I Have Tried It Since Then With Every Sort Of
Accent And Inflection, But I Seem To Lack The Sense Of Humour.
They were of all ages:
Children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity
when that was called for by the subject of our talk. Life, since
the fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious
air. The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a
provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one
of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me
many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my
arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in
her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me with a
certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible
gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I
think there was a real attachment. She was never weary of sitting
to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with
all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to
repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial.
It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the
last. 'No, no,' she would say, 'that is not it. I am old, to be
sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try again.' When
I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a
somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it
was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of
crooks, old lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people
for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see
them yet again.
One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety,
they could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There
was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human
body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of
it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment. My
landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided
patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the
language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever
heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
finished it and took my departure. It is true she had a right to
be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse
for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a
river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the
clear and silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing
might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a
plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised
the ear.
The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my
principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have
spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was
his specially to have a generous taste in eating. This was what
was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I
found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and
special knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are
about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether
secondary question.
I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
grew to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I
could make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure
off the wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one
of the places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand
spent a day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis de
Villemer; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke French imperfectly;
for this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever
he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in patois, she would
make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her
memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it
would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her
works. The peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so
much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering
with this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady
and far from beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the age
appealed so little to Velaisian swine-herds!
On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials
towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an
improving acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in
great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his
subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he
called 'the gallantry' of paying for my breakfast in a roadside
wine-shop.
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