The same day on which the Marquis wrote to his brother Caroline wrote to her sister, and sketched, after her own manner, the country where she was.  
 
 
SÉVAL, near CHAMBON (CREUSE), May 1, '45.
 
At last, my sister, we are here, and it is a terrestrial paradise. The castle is old and small, but well arranged for comfort and picturesque enough. The park is sufficiently large, not any too well kept, and not in the English fashion—thank Heaven!—rich in fine old trees covered with ivy, and in grasses running wild. The country is delightful. We are still in Auvergne, in spite of the new boundaries, but very near to the old limits of La Marche, and within a league of a little city called Chambon, through which we passed on our way to the castle. This little town is very well situated. It is reached by a mountain ascent, or rather, through a cleft in a deep ravine; for mountain, properly speaking, there is none. Leaving behind the broad plains of thin, moist soil, covered with small trees and large bushes, you descend into a long, winding gorge, which in some places enlarges into a valley. In the bottom of this ravine, which soon divides into branches, flow rivers of pure crystal, not navigable, and rather torrents than rivers, although they only whirl along, boiling a little, but threatening no danger. As for myself, having never known anything but our great plains and wide, smooth rivers, I am somewhat inclined to look upon all here as either hill or abyss; but the Marchioness, who has seen the Alps and the Pyrenees, laughs at me, and pretends that all this is as insignificant as a table-cover. So I forbear to give you any enthusiastic description, lest I mislead your judgment; but the Marchioness, who cannot be accused of an undue love of nature, will never succeed in preventing me from being delighted with what I see.
 
It is a country of grasses and leafage, one continual cradle of verdure. The river, which descends the ravine, is called the Vouèze, and then, uniting with the Tarde at Chambon, it becomes the Char, which, again at the end of the first valley, is called the Cher, a stream that every one knows. For myself, I like the name Char (or car); it is excellent for a stream like this, which in reality rolls along at about the pace of a carriage well under way down a gentle slope, where there is nothing to make it jolt or jar unreasonably. The road also is straight and sanded like a garden walk, lined too with magnificent beeches, through which one can see outspread the natural meadows that are just now one carpet of flowers. O, these lovely meadows, my dear Camille! How little they resemble our artificial plains, where you always see the same plant on ground prepared in regular beds! Here you feel that you are walking over two or three layers of vegetation, of moss, reeds, iris, a thousand kinds of grasses, some of them pretty, and others prettier still, columbines, forget-me-nots, and I know not what! There is everything; and they all come of their own accord, and they come always! It is not necessary to turn over the ground once in every three or four years to expose the roots to the air and to begin over again the everlasting harrowing which our indolent soil seems to need. And then, here, some of the land is permitted to go to waste or poorly tilled, or so it seems; and in these abandoned nooks Nature heartily enjoys making herself wild and beautiful. She shoots forth at you great briers which seem inexhaustible and thistles that look like African plants, they flaunt such large coarse leaves, slashed and ragged, to be sure, but admirable in design and effect.
 
When we had crossed the valley,—I am speaking of yesterday,—we climbed a very rugged and precipitous ascent. The weather was damp, misty, charming. I asked leave to walk, and, at the height of five or six hundred feet, I could see the whole of this lovely ravine of verdure. The far-off trees were already crowding toward the brink of the water at my feet, while from point to point in the distance rustic mills and sluices filled the air with the muffled cadences of their sounds. Mingled with all this were the notes of a bagpipe from I know not where, and which kept repeating a simple but pleasing air, till I had heard more than enough of it. A peasant who was walking in front of me began to sing the words, following and carrying along the air, as if he wanted to help the musician through with it. The words, without rhyme or reason, seemed so curious that I will give them to you—
 
"Alas! how hard are the rocks!
The sun melts them not,—
The sun, nor yet the moon!
The lad who would love
Seeketh his pain."
 
There is always something mysterious in peasant songs, and the music, as defective as the verses, is also mysterious, often sad and inducing revery. For myself, condemned as I am to do my dreaming at lightning speed, since my life does not belong to me, I was forcibly impressed by this couplet, and I asked myself many times why "the moon," at least, did not melt the rocks; did this mean that, by night as well as by day, the grief of the peasant lover is as heavy as his mountains?
 
On the top of this hill, which appropriately bristles with these large rocks, so cruelly hard,—the Marchioness says they are small as grains of sand, but then I never happened to see any such beautiful sand,—we entered upon a road narrower than the highway, and, after walking a little way amid enclosures of wooded grounds, we found ourselves at the entrance of the castle, which is entirely shaded by the trees, and not imposing in appearance; but on the other side it commands the whole beautiful ravine that we had just passed through. You can see the deep declivity, with its rocks and its bushes, the river too with its trees, its meadows, its mills, and the winding outlet through which it flows, between banks growing more and more narrow and precipitous. There is in the park a very pretty spring, which rises there, to fall in spray along the rocks. The garden is well in bloom. In the lower court there is a lot of animals which I am permitted to manage. I have a delightful room, very secluded, with the finest view of all; the library is the largest apartment in the house. The drawing-room of the Marchioness, in its furniture and arrangement, calls to mind the one in Paris; but it is larger, not so deadening to sound, and one can breathe in it. In short, I am well, I am content, I feel myself reviving; I rise at daybreak, and until the Marchioness appears, which, thank Heaven, is no earlier here than in Paris, I am going to belong to myself in a most agreeable fashion. O, how free I shall be to walk, and write to you, and think of you! Alas! if I only had one of the children here, Lili or Charley, what delightful and instructive walks we could take together! But it is in vain for me to fall in love with all the handsome darlings that I meet, for it does not last. A moment after I compare them with yours, and I feel that yours will have no serious rivals in my affections, and in the midst of my rejoicing at being in the country, comes the thought that I am farther from you than I was before!—and when shall I see you again?
 
"Alas! how hard are the rocks!" But it's of no use............