[Illustration: THE

                          FIELDS _of_ FRANCE]

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                        [Illustration: LOCHES]




                            THE FIELDS _of_
                                FRANCE

                                  BY
                                MADAME
                             MARY DUCLAUX

                          (A MARY F ROBINSON)

             AUTHOR _of_ “THE LIFE _of_ RENAN” “COLLECTED
                   POEMS” “THE RETURN TO NATURE” ETC

                       WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS
                               IN COLOUR
                                  BY
                            W B MACDOUGALL

                            [Illustration]

                            LONDON CHAPMAN
                         AND HALL L^{TD} 1905




First published in Crown 8vo                            _September, 1903_
Reprinted                                                _December, 1903_
Reprinted                                                _February, 1904_
Reprinted                                                 _October, 1904_
New Edition, in Crown Quarto, with numerous
  additions, and Illustrations BY W. B. MACDOUGALL      _September, 1905_




                                  To

                                MY DEAR

                                MOTHER

                          LIKE ME, A LOVER OF

                         THE FIELDS OF FRANCE




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

A FARM IN THE CANTAL                                                   1

A MANOR IN TOURAINE                                                   45

THE FRENCH PEASANT                                                    77

THE FORESTS OF THE OISE                                              133

A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE                                            167

HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY                                                              195

THE MEDIÆVAL COUNTRY HOUSE                                           239




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


I. LOCHES                                                  _Frontispiece_

II. PUY MARY                                          _Facing page_    6

III. THE FARM AT OLMET                                                14

IV. THE CÈRE AT VIC                                                   22

V. THE OLD HOUSE AT OLMET                                             30

VI. TRÉMOULET                                                         38

VII. THE COMMANDERIE AT BALLAN                                        50

VIII. TOURS                                                           64

IX. AMBOISE                                                           80

X. CHENONCEAUX                                                        96

XI. AZAY-LE-RIDEAU                                                   112

XII. LUYNES                                                          126

XIII. SENLIS                                                         136

XIV. VIEW FROM LA MONTAGNE DE
LA VERBERIE                                                          142

XV. VIEUX MOULIN                                                     148

XVI. THE LAKES OF LA ROUILLIE                                        154

XVII. PIERREFONDS                                                    160

XVIII. THE PALACE OF THE POPES AT
AVIGNON                                                              174

XIX. THE CASTLE OF BEAUCAIRE AT
TARASCON                                                             182

XX. THE ALISCAMPS AT ARLES                                           192




A FARM IN THE CANTAL A FARM IN THE CANTAL

(HAUTE-AUVERGNE)

1902


I

The farm lies in a wonderful country.

Every landscape has a basis of geology: in order to seize the features
of the Cantal, you should stand, if possible, on the pointed crest of
the Puy Mary. Before you, where once yawned a crater, rises an ash-grey
cone of clinkstone: the Puy de Griou, a perfect sugarloaf. Here was the
centre of volcanic force; and from this pile of long-dead lava some
twelve or fifteen deep valleys radiate like the beams of a star. Down
every valley runs a river. The rocky fissures of these river-beds
separate, by a series of wooded gorges, the group of hills that mark the
crater’s rim; and these, on their further flank, roll down towards the
plain in immense wavy plateaux, attaining at their highest point an
altitude of some 6000 feet. These rolling pastures on the mountain-tops
are the wealth of our country and the condition of our agriculture. I
have never climbed higher than the long cliff behind our house, which
bounds on the south the lovely valley of the Cère; even that is an
ascent of some thousand feet. Green at its base with pastures, our
hillside is crowned with a cornice of fluted rocks, andesite and
basalt, which tower above the serried beech woods, mantled on its
breast. When at last you reach Les Huttes (the first village on the
plateau), you see that our valley--wide, romantic, irregular as it
appears--is, none the less, a sort of cañon or ravine sunk between two
high table-lands, whose basalt floor is covered with pasture and dotted
here and there with odd little huts or cabins, which in fact are
cheese-farms; for the people of the valleys send their herds to pasture
on the mountain-tops from May till after Michaelmas. This plateau is not
flat; it rolls and undulates like the sea, and any of its higher points
affords a marvellous view. To the north, the Puy de Griou rises sheer,
as fine and as sharp as the Fusiyama in a Japanese print. The
long-backed ridges of the Plomb du Cantal and Puy Mary, each with its
double hump, crouch beside it, like great dragons, with lean, grey,
ravined flanks, while the endless blue of the rolling plains stretches
in the distance.

The Plomb is an old friend; with the black peaks of the Lioran, it
closes our horizon in the valley, as you look to the north-east.
Although the highest of our mountains (1858 metres)--and quite a
respectable summit, for it is eight metres higher than the Righi--yet
the Plomb is less effective than the frail ash-grey peak of Griou (1694
metres). From Olmet, these bound our view to the right. In front of us
rises the long saddle-shaped back of the Courpou-Sauvage, strewn with
rocks which simulate fantastic ruins. Out of sight, but close at hand,
are Peyre-Arse, L’Usclade, Peyroux, Bataillouze, Puy Violent,
Chavaroche, le Roc des Ombres. Their names preserve the image of a
terror long forgotten. The Wild Creature, with Burnt Rock and Rock
Ruddy; their neighbour, the Scorched Mountain, together with Rock
Warful, Mount Violent and the Rock of Shadows, all rest in peace these
many thousand years; the woods wave, the pasture flowers, the herds
feed upon their rocky sides. Only the black stones, rolled smooth so
long ago, fallen among our fields of flowering buckwheat; only these,
and the veins of lava, which burst their veil of mountain-pink and
heather, remain and tell of that enormous upheaval, still apparent, of
an elder world.

It is astonishing with what personality an accustomed eye invests a
mountain. We say: “The Lioran is darker than usual this morning,” as we
should say: “Emilia has a headache.” And what a pleasure when, towards
September, the Courpou-Sauvage begins to blush with the blossoming
heather! No mountains have ever seemed to me so friendly as these. They
are not very high above our valley, which is situate some 2000 feet
above sea-level, so that we behold a scant two-thirds of their real
height. But their forms are lovely in their infinite variety. Time
cannot wither them, nor custom stale. Woods cling to them; cliffs and
rocks jut from them in peak or turret; cascades and fountains and
innumerable streams gush from their hearts of fire; pasture, fern or
heather robe them higher than the girdle; only the peaks are bare and
take a thousand colours in the changing lights.

The hills do not rise sheer from the bottom, as in Switzerland.
Innumerable landslips have torn their sides which, at periods of great
distance, have fallen away from the cliff, heaping the ground with vast
swellings and ridges, in much romantic confusion. Even to-day, these
landslips continue, and the aspect of the country is slowly but
continually transformed. Covered with beechwood or heather near the
heights, green with pasture lower down, these ledges and terraces lead
the eye to the valley bottom, which itself is never flat, but
cradle-shaped. And therein lies the small winding river of the Cère.

My husband’s old house of Olmet stands on one such ledge, some way up
the southern bank of the valley, with the farm at its feet. Farm and
house no longer belong to each other, but they are still on cordial
terms; which is as well, since from our hinder terrace our eye drops
involuntarily on all the life and business of our neighbours. The farm
has been recently rebuilt by its new owner, and is no longer the
picturesque hovel we used alternately to admire and deplore. But our
tiny mountain manor, or moorland cottage, still bears the stamp of three
hundred years on its thick solid walls and tower. The roof is beautiful,
very steep, as befits a land of six months’ snow, and a soft ash-grey in
colour, being covered with thick heart-shaped tiles of powdery
mica-schist, which surmount with a pyramid either tiny solid turret: a
balcony starts out from the tower, whence you could sling a stone into
the bottom of the valley, for Olmet stands on a jutting rock, to the
great advantage of our view. The house is stunted from the front, where
the garden is on the level of the first floor; but, seen from below,
there is about the place a look at once austere and peaceful, rustic and
dignified, as befits this land of hay and lava, of mountain peak and
cream.

Of the four wishes of Horace, three are in our possession. Alas! we have
not the little wood, so necessary in a southern August; an orchard of
gnarled apple trees is all that we can boast. But we have the modest
country place, the fountain near the door, the garden of flowers and
fruit. “_Quand on a vu l’enclos d’Olmet!_” cries Madame Langeac, at the
farm below (as though Marly or Versailles could not compete with our
little garden), yet it is merely a bare hilly field or orchard, running
to hay, with a flower patch here and there; but loud with the murmur of
the rippling water which sparkles from the rocks, and noble with the
vast and

[Illustration: PUY MARY]

various beauty of the view. To the south rise the ravined foot-hills,
clothed in woods, crowned with cornices and organ-pipes of rock, their
green hummocks swelling and rising to the east, ever larger and ever
higher, till they reach the black cone of the Lioran, to which the
valley ascends in a series of rugged steps, narrowing as it goes. To the
west, on the other hand, it opens like a fan. The precipitous walls of
cliff soften into downs of limestone, which die in the rolling plain
beyond Arpajon, where, thirteen miles away, one lovely hill, broken from
the chain, and larger and more lovely than its fellows, rises soft and
blue, shaped like the breast of Ceres. To the one hand, the scene is
full of grandeur and melancholy; while the western landscape smiles,
most tranquil and noble in its dreamy peace. The mountains cease there,
but long leagues beyond, in the vaporous blue of the distance, the plain
still heaves and swells as with the movement of a sea: such an ocean of
calm and space in which to bathe and renew one’s self from the troubles
of the town!


II

From early June to Michaelmas our valley and half our hills are deep in
flowering hay, or busy with haymaking, or studded with haycocks. As a
poet says, with whom I hope to acquaint my readers--

    “Noun! jusqu’ ohuéi digun n’o pas enbentat res
     Coumo oquelo sentour des prats seguats de frès
     Que porfumo, l’estiou, l’Oubergno tout entièiro!”

No one has ever invented anything like the smell of the new-mown
hayfields, which, in summer, perfumes the whole of Auvergne! Hay is our
wealth, and--when it has suffered a transmutation into cheese and
cattle--our only export and exchange with the valleys below. It is in
order that we may grow our hay all summer for the winter’s needs, that
our cattle are sent in troops to feed on the mountain-tops, leaving
behind only the draught-oxen and the cows for milking. We need plenty of
hay, for, in the stables during the five months of snow that follow All
Saints, you may roughly calculate four cartloads of it to every cow. On
the higher slopes, we cut it once in July and again in September; while
June, August, Michaelmas, and early October are haymaking time for the
water-meadows in the bottoms, which yield four crops a year.

So, the summer long, the hay is out on hill or valley, and at night the
cattle pull through the narrow roads the primitive hay-wains--two mighty
ladders set a tilt on a plank above two wheels. After the wains, the
herds come tramping. I love to watch them, and pass an hour most
evenings seated upon our garden wall--a low stone bench above the
orchard, which drops on the other side some thirty feet to the rocky
lane below. Here come the cows, a score at most (for half a hundred of
the herd are on the mountain), beautiful kine of Salers, small and
neatly made, of a bright deep-red colour all over, all alike, with thick
curly coats and branching horns above their deer-like heads. They are
herded by a tiny cow-boy of seven; a few black goats loiter in the rear.
The finely toned bells tinkle faintly across the silence. The beasts low
as they pass the open door of the huge two-storied barn, into which a
cow and an ox, yoked together, are backing a great toppling wain of hay.
Old Gaffer Langeac, the farmer’s father, has come out to view the crop.
He is five and eighty, and, being past work, he wears out all the week
his long-treasured Sunday garments--a sleeved waistcoat of black cloth,
the full sleeves buttoned into a tight wristband, a white shirt of
coarse hemp-linen, and dark trousers of thick homespun _rase_ or frieze.
His blue eyes, still bright, and his straggling white locks gleam under
a huge soft sombrero of black felt. He is a fine old fellow--but is not
this the very valley of green old age? An ancient goatherdess comes down
the lane, twirling the distaff set with coarse grey hemp, as she follows
her flock; and as she stops to pass the time of day with her neighbour,
her youngest grandchild runs out to meet her from the red-gabled cottage
by the village bakehouse. The cows low to the calves in the byre; the
kid in the orchard springs to its mother; the brown long-tailed sheep
follow the shepherd. One handsome haymaker leans against the wall and
whispers soft nothings in the ear of Annotou, the blonde little maid at
the farm. A scent of cabbage-soup and hot buckwheat comes up from the
cottage kitchens. ’Tis the hour of rest and general home-coming, not
greatly changed since Sappho of old used to watch it in her Ionian
isle--

    Έσπέρε, πάντα φέρεις ὅσα φαιυόλις ἐσκέδασ’ Αὐὼς,
    ϕέρεις οἶν, φέρεις αἶγα, φέρεις ματέρι παῖδα.

There are empty places to-night at the vast table in Langeac’s kitchen;
for the _Vacher_, or chief cowherd and dairy-master, with two
_bouviers_, or cowboys, and a little lad, the _pâtre_ (whose business is
to watch the cattle that pasture on the moor), are up on the mountain
with some fifty cows, half as many young calves, a young bull or two, a
score of swine to fatten on the buttermilk, and some dozen goats. At the
end of May, one mild afternoon, the troop set out from the valley under
the farmer’s care and marched the whole night through, till the next
day, in the morning, they reached the mountain farm, some thirty miles
away. Every farm in our valley has thus its _Sennenhütte_, sometimes
quite near at hand, sometimes at a considerable distance. Langeac, the
farmer, rode back on the morrow; but every fortnight he repeats the
journey, to inspect his herds, and to count the increasing number of the
cheeses. Often we meet him on the mountain roads; he sits astride a
solid roan cob, a grey linen blouse on his shoulders; a sack half-filled
swings on either side his saddle, in which he carries a store of
blackbread, fresh cabbage, news and letters (with sometimes an old
newspaper or so) to the exiles who, all summer long, see neither rose
nor fruit, nor face of wife or child, on the great green pasture of the
mountain-top.

While the herds are afar, we are busy in the valleys, where the recent
advent of the railroad has little changed the ancestral mode of life.
The farm grows almost all the necessaries of our table. Our soil is too
poor for wheat, but rye and buckwheat flourish on the mountain-sides;
whole slopes and ledges, too dry for hay, are a garden of tall, crisp,
white flowers, where the buckwheat (_sarrazin_) waves through August
until mid-September. A little before Michaelmas the flowers die, the
seed turns gradually black, the stems coral-red; and then the farm-hands
come and reap the harvest, bringing great sheets of linen, which they
spread in the field, and thrash thereon the grain with high-dancing
flails. Ground into meal, the buckwheat yields the staple of our diet;
the _bourriol_--a large, thin, soft, round crumpet, which, eaten hot
with butter, or cold with clotted cream, or a nugget of cheese, or
dipped in new milk, is not to be despised. Every morning, the
housewife’s earliest care is to fill the pail of _bourriols_ which
stands in every kitchen; next she warms the milk until the cream clots
and rises. Besides the buckwheat, we grow oats for the cattle and rye
for bread and straw. The rye-bread, very black, at once sweet and sour
(which makes, to my thinking, the most delicious bread and butter in the
world), is shaved into large thin slices in the two-handled porringers,
or _écuelles_, “_pour tremper la soupe_.” Four times a day, and five at
midsummer, the farm-hands gather in Madame Langeac’s kitchen and take
their bowl of cabbage-soup, where the bacon, potatoes, black bread and
cabbage make a mess so thick that the spoon stands up in it; they eat
also a crumpet of buckwheat, and a noggin of Cantal cheese; and often a
dish of curds and whey, when a cheese is in progress; a sausage if the
pig has been lately killed; a fry of mushrooms in September; a tart of
wild-cherries in July; or carrots sliced and fried with snippets of
bacon; sometimes a queer stew of potatoes and curds called _truffado_;
or some other homely treat which, at mid-day, serves to mark the
importance of dinner, always washed down with a glass of the strong
bluish-red wine they call _Limousin_, brought from the neighbouring
departments of the Lot and the Corrèze. Fine brawny men and buxom maids,
who work hard and live long, are grown upon this sober fare. With their
open expression, frank brown eyes, upturned noses, abundant hair and
vigorous frames, the Auvergnats, so ridiculed in France (“ni hommes, ni
femmes, tous Auvergnats,” as Daumier’s legend has it), would be, if but
a shade or so less dirty, a wholly pleasant-looking race, obviously
Celtic, kind, frank, genial, and free.

The Auvergnat has some of the characters of the Yorkshireman. He is
jovial, independent, frank, and shrewd. No man is keener at a bargain,
and neither Greek, Jew, nor Armenian ever got the better of him; yet he
is not sordid, as, for instance, the peasants of Maupassant’s Normandy
are sordid. The broken old grandfather, long past work, is here
surrounded with every care and attention; the doctor is sent for when he
ails; medicine, wine, and broth are his in plenty; those terrible
stories of the old and useless who are left to starve, when they can no
longer take their share in the work of the fields, could never have been
told of the poorest among our uplands. Notwithstanding his overweening
love of money, there is something simple, candid, and kind, which
mellows the heart of the child of Auvergne. His _naïveté_ is legendary,
and forms the subject of a hundred stories and farces, ever since the
days of the Queen of Navarre. I will give none of them here, being
anxious in this little book to set down chiefly the things I have seen
for myself, or which have come under my own knowledge. But here is an
example in point. A cousin of my husband’s, whose country place is about
fifteen miles from Aurillac, prefers spending her winters in town, and
has hired for this purpose the top floor of a friend’s house. One
December morning, the farmer of La Romiguière, her small estate, brought
her in to town a cart-load of wood for fuel. As he was going upstairs he
met an old gentleman in a smoking-cap and plaid dressing-gown--in point
of fact, the landlord. A minute later the farmer was in my cousin’s
lobby, very red and flustered.

“I fear, madam, my manners have not been all they ought!”

“Your manners!” said my cousin, astounded.

“Yes, ma’am. On the stairs I met a foreign priest, and I just bowed. It
comes over me that I ought to have fallen on my knees, and perhaps
kissed his ring.”

“A foreign priest!” cried my cousin, more and more bewildered.

“Yes, madam, with a gold thing round his head, most beautiful, and a
gown all over checks--_uno raubo touto corrolado_. Certainly, I ought to
have dropped on my knees!”

This _naïveté_ does not exclude a shrewd and kindly humour, which is,
in fact, a sort of glorified good sense. One of the members of my
husband’s family was a nun in the Convent of Aurillac--a recluse--who
was, however, permitted to spend a few weeks every summer at her
mother’s country place. One day she was walking there with the old lady,
when they met the farmer driving his harrow.

“Good morning, farmer,” says she. “Is that an ox or a cow?”

“It’s a cow, madam.”

“And how do you know the difference?”

The farmer hesitated an instant, and then, with an indescribable look of
roguish respect, he answered the nun--

“By the horns, madam!”

I give the little dialogue in patois, in case my book should stray into
the hands of a philologist.

“_Oquel es un biòu o uno baco, Bouriaïré?_”

“_Co’s (oco es), uno baco._”

“_Cossì lou counessès?_”

“_Ò los couornos, Modomo!_”

Another farmer of our acquaintance answered an amateur agriculturist (it
was not I!), who advised him to irrigate a particularly arid hayfield,
“I’ll put the water-course, if you’ll find the water!” (_Ièu forai lou
truel se me fosès benì l’aigo._)

These genial and kindly peasants live in farms roomy and solid, built of
blocks of grey volcanic stone; the steep roof has several tiers of
windows; one would suppose it from outside a comfortable home. But in
name and in fact the attics are granaries, and all the household crowd
together in one or two rooms on the ground-floor. A huge chimney, with a
hospitable mantle, shelters a couple of comfortable salt-box settles,
reserved for the old; one stands on either side the cavernous hearth,
where, winter or summer, smoulders the half-trunk of a tree; a tall
grandfather’s clock by the dresser, is bright with painted earthenware
dishes and pewter tankards; the best bed, high as a catafalque, stands,
warmly curtained, in the corner under the stairs; a linen cupboard of
walnut or cherry-wood, a huge massive table of unstained oak, flanked by
two benches, a straw-bottomed chair or so, a few rough stools: such is
the furniture of a kitchen in our parts, seldom clean. Here all the
cooking is done, and the eating; here the other day I saw, in a box-bed,
like a ship’s berth, built into the wall, a young mother and her baby
one day old, perfectly happy, while the farm-hands lunched at the table,
and the fowls strolled in and out; here the masters sleep, in sickness
and health; here visitors are received and farm-hands paid--it is, as
they say in Yorkshire, the house-place. With its one window, its floor
of dark unsmoothed volcanic stone (swept every day, but rarely washed),
with its ceiling hung with herbs and sausages and huge sides of bacon,
it is a warm and homely refuge, but not, as a rule, a bright or a
pleasant place.

Sometimes I think the beasts have the best of it. The barns here are as
large as churches. Built against the side of the mountain, they have two
entrances, each on the level of the ground: the higher story forms the
barn, the lower the byre. I have sometimes counted as many as twenty
windows, set some two metres apart, along one side of those huge stone
structures. Here from mid-November till mid-May the cattle live under
cover, chew the cud and see in memory, no doubt, the meadows hard by
with their delicious grass and the aromatic pastures on the
mountain-top. Here in February and March the calves are born. Nothing is
quainter than to see their wild delight, their leaps, their bounds,
their joy, their tearing races, their frantic gambols,

[Illustration: THE FARM AT OLMET]

when, for the first time in their lives, they come forth into the green
fields and balmy air of May.

The pigsties, airy, spacious, comfortable, form a long line near the
farm. The swine, too, are kept close in winter, but in summer they roam
all over the hillsides and munch the grass like sheep. The pigs here
are, I think, the ugliest and perhaps the wittiest in the world--great
long-backed, long-legged creatures, far larger than a sheep. They climb
the rocky fells, scamper down the smooth sides of the combes, trot all
night after the herds to the mountain farm in summer, are hardy,
inquisitive, and sociable, beyond belief. With their coal-black heads
and pink, naked bodies, my sister says they remind her of the famous
_Dame au Masque_. But they have no shame of their ugliness, and, when
they hear a friendly voice on the other side the hedge, come trooping
down from the top of the field to pass the time of day, with all the
ease and assurance of an honoured acquaintance. A natural humour
enlivens their indecent countenance--for, in France, a _cochon_ is
always indecent, and Madame Langeac, when she speaks to her social
superiors, seldom forgets to call the pigs “_les habillés de soie_.”
(One day I asked her the destination of a cool, stone-floored room:
“_Sauf votre respect, madame_,” she replied, “_elle sert pour saler les
habillés de soie_.”) Clad in silk or clad in bristles (the two words are
the same in French), at least during their lifetime our wide-wandering
mountain-swine have a good time of their own; and, though it is natural
in humans to esteem them chiefly in their ulterior form of ham, I
believe we should miss them from the landscape. We have a proverb in our
parts which says of a pair of friends that they are “_Camarades comme
cochons_”--or _sochons_, as we say in Auvergne. In vain, a learned
professor of Clermont has sought to explain away the unseemly word as a
corruption of the Latin _socius_. Why should we say, “Camarades comme
_socius_?” There’s no meaning in it. Glance at the hills, my good Don,
and see the friendly creatures ambling about, in pairs or little troops,
knocking their heads together, grunting out their gossip or their
confidences, complaining about that last dish at dinner, grazing and
grunting over all the green volcanoes of Auvergne, and then you may hope
to understand the people’s wit.

But listen! What unearthly noise is that which rises at this very moment
from the farm? No pigsticking, for we are in summer still. There goes
Madame Langeac, followed by her two maids and a small boy; each of them
holds high a copper saucepan, warming-pan, or kettle (serving as a
cymbal), on which she clatters with a key or fork. The three dogs and
old Gaffer Langeac look on and grin. Slowly in calm procession they move
down the lane till they reach the old walnut-tree in the field beneath
our wall. And now I see a sort of fruit on a bough of the tree, like a
black hanging pear or melon. It is a swarm of bees. From field to field,
its owners have followed it with this infernal symphony, which serves,
as they suppose, to attract the bees, or in any case to advertise the
owner of the land on which they settle, whose property they are. See, a
woman brings the hive. To-morrow, the swarm will be busy in its
straw-clad home on the sunny bench beneath the south-east wall. And the
bees will take rank as friends. On feast-days the children will deck
their hive with flowers or coloured ribbons; a bow of crape will be tied
to it in times of mourning. So, deeming themselves beloved and
associate, the bees will work and supply their masters with the sweet,
dark honey of Auvergne, so pungently perfumed, so luscious and aromatic,
filled with the scent of the heather and the savour of the sarrazin.


III

Jean-Irénée, our gardener at the lodge, does little work for us save
plant and tend the kitchen-garden, whose produce he shares, and mow the
lawns and orchard--when he deems the grass long enough to feed his cows.
He labours for us until noon; after midday he is on his own account a
busy man, and a small farmer in his way, with four cows, a cart, and
four tiny fields of his own well chosen, scattered in different folds
and hollows of the mountain. We give him his house, an acre of grass or
two, his garden, and stabling for his cows and pigs; in addition, he has
something less than £20 of wages and _étrennes_, so that he is well off,
for Olmet, where even a _bouvier-grand_, that important person and
mainstay of a farm, the head-cowboy, earns barely £17 a year. His cows
are tended (for here the cows are always watched and tended) by his
stepdaughter Florentine, a child of eight years old. Florentine’s
childhood has been sad enough. Her father died before her birth, and,
after her mother’s second marriage, the successive birth of two little
sisters soon left her out in the cold. She is happier now that she is
some one in the household, with a place of her own, and worth her salt.
There is nothing unusual in her position. Here the flocks and herds are
always minded by tiny shepherds of from five to eleven, who herd the
bull past frightened ladies with much air and grace. Alone on the
mountain all day long with their charges, they gain an incomparable
knowledge of animal nature, of the virtues of herbs and plants, the
changes in the skies and winds, and such unwritten lore. The other day,
a farmer’s son, the head of a large dairy farm at Badailhac, told me
that he had learned half he knew as he tended the cows on the hillside
in his childhood. “A gentleman,” he said, “a _monsieur_, could never
understand them. No, a dairyman must be taken young.” But, during their
unconscious education, the poor mites sometimes find time hang heavy on
their hands. I know a little shepherd girl at Aris, demurely dressed in
black; whenever I pass her she is seated beneath a tree, telling her
beads, or reading in a book. But Florentine is barely eight. Her
coal-black eyes and laughing gipsy face bespeak her of a more
adventurous cast. She is even now in disgrace because, the other day,
when Jean-Irénée went up the hill, he found her in a field with little
Guiralou, the farmer’s herd-boy, roasting, in the ashes of a mighty
bonfire, a score of potatoes freshly torn from the field. Fortunately,
the cows, compassionate to their little guardian, had continued to
conduct themselves with propriety, despite her absence.

A greater calamity--a real one--happened last autumn, and then I thought
that Florentine--such an anxious, sobered Florentine!--would never play
the truant any more. She was not at fault, or I tremble to think of her
punishment. Happily the day was a Sunday; Jean-Irénée himself was seated
in the field beside the child, when suddenly the cow stepped on a
rolling stone, fell down a precipitous bank, and broke her leg. It was a
fine beast, in full milk, having weaned its first calf. Even at Olmet,
such a beast is worth from twelve to fifteen pounds. I shall not forget
the consternation of the man, the white despair of the child, as they
came back that afternoon supporting the patient animal, whose russet
foreankle dropped pending. The poor beastie munched cheerfully a handful
of clover and a crust, and lay in the stable, in no great pain
apparently, not ill-content.

But at Olmet we have not learned how to set a cow’s leg. To make
butcher’s meat of poor Corrado, before any fever set in, was her
master’s only thought, and indeed his duty. In vain he visited Vic and
Polminhac, Thiézac and Carlat. At last an army butcher, from Aurillac,
consented to buy the cow for a matter of sixty francs. The loss was
heavy, and for many a day Jean-Irénée saw the sunshine black. It is to
avert such dangers that, on our rocky hillsides, a tiny guardian is
always sent with the cows. One of these little shepherds became (as we
all know) so great a man of science that his contemporaries deemed him a
sorcerer; he invented the pendulum (I think) in clockwork, and finally
ascended the throne of St. Peter as Pope Sylvester II. Having shepherded
lambs, the little _pâtre_ of Aurillac knew how to shepherd nations. I
know not that any other of our Cantal shepherds has shown the genius of
a Gerbert (such was Sylvester’s name), of a Giotto, a Burns, a Joan of
Arc. But such a life, one would imagine, must predispose a thoughtful
mind to reflection and observation.

Sometimes, as we come home at nightfall from our walk, I hear, high up
in the bracken and the broom, a small keen voice singing shrilly, some
large and doleful verse maybe of _lou Grondo_ (_la Grande_), the endless
patois chant our peasants sing; or perhaps a stanza of the
_Marseillaise_. Some poor child up there is growing frightened in the
dusk! Ours is a Celtic country, full of phantoms, elves, and fairies.
Who knows but the huntsman with his spectral rout may dash out of yonder
hollow? There is also, and especially, the Drac, a subtle spirit whose
dear delight it is to play pranks at twilight on the little herds--a
Proteus imp who can change into any shape, who plaits the cattle’s tails
and manes into inextricable mats, who pulled Touéno’s ears only last
November, one evening as he sat upon the hill, leaving the child
half-dead with fear. Who but the Drac misleads the baby cowherds when
they and their cattle take a wrong turning, when nights are dark? ’Twas
he, most likely, who placed the stone on which our Corrado slipped and
broke her leg. It is scant comfort, so far afield and quite alone, to
remember that he is no respecter of persons; or how, one chilly winter’s
night, he pulled the farmer’s wife herself right out of bed. Nothing is
sacred to the Drac! More cause for fear! Sing louder, little shepherd,
and I’ll join in, down here in the lane, to hearten up your courage!


IV

Yesterday, we drove to the _buron_ on the mountain. _Buron_ is a local
word, which we fondly believe to be derived from the Greek, a relic
perhaps of antique settlers, in the south, near Marseilles; however this
may be, it is not patois: in our dialect, we call the buron, _lou
mosut_--“the little house.” Has not Vermenouze sung the little red-tiled
hut, on the summit of the mountain, “like a young cock, red and small,
reared up there in his glory, in the middle of the blue sky.”

    “Lou mosut, coumo un golitchiou
    Quilhat omoun, rougi e pitchiou,
    Ol mièt dèl cieu blus, dins lo glorio.”

However we may call it, a _buron_ expresses a little lonely habitation
on the mountain, almost a hut, where the neatherds sleep in summer, and
where the cheese is made, day after day, from the end of May till
mid-October. It is a long climb from Olmet to the plateau whereon these
little cheese-farms multiply and prosper. The road, in steep zigzags,
mounts the hill; we leave the pasture behind us, and the fields of
flowering buckwheat, and even the high heathery ridge of the _Pas du
Luc_; we enter the hanging beechwoods and crawl up the wall of the
cliff, until lo! we emerge on a great sea of undulating pasture-land,
apparently illimited, save here and there by a grey mountain peak. The
foreground is studded with tiny red-roofed _burons_, each shaded by its
group of centenary limes.

    “L’erbo[1] que pousso eici, pès puèts è sus plotèu
    N’es pas coumo en obal, e pus rudo e pus sono,
    E sent bon; li troubai l’ourgulhouso cinsono,
    Que despleguo soi flours jiaunos coumo un dropéu.”

Do you understand?

    “The grass that grows up here, on the puys and the plateau,
    Is not like that below, it is rougher and more wholesome:
    It smells good; there you find the proud gentian
    Who displays her yellow flowers like a banner.”

It was after four when we at last reached the _buron_. The cows had come
in from the moor to the fold. The milkmen had donned their blouses of
grey hemp-linen, which hung in stiff hieratic folds. Each had, tied to
his loins, a queer stumpy stool, like some odd sort of bustle. Now they
call: “Frijado! Morgorido! Marquise!” Amid a silvery tinkle of cow-bells
the beautiful red beasts approach. As each takes her stand, a cow-herd
brings up to her a curly red calf. But the poor beastie has scarce
pulled a throatful or so of its mother’s milk (its mother or its
foster-mother, for at the _buron_ each calf has a mother and a nurse)
when a strong arm pulls it away and holds it tightly until the pail is
full, when it may resume its supper, while the cow caresses it with a
loving maternal tongue. All round the fold the beasts are being milked,
the calves are bleating or sucking, the herdsmen are busy. Only in the
middle, impassible and haughty, sits the bull, with a look that seems to
say: “All this has nothing to do with me. Let them settle it among
themselves.”

Now the cattle will remain all night in the fold, unsheltered. Every
morning three sides of the palisade are displaced, so that the cows
never sleep twice in the same bed; and in this primitive fashion, at the
end of the summer, the whole pasture has been manured: it is called the
_fumado_. After the milking time at dawn the cattle are set free, and
all day long they pasture in the _aigado_, or marshy moor, where the
gentian, the pink, the meadowsweet and larkspur grow among the rush and
the broom, the bilberry and heather. Here the grass is scantier, but
sweet and aromatic. To the quantity of wild thyme and savoury herbs in
the _aigado_, the peasants attribute the wholesome flavour of the Cantal
cheese.

A mountain farm often boasts in summer some three score to a hundred
head of cattle, besides the pigs to fatten, and the goats, from whose
milk is made a delicate little round cream-cheese, the _cabecou_. The
herd is under the care of a responsible dairyman, aided by two or three
_bouviers_, or cowboys, and at least one little cowherd. It is wonderful
to see how mere a hut suffices to house them all. The cattle sleep in
the open, save the youngest calves, who have a little byre all to
themselves. The men sleep in a rough attic under the sloping roof of the
hut, whose one downstair room serves to make the cheese. Cheese-making
is the great trade of our parts, for here the cheese is the gentleman
who pays the rent (_le fromage paie le fermage_), say our farmers. Push
open the door under the lime-trees. You enter a moderate-sized room
which occupies the whole ground floor, paved with rough volcanic stone,
dark grey, and slopped with whey. In one corner stands a primitive open
fireplace, with a pan or two and a cauldron for the herdsmen’s soup;
close to it are placed a rough table and a bench. The rest of the space
is devoted to cheese-making,

[Illustration: THE CÈRE AT VIC]

and is filled with narrow, man-high wooden measures, or _gerles_, each
containing a hundred litres of milk or so, with cheese-moulds, and
cheese-wrings, with tubs in which the whey ferments, producing at the
end of three days a pale fat cream of which the herdsmen make their
butter, and finally with the churn--the whole indescribably sordid and
dirty. A tiny garden surrounds this primitive dwelling, and furnishes a
few rough roots for the soup; turnips come well there; it is often too
bleak and high for cabbage. But the wealth of the _buron_ is stored in a
cellar under the hill-top, opening to the north. There are laid, on a
rough trellis of wood, the huge golden cheeses, each a hundred pounds in
weight (fifty kilos). They look like so many full moons, laid under the
earth to keep fresh till they are wanted in Heaven.... These cellars
generally join the hut; but, as their coolness and depth is of vast
importance, sometimes a cavern is hewn in a favourable spot on a
solitary mountain side. Few things are more startling to the traveller
unaccustomed to our parts than, while admiring the vast and melancholy
landscape, so wild, so green, so unutterably lonely, to find himself
suddenly assailed by an unmistakable stench of Cantal or Roquefort
cheese.

Summer at the _buron_ is without a change in its season from the
blossoming of the limes till the flowering of the gentian. There rose
and lily, strawberry and peach, green peas and melon, are words of a
dead language. Day succeeds day, with the milking at dawn and the
milking at even, the cheese-making of a morning, and, after the mid-day
siesta (for the cowboys rise at three), the turning of the heavy cheeses
in the cellar. The _vacher_ on the mountain-top is as lonely and as
frugal as the sailor on the sea. Few incidents mark the progress of the
summer. In July the farmer comes and takes away the bulls; at the end
of August the yellow gentian has finished flowering, and the herdsmen
make a brief but lucrative harvest of its plants. The days grow shorter,
the nights cold and sharp, the pasture rarer on _fumado_ and _aigado_.
Yet, such is the sense of freedom, such the exhilaration of the mountain
air, that never have I heard our herdsmen lament the length or dull
remoteness of their _estivade_.


V

Sometimes we hire a carriage and drive far and wide, with half a dozen
huge flagoons under the driver’s seat, in search of fountain-water for
my husband to analyze. Last year, on one of these expeditions, he left
me in the phaeton while he, with his great glass bottles, went down a
hill to the springs of Badalhac. It was Sunday. The peasants of that
cheerful mountain-eyrie were standing about, picturesque enough in their
white shirts, with short black boleros or sleeved waistcoats, and large
sombreros. (In autumn they add a voluminous mantle to this outfit.) One
of them came up to the carriage, and, after a few words to the coachman,
began to address me in patois. I caught the words “Proubenço, Piémont.”
“He says,” explained the coachman, “that if you cannot speak our patois,
he can understand you almost as well in the dialect of Provence or
Piémont.” Never have I felt so ignorant! Here were three modern
languages, in none of which was I able to say good morning to a friendly
fellow-traveller.

The Félibres came in time to give a new lease of life to the
fast-decaying patois of Auvergne. Under their auspices there is
published at Aurillac a local paper, _Lo Cobreto_ (The Bagpipes); for
the bagpipes, as befits a Celtic country, is our national instrument,
and we dance a stately sort of reel, more like a minuet, _la bourrée_.
_Lo Cobreto_, of course, is written in patois, not by peasants, but, as
in Provence, by middle-class men of letters who have made the dialect
their hobby. If Mistral next summer should visit Aurillac as he
proposes, they would give him a great banquet, as they did some years
ago for Felix Gras; and the peasants and small shopkeepers would turn
out to stare at and do homage to the Laureate of Languedoc. Our cousin
Vermenouze would recite him an ode in patois, for Vermenouze is the
local genius and _copiscol_, or chief of the school of Auvergne. Fancy
Don Quixote turned poet and sportsman, pious and chivalrous as ever,
with a cross stuck in his cravat, a blessed medal at his watch-chain, a
gun in his hand, a fishing-rod under his arm, and a volume of Mistral or
Virgil in his pocket. As like as not he has also a pipe in his mouth;
and on his feet, perhaps, a pair of sabots.

    “Jéu pouorte pas toutchiour, quond tourne de lo casso,
          Lèbre, perdigal ou becasso,
    Mès, se trobe plus res, pes puets ou pes trobèrs
          Li culisse ou min fouorço bèrs,
          O plenoi mos e per doutchino,
    Deis bèrs de brousso que sentou lo soubotchino”

(“I do not always bring home, when I return from shooting, a hare, a
partridge, or a snipe. But if I find nothing else on the peaks and on
the fells, at least I gather plenty of verses, by handfuls and by
dozens; verses, made of heather, verses with a wilding scent”)--no
description could be better than the poet’s own. Such is the _copiscol_;
an old bachelor, devoted to family, kinsmen, country; no poet has sung
less of love or more sincerely of home and Nature. The moors round St.
Paul-des-Landes, where the wild duck and snipe troop by in March, where
the partridge rustles in autumn, and the startled hare bounds from the
tussocked grass; the _buron_ on the mountain, the life of the farm in
the village, the great distant Puys on the horizon; such are the
subjects of his muse. Last year, I grieved that such a poet should write
for men who seldom read. But my little Auvergnate housemaid tells me
that his poems are recited in the market-place at Aurillac on holiday
afternoons. What poet could wish for more?

Our patois has a Spanish or a Gascon sound, rough but sonorous, pleasant
to the ear, with numerous _o’s_ and rolling _ou’s_ and _aü’s_. You
pronounce the _v_ almost like _b_ (_Bit_ for Vic, _bedel_ for veau). _A_
changes to _o_, as in _Contau_, Cantal; _Morgorido_, Marguerite. _O_
changes to _ou_--_Obeiroun_, Aveyron; _Louzéro_, Lozère. French _au_,
pronounced as ô, changes to _au_, pronounced as â-oo (_Nautres_,
nous-aûtres; _Contau_, Cantal; _Naut-Miétchour_, Haut-midi), except when
it changes to _ou_, pronounced _oo_, as in _Ourlhat_, Aurillac;
_Oubergno_, Auvergne. Like all the idioms of France, the patois of our
Highlands is a corruption of the Low Latin, or rustic Lingua Romana,
spoken generally in Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasion and for
some centuries after. Most of the frequent words of every day are still
very close to their Romance origin: _Copt_, caput, head; _aigo_, aqua,
water; _fau_, fagus, beech; _compono_, campana, church-bell; _semen_,
semen, seed; _lün_, lumen, lamp; _camps_, campus, a field overgrown with
heather, or a moor; _baco_, vacca, cow; _bedel_, vitellus, calf;
_òussell_, ucellus, bird; _fromentau_, fromentalia, corn-land; _gal_,
gallus, cock; _nèu_, neve, snow; _sor_, soror, a sister; _fenno_,
femina, woman; _hibernar_, hibernare, and _estivar_, æstivare, spend the
winter or pass the summer. Other later words and expressions are a
vulgar corruption of the French: _tchiobal_, cheval; _bilatchi_,
village; _biatchi_, voyage; _Toutchion_ (All Saints), Toussaint. At once
antique and popular, the speech of our mountains is doubtless destined
to disappear, but not without a struggle, and not, if our Félibres can
help it, without having made its mark in literature.

    “Nautres que son lou Naut-Mietjiour,
    Contau, Obeiroun, o Louzèro,
    Porlons tobe lo lengo fiéro
    De los onticos Cours d’Omour.”

“We others, of the High-South: Cantal, Aveyron, Lozère, we also speak
the proud language of the antique Courts of Love,” says Vermenouze,
mindful that his dialect is a branch of that vast and ancient Langue
d’Oc which includes the Provençal and the Catalan, so recently honoured
and preserved by a Mistral and a Verdaguer.


VI

Life and Nature are here my friends and great delight--the round of the
harvests, the flowers in their courses, the ways of beast and bird; and
I can say with the great emperor, “Everything is fruit to me which thy
seasons bring, O Nature.” From earliest June till mid-July or later,
before the hay is cut, our fields are as full of flowers as any Paradise
of Fra Angelico’s. Nowhere have I seen plants so robust and brilliant,
blossom of all sorts so abundant. In the water-meadows, the
forget-me-not grows in high bright patches among the ox-eye daisies; the
meadow-sweet is tall along the runnel’s edge among the flowering mint
and willowherb; the loose-strife springs crimson in the hollows; the
columbine stands high and blue in every hedge; on the heights the
fox-glove hangs its blood-red bells from every rock or bank; at the base
of the beech-woods grows a smaller, more delicate sort, of a faint
lemon-yellow with glossy leaves, and the look of a hothouse plant. The
hedges are smothered with wild roses all July, and with honeysuckle all
the summer long; the banks are full of Ragged-Robin. Now the various
campanulas appear--the thyrsis-campanula, with its dark, deep buds set
close against an upright stem, one would say a bunch of violets tied to
a staff; and paler Canterbury bells, swinging from every hedge-side, and
harebell--our English Fare-thee-well Summer!--on all the moors. The
bright rose-pink blooms of the mallow, larger and more abundant than
elsewhere, flourish on the fallow fields. The moors, in June, are one
field of cloth of gold when the broom is out in flower; later the
scabious and the exquisite soft blue tufts of the mountain jasione
dapple many a sunburned hillside with azure and fawn. The red and white
silene, the yellow impatiens with its balsam-like blossoms, the wild
geraniums, sedum of every sort and saxifrage, and all the Alpine
epilobes, the pink saponaria, which looks like a large rose-coloured
single phlox, with all kinds of woodruff, asperule, and lady’s bed-staw,
cover hill and field with a dazzling perfumed carpet. In the woods and
hedges of Clavière the wine-coloured Japanese-looking Martagon lilies
spring in companies, tall and slender. But the glory of our summers are
the mountain pinks; sometimes small deep eyes of an intensest crimson,
and sometimes large pale-patterned feathery picotees; they grow in beds
about the lava-rocks and spring in thousands among the budding heather.
On the higher mountains, at the Lioran for instance, and on our
tablelands at Les Huttes, the gentian grows, beautiful deep-blue cups
close set to the earth, or free-flowering yellow blossoms arranged in
tiers round a tallish stalk. Here, too, may you find the anemone,
larkspur, grass of parnassus, monk’shood, orchid, martagon lily, and a
huge sort of Solomon’s seal which branches like a bracken. In every
cranny of the loose stone walls abound the most delicate ferns. Every
bank is bright with the wood-strawberry; the gooseberry grows in the
hedge; the tall wild cherry, so frequent in Auvergne, drops its dark
sweet fruit in your lap as you sit under the trees; but you must climb
the woods to find the thick growing raspberry-canes, rose-red with
fruit, and the myrtle-like bilberry close set with round blue berries.
In autumn, on every moor and height, the heather comes out among the
second blossom of the broom. Here is the place for mushrooms, for the
large-domed _Chevalier_ or _coucorlo_, spotted like the breast of a
missel-thrush; among the beech-woods grow the huge delicious _cèpes_,
grotesque in form and colour; on the higher pastures we find the
pink-fleshed English sort, the best of all. We string them like beads on
filaments of broom, knotted together, and tie them round our necks in
chains and necklaces, in order to carry them safe home for dinner.

At last the blackberries shine in the hedges, the whortleberry on the
hills. Now comes the last flower of all, the pale _veilleuse_, or lilac
colchicum, springing in myriads in the aftermath and orchard-grass,
although, on the heights, a few stunted scabious, wild pinks, and
gentians may linger until Martinmas. Chill October is at hand. Already,
a fortnight ago, one stormy afternoon, I watched the swallows gather in
the clouds. The time of flowers is over.

To us, the beautiful blossoms are a mere delight. To the mountain
shepherds, the gentian gathering is a fruitful, unsown harvest. In the
first days of September, when the plants are out of flower, a great
massacre of the innocents takes place upon the mountain-tops. The victim
is the tall yellow gentian, much in request among druggists and
manufacturers of liqueurs. Already, on the last day in August, we met an
old mountain farmer, much elate. He had just sold his bundles of
gentian--twenty-three quintals at twenty-seven francs a quintal (a
quintal is a hundred pounds--fifty kilos)--that is to say, about a large
cartful which brought him in some twenty guineas, at no expense save the
pay of the pickers. The herdsmen can earn at this play of
flower-picking, or rather root-pulling, as much as six francs a day. No
wonder the gentian is popular in Auvergne, and that we celebrate in
prose and verse our _ourgulhouso cinsono_! Did any one ever turn so
pretty a penny out of Irish shamrock or Scotch thistle? The profit of it
is considerable enough to have furnished endless troubles and quibbles
between landlord and tenant, each asserting the gentian his perquisite,
until at last the law courts of Aurillac settled the matter in favour of
the farmer.

_L’amère gentiane et la douce réglisse_ have each their partisans; but
the liquorice is less abundant. Still, in autumn, you may see the
mountain shepherds dig holes upon the hill-tops and carefully
disentangle the fine red filaments leading to the blonde, supple,
horse-radishlike root which furnishes the Spanish juice. This they tear
from the ground, and carefully treasure in pouch or shirtfront; for
this, too, commands its price.


VII

When my friend Vernon Lee affords us the pleasure of a visit, we turn to
other interests, such as fall in with the picturesque and archæological
turn of her imagination. Our hills are studded everywhere with ancient
castles, mountain manors, and country houses, some of them very small,
mere cottages, scarce larger than our tiny Olmet which does not boast a
dozen rooms all told. Such are

[Illustration: THE OLD HOUSE AT OLMET]

Cols, buried in woods under the toppling mountain-crags; and beautiful
Trémoulet, perched on the peak of a rock suddenly reared in the wild
gorge of the Cère. Others are solid feudal keeps, to which has been
added, some two hundred years ago, a steep-roofed comfortable
dwelling-house, with charming unsymmetrical windows, an air of open
grace, and a complete indifference to the old fortress it has married.
Comblat-le-Château is of this sort. Just opposite our windows, on the
other side the valley, it stands amid its lawns and gardens, at the foot
of the mountain, on a low mound, overlooking the road to Vic. Though
seldom inhabited, it looks the most cheerful and habitable of our
châteaux, of which the most picturesque (after Trémoulet) are Pestels
and Vixouge. Pestels, alas! restored last year, but still magnificent,
by virtue of the immense proportions of its six-storied battlemented
keep, and its romantic position--Pestels is seated on a steep ledge or
platform some way up the mountain, surrounded by precipices which, on
three sides, drop to the valley, and, on the fourth, into a wooded
ravine or glen. Vixouge stands halfway up the opposite hill, built on a
knoll or holm, with the pastures falling gently from it. The walls and
gateway are of the fourteenth century, the latter fortified by two small
round towers. But now the gate stands open on a shady lane, opposite a
circular stone fountain, with a drinking-trough for cattle. It leads to
a dark abandoned garden, all overgrown, and a tall seventeenth-century
manor, steep-roofed, with corbelled turrets at the corners, and a
peculiar, inexpressible air of poetic melancholy. Just so must have
looked the moated grange of Mariana. The owls must love to hoot here,
and at night, no doubt, the ravens flap about the lonely house, which
might have taken life from a dream of Robida or Gustave Doré. From the
manor-wall, the eye drops sheer to a glittering lozenge of water in the
fields below--a reservoir, with beside it, half in ruins, a Louis Seize
Chinese pagoda, the bathhouse of some eighteenth-century ancestress; its
bright red dilapidated roof and damp-stained walls tell of a century’s
neglect. All round the mountains lie in heaps. Below Vixouge, right and
left, stretches the Pas du Luc, a long-backed ridge of moor, where
landslip after landslip has loosed the great blocks of andesitic
breccia, which lie heaped up among the bracken and heather. It is a
place to dream in, hour after hour.

Vic itself has its château--the Consular House of the Prince of Monaco,
who was the old hereditary Consul of Vic-en-Carladés. Behind, the grey
houses climb the hill, some of them fine old turreted structures
standing in their orchards and walled gardens, ancient town residences
of the local gentry, while others are the merest village shops, with
wooden balconies and gabled roofs. They lead to the church, not
unpicturesque, with a Romanesque choir. Above the mountain rises, clad
in beech-woods, with great organ-flutings and overhanging blocks of
reddish stone, any one of which, one would think, might fall at any
moment and crush into nothingness the little town below.


VIII

Michaelmas! This year the woods are still unchanged, although the frosts
have turned to golden sequins the leaves of the aspens by the river. At
twilight, Venus glitters in a frosty sky above the faded summits of the
mountain. The wild cherries in the hedge are as pink in their foliage as
the maples on a Japanese fan. The weather is of that intense autumn
blueness and brilliance which Madame de Sévigné once called “un temps
d’or et de cristal.” There is a sharp, pleasant quality in the air. Our
walks on the mountain are longer and taken at a brisker pace, and so the
other day we came upon the prettiest sight: a knoll upon the hillside
crowned by a tall group of mountain thistles of more than a woman’s
stature; the fluff of the thistledown, the delicate tracery of the
leaves profiled against the sunset sky. The sound of our steps aroused
from the heart of it some thirty or forty tiny goldfinches who had been
feeding there,--in that immense landscape they looked scarce larger than
humming-birds, as they rose up, poising, quivering, fluttering, soaring,
like a living fountain of golden downy wings.

The birds here are a great delight. The blackbird, the finches, the
blackcap, the chaffinch, sing in all the fields. I seldom hear the lark,
save on the sunny uplands, and never the nightingale; but the blackbird
pipes his flute in every bush. The larger sort of birds especially love
the mountain: the great buzzard with his brown eagle-wings and wailing
melancholy cry, the crow, the rook, flocks of friendly magpies, and in
every spinny the bright blue flash of the jay. How I love the jay! Its
harsh gay laughter seems to me an integral part of spring--as much so as
the sunny winds of March. No bird is so handsome. I have a friendship
for its fierce, bold eye, its short, proud head of a winy grey, its
breast and pinions so blue, spotted with black, with penfeathers of
black and dazzling white. No creature seems more wild, and none, in
fact, is easier to tame. This very summer I tried to rear a nestling
which a wanton shepherd took. I fed it hour by hour, and the little
creature warmed itself in my hands. I watched it develop with a
religious sense of the mystery of life. The first day I had it, the
nestling was blind, naked, motionless, half stunned from hunger and
exposure; yet even then, mere lump of jelly as it was, the creature had
instincts of decency, and never would defile its nest of snow-white
wadding. The second day, it gave voice to a cry, and afterwards it knew
me, screaming for food when I passed; on the third, its wings and half
its breast were covered with the first blue feathers; on the fourth, it
could rear on its legs, and began to buck and jump in the quaintest
fashion. On the fifth day, alas! it fell from a table and died. My
cousin had better luck, and reared a jay who lived to haunt the woods
about her country house, and often fluttered to her shoulder. When, in
November, she drove home to Aurillac, a matter of eleven miles, the jay,
flitting from tree to tree, accompanied her carriage all the way!

While we enjoy the autumn in dreamy dilettante fashion, the peasants
seldom know an idle hour, for harvest follows harvest from St. John’s
Day to All Saints. In October, while still the leaves are green, a
ladder is set against the ash-trees in the hedge, and all the branches
are clipped, except the lead; every third year each tree is thus mulcted
of her spreading branches, and now you see why the ash-trees of Auvergne
look slender, tall, and frail as a poplar. Sometimes, thus thwarted in
their growth, they twist from side to side as they spring upwards, and
look, in their round slim greenness, like great serpents in an allegory,
reared aloft. They furnish, in fact, a final crop of hay, which is
carefully stored in the dryest corner of the barn. Ash-leaves, green or
dry, are a favourite food with cattle, sheep or goats, and vary their
winter’s fare at small expense. In the rare, dreaded years when the
hay-crops fail, then lime and elm and oak and hazel and false-acacia are
pressed into service, and the cows live scantily all winter on chopped
straw and the fodder of the hedges. The failure of the hay is a
disaster in French agriculture, of terrible importance, so that even
dead leaves are a crop in Auvergne, and not to be neglected. At
Martinmas, the women and the children, carrying sacks, go to the brown
woods and gather the fallen leaves, which give out so strange and
melancholy a smell. The oak-leaves, heaped up and watered, rot and
enrich the soil of the kitchen garden, where they protect the young
autumn-sown plants against the severities of an Auvergnat winter. Dried
leaves, in France, in garden, stable, or farmyard, serve almost all the
purposes of straw.

For my part, I love to sit on a rock in the tranquil woods some sunny
afternoon in mid-November, my dog at my feet as silent as myself, so
silent that we scarce disquiet our neighbour the jay, caught in yonder
bramble, who eyes us, his neck swelling, as he disentangles his great
wings. There he goes, screaming, and the silence reigns anew. At last
there stirs some breath of wind, too soft for us to feel it under cover
of the trees, and the last leaves fall down in great packets with a
soft, dull, mysterious thud and shiver: plop!--which frightens my dog
Sylvester half out of his wits.

Down in the field below, the women are busy. Every man within a range of
many miles is absent to-day at Aurillac for the Martinmas Fair; and, as
the ploughs for once are left at home, the women, free from field work
for one afternoon, have decided to restuff their mattresses. Soon after
dawn they came and gathered the beech-leaves beneath the trees, raking
them in heaps, piling them in sacks, and finally strewing them to dry
and air, like hay, in the sunny fields at the base of the woods. And
now, this afternoon, here they come with their mattress-sacks of white
canvas, fresh washed and speckless, into which they cram their harvest
of beech-leaves. The weather has been fine for some weeks, so we trust
their bedding may not be too damp. Now that the leaves are gathered, but
only now, they will drive the pigs into the woods to feed on the acorns,
while the children collect the beech-mast, “the olive of the North,”
carefully treasured for the winter’s oil.

That last is an important consideration. Oil for burning o’ nights in
the long winter evenings; oil for frying and cooking in a land where
butter is scanty and poor, for our milk (so rich in caseum) has very
little cream. The nut-harvest follows the gathering of the leaves; and
the walnut, of course, affords the richest crop. Every farm has its
walnut orchard, and while the men knock the fruit from the trees with
long poles and perches, the maidservants shell the nuts and prepare them
for the mill. Thence will return the salad-oil; while the beech-mast,
hazel, and hemp-grain will furnish the three-beaked brass _lün_, or
Roman lamp, all winter. At Olmet, the fisherman (who, from his little
farm down by the river, ensnares and nets all summer such trout as the
otter leaves him to make an honest penny by) turns miller in winter, and
crushes the walnut harvest, in a great cellar, between two millstones of
black basalt; an ass is harnessed to the upper millstone, and turns
laboriously round and round in the dim place, while the oil streams from
the crushed kernels. The pulp left apparently dry, but still impregnate
with oil and aroma, is an excellent food for fatting beasts, and not
despised by the young of the human race. This is the perquisite of the
miller. Would I could make you see him--a tall, lean peasant, full of a
rough poetry as he curses his foe, the otter, who eats the speckled
trout at dawn in the fisher’s nets!

If there is a harvest of nuts, there is also a harvest of feathers. The
nights are getting cold, it is time to look to the bedding. Every farm
keeps its tribe of geese, whose down (plucked from the living bird six
times a year, at new moon) is now sufficient in quantity to make or
refresh our _édredons_. The poultry yards afford material for the
feather-beds; the flocks of brown sheep give their fleece for the
mattress, and for the warm Auvergnat quilts of wool, sewn fast between
two sheets of flowered cotton print. All these must be made over or
renewed. Our dark and somewhat dingy farms have soft, clean, and ample
beds piled high in their kitchens, wherein to brave the shudders of
snowy winter nights.

These are play-harvests; but the gathering and preparing of the hemp is
a thing of time and patience. Every farm in the Cantal has, in some
sunny corner of a field, a little three-cornered walled space, _l’ort de
lo combi_ (the hemp-garden). Here the handsome sturdy plants are grown,
and hence, in July, the male stems are torn, to make more room for the
seeding of the female plant. A little after Michaelmas these are ripe.
They are torn up by the roots, and left to ferment in upright heaps well
covered. Eight days later their martyrdom begins; they are shaken till
the seed falls from the pod; they are stretched in a water-meadow to
rot; they are dried in the oven; they are rubbed, beaten, crushed,
pounded, combed with iron combs, till nothing is left of their sturdy
green grace and rustic beauty, no likeness of the poor handsome female
plant, only a mass of loose tow and formless fibre. And from this the
grey thread is spun, on autumn afternoons and evenings, as the women
follow their flocks along the lanes, or sit round the fire, cracking
jokes with the grandfather on his comfortable settle in the inglenook.
Every village has its weaver. When the thread is spun he puts it on his
loom, and weaves the strong hand-made hemp-linen from which our farms
are furnished with sheets, table-cloths, napkins, white shirts for the
men and underwear for the women. It comes home in dreary lengths of
grey, and must be bleached in the morning dew, before the capable hands,
which have planted and prepared the hemp and spun the thread, can
fashion and sew the tissue. Open the linen-cupboard in any farm kitchen,
and you will be amazed at the wealth of its heaps of rustic creamy
white.

Our weavers do not weave, our women do not spin, only hemp-thread and
linen. Every man on the countryside, of the peasant class, is clad in
the stout _rase_ (thick rough cloth), or frieze, which his brown flocks
wore first of all, his own hands sheared, his wife’s clever fingers
spun, and which was woven on the village loom. Never have I seen so
stout, so thick a fabric. One glance at the heavy cloth, striped brown
and black from the undyed wool of our sheep, makes one understand the
nipping cold of winter on our hills.

Meanwhile, the buckwheat has been harvested and garnered; on sunny
afternoons the old wives winnow the grain in sieves on every threshold.
The poorer sort goes to feed the fowls and fatten the calves for the
Martinmas fair; while the perfect grain is set aside for the daily
_bourriols_. The apples now are ripe. They should be gathered, save the
later sorts, and laid on straw in the fruitery, before the little
cowherds come down from the mountains. The chestnuts must be brought
from the lower valleys--a dozen miles away, where the conjunction of a
milder climate with a granite soil lets them grow in abundance; the
potatoes must be uprooted from the fields. With buckwheat-meal,
potatoes, chestnuts in store, the farm can affront the winter. And now,
in this year’s potato-field, the plough is put; and the sower, with a
noble gesture, scatters far and wide the grain of the rye. Two women
follow him

[Illustration: TRÉMOULET]

and gather in a basket any stray potatoes now upturned. And close after
the plough hop some half-dozen ash-grey buntings, neat and slender,
pecking the worms and seeds from the new-turned clods.


IX

The oxen scarcely quit the yoke, for the winter crops must all be sown
by Martinmas, and the compassionate farmer throws a pint of oats into
their every feed. But, busy as we are, to-day is holiday. It is the 15th
of October, and the herds return from the mountain. A great music of
cowbells awoke us at five in the morning; one hears a tramp of feet, and
the loud greetings of the herdsmen, whom the whole village turns out to
welcome; the cows utter long “moos” of excitement and delight; in their
midst we see a rustic cart or chariot piled high with great
cheeses--each cow of the herd should have produced at least three of
these huge moons during the five months of its _Estivade_. Without a
word from the herdsman, the beasts stop at Langeac’s farm and turn into
the pastures they left in May, lowing and frolicking for joy despite the
fatigue of the night-long march. Happier still are the herdsmen. The
master-_vacher_ tosses his baby in the air; the little _pâtre_ has found
his mother; the herdsmen are talking eagerly to a knot of relatives and
friends. What joy to see the valley, and the last bright asters in the
gardens, and the apples red and gold in the orchard trees! How they eye
that bright one out of reach on the topmost bough! (And again a verse of
Sappho rings in my mind:--

    ᾪς γλυκύμαλου ἐρευθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὄσδῳ.

What a pleasure to breakfast by the hearth at home on a bowl of new
milk, in which they crush the first toasted chestnuts of the autumn! How
large and cheerful the greystone houses look after the windshaken
_buron_ on the mountain-top! Not to-night (for all of them will sleep),
but for many a night after, towards midnight, a whisper may be heard in
Langeac’s orchard. A group of shadowy forms moves under the
apple-branches. One might suppose a sudden wind in the trees, for plop!
plop! fall the ripe fruit on the soft grass beneath. But the wary farmer
knows what to expect; a shutter screams on its hinges, a window opens,
and there in the yellow light of the candle is Farmer Langeac in his
shirt-sleeves. The herd boys scurry away, swiftly and silently, with
bulging pockets. For my part, out of compassion, I leave them one tree,
not the best--but they prefer them hard as iron.


X

All Saints is at hand! The winds turn sharp and keen. Sometimes at this
season we have, in the Cantal, an exquisite St. Martin’s summer, with
sunny days reaching up till mid-November, as mild as Michaelmas. Now the
wood-cutters set to work and replenish the store of beech-trunks in the
shed; now the carts come down from the moors, piled with an aromatic
load of broom-twigs neatly tied in faggots; now the heather is cut; now
the leaves are piled in sacks, to furnish fodder all the winter long.
The first-sown corn is already green above the sod, and still, day after
day, the plough is in the field, while on the steeper hills the oxen
draw a mere curved tooth of wood--the Roman _aratro_, our _araire_. The
cattle still browse the meadows; all night the hillsides are melodious
with their chiming bells. The orchard trees are pruned and cut back;
their branches are carefully stored for lighting the oven on baking
days. The sunny noontide is still as busy as in summer, and scarcely
less pleasant, but over these last golden hours hangs a sword of
Damocles--the Winter, which may arrive in full array to-morrow. For if,
in the Cantal, we reckon to some extent on a fine spell early in
November, still we taste fearfully the uncertain, unsecure delight; any
night the snow may fall and end the labours of the farm until it first
begins to melt in March.

    “Como jious lo cenre uno cato,
    Per Toutchion, mai des couots pus lèu.
    Nostro bièlho Oubergno s’ocato
    Jious uno flessado de nèu”

(“Like a cat in the warm ashes of the hearth, at All Saints and
sometimes sooner still, our old Auvergne snuggles down in a soft quilt
of snow”). Adieu, lark and swallow! Poor cicada, perish in thy frozen
hole! No more flowers, no more birds, save the great croaking crows that
flap across the milk-white fields. Winter is here!

The daily round has narrowed its circle. A path is cut from the door to
the gate, another to stable and drinking-trough, where the unfrozen
ever-flowing fountain plashes over a fringe of icicles. The walls of
snow glitter and melt not in the sunniest noon. The farm-kitchen is now
the centre of all works and days. The huge hearth-place is a cavern of
warmth and glow. Soon after three the hill-top intercepts the sun; a
little later, the beasts having been milked and fed, masters and men
assemble round the fire. From the ceiling hangs the three-beaked Roman
lamp, but the flames, leaping from the beech-root on the fire-dogs, give
a brighter light. Rare are the farms as yet where a petroleum lamp
enlivens the gloom. The farm-hands, cutting a bough of cherry or beech,
renew the handles of their scythes, mend their tools, or knock a fresh
set of nails into their sabots. The women twirl their distaffs and
spinning-wheels or sew their seam; on a corner of the table, Urbain, the
elder son, who has been to the Regiment, reads last week’s local paper;
Touènou, the little _pâtre_, sprawls in the blaze and pulls the tail of
the cat; comfortably ensconced on the cushioned settle, the old gaffer
of eighty tells many a story of local tradition, or repeats for the
hundredth time his famous account of a journey to Limoges in 1840, or
makes the shadows creepier with tales about the Drac. A little after six
the supper is spread: a porringer of soup, followed by the bacon and the
cabbage which gave it flavour, and a nugget of cheese. By seven, a
neighbour or so has strolled in to share the _veillée_.

The _veillée_ is, and ever has been, the one recreation of our village
winter; with All Saints’ Eve their reign sets in and endures till Lent
begins. In a hamlet like Olmet, where there are several farms of some
importance, each has its circle of clients; and after supper every night
the humbler neighbours throng to the warm farm-kitchen, where the women
knit or spin, while the men weave baskets or mend their tools. If there
be a pretty girl in the household, be sure the youth of the countryside
will throng from all the hamlets near. While the farmers talk of beasts
and crops, while the women lead the wit and the gossip, lasses and lads
have their own affairs at heart. There will be marriages at Easter. For
in the country, men, like birds and cattle, have their season for
pairing, and the leisurely, laughter-filled evenings that divide All
Saints from Ash Wednesday are the courting-tide.

Time flies. The farmer throws a handful or two of chestnuts to roast in
the embers, and sets, mayhap, on the table a bottle of red wine. And
the stories and the gossip begin again till the log, burned through,
falls with a crash from the fire-dogs and sends up a fountain of sparks.
The cricket sings shrill, but hark! without the snow-blast sings more
shrilly yet. The clock strikes nine. Master and men arise and bid each
other good night. The neighbours light their lanterns and don a sort of
Inverness cloak--their _limousines_; the cowherd goes to seek his warm
bed in the cow-stable. And the door, opened an instant for their egress,
reveals the gusty moon-shot night and the vast expanse, dazzling, and
yet dim, of endless snow--a polar landscape, inhospitable and sad.




A MANOR IN TOURAINE A MANOR IN TOURAINE

(LA COMMANDERIE DE BALLAN)

1903


I

An old irregular house, a long grey line in the hollow, founded by the
Templars some eight hundred years ago and finished yesterday. In 1189,
Henry II. of England lay there for a night, very sick, on his way to die
at Chinon. The house was then a Commanderie of the Knights-Templar: we
know how they perished! In all ages, I think, patriotism in France has
shown two sides--two faces, if you will; the one aristocratic, desiring
the advancement of the nation by means of an _élite_, a chosen few, to
whose perfection the common sort was to be sacrificed; the other,
essentially popular, full of dreams and visions, plotting a general
happiness and justice made absolute on earth. The Templars were of the
former party. Early in the fourteenth century, a democratic king made a
clean sweep of them, confiscated their wealth, and left our Commanderie
to bear an empty name. Doubtless, at the moment, King Philip was full of
virtuous schemes. A volume of documents, edited by Renan, shows the wise
uses to which the French Government intended to put this lucky potful of
treasure: there is a plan for popular education, elaborated by a
certain Pierre Du Bois, which we might read to-day, with colleges for
women, scholarships for lady doctors, an Order of Nursing Sisters to be
sent to the colonies--all strangely modern for 1306. High schools for
boys and girls, with special facilities for studying the natural and
moral sciences, were to be established in the existing Commanderies. But
nothing came of it, of course; and no one knows exactly what hole in
fourteenth-century finance was stopped by the nuggets of the unfortunate
Knights-Templar.

Our Commanderie remained a Commanderie. It was handed over to the
Knights of Malta. So much and no more do we know of its fate from the
time of Philip the Fair till the French Revolution. For five hundred
years a mist envelops it. The nineteenth century was to raise its
fortunes.

One of Napoloen’s marshals had a son--himself a prince and a
soldier--unhappily married to a lady of unattractive virtue. A nervous,
artistic, irascible man, he went about still seeking his ideal, _circuit
rudens, quærens quem devoret_. He found it, unfortunately for her, in
the maiden daughter of one of his old friends. Often have I heard of a
certain dinner-party given by the girl’s father--an old general--in
honour of the prince, and how the guests waited in the stiff yellow
Empire _salon_, where the clock on the chimney-piece struck, first the
half-hour, then the hour; and yet the prince never appeared; and still
the young hostess lingered in her pressing-room. At last the dreadful
truth burst upon the hungry and anxious company--they had eloped
together!

Save for this one great slip in conduct, the lady was a saint--a mute
inglorious George Eliot. She reclaimed her lover, whose courses up to
that time had been of the most devious, and showed him the sweetness of
a calm, domestic life. She even reconciled him with his virtuous spouse,
and if, as I fear, she broke her father’s heart, she lived to be
blessed by the family she had outraged. Society in France still bore
traces of the recent upheaval of the Revolution; the rule of morals was
relaxed, and passion was held a great excuse. The lady’s character and
her lover’s rank and fidelity combined to attenuate their fault: people
ended by thinking of her as a sort of morganatic wife. She would say
sometimes to her partner in shame: “My dear, you must not neglect the
good princess. Remember she has always the first claim on your
attention.” If, thus despatched to his duties, he stayed too long at
home, the prince’s lawful helpmeet would remark one day: “_Mon ami_, it
is a long time since you looked after your plantations at the
Commanderie.” There is a beautiful old romance by Marie de France called
_Eliduc, or, The Man with Two Wives_. With no less gracious a courtesy,
no less delicate a sense of a rival’s due and a lover’s duty, did these
two nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an impossible,
position.

The prince had bought our ancient manor-house to hide therein his
unespousèd saint. He rebuilt the tumbling walls, restored roof and
ceilings; it was he, no doubt, who drained the fishpond which used to
stand so close to the front door. He made the place a little paradise.
He was rich; he sent all over both worlds, old and new, for rare trees
to plant the hilly park which rises about the small grey priory, gently
swelling to a rim of oakwoods all around. The park is, as it were, a
brief and shallow valley from which the river has long disappeared,
leaving only a tiny, almost invisible streamlet which trickles through
the softest lawns, planted now with groups of silvery Atlas cedars; with
old hollow chestnuts, which--they, at least--must date back some two
hundred years, so far have they gone in the sere and yellow leaf; with
Californian cypresses, which flame all autumn until their fiery needles
rust and fall; with strange pines that grow in a pyramid; with deodoras
and monkey-trees from India; with copper beech and silvery maple. He
stocked the place with antelopes, guanacos, and llamas, quaint, shy
creatures, housed in folds under the spreading trees, that would come to
the palings and feed, tame and timid, from their lady’s hand. And here,
as quiet and lonely as Adam and Eve in their garden, lived these
unlawful lovers, eternally sequestered. He, indeed, had his excursions
and forthcomings, incidental to the existence of a man with two wives,
but she, poor soul, wrapt in a veil of tender shame, dared not show her
face beyond the unfenced boundaries of her woods, and did by stealth her
very deeds of mercy.

Some fifty years ago, both prince and lady died. The house and lands
then came by purchase into the hands of some friends of mine, who have
considerably extended the lands of their domain. The younger brother
married an exquisite young _sociétaire_ of the Comédie Française--a
young lady, pure as pearl, good as gold, of a sort rare, though not
impossible, upon the stage, in France. To this paradise of the
Commanderie he brought his young wife; but--alas for our terrestrial
Edens!--she died there before the year was out. When the widower
followed her, he left the house to his elder brother, a soldier of some
note, who turned his sword into a ploughshare, and devoted himself to
his vineyards and cornfields. His daughter is mistress of the
manor-house to-day.

As it stood when it came into her hands, the Commanderie was a fit
pavilion for a pair of lovers, but scarcely the hospitable home of a
numerous family. Much of it had to be rebuilt and much restored. A story
was added. One day, when the masons were taking down an ugly plaster
ceiling from a small room in the tower, there underneath they

[Illustration: THE COMMANDERIE AT BALLAN]

found, still solid, still fresh and clear, the ancient beams and
roof-trees of a distant century, painted with the coat-of-arms of the
Knights of Malta.


II

It is in autumn that you should visit the Commanderie. The house, still
relatively small, is picturesque, a long irregular priory or
manor-house, with lancet chapel-windows at one end, and in the centre a
jutting pseudo-gothic turret that masks the staircase. With its
mullioned windows and grey walls hung with crimson creeper, it looks at
first sight rather Scotch or English than French. The lawn that spreads
in front confirms the impression. Our grass plots in France are
generally left to grow for hay, and stand tall with flowers and
seeding-grasses, save for a band clean shaven near the house. But my
friend here is of Lord Bacon’s thinking: “That nothing is more Pleasant
to the Eye than _Greene Grasse_ kept finely shorn.” A velvet lawn
stretches between the infrequent lovely beds heaped so high, where the
tall cannas outflame the red and orange touches on the woods, where
pale-blue plumbagos, yellow canariensis, and violet clematis, twining
over hop-poles, fall in loose garlands and festoons like coloured
fountains of flowers. So the green expanse sweeps up the slope till it
meets a glade of browner oak-trees, starred thickly underfoot with
crimson cyclamen. Beyond a wandering path the oak-wood rustles, and
crowns the height.

So much for the view from the front; east and west, the park stretches,
occupying a combe between the wooded slopes. Turning east, you cross the
moat, inseparable from every ancient manor-house in France, you pass the
orangery with its terrace, where the trees stand out in pots all
summer, and so you arrive at a series of large walled gardens or
_potagers_. You enter by a _rosarium_ where, well to the south,
sheltered by stone walls draped with peaches in espalier, the roses grow
profusely, not trained over balls or arches, nor cut into standards, but
somewhat wild and bushy, just as Nature made them. Invisible at their
feet, flat beds of mignonette, verbena, violet and heliotrope give
odour; for the rose is a fast flower of its smell, as Lord Bacon noticed
(when writing of gardens one may surely quote him twice): “And you may
walk by a whole row of them and find nothing of their sweetness.” From
the rose-garden starts a long rectangle of three walled _potagers_ in a
suite, opening into each other like a set of state rooms. The walls of
all alike are trained and pleached with fruit-trees, and more
especially, in this first one, with vines: trellises of grapes, purple
and white, and that small golden sort called Chasselas, whose flavour is
perhaps unrivalled. The three gardens communicate by means of arched
gateways, through which--right through from end to end--runs a broad
gravelled walk, set on either side with deep, high banks of common
flowers for cutting, such as roses, chrysanthemums, zinnias, asters,
phlox, dahlias, and cannas, tall Paris daisies, freesias, and autumn
lilies. Behind this varied screen stretch the beds of fruit and
vegetables, strawberries and raspberries, which ripen on into latest
autumn, melons and asparagus, artichokes and cardoons, green peas,
French beans and scarlet-runners--such, in fact, as make some decorative
show; for this first garden is a favourite place for sheltered walking.
To the second garden are relegated the salads of different sorts:
lettuce and _romaine_, spinach and sorrel, scarole, celery and chicory,
capucin’s beard and _bette_ and endive; while in the third grow the
cabbages, carrots, turnips, parsnips, Japanese crosnes, Jerusalem
artichokes, Brussels sprouts, onions, leeks, potatoes, and their kind.
Above the suite of gardens, which occupy the lower slope of a gentle
rise, runs a natural fringe of copse-wood; below, the upper road from
Tours to Ballan divides them from a considerable vineyard, which bears,
on a little holm, a fourth walled garden, or _clos_, filled with orchard
trees of a finer sort than those planted everywhere about the fields.
This is especially sacred to those golden plums for which the country
round Tours is celebrated.

The small estate of the Commanderie comprises some two hundred and forty
acres (96 hectares), of which fifty-five are laid out in park or woods,
forty in pasture, thirty-five in vineyards, eighty in arable land for
corn, about thirty in orchards and gardens. It has amused me to compare
this distribution with that of Ausonius’ _herediolus_, or small family
estate, which, though it seemed a very little property in Roman Gaul,
was more than twice as large as the Commanderie. The fourth-century
poet, who takes us into his confidence on all occasions, does not forget
to lay before us the plan of his ancestral inheritance near Bordeaux. He
had some fifty acres of pasture, one hundred acres of vineyard, two
hundred acres of corn-land, and about as much forest as cultivated land.
But to return to modern times and the Commanderie. The vineyards, with
their five and thirty acres, cover far less space than formerly, for in
October, 1885, the dreaded phylloxera made its appearance in Touraine,
surely and gradually spreading desolation. All the vineyards of the
estate before us have been replanted in the last eight years with
American roots, which are invulnerable to the trans-atlantic pest, and
chiefly with _Rupestris_ and _Riparia_, especially the vine of the
latter sort called _Gloire de Touraine_. On these are grafted the native
vines--the expense of the whole process of uprooting, ploughing,
planting and grafting costing not less than sixty pounds sterling for
the hectare--that is to say, for two and a half English acres. After
four or five years the new plants begin to yield abundantly, especially
if they are budded with the prolific vines of the country, the purple
_Gros lot_ or white _Folle Blanche_, either of which produces an
excellent _vin ordinaire_. At the Commanderie, where the grafts are all
of the finer sort, the yield, in the best years, does not exceed some
forty hectolitres to the hectare. Twice as much is frequent in the
fruitful South.

Some twenty years ago this little town of Ballan was a place of great
prosperity. Every sunny slope all round was planted with the vine. The
grapes of the country, besides filling the local vats, command a good
price at Saumur, a neighbouring town wherein is manufactured much
so-called champagne, which divine beverage, outside its natural borders,
is best made from the light heady wines of these parts. Without any
disguise or taking of names in vain, the _Coteaux_ of the Loire produce
many a famous vintage, such as the golden effervescing Vouvray, and the
excellent claret of Chinon and Joué. But, alas! since 1890, too often
the prosperous vineyard has become a wilderness, or is planted at best
with garden-stuff or corn. The peasant-farmers no longer make a fortune
each September; they barely grow for their own use some acre or so of
vines. Ballan still keeps its air of solid comfort, its handsome
cottages of white stone roofed with slate, its teeming vat in every
cellar, its orchards laden with fruit. But, alas! money is no longer so
flush in every pocket, for no crop replaces the prosperity given by the
grape. You know a wine-growing village when you enter it by an air of
universal well-being; and also by the industrious habits of the dwellers
therein; for the vine demands unremitting care and attention, especially
during the months of January, April, June, September, and October.
Suppose a farmer to grow, beside his vineyard, a field or two of corn,
an acre or so of hay and some potatoes and turnips (and what farmer can
grow less?). You will see, if you count the times of sowing and reaping,
that he can have but little time to play the John-o’-Dreams.


III

Close to the kitchen gardens of the Commanderie lies the farmyard, a
picturesque and pleasant place where I love to loiter of an afternoon.
In the middle stands a squat round tower of considerable girth. Whatever
it was of old (gateway, tower, or colombarium), to-day it is a dairy,
chosen for this office on account of the mighty thickness of its walls
and consequent evenness of the temperature within. The vaulted roof of
the ground floor is lined, like the walls, with bright enamelled tiles,
blue and green; the flags are laid with such evenness that not a speck
of dust can shelter there in any cranny; tables of lava support the
spotless vessels for the milk; the churns and separators are as neat and
dainty as if they stood there not for use, but for ornament. How
different from the rough and (truth to tell) the grimy floors, the
squalid deal bench, the primitive churns and cheese-wrings of our
wind-beaten mountain _burons_ in Auvergne!

True that down here in the plains there is less milk to care for. The
excellent Norman cows of the Commanderie give, in favourable
circumstances, as much as twenty litres of milk a day, whereas our
hard-worked, curly-coated, red Cantal kine seldom yield more than eight;
but then Madame Langeac has more than fourscore heads of cattle in her
rude granges at Olmet, and the herd is larger still at Comblat, across
the valley; while the handsome gothic cow-house of the Commanderie
counts but one and twenty beasts, luxuriously housed, ten on either
side the central gallery or platform. And this is a large _vacherie_ for
Touraine. A farm of fifty acres here possesses barely half a dozen cows;
for while in Auvergne the cattle are the mainstay of an estate devoted
to pasture, here, in this land of corn and wine, they are just the
purveyors of the household dairy. Neither cheese nor butter is a great
source of profit, and the cows never work in the fields.

Next to the cow-house stands a building of great importance--the
wine-press, with its cellar for the vats. The cylinders merely caress
their ripest loads of grapes; broken by the mass of their own weight,
they yield the sweetest of their juice for the _mère-goutte_, mother of
wines of choice. But the _vin-de-presse_, or usual red wine--which is
tonic, and (when new) a little harsh--is crushed from the fruit by great
rollers, which bruise the pulp, break the skins, shatter the pips, and
extract the secret tannin. The _mère-goutte_ is all perfume and aroma;
the _vin-de-presse_ is stronger and has more body. A wise hand often
delicately doses a mixture of the two, endowed with the qualities of
either; one-fourth of the sharper wine added to the _mère-goutte_
ensures its keeping.

I always used to think that red wine was made from purple grapes, and
white wine from white ones; so it was, no doubt, until, in 1688, Dom
Pérignon, abbot of Haut Villiers, in Champagne, invented our modern wine
of champagne, which is made from black grapes. The differences lies in
the treatment, not in the colour of the skin: the white wine is drawn
off the solid residue before it enters into fermentation; the red wine
stands on the aromatic detritus from which it has been crushed, and
absorbs its qualities: red wine must evidently be more impregnate with
tannin. After the juice has been decanted, whether white or red, a great
body of pulp remains, still flush and full of alcohol, rich in perfume
and savour. Supposing you add a little water to this mass, having well
broken it up; if on the morrow you pour on a little more, and do so day
by day, until you reach about one-sixth the volume of the juice drawn
off; if then you let the liquor stand for ten days or so to ferment, and
finally decant the renovated must into barrels, which you keep
hermetically sealed; in this way, you may obtain an excellent light
drink, called _piquette_, or sometimes merely _la boisson_, much used by
farmers and labourers in France. It contains from five to eight per
cent. of alcohol, and is the equivalent of our English beer. But often
(though not at the Commanderie) in countries like Touraine, where the
alcoholic value of the grape is generally low, we sacrifice the good and
innocent piquette to what is called the second wine, or _vin de sucre_,
or _vin de marc_--a liquid obtained by the fermentation of sugared water
added to the pulp. I fear that men of science--especially Chaptal and
Parmentier--are responsible for this practice, which is a tampering with
Bacchus. It has, however, the practical result of raising by some three
per cent. the amount of alcohol, so as to make a second wine which
simulates the natural juice. Again, in cold and rainy seasons, when the
fruit ripens ill, even the first loads of grapes are often powdered with
sugar which, while it counteracts their acidity, increases the strength
of the liquid, and is said to augment its resistance to the malady of
_la graisse_, that scourge of weak white wines. When in the last resort
the wine is drawn off, the pulp which remains is frequently made into
food for the beasts. This latter is an excellent practice. A great
chemist of my acquaintance (in point of fact, my husband, Emile Duclaux)
asserts that alcohol should form a part of the usual dietary of cattle,
being, in fact, when economically dosed by the scientific hand, an
unrivalled and easily digested aliment. As for the wine, it sells at
any price, from twenty or thirty francs a hectolitre for the coarse
rustic kinds, to sixty francs for the same amount of a choicer sort,
such as is made at the Commanderie.

Beyond the press, the far end of the farmyard is formed by a row of
light neat sheds for carts and tools, and a wooden barn--far smaller
than our Cantal granges. Opposite the cow-house stand the duck-pond and
the fowl-pen--loud with the cries of geese, turkeys, ducks, fowls, and
pigeons. All told, the fowl-yard counts some five hundred birds. Some of
them are absent. The ducks swim on the moat; the turkeys occupy, on a
green slope of the park, one of those folds wherein some fifty years ago
the antelopes used to arch their lovely necks. As we pass it, a brooding
turkey-hen hurries her nestlings swiftly under her wings. For see! there
aloft, poised in the blue, so high, so high overhead, that blot of
steady black is the watching buzzard. For a mile round you may hear the
wail of its strange mournful cry, so melancholy that one might suppose
the striking of its prey less a sport than a heart-breaking necessity.


IV

Let us leave the farm and the farmyard, and pass through the gardens to
the house, where it sleeps in the sunlight in its coat of many
colours--ivy, virginia creeper, wistaria, and rose; then let us turn
down the green valley of the park towards the village or small town of
Ballan. The topmost edges of the combe are covered on either hand with
copse-woods of oak. Great Spanish chestnuts, hollow and discrowned,
stand about the first green slopes of the turf, especially on the
northern side of the tiny invisible streamlet which, in the patient
course of untold centuries, has scooped out this sheltered bottom. Below
the chestnuts stand a group or two of stately Atlas cedars, which even
in broad daylight seem to keep a perpetual moonbeam glinting on their
silvered branches. The grass lies plain in the bottom, where the son of
the house has planned a tennis-court; beyond runs the yard-wide brook,
whose banks are planted with deciduous cypresses from Louisiana,
magnificently hectic in the flush of their decay. There is no better
tree for containing a wandering stream on its course through a valley,
for the strong roots run together in a natural dyke on either side the
bed; green as a pine in summertime, few trees are so beautiful between
September and All Saints, when the bald cypress (as it is misnamed)
rivals in splendour with the maple or the cherry. I wonder it is not
more usually planted in the milder regions of the south of England,
whose warm moist climate would permit its growth. The Louisiana cypress
fears a heavy frost, a rigorous winter; but it would prosper in Dorset,
in Devon or in Cornwall as it prospers in Touraine, and is not only a
magnificent ornament, but an unexampled drainer of a marshy region.

A mile through the park and half a mile through woods and fields brings
us to the pleasant little place of Ballan--a “gros bourg,” as they say
in France, something between a village and a little country town. How
charming are the _gros bourgs_ of Touraine--Vouvray and Montrichard,
Savonnières or Ballan--with their neat white houses, built of freestone
topped with slate, a raised flight of stone steps leading to the door,
and large ornamented windows, one or two on either side the entrance;
there is a trellised vine up the front, there are flowers in the garden,
fruit-trees everywhere! These villages have brought prosperity to the
very brink of poetry. Once I spent five weeks at Chenonceau, living at
the village inn, a humble place enough,--the “Bon Laboureur.” The rooms
were rough and homely, with tiled floors, straw-bottomed chairs, and
old-fashioned furniture of waxed walnut; but seldom have I dined better
than in that rustic parlour. It is true that I was young then, and very
happy. The tenderest fowls, the most melting and juicy of melons and
green peas, the freshest eggs for boiling or for breaking in an
omelette, the most savoury _rillettes_, the lightest white bread with
fresh yellow butter, the tastiest ham, the richest abundance of peaches,
grapes, plums and pears, composed our rustic diet. We thought Chenonceau
a little paradise. To know a country-side one must know every class in
it; therefore, not content with my five weeks in a village inn, or with
some twelve summers’ experience of life in a manor, I have written to a
friend of mine (for before her marriage she lived five years in my
service), who is the daughter of a small farmer in Touraine, asking her
to send me the daily bill of fare in a cottage. She replies: “The
peasants live uncommonly well in Touraine. Two or three times a day,
according to the season, they have an excellent meal consisting of
soup--generally cabbage-soup--followed by a dish of beans and bacon, or
a ragout of mutton, or a piece of braised beef, or maybe a fricassee of
veal or a civet of rabbit, but meat of some sort, and very seldom merely
bacon; for dessert, they have goats’-milk cheese, for every farm has its
goats, with fruit, and plenty of common red wine, for every cottage has
its acre or so of vineyard.”

In fact, by force of circumstance, every dweller in Touraine becomes,
for the time being, more or less of an epicure. To arrive there in
October from our Cantal mountains is a startling change of scene. On our
summits, perhaps, already the snow has shed its first fresh whiteness; a
few pears and apples ripen reluctant in the orchards; and if the garden
yield us carrots and cabbage, we scarcely dream of more. In Touraine the
very hillsides run down with bunches of ripe grapes; the fruit-trees by
the road bow beneath a weight of pears and plums. The peaches hang
against the garden walls; the raspberry-canes are rosy still with fruit.
It seems an Eden of plenty and mellow fruitfulness. And there would be a
blank ingratitude in taking no delight in these rich offerings of Mother
Earth. It is natural here that one’s fancy should play about the
preparation of a future meal; we feed the turkeys with walnuts all
October to ensure a feast for Martinmas; we walk in the _potager_ and
criticize the matting of the handsome _cardons_; we see to the banking
of the celery. So near to such an ample Nature, a sort of poetry invades
these homely details, and the daily meal becomes, not just a dinner, but
a pious banquet offered up in praise of Ceres.


V

My friend of the Commanderie has kindly obtained from the _mairie_ of
Ballan a list of the different estates and properties which compose the
commune: a total computed at some 6,500 acres. There are eighteen
estates of more than 30 hectares (75 acres); there are seventy-five
farms between 10 and 30 hectares; there are one hundred and thirty-two
small cottage farms between 1 and 10 hectares (from 2½ to 25
acres)--which is as much as to say, that there are in all two hundred
and twenty-five landlords in a commune which counts only four hundred
and fifty voters. Every second man is a person of property! The
population of farm-labourers and servants is therefore small, and
exclusively employed on the few large estates. My second informant (the
peasant farmer’s daughter) writes: “To work a small farm to profit, the
family of the farmer must suffice. Even in a largish property--25
hectares (about 63 acres)--you can manage with two men, two women, and
two horses. (Admire the progression!) The cows here do no field work,
and are kept for milk and meat. On a farm of this size, you should have
six good Normandy cows, two or three goats, two pigs, plenty of rabbits
and fowls. The heifers arrive at a profitable age when they are from two
to three years old; they should then bear a calf each spring; when the
calf is from six to eight weeks old, you should sell it to the butcher
for from 30 to 50 francs, if the animal turn the scale alive at 50
kilos. The mother will now give milk for another five months. The goats
also are useful; a she-goat gives at least three litres of milk a day.
The little round flat cream-cheeses made from goats’ milk are sold at
1½_d._ each in summer, 3_d._ a piece in winter, and are a considerable
source of profit. As for the land, we sow it in a rotation of crops:
firstly, we sow wheat in the autumn, on which we sow in March a crop of
clover to follow the harvest, then in late autumn we sow barley; after
the barley is reaped, in the following summer, you should let the land
rest a year before you sow with wheat again in October. (This fallacy of
fallow lands still obtains among the lower class in France, though the
agricultural schools have taught the well-to-do farmer to exact a
harvest every year from land enriched with chemical manures, or
refreshed by an occasional crop of clover, vetch or buckwheat, ploughed
into the soil while green, between harvest and autumn seed-time. But, to
resume.) The clover is for the cows. Here they do not live in the fields
as in Auvergne, but chiefly in the stables. In the summer we feed them
three times a day with beet-root or turnip-tops, cabbage, and clover; in
the winter we make a good soup of wheat-chaff, bran, beetroots, and a
sort of oil-cake made from the crushed pulp of the walnuts left in the
oil-press; boiling water is poured on this, it is left to ferment for
two hours; and then, just slightly warm, it is given to the cows in the
stable. They have this soup twice a day, and the rest of the time we
give them something every two hours or so, generally a mangerful of
dried clover, cabbage-leaves and chopped straw.” There is no hay, you
observe, in this substantial diet. Nor does she speak of the large
yellow pumpkins which, in the greater part of Touraine, are so useful a
food both for man and beast. At the Commanderie, the cattle graze the
pastures in summer; in winter they are fed on hay, chopped straw,
beetroot soup, or potatoes, boiled Jerusalem artichokes, mangel-wurzel
and swedes, made into a warm pottage. How our neighbours at Olmet would
stare if I suggested a _purée_ of vegetables for the cows!

A large family is a source of wealth to the farmer, who has to pay five
pounds a year to his herdboy or goose-girl, ten or twelve pounds a year
to the maid who helps his wife, and sixteen pounds a year to every
labourer and ploughman, in addition to their keep. So when the farmer
really _is_ a farmer and cultivates his neighbour’s land, his quiver is
well plenished, as in Auvergne. But in Touraine the peasant works on his
own land; and the dread of having to divide that treasured morsel,
dearer than wife or child, sorely limits his descendants. A law
permitting a greater freedom in the making of wills would certainly be
followed by an immediate increase in the rural population. The French as
a nation are lovers of children and hoarders of money. Who would not
multiply the curly heads around the bowl of cabbage-soup, and save by
the same stroke the money spent in wages?

A labourer living and eating in his own cottage earns in Touraine, as a
rule, some two and thirty pounds a year, or is paid for piecework at a
rate of threepence an hour. Or if he hire himself out by the day, he
earns two francs in winter, finding his own food; three francs from
haymaking to harvest; and five francs for the few golden weeks that pay
the rent. The rate of wages is to me a mystery. A long course of
mediæval studies has left no doubt in my mind that in the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and down to the middle of the sixteenth century, the rural
class of the population was better paid and wealthier, in relation to
the rest of society, than is the case to-day. Never perhaps have the
poor been poorer than in the last three or four hundred years--the era
of polite civilization. And yet the peasant of Touraine is not a
Socialist. Patient, thrifty, humorous, deliberate, and practical, he
takes things as they are, and finds them, on the whole, not amiss.

Positive and superstitious, slow and sure, subtle, cautious, and
independent, the labourer of Touraine is a character apart; so different
from our rough and genial farmers of the Cantal, that it seems strange
to think that one and the other are just peasants of Central France. He
is fond of pleasure; and though a good worker, a lover of his ease. No
man knows better how to hang a garland round the Altar of Duty--a rare
art. “_Molles Turones_,” said Cæsar; and Tasso thought the peasant here
was like his land, which is “molle, lieta e dilettosa.” But this
softness, this measure which knows nor haste nor passion, are enforced
by a patient continuity. Look at the countryman as he saunters along his
fields, dressed in a dark-blue blouse, open over a decent woollen suit.
He appears the happiest of mortals, nonchalant, easy-going, humorous and
delicate. His women are worthy of him. The elder women of Touraine are
dignified and lovely to behold in their long circular cloaks of black
cloth, and the fine and costly conch of embroidered

[Illustration: TOURS]

muslin that discreetly veils the dark hair. One charming young girl,
born to this decorous and dainty costume, used to sport on Sundays (when
I knew her) a singular erection of chip, ostrich feathers out of curl,
and pink muslin convolvulus. One day I regretted the earlier head-dress.
She replied: “Never again, madame, never again! The first day I went
into Tours settled that question. Those idle people on the Rue Royale
looked at me with a sort of pity (or, perhaps, as you say, ma’am, it was
admiration, but I found it very wounding), as if I existed for their
entertainment, rather than on my own account.” The little speech, with
its fierce independence, was quite as good a piece of local colour as
the cap. Jeannette was a person of a refined and delicate temperament,
not uncommon in Touraine, and full of quaint niceties of thought,
feeling, and expression; but, for all that, she had some vulgar failings
of her class: she was fond of money and superstitious. She was quite
aware of the first defect, and was sensitive enough to appreciate the
beauty of disinterestedness; sometimes she would say, as if she
complained of some hereditary malady: “It grieves me to be so
avaricious! But something inside me pushes me that way.” She never, I
think, discovered that she was superstitious, deeming rather the people
of Paris a foolhardy race for not taking certain obvious precautions....
Jeannette, for instance, would not have married into a family of which
any member was afflicted even with auburn hair, and when I admired the
shade we politely call Venetian, she would exclaim: “Every one knows the
meaning of red hair. There’s a sorcerer in that family!” In Touraine,
the sorcerer--the _jeteux de sorts_--has often more authority in a
village than the priest; and many a sensible farmer wears in secret some
article of clothing wrong side out as a means of diverting the witch’s
cruel spell. Once, when I changed house, I found my good Jeannette had
loosed her purse-strings to buy a young cockerel; she sacrificed it in
my new bedroom, letting at least one spot of the blood fall on the fresh
planks: “For the house is new,” she said, “and some one must die in it
before the year’s out; better it should be the bird than madame!” She
used to tell me all her dreams, and would come to me weeping in a
morning if she had dreamed of pearls, a marriage, or I think it was
cornflowers--some unlucky blossom. She had two books in her possession.
One (a sort of mumbo-jumbo, treasured from pure devotedness) was my
_Life of Renan_. The other, much thumbed and tattered from long use, was
_La Clef des Songes_.

I suppose such devotion to fetishes must exhaust the religious faculty,
for like many superstitious persons--especially in Touraine--Jeannette
was not pious. She had in her something stiffly, Puritanically,
virtuous. She was loyal, honest, upright, quarrelsome, affectionate,
precise. While she delicately dawdled through her work, doing it in
perfection, her mind was not idle; she had that thoughtful inward habit,
combined with a faculty of sharp observation, which I have often noticed
in the peasant class. She had a great love of justice; but especially as
it affected herself. It was hard for her to see that other people are
just as real and as important. Having been at one moment exposed to a
baseless calumny, when it was at last cleared up, she burst into tears
and exclaimed: “Ce pauv’ Dreyfus!” Suddenly she understood our emotion,
and what was the injustice which had caused such a to-do.

If I have drawn her portrait here, it is because Jeannette is just a
specimen of the peasant of Touraine. I recognized in her the moral
features of her race:--measure and tact, delicacy of sentiment, love of
ease, lack of enthusiasm, a fidelity tempered by criticism. Also she
made me understand and touch, as it were, certain features of her local
class. For instance, that passionate love of amusement which shows
itself in summer dances on the green (the heaviest old Tourangeau farmer
can dance like any sylph). In winter time, the same bent appears in the
endless repartee and story-telling, round a neighbour’s hearth of
evenings, when the peasants gather for _la veillée_. “At least we are
not dull in Touraine,” Jeannette used to say, “and we are well-housed,
in our nice little stone houses, with the roof stuffed full of hay and
grain above us. You must sleep on a sixth floor in Paris, if you would
really understand the heat of summer or the winter’s cold.”


VI

The city of Tours stands on a fertile plain of chalk some three hundred
feet above sea level--a plain which is diversified by the frequent
valleys of considerable rivers. There are the huge and turbid Loire, the
winding Indre, the clear green Cher, so wide, and yet at ease in its
pebbly bed; a little further off the Creuse and the Vienne. All are
great bodies of water, which elsewhere give their names to whole
departments. Most of these rivers are accompanied, on one side at least,
some little way inland, by a steep rocky ridge of friable white tufa,
whose natural caverns are frequently inhabited, enlarged, and made into
comfortable dwellings by modern troglodytes. So easy to manipulate is
the soft chalky stone! Therein dwell the thrifty peasants, as cosy as a
weevil in a cheese. These earthy _coteaux_, or long level lines of
low-banked hills, are peculiar, I think, to France, and common in every
part of it: if they lie to the north, they are generally covered by a
natural copsewood; if they slope to the south, well set to the sun,
they form a perfect nursery for the vine. Near Ballan, the _coteaux_ of
the Cher grow an excellent red wine; the banks of the Loire produce the
sparkling golden Vouvray; at Chinon, on the Indre, the vines give a
claret celebrated in the south of France; Chinon, indeed, which lies a
little south of Ballan, is the richest part of all the plain. It is the
ample garden of France, beloved of Rabelais, and a land of rich dessert:
wine and walnuts, grapes and almonds, plums and pears. If you pass in
September, the orchards present a busy scene; the yellow Catherine plums
are then in their perfection of mellow ripeness; they are gathered by
hand with dainty care, laid to dry in the sun on wicker trays or
hurdles, and baked several times in a baker’s oven before they issue
thence in the shape of dried fruit for the table in winter: the famous
“Pruneaux de Tours.” Not only the Catherine plum, chiefly grown for
drying, but the delicious Reine Claude, golden hued and splashed with
carmine, the Agen plum that’s red and blue, and the Golden Drop, abound
in these orchards; for the hardy plum-tree, that will grow anywhere,
demands for its perfection a land of wide airy valleys and low-lying
southern slopes. The plum is made for Touraine, and Touraine for the
plum; ’tis a happy marriage. In autumn, when the orchards drop with
fruit; when the slopes are covered with the turning vine; when the laden
pear-trees stand round the fields, which are high with maize and clover
sown for fodder after early harvest; when every farmyard, in the angle
of its wall, shows a huge heap of those great ribbed and golden gourds,
large enough to contain the fairy coach of Cinderella, which feed man
and beast with pumpkin-soup all winter; then the plain of Touraine,
under its customary sky of sunny grey, has a beauty of its own, drawn
from its great wide rivers, its rocky, cavernous cliffs, its smiling
valleys, its pretty hills all clothed with oats, their round heads
delicately outlined against the soft horizon, its great forests of
Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of
pollard willows, its great, straight, white high-roads that the aspen
flecks with shadow, and above all from that indescribable grace in the
lie of the land which satisfies the eye with scant diversity. Arthur
Young may declare it “a dead, flat, unpleasant country--a level of burnt
russet meadow,” and affirm the landscape to be “more uninteresting than
I could have thought it possible for the vicinity of a great river to
be.” We will dare to differ. With Montaigne, we will cry shame on the
Highlander, whose eye, too accustomed to his lochs and heather, fails to
appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine. With Gilbert White, we’ll
declare that the rounded forms of a chalk country make it seem more
alive and breathing, as it were, than any other. For one season of the
year at least, Touraine is beautiful!


VII

The kings of France always thought so. Their castles lie all round.
Lovely Amboise, on the Loire, still belongs to the family of
Bourbon-Orleans; but the Republic holds what time has left of Loches, so
lordly throned above the Indre, with Blois, and the remains of Plessis.
Beautiful Chenonceaux, built across the Cher, has lately been sold to a
millionnaire from Cuba. Other foreigners last year settled at
Azay-le-Rideau, the fairest, to my thinking, of all the so-called
castles of the Loire; for there the Indre seems to eddy round the
deserted palace of the Sleeping Beauty. The huge feudal pile which
dominates the Loire at Langeais belongs to a Protestant banker from the
Havre. Villandry, Moncontour, have been purchased by wealthy families
whose coat-of-arms was unknown a hundred years ago. Luynes alone still
belongs to the ancient ducal house which bears its name.

All of these castles, and a hundred smaller ones, down to our small
Commanderie, or the toy-castle of La Carte, near Ballan, have a grace
and a dignity of their own, untouched by their change of fortunes.
Fallen from their antique state, they appear to own the power of
ennobling their possessors. And as the sea-shell models to its form the
wandering fish that dwells in it by choice, so these old houses,
representing an ideal annihilated by frequent revolutions, have silently
refashioned the sort of aristocracy for which they were created. Their
ancient walls can find no great change between the present and the past.
To make the resemblance all the closer, there has arisen during the last
few years in France, especially since the Dreyfus trial, a semblance of
civil strife, and, as it were, a shadow of those wars of religion with
which these old stones are so familiar. And if as yet no Huguenot
gentlemen dangle anew from the iron balconies of Amboise, it is perhaps
from no want of a will to string them there on the part of their
orthodox neighbours.

Life in any of these chateaux, on either side of the abyss, is much the
same; indeed, much the same life has been led in rural France by the
upper classes since the very days of the Roman Empire. The letters of
Ausonius, written in the fourth century; or the Victorial of Don Pero
Niño, a Spanish knight who visited a castle in Normandy some thousand
years later; each alike present a picture which varies in no essential
point from that which we behold in any important country house to-day.

The letters of Ausonius introduce us to the brilliant villas that
adorned in Gallo-Roman times the banks of the Garonne--villas that were
rather _palazzi_, as they say in Italy to-day, with their
picture-galleries, libraries, bath-rooms, and loggias adorned with
statues. Round them extended noble gardens, like the gardens of
Versailles or St. Cloud, with artificial lakes and canals, clipped yews
in figures, rows of marble busts, and some little sunproof grove of
ilex, where Pan for ever plays a flute grown green with moss. Just as in
our days, the farm adjoined the villa, with its rick-yards and
sheepfolds, its barns, stables, and winepress. But if the outer form of
things was little different, still more striking is the social
resemblance. Then, as now, the men of the household rose early for a
morning’s hunting before the mid-day meal; visitors called after lunch,
partook of a light refreshment, strolled with their hosts about the park
and gardens. After their departure, then, as now, guests and hosts alike
retired to write their letters. Not every day of old came and went the
post, and the missives it brought and took were more studied and wittier
than our hasty messages to-day. Then, as now, the upper class in France
was passionately fond of music; and that, too, was a resource--the
instruments indeed were a little different, being “lyres as big as
carts,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, and hydraulic organs. But the
pleasure and the habit were the same. On most afternoons, some of the
guests of a large party were busy with music, or perhaps with the
preparations for private theatricals, which then, as now, were a
frequent entertainment in a country house: Paulus, of Saintes, brought
with him to Lucaniacus a farce of his own composition for the
delectation of Ausonius and his guests. While these were occupied in
music or reciting, others were driving, or playing at tennis (Paulinus,
of Pella, sent to Rome for his tennis-balls), and others, again, were
planning some mighty race of cars. To-day they are motor-cars,--and
there is all the difference.

After dinner, reading and conversation were the order of the day. Then,
as now, the women were well to the fore. The wife of Ausonius wrote
poetry, his daughter attended a course of university lectures, his aunt
was a lady doctor. Depend upon it, in any age these clever French women
could always hold their own! While some of the hosts of Lucaniacus sat
talking round the lamp, others looked through the last new books; more
often, some one read aloud to a circle of ladies busy with their
needlework: just as to-night! In a quiet corner, dice and trictrac
claimed their devotees. Ausonius does not speak of bridge or boston.

Life in the upper class has little changed in Gallia! We find, indeed, a
greater difference if we compare our modern round of days and works with
the picture offered in the Victorial. In 1406 (as we shall see in a
later chapter), the chateau of Sérifontaine was no less hospitable than
Lucaniacus, “and as well mounted,” says the chronicler, “as any mansion
in Paris;” the pleasures of hunting and shooting, the extreme love and
exquisite practice of music, the light and almost constant art of
conversation were alike in the one as in the other. There is the same
delightful courtesy, the same universal amiability of temper. But in the
mediæval picture there is, perhaps (with a wilding grace and fantasy,
which are not now in fashion), a lack of that sober, solid culture, that
fund of judgment and good sense so oddly mixed with triviality, which in
the days of Ausonius, as in our own, seem to me distinctive of society
in France.

In all the comfortable _bourgeois_ houses that I visit, as in the manor
of Touraine, life runs as easy, as regular, as if on wheels of
clockwork. This same ease and elasticity struck the excellent Don Pedro
Niño, of whom more anon. “Could it last for ever,” said he, “such as it
is, a man would not desire another Paradise.” Every one seems pleased
and happy, and I have long since come to the conclusion that the real
art, the real wealth of France, are just this universal amiability of
temper. Nothing happens, yet every one seems busy and amused. The young
people shoot and play tennis of mornings (they still play tennis in
France), or ride their bicycles (an evident progress on Lucaniacus!), or
mount their horses; the elders write letters, read the papers, stroll in
the grounds, eat grapes from the trellis for a morning “cure;” the
ladies smile and sit about arrayed in wonderful morning gowns,
embroidering strips of mysterious and beautiful needlework. A great
capacity for sitting about and smiling, an ability to embroider
anything, from a shoe-bag to a set of curtains, is part of the equipment
of every well-bred Frenchwoman. Lunch reunites the scattered elements
and is rich in animated conversation: gossip, news, discussion, gibes,
laughing protests, enthusiastic _envolées_, learned disquisitions,
sparkling or ironic repartee, valuable information; for conversation in
all its branches is the national game in France, played on all occasions
by both sexes (especially together), and they are as clever here, and as
easily first, as we in the cricket-field. After lunch the time runs,
with scarce a variation, as it ran at Lucaniacus, or at Sérifontaine,
save that in the last few years the general adoption of the motor-car
has vastly increased the circle of possible visits and excursions. The
letters to write, the game of tennis, the stroll in the grounds, the
hour of music, remain unchanged. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are far
superior at the piano to English-women or Italians; every little circle
possesses its musician of considerable merit, and in almost every
country house we may be sure of finding at least one lady, reading her
music as lightly as her novel, and possessing a vast repertory of
symphonies and sonatas which she plays with a just and fine
understanding. How many an enchanted hour will she while away with
Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, César Franck, greatest of modern masters,
or, perhaps, the idol of the hour, Claude Debussy!

Even as the dice-tables and trictrac stood ready of old for the guests
of Lucaniacus, so in every French country house to-day there is an orgy
of innocent card-playing--such mysteries of Chinese bézique, boston,
bridge (played any time these dozen years or more in France), or immense
and complicated patiences which take five packs of cards. Meanwhile, I
sit in a corner, very quiet, lost in a volume of Balzac, and a sweet
agèd voice calls to me: “Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous préparez,
mon enfant!” Ah, sweet agèd voice that I shall never hear again, your
echo rings still for me in all the rooms of the Commanderie!


VIII

In every French country house of this early twentieth century we shall
find, however, one great and noble preoccupation which took but little
of the time or expenditure of those earlier societies with which I have
compared our contemporaries. The sense of Charity, of social service, of
solidarity or fraternity--call it what you will--the intimate feeling of
our duty to our neighbour in all his troubles and trials, is a strong
moral feature in the life of France to-day. On either side of the
political and moral gulf which divides society, the same sentiment
exists, with different applications. On the Catholic and royalist side,
the most noble sacrifices will be made to support the Sisters in their
work of education and nursing, great sums will be given to the
Brotherhood of Christian Doctrine or to the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The organization of the Catholic Church is beyond all praise--every
charitable impulse of the human heart can find therein its channel, and
work the maximum of effect without let or hindrance. On the other side,
on _our_ side, the canalization is not so perfect. People have to dig
their trench and lay their pipes before they can turn on their supplies.
A great deal is left to individual effort. Schools, _crèches_, nursing
homes, popular colleges, are founded and supported with a passion, a
constant sacrifice, which has in it, with the dignity of charity, all
the enthusiasm of a noble sport. How happy were the world if well-doing
should become the pastime and the passion of the future!

My friends of the Commanderie have founded and endowed a cottage
hospital, a perfect model of cheerfulness and hygiene. With its wide
windows, its inner gallery for walking, its charming white bedrooms, its
cane armchairs and sofas set about in the garden, whence the woods and
vines are always fair to see, with its friendly Sisters in their white
_cornettes_, and its mild fresh air, the _Hospitalité_ of Ballan
appears, less a place to be ill in, than most evidently a place to get
well in. There is an operating theatre (as bright and speckless as the
rest) with a private bedroom for paying guests: and this is by no means
the least service rendered, for the farmers of Touraine, well off and
independent, are wholly without provision in their homes for the weeks
which follow, for instance, the necessary infliction of any large flesh
wound: too often in their homes the microbe finds out that open door. In
the winter and spring, when pneumonia and influenza work their will, the
little hospital can contain some ten or eleven invalids. It is emptied
in the warm summer months, and serves, when there are no sick in Ballan,
as a convalescent home for many a worn-out shop-girl or dressmaker’s
apprentice from Paris.

Sometimes, in that little hospital, I see a vision of social peace which
still seems too far removed from this lovely, humane, courteous,
beneficent, and yet, in so far as politics are concerned (and here
religion is a branch of politics), this most choleric and disputatious
land of France. Built and endowed by a Jewess, visited and approved by
the Archbishop of Tours, its white dormitories show the Sisters of St.
Joseph and the Socialist doctor standing hand-in-hand round the bedside
of the sick. “Ah me!” say I, “might I live to see the day when the whole
of France should imitate this manor in Touraine!” But history tells me
that (in France, at least) the lion will never lie down with the
lamb--for at heart the lion is afraid lest its neighbour take advantage
of the situation.




THE FRENCH PEASANT, BEFORE AND SINCE THE REVOLUTION


The first time we meet him, to my knowledge, is just about the end of
the twelfth century. Who can forget the sombre figure that strides
across the dainty scene of _Aucassin et Nicolette_? Aucassin, on his
courser, dreamy and lost in thought, goes riding towards the greenwood
to find his true love, Nicolette. At the edge of the forest he passes
the little herdboys, sitting on their mantles on the grass, as they
break bread at nones by the fountain’s edge. These are mere children. It
is far later, when the sun is sinking, while the tears course down the
callow cheeks of Aucassin at the thought of his poor strayed love still
unfound, it is deep in the forest glades that he meets the real French
peasant.

“Right down an old green path rode Aucassin. He looked before him and
saw such a varlet as this. Tall was he and wondrous foul of feature; he
had a great shock of coal-black hair; his eyes were a full palm’s
breadth apart. Large was his jowl, flat his great nose, with a broad
nostril, and his thick lips were redder than roast meat; yellow and
unsightly were the teeth of him. Shod was he with hose and shoon of
oxhide, gartered a little lower than the knee with swathes of lime bark;
and he was wrapped in a great coarse cloak that seemed to have two wrong
sides to it. He stood there, leaning on a club; and he was sore afraid
when he marked Aucassin riding towards him.

“‘Now God be with you, fair brother,’ said Aucassin.

“‘God bless you,’ replied the peasant hind.

“‘And what do you here, for the love of God?’ said Aucassin.

“‘What’s that to you?’ said the other.

“‘Nothing,’ said Aucassin. ‘I spoke out of courtesy.’

“‘But you,’ said the peasant--‘why do you weep and go so sad and sorry?
Were I as rich a man as you, naught in this world should make me shed a
tear!’

“‘Bah! Do you know who I am?’ said Aucassin.

“‘Yes. You are Aucassin, the count’s son. And look here, an’ you’ll tell
why you go thus a-weeping, I’ll tell you this business of mine.’

“‘Certes,’ said Aucassin; ‘gladly will I tell you. This morning I went
a-hunting in the forest, having with me a certain white greyhound, the
loveliest thing alive. I have lost it; so I go weeping.’

“‘Oho!’ cried the other. ‘By the heart in the Lord’s bosom, you go
crying for a stinking hound! Bad scan to me if I think any the better of
you for that! Fie, there’s not so rich a man in this land, but if your
father besought him for a gift of ten, or fifteen, or twenty greyhounds,
he would send them you right gladly. But _I_ may weep, and have a cause
for weeping.’

“‘Why, brother?’

“‘Sire; I will tell you. I was hired out to a rich peasant, and drove
his plough with four oxen. And three days ago I had the misfortune to
lose the best of my oxen, Roget, the pride of all my team, which still I
go a-seeking. These four days past, neither bite nor sup has crossed my
lips, for I dare not go near the town lest they put me in gaol.

[Illustration: AMBOISE]

Make good the loss I cannot, for I have nothing of my own save the
clothes I stand up in. And a weary mother have I, and all she owned was
a mattress, which they have taken from under her, so she lies on the
bare straw. And that’s what irks me most of all! For havings come and
go. To-day I’ve lost all. Some other day I might hope to win it back
again, and pay for my lost ox, all in good time. I’ld not waste a tear
on the business, were it not for my mother. And you weep for a stinking
dog! Bad scan to me if I think any the better of ye for that.’

“‘Here is speech of good comfort, fair brother!’ said Aucassin. ‘Good
luck to you. And how much might your ox be worth?’

“‘Sire, they ask twenty sols for the price of it, and I’ve not one
farthing to the good.’

“‘Now look,’ said Aucassin; ‘here is the money in my purse; take it and
pay the fine.’

“‘Sire, many thanks. And may you find the thing you go a-seeking----’”

Were I writing in French, I should make no apology for this long
quotation; in French the poem of Aucassin is little known beyond the
narrow circle of Romance philologists. _Habent sua fata libelli._ In
England the magic touch of a man of genius has rested for one moment on
this mediæval page, leaving it glorious and public. Of late, those
gentlemen of learned leisure, who once translated Horace, then Dante,
have divided their activity between the Rubaiyàt of Omar Khayyam and
this same quaint _chante-fable_ of Aucassin and Nicolette, of which
there are several excellent English versions. But let the reader
consider the passage we have roughly and literally rendered from
Suchier’s edition, not as a literary exercise, but as a plain statement
of fact: a portrait of the French peasant, grotesquely faithful, and
even to-day a speaking likeness. Observe the shock of black curling
hair, the large nose, the broad jowl, the lips thick and ruddy, the
stalwart frame; just such may be seen at any fair in Southern or Central
France. Doubtless the anonymous author did not draw from life; he lived
in an age of convention, and simply took the canon of ugliness; since,
to him and his contemporaries, beauty resided only in a tender fairness,
slenderness to the point of tenuity, long narrow eyes, slim lips, a neat
straight nose, and a delicate pallor flushed with pink. But this is
merely removing the picture from reality by one degree. To the
_cantor’s_ world of the Middle Ages, the common was unclean, the vulgar
ugly, the popular type a thing of repulsion. They confused the idea of
comeliness and the idea of race. They admired only the rare. And this
peasant had perforce to be all that our Prince Charming so obviously was
not--swarthy, squat, red-lipped, hard-featured, rude, and a bit of a
poltroon--so that he becomes a living image of his fellows employed in
ploughing the glebe or hoeing the vineyard.

With what an airy touch our old poet has disengaged the different ideals
of prince and peasant. They are as true to-day as yesterday. Aucassin,
with his facile courtesy, his gentle grace, has none the less that fund
of quiet reserve which marks distinction: “Certainly, good brother, I
will tell you what I seek. I have lost my white greyhound, the loveliest
thing alive.” He speaks in a parable, and the secret of his heart
remains a fountain sealed: nothing is so vulgar as indiscretion. The
peasant, on the contrary, is a churl, with all the quick suspicion of a
churl. “Mind your own business,” is his first word of greeting. And yet
how swiftly he slides into confidence and a free-and-easy _camaraderie_!
He has none of Aucassin’s delicate dissembling. Each of these men is
heart-broken for the sufferings of a woman dependent upon him. But
Aucassin goes dreaming of his lost betrothed rapt in an ideal of
disinterestedness, poetry, and chivalry; while the hind knows what it
costs to bring up a child, and has often seen his mother go hungry in
order to give him a second bowl of pottage, so that he cherishes the
broken old woman who, for his sake, lies on the bare straw. “A weary
mother had I” (_une lasse mère avoie_). Even to-day, in a French
village, such an old, capable, worn-out mother is often the dearest
romance of the peasant’s life.

The “vallet” of _Aucassin_ was probably the ploughman of some _métayer_
or peasant farmer on the system of half profits, equally divided between
landlord and tenant. In such a case, the lost ox being part of the
_cheptel_, or capital, of the farm, and so belonging to the landlord,
would have to be immediately replaced; it was certainly undervalued at
twenty sols--which, in purchasing power, represent about four pounds of
our money. If the peasant cannot pay his fine, he must e’en take to the
woods for an outlaw, like Robin Hood and his merry men. But probably he
would not stay there long. From forest to forest, as stealthily as a
weasel or a mole, he will put half the length of France between him and
his disgrace, hire himself out to some other farmer, lay by, glean, go
a-faggoting, and some day, when a good season has filled the barns,
byres, vats, and pockets of all the country-side, he will offer his old
master the price of his lost ox, and purchase of the king a free pardon,
duly paid for. The _Lettres de Rémission_ of Charles V. and Charles VI.
are full of such instances.

The poetic gamut of the Middle Ages was restricted. Few things were
deemed worthy of immortality in verse. The anger of Achilles and all
worthy knights; heroic deeds by flood and field: or else the coming of
spring; the revolt of young wives against their tyrant; love, especially
unlawful; or strange adventures and the subtleties of dire enchantment;
the dire revenge of the _jaloux_, the injured husband; or the foul end
of the traitor in the camp. These are fit subjects for song and story,
especially when they pass in a world above the common, a world where
Aucassin, Lord of Beaucaire, and Nicolette, Princess of Carthage,
belong, indeed, by right of birth, but where a mere swarthy peasant is
out of place. The mediæval poets thought, with Dr. Johnson, that “in the
case of a Countess, the imagination is more excited.” Once or twice a
countryman lounges across the stage of some _fabliau_, generally in
comic guise. In the “Lai de l’Oiselet,” for instance, we find a spirited
caricature of the rich peasant, who has purchased house and lands; he
inhabits, indeed, a gentleman’s ancient manor, but he has not been able
to buy the title-deeds of gentlehood, in mien, and speech, and thought.
The very birds in his boughs make mock of him, for the Middle Ages were
ever bitter on that sore subject of new men and old acres. Besides these
caricatures, we come across a few weaving songs for women, and certain
_caroles_, or glees and catches for dancing in a ring, such as still
enliven the songs and dances which have always been so pleasant a
feature in the rural life of France. But save for such rare waifs and
strays, we must let slip a century and a half ere, quitting Aucassin, we
find again a mention of the peasant in French literature. And this time
he stands before us redoubtable, insurgent, a murderer.


II

Be sure we see him at his worst, for his chronicler, Froissart, was
somewhat intolerant of the common sort, and ever at heart a contemptor
of the mob. He thought it “_grand’ pitié et dommage quand méchantes gens
sont au-dessus des vaillants hommes_” (translate: “when the lower
classes are set above their betters”), nor deemed that any provocation
could warrant open mutiny. Yet even Froissart owns that the peasants’
rising was not without some sort of an excuse, while the Monk of St.
Denis (a liberal soul) writes: “They could no longer support the ills
which oppressed them, and seeing that their lords, far from defending
them, used them worse than their enemies, the peasants thought they had
a right to rebel, taking their vengeance into their own hands.” Here, as
nearly always in the history of France, a tacit breach of contract is
the root of revolution. Let the nobles live on their lands, defend them
in wartime, cultivate them in time of peace, and the peasants will
submit to tax, and _corvée_, to insult and injury, and scarcely murmur.
But woe to the coward, and ’ware the absentee.

After the victory of the English at Poitiers, an outburst of patriotic
anger and revolt (such as in our own days produced the Commune) brought
about the Jacquerie. The peasant was born to plough and reap, he
ploughed and reaped; the noble was made to fight and conquer; if he
fought and could not conquer--worse still if he could not fight--he was
a tare in the wheat, useless, noxious, to be cast to the burning. While
the nobles of France were captive in the English camp, the defenceless
country-sides of the North were pillaged and ruined. And the farmers
and labourers rose in their wrath, declaring that their masters
“honnissoient et trahissoient le royaume de France;” and so, says
Froissart, they passed sentence of death upon them. A certain Guillaume
Caillet led the mob; his nickname, Jacques Bonhomme, has stuck to the
French peasant ever since. Soon he had a following of a hundred thousand
men as fierce, ignorant, untrained as a hundred thousand gorillas, and
great were their excesses. Froissart can scarce contain his horror, and
still more his wonder, at the exploits of “les vilains, noirs and
petits, et très mal armés.” It is true that, at the time, most of the
men of the ruling class, of an age to fight, were absent. The Jacques
made bonfires of more than sixty castles. Three hundred ladies and
damsels--as pitiable as our own grandmothers at Delhi--escaped their
loathly embraces, and fled across country into the town of Meaux, where
they took refuge in the market. How the King of Navarre and the Count of
Foix rode across France to their relief; killing the villainous Jacques
“in great heaps, like beasts;” hunting them down, in a battue; driving
them into the Marne to drown; burning wholesale them and their villages;
and finally setting free unharmed the hapless, happy dames of
Meaux:--All this, is it not written in the chronicles of Froissart?


III

Despite this direful vengeance at the end of it, the Jacquerie had left
the French peasant conscious of his force. He had learned that nobles
are mortal men and can perish by fire, scythe-cut, or blow of club as
certainly as Jacques himself. Henceforth, let them respect his women and
his horned cattle! Jacques Bonhomme is, on the whole, a patient fellow.
Let the nobles do their duty, and keep their hands off his wife, his
daughter and his herds, and it is astounding what he will submit to:
exactions growing year by year, and _corvées_ such as a decadent fancy
may invent. He will beat the moats all night when my lady is lying in,
lest the croaking of the frogs disturb her delicate slumbers. Only let
my lord keep to his part of the bargain, and respect Jacques Bonhomme’s
womankind and those two white oxen in his stall, those--

    “Deux grands bœufs blancs marqués de roux,”

which (as Pierre Dupont, who knew him well, declares) the French
peasant, although no bad husband, still holds a little dearer than his
wife. The murders recorded in the _Lettres de Rémission_, as committed
by the labourer upon the persons of his betters, are nearly always
caused by rape or cattle raids. On such occasions these “misérables
personnes et gens de labeur” have ever shown themselves capable of a
desperate courage; on such occasions the “croquant” does not fear to
raise his club of greenwood, and dust the embroidered jacket of his
liege lord, even to risk of that noble life and damage of those
seigneurial limbs, as it happened to François Rabault, Seigneur d’Ivay.
Sometimes, more legally, he appeals to the justice of my Lord Governor
of the province, drawing down condign punishment on the head of the
noble offender; indeed, the ravisher of at least one village beauty was
condemned to death by the Courts of Bordeaux. More than once, for such
reasons, some Lovelace of a country gentleman has had his manor sacked
or even burned; as may be seen in the vast manuscript treasure of the
_Lettres de Rémission_; in those printed by the care of M. Douët d’Arcq;
and in a new and charming volume: “Gentilhommes Campagnards de
l’Ancienne France,” by M. Pierre de Vaissière.

The village Hampden flourishes in France, where Jacques has always had a
keen sense of his rights. Ever since the Romans bent their stubborn
shoulders, still unwilling, beneath the yoke, this same independent race
of hardy crofters has never ceased to dream--if not of liberty, in the
magnificent, imaginative, political sense--at least of freedom, of
standing up in one’s own plot of ground (though not in one’s province)
master of one’s fate. Centuries before the French Revolution, the first
dim forebodings of it were already taking shape in the slow brains of
these Croquants, Pastoreaux, Jacques, or Gauthiers. From the sands of
Sologne or the plains of Brie, but more especially from the Celtic
mountains of the Morvan and Auvergne, ever and anon they would rush in
eruption, like an old volcanic force still untamed, destroying the
superficial civilization of the aristocratic world. But more often the
volcano slept in peace. The peasant asked for little here below.

On the whole, we may say that, from the end of the Hundred Years’ War
till the middle of the sixteenth century, the peasant lived on excellent
terms with his masters, fairly prosperous and passably content. The
nobles of those times dwelt in their villages, dealing “basse et moyenne
justice,” punishing petty offences, redressing minor wrongs, settling
the quarrels of neighbours, sending a good soup to the sick, relieving
the necessitous, cultivating their own lands, not themselves too far
removed from the humble interests of the soil, and yet, none the less,
examples of a broader life, an ampler culture to the poor at their
gates. Even so in his manor dwelt Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne; and
if the ordinary country gentleman was more often as simple of spirit as
noble of birth, and sometimes even brutal and violent, he appears on
the whole to have been a fairly good landlord. Foreign visitors to
France marvel at his attachment to the soil. “The nobles in France,”
writes Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador in 1558,--“and this style of
‘noble’ comprises alike the gentry and the prince--do not dwell in the
large towns, but in their villages, where their castles stand.”

Living on their lands and reaping the profit of them, the French gentry
and their peasants under them became notable husbandmen. The end of the
fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries saw endless forests reclaimed,
marshes drained, and fields of wheat flourishing in place of the scrub
oak and the rush. Claude de Seyssel estimates the land under
cultivation, during the reign of Louis XII., at one-third of the
kingdom; and, in 1565, J. Bodin writes: “Depuis cent ans on a défrichi
un infini de forêts et de landes.” Peace reigned abroad, activity at
home, masters and men were animated by the same interests; if one of our
country gentlemen goes to war or to Court, be sure his letters will be
full, not of details of the king’s glory, but rather of instructions to
those at home that they forget not to gather the stones from the fields,
hoe the barley, turn the hay, weed the kitchen garden, prune the trees,
shear the sheep, and steep the hemp. And, as soon as possible, he rides
home again, his head already full of the price he must pay his
harvesters, of the coming cattle-fair, the building of the new barn by
the five-acre field, and the salting of the pork he is wont to despatch
for sale to a certain worthy Thomas Quatorze, in Paris. As yet the
landed gentry and the peasants have the same interests and
preoccupations.

The blot on the landscape is the excess of feudal rights. Even by the
first years of the sixteenth century these had become excessive, and
astounded the wisest traveller of that age. What does Erasmus say in his
_Adages_?

“Open your purse and pay, for you enter a port; pay, for you cross a
bridge; pay, for you need the ferry-boat. And what is the reason of all
these taxes which pare down the poor man’s crust? There’s a tax for the
carrying of the harvest, a tax when the corn goes to the mill, a tax on
the baking of bread. Give half your vintage to my Lord for the right of
putting the other half in cask. There’s no selling a colt or an ass
without settling the rights of the fisc.” Erasmus, not given to mincing
matters, calls the great nobles a set of disgraceful harpies, _harpiis
istis scelaratissimis_.” And yet, despite the truth and blackness of
this picture, owing to the force of a similar life and habits, owing
also to a kindly social instinct in the race, the French country
gentleman--and even the great noble--was a prosperous, honourable, and
useful member of society, so long as he lived on his lands and served
the State, within the boundaries of his own parish, as captain of
militia and justice of the peace. He began to degenerate when the king,
jealous of the authority of the landed gentry, invented a regular army,
which soon usurped the place of the feudal volunteers; and established a
regular magistrature, in which the country squire had neither part nor
lot. Unaccustomed to his enforced idleness, he found provincial life
intolerably dull, and soon began to sell a farm or two, and set out for
Versailles. Quite early in the seventeenth century the rural exodus has
begun, and the country cousins come trooping to Fontainebleau and
Versailles from their deserted villages. The court, the army attract
these noble sons of the soil as a candle the moth. The highly
centralized government of the Kings Louis--XIII., XIV., XV., and XVI.,
of the name--draws to the court all the resources of France, and
disposes at Versailles of all advancement and favour. St. Simon goes so
far as to accuse the king of augmenting the splendour of his court with
a view to sapping the independence of his nobles: “La cour devient un
manège de la politique du despotisme--le roi vent épuiser tout le monde
et le réduire peu à peu a dépendre entièrement de ses bienfaits.” So the
old manors were forgotten; an agent took the rent that paid for the
laced coats at court; the fields became marsh and forest again, and my
lord thought no longer of shearing his sheep and hoeing his corn, but of
serving his majesty in the army, or in the palace of Versailles. For
here also--

    “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

And no man in the kingdom was so unenviable as that honest country
gentleman, faithful to his father’s fields, of whom, on mention of his
name, the king would say, with cold disapproval: “Je ne le vois jamais.”
In this connection, it is instructive to read the memoirs of that
martinet of courtiers, St. Simon, and the letters of Madame de Sévigné
(that admirable country squire), who wrote to her daughter: “J’aime
mieux parfois lire un compte de fermier que les Contes de La Fontaine.”

Absolute monarchy was the ruin of the French peasant; or at least it was
his _moral_ ruin; for the absence of his lord, while depriving him of
his one glimpse into a world a little larger than his own, was sometimes
incidentally the occasion of enlarging Jacques Bonhomme’s narrow field.
My lord spent a terrible deal at Versailles. Dress, play, an outfit for
the wars, soon ran away with the income of parental inheritance. Often
enough the agent had to sell (and pretty much for what it would fetch) a
strip of meadow here, a spinney there. Now, while my lord was always
spending, the peasant, on the other hand, was in a peculiarly favourable
position for saving. Money scarcely ever left his horny grasp. He paid
his rent chiefly in kind, stock, _corvées_, and quit-rents of one sort
or another; but he sold his cattle and crops for coin, at the fair, and
put the treasured sols and livres in some safe place behind the rafter
or beneath the hearthstone. The _corvée_ was the making of the peasant:
pure profit, as he thought, since he only paid in sweat and sinew,
instead of lessening his hoard of secret silver. He mowed his lord’s
meadows, mended his roads, carried his grist, and wood, and fodder, lent
his cart and horse for transport, worked on the estate so many days a
month with nary a penny of wage, was harassed, hampered, overworked, if
you like; but the _corvée_ was a form of rent, and the form his soul
preferred. In exchange he had his cot and his fields, the right to
fatten his porkers in the oakwood, the right to pasture his cow on the
grassy edges of the lane, the right of gleaning his master’s corn in the
fields, his faggots in the forest, and also the dried beech-leaves which
stuffed his bed, and foddered his kine. Every _corvée_ brought him in
some specific advantage; so that, while his masters were running a
break-neck race to ruin at Court, Jacques Bonhomme was buying, out of
their parental acres, here a strip of rye and there a cabbage-patch:
inconsiderable snippets of land scattered here and there, up and down
the country-side, presenting no importance to the eye, but representing
a small estate increasing with every generation. Jacques’ grandson may
be Georges Dandin, even as the great-grandsire of my Lord, perhaps, may
have been the wealthy boor of the “Lai de l’Oiselet.” The seventeenth
century has little but mockery for the peasant-parvenu who marries the
squire’s daughter, yet their son, ennobled by the mother’s gentlehood
(for there are many houses _où le ventre anoblit_), may carry arms and
be a gentleman. Even without this maternal warrant, there are short
cuts to rank; for the snob is of no generation or society, but
pan-endemic, so to speak, in all highly civilized centres. Does not
Madame de Sévigné paint for us a certain little Lord “who is all honey,
especially to dukes and peers”? Does not Molière show us his Arnolphe,
who ennobles himself with scant ado and calls himself M. de la Souche?

    “Et d’un vieux tronc pourri de votre métairie
    Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre,
    Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
    Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux
    Et de Monsieur de l’Isle en prit le nom pompeux.”


IV

While Molière shows us the peasant growing fat on the fruits of his
master’s recklessness and absence, La Bruyère, with his profound and
moral vision of things, reveals the other face of absenteeism: the
diminished standard of virtue, decency, comfort, in the deserted
villages; the peasants sinking almost to the condition of savages,
spending nothing on themselves, and living only in one thought--how to
save enough to buy another rood of land. Meanwhile the soil itself, ill
cultivated, and prized by its absent owners merely as a game-preserve or
an investment, was soon overgrown with rush and bramble, and returned to
marsh or bog or forest, as of old. Few spectacles can have been more
harrowing to the social or moral eye than the French villages of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“There be certain fierce and shy wild animals, male and female, which
are scattered up and down our country-side. They are sunburned to a
sort of dull black, and walk bent towards the earth they delve; on
straightening themselves, they show, it is true, a human face, and, in
fact, they are men and women; they withdraw from the fields at nightfall
to their dens, where they sup on black bread, roots, and water. They
spare their fellow-men the labours of seed-time and harvest, and do not
deserve to lack the bread they sow.”

Could Swift have exhaled more generously his _sæva indignatio_? La
Bruyère, the deepest and tenderest mind of his generation, was therefore
a man of wrath. “Seizures for debt, and the bailiff’s man in the house,
the removal of furniture distrained, prisons, punishment, tortures, all
these things may be just and legal. But what I can never see without the
renewal of astonishment is the ferocity of man to man.”

But especially was La Bruyère a man of wrath when his mind’s eye fell on
rural France. The Italian and Spanish travellers of the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, who showed themselves so sensible to
the charm of country life in France, would no longer, could they have
revisited the scene, have found the least occasion for their praises.
The nobles of France no longer dwelt in their castles, among their
peasants, protecting the village at their gates; and our philosopher
wonders how lords, who might have lodged at home in a spacious palace,
with a suite for the summer planned to the north, and winter quarters
open to the sun, should count themselves happy to lie in a miserable
entresol at the Louvre, with scarce a closet for their wives to receive
their guests in. During the eternal round from Paris to Versailles,
Versailles to Marly, Marly to Fontainebleau, and thence to Paris, what
time has my lord to think of the hundred poor households whose labours
bring in his hundred thousand livres of revenue? An agent collects the
rents; and if the peasant be too poor to light a fire in winter, within
sight of my lord’s forests; if he go clad in a sheepskin or a ragged
sack; if he go without bread to eat--be sure it’s not the fault of my
lord Duke. He is the kindest soul alive. He has not the slightest wish
to oppress his tenants. He has only forgotten them! “And is not all this
a presage for the future?” breaks off La Bruyère.

Again and again he reiterates his warning, finding something unnatural
and shocking in the complete divorce between town and country. Scarce a
man at court could tell a flax plant from hemp, or wheat from
barley--don’t speak to them of fallow fields or aftermath, of laying
down a vine or of marking a young tree fit for the axe: “provignage” and
“baliveau” are no longer French, it seems. If, once in a way, on the
occasion of a hunting party or a Royal progress, my lord duke proceeds
to the home of his ancestors, and decides to open his purse-strings and
spend money on the place, be sure he has some fine scheme for an avenue
right through the heart of the forest, or a terrace raised on arcades
with an orangery, or a fountain with a piece of artificial water which
he takes the village brooks to feed. But reclaim a marsh, clear a wood,
rebuild the tenants’ cottages? Never! These be pursuits for rustics.
Nay, cries La Bruyère, and we hear the tears in his prophetic voice:
“Rendre un cœur content, combler une âme de joie, prévenir d’extrêmes
besoins ou y remédier?--la curiosité des grands ne s’étend pas jusque
là!”

Immured in the circle of their own delights and interests, the nobles of
France had lost touch with the peasants. The country, to please them,
must be all in moor and forest, good for game; and the fertile plains of
Brie are less to their fancy than the wastes of Champagne. They would
turn the crofters from a sheeprun to make room for the deer. The
landlord’s house stands untenanted, though now and then he may use a
shooting-box. And if in his old age (after twenty, thirty, forty years
of hard service) the old soldier, the disgraced or disillusioned
courtier, should haply retire to his paternal acres, too often he finds
them weed-grown and desolate, the manor half in ruins, the turret and
pigeon-cote tumbling about his ears. He no longer knows by sight the
peasants on the estate; he has lost his taste for the land; and the
first wet season sends him packing, if he can. Meanwhile, in his
abandoned village, Jacques Bonhomme--whose landlord is no longer the
friend, protector, justice of the peace, but just a tom-fool in a laced
coat, who cannot tell a blade of wheat when he sees it--Jacques Bonhomme
continues to starve, to sweat, to diddle my lord’s agent, to curb his
back to the blow and his heart to the sod, to suffer, labour, spare,
till his stocking is full of hard-earned pence and pounds; till his mind
is a wilderness of savage and sordid squalor, without an idea, an ideal,
nay, a hope or a feeling, beyond the land. What wonder if the son of the
rich peasant be so often the vulgar parvenu we meet in Molière and
Marivaux? Rather let us marvel that sometimes he turns out a capable
man, soldier or statesman, who quits the glebe to save his country. But
a Colbert, for instance, or even a Georges Dandin, is no longer a French
peasant. Let us return to our sheep and their shepherds.


V

A hundred years later than La Bruyère, in 1787, another generous mind,
another traveller of liberal views, less profound than the French
philosopher, yet accurate, alert, and well-informed: brief, an English
country gentleman--a

[Illustration: CHENONCEAUX]

certain Mr. Arthur Young, of Bradfield Hall, Suffolk--was to visit the
provinces of France and to give us his impressions of the French
peasant. Arthur Young, like his forerunner, is a man of feeling. The
social state of the poor preoccupies him no less than the condition of
French agriculture, which was the original cause of his journey. Great
is his wrath against the noble absentees who neglect the lands which
their extravagance exhausts. For still Versailles, like some deep-rooted
ulcer, absorbs and corrupts the forces of France; and the noble
continues to spend the revenues of a farm on the lace and ribbons of a
coat, or to turn out a country-side of crofters in order to enlarge a
deer forest. Of late a new fashion had indeed revived the prestige of
the long-neglected country-house. Two writers--Rousseau and the elder
Mirabeau--had expressed perhaps, rather than directed, a movement of
reaction; people began to think again of the life of the fields, of
country pleasures, and country freedom. So Arthur Young shows us a
France where many of the great nobles were agriculturists; the mode,
says he, obliges the great of the earth to spend a summer month or two
in rusticating at their rural seats; the Queen has a dairy-farm at
Trianon; milkmaids and shepherds are the rage. The Duke of
Larochefoucauld-Liancourt shares Young’s enthusiasm for turnips, and His
Grace’s sister-in-law is no less passionate for luzern, of which, says
Young, she grew more than any other person in Europe: “What was my
surprise at finding this young Viscountess a great farmer!” No subject
in France was then more modish than the rotation of crops. And no doubt
even this superficial contact between the noble and Nature, the peasant
and his landlord, was better than an absolute divorce; only it came too
late. Both the noble and the peasant had deteriorated during the two
centuries that they have lived apart. On the one hand, the careless
selfishness of the cavalier; on the other, a rancorous squalor, a sordid
if sometimes a servile disrespect. The “foppery and nonsense” of the
country gentry struck Arthur Young no less painfully than the folly of
those “glittering beings of Versailles,” to whose fine coats the
well-being and decency of rural France were sacrificed. There were, no
doubt, in the number of them a fair percentage of good landlords, just
and coarse, proud and poor, such as M. Pierre de Vaissière shows us in
his recent volume, “Les Gentilhommes Campagnards,” and a few great
souls, like Liancourt. But an honourable and mediocre minority could not
suffice to heal the breach, widened by centuries of absence, which
divided peasant from landlord.

The new-fangled residence of the rich in their summer seats did, as a
rule, but little to ameliorate the condition of their poorer neighbours.
Too often, the peasants to them were as the pigs, for whom a sty is all
sufficient. Our English gentleman-farmer pauses at Combourg, the old
patrimonial hall of Chateaubriand, at that time a youth under twenty,
occupied with his earliest literary efforts. This is how the historic
manor of René’s father strikes the owner of Bradfield Hall:--

“One of the most brutal, filthy places that can be seen: mud houses, no
windows, and a broken pavement. Yet here is a château, and inhabited.
Who is this Mons. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung
for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?... Below this hideous
heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded
inclosures.” Nor is this an isolated instance. Everywhere in France he
tells the same tale--“the poor people seem poor indeed!”--“what a vice
is it, and even a crime that the gentry, instead of being the cherishers
and benefactors of their poor neighbours, should thus, by the
abomination of feudal rights, prove mere tyrants.”

Thus the landlord’s summer residence on this estate was too often merely
a convenience to himself and no advantage to the tenantry. He went home
to wear out his old clothes, to consume the produce of his lands, to
economize more or less sordidly for a forthcoming burst of splendour at
Versailles. The only country luxury he cared for was the game-preserve
or the deer-forest. In many districts the peasants might not weed or hoe
their crops lest they disturb the young partridges; nor manure their
lands near the forest, lest the flavour of the game be impaired; nor mow
their hay before a certain date, however favourable the season; nor
plough the stubble after harvest, lest they ruin the shelter of the
young birds. Should the wild boar or the deer quit their native glades,
and take to the fields, destroying the farmer’s crops, he might not
shoot them or do them any injury. Such things, in any country, demand a
revolution. Says Arthur Young: “Great lords love too much an environ of
forest, boars, and huntsmen, instead of marking their residence by the
accompaniment of neat and well-cultivated farms, clean cottages, and
happy peasants.” Had the nobles planted turnips on the waste heaths and
moors, there might (he thought) have been no Reign of Terror.

The feudal privileges of the French nobles seemed as shocking and
unnatural to our free-born English squire as, early in the sixteenth
century, they had appeared to Erasmus. The privileged classes were
exempt from all taxation, of which the burden fell chiefly on the
humbler sort. The _corvées_ had originally been a convenient exchange of
service between master and man--so much toil for so much land or so much
protection, or so many specified perquisites and privileges; but they
had degenerated into a tyrannous abuse, enforced with endless fines and
quit-rents. The poor farmer or cotter had to manage countless payments
of so many fowls, so much butter, so much corn, so much transport, due
to the landlord; mend the manorial roads and weirs; pay death-duties and
marriage-dues; submit to the servitude of employing only the manorial
mill, the manorial winepress, the manorial baking-oven. Moreover, in
addition to all this (which was, in fact, his rent paid in kind and
labour), the peasant of the eighteenth century was abusively charged a
fixed and heavy rent in coin. In this way he paid twice over for his
miserable cabin and few acres of land; while, as time went on, fresh
_corvées_--_corvées_ by custom, _corvées_ by usage of the fief,
_corvées_ by seigneurial decree, and servitudes of every sort,
complicated his intolerable condition. No wonder that Jacques Bonhomme
began to murmur and, in his dim slow way, to meditate the possibility of
a change.

On the 12th of July, 1787, our kind apostle of turnips was walking up a
long hill near Chalons in order to relieve his tired beast, and, so
walking, was joined by a woman of the people, with whom he entered into
conversation. She began, as is the manner of her sort, to complain of
hard times, and said that France was indeed a most distressful country.
This woman at no great distance might have been taken for sixty or
seventy, so bent was her figure, her face so furrowed and roughened by
labour in the fields. “Demanding her reasons, she said that her husband
had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse; yet they had
a _franchar_ of wheat (about 42 lbs.) and three chickens to pay as a
quit-rent to one seigneur, and four _franchars_ of oats, one chicken and
a sol to pay to another, besides very heavy _tailles_ and other taxes.
She had seven children, and the cow’s milk helped to make the soup.

“‘But why, instead of a horse, do you not keep another cow?’

“‘Oh, her husband could not carry his produce so well without a horse,
and asses are little used in the country. It was said at present’, she
went on, ‘that something was to be done by some great folks for the
poor, but she did not know how or who. But God send us better, _car les
tailles et les droits nous écrasent_.’”

And these words recall to our minds another picture--that of the family
of humble peasants whose furniture is seized, who are turned out of
house and home by the king’s officers, in Laclos’ _Liaisons Dangereuses_
“par ce qu’elle ne pouvoit payer la taille.” Valmont, that worse Don
Juan, in order to seduce the chaste and lovely Présidente de Tourvel,
essays the talisman of virtue. By stealth, to all appearance (and yet
well aware that he is followed) he hurries to the rescue, reaching the
woodland village at the very moment when the peasants, in silent yet
indignant groups, witness their neighbour’s eviction.

“Je fais venir le Collecteur; et cédant à ma généreuse compassion, je
paye noblement cinquante-six livres (about £2 4_s._) pour lesquelles on
réduisit cinq personnes à la paille et au désespoir. Quelles larmes de
reconnaissance coulaient des yeux du vieux chef de cette famille et
embellissaient cette figure de Patriarche qu’un moment auparavant
l’empreinte farouche du désespoir rendait vraiment hideuse!... J’ai
senti en moimême un mouvement involontaire mais délicieux; et j’ai été
étonné du plaisir qu’on éprouve en faisant le bien.”

Here, good reader, is a companion picture to Aucassin and his driver of
a team.

Yet, even before ’89, the French peasant was, most often, a merry lout.
For, by nature, the blood of a Frenchman runs an alert and mirthful
course, so that he takes advantage of the least excuse for cheerfulness.
The Duke of Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, that virtuous Revolutionary, was
exiled from his country by the Reign of Terror because, although a
Revolutionary, he was a Duke; standing among the fields of free America
in the harvest month of 1793, he marvelled at the mournfulness of that
land of Liberty. These grim, gaunt Yankee farmers, counting their stooks
of corn in silence, filled the good Gaul with something like dismay:

“Quelle différence du travail grave de ce peuple et de l’activité gaie,
riante, chantante, des moissoneurs de mon pays. Tout le monde y était
content!... Les rires, quoique perpétuels, ne dérangeaient pas le
travail! Et les foins! Et les vendanges! Quel peuple au monde sait plus
jouir du bonheur.”


VI

Young, with some slight exaggeration, rated one-third of the French
territory as belonging to the peasant on the eve of the great
Revolution. His editress, Miss Betham Edwards, has taken pains to verify
this assumption, and in consequence assures us that not more than
one-fourth of French land belonged to the labourer in 1787. Be sure that
this quarter of the kingdom was the richest and the most highly
cultivated. Here was no waste land, no marsh, no deer-forest, no
game-preserve. Not far from Montpellier our traveller was struck with
the luxuriant vegetation of a rocky district, a landslip composed for
the chief part of huge boulders, yet enclosed and planted with the most
industrious attention: “Every man has an olive, a mulberry, an almond or
a peach tree scattered among the rocks, so that the whole ground is
covered with the oddest mixture of these plants and bulging roots....
Such a knot of active husbandmen, who turn their rocks into scenes of
fertility, because, I suppose, _their own_, would do the same by the
wastes if animated by the same beneficent principle.” Again, one day,
near Pau, he came across a scene “so new to me in France that I could
scarce believe my eyes: a succession of many well-built, tight and
_comfortable_ farming cottages, built of stone and covered with tiles,
each having its little garden enclosed by clipt thorn-hedges, with
plenty of peach and other fruit trees, some fine oaks scattered in the
hedges, and young trees nursed up with so much care that nothing but the
fostering love of the owner could effect anything like it. An air of
neatness, warmth and comfort breathes over the whole. It is all in the
hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to
occasion a vicious and miserable population. Proprietorship is visible
in the new-built houses and stables, the little gardens, the hedges, the
courts before the doors, even in the crops for poultry and the sties for
pigs.”

More than a hundred years after the Revolution we may pause and admire
the picture of these little farmsteads, as they flourished on the very
eve of that great upheaval, for we may consider the condition that they
represent as the happiest and most favourable for a rural district.

While Arthur Young was visiting and graphically describing the villages
of France, a man of considerable gifts, but always, in those days as in
these, an obscure individual, without renown or influence, was actually
living in one of these hamlets and constantly observing what went on
before his eyes. Even to-day, even among the students of his period, few
had heard the name of J. J. Gauthier, Curé de la Lande de Gul, when, in
February, 1903, a young historian, M. Pierre La Lande, attracted,
perhaps, by a similarity of name, exhumed his “Essai sur les Moeurs
Champêtres,” and printed a series of extracts from it in the _Revue
Bleue_. Published for the first time in 1787--the very year of Young’s
travels--the essay of the Curé de la Lande never attained the least
celebrity; the whirlwind of the Revolution caught it in its eddy, and
engulfed it along with drift of more importance. The tiny book,
preserved in one sole copy, existing in the Municipal Library of
Alençon, has to-day more value and more interest than it could have
possessed a hundred years ago. It is a series of rustic portraits in the
taste of the time, but obviously drawn from life, and betraying in their
lively unpractised touch the hand of the gifted amateur, who often has
that knack of catching a likeness which escapes your heaven-born
artist’s skill. We see the curé, himself a peasant--avaricious by nature
and breeding, yet charitable by grace--as he tramps the windy downs at
lambing-time to count his tithe, implacable in the assertion of his
rights, were it merely to half a calf’s head or a dozen starveling
pears, yet capable of sharing his food and dividing his last faggot with
the poorest of his flock. He looks not much wealthier himself, as he
strides across the scene, his stalwart limbs clad in an old patched
cassock, with his summer soutane flung across his shoulders, to serve as
a plaid, above a worn-out judge’s gown, picked up second-hand. From his
rusty wig to his vast and heavy high-low shoes, the curé is as
ill-accoutred as any peasant of his flock. And he is scarce possessed of
a more liberal education; he exorcises the thunderbolt with bell and
book, and sprinkles with holy water the unfertile field.

The curé’s parishioners are as superstitious as himself, but singularly
devoid of any real religious feeling. “The farmer is Christian enough in
outward things. The Holy Virgin has a niche over his door, and he
lights a taper there on feast days. He goes to church on high days and
holidays, and takes the communion at Easter. But he has no great opinion
of his parish priest, who rates him for beating his wife and forbids him
to place out his money at usury. And as for his morals ... he holds that
an act is bad or good according to what you risk by it, so that, if he
see no rope a-dangling as the consequence of the deed, he will suppose
it good, or at least indifferent.... Yon farmer in the market-place is
an honest man; he has not stolen the heifer he pushes before him. Only
he knows the beastie’s weak points, and will contrive to sell it you
before _you_ find them out. He has fed it up, curled and combed it,
chosen the propitious moment--be sure he will not acquaint you with
anything which may not meet the eye.... The vet is more thought of than
the doctor in our village. If a cow sickens, the farmer is anxious and
worried, tries this drug and that, sends for the horse-leech. But if old
Gaffer in the ingle droop and die, no one thinks of the doctor, nor
would any one of the household stay at home in harvest-time to wait on
his last hour.... There goes Goodman What’s-your-name! He is well-to-do,
and has added field to field. But hear him talk, you’ld suppose him
poorer than the very beggar in the church porch. He’s always grumbling.
Corn for sowing costs a mint of money; times are hard; _he_ never has
the luck to make a bargain at the Fair. Tell him he is comfortably off,
and you’ll offend him mortally. Call him a poor beggar as loud as you
please; he will like you all the better.”

Well, such is our poor fallen human nature! We could make such thumbnail
sketches in many a village anywhere to-day. What is peculiar to
pre-Revolutionary France is the respective attitudes of rich and poor.
The poorest of the rich are sustained by a proper pride, a sense of
their superiority, inconceivable to-day. The poor gentleman may live in
a tawdry manor, tumbling about his ears for lack of due repairs; in his
sordid seclusion, with no betters and few equals to enlarge his mind by
their society, one thing alone emerges from the squalid round of his
privations, and that is his ancestral pride.

“He holds the art of writing a mere mechanical exercise” (says our
curé), “and thinks he knows enough for a gentleman if he can sign his
name. He has a high idea of his birth and his prerogatives, and keeps
his painted coat of arms bright and fresh in the church porch. He treats
his peasant like a despot, dispenses justice, extorts his manorial
rights, exacts his thirteenth with rigour.... He is exempt from taxes.
But his old manor has neither turret nor dovecot (the outward signs of
_noblesse_), and he can boast neither of fiefs nor vassals. Still, he is
none the less a noble. Madame is never seen without her Fontange (a lace
head-dress), though she be busy with her housekeeping--nay, though we
find her in the stable, milking the cows. There is no woman-servant at
the manor-house; an odd-lad-about cooks and gardens, serves at table and
rubs down the horse. Monsieur, in constant alarm lest he be taken for a
commoner, goes, on Sunday mornings, not indeed to church, where he has
no pew (another country gentleman having, probably, a vested right to
that public preference known as _les Honneurs de l’Eglise_), but to the
churchyard, where he sits during service, his hound and his gun beside
him, careful that some pale beam of his superior rank may set off his
condition in every circumstance.”

The pride and the poverty of the good old country gentleman struck many
a disinterested observer. The French _Revue_ (the late _Revue des
Revues_) published, on May 15th, 1903, some most interesting letters,
written from the little town of Fezensagnet between 1774 and 1776 by a
Protestant lady, born in Germany, but French by race, and living in
Gascony on the eve of the Revolution. The squalor, the sordid ways, the
crass ignorance of the smaller rural gentry appalled this Madame
Leclerc, though she has nothing but praise for the peasants and for the
nobles of high rank. But these needy gentry, the shabby-genteel--the
“half-sirs,” as they say in Ireland--are almost the only nobles to be
met with in rural districts, “et je ne crois pas qu’il y ait rien
d’aussi manant, d’aussi ignorant et d’aussi brute.” She finds the
village peasants better dressed and better mannered as a class, with
among them, here and there, individuals really superior: “il ne leur
manquerait que de la pondre pour avoir l’air d’élégants,” barefoot
though they be. The castle is shut up from time immemorial; its great
solid walls and huge keep stand empty, save for the agent’s residence.
My lord Duke, meanwhile, is at Versailles, and the French peasant never
gives a thought to his absent Grace. Listen to the Curé of La Lande:--

“Came ye straight in descent from Bernard the Dane, or the faithful
Osmond; though your ancestors were liege men of Merowig or Charlemagne,
yet hope not, poor gentleman! that Hodge shall have any reverence for
your rank and title. Wear your orders, gird on your sword, and go to the
cattle fair; the best of you will meet with less respect than John the
Burgess, with his good cloak and leather wallet stuffed with coin. I
know not why, but this brutish herd has lost all confidence in the word
of a man of rank, of old so much esteemed.” This stubborn and stalwart
disrespect, this frank irreverence of the French peasant, struck more
than one acute observer, on the eve of ’89. Mirabeau, in his _L’Ami des
Hommes_ has remarked the same trait, but not without supplying an
explanation: “In my own lifetime” (he writes) “I have seen a great
change in the relations of landlord and peasant. Our lords, always
absent at court, are no longer of any use or service to their tenantry,
and it is natural that, forgetting, they should also be forgot.”


VII

Then came the Revolution, an event so great that I cannot hope to give
the faintest, smallest image of it in this tiny frame. A world perished,
and rose anew from its ashes, purified of many abuses, deprived of some
valuable relics. But the substance of that world, which is French
society, reappeared, after seeming annihilation, not greatly changed,
nor absolutely renovated.

Of this there are a cloud of witnesses. Among them let us choose
Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, whom we left an exile in America. Restored to
his native country in 1800, after some ten years’ absence, he notes the
progress of agricultural reform. Large estates have given place to very
small ones, which, as a rule, produce a yield at least one-fourth more
abundant than the old. Everywhere cultivation is more intelligent, for
the owner puts his mind into his tillage. The homes of the peasants are
improved, more spacious and cleaner; the labourers themselves are
certainly less ignorant than their fathers.

“Ils sont plus qu’eux en état de réfléchir, de combiner, un peu moins
éloignés de toute innovation.”

So writes, disinterestedly, the dispossessed Duke, as he sets the plough
in the stately lawns and avenues planted by Le Nôtre, content to farm a
corner of his old estate, camped in the servant’s quarters of his
ruined palace. We could not have a more able or a more conscientious
authority. But these were but the beginnings of a general reform.

In 1815 another philosophic English traveller passing through
France--one Thomas Hodgskin--was struck by the sordid misery of the
French peasant. And, in fact, the Revolution is not over even yet.

The _corvée_ is supposed to be extinct, but the smaller country roads
are still mended by “prestation,” that is to say, by the personal labour
of the farmer or his men, and he must find both the material and the
means of transport. The feudal _banalités_ were solemnly declared
defunct in 1789--that is to say, the peasant no longer could be forced
to grind his corn, or to press his wine, olives, and walnuts, in the
seigneurial mills. Yet, to take one contemporary instance among many:
the farmers of the Isle of Bouin in Vendée are compelled by contract to
bring their sheaves to the thrashing machines of their landlord; the
only difference being that this landlord is no longer a noble, but a
great agricultural syndicate--the Société des Polders. In the same
commune, the same society exacts the feudal rights of terrage--that is
to say, it requires a sum of money, a yearly premium, paid in addition
to the annual rent in kind--and it also levies a tax on the winepress,
just as if the Revolution had never taken place. “C’est l’Ancien Régime
à peine modifié,” writes M. Léon Dubreuil.[2]

At Olmet, our village in the Cantal, the farmers pay a quit-rent, or
_redevance_, to their landlords in addition to the rent: so many brace
of poultry, so many cheeses, so many pounds of butter; a special kind of
cheese, the most delicate if the smallest, weighing from two to twenty
kilos, is made for this purpose, and still bears its ancient name, the
_fromage de maître_. To-day, even as six score years ago, the farmers of
the Bourbonnais do all their landlord’s carrying--wood from the forest,
corn to and from the mill, stones from the quarry, according to the
mediæval _corvée de transport_; and here, too, the quit-rent flourishes
undiminished: butter, fowls, turkeys, are exacted in tribute from the
tenant. It may happen that he sell his milk straight from the cow to a
dealer in Paris or to an hotel at Vichy; in this case, he must buy milk
from his neighbours in order to churn the seigneurial butter, as nearly
always he buys his turkeys, the birds being very delicate and difficult
to rear. Here, also, reigns the right of terrage under the name of
_impôt colonique_. And, in this part of the country, the game laws seem
scarcely altered by the Revolution; the crops being often destroyed by
the abundance of wild creatures, without any indemnity offered to the
farmer.

But everywhere in rural France an eye educated in feudal custom sees the
survival of the Elder Order. Readers of Zola’s novel, _La Terre_
(scarcely, one would think, a treatise of seigneurial rights), will
remember the telling scene when the old peasant, no longer able to
cultivate his lands, cedes them to his children in return for a yearly
rent of four and twenty pounds. “You’ll pay me the rent,” says he, “and
then, besides, there’s the quit-rent: a barrel of wine _per annum_, a
hundred faggots, and every week ten litres of milk, a dozen eggs and
three cream cheeses.”

The children protest, but the village notary declares: “The wine, the
faggots, the cheese and the eggs are objects of use and custom. People
would point at you in the street if you did not pay the _redevances en
nature_.”

Of all these survivals from the mediæval times the most frequent is the
habit of letting farms _en métayage_, that is to say, paying the rent in
kind, on the system of half profits. It is, I imagine, a very ancient
and natural custom; for I read in the Talmud: “Four shares to the
labourer, and four shares to the owner of the soil;” yet, for some
mysterious reason, this arrangement, which seems on the face of it so
fair and equitable, is as disastrous to the farmer, in hiring a farm, as
it is to the author in publishing a book. In all the South of
France,--in the Landes, Dordogne, Gironde, especially--a great part of
the country still is cultivated in this sort of partnership. At the
close of the eighteenth century, two-thirds of the soil of
France--according to some authorities as much as five-sixths--were
occupied in this fashion, for the labourers were, as a rule, too poor to
rent their holdings in solid coin. Even to-day you may roughly gauge the
prosperity of a district in this fashion: if the agricultural classes
are prosperous, then they are farmers or peasant owners; if they are
sunk in poverty, be sure they are _métayers_. Too often in this case the
landlord is an absentee, and consequently careless of improvements; too
often the _colons_ are penniless and ill nourished, and so ignorant that
the soil, perforce, is poorly tilled, the barns and stables ill
repaired, the stock badly managed. For what is no one’s property is no
one’s pride. The landlord gives the land, and the capital, or
_cheptel_--which comprises the stock and barns, etc.; an inventory of
these is taken when a tenant enters into possession, and he is compelled
to keep them in repair. On his side, the peasant gives his work. And the
harvest is divided, either in kind--grain, wine, olives, cattle, at the
time of their maturity--or more often in money, when the peasant brings
to his landlord half of the profits after the fair or market at which he
has sold the produce. The arrangement is simple, and this is the chief
argument in its favour and the only reason why it endures.... A farm
hand and a dairymaid fall in love and marry; they have no capital, but
they can work, and in a dozen years they hope that their children will
aid their efforts; for a child of eight or ten can be of much use on a
small farm. They hire an acre or two of land, which they undertake to
cultivate _à moitié fruits_, hoping to economize enough to purchase
little by little a freehold of their own. A man and his wife, both
working in the fields, can cultivate about three acres of cornland; if
they have the wherewithal to buy a cow they will probably add three or
four acres of pasture, paying the rent in produce. With such poor
farming as they can bestow,--scant labour, less knowledge, little
manure,--their holding of six or seven acres may bring them in some
twenty pounds a year. How can they save on such an income? For they must
renew stock and tools, tide over a bad season, bring up their children,
tend their sick, bury their dead. They will just scrape along, deeming
themselves fortunate indeed if they lay by a small provision for their
extreme old age. “In the isle of Bouin,” writes M. Dubreuil, “such is
the fertility of the soil that landlords and farmers alike are certain
of prosperity. Only the _métayer_ languishes in poverty.”

But _métayage_ is slowly and steadily dying out. It lingers in the west
and south; it languishes in the centre. In France to-day, on an average,
if you take a hundred farms, you may count some seventy landlords
managing their own estates, a score of farmers, and only ten _métayers_.
By the middle of this century it is probable that rural France will be
divided between the large farmer and the small peasant owner.

[Illustration: AZAY-LE-RIDEAU]


VIII

When the Bourbons returned to France after Waterloo they had, as the
phrase runs, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The nobles took
possession of the remains of their estates, and thought to restore the
habits and privileges of their forefathers, or at least to adapt to
modern manners the principles of the _ancien régime_. But they found in
the peasant a sleepless suspicion, a silent energy and cunning, which
thwarted all their efforts, and which, if they persisted, would often
turn to violence, maintaining the rights of the people by the horrors of
a _Jacquerie_. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed more
than one peasants’ revolt. And if some plot of the reactionaries should
one day place again upon the throne of France a son of the House of
Orleans, or a Bonaparte Pretender, be sure the _croquants_ of the South,
the _Jacques_ of the North, would defend their liberties again as
violently to-morrow.

Two fine novels, each a masterpiece, treat, from different points of
view, this resistance of the peasant class, and the consequent
disintegration of the great feudal domains. _Jacquou le Croquant_, by an
almost unknown novelist, Eugène Le Roy, is the work of a man over sixty,
a native of Périgord, working on the traditions of his native place and
the tales of his grandfathers. Published in the last years of the
nineteenth century, it gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of rural
Southern France, as the author may have seen it in his earliest
childhood, before 1848. The book is written from the peasants’ point of
view, and full of enthusiastic Republican sentiment. Balzac’s _Les
Paysans_ hold a brief for the other side. One of Napoleon’s generals,
the Comte de Montcornet, purchases in 1815 a feudal estate on the
borders of Burgundy and the Morvan, and attempts to dwell there in the
due state and pomp of a great noble. He preserves game, vows vengeance
on poachers, protects his forest trees against the customary thefts of
the village, and, like the farmer in Wordsworth’s ballad, forbids the
old women to filch his faggots. And naturally he attracts the hatred and
suspicion of the peasant. Even his own agent sides with them against
him:--

“On veut vous forcer à vendre les Aigues. Sachez le: depuis Conches
jusqu’à la Ville-aux-Fayes, il n’est pas de paysan, de petit bourgeois,
de fermier, de cabaretier, qui n’ait son argent prêt pour le jour de la
curée.”

And the book ends with the triumph of the peasants and the parcelling of
the domain.

“Le pays n’était plus reconnaissable. Les bois mystérieux, les avenues
du parc, tout avait été défriché; la campagne ressemblait à la carte
d’échantillons d’un tailleur. Le paysan avait pris possession de la
terre en vainqueur et en conquérant. Elle était déjà divisée en plus de
mille lots et la population avait triplé entre Conches et Blangy.”

“Such is progress!” exclaims Emile Blondet, on an impulse of passionate
irony.

It is not picturesque certainly. And yet I remember a magnificent
picture of Sisley’s, representing just such a scene: small fields of
cabbage, and strips of rye, with one bouquet of poplars, basking in the
hot blue of a July noonday; and I know no finer landscape. Still, we
will admit with Emile Blondet that the mysterious forest glades were
infinitely lovelier. On one side, the utmost beauty and luxury reserved
for one man; on the other, a thousand fields, and a tripled population
living in tripled comfort. On which side is progress? On which side is
the price too dear to pay? That is the question.

An old French lady, who could recall the _ancien régime_, was wont to
say, when invited on a country visit: “No, I never go into the
provinces, since they have turned all the castles into farms.” She had a
prophetic eye. If the castles are to survive, they must be turned, more
or less, into farms, and their owners are becoming increasingly aware of
the fact.

Among the young gentlemen of France to-day there is a spirit of return
to the land. The Institut Agronomique instructs every year a bevy of
eager agriculturists, many of them belonging to the upper classes and
possessing landed estates of their own. These young men at five and
twenty are content to leave Paris and cultivate their acres in Normandy
or Languedoc. For myself, I think them wise. I would be, if I could, a
large farmer in a grass country, raising cattle and cheese (a crop less
chancy than corn), with plenty of children, all employed on the estate,
and a handsome wife, ever the first to rise and the last a-bed. Only the
life of an inspector of forests (no one has ever said all that the
Fables of La Fontaine owe to his employment as a Master of Waters and
Forests), or that of a university don (which latter existence, indeed,
much resembles my own), appear to me quite as pleasant as this. I know
one or two such farmers, and think them aware of their good fortune;
their neighbours eye them with envy, for such men are rare, since few of
the farming class possess hereditary acres, while few can afford to pay
the rent of a farm large enough to prosper--some £400 a year, for
instance, such as my neighbour, Farmer Langeac, pays for Olmet. It is
true that less land is needed to make a large income from cereal land or
vineyards; but, when we come to crops, if the rent is less, the expenses
of farming are much greater. The accounts of a farm in the isle of
Bouin are lying on my writing-table: I find that when his rent is paid
to the utmost farthing, the farmer must still reckon on spending some
four guineas an acre on such necessary processes as ploughing, sowing,
manuring, reaping, carrying, threshing, etc. Doubtless he may reap a
considerable profit, for the polders of Vendée are among the most
fertile fields of France. But only a man of substance can make so large
a stake, or may afford to renew it annually, to tide over a bad season,
keep his barns and machines in repair, and pay every week no paltry sum
in wages.


IX

More frequent and less ample is the lot of the peasant owner. No fields
are so prosperous as his, for no fields are tilled and dug with such
untiring devotion: spade-culture forms the staple of his art on the tiny
strips of land he is so proud to call his own. If, at the Revolution,
one-fourth of the soil was in the hands of the peasant, the proportion
to-day is certainly far greater; but the farms are smaller. In the
plains of Beauce, round Orleans, the peasant freeholds compose more than
three-fourths of the land, but the constant division of property by
equal inheritance has reduced every little farm by multiplying its
owners. The soil of this thickly populated district is so fertile that a
farm in Beauce, however tiny, may be supposed sufficient to support a
family; and in all rich and teeming countrysides, such as abound in
France, the excessive division of property, consequent on the
application of the Code Napoléon, has perhaps, up to the last twenty
years or so, done more good than harm. An acre of strawberry gardens at
Plougastel, of vegetables at Roscoff, of carnations at St. Remy de
Provence, is still a valuable piece of property, an exceeding artistry
and skill in cultivation compensating here the narrow limits of the
field. But in such a case the soil, the climate, the economic conditions
must all work for the farmer and conspire to crown his efforts. In
ordinary pasture, in light soils too poor for wheat, too chilly for the
vine, the peasant owner needs a larger glebe. Three acres and a cow are
not sufficient to maintain a family in constant well-being, unless the
circumstances be exceptionally favourable.

A small Socialist review, unusually well written and well informed,
_Pages Libres_, has recently published a series of rural studies, each
the monography of some small village in the provinces of France. In this
way, the hamlet of Voulangis-en-Brie, the fertile polders of the Isle of
Bouin, the villages of the Bourbonnais, so dear to the shades of Sterne
and Arthur Young, each and all become known to us almost as if we had
passed a summer there, for the schoolmaster, the large farmer, the local
poet and archæologist, have each had a hand in these humble but not
unimportant annals, and faithfully reproduce the various world before
their eyes.

Voulangis, a village in Brie, counts five hundred inhabitants, almost
all of them living on the land as farmers or agricultural labourers; the
commune comprises 958 hectares. For clearer comprehension, let us say
that it contains about 2700 English acres, of which a quarter are forest
and woodland. Subtract again some three-score acres occupied by roads
and lanes, and there remain 1750 acres devoted to practical agriculture.
The odd thing is that these 1750 acres are divided into no less than
10,600 lots of land!

Few indeed are the peasant owners who have their scanty acres, so to
speak, in a ring fence. No, with a strip here and a paddock there,
according to the hazard of heritage or purchase, their tiny possessions
are generally scattered over an area of several miles, thus greatly
enhancing the fatigue and expense of the farmer. More than mere chance
has presided at this minute dispersion. In all classes in France (and
not only since the Revolution, but by a very ancient law and custom
which dates back to the early Middle Ages), all the children inherit
equally. Even in noble families, the law of primogeniture, as we
understand it in England, has never obtained in France. In some rare
cases, a _majorat_ favoured the elder son; but as a rule he had nothing
beyond the very modest privilege which awarded him the family chateau
and the land immediately adjacent--the _vol du chapon_--the surroundings
“as far as a cock can flutter.” As for the farming class, and even the
class of country gentry, from time immemorial their lands have been
divided between all their progeny alike. Suppose that a peasant farmer
in Brie has so many acres of meadow, so many acres of forest, so many
acres of rich arable land and a good-sized vineyard; do you imagine that
on his death one son will take the pastures, another the cornland, and
so forth? Not a bit of it! Each child will claim a slice of each sort of
soil; and their children again will subdivide, till the strips of
meadow, rye, cabbage, or vine, are not fields at all, but merely
gardens. During the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century,
this morselling of the land suited well enough with the habits of
agriculture in rural France. The plots of land were tilled with the tiny
one-pronged _araire_, or Roman plough, just a tooth of wood tearing the
fertile earth; more often they were not tilled at all, but merely worked
with spade and hoe and pitchfork. Comparatively few peasant-farmers
owned a horse--some weather-beaten patient ass or cow carried in
panniers the wood from the forest, the manure from the stable, and the
corn to the mill. The women and the children fed the beasts--there were
but one or two of them in the byre--with handfuls of long grass, or
leaves of trees, plucked by the roadsides or in the forest glades, and
rolled to a bundle in their apron--even as Arthur Young remarked them of
old, and thought it a great sign of poverty. No need, however, to grow
much clover, or maize, or vetch or mangel-wurzel, for the cows in those
days. These cows, fed on weeds and grass, these tiny plots turned over
with spade and fork, afforded a considerable profit in times when the
small farmer, owing to the difficulty of transport, had not to reckon
with the products of the model-farm in a distant district. But railways
and machines have changed all that. The plough, and especially the
steam-plough, the thrashing-machine, the reaping-machine, are useless in
these garden-grounds, while the expense of manual labour increases every
year. A peasant-farmer now can only prosper where his holding is so
small that he can cultivate it _en famille_. At Voulangis, for instance,
a haymaker earns from 5 to 6 francs a day, a harvester from 7 to 10,
while the thrashers, even in winter time, average 4 francs of daily
wage. These prices are beyond the reach of small owners. And no less
beyond their reach are the machines which do the same work so rapidly
and cheaply. Yet they must sell their grain at the price set by the
large farms where corn is sown, reaped, thrashed, and carried by steam
labour. Moreover, the agricultural colleges and model-farms have raised
the public standard, and buyers are no longer satisfied with the produce
which contented an earlier generation; while transport is so easy that
an establishment of repute can diffuse its fruits, milk, or butter, far
and wide. At Olmet, for instance, I do not eat the butter of the farm,
ill-churned and made from clotted cream, but that supplied by the
Etablissement Agricole de Roche-sur-Loue, hundreds of miles away in
Franche Comté.

Save for the middleman, who absorbs too large a proportion of the
profits, the peasant owner might still make a living out of his orchard,
his vegetable garden, and his poultry-yard. Was it not Gladstone who
said to the English farmer: “If corn don’t pay, grow roses”? The
flowers, eggs, and fruit of France are a source of incalculable riches,
and are consumed not only at home, but sent in large quantities to
England. Unfortunately, the peasant is, as a rule, intellectually idle,
incapable of combination, suspicious, and impatient of new-fangled
ideas; he finds it simpler to sell his goods to the buyer from Paris as
his father did before him, than to combine with his neighbours in an
agricultural syndicate or trade’s union. Let him once see, however, that
his advantage lies in a peasants’ union, and he will soon find out the
way. The principle of solidarity has scarcely penetrated as yet into
rustic parts, but the need of resisting the low prices imposed by the
large farms using machine labour will certainly, in time, teach the
peasant many things. Let his mind once grasp the idea of a common
prosperity--where Tom’s good luck is not ensured by the misfortunes of
Dick and Harry, but where all are implicated in the well-being of
each--let him forget to suspect and learn to combine; from that day
forth his social future and well-being are assured. There are fewer
middlemen in France than there were fifty years ago, and, oddly enough,
this is a signal disadvantage to the peasant. Fifty years ago the crowd
of buyers who thronged the markets every week in Brie, in Beauce, in
all the fertile “home” provinces of the centre, bid one against the
other for cheese, butter, fruit, and fodder, so that competition brought
about a reasonable offer. To-day the railway has brought the farthest
province within reach of the Paris market; and, in the capital, that
market is directed, no longer by a number of shopkeepers, but by a few
trusts or commission-merchants who dispose of every opening. These few
middlemen, all acquainted, form a ring, and keep prices so low that the
small farmer often makes little, sometimes _no_ profit, on his bargain.

In the spring of 1902, the National schoolmaster of Voulangis-en-Brie, a
certain M. Vaillant, felt his heart burn within him to see the buyers
grow so rich and the peasants remain so poor. He resolved to found a
Farmers’ Association for the sale of fruit to the Paris market; he
started with seven or eight peasant proprietors and a buyer in Paris.
The first stone fruit of the season is the damson, grown almost entirely
for the English market. The syndicate made a “boom” on damsons and early
pears, which are hard fruit, easy to pack and little injured by travel;
owing to their inexperience in packing, they suffered some loss on their
greengages; yet at the end of the autumn, so great were their profits,
compared to those of their neighbours, that they determined to extend
the scope of their operations. In place of selling fruit to Paris and
London, they bought chemical manures from the factories and sold them to
the farmers of Brie. Here, again, they scored a success; out of the
profits they purchased an automatic seed-sifter. They hope in a few
years to possess a complete set of sowing, thrashing, reaping, and
carrying machines, steam-ploughs, and harrows, etc., which will remain
at the disposal of the peasant-farmers who form the association.


X

If a small farmer fails and cannot pay his rent, he takes what remains
of his stock and tools, when his debts are paid, and lets out these and
his powers of labour in _métayage_ to some landlord, who supplies the
land and the seed for his part of the bargain. In many places, indeed,
the landlord supplies stock and land and seed; but even so _métayage_
is, as a rule, chiefly profitable to the landlord, who may make as much
as from 12 to 15 per cent. on his capital. The tenant has generally no
capital behind him, and in bad seasons is compelled to borrow at
usurious interest, for no one will lend to a _métayer_, whose only stake
lies in his arms, stock, and tools. These latter wear out, are broken,
die, have to be renewed; if the cart-horse break his neck, or the cow
die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, his plight is scarce better
than that of the poor hind whom Aucassin encountered in the greenwood;
for, whichever party supply them, the landlord has a right to exact that
stock and tools shall always correspond with the inventory drawn up when
the tenant entered into possession. Thus, if a run of bad luck may soon
bring a farmer’s noble to ninepence and transform him into a _métayer_,
still more easy is the descent from the farmer _à mi-fruits_ to the
condition of farm servant or agricultural labourer. This is the lowest
rung on the rural ladder.

Fifty years ago no class of labour was worse paid than that of farm
servants. A small maid on a farm earned some four and twenty shillings a
year--thirty francs!--her board, her clothes, her washing, and lodging.
Nowadays, even children of twelve earn from four to six pounds a
year--in addition to their keep and certain perquisites--while, after
sixteen, their wages rise to three hundred francs (£12); and a
full-grown man, besides his keep and perquisites, earns, as a rule, some
twenty pounds a year.

Far rougher is the life of the labouring man, generally married, and
living in a small cottage which, in most places, costs him as much as
four pounds (100 francs) a year, though at Olmet, where I live, a very
decent one-roomed cottage, with a loft, cellar, and garden-plot, may be
rented for less than two pounds--forty-five francs. He has perhaps a
little garden of his own, with a pig, some fowls, and a goat which his
wife takes to feed in the lanes. Often he has no settled place, but
labours first with this farmer, and then with that, always overworked;
for an odd man is only called in at time of stress--hoeing time, or hay
time, or for the harvest, or the thrashing, or hedging-and-ditching. But
at least, in such seasons, in the sweat of his brow he earns his bread.
All summer long he can count on two to four francs a day, rising to five
or even seven at haymaking and harvest. It is not till November, when
the thrashing is mainly finished, that his real troubles begin. If there
be walls or roofs to repair, or a road to be set in order, here is a job
for him, in case the neighbouring farmers be well enough off to unloose
their purse-strings; or, again, he can serve in the quarries, when the
farmer has to supply the stones for mending the high roads by a
“prestation en nature:” a quarryman earns about fifteen pence a day,
which is better than nothing in winter, when you have a family to feed.
Often, too, the labourer turns wood-cutter or charcoal-burner at this
season, walking many miles morning and evening, to and from his work,
with a little osier basket hanging from his arm, which contains a
cannikin of vegetable-soup, with a hunch of bread and cheese, and
perhaps an onion.

In a little pamphlet, “En Bourbonnais,” published at the office of
_Pages Libres_, a local novelist of the Allier district, M. Guillaumin,
has added up the yearly receipts of a day labourer in good work, turn by
turn haymaker and harvester, thrasher, wood-cutter, and so on. His
annual earnings amount, in English coin, to twenty-one pounds twelve
shillings. During the summer months, though he be fed abundantly at the
farms where he works, his family must live, and he must feed himself all
winter time. A quartern loaf a day is the least we can allow the little
household, for bread will be the staple of their diet; bread and
cabbage-soup, potato-soup and bread, will vary the menu, with an
occasional stew of a little veal or bacon with carrots and onions. And
bread is dear in France. A policy of protection has raised the price of
the loaf, which is doubtless an excellent thing for the large farmer.
But, out of his twenty-one pounds a year, Jacques Bonhomme, the day
labourer, must pay no less than sixteen pounds for bread alone. No one
would profit more than the French peasant by a cheapening of the price
of corn. The cottage will cost another four pounds; and there remains
one pound twelve shillings for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel,
doctoring, and such indulgences as wine and tobacco. One pound twelve
shillings for all the luxuries of life! Supplemented, no doubt, by the
sale of the pig, and the kids, and the poultry; for the labourer of the
Allier is too poor, as a rule, to put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or
to enjoy a rasher of his own bacon by his own fireside. True, in many
parts of the country, the labourers, like the farm hands, pretend to
certain perquisites. Here, in Olmet, for instance, the principal
labourer on a farm receives seventeen pounds a year in money, with a
sack of potatoes, a sack of chestnuts, and a sack of meal. Yet I cannot
be as optimistic as Mrs. Tammas Glencairn in Mr. Barrie’s story. “My
man,” says she, “has a good wage, and he’s weel worthy o’t. He gets
three and twenty pound in the year, half a score o’ yowes, a coo’s
grass, a bow o’ meal, a bow o’ pitatas, and as mony peats as he likes to
cast and win and cairt.” The French peasant is much in the same case;
but he doubts sometimes if all be for the best in the best possible
world.


XI

Military service has shown him that people live otherwise in the towns.
The spread of machines has lessened the necessary work of the fields;
once out of work, the labourer, instead of seeking a fresh place on a
farm, sets off on the road to Paris in quest of better days.

The rural exodus has become of late years a serious problem, affecting
the very source of wealth and well-being in country districts. I think
the village schools have been in some measure to blame for this.

Although the first Bill on rural education was passed as early as 1833,
nothing was done, in fact, to instruct the mass of village children in
France until the advent of the Second Empire, and very little indeed
before 1871, when the matter was seriously taken in hand. In my _Life of
Renan_, I have spoken of the general impulse towards a moral and
intellectual reform which followed in France so closely on the disasters
of the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussian schoolmaster, even more than
the Prussian generals, was supposed to have directed the victorious
armies of the enemy; and, in education, no less than in arms, the
conquered country began to prepare her _revanche_, by raising for this
purpose a generation of avengers.

The villages in 1871 were, in fact, almost as squalid, as narrow, as
ignorant as before the revolution. The schoolmasters went to their posts
in the spirit of missionaries prepared to civilize a tribe of savages,
ignoring the ideal of the people among whom they dwelt, looking down on
them with lofty benevolence, intending to concede nothing, but to
convert, to quicken, and to change the heart. The first generation
educated in the Primary Schools was treated even as a brand snatched
from the burning. The children had learned from their masters to despise
the animal ignorance, the brutish tastes, the sordid avarice that too
often disfigured the habits of the village. And what they had learned to
admire was something of which the village gave no conception.

For meanwhile in the towns the Socialist siren sang, “Come here, come
here, and I will give you prosperity and peace.” And to the towns went
the village youth. Wages were higher there; the standard of comfort
suited better with a newly acquired ideal of refinement; above all, the
smoky air was full of ideas. Ideas are a passion with the French, but
with no class so absolutely as with the humbler ranks of Socialism.
There reigned in those regions an instant hope in the approaching advent
of a better world--a millennium, in fact, as living, as real as that
which animated the first era of the Christian Church. The Socialist
working man was somewhat in the position of the Christian convert of one
of those great towns of ancient Asia Minor or Italy--a man with the
secret of a New Hope--while the villages, Pagan now as then, slumbered
in their contented ignorance. To go back would have been to apostatize,
to renounce, not only the life-in-life

[Illustration: LUYNES]

of an ideal, but also the means of education, the schools, the
newspapers, the working-man’s club informally united round the zinc
counter of the _Marchand-de-vin_, the Boulevards, the museums, the
_fêtes_, the sense of beauty, the sense of politics, of science, of
social solidarity. And if these parvenus in the moral and intellectual
sphere were often crude, fanatical, harsh, intolerant, at least they
were (what their rural fathers had not been) the heirs of all the ages.
Every year the schools sent more and more young rustics to Paris,
_frotteurs_ and sellers of wood and coal from Auvergne, masons from the
Creuse, old clo’ men from the Lozère, chimney-sweepers from Savoy. In
Paris they found a clan of compatriots ready to welcome them, to show
them how to earn their bread, and how, according to the newest gospel,
to save their souls alive.

And still the drain continues. But trade of late years has not been so
good in Paris. In many branches of industry there has been
overproduction--mechanical engineers, for instance, and masons have less
to do. And often the agricultural labourer, having tramped to town, may
find no work ready to his hands. I read in the reports of the Société
Nationale d’Agriculture of a certain farm in Brie, which has been bought
by the Assistance Publique, in order to give work to those unhappy
labouring men who have fallen into beggary among the unfriendly streets.
Here, on the fields and furrows of La Chalmelle, they touch their mother
earth again, like Antæus; thence they repair, sadder and wiser men, to
such glebes or vineyards as are short of hire. In its humble capacity,
the farm of La Chalmelle attempts to react against the mighty current
ever streaming from the country to Paris, establishing a tiny
counter-stream from Paris to the land. This rural exodus is a grave
question. Indeed, all thoughtful persons must pause and fear when they
come--as they may come, alas!--on a deserted village. For the fields are
the source of our food and the fundamental riches of a nation. To
forsake them for any cause, is to forsake the substance for the shadow.
Therefore Reactionaries, such as the successors of Le Play, and
Socialists, such as M. Vandervelde, are at one in attempting to stem the
ominous tide. The State patronizes cattle-shows and subsidizes technical
colleges; successful farmers are decorated no less than military heroes,
and few orders are more esteemed than the _Mérite Agricole_. Here and
there, manufacturers attempt, by using the water-power of a cascade or
river, to give the rural workman employment, without drawing him from
home. And it is probable that isolated factories employing the youth of
country districts will become more and more frequent in the future, and
increase the well-being of the landed labourer rather by lessening the
hours of employment and leaving him his harvest than by raising the rate
of wage. But all this is little enough, unless we have also that inner
force which sways a period, a generation, and which sometimes inclines
us more and more to Nature, reviving in our hearts the desire of the
land. Still, it is a good sign that the very schoolmasters are nowadays
less exclusively urban and literary in their standards. Science, indeed,
is beginning to dethrone literature even in the National school, and
what is Science but an Aspect of Nature? Science leads back to Nature,
as more important than the classics.

Among the posthumous notes of that noble apostle of national education,
M. Felix Pécaut, in the little book called “Quinze Ans d’Education,”
which saw the light at the close of 1902, I find the following
noteworthy passage:--

“They say that the National schools favour the village exodus. They say
that, after six years of book-learning, the young rustic dreads the
coarse habits, the hard work, the soil, the sweat, inseparable from the
life of a farm-labourer.

“What is the remedy? First of all, teach the children to take an
interest, not only in books, but in the life of the fields. Teach them
gardening, and how to keep bees, the making of cheese and the management
of a dairy. Show them the reason of these things, their cause, and the
possible improvements. Above all, in educating your little rustics, do
not impose an ideal from without; work your reform from within. Make
your scheme of education deliberately rural; be sober, just; teach them
courage, and the contempt of mere ease and well-being; give them a
wholesome, ample way of looking at things; instil the taste for an
active life, the delight in physical energy. Try and turn out, not a
mandarin, but a man of the fields.”


XII

A generation corresponding to this ideal would yet need one or two
reforms in the law of the land before the French peasant could reach his
perfect development. First of all, let us admit that the nation has
outgrown the Code Napoléon, which is a system of excessive
centralization. As usual, the people are in advance of the law of the
land; here as elsewhere, a fossilized system cramps and hinders the
expansion of life. Even at some sacrifice of order, France would be more
fortunate if she were decentralized, with more importance accorded to
the country towns and rural districts. Have we not seen how, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this same vice of
over-centralization was fatal to the country-sides of France, even
as, in the closing years of the Roman Empire, it was fatal to
the country-sides of Gaul? In this lovely land of France,
over-centralization is a sort of endemic disease which we may combat,
but scarcely, perhaps, eradicate. Let us do our best. It were well
should the law, even if it continue the principle of equal inheritance,
at least permit some laxity in practice (as an insertion of the thin
edge of the wedge), allowing the estate, for instance, to remain intact
in the hands of the son who farms it, though a proportion of the revenue
be divided yearly among his brothers and sisters. Let us take from the
Old Order what was best in it. Nothing was more frequent under the
_ancien régime_ than for a family to enjoy in common their paternal
acres. To take a case in point:--when the great-grandfather of Ernest
Renan died in 1732, his sons continued to dwell together in their old
grey farm by the estuary of Ledano, without separating their shares of
the estate. Gilles farmed the land; Alain, François, and Olivier manned
the joint fishing-smack and salted their pilchards in common. This
system of joint possession was usual in France, and suits the sociable
French character. Even to-day, in some such way, the extremest results
of the sub-division of property might be avoided. Thirdly, we would have
every schoolmaster in France teach his children, instead of the names of
the Merovingian kings, such elementary notions of physics and chemistry
as explain or at least suggest the life of natural things: why the sea
is salt; how the dew condenses; how the seed germinates in the earth;
why such and such a soil best serves to produce such and such a crop,
etc. When we see with what extraordinary swiftness the rural population
of France has adopted the theories of Pasteur and their consequences, we
feel that in this direction, at any rate, the rustic is not stupid. Let
the peasants learn the meaning of the world in which they live; they
will find it more interesting. A child who has learned to observe and
reflect has the beginnings of a liberal education, and one that will not
necessarily draw him from the land.

And, again, we would teach our peasants the benefits of union. There is
a great future for agricultural syndicates, buying and selling on
co-operative terms, and distributing among their members the proper
complement of agricultural machines; by their aid the small landowner of
a few acres may be enabled to sustain the competition of the large
model-farms; and perhaps, under new conditions, the agriculture of the
rural districts may revive, surpassing those golden years between 1830
and 1880. But the season of adversity has not been barren. Even the
farmer cannot live by bread alone; and the lean years that end the
nineteenth century have witnessed the moral and mental regeneration of
the French peasant. Whatever be his destiny, he is now that “man of
independent mind” whom Burns proclaimed the equal of any man in any
class.




THE FORESTS OF THE OISE THE FORESTS OF THE OISE

PART I

1893


I

“The prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost.” So runs an old
French proverb, which is not always true. At least, in that bygone year
of 1893 by the end of April the heat was as parched as at midsummer;
roses and strawberries were hawked through the streets of Paris; the
dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a
plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh for the cool grass and
the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand
years! ’Tis something to feel one’s self in a Gaulish forest--though I
can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But, in the forests of the
Oise, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate
silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors who may have shadowed
Pharamond.

At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always
wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air
is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with
its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training-stables, and parched,
oblong racecourse. Chantilly is a true French village, with its one
endless winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. From
almost any point of it you see, beyond the houses, a glint of waters and
hear a rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy lightness about
the place, about the fresh fine air, the loose sand of the soil, the
thin green boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, the smooth-trunked
beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into great forest trees.
It was with an effort of the imagination that we realized the ancient
stock of this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks older than
Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely
disappeared.


II

In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of a hunter-prince, and
everything about it was ordered for the chase. Those wide-open grassy
glades, studded with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer; and
in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does prepared their
nurseries. Great, floundering, russet pheasants came flying by; at every
step a hare or a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far at
the further end of the forest there were deep, unsightly thickets of mud
and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place, for the wild
boar delights in them. As we walked or drove down the neat-clipt avenues
of the forest, the roads appeared impassable to the traveller, and we
wondered at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful
forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching
hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are
ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman.

[Illustration: SENLIS]

Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful venery, for, thick
as grass, thick and sweet, the lily of the valley springs in all the
brakes and shady places. The scent of the game will not lie across these
miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair, and the deer, still
deafened with the winter’s yelp of the hounds--the deer, who sets his
back against the sturdiest oak, and butts at the pack with his antlers,
who swims the lakes, and from his island refuge sells his life as hard
as he can--the deer, accustomed to be always vanquished, beholds himself
at last befriended by an ally more invincible than water or forest oak,
by the sweet innumerable white lily, innocent as himself, that every
May-time sends the huntsmen home.

The lily that saves the deer is the consolation of poor women. Every
morning during the brief season of its blossom, they are up before the
dawn. Holding their children by the hand, they are off to the innermost
dells of its forest; and before our breakfast-time they are back at the
railway stations at Chantilly or Creil, laden with bunches of lilies,
which they sell to the dusty passengers bound by the morning mails for
London or for Brussels. Sweet flowers with the dew upon them, fragrant
posies, who would not give a five-penny-piece for so much beauty? “What
would you buy with your roses that is worth your roses?” sings the
Persian poet. These tired country-women of the Oise would know what to
reply: new sabots for the good man, a white communion veil for the
second girl, a shawl for the old grandam, and a galette for the
children’s dinner! The lilies are a harvest to them, like any other--a
sweet, voluntary, unplanted harvest that comes three months before the
corn is yellow.

The lilies were all out when we drove through the woods at Chantilly. I
had never seen such a sight, for we had not yet visited Compiègne, where
they are still more profuse and, I think, of a larger growth. In the
Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely, in timid clumps; and how
proud of them we were! But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of coy
flowers as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall jonquils of
Orange, ye have a plenteous rival in the north! The whole way to
Commelle the glades were sweet with lilies.

Every traveller between Calais and Paris has marked unwitting the beauty
of Commelle. You remember the view that precedes or follows (according
to your direction) the little station of Orry-Coye? The rails are laid
on the summit of a hill; the train rushes through a delicate forest of
birch. Suddenly we come upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in
a wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the Thérain, placid and
royal amid its mantling woods; while, on the other side, the hill breaks
in a sort of precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets
asleep amid the trees; a turreted white castle rises out of a sedgy
island, and appears the very palace of the _Belle au Bois dormant_.
These are the Pools of Commelle--pools or lakes? Pool is too small and
lake too large for the good French word _étang_. They are considerable
lakelets, some miles round, four in a row, connected each with each.
They lie in a sheltered valley, almost a ravine, whose romantic
character contrasts with the rest of the forest. Here the clipped and
slender trees of Chantilly give place to an older and more stately
vegetation. The gnarled roots of the beeches grip the sides of the hills
with an amazing cordage, spreading as far over the sandy cliff as their
boughs expand above. In the bottom of the combe, one after another, lie
the four sister pools. The road winds by their side through meadows of
cowslips, past the bulrushes where the swan sits on her nest, and past
the clear spaces of open water, where her mate swims double on the
wave. The brink is brilliant with kingcup on a film of ladysmock. At the
end of the last pool the ground rises towards the forest. There are some
ruins; an old grey mill rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the
grace and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground, are exquisitely
tranquil.

We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle--_le
Château de la Reine Blanche_, as the people prefer to call it. It is no
castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the
Prince de Joinville. A tradition runs that, in 1227, the mother of St.
Louis had a chateau here. Six hundred years later, the last of the
Condés built the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the
exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. ’Tis the
romantic Gothic of Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of
1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there
is a homely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it
were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of an old tune--“Ma
Normandie,” perhaps, or “Combien j’ai Douce Souvenance.” The mill-race
rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers near the
hall-door. It is very silent, very peaceful, very deserted. The Castle
of St. Louis would not have seemed so old-world as this.

We must make a long road home by the _Table Ronde_, or we shall not have
seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to
visit, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either
side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of
steps leads steeply down the market-place to the banks of the Nonette,
which runs demurely, as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of
lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But
the river is richer than it looks, and as sometimes we see a meek-faced,
slender little woman mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the
small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great oblong sheet of
artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A
stone’s-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, it dazzles
in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A
bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow
caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here
into a long low hill. There we found a score of white-bloused,
bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour.
Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of
pictures.

Before we leave, we must stroll round by the castle, with its fine old
gardens planted by Le Nôtre, its vast stables, imposing as a church, its
sheets of water, out of which rises, elegantly turreted, the brand-new
chateau of 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles of Touraine. For
once there was an older castle here, built by Jean Bullant for Anne of
Montmorency. The great constable left the splendid palace to his son,
and in 1632 Chantilly, as it stood among the waters and the gardens of
Le Nôtre, was a thing to wonder at and envy. Here Henri, Duke of
Montmorency, kept his court and filled his galleries with famous
pictures. He was a great patron of the arts. His wife, the _Silvie_ of
the poets of her time, has left her name still, like a perfume, among
the avenues and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life; but the duke
was discontented in his castle; private wealth could not console him for
public woes, and he joined in the revolt of Gaston d’Orléans. He was
defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner, and beheaded at
Toulouse, by order of Cardinal Richelieu. “On the scaffold,” says St.
Simon, “he bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and another
to my father.”

The duke was a near kinsman of the Prince of Condé. Until the last,
_Silvie_ had believed that this cousin, powerful and in the king’s good
graces, would intervene, and save her husband’s life. To her surprise,
Condé held his peace. The axe fell--and _Silvie_ understood, when the
king awarded the confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condé.

For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued to be the almost
Royal pleasure-house, the Versailles of the Princes of Condé. Then the
great Revolution rased the castle to the ground. It was not here, but
some miles away--at St. Leu-Taverny--that the last Condé died, in 1830.
Chantilly, which had come into the family by a violent death, left it
also in a sombre and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condé was
found one morning hanged to the handle of his casement-window. The
castle of Chantilly passed to the Duc d’Aumale. In 1840 he began the
labour of restoring it; but the Revolution of 1848 sent him into exile,
and only in 1872 was Chantilly restored to its rightful proprietor.
Then, like a phœnix, the new castle began to rise swiftly from its nest
of ash and ruin. It is as like the castle of the Renaissance, from which
it descends, as a young child is like its illustrious ancestor. ’Tis a
princely and elegant palace, and we find no fault with it beyond its
youth. It stands with a swanlike grace amid its waters; it holds, as in
the days of Montmorency, a rare treasure of old pictures and priceless
manuscripts; and so far as eye can reach from its terraces, the lands
and forests are subject to its lord. Chantilly is, in truth, a great
possession. The Duc d’Aumale, as we know, had no sons. He died in 1897,
and, choosing the most gifted men of his country for his children, he
bequeathed his palace and estate of Chantilly to the Institute of
France.


III

If the day be cold or windy, drive through the forest of Hallatte to
Creil, and thence take the train to Compiègne, for there blows a
stiffish breeze across the plateau of the Oise. But if mild air and sun
attend you, hire a light victoria, choose a good driver (you can get one
to do the thing for five and twenty francs or so), and set out by Senlis
and Verberie for Compiègne. ’Tis a matter of five and forty kilomètres;
and to make the drive a success, you must stretch it a little further
still, and go through the forest of Chantilly, round by St. Léonard, to
Senlis.

Senlis is a charming little town, perched on a hill in true mediæval
fashion, and grouped in a cluster round its fine cathedral and the ruins
of the castle of St Louis (a real mediæval castle, this one, at least so
much as is left of it). Halfway up the hill the antique bulwarks, turned
into a raised and shady walk, wear their elms and limes and beeches like
flowers amid a mural crown. From this green garland the streets rise
ever steeper, darker, more irregular; yet not so narrow but that here
and there we spy some white half-modern house, with pots of pinks in the
windows, and a garden full of flowers, which looks the natural home for
some provincial heroine in a novel of Balzac’s. I should like to end my
days, I think, in just such a little town, to sit in my garden and
receive my fair visitors under the green roof of the lime-tree walk. The
notary, the sous-préfet (is there a sous-préfet?), the curé perhaps, and
some of the country neighbours would come once a week to play écarté,
tric-trac, and boston with each other, and chat with us in a polished
little parlour, with squares of carpet in front of all the chairs. Once
a week, on the afternoon consecrated by local fashion,

[Illustration: VIEW FROM LA MONTAGNE DE LA VERBERIE]

we should walk on the ramparts and meet our neighbours, talk of the
crops and pull the Government to pieces (it stands a great deal of
pulling!). We should shake our heads over the Conseil Municipal, but
forgive the individual councillors, who are invariably amiable in
private life. The terrible M. Dupont would give me a cutting of
Malmaison pink for my garden, and _that_ breach would be healed.... Stop
carriage! let us begin at once, that peaceful imaginary comedy of old
age. But, ah, the little white house is already out of sight. We are in
front of the shattered round towers of the thirteenth-century palace,
all fringed with brown wallflowers against an azure sky. We climb higher
still, for see--here is the high, sunny, little square where the tall
cathedral stands.

Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival building, its great porches arched
around with sculptured saints and prophets. There are two towers, one of
them topped by a surprising steeple, a hundred feet in height, which is
a landmark for all the country round. The deep porches rich in shadow,
the slender lofty towers, compose an exterior altogether simple, noble,
and religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like all Gothic churches, is best
seen from without. Within, that bare unending height of pillar, that
cold frigid solemnity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, is less touching
than the grand yet homely massiveness of Romanesque, or even than the
serene placidity of the classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his
prayers in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built apparently for
the worship of giraffes or pelicans? Oh for the little, low-roofed
chapels of St. Mark’s, the unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant’
Ambrogio, or even the simple, pious beauty of such a Norman village
church as St. Georges de Boscherville, near Rouen! Think of the quaint,
sombre poetry of Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, of Saint
Julien at Brioude, or Saint Trophime at Arles; or even remember the
elegant and holy grace of the Parisian St. Etienne du Mont--these be
churches in which to say one’s prayers. Whereas your Northern Gothic is
a marvellous poem from without; but how frigid is the chill interior of
those august and noble monuments! Duty divorced from charity is not more
cold; and I can easier imagine a filial and happy spirit of worship in
the humblest square-towered parish church.

As it happened, we did not see the interior of Senlis at its best. The
spring cleaning was in full force; the straw chairs were heaped in an
immense barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral--and
really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like Socrates in his
basket--an energetic char-man was brushing the cobwebs from the
sculptured capitals with a huge besom made of the dried but leafy boughs
of trees. He had been hauled up there in a sort of crate by some
ingenious system of ropes and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that
vast cleanly interior was not unpicturesque; it was like a caricature of
any picture of Mr. Orchardson’s.


IV

Senlis was the capital of our friends the Sylvanectes. Hence stretched
on either hand the vast forests which even to-day are still considerable
in a score of relics--the woods of Chantilly, Lys, Coye, Ermenonville,
Hallatte, Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, etc., but which in Gallo-Roman
times were still one vast united breadth of forest. To-day, all round
Senlis the lands are cleared, and the nearest woods, north or south, are
some six miles away. We rumbled regretfully down the hill, out towards
the windy plains of Valois, windiest plains that ever were; bleak
champaigns where the sough and rushing of the wind sounds louder than at
sea. The forests of this northern plain are beautiful. O woods of
Chantilly! O birchen glades of Coye! O deep and solemn vales of
Compiègne, spinnies of Hallatte, and wavy pine-knolls of
Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a collar of green emeralds upon the
breast of Mother Earth? But we must admit that, shorn of their trees,
the plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample solemn roll, of the
plains of Seine-et-Marne. ’Tis a lean, chill, flat, and as it were an
angular sort of beauty; like some thin thirteenth-century saint,
divinely graceful in her robes of verdure; more graceful beneath those
plenteous folds than her better nourished sisters. But never choose her
for your model of Venus Anadyomene. Leave her that imperial cloak of
woods and forests.

We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture; by stretches of sad
precocious corn, already in ear on its scanty span-high stems of green;
by quarries and hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte; then forth
again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till somehow suddenly
we find ourselves on the steep brow of a down (they call it a mountain
here, la Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen through the
poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of
country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver. Far
away beyond the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths of
forest, blue and ever bluer, make an azure background that reaches out
to Compiègne.

We dash down the hill and clatter along the sleepy pebbly village
street, past the inn full of blouses and billiards, till the trees press
thicker and thicker among the lengthening shadows. The forest is full of
the peculiar soft beauty that foreruns the summer dusk. These outskirts
are fragrant with thorn-trees and acacia-trees. O white-flowering
delicate mock-acacias, were I the king of France, I would multiply ye by
all my high roads--for none is more beautiful to the eye and none is
more majestic or more bountiful than you. Throughout that parched spring
of 1893, when the hay stood withered a span high from the ground, your
long green leaves served as fodder for our cattle, most succulent and
sweet. And what shall I say of your blossom--delicious to every
sense--an exquisite rain of white pearls, dropping fragrant perfumes on
the tree, which, plucked and delicately fried in batter, make a
_beignet_ worthy of Lucullus? I love your black and gnarled thorny
trunk, so dark in its veil of lacy green and white; and it always seems
to me that the nightingale sings sweeter than elsewhere from your high
and twisted branches.

Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees, still
in flower, grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground
studded with silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness,
very fair and sweet, their muslin skirt spread white under the gleam of
the rising moon. The lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their
heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We pass--and as soon as we
have passed, no doubt, they clasp their fragrant partners to their
glittering breasts and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance to
celebrate the spring.

But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now
great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far
away, here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides between their
branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror
of the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your
ancestry. You have never known with a shudder just how they sacrificed
the victim on yonder smooth grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God!
Think, on this very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls to-night,
among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has
never sown or reaped his harvest on this sacred soil: it is still
consecrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs rustle immemorial
secrets; the oaks shoot up their mast-like columns to support the temple
roof. And there is Something in the temple, Something vast and nameless.
Something that sighs and laments and chills, super-human or anti-human,
Something which has no place in any of our creeds. What is it, this
obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood and tension of the
spirit, that locks us in a holy awe amid the shades of the nocturnal
forest? Who knows? Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the rites of our
ancestors, Celts or Germans; a drop of the heart’s blood of the Druid or
the Alruna-woman, still alive in us after two thousand years. They say
that children fear the dark because they are still haunted by the dread
of prowling beasts; our babies long obscurely for the blazing camp-fires
which kept the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear
survives in them and forbids them to sleep without that bright
protection. Brr!... I wish we could see the friendly glow to-night in
the wood of Compiègne!

At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a human beacon. ’Tis a
blacksmith’s forge, and then some straggling houses. Again a space of
scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg.
The streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more
exhilarating. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the
famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Compiègne.


V

The market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the
morning, and the gay wide square is full of booths and country-people,
clustered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you
know, we took her--worse luck to us!--at the gate of Compiègne. But it
was at Rouen she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand
ashamed throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the
market-place this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we
could not see the best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with
our hotel stands the fine Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted,
Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for the chimes. It was
finished in 1510, when Louis XII. was king. There he rides, on the large
arcade on the first story, every inch a king; but the statue is modern.

Gay, bright, with charming environs, Compiègne is a pleasant county
town; but it has not that look of age, of historic continuity, which are
the charm of smaller places, such as Crépy and Senlis. No sign is left
of the great palace of the Merovingian kings, no relic of that stalwart
fortress whence are dated so many of the acts of Charles the Wise; that
castle of Compiègne where, says Eustache Deschamps, “Tel froid y fait en
yver que c’est raige,” built against the river bridge--

    “Le Chastel que se lance
    Dessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”

Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place,
here and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Here and there,
on the limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden,
and we recognize a fragment

[Illustration: VIEUX MOULIN]

of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain roads in the
forest were planned and laid out by Francis the First. Then there is the
city gate, built by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of
Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still remain from the
fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and among them that “Hôtel des
Rats” where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1591. There are
one or two old churches, too much restored. And then, of course, there
is the great uninteresting palace, the very twin of the Palais Royal,
which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we remember for the sake of
the two Napoleons.

The charm, the attraction, of Compiègne is elsewhere. The forest here is
beautiful as Fontainebleau. True, here are none of the wild romantic
deserts, the piled crags hoary with juniper, the narrow gorges, and
sudden summer vistas of Fontainebleau. The trees themselves have a
different character. We find few of those great gnarled and hollow
giants whose twisted arms make such uncanny shadows towards sunset in
the Bas-Bréau. Here the oaks shoot up to an inconceivable height erect
and branchless until they meet at last in a roof of verdure just tinged
with April rose and gold. If Fontainebleau reminds us of a comedy of
Shakespeare’s, Compiègne has the noble and ordered beauty, the heroic
sentiment of Racine. What solemn arches and avenues of beeches; what
depths of forest widening into unexpected valleys, rippling in
meadow-grass, where the hamlet clusters round its ruined abbey; what
magical lakes and waters interchained, where the wooded hills shine
bright in doubled beauty! Ah! Fontainebleau, after all, is a blind poet:
the forest is ignorant of lake and river. But Compiègne has the Oise and
the Aisne and the Automne. Compiègne has its lakes and tarns, and pools
innumerable, its seven and twenty limpid brooks, its wells and ripples
in every valley-bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual
irrigation, teems with flowers. The seal of Solomon waves above the
hosts of lily of the valley. The wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel
the grass with their pale stars. Here and there on the sandier slopes a
deep carpet of bluebells, or at the water’s edge a brilliant embroidery
of kingcups, give point to the sweet monotony of white and green, which
vibrates from the flowers in the grass to the flowering may-bushes, to
the acacias only half in blossom, and thence more faintly to the lady
birch and beech with gleaming trunks and delicate foliage. White and
green appear again in the wide sheets of water amid the shimmering
woods. So I shall always think of the wood of Compiègne as of some
paradise, too perfect for violent hue and passionate colour--some Eden
haunted only by the souls of virgins, sweet with all fresh pure scents,
white with white flowers, and green with the delicate trembling green of
April leaves.


VI

Where shall we go to-day? There are many lovely drives in the forest.
Champlieu has its Roman camp, its antique theatre and temple; Morienval
its abbey church with the three Norman towers, St. Nicolas its priory,
St. Pierre its ruins, St. Jean its marvellous old trees, and Ste.
Perrine its lakes where the deer come to die. Shall I confess that we
know these beauties still by rumour only? For we went first of all by
the foot of Mont St. Mard to the hamlet of the old mill, and round the
lakes of La Rouillie to Pierrefonds. And on the morrow, when we set out
for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we would cry to the
driver, “Go back, and take us the same drive as yesterday.” And so
three times we drove past the Vieux Moulin.

This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you visit Compiègne, go
_last_ to Pierrefonds, round by the Vieux Moulin, or, however long you
stay, you will never see the rest.


VII

Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin! We are soon deep in woods of
oak and beech. We pass the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper
height towers above us. See, how wonderful is this deep-green glen,
where the oaks rise sheer a hundred feet and more from the sheet of lily
of the valley at their feet! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the
beautiful growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweetness and profusion
of the flowers, the something delicate, lofty, and serious about this
landscape, makes a rare impression amid the opulence of April. Our glade
slopes downward from the base of Mont St. Mard; at its further extremity
begins the valley of the Vieux Moulin.

It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years
ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side
rises a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just
room in the valley for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its
hay-meadows. They are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream,
with higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and here and
there a taller meadow-orchid. Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight,
but never out of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de
Berne.

The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end--perhaps a hundred dark
little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a
wide hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied
spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses--out in flower, to my
astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the
peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet;
and, if you choose, there is an “ascension” to be made! True, the Mont
St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the
less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our
feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue
plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels
circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep
to the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup
gives place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till,
behold, our meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters,
in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on
between the wood and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent,
and at the top of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little
town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village,
scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest
round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and
surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements,
turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle
and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite
round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away,
beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except
Clisson in Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so
almost theatric in the perfection of its _mise en scène_. And see, the
castle is quite perfect, without a scar, without a ruin! Was the wood,
after all, an enchanted wood, as it seemed? Have we driven back five
hundred years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century?


VIII

Pierrefonds! It was here that a sad ne’er-do-weel (for whom I have a
liking none the less) built himself this famous castle in 1391. It was
the wonder of the age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of
the Crown. It was dismantled in 1617; and all that remains of the
fourteenth-century fortress is, with the foundations, one side of the
keep and part of the outer wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the
triumph of Viollet-le-Duc. Before the decoration was finished, before
the last moats were dry, or the palisade laid out, the Second Empire
fell; the munificent patron became an invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds
was dubbed a national monument, kept from ruin, but no longer an
occasion for expense. I own that I should like to have seen it before it
was restored--to have seen the real, time-stained, historical document.
Yet, after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of documents;
and there is only one such magnificent historical novel as the Castle of
Pierrefonds.

The decoration is often poor and gaudy; but architecturally Pierrefonds
is a work of genius. To walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive,
and as they were: a hundred phrases of mediæval novels or poems throng
our memory. See, there is the great Justice Hall, built separate from
the keep, above the Salle des Gardes; and there, connecting it with the
outer defences, are the galleries or _loggie_, where the knights and
ladies used to meet and watch the Palm Play in the court below. Here is
the keep, a fortress within a fortress, with its postern on the open
country. From its watch-towers, or its double row of battlements, we can
study the whole system of mediæval defence. Ah, this would be the place
to read some particularly exciting book of Froissart’s--“The Campaign in
Brittany,” for instance, or one of those great Gascon sieges, full of
histories of mining and counter-mining, of sudden sallies from the
postern gate, of great engines built like towers, launching stones and
Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by night against the castle wall. I
am deep in mediæval strategy when a timid common-sensible voice
interrupts--

“Mais comment cela se peut-il que le château soit si ancien, p’isque
vous me dites qu’il fut construit sous le Second Empire?”

’Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local tradesman, bent on
holiday, tramping the forest with his wife, their dinner in a basket,
and bunches of _muguets_ dangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd
little fellow. In his one phrase, he has summed up the sovereign
objection to Pierrefonds--

“How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say, ’twas built under
Napoleon III.?”

Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored!


IX

The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one;
for, down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there
stands the _Établissement des Bains_. Here tepid sulphur springs are
captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to
get well in this enchanting village! How they must gossip in the
lime-walk and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces,

[Illustration: THE LAKES OF LA ROUILLIE]

and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one
stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is
not, they say, a very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne,
proclaims the trump of Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois,
eager to keep their lovely home safe from the jerry-builder, have
started these vague rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms.
’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the Parisian--a sort of
sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty of the woods against the
fate of Asnières.

There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay
there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may
take the train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at
Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the
lovely drive through the forest to Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint
old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois, whence the train will take him
on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one would think that such a
dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The road that slopes down
from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an Umbrian
picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the knolly
forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cotterets;
for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst course
open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the train
direct to Paris.




PART II

1901


Never again have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They
lie an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as
inaccessible as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a
longing goes through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the
road that runs right through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to
tell the truth, I have not dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart,
that village, forest, hill, and lake, have long since crumbled into
ashes.

Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time
was midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice.
But even in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of
life too deep and sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a
leaf, enlivened the forest; but how large and frequent seemed the
forest-birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The green
woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of them together, appeared
(although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches long) as large and
bright as parrots. This fine bird, the _pivert_ of France where it is
common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the
long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its
colouring--a mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some
yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like
a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red, drawn close over head and neck. In England
I have never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with us; nor,
though I sometimes find him in my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen the
_pivert_ so much to his advantage as during that cold week in January,
relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter that year was
unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all fast bound in ice; the
snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted on
their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen Blanche. On
every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops
frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest stretched all
round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we, until, as
we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we were
not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still
disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling
incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.

One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a
light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a
world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in
full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or
two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the
_piqueurs_, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It
was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter.
The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local
nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a
land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a
set of training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-Gothic
villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its
English name--Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across
the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than
once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses
glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile,
half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their
money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that
long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode
by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “_Levez votre
queue, levez!_” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys,
in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War.

On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the _taillis_
where the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is
almost all planted in _taillis composé_ with hornbeam, elm, and
oak--three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise
again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as
it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a
reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil
its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is
a _taillis composé_ or _taillis sous futaie_--perhaps the most
profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for
the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the
best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands
several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props
for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit;
for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and
stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.

I love these feathery woods and coppices of France. A long, low,
cliff-like hill, with a landslip at the foot; a pasture sloping to the
river; a spinny or _taillis_ in the middle distance:--there is a
landscape which you may see on any day in any part of France; and I ever
find it full of a delicate yet homely grace. But, for beauty and wonder,
the _haute futaie_ is incomparably finer than the copse. In the _futaie_
the trees are left to grow to their natural shape, the axe serving only
to weed out the misshapen trunks, or to eliminate the intrusive birch
and poplar which push unbidden among the better sort. Here, at least,
the oak and beech, adult, with a century and a half behind them, fall
only in their prime, the rich prize of the woodman’s axe, which still
respects the elect reserve. Compiègne, Fontainebleau, St. Germain, have
all their _futaies_; but few private owners can afford to wait a hundred
and fifty years for their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it
comes due), or have so vast a property that, during more than a century,
some part of it may fall every winter to the axe in due rotation. For
who can boast a hundred and fifty groves, duly planted and tended year
after year? Perhaps the State alone. A third system, much used in parks
and woods round houses, as combining use and ornament, is that of
_jardinage_. Here, as in an earthly paradise, trees of all ages grow
together, and every year the axe takes its toll of young and old alike:
yon great fir may boast two centuries, and here is yesterday’s sapling
at its feet. The fir and the beech are generally grown _en jardinage_.

Hark, the sharp tang of the axe! Let us go and see. There is an art in
wood-cutting, especially in felling a _taillis_; for if the wound be not
clear and sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the rain
sojourn and sodden in the stump, the root will lose its virtue. But the
woodman knows his trade. He was born in our woods, most likely; if not,
ten to one he comes from the Belgian Ardennes, perhaps from Bavaria: be
sure he is a sylvan; mixed with his blood is the sap of the forest.
There, under that spreading oak, he has built his hut of tree-trunks:
long perches of young oaks covered by sods of earth, with the grass
turned inwards. Let us peep in. A pile of dead bracken occupies one
corner. Three stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which forms the
floor, are tied together at the top, and support a great iron soup-pot,
swinging over a fire of braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no
window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is a bachelor.

For in the forest of St. Germains I know another hut which is the very
pride and pink of neatness. The woodman’s wife used to sit there, on a
deep bench of turf built against her rustic house, mending the week’s
wash, while her children played at her feet. The hut itself, though
built, as usual, of trunks and sods, was pleasant to look at, with a
neat white-curtained window in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs;
a door of the same pattern swung on a pole passed through a double set
of iron loops. Door and window were evidently portable, and had been
used on many a clearing. Within, a folding table, a stool or two, and
even some canvas folding chairs such as are used in gardens, gave the
rough place a look of comfort. A wide truckle-bed supported a mattress
of sacking, stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves; a red blanket covered
the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a portable iron stove. Sometimes
the good woman would do her cooking, as she always did her week’s
washing, out-of-doors, and then--ye sylvan deities!--what savoury fumes
would rise from that huge _marmite_! It was, no doubt (for so she said),
a jay or so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them dainty
eating), which so tickled our

[Illustration: PIERREFONDS]

appetite in passing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a hare,
a pheasant, some piece of good wild game. Since no trade is warranted to
breed perfection, let me admit that my friends the woodmen are nearly
always past-masters in the noble art of poaching. How should it be
otherwise? Only on Sundays can they tramp to the nearest village to buy,
with their scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of meal.
The cow, which their children lead to pasture in the glades, affords
them milk, but that is all. And meanwhile the woodland teems with life.
So poor, remote from all society, cognizant of the ways of bird and
beast, shall they mark unmoved the traces of the hare, note with a
disinterested eye the break a fawn has made in yonder brushwood, or that
thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-trunks, where the wild boar last
night stopped to scratch his miry flanks, on his road to the nearest
turnip-field? Meanwhile the man hungers, and the children need their
daily bread.

Who does not remember a charming page of Gustave Droz, which tells how a
young couple, surprised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter in
the charcoal-burner’s hut, and shared their savoury mess? Such luck has
never been mine. It was one of the things for which I envied my revered
and admirable friend, M. Taine, whose childhood, spent on the edge of a
great forest, made him familiar with every sylvan thing.

“In these old forests,” he writes, in an essay on the Ardennes, “there
lingers a race of men still half savage; they are the woodcutters. They
scarcely know the taste of bread; a side of bacon, some potatoes, a
little milk, compose their daily fare. I have spent the night with them
in huts without a window. The large, low, open chimney let in the
daylight and let out the smoke. There the meat was hung to dry. The
children spoke scarce a word of French, expressing themselves in a rude
_patois_; wild as young colts, they roamed the forest all day long; when
they reached their twelfth year, their father put an axe in their hands,
and they chopped the branches of the fallen trees; a few years later,
they felled an oak like him. A mute animal life, full of legends and
strange beliefs, was theirs.”

But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays the children are supposed to
go, at least sometimes and when convenient, to the nearest village
school (for education is compulsory in France); the young men inevitably
serve their time at the regiment; the girls enter domestic service. And
so difficult is it to find recruits for the woodman’s free but rough and
lonely life, that the lack of woodcutters is becoming a grave question
among foresters in France.

When March is well out, and the trees are felled, when the wood is piled
in stacks, the woodman consults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and
sappy morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such of them as
are devoted to that tragic end. It is a nice and delicate business,
which must be undertaken before the leaves are green. For, while the sap
is springing, the bark and the wood are separated by a layer of viscuous
vegetable tissue, the cambium, but so soon as the foliage is
full-formed, this cambium turns hard and welds the two together. Yet the
weather must be warm; a blast of cold wind, the shadow of too black a
cloud, by suddenly lowering the temperature, may at any moment interrupt
the operation: the bark will not strip from the oak. The woodman (who
knows nothing of this capricious cambium, worse than a woman for
yielding only at its pleasure) swears that a herd of sheep must have
passed to his windward, and throws down his axe, well aware, despite his
false premises, that no more stripping will be done that day. He must
wait on sun and zephyr. The next warm day he returns, cuts a sharp ring
round the foot of the tree, another at his right arm’s topmost reach,
and rips the bark in long ribbons, which he lays in the sun to dry, face
downward, for a day and a night, ere he stack them for the tanner. That
is the prime bark, flayed from the living trunk; having taken this, he
fells the oak, and strips as best he can the upper branches.

Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next, and, where the natural
fruit of the trees has not sufficiently renewed the glade, he hoes the
earth, relieves it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole,
and plants a sapling. By early autumn he must change his trade anew; in
September the woodman becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have
dried last winter’s logs; they are ready for the next metamorphosis. The
woodcutter, who knows by heart each glade and clearing and coppice of
the forest, selects some open space, far from the century-old revered
Reserve, and cuts the turf from a chosen circle. Having beaten hard the
ground, he plants in the middle three or four stout stakes and swathes
them together; round these he sets some light inflammable brushwood;
beyond this centre--which will serve as a chimney--he places his logs in
close rings, standing straight on end in the middle, then slantwise more
and more, till they are almost flat at the edge. And now the stack takes
on the shape of a great flattish cake or pie. Thereon he packs a layer
of dead leaves, four inches thick, and over that again a layer of sand
and sods, till, save for a small open space in the middle, the whole is
tightly roofed. At last he casts a flaming brand into the brushwood at
the core, and waits: in an instant the faggots crackle, the smoke rises
up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the crust begin to ooze and
“sweat,” as they say, from the sap and moisture of the buried logs. Now
let the woodman look to the wind, lest too strong a blast cause the
pile to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal, and endanger the forest. If
a sudden gale should rise, he will build a screen of branches and break
the force of its impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily,
smoking and sweating, until--on the third day, as a rule--a faint wreath
alone of bluish vapour curls lightly from the exhausted pile. After a
few days more the mound may be unpacked; if all be well, the charcoal is
ready for sale. The sylvan year has run its course. Our woodman is a
woodcutter again.

Forestry in France is not only an art, a science, an industry, and a
passion. Several generations of savants such as M. Bouquet de la
Grye--to whom, with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly
acknowledged--have reduced the rule of forestry to a method. Thanks to
them, the returns are as sure, the cultivation as regular, as in any
other branch of agriculture. If I had been a man, I would, I think, have
been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector of woods and waters,
like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long under the green and
musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf and resin,
sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the destinies
of oak and beech and pine. At Nancy there is an _Ecole Forestière_,
which forms to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic
Institute. Thence sometimes, or else from Stuttgard, we used to draw our
foresters for the vast woods of India, until, in 1884, a School of
Forestry was established at Cooper’s Hill.

The last years of the nineteenth century, the first of this, have
brought the youth of France back, with a sort of passion, to the land.
In Shakespeare’s time, as we know,

                  “Young gentlemen in France
    Were wont to sigh and look as black as night
    From very wantonness.”

I am glad to think that in our days they are at once more cheerful and
more practical. Cheesemaking, cattle-farming, wine-growing, farming,
forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman may pursue with
credit, and even with enthusiasm. And forestry, at least, is cultivated
as it never was before. Until the last hundred years, more or less, a
forest was just a wood-mine, to be worked until the vein should be
exhausted. But now we sow and tend even more than we destroy. We are
like provident children who seek to repair the ruin wrought by a
generation of prodigals. I have before my eyes the statistics for the
expense which the forests of France have cost the State between 1882 and
1902: they average some three and a half million of francs per annum.
The foresters of France find such a sum the miserable pension of a
miser, and men of science bid us plough, and plant, and fence in our
hillsides, unless we be prepared to see their rocky flanks ravined by
headlong torrents, and the plains at their feet alternately a quagmire
and a Sahara. The course of rivers, the distribution of rains, the
maintenance of mountains in their magnificent integrity, all depend upon
the deep-draining roots, the rain-absorbing foliage of our woods. The
French Revolution, in order to supply the peasants with a great expanse
of arable land, set the axe in the forests of France. Liancourt wrote in
1802, on his return from exile, that, all round his estates, the great
woods which covered that portion of the Oise had been cut down or rooted
up--an excess of deforestation which had already produced disastrous
effects upon the climate. He preached in the desert; content with their
new fields of corn and beet (astonishingly productive, like all virgin
soil), the peasants of the Oise would not hear of replanting; where the
woods had been merely felled and not uprooted, the shepherds drove their
flocks of sheep and goats, fattening them on the young shoots which
should have renewed the forest. But to-day we are wiser: we plant. Sandy
moors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren chalk, are planted with
the hardy sylvan pine, and shortly become things of use and beauty in
themselves, no less than happy influences on the local climate. The pine
gives deal and resin, and grows in any soil. Clays too stiff and damp
for corn or turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak; the
steepest flanks and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient for the
beech; the elm and the ash spring in small spinnies on almost any
sterile field, and their leaves afford a delicious food for cattle, a
crop as regular and as nourishing as hay. Any wood, treated with care
and method through a space of years, will yield a good return for
careful husbandry.

And this, I think, is the special beauty of France--her great and
increasing stretches of woodland. Be they the merest coppices of scrub
oak and horn-beam, yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring
with primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white wood-strawberries. And
what tongue shall declare the majesty of the forest? I love the great
freedom of the wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich harvest of
the lowland plain; but something deeper and more secret--dating from the
days before our ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a
forest-clearing--a thrill primæval, is awakened in me by the rustle of
the woods.




A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE

1892


I

Our first impression of Provence struck us just beyond Mondragon. For
some miles we had traversed the romantic valley of the Rhone, which at
this point might almost be the valley of the Rhine. The river is hedged
in by tall cliffs covered with ruins as steep and as uninhabitable as
the granite which supports them. Every mountain bears its castle and
tells of feudal rule, of brigand oppression, with all the violence and
picturesqueness of a mediæval tale by Sir Walter Scott. The train
carried us through a narrow gully, with barely room in it, above the
strangled river, for the ledge on which the rails are laid. Suddenly, at
the other end of the gorge, the climate changes: the air is milder, the
plain more fertile, the country widens into a great amphitheatre
enclosed between the Alps of Dauphiné and the rounder hills of the
Cévennes. And here, with the suddenness of magic, the first olives
begin--no stripling trees, but gnarled and branching orchards, sunning
their ancient limbs on every southern slope. In the twinkling of an eye
we have come into the kingdom of the South. With a deep breath of the
sharp-scented sunny air, we inhale the beauty of it, and
understand--how intimately!--that horror of high mountains which has
distinguished every race capable of appreciating beauty. Our
recollection of the black gorge, the barren peaks, the swirling torrent,
renders still keener our feeling for the fertile plain where the
blood-red boughs of the Judas-tree make their deep southern blots of
colour against the blue of the delicate, serrated hills behind. Among
the fields the pollard mulberries gleam like baskets of golden filigree,
in the splendour of their early April leaf. The tall pastures are white
with starry jonquils, bending all one way in the wind. The hedges are
sweet with hawthorn, great southern bloom, almost as big and plump as
apple-blossom. And the same delicious contrast of delicacy and abundance
which strikes us in the plain, surrounded by its peaks and barren hills,
is repeated in the difference between this riot of blossom and the
austerity of the foliage, much less green than in the north. The ilex
spreads its cool grey shadow at the homestead door. Every little
red-tiled farm, every vineyard, is screened by its tall hedge of
cypress, a sheer wall of blackish green, planted invariably north-west
of the building. For through those narrow gorges of Mondragon, where
there seemed scarcely room for the train and the river, the Mistral also
passes, like a blast from a giant’s bellows--the Mistral, the terrible
north-western wind, that devastates these plains of Paradise.


II

Our first halting-place is Orange, a white and charming little town,
filling up its ancient girdle with many an ample space of green garden
and lush meadow. Few towns appear more provincial than this charming
Orange, which gave William the Silent to the cause of the Reform, a
dynasty to Holland, and a king to England. There were princes in Orange
long before the Nassau: there was the House of Baux, with its
pretensions to the Empire of the East; there was the House of Adhémar,
which brought forth the noble Guillaume d’Orange, the peer of
Charlemagne. Of all their glory naught remains save one meagre wall, one
tumbling buttress surmounting the hill above the city. Compared with the
beautiful amphitheatre beneath, still important and majestic as in the
days of the Roman occupation, these remains of chivalry appear little
more venerable than the ruins of the jerry-built villas of some
demolished London suburb. Yet as we look at them an emotion awakes in
our heart and a mist comes before our eyes that Roman antiquity does not
evoke. For the monuments of the Middle Ages are other than of stone.

And we remember how, in the beautiful old romance of _Guillaume
d’Orange_, the unhappy hero comes home to his castle wounded, after
Roncesvalles, the only living knight of all his host, and sounds the
horn that hangs before the castle gate. But the porter will not admit
him: none may enter in the absence of the master, and no man of all his
garrison recognizes the hero in this poor man, suddenly aged and pinched
and grey, seated on a varlet’s nag, with nothing martial in his mien.
Their discussion brings the Countess on to the battlements: “_That_--my
husband! My husband is young and valiant. My husband would come a
conqueror, leading tribes of captives, covered with glory and honour.”
Then, seated still on his poor nag, outside his inaccessible castle, the
Count of Orange tells the story of Roncesvalles, and how he alone
escaped the carnage of that day. “Less than ever my husband!” cries the
Countess. “My husband would not have lived when all those heroes died.”
But at last he persuades her that he is in very truth himself, and she
consents to take him and tend his wounds on his promise that, so soon as
he can ride to battle, he will set forth again, to avenge the death of
all his comrades.

“Le monde est vide depuis les Romains,” said St. Just. Beneath the ruins
of that castle on the hill there stands, erect, eternal, built into the
very frame-work of the cliff, the immense theatre of the Romans, still
fit for service, resonant to every tone. Frequently, of late years, many
thousands of people have gathered in the Amphitheatre, which serves on
all great municipal occasions. But I prefer it as we saw it
yesterday--its sweep of steps graciously mantled in long grass growing
for hay, and full of innumerable flowers; its stage tenanted by bushes
of red roses and white guelder roses; the blue empty circles of its
wall-space outlined serenely against the flame-blue sky. Never have I
seen the huge strength of Roman antiquity appear more sweetly venerable,
more assimilable to the unshaken granite structure of the globe itself,
than thus, decked and garlanded with the transitory blossoms of its
eighteen-hundredth spring.

The front wall of the theatre is about one hundred feet in height,
thirteen feet thick, and more than three hundred feet in length. The
colony of Arausio was an important colony, remembered only now by the
monuments of its pleasures and its triumph. When we shall have
disappeared for near two thousand years, what will remain to tell our
story? Our Gothic churches are immense and beautiful, but already, in
their infancy of nine or seven centuries, they are falling into ruin.
Our castles will go the way of the Castle of Orange; and of our
pleasure-houses the oldest that I remember is the little flimsy
seventeenth-century theatre of Parma, already quite a miracle of
cardboard antiquity. We have built too high, or too thin, or too
delicately. We have read too long in our prayer-books that here we have
no abiding city. Our souls have no capacity to imitate that great solid
souvenir of civic use, of pleasure, of triumph, which the Romans have
left behind them in all their provinces. About ten minutes’ walk from
the theatre, on the other side of Orange, stands the Roman Arch of
Triumph, the most beautiful in Gaul. It is perfect in its great
perspective, as it rises from the meadow-grass at the end of a shadowy
avenue. On its sculptured sides the trophies of ancient battle are still
clear, and on its frieze the violent struggle of men in battle--

    “Et tristis summo captivus in arcu.”

The Romans have left behind them in Provence not only a series of
unalterable monuments, but the type of their race. Up country, in the
little farms, a Celtic strain prevails, but in every town we find the
square-built Roman frame and classic features.

We end our afternoon by a long drive through the fertile plain of
Orange, all the brighter for the severeness of its setting, for the
spires and hedges of cypress, for the gaunt dim blue of the distant
mountains. The spring is luxuriant and ample here. The hedges toss their
fragrant boughs of may: the Japanese peonies are pink in every garden,
the quince-orchards seem a bower of tiny roses, the purple flags are out
by all the watercourses: but the prettiest sight of all is on the grass.
Even in Italy I have never seen such hay-meadows, with their great
golden trails of buttercups, their sheets of snow-white narcissus,
springing innumerable and very tall above the grass. There are little
children and boys, and tall young girls, grown women and men of all
ages, in the fields gathering great posies of the delicious flowers.
Never have I seen so bright a picture of the sheer joy of living, the
mere gladness of the spring’s revival. It seems to us that we have
driven by some happy byway into the Golden Age, into some idyl of old
Greece.


III

Here the towns are set as close together as the jewels in a crown. We
have scarcely left Orange before we see, beyond the green belt of the
Rhone, the mediæval outline of the Palace of the Popes. _L’Ile
Sonnante_, as Rabelais called it, rises out of the plain and the water
like an island indeed, much as our own little Rye stands up out of the
Sussex marshes. With its steeples and convents, its towers and
buttresses, massed round the tremendous fortress on the central rock,
girdled by an outer circle of crenelated ramparts, this fair town of
Avignon appears the very sanctuary of the Middle Ages.

The great interest of Avignon is that it appears a town of one time--a
flower of the fourteenth century still full of life and vigour. The
tower of Philippe le Bel at Villeneuve dates from 1307; the great Palace
of the Popes, the fortifications of the town, with their battlements and
machicolations, and the vast round yellow fortress of St. André, massive
against its background of olive-coloured hills--all these, and many
smaller relics, belong to the second half of the fourteenth century.
Even here in the South, few cities can show so many or such pure
examples of the military architecture of the time.

The city wall of Avignon, since in part destroyed, had, when I saw it, a
circumference of about fifteen thousand

[Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE POPES AT AVIGNON]

feet. It stood twelve metres in height. It had thirty-five towers, many
turrets, was crowned with battlements, and pierced with machicolations.
These last, as every one knows, are open spaces left between the wall
and the frieze of arcades which supports the balcony intended for the
garrison (the _chemin de ronde_), spaces which form great oblong holes
in the flooring of the balcony, and through which boiling water, flaming
tow, lighted oil, arrows, stones, and other missiles might be poured
down on assailants engaged in undermining the foot of the wall. The
walls of Avignon, substantial as they appeared, would have been but a
phantasmal protection against a good mitrailleuse: the modern town wore
them as an ornament, and not as armour. The gates, dismantled of their
old portcullises, served for the collection of the toll, and the
officials of the _octroi_ lodged in the romantic gatehouses. One of
these guardians, moved by our interest in his unusual dwelling, led us
up through his kitchen and bedroom in the gate-tower, on to the balcony
that crowns the wall. He left us there in company with his wife and
several babies, whom I expected, at every instant, to tumble through the
holes of the machicoulis; they showed, however, the address and
ingenuity of true mediæval babyhood in avoiding these pitfalls, and
appeared to find the superannuated battlements an admirable playground.
Less adroit, we found the _chemin de ronde_ very dizzy walking; and our
interest in this relic of military architecture was chequered by the
fear of being precipitated into space.

The walls of Avignon were less interesting than its vast central
fortress. It is difficult to imagine a monument so irregular, so
labyrinthine, such a mere sombre maze of towers and walls, of corridors
and staircases. Not a tower is absolutely square, not an angle true, not
a communication simple or direct. All is unexpected, dædal,
disconcerting, in this gigantic relic of an era of confusion.

For the Palace of the Popes was not only a palace, but a stronghold. It
was a necessary answer to the fortress which, in 1307, the King of
France had built at Villeneuve across the Rhone; it was necessary also
for defence against the troops of marauders who infested France after
Crécy and after Poitiers. We remember how, in 1357, a knight, by name
Sir Reynold of Cervole, commonly known as the Archpriest, scoured all
Provence with a company of men-at-arms of all countries, who, since the
King of France was captive and their arrears unpaid, turned brigands,
and made a good thing of escalading castles, and ransoming rich and
timid cities. Froissart has told us how the Archpriest and his men laid
siege to Avignon, striking terror into the hearts of Innocent VI. and
his cardinals. At last, the Papal Court agreed to pay forty thousand
crowns to the company, as an inducement towards its withdrawal. The
brigand-chief came to terms as regards the money, but he demanded
certain small additions to the contract, for he remembered that he was
not a mere marauder, but a person of good family, with other claims to
consideration. He exacted, therefore, a free pardon for all his sins,
and several invitations to dinner. The Pope and his cardinals “received
him as reverently as if he had been the son of the King of France
himself.” Then he consented to lead his followers elsewhere; and after
his departure the Pope considerably improved the fortifications of
Avignon.

By 1370 the city was strong enough to set such besiegers at defiance,
and the palace had grown into the fortress we admire to-day. It is
composed of seven huge _corps de logis_, separated by courts or
quadrangles; and these are riveted to each other by seven immense and
sombre towers. The whole forms a parallelogram of over twelve thousand
square yards. It is an imposing, a tremendous pile--not beautiful, but
unforgettable; conspicuous by the rare height of its walls and towers,
and by the extraordinary upleap of its buttresses, which shoot right up
the wall to the balcony, and form the great arcade which masks the
largest _machicoulis_ that I have ever seen. Not only pitch and Greek
fire, but great beams and boulders could pass through these openings to
crush the assailant underneath. Such a fortress appears impregnable to
the eye: the height of the walls renders an escalade impossible; the
garrison on the balcony atop is out of bowshot, and the huge buttresses
defend the base against the sapper. At one-third of its height the wall
supports a second balcony, whence the besieged could deal deadly damage
on their assailants.

Within, the palace is disfigured by its present use as a barracks. The
vast halls are ceiled over at mid-height and turned into dormitories.
Nearly all the frescoes, painted in the melancholy, elegant manner of
Simone Memmi and the Sienese, have been disfigured within this century.
There is a party in Avignon naturally indignant at this defacement,
which is all for buying the palace from the Government and turning it
into a museum. This, however, would cost a great deal of money. And, as
a mere impression, the great bare dædal building, gay with the crowded
life of these youths of twenty, who race up and down stairs in noisy
troops, or sit in the shadowy window-seats (picturesque figures in their
white undress, black haversacks and deep-red caps), or fill the sombre
quads with march and drill--yes, as a mere impression, it is certainly
more appropriate as it is.


IV

    “Sur le pont d’Avignon
    Tout le monde danse, danse;
    Sur le pont d’Avignon
    Tout le monde danse en rond.”

Many generations of children have doubtless wondered why. Make an effort
to cross the Rhone when the wind is blowing, and you will arrive, at any
rate, at _one_ explanation. O masterly wind! _Vent magistral_, or
_mistral_. With what a round, boisterous, over-mastering force you blow
from the north-west! How you send the poor passengers of Avignon-bridge
whirling in all directions, dancing to all tunes, battling comically and
ineffectually against you! Men used to say that beautiful Provence were
a Paradise, had it not suffered from three scourges: the Parliament, the
Durance and the Mistral. The local Parliament exists no more (and we
regret it), the Durance is no longer a curse, but a blessing, and serves
to irrigate a thousand parched and fruitful southern fields. But the
_mistral_ remains. We ourselves were nearly blown from the hill-top at
Villeneuve; yet I can cherish no rancour against the _mistral_, the
tyrant, who sweeps us all out of his way as he rushes, wreathed in dust,
towards the sea. ’Tis a good honest wind, like our west-country
sou’-wester, and quite devoid of the sharp, thin, exasperating quality
of the east wind of our isles. And, but for the _mistral_, they never
would have planted those dark long screens of soaring cypress which
streak so picturesquely the wide blue prospects of Provence.


V

There is something Athenian in the little literary class of Avignon, and
in the evident pride and joy which all the citizens take in it. Our
cabman stopped us in the street: “Look at that monsieur! Look at him.
He’s a poet!” cried the good man in great excitement. It was M. Félix
Gras. People waylay you to point out the name of Aubanel or Roumanille
written over a bookshop. Every person of every degree treasures some
little speech or anecdote concerning M. Mistral, the hero of the place.
Doubtless the Félibrige, with the little extra romance and importance
which it has given to the South, has much to do with this literary
enthusiasm. In Provence, a taste for poetry is a form of patriotism,
even as it was in Ireland in the days of the “Spirit of the Nation”--as
it is again to-day. The sentiment, which is pretty and touching, appears
quite genuine.

We had forgotten that Roumanille was dead (as was natural, since poets
never die), and so we made a pilgrimage to his bookshop. We were greeted
by a dark-eyed little lady; when we asked for the poet, the tears
started into her fine black eyes, and we realized, with a tightening of
the heart, the cruel carelessness of our question. But Mademoiselle
Roumanille (for it was she), with the beautiful courtesy of her nation,
would not let us depart in this unhappy mood. She talked sweetly and
seriously of her brother’s latter days and of his death-bed, cheerful
and courageous as the last pages of the “Phædo”: these Provençal poets
have a classic temper in their souls! He would not let them wear a
mournful face. “Life is a good thing,” said he; “chequered, no doubt,
with melancholy moments, but none the less bright and excellent as a
whole. We have come now to one of these melancholy passages, but,
believe me, my friends, the sadness of death is greatly overrated! There
is nothing cruel or tragic to lament about. Life has been very good, and
now--at the end of it--death comes in its place, not unkind.”

So the good Félibre passed away, mindful, no doubt, of that passage in
one of his poems where he says--but I have forgotten the words--

    “Now let me depart in peace,
    For I have planted in Provence
    A tree that shall endure.”

If even the gay, the cordial Roumanille gave out at the last this savour
of antique philosophy, the likeness of Mistral to the elder poets is far
more striking. He is the Provençal Theocritus, and his poems, with their
delightful literalness of touch, their unforced picturesqueness and
natural simplicity, will probably endure when more striking monuments of
our nineteenth-century literature are less read than remembered. We
cannot imagine, at any distance of time, a Provence in which some posy
of Mistral’s verses will not be treasured. He will be to the great
province what Joachim du Bellay has been to Anjou. True, he has written
too much, but posterity is an excellent editor, and reduces the most
voluminous among us to a compendious handful. Mistral is the greatest of
the Félibres, and perhaps the only one whose works will survive the
charming _Davidsbund_ of poets and patriots which so loudly fills the
public ear to-day.

We went more than once to see the great man in his garden at Maillane, a
pleasant place surrounding a cool, quiet villa, where the poet lives
with his young wife. It is the only house of any pretensions in
Maillane, and to the good people of the commune Monsieur Mistral is
both the poet and the squire. He comes out to receive you--a strikingly
handsome man with a beautiful voice; so much like the once-famous
Buffalo Bill in his appearance that one day, when the two celebrities
met by accident in a Parisian café, they stared at each other,
bewildered for one moment, and then, rising, each advanced towards the
other and shook hands! We talked of many things, and among others, of
course, of Félibrige. I ventured to ask him the meaning of the name,
which is a puzzle not to philologists alone. He confessed that it had no
particular meaning; that on that day in May, in 1854, when he and
Roumanille and the other five discussed their projected Provençal
renaissance, one of them reminded the others of a quaint old song, still
sung in out-of-the-way Provençal villages: a canticle in honour of
certain prophets or wise men dimly spoken of as

    “Les félibres de la Loi.”

No one knew precisely what the word designed--so much the greater its
charm, its suggestiveness! The name was adopted by acclamation; and
henceforth, at any rate, the meaning of Félibre is clear.


VI

We went the next day, in company with Mistral and his charming,
intelligent wife, to see the races at St. Remy. “Regardez nos
fillettes!” said the poet. “On dirait des statues Grecques.” A Greek
statue is severer in its beauty; but certainly the girls of St. Remy
might be the sisters of the statuettes of Tanagra: so dignified, so
graceful, do they appear in the beautiful costumes of Arles. They were
the great adornment of these mild provincial sports, as we watched them
come in troops from Maillane and Tarascon, from Avignon, from Arles, all
dressed in the plain-falling skirt, the fichu of pure fresh tulle, and
the long pointed shawl, or “Provençale,” which recalls the graceful garb
of the Venetian women. Sometimes the skirt is pale pink or apricot, with
a dove-coloured shawl, or green with a lilac shawl; but, as a rule, the
skirt and shawl alike are black, relieved only by the narrow muslin
apron, which reaches to the hem of the skirt before, and by the abundant
fulness of the white fichu across the breast. Every one who has been to
a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure which surmounts this
costume--the thick wavy black tresses, parted in the middle of the brow,
taken down either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised from
the nape of the neck high at the back of the head, coiled round there
and fixed under a tiny band of white lace, and a large bow or sash of
black ribbon. Few head-dresses are at once so irresistible and so
dignified, and none could be better suited to the regular features,
ample beauty, and melting eyes of the daughters of Provence.

We fell in love with St. Remy: we stayed there for a week, in the Hotel
du Cheval Blanc, where the long dark convent-like corridors and the
cypress-screens behind the house give one already, as it were, a waft of
Italy. St. Remy is a delightful little place. All its streets are
avenues of great zebra-trunked century-old plane-trees, garlanded in
April with quaint little hanging balls, or else of wychelms, gay with
pinkish-buff blossoms, and yet so gnarled and hollow that they might
almost be those famous elms which Sully planted about the towns of
France. “La Ville Verte” the people call it, and never was name better
chosen. Even as at Orange, the town has shrunk within its ancient
girdle, and has filled out its space with gardens, with

[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF BEAUCAIRE AT TARASCON]

orchards, with hay-meadows. The gardens of St. Remy are the fortune of
the place, and owe to their happy situation behind the range of the
Alpines an earlier harvest of flowers and fruit than elsewhere, even in
the sunny South. An acre of carnations of St. Remy is a fortune to a
man, as profitable as an acre of asparagus at Monteuil or early peas at
Plougastel. If the mountains behind us, so lovely in their lilac
bareness, were duly forested and covered to the crown with pine and
ilex, we could imagine no happier situation. But the hills of Provence
are as unthrifty as they are beautiful. They absorb and retain no
salutary moisture from the rare torrential rains of autumn, which dash
down their ravined sides, ruining and tearing the friable soil, with not
a kindly root to stay and store them. This reforesting of mountains is a
great question, nothing being more important to a climate than its
supply of woods and the distribution of its rains; the future of
agriculture depends on it, especially in Provence, where, even more than
elsewhere, the struggle for water is the struggle for life. In 1860, and
for some years after, much planting was done; but then, alas! there came
a slackening of zeal. Farmers everywhere think of the present rather
than the future, and a plantation remains unproductive for a score of
years; whereas these barren mountains serve as winter quarters to
endless herds of sheep, who browse their rocky perfumed sides. In the
year 1902 more than three hundred thousand sheep were pastured on the
territory of Arles. Flocks of three thousand and four thousand beasts
are common. In summer, when the native sheep are sent to feed upon the
high fields of the Alps, the shepherds of Algeria bring their flocks
across the sea to Arles; the patient Africans find sufficient pasturage
in the rare but succulent plants that defy the ardours of the summer sun
among the pebbles of Camargue and Crau, or on those rocky heights
which, arid though they be, prove not unprofitable to the farmer who
lets them out for hire. Talk to him of replanting! He fears to trouble a
certain source of gain, and, knowing the span of life, prefers a small
profit to-day to riches for to-morrow. But he sacrifices all the
countryside. A forest has no enemy so deadly as the shepherd. It is he
who burns the young wood, in order to have more grass; it is he who
leads the sheep among the tender saplings, whose juicy shoots are dear
to all the tribe of ovines, as the bird and the mouse to the cat, or the
poultry-yard to the fox. The sheep must disappear if woods are to grow.

And unless the woods are planted, the climate of Provence will year by
year turn harsher, dryer, more subject to the mistral. The delicate
Alpilles will be worn by the force of torrents to a range of hillocks;
the rivers will ruin the plains. From this, and more, the woods may
deliver us. When men think of their children rather than of
themselves--but when will that be?--the woods will be planted, and a
generation will grow up to call these sheltered and sunny fields a
Paradise. Even as it is, they are fertile and precocious in a rare
degree. In the roomy inn-garden we wondered at the luxuriance of the
spring, as we sat in the shadow of the blossoming guelder-rose bush, or
picked great trails of rose and syringa. We gathered our first dish of
strawberries on the 23rd of April. There are but two openings at St.
Remy--miller or market-gardener: the two prettiest trades, suitable to
this greenest, most pastoral of cities.

St. Remy is but gently raised above the plains; still low enough to
nestle among the white-flowered hawthorn hedges by the runnels bordered
with flowers. But, scarce two miles beyond, there rise the scarred,
fantastic, sun-baked crags of the Alpille range--the Alpines, in modern
guide-book parlance--a furthest prolongation of the Alps. These are true
southern hills, barren and elegant, grey, lilac, blue, pink even, or
purple against the sky; but never green. Walk thither along the upward
road till, at the mountain’s feet, you come to a round knoll of fine
turf, fringed with stone-pines, with, under every tree, a marble
sarcophagus for a seat. Hence the view is beautiful across the wide blue
valley to the snow-streaked pyramid of Mont Ventoux. But you will turn
your back upon the view, for placed on the middle of this grassy mound
is the pride of St. Remy: the Antiquities, sole relic of the prosperous
town of Glanum Livii. Nowhere in Provence have we seen so beautiful a
setting to monuments so perfect in their small proportions as the
Triumphal Arch and the Mausoleum. Time has much ruined, it is true, the
decorations of the Arch: the winged Victories are bruised and battered;
only the feet of one warrior remain, the head and fighting arm of
another; the chains of the slaves have fallen into pieces. But nothing
has marred the style, the grace, the purity of the exquisite outline,
Greek rather than Roman in its simple elegance. The Mausoleum is less
correct in style, but more picturesque, more suggestive. A flight of
steps leads to a sculptured pediment, from which there arises a crossed
double arch, itself supporting a small round temple, roofed, but
enclosed merely by a ring of columns, in the style of the Temple of
Fortune at Rome. Within these columns stand two tall figures, robed in
the ample toga of the Consul; they seem to lean forward as though they
gazed across the valley to some ancient battlefield. Standing so high,
and screened behind their wall of columns, the statues do not show the
trace of the modern restorer. The opinion of archæologists is still, I
believe, divided as to their identity, but the peasants have views of
their own on the matter. Some of them aver the figures to be the
portraits of those twin emperors, Julius and Cæsar; but most of them,
with some show of reason, consider that they commemorate the victories
of Caius Marius, the hero of all this countryside. The figures are
twain, so the peasants have doubled the General; Caius and Marius look
out towards the Fosses Mariennes. Others, aware of the individuality of
their hero, have solved the difficulty by giving him his wife as a
companion! One shepherd, however, offered me the best explanations.

“Those two figures,” said he, “represent the great Caius Marius and the
Prophetess Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and the patroness of our
Provence. They were, as you may say, a pair of friends.”

“Dear me!” said I. “I thought there was a hundred years or so between
them.”

“Maybe,” said the good man; “that well may be, madame; but, none the
less, they remained an excellent pair of friends.”

The facts of these good people were, as you see, a little incoherent.
Yet, indistinct and fallacious though it be, their vision of a distant
glorious past gives their spirit a horizon, their minds a culture, which
I have never met in the provinces of the North, where ancient history
begins with the French Revolution. Every ploughman, every shepherd, in
the kingdom of Arles is aware that their country was to Rome, two
thousand years ago, much what Nice and Cannes are to the Parisians of
to-day. Their inheritance of so ancient a civilization, their
contemplation of the vast and beautiful monuments of Latin triumph, have
given them a certain dignity and sense of importance which may
degenerate here and there into the noisy boastfulness of a Tartarin, but
which far more frequently remain within the limits of an honest proper
pride. Those whom I met, the peasants and shepherds at St. Remy and Les
Baux, had each a theory of his own concerning the great campaign of
Marius, and pointed me out--at varying quarters of the horizon--the line
of the retreat of the barbarians. If I sometimes was made to feel that,
from the height of their ancient glories, they looked down on me as on
one of that defeated horde, yet their attitude was always that of the
kindest, the most courteous superiority. They are citizens of Arles or
Avignon, as one was a citizen of Rome when the greatest honour was to
boast _Civis Romanus sum_.


VII

One day we drove across the plain to Tarascon, a cheerful little town
beside a yellow river, overshadowed by a great yellow castle, the
Château du Roi René, the painter-king. On the other bank of the river
rises the Castle of Beaucaire, and the two old fortresses, whose enmity
was once so cruel, glare at each other as harmlessly in our days as two
china dogs across a village mantelpiece. Tarascon possesses a fine old
church, whose porch would seem still finer were it not so near a
neighbour of St. Trophime at Arles. We descended into the crypt to pay
our reverence to the wonder-working tomb of St. Martha, sister of
Lazarus, who, as every one (south of the Loire) is well aware, was cast
ashore upon the coasts of Provence in company with the two holy Maries.
She founded the city of Marseilles, and is buried under the church at
Tarascon. As we picked our way underground we perceived in a dark recess
of the staircase a second tomb, unvisited of pilgrims, but far more
interesting to our eyes. A marble youth lies along the sarcophagus,
dead. It is Jean de Calabre, the son and heir of King René, an old
friend of ours, for we have followed him in many a Neapolitan campaign.
But after all he did not gain his crown of Naples, the brilliant young
pretender. He lies here, forgotten, in the mouldy vault of St. Martha.

When we emerged to the outer air from this underground sanctuary of
saint and hero, we remembered modern times, and asked our guide for the
latest news of M. Tartarin. She protested her ignorance, but with a
certain subdued irritation (or so we thought), as of one weary of a
_scie_ that has lost its edge. We were more fortunate, however, when we
asked for the Tarasque. She ran with us along a narrow street in great
impatience until we reached a large stable. The door swung open, and we
beheld a sort of huge long-tailed cardboard whale, green, with scarlet
scales stuck all over with yellow spikes, like the almonds in a plum
pudding. The creature has a half-human head with goggle eyes, a vulgar
good-natured smile, and a drooping black moustache, with a long
horsehair mane depending from its neck. It suggests a cavalry “sous-off”
who has in some way got mixed up with his charger.

The eponymic monster of Tarascon is no longer led along the streets in
glory once a year, accompanied by men and maidens, in commemoration of
the day when St. Martha tamed the dragon by a prayer, and led him along
in fraternal peace, tied in a leash of her slender neck ribbon. The
recent law against processions has stopped all that. ’Tis a pity, for
the monster is a pleasant, vivid, childish-looking monster, no more
terrible than a devil by Fra Angelico. He made us remember the horrible
Tarasque which is to be seen in Avignon Museum. This noble monster was
excavated under the foundations of an Early-Christian chapel in the
Church of Mondragon. He is a panther-like person; his fore-claws are
dug deep into two half-scalped human heads. A portion of a human arm
remains between his gruesome jaws. Flaxman himself never imagined a more
hideous devil. “Progress is not an illusion, after all!” we sighed, as
we looked at the amiable if vulgar Tarasque of Tarascon.


VIII

When people come to stay at St. Remy, it is nearly always in order to
make the excursion to Les Baux; a more desolate one cannot well be
imagined, nor one that places in stronger relief the contrast between
the sane and beautiful relics of antiquity and the misery, the squalor
of mediæval ruins. Who was the misguided man who first made it
fashionable to admire barren mountains and ruins, and other such dismal
monstrosities? I should like to quarter him to all eternity in a palace
at Les Baux.

The road thither quits the lovely flowery plain, to rise among arid
limestone mountains. Flocks of sheep are grazing there, but there are
more herbs than grass, and as the poor beasts climb ever in search of a
more succulent blade, they send out beneath their feet the exquisite
fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender and myrtle. On the steeper
scaurs, the pale mountain roses of the cystus are all a-flower, and shed
a spring-like beauty about the desolate scene.

It soon becomes more desolate. We wind higher and higher up the barren
flanks of the Alpilles. The wind-eaten crags of white friable stone defy
even the mountain herbs. It is melancholy cinder-grey lunar landscape.

This white stone is the sole harvest of these regions. As we advance we
find the mountain scarred and hacked into countless quarries. Here and
there, the great pale slabs are piled into a tomb-like dwelling for the
quarrymen. Far off, on the very crest of the mountain, we see, above all
this desolation, an orchard of almond-trees, the only thing that
betokens a human presence more happy than the slave-like labours of the
quarry. Behind these trees there rises, as it seems, an uttermost wall
of crags, yet more jagged, more desolate than the others. They are, as a
matter of fact, the ruins of churches and palaces, the residue of the
once princely city of Les Baux.

When at last we jog into the tiny _Place_ of the city, we find a squalid
village nestling in the centre of the former capital, like a rat in the
heart of a dead princess. About three or four hundred poor creatures
live here: God only knows what they find to live on! Slices of white
stone, I suppose, and almond-shells.

They are, at any rate, eager for pence and human society. The carriage
has not stopped before a guide pounces out upon us, and carries us up
through a steep unspeakable wilderness of dead houses, deserted these
three hundred years, and all falling most lamentably into dissolution.
There is a poor Protestant temple, with its elegant delicate
sixteenth-century carvings all in ruin. “Post tenebras Lux” is proudly
carved above the dilapidated portals. All these ruins, varying over some
two-and-twenty centuries, appear of the same age, the same dead-level of
abjection. The “baums” of the cave-dweller, their cupboards and
door-holes still perceptible, appear but little older than this or that
mediæval palace. Ah, the place is terribly changed since I came here
last with Jean Lefèvre, in 1382, to purchase for the Duke of Anjou the
rights of the Seigneurs des Baux to the Empire of the East!

Under the crag-like tower of the castle there is a windswept
mountain-top, whence you look down on the vast level of Camargue and
Crau. From these coast-like summits the sad-coloured salt-marsh appears
infinite; it is treeless, melancholy beyond words. Were these
spendthrift, sterile mountains planted with kindly woods; were yonder
brown morasses drained and irrigated--(and indeed this latter labour is
very fairly begun)--on what a different and happy scene might we look
down, in barely a score of years! That blue streak on the horizon is the
Mediterranean. There the three Maries landed, and began their inland
march. Their three effigies, carved by their own hands, are still
perceptible yonder, on a stone at the very foot of the mountain where we
stand. Apparently they were wise enough not to seek the inhospitable
summits of Les Baux.

There was one thing I should like to have seen in the dead city, but
when we were there the relic had departed to a barber’s shop at Aigues
Mortes. Some time ago, the landlord of the tavern at Les Baux, digging
in his garden, came on a slab which, being removed, exposed a mediæval
princess, still young and, to all appearance, living. A moment after,
she had crumbled into dust, all save her wonderful golden hair--yards of
it, crisp, silky, and shining--which filled the stone coffin with its
splendour. In this poetic treasure-trove the landlord saw an excellent
opportunity. He changed the name of his inn, which forthwith became The
Sign of the Golden Hair; and there, sure enough, on the parlour table,
in a coffin of glass and plush, lay the thousand-year-old tresses of the
dead princess. The curiosity attracted custom, and having made his
fortune, the landlord sold his tavern of Les Baux and retired to shave
the inhabitants of Aigues Mortes “at the sign of the Capello d’Or.”

The villagers of Les Baux spend most of their time in delving for
similar treasure. No one else has found a coffin full of golden hair;
but skeletons, coins of all periods, and armour, are every-day
occurrences. I made a mistake in thinking that these people lived off
freestone and almond-husks. They dine on Gaulish tibias, skulls of Roman
soldiers, dead cats of the Stone Period, and a miscellaneous assortment
of rusty iron. Not one of them but will sell you a human bone from a
desecrated sepulchre as a souvenir of your visit to Les Baux.


IX

Les Baux is on the way to Arles, and you cannot do better than push on
to that delicious city. Among our impressions of Provence, Orange gave
us an exquisite sense of ancient peace, of dignity not uncheerful in its
seemly ruin; and St. Remy, with its flowery paths, its lilac mountain
scaurs towering above the Roman arch and temple on the pine-fringed
knoll, has left in our memory as it were a perfume of poetry and grace.
But for a profound and melancholy beauty we saw no place like Arles. In
that tiny city every step calls up a new picture, an unforgettable
recollection. How many of them arise before me as I write! The lovely
ruined theatre, so perfect even in its abandonment, two columns still
supporting the fragment of an antique _fronton_; the great arena where
the bulls still fight on Sundays before an eager audience of stalwart
Provençal men and large-eyed women in the solemn dress of Arles; St.
Trophime, with its wonderfully living portal crowded with saints and
prophets, with enigmatic Tarasques and dragons, with strange cat-like
wild animals creeping stealthily about the basement. There is a poem of
Mistral’s, called the _Communion des Saints_, telling the adventure of a
little country

[Illustration: THE ALISCAMPS AT ARLES]

girl who, arriving too late at Arles to hear the mass at St. Trophime,
cried herself to sleep in the porch. When she awoke it was moonlight,
and lo! in order to console her, the carved saints came down out of the
portal and said the mass for her. They are so living, those saints, that
the fable seems the most natural thing in the world.

And the cloisters within, how melancholy in their peace! And then,
across the way, the Museum, with its unparalleled sarcophagi. The finest
was discovered--I think in 1890--in digging the new railway across the
Camargue. Never have I felt so strongly as in this Museum, as rich in
Early Christian as in Classic monuments, the difference between the
Pagan and the Christian conception of death. The Roman tombs are carved
all over with beautiful and cheerful images, some scene of daily life,
some vine-gathering or olive-harvest, perfectly human and natural, as
though they would have placed between the sealed eyes of the dead an
abiding memory of the pleasantest things on earth. The figures on the
Christian coffins have lost their early grace; but these large-headed,
large-handed, awkward saints and mourners have an intensity of
expression, a pathetic conviction in the reality of a Beyond, which we
have not seen before. The Roman mourners look back, the Christian look
forward; the vision of the one is all regret and beauty, the other is
exalted by an ardent and a yearning faith.

We have not yet done with the tombs of Arles. It was the first of May
when we walked through the Alyscamps, and the latest hawthorn bushes
were abloom about the Sacred Way. To tell the truth, we were
disappointed with the Alyscamps. The railway has come too near to these
Elysian fields, sadly narrowing their proportions. The most beautiful
sarcophagi are all in the Museum or in St. Trophime. The tombs no longer
chequer all the fields beyond, as when Dante wandered among them and
thought of Hell; no longer--

            “ad Arli ove ’l Rodano stagna ...
    Fanno i sepolcri tutto ’l loco varo.”

There is left but one long alley, borders with antique tombs, mostly
lidless, obviously empty, shaded by a fringe of plane trees which leads
to the ancient church of St. Honorat. This is a quaint, damp, melancholy
place, with the raised quire built over the crypt, as at San Miniato.
Its round, short pillars, five feet thick, wear an air of sturdy age.
Itself appears a tomb. There is a charm in this mouldering old
Romanesque church, with its illustrious perspective of the Alyscamps.
Yet for a last impression of Arles we would fain go a little further up
the hill, through the lovely Public Gardens to the Roman Theatre. Here
we will sit on the marble steps awhile, and gaze on the unchangeable
elegance of its proportions, serene in ruin, unabated of their dignity,
and no less beautiful in their decay.

Adieu, beautiful city! _Gallula Roma_ of the ancients! How different had
been the fate of all our western world if Constantine had realised his
dream, making of Arles the centre of the Roman empire!




HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY


I

During the Middle Ages the country was inhabited, much as it is to-day,
by three distinct classes of persons--the nobles, the yeomanry, and
peasants; classes distinct but capable of interfusion. Then as now many
a noble, impoverished by warfare or mismanagement, sold the fattest
acres of his lands to the wealthy merchant from the county town.[3] Then
as now many a frugal shepherd laid by a penny here, a farthing there,
till, with the trifling profits of his wage, he bought a plot of ground,
a barn, a cabin; continuing meanwhile his earlier service; until his
repeated and accumulated savings, enriched by the harvests of his rood
of land, were sufficient to purchase a little farm.[4] Then as now the
son of many such a peasant farmer, migrating to the town, became a
wealthy merchant,[5] a man who lived in greater luxury and spent with
greater profusion than the nobles, and who, on account of the services
he could render them, in an age conspicuous for its lack of ready money,
mixed with them almost on equal terms. Finally, in those, as in these
days, the King knighted[6] many and many an eminent citizen, endowed him
with an escutcheon, and married his sons into the oldest families of
France. Thus the burgher class was a sort of omnibus by which the serf
jolted on through several generations, towards the peerage; only, the
journey being long, and demanding not merely talent and perseverance,
but rare qualities of endurance, it was undertaken with success only by
exceptional persons.

These exceptional persons are beyond the narrow limits of this paper:
some other time, perhaps, we may examine the interesting question of the
transition from class to class at the end of the Middle Ages; but to-day
our business is with the humbler rural folk, the yeoman farmer, the
tenant on the estate, the day labourer. What were the wages they earned
and the pence they saved? What was the food they ate and the raiment
they wore? The schools they sent their children to, and the drugs they
brewed for themselves or bought in time of sickness? In examining this,
we examine the sum of continuous inglorious effort which, in a time of
unexampled disaster, helped France to bear up against an untoward fate,
and sent her down to future ages, prosperous and free.

The yeoman farmer, or vavassour, was the aristocrat of his condition;
his ancestors were freemen, and he himself, though less than noble, had
certain of a noble’s privileges: he was free to quit or sell his estates
at will, free to marry whom he would; there were even vavassours who
held their land by military service. But as a class they paid a rent to
their lord, were constrained to till a portion of his lands, and to
furnish him yearly with a draught-horse for his stable; differing in
this from the noble, who held his lands by faith, by homage, and by
military service, paid no rent, and owed no _corvée_. Nevertheless a
wealthy vavassour was, as we should say, a country gentleman of the
humbler sort: a “half-sir,” as they say in Ireland. In time of peace he
lived with a certain state and order; in time of war he carried a lance
and rode to battle on horseback, with his men behind him. There were, of
course, poor vavassours, who paid less rent and performed a more
considerable _corvée_, and (for the limits of class were little less
elastic then than now) if some among the yeoman-farmers rose almost to
equality with the noble, there were also unthrifty and ruined
vavassours[7] who were merely the equals of the saving cottager or the
tenant on the estate.

The vavassour, or yeoman, with the colon or rich farmer, formed an upper
class among the rural population. Immediately below them came the
tenants-on-the-estate, men who were not wholly free, who might not, for
instance, sell their lands or marry without the express permission of
their feudal lord, and who, should their seigneur be taken in battle,
might be taxed to the verge of ruin in order to raise his ransom. These
men, in fact, were serfs; but there were degrees in servage. In the
meaning that we attach to the word, servage was extinct by the end of
the fourteenth century. There was no acknowledged exercise of arbitrary
power. The relations of the peasant to the lord of the manor were as
well defined as those of the lord himself towards his feudal suzerain.
In theory, the peasant might not sell his lands or marry without leave;
but, in practice, this meant merely that he paid his landlord a slight
tax on these occasions, even as we pay the death-dues to the State on
coming into an inheritance. Certainly he was, in theory, “_taillable et
corvéable à volonté_;” but these dues and _corvées_ were almost
invariable; they were attached rather to the land than to the lessee. A
certain property carried with it a certain tax and _corvée_, let who
would be the tenant. That is to say, that in an age when ready money was
locked up in the hands of the merchants or in the excommunicated
treasury of the Jews, rent was paid, not only in cash, but also in kind
and in labour. For instance, a farmer renting an estate worth £20
a-year, would agree to pay £5 in cash, £10 in corn and poultry, and the
remaining £5 in a certain number of days’ labour spent in performing
certain tasks, always rigorously determined beforehand. These were the
_corvée_. It was left for later centuries to abuse a custom which, in
its origin, was at least as convenient to the tenant as to the
proprietor of the estate. The tenant on the estate--serf as he was, and
object of our hereditary pity--occupied, in fact, a situation not unlike
that which Mr. Chamberlain once wished to assure to every cottager in
his kingdom. In Normandy the cottage and outhouses of the tenant covered
a square of eighty feet, the paddock and garden adjoining measured two
Norman acres--nearly six acres of to-day. These dimensions appear to
have been invariable, but the amount of income derived from the farm
varied naturally with the quality of the soil and the character of the
tenant. A rich tenant-farmer was the equal of an unthrifty yeoman. Nor
was it uncommon for the same person to be a tenant-farmer in the country
and a provision-merchant in the market-town, so that the tenants
furnished many thriving and adventurous recruits to the burgher class.
They were often men of means, living very simply, and amassing year by
year the greater part of the profits of their farm. The names of many
among them are registered as the donators of the abbeys and churches of
their countryside. Below this solid, thriving, and generous class, whose
serfdom in the fourteenth century was merely the matter of a
traditionary tax or two, came the real children of the soil, the
_peasants_, _villains_, or _rustics_, renters of a tiny holding, for
which they paid with little money and much service; and, lower still,
the _cottars_, or _labourers_, holders of a mere hut and patch of
garden--men who seldom, if ever, handled coin, who paid for their bread
with the sweat of their brow, and for whom the heaviest _corvées_ were
reserved.

I have never yet met in mediæval documents with anything resembling the
refined and fantastic _corvées_ of the eighteenth century: no mediæval
peasants that I know of were stationed by the moat all night to beat the
water with their flails and keep the frogs from croaking. The first and
most essential _corvée_ of the fourteenth century--which cottars,
tenants, yeomen, were all alike compelled to perform in due degree--was
the service of transport.

We can scarcely realize the difficulties of agriculture in an age when
each countryside was constrained to live almost exclusively upon its own
resources. The roads were so few, so bad, and so unsafe, that rarely any
product, however unnecessary in its immediate district, and however
urgently needed a hundred miles away, could be conveyed to the best
market. Thus, while more than half of Normandy was under forest, the
monks on the marshes of the Norman Cotentin had to cook their meals and
warm their chill refectories in winter-time by a brief blaze of straw
and cow-dung. Corn, it is true, when thrashed and ground, was sent from
place to place; but bulkier crops, such as fodder, hay, and wood, were
rarely carried any distance. When the hay harvest was ended, the farmer
would calculate how many head of cattle he could provide for through the
winter months, and at Martinmas he killed for salting as many as
exceeded his means of sustenance. There was, moreover, a certain amount
of carrying indispensable on every great estate: such as the transport
of manure and marl and lime, for dressing the soil; the carrying of the
master’s corn and wine to and from the winepress and the mill; and
especially the carting from the forest of the wood necessary for fuel
and repairs. For this first and typical _corvée_, the yeoman gave a
draught-horse, the tenant lent his team and cart, the cottar furnished
the strength of his thews and sinews. But this, like every other form of
_corvée_, might always be transmuted into a sum of money. For the
_corvée_, as we have said already, was merely one of the forms of rent.
With the service of transport, the yeoman’s duties usually ended. Yet he
sometimes, and the tenant-farmer always, was responsible for the tilling
of a certain specified number of his master’s acres. The full _corvée_,
exacted of rustics and cottars, comprised not only the service of
carrying and ploughing, but the duties of cleaning out the manorial
stables and outhouses, of digging for marl and lime, of gathering manure
for the fields, of cutting thatch for the roof, besides thrashing the
corn, making the hay, cleaning the moat, washing and shearing the sheep,
and helping in the vintage. It must be remembered that, although men on
_corvée_ received no pay, they were very amply fed throughout the term
of their labours. We may therefore look upon the cottar--the man who
gave no money, but so many days a week in all seasons to his master--as
having signed a contract to work a certain portion of his landlord’s
estate in return for the usage of a smaller portion of that same estate.
He received as payment for his service, and in addition to his plot of
ground, a house to cover him, tools to work with, and his full keep for
every day spent about his master’s business. Despite all abuses, the
Normandy of the fourteenth century was, after all, a place in which a
humble honest man might earn his bread, lay by thriftily, watch the
market, purchase wisely, and rise from class to class much as he may
to-day.


II

France in the Middle Ages, and even in the earlier half of the
fourteenth century, was still a vast agglomeration of heterogeneous
races, each with different customs and different traditions. Aquitaine
was as English as Surrey was French; Brittany was still a separate and
generally an inimical country; Burgundy, Provence, and even Périgord,
were petty sovereignties independent of the crown of France. These
different districts had each their different manner of letting land and
providing for its tillage.

But, in almost all of them, French agriculture was already remarkable;
far superior, for instance, to that of our own England, notwithstanding
her temperate winters and rich soil. The land, ploughed four times a
year in the south of France,[8] was ploughed only once in England,[9]
and there is no record of any harrowing or rolling. The crops chiefly
grown in England were wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and vetches;
hemp, so abundant a crop in France, was less frequently harvested. The
English kitchen-garden was then, as now, singularly deficient. We, who
to-day, as a rule, possess neither chicory, cardoon, scarole, and hardly
any sorrel in our borders, who seldom stew or stuff a cucumber, who are
unaware what excellent soup may be made from a cabbage with a little
butter, or even from the water in which green peas have been boiled,--we
were still poorer in our invention during the Middle Ages; though, at
least, in those days our dinners were not saddened and soddened by the
boiled potato. “Onions, nettles, mustard, leeks, and peas were the only
esculent vegetables,” according to Mr. Thorold Rogers. “We probably also
possessed cabbage, but I have never found either seed or plants
quoted.”[10]

Meanwhile, across the Channel, brussels-sprouts (or _pommes-de-choux_),
three other kinds of cabbage, wintergreens, spinach and sorrel,
beetroot, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beans and peas, watercress,
lettuce and even the larger kind known as Romaine (introduced into
France from Avignon by Bureau de la Rivière), sweet basil, with every
kind of herb, no less than cucumbers, garlic, leeks and onions, rhubarb
and fennel, pumpkins, borage, raddish, were in daily and abundant
cultivation. France in those days had even dishes of which she has lost
the trick to-day, such as violet leaves, cooked like spinach or served
as a salad, the green ears of wheat boiled with melted butter, and the
young burgeons of the vine, dressed with a _sauce piquante_; additions
to the table of which, for some reason, we have disused the habit.[11]

The fruit-garden in England was as behindhand as the kitchen-garden. “We
read of no plums, except once of damsons.” Fancy, choosing damsons! We
had not yet invented our famous William pear, which we have sent over to
France, and which to-day, in the gardens of Touraine, rivals the more
ancient Bon Chrétien, already common there, and celebrated in the
fourteenth century. But, across the Channel, the peaches of Anjou, the
plums of Orleans, the figs of Poitiers, the French grapes and almonds,
had nothing to fear from any competition. As far north as Caen and
Dieppe, apples and pears of many sorts, grapes (grown for dessert on a
trellis in a sheltered place), plums (purple and golden), cherries,
gooseberries, green figs, almonds, and walnuts were commonly sold in the
public market (the town’s headsman had a right to a handful out of every
basket), while peaches and raspberries, though rarer, ripened in private
gardens. Apples were about equally abundant in France and in the kingdom
of King Edward; and we may suppose that the wild fruits of the cherry
and strawberry, domesticated in every French _potager_, could not have
been quite utterly unknown in England.

       *       *       *       *       *

If the English, then as now, were little acquainted with the charm and
cheapness of a vegetable diet, then as now their meat was better and
less expensive than in France; and English wool was quite unrivalled.
The chief wealth of the Anglo-Saxon farmer grew on the curly backs of
his flock. Wool from the fat meadows of England was exported in exchange
for wine from the dry and sunny slopes of France. Another national
industry had begun to develop: English hops and English beer were
already widely known, and compensated the acidity of English wine. The
vine, grown round many a monastery in the south of our island, never
received--and, owing to our watery sunshine, never could receive--any
extensive culture. It is most unlikely, in an age when the wines of
Gascony and English Bordeaux were continually introduced into the mother
country, that English wine was at any time grown for drinking. It was
probably cultivated for the service of the Mass, in small quantities
round every abbey, as in Normandy. The accidents of warfare might
intercept the vessels that brought the wines of Gascony to English
shores; and thus, but for the humble vineyards of Kent and Middlesex, an
unimportant incident of the Hundred Years’ War might practically, at any
moment, have placed the English people under ban of excommunication.


III

We have seen that in Normandy, as in England, the farmer paid his
landlord partly in money and partly in labour; but more in money and in
labour than in kind. In the south of France the system was somewhat
different; the tenant paid his proprietor chiefly in the produce of the
land. Owing to the kindness of Madame Marcel Dieulafoy I have been able
to look through several leases of farms near Toulouse at the present
time; and I have been interested, and even surprised, to see how little
the leases of the farms round Montauban, in 1350, published by M.
Forestier in the Accounts of the Brothers Bonis, differ from the actual
leases in use to-day for farms let _en métayage_ in the south of France.

The mediæval farmer in Aquitaine and Gascony was simply a partner of the
proprietor, for the exploitation of his lands and stock--a ‘bouman,’ as
I believe they still say in Scotland. The one furnished the land, the
cattle, and even the implements, as well as the seed for the first
sowing. The other supplied his time, his labour, the keep of cattle, and
the repair of instruments. The increase was generally divided equally
between the two partners, save in the case of wheat and wine, of which
the landlord usually reserved himself a larger share. This is the system
of _métayage_ still in use in the south of France to-day. Here is a
lease for the year 1351, drawn up between the merchant Bonis, of
Montauban, and two of his “gasaillers,” or farmers.

“Montauban.

                                                     2nd October, 1351.

     “The Second October, 1351, we agreed for the lease with R. Picard
     and Rochelle, our Gasaillers. And we agreed that I shall sow or
     give the seed. We shall share the harvest in the field _au tiers et
     à la moitie_ [a third for wheat and half for other grains], the
     largest half being mine. The meadows and other lands are to remain
     as before: _i.e._ Picard and Rochelle are to pay me an annual rent
     of two livres [let us say, £8 sterling].”

     In another lease, for the year 1353, the farmer takes the arable
     land and cedes half its produce; but for the house, the garden, and
     as much meadow-land as a man would take two days to mow, he pays a
     yearly rental in money of forty sols, and a quit-rent of ten brace
     of capons. The same leases give us particulars as to the wages of
     farm-servants in the south of France. In 1358 a cowherd received
     nine livres a year and a pair of shoes. Now, historians are pretty
     generally agreed that the fourteenth-century livre represents about
     a hundred francs of our money. At this valuation, our Gascon
     neatherd received the equivalent of nine hundred francs in modern
     currency: that is to say, £36. A swineherd was paid four livres a
     year and his shoes; a shepherd, six livres a year (£24) and his
     shoes; an old woman-servant, two livres a year (about £8), her
     shoes and a warm petticoat; for in those days, as in these, the
     servants on a Gascon farm were housed and fed at the expense of the
     farmer. Thus the rate of rustic wages was sensibly higher than it
     is to-day, when twenty pounds a year are considered excellent wages
     for a labourer on a farm. It is true that a modern shepherd or a
     head-cowboy has certain perquisites which raise his wage to very
     nearly the amount paid in the fourteenth century. But we cannot
     talk of progress.

     There were several ways of hiring stock. On most farms the cattle
     were supplied by the landlord, the tenant being bound, at the
     expiry of his lease, to restore the flock and herds in the same
     condition as he found them. They were also let out on hire.
     Rochelle, the farmer of Bonis, hires from his landlord a pair of
     oxen worth twelve livres; for the use of them he pays every year a
     rent of three septiers of wheat (about 650 litres), but for every
     septier of wheat he is accounted to have acquired a right to
     one-twelfth part of the cattle, so that at the end of four years
     the team was to become the property of Rochelle. This system (not
     unlike the three years’ hire system, by which many people of the
     modern middle class acquire their more expensive furniture) was
     very widely spread throughout the southern provinces.

     The ploughs, carts, reaping-hooks, rakes, flails, scythes, spades,
     shovels, winepresses, benches, taps, and barrels, etc., necessary
     on every estate, were let with the land upon a repairing lease.

The Hundred Years’ War, with its train of ruin and depopulation,
introduced the disastrous fashion of mortgaging the cattle on a farm.
The unhappy tenant, at his wits’ end for ready money to pay the taxes
and to defray the expenses of his farm, sold his herds to some farmer a
little less wretched than himself, with the proviso that, for a
stipulated number of years, he was to keep on using the cattle with a
right to half their produce. Thus one Colin Bois du Mesnil-Patri, near
Caen, sells to Guillaume le Paumier, of St. Pierre, nine and twenty
sheep, two red cows, two calves, a two-year-old steer, and a mare for
the trifling sum of eight livres fifteen sols (say £35), reserving the
use of them and half their produce during the three years next
ensuing,[12] after which time the entire stock was to become the
property of the buyer. In three years, therefore, such unwary farmers
would find themselves deprived of the only manner in which they could
work their land; it was certain ruin unless, in the breathing-space
assured them by the mortgage, some unusual harvest or happy turn of
their affairs should enable them to lay aside a sum sufficient to stock
the farm afresh.

Sheep in those days cost, as a rule, ten sols per head (say £2), alive
and unshorn,[13] though when dead and skinned a sheep could be had for a
tenth the price.[14] (At the present time in Gascony the normal price
for a live sheep is two and thirty francs.) A fourteenth-century ox cost
from two to six livres, a cow about three livres (£12). Pigs were dear,
valued each between two and three livres, a price apparently in excess
of modern values. The horse was less esteemed than the ox for
agricultural purposes; he cost as much, or more, to buy, and a great
deal more to keep; you could not eat him, he has no horns, and his skin
was far less valuable as hide. Still, the horse was indispensable to
travel. We give a list of the prices that he fetched in the Comté d’Eu
between 1382 and 1388:--

                                     Livres. Sols. Deniers.
1 horse.                               2      10      0
1 hackney.                             2      10      0
1 tall grey horse                      1      10      0
The horse called Rage-en-tête          2      10      0
The roan hackney.                      2      10      0[15]

And in Picardy, in 1389--

                                     Livres. Sols. Deniers
A bay hackney                          1      10      0
A black horse                          7       0      0
A grey nag                             5       0      0
A pair of greys                       10       0      0[16]

The inventories published in the _Accounts of Bonis_ show us that, on a
small farm, at any rate, a pair of oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs
and a sow, a good deal of poultry, and a swarm of bees were usually
kept. (In my chapter on Touraine, you will see that this is about the
stock of a similar holding to-day.) We cannot estimate the price of
these animals at less than twenty livres; so that few small landowners
could hope to stock their farm out of their savings. Therefore, in
districts where the hire-and-purchase system did not obtain, it was
customary for the large farmer to let out his beasts to the poorer one;
the oxen at a rate of from five to six sols per year, the sheep at about
one sol per annum and per head; the milk and the young belonging to the
tenant.


IV

As a rule, then as now, the person who made the largest profit on his
land was the very small landowner. Many circumstances combined to favour
him in the end of the Middle Ages. The cost of labour was high; he with
his family could run the farm without paid assistance. The raising of
cattle is nearly always more profitable than the growing of crops, and
the man with little land might yet possess considerable herds. A very
slight tax, paid either in labour or in kind to the lord of the manor,
secured him the right to pasture his cattle on the wide grassy borders
of the lanes and in the interminable forests that still covered half of
France; the sheep were driven to pasture in the salt-marshes, one in
every flock being yielded, as a sort of tithe or rent, to the owner of
the land; while in winter-time the right of pasture in stubble or
aftermath was common to all the cattle of a commune. The tenant who
owned all these flocks of swine and sheep, which fattened on the acorns
and grasses of the manor, had probably round his humble cabin nothing
more than a few acres of harvest-land for his own use. He possessed
neither draught oxen nor horses for ploughing, but paid one of his
wealthier neighbours to perform this service. Over and over again we
find the records of similar transactions; the price given varying
naturally according to the extent and quality of the fields to be
furrowed.[17]

At harvest-time, then as now, the peasant farmer could engage a man by
the day to help him in the stress of work; the labourer usually received
his meals and about one sol per day,[18]--say five francs--which is much
what he would receive at the present time.

We have now a fair idea of the expenses of farming. The profits then as
now were mainly the sale of wool and hides, of beasts, of corn, of wine
or cider. The price of these articles, due proportion being guarded, has
not varied in any surprising fashion. The average price of corn (which
in the terrible years that followed Poitiers rose to thirty sols) was
fifteen sols the septier, let us say thirty shillings the hectolitre;
owing to the quantity of foreign corn imported, it does not fetch more
than half as much to-day, but on the other hand, owing to our
improvement in agriculture, an acre nowadays yields twice as large a
harvest, so that the profit to the farmer is about the same. The
commonest _vin ordinaire_ appears to have been worth thirty-two deniers
the septier--a little more than a halfpenny the litre; but the wine
usually served in country taverns cost four deniers the pint[19] (about
1_s._ 3_d._ the bottle, shall we say)--which is more than a “Gladstone
claret” commands in France to-day. (That used in our kitchen, the common
household wine of France in 1903, costs, if bought by the barrel, a
little more than fourpence a litre; but were it not for the extravagant
tax paid to the State, it should cost no more than two-pence, at most.)
To return to our fourteenth century: In 1371 a butcher at Evreux values
two small oxen at four livres five sols; while a large ox of Tallevaude,
in 1383, is worth six livres--about four and twenty pounds--which is
just five pounds less than the average price given by French country
butchers for a fine full-grown beast to-day.

The houses of the farmers and the country people differed (then as now)
according to their rank and prosperity, and also according to the
district they inhabited. The yeoman farmer, and even the well-to-do
husbandman, dwelt in a solid house of brick or stone, tiled or slated,
with a paved yard separating it from the barns, the outhouses, the
dairy, and cattle-pens. The farm-house--which, in England, was always
constructed with a southern aspect--as invariably faced the east in
Aquitaine, while to the rear, well open to the west, was a long tiled
verandah, where, in winter afternoons, the hemp-picking, the
wool-carding, the threshing, &c., was done.[20] Within, the vast kitchen
glowed in the light of the fire--almost as unextinguishable as the
vestal virgin’s; peat, coal, and wood were each abundantly employed; and
for a trifling rent, generally paid in kind or labour, the lord of the
manor would permit the farmers on his land to cut their turfs from his
bog, or their boughs from his forest. Fuel was not only actually, but
relatively cheaper in the Middle Ages than to-day; for the bogs were not
drained in those days, the forests covered great expanses, and the cost
of carriage made it almost impossible to transport their produce. In
nearly every part of France and England the supply of fuel was in excess
of the demand.

This hospitable fire flared up a chimney proportioned to its size,
lighting the huge brick oven, the iron fire-dogs, the bellows, shovel,
gridiron, ladles, cauldrons, saucepans, mortar, tin pails, and other
utensils that stood on the brackets of the hearth; and irradiating the
brass and copper pots, the metal candlesticks, the lamp, the lantern,
the not unfrequent silver beaker, and the glass drinking-cups, that were
ranged on the chests and cupboards round the walls.[21] Near this fire
stood a high-backed settle, the master’s ingle corner; and under the
great mantel of the chimney narrower benches were set in the brick.
Within easy reach of the hearth, a deep oak chest held the logs for
burning. It was generally matched by a handsome wedding-chest with
carved or painted front, long enough to contain a grown person
full-length (as the readers of _Ginevra_ will mournfully remember), but
more usually filled, it must be admitted, with the best clothes, the
trinkets, and the savings of the household. The _Registers of the
Châtelet_ record no crime so common as the breaking open of such
wedding-chests; and it is surprising how many clasps or jewels, girdles
of pearls, golden head-dresses and rings, and purses full of gold, were
stolen from quite humble households. Our forefathers lived in times when
the letting out of money at interest was insecure and considered a
deadly sin, so they invested their capital in cups or trinkets of
precious metal, pretty to look at, easy to hide, and readily converted
into cash when necessity demanded a sacrifice.

The windows of this great kitchen were almost always small and rarely
glazed: conceive it as a great stone cavern lit up by an undying fire
that played on glittering surfaces. The light came chiefly from the
hearth, or from the home-made rushlights of the north, the flaring
pine-torches of the south, which lit the spinning wives and maidens,
when at close of day they clustered round the fire. In the daytime the
kitchen was a dusky place, as indeed it is still in most French country
places, where its aspect has singularly little altered. Sometimes the
only aperture, besides the door and chimney, was such a small square
window as may be seen to-day in the cottages of Savoy, pasted over with
a piece of oiled linen, impervious to the air. Often a heavy shutter,
made of one slab of polished oak, protected a small uncovered lattice,
shutting with a spring. These houses, so hygienically built to face the
rising or the mid-day sun, could receive scarce a ray of its purifying
light. Doubtless the vast chimney and the day-long fire sufficed to
ventilate their dark recesses.

In one of the deepest of these recesses, well out of the way, was
placed the bed--a bed such as we can barely imagine, a family
four-poster! Here reposed the father and the mother, several of the
children, and--(readers of the _Heptameron_ will remember this striking
custom, which continued into the sixteenth century)--and the stranger
within their gates.[22] A share of this ample couch was considered a
special honour offered to a guest of note. The bed, if little private,
was generally comfortable. The invoice of a day-labourer’s widow, taken
at Montauban in 1345,[23] proves her to possess two feather-beds, with
pillows, fifteen linen sheets, four striped yellow counterpanes. In much
poorer households the bed was sometimes stuffed with straw,[24] but
nearly every mention we have of the bedding of the time proves it to
have been no less ample, comfortable (nor, indeed, less cleanly) than in
country places at the present day. In this respect the French were, and
are to-day, far before the English, whom Mr. Thorold Rogers shows us
sleeping on a rude and sheetless bed, covered by night with the garments
in daily wear.[25]

Such was the house-place of the well-to-do: one room, but well furnished
and spacious. Yet in 1417, Petit Pas and Isabel his wife, labourers of
Vaux (Oise), have two rooms in their “ostel” (our Cantal _ostiau_), a
“foyer” and a “chambre” (a but and a ben, as we might say), separated by
an earthen wall. The rich yeoman was more amply lodged; and the
manor-house contained, as a rule, three rooms: the hall, the dormitory,
and the parlour.[26] But the cottars dwelt in far humbler habitations.
The small thatched cabins of Normandy were replaced in the centre of
France by mere huts, generally built of plastered wattle, but sometimes
no more than a rude lattice, of which the interstices were bunged with
straw or hay; such a refuge as Nicolette built for herself in the
forest, weaving it of boughs in their green leaves; such as to-day the
summering shepherds construct, in an hour or two, on any down. Three
such huts--one for the peasant, one for his cattle, one for his
crops--stood round a paven yard.[27] The door of the hut in which the
cottar lived with his family was divided laterally at about six feet
from the ground, so that, while the lower part was closed, the upper
door or shutter might remain open to admit the air and let out the
smoke. For in these cabins there was frequently no other window. There
was often no chimney, save a hole in the roof. The food was cooked over
a brazier of charcoal, a _scaldino_, such as the poor people use to-day
in Italy; but owing to the rising of the fumes, save in very windy
weather, there was little smoke.

The people who lived so simply had better tools and more numerous
implements than we suppose. Most countrymen possessed a ladder, a
hand-mill, an axe, a crowbar, nails, a gimlet, hedge-clippers, a
branding iron, a wheelbarrow, and often a light cart, a plough, harness,
reaping-hooks, scythes, a hoe, spade, rake, flail, sieve, bushel, knife,
hammer, a long ferruled staff, a bow; many owned a lance, and some a
sword and buckler.[28] The Gascon labourer’s widow already mentioned
possessed a corn-mill, a tin washtub, a metal warming-pan, two brass
water-jugs, two pint pots, a metal bowl, two metal pots, four bottles,
a cauldron, a pestle and mortar, a salt-box, a pail, two iron tripods, a
copper box, two large chests, a cupboard, a box, four trestle-tables, a
bench, a carpenter’s bench and tools, two baking-tubs, one
kneading-trough, two corn-chests, and a large table, besides two axes,
four lances, a crossbow, a scythe, and other arms and tools. We doubt if
she would be better off to-day. The inventory of a farmer’s stock of the
same date and place (Montauban, 1345) contains four kneading-troughs, a
large funnel, one winepress with screws, four tuns, eight casks, three
barrels, and two kegs; a lead alembic for distilling, a cauldron, two
metal water-jugs, cooking utensils; two wool-cards, three carding-combs
for hemp, two spades, two flails, three reaping-hooks, one scythe, one
crossbar, two carpenters’ benches and tools, one shovel, two iron goads;
a cart and harness; two oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs, two sows,
and a swarm of bees. Probably many a squatter’s ranch is little better
stocked.


V

The food of country people in the fourteenth century was little
different to that they use to-day, save that potatoes and buckwheat (so
frequent in French rural diet) were then conspicuous by their absence.
Then, as now, their meat was chiefly pork, in all its forms of bacon,
ham, brawn, or blood-pudding; and pork was relatively little cheaper
than it is in many a remote and rural place to-day. Butter, cheese, eggs
were very plentiful; herrings were an article of almost daily diet (they
cost a sol the hundred, about a halfpenny apiece), and in the north of
France people consumed freely a kind of salted whale called _craspois_,
a truly Viking dish, of which the popularity has wholly vanished.[29]
In Normandy pea-soup was then, as now, a favourite food.[30] Wine, beer,
and mead were drunk by all classes. In 1392, a homeless pin-maker on the
tramp breakfasts off wine and fish;[31] workmen out of employment dine
at the village inn off bread, meat, and red wine at fourpence the
pint.[32] In the same year the provisions left in the house of the wife
of the Duke of Bourbon’s minstrel were: bacon to the value of four sous
or shillings, six large loaves of bread, a great pot full of green peas,
two penn’orth of onions, and a shilling’s worth of salt.[33] But the
best criterion we get of the daily food of the rural population is the
record preserved in the accounts of manors and monasteries of the
dinners afforded to labourers on _corvée_, or, doled out day by day in
return for some bounden service. Thus, the smith of the monastery of
Jumièges received in return for his occasional services a daily ration
of two small loaves, a measure of wine of medium quality, and either six
eggs, four herrings, or some equivalent dish.[34] A vintager of St.
Ouen, on _corvée_, was supplied every day with two rolls and a mess of
peas and bacon with salt.[35] A tenant of the monks of Bayeux, during
his _corvée_, was entitled to a daily meal of a white loaf, a brown
loaf, five eggs, or three herrings, with a gallon of beer.[H] The monks
of Montebourg gave each of their men a loaf, a mess of pea-soup, three
eggs, and the quarter of a cheese, or, if they chose, six eggs, and no
cheese; on fast days they made shift with three herrings and some nuts:
they washed down this ample meal with as much beer as they chose to
drink.[36] A tenant of the monks of St. Ouen received, in return for his
_corvée_, not only bread and wine, pea-soup and bacon, but fresh or salt
beef and poultry. All this is in Normandy. In Anjou, the men on _corvée_
dine more sparely off wine and bread and garlic; but the carpenters on a
farm receive in addition to a daily wage of one sol eight deniers, five
penn’orth of meat per person; the hedgers and ditchers also dine off
bread and meat.[37] In almost every one of the numerous records that we
have of the daily fare of the labouring class in fourteenth-century
France, we find a dish of eggs, a mess of peas and bacon, half a
chicken, a few herrings, or a generous slice of meat, added to the
modern labourer’s too scanty nuncheon of bread and cheese and beer.

Our rural ancestors of every class went well and warmly clad. The farm
labourers of the fourteenth century wore better garments than our
ploughmen use to-day. Men of every class appear to have possessed linen
shirts and linen drawers, hose of strong cloth, and leather shoes; a
coat of warm russet or fustian, an ample cloak resembling the _Limousin_
of Auvergne, or Tuscan _Ferraiuolo_, and (sometimes attached to this
garment, sometimes separate) a long-tailed hood of cloth. Masons,
labourers, workmen of every class, completed this costume by a pair of
gloves: London gloves were held in high esteem. Bonis, the merchant of
Montauban, sold them to his country clients at seven sols the dozen.

       *       *       *       *       *

The women were as sensible in their attire. They all wore a long chemise
of linen, and over this a garment called a doublet, in form resembling
the linen bodice sewn to a white petticoat, which is still used in
dressing little girls. The wedding doublet of the butcher’s daughter of
Montauban took about five yards of fine white linen of Paris, costing
fifteen sols the ell--a measure which exceeded the modern metre by about
two nails. The butcher was evidently a man of means; for we find his
wife ordering some doublets for herself at £3 10_s._ apiece, while a
neighbouring noble’s wife spends not quite half as much on those
selected for her wardrobe. The wife of another burgher chooses three and
twenty doublets, delicate in quality and of a vermeil colour. Over this
garment the women of the fourteenth century put a tight long bodice of
strong cloth, to which they attached, by hooks or lacets, a pair of
tight long sleeves, generally of some costly material, silk being used
on great occasions even by the poorer classes. Over this, again, they
slipped a very long dress, touching the ground on all sides, tight in
the bodice, but sleeveless, or with loose hanging sleeves; it was
generally much trimmed with silk and braid. A farm-servant buys a piece
of red silk to trim her gonella, another chooses one of blue cloth worth
one livre: the simplest that we find, which is made of a coarse pale
cloth called blanket, comes, with the trimmings, to nearly fourteen
sols. The gown was surmounted by a heavy girdle, richly ornamented, from
which the purse and keys of the house-wife dangled. Out-of-doors a long
draped mantle, trimmed to match the gonella, was usually worn.

The women of the later fourteenth century were fastidious in dressing
their hair. We all know the _hennin_, the tall slender sugar-loaf of
buckram, from which floated a gauzy veil. The peasants naturally did not
wear this inconvenient and romantic head-dress. They braided their hair
with ribbons and galoons intertwined in every plait. A woman with long
hair would use about seven yards of ribbon; over this she placed a
strong net of silk or thread; the whole was enveloped in a veil or
mantilla of thin silk, the favourite ornament of country-women, and
frequently given as a wedding-present. A very handsome veil of German
silk would cost as much as seventeen sols; a commoner one, of good
Aleppo silk, from five to ten sols; still a mantilla quite presentable
in appearance, of a rougher silk, could be had as low as three sols (we
may suppose about twelve shillings of our money). Almost every peasant
in well-to-do circumstances afforded his wife and daughter this piece of
elegance, probably only worn on great occasions. The artisans, small
farmers, and farm servants of the fourteenth century were less
economical in ornament than their descendants. The butcher of the little
country town of Montauban gives his daughter, for her wedding day, a
silver necklace, a purse, a girdle of silk, a string of amber beads, a
pair of embroidered gloves, a veil or mantilla of German silk, two silk
nets for her hair, and many-coloured silks and threads for the
embroidery of her wedding-gown. An artisan affords his child a veil of
German silk, a net to match, a string of amber, a purse and girdle, the
whole expense coming to £1 6_s._, or about five guineas of our currency.
A servant on one of Bonis’ farms buys for his wife a silk wimple;
gloves, hair-ribbons, and ornamented hair-nets are common fairings.

We see all these good people, arrayed soberly or splendidly according to
their rank, but almost always comfortably dressed, as we turn the pages
of the _Accounts of Bonis_ or the palpitating _Registers of the
Châtelet_ (the Newgate Calendar of an earlier age). Along the country
roads the notary jogs on business, dressed in violet cloth richly
furred, solidly seated on his ample cob. He passes the country squire
(the grandchild of the last rich semi-noble vavassour) hooded in black
parti-coloured russet, and wrapped in a houppelande of English green,
furred with squirrel, the long end of his cloak thrown over the left
shoulder. The shepherd on the hill drives his flock; he is warmly clad
in strong brown woollen. The thatcher, as he steps across the fields
from his daughter’s churching, is dressed all in his best in a large
check of brown and white and blue. There stands the farmer, all in
sombre russet, with an elegant hood striped black and yellow; there are
gold rings on his hand, worn over his gloves; there are gold clasps to
his girdle. At the little village inn, the serving-maid comes out,
dressed in iron-grey, with a bunch of pink roses in her hands. The mason
of the hamlet stands at his gate, chatting with a fellow of his craft,
and with a tramp in search of work; the home-staying workman is well
clad in whitish-grey, with darker grey hose and grey-blue hood; the
traveller has a long brown _cottehardie_, lined with an old coat, a
brown hood buckled under the chin, brown hose, and strong leather shoes
with steel buckles. At the corner of the road a wandering beggar waits
for alms, dressed in a mantle of faded russet patched with an older
light-blue garment, and a hood of Heaven knows what colour, not worth
two deniers. His wife squats beside him, slovenly dressed in an old
patched cassock tied round her waist with a reed. She has no hair, and a
strip of dirty cloth tied round her head but half conceals her baldness.
They are the only really shabby people that we meet (save the wandering
friars, who make a virtue of it); but few are so magnificent as the
drover, a person of importance, it would appear, from the quality and
the quantity of his purchases. The goat-herd and the shepherd are all in
russet; but see the drover as he comes home from market resplendent in
his mantle checked with black and green: he sports a hood striped with
grey and yellow; hood and cloak are in accordance with the most
fashionable standard of the day. Here out in the fields we seldom use
such brilliant colours: russet, blanket, grey, blue, and English green
are our usual wear. It is only when the knight, the doctor, or the
merchant from the town is drawn this way that we see the real taste of
the _bon ton_: the parti-coloured green and vermeil, white and blue,
_vert perdu_ and slate colour, yellow and black, white and vermeil, that
are, with the universal black and green, the last cry of the _mode_.
Both check and stripe are popular alike in town and country.


VI

If not in every village, at least in every _châtellerie_, there was a
doctor, a surgeon or a barber surgeon;[38] the labourers appear to have
used their services freely and to have rewarded them with liberality.
One of Bonis’ day-labourers falling ill, sends to Montauban for the
physician of the place, and pays him for several visits the sum of 4
sols 2 deniers--which we may compare to nearly £1 15_s._ of our money.
Another pays his doctor as much as 18 sols, say £3 12_s._ And in the
_Accounts of Bonis_ we find frequent mentions of drugs and medicinal
spices of an expensive sort, sold to the agricultural labourers of the
district.

The doctors of the Middle Ages and later, even so late as the middle of
the fifteenth century, were chiefly inspired by the theories of the
Arabs. Louis XI., as we know, ordered the Paris University to copy _in
extenso_ the great work of Aboo Bekr ibn Zacaria er Razi, the famous
physician of the tenth century, whose masterpiece, _El Mansoori_, is a
compendium of Arabian therapeutics. This book, commonly known as “Razi,”
was very popular throughout the fourteenth century. A copy of it, bought
by Bonis for four livres, assisted him in the preparation of his drugs,
and of the plasters, unguents, electuaries and tisanes especially in
request among a fourteenth-century rural population.

It may be interesting to examine a few of the remedies employed.
Rheumatism, that special misery of those that work in the wintry fields,
was treated externally by the application of a plaster of cordials and
aromatic gums spread on a thin piece of silk. The part affected was also
rubbed with an ointment (costing seven sols) made of four ounces of
turpentine and two ounces of white wax, one ounce of resin, one ounce of
myrrh, two ounces of _bol d’Arménie_, and two ounces of oil of
roses;[39] it was then covered with a sheet of wadding. Complaints of
the skin were treated by an unguent composed of a quarter of a pound of
marsh-mallow, a quarter of a pound of white wax, a quarter of a pound of
olive oil, an ounce of incense, and an ounce of turpentine; medicated
baths were also recommended. Sulphur was freely used. Aniseed was given
as a specific against indigestion, with camomile, _Quassia amara_,
camphor, and essence of cinnamon. Coughs and colds were cured by a
sudorific tea of rose and camomile; by a milk of almonds mixed with
starch and sugar, almost exactly resembling the delicious _looch_ of
modern France: by an infusion of pectoral flowers (mallow, violet, &c.),
as well as by lozenges of gum arabic and barley sugar[40]. In severe
cases the physicians of the Middle Ages administered the famous theriac
of Nero, the _Theriacus Andromachi_, composed of opium powdered with
some tannic bitter substance, together with sulphate of iron, and some
two and forty active aromatic essences, such as turpentine, Cingalese
cinnamon, valerian, citron, rose, etc.[41] A labourer at Bloxham, in
Oxfordshire, was treated for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel
and squills[42]. Disorders of the intestines were pretty generally
combated by starch water, alum, and the astringent _bol d’Arménie_.
Senna tea was also an ingredient in the humblest medicine chest. Besides
the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon, camphor, resin,
and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice, dried prunes, and honey of
roses were constantly employed. Oxide of zinc mixed with camphor[43] was
also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The hot bath and
the vapour bath were highly esteemed, though less frequent, perhaps,
than in the earlier Middle Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried
through all the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century there
was no town in any way considerable without at least one _établissement
de bains_. We find in the _Registers of the Châtelet_ that a hot bath
was a somewhat expensive luxury, costing several sols. The prolonged
warm baths in honour at the Court of Charles VI. were a scandal to the
Church, and are denounced in a famous sermon of Jacques le Grand.

Besides the remedies we have quoted, it must be allowed that others more
fantastic were occasionally used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy
informed me that I need never suffer from migraine, for I could tie a
live pigeon on my head, and let it depose its excrement on my hair: a
certain remedy. He assured me also that his sister, whom the doctor from
Vic had declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs, had been
saved by the presence of mind of his mother: she slit up a live cat,
placed half the palpitating creature on the back, half on the breast of
the patient, who immediately recovered. Doubtless these medicines were
known in the fourteenth century. An equally absurd but more elaborate
sort were used especially at court and in the treatment of great
personages. But our agricultural labourers, who thought twice before
they changed their silver sou, though they may have split up a cat, were
not accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the _Accounts of Bonis_,
we find only two receipts that are patently unreasonable; and these are
the most expensive. One of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the
other an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax, pounded with
“half an ounce of mummy.” But the cold creams and cosmetics of the
present day are not always conspicuous for science; we might find
nostrums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame Georgine Champbaron.
And, indeed, it may be doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of
the Middle Ages were not sometimes as successful against the nervous
maladies in which they were most often used, as the Lourdes water, the
hypnotising-mirrors, and the various patent medicines so capriciously
infallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their humble,
painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as now, the virtues of friction
and wadding against lumbago; the peppermint tea that calms the colic;
the plaster of boiled poppy-heads applied against the raging tooth. The
old man, struggling with his asthma, had almost as good an opiate; the
feverish child, tossing under its doubled blanket, a potion almost as
sudorific, as we should find in any country place to-day.

Apart from their special virtues, the medicines of the Middle Ages had a
very high hygienic value. They were unusually powerful prophylactics.
In an article on the “Workmen of Paris,” published some years ago in the
_Fortnightly Review_, I quoted from the Annales of the Institut-Pasteur
a series of experiments made by MM. Cadiac and Meunier establishing the
microbicide effect of Cingalese cinnamon; while the oil of pinks, the
essences of valerian, thyme, citron, rose, etc., employed in almost
every mediæval recipe, are each and all more hostile to the microbe than
the iodoform treatment employed against typhoid fever in the Paris
hospitals to-day. I advance this assertion with all due discretion,
since I have never made any single experiment, and am not in a position
to control the opinion of experts; but since the vanguard of science
admits so high a value in the drugs employed by our benighted ancestors,
we may allow that the pleasantries in vogue on the subject are possibly
overstated or misplaced.


VII

If the fourteenth-century village was less ill off than we are apt to
imagine it in regard to the medicines of the body, it appears that the
training of the mind was less absolutely non-existent in the rural class
than it has been our habit to assert. Many of the labourers on the farms
of Bonis could sign their names, though probably their science in
writing ended there. But every tenant-farmer, in an age when the
accounts of tenant and landlord were peculiarly complicated, was obliged
to know a certain amount of book-keeping: doubtless the steward was
often more learned than his lord. Hedge-schools were common;[44] in
every considerable village, if not in every hamlet, there was a
schoolmaster, appointed generally by the patron of the village living.
There was a certain regulated number of parish schools in every county,
and this number might not be exceeded: our ancestors never could be
brought to recognize the advantages of competition. Certain texts,
however, prove the existence of unauthorized hedge-schools, promptly
quashed as soon as they came to the knowledge of the authorities.

The Great Plague, which so changed the face of Europe, diminished
education by carrying off the schoolmasters. The Continuator of
Guillaume de Nangis remarks that, after the epidemic of 1348, there were
not enough teachers for the requirements of the houses, hamlets, and
castles of his country. Thus the sons of the men who fought at Crecy
grew up, though richer, more ignorant than their fathers.

The schools of the fourteenth century were not entirely free; and as a
certain proportion of their profits went to the patron, he filled up the
gaps as soon as possible. The village priest was often the schoolmaster,
and the instruction was always chiefly religious; but the boys were also
taught the rudiments of Latin grammar. The ideal of every peasant was to
have a son in the Church--a son who might become abbot, bishop,
chancellor, cardinal. It was their one great chance of rising in the
world. But in the kingdom of the Mind, many are called, few chosen. Of
the dozen or so boys who went to every village school (each with a dim
idea that perhaps by-and-by he might become a parish priest, or enter
some religious order) a fair proportion grew up as stewards or
labourers.[45] Some, no doubt, persevered in their original intention;
some went to the town, or, tiring of grammar, ‘listed for a soldier;
but, alas! we meet with a good many of them in the _Registers of the
Châtelet_. Perhaps--who knows?--these ne’er-do-wells were the most
useful of them all, for their depositions in the Court of Justice throw
many curious lights on mediæval education. Thus, for example, one
Jehannin de la Montaigne, a wandering mason accused of horse-stealing,
invokes the privilege of clergy, asserting that he was tonsured at the
age of eight years old when he went to school and learned his
psalter--“car auparavant qu’il aprenist son dit métier de maçon, il
avait esté avec plusieurs enfans d’icelle ville de Château Regnault à
l’escole de la dite ville et avoit aprins jusqu’à son _Donnet_ et
_Catonnet_; et lors il savait bien lire.”[46] This _Donnet_ or _Donat_
was the grammatical treatise of the learned Ælius Donatus, that glory of
the fourth century, whose vigilant elucubrations were very popular
throughout a thousand years. _Catonnet_, a school-book equally
universal, was one century older: it was a paraphrase of the distiches
of Dionysius Cato, once a famous philologist. These were both great
doctors. To-day, as you see, we scarcely know their names.

The names of these two guides to knowledge were known to Jehannin de la
Montaigne, but his science went no further. After a judicious course of
torture, he was taken to the kitchen (as was the custom of that guileful
age), placed in a comfortable chair before a cosy fire, with a warm
mantle round his shoulders and a glass of wine in his hand. Many
criminals, obstinate to screw and pulley, succumbed to these more
deceiving influences, especially as they succeeded the chill and dismal
hour of execution (the torture of the fourteenth century was far less
diabolic than that of ages more refined, but it was uncomfortable and
rheumatic--pails of icy water being dashed from time to time upon the
dislocated patient). Well, to return to Jehannin, whom we choose as an
example from a crowd of fellow-sinners--he confessed, as he sat by the
kitchen fire, that he was no more a priest than the cook. “But,” added
he, “a tonsure is convenient in judicial circumstances. Many of my
companion masons had tonsures, and it was they who advised me to get one
also, which they said I could do without prejudice, as I have really
been to school and could read and write well enough when I left it.
Therefore I went to the village and had myself tonsured _par un barbier,
et non aultrement_.” That confession was the end of friend Jehannin;
having no longer any claim to the jurisdiction of the Church, he swung
forthwith from the neighbouring gallows. “Il n’avoit aucuns biens.”

The courts of the Châtelet were literally encumbered with these sham
clerks, who impeded the course of justice by asserting a non-existent
benefit of clergy. Not one of them when confronted in the courts of
justice with a psalter and a primer could read, write, spell a Pater, or
say by heart a Latin prayer. This, however, proves nothing against the
system of education, which was probably excellent. The School Board
manager of the present day, in an age of unexampled science, knows how
easily a boy may pass through half a dozen years of reading, writing,
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, Biblical
exegesis, and all the other necessaries that no modern ploughboy is
complete without; and he emerges no less ignorant than he went in. Yet
the boys nowadays stay at school till twelve, or sometimes till
fourteen; in those days they left at eight or ten. It is probable that
_Donnet_ and _Catonnet_ did not penetrate far into the average inner
consciousness. But all were not as ignorant as the good-for-nothings who
came before the courts of law for purse-slitting and horse-lifting;
these we may probably take as a natural selection of the unfittest. M.
Delisle, in his _Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_, gives some
delicious examples of the demi-Latinity of the learned peasant, which
unfortunately I have not got by heart.


VIII

The population of the rural districts of fourteenth-century France
varied terribly according to the progress of the Hundred Years’ War. It
is difficult to frame a clear idea of then and now. But from the size of
the churches remaining from the thirteenth century, which are almost
always in accordance with the actual population, we may suppose that the
inhabitants have not increased by more than half: we must allow about
that proportion, since mediæval churches, built for sanctuary, were
obliged to be large enough to shelter not only all the villagers, but
also their valuables, in war time. The villages which have come down to
us are not immensely larger, but numerous new communes have arisen on
land that was covered then by bog or forest.

On the other hand, many villages called into life by the plenty and
peace that followed the last Crusade of Saint Louis disappeared utterly
in the long disaster of the Hundred Years’ War. The King’s tax-gatherers
jolted through the country collecting the hearth-tax; again and again
they found, beside the ruined steeple, a few tumbling beams, an empty
stock-yard still paven; nothing more. Another village had vanished. The
ordonnances of the Kings of France during the first twenty years of
Charles V. are painfully eloquent of this continuous depopulation of the
country. The wars against the English on the frontiers of Normandy and
Gascony accomplished the same end as the cruel repression of the
Peasants’ Revolt in the centre, or the sackings and plunderings of the
Captains of Adventure round Rheims, round Orleans, and on the borders of
Provence. I have dismissed many tragedies in a single phrase; but how in
a few lines shall I indicate the terrible position of the peasants?
Their grandfathers had dwelt in little hamlets almost under shelter of
the town, to whose palisaded suburbs every winter they, with their
families, their harvest and their furniture, thronged for asylum.
Moreover, in that earlier age, ruled by firm principles still
confidently trusted, the peasant was little less sacred than the priest.
All classes recognized the holiness, the authority, of him who sows and
reaps the grain that is the life of all. No usurer might take in pledge
the ploughshare, the beasts that draw it, nor the corn as yet
unthrashed. Four days a week, in war time as in peace time, from every
Wednesday night till Monday at sunrise, the _Truce of God_ forbade the
men-at-arms to traverse field or sheep-walk; moreover, at any time the
peasant, threatened by marauders, was safe if he fled to his plough and
laid his hand upon it; the man who touched the iron that furrowed the
earth was inviolable, and the plough was as sure a sanctuary as the
church.[47] But in the thirteenth century the rural populations,
overcrowded round their district towns, pushed further and yet further
out into the outlying area of moor and forest, till their clearings, far
afield, were beyond reach of their earlier centre. In their new home
they clustered all year long round the church which they had raised,
under protection of the nearest manor. And the years of peace continued
and the population swelled. Thus from each _Châtellerie_ sprang new
off-shoots; distant hamlets that had forgotten the necessity of a
sword-arm to shelter them, paying tribute to their feudal lord, but too
far from his fortress to receive any efficient aid in wartime. When the
great English war broke out and the long years of invasion, these
peasants learned to feel their loneliness. True, their neighbours round
the manor-house were little better off; for after Crecy, and after
Poictiers, the greater part of the Seigneurs of France were either dead
or in the hands of the English. The ransom they had to raise was all
their tenants knew of them; bitter songs and proverbs began to fly from
mouth to mouth. “Ten of our Seigneurs will cry surrender to the sound of
an Englishman’s voice a mile away!” cried Hodge, indignant. Poor Hodge,
other miseries were in store for him! The Great Plague, which had
emptied the country after Crecy (“la tierce partie du monde mourust”),
came again, following Poictiers. When at last the epidemic passed away
(having doubled the rate of wage in less than ten years), when the
farmer prepared himself to face new economic conditions, he found
himself confronted with new dangers. The truce that had followed
Poictiers had brought indeed a momentary peace, so that hope began to
flourish with the primroses. But the peace that came in the wake of the
battles of the fourteenth century was crueller than battle.... The
engagements were no longer fought solely by the armed chivalry of a
kingdom; the system of regular armies was as yet unknown. In this bitter
time of transition, war was chiefly made by mercenary Captains, who led
their troops of adventurers in the pay of the highest bidder.

When the war was over, the men who had fought in it could not vanish
into air. The nobles rode home to their castles, the peasants to their
farms; but the bulk of the army, these bands of mercenaries, remained
hovering with the vultures round the battlefield of yesterday. They were
hungry and must eat; they must find a lodging somewhere; and their habit
was to plunder. So east and west, north and south, the Companies went,
riding as to a tourney; but chiefly they made their way to the rich
unravaged Centre; there they soon took thirteen towns, with many
fortresses and castles.... Readers who remember the terrible chapters in
which Froissart describes the depredations of the Captains of Adventure
throughout the centre of France, and down through Gascony to Provence,
must very often have dissented from my cheerful picture of the life of
fourteenth-century villagers. They remember the despair of the Jacques
of Brie, and their extermination; they count up the villages marked in
some Royal ordnance as having disappeared; they recall the ballads of
Eustache Deschamps describing the sack of Vertus, and think how many a
flourishing little town and what innumerable hamlets shared its fate:

“If you wish to see poverty, a ruined country-side, a deserted town,
tottering walls where the fire has been, miserable homes, and a more
miserable population--go to Vertus! The English have left everything in
flames. There you can have at your good pleasure a horse all skin and
bone, a broken bed with foul sheets, and, when you take your walks
abroad, the amusement of the ruined housetops tumbling round your ears.

“Henceforth the farms round Vertus shall be abandoned; the vineyards are
neglected and no man tends the plants. This first year after the sack
there will be few wages paid and those uncertain. The man who was wont
to speak loud will learn to speak low. Our town exists no more, and
’twill be long before her walls are built again.”[48]

All this is true; and we shall never know in how many villages the
sleeping peasants awoke one night to the dreaded tramp of armed
horsemen, to the blare of trump and fife, to the sheen of moonlit
armour, and the presence of the redoubtable Company in their midst....
Bretons axe in hand, Gascons armed with lances, the Genoese
crossbow-men, the English with their bows and arrows, the Lombards with
their knives; they were all as well known as the French--all prayed
against and watched for throughout the land of France. The
sharpest-sighted villager would stand for days in the steeple on the
look-out, in order to alarm his fellows when the first of the horsemen
should ride up from the horizon. In a moment, women, children, men,
would throng to the appointed hiding-place in the brake, bringing with
them such treasure as still was left unburied. Happy those who could
thus escape in time, and for whom no crueller fate was in store than to
find on the morrow a heap of red ashes where once their village stood!

Yet, how shall we believe it? Though all this was true, the countrysides
retained their astonishing vitality. Although in many districts most of
the young men went off to the wars (“Nous aymons mieux faire le
gallin-gallant que labourer sans rien avoir,” as Gerson heard them say),
with a natural preference for plundering over being plundered, yet they
only pushed a little further the work begun by the Great Plague. The
wages of the few remaining labourers became so high that it was easy for
them to recover in a little while more than their old well-being. True,
the wattled cottage was razed to the ground, but the paved yard
remained. The peasant knew that his treasure was safe in the keeping of
some man of trust--some merchant of the walled city--when it was not
buried in a box or a glove some three feet to the west of the wild
cherry-tree, far enough from home to remain unsuspected by the Company.
If most of the harvest was destroyed, the remainder sold for an
extravagant price; and the hunger of the poor in town was at least the
farmers’ gain.[49] Then Charles V., the unparalleled king, sent off the
Companies to Spain, to Lombardy, well out of the way. In 1375 our good
Master Eustache takes heart and makes an ironical ballad, in which the
Companies are supposed to lament the prosperity and good order of the
kingdom.

    “Le plat pays s’en sent déjà bien
    Car on n’y ose piller rien;

     *       *       *       *       *

    Nul n’y va courrer sur les champs,
    Ne n’y rançonne par puissance.
    L’on n’y prend chevaux ni juments
    Linges, draps, robes, ni finance,
    Poulaille, moutons ... violence
    Ne s’y fait....
    ... et le commun bien
    Y règne en grande autorité.
    On fait labours en abondance.
    Honorés sont les anciens....
    _Chacun dist quz c’est grand pitié._”[50]

So the wars ended.

But the rate of wage remained fairly high throughout all the fifteenth
century. The peasants ate more and of better food, drank more freely of
wine and cider (a good deal too freely, and they have not lost the
habit), wore more costly and more comfortable garments, afforded their
wives and daughters richer ornaments and trinkets than, in the same rank
and class, they can afford to-day. In all times, in France, the poorest
have contrived to hoard; mediæval accounts and registers reveal the
amount of saving effected by all classes, and record the lands and herds
constantly acquired by farm labourers and domestic servants. They and
their kind prospered, laid by their savings, and bought, rood by rood,
the lands of the diminished noble, whom the long wars had left
penniless and threadbare. The lords were glad to sell here a croft and
there a spinny, for in very many cases they could no longer afford to
work their immense estates. And thus the rise in the rate of wages,
brought about by battle and plague, not only retrieved the ravage of the
English wars, but even prepared insidiously the final ruin of the Feudal
system.




THE MEDIÆVAL COUNTRY-HOUSE

        _Solos aio bene vivere, quorum_
_Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis._
                  HORACE, _Epistolæ_.


I

One of my friends, by race a Persian, a native of the Russian Caucasus,
was used to come and see me on his home-sick days, to talk about the
castle he had left at home. It is a great, strong castle, with stone
towers and wooden balconies, and a vast hall within where my lord sits
in state by the cavernous hearth and listens to the wandering minstrels,
who sing long ballads to their instruments. Not only singers come there,
but itinerant pedlars, the acrobats of the fair, pilgrims to some
distant shrine, travellers of many sorts who bring to this high-perched
castle news of the outer world. If my lord Aga should wish to see that
world at closer quarters, in the nearest city he has his “hostel” in
some wealthy burgher’s house, and thither sometimes he repairs during
the dead weeks of the winter. But with the first bud or sprout on the
topmost sprig, he is back in the castle. For now the real life of the
noble begins--the season of the chase! My lord is more or less of a
scholar, and in the winter time he fingers amorously his rare collection
of illuminated manuscripts (we possess one, for which his nephew offers
us a village in Karabag!), brought together at an infinite expense and
trouble. But how far he prefers the summer morning, when, hawk in hand,
the noble hunters troop forth on their gay-caparisoned horses to chase
eagle or heron on the mountain heights! Deep down in the dungeon
underground perchance some penitent wonders if the spring will ever
come--for there are dungeons still in the castles of Karabag, though the
lords there have no longer the right of life and death. Here the nobles
live a merry life, united among themselves and seeing few who are not of
their order, save the Emperor’s hated tax-collector or the Jew doctor
who comes upon his rounds, a quantity of little powders sewn into the
sash about his waist.... Could we but be spirited to Karabag, we should
find the Middle Ages there in flesh and blood, alive!

Who knows? Yet we who wish to visit the mediæval country-house, we will
take a humbler way. We will mount pillion behind some solid, clerkly
person: Maistre Jehan Froissart or Maistre Eustache Deschamps, sure of
his road and garrulous about his masters. Thus we will jog along,
gossiping, from place to place, alighting here and there at some stately
castle, where the lord, like that Count of Foix who sent for Froissart
from his inn--“est le seigneur du monde qui plus volontiers voit
estrangers pour ouyr nouvelles;” or we will turn in at some pleasant
manor, such as that Manor of Cachant, dear to Master Eustace, where
there are gardens sweet with rose, gladiolus, and mint--where there are
meadows, vineyards, and “a noble willow-wood,” with baths of all kinds
to refresh the weary traveller: “bains et estuves et le ruissel
courant.”

If the countryside afford a good granite rock surmounting a hill or
mound of any height, that situation has generally been chosen for the
castle, encircled by its protecting precipice. But in some parts of
Northern France such sites are few; and, contrasted with the German or
Italian fortress on the hill, we find more frequently the manor “emmy
estangs,” so often sung of old poets--the castle built like Rochester,
or Melun, on the brink or island of a river, isolated by moats and
defended by encircling towers. Such was, for example, the Castle of
Bièvre, commended by Deschamps in his 454th Ballad--

    “La place est forte et de noble cloison.
    Emmy l’estang où le donjon se lance
    Trois tours y a de pierre et de moellon.”

Each tower is three stories high, and each stands well in advance of the
castle wall, the entry defended by a “puissant pont-levis.” By the
fourteenth century, the castles were no longer built with a sole view to
refuge and defence; the nobles no longer dwelt there as a last resort in
war time, living in the guardroom with their garrison, and directing the
defence amid the treasure. The castles of that time of transition were
very habitable palaces; and Master Eustace passes from the military
architecture to belaud the “noble aqueduct,” which carried water into
the interior of the castle, and to praise the rich device of the halls
and chambers, the excellent _vivarium_, the well-stocked preserves of
game, the baths, the gardens, the rowing-boats, the shady park. “’Tis,”
he finishes, “the pleasantest house I know--_pour demourer la nouvelle
saison_.”

This is not the strain in which a thirteenth-century minstrel would have
sung the praise of Coucy--the castle has become a country-house. The
great square tower, flanked with turrets at the angles, which has
succeeded to the round tower of defence, is spacious enough for
luxurious habitation. Every story contains a large hall, a
moderate-sized room and a smaller one, beside the four cabinets in the
corner turrets. Generally, the gallery, the chapel, the dining-hall,
and the lord’s private room or “retrait” occupied the first story; above
came my lady’s chamber, her tiring-room, her oratory, and the
“garde-robe,” where her dresses lay folded in spice and lavender, and
where her maidens sewed by day and slept by night. The upper stories
were occupied by the children and by the guests; and the castle was
crowned by several tiers of “machicoulis,” or crenelated battlements,
pierced by loopholes and communicating by a “chemin de ronde.”

The ground floor was still dark and difficult of access, lighted only by
a few rare lancet-windows, and given over to store-rooms, bath-rooms,
ice-houses, and suchlike uses. It communicated, by means of trap-doors,
with the cellars and dungeons underneath. Philippe de Vigneulles, in his
chronicle, has left us an unforgettable account of his imprisonment,
well on in the fifteenth century, in a dungeon of this kind. There were
no kitchens within the house, for the cooking was done in a round
high-roofed building, like a baptistry, in an outer court, near the
servants’ quarters; but sometimes the sick-chambers were situate on this
dark, quiet, unfrequented ground floor, which preserved the tradition of
its inaccessibility by the absence of any entrance on a level with the
ground. A broad double flight of marble steps led from the court to the
portal on the first floor. In any London suburb we still may see modest
villas thus entered by a flight of steps raised above a high basement,
which are, doubtless, quite unconscious of their direct descent from the
keep of the twelfth century, entered only by a ladder reared against the
front, or by knotted ropes let down from the first-floor window! By the
14th century, however, the _Perron_ of the country-house was an object
of great architectural dignity. It generally opened into a long gallery,
or _loggia_, or verandah, occupying all one side of the keep: a sort of
first-floor cloister, with clustered ogival windows looking on the court
below; in fact, the lineal descendant of the Gallo-Roman peristyle or
diambulatorium. I believe that in America it is still common. Here the
squires and dames used to loiter, “regardant bas en la cour les joueurs
de paume jouer.” Half the action of the novel of John of Saintré passes
“ès galleries;” and no portion of the castle is more frequently cited by
early poets. The Count of Foix received Master Jehan Froissart as he was
walking after dinner in his gallery. In fact, the chief use of these
_loggia_, _loges_, or _laube_, appears to have been as a promenade or
loitering-place when it was too hot or too wet to meet in the orchard
just beyond the walls. A very beautiful gallery of the Middle Ages is
still preserved in the castle of Wartburg.

In the larger castles this gallery or _loggia_ was sometimes distinct
from the keep. Together with the great dining-hall (“sänger-saal” or
“mandement”), where the lord sat in justice and received his guests, it
formed a lower church-like building, in style much like an Oxford
chapel, placed beside the keep and less strongly fortified. These
separate halls were only used in time of peace. They were already well
known in the thirteenth century, for in the palace of Percival--

    “La sale fu devant la tour
    Et les loges devant la sale.”

And we read in the _Lai de Lautrec_--

    “Prochaines eurent leurs maisons
    Et leurs sales et leurs donjons.”

But the sole square tower with its corner turrets remains, even in the
fourteenth century, the type of the castle keep. The chateau of
Vincennes, built by Charles V., is an admirable example of the kind.


II

It was not easy to enter the castle keep. It stood encircled by a
strongly fortified enclosure, isolated by moat or precipice, and
defended, not only by outworks of palisading, but by a barbican and
several smaller towers. Having run the gauntlet of all this, having
passed down the narrow winding path between the palisades, the visitor
arrived at the moat, and blew a horn hung there for the purpose. After
parley with porter and watchman, the drawbridge was let down; and after
further parley, perchance, the great gate may have swung back on its
hinges. In this case, the stranger found himself in a long hollow
archway, protected by a series of portcullises, with a perforated roof,
through which boiling pitch, molten lead, Greek fire, or simple scalding
water could be poured down from an upper chamber. In time of peace,
however, the visitor passed unscathed through the gate into a vast
courtyard enclosed by huge battlemented walls or towers; a courtyard
that is almost a village, for it contains the church, the knights’
quarters, the squires’ house, the lodgings for pages and servants, the
barracks, the cottages of the artisans and labourers on the estate, the
bake-house, the kitchen, the walled and gated fish-pond, the fountain,
the washing-place, the stables, the barns, etc. A second gate, a second
portcullis, lead to a smaller court, where--huge, swart, and
sombre--towers the keep. It is immense, it is impregnable, and always
opposite to the weakest point of the defence, with a postern of its own
leading to the orchard, and a subterranean way into the open country.
Those who have admired the black majesty of Loches will admit the
grandeur of the mediæval keep.

Built against the castle’s outer wall, looking from its upper windows
across the open country, the keep sometimes has pleasant views. An
island castle, defended by a wide expanse of water, or lifted high above
the plain upon a granite needle, could afford the luxury of light and
air, could indulge in large windows, grouped three or four together in a
space of dead wall, on which they make a lacework of pointed arch and
separating columns. But the huge moated castle of the plain was less
fortunate. The windows were rare, narrow, far apart. The walls, ten feet
thick, made a deep and dark recess for the long lancet holes, more often
closed with oiled and painted linen than with glass, and placed very
high for the sake of safety. Sometimes they were as much as five feet
above the floor. A few years ago in Florence, at the Palazzo Alessandri,
I remember seeing windows of this sort, high-perched recesses, the size
and shape of an opera-box, reached by a staircase cut in the stone of
the wall. On the granite window-benches, heap embroidered cushions; lay
a Saracen carpet on the floor; and set in this narrow shrine some fair
young woman, lily-slender in her tight brocaded gown. She is playing
chess with a squire still younger than herself. Or perhaps she is alone,
singing to her lute some ballad of the Round Table--

    “La reine chante doucement,
    La voix accorde à l’estrument,
    Les mains sont belles, li laiz bons,
    Douce la voix et bas li tons.”


III

Even nobles of some pretensions used in their daily life little more
than the great hall of justice (where the movable trestle-tables were
brought in at dinner-time), the gallery which answered to our modern
drawing-room, the chapel, the chamber, and the garde-robe, where the
young maids-of-honour learned to embroider amid their waiting-women.

These halls and chambers were furnished with some splendour. By the
middle of the fourteenth century, the walls were no longer ornamented
with the mere stencil-pattern in white and yellow ochre, which sufficed
for the princely keep of Coucy. There is a frieze painted, with knights
and goddesses, with “Vénus la Dieuesse d’Amour,” or else adorned in
fresco or mosaic by “generations of Christians and Saracens painted in
battle,” such as the Seigneur de Caumont admired on the walls of
Mazières.[51] Lower down, the walls were often wainscotted like that--

        “Rice sale à lambres
    Et d’or musique painturée
    Et de fin or tout listée”--

where Percival found the Damosel. If the walls were left bare, they were
furnished just below the frieze with an iron rod, whence depended
hangings of warm stuff or tapestry. Every castle possessed several sets
for each apartment, and the noble on his travels had at least one set of
chamber-hangings strapped among his baggage. Nothing was easier than to
suspend these stuffs, already provided with their hooks, to the rod and
rings prepared to hold them. “One thousand hooks for tapestry,” is a
common item in fourteenth-century accounts.[52]

The hangings were of plain serge, of worked silk cloth of gold, or
“tapisserie de haute lisse,” according to the wealth of the noble or the
splendour of the occasion they adorned. In times of mourning the
hangings were all black. Such a “chamber,” consisting of wall-hangings,
bed-furniture, chair-coverings, cushions, etc., in striped serge, with
cord and fringe to match, was supplied to the Lady de la Trémoille in
1396, at a cost of fifty-nine livres--about £240 of our money. As the
appearance of the hall could be changed at an hour’s notice on the
occasion of mourning or festivities, even the greatest castles had
ordinary hangings for common use. King Charles V. possessed no less than
sixty-four “chambers,” or complete sets of hangings, in silk, velvet,
cloth of silver, leather, embroidery, etc.[53] When Valentine Visconti,
Duchess of Orleans, prepared to leave Paris in 1408, a few months before
her death, a few months after her husband’s murder, she caused her
chamberlain to draw up a list of her furniture, which still exists in
the Bibliothèque Nationale. This document (pathetically marked by faded
crosses against the names of such objects as Valentine desired to carry
with her to Touraine) enumerates more than sixty sets of hangings. In
the embroidered curtains, some of the subjects appear astonishingly
modern, and indicate a complete mastery of the human figure on the part
of the designers. As few persons, I believe, have had the privilege of
reading this unpublished manuscript (communicated to me by the late
Comte Albert de Circourt). I proceed to quote a few of the more
interesting descriptions:--

“2. Bed-furniture of green; the baldaquin is worked with a design of
angels; the long curtain depending from the tester behind the pillows
represents shepherds and shepherdesses feasting on cherries and walnuts;
the counterpane shows a shepherd and a shepherdess within a park; the
whole is embroidered with gold thread and with coloured wools. Item,
wall-hangings to match. Item, curtains for the walls, without gold, and
three smaller curtains of green serge.

“3. Item, a ‘chamber’[54] in gold, silk, and wool, with a device of
little children on a river bank, with birds flying overhead. There are
three hangings to match, bed-furniture and sofa-cover. The counterpane
is embroidered with a group of children, their heads meeting in the
middle. Item, three other hangings, with a cherry-tree, and a dame and a
squire gathering cherries in a basket--which go with the aforesaid
chamber-hangings to make up (_pour fournir_).

“4. Item, another ‘chamber,’ of a brownish green, _sans_ gold, with a
lady holding a harp; and there are six hangings to match, with
bed-furniture, and a quilt for the couch.

“17. Item, a great tapestry, with the history of the destruction of Troy
the Great.

“Item, two wall hangings, with the victories of Theseus.

“Item, a green velvet cover for a couch, and a long cushion covered with
green velvet, and two chair cushions, also of green velvet.

“19. Item, a white ‘chamber,’ sown with gladiolus; bed-furniture, quilt
for couch, and four rugs.

“20. Item, a set of green tapestries de haute lisse, with the Fountain
of Youth and several personages; with bed-hangings, counterpanes,
sofa-covers, and six wall-hangings, all worked with gold, without guards
(linen coverings or _housses_).

“Item, a ‘chamber,’ representing a lady playing with a knight at the
game of chess.

“Item, a set of hangings of cloth of gold, including bed-curtains,
counterpane, and two large cushions.”

These tapestries must have been as marvellous as those exquisite
rose-grey hangings which still adorn the upper gallery of the Musée
Cluny. The smaller curtains were stretched over screens of wicker, or
served to drape the great roofed and cushioned settle near the fire,
while cloths of gold and silver curtained the throne-like faldestuil
reserved for the master of the house. Mats of plaited rushes, not unlike
our India matting, were laid in winter on the floors under the delicate
rugs of wool, imitated from the industry of the East; but in summer a
strew of fresh rushes, mint, and gladiolus (that flower so dear to
mediæval eyes), covered the pavement with a cool fragrance, while a
bough of some green tree or flowering bush filled the hearth.[55] Great
soft cushions, “carreaux” or “couettes,” were placed, sometimes on the
chairs and benches, sometimes on the floor itself, according to their
size. They served, like the tabourets of Saint Simon, for people of
lesser dignity, seated on occasions of ceremony, in presence of their
lord. There were also _bankers_, or stuffed backless benches (divans, as
we should say), placed against the wall; _dossiers_, a sort of short
sofa with a back and cushions; and armchairs provided with _pavilions_,
or tester and curtains to keep off the draughts. There were always
carpets in rich halls or chambers; long, narrow ones in front of the
bankers and the settle, and larger thicker “tapis velus” in the middle
of the room. Rugs of embroidered Hungarian leather, and skins of leopard
or tiger were sometimes laid upon the hearth.[56]


IV

All these cushions, curtains, carpets, did not suffice to keep the cold
from the great deep halls of our forerunners. A shiver runs through the
literature of the age.

    “Telz froid y fait en yver que c’est raige!”

says Eustache Deschamps in his 805th Ballad, describing the Castle of
Compiègne. Even in the house one must arm one’s self with good furry
hose, furred pourpoints, warm fur-lined cloaks and hoods. In winter, men
and women alike wore a long tunic of fur, quilted between two pieces of
stuff, underneath their outer garments. But to be slender was the ideal,
the supreme elegance of the later Middle Ages. In vain the Knight of La
Tour warns his daughters of the fate of sundry very comely maidens, who,
wishing to appear in their true slimness before their lovers, discarded
their furred tunics despite the blast of winter, and turned the young
men’s hearts against them by the chicken-flesh of their cheeks and the
blueness of their noses! In vain he draws a salutary picture of lovers,
at last united, dying of cold in the arms of one another, victims to the
too chilly elegance of their figures! The furred tunic was all very well
for gouty Master Eustace and the elderly knight: young beauties and trim
gallants often preferred the risk of mortal illness, and let them
grumble.

“Sy est cy bon exemple comment l’en ne se doit mie si lingement ne sy
joliettement vestir, pour soy greslir et faire le beau corps en temps
d’yver, que l’on en perde sa manière et sa couleur.”[57]

“Do not be shaved,” interrupts Master Eustace, who must decidedly have
been an ill-dressed, slovenly old poet, “neither have your hair cut, nor
take a bath this bitter weather.” The young people might reply that the
_Roman de la Rose_ prescribes the hot bath as a sovereign remedy against
winter. The bath-room, with its warm pipes, its great wooden tubs, with
the carved gilt garlands round them, its lounges for cooling, its little
tables spread with a dainty supper, still preserved a _souvenir_ of
Roman luxury. People used to bathe in company, sometimes men and women
together (as we still do at the sea-side), their heads beautifully
dressed and adorned with flowers, their bodies hidden up to the neck in
their great cask-like baths, where the water was often thickened with
scented bran or strewn with a dust of salutary herbs.

    “Quand viendroit la froide saison,”

sings Maistre Jehan de Meung--

    “Quand l’air verroient forcenez
    Et jeter pierres et tempestes
    Que tuassent ès champs les bestes
    Et grands fleuves prendre et glacer....

    “On feroient chaudes estuves
    S’y pourroient tuit nuz demourer
    Se baignant entr’eus ès cuves.”

In a German poem, _Der nakte Bote_ quoted by Herr Alwin Schulz, a
messenger arrives at a distant castle, and proceeds, as was the custom,
to strip and take a bath after his dusty journey before presenting
himself before the lord of the castle. What was his surprise on opening
the door of the bath-room to behold my lord, my lady, and all their
olive-branches disporting themselves in steaming tubs! It was, they
explained, the only way they could keep themselves from freezing.

Master Eustace prefers a warm chamber, “nattée sus et jus,” with all
the windows shut, a fur-lined dressing-gown, a bowl of old Beaune:

    “Le chaud civet et bonne espicerie.”

Contest of youth and age! But which, Master Eustace, would be better for
your gout?


V

The hearth none the less was deep and ample. Sometimes several
fireplaces, grouped together on a raised daïs, occupied all the upper
end of the hall with their blazing hearths and shadowy overmantels. A
magnificent example still exists at Bourges. In houses of less
pretension the hall could boast but one chimney, but that at least was
vast. A whole tree could be laid across the gigantic fire-dogs, whence
the great blaze radiated warmth and light into the church-like frigidity
of the hall. Those who know the Salle de Garde at Langeais, will
remember its beautiful chimney-piece representing the Castle’s own
crenelated _chemin-de-ronde_, carved with mimic soldiers and stooping
watchers, who lean over the battlements to look at the blaze below; few
objects are more stately than the monumental fourteenth-century
fireplace. If the heat did not penetrate very far, if the humbler fry in
the lower hall were grateful for their furs--at least, under the huge
overmantel, where the curtained settles stood, there was a cosy
ingle-nook for the master of the house, his wife, his children, his
guests, his chief retainers.

In such noble houses as could not boast a resident physician, or a
master of requests, or a staff of notaries and secretaries, there was,
at least, invariably, a chaplain. Immediately below that reverend clerk
came the seneschal who was constable, governor, or simple steward,
according to the standing of the castle. When no separate dispenser was
employed, the seneschal was dispenser, master of the household, and
governor of the pages. Next to him came the butler; then, the
chamberlain, to whom were entrusted the jewels, art treasures, and
furniture of the castle; the marshal, or master of the horse, and the
head falconer. All these were persons of importance, to be treated with
a certain ceremony; they were frequently of noble blood; they
accompanied their master on many of his journeys, and were rather his
ministers than his servants. Next to them in order of rank stood the
housekeeper or governess, often a beguine or Tertiary nun, who
supervised the ordering of the house, engaged and controlled the
servants, and governed the young girls of noble family serving in the
castle as maids of honour. Under her came a swarm of chambermaids and
housemaids, cooks and tailors, page-boys and varlets. Let us not forget
from the list of our retainers that person of consideration, the fool:
the ancestor of the modern diner-out. Fools and dwarfs were not to be
found under every noble roof. The smaller country-houses were sometimes
condemned to a distressing sanity, and depended for their amusement on
wandering minstrels and the acrobats of the fair.

We have not counted in our list the knights and squires of the keep, nor
yet the garrison with its captain, nor the artisans and labourers on the
estate. For the moment we are occupied merely with the interior of the
castle. And the chief thing that strikes us in it is the abundance of
young people--the troops of boys and girls.


VI

Every castle was, in fact, a school--a seminary of polite education.
From the king to the pettiest baron, every noble received at his court
the children of his principal vassals; and thus every noble child was
educated to the standard of the sphere immediately above his own. In
their homes, from the age of seven, boys and girls alike had learned to
spell, to ride, to know that they were Christians. At the age of ten or
twelve they were generally sent to court. Here they learned, above all,
the duties and behaviour of gentlepeople.

Great care was taken that they should be well-bred, chivalrous,
courteous, neatly clad, and clean. Along with this, the boys learned to
fence, shoot, fight with sword and shield, joust, play quintaine,
tennis, palm-play, chess, draughts, and tric-trac. They were taught to
ride, climb, leap, swim, and to perform all these feats in heavy armour
and handicapped by difficult conditions. In a word, they were trained to
amuse themselves, to exert themselves, and to endure. The _Livre des
Faiz de Jean Bouciquaut_ shows the great stress laid upon physical
education; but it also shows that physical education was not all. Boys
who would grow into knights, and pass through many courts and countries,
had to learn several languages. French, of a sort, was taught in all
European countries--often, no doubt, it was of the kind of
Stratford-atte-Bowe--for French then, as now, was the language of
diplomacy and courts. And some lads then, as now, acquired a little
Greek and Latin; but so much learning was rarely encouraged save in the
future Churchman. All noble children, boys and girls, learned to read
and write, though frequently in after-life the warrior’s remembrance of
these arts was no more precise than the knowledge possessed by our
average country squire of the _Iliad_ he used to parse at school. The
women kept up their accomplishments: most noble women in England and
Italy, as in France, could read, play some musical instrument,
embroider, speak a little French, bind a wound and tend a fever, if
comparatively few could wield the pen.

At twelve years old the page was sent to court. Here he was to finish
his education, to win, if possible, his suzerain’s favour, and to lay
the beginnings of his fortune. But at first he saw little of his lord.
He was entirely under the control of the seneschal, the chamberlain, and
the first equerry, for, as the name denotes, the young squire’s quarters
were situate in the _écuries_. After a few years’ apprenticeship his
opportunity might come. A chance might make him a page-messenger, and so
he might earn the confidence of his Seigneur. He might, by his good
manners and courtesy, awaken the attention of some noble dame. He might
even accompany his suzerain to some superior court, attract the notice
of the over-lord, and be adopted to that higher sphere. Thus the little
Jehan de Saintré, a young lad in the household of his father’s suzerain
in Touraine, was taken by that gallant knight to Paris, where the king
took a fancy to the child--“tellement que il le voulut avoir en sa cour
à estre son paige, pour après lui chevaucher, et au sourplus servir en
salle, comme ses aultres paiges et enffans d’honneur.” But the natural
course of things was for the lad to remain a page among his fellow-pages
till the age of fifteen or sixteen, when he was ripe for the office of
messenger or carver at the lord’s table. These offices entailed
squireship. In this condition he remained until about the age of
twenty, when, generally on the occasion of some princely wedding, some
outbreak of war, some tournament or other great occasion, he was dubbed
knight, and set forth on his adventures.

While all these lads from twelve to twenty were fencing, riding, or
playing palm-play in the court, their sisters were employed in my lady’s
company. They seldom came together with the men of the castle, save on
holidays and feast-days. At other times they spent their time in my
lady’s chamber or tiring-room, or walked with her in the country, for it
was held unseemly that ladies of noble birth should be met walking
alone. They were, in fact, much in the position of “girls still in the
schoolroom” in a modern country-house. They learned their lessons with
their governess, practised their lute, went to church every morning,
embroidered chasubles and altar-cloths, and worked wonderful hangings
for the cold stone walls. And there were from seventy to a hundred yards
of needlework in a set of hangings! They could also spin fine silk and
linen, and ornament with needlework their feast-day veils and dresses.
(The less interesting forms of sewing were left to the army of
tire-women and waiting-women who attended on the noble maidens and their
lady.) They all knew how to ride and how to fly a hawk, to make wreaths
and posies, to sing, to play, to beguile the long hours with chess,
tric-trac, draughts; and the youngest of them began to deal and shuffle
the new-invented “naypes,” or “naibi”--the first playing-cards. They
could pluck or brew virtuous simples, bind a broken limb, or nurse a
fever. They could amuse the convalescent with endless tales of the Round
Table, with the legends of Charlemagne, and with lives of the saints no
less interesting and romantic. Most of them could read aloud some novel:
_Cléomadès_ or _Mélusine_. They must, I think, have been blithe,
charming, capable companions in the long winter of a lonely
country-house. On the whole, with its constant undercurrent of chivalry
and religion, theirs was an education which left its women delightful,
tender of heart, and generous, if, perhaps, with little moral strength
to resist the illusions of the heart.


VII

From December till the end of March, life in the castle was perforce an
idle one. War was rarely made in winter; there were no tourneys in the
bitter weather, too cold for combatant or spectator; and in heavy snow
time there was perforce a truce to hunting of the more vigorous kind. It
would have been extravagant to rise before candlelight, so that it was
after seven when knights and ladies left their curtained beds, washed
their hands and face in rose-water, heard the Mass, and took their
morning broth. Dinner, which in the summer was sometimes as early as
nine, was sometimes in winter put as late as noon. And after dinner
there was the siesta--the apparently inevitable siesta, sensible enough
in summer heats after a morning already seven or eight hours old, but
inexplicable during the best part of a winter’s day. Still, in all the
novels and chronicles of the fourteenth century, I am bound to admit
that, at all seasons of the year, after the principal meal, both men and
women retire to sleep for at least a couple of hours. It is true the
meal was long and heavy, and highly spiced. Still, in our visions of
mediæval heroes we cannot imagine Charlemagne nodding after dinner every
day, despite the assurance of Philippe Mouskes “that he always undressed
himself and slept for two hours after the midday meal, holding the
practice for a very wholesome one.”[58] We do not evoke Knight Percival
and his companions as sleeping half the afternoon away. Yet--

              “après le disner
    Se couchièrent ... à dormir
    Jusqu’al vespre sans nul espir.

    *       *       *       *       *

    Endroit vespre sont reveillé
    Le souper ont appareillié.”[59]

Joinville mentions, as the most natural thing in the world, that St.
Louis went to bed every day after the midday dinner until vespers; while
the child Jehan de Saintré, Damp Abbez, the Dame des Belles Cousines,
Pero Niño, the Dame de Sérifontaines, the Lady of Fayel, the Chastelain
de Coucy, all the brood of fourteenth-century heroes and heroines,
follow, in this respect, the example of their elders.

Towards three o’clock, our dames and knights aroused themselves, took a
slender meal of bread dipped in wine or hypocras, and preserved fruits,
and then set out to vespers. We still are faithful to the afternoon-tea,
but we have dropped the daily church service. After vespers the winter
evening had closed in--the fourteenth-century evening ill-lit by flaring
torches. It was fortunate if pedlar or pilgrim, minstrel or acrobat,
knocked at the castle gate and demanded hospitality. Otherwise, despite
the well-worn _facetiæ_ of Master Hausselicoq, the fool, the evening was
apt to prove a trifle long.

The accounts of fourteenth-century barons abound in mention of
minstrels, acrobats, “joueurs d’espertise,” “joueurs de la corde,”
“chanteurs et chanteresses,” and all the motley crew.[60] Every castle
was glad to extend its hospitality to wayfarers of every kind, for they
brought news and amusement, and renewed the worn-out stock of gossip.
Two little pictures of people of this sort occur to me as I am writing.
One is a sketch of the Welsh or Breton harper, from the poem of Renart.
When Renart, disguised as a jongleur, offered to sing to Isengrin his
lays of the Round Table, he put on a strange jargon, and proceeded to
tell his story in almost unintelligible French--

    “‘Je fot saver bon lai Breton
    Et di Merlin et di Foucon
    Del Roi Artus, et de Tristan
    Del Chievrefoil, et Saint Brandan.’ ...
    ‘Et sais-tu le Lai Dan Iset?’....
    ‘Ya-ia!’ dit il. ‘Godistouët!’” (God is to wit?)

Wrapped in their weather-beaten mantle, shaggy, ridiculous, singing much
as sings Hans Breitmann to-day, it is thus (according to M. Joseph
Bédier[61]) that we must picture the minstrels who sang of Tristan and
Yseult. Probably they used their strange, absurd prose merely as a
medium to explain the story to their hearers in much such a
_chante-fable_ as “Aucassin et Nicolette,” while they sang their lyrics
in their Celtic tongue to the music of their harps. And if the voice is
sweet, after all, the language is of little consequence.

Our other tiny idyl is drawn from the arrival of the pedlar at the
castle of the Lady of Fayel. That hapless and guilty lady, desirous at
all risks to meet her noble lover, bids the Chastelain de Coucy don the
pedlar’s garb in order to approach her. He puts on rough laced boots and
a coat of coarse cloth, on his head a torn and battered hat, a stick in
his hand, a pack upon his back. He comes to the castle and undoes his
wares:

                  “car mercier
    Porte en tous lieus son panier
    Et en salles et en maisons
    S’ebate en toutes saisons.”

The lady and her maidens stand round and pick and choose, praise this,
bargain for that, choose and discard in true feminine fashion.

    “Ont maintes choses barguigné
    Et li aucuns ont acheté
    Ce que leur vint à volonté.”

But when the pack is strapped again, the pedlar murmurs that it is late.
“And it rains!” cries the Dame de Fayel. So the packman stays all night
at the castle, and my lady finds means to get speech with her lover.

In the summer, when there were tourneys and weddings and other
festivities in the countryside, not only packmen passed and minstrels,
but acrobats, conjurers who swallowed knives and lighted candles,
keepers of learned pigs and clever dogs, owners of puppet-shows, dancers
and jongleurs in plenty. They travelled from place to place, lodging in
the castle or the village inn, always welcome guests in the monotony of
country life. But all these visitors were rarer birds in winter. Then
the long days were passed in chess-playing and tric-trac; heavy bets
were laid and taken, and in the cumber of their idleness many a knight
was ruined out of sheer _ennui_.

Gambling was the curse of the noble, as it has always been the curse of
every class trained to win and to desire, but with scant outlets for its
energies. The knights in winter gambled pretty nearly all day long. We
remember how the Servitor of Milun, entering a castle in the morning,
finds in the great hall two knights playing chess, so absorbed that they
do not see him.... “When Easter comes,” say the knights to Milun, “we
will recommence our tournaments,” but until Easter there is no rival to
their games of chance, except the eternal game of love. Chess was the
baccarat, the bridge of the Middle Ages. In vain the king forbade it in
1369, in 1393, and both before and after, with every other game of
hazard. But who was to enter the snowed-up country castle, to tell tales
of knights and ladies playing the forbidden game? The women were almost
as bad as the men. “Never play chess, save for love,” says the Knight de
la Tour to his daughters: “ne soyez jamais grant jouaresses de tables.”
And he proceeds to tell them melancholy tales of land, of money, and of
women’s honour spent over the too enticing board. But, alas, good
knight, the days are ill to pass in winter time!


VIII

So there was great joy when the trees began to redden:

    “Betweene Mersh and Averil
    When spray beginth to spring.”

The poets of the Middle Ages, all intoxicate with May-dew, did but
express the hearts of their whole generation. The long dull months, shut
in cold and ill-lit draughty houses, with, for nourishment, the same
eternal salt meat and shipboard food, were now delightfully over-past.
The voice of the stock-dove was heard in the land, and the almond-boughs
began to blossom in the orchard. Spring meant a free life out of doors
in the sunlight; spring meant the hunt, delicious days spent in the
fresh green wood in healthy sport that made the pulses beat. Spring
meant the game-bag full; a varied table spread in bower or garden.
Spring meant a hundred little intimate festivities waking to mirth the
numerous young people of every fourteenth-century castle. Sometimes the
whole company go out to hunt for several days in the forest, knights and
ladies, pages, maidens, carrying with them tents, provisions. The girls
wash their hands and faces in the dew of flowers to get a good
complexion, as they still used to do in Warwickshire when I was a little
child. Every hunter has a horn to sound if he gets lost in the forest.
How they laugh over all the little hardships and adventures of the
picnic! In one old poem--old even in the days of Valentine Visconti--the
knights have forgotten their towels and have to dry their faces on the
ladies’ skirts.[62]

Generally these great hunts were made with hounds, and the game was deer
or bear, wild boar, hare, or otter. But the most fashionable sport was
hawking. Every castle had its knight-falconer, who was a great person
with onerous duties. The royal falconer was paid as much as twenty-four
sols a day--three times the daily due of the physician; and even a
varlet falconer was given three sols _per diem_--a very respectable
salary.[63] But he was not paid for doing nothing; the hawk was hard to
catch, and when caught difficult to train. Night and day the falconer,
with the bird, hooded and fasting, on his hand, must pace up and down,
up and down, like a mother with her teething child. When at last the
bird was fit for use, perched lightly on his lady’s wrist, or soaring
after swan, pheasant, or wild duck through the upper air, he was one of
the most precious and beautiful possessions of a noble. The best
esteemed was the Irish or Norwegian ger-falcon. What pet name was more
endearing than that of “Gay Goshawk”? His clear eye, a pure grey,
neither greenish nor bluish, is the inevitable standard to which the
mediæval lover compares his lady’s glance--falcon-keen, falcon-swift,
falcon-bright, and grey as the hawk’s eye. In the evening, invigorated
rather than fatigued by the long day in the forest, knights and ladies
would fall to dancing. The country neighbours would come for miles; even
the burghers of the richest sort were now and then invited. “Il est
accoustumé en esté de veiller à dances jusqu’au jour,” writes the Knight
of La Tour, but he condemns the practice, being past his youth, and
asserts that strange things happen when some band of practical jokers
contrives to extinguish all the lights. Let us hope that such accidents
did not frequently occur, and that the knight’s three daughters were not
kept at home too often “pour le péril de mauvaises langues.”


IX

It would be pleasant to spend a day or two in some fourteenth-century
country-house during the early summer. Let us attach ourselves to the
suite of a certain Spanish hidalgo, Don Pero Niño, a noble adventurer,
who, landing at Harfleur in 1405, went to visit Renaud de Trie, Admiral
of France, at his country seat of Sérifontaines. Don Pero Niño, fresh as
we to France, sets forth, by means of his gifted secretary and
chronicler, all the details of that memorable visit. We remember no page
in Froissart at once so bright and so precise.

The Admiral de Trie was an aged knight, ill in health. In his day he had
been a famous fighter, but in 1405, broken down by many battles, he
lived retired on his estate in Normandy.[64]

“There dwelt he in great comfort in a castle, strong, although situate
in a plain, and furnished as well as it had been in Paris. He had about
him young gentlemen in pageship, and all kind of servitors, as befits so
great a lord.

“In his house there was a great chapel, where Mass was said every
morning to the sound of trumpets and divers instruments, played by his
minstrels in a way that was a marvel. Before the house a river flowed;
orchards and gracious gardens bordered it. On the other side of the
castle was a pond for fish, enclosed by walls, and guarded by gates
well-locked; whence, every day, the steward might furnish food for three
hundred persons.... There was a pack of fifty hounds; twenty horses were
kept for the service of the lord of the castle. There were plenty of
falcons-gentle. There was all that heart can wish for in the way of
hunting--the otter, the roe, the wild boar, small game, or waterfowl.”

The old knight had a young wife, “the fairest lady that was at that time
in France.” She was a woman of great sense and order, and, as was in
those days the custom, she was almost entirely responsible for the
management of her husband’s estates.

“All things were arranged or decided by my lady. She alone governed
everything both within and without. My lord the Admiral was a rich man,
lord of many lands; but he had to take thought for none of these things,
my lady being sufficient unto all.”

“My lady had her noble lodging apart from the mansion of her lord. They
dwelt within the self-same moat, but divided the one from the other by a
drawbridge. It would be long to set forth the number and the
magnificence of the furniture that there was in this lodging. Here lived
my lady, surrounded by ten maids of honour, very richly clad and
accoutred all of them, who had nought to do save keep their lady
company, for beneath them there were many waiting-women.

“Now will I tell you the rule and order of my lady’s life. Of a morning,
so soon as she was dressed, forth she went with her damsels to a spring
hard by, where each one told her rosary, and read her book of _Hours_ in
silent prayer, sitting a little apart from her fellows. Next, plucking
flowers and violets upon their way, they hied them home to the palace,
and gathered in the chapel, where they heard a low Mass. As they came
out of church their servants handed them a silver tray, furnished with
larks, chickens, and other roast fowl, of which they took or left what
they would, and drank a little wine. My lady ate but rarely of a
morning, or trifled with some morsel to humour those about her. Their
fast broken, lady and damsels mounted their noble hackneys, and then,
met in company with such knights and squires as were of their party,
they went riding through the lanes and open country for some while,
weaving garlands of flowers as they went. Then might you hear such
singing, by voices well-tuned and timed together, of virelays, lays,
rondeaux, songs, complaints, ballads, and other verses, such as the
French know featly how to finish, that, I declare you, could it last for
ever, you would have thought yourself in Paradise.”

With this company rode the Captain Pero Niño, the occasion of all this
festival. With them at dinner-time he rode home to the castle,
dismounted, and strode into the hall, where the portable trestle-tables
had been already spread. The Admiral could no longer ride afield, but he
welcomed home his guests with a marvellous good grace. My lady and Pero
Niño were placed at the Admiral’s table, while the seneschal presided
over the other, and saw that every damsel sat between a squire and a
knight. There were meats of all manner in great number and marvellous
well cooked. During the meal whosoever knew how to speak with courtesy
and measure of arms and love was sure to find a hearing and an answer.
Meanwhile the jongleurs made low music on divers instruments. Dinner
over, grace was said, the tables removed, and then the minstrels came;
my lady danced with Pero Niño, and every damsel with her squire. This
dance lasted an hour; when it was over, my lady gave the kiss of peace
to Pero Niño, and every lady to her cavalier. Then wine and spices were
handed round, and all alike dispersed to their siesta. Pero Niño, happy
knight, had his lodging in my lady’s tower.

Later in the afternoon the horses were brought round, and the pages
stood ready bearing falcons: a huntsman had already tracked the heron’s
course:

“Then would you have seen a noble sport and fair amusement, with
swimming of hounds, beating of drums, whirring and wheeling of falcons,
with knights and ladies riding along the river-bank as many as you can
imagine them. That sport ended, my lady and her company would seat
themselves to rest in some green meadow, while the pages unpacked cold
fowl and game, and divers fruit. All eat and drank, twining garlands.
Then, singing glees and songs, they returned to the castle.”

Supper came at nightfall if it were winter-time. In summer the meal was
earlier, and afterwards my lady would set off on foot to wander up and
down the countryside till dark, while some would accompany her, and some
would stay to play at bowls. Then the torches flared in the great hall,
the minstrels gathered in, and there was dancing until far into the
night. And this is the order which was followed every day, according to
the seasons and the quality of the guests, whenever there was holiday at
Sérifontaines. But now, ’tis late. Hand round the wine and spices, and
to bed!


X

During these long days, when my lady danced, sang, and rode with Pero
Niño, she and he discovered that the Admiral was old. “En tout honneur,”
they fell in love with one another. Like the woman of order that she
was, instead of keeping Pero Niño as her lover, Madame de Trie sent him
to her father to see if he would do for her second husband, while she
stayed at Sérifontaines and nursed the Admiral. The father apparently
consented, for we hear that they “se tinrent pour amoureux.” Meanwhile
the Admiral died. My lady and Don Pero exchanged keepsakes, and he
promised to return to France and marry her at the expiry of her
mourning. But having met in Spain a certain Doña Beátriz, he married her
instead; and perhaps in later years Madame de Trie thought more kindly
of the good old Admiral.

Neither the knights nor the ladies of these old chronicles surprise us
by the delicacy of their heart. With the _Roman de la Rose_, the still
unpurified passions of those ages held that--

    “Nous sommes faiz, beau filz, sans doutes,
    Toutes pour tous et tous pour toutes.”

Adultery is as common in their chronicles as it has always been in
fiction--and perhaps in fact. And when the lovers are tired of each
other, it is difficult to veil the case less kindly than the Dame des
Belles-Cousines, in her behaviour to Jehan de Saintré, or the Chastelain
de Coucy when he punishes the Lady of Vermandois. Moreover, the very
first beginnings of love were contaminated by a thought of utility, of
“subsidy,” as one of our authors does not fear to state. Even in that
pure and charming chronicle, the _Livre des Faiz de Jehan Bouciquaut_,
we read that on account of her influence and her prestige, “it is much
better to love a lady of a station superior to one’s own.” Listen to the
counsels which a lady of great position, the Dame des Belles-Cousines,
gives to Jehan de Saintré! The lad, a child of thirteen, has refused to
tell her the name of his sweetheart:

“The tears came into the lad’s eyes, for never in his days had he given
thought to such a thing as love or lady-loves. His heart fell, his face
turned pale.... He sat a long while in silence, twirling the loose end
of his girdle round his thumbs.... At last he cried out in his despair,
for all the maids of honour fell to questioning him together and at
once: ‘What can I tell her? I have no lady-love! If I had one, I would
tell you soon enough!’

“‘Well, whom do you love the best of all in the world?’ asked the
maidens.

“‘My mother,’ said little Saintré, ‘and after her my sister Jacqueline.’

“Then said my lady:

“‘But of them that are nothing to ye, which love ye the best?’

“‘I love none of them,’ said Saintré.

“‘What! none of them?’ quoth my lady. ‘Ha! false gentleman! You love
none of them? Then by that token I prophesy that you will come to
nothing. Faint heart that ye are! whence sprang all noble enterprises,
all great achievements and valorous deeds of Launcelot, of Gawain, of
Tristan, of the courteous Giron, and the other knights of the Round
Table? Also of Ponthus,[65] and innumerable other heroes? What else but
love-service? What else but the desire to keep the favour of their
much-desired dame? And I myself have known many men who, through their
love affairs, have reached the highest possible honours, of whom, but
for these, no more talk had been made than of so many simple soldiers.’”

Little Saintré left the lady’s presence shamefaced, and when the door
was shut, “he ran down the gallery as fast as if he had fifty wolves
behind him.” But one day, as he waited at table on the maids of honour,
these ladies made him vow to give the promised answer that afternoon.
Therefore, when the king and queen retired for their noonday siesta, my
lady sought young Saintré in the gallery, and took him to her chamber
with her; and there, surrounded by her ladies, she seated him at the
foot of her couch and summoned him for a reply.

“At last the poor lad bethought him of one of the noble maidens sent to
court, who was ten years of age.

“‘My lady,’ quoth he, ’tis Matheline de Courcy!’

“‘Ah, coward!’ cried my lady, ‘to choose a child like Matheline. Not
that she be not a very fair maiden, and of an excellent house, better
than thine. But what good, what profit, what honour, what comfort, what
advantage, _what subsidy_, what aid and counsel can you find in the love
of Matheline? She is but a lassie yet. Nay, you should choose a lady of
high and noble birth, wise, and _with the wherewithal to help your
fortunes_, and set you above necessity; and her should you love with
perfect service, loyally and well, and in all honour. Be sure that in
the end she will have mercy upon you, “et par ainsy deviendrez homme de
bien.”’”[66]

When we think that this harangue (and especially all that follows it)
was penned by an ecclesiastic for the education of a prince, we perceive
that our code of morals has changed. Young Saintré received large sums
of money from his mistress, with no loss of honour, and the lady herself
enters on her mission as on a sacred calling. “Although so young, she
had, in her virtue, formed a Roman resolution never to remarry; but
often she wished that her work in the world might be to train some young
knight or squire and make him a pattern of chivalry.” It is with this
high intention that she becomes the mistress of young Saintré; that she
bestows her wealth upon him, and keeps him in due splendour of steed and
apparel; that she preaches to him, with a sublime lack of logic, “how to
flee the seven mortal sins”; that she finds him books to read, and
stuffs him with quotation from Thales of Miletus, Chilon of Lacedemonia,
Avicenna, Valerius Maximus, and Pittacus of Mitylene. To this end she
persuades herself to a cruel separation, and sends him on his travels as
knight-errant. She is, in fact, his mundane Beatrice. Her love for him
is in truth a liberal education, and one that seems delightful and
legitimate to her contemporaries. But our eyes see in her an ugly
likeness to Madame de Warens, and we should say, in downright English,
that she corrupts the lad.


XI

Virtuous or frail, the ladies of the Trecento, as of the two preceding
centuries, were all alike as sisters in their loveliness. Or rather, we
may say that only one type of beauty was recognized as such, all
mediæval heroines were required to conform to that absolute standard.

In our eyes the dark-eyed beauties of Murillo, the warm blondes of
Titian and Palma, the slender angels of Perugino, the powdered
_espiègle_ ladies of Gainsborough and Reynolds; the majestic form of the
Venus of Milo, and the somewhat mannered elegance of Tanagra, are all,
in their kind, types of accomplished beauty. Many different ideals have
enlarged and exercised our taste. But, of all the candidates on our
list, the Middle Ages would have admitted only the Perugino angel and
the Tanagra statuette.

This lessens, at any rate, the difficulty of description. The mediæval
beauty was _always_ golden-haired, either naturally or by the aid of
art. Her hair was very fine, rippling in long curves above a fair broad
forehead. One of her distinctive charms was the large space between the
brows, the “plaisant entr’euil” so often sung of early poets; very few
things seemed more hideous to our forefathers than shaggy eyebrows
meeting in the middle. It was also a great disadvantage for the eyebrows
to be fair. They should be several shades darker than the hair, narrow,
pencilled, delicately arched; Burns’--

    “Eyebrows of a darker hue
      Bewitchingly o’erarching.”

Eyes, not blue, but “grey as glass,” “plus vairs que cristal,” not
over-large, somewhat deeply set, and always bright, keen, and shining as
a falcon’s.

Below these brilliant eyes, a small straight nose, rather long than
short, but above all “traitis”--that is to say, neat and
straight--divided two oval cheeks, with dimples that appear at the
bidding of a smile. A fresh, faint pink-and-white colour, like the first
apple-blossom, must flourish in these little cheeks. The lips are much
redder, slightly pursed over the tiny pearly teeth; “la bouche petite et
grossette,” says the prosaic _Roman de la Rose_; but Ulrich von
Lichtenstein expressed his meaning better in his “kleinvelhitzerôter
munt,” his “little, very fire-red mouth;” or the author of _Guillaume le
Faucon_, who likens his heroine’s lips to a scarlet poppy-bud:

    “Tant estoit vermeille et close.”

Sometimes the small mouth was only half shut, as if about to speak:

    “Les lèvres jointes en itel guise
    C’un poi i lessa ouverture
    Selonc réson et par mesure,”

says the author of _Narcisse_.[67]

The cleft chin and the ears must be small and round and white, above a
long neck, with a full white throat. The fairness of this throat, its
delicacy and transparence, was the _sine quâ non_ of feminine
loveliness. “When she drank red wine, one saw the rosy fluid through her
throat,” say the poets.

The beauty of the Middle Ages was invariably slender, slim, and round as
a willow-wand. The shoulders are small, the whole figure “greslette et
alignie”; long-drawn out in slenderness, with slim, round, long limbs,
and slim, round, long fingers, that show no joints, and terminate in
trim, shining nails, cut very close. The bust is high, with neat, round,
well-divided breasts, and a slim, round waist. When Eustache Deschamps,
in his 960th Ballad, sings the charms of a lady quite correctly like
this portrait, he ends with saying:

    “Mais sur toutes portez bien vos habiz
    Plus que nulle dame ne damoiselle
    Qui soit vivante en terre n’en paÿs.”[68]

Poets in every century have laid great store by that

          “something i’ the gait
    Gars ony dress look weel.”

The _Roman de la Rose_, that manual of the fourteenth century, devotes a
score or so of verses to this doctrine of deportment.

“‘Marche joliettement,’ walk prettily, mincingly, showing your pretty
little shoes, so well made they fit without a wrinkle.... And if your
dress trail behind on the pavement, yet take thought to lift it a little
towards the front, as if the wind had caught it, so that every one who
passes you may notice the dainty well-shod slimness of your feet.

“And if you have a long mantle--one of those long, full cloaks that
almost entirely hide your charming figure--with your two hands and your
two arms manage to open it wide in front, whether the day be fair or
foul, even as a peacock spreads his tail.”


XII

Let us not think that the fourteenth-century castle was entirely peopled
by men and women in the bloom of idle youth. There were charitable
widows whose conversation was in heaven; there were knights strong and
resolute in their absolute religion. In spite of all its mediocrity,
alongside of its frivolity, its often criminal looseness of the marriage
tie, the fourteenth century was an age of piety and honour. Every
gentleman had two religions, for either of which he would have died; and
the briefest record of life in the castle must find a place for the
observances of the Church and the duties of chivalry. We cannot lay too
great a stress upon the austerity, upon the charity, inherent in the
ideal woman of a period whose great ladies were so often purely worldly
and emotional. We should leave our readers under a false conception if
we let them suppose that the women of a fourteenth-century castle were
invariably after the pattern of the sprightly Dame des Belles-Cousines,
or of the sweeter Lady of Fayel. “Even in a palace life can be lived
well.” No saint in her cloister was purer than Madame Olive de
Belleville, “la plus courtoise dame et la plus humble;” stern to
herself, fasting daily, wearing the hair-shirt on her tender flesh, but
to all others most pitiful and gentle, visiting the sick, helping poor
women in childbirth, praying on the graves of poor or aged people who
had few to mourn them. And, by a rare virtue, she was charitable not
only to the unhappy; she knew no less how to welcome and honour the
well-to-do, the honourable, the unpathetic; she knew how to deck with
fair, white raiment the smiling daughters of ruined gentle-folk, who
else would have gone to their bridegrooms without a jewel or a wedding
garment. She was hospitable, and even lavish, to the careless minstrel
folk, so that they made a “Ballad of Regret” when at last she left them.
Above all, she would never hear ill of anybody. And when the ugly story
went round in whispers, and the worldly and the sceptical smiled
half-content, this good woman, who denied herself the simplest
pleasures, would hasten to excuse the sinner, to doubt if the tale were
true; or, were it proven, then she would say that God would amend it,
and that His judgments and His mercy alike were marvellous, and would
one day astound us all. So that in her neighbourhood none went
undefended in the hour of slander, unsaluted in prosperity, unvisited in
sickness or sorrow, unholpen in poverty, or unprayed for in the hour of
death. Few sweeter eulogies could be given to any woman. “In truth,”
says the Knight of La Tour, “though I was only nine years old when I
knew her, I still remember many a wise thing she said and did, that I
would set down here had I the time and space.”

Madame Olive de Belleville was as frequent a type as the Lady des
Belles-Cousines and her kind. More frequent than either, and between the
two extremes of saint and sinner, is the wise and prudent Lady of La
Tour, the careful mother of growing daughters, “très gentille et preude
femme,” who, beautiful still, and often subject to temptation, is
skilful as Portia or Beatrice in the witty answer, the brilliant,
inviolable smile, which serves to turn aside the insinuation of evil.
Nor let us forget that noble wife of a nobler husband, Madame Antoinette
de Turenne, “who scarce lived in her husband’s absence, with so great
love did they love each other,” who had refused the hand of a Royal
prince in order to marry Sir John Bouciquaut. There were then, as now,
in every class, countless women of purest honour, of staunchest virtue,
wise in counsel, true of heart. And, in the highest rank, if the absence
of daily cares produced many frail and thoughtless beauties, the same
cause added to the souls of its saints a singular aloofness, a dazzling
lustre of unworldliness, and a penetrating grace of meditation. The long
empty hours of the mediæval donjon, if they fostered the loves of a
Tristan and an Yseult, also brought forth many a radiant spiritual
flower.


XIII

In the castles of the fourteenth century, the men no less than the women
were religious. The middle class, and especially the respectable
bourgeois man of letters, affected a certain freedom of thought: he was
already the father of Voltaire and the grandfather of the speech-making
Jacobins of the French Revolution. But all that was changed among the
nobility. There it was essential (even as it is among the nobles of
France to-day), however light of life, to be grave of thought. The
education of every knight made him instinctively religious. Even the
scapegrace Louis of Orleans would pass weeks together in the Convent of
the Celestines, praying, fasting with the monks before the altar. And a
perfect knight was habitually not only pious, but austere.

The _Livre des Faiz de Messire Jehan Bouciquaut_ gives us an admirable
picture of a pattern of chivalry. The great Governor of Genoa (whom the
documents of the Florentine archives reveal to us as an insupportable
martinet, dogmatic, obstinate, and tyrannical, despite his virtues)
appears in these pages in the inner splendour of a noble soul. Every
morning he rose at dawn, “that the first-fruits of his day might be
consecrate to God,” and we learn with some surprise that this poet of
courtly ballads, this soldier, this statesman, gave every morning of his
life three consecutive hours to his “œuvre d’oraison,” as infallibly
renewed at night. At table, while his household were served in gold and
silver, he ate and drank from pewter, glass, or wood; however rich the
banquet, he partook but of one dish, the first served, with one glass of
wine and water.

“He loves to read the fair books of God, the lives of the saints, the
deeds of the Romans, and ancient history; but he talks little and will
listen to no slander.... Marvellously hateth he liars and flatterers,
and driveth them from him.... Marvellously hateth he also all games of
chance and fortune, and never consenteth to them.... Those virtues which
be contrary to lubricity are steadfast in him.... He is stern and to the
point in justice, yet faileth he not in mercy and compassion.... He is
very piteous to the ancient men-at-arms who can no longer help
themselves, who have been good blades in their time, but have laid by
nothing, and so are sore distressed in their old age.... And with all
his heart loveth he those who are of good life, fearing and serving our
Lord Jesus Christ.... He oweth no debts.... He never lies; and all that
he promiseth, so much doth he perform.”

We are content to end our studies with the portrait of so true a knight.


THE END


PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Flour de Brousso,” par Arsène Vermenouze. [Imprimerie Moderne.
Aurillac. 1896.]

[2] _Pages Libres_, No. 103.

[3] See the _Comptes des Frères Bonis_, merchants at Montauban during
the second half of the fourteenth century, published (1890) by M. Ed.
Forestier. Bonis himself possessed in the vicinity of Montauban lands
and houses to the value of sixty or seventy thousand pounds sterling,
modern value;--which did not prevent his selling his goods with his own
hands, down to the smallest detail.

[4] See _Bonis_, ccviii. Among Bonis’ servants the swineherd, Jean
Chaussenoire, bought a vineyard; the neatherd, Salona, two houses in
town; another neatherd, a house on the banks of the Aveyron. In 1366,
under the English, a shepherdess comes to Bonis and entrusts him with
her savings: three and thirty pounds! Bonis’s valet, a man at wages
of five pounds a year, possessed enough land to take 430 litres (two
septiers) of wheat at the sowing: from six to eight acres of land.

[5] Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_. See pp.
8-17, an account of the position of the _hospites_, who, often burghers
in the town, were little better than serfs in the country.

[6] For example, the Marmosets of Charles V.; but this king also
knighted numerous burghers of Paris.

[7] For the full description of the origin and class of vavassours, we
refer our reader to L. Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_.

[8] Bonis.

[9] Thorold Rogers, i. 16.

[10] _History of Prices_, _loc. cit._, and p. 66.

[11] See especially the treatise on gardening in the _Menagier de
Paris_. There is also a valuable chapter on the kitchen-garden in M.
L. Delisle’s _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_. Most of the plants
quoted were already grown in the gardens of Charlemagne.

[12] Delisle, p. 221.

[13] Delisle, p. 616.

[14] Thorold Rogers, i. 54.

[15] Delisle, p. 583.

[16] _Régistres du Châtelet_, i. p. 3; and ii. pp. 100, 351, 370, 460,
and 461.

[17] Bonis, cxcvii.

[18] _Régistres du Châtelet_: varlet thatcher, one sol and his keep (i.
393). Joubert, _Vie privée en Anjou_: hedgers paid per day, one sol
and their food (p. 98). Thorold Rogers: for mowing an acre, 8½_d._;
harvesters for carting corn, one sol two deniers, and their food (i.
255).

[19] _Régistres du Châtelet_, i. 427, 448, 558, _et passim_; and ii.
497.

[20] Bonis, p. cxciii.

[21] See the farm inventory in Joubert’s _Vie Privée en Anjou au XVme.
siêcle_.

[22] Joubert.

[23] _Comptes des Frères Bonis, Marchands de Montauban_, publié par M.
Edouard M. Forestier, 1890, p. ccx.

[24] _Châtelet_, ii. 509: “They took the bed, pulled the straw out of
it, threw it in the chimney, and set fire to it.”

[25] Thorold Rogers, _History_, i. 13.

[26] See Vaissière, _Gentilshommes Campagnards de l’Ancienne France_;
see also Thorold Rogers, _History of Prices_, i. 13. See _ibid._,
inventory of John Senekworth’s effects, for the furniture of a
Cambridgeshire manor in 1314. We notice six sheets, a mattress, a
coverlet, a counterpane, a “banker” or stuffed cushion for a bench,
three cushions, three table-cloths and two napkins, two drinking
glasses, four silver spoons, basin and ewer, two silver seals, and
_three books of romance_!

[27] Douët d’Arcq, ii. 139. 6.

[28] Joubert, _La Vie Privée en Anjou_.

[29] Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande_, p. 189.

[30] _Régistres du Châtelet_ for 1392, i. 174.

[31] _Ibid._, 427.

[32] _Ibid._, 526.

[33] Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande_, 189.

[34] _L’Agriculture Normande._

[35] _Ibid._, 190.

[36] _L’Agriculture Normande_, 190.

[37] Joubert, _Vie Privée en Anjou_, p. 94.

[38] Joubert, _Vie Privée en Anjou_, p. 60.

[39] Bonis, cxxi.

[40] All these remedies are taken from the _Accounts of Bonis_, _loc.
cit._, _et seq._

[41] Henri de Parville, “Revue des Sciences,” in the _Journal des
Débats_, 23rd January, 1890.

[42] Thorold Rogers, i. 399.

[43] Bonis.

[44] Joubert, p. 60. But see especially for this subject the masterly
passage of M. Léopold Delisle, _L’Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age_,
p. 175, _et seq._

[45] It will be remembered that in the Third Order of St. Francis
special provision is made for laymen who can read, evidently a
considerable class.

[46] _Registres du Châtelet_, ii. 103.

[47] See D. Bessin, _Concilia_, part i., p. 78, quoted by Delisle, p.
116.

[48] Eustache Deschamps, _Ballades_, édition du Marquis de Queux de St.
Hilaire. Ballade 835.

[49] In the disastrous years immediately preceding the accession of
Charles V., the price of corn doubled.

[50] Eustache Deschamps, ii.

[51] _Voyage du Seigneur de Caumont_, quoted by Viollet-le-Duc, _op.
cit._, v. p. 83.

[52] See, for instance, Douët d’Arcq, _Comptes de l’Hotel des Rois de
France_.

[53] Labarte, _Mobilier de Charles V._

[54] The “chamber” generally consisted of bed-curtains, a baldaquin,
counterpane and covering for the couch or sofa, hangings for the wall,
doors, and windows, cushions for the benches and chairs.

[55] The Knight of La Tour makes a mock of certain eccentric “Gallois”
who strew their floors and deck their hearths, in winter, “comme en
esté,” with herbs and holly.--p. 242.

[56] Labarte, _Mobilier de Charles V._

[57] _Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry._

[58] “Après mengier al miédi, et lors tout nuz il se couçoit, dormir
deux heures, puis levoit” (Philippe Mouskes: _Chronique_).

[59] Quoted by Herr Alwin Schultz, _op. cit._, i. 362.

[60] See, for instance, the _Comptes de la Trémoille_ and the _Comptes
de l’Hotel des Rois_.

[61] “Les Lais de France,” par J. Bédier: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, Oct.
15, 1891.

[62] Guillaume de Dole. Quoted by Herr Alwin Schultz, t. i. p. 470.

[63] Douët d’Arcq, _Comptes de l’Hotel du Roy Charles V_.

[64] Le Victorial, _Chronique de Don Pedro Niño, Comte de Buelna_, par
Gutierre Diaz de Gomez, son Alferez, 1379-1449. Traduit de l’Espagnol
d’après le manuscrit, avec une introduction et des notes, par le Comte
Albert de Circourt et le Comte de Puymaigre.

[65] _Les Amours de Ponthus et de la belle Sidonie_ is the name of a
once famous romance of chivalry.

[66] _Le Petit Jehan de Saintré_, édition Guichard.

[67] Quoted from Herr Alwin Schultz, _op. cit._, t. i. p. 215.

[68] _Ballades d’Eustache Deschamps_, in five volumes. Edited by the
Marquis de Queux de St. Hilaire.