Note 34 — VALDUNA

I have just gone through Quinet’s pages again. They are a thing apart, in French travel-literature. Here is no affectation, no mockery, no rhetoric, no complaints about this or that, no advice to the Greeks as to how they should govern themselves; nothing but the impressions of a blithe and sympathetic traveler. So he wanders through this country which then possessed “not a single two-wheeled carriage” nor domestic beasts of any kind; he gives us poignant sketches of its utter desolation—the fire-blackened villages and their few, half-starved inhabitants, the putrefying corpses, skeletons by the wayside, leagues of burnt forest and olive-groves; together with a few brighter descriptions of life in Arcadia, of those delightful Albanian children, and of chance meetings with the great Kolokotroni and others. What strikes me as distinctively non-French in Quinet is his whole-hearted love of nature, and a certain organic nobility of outlook. One would gladly quote from those stimulating reflections on the art of ancient Greece, but as I am on the subject of homesickness, I will merely transcribe what he says of Sparta (then a mere hovel) which has the true nostalgic ring. “Je laisse à d’autres à expliquer comment une ville qui ne vous est rien, bien moins, quelques tertres de cailloux que vous ne reverrez jamais, peuvent vous manquer plus que votre terre natale.” Quinet, it will be seen, wrote as citizen of the world, not of France; and that is why his book is a thing apart. It ends with a touching farewell to the whole country. “Ni demain, ni après, ne verrai-je plus mes hôtes de Dhervény ou de Mistra, ni les forêts brulées, ni les os sur la grève, ni tout ce que les hommes peuvent souffrir pour une pensée, sans cesser de la mettre à haut prix ...”

There once passed through my hands a copy of these travels marginally annotated by some Greek reader in faded, yellow ink. One of his observations ran to this effect: “Ce livre est tout ce qu’il doit être, admirable de description et de vérité. Moi, Grec, je puis témoigner que ce livre est plein de vérités et de charmes.”