his breast, calling it his best and dearest friend, and performed fifty other such antics. He obtained, in short, no repose, until his secretary, who entered at his bidding half-dressed and with one eye half shut, had written the following note to my father, under his dictation,--a letter evidently written in a paroxysm of high fever:

"Friend of my heart, jessamine of my soul, bright party-coloured tulip of my _souvenirs_, may the Creator pour upon your gray and venerable head a stream from his flower-pot of blessings!

"Dear Friend,--Several atrocious doctors, with pale noses, the very sight of which gives one the cholic, and with black searching eyes, that make one tremble, say that I am very ill,--that I shall die. They say too that there is only one mode of cure, and that is to take my valuable body into your beautiful province. It is the east wind they say, and blue-bottles, corn-flowers, field-poppies, and the green turf; the song of the nightingale and the beautiful moonlight nights; the hum of bees and the bleating of sheep, which will effect this marvellous cure. It is amongst the rocks and streams of your mountains, in long walks in your forests, and in your valleys; in the innocent candour of your pretty peasant girls, the pure water of your fountains, and the cream cheeses of your dairies that I am told resides the power to retain here below my soul, just ready to fly away. Alas! yes, I am forced to admit the fact; I must say I am very ill, and it is my own fault;--yes, my own undoubted fault. I have drank too deeply of voluptuous ease; I have tasted too often the luscious grapes of forbidden pleasures. I am no longer virtuous enough to wish to see the sun rise, and hence it is that I am suffering intensely in the capacity of a human pincus.h.i.+on, in which, one after the other, the sharpest and most pointed pins have stuck themselves, namely, every infirmity and every disease that mortal man is heir to.

"In this delicate and distressing position, dear friend, I thought of you: yes, to you, to you only, shall I owe my restoration to health. Do not therefore be surprised if, in the course of a few days, you should see my shadow approach your hospitable door; and prepare for it, I beg you, a small room and a bed of dried leaves, coa.r.s.e bread, and a jug of water. It seems that in order to regenerate my blood I shall want all these; and I shall be fortunate if, in seeking a perfect restoration to health, I am not obliged to be a swine-herd or keep sheep, to dig, cut, and saw wood, pick spinach, or weed the flower-beds! Quick, my friend; light with all convenient haste the altar on which we will burn again the incense and benjamin of friends.h.i.+p. Blow again the sparks now so nearly extinguished of our happy boyish days; revive again the holy flames of our youthful affections; and, above all things, have the scissors ready which are to cut the Gordian knot of my complicated diseases. Soon, in shaking you by the hand, my shadow shall say much more."

Yours, &c.,

Fifteen days after the receipt of this extraordinary composition, the banker, escorted by a lean and cadaverous-looking doctor, arrived at our _chateau_, half strangled with a churchyard cough, and in a state of apparently hopeless debility. He was evidently very, very ill; and if it had not been for the sincere friends.h.i.+p my father had for him, I really do not know how we could have supported the dark cloud which his presence seemed to throw upon our house for nearly nine mortal weeks.

No one dared either to move or speak: if you wished to laugh, it could only be on the terrace; if to blow your nose, it was to be done in the cellar; and as to sneezing, one was obliged to go to the bottom of the garden. The horses' feet were wrapped up in hay-bands, so that no sound should be heard in the court-yard; the servants went about the house in list shoes, and all the approaches to it were knee-deep in straw. There was an end to the _fanfares_ of the huntsman's horn, and the rollicking chorus; guns, shot and powder, were all placed under lock and key; the kennel was mute, and the muzzled dogs looked piteously at one another, and hung their heads, as if they had given themselves up to the certain prospect of being drowned. The very hares knew how matters were, and pa.s.sed to and fro before the garden-windows; and a stray wolf, which came one evening into the court-yard, sat on his hind-quarters and looked us impudently in the face; as to the birds, they ate up very nearly every peach and apricot we had. The silence of the grave reigned everywhere--the house seemed a very sepulchre, in which nothing could be heard but the monotonous liquid bubblings of the fountains, the ticking of the clocks, and the sighing breezes that whistled through the cas.e.m.e.nts.

Fairly worn out with this state of things, I was thinking seriously of leaving for the gay swamps of Holland, when a crisis occurred in the banker's disorder, and after a severe struggle, in which every bone of his body seemed to twist itself round, he was declared by his pallid doctor out of danger--saved. Surrounding his bed, we drank with no little joy to his perfect recovery, and during one entire week we suspended on the walls of his bed-room, according to the custom in Le Morvan, garlands of lilies and _vervenia_, interwoven with green foliage and wild thyme. From this time he improved daily, and three months after no one would have recognized the sick man; his face became quite rosy, and his eyes looked full of returning health. With a gun on his shoulder, he followed us nimbly through the vineyards, never flinched from his bottle, sang barcarolles with the ladies, made declarations of love to all the young girls, promised to marry each, once at least, and danced away in the evening under the acacias with the nymphs of the village, to whom he had always some secret to tell behind the trees, or in some snug little corner. The woodc.o.c.k season having arrived during his stay, which was now nearly over, we determined that he should be introduced to _la cha.s.se aux Mares_.

Pardon me, kind reader, for all this gossip by the way, but this is the point at which I wished to arrive.

CHAPTER XV.

Summer months in the Forest--_Mare_ No. 3--Description of it--The Woodc.o.c.k fly--The Banker has a day's sport--Arrives at the _Mare_--Difficult to please in his choice of a hut--Proceeds to a larger _Mare_--His friends retire--The Banker on the alert for a Wolf or a Boar--Fires at some animal--The unfortunate discovery--Rage of the Parisian--Pays for his blunder, and recovers his temper.

During the months of June, July, and August, the great heats in our forests are suffocating, and the woodc.o.c.k, which during the livelong day has been squatting under some mossy root, is impressed with the idea that a bathe in a clear pool of cold fresh water would be very conducive to its health. Thus directly the sun, red as a shot which leaves the furnace, falls below the horizon, and that the clouds surrounding the spot where it disappears, at first lurid and bright like fire, then yellow like a sea of gold, become cool, pale, and at length sink into more sober hues, the woodc.o.c.k,--which waits only for this moment to open its wings and promenade the neighbourhood,--comes forth and commences a study of the winds. Guided by instinct, and by the fresh currents of air that float unseen in the atmosphere, she follows the sweet upland breezes, and soon arrives at the spring or piece of water of which she is in search.

The _Mares_ No. 3, in which the woodc.o.c.k more especially loves to take a bath, are almost as difficult to find as the one that I discovered, for they are hidden in the depths of the forest; like it, also, they are for the most part small, encircled by the thick foliage of the surrounding trees, and consequently very dark; and the more this is the case, the more solitary they are, and therefore the more sought after by this bird. A woodc.o.c.k never bathes in the _Mare_ No. 1; for to them resort one after another all the large game, or those No. 2, as these are too open. The woodc.o.c.ks are discreet and bashful, and, like the wives of the Sultan, love a retired bath-room, where they may disport themselves on banks ever fresh and green, perfumed with wild flowers, and immerse their fair persons in pellucid waters that have never been tainted with a drop of blood, or covered with feathers torn from the victim of the sportsman's gun. Thus it is therefore that the _Mares_ frequented by the woodc.o.c.k are so entirely hidden by the thick and falling branches, so enveloped in deep shade, that you must have eyes made on purpose to be able to discover their large brown bodies plunging in the crystal water and wading amongst the flags. In aid of the sportsman, now as in the spring, a little fly comes buzzing and wheeling about in the air to warn the sportsman of the arrival of the birds, which, directly the moon's white horn is seen glancing between the trees, arrive flapping their wings in small parties of two and three at a time. One afternoon, when the wind blew soft, and the sun was refulgent in the azure above, we proposed an excursion in the forest to our friend the banker, who was now quite convalescent.

"What! do you wish to give me up to the beasts?" cried he, jumping up from his seat.

"Not at all, dear sir, pray don't be alarmed; we are merely desirous of making you acquainted with the most innocent, the least dangerous sport of the _cha.s.se a l'affut_," and having convinced him, we started.

Everything went well as far as the entrance to the forest; but there the _millionnaire_, little accustomed to walk over the stumps of underwood and amongst the thorns, he began to drop into the rear, stopping every now and then to rest against some tree, or disentangle his legs from some yards of bramble, puffing and blowing, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. Oh's! and Ha's! by dozens.

"Courage! sir," we said, "courage! we shall arrive too late; one brisk half-hour's walk, and we are at our posts."

"Upon my word, gentlemen, you are really considerate; I walk, I suspect, quite as fast as you. But"--and how was he delighted to find an excuse for a halt--"you spoke of a _cha.s.se a l'affut_, hiding for what I should like to know--for bears, panthers, or crocodiles? is it this kind of game we are to watch for?"

"Oh! no--for woodc.o.c.ks."

"Woodc.o.c.ks!--what, have you made me walk since the morning through perfect beds of briars and over miles of large stones, escalade the mountains, descend precipices, and brought me through water-courses and dark ravines, to kill a few woodc.o.c.ks?"

"Would you prefer confronting a wild boar?"

"Certainly," said the puffing convalescent; "if there was no chance of danger, I should infinitely prefer killing a boar."

"For to-day this is impossible."

"Why so?"

"Why, in the first place, there are no boars in this wood, and it is too late to take you to those which they frequent."

"Then we shall find only woodc.o.c.ks in the place we are going to?"

"Nothing else; at least during the half-hour we shall remain."

"And if we were to remain more than half an hour?"

"Oh! then we might perhaps by accident see a roebuck--perhaps a hungry wolf."

"A hungry wolf!--the deuce! And if there should come by chance a wolf to the _Mare_ when I shall be all alone, what must I do?"

"Why kill it, to be sure."

"To be sure, why of course I should kill the ferocious animal,"--and the banker, though smacking his fingers and whistling as if quite unconcerned, looked very grave. Continuing our walk, we arrived at the _Mares_.

"Goodness," said my companion, "how dark it is here,"--looking into each hut that was shown him. "Misericorde! if I were to ensconce myself in this leafy cabin, this gloomy sombre hole, I should fancy myself seated at the bottom of a blacking-bottle--I respectfully decline the honour of occupying the hut."