To go from Nantes to La Rochelle you travel straight southward,across the historic bocage of La Vendee,the home of royalist bushfighting.The country,which is exceedingly pretty,bristles with copses,orchards,hedges,and with trees more spreading and sturdy than the traveller is apt to deem the feathery foliage of France.It is true that as I proceeded it flattened out a good deal,so that for an hour there was a vast featureless plain,which offered me little entertainment beyond the general impression that I was approaching the Bay of Biscay (from which,in reality,I was yet far distant).As we drew near La Rochelle,however,the prospect brightened considerably,and the railway kept its course beside a charming little canal,or canalized river,bordered with trees,and with small,neat,brightcolored,and yet oldfashioned cottages and villas,which stood back on the further side,behind small gardens,hedges,painted palings,patches of turf.The whole effect was Dutch and delightful;and in being delightful,though not in being Dutch,it prepared me for the charms of La Rochelle,which from the moment Ientered it I perceived to be a fascinating little town,a most original mixture of brightness and dulness.
Part of its brightness comes from its being extraordinarily clean,in which,after all,it is Dutch;a virtue not particularly noticeable at Bourges,Le Mans,and Angers.Whenever I go southward,if it be only twenty miles,I begin to look out for the south,prepared as I am to find the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of which it may,be said that they may be south of something,but are not southern.
To go from Boston to New York (in this state of mind)is almost as soft a sensation as descending the Italian side,of the Alps;and to go from New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and warmth.Given this absurd disposition,I could not fail to flatter myself,on reaching La Rochelle,that I was already in the Midi,and to perceive in everything,in the language of the country,the caractere meridional.Really,a great many things had a hint of it.For that matter,it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound to wake up there,as it were would be a very imperfect pleasure.The full pleasure is to approach by stages and gradations;to observe the successive shades of difference by which it ceases to be the north.These shades are exceedingly fine,but your true southlover has an eye for them all.If he perceive them at New York and Philadelphia,we imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston,how could he fail to perceive them at La Rochelle?The streets of this dear little city are lined with arcades,good,big,straddling arcades of stone,such as befit a land of hot summers,and which recalled to me,not to go further,the dusky portions of Bayonne.It contains,moreover,a great wide place d'armes,which looked for all the world like the piazza of some dead Italian town,empty,sunny,grassgrown,with a row of yellow houses overhanging it,an unfrequented cafe,with a striped awning,a tall,cold,florid,uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on one side,and on the other a shady walk,which forms part of an old rampart.I followed this walk for some time,under the stunted trees,beside the grasscovered bastions;it is very charming,winding and wandering,always with trees.Beneath the rampart is a tidal river,and on the other side,for a long distance,the mossy walls of the immense garden of a seminary.Three hundred years ago,La Rochelle was the great French stronghold of Protestantism;but today it appears to be a'nursery of Papists.
The walk upon the rampart led me round to one of the gatesi of the town,where I found some small modern,fortifications and sundry redlegged soldiers,and,beyond the fortifications,another shady walk,a mail,as the French say,as well as a champ de manoeuvre,on which latter expanse the poor little redlegs were doing their exercise.It was all very quiet and very picturesque,rather in miniature;and at once very tidy and a little out of repair.This,however,was but a meagre backview of La Rochelle,or poor sideview at best.There are other gates than the small fortified aperture just mentioned;one of them,an old gray arch beneath a fine clocktower,Ihad passed through on my way from the station.
This picturesque Tour de l'Horloge separates the town proper from the port;for beyond the old gray arch,the place presents its bright,expressive little face to the sea.I had a charming walk about the harbor,and along the stone piers and seawalls that shut it in.This indeed,to take things in their order,was after I had had my breakfast (which I took on arriving)and after I had been to the hotel de ville.The inn had a long narrow garden behind it,with some very tall trees;and passing through this garden to a dim and secluded salle a manger,buried in the heavy shade,I had,while I sat at my repast,a feeling of seclusion which amounted almost to a sense of incarceration.I lost this sense,however,after I had paid my bill,and went out to look for traces of the famous siege,which is the principal title of La Rochelle to renown.I had come thither partly because Ithought it would be interesting to stand for a few moments in so gallant a spot,and partly because,Iconfess,I had a curiosity to see what had been the startingpoint of the Huguenot emigrants who founded the town of New Rochelle in the State of New York,a place in which I had passed certain memorable hours.It was strange to think,as I strolled through the peaceful little port,that these quiet waters,during the wars of religion,had swelled with a formidable naval power.The Rochelais had fleets and admirals,and their stout little Protestant bottoms carried defiance up and down.