and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an apothecary in

Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in
America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny in his

pocket. And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an
adventurous life! I thought he might as well have stayed at home;

but you never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what he
sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to marry, a third to write

scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in public, and now this
fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his old

father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour. 'I had
always bread for him,' he said; 'he ran away to annoy me. He loved

to annoy me. He had no gratitude.' But at heart he was swelling
with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out

of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of
paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. 'This comes from

America,' he cried, 'six thousand leagues away!' And the wine-shop
audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.

I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the
country. OU'ST QUE VOUS ALLEZ? was changed for me into QUOI, VOUS

RENTREZ AU MONASTIER and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There

was one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for
me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They

were filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion,
the dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's

head on English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in
English Journals. The language, in particular, filled them with

surprise.
'Do they speak PATOIS in England?' I was once asked; and when I told

them not, 'Ah, then, French?' said they.
'No, no,' I said, 'not French.'

'Then,' they concluded, 'they speak PATOIS.'
You must obviously either speak French or PATIOS. Talk of the force

of logic - here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was met with

a new mortification. Of all PATIOS they declared that mine was the
most preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word

there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones
were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in

ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly
disagreeable bewilderment. 'Bread,' which sounds a commonplace,

plain-sailing monosyllable in England, was the word that most
delighted these good ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them

frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and they all got it
carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for winter evenings. I

have tried it since then with every sort of accent and inflection,
but I seem to lack the sense of humour.

They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid

married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and

natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity when
that was called for by the subject of our talk. Life, since the fall

in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious air. The
stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a provocative and not

unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one of the grandmothers,
who was my great friend of the party, gave me many a sharp word of

judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, and gave
them with a wry mouth and a humoroustwinkle in her eye that were

eminently Scottish. But the rest used me with a certain reverence,
as something come from afar and not entirely human. Nothing would

put them at their ease but the irresistiblegaiety of my native
tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a real

attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily

composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she
would always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to

see her sitting in judgment over the last. 'No, no,' she would say,
'that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than

that. We must try again.' When I was about to leave she bade me
good-bye for this life in a somewhat touching manner. We should not

meet again, she said; it was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But
life is so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows? I have said

good-bye to people for greater distances and times, and, please God,
I mean to see them yet again.

One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they

could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was
nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body,

but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair
and square, by way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was

pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided PATOIS like a
weakness, commonly addressed her child in the language of a drunken

bully. And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an
old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making a sketch,

and her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it and took my
departure. It is true she had a right to be angry; for here was her

son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the day was
well begun. But it was strange to hear her unwearying flow of oaths

and obscenities, endless like a river, and now and then rising to a
passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning.

In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed; but in a
country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this

beastliness of speech surprised the ear.
The CONDUCTOR, as he is called, OF ROADS AND BRIDGES was my principal

companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more
or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specially

to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in

his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special
knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are about,

whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary
question.

I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
grew to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could

make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the
wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the

places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand

spent a day while she was gathering materials for the MARQUIS DE
VILLEMER; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child

running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke French imperfectly; for

this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever he let
slip a broad and picturesquephrase in PATOIS, she would make him

repeat it again and again till it was graven in her memory. The word
for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it would be curious to

know if she afterwards employed it in her works. The peasants, who
knew nothing of betters and had never so much as heard of local

colour, could not explain her chattering with this backward child;
and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far from beautiful:

the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian
swine-herds!

On my first engineeringexcursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an improving

acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the

supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called 'the gallantry'
of paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he

was a man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper.
But I am afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he

had seen one night a company of BOURGEOIS ET DAMES QUI FAISAIENT LA
MANEGE AVEC DES CHAISES, and concluded that he was in the presence of