THE

FIELDS OF FRANCE

MADAME MARY DUCLAUX

'Y^LE-WIMKYIEI^SlIirY"

Gift of 19 fd

THE FIELDS OF FRANCE

THE
FIELDS OF FRANCE
LITTLE ESSAYS IN DESCRIPTIVE
SOCIOLOGY BY
MADAME MARY DUCLAUX
* i I
(A, MARY F. ROBINSON)
AOTHOR OF "the LIFE OF RENAN," "COLLECTED POEMS," ETC.

SECOND EDITION

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, ld.
1904

MY DEAR
MOTHER
LIKE ME, A LOVER OF THE
FIELDS OF FRANCE

CONTENTS
PAGE
A FARM IN THE CANTAL  i
A MANOR IN TOURAINE  51
THE FRENCH PEASANT  89
THE FORESTS OF THE OISE . . .149
A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE. .189
HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY  221
THE MEDIAEVAL COUNTRY HOUSE . . .271

VII

A FARM IN THE CANTAL

A FARM IN THE CANTAL
(Haute-Auvergne) 1902

THE farm lies in a wonderful country.
Every landscape has a basis of geology ; and in
order to seize the features of the Cantal, you should
stand, if possible, on the pointed crest of the Puy
Mary, Before you, in the middle of the crater, rises
an ash-grey cone of clink-stone : the Puy de Griou, a
perfect sugarloaf. All round, the mountains define the
circle of the ancient orifice, sheer on three oftheir sides,
separated from one another by wooded passes, and by
the deep fissure of rocky valleys which radiate from
the crater like the beams of a star. On their further
flank, the mountains roll down towards the plain in
immense wavy plateaux which, at their highest point,
attain 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 C^re ; even that is an ascent ofsome thousand feet.
3 B 2

The Fields of France

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 canon or ravine sunk between two high
table-lands. These last are 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 de 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 respect
able 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 splendid saddle-shaped back of the Courpou-
Sauvage, strewn with rocks which simulate fantastic
4

A Farm in the Cantal

ruins. Out of sight, but close at hand, are Peyre-Arse,
L'Usclade, Peyroux, Bataillouze, Puy Violent, Chava-
roche, 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 the 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, bursting from 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 ac
customed 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
5

The Fields of France

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
furrows lead the eye to the valley bottom, which
itself is never flat, but cradle-sh£|(^ed. And therein
lies the small winding river of the Cere.
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 moor
land 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
6

A Farm in the Cantal

you could sling a stone into the bottom of the valley,
for Olmet stands on a jutting rock, to the great
advantage of our viev;. 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. " Qtiand on a
VU Fenclos 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, narrow
ing 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,
7

The Fields of France

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' ohuei digun n'o pas enbentat res
Coumo oquelo sentour des prats seguats de fres
Que porfumo, I'estiou, I'Oubergno tout entieiro ! '
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, leav
ing behind only the draught-oxen and the cows for
milking. We need plenty of hay, for, in the stables
8

A Farm in the Cantal

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
9

The Fields of France

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 neigh
bour, 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 buck
wheat 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 —
'Emipe, irivra <p4peis '6ira ipcuv6Kis iaxeSacr' Aii&s,
*e/)eis oiv, <^c/)6is alya, tpepus fiUTepi iralSa,
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 pAtre (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
IO

A Farm in the Cantal

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
Sennenhiitte, sometimes quite near at hand, some
times 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 black-bread, 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

The Fields of France

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 ecuelles, "pour tremperla 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 midday, serves to mark the import
ance 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 Corr^ze. Fine brawny men and buxom
12

A Farm in the Cantal

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 Dau-
mier'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 overween
ing love of money, there is something simple, candid,
and kind, which mellows the heart of the child of
Auvergne. His natveti 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,
13

The Fields of France

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
Romigui^re, 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 land
lord. 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
tout corrolado. Certainly, I ought to have dropped
on my knees 1 "
This naivete 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.

A Farm in the Cantal

" 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 i un biau a uno baco, Bouriairi? "
" Qui, uno baco"
" Cossl lou counessh ? "
" O los cournos, Modomo I "
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 ! " (liu forai
loti truel se mefosks beni I'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
IS

The Fields of France

painted earthenware dishes and pewter tankards ; the
best bed, high as a catafalque, stands, warmly cur
tained, 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
i6

A Farm in the Cantal

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 eochon is always indecent, and
Madame Langeac, when she speaks to her social
superiors, seldom forgets to call the pigs " les habilUs
de soie." (One day I asked her the destination of a
cool, stone-floored room : " Sauf voire respect, madame,"
she replied, " elle sert pour saler les habilUs de soie.")
17 c

The Fields of France

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 con
fidences, 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 pig
sticking, 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 sauce
pan, 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
i8

A Farm in the Cantal

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.
Ill
Jean-Ir6n^e, 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
19

The Fields of France

addition, he has some ;^20 of wages and itrennes, 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 £1^ a year.
His cows are tended (for here the cows are always
watched and tended) by his stepdaughter Floren
tine, a child of eight years old. Florentine's child
hood 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 excep
tional 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 incom
parable 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 vacher 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 ; when
ever I pass her she is seated beneath a tree, telling
20

A Farm in the Cantal

her beads, or reading in a book. But Florentine
is barely eight. Her coal-black eyes and laugh
ing gipsy face bespeak her of a more adventurous
cast. She is even now in disgrace because, the other
day, when Jean-Irende 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. For
tunately, 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-Ir^nee 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 Mimi,
21

The Fields of France

before any fever set in, was her master's only thought,
and indeed his duty. In vain he visited Vic and
Polminhac, Thi6zac 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 Jea.n-lr6n6e saw the sunshine black.
It is to avert such dangers that, on our rocky hill
sides, 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 contem
poraries 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 pdtre 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 per
haps 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
22

A Farm in the Cantal

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 Toueno'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 poor Mimi 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 1 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 bw'on on the moun
tain. 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 ; how
ever 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." 23

The Fields of France

" Lou mosut, coumo un golitchiou
Quilhat omoun, rougi e pitcHou,
01 mi^t dh\ 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' que pousso eici, pis pufets fe sus plotiu
N'es pas coumo en obal, e pus rudo e pus sono,
E sent bon ; li troubai I'ourgulhouso cinsono,
Que despleguo soi flours jiaunos coumo un drop&."
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 hke a banner."
It was after four when we at last reached the
buron. The cows had come in from the moor to the
* "Flour de Brousso," par Arsfene Vermenouze. [Imprimerie
Moderne. Aurillac. 1896.]
24

A Farm in the Cantal

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 : " Mimi !
Morgorido ! Annoto 1 " 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
2S

The Fields of France

thyme and savoiiry 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 dairy
man, 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
geries, 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
26

A Farm in the Cantal

indescribably sordid and dirty, A tiny garden sur
rounds 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 unaccus
tomed to our parts than, while admiring the vast and
melancholy landscape, so wild, so green, so unutter
ably 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, straw
berry and peach, green peas and melon, are words of
a dead language. Day succeeds day, with the milk
ing 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
27

The Fields of France

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 estivage.
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, pictu
resque 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 " Prouben50,
Pidmont." " He says," explained the coachman,
" that if you cannot speak our patois, he can under
stand you almost as well in the dialect of Provence
or Pi^mont." Never have I felt so ignorant ! Here
were three modern languages, in not one of which
I was able to say good morning to a friendly
fellow-traveller. 28

A Farm in the Cantal

The F^libres 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 botirrie. 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 chival
rous 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,
"Jeu pouorto pas toutchiour, quond tourno de lo casso,
Lebre, perdigal ou becasso,
Mes, se trobe plus res, pes puets ou pes trobirs
Li culisse ou min fouorgo bfers,
O plenoi mos e per doutchino,
Deis bfers de brousso que sentou Io soubotchino "
(" I do not always bring home, when I return from
shooting, a hare, a partridge, or a snipe. But if I
29

The Fields of France

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 huron 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
ds and rolling otis and aii's. You pronounce the v
almost like b {Bit for Vic, bedel for veau). A changes
to 0, as in Contau, Cantal ; Morgorido, Marguerite, O
changes to ou — Obeiroun, Aveyron ; Louzero, Lozere,
French au, pronounced as 6, changes to au, pronounced
as i-oo {Nautres, nous-autres ; Contau, Cantal ; Naut-
Miitchour, 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
30

A Farm in the Cantal

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 ; liln, lumen, lamp ; camps, campus, a field over
grown with heather, or a moor ; bacco, vacca, cow ;
bedel, vitellus, calf ; oussell, ucellus, hhd', fromentale,
fromentalia, corn-land ; gal, gallus, cock ; nev, neve,
snow ; sor, soror, a sister ; fenno, femina, woman ;
hibernar, hibernare, and estiver, aestivare, spend the
winter or pass the summer. Other later words and
expressions are a vulgar corruption of the French :
tchiobal, cheval ; bilotchi, village ; biatchi, voyage ;
Toutchioun (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 Felibres can help it, without having
made its mark in literature.
" Nautres que son lou Naut-Mietjiour,
Contau, Obeiroun, o Louzero,
Porlons tobe lo lengo fiero
De los onticos Cours d'Omour."
"We others, ofthe High-South: Cantal, Aveyron,
Lozfere, 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 Provengal and the
Catalan, so recently honoured and preserved by a
Mistral and a Verdaguer.

31

The Fields of France

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 sraothered 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,
32

A Farm in the Cantal

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 Clavifere 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 par-
nassus, 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,
33 D

The Fields of France

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 coucotirlou, spotted like the breast
of a missel-thrush ; among the beech-woods grow the
huge delicious c^pes, 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, al
though, 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
34

A Farm in the Cantal

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,
Vamhre gentiane et la douce riglisse 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 plea
sure of a visit, we turn to other interests, such as fall
35

The Fields of France

in with the picturesque and archaeological 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 Tremoulet,
perched on the peak of a rock suddenly reared in the
wild gorge of the C^re. 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-ChS.teau 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 chateaux, of
which the most picturesque (after Trdmoulet) are
Pestels and Vixouge, Pestels, alas! restored last
year, but still magnificent, by virtue of the immense
proportions of its six-storied battleraented keep, and
its roraantic position — Pestels is seated on a steep
ledge or platform some way up the mountain, sur
rounded 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
36

A Farm in the Cantal

round towers. But now the gate stands open on a
shady lane, opposite a circular stone fountain, Virith a
drinking-trough for cattle. It leads to a dark aban
doned 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 Dord. From
the manor-wall, the eye drops sheer to a glitter
ing 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 chateau — the Consular House of
the Prince of Monaco, who was the old hereditary
Consul of Vic-en-Carladds, Behind, the grey houses
clirab the hill, some of them fine old turreted struc
tures 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,
37

The Fields of France

not unpicturesque, with a Roraanesque 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 un
changed, 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
Sdvignd once called "un temps d'or et de cristal."
There is a sharp, pleasant quality in the air. Our
walks on the raountain are longer and taken at a
brisker pace, and so the other day we carae upon the
prettiest sight : a knoll upon the hillside crowned by
a tall group of raountain thistles of raore than a
woraan's stature ; the fluff of the thistledown, the
delicate tracery of the leaves profiled against the sun
set sky. The sound of our steps aroused frora the
heart of it some thirty or forty tiny goldfinches
who had been feeding there, — in that iraraense land
scape they looked scarce larger than humming-birds,
as they rose up, poising, quivering, fluttering, soaring,
like a living fountain of golden downy wings.
38

A Farm in the Cantal

The birds here are a great delight. The black
bird, 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 tarae. This very suraraer I tried to rear a nest
ling which a wanton shepherd took. I fed it hour
by hour, and the little creature warmed itself in ray
hands. I watched it develop with a religious sense
of the raystery 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, screaraing 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
39

The Fields of France

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 frora 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 boughs are clipped, except the lead ; every
third year each tree is thus mulcted of her spreading
boughs, and now you see why the ash-trees of
Auvergne look slender, tall, and frail as a poplar.
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 im
portance. A young savant, M. Fernand Lafeuille,
has recently invented a system for drying shreds of
beet-root to supplement the hay, but this is still a
matter of theory. Meanwhile, leaves are a crop in
40

A Farm in the Cantal

Auvergne, and not to be neglected. At Martinmas,
the women and the children, carrying sacks, go to
the woods and gather the fallen leaves. 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 ray 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
carae and gathered the beech-leaves beneath the trees,
raking thera 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
41

The Fields of France

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 bed
ding raay 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," care
fully 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 gather
ing of the leaves ; and the walnut, of course, affords
the richest crop. Every farm has its walnut orchard,
and while the raen 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
lun, or Roman lamp, all winter. At Olmet, the fisher
man (who, from his little farra down by the river,
ensnares and nets all suraraer 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
42

A Farm in the Cantal

aroma, is an excellent food for fatting beasts, and not
despised by the young of the human race. This is
the perquisite of the railler. 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 farra keeps its tribe of
geese, whose down (plucked frora the living bird six
times a year, at new moon) is now sufficient in quan
tity to make or refresh our Mredons. 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 herap 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, Port
de lo combi (the hemp-garden). Here the handsorae
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
43

The Fields of France

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-raade
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 horae in
dreary lengths of grey, and raust be bleached in the
morning dew, before the hands, which have planted
and prepared the hemp and spun the thread, can
fashion and sew the tissue. Open the linen-cupboard
in any farra 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,
44

A Farm in the Cantal

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 railes 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 sorae 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 com
passionate farmer throws a pint of oats into their
45

The Fields of France

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 rausic of cowbells awoke us at
five in the raorning ; one hears a tramp of feet, and
the loud greetings of the herdsmen, whom the whole
village turns out to welcorae; the cows utter long
" moos " of exciteraent and delight ; in their raidst
we see a rustic cart or chariot piled high with great
cheeses — each cow of the herd should have pro
duced at least three of these huge raoons during
the five raonths of its Estivade. Without a word
frora the herdsraan, the beasts stop at Langeac's
farra and turn into the pastures they left in May,
lowing and frolicking for joy despite the fatigue
of the night-long raarch. Happier still are the
herdsmen. The xa'a.sX.ex-vacher tosses his, baby in the
air; the little pdtre has found his mother; the herds
men 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 ray mind.: —
*flj yXvKineCKav epeufferai &,Kptf lit' oaScf.^
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 auturan ! How large and
cheerful the greystone houses look after the wind-
shaken buron on the mountain-top! Not to-night
(for all of them will sleep), but for many a night after,
46

A Farm in the Cantal

towards midnight, a whisper may be heard in Lan
geac'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 Farraer Langeac in his shirt
sleeves. The herdboys scurry away, swiftly and
silently, with bulging pockets. For my part, out of
corapassion, I leave thera 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-Noveraber, 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 raoors, 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 raere curved tooth
of wood— the Roraan aratro, our araire. The cattle
still browse the meadows ; all night the hillsides are
melodious with their chiraing bells. The orchard
47

The Fields of France

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
sumraer, 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 14u.
Nostro biilho Oubergno s'ocato
Jious uno flessado de nfeu "
(" 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 hilltop intercepts the
sun ; a little later, the beasts having been milked and
48

A Farm in the Cantal

fed, masters and raen assemble round the fire. From
the ceiling hangs the three-beaked Roman larap, but
the flaraes, leaping frora the beech-trunk 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 ; Touenou, the little
pdtre, sprawls in the blaze and pulls the tail of
the cat ; comfortably ensconced on the cushioned
settle, the old gaffer of eighty tells raany a story
of local tradition, or repeats for the hundredth time
his faraous 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 veillie. 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 half-past eight. Master
and men arise an^ bid each other good night. The
49 E

The Fields of France

neighbours light their lanterns and don a sort of
Inverness cloak — their limousines ; the cowherd goes
to seek his warra bed in the cow-stable. And the
door, opened an instant for their egress, reveals the
gusty raoon-shot night and the vast expanse, dazzling,
and yet dira, of endless snow — a polar landscape,
inhospitable and sad.

50

A MANOR IN TOURAINE

A MANOR IN TOURAINE
(La Commanderie de Ballan)
1903

AN old irregular house, a long grey line in the
hollow, founded by the Teraplars 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 Mite, 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 as full of
S3

The Fields of France

virtuous schemes as — shall we say M. Corabes? 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 raight 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 Comraanderies. 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 Napoleon's marshals had a son — hiraself
a prince and a soldier — unhappily raarried to a lady
of unattractive virtue, A nervous, artistic, irascible
man, he went about still seeking his ideal, circuit
rudens, qucerens quem devoret. He found it, un
fortunately for her, in the maiden daughter of one
ofhis 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
54

A Manor in Touraine

clock on the chimneypiece struck, first the half-hour,
then the hour ; and yet the prince never- appeared ;
.and still the young hostess lingered in her dressing-
roora. 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
reclairaed 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 recon
ciled 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 Re
volution ; 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. Reraember 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
55

The Fields of France

nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an im
possible, position.
The prince had bought our ancient manor-house,
to hide therein his unespousfed 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
56

A Manor in Touraine

a veil of tender sharae, dared not show her face
beyond the unfenced boundaries of her woods, and
did by stealth her very deeds of raercy.
Sorae fifty years ago, both prince and lady died.
The house and lands then carae 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 soci^aire of the
Com^die Francaise — 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 Com
manderie 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
Comraanderie 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 rauch
restored. A story was added. One day, when the
raasons were taking down an ugly plaster ceiling
frora a sraall 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.

57

The Fields of France

II
It is in autumn that you should visit the Cora-
raanderie. 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 muUioned 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 lawns 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 outflarae the red and orange
of the woods, where pale-blue plurabagos, yellow
canariensis, and violet clematis, twining over hop-
poles, fall in loose garlands and festoons like coloured
fountains of flowers. So the lawn sweeps up the
slope till it meets a glade of oak-trees, starred thickly
underfoot with crimson cyclamen. Beyond a wander
ing 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 corabe between
the wooded slopes. Turning east, you cross the moat,
inseparable from every ancient manor-house in France,
58

A Manor in Touraine

you pass the orangery with its terrace, where the trees
stand out in pots all sumraer, and so you arrive at a
series of large walled gardens ox 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 hira 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 comraunicate 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
comraon flowers for cutting, such as roses, chrysan
themums, zinnias, asters, phlox, dahlias, and cannas,
tall Paris daisies, freesias, and autumn lilies. Behind
this varied screen stretch the beds of fruit and vege
tables, strawberries and raspberries, which ripen on
into latest autumn, melons and asparagus, artichokes
and cardoons, green peas, French beans and scarlet-
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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 frora Tours to Ballan divides them from a con
siderable 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
Comraanderie. 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
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A Manor in Touraine

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
Rtipestris 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 cost
ing 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 Coraraanderie, 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, coraraand a
good price at Saumur, a neighbouring town wherein is
raanufactured much so-called charapagne, which divine
beverage, outside its natural borders, is best made from
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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 Joue. But, alas ! since 1 890, 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 Sep
tember; they barely grow for their own use some
acre or so of vines. Ballan still keeps its air of
solid comfort, its handsorae cottages of white stone
roofed with slate, its teeraing vat in every cellar,
its orchards laden with fruit. But, alas! raoney 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 in
dustrious habits of the dwellers therein ; for the vine
deraands unremitting care and attention, especially
during the raonths 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, ifyou count the times of
sowing and reaping, that he can have but little tirae
to play the John-o'-Dreams.

Ill
Close to the kitchen gardens of the Commanderie
lies the farmyard, a picturesque and pleasant place
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A Manor in Touraine

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 colom-
barium), to-day it is a dairy, chosen for this office on
account of the mighty thickness of its walls and con
sequent 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 raore than eight ; but then Madarae 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
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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 mere-
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
mhe-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 mhre-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, Dora Perignon,
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
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A Manor in Touraine

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
raore, and do so day by day, until you reach about one-
sixth the volurae of the juice drawn off; if then you
let the liquor stand for ten days or so to ferment,
and finally decant the renovated raust into barrels,
which you keep hermetically sealed ; in this way, you
may obtain an excellent light drink, called piquette,
or sometiraes 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 araount 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 counter
acts their acidity, increases the strength of the liquid,
and is said to augment its resistance to the malady
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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,
ray husband, Eraile 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 Coraraanderie,
Beyond the press, the far end of the farrayard 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 swira 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 raournful
cry, so melancholy that one might suppose the striking
of its prey less a sport than a heart-breaking necessity,
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A Manor in Touraine

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 copsewoods 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 cen
turies, 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 ?. 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
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The Fields of France

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 charraing are the gros bourgs of Touraine
— Vouvray and Montrichard, Savonniferes or Ballan
— with their neat white houses, built of freestone
topped with slate, a raised flight of stone steps lead
ing 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 I 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 horaely, with tiled floors, straw-
bottoraed 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 raost
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
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A Manor in Touraine

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 rae the daily bill of fare in a
cottage. She replies : " The peasants live uncora-
monly well in Touraine. Two or three tiraes a
day, according to the season, they have an excel
lent 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 seldon merely bacon ; for dessert,
they have goats'-railk cheese, for every farm has its
goats, with fruit, and plenty of comraon red wine, for
every cottage has its acre or so of vineyard."
In fact, by force of circurastance, every dweller in
Touraine becoraes, 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 be
neath a weight of pears and plums. The peaches
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The Fields of France

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 Martinraas ; we walk in
thepotager and criticize the raatting of the handsorae
car dons; we see to the banking of the celery. So
near to such an araple 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.

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
sraall cottage farms between i and 10 hectares (from
2 J to 25 acres) — which is as rauch 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 sm all, and exclusively employed on the few
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A Manor in Touraine

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 railk and
meat. On a farra of this size, you should have
six good Norraandy cows, two or three goats,
two pigs, plenty of rabbits and fowls. The heifers
arrive at a profitable age when they are frora two to
three years old ; they should then bear a calf each
spring ; when the calf is frora six to eight weeks old,
you should sell it to the butcher for frora 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' railk are
sold at i^d. each in suramer, 3^/, 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 auturan, on which we sow in March
a crop of clover to follow the harvest, then in late
auturan 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,
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The Fields of France

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 frora the
crushed pulp of the walnuts left in the oil-press ;
boiling water is poured on this, it is left to ferraent
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 for cattle. At the
Comraanderie, the beasts graze the pastures in sum
raer ; in winter they are fed on hay, chopped straw,
beetroot soup, or potatoes, boiled Jerusalera arti
chokes, raangel-wurzel and swedes, raade into a warm
pottage. How our neighbours at Olmet would stare
if I suggested a puree 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
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A Manor in Touraine

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 raaking of wills
would certainly be followed by an iramediate 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. The rate of wages is to me a
mystery. A long course of raediaeval 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 thera, on the
whole, not araiss.
Positive and superstitious, slow and sure, subtle,
cautious, and independent, the labourer of Touraine
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The Fields of France

is a character apart ; so different frora our rough and
genial farraers of the Cantal, that it seems strange to
think that one and the other are just peasants of
Central France. The elder women of Touraine are
dignified and lovely to behold in their long circular
cloaks of black cloth, and the fine conch of muslin
that discreetly veils the hair. One charming young
girl, born to this decorous and dainty costurae, used
to wear 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, madarae,
never again ! The first day I went into Tours settled
that question. Those idle people on the Rue Royale
looked at rae 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 temperaraent, not
uncoraraon 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 ; some
tiraes she would say, as if she complained of some
hereditary malady : " It grieves me to be so avaricious !
But something inside me pushes rae that way." She
never, I think, discovered that she was superstitious,
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A Manor in Touraine

deeming rather the people of Paris a foolhardy race
for not taking certain obvious precautions. . . .
Jeannette, for instance, would not have raarried into
a family of which any raeraber was affiicted 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 faraily!" And once, when I changed house,
I found the poor child had loosed her pursestrings
to buy a pullet ; she sacrificed it in ray 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 pullet than madame ! " She used to tell me
all her dreams, and would come to rae weeping in a
raorning 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 murabo-jumbo, treasured from pure devotedness)
was my Life of Renan. The other, much thurabed
and tattered from long use, was La Clef des Songes.
I suppose such devotion to fetishes raust exhaust
the religious faculty, for like raany superstitious
persons, Jeannette was not pious. She had in her
something stifHy, Puritanically, virtuous. She was
loyal, honest, upright, quarrelsome, affectionate, pre
cise. While she delicately dawdled through her
work, her raind was not idle ; she had that thoughtful
inward habit, corabined with a faculty of sharp
observation, which I have often noticed in the peasant
class. She had a great love ofjustice ; but especially
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The Fields of France

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 speclraen of the peasant of
Touraine. She raade me understand and touch, as
it were, certain features of her local class. For in
stance, that passionate love of amusement which
shows itself in summer dances on the green (the
heaviest old Tourangeau farraer can dance like any
sylph). In winter tirae, the same bent appears in the
endless repartee and story-telling, round a neighbour's
hearth of evenings, when the peasants gather for la
veillie. "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 con
siderable rivers. There are the huge and turbid
Loire, the winding Indre, the clear green Cher, so
76

A Manor in Touraine

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 accorapanied,
on one side at least, sorae little way inland, by a
steep rocky ridge of friable white tufa, whose natural
caverns are frequently inhabited, enlarged, and raade
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 coteatix, or long level lines of low-
banked hills, are peculiar, I think, to France, and
coramon 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 alraonds, 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
tiraes in a baker's oven before they issue thence in
the shape of dried fruit for the table in winter : the
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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 per
fection 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 auturan, 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 raaize 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 the kine with pump
kin-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 ridges of copse-
wood, its great forests of Loches and Amboise, 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, un
pleasant country — a level of burnt russet meadow,"
and affirra the landscape to be "raore 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 sharae on the Highlander,
whose eye, too accustoraed to his lochs and heather,
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A Manor in Touraine

fails to appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine.
With Gilbert White, we'll declare that the rounded
forras of a chalk country raake 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. I^ovely 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 latelyibeen sold to a millionnaire
frora 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
seeras to eddy round the deserted palace of the
Sleeping Beauty. The huge feudal pile which domi
nates 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 Comraanderie, 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
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own the power of ennobling their possessors. And
as the sea-shell models to its forra the wander
ing 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 Araboise, it is perhaps
frora no want of a will to string thera there on the
part of their orthodox neighbours.
Life in any of these chateaux, on either side of the
abyss, is rauch 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 Victoria! of Don Pero Nirio, 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 tiraes the banks
of the Garonne — villas that were rather palazzi, as
they say in Italy to-day, with their picture-galleries,
libraries, bath-rooras, and loggias adorned with statues.
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A Manor in Touraine

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 wine
press. But if the exterior form of things was little
different, still more striking is the social resemblance.
Then, as now, the raen of the household rose early
for a raorning's hunting before the mid-day meal ;
visitors called after lunch, partook of a light refresh
ment, 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 instru
ments 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
8i G

The Fields of France

driving, or playing at tennis (Paulinus, of Pella, sent
to Rome for his tennis-balls), and others, again, were
planning sorae raighty race of cars. To-day they are
raotor-cars, — and there is all the difference.
After dinner, reading and conversation were the
order of the day. Then, as now, the woraen 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 Frenchworaen could always hold
their own ! While sorae of the hosts of Lucaniacus
sat talking round the larap, others looked through
the last new books ; raore often, sorae 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 Victoria!. In 1406 (as we
shall see in a later chapter), the chateau of Sdri-
fontaine 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 conver
sation were alike in the one as in the other. There
is the sarae delightful courtesy, the sarae universal
amiability of temper. But in the raediaeval picture
there is, perhaps (with a wilding grace and fantasy,
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A Manor in Touraine

which are not now in fashion), a lack of that sober,
solid culture, that fund of judgraent 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
Nino, of whora raore anon. " Could it last for ever,"
said he, " such as it is, a raan would not desire another
Paradise." Every one seeras 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 araused. The young people
shoot and play tennis of raornings (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 frora the trellis for a raorning
" cure ; " the ladies sraile and sit about arrayed in
wonderful morning gowns, embroidering strips of
mysterious and beautiful needlework. A great capa
city 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
Frenchworaan. Lunch reunites the scattered elements
and is rich in animated conversation : gossip, news,
discussion, gibes, laughing protests, enthusiastic
envoUes, learned disquisitions, sparkling or ironic
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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 S6ri-
fontaine, 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-
woraen or Italians ; every little circle possesses its
rausician of considerable raerit, and in alraost every
country house we raay be sure of finding at least one
lady, reading her rausic 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, Cdsar Franck,
greatest of raodern 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
bdzique, boston, bridge (played any time these dozen
years or raore in France), or iraraense 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 ag^d voice calls to me: "Quelle
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A Manor in Touraine

triste vieillesse vous vous pr^parez, mon enfant ! "
Ah, sweet aghd voice that I shall never hear again,
your echo rings still for me in all the rooms of the
Comraanderie !

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 corapared 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 raoral feature in the life of France
to-day. On either side of the political and raoral gulf
which divides society, the same sentiment exists,
with different applications. On the Catholic and
royalist side, the most noble sacrifices will be raade
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 raaximum 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,
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The Fields of France

crkhes, 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 cheer
fulness and hygiene. With its wide windows, its
inner gallery for walking, its charming white bed
rooms, 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 Hospitalite 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 eraptied in the warm sumraer raonths, and serves,
when there are no sick in Ballan, as a convalescent
home for raany a worn-out shop-girl or dressmaker's
apprentice from Paris.
Soraetimes, in that little hospital, I see a vision of
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A Manor in Touraine

social peace which still seems too far reraoved frora
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 dispu
tatious 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 rae ! " 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 always afraid lest its neighbour take an unfair
advantage of the situation.

87

THE FRENCH PEASANT
BEFORE AND SINCE THE REVOLUTION

THE FRENCH PEASANT, BE
FORE AND SINCE THE RE
VOLUTION

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 ? Aucas
sin, 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
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The Fields of France

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 seeraed to have two wrong
sides to it. He stood there, leaning on a club ; and
he was sore afraid when he raarked 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 ara .¦• ' 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 raine.'
" ' 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 hira for a gift of ten, or
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The French Peasant

fifteen, or twenty greyhounds, he would send them
you right gladly. But / 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 ray 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 ray own save
the clothes I stand up in. And a weary raother 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 rae most of all ! For havings
corae 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 

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Were I writing in French, I should raake no
apology for this long quotation ; in French the poem
of Aucassin is little known beyond the narrow circle
of Roraance philologists. Habent sua fata libelli.
In England the raagic touch of a raan of genius has
rested for one moraent on this raediaeval 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
Rubaiyit of Omar Khayyara 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 con
vention, and simply took the canon of ugliness ; since,
to hira 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 com
raon was unclean, the vulgar ugly, the popular type
a thing of repulsion. They confused the idea of
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The French Peasant

comeliness and the idea of race. And this peasant,
who had perforce to be all that our Prince Charming
so obviously was not — and, therefore, swarthy, squat,
red-lipped, hard-featured, rude, and a bit of a poltroon
— becoraes a living iraage of his fellows employed in
ploughing the glebe or hoeing the vineyard.
With what an airy touch our old poet has dis
engaged 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 dis
tinction: "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
drearaing 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 raother 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 mhe avoie). Even to-day, in a French
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The Fields of France

village, such an old, capable, worn-out raother is
often the dearest roraance of the peasant's life.
The "vallet" of Aucassin was probably the
ploughman of sorae mitayer 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 im
raediately 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
raaster the price of his lost ox, and purchase of the
king a free pardon, duly paid for. The Lettres de
Remission of Charles V. and Charles VI. are full of
such instances.
The poetic gamut of the Middle Ages was re
stricted. Few things were deemed worthy of immor
tality in verse. The anger of Achilles and all worthy
knights ; heroic deeds by flood and field : or else the
coraing of spring ; the revolt of young wives against
their tyrant ; love, especially unlawful ; or strange
adventures and the subtleties of dire enchantment •
96

The French Peasant

the dire revenge of the jaloux, the injured hus
band ; 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 Nico
lette, Princess of Carthage, belong, indeed, by right
of birth, but where a mere swarthy peasant is out
of place. The mediaeval poets thought, with Dr.
Johnson, that " in the case of a Countess, the imagi
nation is more excited." Once or twice a countryman
lounges across the stage of some fabliau, generally in
comic guise. In the " Lai de I'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 raien, and
speech, and thought. The very birds in his boughs
raake 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 woraen, 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, in
surgent, a murderer.

97 H

The Fields of France

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' pitii et dommage quand michantes
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 sorae 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 eneraies, the peasants
thought they had a right to rebel, taking their venge
ance 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 tirae
of peace, and the peasants will submit to tax, and
corvie, 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
98

The French Peasant

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 Bonhomrae, 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 tr^s mal
armds." 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 un
harmed the hapless, happy dames of Meaux : — All
this, is it not written in the chronicles of Froissart ?

99

The Fields of France

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 raortal
raen and can perish by fire, scythe-cut, or blow of
club as certainly as Jacques hiraself. Henceforth,
let them respect his women and his horned cattle !
Jacques Bonhorame 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 corvies such as a decadent fancy raay
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 Bonhorarae's woraan-
kind and those two white oxen in his stall, those —
" Deux grands bceufs blancs marques de roux,''
which (as Pierre Dupont, who knew hira well, declares)
the French peasant, although no bad husband, still
holds a little dearer than his wife. The raurders
recorded in the Lettres de Rimission, as coramitted
by the labourer upon the persons of his betters, are
nearly always caused by rape or cattle raids. On
such occasions these " mis^rables personnes et gens de
labeur" have ever shown theraselves 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
IOO

The French Peasant

that noble life and damage of those seigneurial limbs,
as it happened to Frangois Rabault, Seigneur d'lvay.
Sometimes, more legally, he appeals to the justice of
my Lord Governor of the province, drawing down
condign punishraent 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 Rimission ; in those printed
by the care of M. Douet d'Arcq ; and in a new and
charming volume : " Gentilhomraes Campagnards de
I'Ancienne France," by M. Pierre de Vaissiere.
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 inde
pendent race of hardy crofters has never ceased to
dream^f not of liberty, in the magnificent, imagina
tive, 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 raountains of the Morvan
and Auvergne, ever and anon they would rush in
eruption, like an old volcanic force still untaraed,
destroying the superficial civilization ofthe aristocratic
IOI

The Fields of France

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 raoyenne 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 them
selves too far removed frora the hurable 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 re
claimed, raarshes drained, and fields of wheat flourish
ing in place of the scrub oak and the rush. Claude de
102

The French Peasant

Seyssel estiraates the land under cultivation, during
the reign of Louis XII., at one-third ofthe kingdora ;
and, in 1565, J. Bodin writes : "Depuis cent ans on
a d^frichi un infini de for^ts 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 horae
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 horae
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 French country gentleman was a prosperous,
honourable, and useful member of society, just so
long as he lived thus 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.
Unaccustoraed to his enforced idleness, he found
103

The Fields of France

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 array attract these noble
sons of the soil as a candle draws the moth. The
highly centralized government of the Kings Louis —
XIII., XIV., XV., and XVL, of the name— draws to
the court all the resources of France, and disposes at
Versailles of all advancement and favour. St. Siraon
goes so far as to accuse the king of augraenting the
splendour of his court with a view to sapping the
independence of his nobles : " La cour devient un
raanage de la politique du despotisme — le roi vent
dpuiser tout le monde et le reduire peu a peu a
d^pendre enti^rement 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 raajesty 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 vols
jamais." In this connection, it is instructive to read
the letters of Madarae de S6vign^ (that admirable
104

The French Peasant

country squire) and the memoirs of that martinet of
courtiers, St. Simon.
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
glirapse into a world a little larger than his own,
was sometiraes incidentally the occasion of enlarging
Jacques Bonhorarae's narrow field. My lord spent
a terrible deal at Versailles. Dress, play, an outfit
for the wars, soon ran away with the parental in
heritance. Often enough the agent had to sell (and
pretty rauch for what it would fetch) a strip of
raeadow here, a spinney there. Now, while ray 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, corvees, 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 sorae safe place behind the rafter or
beneath the hearthstone. The corvee 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
raeadows, mended his roads, carried his grist, and
wood, and fodder, lent his cart and horse for trans
port, worked on the estate so many days a month
with nary a penny of wage, was harassed, harapered,
overworked, if you Uke ; but the corvee was a form
of rent, and the form his soul preferred. In ex
change he had his cot and his fields, the right to
lOS

The Fields of France

fatten his porkers in the oakwood, the right to
pasture his cow on the grassy edges of the lane, the
right of gleaning his ra aster'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
corvee brought him in some specific advantage ; so
that, while his masters were running a break-neck
race to ruin at Court, Jacques Bonhomrae was buy
ing, 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 repre
senting a small estate increasing with every generation.
Jacques' grandson may be Georges Dandin ; his great-
grand-sire, perhaps, was the wealthy boor of the " Lai
de I'Oiselet." Although the seventeenth century has
little but mockery for the peasant-parvenu who marries
the squire's daughter, yet his son, if ennobled by the
mother's gentlehood (for there are many houses oil 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 Sdvign^
paint for us a certain little Lord " who is all honey,
especially to dukes and peers ? " Does not Moliere
show us his Arnolphe, who ennobles hiraself with
scant ado and calls himself M. de la Souche ?
" Et d'un vieux tronc pourri de votre m^taitie
Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurle.
1 06

The French Peasant

Je sais un paysan qu'on appelait Gi-os-Pierre,
Qui, n'ayant pour tout bien qu'un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout i I'entour faire un fosse bourbeux
Et de Monsieur de I'Isle en prit le nom pompeux."

IV
While Moliere shows us the peasant growing fat
on the fruits of his master's recklessness and absence.
La Bruyere, with his profound and raoral 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 them
selves, 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 raoral eye than the French villages of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
" There be certain fierce and shy wild aniraals,
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
woraen ; they withdraw frora the fields at nightfall to
their dens, where they sup on black bread, roots, and
water. They spare their fellow-raen the labours of
107

The Fields of France

seed-time and harvest, and do not deserve to lack the
bread they sow."
Could Swift have exhaled more generously his
sava indignatio? La Bruyere, 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, punishraent, tortures, all these things may be
just and legal. But what I can never see without
the renewal of astonishraent is the ferocity of man to
man." But especially was La Bruyere 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 them
selves 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 horae in a spacious palace,
with a suite for the suramer 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 ray lord to think of the hundred poor households
whose labours bring in his hundred thousand livres
io8

The French Peasant

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 sheep
skin or a ragged sack ; if he go without bread to eat
— be sure it's not the fault of ray 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 Bruyere.
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 herap, or wheat frora
barley — don't speak to thera of fallow fields or after-
raath, of laying down a vine or of raarking 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 pro
gress, ray 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
scherae 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 reclaira a marsh,
clear a wood, rebuild the tenants' cottages .? Never !
These be pursuits for rustics. Nay, cries La Bruyere,
and we hear the tears in his prophetic voice : " Rendre
un cceur content, combler une irae de joie, prevenir
d'extr^mes besoins ou y rem^dier ? — la curiosity des
grands ne s'^tend pas j usque Icl ! "
109

The Fields of France

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, raust 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 land
lord'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 Bon
horame — 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 Bonhomrae 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 wilder
ness 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 Moliere and
Marivaux ? Rather let us marvel that sometiraes he
no

The French Peasant

turns out a capable raan, soldier or statesraan, who
quits the glebe to save his country. But a Colbert,
for instance, or even a Georges Dandin, is no longer
a Frenchy^ peasant. Let us return to our sheep and
their shepnerds. V
A hundred years later than La Bruyere, in 1787,
another generous raind, 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 raan 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 sorae 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 ex
pressed perhaps, rather than directed, a raoveraent
of reaction ; people began to think again of the life
III

The Fields of France

of the fields, of country pleasures, and country
freedora. So Arthur Young shows us a France where
raany of the great nobles were agriculturists ; the
raode, says he, obliges the great of the earth to
spend a suramer month or two in rusticating at
their rural seats ; the Queen has a dairy-farm at
Trianon ; railkmaids and shepherds are the rage.
And no doubt even this superficial contact between
the noble and Nature, the peasant and his land
lord, 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 Vaissiere
shows us in his recent volume, "Les Gentilhomraes
Carapagnards." But an honourable and mediocre
minority could not suffice to heal the breach, widened
by centuries of absence, which divided peasant frora
landlord. The new-fangled residence of the rich in their
suraraer seats did, as a rule, but little to ameliorate
the condition of their poorer neighbours. The
peasants to them were as the pigs, for whom a sty
112

The French Peasant

is all sufficient. Our English gentleman-farmer
pauses at Corabourg, 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 Ren^ 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 chiteau, 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 wretched
ness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded
inclosures," Nor is this an isolated instance. Every
where in France he tells the same tale — "the poor
people seem poor indeed I " — " 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 raerely a convenience to himself and no
advantage to the tenantry. He went home to wear
out his old clothes, to consurae the produce of his
lands, to econoraize raore or less sordidly for a forth-
coraing 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 ;
113 I

The Fields of France

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 raight not shoot thera or do them any
injury. Such things, in any country, deraand a
revolution. Says Arthur Young : " Great lords love
too rauch an environ of forest, boars, and huntsmen,
instead of raarking their residence by the accora-
paniment of neat and well-cultivated farms, clean
cottages, and happy peasants." Had the nobles
planted turnips on the waste heaths and moors, there
raight (he thought) have been no Reign of Terror.
The feudal privileges of the French nobles seeraed
shocking and unnatural to our free-born English
squire. They were generally exempt frora all taxa
tion, of which the burden fell chiefly on the humbler
sort. The corvees had originally been a convenient
exchange of service between master and raan — 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 payraents 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
114

The French Peasant

(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
corvies — corvies by custora, corvies by usage of the
fief, corvies by seigneurial decree, and servitudes of
every sort, coraplicated his intolerable condition. No
wonder that Jacques Bonhorame began to murmur
and, in his dim slow way, to meditate the possibility
of a change.
On the 1 2th 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 ofthe 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 iour franchars of oats, one chicken and
a sol to pay to another, besides very heavy tallies 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 ? ' "5

The Fields of France

" ' 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 sorae 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
ecrasent' "
Here, good reader, is a companion picture to
Aucassin and his driver of a team.
VI -
Young, with some slight exaggeration, rates 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 be
longed to the labourer in 1787. Be sure that this
quarter of the kingdora was the richest and the most
highly cultivated. Here was no waste land, no marsh,
no deer-forest, no game-preserve. Not far from Mont
pellier 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
platited 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
husbandraen, who turn their rocks into scenes of
116

The French Peasant

fertility, because, I suppose, their own, would do the
same by the wastes if aniraated by the same benefi
cent 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 dipt 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 neat
ness, warmth and comfort breathes over the whole.
It is all in the hands of little proprietors, without the
farras 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 favour
able for a rural district.
While Arthur Young was visiting and graphically
describing the villages of France, a man of consider
able 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,
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even araong the students of his period, few had
heard the narae of J. J. Gauthier, Cur6 de la Lande
de Gul, when, in February, 1903, a young historian,
M. Pierre La Lande, attracted, perhaps, by a simi
larity of name, exhumed his " Essai sur les Moeurs
Champdtres," 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
Cur6 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 Alencon, has to-day
more value and more interest than it could have
possessed a hundred years ago. It is a series of
rustic porfl-aits in the taste of the time, but obviously
drawn from life, and betraying in their lively unprac
tised 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 curd,
himself a peasant — avaricious by nature and breed
ing, 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
hiraself, as he strides across the scene, his stal
wart 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
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The French Peasant

second-hand. From his rusty wig to his vast and heavy
high-low shoes, the curd is as ill-accoutred as any
peasant of his flock. And he is scarce possessed of
a more liberal education ; he exorcises the thunder
bolt with bell and book, and sprinkles with holy
water the unfertile field.
The curd'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 raan ; 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 thera 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 raore 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 horae in
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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
raortally. 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, incon
ceivable 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 curd), "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 arras 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
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The French Peasant

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 comraoner, 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
V 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,
in the spring of 1903, some most interesting letters
from 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. The
castle is shut up from time immemorial ; its great
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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 Curd
of La Lande : —
" Came ye straight in descent from Bernard the
Dane, or the faithful Osmond ; though your ancestors
were liege raen of Merowig or Charleraagne, yet
hope not, poor gentieraan ! 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 stal
wart 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 supply
ing an explanation : " In my own lifetirae " (he writes)
" I have seen a great change in the relations of land
lord 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 carae the Revolution, an event so great that
I cannot hope to give the faintest, sraallest image of

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The French Peasant

it in this tiny frarae. A world perished, and rose
anew frora 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.
In 1815 another philosophic English traveller was
to pass through France. The Revolution, and the
Empire even, had ceased to be, yet Thomas Hodg
skin, no less than Arthur Young, was struck by the
sordid misery of the French peasant. And, in fact,
in France, the Revolution is not over even now.
The corvie 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 banalitis 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 Vendde are corapelled by contract to bring
their sheaves to the thrashing raachines of their land
lord ; the only difference being that this landlord is
no longer a noble, but a great agricultural syndicate
— the Socidtd des Polders. In the sarae comraune,
the sarae society exacts the feudal rights of terrage
— that is to say, it requires a sum of money, a yearly
preraium, paid in addition to the annual rent in kind
— and it also levies a tax on the winepress, just as
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if the Revolution had never taken place. " C'est
I'Ancien Rdgime k peine modifid," writes M. Ldon
Dubreuil.* 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 about twenty kilos, is made for this purpose,
and still bears its ancient name, ^e fromage de maitre.
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 frora the mill,
stones from the quarry, according to the mediasval
corvie 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 raust buy railk 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 impdt 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.
* Pages Litres, No. 103.
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The French Peasant

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 mediasval times the
most frequent is the habit of letting farms en metayage,
that is to say, paying the rent in kind, on the
systera 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
arrangeraent, which seems on the face of it so fair
and equitable, is as disastrous to the farmer, in hiring a
farra, 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
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The Fields of France

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 metayers. Too often in this
case the landlord is an absentee, and consequently
careless of iraproveraents ; 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 arrangeraent is siraple, and this is the
chief arguraent 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 'i
moitii fruits, ho'pmg 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
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The French Peasant

about three acres of cornland ; if they have the where
withal 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 raay bring thera in some twenty
pounds a year. How can they save on such an in
come ? 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 extrerae old age. " In
the isle of Bouin," writes M. Dubreuil, " such is the
fertility of the soil that landlords and farraers alike
are certain of prosperity. Only the mitayer languishes
in poverty." But metayage 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 farras, you may count some seventy
landlords managing their own estates, a score of
farmers, and only ten metayers. 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
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The Fields of France

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 raanners the principles
of the ancien rigime. 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 re
actionaries 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 alraost
unknown novelist, Eugdne Le Roy, is the work of a
raan over sixty, a native of Pdrigord, 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 pf Napoleon's generals, the
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The French Peasant

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 k vendre les Aigues. Sachez
le : depuis Conches jusqu'a la Ville-aux-Fayes, il
n'est pas de paysan, de petit bourgeois, de fermier,
de cabaretier, qui n'ait son argent pret pour le jour
de la curde,"
And the book ends with the triumph of the
peasants and the parcelling of the domain.
"Le pays n'dtait plus reconnaissable, Les bois
mystdrieux, les avenues du pare, tout avait dtd dd-
frichd ; la carapagne resserablait a la carte d'dchantil-
lons d'un tailleur, Le paysan avait pris possession
de la terre en vainqueur et en conqudrant. Elle dtait
ddjii divisde en plus de mille lots et la population
avait tripld entre Conches et Blangy."
" Such is progress ! " exclaims Emile Blondet, on
an irapulse of passionate irony.
It is not picturesque certainly. And yet I re
member 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
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The Fields of France

landscape. Still, we will admit with Emile Blondet
that the raysterious 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 com
fort. 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
regime, 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
raust be turned, more or less, into farras, and their
owners are becoming increasingly aware of the fact,
Araong the young gentlemen of France to-day
there is a spirit of return to the land. The Institut
Agronoraique instructs every year a bevy of eager
agriculturists, raany of thera belonging to the upper
classes and possessing landed estates of their
own. These young raen at five and twenty are con
tent to leave Paris and cultivate their acres in
Norraandy or Languedoc. For rayself, I think thera
wise. I would be, if I could, a large farraer in a
grass country, raising cattle and cheese (a crop less
chancy than corn), with plenty of children, all era
ployed on the estate, and a handsorae 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 eraployraent as a
Master of Waters and Forests), or that of a university
don (which latter existence, indeed, rauch resembles
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The French Peasant

my own), appear to rae quite as pleasant as this. I
know one or two such farraers, 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 raake a large incorae frora
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 utraost farthing,
the farraer must still count on spending some four
guineas an acre on such necessary processes as
ploughing, sowing, manuring, reaping, carrying,
threshing, etc. Doubtless he may reap a consider
able profit, for the polders of Vendde are araong
the most fertile fields of France. But only a man
of substance can raake so large a stake, or raay
afford to renew it annually, to tide over a bad season,
keep his barns and raachines 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
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The Fields of France

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 farras 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 multiply
ing 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 faraily ;
and in all rich and teeming country-sides, such as
abound in France, the excessive division of property,
consequent on the application of the Code Napoldon,
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 condi
tions 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
suflScient to raaintain 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 pub
lished a series of rural studies, each the monography
of some small village in the provinces of France.
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The French Peasant

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 becorae known to us
almost as if we had passed a summer there, for the
schoolmaster, the large farmer, the local poet and
archaeologist, 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, alraost all of them living on the land
as farraers 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 prac
tical 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 posses
sions are generally scattered over an area of several
railes, thus greatly enhancing the fatigue and expense
of the farraer. 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
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The Fields of France

we understand it in England, has never obtained in
France. And if, in some rare cases, a majorat has
favoured the elder son, beyond the very modest
privilege which awards him the family chateau and
the land imraediately adjacent, such a disposition of
property has always been extremely rare. 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 raany acres of meadow,
so many acres of forest, so raany 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 ; raore often
they were not tilled at all, but raerely worked with
spade and hoe and pitchfork. Coraparatively few
peasant-farmers owned a horse — some weather-beaten
patient ass or cow carried in panniers the wood from
the forest, the raanure frora the stable, and the corn to
the raill. 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
134

The French Peasant

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 raangel-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 dis
trict. But railways and machines have changed all
that The plough, and especially the steam-plough,
the thrashing-raachine, the reaping-machine, are use
less 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-farras 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
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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 railes away in Franche Comtd.
Save for the raiddleraan, who absorbs too large
a proportion of the profits, the peasant owner raight
still raake 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, sus
picious, and irapatient 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 advan
tage 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 raany things. Let his raind once grasp
the idea of a common prosperity — where Tom's good
luck is not ensured by the raisfortunes of Dick and
Harry, but where all are implicated in the well-being
of each — let him forget to suspect and learn to com
bine ; from that day forth his social future and
well-being are assured. There are fewer middleraen
136

The French Peasant

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 raarkets every week in Brie, in Beauce,
in all the fertile " horae " provinces of the centre, bid
one against the other for cheese, butter, fruit, and
fodder, so that competition brought about a reason
able 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
raakes little, soraetimes 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 Farraers' Association for the sale of fruit to
the Paris raarket ; he started with seven or eight
peasant proprietors and a buyer in Paris. The first
stone fruit of the season is the darason, 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, corapared to
those of their neighbours, that they deterrained to
extend the scope of their operations. In place of
137

The Fields of France

selling fruit to Paris and London, they bought
chemical raanures frora the factories and sold thera
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 carry
ing machines, steam-ploughs, and harrows, etc., which
will remain at the disposal of the peasant-farmers
who form the association.

X
If a sraall 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 metayage to some landlord, who, lower
ing the rent on account of the stock, supplies
the land and the seed for his part of the bargain.
Metayage is, as a rule, chiefly profitable to the land
lord, who raay raake as rauch as from 12 to 15
per cent, on his capital. The tenant has generally
no capital behind hira, and in bad seasons is com
pelled to borrow at usurous interest, for no one will
lend to a mitayer, whose only stake lies in his arras,
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 whora Aucassin encountered in the green
wood ; for, whichever party supply thera, the landlord
has a right to exact that stock and tools shall always
138

The French Peasant

continue to correspond with the inventory of them
drawn up when the tenant entered into possession.
Thus, if a run of bad luck may soon bring a farmer's
noble to ninepenee and transform him into a metayer,
still more easy is the descent from the farmer cl 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 raaid on a farra
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 {£\2) ; 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 raan,
generally raarried, and living in a sraall cottage which,
in most places, costs him as much as four pounds
(lOO francs) a year, though at Olraet, where I live,
a very decent one-rooraed 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
farraer, and then with that, always overworked ;
for an odd raan is only called in at time of stress
— hoeing time, or hay tirae, or for the harvest, or
the thrashing, or hedging-and-ditching. But at least,
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The Fields of France

in such seasons, in the sweat of his brow he earns his
bread. All sumraer 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 farraers 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 faraily to feed. Often, too, the labourer
turns wood-cutter or charcoal-burner at this season,
walking raany railes morning and evening, to and
from his work, with a little osier basket hanging
from his arra, which contains, or once contained, 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 poet of the Allier
district, M. Guillaumin, has added up the yearly
receipts of a day labourer in good work, tum by
turn hayraaker 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 raust feed hiraself all winter tirae, A
quartern loaf a day is the least we can allow the
140

The French Peasant

little household, for bread will be the staple of their
diet ; bread and cabbage-soup, potato-soup and
bread, will vary the raenu, 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 farraer. But, out of his
twenty-one pounds a year, Jacques Bonhomrae, 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 ex
penses, 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 farra hands, pretend to certain
perquisites. Here, in Olmet, for instance, the princi
pal labourer on a farm receives seventeen pounds a
year in money, with a sack of potatoes, a sack of chest
nuts, and a sack of meal. Yet I cannot be as opti
mistic 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 raony peats
141

The Fields of France

as he likes to cast and win and cairt." The French
peasant is much in the same case ; but he doubts
soraetimes 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 sorae raeasure to blarae
for this.
Although the first Bill on rural education was
passed as early as 1833, little was done, in fact, to
instruct the mass of village children in France until
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 reforra
which followed in France so closely on the disasters
of the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussian school
raaster, even more than the Prussian generals, was
supposed to have directed the victorious armies of
the eneray ; 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.
142

The French Peasant

The villages in 1871 were, in fact, almost as
squalid, as narrow, as ignorant as before the revolu
tion. The schoolraasters went to their posts in the
spirit of raissionaries prepared to civilize a tribe of
savages, ignoring the ideal of the people araong whora
they dwelt, looking down on them with lofty be
nevolence, intending to concede nothing, but to con
vert, to quicken, and to change the heart. The first
generation educated in the Primary Schools was
treated even as a brand snatched frora the burning.
The children had learned from their masters to
despise the animal ignorance, the brutish tastes, the
sordid avarice that too often disfigured the habits
of the village. And what they had learned to admire
was something of which the village gave no con
ception. For meanwhile in the towns the Socialist snren
sang, "Come here, come here, and I will give you
prosperity and peace." And to the towns went the
village youth. Wages were higher there ; the standard
of comfort suited better with a newly acquired ideal
of refinement; above all, the smoky air was full of
ideas. Ideas are a passion with the French, but with
no class so absolutely as with the humbler ranks of
Socialism. There reigned in those regions an instant
hope in the approaching advent of a better world — a
millennium, in fact, as living, as real as that which
animated the first era of the Christian Church, The
Socialist working raan was soraewhat in the position
of the Christian convert of one of those great towns
of ancient Asia Minor or Italy — a raan with the
143

The Fields of France

secret of a New Hope — while the villages. Pagan
now as then, slumbered in their contented ignorance.
To go back would have been to apostatize, to re
nounce, not only the life-in-life of an ideal, but also
the means of education, the schools, the newspapers,
the working-raan's club inforraally united round the
zinc counter of the Marchand-de-vin, the Boulevards,
the museuras, the files, the sense of beauty, the
sense of politics, of science, of social solidarity. And
if these parvenus in the raoral and intellectual sphere
were often crude, fanatical, harsh, intolerant, at least
they were (what their rural fathers had not been)
the heirs of all the ages. Every year the schools
sent raore and more young rustics to V aris, frotteurs
and sellers of wood and coal from Auvergne, masons
from the Creuse, old cio' men from the Lozdre,
chimney-sweepers from Savoy. In Paris they found
a clan of compatriots ready to welcome them, to
show them how to earn their bread, and how,
according to the newest gospel, to save their souls
alive. And still the drain continues. But trade of late
years has not been so good in Paris. In many branches
of industry there has been overproduction — raechanical
engineers, for instance, and raasons have less to do.
And often the agricultural labourer, having tramped to
town, raay find no work ready to his hands. I read in
the reports of the Socidtd Nationale d' Agriculture of a
certain farra in Brie, which has been bought by the
Assistance Publique, in order to give work to those
unhappy labouring men who have fallen into beggary
144

The French Peasant

among the unfriendly streets. Here, on the fields and
furrows of La Chalmelle, they touch their raother
earth again, like Antaeus ; thence they repair, sadder
and wiser men, to such glebes or vineyards as are
short of hire. In its humble capacity, the farm of
La Chalmelle atterapts to react against the raighty
current ever strearaing from the country to Paris,
establishing a tiny counter-stream from Paris to
the land. This rural exodus is a gr-ave question.
Indeed, all thoughtful persons raust pause and fear
when they come — as they may come, alas ! — on a
deserted village. For the fields are the source of
our food and the fundamental riches of a nation.
To forsake them, for any cause, is to forsake the sub
stance for the shadow. Therefore Reactionaries, such
as the successors of Le Play, and Socialists, such as
M. Vandervelde, are at one in attempting to stera the
ominous tide. The State patronizes cattle-shows
and subsidizes technical colleges ; successful farmers
are decorated no less than military heroes, and few
orders are more esteeraed than the Mirite Agricole.
Here and there, manufacturers attempt, by using the
water-power of a cascade or river, to give the rural
workman eraployraent, without drawing him from
horae. But all this is little enough, unless we have also
that inner force which sways a period, a generation,
and which soraetimes inclines us raore and raore to
Nature, reviving in our hearts the desire of the land.
Still, it is a good sign that the very schoolraasters are
nowadays less exclusively urban and literary in their
standards. Science, indeed, is beginning to dethrone
145 L

The Fields of France

literature even in the National school, and science leads
back to nature, as more iraportant than the classics.
Araong the posthumous notes of that noble
apostle of national education, M. Felix Pdcaut, in the
little book called " Quinze Ans d'Education," which
saw the light at the close of 1902, 1 find the following
noteworthy passage : —
" They say that the National schools favour the
village exodus. They say that, after six years of
book-learning, the young rustic dreads the coarse
habits, the hard work, the soil, the sweat, inseparable
frora the life of a farm-labourer.
"What is the remedy? First of all, teach the
children to take an interest, not only in books, but in
the life of the fields. Teach them gardening, and how
to keep bees, the raaking of cheese and the raanage-
raent ofa dairy. Show them the reason of these things,
their cause, and the possible iraproveraents. Above
all, in educating your little rustics, do not irapose an
ideal from without ; work your reform from within.
Make your scheme of education deliberately rural;
be sober, just ; teach them courage, and the contempt
of raere ease and well-being ; give thera a wholesome,
ample way of looking at things ; instil the taste for
an active life, the delight in physical energy. Try and
turn out, not a mandarin, but a man of the fields."
XII
A generation corresponding to this ideal would yet
need one or two reforms in the law of the land before
146

The French Peasant

the French peasant could reach his perfect develop
ment. First of all, let us admit that the nation has
outgrown the Code Napoldon, a system of excessive
centralization. As usual, the people are in advance
of the law of the land ; here as elsewhere, a fossilized
system crad^s and hinders the expansion of life.
Even at sorae sacrifice of order, France would be
raore fortunate if she were decentralized, with more
importance accorded to the country towns and rural
districts. Have we not seen how, in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, this same vice of over-
centralization was fatal to the country-sides of
France, even 'as, in the closing years of the Roraan
Erapire, it was fatal to the country-sides of Gaul?
In this lovely land of France, over-centralization is
a sort of endemic disease which we may combat,
but scarcely, perhaps, eradicate. Let us do our
best. It were well should the law, even if it con
tinue the principle of equal inheritance, at least
permit some laxity in practice (as an insertion of the
thin edge of the wedge), allowing the estate to remain
intact in the hands of the son who farms it, though a
proportion of the revenue be divided yearly araong his
brothers and sisters. In some such way, the ex
tremest results of the sub-division of property might
be avoided. Thirdly, we would have every school
master in France teach his children, instead of the
names of the Merovingian kings, such elementary
notions of physics and chemistry as explain or at
least suggest the life of natural things: why the
sea is salt; how the dew falls; how the seed
147

The Fields of France

germinates in the earth ; why such and such a soil
best serves to produce such and such a crop, etc.
When we see with what extraordinary swiftness the
rural population of France has adopted the theories
of Pasteur and their consequences, we feel that in
this direction, at any rate, the rustic is not stupid.
Let the peasants learn the meaning of the world in
which they live ; they will find it more interesting.
A child who has learned to observe and reflect has
the beginnings of a liberal education, and one that
will not necessarily draw him from the land.
And, again, we would teach our peasants the bene
fits of union. There is a great future for agricultural
syndicates, buying and selling on co-operative
terms, and distributing araong their raerabers the
proper complement of agricultural machines ; by
their aid the small landowner of a few acres may be
enabled to sustain the competition of the large model-
farms ; and perhaps, under new conditions, the agri
culture of the rural districts may revive, surpassing
those golden years between 1830 and 1880. But
the season of adversity has not been barren. Even
the farmer cannot live by bread alone ; and the
lean years that end the nineteenth century have
witnessed the moral and mental regeneration of the
French peasant. Whatever be his destiny, he is now
that " man of independent mind " whom Burns
proclairaed the equal of any raan in any class.

148

THE FORESTS OF THE OISE

THE FORESTS OF THE OISE
Part I
1893 I
" 'T^HE prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost."
-»- So runs an old French proverb, which is not
always true. At least, in that bygone year of 1893,
by the end of April the heat was as parched as at
raidsummer ; roses and strawberries were hawked
through the streets of Paris ; the dust was a moving
sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed
for a plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh
For the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that
have been woods for these two thousand years ! 'Tis
something to feel one's self in a Gaulish forest —
though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire.
But, in the forests of the Oise, from father to son, the
succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches
of Chantilly spring from ancestors who raay have
shadowed Pharamond.
At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge
of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed
151

The Fields of France

there, in the little station inn, where the air is still
sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the
town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of
training-stables, and parched, oblong racecourse
Chantilly is a true French village, with its one end
less winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the
end of it. From almost any point of it you see,
beyond the houses, a glint of waters and hear a
rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy
lightness about the place, about the fresh fine air,
the loose sand of the soil, the thin green boughs of
silver birch and hornbeam, the sraooth-trunked
beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into
great forest trees. It was with an effort of the
imagination that we realized the ancient stock of
this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks
older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the
Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared.
II
In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of
a hunter-prince, and everything about it was ordered
for the chase. Those wide-open grassy glades, studded
with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer ;
and in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does
prepared their nurseries. Great, floundering, russet
pheasants carae flying by ; at every step a hare or
a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far
at the further end of the forest there were deep,
unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling
152

The Forests of the Oise

amid the trim order of the place, for the wild boar
delights in them. As we walked or drove down the
neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appeared
impassable to the traveller, and we wondered at the
contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful
forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of
the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are
bad on purpose ; every spring they are ploughed
afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the
horseman. Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful
venery, for, thick as grass,, thick and sweet, the lily
of the valley springs in all the brakes and shady
places. The scent of the game will not lie across
these miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair,
and the deer, still deafened with the winter's yelp of
the hounds- — the deer, who sets his back against the
sturdiest oak, and butts at the pack with his antlers,
who swiras the lakes, and frora his island refuge sells
his life as hard as he can — the deer, accustomed to
be always vanquished, beholds himself at last be
friended by an ally more invincible than water or
forest oak, by the sweet innumerable white lily,
innocent as hiraself, that every May-tirae sends the
huntsmen home.
The lily that saves the deer is the consolation of
poor women. Every raorning during the brief season
of its blossora, they are up before the dawn. Holding
their children by the hand, they are off to the inner
most dells of its forest ; and before our breakfast-time
they are back at the railway stations at Chantilly or
153

The Fields of France

Creil, laden with bunches of lilies, which they sell to
the dusty passengers bound by the morning mails
for London or for Brussels. Sweet flowers with the
dew upon them, fragrant posies, who would not give
a fivepenny-piece for so much beauty? "What
would you buy with your roses that is worth your
roses ? " sings the Persian poet. These tired country
women of the Oise would know what to reply : new
sabots for the good man, a white coraraunion veil
for the second girl, a shawl for the old grandara,
and a galette for the children's dinner! The lilies
are a harvest to thera, like any other — a sweet,
voluntary, unplanted harvest that coraes three raonths
before the corn is yellow.
The lilies were all out when we drove through the
woods at Chantilly. I had never seen such a sight,
for we had not yet visited Compidgne, where they
are still more profuse and, I think, of a larger growth.
In the Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely,
in timid cluraps ; and how proud of them we were !
But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of coy flowers
as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall
jonquils of Orange, ye have a plenteous rival in the
north ! The whole way to Commelle the glades
were sweet with lilies.
Every traveller from Calais to Paris has marked
unwitting the beauty of Commelle, You remeraber
the view that precedes or follows (according to your
direction) the little station of Orry-Coye ? The rails
are laid on the summit of a hill ; the train rushes
through a delicate forest of birch. Suddenly we come
154

The Forests of the Oise

upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in a
wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the
Thdrain, placid and royal amid its mantling woods ;
while, on the other side, the hill breaks in a sort of
precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets
asleep araid the trees ; a turreted white castle rises
out of a sedgy island, and appears the very palace of
the Belle au Bois dormant. These are the Pools of
Coraraelle — pools or lakes? Pool is too sraall and
lake too large for the good French word itang. They
are considerable lakelets, some miles round, four in
a row, connected each with each. They lie in a
sheltered valley, alraost a ravine, whose romantic
character contrasts with the rest of the forest. Here
the clipped and slender trees of Chantilly give place
to an older and more stately vegetation. The gnarled
roots of the beeches grip the sides of the hills with
an amazing cordage, spreading as far over the sandy
cliff as their boughs expand above. In the bottom
of the corabe, one after another, lie the four sister
pools. The road winds by their side through meadows
of cowslips, past the bulrushes where the swan sits on
her nest, and past the clear spaces of open water,
where her mate swims double on the wave. The
brink is brilliant with kingcup on a film of ladysmock.
At the end of the last pool the ground rises towards
the forest. There are some ruins ; an old grey mill
rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the grace
and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground, are
exquisitely tranquil.
We return along the other track to the Sleeping
155

The Fields of France

Beauty's Castle — le Chdteau de la Reine Blanche, as
the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at
all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to
the Prince de JoinviUe. A tradition runs that, in
1227, the mother of St. Louis had a chateau here.
Six hundred years later, the last of the Condds built
the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the
exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey
roof. 'Tis the romantic Gothic of Thdophile Gautier
and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic
than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there
is a horaely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers,
a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting,
as of an old tune — "Ma Norraandie," perhaps, or
" Corabien j'ai Douce Souvenance." The mill-race
rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac
flowers near the hall-door. It is very silent, very
peaceful, very deserted. The Castle of St. Louis
would not have seemed so old-world as this.
We must raake a long road horae by the Table
Ronde, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest
of Chantilly. There is still the village to visit, and
the castle, and the charming country that stretches
on either side of the long village street. I remember
one walk we went, A row of steps leads steeply down
the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which
runs demurely, as befits its narae, between an over-
spanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at
the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer
than it looks, and as soraetiraes we see a raeek-faced,
slender little woraan mother of some amazing Hebe
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of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources
of yon great oblong sheet of artificial water, raore
than two railes long and eighty metres wide ! A
stone's-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters,
it shines, it dazzles in the valley, visible from
the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge
crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful
meadow caught in between the water and the forest,
which rises steeply here into a long low hill. There
we found a score of bloused, bareheaded workmen,
lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour,
Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the
place is full of pictures.
Before we leave, we must stroll round by the castle,
with its fine old gardens planted by Le Notre, its vast
stables, imposing as a church, its sheets of water, out
of which rises, elegantly turreted, the brand-new
chateau of 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles
of Touraine. For once there was an older castle
here, built by Jean BuUant for Anne of Montmorency.
The great constable left the splendid palace to his
son, and in 1632 Chantilly, as it stood among the
waters and the gardens of Le N6tre, was a thing to
wonder at and envy. Here Henri, Duke of Mont
morency, kept his court and filled his galleries with
famous pictures. He was a great patron of the arts.
His wife, the Silvie of the poets of her tirae, has
left her name still, like a perfume, among the avenues
and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life ; but
the duke was discontented in his castle ; private
wealth could not console him for public woes, and he
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joined in the revolt of Gaston d'Orldans. He was
defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner,
and beheaded at Toulouse, by order of Cardinal
Richelieu. " On the scaffold," says St. Siraon, " he
bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and
another to ray father,"
The duke was a near kinsraan of the Prince of
Condd. Until the last, Silvie had believed that
Condd, powerful and in the king's good graces, would
intervene, and save her husband's life. To her sur
prise, Condd held his peace. The axe fell — and
Silvie understood, when the king awarded the
confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condd.
For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued
to be the alraost Royal pleasure-house, the Versailles
of the Princes of Condd. Then the great Revolution
rased the castle to the ground. It was not here, but
some miles away — at St. Leu-Taverny — that the last
Condd died, in 1830. Chantilly, which had come into
the faraily by a violent death, left it also in a sorabre
and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condd
was found one morning hanged to the handle of his
casement-window. The castle of Chantilly passed
to the Due d' Aumale. In 1840 he began the labour
of restoring it ; but the Revolution of 1848 sent him
into exile, and only in 1872 was Chantilly restored
to its rightful proprietor. Then, like a phoenix, the
new castle began to rise swiftly from its nest of ash
and ruin. It is as like the castle of the Renaissance,
from which it descends, as a young child is like its
illustrious ancestor. 'Tis a princely and elegant
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palace, and we find no fault with it beyond its youth.
It stands with a swanlike grace amid its waters ; it
holds, as in the days of Montmorency, a rare treasure
of old pictures and priceless manuscripts ; and so far
as eye can reach frora its terraces, the lands and
forests are subject to its lord. Chantilly is, in truth,
a great possession. The Due d' Aumale, as we know,
had no sons. He died in 1897, and, choosing the
most gifted men of his country for his children, he
bequeathed his palace and estate of Chantilly to the
Institute of France. Ill
If the day be cold or windy, drive through the
forest of Hallatte to Creil, and thence take the train
to Compidgne, for there blows a stiffish breeze across
the plateau of the Oise. But if raild air and sun
attend you, hire a light victoria, choose a good driver
(you can get one to do the thing for five and twenty
francs or so), and set out by Senlis and Verberie for
Corapidgne. 'Tis a raatter of five and forty kilo-
radtres ; and to raake the drive a success, you raust
stretch it a little further still, and go through the
forest of Chantilly, round by St. Ldonard, to Senlis.
Senlis is a charming little town, perched on a hill
in true mediaeval fashion, and grouped in a cluster
round its fine cathedral and the ruins of the castle of
St. Louis (a real raediaeval castle, this one, at least so
much as is left of it). Halfway up the hill the
antique bulwarks, turned into a raised and shady
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walk, wear their elras and limes and beeches like
flowers amid a raural crown. From this green gar
land the streets rise ever steeper, darker, more
irregular ; yet not so narrow but that here and there
we spy some white half-modern house, with pots of
pinks in the windows, and a garden full of flowers,
which looks the natural home for some provincial
heroine in a novel of Balzac's. I should like to end
ray days, I think, in just such a little town, to sit in
my garden and receive my fair visitors under the
green roof of the lime-tree walk. The notary, the
sous-prdfet (is there a sous-prdfet ?), the curd perhaps,
and some of the country neighbours would come once
a week to play dcartd, tric-trac, and boston with each
other, and chat with us in a polished little parlour,
with squares of carpet in front of all the chairs.
Once a week, on the afternoon consecrated by local
fashion, we should walk on the ramparts and meet
our neighbours, talk of the crops and pull the Govern
raent to pieces (it stands a great deal of pulling!).
We should shake our heads over the Conseil Muni
cipal, but forgive the individual councillors, who are
invariably amiable in private life. The terrible M.
Dupont would give rae a cutting of Malraaison pink
for my garden, and that breach would be healed. . . .
Stop carriage! let us begin at once, that peaceful
iraaginary coraedy of old age. But, ah, the little
white house is already out of sight. We are in front
ofthe shattered round towers ofthe thirteenth-century
palace, all fringed with brown wallflowers against an
azure sky. We climb higher still, for see — here is
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the high, sunny, little square where the tall cathedral
stands. Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival building, its great
porches arched around with sculptured saints and
prophets. There are two towers, one of them topped
by a surprising steeple, a hundred feet in height,
which is a landmark for all the country round. The
deep porches rich in shadow, the slender lofty towers,
corapose an exterior altogether siraple, noble, and
religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like all Gothic
churches, is best seen from without. Within, that
bare unending height of pillar, that cold frigid
solemnity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, is less
touching than the grand yet homely massiveness of
Romanesque, or even than the serene placidity of the
classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his prayers
in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built ap
parently for the worship of giraffes or pelicans ? Oh
for the little, low-roofed chapels of St. Mark's, the
unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant' Am-
brogio, or even the simple, pious beauty of such a
Norman village church as St. Georges de Boscherville,
near Rouen ! Think of the quaint, sombre poetry of
Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, of Saint
Julien at Brioude, or Saint Trophime at Aries ; or
even remember the elegant and holy grace of the
Parisian St. Etienne du Mont — these be churches
in which to say one's prayers. Whereas your
Northern Gothic is a raarvellous poera from with
out; but how frigid is the chill interior of those
august and noble monuments ! Duty divorced from
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charity is more than cold ; and I can easier imagine
a filial and happy spirit of worship in the humblest
square-towered parish church.
As it happened, we did not see the interior of
Senlis at its best. The spring cleaning was in full
force ; the straw chairs were heaped in an immense
barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral
— and really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like
Socrates in his basket — an energetic char-raan was
brushing the cobwebs from the sculptured capitals
with a huge besom made of the dried but leafy
boughs of trees. He had been hauled up there in
a sort of crate by some ingenious system of ropes
and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that vast
cleanly interior was not unpicturesque ; it was like
a caricature of any picture of Mr. Orchardson's.
IV
Senlis was the capital of our friends the Sylva
nectes. Hence stretched on either hand the vast
forests which even to-day are still considerable in a
score of relics — the woods of Chantilly, Lys, Coye,
Ermenonville, Hallatte, Corapidgne, Villers-Cotterets,
etc., but which in Gallo-Roman times were still one
vast united breadth of forest. To-day, all round
Senlis the lands are cleared, and the nearest woods,
north or south, are some six miles away. We rumbled
regretfully down the hill, out towards the windy plains
of Valois, windiest plains that ever were ; bleak
champaigns where the sough and rushing of the
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wind sounds louder than at sea. The forests of this
northern plain are beautiful. O woods of Chantilly !
O birchen glades of Coye ! O deep and solemn vales
of Corapidgne, spinnies of Hallatte, and wavy pine-
knolls of Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a collar of
green emeralds upon the breast of Mother Earth?
But we must admit that, shorn of their trees, the
plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample
solemn roll, of the plains of Seine-et-Marne. 'Tis
a lean, chill, flat, and as it were an angular sort
of beauty ; like some thin thirteenth-century saint,
divinely graceful in her robes of verdure ; raore
graceful beneath those plenteous folds than her
better nourished sisters. But never choose her for
your raodel of Venus Anadyoraene. Leave her that
imperial cloak of woods and forests.
We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture ;
by stretches of sad precocious corn, already in ear on
its scanty span-high stems of green ; by quarries and
hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte ; then forth
again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till
somehow suddenly we find ourselves on the steep
brow of a down (they call it a mountain here, la
Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen
through the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side,
a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying
across it like a scimitar of silver. Far away beyond
the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths
of forest, blue and ever bluer, raake an azure back
ground that reaches out to Corapidgne,
We dash down the hill and clatter along the
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sleepy pebbly village street, past the inn full of
blouses and billiards, till the trees press thicker and
thicker among the lengthening shadows. The forest
is full of the peculiar soft beauty that foreruns the
sumraer dusk. These outskirts are fragrant with
thorn-trees and acacia-trees, O white-flowering deli
cate raock-acacias, were I the king of France, I would
multiply ye by all my high roads — for none is more
beautiful to the eye and none is more raajestic or
raore bountiful than you. Throughout that parched
spring of 1893, when the hay stood withered a span
high frora the ground, your long green leaves served
as fodder for our cattle, most succulent and sweet.
And what shall I say of your blossom — delicious to
every sense — an exquisite rain of white pearls, drop
ping fragrant perfuraes on the tree, which, plucked
and delicately fried in batter, raake a beignet worthy
of Lucullus .' I love your black and gnarled thorny
trunk, so dark in its veil of lacy green and white;
and it always seeras to me that the nightingale sings
sweeter than elsewhere frora your high and twisted
branches. Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The
white may-trees, still in flower, grow in rounds and
rings together on the broken ground studded with
silver birch. They stand in the dusky sumraer still
ness, very fair and sweet, their muslin skirt spread
white under the gleam of the rising moon. The
lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their
heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We pass
— and as soon as we have passed, no doubt, they
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clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts
and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance
to celebrate the spring.
But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and
closer. They are now great forest-trees. The wind
soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far away,
here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides
between their branches. Have you ever felt at night
in some deep glade the holy horror of the forest ?
If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your
ancestry. You have never known with a shudder
just how they sacrificed the victim on yonder smooth
grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God ! Think,
on this very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls
to-night, among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the
Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or
reaped his harvest on this sacred soil : it is still con
secrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs
rustle iraraemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their
mast-like columns to support the temple roof. And
there is Something in the teraple, Soraething vast and
nameless. Soraething that sighs and laments and
chills, super-human or anti-human, Soraething which
has no place in any of our creeds. What is it, this
obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood
and tension of the spirit, that locks us in a holy awe
amid the shades of the nocturnal forest .' Who knows ?
Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the rites of
our ancestors, Celts or Germans ; a drop of the heart's
blood of the Druid or the Alruna-woman, still alive
in us after two thousand years. They say that
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children fear the dark because they are still haunted
by the dread of prowling beasts ; our babies long
obscurely for the blazing carap-fires which kept the
wolves and bears at bay ; an old anxious forest-fear
survives in them and forbids them to sleep without
that bright protection. Brr ! . . . I wish we could
see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Cora
pidgne !
At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a
huraan beacon, 'Tis a blacksraith's forge, and then
some straggling houses. Again a space of scantier
wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying
faubourg. The streets grow steeper, the houses taller,
our pace quicker and raore exhilarating. And at last
we draw up with a clack of the whip before the faraous
friendly Hdtel de la Cloche at Corapidgne.

The market is in full swing when we throw our
shutters open in the morning, and the gay wide square
is full of booths and country-people, clustered round
the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you
know, we took her — worse luck to us ! — at the gate of
Corapidgne. But it was at Rouen she raade her entry,
and that exit for which, alas ! we stand asharaed
throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller
than the raarket-place this morning. It terapts us
out ; and then we find that we could not see the best
of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our
hotel stances the fine Hdtel de Ville, with its fretted
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Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for the chimes.
Itwas finished in 1 510, when Louis XII. was king.
There he rides, on the large arcade on the first story,
every inch a king ; but the statue is modern.
Gay, bright, with charming environs, Corapidgne
is a pleasant county town ; but it has not that look
of age, of historic continuity, which are the charm of
sraaller places, such as Crdpy and Senlis. No sign is
left of the great palace of the Merovingian kings, no
relic of that stalwart fortress whence are dated so
many of the acts of Charles the Wise ; that castle of
Corapidgne where, says Eustache Deschamps, "Tel
froid y fait en yver que c'est raige," built against the
river bridge —
" Le Chastel que se lance
Dessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige."
Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the raodern
prosperity of the place, here and there a souvenir of
the more illustrious past. Here and there, on the
limits of the town, a towered wall rises in sorae
private garden, and we recognize a fragment of the
fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain
roads in the forest were planned and laid out by
Francis the First. Then there is the city gate, built
by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of
Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still
reraain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries,
and among them that " Hdtel des Rats " where Henri
IV. lived with Gabrielle d'Estrdes in 1591. There are
one or two old churches, too much restored. And
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then, of course, there is the great uninteresting palace,
the very twin of the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built
for Louis XV., and which we remeraber for the sake
of the two Napoleons.
The charra, the attraction, of Corapidgne is else
where. The forest here is beautiful as Fontainebleau.
True, here are none of the wild romantic deserts, the
piled crags hoary with juniper, the narrow gorges,
and sudden sumraer vistas of Fontainebleau. The
trees theraselves have a different character. We find
few of those great gnarled and hollow giants whose
twisted arms make such uncanny shadows towards
sunset in the Bas-Brdau. Here the oaks shoot up
to an inconceivable height erect and branchless until
they raeet at last in a roof of verdure just tinged with
April rose and gold. If Fontainebleau reminds us of
a comedy of Shakespeare's, Corapidgne has the noble
and ordered beauty, the heroic sentiraent of Racine.
What soleran arches and avenues of beeches ; what
depths of forest widening into unexpected valleys,
rippling in raeadow-grass, where the haralet clusters
round its ruined abbey ; what raagical lakes and
waters interchained, where the wooded hills shine
bright in doubled beauty ! Ah ! Fontainebleau, after
all, is a blind poet : the forest is ignorant of lake and
river. But Corapidgne has the Oise and the Aisne
and the Automne. Corapidgne has its lakes and
tarns, and pools innuraerable, its seven and twenty
lirapid brooks, its wells and ripples in every valley-
bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual
irrigation, teems with flowers. The seal of Solomon
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waves above the hosts of lily of the valley. The
wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel the grass
with their pale stars. Here and there on the sandier
slopes a deep carpet of bluebells, or at the water's
edge a brilliant embroidery of kingcups, give point
to the sweet monotony of white and green, which
vibrates from the flowers in the grass to the flowering
may-bushes, to the acacias only half in blossom, and
thence more faintly to the lady birch and beech with
gleaming trunks and delicate foliage. White and
green appear again in the wide sheets of water amid
the shimraering woods. So I shall always think of
the wood of Corapidgne as of some paradise, too
perfect for violent hue and passionate colour — some
Eden haunted only by the souls of virgins, sweet
with all fresh pure scents, white with white flowers,
and green with the delicate trembling green of April
leaves. VI
Where shall we go to-day? There are many
lovely drives in the forest. Champlieu has its Roman
camp, its antique theatre and temple ; Morienval its
abbey church with the three Norman towers, St.
Nicolas its priory, St. Pierre its ruins, St. Jean its
marvellous old trees, and Ste. Perrine its lakes where
the deer corae to die. Shall I confess that we know
these beauties still by ruraour only? For we went
first of all by the foot of Mont St. Mard to the haralet
of the old mill, and round the lakes of La Rouillie to
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Pierrefonds. And on the morrow, when we set out
for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we
would cry to the driver, " Go back, and take us the
same drive as yesterday." And so three times we
drove past the Vieux Moulin.
This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you
visit Corapidgne, go last to Pierrefonds, round by the
Vieux Moulin, or, however long you stay, you will
never see the rest.

VII
Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin ! We
are soon deep in woods of oak and beech. We pass
the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts ; a steeper
height towers above us. See how wonderful is this
deep-green glen, where the oaks rise sheer a hundred
feet and raore from the sheet of lily of the valley at
their feet ! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the
beautiful growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweet
ness and profusion of the flowers, the something deli
cate, lofty, and serious about this landscape, makes a
rare impression araid the opulence of April, Our glade
slopes downward from the base of Mont St, Mard ; at
its further extremity begins the valley of the Vieux
Moulin. It is a valley of meadow land beside a streara
which, a thousand years ago, raust have cut the
shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises
a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There
is just roora in the valley forthe small Alpine-looking
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The Forests of the Oise

haralet and its hay-meadows. They are full of
flowers ; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with
higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip,
and here and there a taller meadow-orchid. Some
where among the flowers, out of sight, but never out
of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the
Ru de Berne.
The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end — per
haps a hundred dark little houses, irregularly grouped
round an odd little church with a wide hospitable
verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied
spire. The houses are gay with clirabing roses — out
in flower, to ray astonishraent, on this 28th of April ;
and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and
crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet ;
and, ifyou choose, there is an "ascension " to be made !
True, .the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in sorae
three-quarters of an hour ; but none the less its
suramit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest
at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes
and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods,
where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels circled
in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if
we keep to the valley. The raeadows grow lusher and
sedgier, and the kingcup gives place to the bulrush,
and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our
raeadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding
waters, in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored
The road winds on between the wood and the water
till we reach a long, slow, raild ascent, and at the top
of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little
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town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the pic
turesque village, scattered over several roundly swell
ing hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and
wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surraounted
by a huge mediaeval fortress, one frown of battle
ments, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous
walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the
depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round,
girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime.
Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-
blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in Vendde,
I can think of no little town so picturesque, so alraost
theatric in the perfection of its mise en seine. And
see, the castle is quite perfect, without a scar, without
a ruin ! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood,
as it seeraed ? Have we driven back five hundred
years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century ?
VIII
Pierrefonds ! It was here that a sad ne'er-do-weel
(for whora I have a liking none the less) built hiraself
this faraous castle in 1391. It was the wonder of the
age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of
the Crown. It was dismantled in 1617 ; and all that
remains of the fourteenth-century fortress is, with the
foundations, one side of the keep and part of the outer
wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the triumph
of Viollet-le-Duc. Before the decoration was finished,
before the last moats were dry, or the palisade laid
out, the Second Erapire fell ; the raunlficent patron
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becarae an invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds was
dubbed a national monument, kept from ruin, but no
longer an occasion for expense. I own that I should
like to have seen it before it was restored — to have
seen the real, time-stained, historical document. Yet,
after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of
docuraents ; and there is only one such raagnificent
historical novel as the Castle of Pierrefonds.
The decoration is often poor and gaudy ; but
architecturally Pierrefonds is a work of genius. To
walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive, and
as they were : a hundred phrases of raediaeval novels
or poems throng our raeraory. See, there is the great
Justice Hall, built separate frora the keep, above the
Salle des Gardes ; and there, connecting it with the
outer defences, are the galleries or loggie, where
the knights and ladies used to meet and watch the
Palm Play in the court below. Here is the keep, a
fortress within a fortress, with its postern on the open
country. Frora its watch-towers, or its double row
of battleraents, we can study the whole systera of
raediaeval defence. Ah, this would be the place to
read sorae particularly exciting book of Froissart's —
" The Carapaign in Brittany," for instance, or one of
those great Gascon sieges, full of histories of mining
and counter-mining, of sudden sallies from the postern
gate, of great engines built like towers, launching
stones and Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by
night against the castle wall. I am deep in mediaeval
strategy when a timid common-sensible voice inter
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" Mais comment cela se peut-il que le chdteau
soit si ancien, p'isque vous me dites qu'il fut construit
sous le Second Empire ? "
'Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local
tradesraan, bent on holiday, tramping the forest with
his wife, their dinner in a basket, and bunches of
muguets dangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd
little fellow. In his one phrase, he has summed up
the sovereign objection to Pierrefonds —
" How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say,
'twas built under Napoleon IIL?"
Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored !
IX
The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but
not the only one ; for, down by the lake, on the over
grown and weedy promenade, there stands the Etablis
sement des Bains. Here tepid sulphur springs are
captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick
people, who are sent to get well in this enchanting
village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk
and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces, and
wander in the forest ! Happy sick people ; for, alas !
(unless one stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierre
fonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a very
healthy place. So, at least, from Corapidgne, pro
claims the trump of Envy; or perhaps thelrapara-
dised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely horae
safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague
rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms.
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The Forests of the Oise

'Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the
Parisian — a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the
natural beauty of the woods against the fate of
Asnidres. There are three courses open to the visitor to
Pierrefonds. He may stay there, and that would
certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take
the train, and after little more than half an hour
arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, re
serving for the raorrow the lovely drive through the
forest to Vauraoise, and the visit to the quaint old
high-lying town of Crdpy en Valois, whence the train
will take hira on to Paris. Crdpy is a dear old town.
No one would think that such a dull disastrous treaty
once was signed there. The road that slopes down
from Crdpy to the plain is full of a romantic, alraost
an Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once,
years ago, and visited the knoUy forest full of moss
and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cot
terets ; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed
the third and worst course open to us: we drove
back to Corapidgne, and thence we took the train
direct to Paris.

175

Part II
1901
Never again have I visited Pierrefonds or the
woods of Compiegne. They lie an hour or so from
Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inacces
sible as fairyland. Soraetimes, on a fine morning at
Eastertide, a longing goes through me to start for
those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right
through thera to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to
tell the truth, I have not dared ; I doubt not, at
the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and
lake, have long since crumbled into ashes.
Years later, it was my fate, however, to return
to Chantilly. The time was raidwinter ; January
wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But
even in raidwinter there still beats in copse and wold
a heart of life too deep and sound for any frost to
touch it. Not a fiower, not a leaf, enlivened the
forest ; but how large and frequent seemed the forest-
birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The
green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of
thera together, appeared (although, in fact, not raore
than fourteen inches long) as large and bright as
parrots. This fine bird, the pivert of France where
it is comraon, ever excites ray admiration, so graceful
176

The Forests of the Oise

is its shape, from the long bill to the slender some
what drooping tail, so bright is its colouring — a
mantle of raoss green, a breast of greenish yellow,
some yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and
white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red,
drawn close over head and neck. In England I have
never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with
us ; nor, though I soraetimes find hira in my Cantal
orchards, have I ever seen the pivert so much to his
advantage as during that cold week in January,
relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter
that year was unusually hard. The pools of Com
melle were all fast bound in ice ; the snow lay heaped
beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted
on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle
of Queen Blanche, On every twig and branch of
the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops
frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great
forest stretched all round us, like an enchanted place
where no one lived but we, until, as we reached the
third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we
were not alone : a company of wild ducks had
alighted on the ice, still disposed, as when they fly,
in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling incessantly
their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter
floor. One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer ;
a thaw had set in ; a light white mist enveloped
everything. We walked on the comraon as in a
world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a
pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist
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The Fields of France

darap mist ; we saw them for a yard or two, and then
the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of
the piqueurs, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and
disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres' meet.
Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans
princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of
local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures
of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a
corner of the woods you raay corae upon a set of
training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-
Gothic villa, which looks as if it carae frora Learaing-
ton, erablazoned with its English narae — Rose Cot
tage or Ivy Lodge, In every lane you come across
the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their
thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I
saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up
with a jest frora their work at the saw-mill or the
woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys' wizened
youth, half content that their raoney should enrich
the country-side. And I thought of that long-for
gotten France where, for so raany decades, the Eng
lish lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French
peasants chuckled " Levez votre queue, levez ! " being
persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys,
in those sad old times of the Hundred Years' War.
On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We
walked in the taillis where the wood-cutters were
hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is alraost
all planted in taillis compose with hornbeara, elra, and
oak — three species which, however often you may
fell them, will rise again frora the roots, apparently
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The Forests of the Oise

imraortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches
thirty years is raarked for the axe, with the exception
of a reserve, drawn frora the finest subjects, which is
perraitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a
perraanent covert for the rest. Such is a taillis com-
posi or taillis sous futaie — perhaps the most profitable
crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too
light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The
hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for
, burning ; the oak is their rival, and comraands several
markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetraaker's
oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves
too, are a source of profit ; for dead leaves in France
serve alraost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a
raattress, or litter a stable, or raanure the kitchen
garden. I love these feathery woods and coppices ofFrance,
A long, low, cliff-like hill, with a landslip at the foot ;
a pasture sloping to the river ; a spinny or taillis in
the middle distance : — there is a landscape which
you raay see on any day in any part of France ; and
I ever find it full of a delicate yet homely grace.
But, for beauty and wonder, the haute futaie is in
comparably finer than the copse. In the futaie the
trejs are left to grow to their natural shape, the
axe serving only to weed out the misshapen trunks,
or to eliminate the intrusive birch and poplar which
push unbidden araong the better sort. Here, at
least, the oak and beech, adult, with a century and
a half behind thera, fall only in their prirae, the rich
prize of the woodman's axe, which still respects the
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The Fields of France

elect reserve. Corapidgne, Fontainebleau, St. Ger-
raain, have all their futaies ; but few private owners
can afford to wait a hundred and fifty years for
their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it
coraes due), or have so vast a property that, during
raore than a century, sorae part of it may fall every
winter to the axe in due rotation. For who can
boast a hundred and fifty groves, duly planted and
tended year after year? Perhaps the State alone,
A third system, much used in parks and woods
round houses, as combining use and ornament, is
that oi jardinage. Here, as in an earthly paradise,
trees of all ages grow together, and every year the
axe takes its toll of young and old alike : yon great
fir may boast two centuries, and here is yesterday's
sapling at its feet. The fir and the beech are gene
rally grown en jardinage.
Hark, the sharp tang of the axe ! Let us go and
see. There is an art in wood-cutting, especially in
felling a taillis ; for if the wound be not clear and
sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the
rain sojourn and sodden in the stump, the root will
lose its virtue. But the woodman knows his trade.
He was born in our woods, most likely ; if not, ten to
one he comes from the Belgian Ardennes, perhaps
from Bavaria : be sure he is a sylvan ; mixed with his
blood is the sap of the forest. There, under that
spreading oak, he has built his hut of tree-trunks :
long perches of young oaks covered by sods of earth,
with the grass turned inwards. Let us peep in. A
pile of dead bracken occupies one corner. Three
1 80

The Forests of the Oise

stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which forms
the floor, are tied together at the top, and sup
port a great iron soup-pot, swinging over a fire of
braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no
window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is
a bachelor. For in the forest of St Germains I know another
hut which is the very pride and pink of neatness. The
woodman's wife used to sit there, on a deep bench of
turf built against her rustic house, raending the week's
wash, while her children played at her feet The hut
itself, though built, as usual, of trunks and sods, was
pleasant to look at, with a neat white-curtained
window in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs ;
a door of the same pattern swung on a pole passed
through a double set of iron loops. Door and window
were evidently portable, and had been used on many
a clearing. Within, a folding table, a stool or two,
and even some canvas folding chairs such as are used
in gardens, gave the rough place a look of comfort.
A wide truckle-bed supported a mattress of sacking,
stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves ; a red blanket
covered the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a
portable iron stove. Sometiraes the good woman
would do her cooking, as she always did her week's
washing, out-of-doors, and then — ye sylvan deities !
— what savoury fumes would rise from that huge
marmite! It was, no doubt (for so she said), a jay or
so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them
dainty eating), which so tickled our appetite in pass
ing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a
i8i

The Fields of France

hare, a pheasant, some piece of good wild garae.
Since no trade is warranted to breed perfection, let
me admit that my friends the woodraen are nearly
always past-masters in the noble art of poaching.
How should it be otherwise .' Only on Sundays can
they tramp to the nearest village to buy, with their
scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of
meal. The cow, which their children lead to pasture
in the glades, affords thera railk, but that is all.
And meanwhile the woodland teems with life. So
poor, reraote from all society, cognizant of the
ways of bird and beast, shall they mark unmoved
the traces of the hare, note with a disinterested eye
the break a fawn has raade in yonder brushwood, or
that thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-trunks,
where the wild boar last night stopped to scratch
his rairy flanks, on his road to the nearest turnip-
field ? Meanwhile the raan hungers, and the children
need their daily bread.
Who does not remeraber a charming page of
Gustave Droz, which tells how a young couple, sur
prised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter
in the charcoal-burner's hut, and shared their savoury
mess ? Such luck has never been mine. It was one
of the things for which I envied ray revered and
admirable friend, M, Taine, whose childhood, spent
on the edge of a great forest, made him familiar with
every sylvan thing.
" In these old forests," he writes, in an essay on
the Ardennes, " there lingers a race of men still half
savage ; they are the woodcutters. They scarcely
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The Forests of the Oise

know the taste of bread ; a side of bacon, some
potatoes, a little milk, compose their daily fare. I
have spent the night with them in huts without a
window. The large, low, open chimney let in the
daylight and let out the smoke. There the raeat was
hung to dry. The children spoke scarce a word of
French, expressing theraselves in a rude patois ; wild
as young colts, they roamed the forest all day long ;
when they reached their twelfth year, their father put
an axe in their hands, and they chopped the branches
of the fallen trees ; a few years later, they felled an
oak like him. A raute aniraal life, full of legends and
strange beliefs, was theirs."
But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays
the children are supposed to go, at least sometimes
and when convenient, to the nearest village school
(for education is compulsory in France) ; the young
raen inevitably serve their time at the regiment ; the
girls enter domestic service. And so difficult is it to
find recruits for the woodman's free but rough and
lonely life, that the lack of woodcutters is becoming
a grave question among foresters in France.
When March is well out, and the trees are felled,
when the wood is piled in stacks, the woodman con
sults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and sappy
morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such
of them as are devoted to that tragic end. It is a
nice and delicate business, which must be undertaken
before the leaves are green. For, while the sap is
springing, the bark and the wood are separated by
a layer of viscuous vegetable tissue, the cambium,
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The Fields of France

but so soon as the foliage is full-formed, this cara-
biura turns hard and welds the two together. Yet the
weather must be warm ; a blast of cold wind, the
shadow of too black a cloud, by suddenly lowering
the teraperature, raay at any raoment interrupt the
operation : the bark will not strip frora the oak. The
woodman (who knows nothing of this capricious cam
bium, worse than a woman for yielding only at its
pleasure) swears that a herd of sheep must have passed
to his windward, and throws down his axe, well aware,
despite his false premises, that no raore stripping will
be done that day. He must wait on sun and zephyr.
The next warm day he returns, cuts a sharp ring round
the foot of the tree, another at his right arm's top
most reach, and rips the bark in long ribbons, which
he lays in the sun to dry, face downward, for a day
and a night, ere he stack thera for the tanner. That
is the prirae bark, flayed frora the living trunk ; having
taken this, he fells the oak, and strips as best he can
the upper branches.
Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next,
and, where the natural fruit of the trees has not suffi
ciently renewed the glade, he hoes the earth, relieves
it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole,
and plants a sapling. By early autumn he must
change his trade anew ; in September the woodman
becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have
dried last winter's logs ; they are ready for the next
metamorphosis. The woodcutter, who knows by heart
each glade and clearing and coppice of the forest,
selects some open space, far from the century-old
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The Forests of the Oise

revered Reserve, and cuts the turf frora a chosen
circle. Having beaten hard the ground, he plants in
the raiddle three or four stout stakes and swathes them
together ; round these he sets some light inflararaable
brushwood ; beyond this centre — which will serve as
a chiraney — he places his logs in close rings, standing
straight on end in the middle, then slantwise raore
and more, till they are almost flat at the edge. And
now the stack takes on the shape of a great flattish
cake or pie. Thereon he packs a layer of dead leaves,
four inches thick, and over that again a layer of sand
and sods, till, save for a small open space in the
raiddle, the whole is tightly roofed. At last he casts
a flaming brand into the brushwood at the core, and
waits : in an instant the faggots crackle, the smoke
rises up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the
crust begin to ooze and "sweat," as they say, from
the sap and moisture of the buried logs. Now let the
woodman look to the wind, lest too strong a blast
cause the pile to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal,
and endanger the forest If a sudden gale should rise,
he will build a screen of branches and break the force
of its impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily,
smoking and sweating, until — on the third day, as a
rule — a faint wreath alone of bluish vapour curls
lightly frora the exhausted pile. After a few days
raore the raound raay be unpacked; if all be well,
the charcoal is ready for sale. The sylvan year has
run its course. Our woodraan is a woodcutter again.
Forestry in France is not only an art, a science,
an industry, and a passion. Several generations of
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The Fields of France

savants such as M. Bouquet de la Grye — to whora,
with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly
acknowledged — have reduced the rule of forestry to
a method. Thanks to them, the returns are as sure,
the cultivatioh as regular, as in any other branch of
agriculture. If I had been a man, I would, I think,
have been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector
of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine,
riding all day long under the green and musical
covert, araong the fresh scents of herb and leaf and
resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden's lodge,
deciding the destinies of oak and beech and pine.
At Nancy there is an Ecole Forestiire, which forms
to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic
Institute, Thence sometiraes, or else frora Stuttgard,
we draw our foresters for the vast woods of India,
because in England we possess no School of Forestry.
The last years of the nineteenth century, the first
of this, have brought the youth of France back, with
a sort of passion, to the land. In Shakespeare's time,
as we know, " Young gentlemen in France
Were wont to sigh and look as black as night
From very wantonness."
I am glad to think that in our days they are
at once more cheerful and more practical. Cheese-
making, cattle - farraing, wine - growing, farraing,
forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman
may pursue with credit, and even with enthusiasra.
And forestry, at least, is cultivated as it never was
before. Until the last hundred years, more or
1 86

The Forests of the Oise

less, a forest was just a wood-mine, to be worked
until the vein should be exhausted. But now we
sow and tend even more than we destroy. Sandy
raoors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren
chalk, are planted with the hardy sylvan pine, and
shortly become things of use and beauty in them
selves, no less than happy influences on the local
climate. The pine gives deal and resin, and grows
in any soil. Clays too stiff and darap for corn or
turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak ; the
steepest flanks and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient
for the beech ; the elm and the ash spring in small
spinnies on almost any sterile field, and their leaves
afford a delicious food for cattle, a crop as regular
and as nourishing as hay. Any wood, treated with
care and method through a space of years, will yield
a good return for careful husbandry.
And this, I think, is the special beauty of France
— her great and increasing stretches of woodland. Be
they the merest coppices of scrub oak and horn-beam,
yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring
with primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white
wood-strawberries. And what tongue shall declare the
raajesty of the forest? I love the great freedom of
the wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich
harvest of the lowland plain ; but something deeper
and more secret — dating from the days before our
ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a
forest-clearing — a thrill primaeval, is awakened in rae
by the rustle of the woods.

187

A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE

A LITTLE TOUR IN PROVENCE
1892

OUR first impression of Provence struck us just
beyond Mondragon. For some miles we had
traversed the roraantic valley of the Rhone, which at
this point raight alraost be the valley of the Rhine.
The river is hedged in by tall cliffs covered with ruins
as steep and as inhabitable as the granite which
supports them. Every mountain bears its castle and
tells of feudal rule, of brigand oppression, with all the
violence and picturesqueness of a raediaeval tale by Sir
Walter Scott. The train carried us through a narrow
gully, with barely room in it, above the strangled river,
for the ledge on which the rails are laid. Suddenly,
at the other end of the gorge, the climate changes :
the air is milder, the plain more fertile, the country
widens into a great amphitheatre enclosed between
the Alps of Dauphind and the rounder hills of the
Cdvennes. And here, with the suddenness of raagic,
the first olives begin — no stripling trees, but gnarled
and branching orchards, sunning their ancient limbs
on every southern slope. In the twinkling of an eye
we have come into the kingdom of the South. With
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The Fields of France

a deep breath of the sharp-scented sunny air, we
inhale the beauty of it, and understand — how inti
mately! — that horror of high mountains which has
distinguished every race capable of appreciating
beauty. Our recollection of the black gorge, the
barren peaks, the swirling torrent, renders still keener
our feeling for the fertile plain where the blood-red
boughs of the Judas-tree make their deep southern
blots of colour against the blue of the delicate, serrated
hills behind. Among the fields the pollard mulberries
gleam like baskets of golden filigree, in the splendour
of their early April leaf. The tall pastures are white
with starry jonquils, bending all one way in the wind.
The hedges are sweet with hawthorn, great southern
bloom, almost as big and plurap as apple-blossom.
And the same delicious contrast of delicacy and
abundance which strikes us in the plain, surrounded
by its peaks and barren hills, is repeated in the differ
ence between this riot of blossom and the austerity of
the foliage, much less green than in the north. The
ilex spreads its cool grey shadow at the homestead
door. Every little red-tiled farm, every vineyard, is
screened by its tall hedge of cypress, a sheer wall
of blackish green, planted invariably north-west of
the building. For through those narrow gorges of
Mondragon, where there seemed scarcely room for
the train and the river, the Mistral also passes, like a
blast from a giant's bellows— the Mistral, the terrible
north-western wind, that devastates these plains of
Paradise.

192

A Little Tour in Provence

II
Our first halting-'place is Orange, a white and
charming little town, filling up its ancient girdle with
raany an ample space of green garden and lush
meadow. Few towns appear more provincial than
this charming Orange, which gave William the Silent
to the cause ofthe Reform, a dynasty to Holland, and
a king to England. There were princes in Orange
long before the Nassau : there was the House of Baux,
with its pretensions to the Erapire of the East ; there
was the House of Adhdraar, which brought forth the
noble Guillaume d'Orange, the peer of Charlemagne.
Of all their glory naught remains save one meagre
wall, one tumbling buttress surmounting the hill
above the city. Compared with the beautiful amphi
theatre beneath, still important and raajestic as in
the days of the Roraan occupation, these reraains of
chivalry appear little raore venerable than the ruins
of the jerry-built villas of some demolished London
suburb. Yet as we look at them an emotion awakes
in our heart and a mist comes before our eyes that
Roman antiquity does not evoke. For the monu
ments of the Middle Ages are other than of stone.
And we remeraber how, in the beautiful old
romance of Guillaume d'Orange, the unhappy hero
comes home to his castle wounded, after Ronces
valles, the only living knight of all his host, and
sounds the horn that hangs before the castle gate.
But the porter will not admit him ; none may enter
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The Fields of France

in the absence of the master, and no raan of all his
garrison recognizes the hero in this poor man,
suddenly aged and pinched and grey, seated on a
varlet's nag, with nothing martial in his mien. Their
discussion brings the Countess on to the battlements :
" That — my husband ! My husband is young and
valiant. My husband would corae a conqueror, lead
ing tribes of captives, covered with glory and honour."
Then, seated still on his poor nag, outside his in
accessible castle, the Count of Orange tells the story
of Roncesvalles, and how he alone escaped the carnage
of that day, " Less than ever ray husband ! " cries
the Countess. " My husband would not have lived
when all those heroes died." But at last he persuades
her that he is in very truth hiraself, and she consents
to take hira and tend his wounds on his promise
that, so soon as he can ride to battle, he will
set forth again, to avenge the death of all his
comrades. " Le monde est vide depuis les Roraains," said St.
Just. Beneath the ruins of that castle on the hill
there stands, erect, eternal, built into the very frame
work of the cliff, the iraraense theatre of the Roraans,
still fit for service, resonant to every tone. Frequently,
of late years, many thousands of people have collected
in the Amphitheatre, which serves on all great rauni-
cipal occasions. But I prefer it as we saw it yesterday
— its sweep of steps graciously mantled in long grass
growing for hay, and full of innumerable flowers ; its
stage tenanted by bushes of red roses and white
guelder roses ; the blue empty circles of its wall-space
194

A Little Tour in Provence

rising serenely against the flame-blue sky. Never
have I seen the huge strength of Roman antiquity
appear more sweetly venerable, more assimilable to
the unshaken granite structure of the globe itself,
than thus, decked and garlanded with the transitory
blossoms of its eighteen-hundredth spring.
The front wall of the theatre is about one hundred
feet in height, thirteen feet thick, and more than
three hundred feet in length. The colony of Arausio
was an important colony, remembered only now by
the raonuments of its pleasures and its triuraph.
When we shall have disappeared for near two
thousand years, what will reraain to tell our story ?
Our Gothic churches are immense and beautiful, but
already, in their infancy of nine or seven centuries,
they are falling into ruin. Our caatles will go the
way of the Castle of Orange ; and of our pleasure-
houses the oldest that I remeraber is the little flirasy
seventeenth-century theatre of Parma, already quite
a rairacle of cardboard antiquity. We have built too
high, or too thin, or too delicately. We have read
too long in our prayer-books that here we have no
abiding city. Our souls have no capacity to imitate
that great solid souvenir of civic use, of pleasure, of
triuraph, which the Roraans have left behind thera in
all their provinces. About ten rainutes' walk from
the theatre, on the other side of Orange, stands the
Roman Arch of Triumph, the most beautiful in Gaul.
It is perfect in its great perspective, as it rises from
the meadow-grass at the end of a shadowy avenue.
On its sculptured sides the trophies of ancient battle
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The Fields of France

are still clear, and on its frieze the violent struggle of
men in battle —
" Et tristis summo captivus in arcu."
The Roraans have left behind them in Provence
not only a series of unalterable monuraents, but the
type of their race. Up country, in the little farras,
a Celtic strain prevails, but in every town we find the
square-built Roraan frame and classic features.
We end our afternoon by a long drive through
the fertile plain of Orange, all the brighter for the
severeness of its setting, for the spires and hedges of
cypress, for the gaunt dim blue of the distant
mountains. The spring is luxuriant and ample here.
The hedges toss their fragrant boughs of may: the
Japanese peonies are pink in every garden, the quince-
orchards seem a bower of tiny roses, the purple flags
are out by all the watercourses : but the prettiest
sight of all is on the grass. Even in Italy I have
never seen such hay-meadows, with their great golden
trails of buttercups, their sheets of snow-white nar
cissus, springing innuraerable and very tall above the
grass. There are little children and boys, and tall
young girls, grown women and men of all ages, in
the fields gathering great posies of the delicious
flowers. Never have I seen so bright a picture of
the sheer joy of living, the mere gladness of the
spring's revival. It seems to us that we have driven
by some happy byway into the Golden Age, into
some idyl of old Greece.

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III
Here the towns are set as close together as the
jewels in a crown. We have scarcely left Orange
before we see, beyond the green belt of the Rhone,
the mediaeval outline of the Palace of the Popes.
L'lle Sonnante, as Rabelais called it, rises out of the
plain and the water like an island indeed, much as
our own little Rye stands up out of the Sussex
marshes. With its steeples and convents, its towers
and buttresses, massed round the tremendous fortress
on the central rock, girdled by an outer circle of
crenelated ramparts, this fair town of Avignon
appears the very sanctuary ofthe Middle Ages.
The great interest of Avignon is that it appears a
town of one time — a flower of the fourteenth century,
still full of life and vigour. The tower of Philippe le
Bel at Villeneuve dates from 1307; the great Palace
of the Popes, the fortifications of the town, with their
battleraents and raachicolations, and the vast round
yellow fortress of St Andrd, raassive against its
background of olive-coloured hills — all these, and
raany sraaller relics, belong to the second half of the
fourteenth century. Even here in the South, few
cities can show so many or such pure examples of
the military architecture of the time.
The city wall of Avignon, since in part destroyed,
had, when I saw it, a circuraference of about fifteen
thousand feet. It stood twelve metres in height. It
had thirty-five towers, raany turrets, was crowned
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with battlements, and pierced with machicolations.
These last, as every one knows, are open spaces left
between the wall and the frieze of arcades which
supports the balcony intended for the garrison (the
chemin de ronde), spaces which form great oblong
holes in the flooring of the balcony, and through
which boiling water, flaraing tow, lighted oil, arrows,
stones, and other raissiles might be poured down on
assailants engaged in undermining the foot of the
wall. The walls of Avignon, substantial as they
appeared, would have been but a phantasraal protection
against a good raitrailleuse : the town wore them as an
ornaraent, and not as armour. The gates, dismantled
of their old portcullises, served for the collection of
the toll, and the officials of the octroi lodged in the
romantic gatehouses. One of these guardians, moved
by our interest in his unusual dwelling, led us up,
through his kitchen and bedroora in the gate-tower,
on to the balcony that crowns the wall. He left us
there in corapany with his wife and several babies,
whora I expected, at every instant, to tumble through
the holes of the raachicoulis ; they showed, however,
the address and ingenuity of true mediaeval babyhood
in avoiding these pitfalls, and appeared to find the
superannuated battlements an admirable playground-
Less adroit, we found the chemin de ronde very dizzy
walking; and our interest in this relic of railitary
architecture was chequered by the fear of being
precipitated into space.
The walls of Avignon were less interesting than
its vast central fortress. It is difficult to iraagine a
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A Little Tour in Provence

monuraent so irregular, so labyrinthine, such a raere
sombre maze of towers and walls, of corridors and
staircases. Not a tower is absolutely square, not an
angle true, not a communication simple or direct.
All is unexpected, daedal, disconcerting, in this
gigantic relic of an era of confusion.
For the Palace of the Popes was not only a palace,
but a stronghold. It was a necessary answer to the
fortress which, in 1307, the King of France had built at
Villeneuve across the Rhone ; it was necessary also for
defence against the troops of marauders who infested
France after Crdcy and after Poitiers. We reraeraber
how, in 1357, a knight, by name Sir Reynold of Cer-
vole, coramonly known as the Archpriest, scoured
all Provence with a company of men-at-arms of all
countries, who, since the King of France was captive
and their arrears unpaid, turned brigands, and raade
a good thing of escalading castles, and ransoraing
rich and tiraid cities. Froissart has told us how the
Archpriest and his raen laid siege to Avignon, striking
terror into the hearts of Innocent VI. and his cardinals.
At last, the Papal Court agreed to pay forty thousand
crowns to the corapany, as an inducement towards its
withdrawal. The brigand-chief came to terms as
regards the money, but he demanded certain small
additions to the contract, for he reraerabered that he
was not a raere raarauder, but a person of good faraily,
with other claims to consideration. He exacted,
therefore, a free pardon for all his sins, and several
invitations to dinner. The Pope and his cardinals
" received him as reverently as if he had been the
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son of the King of France himself." Then he con
sented to lead his followers elsewhere; and after
his departure the Pope considerably iraproved the
fortifications of Avignon,
By 1370 the city was strong enough to set such
besiegers at defiance, and the palace had grown into
the fortress we adraire to-day. It is composed of
seven huge corps de logis, separated by courts or
quadrangles ; and these are riveted to each other by
seven immense and sombre towers. The whole forms
a parallelogram of over twelve thousand square yards.
It is an imposing, a tremendous pile — not beautiful,
but unforgettable ; conspicuous by the rare height of
its walls and towers, and by the extraordinary up-
leap of its buttresses, which shoot right up the wall
to the balcony, and form the great arcade which
masks the largest machicoulis that I have ever seen.
Not only pitch and Greek fire, but great beams and
boulders could pass through these openings to crush
the assailant underneath. Such a fortress appears
impregnable to the eye : the height of the walls
renders an escalade impossible ; the garrison on the
balcony atop is out of bowshot, and the huge but
tresses defend the base against the sapper. At one-
third of its height the wall supports a second balcony,
whence the besieged could deal deadly damage on
their assailants.
Within, the palace is disfigured by its present use
as a barracks. The vast halls are ceiled over at mid-
height and turned into dormitories. Nearly all the
frescoes, painted in the melancholy, elegant manner
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A Little Tour in Provence

of Simone Memmi and the Sienese, have been dis
figured within this century. There is a party in
Avignon naturally indignant at this defacement,
which is all for buying the palace from the Govern
ment and turning it into a museum. This, however,
would cost a great deal of money. And, as a mere
irapression, the great bare daedal building, gay with
the crowded life of these youths of twenty, racing
up and down stairs in noisy troops, sitting in the
shadowy window-seats (picturesque figures in their
white undress, black haversacks and deep-red caps),
filling the sombre quads with raarch and drill — yes,
as a mere impression, it is certainly raore appropriate
as it is.

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

V
There is soraething Athenian in the little literary
class of Avignon, and in the evident pride and joy
which all the citizens take in it Our cabraan
stopped us in the street : " Look at that monsieur !
Look at him. He's a poet ! " cried the good man in
great excitement. It was M. Fdlix Gras. People
waylay you to point out the name of Aubanel or
Roumanille written over a bookshop. Every person
of every degree treasures some little speech or anec
dote concerning M. Mistral, the hero of the place.
Doubtless the Fdlibrige, with the little extra roraance
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A Little Tour in Provence

and iraportance which it has given to the South,
has rauch to do with this literary enthusiasm. In
Provence, a taste for poetry is a form of patriotisra,
even as it was in Ireland in the days of the " Spirit
of the Nation " — as it is again to-day. The sentiment,
which is pretty and touching, appears quite genuine.
We had forgotten that Roumanille was dead,
as was natural, since poets never die, and so
we made a pilgriraage to his bookshop. We were
greeted by a dark-eyed little lady ; when we asked
for the poet, the tears started into her fine black
eyes, and we realized, with a tightening of the heart,
the cruel carelessness of our question. But Made
moiselle Roumanille (for it was she), with the beautiful
courtesy of her nation, would not let us depart in this
unhappy mood. She talked sweetly and seriously of
her brother's latter days and of his death-bed, cheerful
and courageous as the last pages of the " Phaedo " :
these Provengal poets have a classic temper in their
souls I He would not let them wear a mournful face.
" Life is a good thing," said he ; " chequered, no
doubt, with raelancholy moraents, but none^the less
bright and excellent as a whole. We have corae now
to one of these raelancholy passages, but, believe rae,
my friends, the sadness of death is greatly over
rated ! There is nothing cruel or tragic to lament
about Life has been very good, and now — at the
end of it — death coraes in its place, not unkind."
So the good Fdlibre passed away, raindful, no
doubt, of that passage in one of his poems where he
says — but I have forgotten the words—
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" Now let me depart in peace.
For I have planted in Provence
A tree that shall endure. "
If even the gay, the cordial Roumanille gave out at
the last this savour of antique philosophy, the likeness
of Mistral to the elder poets is far raore striking.
He is the Proven5al Theocritus, and his poeras, with
their delightful literalness of touch, their unforced
picturesqueness and natural simplicity, will probably
endure when more striking monuments of our nine
teenth-century literature are less read than remera
bered. We cannot iraagine, at any distance of tirae,
a Provence in which some posy of Mistral's verses
will not be treasured. He will be to the great
province what Joachim du Bellay has been to Anjou.
True, he has written too much, but posterity is an
excellent editor, and reduces the most voluminous
araong us to a compendious handful. Mistral is the
greatest of the Fdlibres, and perhaps the only one
whose works will survive the charming Davidsbund
of poets and patriots which so loudly fills the public
ear to-day.
We went raore than once to see the great man in
his garden at Maillane, a pleasant place surrounding
a cool, quiet villa, where the poet lives with his young
wife. It is the only house of any pretensions in
Maillane, and to the good people of the comraune
Monsieur Mistral is both the poet and the squire.
He coraes out to receive you — a strikingly handsome
man with a beautiful voice ; so much like the once-
faraous Buffalo Bill in his appearance that one day,
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A Little Tour in Provence

when the two celebrities met by accident in a Parisian
cafe, they stared at each other, bewildered for one
moraent, and then, rising, each advanced towards the
other and shook hands ! We talked of many things,
and among others, of course, of Fdlibrige, I ventured
to ask him the raeaning of the narae, which is a puzzle
not to philologists alone. He confessed that it had no
particular raeaning ; that on that dayin May, in 1854,
when he and Rouraanille and the other five discussed
their projected Provengal renaissance, one of them
reminded the others of a quaint old song, still sung in
out-of-the-way Provengal villages : a canticle in honour
of certain prophets or wise men dimly spoken of as
" Les felibres de la Loi."
Na one knew precisely what the word designed — so
much the greater its charm, its suggestiveness ! The
narae was adopted by acclamation ; and henceforth,
at any rate, the meaning of Fdlibre is clear.
VI
We went the next day, in company with Mistral
and his charraing, intelligent wife, to see the races
at St. Remy. "Regardez nos fillettes!" said the
poet " On dirait des statues Grecques." A Greek
statue is severer in its beauty ; but certainly the girls
of St. Remy might be the sisters of the statuettes of
Tanagra: so dignified, so graceful, do they appear
in the beautiful costuraes of Aries, They were the
great adornraent of these raild provincial sports, as
we watched them come in troops from Maillane and
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Tarascon, from Avignon, from Aries, all dressed in the
plain-falling skirt, the fichu of pure fresh tulle, and the
long pointed shawl, or " Provengale," which recalls
the graceful garb of the Venetian women. Sometiraes
the skirt is pale pink or apricot, with a dove-coloured
shawl, or green with a lilac shawl ; but, as a rule,
the skirt and shawl alike are black, relieved only by
the narrow rauslin apron, which reaches to the hem
of the skirt before, and by the abundant fulness of
the white fichu across the breast. Every one who
has been to a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure
which surmounts this costume — the thick wavy black
tresses, parted in the middle of the brow, taken down
either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised
from the nape of the neck high at the back of the
head, coiled round there and fixed under a tiny band
of white lace, and a large bow or sash of black ribbon.
Few head-dresses are at once so irresistible and so
dignified, and none could be better suited to the
regular features, araple beauty, and melting eyes of
the daughters of Provence,
We fell in love with St. Remy : we stayed there
for a week, in the Hotel du Cheval Blanc, where the
long dark convent-like corridors and the cypress-
screens behind the house give one already, as it were,
a waft of Italy. St Remy is a delightful little place.
All its streets are avenues of great zebra-trunked
century-old plane-trees, garlanded in April with
quaint little hanging balls, or else of wych-elms, gay
with pinkish-buff blossoms, and yet so gnarled and
hollow that they might almost be those famous elms
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A Little Tour in Provence

which Sully planted about the towns of France. " La
Ville Verte " the people call it, and never was narae
better chosen. Even as at Orange, the town has
shrunk within its ancient girdle, and has filled out its
space with gardens, with orchards, with hay-meadows.
The gardens of St. Remy are the fortune of the
place, and owe to their happy situation behind the
range of the Alpines an earlier harvest of flowers and
fruit than elsewhere, even in the sunny South. An
acre of carnations of St. Remy is a fortune to a man,
as profitable as an acre of asparagus at Monteuil or
early peas at Plougastel. If the mountains behind
us, so lovely in their lilac bareness, were duly forested
and covered to the crown with pine and ilex, we
could iraagine no happier situation. But the hills of
Provence are as unthrifty as they are beautiful,
They absorb and retain no salutary moisture from
the rare torrential rains of autumn, which dash down
their ravined sides, ruining and tearing the friable
soil, with not a kindly root to stay and store them.
This reforesting of mountains is a great question,
nothing being more important to a climate than its
supply of woods and the distribution of its rains ;
the future of agriculture in Provence depends on it.
In i860, and for some years after, rauch planting was
done ; but then, alas ! there carae a slackening of
zeal. Farmers everywhere think of the present
rather than the future, and a plantation remains un*
productive for a score of years ; whereas these barren
mountains serve as winter quarters to endless herds
of sheep, who browse their rocky perfumed sides
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The Fields of France

When men think of their children rather than of
themselves— but when will that be ? — the woods will
be planted, and a generation will grow up to call
these sheltered and sunny fields a Paradise. Even
as it is, they are fertile and precocious in a rare
degree. In the roomy inn-garden we wondered
at the luxuriance of the spring, as we sat in
the shadow of the blossoming guelder-rose bush,
or picked great trails of rose and syringa. We
gathered our first dish of strawberries on the 23rd
of April. There are but two openings at St. Remy
— miller or market-gardener : the tvvo prettiest
trades, suitable to this greenest, raost pastoral of
cities. St. Remy is but gently raised above the plains ;
still low enough to nestle among the white-flowered
hawthorn hedges by the runnels bordered with
flowers. But, scarce two miles beyond, there rise the
scarred fantastic sun-baked crags of the Alpille range
— the Alpines, in raodern guide-book parlance —
a furthest prolongation of the Alps. These are true
southern hills, barren and elegant, grey, lilac, blue,
pink even, or purple against the sky; but never
green. Walk thither along the upward road till, at
the raountain's feet, you come to a round knoll of
fine turf, fringed with stone-pines, with, under every
tree, a marble sarcophagus for a seat. Hence the view
is beautiful across the wide blue valley to the snow-
streaked pyraraid of Mont Ventoux. But you will
turn your back upon the view, for placed on the
middle of this grassy mound is the pride of St
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A Little Tour in Provence

Remy : the Antiquities, sole relic of the prosperous
town of Glanum Livii, Nowhere in Provence have
we seen so beautiful a setting to monuments so
perfect in their sraall proportions as the Triumphal
Arch and the Mausoleura. Tirae has rauch ruined,
it is true, the decorations of the Arch : the winged
Victories are bruised and battered ; only the feet of
one warrior reraain, the head and fighting arm of
another; the chains of the slaves have fallen into
pieces. But nothing has marred the style, the grace,
the purity of the exquisite outline, Greek rather than
Roman in its siraple elegance. The Mausoleum is
less correct in style, but more picturesque, more
suggestive. A flight of steps leads to a sculptured
pediment, from which there arises a crossed double
arch, itself supporting a small round temple, roofed,
but enclosed merely by a ring of columns, in the
style of the Teraple of Fortune at Rome. Within
these columns stand two tall figures, robed in the
ample toga of the Consul ; they seem to lean forward
as though they gazed across the valley to some
ancient battle-field. Standing so high, and screened
behind their wall of columns, the statues do not show
the trace of the modern restorer. The opinion of
archaeologists is still, I believe, divided as to their
identity, but the peasants have views of their own on
the matter. Some of them aver the figures to be the
portraits of those twin emperors, Julius and Caesar ;
but most of them, with sorae show of reason, consider
that they commemorate the victories of Caius Marius,
the hero of all this countryside. The figures are
209 P

The Fields of France

twain, so the peasants have doubled the General;
Caius and Marius look out towards the Fosses
Mariennes. Others, aware of the individuality of
their hero, have solved the difficulty by giving him
his wife as a companion! One shepherd, however,
offered rae the best explanations.
" Those two figures," said he, " represent the great
Caius Marius and the Prophetess Martha, the sister
of Lazarus, and the patroness of our Provence. They
were, as you raay say, a pair of friends."
"Dear rae!" said I. "I thought there was a
hundred years or so between them."
" Maybe," said the good man ; " that well may be,
madame ; but, none the less, they remained an
excellent pair of friends."
The facts of these good people were, as you see,
a little incoherent. Yet, indistinct and fallacious
though it be, their vision of a distant glorious past
gives their spirit a horizon, their minds a culture, which
I have never met in the provinces of the North, where
ancient history begins with the French Revolution.
Every ploughman, every shepherd, in the kingdora
of Aries is aware that their country was to Rome,
two thousand years ago, much what Nice and Cannes
are to the Parisians of to-day. Their inheritance of
so ancient a civilization, their conteraplation of the
vast and beautiful raonuraents of Latin triumph, have
given them a certain dignity and sense of import
ance which may degenerate here and there into the
noisy boastfulness of a Tartarin, but which far more
frequently remain within the limits of an honest proper
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A Little Tour in Provence

pride. Those whom I met, the peasants and shepherds
at St. Remy and Les Baux, had each a theory of his
own concerning the great campaign of Marius, and
pointed me out — at varying quarters of the horizon —
the line of the retreat of the barbarians. If I some
times was raade to feel that, from the height of their
ancient glories, they looked down on me as on one
of that defeated horde, yet their attitude was always
that of the kindest, the most courteous superiority.
They are citizens of Aries or Avignon, as one was a
citizen of Rome when the greatest honour was to
boast Civis Romanus sum. VII
One day we drove across the plain to Tarascon,
a cheerful little town beside a yellow river, over
shadowed by a great yellow castle, the Chateau du
Roi Rend, the painter-king. On the other bank of
the river rises the Castle of Beaucaire,. and the two
old fortresses, whose enmity was once so cruel, glare
at each other as harralessly in our days as two china
dogs across a village raantelpiece. Tarascon possesses
a fine old church, whose porch would seera still finer
were it not so near a neighbour of St. Trophime at
Aries. We descended into the crypt to pay our
reverence to the wonder-working tomb of St. Martha,
sister of Lazarus, who, as every one (south of the
Loire) is well aware, was cast ashore upon the coasts of
Provence in company with the two holy Maries. She
founded the city of Marseilles, and is buried under
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the church at Tarascon. As we picked our way
underground we perceived in a dark recess of the
staircase a second tomb, unvisited of pilgrims, but
far more interesting to our eyes. A marble youth
lies along the sarcophagus, dead. It is Jean de
Calabre, the son and heir of King Rend, an old friend
of ours, for we have followed hira in raany a Neapoli
tan campaign. But after all he did not gain his
crown of Naples, the brilliant young pretender. He
lies here, forgotten, in the mouldy vault of St. Martha.
When we eraerged to the outer air frora this
underground sanctuary of saint and hero, we reraera
bered raodern times, and asked our guide for the
latest news of M. Tartarin. She protested her ignor
ance, but with a certain subdued irritation (or so we
thought), as of one weary of a scie that has lost its
edge. We were more fortunate, however, when we
asked for the Tarasque. She ran with us along a
narrow street in great impatience until we reached
a large stable. The door swung open, and we beheld
a sort of huge long-tailed cardboard whale, green,
with scarlet scales stuck all over with yellow spikes,
like the almonds in a plum pudding. The creature
has a half-human head with goggle eyes, a vulgar,
good-natured sraile, and a drooping black raoustache,
with a long horsehair mane depending from its neck.
It suggests a cavalry "sous-off" who has in some
way got mixed up with his charger.
The eponymic monster of Tarascon is no longer
led along the streets in glory once a year, accom
panied by raen and maidens, in commemoration of the
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A Little Tour in Provence

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

VIII
When people come to stay at St, Remy, it is
nearly always in order to make the excursion to Les
Baux ; a more desolate one cannot well be iraagined,
nor one that places in stronger relief the contrast
between the sane and beautiful relics of antiquity and
the raisery, the squalor of mediaeval ruins. Who was
the misguided man who first made it fashionable to
admire barren mountains and ruins, and other such
dismal monstrosities ? I should like to quarter hira
to all eternity in a palace at Les Baux,
The road thither quits the lovely flowery plain,
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The Fields of France

to rise araong arid liraestone mountains. Flocks
of sheep are grazing there, but there are more herbs
than grass, and as the poor beasts climb ever in search
of a more succulent blade, they send out beneath their
feet the exquisite fragrance Of mountain thyme and
lavender and rayrtle. On the steeper scaurs, the pale
raountain roses of the cystus are all a-flower, and
shed a spring-like beauty about the desolate scene.
It soon becomes raore desolate. We wind higher
and higher up the barren flanks of the Alpilles. The
wind-eaten crags of white friable stone defy even the
raountain herbs. It is raelancholy cinder-grey lunar
landscape. This white stone is the sole harvest of these
regions. As we advance we find the mountain
scarred and hacked into countless quarries. Here
and there, the great pale slabs are piled into a tomb
like dwelling for the quarrymen. Far off, on the
very crest of the raountain, we see, above all this
desolation, an orchard of alraond-trees, the only thing
that betokens a human presence more happy than
the slave-like labours of the quarry. Behind these
trees there rises, as it seems, an utterraost wall of
crags, yet raore jagged, more desolate than the others.
They are, as a matter of fact, the ruins of churches
and palaces, the residue of the once princely city of
Les Baux.
When at last we jog into the tiny Place of the
city, we find a squalid village nestling in the centre
of the former capital, like a rat in the heart of a dead
princess. About three or four hundred poor creatures
214

A Little Tour in Provence

live here : God only knows what they find to live on !
Slices of white stone, I suppose, and almond-shells.
They are, at any rate, eager for pence and human
society. The carriage has not stopped before a
guide pounces out upon us, and carries us up through
a steep unspeakable wilderness of dead houses,
deserted these three hundred years, and all falling
most lamentably into dissolution. There is a poor
Protestant temple, with its elegant delicate sixteenth-
century carvings all in ruin. " Post tenebras Lux "
is proudly carved above the dilapidated portals. All
these ruins, varying over some two-and-twenty cen
turies, appear of the same age, the sarae dead-level
of abjection. The " bauras " of the cave-dweller,
their cupboards and door-holes still perceptible,
appear but little older than this or that mediaeval
palace. Ah, the place is terribly changed since I
came here last with Jean Lefdvre, in 1382, to purchase
for the Duke of Anjou the rights of the Seigneurs
des Baux to the Empire of the East !
Under the crag-like tower of the castle there is a
wind-swept mountain-top, whence you look down on
the vast level of Camargue and Crau. From these
coast-like summits the sad-coloured salt-raarsh ap
pears infinite ; it is treeless, raelancholy beyond
words. Were these spendthrift, sterile raountains
planted with kindly woods ; were yonder brown
morasses drained and irrigated — (and indeed this
latter labour is very fairly begun) — on what a different
and happy scene might we look down, in barely a
score of years ! That blue streak on the horizon is
215

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the Mediterranean. There the three Maries landed,
and began their inland march. Their three effigies,
carved by their own hands, are still perceptible
yonder, on a stone at the very foot of the mountain
where we stand. Apparently they were wise enough
not to seek the inhospitable suraraits of Les Baux.
There was one thing I should like to have seen
in the dead city, but when we were there the relic
had departed to a barber's shop at Aigues Mortes.
Sorae tirae ago, the landlord of the tavern at Les
Baux, digging in his garden, carae on a slab which,
being reraoved, exposed a raediaeval princess, still
young and, to all appearance, living. A raoraent
after, she had crurabled into dust, all save her won
derful golden hair — yards of it, crisp, silky, and
shining — which filled the stone coflSn with its splen
dour. In this poetic treasure-trove the landlord saw
an excellent opportunity. He changed the name of
his inn, which forthwith becarae The Sign of the
Golden Hair ; and there, sure enough, on the parlour
table, in a coffin of glass and plush, lay the thousand-
year-old tresses of the dead princess. The curiosity
attracted custora, and having raade his fortune, the
landlord sold his tavern of Les Baux and retired to
shave the inhabitants of Aigues Mortes "at the sign
ofthe Capello d'Or."
The villagers of Les Baux spend most of their
time in delving for similar treasure. No one else
has found a coffin full of golden hair ; but skeletons,
coins of all periods, and armour, are every-day oc
currences. I made a mistake in thinking that these
216

A Little Tour in Provence

people lived off freestone and almond-husks. They
dine on Gaulish tibias, skulls of Roraan soldiers,
dead cats of the Stone Period, and a miscellaneous
assortment of rusty iron. Not one of them but will
sell you a human bone from a desecrated sepulchre
as a souvenir of your visit to Les Baux.

IX
Les Baux is on the way to Aries, and you cannot
do better than push on to that delicious city. Araong
our impressions of Provence, Orange gave us an
exquisite sense of ancient peace, of dignity not un-
cheerful in its seemly ruin ; and St Remy, with its
flowery paths, its lilac mountain scaurs towering
above the Roraan arch and temple on the pine-
fringed knoll, has left in our meraory as it were a
perfurae of poetry and grace. But for a profound
and raelancholy beauty we saw no place like Aries.
In that tiny city every step calls up a new picture, an
unforgettable recollection. How many of them arise
before rae as I write ! The lovely ruined theatre, so
perfect even in its abandonment, two columns still
supporting the fragment of an antique fronton ; the
great arena where the bulls still fight on Sundays
before an eager audience of stalwart Provengal men
and large-eyed woraen in the soleran dress of Aries ;
St Trophirae, with its wonderfully living portal
crowded with saints and prophets, with enigmatic
Tarasques and dragons, with strange cat-like wild
animals creeping stealthily about the basement.
217

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There is a poera of Mistral's, called the Communion
des Saints, telling the adventure of a little country
girl who, arriving too late at Aries to hear the
raass at St. Trophirae, cried herself to sleep in the
porch. When she awoke it was raoonlight, and
lo ! in order to console her, the carved saints carae
down out of the portal and said the mass for her.
They are so living, those saints, that the fable seems
the raost natural thing in the world.
And the cloisters within, how melancholy in their
peace ! And then, across the way, the Museum, with
its unparalleled sarcophagi. The finest was dis
covered — I think in 1890 — in digging the new railway
across the Caraargue. Never have I felt so strongly
as in this Museura, as rich in Early Christian as in
Classic raonuraents, the difference between the Pagan
and the Christian conception of death. The Roraan
torabs are carved all over with beautiful and cheerful
iraages, sorae scene of daily life, some vine-gathering
or olive-harvest, perfectly human and natural, as
though they would have placed between the sealed
eyes of the dead an abiding memory of the pleasantest
things on earth. The figures on the Christian coffins
have lost their early grace ; but these large-headed,
large-handed, awkward saints and mourners have an
intensity of expression, a pathetic conviction in the
reality of a Beyond, which we have not seen before.
The Roman raourners look back, the Christian look
forward ; the vision of the one is all regret and beauty,
the other is exalted by an ardent and a yearning
faith. 218

A Little Tour in Provence

We have not yet done with the tombs of Aries.
It was the first of May when we walked through the
Alyscaraps, and the latest hawthorn bushes were
abloom about the Sacred Way. To tell the truth, we
were disappointed with the Alyscaraps. The railway
has corae too near to these Elysian fields, sadly
narrowing their proportions. The raost beautiful
torabs are all in the Museum or in St. Trophime.
There is left but one long alley of sarcophagi, shaded
by a fringe of poplars which leads to the ancient
church of St. Honorat. This is a quaint and melan
choly place, with the raised quire built over the crypt,
as at San Miniato, Its round, short pillars, five feet
thick, wear an air of sturdy age. There is a great
charm in this damp and curious old Romanesque
church, with its illustrious perspective of the Alys
caraps. Yet for a last irapression of Aries we would
fain go a little further up the hill, through the lovely
Public Gardens to the Roman Theatre. Here we
will sit on the marble steps awhile, and gaze on the
unchangeable elegance of its proportions, serene in
ruin, unabated of their dignity, and no less beautiful
in their decay.
Adieu, beautiful city! Gallula Roma of the
ancients ! How different had been the fate of all
our western world if Constantine had realised his
dream, making of Aries the centre of the Roman
Empire !

219

HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY

HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY

DURING the Middle Ages the country was in
habited, much as it is to-day, by three distinct
classes of persons — the nobles, the yeomanry, and
peasants ; classes distinct but capable of interfusion.
Then as now raany a noble, irapoverished by warfare
or raisraanageraent, sold the fattest acres of his lands
to the wealthy merchant from the county town.*
Then as now many a frugal shepherd laid by a
penny here, a farthing there, till, with the trifling
profits of his wage, he bought a plot of ground, a
barn, a cabin ; continuing meanwhile his earlier
service ; until his repeated and accumulated savings,
enriched by the harvests of his rood of land, were
sufficient to purchase a little farra.f Then as now
¦• See the Comf tes des Frires Bonis, merchants at Montauban during
the second half of the fourteenth century, published (1890) by M. Ed.
Forestier, Bonis himself possessed in the vicinity of Montauban
lands and houses to the value of sixty or seventy thousand pounds
sterling, modem value ; — which did not prevent his selling his goods
with his own hands, down to the smallest detail.
+ See Bonis, ccviii. Among Bonis' servants the swineherd, Jean
Chaussenoire, bought a vineyard ; the neatherd, Salona, two houses in
223

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the son of raany such a peasant farraer, raigrating
to the town, became a wealthy merchant,* a man
who lived in greater luxury and spent with greater
profusion than the nobles, and who, on account of
the services he could render them, in an age con
spicuous for its lack of ready money, raixed with
them almost on equal terras. Finally, in those, as
in these days, the King knighted f raany and many
an eminent citizen, endowed him with an escutcheon,
and married his sons into the oldest farailies of
France. Thus the burgher class was a sort of
oranibus by which the serf jolted on, through several
generations, towards the peerage ; only, the journey
being long, and demanding not raerely talent and
perseverance, but rare qualities of endurance, it was
undertaken with success only by exceptional persons.
These exceptional persons are beyond the narrow
liraits of this paper: sorae other time, perhaps, we
may exaraine the interesting question of the tran
sition frora class to class at the end of the Middle
Ages ; but to-day our business is with the humbler
rural folk, the yeoman farmer, the tenant on the
estate, the day labourer. What were the wages they
town ; another neatherd, a house on the banks of the Aveyron. In
1366, under the English, a shepherdess comes to Bonis and entrusts
him with her savings : three and thirty pounds ! Bonis's valet, a man
at wages of five pounds a year, possessed enough land to take 430 litres
(two septiers) of wheat at the sowing: from six to eight acres of land.
* L&pold Delisle, V Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age. See
pp. 8-17, an account of the position of the hospites, who, often burghers
in the town, were little better than serfs in the country.
t For example, the Marmosets of Charles V. ; but this king alsq
knighted numerous burghers of Paris. 224

} i
How the Poor livedjin the Fourteenth Century
— '" ¦ ¦ —
earned and the pence they saved? What was the
food they ate and the raiment they wore? The
schools they sent their children to, and the drugs
they brewed for themselves or bought in tirae of
sickness ? In examining this, we examine the sum
of continuous inglorious effort which, in a time of
unexampled disaster, helped France to bear up
against an untoward fate, and sent her down to
future ages,. prosperous and free.
The yeoman farmer, or vavassour, was the aris
tocrat of his condition ; his ancestors were freemen,
and he hiraself, though less than noble, had certain
of a noble's privileges : he was free to quit or sell
his estates at will, free to raarry whom he would ;
there were even vavassours who held their land by
military service. But as a class they paid a rent to
their lord, were constrained to till a portion of his
l.\nds, and to furnish him yearly with a draught-
iMjrse for his stable ; differing in this from the noble,
who held his lands by faith, by horaage, and by
military service, paid no rent, and owed no corvee.
Nevertheless a wealthy vavassour was, as we should
say, a country gentleman of the humbler sort: a
" half-sir," as they say in Ireland. In time of peace
he lived with a certain state and order ; in time of
war he carried a lance and rode to battle on horse
back, with his men behind him. There were, of
course, poor vavassours, who paid less rent and
performed a more considerable corvee, and (for the
limits of class were little less elastic then than now)
if sorae among the yeoman-farmers rose almost to
225 Q

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equality with the noble, there were also unthrifty
and ruined vavassours * who were merely the equals
of the saving cottager or the tenant on the estate.
The vavassour, or yeoman, with the colon or rich
farmer, formed an upper class among the rural popu
lation. Imraediately below them came the tenants-
on-the-estate, men who were not wholly free, who
raight not, for instance, sell their lands or raarry with
out the express perraission Of their feudal lord, and
who, should their seigneur be taken in battle, raight
be taxed to the verge of ruin in order to raise his
ransora. These raen, ih fact, were serfs ; but there were
degrees in servage. In the raeaning that we attach
to the word, servage was extinct by the end of the
fourteenth century. There was no acknowledged
exercise of arbitrary power. The relations of the
peasant to the lord of the raanor were as well de/ined
as those of the lord hiraself towards his fe-adal
suzerain. In theory, the peasant might not sell his
lands or marry without leave ; but, in practice, tbis
meant merely that he paid his landlord a slight ta x
on these occasions, even as we pay the death-dues to
the State on coming into an inheritance. Certainly
he was, in theory, " taillable et corveable d volonte / "
but these dues and corvees were alraost invariable ; they
were attached rather to the land than to the lessee/
A certain property carried with it a certain tax and
corvie, let who would be the tenant. That is to say,
that in an age when ready raoney was locked alraost
* For the fiiU description of the origin and class of vavassours, we
refer our reader to L, DeUsle, V Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age,
226

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
exclusively in the hands of the raerchants or in the
excommunicated treasury of the Jews, rent was paid,
not only in cash, but also in kind and in labour.
For instance, a farmer renting an estate worth ;^20
a-year, would agree to pay £$ in cash, ;^io in corn
and poultry, and the remaining £5 in a certain number
of days' labour spent in performing certain tasks,
always rigorously determined beforehand. These were
the corvie. It was left for later centuries to abuse a
custom which, in its origin, was at least as convenient
to the tenant as to the proprietor of the estate. The
tenant on the estate — serf as he was, and object of our
hereditary pity — occupied, in fact, a situation not un
like that which Mr. Chamberlain once wished to assure
to every cottager in his kingdom. In Normandy the
cottage and outhouses of the tenant covered a square
of eighty feet, the paddock and garden adjoining
measured two Norman acres — nearly six acres of
to-day. These dimensions appear to have been
invariable, but the araount of income derived from
the farra varied naturally with the quality of the soil
and the character of the tenant. A rich tenant-
farmer was the equal of an unthrifty yeoman, and it
was not uncommon for the sarae person to be a
tenant-farmer in the country and a provision-
merchant in the nearest market-town. The tenants
furnished raany thriving and adventurous recruits to
the burgher class. They were often men of means,
living very simply, and amassing year by year the
greater part of the profits of the farra. The names
pf many among them are registered as the donators
227

The Fields of France

of the abbeys and churches of their countryside.
Below this solid, thriving, and generous class, whose
serfdora in the fourteenth century was raerely the
matter of a traditionary tax or two, came the real
children of the soil, the peasants, villains, or rustics,
renters of a tiny holding, for which they paid with
little money and much service ; and, lower still, the
cottars, or labourers, holders of a mere hut and patch
of garden — raen who seldom, if ever, handled coin,
who paid for their bread with the sweat of their brow,
and for whom the heaviest corvies were reserved.
The corvies on all estates were pretty much the
same, I have never yet met in raediaeval docuraents
with anything resembling the refined and fantastic
corvees of the eighteenth century : no mediaeval
peasants that I know of were stationed by the moat
all night to beat the water with their flails and keep
the frogs frora croaking. The first and most essential
corvee of the fourteenth century — which cottars,
tenants, yeomen, were all alike compelled to perform
in due degree — was the service of transport
We can scarcely realize the difficulties of agricul
ture in an age when each countryside was constrained
to live almost exclusively upon its own resources.
The roads were so few, so bad, and so unsafe, that
rarely any product, however unnecessary in its im
mediate district, and however urgently needed a
hundred railes away, could be conveyed to the best
raarket. Thus, while raore than half of Normandy
was under forest, the monks on the marshes of the
Norman Cotentin had to cook their naeals and warni
228

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
their chill refectories in winter-time by a brief blaze of
straw and cow-dung. Corn, it is true, when thrashed
and ground, was sent from place to place ; but
bulkier crops, such as fodder, hay, and wood, were
rarely carried any distance. When the hay harvest
was ended, the farmer would calculate how many
head of cattle he could provide for through the winter
raonths, and at Martinmas he killed for salting as
many as exceeded his raeans of sustenance. There
was, moreover, a certain amount of carrying indis
pensable on every great estate : such as the transport
of raanure and raarl and lirae, for dressing the soi! ; the
carrying of the raaster's corn and wine to and from
the winepress and the raill ; and especially the cart
ing from the forest of the wood necessary for fuel
and repairs. For this first and typical corvie, the
yeoman gave a draught-horse, the tenant lent his
teara and cart, the cottar furnished the strength of
his thews and sinews. But this, like every other form
of corvie, might always be transmuted into a sum of
money. For the corvie, as we have said already, was
raerely one of the forras of rent With the service of
transport, the yeoraan's duties usually ended. Yet
he soraetimes, and the tenant-farmer always, was re
sponsible for the tilling of a certain specified number
of his master's acres. The full corvie, exacted of
rustics and cottars, comprised not only the service of
carrying and ploughing, but the duties of cleaning out
the manorial stables and outhouses, of digging for marl
and lime, of gathering raanure for the fields, of cutting
thatch for the roof, besides thrashing the corn, making
229

The Fields of France

the hay, cleaning the raoat, washing and shearing the
sheep, and helping in the vintage. It must be remem
bered that, although men on corvie received no pay,
they were very amply fed throughout the term of
their labours. We may therefore look upon the cottar
— the man who gave no raoney, but so many days a
week in all seasons to his master — as having signed
a contract to work a certain portion of his landlord's
estate in return for the usage of a smaller portion of
that sarae estate. He received in return for his service
and in addition to his plot of ground, a house to cover
him, tools to work with, and his full keep for every
day spent about his master's business.
II
France in the Middle Ages, and even in the
earlier half of the fourteenth century, was still a vast
agglomeration of heterogeneous races, each with
different custoras and different traditions. Aquitaine
was as English as Surrey was French ; Brittany was
still a separate and generally an inimical country ;
Burgundy, Provence, and even Pdrigord, were petty
sovereignties independent of the crown of France,
These different districts had each their different
manner of letting land and providing for its tillage.
But, in almost all of thera, French agriculture was
already reraarkable ; far superior, for instance, to that
of our own England, notwithstanding her temperate
winters and rich soil. The land, ploughed four times a
year in the south of France,* was ploughed only once
* Bonis.
230

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
in England,* and there is no record of any harrowing
or rolling. The crops chiefly grown in England were
wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and vetches ; hemp,
so abundant a crop in France, was less frequently
harvested. The English kitchen-garden was then, as
now, singularly deficient We, who to-day, as a rule,
possess neither chicory, cardoon, scarole, and hardly
any sorrel in our borders, who seldora stew or stuff a
cucumber, who are unaware what excellent soup may
be made frora a cabbage with a little butter, or even
from the water in which green peas have been boiled, —
we were still poorer in our invention during the Middle
Ages ; though, at least, in those days our dinners
were not saddened and soddened by the boiled potato,
" Onions, nettles, raustard, leeks, and peas were the
only esculent vegetables," according to Mr. Thorold
Rogers, " We probably also possessed cabbage, but
I have never found either seed or plants quoted." t
Meanwhile, across the Channel, brussels-sprouts
(or pommes-de-choux), three other kinds of cabbage,
winter-greens, spinach and sorrel, beetroot, carrots,
turnips, beans and peas, lettuce and even the larger
kind known as Romaine (introduced into France from
Avignon by Bureau de la Rividre), sweet basil, with
every kind of herb, no less than cucumbers, garlic,
leeks and onions, rhubarb and fennel, were in daily
and abundant cultivation. France in those days had
even dishes of which she has lost the trick to-day,
such as violet leaves, cooked like spinach or served as
* Thorold Rogers, i. 16.
t History of Prices, loe. cit,, and p, 66,
231

The Fields of France

a salad, the green ears of wheat boiled with melted
butter, and the young burgeons of the vine, dressed
with a sauce piquante ; additions to the table of which,
for sorae reason, we have disused the habit*
The fruit-garden in England was as behindhand
as the kitchen-garden. " We read of no plums, except
once of damsons." Fancy, choosing damsons ! We
had not yet invented our famous William pear,
which we have sent over to France, and which
to-day, in the gardens of Touraine, rivals the more
ancient Bon Chrdtien, already comraon there, and
celebrated in the fourteenth century. But, across
the Channel, the peaches of Anjou, the pluras of
Orleans, the figs of Poitiers, the French grapes and
alraonds, had nothing to fear from any competition.
Apples were, however, about equally abundant in
the kingdom of King Edward and in the kingdora of
the Valois ; and we may suppose that the wild fruits
of the cherry, raspberry, and strawberry, domesticated
in every French potager, could not have been quite
utterly unknown in England.
If the English, then as now, were little acquainted
with the charm and cheapness of a vegetable diet then
as now their meat was better and less expensive than
in France ; and English wool was quite unrivalled. The
chief wealth of the Anglo-Saxon farmer grew on the
* See especially the treatise on gardening in the Menagier de Paris.
There is also a valuable chapter on the kitchen-garden iu M. L. Delisle's
V Agriculture Normande au Moyen Age. Most of the plants quoted
were already grown in the gardens of Charlemagne.
232

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
curly backs of his flock. Wool frora the fat raeadows
of England was exported in exchange for wine frora
the dry and sunny slopes of France. Another national
industry had begun to develop : English hops and
English beer were already widely known, and cora-
pensated for the acidity of English wine. The vine,
grown round many a monastery in the south of our
island, never received — and, owing to our watery sun
shine, never could receive — any extensive culture. It
is most unlikely, in an age when the wines of Gascony
and English Bordeaux were continually introduced
into the mother country, that English wine was at any
tirae grown for drinking. It was probably cultivated
for the service of the Mass, in sraall quantities round
every abbey, as in Norraandy. The accidents of
warfare might intercept the vessels that brought the
wines of Gascony to English shores ; and thus, but
for the humble vineyards of Kent and Middlesex,
an uniraportant incident of the Hundred Years' War
raight practically, at any moment, have placed the
English people under ban of excoraraunication.

Ill
We have seen that in Normandy, as in England,
the farmer paid his landlord partly in raoney
and partly in labour ; but raore in money and in
labour than in kind. In the south of France the
system was somewhat different ; the tenant paid his
proprietor chiefly in the produce of the land. Owing
to the kindness of Madame Marcel Dieulafoy I have
233

The Fields of France

been able to looTc through several leases of farms
near Toulouse at the present time ; and I have been
interested, and even surprised, to see how little the
leases of the farms round Montauban, in 1350, pub
lished by M. Forestier in the Accounts of the Brothers
Bonis, differ from the actual leases in use to-day for
farms let en mitayage in the south of France.
The mediaeval farmer in Aquitaine and Gascony
was siraply a partner of the proprietor, for the ex
ploitation of his lands and stock — a ' bouraan,' as I
believe they still say in Scotland. The one furnished
the land, the cattle, and even the implements, as well
as the seed for the first sowing. The other supplied
his time, his labour, the keep of cattle, and the repair
of instruments. The increase was generally divided
equally between the two partners, save in the case of
wheat and wine, of which the landlord usually re
served himself a larger share. This is the system of
mitayage still in use in the south of France to-day.
Here is a lease for the year 135 1, drawn up between
the merchant Bonis, of Montauban, and two of his
" gasaillers," or farmers,
"Montauban. 2nd October, 1351.
"The Second October, 135 1, we agreed for the
lease with R. Picard and RocheUe, our Gasaillers,
And we agreed that I shall sow or give the seed.
We shall share the harvest in the field au tiers et d, la
moitie [a third for wheat and half for other grains],
the largest half being mine. The meadows and
other lands are to remain as before : i.e. Picard and
234

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
RocheUe are to pay me an annual rent of two livres
[let us say, ;^8 sterling]."
In another lease, for the year 1353, the farmer
takes the arable land and cedes half its produce ; but
for the house, the garden, and as much meadow-land
as a raan would take two days to raow, he pays a
yearly rental in money of forty sols, and a quit-rent
of ten brace of capons. The same leases give us
particulars as to the wages of farm-servants in the
south of France. In 1358 a cowherd received nine
livres a year and a pair of shoes. Now, historians are
pretty generally agreed that the fourteenth-century
livre represents about a hundred francs of our money.
At this valuation, our Gascon neatherd received the
equivalent of nine hundred francs in modern currency :
that is to say, ^'36. A swineherd was paid four livres
a year and his shoes ; a shepherd, six livres a year
(;^24) and his shoes ; an old woman-servant, two livres
a year (about £8), her shoes and a warm petticoat ; for
in those days, as in these, the servants on a Gascon
farm were housed and fed at the expense of the
farmer. Thus the rate of rustic wages was sensibly
higher than it is to-day, when twenty pounds a year
are considered excellent wages for a labourer on a
farm. It is true that a modern shepherd or a head-
cowboy has certain perquisites which raise his wage
to very nearly the amount paid in the fourteenth
century. But we cannot talk of progress.
There were several ways of hiring stock. On
most farms the cattle were supplied by the landlord,
the tenant being bound, at the expiry of his lease, to
23s

hnWiteHaMfeiiaUUSUi

The Fields of France

restore the flock and herds in the same condition
as he found thera. They were also let out on hire,
RocheUe, the farmer of Bonis, hires from his landlord
a pair of oxen worth twelve livres ; for the use of
them he pays every year a rent of three septiers of
wheat (about 650 litres), but for every septier of wheat
he is accounted to have acquired a right to one-twelfth
part of the cattle, so that at the end of four years the
team was to become the property of RocheUe, This
system (not unlike the three years' hire system, by
which raany people of the raodern raiddle class
acquire their more expensive furniture) was very
widely spread throughout the southern provinces.
The ploughs, carts, reaping-hooks, rakes, flails,
scythes, spades, shovels, winepresses, benches, taps,
and barrels, etc., necessary on every estate, were let
with the land upon a repairing lease.
The Hundred Years' War, with its train of ruin
and depopulation, introduced the disastrous fashion
of mortgaging the cattle on a farm. The unhappy
tenant, at his wits' end for ready money to pay the
taxes and to defray the expenses of his farm, sold his
herds to sorae farraer a little less wretched than
hiraself, with the proviso that, for a stipulated nuraber
of years, he was to keep on using the cattle and to
reserve a certain portion of their produce. Thus one
Colin Bois du Mesnil-Patrl, near Caen, seUs to Guil-
laurae le Pauraier, of St Pierre, nine and twenty
sheep, two red cows, two calves, a two-year-old steer,
and a mare for the trifling sum of eight livres fifteen
236

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
sols (say £3^), reserving the use of them and half
their produce during the three years next ensuing,*
This disastrous practice naturally deprived the pea
sants of their very means of sustenance, of the only
manner in which they could work their land ; it was
certain ruin unless, in the three years' breathing-space
assured them by the mortgage, sorae unusual harvest
or happy turn of their affairs should enable them to
lay aside a sum sufficient to stock the farra afresh.
Sheep in those days cost, as a rule, ten sols per
head (say £2), alive and unshorn,t though when dead
and skinned a sheep could be had for a tenth the
price.f At the present tirae in Gascony the normal
price for a live sheep is two and thirty francs. An
ox cost from two to six livres, a cow about three livres
(;^I2), Pigs were dear, costing each between two and
three livres, a price apparently in excess of modern
values. The horse was less esteemed than the ox for
agricultural purposes ; he cost as much, or raore, to
buy, and a great deal raore to keep ; you could not
eat hira, he has no horns, and his skin was far less
valuable as hide. Still, the horse was indispensable to
travel. We give a list of the prices that he fetched
in the Comtd d'Eu between 1382 and 1388 : —
Livres. Sols. Deniers.
I horse . . . . . . . . 2 10 o
I hackney . . . . . . . . 2 10 o
I tall grey horse . . . . . . i 10 o
The horse called Rage-en-tete . . 2 10 o
The roan hackney . . .. .. 2 10 o§
* Delisle, p. 221. f Delisle, p. 616.
t Thorold Rogers, i. 54. § Delisle, p. 583.
237

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And in Picardy, in 1389— Livres. Sols. Deniers.
A bay hackney . . • . . , I lo o
A black horse . . . . . . 7 O O
A grey nag . . , , . . . . 5 ^ ^
A pair of greys . . . . . . 10 o o •
The inventories published in the Accounts of
Bonis show us that, on a sraall farm, at any rate, a
pair of oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs and a sow,
a good deal of poultry, and a swarm of bees were
usually kept In my chapter on Touraine, you will
see that this is about the stock of a similar holding
to-day. We cannot estimate the price of these
animals at less than twenty livres ; few small pro
prietors could stock their farm out of their savings.
Therefore, in districts where the hire-and-purchase
system did not obtain, it was customary for the large
farraer to let out his beasts to the poorer one ; the
oxen at a rate of frora five to six sols per year, the
sheep at about one sol per annum and per head ;
the milk and the young, of course, belonging to the
tenant.

IV
As a rule, then as now, the person who made the
largest profit on his land was the very small pro
prietor. Many circumstances corabined to favour
him in the end of the Middle Ages. The cost of
labour was high ; he with his family could run the
* Rigistres du CMtelet, i, p. 3 ; and ii. pp. 100, 351, 370, 460,
and 461, '
238

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
farm without paid assistance. In a time when the
main profits of agriculture were derived from the sale
of wool, cheese, butter, and other products of live
stock, the man with little land might yet possess
considerable herds. A very slight tax, paid either in
labour or in kind to the lord of the manor, secured
him the right to pasture his cattle on the wide grassy
borders of the lanes and in the interminable forests
that covered half of France ; the sheep were driven
to pasture in the salt-marshes, one in every flock
being yielded, as a sort of tithe or rent, to the owner
of the land. In winter-time the right of pasture in
stubble or aftermath was common to all the cattle of
a commune. The tenant who owned all these flocks
of swine and sheep, fattened on the acorns and grasses
of the raanor, had probably round his cabin a few
acres of harvest-land and little else. He possessed
neither draught oxen nor horses for the ploughing, but
paid one of his wealthier neighbours for this service.
Over and over again we find the records of sirailar
transactions ; the price given varied according to the
extent and quality of the fields to be furrowed.*
At harvest-tirae, then as now, the peasant farmer
could engage a man by the day to help him in the
stress of work ; the labourer usually received his meals
and about one sol per day,t — say five francs — ^which
is much what he would receive at the present time.
'* Bonis, cxcvii.
t Rigistres du ChAtelet : varlet thatcher, one sol and his keep (i. 393).
Joubert, Fie privie en Anjou : hedgers paid per day, one sol and their
food (p. 98). Thorold Rogers : for mowing an acre, S^d. ; harvesters
for carting corn, one sol two deniers, and their food (i. 255).
239

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We have now a fair idea of the expenses of farm
ing. The profits then as now were mainly the sale
of wool and hides, of beasts, of corn, of wine or cider.
The price of these articles, due proportion being
guarded, has not varied in any surprising fashion.
The average price of corn (which in the terrible years
that followed Poitiers rose to thirty sols) was fifteen
sols the septier, let us say thirty shillings the hecto
litre ; owing to the quantity of foreign corn iraported,
it does not fetch raore than half as much to-day, but
on account of our iraproveraent in agriculture, an
acre of land yields twice as large a harvest as in the
Middle Ages, so that the profit to the farraer is about
the same. The coraraonest vin ordinaire appears to
have been worth thirty-two deniers the septier — a
little more than a halfpenny the litre ; but the wine
usually served in country taverns cost four deniers
the pint * (about \s. ^d. the bottle, shall we say) —
which is more than a "Gladstone claret" commands
in France to-day. That used in our kitchen, the
comraon household wine in France in 1903, costs, if
bought by the barrel, a little more than fourpence a
litre, but this is on account of the extravagant tax
paid to the State ; it ought not to cost more than
twopence, at most A butcher at Evreux, in 1371,
values two small oxen at four livres five sols ; while a
large ox of Tallevaude, in 1383, is worth six livres.
As it happens, this price, which we may reckon as four
and twenty pounds, is just five pounds less than the
* Rigistres du CMtelet, i. 427, 448, 558, et passim; and ii. 497.
240

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
average price given by French country butchers for a
fine full-grown beast to-day.
The houses of the farmers and the country people
differed (then as now) according to their rank and
prosperity, and also according to the district they
inhabited. The yeoman farmer, and even the well-
to-do husbandman, dwelt in a solid house of brick
or stone, tiled or slated, with a paved yard separating
it from the barns, the outhouses, the dairy, and cattle-
pens. The farm-house — which, in England, was always
constructed with a southern aspect — as invariably
faced the east in Aquitaine, while to the rear, well
open to the west, was a long tiled verandah, where, in
winter afternoons, the hemp-picking, the wool-carding,
the threshing, &c., was done.* Within, the vast kitchen
glowed in the light ofthe fire — almost as unextinguish-
able as the vestal virgin's ; peat, coal, and wood were
each abundantly eraployed ; and for a trifling rent,
generally paid in kind or labour, the lord of the
raanor would permit the farmers on his land to cut
their turfs from his bog, or their boughs from his forest.
Fuel was not only actually, but relatively cheaper in
the Middle Ages than to-day ; for the bogs were not
drained in those days, the forests covered great ex
panses, and the cost of carriage made it almost
impossible to transport their produce. In nearly
every part of France and England the supply of fuel
was in excess of the demand.
This hospitable fire flared up a chimney propor
tioned to its size, lighting the huge brick oven, the
* Bonis, p. cxciii.
241 R

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iron fire-dogs, the bellows, shovel, gridiron, ladles,
cauldrons, saucepans, raortar, tin pails, and other
utensils that stood on the brackets of the hearth ;
and irradiating the brass and copper pots, the raetal
candlesticks, the lamp, the lantern, the not unfrequent
silver beaker, and the glass drinking-cups, that were
ranged on the chests and cupboards round the walls.*
Near this fire stood a high-backed settle, the master's
ingle corner ; and under the great mantel of the
chimney narrower benches were set in the brick.
Within easy reach of the hearth, a deep oak chest
held the logs for burning. It was generally matched
by a handsorae wedding-chest with carved or painted
front, long enough to contain a grown person full-
length (as the readers of Ginevra will raournfully
reraember), but raore usually filled, it must be ad
mitted, with the best clothes, the trinkets, and the
savings of the household. The Registers of the Chdtelet
record no crime so coramon as the breaking open of
such wedding-chests ; and it is surprising how many
clasps or jewels, girdles of pearls, golden head-dresses
and rings, and purses full of gold, were stolen from
quite humble households. Living in tiraes when the
letting out of raoney at interest was both insecure
and considered a deadly sin, our forefathers invested
their capital in cups or trinkets of precious metal,
pretty to look at, easy to hide, and readily converted
into cash when necessity demanded a sacrifice.
The windows of this great kitchen were almost
¦* See the farm inventory in Joubert's ViePrivleen Anjou au XVme.
siicle.

242

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
always small and rarely glazed : conceive it as a
great stone cavern lit up by an undying fire that
played on glittering surfaces. The light came chiefly
from the hearth, or from the home-raade rushlights
of the north, the flaring pine-torches of the south,
which lit the spinning wives and raaidens, when at
close of day they clustered round the fire. In the
daytime the kitchen was a dusky place, as indeed it
is still in most French country places, where its
aspect has singularly little altered. Sometiraes the
only aperture, besides the door and chimney, was such
a small square window as may be seen to-day in the
cottages of Savoy, pasted over with a piece of oiled
linen, impervious to the air. Often a heavy shutter,
raade of one slab of polished oak, protected a sraall
uncovered lattice, shutting with a spring. These
houses, so hygienically built to face the rising or the
mid-day sun, could receive scarce a ray of its purify
ing light. Doubtless the vast chiraney and the day
long fire sufficed to ventilate their dark recesses.
In one of the deepest of these recesses, well out
of the way, was placed the bed — a bed such as we
can barely iraagine, a faraily four-poster ! Here
reposed the father and the raother, several of the chil
dren, and — (readers of the Heptameron will remember
this striking custora, which continued into the six
teenth century) — and the stranger within their gates.*
A share of this araple couch was considered a special
honour offered to a guest of note. The bed, if little
private, was generally comfortable. The invoice of
* Joubert. 243

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a day-labourer's widow, taken at Montauban in 1345,*
proves her to possess two feather-beds, with pillows,
fifteen linen sheets, four striped yellow counterpanes.
In much poorer households the bed was soraetimes
stuffed with straw,t but nearly every mention we
have of the bedding of the time proves it to have
been no less ample, corafortable (nor, indeed, less
cleanly) than in country places at the present day.
In this respect the French were, and are to-day, far
before the English, whom Mr. Thorold Rogers shows
us sleeping on a rude and sheetless bed, covered by
night with the garments in daily wear.J
Such was the house-place of the well-to-do : one
room, but well furnished and spacious. Yet in 1417,
Petit Pas and Isabel his wife, labourers of Vaux
(Oise), have two rooms in their " ostel " (our Cantal
ostiau), a " foyer " and a " eharabre," a but and a ben,
as we raight say, separated by an earthen wall. The
rich yeoraan was more amply lodged ; and the manor-
house contained, as a rule, three rooms : the hall, the
dormitory, and the parlour.§ But the cottars dwelt in
* Comptes des Prires Bonis, Marchands de Montauban, publie par
M. Edouard M. Forestier, 1890, p. ccx.
t ChAtelet, ii. 509 : " They took the bed, pulled the straw out of it,
threw it in the chimney, and set fire to it."
% Thorold Rogers, History, i. 13.
§ See Vaissiere, Gentilshommes Campagnards de V Ancienne France ;
see also Thorold Rogers, History of Prices, i. 13. See ibid., inventory
of John Senekworth's effects, for the furniture of a Cambridgeshire manor
in 1314. We notice six sheets, a mattress, a coverlet, a counterpane,
a " banker " or stuffed cushion for a bench, three cushions, three table
cloths and two napkins, two drinking glasses, four silver spoons,
basin and ewer, two silver seals, and three books of romance I
244

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
far hurabler habitations. The sraall thatched cabins of
Norraandy were replaced in the centre of France by
mere huts, generally built of plastered wattle, but
sometiraes no more than a rude lattice, of which the
interstices were bunged with straw or hay ; such as
Nicolette built for herself in the forest, weaving it of
boughs in their green leaves ; such as to-day the
suraraering shepherds construct, in an hour or two, on
any down. Three such huts — one for the peasant, one
for his cattle, one for his crops — stood round a paven
yard.* The door of the hut in which the cottar lived
with his faraily was divided laterally at about six feet
frora the ground, so that, while the lower part was
closed, the upper door or shutter might reraain open
to adrait the air and let out the sraoke. For in these
cabins there was frequently no other window. There
was often no chimney, save a hole in the roof. The
food was cooked over a brazier of charcoal, a scaldino,
such as the poor people use to-day in Italy ; but
owing to the rising of the fumes, save in very windy
weather, there was little smoke.
The people who lived so simply had better tools
and more numerous impleraents than we suppose.
Most countryraen possessed a ladder, a hand-raill,
an axe, a crowbar, nails, a gimlet, hedge-clippers,
a branding iron, a wheelbarrow, and often a light cart,
a plough, harness, reaping-hooks, scythes, a hoe,
spade, rake, flail, sieve, bushel, knife, hammer, a long
ferruled staff, a bow; many owned a lance, and
some a sword and bucklenf The Gascon labourer's
* Douet d'Arcq, ii. 139. 6. t Joubert, La 'Vie Privie en Anjou.
245

The Fields of France

widow already mentioned possessed a corn-mill, a
tin washtub, a metal warming-pan, two brass water-
jugs, two pint pots, a metal bowl, two metal pots,
four bottles, a cauldron, a pestle and mortar, a salt-
box, a pail, two iron tripods, a copper box, two large
chests, a cupboard, a box, four trestle-tables, a bench,
a carpenter's bench and tools, two baking-tubs, one
kneading-trough, two corn-chests, and a large table,
besides two axes, four lances, a crossbow, a scythe,
and other arms and tools. We doubt if she would
be better off" to-day. The inventory of a farmer's
stock of the sarae date and place (Montauban, 1345)
contains four kneading-troughs, a large funnel, one
winepress with screws, four tuns, eight casks, three
barrels, and two kegs ; a lead alerabic for distilling,
a cauldron, two metal water-jugs, cooking utensils ;
two wool-cards, three carding-combs for hemp, two
spades, two flails, three reaping-hooks, one scythe,
one crossbar, two carpenters' benches and tools, one
shovel, two iron goads ; a cart and harness ; two
oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs, two sows, and
a swarm of bees. Probably raany a squatter's ranch
is little better stocked.

V

The food of country people in the fourteenth
century was chiefly pork, in all its forms of bacon,
ham, brawn, or blood-pudding; and pork was re
latively little cheaper than it is in many a remote
and rural place to-day. Butter, cheese, eggs were
246

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
very plentiful; herrings were an article of almost
daily diet (they cost a sol the hundred, about a
halfpenny apiece), and in the north of France people
consumed freely a kind of salted whale called cras-
pois, a truly Viking dish, of which the popularity
has wholly vanished.* In Normandy pea-soup was
then, as now, a favourite food.* Wine, beer, and
mead were drunk by all classes. In 1392, a home
less pin-maker on the trarap breakfasts off wine
and fish ; f workraen out of eraployraent dine at
the village inn off bread, meat, and red wine at
fourpence the pint.t In the same year the pro
visions left in the house of the wife of the Duke of
Bourbon's minstrel were : bacon to the value of four
sous or shillings, six large loaves of bread, a great
pot full of green peas, two penn'orth of onions, and a
shilling'sworth of salt.§ But the best criterion we
get of the daily food of the rural population is the
record preserved in the accounts of raanors and
raonasteries of the dinners afforded to labourers on
corvee, or doled out day by day in return for some
bounden service. Thus, the smith of the monastery
of Jumidges received in return for his occasional
services a daily ration of two small loaves, a measure
of wine of medium quality, and either six eggs, four
herrings, or some equivalent dish.|| A vintager of
St. Ouen, on corvie, was supplied every day with two
* Leopold Delisle, D Agriculture Normande, p. 189.
t Rigistres du Chdtelet ioi 1392, i. 174.
X Ibid., 427.
§ Ibid., 526.
II Delisle, L' Agriculture Normande, 189.
247

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rolls and a mess of peas and bacon with salt* A
tenant of the monks of Bayeux, during his corvie,
was entitled to a daily meal of a white loaf, a brown
loaf, five eggs, or three herrings, with a gallon of beer.t
The monks of Montebourg gave each of their men a
loaf, a raess of pea-soup, three eggs, and the quarter
of a cheese, or, if they chose, six eggs, and no cheese ;
on fast days they made shift with three herrings and
some nuts : they washed down this ample meal with
as much beer as they chose to drink.f A tenant of
the monks of St. Ouen received, in return for his
corvie, not only bread and wine, pea-soup and bacon,
but fresh or salt beef and poultry. All this is in
Normandy, In Anjou, the men on corvie dine raore
sparely off wine and bread and garlic ; but the
carpenters on a farm receive in addition to a daily
wage of one sol eight deniers, five penn'orth of meat
per person ; the hedgers and ditchers also dine off
bread and meat.J In almost every one of the
numerous records that we have of the daily fare of
the labouring class in fourteenth-century France, we
find a dish of eggs, a raess of peas and bacon, half a
chicken, a few herrings, or a generous slice of meat,
added to the modern labourer's too frequent nun-
cheon of bread and cheese and beer.
Our rural ancestors of every class went well and
warmly clad. The farm labourers of the fourteenth
century wore better garments than our ploughmen
use to-day. Men of every class appear to have
* V Agriculture Normande. f Ibid., igo,
J Joubert, 'Vie Privie en Anjou, p. 94,
248

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
possessed linen shirts and linen drawers, hose of
strong cloth, and leather shoes ; a coat of warm
russet or fustian, an ample cloak resembling the
Limousin of Auvergne, or Tuscan Ferraiuolo, and
(sometimes attached to this garment, soraetiraes
separate) a long-tailed hood of cloth. Masons,
labourers, workmen of every class, completed this
costurae by a pair of gloves : London gloves were
held in high esteera. Bonis, the raerchant of Mon
tauban, sold them to his country clients at seven sols
the dozen.
The women were as sensible in their attire. They
all wore a long cheraise of linen, and over this a
garraent called a doublet, in forra reserabling the
linen bodice sewn to a white petticoat, which is still
used in dressing little girls. The wedding doublet of
the butcher's daughter of Montauban took about five
yards of fine white linen of Paris, costing fifteen sols
the ell — a raeasure which exceeded the raodern metre
by about two nails. The butcher was evidently a
man of means ; for we find his wife ordering some
doublets for herself at ;^3 ioj. apiece, while a neigh
bouring noble's wife spends not quite half as much
on those selected for her wardrobe. The wife of
another burgher chooses three and twenty doublets,
delicate in quality and of a vermeil colour. Over
this garment the woraen of the fourteenth century
put a tight long bodice of strong cloth, to which they
attached, by hooks or lacets, a pair of tight long
sleeves, generally of sorae costly raaterial, silk being
249

The Fields of France

used on great occasions even by the poorer classes.
Over this, again, they slipped a very long dress,
touching the ground on all sides, tight in the bodice,
but sleeveless, or with loose hanging sleeves ; it was
generally much triraraed with silk and braid. A farra-
servant buys a piece of red silk to trim her gonella,
another chooses one of blue cloth worth one livre :
the simplest that we find, which is made of a coarse
pale cloth called blanket, comes, with the triramings,
to nearly fourteen sols. The gown was surraounted
by a heavy girdle, richly ornamented, from which the
purse and keys of the house- wife dangled. Out-of-
doors a long draped mantle, triraraed to match the
gonella, was usually worn.
The women of the later fourteenth century were
fastidious in dressing their hair. We all know the
hennin, the tall slender sugar-loaf of buckram, from
which floated a gauzy veil. The peasants naturally
did not wear this inconvenient and romantic head
dress. They braided their hair with ribbons and
galoons intertwined in every plait A woraan with
long hair would use about seven yards of ribbon ;
over this she placed a strong net of silk or thread ;
the whole was enveloped in a veil or mantilla of thin
silk, the favourite ornament of country-woraen, and
frequently given as a wedding-present A very
handsorae veil of German silk would cost as much as
seventeen sols ; a comraoner one, of good Aleppo
silk, frora five to ten sols; still a raantilla quite
presentable in appearance, of a rougher silk, could
be had as low as three sols (we may suppose about
250

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
twelve shillings of our money). Almost every
peasant in well-to-do circumstances afforded his wife
and daughter this piece of elegance, probably only
worn on great occasions. The artisans, small farmers,
and farra servants of the fourteenth century were less
econoraical in ornaraent than their descendants.
The butcher of the little country town of Montauban
gives his daughter, for her wedding day, a silver
necklace, a purse, a girdle of silk, a string of araber
beads, a pair of erabroidered gloves, a veil or raantilla
of Gerraan silk, two silk nets for her hair, and raany-
coloured silks and threads for the erabroidery of her
wedding-gown. An artisan affords his child a veil of
Gerraan silk, a net to raatch, a string of araber, a
purse and girdle, the whole expense coraing to £i 6s.,
or about five guineas of our currency. A servant on
one of Bonis' farms buys for his wife a silk wimple ;
gloves, hair-ribbons, and ornamented hair-nets are
comraon fairings.
We see all these good people, arrayed soberly or
splendidly according to their rank, but alraost always
corafortably dressed, as we turn the pages of the
Accounts of Bonis or the palpitating Registers of the
Chdtelet (the Newgate Calendar of an earlier age).
Along the country roads the notary jogs on business,
dressed in violet cloth richly furred, solidly seated on
his araple cob. He passes the country squire (the
grandchild of the last rich semi-noble vavassour)
hooded in black parti-coloured russet, and wrapped
in a houppelande of English green, furred with
squirrel, the long end of his cloak thrown over the
251

The Fields of France

left shoulder. The shepherd on the hill drives his
flock; he is warmly clad in strong brown woollen.
The thatcher, as he steps across the fields from his
daughter's churching, is dressed all in his best in a
large check of brown and white and blue. There stands
the farmer, all in sombre russet, with an elegant hood
striped black and yellow; there are gold rings on his
hand, worn over his gloves ; there are gold clasps to
his girdle. At the little village inn, the serving-maid
comes out, dressed in iron-grey, with a bunch of pink
roses in her hands. The mason of the hamlet stands
at his gate, chatting with a fellow ofhis craft, and with
a trarap in search of work ; the horae-staying workraan
is well clad in whitish-grey, with darker grey hose
and grey-blue hood ; the traveller has a long brown
cottehardie, lined with an old coat, a brown hood
buckled under the chin, brown hose, and strong
leather shoes with steel buckles. At the corner of
the road a wandering beggar waits for airas, dressed
in a mantle of faded russet patched with an older light-
blue garment, and a hood of Heaven knows what
colour, not worth two deniers. His wife squats
beside him, slovenly dressed in an old patched
cassock tied round her waist with a reed. She has
no hair, and a strip of dirty cloth tied round her head
but half conceals her baldness. They are the only
really shabby people that we meet (save the wander
ing friars, who make a virtue of it) ; but few are so
magnificent as the drover, a person of importance, it
would appear, from the quality and the quantity of
his purchases. The goat-herd and the shepherd are
252

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
all in russet ; but see the drover as he comes home
from raarket resplendent in his raantle checked with
black and green : he sports a hood striped with grey
and yellow ; hood and cloak are in accordance with
the raost fashionable standard of the day. Here out
in the fields we seldora use such brilliant colours :
russet, blanket, grey, blue, and English green are our
usual wear. It is only when the knight, the doctor,
or the raerchant frora the town is drawn this way that
we see the real taste of the bon ton : the parti-coloured
green and verraeil, white and blue, vert perdu and
slate colour, yellow and black, white and verraeil,
that are, with the universal black and green, the last
cry of the mode. Both check and stripe are popular
alike in town and country.

VI
If not in every village, at least in every chdtellerie,
there was a doctor, a surgeon or a barber surgeon ; *
the labourers appear to have used their services freely
and to have rewarded them with liberality. One of
Bonis' day-labourers falling ill, sends to Montauban
for the physician of the place, and pays him for
several visits the sum of 4 sols 2 deniers — which we
may corapare to nearly £\ 15J. of our money.
Another pays his doctor as rauch as 18 sols, say
£¦3 I2S. And in the Accounts of Bonis we find
frequent mentions of drugs and medicinal spices of
*¦ Joubert, Vie Privie en Anjou, p, 60,
253

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an expensive sort, sold to the agricultural labourers
of the district
The doctors of the Middle Ages and later, even
so late as the raiddle of the fifteenth century, were
chiefly inspired by the theories of the Arabs. Louis
XL, as we know, ordered the Paris University to
copy in extenso the great work of Aboo Bekr ibn
Zacaria er Razi, the famous physician of the tenth
century, whose masterpiece. El Mansoori, is a com
pendium of Arabian therapeutics. This book, cora
monly known as " Razi," was very popular throughout
the fourteenth century. A copy of it, bought by
Bonis for four livres, assisted him in the preparation
of his drugs, and of the plasters, unguents, electuaries
and tisanes especially in request among a fourteenth-
century rural population.
It may be interesting to examine a few of the
remedies employed, Rheumatisra, that special raisery
of those that work in the wintry fields, was treated
externally by the application of a plaster of cordials
and aroraatic guras spread on a thin piece of silk. The
part affected was also rubbed with an ointraent (costing
seven sols) made of four ounces of turpentine and
two ounces of white wax, one ounce of resin, one
ounce of myrrh, two ounces of bol d'Arminie, and two
ounces of oil of roses ; * it was then covered with a
sheet of wadding. Complaints of the skin were treated
by an unguent coraposed of a quarter of a pound of
raarsh-mallow, a quarter of a pound of white wax, a
quarter of a pound of olive oil, an ounce of incense,
* Bonis, cxxi,
254

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
and an ounce of turpentine; medicated baths were also
recomraended. Sulphur was freely used. Aniseed was
given as a specific against indigestion, with camomile.
Quassia amara, camphor, and essence of cinnaraon.
Coughs and colds were cured by a sudorific tea of
rose and camomile; by a milk of almonds mixed
with starch and sugar, almost exactly resembling the
delicious looch of modern France : by an infusion of
pectoral flowers (mallow, violet, &c.), as well as by
lozenges of gum arable and barley sugar.* In severe
cases the physicians of the Middle Ages administered
the faraous theriac of Nero, the Theriacus Andromachi,
composed of opium powdered with some tannic bitter
substance, together with sulphate of iron, and some
two and forty active aroraatic essences, such as turpen
tine, Cingalese cinnaraon, valerian, citron, rose, etct
A labourer at Bloxhara, in Oxfordshire, was treated
for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel and
squills.f Disorders of the intestines were pretty
generally combated by starch water, alum, and the
astringent bol dArmenie. Senna tea was also an
ingredient in the humblest raedicine chest. Besides
the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon,
caraphor, resin, and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice,
dried prunes, and honey of roses were constantly
eraployed. Oxide of zinc raixed with camphor § was
* All these remedies are taken from the Accounts of Bonis, loe,
cii., et seq.
t Henri de Parville, "Revue des Sciences,'' in Has Journal des
Dibats, 23rd January, 1890.
X Thorold Rogers, i. 399.
§ Bonis. 255

The Fields of France

also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The
hot bath and the vapour bath were highly esteeraed,
though less frequent perhaps, than in the earlier Middle
Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried through all
the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century
there was no town in any way considerable without
at least one etablissement de bains. We find in the
Registers of the Chdtelet that a hot bath was a sorae
what expensive luxury, costing several sols. The
prolonged warra baths in honour at the Court of
Charles VI. were a scandal to the Church, and are
denounced in a faraous sermon of Jacques le Grand.
Besides the remedies we have quoted, it raust be
allowed that others raore fantastic were occasionally
used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy informed me
that I need never suffer frora migraine, for I could tie
a live pigeon on ray head, and let it depose its excre
ment on my hair : a certain reraedy. He assured rae
also that his sister, whom the doctor from Vic had
declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs,
had been saved by the presence of raind of his
raother : she slit up a live cat, placed half the palpi
tating creature on the back, half on the breast of the
patient, who iraraediately recovered. Doubtless these
medicines were known in the fourteenth century. An
equally absurd but more elaborate sort were used
especially at court and in the treatment of great
personages. But our agricultural labourers, who
thought twice before they changed their silver sou,
though they may have split up a cat, were not
accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the Accounts
256

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
of Bonis, we find only two receipts that are patently
unreasonable ; and these are the most expensive. One
of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the other
an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax,
pounded with " half an ounce of rauramy." But the
cold creams and cosraetics of the present day are not
always conspicuous for science ; we raight find nos
trums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame
Georgine Champbaron. And, indeed, it may be
doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of the
Middle Ages were not soraetiraes as successful against
the nervous maladies in which they were most often
used, as the Lourdes water, the hypnotising-mirrors,
and the various patent raedicines so capriciously in
fallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their
humble, painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as
now, the virtues of friction and wadding against lum
bago ; the pepperraint tea that calras the colic ; the
plaster of boiled poppy-heads applied against the
raging tooth. The old raan, struggling with his
asthma, had almost as good an opiate ; the feverish
child, tossing under its doubled blanket, a potion
almost as sudorific, as we should find in any country
place to-day.
Apart from their special virtues, the medicines of
the Middle Ages had a very high hygienic value.
They were unusually powerful prophylactics. In an
article on the " Workmen of Paris," published some
years ago in the Fortnighty Review, I quoted from
the Annales of the Institut-Pasteur a series of experi
ments made by MM, Cadiac and Meunier establishing
257 s

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the microbicide effect of Cingalese cinnamon ; while
the oil of pinks, the essences of valerian, thyme,
citron, rose, etc., employed in almost every mediae
val recipe, are each and all raore hostile to the
microbe than the iodoform treatment employed against
typhoid fever in the Paris hospitals to-day. I advance
this assertion with all due discretion, since I have
never made any single experiment, and am not in a
position to control the opinion of experts ; but since
the vanguard of science adraits so high a value in
the drugs eraployed by our benighted ancestors, we
may allow that the pleasantries in vogue on the
subject are possibly overstated or misplaced.

VII
If the fourteenth-century village was less ill off
than we are apt to imagine it in regard to the
medicines of the body, it appears that the training
of the mind was less absolutely non-existent in the
rural class than it has been our habit to assert.
Many of the labourers on the farras of Bonis could
sign their naraes, though probably their science in
writing ended there. But every tenant-farmer, in an
age when the accounts of tenant and landlord were
peculiarly complicated, was obliged to know a certain
araount of book-keeping : doubtless the steward was
often more learned than his lord. Hedge-schools
were common ; * in every considerable village, if not
• Joubert, p. 60. But see especially for this subject the masterly
258

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
in every hamlet, there was a schoolmaster, appointed
generally by the patron of the viUage living. There
was a certain regulated nuraber of parish schools in
every county, and this number might not be ex
ceeded : our ancestors never could be brought to
recognize the advantages of competition. Certain
texts, however, prove the existence of unauthorized
hedge-schools, proraptly quashed as soon as they
came to the knowledge of the authorities.
The Great Plague, which so changed the face of
Europe, diminished education by , carrying off the
schoolmasters. The Continuator of Guillaume de
Nangis reraarks that, after the epideraic of 1348,
there were not enough teachers for the requirements
of the houses, hamlets, and castles of his country.
Thus the sons of the men who fought at Crecy
grew up, though richer, more ignorant than their
fathers. The schools of the fourteenth century were not
entirely free ; and as a certain proportion of their
profits went to the patron, he filled up the gaps as
soon as possible. The village priest was often the
schoolmaster, and the instruction was always chiefly
religious ; but the boys were also taught the rudi
ments of Latin grammar. The ideal of every peasant
was to have a son in the Church— a son who might
become abbot, bishop, chancellor, cardinal. It was
their one great chance of rising in the world. But
in the kingdom of the Mind, many are called, few
passage of M. Leopold Delisle, L' Agriculture Nirmande au Moyen Age,
p. 175, etseq. 259

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chosen. Of the dozen or so boys who went to every
village school (each with a dira idea that perhaps
by-and-by he raight become a parish priest, or enter
sorae religious order) a fair proportion grew up as
stewards or labourers.* Sorae, no doubt, persevered
in their original intention ; some went to the town,
or, tiring of grammar, 'listed for a soldier ; but, alas !
we meet with a good many of them in the Registers
of the Chdtelet. Perhaps — who knows ? — these ne'er-
do-wells were the most useful of thera all, for their
depositions in the Court of Justice serve to give us
many curious lights on mediaeval education. Thus, for
example, one Jehannin de la Montaigne, a wandering
mason, accused of horse-stealing, invokes the privi
lege of clergy, asserting that he was tonsured at the
age of eight years old when he went to school and
learned his psalter — "car auparavant qu'il aprenist
son dit metier de magon, il avait este avec plusieurs
enfans d'icelle ville de Chateau Regnault a I'escole
de la dite ville et avoit aprins jusqu'a son Donnet et
Catonnet ; et lors il savait bien lire." f This Donnet
or Donat was the grammatical treatise of the famous
yElius Donatus, who flourished in the fourth century,
and whose elucubrations were very popular through
out the ten foUowing centuries. Catonnet, a school-
book equally universal, was one century older: it
was a paraphrase of the distiches of the once
* It will be remembered that in the Third Order of St. Francis
special provision is made for laymen who can read, evidently a consider.
able class.
t Registres du Chdtelet, ii. 103. 260

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
celebrated Dionysius Cato, These were both great
doctors. To-day, as you see, we scarcely know
their names.
The naraes of these two guides to knowledge
were known to Jehannin de la Montaigne, but his
knowledge went no further. After a judicious course
of torture, he was taken to the kitchen (as was the
custora of that guileful age), placed in a comfortable
chair before a cosy fire, with a warm mantle round
his shoulders and a glass of wine in his hand. Many
crirainals, obstinate to screw and pulley, succurabed
to these raore deceiving influences, especially as they
succeeded the chill and dismal hour of execution
(the torture of the fourteenth century was far less
diabolic than that of ages more refined, but it was
uncomfortable and rheumatic — pails of icy water
being dashed from time to time upon the dislocated
patient). Well, to return to Jehannin, whom we
choose as an example frora a crowd of fellow-sinners
— he confessed, as he sat by the kitchen fire, that
he was no more a priest than the cook. "But,"
added he, "a tonsure is convenient in judicial cir
curastances. Many of ray companion masons had
tonsures, and it was they who advised me to get
one also, which they said I could do without pre
judice, as I have really been to school and could
read and write weU enough when I left it. Therefore
I went to the village and had myself tonsured par
un barbier, et non aultrement," That confession was
the end of friend Jehannin, who, having no longer
any pretension to the jurisdiction of the Church,
261

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swung forthwith from the neighbouring gaUows. " II
n'avoit aucuns biens."
The courts of the Chatelet were literally en
cumbered with these sham clerks, who impeded the
course of justice by asserting a non-existent benefit
of clergy. Not one of thera when confronted in the
courts of justice with a psalter and a priraer could
read, write, spell a Pater, or say by heart a Latin
prayer. This, however, proves nothing against the
system of education, which was probably excellent.
The School Board manager of the present day, in an
age of unexampled science, knows how easily a boy
may pass through half a dozen years of reading,
writing, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, botany,
physics, cheraistry, Biblical exegesis, and all the
other necessaries that no raodern ploughboy is cora
plete without ; and yet he emerges no less ignorant
than he went in. Yet the boys nowadays stay at
school till twelve, or sometimes till fourteen ; in
those days they left at eight or ten. It is probable
that Donnet and Catonnet did not penetrate far into
the average inner consciousness. But all were not as
ignorant as the good-for-nothings who came before
the courts of law for purse-slitting and horse-lifting ;
these one may probably take as a natural selection
of the unfittest. M. Delisle, in his Agriculture
Normande au Moyen Age, gives some delicious
exaraples of the demi- Latinity of the learned peasant,
which unfortunately I have not got by heart

262

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century

VIII
The population of the rural districts of fourteenth-
century France varied terribly according to the
progress of the Hundred Years' War. It is difficult
to forra any very accurate idea of the actual numbers.
But from the size of the churches remaining frora
the thirteenth century, which are alraost always in
accordance with the actual population, we raay
suppose that it has not increased by more than half :
we must allow about that proportion, since mediaeval
churches, built for sanctuary, were obliged to be
large enough to shelter not only all the villagers,
but also their valuables, in war tirae. If, however,
such villages as have come down to us are not
immensely larger, still it must be adraitted that
nuraerous new communes have arisen on land that
was covered then by bog or forest.
On the other hand, many villages called into life
by the plenty and peace that followed the last
Crusade of Saint Louis disappeared utterly in the
long disaster of the Hundred Years' War, The
King's tax-gatherers jolted through the country
collecting the hearth-tax ; again and again they
found, beside the ruined steeple, a few turabling
bearas, an erapty stock-yard still paven ; nothing
raore. Another village had vanished. The ordon-
nances of the Kings of France during the first twenty
years of Charles V, are painfully eloquent of this
continuous depopulation of the country. The wars
263

The Fields of France

against the English on the frontiers of Norraandy
and Gascony accorapUshed the sarae end as the cruel
repression of the Peasants' Revolt in the centre, or
the sackings and plunderings of the Captains of
Adventure round Rheiras, round Orleans, and on
the borders of Provence. I have disraissed many
tragedies in a single phrase ; but how in a few lines
shall I indicate the terrible position of the peasants ?
Their grandfathers had dwelt in little hamlets alraost
under shelter ofthe town, to. whose palisaded suburbs
every winter they, with their families, their harvest
and their furniture, thronged for asylura. Moreover,
in that earlier age, ruled by firra principles still
confidently trusted, the peasant was little less sacred
than the priest. All classes recognized the holiness,
the authority, of him who sows and reaps the grain
that is the life of all. No usurer might take in
pledge the ploughshare, the beasts that draw it, nor
the corn as yet unthrashed. Four days a week, in
war time as in peace time, from every Wednesday
night till Monday at sunrise, the Truce of God
forbade the men-at-arms to traverse field or sheep-
walk ; moreover, at any time the peasant, threatened
by marauders, was safe if he fled to his plough and
laid his hand upon it; whoso touched the iron that
furrowed the earth was inviolable, and the plough
was as sure a sanctuary as the church,* But in the
thirteenth century the rural populations, overcrowded
round their country towns, pushed further and yet
further into the outlying area of raoor and forest,
? See D. Bessin, Concilia, part i., p 78, quoted by Delisle, p. Il6.
264

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
till their clearings, far afield, were beyond reach of
their earlier centre. In their new home they clustered
all year long round the church they had raised and
under protection of the nearest manor. And the
years of peace continued and the population swelled.
Thus from each Chdtellerie sprang new off-shoots ;
distant hamlets that had forgotten the necessity of
a sword-arm to shelter them, paying tribute to their
lord, but too far from his fortress to receive any
efficient aid in wartime. When the great English
war broke out and the long years of invasion, these
peasants learned to feel their loneliness. True, their
neighbours round the raanor-house were little better
off"; for after Crecy, and after Poictiers, the greater
part of the Seigneurs of France were either dead or
in the hands of the English, The ransom they had
to raise was all their tenants knew of them ; bitter
songs and proverbs began to fly from raouth to
mouth, " Ten of our Seigneurs will cry surrender to
the sound of an Englishman's voice a raile away ! "
cried Hodge, indignant. Poor Hodge, other miseries
were in store for him ! The Great Plague, which had
emptied the country after Crecy (" la tierce partie du
monde mourust "), carae again, following Poictiers.
When at last the epideraic passed away (having
doubled the rate of wage in less than ten years), when
the farraer prepared hiraself to face, new economic
conditions, he was confronted with other dangers.
The truce that had followed Poictiers had brought a
momentary peace, and hope began to flourish with
the primroses. But the peace that came in the wake
265

The Fields of France

of the battles of the fourteenth century was crueller
than battle, , , . The engageraents were no longer
fought solely by the armed chivalry of a kingdom ;
the system of regular armies was as yet unknown.
In this bitter time of transition, war was chiefly made
by mercenary Captains, who led their troops of ad
venturers in the pay of the highest bidder.
When the war was over, the men who had fought
in it could not vanish into air. The nobles rode
horae to their castles, the peasants to their farras ;
but the bulk of the army, these bands of mercenaries,
remained hovering with the vultures round the battle
field of yesterday. They were hungry and must eat ;
they must find a lodging soraewhere ; and their habit
was to plunder. So east and west, north and south,
the Corapanies went, riding as to a tourney ; but
chiefly they made their way to the rich unravaged
Centre ; there they soon took thirteen towns, with
many fortresses and castles. , . . Readers who re
member the terrible chapters in which Froissart
describes the depredations of the Captains of Adven
ture throughout the centre of France, and down
through Gascony to Provence, raust very often have
dissented from ray cheerful picture of the life of
fourteenth-century villagers. They remeraber the
despair of the Jacques of Brie, and their extermina
tion ; they count up the villages raarked in sorae
Royal ordnance as having disappeared ; they recall
the ballads of Eustache Deschamps describing the
sack of Vertus, and think how raany a flourishing little
town and what innumerable hamlets shared its fate :
266

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
" If you wish to see poverty, a ruined country
side, a deserted town, tottering walls where the fire
has been, miserable homes, and a more miserable
population — go to Vertus ! The English have left
everything in flaraes. There you can have at your
good pleasure a horse all skin and bone, a broken
bed with foul sheets, and, when you take your walks
abroad, the amuseraent of the ruined housetops
tumbling round your ears.
"Henceforth the farms round Vertus shall be
abandoned ; the vineyards are neglected and no man
tends the plants. This first year after the sack there
will be few wages paid and those uncertain. The
raan who was wont to speak loud will learn to speak
low. Our town exists no more, and 'twill be long
before her walls are built again." *
All this is true ; and we shall never know in how
many villages the sleeping peasants awoke one night
to the dreaded tramp of armed horsemen, to the blare
of trurap and fife, to the sheen of raoonlit arraour,
and the presence of the redoubtable Corapany in
their raidst , . . Bretons axe in hand, Gascons
arraed with lances, the Genoese crossbow-raen, the
English with their bows and arrows, the Lorabards
with their knives; they were all as well known as
the French — all prayed against and watched for
throughout the land of France. The sharpest-sighted
villager would stand for days in the steeple on the
look-out, in order to alarm his fellows when the first
* Eustache Deschamps, Ballades, Edition du Marquis de Queux de
St. Hilaire. Ballade 835. 267

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of the horsemen should ride up from the horizon.
In a raoment, women, children, raen, would throng
to the appointed hiding-place in the brake, bringing
with them such treasure as was still left unburied.
Happy those who could thus escape in tirae, and
for whora no crueller fate was in store than to find
on the raorrow a heap of red ashes where once their
village stood !
Yet, how shall we believe it? Though all this
was true, the countrysides retained their astonishing
vitality. Although in many districts most of the
young men went off to the wars (" Nous aymons mieux
faire le gallin-gallant que labourer sans rien avoir,"
as Gerson heard them say), with a natural preference
for plundering over being plundered, yet they only
pushed a little further the work begun by the Great
Plague. The wages of the few reraaining labourers
becarae so high that it was easy for them to recover
more than their old well-being. True, the wattled
cottage was razed to the ground, but the paved yard
remained. The peasant knew that his treasure was
safe in the keeping of some raan of trust — some
merchant of the walled city — when it was not buried
in a box or glove three feet to the west of the wild
cherry-tree, far enough from home to remain unsus
pected by the Corapany. If raost of the harvest
was destroyed, the remainder sold for an extravagant
price ; and the hunger of the poor in town was at
least the farmers' gain.* Then Charles V., the
• In the disastrous years immediately preceding the accession of
Charles V,, the price of corn doubled. 268

How the Poor lived in the Fourteenth Century
unparalleled king, sent off the Companies to Spain,
to Lombardy, well out of the way. In 1375 our good
Master Eustache takes heart and makes an ironical
ballad, in which the Companies are supposed to
lament the prosperity and order of the kingdom.
" Le plat pays s'en sent deja bien
Car on n'y ose piller rien j
Nul n'y va courrer sur les champs,
Ne n'y ranjonne par puissance.
L'on n'y prend chevaux ni juments,
Linges, draps, robes, ni finance,
Poulaille, moutons . . . violence
Ne s'y fait . . .
. , . et le commun bien
Y regne en grande autorite.
On fait labours en abondance.
Honores sont les anciens . . .
Chacun dist quz c'est grand pitie" *
So the wars ended.
But the rate of wage remained fairly high through
out the fifteenth century. The peasants ate more
and of better food, drank more freely of wine and
cider (a good deal too freely, and they have not lost
the habit), wore more costly and more comfortable
garments, afforded their wives and daughters richer
ornaments and trinkets than, in the same rank and
class, they can afford to-day. In all tiraes, in France,
the poorest have contrived to hoard ; mediaeval ac
counts and registers reveal the amount of saving
effected by all classes, and record the lands and herds
constantly acquired by farm labourers and domestic
* Eustache Deschamps, ii.
269

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servants. They and their kind prospered, laid by
their savings, and bought, rood by rood, the lands
of the diminished noble, whora the long wars had
left penniless and threadbare. The lords were glad
to sell here a croft and there a spinny, for in very
raany cases they could no longer afford to work their
immense estates. And thus the rise in the rate of
wages not only retrieved the ravage of the English
wars, but even prepared insidiously the final ruin of
the Feudal system.

270

THE MEDIEVAL COUNTRY-
HOUSE

THE MEDIEVAL COUNTRY-
HOUSE

Solos aio bene vivere, quorum
Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis.
Horace, Epistola.

ONE of my friends, by race a Persian, a native of
the Russian Caucasus, calls on rae soraetimes
on his home-sick days, and talks about the castle he
has left at home. It is a great, strong castle, with
stone towers and wooden balconies, and a vast hall
within where my lord sits in state by the cavernous
hearth and listens to the wandering minstrels, who
sing long ballads to their instruments. Not only
singers come there, but itinerant pedlars, the acrobats
of the fair, pilgrims to some distant shrine, travellers
of many sorts who bring to this high-perched castle
news of the outer world. If my lord should wish to
see that world at closer quarters, in the nearest city
he has his "hostel" in some wealthy burgher's house,
and thither sometiraes he repairs during the dead
weeks of the winter. But with the first bud or sprout
on the topraost sprig, he is back in the castle. For
now the real life of the noble begins — the season of
273 T

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the chase! My lord is raore or less of a scholar,
and in the winter tirae he fingers amorously his rare
collection of illuminated manuscripts (we possess one,
for which his nephew offers us a village in Karabag !),
brought together at an infinite expense and trouble.
But how far he prefers the summer morning, when,
hawk in hand, the noble hunters troop forth on their
gay-caparisoned horses to chase eagle or heron on
the mountain heights ! Deep down in the dungeon
underground perchance some penitent wonders if the
spring will ever come — for there are dungeons still in
the castles of Karabag, though the lords there have no
longer the right of life and death. Here the nobles
live a raerry life, united among themselves and seeing
few who are not of their order, save the Emperor's
hated tax-collector or the Jew doctor who coraes
upon his rounds, an infinite number of little powders
seWn into the sash about his waist , , , Could we
but be spirited to Karabag, we should find the Middle
Ages there in flesh and blood, alive !
Who knows? Yet we who wish to visit the
mediaeval country-house, we will take a humbler way.
We will raount pillion behind sorae solid, clerkly
person : Maistre Jehan Froissart or Maistre Eustache
Descharaps, sure of his road and garrulous about his
raasters. Thus we will jog along, gossiping, from
place to place, alighting here and there at some
stately castle, where the lord, like that Count of Foix
who sent for Froissart from his inn — " est le seigneur
du monde qui plus volontiers voit estrangers pour
ouyr nouvelles " ; or we will turn in at some pleasant
274

The Mediaeval Country-house
manor, such as that Manor of Cachant, dear to
Master Eustace, where there are gardens sweet with
rose, gladiolus, and raint — where there are raeadows,
vineyards, and "a noble willow-wood," with baths
of all kinds to refresh the weary traveller : " bains et
estuves et le ruissel courant."
If the countryside afford a good granite rock
surraounting a hill or mound of any height, that
situation has generally been chosen for the castle,
encircled by its protecting precipice. But in some
parts of Northern France such sites are few; and,
contrasted with the German or Italian fortress on
the hill, we find more frequently the raanor " eraray
estangs," so often sung of old poets — the castle built
like Rochester, or Melun, on the brink or island of a
river, isolated by moats and defended by encircling
towers. Such was, for example, the Castle of
Bidvre, commended by Descharaps in his 4S4th
Ballad— " La place est forte et de noble cloison.
Emmy I'estang ou le donjon se lance
Trois tours y a de pierre et de moellon."
Each tower is three stories high, and each stands
well in advance of the castle wall, the entry defended
by a "puissant pont-levis." By the fourteenth
century, the castles were no longer built with a sole
view to refuge and defence ; the nobles no longer
dwelt there as a last resort in war tirae, living in the
guardroom with their garrison, and directing the
defence amid the treasure. The castles of that time
of transition were very habitable palaces ; and Master
275

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Eustace passes frora the military architecture to
belaud the "noble aqueduct," which carried water
into the interior of the castle, and to praise the rich
device of the halls and chambers, the excellent
vivarium, the well-stocked preserves of garae, the
baths, the gardens, the rowing-boats, the shady park.
" 'Tis," he finishes, " the pleasantest house I know —
pour demourer la nouveUe saison,"
This is not the strain in which a thirteenth-
century minstrel would have sung the praise of
Coucy — ^the castle has become a country-house. The
great square tower, flanked with turrets at the angles,
which has succeeded to the round tower of defence,
is spacious enough for luxurious habitation. Every
story contains a large hall, a moderate-sized room
and a smaller one, beside the four cabinets in the
corner turrets. Generally, the gallery, the chapel,
the dining-hall, and the lord's private room or
"retrait" occupied the first story; above came ray
lady's charaber, her tiring-roora, her oratory, and the
" garde-robe," where her dresses lay folded in spice
and lavender, and where her raaidens sewed by day
and slept by night. The upper stories were occupied
by the children and by the guests ; and the castle
was crowned by several tiers of "raachicoulis," or
crenelated battleraents, pierced by loopholes and
coraraunicating by a " cherain de ronde,"
The ground floor was still dark and difficult of
access, lighted only by a few rare lancet-windows, and
given over to store-rooras, bath-rooras, ice-houses,
and suchlike uses. It coramunicated, by means of
276

The Mediaeval Country-house
trap-doors, with the cellars and dungeons underneath.
Philippe de VigneuUes, in his chronicle, has left us
an unforgettable account of his imprisonraent, well
on in the fifteenth century, in a dungeon of this kind.
There were no kitchens within the house, for the
cooking was done in a round high-roofed building,
like a baptistry, in an outer court, near the servants'
quarters ; but soraetimes the sick-charabers were
situate on this dark, quiet, unfrequented ground floor,
which preserved the tradition of its inaccessibility by
the absence of any entrance on a level with the
ground. A broad double flight of marble steps led
from the court to the portal on the first floor. In
any London suburb we still may see modest villas
thus entered by a flight of steps raised above a high
basement, which are, doubtless, quite unconscious of
their direct descent from the keep of the twelfth cen
tury, entered only by a ladder reared against the front,
or by knotted ropes let down from the first-floor win
dow ! By the 14th century, however, the Perron of
the country-house was an object of great architectural
dignity. It generally opened into a long gallery or
loggia occupying all one side of the keep : a sort of
first-floor cloister, with clustered ogival windows look
ing on the court below ; in fact, the lineal descendant
of the Gallo-Roman peristyle or diambulatorium.
Here the squires and dames used to loiter, " regardant
bas en la cour les joueurs de paume jouer." Half the
action of the novel of John of Saintrd passes "ds
galleries ; " and no portion of the castle is raore
frequently cited by early poets. The Count of Foix
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received Master Jehan Froissart as he was walking
after dinner in his gallery. In fact, the chief use of
these loggia, loges, or laube, appears to have been as
a promenade or loitering-place when it was too hot
or too wet to meet in the orchard just beyond the
walls, A very beautiful gallery of the Middle Ages
is still preserved in the castle of Wartburg.
In the larger castles this gallery or loggia was
sometimes distinct from the keep. Together with
the great dining-hall (" sanger-saal " or "mande-
raent"), where the lord sat in justice and received his
guests, it forraed a lower church-like building, in
style much like an Oxford chapel, placed beside the
keep and less strongly fortified. These separate
halls were only used in time of peace. They were
already well known in the thirteenth century, for in
the palace of Percival —
" La sale fu devant la tour
Et les loges devant la sale,"
And we read in the Lai de Lautrec —
" Prochaines eurent leurs maisons
Et leurs sales et leurs donjons."
But the sole square tower with its corner turrets
remains, even in the fourteenth century, the type of
the castle keep. The chateau of Vincennes, built by
Charles V., is an admirable example of the kind.

278

The Mediaeval Country-house

II
It was not easy to enter the castle keep. It stood
encircled by a strongly fortified enclosure, isolated by
moat or precipice, and defended, not only by out
works of palisading, but by a barbican and several
smaller towers. Having run the gauntlet of all this,
having passed down the narrow winding path be
tween the palisades, the visitor arrived at the moat,
and blew a horn hung there for the purpose. After
parley with porter and watchraan, the drawbridge
was let down ; and after further parley, perchance,
the great gate may have swung back on its hinges.
In this case, the stranger found himself in a long
hollow archway, protected by a series of portcullises,
with a perforated roof, through which boiling pitch,
molten lead, Greek fire, or siraple scalding water
could be poured down from an upper chamber. In
time of peace, however, the visitor passes unscathed
through the gate into a vast courtyard enclosed by
huge battleraented walls or towers ; a courtyard that
is almost a village, for it contains the church, the
knights' quarters, the squires' house, the lodgings
for pages and servants, the barracks, the cottages of
the artisans and labourers on the estate, the bake
house, the kitchen, the walled and gated fish-pond,
the fountain, the washing-place, the stables, the
barns, etc. A second gate, a second portcullis, lead
to a smaller court, where — huge, swart, and sombre —
towers the keep. It is immense, it is impregnable,
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and always opposite to the weakest point of the
defence, with a postern of its own leading to the
orchard, and a subterranean way into the open
country. Those who have admired the black majesty
of Loches will admit the grandeur of the mediaeval
keep. Built against the castle's outer wall, looking from
its upper windows across the open country, the keep
sometimes has pleasant views. An island castle,
defended by a wide expanse of water, or lifted high
above the plain upon a granite needle, could afford
the luxury of light and air, could indulge in large
windows, grouped three or four together in a space
of dead wall, on which they make a lacework of
pointed arch and separating colurans. But the huge
moated castle of the plain was less fortunate. The
windows were rare, narrow, far apart The walls,
ten feet thick, made a deep and dark recess for the
long lancet holes, more often closed with oiled and
painted linen than with glass, and placed very high
for the sake of safety. Soraetiraes they were as
much as five feet above the floor, A few years ago
in Florence, at the Palazzo Alessandri, I remember
seeing windows of this sort, high-perched recesses,
the size and shape of an opera-box, reached by a
staircase cut in the stone of the wall. On the granite
window-benches, heap erabroidered cushions ; lay a
Saracen carpet on the floor ; and set in this narrow
shrine sorae fair young woman, lily-slender in her
tight brocaded gown. She is playing chess with a
squire still younger than herself. Or perhaps she
2So

The Mediaeval Country-house
is alone, singing to her lute some ballad of the
Round Table—
" La reine chante doucement.
La voix accorde i I'estrument,
Les mains sont belles, li laiz bons,
Douce la voix et bas li tons."

Ill
Even nobles of some pretensions used in their
daily life little raore than the great hall of justice
(where the raovable trestle-tables were brought in
at dinner-tirae), the gallery which answered to our
raodern drawing-roora, the chapel, the chamber, and
the garde-robe, where the young maids-of-honour
learned to embroider amid their waiting-women.
These halls and chambers were furnished with
some splendour. By the middle of the fourteenth
century, the waUs were no longer ornamented with
the raere stencil-pattern in white and yellow ochre,
which sufficed for the princely keep of Coucy.
There is a frieze painted, with knights and goddesses,
with "Vdnus la Dieuesse d'Araour," or else adorned
in fresco or mosaic by "generations of Christians
and Saracens painted in battle," such as the Seigneur
de Cauraont admired on the walls of Mazidres.*
Lower down, the walls were often wainscotted like
that— * Voyage du Seigneur de Caumont, quoted by Viollet-le-Duc, op. ci,
t, v. p. 83.
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" Rice sale k lambres
Et d'or musique painturee
Et de fin or tout listee "—
where Percival found the Damosel. If the walls
were left bare, they were furnished just below the
frieze with an iron rod, whence depended hangings
of warra stuff or tapestry. Every castle possessed
several sets for each apartment, and the noble on
his travels had at least one set of chamber-hangings
strapped among his baggage. Nothing was easier
than to suspend these stuffs, already provided with
their hooks, to the rod and rings prepared to hold
them. "One thousand hooks for tapestry," is a
common item in fourteenth-century accounts.*
The hangings were of plain serge, of worked silk,
cloth of gold, or " tapisserie de haute lisse," according
to the wealth of the noble or the splendour of the
occasion they adorned. In times of mourning the
hangings were all black. Such a " chamber," consist
ing of wall-hangings, bed-furniture, chair-coverings,
cushions, etc., in striped serge, with cord and fringe
to raatch, was supplied to the Lady de la Trdmoille
in 1396, at a cost of fifty-nine livres — about ;£^240
of our raoney. As the appearance of the hall
could be changed at an hour's notice on the occasion
of raourning or festivities, even the greatest castles
had ordinary hangings for comraon use. King Charles
V. possessed no less than sixty-four "chambers,"
or coraplete sets of hangings, in silk, velvet, cloth
¦* See, for instance, Douet d'Arcq, Comptes de f Hotel des Rois de
France. 282

The Mediaeval Country-house
of sUver, leather, embroidery, etc.* When Valentine
•Visconti, Duchess of Orleans, prepared to leave
Paris in 1408, a few months before her death,
a few months after her husband's murder, she
caused her chamberlain to draw up a list of her
furniture, which still exists in the Bibliothdque
Nationale. This document (pathetically marked by
faded crosses against the naraes of such objects
as Valentine desired to carry with her to Touraine)
enuraerates raore than sixty sets of hangings. In
the embroidered curtains, some of the subjects
appear astonishingly modern, and indicate a com
plete mastery of the human figure on the part of
the designers. As few persons, I believe, have had
the privilege of reading this unpublished manuscript
(communicated to me by the late Comte Albert de
Circourt) I proceed to quote a few of the raore
interesting descriptions : —
"2, Bed-furniture of green; the baldaquin is
worked with a design of angels; the long curtain
depending from the tester behind the pillows repre
sents shepherds and shepherdesses feasting on cherries
and walnuts; the counterpane, a shepherd and a
shepherdess within a park ; the whole embroidered
with gold thread and with coloured wools. Item,
wall-hangings to match. Item, curtains for the walls,
without gold, and three smaller curtains of green
serge, "3, Item, a ' chamber 't in gold, silk, and wool,
* Labarte, Mobilier de Charles V.
t The "chamber " generally consisted of bed-curtains, a baldaquin,
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with a device of little children on a river bank, with
birds flying overhead. There are three hangings to
raatch, bed-furniture and sofa-cover. The counterpane
is erabroidered with a group of children, their heads
raeeting in the middle. Item, three other hangings,
with a cherry-tree, and a dame and a squire gathering
cherries in a basket — which go with the aforesaid
chamber-hangings to make up- {pour fournir).
" 4. Itera, another ' chamber,' of a brownish green,
sans gold, with a lady holding a harp ; and there are
six hangings to match, with bed-furniture, and a
quilt for the couch.
" 17. Item, a great tapestry, with the history of
the destruction of Troy the Great.
"Item, two wall hangings, with the victories of
Theseus. " Item, a green velvet cover for a couch, and a
long cushion covered with green velvet, and two
chair cushions, also of green velvet.
"19. Item, a white 'charaber,' sown with gladi
olus ; bed-furniture, quilt for couch, and four rugs.
" 20. Itera, a set of green tapestries de haute lisse,
with the Fountain of Youth and several personages ;
with bed-hangings, counterpanes, sofa-covers, and six
wall-hangings, all worked with gold, without guards
(linen coverings or housses).
" Itera, a ' charaber,' representing a lady playing
with a knight at the garae of chess.
" Item, a set of hangings of cloth of gold, in-
counterpane and covering for the couch or sofa, hangings for the wall,
doors, and windows, cushions for the benches and chairs,
284

The Mediaeval Country-house
eluding bed-curtains, counterpane, and two large
cushions," These tapestries must have been as raarvellous
as those exquisite rose-grey hangings which still
adorn the upper gallery of the Musde Cluny. The
smaller curtains were stretched over screens of wicker,
or served to drape the great roofed and cushioned
settle near the fire, while cloths of gold and silver
curtained the throne-like faldestuil reserved for the
master of the house. Mats of plaited rushes, not
unlike our India raatting, were laid in winter on the
floors under the delicate rugs of wool, iraitated frora
the industry of the East ; but in summer a strew of
fresh rushes, mint, and gladiolus (that flower so dear
to mediaeval eyes), covered the pavement with a cool
fragrance, while a bough of some green tree or flower
ing bush filled the hearth.* Great soft cushions,
" carreaux " or " couettes," were placed, sometimes on
the chairs and benches, sometiraes on the floor itself,
according to their size. They served, like the tabourets
of Saint Simon, for people of lesser dignity, seated
on occasions of ceremony, in presence of their lord.
There were also bankers, or stuffed backless benches
(divans, as we should say), placed against the wall ;
dossiers, a sort of short sofa with a back and cushions ',
and arrachairs provided with pavilions, or tester and
curtains to keep off' the draughts. There were
always carpets in rich halls or chambers ; long,
* The Knight of La Tour makes a mock of certain eccentric
" Gallois " who strew their floors and deck their hearths, in winter,
"comme en est6," with herbs and holly. — p. 242.
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narrow ones in front of the bankers and the settle,
and larger thicker " tapis velus " in the middle of
the room. Rugs of embroidered Hungarian leather,
and skins of leopard or tiger were sometimes laid
upon the hearth,* IV
All these cushions, curtains, carpets, did not
suffice to keep the cold from the great deep halls
of our forerunners.- A shiver runs through the
literature of the age.
" Telz froid y fait en yver que c'est raige ! "
says Eustache Deschamps in his 805th Ballad,
describing the Castle of Corapidgne. Even in the
house one must arm one's self with good furry hose,
furred pourpoints, warra fur-lined cloaks and hoods.
In winter, raen and woraen alike wore a long tunic of
fur, quilted between two pieces of stuff, underneath
their outer garments. But to be slender was the
ideal, the supreme elegance of the later Middle Ages.
In vain the Knight of La Tour warns his daughters
of the fate of sundry very comely maidens, who,
wishing to appear in their true slimness before their
lovers, discarded their furred tunics despite the blast
of winter, and turned the young raen's hearts against
them by the chicken-flesh of their cheeks and the
blueness of their noses ! In vain he draws a salutaty
picture of lovers, at last united, dying of cold in the
arms of one another, victims to the too chilly elegance
¦* Labarte, Mobilier de Charles V.
286

The Mediaeval Country-house
of their figures 1 The furred tunic was all very well
for gouty Master Eustace and the elderly knight :
young beauties and trim gallants often preferred the
risk of raortal illness, and let them grumble,
" Sy est cy bon exemple coraraent Ten ne se doit
mie si lingement ne sy jolietteraent vestir, pour soy
greslir et faire le beau corps en temps d'yver, que
l'on en perde sa manidre et sa couleur," *
" Do not be shaved," goes on Master Eustace, who
must decidedly have been an Ul-dressed, slovenly old
poet, "neither have your hair cut, nor take a bath
this bitter weather." The young people raight reply
that the Roman de la Rose prescribes the hot
bath as a sovereign reraedy against winter. The
bath-room, with its warm pipes, its great wooden
tubs, with the carved gilt garlands round them, its
lounges for cooling, its little tables spread with a
dainty supper, still preserved a souvenir of Roman
luxury. People used to bathe in corapany, some
times men and woraen together (as we still do at the
sea-side), their heads beautifully dressed and adorned
with flowers, their bodies hidden up to the neck in
their great cask-like baths, where the water was
often thickened with scented bran or strewn with a
dust of salutary herbs.
•' Quand viendroit la froide saison,"
sings Maistre Jehan de Meung —
" Quand I'air verroient forcenez
Et Jeter pierres et tempestes
? Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry,
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Que tuassent es champs les bestes
Et grands fleuves prendre et glacer, . . .
" On feroient chaudes estuves
S'y pourroient tuit nuz demourer
Se baignant entr'eus es cuves. "
In a German poem, Der nakte Bote quoted by
Herr Alwin Schulz, a messenger arrives at a distant
castle, and proceeds, as was the custom, to strip and
take a bath after his dusty journey before presenting
himself before the lord of the castle. What was his
surprise on opening the door of the bath -roora to
behold ray lord, ray lady, and all their olive-branches
disporting theraselves in stearaing tubs ! It was,
they explained, the only way they could keep thera
selves frora freezing.
Master Eustace prefers a warra chamber, " nattde
sus et jus," with all the windows shut, a fur-lined
dressing-gown, a bowl of old Beaune :
" Le chaud civet et bonne espicerie."
Contest of youth and age ! But which. Master
Eustace, would be better for your gout ?

The hearth none the less was deep and ample.
Sometimes several fireplaces, grouped together on a
raised dais, occupied all the upper end of the hall
with their blazing hearths and shadowy overmantels.
A magnificent example still exists at Bourges. In
houses of less pretension the hall could boast but one
chimney, but that at least was vast. A whole tre^
288

The Mediaeval Country-house
could be laid across the gigantic fire-dogs, whence
the great blaze radiated warmth and light into the
church-like frigidity of the hall. Those who know
the Salle de Garde at Langeais, will remeraber its
beautiful chimney-piece representing the Castle's own
crenelated ckemin-de-ronde, carved with mimic soldiers
and stooping watchers, who lean over the battlements
to look at the blaze below ; few objects are more stately
than the monumental fourteenth-century fireplace.
If the heat did not penetrate very far, if the humbler
fry in the lower hall were grateful for their furs — at
least, under the huge overmantel, where the curtained
settles stood, there was a cosy ingle-nook for the
master of the house, his wife, his children, his guests,
his chief retainers.
In such noble houses as could not boast a resi
dent physician, or a raaster of requests, or a staff of
notaries and secretaries, there was, at least, invariably,
a chaplain. Iraraediately below that reverend clerk
carae the seneschal, who was constable, governor, or
siraple steward, according to the standing of the castle.
When no separate dispenser was eraployed, the sene
schal was dispenser, raaster of the household, and
governor of the pages. Next to him came the butler ;
then, the chamberlain, to whom were entrusted the
jewels, art treasures, and furniture of the castle ; the
marshal, or master of the horse, and the head falconer.
All these were persons of importance, to be treated
with a certain ceremony ; they were frequently of noble
blood; they accompanied their master on raany of
his journeys, and were rather his ministers than his
289 U

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servants. Next to thera in order of rank stood the
housekeeper or governess, often a beguine or Tertiary
nun, who supervised the ordering of the house,
engaged and controlled the servants, and governed
the young girls of noble faraily serving in the castle
as maids of honour. Under her came a swarm of
chambermaids and housemaids, cooks and tailors,
page-boys and varlets. Let us not forget from the
list of our retainers that person of consideration, the
fool: the ancestor of the modern diner-out. Fools
and dwarfs were not to be found under every noble
roof. The smaller country-houses were sometiraes
conderaned to a distressing sanity, and depended for
their amusement on wandering minstrels and the
acrobats of the fair.
We have not counted in our list the knights and
squires of the keep, nor yet the garrison with its
captain, nor the artisans and labourers on the estate.
For the moraent we are occupied raerely with the
interior of the castle. And the chief thing that strikes
us in it is the abundance of young people — the troops
of boys and girls. VI
Every castle was, in fact, a school — a seminary of
polite education. From the king to the pettiest baron,
every noble received at his court the children of his
principal vassals ; and thus every noble child was
educated to the standard of the sphere immediately
above his own, In their homes, from the age of
290

The Mediaeval Country-house
seven, boys and girls alike had learned to spell, to
ride, to know that they were Christians. At the age
of ten or twelve they were generally sent to court.
Here they learned, above all, the duties and behaviour
of gentlepeople. Great care was taken that they should be well-
bred, chivalrous, courteous, neatly clad, and clean.
Along with this, the boys learned to fence, shoot,
fight with sword and shield, joust, play quintaine,
tennis, palm-play, chess, draughts, and tric-trac.
They were taught to ride, climb, leap, swim, and
to perform all these feats in heavy armour and
handicapped by difficult conditions. In a word, they
were trained to amuse themselves, to exert them
selves, and to endure. The Livre des Faiz de Jean
Bouciquaut shows the great stress laid upon physical
education ; but it also shows that physical education
was not all. Boys who would grow into knights, and
pass through many courts and countries, had to learn
several languages. French, of a sort, was taught in
all European countries — often, no doubt, it was of the
kind of Stratford-atte-Bowe— for French then, as
now, was the language of diplomacy and courts.
And some lads then, as now, acquired a little Greek
and Latin ; but so much learning was rarely en
couraged save in the future Churchman. All noble
children, boys and girls, learned to read and write,
though frequently in after-life the warrior's remera
brance of these arts was no more precise than the
knowledge possessed by our average country squire
of the Iliad he used to parse at school. The women
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kept up their accoraplishments : most noble woraen
in England and Italy, as in France, could read, play
some musical instruraent, erabroider, speak a little
French, bind a wound and tend a fever, if com
paratively few could wield the pen.
At twelve years old the page was sent to court.
Here he was to finish his education, to win, if
possible, his suzerain's favour, and to lay the begin
nings of his fortune. But at first he saw little of
his lord. He was entirely under the control of the
seneschal, the chamberlain, and the first equerry,
for, as the name denotes, the young squire's quarters
were situate in the icuries. After a few years'
apprenticeship his opportunity might come. A
chance raight raake him a page-messenger, and so
he might earn the confidence of his Seigneur. He
might, by his good manners and courtesy, awaken
the attention of some noble dame. He might even
accompany his suzerain to some superior court,
attract the notice of the over-lord, and be adopted
to that higher sphere. Thus the little Jehan de
Saintrd, a young lad in the household of his father's
suzerain in Touraine, was taken by that gaUant
knight to Paris, where the king took a fancy to the
child — "tellement que il le voulut avoir en sa cour
k estre son paige, pour aprds lui chevaucher, et au
sourplus servir en salle, corame ses aultres paiges
et enffans d'honneur." But the natural course of
things was for the lad to remain a page araong
his fellow-pages till the age of fifteen or sixteen,
when he was ripe for the office of messenger or
292

The Mediaeval Country-house
carver at the lord's table. These offices entailed
squireship. In this condition he reraained until about
the age of twenty, when, generally on the occasion
of sorae princely wedding, sorae outbreak of war,
sorae tournament or other great occasion, he was
dubbed knight, and set forth on his adventures.
While all these lads frora twelve to twenty were
fencing, riding, or playing palra-play in the court,
their sisters were eraployed in ray lady's company.
They seldom carae together with the men of the
castle, save on holidays and feast-days. At other
tiraes they spent their time in ray lady's chamber or
tiring-roora, or walked with her in the country, for it
was held unseemly that ladies of noble birth should be
met walking alone. They were, in fact, much in the
position of " girls still in the schoolroom " in a modern
country-house. They learned their lessons with their
governess, practised their lute, went to church every
morning, embroidered chasubles and altar-cloths, and
worked wonderful hangings for the cold stone walls.
And there were frora seventy to a hundred yards of
needlework in a set of hangings ! They could also
spin fine silk and linen, and ornaraent with needle
work their feast-day veils and dresses. (The less
interesting forras of sewing were left to the array
of tire-women and waiting-women who attended on
the noble maidens and their lady.) They all knew
how to ride and how to fly a hawk, to make wreaths
and posies, to sing, to play, to beguile the long hours
with chess, tric-trac, draughts ; and the youngest of
them began to deal and shuffle the new'invented
293

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" naypes," or " naibi " — the first playing-cards. They
could pluck or brew virtuous siraples, bind a broken
lirab, or nurse a fever. They could amuse the con
valescent with endless tales of the Round Table, with
the legends of Charlemagne, and with lives of the
saints no less interesting and roraantic. Most of
thera could read aloud sorae novel : Cliomadis or
Milusine. They raust, I think, have been blithe,
charming, capable companions in the long winter of
a lonely country-house. On the whole, with its
constant undercurrent of chivalry and religion, theirs
was an education which left its women delightful,
tender of heart, and generous, if, alas! with little
moral strength to resist the illusions of the heart.

VII
From December till the end of March, life in the
castle was perforce an idle one. War was rarely
made in winter ; there were no tourneys in the bitter
weather, too cold for combatant or spectator ; and in
heavy snow time there was perforce a truce to hunt
ing of the more vigorous kind. It would have been
extravagant to rise before candlelight, so that it was
after seven when knights and ladies left their curtained
beds, washed their hands and face in rose-water,
heard the Mass, and took their morning broth.
Dinner, which in the sumraer was sometimes as early
as nine, was sometiraes in winter put as late as noon.
And after dinner there was the siesta — the apparently
inevitable siesta, sensible enough in summer heats
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The Mediaeval Country-house
after a morning already seven or eight hours old, but
inexplicable during the best part of a winter's day.
Still, in all the novels and chronicles of the fourteenth
century, I am bound to admit that, at all seasons of
the year, after the principal raeal, both men and
women retire to sleep for at least a couple of hours.
It is true the meal was long and heavy, and highly
spiced. Still, in our visions of mediaeval heroes we
cannot imagine Charleraagne nodding after dinner
every day, despite the assurance of Philippe Mouskes
"that he always undressed himself and slept for two
hours after the midday meal, holding the practice for
a very wholesome one." * We do not evoke Knight
Percival and his companions as sleeping half the after
noon away. Yet — " aprfes le disner
Se couchi^rent . . . h dormir
Jusqn'al vespre sans nul espir.
* * * *
Endroit vespre sont reveille
Le souper ont appareillid" f
JoinviUe mentions, as the most natural thing in the
world, that St Louis went to bed every day after the
midday dinner until vespers ; while the child Jehan
de Saintrd, Damp Abbez, the Dame des Belles
Cousines, Pero Nino, the Dame de Sdrifontaines, the
Lady of Fayel, the Chastelain de Coucy, all the
brood of fourteenth-century heroes and heroines,
follow, in this respect, the example of their elders.
* " Apris mengier al miedi, et lors tout nuz il se cou9oit, dormir
deux heures, puis levoit" (Philippe Mouskes : Chronique).
t Quoted by Herr Alvrin Schultz, op. cit., i. 362.
295

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Towards three o'clock, our dames and knights
aroused themselves, took a slender raeal of bread
dipped in wine or hypocras, and preserved fruits,
and then set out to vespers. We still are faith
ful to the afternoon-tea, but we have dropped the
daily church service. After vespers the winter even
ing had closed in — the fourteenth-century evening
ill-lit by flaring torches. It was fortunate if pedlar
or pilgrira, rainstrel or acrobat, knocked at the castle
gate and deraanded hospitality. Otherwise, despite
the well-worn facetice of Master Hausselicoq, the fool,
the evening was apt to prove a trifle long.
The accounts of fourteenth-century barons abound
in raention of rainstrels, acrobats, "joueurs d'espertise,"
"joueurs de la corde," "chanteurs et chanteresses,"
and all the motley crew.* Every castle was glad to
extend its hospitality to wayfarers of every kind, for
they brought news and amusement, and renewed the
worn-out stock of gossip. Two little pictures of
people of this sort occur to me as I am writing. One
is a sketch of the Welsh or Breton harper, from the
poem of Renart. When Renart, disguised as a
jongleur, offered to sing to Isengrin his lays of the
Round Table, he put on a strange jargon, and
proceeded to tell his story in almost unintelligible
French — "'Je fot saver bon lai Breton ,
Et di Merlin et di Foucon
Del Roi Artu et de Tristan
Del Chievrefoil, et Saint Brandan.' . . .
*" See, for instance, the Comptes de la Trimoille and the Comptes de
r Hotel des Rois. 296

The Mediaeval Country-house
• Et sais-tu le Lai Dan Iset ? ' . . .
« Ya-ia 1 ' dit il. ' Godistouet ! ' " (God is to wit ?)
Wrapped in their weather-beaten raantle, shaggy,
ridiculous, singing much as sings Hans Breitmann
to-day, it is thus (according to M. Joseph Bddier *)
that we must picture the minstrels who sang of
Tristan and Yseult. Probably they used their strange,
absurd prose raerely as a raedium to explain the
story to their hearers in much such a chante-fable as
" Aucassin et Nicolette," while they sang their lyrics
in their Celtic tongue to the music of their harps.
And if the voice is sweet, after all, the language is of
little consequence.
Our other tiny idyl is drawn from the arrival of
the pedlar at the castle of the Lady of Fayel, That
hapless and guilty lady, desirous at all risks to raeet
her noble lover, bids the Chastelain de Coucy don
the pedlar's garb in order to approach her. He puts
on rough laced boots and a coat of coarse cloth, on
his head a torn and battered hat, a stick in his handj
a pack upon his back. He comes to the castle and
undoes his wares : "car mercier
Porte en tous lieus son panier
Et en salles et en maisons
S'ebate en toutes saisons."
The lady and her maidens stand round and pick
and choose, praise this, bargain for that, choose and
discard in true feminine fashion,
¦• " Les Lais de France," par J. Bedier : Reuue des Deux Mondes,
Oct. 15, 1891.
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" Ont maintes choses barguignd
Et li aucuns ont achete
Ce que leur vint k volenti."
But when the pack is strapped again, the pedlar
murmurs that it is late. " And it rains ! " cries the
Dame de Fayel. So the packman stays all night at
the castle, and my lady finds means to get speech
with her lover.
In the summer, when there were tourneys and
weddings and other festivities in the countryside,
not only packmen passed and rainstrels, but acrobats,
conjurers who swaUowed knives and lighted candles,
keepers of learned pigs and clever dogs, owners of
puppet-shows, dancers and jongleurs in plenty. They
travelled frora place to place, lodging in the castle or
the village inn, always welcorae guests in the raonotony
of country life. But all these visitors were rarer birds
in winter. Then the long days were passed in chess-
playing and tric-trac; heavy bets were laid and
taken, and in the curaber of their idleness many
a knight was ruined out of sheer ennui.
Gambling was the curse of the noble, as it has
always been the curse of every class trained to win
and to desire, but with scant outlets for its energies.
The knights in winter gambled pretty nearly all day
long. We remeraber how the Servitor of Milun,
entering a castle in the raorning, finds in the great
hall two knights playing chess, so absorbed that they
do not see hira. ..." When Easter coraes," say the
knights to Milun, " we will recoramence our tourna
ments," but until Easter there is no rival to their
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games of chance, except the eternal game of love.
Chess was the baccarat, the poker of the Middle Ages.
In vain the king forbade it in 1369, in 1393, and both
before and after, with every other game of hazard.
But who was to enter the snowed-up country castle,
to tell tales of knights and ladies playing the for
bidden garae ? The woraen were alraost as bad as
the raen. "Never play chess, save for love," says
the Knight de la Tour to his daughters : " ne soyez
jaraais grant jouaresses de tables." And he proceeds
to tell thera melancholy tales of land, of money, and
of woraen's honour spent over the too enticing board.
But, alas, good knight, the days are ill to pass in
winter time !

VIII
So there was great joy when the trees began to
redden : "Betweene Mersh and Averil
When spray beginth to spring."
The poets of the Middle Ages, all intoxicate with
May-dew, did but express the hearts of their whole
generation. The long dull months, shut in cold and
ill-lit draughty houses, with, for nourishment, the
same eternal salt meat and ship-board food, were
now delightfully over-past. The voice of the stock
dove was heard in the land, and the almond-boughs
began to blossom in the orchard. Spring meant a
free life out of doors in the sunlight ; spring meant
the hunt, delicious days spent in the fresh green
299

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wood in healthy sport that raade the pulses beat
Spring raeant the game-bag full ; a varied table
spread in bower or garden. Spring meant a hundred
Uttle intiraate festivities waking to mirth the numerous
young people of every fourteenth-century castle.
Sometimes the whole company go out to hunt for
several days in the forest, knights and ladies, pages,
raaidens, carrying with them tents, provisions. The
girls wash their hands and faces in the dew of
flowers to get a good complexion, as they still used
to do in Warwickshire when I was a little child.
Every hunter has a horn to sound if he gets lost in
the forest. How they laugh over all the little hard
ships and adventures of the picnic ! In one old
poem — old even in the days of Valentine Visconti —
the knights have forgotten their towels and have to
dry their faces on the ladies' skirts,*
Generally these great hunts were raade with
hounds, and the garae was deer or bear, wild boar,
hare, or otter. But the raost fashionable sport was
hawking. Every castle had its knight-falconer, who
was a great person with onerous duties. The royal
falconer was paid as rauch as twenty-four sols a day —
three tiraes the daily due of the physician ; and even a
varlet falconer was given three sols per diem — a very
respectable salary.f But he was not paid for doing
nothing; the hawk was hard to catch, and when
caught difficult to train. Night and day the falconer,
with the bird, hooded and fasting, on his hand, raust
* Guillaume de Dole. Quoted by Herr Alwin Schultz, t. i. p. 470,
t Douet d'Arcq, Comptes de V Hotel du Roy Charles V,
300

The Mediaeval Country-house
pace up and down, up and down, like a mother with
her teething child. When at last the bird was fit
for use, perched Ughtly on his lady's wrist, or soaring
after swan, pheasant, or wild duck through the upper
air, he was one of the most precious and beautiful
possessions of a noble. The best esteemed was the
Irish or Norwegian ger-falcon. What pet name was
more endearing than that of " Gay Goshawk " ?
His clear eye, a pure grey, neither greenish nor
bluish, is the inevitable standard to which the
mediaeval lover compares his lady's glance — falcon-
keen, falcon-swift, falcon-bright, and grey as the
hawk's eye. In the evening, invigorated rather than
fatigued by the long day in the forest, knights and
ladies would fall to dancing. The country neighbours
would come for miles ; even the burghers of the
richest sort were now and then invited. "II est
accousturad en estd de veiller k dances jusqu'au jour,"
writes the Knight of La Tour, but he condemns the
practice, being past his youth, and asserts that
strange things happen when some band of practical
jokers contrives to extinguish all the lights. Let us
hope that such accidents did not frequently occur,
and that the knight's three daughters were not kept
at horae too often "pour le pdril de mauvaises
langues." IX
It would be pleasant to spend a day or two in
some fourteenth-century country-house during the
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early suramer. Let us attach ourselves to the suite
of a certain Spanish hidalgo, Don Pero Nino, a noble
adventurer, who, landing at Harfleur in 1405, went to
visit Renaud de Trie, Admiral of France, at his country
seat of Sdrifontaines, Don Pero Niiio, fresh as we to
France, sets forth, by means of his gifted secretary
and chronicler, all the details of that memorable
visit We remember no page in Froissart at once
so fresh and so precise.
The Admiral de Trie was an aged knight, ill in
health. In his day he had been a famous fighter,
but in 1405, broken down by many battles, he lived
retired on his estate in Normandy.*
"There dwelt he in great comfort in a castle,
strong, although situate in a plain, and furnished as
well as it had been in Paris. He had about him
young gentlemen in pageship, and all kind of servitors,
as befits so great a lord.
" In his house there was a great chapel, where
Mass was said every morning to the sound of
trumpets and divers instruments, played by his
minstrels in a way that was a marvel. Before the
house a river flowed ; orchards and gracious gardens
bordered it. On the other side of the castle was
a pond for fish, enclosed by walls, and guarded by
gates well-locked ; whence, every day, the steward
might furnish /ood for three hundred persons. . . .
* Le Victorial, Chronique de Don Pedro Ni'Ro, Comte de Btielna,
par Gutierre Diaz de Gomez, son Alferez, 1379-1449. Traduit de
I'Espagnol d'apres le manuscrit, avec une introduction et des notes, par
le Comte Albert de Circourt et le Comte de Fuymaigre.
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The Mediaeval Country-house
There was a pack of fifty hounds ; twenty horses
were kept for the service of the lord of the castle.
There were plenty of falcons-gentle. There was all
that heart can wish for in the way of hunting — the
otter, the roe, the wild boar, small game, or water
fowl." The old knight had a young wife, "the fairest
lady that was at that tirae in France." She was a
woman of great sense and order, and, as was in
those days the custom, she was alraost entirely
responsible for the management of her husband's
estates. "All things were arranged or decided by my
lady. She alone governed everything both within
and without. My lord the Adrairal was a rich man,
lord of raany lands; but he had to take thought
for none of these things, my lady being sufficient
unto all."
My lady had her noble lodging apart from the
mansion of her lord. They dwelt within the self
same raoat, but divided the one from the other by
a drawbridge. It would be long to set forth the
number and the magnificence of the furniture that
there was in this lodging. Here lived my lady,
surrounded by ten maids of honour, very richly clad
and accoutred all of thera, who had nought to do
save keep their lady corapany, for beneath them
there were many wai ting- women.
"Now will I tell you the rule and order of my
lady's life. Of a morning, so soon as she was
dressed, forth she went with her damsels to a spring
303

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hard by, where each one told her rosary, and read
her book of Hours in silent prayer, sitting a little
apart from her fellows. Next, plucking flowers and
violets upon their way, they hied them home to the
palace, and gathered in the chapel, where they heard
a low Mass. As they came out of church their
servants handed them a silver tray, furnished with
larks, chickens, and other roast fowl, of which they
took or left what they would, and drank a little
wine. My lady ate but rarely of a raorning, or
trifled with sorae morsel to huraour those about her.
Their fast broken, lady and damsels mounted their
noble hackneys, and then, raet in company with such
knights and squires as were of their party, they went
riding through the lanes and open country for sorae
while, weaving garlands of flowers aS they went.
Then raight you hear such singing, by voices well-
tuned and timed together, of virelays, lays, rondeaux,
songs, complaints, ballads, and other verses, such as
the French know featly how to finish, that, I declare
you, could it last for ever, you would have thought
yourself in Paradise,"
With this company rode the Captain Pero Niiio,
the occasion of all this festival. With them at dinner-
tirae he rode horae to the castle, disraounted, and
strode into the hall, where the portable trestle-tables
had been already spread. The Admiral could no
longer ride afield, but he welcomed horae his guests
with a raarvellous good grace. My lady and Pero
Nifio were placed at the Adrairal's table, while the
seneschal presided over the other, and saw that every
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The Mediaeval Country-house
damsel sat between a squire and a knight. There
were meats of all manner in great nuraber and
marvellous well cooked. During the meal whoso
ever knew how to speak with courtesy and measure
of arms and love was sure to find a hearing and an
answer. Meanwhile the jongleurs made low music
on divers instruments. Dinner over, grace was said,
the tables removed, and then the minstrels came ;
my lady danced with Pero Nifio, and every damsel
with her squire. This dance lasted an hour; when
it was over, ray lady gave the kiss of peace to Pero
Niiio, and every lady to her cavalier. Then wine
and spices were handed round, and all alike dispersed
to their siesta, Pero Niiio, happy knight, had his
lodging in my lady's tower.
Later in the afternoon the horses were brought
round, and the pages stood ready bearing falcons:
a huntsman had already tracked the heron's course :
"Then would you have seen a noble sport and
fair arauseraent, with swimming of hounds, beating
of druras, whirring and wheeUng of falcons, with
knights and ladies riding along the river-bank as
many as you can imagine them. That sport ended,
my lady and her company would seat theraselves to
rest in sorae green meadow, while the pages unpacked
cold fowl and game, and divers fruit. All eat and
drank, twining garlands. Then, singing glees and
songs, they returned to the castle."
Supper came at nightfall if it were winter-time.
In summer the raeal was earlier, and afterwards ray
lady would set off on foot to wander up and down
305 X

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the countryside till dark, while some would accom
pany her, and some would stay to play at bowls.
Then the torches flared in the great hall, the
minstrels gathered in, and there was dancing until
far into the night. And this is the order which was
followed every day, according to the seasons and
the quality of the guests, whenever there was holiday
at Sdrifontaines, But now, 'tis late. Hand round
the wine and spices, and to bed !
X
During these long days, when my lady danced,
sang, and rode with Pero Nino, she and he discovered
that the Adrairal was old. " En tout honneur," they
fell in love with one another. Like the woman of
order that she was, instead of keeping Pero Nino
as her lover, Madame de Trie sent him to her father
to see if he would do for her second husband, while
she stayed at Sdrifontaines and nursed the Admiral.
The father apparently consented, for we hear that
they "se tinrent pour amoureux." Meanwhile the
Admiral died. My lady and Don Pero exchanged
keepsakes, and he promised to return to France and
marry her at the expiry of her mourning. But
having raet in Spain a certain Dofia Bedtriz, he
married her instead ; and perhaps in later years
Madame de Trie thought more kindly of the good
old Admiral.
Neither the knights nor the ladies of these old
chronicles surprise us by the delicacy of their heart,
306

The Mediaeval Country-house
With the Roman de la Rose, the still unpurified
passions of those ages held that —
" Nous sommes faiz, beau filz, sans doutes,
Toutes pour tous et tous pour toutes."
Adultery is as comraon in their chronicles as it has
always been in fiction — and perhaps in fact And
when the lovers are tired of each other, it is difficult
to veil the case less kindly than the Darae des Belles-
Cousines, in her behaviour to Jehan de Saintrd, or
the Chastelain de Coucy when he punishes the Lady
of Vermandois. Moreover, the very first beginnings
of love were contaminated by a thought of utility, of
"subsidy," as one of our authors does not fear to
state. Even in that pure and charming chronicle,
the Livre des Faiz de Jehan Bouciquaut, we read that,
on account of her influence and her prestige, " it is
much better to love a lady of a station superior to
one's own." Listen to the counsels which a lady of
great position, the Dame des Belles- Cousines, gives
to Jehan de Saintrd ! The lad, a child of thirteen,
has refused to tell her the narae of his sweetheart :
" The tears carae into the lad's eyes, for never in
his days had he given thought to such a thing as
love or lady-loves. His heart fell, his face turned
pale. . . . He sat a long while in silence, twirling the
loose end of his girdle round his thumbs, , . , At
last he cried out in his despair, for all the maids of
honour fell to questioning him together and at once :
What can I tell her ? I have no lady-love ! If
I had one, I would tell you soon enough !
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" ' Well, whom do you love the best of all in the
world ? ' asked the maidens.
" ' My mother,' said little Saintrd, ' and after her
my sister Jacqueline.'
" Then said ray lady :
" ' But of them that are nothing to ye, which love
ye the best ? '
" ' I love none of them,' said Saintrd.
" ' What ! none of thera ? ' quoth ray lady. ' Ha !
false gentleman ! You love none of thera ? Then
by that token I prophesy that you will come to
nothing. Faint heart that ye are ! whence sprang all
noble enterprises, all great achievements and valorous
deeds of Launcelot, of Gawain, of Tristan, of the
courteous Giron, and the other knights of the Round
Table ? Also of Ponthus,* and innuraerable other
heroes ? What else but love-service ? What else
but the desire to keep the favour of their much-
desirdd dame? And I myself have known raany
men who, through their love affairs, have reached the
highest possible honours, of whora, but for these, no
more talk had been made than of so raany simple
soldiers.' "
Little Saintrd left the lady's presence shamefaced,
and when the door was shut, " he ran down the gaUery
as fast as if he had fifty wolves behind him." But one
day, as he waited at table on the maids of honour,
these ladies made him vow to give the promised
answer that afternoon. Therefore, when the king
* Les Amours de Ponthus et de la belle Sidonie is the name of a
once famous romance of chivalry. 308

The Mediaeval Country-house
and queen retired for their noonday siesta, my lady
sought young Saintrd in the gallery, and took hira to
her charaber with her ; and there, surrounded by her
ladies, she seated hira at the foot of her couch and
summoned hira for a reply.
"At last the poor lad bethought him of one of
the noble maidens sent to court, who was ten years
of age. '"My lady,' quoth he, 'tis Matheline de Courcy ! '
" ' Ah, coward ! ' cried my lady, ' to choose a child
like Matheline. Not that she be not a very fair
maiden, and of an exceUent house, better than thine.
But what good, what profit, what honour, what com
fort, what advantage, what subsidy, what aid and
counsel can you find in the love of Matheline ?
She is but a lassie yet. Nay, you should choose a
lady of high and noble birth, wise, and with the
wherewithal to help your fortunes, and set you above
necessity ; and her should you love with perfect
service, loyally and well, and in all honour. Be sure
that in the end she will have mercy upon you, " et
par ainsy deviendrez horarae de bien." ' " *
When we think that this harangue (and especially
all that follows it) was penned by an ecclesiastic for
the education of a prince, we perceive that our code
of morals has changed. Young Saintrd received
large sums of money from his mistress, with no loss
of honour, and the lady herself enters on her mission
as on a sacred calling. " Although so young, she had,
in her virtue, formed a Roman resolution never to
* Le Petit Jehan de Saintrl, edition Guichard,
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remarry ; but often she wished that her work in the
world might be to train some young knight or squire
and make him a pattern of chivalry." It is with this
high intention that she becoraes the mistress of young
Saintrd ; that she bestows her wealth upon hira, and
keeps hira in due splendour of steed and apparel ; that
she preaches to him, with a sublirae lack of logic,
"how to flee the seven mortal sins"; that she finds
him books to read, and stuffs hira with quotation frora
Thales of Miletus, Chilon of Lacedemonia, Avicenna,
Valerius Maxiraus, and Pittacus of Mitylene. To
this end she persuades herself to a cruel separa
tion, and sends him on his travels as knight-errant.
She is, in fact, his mundane Beatrice. Her love for
him is in truth a liberal education, and one that seems
delightful and legitiraate to her conteraporaries. But
our eyes see in her an ugly likeness to Madarae de
Warens, and we should say, in downright English,
that she corrupts the lad. XI
Virtuous or frail, the ladies of the Trecento, as of
the two preceding centuries, were all alike as sisters
in their loveliness. Or rather, we may say that only
one type of beauty was recognized as such, all
mediaeval heroines were required to conform to that
absolute standard.
In our eyes the dark-eyed beauties of Murillo,
the warra blondes of Titian and Palraa, the slender
angels of Perugino, the powdered espiigle ladies of
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The Mediaeval Country-house
Gainsborough and Reynolds ; the majestic form ofthe
Venus of Milo, and the somewhat mannered elegance
of Tanagra, are all, in their kind, types of accomplished
beauty. Many different ideals have enlarged and
exercised our taste. But, of all the candidates on
our Ust, the Middle Ages would have admitted only
the Perugino angel and the Tanagra statuette.
This lessens, at any rate, the difficulty of descrip
tion. The mediaeval beauty was always golden-
haired, either naturally or by the aid of art Her
hair was very fine, rippling in long curves above a
fair broad forehead. One of her distinctive charras
was the large space between the brows, the " plaisant
entr'euil " so often sung of early poets ; very few
things seeraed raore hideous to our forefathers than
shaggy eyebrows meeting in the middle. It was also
a great disadvantage for the eyebrows to be fair.
They should be several shades darker than the hair,
narrow, pencilled, delicately arched ; Burns' —
" Eyebrows of a darker hue
Bewitchingly o'erarching."
Eyes, not blue, but "grey as glass," "plus vairs que
cristal," not over-large, somewhat deeply set, and
always bright, keen, and shining as a falcon's.
Below these brilliant eyes, a small straight nose,
rather long than short, but above all " traitis " — that
is to say, neat and straight — divided two oval cheeks,
with dimples that appear at the bidding of a smile.
A fresh, faint pink-and-white colour, like the first
apple-blossom, must flourish in these little cheeks.
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The lips are much redder, slightly pursed over the
tiny pearly teeth ; " la bouche petite et grossette,"
says the prosaic Roman de la Rose; but Ulrich von
Lichtenstein expressed his meaning better in his
" kleinvelhitzer6ter raunt," his "little, very fire-red
mouth ; " or the author of Guillaume le Faucon,
who likens his heroine's lips to a scarlet poppy-bud :
" Tant estoit vermeille et close."
Sometimes the small mouth was only half shut, as if
about to speak :
" Les levres jointes en itel guise J
C'un poi i lessa ouverture
Selonc reson et par mesure,"
says the author of Narcisse.*
The cleft chin and the ears must be small and
round and white, above a long neck, with a full white
throat. The fairness of this throat, its delicacy and
transparence, was the sine qud non of feminine loveli
ness. " When she drank red wine, one savv the rosy
fluid through her throat," say the poets.
The beauty of the Middle Ages was invariably
slender, slim, and round as a willow-wand. The
shoulders are small, the whole figure "greslette et
alignie"; long-drawn out in slenderness, with slim,
round, long limbs, and slim, round, long fingers, that
show no joints, and terrainate in trira, shining nails,
cut very close. The bust is high, with neat, round,
well-divided breasts, and a slira, round waist. When
Eustache Descharaps, in his 960th Ballad, sings the
* Quoted from Herr Alwin Schultz, op. cit. t, i. p. 215.
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charras of a lady quite correctly like this portrait, he
ends with saying :
" Mais sur toutes portez bien vos habiz
Plus que nulle dame ne damoiselle
Qui soit vivante en terre n'en pays." *
Poets in every century have laid great store by that
" something i' the gait
Gars ony dress look weel."
The Roman de la Rose, that manual of the fourteenth
century, devotes a score or so of verses to this
doctrine of deportraent.
"'Marche joUettement,' walk prettily, mincingly,
showing your pretty little shoes, so well raade they
fit without a wrinkle. , . . And if your dress trail
behind on the paveraent, yet take thought to lift it
a little towards the front, as if the wind had caught
it, so that every one who passes you raay notice the
dainty well-shod slimness of your feet.
"And if you have a long mantle — one of those
long, full cloaks that alraost entirely hide your charra
ing figure — with your two hands and your two arras
manage to open it wide in front, whether the day
be fair or foul, even as a peacock spreads his tail."

XII
Let us not think that the fourteenth-century
castle was entirely peopled by men and women in the
• Ballades d" Eustache Deschamps, in five volumes. Edited by the
Marquis de Queux de St. Hilaire. 313

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bloora of idle youth. There were charitable widows
whose conversation was in heaven ; there were knights
strong and resolute in their absolute religion. In
spite of all its raediocrity, alongside of its frivolity,
its often crirainal looseness of the raarriage tie, the
fourteenth century was an age of piety and honour.
Every gentieraan had two religions, for either of
which he would have died ; and the briefest record
of life in the castle must find a place for the ob
servances of the Church and the duties of chivalry.
We cannot lay too great a stress upon the austerity,
upon the charity, inherent in the ideal woman of a
period whose great ladies were so often purely worldly
and emotional. We should leave our readers under
a false conception if we let thera suppose that the
women of a fourteenth-century castle were invariably
after the pattern of the sprightly Dame des Belles-
Cousines, or of the sweeter Lady of Fayel. " Even in a
palace life can be lived well." No saint in her cloister
was purer than Madame Olive de BeUeville, " la plus
courtoise dame et la plus humble ; " stern to herself,
fasting daily, wearing the hair-shirt on her tender
flesh, but to all others most pitiful and gentle, visiting
the sick, helping poor woraen in childbirth, praying
on the graves of poor or aged people who had few
to raourn thera. And, by a rare virtue, she was chari
table not only to the unhappy ; she knew no less how
to welcome and honour the well-to-do, the honourable,
the unpathetic ; she knew how to deck with fair,
white raiment the smiling daughters of ruined gentle
folk, who else would have gone to their bridegrooras
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The Mediaeval Country-house
without a jewel or a wedding garment She was
hospitable, and even lavish, to the Careless minstrel
folk, so that they made a " Ballad of Regret " when at
last she left them. Above all, she would never hear
ill of anybody. And when the ugly story went round
in whispers, and the worldly and the sceptical smiled
half-content, this good woman, who denied herself
the simplest pleasures, would hasten to excuse the
sinner, to doubt if the tale were true ; or, were it
proven, then she would say that God would amend
it, and that His judgments and His mercy alike were
marvellous, and would one day astound ps all. So
that in her neighbourhood none went undefended in
the hour of slander, unsaluted in prosperity, unvisited
in sickness or sorrow, unholpen in poverty, or un-
prayed for in the hour of death. Few sweeter
eulogies could be given to any woman. " In truth,"
says the Knight of La Tour, " though I was only
nine years old when I knew her, I still remember
many a wise thing she said and did, that I would set
down here had I the time and space."
Madame Olive de Belleville was as frequent a
type as the Lady des BeUes-Cousines and her kind.
More frequent than either, and between the two
extremes of saint and sinner, is the wise and prudent
Lady of La Tour, the careful mother of growing
daughters, "trds gentille et preude femme," who,
beautiful stiU, and often subject to temptation, is
skilful as Portia or Beatrice in the witty answer, the
brilliant, inviolable sraile, which serves to turn aside
the insinuation of evil. Nor let us forget that noble
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wife of a nobler husband, Madame Antoinette de
Turenne, "who scarce lived in her husband's absence,
with so great love did they love each other," who had
refused the hand of a Royal prince in order to raarry
Sir John Bouciquaut. There were then, as now, in
every class, countless women of purest honour, of
staunchest virtue, wise in counsel, true of heart And,
in the highest rank, if the absence of daily cares pro
duced raany frail and thoughtless beauties, the sarae
cause added to the souls of its saints a singular
aloofness, a dazzling lustre of unworldliness, and a
penetrating grace of meditation. The long empty
hours of the raediaeval donjon, if they fostered the
loves of a Tristan and an Yseult, also brought forth
many a radiant spiritual flower.
XIII
In the castles of the fourteenth century, the raen
no less than the women were religious. The middle
class, and especially the respectable bourgeois raan
of letters, affected a certain freedora of thought : he
was already the father of Voltaire and the grand
father of the speech-making Jacobins of the French
Revolution. But all that was changed among the
nobility. There it was essential (even as it is araong
the nobles of France to-day), however light of life, to
be grave of thought. The education of every knight
made hira instinctively religious. Even the scape
grace Louis of Orleans would pass weeks together in
the Convent of the Celestines, praying, fasting with
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The Mediaeval Country-house
the raonks before the altar. And a perfect knight was
habitually not only pious, but austere.
The Livre des Faiz de Messire Jehan Bouciquaut
gives us an adrairable picture of a pattern of chivalry.
The great Governor of Genoa (whom the docuraents
of the Florentine archives reveal to us as an insup
portable raartinet, dogmatic, obstinate, and tyrannical,
despite his virtues) appears in these pages in the
inner splendour of a noble soul. Every morning he
rose at dawn, " that the first-fruits of his day might
be consecrate to God," and we learn with some sur
prise that this poet of courtly ballads, this soldier,
this statesman, gave every morning of his life three
consecutive hours to his "oeuvre d'oraison,'' as in
fallibly renewed at night. At table, while his house
hold were served in gold and silver, he ate and
drank from pewter, glass, or wood ; however rich the
banquet, he partook but of one dish, the first served,
with one glass of wine and water.
" He loves to read the fair books of God, the lives
of the saints, the deeds of the Romans, and ancient
history ; but he talks little and will listen to no
slander. . . . Marvellously hateth he liars and flat
terers, and driveth them from him. . . . Marvellously
hateth he also all games of chance and fortune, and
never consenteth to thera, . . . Those virtues which
be contrary to lubricity are steadfast in him. . . . He
is stern and to the point in justice, yet faileth he not
in raercy and corapassion. . . . He is very piteous
to the ancient men-at-arms who can no longer help
themselves, who have been good blades in their time,
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but have laid by nothing, and so are sore distressed
in their old age. . . . And with all his heart loveth
he those who are of good life, fearing and serving
our Lord Jesus Christ . . . He oweth no debts. . . .
He never lies ; and all that he promiseth, so much
doth he perform."
We are content to end our studies with the
portrait of so true a knight

THE END

PRIHTED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AHD BECCLES.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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