Away from Boulogne-sur-Mer,—away from the treacherous sea, that laughs, as we look back upon it, tossing its white caps mischievously up to the smiling sky; away from thoughts of Thackeray, who has left the wide stretches of coast around Boulogne haunted by Claude Newcombe’s ghost, and on as fast as the “boat-train” can take us to the place where, some one has said, “good Americans go when they die.”
There is nothing interesting in the tame, flat country; nothing novel in the farm houses, and thatched cottages, and sleepy-looking villages along the route, or in the general aspect of the people, except that the bonnet of the English peasant is replaced by the snowy cap, the frock of the English farmer by the Frenchman’s clean blue blouse. The English fog keeps its own side of the channel, and we look up into the blue sky, radiant with sunshine, with a sense of having found an old long-absent friend. Long before we arrive in Paris, even the staunchest Briton of us all marvels why she wanted to stay in London, when here, just over the water, lay this smiling and beautiful France.
And to us, as to most strangers, Paris and France are one. We shall see none of its other cities unless, moving southward, we stop at Lyons, and linger a day at Marseilles. Provincial life will come to us only in the city’s borrowed attire, as we find it in Paris, imported, and making itself at home. Nature and natural scenery can do little to captivate unless, indeed, we enter Italy by the pass of Mont Cenis, when we shall see what it is, even to a frivolous people like the French, to “lift their eyes unto the hills.” Ordinarily, nature seems here at a disadvantage, a pale, flat background for the intense artificiality of France. Her rivers seem to wind—the sluggish Seine with the rest—to show the architectural effect of her bridges, rather than to make the green banks blossom and to refresh the thirsty land. Her forests, even Fontainebleau and Versailles, what are they but the background for palaces? And even her wide, straight, dusty roads stretch on with a dreadful symmetry of commonplaceness that makes one feel as if the land had no lovely nooks, to reach which one must choose a shaded or winding way.