I, to whom the beer-scandals of the Rhine and the students’ holidays of the Seine were among the Childe-Harold enormities of a not over-sinful youth, was sadly disappointed.  Thinking of the groves of an Eden, I ran against the furnaces of a Pandemonium.  For a stroll back toward my adolescence, Belleville was a bad beginning.  I determined to console myself with the green meadows of Saint-Gervais and the pretty woods of Romainville.  Attaining the latter was half an hour’s affair among long walls and melancholy houses:  at Saint-Gervais, a double file of walls and houses—­at Romainville, houses and walls again.  In the latter, where formerly there were scarcely three watches distributed amongst the whole village, I was incensed to find the shop of a clockmaker:  it was somewhat consoling, though, to find it a clockmaker’s of the most pronounced suburban kind, with pairs of wooden shoes amongst the guard-chains in the window, and pots of golden mustard ranged alternately with the antiquated silver turnips.

Before the church I found yet standing a knotty little elder tree, a bewitched-looking vegetable.  A beadle in a blouse, engaged in washing one of the large altar-candles with soap and water at the public pump, gave me the following history of the elder tree.  I am passionately fond of legends, and this is one quite hot and fresh, only a hundred years old.  Hear the tale of the elder of Romainville.

The excellent cure of Romainville in the last century was a man of such a charitable nature that his all was in the hands of the poor.  The grocer of the village, a potentate of terrific powers and inexorable temper, finally refused to trust him with the supply of oil necessary for the lamp in the sanctuary.  Soon the sacred flame sputtered, palpitated, flapped miserably over the crusted wick:  the cure, responsible before Heaven for the life of his lamp, tottered away from the altar with groans of anguish.  Arrived in the garden, he threw himself on his knees, crying Mea culpa, and beating his bosom.  The garden contained only medicinal plants, shaded by a linden and an elder:  completely desperate, the unhappy priest fixed his moist eyes on the latter, when lo! the bark opened, the trunk parted, and a jet of clear aromatic liquid spouted forth, quite different from any sap yielded by elder before.  It was oil.  A miracle!

The report spread.  The grocer came and humbly visited the priest in his garden, his haughty hat, crammed with bills enough to have spread agony through all the cottages of Romainville, humbly carried between his legs.  He came proposing a little speculation.  In exchange for a single spigot to be inserted in the tree, and the hydraulic rights going with the same, he offered all the bounties dearest to the priestly heart—­unlimited milk and honey, livers of fat geese and pies lined with rabbit.  The priest, though hungry—­hungry with the demoniac hunger of a fat and paunchy man—­turned his back on the tempter.