A Hilltop on the Marne - Mildred Aldrich
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A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE
By Mildred Aldrich
Being Letters Written
June 3-September 8, 1914
Note To Tenth Impression
The author wishes to apologize for the constant use of the word English
in speaking of the British Expedition to France. At the beginning of
the war this was a colloquial error into which we all fell over here,
even the French press. Everything in khaki was spoken of as "English,"
even though we knew perfectly well that Scotch, Irish, and Welsh were
equally well represented in the ranks, and the colors they followed were
almost universally spoken of as the "English flag." These letters were
written in the days before the attention of the French press was called
to this error of speech, which accounts for the mistake's persisting in
the book.
La Creste, Huiry,
France, February, 1916.
To My Grandmother
Judith Trask Baker
That Staunch New Englander And
Pioneer Universalist
To The Memory Of Whose Courage
And Example I Owe A Debt
Of Eternal Gratitude
A HILLTOP ON THE MARNE
June 3, 1914
Well, the deed is done. I have not wanted to talk with you much about
it until I was here. I know all your objections. You remember that you
did not spare me when, a year ago, I told you that this was my plan. I
realize that you--more active, younger, more interested in life, less
burdened with your past--feel that it is cowardly on my part to seek a
quiet refuge and settle myself into it, to turn my face peacefully to
the exit, feeling that the end is the most interesting event ahead of
me--the one truly interesting experience left to me in this incarnation.
I am not proposing to ask you to see it from my point of view. You
cannot, no matter how willing you are to try. No two people ever see
life from the same angle. There is a law which decrees that two objects
may not occupy the same place at the same time--result: two people
cannot see things from the same point of view, and the slightest
difference in angle changes the thing seen.
I did not decide to come away into a little corner in the country, in
this land in which I was not born, without looking at the move from all
angles. Be sure that I know what I am doing, and I have found the place
where I can do it. Some time you will see the new home, I hope, and
then you will understand. I have lived more than sixty years. I have
lived a fairly active life, and it has been, with all its hardships--and
they have been many--interesting. But I have had enough of the
city--even of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Nothing can
take any of that away from me. It is treasured up in my memory. I am
even prepared to own that there was a sort of arrogance in my
persistence in choosing for so many years the most seductive city in the
world, and saying, "Let others live where they will--here I propose to
stay." I lived there until I seemed to take it for my own--to know it on
the surface and under it, and over it, and around it; until I had a sort
of morbid jealousy when I found any one who knew it half as well as I
did, or presumed to love it half as much, and dared to say so. You will
please note that I have not gone far from it.
But I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet--perfect peace. I
know again that there is a sort of arrogance in expecting it, but I am
going to make a bold bid for it. I will agree, if you like, that it is
cowardly to say that my work is done. I will even agree that we both
know plenty of women who have cheerfully gone on struggling to a far
greater age, and I do think it downright pretty of you to find me
younger than my years. Yet you must forgive me if I say that none of us
know one another, and, likewise, that appearances are often deceptive.
What you are pleased to call my "pride" has helped me a little. No one
can decide for another the proper moment for striking one's colors.
I am sure that you--or for that matter any other American--never heard
of Huiry. Yet it is a little hamlet less than thirty miles from Paris.
It is in that district between Paris and Meaux little known to the
ordinary traveler. It only consists of less than a dozen rude
farm-houses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, which,
with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the
banks of the Marne, spanned just there bylines of old mills whose
water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular
with excursionists. There are people who go there to see where Bossuet
wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house standing among
pines and cedars on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop's palace,
now, since the "separation," the property of the State, and soon to be a
town museum. It is not a very attractive town. It has not even an
out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.
My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant's hut. It is
considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and
outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables. Is it not a
pity, for early association's sake, that it has not one more?
I have, as Traddles used to say, "Oceans of room, Copperfield," and no
joking. I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair sized
salon, into which the front door opens directly. Over that I have a
long, narrow bed-room and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a
sort of attic work-shop. In an attached, one-story addition with a
gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east
and west. Behind the salon on the west side I have a double room which
serves as dining and breakfast-room, with a guest-chamber above. The
kitchen, at the north side of the salon, has its own gable, and there is
an old stable extending forward at the north side, and an old grange
extending west from the dining-room. It is a jumble of roofs and
chimneys, and looks very much like the houses I used to combine from my
Noah's Ark box in the days of my babyhood.
All the rooms on the ground floor are paved in red tiles, and the
staircase is built right in the salon. The ceilings are raftered. The
cross-beam in the salon fills my soul with joy--it is over a foot wide
and a foot and a half thick. The walls and the rafters are painted
green,--my color,--and so good, by long trial, for my eyes and my
nerves, and my disposition.
But much as I like all this, it was not this that attracted me here.
That was the situation. The house stands in a small garden, separated
from the road by an old gnarled hedge of hazel. It is almost on the
crest of the hill on the south bank of the Marne,--the hill that is the
water-shed between the Marne and the Grand Morin. Just here the Marne
makes a wonderful loop, and is only fifteen minutes walk away from my
gate, down the hill to the north.
From the lawn, on the north side of the house, I command a panorama
which I have rarely seen equaled. To me it is more beautiful than that
we have so often looked at together from the terrace at Saint-Germain.
In the west the new part of Esbly climbs the hill, and from there to a
hill at the northeast I have a wide view of the valley of the Marne,
backed by a low line of hills which is the water-shed between the Marne
and the Aisne. Low down in the valley, at the northwest, lies lie de
Villenoy, like a toy town, where the big bridge spans the Marne to carry
the railroad into Meaux. On the horizon line to the west the tall
chimneys of Claye send lines of smoke into the air. In the foreground
to the north, at the foot of the hill, are the roofs of two little
hamlets,--Joncheroy and Voisins,--and beyond them the trees that border
the canal.
On the other side of the Marne the undulating hill, with its wide
stretch of fields, is dotted with little villages that peep out of the
trees or are silhouetted against the sky-line,--Vignely, Trilbardou,
Penchard, Monthyon, Neufmortier, Chauconin, and in the foreground to
the north, in the valley, just halfway between me and Meaux, lies
Mareuil-on-the-Marne, with its red roofs, gray walls, and church spire.
With a glass I can find where Chambry and Barcy are, on the slope behind
Meaux, even if the trees conceal them.
But these are all little villages of which you may never have heard. No
guidebook celebrates them. No railroad approaches them. On clear days
I can see the square tower of the cathedral at Meaux, and I have only to
walk a short distance on the route nationale,--which runs from Paris,
across the top of my hill a little to the east, and thence to Meaux and
on to the frontier,--to get a profile view of it standing up above the
town, quite detached, from foundation to clock-tower.
This is a rolling country of grain fields, orchards, masses of
black-currant bushes, vegetable plots,--it is a great sugar-beet
country,--and asparagus beds; for the Department of the Seine et Marne
is one of the most productive in France, and every inch under
cultivation. It is what the French call un paysage riant, and I assure
you, it does more than smile these lovely June mornings. I am up every
morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into sabots, wrap
myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to make sure that
the panorama has not disappeared in the night. There always lie--too
good almost to be true--miles and miles of laughing country, little
white towns just smiling in the early light, a thin strip of river here
and there, dimpling and dancing, stretches of fields of all colors--all
so, peaceful and so gay, and so "chummy" that it gladdens the opening
day, and makes me rejoice to have lived to see it. I never weary of it.
It changes every hour, and I never can decide at which hour it is the
loveliest. After all, it is a rather nice world.
Now get out your map and locate me.
You will not find Huiry. But you can find Esbly, my nearest station on
the main line of the Eastern Railroad. Then you will find a little
narrow-gauge road running from there to Crecy-la-Chapelle. Halfway
between you will find Couilly-Saint-Germain. Well, I am right up the
hill, about a third of the way between Couilly and Meaux.
It is a nice historic country. But for that matter so is all France. I
am only fifteen miles northeast of Bondy, in whose forest the naughty
Queen Fredegonde, beside whose tomb, in Saint-Denis, we have often stood
together, had her husband killed, and nearer still to Chelles, where the
Merovingian kings once had a palace stained with the blood of many
crimes, about which you read, in many awful details, in Maurice
Strauss's "Tragique Histoire des Reines Brunhaut et Fredegonde," which I
remember to have sent you when it first came out. Of course no trace of
those days of the Merovingian dynasty remains here or anywhere else.
Chelles is now one of the fortified places in the outer belt of forts
surrounding Paris.
So, if you will not accept all this as an explanation of what you are
pleased to call my "desertion," may I humbly and reluctantly put up a
plea for my health, and hope for a sympathetic hearing?
If I am to live much longer,--and I am on the road down the hill, you
know,--I demand of Life my physical well-being. I want a robust old
age. I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in
town,--city-born and city-bred though I am. I used to think, and I
continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did
not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems
to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my
habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet. In the
simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I expect
to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me.
I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle. No one ever dies up on this
hill, I am told, except of hard drink. Judging by my experience with
workmen here, not always of that. I never saw so many very old, very
active, robust people in so small a space in all my life as I have seen
here.
Are you answered?
Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am
shirking--well, I am sorry. It seems to me that, from another point of
view, I am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room--
getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and me,
was getting trying for my mental complexion. If I have blundered, the
consequences be on my own head. My hair could hardly be whiter--that's
something. Besides, retreat is not cut off. I have sworn no eternal
oath not to change my mind again.
In any case you have no occasion to worry about me: I've a head full of
memories. I am going to classify them, as I do my books. Some of them I
am going to forget, just as I reject books that have ceased to interest
me. I know the latter is always a wrench. The former may be
impossible. I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that. I
may miss talking. Perhaps that is a good thing. I may have talked too
much. That does happen.
Remember one thing--I am not inaccessible. I may now and then get an
opportunity to talk again, and in a new background. Who knows? I am
counting on nothing but the facts about me. So come on, Future. I've
my back against the past. Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue.
I've crossed the Rubicon, and can return only when I have built a new
bridge.
II
June 18, 1914.
That's right. Accept the situation. You will soon find that Paris will
seem the same to you. Besides, I had really given all I had to give
there.
Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material
side of my life is arranged,--all my comforts and discomforts,--since
you ask.
I am now absolutely settled into my little "hole" in the country, as you
call it. It has been so easy. I have been here now nearly three weeks.
Everything is in perfect order. You would be amazed if you could see
just how everything fell into place. The furniture has behaved itself
beautifully. There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived
anywhere else. The shabby old furniture with which you were long so
familiar just slipped right into place. I had not a stick too little,
and could not have placed another piece. I call that "bull luck."
I have always told you--you have not always agreed--that France was the
easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in which
to be a pauper. That is why it suits me.
Don't harp on that word "alone." I know I am living alone, in a house
that has four outside doors into the bargain. But you know I am not one
of the "afraid" kind. I am not boasting. That is a characteristic, not
a quality. One is afraid or one is not. It happens that I am not.
Still, I am Very prudent. You would laugh if you could see me "shutting
up" for the night. All my windows on the ground floor are heavily
barred. Such of the doors as have glass in them have shutters also.
The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with
diamond-shaped holes in the upper part. First, I put up the shutters on
the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south
side; then I lock the door. Then I do a similar service for the kitchen
door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both
doors. Then I go out the salon door and lock the stable and the grange
and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door
after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.
After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of
the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee
Carnavalet. Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs. I do it
systematically every night--because I promised not to be foolhardy. I
always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play. It impresses me
so much like a tremendous piece of business--dramatic suspense--which
leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.
When it is all done I feel as I used to in my strenuous working days,
when, after midnight, all the rest of the world--my little world--being
calmly asleep, I cuddled down in the corner of my couch to read;--the
world is mine!
Never in my life--anywhere, under any circumstances--have I been so well
taken care of. I have a femme de menage--a sort of cross between a
housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work. She is a married woman, the wife of
a farmer whose house is three minutes away from mine. My dressing-room
window and my dining-room door look across a field of currant bushes to
her house. I have only to blow on the dog's whistle and she can hear.
Her name is Amelie, and she is a character, a nice one, but not half as
much of a character as her husband--her second. She is a Parisian. Her
first husband was a jockey, half Breton, half English. He died years
ago when she was young: broke his neck in a big race at Auteuil.
She has had a checkered career, and lived in several smart families
before, to assure her old age, she married this gentle, queer little
farmer. She is a great find for me. But the thing balances up
beautifully, as I am a blessing to her, a new interest in her monotonous
life, and she never lets me forget how much happier she is since I came
here to live. She is very bright and gay, intelligent enough to be a
companion when I need one, and well-bred enough to fall right into her
proper place when I don't.
Her husband's name is Abelard. Oh, yes, of course, I asked him about
Heloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when the little
old toothless chap giggled and said, "That was before my time." What do
you think of that? Every one calls him "Pere Abelard," and about the
house it is shortened down to "Pere." He is over twenty years older than
Amelie--well along in his seventies. He is a native of the commune--was
born at Pont-aux-Dames, at the foot of the hill, right next to the old
abbaye of that name. He is a type familiar enough to those who know
French provincial life. His father was a well-to-do farmer. His mother
was the typical mother of her class. She kept her sons under her thumb
as long as she lived. Pere Abelard worked on his father's farm. He had
his living, but never a sou in his pocket. The only diversion he ever
had was playing the violin, which some passer in the commune taught him.
When his parents died, he and his brothers sold the old place at
Pont-aux-Dames to Coquelin, who was preparing to turn the historic old
convent into a maison de retraite for aged actors, and he came up here
on the hill and bought his present farm in this hamlet, where almost
every one is some sort of a cousin of his.
Oddly enough, almost every one of these female cousins has a history.
You would not think it, to look at the place and the people, yet I fancy
that it is pretty universal for women in such places to have
"histories." You will see an old woman with a bronzed face--sometimes
still handsome, often the reverse--in her short skirt, her big apron
tied round where a waist is not, her still beautiful hair concealed in a
colored handkerchief. You ask the question of the right person, and you
will discover that she is rich; that she is avaricious; that she pays
heavy taxes; denies herself all but the bare necessities; and that the
foundation of her fortune dates back to an affaire du coeur, or perhaps
of interest, possibly of cupidity; and that very often the middle-aged
daughter who still "lives at home with mother," had also had a
profitable affaire arranged by mother herself. Everything has been
perfectly convenable. Every one either knows about it or has forgotten
it. No one is bothered or thinks the worse of her so long as she has
remained of the "people" and put on no airs. But let her attempt to
rise out of her class, or go up to Paris, and the Lord help her if she
ever wants to come back, and, French fashion, end her days where she
began them. This is typically, provincially French. When you come down
here I shall tell you tales that will make Balzac and De Maupassant look
tame.
You have no idea how little money these people spend, It must hurt them
terribly to cough up their taxes. They all till the land, and eat what
they grow. Amelie's husband spends exactly four cents a week--to get
shaved on Sunday. He can't shave himself. A razor scares him to death.
He looks as if he were going to the guillotine when he starts for the
barber's, but she will not stand for a beard of more than a week's
growth. He always stops at my door on his way back to let his wife kiss
his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles--the ordeal is over for
another week. He never needs a sou except for that shave. He drinks
nothing but his own cider: he eats his own vegetables, his own rabbits;
he never goes anywhere except to the fields,--does not want to--unless
it is to play the violin for a dance or a fete. He just works, eats,
sleeps, reads his newspaper, and is content. Yet he pays taxes on
nearly a hundred thousand francs' worth of real estate.
But, after all, this is not what I started to tell you--that was about
my domestic arrangements. Amelie does everything for me. She comes
early in the morning, builds a fire, then goes across the field for the
milk while water is heating. Then she arranges my bath, gets my coffee,
tidies up the house. She buys everything I need, cooks for me, waits on
me, even mends for me,--all for the magnificent sum of eight dollars a
month. It really isn't as much as that, it is forty francs a month,
which comes to about a dollar and eighty cents a week in your currency.
She has on her farm everything in the way of vegetables that I need,
from potatoes to "asparagras," from peas to tomatoes. She has chickens
and eggs. Bread, butter, cheese, meat come right to the gate; so does
the letter carrier, who not only brings my mail but takes it away. The
only thing we have to go for is the milk.
To make it seem all the more primitive there is a rickety old diligence
which runs from Quincy--Huiry is really a suburb of Quincy--to Esbly
twice a day, to connect with trains for Paris with which the branch road
does not connect. It has an imperial, and when you come out to see me,
at some future time, you will get a lovely view of the country from a
top seat. You could walk the four miles quicker than the horse
does,--it is uphill nearly all the way,--but time is no longer any
object with me. Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive me to
the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to do an
errand or go to the laundress, or merely to amuse myself.
If you can really match this for a cheap, easy, simple way for an
elderly person to live in dignity, I wish you would. It is far easier
than living in Paris was, and living in Paris was easier for me than the
States. I am sorry, but it is the truth.
You ask me what I do with the "long days." My dear! they are short, and
yet I am out of bed a little after four every morning. To be sure I get
into bed again at half past eight, or, at latest, nine, every night. Of
course the weather is simply lovely. As soon as I have made sure that
my beloved panorama has not disappeared in the night I dress in great
haste. My morning toilette consists of a long black studio apron such
as the French children wear to school,--it takes the place of a
dress,--felt shoes inside my sabots, a big hat, and long
gardening-gloves. In that get-up I weed a little, rake up my paths,
examine my fruit trees, and, at intervals, lean on my rake in a Maud
Muller posture and gaze at the view. It is never the same two hours of
the day, and I never weary of looking at it.
My garden would make you chortle with glee. You will have to take it by
degrees, as I do. I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it
myself--en masse, so to speak. I hardly know a thing in it by name. I
have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and
cherry trees on the north side. The east side is half lawn and half
disorderly flower beds. I am going to let the tangle in the orchard
grow at its own sweet will--that is, I am going to as far as Amelie
allows me. I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that,
while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of the
ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole place if
allowed to grow. Yet some of these same saletes are so pretty and grow
so easily that I am tempted not to care. One of these trials of my life
is what I am learning to know as liserone--we used to call it wild
morning-glory. That I am forbidden to have--if I want anything else.
But it is pretty.