Chapter 90

AND OTHER STORIES 83 of that fact. On the other hand, it is exceedingly difficult to believe that these articles could have remained in the thicket specified for a longer period than a single week — for a longer period than from one Sunday to the next. Those who know anything of the vicinity of Paris know the extreme difficulty of finding seclusion , unless at a great distance from its suburbs. Such a thing as an unexplored, or even an unfrequently visited recess, amid its woods or groves, is not for a moment to be imagined. Let any one who, being at heart a lover of nature, is yet chained by duty to the dust and heat of this great metropolis— let any such one attempt, even during the weekdays, to slake his thirst for solitude amid the scenes of natural loveliness which immediately surround us — at every step he will find the growing charm dispelled by the voice and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound — here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of the heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to less odious, because less incongruous, sink of pollution. But if the vicinity of the city is so beset during working days of the week, how much more so on Sabbath ! It is now especially that, released from the claims of labor or deprived of the customary opportunities of crime, the town blackguard seeks the precincts of the town, not through love of the rural, which in his heart he despises, but by way of escape from the restraints and conventionalities of society. He desires less the fresh air and the green trees than the utter license of the country. Here, at the roadside inn or beneath the foliage of the woods, he indulges, unchecked by any eye except those of his boon companions, in all the mad excess of a counterfeit hilarity — the joint offspring of liberty and of rum. I say nothing more than what must be obvious to every dispassionate observer.