Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digressing), is a long street
of houses all built together as animals build their communities.
They
are all very old, but the people have worked hard since the
Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them very rich.
I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say, was in
disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor,
cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of
morning - that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old
wood; which is the true breath of morning, because it is the scent
that all the human race worth calling human first meets when it rises,
and is the association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the
world alive: but not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of
all in the minds of journalists, who know nothing of morning save that
it is a time of jaded emptiness when you have just done prophesying
(for the hundredth time) the approaching end of the world, when the
floors are beginning to tremble with machinery, and when, in a weary
kind of way, one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually a
short one.
To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one
street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at
college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the
Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic
nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth,
that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men
together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the
phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember
that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed
houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for
you are in civilization again.
But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The first thing I saw as I
came into the street and noted how the level sun stood in a haze
beyond, and how it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities
of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which came at and
passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself forward. In
the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going out
mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are.
Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very
old man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where
I could find coffee and bread at that hour; but he shook his head
mournfully and wished me good-morning in a strong accent, for he was
deaf and probably thought I was begging.
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