Chapter 19

There is much entertainment in the journey through
the wide, smiling garden of Gascony; I speak of it as
I took it in going from Bordeaux to Toulouse. It is
the south, quite the south, and had for the present
narrator its full measure of the charm he is always
determined to find in countries that may even by
courtesy be said to appertain to the sun. It was,
moreover, the happy and genial view of these mild
latitudes, which, Heaven knows, often have a dreari-
ness of their own; a land teeming with corn and wine,
and speaking everywhere (that is, everywhere the phyl-
loxera had not laid it waste) of wealth and plenty.
The road runs constantly near the Garonne, touching
now and then its slow, brown, rather sullen stream, a
sullenness that encloses great dangers and disasters.
The traces of the horrible floods of 1875 have dis-
appeared, and the land smiles placidly enough while
it waits for another immersion. Toulouse, at the period
I speak of, was up to its middle (and in places above
it) in water, and looks still as if it had been thoroughly
soaked, - as if it had faded and shrivelled with a long
steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more
forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charm-
ing Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, bar-
ring the straightness, and here and there occupies the
foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while
the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course
a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals
- and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I hold
the taste to be most legitimate - will delight in this
admirable specimen of the class, which has a very in-
teresting history, not to be narrated here. On the
other side of the road (the left), all the way, runs a
long, low line of hills, or rather one continuous hill,
or perpetual cliff, with a straight top, in the shape of
a ledge of rock, which might pass for a ruined wall.
I am afraid the reader will lose patience with my habit
of constantly referring to the landscape of Italy, as if
that were the measure of the beauty of every other.
Yet I am still more afraid that I cannot apologize for
it, and must leave it in its culpable nakedness. It is
an idle habit; but the reader will long since have dis-
covered that this was an idle journey, and that I give
my impressions as they came to me. It came to me,
then, that in all this view there was something trans-
alpine with a greater smartness and freshness and
much less elegance and languor. This impression was
occasionally deepened by the appearance, on the long
eminence of which I speak, of a village, a church, or
a chateau, which seemed to look down at the plain
from over the