Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months--and what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and everything is for the best in the best of worlds.
Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube. The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an emerald. { 293}
{ 295}The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.
How one sees her come to life again in such sites! Her marbles are fallen, her festivals have vanished; but in the shivering of the firs, at the sound of the cracking glaciers, before the steely splendors of { 296}these chaste waters, she reappears like a vision. All the night long, in the outcries of the wind, the herdsmen could hear the baying of her hounds and the whistling of her arrows; the untamed chorus of her nymphs coursed over the precipices; the moon shone upon their shoulders of silver, and on the point of their lances. In the morning she came to bathe her arms in the lake; and more than once has she been seen standing upon a summit, her eyes fixed, her brow severe; her foot trod the cruel snow, and her virgin breasts gleamed beneath the winter sun.
The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants, a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek, learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God. The { 297}Bishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: "Madame, if there were at the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts, each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire." She did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted, had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.