again.

The bridge taken for granted, Grez is a less inspiring place than
Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly in
the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing
in one corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the
early morning all the painters breaking their fast upon white wine under
the windows of the villagers. It is vastly different to awake in Grez,
to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the
bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals
are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars
and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the
jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is
"something to do" at Grez. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall
no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the
solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This "something to do"
is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high
spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone! But Grez
is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The
course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle
attractions for the navigator: islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the
red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lilies,
and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of
roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours
between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Grez is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and
buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and the place
as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They,
indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening,
the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the company that
gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now
dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall
follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in
name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. "For remembrance of
the old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one
story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters
were left stranded and penniless in Grez; and there, until the war was
over, the C