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A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi.
We knew that the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen would be the shabbiest omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm our Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer vehicle. But what we were not prepared for was the fact of octroi at Valladolid, and for the strange behavior of the local customs officer who stopped us on our way into the town.
At one of these I had learned, that, three or four weeks ago, a young Englishwoman with a little girl had passed by on foot, each carrying a small bundle, which had not been examined. It was the octroi on the road to Granville, which was between thirty and forty miles away. From Granville was the nearest route to the Channel Islands.
The guards at the gates were doubtless the officers entrusted with the collection of the octroi duties. This system of collecting octroi dues at the gates of principal towns lasted till recent days, having only been abolished by the British Government. "The seventh fortress is to the north, and is the palace of the king.
But the octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties, eased us not very swiftly, but softly through the local customs, and then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we had decided we would have rooms on the patio.
At each moment, at each step, it seemed to me that some great call must be made upon my self-possession and courage, some event happen; but there was nothing. All was calm, the houses on either side of the way were open, all but the office of the octroi which was black as night with its closed door. M. le Curé has told me since that he believed Them to be there, though unseen.
Left entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi town perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and billiard-tables by the half-dozen the population is as essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day, by either landlord or agent.
Two French soldiers, striding across a bench, are playing at picquet with a pack of greasy cards. A pack-horse or two nibble the blades of grass between the stones, while their owners haggle with the solitary guard about the "octroi" duties. A sentinel on duty stares listlessly at you as you pass, and you have entered Rome.
I have buffeted my way through a crowd before now, but I may say that I never before knew what terror was. When I fell upon the door, dragging Lecamus with me, it opened, thank God! I stumbled in, clutching at Riou with my disengaged hand, and fell upon the floor of the octroi, where they thought I had fainted. But this was not the case.
Achmet Pacha, son of Mehemet Ali, is fighting for us with the most wonderful intrepidity. A chef de bataillon of the 34th was slain by a shot from a window, and some offices of the Octroi have been burned. Three men were killed at the Batignolles, and their bodies were accompanied by an immense throng to the Morgue."
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