The Valley Of The Moselle, Which I Had Never Thought Of
Save As A Half Mountainous Region, Had Fallen, To
Become a kind of
long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
The main waterway of the valley
Was now not the river but the canal
that fed from it.
The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
slopes bounding it on either side.
Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
walked thirty-two kilometres - which is twenty miles - from Toul; that
it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
wrecked all these early hours.
As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
best of all Christian associations - a large village.
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