Chapter Chapter 72 · WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES

Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person

who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his

course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved

road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which

succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce

something in the nature of enormous waves.

He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived

the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l’Alleud, which has the form of a

reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and at

the angle of the crossroad, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet

bearing the inscription _Ancient Barrier No. 4_, a public house,

bearing on its front this sign: _At the Four Winds_ (Aux Quatre Vents).

_Échabeau, Private Café_.

A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little

valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through

the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very

green trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is

dispersed over the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and

as in order in the direction of Braine-l’Alleud.

On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart

at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried

brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and

a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A

young girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably

of some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in

the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla

of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes.

The wayfarer struck into this.

After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth

century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he

found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear

impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat

medallions. A severe façade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular

to the façade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt

right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through

which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.

The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old

rusty knocker.

The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,

which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A

brave little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted

manner in a large tree.

The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,

resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the

foot of the pier of the door.

At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman

emerged.

She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.

“It was a French cannon-ball which made that,” she said to him. And she

added:—

“That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the

hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce

the wood.”

“What is the name of this place?” inquired the wayfarer.

“Hougomont,” said the peasant woman.

The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and

went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through

the trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this

elevation something which at that distance resembled a lion.

He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.