II
In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of
Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the whole western
side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well
enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without
some special character and charm. Such quarters, for instance, as
the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a
hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the
silence of the birds. The two last are really conterminous; and in
both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand
political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper
placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the
air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs. In
the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock
lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper
slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the
great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a
grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos.
Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of
the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road conceived for pageantry
and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of
glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves,
and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen
far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon
one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a
little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and
heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine
trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be
forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a
hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an
unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing;
and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with
the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance.
There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the
lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the
glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant
darkness of the wood.
In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a
changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in. As fast as
your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each
vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that
hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers
and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.
And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in
the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if
with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint,
has countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you
are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,
to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the
aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a
wilderness; it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre
of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the midst, a little
mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure;
and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled by historic
names, stands smokeless among gardens.
Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless
humbug who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by
the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner
of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the
romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of
sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of
his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his perfect
wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a
great avidity. In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-
stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he
was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would
seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places
still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten,
and that lie unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows
waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the
corner of a rock. But your security from interruption is complete;
you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul
suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have
committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could
still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and
chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate
landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he
would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;
and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated
quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the
immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests. And
the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented
inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the
companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination
vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;
others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem
but an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day. But to the
plain man it offers solitude: an excellent thing in itself, and a
good whet for company.
