Читать книгу The Life of the Moselle - Octavius Rooke - Страница 8

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Bathing at Toul.

“Oh, pleasant land of France!” sings the poet; and a pleasant land it is, especially when, as now, the tall and yellow grain is spreading over its fair plains. As we approach Toul the reapers are at work; the women and children are busy binding or spreading out the sheaves fast as the men can cut them—all is gay and happy; the sun glowing on the grain makes the whole land seem an El Dorado, and we appear to move in one of the golden dreams of fairyland.

Coming on our river again, which has serpentined along, loitering to water those fruitful plains of “old Lorraine,” we find her stream shrunk within its pebbly bed; for the sun has drunk from earth her moisture, and the fire element rules now for the good of man, where the water, moistening the earth, had produced the germ within her bosom.

The contrast of the burning sun and corn makes our dear river seem the cooler and the fresher. All down its course the bathers are wading refreshingly about: in a side-stream, shaded by tall poplars and guarded from eyes inquisitive by rows of piled-up firewood, bathe the women, maids, and girls; in long loose dresses floating, with hair wreathed lightly round their glistening heads, they toss the glittering drops upon each other, and laugh, and scream, and sing: here, hand-in-hand, with tottering gait, they struggle up against the stream, slipping and tumbling at each forward step—then, the desired point reached, merrily they float down, and the blue tide sparkles with their beauty. Upon the bank are some timidly adventuring their hesitating feet before they plunge into the element; some bind their hair, preparing; others, having bathed, unbind, and the long tresses stream over the fair shoulders: blithely thus they pass the time, and defy the hot old sun upon the river’s bank.

A little further, and the green slopes of the fortifications sweep up, and the cathedral towers stand high above the invisible town; beyond the towers is a great flat-topped hill, whose smaller brethren stretch south-wards: in all, the same flatness of the summit is perceptible.

The river makes a great bend after passing Toul; she seems to have come so far, to see the old capital of the Leuci, and finding there little to arrest her progress or detain her steps, she hastens off to hear from her girlish friend, the Meurthe, the history of Nancy, whose walls the latter guards.

Before we go with our Moselle to hear the tales of Nancy, we must first listen to a simple story from French every-day life, near Toul.