Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone
by Angus B. Reach · English · Gutenberg #43844 · 420,869 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone
Author: Angus B. Reach
Release date: September 29, 2013 [eBook #43844]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLARET AND OLIVES, FROM THE GARONNE TO THE RHONE ***
CLARET AND OLIVES,
FROM
THE GARONNE TO THE RHONE;
OR,
NOTES, SOCIAL, PICTURESQUE, AND LEGENDARY,
BY THE WAY.
BY ANGUS B. REACH,
AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF A BUCCANEER," ETC.
[Illustration]
LONDON: DAVID BOGUE, FLEET STREET.
MDCCCLII.
LONDON:
HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER,
GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET.
TO
CHARLES MACKAY, ESQ., LL. D.,
MY EARLIEST AND KINDEST LITERARY FRIEND,
These Pages
ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Diligence--French Country Places--The English in
Guienne--Bordeaux--Old Bordeaux--A Bordeaux
Landlord--A Suburban Vintaging--The Vintage
Dinner 1-20
CHAPTER II.
Claret _v._ Port--The Claret Soil--The Claret Vine--Popular
Appetite for Grapes--Variable qualities of the
Claret Soil--French Veterans--The "Authorities" in
France 21-38
CHAPTER III.
The Claret Vintage--The Treading of the Grape--The Last
Drops of the Grape--Wanderings amongst the
Vineyards--Wandering Vintagers--The Vintage Dinner--The
Vintagers' Bedroom--The Claret Chateaux--The Chateau
Margaux 39-57
CHAPTER IV.
The Landes--The Bordeaux and Teste Railway--M. Tetard
and his Imitator--Start for the Landes--The Language
of the Landes--A Railway Station in the Landes--The
Scenery of the Landes--The Stilt-walkers of the
Landes--A Glimpse of Green 58-76
CHAPTER V.
The Clear Water of Arcachon--Legend of the Baron of
Chatel-morant--The Resin Harvest--The Witches of
the Landes--The Surf of the Bay of Biscay--French
Priests--Do the Landes Cows give Milk?--The _Amour
Patriæ_ of the Landes 77-101
CHAPTER VI.
Dawn on the Garonne--The Landscape of the Garonne--The
Freaks of the Old Wars in Guienne--Agen--Jasmin,
the Last of the Troubadours--Southern Cookery
and Garlic--The Black Prince in a New
Light--Cross-country Travelling in France 102-126
CHAPTER VII.
Pau--The English in Pau--English and Russians--The
View of the Pyrenees--The Castle--The Statue of
Henri Quatre--His Birth--A Vision of his
Life--Rochelle--St. Bartholomew--Ivry--Henri and
Sully--Henri and Gabrielle--Henri and Henriette
d'Entragues--Ravaillac 127-136
CHAPTER VIII.
The Val d'Ossau--The Vin de Jurancon--Pyrenean Cottages--The
Bernais Peasants--The Devil learning
Basque--The Wolves of the Pyrenees--The Bears of
the Pyrenees--The Dogs of the Pyrenees--An Auberge
in the Pyrenees--Omens and Superstitions in
the Pyrenees--The Songs of the Pyrenees 137-155
CHAPTER IX.
Wet Weather in the Pyrenees--Eaux Chaudes out of
Season, and in the Rain--Plucking the Indian Corn
at the Auberge at Laruns--The Legend of the Wehrwolf,
and the Baron who was changed into a Bear 156-166
CHAPTER X.
The Solitary Big Hotel--The Knitters of the Pyrenees--The
Weavers of the Pyrenees--Pigeon-catching in
the Pyrenees--The Giant of the Pyrenean Dogs--Murray
and _Commis Voyageurs_--The Eastern Pyrenees--The
Legend of Orthon 167-186
CHAPTER XI.
Languedoc--The "Austere South"--Beziers and the
Albigenses--The Fountain of the Greve--The Bishop
and his Flock--The Canal du Midi--The
Mistral--Rural Billiard-playing 187-199
CHAPTER XII.
Travelling by the Canal du Midi--Travelling French
People--The Salt Harvest--Equestrian Thrashing
Machines--Cette--The Mediterranean--The "Made"
Wines--The Priest on Wines--_La Cuisine Française_ 200-218
CHAPTER XIII.
The Olive-gathering--A Night with the
Mosquitoes--Aigues-Mortes--The Fever in
Aigues-Mortes--My _Cicerone_ in Aigues-Mortes--The
Pickled Burgundians--Reboul's Poetry--The Lighthouse
of Aigues-Mortes 219-235
CHAPTER XIV.
Fen Landscape--Tavern Allegories--Roman Remains--Roman
Architecture--Roman Theatricals--The Maison
Carrée--Greek Architecture--Catholic and Protestant--The
Weaver's _Cabane_--Protestant and Catholic 236-255
CHAPTER THE LAST.
Backward French Agriculture--French Rural Society--The
Small Property System--French "Encumbered
Estates" 256-264
[Illustration]
CLARET AND OLIVES.
CHAPTER I.
THE DILIGENCE--OLD GUIENNE AND THE ENGLISH IN FRANCE--BORDEAUX AND A
SUBURBAN VINTAGING.
"_Voila la voila! La ville de Bordeaux!_"
The conductor's voice roused me from the dreamy state of dose in which I
lay, luxuriously stretched back amid cloaks and old English
railway-wrappers, in the roomy banquette of one of the biggest
diligences which ever rumbled out of Caillard and Lafitte's yard.
"_Voila! la Voila!_" The bloused peasant who drove the six stout nags
therewith stirred in his place; his long whip whistled and cracked; the
horses flung up their heads as they broke into a canter, and their bells
rang like a joy peal; while Niniche, the conductor's white poodle,
which maintained a perilous footing in the leathern hood of the
banquette, pattered and scratched above our heads, and barked in
recognition of his master's voice.
I rubbed my eyes and looked. We were on the ridge of a wooded hill.
Below us lay a flat green plain, carpetted with vines. Right across it
ran the broad, white, chalky highway, powdering with dust the double
avenue of chestnuts which lined it. Beyond the plain glittered a great
river, crowded with shipping, and beyond the river rose stretching,
apparently for miles, a magnificent façade of high white buildings,
broken here and there by the foliage of public gardens, and the dark
embouchures of streets; while, behind the range of quays, and golden in
the sunrise, rose high into the clear morning air, a goodly array of
towering Gothic steeples, fretted and pinnacled up to the glancing
weather-cocks. It was, indeed, Bordeaux.
The long journey from Paris was all but over, yet though I had been
tired enough of the way, I felt as if I could brave it again, rather
than make the exertion of encountering octroi officers, and plunging
into strange hotels. For after all, comfortable Diligence travelling
makes a man lazy. It is slow, but you get accustomed to the slowness; in
the banquette, too, you are never cramped; there is luxurious roominess
behind, and you plunge your legs in straw up to the knees. Then leaning
supinely back, you indulge a serene passiveness, rolling lazily on with
the rumbling mountain of a vehicle. The thunder of the heavy wheels, and
the low monotonous clash, clash, clash, of the hundred grelots, form a
soothing atmosphere of sound about you, and musingly, and dreamingly you
watch the action of the team--these half dozen little but stout tough
work-a-day horses, trotting manfully in their rough harness, while the
driver--oh, how different from our old coaching dandies!--a clumsy
peasant, in sabots, and a stable-smelling blouse, sits slouched, and
round-shouldered like a sack before you, incessantly flourishing that
whistling whip, and shouting in the uncouth jargon of his province, to
the jingling team below. And next you watch the country or the road. A
French road, like a mathematical line, on, and on, and on, straight,
straight, mournfully, dismally, straight, running like a tape laid
across the bleak bare country, till it fades, and fades, and seems to
tip over the horizon; or if you are in an undulating wooded district,
you catch sections of it as it climbs each successive ridge; and you
know that in the valleys it is just the same as on the hill tops. You
see your dinner before you, as Englishmen say over roast mutton. You see
your journey before you, as Frenchmen may say, over the slow trotting
team. And how drear and deserted the country looks--open, desolate, and
bare. Here and there a distant mite of a peasant or two bending over the
sun-burnt clods. No cottages, but ever and anon a congregation of
barns--the _bourgs_ in which the small land-owners collect; now a witch
of an old woman herding a cow; anon a solitary shepherd all in rags,
knitting coarse stockings, and followed by a handful of sheep, long in
the legs, low in the flesh, with thin dirty fleeces as ragged as their
guardian's coat. Upon the road travellers are scanty. The bronzed
Cantonier stares as you pass, his brass-lettered hat glittering in the
glare. There go a couple of soldiers on furlough, tramping the dreary
way to their native village, footsore, weary and slow, their hairy
knapsacks galling their shoulders, and their tin canteens evidently
empty. Another diligence, white with dust, meeting us. The conductors
shout to each other, and the passengers crane their heads out of window.
Then we overtake a whole caravan of _roulage_, or carriers, the
well-loaded carts poised upon one pair of huge wheels, the horses, with
their clumsy harness and high peaked collars, making a scant two miles
an hour. Not an equipage of any pretension to be seen. No graceful
phaeton, no slangy dog-cart, no cosey family carriage--only now and then
a crawling local diligence, or M. le Curé on a shocking bad horse, or an
indescribably dilapidated anomalous jingling appearance of a vague
shandry-dan. And so on from dawn till sunset, through narrow streeted
towns, with lanterns swinging above our heads, and open squares with
scrubby lime trees, and white-washed cafés all around; and by a shabby
municipality with gilded heads to the front railings, a dilapidated
tricolor, and a short-legged, red-legged sentinel, not so tall as his
firelock, keeping watch over it; and then, out into the open, fenceless,
hedgeless country, and on upon the straight unflinching road, and
through the long, long tunnels of eternal poplar trees, and by the
cantonnier, and the melancholy _bourgs_, and the wandering soldiers, and
the dusty carriers' carts as before.
One thing strikes you forcibly in these little country towns--the
marvellously small degree of distinction of rank amid the people. No
neighbouring magnate rattles through the lonely streets in the
well-known carriage of the Hall or the Grange, graciously receiving the
ready homage of the townspeople. No retired man of business, or bustling
land-agent, trots his smart gig and cob--no half-pay officer goes
gossipping from house to house, or from shop to shop. There is no
banker's lady to lead the local fashions--no doctor, setting off upon
his well-worked nag for long country rounds--no assemblage, if it be
market day, of stout full-fed farmers, lounging, booted and spurred,
round the Red Lion or the Plough. Working men in blouses, women of the
same rank in the peasant head-dress of the country, and here and there a
nondescript personage in a cap and shooting jacket, who generally turns
up at the scantily-attended table d'hôte at dinner time--such are the
items which make up the mass of the visible population. You hardly see
an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon the
spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left entirely to
themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from
generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi
town--perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and
billiard tables by the half-dozen--the population is as essentially
rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day,
by either landlord or agent. It often happens that a large landed
proprietor has not even a house upon his ground. He lets the land,
receives his rent, and spends it in Paris or one of the large towns,
leaving his tenants to go on cultivating the ground in the jog-trot
style of their fathers and their grandfathers before them. The French,
in fact, have no notion of what we understand by the life of a country
gentleman. A proprietor may pay a sporting visit to his land when
partridge and quail are to be shot; but as to taking up his abode _au
fond de ses terres_, mingling in what we would call county business,
looking after the proceedings of his tenants, becoming learned, in an
amateur way, in things bucolic, in all the varieties of stock and all
the qualities of scientific manures--a life, a character, and a social
position of this sort, would be in vain sought for in the rural
districts of France. There are not, in fact, two more differing meanings
in the world than those attached to our "Country Life," and the French
_Vie de Chateau_. The French proprietor is a Parisian out of Paris. He
takes the rents, shoots the quails, and the clowns do the rest.
An Englishman ought to feel at home in the south-west of France. That
fair town, rising beyond the yellow Garonne, was for three hundred years
and more an English capital. Who built these gloriously fretted Gothic
towers, rising high into the air, and sentinelled by so many minor
steeples? Why Englishmen! These towers rise above the Cathedral of St.
Andrew, and in the Abbey of St. Andrew the Black Prince held high court,
and there, after Poitiers, the captive King of France revelled with his
conqueror, with the best face he might. There our Richard the Second was
born. There the doughty Earl of Derby, long the English seneschal of
Bordeaux, with his retinue, "amused themselves," as gloriously
gossipping old Froissart tells, "with the citizens and their wives;" and
from thence Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, went forth, being eighty-six
years of age, mounted upon a little palfrey, to encounter the Duke of
Anjou, in those latter days when our continental dominions were
shrinking, as we deserved that they should shrink, after the brutal
murder of the glorious Maid of Domrémy. It is true that we are at this
moment in the department of the Dordogne, and that when we cross the
river we shall be in that of the Gironde. But we Englishmen love the
ancient provinces better than the modern departments, which we are
generally as bad at recognising, as we are in finding out dates by
Thermidors and Brumaires. No, no, departments may do for Frenchmen, but
to an Englishman the rich land we are crossing will ever be Guienne, the
"Fair Dutchy," and part and parcel of old Aquitane, the dowry of
Eleanor, when she wedded our second Henry.
Is it not strange to think of those old times, in which the English were
loved in the Bourdelois--fine old name--and the French were hated, in
which the Gascon feudal chiefs around protested that they were the
"natural born subjects of England, which was so kind to them?" Let us
turn to Froissart:--The Duke of Anjou having captured four Gascon
knights, forced them, _nolens volens_, to take the oath of allegiance to
the King of France, and then turned them about their business. The
knights went straight to Bordeaux, and presented themselves before the
seneschal of the Landes, and the mayor of the city, saying, "Gentlemen,
we will truly tell you that before we took the oath, we reserved in our
hearts our faith to our natural lord, the king of England, and for
anything we have said or done, we never will become Frenchmen." Our
gallant forefathers appear on the whole, to have led a joyous life in
Guienne. In truth, their days and nights were devoted very much to
feasting themselves, and plundering their neighbours: two pursuits into
which their Gascon friends entered with heart and soul. It is quite
delightful to read in Froissart, or Enguerrand de Monstrelet, how
"twelve knights went forth in search of adventures," an announcement
which may be fairly translated, into how a dozen of gentlemen with
indistinct notions of _meum_ and _tuum_, went forth to lay their
chivalrous hands upon anything they could come across. Of course these
trips were made into the French territory, and really they appear to
have been conducted with no small degree of politeness on either side,
when the English "harried" Limousin, or the French rode a foray into
Guienne. The chivalrous feeling was strong on both sides, and we often
read how such-and-such a French and English knight or squire did
courteous battle with each other; the fight being held in honour of the
fair ladies of the respective champions. Thus, not in Guienne, but in
Touraine, when the English and the Gascons beleaguered a French town,
heralds came forth upon the walls and made this proclamation:--"Is there
any among you gentlemen, who for love of his lady is willing to try some
feat of arms? If there be any such, here is Gauvin Micaille, a squire
of the Beauce, quite ready to sally forth, completely armed and
mounted, to tilt three courses with the lance, give three blows with the
battle-axe, and three strokes with the dagger. Now look you, English, if
there be none among you in love." The challenge was duly accepted. Each
combatant wounded the other, and the Earl of Shrewsbury sent to the
squire of Beauce his compliments, and a hundred francs. This last
present takes somewhat away from the Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of
England vein; but the student of the old chroniclers, particularly of
the English in France, will be astonished to find how long the chivalric
feeling and ceremonials co-existed with constant habits of plundering
and unprovoked forays.
Another curious trait of our forefathers in Guienne is the early
development of the English _brusquerie_, and haughtiness of manner to
the Continentals. The Gascons put up, however, with many a slight,
inasmuch as their over sea friends were such valiant plunderers, and
they, of course, shared the spoils. Listen to the frank declaration of a
Gascon gentleman who had deserted from the English to the French side.
Some one asking him how he did, he answers: "Thank God, my health is
very good; but I had more money at command when I made war for the king
of England, for then we seldom failed to meet some rich merchants of
Toulouse, Condom, La Reole, or Bergerac, whom we squeezed, which made us
gay and _debonnair_; but that is at an end." The questioner replies: "Of
a truth, that is the life Gascons love. They willingly hurt their
neighbour." Not even all the plunder they got, however, could silence
the grumblings of the native knights at the haughty reserve of the
English warriors. "I," says the canon of Chimay, "was at Bordeaux when
the Prince of Wales marched to Spain, and witnessed the great
haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than
their own. Neither could any of the gentlemen of Gascogny or Acquitaine
obtain office or appointment in their own country, for the English said
they were neither on a level with them, nor worthy of their society." So
early and so strongly did the proud island blood boil up; while many an
Englishman, to this good day, by his reserved and saturnine bearing
among an outspoken and merry-hearted people, perpetuates the old
reproach, and keeps up the old grievance.
All sensible readers will be gratified when I state that I have not the
remotest intention of describing the archæology of Bordeaux, or any
other town whatever. Whoever wants to know the height of a steeple, the
length of an aisle, or the number of arches in a bridge, must betake
themselves to Murray and his compeers. I will neither be picturesquely
profound upon ogives, triforia, clerestorys, screens, or mouldings; nor
magniloquently great upon the arched, the early pointed, the florid, or
the flamboyant schools. I will go into raptures neither about Virgins
nor Holy Families, nor Oriel windows, in the fine old cut-and-dry school
of the traveller of taste, which means, of course, every traveller who
ever packed a shirt into a carpet bag; but, leaving the mere archæology
and carved stones alone in their glory, I will try to sketch living,
and now and then historical, France--to move gossippingly along in the
by-ways rather than the highways--always more prone to give a good
legend of a grey old castle, than a correct measurement of the height of
the towers; and always seeking to bring up, as well as I can, a varying,
shifting picture, well thronged with humanity, before the reader's eye.
[Illustration: BORDEAUX.]
When I got to Bordeaux, the vintage time had just commenced, and having
ever had a special notion that vintages were very beautiful and poetic
affairs, and a still more confirmed taste and reverence for claret, it
was my object to see as much of the vintage as I could--to see the juice
rush from the grape, which makes so good a figure in the bottle. Letters
of introduction I had none. But there is a knack of making one's own
way--of making one's own friends as you go--in which I have tolerable
confidence, and which did not fail me in the present conjuncture. First,
to settle and make up my notions, I strolled vaguely about the city,
buying local maps and little local guide-books. Bordeaux is emphatically
what the French call a _riant_ town, with plenty of air, and such pure,
soft, bright, sunny air. In the centre of a broad grand _Place_,--dotted
with very respectable trees for French specimens, emblazoned with gay
parterres, sprinkled with orange shrubs in bloom, and holed with no end
of round stone basins, in which dolphins and Neptunes spout from their
bronze mouths the live-long day, and urns, and pillars, and Dianas, and
Apollos stand all around--there rises upon his massive pedestal the
graven image of a fat comfortable gentleman in the ample cloak and
doublet of Louis Quatorze, knots of carven ribbons decorating his
shoulders, and flowing locks descending from under his broad-brimmed,
looped-up hat. This is the statue of a M. de Tournay, an ancient
intendant of the province, who was almost the creator of modern
Bordeaux. Under his auspices the whole tribe of dolphins and heathen
gods and goddesses were invoked to decorate the city. He reared great
sweeps of pillared and porticoed buildings, and laid out broad streets
and squares, on that enormous scale so characteristic of the _grand
monarque_. He made Bordeaux, indeed, at once vast, prim, and massively
magnificent. The mercantile town got quite a courtly air; and when the
tricolor no longer floated in St. Domingo, and the commerce of the
Gironde declined, so that not much was left over and above the wine
trade, which, as all the world knows, is the genteelest of all the
traffics, Bordeaux became what it is--a sort of retired city, having
declined business--quiet, and clean, and prim, and aristocratic. Such,
at least, is the new town. With old Bordeaux, M. de Tournay meddled not;
and when you plunge into its streets you leap at once from eighteenth
century terraces into fourteenth century lanes and tortuous by-ways.
Below you, rough, ill-paved, unclean, narrow thoroughfares; above, the
hanging old houses of five ages ago, peaked gables, and long projecting
eaves, and hanging balconies; quaint carvings in blackened wood and
mouldering stone;--the true middle-age tenements, dreadfully ricketty,
but gloriously picturesque--charming to look at, but woful to live in;
deep black ravines of courts plunging down into the masses of piled up,
jammed together dwellings; squalid, slatternly people buzzing about like
bees; bad smells permeating every street, lane, and alley; and now and
then the agglomeration of darksome dwellings clustering round a great
old church, with its vast Gothic portals, and, high up, its carven
pinnacles and grinning _goutieres_, catching the sunshine far above the
highest of these high-peaked roofs. This is the Bordeaux of the English
and the Gascons--the Bordeaux which has rung to the clash of armour--the
Bordeaux which was governed by a seneschal--the Bordeaux through whose
streets defiled,
"With many a cross-bearer before,
And many a spear behind,"
the christening procession of King Richard the Second.
We shall step into one church, and only one, that of the Feuillans.
There, upon a dark and massive pedestal, lies stretched the effigy of an
armed man. His hands are clasped, his vizor up shows his peaked beard,
and he is clad _cap-à-pied_ in steel. Who was the doughty warrior, thus
resting in his mail? Strange to say, no warrior at all; but the quietest
and most peaceable of God's beings. He had an odd, pedantic father, who
brought him up in strange Paganwise. The boy was never addressed but in
Latin. He never had a mother-tongue. He was surrounded with a blockade
of Latin speakers to keep afar off the profanation of French; he was
mentally fed upon the philosophers and the poets of old Rome, and taught
to weep for Seneca in the tub, as the nearest catastrophe which could
touch his sympathies. Furthermore, his father, out of respect for his
nerves, had him awakened every morning by the sound of soft music.
Happily, even this sublimity of pedantry and pedagoguism was
insufficient to ruin the native genius of Michael, Seigneur of
Montaigne, whose "essays ought to lie in every cottage window."
I have said that I was in search of some one to introduce me to the
vineyards and the vintagers. In a day or two I had pitched upon my
landlord as my protector. His hotel was a very modest one, where never
before, I do believe, had Englishmen come to make everything dear and
disagreeable. The red boards of the aristocratic Murray were unknown in
his _salle à manger_. He hadn't an ounce of tea in his house, and very
probably, if he had, he would have fried it with butter, and served it
_à la_ something or other. When I say he, however, I mean madame, not
monsieur. The latter would have made a capital English innkeeper, but he
was a very bad French one. My gentleman, who was more than six feet
high, and a stately personage, was cut out for a "mine host." He would
have presided in a bar--which means drinking a continued succession of
glasses of ale--with uncommon effect, for his temperament was convivial
and gossippy; but he had no vocation for the kitchen, which is the
common sphere of a French innkeeper not of the first class, and where,
under the proud denomination of the _chef_, and clad in white like a
grimly ghost, he bustles among pipkins and stew-pans and skillets, and
lifts little trap-doors in his smoky range, and peers down them at blue
charcoal furnaces--over which the _plats_ are simmering. Now my good
landlord never troubled himself about these domestic matters; but he was
very clever at standing on the outer steps of his door, smoking cigars;
and, indeed, would stay very willingly there all day--at least, until he
heard his wife's voice, upon which he would make a precipitate retreat
to a neighbouring café, where he would drink _eau sucreé_ and rattle
dominoes on a marble table till dinner-time. With this worthy I formed a
personal acquaintance, by buying from him, at the reasonable rate of six
sous a-piece, a number of quaint brass-set flat stones, very like red
and grey cornelians, and just as pretty, which it was the fashion in the
days of the Directory to mount in watch-keys, and wear two at a time,
one dangling from each fob. These stones are picked up in great
quantities from the light shingly soil, whereon ripens the grape, which
is pressed into claret wine; and handsome and lustrous in themselves,
they thus become a species of mementos of chateau Margaux and chateau
Lafitte. To the landlord, then, I stated that I wished to see some
vine-gathering.
"Could anything be more lucky? His particular friend M. So-and-so was
beginning his harvesting that very day, and was going to give a dinner
that very night on the occasion. I should go--he should go. A friend of
his was M. So-and-so's friend; in fact, we were all friends together."
The truth I suspect to be, that my ally was dreadfully in want of an
excuse to go to the dinner, and he welcomed my application as the
Israelites did manna in the desert. It was meat and drink and amusement
to him, and off we went.
As I shall presently describe the real claret vintage upon a large
scale, I shall pass the more quickly over my first initiation into the
plucking of the grapes. But I passed a merry day, and eke a busy one.
There are no idle spectators at a vintage--all the world must work; and
so I speedily found myself, after being most cordially welcomed by a fat
old gentleman, hoarse with bawling, in a pair of very dirty
shirt-sleeves and a pouring perspiration--with a huge pair of scissors
in my hand cutting off the bunches, in the midst of an uproarious troop
of young men, young women, and children--threading the avenues between
the plants--stripping, with wonderful dexterity, the clustered
branches--their hands, indeed, gliding like dirty yellow serpents among
the broad green leaves--and sometimes shouting out merry badinage,
sometimes singing bits of strongly rhythmed melody in chorus, and all
the time, as far as the feat could be effected, eating the grapes by
handfuls. The whole thing was very jolly; I never heard more laughing
about nothing in particular, more open and unblushing love-making, and
more resolute quizzing of the good man, whose grapes were going partly
into the baskets, tubs, pots, and pans, carried every few moments by the
children and old people out of the green alleys to the pressing-tub, and
partly into the capacious stomachs of the gatherers. At first I was
dainty in my selection of the grapes to be chosen, eschewing the
under-ripe and the over-ripe. A damsel beside me observed this. From her
woolly hair and very dark but merry face, I imagined her to have a touch
of Guadeloupe or Martinique blood. "Cut away," she said; "every grape
makes wine."
"Yes--but the caterpillars--"
"They give it a body."
"Yes--but the snails--"
"O, save the snails, please do, for me!" said a little girl, holding out
her apron, full of painted shells.
"What do you do with them?" I inquired.
"Boil them and eat them," said my juvenile friend.
I looked askance.
"You cant think how nice they are with vinegar!" said the mulatto girl.
I remembered our own appetite for periwinkles, and said nothing; but
added my mite of snail-flesh to the collection.
I was talking to the lord of the vineyard, when some one--there was
petticoats in the case--dashed at him from behind, and instantly a
couple of hands clasped his neck, and one of them squashed a huge bunch
of grapes over his mouth and nose, rubbing in the burst and bleeding
fruit as vigorously as if it were a healing ointment, while streams of
juice squirted from between the fingers of the fair assailant, and
streamed down the patron's equivocal shirt. After being half burked, the
good man shook his fist at the girl as she flew, laughing, down the
alley; and then resuming his talk with me, he said: "We call that,
_Faire des moustaches_. We all do it at vintage time." And ten minutes
thereafter I saw the jolly old boy go chasing an ancient crone of a
pail-bearer, a bunch of very ripe grapes in his hand, amid the delighted
hurrahs of all assembled.
Dinner was late, for it behoves vintagers to make the best of the
daylight. The ordinary hired labourers dined, indeed, soon after noon;
but I am talking of the feast of honour. It was served in a
thinly-furnished, stone-paved, damp and dismal _salle à manger_. A few
additional ladies with their beaux, grand provincial dandies, all of
whom tried to outstrip each other in the magnificence of their
waistcoats, had arrived from Bordeaux. It had been very hot, close
weather for a day or two past, and everybody was imprecating curses on
the heads of the mosquitos. The ladies, to prove the impeachment,
stripped their sleeves, and showed each other the bites on their brown
necks; and the gentlemen swore that the scamps were biting harder and
harder. Then came the host, in a magnificently ill-cut coat--all the
agricultural interest could not have furnished a worse--and his wife,
very red in the face, for she had cooked dinner for the vintagers and
for us; and then our host's father, a reverend old man in a black velvet
scull cap, and long silver hair. The dinner was copious, and, as may be
conceived, by no means served in the style of the _café de Paris_. But
_soupe_, _bouilli_, _roti_, the stewed and the fried, speedily went the
way of all flesh. Everybody _trinque-ed_ with everybody: the jingle of
the meeting glasses rose even over the clatter of the knives and forks;
the jolly host's heart grew warmer at every glass, and he issued
imperious mandates for older and older wine. His comfortable wife, whose
appetite had been affected by the cooking, made up for the catastrophe
at the dessert. The old grandfather garulously narrated tales of
wondrous vintages long ago. The waistcoats had all the scandal of
Bordeaux at their finger ends; and the young ladies with the mosquito
bites took to "making moustaches" on their male friends, with pancakes
instead of grapes--a process by which the worthy host was, as usual, an
especial sufferer.
As may be conceived, my respected landlord was far more in his element
than at home with his wife. He eat more, drank more, talked more, and
laughed more than any two men present. Afterwards he grew tender and
sentimental, and professed himself to be an ardent lover of his kind--a
proposition which I suspect he afterwards narrowed specially in favour
of a most mosquito-ridden lady next him--to the high wrath of a
waistcoat opposite, who said sarcastic and cutting things, which nobody
paid any attention to; and the landlord, being really a good-looking
and plausible fellow, went on conquering and to conquer, and drinking
and being drunk to; until, under a glorious outburst of moonlight which
paled the blinking candles on the table, the merry company broke up; and
mine host of Bordeaux, after certain rather unsteady walking, suddenly
stopped on the centre of the bridge, and refused to go further until he
had told me a secret. This was said with vast solemnity and aplomb, so
we paused together on the granite pavement, and, after looking
mysteriously at the Garonne, the moon, and the dusky heights of Floriac,
my companion informed me in a hoarse whisper that he should leave
France, his native and beloved land, where he felt sure that he was not
appreciated, and pitch his tent, "_la bas, en Angleterre, parceque les
Anglais etaient si bons enfants!_"
"So ho!" thought I; "a strange reminiscence of the old Gascons." But on
the morrow, my respectable entertainer had a bad headache, a yellow
visage, and an entire forgetfulness of how he had got home at all.
[Illustration: MOUSTACHE AT THE VINTAGE]
CHAPTER II.
CLARET--AND THE CLARET COUNTRY.
That our worthy forefathers in Guienne loved good wine, is a thing not
to be doubted--even by a teetotaller. When the Earl of Derby halted his
detachments, he always had a pipe set on broach for the good of the
company; and it is to be presumed that he knew their tastes. The wines
of the Garonne were also, as might be expected, freely imported into
England:
"Whit wyn of Oseye, and of Gascoyne,
Of the Ruele, and of the Rochel wyn."
As far down, indeed, as Henry VIII.'s time you might get Gascony and
Guienne wine for eightpence a gallon, and the comfortable word "claret"
was well known early in the seventeenth century. One of its admirers,
however, about that time gave odd reasons for liking it, to wit--"Claret
is a noble wine, for it is the same complexion that noblemen's coats be
of." This gentleman must have been a strenuous admirer of the
aristocracy. The old Gascon growth was, however, in all probability,
what we should now call coarse, rough wine. The district which is
blessed by the growth of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Lafitte, was a
stony desert. An old French local book gives an account of the "savage
and solitary country of Medoc;" and the wines of the Bordelais, there
is every reason to believe, were grown in the strong, loamy soil
bordering the river. By the time that the magic spots had been
discovered, blessed with the mystic properties which produce the Queen
of Wine we had been saddled with--our tastes perverted, and our stomachs
destroyed--by the woful Methuen treaty--heavy may it sit on the souls of
Queen Anne, and all her wigged and powdered ministers--if, indeed, men
who preferred port wine to claret can be conceived to have had any souls
at all, worth speaking about--and thenceforth John Bull burnt the coat
of his stomach, muddled the working of his brain, made himself bilious,
dyspeptic, headachy, and nationally stupid, by imbibing a mixture of
strong, coarse, wines, with a taste but no flavour, and bedevilled with
every alcoholic and chemical adulteration, which could make its natural
qualities worse than they were. See how our literature fell off. The
Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn;" and we had the
giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret.
Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and, instead of
Wycherly's _Country Wife_, and Vanbrugh's _Relapse_, we had Mr. Morton's
_Wild Oats_, and Mr. Cherry's _Soldier's Daughter_. It is really much to
the credit of Scotland, that she stood staunchly by her old ally,
France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the
worst part of Spain--Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old
Scotch houses a cask of claret stood in the hall, nobly on the tap. In
the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter _tappit hen_, holding
some three quarts--think of that, Master Slender,--"reamed," _Anglice_
mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask, and you quaffed it,
snapping your fingers at custom-houses. At length, in an evil hour
Scotland fell:
"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,
Firm was his mutton, and his claret good;
'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried.
He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"
But enough of this painful subject. As Quin used to say, "Anybody drink
port? No! I thought so: Waiter, take away the black strap, and throw it
out."
Upon the principle, I suppose, of the nearer the church, the further
from God, Bordeaux is by no means a good place for good ordinary wine;
on the contrary, the stuff they give you for every-day tipple is
positively poor, and very flavourless. In southern Burgundy, the most
ordinary of the wines is capital. At Macon, for a quarter of a handful
of sous they give you nectar; at the little town of Tain, where the
Rhone sweeps gloriously round the great Hermitage rock, they give you
something better than nectar for less. But the ordinary Bordeaux wine is
very ordinary indeed; not quite so red-inky, perhaps, as the _Vin de
Surenne_, which, Brillat Savarin says, requires three men to swallow a
glassful--the man who drinks, and the friends who uphold
him on either side, and coax, and encourage him; but still meagre and
starveling, as if it had been strained through something which took the
virtue out of it. Of course, the best of wine can be had by the simple
process of paying for it, but I am talking of the ordinary work-a-day
tipple of the place.
A few days' lounging in Bordeaux over, and hearing that the vintage was
in full operation, I put myself into a respectable little omnibus, and
started for the true claret country. In a couple of hours I was put down
at the door of the only auberge in the tiny village of Margaux, and to
any traveller who may hereafter wish to visit the famous wine district,
I cordially commend "The Rising Sun," kept by the worthy "Mere
Cadillac." There you will have a bedroom clean and bright as a Dutch
parlour; a grand old four-poster of the ancient regime, something
between a bed and a cathedral; a profusion of linen deliciously white
and sweet smelling; and _la Mere_ will toss you up a nice little potage,
and a cotelette done to a turn, and an omelette which is perfection; and
she will ask you, in the matter of wine, whether you prefer _ordinaire_
or _vieux_? and when you reply, _Vieux et du meilleur_, she will
presently bustle in with a glorious long-necked, cobwebby flask, the
first glass of which will induce you to lean back in a tranquil state of
general happiness, and contemplate with satisfaction even the naughty
doings of the wicked Marguerite of Burgundy, and her sisters Blanche and
Henriette, with Buridan and Gaulnay, in the _Tour de
Nesle_--illustrations of which popular tragedy deck the walls on every
side.
While thus agreeably employed, then, I may enlighten you with a few
topographical words about the claret district. Look at the map, and you
will observe a long tract of country, dotted with very few towns or
villages, called the Landes, stretching along the sea coast from the
Pyrenees to the mouth of the Gironde. At one place the Landes are almost
sixty miles broad, but to the north they fine gradually away, the great
river Garonne shouldering them, as it were, into the sea. Now these
Landes (into which we will travel presently) are, for the most part, a
weary wilderness of pine-wood, morasses, sand-deserts, and barren
shingle. On the other hand, the low banks of the Garonne are generally
of a fat, loamy, and black soil, called, locally, _Palus_. Well, between
the Palus and the Landes, there is a longish strip of country from two
to five miles broad, a low ridge or backbone, which may be said to be
the neutral and blending point of the sterile Landes and the fat and
fertile Palus. And truth to tell, the earth seems as if the influence of
the latter had much to do to bear up against the former. A Norfolk
farmer would turn with a contemptuous laugh from the poor-looking stony
soil. "Why," says he, "it's all sand, and gravel, and shingle, and
scorched with the sun. You would not get a blade of chickweed to grow
there." The proprietors of Medoc would be very glad if this latter
assertion were correct, for the weeding of the vineyards form no
inconsiderable item in the expense of cultivation; but this much may be
safely predicted of this strange soil, that it would not afford the
nourishment to a patch of oats, which that modest grain manages to
extract from the bare hill-side of some cold, bleak, Highland croft, and
yet that it furnishes the influence which produces grapes yielding the
most truly generous and consummately flavoured wine ever drank by man
since Noah planted the first vine slip.
You have now finished the bottle of Vieux. Up, and let us out among the
vineyards. A few paces clears us of the little hamlet of Margaux, with
its constant rattle of busy coopers, and we are fairly in the country.
Try to catch the general _coup d'oeil_. We are in an unpretending
pleasant-looking region, neither flat nor hilly--the vines stretching
away around in gentle undulations, broken here and there by intervening
jungles of coppice-wood, by strips of black firs, or by the stately
avenues and ornamental woods of a first-class chateau. Gazing from the
bottoms of the shallow valleys, you seem standing amid a perfect sea of
vines, which form a monotonous horizon of unvaried green. Attaining the
height beyond, distant village spires rise into the air--the flattened
roofs and white walls of scattered hamlets gleam cheerfully forth from
embowering woods of walnut trees--and the expanse of the vineyards is
broken by hedged patches of meadow land, affording the crops of coarse
natural hay, upon which are fed the slowly-moving, raw-boned oxen which
you see dragging lumbering wains along the winding dusty way.
And now look particularly at the vines. Nothing romantic in their
appearance, no trellis work, none of the embowering, or the clustering,
which the poets are so fond of. Here, in two words, is the aspect of
some of the most famous vineyards in the world.
[Illustration]
Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes,
seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the
summit of deep furrow ridges, and fastened with great care to low,
fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end
of the huge fields to the other. These espaliers or lathes are cuttings
of the walnut-trees around, and the tendrils of the vine are attached to
the horizontally running stakes with withes, or thongs of bark. It is
curious to observe the vigilant pains and attention with which every
twig has been supported without being strained, and how things are
arranged so as to give every cluster as fair a chance as possible of a
goodly allowance of sun. Such, then, is the general appearance of
matters; but it is by no means perfectly uniform. Now and then you find
a patch of vines unsupported, drooping, and straggling, and sprawling,
and intertwisting their branches like beds of snakes; and again, you
come into the district of a new species of bush, a thicker, stouter
affair, a grenadier vine, growing to at least six feet, and supported
by a corresponding stake. But the low, two-feet dwarfs are invariably
the great wine givers. If ever you want to see a homily, not read, but
grown by nature, against trusting to appearances, go to Medoc and study
the vines. Walk and gaze, until you come to the most shabby, stunted,
weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously
bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack--these
utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing, as they do,
the gravelly soil to show in bald patches of grey shingle through the
straggling branches--these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed
and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and
the most inimitably flavoured wines. Such are the vines which grow
Chateau Margaux at half a sovereign the bottle. The grapes themselves
are equally unpromising. If you saw a bunch in Covent Garden you would
turn from them with the notion that the fruiterer was trying to do his
customer, with over-ripe black currants. Lance's soul would take no joy
in them, and no sculptor in his senses would place such meagre bunches
in the hands and over the open mouths of his Nymphs, his Bacchantes, or
his Fauns. Take heed, then, by the lesson, and beware of judging of the
nature of either men or grapes by their looks. Meantime, let us continue
our survey of the country. No fences or ditches you see--the ground is
too precious to be lost in such vanities--only, you observe from time to
time a rudely carved stake stuck in the ground, and indicating the
limits of properties. Along either side of the road the vines extend,
utterly unprotected. No raspers, no ha-ha's, no fierce denunciations of
trespassers, no polite notices of spring guns and steel traps constantly
in a state of high go-offism--only, when the grapes are ripening, the
people lay prickly branches along the way-side to keep the dogs,
foraging for partridges among the espaliers, from taking a refreshing
mouthful from the clusters as they pass; for it seems to be a fact that
everybody, every beast, and every bird, whatever may be his, her, or its
nature in other parts of the world, when brought among grapes, eats
grapes. As for the peasants, their appetite for grapes is perfectly
preposterous. Unlike the surfeit-sickened grocer's boys, who, after the
first week loathe figs, and turn poorly when sugar-candy is hinted at,
the love of grapes appears literally to grow by what it feeds on. Every
garden is full of table vines. The people eat grapes with breakfast,
lunch, dinner, and supper, and between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and
supper. The labourer plods along the road munching a cluster. The child
in its mother's arms is tugging away with its toothless gums at a
bleeding bunch; while as for the vintagers, male and female, in the less
important plantations, Heaven only knows where the masses of grapes go
to, which they devour, labouring incessantly at the _metier_, as they
do, from dawn till sunset.
A strange feature in the wine country is the wondrously capricious and
fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon's walk will show you the earth
altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot
silk--gravel of a light colour fading into gravel of a dark--sand
blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to
an ashen grey--strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into
light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle--or bright
semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and
hue. At two principal points these blending and shifting qualities of
soil put forth their utmost powers--in the favoured grounds of Margaux,
and again, at a distance of about fifteen miles further to the north, in
the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny
slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the
quality--the magic--of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a
corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and wilful
fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a
curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more
oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame to
another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen
furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage
which will be drunk in the halls and palaces of England and Russia, and
vines yielding a harvest which will be consumed in the cabarets and
estaminets of the neighbourhood. It is to be observed, however, that the
first-class wines belong almost entirely to the large proprietors. Amid
a labyrinth of little patches, the property of the labouring peasants
around, will be a spot appertaining to, and bearing the name of, some of
the famous growths; while, conversely, inserted, as if by an accident,
in the centre of a district of great name, and producing wine of great
price, will be a perverse patch, yielding the most commonplace tipple,
and worth not so many sous per yard as the surrounding earth is worth
crowns.
How comes this? The peasants will tell you that it doesn't come at all.
That it is all cant and _blague_ and puff on the part of the big
proprietors, and that their wine is only more thought of because they
have more capital to get it bragged about. Near Chateau Lafitte, on a
burning afternoon, I took refuge beneath the emblematic bush; for the
emblem which good wine is said not to require, is still, in the mid and
southern districts of France, in universal use; in other words, I
entered a village public-house.
Two old men, very much of the general type of the people of the
country--that is, tall and spare, with intelligent and mildly-expressive
faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One
of them had lost an arm, and the other a leg. As I glanced at this
peculiarity, the one-legged man caught my eye.
"Ah!" he said, "looking at our misfortunes; I left my leg on Waterloo."
"And I," chimed in his companion, "left my arm at Trafalgar."
"_Sacré!_" said the veteran of the land. "One of the cursed English
bullets took me in the knee, and spoiled as tight a lancer as they had
in the gallant 10th."
"And I," rejoined the other, "was at the fourth main-deck gun of the
Pluton when I was struck with the splinter while we were engaging the
Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars' captain's head
off!"--a fact which I afterwards verified. Captain Duff, the officer
alluded to, was thus killed upon his quarter-deck, and the same ball
shattered two seamen almost to pieces.
"_Sacré!_" said the _ci-devant_ lancer, "I'd like to have a rap at the
English again--I would--the English--_nom de tonnerre_--tell me--didn't
they murder the emperor?"
A rising smile, which I could not help, stopped him. I had spoken so few
words, that the fact that a son of _perfide Albion_ was before them was
only manifested by the expression of my face.
"_Tiens!_" continued the Waterloo man, "_You_ are an Englishman."
The old sailor, who was evidently by no means so keen a hand as his
comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to draw it
mild; but the ex-lancer of the 10th was not to be put down.
"Well, and if you are, what then, eh? I say I would like to have another
brush with you."
"No, no! We have had enough of brushes!" said the far more pacific man
of the sea. "I think--_mon voisin_--that you and I have had quite enough
of fighting."
"But they killed the emperor. _Sacré nom de tous les diables_--they
killed the emperor."
My modest exculpation on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland was
listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great
attention by the maimed sailor, who kept up a running commentary:
"_Eh! eh! entendez cela._ Now, that's quite different (to his friend)
from what you tell us. Come--that's another story altogether; and what I
say is, that's reasonable."
But the lancer was not to be convinced--"_Sacré bleu!_--they killed the
emperor."
All this, it is to be observed, passed without the slightest feeling of
personal animosity. The lancer, who, I suspect, had passed the forenoon
in the cabaret, every now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as
to show that his wrath was national--not individual; and when I proposed
a bottle of rather better wine than they had been drinking, neither
soldier nor sailor had a word to say in objection. The wine was brought,
and very good it was, though not, of course, first-class claret.
"What do you think of that?" said the sailor.
"I wish I had as good every day in England," I replied.
"And why haven't you?" said the fierce lancer. "You might, if you chose.
But you drink none of our wines."
I demurred to this proposition; but the Waterloo man was down on me in
no time. "Yes, yes; the wines of the great houses--the great
proprietors. _Sacré!_--the _farceurs_--the _blageurs_--who puff their
wines, and get them puffed, and great prices for them, when they're not
better than ours--the peasant's wines--when they're grown in the same
ground--ripened by the same sun! _Mille diables!_ Look at that
bottle!--taste it! My son-in-law grew it. My son-in-law sells it; I know
all about it. You shall have that bottle for ten sous, and the Lafitte
people and the Larose people would charge you ten francs for it; and it
is as good for ten sous as theirs for ten francs. I tell you it grew
side by side with their vines; but they have capital--they have power.
They crack off their wines, and we--the poor people!--we, who trim and
dig and work our little patches--no one knows anything about us. Our
wine--bah!--what is it? It has no name--no fame! Who will give us
francs? No, no; sous for the poor man--francs for the rich. Copper for
the little landlord; silver--silver and gold for the big landlord! As
our curé said last Sunday: 'Unto him who has much, more shall be given.'
_Sacré Dieu de dieux!_--Even the Bible goes against the poor!"
All this time, the old sailor was tugging his comrade's jacket, and
uttering sundry deprecatory ejaculations against such unnecessary
vehemence. The Trafalgar man was clearly a take-it-easy personage; not
troubled by too much thinking, and by no means a professional
grievance-monger. So he interposed to bring back the topic to a more
soothing subject, and said that what he would like, would be to see lots
of English ships coming up the Gironde with the good cottons and
woollens and hardwares we made in England, and taking back in exchange
their cheap and wholesome wines--not only the great vintages (_crus_)
for the great folk, but the common vintages for the common folk.
"Indeed, I think," he concluded, "that sitting here drinking this good
ten sous' wine with this English gentleman--who's going to pay for
it--is far better than fighting him and hacking him up, or his hacking
us up, with swords and balls and so forth."
To this most sensible opinion we had all the pains in the world to get
the doughty lancer to incline. He couldn't see it at all. He would like
to have another brush. He wasn't half done for yet. It was all very
well; but war was grand, and glory was grand. "_Vive la guerre!_" and
"_Vive la gloire!_"
"But," said the sailor, "there is death in glory!"
"_Eh bien!_" shouted the warrior, with as perfect French sentiment as
ever I heard, "_Vive la mort!_"
In the end, however, he was pleased to admit that, if we took the
peasant wines, something might be made of us. The case was not utterly
hopeless; and when I rose to go, he proposed a stirrup-cup--a _coup de
l'étrier_--to the washing down of all unkindness; but, in the very act
of swallowing it, he didn't exactly stop, but made a motion as if he
would, and then slowly letting the last drop run over his lips, he put
down the glass, and said, bitterly and coldly, "_Mais pourtant, vous
avez tué l'Empereur!_"
I have introduced this episode principally for the purpose of showing
the notions entertained by the small proprietary as to the boasted
superiority of the large vineyards; but the plain truth is, that the
great growers are perfectly in the right. I have stated that the quality
of the soil throughout the grape country varies almost magically. Well,
the good spots have been more or less known since Medoc was Medoc; and
the larger and richer residents have got them, by inheritance, by
marriage, and by purchase, almost entirely into their own hands. Next
they greatly improved both the soil and the breed of plants. They
studied and experimentalized until they found the most proper manures
and the most promising cultures. They grafted and crossed the vine
plants till they got the most admirably bearing bushes, and then,
generation after generation, devoting all their attention to the quality
of the wine, without regard to the quantity--scrupulously taking care
that not a grape which is unripe or over-ripe finds its way to the
tub--that the whole process shall be scrupulously clean, and that every
stage of fermentation be assiduously attended to--the results of all
this has been the perfectly-perfumed and high-class clarets, which fetch
an enormous price; while the peasant proprietors, careless in
cultivation, using old vine plants, anxious, at the vintage, only for
quantity, and confined to the worst spots in the district, succeed in
producing wines which, good as they are, have not the slightest pretence
to enter into competition with the liquid harvests of their richer and
more enlightened neighbours.
But it is high time to sketch, and with more elaboration than I have
hitherto attempted, the claret vintage and the claret vintagers. Yet
still, for a moment, I must pause upon the threshold. Will it be
believed--whether it will or not it is, nevertheless, true--that the
commencement of the vintage in France is settled, not by the opinion or
the convenience of the proprietors, but by the _autorités_ of each
_arrondissement_? As September wanes and the grape ripens, the rural
mayor assembles what he calls a jury of _experts_; which jury proceed,
from day to day, through the vineyards, inspecting and tasting the
grapes and cross-questioning the growers; after which, they report to
the mayor a special day on which, having regard to all the vineyards,
they think that the vintage ought to commence. One proprietor, in a very
sunny situation and a hot soil, may have been ready to begin a fortnight
before; another, in a converse locality, may not be ready to commence
for a fortnight afterwards. _N'importe_--the French have a great notion
of uniform symmetry and symmetrical uniformity, and so the whole
district starts together--the mayor issuing, _par autorité_, a
highly-official-looking document, which is duly posted by
yellow-breeched _gens-d'armes_, and, before the appearance of which, not
a vine-grower can gather, for wine purposes, a single grape. Now, what
must be the common sense of a country which permits, for one instant,
the continuance of this wretched little tyrannical humbug? Only think of
a trumpery little mayor and a couple of beadles proclaiming to the
farmers of England that now they might begin to cut their wheat! The
mayor's mace would be forced down the beadle's throat, and the beadle's
staff down the mayor's. But they manage these things--not
exactly--better in France. What would France be without _les autorités_?
Could the sun rise without a prefect? Certainly not. Could it set
without a sub-prefect? Certainly not. Could the planets shine on France
unless they were furnished with passports for the firmament? Clearly
not. Could the rain on France unless each drop came armed with the
_visé_ of some wonderful bureau or other? Decidedly not. Well, then, how
could the vintage begin until the people, who know nothing about the
vintage, command it? It is quite clear, that if you have any doubt
about these particulars, you know very little of the privileges, the
rights, the functions, and the powers, of the "authorities" in France.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE VINTAGE.]
CHAPTER III.
THE VINTAGE AND THE VINTAGERS.
So much, then, for preliminary information. Let us now proceed to the
joyous ingathering of the fruits of the earth--the great yearly festival
and jubilee of the property and the labour of Medoc. October, the "wine
month," is approaching. For weeks, every cloud in the sky has been
watched--every cold night breeze felt with nervous apprehension. Upon
the last bright weeks in summer, the savour and the bouquet of the wine
depend. Warmed by the blaze of an unclouded sun, fanned by the mild
breezes of the west, and moistened by morning and evening dews, the
grapes by slow degrees attain their perfect ripeness and their
culminating point of flavour. Then the vintage implements begin to be
sought out, cleaned, repaired, and scoured and sweetened with hot
brandy. Coopers work as if their lives depended upon their industry; and
all the anomalous tribe of lookers-out for chance jobs in town and
country pack up their bag and baggage, and from scores of miles around
pour in ragged regiments into Medoc.
There have long existed pleasing, and in some sort poetical,
associations connected with the task of securing for human use the
fruits of the earth; and to no species of crop do these picturesque
associations apply with greater force than to the ingathering of the
ancient harvest of the vine. From time immemorial, the season has
typified epochs of plenty and mirthful-heartedness--of good fare and of
good-will. The ancient types and figures descriptive of the vintage are
still literally true. The march of agricultural improvement seems never
to have set foot amid the vines. As it was with the patriarchs in the
East, so it is with the modern children of men. The goaded ox still
bears home the high-pressed grape-tub, and the feet of the treader are
still red in the purple juice which maketh glad the heart of man. The
scene is at once full of beauty, and of tender and even sacred
associations. The songs of the vintagers, frequently chorussed from one
part of the field to the other, ring blithely into the bright summer
air, pealing out above the rough jokes and hearty peals of laughter
shouted hither and thither. All the green jungle is alive with the
moving figures of men and women, stooping among the vines or bearing
pails and basketfuls of grapes out to the grass-grown crossroads, along
which the labouring oxen drag the rough vintage carts, groaning and
cracking as they stagger along beneath their weight of purple tubs
heaped high with the tumbling masses of luscious fruit. The congregation
of every age and both sexes, and the careless variety of costume, add
additional features of picturesqueness to the scene. The white-haired
old man labours with shaking hands to fill the basket which his
black-eyed imp of a grandchild carries rejoicingly away. Quaint
broad-brimmed straw and felt hats--handkerchiefs twisted like turbans
over straggling elf locks--swarthy skins tanned to an olive-brown--black
flashing eyes--and hands and feet stained in the abounding juices of the
precious fruit--all these southern peculiarities of costume and
appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The
clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy
questions, and more saucy retorts--of what, in fact, in the humble and
unpoetic but expressive vernacular, is called "chaff,"--is kept up with
a vigour which seldom flags, except now and then, when the butt-end of a
song, or the twanging close of a chorus strikes the general fancy, and
procures for the _morceau_ a lusty _encore_. Meantime, the master
wine-grower moves observingly from rank to rank. No neglected bunch of
fruit escapes his watchful eye. No careless vintager shakes the precious
berries rudely upon the soil, but he is promptly reminded of his
slovenly work. Sometimes the tubs attract the careful superintendent. He
turns up the clusters to ascertain that no leaves nor useless length of
tendril are entombed in the juicy masses, and anon directs his steps to
the pressing-trough, anxious to find that the lusty treaders are
persevering manfully in their long-continued dance.
Thither we will follow. The wine-press, or _cuvier de pressoir_,
consists, in the majority of cases, of a massive shallow tub, varying in
size from four square feet to as many square yards. It is placed either
upon wooden trestles or on a regularly-built platform of mason-work
under the huge rafters of a substantial outhouse. Close to it stands a
range of great butts, their number more or less, according to the size
of the vineyard. The grapes are flung by tub and caskfuls into the
cuvier. The treaders stamp diligently amid the masses, and the expressed
juice pours plentifully out of a hole level with the bottom of the
trough into a sieve of iron or wickerwork, which stops the passage of
the skins, and from thence drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the
moment of our arrival, the cuvier for a brief space empty. The
treaders--big, perspiring men, in shirts and tucked-up
trowsers--spattered to the eyes with splatches of purple juice, lean
upon their wooden spades, and wipe their foreheads. But their respite is
short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is heard, and immediately
the waggon is backed up to the broad open window, or rather hole in the
wall, above the trough. A minute suffices to wrench out tub after tub,
and to tilt their already half-mashed clusters splash into the reeking
_pressoir_. Then to work again. Jumping with a sort of spiteful
eagerness into the mountain of yielding quivering fruit, the treaders
sink almost to the knees, stamping and jumping and rioting in the masses
of grapes, as fountains of juice spurt about their feet, and rush
bubbling and gurgling away. Presently, having, as it were, drawn the
first sweet blood of the new cargo, the eager trampling subsides into a
sort of quiet, measured dance, which the treaders continue, while, with
their wooden spades, they turn the pulpy remnants of the fruit hither
and thither, so as to expose the half-squeezed berries in every possible
way to the muscular action of the incessantly moving feet. All this
time, the juice is flowing in a continuous stream into the tubs beneath.
When the jet begins to slacken, the heap is well tumbled with the wooden
spades, and, as though a new force had been applied, the juice-jet
immediately breaks out afresh. It takes, perhaps, half or three-quarters
of an hour thoroughly to squeeze the contents of a good-sized cuvier,
sufficiently manned. When at length, however, no further exertion
appears to be attended with corresponding results, the tubfuls of
expressed juice are carried by means of ladders to the edges of the
vats, and their contents tilted in; while the men in the trough,
setting-to with their spades, fling the masses of dripping grape-skins
in along with the juice. The vats sufficiently full, the fermentation is
allowed to commence. In the great cellars in which the juice is stored,
the listener at the door--he cannot brave the carbonic acid gas to enter
further--may hear, solemnly echoing in the cool shade of the great
darkened hall, the bubblings and seethings of the working liquid--the
inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings which proclaim that a
great metempsychosis is taking place--that a natural substance is rising
higher in the eternal scale of things, and that the contents of these
great giants of vats are becoming changed from floods of mere mawkish,
sweetish fluid to noble wine--to a liquid honoured and esteemed in all
ages--to a medicine exercising a strange and potent effect upon body and
soul--great for good and evil. Is there not something fanciful and
poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the
darkness, when all the doors are locked and barred--for the atmosphere
about the vats is death--as if Nature would suffer no idle prying into
her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection
from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful
nature--fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by
the invisible halo of stifling gas? I saw the vats in the Chateau
Margaux cellars the day after the grape-juice had been flung in.
Fermentation had not as yet properly commenced, so access to the place
was possible; still, however, there was a strong vinous smell loading
the atmosphere, sharp and subtle in its influence on the nostrils;
while, putting my ear, on the recommendation of my conductor, to the
vats, I heard, deep down, perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a
seething, gushing sound, as if currents and eddies were beginning to
flow, in obedience to the influence of the working Spirit, and now and
then a hiss and a low bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil.
Within twenty-four hours, the cellar would be unapproachable.
Of course, it is quite foreign to my plan to enter upon anything like a
detailed account of wine-making. I may only add, that the refuse-skins,
stalks, and so forth, which settle into the bottom of the fermentation
vats, are taken out again after the wine has been drawn off and
subjected to a new squeezing--in a press, however, and not by the
foot--the products being a small quantity of fiery, ill-flavoured wine,
full of the bitter taste of the seeds and stalks of the grape, and
possessing no aroma or bouquet. The Bordeaux press for this purpose is
rather ingeniously constructed. It consists of a sort of a skeleton of a
cask, strips of daylight shining through from top to bottom between the
staves. In the centre works a strong perpendicular iron screw. The
_rape_, as the refuse of the treading is called, is piled beneath it;
the screw is manned capstan fashion, and the unhappy seeds, skins, and
stalks, undergo a most dismal squeezing. Nor do their trials end there.
The wine-makers are terrible hands for getting at the very last
get-at-able drop. To this end, somewhat on the principle of rinsing an
exhausted spirit bottle, so as, as it were, to catch the very flavour
still clinging to the glass, they plunge the doubly-squeezed _rape_ into
water, let it lie there for a short time, and then attack it with the
press again. The result is a horrible stuff called _piquette_, which, in
a wine country, bears the same resemblance to wine as the very dirtiest,
most wishy-washy, and most contemptible of swipes bears to honest porter
or ale. Piquette, in fact, may be defined as the ghost of wine!--wine
minus its bones, its flesh, and its soul!--a liquid shadow!--a fluid
nothing!--an utter negation of all comfortable things and associations!
Nevertheless, however, the peasants swill it down in astounding
quantities, and apparently with sufficient satisfaction.
And now a word as to wine-treading. The process is universal in France,
with the exception of the cases of the sparkling wines of the Rhone and
Champagne, the grapes for which are squeezed by mechanical means, not by
the human foot. Now, very venerable and decidedly picturesque as is the
process of wine-treading, it is unquestionably rather a filthy one; and
the spectacle of great brown horny feet, not a whit too clean, splashing
and sprawling in the bubbling juice, conveys at first sight a qualmy
species of feeling, which, however, seems only to be entertained by
those to whom the sight is new. I looked dreadfully askance at the
operation when I first came across it; and when I was invited--by a
lady, too--to taste the juice, of which she caught up a glassful, a
certain uncomfortable feeling of the inward man warred terribly against
politeness. But nobody around seemed to be in the least squeamish. Often
and often did I see one of the heroes of the tub walk quietly over a
dunghill, and then jump--barefooted, of course, as he was--into the
juice; and even a vigilant proprietor, who was particularly careful that
no bad grapes went into the tub, made no objection. When I asked why a
press was not used, as more handy, cleaner, and more convenient, I was
everywhere assured that all efforts had failed to construct a wine-press
capable of performing the work with the perfection attained by the
action of the human foot. No mechanical squeezing, I was informed, would
so nicely express that peculiar proportion of the whole moisture of the
grape which forms the highest flavoured wine. The manner in which the
fruit was tossed about was pointed out to me, and I was asked to
observe that the grapes were, as it were, squeezed in every possible
fashion and from every possible side, worked and churned and mashed
hither and thither by the ever-moving toes and muscles of the foot. As
far as any impurity went, the argument was, that the fermentation flung,
as scum to the surface, every atom of foreign matter held in suspension
in the wine, and that the liquid ultimately obtained was as exquisitely
pure as if human flesh had never touched it.
In the collection of these and such like particulars, I sauntered for
days among the vineyards around; and, utterly unknown and unfriended as
I was, I met everywhere the most cordial and pleasant receptions. I
would lounge, for example, to the door of a wine-treading shed, to watch
the movements of the people. Presently the proprietor, most likely
attired in a broad-brimmed straw hat, a strange faded outer garment,
half shooting-coat half dressing gown, would come up courteously to the
stranger, and, learning that I was an English visitor to the vintage,
would busy himself with the most graceful kindness, to make intelligible
the _rationale_ of all the operations. Often I was invited into the
chateau or farm-house, as the case might be; a bottle of an old vintage
produced and comfortably discussed in the coolness of the darkened,
thinly-furnished room, with its old-fashioned walnut-tree escrutoires,
and beauffets, its quaintly-pannelled walls, and its polished floors,
gleaming like mirrors and slippery as ice. On these occasions, the
conversation would often turn upon the general rejection, by England, of
French wines--a sore point with the growers of all save the first-class
vintages, and in which I had, as may be conceived, very little to say in
defence either of our taste or our policy. In the evenings, which were
getting chill and cold, I occasionally abandoned my room with
illustrations from the _Tour de Nesle_ for the general kitchen and
parlour of Madame Cadillac, and, ensconcing myself in the chimney
corner--a fine old-fashioned ingle, crackling and blazing with hard wood
logs--listened to the chat of the people of the village; they were
nearly all coopers and vine-dressers, who resorted there after the day's
work was over to enjoy an exceedingly modest modicum of very thin wine.
I never benefitted very much, however, by these listenings. It was my
bad luck to hear recounted neither tale nor legend--to pick up, at the
hands of my _compotatores_, neither local trait nor anecdote. The
conversation was as small as the wine. The gossip of the place--the
prospects of the vintage--elaborate comparisons of it with other
vintages--births, marriages, and deaths--a minute list of scandal, more
or less intelligible when conveyed in hints and allusions--were the
staple topics, mixed up, however, once or twice with general
denunciations of the niggardly conduct of certain neighbouring
proprietors to their vintagers--giving them for breakfast nothing but
coarse bread, lard, and not even piquette to wash it down with, and for
dinner not much more tempting dishes.
In Medoc, there are two classes of vintagers--the fixed and the floating
population; and the latter, which makes an annual inroad into the
district just as the Irish harvesters do into England and Scotland,
comprising a goodly proportion of very dubious and suspicious-looking
characters. The _gen-d'armerie_ have a busy time of it when these gentry
are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the
most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have
no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were marching by; and
garden-fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a
rigid application of the maxim that _la propriété c'est le vol_. Where
these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers
among them from all parts of France--from the Pyrenees and the
Alps--from the pine-woods of the Landes and the moors of Brittany. They
unite in bands of a dozen or a score men and women, appointing a chief,
who bargains with the vine-proprietor for the services of the company,
and keeps up some degree of order and subordination, principally by
means of the unconstitutional application of a good thick stick. I
frequently encountered these bands, making their way from one district
to another, and better samples of "the dangerous classes" were never
collected. They looked vicious and abandoned, as well as miserably poor.
The women, in particular, were as brazen-faced a set of slatterns as
could be conceived; and the majority of the men--tattered,
strapping-looking fellows, with torn slouched hats, and tremendous
cudgels--were exactly the sort of persons a nervous gentleman would have
scruples about meeting at dusk in a long lane. It is when thus on the
tramp that the petty pilfering and picking and stealing to which I have
alluded to goes on. When actually at work, they have no time for
picking up unconsidered trifles. Sometimes these people pass the
night--all together, of course--in out-houses or barns, when the _chef_
can strike a good bargain; at other times they bivouac on the lee-side
of a wood or wall, in genuine gipsy fashion. You may often see their
watchfires glimmering in the night; and be sure that where you do, there
are twisted necks and vacant nests in many a neighbouring hen-roost. One
evening I was sauntering along the beach at Paulliac--a little town on
the river's bank, about a dozen of miles from the mouth of the Gironde,
and holding precisely the same relation to Bordeaux as Gravesend does to
London--when a band of vintagers, men, women, and children, came up.
They were bound to some village on the opposite side of the Gironde, and
wanted to get ferried across. A long parley accordingly ensued between
the chief and a group of boatmen. The commander of the vintage forces
offered four sous per head as the passage-money. The bargemen would hear
of nothing under five; and after a tremendous verbal battle, the
vintagers announced that they were not going to be cheated, and that if
they could not cross the water, they could stay where they were.
Accordingly, a bivouac was soon formed. Creeping under the lee of a row
of casks, on the shingle of the bare beach, the women were placed
leaning against the somewhat hard and large pillows in question; the
children were nestled at their feet and in their laps; and the men
formed the outermost ranks. A supply of loaves was sent for and
obtained. The chief tore the bread up into huge hunks, which he
distributed to his dependents; and upon this supper the whole party
went coolly to sleep--more coolly, indeed, than agreeably; for a keen
north wind was whistling along the sedgy banks of the river, and the red
blaze of high-piled faggots was streaming from the houses across the
black, cold, turbid waters. At length, however, some arrangement was
come to; for, on visiting the spot a couple of hours afterwards, I found
the party rather more comfortably ensconced under the ample sails of the
barge which was to bear them the next morning to their destination.
The dinner-party formed every day, when the process of stripping the
vines is going on, is, particularly in the cases in which the people are
treated well by the proprietor, frequently a very pretty and very
picturesque spectacle. It always takes place in the open air, amongst
the bushes, or under some neighbouring walnut-tree. Sometimes long
tables are spread upon tressles; but in general no such formality
is deemed requisite. The guests fling themselves in groups upon the
ground--men and women picturesquely huddled together--the former bloused
and bearded personages--the latter showy, in their bright short
petticoats of home-spun and dyed cloth, with glaring handkerchiefs
twisted like turbans round their heads--each man and woman with a deep
plate in his or her lap. Then the people of the house bustle about,
distributing huge brown loaves, which are torn asunder, and the
fragments chucked from hand to hand. Next a vast cauldron of soup,
smoking like a volcano, is painfully lifted out from the kitchen, and
dealt about in mighty ladlefuls; while the founder of the feast takes
care that the tough, thready _bouilli_--like lumps of boiled-down
hemp--shall be fairly apportioned among his guests. _Piquette_ is the
general beverage. A barrel is set abroach, and every species of mug,
glass, cup, and jug about the establishment is called in to aid in its
consumption. A short rest, devoted to chatting, or very often sleeping
in the shade, over, the signal is given, and the work recommences.
"You have seen our _salle à manger_," said one of my courteous
entertainers--he of the broad-brimmed straw hat; "and now you shall see
our _chambre à coucher_." Accordingly, he led me to a barn close to his
wine-cellars. The place was littered deep with clean, fresh straw. Here
and there rolled-up blankets were laid against the wall; while all
round, from nails stuck in between the bare bricks, hung by straps and
strings the little bundles, knapsacks, and other baggage of the
labourers. On one side, two or three swarthy young women were playfully
pushing each other aside, so as to get at a morsel of cracked mirror
stuck against the wall--their long hair hanging down in black elf-locks,
in the preliminary stage of its arrangement.
"That is the ladies' side," said my _cicerone_, pointing to the girls;
"and that"--extending his other hand--"is the gentlemen's side."
"And so they all sleep here together?"
"Every night. I find shelter and straw; any other accommodation they
must procure for themselves."
"Rather unruly, I should suppose?"
"Not a bit. They are too tired to do anything but sleep. They go off,
sir, like dormice."
"_Oh, sil plait à Mossieu!_" put in one of the damsels. "The chief of
the band does the police." (_Fait la gen-d'armerie._)
"Certainly--certainly," said the proprietor; "the gentlemen lie here,
with their heads to the wall; the ladies there; and the _chef de la
bande_ stretches himself all along between them."
"A sort of living frontier?"
"Truly; and he allows no nonsense."
"_Il est meme éxcessivement severe_," interpolated the same young lady.
"He need be," replied her employer. "He allows no loud speaking--no
joking; and as there are no candles, no light, why, they can do nothing
better than go quietly to sleep, if it were only in self-defence."
One word more about the vintage. The reader will easily conceive that it
is on the smaller properties, where the wine is intended, not so much
for commerce as for household use, that the vintage partakes most of the
festival nature. In the large and first-class vineyards the process goes
on under rigid superintendence, and is as much as possible made a cold
matter of business. He who wishes to see the vintages of books and
poems--the laughing, joking, singing festivals amid the vines, which we
are accustomed to consider the harvests of the grape--must betake him to
the multitudinous patches of peasant property, in which neighbour helps
neighbour to gather in the crop, and upon which whole families labour
merrily together, as much for the amusement of the thing, and from good
neighbourly feeling, as in consideration of francs and sous. Here, of
course, there is no tight discipline observed, nor is there any absolute
necessity for that continuous, close scrutiny into the state of the
grapes--all of them hard or rotten, going slap-dash into the
_cuvier_--which, in the case of the more precious vintages, forms no
small check upon a general state of careless jollity. Every one eats as
much fruit as he pleases, and rests when he is tired. On such occasions
it is that you hear to the best advantage the joyous songs and choruses
of the vintage--many of these last being very pretty bits of melody,
generally sung by the women and girls, in shrill treble unison, and
caught up and continued from one part of the field to another.
[Illustration: RETURNING FROM THE VINTAGE.]
Yet, discipline and control it as you will, the vintage will ever be
beautiful, picturesque, and full of association. The rude wains,
creaking beneath the reeking tubs--the patient faces of the yoked
oxen--the half-naked, stalwart men, who toil to help the cart along the
ruts and furrows of the way--the handkerchief-turbaned women, their gay,
red-and-blue dresses peeping from out the greenery of the leaves--the
children dashing about as if the whole thing were a frolic, and the
grey-headed old men tottering cheerfully adown the lines of vines, with
baskets and pails of gathered grapes to fill the yawning tubs--the whole
picture is at once classic, venerable, and picturesque, not more by
association than actuality.
And now, Reader, luxuriating amid the gorgeously carven and emblazoned
fittings of a Palais Royal or Boulevard restorateur, Vefours, the
Freres, or the Café de Paris; or perhaps ensconced in our quieter and
more sober rooms--dim and dull after garish Paris, but ten times more
comfortable in their ample sofas and carpets, into which you sink as
into quagmires, but with more agreeable results,--snugly, Reader,
ensconced in either one or the other locality, after the waiter has, in
obedience to your summons, produced the _carte de vins_, and your eye
wanders down the long list of tempting nectars, Spanish and Portuguese,
and better, far better, German and French--have you ever wondered as you
read, "ST. JULLIEN, LEOVILLE, CHATEAU LA LAFITTE, CHATEAU LA ROSE, and
CHATEAU MARGAUX, what these actual vineyards, the produce of which you
know so well--what those actual chateaux, which christen such glorious
growths, resemble?" If so, listen, and I will tell you.
As you traverse the high road from Bordeaux to Pauillac, some one will
probably point out to you a dozen tiny sugar-loaf turrets, each
surmounted by a long lightning-conductor, rising from a group of noble
trees. This is the chateau St. Jullien. A little on, on the right side
of the way, rises, from the top of a tiny hill overlooking the Gironde,
a new building, with all the old crinkum-crankum ornaments of the
ancient fifteenth century country house. That is the chateau Latour.
Presently you observe that the entrance to a wide expanse of vines,
covering a series of hills and dales, tumbling down to the water's edge,
is marked by a sort of triumphal arch or ornamented gate, adorned with a
lion couchant, and a legend, setting forth that the vines behind produce
the noted wine of Leoville. The chateau Lafitte rises amid stately
groves of oak and walnut-trees, from amid the terraced walks of an
Italian garden--its white spreading wings gleaming through the trees,
and its round-roofed, slated towers rising above them. One chateau, the
most noted of all, remains. Passing along a narrow, sandy road, amid a
waste of scrubby-looking bushes, you pass beneath the branches of a
clump of noble oaks and elms, and perceive a great white structure
glimmering garishly before you. Take such a country house as you may
still find in your grandmothers' samplers, decorated with a due
allowance of doors and windows--clap before it a misplaced Grecian
portico, whitewash the whole to a state of the most glaring and dazzling
brightness, carefully close all outside shutters, painted white
likewise--and you have chateau Margaux rising before you like a wan,
ghastly spectre of a house, amid stately terraced gardens, and trimmed,
clipped, and tortured trees. But, as I have already insisted, nothing,
in any land of vines, must be judged by appearances. The first time I
saw at a distance Johannesberg, rising from its grape-clustered domains,
I thought it looked very much like a union workhouse, erected in the
midst of a field of potatoes.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: LANDES SHEPHERDS.]
CHAPTER IV.
THE LANDES--THE BORDEAUX AND TESTE RAILWAY--NINICHE--THE LANDSCAPE
OF THE LANDES--THE PEOPLE OF THE LANDES--HOW THEY WALK ON STILTS,
AND GAMBLE.
Turn to the map of France--to that portion of it which would be
traversed by a straight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne--and you
will observe that such a line would run through a vast extent of
bare-looking country--of that sort, indeed, where
"Geographers on pathless downs
Place elephants, for want of towns."
Roads, you will observe, are few and far between; the names of
far-scattered towns will be unfamiliar to you; and, indeed, nine-tenths
of this part of the map consists of white paper. The district you are
looking at is the Landes, forming now a department by itself, and
anciently constituting a portion of Gascony and Guienne. These Landes
form one of the strangest and wildest parts of France. Excepting here
and there small patches of poor, ill-cultivated land, the whole country
is a solitary desert--black with pine-wood, or white with
vast plains of drifting sand. By these two great features of the
district, occasionally diversified by sweeps of green morass,
intersected by canals and lanes of stagnant and often brackish water,
the Landes take a goodly slice out of La Belle France. Their sea-line
bounds the French side of the Bay of Biscay, stretching from Bayonne to
the mouth of the Gironde; and at their point of greatest breadth they
run some sixty miles back into the country; thence gradually receding
away towards the sea, as though pushed back by the course of the
Garonne, until, towards the mouth of the river, they fade away
altogether.
So much for the _physique_ of the Landes. The inhabitants are every whit
as rugged, strange, and uncultivated. As the Landes were four centuries
ago, in all essential points, so they are now; as the people were four
centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now. What should the
tide of progress or of improvement do in these deserts of pine and sand?
The people live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They
speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they
have none of the national characteristics--little, perhaps, of the
national blood. They are saturnine, gloomy, hypochondriac, dismally
passing dismal lives in the depths of their black forests, their dreary
swamps, and their far-spreading deserts of white, fine sand. Such an odd
nook of the world was not to be passed unvisited; besides, I wanted to
see the Biscay surf; and accordingly I left Bordeaux for the Landes--not
in some miserable cross-country vehicle--not knight-errantwise, on a
Bordelais Rosinante--not pilgrim-wise, with a staff and scrip--but in a
comfortable railway-carriage.
Yes, sir, a comfortable railway-carriage; and the railway in
question--the Bordeaux and Teste line--is the sole enterprise of the
kind undertaken and achieved in the south-west of France.
"Railways!" said the conductor of the Paris and Bordeaux diligence to
me, with that magnificent condescension with which a Frenchman explains
to a Briton all about _Perfide Albion!_--"Railways, monsieur," he said,
"as all the world knows, have achieved the ruin of the Old England, and
presently they will do as much for France. _Tenez_; they are cursed
inventions--particularly the Paris and Bordeaux Railway."
But if the ruin of France is to be consummated by railways, France, like
bankrupt linendrapers, will take a long time to ruin. The Bordeaux line
crawls but slowly on. In 1850, we left the rails and took to the road at
Tours; and, barring the bits of line leading down from some of the
Mediterranean towns to Marseilles, the Bordeaux and Teste fragment was
the sole morsel of railway then in operation south of Lyons. The
question comes, then, to be, What earthly inducement caused the
construction of this wilderness line, and how it happens that the only
locomotives in fair Guienne whistle through the almost uninhabited
Landes? The fact seems to be, that, once upon a time, the good folks of
Bordeaux were taken with an inappeasable desire to have a railway. One
would have thought that the natural course of such an undertaking would
have been northward, through the vines and thickly-peopled country of
Medoc to the comparatively-important towns of Paulliac and Lesparre. The
enterprising Bordelais, however, had another scheme. Some forty miles to
the west of the city, the sands, pines, and morasses of the Landes are
broken by a vast shallow basin, its edges scolloped with innumerable
creeks, bays, and winding friths, into which, through a breach in the
coast line of sand-hills, flow the waters of the Atlantic. On the
southern side of this estuary lie two or three scattered groups of
hovels, inhabited by fishermen and shepherds--the most important of the
hamlets being known as Teste, or Teste-la-buch. Between Teste and
Bordeaux, the only line of communication was a rutty road, half sand and
half morass, and the only traffic was the occasional pilgrimage to the
salt water of some patient sent thither at all risks by the Bordeaux
doctors, or now and then the transit towards the city of the Garonne of
the products of a day's lucky fishing, borne in panniers on the backs of
a string of donkeys. Folks, however, were sanguine. The speculation
"came out," shares got up, knowing people sold out, simple people held
on, and the line was actually constructed. No doubt it was cheaply got
up. Ground could be had in the Landes almost for the asking, and from
terminus to terminus there is not an inch of tunnel-cutting or
embankment. The line, moreover, is single, and the stations are knocked
up in the roughest and most primitive style. The result, however,
astonished no one, save the shareholders. The traffic does not half pay
the working expenses. Notwithstanding that some increase in the amount
of communication certainly did take place, consequent upon the facility
with which Teste can now be reached--a facility which has gone some way
to render it a summer place of sea-side resort--the two trains which
_per diem_ seldom convey more than a dozen or so of third-class
passengers, and the shareholders at length flung themselves into the
hands of the Government; and, insisting upon the advantages which would
accrue to the State as soon as the Paris and Bordeaux line was finished,
by a direct means of communication between the metropolis and a harbour
in the Bay of Biscay, they succeeded in hypothecating their line to the
Government for a small annual subvention. Such is the present agreeable
position of the single railway in the south-west of France.
I was somewhat late, as I feared, for the train, and, calling a
_citadine_, got the man to urge his horse to a gallop, so that we pulled
up at the terminus with the animal in a lather. A porter approached, and
grinned. "Monsieur has made haste, but the winter season begins to-day,
and the train does not go for an hour and a half." There was no help for
it, and I sauntered into the nearest _café_ to read long disquisitions
on what was then all the vogue in the political world--the "situation."
I found the little marble slabs deserted--even the billiard-table
abandoned, and all the guests collected round the white Fayence stove.
Joining them, I perceived the attraction. On one of the velvet stools
sat an old gentleman of particularly grave and reverend aspect--a most
philosophic and sage-like old gentleman--and between his legs was a
white poodle, standing erect with his master's cane in his paws. All the
company were in raptures with Niniche, who was going through his
performances.
"Niniche," said the patriarch, "what does Monsieur Tetard do when he
comes home late?"
The dog immediately began to stagger about on its hind legs, sometimes
losing its balance and then getting up again, looking all the time with
a sort of stupid blinking stare at its master. It was clear that M.
Tetard, when he came home late, did not come home sober.
"_Tiens! c'est admirable!_" shouted the spectators--burly fellows, with
black beards, and honest tradesman-looking people, with glasses of _eau
sucreé_ in their hands.
"And now," said the old gentleman, the poodle's proprietor and
instructor, "what does Madame Tetard do when Monsieur Tetard comes home
late?"
The dog straightway began to utter, with wonderful volubility, a series
of loud, shrill, yelping snaps, jerking itself up and down on its
haunches, and flinging its paws about as if it had the hydrophobia. The
spectators were enraptured. "It is actually her voice," said one. "Only
the dog is too good-looking for her," said another. "_Voilà petite!_"
vociferated a third, holding a huge piece of bluish-tinted beetroot
sugar to the performer, when suddenly the group was broken by a fussy,
fat old gentleman with a white baggy cravat, very snuffy, and a pair of
heavy gold spectacles.
"_Je dis--moi!_" shouted the new comer, in violent wrath; "_que c'est
abominable ce que vous faites là Père Grignon._" A murmur of suppressed
laughter went through the group. Père Grignon looked considerably taken
aback, and the speaker aimed a hearty kick at Niniche, who dodged away
round the stove. It was evident that he was no other than the injured
and maligned Tetard himself. Instantly he broke into loud objurgations.
He knew how that atrocious old _Père Grignon_ had taught his dog to
malign him, the _bête misérable_! But as for it, he would poison
it--shoot it--drown it; and as for Père Grignon, who ought to have more
sense, all the quartier knew what he was--an _imbécille_, who was always
running about carrying tales, and making mischief. But he would appeal
to the authorities; he would lay his complaint before the commisary of
the quartier; he would--he would--. At this moment the excited orator
caught sight of the offending poodle slipping to the door, and instantly
sprung vigorously after him:--
"_Tenez-tenez_; don't touch Niniche--it's not his fault!" exclaimed the
poodle's proprietor. But the dog had bolted, with Tetard in hot chase of
his imitator, and vowing that he should be _écraséd_ and _abiméd_ as
soon as caught. There was, of course, great laughter at the whole
proceeding; and then the group betook themselves to the marble slabs
and dominoes--the instructor of the offending quadruped coolly lighting
his pipe, as he muttered that old Tetard was, after all, a _bon enfant_,
and that over a _petit verre_ he would always listen to reason.
At length the tedious hour and a half wore away, and I entered the
terminus--a roughly built wooden shed. The train consisted of a first,
second, and third-class carriage; but there were no first-class
passengers, only one solitary second-class, and about a dozen
third-classes, with whom I cast my lot. Miserable as the freight was,
the locomotive whistled as loud and panted as vehemently as if it were
yoked to a Great Western express; and off we went through the broad belt
of nursery gardens, which encircles every French town, and where the
very best examples of the working of the small proprietary system are to
be seen. A rapid run through the once greatly famed and still esteemed
vineyards of Hautbrion, and we found ourselves scurrying along over a
negative sort of country--here a bit of heath, there a bit of
vineyard--now a bald spot of sand, anon a plot of irregularly-cut
stubble; while a black horizon of pine-wood rose gradually on the right
and left. On flew the train, and drearier grew the landscape; the heath
was bleaker--the pines began to appear in clumps--the sand-stretches
grew wider--every thing green, and fertile, and _riant_ disappeared. He,
indeed, who enters the Landes, appears to have crossed a French
frontier, and left the merry land behind. No more bright vineyards--no
more rich fields of waving corn--no more clustered villages--no more
chateau-turrets--no more tapering spires. You look up to heaven to see
whether the sky has not changed, as well as the land. No; all there is
blue and serene as before, and the keen, hot sun glares intensely down
upon undulating wastes of marsh, fir, and sand, among which you may
travel for leagues without seeing a man, hearing a dog bark, or a bird
sing. At last we were fairly among the woods, shooting down what seemed
an eternal straight tunnel, cleft by lightning through the pines. The
trees stood up stark and stiff, like cast-iron; the fir is at once a
solemn and a rigid tree--the Puritan of the forest; and down the side of
each Puritan I noticed a straight, yellowish gash, running
perpendicularly from the spread of the branches almost to the earth, and
turned for explanation to an intelligent-looking man, evidently a
citizen of Bordeaux, opposite me.
"Ah!" he said, "you are new to our Landes."
I admitted it.
"And these gashes down the trees--these, monsieur, give us the harvest
of the Landes."
"The harvest! What harvest?"
"What harvest? Resin, to be sure."
"Ay, resin," said an old fellow with a blouse and a quick eye; "resin,
monsieur; the only harvest that man can grow in sand."
"_Tenez_," said my first interlocutor; "the peasants cut that gash in
the tree; and at the root they scoop a little hollow in the ground. The
resin perspires out of the wood, flows slowly and glutinously down the
gash, and in a month or so, according to the heat of the weather, the
hole is full, and the man who rents the trees takes up the sticky stuff,
like soup, with a ladle."
"That's a very good description," said the old bloused gentleman. "And
then, sir" (addressing me), "we barrel our crop of the Landes. Yes,
indeed, we barrel it, as well as they do the crop of the Medoc."
"Only you wouldn't like to drink it so well," said the Bordeaux man.
Presently we pulled up at a station--a mere shed, with a clearing around
it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the
name--TOHUA-COHOA, and remarked that it did not look like a French one.
"French one!" said he of Bordeaux; "you don't expect to find French in
this chaos? No, no; it is some of the gibberish the savages hereabout
speak."
"No such gibberish, and no such savages either," said the little
keen-eyed man. "_Moi, je suis de Landes_; and the Landes language is a
far finer language than French. French! phoo, phoo!"
And he took a pinch of snuff indignantly and triumphantly. The Bordeaux
gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a character
to be humoured, and then looked doubtful and unconvinced.
"Tohua-Cohoa," he said; "it has a _sacré tonnerre_ of a barbarous sound;
has it any meaning?"
"Meaning!" exclaimed the man of the Landes; "I should think so.
Tohua-Cohoa means, in French, _Allez doucement_; and the place was so
called because there was there a dangerous swamp, in which many a
donkey coming up from Teste with fish to you of Bordeaux was smothered;
and so it got to be quite proverbial among the drivers of the donkeys,
and they used to shout to each other, 'Tohua-Cohoa!' whenever they came
near the slough; meaning to look out, and go gently, and take care of
the soft places."
The man with the blouse, who was clearly the champion of the Landes,
then turned indignantly from the Bordeaux man and addressed himself to
me. "The language which the poor people here speak, monsieur, is a fine
and expressive language, and liker the Spanish than the French. The
people are poor, and very ignorant. They believe, monsieur, in ghosts,
and witches, and sorceries, just as all France did two or three hundred
years ago. Very few of them can read, monsieur, and they have bad food
and no wine. But nevertheless, monsieur, they are _bons enfants--braves
gens_, monsieur. They love their pine-woods and their sands as much as
other people do their corn-fields and their vines, monsieur. They would
die, monsieur, if you took them away from the sand and the trees. They
are not like the Auvergnats, who go in troops to Paris to carry water
from the fountains, and who are _betes--betes--bien betes_! They stay at
home, monsieur. They wear their sheep-skins and walk upon their stilts,
like their forefathers before them, monsieur; and if you are coming here
to see the Landes, and if you lose yourself in the woods, and see a
light glimmering through the trees, and rap at the cottage door,
monsieur, you will be welcomed, monsieur, and have the best they can
offer to eat, and the softest they can offer to sleep on. _Tenez, tenez;
nous sommes pauvres et ignorants mais nous sommes, loyals et bons!_"
The tears fairly stood in the keen black eyes of the Landes man as he
concluded his harangue, of which I have only reported the main points;
for, truth to tell, the poor fellow's vehemence was so great, and his
utterance so rapid, that I lost nearly as much as I caught. The Bordeaux
gentleman hammered the floor with his umbrella in satirical approbation,
the rest of the passengers looked curiously on, and, the engine
whistling, we pulled up again at a station similar to the first--a
shed--a clearing, and black pine all around. There were just three
persons on the rough platform--the station-master in a blouse, and two
yellow-breeched _gens-d'armes_. What could they find to occupy them
among these drear pine-woods? What thief, who had not made a vow of
voluntary starvation, or who had not a morbid taste for living upon
resin, would ever have ventured among them? But the authorities! Catch a
bit of France without an "authority!" As they certainly are omnipotent,
and profess to be omniscient, it is only to be supposed that they should
be omnipresent. One man left the train at the station in question--a
slouching, stupid, swarthy peasant, the authorities pounced upon him,
evidently in prodigious glee at catching somebody to be _autoritised_
over, and we left them, spelling and squabbling over the greasy-looking
"papers" presented by the profoundly respectful Jacques or Pierre.
And now, before proceeding further, I may be allowed to describe, with
some minuteness, the landscape which will greet the traveller in the
Landes. Its mere surface-aspect I have already sketched; but general
terms go but a small way towards indicating the dreary grandeurs of that
solemn wilderness. Over all its gloom and barrenness--over all its
"blasted heaths" and monotonous pine-woods, and sodden morasses, and
glaring heaps of shifting sand--there is a strong and pervading sense of
loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which, as it were,
clothes the land with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging
from black forests of fir, the wanderer may find himself upon a plain,
flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in
one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and
ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine;
sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the
horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right.
Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and
coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses
of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark
veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes,
perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the
endless sand-banks and stretches of shadowy pine. The dwellings which
dot this dreary, yet, in its way, solemnly poetic landscape, are
generally mere isolated huts, separated sometimes by many miles, often
by many leagues. Round them the wanderer will descry a miserable field
or two, planted with a stunted crop of rye, millet, or maize. The
cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones,
clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes,
pine stakes, and broadleaved reeds, beneath which cluster, when not
seeking their miserable forage in the woods, two or three cows, mere
skin and bone, and a score or two of the most abject-looking sheep which
ever browsed.
Proceeding through the Landes towards the coast, a long chain of lakes
and water-courses, running parallel to the ocean, breaks their
uniformity. The country becomes a waste of shallow pools, and of land
which is parched in summer and submerged in winter. Running in devious
arms and windings through moss and moor and pine, these "lakes of the
dismal swamp" form labyrinths of gulfs and morasses which only the most
experienced shepherds can safely thread. Here and there a village, or
rather bourg, will be seen upon their banks, half hidden in the
pine-woods; and a roughly-built fishing-punt or two will be observed
floating like the canoe of a savage in the woodland lakes. Sometimes, as
in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described,
these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores
of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of
surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean,
and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For,
forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred
miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white
sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale
changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the
land flings millions of tons of sand per hour into the sea, to be washed
up again by the surf, flung on the beach, and in the first Biscay gale
blown in whirlwinds inland. A winter hurricane again from the west has
filled up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced
waters inland, dispersing them in gleaming lakes among the pine-woods,
flooding, and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people,
and burying for ever their fields of millet and rye. I shall presently
have occasion to touch upon some disasters of this sort. Meantime,
having made the aspect of the Landes familiar to the reader, I pursue
the thread of my journey.
The novelty of a population upon stilts--men, women, and children,
spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than
the rest of mankind--irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant
anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in
his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but
they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the
turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At
last I was gratified; as the train passed not very quickly along a
jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it,
as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite
eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with
broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the
rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the
apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all.
Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient
profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together
across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall
ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were
boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were
scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a
cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish
petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld
at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the
sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not
only by two daddy long-legs' limbs, but by a third, which appeared to
grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly
explained by my bloused _cicerone_, who seemed to feel especial pleasure
at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the
people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied
to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his
back-stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at
home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs.
"He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being
wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the
Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of
stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play
cards, so, without once coming off their stilts."
"Ay, and cheat! _Mon Dieu!_ how they cheat!" said the Bordeaux
gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctantly admitted that was
the truth, and the other went on:--
"These fellows here on the stilts are the most confounded gamblers in
Europe. Men and women, it's all the same--play, play, play; they would
stake their bodies first, and their souls after. _Tenez_; I once heard
of a lot of the fellows playing in a wood till they were all but
starved. In the day they played by daylight, and when night came, they
kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in
spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money--not that they had
much of that--and their crops--not that they were of great value
either--and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and
then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, their
stilts--for a Landes man thinks his stilts the principal part of his
wardrobe; and, _sacré!_ monsieur, three of the fellows were ruined out
and out, and had to give up their hats, and sheep-skins, and sabots,
while the man who was the greatest winner walked home on his own stilts,
with the stilts of all his comrades tucked under his arm."
"Gaming is their fault--their great fault," meekly acknowledged the
blouse.
"Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A
Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards."
"The fact is," replied the apologist, "that they count cheating part of
the game. Their motto is, win anyhow; so it is no worse for one than the
other. Cards is chance; but cheating needs skill, and _voila tout_."
We were fast approaching Teste, and had passed two or three clusters of
poor huts, and a party of women up to their waists in a sluggish stream
washing fleeces, while yellow patches of ripening maize began to recur
quicker and quicker, showing that we had reached a comparatively
thickly-peopled district, when all at once there burst upon my eyes a
glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest
green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England,
the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most
intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and
fuzzy, and rusty, compared to this wonderful hue. The land looked like
one huge emerald, sparkling in the sun. The brightness, the freshness,
the radiance of the tint, was almost supernatural, and the eye, nursed
for it, as it were, after our journey over the brown moors and black
pines, caught the bright fresh beauty of the colour with rapture.
"Come," I thought, "there are, at least, oases in the Landes. Never was
turf so glorious; never was sward so bewitching." And then, gazing far
and wide upon the prairie, I saw it dotted with human figures labouring
at the soil, and great wains and carts drawn by oxen, looking like black
specks upon a great, fresh, green leaf. But, in a moment, I saw
something more. Could I believe my eyes? A ship! Yes, verily, a ship,
fast aground, high and dry upon the turf! and not only one, but two,
three, four, good-sized schooners and _chasse marées_, with peasants
digging about them, and country carts high heaped with green
rural-looking burdens.
The Landes man saw my bewilderment. "The green-looking land," he said,
"is the flat bottom of part of the bay of Arcachon. It is now dead
low-water, and the country people have come down with their carts to
fill them with that green slimy seaweed, which makes capital manure; and
some of them, perhaps, have brought casks of resin for those ships which
principally belong to Bordeaux, Rochelle, and Nantes, and come here and
into other bays along the coast for the harvest of the Landes."
The engine whistled. We were at Teste--a shabby, ancient little village,
with a deep stream flowing sluggishly around it, and dividing itself
into a many-forked delta along the level sand; fishermen's hovels
scattered on the beach, brown boats drawn up beneath them, nets drying,
a considerable fishy smell pervading the atmosphere, with, beyond again,
the black, unvarying mantle of pine-woods. There is a very good hotel at
Teste; thanks to its being one of the Bordeaux watering-places; and
there, for dinner, was provided red mullets, which would have made the
red mullet-loving Duke of Devonshire crazy, as he noted the difference
between the fish from the bay of Arcachon and their brethren from the
coast of Weymouth.
CHAPTER V.
THE LANDES--THE BAY OF ARCACHON AND ITS FISHERS--THE LEGEND OF
CHATEL-MORANT--THE PINE-WOODS--THE RESIN-GATHERER--THE WILD
HORSES--THE SURF OF THE BAY OF BISCAY--THE WITCHES OF THE
LANDES--POPULAR BELIEFS, AND POPULAR CUSTOMS.
The sun was low in the heavens next morning when I was afoot and down to
the beach, the glorious bay now brimming full, and the schooners and
_chasse marées_, like the swan on St. Mary's Loch, floating double,
ships and shadows. The scene was very strange. The green meadow had
disappeared, and where it had been, a gleaming lake stretched brilliant
in the sunshine, set in the pine-woods like a mirror in an ebony frame,
cutting slices of sweeping bay out of their dusky margins, and piercing
their depths with silent, weedy water-veins.
[Illustration]
Where the villages lie, there have been clearings made in the wood,
precisely as one would expect to see in a New Zealand or Australian bay.
Close to high-water mark, rows of rounded huts serve as storehouses for
nets, and spars, and sails. Before them straggling jetties run on piles
far to seaward; behind, huddled amid scanty vineyards and patches of
broadleaved Indian corn, groups of houses--their roofs nearly flat, and
their walls not above six feet, in some places not four feet, high--seem
cowering away from observation. For every cottage built of stone, there
are half-a-dozen out-houses, sheds, pig-sties, and so forth, piled up
with old oars, broken masts, furze, pine-cuttings, and Irish-looking
sod. I made my way to what seemed the principal landing-place--a
bleached jetty. A dozen or so of boats floated round it, roughly built,
very narrow, and very light, lying upon the very top of the water, and
just, in fact, as like canoes as the scene about resembled some still
savage country. Three boats were starting for the oyster fishery, manned
each by four as buxom, blithe, and debonnaire wenches as you would wish
to see. They had short petticoats--your Nereides of all shores have--and
straw hats, shaped like a man's. In the stern-sheets of each boat a
venerable, ancient mariner held the tiller; and as I approached, the
damsels, who were getting their clumsy oars inserted between the
thole-pins, clamoured out in a torrent of vociferous gabble, offering me
a day's oyster-fishing, if I would go with them. They were evidently
quite _au fait_ to ridding the Bordeaux loungers of their spare francs,
in the shape of passage-money, for a frolic on the oyster-banks; but I
had determined to pass the day in another fashion. I wanted a sail on
the bright, still bay, a walk in the pine-woods, and a glance at the
surf tumbling in from the Bay of Biscay; so I scrutinized the faces of
two or three lounging boatmen, with as much reference to Lavater's
principles as I might, and selecting the most intelligent-looking of the
lot--a mild, grey-eyed man, who spoke gently and slowly--we soon made a
bargain, and were speedily afloat in the bean-cod looking canoe of which
he was the skipper. I was gazing doubtfully at the heavy oars, and the
expanse of water, when a flying cat's-paw made just a pretence of
ruffling it.
"_Merci, le bon vent!_" said the fisherman. Up went a mast; up went a
light patch of thin white canvass, and straightway the bubbles flew fast
and faster by the gunwale, and there arose a sweet gurgle from the
cleaving bow.
"You can see how fast we're going by the bottom," said the boatman. I
leant over the gunwale, and looked down. Oh, the marvellous brightness
of that shining sea! I gazed from the boat upon the sand through the
water, almost as you might through the air upon the earth from a
balloon. Ghost-like fish gleamed in the depths, and their shadows
followed them below upon the ribbed sea-sand. Long flowing weeds, like
rich green ribbons, waved and streamed in the gently running tidal
current. You could see the white pebbles and shells--here a ridge of
rocks, there a dark bed of seaweed; and now and then a great flat-fish,
for all the world like a burnished pot-lid set in motion--went gleaming
along the bottom.
"Once," said the boatman, "all the bottom of this great bay that you are
looking at was dry land, and there were cottages upon it, and an ancient
chateau. That was the chateau of Armand de Chatel-morant, an old baron
of these parts, a wicked man and a great magician, who had a familiar
spirit, which came when he blew a horn, and who was able, by his
sorceries, to rule the winds that blow. Only, once he raised a storm he
could not quell; and it was that storm which made the Bay of Arcachon;
for the wind blew the sand of the sea-shore up the country, like a
snow-storm, and the sand-hills rolled before it; and what the wind
began, the _coup de mer_ finished, and the ocean came bursting through
the breach it had battered in the sand-ridges of the coast, and
swallowed up the chateau and drowned the magician, and there was an end
of him."
"Well," said I, "so be it; he deserved his fate."
"For many a year after the flood the baron had made," the boatman
continued, "you could see, out of a boat, the pointed tops of the towers
of the chateau below you, with the weather-cocks still pointing to the
west, and the green seaweed hanging to them, like pennons from a ship's
vanes."
"But I fear it is not to be seen now."
"Oh! no. Ages and ages ago it rotted and rotted away; but the old men of
the village have heard from their fathers that the fishermen only
ventured there in calm summer weather and in good daylight; for, in the
dark, look you, and when a Biscay wind was blowing, they said they heard
the sounding of Chatel-morant's magic horn, and they saw his imp flying
above them and wailing like a hurt seabird."
Of course, I was on thorns to hear all the story; and so my boatman
recounted a rude, disjointed tale, which I have hitched, legendwise,
into the following narrative:--
The Baron Armand de Chatel-morant sat in his dim studio high up in the
most seaward tower of the chateau of Chatel-morant. His hair and his
beard were white, but his eyes were keen, and his cheeks as ruddy as the
eyes and the cheeks of a young man. He had a furnace beside him, with
implements of projection, crucibles, and powders. On the table were
astrological instruments, and the magic crystal, which his Familiar had
given him, and in which--only, however, when the Familiar pleased--the
baron could read the future; but, for every reading of the future, the
baron was a year older--the Familiar had a year of his life. The baron
was clothed in a long furred robe, and he wore red shoes, with peaked
toes, as long again as his feet. His face was moody, and clouds went
driving along his brow. He took up his instruments, and laid them down,
and opened a big book, full of spells and cantrips, and shut it; then he
walked about the room; and then he stopped and blew a silver whistle.
Very prompt at the sound came an old man--reverent and sorrowful
looking--with a white wand; for he was the seneschal of the chateau of
Chatel-morant.
"Your niece," said the baron, "who comes hither from the town of
Bordeaux to visit you, and whom I saw but yester even,--has she
returned?"
"She went this morning, monseigneur," said the seneschal; "she has
preparations to make; for, God save the pretty child! she is to be
married on the day of Blessed St. John."
The baron frowned; for he was not an admirer of the saints, being quite,
indeed, on the other side of the hedge.
"Say the number of the day, and the name of the month," he replied,
angrily; "and do not torment me with that shaveling jargon which they
talk in the monastery of Andrew, whom they call St. Andrew at Bordeaux."
The seneschal, who was accustomed to be bullied, particularly upon
religious subjects, crossed himself behind his back; for he was a
prudent man, and, owing to the absence of mind of the baron, who was
always experimentalizing in the black art, managed, one way or other, to
pick up so much as to make his place a tolerably profitable one.
"Married!" said the baron; "and to whom?"
"Just to honest and brave Jacques Fort--the stoutest mariner who sails
out of the Garonne. He has got a ship of his own, now--the _Sainte
Vierge_; and to-day he sails upon his first voyage, as far as Bayonne."
"He sails to-day--so; and the maiden's name--your niece's name--what is
that?"
"Toinette, so please you, sir."
"You may go."
And go the seneschal did, wondering very much at the uncommon interest
his master seemed to be taking in vulgar, sublunary things.
Then Baron Armand de Chatel-morant paced the room a long time in gloomy
meditation. At length he sat down again, and said aloud: "There is no
doubt of it--I am in love. That face haunts me; Toinette's face is ever
floating opposite to me. 'Tis an odd feeling; I was never so before.
But, since it is so, I must even have the maiden--she will cheer me--I
love her face. I will send to-morrow to Bordeaux, as from her uncle; and
when she comes here, by the star of Aldeboran, she stays here, Jacques
Fort to the contrary notwithstanding!"
"Wrong--quite wrong!" said a voice.
The baron turned coolly round, and saw, sitting upon the arm of the
chair close to him, the figure of a very thin dwarf, with a long,
unearthly face, and fingers like hawks' claws. This was the imp--the
baron's Familiar.
"How, Klosso!" said Armand; "you come without being called?"
"Yes; but you would have called me soon."
"You know what I am thinking of--of Toinette. I love her--I must have
her."
"You will not have her."
"Why so?"
"Because it is so decreed."
"Klosso," said the baron, "I don't believe you. You know the future;
but you lie about it when you speak."
"Will you, then," answered the demon, "look into the crystal: that can't
lie. Come--it's only another year--give yourself a treat--come!"
"I have given you many years already," said the baron, musing; "look how
grey my hair is!"
"Dye it," said the imp, who, if he was a Familiar, certainly behaved as
such. But the baron took no notice of his impertinence. He was
dreadfully smitten by Toinette, and said he'd have a twelvemonths' worth
of knowledge of futurity for her sake. The thin dwarf grinned, and then
made a motion of relief, as one who saw before him the speedy end of a
long, long watch. So he took the crystal, uttered, as may be supposed,
some magic words; and the baron looked upon the clear surface.
"Malediction!" he exclaimed, as he saw in the crystal a huge hearth,
with pots on the fire, and poultry roasting before it, and Toinette
tending the cookery, and a stalwart fellow helping her clumsily.
"That is Toinette!" cried the baron; "but who is the rascal with her?"
"Her husband, Jacques Fort."
"Curses on him!"
Here the baron saw Jacques fling his arm round Toinette's waist, and
kiss her so naturally, that he ground his teeth.
"Domestic felicity," said the imp; "a charming picture, baron--they're
cooking the christening feast for young Jacques."
The baron flung the crystal down.
"Pay me," said the imp; and he passed the bird-like hand over the
baron's face, and each of his fingers drew a wrinkle. A shudder went
over the sorcerer's frame, and then he breathed heavily, and looked
wistfully at the imp. He was a year older.
"Klosso!" shouted Armand, leaping to his feet, "I will fight fate!"
"Better not," said Klosso.
"Curse the future!" exclaimed the baron; "I will alter the future, and
give the lie to the crystal, as to you!"
"If you try," replied the imp, coolly, "you will belong to me before the
morning."
"Silence, slave!" cried Armand, who was not a man to be put out of his
way; "you rule the winds--I rule you. Make the west wind blow."
The imp raised its hand, and they heard the whistling of a strong, gusty
wind, and the creaking of the weather-cocks, as they all turned towards
the sea.
"Stronger--stronger--stronger!" shouted the baron; and the whistle
became a roar, and the roar a howl; and the castle shook and swayed in
the blast.
"Good--good!" laughed the baron; "something more than a puff there--ha!
ha!--as Jacques Fort has found by this time on the deck of his new ship
in the Bay of Biscay."
The Familiar gently remarked that the weather was roughish, when the
seneschal rushed into the room in a dreadful state of terror at the
storm.
"My lord--my lord!" he said, "we shall all be blown away; the air is
full of sand; you would be suffocated outside. The wind is tearing up
the pines; and oh, poor Jacques Fort is at sea, and drowned--drowned, by
this time, to a certainty!"
"Yes," said Armand, "I should rather think so. Toinette must take up
with somebody else.--Stronger!"
The last injunction was addressed to the imp, and instantly complied
with. The tempest roared like the up-bursting of a volcano, and
screeched and screamed through the sugar-loaf turrets and the lattices,
which it had burst in, and the loop-holes, like a hundred thousand
devils' whistles. The seneschal fell on his knees.
"Stronger still!" said the baron.
And meantime what was Jaques Fort doing in his new ship? With every rag
of canvass torn out of the bolt-ropes, the _Sainte Vierge_ was flying on
the very top, as it seemed, of the driving spray, on to the breakers.
Jacques was the only man left on deck--every one of the rest had been
washed overboard, and were already sleeping in the sea; and he knew that
in a moment he would follow them. The staggering ship rose on the back
of a mighty breaker; and the captain knew that with its fall upon the
beach his vessel would be ground to powder.
"Oh, Toinette!" he murmured, as the ship was hove forward like a bolt
from a bow, and then fell shooting into a creaming current of rushing
water, while the sand-hills appeared right and left for a moment, and
then were left astern. The last grand wave had burst the barrier, and
the frail ship and the kneeling mariner were borne onward on the ridge
of the advancing flood, which formed the lake of Arcachon. Jacques Fort
saw a light, and steered towards it: it was the light in the baron's
chamber at the chateau of Chatel-morant.
There, by the burst-in lattice, stood the baron, his grey hair flying
above his head, and ever shouting to the imp, "Stronger,
Klosso--stronger!" And every time he used the words, the hurricane burst
louder and louder upon the rocking turrets. And still Armand clung to
the stone-work of the burst-in lattice, through which the flying sand
drove in, and clustered in his robes and hair.
And now the terrified domestics began to rush up to the chamber of the
baron.
"My lord, such a storm was never heard of!"
"My lord, the devil is loose, and riding on the wind!"
"My lord, the end of the world is at hand!"
"Klosso!" shouted the baron, "stronger!"
As he spoke, the wind burst like a thunder-clap over them, and they
heard the crash of a falling tower. The serving men and women grovelled
in terror on the floor; the baron clung by the window; the imp, visible
only to him, sat on the back of the arm-chair, as he had sat since his
appearance.
But hush! Another sound, mingling with the roar of the wind, and deeper
and more awful still. It rapidly increased, and the baron found his face
besprinkled with driving drops of water--they were salt.
"My lord--my lord!" screamed the seneschal, sinking, as he spoke, at
the baron's knees; "my lord--the sea!"
A cry was heard without; the lights of the hamlet beneath disappeared;
and then a shock from below made the chateau swing and rock, and white
waves were all around them.
"The sea, my lord," said the seneschal, "has burst the sand-banks; the
castle stands on low ground. We are all dead men--the sea--the sea!"
The Baron Armand turned to Klosso: "Does he speak truth?"
"The worthy gentleman," said the imp, "is perfectly in the right; you
are all dead men; and, Monseigneur le Baron, when you gave me last a
year of your life, you gave me the last you had to give."
Up rose the water, and higher dashed the waves. Up, foot by foot, and
yard by yard; and still the baron stood erect amid the raving of the
elements--his face as white as his hair, but his eyes as bright and keen
as ever.
"Klosso," he said, "I am yours; and the future is the future."
He looked at the iron lamp swinging above his head.
"It will soon be out," said Klosso.
Jacques Fort still steered to the light. It came nearer and nearer; and
he saw, even through the gloom and the driving spray, that it shone from
a castle-turret, and he seized the tiller to change the course of the
vessel; but as he did so, the grand, triumphant, finishing blast of the
hurricane fell upon the seething flood like iron--heaved up one
bristling, foaming sea, which caught the _Sainte Vierge_ upon its
crest, and flung the ship almost into the air. The light gleamed for a
moment almost beneath him; and Jacques, rushing to the bow, saw below
it, as in a prison, a fierce convulsed face, and staring eyes, and
flying white hair; and the eyes saw him. As Jacques recognised the
sorcerer Armand of Chatel-morant, so did Armand recognise the face and
form he had seen helping Toinette to cook the christening feast.
The next instant the _Sainte Vierge_ was borne over and over the highest
turret of the chateau, her keel a fathom good above the loftiest and the
gaudiest of all the gilt weather-cocks.
The event foreshadowed in the crystal duly took place on the anniversary
of the day which saw the chateau de Chatel-morant swallowed in the Bay
of Arcachon.
The legend of the submerged chateau, with which I plead guilty to having
taken a few liberties, but "only with a view" (as the magistrate said
when he put his neighbour into the stocks)--"only with a view towards
improvement," occupied us during the greater part of our smooth and
pleasant sail. Dismissing matters legendary, we talked of the fishermen
of the bay, and their neighbours, the shepherds on stilts. The man of
the sea held the men of the land cheap. The peasants were never out of
the forests and the sand, he said; the fishermen often went to Bordeaux,
and sometimes to Rochelle, and sometimes even to Nantes. They (the
boatmen) never used stilts; but as soon as the peasant's children were
able to toddle, they were clapped upon a pair of sticks, and many a
tumble, and many a broken face they caught, before they could use them
easily. "They are a good set of people, but very ignorant, and they
believe whatever you tell them. They are frightened out of their wits if
you speak of witches or sorcerers; but we know that all these old tales
are nothing but nonsense. We go to Bordeaux very often as pilots, and to
Rochelle, and even to Nantes." I was further informed, that in the
winter time the fishermen pursued their occupation in the bay in such
boats as that in which I was sailing; and that in summer they went out
into the Atlantic; but never ventured more than a few miles to sea, and
never, if they could help it, stayed out a night.
This kind of conversation brought us tolerably well to the narrow
passage, all fenced with intricate sand-banks, which leads to the open
sea. A white, graceful lighthouse rose above the sand-banks on our
right, into which the pine-woods were stretching in long, finger-like
projections; and the boat, beginning to rise and fall upon the slow,
majestic heave which the swell without communicated to the shallow water
within the bar, assured me that if we went further, the surf would
prevent our landing at all. We ran the boat upon the beach, and drawing
her up high and dry, plunged into, not the greenwood, but the black-wood
tree. It was hard walking. The pines grew out of fine bright sand, bound
here and there together by carpets of long bent grass, and the air was
sickly with the peculiar resinous smell of the rich sap of the tree
fermenting and distilling down the gashes. In our ramble, we encountered
two of the peasants, whose dreary work it is to hack the pines and
ladle up the flowing proceeds. We heard the blows of the axe echoing in
the hot silence of the mid-day, and made our way to whence the sound
proceeded, speedily descrying the workman, perched upon a slight bending
ladder, gashing the tree. This man, and, indeed, all his brethren whom I
saw, were miserable-looking creatures--their features sunken and
animal-like--their hair matted in masses over their brows--their feet
bare, and their clothing painfully wretched. Their calling is as
laborious as it is monotonous. Starting with the dawn, they plunge--a
ladder in one hand, and an adze in the other--into the recesses of the
pine-wood, repeating the same process to every tree. The ladder in
question is very peculiar, consisting of a single strip of elastic wood,
about ten feet long, dotted with knobs cut plain upon one side for the
foot to rest upon, and thus serving instead of rounds or steps. This
primitive ladder is sliced away towards the top, so as to rest more
commodiously upon the tree. When in use, it is placed almost
perpendicularly, and the workman ascends it like a monkey, never
touching the tree, but keeping the ladder in its position by the action
of his legs, which, from the knee downward, seem to cling round and
round the bending wood, and keep it in its place, even when the top,
laid perhaps against the rounded side of the trunk, appears to be
slipping off every moment.
"Well," said my guide, the Teste boatman, "I would rather reef topsails
in a gale of wind than go up there, at any rate."
The ladder, its proprietor told me, could not be used except with naked
feet. The instrument with which he cut the tree was as sharp as a razor,
and required long practice to acquire the knack of using it. I wondered
that the gashing did not kill the trees, as some of the largest were
marked with half-a-dozen cuts from the ground to the fork. Here and
there, indeed, you found one which had succumbed to the process, rotted,
and fallen; but the majority seemed in very good case, nevertheless.
"Look at that tree," said a resin-gatherer. More than half the bark had
certainly gone in these perpendicular stripes, and yet it looked strong
and stately "That tree is more than a hundred years old; and that is not
a bad age for either a man or a fir."
Leaving the peasant behind, we pushed steadily towards the sea. The
ground, thanks to the debris of the pines, was as slippery as ice,
except where we plunged into fine hot sand, half way to the knees. Every
now and then we crossed what I cannot describe better than by calling it
a perfectly bald spot in the woods--a circular patch of pure white
sand--in certain lights, you might have taken it for snow. All around
were the black pines; but not a blade or a twig broke the drifted
fineness of the bald white patch. You could find neither stone nor
shell--nothing but subtle, powdery sand--every particle as minute and as
uniform as those in an hour-glass.
"That," said my guide, when we came in view of the first of these
singular little saharas--"that is a devil's garden."
"And what does he grow there?" I asked. The man lowered his voice: "It
is in these spots of fine white sand that all the sorcerers and witches,
and warlocks in France--ay, and I have heard, in the whole world--meet
to sing, and dance, and frolic; and the devil sits in the middle. So, at
least," he added, after a pause, and in a more sprightly tone--"so the
peasants say."
"And do you say it?"
"Well, I do not know. There's witches, for certain, in the Landes,--old
women--but whether they come flying out here to dance round the devil or
no--the peasants say so for certain--but I don't think I believe it."
"I should hope you didn't."
"They enchant people, though; there's no doubt of that. They can give
you the fever so bad that no doctor can set you to rights again; and
they can curse a place, and keep the grass from growing on it; but I
don't believe they fly on broomsticks, or dance round the devil."
"Are there any young women witches?"
"Well, I do hear of one or two. _Mais elles ne sont pas bien fortes._ It
is only the old ones make good witches, and the uglier they are the
better."
"Well, now, did they ever do any harm to you?"
The man paused, and looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Our little
Marie," he said, "has fits; and my wife does say--" Here he stopped.
"No, monsieur," he said, "I do not believe in witches."
But he did, as firmly as King Jamie; only now and then, in the bright
sunlight, and with an incredulous person, he thought he did not.
On, however, we went mile after mile, over the slippery ground, and in
the shadow of the pines, ere we saw gleaming ahead, the region of fine
sand, and heard--although the little breeze which blew was off the
shore--the low thunder of the "coup de mer"--the breaking surf of the
ocean. Presently, passing through a zone of stunted furze, and dry
thin-bladed grass, we emerged into the most fearful desert I ever looked
upon--a sea of heights and hollows, dells and ridges, long slopes and
precipitous ravines--all of them composed of pure white, hot, drifting
sand. The labour of walking was excessive. I longed for the stilts I had
seen the day before. Every puff of breeze sent the sand, like dry
pungent powder, into our faces, and sometimes we could see it reft from
the peaks of the ridges, and blown like clouds of dust far out into the
air. All at once my guide touched my arm, "_Voila! donc, voila! des
chevaux sauvages!_" It certainly only required a breed of wild horses to
make the country an exact counterpart of Arabia; and I eagerly turned to
see the steeds of the desert, just succeeding in catching a glimpse of a
ruck of lean, brown, shaggy ponies, disappearing round a hill, in a
whirlwind of sand. There is, undoubtedly, something romantic and
Mazeppaish in the notion of wild horses of the desert; but stern truth
compels me to add, that a more stunted, ragged lot of worthless brutes,
not bigger than donkeys, than were the troop of desert steeds of the
Landes which I had the fortune to see, could be nowhere met with. My
fisherman told me that, when caught and tamed, they were useful in
carrying sacks and panniers along the sandy ways; but that there were
not more vicious, stubborn brutes in nature than Landes ponies.
A doubly fatiguing trudge, unbroken by any further episodical visions of
desert steeds, but enlivened by the fast increasing thunder of the surf,
at length brought us to its foam. Winding through a succession of sand
valleys, we climbed a steepish bank, sinking to our knees at every step,
and from this last ridge beheld a long, gentle slope, as perfectly
smooth as though the sand had been smoothed by a ruler--fining away down
to the white creaming sheets of water which swept, with the loud
peculiar hiss of the agitated sea, far up and down the level banks. The
full force of the great heaving swells was expended in breakers, roaring
half a mile from the land; and from their uttermost verge to the tangled
heaps of seaweed washed high and dry upon the beach, was a vast belt of
foaming water, extending away on either hand in a perfectly straight
line as far as the eye could reach, and dividing the shipless expanse of
water from the houseless expanse of land. The scene was very solemn.
There was not even a seabird overhead--not an insect crawling or humming
along the ungrateful sand. Only the grand organ of the surf made its
incessant music, and the sharp thin rustle of the moving sand came
fitfully upon the ear. I sat down and listened to it, and as I sat, the
continually shifting sand gradually rose around me, as the waters rose
round the chateau of Chatel-morant. Had I stayed there long enough, only
my head would have been visible, like the head of the sphinx.
I dined that day at the hotel, _tete-à-tete_ with a young priest, who
was returning to Bordeaux from a visit to his brother, one of the
officers of the Preventitive Service, whose lonely barracks are almost
the only human habitations which break the weary wilderness stretching
from the Adour to the Gironde. One would have thought that there could
be but little smuggling on such a coast; but the Duaniers are always
_autorités_, and the waves of the Gulf of Gascony could not, of course,
break on French ground without _autorités_ to help them. With respect to
the priest, however, he had one of the finest heads and the most
perfectly chiselled features I ever saw. The pale high brow--the keen
bright eyes, with remarkably long eye-lashes--the tenuity of the
cartilage of the nose, and the perfect delicacy of the mouth--all told
of intellect in no common development; while the meek sweetness of the
noble face had something in it perfectly heavenly. Fling in imagination
an aureole round that head, and you had the head of a youthful martyr,
or a saint canonized for early virtues. There was devotion and
aspiration in every line of the countenance--a meek, mild gentleness,
beautifully in keeping with every word he uttered, and every movement he
made. I was the more struck with all this, inasmuch as there is not an
uglier, meaner, nor, I will add, dirtier, set of worthy folks in all the
world, than the priests of France. Nine times out of ten, they are
big-jowled, coarse, animal-looking men, with mottled faces, and skins
which do not take kindly to the razor. The arrangements about the neck
show a decided scarcity of linen, and a still greater lack of soap and
water. They are seldom or never gentlemen, their figures are ungainly,
their motions uncouth, and--barring, of course, their scholastic and
theological knowledge--I found the majority with whom I conversed
stupid, illiterate, and unintelligent. Now, the young priest at Teste
was the reverse of all this. With manners as polished as those of any
courtly _abbé_ of the courtly old _regime_, there was a perfect
atmosphere of frankness and quiet good-humour about my companion, and
his conversation was delightfully easy, animated, and graceful. I do not
know if my friend belonged to the College of Jesus; but, if he did, he
was cut out for the performance of its highest and subtlest diplomacy.
We talked of the strange part of the world I was visiting, and I found
he knew the people and the country well. I mentioned the submerged
chateau and its legend, and he replied that it was an undoubted fact,
that both chateaux and villages had been overwhelmed--both by the
inbursting of the sea, and by great gales blowing vast hills of sand
down into the existing lakes, and so forcing them out of their ancient
beds. The sand, indeed, he said, was more dangerous than the water.
Often and often the coast-guard stations had to be dug out after a gale;
and he believed that, on one occasion, a small church near the mouth of
the Gironde had been overwhelmed to such a height that only a few feet
of the spire and the weathercock were left apparent. The story put me
forcibly in mind of the remarkably heavy fall of snow experienced by my
old friend, Baron Munchausen; but, for all that, I see no reason why it
should not be literally correct. The pines, the priest informed me, were
the saving of the country, by fixing the unstable soil, and the
Government had engineers busily engaged in laying out plantations all
along the coast--the object being to get the trees down to high-water
mark. I mentioned the superstitions of the people.
"Alas!" said the priest, "What you have heard is perfectly true. We are
improving a little, perhaps. The boys and girls we get to come to school
are taught to laugh at the notion of their old grandmothers being
witches, and in another generation or two there will be a great change."
"And how do your witches work?" I asked. "As ours in England used to
do--by spell and charm?"
"Precisely. They are said to make clay figures of their victims, and to
stick pins in them, or bake them in a fire; and then they have rhymes
and cabalistical incantations, and are greatly skilled in the magic
power of herbs. The worst of it is, that a year seldom passes without an
outrage on some poor old woman. A lout, who thinks himself bewitched by
such a person, will attack her and beat her; and occasionally a bullet
has been fired at night through the cottage-window."
"The Landes people have, or had, other queer notions, as well as the
witch ones?"
"Oh, yes! They long held out against potatoes, which, they said, gave
them apoplexy, and they have only lately begun to milk their cows."
"Why so? As a pastoral people, they ought to be great in butter and
cheese."
"On the contrary, they dislike them, and use lard or goose-grease
instead. Indeed, for centuries and centuries, they religiously believed
that Landes cows gave no milk."
"But was not the experiment ever tried?"
"Scores of times. An anxious reformer would go to a Landes farmer, and
urge him to milk his cows. 'Landes cows give no milk,' would be the
answer. 'Will you let me try?' would, perhaps, be replied. The Landes
man would have no objection; and the cow would be brought and milked
before him."
"Well, seeing that would convince him."
"Ah, you don't know the Landes people--not in the least; why, the farmer
would say, 'Ay, there are a few drops, perhaps; but it's not worth the
trouble of taking. Our fathers never milked their cows, and they were as
wise as we are. And next day he would have relapsed into the old creed,
that Landes cows never gave milk at all."
I inquired about the rate at which the stilt-walkers progressed--whether
they could, as one sometimes hears, keep up with a horse at the gallop;
and found, as I expected, that six or seven miles an hour was as much as
they ever managed to achieve. The priest went on succinctly to sketch
the costume and life of the people. When in regular herding dress, the
shepherd of the Landes appears one uncouth mass of dirty wool. On his
body he wears a fleece, cut in the fashion of a rude paletot, and
sometimes flung over one shoulder, like a hussar's jacket. His thighs
and legs are defended on the outside by cuisses and greaves of the same
material. On his feet he wears sabots and coarse worsted socks, covering
only the heels and the instep. His remaining clothing generally consists
of frayed and tattered home-spun cloth; and altogether the appearance of
the man savours very strongly of that of a fantastically costumed
scarecrow.
So attired, then, with a gourd containing some wretched _piquette_ hung
across his shoulders, and provided with a store of rye-bread, baked,
perhaps, three weeks before, a few dry sardines, and as many onions or
cloves of garlic, the Landes shepherd sallies forth into the wilderness.
He reckons himself a rich man, if his employer allows him, over and
above his food, sixty francs a-year. From the rising to the setting of
the sun, he never touches the ground, shuffling backwards and forwards
on his stilts, or leaning against a pine, plying the never-pausing
knitting-needle. Sometimes he drives his flock home at eventide;
sometimes he bivouacs in the wild. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing
his flint and steel, he has soon a rousing fire of fir-branches, when,
gathering his sheep-skins round him, he makes himself comfortable for
the night, his only annoyances being the mosquitoes and the dread of the
cantrips of some unchancy old lady, who may peradventure catch a glimpse
of him in the moonlight, as she rides buxomly on her besom to a festal
dance in a devil's garden.
"Yet still," continued the young priest, "they are a good,
honest-hearted, open-handed people. For their wild, solitary life they
have a passionate love. The Landes peasant, taken from his dreary
plains, and put down in the richest landscape of France, would pine for
his heath, and sand, and woods, like a Swiss for his hills. But they
seldom leave their home here in the forests. They live and die in the
district where they were born, ignorant and careless of all that happens
beyond their own lonely bounds. France may vibrate with revolution and
change--the shepherds of the Landes feel no shock, take no heed, but
pursue the daily life of their ancestors, perfectly happy and contented
in their ignorance, driving their sheep, or notching their trees in the
wilderness."
CHAPTER VI.
UP THE GARONNE--THE OLD WARS ON ITS BANKS--ITS BOATS AND ITS
SCENERY--AGEN--JASMIN, THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS--SOUTHERN
COOKERY AND GARLIC--THE BLACK PRINCE IN A NEW LIGHT--A DREARY
PILGRIMAGE TO PAU.
A solemn imprecation is on record, uttered against the memory of the man
who invented getting up by candle-light; to which some honest gentleman,
fond of long lying, has appended a fellow curse, fulminated against the
man who invented getting up at all. Whatever we may think of the latter
commination, I suppose we shall all agree in the propriety of the
former. At all events, no one ever execrated with more sincere good will
the memory of the ingenious originator of candle-light turnings-out than
I did, when a red ray shone through the keyhole of my bedroom, and the
knuckles of--one would call him boots at home--rattled at the door,
while his hoarse voice proclaimed, "_Trois heures et demi_,"--a most
unseasonable and absurd hour certainly; but the Agen steamer, having the
strong stream of the Garonne to face, makes the day as long as possible;
and starts from the bridge--and a splendid bridge it is--of Bordeaux,
crack at half-past four. There was no help for it; and so, leaving my
parting compliments for my worthy host, I soon found myself following
the truck which conveyed my small baggage, modestly stuck into the
interstices of an Alp-like pile of ricketty boxes and faded valises, the
property of an ancient _commis voyageur_, my fellow-lodger; and pacing,
for the last time, the stately quays of the city of the Black Prince.
Early as it was, and pitch-dark, the steam-boat pier was crowded and
bustling enough. Men with lanterns and luggage were rushing breathlessly
about--and gentlemen with brushy black beards were kissing each other
with true French _éffusion_--while a crowd of humble vintagers were
being stowed away in the fore part of the boat. On the pier I observed a
tent, and looking in, found myself in a genuine early breakfast shop,
where I was soon accommodated with a seat by a pan of glowing charcoal.
The morning was bitter cold; and a magnificent bowl of smoking coffee,
bread hot from the oven, and just a nip of cognac, at the kind
suggestion of the jolly motherly-looking old lady in no end of shawls,
who presided over the establishment, and who pronounced it "_Bon pour
l'estomac, du monsieur le voyageur_." Then aboard; and after the due
amount of squabbling, bell-ringing, and contradictory orders, we
launched forth upon the black, rushing river.
A dreary time it is waiting for the daylight of an autumnal morning,
watching the pale negative lighting of the east--then the spreading of
the dim approaching day--stars going out, and the outlines of hills
coming in--and houses and trees, faint and comfortless, looming amid the
grey, cold mist. The Garonne gradually turned from black to yellow--the
genuine pea-souppy hue--and bit by bit the whole landscape came clearly
into stark-staring view--but still cold and dreary-looking--until the
cheering fire stood upon the hill-tops, and announced the rising sun. In
half an hour the valley of the Garonne was a blaze of warmth and
cheerfulness, and nothing could be more picturesquely beautiful, seen
under such auspices, than the fleet of market-boats through which we
threaded our way, and which were floating quietly down to Bordeaux. I
dismiss the mere vegetable crafts; but the fruit-boats would have made
Mr. Lance leap and sing for joy. They were piled--clustered--heaped
over--with mountains of grapes bigger than big gooseberries--peaches and
apricots, like thousands of ladies' cheeks--plums like pulpy, juicy
cannon-balls--and melons big as the head of Gog or Magog. I could not
understand how the superincumbent fruit did not crush that below; but I
suppose there is a knack in piling. At all events, the boats were loaded
to the gunwales with the luscious, shiny, downy, gushing-looking
globules, purple and yellow, and both colours mellowed and softened by
the grateful green of the clustering leaves. These boats looked like
floating cornucopias. Amongst them sometimes appeared a wine-boat--one
man at the head, one at the stern, and a Pyrenees of wine casks between
them--while here and there we would pass a huge Noah's ark of a barge,
towed by a string of labouring oxen, and steered from a platform
amidships by a tiller a great deal longer, thicker, and heavier than the
mast.
And now for a bit of the landscape. We have Gascony to our right, and
Guienne to our left.
Here and there, then, particularly in Guienne, the Garonne is not unlike
the tamer portions of the Rhine. The green vine-clothed banks rise into
precipitous ridges, whitened by streaks of limestone cliff, cottages
nestling in the crevices and ravines, and an occasional feudal tower
crowning the topmost peak. The villages passed near the water's edge are
doleful-looking places, ruinous and death-like; whitish, crumbling
houses, with outside shutters invariably closed; empty and lonesome
streets, and dilapidated piers, the stakes worn and washed away by the
constant action of the river. Take Langon and Castres as specimens of
these places: two drearier towns--more like sepulchres than towns--never
nurtured owls and bats. They seem to be still lamenting the old English
rule, and longing for the jolly times when stout English barons led the
Gascon knights and men-at-arms on profitable forays into Limousin and
Angoumais. Occasionally, however, we have a more promising and pleasing
looking town. These, for the most part, are tolerably high up the river,
and possess some curious and characteristic features. You will descry
them, for instance, towering up from a mass of perpendicular cliffs; the
open-galleried and bartizaned red houses, reared upon arches and
pillars, rising from the rock; flights of stairs from the water's edge
disappearing among the buildings, and strips of terraced gardens laid
out on the narrow shelves and ledges of the precipice.
The ruins of old feudal castles are numerous on both sides of the river;
and if the red mossy stone could speak, many a tale of desperate siege
and assault it could, no doubt, tell--for these strongholds were
perpetually changing masters in the wars between the French and the
English and Gascons; and often, when peace subsisted between the crowns,
were they attacked and harried by moss-trooping expeditions led by
French Watts Fire-the-Braes, or by English Christies of the Clinthill.
While, then, the steamer is slowly plodding her way up stream, turning
reach after reach, and showing us another and yet another pile of feudal
ruins, let us sit down here with Froissart beneath the awning, and try
to gain some inkling into the warlike customs of the times when these
thick-walled towers--no doubt built, as honest King James remarked, by
gentlemen who were thieves in their hearts--alternately displayed the
Lion Rampant and the Fleur-de-Lis.
In all the fighting of the period--I refer generally to the age of the
Black Prince--there would appear to have been a great deal of chivalric
courtesy and forbearance shown on either side. It was but seldom that a
place was defended _à outrance_. If the besiegers appeared in very
formidable force, the besieged usually submitted with a very good grace,
marched honourably out, and had their turn next time. I cannot find that
there was anything in the nature of personal animosity between the
combatants, but there was great wantonness of life; and though few men
were killed in downright cold blood, a man was frequently made the
victim of a sort of murderous frolicsomeness, the manner of his death
being suggested, by the circumstances of the moment. For instance, on
one occasion, an English and Gascon garrison was besieged in
Auberoche--the French having "brought from Toulouse four large machines,
which cast stones into the fortress night and day, which stones
demolished all the roofs of the towers, so that none within the walls
dared to venture out of the vaulted rooms on the ground-floor." In this
strait, a "varlet" undertook to carry letters, requesting succour, to
the Earl of Derby, at Bordeaux. He was unsuccessful in getting through
the French lines, and being arrested, the letters were found upon him,
hung round his neck, and the poor wretch bound hand and foot, inserted
in one of the stone-throwing machines. His cries for mercy all unheeded,
the engine made two or three of its terrific swings, and then launched
the screaming "varlet" into the air, right over the battlements of
Auberoche, "so that he fell quite dead amid the other varlets, who were
much terrified at it;" and presently, the French knights, riding up to
the walls, shouted to the defenders: "Gentlemen, inquire of your
messenger where he found the Earl of Derby, seeing that he has returned
to you so speedily." But the Earl of Derby did come, and took signal
vengeance. The battle, which Froissart tells in his best manner,
resulted in the capture by the English of nine French viscounts, and "so
many barons, squires, and knights, that there was not a man-at-arms
among the English that had not for his share two or three."
The captains of the pillaging bands, who preyed both upon the English
and the French, and the hired auxiliaries, who transferred their
services from one side to the other, were, however, miserable
assassins, thirsting for blood. These men were frequently Bretons; and,
says Froissart, "the most cruel of all Bretons was Geoffrey Tete-Noire."
With this Geoffrey Tete-Noire, continues the old chronicler, "there was
a certain captain, who performed many excellent deeds of arms, namely,
Aimerigot Marcel, a Limousin squire, attached to the side of the
English." One of the "deeds of arms" performed under this worthy's
auspices is narrated as follows:--
"Aimerigot made one day an excursion, with only twelve companions, to
seek adventures. They took the road towards Aloise, near St. Fleur,
which has a handsome castle in the bishopric of Clermont. They knew the
castle was only guarded by the porter. As they were riding silently
towards Aloise, Aimerigot spied the porter sitting upon the branch of a
tree without side of the castle. The Breton, who shot extraordinary well
with a cross-bow, says to him, 'Would you like to have that porter
killed at a shot?'--'Yea,' replied Aimerigot; 'and I hope you will
do so.' The cross-bow man shoots a bolt, which he drives into the
porter's head, and knocks him down. The porter, feeling himself mortally
wounded, regains the gate, which he attempts to shut, but cannot, and
falls down dead."
This delectable anecdote, Froissart--probably as kind-hearted a man by
nature as any of his age--tells as the merest matter of course, and
without a word of compunction or reproof. The fact is, that the gay and
lettered canon of Chimay cared and thought no more of the spilling of
blood which was not gentle, than he would of the scotching of a rat or
a snake. Lingeringly and wofully does he record the deaths of dukes, and
viscounts, and even simple knights and squires, who have done their
_devoirs_ gallantly; but as to the life-blood of the varlets--the
vilains--the kernes--the villagios--the Jacques Bonhommes--foh! the red
puddle--let it flow; blood is only blood when it gushes from the veins
of a gentleman!
[Illustration: JASMIN.]
The evening was closing, and the mist stealing over the Garonne, when we
came alongside the pier at Agen. A troop of diligence _conducteurs_ and
canal touters immediately leaped on board, to secure the passengers for
Toulouse, either by road or water. Being, fortunately, not of the number
who were thus taken prisoners, I walked up through the sultry
evening--for we are now getting into the true south--to the very
comfortable hotel looking upon the principal square of the town. One of
my objects in stopping at Agen was, to pay a literary visit to a very
remarkable man--JASMIN, the peasant-poet of Provence and Languedoc--the
"Last of the Troubadours," as, with more truth than is generally to be
found in _ad captandum_ designations, he terms himself, and is termed by
the wide circle of his admirers; for Jasmin's songs and rural epics are
written in the _patois_ of the people, and that _patois_ is the still
almost unaltered _Langue d'Oc_--the tongue of the chivalric minstrelsy
of yore. But Jasmin is a Troubadour in another sense than that of merely
availing himself of the tongue of the _ménestrels_. He publishes,
certainly--conforming so far to the usages of our degenerate modern
times; but his great triumphs are his popular recitations of his poems.
Standing bravely up before an expectant assembly of perhaps a couple of
thousand persons--the hot-blooded and quick-brained children of the
South--the modern Troubadour plunges over head and ears into his lays,
working both himself and his applauding audience into fits of enthusiasm
and excitement, which, whatever may be the excellence of the poetry, an
Englishman finds it difficult to conceive or account for. The raptures
of the New Yorkers and Bostonians with Jenny Lind are weak and cold
compared with the ovations which Jasmin has received. At a recitation
given shortly before my visit at Auch, the ladies present actually tore
the flowers and feathers out of their bonnets, wove them into extempore
garlands, and flung them in showers upon the panting minstrel; while the
editors of the local papers next morning assured him, in floods of
flattering epigrams, that, humble as he was now, future ages would
acknowledge the "divinity" of a Jasmin! There is a feature, however,
about these recitations, which is still more extraordinary than the
uncontrollable fits of popular enthusiasm which they produce. His last
entertainment before I saw him was given in one of the Pyrenean cities
(I forget which), and produced 2000 francs. Every sous of this went to
the public charities; Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so
earned. With a species of perhaps overstrained, but certainly exalted,
chivalric feeling, he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit
for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him. After, perhaps, a
brilliant tour through the South of France, delighting vast audiences in
every city, and flinging many thousands of francs into every poor-box
which he passes, the poet contentedly returns to his humble occupation,
and to the little shop where he earns his daily bread by his daily toil,
as a barber and hairdresser. It will be generally admitted, that the man
capable of self-denial of so truly heroic a nature as this, is no
ordinary poetaster. One would be puzzled to find a similar instance of
perfect and absolute disinterestedness in the roll of minstrels, from
Homer downwards; and, to tell the truth, there does seem a spice of
Quixotism mingling with and tinging the pure fervour of the enthusiast.
Certain it is, that the Troubadours of yore, upon whose model Jasmin
professes to found his poetry, were by no means so scrupulous.
"Largesse" was a very prominent word in their vocabulary; and it really
seems difficult to assign any satisfactory reason for a man refusing to
live upon the exercise of the finer gifts of his intellect, and throwing
himself for his bread upon the daily performance of mere mechanical
drudgery.
[Illustration: A POET'S HOUSE.]
Jasmin, as may be imagined, is well known in Agen. I was speedily
directed to his abode, near the open _Place_ of the town, and within
earshot of the rush of the Garonne; and in a few moments I found myself
pausing before the lintel of the modest shop inscribed, _Jasmin,
Perruquier, Coiffeur de jeunes Gens_. A little brass basin dangled above
the threshold; and, looking through the glass, I saw the master of the
establishment shaving a fat-faced neighbour. Now, I had come to see and
pay my compliments to a poet; and there did appear to me to be something
strangely awkward and irresistibly ludicrous in having to address, to
some extent in a literary and complimentary vein, an individual
actually engaged in so excessively prosaic and unelevated a species of
performance. I retreated, uncertain what to do, and waited outside until
the shop was clear.
Three words explained the nature of my visit; and Jasmin received me
with a species of warm courtesy, which was very peculiar and very
charming--dashing at once, with the most clattering volubility and fiery
speed of tongue, into a sort of rhapsodical discourse upon poetry in
general, and his own in particular--upon the French language in general,
and the _patois_ of it spoken in Languedoc, Provence, and Gascony in
particular. Jasmin is a well-built and strongly limbed man, of about
fifty, with a large, massive head, and a broad pile of forehead,
overhanging two piercingly bright black eyes, and features which would
be heavy were they allowed a moment's repose from the continual play of
the facial muscles, which were continually sending a series of varying
expressions across the swarthy visage. Two sentences of his conversation
were quite sufficient to stamp his individuality. The first thing which
struck me was the utter absence of all the mock-modesty, and the
pretended self-underrating, conventionally assumed by persons expecting
to be complimented upon their sayings or doings. Jasmin seemed
thoroughly to despise all such flimsy hypocrisy. "God only made four
Frenchmen poets!" he burst out with; "and their names are Corneille,
Lafontaine, Beranger, and Jasmin!" Talking with the most impassioned
vehemence, and the most redundant energy of gesture, he went on to
declaim against the influences of civilization upon language and
manners as being fatal to all real poetry. If the true inspiration yet
existed upon earth, it burned in the hearts and brains of men far
removed from cities, _salons_, and the clash and din of social
influences. Your only true poets were the unlettered peasants, who
poured forth their hearts in song, not because they wished to make
poetry, but because they were joyous and true. Colleges, academies,
schools of learning, schools of literature, and all such institutions,
Jasmin denounced as the curse and the bane of true poetry. They had
spoiled, he said, the very French language. You could no more write
poetry in French now, than you could in arithmetical figures. The
language had been licked, and kneaded, and tricked out, and plumed, and
dandified, and scented, and minced, and ruled square, and chipped--(I am
trying to give an idea of the strange flood of epithets he used)--and
pranked out, and polished, and muscadined, until, for all honest
purposes of true high poetry, it was mere unavailable and contemptible
jargon. It might do for cheating _agents de change_ on the Bourse--for
squabbling politicians in the Chambers--for mincing dandies in the
_salons_--for the sarcasm of Scribeish comedies, or the coarse
drolleries of Palais Royal farces; but for poetry the French language
was extinct. All modern poets who used it were mere _faiseurs de
phrase_--thinking about words, and not feelings. "No, no," my Troubadour
continued; "to write poetry, you must get the language of a rural
people--a language talked among fields, and trees, and by rivers and
mountains--a language never minced or disfigured by academies, and
dictionary-makers, and journalists; you must have a language like that
which your own Burns (whom I read of in Chateaubriand) used; or like the
brave old mellow tongue--unchanged for centuries--stuffed with the
strangest, quaintest, richest, raciest idioms, and odd, solemn words,
full of shifting meanings and associations, at once pathetic and
familiar, homely and graceful--the language which I write in, and which
has never yet been defiled by calculating men of science or jack-a-dandy
_litterateurs_."
The above sentences may be taken as a specimen of the ideas with which
Jasmin seemed to be actually overflowing at every pore in his body, so
rapid, vehement, and loud was his enunciation of them. Warming more and
more as he went on, he began to sketch the outlines of his favourite
pieces, every now and then plunging into recitation, jumping from French
to _patois_, and from _patois_ to French, and sometimes spluttering them
out, mixed up pell-mell together. Hardly pausing to take breath, he
rushed about the shop as he discoursed, lugging out, from old chests and
drawers, piles of old newspapers and reviews, pointing me out a passage
here in which the estimate of the writer pleased him, a passage there
which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his
poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect _naivete_, how
mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be
misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper-snapper scamps of
journalists. There was one review of his works, published in a London
"_Recueil_," as he called it, to which Jasmin referred with great
pleasure. A portion of it had been translated, he said, in the preface
to a French edition of his works; and he had most of the highly
complimentary phrases by heart. The English critic, he said, wrote in
the _Tintinum_; and he looked dubiously at me when I confessed that I
had never heard of the organ in question. "_Pourtant_," he said, "_je
vous le ferai voir_:" and I soon perceived that Jasmin's _Tintinum_ was
no other than the _Athenæum_.
In the little back drawing-room behind the shop, to which the poet
speedily introduced me, his sister, a meek, smiling woman, whose eyes
never left her brother, following him as he moved with a beautiful
expression of love and pride in his glory, received me with simple
cordiality. The walls were covered with testimonials, presentations, and
trophies, awarded by cities and distinguished persons, literary and
political, to the modern Troubadour. Not a few of these are of a nature
to make any man most legitimately proud. Jasmin possesses gold and
silver vases, laurel branches, snuff-boxes, medals of honour, and a
whole museum of similar gifts, inscribed with such characteristic and
laconic legends as--"_Au Poete, Les Jeunes filles de Toulouse
reconnaissantes_----." The number of garlands of _immortelles_, wreaths
of ivy-jasmin (punning upon the name), laurel, and so forth, utterly
astonished me. Jasmin preserved a perfect shrubbery of such tokens; and
each symbol had, of course, its pleasant associative remembrance. One
was given by the ladies of such a town; another was the gift of the
prefect's wife of such a department. A handsome full-length portrait had
been presented to the poet by the municipal authorities of Agen; and a
letter from M. Lamartine, framed, above the chimney-piece, avowed the
writer's belief that the Troubadour of the Garonne was the Homer of the
modern world. M. Jasmin wears the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and
has several valuable presents which were made to him by the late ex-king
and different members of the Orleans family.
I have been somewhat minute in giving an account of my interview with M.
Jasmin, because he is really the popular poet--the peasant poet of the
south of France--the Burns of Limousin, Provence, and Languedoc. His
songs are in the mouths of all who sing in the fields and by the cottage
firesides. Their subjects are always rural, _naive_, and full of rustic
pathos and rustic drollery. To use his words to me, he sings what the
hearts of the people say, and he can no more help it than can the birds
in the trees. Translations into French of his main poems have appeared;
and compositions more full of natural and thoroughly unsophisticated
pathos and humour it would be difficult to find. Jasmin writes from a
teeming brain and a beaming heart; and there is a warmth and a glow, and
a strong, happy, triumphant march of song about his poems, which carry
you away in the perusal as they carried away the author in the writing.
I speak of course from the French translations, and I can well conceive
that they give but a comparatively faint transcript of the pith and
power of the original. The _patois_ in which these poems are written is
the common peasant language of the south-west. It varies in some slight
degree in different districts, but not more than the broad Scotch of
Forfarshire differs from that of Ayrshire. As for the dialect itself, it
seems in the main to be a species of cross between old French and
Spanish--holding, however, I am assured, rather to the latter tongue
than the former, and constituting a bold, copious, and vigorous speech,
very rich in its colouring, full of quaint words and expressive phrases,
and especially strong in all that relates to the language of the
passions and affections.
I hardly know how long my interview with Jasmin might have lasted, for
he seemed by no means likely to tire of talking, and his talk was too
good and too curious not to be listened to with interest; but the
sister, who had left us for a moment, coming back with the intelligence
that there was quite a gathering of customers in the shop, I hastily
took my leave, the poet squeezing my hand like a vice, and immediately
thereafter dashing into all that appertains to curling-irons, scissors,
razors, and lather, with just as much apparent energy and enthusiasm as
he flung into his rhapsodical discourse on poetry and language.
Hereabouts you begin to become sensible of a change in the cookery at
the _table-d'hôtes_; and in the gradually increasing predominance of oil
and garlic, you recognise the kitchen influences of the sweet south.
Garlic is a word of fear--of absolute horror to a great proportion of
our countrymen, whose prejudices will permit them to learn no better. I
admit that the first whiff of the odorous root coming upon
inexperienced nostrils is far from pleasant; indeed, I well remember
being once driven from the table in a small _gasthoff_ at Strasbourg by
the fumes of a particularly strong sausage. Now, however, I think I
should know better. A relish for garlic, in fact, is one of those many
acquired tastes which grew upon us with curious rapidity. You turn from
the first garlicky dish with dismay; the second does not appear quite so
bad; you muster up courage, and taste the third. A strange flavour
certainly--nasty, too--but still--not irredeemably bad--there is a
lurking merit in the sensation--and you try the experiment again and
again--speedily coming to Sir Walter Scott's evident opinions touching
the _petit point d'ail_, "which Gascons love and Scotsmen do not
despise." Indeed, your friends will probably think it well if you
content yourself with the _petit point_, and do not give yourself up to
a height of seasoning such as that which I saw in the _salle à manger_
at Agen, drive two English ladies headlong from the room. Every body in
the South eats garlic, and you will find it for your interest, if but in
self-defence, to do the same; while the oil eating is equally
infectious: you enter Provence, able just to stand a sprinkling upon
your salad--you depart from it, thinking nothing of devouring a dish of
cabbage, chopped up, and swimming in the viscous fluid. The peasants all
through the South eat and drink oil like so many Russians. Wandering
through the dark and narrow streets of Agen--for we have now reached the
point where the eaves of the roofs are made to project so far as to cast
a perpetual shade upon the thoroughfare beneath--I came upon a group of
tiny urchins, clustered round a grocer's shop, in great admiration of a
row of clear oil-flasks displayed in the window.
"_Tiens_," said one. "_C'est de l'huile ça--de l'huile claire--ça doit
etre bon su' le pain--ça!_" The little gourmand looked upon oil just as
an English urchin would upon treacle.
It was from the heights above Agen--studded with the plum-trees which
produce the famous _prunes d'Agen_--that I caught my first glimpse of
the Pyrenees. I was sitting watching the calm uprising of the light
smoke from the leaf-covered town beneath, and marking the grand panorama
around me--the masses of luxuriant vines climbing up the plum and
fig-trees, and the earth frequently yellow with the bursting beds of
huge melons and pumpkins--when, extending my gaze over the vast expanse
of champagne country, watered by the winding reaches of the Garonne, I
saw--shadowy as the phantoms of airy clouds, rising into the far bright
air--faintly, very faintly traced, but still visible, a blue vision of
sierrated and jagged mountain peaks, stretching along the horizon from
east to west, forming the central portion of the great chain of peaks
running from Perpignan to Bayonne, and certainly, at least, one hundred
and twenty miles distant from me as the crow flies. There they
stood,--Louis Quatorze to the contrary, notwithstanding--one of the
great landmarks of the world; a natural boundary for ever; dividing a
people from a people, a tongue from a tongue, and a power from a power!
Below me, at the back of the town, once rose the ancient castle of Agen.
Its ruins were demolished, with those of a cathedral, at the time of the
Revolution; but its memory recalls a very curious story, developing the
true character of the Black Prince, and shewing that, chivalrous and
daring as he was, his tongue had in it an occasional smack of the
braggart, and that the Foremost Knight of all the World could
occasionally do uncommonly sneaking things. Thus it fell out:--In the
year 1368, the Lord of Aquitaine announced that he would raise a
hearth-tax throughout Guienne. The measure was, of course, unpopular,
and the Gascon lords appealed to the King of France, as Feudal Superior
of the Prince; and the King sent, by two commissioners--a lawyer and a
knight--a summons to Edward, to appear and answer before the Parliament
of Paris. The emissaries were introduced in High Court, at Bordeaux,
told their tale, and exhibited their missives. The Black Prince heard in
silence, and then, after a long pause, he sternly and solemnly replied:
"Willing shall we be to attend on the appointed day at Paris, since the
King of France sends for us; but it will be with the helmet on our head,
and sixty thousand men behind us."
The envoys fell on their knees, and bowed their heads to the ground.
After the Prince had retired, they were assured that they would get no
better answer; and so, after dinner, they set forth on the road to
Toulouse, where the Duke of Anjou lay, to convey to him the defiance of
the Englishman. Meantime, however, Edward began rather to repent the
unconditional style of his reply, and to wish the ambassadors back
again. Perhaps, after all, he had been a little too hasty, and had gone
a little too far; so he called together the chief of his barons, and
opened his mind to them. "He did not wish," he said, "the envoys to bear
his cartel to the King of France." In the opinion of the straightforward
practitioners whom he consulted, the means of prevention were easy: what
more practicable and natural than to send out a handful of
men-at-arms--catch the knight and the lawyer, and then and there cut
their throats? But Edward refused to commit unnecessary slaughter; and
possibly exclaiming, as gentlemen in a drama and a dilemma always do--"I
have it"--he gave some private instructions to Sir William le Moine, the
High Steward of Agenois, who immediately set forth at the head of a
plump of spears. Meantime, the envoys were quietly jogging along, when,
what was their horror and surprise at being suddenly pounced upon by the
Lord Steward, and arrested, upon the charge of having stolen a horse
from their last baiting place. It was in vain that the unfortunate pair
offered to bring any evidence of the falsity of the charge; Sir William
had as many witnesses as he commanded men-at-arms, and the victims were
hurried to the castle of Agen, and left to their own reflections in the
securest of its dungeons. When they got out again, or whether they ever
got out at all, Froissart does not condescend to inform us; but surely
the story shews the Black Prince in a new and not exactly favourable
light. We would hardly have expected to find the "Lion whelp of
England" stooping to trump up a false accusation against innocent men,
in order to shuffle out of the consequences of his own brag.
I found it no easy matter to get comfortably from Agen to Pau:
cross-country diligences are most untrustworthy conveyances. The pace at
which they crawl puts it out of the question that they should ever see a
snail which they did not meet; while the terribly long stages to which
the horses are doomed, keeps one in a constant state of moral
discomfort. However, I managed to get rattled and jangled on to Auch, on
the great Toulouse road, one of those towns which you wonder has been
built where it chances to lie, rather than anywhere else; and boasting a
grand old Gothic cathedral church, which Louis Quatorze, in the kindest
manner, enriched with a hugely clumsy Grecian portico, supported on fat,
dropsical pillars. The question was now, how to get on to Pau. The
Toulouse diligence passed every day, but was nearly always full; I might
have to wait a week for a place. A _voiturier_, however, was to start in
the evening, and he faithfully promised to set me down at Tarbes, whence
locomotion to Pau is easy, in time for a late supper; and so with this
worthy I struck a bargain. He shewed me a fair looking vehicle, and we
were to start at six. Punctually to the time, I was upon the ground, but
no conveyance appeared. The place was the front of a carrier's shed,
with an army of _roulage_ carts drawn up before it. I kicked my heels
there in vain, for not a bit could I see of _voiture_ or _voiturier_.
Seven struck--half-past seven--the north wind was bitterly cold, and a
sleety rain began to fall. Had I absolute powers for ten minutes, like
Abou Hassan, sorrowful would have been the fate of that _voiturier_. As
it was, the wind got colder and colder; the streets became deserted, and
the rain and sleet lashed the rough pavement with a loud, shrieking
rattle, when a wilder gust than common came thundering up the narrow
street. At length, sick of cursing the scoundrel, I turned, for warmth,
into a vast, broad-eaved _auberge_, the house of call, I supposed, for
the carriers; and entering the great shadowy kitchen, almost as big and
massive looking a room as an old baronial hall, a voice I knew--the
voice of the rascally _voiturier_ himself--struck my ear, exclaiming
with the most warm-hearted affability, "_Entrez, monsieur; entrez._ We
were waiting for you."
Waiting for me! Surrounded by a group of men in blouses, and two or
three fat women, who were to be my fellow-passengers, there was the
villain, discussing a capital dinner--the bare-armed wenches of the
place rushing between the vast fireplace and the table, with no end of
the savouriest and the most garlicky of dishes, and the whole party in
the highest state of feather and enjoyment. The cool impertinence of the
greeting, however, tickled me amazingly; and room being immediately
made, I was entreated to join the company, and exhorted to eat, as it
would be a good many hours before I had another chance. This looked
ominous; and besides, the whole meal, full of nicely browned stews, was
so appetising, that I fear I committed the enormity of making a very
tolerable second dinner; and so about half-past eight we at last got
under weigh.
But not in the vehicle which I had been shown. There was some
cock-and-bull story of that having been damaged; and we were
squeezed--six of us, including the fat ladies--into a dreadful square
box, with our twelve legs jammed together like the sticks of a faggot,
in the centre. Oh, the woes of that dreary night!--the gruntings and the
groanings of the fat ladies--the squabbles about "making legs," and,
notwithstanding our crowded condition, the intensity of the pinching
cold--one window was broken, another wouldn't pull up, and the whole
vehicle was full of cracks and crevices. Outside, the gale had increased
to a hurricane; the rain and sleet lashed the ground, so that you could
hardly hear the driver shouting at the full pitch of his voice to the
poor jades, who drearily dragged us through the mire. After an hour or
two's riding, the water began to trickle in on all sides. The fat ladies
said they could not possibly survive the night; and a poor thin slip of
a soldier next me accepted half a railway wrapper with the most vehement
"_Merci-bien merci!_" I ever heard in my life. About one in the morning
we pulled up at a lone public-house, in the kitchen of which the
passengers refreshed themselves with coffee, and I myself, to their
great surprise, with a liberal application of cognac and hot water. But
the French have no notion of the mellow beauties of toddy. The rest of
the night wore slowly and wretchedly on. I believe we had the same
horses all the way. Day was grey around us when we heard the voices of
the market people flocking in to Tarbes; and looking forth, after a
short, nightmareish dose, I beheld around me a wide champaign country,
as white with snow as Nova Zembla at Christmas. And this was the boasted
South of France, and the date was the twentieth of October!
[Illustration: CASTLE OF PAU.]
CHAPTER VII.
PAU--THE ENGLISH IN PAU--ENGLISH AND RUSSIANS--THE VIEW OF THE
PYRENEES--THE CASTLE--THE STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE--HIS BIRTH--A
VISION OF HIS LIFE--ROCHELLE--ST. BARTHOLEMEW--IVRY--HENRI AND
SULLY--HENRI AND GABRIELLE--HENRI AND HENRIETTE
D'ENTRAGUES--RAVAILLAC.
Excepting, perhaps, the famous city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pau is the most
Anglicised town in France. There are a good many of our countrymen
congregated under the old steeples of Tours which every British man
should love, were it only for Quentin Durward; but they do not leaven
the mass; while in Pau, particularly during the winter time, the main
street and the _Place Royale_ look, so far as the passengers go, like
slices cut out from Weymouth, Bath, or Cheltenham. You see in an
instant the insular cut of the groups, who go laughing and talking the
familiar vernacular along the rough _pavé_. There is a tall, muscular
hoble-de-hoy, with red hair, high shirt collar, and a lady on each
arm--fresh-looking damsels, with flounces, which smack unmistakeably of
England. It is a young gentleman with his sisters. Next come a couple of
wonderfully well-shaved, well buttoned-up, fat, elderly, half-pay
English officers, talking "by Jove, sir," of "Wilkins of ours;" and "by
George, sir," of what the "old Duke had said to Galpins of the 9th. at
the United Service." An old fat half-pay officer is always a major. I do
not know how it happens, but so it is; and when you meet them settled
abroad, ten to one they have been dragged there by their wives and
daughters.
"By Jove, sir!" said one of these veterans to me at Pau--he was very
confidential over a glass of brandy and water at the _café_ on the
_Place_--"By Jove, sir, for myself, I'd never like to go further from
Pall Mall than just down Whitehall, to set my watch by the Horse Guards'
clock; but the women, you know, sir, have a confounded hankering for
these confounded foreign places; and, by Jove, sir, what is an old
fellow who wants a quiet life to do, sir?"
The colony of our country folks at Pau keep, as usual, very much
together, and try to live in the most English fashion they may; ask each
other mutually to cut mutton; display joints instead of _plats_, and
import their own sherry; pass half their time studying _Galignani_, and
reading to each other long epistles of news and chat from England--the
majors and other old boys clustering together like corks in a tub of
water; the young people getting up all manner of merry pic-nics and
dances, and any body who at all wishes to be in the set, going
decorously to the weekly English service.
"_Tenez_," said a Pau shopkeeper to me; "your countrymen enjoy here all
the luxuries of England. They have even an episcopal chapel and a pack
of fox-hounds."
Of course, the prosperity of Pau mainly depends upon its English
residents, who are generally well-to-do people, spending their money
freely. Shortly before my visit, however, a Russian prince, who had
established himself in a neighbouring chateau, had quite thrown the
English reputation for wealth into the shade. His equipages, his
parties, the countess's diamonds, had overblazed the grandeur of the
English all put together; and the way in which he spent money enraptured
the good folks of the old capital of Bearne. The Russians, indeed,
wherever they go on the continent, deprive us of our _prestige_ as the
richest people in the world--an achievement for which they deserve the
thanks of all Englishmen with heads longer than their purses.
"_Ah, monsieur!_" I was once told, "_la pluie de guineés, c'est bonne;
mais le pluie de roubles, c'est une averse--un deluge!_"
Gaston Phoebus, Count de Foix, was a sad Bluebeard of a fellow, but he
showed his taste in pitching upon a site for the castle of Pau. He
reared its towers on the edge of a rocky hill. Far beneath sparkle the
happy waters of the Gave--appearing and disappearing in the broken
country--a tumbling maze of wooded hill, green meadow, straggling
coppice, corn-fields, vineyards, and gardens--verily a land flowing with
milk and honey. Further on, sluggish round-backed hills heave up their
green masses, clustered all over with box-wood; and then come--cutting
with many a pointed peak and jagged sierra--the bright blue sky--the
glorious screen of the Pyrenees. From the end of the _Place_, which runs
to the ridge of the bank on which stands the town, you may gaze at it
for hours--the hills towering in peak and pinnacle, sharp, ridgy,
saw-like--either deeply, beautifully blue, or clad in one unvarying garb
of white; and beyond that, Spain. The same view from the castle is even
still finer, as you are more elevated; and the sheer sink of the wall
and rock below you, makes, as it were, a vast gulf, across which the
mind leaps, even over the green stumbling landscape of the foreground to
the blue or white peaks beyond.
[Illustration: STATUE OF HENRI QUATRE.]
But the feature--the characteristic--the essence--the very soul of
Pau--is neither the fair landscape, nor the rushing Gave, nor the
stedfast Pyrenees. It is the memory of the good King Henri Quatre, which
envelopes castle and town--which makes haunted holy stones of these grim
grey towers--which gives all its renown and glory to the little capital
of Bearne. Look up at the "Good King" in his bronze effigy in the
_Place_. These features are more familiar to you than those of any
foreign potentate. You know them of old--you know them by heart--a
goodly, honest, well-favoured, burly face--a face with mind and matter
in it--a face not of an abstract transcendental hero, but emphatically
of a MAN. Passion and impulse are there, as in the jaw of Henry VIII.;
energy and strong thought, as in the brow of Cromwell; a calm, and
courtly, and meditative smile over all, as in the face of Charles I. The
stubbly beard grizzling round the firm and close-set lips, and worn by
the helmet, speaks the soldier--the conqueror of Ivry; the high, broad
forehead and the quick eye tell of the statesman--he who proclaimed the
edict of Nantes; the frank, gallant, and blithsome expression of the
whole face--what does it tell of--of the gallant, whose mingled sagacity
and debonnair courage won La Reine Margot from the intrigues of
Catherine; whose impulsive heart and fiery passions cast him at the feet
of Gabrielle d'Estrees; and whose weakness--manly while unmanly--made
him for a time the slave of Henriette d'Entragues. There is an
encyclopædia of meaning in the face, and even in the figure, of Henri.
He had a grand mind, with turbulent passions; he was deeply wis
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