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. ............