During those eight years I thought
often of Italy and the south of France, but the train journey of
sixteen or seventeen or eighteen hours to the Italian frontier always
seemed so much like what purgatory must be, that the heaven of Italy
on the other side never tempted me sufficiently to undertake it. A
companion would be of no use; one cannot talk for fifteen or sixteen
hours, and while debating with myself whether I should go to Plessy, I
often glanced down the long perspective of hours. Everything, pleasure
and pain alike, are greater in imagination than in reality--there is
always a reaction, and having anticipated more than mortal weariness,
I was surprised to find that the first two hours in the train passed
very pleasantly. It seemed that I had only been in the train quite a
little while when it stopped, yet Laroche is more than an hour from
Paris, quite a countryside station, and it seems strange that the
_Cote d'Azur_ should stop there. That was the grand name of the
train that I was travelling by. Think of any English company running a
train and calling it "The Azure Shore"! Think of going to Euston or to
Charing Cross, saying you are going by "The Azure Shore"! So long as
the name of this train endures, it is impossible to doubt that the
French mind is more picturesque than the English, and one no longer
wonders why the French school of painting, etc.
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