My Twenty-Five Days
I had just taken possession of my room in the hotel—a narrow slip between two papered partitions through which I could hear everything my neighbours were doing—and was arranging my clothes in the wardrobe when I opened the middle drawer and noticed a roll of paper. I straightened it out and read the title:
My Twenty-Five Days.
It was the diary of a visitor at the watering-place, of the last occupant of my cabin-like room, forgotten at the last moment.
These notes may be of interest to the wise and healthy who never leave their homes. It is for their benefit that I am making this copy without altering a single line.
Châtel-Guyon, 15 July.
At the first glance this country is not gay. However, I am going to spend twenty-five days here for the good of my stomach and my liver, and to get thinner. The twenty-five days of anyone who takes the waters are very like the twenty-eight days of the reservist; they are spent entirely in drudgery, and at its worst. I have done nothing today except settle down, meet the doctor, and look around. Châtel-Guyon consists of a stream of yellow water flowing between several low hills dotted about with a casino, houses, and stone crosses.
On the bank of the stream at the end of the valley there is a square building with a small garden; this is the Bathing Establishment round which sad-faced beings—the sick—wander. A great silence reigns in the walks shaded by trees, for this is not a pleasure resort, but a real health centre where you make a business of taking care of yourself, and you get cured, so it seems.
Those who know even affirm that the mineral waters work miracles, but no votive offerings hang in the cashier’s office.
Occasionally men and women go up to the slate-covered pavilion which shelters a sweet, smiling woman, and where a spring bubbles in a cement basin. No words are exchanged between the invalid and the custodian of the healing water. The latter hands a little glass in which air bubbles sparkle in the transparent liquid, to the visitor, who drinks and departs with solemn steps to resume the interrupted walk under the trees.
There is no sound in the little park, no breath of air in the leaves, no voice passing through the silence. A notice should be put up: “No one ever laughs here, care of the health is the only diversion.” Those who do talk look like the dumb who move their lips in imitation of speech, for they are afraid of allowing their voices to be heard.
In the hotel the same silence reigns. It is a big hotel where you dine solemnly between well-bred folk who have nothing to say to each other. Their manners show good breeding, and their faces reflect the conviction of a superiority that it would perhaps be difficult for some of them to justify.
At two o’clock I go up to the Casino, a little wood hut perched on a hillock reached by a goat path, the view from which is magnificent. Châtel-Guyon is situated in a very narrow valley right between the plain and the mountain. To the left I can see the first big rolling waves of the mountain-range of Auvergne covered with trees, and extensive grey patches dotted about here and there: hard masses of lava, for we lie at the foot of the old volcanic craters. To the right through the narrow cut of the valley I can see a plain vast as the sea, bathed in a bluish mist that leaves one to guess at the presence of villages, towns, fields gold with ripe corn, and the green stretches of meadow-land lying in the shadow of apple trees. It is Limagne, an immense
