Italy Revisited

I

I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber
(they took place on the 14th of October); as only after one had
learned that the famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his
ministers to drive the French nation to the polls like a flock of
huddling sheep, each with the white ticket of an official
candidate round his neck, had not achieved the success which the
energy of the process might have promised--only then it was
possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican party
of such support as might have been conveyed in one's sympathetic
presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been
enchanting--there were Italian fancies to be gathered without
leaving the banks of the Seine. Day after day the air was filled
with golden light, and even those chalkish vistas of the Parisian
beaux quartiers assumed the iridescent tints of autumn.
Autumn weather in Europe is often such a very sorry affair that a
fair-minded American will have it on his conscience to call
attention to a rainless and radiant October.

The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while
after starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as
you leave Paris at night, in a train unprovided with
encouragements to slumber, is a singular mixture of the odious
and the charming. The charming indeed I think prevails; for the
dark half of the journey is the least interesting. The morning
light ushers you into the romantic gorges of the Jura, and after
a big bowl of cafe au lait at Culoz you may compose
yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day
before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had just returned
from a visit to a Tuscan country-seat where he had been watching
the vintage. "Italy," he said, "is more lovely than words can
tell, and France, steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no
better than a bear-garden." The part of the bear-garden through
which you travel as you approach the Mont Cenis seemed to me that
day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence
of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their
low garlands between the mulberries round about Chambery looked
like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier station of
Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is a very
ill-regulated place; but even the most irritable of tourists,
meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it
good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scrambling,
and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of
ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian
custom-house are much scantier than should be; but for myself
there is something that