IV. FONTAINEBLEAU 313

two at first show only want of faith in my old manner, and more endeavour for light and shade, futile enough. The flat cross-country between Chartres and Fontainebleau, with an oppressive sense of Paris to the north, fretted me wickedly; when we got to the Fountain of Fair Water¹ I lay feverishly wakeful through the night, and was so heavy and ill in the morning that I could not safely travel, and fancied some bad sickness was coming on. However, towards twelve o’clock the inn people brought me a little basket of wild strawberries; and they refreshed me, and I put my sketch-book in pocket and tottered out, though still in an extremely languid and woe-begone condition; and getting into a cart-road among some young trees, where there was nothing to see but the blue sky through thin branches, lay down on the bank by the roadside to see if I could sleep. But I couldn’t, and the branches against the blue sky began to interest me, motionless as the branches of a tree of Jesse on a painted window.

Feeling gradually somewhat livelier, and that I wasn’t going to die this time, and be buried in the sand, though I couldn’t for the present walk any farther, I took out my book, and began to draw a little aspen tree, on the other side of the cart-road, carefully.

76. How I had managed to get into that utterly dull cart-road, when there were sandstone rocks to be sought for, the Fates, as I have so often to observe,² only know; but I was never fortunate enough to find at Fontainebleau any of the sublimities which I hear vaunted by French artists, and which disturbed poor Evelyn’s mind nearly as much as the “horrid Alp” of Clifton:³-

“7th March (1644).-I set forwards with some company towards Fontaine Bleau, a sumptuous palace of the King’s like ours at Hampton Court. By the way we passe through a forest so prodigiously encompass’d with

¹ [The “Fontaine de Belle Eau,” formerly in the gardens of the Palace, is supposed to have given its name to the place (see § 77); the source has been lost in forming artificial ponds.]

² [See, e. g., pp. 224 n., 304.]

³ [See above, ii. § 2 (p. 244).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]