There is less to distract the
attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself. It is not
bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor
bestrewn with the remains of English picnics. The hunting still
goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
since, 'a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers.'
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills
that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of
country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all
mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey,
and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine
of a solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by
themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of
birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate,
and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then a
long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown
heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the
later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
of sunlight set in purple heather.
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