THE CASE OF DELICACY.
When you have gained the top of Mount Taurira, you run presently down to Lyons: --adieu, then, to all rapid movements! 'Tis a journey of caution; and it fares better with sentiments, not to be in a hurry with them; so I contracted with a voiturin to take his time with a couple of mules, and convoy me in my own chaise safe to Turin, through Savoy.
Poor, patient, quiet, honest people! fear not: your poverty, the treasury of your simple virtues, will not be envied you by the world, nor will your valleys be invaded by it.--Nature! in the midst of thy disorders, thou art still friendly to the scantiness thou hast created: with all thy great works about thee, little hast thou left to give, either to the scythe or to the sickle;--but to that little thou grantest safety and protection; and sweet are the dwellings which stand so shelter'd.
Let the way-worn traveller vent his complaints upon the sudden turns and dangers of your roads,--your rocks,--your precipices;-- the difficulties of getting up,--the horrors of getting down,-- mountains impracticable,--and cataracts, which roll down great stones from their summits, and block his road up.--The peasants had been all day at work in removing a fragment of this kind between St. Michael and Madane; and, by the time my voiturin got to the place, it wanted full two hours of completing before a passage could any how be gain'd: there was nothing but to wait with patience;--'twas a wet and tempestuous night; so that by the delay, and that together, the voiturin found himself obliged to put up five miles short of his stage at a little decent kind of an inn by the roadside.
I forthwith took possession of my bedchamber--got a good fire-- order'd supper; and was thanking heaven it was no worse, when a voiture arrived with a lady in it and her servant maid.
As there was no other bed-chamber in the house, the hostess,-- without much nicety, led them into mine, telling them, as she usher'd them in, that there was nobody in it but an English gentleman;--that there were two good beds in it, and a closet within the room which held another. The accent in which she spoke of this third bed, did not say much for it;--however, she said there were three beds and but three people, and she durst say, the gentleman would do anything to accommodate matters.--I left not the lady a moment to make a conjecture about it--so instantly made a declaration that I would do anything in my power.
As this did not amount to an absolute surrender of my bed-chamber, I still felt myself so much the proprietor, as to have a right to do the honours of it;--so I desired the lady to sit down,--pressed her into the warmest seat,--called for more wood,--desired the hostess to enlarge the plan of the supper, and to favour us with the very best wine.
The lady had scarce warm'd herself five minutes at the fire, before she began to turn her head back, and give a look at the beds; and the oftener she cast her eyes that way, the more they return'd perplexd;--I felt for her--and for myself: for in a few minutes, what by her looks, and the case itself, I found myself as much embarrassed as it was possible the lady could be herself.
That the beds we were to lie in were in one and the same room, was enough simply by itself to have excited all this;--but the position of them, for they stood parallel, and so very close to each other as only to allow space for a small wicker chair betwixt them, rendered the affair still more oppressive to us;--they were fixed up moreover near the fire; and the projection of the chimney on one side, and a large beam which cross'd the room on the other, formed a kind of recess for them that was no way favourable to the nicety of our sensations: --if anything could have added to it, it was that the two beds were both of them so very small, as to cut us off from every idea of the lady and the maid lying together; which in either of them, could it have been feasible, my lying beside them, though a thing not to be wish'd, yet there was nothing in it so terrible which the imagination might not have pass'd over without torment.