d now come upon a part of the road which
Joseph knew, he pointed out to me, in the far distance, the little
villa, Les Charmettes, where Rousseau and Madame de Warens kept house
together. Again and again I thought we were on the point of arriving
in the town, and had visions of exchanging adventures with the Boy at
the Hotel de France; but always the place seemed to recede before our
eyes, elusive as a mirage, alighting again five or six miles away; and
this it did, not once, but several times, with singular skill and
accuracy.

At last, however, after a tedious tramp along a monotonously level
road, upon which we had plunged suddenly, we came into an old town,
all grey, with the soft grey of storks' wings. The place had a mild
dignity of its own--as befitted the ancient capital of Savoie--and
might have lived, if necessary, on the romantic reputation of its
ancient chateau, standing up high and majestic above a populous modern
street. There was an air of almost courtly refinement that reminded me
of the wide, sedate avenues of Versailles; and no doubt this effect
was largely due to the fine statues and decorative grouping of the
arcaded streets. One monument was so imposing and so unique, that I
forgot for a moment my anxiety to find the Boy and hear his news. The
huge pile held me captive, staring up at a miniature Nelson column,
supported on the backs of four colossal elephants sculptured in grey
granite of true elephant-colour. These benevolent mammoths, not
content with the duty of bearing a tower of stone with a more than
life-sized general balancing on top of it, generously spent their
spare time in pouring volumes of water from wrinkled trunks into a
huge basin. Joseph knew that the balancing general, De Boigne, had
used a vast fortune made in the service of an Indian prince, to shower
benefits on his native town, as his elephants showered water, and that
it was in gratitude to him that Chambery had raised the monument; but
I was disappointed to learn that the elephants had no prototypes in
real life. It would have satisfied my imagination to hear that the
soldier of fortune had returned from the Orient to his birthplace,
with the four original elephants following him like dogs, having
refused to be left behind. But nothing is quite perfect in history,
and one usually feels that one could have arranged the incidents more
dramatically one's self; indeed, some historians seem to have found
the temptation irresist