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 dreariness of their own;a land teeming with corn and wine,and speaking everywhere (that is,everywhere the phylloxera 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 1875have disappeared,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 charming Canal du Midi,which is as pretty as a river,barring 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 interesting 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 discovered 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 transalpine 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 ruined wall.The perpetual vines,the brightfaced flatroofed houses,covered with tiles,the softness and sweetness of the light and air,recalled the prosier portions of the Lombard plain.Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression,but not enough to give a color to its dark,dirty,crooked streets,which are irregular without being eccentric,and which,if it were not for the,superb church of SaintSernin,would be quite destitute of monuments.
