THE FIELDS of
FRANCE

BY
MADAME
MARY DUCLAUX
(A MARY F ROBINSON)
AUTHOR of “THE LIFE of RENAN” “COLLECTED
POEMS” “THE RETURN TO NATURE” ETC
WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
BY
W B MACDOUGALL

LONDON CHAPMAN
AND HALL L^TD 1905

To
MY DEAR
M O T H E R
LIKE ME, A LOVER OF
THE FIELDS OF FRANCE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A FARM IN THE CANTAL A FARM IN THE CANTAL
(Haute-Auvergne)
1902

I

THE farm lies in a wonderful country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your manners!” said my cousin, astounded.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a cow, madam.”

“And how do you know the difference?”

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

“By the horns, madam!”

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

“Oquel es un biòu o uno baco, Bouriaïré?”

“Co’s (oco es), uno baco.”

“Cossì lou counessès?”

“Ò los couornos, Modomo!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

Do you understand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

Our patois has a Spanish or a Gascon sound, rough but sonorous, pleasant to the ear, with numerous o’s and rolling ou’s and aü’s. You pronounce the v almost like b (Bit for Vic, bedel for veau). A changes to o, as in Contau, Cantal; Morgorido, Marguerite. O changes to ou—Obeiroun, Aveyron; Louzéro, Lozère. French au, pronounced as ô, changes to au, pronounced as â-oo (Nautres, nous-aûtres; Contau, Cantal; Naut-Miétchour, Haut-midi), except when it changes to ou, pronounced oo, as in Ourlhat, Aurillac; Oubergno, Auvergne. Like all the idioms of France, the patois of our Highlands is a corruption of the Low Latin, or rustic Lingua Romana, spoken generally in Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasion and for some centuries after. Most of the frequent words of every day are still very close to their Romance origin: Copt, caput, head; aigo, aqua, water; fau, fagus, beech; compono, campana, church-bell; semen, semen, seed; lün, lumen, lamp; camps, campus, a field overgrown with heather, or a moor; baco, vacca, cow; bedel, vitellus, calf; òussell, ucellus, bird; fromentau, fromentalia, corn-land; gal, gallus, cock; nèu, neve, snow; sor, soror, a sister; fenno, femina, woman; hibernar, hibernare, and estivar, æstivare, spend the winter or pass the summer. Other later words and expressions are a vulgar corruption of the French: tchiobal, cheval; bilatchi, village; biatchi, voyage; Toutchion (All Saints), Toussaint. At once antique and popular, the speech of our mountains is doubtless destined to disappear, but not without a struggle, and not, if our Félibres can help it, without having made its mark in literature.

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

ᾪς γλυκύμαλου ἐρευθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὄσδῳ.

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

X

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MANOR IN TOURAINE A MANOR IN TOURAINE
(La Commanderie de Ballan)
1903

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

THE FRENCH PEASANT, BEFORE AND SINCE THE REVOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Why, brother?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

III

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

“Deux grands bœufs blancs marqués de roux,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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

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

“Et d’un vieux tronc pourri de votre métairie
Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie.
. . . . . .
Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre,
Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux
Et de Monsieur de l’Isle en prit le nom pompeux.”

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

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

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

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

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

XI

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

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

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