bonnais; those sites
and streams in them, of name once so indifferent to us, but to which
George Sand gave such a music for our ear,--La Chatre, Ste. Severe, the
_Vallee Noire_, the Indre, the Creuse; how many a reader of George Sand
must have desired, as I did, after frequenting them so much in thought,
fairly to set eyes upon them!

I had been reading _Jeanne_.[298] I made up my mind to go and see Toulx
Ste. Croix, Boussac, and the Druidical stones on Mont Barlot, the
_Pierres Jaunatres_.[299]

I remember looking out Toulx in Cassini's great map[300] at the
Bodleian Library. The railway through the centre of France went in those
days no farther than Vierzon. From Vierzon to Chateauroux one travelled
by an ordinary diligence, from Chateauroux to La Chatre by a humbler
diligence, from La Chatre to Boussac by the humblest diligence of all.
At Boussac diligence ended, and _patache_[301] began. Between
Chateauroux and La Chatre, a mile or two before reaching the latter
place, the road passes by the village of Nohant. The Chateau of Nohant,
in which Madame Sand lived, is a plain house by the road-side, with a
walled garden. Down in the meadows, not far off, flows the Indre,
bordered by trees. I passed Nohant without stopping, at La Chatre I
dined and changed diligence, and went on by night up the valley of the
Indre, the _Vallee Noire_, past Ste. Severe to Boussac. At Ste. Severe
the Indre is quite a small stream. In the darkness we quitted its
valley, and when day broke we were in the wilder and barer country of La
Marche, with Boussac before us, and its high castle on a precipitous
rock over the Little Creuse.

That day and the next I wandered through a silent country of heathy and
ferny _landes_,[302] a region of granite boulders, holly, and broom, of
copsewood and great chestnut trees; a region of broad light, and fresh
breezes and wide horizons. I visited the _Pierres Jaunatres._ I stood at
sunset on the platform of Toulx Ste. Croix, by the scrawled and almost
effaced stone lions,--a relic, it is said, of the English rule,--and
gazed on the blue mountains of Auvergne filling the distance, and
southeastward of them, in a still further and fainter distance, on what
seemed to be the mountains over Le Puy and the high valley of the Loire.

From Boussac I addressed to Madame Sand the sort of letter of which she
must in her lifetime have had scores, a letter conveying to her, in bad
French, the homage of a youthful and e