They will not
conceive it possible that the getting of a passport (as a mere means
of rapidly establishing one's identity at bank or post-office) was a
simple transaction done through a banker or a tourist agency, the
enclosing of stamps and the payment of a shilling or two; that there
was no question of _visas_ entailing endless humiliation and
back-breaking delays, waiting about in ante-rooms and empty
apartments of squalid, desolating ugliness situate always in the
most odious parts of a town. But the Foreign Offices of Europe were
agreed on one topic, and this was that having got their feet back on
the necks of the people, their serfs of the glebe should not, save
under circumstances hateful, fatiguing, unhealthy and humiliating,
travel through the lands that once were beautiful and bountiful and
are so no longer.
So: Vivie, never having consciously been abroad before (though she
was later to learn she had actually been born in Brussels), began to
experience all the delights of travel in a foreign land. She woke up
the next morning to the country pleasures of Villa Beau-sejour, a
preposterous chateau-villa it might be, but attached to a charming
Flemish farm; with cows and pigs, geese and ducks, plump poultry and
white pigeons, with clumps of poplars and copses of hawthorns and
wild cherry trees which joined the little domain on to the splendid
forest of Tervueren.
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