CHAPTER X. HOME! I EXECUTED with great satisfaction the last orders of Count R. I only knew too well what to do with the money. Within my experience of this brilliant holiday Paris, there was no lack of tears to dry nor of misery to mitigate. My own affairs did not detain me much longer in this town, which I was already impatient to leave. Nothing is more fatiguing than the days and weeks which precede an anticipated and inevitable departure. I hailed with joy the hour which found me, on the stroke of six in the afternoon, before the great courtyard in the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau. Oh, happy days of most unvalued quiet, too rashly and too cheaply sold to the army of railway contractors in exchange for sixty miles an hour and spine diseases! days when life enjoyed the dignity of delay; when the world traveled by post, and the world's wife on a pillion! Then, as we jogged along the highway, I do verily believe that (in despite of Danton's ghost) high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish, stood far enough asunder to be able to take a good look at each other as they passed along, and, as one says, "knew their places." Now the journey of life is more rapid, but I'll be shot if I think it half so pleasant; for in the hurry-skurry we are so tumbled to gether, that who can say where he is or where he will be; and 'tis but a sorry chance which of us may fall uppermost. Six! It clashes clear from the great dial, and the frosty twilight is falling. Six! And cheerily issues the first britska from the inner court, where these ponderous locomotives of an unlocomotive age used to lurk harnessed and ready when the hour struck to disperse themselves leisurely to the four quarters of the compass. Bordeaux! shouts the employé de la poste. A couple of travelers jump into the carriage. The door shuts with a sharp click. The postillion blithely clacks his long-lashed, short-handled whip, and four colossal percherons strain forward in the traces, and start off at a brisk trot to the merry sound of a multitude of little tinkling bells. Calais! Lyons! A second calèche; a third. The courrier swings himself into the cabriolet. They are off. At last, Strasbourg! How my heart beats! dulce germen matris! (may the souls of the grammarians forgive me the pun!) Oh dear mother German ! Home! and with what homeward thoughts I scale the high carriage step. We issue on to the great open spaces of the night by the Barrier St. Denis. I plunge my yearning looks beyond me, deep and far into the glimmering air, searching on the utmost verge of the dark horizon that long line of clouds which may perhaps o'ercanopy (oh pleasant thought!) the skies of Germany. And as the restless roar of Paris (that never quiet heart) sinks faint behind me on the seri ous, cold night air, I have little care to remember that I am leaving, perhaps forever, a world bottomless, vast-a world of vice and grandeur, of the ludicrous and the sublime. PART I I. THE PATIENT. To tread a maze that never shall have end, |