‘Twenty minutes—half an hour—three-quarters—what mademoiselle pleases!’

This was what the waiter said when we asked him how long it would take to drive to the Gare d’OrlÉans on the morning that we left Paris. We selected half an hour, and by so doing as nearly as possible missed our train—in fact, when we arrived at the Quai d’Austerlitz the station clock was already at the hour of departure. It was consoling to be told officially that it was five minutes fast, but five minutes does not go far in the maddening routine of French stations, and we were wrecks, mentally and physically, by the time we had wedged ourselves into the crowded carriage, labelled ‘Bordeaux—Bastide,’ that was to be our portion. French railway officials never weary of this little practical joke of keeping the outside clock of the station five minutes fast. If they did it always it would lose its piquancy, but they guard against this by occasional deviations into truth, so that the nerve of the public is effectively shattered, and the station officials never fail of amusement.

Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time, especially when the train goes through a country that, after a first hour or so of picturesqueness, lacks absolutely any distinction of colour or outline. Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side, without a fence, without a boundary, except for the occasional rows of housemaids’ mops and birch-rods that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of poplars are inseparable from French travelling; they haunt the ridges of the plains like the ghosts of worthier trees, with all the dejection befitting those who know that they are only worth a few francs, and can hope for no better transmigration than a kitchen table or a pig’s trough. The country seemed silent and empty after the harvest; we saw very few living things except flocks of sheep, and we meditated with an ever-growing wonder on what might be the moral suasion that kept each of these on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing from the more than demoniacal perverseness of Irish sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to us that the French must have hit on the supreme expedient of offering no resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed at one blow the essential joy of trespass.

The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us time to observe all wayside objects: we could have counted the big citrouilles that lay in magnificent obesity, with their sunset-hued cheeks glowing like fire on the colourless fields, suggestive of immeasurable pumpkin squash, and we could see on the low bushes that we had at first taken for currant trees, the black clusters that told we had at last come into the wine country. It was not so pleasant to see in the waiting-room at Poitiers the black clusters of men, each enveloped in his own halo of garlic or bad tobacco smoke, that told us our chance of getting a cup of coffee was not worth the attendant horror of elbowing our way through them to the buffet. We had not got over the strangeness of knowing that at any or every small hotel or railway station we could have a really good cup of coffee, unflavoured by chicory, liquorice, blackbeetles, or whatever may be the master ingredient in the muddy draught that is invariable at such places in England, and we had looked forward to Poitiers with an enthusiasm quite unconnected with the Black Prince, or any other romantic memory of Mrs. Markham’s History of England.

By the time we reached AngoulÊme it was quite dark, and we had fallen into the sodden stupefaction of travel. The carriage was nearly empty, and the lamp cast a distorted light upon the puckered faces of the old lady and gentleman who were our only fellow-travellers, as their heads nodded and rolled in anxious, uneasy slumber. The small stations became more frequent, and we were drearily aware of the same routine at each: the half-dozen lights of a village across the fields, the nasal bellow of an unintelligible name, the thump of a box or two on the platform, and finally a sound that we took at first for the bleat of a tethered kid, but which we discovered to be the note of a small trumpet or horn, wound by the guard as the signal for departure. It was only towards the end of the journey that this implement had replaced the ordinary whistle, and for about eight or ten stations we laughed at it; after that the lament of the kid added itself seriously to the general gloom.

The last hour or two before Bordeaux would have been much harder to bear but for a display of sheet lightning, the like of which we had never seen before. The sudden beautiful flicker played hide-and-seek like a living creature among the curtains of cloud, flashing about all the points of the compass between south and east, or sometimes thrusting to and fro across an opening, like glimpses of the rapiers in a giants’ fencing bout. It was under this mocking, elfish light that we first sighted Bordeaux and its river, and realised that the time had come for us to strap up our rugs, and say ‘pardon’ in our best French accent to the old gentleman on whose feet we trod as we did so, and to drag our stiff bodies forth into the electric glare of the station. We had reached such a stage of fatigue and demoralisation that we should rather have stayed in the carriage all night, and gone on with the old lady to a place she called ‘Erin,’ in a fine Hammersmith twang. We should not have cared much whether it proved to be the land of our birth, or Irun, on the Spanish frontier, which we now believe to have been her destination.

We had a long quarter of an hour to wait before the Douane could bring itself to give up its dead, and there was another quarter of an hour of driving through deserted and badly-lighted streets before we got to our hotel. We crossed a bridge that must have been half a mile long, we feigned to each other an interest in a half-seen gateway at the end of it, and our hearts were all the time groping in a certain hold-all, where lay a spirit-kettle, a teapot, and half a pound of English tea. The offensively urbane and wide-awake head waiter, with his clean-shaven face and foxy eyes, had some evident difficulty in repressing his scorn when he heard that he was to faire monter to our room a little milk and hot water, but it mounted to our third floor for all that. It was a blow to find a skin on the top of the milk that showed it had once been boiled: we did not know then that French hotels considered milk in its raw, uncooked state to be as baneful as if it were water.

Our room was large, and of a somewhat gloomy magnificence, with towering bed canopies, and darkly-gleaming mahogany; and as our one bougie—valued in the bill at a franc—contended with its surroundings, we felt like a chapter out of almost any of Scott’s novels—the chapter where the hero spends a night in some one’s private and luxurious dungeon, and having obtained writing materials, has heard the last retreating footsteps of an attendant who has unostentatiously locked and double-locked the door. What we heard principally, while we drank our surreptitious midnight cup of tea, was not the howling of the storm or the hoarse baying of a bloodhound in the courtyard, but the snoring of some one in the next room. It was hard to believe that the artist was not doing it on purpose; each snore was so painstaking, so measured, and had such a careful crescendo in its vibrating fortissimo. He had certainly brought the accomplishment to a high degree of perfection, and if he does not die of concussion of the brain in the attempt, he ought, with a little more practice, to be able to empty any hotel in a single night.

It was broad summer in Bordeaux, so we discovered next morning when we escaped from the

half-light of the coffee-room and walked forth to see the town. We went down to the quays and crawled along them in the shade, looking at the immense river, and the long ‘winter woodland’ of masts of all countries, stretching away seemingly to the Bay of Biscay: it did not matter that the water was the colour of cafÉ au lait, churned to dirty froth by innumerable screws and paddles, or that the hoarse screams of steam whistles ascended through black smoke to the brilliant heavens; all was new and delightful, and of a cheerfulness unknown to the British Isles. It was here that we began to realise what the wine country could do when it gave its mind to it. The great quays were packed close with barrels as far as the eye could follow—barrels on whose ends were hieroglyphs that told of aristocratic birth as plainly as the armorial bearings on a carriage; the streets were full of long narrow carts like ladders on wheels, laden also with barrels, one behind the other; and about every five minutes, as it seemed to us, some big ship moved out from the wharf, filled to the brim with claret, and slipped down the yellow current to other climes. As we sat under the chestnut trees and watched the tide of the traffic, we began to notice that there are more grey horses in France than one would have imagined there could have been in the world. The streets of Paris are mottled by them; the streets of Bordeaux are mottled in the opposite way—that is to say, the dark horses are like specks among the white, and in the MÉdoc the necessary difficulty of providing black horses for funerals can probably be only solved by blacklead.

We carried a map of Bordeaux in our hands, and stopped many times to study it as we strolled along, causing thereby an ecstasy of interest among the sailors and the women sitting at their stalls of strange fruits and fungi. It was disappointing that French wit did not on these occasions elaborate any jest more sparkling than ‘Ah! Les Anglaises!’ though the inhabitants seemed to find the humour of the situation satiatingly expressed in this simple formula. Once, in Paris, a butcher’s boy screamed ‘Angleesh spock-en’ after us, and convulsed the whole street with the sally; but we thought that we could have produced something better any day on Patrick’s Bridge, Cork. We perseveringly ciphered out our route to the church of St. Michel, assisted a good deal, it must be admitted, by the fact that its steeple is the tallest thing in Bordeaux. We were getting very hot indeed as we toiled through the Tour de Cailhau—so hot that, as a Galway woman once remarked, ‘it would have been a pleasure to any one to lie down and die,’ and we longed to sit down and rest on the kerbstone in the shade of the Tour beside a man in a blue blouse who was sharpening a razor in his entirely filthy palm.

This being out of the question, we struggled on towards St. Michel, promising ourselves a bath of coolness and darkness under its lofty roof, and more especially in its underground caverns, where inhabit the celebrated mummies that have been preserved by the soil of the graveyard from dissolution. We crossed the last and sunniest street, and passed through a swing door into a large church, considerably hotter than anything or anywhere outside, and with an atmosphere of an unknown and stifling kind. We walked round it in silence, and, looking at each other, as we fanned ourselves with guide-books, we felt that our last chance of averting heat-apoplexy was to go underground at once and see the mummies.

We found that the mummies lived in a place apart from the church, under the clocher, as the beautiful spire is called, by which we had steered our way, and we approached with feelings of unmitigated awe and creepiness the doorway to which we had been directed by two little boys who were playing cards in the shadow of a buttress. The door itself was round another buttress, in a low and crumbling stone archway, and we knocked timidly at it. It opened, and in a room of about the size and shape of a bonnet-box we beheld, instead of mummies, a cheerful family party at breakfast. We were about to retire, but the mother, wiping the vin ordinaire from her jovial mouth, assured us that she was ready to show us the Cellar of the Mummies immediately. We squeezed past the rest of the family, and saw that at their very feet a precipitous stone staircase plunged into darkness.

Our guide picked up a candlestick of a pattern that we were destined to see more of afterwards,—i.e. a long piece of wood with a tallow bougie erect at one end of it,—and after an anxious inquiry on our parts as to whether there was any scent lÀ-bas in the cave had been answered in the negative, we followed her into the abyss. It proved to be a circular vault, made, like everything else in Bordeaux, of dusty yellow stone, and, after a minute of despondency on the part of the bougie, we saw, lining its walls, a dismal array of little brown figures, propped on end behind a low wooden rail.

The guide advanced with alacrity to her task.

‘Behold, mesdames, the celebrated mummies of St. Michel’—

She paused, and flourished the candle in the awful faces of a group of objects who were just preserved from being skeletons by a ragged covering of dusty leather which had once been flesh.

‘VoiÇi la famille empoisonnÉe! Observe the morsel still in the mouth of the little one! Mosh-rhume! Hein?’ She made a light-hearted attempt at the English word, but seeing we looked bewildered, passed easily back into French. ‘Mushrooms, mesdames. All the family are found dead together!’

We looked at them, but not too closely, and also at their companions—the porter, the fat woman (now a shrivelled and dreadful dwarf), the boy who had been buried alive,—at least, the guide hopefully said that she was almost sure that he had been buried alive,—and the General, evidently a special favourite, who had been frequently wounded in the battle, so she told us, as an apology for the fact that there was very little of him left. How she knew these gruesome histories we did not inquire, and with the best intentions in the world we could not altogether believe them. There was nothing human or appealing in these grotesque survivals of three centuries ago; they might have been little damaged terra-cotta figures, had it not been for the dusty grins that showed unmistakable teeth, and some indefinable sentiment of genuineness and absence of effort.

As we climbed up the stone stairs into the sun and heat, we felt that the immortality thrust upon the mummies of St. Michel was a cruel one; and nothing but the affectionate satisfaction of the able show-woman with her show reconciles us to its memory.