Travelling by Guy De Maupassant

Saint-Agnès, 6th May.

My Dear Friend,

You asked me to write to you often, and particularly to tell you what I had seen. You also asked me to search through my memories of travel and find some of those short anecdotes which one hears from a peasant met by the way, from some hotelkeeper, or some passing stranger, and which remain in the memory like the key to a country. You believe that a landscape sketched in a few lines, or a short story told in a few words, reveals the true character of a country, makes it live, visibly and dramatically. I shall try to do as you wish. From time to time I will send you letters, in which I shall not mention ourselves, but only the horizon and the people who move on it. Now I begin.

Spring, it seems to me, is a season when one should eat and drink landscapes. It is the season for sensations, as the autumn is the season for thought. In spring the country stirs the body; in autumn it penetrates the mind.

This year I wanted to inhale orange-blossoms, and I set out for the South at the time when everybody comes back from there. I passed through Monaco, the town of pilgrims, the rival of Mecca and Jerusalem, without leaving my money in anybody else's pocket, and I ascended the high hills beneath a canopy of lemon, orange and olive trees.

Did you ever sleep in a field of orange trees in bloom? The air which one inhales deliciously is a quintessence of perfumes. This powerful and sweet smell, as savoury as a sweetmeat, seems to penetrate one, to impregnate, to intoxicate, to induce languor, to bring about a dreamy and somnolent torpor. It is like opium prepared by fairy hands and not by chemists.

This is a country of gorges. The sides of the mountains are seamed and slashed all over, and in these winding crevices grow veritable forests of lemon trees. At intervals, where the abrupt ravine stops at a sort of ledge, man has fashioned reservoirs which catch the water from the rain storms. They are great holes with smooth walls, which offer no projection to catch the hand of those who fall.

I was walking slowly through one of these rising valleys, looking through the leaves at the bright fruit still remaining on the branches. The narrow gorge made the heavy perfumes of the flowers more penetrating; in there the air seemed dense because of them. I felt tired and wanted to sit down. A few drops of water rolled on the grass, I thought a spring must be near, and I climbed higher to find it. But I reached the edge of one of these huge, deep reservoirs. I sat down cross-legged and remained dreaming in front of the hole, which seemed to be full of ink, so black and stagnant was the water in it. Down below, through the branches, I could see, like splashes, bits of the Mediterranean, blindingly dazzling. But my glance constantly returned to this vast and sombre hole which seemed uninhabited by any form of water life, its surface was so still.

Suddenly a voice made me start. An old gentleman, looking for flowers (for this country is the richest in Europe for botanists), asked me:

"Are you a relative of those poor children?"

I looked at him in astonishment.

"What children?"

Then he seemed embarrassed and answered with a bow:

"I beg your pardon. Seeing you so absorbed in that reservoir I imagined you were thinking of the awful drama which took place there."

I wanted to know all about it, and I asked him to tell me the story.

It is a very gloomy and heartbreaking story, my dear, and very commonplace, at the same time. It is simply like an incident from the daily papers. I do not know whether my emotion is to be attributed to the dramatic way in which it was told to me, to the mountain background, or to the contrast between the joyous flowers and sunshine and this dark, murderous hole. My heart was torn and my nerves shaken by this story, which may not seem so terribly poignant to you, perhaps, as you read it in your room, without seeing the scene in which the drama is laid.

It was in the spring a few years back. Two little boys often used to play on the edge of this cistern, while their tutor read a book, lying under a tree. Now, one hot afternoon, a piercing cry aroused the man, who was dozing, and the noise of water splashing after a fall caused him to get up immediately. The younger of the two children, aged eleven years, was yelling, standing near the reservoir, whose troubled, rippling surface had closed over the elder, who had just fallen in while running along the stone ledge.

The distracted tutor, without waiting, without thinking, jumped into the depths, and did not appear again, having struck his head against the bottom. At the same moment, the little boy, who had come to the surface, was waving his arms to his brother. Then the child who was on dry land lay down and stretched out, while the other tried to swim, to reach the wall, and soon four little hands seized and held each other, clutching in a convulsive grip. Both felt the keen joy of being restored to life, the thrill of a peril that has passed. The elder tried to climb up, but could not, the wall being steep, and the younger, being too weak, was slowly slipping towards the hole. Then they remained motionless, seized again with terror, and waited.