The pause was a very short one, for horses are soon changed. Madame de
Ferrier threw a searching eye over the landscape. It was a mercy she did
not see the hole in the grenier, through which I devoured her, daring
for the first time to call her secretly--Eagle--the name that De
Chaumont used with common freedom! Now how strange is this--that one
woman should be to a man the sum of things! And what was her charm I
could not tell, for I began to understand there were many beautiful
women in the world, of all favors, and shapely perhaps as the one of my
love. Only her I found drawing the soul out of my body; and none of the
others did more than please the eye like pictures.
The carriages were gone with the sun, and it was no wonder all fell gray
over the world.
De Chaumont had sailed behind us, and he would be in Paris long before
us.
I had first felt some uneasiness, and dread of being arrested on our
journey; though our Breton captain--who was a man of gold that I would
travel far to see this day, if I could, even beneath the Atlantic, where
he and his ship now float--obtained for us at Dieppe, on his own pledge,
a kind of substitute for passports. We were a marked party, by reason of
the doctor's lameness and Skenedonk's appearance. The Oneida, during his
former sojourn in France, had been encouraged to preserve the novelty
of his Indian dress. As I had nothing to give him in its place it did
not become me to find fault. And he would have been more conspicuous
with a cocked hat on his bare red scalp, and knee breeches instead of
buckskins. Peasants ran out to look at him, and in return we looked at
them with a good will.
We reached the very barriers of Paris, however, without falling into
trouble. And in the streets were so many men of so many nations that
Skenedonk's attire seemed no more bizarre than the turbans of the east
or the white burnous of the Arab.
It was here that Skenedonk took his role as guide, and stalked through
narrow crooked streets, which by comparison made New York, my first
experience of a city, appear a plain and open village.
I do not pretend to know anything about Paris. Some spots in the mystic
labyrinth stand out to memory, such as that open space where the
guillotine had done its work, the site of the Bastille, and a long
street leading from the place of the Bastille, parallel with the river;
and this I have good reason to remember. It is called Rue St. Antoine. I
learned well, also, a certain prison, and a part of the ancient city
called Faubourg St. Germain. One who can strike obscure trails in the
wilderness of nature, may blunt his fine instincts on the wilderness of
man.
This did not befall the Indian. He took a bee line upon his old tracks,
and when the place was sighted we threaded what seemed to be a rivulet
between cliffs, for a moist depressed street-center kept us straddling
something like a gutter, while with outstretched hands we could brace
the opposite walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account