Early in April money came from home, and he was on his way again. This time he started South in true earnest, hurtling southward on one of the crack trains of the P. L. M., his nose flattened against the window of the compartment and his eyes glued on the landscape with such an unwinking intensity, a desperate and insatiate greed, that his fellow-passengers stared at him curiously and then looked at one another with quiet smiles and winks.
As it had always done, the movement and experience of the train filled him with a sense of triumph, joy, and luxury. The crack express, with its gleaming cars, its richly furnished compartments, its luxurious restaurant, warm with wine and food and opulence and suave service, together with the appearance of the passengers, who had the look of ease and wealth and cosmopolitan assurance that one finds among people who travel on such trains, awoke in him again the feeling of a nameless and impending joy, the fulfilment of some impossible happiness, the feeling of wealth and success which a train had always given him, even when he had only a few dollars in his pocket, and that now, in the groomed luxury of this European express, was immeasurably enhanced.
On such a train, indeed, the compact density of the European continent became thrilling in its magical immediacy: one felt everywhere around him — in the assured and wealthy-looking men, the lovely and seductive-looking women — even in the landscape that stretched past with its look of infinite cultivation, its beautifully chequered design of fields, its ancient scheme of towns and villages and old farm buildings — the sense of a life rich with the maturity of centuries, infinitely various and fascinating in its evocation of a world given without reserve to pleasure, love, and luxury — in short, the American’s dream of “Europe,” a world with all the labour, pain, and fear, the rasping care and fury of his own harsh world, left out.
At Lyons, midway on his journey to the South, he left the train. And again, he did not know the reason for his stopping: he had been told that “there was nothing to be seen,” but the place was a great city; his old hunger for new cities conquered him, he paused to stay a day and stayed a week.
Later he could remember just four things that had held him there in that great provincial town. They were a river, two restaurants, and a girl. The river was the Rh?ne; it came foaming out of the Alps to form at Lyons its juncture with the Sa?ne. Day after day he sat on a café terrace looking at the river; it foamed past bright and glacial, green as emerald, cold and shining, bearing in for ever its message of the Alps, the thaw of crystal ice, the coming on of spring. All of the coming of the spring was somehow written in the cold, sparkling and unforgettable green loveliness of that shining water; it haunted him like something he had always known, like something he had found, like something he would one day discover.
The food in the town was incomparable. It was a native cookery, a food belonging to the region — plain, pungent, peasant-like and nobly good; there is in all the world no better cooking than can be found in the great provincial town of Lyons.
At two places there, La Mère Guy’s and La Mère Filliou’s, they call their best cooks by the name of “mother.” They offer eating fit for kings, yet all so reasonable and plain that almost any man can afford it. La Mère Guy’s establishment is in an old house with various old rooms all used as restaurants. The floor is sanded, there are no suave carpets, no low murmuring of refined voices, no thin tinkle of musical glasses, none of the suave, worldly luxury that one finds in the great restaurants of Paris. It is a place not made for tourists — for Lyons is not a tourist town, and what tourist before ever came there to eat? — It is a place made for the Lyonnais — according to their taste — and one will find them there at Mother Guy’s and Filliou’s, in all their robust, straightforward eating earnestness. Mother Filliou’s is a more open sort of place than Mother Guy’s; it is across the river, away from the central part of Lyons, which is on an island formed by the green girdling of the Rh?ne and Sa?ne. At Mother Filliou’s one can look inside; when the weather permits, most people eat outside on a terrace: Mother Filliou’s has more sunlight, open air, and gaiety, but the rooms at Mother Guy’s have a more convenient, closed, and homely appearance. Both places are crowded with solid-looking Lyonnais of both sexes, their faces filled with sanguinary life, their voices loud and robust, their napkins tucked in under their chins, as they set heartily to work.
The food is largely chicken, beef, and fish, superbly cooked. One will never forget the chicken at Mother Guy’s or Mother Filliou’s: the chicken is plump and tender country chicken, fresh from the lovely countryside near Lyons; it is so crisp and succulent it almost melts away in your mouth. The beef is thick and juicy and tender, everything is cooked plainly, but with all the peasant spice and pungency; they like spicy and robust relishes, and one eats whole onions, pickled in a kind of brine. There, people drink only one wine, but that is Beaujolais, a plain, grand wine that in this town is cheaper than mineral water, and seems made by nature to wash down such victuals as these people eat.
On the opposite side of the central isle of Lyons, which is the side bounded by the Sa?ne, there is a steep hill surmounted by the church of Notre–Dame-deFourvière, a famous place of pilgrimage for the devout. And there, one day, while pilgrims filed in to see the relics and pay devotion to their saint, and while some monks were chanting from their sonorous and reverberating litany through the great spaces, he saw a girl he could not forget: she sat down across the aisle from him, looked at him, smiled drowsily. She was small, plump; her figure was erotically seductive; she raised her head, and seemed to listen drowsily to chanting monks, and he saw that in her neck, a warm, slow pulse was beating — slowly, slowly, richly, warmly beating. She turned her eyes, which were grey and smoky with a cat-like potency, and looked at him again, smiled drowsily, and slowly crossed her heavy legs with a slow, sensual sliding of warm silk. And all the time the pulse beat slowly, richly, with a drowsy warmth of maddening and hot desire — and that was the last of the four things he saw, remembered, and could not forget of Lyons.
A shining river, emerald-green, and magic with its Alpine prescience of spring, of known, undiscovered loveliness; the noble cooking of Mother Guy and Mother Filliou; a pulse in the throat of an unknown girl that beat its slow, warm promise of fulfilled desire — these, of a town of more than six hundred thousand lives and faces, were all that later clearly would remain.
The rest was smoke and silence — some faces here and there, a scheme of streets, an enormous square, a hill crowned with a pilgrim’s church, a priest, broad-hatted, with slit mouth and gimlet eyes, some museum relics out of ancient Gaul — all fugitive and broken, gone like smoke.
. . . An emerald river and a shining light; some glorious cookery and drink; the pulse-beat in the warm throat of a girl — these would remain. Smoke! Smoke! has it been otherwise with any man?
And again, he was hurtling southward in a train.