Chapter: VOLUME 2 CHAPTER I



 Where'er I roam, whatever realms I see,
 My heart untravell'd still shall turn to thee.
     GOLDSMITH

The carriages were at the gates at an early hour; the bustle of the
domestics, passing to and fro in the galleries, awakened Emily from
harassing slumbers: her unquiet mind had, during the night, presented
her with terrific images and obscure circumstances, concerning her
affection and her future life. She now endeavoured to chase away the
impressions they had left on her fancy; but from imaginary evils she
awoke to the consciousness of real ones. Recollecting that she had
parted with Valancourt, perhaps for ever, her heart sickened as memory
revived. But she tried to dismiss the dismal forebodings that crowded on
her mind, and to restrain the sorrow which she could not subdue;
efforts which diffused over the settled melancholy of her countenance
an expression of tempered resignation, as a thin veil, thrown over
the features of beauty, renders them more interesting by a partial
concealment. But Madame Montoni observed nothing in this countenance
except its usual paleness, which attracted her censure. She told her
niece, that she had been indulging in fanciful sorrows, and begged she
would have more regard for decorum, than to let the world see that she
could not renounce an improper attachment; at which Emily's pale cheek
became flushed with crimson, but it was the blush of pride, and she made
no answer. Soon after, Montoni entered the breakfast room, spoke little,
and seemed impatient to be gone.

The windows of this room opened upon the garden. As Emily passed them,
she saw the spot where she had parted with Valancourt on the preceding
night: the remembrance pressed heavily on her heart, and she turned
hastily away from the object that had awakened it.

The baggage being at length adjusted, the travellers entered their
carriages, and Emily would have left the chateau without one sigh of
regret, had it not been situated in the neighbourhood of Valancourt's
residence.

From a little eminence she looked back upon Tholouse, and the far-seen
plains of Gascony, beyond which the broken summits of the Pyrenees
appeared on the distant horizon, lighted up by a morning sun. 'Dear
pleasant mountains!' said she to herself, 'how long may it be ere I see
ye again, and how much may happen to make me miserable in the interval!
Oh, could I now be certain, that I should ever return to ye, and find
that Valancourt still lived for me, I should go in peace! He will still
gaze on ye, gaze when I am far away!'

The trees, that impended over the high banks of the road and formed a
line of perspective with the distant country, now threatened to exclude
the view of them; but the blueish mountains still appeared beyond the
dark foliage, and Emily continued to lean from the coach window, till at
length the closing branches shut them from her sight.

Another object soon caught her attention. She had scarcely looked at
a person who walked along the bank, with his hat, in which was the
military feather, drawn over his eyes, before, at the sound of wheels,
he suddenly turned, and she perceived that it was Valancourt himself,
who waved his hand, sprung into the road, and through the window of the
carriage put a letter into her hand. He endeavoured to smile through
the despair that overspread his countenance as she passed on. The
remembrance of that smile seemed impressed on Emily's mind for ever.
She leaned from the window, and saw him on a knoll of the broken bank,
leaning against the high trees that waved over him, and pursuing the
carriage with his eyes. He waved his hand, and she continued to gaze
till distance confused his figure, and at length another turn of the
road entirely separated him from her sight.

Having stopped to take up Signor Cavigni at a chateau on the road,
the travellers, of whom Emily was disrespectfully seated with Madame
Montoni's woman in a second carriage, pursued their way over the plains
of Languedoc. The presence of this servant restrained Emily from reading
Valancourt's letter, for she did not choose to expose the emotions it
might occasion to the observation of any person. Yet such was her wish
to read this his last communication, that her trembling hand was every
moment on the point of breaking the seal.

At length they reached the village, where they staid only to change
horses, without alighting, and it was not till they stopped to dine,
that Emily had an opportunity of reading the letter. Though she had
never doubted the sincerity of Valancourt's affection, the fresh
assurances she now received of it revived her spirits; she wept over his
letter in tenderness, laid it by to be referred to when they should be
particularly depressed, and then thought of him with much less anguish
than she had done since they parted. Among some other requests, which
were interesting to her, because expressive of his tenderness, and
because a compliance with them seemed to annihilate for a while the pain
of absence, he entreated she would always think of him at sunset. 'You
will then meet me in thought,' said he; 'I shall constantly watch the
sun-set, and I shall be happy in the belief, that your eyes are fixed
upon the same object with mine, and that our minds are conversing. You
know not, Emily, the comfort I promise myself from these moments; but I
trust you will experience it.'

It is unnecessary to say with what emotion Emily, on this evening,
watched the declining sun, over a long extent of plains, on which she
saw it set without interruption, and sink towards the province which
Valancourt inhabited. After this hour her mind became far more tranquil
and resigned, than it had been since the marriage of Montoni and her
aunt.

During several days the travellers journeyed over the plains of
Languedoc; and then entering Dauphiny, and winding for some time among
the mountains of that romantic province, they quitted their carriages
and began to ascend the Alps. And here such scenes of sublimity opened
upon them as no colours of language must dare to paint! Emily's mind was
even so much engaged with new and wonderful images, that they sometimes
banished the idea of Valancourt, though they more frequently revived
it. These brought to her recollection the prospects among the Pyrenees,
which they had admired together, and had believed nothing could excel
in grandeur. How often did she wish to express to him the new emotions
which this astonishing scenery awakened, and that he could partake
of them! Sometimes too she endeavoured to anticipate his remarks, and
almost imagined him present. She seemed to have arisen into another
world, and to have left every trifling thought, every trifling
sentiment, in that below; those only of grandeur and sublimity now
dilated her mind, and elevated the affections of her heart.

With what emotions of sublimity, softened by tenderness, did she meet
Valancourt in thought, at the customary hour of sun-set, when, wandering
among the Alps, she watched the glorious orb sink amid their summits,
his last tints die away on their snowy points, and a solemn obscurity
steal over the scene! And when the last gleam had faded, she turned
her eyes from the west with somewhat of the melancholy regret that is
experienced after the departure of a beloved friend; while these lonely
feelings were heightened by the spreading gloom, and by the low sounds,
heard only when darkness confines attention, which make the general
stillness more impressive--leaves shook by the air, the last sigh of the
breeze that lingers after sun-set, or the murmur of distant streams.

During the first days of this journey among the Alps, the scenery
exhibited a wonderful mixture of solitude and inhabitation, of
cultivation and barrenness. On the edge of tremendous precipices, and
within the hollow of the cliffs, below which the clouds often floated,
were seen villages, spires, and convent towers; while green pastures
and vineyards spread their hues at the feet of perpendicular rocks
of marble, or of granite, whose points, tufted with alpine shrubs, or
exhibiting only massy crags, rose above each other, till they terminated
in the snow-topt mountain, whence the torrent fell, that thundered along
the valley.

The snow was not yet melted on the summit of Mount Cenis, over which
the travellers passed; but Emily, as she looked upon its clear lake and
extended plain, surrounded by broken cliffs, saw, in imagination, the
verdant beauty it would exhibit when the snows should be gone, and the
shepherds, leading up the midsummer flocks from Piedmont, to pasture on
its flowery summit, should add Arcadian figures to Arcadian landscape.

As she descended on the Italian side, the precipices became still more
tremendous, and the prospects still more wild and majestic, over which
the shifting lights threw all the pomp of colouring. Emily delighted to
observe the snowy tops of the mountains under the passing influence of
the day, blushing with morning, glowing with the brightness of noon, or
just tinted with the purple evening. The haunt of man could now only be
discovered by the simple hut of the shepherd and the hunter, or by the
rough pine bridge thrown across the torrent, to assist the latter in his
chase of the chamois over crags where, but for this vestige of man, it
would have been believed only the chamois or the wolf dared to venture.
As Emily gazed upon one of these perilous bridges, with the cataract
foaming beneath it, some images came to her mind, which she afterwards
combined in the following

     STORIED SONNET

 The weary traveller, who, all night long,
 Has climb'd among the Alps' tremendous steeps,
 Skirting the pathless precipice, where throng
 Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps
 If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees
 The mountain-shepherd's solitary home,
 Peeping from forth the moon-illumin'd trees,
 What sudden transports to his bosom come!
 But, if between some hideous chasm yawn,
 Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays,
 In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn
 He stands, and views in the faint rays
 Far, far below, the torrent's rising surge,
 And listens to the wild impetuous roar;
 Still eyes the depth, still shudders on the verge,
 Fears to return, nor dares to venture o'er.
 Desperate, at length the tottering plank he tries,
 His weak steps slide, he shrieks, he sinks--he dies!

Emily, often as she travelled among the clouds, watched in silent awe
their billowy surges rolling below; sometimes, wholly closing upon the
scene, they appeared like a world of chaos, and, at others, spreading
thinly, they opened and admitted partial catches of the landscape--the
torrent, whose astounding roar had never failed, tumbling down the rocky
chasm, huge cliffs white with snow, or the dark summits of the pine
forests, that stretched mid-way down the mountains. But who may describe
her rapture, when, having passed through a sea of vapour, she caught
a first view of Italy; when, from the ridge of one of those tremendous
precipices that hang upon Mount Cenis and guard the entrance of that
enchanting country, she looked down through the lower clouds, and, as
they floated away, saw the grassy vales of Piedmont at her feet, and,
beyond, the plains of Lombardy extending to the farthest distance, at
which appeared, on the faint horizon, the doubtful towers of Turin?

The solitary grandeur of the objects that immediately surrounded her,
the mountain-region towering above, the deep precipices that fell
beneath, the waving blackness of the forests of pine and oak, which
skirted their feet, or hung within their recesses, the headlong torrents
that, dashing among their cliffs, sometimes appeared like a cloud of
mist, at others like a sheet of ice--these were features which received
a higher character of sublimity from the reposing beauty of the Italian
landscape below, stretching to the wide horizon, where the same melting
blue tint seemed to unite earth and sky.

Madame Montoni only shuddered as she looked down precipices near whose
edge the chairmen trotted lightly and swiftly, almost, as the chamois
bounded, and from which Emily too recoiled; but with her fears were
mingled such various emotions of delight, such admiration, astonishment,
and awe, as she had never experienced before.

Meanwhile the carriers, having come to a landing-place, stopped to rest,
and the travellers being seated on the point of a cliff, Montoni and
Cavigni renewed a dispute concerning Hannibal's passage over the Alps,
Montoni contending that he entered Italy by way of Mount Cenis, and
Cavigni, that he passed over Mount St. Bernard. The subject brought
to Emily's imagination the disasters he had suffered in this bold and
perilous adventure. She saw his vast armies winding among the defiles,
and over the tremendous cliffs of the mountains, which at night were
lighted up by his fires, or by the torches which he caused to be carried
when he pursued his indefatigable march. In the eye of fancy, she
perceived the gleam of arms through the duskiness of night, the glitter
of spears and helmets, and the banners floating dimly on the twilight;
while now and then the blast of a distant trumpet echoed along the
defile, and the signal was answered by a momentary clash of arms. She
looked with horror upon the mountaineers, perched on the higher cliffs,
assailing the troops below with broken fragments of the mountain; on
soldiers and elephants tumbling headlong down the lower precipices; and,
as she listened to the rebounding rocks, that followed their fall,
the terrors of fancy yielded to those of reality, and she shuddered to
behold herself on the dizzy height, whence she had pictured the descent
of others.

Madame Montoni, meantime, as she looked upon Italy, was contemplating in
imagination the splendour of palaces and the grandeur of castles, such
as she believed she was going to be mistress of at Venice and in the
Apennine, and she became, in idea, little less than a princess. Being
no longer under the alarms which had deterred her from giving
entertainments to the beauties of Tholouse, whom Montoni had mentioned
with more eclat to his own vanity than credit to their discretion, or
regard to truth, she determined to give concerts, though she had neither
ear nor taste for music; conversazioni, though she had no talents for
conversation; and to outvie, if possible, in the gaieties of her parties
and the magnificence of her liveries, all the noblesse of Venice. This
blissful reverie was somewhat obscured, when she recollected the Signor,
her husband, who, though he was not averse to the profit which sometimes
results from such parties, had always shewn a contempt of the frivolous
parade that sometimes attends them; till she considered that his pride
might be gratified by displaying, among his own friends, in his native
city, the wealth which he had neglected in France; and she courted again
the splendid illusions that had charmed her before.

The travellers, as they descended, gradually, exchanged the region of
winter for the genial warmth and beauty of spring. The sky began to
assume that serene and beautiful tint peculiar to the climate of Italy;
patches of young verdure, fragrant shrubs and flowers looked gaily among
the rocks, often fringing their rugged brows, or hanging in tufts
from their broken sides; and the buds of the oak and mountain ash were
expanding into foliage. Descending lower, the orange and the myrtle,
every now and then, appeared in some sunny nook, with their yellow
blossoms peeping from among the dark green of their leaves, and mingling
with the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate and the paler ones of the
arbutus, that ran mantling to the crags above; while, lower still,
spread the pastures of Piedmont, where early flocks were cropping the
luxuriant herbage of spring.

The river Doria, which, rising on the summit of Mount Cenis, had dashed
for many leagues over the precipices that bordered the road, now began
to assume a less impetuous, though scarcely less romantic character, as
it approached the green vallies of Piedmont, into which the travellers
descended with the evening sun; and Emily found herself once more amid
the tranquil beauty of pastoral scenery; among flocks and herds, and
slopes tufted with woods of lively verdure and with beautiful shrubs,
such as she had often seen waving luxuriantly over the alps above. The
verdure of the pasturage, now varied with the hues of early flowers,
among which were yellow ranunculuses and pansey violets of delicious
fragrance, she had never seen excelled.--Emily almost wished to become
a peasant of Piedmont, to inhabit one of the pleasant embowered cottages
which she saw peeping beneath the cliffs, and to pass her careless hours
among these romantic landscapes. To the hours, the months, she was to
pass under the dominion of Montoni, she looked with apprehension; while
those which were departed she remembered with regret and sorrow.

In the present scenes her fancy often gave her the figure of Valancourt,
whom she saw on a point of the cliffs, gazing with awe and admiration
on the imagery around him; or wandering pensively along the vale
below, frequently pausing to look back upon the scenery, and then,
his countenance glowing with the poet's fire, pursuing his way to some
overhanging heights. When she again considered the time and the distance
that were to separate them, that every step she now took lengthened this
distance, her heart sunk, and the surrounding landscape charmed her no
more.

The travellers, passing Novalesa, reached, after the evening had closed,
the small and antient town of Susa, which had formerly guarded this pass
of the Alps into Piedmont. The heights which command it had, since the
invention of artillery, rendered its fortifications useless; but these
romantic heights, seen by moon-light, with the town below, surrounded
by its walls and watchtowers, and partially illumined, exhibited an
interesting picture to Emily. Here they rested for the night at an inn,
which had little accommodation to boast of; but the travellers brought
with them the hunger that gives delicious flavour to the coarsest
viands, and the weariness that ensures repose; and here Emily first
caught a strain of Italian music, on Italian ground. As she sat after
supper at a little window, that opened upon the country, observing an
effect of the moon-light on the broken surface of the mountains, and
remembering that on such a night as this she once had sat with her
father and Valancourt, resting upon a cliff of the Pyrenees, she heard
from below the long-drawn notes of a violin, of such tone and delicacy
of expression, as harmonized exactly with the tender emotions she was
indulging, and both charmed and surprised her. Cavigni, who approached
the window, smiled at her surprise. 'This is nothing extraordinary,'
said he, 'you will hear the same, perhaps, at every inn on our way. It
is one of our landlord's family who plays, I doubt not,' Emily, as she
listened, thought he could be scarcely less than a professor of music
whom she heard; and the sweet and plaintive strains soon lulled her into
a reverie, from which she was very unwillingly roused by the raillery
of Cavigni, and by the voice of Montoni, who gave orders to a servant to
have the carriages ready at an early hour on the following morning; and
added, that he meant to dine at Turin.

Madame Montoni was exceedingly rejoiced to be once more on level ground;
and, after giving a long detail of the various terrors she had suffered,
which she forgot that she was describing to the companions of her
dangers, she added a hope, that she should soon be beyond the view of
these horrid mountains, 'which all the world,' said she, 'should not
tempt me to cross again.' Complaining of fatigue she soon retired to
rest, and Emily withdrew to her own room, when she understood from
Annette, her aunt's woman, that Cavigni was nearly right in his
conjecture concerning the musician, who had awakened the violin with
so much taste, for that he was the son of a peasant inhabiting the
neighbouring valley. 'He is going to the Carnival at Venice,' added
Annette, 'for they say he has a fine hand at playing, and will get a
world of money; and the Carnival is just going to begin: but for my
part, I should like to live among these pleasant woods and hills, better
than in a town; and they say Ma'moiselle, we shall see no woods, or
hills, or fields, at Venice, for that it is built in the very middle of
the sea.'

Emily agreed with the talkative Annette, that this young man was making
a change for the worse, and could not forbear silently lamenting, that
he should be drawn from the innocence and beauty of these scenes, to the
corrupt ones of that voluptuous city.

When she was alone, unable to sleep, the landscapes of her native home,
with Valancourt, and the circumstances of her departure, haunted her
fancy; she drew pictures of social happiness amidst the grand simplicity
of nature, such as she feared she had bade farewel to for ever; and
then, the idea of this young Piedmontese, thus ignorantly sporting with
his happiness, returned to her thoughts, and, glad to escape awhile from
the pressure of nearer interests, she indulged her fancy in composing
the following lines.

     THE PIEDMONTESE

 Ah, merry swain, who laugh'd along the vales,
 And with your gay pipe made the mountains ring,
 Why leave your cot, your woods, and thymy gales,
 And friends belov'd, for aught that wealth can bring?
 He goes to wake o'er moon-light seas the string,
 Venetian gold his untaught fancy hails!
 Yet oft of home his simple carols sing,
 And his steps pause, as the last Alp he scales.
 Once more he turns to view his native scene--
 Far, far below, as roll the clouds away,
 He spies his cabin 'mid the pine-tops green,
 The well-known woods, clear brook, and pastures gay;
 And thinks of friends and parents left behind,
 Of sylvan revels, dance, and festive song;
 And hears the faint reed swelling in the wind;
 And his sad sighs the distant notes prolong!
 Thus went the swain, till mountain-shadows fell,
 And dimm'd the landscape to his aching sight;
 And must he leave the vales he loves so well!
 Can foreign wealth, and shows, his heart delight?
 No, happy vales! your wild rocks still shall hear
 His pipe, light sounding on the morning breeze;
 Still shall he lead the flocks to streamlet clear,
 And watch at eve beneath the western trees.
 Away, Venetian gold--your charm is o'er!
 And now his swift step seeks the lowland bow'rs,
 Where, through the leaves, his cottage light ONCE MORE
 Guides him to happy friends, and jocund hours.
 Ah, merry swain! that laugh along the vales,
 And with your gay pipe make the mountains ring,
 Your cot, your woods, your thymy-scented gales--
 And friends belov'd--more joy than wealth can bring!

 Emily's maybe the only person ever who has to be dragged to Venice. As the carriage heads off, a disguised Valancourt presses a letter into her hand. Game on. Here are the juicy tidbits of Valancourt's letter: every time the sun sets, he'll look at it and think of her. Aww, it's just waiting to be turned into a Disney movie. Some more reflections about land and travel are headed our way. Em writes a pretty profound sonnet about a weary traveler climbing the Alps. She also writes a little poem about a local musician heading to Venice. She's a regular Shakespeare, that Emily.

