Yet, discipline and control it as you will, the vintage will ever be beautiful, picturesque, and full of association. The rude wains, creaking beneath the reeking tubs—the patient faces of the yoked oxen—the half-naked, stalwart men, who toil to help the cart along the ruts and furrows of the way—the handkerchief-turbaned women, their gay, red-and-blue dresses peeping from out the greenery of the leaves—the children dashing about as if the whole thing were a frolic, and the grey-headed old men tottering cheerfully adown the lines of vines, with baskets and pails of gathered grapes to fill the yawning tubs—the whole picture is at once classic, venerable, and picturesque, not more by association than actuality.
And now, Reader, luxuriating amid the gorgeously carven and emblazoned fittings of a Palais Royal or Boulevard restorateur, Vefours, the Freres, or the Café de Paris; or perhaps ensconced in our quieter and more sober rooms—dim and dull after garish Paris, but ten times more comfortable in their ample sofas and carpets, into which you sink as into quagmires, but with more agreeable results,—snugly, Reader, ensconced in either one or the other locality, after the waiter has, in obedience to your summons, produced the carte de vins, and your eye wanders down the long list of tempting nectars, Spanish and Portuguese, and better, far better, German and French—have you ever wondered as you read, "St. Jullien, Leoville, Chateau la Lafitte, Chateau la Rose, and Chateau Margaux, what these actual vineyards, the produce of which you know so well—what those actual chateaux, which christen such glorious growths, resemble? If so, listen, and I will tell you.
As you traverse the high road from Bordeaux to Pauillac, some one will probably point out to you a dozen tiny sugar-loaf turrets, each surmounted by a long lightning-conductor, rising from a group of noble trees. This is the chateau St. Jullien. A little on, on the right side of the way, rises, from the top of a tiny hill overlooking the Gironde, a new building, with all the old crinkum-crankum ornaments of the ancient fifteenth century country house. That is the chateau Latour. Presently you observe that the entrance to a wide expanse of vines, covering a series of hills and dales, tumbling down to the water's edge, is marked by a sort of triumphal arch or ornamented gate, adorned with a lion couchant, and a legend, setting forth that the vines behind produce the noted wine of Leoville. The chateau Lafitte rises amid stately groves of oak and walnut-trees, from amid the terraced walks of an Italian garden—its white spreading wings gleaming through the trees, and its round-roofed, slated towers rising above them. One chateau, the most noted of all, remains. Passing along a narrow, sandy road, amid a waste of scrubby-looking bushes, you pass beneath the branches of a clump of noble oaks and elms, and perceive a great white structure glimmering garishly before you. Take such a country house as you may still find in your grandmothers' samplers, decorated with a due allowance of doors and windows—clap before it a misplaced Grecian portico, whitewash the whole to a state of the most glaring and dazzling brightness, carefully close all outside shutters, painted white likewise—and you have chateau Margaux rising before you like a wan, ghastly spectre of a house, amid stately terraced gardens, and trimmed, clipped, and tortured trees. But, as I have already insisted, nothing, in any land of vines, must be judged by appearances. The first time I saw at a distance Johannesberg, rising from its grape-clustered domains, I thought it looked very much like a union workhouse, erected in the midst of a field of potatoes.
Turn to the map of France—to that portion of it which would be traversed by a straight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne—and you will observe that such a line would run through a vast extent of bare-looking country—of that sort, indeed, where
Roads, you will observe, are few and far between; the names of far-scattered towns will be unfamiliar to you; and, indeed, nine-tenths of this part of the map consists of white paper. The district you are looking at is the Landes, forming now a department by itself, and anciently constituting a portion of Gascony and Guienne. These Landes form one of the strangest and wildest parts of France. Excepting here and there small patches of poor, ill-cultivated land, the whole country is a solitary desert—black with pine-wood, or white with vast plains of drifting sand. By these two great features of the district, occasionally diversified by sweeps of green morass, intersected by canals and lanes of stagnant and often brackish water, the Landes take a goodly slice out of La Belle France. Their sea-line bounds the French side of the Bay of Biscay, stretching from Bayonne to the mouth of the Gironde; and at their point of greatest breadth they run some sixty miles back into the country; thence gradually receding away towards the sea, as though pushed back by the course of the Garonne, until, towards the mouth of the river, they fade away altogether.
So much for the physique of the Landes. The inhabitants are every whit as rugged, strange, and uncultivated. As the Landes were four centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now; as the people were four centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now. What should the tide of progress or of improvement do in these deserts of pine and sand? The people live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they have none of the national characteristics—little, perhaps, of the national blood. They are saturnine, gloomy, hypochondriac, dismally passing dismal lives in the depths of their black forests, their dreary swamps, and their far-spreading deserts of white, fine sand. Such an odd nook of the world was not to be passed unvisited; besides, I wanted to see the Biscay surf; and accordingly I left Bordeaux for the Landes—not in some miserable cross-country vehicle—not knight-errantwise, on a Bordelais Rosinante—not pilgrim-wise, with a staff and scrip—but in a comfortable railway-carriage.
Yes, sir, a comfortable railway-carriage; and the railway in question—the Bordeaux and Teste line—is the sole enterprise of the kind undertaken and achieved in the south-west of France.
"Railways!" said the conductor of the Paris and Bordeaux diligence to me, with that magnificent condescension with which a Frenchman explains to a Briton all about Perfide Albion!—"Railways, monsieur," he said, "as all the world knows, have achieved the ruin of the Old England, and presently they will do as much for France. Tenez; they are cursed inventions—particularly the Paris and Bordeaux Railway."
But if the ruin of France is to be consummated by railways, France, like bankrupt linendrapers, will take a long time to ruin. The Bordeaux line crawls but slowly on. In 1850, we left the rails and took to the road at Tours; and, barring the bits of line leading down from some of the Mediterranean towns to Marseilles, the Bordeaux and Teste fragment was the sole morsel of railway then in operation south of Lyons. The question comes, then, to be, What earthly inducement caused the construction of this wilderness line, and how it happens that the only locomotives in fair Guienne whistle through the almost uninhabited Landes? The fact seems to be, that, once upon a time, the good folks of Bordeaux were taken with an inappeasable desire to have a railway. One would have thought that the natural course of such an undertaking would have been northward, through the vines and thickly-peopled country of Medoc to the comparatively-important towns of Paulliac and Lesparre. The enterprising Bordelais, however, had another scheme. Some forty miles to the west of the city, the sands, pines, and morasses of the Landes are broken by a vast shallow basin, its edges scolloped with innumerable creeks, bays, and winding friths, into which, through a breach in the coast line of sand-hills, flow the waters of the Atlantic. On the southern side of this estuary lie two or three scattered groups of hovels, inhabited by fishermen and shepherds—the most important of the hamlets being known as Teste, or Teste-la-buch. Between Teste and Bordeaux, the only line of communication was a rutty road, half sand and half morass, and the only traffic was the occasional pilgrimage to the salt water of some patient sent thither at all risks by the Bordeaux doctors, or now and then the transit towards the city of the Garonne of the products of a day's lucky fishing, borne in panniers on the backs of a string of donkeys. Folks, however, were sanguine. The speculation "came out," shares got up, knowing people sold out, simple people held on, and the line was actually constructed. No doubt it was cheaply got up. Ground could be had in the Landes almost for the asking, and from terminus to terminus there is not an inch of tunnel-cutting or embankment. The line, moreover, is single, and the stations are knocked up in the roughest and most primitive style. The result, however, astonished no one, save the shareholders. The traffic does not half pay the working expenses. Notwithstanding that some increase in the amount of communication certainly did take place, consequent upon the facility with which Teste can now be reached—a facility which has gone some way to render it a summer place of sea-side resort—the two trains which per diem seldom convey more than a dozen or so of third-class passengers, and the shareholders at length flung themselves into the hands of the Government; and, insisting upon the advantages which would accrue to the State as soon as the Paris and Bordeaux line was finished, by a direct means of communication between the metropolis and a harbour in the Bay of Biscay, they succeeded in hypothecating their line to the Government for a small annual subvention. Such is the present agreeable position of the single railway in the south-west of France.
I was somewhat late, as I feared, for the train, and, calling a citadine, got the man to urge his horse to a gallop, so that we pulled up at the terminus with the animal in a lather. A porter approached, and grinned. "Monsieur has made haste, but the winter season begins to-day, and the train does not go for an hour and a half." There was no help for it, and I sauntered into the nearest café to read long disquisitions on what was then all the vogue in the political world—the "situation." I found the little marble slabs deserted—even the billiard-table abandoned, and all the guests collected round the white Fayence stove. Joining them, I perceived the attraction. On one of the velvet stools sat an old gentleman of particularly grave and reverend aspect—a most philosophic and sage-like old gentleman—and between his legs was a white poodle, standing erect with his master's cane in his paws. All the company were in raptures with Niniche, who was going through his performances.
"Niniche," said the patriarch, "what does Monsieur Tetard do when he comes home late?"
The dog immediately began to stagger about on its hind legs, sometimes losing its balance and then getting up again, looking all the time with a sort of stupid blinking stare at its master. It was clear that M. Tetard, when he came home late, did not come home sober.
"Tiens! c'est admirable!" shouted the spectators—burly fellows, with black beards, and honest tradesman-looking people, with glasses of eau sucreé in their hands.
"And now," said the old gentleman, the poodle's proprietor and instructor, "what does Madame Tetard do when Monsieur Tetard comes home late?"
The dog straightway began to utter, with wonderful volubility, a series of loud, shrill, yelping snaps, jerking itself up and down on its haunches, and flinging its paws about as if it had the hydrophobia. The spectators were enraptured. "It is actually her voice," said one. "Only the dog is too good-looking for her," said another. "Voilà, petite!" vociferated a third, holding a huge piece of bluish-tinted beetroot sugar to the performer, when suddenly the group was broken by a fussy, fat old gentleman with a white baggy cravat, very snuffy, and a pair of heavy gold spectacles.
"Je dis—moi!" shouted the new comer, in violent wrath; "que c'est abominable ce que vous faites là Père Grignon." A murmur of suppressed laughter went through the group. Père Grignon looked considerably taken aback, and the speaker aimed a hearty kick at Niniche, who dodged away round the stove. It was evident that he was no other than the injured and maligned Tetard himself. Instantly he broke into loud objurgations. He knew how that atrocious old Père Grignon had taught his dog to malign him, the bête misérable! But as for it, he would poison it—shoot it—drown it; and as for Père Grignon, who ought to have more sense, all the quartier knew what he was—an imbécile, who was always running about carrying tales, and making mischief. But he would appeal to the authorities; he would lay his complaint before the commisary of the quartier; he would—he would—. At this moment the excited orator caught sight of the offending poodle slipping to the door, and instantly sprung vigorously after him:—
"Tenez-tenez; don't touch Niniche—it's not his fault!" exclaimed the poodle's proprietor. But the dog had bolted, with Tetard in hot chase of his imitator, and vowing that he should be écraséd and abiméd as soon as caught. There was, of course, great laughter at the whole proceeding; and then the group betook themselves to the marble slabs and dominoes—the instructor of the offending quadruped coolly lighting his pipe, as he muttered that old Tetard was, after all, a bon enfant, and that over a petit verre he would always listen to reason.
At length the tedious hour and a half wore away, and I entered the terminus—a roughly built wooden shed. The train consisted of a first, second, and third-class carriage; but there were no first-class passengers, only one solitary second-class, and about a dozen third-classes, with whom I cast my lot. Miserable as the freight was, the locomotive whistled as loud and panted as vehemently as if it were yoked to a Great Western express; and off we went through the broad belt of nursery gardens, which encircles every French town, and where the very best examples of the working of the small proprietary system are to be seen. A rapid run through the once greatly famed and still esteemed vineyards of Hautbrion, and we found ourselves scurrying along over a negative sort of country—here a bit of heath, there a bit of vineyard—now a bald spot of sand, anon a plot of irregularly-cut stubble; while a black horizon of pine-wood rose gradually on the right and left. On flew the train, and drearier grew the landscape; the heath was bleaker—the pines began to appear in clumps—the sand-stretches grew wider—every thing green, and fertile, and riant disappeared. He, indeed, who enters the Landes, appears to have crossed a French frontier, and left the merry land behind. No more bright vineyards—no more rich fields of waving corn—no more clustered villages—no more chateau-turrets—no more tapering spires. You look up to heaven to see whether the sky has not changed, as well as the land. No; all there is blue and serene as before, and the keen, hot sun glares intensely down upon undulating wastes of marsh, fir, and sand, among which you may travel for leagues without seeing a man, hearing a dog bark, or a bird sing. At last we were fairly among the woods, shooting down what seemed an eternal straight tunnel, cleft by lightning through the pines. The trees stood up stark and stiff, like cast-iron; the fir is at once a solemn and a rigid tree—the Puritan of the forest; and down the side of each Puritan I noticed a straight, yellowish gash, running perpendicularly from the spread of the branches almost to the earth, and turned for explanation to an intelligent-looking man, evidently a citizen of Bordeaux, opposite me.
"Ah!" he said, "you are new to our Landes."
I admitted it.
"And these gashes down the trees—these, monsieur, give us the harvest of the Landes."
"The harvest! What harvest?"
"What harvest? Resin, to be sure."
"Ay, resin," said an old fellow with a blouse and a quick eye; "resin, monsieur; the only harvest that man can grow in sand."
"Tenez," said my first interlocutor; "the peasants cut that gash in the tree; and at the root they scoop a little hollow in the ground. The resin perspires out of the wood, flows slowly and glutinously down the gash, and in a month or so, according to the heat of the weather, the hole is full, and the man who rents the trees takes up the sticky stuff, like soup, with a ladle."
"That's a very good description," said the old bloused gentleman. "And then, sir" (addressing me), "we barrel our crop of the Landes. Yes, indeed, we barrel it, as well as they do the crop of the Medoc."
"Only you wouldn't like to drink it so well," said the Bordeaux man.
Presently we pulled up at a station—a mere shed, with a clearing around it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the name—Tohua-Cohoa, and remarked that it did not look like a French one.
"French one!" said he of Bordeaux; "you don't expect to find French in this chaos? No, no; it is some of the gibberish the savages hereabout speak."
"No such gibberish, and no such savages either," said the little keen-eyed man. "Moi, je suis de Landes; and the Landes language is a far finer language than French. French! phoo, phoo!"
And he took a pinch of snuff indignantly and triumphantly. The Bordeaux gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a character to be humoured, and then looked doubtful and unconvinced.
"Tohua-Cohoa," he said; "it has a sacré tonnerre of a barbarous sound; has it any meaning?"
"Meaning!" exclaimed the man of the Landes; "I should think so. Tohua-Cohoa means, in French, Allez doucement; and the place was so called because there was there a dangerous swamp, in which many a donkey coming up from Teste with fish to you of Bordeaux was smothered; and so it got to be quite proverbial among the drivers of the donkeys, and they used to shout to each other, 'Tohua-Cohoa!' whenever they came near the slough; meaning to look out, and go gently, and take care of the soft places."
The man with the blouse, who was clearly the champion of the Landes, then turned indignantly from the Bordeaux man and addressed himself to me. "The language which the poor people here speak, monsieur, is a fine and expressive language, and liker the Spanish than the French. The people are poor, and very ignorant. They believe, monsieur, in ghosts, and witches, and sorceries, just as all France did two or three hundred years ago. Very few of them can read, monsieur, and they have bad food and no wine. But nevertheless, monsieur, they are bons enfants—braves gens, monsieur. They love their pine-woods and their sands as much as other people do their corn-fields and their vines, monsieur. They would die, monsieur, if you took them away from the sand and the trees. They are not like the Auvergnats, who go in troops to Paris to carry water from the fountains, and who are betes—betes—bien betes! They stay at home, monsieur. They wear their sheep-skins and walk upon their stilts, like their forefathers before them, monsieur; and if you are coming here to see the Landes, and if you lose yourself in the woods, and see a light glimmering through the trees, and rap at the cottage door, monsieur, you will be welcomed, monsieur, and have the best they can offer to eat, and the softest they can offer to sleep on. Tenez, tenez; nous sommes pauvres et ignorants mais nous sommes, loyals et bons!"
The tears fairly stood in the keen black eyes of the Landes man as he concluded his harangue, of which I have only reported the main points; for, truth to tell, the poor fellow's vehemence was so great, and his utterance so rapid, that I lost nearly as much as I caught. The Bordeaux gentleman hammered the floor with his umbrella in satirical approbation, the rest of the passengers looked curiously on, and, the engine whistling, we pulled up again at a station similar to the first—a shed—a clearing, and black pine all around. There were just three persons on the rough platform—the station-master in a blouse, and two yellow-breeched gens-d'armes. What could they find to occupy them among these drear pine-woods? What thief, who had not made a vow of voluntary starvation, or who had not a morbid taste for living upon resin, would ever have ventured among them? But the authorities! Catch a bit of France without an "authority!" As they certainly are omnipotent, and profess to be omniscient, it is only to be supposed that they should be omnipresent. One man left the train at the station in question—a slouching, stupid, swarthy peasant, the authorities pounced upon him, evidently in prodigious glee at catching somebody to be autoritised over, and we left them, spelling and squabbling over the greasy-looking "papers" presented by the profoundly respectful Jacques or Pierre.
And now, before proceeding further, I may be allowed to describe, with some minuteness, the landscape which will greet the traveller in the Landes. Its mere surface-aspect I have already sketched; but general terms go but a small way towards indicating the dreary grandeurs of that solemn wilderness. Over all its gloom and barrenness—over all its "blasted heaths" and monotonous pine-woods, and sodden morasses, and glaring heaps of shifting sand—there is a strong and pervading sense of loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which, as it were, clothes the land with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from black forests of fir, the wanderer may find himself upon a plain, flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes, perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the endless sand-banks and stretches of shadowy pine. The dwellings which dot this dreary, yet, in its way, solemnly poetic landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated sometimes by many miles, often by many leagues. Round them the wanderer will descry a miserable field or two, planted with a stunted crop of rye, millet, or maize. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones, clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes, pine stakes, and broadleaved reeds, beneath which cluster, when not seeking their miserable forage in the woods, two or three cows, mere skin and bone, and a score or two of the most abject-looking sheep which ever browsed.
Proceeding through the Landes towards the coast, a long chain of lakes and water-courses, running parallel to the ocean, breaks their uniformity. The country becomes a waste of shallow pools, and of land which is parched in summer and submerged in winter. Running in devious arms and windings through moss and moor and pine, these "lakes of the dismal swamp" form labyrinths of gulfs and morasses which only the most experienced shepherds can safely thread. Here and there a village, or rather bourg, will be seen upon their banks, half hidden in the pine-woods; and a roughly-built fishing-punt or two will be observed floating like the canoe of a savage in the woodland lakes. Sometimes, as in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described, these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean, and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For, forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the land flings millions of tons of sand per hour into the sea, to be washed up again by the surf, flung on the beach, and in the first Biscay gale blown in whirlwinds inland. A winter hurricane again from the west has filled up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters inland, dispersing them in gleaming lakes among the pine-woods, flooding, and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and burying for ever their fields of millet and rye. I shall presently have occasion to touch upon some disasters of this sort. Meantime, having made the aspect of the Landes familiar to the reader, I pursue the thread of my journey.
The novelty of a population upon stilts—men, women, and children, spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than the rest of mankind—irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At last I was gratified; as the train passed not very quickly along a jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it, as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all. Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not only by two daddy long-legs' limbs, but by a third, which appeared to grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly explained by my bloused cicerone, who seemed to feel especial pleasure at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his back-stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs.
"He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play cards, so, without once coming off their stilts."
"Ay, and cheat! Mon Dieu! how they cheat!" said the Bordeaux gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctantly admitted that was the truth, and the other went on:—
"These fellows here on the stilts are the most confounded gamblers in Europe. Men and women, it's all the same—play, play, play; they would stake their bodies first, and their souls after. Tenez; I once heard of a lot of the fellows playing in a wood till they were all but starved. In the day they played by daylight, and when night came, they kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money—not that they had much of that—and their crops—not that they were of great value either—and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, their stilts—for a Landes man thinks his stilts the principal part of his wardrobe; and, sacré! monsieur, three of the fellows were ruined out and out, and had to give up their hats, and sheep-skins, and sabots, while the man who was the greatest winner walked home on his own stilts, with the stilts of all his comrades tucked under his arm."
"Gaming is their fault—their great fault," meekly acknowledged the blouse.
"Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards."
"The fact is," replied the apologist, "that they count cheating part of the game. Their motto is, win anyhow; so it is no worse for one than the other. Cards is chance; but cheating needs skill, and voila tout."
We were fast approaching Teste, and had passed two or three clusters of poor huts, and a party of women up to their waists in a sluggish stream washing fleeces, while yellow patches of ripening maize began to recur quicker and quicker, showing that we had reached a comparatively thickly-peopled district, when all at once there burst upon my eyes a glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England, the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and fuzzy, and rusty, compared to this wonderful hue. The land looked like one huge emerald, sparkling in the sun. The brightness, the freshness, the radiance of the tint, was almost supernatural, and the eye, nursed for it, as it were, after our journey over the brown moors and black pines, caught the bright fresh beauty of the colour with rapture.
"Come," I thought, "there are, at least, oases in the Landes. Never was turf so glorious; never was sward so bewitching." And then, gazing far and wide upon the prairie, I saw it dotted with human figures labouring at the soil, and great wains and carts drawn by oxen, looking like black specks upon a great, fresh, green leaf. But, in a moment, I saw something more. Could I believe my eyes? A ship! Yes, verily, a ship, fast aground, high and dry upon the turf! and not only one, but two, three, four, good-sized schooners and chasse marées, with peasants digging about them, and country carts high heaped with green rural-looking burdens.
The Landes man saw my bewilderment. "The green-looking land," he said, "is the flat bottom of part of the bay of Arcachon. It is now dead low-water, and the country people have come down with their carts to fill them with that green slimy seaweed, which makes capital manure; and some of them, perhaps, have brought casks of resin for those ships which principally belong to Bordeaux, Rochelle, and Nantes, and come here and into other bays along the coast for the harvest of the Landes."
The engine whistled. We were at Teste—a shabby, ancient little village, with a deep stream flowing sluggishly around it, and dividing itself into a many-forked delta along the level sand; fishermen's hovels scattered on the beach, brown boats drawn up beneath them, nets drying, a considerable fishy smell pervading the atmosphere, with, beyond again, the black, unvarying mantle of pine-woods. There is a very good hotel at Teste; thanks to its being one of the Bordeaux watering-places; and there, for dinner, was provided red mullets, which would have made the red mullet-loving Duke of Devonshire crazy, as he noted the difference between the fish from the bay of Arcachon and their brethren from the coast of Weymouth.
The sun was low in the heavens next morning when I was afoot and down to the beach, the glorious bay now brimming full, and the schooners and chasse marées, like the swan on St. Mary's Loch, floating double, ships and shadows. The scene was very strange. The green meadow had disappeared, and where it had been, a gleaming lake stretched brilliant in the sunshine, set in the pine-woods like a mirror in an ebony frame, cutting slices of sweeping bay out of their dusky margins, and piercing their depths with silent, weedy water-veins.
Where the villages lie, there have been clearings made in the wood, precisely as one would expect to see in a New Zealand or Australian bay. Close to high-water mark, rows of rounded huts serve as storehouses for nets, and spars, and sails. Before them straggling jetties run on piles far to seaward; behind, huddled amid scanty vineyards and patches of broadleaved Indian corn, groups of houses—their roofs nearly flat, and their walls not above six feet, in some places not four feet, high—seem cowering away from observation. For every cottage built of stone, there are half-a-dozen out-houses, sheds, pig-sties, and so forth, piled up with old oars, broken masts, furze, pine-cuttings, and Irish-looking sod. I made my way to what seemed the principal landing-place—a bleached jetty. A dozen or so of boats floated round it, roughly built, very narrow, and very light, lying upon the very top of the water, and just, in fact, as like canoes as the scene about resembled some still savage country. Three boats were starting for the oyster fishery, manned each by four as buxom, blithe, and debonnaire wenches as you would wish to see. They had short petticoats—your Nereides of all shores have—and straw hats, shaped like a man's. In the stern-sheets of each boat a venerable, ancient mariner held the tiller; and as I approached, the damsels, who were getting their clumsy oars inserted between the thole-pins, clamoured out in a torrent of vociferous gabble, offering me a day's oyster-fishing, if I would go with them. They were evidently quite au fait to ridding the Bordeaux loungers of their spare francs, in the shape of passage-money, for a frolic on the oyster-banks; but I had determined to pass the day in another fashion. I wanted a sail on the bright, still bay, a walk in the pine-woods, and a glance at the surf tumbling in from the Bay of Biscay; so I scrutinized the faces of two or three lounging boatmen, with as much reference to Lavater's principles as I might, and selecting the most intelligent-looking of the lot—a mild, grey-eyed man, who spoke gently and slowly—we soon made a bargain, and were speedily afloat in the bean-cod looking canoe of which he was the skipper. I was gazing doubtfully at the heavy oars, and the expanse of water, when a flying cat's-paw made just a pretence of ruffling it.
"Merci, le bon vent!" said the fisherman. Up went a mast; up went a light patch of thin white canvass, and straightway the bubbles flew fast and faster by the gunwale, and there arose a sweet gurgle from the cleaving bow.
"You can see how fast we're going by the bottom," said the boatman. I leant over the gunwale, and looked down. Oh, the marvellous brightness of that shining sea! I gazed from the boat upon the sand through the water, almost as you might through the air upon the earth from a balloon. Ghost-like fish gleamed in the depths, and their shadows followed them below upon the ribbed sea-sand. Long flowing weeds, like rich green ribbons, waved and streamed in the gently running tidal current. You could see the white pebbles and shells—here a ridge of rocks, there a dark bed of seaweed; and now and then a great flat-fish, for all the world like a burnished pot-lid set in motion—went gleaming along the bottom.
"Once," said the boatman, "all the bottom of this great bay that you are looking at was dry land, and there were cottages upon it, and an ancient chateau. That was the chateau of Armand de Chatel-morant, an old baron of these parts, a wicked man and a great magician, who had a familiar spirit, which came when he blew a horn, and who was able, by his sorceries, to rule the winds that blow. Only, once he raised a storm he could not quell; and it was that storm which made the Bay of Arcachon; for the wind blew the sand of the sea-shore up the country, like a snow-storm, and the sand-hills rolled before it; and what the wind began, the coup de mer finished, and the ocean came bursting through the breach it had battered in the sand-ridges of the coast, and swallowed up the chateau and drowned the magician, and there was an end of him."
"Well," said I, "so be it; he deserved his fate."
"For many a year after the flood the baron had made," the boatman continued, "you could see, out of a boat, the pointed tops of the towers of the chateau below you, with the weather-cocks still pointing to the west, and the green seaweed hanging to them, like pennons from a ship's vanes."
"But I fear it is not to be seen now."
"Oh! no. Ages and ages ago it rotted and rotted away; but the old men of the village have heard from their fathers that the fishermen only ventured there in calm summer weather and in good daylight; for, in the dark, look you, and when a Biscay wind was blowing, they said they heard the sounding of Chatel-morant's magic horn, and they saw his imp flying above them and wailing like a hurt seabird."
Of course, I was on thorns to hear all the story; and so my boatman recounted a rude, disjointed tale, which I have hitched, legendwise, into the following narrative:—
The Baron Armand de Chatel-morant sat in his dim studio high up in the most seaward tower of the chateau of Chatel-morant. His hair and his beard were white, but his eyes were keen, and his cheeks as ruddy as the eyes and the cheeks of a young man. He had a furnace beside him, with implements of projection, crucibles, and powders. On the table were astrological instruments, and the magic crystal, which his Familiar had given him, and in which—only, however, when the Familiar pleased—the baron could read the future; but, for every reading of the future, the baron was a year older—the Familiar had a year of his life. The baron was clothed in a long furred robe, and he wore red shoes, with peaked toes, as long again as his feet. His face was moody, and clouds went driving along his brow. He took up his instruments, and laid them down, and opened a big book, full of spells and cantrips, and shut it; then he walked about the room; and then he stopped and blew a silver whistle.
Very prompt at the sound came an old man—reverent and sorrowful looking—with a white wand; for he was the seneschal of the chateau of Chatel-morant.
"Your niece," said the baron, "who comes hither from the town of Bordeaux to visit you, and whom I saw but yester even,—has she returned?"
"She went this morning, monseigneur," said the seneschal; "she has preparations to make; for, God save the pretty child! she is to be married on the day of Blessed St. John."
The baron frowned; for he was not an admirer of the saints, being quite, indeed, on the other side of the hedge.
"Say the number of the day, and the name of the month," he replied, angrily; "and do not torment me with that shaveling jargon which they talk in the monastery of Andrew, whom they call St. Andrew at Bordeaux."
The seneschal, who was accustomed to be bullied, particularly upon religious subjects, crossed himself behind his back; for he was a prudent man, and, owing to the absence of mind of the baron, who was always experimentalizing in the black art, managed, one way or other, to pick up so much as to make his place a tolerably profitable one.
"Married!" said the baron; "and to whom?"
"Just to honest and brave Jacques Fort—the stoutest mariner who sails out of the Garonne. He has got a ship of his own, now—the Sainte Vierge; and to-day he sails upon his first voyage, as far as Bayonne."
"He sails to-day—so; and the maiden's name—your niece's name—what is that?"
"Toinette, so please you, sir."
"You may go."
And go the seneschal did, wondering very much at the uncommon interest his master seemed to be taking in vulgar, sublunary things.
Then Baron Armand de Chatel-morant paced the room a long time in gloomy meditation. At length he sat down again, and said aloud: "There is no doubt of it—I am in love. That face haunts me; Toinette's face is ever floating opposite to me. 'Tis an odd feeling; I was never so before. But, since it is so, I must even have the maiden—she will cheer me—I love her face. I will send to-morrow to Bordeaux, as from her uncle; and when she comes here, by the star of Aldeboran, she stays here, Jacques Fort to the contrary notwithstanding!"
"Wrong—quite wrong!" said a voice.
The baron turned coolly round, and saw, sitting upon the arm of the chair close to him, the figure of a very thin dwarf, with a long, unearthly face, and fingers like hawks' claws. This was the imp—the baron's Familiar.
"How, Klosso!" said Armand; "you come without being called?"
"Yes; but you would have called me soon."
"You know what I am thinking of—of Toinette. I love her—I must have her."
"You will not have her."
"Why so?"
"Because it is so decreed."
"Klosso," said the baron, "I don't believe you. You know the future; but you lie about it when you speak."
"Will you, then," answered the demon, "look into the crystal: that can't lie. Come—it's only another year—give yourself a treat—come!"
"I have given you many years already," said the baron, musing; "look how grey my hair is!"
"Dye it," said the imp, who, if he was a Familiar, certainly behaved as such. But the baron took no notice of his impertinence. He was dreadfully smitten by Toinette, and said he'd have a twelvemonths' worth of knowledge of futurity for her sake. The thin dwarf grinned, and then made a motion of relief, as one who saw before him the speedy end of a long, long watch. So he took the crystal, uttered, as may be supposed, some magic words; and the baron looked upon the clear surface.
"Malediction!" he exclaimed, as he saw in the crystal a huge hearth, with pots on the fire, and poultry roasting before it, and Toinette tending the cookery, and a stalwart fellow helping her clumsily.
"That is Toinette!" cried the baron; "but who is the rascal with her?"
"Her husband, Jacques Fort."
"Curses on him!"
Here the baron saw Jacques fling his arm round Toinette's waist, and kiss her so naturally, that he ground his teeth.
"Domestic felicity," said the imp; "a charming picture, baron—they're cooking the christening feast for young Jacques."
The baron flung the crystal down.
"Pay me," said the imp; and he passed the bird-like hand over the baron's face, and each of his fingers drew a wrinkle. A shudder went over the sorcerer's frame, and then he breathed heavily, and looked wistfully at the imp. He was a year older.
"Klosso!" shouted Armand, leaping to his feet, "I will fight fate!"
"Better not," said Klosso.
"Curse the future!" exclaimed the baron; "I will alter the future, and give the lie to the crystal, as to you!"
"If you try," replied the imp, coolly, "you will belong to me before the morning."
"Silence, slave!" cried Armand, who was not a man to be put out of his way; "you rule the winds—I rule you. Make the west wind blow."
The imp raised its hand, and they heard the whistling of a strong, gusty wind, and the creaking of the weather-cocks, as they all turned towards the sea.
"Stronger—stronger—stronger!" shouted the baron; and the whistle became a roar, and the roar a howl; and the castle shook and swayed in the blast.
"Good—good!" laughed the baron; "something more than a puff there—ha! ha!—as Jacques Fort has found by this time on the deck of his new ship in the Bay of Biscay."
The Familiar gently remarked that the weather was roughish, when the seneschal rushed into the room in a dreadful state of terror at the storm.
"My lord—my lord!" he said, "we shall all be blown away; the air is full of sand; you would be suffocated outside. The wind is tearing up the pines; and oh, poor Jacques Fort is at sea, and drowned—drowned, by this time, to a certainty!"
"Yes," said Armand, "I should rather think so. Toinette must take up with somebody else.—Stronger!"
The last injunction was addressed to the imp, and instantly complied with. The tempest roared like the up-bursting of a volcano, and screeched and screamed through the sugar-loaf turrets and the lattices, which it had burst in, and the loop-holes, like a hundred thousand devils' whistles. The seneschal fell on his knees.
"Stronger still!" said the baron.
And meantime what was Jaques Fort doing in his new ship? With every rag of canvass torn out of the bolt-ropes, the Sainte Vierge was flying on the very top, as it seemed, of the driving spray, on to the breakers. Jacques was the only man left on deck—every one of the rest had been washed overboard, and were already sleeping in the sea; and he knew that in a moment he would follow them. The staggering ship rose on the back of a mighty breaker; and the captain knew that with its fall upon the beach his vessel would be ground to powder.
"Oh, Toinette!" he murmured, as the ship was hove forward like a bolt from a bow, and then fell shooting into a creaming current of rushing water, while the sand-hills appeared right and left for a moment, and then were left astern. The last grand wave had burst the barrier, and the frail ship and the kneeling mariner were borne onward on the ridge of the advancing flood, which formed the lake of Arcachon. Jacques Fort saw a light, and steered towards it: it was the light in the baron's chamber at the chateau of Chatel-morant.
There, by the burst-in lattice, stood the baron, his grey hair flying above his head, and ever shouting to the imp, "Stronger, Klosso—stronger!" And every time he used the words, the hurricane burst louder and louder upon the rocking turrets. And still Armand clung to the stone-work of the burst-in lattice, through which the flying sand drove in, and clustered in his robes and hair.
And now the terrified domestics began to rush up to the chamber of the baron.
"My lord, such a storm was never heard of!"
"My lord, the devil is loose, and riding on the wind!"
"My lord, the end of the world is at hand!"
"Klosso!" shouted the baron, "stronger!"
As he spoke, the wind burst like a thunder-clap over them, and they heard the crash of a falling tower. The serving men and women grovelled in terror on the floor; the baron clung by the window; the imp, visible only to him, sat on the back of the arm-chair, as he had sat since his appearance.
But hush! Another sound, mingling with the roar of the wind, and deeper and more awful still. It rapidly increased, and the baron found his face besprinkled with driving drops of water—they were salt.
"My lord—my lord!" screamed the seneschal, sinking, as he spoke, at the baron's knees; "my lord—the sea!"
A cry was heard without; the lights of the hamlet beneath disappeared; and then a shock from below made the chateau swing and rock, and white waves were all around them.
"The sea, my lord," said the seneschal, "has burst the sand-banks; the castle stands on low ground. We are all dead men—the sea—the sea!"
The Baron Armand turned to Klosso: "Does he speak truth?"
"The worthy gentleman," said the imp, "is perfectly in the right; you are all dead men; and, Monseigneur le Baron, when you gave me last a year of your life, you gave me the last you had to give."
Up rose the water, and higher dashed the waves. Up, foot by foot, and yard by yard; and still the baron stood erect amid the raving of the elements—his face as white as his hair, but his eyes as bright and keen as ever.
"Klosso," he said, "I am yours; and the future is the future."
He looked at the iron lamp swinging above his head.
"It will soon be out," said Klosso.
Jacques Fort still steered to the light. It came nearer and nearer; and he saw, even through the gloom and the driving spray, that it shone from a castle-turret, and he seized the tiller to change the course of the vessel; but as he did so, the grand, triumphant, finishing blast of the hurricane fell upon the seething flood like iron—heaved up one bristling, foaming sea, which caught the Sainte Vierge upon its crest, and flung the ship almost into the air. The light gleamed for a moment almost beneath him; and Jacques, rushing to the bow, saw below it, as in a prison, a fierce convulsed face, and staring eyes, and flying white hair; and the eyes saw him. As Jacques recognised the sorcerer Armand of Chatel-morant, so did Armand recognise the face and form he had seen helping Toinette to cook the christening feast.
The next instant the Sainte Vierge was borne over and over the highest turret of the chateau, her keel a fathom good above the loftiest and the gaudiest of all the gilt weather-cocks.
The event foreshadowed in the crystal duly took place on the anniversary of the day which saw the chateau de Chatel-morant swallowed in the Bay of Arcachon.
The legend of the submerged chateau, with which I plead guilty to having taken a few liberties, but "only with a view" (as the magistrate said when he put his neighbour into the stocks)—"only with a view towards improvement," occupied us during the greater part of our smooth and pleasant sail. Dismissing matters legendary, we talked of the fishermen of the bay, and their neighbours, the shepherds on stilts. The man of the sea held the men of the land cheap. The peasants were never out of the forests and the sand, he said; the fishermen often went to Bordeaux, and sometimes to Rochelle, and sometimes even to Nantes. They (the boatmen) never used stilts; but as soon as the peasant's children were able to toddle, they were clapped upon a pair of sticks, and many a tumble, and many a broken face they caught, before they could use them easily. "They are a good set of people, but very ignorant, and they believe whatever you tell them. They are frightened out of their wits if you speak of witches or sorcerers; but we know that all these old tales are nothing but nonsense. We go to Bordeaux very often as pilots, and to Rochelle, and even to Nantes." I was further informed, that in the winter time the fishermen pursued their occupation in the bay in such boats as that in which I was sailing; and that in summer they went out into the Atlantic; but never ventured more than a few miles to sea, and never, if they could help it, stayed out a night.
This kind of conversation brought us tolerably well to the narrow passage, all fenced with intricate sand-banks, which leads to the open sea. A white, graceful lighthouse rose above the sand-banks on our right, into which the pine-woods were stretching in long, finger-like projections; and the boat, beginning to rise and fall upon the slow, majestic heave which the swell without communicated to the shallow water within the bar, assured me that if we went further, the surf would prevent our landing at all. We ran the boat upon the beach, and drawing her up high and dry, plunged into, not the greenwood, but the black-wood tree. It was hard walking. The pines grew out of fine bright sand, bound here and there together by carpets of long bent grass, and the air was sickly with the peculiar resinous smell of the rich sap of the tree fermenting and distilling down the gashes. In our ramble, we encountered two of the peasants, whose dreary work it is to hack the pines and ladle up the flowing proceeds. We heard the blows of the axe echoing in the hot silence of the mid-day, and made our way to whence the sound proceeded, speedily descrying the workman, perched upon a slight bending ladder, gashing the tree. This man, and, indeed, all his brethren whom I saw, were miserable-looking creatures—their features sunken and animal-like—their hair matted in masses over their brows—their feet bare, and their clothing painfully wretched. Their calling is as laborious as it is monotonous. Starting with the dawn, they plunge—a ladder in one hand, and an adze in the other—into the recesses of the pine-wood, repeating the same process to every tree. The ladder in question is very peculiar, consisting of a single strip of elastic wood, about ten feet long, dotted with knobs cut plain upon one side for the foot to rest upon, and thus serving instead of rounds or steps. This primitive ladder is sliced away towards the top, so as to rest more commodiously upon the tree. When in use, it is placed almost perpendicularly, and the workman ascends it like a monkey, never touching the tree, but keeping the ladder in its position by the action of his legs, which, from the knee downward, seem to cling round and round the bending wood, and keep it in its place, even when the top, laid perhaps against the rounded side of the trunk, appears to be slipping off every moment.
"Well," said my guide, the Teste boatman, "I would rather reef topsails in a gale of wind than go up there, at any rate."
The ladder, its proprietor told me, could not be used except with naked feet. The instrument with which he cut the tree was as sharp as a razor, and required long practice to acquire the knack of using it. I wondered that the gashing did not kill the trees, as some of the largest were marked with half-a-dozen cuts from the ground to the fork. Here and there, indeed, you found one which had succumbed to the process, rotted, and fallen; but the majority seemed in very good case, nevertheless.
"Look at that tree," said a resin-gatherer. More than half the bark had certainly gone in these perpendicular stripes, and yet it looked strong and stately "That tree is more than a hundred years old; and that is not a bad age for either a man or a fir."
Leaving the peasant behind, we pushed steadily towards the sea. The ground, thanks to the debris of the pines, was as slippery as ice, except where we plunged into fine hot sand, half way to the knees. Every now and then we crossed what I cannot describe better than by calling it a perfectly bald spot in the woods—a circular patch of pure white sand—in certain lights, you might have taken it for snow. All around were the black pines; but not a blade or a twig broke the drifted fineness of the bald white patch. You could find neither stone nor shell—nothing but subtle, powdery sand—every particle as minute and as uniform as those in an hour-glass.
"That," said my guide, when we came in view of the first of these singular little saharas—"that is a devil's garden."
"And what does he grow there?" I asked. The man lowered his voice: "It is in these spots of fine white sand that all the sorcerers and witches, and warlocks in France—ay, and I have heard, in the whole world—meet to sing, and dance, and frolic; and the devil sits in the middle. So, at least," he added, after a pause, and in a more sprightly tone—"so the peasants say."
"And do you say it?"
"Well, I do not know. There's witches, for certain, in the Landes,—old women—but whether they come flying out here to dance round the devil or no—the peasants say so for certain—but I don't think I believe it."
"I should hope you didn't."
"They enchant people, though; there's no doubt of that. They can give you the fever so bad that no doctor can set you to rights again; and they can curse a place, and keep the grass from growing on it; but I don't believe they fly on broomsticks, or dance round the devil."
"Are there any young women witches?"
"Well, I do hear of one or two. Mais elles ne sont pas bien fortes. It is only the old ones make good witches, and the uglier they are the better."
"Well, now, did they ever do any harm to you?"
The man paused, and looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Our little Marie," he said, "has fits; and my wife does say—" Here he stopped. "No, monsieur," he said, "I do not believe in witches."
But he did, as firmly as King Jamie; only now and then, in the bright sunlight, and with an incredulous person, he thought he did not.
On, however, we went mile after mile, over the slippery ground, and in the shadow of the pines, ere we saw gleaming ahead, the region of fine sand, and heard—although the little breeze which blew was off the shore—the low thunder of the "coup de mer"—the breaking surf of the ocean. Presently, passing through a zone of stunted furze, and dry thin-bladed grass, we emerged into the most fearful desert I ever looked upon—a sea of heights and hollows, dells and ridges, long slopes and precipitous ravines—all of them composed of pure white, hot, drifting sand. The labour of walking was excessive. I longed for the stilts I had seen the day before. Every puff of breeze sent the sand, like dry pungent powder, into our faces, and sometimes we could see it reft from the peaks of the ridges, and blown like clouds of dust far out into the air. All at once my guide touched my arm, "Voila! donc, voila! des chevaux sauvages!" It certainly only required a breed of wild horses to make the country an exact counterpart of Arabia; and I eagerly turned to see the steeds of the desert, just succeeding in catching a glimpse of a ruck of lean, brown, shaggy ponies, disappearing round a hill, in a whirlwind of sand. There is, undoubtedly, something romantic and Mazeppaish in the notion of wild horses of the desert; but stern truth compels me to add, that a more stunted, ragged lot of worthless brutes, not bigger than donkeys, than were the troop of desert steeds of the Landes which I had the fortune to see, could be nowhere met with. My fisherman told me that, when caught and tamed, they were useful in carrying sacks and panniers along the sandy ways; but that there were not more vicious, stubborn brutes in nature than Landes ponies.
A doubly fatiguing trudge, unbroken by any further episodical visions of desert steeds, but enlivened by the fast increasing thunder of the surf, at length brought us to its foam. Winding through a succession of sand valleys, we climbed a steepish bank, sinking to our knees at every step, and from this last ridge beheld a long, gentle slope, as perfectly smooth as though the sand had been smoothed by a ruler—fining away down to the white creaming sheets of water which swept, with the loud peculiar hiss of the agitated sea, far up and down the level banks. The full force of the great heaving swells was expended in breakers, roaring half a mile from the land; and from their uttermost verge to the tangled heaps of seaweed washed high and dry upon the beach, was a vast belt of foaming water, extending away on either hand in a perfectly straight line as far as the eye could reach, and dividing the shipless expanse of water from the houseless expanse of land. The scene was very solemn. There was not even a seabird overhead—not an insect crawling or humming along the ungrateful sand. Only the grand organ of the surf made its incessant music, and the sharp thin rustle of the moving sand came fitfully upon the ear. I sat down and listened to it, and as I sat, the continually shifting sand gradually rose around me, as the waters rose round the chateau of Chatel-morant. Had I stayed there long enough, only my head would have been visible, like the head of the sphinx.
I dined that day at the hotel, tete-à-tete with a young priest, who was returning to Bordeaux from a visit to his brother, one of the officers of the Preventitive Service, whose lonely barracks are almost the only human habitations which break the weary wilderness stretching from the Adour to the Gironde. One would have thought that there could be but little smuggling on such a coast; but the Duaniers are always autorités, and the waves of the Gulf of Gascony could not, of course, break on French ground without autorités to help them. With respect to the priest, however, he had one of the finest heads and the most perfectly chiselled features I ever saw. The pale high brow—the keen bright eyes, with remarkably long eye-lashes—the tenuity of the cartilage of the nose, and the perfect delicacy of the mouth—all told of intellect in no common development; while the meek sweetness of the noble face had something in it perfectly heavenly. Fling in imagination an aureole round that head, and you had the head of a youthful martyr, or a saint canonized for early virtues. There was devotion and aspiration in every line of the countenance—a meek, mild gentleness, beautifully in keeping with every word he uttered, and every movement he made. I was the more struck with all this, inasmuch as there is not an uglier, meaner, nor, I will add, dirtier, set of worthy folks in all the world, than the priests of France. Nine times out of ten, they are big-jowled, coarse, animal-looking men, with mottled faces, and skins which do not take kindly to the razor. The arrangements about the neck show a decided scarcity of linen, and a still greater lack of soap and water. They are seldom or never gentlemen, their figures are ungainly, their motions uncouth, and—barring, of course, their scholastic and theological knowledge—I found the majority with whom I conversed stupid, illiterate, and unintelligent. Now, the young priest at Teste was the reverse of all this. With manners as polished as those of any courtly abbé of the courtly old regime, there was a perfect atmosphere of frankness and quiet good-humour about my companion, and his conversation was delightfully easy, animated, and graceful. I do not know if my friend belonged to the College of Jesus; but, if he did, he was cut out for the performance of its highest and subtlest diplomacy.
We talked of the strange part of the world I was visiting, and I found he knew the people and the country well. I mentioned the submerged chateau and its legend, and he replied that it was an undoubted fact, that both chateaux and villages had been overwhelmed—both by the inbursting of the sea, and by great gales blowing vast hills of sand down into the existing lakes, and so forcing them out of their ancient beds. The sand, indeed, he said, was more dangerous than the water. Often and often the coast-guard stations had to be dug out after a gale; and he believed that, on one occasion, a small church near the mouth of the Gironde had been overwhelmed to such a height that only a few feet of the spire and the weathercock were left apparent. The story put me forcibly in mind of the remarkably heavy fall of snow experienced by my old friend, Baron Munchausen; but, for all that, I see no reason why it should not be literally correct. The pines, the priest informed me, were the saving of the country, by fixing the unstable soil, and the Government had engineers busily engaged in laying out plantations all along the coast—the object being to get the trees down to high-water mark. I mentioned the superstitions of the people.
"Alas!" said the priest, "What you have heard is perfectly true. We are improving a little, perhaps. The boys and girls we get to come to school are taught to laugh at the notion of their old grandmothers being witches, and in another generation or two there will be a great change."
"And how do your witches work?" I asked. "As ours in England used to do—by spell and charm?"
"Precisely. They are said to make clay figures of their victims, and to stick pins in them, or bake them in a fire; and then they have rhymes and cabalistical incantations, and are greatly skilled in the magic power of herbs. The worst of it is, that a year seldom passes without an outrage on some poor old woman. A lout, who thinks himself bewitched by such a person, will attack her and beat her; and occasionally a bullet has been fired at night through the cottage-window."
"The Landes people have, or had, other queer notions, as well as the witch ones?"
"Oh, yes! They long held out against potatoes, which, they said, gave them apoplexy, and they have only lately begun to milk their cows."
"Why so? As a pastoral people, they ought to be great in butter and cheese."
"On the contrary, they dislike them, and use lard or goose-grease instead. Indeed, for centuries and centuries, they religiously believed that Landes cows gave no milk."
"But was not the experiment ever tried?"
"Scores of times. An anxious reformer would go to a Landes farmer, and urge him to milk his cows. 'Landes cows give no milk,' would be the answer. 'Will you let me try?' would, perhaps, be replied. The Landes man would have no objection; and the cow would be brought and milked before him."
"Well, seeing that would convince him."
"Ah, you don't know the Landes people—not in the least; why, the farmer would say, 'Ay, there are a few drops, perhaps; but it's not worth the trouble of taking. Our fathers never milked their cows, and they were as wise as we are. And next day he would have relapsed into the old creed, that Landes cows never gave milk at all."
I inquired about the rate at which the stilt-walkers progressed—whether they could, as one sometimes hears, keep up with a horse at the gallop; and found, as I expected, that six or seven miles an hour was as much as they ever managed to achieve. The priest went on succinctly to sketch the costume and life of the people. When in regular herding dress, the shepherd of the Landes appears one uncouth mass of dirty wool. On his body he wears a fleece, cut in the fashion of a rude paletot, and sometimes flung over one shoulder, like a hussar's jacket. His thighs and legs are defended on the outside by cuisses and greaves of the same material. On his feet he wears sabots and coarse worsted socks, covering only the heels and the instep. His remaining clothing generally consists of frayed and tattered home-spun cloth; and altogether the appearance of the man savours very strongly of that of a fantastically costumed scarecrow.
So attired, then, with a gourd containing some wretched piquette hung across his shoulders, and provided with a store of rye-bread, baked, perhaps, three weeks before, a few dry sardines, and as many onions or cloves of garlic, the Landes shepherd sallies forth into the wilderness. He reckons himself a rich man, if his employer allows him, over and above his food, sixty francs a-year. From the rising to the setting of the sun, he never touches the ground, shuffling backwards and forwards on his stilts, or leaning against a pine, plying the never-pausing knitting-needle. Sometimes he drives his flock home at eventide; sometimes he bivouacs in the wild. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing his flint and steel, he has soon a rousing fire of fir-branches, when, gathering his sheep-skins round him, he makes himself comfortable for the night, his only annoyances being the mosquitoes and the dread of the cantrips of some unchancy old lady, who may peradventure catch a glimpse of him in the moonlight, as she rides buxomly on her besom to a festal dance in a devil's garden.